How The West Became Wealthy...And How We Can Get It All Back

It's not about "stimulus" plans, or "smart investing", or bullet trains or green jobs...

Can you believe all it might really take is...the freedom to work, think, and believe untethered from government coercion?

Yeah:

Starting in the 1700s with Franklin’s lightning rod and Watt’s steam engine, and going nuts in the 1800s, and nuttier in the 1900s, the West, which for thousands of years had played technological second fiddle to China, became astoundingly innovative.

Give the middle class dignity and liberty for the first time in human history and here’s what you get: the steam engine, the automatic textile loom, the assembly line, the symphony orchestra, the railway, the corporation, abolitionism, the steam printing press, cheap paper, literacy, cheap steel, cheap plate glass, the modern university, the modern newspaper, clean water, reinforced concrete, the women’s movement, the electric light, the elevator, the automobile, petroleum, vacations in Yellowstone, plastics, half a million new English-language books a year, hybrid corn, penicillin, the airplane, clean urban air, civil rights, open-heart surgery and the computer.

The result was that for the first time in human history the ordinary people, and especially the very poor, were made much better off. Much, much better off...

Explains why places like the Middle East have barely moved past the Middle Ages. Explains why China, as it has become more "liberal" (with a long ways to go) has become so much more dynamic. Explains why the "Social Democracies" of Europe have been mired in the economic mud for decades.

Explains why that despite all the potential of our great nation with its great people, we are going nowhere, fast, as our leadership works harder and harder every day to burden business with excessive regulations and to limit American's freedom of choice in a no-longer-transparent design to have the government exert control over virtually every aspect of our lives.

The results are all around us - in the boarded-up storefronts, the unemployment lines, and the world's race to tie their chariots to a new horse...

Good luck trying to tell Barack Obama, though. He's knee-deep in Alinsky and Mao...and alas, so are we....