That was the little paradoxical breather of the day. A weightier one was expressed by Professor Milton Friedman, who gave a public talk in which the question was explored: Are freedoms indivisible? We like to think that this is so, which is why we have been hanging on, breathless, looking at China, which grants economic freedoms on larger and larger scales, but has just brought to power, to succeed longstanding traditional Communist tyrants, a fresh face: the man who, in 1989, imposed martial law on Tibet and who was the first Chinese regional party secretary to send a congratulatory telegram to the central government after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Mr. Friedman made the sobering point that far from assuming that economic freedoms will automatically bring civil freedoms, we need to remind ourselves that civil freedoms are sometimes exercised to deny economic freedoms. This is what happened in Great Britain after the war. Where there is progressive taxation, let alone predatory taxes, however authorized by due democratic process, economic freedom diminishes. That being the basic freedom (people decide how to spend their money more often than when to write their congressman), it is often menaced by the exercise of civil freedoms.
We Americans, and a few others, are blessed with both freedoms, but have to live with the paradox, that the exercise of one freedom is sometimes done at the expense of the other.