In recent decades, appreciation of private ownership has been declining in the West. High taxes, welfare transfers, regulatory restraints, and bureaucratic edicts are eroding private property. Increasingly, the political process—that is, government ownership and control—is being substituted for private property and the market process which is a natural outgrowth of private ownership. Paradoxically, evidence is mounting that private ownership not only protects liberty, as our forefathers recognized, but it also provides for superior economic performance. In contrast, government ownership creates a perverse incentive structure which leads to a Hobbesian world of political infighting and waste of valuable resources. . . .