PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

Some sound reflections from Peter Roff on the transition to a sustainable liberal order in Iraq;

Those who will be dispensing advice to the post-war government must not repeat the mistakes U.S. advisers made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Assisting the transitions as Soviet-style systems collapsed throughout Eastern Europe and Russia, they emphasized the need for expanding and securing political rights over the need to codify economic rights.

Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist, correctly recognized that the free-market capitalist system is the only one through which individuals can intelligently coordinate a society. The sudden appearance or even the imposition of political rights is not sufficient to guarantee peace, liberty or democracy.

"We have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant," Hayek once wrote, adding that this led many of his generation to understand "that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."

"The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed," Hayek said.

The large independent sphere he describes can only be achieved where the right of citizens to acquire, amass and transfer property exists and is protected, hence the need for an emphasis on economic rights in a reborn Iraq.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Posted by Greg Ransom