Got a quibble

with Robert Ringer. He says:

Presidential candidates love to talk about freedom, even while telling us how they intend to further enslave us. They do this by manufacturing “rights” out of thin air. This year’s crop of candidates has been especially bold in this respect, babbling endlessly about our nonexistent rights and how they intend to fulfill them.

The problem is that all artificially created rights are anti-freedom, because in order to fulfill one person’s rights (read, desires), another person’s rights must be violated. That is precisely what is meant by Madam Obama’s infamous statement “Someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so someone else can have more.”

At the heart of such thinking are three converging afflictions: guiltism, envyism, and villainism. (More on all these in future articles.) People suffering from such afflictions do not want a free society. They are usually individuals who are unable to achieve success in a free society, thus they yearn for an external force (government) to “level the playing field” and equalize results.

I hear a lot of that at work. Usually I just let 'em blather their bullcrap. One reason I intend to be an entrepreneur is so that when I speak, people will listen.

My quibble with Ringer is with this statement "They are usually individuals who are unable to achieve success in a free society." What did they do, immigrate from Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Bahama, Bermuda...? Those countries beat us all to crap on the Economic Freedom Index. For personal freedoms, you can't beat America, Canada, Western Europe, NZ and Australia, but there's not much money to be made pursuing them.

We haven't seen a free society since the territories were all made states. And at that time, the opportunities you find with high population and modern technology didn't exist.

In a free market, you don't have to be first to be a winner (in a corporatist state, you do, because the government decides who's "too big to fail"). You just have to entice a sufficient number of customers to buy your stuff. You don't need to be WalMart. But, there may come a time when you need to ask the question, how did WalMart get to be WalMart?