What would happen if Economic freedom was lost? In her novel, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand showed what happens to a society that allows its government to go down the road of National Socialism: over taxation of the successful to support the poor and taxation of all people to support an assortment of government bureaucratic programs none of which are allowed under the United States Constitution, and the support of inefficient businesses in the name of saving jobs and the overburdening of the more efficient with rules and regulations.
Rand demonstrates that in this kind of atmosphere the only way to “flourish” is by businessmen becoming corrupt in order to seek profits. To do this, of course, they must manipulate crooked politicians on the take. Sound familiar to anything happening today?
The Health Care bill which seems likely to pass after reconciliation between the Senate and House versions will almost certainly take us, by a giant leap, to socialism by turning our doctors into slaves of the state. Think what this will do to the quality of young men and women who decide to become doctors. Who do you think will sign up to train for 10-15 years of grueling study and hardship in order to practice a profession where the majority under the best of circumstances makes an OK living? For the most part it will not be the best and the brightest but the ones who can “work the system” as Rand showed in her novel. In a sense there will be a strike by the doctors - the best, brightest and honest ones will NOT become doctors.
Rand’s novel depicts a scenario where the men of the mind go on strike. Brilliant bankers, engineers, financiers, doctors and nurses, all decide to withdraw their minds from the market place. Hundreds go to a secret town in the mountains to start a new society based on individual rights and economic freedom. They do this as a declaration of their right to think, live and exercise their profession as they see fit.
Maybe the beginning of the 2nd decade of the 2nd millennium is the time for a showdown between statism and freedom, Socialism and Capitalism, and between the chained mind and the free mind. It’s time for Americans to learn what Capitalism is and what huge benefits and riches it has provided those few nations that follow even partially its principles, and we must learn that governments exist to PROTECT rights….not to violate them as ours has for the past century in ever increasing amounts.
“Capitalism, the system of individual rights, has brought increased freedom to men all over the world. In Europe, capitalism ended feudalism…In America... the principle of individual rights impelled the British colonists to throw off the rule of the monarchy and establish history’s freest nation – and the logic of the country’s founding principles led, in less than a century, to the abolition of slavery…”
“Capitalism is the system of freedom…”
“Capitalism is the system of wealth…” (The Capitalist Manifest by Andrew Bernstein; University Press of America)
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