Thoughts on the First Anniversary of the COVID Lockdown...
THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
IT’S AN AMAZING BARGAIN!
By P.J. O'Rourke
CLICK HERE TO READ THE WEB VERSION
The coronavirus pandemic made me feel young again – like an angry teen who’s been grounded for a year. But now, after 12 months of confinement and boredom, the metaphorical parents are returning the metaphorical car keys. Vaccination is underway. We can start thinking about freedom again. That’s what I’ve been doing, though not in the way I would have when I was a young person and my thoughts turned mostly to wine, women, and song (or in my case, beer, girls, and the Rolling Stones). As an old person, what I’ve been doing
instead is quantitative analysis of freedom – trying to take the measurements of liberty. One important measurement of liberty is money... It’s hard to exercise most freedoms without it. (Just ask the teen, newly liberated with car keys but whose allowance is still being docked.) But it would be wrong to simply say, “Being richer means you’re more free.” You’d have to be a very poor woman in America to want to trade places with a very rich woman in Saudi Arabia. And while we know that wealth is generated by free enterprise, we also know that free enterprise can exist in places that lack freedom
78
March 2021
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online