The Texas Declaration of Independence

The Unanimous Declaration of Independence made by the Delegates of the People of Texas in General Convention at the town of Washington on the 2nd day of March 1836.

When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted, and so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those inestimable and inalienable rights, becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression.

When the Federal Republican Constitution of their country, which they have sworn to support, no longer has a substantial existence, and the whole nature of their government has been forcibly changed, without their consent, from a restricted federative republic, composed of sovereign states, to a consolidated central military despotism, in which every interest is disregarded but that of the army and the priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the ever-ready minions of power, and the usual instruments of tyrants.

When, long after the spirit of the constitution has departed, moderation is at length so far lost by those in power, that even the semblance of freedom is removed, and the forms themselves of the constitution discontinued, and so far from their petitions and remonstrances being regarded, the agents who bear them are thrown into dungeons, and mercenary armies sent forth to force a new government upon them at the point of the bayonet.

When, in consequence of such acts of malfeasance and abdication on the part of the government, anarchy prevails, and civil society is dissolved into its original elements. In such a crisis, the first law of nature, the right of self-preservation, the inherent and inalienable rights of the people to appeal to first principles, and take their political affairs into their own hands in extreme cases, enjoins it as a right towards themselves, and a sacred obligation to their posterity, to abolish such government, and create another in its stead, calculated to rescue them from impending dangers, and to secure their future welfare and happiness.

Nations, as well as individuals, are amenable for their acts to the public opinion of mankind. A statement of a part of our grievances is therefore submitted to an impartial world, in justification of the hazardous but unavoidable step now taken, of severing our political connection with the Mexican people, and assuming an independent attitude among the nations of the earth.

The Mexican government, by its colonization laws, invited and induced the Anglo-American population of Texas to colonize its wilderness under the pledged faith of a written constitution, that they should continue to enjoy that constitutional liberty and republican government to which they had been habituated in the land of their birth, the United States of America.

In this expectation they have been cruelly disappointed, inasmuch as the Mexican nation has acquiesced in the late changes made in the government by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who having overturned the constitution of his country, now offers us the cruel alternative, either to abandon our homes, acquired by so many privations, or submit to the most intolerable of all tyranny, the combined despotism of the sword and the priesthood.

It has sacrificed our welfare to the state of Coahuila, by which our interests have been continually depressed through a jealous and partial course of legislation, carried on at a far distant seat of government, by a hostile majority, in an unknown tongue, and this too, notwithstanding we have petitioned in the humblest terms for the establishment of a separate state government, and have, in accordance with the provisions of the national constitution, presented to the general Congress a republican constitution, which was, without just cause, contemptuously rejected.

It incarcerated in a dungeon, for a long time, one of our citizens, for no other cause but a zealous endeavor to procure the acceptance of our constitution, and the establishment of a state government.

It has failed and refused to secure, on a firm basis, the right of trial by jury, that palladium of civil liberty, and only safe guarantee for the life, liberty, and property of the citizen.

It has failed to establish any public system of education, although possessed of almost boundless resources, (the public domain,) and although it is an axiom in political science, that unless a people are educated and enlightened, it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty, or the capacity for self government.

It has suffered the military commandants, stationed among us, to exercise arbitrary acts of oppression and tyrrany, thus trampling upon the most sacred rights of the citizens, and rendering the military superior to the civil power.

It has dissolved, by force of arms, the state Congress of Coahuila and Texas, and obliged our representatives to fly for their lives from the seat of government, thus depriving us of the fundamental political right of representation.

It has demanded the surrender of a number of our citizens, and ordered military detachments to seize and carry them into the Interior for trial, in contempt of the civil authorities, and in defiance of the laws and the constitution.

It has made piratical attacks upon our commerce, by commissioning foreign desperadoes, and authorizing them to seize our vessels, and convey the property of our citizens to far distant ports for confiscation.

It denies us the right of worshipping the Almighty according to the dictates of our own conscience, by the support of a national religion, calculated to promote the temporal interest of its human functionaries, rather than the glory of the true and living God.

It has demanded us to deliver up our arms, which are essential to our defense, the rightful property of freemen, and formidable only to tyrannical governments.

It has invaded our country both by sea and by land, with intent to lay waste our territory, and drive us from our homes; and has now a large mercenary army advancing, to carry on against us a war of extermination.

