New Year’s Day is the traditional first opportunity for clearing away the accumulated encumbrances and resolutely facing the future. Along with the inability to rid our minds of such clichés comes the inevitable insistence that we mark the year past according to its place in human “progress.” This is especially so for those living in the nation’s capital, the locus and occasion for so much that is supposed to be progress.
We consider it progress when individual creativity is emancipated; when people come together voluntarily for mutual advantage in commerce; when citizens can control their own property undeterred by petty tyrants; when those in public life who feel anointed to control our private lives are kept at bay.
We deem it progress when human beings,acting individually or concertedly, can pursue truth — whether they find it in art, science or religion — without the threat of political interference or coercion. We hold that it is democracy perfected when sovereign individuals can vote in a marketplace of goods, services and ideas to serve whatever they view as their own best interests, thereby reducing the need for majoritarian might.
We think it progress when free peoples act in self-defense — again, individually and concertedly — against enemies sworn to overturn liberty and order with violence and despotism. And we consider it a progressive virtue when the people of a comparatively free nation act on a carefully weighed chance to help another, more desperate people throw off the bonds of tyranny. If such an effort falls short, the praiseworthy people behind it should not wallow in guilt or entertain sinister and self-destructive theories about their leaders’ motives.
“Freedom is the one thing you cannot have,” wrote the great Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White early in the 20th century, “unless you are willing to give it to everyone else.” It was a profound insight, demolishing the false dichotomy between self-interest and selflessness. On that observed dynamic, among much else stemming from the liberation of the human spirit, was built the great American civilization.
Freedom and the idea of progress, handed down from antiquity, are forever linked, mutually sustaining. But let us remember in this New Year that human progress cannot survive when the spark of individual initiative is choked by an expansionist state that everywhere seeks to pre-empt individual choice, always, allegedly, in the name of an individual or the common good.
It is this fundamental preemption of individual choice that inevitably diminishes the realm of freedom whenever government grows bigger. Our government has for too many decades continually grown, becoming ever more expensive and intrusive. May 2007 be the first year of many to come in which it is instead freedom that grows.
