Freedom Works
The only real restraint on progress is a government that smothers the human spirit.

Mr. Moore is president of the Club for Growth
July 3, 2001 3:00 p.m.

his 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.