If a patron saint for the libertarian movement were to be chosen, at the top of the list would be Rev. Edmund A. Opitz, minister and theologian for liberty. He was a good friend of Murray Rothbard and many others in the freedom movement—he was present from the beginning and knew almost everyone. From the 1950s through the 1990s, Opitz called the church to an integrated understanding of religion, economics, and individual liberty. He passed away in 2006, creating a void yet to be filled but leaving this world much better than he had found it.Opitz trained for Christian ministry at Andover Seminary and initially ministered in the Unitarian Church. But during his early years of ministry Unitarianism became more and more influenced by liberal Protestantism and the social gospel, whereas Opitz consistently grew more theologically conservative. He eventually left the Unitarian Church for the Congregationalist denomination and continued to promote conservative values and a thoroughly free market outlook upon social life.

Religion, Opitz would say, is far more than an academic exercise in one subject among many others; rather it is the fundamental way one approaches, understands, and evaluates all subjects. One’s religion, or worldview, makes all the difference in how one interacts with the world. Opitz’s Christian faith led him to the realization that liberty was the only reasonable organizing principle for society. Liberty and faith are not merely compatible – they are inseparable. “Liberty rests upon the belief that all proper authority for man’s relationships with his fellow men comes from a source higher than man — from the Creator… Each person has a relation to his Maker with which no other person, not even the ruler, has any right to interfere.” Reciprocally, Opitz believed a philosophy of liberty presupposed a background of Christian philosophy. Whether or not one accepts this notion, certainly Western civilization is indebted to Christendom for the understanding that natural law provides an absolute rather than relative standard—that there is something higher than the whims of men.

Opitz understood this philosophy of liberty as the true meaning of individualism. He repeatedly emphasized the importance of individual liberty in religious conviction: “Men must be free in society because each person has a destiny beyond society which he can work out only under the conditions of liberty.” The concept of individualism is often lost in the modern church. One frequently hears in religious circles that “individualism has no place in the life of the church,” but this constitutes a misunderstanding of the word itself. At its core, individualism means the individual is responsible for his own actions, in particular before God, and thus individual liberty is necessary for living out the dictates of conscience. Opitz would agree that one cannot be in Christ (Galatians 3:28) without the body of Christ—the church—but many Christians take this much too far and find themselves promoting collectivism rather than community. Individualism is not social atomism: “We have no inclination to be hermits; we are social creatures, and we achieve our full humanity only in association, in mutuality, and in community.” Voluntary action is the very essence of community, and thus the collectivist is actually acting against the spirit of community he seeks to promote.

The natural outgrowth of holding a consistent philosophy of political liberty is supporting a free market economy. Opitz understood that the free market was absolutely essential to maintaining a free society. “Economic freedom is to be cherished for itself, just as we cherish every one of our liberties. But economic freedom is doubly important because it sustains all the rest [of our liberties]… Economic freedom represents our livelihood, and whoever controls our livelihood has acquired critical leverage over every other aspect of our lives as well.” In this insight, Opitz recognized that Christianity, which mandates a free society where individuals can peacefully fulfill their responsibilities before God, and capitalism, which supports and maintains the free society, are not enemies in the least. Rather, they are critical allies, the best of friends. Opitz elaborates upon this topic at length in his appropriately titled book, Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies.

But how can individual freedom be protected from tyranny? The solution, according to Opitz, lies in returning to classical-liberal political ideals. “There is a place for government in the affairs of men, and our Declaration of Independence tells us precisely what that place is. The role of government is to protect individuals in their God-given individual rights. Freedom is the natural birthright of man, but all that government can do in behalf of freedom is to let the individual alone, and it should secure him in his rights by making others let him alone.” Thus, if government is to have any purpose at all, it is only to secure the rights of individuals in their persons and property. Anything else is nothing short of criminal, for the standard of morality does not change when one dons a government uniform. Opitz saw the American governmental system as a unique solution in the history of man that had yet to be matched. To him, minimal government was the best way to restrain tyranny.

With these principles in mind, it is no surprise that Opitz was patently opposed to the so-called “social gospel” that was popular in the church for much of the 20th century. The central tenet of the social gospel was that the chief function of the church was to provide for the physical needs of the destitute by all possible means. Though charity is indeed a great part of the Christian way of life, social-gospel activists in effect renounced charity and condoned the use of force to achieve their meta-goals of social and economic equality through government programs and wealth transfer. Opitz’s keen outlook history and philosophy led him to write scathing critiques of the actions of social-gospel proponents, and in many respects he single-handedly turned much of the tide against this deviant theological point of view. (See his book The Libertarian Theology of Freedom for an excellent history of the social gospel.)

Opitz’s strong belief in freedom was coupled with action. Early in his career, he helped form and manage a group called Spiritual Mobilization, which disseminated newsletters promoting free-market ideas to over 20,000 ministers nationwide. Following the dissolution of Spiritual Mobilization, Opitz joined the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) as a senior staff member (and resident theologian). While at FEE, he founded the Nockian Society, which helped keep Albert Jay Nock’s writings in print, and “the Remnant,” a small fellowship of conservative and libertarian ministers named after the theme of Nock’s essay “Isaiah’s Job.” He spent 37 years at FEE, retiring in 1992.

He made a great impact upon the libertarian movement through his writing. The paper trail of his thoughts is voluminous. While a part of Spiritual Mobilization, Opitz was a frequent contributor to the magazine Faith and Freedom. He left an indelible mark upon FEE’s publication, The Freeman, with his numerous book reviews and articles. Religion and Capitalism is considered a classic text in both economics and theology. His manner of writing matched his manner of person—gentlemanly, persuasive, and humble—worthy traits that all libertarians should emulate.

Opitz could see the ramifications of the war of ideas that has been fought for centuries between liberty and tyranny. He saw the trajectories of the prominent ideas of his day—social gospel, collectivism, socialistic economic policy—and he used his abilities to promote what was good and right. “With how little wisdom do we organize our lives, especially in the areas of government and the economy. We’ve been going by dead reckoning for too long, and our dumb luck has just about run out,” he wrote in the August 1992 Freeman. Libertarian Christians should remember that Opitz helped pave the way for us to make a difference. Let us honor his legacy by telling Christians in America the answer to the problems society faces is not the State, but rather liberty and faith.

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Edmund Opitz – Minister to Liberty

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The recent movie called Out of Africa has acquainted millions of Americans with the name of a Danish Baroness Blixen, whose pen name was Isak Dinesen. The movie is based on Dinesen’s 1938 book, a semi-autobiographical work called Out of Africa. Four years earlier, in 1934, Isak Dinesen had published a work entitled Seven Gothic Tales, really seven short novels within the covers of a single book. One of these Gothic tales was set in the Paris of several generations ago and consisted mainly of the reminiscences of an old gentleman. There is a story within this larger story involving an Armenian organ grinder and his pet monkey. Some of you may recall seeing this type of street musician who would wander through city neighborhoods carrying, slung over his shoulder, a kind of music box the size of an accordion, a crank on its side. This contraption was set atop a pole, which supported the weight of the music machine when the man stopped to perform. The man would be dressed in a sort of gypsy costume, and as the entertainer cranked out his tunes his little capuchin monkey would pass through the crowd collecting coins, which he’d turn over to his master. This in itself was quite a stunt; but this little monkey was cleverer than most of his kind, because his master had taught him to perform a great variety of crowd-pleasing tricks, each one triggered by a word of command—in Armenian.

The Armenian died, and the little animal came into the possession of a kindly French couple who housed the monkey and fed him well. Time passed, and although the animal was properly cared for, he languished; he seemed to know that he had talents lying dormant which no one knew how to bring out. There was no one to voice the magic Armenian words. Lots of potential talent was trapped inside the little beast, but no one knew how to release it; the key had been lost.

It is my guess that Isak Dinesen intended this little story to be a parable of the human condition. Translate the parable and it suggests that individual men and women are loaded with potential talents of all sorts—talents unlimited—but these potentialities are locked up inside us and become actual only when touched by a magic wand from without—the magic wand called “education.”

The scholastic curriculum labeled “liberal arts education” emerged, developed, and grew—in the course of centuries—in order to give the young people of each successive generation the tools of learning, tools which they could then use to free themselves from the hindrances and obstructions, the ignorance and taboos which prevented them from becoming the kind of persons they had it in them to be. The “liberal arts,” in other words, were the “liberating arts”; they freed the individual person from all that prevented him from realizing his full potential. The ultimate goal of liberal education is wisdom and understanding—a broader and deeper understanding of human nature and the human condition, and a few clues as to the purposes of our earthly pilgrimage. Education deals with the goals of life; it is “ends oriented,” and its primary tools are language, literature, philosophy, history, and mathematics.

Education and Training

Education is not the same as training. Training has to do with “how-to” knowledge, with practical instruction; training is what might be called “instrumental” knowledge. Training deals with means rather than with ends—ends being the province of education. The world could not continue on its course without the help it gets from the millions of trained men and women who accomplish the world’s work—the scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, and technologists; the doctors, dentists, nurses, manufacturers, managers, and so on. If asked to name an American exemplar of the trained man, most of us would mention someone like Thomas Alva Edison. Edison’s kind of genius has given us inventions which have transformed life in modern societies in many beneficial ways; our life is cleaner, brighter, healthier, more convenient—and noisier—because people like Edison have lived and worked. We have many more things; sometimes it seems that gadgetry almost overwhelms us!

Virtually everyone acknowledges the important contributions of trained people; they keep our society going, and they make it better. They have enormously increased the number and potency of our means; enormous power is now at our disposal. But what about the people who are schooled merely in the liberating arts; what role might they aspire to play in our culture? If students have been exposed to the best that has been thought and said about man, the human species, so that they have some understanding of what it means to be a person, some understanding of the nature, destiny, and proper end of a human being, then—if such people are heeded by those with know-how and power—we might yet scrape together sufficient wisdom to save our society from being fragmented by the detonation of its newly released energies. It seems to be our fate to live at a time in history when enormous power is in our hands but barely under our control. Ideas still role in human affairs and we won’t know what to do with our recently acquired powers until we have decided what to do with our lives. And that is where the liberating arts come in, for it is a main function of a liberal educa-6on to help us face up to the question of how to make our lives count for the things that really matter.

Education and Schooling

I have briefly drawn a distinction between education and training and I shall now draw an equally important distinction between education and schooling. No society before our own has ever put so much faith in schooling, which we usually mislabel “education.” Virtually no child in America lives beyond the reach of his local public school and every child’s exposure to public schooling is compulsory. A few generations ago schooling at the college level was deemed a rare privilege; but now there are as many local community colleges as there once were high schools; the college population in this nation has exploded during the past generations while the curriculum has been downgraded. We proudly point to our vast network of schools and colleges as our “educational establishment,” when it is no such thing. Education does occasionally occur in our schools and colleges, but it is rare to find a student who is really educable. In one of Will Durant’s early books, written in 1929, he mentions a foreign student who came to this country to get a graduate degree at one of our great universities. Shortly before he returned to his native land the young student summed up his experience by declaring: “American universities are really athletic institutions, with opportunities for study for the feeble bodied.”

My remark a moment ago that only the occasional college student is really educable may sound arrogant and elitist. But it wouldn’t have sounded at all elitist if I had referred to the occasional educable student as a bookworm! It’s a fact; liberal arts education is primarily for bookworms—a bookworm being defined as a kid who’s mesmerized by the printed page. The liberal arts scholar frequents the library, not the laboratory; he gets his education by studying the books and papers written by other scholars. And a liberal arts scholar is the kind of person who does quite well in the typical IQ test, the Stanford-Binet test, for example. I would point out to you that what is measured by the typical IQ test is not the only kind of intelligence human beings possess; but it is one kind. The results of an IQ test predict reasonably well how the individual would fare in a typical liberal arts curriculum. But that’s it!

Many years ago when I was studying in Berkeley at the Pacific School of Religion our psychology teacher was the head of the psychology department at the University of California. Of course he had to expose the theological students to an IQ test. As it turned out we did reasonably well, having an average IQ score of over 130 compared to the average of the graduate students at the University next door of about 120. Does that mean that we were smarter than the students at U Cal? Not at all. It simply means that we had a different kind of smartness than the graduate students in physics, or chemistry, or geology, or astronomy; our forte was book learning, their intelligence was of another species. The modern world has suffered unduly from its failure to understand important distinctions in this area of schooling. We exhibit a weak understanding of the role of the liberal arts program—it’s not for everyone—and we extravagantly over-value the figures obtained by IQ testing.

We began about a hundred and fifty years ago to set up a vast system of compulsory public instruction in this country. With the centuries-old liberal arts tradition in mind we geared our school system into the three R’s—Readin’, ‘Ritin’, ‘n’ ‘Rithmetic. This was a system well adapted to bookworms; it prepared them to enter one of our liberal arts colleges. But it was not adapted to the youngsters whose intelligence ran in the direction of vocational and technical training. School, for them, tended to be a frustrating experience.

Come down to the period after World War II when someone decided that everyone ought to have a college education. There was a vast expansion of the student population. Teachers in great numbers were needed and hired, but only a few men and women in each generation have a true vocation to teach, and only a few students have a vocation for a liberal arts education. There was bound to be trouble. Trouble came, and it turned many campuses into what resembled battlefields. Our first mistake was to set up a system of compulsory public instruction, and then we compounded this error by refusing to recognize the important distinction between education and training.

Needed: Talents

A complex modern society needs a great diversity of talents, and not all talented people, by any means, are good material for a liberal arts education. As a matter of fact, no society can absorb more than a tiny percentage of people with a liberal arts Ph.D.—too many liberal arts doctors will rain any society! But no society can have too many honest craftsmen and artisans . . . butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and all the rest. The head is important; the hands are important. More important is the proper balance between them. Listen to John Gardner on this point: “The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”

This lack of balance was perceived by an astute French critic, Ernest Renan, more than a century ago, but we did not heed his warning: “. . . . countries which, like the United States, have set up considerable popular instruction without any serious higher education, will long have to expiate their error by their intellectual mediocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit, their failure in general intelligence.”

Every one of us has encountered persons of enormous energy and enthusiasm; bursting with ideas which sound plausible but whose projects fizzle out without getting anywhere. I once knew such a man. He had written a widely noticed book during the thirties, and since that time had started numerous organizations to save the world. The world persistently refused the offer. Discussing the matter with a friend some years ago I wondered aloud why so-and-so had never gotten himself off the ground. “The trouble with him,” said my friend, “is that he got his drive shaft installed before his steering wheel.”

It is a prime function of a liberal education to provide us with the moral equivalent of a steering wheel, and perhaps a map, as well. A bishop of the early church said much the same thing when he declared that society needs three kinds of men: those who work, those who fight, and those who pray. Society needs someone to grow the wheat and bake the bread. it needs someone to stand guard and protect the producer against marauders. But in addition, every society needs those who continually remind the rest of us that there is more to life than taking care of our creaturely needs. Man has a spiritual and intellectual nature with needs just as real as our physical hungers. Human life has meanings which transcend material comfort or even physical survival, and we will not resolve our material and social problems until we absorb those meanings and live by them.

Scholarship, therefore, has a significance beyond mere scholarship. The tradition of Western learning goes back to Socrates—or to Plato. These men laid down the lines along which most serious thought has moved until our own time. This body of thought, which goes back nearly two and a half millennia, comprises “the grand old fortifying classical curriculum” of our ancestors. It is like the Gulf Stream, coursing through the Atlantic as it comes down to us through the generations, touching, at any given time, only a handful of persons. There is only a little exaggeration in Emerson’s observation that “There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato—never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these [works] come duly down for the sake of these few persons . . . .”

The custodian of this intellectual treasure of ancient learning is the university. Every college in the American colonies consciously partook of this heritage, and likewise most of the colleges founded during the nineteenth century. The first of our colleges, Harvard, was founded in 1636. John Harvard, an eminent English divine, came to the new world in 1637 and was immediately involved in supporting the college. He donated half his estate, nearly 800 pounds, plus his 320-book library, and a grateful citizenry named the college after him. William Bradford, of Plymouth Plantation fame, traces Harvard’s line of descent: “A light was kindled in Newtown [that is, Cambridge] in the Bay Colony in 1636. But the spark that touched it off came from a lamp of learning first lighted by the ancient Greeks, tended by the Church through the Dark Ages, blown white and high in the medieval universities, and handed down to us in direct line through Paris, Oxford and Cambridge.” Harvard College was largely a duplicate of Emmanuel College, the most Puritan of the Cambridge (England) colleges, and the one where John Harvard earned his Master of Arts degree. The Harvard curriculum was the classical liberal arts educational scheme unique to Western Civilization.

Western Civilization

A hundred and thirty years ago, Cardinal Newman paid an eloquent tribute to Western Civilization, the historic culture within which most of us were reared. Its nature is such, he argues, that, to all intents and purposes, Western Civilization and Civilization are equivalent terms. This idea is under deadly attack these days, so let me allow Cardinal Newman to say what he has in mind, in his own words: “. . . though there are other civilizations in the world, as there are other societies, yet this civilization, together with the society which is its creation and its home, is so distinctive and luminous in its character, so imperial in its extent, so imposing in its duration, and so utterly without rival upon the face of the earth, that the association may fitly assume to itself the rifle of ‘human society,’ and its civilization the abstract term ‘civilization.’”

These words of Cardinal Newman are taken from a lecture he gave in Dublin in 1858. England was at the height of her powers, prestige, and self-confidence. Britannia ruled the waves; her colonies were on every continent, leading to the proud declaration that the sun never sets on the British flag. The English gentleman was regarded the world over as the model, as the human male par excellence. English was a universal language. “Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master,” declared the noted philosopher, George Santayana.

Much has happened since Newman’s day to change that picture. We now know that high levels of civilization were attained in Asia and Africa thousands of years ago, long before Greece and Rome emerged onto the world scene. Civilization can no longer be regarded as simply a European thing. But note that it was through the work of European scholars during the past couple of centuries that the world came to know something of the glories of ancient China, India, and Egypt. The people of India had lost contact with their remote past, and owe it to the work of English scholars that ancient Hindu literature—such as the Vedas and the Upanishads—was discovered, translated from the Sanskrit, and read for the first time—in English—by Hindu students!

The growing awareness of ancient civilizations upset the idea that the culture whose time span stretched from Homer to the Victorian Age was the world’s only civilization, and this new knowledge also caused Europeans to have a keener perception of the defects of their Western world. Besides, the English were weary of bearing the white man’s burden, and, in the colonies, the natives were restless. Herbert Spencer, writing a letter to Grant Allen just before the turn of the century, voiced the opinion that “. . . we are in course of re-barbarization.”

But it was World War I that really stunned the West and proved to the rest of mankind that Western world hegemony was but a shadow and no longer a thing of substance. The statesmen of Western nations played their dangerous games during the early years of this century, completely lacking in the kind of fore sight which wiser statesmen might have employed to anticipate the horrible end results of the trends they had set in motion. A Serbian terrorist assassinated an Archduke and the whole house of cards began to crumble. A man named Francis Neilson resigned from Parliament in 1914 to publish his book, How Diplomats Make War, a piece of foresight that reads like hindsight. But not even Neilson could anticipate that the war would continue its slaughter for four dreadful years. Virtually no one in August of 1914 believed that the war would involve millions of combatants from nations all over the globe. Some did, of course. Viscount Grey of Fallodon, the English Foreign Secretary until 1916, uttered the gloomy prophecy, “The lights are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them come on again in our lifetime.” The opinion of the man in the street I heard from the lips of Max Brauer, the mayor of Hamburg in 1938, who lectured that year in Berkeley: “We all thought we’d be home for Christmas,” that is, in four months.

A youngish German high school teacher spent the last year or so of the war writing a book. Volume I appeared in 1918; volume II in 1922. New York publisher Alfred Knopf brought out an English translation in 1926, entitled The Decline of the West. It was not easy reading and the thesis was dubious. But the pessimism of Oswald Spengler matched the post-war despair and gloom of many people in Europe and America, with the result that The Decline of the West was probably the most talked-about book and the most written-about book of the 1920s and ‘30s. Spengler’s overwrought book seemed to say in exhausting detail what many felt in their bones—that Western Civilization was finished, kaput. Spengler despised the Nazis and had no use for Communism, but his devaluation of the West added fuel to Soviet expansionism by making it appear that some kind of Marxism was the only viable alternative now that the West was sinking below the horizon.

Our Present Situation

Where do we stand today? I think we must admit that Cardinal Newman’s panegyric to Western Civilization was overstated; there were and are, we now know, other civilizations which merit our respect. That’s the first point; and the second is to emphasize that although Western Civilization is not the only civilization, it is our civilization; and only persons firmly rooted in their native habitat can come to a proper appreciation of, say, Hindu culture, or Chinese culture. Those who are alienated from their native soil fall prey to charlatans. We have recently witnessed the spectacle of a grubby turbaned clown, who’d be ridiculed by real Hindu scholars, conning gullible Americans into parting with their money and with whatever wits they possessed in order to grovel at his feet. Genuine Hinduism serves the spiritual needs of millions of Indians, but fake Hinduism is a bad joke; and so, of course, is fake Christianity as other recent events remind us.

