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is the one time of the year when we Americans reflect on how fortunate
we are to have been born at this particular moment in time in this
great country. There are 275 million Americans, but 6 billion people
on the planet. We all had less than a 1-in-20 chance of being born
American. Folks, we have won the most important of life's lotteries!
In our recent book It's
Getting Better All the Time: The Greatest Trends of the Last 100
years, my co-author Julian Simon and I ask the question:
Why did so much of the human progress of the past century originate
in the United States? What is so special about this country that
has sparked such incredible human ingenuity and invention?
The shorthand answer is: Freedom works. The unique American formula
of individual liberty and free enterprise has cultivated risk taking,
experimentation, innovation, and scientific exploration on a grand
scale that has never occurred anywhere before.
Economic freedom and freedom from government repression, in particular,
are necessary ingredients for human progress. In the United States
for the most part, and at least more than nearly anywhere else of
consequence on the globe, the government has set down a reasonable
rule of law, providing a well-balanced equilibrium between liberty
and order, and then gotten out of the way. In the post-World War
II period when America's closest economic rival, Europe, experimented
with socialism in the west and totalitarianism in the east, the
U.S. wisely continued to pursue free-market capitalism, thus widening
the U.S. lead in economic prosperity.
I would add to this that America enjoys a unique advantage over
other nations — and I know some of my NR colleagues
disagree here. We are a nation that remakes itself through the new
blood of immigrants. The tens of millions of new Americans who came
through Ellis Island or across the Rio Grande have represented the
skim off the cream of the rest of the world. Americans are a people
who have been self-selected as problem solvers and progress-seekers.
America got rich at such a faster pace than other nations in the
20th century quite simply because no other place on Earth cultivates
the entrepreneurial, inventive spirit of human beings, more than
the United States does. Government has grown enormously over the
past century in the U.S., much more than we believe is optimal;
but compared to other nations and compared to the heavy hand of
government that restricted individual freedom in past eras (slavery,
Jim Crowe laws, etc.), Americans today enjoy an unprecedented degree
of political and economic freedom. This provides Americans the ability
and the incentive to build, create, and prosper.
Repression by government short-circuits the human spirit and dooms
its citizens to sustained periods of stagnation and even anti-progress.
The tragedy of the past 100 years is that mankind has had to relearn
the lesson of history again and again — most recently in the
former Soviet Union where life expectancies have tragically fallen
and in China where tens of millions of Chinese have starved to death
under collectivist agricultural policies. There is a strong positive
relationship between economic freedom and economic prosperity. The
free countries are the rich countries. Free nations like the U.S.
have a 10 times higher per-capita income than countries that are
not free. Economics is really a very simple science. Why do economists
try to make it so complicated?
Health and freedom also go hand in hand. Life expectancies are 17
years longer for those born in free nations than those born in non-free
nations.
The American intelligentsia is the last to get this message. Many
in the media and academia reject the notion of American exceptionalism
and applaud statism. But almost every great tragedy of the 20th
century was a result of too much government, not too little. Nazism,
socialism, Maoism, Communism, Marxism, and Apartheid were all simply
fancy names for statism — for tyrannical governmental control
over the lives and liberties of the citizenry. Hitler killed 6 million
Jews in the Holocaust, Mao murdered an estimated 30-40 million people;
Stalin's purges led to the extermination of between 20 and 60 million;
Pol Pot killed roughly 2 million in the killing fields of Cambodia.
The enduring lesson of the last century is that the only real restraint
on progress is a government that smothers the human spirit.
This is why it is a wonderful holiday, the Fourth of July. We celebrate
a unique American-style liberty and freedom. The good news is that
freedom is now stretching around the world. But it is still far
too much of a rarity.
Reagan said it best when he noted at the 1980 Republican Convention,
"No one can doubt that it was divine providence that created this
shining city on a hill — this beacon of freedom." Yes, God
surely has blessed America.
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