FREEDOM AND PRIVATE PROPERTY CONCEPTS

 2/26/2010 3:03:07 P.M. Eastern Standard Time




　FREEDOM AND PRIVATE PROPERTY CONCEPTS


 BY MANUEL CEREIJO

Private property and freedom are inseparable. The individual’s right to live freely and pursue happiness includes the right to acquire and possess property. Property represents the fruits of each individual own intellectual and physical labor. Freedom and private property are the antidote to tyranny, to socialism, to big government, where a few dictate to the many. Freedom is good in itself and also makes us rich. Collectivism compounds bondage with poverty. While democracy seeks equality in freedom, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
Capitalism, free market, is the most transformative of economic systems. It encourages creativity and inventiveness. It produces wealth, in the form of industries, products, services, as well as improving upon existing ones. The most important event in the late 20th century was the demise of the socialist dream. The most important event of the recent era is the failure of capitalism to win a corresponding total triumph. The belief that the good fortune of others is also finally one’s own does not come easily to the human breast. Hypocrisy is the tribute paid by vice to virtue
The key to understanding the free market is private property. The free market is the only economic system that produces an abundance of food, housing, energy, and medicine. It is in man’s desire to take risks, to innovate, to achieve, to compete, and to acquire. The individual knows better how to make and spend, and provide for his family than any government can do. The government does not add value to the economy. On the contrary, it removes value from the economy by imposing taxes on the people.
The crucial source of creativity and initiative is the individual investor. Supply creates demand. Wealth consists in assets that promise a future stream of income. Real wealth is hard work, requiring prolonged and profitable production of goods. On every epoch the peoples who have excelled in creating wealth have been the victims of some society’s greatest brutalities. Recent history has seen in Germany, Russia, China, Cuba.

In a civil, free society, the individual has a duty to respect the unalienable rights of others and the values, customs, and traditions, tried over time and passed from one generation to the next. This establishes a nation’s cultural identity. He is responsible for attending to his own well-being and that of his family.
We are living in a world without moral clarity, in which dictators speak about human rights even as they kill many of their own people. Only those who have no understanding of tyranny can take such nonsense seriously. A society is free if people have the right to express their views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm. The public statements of those who live in fear are never a reliable indication of people’s true opinions. For those living in a free society, the idea that a state would try to thoroughly brainwash its subjects is particularly difficult to grasp. Freedom from tyranny is not only universally desired, it should also be universally desirable.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We do not pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on them to do the same, or we might see our coming years telling our children, and grandchildren what it was once like in the United States when men were free. Hard to believe? Keep in mind Cuba, January, 1959.
Sent: 2/26/2010 3:03:07 P.M. Eastern Standard Time