[As I read through the hundreds of emails pouring in to my inbox each day from conservative watchdogs, emails variously bemoaning the current threats to our national sovereignty, threats to our national security due to a foreign policy that invites challenge, threats to our Constitution’s 1^st, 2^nd , 5^th and 22^nd Amendments, threats to our health care system , threats to our economy—an economy strangled by government regulations, crony capitalism, government binge spending and debt—I remember one of my heroes and his thoughts on our country and its founding. An article has been building in me for years now, ever since I first began looking into the demise of our country. So, now is a good time to air this. –mc ]

“If you build a society that values equality over liberty, you will get neither equality nor liberty.” So Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman once said in answer to a young college student at Stanford University many years ago. The student, no doubt, was learning Economics and/or Sociology from the by-then, well-entrenched Marxist ideologues who had infiltrated our American Universities several decades earlier.

The student was no doubt taught to believe the leftist dogma that the equality of economic outcomes in society was a more “worthy” goal than was liberty. One must give up some liberty—a “You can’t always get what you want” attitude—in order for government to ensure that its poor and “oppressed” citizens are raised up to some “minimum standard” of living. As the student had pointed out to Friedman,  he wished people had the opportunity for inexpensive housing and education.

Interestingly, what began as the “Progressive” policies Woodrow Wilson and FDR, that were recycled in the 1960s, are today heard from Barack Obama as he argues for “free” pre-school for children. When the government says “free” it is talking to those who will receive—but who will give? In order for one person to be the recipient of “free” goods and services, some other person had to invest time and energy to produce those goods and services. Put another way, one person’s private property must be taken by force. Remember that government produces nothing.

So, is it more worthy to value equality over liberty? Our founders did not believe so, and history has proven this beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt. When a society values the pursuit of economic equality over liberty, government must steal money from some people in order to give it to other people—and, of course, siphon off a fee for doing so. This is a demonstrable outcome. No one willingly gives up their property to thieves, and therefore the threat of force must be used to extract it. In doing this, the government causes prosperity to decline; freedom is lost; the people as a whole produce less, and, after a while, there is less wealth to spread around. This means that the original goal of equality, if met, will result in equal shares of a miserable existence. Every government that has tried this has failed to provide for its people even small fraction of what a free market society has historically accomplished.