If the recent Carolina Journal Radio/CarolinaJournal.tv interview with Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute prompted you to pick up a copy of his new book, The Road To Freedom, you’ve likely picked up on his key theme: America’s free-enterprise system is important not because it helps make us wealthy, but because it contributes to basic human desires.
If not money, then what do people really crave? The answer is earned success, the ability to create value with your life or in the lives of others. It does not come from a lottery check or an inheritance. It doesn’t even mean earning a lot of money, given all the blissfully happy social entrepreneurs I’ve met who are basically living on ramen noodles and tap water.
To earn your success is to define and pursue your happiness as you see fit. It’s the freedom to be an individual and to delineate your life’s “profit” however you want. For some, this profit is measured in money. But for many, profit is measured in making beautiful art, saving people’s souls, or pulling kids out of poverty.
Earned success is what the Founders were talking about in the Declaration of Independence. Charlatans and scoundrels promise happiness. The “Ministry of Plenty” in George Orwell’s 1984 promised “our new, happy life.” Soviet propaganda called Josef Stalin — on his way to murdering tens of millions — the “Constructor of Happiness.” The Founders didn’t guarantee happiness. They didn’t even say people have the “right to happiness.” They said they have the right to pursue happiness.
Folks in the Charlotte area will have a chance to hear Brooks discuss his book July 18. The Civitas Institute is hosting a luncheon that day featuring Brooks.
