The world went my way

It is pretty startling to me that the world of 2012 is pretty much what I wanted it to be as a young man. The trends in the world have been going in my direction for a long time.

First, had to come the change in my world view.

I was born and raised on Lefty bottle milk that was a mixture of proteins, FDR and communism. My father was a Rabbi who believed that Adlai Stevenson was the prophet who climbed Mount Sinai and brought us the 10 Commandments.

Second, years later,  two things converged to change my world view. The first was my reading of George Orwell's Animal Farm. A book I'm sure that has been banned from the entire academic world. I loved Orwell and happened to read that book at age 17. At age 19 I was on a kibbutz. The two experiences converged. I realized that successful kibbutz communism was a fantasy. Irrelevant to real human being.

From that point on I began to look at the world in terms that would evolve over time into my pro-commerce world view.

For the rest of my life I have watched the traditional communist lefty liberal views meet their appropriate tragic end. The Rosenbergs turned out to be spies.  Sacco and Vanzetti turned out to be the real bombers. The Soviet Union fell, communist China fell, India changed direction, virtually every other socialist communist government disappeared in the swamp of murder, starvation and abject failure.

The number of free market democracies in my life moved from a dozen to over five dozen.

Simultaneously in the United States a new respect and understanding of the marketplace began to emerge. In the 1950s we had Milton Friedman and William Buckley. As time went on we got Ronald Reagan and talk radio.

Today we have Fox news, a myriad of brilliant conservative intellectuals, a half dozen outstanding periodicals and the most marvelous democratic development of all: the Tea Party.

My life has been a trajectory of success and happiness.