The main argument for liberal democracy is that it is best at unleashing new and workable ideas. Hence, it is argued that there is a one to one correspondence between liberty and prosperity. But suppose an authoritarian society simply adopted the most commercially successful ideas and processes of a liberal society. Then the one to one correspondence would not necessarily hold. After all, there is an apparent one to one correspondence between hard work and prosperity too, but robbers have found a way around it. You work, we steal. Why not you invent, we copy? But this is only possible in a globalized world. Where barriers to information existed, or were even self-imposed (as in the old Soviet Union) the correspondence between liberty and prosperity were probably more pronounced.

It’s interesting to consider how domestic radicals can accept, with perfect naturalness, the income from their trust funds or the profits of the businesses they own, as their right while hating the system that makes their wealth possible. That can only happen when there is no necessary correspondence between an embrace of the Enlightenment ideal and benefiting from that Ideal. I guess it is possible to eat bacon without liking the pig.