Free or Equal ---- chicken or the egg?

A former student sent me a link: http://ideasmatter.typepad.com/ideas-matter/2010/12/free-or-equal-with-johan-norberg-preview-clip.html that I watched but then was able to watch the entire program on TV later last evening.  I am trying to lay hands on the DVD for it is a powerful work featuring Milton Friedman and his great work as background but with modern status of location and status of Friedman's concept four decades later.  I was spellbound and hope you can find a way to watch this whole video.

In what seems a world gone wild in this early part of our new century, the context of Friedman and thus the video rests upon two pillars for an economy; citizenry freedom or Economic control.  The thesis is, of course, the power of what Adam Smith postulated in his Wealth of Nations in 1775 that economic forces will, over time self correct the ills and misalignment of economies for the ultimate good of the consumer. AMEN says I!  Friedman, to prove his thesis went to the most unrestricted government on earth at the time, Hong Kong. What he found was a thriving economy, poor but  striving to grow, but with zero interference from the government in the form of tariffs, taxes, protectionist legislation, none and the country blossomed to one of the richest nations on earth.

Then Friedman, rightly, parallelled the Hong Kong miracle, Smith wrote about three hundred years before, with the US which has built an impossible tax structure, protectionists barriers from top to bottom, seems to abhor tree trade agreements and we can all see today the impact of all of that.  Smith spoke of the Invisible Hand that, unseen, but always present in every single transaction large or small thus a metaphor for an economic system where the consumer, unhindered by government interference, will find a way to make, sell, shift the factors of production to maximize the existing pull by the consumer but agile enough to shift those factor away when the demand slowly due to over supply.

I guess I am yet again beating the drum for a return to a true Free Market.  Unions do not like that. Legislators apparently abhor it but three centuries of proof should at least merit serious consideration. There is simply far too much government INTERFERENCE in the gearing of the market based economy. Even China, a free market economy but with a Communist form of government, sees the ills of a socialistic economic system and we can see her growth abounding.

The aggregate of Smith and the video is that you can have an economy without freedom but you will never have a growing, bustling economy until you have personal and economic freedom first.  We see almost daily basic freedoms in the nations being overtaken by governmental czars, commissions, court interpretation and thus we see a stagnated economy and an abysmal economic growth.  Perhaps we should blow the dust of Wealth of Nations and give it a whirl again?