George Santayana warned, in 1905: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Consider, today, that the American and French revolutions shared several core ideas and tactics. Both rebellions, being born in the Age of Enlightenment, pushed back against perceived tyrannies. However, they unfolded differently… severely so.

The American Revolution was based on the concept of free enterprise (in the modern "freedom to own, trade, and operate businesses with limited arbitrary state interference" sense). Imperfect as the times were, the American Founders set up institutions and political ideas that aligned with economic freedom: with an emphasis on property rights, limited government through constitutional rule, and a belief that people should have liberty to pursue economic activity without centralized (inevitably tyrannical) control.

The French Revolution, by contrast, while it promoted rights and equality, was more strongly associated, especially in its radical Jacobin phases led by Maximilien Robespierre, with state-driven control and suspicion of economic wealth.

Consider the following missive, excerpted from Lawrence Reed's introduction to the classic illustration of free enterprise, I, Pencil, describing spontaneous order, the division of labor, dispersed knowledge, and how voluntary cooperation via markets produces complex goods without central direction.

Reed writes:

Maximilien Robespierre is said to have blessed the horrific French Revolution with this chilling declaration: "On ne saurait pas faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs." Translation: "One can't expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs." A consummate statist who worked tirelessly to plan the lives of others, Robespierre would become the architect of the Revolution's bloodiest phase—the Reign of Terror of 1793–94.

Robespierre and his guillotine broke eggs by the thousands in a vain effort to impose a utopian society with government planners at the top and everybody else at the bottom. That French experience is but one example in a disturbingly familiar pattern. Call them what you will — socialists, interventionists, collectivists, statists — history is littered with their presumptuous plans for rearranging society to fit their vision of the common good, plans that always fail as they kill or impoverish other people in the process. If socialism ever earns a final epitaph, it will be this: Here lies a contrivance engineered by know-it-alls who broke eggs with abandon but never, ever created an omelet.

None of the Robespierres of the world knew how to make a pencil, yet they wanted to remake entire societies. How utterly preposterous, and mournfully tragic! But we will miss a large implication of [the author's] message if we assume it aims only at the tyrants whose names we all know. The lesson of "I, Pencil" is not that error begins when the planners plan big. It begins the moment one tosses humility aside, assumes he knows the unknowable, and employs the force of the State against peaceful individuals. That's not just a national disease. It can be very local indeed. In our midst are people who think that if only they had government power on their side, they could pick tomorrow's winners and losers in the marketplace, set prices or rents where they ought to be, decide which forms of energy should power our homes and cars, and choose which industries should survive and which should die. They should stop for a few moments and learn a little humility from a lowly writing implement.

Does this sound familiar?

When voting this November, consider who has your individual best interests in mind. Which candidates express these essential sentiments — the wonder of unplanned coordination, the power of prices and incentives, the limits of any single mind or planner, and the facilitated productivity that arises from free people voluntarily specializing in and exchanging the goods and services they choose, not what others dictate to them.

History shows us, over and again, that our lives may very well depend on our decisions.

If we are doomed to repeat history, which version will we choose?

H. Jay Eshelman