In throwing out the bathwater of the West, they also throw out the baby that was the foundation of its advancement: the still radical idea of individual rights protected rather than infringed by the state. The evolution of the British common law’s protection of contract and property, the gradual acceptance of the once heretical notion that the state is to be subordinate to its people, and the ideal of protected, individual, inalienable rights—never fully realized and now abandoned—served as the philosophical springboard for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ innovation and progress.

Progress and the fulfillment of human potential require much more than just population and natural resources. How many people immigrate to Russia or China? Millions did so to the U.S. during its heyday of freedom, drawn by the opportunity to live their lives as they saw fit. Nowadays such opportunity is unavailable in Russia, China, the U.S., or anywhere else. Most of the immigrants now flooding the U.S. are here for the handouts rather than for its residual and dwindling freedom.

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