From Instapundit, with link to article.

^For about the last two hundred years (three in a few locales), the fundamental structure of Western civilization has been anomalous in a crucial way. The anomaly consists in this: whereas in the overwhelming majority of societies the dominant route to wealth and status has been through political control, essentially the use of force or threat of force to extract value from others, in the West it has generally been through exchanges in which the parties have choices, and in which value must be returned for value received if the transaction is to consummate. We're so conditioned to this, to the fact that our great fortunes belong to entrepreneurs, inventors, magnates, entertainers, and athletes, people who make (or do) things that others want, rather than to royalty, nobility, high priests, mandarins, court favorites and military leaders, people who take in taxes and booty things that others would prefer to keep, that we - very much including historians, journalists, and social commentators of almost every stripe - give little or no thought to it, considering it pretty much the natural order of things. But our exchange-oriented social order does not represent the natural order of things, and what it anomalously results in is of enormous – though perhaps ultimately self-destructive - consequence.^
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^Where the route to wealth is via exchange, members of society, especially the most talented and energetic, are motivated to produce more wealth in order to trade it for the wealth produced by others. Relationships tend to become mutually beneficial, overall wealth increases, and inventive ways are found to produce ever more of it. On the other hand, where the preferred route to wealth is command, outcomes are quite different, exchanges being less wealth for wealth than wealth for (as some waggish economists have put it) "illth" – or at least potential illth in the form of "offers that can’t be refused." Wealth, if it grows at all, grows slowly, with innovation becoming more concentrated on how to extract and how to evade, than on how to produce. Society takes on a hierarchical and less mobile cast; more centered on birth and alliances among elites, less on creative ability; more status consciousness and less socially egalitarian.^
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^This last circumstance is particularly worth stressing because of the social atmosphere it fosters. While power is always distributed unequally, the average individual has much more clout in exchange-centered (let us simply say "free") than in extraction-centered ("unfree") societies. Extraction is based on narrowly distributed skill sets, those of the warrior, courtier, and bureaucrat, who generally seek to, and usually succeed in, monopolizing their functions. Productivity, by contrast, may assume many forms, and individuals - both as producers and consumers - typically deal with vastly larger numbers of transactional partners through the marketplace than in the polity. Even compared to representative government, with regular, competitive balloting, the marketplace offers the average person far more choice, not just among a few promise-making candidates at widely spaced electoral intervals, but among numerous products and providers on a daily basis. The upshot is that in free societies the typical individual has more leverage and can demand more consideration than in those organized around command. Competition in productivity - however sharp its elbows may sometimes feel - tends to elevate the standing and dignity of the ordinary man and woman, enriching them as much in psychological as in material possession. In highly developed exchange societies the demos - consumerdom - may not be royalty, but it is catered to with deference by those eager for its custom (and votes). Customers may not be always right, but they’re nearly always flattered.^
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I have long commented on how our society is a glittering exception to most of human history. We have no special immunity to falling under tyranny, and there is nothing to indicate that America's culture is somehow any more unlikely to generate tyrants from its own people than any of hundreds of others.