Our Republic's Potential ... From the Time of Ben Franklin in 1787 to Jeb Bush in 2011... Some Things Never Change

Upon leaving the constitutional convention on September 17, 1787, a woman he passed on the street asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government the convention delegates had given the people.

Franklin reportedly replied: "A republic, madam--if you can keep it."

In Capitalism and the Right to Rise, former Florida governor Jeb Bush updates Franklin's advice:

"Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."

Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect.

But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

That is what economic freedom looks like. Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. People understand this. Freedom of speech, for example, means that we put up with a lot of verbal and visual garbage in order to make sure that individuals have the right to say what needs to be said, even when it is inconvenient or unpopular. We forgive the sacrifices of free speech because we value its blessings.

But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.

Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations. We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand "Do something . . . anything."

As Florida's governor for eight years, I was asked to "do something" almost every day. Many times I resisted through vetoes but many times I succumbed. And I wasn't alone. Mayors, county chairs, governors and presidents never think their laws will harm the free market. But cumulatively, they do, and we have now imperiled the right to rise.

Woe to the elected leader who fails to deliver a multipoint plan for economic success, driven by specific government action. "Trust in the dynamism of the market" is not a phrase in today's political lexicon.

Have we lost faith in the free-market system of entrepreneurial capitalism? Are we no longer willing to place our trust in the creative chaos unleashed by millions of people pursuing their own best economic interests?"

Later Bush warns that, as always in a self governing society, the choice of the future American path is for American citizens to make, as it has been for the last two plus centuries:

"We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent.

Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.

In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line."

How are things in the world today? To begin our limited survey, we can conclude that Europe's experiment with socialism is proving to be an abject failure.

And now the North Korean dictator is dead, and his youngest son apparently is replacing him. The future freedom of North Korean citizens is unknown but it certainly does not look good. See Pyongyang's Uncertainty Hangs Over Region.

Meanwhile, the Russian people are openly protesting Vladimir Putin's authoritarian regime and his certain return to power as the Russian President in 2012. See As the Ice Cracks Under Putin, What Will He Do?

For a lesson on overcoming communism, the Czechs are now mourning Vaclav Havel, their very own courageous champion of freedom who died on Sunday. See Vaclav Havel.

Of course, the world has also just experienced the Arab spring of 2011 and many other examples where people have acted bravely and courageously. In so doing, they risked and often lost their lives while advocating freedom for themselves and their fellow countrymen.

To be clear, stability is something the world doesn't enjoy today. Lots of turmoil, in fact.

But here's a question definitely worth pondering for free Americans. Despite our current travails, why are we in the U.S. so lucky to have been born free with so many opportunities for the taking?

Well, it's actually a pretty simple story. For that we can give thanks to the Founding Fathers and the many others who preceded them, along with later generations of Americans who came before us. We're born free and stay that way throughout our lives. Why's that?

In the 1600s, English philosopher John Locke declared that all people are born free. To protect those individual freedoms, he argued that humans often join together in civil societies for their mutual benefit and protection.

Locke's views on freedom and civil society largely formed the ideological underpinnings of our uniquely American system of constitutional government which Benjamin Franklin and the rest of the Founding Fathers adopted in 1787.

In other words, American Exceptionalism is among our very real American birthrights. But along with those rights, we have inherited and are called upon to exercise clear responsibilities as well.

That's what Mr. Franklin meant when he warned the woman about the necessity to do those things in the future which will always be necessary to sustain a republican form of government for free people.

In the end, I'm not totally sure which is harder--to gain or maintain individual freedoms. But that said, my strong guess is that we Americans today have the much easier task compared to both prior generations of Americans and those citizens of other countries today who are seeking individual freedoms for themselves.

All we Americans have to do is work diligently and continuously to defend and protect our system of self government and economic freedoms. That's our duty as 21st century U.S. citizens.

Accordingly, my take on the meaning of the past 224 years is quite simple: how lucky I am to have been born a free citizen belonging to a self governing republican form of government.

As we discharge our responsibilities to protect our American heritage, that republican experiment of which Franklin spoke so long ago will long endure--perhaps forever.

Led by our example, the rest of the world's people will join us in due course. Of that I'm also sure.

They were each and all born with natural rights, too.

In the meantime, long live American Exceptionalism and our self governing individual freedom based society.

Thanks. Bob.