All efforts to displace individual plans with central planning, he warned us, must end in disaster and dictatorship. No lofty vision can vindicate the use of the brute force necessary to attain it. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule. These apologists reject the iron fist and claim that the State can achieve their egalitarian and collectivist goals with a velvet glove. Nowhere in the world has the statist impulse produced an omelet.
People worse off than before, impoverished and looking elsewhere for answers and escape.
It is a telling conclusion that statists have no successful model to point to, no omelet they can hold up as the pi ce de r sistance of their cuisine. Not so for those of us who believe in freedom. In contrast, no country with a persistently low rating was able to achieve even middle income status. The countries with the largest increases in economic freedom during the period achieved impressive growth rates. At the time of the original publication, Lawrence Reed was president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market research and educational organization in Midland, Michigan, and chairman of FEE's Board of Trustees.