Thank the goddess, no! I feel capitalism thriving while socialism starves and burns! I feel individualism ascending while collectivism falls!
I see the billion people raised out of severe poverty by capitalism in the past twenty-five years. I see them beginning to be prosperous enough to pursue luxuries like environmentalism. I see their birth rates dropping, as people’s do when they become wealthier.
I hear the voices of the dispossessed and the untouchable, freed by capitalist-supplied technology to tell their stories on a global stage.
I mourn those still stuck in bubbles of collectivism and faith in central authority, yearning fruitlessly for a romanticized hunter-gatherer past which never existed. I wish they could read Hayek and understand that the order of compassion they seek is found, not in power-over models of redistribution, but in power-exchange models based on free action and radical decentralization.
I am pessimistic about the future of nation-states and their creations, the corporations. But I am optimistic about the future of the planet and its inhabitants.
