Some members of the group asked some questions that are applicable to the work of the group. The questioners wanted to expand on the ideas of free markets and entrepreneurship. They wanted to know whether imagination is creativity and what can be done to change the mindset of youth in society. This essay is a response and an expansion of the concepts that they were exploring The ideas of liberty have been around for a very long time. The great Roman statesman, Cicero, was outspoken and well written on justice, on liberty, on the law, and on many other important ideas that have been the guiding light for people seeking freedom. Cicero lived and spoke and wrote more than 2,100 years ago. The promotion of liberty dont sit well with those in power. Cicero was their enemy and was eventually assassinated, with his head hung in the Senate as a warning to others. The ideas of liberty are powerful, and thus they can be dangerous when confronting the powerful. Two millennia after Cicero, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence of the United States and subsequent president, noted that the tree of liberty must from time to time be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Liberty is the enemy of tyranny. The more of one, the less of the other. Tyrants will continue to consolidate power and increase oppression if there is no resistance. The point is not that violent rebellion is good, but rather that those in power must know that abuse of the citizens brings repercussions. Liberty, in all cases, comes from the people themselves. Those with power never give it up voluntarily. If the people accept oppression, they will certainly be oppressed. Freedom is another term for liberty. It doesnt mean the freedom from a foreign colonialist government, as some seem to take it. Most African countries, in spite of liberation from colonial powers, are not free. Their oppressors are now domestic instead of foreign. Many people view countries with democratic governments as necessarily free, simply because the people can vote. Being able to vote for your oppressor, however, doesnt make you free. Freedom is necessarily an individual thing. You are free to the extent to which you can make decisions about your own life without outside interference. Slavery is the ownership of one person by another. A slave is subject to the dictates of his or her owner. A slave owner who seeks to make every decision for the slave must necessarily be brutal and repress the self-direction and the innate will of the slave, since all individuals instinctively strive to make decisions that will benefit themselves and their loved ones. As should be obvious, the lack of outright, formal slavery does not mean the lack of oppression. The lack of oppression goes far beyond the abolition of formal slavery. Lack of oppression is the definition of freedom in its most fundamental form. The more free one is, the less subject one is to the whims of others and the more control over ones own life and choices. Sometimes people separate political freedom from economic freedom, and justify encroachments by official into the economic lives of people. Freedom is, however, simply choice in all realms of life. John Locke, one of the political philosophers who most influenced Jefferson and many other proponents of limited government and individual liberty, wrote about the rights of every individual to his or her life, liberty and property. The key feature of freedom is that it is reciprocal. The right of every individual to life, liberty and property means necessarily that the decisions I make about my life, my liberty, and my property are bound by those same rights in other people. My decisions cant violate the rights of others to their lives, their liberty, or their property. The prosperous countries of the world, either at present or sometime in the past, have had a high level of economic freedom, voluntary commerce, and a restraint on political repression of individual activities. Even some of the countries that today boast of a high level of development while hosting socialist or interventionist owe their prosperity to prior states of economic freedom. Their present state could not have developed without prior freedom of commerce. Free markets are nothing more than free people interacting on the basis of voluntary commerce, exchanging value without political interference, with both parties getting something that they personally value more than the thing that they give up. People produce value by the things that they do, the goods that the produce, the services that they offer to other people. Prosperity is simply the sum total of all of the production of the people minus the amount that they use up or consume. Economic freedom is simply freedom in all arenas of life. It is sometimes discussed in terms of how easy it is to do business and how much regulation over business is justifiable, but that is a distortion of the very idea of freedom. If a politician arbitrarily denies an individual the right to make a decision about his or her business or prevents some type of economic activity, that politician is taking away freedom in every sense of the word. If a politician takes away the right of individual to compete against a government monopoly, that politician has diminished freedom of that individual, as well as the range of choices for everyone else. If a politician demands that you get a license and register your business before you are allowed to sell your products and services, that politician has limited your liberty. There is nothing in the idea of free markets or freedom