A new year gives us fresh reminders that the battle for freedom and liberty demand renewed intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual efforts.
We need look no further than Venezuela for evidence that central control of an economy is spiritually and materially detrimental to a nation’s people. The previous century is rife with other examples of government-controlled economies squelching the entrepreneurship, innovation and human flourishing concomitant with free markets.
“More troubling to me are well-funded groups that employ faith as a Trojan horse for progressive agendas.”
Unfortunately, despite all the evidence to support the economic principles in which we endeavor to instruct not only Christians and people of faith but also policymakers and the public at large, we continue to face an uphill battle. More than 60 years after formerly fervent Marxist adherents declared Communism “the God that failed,” and mere decades after the collapse of the USSR and the shredding of the Iron Curtain, the collectivist urge continues to entice with false promises of an earthly utopia. Witness the support for a self-professed Democratic Socialist among an estimated 70 percent of millennials during the 2016 presidential primaries, the anticapitalist Occupy Wall Street movement and any number of proposed government schemes and political promises to redistribute income and wealth masked as forcing others to pay their “fair share.”
Witness as well the ridiculous fashion statement represented by T-shirts of college students and musicians emblazoned with Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s visage, the delusional encomiums rendered by public figures upon the death of Fidel Castro and the persistent claims made for Sweden and Denmark as socialist paradises. Largely unmentioned is that these last assertions run contrary to both countries increasingly trending toward free-market privatization and deregulation over the course of the past 20 years.
More troubling to me are well-funded groups that employ faith as a Trojan horse for progressive agendas. So-called “social justice” advocates, shareholder activists, environmentalists and other groups increasingly claim religious authority for advocating government-enforced wealthredistribution schemes. Rarely—if ever—do they acknowledge the benefits provided society as a whole by free-market prosperity and innovation. It’s our job to remind everyone of the spiritual and material necessities of the Acton Institute’s mission.
