The Civil War marks a deep cleavage in American life; the increasingly industrialized America of the latter decades of the 19th century was quite different from pre-Civil War America. The economy of the first part of the last century did of course engage in some manufacturing, but the businessman of the period was typically a merchant and a trader rather than a factory owner or mine operator. Men of ambition made money shipping lumber to China and returning with tea, opium, mandarin screens, and the like. American whalers plied their arduous trade all over the world. The Yankee clipper, sailing out of eastern ports from Baltimore to Salem, was the most beautiful thing afloat, and the swiftest vessel on the seven seas till after the Civil War.

Most Americans, during this period, lived in villages and small towns; farming was the major occupation, and rural life was a struggle for survival. Poverty was widespread, giving rise to the old New England maxim: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby Dick, tells how dirty and dangerous life was on board a whaling ship. Imagine then, if you will, what it was like trying to wrest a living out of the rocky soil of New England if life aboard a whaler was the preferred alternative!

No one would refer to the early decades of the last century as “The Era of Free Enterprise Individualism.” It is the post-Civil War period that is usually labeled so. “Free Enterprise” and “Individualism” are two very slippery terms. In any event, the decades under evaluation here are bounded, on the one side, by the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, and on the other, by William McKinley; roughly from 1869 to 1901. This was America’s Gilded Age, so labeled by Mark Twain in his novel of that name. The Gilded Age expressed Mark Twain’s disillusionment over the decline in his nation from the decent, old, kindly America he remembered from his boyhood to the America of Black Friday, Credit Mobilier, Boss Tweed, Tammany, and the hustle for the fast buck.

The Changing Scene

Mark Twain, in collaboration with his neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner—called “Deadly Warning” by his friends—published The Gilded Age in 1873. The theme of this novel is announced in the Preface: “In a State where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed.” But we no longer have people of this character, Mark Twain is telling us; corruption has eaten so deeply into the hearts and minds of people that he and Warner have ample material for the 453-page fictionalized history he and his friend have constructed.

In chapter 18 the authors venture a conjecture as to how this mutation in the American character had come about: “The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 had uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.” The Gadarene progress was more rapid than Mark Twain had anticipated; it worked itself out close to the bitter end before he died thirty- seven years later.

Twain’s satire was merely a prologue; the play followed, and the main characters are all well- known names. There was Commodore Vanderbilt (who conferred that naval distinction on himself because he ran a ferryboat between Staten Island and the Battery); and Jay Gould, who built himself a mansion just up the road from the property which now houses The Foundation for Economic Education. There was Daniel Drew, and Jim Fisk, and Andrew Carnegie; there was Huntington, Stanford, Harriman, Rockefeller and Morgan. I’ve listed here ten names; add ten more if you wish, or a thousand more. The point is that these “robber barons,” as they’ve been called, were a mere handful of men whose deeds and misdeeds have been lovingly chronicled by three generations of journalists and muckrakers.

Conniving with Politicians

These extravagant characters have been represented as exemplars of unrestrained individualism at its worst, fiercely competitive, practitioners of undiluted laissez faire capitalism. They were nothing of the sort. So far were they from wanting a genuinely free market economy that they bought up senators and paid off judges in order to stifle competition. They did not want a government that would let them alone; they wanted a government they could use. Had they been able to understand the original idea of laissez faire they would have opposed it. They were- not individualists; they did not believe in a fair field and no favor; they stacked the odds against their competitors.

The last thing Vanderbilt, Gould, Carnegie and the others wanted was open competition in a game where the best man wins. To the contrary! They connived with politicians to obtain advantages for themselves by controlling government and the law; they manipulated the public power for private gain. And the government was eager to oblige.

This was done openly, and virtually everyone knew about it. Witty commentators referred to certain politicians as the Senator from coal, or the Senator from railroads, or the Senator from steel. Observing the situation in Pennsylvania, one critic was led to remark that Standard Oil had done everything with the legislature—except refine it! Such political practices were a far cry from the vision of James Madison, who had declared that “Justice is the end of government, and justice is the end of civil society.” The Gilded Age was a throwback to the age-old practice of using political power for the economic advantage of those who hold office, and for their friends.

