"Free enterprise and democracy are not necessarily the same thing. And they do not necessarily coexist."

Stuart Schneiderman writes,

...In a functioning democratic nation people live by the rule of law and respect the verdict of the ballot box. They treat each other with respect, courtesy and decorum. They do so every day. It takes more than a purple finger to create a functioning democracy.

One does well here to distinguish between the freedom to cast ballots and the freedom to function in the marketplace. They might seem to be the same, but they are not.

As agents working and consuming in a free market, individuals make free decisions all the time. Thereby they allow capital to be allocated more efficiently and more effectively than any central planner has ever been able to do. But, that is the rub. Free enterprise is the ultimate rebuke to central planners, but free enterprise and democracy are not necessarily the same thing. And they do not necessarily coexist.

...One notes with Hannan that the happiest countries are democratic. Among them are Norway, Australia and Switzerland. They are also relatively homogeneous. They are not brimming with diversity, as the saying goes.

And yet, China is today’s rising global superpower. Surely, it has become a model of free enterprise, but it has not allowed people very many democratic freedoms and human rights. When developing nations look around the world do they want to become more like China or more like America?

I do not know how well Chinese people rate on a happiness scale, but they have certainly, over the past 35 years, gained more confidence and more swagger. You might believe that they are miserable for having been deprived of their right to vote. Yet, many of them recall the Maoist past where millions of people starved to death and the rest lived in extreme poverty. And yet, the rulers of China turned it around without allowing anyone to vote.

When it comes to debates over democracy, China is the problem. Of course, China does not have a democratic tradition that goes back two millennia. It has no real notion of human rights. And yet, it allows the free market to function in a relatively unfettered fashion and has moved fromf extreme poverty to ascending world power.

But, China is run by an elite. It is run by leaders of what is still called a Communist party. Before it was run by a group that Mao called capitalist roaders, it was also run by an elite, by Mao and his henchmen. Today’s elite has allowed the people to make relatively free decisions as actors in the marketplace. Mao never imagined such a thing. When Deng Xiaoping and his band took over China in 1976 the first thing they did was to privatize agriculture, to roll back the central planners’ communized agricultural policy. They did not hand out ballots. They freed people to function in the market.

...Moreover, when the Chinese look to America and the West, they do not just see the glory of democracy. They see the madness that democracy can unleash. Do they really want to spend their time debating transgender restrooms? Do they really want to spend their time trying to integrate women into the combat infantry? Do they really want their people to be rioting in the streets, shooting the police and burning down their neighborhoods in the name of free expression?

And that's just America. What do they see when they look to democratic Europe. Do the Chinese want, out of an excessive concern for equal rights and for democratic freedoms, allow their nation to be overrun by refugees who will molest women and to rob, pillage and murder? How is democracy working out in Europe these days?

When members of its own Muslim population decided to try their hand at terrorism, the Chinese authorities cracked down on them, even to the point of suppressing their ability to practice their religion. Those who were deemed responsible for terrorism were not represented by an army of law professors. They were not sent to prison while their cases awaited appeal. They were put on trial, convicted and taken out and shot. China does not have a very significant terrorism problem these days.

...If democratic rights contribute to prosperity and social harmony, other peoples in other parts of the world might find them worth emulating. If they seem to be leading great nations to doom, other peoples will not.

Read more here.

Which dream is more likely to come true in the United States of America in 2016?

Tom Krannawitter writes,

Suppose there are two adult men. The life dream of Man A is to be a woman.
He knows he can never fully, truly be a woman in every way. He knows he cannot change his chromosomes, for example. He knows he'll never experience growing up as a girl and transforming physically and biochemically through puberty into an adult woman. He knows he cannot be impregnated or have a baby, and he knows that he'll never know the concerns and joys connected to that uniquely female phenomenon.

Still, he can hire a physician to alter his body. He can swallow daily hormone pills. He can wear feminine clothes and makeup. He can legally change his name to something feminine-sounding. And he can demand that others treat him as a her for typical social purposes.

The life dream of Man B is to start his own business, build it into something large and successful and influential by delivering value to many other people, and run his own business EXACTLY how he pleases.

Which dream is more likely to come true in the United States of America in 2016?

Why is the Middle East falling apart?

Stuart Scheiderman writes at Had Enough Therapy,

The Middle East is falling apart because it failed to modernize, failed to adopt free enterprise solutions to its economic problems and failed to function according to the rules and norms of a liberal democracy.

... Such is the issue in the Middle East, where Israel’s neighbors take its success to be the problem. They would do better to see Israel as a beacon showing them the way to improve their societies and their living conditions.

Now, however, many of these people do not know how to deal with the shame they feel when they see how Israelis live. They believe that Israeli success shows them to be failures and they believe that they must destroy it to restore their self-esteem. After all, this is a culture that believes that best way to restore family honor when a teenage daughter is caught holding hands with a boy is to murder her. They hold to fanatical beliefs, not because they do not feel connected to others within their community, but because the world seems to have passed them by. They cannot accept that their culture and their religion need a serious reformation.

Read more here.

Fighting for people

How has the Obama presidency worked out for us in the 99 percent?

According to University of California, Berkeley, economist Emmanuel Saez, 95 percent of all recovery gains have accrued to the much-vilified “top 1 percent.”

