As 2011 draws to a close, I wonder: Is freedom winning? Did
America become freer this year? Less free? How about the rest of
the world?

I’m a pessimist. I fear Thomas Jefferson was right when he said,
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and
government to gain ground.” That’s what’s happened. Bush and Obama
doubled spending and increased regulation. Government’s
intrusiveness is always more, never less. The state grows, and
freedom declines.

But there were bright spots. We don’t yet know what will become
of what people call the Arab Spring. But this year, for the first
time in my life, there was hope that masses of people in the Middle
East will embrace liberalism—in the original sense of people being
left alone to pursue their own lives.

Another possible bright spot: President Obama declared the war
in Iraq over. I don’t believe it because 17,000 embassy personnel
remain, but at least he’s saying it, and troops have left. Some
will also leave Afghanistan. But I’m confused. Obama was elected
partly because he promised to end the wars. But then he almost
tripled the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan, from 35,000
to 100,000.

I’m pessimistic about America going bankrupt, like Greece,
thanks to ballooning spending on entitlements like Medicare. But
terms of debate can change quickly. This spring, Wisconsin Rep.
Paul Ryan presented a timid plan that would have slowed the growth
of government slightly. Even Republicans went bonkers. Newt
Gingrich called it “right-wing social engineering.”

But now, just seven months later, the country’s in a different
place. Newt’s apologized. Speaker John Boehner and other
Republicans praise Ryan’s plan. The Republican Study Committee
wants to go further. Now Ryan agrees that his plan was “mild.”
Today he says he’d go farther.

Maybe attitudes changed because Americans watched the video of
riots in Greece and realized what can happen when the money runs
out. Maybe Standard and Poor’s downgrading of the government’s
credit rating mattered. Maybe attitudes changed simply because the
deficit numbers are so ugly that even the establishment has to
acknowledge it.

But also, attitudes changed because we libertarians won the
battle of ideas. Now every Republican presidential candidate — not
just Ron Paul — talks about free enterprise.

Alec Baldwin told Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, “You can’t
not have strong capital markets in this country or the country’s
going to go down the tubes.”

Wow. Even left-wing celebrities defend “strong capital markets”?
The world is moving toward limited government and free enterprise.
We libertarians have won!

What am I talking about? We haven’t won. Even Republicans want
to grow government. When the Super Committee failed to reach its
super conclusion and thereby put us on automatic pilot to a
trillion dollars in spending cuts, Republicans screamed about
draconian damage to the military. But the automatic cuts are really
just cuts in the rate of increase. Spending will still go up, just
at a slightly slower rate. Why is this even controversial?

I fear that much of the country is in agreement with the Wall
Street protestors who love free stuff from government — free
health care, free college education, free lunch. Elderly Americans
want no cuts to Medicare. Even after the Solyndra scandal, 62
percent of Americans say America should continue to invest in
clean-energy jobs. Don’t they think about what that money would be
producing if left in the hands of free, entrepreneurial
individuals? No.

Lots of Americans oppose free trade and free markets. It takes
some knowledge to realize that the seeming chaos masks underlying
order. The benefits of freedom are not intuitive, and when you go
against people’s intuition, they get upset.

The benefits of freedom are largely “unseen,” as the 19th
century French liberal Frederic Bastiat put it. He meant that
rising living standards and labor-saving inventions don’t appear to
flow from freedom. But they do.

It’s one of the ironies of life that people need not understand
freedom for it to work, and because of this, there is the perennial
danger that they will give it up without realizing the disastrous
consequences that follow.

We freedom-lovers have a lot more work to do.