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Then finally, there's a good economic reason for choosing a liberal society because among the rights that liberalism protects is the right to own pri… - Francis Fukuyama
" "Then finally, there's a good economic reason for choosing a liberal society because among the rights that liberalism protects is the right to own private property, to transact, to engage in commerce, and therefore it is the basis of a market economy. Liberal societies like England and the Netherlands in the 17th century, were the leaders in terms of creating the modern economic world precisely because they respected property rights and trade. Even Communist China, when it opened up in... 1978, did so by adopting certain liberal principles. Deng Xiaoping allowed peasants to keep the fruits of their labor, and as a result of those incentives, quasi-property rights, agricultural productivity doubled in the space of 4 years, and in general, the most dynamic parts of this amazing Chinese growth story come from the private sector where people are allowed to buy and sell, and... in effect to own property. So even in a... politically illiberal society, economic liberalism has led to tremendous prosperity. So those are the 3 reasons.
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About Francis Fukuyama
Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American philosopher, political economist, and author best known for his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.
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Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama
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Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama
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Fukuyama
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Additional quotes by Francis Fukuyama
[L]iberalism has been very severely threatened in recent years. It's been threatened from a number of sources. So internationally you have two great powers, Russia and China, that are definitely not liberal polities, that have expansive ambitions... [A]s Vladimir Putin said... in an iterview with the FT in 2019 "Liberalism is an obsolete doctrine." But the threat... also comes from other places. ...[Y]ou have the rise of a populist nationalist right in many countries. This is Viktor Orbán in Hungary. This is Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States, ...Marine Le Pen in France. All of them criticizing liberalism precisely for the tolerance that it permits and tries to deal with, in diverse and increasingly ethnically and racially diverse countries.
The United States has been in a long term decline, with its political institutions decaying. ...[T]he single source of that decline is ...the pervasive polarization ...within American society that has made the United States unable to meet some of the basic governance challenges that it has faced. The most recent example... has been the COVID pandemic... [W]earing a mask, instead of becoming a health measure that people take to protect themselves and their loved ones, becomes as political statement... [Y]ou don't wear a mask if you're a Trump supporter, and you do... if you're a Democrat. This is... not the way that... coherent nations... meet systemic challenges like a global pandemic.
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The second reason has to do with the moral basis, which is the protection of human autonomy. ...If you ask, in what sense could a liberal believe that all people are equal, when they differ by skin color, by gender, by intelligence, by many other characteristics. The answer... goes back to the fundamental insight... in the Book of Genesis... that Adam and Eve are told not to eat of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil by God and they disobey Him. ...It gives human beings a moral status that other parts of created nature don't have. They can make moral choices. They can distinguish between right and wrong, and it is that ability to choose morally, that ultimately is what makes us all equal because we share that despite the more superficial differences... [I]t's that right of autonomy... the decisions on what to do in life, where to live, who to marry, what beliefs to engage in. These are all essential characteristics of every human being that every human being wants, and the liberal regime protects that autonomy.
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