Archive for free market
Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand
Posted by: |By Edmund Opitz, author of The Libertarian Theology of Freedom and Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies. This article originally appeared in the June 1976 issue of The Freeman.
We celebrate in 1976 the bicentennial of two significant events, the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, and the publication of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.
Smith had made a name for himself with an earlier volume entitled Theory of the Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, but he is now remembered mainly for his Wealth of Nations, on which he labored for ten years. The Wealth of Nations sold briskly in the American colonies, some 2,500 copies within five years of publication, even though our people were at war. This is a remarkable fact, for there were only three million people living on these shores two centuries ago, and about one-third of these were Loyalists. In England, as in the colonies, there were two opposed political factions—Whigs and Tories. The Tories favored the King and the old regime; the Whigs worked to increase freedom in society. Adam Smith was a Whig; the men we call Founding Fathers were Whigs. There was a Whig faction in the British Parliament and many Englishmen were bound to the American cause by strong intellectual and emotional ties.
Adam Smith’s book was warmly received here, not only because it was a great work of literature, but also because it provided a philosophical justification for individual freedom in the areas of manufacture and trade. The colonies, of course, were largely agricultural; but of necessity there were also artisans of all sorts. There had to be carpenters and cabinet makers, bricklayers and blacksmiths, weavers and tailors, gunsmiths and bootmakers. These colonial manufacturers and farmers had been practicing economic freedom all along; simply because the Crown was too busy with other matters to interfere seriously. There were numerous laws designed to regulate trade, but the laws were difficult to enforce, and so they were ignored.
Mercantilism
The nations of Europe at this time embraced a theory of economic organization called "Mercantilism." Mercantilism was based upon the idea of national rivalry, and each nation sought to get the better of other nations by exporting merchandise in exchange for gold and silver. The goal of Mercantilism was the enhancement of national prestige by accumulating the precious metals, but the goal was not nearly so significant as the means employed to reach it. Mercantilism was the planned economy par excellence; the nation was trussed up in a strait jacket ofregulations just about as severe as the controls imposed today upon the people of Russia or China. The modern authoritarian state, of course, has more efficient methods of surveillance and control than did the governments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the basic idea is similar.
Take the theory of Mercantilism and boil it down. What do you get? You get political control over what you eat. Now, if someone holds the power of decision over you as to whether you eat or starve, he’s acquired considerable leverage over every aspect of your life; you do not bite the hand that feeds you! If someone controls your livelihood, you do his bidding, or people start talking about you in the past tense!
Mercantilism, in short, is the prototype of today’s totalitarian state, where government — by controlling the economy — exerts a commanding influence over people in every sector of their lives.
The major theme of The Wealth of Nations has to do with the interaction between government and the economic order. The theory of Mercantilism held that government must control and manage the economy, else production would be chaotic and the right people would not be properly rewarded. Present-day collectivists concur; they want a national plan which taxes away about 40 per cent of the peoples’ earnings in order to redistribute these billions of tax dollars to politically selected individuals and groups.
Questions of Political Power
The actions of the redistributive state — call it the welfare state if you prefer — are political actions. From ancient times to the present, every political theorist — except the Classical Liberals — tried to frame answers for three questions.
The first question was: Who shall wield power? Whether the structure took the form of a monarchy backed by divine right or a democracy based on the so-called will of the majority, it was essential that power be wielded by the small group thought most fit to exercise rule. The ruler’s job is to program our lives toward the achievement of national goals. But it was never power simply for power’s sake; it was political power for the sake of the economic advantage power bestows.
So the second question is: For whose benefit shall this power be wielded? The court at Versailles is a good example of what I mean. The French nobles favored by royalty lived rather well, although they’d rather be caught dead than working. In virtue of their privileged position in the political structure, they got something for nothing. I daresay that each of you can think of parallel instances operating today, even in our own country. Now, when someone in a society gets something for nothing through political channels, there are others in that society who are forced to accept nothing for something! And the third question, of course, is: At whose expense shall this power be wielded? Somebody must be sacrificed.
Let me repeat these three questions, for they provide an apt key to many political puzzles: Who shall wield power? For whose benefit? At whose expense? One might put this in a formula: Votes and taxes for all; subsidies and privileges for us, our friends, and whoever else happens at the moment to pack a lot of political clout. The American system was to be based upon a different idea. It took seriously the ideas of God, the moral order, and the rights of persons. It discarded the notion of using government to arbitrarily disadvantage a selected segment of society, and instead embraced the ideal of equality before the law. Government, in this scheme, functioned somewhat like an umpire on the baseball field. The umpire does not write the rules for baseball; these have emerged and been inscribed in rule books over the years and they lay down the norms as to how the game shall be played.
If any person is on the field it is to be presumed that he has freely chosen to be there, and in his thoughtful moments he knows that the game cannot go on unless there is an impartial arbiter on the field to interpret and enforce last-resort decisions — such as ball or strike, safe or out at first. Government, similarily, enforces the previously agreed upon rules.
This is the political theory of Classical Liberalism, and it marks a radical departure from all other political theories. It declared that the end of government is justice between persons, and maximum liberty for everyone in society. "Justice is the end of government," wrote Madison in the 51st Federalist Paper; "it is the end of civil society."
Government Is Force
The point to be stressed is that the essential nature of government — its license to resort to force at some point — is not changed by merely altering the warrant under which government acts. Divine right or popular sovereignty — it makes no difference to this point: Government is as government does.
Governmental action is what it is, no matter what sanction might be offered to justify what it does. The nature of goverment remains the same even though its sponsorship be changed from monarchial power to majority rule. Government always acts with power; in the last resort government uses force to back up its decrees. The government of a society is its police power, and the nature of government remains the same, even when office holders are elected by a vote of the people. And when the police power — government — is limited to keeping the peace of the community by curbing those who disturb the peace — criminals —then there is maximum liberty for peaceful citizens.
"The history of liberty," wrote Woodrow Wilson in 1912, "is the history of the limitations placed upon governmental power." The 18th century Whigs achieved a limited monarchy in England, and a constitutional republic for the thirteen colonies. This was a victory for freedom over tyranny. Such battles, however, do not stay won, and in our time many people have lost their freedom.
Twentieth century political despotism is much more extensive and severe than the monarchial rule of Smith’s day, which is why The Wealth of Nations is still a relevant book. Smith demonstrated that a country does not need an overall national plan enforced upon people in order to achieve social harmony. This is not to say that a peaceful, orderly society comes about by accident, or as the result of doing nothing. Certain requirements must be met if people are to live at peace with their neighbors. It is required, first of all, that there be widespread obedience to the moral commandments which forbid murder, theft, misrepresentation, and covetousness. The second requirement is for a legal system which secures equal justice before the law for every person. When these moral and legal requirements are met, then the people will be led into a system of social cooperation under the division of labor "as if by an invisible hand."
Adam Smith liked this metaphor of "an invisible hand" and used it in Theory of the Moral Sentiments as well as in The Wealth of Nations. Every person, Smith writes, employs his time, his talents, his capital, so as to direct "industry that its produce may be of the greatest value…. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it…. He intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intentions." Smith concludes this passage by adding, sardonically, "I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."
What is Adam Smith telling us? He is saying that if we operate within the proper moral and legal framework, employing our God-given talents to the limit of our powers, then we will find individual fulfillment directly and get the good society as an unexpected bonus.
Equality, Liberty, Justice
The Wealth of Nations is generally regarded as a work on economics, but Smith did not think of himself as an economist. Smith was a professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, where he lectured on ethics, rhetoric, jurisprudence, and political economy. Ask Adam Smith for a thumbnail description of the system of political economy he believed in, and he’d reply that he advocated "the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice."
These three virtues together characterize the free society, and in fact they are but three facets of a single truth. Equality, as the term is used in the Declaration of Independence, and here by Adam Smith, means the abolition of privilege — one law for all men alike because all men are one in their essential humanity. Because all people are created equal, it is wrong for government to play favorites and bestow advantages on some at the expense of others. The goal is "equal and exact justice for all men, of whatever state or persuasion" — to quote from Jefferson’s First Inaugural. Justice is equality before the law, and this describes a society where each person may freely pursue his own goals, provided he does not infringe the equal right of all the others to pursue theirs.
You’re all familiar with the division of society into a public sector and a private sector; call the former the governmental, coercive sector, if you prefer, and the latter the voluntary sector. When the governmental sector expands, the voluntary sector contracts, and vice versa. The efforts of the old-fashioned Whigs and the Classical Liberals were directed toward the goal of a government limited to maintaining the peace of the community and assuring justice and fair play among people — the umpire role in society. This expanded the voluntary sector and gave us the ideals of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious liberty. And in 1776, Adam Smith provided a rationale for freedom of economic action.
One of the large questions which every society has to face and resolve is: How shall the economic rewards be allocated? Food, clothing, shelter — as well as things like automobiles, television sets, refrigerators, concerts, and trips to Europe — are in limited supply. How shall we "divvy up" the available quantity of these goods? Who gets what?
We know how it was under the old regime: those who wielded political power used it for the economic advantage of themselves and their friends, at the expense of those who lacked political power. There were Haves and Have-nots, and the Haves obtained their wealth by seizing it.
But when men are free, economic rewards are parceled out in a different manner. The free society allocates rewards in the market place; the Haves get that way by pleasing the customers, at which game some are more successful than others.
Consumer Choice
Every one of us in a free society is rewarded in the marketplace by his peers, according to the value willing buyers attach to the goods and services he offers for exchange. This marketplace assessment is made by consumers who are ignorant, venal, biased, stupid; in short, by people very much like us! This does seem to be a clumsy way of deciding how much or how little of this world’s goods shall be put at this or that man’s disposal, and so people of every age look for an alternative.
There is an alternative, and it runs something like this: People are too dumb to know what is good for them, and they fall easy victims of Madison Avenue. Therefore, let’s invite the wise and good to come down from Olympus to sit as a council among men, and we’ll appear before them one by one, to be judged on personal merit and rewarded accordingly. Then we’ll be assured that those who make a million really deserve it, and those who are paupers belong at that level; and we’ll all be contented and happy. What lunacy! The genuinely wise and good would not accept such a role, and I quote the words of the highest authority declining it: "Who made me a judge over you?"
The Alternative Is Worse
The market-place decision that this man shall earn twenty-five thousand, this one ten, and so on, is not, of course, marked by supernal wisdom; no one claims this. But it is infinitely better than the alternative, which is to recast consumers into voters, who will elect a body of politicians, who will appoint bureaucrats, who will "divvy up" the wealth by governmental legerdemain. This mad scheme backs away from the imperfect and crashes into the impossible!
There are no perfect arrangements in human affairs, but the fairest distribution of material rewards attainable by imperfect men is to let a man’s customers decide how much he should earn; this method will distribute economic goods unequally, but nevertheless equitably. Parenthetically, it should be understood that the market does not measure the true worth of a man or a woman. If it did, we would have to rate all who make a lot of money as superior beings — rock music stars, producers of porno films, publishers of dirty books, television commentators, authors of best sellers — and they’re not superior. To the contrary! But such people constitute only a tiny sector of the free economy, and they are a very small price to pay for the blessings of liberty we enjoy.
In a free society, those who earn more than the national average are entitled to enjoy their possessions, for they’ve gained them in a system of voluntary exchange; the well-being the Haves enjoy is matched by the well-being they have bestowed upon other people —as these other people measure it. There is genuine reciprocity in the free society. But opponents of the market are blind to its built-in mutuality. The Left, therefore, will make a determined effort to instill a guilty conscience in everyone who lives above the poverty level. They use Karl Marx’s exploitation theory which alleges that the man who works for wages produces, over and above his wage, a "surplus value" which is garnisheed by his employer. To be employed — they tell us — is to be exploited, and the whole capitalist class should feel guilty for denying the working class its due!
"Surplus Value" Exposed
This naive and vicious notion was demolished even while Marx still lived, by the economist, Böhm-Bawerk — founder of the Austrian School. Bohm-Bawerk did it again in a second book, in 1896, with the result that the exploitation theory is not now promoted even by Communist theoreticians. But the "surplus value" idea does intensify feelings of envy and guilt, so it is still useful as propaganda.
The free economy sounds pretty good in theory, you might say, but what does it do for the poor? Well, it takes most of them out of that category! A free people becomes a properous people. To the extent that the free economy has been allowed to operate in a nation, in like measure has the free economy elevated more people further out of poverty, faster, than any other system.
It is easy to see why this is so. Poverty is a lack of certain things.
A man is poor whose supply of food, clothing, and shelter are meager; he has only one shabby suit, his diet is macaroni and cheese, and he lives in a sparsely furnished room. A man moves out of poverty only as he acquires better clothes, a more varied diet, and then expands into an apartment or a house. People are well off or less well off according as they command more or less of the things which are manufactured or grown. This is axiomatic, and it follows that poverty is overcome by increased productivity and in no other way. America is the world’s most properous nation because America has been the most productive nation; we have more wealth because we produce more wealth.
Who has the biggest stake in the free economy? Who has most to lose if the free economy lapses into the planned state? Not the rich; the poor! The corporate executive type; the shrewd, energetic, hard-driving, far-seeing, imaginative, nimble, smart, tough executive will make a bundle under any system. In Russia he’d be a commissar. It’s the not so smart, not so energetic, not so imaginative, plodder type who has the biggest stake in the free society. This description fits most of us, and there is a place for us in the free society, where we are rewarded quite handsomely. We’d be serfs, or worse, in most other societies — if we survived liquidation!
When people are free, there is no guarantee that they’ll use their freedom wisely. Freedom of speech does not assure witty conversation, eloquent preaching, or lofty utterance. Most talk, as a matter of fact, is banal and shallow and gossipy; but no one on this account suggests we put a political ban on free speech. We have freedom of the press, with the result that we are knee deep in triviality and garbage. But we support freedom of the press anyway, knowing that a governmentally controlled press would be far worse. Freedom of religion opens the door to all kinds of weird cults, as well as to exotic brands of superstition and magic; but no one advocates that we repeal the First Amendment and set up an American National Church!
That is what freedom is all about — putting up with things we don’t like, and living with a lot of people we can barely stand! We must support the processes of freedom even when we cannot endorse every one of the products of freedom. And that goes for freedom of economic enterprise as well —as Adam Smith advised 200 years ago.
Now, neither the free economy nor its business sector can guarantee to every person full realization of his potential talents; this is a matter for individual decision. All the free society can promise is maximum and equal opportunity —and this is all the guarantee we need.
Tags: Adam Smith, capitalism, economics, Edmund Opitz, free market, free society, history, invisible hand, mercantilism
Humane Values and the Free Economy
Posted by: |By Edmund Opitz, author of The Libertarian Theology of Freedom and Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies. This article originally appeared in the June 1978 issue of The Freeman.
The average American is in favor of freedom and he’ll tell you so in no uncertain terms. He wants Church and State separate, he would object if government were to censor the press, he doesn’t want some bureaucrat dictating to professors what they should teach. But at the same time he wants government to control and regulate business; he thinks industry and trade need to be policed in order to protect the consumer from the wolves. Warming up to his subject he proceeds to catalogue the wickedness of people engaged in commercial activity, and especially the sins of "big business."
Strange to say, these turn out to be the same old sins one finds in every walk of life. Some men in the business world are wicked, no doubt; but so are some ministers, some professors, some publishers, some entertainers, and even some television commentators. There’s no reason for singling out businessmen—except to provide a specious rationale for saddling economic life with ever more bureaucratic regulations and controls. This has adverse economic effects, of course, adding to the costs of doing business and making all of us poorer, but that’s not the worst of it. When economic enterprise is not free every other freedom is in jeopardy.
Human liberty is a precious and a fragile thing. Human liberty can not be won, or even sustained, on the economic level alone; but it can be lost on that level, and it is being lost there. Control the economic life of a people and you control every other aspect of their lives as well. "Power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will." The truth of this ancient maxim has been pounded home in our time by the conditions of life behind the Iron Curtain.
Now, it is true that business is not the only sector of our society under fire. Our whole civilization—western civilization—has been under siege for several generations; and because our culture so largely embodies bourgeois values, the attack against business is reinforced by the revolutionary Communist thrust to unseat the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie are the middle class—townspeople engaged in industry and trade—and their emergence in the modern period was opposed by the aristocracy, whose values were quite different. Few of us live next door to counts, dukes or lords: the nobility is distant in time and space, glowingly enshrined in romance and myth. "The nobleman has courage, spends without counting, despises petty detail. There is a great air of freedom and unselfishness about the nobleman. He will throw his life away for a cause, not calculate the returns. That is the noble idea. In reality, he lives by the serfdom of others, and he broadens his acres by killing, and taking other people’s land-’the good old rule, the simple plan. That they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can." These are Jacques Barzun’s words.
Dr. Barzun continues, "The bourgeoisie opposed such noble free-handedness and supported a king who would replace ‘the good old rule’ by one less damaging to trade and manufacture—and to the peasants’ crops. But the regrettable truth is that there is no glamour about trade. Trade requires regularity, security, efficiency, an exact quid pro quo, and an exasperating attention to detail. . . . There is nothing spontaneous, generous or large-minded about it. Man’s native love of drama rebels against a scheme of life so plodding and resents the rewards of qualities so niggling."
"What a convenient word is bourgeois!" Barzun observes. "How expressive and well-shaped for the mouth to utter scorn. And how flexible in its application—it is another wonderful French invention!"
The Working Class
The free enterprise system—or what is popularly called "capitalism"—has a special affinity for the type of man we’d call bourgeois or middle class. Industry and trade have never been the preoccupation of any aristocracy, which dislikes to sully its hands with ordinary work. Most of the world’s work today is done by those who have risen from the ranks, largely by their own efforts, in societies which have no rigid caste barriers to prevent upward mobility.
The emergence of the businessman during recent centuries was not a solitary adventure; the freeing of the business sector of western society went hand in hand with the expansion of other liberties we cherish. The story is a familiar one, and it begins with the religious revolution of the 16th century which led eventually to the separation of church and state, and freedom of worship. Free speech and freedom of the press were parts of this liberating movement, and eventually—as Mercantilism gave way before the current of ideas released by Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and others—economic enterprise was freed from political regulations and controls, and came under consumer guidance.
Consumers—by our millions of daily decisions in the market place to buy this or not buy that—project a pattern; and these buying habits of ours give entrepreneurs the clues they need to direct production into this channel or that, in an effort to please customers. In the free economy the consumer is sovereign. You may regard your product as the best gismo available anywhere at any price, but if the consumers don’t like it they buy elsewhere and you go out of business. You, as an entrepreneur, have no power over customers except your ability to persuade and the quality of your product. This is the free market economy, and it is an integral part of the free society.
Everyone’s Business
Freedom, we hear it said, is everyone’s business, so each of us really does have a stake in freedom in-general. To the extent that anyone’s freedom is lost, everyone’s freedom is in jeopardy. But there are particular freedoms, and when a particular freedom is attacked you’d expect those directly involved to rush to its defense. And this is what you do find in most instances. When religious liberty is threatened, churchmen unite to oppose the threat. When freedom of the press is imperiled newsmen band together. Any impairment of academic freedom is challenged by teachers, and intellectuals do battle on behalf of free speech. And when freedom of economic enterprise is being throttled by governmental controls businessmen and business organizations mobilize to resist the attack. Right? Wrong!
Businessmen, all too often, are unwilling to speak out vigorously, even in self-defense—as the celebrated economist, Joseph Schumpeter, has scathingly pointed out: "Perhaps the most striking feature of the picture is the extent to which the bourgeoisie, besides educating its own enemies, allows itself in turn to be educated by them. It absorbs the slogans of current radicalism and seems quite willing to undergo a process of conversion to a creed hostile to its very existence. . . . This is verified by the very characteristic manner in which particular capitalist interests and the bourgeoisie as a whole behave when facing direct attack. They talk and plead—or hire people to do it for them; they snatch at every chance of compromise; they are ever ready to give in; they never put up a fight under the flag of their own ideals and interests—in this country there was no real resistance anywhere against the imposition of crushing financial burdens during the last decade or against labor legislation incompatible with the effective management of industry."
I can imagine an ideal society where each sector was alert to rebuff threats to any other sector; where clergymen would go to bat whenever freedom of the press was threatened, and publishers jealously guarded academic freedom, and professors fought for freedom of medical practice, and doctors resisted every bureaucratic invasion of the market place, and businessmen cherished freedom of religion. In real life, however, things do not happen this way.
It is partly the fault of business itself that the freedom most gravely threatened right now is the freedom of the economy, on which not only our prosperity depends, but much else besides. Those immersed in the grubby details of the market place often lose sight of the big picture; the head of a business worries about falling sales and how to meet the next payroll, but here, in this serene academic environment, we can sit back and theorize.
Better Understanding, The Best Defense
The best defense of the free economy is a better understanding of the free economy, shared by more people. So let’s put capitalism to the test. Put aside, for the moment, any opinions you may entertain about the free enterprise system we now have, and let’s draw up some plans for an ideal economic order. If we were starting from scratch what requirements would we lay down for an economic order that would meet with our approval? I’m going to suggest that there are four major demands we should make of any economic system, and after we have spelled these out a bit each of us can decide for himself whether our present system falls short and how it might be strengthened and defended.
A good economic system has four characteristics:
1. A good economy produces goods and services efficiently.
2. A good economy allocates rewards equitably, to all participants.
3. A good economy broadens the scope for individual free choice.
4. A good economy functions in harmony with religious and moral values.
There’s no argument on the first point; our present economic system does deliver the goods, as even its enemies admit. The American economy has never been wholly free; it has operated under various political restraints from the very beginning. But compared to the politically planned economies of other nations our relatively free economy has been a paragon.
Producing and exchanging in a largely free country has bestowed a prosperity upon America that the world envies. Americans started poor. There was little per capita wealth two hundred years ago; but our forebears had an abundant faith in the nation’s future under God, a strong belief in themselves, and they practiced the Puritan work ethic. This was the land of opportunity, and millions of the poor and oppressed of other nations migrated here to make their own way in this "land of the free." By and large they succeeded; never have so many advanced so far out of poverty in so short a time.
There have been evils in American life, and some are there still; along with errors, shortcomings and blind spots. But what other nation is entitled to cast the first stone, or the second, or the third? Lf the American Dream has faded, if there is tarnish on our idealism, where lies the fault? The Church and the School are the institutions charged with the responsibility for things of the mind and spirit, and if we have lost that vision without which the people perish, if our value system is in disarray, we surely can’t blame business and industry—which merely reflect the consensus.
The Goals of Life
The goals of human life, the ends appropriate for creatures such as we, are the primary concerns of religion and education. The increase of material well-being may be the means for achieving the good life; it is certainly not the end for which life should be lived. The economic order has the modest role of supplying our creaturely needs efficiently so that we may have the leisure to pursue our personal goals. In America the economy has performed its role commendably. It is not to be blamed for the failures of other institutions. The relatively free economy we have enjoyed in America has brought unparalleled prosperity, but an affluent society is not necessarily a just society. And so we come to the second test we wish to put to the free enterprise system: Does it allocate the rewards fairly and equitably?
In a free society every one of us is rewarded by his peers according to the value willing buyers attach to the goods and services he offers in exchange. This is the market in action. This market place assessment is made by consumers, and we all know that consumers are ignorant, venal, biased, stupid; in short they are people very much like us! This does seem to be a clumsy way of deciding how much or how little of this world’s goods shall be put at this or that man’s disposal.
Isn’t there an alternative? Yes, there’s an alternative, and it occurred to people more than two millennia ago. We’ll invite the wise and the good to come down from Olympus to sit as a council among men, and we’ll appear before them one by one, to be judged on personal merit and rewarded accordingly. Then we’ll be assured that those who make a million really deserve it, and those who are paupers belong at that level; and we’ll all be contented and happy. What lunacy! The genuinely wise and good would not accept such a role, and I quote the words of the highest authority declining it: "Who made me a judge over you?"
The market place decision that this man shall earn twenty-five thousand, this one ten, and so on, is not, of course, marked by supernal wisdom; no one claims this. But it is a million miles ahead of the alternative, which is to recast consumers into voters, who will elect a body of politicians, who will appoint bureaucrats, who will divvy up the wealth—by governmental legerdemain. This mad scheme backs away from the imperfect and lurches into the impossible! There are no perfect arrangements in human affairs, but the fairest distribution of material rewards attainable by imperfect men is to let a man’s customers decide how much he should earn; this method will distribute economic goods unequally, but equitably.
We do live in an affluent society, and the fact is that the prosperity generated by our relatively free institutions has been widely shared by the American people. There are the rich, there are the less well to do, and there are still some poor; but this allocation of rewards represents the choices of people themselves—as reflecting their buying habits. But the question still remains; do we have a lopsided society in which a handful of people have accumulated the bulk of the wealth produced in our economy? Dubious statistics are offered to demonstrate that 10 per cent of the people own two-thirds of the wealth, or three-quarters, or 90 per cent, or whatever. Is there any truth in such figures, or do they tell a lie?
There’s a fairly simple way to check this out for yourself. Take home ownership. Is it a fact that a handful of people own the homes most of us live in? To the contrary; 45 million homes are owned by the families that occupy them. Assuming the family unit to consist in father, mother and one child this accounts for 135 million persons. Millions of other Americans can afford to own their homes, but choose instead to rent an apartment or a house. Take automobile ownership: 82 million people own their own cars and 33 million own two or more cars. There are 130 million licensed drivers in the country.
Eighty-three million housing units have electric refrigerators; there are 125 million television sets, 55 million of them color; 70 million homes have washing machines; and there is a radio for every man, woman and child in the country. And as for food, we are the only nation in history whose number one medical problem is overeating! I do not know who concocted the first share-the-wealth scheme. It was ages ago, and it was a pipe dream from the beginning. It is a pipe dream still for most of the world’s people. But in America that dream has come true—in large measure. Capitalism—the free economy—has produced material abundance, and the benefits of our prosperity are enjoyed by almost every man, woman, and child in the country—as well as by millions of people around the globe.
Let me pursue this point through one more stage. Most people, when they reflect on the matter, agree that there is no concentration of ownership in everyday things like houses, automobiles and food. But when they get into the arcane world of the corporation, they are easily misled by those who have twisted "big business" into a four-letter word; they have been led to believe that the industry of this country is owned by a handful of stockholders.
Widespread Ownership
Pick any one of the giant corporations and examine its annual report. I picked Exxon, a fairly large outfit. The 1976 Annual Report reveals that Exxon is owned by approximately 700,000 shareholders; that’s roughly 5½ times as many owners as employees, and it’s about as many people as live in the whole state of Delaware. That’s a lot of people, but there’s more to come.
Note the large number of stockholders who are not individuals but institutions. Every major church body owns shares of stock in industry, but in some statistics a denomination counts as but one stockholder. Several thousand colleges own stock, but each is counted as one stockholder. Your local Bank and Trust Company is a stockholder on behalf of its thousands of depositors; every insurance company owns stock on behalf of its millions of policy holders; every pension fund is invested in stocks. Pension funds, including labor union funds, now own about one-third of the total value of all the stocks listed on the New York exchange. The unions have come to own so large a share of American industry that Peter Drucker refers to this phenomenon as "pension fund socialism." In short, nearly every American owns a chunk of the corporate wealth of America!
Now, it is true, of course, that there are some enormously rich people in this country. What do they do with their money? Some of them spend their money foolishly, just as you and I would do if we were in their shoes. But any millionaire, who wants to preserve his fortune and pass it along to his children and their children, has no choice but to invest it in industries which produce the incredible variety of goods which flood the market places of America soliciting the patronage of the masses of consumers. No other society has ever allocated its rewards as generously, or so equitably.
Our present economic system, the system of free enterprise, has met our first two requirements; it has made us an affluent society producing over and above our own needs, an abundance that we have generously shared with the world; and every person who has participated in the production of goods and services shares equitably in the fruits of his production.
The third test has to do with an aspiration deeply rooted in human nature; we want to be free; we want the freedom to choose. We want to be free to worship in the church of our choice, to choose our own schools, to read freely and speak our minds. We want to be free to be ourselves, even if this is to practice what others regard as our harmless eccentricities. We want to be free to choose our profession or place of employment. We want solitude when we choose to be alone, and we want the freedom to choose our associates—which includes the right to dissociate. These are some of the demands of human nature itself, this is how God made us. As Jefferson put it, "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time." Therefore, the third demand we make of an economic order is that it manifest, in its operations, a creature who is a freely choosing being.
By Acts of Choice
Man’s will is uniquely free. All other creatures—birds, beasts, fish, and so on—obey the laws of their nature willy-nilly. Only man has the capacity to disobey the deep mandates of his being. Ortega, the great Spanish philosopher, remarked that the tiger cannot be de-tigered but the human being is always in danger of being dehumanized. It is by acts of will, by acts of choice, that man is humanized; and this decision process, in the nature of the case, must be engineered by the individual concerned—by an act of inner resolve. Each person is self-controlling, he is in charge of his own life; and if a person refuses to assume responsibility for himself no one can exercise this role by proxy, from the outside.
The free society is our natural habitat; freedom accords with human nature, and the tactic of freedom as it applies in the economic sector is capitalism, the market economy. The economy is free when the productive activities of men respond sensitively to the needs of consumers, as these needs manifest themselves in people’s buying habits. It is true, of course, that when people are free to spend their money as they please they will often spend it foolishly—other people, that is! They’ll make mistakes. But isn’t that one of the important ways we learn in life, by being free to make mistakes, picking ourselves up every time we fail and standing a bit taller every time we succeed?
The biggest mistake of all is to persuade ourselves that we can avoid the little mistakes people make in a free society by adopting a planned economy. A centrally planned nation is necessarily a command society. Individual persons are no longer free to make their own decisions, their private plans must be cancelled whenever they conflict with the overall political plan. This is a giant step along the road to serfdom.
No Guarantees
To have economic freedom does not, of course, mean that you will be assured the income you think you deserve, or the job to which you think you are entitled. Economic freedom does not dispense with the necessity for work. Its only promise is that you may have your pick from among many employment opportunities, or go into business for yourself. And as a bonus the free economy puts a multiplier onto your efforts, to enrich you far beyond what the same effort returns you under any alternative system.
The American economic system—free enterprise, capitalism, the market economy, call it what you will—has never been as free as the believer in the free society would wish. But it aspires toward freedom, as do most citizens of our country; and our economy has indeed been freer than the economies of other nations. But despite the restrictions and controls, our relatively free economy has (1) delivered goods and services efficiently; it has (2) allocated rewards equitably; and (3) it does expand opportunities for personal choice in society.
There is one final point. Americans are basically a religious people who try to bring moral values to bear on the issues of public life. Does a person have to put aside his religious and moral values while engaged in the sordid business of making a living—as some misguided voices declare? Or is there, as I believe, a vital relationship between market place and altar? No man’s judgment can rise above his understanding of the facts; and as I have pointed out, there is gross misunderstanding of the nature of business and the economy—especially, it seems, among those given to pronouncing moral judgments!
Biblical religion has at least three important and relevant criteria for judging social policy:
(a) the idea of justice voiced by the Old Testament prophets;
(b) the New Testament ideal of the sacredness of persons (i.e., Rights endowed by the Creator); and
(c) the Protestant emphasis on the importance of personal decision—you are closed to God’s grace until you decide to open yourself up.
Put these ingredients together in the proper proportions—justice, the sacredness of persons, and the necessity of choice—and you have the free society. The political structures of a free society are designed to assure the inviolability of every person. They maximize his opportunity to pursue his personal goals, and they cultivate an economic order that is guided by consumer demand. This was the social goal envisioned by the eighteenth-century Whigs, the men we refer to as the Founding Fathers. What they founded was prepared for by eighteen centuries of tutelage in biblical religion.
Questions Concerning the Morality of Capitalism
This may sound good, the critic tells us, but doesn’t the psychology of capitalism take the wraps off greed, and doesn’t capitalism elevate money-making to the chief end of man? And didn’t Jesus condemn wealth?
The answer to all three questions is No. As my first witness I call upon the eminent sociologist, Max Weber, and quote from his celebrated book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. "The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit." Greed is a human frailty, to be condemned where found and overcome if possible. It is not the exclusive vice of any class or occupation. In any event, it has nothing to do with the efficient production of goods and services in the capitalist order and their equitable distribution.
My second witness is the eminent theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Late in life, after being converted away from Socialism, Niebuhr made a sage comment on the profit motive. Even the minister is economically motivated, he wrote, "when he moves to a new charge because the old one did not give him a big enough parsonage or a salary adequate for his growing family."
We can better understand Jesus’ attitude toward material possessions if we contemplate a seeming paradox: Jesus had harsh things to say about the three R’s; the three R’s in this case being Religion, Righteousness, and Riches! We learn from the Gospels that something which resembles religion, but which is ritualistic and external, may immunize us against the real thing, which is inward and spiritual.
Which of us does not feel, at times, the exasperation which caused a member of Parliament to blow his top and say: "Thank God for the Church of England; it’s all that stands between us and Christianity!" And by the same token, perfunctory righteousness—Pharisaism—may harden the heart and beget an uncharitable spirit. Riches, too, may pose a peril; but this is a matter of degree only, for it is just as common to be infected with a false philosophy of material possessions by a thousand dollars as by a million. Avarice is a common trait in all cultures and at every economic level. There are misers everywhere, and a miser is one who puts his trust in riches, and in so doing he treats means as an end.
This is the point of Jesus’ parable of the rich man whose crops were so good that he had to build bigger barns. This good fortune was the man’s excuse for saying, "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years! Take thine ease, eat, drink, be merry." There is a two-fold point in the parable; the first is that nothing in life justifies a man in assuming this attitude; we must never stop growing. It has been well said that we don’t grow old, we become old by not growing. The second point is that a material windfall may tempt a man into the error of quitting the struggle for the real goal of life. Jesus condemned the man who put his trust in riches, who "layeth up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God." Which is not the same as condemning material possessions per se, or wealth held under proper stewardship.
Life is probative; our three score years and ten are a test run. As St. Augustine put it, "We are here schooled for life eternal." And one of the important examination questions concerns the economic use of the planet’s scarce resources and the proper management of our material possessions. These are the twin facets of Christian stewardship, and poor performance here will result in dire consequences. As Jesus put it, "If, therefore, you have not been faithful in the use of worldly wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?"
Economics, the science of means, needs religion, the science of ends. To inflate a means into an end is idolatry. In sober truth, no economic system can be anything more than a means. The ends for which life should be lived take us into another dimension, into the domain of our moral and religious life. As created beings we are designed to achieve a transcendent end: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee." But if we are to live as we should live during this life, we must be free; and one of the imperatives of the free life is freedom of economic enterprise.
Tags: culture, free market, free society, liberty
Thinking About Economics: It’s more than just money.
Posted by: |By Edmund Opitz, author of The Libertarian Theology of Freedom and Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies. This article originally appeared in the May 1979 issue of The Freeman.
Man is not simply a spiritual being; he is a spiritual being who feels hunger, needs protection from the cold, and seeks shelter from the elements. In order to feed, house and clothe himself, a person must work. Augmenting his labor with tools and machinery, he converts the raw materials of his natural environment into consumable goods. He learns to cooperate with nature and use her forces to serve his ends. He also learns to cooperate with his fellows, his natural sociability reinforced by the discovery that the division of labor benefits all. "Trade is the great civilizer." There’s an unbroken thread that runs from these primitive beginnings to the complex economic order of our own time: it is the human need to cope with scarcity, to satisfy creaturely needs, to provide for material well-being.
The visible signs of this endeavor are all about us; factories, stores, offices, farms, mines, power plants. These are the locations where work is performed, services rendered, goods exchanged, wages paid, money spent, and so on. This is the economy, and in the free society the economy is not under government control and regulation.
In the free society the law protects life, liberty and property of all men alike, ensuring peaceful conditions within the community. This lays down a framework and a set of rules, enabling people to compete and cooperate as they go about the job of providing for their material well being. When government performs as an impartial umpire who interprets and enforces the agreed upon rules, then the uncoerced economic activities of people display regularity and harmony—as if guided by Adam Smith’s invisible hand!
The Capitalistic Economy
In a society where people are free, the economy is referred to as capitalistic. Some prefer the term free enterprise; others like the private enterprise system, or the private property system, or the market economy. Now, of course, no society has ever been one hundred per cent free, which means that we’ve never had a completely free market economy. Some people have always seized and misused political power to rig the market in their favor. Obviously, it is not the market’s fault if some people choose to break the rules.
The appalling thing is that many intellectuals mistake these deviations from free enterprise for free enterprise itself! And so they condemn "capitalism." But the "capitalism" they condemn is actually the failure of certain people to live up to the rules of capitalism–the system of voluntary exchange among uncoerced people. We’re aware of human frailties and shortcomings; we know that it’s easier to preach than to practice, easier to announce a set of ideals than to live up to them. Economic theory provides us with a description of the way an economy would work among a people who exercise individual liberty and practice voluntary association. It is this theory we seek to understand and explain, and it is the deviations from this ideal that we seek to correct.
Every person of good will wants to see other people better off; better fed, better housed, better clothed, and well provided with the amenities. So everyone wants the economic order to function efficiently. But how important is it that the economic order be free from bureaucratic direction and political controls? Does it do any harm if we allow the economic order to be quarterbacked by government? Let’s examine a concrete example to indicate the serious secondary consequences of government control.
In the economic sector of our society there is a multi-billion dollar industry engaged in the production of newspapers, magazines, and journals of opinion. There is also the book trade. Those who publish and distribute the printed word constitute The Press, and one of the important freedoms cherished in our intellectual heritage is Freedom of the Press. The concept is now extended to cover the media—radio and television—where the same principle applies.
Freedom of the Press means simply that the government does not tell editors what to print and what not to print–nor does it dictate to purveyors of television commentary. Some editors print stuff they think will sell. Some editors are men of strong conviction trying to promote a cause they believe in; others are party hacks thumping the tub for some ideological idiocy like communism, or anarchism, or the New Left, or whatever. But not a single editor in the country is out crusading for government censorship of the press; except indirectly!
Editorial Inconsistency
A large number of editors, writers and commentators who demand freedom for themselves in one breath, demand government regulation of business and industry with the next! If, at the urging of The Press, government continues to extend its controls over one business after another, how can anyone believe that government will respect the editorial room as a privileged sanctuary, and keep its hands off that section of business known as The Press? Socialize the economy and The Press becomes a branch of the government bureaucracy, free no longer.
The fact that The Press actively cooperates in its own entrapment makes the end result even more bitter. It is one thing to go down fighting; it is something else to cooperate in your own demise. Political control and regulation of the written and spoken word means excessive influence over the minds and thoughts of people. It means eventually a ministry of Propaganda and Information, and an Office of Censorship.
If you get the impression that I don’t think highly of some of the people involved with The Press, you’d be correct; they are—with notable exceptions—a sorry lot. They, along with their counterparts in the University and in the Church—with notable exceptions—are guilty of that "treason of the intellectuals" denounced by the French writer, Julien Benda, in his 1927 book of that title. The intellectuals’ treason in the modern world, wrote Benda, is to abandon the pursuit of truth and to seek political preferment instead.
Lest you think I am being unduly harsh on some of those who refer to themselves as Intellectuals, I shall quote a few words of C. S. Lewis:
It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by an unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her… It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary; it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.(1)
A Vital Connection
I use The Press to point up the vital relationship between intellectual freedom and economic freedom. Freedom of thought, bound only by the rules of thought itself; freedom of belief, in terms of the mind’s own energy; freedom of utterance, guided by logic and within reason–these spiritual freedoms are of the very essence of our being. When they are threatened directly all of us rush to their defense. My point is that they are threatened indirectly whenever—and to whatever degree—their material and economic support is straitjacketed by government regulations and controls.
The same analysis would apply to the Academy and to the Church. If the government owns the campus and pays the professor’s salary, the teacher becomes a political flunky, no longer free to research, write, and teach according to his best insights and conscience. And when private property is no longer regarded as the sine qua non of a free people, when private property suffers increasing encroachments by government, then church properties, too, become politicized. And, as taxes increase and disposable individual income diminishes, private voluntary funding of churches correspondingly declines and religious programs suffer. Accept economic controls, and what then becomes of Academic Freedom and Freedom of Worship?
In short, freedom is all of a piece; philosophy is not the same as digging a ditch, but socialize the ditch-digger and the philosopher begins to lose some of his freedom. Freedom of the marketplace and liberties of the mind hang together as one depends on the other.
The great philosopher, George Santayana, reflected sadly that, in this life of ours, the things that matter most are at the mercy of the things which matter least. A bullet, a tiny fragment of common lead, can snuff out the life of a great man; a few grains of thyroxin one way or the other can upset the endocrine balance and alter the personality, and so on. But the more we think about this situation and the more instances of this sort we cite, the more obvious it becomes that the things Santayana declared matter least, actually matter a great deal. They are so tied in with the things which matter most that the things which matter most depend on them!
Economic Liberty Paramount
In precisely the same way, economic liberty matters a great deal because every liberty of the mind is joined to freedom of the market, economic freedom. There’s an old proverb to the effect that whoever controls a man’s subsistence has acquired a leverage over the man himself, which impairs his freedom of thought, speech, and worship. The man who cannot claim ownership over the things he produces has no control over the things on which his life depends; he is a slave, by definition. A man who is not allowed to own becomes the property of whoever controls his means of survival, for "a power over a man’s support is a power over his will," wrote Hamilton in The Federalist. Economic planning implies the power to regulate the noneconomic sectors of life.
F. A. Hayek puts it this way in his influential book, The Road to Serfdom: "Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends."(2)
In a totalitarian country like Russia or China the government acts as a planning board to assign people to jobs and direct the production and distribution of goods. The whole country is, in effect, a gigantic factory. In practice, there is bound to be a lot of leakage—as witness the inevitable black market. But to whatever extent the State does control the economic life of the Russian and Chinese people it directs every other aspect of their lives as well.
The Masses Content to Drift
The masses of people everywhere and at all times are content to drift along with the trend; they pose no problem for the planner. But what happens to the rebels in a planned economy? Suppose you wanted to publish an opposition newspaper in a place like Russia or China. You could not go out and simply buy presses, paper, and a building; you’d have to acquire these from the State. For what purpose? Why, to attack the State! You would have to find workmen willing to risk their necks to work for you; ditto, people to distribute; ditto people willing to be caught buying or reading your paper. A Daily Worker may be published in a capitalist country, but a Daily Capitalist in a communist country is inconceivable!
Or take the orator who wants to protest. Where could he find a platform in a country in which the State owns every stump, street corner, and soap box—not to mention every building?
Suppose you didn’t like your job, where could you go and what could you do? Your job is pretty bad, but it is one notch better than Siberia or starvation, and these are the alternatives. Strike? This is treason against the State, and you’ll be shot. Listen to George Bernard Shaw, defending Socialism, writing in Labor Monthly, October 1921: "Compulsory labor, with death as the final penalty, is the keystone of Socialism." Shaw was a vegetarian because he loved animals; perhaps he was a Socialist because he hated people!
Point One: Economic freedom is important in itself, and it is doubly important because every other freedom is related to it.
To have economic freedom does not, of course, mean that you will be assured the income you think you deserve, nor the job to which you think you may be entitled. Economic freedom does not dispense with the necessity for work. Its only promise is that you may have your pick from among many employment opportunities, or go into business for yourself, and as a bonus the free economy puts a multiplier onto your efforts to enrich you far beyond what the same effort returns you under any alternative system.
Under primitive conditions a family grows its own potatoes, builds its own shelter, shoots its own game, and so on. But we live in a division of labor society where individuals specialize in production and then exchange their surpluses for the surpluses of other people until each person gets what he wants. Most of us work for wages; we produce our specialty, and in return we acquire a pocketful of dollar bills. The dollars are neutral, and thus we can use them to achieve a variety of purposes. We use some of them to satisfy our needs for food, clothing and shelter; we give some to charity; we take a trip; we pay taxes; we go to the theater, and so on. The money we earn is a means we use to satisfy our various ends.
These interlocking events—production, exchange, and consumption—are market phenomena, and the science of economics emerged, as Mises put it, with "the discovery of regularity and sequence in the concatenation of market events."
Economics Concerns the Means to Achieve Human Goals
Economics has often been called a science of means. The economist, speaking as an economist, does not try to instruct people as to the nature and destiny of man, nor does he try to guide them toward the proper human goals. The ends or goals people strive for are, for the economist, part of his given data, and his business is merely to set forth the means by which people may attain their preferences most efficiently and economically. Economics, as Mises says, "is a science of the means to be applied for the attainment of ends chosen." And a "science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends."(3)
When people are free to spend their money as they please, they will often spend it foolishly—I mean other people, of course! As consumers they will demand—and producers will obediently supply—goods that glitter but are shoddy; styles that are tasteless; entertainment that bores; and music that drives us nuts. Nobody ever went broke, H. L. Mencken used to say, by underestimating the taste of the American public. But this, of course, is only half the story. The quality product is available in every line for those who seek it out, and many do. The choices men make in the economic sector will be based upon their scales of values; the market is simply a faithful mirror of ourselves and our choices.
Now, man does not live by bread alone, and no matter how much we might increase the quantity of available material goods, nearly everyone will acknowledge that there is more to life than this. Individual human life has a meaning and purpose which transcends the social order; man is a creature of destiny.
As soon as we begin talking in these terms, of human nature and destiny, we move into the field of religion—the realm of ends. A science of means, like economics, needs to be hitched up with a science of ends, for a means all by itself is meaningless; a means cannot be defined except in terms of the ends or goals to which it is related. The more abundant life is not to be had in terms of more automobiles, more bathtubs, more telephones, and the like. The truly human life operates in a dimension other than the realm of things and means; this other dimension is the domain of religion—using the term in its generic sense. Or, call it your philosophy of life, if you prefer.
If we as a people are squared away in this sector of life—if our value system is in good shape so that we can properly order our priorities—then we’ll be able to take economic and political problems in our stride. On the other hand, if there is widespread confusion about what it means to be a human being, so that people are confused as to the proper end and goal of human life—some seeking power, others wealth, fame, publicity, pleasure or chemically induced euphoria—then our economic and political problems overwhelm us.
If economics is a science of means, that is, a tool, we need some discipline to help us decide how to use that tool. The ancient promise of "seek ye first the Kingdom" means that if we put first things first, then second and third things will drop naturally into their proper places. Our actions will then conform to the laws of our being and we’ll get the other things we want as a sort of bonus.
Point Two: Once we understand that economics is a science of means, we realize that economics cannot stand alone—it needs to be hooked up with a discipline which is concerned with ends, which means religion or philosophy.
There is no easy answer to questions about the ends for which life should be lived, or the goals proper for creatures of our species, but neither is the human race altogether lacking in accumulated wisdom in the matter. Let me offer you a suggestion from Albert Jay Nock. Nock used to speak of "man’s five fundamental social instincts," and he listed them as an instinct of expansion and accumulation, of intellect and knowledge, of religion and morals, of beauty and poetry, of social life and manners. He then makes the charge that our civilization, especially during the past two centuries, has given free reign only to the instinct of expansion and accumulation, that is, the urge to make money and exert influence; while the other four instincts have been disallowed and perverted. Our culture is lopsided as a result, and some basic drives of human nature are being thwarted.
Let’s move to the next stage of our inquiry and ask: What is the distinguishing feature of a science, and in what sense is economics a science? Adam Smith entitled his great work The Wealth of Nations (1776); one of Mises’ books is entitled The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth (1927). It is clearly evident that these works deal with national prosperity, with the overall well-being of a society, with upgrading the general welfare. These are works of economic science, insofar as they lay down the general rules which a society must follow if it would be prosperous.
General Principles
The distinguishing feature of a science, any science, is that it deals with the general laws governing the behavior of particular things. Science is not concerned with particular things, except insofar as some particular thing exemplifies a general principle. When we concentrate on a particular flower, like Tennyson’s "flower in the crannied wall," we move into the realm of art and poetry. Should we want the laws of growth for this species of flower, we consult the science of botany. These books by Smith and Mises lay down the rules a society must conform to if it wants to prosper, they do not tell you as an individual how to make a million in real estate, or a killing in the stock market. This is another subject.
The question before the house in economic inquiry is: "How shall we organize the productive activities of man so that society shall attain maximum prosperity?" And the answer given by economic science is: "Remove every impediment that hampers the market and all the obstructions which prevent it from functioning freely. Turn the market loose and the nation’s wealth will be maximized." The economist, in short, establishes the rules which must be followed if we want a society to be prosperous; but no conceivable elaboration of these rules tells John Doe that he ought to follow them.
Economic science can prescribe for the general prosperity, but it cannot tell John Doe that he ought to obey that prescription. That job can be performed, if at all, by the moralist. The problem here is to bridge the gap between the economist’s prescription for national prosperity and John Doe’s adoption of that prescription as a guide for his personal conduct.
A Science of Means
Economics is a science of means. It abstains from judgments of value and does not tell John Doe what goals he should choose. If you want to persuade John Doe to follow the rules of economics for maximizing the general prosperity you must argue that he has a moral obligation to conform his actions to certain norms already established in his society by the traditional ethical code.
This code extols justice, forbids murder, theft, and covetousness, and culminates in love for God and neighbor. This is old stuff, you say; true, but it’s good stuff! It’s the very stuff we need when constructing a proper framework for economic activity.
The market economy is not something which comes out of nothing. But the market economy emerges naturally whenever certain noneconomic conditions are right. There is a realm of life outside the realm of economic calculation, on which the market economy depends. Let me cite Ludwig Mises again, quoting this time from his great work, Socialism. Mises speaks of beauty, health, and honor, calling them moral goods. Then he writes: "For all such moral goods are goods of the first order. We can value them directly; and therefore have no difficulty in taking them into account, even though they lie outside the sphere of monetary computation." In other words, the market economy is generated and sustained within a larger framework consisting of, among other things, the proper ethical ingredients.
Point Three: The free market will not function in a society where the sense of moral obligation is weak or absent.
Nearly everything on this planet is scarce. There are built-in shortages of almost everything people want. For this reason we need a science of scarcity, and this is economics—a science of scarcity. Goods which are needed but not scarce, such as air, are not economic goods. Air is a free good. Economics deals with things which are in short supply, relative to human demand for them, and this includes most everything we need and use. Our basic situation on this planet is an unbalanced equation with man and his expanding wants on one side, and the world of scanty resources on the other.
Human Wants Insatiable
The human being is a creature of insatiable wants, needs, and desires; but he is placed in an environment where there are but limited means for satisfying those wants, needs, and desires. Unlimited wants on one side of this unbalanced equation; limited means for satisfying them on the other. Now, of course, it is true that no man, nor the human race itself, has an unlimited capacity for food, clothing, shelter, or any other item singly or in combination. But human nature is such that if one want is satisfied the ground is prepared for two others to come forward with their demands. A condition of wantlessness is virtually inconceivable, short of death itself.
What does all this mean? The upshot of all this is that the economic equation will never come out right. It’s insoluble. There’s no way of taking a creature with unlimited wants and satisfying him by any organization or reorganization of limited resources. Something’s got to give, and economic calculation is the human effort to achieve the maximum fulfillment of our needs while avoiding waste.
Let me, at this point, offer you a little parable. This story has to do with a bright boy of five whose mother took him to a toy store and asked the proprietor for a challenging toy for the young man. The owner of the shop brought out an elaborate gadget, loaded with levers, buttons, coils of wire, and many movable parts. The mother examined the complicated piece of apparatus and shook her head. "Jack is a bright boy," she said, "but I fear that he is not old enough for a toy like this."
"Madam," said the proprietor, "this toy has been designed by a panel of psychologists to help the growing child of today adjust to the frustrations of the contemporary world. No matter how he puts it together, it won’t come out right."
Relative Scarcity
Economics is indeed the science of scarcity, but it’s important to realize that the scarcity we are talking about in this context is relative. In the economic sense, there is scarcity at every level of prosperity. Whenever we drive in city traffic, or look vainly for a place to park, we are hardly in a mood to accept the economic truism that automobiles are scarce. But of course they are, relative to our wishes. Who would not want to replace his present car with a Rolls Royce if it were available merely for the asking?
These simple facts make hash of the oft repeated remark that "we have solved the problem of production, and now we must organize politically to redistribute our abundance." Economic production involves engineering and technology, in that men, money, and machines are linked to turn out airplanes, or automobiles, or tractors, or typewriters, or what not. But resources are limited, and the men, money, and machines we employ to turn out airplanes are not available for the production of automobiles, or tractors, or anything else. The dollar you spend for a package of cigars is no longer available to you for a hamburger.
The economic equation can never be solved; to the end of time there will be scarce goods and unfulfilled wants. There will never be a moment when everyone will have all he wants. "Economics," in the words of Wilhelm Roepke, "should be an anti-ideological, anti-utopian, disillusioning science,"(5) and indeed it is. The candid economist is a man who comes before his fellows with the bad news that the human race will never have enough. Organize and reorganize society from now till doomsday and we’ll still be trying to cope with scarcity. This truth does not set well with those who have the perfect solution in hand—and the woods are full of such. No wonder economists are unpopular!
Point Four: Things are scarce, and therefore we need a science of scarcity in order to make the best of an awkward situation.
The modern mind takes the dogma of inevitable progress for granted. Most of our contemporaries assume that day by day, in every way, we are getting better and better, until some day the human race will achieve perfection. The modern mind is passionately utopian, confident that some piece of social machinery, some ideological gadgetry, is about to solve the human equation. Minds fixed in such a cast of thought, minds with this outlook on life, are immune to the truths of economics. The conclusions of economics, in their full significance, are incompatible with the facile notions of automatic human progress which are part of the mental baggage of modern man—including many economists!
I’m not denying that there is genuine progress in certain limited areas of our experience. This year’s color television set certainly gives a better picture than the first set you bought in, say, 1950. The jet planes of today deliver you more rapidly and in better shape than did the old prop jobs—although there’s some truth in the remark of some comedian: "Breakfast in Paris, luncheon in New York, dinner in San Francisco—baggage in Rio de Janeiro!" Automobiles are more luxurious, we have more conveniences around the house, we are better equipped against illness. There is real progress in certain branches of science, technology, and mechanics.
But are the television programs improving year by year? Are the novels of this year so much better than the novels of last year, or last century? Are the playwrights whose offerings we have seen on Broadway this season that much better than Shakespeare? Has the contemporary outpouring of poetry rendered Homer, Dante, Keats and Browning obsolete? Is the latest book on the "new morality" superior to Aristotle’s Ethics?
Are the prevailing economic doctrines of 1979, reflecting the Samuelson text, sounder than those of a generation ago, nourished on Fairchild, Furness and Buck? Are today’s prevailing political doctrines more enlightened than those which elected a Grover Cleveland? Henry Adams in his Education observed that the succession of presidents from Washington, Adams and Jefferson down to Ulysses Grant was enough to disprove the theory of progressive evolution! What would he say if he were able to observe the recent past?
The dogma of inevitable progress does not hold water. Perfect anthills may be within the realm of possibility; but a perfect human society, never! Utopia is a delusion. Man is the kind of a creature for whom complete fulfillment is not possible within history; unlike other organisms, he has a destiny in eternity which takes him beyond biological and social life. This is the world outlook of all serious religion and philosophy. The conclusion of economics—that life holds no perfect solutions—is just what a person who embraces this world view would expect. Economic truths are as acceptable to the religious world view as they are unacceptable to the world view premised on automatic progress into an earthly paradise.
Another Dimension Transcends the Natural Order
If there is another dimension of being which transcends the natural order—the natural order being comprised of the things we can see and touch, weigh and measure—and if man is really a creature of both orders and at home in both, then he has an excellent chance of establishing his earthly priorities in the right sequence. He will not put impossible demands on the economic order, nor will he strive for perfection in the political order. Earth is enough, so he’ll leave heaven where it belongs, beyond the grave! The effort to build a newfangled heaven on earth in countries like Russia and China has resulted in conditions that resemble an old-fashioned hell. Let us strive for a more moderate goal, let us work for a tolerable society —not a perfect one—and we may make it!
Point Five: Economics tells us that the Kingdom of God is beyond history.
Economics is a discipline in its own right, but it has some larger meanings and implications. Its very nature demands a framework in which there are religious and ethical ingredients. Establish these necessary conditions—together with their legal and political corollaries —and within this framework the economic activities of men are self-starting, self-operating, and self-regulating. Given the proper framework, the economy does not have to be made to work; it works by itself, and it pays rich dividends in the form of a free and prosperous commonwealth.
(1) The Abolition of Man, pp. 34-35.
(2) The Road to Serfdom, p. 92.
(3) Human Action, p. 10.
(4) Socialism, p. 116.
(5) A Humane Economy, p. 150.
Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.
Tags: capitalism, Christianity, culture, economics, free market, free society
Review of Andrew Napolitano, It is Dangerous to be Right When the Government is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom (Thomas Nelson, 2011), 320 pp. Hardcover: $24.99 ($16.49 on Amazon.com).
I am long overdue to comment on what I sincerely believe to be one of the best new libertarian works from 2011, Judge Andrew Napolitano’s It is Dangerous to be Right When the Government is Wrong. To a great extent, I am tempted just to stop here and tell everybody to buy the book and read it immediately, but such would make me a very poor reviewer overall. The heroic host of FreedomWatch deserves better than that.
The prime beauty of Napolitano’s work is encapsulated in the Introduction, titled “Where do Our Rights Come From?” Napolitano takes his legal background as a judge and explains the natural law and natural rights (which he says are separate but related concepts) in an incredibly powerful way. He places the natural law and our rights as human beings in contradistinction with the fake “laws” that governments impose. The “legal positivism” philosophy, which says that whatever the state says is law, is denounced as a falsehood. What is more, Christians will clearly see Napolitano’s Christian faith (with a Catholic background) through his discussions of the origins of the natural law.
Napolitano continues in the “chapters” of the book working out this understanding of the eternal law, natural law, and natural rights, approaching a variety of topics including economic freedom and property rights, free speech, freedom of association, self-defense, freedom to travel and immigration, sound money, and doing what you want with your own body. Dealing with these topics is not novel, but what makes Napolitano’s explanation special is the data presented in the book. Example after example is provided that illustrate the principles in enlightening ways, and all the examples are backed up in the notes with websites, books, articles, and various other source materials.
The “Ride on Dr. Feinberg’s Bus” chapter, for instance, was particularly interesting to read. Napolitano poses a hypothetical situation for us to consider, a ride on the bus that becomes annoying and disgusting to the point of absurdity, but that none of the actions, however annoying they may be, can be considered criminal. Without getting too detailed with the specifics, Napolitano then explains why there must be a moral limit upon what kind of actions can be made illegal (hint: only aggressive behavior). Besides colorful examples, the statistics in the book are a terrific resource for future use. Indeed, I have already referenced this book a number of times when writing articles and discussing particular topics (namely, guns and health care) with my non-libertarian friends.
Part of what excites me about the book is that it is clearly targeting people who are questioning the government, but don’t know where to start building their philosophy of government. He says, “If there is any message that I hope to communicate in this book, it is that all of us should be constantly questioning the validity of our officials’ commands… We must stop obeying the unjust laws with which the government enslaves.” Napolitano has gone back to the basics and covers the gamut of personal liberty boldly and convincingly. This is not a new thing to do, but this book is special because it does so in a more accessible way to outsiders than I generally have the pleasure of reading. I cannot imagine someone from the left or right putting down the book and rejecting the fundamental claims about law and rights without understanding that by doing so they spurn all the benefits of Western civilization itself.
I do not know if this will be a book looked upon in a century as a timeless classic. However, this is a book whose time has come. In a day when so many of us do not understand what the basis of law is, Napolitano has provided an accessible book that will remind some, educate all, enlighten our way, and encourage many to take a strong stand against the tyranny of statism.
Interested in learning more? Check out the book at Amazon.com. Remember that you support the work of LibertarianChristians.com every time you make a purchase at Amazon for 24 hours after clicking an LCC link!
Tags: Book Reviews, free market, free society, government, justice, law, libertarianism, natural law, recommended books, rights
The Sinful State
Posted by: |This article is by Lew Rockwell and was originally published in his book Speaking of Liberty.
Hardly anyone talks of the table of virtues and vices anymore — which includes the Seven Deadly Sins — but in reviewing them, we find that they nicely sum up the foundation of bourgeois ethics, and provide a solid moral critique of the modern state.
Now, libertarians don’t often talk about virtues and vices, mainly because we agree with Lysander Spooner that vices are not crimes, and that the law ought only to address the latter. At the same time, we do need to observe that vices and virtues — and our conception of what constitutes proper behavior and culture generally — have a strong bearing on the rise and decline of freedom.
Let me illustrate. A speaker at a Mises Institute conference two years ago was explaining how problems of welfare, charity, and support for the poor could be handled through voluntary means — that is, through philanthropy. His explanation was brilliant, but a hand shot up.
A student from India had a question. What if, he said, one lives in a society in which the religion says that a person’s lot in life is dictated by God, and thus it would be sin to change it in any way. The poor, in this view, are supposed to be poor, and to help them would violate God’s will. In fact, a charitable person is committing a crime against God.
The speaker stood there in stunned silence. The students around the room looked at the questioner with their mouths open. We were all amazed to confront a reality too often ignored; namely, that the ethics undergirding our culture, which we so often take for granted, are essential to the functioning of what we call the good society, based on the dignity of the individual, and the possibility of progress, freedom, and prosperity.
In our country and in our times, a productive free-market economy, one supported by a strong sense of personal responsibility and a moral commitment to the security of property rights, has one great enemy: the interventionist state. It is the state that taxes, regulates, and inflates, distorting a system that would otherwise operate smoothly, productively, and to the great benefit of all, generating wealth, security, and peace, and creating the conditions necessary for the flourishing of everything we call civilization.
The name that Karl Marx gave to this system was capitalism, because he believed that the free market was the system that empowered the owners of capital — the bourgeoisie — at the expense of the workers and peasants of the proletarian class.
The name capitalism is somewhat misleading, because free enterprise is not, in fact, a system of economics organized for the sole benefit of the property-owning classes. And yet, the advocates of free markets have not been entirely unhappy with having to use the term capitalism, precisely because capital ownership and accumulation is indeed the engine that drives the operation of a productive free market.
While the system works not to the sole benefit of the capitalists, it is certainly true that private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of this class of citizens, are crucial for us to enjoy all the glories of a productive economy to bestow themselves on society.
Along with the creation of this class comes the formation of what are called bourgeois ethics — a term used derisively to describe the habitual ways of the business class. Hard-core Marxists still use the phrase as if it described the exploiter class. More commonly, it is used by intellectuals to identify a kind of white-bread sameness and predictability that lacks an appreciation for the avant-garde.
Usually it is used to describe people who have an affection for hometown, faith, and family, and a suspicion of lifestyle experiments and behaviors that skirt commonly accepted cultural norms. But those who use the term derisively are not generally appreciative of the extent to which bourgeois ethics make possible the lifestyle of all classes, including the intellectual class.
The bourgeoisie is a class of savers and contract keepers, people who are concerned for the future more than the present, people with an attachment to family. This class of people cares more for their children’s welfare, and for work and productivity, than for leisure and personal indulgence.
The virtues of the bourgeoisie are the traditional virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Each has an economic component — many economic components in fact.
Prudence supports the institution of saving, the desire to get a good education to prepare for the future, and the hope to pass on an inheritance to our children.
With justice comes the desire to keep contracts, to tell the truth in business dealings, and to provide compensation to those who have been wronged.
With temperance comes the desire to restrain oneself, to work before play, which shows that prosperity and freedom are ultimately supported by an internal discipline.
With fortitude comes the entrepreneurial impulse to set aside inordinate fear and to forge ahead when faced with life’s uncertainties. These virtues are the foundation of the bourgeoisie, and the basis of great civilizations.
But the mirror image of these virtues shows how the virtuous mode of human behavior finds its opposite in public policies employed by the modern state. The state sets itself against bourgeois ethics and undermines them, and the decline of bourgeois ethics allows the state to expand at the expense of both freedom and virtue.
In the Western religious tradition, the Seven Deadly Sins are not the only ones. They are called the deadly ones because in traditional teaching, they result in spiritual death. Let’s take each one in turn.
Vainglory
This is also called pride, or, more precisely, excessive or disproportionate pride. We know what it means for a person to be excessively vainglorious or prideful. It means that he puts his interests before that of anyone else, even if doing so may cause harm to another. It is the overestimation of the worth of oneself and one’s interests and entitlements at the expense of others.
In public policy, we can think of many pressure groups who believe their interests are more important than anyone else’s. In fact, this trait of vainglory describes the appalling clamor for all sorts of new rights. We have disability lobbyists who believe they are entitled to violate everyone else’s property rights and freedom for their own sake.
The same is true of many groups identified by various racial and sexual categories. They are convinced by their own pride to believe that they are owed special privileges. The rule of law and its equal application becomes distorted by the demands of the few against the many.
This is hardly the route to long-term social peace. Consider the issue of discrimination in hiring. Why anyone would want to work for an employer who does not really want to hire him is beyond me. In a competitive market, employers are permitted to discriminate, but the costs of discriminatory hiring are wholly born by the employer, whose success or failure is determined by the consumer.
Because employers are in competition with each other, everyone can find a place for himself within the vast network of the division of labor. The pride that leads to short-circuiting this process is not in the long-term interests of society.
The same is true of nations. There is nothing wrong with having a natural and normal pride in one’s nation. But to be vainglorious and to overestimate the merit of one’s nation can have bad economic effects. Among these bad effects may be chauvinism and belligerence in foreign affairs, as well as mercantilism in international trade policy.
If, for example, we are so convinced that American steel is so much better than foreign steel that we must punish any foreigner who would attempt to sell us steel, we are guilty of vainglory. We are also doing ourselves economic harm by forcing consumers of steel — at all stages of production — to pay higher prices for lesser quality steel than would prevail in a free market.
This is an unsustainable state of affairs. Any industry that is protected from competition becomes ever less efficient. The nation that comes to practice this form of mercantilism can end up producing all sorts of things inefficiently, and displacing new lines of production that would be efficient but are not being undertaken.
Pride in public policy can result in a failure to use critical intelligence in assessing our system of government. We might say, for example, that the United states is the greatest nation on earth. But does that mean that our tax and regulatory polices are what they should be, and that to criticize them is somehow anti-American? Not by any means. To say so is to be guilty of vainglory.
The truth is that the US system of government is gravely flawed and woefully contrary to most of what the founders hoped to bring about when they set up a new government.
The framers never imagined such a thing as the monstrous Department of Homeland Security, or an income tax, or a Federal Reserve, or a far-flung military empire that spends more than most of the world’s other nations combined.
These institutions and the change of public-policy culture generally have created the most vainglorious state in the history of the world, especially under the leadership of the current president, whose speeches and statements give new meaning to the word messianic.
Anger
Western civilization over the last 2,000 years has regarded anger as a grave vice because it leads to destruction rather than peace and productivity. Thus the institution of courts in domestic affairs and diplomacy in foreign affairs.
But in our own country, the taboo against anger in public affairs came to be violated, in particular by the war crimes of federal armies during the civil war. Civilians were deliberately targeted. Homes were looted, crops were burned, livestock killed. This was an expression of anger.
The institutionalization of anger has persisted ever since, in massacres of civilians in the Philippines, in the hunger blockade of World War I, in the bombing of cities in World War II, in the destruction of churches in the war on Serbia, and in the war on Iraq, 11 years running.
When officials say they are angry and plan to unleash Hell on some foreign country, they are partaking in this deadly vice, which also has cultural effects.
The man who was behind the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building developed his taste for violent anger during the first Gulf War. Many of the killers who have shot up public schools were later revealed to be obsessed with military means and wars.
What lesson is the current generation learning from the speeches and attitudes of the current ruling class and its taste for blood? I shudder to think.
The modern military arsenal, combined with a shredding of all restraints on what is permissible and impermissible in warfare, has unleashed the angry state on the world. Its relentless mode in foreign policy is vengeance, and its main product is human suffering and death.
Envy
Again, this is a word hardly heard anymore. Envy is not the same as jealousy. Jealousy is merely wishing that you enjoyed the same property and status as another. Envy means the desire to harm someone else solely because he enjoys some quality, virtue, or possession, and you do not. It is the desire to destroy the success or good fortune of another.
In the current round of corporation bashing, I fear the unleashing of envy against people because of their personal accomplishments. And we see the work of envy in the redistributionist welfare state.
Some people say that what matters most is not that the welfare state helps the poor but rather that it hurts the rich. So too with the inheritance tax, which collects relatively little revenue, but does grave damage to would-be family dynasties.
How many Congressional speeches against the business class and the rich are driven by this deadly sin? All too many. Antitrust policy that seeks to smash a business solely because it is big and successful is a working out of envy. I recall an article by Michael Kinsley several years ago in Slate magazine that honestly asked the question: what is wrong with envy?
Nothing, he concluded. In fact, he rightly observed, it is the foundation of much modern public policy. Even so, it is a deadly sin. It is one that will destroy society if it is fully unleashed. And nowhere is it more relentlessly unleashed than within the culture of the state itself, which attacks success in business and private life in every way.
A century ago, many private dynasties had more wealth at their disposal than the federal government. Would the modern Envy State tolerate such a thing? Not likely. All wealth apart from the state’s own is up for grabs, but particularly dynastic wealth.
Covetousness
The related sin of desiring to grasp what belongs to another, through whatever means one can assemble, is also socially harmful. Through taxation and welfare programs, the state is effectively blessing the sin of covetousness.
Now, let us be clear. To covet something is not the same as an innocent desire to improve one’s lot in life. This is a good impulse, one that drives people to succeed. Covetousness is different because it cares nothing for the means used to achieve one’s goals.
Instead of productive exchange, covetousness resorts to theft, whether private theft or public theft that uses the government. We saw covetousness turn to a public clamor after the collapse in stock prices in 2000 and following, when the public demanded that the Fed do something to stop their investments from going belly-up.
Here again, we see the desire for money outstrip the moral consideration of how precisely this money is to be acquired. And the more the state feeds the sin of covetousness, the more of it we are likely to see, and the more bourgeois ethics fall into disuse.
The modern state is nothing if not covetous. It has its gaze constantly fixed on our liberty, privacy, wealth, and independence, and desires to take through any means possible. In the covetous state, liberty is always declining, the percentage of wealth subject to taxation always growing, and the ability for institutions and individuals to thrive apart from government blessing always in doubt.
Gluttony
We think of gluttony as solely related to eating. But it can also mean the excessive desire for comfort, luxury, and leisure at the expense of work and productivity. Senior citizens’ lobbies, when they demand that the public provide comfy living for all septuagenarians at the expense of young workers, are playing into the deadly sin of gluttony.
The problem doesn’t only afflict seniors. It is a problem among the poor, who have been conditioned by the welfare state to believe they are entitled to live well without earning their money. Interestingly, rates of obesity among the poor far outstrip those among the bourgeoisie.
The pervasiveness of gluttony also shows up in the appalling consumer debt load. This implies a desire to consume now regardless of the later consequences. The gluttonous consumer cares nothing about the long term, only that his appetite is satisfied today.
The Federal Reserve encourages this deadly sin through loose credit policies and bailouts, which create the illusion that there is no downside to living for the present at the expense of the future. So too with the policy of inflation, which encourages us to spend money today because it will have less buying power tomorrow. Inflation institutionalizes the sin of gluttony and makes it appear rational.
It only takes a quick look at a detailed map of Washington, DC, to see the ultimate display of gluttony, for land, money, and power. From the point of view of the state, it never has enough land, money, and power. It eats and eats, grows ever fatter, and you take a risk in merely pointing this out.
Sloth
The story of how the welfare state has created a slothful class is an old one, hardly disputed anymore, but no less true. The promise of something for nothing at others’ expense has corrupted the poor, but also the aged and another group as well: students between the ages of 18 and 25.
On the aged, it is pathetic to see how a class of people that should be leading society with wisdom and through experience, to the highest ideals, has become a grasping group of vacationers with ever more time on their hands. Let us be clear: in a free society, there is no right to retirement, and certainly no right to a comfortable retirement. The concept itself was invented by the late New Deal. Before then, sloth was something to be purchased with one’s own money. Now, one can enjoy it via the tax state.
As for students, our school system has socialized them into believing that the more official credentials one earns, the more one has the right to extract from society, a payment in return for blessing the world with one’s mere presence. Talk to anyone who is in the hiring business these days. He will tell you that it is extremely rare to find a young person who understands that employment is not a tribute paid but an exchange of work for wages. All these trends are worse in Europe, where school welfare is more generous — but we are catching up.
The subsidization of sloth creates a vicious circle. The more the state rewards not working, the less people have by way of personal and financial resources to live independently from the state. The slothful are naturally inclined to develop dependencies, which is exactly the way the state likes it.
Meanwhile, consider the slothfulness of the state itself. There is no more risk-averse class than the bureaucratic one. Whether it is in the FDA process of approving drugs or the loan-application department at HUD, getting bureaucrats to work is like getting hogs to run a race.
Some years ago, a federal bureaucrat sent us the following article, to which he refused to attach his name. It noted,
What draws people to government work? What keeps them there for a lifetime? It’s simple: overcompensation, huge benefits, and great working conditions. It’s attractive to sign up and nearly impossible to leave…. What would I lose if I left the government? The short work week would be out the window…. Right now, I can spend 8.7 percent of my work time on vacation. That’s six weeks per year in perpetuity…. I could also forget about the unofficial "bennies": for example, I take an hour-long jog every day, followed by a shower and a leisurely lunch. It keeps me in tip-top condition for my vacations. And shopping excursions during work are always possible. What about stress? If relaxation lengthened life, bureaucrats would live to be 150 years old.
And yet, in this one area, perhaps we should be grateful. The only thing worse than the slothful state is an energized one that awakes early to take away our liberty.
Lust
This is thought of as a personal problem only. But we see its destructiveness at work in any government policy that fails to appreciate the family as the foundation of bourgeois society. In public life today, we pretend as if the family is dispensable, when it is the essential bulwark between the individual and the state.
Thoughtful economists like Ludwig von Mises and Joseph Schumpeter saw that the family is the training ground for the ethics of capitalism. It is here where we learn about the evil of theft and to respect others’ property, to save and to plan for the future, to keep our word.
It is no accident that Marxists have long sought to smash the family as an institution, and reduce all of society to atomistic individuals who lack the resources to provide security for themselves and who inevitably turn to the state, instead of parents and kin, for help.
These are the Seven Deadly Sins, and in each case, and in a hundred ways I have not mentioned, current government policy encourages them at the expense of bourgeois ethics, which are the ethics of a free market, of a society that is productive, peaceful, and secure from arbitrary power.
Why do we hear so little of the Seven Deadly Sins? Perhaps because no institution is more gluttonous, covetous, prideful, or angry than the state itself. In the private sector, market institutions correct these abuses over time. In the state, with no market test and no check on unethical behavior, these deadly sins thrive with a vengeance.
I am by no means despairing of the future of the bourgeoisie. If there were a danger that this class could be destroyed, 60 or so years of government policy designed to kill it would have accomplished its goal by now.
And yet, we should not become complacent. To the same degree that so many current political struggles are reduced to a conflict of cultures, our best means of fighting back is to live and practice bourgeois ethics in our homes, communities, and businesses.
Let us instead recall the four great bourgeois virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, and, in doing so, do our part to build freedom and prosperity, even in our times. May we never take these cultural foundations of our civilization for granted.
Tags: free market, free society, government, sin, statism, The State, vice, virtue
Norman Horn is the creator and primary writer for LCC. Learn a little bit about him in the 