It has, through its emissaries, incited the merciless savage, with the tomahawk and scalping knife, to massacre the inhabitants of our defenseless frontiers.

It hath been, during the whole time of our connection with it, the contemptible sport and victim of successive military revolutions, and hath continually exhibited every characteristic of a weak, corrupt, and tyrannical government.

These, and other grievances, were patiently borne by the people of Texas, until they reached that point at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. We then took up arms in defense of the national constitution. We appealed to our Mexican brethren for assistance. Our appeal has been made in vain. Though months have elapsed, no sympathetic response has yet been heard from the Interior. We are, therefore, forced to the melancholy conclusion, that the Mexican people have acquiesced in the destruction of their liberty, and the substitution therefore of a military government; that they are unfit to be free, and incapable of self government.

The necessity of self-preservation, therefore, now decrees our eternal political separation.

We, therefore, the delegates with plenary powers of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, Sovereign, and independent republic, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the decision of the Supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations.

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Happy Texas Independence Day!

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Tags: Austin, freedom, government, history, individualism, Texas

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Communism is the vision of an egalitarian society with common ownership of property. Karl Marx, the father of communism, stated that the prevailing capitalist environment is responsible for class struggle and inequality among people. He believed that people’s lives are determined by their economic environment and in order to achieve the communist utopia, that environment has to be changed. For this change to occur, the working class (proletariat) must overthrow the existing regime, dismantle all capitalist institutions, and eliminate the possibility of a counterrevolution by the merchant class (bourgeoisie). Then, as a necessary pre-stage to communism, a socialist authoritarian government must be established to take complete control over the means of production—natural resources, infrastructure, tools, financial capital, and labor. Once people are thoroughly conditioned by this new structure they will morph into a “higher” man. Soon, government will wither away and in its place will emerge the stateless, egalitarian society that communists envisage. This may sound good in theory to some, but the communist experiments of the 20th century resulted in economic deprivation and murder on a massive scale.

Communism kills. Marx knew that winning the revolution would not be enough. He penned that “so long as other classes continue to exist, the capitalist class in particular, the proletariat fights it…it must still use a measure of force, hence governmental measures.” Lenin purged his ideological rivals, the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries. Stalin, Pol Pot, Che Guevara, Castro, and Mao all eliminated whoever they suspected of opposing their regimes, whether by deporting dissidents to slave labor camps, subjecting them to sham trials in which the forgone conclusion was a “guilty” verdict and execution, or simply murdering them outright. In all, even according to conservative estimates, communist regimes have killed at least 150 million people. Not too peaceful…

Communism prohibits private property. As Marx saw it, private property is the primary cause of man’s alienation from his social nature and a limitation on his freedom: "The right of property is therefore, the right to enjoy one’s fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without regard for other men and independently of society…It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty." Marx agreed that private property is the basis of the capitalist system, creating enormous wealth and economic progress; but he claimed that such wealth and progress is limited to a small class of rich merchants at the expense of a large class of poor workers. But, as classical liberals such as Adam Smith and John Locke argued, private property is essential to securing man’s natural rights to life and liberty. Think about it: the right to life is the right to live, and to live in the way you choose; the right to liberty is the right to pursue what you need to survive and live a good life, so long as it does not entail violating the rights of someone else to do the same.

However, if the needs of others are the determinant of how much food, shelter, or clothing you are allowed to have or of the profession you may pursue—then, ultimately, your life depends on whoever can claim to have a greater need than you. That’s not freedom; that’s slavery.

Communism is full of contradictions:

• Communists claimed that their philosophy would outdo capitalism economically because it promotes the good of all rather than the narrow self-interest of a few greedy capitalists. Yet, if being self-interested means that one acts according to a set of values that one holds and wants to realize, then communism itself could not be implemented without self-interest. Capitalist economies far surpassed communist ones in wealth, evident by the fact that the least-well-off in the former have a greater standard of living than all but the top echelon of government officials in the latter. To achieve the economic growth necessary to alleviate poverty, productivity and innovation are key, both of which depend on the proper incentives. Under capitalism people get to keep and dispose of what they have produced, which gives them an incentive to produce and innovate more. This is absent under communism.
• Communist leaders hailed their societies as beacons for a more just, abundant society. Yet, one only needs to look at how people voted with their feet to know that was not true; many willingly risked death to escape the devastatingly brutal conditions of communist countries to obtain a better life in capitalist countries. Moreover, in areas once seen as “breadbaskets” of the world, communism (and the disallowance of private property) brought mass famine, as was seen in Russia in the early 1920s and in China in the late 1950s.
• Communists stated that their philosophy is ethically superior to classical liberalism and capitalism because it seeks to abolish inequality. Under communism, they claim, everybody is equally provided for but in reality only those in power (bureaucrats and party honchos) win while everybody else loses. The only level of equality reached by the common man is in the shared level of misery.

