Look around and behold the blessings of freedom all around you. Begin first with the lavish presents and food that are holiday traditions in your home. No people at any time in human history has had access to what we have around us. And look at the generations gathered: people living to their 80 and 90s and longer. This would have been unthinkable in the past, when 40 was consider a ripe old age.
Our children and grandchildren play with electronic gizmos that would have baffled the minds of anyone in human history born before twenty years ago. The food is plentiful and delicious, and few of us had anything to do with planting or cultivating or raising or slaughtering. It is there waiting for us at the grocery store. The clothing we give and receive we did not weave; others do it for us, and by the time we carry it to the checkout stand it could have traveled around the world and back.
The music we hear is brought to us via a digital medium that presents ancient and modern sounds in our intimate spaces with the push of a button, and for very little money. Think of the email messages you will receive from friends and family from far away, and how you will check the news on the web during the down times in the next few days. Consider how fortunate we are to have leisure time at all, when we are not consumed by endless toil to provide food and shelter and clothing, as were most people in all of history.
These blessings are not brought to you by the Department of Homeland Holidays or any political party. No force was involved in delivering them to your table or under your tree. Those who made them and sold them, and invested in their production in the first place, did so voluntarily and with the risk that there would be no payoff at all. Those who buy them are not compelled to do so but rather choose it to be this way. And all this cooperation via market exchange yields material blessings beyond description. This wealth brings us health, and the ability to be charitable to others.
The blessings are material but the foundation for the system that makes it possible is intellectual. It is the idea of freedom at work. It is not the only idea alive in the world today. The contrary idea is that power is the answer to our woes. But what has power brought us this holiday season? Less security, less opportunity, less cooperation, and more of the only thing that the state ultimately provides us despite all its promises: taxation, regulation, economic dislocation, and war. In a word: coercion.
The better way is through enterprise, that voluntary act of sharing talents and serving one another through exchanges that link the world in friendship. All the technical aspects of economic aside, the simple claim of the Mises Institute is that the world would be better off with more exchange and less coercion. We hold out an ideal rooted in an idea—an ideal that is fragile and in need of unrelenting defense. As you consider all these blessings, consider that supporting these ideas is one way to assure that the holiday season will be as plentiful for future generations as it is for this one.
