Pete Hendrickson (@LostHorizons)

Is There Any Chance Of Restoring Our Lost Freedoms? by George Leef (with an important afterword by Yours Truly) Sometimes I think about what America was like when my grandfather was young. In 1908, when he was 22, he started a business that, I’m happy to say, thrives to this day. He was the son of Swedish immigrants and started with nothing but some mechanical know-how and a good entrepreneurial idea. Stories like his were very common in the America of a century ago. Millions of ambitious immigrants flooded into the US because its governmental system and culture were conducive to productivity and innovation. The people overwhelmingly expected to succeed or fail on their own efforts. Almost nobody thought he had a right to live at the expense of others, or had any right to dictate how others must act or what they must believe. Moreover, the legal system protected Americans’ rights to life, liberty, and property. Theft was illegal. Acts of coercion were illegal. If someone wanted your money, he could only ask for it and had to take “no” for an answer. If someone wanted you to join a labor union, he could ask, but you were perfectly free to decline. In those days, there were no officious bureaucrats dictating what people could and couldn’t do in their businesses. Taxes were low. At all levels, government consumed less than ten percent of the GDP. Therefore, nearly all of America’s resources of labor and materials were under the direction of the market’s profit and loss system. Profits signaled where more investment would pay off; losses quickly put an end to ill-conceived ventures. And – crucially – government had almost no power to reward special interest groups. It did interfere with international trade to benefit domestic producers, but aside from that, government stuck closely to the precepts of laissez-faire. The result was tremendous output of goods and services, along with innovation that propelled economic expansion at an accelerating pace. America was all about work, a point that Alexis de Tocqueville commented on in his book Democracy in America. Compared with his native France, where guilds and regulations and the high cost of government acted as a brake on the economy, in America he saw boundless energy. Continued at https://losthorizons.com/N/192.htm#4