The first great error here is the mental habit that many have of thinking that big government and big business are somehow at odds. The whole of American history from the beginning to the present suggests precisely the opposite.
All the things you use every day started out as good ideas. In the market economy, good ideas are built upon by better ideas. And the results are not just felt in the abstract but become very real to millions.
In 83 years, all but 20 of Time's Persons of the Year have been political, military, or international leaders. But the world is changing, and people like Zuckerberg are creating that change. While politicians stand in the way of progress, entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg make it.
You have only a few years to live and cannot hope to remake society in so short a time. Nobody now living will see a free society in America. But, in fighting for it, one can have a lot of fun. Consider the effort as a legacy to your great-grandchildren.
I want to focus on how these times relate to history and how we can change the future by applying the economic way of thinking. I am therefore going to draw your attention to four different themes.
The envy-driven masses do not care a whit for what the demagogues call the "bourgeois" concern for freedom of conscience, of thought, of the press, for habeas corpus, trial by jury, and all the rest. They long for the earthly paradise that the socialist leaders promise them.
As "left" and "right" categories dissolve and become increasingly meaningless on the American ideological scene, as young people, with the collapse of both the SDS-Left and the liberal "consensus," grope toward a new philosophy and a new orientation, right-libertarianism may ascend.
Legal or not, destruction is animal-like behavior. It's one thing when it is done by wild pigs. But when identical forms of destruction are sponsored by the state, we are talking about a form of brutality that is purely man-made.
Anyone who has worked in middle management has likely, at one time or another, had their big boss pass out some dopey management books that especially touched the hamster-brained sociopath (as Scott Adams would say) who was in charge of operations.
The honor of being called the "father of modern economics" belongs not to its usual recipient, Adam Smith, but to a gallicized Irish merchant, banker, and adventurer who wrote the first treatise on economics more than four decades before the publication of the Wealth of Nations.
