I hope you’ll take a few moments to read a great interview by JLF’s Mitch Kokai with Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute. Brooks has released a book titled The Road to Freedom. Kokai talked with him for Carolina Journal Radio. Here’s a sample.
Kokai: In writing The Road to Freedom, what do you set out as the road?
Brooks: The road to freedom is, effectively, free enterprise. The road to freedom as a society is free enterprise. And the reason I say this is in response to a common mistake that people make in the conservative movement: understanding free enterprise as nothing more than an economic alternative, as a way to be more prosperous, as a way to make more money, to be the richest society in the history of the world.
In point of fact, that’s not the important thing about the free-enterprise system. It’s not an economic alternative; it’s a moral imperative. What I show in this book, The Road to Freedom, is that the road to freedom for us as individuals goes through the system that allows us to earn our success — the fairest system that rewards merit, and a system that literally is the only one that can lift up the poor by the billions around the world. That’s the free-enterprise system. That’s why it’s the road to personal freedom. That’s the road to freedom for people, true freedom.