Next | All Memes (upcoming)

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Communism Kills

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Tags: capitalism, communism, economics, ethics, history, Marx

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Our group from the Libertarian Longhorns (and Robert Butler, executive director of LP-Texas) left Austin around 6am on Saturday, January 23, to make sure we arrived in time to get a decent seat. Robert volunteered his vehicle, and so I didn’t have to drive. We talked up the LP’s plans and upcoming events on the drive to Houston and back.

Upon arrival, we had the privilege to meet some really neat  people. I happened to run across a few LCC readers as well, like Yvonne Kelly (on the far left of the group picture). Tom Woods said hello as he walked in, and I briefly spoke with Lew Rockwell as well while drinking some coffee.

The theme of the day was "the failure of Keynesianism" — appropriate considering our current political situation, wouldn’t you say? Doug French was the first speaker. For some reason I have lost my notes, but his topic was "Bank Failures in a Keynesian World." What was most interesting to me about his talk was the striking parallels of the circumstances preceding "the lost decade" and the circumstances we are now experiencing in the United States. One can only hope that failed policies would be remembered, but alas and alack it’s politics not wisdom that we deal with.

Tom Woods spoke about "Keynesian Predictions vs. American History." Did you know that as World War 2 was coming to a close, policy makers were concerned that the soldiers coming home would overwhelm the economy and that a new depression would ensue. How wrong they were: 1946 was the single greatest year for the American economy ever. I also enjoyed his ransacking of Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman.

Before lunch we enjoyed hearing the beloved Congressman Ron Paul. His principal point was simply that a true revolution is philosophic in nature. This is most certainly true, and the Austrian School of Economics is at the forefront of this change. Dr. Paul touched on many topics, but as he likes to do he focused on monetary policy and foreign policy. He made specific mention of the importance of auditing the Federal Reserve. He said that once audited, two well-kept secrets will be brought into the open once again: (1) that the Fed frequently bails out friends via the discount window (Fed short term loans), and (2) that the Fed has many international activities unaccounted for. Thus, we find monetary policy is also connected to foreign policy as well. Call me conspiratorial if you must, but the CIA’s funding goes beyond Congress – it’s tied to the Fed as well. Best quote from Ron: "Quite frankly, in a Constitutional Republic, you would not have a CIA."

Lew Rockwell was our final speaker for the day on "Economics and Moral Courage." He noted that although in many ways we are quite free (such as the freedom of the internet), we are also having much freedom taken away from us little by little. Moreover, as more freedom is stolen from us, people are more frequently not able to envision how freedom actually works. They simply do not have experience in understanding cause and effect. In truth, this is due to the "banality of evil," something small that ekes its way into public life. For example, the acceptance of a wrong premise about the role of government in life can be a first step toward more and more government control, leading finally to totalitarianism. What begins with banality, ends in bloodshed.

Overall, I’d say it was a great day…

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Mises Circle Houston Recap

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Tags: Austrian School, economics, free market, free society, freedom, history, keynesianism, Mises Institute, Ron Paul

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End the Fed, by Ron Paul – The Federal Reserve banking system is corrupt and has devastated the world economy, and Ron Paul demonstrates in this great book just how bad it really is. A must-read for our current political situation!

Meltdown, by Thomas Woods – Here’s another essential book for you to know well. Tom has not only written a great expose of how the government has crippled the economy but also a great treatise in basic economics. This book even hit the NYT Bestseller list for multiple weeks!

The Libertarian Theology of Freedom, by Edmund Opitz – Most LCC readers are already familiar with Opitz since I have been in the process of archiving his essays online, but I want to point out that this book is back in stock again at Amazon (but probably not for long). Read my review of this book for more information. But for that matter, any book by Ed Opitz is well worth having on your bookshelf.