If you want the story of these men and their times, a good place to start is Gustavus Myers’ History of the Great American Fortunes. First published in 1907, this book went through several editions here and in England. It was published in a large inexpensive edition in 1936 as a Modern Library Giant. I bought my secondhand copy in 1953; the original purchaser bought his in 1939 and it contains a gracious inscription by Myers himself: “May you be included in my next- supplement to this tome.”

Myers tells the reader that he was just a reformer when he began his research, eager to reveal the unsavory tactics of rapacious men in business and industry in the absence of government supervision of economic life. Only later did he conclude that a radical restructuring of society—some form of socialism—was the only answer. The conclusion is a strange one. Myers demonstrates throughout his book that such powers as government exercised in this nation during the Gilded Age were misused so as to wrongfully give monetary advantage to some at the expense of others. If this government with a little power did harm, there is no reason at all to assume that a new government wielding a lot of power will do good!

I have gone through Myers’ book and underlined every passage which describes a sinister alliance between politicians and these fortune hunters; there are some hundred and fifty such passages. Let me offer you a representative sample.

. . . peculiar special privileges, worth millions of dollars.

. . . as a free gift from government.

. . . the free use of the people’s money, through the power of government.

. . . a notorious violator of the law, invoking the aid of the law to enrich himself still further.

. . . causing public money to be turned over to his private treasury.

By either the tacit permission or connivance of government.

The simple mandate of law was sufficient authorization for them to prey upon the whole world outside their charmed circles.

. . . while it was essential to control law-making bodies, it was imperative to have as their auxiliary the bodies that interpreted the law. [That is, the courts.]

I think you catch the flavor of Mr. Myers’ book. He is a moralist; he is indignant; he preaches a hell-fire and brimstone sermon against the wicked men who took advantage of their fellow Americans by subverting the law from its proper role of administering an evenhanded justice between person and person. They bent the law into an instrument of plunder. But Myers is not a philosopher; he does not shape his material according to a coherent theory of the economic and political orders.

Gaudy tales about these few unprincipled buccaneers distract our attention away from the millions of Americans on the farm and in the workshops. These hard working people constituted the real American economy during the Gilded Age. This bustling, surging economy of ours received immigrants from Europe at a rate of about a million a year, and it absorbed them on our farms and in other places of work. The standard of living was rising all the while; wages doubled between 1870 and 1900.

It was an age of invention. During the eighty years from 1790 to 1870, the U.S. Patent Office had granted just over 40,000 patents; during the next thirty years it granted just over 400,000. New types of farm machinery transformed agriculture. To cite one instance: not one bushel of wheat had been raised in the Dakota Territory before 1881; by 1887 its wheat crop was sixty-two million bushels. In 1870 there was nothing that could be called an American steel industry; by 1900 we were producing more than ten million tons of steel annually—more than all the rest of the world combined.

The economic opportunity in America attracted millions of foreigners to these shores during these decades. These men, women and children did not uproot themselves from Europe, leaving family and friends, then undertake an uncomfortable ocean voyage, in order to be exploited; they came here because they could, by their own efforts, forge a better life for themselves in the freest economy the world had yet known.

An Economy of Opportunity

The economy was not wholly free, else there would not have been a single robber baron. But the fact that certain sharp operators piled up large fortunes by means of legally sanctioned thievery means that there was already wealth here to be stolen. The wealth they filched from the taxpayers was created by millions of industrious Americans laboring under conditions that approximated the free market. Compared to working conditions in Europe, we had an economy of opportunity. Thirty million immigrants told us so by coming to these shores, where they found a better and freer life for themselves and their descendants.

