Dear Representative Ocasio-Cortez,
Your meteoric rise to political prominence has generated great amounts of heat. In a short period of time, you’ve become something like political fire. Some people find you comforting. Others fear you. Everyone knows of you.
The question is: Can you provide light—or enlightenment—as well?
You proclaim to care about those who today have little and want more. I, for one, join you in the caring.
I have devoted my life to understanding the conditions in which human beings are most likely to grow as individuals, to flourish, and to improve the lives of their loved ones as well as their own, for one simple reason: I dread to see people suffer and I rejoice at seeing people thrive.
Here, then, is a simple, true idea I offer for your consideration: Human beings are most productive when they are largely free from controlling external forces while enjoying strict protection of the laws for their own individual natural freedom and private property.
The reason for this is that wealth is the key to material improvement of human life, and wealth can and must be created. Human beings are most likely to create wealth, and to rise out of poverty, when they are secure in whatever they produce, make, or earn.
Here’s the beauty of wealth: Human beings create wealth by doing or producing things that other people want, need, appreciate, or otherwise value. That’s right: We best help ourselves by helping others—our self-interest is intrinsically connected to the interests of others—which is exactly what free people tend to do and how all new wealth is created.
Here’s another beautiful aspect of wealth: When you work productively and create something others value, something others want to purchase or for which they are willing to trade, your creativity in no way prevents me (or anyone else) from working productively and creating what others value!
Wealth, in other words, is not a fixed amount. Just because some have much today in no way means others must have little tomorrow. As long, that is, as government does not burden citizens who want to create more with regulations, taxes, and other barriers to market entrance.
So, please, Representative Ocasio-Cortez, use your newly-won public influence and celebrity to teach, inspire, and persuade others to knock down the gigantic regulatory state that the U.S. government has become. Let us create, as best we can, the conditions in which human beings are most likely to thrive and flourish and create new wealth: wide swaths of individual freedom, little government interference, and equal protection of the laws for the person and property of every U.S. citizen!
Thank you,
Thomas L. Krannawitter, Ph.D.
Citizen
