There’s no shortage of pretenders who redefine progress to fit their agenda.  They speak with confidence, but every word is hollow.  Progress, in their mouth, means regression.  It means shackling the individual and praising the collective.  They babble about fairness, sustainability, and equality, but strip away the slogans and what remains is control.

Progress isn’t state planning, forced redistribution, or bureaucratic tinkering.  Real progress is born out of free exchange, where property is respected and contracts are voluntary.  It isn’t decreed from above—it emerges when people are left alone to create, trade, and innovate.  The irresponsible pretenders want you to believe otherwise.

A market, free and open, has a ruthless honesty.  It discards what people don’t want.  It rewards those who serve the masses.  It doesn’t bend to the vanity of academics or the ideology of bureaucrats.  It listens only to demand.  If a product is overpriced, it fails.  If a service doesn’t satisfy, it collapses.  The consumer, not the commissar, gives the orders.

This is exactly why the pretenders despise it.  Their careers depend on being shielded from judgment.  The professor lectures about injustice, yet can’t explain why his own work receives no demand outside state classrooms.  The activist clamors for redistribution because he can’t earn redistribution voluntarily.  Their failure on the market is disguised as society’s failure, so the state must intervene to correct it.

What do they call this intervention?  Capitalism.  Liberalism.  Freedom.  The words are twisted until they mean their opposite.  Regulation becomes “reform.” Censorship becomes “safety.” Dependency becomes “liberty.” By controlling the dictionary, they control the debate.  By controlling the debate, they tighten control over life itself.

The road is always the same.  Step by step, freedom vanishes.  Information is filtered.  Speech is branded “misinformation.” Private property becomes a privilege instead of a right.  Those who disagree aren’t imprisoned—at least not yet—but they are silenced, deplatformed, erased.  Modern liquidation doesn’t use the firing squad.  It uses the censor’s pen.

There’s nothing progressive about this.  It’s anti-progress.  It is the suffocation of creativity, the destruction of liberty, and the enthronement of mediocrity.  We’re told to celebrate it, to clap as chains are fastened.  Yet the emperor still has no clothes.

Reference

Ludwig von Mises; The Anti-Capitalist Mentality