At the same time, the poor have become even more desperate. The number of Americans receiving aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (known as food stamps) has increased by almost 50 percent since January 2009, from 32.2 million to 47.7 million. One in six citizens in the richest country in the world now rely on food aid from their government.

Today, a lower percentage of Americans are in the workforce—63 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—than at any time since the infamous days of Jimmy Carter.

Arthur C. Brooks suggests the need for transformation: personal moral transformation, and four pillars:

faith, family, community, and work.

His second recommendation is material giving:

As I found in my 2006 book Who Really Cares, the average conservative household contributes significantly more to charity than does the average liberal household despite earning less income. According to the 1996 General Social Survey, those who strongly agreed that “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” gave away $140 on average to charity. Among those who strongly disagreed, the average gift was $1,637.

Of the 10 most charitable states in 2012, as ranked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, nine went for Romney over Obama. Three times as many red states as blue states placed in the top 20 states in giving. And all but one of the 10 least charitable states swung President Obama’s way.

But we have learned three lessons from our material giving:

First, there is nothing inherently wrong with safety-net programs, be they SNAP, housing support, or Medicaid. Second, they must be designed and administered in ways that fight fiercely against dependency. And third, the safety net’s ultimate goal cannot be the perpetual subsistence of poor Americans in barely tolerable lives. We can aim at nothing less than real human flourishing.

Brooks proposes a third plank in a "social justice agenda:" opportunity.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has shown that in 1980, 21 percent of Americans in the bottom income quintile rose to the middle quintile or higher by 1990. But those who started off in the bottom quintile in 1995 had only a 15 percent chance of becoming middle class in 2005. That is a one-third decline in mobility in under a generation. Other analyses tell a similar tale. One 2007 Pew study measured relative mobility in Canada and Scandinavia at more than twice America’s level.

How can a conservative social-justice agenda reverse these trends and expand opportunity for all? An opportunity society has two basic building blocks: Universal education to create a base of human capital and an economic system that rewards hard work, merit, innovation, and personal responsibility. So opportunity conservatism must passionately advance education reform and relentlessly defend the morality of free enterprise.

So, how are we doing in education?

Public schools in Washington D.C. spend more per pupil than all but one U.S. state (New York), yet only about 56 percent of children graduate from high school. In our nation’s capital, a city flanked by six suburban counties that rank among America’s 10 richest, only 15 percent of eighth-graders read at grade level.

But, while our education system has failed so many, our free enterprise system has

saved billions from poverty by giving them their first opportunity to rise in history. Truly, this is America’s gift to the world. Conservatives can and must champion this truth without apology or compromise. For the sake of all people, our end goal must be to make free enterprise as universally accepted and nonpartisan as civil rights are today.

So what should conservatives do?

For too long, conservatives have identified themselves as fighting against things, perpetually making war on the left’s mistaken priorities. They fight against punitive taxes, creeping overregulation, wasteful spending, licentious culture, and ruinous national debt.

The central, motivating purpose of conservative philosophy is not fighting against things. It is fighting for people.

Read more here.
Thanks to Kris Cook.

What the Republicans have to do

Spengler (David Goldman) advocates some heresy and getting rid of obstacles to investment:

The problem is NOT government spending, contrary to the well-meaning obsession of the Tea Party. That will BECOME the problem a decade or two from now. The problem now is obstacles to investment: the highest corporate tax rate in the world, onerous regulation, the crazyquilt uncertainty of Obamacare. America needs aggressive tax cuts and regulatory rollback. It also needs to spend more on infrastructure, which is becoming a major obstacle to growth. It needs to spend more on R&D, particularly on cutting-edge military R&D. The way to do this, I’ve argued for years, is to emulate Roosevelt’s alphabet-soup federal agencies and put unemployed Americans to work repairing infrastructure at $20 an hour, rather than paying $50 an hour to the construction unions. That’s heresy from a free-marketeer like me, but it makes economic sense and will drive the Democrats crazy.

If Republicans stage more cliffhangers around the budget, they may yet snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. They should talk about nothing but growth and jobs. Many Republican analysts claimed that Obama just got lucky in 2012, that the economy was turning up in any event and the incumbent got the credit. That is self-consoling nonsense: the Republicans lost because Mitt Romney came across like a silver-spoon princeling, and because Americans (with good reason) blamed the Republicans as much as the Democrats for the economic mess. They chose economic dependency over enterprise, because enterprise–in the form of the Internet and housing bubbles–hadn’t gotten them anywhere. We Republicans have a lot of explaining to do and we had better get down to it.

Free enterprise: America's gift to the world

What is the greatest achievement in the history of the world? This graph will give you a hint.



Mark J. Perry writes that it is

the 80% reduction in world poverty in only 36 years, from 26.8% of the world’s population living on $1 or less (in 1987 dollars) in 1970 to only 5.4% in 2006. (Source: The 2009 NBER working paper “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” by economists Maxim Pinkovskiy (MIT) and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Columbia University).

What made it happen?

It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship. In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world.

I will state, assert and defend the statement that if you love the poor, if you are a good Samaritan, you must stand for the free enterprise system, and you must defend it, not just for ourselves but for people around the world. It is the best anti-poverty measure ever invented.