Christianity and War, by Laurence Vance – I’m going to keep pushing this book until every Christian I know is reading it. Laurence’s work is incredible and absolutely essential for getting the church at large to realize war is NOT the answer. (Don’t forget that you can get the audiobook exclusively from LCC!)

Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman – Does American “culture” sometimes make you wonder what on earth happened here? Neil Postman clarifies the problems we face on a regular basis in this classic book. Check out my book review here at LCC.

The Ethics of Money Production, by Guido Hulsmann – Guido is definitely one of my favorite scholars in the Austrian School, and this book is just one more reason why. His thesis is simple: money creation must occur on the free market, neither inhibited nor controlled by government, in order to be created in an ethical manner. Pretty great topic, eh? (By the way, you can get this book at Amazon, but it’s cheaper via the Mises Institute online store.)

The Cult of the Presidency, by Gene Healy – I met Gene for the first time this past October at the Students for Liberty Texas Conference, and am now an even greater admirer of his intellect and tenacity to hit the establishment hard. This book shows just how ridiculous statolatry has become, especially in the last eight years with Bush. Now, I think he could write a second book just about Obama. (Also, the paperback version runs a couple bucks cheaper if it matters to you.)

Faith and Liberty, by Alejandro Chafuen – I was really excited to find this book, which covers the history of the Late Scholastic thinkers and their writings on private property, trade, money, and the State – which were all written from theological perspective.

The Way, the Truth, and the Sword, by Scott Ritsema – You can get Scott’s great book either as an eBook or through Lulu.com. Either way, you’re in for a treat, as Scott has written a wonderful little book encouraging the church at large to reject the State and get back to the true savior, Jesus Christ. Scott is the webmaster at Civics News.

An Amazon Kindle filled with the Mises library and Christian Classics – This may be #10, but it’s probably #1 in my list. You know, almost every book the Mises Institute publishes (and much more) is available to download for free as a PDF on their website. You could easily fill a flash drive with liberty PDF’s from the Mises Library and tons of classic theological texts from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and Project Gutenberg. Now THAT would be a gift long remembered! (Hey Mom, hint hint?)

And remember, if you follow one of these links, LCC gets a small referral cut from every purchase you make at no cost to you. So, get some great books AND support LibertarianChristians.com while doing your Christmas shopping. It’s much appreciated…

Finally, if you think a great book deserves to be on this list, comment below and make your voice heard!

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Top 10 Books for Christian Libertarians – 2009 Edition

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Tags: Book Reviews, culture, government, history, money, philosophy, recommended books, statolatry, theology

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Here’s clip #1:

Here’s clip #2:

The book Dr. Paul cites sounds really interesting, check out Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly at Amazon.

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Ron Paul: Get out of Afghanistan NOW!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Point—Freedom

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

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

Second Point—Property

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

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

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

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

Third Point—Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fourth Point—Economic Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fifth Point—Political Plunder

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

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

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

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

The Roots of Plunder

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

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

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

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

1. Who shall wield power?

2. For whose benefit shall this power be wielded?

3. At whose expense shall this power be wielded?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Whig Idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in The Freeman, October 1987.

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Human Nature and the Free Society

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

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

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

Liberty Lost

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

Liberty Regained

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

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

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

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

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

“Social Utility” Trap

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

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

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

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

Competing Ethical Codes

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

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

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

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

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

The Lack of an Ethical Consensus

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing Christianity

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

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

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

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

Utilitarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The City of God and The City of Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Perhaps the most valid justification of government is its defense of citizens against foreign aggressors. But when governments wage war, a thin line separates defense and offense. And even in a defensive war, governments typically deprive their own citizens of many liberties. Historically, war has done more than anything else to enhance the power of governments and to diminish the liberties of the people. Classical liberals have always recognized the dangers of war and supported policies, such as free international trade, that reduce the likelihood of war.

The Foundation for Economic Education has stood squarely in this classical liberal tradition, and over the years its monthly publication, The Freeman, has presented many articles alerting readers to the domestic dangers of war and espousing policies that promote peaceful international relations. Leviathan at War, edited by Edmund A. Opitz, reproduces many of those articles as well as several other commentaries. The longest essay in the collection, Wesley Allen Riddle’s “War and Individual Liberty in American History,” is a previously unpublished contribution.

In a chapter on “The Roots of War,” Ayn Rand succinctly states a major theme of the book: “If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged `good’ can justify it—there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.”

