The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible - Bastiat Institute

How did we make the
transition from using
wood to using coal,
from using coal to
using oil, from oil to
natural gas? How in
God’s name did we
make that transition
without a Federal
Energy Agency?
Milton Friedman,
1978
Success and failure
are both the
necessary incentives
to learn and to grow.
Extract from
Jonathan’s Guiding
Principles
Chapter 2 • Troublemakers
a wider range of employment opportunities that
use a greater diversity of talents.
Although some people will be upset by
change, change is the price of progress for
everyone’s higher standard of living.
The only way this process can be slowed to a
near standstill, for it can never be stopped, is for
people to go to government and request laws to
prevent the use of new innovative tools.
Background
The subject of patents is an interesting debate.
Daniel Drawbaugh, the developer of many
intriguing devices from a coin sorter to a clock
with a magnetically controlled pendulum,
claimed to be the inventor of the fi rst telephone
ten years before Alexander Graham Bell. Some
say the patent fees were too expensive for his
meagre income. Bell, however, patented a
telephone device and was thereby able to block
Drawbaugh and 600 others from using similar
devices because of patent infringement lawsuits.
Whether or not Bell was the sole and original
inventor of the telephone, he was an authentic
scientist, unlike George Selden who appears in a
later chapter of this book.
References
Richard B. McKenzie, in The American
Job Machine, says, “Creating jobs is easy
– just outlaw farm machinery. If the health of
an economy is measured by the number of jobs
its citizens have, then China should have the
strongest economy on earth.”
Further articles on this, and related issues,
may be found on the Cato Institute research site:
http://www.cato.org/research.
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