This talk was delivered at the Jeremy Davis Mises Circle in Houston, Texas, on January 23, 2010.
By Lew Rockwell.
I'm finding it ever more difficult to describe to people the kind of world that the Mises Institute would like to see, with the type of political order that Mises and the entire classical-liberal tradition believed would be most beneficial for mankind.
It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It is a fascinating thing to behold.
- People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure without massive invasions of our privacy at every step, and even being strip-searched before boarding airplanes, even though private institutions manage much greater security without any invasions of human rights;
- People can no longer remember how a true free market in medical care would work, even though all the problems of the current system were created by government interventions in the first place;
- People imagine that we need 700 military bases around the world, and endless wars in the Middle East, for "security," though safe Switzerland doesn’t;
- People think it is insane to think of life without central banks, even though they are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency;
- Even meddlesome agencies like the Consumer Products Safety Commission or the Federal Trade Commission strike most people as absolutely essential, even though it is not they who catch the thieves and frauds, but private institutions;
- The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both;
- People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn't create in America the world's most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.
This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom – the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself – is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration.
This has profoundly affected the political culture. We've lived through regime after regime, since at least the 1930s, in which the word freedom has been a rhetorical principle only, even as each new regime has taken away ever more freedom.
Can read
the rest here.
Fred