Re: Chris Talgo's "This Valentine’s Day, show some love for America" [Feb. 11], Talgo, editorial director of the Heartland Institute, praises our nation's founding ideas of "individual freedom and self-governance," "strict limits on governmental power" and "free-market capitalism."
He goes on to acknowledge that slavery and prejudice are a stain on "our history of upholding freedom," but in doing so, he overlooks the flaws of the values he praises, such as the harmful consequences of unregulated free-market capitalism, or the ways in which an emphasis on individual freedom can undermine a sense of social responsibility, to the detriment of all.
The reason for these omissions becomes clear when you take into account the organization he serves. According to Wikipedia, "The Heartland Institute is an American conservative and libertarian public policy think tank known for its rejection of both the scientific consensus on climate change and the negative health impacts of smoking.
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"Founded in 1984, it worked with tobacco company Philip Morris throughout the 1990s to attempt to discredit the health risks of secondhand smoke and lobby against smoking bans. Since the 2000s, the Heartland Institute has been a leading promoter of climate change denial."
Both the tobacco and oil industries are prime examples of the dangers of free-market capitalism.
Ignoring the findings of their own researchers about the danger of smoking and fossil fuel emissions, they created a distrust of science to protect themselves and their profit margins.
As for the downside of an emphasis on individual freedom, consider the resistance to gun regulation, or the resistance to masking mandates and vaccines that has contributed thus far to more than a million American deaths from COVID. In his valentine to America, Talgo subtly promotes a point of view that, in its one-sidedness, works against the public good.
H. Scott Butler, Blacksburg
