Here’s a response to a reply from a “proud Trump man.”
Mr. McKinney:
You write that I “and other market fundamentalists don’t get that economic freedom should be judged on how good it is at boosting traditional families like those which Made America Great following the war. If it won’t do this, government has got to step in, like President Trump thankfully is doing.”
I couldn’t disagree more, but I’m in no mood to offer a lengthy reply. I’ll simply share with you an observation from 1856 by Alexis de Tocqueville, with which I heartily concur: “The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.”*
I despair that so many of my fellow Americans – on the left, and now increasingly also on the right – are behaving as if they are born to be slaves.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030* Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Stuart Gilbert, trans. (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955 [1856]), page 169.
