by Jacob G. Hornberger

July 30, 2026

When I was a kid in the 1950s, I loved a book entitled When Worlds Collide, which was later made into a great movie. It was about a huge planet that was hurtling toward Earth and was going to collide with it. Everyone was going to die. It was going to be the end of the human race. But there was a smaller planet along with the big one that would end up orbiting the sun after the collision. It had an atmosphere that could sustain human life. So, people from different countries, including Americans, were able to escape to that planet in space ships.

So, here is my free-market hypothetical: Let’s assume that that were to happen today and that 250,000 Americans successfully escape and land on that planet. They leave Earth with simply the clothes they are wearing and enough food and water to last just a few months. In other words, everyone, without exception, is desperately poor and facing the possibility of starvation.

What should people do?

Americans today would say, “Organize a government and immediately enact a welfare state. Adopt Social Security, Medicare, subsidies, grants, food stamps, and other welfare. That’s the best way to deal with the mass poverty in society.”

But there is a big problem with that approach. Before the government can give money away, it must first have money. In other words, simply because people organize a government doesn’t mean that the government has any money. To get money, it has to tax people. But since no one has any wealth to tax, the government has no means of getting the money to give people welfare.

This is what socialists fail to realize when they advocate socialism. The reason they don’t consider it is because there is already wealth that has been built up in society that they want to seize and redistribute. They see all that wealth and simply take it for granted. Why not have the government seize part of that wealth and use to to help the poor, needy, and disadvantaged as well as seniors?

But there are two important points here. One, socialists never ask: What was it that brought that wealth into existence? They just see it and want to grab it. And, two, by interrupting the process of wealth creation, they don’t realize that their seizure of wealth results in lower standards of living for everyone, especially the poor.

Here is what free-market advocates would say that the people on that planet should do: Implement a genuine free-market or free-enterprise economic system. No taxes. No welfare programs, including Social Security and Medicare. No economic regulations. No government monetary system. No border controls. No trade restrictions. Just leave people free to engage in economic enterprise without worrying about any government interference or help at all.

Immediately, people would begin accumulating wealth. Their standard of living would start to increase. If left alone, the process would continue improving people’s economic well-being.

That’s, in fact, what happened in the United States. By the time the period 1870-1910 arrived, Americans had the most unusual economic system in history. Imagine: No income tax or IRS, Social Security, Medicare, welfare, national-security state, Pentagon, vast military-industrial complex, empire of military bases, CIA, NSA, FBI, foreign wars, economic regulations, minimum-wage laws, state-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, sanctions, embargoes, drug war, (minimal) immigration controls, public (i.e., government) schooling systems, paper money, Federal Reserve, and much more.

Sure, it wasn’t perfect. Statists were already making inroads: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, Jim Crow laws, the Spanish-American War, and others. But it was the closest to a pure free-market, limited-government system that mankind has ever come.

The result? Vast and enormous wealth and soaring and ever-increasing standards of living, especially for the poor. In fact, millions of penniless immigrants were flooding into America to get in on the action. Americans had discovered the key to ending poverty. There was also the greatest outpouring of voluntary charity in history.

But when they saw this enormous pool of wealth, statists couldn’t help themselves. Consumed by envy and covetousness, they decided that they wanted to use the force of government to seize money from those to whom it belonged and give it to those to whom it it did not belong. And they wanted to appear good, caring, and compassionate, not with their own money, but rather with money that the IRS seized from other people.

In a word, socialism.

Fortunately, as the decades proceeded, Americans were able to outpace the socialist confiscations of wealth by producing more, primarily because of the tremendous base of productive capital that had already been accumulated and because of technological inventions that made people more productive

But it boggles the mind how much better off Americans would be today if 20th-century Americans had not abandoned the free-market, limited-government principles of our American ancestors. The standard of living of the American people, especially the poor, would be exponentially higher.

That, of course, is water under the bridge. But there is still time for a course correction. Americans living today would be wise to reject the welfare state, warfare state, regulated/managed economy, immigration controls, income taxation, tariffs, paper money, Federal Reserve and other socialist and statist programs and restore the trajectory toward free markets and a limited-government republic that our American ancestors established. That’s the key to economic liberty and ever-rising standards of living.