⚡️💬 During a trip to Asia, Milton Friedman (winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics) visited a construction site where he observed hundreds of workers using shovels to move earth.

Intrigued, he asked the local manager why they didn't use bulldozers. He explains that it's to mobilize as many workers as possible, demonstrating the state's ability to create jobs.

Friedman replies, "In that case, give them spoons!"

This anecdote perfectly illustrates a truth that many prefer to ignore: work alone is not enough to create wealth. Employment is not an end in itself; only the creation of value really counts.

If that were the case, all you'd have to do to become prosperous is dig holes and fill them up again...

Work remains the basic ingredient, to be sure. But wealth only emerges when this effort is combined with ideas, capital, organization and, above all, risk-taking.

A job doesn't exist simply because there's "something to do". It exists because someone sees an opportunity, invests, structures a project and proposes a product or service that others want to buy.

That's probably why some people are so critical of entrepreneurs. Because this truth reveals an uncomfortable reality: in a way, work is only worthwhile if it serves others.

Yet there's nothing to stop them setting up a cooperative tomorrow, doing away with hierarchies, distributing income and facing up to the reality of supply and demand.

Why hasn't this model become the norm and a model of collectivist success? Because every cooperative eventually discovers that the real problem is not the "boss" who crushes wages and jobs: it's the state.

In France, between social charges and taxes, almost 50% of what an employee costs disappears before it reaches his or her pocket - one of the highest rates in the OECD. This tax burden stifles employment, reduces take-home pay and discourages growth.

By contrast, Ireland has reduced its overall tax rate on labor to around 25%, while maintaining high public revenues thanks to the economic growth generated. The result? An unemployment rate halved in fifteen years.

Prosperity will not come from an ever more obese and hungry state of planning and collectivism, but from a framework slimmed down to the bare minimum, where risk-taking is encouraged and the fruits of labor truly benefit those who produce them.

Only then can we all work together to create wealth and prosperity.