Gettysburg Redux

                The anniversary of the Gettysburg Address whizzed by us again on Nov 19.  Feeling a bit grandiose, we wanted to start this post off with a tip of the hat to it.

                Two hundred and thirty-seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

                (It is a time so far away that our interest in it sometimes verges into the archeological.  A few years ago in Boston someone accidentally dug up some old bottles and such that dated from colonial times.  Scholars carefully combed through the site, wondering what life was like for people back then.)

We are now engaged in a great struggle testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, can long endure.

                That struggle is not just about terrorism, and terrorism may or may not be connected to what the basic struggle actually is. 

                The big picture is the worry that Plato might have been correct when he said that the cycle of government goes, in descending order, from monarchy to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny.

                The smaller picture (although still a rather large one) is that, although there are many things required to maintain a society’s health, among the most important is economic growth.  In fact it is something without which we are in deep trouble.  We saw in the mid-twentieth century what happened when growth was reversed during the worldwide Great Depression: the globe convulsed in the violence of World War Two.

                Economic growth is vital for the maintenance of our civic order.  It maintains the hope, for those who want a better life, that they or their children can have it.  Without that hope, there is blame and the impulse to want what others have, to the point of taking it from them.

                For that growth to occur, there are certain basics that must be in place.  Many of these basics boil down to freedom: the freedom of individuals to operate as they see fit, in business as well as in their personal lives.

                Our economic system, besides being labeled capitalist, is also called free enterprise.  The basics of its operation were observed and written down nearly three centuries ago by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.  He spoke of the “invisible hand”—the marketplace--that would automatically regulate business and commerce for the benefit of everyone. 

The question of whether his system should be applied in its total purity is still a matter of debate.  It is generally agreed that its opposite, a total command economy, does not work.  No government is smart enough to know what and how much is needed at all times.  (As a matter of fact, no government is smart, period. Only individuals are smart, and they generally do not think well in group situations.  Especially governments.)  Conversely, a functioning free market will result in needed and wanted things being produced and delivered.

                (To be continued.)