The Gold, the Red and the Green

There has been one constant in the defining struggle in politics over the past two centuries. That struggle has been between those who want more of their country’s resources and incomes to be “fairly” shared on some politically determined basis, and those who want the incomes and resources to be retained by the people who earn and own them, allowing those people to consume their income and wealth with minimal restraint on the direction of such consumption.

We might best define that struggle on a collectivist–individualist axis. Over the twentieth century and in the centuries that preceded it, insofar as domestic politics was at issue, the major battleground of the struggle was between socialism and free enterprise.

Failure of the great socialist experiments of the twentieth century demonstrated that the pursuit of individual self-interest, private ownership of property and competition in commerce has no rival in the creation of high living standards. But, as the slogans of the…