In any event—to return to our original theme—the liberal arts curriculum has been the educational scheme of Western Civilization, and will be again. A civilization like ours has immense and still untapped powers of recovery and regeneration—as its story is told m several of the books in my bibliography. It has been said that no civilization has ever been murdered, never destroyed from without. Civilizations suffer decay from within, and crumble; that is to say, they commit suicide. But a civilization which responds vigorously to challenges from within and challenges from without may renew itself. It all depends on the kind of people who compose that civilization. In other words, the fate of our society depends on us, and we can work on ourselves.

Reviving the Freedom Philosophy

It was a set of ideas along these lines that inspired Leonard Read to set up The Foundation for Economic Education 42 years ago. The American nation had lapsed into a New Deal type of socialism because this country’s citizens, for several generations, had failed to educate themselves in the freedom philosophy. The beliefs upon which our eighteenth-century ancestors had erected the basic political and economic structures of this society no longer inspired us even to maintain those structures. And during the decades when the freedom philosophy was in remission, the ideologues of socialism carried on an unremitting campaign to persuade people that the government could run things better than we could run them ourselves. The socialists manufactured a new public opinion different from the original and, as a result of the inculcation of bad ideas, we are saddled with numerous bureaucratic interventions into every sector of our lives.

The suggested FEE remedy is two-fold: first, try to arouse an interest in personal liberty and the free society; and second, nourish this new interest in freedom by having on hand books, pamphlets, periodicals, and speeches expounding the freedom philosophy. Thus, gradually, bad ideas will be replaced by better ideas. Right action will follow. The Foundation emphasis is on self-education. And when you come right down to it, self-education is the only kind of education there is. A wise and experienced teacher is one who has been over the route before, so he can tell you where the mine-fields are, which roads are blind alleys and which are dead ends, and which books are worth studying. But there’s one thing no teacher can do: he cannot educate you. You have to educate yourself. “Educate” is not a transitive verb, that is, education is not something that anyone can do to another or for another. But anyone who has the incentive can do it for himself.

I first encountered this approach years ago in a pamphlet by the eminent British novelist, Arnold Bennett; it was entitled “How to Live on Twenty Four Hours a Day.” You can make your own life more exciting and fulfilling, wrote Bennett in the breezy manner of a novelist, if you resolve to learn some subject, any topic of your own choosing—like political economy—and make a pact with yourself to spend 90 minutes three evenings a week in intense study. This does not mean merely sitting down with a book in front of you, which is all you’ll be able to do at first. You’ll start to read, and after a few pages your mind will be miles away. Grab your mind and drag it back by the scruff of the neck! says Bennett, and gradually your mind will realize that you are in charge and that you mean business. At this point your mind will start to pay attention and do what you demand of it.

Another way to teach your mind that you are in charge of it is to spend a few minutes before retiring rehearsing the events of the day, hour by hour: what you saw, heard and did, whom you met, what you said, and so on. Once your mind realizes that it will be called upon to recite at the day’s end, it will begin to pay attention during the day; you’ll experience things more vividly and thus recall them more readily. Plan to keep a daily journal, as Leonard Read did for years.

The liberating arts require a lot of reading,and reading requires seeing, which is why I recommend The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley. Reading does not come naturally; reading is an acquired skill, like playing the fiddle or walking on your hands.

You can teach yourself to read better with books like Walter B. Pitkin’s The Art of Rapid Reading. Several courses are now available which teach speed reading, but I don’t know how well they live up to their claims. I do know it to be a fact that anyone can train himself to read easier, faster, and with greater pleasure. Better comprehension follows. Use a red pencil to bracket and underline salient points. This is an aid to memory and helpful for later review.

The Art of Thinking

Now that you have awakened a few billion brain cells and pumped some information into them, your mind will begin to churn out ideas and you’ll be thinking lots of new and exciting thoughts. What is it like to think? Let me quote a few lines from Jacques Barzun, a first-rate thinker: “Thinking is inwardly a haphazard, fitful, incoherent activity. If you could peer in and see thinking going on, it would not look like that trimmed and barbered result, A Thought. Thinking is messy, repetitious, silly, obtuse, subject to explosions that shatter the crucible and leave darkness behind. Then comes another flash, a new path is seen, trod, lost, broken off, and blazed anew. It leaves the thinker dizzy as well as doubtful; he does not know what he thinks until he has thought it, or better, until he has written and riddled it with a persistence akin to obsession.”

Once you get hooked on thinking you’ll be irresistibly drawn into writing, and you’ll quickly discover that almost no author who relies on the contents of his own mind alone ever wrote a readable essay, let alone a book. Every thinker and writer needs to know how to use reference books and conduct research, and the complete guide to this is the book, The Modern Researcher, by Jacques Barzun and Henry Graft. But you cannot stop there; you have to learn to write passable English prose, and there’s no easy way to do that. The most helpful book on writing, in my view, is Barzun’s Simple and Direct. If you’re interested in knowing how the ancient Greeks went about the chore of putting together a persuasive speech, look into Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

The human person is emphatically not the mere accidental end result of the chance interaction of physical and chemical forces, however much it might please certain of our contemporaries to believe this. Nor is man some untidy excrescence appearing on the earth’s surface sometime between the last two ice ages, tossed about by the same natural forces which rust iron and ripen corn. To the contrary, every man and woman is a work of divine art; through our being flow the primordial creative forces of the universe. Coordinate with those forces and we become creators too, some of us in small and others in large measure.

Novelty comes onto the cosmic scene with every thought we think. The future is still in the making, and there’s no action we take that does not alter the future in some degree. The future really is in our hands, and this is a responsibility we cannot avoid. Even if we do nothing, the future inexorably records our inaction, by being a little bit different than it would have been, had we done something.

The center of human creativity is the individual human mind, and the creative process in thought, literature, music, and art is the subject of The Creative Process, a wide-ranging anthology edited by Brewster Ghiselin.

To sum up: I’ve had some things to say about the ages-old liberal arts curriculum as an essential element of Western Civilization. Now that we know something of other great world civilizations we realize that we can learn from them, but only if we retain a firm hold on our own heritage. I have pointed out that education is not at all the same thing as schooling, and I have argued that education and training are not quite the same. All genuine education is self-education. But you must first train yourself, in order to acquire the tools of learning you need to educate yourself with. Education deals with ideas, and ideas rule the human world. The man or woman who thinks is an influence on those who come into contact with him, and by his thoughtful actions he exerts leverage over the future.

Albert Jay Nock was a product of “the grand, old, fortifying classical curriculum,” and it’s fairly safe to refer to Nock as the most exquisitely educated gentleman of the first third of this century. And Nock thought of himself as a superfluous man! It is certainly true that a classical education will not make you the life of the party; it won’t put you among the rich and famous; it might even make you feel superfluous. But “the fun is in the going”; where it gets you is secondary. Self-education is a never-ending series of challenges. Each challenge we surmount only confronts us with a bigger and more complex challenge—and a wider horizon. But that’s what life is all about. And such a life is never dull!

Originally published in The Freeman, December 1988. “The Liberating Arts” was presented as a FEE Seminar lecture in Alderbrook, Washington, in 1988.

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Bibliography

Aristotle — The Rhetoric, Lane Cooper, Editor. 1932.

Barzun, Jacques— Darwin, Marx, Wagner, 1941.

Barzun, Jacques— Teacher in America, 1945.

Barzun. Jacques— Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, rev. ed. 1985.

Barzun and Graff— The Modern Researcher. 4th ed.. 1985.

Bennett, Arnold— How to Live (n.d.).

Chesterton, G. K.— Orthodoxy, 1924.

Chesterton, G. K.— The Everlasting Man, 1925.

Dawson, Christopher The Making of Europe, 1937.

Dawson, Christopher—Religion and the Rise of Western Civilization, 1950.

De Burgh, W. G.—Legacy of the Ancient World, rev. ed., 1947.

DeRougemont, Denis—Man’s Western Quest, 1957.

Hazlitt, Henry—Thinking As A Science, 1916. 1969.

Heard, Gerald—Man the Master, 1941.

Heard, Gerald—The Human Venture, 1955.

Highet, Gilbert—The Classical Tradition, 1949.

Highet, Gilbert—Man’s Unconquerable Mind. 1954.

Huxley, Aldous—The Art of Seeing, 1942.

Joad, C. E. M.—Guide to Philosophy, 1936.

Joad, C. E.M.—The Recovery of Belief, 1952.

Krutch, Joseph Wood—The Modern Temper. 1929.

Krutch, Joseph Wood—The Measure of Man, 1954.

Lewis, C. S.—Abolition of Man, 1947.

Lewis, C. S.—Miracles, 1947.

Lewis. C. S.—God in the Dock, 1970.

Matron, H. I.—Education in Antiquity, 1956.

Newman, J. H.—The Idea of a University, 1852, 1959.

Nock, A. J.—The Theory of Education in the U.S., 1932.

Nock, A. J.—Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943.

Pitkin, Walter B.—The Art of Rapid Reading, 1929.

Polya, G.—How to Solve It, 2nd ed., 1956.

Sayers, Dorothy—The Lost Tools of Learning, 1948 (Reprinted in A Matter of Eternity, R. K. Sprague, editor, 1973).

Whitehead, Alfred North—The Aims of Education, 1929.

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The Liberating Arts

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American political institutions presuppose certain convictions about human nature, the worth and prerogatives of persons, the meaning of life, the distinction between right and wrong, and the destiny of the individual. The Colonists came to their understanding of these matters as heirs of the intellectual and religious heritage of Christendom—the culture whose shaping forces sprang from ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome.

Given the consensus of two centuries ago—which regarded man as a sovereign person under God—it was only logical to structure government so as to expand opportunities for the exercise of personal freedom. The Constitution is clearly designed to maximize each individual’s equal right to pursue his own peaceful goals and enjoy the benefits and responsibilities of ownership.

The Declaration of Independence put into words what nearly everyone was thinking, that personal rights and immunities are ours because we are created beings, that is, we manifest a major purpose and intent of this universe. This implies a firm rejection of the alternative, which is to assume that we are the mere end products of natural and social forces, adrift in a meaningless cosmos. For if the universe is meaningless, then no way of life is any more meaningful than any other; in which case Power has no limits.

Our forebears had firm convictions about the purpose of life, and knew that in order to achieve life’s transcendent end Power must be limited: “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,” they declared. If life is viewed in these terms, how shall we conceive the proper scope and competence of government? What is its role in society? What functions should we assign to it?

Government is the power structure of a society. This is the first and most important fact about the political agency, that it has the legal authority to coerce. The second thing is to inquire whether the power wielded by government is self-sprung, or delegated by a more comprehensive authority than the merely political. Does government rule autonomously or by divine right; or is the real power located elsewhere and merely loaned to government? The Constitution is clear on this point; the power is in the people to lay down the laws which Power must obey. They set it up; they tell it what to do.

“We, the People of the United States,” reads the Preamble, “do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Specific Limitations

The people empower an agency to do certain things for them as a nation, but if we isolate the provisions they laid down to limit government the prevailing intent or consensus which made the Constitution its political tool becomes clearer.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Amendment X

The people, furthermore, possess a body of rights by native endowment above and beyond those mentioned in the Constitution.

The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Amendment IX

These sovereign people shall be free to worship, speak, and publish freely.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Amendment I

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech. Amendment I

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press. Amendment I

Voluntary association is the corollary of individual liberty, and this is emphasized, as well as the right of petition.

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble. Amendment I

Congress shall make no law abridging . . . the right of the people . . . to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Amendment I

The old world divisions of mankind into castes and orders of rank are to be no more.

No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States. Article I, 9

Every citizen shall have a right to participate in the processes by which the nation is governed; and, should he desire to run for public office he shall not be put to a creedal test.

The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged. . . . Amendments’ XV and X1X

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. Article VI

Freedom to Trade; No Special Privilege

Commerce makes for a free and prosperous people, so restraints on trade shall be removed.

No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any State. . . . Article 1, 9

No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one State over those of another. Article I, 9

Progressive taxation violates the principle of equal treatment under the law—penalizes ability, and lowers productivity, so it is forbidden.

No capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census. . . . Article I, 9

The public treasury shall be inviolate; government shall not confer economic privilege on some at the expense of others.

No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law. Article I, 9

Personal privacy shall be respected and jealously guarded.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects . . . shall not be violated. Amendment IV

Conflict is a built-in feature of human action, and when collisions of interest do occur in society, the rights of the individual must be maintained.

No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Amendment V

Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. Amendment V

Strings on the Military

In some nations, the civilian life is a mere appendage to the military. This will not happen here because civilians control the purse strings.

No appropriation of money (to raise and support military and naval forces) shall be for a longer term than two years. Article 1, 8

As a further safeguard against any future militarization of this nation, the civilian sector must have the means for defending itself.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. Amendment II

In some countries, criminal proceedings are used to entrap citizens, whose guilt is assumed; the burden of proof is on them to show their innocence. Here, the innocence of the accused is assumed, until his guilt is proved. The law shall not reach backward to designate as criminal an action which until then was innocent.

No . . . ex post facto law shall be passed. Article I, 9

There shall be no Star Chamber proceedings.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury. Amendment V

Protecting the Accused

The accused is protected against illegal imprisonment, and must be informed of the charges against him.

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended. Article I, 9

Punishment shall fit the crime; it shall not mean extinction of civil rights, forfeiture of property, or penalties against kin.

No bill of attainder . . . shall be passed. Article 1, 9

The accused is entitled to be tried by his peers.

. . . the right of trial by jury shall be preserved. Amendment VII

There is to be no forced self-incrimination.

Nor shall [he] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. Amendment V

The rights of the accused are summarized:

1. . . . . a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury;

2. Within the district wherein the crime shall have been committed;

3. to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation;

4. to be confronted with the witnesses against him;

5. to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor;

6. and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense. Amendment VI

Even when found guilty, the accused is protected.

1. Excessive bail shall not be required;

2. Nor excessive fines imposed;

3. Nor creel and unusual punishments inflicted. Amendment VIII

Treason

Treason is a crime against the nation, so serious that it must be defined with special care.

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. Article III, 3

The person judged guilty of treason is personally responsible for his crime, and therefore his family and kin shall not be punished.

No attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood. Article III, 3

Impeachment is a special case.

The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments . . . and no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the members present.

Judgment . . . shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States. Article I, 3

A blind spot in the original Constitution is corrected.

Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime . . . Amendment XIII

No state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Amendment XIV

The separate states are not wholly sovereign.

No state shall enter into any treaty . . . coin money . . . pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts. Article I, 10

The Method of Freedom

There is a strong penchant in human nature which impels people who feel strongly about something—a good cause, say—to group their forces and use the power of government to fasten their panacea on those they’ve been unable to persuade. The Constitution is a prime example of the limitations placed upon governmental power so that people with a cause to advance must resort to education, persuasion, and example only. This is the method of freedom, and a people committed to the method of freedom find the Constitution still an apt instrument for structuring a society which maximizes freedom and opportunity for all persons. It was designed to establish a national government internally controlled by checks and balances between the separate powers. And government was to be further limited by the Federal structure itself, in which the centripetal power of Washington was to be offset by the centrifugal powers of the separate states.

The Constitution was not a perfect document, but it carried the means of its own correction, and it did embody the consensus of the people for whom freedom was the prime political good. It was workable. And it will work again whenever a significant number of people have the force of intellect to comprehend sound ideas, and the force of character to make them prevail.

Originally published in The Freeman. This article originally appeared in the April 1978 Freeman and was reprinted in September 1987 to mark the 200th anniversary of the completion of the writing of the U.S. Constitution.

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Constitutional Restraints on Power

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The real American revolution of two hundred years ago took place in the minds of people; it was a philosophical revolution which evolved a new temper and state of mind. There were some dating assumptions about the nature of the human person, with his Creator-endowed rights, as set forth in the catalog of self-evident truths contained in the Declaration of Independence. The acceptance of these novel truths about the human person led logically to a new conception of government, a theory of right political action radically different from all previous theories of the purposes of government in human affairs.

Government, according to the Declaration, is instituted for one purpose only—to secure every person in his God-given rights. Period. No longer was the State to exercise the positive function of ordering, regulating, controlling, directing, or dominating the citizens. The new idea was to limit government to a negative role in society; government’s task is to protect life, liberty, and property by using lawful force against aggressive and criminal actions. Government would discipline the anti-social, but otherwise let people alone. The law was to apply equally to all; justice was to he impartial and even-handed.

Along with the words Life, Liberty, and Property, the word Equality has a prominent place in the political vocabulary of American thought.

Our Declaration of Independence reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Note well that the men who prepared this document did not say that all men are equal; they did not say that all men are born equal or should be equal, or are becoming equal. These several propositions are obviously untrue. The Declaration said: “created equal.” Now, the created part of a man is his soul or mind or psyche. Man’s body is compounded of the same chemical and physical elements which go into the makeup of the earth’s crust, but there is a mental and spiritual essence in man which sets him apart from the natural order. Man alone among the creatures of earth is created in God’s image—meaning that man has free will, the capacity to order his own actions, and so become the kind of person God intends him to be.

The political theory enunciated in the Declaration is based upon certain assumptions about human nature and destiny which were ingredients of the religion professed by our fore-bears. It was an article of faith in the religious tradition of Christendom — a culture compounded of Hebraic, Greek, and Roman elements – that man is a created being. To say that man is a created being is to affirm that man is a work of divine art and not a mere accidental by-product of physical and chemical forces. Man is God’s property, said John Locke, because He made us and the product belongs to the producer. As an owner, God cares for that which belongs to Him. Therefore, the soul of each person is precious in God’s sight, whatever the person’s outward circumstances. “God is no respecter of persons.” (Acts 10:34) He “. . . makes His sun to rise on good and bad alike, and sends the rain on the honest and dishonest.” (Matt. 5:45) Equality before the law is the practical application of this understanding of the nature of the human person. Equal justice means that a nation’s laws apply, across the board, to all sorts and conditions of men, regardless of race, creed, color, position, pedigree, income, or whatever. In the eyes of the law, all are alike.

But right there the likeness ends; human beings are different and unequal in every other way; they are male and female, in the first place—and they are tall and short, thick and thin, weak and strong, rich as well as poor, and so on. They are equal in one respect only; they are on the same footing before the law. Equality before the law is the same thing as political liberty viewed from a different perspective; it is also justice—a regime under which no man and no order of men is granted a political license issued by the State to use other men as their tools or have any other legal advantage over them. Given such a framework in a society, the economic order will automatically be free market, or capitalistic. (We are speaking now of the idea of equality in a political context. Later I shall deal with the opposing concept of economic equality, which is incompatible with limited government and the free market.)

Political Equality

Political equality is the system of liberty, and its leading features are set forth in Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address: “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,—entangling alliances with none . . . freedom of religion, freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus” and so on.

The idea of political equality—equal justice before the law—is a relatively new one. It did not exist in the ancient world. Aristotle opened his famous work entitled Politics with an attempted justification of slavery, concluding his argument with these words: “It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right.”

Plato conceived the vision of a society constructed like a pyramid. A few men are at the top wielding unlimited power; then descending levels of power—the men on each level being bossed by those above and bossing, in turn, those below. On the bottom are the slaves, who outnumber all the rest of society. Plato knew that those in the lower ranks would be discontented with their subservient position, so he proposed a myth to condition them with—in his words—a “noble lie,” or an “opportune falsehood.” “While all of you in the city are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet God in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule mingled gold in their generation . . . but in the helpers silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen.” You know dam well that fraudulent theories of this sort are in vented by men who suspect gold in their own makeup!

Hinduism, with its system of castes, provides a contemporary example of a system of privilege. Men are born into a given caste, and that’s where they stay; that’s where their ancestors were, and that’s where their descend ents will be. There is no ladder leading from one level in this society to any of the others. Hinduism justifies these divisions between men by the doctrine of reincarnation, arguing that some are suffering now for misdemeanors committed during a previous existence, while others are being rewarded now for earlier virtue. This outlook breeds fatalism and social stagnation. The eminent Hindu philosopher and statesman, S. Radhakrishnan, defends the caste system with a metaphor. He likens society to a lamp and says, “When the wick is aglow at the tip the whole lamp is said to be burning.”

Politics—it must be emphasized—rests upon certain assumptions in basic philosophy. We of the West make different philosophical assumptions than do Greek and Hindu philosophers, for we have a different religious heritage than they. The fountain source of the religious heritage of Christendom is, of course, the Bible. The Bible was the textbook of liberty for our forebears, who loved to quote such texts as “Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,” (2 Cor. 3:17) and, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (Jn. 8:32) And they turned often to the Old Testament prophets with their emphasis on justice and individual worth.

