Progress is the act of moving forward toward good things. Regress is the act of sliding backwards away from good things already enjoyed.
With this understanding of progress in mind, turn the clock back to 1700. Turn it back further, to the Middle Ages. Keep going backward.
Do we see anywhere in the world economic prosperity, affluent societies, and high standards of living? Do you see sustainable and forward-looking economies? Do you see the flowering of the sciences, arts, and learning?
No, we don’t.
When did social progress begin? Where in history do we see the liberation of millions from hand-to-mouth existences, poverty, and static societies?
Societies progressed away from ages of stagnation and poverty by embracing freedom. Progress began wherever there were free markets, free trade, and government policies that allowed for the unplanned progress of society. Regress occurs every time governments suppress freedom and seek to turn the clock back to the mercantile-style government planning of economies, and attempt to shape societies into the image of their choosing.
Back to historical examples.
Prior to the expansion of free market capitalism in19th century Europe, economic activity was dictated by the mercantile policies of a handful of people in governments. In Liberalism, The Classical Tradition, Ludwig von Mises reminds us that for western Europeans in the period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the beginning of the first World War (1914) an unprecedented improvement in the standard of living took place alongside a quickly rising population.
How did this transformation come to pass? Mises explains that, because of free market capitalism, millions of would-be serfs became the consumers businesses sought to please. Because people wanted a higher standard of living and because other people were free to provide so much for them, society progressed. This “democracy of the market” unleashed the creative and productive power of societies. "By the time of the start of the Great War, the average industrial worker in England and the U.S. “lived better and more graciously than the nobleman of not too long before.”
In Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell highlights the rapid progress countries experience when they loosen government restrictions on trade and price controls. India, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, South Korea, and China all experienced progress by permitting more freedom, not less, in their economies. In 1978, for example, “less than 10 percent of China’s agricultural output was sold in open markets, but, by 1990, 80 percent was.”
This increase in output and resulting boon to the living conditions of everyday Chinese citizens was the result of more freedom, not less. From 1978 to 1995 China experienced an annual economic growth rate of 9 percent.
As for aversion to freedom and regressive policies think of the living conditions in Cuba, North Korea, the former eastern European communist countries, and third world countries ruled by authoritarian governments. The contrast could not be sharper. These examples mark a regression to precapitalistic times, that is, before freedom in the market place was tried and embraced.
Listen to Milton Friedman’s summation of the issue:
It is interesting, if not befuddling, then, that the economic and social policies of self-described “progressives” (or, generically, “liberals”) point us backward to the kinds of mercantilistic, central planning authority in governments that predates any real progress in the world.
Returning to Friedman, he bemoans a similar frustration with the term “liberal”:
“In the name of welfare and equality, the twentieth-century liberal has come to favor a revival of the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought. In the very act of turning the clock back to seventeenth-century mercantilism, he is fond of castigating true liberals as reactionary!”Liberal has come to mean illiberal, and progressive has come to mean regressive.
In that short span of sixteen months the president and a Democratic Congress have pushed through three major pieces of legislation: the stimulus package, healthcare, and, now, financial reform. Self-proclaimed progressives back these measures and call more aggressive, even outright socialist, forms of statism.
All three involve thousands of pages creating mirky new powers for the government. All three cost trillions of dollars, increasing the debt and shackling the taxpayer tighter to the Treasury Department. All three mire citizens and their individual lives in a regulatory bog that is growing, not shrinking. All three attempts at “reform” are decidedly regressive, not progressive, and therefore are not reforms at all.
The result of these new laws will not be surprising: government will assume centralized control of the “private sector” and hence control of our lives. (What is the “private sector” but you and I voluntarily coordinating our lives by exchanging goods and services?) We will regress to less opportunity and choice.
That is, unless more Americans come to understand and embrace true progress, then insist on truly progressive policies. The more Americans understand that freedom is not an abstraction but at the heart of the only real progress in the world, the closer we’ll come to approximating a reinvigorated belief in freedom into real policy. We still live in a constitutional republic, and when the voice of the people is consistent enough and clear enough, public opinion will echo in the halls of legislatures.
A belief in freedom is a belief in the resourceful, creative, and productive powers of Americans themselves. Insisting on a policy of freedom is our best way of progressing forward.
Otherwise, we have no where to go but backward.
