> without freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, sexual liberty, etc. who cares about material riches?
Who cares about them? Everyone who doesn’t have material prosperity? You think the Chinese would trade their last two decades of growing material prosperity for greater speech and sexual freedom?
Wealthy societies are able to afford those vices. But when America was developing, for example, the scope of those freedoms were sharply narrower than the way you probably think of them today. The Americans who made the country wealthy and prosperous today are not the post-1960s libertines that now enjoy the fruits of those efforts.