Let me quote a few lines from an unsigned editorial appearing in the magazine Fortune some years ago:

The United States is not Christian in any formal sense, its churches are not full on Sundays and its citizens transgress the precepts freely. But it is Christian in the sense of absorption. The basic teachings of Christianity are in its bloodstream. The central doctrine of our political system—the inviolability of the individual—is the doctrine inherited from 1900 years of Christian insistence upon the immortality of the soul.

It takes a while, centuries sometimes, for a new idea about man to seep into the habits, laws, and institutions of a people and shape their culture. It was not until the eighteenth century that Adam Smith came along and spelled out a system of economics premised on the freely choosing man. Smith referred to his system as “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” The European society of Smith’s day was, by contrast, a system of privilege; it was an aristocratic order.

The Rise of Aristocracy

England’s aristocratic order did not rise by accident; it was imposed by a conqueror. England’s social structure may be traced back to the battle of Hastings in 1066 and the Norman invasion of England. William of Normandy had a claim, of sorts, to the British throne, a claim which he validated by conquering the island. Having established his overlordship of England he parceled out pieces of the island to his followers as payment for their services. In the words of historian Arthur Bryant, “William the Conqueror kept a fifth of the land for himself and gave one-quarter to the Church. The remainder, save for an insignificant fraction, was given to 170 Norman and French followers—nearly half to ten men.” [1] In other words, 55 per cent of the territory of England was divided among 170 men, ten of whom got the lion’s share, or 27 per cent among them, while 160

men got the rest. This redistribution of England’s territory was, of course, at the expense of the Anglo-Saxon residents who were displaced to make room for the new owners. The new owners of England from William on down were the rulers of England; ownership was the complement of their rulership, and the wealth they accumulated sprang from their power and their feudal privileges and dues.

Norman overlordship was a system of privilege. That is to say, the Norman rulers did not obtain their wealth by satisfying consumer demand. Under the system of liberty, by contrast, where the economic arrangements are free market or capitalistic, the only way to make money is to please the customers. Under the various systems of privilege you make money by pleasing the politicians, those who hold power. Either that, or you wield power yourself.

This was a fine system—from the Norman viewpoint; but the Anglo-Saxon reduced to serfdom viewed the matter quite differently. It was obvious to the serf and the peasant that the reason why they had so little land was because the Normans had so much and, because wealth flowed from holdings of land, the Anglo-Saxons reasoned correctly that they were poor because the Normans were rich! It is always so under a system of privilege, where those who wield the political power use that power to enrich themselves economically, at the expense of other people. It makes little difference whether the outward trappings of privilege are monarchical, or democratic, or bear the earmarks of 1984; in a system of privilege, political power is a means of obtaining economic advantage.

When our forebears wrote that “all men are created equal,” they threw down a challenge to all systems of privilege. They believed that the law should keep the peace—as peacekeeping is spelled out in the old-fashioned Whig-Classical Liberal tradition, as liberty and justice for all. This preserves a free field and no favor—which is the real meaning of laissez faire—within which peaceful economic competition will occur. The term laissez faire never meant the absence of rules; it doesn’t imply a free-for-all. Government, under laissez faire, does not intervene positively to manage the affairs of men; it merely acts to deter and redress injury—as injury is spelled out in the laws. This is the system of liberty championed by present-day exponents of the freedom philosophy—whether they call themselves Libertarians, or Conservatives, or Whigs, or whatever.

The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith’s “liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice” was never practiced fully in any nation, but what was the result of a partial application of the ideas of The Wealth of Nations? The results of abolishing political privilege in Europe and starting to organize a no-privilege society with political liberty and a market economy were so beneficial that even the enemies of liberty pause to pay tribute.

R. H. Tawney, one of the most gifted of the English Fabians, was an ardent socialist and egalitarian. His most famous work is Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, but in 1931 he wrote a book entitled Equality, arguing, in effect, that no one should have two cars as long as any man was unable to afford even one. He wished to take from those who have and give to those who have not, in order to achieve economic equality. But he acknowledged that there was an earlier idea of equality—equal treatment under the law. Here is what Tawney writes about the beneficial results of the movement toward political liberty and the free economy in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the movement known as Classical Liberalism:

Few principles have so splendid a record of humanitarian achievement . . . Slavery and serfdom had survived the exhortations of the Christian Church, the reforms of enlightened despots, and the protests of humanitarian philosophers from Seneca to Voltaire. Before the new spirit, and the practical exigencies of which it was the expression, they disappeared, except from dark backwaters, in three generations . . . . It turned [the peasant] from a beast of burden into a human being. It determined that, when science should be invoked to increase the output of the soil, its cultivator, not an absentee owner, should reap the fruits. The principle which released him he described as equality, the destruction of privilege. [2]

Smith’s “liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice”means the practice of political liberty. Now, when people are free politically and legally equal, there will still be economic inequalities. There will continue to be rich and poor, as there have been wealth differentials in every society since history began. But now there’s this difference: in the free economy the wealthy will be chosen by the daily balloting of their peers in the marketplace, and the wealthy won’t necessarily be the powerful, nor will the poor necessarily be the weak.

Variation is a fact of life; individuals differ one from another. Some are tall and some are short; some are swift and some are slow; some are bright and others are not so bright. The talents of some lie along musical lines, others are athletes, a few are mathematical wizards. Some people in every age are highly endowed with a knack for making money; whatever the circumstances, these people have more worldly goods than others.

Rich and poor are relative terms, but every society reveals a population distribution ranging from opulence to indigence. This occurs under monarchies, and it occurs in primitive tribes which measure a man’s wealth by cattle and wives; it occurs in communist states where, as Milovan Djilas pointed out in a famous book, a “new class” emerges out of the classless society, and the “new class” enjoys privileges denied the masses.

Under the system of liberty, the free market will reward men in differing degrees so that some men will make a great deal of money while others, such as teachers and preachers, have to get by on a very modest income. But under the system of liberty even those in lower income brackets enjoy a relatively high standard of living, and, furthermore, the practice of the Rule of Law guarantees that there’ll be no persecution for deviant intellectual and religious beliefs. The government does not try to manage the economy or control the lives of the citizens; it keeps out of people’s way—unless rights are violated.

Under conditions of political equality—which is the system of liberty, with the Rule of Law and the market economy—a man’s income depends upon his success at pleasing consumers, at which game some people are much more successful than others. A certain American entertainer earned millions of dollars last year by gyrating and howling in public places. He didn’t get any of my money, and except for the fact that I believe in liberty, I might have paid a substantial sum to keep him permanently tranquilized! On a somewhat higher level, there are talented people who are sensitive to consumer demand, and so they produce the kinds of goods or render the kinds of services that people will be able and willing to buy. They’ll make a bundle, in virtue of their ability to attract customers in free market competition.

Our own country’s past affords the best example of the enormous multiplication of wealth—broadly shared—which results from the release of human creativity under a system of liberty. But reintroduce a system of privilege, and dreams of prosperity fade.

Helping the Poor

The big domestic issue is poverty. Ever since New Deal days in the 1930s, governments have legislated various welfare schemes designed ostensibly to help “the poor,” spending trillions of dollars in these efforts. And the big issue is still poverty! it’s only the relative prosperity of the private sector, working against politically imposed obstructions, which has provided the funds to fuel the futile political programs touted as the remedy for economic distress. These are false remedies. The truth of the matter is that only economic action can produce the goods and services whose lack is indigence and destitution. Misguided political programs actually manufacture poverty by hampering productivity. Should we trust further government interventions to correct the very conditions government has caused by its earlier interventions?

Poverty may be measured in various ways, but whatever else it is, poverty means a lack of the things which sustain Fife at the basic level, or not enough of the things which make life pleasant and enjoyable. A genuinely poor person in the United States lives in a shabby room, dresses in hand-me-down clothing, and eats meals running heavily to starchy food, with little meat and fruit. A person who is this poor would be better off if he enjoyed a larger and finer house, had several extra suits, and ate tastier and more nourishing food. After improving the situation at the level of necessities he’d move ahead to the amenities: to recreation, a second car, air conditioning, and so on. The point to note is that people move away from poverty and toward prosperity only as they command more economic goods, more of the things which are manufactured, grown, transported, or otherwise produced.

Poverty is overcome by production, and in no other way. Therefore, if we are seriously concerned with the alleviation of poverty, our concern for increased production must be equally serious. This is simple logic. But look around us in this great land today and try to find anyone for whom increased productivity is a major goal. There are some able production men in industry, but many established businesses have learned to live comfortably with restrictive legislation, government contracts, the foreign aid program, and our international commitments. The competitive instinct burns low, and the entrepreneur who is willing to submit to the uncertainties of the market is a rare bird. And then there are the farmers. Agricultural production has taken a great leap forward in recent years, but no thanks to those farmers who latch onto the government’s farm program and accept payment for keeping land and equipment idle. Union leaders claim to work for the betterment of the membership, but no one has ever accused unions of a burning desire to be more productive on the job. Politicians are not interested in increased industrial or agricultural production, which is why government welfare programs manufacture poverty, and the economic well-being of the nation as a whole sinks below the level of prosperity a free market economy would achieve.

Confirmation of this point comes from a New York Times Magazine article by the celebrated economist, Thomas Sowell:

To be blunt, the poor are a gold mine. By the time they are studied, advised, experimented with and administered, the poor have helped many a middle class liberal to achieve affluence with government money. The total amount of money the government spends on its anti-poverty efforts is three times what would be required to lift every man, woman, and child in America above the poverty line by simply sending money to the poor.

An overall increase in the output of goods and services is the only way to upgrade the general welfare, but there is no clamor on behalf of increased productivity. The clamor is for redistribution, for political interventions which exact tribute from the haves and bestow largesse on the have-nots. Present-day politics is based on the redistributionist principle: taxes for all, subsidies for the few.

I’m arguing on behalf of a philosophy of government which understands the primary function of the Law as the defense of the life, liberty, and property of all persons alike. Such a political establishment leads to the kind of society in which bread and butter issues are handled by the market. So now, a few words about the nature of the market.

The market is not a magic instrumentality which comes up automatically with the fight answer for every sort of question. The market is a sort of popularity contest; the market tells us what people like well enough to buy; it’s an index of their preferences. Thus, the market provides a very valuable piece of information, but it’s far from the whole story. It’s important for a manufacturer to project an accurate guess as to where the hemline will be next season, or what people will look for when the new car models are unveiled. But a similar fingering of the popular pulse is an abomination in the intellectual and moral realms—unless one is a liberal intellectual! I refer to the proclivity of the current crop of liberal opinion molders to ask: “What’s going to be the fashion in ideas next season?” One glaring example of this—a former professor of mine was a leading clerical spokesman for involving the United States in World War II; but when the climate of opinion changed he became a co- chairman of SANE. This man has a good market in the intellectual realm, but of course he opposes the market in the economic realm!

The market is not some entity; the market is only a word describing people freely ex-changing goods and services in the absence of force and fraud. The market is the only device available for serving our creaturely needs while conserving scarce resources. But the market is no gauge of the validity of ideas. The market measures the popularity of an idea or a book or a system of thought, but not its truth or worth. Mises and Hayek are, for my money, far better thinkers and economists than Samuelson and Galbraith; but the market for the services of the latter pair is enormously greater than the popular demand for Mises and Hayek. Likewise in aesthetic questions. An entertainer’s popularity is no index of his musicianship, and a best-selling novel may fall far short of the category of literature.

The Market as Mirror

The market is simply a mirror of popular preferences and public taste; but if we don’t like what the mirror reveals we won’t improve the situation by throwing rocks at the glass! There is a great deal more to life than pleasing the customer, but if the integrity of the market is not respected, consumer choice is impaired and some people are given a license to foist their values on others. Permit this kind of poison to infect economic relationships and our ability to resist it elsewhere is seriously weakened.

We are throwing rocks at the mirror whenever we undertake programs of social leveling, aimed at economic equality. The government promises to aid the poor by redistributing the wealth. This, of course, is a power play, and it is the poor—generally the weakest members of a society—who are hurt first and most in any power struggle. Furthermore—and this is an important point—economic inequalities cannot be overcome by coercive redistribution without increasing political inequalities. Every form of political redistribution widens power differentials in society; officeholders have more power, citizens have less; political contests become more intense, because the control and dispersal of great amounts of wealth are at stake.

Every alternative to the market economy—call it socialism or communism or fascism or whatever—concentrates power over the life and livelihood of the many into the hands of the few who constitute the State. The principle of equality before the law is discarded—the Rule of Law is incompatible with any form of the planned economy—and, as in the George Orwell satire, some people become more equal than others. We head back toward the Old Regime—the system of privilege.

Those who have assumed Or seized power to take from the “haves” and give to the “have-nots” will eventually realize that they are operating a dumb racket. The “have-nots” who may be on the receiving end at the beginning are generally not society’s best and brightest, not the kind of people the power brokers like to hobnob with. The politically powerful who operate the transfer system will—when the light dawns—continue to plunder the “haves” but will then divvy up their take between themselves and the beautiful people who possess enough sensibility to realize the rightness of running a society for the benefit of such as they! The poor are squeezed out; they are worse off than before. And the nation is saddled with the “democratic despotism” predicted by Alexis de Tocqueville as far back as 1835.

Those of you who are fans of Lewis Carroll will remember his poem, “The Hunting of the Snark.” Hunters pursued this strange beast, but every time they thought they had their quarry the snark turned out to be a quite different beast—a boojum! Every time a determined group of people have concentrated power in a central government to carry out their program, the power they have set up gets out of hand. The classic example of this is the French Revolution, which turned and devoured those who had started it. It is not so much that power corrupts, as that power obeys its own laws. Our forebears in the old-fashioned Whig-Classical Liberal tradition were aware of this, so they sought to disperse and contain power. They chose liberty. They chose liberty in full awareness that in a free society the natural differences among human beings would show up in various ways; some would be economically better off than others. But in a free society there would be no political inequality; everyone would be equal before the law.

The alternative to the free economy is a servile state, where a ruling class enforces an equality of poverty on the masses, and lives at the expense of the producers. To embark on a program of economic leveling, then, is like trying to repeal the law of gravity; it’ll never work, and the energy we waste trying to make it work defeats our efforts to attain the reasonable goals which are within our capacity to achieve.

- – - – - – - – - –

1.   Story of England, Arthur Bryant, Vol. I. p. 164.

2.   Equality, R. H. Tawney, pp. 120-121.

Originally published in The Freeman, April 1988.

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Equal But Not the Same

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Is there anything in the basic makeup of the men and women we know, or those we read about in the press, or encounter in the pages of history texts, which encourages us to believe that the free society we strive for is a realistic possibility?

Edward Gibbon, the great historian of Rome’s decline and fall, offered, as his considered judgment, the opinion that “History is little more than a register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” The bleakness of this assessment is redeemed somewhat by the inclusion of the words “little more.” Human nature does have its dark underside which pulls us down below the norm and produces the crimes, follies, and misfortunes recorded by historians.

But there is more to our story than this; there is also a record of the geniuses in every field—including heroes and saints—who demonstrate the realized potential of our common humanity. And then there are the multitudes who are just plain, ordinary, decent, hardworking folks, uplifted on occasion by the magnetism of those who rise above the average, and sometimes seized by a madness of sorts when the criminal and depraved acquire a kind of glamour.

Every society takes on its unique characteristics from the people who compose it; we are the basic ingredients of our society. The human story is a checkered affair; some ups, many downs. Does a realistic appraisal of our history on this planet provide any warrant for believing that we human beings are capable of approximating a truly free society with its market economy?

I propose to deal with four features of human nature and conduct which give me confidence that in the constitution of ordinary men and women are the characteristics which incline them to strive for a freer life with their fellows. I shall list these four points and then discuss them.

1. There is a strong instinct in all men and women to be free to pursue their personal goals.

2. There is a universal need in each of us to call something our very own; an instinct for property.

3. There is an upward thrust in human nature to live a life that is not simply more comfortable, but better in a moral sense. We really believe in fair play; we respond to the ideals of justice.

4. The market is everywhere; people in every part of the globe have sought to better their economic circumstances by barter and trade. The market is universal; but only occasionally does the market become institutionalized as the market economy.

First Point—Freedom

Every person has a deeply rooted urge to be free to pursue his chosen goals; it is impossible to imagine a person, who is determined to accomplish a certain task, inviting people to hinder or prevent him from getting his job done. Even a dictator as vicious as Stalin, one of whose aims was to extinguish personal freedom in a great nation, demanded complete freedom to pursue his evil goals. Anyone who tried to hinder him was shortly referred to in the past tense.

But despite the universal urge for full personal liberty, most people who have ever lived have been slaves, serfs, bondsmen, thralls, helots, Sudras, retainers, lackeys, vassals, liege men, and the like. Despite the fact that every person wants to be free to live on his own terms, most of the earth’s people have lived wholly or in part on terms laid down by someone else. There are more of them today than ever before. A powerful instinct for individual liberty animates virtually every man and woman, but this universal urge to be free has been fully institutionalized only once in history—in the theory and practice of old-fashioned Whiggery and Classical Liberalism, rising and falling during the period, approximately from the American Revolution to the early twentieth century.

Second Point—Property

The sense of personal identity is aroused in us early in infancy; it suddenly dawns on each of us that “I am me!” The seeds of our lifelong personal uniqueness are planted early. As soon as we learn to think “me” we begin to think its inevitable corollary, “mine.” Every child, early on, comes to regard certain toys as his own. Each of us grows into a property relationship with things in his environment long before he evolves a theory of property, that is, a theory of the correct relationship between ourselves and the things that belong to us. Your property is an extension of your self; no one can live his life to the full unless he owns the things on which his life depends, things which he may use and dispose of in any peaceful way he chooses. Justice demands that every person have a right to acquire property, for every person’s sense of self is powerfully linked to the things he owns.

Because property is right, theft is wrong. The belief that property is fight is so nearly universal that even thieves believe it. The pickpocket who steals your wallet does not intend his action as a symbolic gesture against the idea of private property; he may be a crook, but he’s no socialist! Every crook believes in the sanctity of private property—he doesn’t want people stealing from him! His attitude toward other folks’ property is, shall we say, somewhat liberated. And there’s the rub. “Me” and “mine” is a natural instinct; it’s the “thee” and “thine” that needs to be fortified by moral values, by manners, and by the law. Gradually, as we mature into moral beings, reciprocity—the idea of “do as you would be done by”-generates the belief that mutual respect for individual property rights is the cornerstone of the free society.

Since the dawn of history, getting hold of other people’s property by war, plunder, piracy, pillage, and looting has been a way of life for a large segment of mankind. “Robbery is perhaps the oldest of labor saving devices,” wrote Lewis Mumford fifty years ago, “and war vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.” And Ludwig von Mises points out that “All ownership derives from occupation and violence.” (Socialism, p. 32. See also Human Action, p. 679.) English civilization emerged in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest; most modern nations have followed a similar pattern, including our own. A people or a tribe acquires its territory by successfully doing battle. It is only the slow progress of civilization and the development of the idea of The Rule of Law that generates the belief that every person’s property should be regarded as inviolate by every other person.

A corollary of this is the belief that the primary task of a just legal system is to secure every person’s right to that which is his own. We do this by stressing the sanctity of private property and, when moral deterrents to theft are not enough, we seek to discourage thievery by invoking a swift and sure justice designed to increase the risks of robbery and diminish any conceivable benefits.

Third Point—Justice

The practice of pillage is ancient, but so is mankind’s concern for justice. Some fifteen hundred years before Christ, a legislator of ancient Israel wrote: “You shall not pervert justice, either by favoring the poor or by subservience to the great. You shall judge your fellow countrymen with strict justice” (Lev. 19:15). Pericles, the Athenian statesman of the fifth century B.C., said in his great funeral oration, “If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences.” And Cicero, one of the last of the old Romans, in the century before our era: “Of all these things respecting which learned men dispute there is none more important than clearly to understand that we are born for justice, and that right is founded not in opinion but in nature.”

Long before some unknown genius framed a theory of justice, men and women knew when they had been wronged, betrayed, let down, dealt with unfairly. The capacity to make moral judgments is built into human nature itself; and human nature is constituted as it is because our nature is derived from the ways things are in the universe.

We are “in play” with the universe as we try to keep in time with its music. We have, for example, categories of round and square because these shapes and others are found in the nature existing outside us. The concepts of long and short would be meaningless to us were length not one characteristic of the way-things-are. We have a sense of beauty because we have seen lovely things and listened to melodious sounds. And by the same token, the distinction that mankind universally makes between right and wrong or good and evil presupposes a moral dimension in this universe from which our personal categories derive.

