As I write this piece, I’m about to board an airplane. I’m in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but in just over 13 hours I’ll be in Zurich, Switzerland. In the 19th century, not even the wealthiest imaginable person would have been able to travel this quickly. Indeed, the entire wealth of the world could not have bought a 13-hour trip of just over 7,000 miles, say, in 1910, because it simply didn’t exist. But now it does and I can book it, which means that at least in this regard I’m richer today than anyone was back in the day. I’m not a multi-millionaire, or even a millionaire, and I don’t even think of myself as being rich at all. I just happen to live in 2025.
It’s very likely that the flight crew will be Swiss, since the airline I’m flying is based in Switzerland. Not long ago, most people in the world were unlikely to ever meet people foreign to their own countries. Today still, most people are expected to not move too much during their lifetimes and die pretty close to where they were born. But just as more and more people go to distant places, other people come to ours as well. And our first-hand knowledge of other cultures increases exponentially when they do.
Before boarding the plane, I’ll take a pill that frees up my nostrils, so my ears don’t get plugged for a whole day after I take off. (It’s strange, I know. I have to get surgery in my nose to avoid that in the future.) I’ve used these pills before and I know they work exactly as designed. All it took to get them was a visit to the doctor, a prescription, and about twenty dollars. And after I board the plane, I’ll put on headphones that will cancel all surrounding noise as we lift off so I can relax and maybe take a nap. Can you imagine explaining this kind of comfort to the millions of people who, just one century ago, were boarding ships from Europe to America for months-long journeys during which it was very likely that some people would die???
When I’m in the plane, I’ll continue to write this piece on a laptop, the mere concept of which was nonexistent barely fifty years ago. Yet today, millions of people around the world own personal devices like these computers with which they can work, access all kinds of information from multiple sources worldwide, play games, stream movies, et etcetera. As long as you have internet access, you can access more information than in the Library of Alexandria or any other library in the world. Literally.
If I get bored on the flight as a write this piece, I’ll probably turn my attention to one of the two books I brought along for the journey. But a person like Aristotle, for example, could not dream of such an object. The fact that there exist printers on a mass scale and a transportation system that allows for books filled with standardized typographies to be distributed across the world is amazing.
Once I leave the plane, I’ll immediately text my girlfriend that I’ve arrived safely, something that was inconceivable a few decades ago. We no longer need to write potentially outdated letters that may take months to arrive or make prohibitively expensive calls to talk to our loved ones. The same cellphone I use in Argentina allows me to be in touch with anyone even if I’m in a different continent.
Freedom makes all of these things possible. Planes, pills, headphones, laptops, books, cellphones: Whenever we make it possible for human ingenuity to flourish, we come up with new inventions that raise our standard of living over and over. In particular, the ability to trade with others and make profits assures us that people have an incentive to improve not just their lives, but also those of others. This applies to services too, which is why airlines and all other businesses exist. Individuals that you’ll never meet are working hard to make money and at the same time will bring you new inventions that everyone will profit from in different ways.
The benefits of free market capitalism and the international division of labor, which we usually take for granted, are incredible, and their extent is probably impossible to fully realize. We often forget what life used to be like, but as we’ve become freer it has only gotten better and continues do so everyday. When you board a plane next year, think about how marvelous this world is for giving regular people like us the chance to enjoy it.
Marcos Falcone is the Project Manager of Fundación Libertad and a regular contributor to Forbes Argentina. His writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, National Review, and Reason, among others. He is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
