I too grew up in the 1960s across the Delaware from Philadelphia in New Jersey. I too opposed the Vietnam War because I did not believe the Vietnamese wanted freedom as much as America wanted it for them.
In college I read books like Frederick Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Paul Samuelson’s economics text books. Recently, I read Arthur Brooks’s book The Road to Freedom. I highly recommend Brooks’s book. It gives a moral argument for the free enterprise system.
I appreciate Jonathan Baird’s vision for Socialism (Monitor, June 30), but free stuff is unattainable because it takes taxing productive capital to pay for these programs. History tells us that when private capital is treated this way, it leaves that economy and the source of socialistic revenue dries up and austerity is needed to fund the economy.
Southeast Asia is waiting for the US. to adopt Socialism. Baird’s vision also denies that people are created with a human nature that demands freedom and the opportunity to earn success. This denial is why Socialism has failed when tried over the last 100 years. With Socialism we would not have Amazon shopping, an Apple ecosystem, Netflix and Starbucks. This is because it is the innovation of our human nature, freely operating in a free enterprise economy which produces this standard of living.
Joe Mendola
Warner