As far back as we can trace man’s story we find him drawing ethical distinctions, employing the categories of right and wrong. Jeane Kirkpatrick speaks of “. . . the irreducible human concern with morality.” Obviously, we would not expect universal agreement as to which actions should be classified as right and which wrong; but the classification would stand—nearly everyone has agreed that some things are right and others are wrong. It is a long trail that leads from these primitive beginnings to the insights of the moral geniuses of the race—the Hebrew Prophets, Jesus, Confucius, St. Francis—and to the refinements of moral theory of the great philosophers of ethics—Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Aquinas, Spinoza, Adam Smith, to name a few.

At this point some timid folk may fear that we are treading on dangerous ground here. Start with the philosophical distinction between right and wrong, they point out, and the next step is to divide people into the multitudes who are wrong, and the few of us who are right. A third step seems to follow: We who are right are commissioned to correct the evil ways of the rest of you. Hence, crusaders against the infidel, suppression, prohibitions, and the like. A spoilsport like Carrie Nation goes around with her hatchet busting up saloons! Innocent pleasures and festive occasions come under attack. Reaction against such real or imagined sequences of events contributes to the widespread ethical relativism of our time. Right and wrong, we now hear it said, is a matter of taste, a matter of feeling; everyone is entitled to decide for himself what is right or wrong for him. In today’s vernacular, we are told: “Do your own thing.”

But when you discard ethical yardsticks, the weak doing their thing are at the mercy of the strong doing theirs, as the twentieth century attests. Ours is the age of ethical relativism and nihilism, and it’s no coincidence that “we live in an age unique for the unrestrained use of brute force in international relations.” The words are those of Pitirim Sorokin, from his four-volume study of war during the past 2,500 years. The most widespread, potent, evangelizing religion of our time is communism, and communist theory has no place for the traditional ethical yardsticks; in Marxist theory, right and wrong are whatever the party commands. In consequence, communist policy during the first seventy years after the Russian Revolution has exacted a toll of more than a hundred million lives, and what it has not destroyed it has damaged.

These horrors do not faze the liberals who, when their attention is called to the facts, like to refer to Lenin’s remark that you cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Human life is cheap in the twentieth century.

You can burn down the ham and get rid of the rats, and you can discard the idea of a moral order and get rid of the reformers. But at what price! If there are no ethical standards, moral relativism holds sway, right gives way to might, and disaster overtakes us in the ways made familiar in this century.

Traditional ethical theory maintains that right is right and wrong is wrong. Why? Because the universe has a built-in moral dimension, a moral law, often identified with God’s will. In any event, this moral law is anchored in something deeper and more fundamental than private feelings, majority opinion, party dictates, or the will of some despot. The moral law is an important facet of the nature of things, and it is binding on all men and women.

Every one of us is fallible; no one can be certain that he has correctly read some deliverance of the moral law. So we shouldn’t be surprised when some would-be reformer comes out of the woodwork and annoys us with his eccentric interpretations of the moral law. He may earnestly desire to do good, but he goes about it in the wrong way. But such a person is harmless, unless he comes to power. Moreover, if we solicit the counsel of the most ethically advanced men and women we find that they are unanimous in telling us that the right and the good can be advanced in three ways only: by reason, by persuasion, and above all by example.

Fourth Point—Economic Action

It is a fact of the human situation—regardless of the nature of the social order—that man does not find, ready-made in his natural environment, the wherewithal to feed, house, and clothe himself. There are only raw materials in nature, and most of these are not capable of satisfying human needs until someone works them over and transforms them into consumable goods.

Man has to work in order to survive. He learns to cooperate with nature, making use of natural forces to serve his ends. Work is built into the human situation; the things by which we live do not come into existence unless someone grows them, manufactures them, builds them, and moves them from place to place.

Work is irksome and things are scarce, so people must learn to economize and avoid waste. They invent labor-saving devices, they manufacture tools, they specialize and exchange the fruits of their specialization. They learn to get along with each other, our natural sociability reinforced by the discovery that the division of labor benefits all. Division of labor and voluntary exchange constitute the marketplace, which is the greatest labor-saving device of all.

“This division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived,” wrote Adam Smith, “is not originally the effect of any human wisdom which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature . . . the propensity to track, barter, and exchange one thing for another. . . . It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.”

It is natural for us human beings, as we seek to improve our circumstances, to bargain, swap, barter, and trade. This is the market in action: men and women trading goods and services in a noncoercive situation. The benefits of such activity are mutual and obvious, which is why the market is everywhere. The market has always existed, and it’s in operation today all over the world. Virtually no tribes are so primitive, and no collectivism so totalitarian as to prevent people from engaging in voluntary exchanges for mutual advantage. But only rarely has the market ever got itself institutionalized as the market economy—the thing called capitalism.

What does it mean to say that something has been institutionalized? When practices which heretofore have been informal and sporadic become formalized, regular, habitual, and customary they are said to be institutionalized. As institutions they operate by an established rule or principle; they draw support from the moral code and are buttressed by appropriate laws.

For example, education is institutionalized as the school; religion is institutionalized as the church. And the market—individuals trading, bartering, and swapping—is institutionalized as the market economy, or capitalism. This occurs when free-market practices are allied with appropriate moral, cultural, legal, and political structures. Has this ever happened? Yes, but probably only once, and in a few countries only, when free-market practices coalesced with the Whig social order in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was the social order Adam Smith referred to as his “liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.”

I have briefly set forth four convictions of mine—which I would put into the category of self- evident truths. First, every person has an unquenchable urge to be free to pursue his personal goals—but seldom translates this into the idea of “equal freedom.” Second, every person has an instinct for private property—every “me” requires a “mine.” Third, every person has moral sense; he knows when he has been dealt with unfairly or treated unjustly. When we become mature persons we strive for equity; we try to treat others as we would like to be treated. In the fourth place, it is a fact of common observation that people of every culture, and at every level from the most primitive to the most civilized, engage in trade and barter; the market is ubiquitous.

A Fifth Point—Political Plunder

And now for the bad news: Whenever a society moves above the level of desperate poverty, and has generated even a modicum of prosperity, some citizens set up institutions which enable them to live on the fruits of others’ toil. The law, established to achieve justice between person and person, is perverted into an instrument of plunder. This is the central message of Frederic Bastiat’s The Law.

Citizens of our own nation have gone far in this direction. A recent news item reports that 66 million Americans receive 129 million checks each month from the Department of Health and Human Services. Tens of millions of additional Americans derive their incomes in part or in full from money taxed from productive working people. These 80 or 90 million people constitute what Leonard Read used to call a plunderbund.

We are now a nation where almost everyone is trying to live at the expense of everyone else. We have written a form of theft into our statutes. Why? Because there’s a little bit of larceny in our souls! Large chunks of the American electorate have discovered that living off government handouts is easier than working for a living and safer than stealing, so they create political parties in their own image; and they elect politicians who promise them an inside track to the public treasury.

Present-day Americans are not unique in this respect. The legal transfer of wealth from producers to beneficiaries goes on today in every nation, and something like this has occurred in virtually every society since the dawn of time.

The Roots of Plunder

How did this politico-economic pattern originate? The most plausible answer is that the system of plunder was installed in the aftermath of a conquest. A hardy band of warriors swoops down from the hills and overcomes the people of the plain. The victors enslave the vanquished, setting themselves up as a governing body over a permanent underclass. Time passes, intermarriage occurs, and gradually the former warriors go soft and a hardier tribe overcomes them, and history repeats itself.

Apart from whatever excitement some men feel in battle, and the gratification that some people get from being the boss and giving orders, there is an economic motive behind the conquest and the subsequent system of rule. There is a natural drive in human beings to live better while working less; or, better yet, to live well without working at all.

Now, no one can get something for nothing unless he wields political power or is a friend of those in power. If you have such power you don’t have to go into the marketplace and try to woo customers; you take what you want. This is not considered theft because the legal system has been set up to facilitate this transfer of property from those who produced it to those in power.

Such is the political pattern exhibited by most nations known to history. This pattern can be viewed as an effort to answer three questions:

1. Who shall wield power?

2. For whose benefit shall this power be wielded?

3. At whose expense shall this power be wielded?

What we are describing here is the well-nigh universal arrangement by which nations have been governed over the centuries by kings, presidents, and potentates; by emperors and mikados; by shahs, czars, maharajas, and pooh-bahs of all kinds. Their institution is usually called “government.” The word “govern” is derived from the Latin Guber-nare, to steer. So when a group of people is elevated above the generality of citizens — as a result of conquest, usually — to ride herd on them, rule them, regulate them, control them, and exact tribute from them, they are “governing.”

This was the modus operandi in the governance of nations, everywhere, and in every century. Then came the Whig breakthrough in the eighteenth century. It was the polar opposite of “rule” in the old sense; it was a new vision of a society which aspired to achieve liberty and justice for all. It was the novel idea of a government that did not “govern,” but sought instead to protect the life, liberty, and property of all persons alike. The keynote of Whiggery was the ideal of equality before the bar of justice: The Rule of Law.

It is an idea familiar to everyone that the same instrument may he put to radically different uses. The knife you use to slice the roast may be used to kill someone. The hand that now caresses may, next hour, deal someone a mortal blow. And the law, as Bastiat points out, may serve justice, or it may violate justice when it is employed as an instrument of plunder.

The law serves justice when it acts to restore the peace, broken when someone’s rights were violated. But the law may misuse the power entrusted to it by itself violating someone’s rights, for its own ends or to further the purposes of a third party.

The Whigs used the word “government” but gave it a radically new meaning; from now on its role was to be limited to the actions required to maintain justice between person and person. Government was no longer to intervene positively in people’s lives to rule them, regulate them, or interfere with the peaceful actions of anyone.

Confusion is sown when two radically different functions are tagged with the same label; the agency designed to serve the ends of justice by securing each person’s rights to life, liberty, and property may rightfully be called “government.” But the institution set up to impair people’s rights to the life, liberty, and property ought to bear some other name. Albert Jay Nock suggested that the law, when perverted into an instrument of plunder, be called The State. The functional distinction between the two institutions—government and state—is clear.

It is in the nature of government, we might say, to use lawful force against aggressors for the protection of peaceful people. Government does not initiate action; government is triggered into “re-action” by earlier criminal conduct which causes personal injury to innocent people or otherwise disrupts the peace of the community. The state, on the other hand, initiates action. The state initiates legalized violence against peaceful people in order to advantage some people at the expense of others, or to further some grandiose national plan, or to promote some impossible dream. To paste the same label on two such radically different actions is to promote misunderstanding.

The problem is ancient, as witness the testimony of St. Augustine, dating back to the fifth century A.D.:

Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robber bands? For what are robber bands themselves, but little kingdoms. The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince; it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues people, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom.

The Whig Idea

The Whigs got the point. Whiggery was the eighteenth-century creed of such men as Edmund Burke and Adam Smith; on these shores it was embraced by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Whiggism became Liberalism after 1832, and this noble creed projected a pattern for the lawful ordering of a society which was radically different from every political pattern known to history prior to the eighteenth century. Since the eighteenth century many nations have gone from monarchy to republicanism to democracy to socialism, but this is merely to rearrange the furniture while the political plundering continues much as before.

Whiggism is a difficult philosophy to grasp, for old ways of thinking stand in the way—and so does the ingrained reluctance of many to give up the ages-old political racket which operates whenever the law is perverted into an instrument of plunder.

Jefferson and his friends had a solid grasp of the old Whig idea when they wrote that “all men are created equal,” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that governments have no other reason for being than to secure people in their God-given rights.

The Whig idea filtered down into the popular mentality and came out as a piece of folk wisdom wrongly attributed to Jefferson: “That government governs best which governs least.” Close, but no cigar. Thoreau did better with his play on words: “That government governs best which ‘governs’ not at all,” perhaps having in mind Aesop’s fable about King Log versus King Stork.

The Whig idea, the American idea as voiced in the Declaration of Independence, viewed “government” as an instrument of justice, set up to interpret—and enforce when necessary—the previously agreed upon rules without which a free society cannot function. “Government,” then, would be analogous to the umpire in the game of baseball. The umpire does not direct the game, nor does he side with either team; the umpire acts as an impartial arbiter who decides whether it’s a strike or a ball, whether or not the runner is safe at first, and so on. In the nature of the case these decisions cannot be made by the players or by the fans; the game of baseball needs an independent functionary who sees to it that the game is played within the rules. Every society, likewise, needs a nonpartisan agency to act when there is a violation of the rules on which that society’s very existence depends.

The uniquely Whig and American political breakthrough was the conception of a government that did not “govern,” an umpire government limited to insuring that the rules upon which a society of free people is premised are maintained—and with the authority to penalize anyone who violates those rules.

We have moved a long distance away from a truly free society; and we’re even further from the theory or philosophy which gave rise to the free society. The restoration of that philosophy begins with a candid exploration of the issues.

However, no clarification of the issues is sufficient by itself to rehabilitate the old ideals of freedom and justice. The next step must be adequate educational attention to the matters in question; and from there on we rely on informed moral choice.

Originally published in The Freeman, October 1987.

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Human Nature and the Free Society

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Adam Smith’s monumental achievement was to enlarge the individual person’s freedom of action in economic affairs, and thus in other sectors of his life as well. Smith’s argument had several minor loopholes, but these were plugged by the Austrian School—Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk about a century after The Wealth of Nations. Today, it is fair to say that Ludwig von Mises and his students have created a genuine science of economics—a systematic exposition of the free market economy-which, as an intellectual structure, is virtually impregnable. Misesian economic science is, so to speak, The Answer. It’s the recipe for anyone who wants to know how a society must organize its workplace activities so as to maximize economic well-being for all.

The Question is: How may we achieve the free and prosperous commonwealth? To which The Answer is: Install the free market economy, as taught by Austrian—and some other—economists.

Trouble is, almost no one is asking The Question!

Economic science does not tell John Doe how to make a million dollars on Wall Street, or a killing in real estate, or how to protect his assets. Entrepreneurship is an art, not a science; profitable investing likewise. Economic science, like every other science, deals with abstract principles and general rules. Economic science sets forth the general rules which members of a particular society must apply in practice if the society is to enjoy maximum productivity and raise the general level of economic well-being. Economic science is a scholarly endeavor which shows what must be done to maximize the wealth of nations.

Economic science has The Answer for anyone who asks how a society may advance from poverty toward affluence. But economic science has no answer for those who ask: How can I make a fast and easy buck?

This is the wrong question, so far as economic science is concerned. How can people be persuaded to ask the right question? The question people should ask might be phrased as follows: How can we create the social institutions which provide maximum opportunity for all of us to be more prosperous? Only a sense of moral obligation will generate such a question.

The ordinary, decent, law-abiding citizen in his private dealings with his fellows would not use force or fraud to gain advantage over another. But when force and/or fraud are legalized millions do seek some advantage for themselves at the expense of their fellows. When the State allocates resources and redistributes the wealth, it is using its power to deprive producers of what belongs to them, in order to dispense it to those who have not earned it. Everyone is forced to pay tribute for the benefit of the wield-crs of power and their friends. Concerned with their own immediate well-being and looking to the State for handouts, tens of millions of Americans have no interest in working toward an economic order which would assure a rising level of prosperity for everyone—the free market economy.

Austrian economics is The Answer, all right, but it is the answer to a question which only a few are asking. The reason: only a few have an ethical incentive to ask it. Millions are searching for ways to increase their salaries, double their incomes, and enjoy the good life. Only a handful, by comparison, are working with any intensity to advance the free society-market economy way of life.

Economic Fallacies

We have it on the authority of Henry Hazlitt that “Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man.” Who can deny it? Any reasonably bright high school student can read Economics in One Lesson. Haw ing read the book, he can spot the fallacies in many textbooks of economics, in the speeches of public figures, in the commentaries of television and radio pundits, in sermons and academic lectures, in almost any place he cares to look.

The discipline of economics is not mired in simple ignorance; it is stalled by willful ignorance. Economic fallacies abound because every economic fallacy in practice gives someone an economic or other advantage over someone else. Pocketbook motivations keep economic fallacies alive; slay them in one generation and they return from the dead in the next.

Virtually every economic fallacy that plagues us today has been demolished time and again over the past couple of centuries; but has this work of demolition diminished the number and power of economic fallacies? Hardly; they appear about as numerous and virulent as ever. There are few new economic truths, but new errors proliferate wildly. Demolishing fallacies and exposing errors may be exhilarating for a time, but it is negative work; it is to toil on a treadmill. The positive maths of a market economy—together with its supporting institutions and ideas—are reached only by taking a different route.

The celebrated classicist, Gilbert Murray, offers some wise words on truth and error: “The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand; and the mind that desires such things—that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.”

There will always be a need to expose economic error and demolish fallacies, but something more is needed if we wish to advance in the direction of a truly free society; and that something more is the sense of moral obligation which motivates persons to pursue the goals they perceive to be ethically right and good. Economics needs ethics.

Mises points out that economics “is a science of means, not of ends,” and that science, furthermore, is value- free. A science describes; but does not prescribe. “Science,” Mises goes on to say, “never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends . . . . Praxeology and economics do not say that men should peacefully cooperate within the frame of societal bonds; they merely say that men must act this way if they want to make their actions more successful than otherwise.” Moral obligation, a sense of “oughtness,” is not within the purview of science; the sciences, basically, operate in a sector of the universe that is ethically neutral. By the same token, there are no grounds in economic science per se for telling anyone that he ought to do this when he prefers to do that.

Although every science is value-free, the universe is not value-free! We live in a rationally and ethically structured universe where some things are morally right and other things are morally wrong; there is genuine good, as well as real evil. Moral obligation, besides being a reality that presses on the sensitive conscience, is a potent incentive to strive to translate the reasoned maths of economic science into a go_ ing concern economy.

Economics is the science of human action, and the actions of human beings are intimately implicated with ethical standards and moral obligation. In other words, economic science does not stand alone; it is a “means,” and as a means economics needs to be hooked up with disciplines that deal with ends.

What we have here is an IF—THEN situation. The economist cannot tell us that we ought to prefer a free and prosperous commonwealth; but IF that is what we want, THEN economic science can demonstrate that the market economy is the only means to achieve that end. Economic science can only explain; the economic argument must therefore be joined to an ethical imperative which commands.

Strengthening the Case

Economic reasoning can demonstrate that the free market system is the most efficient way to produce goods and services, rewarding every participant according to his contribution to the productive process—as that contribution is judged by his peers. But the economic case for freedom is strengthened immeasurably when it is bolstered by moral reasoning which demonstrates that the market economy is the only economic order which embodies the ideas of liberty and justice for all. Capitalism is the only economic system that does not reward some at the expense of others.

The interventionist state provides cushy jobs for many a predator and parasite, people whose services would not be needed in a truly free economy. Many of these people, once they become dependent on consumer choice, might, to begin with, be worse off economically than before. The pocketbook argument will not persuade them, but the moral argument might.

Originally published in The Freeman, April 1989.

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The church plays an important role in human life.

It was once the unwritten rule in polite society that two topics have no place in civilized conversation; religion and politics. It was ill-bred to discuss religion; it was gauche to talk politics. But times have changed. We live in a different and more open age. Now we discuss religion for political reasons, and we talk politics for religious reasons! The Bishops issue a Letter; the highest dignitaries of the various denominations pronounce on matters of government and business. The people behind these proclamations represent only a tiny minority of the total church membership, but they presume to speak for everyone. What they say is, in effect, the Socialist Party platform in ecclesiastical drag.

These ecclesiastical documents focus on an economic malaise, poverty; the poverty of the masses, especially the masses of the Third World. Churchmen profess to know the cause of this poverty. Third World poverty is caused by the wealth of the capitalistic nations; they are poor because we, in becoming wealthy, have pauperized them. Likewise, within our own nation the wealth of those who are better off is gained at the expense of those who are made worse off in the process. These are the typical allegations: the rich get richer by making the poor poorer.

Ecclesiastical myopia views the market economy—or capitalism—as an evil system which, by its very nature impoverishes the many as the means by which the few are enriched. The suggested cure for these differentials in wealth is to use government’s power to tax to exact tribute from the rich, and then distribute the proceeds to the poor—minus the cost to the nation of these wealth transfers. Robin Hood robs the rich to pay the poor, but Robin takes his cut!

It is as if these churchmen had swallowed the current secular agenda to which they have merely added oil and unction; as if social reform were the end, religion the mere means; as if religion has little more to offer modern men and women beyond what they can get from contemporary liberalism or socialism. The church has a more important role to play in human life, as I shall suggest in the course of this article.

One of my favorite modern theologians is the late William Ralph Inge. Inge was the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the scholar’s pulpit of the Church of England. Dean Inge wrote some notable books in theology, philosophy, and social theory, but he was also a newspaper columnist during the 1920s where his hard-nosed comments on the passing scene earned him the nickname, “the gloomy Dean.”

