June 4, 2011… Tiananmen Martyrs Remembered
“From Aristotle to Alexis de Tocqueville, Western thinkers have championed the middle class as essential for prosperous, enlightened societies,” writes Christa Case Bryant in the Christian Science Monitor. “They held it up as the engine for economic growth, the guardian of social values, and an impelling and protecting force for democracy.”
So it’s good news, as Bryant notes, that according to a recent study:
“The world will, for the first time in history, move from being mostly poor to mostly middle-class by 2022, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development projects.”
As Tocqueville himself might have noted, this development is easily overstated by partisans of both socialism and capitalism.
On the one hand, many members of the new middle class have fundamentally communitarian beliefs or come from traditionally non-materialist traditions. As well, in some surging emerging market countries, it’s clear that democracy — the concept and practice of political equality and popular sovereignty over legislative power — preceded economic reform.
On the other hand, there is no denying that the rise of the middle class in China and India, to name just two of the largest examples, have benefited from essentially free-market, low-taxation economic policies that go back now more than a generation.
Furthermore, for all the triumphalism of Beijing’s authoritarian regime, it’s clear that many members of China’s citizens, while they appreciate material prosperity, have not been bought off by it. Today the world celebrates the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Maybe, for a while at least, everyone can stop arguing about which comes first, the capitalist chicken or the democratic egg. It’s a prosperous time for the world. Can we just enjoy that fact for a few weeks and then get back to the debate over bailing out Greece, invading Libya, or raising the U.S. debt ceiling? Yes, of course. But there is something more to do.
Andrew Napolitano asks: “Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? How long can the United States of America remain free when the Congress continues to bribe the public with the public’s money? Tonight, entitlements and the government.”