in the general sense that would allow for fraud, pollution or violence. Those things are violations of the rights of others, and thus not acceptable in free society. People need to have the ability to defend themselves from the aggression of others and get restitution for violations of their life, liberty, or property. Entrepreneurship is the response of individuals to the challenges of the market. It is the discovery process by which economies and societies advance. The entrepreneur is the risk-taker and the change maker. Entrepreneurs often fail, but that failure is actually good. It is one more way that doesnt work. The failure is a learning experience, the door to success through which the risk-takers must pass. Some learn the lessons quickly. The very lucky ones learn the lessons from others. Others must keep pounding their head on the door before the lessons sink in. Many people avoid the pain of failure by never trying, but by never trying, they never give luck an opportunity to find them. They never give themselves the opportunity to learn lessons that will help them to improve their own lives and the lives of others. Most people are imaginative in some way and to some extent. Imagination is the precursor to creativity. Without the imagination, the thinking process, nobody would be creative. Every good thing that exists today was created first is someones mind. The job of the entrepreneur is to move beyond imagination, to take an idea from the abstract and to make it concrete. The entrepreneur, however, must first figure out a way to earn a profit from the concrete, because profits are the only way that an idea can expand and flourish. If the item does not meet a need of people in the market, or if it does not provide value in excess of the resources used to create it, that idea will die. Other entrepreneurs with better ideas or better, more efficient processes may be able to use the same or similar idea in another way that is profitable, allowing the product or service to expand and create more value for everyone involved. The entrepreneurs are the disruptors in society. They are the change-makers. They are the ones from which progress springs. Entrepreneurs, however, flourish when the environment is stable, when they can better anticipate the future. Politics, buy its nature, resists change, and sometimes actively thwart the activities of entrepreneurs and producers. More often, however, politicians create an environment that is filled with risk, with arbitrary rule-making, with interference, and with added cost to producers. While the moral justification for freedom does not depend on the results of freedom in economies, it is a happy relationship that more freedom correlates with more prosperity. Various indexes of economic freedom have been developed to measure freedom based on objective factors in the various countries in the world. As it turns out, the more free a country is, the more likely that it will be more prosperous. Less free nations tend to be poorer. While the indexes are certainly not perfect representations of each country studies, the results are very compelling. For those who are convinced by evidence rather than philosophy, the indexes provide a pretty convincing case for improving the level of economic freedom in any nation. Take some time to look at and understand the Index of Economic Freedom and the Freedom in the World Index. They have been compiled by economists and researchers in two separate organizations, but the results are fairly consistent between them. Look up the results for your own country to see how it compares with what you know to be true in your own lives and society. This brings us to the question of how to change the mind set of the young people, to convince them of the necessity for expanded freedom, for limited political interference, and for voluntary commerce in all areas of life and society. As young people yourselves, you are in the best position to do that. But in order to accomplish that, you must become salesmen for those ideas. You must be convinced yourself and armed with knowledge, not only of the facts, but also knowledge of how to persuade. There is a tremendous body of literature, old and new, that can help to strengthen your grasp of the ideas. The group will make that literature and that knowledge more available to you, but it is up to you to be curious, to ask questions when things dont make sense, and to find ways to find the answers. There are also ways to go about convincing others, but the fundamental method is to talk with people. You will get resistance to many of the concepts, but only because they are things they have not thought about. Ask why they disagree and lead them to ask more questions. You dont have to know all of the answers. You need mostly the passion to get people interested in finding the answers to their own questions. The objective of the Sierra Leone Liberty Group is to help you develop your own personal toolset for presenting ideas and for persuading others to start the same journey to understanding. The things that have been happening in the last few months have created unforeseen difficulties, but those difficulties can be turned into advantages when the group is out in the community talking with people about the activities and about the ideas that the group is promoting. The crisis will be over in time and the Group will be in an even better position to make a tremendous difference in the future of Sierra Leone.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 04:22:49 +0000
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