#178 Economic Freedom Must be Defended

Just like national freedom, economic freedom must be defended.  When we stop defending it, we are on the Road to Serfdom. Ginger and I attended a family wedding recently where many of the attendees were members of the military.  I mentioned to a small group my typical phrase, “Thank you for your service to our country.”  Then added, “You know, just like our national freedom needs defending, so does our economic freedom.”    What is Economic Freedom? A good definition is “The Fundamental Right of Every Human to Control Their Labor and Property.”  In an economically free society, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please. For a member of the military, it means you had the economic freedom to control your labor, by joining or not joining the military.  I will argue that Milton Friedman was the greatest economist of the 20th century, and he gets most of the credit for ending the draft, with the simple assumption that a volunteer force is more motivated than a conscripted force.  In a committee meeting on the topic, Friedman asked “General Westmoreland, would you rather command a slave force?”  That totalitarians and socialists like to command labor is not my subject today.  I’ve unpacked some of that in podcast #61 titled Socialism and Slavery. I pointed out to some of the wedding party that one of the first books on economics, by Ludwig von Mises, was titled Human Action because economics is about more than money, it’s about how you use your freedom to produce and distribute goods and services.  Obviously, serving in the military provides a service.  Friedman was correct: Those who freely volunteer to serve are more motivated than those whose freedom is taken away from them as conscripts. There is an abundance of scriptural support for economic freedom.  It’s the first of the ten Biblical commandments of economics that Sergiy Saydometov and I wrote about in our book, Biblical Economic Policy.   The Fallen Nature The Christian Worldview contains three elements: Creation, fall, and redemption.  Perhaps the most dangerous assumption in national freedom is to assume there is no fallen nature.  Actually, it’s the most dangerous in economics as well, but I want to explain national freedom first.  When the Soviet Union fell in 1989, the cold war was over, and in the decade of the 1990s, the Clinton administration quickly traded guns for butter.  Three books in a 13-year period predicted a safe, secure future world, consistent with President Clinton’s move to a peace-time military.  All three books were wrong because they denied the fallen nature.  First, in 1992, Francis Fukiyama explained in The End of History and the Last Man that history records when a country knocks off its neighbor.  Since we seemed to be in a period of relative calm, he predicted that would not happen again.  Next, in 1998, Yergin and Stanislav wrote in The Commanding Heights, that all developed nations had some sort of democratic government and relatively free-market capitalist economies.  Finally, even after the terrorist attack on the World Trade center towers in 2001, Thomas Friedman wrote The World is Flat, in 2005 and predicted a world of peace and harmony, where individuals would trade freely across borders.  Then Russia took Crimea in 2014, and invaded Ukraine in 2022.  The lesson is simple: We must continue to assume that huma...