In an excerpt from Human Action, Ludwig von Mises expresses similar ideas. “Aggressive nationalism is the necessary derivation of the policies of interventionism and national planning. While laissez faire eliminates the causes of international conflict, government interference with business and socialism create conflicts for which no peaceful solution can be found.” Mises describes how the engagement of governments in “total” war led them inexorably to extend their controls over economic life.

Perhaps the starkest wartime deprivation of liberty is the conscription of men to serve as soldiers. The United States first conscripted men during the Civil War. In World War I nearly 3 million were drafted, in World War II some 10 million, and the draft persisted until 1973. In “The Conscription Idea,” written in 1953, Dean Russell lamented that “the principle of conscription is now fearfully close to becoming a permanent American institution.” Russell, who had served in the Air Corps for five years during World War II, rejected the standard defense of the draft, which maintains that the end justifies the means. Said Russell, “Those who advocate the `temporary loss’ of our freedom in order to preserve it permanently are advocating only one thing: the abolition of liberty.” He believed that if the United States were genuinely menaced from abroad, volunteers would come forward in sufficient numbers to defend the country.

The book reprints Daniel Webster’s stirring speech opposing conscription when it was proposed in 1814. “An attempt to maintain this doctrine upon the provisions of the Constitution,” declared Webster, “is an exercise of perverse ingenuity to extract slavery from the substance of a free Constitution.” Anyone would be struck by reading Webster’s speech alongside the unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of the draft in 1918. Then, Chief Justice Edward White found himself “unable to conceive” how anyone could regard conscription as involuntary servitude—obviously, America’s effective constitution had changed enormously since 1814. In an excerpt from a 1944 book, the British military historian B. H. Liddell Hart criticizes conscription, calling it “a decisive step towards totalitarianism.”

In “How to Finance a War,” Willard M. Fox exposes the fallacy that the costs of war can be shifted to future generations by debt financing. He observes that “the real cost of waging war is borne by the living who are deprived of things that in the absence of war could be produced and consumed in ordinary peacetime life. No amount of fiscal hocus pocus can change that reality.” He also shows how the U.S. government has resorted to inflation to help finance its wars, and he explodes the myth of wartime prosperity. He concludes that “by a combination of persuasion, appeals to patriotism, veiled threats of coercion, and bidding a high enough price, government can get what it wants in the market” for most wartime purposes.

Nothing displaces sound morality quicker than warfare. Soldiers are lionized for indiscriminately killing people and destroying property—actions that would ordinarily bring moral censure. Government propaganda encourages citizens to dehumanize enemy populations, so that mass murder can go forward without moral restraint. Leonard E. Read’s contribution, “Conscience on the Battlefield,” challenges the herd mentality underlying the savagery that attends the waging of war. Mark Twain’s classic “War Prayer” hits the same target.

James Madison spoke wisely when he warned that “of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded.” It is inconceivable that, absent the wars of the past century, the government of the United States—and probably many others as well—could have grown nearly so powerful. From its participation in wars, the U.S. government gained, for example, high income-tax rates and income-tax withholding, the system used to finance the voracious modern welfare/warfare state. Even more importantly, victory in the world wars convinced Americans that the federal government has the ability to achieve great social objectives in the public interest and can be trusted to do so. A clear progression leads from wartime economic planning to the massive contemporary government meddling in economic affairs.

Edmund Opitz deserves much credit for compiling an excellent collection of commentaries on a subject of the greatest importance. No matter how much Americans may wish to throw off the shackles of the welfare state, recover their lost liberties and live in peace, they stand little chance so long as the government can divert them by engaging in war. As Opitz wisely observes, “while many people say they want peace, few know or want the things that make for peace. . . . When men rely on political privilege to acquire economic goods, they have already embraced the near end of a principle whose far end is war.”

December 1995

Robert Higgs is Research Director for the Independent Institute.

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It is customary on occasions such as this to begin by stating what an honor it is to have been asked to speak. and the challenge with which I find myself confronted is how to express to you my deep sense of privilege without it sounding in any way perfunctory.

The best way in which I can do that is, perhaps, indulgent, but being a Catholic, I tend to believe in indulgences, within the requisite boundaries—and I consider this occasion to meet that standard.

I was born not more than fifty miles due south of this compound, at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, into a hard-working, blue-collar Italian family. I went to school in a multicultural and ecumenical context, long before the words multicultural or ecumenical were employed in common parlance.

