Richard Weaver had it right: Ideas have consequences.
That was the title of the seminal 1948 book by political theorist Weaver, and it serves as appropriate summation of the message of a global survey released last month that shows a correlation between a nation’s economic health and the number of independent think tanks that operate there.
As Weaver put it in the introduction to “Ideas Have Consequences” : “The conscious policies of men and governments are not … brought about by unaccountable forces. They are rather deductions from our most basic ideas of human destiny, and they have a great, though not unobstructed, power to determine our course.”
The survey by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation showed just how strongly the courses of nations are indeed determined by their openness to the power of ideas.
For purposes of its comparisons, Atlas used threewidely respected indices of economic development and political freedom — from Freedom House, the Fraser Institute of Vancouver, Canada, and from the Wall Street Journal together with the Heritage Foundation respectively. From that data, Atlas reached three inescapable conclusions.
First, “the most repressed countries have the fewest Western-style think tanks.” Second, “countries that deny civil and political liberties appear most hostile to organizations supporting Western ideas.” Third, “countries that obstruct economic freedom also appear hostile to such organizations.”
Atlas backed up its conclusions with a raft of statistics. For instance, the survey “found that 33 of 45 countries with the lowest ratings on the 2006 Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation ‘Index of Economic Freedom’ also had no independent think tanks and policy organizations.”
Said Atlas President Alejandro Chafuen: “History shows that ideas come first. Freedoms follow. If the free flow of ideas is inhibited or prohibited, progress and freedom will be retarded and people will be repressed.”
None of which, of course, should come as any surprise to Americans. This great nation remains the only one whose very founding was tied inextricably to an idea rather than to an ethnicity or to any geographical boundaries. Our big idea is that a nation must respect the self-evident truths that our Creator has endowed us with “inalienable rights” that no government can rightly take away.
The American idea is that government must be limited, with the first and chief limit being the consent of the governed. Flowing from that idea is a system of government in which powers are partly separated into, and partly shared among, three great branches; and in which power is also shared by three federated levels of government: local, state, and national.
All of which seems like such second nature to us in these United States that we sometimes forget how, well, foreign these ideas would seem to hundreds of millions of people elsewhere on the globe. Yet those hundreds of millions share the same Creator, and they by rights should possess the same freedoms we Americans enjoy. The Atlas survey shows that such freedoms, springing from noble ideas, breed both prosperity and civic health.
