Divided We Stand

“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.