Governments everywhere, including here in the Unites States, have created ever-expanding bureaucracies that regulate nearly every aspect of our lives.

Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being.

The rationale for the vast network of government welfare programs as well as regulation and control over private enterprise is based on the socialist analysis of the market economy.

Our world today is in the grip of anti-capitalism. State bureaucracies ruling over anti-market policies have grown into ideological and political elites who arrogantly presume to know and dictate how we should all live and work.

Socialism's failure in the former Soviet Union and in the other socialist countries stands as a clean and unquestionable warning as to which path any rational and sane people should never follow again. Government planning brought poverty and ruin...Unfortunately, America is not absorbing the lessons that should be learned from the socialist experience and, instead, is following the same path of destruction.

Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny.

Each of us, Leonard Read said, must become candles of liberty in the darkness of collectivist ideas. The brighter we each shine through our understanding and ability to articulate the meaning of freedom, the more we will be beacons that can attract others.