Posted by Peter Boettke on November 08, 2009 at 09:25 AM at The Austrian Economist
November 9th 1989 — forgive me if I still get choked up about it 20 years later — is a critical date in modern history whose significance should never be forgotten. Those of us who believe strongly in the freedom of the individual and in the power of voluntary civil associations (including the profit motive of the market) to resolve social dilemmas instead of relying on the coercive power of the state have lost much of the ground we gained in the 1980s and 1990s during the time since 9/11, and especially this past year. But we still can rejoice in this shinning example of the victory of the individual over the collective. Freedom was celebrated that day by people who were oppressed by their government for far too long.
Let’s remember the sheer joy of that day, and the celebration of life evident in the faces of the young (and old) as they tore down the wall figuratively and literally and reclaimed their basic human freedoms. And let us also remember the intellectual arguments from our discipline of economics and political economy that so thoroughly demonstrated that tyranny fails to deliver the goods, while freedom actually works. Even us cool-headed academics can get passionate about the fact that there is only one economic system that simultaneously delivers individual autonomy, generalized prosperity, and peaceful cooperation among diverse groups. Capitalism is not just ruthlessly efficient, it is civilizing — doux commerce thesis must be championed by economists no less than the efficiency properties of a private property order and freedom of exchange. And political capitalism is NOT capitalism, but instead statism that both uses, and is used by, an alliance between business and government to profit some at the expense of others.
Anyway, Richard Ebeling has a nice retrospective on the 20th anniversary that is highly recommended.
