Liberty Is Winning, Mostly
by
Gary North
Tea Party Economist
Recently
by Gary North: The
Day General Grant Expelled the Jews
Tom Bethell
has written a fine article on the America he has known, 1962-today.
He was an immigrant from England in 1962. He came here to study
New Orleans jazz. That’s a man after my own heart. He loved
George Lewis’ music. So did I. He wrote a book on Lewis. That,
I did not do.
He is a conservative.
He sees things pretty much the way I do. Not many others do.
He thinks progressive
liberalism is on the run, all over the world. So do I. He thinks
technology is on freedom’s side. So do I. He thinks jazz has
declined since 1970. So do I. He thinks India and China are the
wave of the future because statism is declining in both nations.
So do I.
Here are highlights.
Culturally,
it has been downhill.
When I later
saw what happened to American popular music – tumbling from
ragtime to the idiocies of rap in less than a century – I
have been dogged by a sense of decline. Classical music, ditto:
Bach to Bartok. Where’s the improvement? It’s all downhill.
Perhaps that helps explain why I don’t believe in evolution.
Things don’t evolve; they peak quickly and inconspicuously,
then they fall apart. . . .
His rallying
cry: “Shut it down!”
Like welfare,
foreign aid hurts those who receive it, and I’m always glad
to read that a country has rid itself of the Agency for International
Development. Howard Phillips, appointed by President Nixon to
head the Office of Economic Opportunity, promptly attempted to
shut it down, and Howie and I have been friends ever since. .
. .
Communism is
dead. Liberalism isn’t.
What of
Communism today? As a party program with satellite countries,
millions of “apparatchiks,” and a queen bee in the Kremlin,
it is dead. But American-style liberalism is its remnant and it
lives on in its dishonest way. . . .
What do
modern leftism (American liberalism) and communism have in common?
Both are godless and egalitarian, but liberalism has “evolved.”
Communists
wanted to kill off capitalism, for example, but liberals know
it must be preserved – in a highly taxed and regulated form.
It must be permitted to create sufficient wealth to redistribute
to favored groups – single mothers, minorities, college professors
– if the system is to keep Democrats in office. Liberals
want market outcomes to be “predictable.” Appeals to
envy and blame heaped on the rich can also be used as a bludgeon,
as Obama has shown. . . .
 Liberals
fear democracy.
The liberal-left,
who in some ways constitute our intelligentsia, are never reliably
in power in a democracy. It frustrates them that they must submit
to majority rule. Hence the importance they attach to the Supreme
Court, a tribunal where five votes can enforce the things they
most care about. Unrestricted access to abortion is probably their
top issue today, and has been for some time. . . .
But there
have also been opposing trends since the Hiss days. Blue-collar
workers, once known as the working class, have shown they are
not revolutionists. They aspire to join the middle class, not
overthrow it. Think “Reagan Democrats.” It’s intellectuals
who are, and always have been, the core of the revolutionary party.
The free market
is winning.
Another
change is that market forces, despite the liberals’ regulatory
zeal, are far stronger than they were in 1962. The world’s
two most populous countries, China and India, are becoming market
economies, and we should no more fear their growing wealth than
we did Japan’s after World War II. Regulatory agencies, including
the EPA (a Nixon creation!), may hamstring the U.S. If so, China
will move ahead all the faster. Don’t think of China as “Communist”
either. True, that’s what their government calls itself,
but they seem to be pulling off the unprecedented feat of both
staying in power and encouraging capitalism. Taiwan may be the
mainland’s undeclared model. China is not our enemy, and
the same goes for Russia.
In Europe
there’s a comparable lesson. Bond markets are now more powerful
than politicians, despite the best efforts of the IMF. This frustrates
the intelligentsia, who want Europe to submit to their foolish
Euro-diktat. It won’t work. Europe is fragmenting, not uniting.
Its countries are subdividing and will continue to do so. The
EU is emerging as one of the great planning disasters engineered
by the postwar ruling class.
 Technology
is our friend.
Technology
meanwhile is ushering in huge changes. I am thinking of the digital
world, the Internet in particular. It is so recent that predictions
about it are hazardous. But its major effect will be to decentralize
power. This is already happening, and the mainstream media can
tell you about it. But they would rather not. Their semi-monopolistic
mainstream is dividing into a thousand rivulets. Television is
finally waning. The stock price of the Washington Post
has fallen by two-thirds, while that of the New York Times
is down to one-sixth of its peak a decade ago.
Read
the whole article. Please.
Continue
Reading on spectator.org
December
18, 2012
Gary
North [send him mail]
is the author of Mises
on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com.
He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An
Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright ©
2012 Gary North
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