I will relate only one of the images etched in my mind which formed the initial soil that would harbor and nourish the seeds which would come to fruition at a somewhat later date seeds which this institution, in general, and Edmund Opitz, in particular, had something to do with scattering and planting.

The image to which I refer is of an elderly Jewish lady who lived across from my family’s railroad flat above Coney Island Avenue. Mrs. Snyder had, what seemed to a child of six, the magic ability to cause the most luscious, aromatic, and sweet smells imaginable to emanate from her old Wedge-wood stove.

I recall sitting at our kitchen window as she would gather and pour all her ingredients into a large mixing bowl, creating a doughy substance, which she would then pluck from the bowl, piece by piece, and place on a cookie sheet. This she would then place into the oven which, in a short time, would result in an aroma that was so rich that you could almost see it wafting between our two windows.

A few minutes later, which seemed like an eternity, Mrs. Snyder would remove that tray, replacing it with another, and place the now finished product on her windowsill to cool.

I watched this ritual intently, and when the temperature of the cookies had dropped, but not so much that they weren’t still warm, Mrs. Snyder would beckon me in her thick Central European accent: “You’ll come and I’ll give you some.” I hopped out my window and walked—floated is perhaps a more apt word to describe the sensation—the few feet to her window.

One summer day when Mrs. Snyder, in a short-sleeved calico dress, filled my hands with a napkin overflowing with her treasures, I noticed something on her forearm.

I didn’t say anything to her, but when I climbed back into my kitchen, I asked my mother why Mrs. Snyder had numbers on her arm.

My mother explained, as best she could to one so young, that because of their religion Mr. and Mrs. Snyder had been treated like animals and branded.

That remembrance of the attempt to use force over the human conscience stays with me to this day. But, at the time, and for many years after it, I found myself confused when I tried to make sense of the interrelationship of liberty and religion.

It was when I was in my mid-twenties, still not having made a coherent connection between these ideas, that a friend visited. (It was my birthday.) We had had numerous conversations, indeed arguments, about philosophy, economics, politics, and religion.

I was, at the time, I confess, ensnared in the fog of socialist rhetoric, there being little else intellectually about socialism to ensnare one. The birthday present my friend arrived with that day was a small library of books and magazines. Among them were titles with which this gathering will be familiar: Socialism, by Ludwig von Mises, Capitalism and the Historians and The Road to Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, The Freeman, and, of course, Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies, by Edmund Opitz.

In a short period of time the fog cleared, proving once again the truth of the old saying: “You may be a socialist when you’re young because you have a heart, but you won’t be a socialist when you’re older if you have any brains.”

Thus, I began to read The Freeman and have been assisted in ways too countless to enumerate by the wise, prudent, temperate, and erudite contributions of Ed Opitz.

Not only his scholarship, but his very example as a Christian gentleman assured me of the possibility of integrating virtue and liberty in one’s life and society.

It came to pass that I recovered my earlier faith, and thanks in significant part to the existence of The Foundation for Economic Education and the cogitations of Ed over the years, I was duly inoculated against the specious claims of the left by the time I entered seminary to study for the priesthood.

But you, of all people, have heard this kind of story many times over. And this is because The Foundation for Economic Education, and Ed Opitz, have simply become a part of the landscape of liberty in this century.

In the days when central planning was the unquestioned course of public policy, and when religious leaders taught variations on the theme that socialism was the practice of which Christianity was the religion—there was Ed Opitz, in a plethora of articles, boldly, yet calmly, adamantly, yet with respect, indicating with the most gentle and genteel of manners, that, in point of fact, the Emperor had no clothes. Before there was such a thing as liberation theology, Mr. Opitz provided the antidote to that theological and economic heresy.

Not more than four years ago, Europe was in the literal death grip of history’s most brutal institutionalization of collectivism. With great prescience Ludwig von Mises, of esteemed memory, and no stranger to these very corridors, demonstrated in the 1920s that socialism would fail because it interfered with the coordination of information as expressed in the free market’s pricing system. In the late 1980s, that economic insight was combined with the spiritual nudge which caused the colossal wreck of Communism to cave in on itself.

This was the very integration made flesh—whether the Pentecostals in Russia, the Soviet Jews, the Evangelicals in Hungary, or the Catholics in Poland this was the incarnation of the theory of the alliance of religion and freedom which formed the leitmotif of Ed Opitz’s work over the years.

