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Chapter 3: The Choice is Ours to Make

competition, entrepreneurship, innovation, and
consumer sovereignty, resulting in insufficient growth
and serfdom.

Friedrich Hayek warned us against economic
policies in the name of “social justice” in his book The
Mirage of Social Justice. Thousands of organizations
have in their mission statement that they aim to improve
social justice. For example, the AFL-CIO claims that
their mission is to improve the lives of working
families—to bring economic and social justice to the
workplace and nation. Hayek believed that “social
justice” is a term that means anything a group wants it
to mean and it is, therefore, an excuse to limit freedom
and redistribute wealth.
Global prosperity requires real change — and that
change is impossible without suffering. Instead of
planners going with the flow and changing their policies
as conditions change, they tend to be fixated on
achieving their specified goals on specified dates,
regardless of changing events.

On January 28, 1986, even though engineers
predicted failure, NASA managers authorized the
launch of the Challenger spacecraft to meet the
deadline; the shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight.
In 2013, experts indicated that 41 of the 91
Healthcare.gov functions were not working, and a week
later another checklist showed more defects. Regardless
of these warnings, the government launched the
website. It failed almost immediately. According to
Hayek, events like these are inevitable.

Keynesians argue that our problems are more
mostly political. If the crisis were economic, we could
reduce corporate tax rates and red tape to encourage

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