And, One year later – understanding how very, very far it is to go…

Black Flag - http://standupforamerica.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/one-year-of-standing-up-for-america/#comment-44502

Do you think ideas don’t matter, that what people believe about themselves and their world has no real consequence?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/8347409.stm

This BBC poll finds that only 11 percent of people questioned around the world – and 29,000 people were asked their opinions – think that free-market capitalism is a good thing.

The rest believe in more government regulation.

Only a small percentage of the world’s population believes that capitalism works well and that more regulation will reduce efficiency.

One-quarter of those asked said that capitalism is “fatally flawed.”

In France, 43 percent believe this. In Mexico, it is 38 percent.

A majority believes that government should rob the rich to give money to poor countries. In only one country, Turkey, did a majority say that less government is better.

It gets even worse.

While most Europeans and Americans think it was a good thing for the Soviet Union to disintegrate, people in India, Indonesia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Russia, and Egypt mostly think it was a bad thing. Yes, you read that right: millions freed from socialist slavery = bad thing.

That news must lift the heart of every would-be despot the world over.

And it comes as something of a shock twenty years after the collapse of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe revealed what this system had created: backward societies with citizens who lived short and miserable lives.

Then there is the China case, a country rescued from bloody barbarism under communism and transformed into a modern and prosperous country by capitalism.

What can we learn?

Far from not having learned anything, people have largely forgotten the experience and have developed a love for the ancient fairytale that all things can be fixed through collectivism and central planning.

As to those who would despair at this poll, consider that it might have been much worse had not the reality of examples of the collapse of Socialism did not exist.

It might have been 99% in support of socialist tyranny.

What, for example, is capitalism? Do people even know? Michael Moore doesn’t know, else he wouldn’t be calling bailouts for elite, Fed-connected financial firms a form of capitalism.

Many other people reduce the term capitalism to: “the system of economics in the U.S.” It is no more complicated than that. This is despite the reality that the U.S. has a comprehensive planning apparatus in place that is directly responsible for all our current economic troubles.

Now, let’s take this further.

Among the people around the world who do not like the U.S. empire, many believe they don’t like capitalism either. If the U.S. economy drags the world down into recession, that is a prime example of capitalism’s failure.

Even more preposterous, if you didn’t like George W. Bush, his ways and his cronies, and Obama is something of a relief, then you don’t like capitalism and you do like socialism.

Another point of view misunderstands the idea of capitalism itself.

It is not about creating economic structures that benefit capital at the expense of labor or culture or religion.

It is about a system that protects the rights of everyone and serves the common good. Capitalism is just the name that happened to be identified with this system. If you want to call freedom a banana, fine.

What matters is not words but ideas.

I do know that none of these messed-up definitions of capitalism follow. You know this too.

But for the world at large, serious ideological analytics are not the active force of daily life.

Many, if not most, people attach themselves to vague slogans.

All of which leaves true capitalism – a product of the voluntary society and the sum total of all the exchanges and cooperative acts of people all over the world – with few actual intellectual defenders.

We are growing, but the educational work we need to do is daunting, and we are facing the most powerful forces in the world.

But, there is nothing new in this.

In the history of the world, freedom is the exception, not the rule. It must be fought for anew in every generation. Its enemies are everywhere.

The fashion for socialism and the opposition to capitalism should alarm every lover of freedom the world over.

We have our jobs cut out for us, but with numbers this bad, we must do much better at educating and teaching and explaining freedom, because if we fail, it will be the end of human civilization.

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