If this venerable institution on the Hudson is the mother of all free-market think tanks, then Ed Opitz is one of the patriarchs of liberty-promoting clergy.

I am, in a sense, an heir to his legacy, and it is with an overwhelming sense of gratitude to Almighty God that I am aware of being merely one of Ed’s intellectual descendants, though luckier than the others, because it is I who have the honor of giving voice to what I feel sure each of them would say.

Ed, in my person, your children rise up to call you blessed. In their name, I thank you.

Upon Ed’s passing in 2006, Sirico wrote the obituary article in the National Review.

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Every variety of tyranny rests upon the belief that some persons have a right — or even a duty — to impose their wills upon other people. Tyranny may be fastened upon others by the mere whim of one man, such as a king or dictator under various names. Or tyranny may be imposed upon a minority “for their own good” by a democratically elected majority. But in any case, tyranny is always a denial — or a misunderstanding — of the mandates of an authority or law higher than man himself.

Liberty rests upon the belief that all proper authority for man’s relationships with his fellow men comes from a source higher than man — from the Creator. Liberty decrees that all men — subject and ruler alike — are bound by this higher authority which is above and beyond man-made law; that each person has a relation to his Maker with which no other person, not even the ruler, has any right to interfere. In order to make these conceptions effective for liberty, they must be deeply ingrained in the fundamental values of a people. That is to say, they must be part of the popular religion. There was one people of antiquity for whom this was true, the people who gave us our Old Testament. It was among the ancient Israelites that the conviction took hold and emerged into practice that there was a God of righteousness whose judgments applied even to rulers.

No Royal Inscription

The science of archaeology has unearthed some spectacular ruins in Egypt, in Babylonia, in Crete and in Greece. All over the Middle East, patient researchers have turned up monuments and vainglorious inscriptions carved into rock or pressed into clay at the behest of proud kings. Except in Palestine! There has been nothing brought to light in Palestine comparable to the monuments extolling the vain kings of Egypt.

An authority states that there is not a single royal inscription from any of the Bible kings. The Prophets saw to that! No boastful king in ancient Israel would have presumed to leave an inscription dedicated to his own glory, much as he felt he deserved such. The Prophets would have quickly put such a king in his place, and popular resentment would have run high against such inflation of human pride.

In Greece and Rome there were men noted as great lawgivers: Lycurgus, Solon, Justinian and others. In other countries there were royal decrees by the thousands. A law would be promulgated with some such words as, “I, the King, command….” In Egypt and in Babylon, even as in Greece and Rome, authority for a law stemmed from a man, the ruler. But in Palestine the situation was different.

In Biblical literature there is not a single law emanating from kings or other secular authority which was recorded and preserved as permanently valid. Nor have archaeologists in Palestine unearthed royal decrees inscribed on clay tablets or graven on rock.

Now, no people live together without conforming to a commonly accepted code, and without having recourse at times to law. The people of ancient Palestine lived under authority, not in a condition of anarchy. If the king was not the source of their law, there must have been another and higher source. There is no doubt as to what their authority was: they looked to God as the source of their law.

“The Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king” (Is. 33:22). All, or nearly all, of the basic laws of this people were written as though emanating from God Himself. Instead of “I, the King,” it was “I, the Lord.”

“And ye shall keep my statutes and do them: I am the Lord” (Lev. 20:8). “Thus saith the Lord: Execute ye judgment and righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor; and do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow” (Jer. 22:3).

This is the system of law, laid down in the Scriptures, expanded and interpreted by human reason, of’ which the Psalmist said, “[H]is delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night” (Ps. 1:2).

Nearly every man was learned in this law, and also deeply involved in the religious relation to God in which the law was rooted — and liberty was a precious by-product of these conditions. Establish these conditions — that is, widely held religious values in which God is regarded as the source of authority and justice, superior to any earthly power — and they provide a firm foundation for political liberty.

In these circumstances there is a continuous check to tyranny, should any such attempt to raise its head. Neglect these conditions, and liberty has no roots. It is like a cut flower which has no vitality in itself and does not last beyond the life it derived from the plant. The way is prepared for tyranny.

This is not to say that there are no economic and political problems peculiar to liberty itself, nor that liberty is not at times impaired by ignorance among a people whose religious values are intact. It is to stress the importance of maintaining the things on which liberty depends — and these are the things of religion. This foundation must be sound, but the structure erected on it must be sound, too.

