Economic freedom is a crucial component of liberty. It empowers people to work, produce, consume, own, trade, and invest their own resources, while respecting others’ rights to do the same. It has been shown in numerous peer-reviewed studies to promote prosperity and other positive outcomes. It is a necessary condition for democratic development.
Economic freedom is a crucial component of liberty. It empowers people to work, produce, consume, own, trade, and invest their own resources, while respecting others’ rights to do the same. It has been shown in numerous peer-reviewed studies to promote prosperity and other positive outcomes. It is a necessary condition for democratic development. It liberates people from dependence on government in a planned economy, and allows them to make their own economic and political choices.
We have seen through the ages countries whose citizens feel powerless to challenge their governments, and, opposition political parties become impotent because their economic viability is tied to the very government whom they seek to unseat.
Governments of economically enslaved countries, their families and cronies enjoy luxurious lifestyles, traveling to foreign lands for vacation and healthcare; their children attend the best schools overseas, in most cases at the expense of the taxpayers. They also traverse the public thoroughfares in convoys on non-essential missions, scattering the public who are desperately trying to eke out a living. Ordinary citizens are forced to decide between paying for necessities like utilities and their children’s basic requirements for attending school; healthcare comes at price sometimes the ultimate price of death.
In a recent article American billionaire Nick Hanauer wrote “The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats” although he was discussing the USA it is relevant to all countries without economic freedom and huge disparities between the wealthy and the poor.
He went on to say
“But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.”
Governments, Opposition parties and Citizens alike your coexistence is inextricably linked, tread cautiously. We cannot say we haven’t been warned by history.
“He who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it
Credits:
Economic Freedom
Heritage Foundation
Nick Hanauer a Seattle-based entrepreneur
