Dark before the dawn: America

China is the most dynamic country in the world today. By itself, it is remaking the world map. Its heroes are hundreds of millions of hard-working people, released by economic freedom to better themselves and their families.

We fear darkness from China's leadership riding the tiger of a popular surge it barely controls. We fear some misbegotten effort to tame the tiger will turn out bad for the world, before China eventually reaches political freedom.

This blog has repeatedly come back to America’s own darkness before its dawn, the elite’s current rearguard fight to hang onto power by enlarging government control over our capitalist system. People who once won, such as our current elite, fight harder to hold onto what they have than do those yet to win.

The elite’s struggle to hang on is bound to fail, sooner or later. Listen to George Will:

We are not Europeans. We are not, in Orwell's phrase, a "state-broken people." We do not have a feudal background of subservience to the state. No, that is the project of the current administration - it can be boiled down to learned feudalism. It is a dependency agenda. . .The American people . . . have nothing to fear, right now, but an insufficiency of their fear itself. It is time for a wholesome fear of what people with a dependency agenda are trying to do. We have few allies. We don't have Hollywood, we don't have academia, and we don't have the mainstream media. But we have . . . arithmetic. The numbers do not add up, and cannot be made to do so.

And listen to Thomas Sowell:

How [is it] possible that transferring decisions from elites with more education, intellect, data and power to ordinary people [leads] consistently to demonstrably better results? One implication is that no one is smart enough to carry out social engineering, whether in the economy or in other areas where the results may not always be so easily quantifiable. We learn, not from our initial brilliance, but from trial and error adjustments to events as they unfold.

Science tells us that the human brain reaches its maximum potential in early adulthood. Why then are young adults so seldom capable of doing what people with more years of experience can do? Because experience trumps brilliance. Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they pre-empt. The education and intellects of the elites may lead them to have more sweeping presumptions, but that just makes them more dangerous to the freedom, as well as the well-being, of the people as a whole.

Sowell’s statement is simply the most brilliant I have seen about why the people win out in the end. Economic determinism by Adam Smith triumphs over that of Karl Marx.