Posted on 09/22/2010 6:45:26 PM PDT by La Lydia
Juxtapose pictures of Frankfurt and Liverpool in 1945, and then again in 2010 (or for that matter Hiroshima and Detroit). Something seems awry. Perhaps one can see, even in these superficial images, that something other than military defeat more often erodes societies...The factories of the United Kingdom (despite the 1940 blitz and the later V-1 and V-2 attacks) were largely untouched, and the United States pristine. Both countries had incurred massive debt. Yet Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s socialized, increased vastly the public sector, and become the impoverished nation of the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast, America began to return to its entrepreneurial freedoms, and geared up to supply a wrecked world with industrial and commercial goods, paying down its massive debt through an expanding economy. We thrived; yet socialist Britain did not become a West Germany, Japan, or Singapore...
Cultural tradition plays a role, of course. But more important still is the nature of politics and the economy. As a general rule, the more freedom of the individual and flexibility of markets — with lower taxes, less bureaucracy, constitutional government, more transparency, and the rule of law — the more likely a society is to create wealth and rebound from either war or natural disasters...
These truths transcend space and time, and they trump race and nationality, weather and climate, resources and geography. The notion that we are doomed and the Chinese fated to prosper is not written in stone. It is simply a matter of free will, theirs and ours. They must deal with a new era of coming suburban blues, worker discontent, unions, environmental discretion and regulation, an aging and shrinking population and greater personal appetites, social protest, and nonconformity — in the manner that industrializing Western nations did as well in the early twentieth century...
We in turn can easily outdistance any country should we remain the most free, law-abiding, and economically open society as in our past. A race-gender-ethnic-blind meritocracy, equal application of the law, low taxes, small government, and a transparent political and legal system are at the heart of that renewal. America could within a decade become a creditor nation again, with a trade balance and budget surplus, drawing in the world’s talent and capital in a way not possible in the more inflexible or less meritocratic China, Japan, or Germany. Again that is our choice, not a superimposed destiny from someone else...
Unfortunately, we are mired — as in the case of many complex societies that become ever more top-heavy and bureaucratic, when salvation alone is found in becoming less so — in a new peasant notion of the limited good. Anything produced is seen to come at the expense of others. Absolute wealth is imaginary, relative wealth is not. We would rather be equal and unexceptional than collectively better off with a few more better off still...
We finally did that on 1-20-2009.
Yes, that is what I wrote.
“We in turn can easily outdistance any country should we remain the most free”. Not under this administration. Their goal is a New World Order.
I believe the phrase, “should we remain free” took that into consideration.
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