Very well said

"In the economic world, freedom is a reference to the “free market”. The free market is simply peaceful, voluntary exchange between buyers and sellers. For a nation, it is millions of people and businesses trading value for value in a voluntary way. The exchange is typically money for goods and services but the hallmark of this exchange is that it is about peaceful exchange…that is the essence of a free market…FREEDOM.

The net result of this free exchange is economic growth. The buyers get goods and services while the sellers get paid for their cost of production plus a profit. The profit, then, is utilized for growth whether we realize or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. The bottom line is that this activity is about PRODUCTION. Production is a critical part of a healthy, growing economy. Without the production of goods and service, what consumption can there be?

In that voluntary exchange, profit is the crucial key to growing that business in particular and the economy in general. Profit is the catalyst for job creation, innovation and business expansion. The primary beneficiary of this private growth and expansion is the government. As profits grow and jobs are created, this ultimately results in greater tax revenue for government. But what if government…the state…grows faster than the economy’s ability to sustain it? You must remember that statism and government is not merely paperwork, taxes, laws, regulations, bureaucracy and what we see. Keep in mind that statism (as embodied in government) is CONSUMPTION BY FORCE.

The embodiment of statism (government) siphons its resources by force from the economy. If it is kept at a reasonable (low) level, then both the free market (the economy) and the government can co-exist just fine. If government is kept at a reasonable level, general prosperity is relatively easy to achieve. However, this is not the case today. Far from it!

I came from a now-defunct communist country (the former socialist paradise of Yugoslavia). My family and I learned that painful economic lesson all too well. When you tear away “communist rhetoric”, what you have is an economy totally run by government bureaucracy where “consumption” is king and “production” is basically decimated. What you had left was a country where the general populace was hungry and constantly in need of the basics of life. You had an economy that was top-heavy in “wants and needs” unfulfilled and totally lacking in the means (production!) to fulfill those wants and needs (translation: Poverty!)

The Yugoslavian government thought that an easy way to fix the problem was simply to flood the economy with “more money”. After all, the government (statism) was in charge of printing money. Surely you can make everyone better off by printing trillions of “dinars” (the currency at the time) and give the economy some good old-fashioned stimulus…Right?

Wrong. It didn’t solve the crisis of production. Of course, what it did “produce” was hyper-inflation. By now, the people had enough. Social chaos and conflict ensued and this led to civil war and total breakdown. Yugoslavia was no more by 1994. At the heart of all this was a case of statism gone too far.

The lesson is that freedom and a healthy, thriving free market is critical…CRITICAL…to the long-term success and viability of an economy. And yes…it is even critical for the government’s own well-being and for the well-being of those that are dependent on what it offers.

What worries me is that this lesson is being ignored right now in America."