The Promise

 

Arthur Brooks narrated a Prager U video on 6/9/2014, entitled The Promise of Free Enterprise. I took notes on the short film and will comment on them.

 

Brooks: “What is free enterprise? It is about making money but there is another side more important.  Free enterprise is not just exceptional for its material benefits, but due to its moral benefits.”

 

My response: If Rand and I are correct, and we are, self-interest is virtue, and selflessness and excessive self-denial to the collective is vice or evil. Considering that free enterprise, a fairly modern economic system is the freest, more opportunity yielding economic system allowing any individual the chance to make enough money and to be his own person or self-realize. When he is happy living the life that God meant him to live in a free society run on economic principles of free enterprise, he is happy and grateful: his self-esteem is very high, so he loves himself and that is the greatest moral value in the world. When he loves himself then he can love God and thus the world gets better. Free enterprise does not cause this moral benefit, but it provides the economic milieu most conducive to moral virtue for humans on earth.

 

Brooks: “This may seem counterintuitive to you, especially to those of you that have encountered college professors declaring free enterprise is about selfishness and greed.

 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Leftists grudgingly admitted free enterprise gives us material benefits. (Ed Notes: Getting per capita material benefits by itself grows self-esteem or virtue.) But the cost isn’t worth it. People become too materialistic, and corporations become too powerful. Profits are corrupting and there is just too much material inequality.

 

Is that a fair assessment? Not it is not and here is why. Free enterprise is not just materially fulfilling, it is a moral imperative. One reason: only free enterprise enables us to become truly happy because it enables us to earn our success. Earned success is the happiness and satisfaction we derive from having dreams and working hard to achieve them. This is only possible in a system where rewards are based on earning them.”

 

My response: Brooks is very wise here: we need meaning to enjoy life, and if we do not create our own meaning, and pay our own way by our own efforts, we can never overcome the natural human wickedness inside, the feeling of being nothing, of hating ourselves for our lack of merit, love, excellence, and accomplishment.

 

Brooks: “In other systems rewards are allotted based on the right connections or having to please politicians not customers.

 

What else makes you happy? Your personal relationships, you family and maybe your job. These things represent hard work, personal virtue, and achievement. Sure, we all want nice things. But if we don’t earn them, they do not make us happy.

 

If you win the lottery, unearned wealth, you are less happy, quite often, than before. Money doesn’t buy happiness (Ed Notes: but it does alleviate anxiety, worry and unhappiness about not having enough, a realistic worry, that keeps one from becoming happy).

 

Despite this, Leftists say only we had more equal incomes, we will be happier as a society.”

 

My response: Unearned rewards or unearned material success as welfare or charity may convert the receiver into a parasite with no self-esteem, no happiness.

 

Brooks: “This is not true. Happiness is earned not given by others. Business owners rate themselves in studies as among the happiest groups of people, and it is not by working short hours, or making lots of money. On average, entrepreneurs make 24.5% less than government managers. (Ed Notes: the richest counties in America are around Washington DC.).

 

Entrepreneurs are happy because their business allows them to earn their own success. This success makes them happy, and this is only possible through their operating in a free enterprise economy. Government handouts make us feel unfilled. This is not my idea. It came from the Founding Fathers who put together happiness and earned success.

 

The Declaration of Independence talks about the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. You do not have the right to be happy—you only have the right to pursue happiness. Only free enterprise lets us decide what makes us happy and then go do it.

 

My response: we cannot have liberty and open-ended self-actualizing creativity and have government enforced “equal happiness defined as equal outcomes.”

 

We do not worry about being happy, but if we try our best to self-realize, happiness is often an accompanying reward or welcome byproduct. That you tried is enough, for the journey is more important than the end sought. When one self-realizes, one keeps growing and growing, becoming while alive until one dies, for there is no resting upon one’s laurels.