Christian Socialism was strong within the church of England, with some churchmen going so far as to declare that for a Christian not to be a socialist was to be guilty of heresy. A popular slogan was “Christianity is the religion of which Socialism is the practice.” Dean Inge would have none of this, so he waged a perpetual war of words against the socialists, especially against socialists of the Christian variety. “I do not like to see the clergy,” he wrote, “who were monarchists under a strong monarchy, and oligarchs under the oligarchy, tumbling over each other in their eagerness to become court chaplains to King Demos. The black coated advocates of spoliation are not a nice lot!”

It was not that Dean Inge was a defender of the status quo; far from it. Inge was a severe critic of many features of the modern western world. He argued that socialism is little more than a logical extension of many of the worst features of the modern temper, derived from the French Revolution, with its inveterate faith that man is a good animal by nature, but corrupted by his institutions; “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains,” as Rousseau put it. This being the case, said the socialists, all we have to do is change our institutions in order to produce an improved society out of unimproved men and women.

Dean Inge foresaw a tendency within this mind-set toward “a reversion to a political and external religion, the very thing against which the Gospel waged relentless war.” It is not that Christianity regards social progress as unimportant, Inge goes on to say; it is a question of how genuine improvement may occur. “The true answer,” he wrote, “though it is not a very popular one, is that the advance of civilization is in truth a sort of by-product of Christianity, not its chief aim; but we can appeal to history to support us that [the advance of civilization] is most stable and genuine when it is the by-product of a lofty and unworldly idealism.”

The Pull of Public Opinion

Churchmen in every age are tempted to adopt the protective coloration of their time; like all intellectuals, churchmen are verbalists and wordsmiths; they are powerfully swayed by the printed page, by catch words, slick phrases, slogans, and bumper stickers. In consequence, they are pulled first this way then that by whatever currents of public opinion happen at the moment to exert the greatest power over their emotions and imagination. Today, it is the powerful gravitational pull of “environmentalism.”

I’m using the word environmentalism as a label for the belief that the human species is nothing but what external conditions have made us, that we are the victims of circumstances, that our lives are determined by forces we can barely understand, let alone control. Random chemical and physical interactions produced mankind in the first place. Then this raw material—mankind as it comes from nature—is shaped into various forms by the particular society in which we find ourselves. The social class to which we belong determines, finally, what we are and how we view the world and ourselves. Environmentalism exerts a powerful attraction today over intellectuals of all creeds. It is the ideology of Marxists and non-Marxists alike that men and women are the mere end products of nature and society—responsible men and women no longer—and that social engineering can construct a perfect society out of defective human units. Environmentalism has the cart before the horse; it is dehumanizing.

If there is disorder in our society it follows that there is disorder within our very selves, in our faulty thinking and erroneous beliefs, in our misplaced loyalties and misguided affections. Disharmony in our personal lives will result in conflict and frictions in society. This is why serious religion has traditionally focused on the inward and the spiritual, on the mind and conscience of individual persons, to make them responsible individuals. The premise is that only right beliefs rightly held can produce right action. The good society emerges only if there is a significant number of people of intellect and character; and the elevation of character is the perennial concern of genuine religion, in league with education and art.

But the modern world views the matter differently. The modern world assumes that the human species is the mere end product of external forces; a product, first of all, of physics and chemistry—our natural environment; and a product, secondly, of the particular society in which an individual happens to live. The basic assumption is that man’s character is made for him, by others; no individual is really responsible for himself. It is only necessary, then, for “the others” to acquire political power and use it to create social structures designed to produce a new humanity. Transform external arrangements and—according to this ideology—it matters little if men and women remain unregenerate; they will behave correctly because their institutions have programmed them to act according to the blueprint. This is the modern heresy.

Christianity, rightly understood, stands for a society with such basic features as personal responsibility, equal justice under the law, and maximum freedom for every person—the kind of society envisioned by the 18th- century Whigs like Burke, Madison, and Jefferson. Such a social and political order as the Whigs had in mind lays down the conditions in a nation which permit the operation of one kind of an economic order only, the free market economy—later nicknamed capitalism—the thing described by Adam Smith.

The economic order which Adam Smith challenged was called Mercantilism. Mercantilism was the communism or socialism or planned economy of the 17th and 18th centuries. The nation was covered with a network of minute regulations controlling every stage of manufacture and exchange, and the controls were brutally enforced, as they must be in every planned economy; in a 73-year period in France, 1686 to 1759, approximately 16,000 people were put to death for some infraction of the government regulations over the economy.

Adam Smith set out to free the economy with what he referred to as his “liberal plan of liberty, equality, and justice.” (p. 628)It is more than a coincidence that The Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of Independence appeared within a few months of each other, in the year 1776. The Declaration endorses the Whig political vision whose main features were voiced by Jefferson in his First Inaugural: “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none . . . freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of the person under the protection of the habeas corpus,” and so on. This was the political and legal framework laid down by the Whig theorists, within which Adam Smith’s free market economy, or capitalism, had the freedom necessary if it was to function-his “liberal plan of liberty, equality and justice.”

Millions of people during the 20th century have turned away from the traditional religious faiths of the West—Christianity and Judaism-to embrace some form of secular religion, such as communism or socialism. The prevailing world view in our time is not Theism—the belief that mind and spirit are rock-bottom realities in the universe; it is Materialism—the belief that basic reality is composed of nothing else but particles of matter.

Materialism is explicit wherever Marxism is the official creed, but it is implicit almost everywhere else. Begin with the Marxist premise of Dialectical Materialism—or any other variety of Materialism—and some form of totalitarianism logically follows. Such a society reduces human persons to minions of the state, to be used and used up in the utopian endeavor to bring about the classless society of the communist pipe dream. Christian doctrine, by contrast, makes the individual person central. His role in life is to serve the highest value he can conceive—God; the modest role of the political order is to provide maximum freedom for all persons in order that we, as created beings, may achieve our proper destiny.

The Theocratic Temptation

In the free society, church and state are independent of one another, as set forth in the First Amendment. But there is, historically, a perennial temptation for church and state to join forces and form a theocracy—an alliance which tends to divinize politics and depreciate genuine religion. We are moving in that direction.

The church has been allied with the state ever since the fourth century, and this church-state combination has often been less than Christian in its treatment of Christians, and others. Edward Gibbon, the 18th-century historian, is only one of the many scholars who have chastised the official church for its misdeeds. But listen to Gibbon when he refers to original Gospel Christianity; he speaks of “. . . those benevolent principles of Christianity, which inculcate the natural freedom of mankind.” (Vol. I, p. 661)

The idea of Christian freedom came into sharp focus in the preaching of 18th-century clergymen in New England. F. P. Cole, an historian of the period, writes: “There is probably no group of men in history, living in a particular area at a given time, who can speak as forcibly on the subject of liberty as the Congregational ministers of New England between 1750 and 1785.”

It was the custom of the New England clergy to preach twice a year on some theme having to do with the secular order, the Artillery Day Sermon and the Election Day Sermon. These scholarly sermons were published by the Massachusetts General Court, as the legislature was then called, and they have provided the raw material for many a doctoral dissertation. Let me offer a typical statement by one of the ablest of these preachers, Jonathan Mayhew of Boston, in 1752. “Having been initiated in youth in the doctrines of civil liberty, as they were taught by such men as Plato, Demosthenes, Cicero, and other renowned persons among the ancients; and such as Sydney and Milton, Locke and Hoadley among the moderns, i liked them; they seemed rational. And having learnt from the Holy Scriptures that wise, brave, and virtuous men were always friends of liberty,—that God gave the Israelites a king in His anger, because they had not the sense and virtue enough to be a free commonwealth,—and that ‘where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty’—this made me conclude that freedom was a great blessing.”

Religion and the Founders

Most of the men we refer to as our Founding Fathers were not active churchmen, for one reason or another, but they were men of strong religious convictions. Norman Cousins has compiled a 450-page anthology of the religious beliefs and ideas of eight of these men in their own words. (In God We Trust, 1958) Those quoted are Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, the two Adamses, Hamilton, and Jay. There’s also a section devoted to Tom Paine. A familiar statement of Jefferson pretty well summarizes the outlook of this remarkable group of men. “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.”

Tom Paine authored some influential political pamphlets, and he also wrote a great deal on the subject of religion, much of it critical—which is all right, because there is much about the ecclesiastical life of any period which deserves criticism. But when it was a matter of Christian liberty, Paine was on target. Cousins, for some reason, does not quote a surprising statement by Paine: “Wherefore, political as well as spiritual liberty, is the gift of God, through Christ.” (From his essay “Thoughts on Defensive War”)

What was the situation in the 19th century? Let me offer a few remarks by one of the keenest foreign observers ever to visit this nation, Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville landed in New York in May, 1831. Nine months and seven thousand miles later he returned to France and wrote his great book, Democracy in America, with special attention being given to religion and the churches. “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds,” he wrote, “that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other . . . Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions . . . They hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.”

“Despotism may govern without faith,” he continues, “but liberty cannot . . . [for] how is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?”

Tocqueville observed that the clergy stayed away from politics. The clergy, he observed, “keep aloof from parties and public affairs . . . In the United States religion exercises but little direct influence upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion; but [religion] directs the customs of the community, and, by regulating everyday life it regulates the state.”

A Spotty Record

The history of the church during the past two thousand years is a spotty record, with many ups and some downs. There have been glorious epochs, and there have been periods which make for melancholy reading. Occasionally, the church has sanctioned tyrannous political rule; from time to time it has lent its support to persecutions, inquisitions, and crusades. As an arm of the state, or as a tool of the state, it has betrayed its sacred task while it pursued secular goals like wealth and power.

In the 20th century segments of ecclesiastical officialdom and councils of churches demand legislation to transfer wealth from one group of citizens to another. They work for a collectivist economic order planned, controlled, and regulated by government. The intended aim is to overcome poverty and feed the hungry; the means is the planned economy, otherwise labeled socialism, collectivism, the new deal, or whatever. Whatever the label, the planned economy puts the nation in a strait jacket; the planned economy, however noble the intentions of the planners, is the road to serfdom, as F. A. Hayek demonstrated in a landmark book written some forty years ago.

A planned economy forcibly directs the lives of individual men and women, and to do so the state must deprive people of their earnings which they would otherwise use to direct their own lives. Nation after nation during the 20th century has gone in for political planning of the economy and the results have been disastrous; where the planning has been strictly enforced, as in communist nations, the result has been a nation ill housed, iii fed, and ill clothed, it is a sad paradox indeed that the secular program, promoted by church hierarchies to alleviate poverty, has caused poverty in every society which has tried it. The only way to alleviate poverty in a nation is to increase productivity; and increased productivity is generated only by an economy of free men and women. Freedom is an essential part of the church’s business. Freedom is a blessing in itself, and it’s a double blessing, for prosperity follows freedom.

The socialists, until recently, have claimed the high moral ground. Their boast is that only socialists—or liberals—really care about people. What nonsense! Every person of good will wants to see other people better off; better housed, better fed, better clothed, healthier, better educated, with finer medical care, and all the rest. The dispute between socialists and believers in the free economy is not so much over the goals as over the means by which these goals may be met. The socialist’s means—his command economy—will not achieve the goals he says he wants to reach; socialism makes the nation worse off; poorer in material wealth, and poorer in every other respect as well.

There is another route for churchmen to take, a way that leads to more freedom for people in society, rather than less freedom. Freedom is at the heart of the gospel message, and the true genius of our religion was proudly proclaimed by our forebears, some of whose words I have quoted.

Man’s will is uniquely free; that’s the way God made us. We are free beings precisely in order that each person shall be responsible for his own life and therefore accountable for his actions. It is by acts of will, acts of choice, exercised daily over the course of a lifetime that each of us becomes the person we have the potential to be. Each person is by nature self-controlling; each person is in charge of his own life.

The free society, then, is our natural habitat; freedom in the relations of persons to each other accords with human nature. The tactic of freedom in the business and industrial sectors is the free market economy; the free choice economic system corresponds to the freely choosing creature that each of us is.

Animals, unlike us humans, have a finely tuned set of instincts which infallibly guides each creature according to its species. We humans do not have such elaborate instinctual equipment; instead of instincts we are given a moral code, which we are free to obey or not. Anyone can figure out for himself that no kind of society is possible unless most people most of the time do not murder, steal, assault, or lie. Thus we have commandments that say Thou shalt not murder, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, and so on. These and other commands compose the basic moral code which is the foundation of our law.

Because we are flawed creatures as well as free, we occasionally break the law, and so we need an umpire to interpret and, if necessary, enforce the rules. We refer to this umpire function as the political order—government, the police power, the law. And we have the courts, where honest differences of opinion may be examined and resolved.

The Productivity of Capitalism

The free market economy, or private property order, or capitalism—if you like—is, by common agreement, the most productive economic order. In fact, it’s the only productive economic order. Socialism in a given country lives by exploiting the previous productive economy of that country, and when that gives out, socialist nations live on largess from capitalist nations.

The incredible productivity of capitalism is generally admitted, even by its critics; it’s the way the wealth gets distributed that they complain about. What’s wrong about capitalism, the critics charge, is that some people in our society have enormous incomes while other people have to get by on a mere pittance. Disparities in income show up most vividly in the sports and entertainment industries. Take basketball players, for instance. Basketball is a fun game which thousands play for pleasure and recreation. But many professional players make more money in a year than any six of us will make in a lifetime of hard work. Baseball is almost as grotesque, and then the players threaten to strike for more pay! A rock singer gives what is laughably called a concert and more money changes hands in one evening than the Seattle Symphony sees in a year. Supply your own examples. The question is: How can any person with even a modicum of intelligence and refinement condone such grotesqueries? How do we respond to such a critic?

Part of the answer is that in a free society—a social order characterized by equal freedom under the law—the market place becomes a showcase for popular folly, ignorance, superstition, bad taste, and stupidity. The market, in other words, is individual free choice in action, and no one is pleased with everyone else’s choices. But our displeasure is a price we must learn to pay if we are to enjoy the blessings of liberty. We must stand firmly behind the processes of freedom, even though we can barely stand some of the products of freedom. So let’s stop wringing our hands; let’s try to be tolerant, and let’s get on with our lifelong task of setting a better example of what freedom means.

Remember that no one is forced to pay over good money to watch a sporting event; no one has to listen to some hyperkinetic young man howl and gyrate in public places to the accompaniment of amplified sound. You and I might not pay money for such a performance, and if everyone were just like us, those who now make millions playing games would have to go back to sport for its own sake, just like the rest of us. And if a miraculous change in musical taste should occur, there’d be crowds attending Bach recitals every Sunday afternoon on your local church organ.

Turn from the sports and entertainment field to the business and industry sector. Here, too, there are wide variations in wages, income and wealth. How does this come about?

Here’s a person with a knack for manufacturing a better mousetrap, which turns out to be just what millions of consumers have been waiting for. They are willing to pay handsomely for this better mousetrap, and so the manufacturer becomes wealthy. His employees also benefit. Our entrepreneur’s wealth is voluntarily conferred upon him by consumers who aren’t forced to buy the product, but who find that these new mousetraps make their lives safer, better, and more enjoyable. Every step in this procedure—manufacturing, marketing, exchanging—is free and fair, and when this is the case the resulting distribution of rewards is also fair. It is only when someone profits and becomes rich because government gives him a subsidy or provides him with some advantage over his rivals and his customers that there is mal-distribution and unfairness in the final result.

Setting a Good Example

Let me emphasize the fact that the free market economy rewards each participant according to the value willing consumers attach to his offering of goods and services. Why does a rock singer make millions while your fine church organist makes hundreds? The answer is obvious; crowds of people would rather pay a lot of money to hear rock than to listen to Bach for free. We may find this intellectual and esthetic wasteland repugnant to our refined sensibilities. But what an opportunity this situation presents to every teacher. I refer not only to full time professors, preachers, and writers. Most anyone can be a teacher. Nearly everyone, in other words, has the capacity to convey a new idea to some other person, to instill a nobler sentiment, a superior value, a higher moral tone. More persuasive than any of these, we can set a good example.

It is a solid truth, I believe, that you cannot build a free society out of just any old kind of people. A free society is built around a nucleus of people of superior intellect and integrity who are, at the same time, cognizant of economic and political reality. You need people who love God and their neighbor; people of understanding and compassion; people with enduring family ties. Our schools and our churches should be producing people of this caliber, for it is the function of education and religion—in the broad sense of both terms—to make us better and wiser men and women. When we have a significant number of wise and good people living lives of a quality high enough to deserve a free society we’ll have a free society. All the rest of us, riding on their coattails, will reap the rich blessings of liberty.

Originally published in The Freeman, August 1986.

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Countless generations of men have lived in unfree societies, but many men dreamed of freedom and hoped for the day when their children would be free. Gradually the West developed a philosophy of freedom, a rationale for individual immunity against governmental power. This intellectual movement gathered strength in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Liberalism, as it was called, became the major social force in country after country. As the twentieth century dawned it appeared that the ideals of the free society were safely installed in the thinking of the West and progressively realized in practice in the major countries. But then something hap pened. In country after country, the highway of Liberalism turned into the road to serfdom. We made an about face in this country, but those who led off in a new direction didn’t even bother to change the labels. They still call themselves Liberals, but the program of Liberalism in 1993 is radically opposed to the ideals of a free society. It is merely a pragmatized version of old-line socialism.

We sense that all is not well with our society, nor with our world. Our traditional rights and liberties, once taken for granted, are in jeopardy; they are undermined by dubious theories, and often overridden in practice. Under constant attack are such things as individual liberty, limited government, the private property concept, and the free market way of doing business. Taken together these items are the essential elements of the free society.

This essay is an effort to get to the roots of the present situation, to determine, if possible, some of the causes; and to suggest, in the light of this analysis, the nature of the remedy. The dislocations which meet the eye most immediately appear on the economic and political levels, but they stem if the analysis of this paper is correct from aberrations at the deeper levels of ethics and religion. Believing that no remedy can be successful that does not go at least as deep as the disease, it is suggested that sound economic and political theory, while imperative and good as far as it goes, does not go far enough by itself to make the case for liberty. It is further suggested that the typical added arguments from ethics are in fact substitutes for a genuine ethical theory. The difficulties that confront any effort to construct or revive an ethical consensus are alluded to, leading to an awareness of the need for reconstruction in the area of philosophy or theology. The case for liberty, in short, needs to be watertight. If there is an open seam at any level it may prove to be the gap through which liberty will be lost, for “Nature always seeks out the hidden flaw.”

Liberty Lost

Given a choice, most people today, will choose liberty—other things being equal. People don’t give up their liberties except under some delusion, such as the delusion that the surrender of a little liberty will strengthen the guarantee of economic security. There never has been a serious anti-liberty philosophy and platform as such, whose principles people have examined, accepted, and then put into practice. Things haven’t happened this way. But although we haven’t chosen statism, statism is what we are getting: Speaking now not of conquered countries where liberty has been suppressed but of nations like our own where the old legal forms have been preserved, we may say that the steady attrition of liberty in the modern world is not the consequence of a direct assault by open and avowed anti-libertarians. No, the steady decline of liberty among people who sincerely prefer liberty if given a choice is the unforeseen and unwanted by-product of something else.

Liberty Regained

Many people are concerned with the plight of liberty and are working toward its restoration. The tremendous upsurge of interest in the libertarian-conservative philosophy since 1950 is sufficient witness to that fact. The libertarian-conservative camp is unanimous in its opposition to every variety of collectivism and statism, but at this point the unanimity begins to break down. Libertarians and conservatives differ among themselves in their estimate of what it takes to challenge the prevailing ideologies successfully. There are four possible levels or stages of the anti-collectivist, pro-freedom argument: the economic, the political, the ethical, and the religious. Do we need to use all four? Or is one or two sufficient? Opinions differ in the libertarian- conservative camp. Let us examine some of the arguments advanced at each level, beginning with the economic.

It is enough to expound free market economics, say some. Socialism is nothing more than economic heresy and all we have to do is demonstrate the greater productive efficiency of the free market and the socialists will retire in confusion. Freedom works, they say, and as proof point to America’s superiority in computers, telephones, bathtubs, and farm products. The improvement of his material circumstance is man’s chief end, and the only thing that makes a man a Communist or a collectivist is his ignorance of the conditions which must prevail if a society is to be prosperous.

Most of those who stress economic arguments add considerations drawn from political philosophy. Socialism is not only unproductive economically, but the operational imperatives of a socialist society make government the sole employer. Society is run by command, by directives from the top down, the way an army is run. The individual citizen must do as he is told, or starve. There is no independent economic base to sustain political resistance, so the population in a socialized society is necessarily reduced to serfdom. This is an inevitable consequence of a managed economy, a development which is fatal to such political goods as the Rule of Law, respect for the rights and dignity of the individual, and the idea of private ownership protected by law.

