Why Freedom Works

Scripps Howard News Service
Matthew Zobian
(Matthew Zobian is an MBA student of finance in Penn State's Smeal College of Business. When he isn't learning about economics and finance, he's writing about it.)

As the world once again braces for the inevitable anti-globalist violence and protests at the World Trade Organization meeting this year, we have to stop and wonder: What is fueling this anger and resentment over such mundane trade treaty summits? The answer is simple: freedom. Anti-globalists want the world to have less of it.

Ask the average school kid - and the average anti-globalist - to explain freedom, and you'll most likely hear a simple list of our common political freedoms, like the right to vote, the right to petition, etc. What they'll fail to mention, and what the entire anti-globalist movement ignores at its own peril, are our economic freedoms: the right for citizens to work, to buy, and to sell as they wish, the right to compete for customers, and the right to securely own property, all free from criminality and interference of the state. These rights are taken very seriously in the West. We owe our prosperity to free markets, not just free elections.

To see that this is true, consider that many countries in the world (even Russia) now grant political freedoms to their people, yet how many countries grant economic freedom? Surprisingly few: the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, those in Western Europe and a handful of others. You may have also noticed they happen to be the world's only prosperous and stable nations. That's not a coincidence. Economic freedom is the key to national development.

Capitalism is the system of economic freedom, and free trade is one of its primary principles. So why then do the anti-globalists oppose it?

They oppose it, sadly, out of ignorance. Capitalism has been wrongly associated with some pretty ugly social regimes in recent world history. One of the most egregious is the "crony capitalism" of corrupt governments in developing nations, where markets and economic opportunity are free and open to only a privileged few. This isn't capitalism in any sense of the word, but the name has stuck and it has made capitalism somewhat synonymous with the corruption, oppression and poverty in those nations. It also somehow made "anti-globalization" the rallying cry and bogeyman of two misguided Western political factions, the activist left and the isolationist right.

Perhaps social complacency is to blame for such ignorance. We Westerners savor the fruits of the freedom that our capitalist system provides yet so few of us have ever bothered to learn what capitalism is and how it works. So when confronted with economic problems both here and abroad, some of us are tempted to attack capitalist policies as the problem. But quite the opposite is true. The problem is not the existence of capitalist policies that promote free and efficient markets, but their absence.

The West must continue to promote economic freedom in the global community. In our modern age of democracy and capitalism, there is simply no good reason why crops shouldn't be getting to market, why children aren't in school, and why anyone should lack electricity, clean drinking water, and affordable basic health care. If only anti-globalists would stop attacking the capitalist tenet of free trade, they could be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

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REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Wyatt DuBois in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or wed112@psu.edu .

Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, marketing, insurance and real estate, management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the eBusiness Research Center, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.

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