Freedom: The Key to Human Progress
Many years ago, I was verbally marveling at the prosperity of the United States in comparison with most of the rest of the world. A young college-educated woman heard my comments, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “It would be difficult to not be prosperous, considering the vast natural resources of the country.”
This being the 1980s, I countered that the Soviet Union had at least as many, if not more, natural resources than our country, and not only did it lag behind us, it was far behind Japan, a country well known for its comparable lack of resources. Besides that, I added, the resources here had existed for generations before our nation was even in existence, so it had to be something additional that has made the United States a country that millions of people around the world want to come to.
In a word, that additional difference the liberal woman did not understand is freedom. In the long history of the world, slavery and servitude have been far more common than freedom. This lack of liberty for the individual to chart his own course, free from the dictates of a government that assumes it knows best, has been what has caused most of the world’s population to suffer in poverty for centuries. The idea that a self-described elite know best for the rest of us is what Friedrich Hayek rightly called “the fatal conceit.”
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