This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 9, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Embracing economic liberty and showing respect for commercial enterprise were a key

to the massive human advancement made in the last few centuries.

So says Art Cardin and his new co-authored book with Deirdre McClosky,

Leave me alone and I'll make you rich, how the bourgeois deal enriched the world.

They argue that the hands-off bourgeois deal is always under attack but worth preserving.

People are familiar with Dider McClosky's bourgeois trilogy, these big sweeping books about how we got here in terms of wealth, the famous hockey stick, but what's the bourgeois deal and when was it struck?

The bourgeois deal is a deal that society struck with the bourgeoisie, the innovators, the merchants, those who basically just wanted to be the invent a new strain of rice, invent a different way to carry the world's information in your pocket.

And the cool part of the deal is that by leaving them alone and letting them innovate,

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the great innovators of the 19th century, they made us rich.

So we are much, much wealthier today than we used to be, and our lives are much, much better

than they used to be, simply because we decided, as a society,

to let people innovate, to not expect people to ask permission for wanting to open a new store or come up with a new retail format or any of these other things that we that we typically want people to do.

And indeed, another important element of the bourgeois deal is that it's not just tolerance but in some senses it's respect, its dignity, it's veneration.

If you ask a lot of people, what do you want to do? They'll say, well we want to be, I want to be an'll say well we want to be I want to be an

innovator I want to be a disruptor everybody wants to disrupt this space or that

space or the other space and they look up to Elon Musk they look up to Steve jobs

they look up to Mark Zuckerberg they look up to Steve Jobs, they look up to Mark Zuckerberg, they look up to people who have

made in the last decade, decade and a half, some major, major changes in how we live, work and play.

That deal seems to be breaking down and it seems to have had periods where it has broken down and re-emerged,

at least maybe twice in the 20th century. So what was the global experience and if you want to focus on the

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