Some libertarians and conservatives agree with the urgent need to argue the case on economic and political grounds, but believe that it must be carried a stage further—into ethics. There is not, they would argue, one ethical code for politicians and another for people—there is just one set of ethical norms which is binding on rulers and ruled alike. A socialized society is poor in economic goods, and its citizens are, politically, reduced to serfs. These are social consequences of the moral violations which are built-in features of every variety of collectivism and statism. The moral violations which this argument has in mind are not simply the obvious sins of totalitarian regimes; the lying for political advantage, the murders for convenience, the concentration camps, and so on. These are included, of course, but this argument is mainly directed at the more subtle moral violations inherent in the operations of the welfare state.

The welfare state in America, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, is based on the redistributionist principle: “Votes and taxes for all, subsidies for a few.” In actual practice, the welfare state deprives all citi zens of a percentage of their earnings in order to redistribute this money to its favorites-after taking out a healthy cut to cover its own costs. Such a Robin Hood operation would be both illegal and immoral if private citizens engaged in it; and although any government can, by definition, make its actions legal, it cannot make them moral. Every variety of collectivism, therefore, is charged with ethical violations, in addition to practicing economic and political lunacy.

“Social Utility” Trap

It is at this point that a major rift begins to appear in the freedom camp. Some libertarians challenge the validity of ethical arguments. The universe, they assert, displays no recognizable ethical dimension. Says one of them: “Nature is alien to the idea of right and wrong . . . . It is the social system which determines what should be deemed right and what wrong . . . . The only point that matters is social utility.” Well, all sorts of habit and customs, from primitive ritual cannibalism to using the proper soup spoon, serve the ends of “social utility,” and if social utility is “the only point that matters” I doubt that the case for liberty can be made convincing, however skillful our economic reasoning.

Those who discount ethical and religious arguments get off the bus here. These sturdy fighters for freedom have made their choice of weapons and they are drawn exclusively from the arsenal of economic and political theory. But even among those who would use ethical arguments there is great difference of opinion. “Whose ethics?” they ask, or “What theory of ethics?” One group steers clear of religion, regarding it as a strictly private matter with little or no relevance to the free society. A second group regards religion as hostile to the free society. I propose to deal first with this position.

These anti-religionists employ what they label ethical arguments, as well as arguments drawn from economic and political theory, but when it comes to religion, they draw the line. They want nothing to do with this God stuff! God’s existence is, in their eyes, improbable, but this is not all; religious belief is actually harmful! The title of a lecture in a series sponsored by this group is “The Destructiveness of the God idea.” They proudly proclaim themselves atheists.

There are numerous conceptions of God, and every one of us is a-theist-ic with reference to one or more of them. Most self-styled atheists are a-theist-ic with respect to a childish version of the deity. This is about on a par with not believing in the moon because some people say it is made of green cheese! In history there have been men of incomparable intellectual attainments who have been theists, who would not have been theists if they had had to believe in such a concept of the deity as the typical atheist rejects. And the same is true of contemporary theists. There are popular and degrading notions of God, but the argument is not confined to the limitations imposed by superstition!

Competing Ethical Codes

Now let me return to the first group of ethicists; those who lean heavily on ethical arguments but steer clear of the religious area. These people generally understand that in economics, liberty means reliance on the uncoerced buying habits of consumers as a guide to making economic decisions; “the market,” in short. In politics, liberty implies limited government. This means that governmental action, circumscribed by a written constitution, is designed to protect the lives, the liberties, and the property of all citizens alike. But it also means that both government and constitution must operate within the framework imposed by an ethical code. In terms of this ethical code, political invasions of personal liberty and property are morally wrong. If an act is wrong when done by private citizens, it is just as wrong when done by public officials.

Such a statement as this assumes that private citizens and public officials acknowledge and try to live by the same ethical code. They may, or again, they may not. There is not just one ethical code in 1993; there are several competing and conflicting codes even in this country. Today, however, there is general confusion in the area of our moral values, and some contend that “right” and “wrong” are not meaningful terms. Ethical relativism is widely accepted, and this creed maintains that something which may be right in one time or place may be wrong in another time or place.

A century ago in this country the ethical code could pretty much be taken for granted; people’s notion of what things were right and what things were wrong were, for the most part, deductions from a common source. We derived our ethical consensus from the prevailing religion of the West, Christianity. This ethical consensus was recognizably different, even a century ago, from the ethical consensus of Hindu society, which sanctioned the division of society into inferior and superior castes, and put millions of outcastes outside the category of human beings. It differed in important ways from the ethical consensus which had prevailed in Greece and Rome. W.E.H. Lecky’s famous book, History of European Morals (1869), was a dispassionate account of the transformation wrought in the moral ideals of the ancient world by the introduction of Christianity.

But, although there was a nineteenth-century ethical consensus, fateful developments were pending in the realm of religion and ethics. Friedrich Nietzsche told his contemporaries, in effect: You have given up the Christian God and this means that you cannot long retain your ethical code which is bound up with this faith. Let’s get back to the ethical code of the ancient Greeks! Nietzsche urged what he called “a trans-valuation of all values.” Karl Marx was telling us during this period that the productive efforts of a society are the main thing; ethical, intellectual, and spiritual things are mere superstructure. The moral values of the nineteenth century, therefore, were capitalist ethics; get rid of capitalist production and capitalist ethics would follow it down the drain, to be replaced by Communist ethics. And Communist ethics, as spelled out by Lenin, are an inversion of Christian ethics. Whatever advances the Party is right and good. Lying and murder are endorsed as ethical practices if they further the cause of the Communist Party.

The ethical confusion has worsened in our own day, and become more complicated. And so an awareness grows that the kind of an ethical code we would endorse is by no means obvious to a lot of people; therefore, if this code is again to become an active principle in the lives of people it needs some attention.

The Lack of an Ethical Consensus

Our traditional ethical code is the end result of a particular historical development. This code is something people have learned; they have imbibed it from Western culture. It is not, in other words, a biological set of guidelines with which people come equipped at birth, as they have two hands, two feet, one head, and so on. Recognition of this fact turns up in odd places. John Dewey, himself no Christian, spent some time in China after World War I, and in 1922 he made this pertinent observation: “Until I had lived in a country where Christianity is relatively little known and has had relatively very few generations of influence upon the character of people, I had always assumed, as natural reactions which one could expect of any normal human being in a given situation, reactions which I now discover you only find among the people that have been exposed many generations to the influence of the Christian ethic.” In other words, our traditional ethical code is one we have learned over the centuries in a Christian culture. We were educated into it century after century, until the past several generations, during which time we have been slowly educated out of it. The assumption that we can take our ethical code for granted and use it to confound the collectivists presupposes a situation that does not exist; it presupposes an ethical consensus, when it is precisely the absence of such a consensus which has helped create the vacuum into which collectivism has seeped!

As the French philosopher André Mal-raux tells us, we are living in the first agnostic civilization. Until the past two or three generations, men believed that their moral ideals reflected the nature of the universe. But if the universe is a complete moral blank, completely alien to notions of right and wrong, then all moral codes are merely homemade rules for convenience. A rule against murder is on the same level as a rule against driving on the left hand side of the street; there is no intrinsic difference between the two. A libertarian writer defends the integrity of scientific and economic laws as the only constants in the universe. These, he writes, “must not be confused with man-made laws of the country and with man-made moral precepts.” It follows, therefore, that if men do not happen to like the ethical code they are living under they can write themselves a new one, just as easily as they can change from summer to winter clothing.

To sum up the matter: We can no longer take our traditional ethical code for granted. The foundation it was based upon has been neglected, and an ethical code, by its nature, is a set of inferences and deductions from something more fundamental than itself. We may behave decently out of habit, but ethical theory—by its very nature—must be grounded in a theology, or cosmology, if you prefer. A belief in the impossibility of ethics because the universe is a moral blank is an instance of the truism that every code for conduct is a deduction from a judgment based on faith as to the nature of things.

We hear it said frequently that individual man, in the totalitarian countries, is made for the state; but here, the state is made for man. If we say that the state is made for man, the implication is that we have come to some tentative conclusions as to what man is made for. We must have asked, and found some sorts of answers, to questions such as the following: What is the end and goal of human life? What is the purpose and meaning of individual life? What is my nature, and my destiny? Within what framework of meaning does the universe make sense? These are theological and religious questions, and when they are seriously pondered some sorts of answers are bound to come.

That things are senseless and individual life without meaning is one sort of an answer. Once this answer is given, it will start to generate an appropriate ethical code. This is a sort of salvage effort to which the works of the late Albert Camus were devoted. “I proclaim that I believe in nothing,” he writes, “and that everything is absurd.” The only appropriate response to this act of faith is rebellion, arising “from the spectacle of the irrational coupled with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.” This is one reading of the universe and the human condition, together with an appropriate recommended code of conduct. It is, therefore, a religion, although the number of its adherents do not appear in any census. In passing, one might remark that it is a curious kind of “incomprehensible condition” from which a man can apprehend enough to write several books about it! Communism is another contemporary religion. Its universe is a materialistic one, but the universe contains a dynamic force—the mode of production—which is working toward the fulfillment of history in a classless society. And there is an appropriate code of conduct enjoined upon all good Communists.

Choosing Christianity

There is a third option which makes considerable sense to me, and that is Christianity. Such a statement comes as no surprise, and you are probably telling yourself that I, as a professional religionist, have a vested interest in offering just such a conclusion. Permit me, therefore, to digress and sound an autobiographical note. If anyone had told me during my high school years, or up to my senior year in college that I’d wind up as a minister, I’d have taken it as a personal affront! As things turned out, however, I did find myself in theological school after college, but before the first year had gone by I had decided that the ministry was not for me. I was skeptical about theological matters and decided to go into the field of psychology. In theological controversy it seemed to me there were good arguments in favor of all the basic doctrines, and good arguments against. How, then, does one tip the balance in one direction or another? On the level of doctrinal theory it was difficult for me to say. To make a long story short, I finally returned to theological studies, got my degree, and—full of misgivings—was foisted upon an innocent and unsuspecting congregation.

During these years I held to a parallel set of interests in economics and political science. I was a libertarian before I ever heard the word, based on an acquaintance with the thinking of the Classic Liberals and a prejudice in favor of freedom. But my social thinking was in one compartment and my religion was in another. Unbeknownst to me, however, these two things were on a collision course, and it was fated that one day they should bump into each other. They did, and lots of things began to fall into place. I became aware of what Christianity had meant to Western civilization and to the framing of America’s institutions, and before long I had the ingredients to tip my theological balance in the direction of firmer religious convictions. I also knew why Classic Liberalism failed, although it had played its own game with its own deck—it lacked the religious dimension which alone makes life meaningful to individuals and provides a foundation for ethics.

People were freer in the nineteenth century than men had ever been before. This period was the heyday of Liberalism, but it also happened to be the twilight of religion. Large numbers of people became uncertain about the ends for which life should be lived. Lacking a sense of purpose and destiny they were afflicted by the feeling that life has little or no meaning, that the individual doesn’t matter nor his life count. Just when people had the most freedom they lost touch with the things which make freedom really worth having. Freedom had once been affirmed as a necessary condition for man if he were to achieve his true end, but when the religious dimension dropped out of life the advocates of freedom got themselves into a “promising contest” with the collectivists as to which could outpromise the other when it came to delivering the maximum quantity of material things. As was to be expected, the collectivists outpromised their opponents, although their actual performance must forever fall short. Liberty, in other words, is recognized for the precious thing it really is when significant numbers of people know that they must have it in order to work out their eternal destiny.

There are two things I am not saying. I am not saying that we have to cook up or feign an interest in religion merely to accomplish political or economic ends. Such efforts would be fruitless, but even if they were effective I’d oppose them. Secondly, I am not saying that men who, for reasons of their own, cannot embrace religion and ethics, cannot therefore be effective champions of free market economics and limited government. There are technical areas in political theory, and especially in economics, where a lot more enlightenment is needed, and where there is no impingement on the domains of ethics and religion. Nonreligious libertarians may be invaluable here. Even so, they cannot touch all bases. The man who is a socialist for religious or ethical reasons won’t be shaken in his convictions by economic and political arguments alone; his religious and ethical misconceptions must be met on their own ground.

Utilitarianism

At this point I shall be reminded that economists, after Adam Smith to the present day, do tend typically to hold some variety of the ethical theory known as Utilitarianism, which dates back to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in the early and middle part of the nineteenth century. But as Mill himself pointed out, the creed has a long history, dating from Epicurus in the third century B.C.

Utilitarianism states its principles in various ways, but invariably it emphasizes two cardinal points—maximum satisfaction and minimum effort. Man, in terms of this theory, acts only to maximize his happiness, pleasures, satisfactions or comfort, and he seeks to do this with a minimum expenditure of energy. Utilitarianism has little or nothing to say about the spiritual, ethical or cultural framework within which its “maximum economy—maximum satisfaction” principle operates. It minimizes or denies life’s spiritual dimension, it uses the word “good” in a non-ethical sense, i.e., equivalent to “happiness producing,” and it asserts that men are bound together in societies solely on the basis of a rational calculation of the private advantage to be gained by social cooperation under the division of labor.

The Utilitarian proposition that each man invariably tends to achieve his ends with a minimum of effort says nothing about the means he may or will use. The “maximum economy” principle, when it first took over as a conscious maxim of human behavior—in nineteenth-century England—operated within the value system or ethical code persons happened to have at the time. The ethical code in the West during the period of the appearance and gradual acceptance of the “maximum economy” principle—during the past century—was largely a product of the religious heritage of Europe. This ethical legacy assured that although men would tend to take the line of least effort in the attaining of their ends, they would at the same time use only those means which are compatible with the moral norms enjoined by their religion. Moral norms are restraints on certain actions, and if the “maximum economy” principle is fervently accepted it must go to work on the restraints embodied in the ethical code whenever they interfere with the line of least resistance between a man’s aims and their realization. The” maximum economy” principle, by its very nature, necessarily sacrifices means to ends, and in the circumstances of the modern world Utilitarianism begins to undermine the old ethical norms wherever these impede an individual’s attainment of his economic ends.

Robbery, it has been observed, is the first labor saving device. If a man accepts, without qualification, the precept “Get more for less” as his categorical imperative, what will he do when a combination of circum stances presents him with a relatively safe opportunity to steal? His ethical compunctions against theft have already been dulled, and the use of theft as a means of acquiring economic goods is one of the possible logical conclusions that may be drawn from the “greatest economy” principle. Theft is, of course, forbidden in many of the world’s ethical codes, and conformity to these codes over the millennia has bred a reluctance to steal in most men. Thievery there has been aplenty despite the bans, but it has been accompanied by a guilty conscience. The “maximum economy” principle, when first accepted, is applied to productive labor within the framework of the code. But if the idea of “Get more for less” is a principle, why not apply it across the board?

There are two impediments to a man’s acquisition of economic goods: First, there is the effort required to produce them, and second, there is the prohibition against stealing them. The former is in the nature of things, but the latter comes to be regarded as merely a man-made rule. The “greatest economy” principle goes to work on the first impediment—productive effort—by inventing labor saving devices; it goes to work on the second impediment—the moral code—by collectivizing it. It reduces the commandment against theft to a matter of social expediency.

Society is admonished against theft on the grounds that a society in which property is not secure is a poor society. But this truism offers no guidance to the individual who finds himself in a situation where he can steal with relative impunity. To the extent that he is emancipated from “outmoded” taboos and follows the line of least resistance, he will steal whenever he thinks he can get away with it, and to make theft easier and safer he will start writing a form of theft into his statutes: “Votes and taxes for all, subsidies for us.” Utilitarianism, in short, has no logical stopping place short of collectivism. Utilitarian collectivism is not a contradiction in terms, although particular Utilitarians, restrained by other principles, may stop short of collectivism.

Utilitarianism purports to be a theory of ethics; man ought to act, it declares, so as to augment the quantity of satisfactions. It is usually linked to a theory of motivation which sweepingly declares that every human action aims at improving the well-being of the acting agent: “acting is necessarily always selfish.” Capitalism, it is asserted, is based on this deterministic psychology. The militant atheist group mentioned earlier adopts what it calls a morality of self-interest. “Morality is a rational science,” we read in their literature, “with man’s life as its standard, [and] self-interest as its motor.” “Capitalism,” the author continues, “expects, and by its nature demands that every man act in the name of his rational self-interest.” Let us examine this unqualified assertion. Capitalism, or the market economy, begins to work automatically in a society where there is a preponderance of fair play and an evenhanded justice in operation. Lacking these essential conditions capitalism cannot be made to work. Here’s a person with more shrewdness than ability; he has little energy and fewer scruples. On the market, the verdict of his peers is that his services aren’t worth very much; so he consults his rational self-interest—unimpeded by old-fashioned ethics—and learns that his shrewdness and lack of scruples admirably equip him to operate a racket. He starts one, and becomes wealthy and famous. Would anyone care to try to convince an Ivan Boesky, for instance, that it is really to his own self-interest to play the game fairly even though this would put him behind the wheel of a bakery truck at $160.00 per week? How can the anti-capitalistic mentality, if it is true to itself, and acts in its own self-interest, project a capitalist society? The answer is, it can’t.

Some accidents of history shattered our society’s ethical and religious framework just at the time when free market economists came forth armed with insights into human behavior in the areas of production and trade. But because men respond one way in one sector of life it cannot be inferred that they respond the same way everywhere, nor that they should. Oddly enough, it is precisely free market economists themselves who best embody this truism. Free market economists in these days find a poor market for their services. There is, on the other hand, a great public demand for the tripe palmed off as the new economics by the “social scientists.”

Resisting all such market demands the free market economists stand by their principles even though this means that, with motives impunged, they are lonely voices, victims of academic and professional dis crimination. Why do they not yield to pressure of popular demand, as they themselves advocate should be done in the realms of production, trade, and entertainment? Does the market demand ridiculous spike-heeled shoes and mismatched clothes? Then give the public what it wants, say the free market economists; in the realm of material things, the majority is always right. Are there complaints about the high salaries of rock wailers and Hollywood sex symbols, coupled with laments about the low estate of the legitimate theater? Yes, but not from free market economists who conceal any disgust they may feel and merely say, “Let the public be served.” But when it comes to the realm of ideas the economists, to their enormous credit, ignore the market—public and majority pressures—and do not trim or hedge or yield an inch on their convictions. In other words, they operate with one set of principles in the realm of material things-“Give the public what it wants”—but they invoke another set of principles when they enter the realm of economic ideas—“Resist public pressure on behalf of intellect and conscience.” Oddly enough, however, there is nothing in their philosophy to legitimize the second set of principles. They know by a kind of instinct or intuition that ideas or opinions which have a price tag attached—as if they were marketable commodities like any other—aren’t worth much, and neither is the person who hawks them. But instincts and intuitions, however civilized and humane, are largely uncommunicable.

Conduct, however exemplary, cannot make its point when it is tied to a philosophy which alleges that the game of life has no rules; therefore, seek private advantage, maximize personal satisfactions. No matter how such ingredients as these are combined they won’t result in a philosophy of liberty. This needs something else, namely, a framework of values which makes possible a different approach. The restoration of our ethical consensus and the repair of our value system brings us to arguments on the religious level. The traditional arguments in this area won’t be given a fair shake by our contemporaries unless there is a contemporary approach to them which really confronts us with them. Perhaps there is such an approach.

The City of God and The City of Man

Christianity introduced a concept into the thought of the West which is alien to the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, the two major thinkers of the ancient world. This new concept has been called, after Augustine, the idea of the two cities: the City of God and the City of Man. Man, it is asserted, holds his citizenship papers in two realms, the earthly and the heavenly. He is to negotiate this life as best he can, seeking as much justice and such happiness as this world permits, but in full awareness that his ultimate felicity may be attained only in another order of existence.

This concept would have been largely incomprehensible to the Greeks. Man, for Aristotle, was a political animal who might find complete fulfillment in the closed society of the Greek city-state. A standard work on this aspect of Grecian life is Ernest Barker’s Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (1906, 1959), and a few sentences from this book convey the flavor of the Greek outlook. Summarizing Aristotle, Barker writes: “The good of the individual is the same as the good of the society . . . . The notion of the individual is not prominent, and the conception of rights seems hardly to have been attained.” Speaking of Socrates, Barker writes, “For him there was no rule of natural justice outside the law; law is justice, he held, and what is just is simply what is commanded in the laws.” Ethics and politics are one, and there is no distinction between Church and State. The city-state, “being itself both Church and State . .. had both to repress original sin—the function to which medieval theory restricted the State, and to show the way to righteousness—a duty which medieval theory vindicated for the Church.”

