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The Global Fight for Freedom
In 1820, 84% of humanity lived in abject poverty — half of all children didn't survive to five. Cycles of famine ravaged civilizations across the globe. Few lived past 30.
Then, in a handful of countries, an idea took root. Or rather, it detonated.
Within two centuries, the number plunged to under 9%. It happened wherever governments stopped deciding what people could own, trade, and build — and let individuals decide instead.
The idea began as philosophy: the Enlightenment belief that individuals hold natural rights which no ruler may revoke. That claim hardened into checks on kings — parliaments, courts, constitutions — and only then into economic practice: secure property, open trade, contracts a government couldn't seize at will.
Then came the explosion: From Manchester to Shenzhen, one thread runs through them all.
Economic freedom: Low taxation. Limited regulation. Free trade across borders. Rule of law applied equally. Secure property rights — especially secure property rights.
The Data Doesn't Care
The data on this unequivocal. The Fraser Institute's “Economic Freedom of the World” report — initiated by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, and the longest-running measure of the concept — found nations in the least free quartile of humanity have poverty rates 25 times greater than in the freest quartile.
That correlation is inconvenient for many ideologies, but none more than Marxism. This week, every story supplies the evidence.
Flashpoints
- Xi's Cat Is Forever Red
- Africa's Breadbasket Goes Hungry
- Nicaragua Ends Its "Bourgeois Nonsense"
Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.
Drones swoop from the sky, dropping bowls of noodles onto office balconies. Driverless robotaxis glide silently through intersections. Inside gleaming showrooms, humanoid robots pour tea for awestruck tourists.
Welcome to Shenzhen. 46 years ago, this was a poor fishing village — a mere 30,000 people casting nets into the Pearl River delta. Rice paddies. Bamboo scaffolding. A border fence, and beyond it, Hong Kong's glow tempting villagers, some of whom drowned trying to reach it.
In 1979, China's per-capita GDP was under $200 per year. Mao had just finished starving tens of millions of his own people with his “Great Leap Forward” effort to centrally control agriculture production.
Deng Xiaoping had other plans. Purged twice by Mao for insufficient zeal, he had no patience for rigid ideology. "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white," he said, "as long as it catches mice." Deng demanded officials "seek truth from facts" rather than from Marxist scripture.
Deng was using capitalism to save socialism. In 1980, he launched an experiment that would transform China — the same year his push to learn from capitalist countries brought free-market evangelist Milton Friedman himself to lecture Chinese officials.
Shenzhen was one of just four cities designated a "Special Economic Zone." Its tax rate on foreign firms was cut to 15%, companies won the right to hire and fire at will, customs waived duties, foreign investment was allowed, and a fishing collective's swampland went to market.
Four of the five pillars of economic freedom, unlocked at once.
The result: nominal GDP up roughly 13,000-fold in four decades, 18 million residents where 30,000 once lived. Millions escaping grinding poverty. Travelers now joke that Shenzhen is the city living a year ahead of everyone else.
Xi hasn't torched it all. He knows better than to bite the hand that feeds his export engine: in 2021 he expanded Shenzhen's free-trade zone eightfold, still smoothing customs and trade even as he tightened the screws elsewhere.
But in 2020, Beijing limited how much property developers could borrow, the same command instinct that once starved farmers. Shenzhen-based Evergrande couldn't meet the limits and became China's largest corporate default. Beijing's tech crackdown hit Shenzhen twice more, costing Tencent billions in fines and Ant Group its public stock offering. Executives who once ran their companies freely now get summoned to hand over fortunes to the Party's "common prosperity" fund.
Anecdotal accounts suggest restaurants are shuttering across the Pearl River Delta. Factory workers have shown up to find the gates locked. Delivery riders now earn as little as 32 cents per order — barely enough to cover rent. Shenzhen's home province now logs the most labor unrest in China.
Deng sought truth from facts. Xi imposes his ideology upon them.
Whether it catches mice or not, Xi’s cat will forever be red.
Sources: South China Morning Post, Freedom House, Asia Society, Vision Times (Note: a Falun Gong-associated publication)
In 1966, with only with 8 miles of paved road, near-universal illiteracy, and a per-capita income of $70 a year, Botswana became a nation — the third-poorest on Earth.
