Progressive or Regressive?

"The myth of socialism is far stronger than the reality of capitalism. That is because capitalism is not really an 'ism' at all. It is what people do if you leave them alone."~~Arnold Beichman

From a prior post with some revisions...This has been on my mind a lot lately:

Progress is the act of moving forward toward good things. Regress is the act of sliding backwards away from good things already enjoyed.

Historically, societies progressed away from hand-to-mouth existences by embracing free and cooperative exchange.  Real material progress began wherever there were free markets, free trade, and government policies that allowed for the unplanned progress of society. Regress, poverty, and stagnation have occurred every time governments suppress freedom and seek to turn the clock back to the mercantile-style government planning of economies, attempting to shape societies into the image of their choosing.

It is interesting and 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 both predates any real progress in the world and has been the source of social and economic regression.

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 western Europeans in the period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the beginning of the first World War (1914) experienced an unprecedented improvement in the standard of living alongside a quickly rising population.

How did that happen? Mises explains that because of free market capitalism, millions of erstwhile serfs became the consumers that entrepreneurs sought to please. Because serfs wanted a higher standard of living and because other people were free to provide so much for them, society progressed out of centuries-old patterns of inter-generational poverty. 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 experienced when they loosened 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 markets. In 1978 “less than 10 percent of China’s agricultural output was sold in open markets, but, by 1990, 80 percent was.” 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 Soviet Union, 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 before freedom in the market place was embraced.

Returning to the progressive/liberal identification in contemporary political culture, here is Milton Friedman bemoaning what the term “liberal” has come to represent:

“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; progressive has come to mean regressive.

The more Americans understand that real human freedom is not an abstract concept but is at the heart of the only real progress in world history, the closer we’ll come to approximating a reinvigorated belief in freedom into real policy.  Proponents of freedom should heartily take on the "progressive" label and remind others just what makes them progressive.

A belief in freedom is a belief grounded in history and realistic optimism about the resourceful, creative, and productive powers of Americans and other capitalist societies in the world.  Insisting on a policy of freedom is our best way of progressing forward, slowly but most assuredly out of this debt-riddled recession into which we've allowed our neo-mercantilists to bog us down.

Otherwise, we have no where to go but backward.