After the decay of ancient society and the polarization of Church and State, the distinction between spiritual and secular power in Europe and America for the past nineteen centuries guaranteed that there would always be some separation and dispersal of power within the nation. But with the dropping of the religious dimension from modern life we return to the unitary state in both theory and practice. This was obvious to Barker early this century as he foresaw the rise of the welfare state: “It seems to be expected of the State that it shall clothe and feed, as well as teach its citizens, and that it shall not only punish drunkenness, but also create temperance. We seem to be returning to the old Greek conception of the State as a positive maker of goodness; and in our collectivism, as elsewhere, we appear to be harking ‘back to Aristotle.’”

Christianity introduced another concept into Western thought which has had an effect upon our thinking about government, the concept of the Fall. Christian thought distinguishes between the created world as it came from the hand of God, and the fallen world known to history; between the world of primal innocence we posit, and the world marred by evil, which we know. It follows from this original premise that Christian thought is non-behaviorist; it is based on the idea that the true inwardness of a thing—its real nature—cannot be fully known by merely observing its outward behavior. Things are distorted in the historical and natural order, unable to manifest their true being. Man especially is askew. He is created in the image of God, but now he is flawed by Sin.

Some political implications may be drawn from these premises: It has been a characteristic note in Christian sociology, from the earliest centuries, to regard government not as an original element of the created world but as a reflection of man’s corrupted nature in our fallen world. Government, in other words, is a consequence of sin; it appears only after the fall. Government is an effect of which human error and evil are the causes. Government, at best, is competent to punish injustice, but it cannot promote virtue. In other words, the Christian rationale for government is incompatible with the total state required by collectivism. When the Christian rationale for government is understood and spelled out, the only political role compatible with it is the modest function of defending the peace of society by curbing peace breakers. When government is limited to repressing criminal and destructive actions, men are free to act constructively and creatively up to the full limit of their individual capacities.

We arrive at a similar conclusion by contemplating the second half of the Great Commandment, where we are enjoined to love our neighbor as ourselves. The bonds that should unite people, it is here implied, are those of unyielding good will, understanding, and compassion. But in collectivist theory, on the other hand, people are to be put through their paces by command and coercion. This is the nature of the means which must be, and are being, employed in even the most well-intentioned welfare state. In practice, every collectivized order careens toward a police state whose own citizens are its first victims. The love commandment of the Gospels, brought down to the political level, implies justice and parity and freedom. There is no way to twist these basic premises into a sanctioning of the operational imperatives of a collectivist society.

The argument from liberty to Christianity has now been sketched in outline. Those who would limit the defense of liberty to a discussion of free market economics, with an assist from political theory, have a genuine role to perform, as far as they go. And if they cannot bring themselves to accept the truth of ethics and religion, integrity demands that they refuse to pretend otherwise. Their economic arguments are much needed, and thus they are invaluable allies in this sector. But liberty has not been lost on this level alone, and it cannot be won back on this level alone.

We are confronted, not only by highly developed and sophisticated arguments for socialism and communism, but by fully collectivized nations.

Before there was ever a collectivist nation, there was a collectivist program. Before there was ever a collectivist program, there was a collectivist philosophy. Before there was ever a collectivist philosophy, there were collectivist axioms and premises, with appropriate attitudes toward life, and an appropriate mood.

The roots of collectivism go this deep, right down to our basic attitude toward the universe and our primordial demands on life. This is the level of a man’s fundamental orientation of his life, the level at which religion begins to do its work. We must get squared away here, otherwise our thinking on the other levels will be distorted. But with a proper religious orientation—at this fundamental level of basic attitudes and mood we can work out a philosophy of freedom.

When we have worked out the philosophy of freedom, we can advance a program based upon it.

And when we have a freedom philosophy and program we will eventually get a free society. This sounds like a laborious route to take, and it is. But life doesn’t serve up many short cuts.

Originally published in The Freeman, January 1993, Volume 43, Issue 1.

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Ethics and Business (March 1993)

A few years ago there was an immensely popular television series, named after Dallas. The central character of this show was a powerful and unscrupulous businessman who got that way by climbing over the backs of rivals, manipulating politicians, and wheeling and dealing with shadowy figures on the fringes of the underworld. J. R. Ewing finally got in the way of a bullet, and for months this nation was racked by the question: “Who shot J.R.?” But the civilized man could only wonder why the trigger man waited so long!

Business and the businessman have had a bad press, almost uniformly. Do you remember the television show whose hero was a businessman? The show that portrayed this businessman as a person of integrity and vision, who labored long hours to produce a product that supplied a genuine need, which he marketed at prices people could afford? Who treated his employees with generosity and consideration, and his customers with unfailing courtesy? Who was a devoted family man, active in civic affairs, and a churchman? Who could recite Shakespeare by the yard, relaxed by listening to his fine collection of recorded symphony music, and could tell a Corot from a Monet? Do you remember that show? Perhaps it was a movie? Actually it was neither. Such a show was never produced; the subject is taboo, by today’s mores.

The businessman has rarely if ever been treated fairly and accurately in drama or fiction. Is this because there are no men and women of superior intellect and high character in the world of business, industry, and trade? Not at all. Has the world of business no dramatic possibilities? Of course it has. But the fictional businessman invariably turns out to be the villain. There is a reason why this is so; the businessman is portrayed as a scoundrel because there is an almost universal bias against business on the part of novelists and dramatists. Businessmen do not get a fair shake because novelists and dramatists—with rare exceptions—have an ideological axe to grind.

This is the impression that emerges from our casual contact with the world of popular entertainment, the world of television, films, and fiction. This impression is confirmed in an unpretentious little volume by Ben Stein entitled The View from Sunset Boulevard. Stein interviewed a number of Hollywood writers and producers of television shows in order to find out how they viewed the various aspects of American life. If a visitor from England were to spend a little time watching television, what image of America would he come away with? Stein deals with television’s treatment of crime, the police, government, the army, the family, and other aspects of American life, including business. How do the people in Hollywood regard business? “One of the clearest messages of television,” Stein writes, “is that businessmen are bad, evil people, and that big businessmen are the worst of all . . . the murderous, duplicitous, cynical businessman is about the only kind of businessman there is on TV adventure shows, just as the cunning, trickster businessman shares the stage with the pompous buffoon businessman in situation come-dies.” A well known producer, Stanley Kramer, sees business as “part of a very great power structure which wields enormous power over the people.” And beyond that, Kramer implies, there is an “arrangement” between business and organized crime: “the Mafia is part of the entire corporate entity now.”

The warped feelings of wealthy and talented Hollywood writers and producers did not spring into existence unaided; it is one of the calculated end results of an intense propaganda effort that has been hacking away at the roots of Western society since the middle of the last century—attacking its religious origin, its values, and what is perceived as the last bastion of the bourgeoisie, business. A scholarly work which meticulously researched this vast literature appeared in 1954, by Professor James Desmond Glover of the Harvard Business School, entitled The Attack on Big Business. Professor Glover writes: “In volumes upon volumes of testimony before Congressional committees, in popular novels, in learned treatises and textbooks, in poetry, in sermons, in opinions of Supreme Court justices, ‘big business’ and its works are seen as evil and attacked. The literature of criticism of ‘big business,’ and of the civilization it has done so much to bring into being, represents by now a perfectly staggering mass of material.”

The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality

What is the rationale for this widespread antagonism toward the business system, otherwise known as capitalism? I don’t profess to understand all the reasons for the anti-capitalistic mentality, but the root cause of the antipathy is surely the perception, the mistaken perception, that the relation between employer and employee is that of exploiter to victim. The employer may intend no harm, he may intend only good to those who work for him, but in the capitalistic mode of production Karl Marx contended the worker is denied the full fruits of his labor; a portion of every wage earner’s product is garnished by his boss. To simplify Marxist theory, we might say that John Smith who runs a machine in a shoe factory—punches the clock at eight o’clock in the morning and works till noon. During these four hours he produces six palm of shoes, which represent his wage for the day. John Smith returns to his bench and works four more hours in the afternoon, but the shoes he produces during these four hours are expropriated by his employer.

This is a summary statement of the surplus value theory, otherwise known as Marx’s exploitation theory. It is a central contention of Marxism that labor alone creates value, the value of a commodity being measured by the quantity of labor normally necessary to produce it. But if it is labor alone that creates value, the value created should belong exclusively to labor. It does not, however; the lion’s share is grabbed by the employer while the real producer is paid only a subsistence wage.

This theory overlooks the role of tools and machinery in production. The tool user in this generation is many times more productive than his counterpart of a few generations ago. Why is this? His naked labor power is no greater than that of people over the ages. The enhanced productivity of labor today is due to the tools and machinery at the disposal of every one of us—and those tools are the fruits of the labor of earlier generations. If today’s “worker” retained the full product of his individual effort, and only that, the poor fellow would starve.

A contemporary of Marx, the celebrated Austrian economist Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, demolished the surplus value theory in a book entitled Capital and Interest, published in 1884, the year after Marx died. The demolition job has been repeated many times since the appearance of Bohm-Bawerk’s great book, and the consensus of opinion among independent economists is that the surplus value theory does not hold water. The exploitation theory has great propaganda value, however, and it is used unthinkingly by those who are acting out a grudge against business, which, in their distorted vision, keeps the poor locked in their poverty in order that others might be rich.

Ben Stein, in the book mentioned earlier, records a portion of his conversation with television writer Bob Weiskopf:

“Q. Why are people poor in America?

“A. Because I don’t think the system could function if everyone was well off.

“Q. What do you mean?

“A. I think you have to have poor people in a capitalist society.

“Q. Why?

“A. To exploit. The rich people can’t exploit each other. Consequently they always exploit the poor.”

It is not only Hollywood script writers who profess to believe that the rich get richer only by making the poor poorer. The coordinator of the National Council of Churches’ Anti-Poverty Task Force asserts that, “Poverty would not continue to exist if those in power did not feel it was good for them.” A moment’s reflection will reveal this insulting accusation for the silly sentiment it is. We live in a commercial and manufacturing society. Our economy is featured by mass production, not only in factories but also in agriculture. The products of mass production flood our stores and supermarkets and showrooms, to be bought by the mass of consumers. Mass production cannot continue unless there is mass consumption; and the masses of people cannot consume the output of our mass production factories and fields unless they possess pur chasing power—the money to buy the goods of their choice. To suggest that those who have goods and services to sell have some sinister interest in keeping their potential customers too poor to buy is sheer nonsense! If the president of General Motors wants to sell you a Cadillac or a Buick or a Chevrolet—which he does—then he wants you to be rich enough to buy. in the free economy, everyone has a stake in the economic well-being of every other person.

It is in the immediate interest of business and businessmen that the masses of people be well off; people who are poor are poor customers, and business cannot survive without customers. Business has no stake in poverty; but there is a class of people who do need the poor, who do have an interest in keeping them poor. Permit me, in a slight digression, to offer you a few words on this point by the celebrated economist Thomas Sowell: “To be blunt, the poor are a gold mine. By the time they are studied, advised, experimented with and administered, the poor have helped many a middle class liberal to achieve affluence with government money. The total amount of money the government spends on its ‘anti-poverty’ efforts is three times what would be required to lift every man, woman, and child in America above the poverty line by simply sending money to the poor.”

Back now to the widespread animus against business, stemming from the false idea that labor is the sole source of value but is not allowed to keep what it produces. In the distorted vision of Karl Marx, business, industry, and trade—as these economic activities are organized in the free world—re intrinsically evil, and the businessman is a parasite and predator. Similar notions are entertained by many a man in the street who has never read a line of Marx, as well as by intellectuals who regard themselves as anti-Communists. Given this climate of opinion, the term “ethical businessman” is a contradiction in terms; it is the figure of speech known to English teachers as an oxymoron—a figure which juxtaposes incongruous terms like “virtuous thief” or “honest liar.”

Now, if businessmen are involved in activities which are intrinsically crooked, evil by their very nature, then it is pointless to discuss the ethical situations of business or the moral dilemmas businessmen sometimes face. It would be like instructing a thief on how to rob banks honestly! So I propose to spend a few minutes trying to understand the nature of the economic activities that engage businessmen, while touching upon some of the values that are implicated in the production of goods and services.

All Are Sinners

You have a right to know the direction from which I am coming at you, to know my bias. I have examined the catalogue of sins of which businessmen are allegedly guilty, and Lo! they are the very same sins exhibited by people in every other walk of life. We all break the Commandments now and then, every one of us. Businessmen have no monopoly on sin. My mind goes back to a conversation I had several years ago with a professor of economics with years of teaching behind him, who had also served for many years as the academic dean of a prestigious Midwestern college. He said to me, “You know, Ed, a thoroughly dishonest man can last a lot longer in teaching or preaching than as a used car salesman.” There may be some hyperbole here, but my friend has a point. There are good and bad in all walks of life, and there are very few saints anywhere; but in the eyes of the law all are equal. The law should mete out justice upon the guilty party with impartiality. It should punish those who harass, steal, defraud, breach a contract, assault, or murder. This is the rule of law in action.

There is no justification for the assumption that all businessmen are evil people who must therefore be regulated, i.e., adjudged guilty until proven innocent. There is no more reason for regulating businessmen than for regulating clergymen or teachers!

Who Decides?

The free market economic system produces goods and services in abundance, and it rewards every participant according to his individual contribution—as his peers judge that contribution. “To the producer belongs the fruits of his toil,” is an ancient bit of wisdom, as true now as when first uttered. The relation between an individual’s effort and the eventual reward of his exertions is fairly clear in a simple situation like subsistence farming. You work by yourself, preparing the ground in the spring, seeding and tilling it, watering the furrows with your sweat during the heat of summer, reaping in the fall. The abundance of your harvest is directly traceable to your skills and the amount of work you put forth. The greater your effort the more ample your harvest—other things being equal. The harvest is your wage, and your wage in this instance is pretty much determined by your own skill and your own exertions; the more you put in the more you will take out. What you take out is your wage, the economic equivalent of your contribution.

How is your wage determined in a complex division of labor society such as ours? Justice still demands that every participant in the economy be rewarded according to his contribution to the productive process. But how shall we identify each individual’s contribution in order to reward him commensurately? Economists from Adam Smith to Ludwig von Mises to F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman have worked this question over and come up with an answer that is completely democratic and economically efficient, while encouraging every person in the full exercise of his lawful liberties. The answer provided by the economist is: Let the market decide what each person’s contribution is worth and reward him accordingly. “The market” describes the process of social cooperation under the division of labor where free people specialize in a complex variety of tasks in anticipation of a consumer demand for the goods and services they produce—followed by multiple voluntary exchanges of these products in which persons give over something they value for whatever they value more. This market process will reward people unequally, but it will reward them equitably, compensating each person in a measure equal to his peers’ evaluation of his services.

The eminent economist Frank H. Knight, founder of the Chicago School, put the matter in these words: “It is a proposition of elementary economics that ideal market competition will force entrepreneurs to pay every productive agent employed what his cooperation adds to the total, the difference between what it can be with him and what it would be without him. This is his own product in the only meaning the word can have where persons or their resources act jointly.” In short, each person will get his fair share, defined as what others will voluntarily offer for his goods and services—provided there is general freedom.

Each one of us is judged by his peers; our offerings of goods and services are evaluated by consumers who give us what they think our offerings are worth to them, and not a penny more. This is a democratic judgment on the value of the products of our labor—one dollar, one vote—and it is made by consumers who are, as everyone knows, ignorant, venal, superstitious, neurotic, biased, and stupid. In other words, people just like us—because every one of us is a consumer! When it is a question of the wage we earn we are dependent on consumers, who couldn’t care less that we are upright men of sterling character; their sole concern is: Do we have a product or service they want? If we do, they reward us handsomely. If we don’t, it matters not that we have labored long and painfully over our brainchild; if the customers don’t want it, we’re stuck with it. This is consumer sovereignty.

Consumers run the free economy; producers cater to their demands. It’s their show. What kind of a show do they put on? Not always a good one, I’m sorry to say. But I’ll say one thing for consumer sovereignty: it sure beats the alternative.

Freedom to Excel and Fail

Freedom is a costly thing, and we cannot keep it unless we are willing to pay the price. It is required of each one of us that we firmly adhere to the processes of freedom, even when we can barely stand some of the products of freedom—the products being what people do when given their “druthers.” The freer the society the more things people will do that we might find distasteful; this is one of the consequences of freedom, and we have to school ourselves to accept it. This we have learned to do in two important areas—freedom of the press and freedom of worship. We must learn to be equally tolerant in the areas of business, industry, and trade.

How fares the written word when the masses are relatively literate and free to pick their own reading material, where they themselves select the men and women who will do their writing for them? The highest paid writers may be those whose subliterary efforts jam the boob tube, some of whose opinions I quoted earlier. The magazines and newspapers of largest circulation may be those which cater to our prurient interests. Best-selling novels are forgotten by next year. But as much as anyone might deplore the decline of reading and the low estate of publishing—now that the press is free—no one with any sense would wish to add a Department of Censorship to the already overgrown government bureaucracy. To put the press under a Ministry of Information and Propaganda would be disastrous. Freedom of the press may give every idiocy a voice; authors may not reap a monetary reward commensurate with their literary talents; so be it, we say; it’s the price we pay willingly for freedom of the press. Freedom merely allows the budding genius the elbow room he needs to live, and breathe, and write. And books of solid scholarly competence still appear regularly for the small audience which needs the nourishment only the word can provide. My mind goes back to an observation of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:—never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these [works] come duly down, for the sake of those few persons . . . .”

Take the matter of religious liberty, the separation of church and state. In a free society people are not punished for belonging to the “wrong” church. They belong to the church of their own choice, or they belong to no church, as the case might be. In any event, the law pays no attention, so long as no injury is done to person or property. What happens when people are free in the area of religion? First of all, they mangle the phrase “separation of church and state” into my least favorite American shibboleth! Even people who should know better distort and misuse the phrase.

Then there are the so-called “electronic churches,” the spellbinders who appear in television; there are the “hot gospellers” who dominate radio every Sunday morning; there are the cults in which people give over their souls to some figure of dubious charismatic allure; there is the new appeal of mystical imports from the exotic Orient; the occult flourishes, along with magic and superstition. And the mainline churches, in many instances, have subordinated theology to dubious economic and political theory. Church bodies support and help finance revolutionary and guerrilla activities. But is anyone campaigning to establish a government Department of Religion? Not to my knowledge. However much we may dislike certain manifestations of religion when belief is free, we shrug our shoulders and tolerate what we dislike as the price of religious liberty.

Some of these same considerations apply to the realm of business, industry, and trade, where, as H.L. Mencken once wryly observed: “Nobody ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public.” This is all too obvious in what is called the entertainment industry. Here is a hyperkinetic young man, lacking in musical sense, who makes eight million dollars a year by howling and gyrating in public places. Here’s another young man, gifted with a high musical I.Q. and years of study behind him. A handful of people appreciate his organ virtuosity and his sensitive interpretation of Bach. He earns a living as a bank teller, directs a choir, and gives an occasional free organ recital. Young people pay millions of dollars to hear the Rolling Stones, while the Boston Symphony has to pass the hat in order to survive. Is this fair? No. Is it a matter for political solution? That would be an even greater travesty of justice.

The Market Economy

Human beings everywhere have engaged in trade and barter. There is some specialization and a division of labor even among primitive people, with a consequent exchange of the fruits of specialization. The voluntary exchange of goods and services is the market in operation, and the market is everywhere. But the market does not spontaneously or automatically transform itself into the market economy; the market economy emerges only when the moral, political, and legal conditions are right. This occurred under the Whig philosophy of men like Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. These men drew up a frame of government whose main purpose was to secure each person in his life, liberty, and property. This political idea of limited, constitutional government is grounded on the religious conviction that we are God’s creatures, possessing immortal souls. The conviction that persons are sacred is politically translated into our Creator- endowed rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Adam Smith referred to his “liberal plan of liberty, equality and justice,” with the free market as the economic counterpart to political liberty. The rule of law replaces the arbitrary will of rulers and personal freedom expands. It is significant that The Wealth of Nations appeared in the same year as the Declaration of Independence.

The discipline of economics as a separate subject matter was almost non-existent prior to Adam Smith. Virtually starting from scratch, Smith created nearly the whole edifice of economics. Adam Smith presupposed the legal framework of the Whig jurists, where the law would eliminate force from the marketplace, punish fraud, and enforce contracts. He also presupposed a high level of probity in the general population. Given these conditions, the market is self-starting and self-regulating; the buying habits of consumers guide producers, determining how the entrepreneur will decide to combine scarce resources for the maximum satisfaction of consumer needs. There will be a harmony in these diverse activities of millions of participants as if everything were directed by “an invisible hand.” The market economy—dubbed “capitalism” by its enemies about a century after Smith—contained the promise of prosperity for the multitudes. These same masses composed a self-governing people. Political liberty expanded and people had lots of elbow room to pick and choose and plan their own lives.

