Years ago, as a college professor of economics, I posed a question to each new group of freshman students on or about the first day of class. "Can anyone tell me," I asked, "what determines whether society is organized along socialist, centrally–planned lines or as a free enterprise, private property order?" The answer to that query, I suggested, would be the same as the answer to this corollary question: "What causes societies to occasionally change from one economic system to the other?"
Rarely would I elicit the response I was looking for, despite all the hints I could come up with. The students' answers included the following: "the President," "the Congress," "the news media," "the unions," "the schools." Invariably, someone would suggest that there was no determinant at all, that we were talking about mere random, chance events – a kind of irrational and unexplainable ebb and flow of history.
At some point, the guesswork would come to an end and I would reveal the answer I was seeking. "People or the institutions they establish play important roles, but neither one is fundamental enough because neither one explains why people behave the way they do. The correct answer is that which the French author Victor Hugo once called 'more powerful than all the armies of the world'-IDEAS!"
People, including politicians, activists, clerics, teachers, and others, often can be agents of change, but ideas are the instigators. In shaping public policy – including the larger question of free enterprise or socialism, democracy or dictatorship – ideas are of paramount, decisive importance. What people believe, in other words, says a great deal (maybe everything) about how they behave, for whom they vote, what laws and rules they embrace, what kind of system they'll work to achieve. Change ideas, and you can change the course of history.