Collectivist regimes, in the nature of things, must be profoundly irreligious, even to the extent of pressing a corrupted religion into service to shore up tyranny. Genuine religious experience entails the recognition of an inviolable essence in men, the human soul. It inculcates a sense of the worth and dignity of the person and breeds resistance to efforts to submerge individuals in the mass.

Men whose personal experience convinces them that they are creatures of God will not become willing creatures of the state, nor attempt to make creatures of other men. For them, God is the Lord, whose service is perfect freedom; and Caesar is the ruler, whom to serve is bondage.

It was upon such a faith that this country was founded. Those who migrated to these shores in the early days did not always see the full implications of their beliefs, and sometimes acted contrary to them. But in the end those beliefs prevailed, and they are recognizable in American institutions.

I know it has been fashionable of late to depreciate the motives of the men who made the early settlements on American shores, but I am convinced that the judgment made by Alexis de Tocqueville 120 years ago is nearer the truth. Writing of the men who established Plymouth colony, de Tocqueville said, “[I]t was a purely intellectual craving that called them from the comforts of their former homes; and in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile their object was the triumph of an idea.”

This idea was one which had been spreading in England since even before the Reformation, but it bears more directly upon the time when the English people had, for the first time, the Bible in their own tongue. The idea of a new commonwealth, fired by reading in the Old Testament of the people of the covenant, launched in America what de Tocqueville described as “a democracy more perfect than antiquity had dared dream of.”

The first minister of the church in Boston in 1630 was John Cotton. Cotton Mather wrote of him, that he “propounded unto them an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might be, to that which was the glory of Israel, the ‘peculiar people.’” The Puritan regime, taken by itself, was pretty rigorous. But it matured, and in its maturity received an infusion from something radically different — the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment by itself in France ran its course and became its own caricature. It teamed up with a revolution at the end of which was Napoleon. But in America the seemingly diverse elements fused. Here, we conceived the idea of a limited government under a written constitution; the idea of a separation of powers in the federal government and a retention of sovereignty in important spheres by the individual states; the concept of the immunity of persons from arbitrary encroachment by government.

An experiment based on those principles was launched on these shores less than two centuries ago. It was the result of a conscious effort to forge an instrumentality of government in conformity with the higher law, based on the widely held conviction that God is the author of liberty.

Basis of Political Liberty

Our political liberties were not born in a vacuum, but among a people who had a sense of their unique destiny under God. Our religious foundation has been alluded to in a Supreme Court decision (1892, 143 U.S. 457):

[T]his is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation.

So long as men accepted the basic affirmations of religion — that there is a God of all people with whom each individual has a personal relationship — our liberties were basically secure. Whenever there was a breach in them, we possessed a principle by which we could discover and repair the breach. But when there ceases to be a constant recurrence to fundamental principles, our political freedom is placed in jeopardy. Political liberty is not self-sustained; it rests upon a religious base.

All men desire to be free, and the will to be free is perpetually renewed in each individual who uses his faculties and affirms his manhood. But the mere desire to be free has never saved any people who did not know and establish the things on which freedom depends — and these are the things of religion. The God-concept, when cherished in the values of a people, is the universal solvent of tyranny, for, as Job said, “He looseth the bond of kings” (Job 12:18).

Many “monuments for posterity” are being built today in our country. Are they mostly dedicated to man and his vain decrees, or to the Creator of man and the higher law? The future of our civilization rests on the answer to the spirit of that question.

Check out Opitz’s book “The Libertarian Theology of Freedom” on Amazon.com.

——

The Rev. Edmund A. Opitz was a Congregationalist minister who for decades championed the cause of a free society and the need to anchor that society in a transcendent morality. For 37 years, he was a senior staff member and resident theologian at the Foundation for Economic Education. In the early 1950s, he had been part of Spiritual Mobilization, an organization that published the magazine Faith and Freedom, for which Murray Rothbard and Henry Hazlitt often wrote. It was sent to over 20,000 ministers. While at FEE, he started a small organization called the Remnant, a fellowship of conservative and libertarian ministers, using the main theme of a reprinted essay that FEE published, written by Albert Jay Nock in 1937, “Isaiah’s Job.” See his article archives at Mises.org.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Religious Roots of Liberty

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Tags: history, individualism, philosophy, rights, theology

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