The Declaration and the Constitution created the political frame for a people who aspired to the ideal of”liberty and justice for all.” Political liberty assured freedom in economic transactions between employer and employee, seller and buyer. The work ethic was enshrined in America and wages doubled, redoubled, and doubled again during the nineteenth century—an eightfold increase in real wages. For the first time in history the masses glimpsed the possibility of pulling themselves out of poverty and creating new opportunities for their children. America’s schools and churches sought to shore up the traditional value structure of our culture and to orient the newly enlarged popular freedom toward virtue. Their success, needless to say, was only partial.

Was there ugliness in American life? Of course there was. Freedom was misused; the scramble for wealth was sometimes pretty crass. The newly rich were vulgar; plunderers bought and sold politicians, and fortunes were scooped out of the public treasury—all in violation of Whig theory and free market economics. But you cannot blame capitalism for the miscreants who refuse to abide by its rules.

Despite the gray and black areas in our history, there was still open opportunity on these shores, in comparison to what was available in other parts of the globe. Thirty-three million people told us so by coming here as immigrants during the half century before World War I. They came because life here—although far from perfect—was far better for them than life elsewhere.

The business of America is not business. It never was. The business of America is individual liberty, with the law enforcing an even-handed justice among equal persons. When the law provides a free field and no favor—which was the original implication of laissez faire—the economic order is the free market.

The market economy does not carry any implication that business may act irresponsibly with impunity. If, for example, industrial wastes are disposed of in such a way that persons are injured or property damaged, the law should punish those responsible and offer redress to the injured party. If a seller misrepresents a product he is guilty of fraud and the buyer’s injury should be redressed. If a businessman solicits and obtains a subsidy from government, or if government gives him monopolistic advantages over his competition enabling him to exact a higher price from his customers, he has forfeited his status as a businessman. A businessman as such has no power over anyone, his only leverage being the quality of his goods and the persuasiveness of his advertising. The businessman has the same rights and the same responsibilities as every other member of society, no more and no less.

Lord Acton’s aphorism about power has been over-quoted, but it is still terribly true. Power must be curbed if we will that people shall be free, and an independent economic order does put fetters on governmental power. People who control their own livelihood have little to fear from rulers; but political control of the economic life of a nation is totalitarian rule. The market economy curbs power in another way as well; it channels the activities of energetic, ambitious, and competitive personalities into the production of goods and services and away from politics. The rich in a free economy get that way because consumers appreciate the goods and services they offer; and if these few wish their descendants to enjoy this wealth the bulk of it must be invested in industries producing goods for the masses.

The End of Liberty

Let us give credit where credit is due; business, industry, and trade have made us into a prosperous nation. But our wealth has not made us a happy nation, or a contented one. We have proved once again—as if any further proof were needed—that prosperity and worldly success are, at best, a means to ends beyond themselves. Refine and improve a means as you will, it still remains only a means, needing a worthy end if it is to be meaningful. There is a discipline that deals with ends and goals, with the purposes that make life significant; it is called religion- though not everything bearing that label qualifies. But genuine Christianity is at a low ebb in the modern world; we have lost that vital contact with God and the moral law which energized our ancestors and made life for them an adventure in destiny. The decadence of Christianity is the root cause of the modern malaise; Plato argued two millennia ago that disorder in society is a reflection of disorder in the soul, that is, in our defective thinking and misguided loyalties. The work of renewal must begin here, with individual persons, and then go on to a restoration of the theological foundation necessary to a free society.

This is not the task of business, industry, and trade; the economic order has a more humble role to play. Business and the free economy beget a prosperous society which provides people the leisure they need to cultivate those goods which mark a high civilization: religion and worship, education and science, arts and crafts, conversation and play. These are the areas where people exercise their freedom most creatively, where they discover the goals proper to human life. Responsible freedom in the economic realm has the important role of supplying the indispensable means for these ends.

Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.

Business and Ethics (December 1983)

Mr. X manufactures gizmos in a plant which uses the varied skills of a thousand employees. These people might cheerfully acknowledge that they’d rather be sailing, or fishing, or whatever; but when it comes to supporting themselves they have chosen to work with Mr. X in preference to any known alternative. They are free to leave whenever a better opportunity offers, and many have indeed “graduated” into other forms of employment, to be replaced by people who have chosen to work with Mr. X as the best opportunity available to them. A lot of people find gizmos useful, and they are offered for sale at a price consumers can afford. So people buy, and Mr. X prospers. The relations between Mr. X and his employees are amicable; they are completely non-coercive and all arrangements are voluntary. Likewise all arrangements with customers. Mr. X is wholly dependent on willing customers, over whom he has no leverage except the appeal of his product, plus the persuasiveness of his advertising. Mr. X has a profitable business, and his customers profit too; owning a gizmo makes life more pleasant. There is an overall upgrading of the level of human satisfactions on the part of everyone involved: Mr. X, his employees, and the users of his product. By any definition of the term, Mr. X is performing a public service; everybody profits, nobody is coerced.

Mr. Y manufactures thingamajigs. There was once a brisk market for this gadget, but times have changed and the item is no longer fashionable. Sales decline steeply and the firm slumps into the red. Mr. Y’s firm is on the verge of failure. Now, no one likes to go down the drain, although in the profit and loss system of the free economy—usually called “capitalism”—some firms are bound to fail; customers simply stop buying, an act of free choice on their part, consumer sovereignty in action.

Mr. Y, although he has lost most of his former customers, has friends in Washington; so he lobbies for a handout. The politicians and bureaucrats respond by bailing him out with taxpayers’ money. What does this mean to the average citizen? People who had refused to voluntarily pay their hard-earned dollars for one of Mr. Y’s thingamajigs now have a portion of their earnings confiscated by the taxing authority in order to keep Mr. Y and his company afloat. Doesn’t seem right, does it?

As long as Messrs. X and Y operated in the private, voluntary sector of society they had no power to coerce anyone. Neither man could force anyone to work for him or buy his products. The rules of the marketplace forbid this. Under these rules Mr. Y faced failure, so he entered into an arrangement with government, and now the law forces every taxpayer to spend a fraction of his time working for Y, and another fraction to subsidize the sale of Y’s product.

There are many real-life situations that parallel the case of Mr. Y. Most recently in the news, and therefore fresh in our memories, is the Chrysler caper. The firm is a large one, and its products have merit. But for a complex set of reasons the American public turned to other makes of automobiles. The free market—which is the playing field where the rules of business hold sway—began telling Chrysler to go into some other line of business, or fail.

This adverse business judgment on its products turned Chrysler toward politics. The several hundred thousands of people who make up Chrysler—management, labor, and stockholders—refused to accept the verdict of consumers, who chose to buy other makes of cars. Instead, they turned to Washington and got help. They got a political remedy for economic failure, as have countless others.

Unbusinesslike Conduct

A business or industry endures only so long as it pleases customers. When a business ceases to please customers it ceases to exist as a business. At this stage of the game it may succeed in pleasing politicians, who have the power to force taxpayers to support the new operation. This is a different ball game. A failed business propped up by a government handout is no longer a business; it’s a hybrid which deserves criticism as an unethical raid on the public treasury. It doesn’t matter much what you label this politicized industry, so long as you realize that it operates in defiance of the rules which define a business or industry in a free society.

A businessman per se operates within the framework of rules laid down by “the market”; when he operates outside this framework, and by a different set of rules, he is something other than a businessman. “The market” describes the process of social cooperation under the division of labor, where free and virtuous people specialize in a complex variety of tasks in anticipation of a consumer demand for the goods and services they produce. This is stage one of the market, and it is followed by stage two—multiple voluntary exchanges of these goods and services where people give over something they value for whatever it is they value more. The end they have in view is maximum satisfaction of creaturely needs for food, clothing, shelter, recreation, or whatever.

Most of those involved in business, industry, and trade operate within the framework laid down by “the market.” They have a genuine desire to serve consumers; they take a craftsman’s pride in the honest workmanship embodied in quality products which make the life of all of us safer, healthier, or more pleasant. And they feel a moral obligation to give value for value received; they have adopted and try to live up to a code of “business ethics,” a praiseworthy effort, at which most businessmen succeed far better than many in other walks of life.

I was discussing this ethical point with a friend who had taught economics to a generation of students at a fine Midwestern college, where he also served for some years as Dean. We were talking about our two professions—teaching and preaching—some of whose seamier sides we had experienced from the inside. “You know, Ed,” he said to me, “a thoroughly dishonest man can last longer as a professor or a preacher than as a used car salesman!” I had to admit that there was more than a grain of truth in Ben’s cynical observation; and further, that these same intellectuals have a tendency to look down their noses at business, industry, and trade, as if the people involved in commercial activity are a lesser breed—a mean and mistaken opinion which I reject completely.

The Customer Is Boss

In a genuinely free society, a laissez faire society in the early sense of this much-abused phrase, the businessman is a mandatory of consumers; the customer is boss. Consumer sovereignty! Is this the way the businessman likes it? Of course not. Our businessman would like to think of himself as the man in charge, hands on the reins, running a tight ship. But who is he kidding? He doesn’t have even the power to set wages in his own factory, or fix the prices he’ll charge for his products! His competition, his employees, and his customers make those decisions for him. If he tries to lower wages he will lose his best workers to his competition who pay the going rate or more. If he tries to raise prices people buy elsewhere. He’s stymied, and that’s why he’s tempted on occasion to persuade some politician to bend the rules in his favor, just enough to give him a little “fair advantage.” But when a businessman yields to this temptation he forfeits his standing as a businessman and becomes something else—a branch of the government bureaucracy with a status similar to the postal service. Wealth has a universal appeal, but wealth production is a dull affair. There’s nothing about work to make the adrenalin flow or the heart to leap; there’s no poetry, dash, or glamour about commercial transactions—which is why the literary tribe turns its back on the realm of trade.

John Ruskin, for example, admired the buccaneer and freebooter type, calling him the Baron of the Crags—the knight with his castle atop a hill. The modern man of wealth Ruskin referred to contemptuously as the Baron of the Bags—moneybags, that is. The businessman tends to accept this caricature of himself and his function, vainly trying to conceal it under a false and somewhat ridiculous image. If only business radiated some of the magic that invests royalty, or reflected some of the panache of the military! So dreams the man of business, who then finds wish fulfillment, of sorts, in assuming titles such as The Spaghetti King, The Chewing Gum Czar, The Fast Food Tycoon, and so on. Captains of Industry meet with their Lieutenants at the Admirals’ Club to work out the strategy and tactics of the next “trade war.” Inside the plant or in the boardroom our tiger is referred to with affectionate dread as The Boss, or The Old Man.

The Function of the Businessman Is to Serve the Customer

There is an inversion of values here, as well as a gross misunderstanding of the role of the businessman in society, a misunderstanding on the part of the businessman himself, which is shared by friends and enemies alike. Kings and dukes in the precapitalistic ages did not produce or earn the wealth they enjoyed; they seized the wealth produced by others. They lived by “The good old rule, The simple plan, That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can.”

Royalty and the nobility exercised vital functions at the time, but work was not one of them; and the same might be said of the military. As necessary as a military establishment is for the defense of the nation, is it not obvious that military action results in the consumption and destruction of wealth? The businessman appeared on the scene as a different breed altogether; the businessman earns whatever wealth he obtains, and the method he employs increases the well-being of others. He is on an ethical par, to say the very least, with those who rule and those who fight!

“I take what I want,” said Frederick the Great. “I can always get some pedant to justify my actions.” The thief also takes what he wants, and so does the pirate and the racketeer. The king, the crook, the buccaneer and the gangster pursue their naked self-interest directly, operating in terms of a ruthless egoistic hedonism. Bemused by these glamorous figures, apologists for capitalism have explained the motivation of the businessman in terms of the same egoistic hedonism. With friends like this the businessman doesn’t need enemies! It is a truism to say that everyone tries to improve his circumstances, to upgrade his level of well-being. The question is How? Pursuing one’s self-interest directly, at the expense of other people, is the way of the powerful and the crooked. Serving one’s self indirectly by advancing the well-being of other people is the operational principle of the free-market economy.

To illustrate: the successful buggy manufacturer with a deep personal commitment to this means of transport and pride in his product finds business falling off. Consumer taste is gravitating toward the new-fangled horseless carriage. Our entrepreneur, if he wants to stay in business, must swallow his pride and put his time, talents, and capital at the service of those who want automobiles. The ruler of this tiny industrial empire, as he fancies himself, surrenders, and agrees to put himself at the disposal of consumers. Everyone’s welfare is upgraded in the only way possible for this to occur.

The Good Society

The latter part of the 18th century marks a watershed in human history. Walter Lippmann, writing about the capitalistic era which opened two hundred years ago, utters an incandescent truth about this startlingly novel way of conducting our economic affairs: “For the first time in human history men had come upon a way of producing wealth in which the good fortune of others multiplied their own.” Read that one again, for it is the basic axiom of the free market economy, so fundamental that it is overlooked by friend and foe alike. Lippmann continues: “For the first time men could conceive a social order in which the ancient moral aspiration for liberty, equality, and fraternity was consistent with the abolition of poverty and the increase of wealth” (The Good Society, pp. 193–94).

This was the social order originally known as Classical Liberalism, built around the conviction that there is an inviolable essence in each person, which it is the function of the Law to protect. When the Law is limited to the administration of justice by securing the life, liberty and property of all persons alike, then people are free to peacefully pursue their personal goals, each respecting the right of every other to do the same. This is the good society operating under the moral law, the only kind of society in which a complex division-of-labor economy can flourish.

There is a moral law whose mandates are binding on every one of us. The moral law within each person—his individual conscience—instructs us to “injure no man.” It obligates us to work for justice and fair play in human affairs; to speak the truth in charity, keep our word and fulfill our contracts. This ancient code forbids murder, assault, theft, and covetousness. These are the most important items in any ethical code, so universal as to seem part of human nature itself, and so compelling that most of us acknowledge them as binding even while we fail to obey them.

There is not a separate ethic or set of moral principles trimmed or adapted to this group or that in society, even though our common speech seems to suggest this. It is improper, strictly speaking, to talk about “legal ethics,” “medical ethics,” “business ethics,” or the like. Lawyers, doctors, businessmen are judged by the same moral law that applies to all the rest of us. Free-market rules of business fall well within the moral law; and individual businessmen, large as well as small—so long as they stick to their last—measure up at least as well as members of other trades and professions. Only when a government grant of privilege is obtained is a moral principle violated. But when this happens the violator is no longer a businessman.

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Ethics and Business

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Albert Jay Nock: Apostle to the Remnant

ALBERT JAY NOCK was before the public in one capacity only, as a man of letters. He was in turn clergyman, editor, professor, essayist, biographer, student of fundamental economics – and a superfluous man withal! How he got that way, what ideas went into the formation of his mind, he explained in his Memoirs [of a Superfluous Man], an unusual autobiography of a distinguished and lonely intellect whose bent for privacy amounted to a passion.

Nock had an ample but refined capacity for enjoying life, even though he believed that, like a citizen of fifth century Rome, he was living in the last days of a dying civilization. Nock believed he was experiencing the “imperatorship and anarchy” Henry George had predicted. But human nature is resilient, and once the pessimist assures himself that doom is certain, then that’s settled and cheerfulness breaks in – like the man in the tumbrel en route to the guillotine winking at the pretty girls in the rabble.

Albert Jay Nock devoted himself single-mindedly to the advancement of understanding – his own! Once he had unearthed a precious nugget of truth and put it on display where all who wished might see, he dropped the matter and went on to the next question. Training reinforced temperament to turn him away from even the slightest propaganda efforts; he never buttonholed anybody about anything. “Never argue; never explain,” he would say with infuriating detachment. Nock believed, correctly I think, that he had uncovered the plain truth of things in the several areas of his interest, and he painstakingly set forth his elucidations in impeccable English, serene in his faith that this fully discharged his duty. This assumption back of this faith is that truth has an internal energy of its own enabling it, if we don’t stand in its way, to cut its own channels and gain acceptance in minds ready for it. Trying to make truth palatable for minds not ready for it is no service to the people involved, for it clogs whatever thought processes they have; and truth tampered with is truth lost.

The hard truth is what Nock is talking about; truth with the bark on it, truth unsophisticated by even good intentions, undiluted by ulterior considerations. Are there minds ready for this kind of truth? Nock believed that every society has such minds else it would fall apart. Every society is held together by a select few – men and women who have the force of intellect to discern the rules upon which social life is contingent, and the force of character to exemplify those rules in their own living. Nock called these scattered few “the Remnant” in his brilliant essay,”Isaiah’s Job.”

Nock does not tell us whence his methodology derives, but we do know that his devotion to the philosophy of Henry George was life-long, and that as a student he read these words: “Social Reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting; by complaints and denunciation; by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions; but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.” Nock’s book on George appeared in 1939.

It’s a lovely notion, runs the thought, but is it practical? will it work? Well, it appears to be working in Mr. Nock’s case, although not all the returns are in and one can’t say for sure. Albert Jay Nock’s reputation while he lived was limited, and none of his books had much of a sale, except his Jefferson and the Memoirs. Nock’s death in 1945 passed relatively unnoticed. But then things began to happen; the posthumous publication of a Journal, two volumes of letters and a volume of essays; a new edition of the Memoirs, a reprinting of four of his out of print books with a fifth imminent; and formation of The Nockian Society which has just published Cogitations from AJN.

Nock sought to improve the quality of human life, and the forces he set in motion are still at work in those sensitive enough to feel them.

Originally published from the Henry George News, April 1971.

Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945)

Albert Jay Nock came before the public in one capacity only, as a man of letters. That’s the way he wanted it, believing that the rest of him was nobody’s business. We do know that he was exposed to the “grand old fortifying classical curriculum” at St. Stephen’s, where he earned a degree in 1892. He did graduate work in theology, was ordained and served three Episcopal parishes for a decade, entered the world of journalism, and won renown as an editor and belle lettrist. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943) was literary and philosophical, setting forth his views of life and society, how he came to hold them, and why. This is the kind of book that gets under a person’s skin, performing catalytically to persuade the reader to become what he has it in him to be.

Those whom Nock has reached do not form a movement or a clique: such men as the eminent sociologist, Robert Nisbet, out in the South Pacific during World War II where he “practically memorized” the Memoirs; or the influential scholar, Russell Kirk, at an army camp reading Nock and corresponding with him. Nock was a frequent guest at the Buckley home during the early ’40s, and it is safe to assume that the brilliant William F. Buckley, Jr., and his National Review owe something to these contacts. Nock inspires the reader to do his utmost for himself or herself as the only way there is for anyone to do some real service for anyone else. There’s only one way to improve society, he used to say; present it with one improved unit – yourself.

Nock laid no claim to originality; he sought to give known, tried, and true ideas a new twist, a different slant which breaks through current stereotypes. As a critic he stands in the great succession of men like Rabelais and Artemus Ward, who knew that “for life to be fruitful, life must be felt as a joy; that it is by the bonds of joy, not of happiness or pleasure, not of duty or responsibility, that the called and chosen spirits are kept together in this world.”

Nock’s books were not best sellers, but they keep coming back into print. The weekly journal he edited from 1920 to 1924, The Freeman, had a small circulation, but scholars continue to draw on it, and discerning souls regard it as the high water mark of American journalism. Nock wrote for the educable few who simply want to get at the plain truth of things – The Remnant. “You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor where they are, nor how many there are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you know, and no more; first, that they exist; and second, that they will find you.”

Nock believed that he had uncovered the plain truth of things in several areas, and he set forth his elucidations in impeccable English, serene in his faith that this fully discharged his duty. The assumption back of this faith is that truth has an internal energy of its own, enabling it, if we don’t stand in its way, to cut its own channels and gain acceptance in minds ready for it. Trying to make truth palatable for minds not ready for it is no service to the people involved, for it clogs whatever thought processes they have.

Truth tampered with is truth lost. The hard truth is what Nock is talking about: truth with the bark on it, truth unsophisticated by even good intentions, undiluted by ulterior considerations. Are there minds ready for this kind of truth? Nock believed that every society has such minds, else it would fall apart. Every society is held together by a select few – men and women who have the force of intellect to discern the rules upon which social life is contingent, and the force of character to exemplify those rules in their own living.

The Remnant grows, and they are finding him. Since Nock’s death most of his titles have come back into print, only to be sold out. Two collections of letters were published posthumously, and another Journal. Two books have been written about Nock, one about his Freeman, plus several doctoral theses. Not bad for a superfluous man!

And there is a Nockian Society, at 30 South Broadway, Irvington, N.Y. 10533, with members throughout the world. The letterhead reads: “No officers, No dues, No meetings.” He would have liked that!

Much of Nock’s work defies time, which means that he will be discovered anew by each generation. Many will make his acquaintance in the new editions of his books, whose appearance is a happy portent that Nock’s best writing will never for long be out of print.

Originally published in Fragments, April-June 1982.

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Albert Jay Nock: Apostle to The Remnant

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