“I think the disruption added to the excitement of the evening,”
said a fellow attendee at the recent Milton Friedman Prize for
Advancing Liberty Award Dinner as we were leaving the International
Ballroom at the Washington Hilton earlier this month.
He was talking about an unscripted Occupy outbreak when a
protester burst into the ballroom, yelling and waving two large
placards above his head and charging the stage during the
presentation of the 2012 Friedman award to Mao Yushi, an
83-year-old economist and engineer, one of the pioneers of the
movement in China committed to individual freedom, government
reform, and the transition from a centrally planned and politicized
economy to a market economy.
The Friedman award, which includes a $250,000 cash prize, is
presented by the Cato Institute every other year to an individual
who has made “a significant contribution to advancing human
freedom.”
In 2007, China Newsweek named Mao Yushi and Tsinghua
University’s Qin Hui the most influential intellectuals of the
decade. In 2011, Mao Yushi’s article chronicling the human costs of
brutal communist policies in China from 1949 to 1976, “Returning
Mao Zedong to Human Form,” led to calls for his prosecution and
execution for treason.
In any case, it was hard to immediately know what the
protester’s yelling was all about at the dinner. Markets work
better than communism — even in China, that’s increasingly
obvious.
Additionally, a swanky black tie event in D.C., at a moment
between the double entrée of herb crusted tenderloin of beef and
grilled swordfish with apricot relish and a triple dessert of green
tea crème brûlée, mini-caramellow, and basil cheesecake, hardly
seemed the best time and place to convince anyone that freedom is a
scary thing, scarier than totalitarian rule and poverty-inducing
collectivism.
Plus it was hard to get the message because he was yelling in
Chinese and the placards were in Chinese.
Like any good activist, the protester has a blog, proudly
displaying his latest disruption, along with photos of the posters
and his dash to the stage.
When we got back to Pittsburgh, I took my computer to lunch at
my favorite Chinese restaurant and asked for a translation from one
of the employees.
“He is saying Mao Yushi is a traitor to his country, that this
person Mao Yushi is a betrayer of the Chinese government,” she
explained, reading the blog. “He wanted to ‘disturb’ the
award.”
She translated the first poster: “It says, ‘Mao, Puppy of USA
1%.’ He is saying that Americans are the owner and Mao Yushi is the
dog.”
The message on the second poster was similar, again echoing the
rich versus poor stance of the Occupy movement, the 99 percent
versus the 1 percent: “Mao serves American rich people — 99% not
slave.”
The message echoes the flawed and destructive view of seeing an
economy as a fixed pie, an unchanging asset where an increase of
one person’s piece comes only at the expense of all the others —
not unlike how bickering and envious offspring fight over dad’s
will.
It’s a creed that fails to see how a Henry Ford or Bill Gates
creates a whole new pie. It’s an ideology that creates a mindset
that automatically condemns the success, incomes and accumulated
wealth of a Ford or Gates, a mentality that seeks, first and
foremost, a redistribution of income and assets, a mentality that
destroys incentives for performance and refuses to acknowledge how
Ford and Gates increased the incomes and living standards of
countless workers and consumers.
I asked the woman doing the translating what she thought about
the children and grandchildren of Communist China’s revolutionary
leaders now becoming super-wealthy, some by way of entrepreneurship
and free market ventures, and others by way of insider trading on a
massive scale and crony capitalism.
“Equality does not work,” she replied. “It never works, not
anywhere. There is always inequality, in every city, even in small
villages. That is the unchanging nature of things. People with
money have dominion, the say-so. It is no different in China. It
cannot be equal.”
As Milton Friedman said to Phil Donohue during a TV interview in
1979: “You think China doesn’t run on greed?”
