I’m Ayaan Hirsi Ali and I’m a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.
I was not always a classical liberal. I would say from the time I started to think independently of my parents that I started out as a radical Islamic fundamentalist then I came to the Netherlands and I was very much taken and I’m still impressed by the system that the Dutch put in place. I have now come to see its weaknesses but I started out as a social democrat after I graduated from university. In politics, when taking the theory of politics and it all added up, it all makes sense. It’s only in practice that I realized the weaknesses of social democracy. People become apathetic, depend on the government and the system tends to be vulnerable when confronted with external effects such as immigration, globalization. The system tends now to become very weak.
When I came to the Netherlands last time, I got a place to live. My health was taken care of, I mean, I got so much and I don’t know how I would have responded to the reality of the United States where you have to do it all by yourself. Having to live in Africa, having to live in the Netherlands and now in the United States, I think if you use heterogeneity as a measure, meaning a mixture of people from many different cultures, different ages, heterogeneity in its broadest form that the American system of a free market is not a perfect system but is the best system.
I don’t see this crisis as anything that will lead me to change my mind about the superiority of the system of free markets. The alternative would be a government ran and planned by the government. Look at Russia. By the way, a number of other European states in my country Holland, the government has kind of nationalized all banks. Again it takes away the Dutch participant in the market who was irresponsible isn’t going to be punished as much as the American irresponsible Wall Street trader and the difference is the American economy out of Islam at one point and those lessons of the past few months are so well learned that I think it’s going to stay in the memories of Americans for generations to come. Whereas I fear that people in Holland for instance, they will forget it because it’s easily taken care of by the government and there’s going to be a time when welfare states in Europe will not be able to pay for that amount of definite interest.
I will also give you the example of the man who murdered 03:59 who was on welfare. Based on that principle, 26 year old healthy young man and what I took from that and I think many Dutch people learn from that is he had the time to commit a murder which in the United States he would not be. He would be busy trying to feed himself and find a hoop out of his head. So the idea that the free market makes the rich richer, the poor poorer that’s clearly is a class antagonism and that that will become a showdown between the two classes and you’re going to have the crime rates go up. And anyway the rich people does have it, why don’t share? I think it’s too simplistic and it’s been tried all over again and it shows that that’s not really how it works.
Not only does it place government, it’s also far more efficient. If a philanthropic organizations say the Gates Foundation fills in its stated mission, it will correct itself much faster that if that mission state was stated by a government. What you get in programs provided by governments very often is an entrenched interest comes about for the people who are supposedly civil servants and any other group of people who have an interest and so there’s no point in solving the problem, the social problems because if you solve problems, you don’t have that income from government. There’s no reason for you to exist. So I intend to agree more with the Americans who were suspicious about governments and who say, “Hey, we are going to take care of whatever social issues that our country is facing by collecting money and by allocating that money much more efficiently.” The government in the United States and anywhere else has been planning public schools and just read the history of public schools and I come out thinking, if these were from say Gates Foundation, that’s where it have much, much more sense.
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