Saturday, October 4, 2014

Hong Kong freedom protests Milton Friedman's legacy

Hong Kong Protests Are Led By Milton Friedman's Children


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Freedom: Hong Kong's protests for democracy are clearly read as a danger to the communist tyrants in Beijing. They underscore that this is the land that Milton Friedman once used to teach Americans about free markets.
How else can you explain 17-year-old Joshua Wong, leader of the biggest challenge ever mounted against the gray men ruling Beijing?
The gangly bespectacled leader of the peaceful protest megawave wasn't even born when the Berlin Wall fell or Tiananmen Square's democracy protesters were massacred by China's communists in 1989. Presumably, he would have no knowledge about what William F. Buckley once called "the greatest curse in human history" and be nothing more than a product of his own culture.
Yet that's the culture Friedman chose for his memorable, influential "Free to Choose" PBS series, that expounded to Americans at the dawn of the Reagan era the critical importance of economic freedom.
In that 1980 series, Friedman showed how the strength of free markets could transform Hong Kong, once an impoverished enclave of rocks on the South China Sea, into a wealth-creating global powerhouse.
Americans and others saw that series and realized that free markets were the only way out of communist tyranny — and the only way out of the democratic-socialist malaise of the Carter era — ushering in an explosion of Hong Kong imitators by the 1990s.
Now comes Wong, the product of free-market liberty, born in 1996, who embodies the natural progression of economic freedom.
It's not the communist stereotype of dog-eat-dog competition, but humanitarian values and civil society institutions that are the features of economic liberalism.
Hong Kong's loud call for political freedom is a movement of free men and free markets that has nothing in common with the vacant, well-intentioned idealism of the so-called democracy revolutions of recent years, most of which have fallen flat because no one really knew what freedom is about.
Hong Kong does. It has held the No. 1 ranking on the Heritage Foundation's global Index of Economic Freedom for 20 years straight.
Much of Hong Kong is made up of refugees from Beijing's communism who chose freedom. But its economic freedoms also make it a place of variety and diversity as free markets facilitate exchanges of ideas and peoples — Parsees, Indians, and what's comically known in the financial community as FILTH (failed in London, try Hong Kong) as well as variety and innovation seen only in free societies.
Wong has told the press he got his political start through his Christian faith, which is abundantly practiced in Hong Kong amid all its free choices. It led to his first political experience: protesting Beijing's centralized education curriculum in 2012.
Back then, the 15-year-old protested the tissue of lies and propaganda called "The China Model" curriculum, a proclamation of state propaganda that called Beijing's Communist Party "progressive, selfless and united," and claimed that the U.S. had fallen apart because of its multiple party system. It also omitted the horrors of the Tiananmen massacre.
From this, he called his movement "scholarism" — in a distinct ding at dimwitted communists who cannot countenance an educated, free-thinking population, and instead require low-information voters to ensure their continued power.
And it also blows apart the myth that unfettered capitalism erases national identity, scholarism being a nod to the traditional Chinese value of academic excellence, and honoring and pleasing one's parents.
Wong drew 32,000 people to his protests then. Today he's leading millions in a dazzling peaceful demonstration that embodies the longing of millions.


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