That same decade next door, Rhodesia was feeding a continent, its silos overflowing with corn and tobacco, its farms so productive the country earned the nickname "Africa's breadbasket."
Sixty years later, Botswana has become an upper-middle-income success story — as Africa’s breadbasket starves.
Botswana's first president, Seretse Khama, chose property rights over patronage — miners kept what they found, diamond revenue funded roads and clinics, and Khama's party tolerated opposition. Government stayed small, the currency stayed sound, and trade stayed open. Political competition forced accountability; accountability forced good economic policy.
Rhodesia — renamed Zimbabwe at 1980 independence — took the opposite path.
Why Nations Fail calls Zimbabwe's problem "extractive institutions" — government institutions built to funnel wealth to a narrow elite. Robert Mugabe inherited Britain’s “extractive” colonial institutions in 1980, but instead of dismantling them, he funneled them to himself.
Mugabe arrived a committed Marxist-Leninist guerrilla, promising reconciliation. Instead, he seized white-owned farms and handed them to his cronies, gutting the country's main export engine. His central bank printed money to cover the shortfall. GDP fell by 51% between 2000 and 2008 — a collapse that dwarfed the entire Great Depression.
Inflation hit 231,000,000%; a $100-trillion note traded for 40 American cents. Life expectancy, once approaching 60, cratered into the low 40s.
Emmerson Mnangagwa — nicknamed "the Crocodile" for his ruthlessness — seized power from Mugabe in a 2017 coup. He brought pragmatism and less Marxist rhetoric, but the same kleptocracy. Gold has bought him room to maneuver. A 2025 mining boom spurred modest economic growth and let the central bank stop printing money. But the growth runs on informal gold trade and cash from the diaspora, not reform.
Last week, Mnangagwa signed a law extending his rule to 2030 and abolishing direct presidential elections. Zimbabwe now ranks 164th of 165 nations on the Fraser Index.
Ranked 69th, the average Botswanan now earns three times his Zimbabwean neighbor.
One nation chose economic freedom. The other chose the crocodile, ensuring Zimbabwean suffering will continue unabated.
Sources: The Economist, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Zim Field Guide (Zimbabwe), Harvard International Review
In 1990, the phone rang inside Daniel Ortega’s bunker just hours after the polls closed. On the line was Fidel Castro, who berated Ortega for indulging in the " bourgeois nonsense" of allowing a vote.
Castro had reason to feel anxious: the Berlin Wall had fallen three months earlier, and a widow named Violeta Chamorro, campaigning with a literal chunk of it in her hand, had just crushed his protégé at the ballot box.
Ortega's Sandinistas were Marxist guerrillas who'd toppled a corrupt dynasty in 1979 and ruled for a decade as a one-party Communist state, armed and bankrolled by Moscow. Confident of victory, they staged elections anyway — and lost badly.
Jimmy Carter brokered Ortega's concession, then meekly talked Chamorro into leaving the military and intelligence services in Sandinista hands, enabling Ortega’s eventual comeback.
He won the presidency again in 2007 and never repeated the “bourgeois nonsense”. He packed the courts, gutted the legislature, and jailed rivals — including Chamorro's own daughter, detained for daring to run against him in 2021.
In 2018, his police killed over 350 protesters. Roughly 10% of the population has fled since. In 2024 he rewrote the constitution to crown his wife, Rosario Murillo, "co-president" — despite her own daughter's accusation that Ortega raped her.
Last month, a Catholic bishop was imprisoned for praying for the persecuted. Meanwhile, Ortega’s son visited Beijing. A Communist Party official there pledged deeper ties, leaving Xi’s record of supporting the world’s worst regimes unblemished.
20% of Nicaraguans now go hungry. When the UN reported the finding, the regime’s answer was to expel its monitors.
The year Ortega retook power, neighboring Costa Rica was about 4.5 times richer per person. Less than a generation later, the gap has grown to nearly 6 times. One country built independent courts and free elections; the other rebuilt a dictatorship.
Secretary of State Rubio now calls the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship "an enemy of humanity," and he’s right.
The good news? With Bolivia's Morales sidelined, Colombia's Petro vanquished at the ballot box, and Cuba's Marxists teetering under their own incompetence, it’s one of the last in the hemisphere.
Sources: Americas Quarterly, The Economist, The Washington Stand, The Washington Times
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