The Wall Street Journal Online

Freedom's Unsung Hero
January 26, 2006; Page A10

Hong Kong's prosperity since World War II is sometimes referred to as a "miracle." But miracles require the intervention of a deity, whereas Hong Kong's remarkable economic growth between 1945 and its handover to China in 1997 owes a great deal to the nonintervention of a mortal man, John James Cowperthwaite, who died over the weekend at the age of 90.

Cowperthwaite arrived in Hong Kong in 1945 and served as Financial Secretary of the then-British colony from 1961-1971. Perhaps more than any other single figure, he was the architect and guardian of the greatest natural experiment in free-market capitalism in the postwar world. It is all the more remarkable that he kept the colonial government small and out of the business of business at a time when socialism was ascendant in Britain.

In 1997, Milton Friedman noted that since 1945 Hong Kong's GDP per capita had gone from a fraction to substantially more than that of Israel and Britain, and had caught up with that of the U.S., even as the colony's population increased tenfold. That astonishing performance became a policy beacon first to the nearby small nations of Asia (the "tigers") and eventually to Mainland China itself.

One of the better known stories about the undeservedly obscure Cowperthwaite was his refusal to collect economic statistics about Hong Kong during his tenure as Financial Secretary, lest they produce an impulse toward central planning among the bureaucrats. "I did very little," Sir John once said. "All I did was to try to prevent some of the things that might undo it." Other would-be central planners could learn a lot from what John Cowperthwaite didn't do.
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Many people want to "control" the church, but I say let the capitalist approach set the pace. There is no better way to "Manage" a church than the way Cowperwaite ran Hong Kong. He let the people run themselves.

The old European approach to church leadership is dead. They always wanted central planning, central control and central bureaucracies. In the day when it took three months to get word from London to Boston and all things were moving slowly, that may not have seemd normal.

But even back in the 1700's American Christians became impatient with all that central control and began to turn the spiritual life of Americans over to every man and women. It has revolutionized the way we do church.

The First Great Revival/Awakening led to economic freedom, the Revolutionary War, freedom for women and freedom for the establishment of new churches .

The Second Revival/Awakening led to the Abolition Movement and freedom of slaves as well as more economic freedom.

Today's Revival/Awakening is leading to the sharing of not so much economic and political freedom but of spiritual freedom.

The Motto is: Let my People Grow and Go.