MICHAEL MORRIS: Freedom: what a maddening, reckless thing it seems to be - Business Day
Michael Morris
There is an aspect almost of puzzlement about The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes’ mid-April note to subscribers about “the world’s richest, most productive and most innovative big economy ... leaving its peers ever further in the dust”.
This, she notes, while “(nearly) four-fifths of Americans tell pollsters that their children will be worse off than they are”, and when, among other things, “America’s politics are toxic and ... life expectancy is being dragged down by shootings and drug overdoses”.
Yet, “(only) those in über-rich petrostates and financial hubs enjoy a higher income per person” than Americans, while “American firms own more than a fifth of patents registered abroad, more than China and Germany put together”.
“Talking down the American economy is not only wrong in fact,” she writes, “it also breeds pessimistic policies like protectionism, lower immigration and government subsidies that could spoil the secret sauce which has made America so successful.”
Reading this against the backdrop of what is surely SA’s lack of seriousness in choosing what matters in its international friendships underscores perhaps the difference between societies that embrace freedom (and other free societies) and those that are afraid that freedom might undermine their authority, and so seem anxious to limit the influence of societies which, in contrast, relish their freedom, and happily live with its risks.
Another piece in The Economist just last week dwelled on one costly downside, noting that across the US, “a mishmash of regulations from state to state differ on everything from how to manufacture lifts and how to produce liquor to how to run a bank”.
What a maddening, reckless thing freedom seems to be.
Yet, as The Economist recorded in April, average US incomes “have grown much faster than in Western Europe or Japan” (exceeding $50,000 in Mississippi, the US’s poorest state, “higher than in France”). Incomes “for the poorest fifth have risen in real terms by 74% since 1990, much more than in Britain”.
Instinctively, one senses such rewards are least likely in states in which, by way of example, a comedian is punished for “humiliating” the “people’s army” (BBC headline: “China fines comedy troupe $2m for joke about the military”). Comic Li Haoshi unforgivably used part of a 2013 slogan unveiled by President Xi Jinping as a goal for the Chinese military — “Fight to win, forge exemplary conduct” — in a stand-up routine about watching his two adopted dogs chasing a squirrel.
Perhaps what best defines the contrasting state of liberty is redoubtable scholar Deirdre McCloskey’s conception of “equality of permission”, a quality she described in an essay last year as having gained strength “in the 18th century in Northwestern Europe and parts of Northern America, before steam and steel and democracy and divided highways and containerisation”, first in theory, but later with “more and more meaning”.
McCloskey deftly captures the potency — and the egalitarian scale — of this idea of “equality of permission” in an account of a Russian tourist of the 1880s, who, having “made it to the Powder River Valley of Montana, apparently without having had a lot of experience elsewhere in the US ... came up to a cowboy and inquired, ‘Who is your master?’ The cowboy replied, ‘He ain’t been born yet’.”
It is hard to imagine a sentiment as casually contemptuous of so incredible, and hitherto unimagined, an authority as a “master” being tolerable to Beijing’s anxious mandarins.
How ironic, when you think about it, that SA seems as anxious about freedom, and for much the same reasons.
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations