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.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

The Sinful State

To me, it seems ironic to me that they would criticize “neo-liberal thinking” of trying to implement “technical solutions” to economic problems, then essentially propose a new central bank. I can’t think of anything more “technical” than forming a new state apparatus that has monopoly power over money itself. If anything, the statement shows a profound confusion about the nature of economic problems in the world and what must be done to solve them.

Tom Woods has been very busy these past few days writing response articles to this statement, and they are worth reading (especially if you’re not particularly familiar with the internals of the Catholic Church). Here are the links:

Idolatry of the Market at LewRockwell.com

Truth and Charity at Taki’s Magazine

Don’t Mix the Ecclesiastical with the Economical at NPR

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

The Vatican’s Confused Statement on the Marketplace

"Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended." ~ George W. Bush, September 11, 2001

We have heard it repeated loudly and continuously since 9/11 – the troops are defending our freedoms. This claim is made so often and by so many different segments of society that it has become another meaningless national dictum – like "God Bless America" or "In God We Trust."

This cliché is actually quite insidious. It is used as a mantra to justify or excuse anything the U.S. military does.

U.S. troops are engaged in unconstitutional, undeclared wars – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. drone strikes killed civilians in Pakistan – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. bombs landed on a wedding party in Afghanistan – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. soldiers murdered Afghan civilians and kept some of their body parts – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. helicopter pilots gunned down Iraqi civilians – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. soldiers killed civilians for sport – but the troops are defending our freedoms. U.S. troops carelessly killed civilians and then covered it up – but the troops are defending our freedoms.

But as I have pointed out many times in my articles on the military, and others like Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation have been arguing for years (see here and here), the troops are doing everything but defending our freedoms. In fact, the more the troops defend our freedoms by bombing, invading, and occupying other countries, the more enemies they make of the United States and the more our freedoms get taken away in the name of "fighting terrorism" or "national security."

Not in any particular order, and in varying degrees of significance, here are some freedoms I wish the military were defending:

• The freedom to fly without being sexually violated.
• The freedom to purchase a gun without a waiting period.
• The freedom to grow, sell, and smoke marijuana.
• The freedom to sell goods and services for whatever amount a buyer is willing to pay.
• The freedom to make more than six withdrawals from one’s savings account each month.
• The freedom to drink alcohol as a legal, voting adult under twenty-one years of age.
• The freedom to purchase Sudafed over the counter.
• The freedom to gamble without government approval.
• The freedom to deposit more than $10,000 in a bank account without government scrutiny.
• The freedom to not be stopped at a checkpoint and have one’s car searched without a warrant.
• The freedom to sell any good or offer any service on Craigslist.
• The freedom to fill in a "wetland" on one’s own property.
• The freedom to cut someone’s hair for money without a license.
• The freedom to home-brew over 100 gallons of beer per year.
• The freedom to advertise tobacco products on television.
• The freedom to smoke Cuban cigars.
• The freedom to not wear a seatbelt.
• The freedom to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
• The freedom to keep the fruits of one’s labor.
• The freedom of an employer and an employee to negotiate for any wage.
• The freedom to discriminate against anyone for any reason.
• The freedom to videotape the police in public.
• The freedom of businesses to hire and fire whomever they choose.
• The freedom to not be brutalized by the police.
• The freedom to not be arrested for victimless crimes.
• The freedom to sell raw milk.
• The freedom to not have one’s child subject to unnecessary vaccinations.
• The freedom to not have one’s child unjustly taken by Child Protective Services.
• The freedom to not be subject to the Patriot Act.
• The freedom for kids to set up neighborhood lemonade stands.
• The freedom to not have every facet of business and society regulated.
• The freedom to stay in one’s home during a hurricane.
• The freedom to not have our e-mail and phone conversations monitored.
• The freedom to travel to and trade with any country.
• The freedom to be left alone.

Certainly there are hundreds of things that could be added. We no longer live in a free country. We are increasingly living in a police state, a warfare state, and a national security state. Our freedom is not absolute. The only reason the United States is still considered "the land of the free and the home of the brave" is because we are relatively free, with the degree of freedom varying depending on which country America is compared to.

Would I rather live somewhere else? No, I wouldn’t, but that is a ridiculous question. First of all, if the typical German, Italian, Swede, Korean, Australian, or Spaniard were asked if he would rather live somewhere else you would probably get the same answer. And second, although a prisoner would rather live in a clean prison than a dirty prison and a safe prison rather than a violent prison, he would prefer to not be a prisoner in the first place.

I conclude with three brief thoughts. One, I want the military to defend our freedoms. But fighting foreign wars only reduces our freedoms. After all, it is still true that war is the health of the state. Two, if the military is going to defend our freedoms, then we need freedoms to defend. Our freedoms must be restored before the military can defend them. And three, the greatest threat to our freedoms is the U.S. government, not the governments of China, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, or Iran.

Originally published at LewRockwell.com on September 6, 2011.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Freedoms I Wish the Military Were Defending

I’m still waiting for him, or anyone else, to explain exactly how one measures the common good.  Should we measure it in median income, chicken dinners per household, or perhaps dinners per chicken coop?

Come to think of it, one cannot “measure the economy” at all; neither by the common good nor by maximum profit.  Maximum profit is only a useful measure for a private enterprise.  It is the key measure to know whether the company is producing more value than it is costing.  Every company should aim for this goal.  The economy as a whole is an impossible and meaningless aggregate like GDP and is used for political aims, not economic gains.

He continues, “The economy cannot function only with mercantile self-regulation but needs an ethical reason in order to work for man,”  But this fails to realize that these interests are one and the same.  It is ethical and necessary for man to work because God commands us not to take from others.  In our pursuit of profits the market is regulated by supply and demand.  This is not a “self” regulation but a product of the free market system.  Nowhere, this side of heaven, will people “self-regulate” their actions.

Tom Woods, a vocal Catholic and Austrian economist, has written a great book on the church and the free market. I wish the Pope would read it.

Editor’s Note: Although we think the Pope is completely wrong on this issue, we do not wish to be disparaging in total. (The alliteration was clever, though, don’t you think?) We will freely criticize leaders of any denomination who promote bad economics and seek power, and herald those who speak truth to power.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Don’t be duped by this dope, errr, Pope.

I might consider myself a Libertarian, except I just can’t get over that so many libertarians are atheists and against all religious expression by government. For instance, Libertarians hate Mike Huckabee for some fear of a “theocracy.” How do you address these things about your secular libertarian friends (such as Ayn Rand types)?

This question has multiple levels, and thus I want to wade carefully through the various issues wrapped in it. First off, just because there are plenty of atheist libertarians does not mean that it is a political philosophy only for atheists. On the contrary, I would argue that Christianity has lots in common with libertarianism and very little in common with statism. A philosophy that is essentially founded upon “treat others the way you want to be treated” would naturally see Christianity as favorable. See my Lessons in Liberty article for more.

As for religious expression by governments, Christian libertarians do not want to see government taking on vestments of Christianity whatsoever for two reasons: (1) the State is founded in rebellion to God and it should not be covered in Christian garb to look better than it is. We should always look to expose the State’s evils rather than “baptize” it to gain benefits; and (2) the Church universal needs to be internally protected from the trappings of the State in order to stay pure. The more governments get wrapped up in Christianity, the worse it will be for the Church.

I wouldn’t say that libertarians “hate” Huckabee because they fear theocracy (hate is a strong word anyway). Still, there is much to despise in his politics. Huckabee is a warmonger, pro-big government, pro-drug war, economically illiterate, anti-free market, anti-immigrant, and a supporter of the police state. If he supports these things because he thinks that’s what God wants, then he’s completely off his rocker and that’s worth criticizing in its own right.

I have many non-Christian, libertarian friends. Some of them love Ayn Rand, some don’t. But I have rarely had any issue in sharing my faith or dealing with sensitive topics because we have a common desire to treat others with respect. Here’s the bottom line: liberty brings people together. Libertarians come from all over the belief spectrum, but the commonality of seeking liberty transcends boundaries. As a result, you have many opportunities to live out the gospel to those around you.

********

He concluded with a statement that kind of begs a response:

Also, I can’t get over how so many Libertarians (probably not you guys) are like Barney frank on social issues but Jim DeMint on fiscal issues.

Christian libertarians do not believe that you can solve moral problems through legislation. Insofar as law exists, we seek to reduce its grasp on individual action that is not aggressive in nature. Instead, we want to use the power of social change, leveraged through the Church and local communities, to fix such problems.

Libertarians understand that the government cannot do anything right for an economy. Thus, if the government is to exist at all, it should not involve itself in anything other than the protection of basic property rights. (And many libertarians, myself included, think the State cannot even protect rights without becoming corrupt!) Hence, the government should abolish all income and property taxes and not involve itself in trade whatsoever.

Besides that, Jim DeMint is not a great example of someone being “libertarian” on fiscal issues. If you’re going to look anywhere in Congress, look to Ron Paul!

Have a question you’d like to ask? Submit yours here.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Government and Religious Expression

“Common Sense Concept exists at the center of a new conversation about how things should be.  Many years of poverty and stories of redemption have shown what works and what doesn’t.   A generation that understands these truths will, finally, transform society. Be a part of it.”

The target market is evangelical college students and young adults. I don’t know exactly how effective it will be, nor do I support every policy position take by AEI.  But when they asked me to contribute to their blog, I agreed.  Here’s my inaugural post.  I’ll be posting responses to articles probably once or twice a month.  Hopefully this will continue to advance deeper thinking about political philosophy among Christians.  I encourage LCC readers to check it out and lend your always insightful comments!

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Common Sense Concept

Freedom is the default.

(Great job Students for Liberty friend Michelle Fields as well. If I recall correctly, she is a student at Church of Christ-based Pepperdine University as well! Michelle, if you’re an LCC reader please comment so we can all brag on you a bit…)

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

How much money would someone have to pay you to give up the internet?

Every person of good will longs for peace on earth; he strives for justice and fair play in human affairs. Proclaiming such goals as these does not distinguish the Socialist from other men; rather, it is his means for attaining these ends that marks him out. The operational imperatives of a Socialist order demand a coercive arrangement of society, within which the lives of the many are planned and managed by the few who wield political power. Why do many otherwise idealistic and intelligent people find this scheme appealing? This is a recurring question. Everything about freedom seems so natural and so right to those who understand it that they can’t help but wonder why anyone rejects it in favor of Socialism or Communism. But millions do.

The twentieth century faces Left, and nation after nation succumbs to a "progressive" ideology. Marxism, of the Moscow or the Peking variety, is the official faith of hundreds of millions of people the world over. Countless others may reject Marxism, but they embrace a "liberal" ideology; they advocate national planning, state regulation of key industries, public works, welfarism. Add up these millions and you ask: Who else is there? Well, there are a few people in today’s world who are firmly grounded in the tradition of eighteenth century Whiggism, or Classical Liberalism; who acknowledge the political wisdom of The Federalist; who embrace the free market economic theories of the Manchester and Austrian Schools. There are able scholars in this camp whose writings demolish collectivist theory and marshall solid, carefully reasoned moral and intellectual arguments on behalf of the free economy/free society position.

The soundness of this freedom philosophy is attested even by its opponents, that is to say, by the triviality of Left-wing analysis and criticism of it. The Left rarely attempts to make the case against the philosophy of the free society by meeting its arguments on their own level. We may be sure that if the Left had such a case they’d use it. The Left opposes the free society position, of course, but seldom by argument, that is, intellectually. Opponents of the free economy position have several typical ways of dealing with it. The first tactic is to ignore it; don’t discuss; pretend it isn’t there. The second line of defense is: If you can’t ignore it, misstate the position; then knock the straw man down. Third, call names. Useful epithets are "reactionary," "eighteenth century idea," "capitalist," "outdated." Fourth, allege hardheartedness toward the plight of "the poor." This last is almost hilarious.

To the extent that the free economy has been allowed to function in a given nation, in like measure has the free economy elevated more poor people further out of poverty in less time than any other system! What amalgam of ignorance, stupidity and malice does it take to bring this charge against the free economy, that it neglects "the poor"? The record shows that the government handout system, by contrast, not only fails to help "the poor," it keeps them that way — and demeans them to boot!

Attacks Rooted in Envy

The system of liberty has solid intellectual and moral foundations; why, then, do not more people find the case persuasive? Why do so many people gravitate toward freedom’s opposite, jostling one another as they crowd the road to serfdom? Is there some human trait which, released from moral controls, is readily enlisted under the banners of Socialism? The answer is Yes; there is such a trait — envy. Envy, and its twin, covetousness, are unlovely facets of human nature, and only moral energy keeps them bottled up. But when envy and covetousness are uncorked they work against freedom and for Socialism.

Ask the man in the street what he understands by Socialism, and he’ll tell you that it’s a scheme for dividing up the wealth; "the equal division of unequal earnings," as someone put it; soaking the rich to pay "the poor." Spellbinders of the Left play upon the feelings of envy and covetousness with practiced skill, setting person against person, class against class. These ugly traits of human nature have caused trouble since time immemorial. "Thou shalt not covet," is one of the Ten Commandments; envy and covetousness are two of the Seven Deadly Sins. Our forebears, aware of the destructive potential of these traits, endeavored to neutralize them by making their control a religious duty.

But if the egalitarian drive is to pick up momentum, it needs the fuel only envy and covetousness can supply. Socialism uses envy, and exploits the new morality whose energumens tell people that they should covet their neighbor’s goods. Roll your own Ten Commandments, and remember that there are easier ways of getting your hands on a buck than working for it! The society is first divided into the Haves and the Have-nots. Then the Have-nots must be convinced that their lack of the amenities is somehow the fault of the Haves; that the man who earns twenty-five thousand dollars a year is somehow to blame for the fact that another man earns only seventy-five hundred.

With a part of ourselves we’d like to believe this, so it is not surprising that a lot of people are reluctant to utter a mea culpa in the case of their own failures and shortcomings; they find it gratifying to learn that someone who seems more successful than they, is the reason they are not doing better. Such sentiments as these are music to our ears, but they cannot survive even a limited exposure to economic reasoning.

Advantages of Trade

We can learn from economics, if we will, that the free economy is not like a zero sum game where one man’s gain inevitably means another man’s loss. In a poker game, as one man’s stack of chips grows higher and higher there is a corresponding shrinkage of the other players’ stacks. In the market economy, by contrast, there is a progressive increase in the number of chips (so to speak) available to every player; and every man earns precisely what consumers think his services are worth. Now, in his secret thoughts, Everyman knows he is worth a great deal more than consumers think he’s worth! It is only experience and self-discipline that allows the reality sense in most people to be brought into play and prevail in the end. But economic understanding, and reasonable considerations such as these, must be squelched in order to inflame more acutely the envy of the Have-nots.

But envy is only the first half of the story; the inflamed envy of the Have-nots must be orchestrated into harmony with the aroused guilt of the Haves. Now, a person whose wealth has been obtained by force and fraud should feel guilty; if there is no guilt feeling associated with advantages gained at another’s expense there is evidence of a moral blind spot. Parenthetically, there are scores of millions in this category — gaining advantages at someone else’s expense —every person on the welfare state’s subsidy list! And paradoxically, most of these would be thought of as being in the Have-not category, and would so place themselves, and they would attach great virtue to the particular means by which they obtain an income!

Consumers Make the Awards

Every one of us in a free society is rewarded by his peers according to the value willing buyers attach to the goods and services he offers for exchange. This market place assessment is made by consumers who are ignorant, venal, biased, stupid; in short, by people very much like you and me! 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?" Anyone who applied for such a role would cast grave doubt on his wisdom and goodness by the mere fact of applying!

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 Socialism’s alternative, which is to recast consumers into voters, who will elect a body of politicians, who will appoint bureaucrats to 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.

A Guilt Complex

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 they enjoy is matched by the well-being they have bestowed upon other people! There are no valid reasons for anyone to be plagued by feelings of guilt on this score. There is genuine reciprocity in the free society, but its opponents are blind to the market’s 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 is to be exploited, and the whole capitalist class should feel guilty for denying the working class its due!

This naive notion was demolished by Böhm-Bawerk even while Marx lived, and it is not now defended even by Communist theoreticians. But the "surplus value" idea accords with feelings of envy and guilt, so it is still useful as propaganda.

Given a century and more of Marxist propaganda and it is not surprising that there are a lot of guilt-ridden millionaires and sons of millionaires, as well as many captains of industry and top executives whose hearts bleed for "the poor." Envious Have-nots and guilty Haves: fertile breeding ground for Socialistic propaganda!

It is not only among individuals that wealth differentials are exploited; there are Have and Have-not nations. The Have-not nations are those to whom Americans have given upwards of two hundred billions of dollars worth of goods since the end of World War II. But despite this incredible bounty (for which the nations of the world rise up and call us blessed!) we still have too much, in the eyes of our critics. The words vary but the music is always the same: Americans who represent only 7 per cent of the world’s population consume 20 percent of the world’s food, drive 75 per cent of the world’s automobiles, have 75 per cent of the world’s television sets, and so on and on and on.

Now, I’m an amateur critic of the quality of life lived in America, and for those who insist on having my opinion I’d say that Americans do eat too much, and they stuff themselves with food of the wrong kind. It would be good for them to leave the car in the garage occasionally, and walk, or ride a bicycle. Furthermore, no mixture of ease, comfort, speed and gadgetry will add up to the good life — as most persons would agree. But all this is by the way; the matter at issue here is not the desirability of a more Spartan or Stoic style of life — which, incidentally, is not practiced by the rich of Asia, Africa, Europe, or you name it. It’s just that more people in these fifty states are enabled to enjoy more material wealth than all but a handful of people elsewhere, and so we are conspicuous enough to provoke the carefully nurtured envy of the rest of the world. Should Americans deliberately lower their living standards? Well, perhaps there are good reasons for a return to plain living, hard work and the Puritan ethic — but deferring to local liberals and critics from the Have-not nations is not one of them!

Productivity the Key

Americans do consume more on the average than the people of other nations. It might be interesting to ask why. The answer is clear: Americans consume more because Americans produce more. If the people of India want to consume more, they’ll have to learn to become more productive. And America is bursting with people who would be delighted to tell them how to increase their productivity. You merely have to accumulate capital at a faster rate than population growth, so that each worker will have more and more machinery, tools, and equipment. Productive efficiency, in other words, requires institutional incentives for capital accumulation — such as widespread belief in the sacredness of private property; an ethic which exalts honesty, thrift, and hard work; the idea of inherent rights, and so on. A nation that builds on a foundation like this is bound to prosper, as America has.

Suppose the American government continues to yield to the pressure of envy stemming from the Have-not nations, and increases the tax bite on American citizens so that they will consume less. Suppose, in other words, that a larger and larger percentage of the goods produced here annually is siphoned off and shipped abroad.

What will happen to production here when our people are prevented from enjoying its fruits? You know what will happen to it; production will decline, inevitably. Why does a man produce? He produces in order to consume; consumption is the end in view of all productive activities. If everything a man produces is taken from him he’ll stop working; and if fifty per cent is taken from him he’ll slow down.

The upshot is that the worst help we can give to the Have-not nations is to inflict policies upon Americans which will inevitably make us dollars poorer without making the Have-not nations a penny richer.

This envy/guilt syndrome provides an interesting glimpse into the Socialist mentality, which has little concern with production, with the way material goods come into existence. Socialists are preoccupied with the political redistribution of the already existing stock. There is, in fact, only one way to make economic goods appear, and that is to apply human energy, augmented by tools and machinery, to raw material. Human labor applied to natural resources is the only way to produce food, clothing, shelter, and the amenities; but the Left has no interest in this process, let alone in increasing its efficiency.

Tax and Subsidize

The attention of the Left is focused on taxing producers and subsidizing consumers. Assuming that production occurs by magic, automatically, Socialism has no program except to seize property from the Haves and distribute it to the Have-nots. The guaranteed end result of this to enforce domestic poverty and spread hunger around the globe. But a certain glamour attaches to any Robin Hood operation which promises to take from the rich and give to the poor — and some of this glamour lingers even after it has become plain that Robin the Hood is actually robbing both rich and poor for the benefit of Robin!

As a result of economic progress, a society moves up from a situation where just about everybody is poor to one characterized by general prosperity, shared by all but a few. That is to say, there will be pockets of poverty in any prosperous society, and the contrast between rich and poor makes the residual poverty painfully obvious to all compassionate people. Indignation suggests a remedy which appears obvious to those who respond emotionally, without thinking. If some are better off than others, why pass a law to deprive the former of a portion of their property and dole it out to those in need! Not an efficient procedure, by the way; it costs the government several dollars to give one dollar to "the poor."

Imagine a system of medicine where doctors blamed sickness on the healthy, and sought to cure illness by making the well sick! This is madness, and if this tactic were used in medicine few patients would survive. Economic distress likewise; poverty cannot be relieved unless we known its cause, and this means that we must also learn the cause of prosperity, for poverty can be overcome by productivity, and in no other way.

Prosperity in a nation is generated by efficiency in production, and productive efficiency demands such things as a climate of freedom, security for property, the accumulation of capital, progressive technology, good work habits, skillful management, and the like. It follows that any impairment of the functioning of any or all of the factors that cause prosperity makes people poorer. Here are some examples of political interventions which hamper productivity: confiscatory taxation which diminishes the supply of capital; minimum wage laws which disemploy large numbers of people; monopoly unionism which institutionalizes unemployment by exacting an above the market wage and imposing a rigid wage structure; price and wage controls; inflation.

Such political interventions as these do no one any good, and they do some people immense harm. Those most severely affected are the very ones whose plight arouses our sympathy and causes some short-sighted citizens to demand drastic government action to correct disparities in income! The only sound strategy is to apply the formula for prosperity across the boards; and this means that we must find some way of stopping government from hurting people by unwise legislation. Unshackle production, turn the market loose, and everyone will share — more or less — in the ever-increasing prosperity.

Of course, it is not enough for a nation to be merely prosperous; riches don’t bring happiness. A happy person is one who has something to live for, whose way of life challenges him to draw upon his powers and exert his full potential. Material well-being — food to nourish you, clothing to keep you warm, shelter against the elements — material well-being is one element in the good life. But in our time this one element looms so large in the eyes of many that evidence of economic distress anywhere is all the excuse they need to demand a program that will wreck the system which produced our prosperity! It is as if a doctor had treated a completely paralyzed patient with some miracle drug which restored function to arms and legs but left the former patient with one stiff knee, and was then accused of malpractice and blamed for the man’s game leg!

Justice and Charity

Justice first; no legislation designed to give some an economic advantage at the expense of others, no arbitrary controls which prevent people from being as productive as they choose to be. Then, after justice, charity — which is simply an acknowledgement that some handicapped people can’t cope. The scope of private philanthropy is still enormous, even after a generation of government welfare schemes. The springs of compassion have not run dry, and it is obvious that they run more freely in the voluntary sector of society than in the coercive governmental sector. The coercive sector hits John Doe with heavy taxation during his productive years and uses his money to finance programs he’s against. Doe is tens of thousands of dollars poorer as a result. During the same period the Social Security tax deprives this man of thousands more. And all the while government is inflating the currency which increases the price of everything John Doe buys. When retirement comes, the government leaves John Doe with a lot less money than he actually earned during his productive period, and it cheapens the value of every dollar it gives him during his latter years. This is how government takes care of the poor!

There is no doubt in my mind that envy, covetousness and guilt —plus plain stupidity and ignorance — are of Socialism’s essence. Socialism would stall at ground level if it could not inflame these feelings and shortcomings. But there are other causes contributory to the advance of Socialism in our time. There’s idolatrous religion. We live in a period when the traditional religious faiths no longer exert the hold they once had over the minds of millions of people. The predominant world view is earthbound, with little or no place for the dimension of transcendence, or the sacred. Unable or unwilling, therefore, to make a religion of Religion, many twentieth century people make a religion of politics or economics.

A Religious Impulse

The term religion has reference, on the one hand, to intensity of belief and devotion; and, on the other hand, it has to do with the object which inspires this intense belief and devotion. Lacking a transcendent object, God, because of the prevailing earthbound world view, intense belief and devotion will affix itself to some object whose nature does not merit worship, such as the State, or Revolution. Thus Socialism or Communism becomes an ersatz religion for millions of people in our time.

The case of H. G. Wells is instructive. Wells was an early Fabian, and until the disillusionment of his late years, worked tirelessly for the advancement of Socialism. "Socialism," he wrote, "is to me a very great thing indeed, the form and substance of my ideal life, and the only religion I possess. I am, by a sort of predestination, a Socialist." Similar sentiments have been voiced by a multitude of the intellectual, literary, scientific, and political leaders of our time. Perversely, the low ebb of spiritual religion in our time has affected the churches, making it possible for men whose real religion is reform or revolution to capture large segments of the church for Socialism — by controlling various sounding boards, such as editorial offices, teaching and preaching posts, social action committees, interchurch councils.

And just as the religious impulse has been bent to the uses of Socialism, so has the artistic impulse. The artist cannot "let nature take its course”; he must impose significant form upon it, bringing his kind of order out of what appears to him to be chaos. Twist the artistic vision around to society, and lo! the planned economy! The untutored mind does not sense the magnificent and intricate order in a free society, which is the result of human action but not the consequence of human design. Merely enforce a few simple rules against theft, fraud and murder, enforce contracts, redress injury — and within these few rules people acting freely and productively will project an order so complicated that it defies human understanding. Could we fully understand it, economic calculation apart from a market would be feasible — which it is not.

The artist in us dislikes loose ends, insists on tidying things up, is caught up in a vision it feels bound to realize. Fine, on canvas! But if you insist on a certain pre-planned order and pattern as an end result in your society — the nation as a work of art — it is obvious that this overall goal cannot be achieved if everyone in the society is free to pursue his own peaceful goals. There is no way to achieve a unitary National Goal except by nullifying individual goals.

Diversity Encouraged

The free society not only tolerates individual differences, it encourages diversity on the ground that each person has his unique contribution to make to the total richness. This position runs counter to the pressure for uniformity in this age of mass man. The advocate of the free society, therefore, runs the risk of rubbing people the wrong way; often he has to make his case against the grain of human nature which hates dissent. In order that a society may be free, a great many people must exhibit a much higher level of tolerance for individual eccentricity than has hitherto prevailed.

The believer in freedom, then, is like a salesman trying to persuade people to buy a product, by telling them that, chances are, there are things about it they won’t much like after they get it! That’s a hard sell! Freedom means putting up with a lot of things you don’t like, and living with a lot of people you can barely stand. Freedom of speech and press, of religion and economics, means that other people will say, print, believe and produce things which we might find distasteful. Freedom doesn’t come cheap; it costs, and those unable or unwilling to pay the price will never achieve freedom, nor will they retain the freedom they now enjoy.

The late Dean Inge used to say that labels are libels! How shall we label the social system of America, England, and some European nations in the period between the Civil War and the New Deal? It was an age marked by a great expansion of science and technology, so we might speak of the Age of Science. A fine historian characterized the period as the Age of Materialism. Democracy took over as the kings departed, and that label is popular. The mode of production during this century was "capitalist," the label given currency by Marx. It suited the Communists to use one label, "Capitalism," for the social system they wanted to destroy, rather than, say, "Democracy."

A Deadly Label

Now, a modern western nation is an exceedingly complex affair, and it takes patient analysis to understand any single phenomenon of the many it exhibits. A social evil demands attention and it takes knowledge and skill to trace out its root causes. Much simpler to blame everything that goes wrong on Capitalism! Why poverty? Capitalism! Why the Great War? Capitalism! Why the Great Depression? Capitalism! Why unhappiness? Capitalism! Nothing was better calculated to deaden the analytical and critical faculties of several generations of intellectuals than this Marxist strategy; it worked; "social scientists" were conditioned to salivate on demand over the prospect that they had been chosen to lead humanity into the promised land.

Some able men are attracted to Socialism because it pretends to be scientific and progressive; and they regard themselves as scientific and progressive. But it is obvious that the mass of ordinary people are quite otherwise; they are stubborn and backward, and consequently, they make a mess of things. They refuse to accept the best scientific information available to them, preferring instead to be sloppy and unscientific. Witness their life style, their eating habits, the way they rear children, their resistance to new trends in schooling, the foolish way they spend their money, their superstitions! The indictment against the man in the street is a lengthy one, and the conclusion is that ignorant people such as this cannot be trusted to run their own lives. Any volunteers for the job of running people’s lives for them? Of course! Lots of highbrows believe themselves competent to operate a progressive society along scientific lines, all for the people’s own good, of course.

Who Shall Live Your Life?

Now, it may be true that a lot of people exercise but little wisdom in running their own lives, but it is a non sequitur to deduce from this that A’s situation will be improved if B runs A’s life for him against A’s will ! We know that this cannot work because it violates the basic law of life, a law as fundamental in human affairs as the law of gravity in Newtonian physics: Each person is in control of his own life, and if he doesn’t take charge of himself no one can assume this responsibility for him.

Life is a chancy thing, and of course we all make mistakes. But the mistakes we make while running our own affairs will teach us something, and we’re on earth to learn. As St. Augustine put it, "We are here schooled for life eternal." Unless we are allowed to make our own mistakes, to pick ourselves up after every failure, and stand taller with every success, the learning process is stymied. The great issue here is between those who regard human beings as mere things to be manipulated into some social pattern, versus those who believe that persons need liberty, because without it they cannot work out their proper destiny, which requires this life and the life to come for fulfillment.

The attention so far in this paper has been directed at "them," people of the Left, Liberals, Socialists. What about "us"; free enterprisers, capitalists, businessmen? Do people get turned on to Socialism because of us? I’m afraid they do. Now, no one can really blame an ordinary businessman for not understanding the theory of the free economy, and for his inability to articulate its concepts clearly. The blame, if any is to be laid, attaches to intellectuals who dig no deeper than this for their understanding of the free economy. Admittedly, however, it does not make our chore any easier when business organizations seek government favors for their members, or rush forward to praise wage and price controls.

But the real problem is elsewhere. A sharp distinction must be made between the economic theory of the free market and the ideologies erected around market theory by its self-proclaimed defenders. How many potential supporters of the free economy have been turned off by hearing certain ideologues of capitalism loudly proclaim that you have to be an atheist before you can become a genuine capitalist! Or you have to be a rationalist. Or a utilitarian. Or an anarchist. Furthermore, it is difficult for an outsider to judge the arguments for the free market on their economic merits if he has to wade through dubious notions of history, art, literature, psychology, ethics and religion to get to them! High level arguments in economic theory coupled with low level arguments in the ideological framework are not very damaging to Socialism, but they can make a shambles of Capitalism! It is only within the right philosophical structure that the market becomes the market economy, and that structure needs shoring up.

Economic action is necessary to survival, but by itself it cannot generate the free economy. The food, clothing, and shelter without which no people can exist are produced by human exertion on natural resources, and there is no other way. The division of labor is as old as mankind; people have always traded and bartered. These interlocking events constitute the market, and the market is ubiquitous. But the ever-present market does not become the market economy by spontaneous generation; nonmarket factors must be present to act as catalytic agents. Create a political structure around belief in the inviolability of the individual person and you have a context of liberty and justice for all in which property is respected and free choice maximized. The market, then, is institutionalized as the free economy. Neglect this necessary political framework — the one we inherited from the eighteenth century — and as it decays it will take the free economy down with it.

Our Fear of Freedom

There is something in human nature itself which makes us ambivalent toward freedom. Human beings would never strive for a free society unless the urge to be free were a drive deeply rooted in human nature; and we wouldn’t have to strive for freedom — nor periodically lapse into despotism — were there not a paradoxical strain in our make-up which fears freedom. Let me try to elucidate.

Each of us has his own life to live, his own ends to achieve. We are purposive beings, so we project a series of goals which constitute our lifelong pursuits, and we set up various targets for occasional endeavors. It is a self-evident truth that each of us wants maximum freedom to live the life that is ours and to pursue the goals we have chosen for ourselves. It is inconceivable that anyone in his right mind would deliberately invite other people to impair his freedom of action, for no one can set goals for himself and simultaneously ask other people to prevent him from reaching them! If, in some bizarre situation, a person does ask another to restrain him, then his real goal is to be restrained—no matter what he says his goal is.

The most evil tyrant imaginable, whose goal is to extinguish human liberty, does not want impediments placed between himself and his goal; he wants to be free to wield power unconditionally. Everyone, in short, desires his own freedom; but not everyone is seriously concerned that all other persons have as much freedom of action as he has. Very few people, as a matter of fact, favor equal freedom — a social condition of maximum freedom of action for everyone.

And there’s the rub! Freedom for yourself is a biological urge; the will to equal freedom for everyone stems from a more complex facet of our nature.

Man Must Think and Choose

No person can help wanting freedom for himself. This is part of our fight for survival, the struggle to continue in existence. Man shares this with every other living thing. But every living organism — except man — has a built-in servomechanism which preserves the nature and guarantees the continuing identity of the organism in question, whether tree, tiger, oyster, or whatever. The truly human person, however, is a different kind of creature; we cannot complete our nature — realize our potential to the full — without deliberately willing to do so. Our inner freedom is so flexible that each person has a lot of latitude in choosing what he will make of his life. Your final destiny depends on the wisdom of your daily resolves. Each of these daily and hourly decisions we make, breeds consequences — for which we must assume responsibility, and with which we have to live. This is intrinsic to the human situation.

Things would be much simpler if we could just sit back and let Nature take its course with us, as Nature does take its course with animals. It’ll never happen! Nor can we be wound up like robots to function as we should, as T. H. Huxley once wished. Belying his name as "Darwin’s bulldog," the famous scientist said, "If some great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer." Don’t wait, the offer will never be made!

We are neither robots nor animals. We are persons, gifted with an inner freedom, which puts us under the necessity of choosing, where we face the constant risk of making wrong choices. We are responsible beings, and the burden weighs heavy on us. This is the freedom we dread — our unique freedom which forces us to strive constantly if we would attain our humanity. It is in this fear of freedom that Socialism takes root. Socialism offers the siren promise that we need not be individually responsible, either for ourselves or for anyone else. "They" will be responsible for us, and at the same time relieve us of any obligation toward others; the burden of being human will be lifted from our shoulders.

Human nature, then, exhibits these two facets; the biological urge to be free, and the all-too-human wish to shirk responsibility. The biological drive to be free manifests itself in some types as a grab for power, a lust to dominate others. This is a constant threat latent in human nature, which is why every period in history has to contend with tyrants and dictators. That history is not one unbroken record of tyranny, that freedom ebbs and flows, is due to the fact that this authoritarian thrust in human nature may be rechanneled. Such rechanneling is our first line of defense against tyranny, and it consists of moral and religious restraints on the will to power which the authoritarian accepts as binding upon himself. The energies of the might-have-been tyrant are redirected in constructive ways.

There is a second line of defense against tyranny. This barrier is located in the hearts and minds of the to-be-tyrannized-over; it is a deeply felt conviction which affirms, in the familiar words of the Eighteenth Century: "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." Our ancestors believed that life and liberty were inseparably joined; both were gifts of God. And because no one could fully serve his Maker unless he was free, freedom was just as precious as life itself. No person who acquiesced in tyranny could fulfill his life’s purpose.

In a nation where both lines of defense are in working order there is maximum liberty for all persons. On the one hand, inner restraints quench the thirst for power; and on the other, a people, who know that the purpose of life cannot be realized unless they are free, will be alert to detect the slightest threat to their liberties. But when the would-be tyrant recognizes no inner curbs on power, and when the populace invites him to rule over them because they shirk the responsibility and burdens of being human, then the dictatorship is total.

To be a person, means accepting full responsibility for our acts of choice and our conduct. But the prevailing earthbound ideology instructs us that we don’t really possess free will, and because we are the mere end products of our natural and social environment we are not responsible for ourselves. Accept this blighting ideology and the will to freedom withers; you have optimum conditions for tyranny. The same materialistic ideology which convinces the multitudes that they are not responsible convinces authoritarians that there are no inner restraints on power. Dictatorship gets the message: All systems go! The tidal movement of Socialism in the twentieth century is no mystery.

You’d like to roll back this tide? It’s very simple! The social order outside of us is a reflection of the mental and moral situation inside of us. If there is social disorder, we may infer that there is disorder within, in our hearts and minds. The great Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, puts it this way: "Any explanation of the visible changes appearing on the surface of history which does not go deep down until it touches the mysterious and latent changes produced in the depths of the human soul is superficial." (What is Philosophy?, p. 31) Each person, therefore, must first work on himself before his improved understanding can radiate to those in his orbit.

If only we could straighten out our own thinking we might order our lives aright, and if a significant number of people did this, then the society — which, after all, is but a reflection of ourselves — would begin to square itself away. This is a slow way to go, but it is the only way.

If we have looked back over history to learn the lessons taught by the rise and fall of nations, we know that societies never die of old age but only of autointoxication. We learn that civilizations have been, and can be, rejuvenated —from within! What other peoples have done in times past we can do today and tomorrow — provided we have the will to do it. We have all the ingredients for the restoration of our society; only the will is lacking — and only individual decision can make that up!

Originally published in the July 1975 edition of The Freeman. Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Why do “They” turn to socialism?

The great political battles of the modern world have been fought around certain key words, one of which is Equality. The watch­words of the French Revolution, you recall, were “Liberty, Equal­ity, Fraternity.” Talleyrand got fed up with this slogan and once remarked that he’d heard so much talk about fraternity that if he had a brother he’d call him cousin!

There’s a sound reason for Talleyrand’s adverse reaction to the idea of brotherhood. The hu­man capacity for affection is lim­ited and it is selective. The de­mand for unlimited brotherliness puts human nature under a strain; it generates a backlash in the form of the either/or mood of the revolutionary who puts a gun to your head and says: “Be my brother, or I’ll kill you!” Sane so­cial living forbids murder; it strives after justice; and it re­serves brotherliness and love for family and friends.

Real friendship, even within a limited circle, is a genuine achieve­ment. Recall the words of La Bruyere, writing in the middle of the seventeenth century: “Some ask why mankind in general do not compose one nation, and are not contented to speak one lan­guage, to live under the same laws and agree among themselves to have the same customs and the same worship; whilst I, seeing how contrary are their minds, their tastes and their sentiments, wonder to see even seven or eight persons living within the same walls under the same roof and making a single family.”

We don’t have the word Fraternity in our political heritage, but the idea of Equality occupies a prominent spot. Our Declaration of Independence reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Note well that the men who pre­pared this document did not say that “all men are equal”; they did not say that all men are “born equal”—both propositions being obviously untrue. They said “cre­ated equal.”

Now, the created part of a man is his soul or mind. Man’s body is compounded of the same chemical and physical elements which go into the make-up of the earth and its creatures, but there is a men­tal and spiritual essence in man which sets him apart from nature—his soul or psyche. It is an arti­cle of faith in our religious tradi­tion that the soul of each person is precious in God’s sight what­ever the individual’s outer cir­cumstances; and equality before the law is implicit in this premise—the idea of one law alike for all men because all men are one in their essential humanness.

But right here the likeness ends; human beings are different and unequal in every other way. They are alike in one respect only; they are equal before the law. Equality before the law is the same thing as political liberty viewed from a different perspec­tive; it is also justice—a regime under which no man and no order of men is granted a political li­cense issued by the state to use other men as their tools or have any other legal advantage over them. Given such a framework in a society, the economic order will automatically be free market, or capitalism. We are speaking now of the idea of equality in a politi­cal context. Later I shall deal with the opposing concept of economic equality, which is incompatible with limited government and the free market.

Equal Justice Before the Law

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

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

Plato wished to see society con­structed like a pyramid. A few men at the top wielding unlimited power; then descending levels of power—the men on each level being bossed by those above and bossing, in turn, those below. On the bottom are the slaves, who outnumber all the rest of society. Plato knows that those in the lower ranks will be discontented with their subservient position, so he proposes to condition them with a “noble lie,” as he calls it. “While all of you in the city are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet God in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule mingled gold in their generation,… but in the helpers silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen.” Fraudulent theories of this sort are invented by men who suspect gold in their own make-up!

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

Our Western Heritage

Politics rests upon certain as­sumptions in metaphysics, and we make different metaphysical as­sumptions than do the Greeks and Hindus. In other words, we have a different religious heritage. Our religious values come from the Bible. Christianity was introduced into the ancient world, and it has had important political conse­quences. We take personal liberty for granted and regard slavery as artificial because of nineteen cen­turies of emphasis on the worth of the individual soul. The soul of man was a battleground on which were thrashed out the issues of good and evil. The individual was held responsible for the proper ordering of his soul; that is, he had the gift of free will. His sal­vation was neither automatic nor guaranteed; it hinged on a series of voluntary decisions, choices freely made.

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

Control by Conquest

England’s aristocratic order did not arise by accident, but through conquest; it may be traced back to the Battle of Hast­ings in 1066 and the Norman in­vasion. William of Normandy had a claim, of sorts, to the English throne, a claim which he validated by conquering the island. Having established his over lordship of England he parceled out pieces of the island to his followers as pay­ment for their services. In the words of historian Arthur Bryant, “William the Conqueror kept a fifth of the land for himself and gave one-quarter to the Church. The remainder, save for an insig­nificant fraction, was given to 170 Norman and French followers—nearly half to ten men.”¹

This redistribution of England’s territory was, of course, at the ex­pense of the Anglo-Saxon resi­dents who were displaced to make room for the new owners. The new owners of England from William on down were the rulers of Eng­land; ownership was the comple­ment of their rulership, and the wealth they accumulated sprang from their power and their feudal holdings. That is to say, they did not obtain wealth by satisfying consumer demand. Under the sys­tem of liberty where the economic arrangements are free market or capitalistic, the only way to make money is to please the customers. Under any alternative system, you make money by pleasing the poli­ticians, those who hold power. Either that, or you wield power yourself.

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

Keeping the Peace

When our forebears wrote that “all men are created equal,” they threw down a challenge to the system of privilege. They believed that government should keep the peace—as peacekeeping is spelled out in the old-fashioned Whig-Classical Liberal tradition. This preserves a free field and no favor—which is the meaning of laissez-faire—within which peaceful eco­nomic competition will occur. The term “laissez faire” never meant the absence of rules; it didn’t im­ply a free-for-all. The term comes originally out of chivalry and was used on the jousting field to signal the beginning of a match. Two armored knights got ready to ride at each other and the cry of “laissez faire” meant, in effect, “You boys know the rules; may the best man win.” Government, under laissez faire, does not in­tervene positively to manage the affairs of men; it merely acts to deter and redress injury—as in­jury is spelled out in the laws. This is the system of liberty championed by present-day liber­tarians and conservatives.

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

R. H. Tawney, one of the most gifted of the English Fabians, was an ardent socialist and egalitar­ian. His most famous work is past affords the best example of the great multiplication of wealth which results from the release of individual human creativity under the system of liberty.

The Nature of Political Power

I’ve used the term “power” sev­eral times, so let’s note that the word “power” in this context re­fers to government. There’s only one genuine power structure in a given society, and that is the gov­ernment. Government possesses a unique, one-of-a-kind type of power, and unless the government deputizes or licenses some other person or agency no one in a given society may exercise the kind of power which government alone wields. We employ meta­phors when we speak of buying power or economic power. Govern­ment is the power structure. Only government can mobilize the police, the armies, the navies; only government can draft a young man to serve in Vietnam; only government can tax, and so on. The largest corporation in the land cannot force me to buy one of its products or work for it; I can ignore General Motors, but no one who chooses to live within these fifty states can ignore the real power structure—which is the political agency, government.

Under a monarchy, economic ad­vancement is obtained by pleasing the king or the queen. Royal fa­vorites lived well while enjoying the friendship of the ruler, but when they fell out of favor they sometimes lost their heads. The mass of people lived in what we would think of as poverty, and typically they lacked the guaran­tees of intellectual, religious, and civil liberties that we take for granted. Moreover, the entire na­tion from top to bottom lived quietly with the idea of economic stagnation; no one thought in terms of a progressive increase of the stock of goods so that every­one would move gradually up the economic ladder—they thought in terms merely of redistributing the existing stock of wealth. No one thought of increasing the size of the pie; the idea was to obtain a bigger slice for one’s self—either by seizing it in a direct power grab, or as largesse by being a friend of the powerful. A similar sentiment—anti-economic in na­ture—prevails today.

The big domestic political issue is poverty. The nation has been geared to welfare measures ever since the New Deal, a generation ago; then in 1964 Congress opened the Office of Economic Opportun­ity and declared war on poverty. Indigence may be measured in various ways, but whatever else it is, indigence is a lack. A person who is poor would be better off if he owned a larger and finer house, had several extra suits and sport jackets in his closet, enjoyed tas­tier and more nourishing food plus an occasional drink. After improving the situation at the level of necessities he’d move ahead to the amenities—to recre­ation, a second car, air condition­ing, and so on.

Poverty Overcome by Production

The point to note is that people move out of poverty only as they command more of the things which are manufactured, grown, or otherwise produced. Poverty is overcome by production, and in no other way. If you are seriously concerned with the alleviation of poverty your concern for in­creased production must be equal­ly serious. This is simple logic.

But look around us in this great land today and try to find some­one for whom increased produc­tivity is a major goal. There are some able production men in in­dustry, but most established busi­nesses have learned to live com­fortably with restrictive legisla­tion, government contracts, the foreign aid program and our inter­national commitments. The com­petitive instinct burns low, and the entrepreneur who is willing to submit to the uncertainties of the market is a rare bird. And then there are the farmers. Agri­cultural production has taken a great leap forward in recent years, but no thanks to those farmers who latch onto the government’s farm program and accept pay­ment for keeping land and equip­ment idle. Union leaders claim to work for the betterment of the membership, but no one has ever accused unions of a burning de­sire to be more productive on the job. Politicians are not interested in increased industrial production. As a matter of fact, it might be said that the national government is continually—by its interven­tions—manufacturing poverty, and the whole country lives at a level lower than natural economic necessity would dictate.

An overall increase in the out­put of goods and services is the only way to upgrade the general welfare, but there is no clamor on behalf of increased productivity—only an occasional murmur. The clamor is for redistribution, for political interventions which ex­act tribute from the haves and bestow largesse on the have nots. Present day politics is based on the redistributionist principle: taxes for all, subsidies for the few. Its alleged purpose is to elevate the low income groups by depress­ing the wealthy. President John­son, addressing Congress in Jan­uary 1964, phrased it thus: “We are going to try to take all of the money that we think is unneces­sarily being spent and take it from the ‘haves’ and give it to the ‘have nots’ that need it so much.”

Several years earlier a theo­logian of considerable reputation, Nels Ferre, expressed similar sen­timents, but gave them a religious flavor: “All property is God’s for the common good. It belongs therefore, first of all to God and then equally to society and the individual. When the individual has what the society needs and can profitably use, it is not his, but belongs to society, by divine right.”³

The Role of the Market

The rage for redistribution is upon us, and we might multiply statements similar to the ones I have quoted from Mr. Johnson and Dr. Ferre. Those who es­pouse this viewpoint hold the ut­terly mistaken notion that the dis­tribution of rewards in a free market society, or capitalism, is analogous to the parceling out of loot to members of a robber gang, or the division of spoils after a pirate expedition. Actually, these things are as unlike as night and day; there is no comparison between them. In the free econ­omy, a man is rewarded to the degree that he pleases consumers.

Now, the market is not a magic instrumentality which comes up automatically with the right an­swer for every sort of question. The market is a sort of popularity contest; it tells us what people like; it’s an index of their prefer­ences. The market provides a very valuable piece of information, but it’s not the whole story. It’s im­portant for a shoe manufacturer to project an accurate guess as to whether women next season will prefer chunkies to wedgies; but a similar fingering of the popular pulse is out of keeping in the in­tellectual and moral realms—un­less one is a liberal intellectual! I refer to the proclivity of the current crop of opinion molders to ask: “What’s going to be the fashion in ideas this season?” One glaring example of this—a former professor of mine was a leading clerical spokesman for involving the United States in World War II; now he’s a co-chairman of SANE. This man has a good market in the intellectual realm, but of course he opposes the market in the economic realm.

The market is the only device available for serving our creatur­al needs while conserving scarce resources; but the market is no gauge of the truth or falsity of an idea. The market measures the popularity of an idea, but not its truth. Mises and Hayek are better economists than Samuelson and Galbraith but the market for the services of the latter pair is enor­mously greater than the popular demand for Mises and Hayek. Likewise in aesthetic questions. An entertainer’s popularity is no index of his musicianship, and a best selling novel may fall far short of the category of literature.

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

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

Every alternative to the market economy—call it socialism or communism or fascism or what­ever—concentrates power over the lives and livelihood of the many in the hands of a few. The principle of equality before the law is dis­carded—the Rule of Law is in­compatible with any form of the planned economy—and, as in the George Orwell satire, some men become more equal than others. We head back toward the Old Regime—the system of privilege. Every state tends to create the means of its own support—com­prising citizens and pressure groups who realize their depend­ence on the state for such eco­nomic advantages as they enjoy. The court at Versailles was the symbol of this under the Old Regime; the symbol in our time is a deep freeze, a vicuna coat, a television set, the relief racket, a lush government contract, farm subsidies, predatory labor unions, or what have you.

Human beings are imperfect now and forever, and the societies we form exhibit all the imperfec­tions individuals display and more besides. There’s no way to achieve utopia; heaven on earth is an im­possible dream. But human beings will do better under the system of liberty than under any other social arrangement.

In the nineteenth century, as Tawney pointed out, the abolition of privilege got rid of slavery and serfdom; it turned the peasant into a human being. Furthermore, this was a comparatively peaceful century—between the Congress of Vienna and the First World War. Real wages doubled, redoubled, and doubled again. Diseases were diminished and people lived long­er; illiteracy almost disappeared, and people were freer in their daily lives than ever before.

Things were far from perfect, but they were more than tolerable—until a few people got the idea that human affairs could be per­fected if the lives of all men were put under political direction and control. This would create a vast power structure on top of so­ciety; but the fear of power was overcome by the thought that power, this time, was democratic and majoritarian in nature, and thus benign. The tragic fallacy here is that power obeys the laws of its nature, no matter what the sanction. Political power is invari­ably coercive, and if used wrongly destroys what it is set up to secure.

Fans of Lewis Carroll will re­member his poem, “The Hunting of the Snark.” Every time the hunters closed in on their quarry the snark turned out to be a boojum. Every time a determined group of people have concentrated power in a central government to carry out their program, the pow­er they have set up gets out of hand. The classic example of this is the French Revolution, which turned and devoured those who had started it.

It is not so much that power corrupts, as that power obeys its own laws. Our forebears in the old-fashioned Whig-Classical Lib­eral tradition were aware of this, so they sought to disperse and contain power. They chose politi­cal liberty, in full awareness that in a free society the natural dif­ferences among human beings would show up in various ways; some would be better off than others, but there would be no political inequality.

The alternative to the free economy is a servile state in which a ruling class enforces an equality of poverty on the masses. To embark on a program of economic leveling is like trying to repeal the law of gravity; it’ll never work, and trying to make it work defeats our efforts to attain rea­sonable goals.

—FOOTNOTES—

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

² Religion and the Rise of Capital­ism, but in 1931 he wrote a book entitled Equality, arguing, in effect, that no one should have two cars so long as any man was un­able to afford even one. He wished to take from those who have and give to those who have not, in or­der to achieve economic equality.

³ Christianity and Society, p. 226.

Originally published in the September 1969 edition of The Freeman. Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Two Concepts of Equality

The World we live in is divided. The major division, the division drilled into us by journalistic usage, separates the planet into the iron curtain countries versus the free world. Soviet Russia and its satellites plus communist China and its satellites are geographically separate from the nations comprising the free world, but the differences are not merely geographical.

The iron curtain countries are fiercely devoted to an ideology which is at war with the philosophy of liberty which the free world professes, but to which the free world gives little more than lip service. Communism is a fanatical, crusading faith which activates millions behind the iron curtain; nothing of like intensity inspires the citizens of the so-called free nations. I say “so-called,” having in mind that Britain is socialist, France has a socialist president, and America continues welfarist despite the good intentions of Mr. Reagan and many of his henchmen.

Why does government continue to expand? Why does it cost us more with each passing year? It’s no mystery; more and more people are dependent on government give-away programs which the taxpayers have to pay for. Social Security is a costly program and it’s here to stay, at ]east for the foreseeable future; it has now become compulsory for those formerly outside its grasp—like FEE. Then there is our permanent bureaucracy, with its multiple alphabet agencies empowered to regulate virtually every facet of our lives. There are various and growing numbers of people and groups encompassed by the entitlement programs; many businessmen enjoy special privileges conferred by government; millions of former government employees and politicians dig deep into the tax fund for their pensions. Everyone who feeds at the political trough has a stake in bigger government and higher taxes.

Freedom at the Fringes

Freedom is marginal in modern societies; it survives on the fringes of life. We can widen the margin of freedom only insofar as we deepen our understanding of the free society and its imperatives, and then act wisely in terms of what it demands of us. Recovery of freedom will not be easy, for the people of this nation are not of one mind as to the merits of a society of free people. There are Marxists in America and they show renewed vitality. One of them, a professor at New York University, has recently (1982) written a book entitled The Left Academy, describing Marxist scholarship on American campuses, in the departments of economics, political science, sociology, history and psychology. He tells us that:

In political science, for example, four Marxist-inspired textbooks in American government have been published since 1970, whereas before that there were none. In the same period, Cambridge, Oxford, and Princeton University Presses, the three most prestigious university publishers, have among them brought out over fifteen books on Marx and Marxism, almost all of them quite sympathetic. There are over 400 courses given today in Marxist philosophy, whereas hardly any were given in the 1960s.

Socialists and liberals in our nation are more numerous than Marxists: they are also more respectable. They regard themselves as intellectuals, and they write and they talk. Using the written and the spoken word from a variety of podia and pulpits they virtually dominate the various avenues of communication—radio, television, movies, the press, schools and churches. They report the news they want us to hear and tell us how to think about it; they write most of the scripts for Broadway, radio, television and the movies; they write speeches for people in public life; they compose the songs and the slogans that stir popular emotions. They manufacture the public opinion which determines political action.

In short, millions of Americans today—for reasons of their own—do not want a market economy; they are financially dependent on an over-extended government, massive Federal spending, and high taxes.

That’s the bad news. Now for the good news. The good news is that the philosophy of the market economy and the free society is in better shape than ever before. It is more intellectually rigorous, more solidly based, spelled out more clearly than ever. And it is available in an increasing number of books, pamphlets, and periodicals. Hundreds of organizations are now hotbeds of free market activity, promoting a set of beliefs on the highest mental and moral plane, and reaching down into the deepest wellsprings of human nature—the firmly rooted aspiration of every man and woman for the elbow room necessary for them if they are to achieve their personal goals.

The Socialist System versus The Free Market Economy

Socialism or communism is easy to understand; a socialized society is one where the government owns the means of production; government operates the factories, the banks, the farms, the mines; it generates the power and controls transport and communication. In a socialist or communist system government runs the country. The system doesn’t work.

The free society, by contrast, is not run by anyone. Yet, it runs more efficiently than any politically planned economy. The free society operates within certain rules which safeguard life, liberty and property; individual decisions within these rules marvelously coordinate—as if guided by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” Individual ownership is a key concept of the free society; manufacturing, business and trade operate under private auspices; productive property is owned by scores of millions of individual persons. The market economy is not a “system,” but it works. It is the market economy which created and continuously renews the prosperity we enjoy, and which the world envies.

Our forebears in the 18th century talked a lot about property. The political war cry of the period was “Life, Liberty, and Property,” with major stress on property. There was a reason for this. These people knew that the chief distinction between a slave and a free man was the fact that the slave had no right to own things. The slave worked and he produced things, but he had no right to possess them; the product of the slave’s labor belonged to his owner. On the other hand, any person with the right to own whatever he produced was a free man; his survival did not depend on another’s whim: he was his own man. And being free, he had every incentive to become more productive, and thus more prosperous.

Personal liberty cannot exist except on a private property foundation, and that foundation is badly eroded in 1984. The fact that in our nation today the productive people of this society work approximately five months out of each year for government, before they are allowed to keep the fruits of their toil for themselves, would have seemed to our forebears a monstrous injustice. Private property is a pillar of the free society idea, but it’s a shaky pillar in today’s world.

Everyone desires a place in society which gives him the widest range of opportunities over the greatest possible latitude to live the life he has chosen. Everyone knows that he must be free if he is to fully realize his personal goals. I suppose that the average citizen of Moscow or Peking has his dreams, just as we do, and presumably he does achieve some of his ambitions. But the state exercises almost complete authority over his life, determining his training, the kind of work he does, how he shall live, with whom he associates, and what he reads.

Interrelated Freedoms

Although we in this country are not as free as we say we’d like to be, the opportunities here to live a full and well-rounded life are infinitely greater than they are in collectivist nations. We are free to read what we please, to speak our minds, to attend the church and school of our choice. These intellectual and cultural freedoms of ours are directly related to the degree of freedom we enjoy in the economic sphere. Economic freedom is important in itself, because every freedom is important. But economic freedom is doubly important because the higher freedoms depend on it.

Take freedom of the press, for example—and I use the term “the press” broadly, to include not only newspapers and periodicals, but also TV and radio. The press is the communications industry, and it is big business; it’s one of our largest industries. People in the communications industry often display an inflated notion of what freedom of the press means; their understanding of responsible journalism is very vague. Those of you who read the newsletter, Accuracy in Media, are aware of the extent of irresponsible journalism in contemporary society. Despite which, believers in the free society uphold the doctrine of freedom of the press.

A free press is what you have when there is no government censor telling reporters what to write and editors what to print. No American publisher, to my knowledge, advocates that the Washington bureaucracy be empowered to control and operate the publishing business. But a lot of people in the newspaper trade editorialize in favor of the government regulation of business—their own excepted; and we find the same kind of advocacy journalism on radio and television. People in the press are left of center, by and large.

Suppose the country accepts the advice of these people and nationalizes coal, steel, the automobile industry, the airlines—one industry after another till all business is run by the government. Should this happen can anyone believe that a now all-powerful government will exempt the gigantic communications industry from its controls and allow the press to remain free to criticize it? Not a chance. The press too will be nationalized, becoming the government’s agency of information and propaganda, specializing in Orwell’s newspeak to program the minds of people.

Academic Freedom

An analogous situation exists with reference to academic freedom. I’ve never heard of a professor opposing the concept of academic freedom; he might not understand what academic freedom means, but he’s all for it. Academic freedom means that a professor is allowed to teach, research and publish as he pleases without having to go to the government for permission—so long as some academic institution is willing to pay him a salary and provide him with such classroom and laboratory facilities as he needs. Academic freedom does not mean that the professor is entitled to a teaching job in an institution that doesn’t want him; it means only that the government shall keep hands off the campus.

Professors, like their counterparts in the press, tend to be left of center; they believe that business and industry should be regulated by the government. Suppose their wishes come true; suppose government does control the nation’s business and industry. From whence will come the funds to support our colleges? From one source only: government. Government controls have dried up the private sources which once bankrolled education, so government will have to finance the schools. Whoever pays the piper will call the tune, so when government pays the bills it will eventually dictate the curriculum. Teachers then become political flunkies and our colleges and universities become an arm of government, something like the Post Office.

The situation in the churches is similar, but somewhat more complex. I have many friends in the parish ministry, and I know them to be devout, honest, hardworking and devoted to the traditional values. There are some left-wing clergy in the parish ministry, turned in that direction by their professors in college and seminary, and by the materials foisted on them by certain departments in their respective denominations. But if you are looking for hard core left-wing churchmen go to the denominational hierarchies, to the religious press, to theological faculties, to the various local councils of churches, and especially to the National and World Councils of Churches. Collectivist churchmen have a monopoly of the positions of influence in these sectors of ecclesiastical life.

These people profess their devotion to the ideal of religious liberty; they believe in the independence of the churches from government interference; they don’t want a state church—they say. But if we get what they are striving for—government control of business and industry—private funding of churches will give way to taxpayer funding. When this happens the churches will no longer be free institutions; they will become branches of the government bureaucracy.

The Most to Lose

Who has the greatest stake in the free economy? Businessmen? No. Industrialists? No. It is the scholarly class that has the greatest stake in the free society and market economy. I’m talking about teachers, preachers, researchers, writers, of independent mind and character—the genuine intellectuals. When a nation succumbs to communism or any other form of totalitarian tyranny, it is no longer business as usual, but business of some sort must continue.

Every industrialized society needs managerial and technical expertise to keep it going. Someone has to operate the factories, someone must keep the wheels of industry turning, and someone must maintain a certain level of productive efficiency. Who will do this: professors of sociology, preachers, Dan Rather, Jane Fonda? Successful industrialists and businessmen, technicians who know how to get things produced—such people have a pretty fair chance to get good jobs after the Revolution. But what happens to independent intellectuals when the communists take over? A totalitarian society has no place for people of searching mind and high character; they vanish into the Gulag.

What a paradox; those who would have most to lose in a collectivist society are working hardest to bring it about. It’s a kind of social suicide for these folk.

The market economy happens to be the most productive, most prosperous economy. But even if it were not, even if the market economy left us poor but honest, there’s not a one of us here who would not choose to live under it, because only the free economy is compatible with freedom of worship, only the free economy permits a variety of independent educational systems, only the free economy allows the free mind to function in the areas of speech and publishing.

Economics is only a part of life, but it is the part which sustains and makes possible all the rest—the intellectual, the spiritual, the cultural. If we want to be free in these areas we must maintain economic freedom. John Maynard Keynes, in his backhanded fashion, lends support to this contention by declaring that his theory of economic planning adapts nicely to a totalitarian political order. He wrote a special foreword for the 1936 German translation of his General Theory, and had this to say: “The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book . . . can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than . . . under conditions of free production and a large degree of laissez-faire.” If the planned economy adapts nicely to Nazism, it is obviously incompatible with the institutions of a free society.

If you look behind the iron curtain you will see several species of communism. Russian communism has a Slavic flavor. The communism of the late Mao Tse-tung contains elements unique to the culture of China. There’s a Latin beat to Castro’s communism. Yugoslavian communism is, to a limited extent, in business for itself; and the same is true of the communisms of various Third World nations. Those who happen to have an interest may make comparisons between the communism of one nation and that of another.

The situation as regards the free society and market economy way of life is quite different; there’s only one capitalism in history, and only one today. Japan, I regard as a branch grafted onto our stem. I yield to popular usage and for convenience use the term “capitalism” for the social order I have briefly sketched—the free society and market economy way of life. The word “capitalism” is today a little less confusing than the word “liberalism” which was intelligible to our forebears, but which now means the opposite of what it meant in the 19th century. Capitalism became explicit about two centuries ago when the political ideas of The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution joined forces with the economic ideas expounded in The Wealth of Nations.

The American Idea

Capitalism is a shorthand term for the kind of society based on this combination of the market economy with a limited government of equal justice, and it appeared in just one place on the globe. It would be more accurate to say “one culture, the Anglo-American, separated by the Atlantic Ocean.” The colonists thought of themselves as Englishmen until just before the Revolution. Many had come here from England; they shared their institutions and their history with England. But liberty attained a purer form here than in the mother country, for England was bogged down in the remnants of feudalism. So, let’s focus on the free society as it took shape in America, and nowhere else on the planet.

The American idea of government was unique. Trace the history of political institutions as far back as you wish; every one is based on the philosopher-king idea. It was Plato who pinned this label on the universally accepted belief that “cities would never have rest from their evils” until they found some man who possessed the wisdom of a philosopher and at the same time wielded absolute power. The philosopher, as Plato uses the term, might be defined as a very smart fellow who really does know what is good for us. Trouble is, we ignore the philosopher; we don’t want to know what is good for us; or, if we do know we are too lazy or too wicked to live the life that is good for us. What’s the answer?

Simple! Find the man who embodies the ultimate in wisdom and goodness. Then vest this man with all the power he needs to extend his benevolence, as dictated by his wisdom. He will then use his power to force us to be free; he will make us good—at which point we’ll have our heaven on earth.

The people we refer to as our Founding Fathers took just the opposite tack. They threw out the philosopher-king idea, lock, stock and barrel. They rejected altogether those who advised: “Increase the powers of government in order to magnify its capacity to do good.” Believing that authoritarian politics is intrinsically evil, they said: “Limit the powers of government drastically, by the rule of law, so that those who rule will have no opportunity to do evil.” This was the unique political formula which took root on our shores. My own thumbnail formulation of this point is: “Never advocate any more power for your best friends than you would be willing to see wielded by your worst enemies.”

The Containment of Power

The critical issue here is the containment of power. Each person should be regarded as an end in himself, and in a truly free society individual autonomy is respected. But in a power situation people are reduced to a mere means to serve the ends of others. The philosopher-king idea of unlimited power to run the lives of others is based upon a profound distrust of the ability of people to run their own lives. People must be made to feel little before governments can grow big. As the power of government increases the power in the people diminishes.

Now, it may be true that a lot of people exercise but little wisdom in running their own lives, but it is a non sequitur to deduce from this that A’s situation will be improved if B runs A’s life for him against A’s will! We know that this cannot work because it violates the basic law of life, a law as fundamental in human affairs as the law of gravity in Newtonian physics: Each person is in control of his own life, and if he doesn’t take charge of himself no one can assume this responsibility for him.

The original American idea was based upon the profound conviction that people really do have the latent talents and abilities which, properly schooled and utilized, enable each person to take charge of his own life and accept responsibility for his actions; each person has within him the necessary ingredients for living a truly human life of growth, fulfillment and joy. The potential for life of this quality is built into human nature itself as an original endowment. What we do or fail to do with that original endowment is up to the individual man or woman, and only a free society provides the maximum opportunity for the fullest attainment of what we have it in us to become.

Before people accept a caretaker government they must be convinced that they can’t take care of themselves; independence, resourcefulness, self-reliance, fortitude, endurance, hardihood, and similar personal qualities must be programmed out of them. Our 18th-century forebears possessed these and other traits of character which enabled them to stand on their own two feet; so they conceived a government that would keep the peace and otherwise let people alone to run their own affairs.

What was the source of their beliefs about themselves; where did their ideas about life come from? We know from the books they read that the Greek literature of the classical age was familiar to them. In Latin literature and in the history of Rome they saw their own situation as in a mirror. And even those who were comparatively unlettered were steeped in the Old and New Testaments. It has often been observed that the Western intellectual and spiritual heritage is a triple cord woven of ideas and a vision of the good life derived from Athens, Rome, and The Bible.

On Becoming Human

The human nature we are born with is raw material; it’s the elemental stuff each of us works with toward the achievement of adulthood and maturity. Very few people realize their potential fully, but the degree of our attainment depends on the ideas we have as to what it means to be a human being. If we believe ourselves to be helpless pawns in the grip of fate we will be less effective personalities than if we believe ourselves masters of our own destiny. If we blame childhood poverty, or parents who didn’t understand us, or the wrong crowd, or an uncaring society, or our glands, or whatever, for our personal shortcomings we will never strive to convert our minuses into pluses.

No person reaches his full stature of humanity unless he maintains a lively contact with a set of ideas as to what it means to be a person, ideas we have absorbed from our cultural heritage. And it is a fact that great numbers of people in this favored land of ours no longer believe in the ideas that made Western civilization unique. What are some of these ideas?

Our forebears learned from their educational sources that we live in a purposeful universe in which human beings are the most meaningful representation of a mighty cosmic design. They believed that we are created beings, not mere chance collocations of atoms. As embodiments of the Divine Creativity we are gifted with reason and free will. By the exercise of right reason we can think God’s thoughts after Him and thus gain precious nuggets of truth. And by the exercise of free will, we can overcome environmental handicaps and become responsible beings. They believed that it is within the power of every person to fashion his own character, and that he has a moral obligation to do just that.

Our forebears believed in the moral law. They knew that the very existence of a free society presupposes that most people most of the time will not murder or assault or steal; they will keep their word, fulfill their contracts, tell the truth, lend a hand to a neighbor. These moral imperatives were believed to be expressions of the will of God.

Every human being has a unique role to play in the Divine Plan, and because of this, each private life is lived within a sacred precinct. Acknowledging the inviolability of this personal domain, the Declaration speaks of rights endowed by The Creator which governments are morally bound to respect. Given the premise of individual rights it follows that the primary responsibility of the law is to secure the rights of every man, woman and child.

It was upon a foundation of these basic ideas about the unique sacredness of human life, the efficacy of reason, the reality of free will, the moral law, and the inviolable rights of persons that the solid citizenry of the 18th century structured the free society—with the free market as its economic corollary. We have carelessly allowed this precious heritage to dribble away, but the hunger for freedom has not been lost; it will never be lost, for it is born anew with every child who comes into the world. The recovery of our heritage of liberty may exact a cost in blood, sweat and tears; but of one thing I am certain—when we want freedom desperately enough, nothing will stop us from getting it.

Originally published in the May 1984 edition of The Freeman. Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.

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