“I remember the wall”, I said when it was my turn. There was a
terrible excitement in the air and everyone stood close to the old
wooden television. The fact that people were standing added to the
tension and I could sense that all over the country, people were
standing and watching the exact same station on the same wooden
television. Everybody had the same television, you weren’t allowed
to buy any other model back then. There was shock on my parents’
faces, and fear. It was wholly unclear to me if the scenes of young
men with mallets and pickaxes hacking away at concrete blocks was
good news or bad. The wall is the first thing I can remember watching
on the news.
It was the felling of not just a wall, but of an ideology. The
rejection of central planning and government control. The unthinkable
happened, the East would never be the same. But a barrier divides two
halves. The changes to the East were obvious and visible. People born
on the wrong side tasted pineapple for the first time in their lives.
Across the fields of rubble, the abandoned machine-gun posts and
checkpoints, the West was also about to change.
When the sour communist faces stared back at us from behind barbed
wire fences, it was easy to remember why we embraced free market
capitalism and individualism. As the dust settled and the east
adopted free markets, the west began to forget its values. Social
safety nets expanded into cradle-to-grave welfare. Millions of pages
of rules and regulations were written, dwarfing all of the combined
creative genius that had been put on to the written page by western
civilisation until that point.
Communism had failed. The central planning of an economy and the
suppression of individual will causes poverty and misery. Staring
this failure in the face should have vindicated the free market
principles of Adam Smith and the liberal philosophy of John Stuart
Mill. Instead, capitalism has been vilified as greedy profit-seeking
and people talk again of the great plenty that will come, if only
government’s hands were not tied by the agents of evil
corporations.
Indeed it is now very confusing, that there is more economic freedom
in communist China than there is in so-called capitalist America. As
Adam and John walked east across the rubble where the wall once
stood, Marx and Weber passed them as they were heading west. Of
course, I am exaggerating, the United States is not a communist
dictatorship and China is not a champion of liberty - but neither is
the opposite true.
However, as the Cuban wall starts to crumble and Kin Jung-un gets
weaker, the last living examples of the failures of total socialism
start to fade. Without these grotesque monuments to human stupidity,
we might forget to keep in check our own socialist tendencies as we
continue to embrace ever more government control and forsake the
heritage that made us free and prosperous.
 |
| Sunset. Sunrise. Moon shrugs. |
