America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing
more—and nothing less. The rest—everything that America achieved, everything
she became, everything “noble and just,” and heroic, and great, and
unprecedented in human history—was the logical consequence of fidelity to that
one principle. The first consequence was the principle of political freedom,
i.e., an individual’s freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or
interference by the government. The next was the economic implementation of
political freedom: the system of capitalism.