LP Policy: Freedom works!

Freedom works.  That is, freedom promotes peaceful and prosperous world by creating an environment where miracles happen.  Free people own their own lives and relinquish claims on others' lives.

To really communicate the “blessings of liberty” you must predict the unpredictable miracles that free people create.  To predict future miracles requires uncommon imagination.  The best we can do is to point to a few of countless miracles from the past:

Free markets offer more power to citizens

Consider two contrasting case histories: the development of transportation and public education in America since 1776. 

Americans made their own horse-drawn wagons in 1776.  Today’s international automotive industry routinely makes millions of modern-day miracles called cars. 

The communication model of public education – one teacher broadcasting to dozens of students – is largely unchanged since then.  Based on results, the quality of K-12 education has declined since 1776, when America enjoyed near-universal literacy, while the costs have skyrocketed.  The results of government-run education – the industrial world’s worst! – are hardly miraculous.  It is a miracle that all people haven’t revolted from this “state-sponsored child abuse”.  

A postscript: It would be absurd to try to build a modern car at home today.  Yet two million children are home-schooled today – powerful testimony to the failure of the government’s K-12 to produce to the satisfaction of millions of loving parents.  

The power of America’s civil sector to correct injustice

Freedom empowers deeply spiritual men and women to make a difference.

In the world view of modern white liberal establishment, it is they, not black Americans, who hold the starring roles in America’s heroic Civil Rights Movement.  In their view, the key breakthrough was the passage (by the white Congress) on the landmark Civil Rights legislation of 1964.  Salvation through (white) government.  The film “Mississippi Burning”, a fictional account of how white FBI agents cracked the infamous murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, exemplifies their view. 

Black Americans were, in fact, the stars of America’s heroic Civil Rights Movement.  Dr. Martin Luther King and his followers achieved a revolutionary, historic goal: Doom racial bigotry by getting through the fat, thick skulls of white Americans the fact that black Americans were human beings.  They did so by demonstrating extraordinary humanity (nonviolence) in the face of extraordinary inhumanity (vicious dogs, fire hoses and police clubs). 

The laws, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, followed the revolution: the transformation of America’s heart and mind. 

This revolution was inspired by Dr. King’s dream: Freedom.  In his “I Have a Dream” speech he reaffirmed the integrity of American Citizenship: “All men are created equal.”  He used the word “freedom” 20 times throughout the speech.  He closed his famous speech with an explicit declaration: that all people are “free at last!”  (Dr. King’s dream was not – as the modern Civil Rights Establish still believes – a 30% increase in the size of the government’s social welfare state.) 

The power of free Americans to inspire transformation abroad

The collapse of apartheid in South Africa offers another example.  Modern American liberals and conservatives both regard (I believe erroneously) economic and cultural sanctions as decisive in ending apartheid in South Africa.  (Our bipartisan political establishment's world view only allows one possible explanation: force – i.e., war or sanctions – or the threat of force.)

An explanation that fits the facts better and that is more in character with other revolutions follows: The most popular television program in apartheid South Africa was The Cosby Show.  (Note: Whites owned almost all TV sets in apartheid South Africa.)  As with the American Civil Rights Movement, the extraordinary humanity, this time dramatized through the extraordinary personality of Bill Cosby, registered in the minds of white South Africans the fact that black people are human. As with the American Civil Rights Movement, racial bigotry was dealt a mortal wound and the political changes followed. 

Note: The South African Government noticed this phenomenon and stopped the broadcast of the The Cosby Show into South Africa – but too late.  Bill Cosby (with his extraordinary personality) had dealt apartheid a fatal blow.  Political changes followed the transformation in the hearts of white South Africans.