A new financial order

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 (UPI) -- "The relationship between a free-market society and prosperity is absolute."

There it was, blaring out from my television on CNN's Moneyline: a senior news correspondent, exploring post-Sept. 11 economics, declaring -- before the cable gods and everyone -- a principle that has long rendered me a social outcast.

Actually, it is probably my fondness for the work of economist Adam Smith that people find so annoying. Smith first advanced the link between free markets and prosperity in his opus "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations." Published in 1776, it was to informed citizens of its day what Microsoft is to modern man: an uncommon influence in a time of extraordinary change.

But what do Smith's words mean in an emerging America, in the new world order that will most certainly arise from the ravages of terrorism and war?

Everything.

The Middle East attracted 10 percent of the world's foreign investment in the 1980s, and began to see a corresponding increase in its standard of living. Just 20 years later, that investment has fallen to less than 1 percent. The images of abject poverty now filling our television screens confirm the heartrending result. In its recent study of developing nations, those with what the Heritage Foundation called "terrorist economies" fared the absolute worst.

What's that got to do with recovery?

Everything. The target of our attackers on Sept. 11 was not a building, an army, or a group of innocent civilians. It was a way of life: American life -- "The American Dream" -- a vision and a reality tied firmly to the prosperity of the individual.

As we proceed with the reordering of priorities that follows such extraordinary loss, American business should ask itself some hard questions. Not whether it's right to peddle this message or that at a sensitive time. Not whether to send our employees to work on planes or on trains.

No, the hard question American business must ask itself is this: What does the average person know about the policies that create and protect prosperity?

If asked, most Americans would probably say, "not enough." Who does know? Business and industry. The employer.

Employers talk to employees every day. Granted, most people think it's controversial to talk politics in the workplace. But, increasingly, the policies of prosperity are not party-specific, not bound by the legal and social constraints on political endorsement. China trade crossed party lines. Labor stood side by side with conservatives on the $218 billion Highway Bill -- the biggest public works project in history. In fact, exit polling showed that more than 70 percent of the 2000 congressional electorate were stockholders. That's a lot of employees who have more than a paycheck invested on the playing field of policy and politics.

Employers and employees have a shared interest in prosperity. Why not share information about policy? How? The same way we talk to co-workers every day -- via e-mail, phone, the Internet. How many e-mails were in your "inbox" this morning? How many of them gave you the information you need to protect the American way of life?

But what can an individual do with mere information? How does one person influence policy? We vote. And we get involved politically. After all, an informed electorate -- exercising the right to vote -- is the bedrock of our brand of democracy.

Wealthy people, even wealthy nations, do not produce prosperity, as recent news footage confirms. Political freedom, linked inextricably to economic freedom, is the source of prosperity. The vast majority of American adults, even in this economic climate, have an employer. Employers have a responsibility -- and an opportunity -- to do the right thing. To give their employees the benefit of their intelligence, and their freedoms, and to move America toward a new era of strength.

No one has asked us to leave our families and put ourselves in harm's way in a hostile land. But I believe we are called to support those who have stepped up to that plate. As leaders of our communities, and leaders of our economy, I believe we can marshal our own armies, here at home, in defense of the way of life our enemies sought to destroy.

(Greg Casey is president of BI-PAC, the Business-Industry Political Action Committee.)