Let me retrace our steps to the place where I alleged that Gustavus Myers was long on indignation, but somewhat short on theory. He tells the sordid tale of a gang of private citizens in cahoots with government to operate a scam against the public. His fortune hunters are supposed to represent “free enterprise,” but in reality, the robber barons are to the market economy what Jesse James and the Dalton brothers were to the hardy homesteaders who settled the western territories. In other words, they were more predators than producers.

We need to come to some understanding of the political order appropriate to a society of free people. By the same token, we need to know how the free economy operates, and the role of the businessman within a market economy.

Politically, I call myself an old-fashioned Whig. I’m a believer in equal justice under the law, and something of a Jeffersonian, so let me quote a few lines from Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address describing the society he strove for: “Equal and exact justice to all men; of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendships with all nations,—entangling alliances with none . . . freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus.”

Later in the same Address Jefferson praised “. . . a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

The function of government, in the Jeffersonian scheme, is to secure the God-given rights of all persons, to deter and redress injury, and otherwise let people alone.

Limited Government

The American Constitution is more explicit in what it forbids government to do than in what it authorizes government to do; the words “no” and “not” in restraint of governmental power occur forty-five times in the first seven Articles and the Bill of Rights. Limiting the scope and power of government maximizes individual liberty and gives us a society of free people. Government, in a free society, has no power to confer economic advantage on some at the expense of others, which eliminates “robber barons,” be they individuals or groups, rich or poor. The government of a free people does not misuse its power to tax by taking wealth from those whose labor produced it and allocating it to the pressure groups who possess political influence.

Limited government under the Rule of Law maintains an evenhanded justice; it keeps the peace of the community by curbing those who break the peace. It lets people alone, and it punishes any individual who refuses to let other people alone.

A free government is distinguished from other forms of government by the use it makes of the law; it employs lawful force against criminals in order that peaceful people may go about their business. This is force used in self defense. Every other political system uses legal violence against peaceful people—for any sort of reason the users of violence may conjure up. This is the aggressive use of force. The distinction is between law and tyranny, as the Greeks put it. “Let no man live uncurbed by law; nor curbed by tyranny,” said the playwright Aeschylus.

Given the law order of a free society, the economic activities of men and women, as they go about the business of earning a livelihood, is necessarily free market and voluntary.

Consumer Sovereignty and the Free Society

In a genuinely free society, a laissez faire society in the early sense of this much abused phrase, the businessman is a mandatory of consumers; the customer is boss. Consumer sovereignty! Is this the way the businessman likes it? Of course not. Our businessman would like to think of himself as the man in charge, a captain of industry running a tight ship. But who’s he kidding? He doesn’t even have the power to set wages and prices. His competition, his employees, and his customers make those decisions for him. If he tries to lower wages he will lose his best workers to his competitors who pay the going rate or more. If he tries to raise prices, people buy elsewhere. He’s stymied, and that’s why he’s tempted on occasion to persuade some politician to bend the rules in his favor, just enough to give him what a friend of mine called, ironically, a “fair advantage.”

But when a businessman yields to this temptation he forfeits his standing as a businessman and becomes something else—a branch of the government bureaucracy. He has left the economic order, and is now part of the State. As a businessman he had no power over anyone; as a part of the State he shares, with government, the power to tax. People now have to pay for his products whether they buy them or not.

Was there “free enterprise” during the Gilded Age? Yes, there was—but not much of it on the part of the “robber barons” who were in cahoots with government. Was there “individualism” during the period? Well, there was individuality, but the kind of individualism which means equal freedom for every person to pursue his private goals was not a guiding policy.

But who are we, as we go stumbling down the road to serfdom, to cast the first stone?

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

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

The Robber Barons and the Real Gilded Age

Every Person pursues his individual goals in the context of some society. The norms, customs, habits and fashions of that society seem at times to hinder him, but at the same time they are a sustaining presence. Likewise the laws of his nation. Man is said to be a political animal, in the sense that society is his native habitat. But he’s also a political animal in one further respect; people create governments in their own image. This is obvious in a democratic system.

It is self-evident that the politicians elected to public office are men who embody the consensus. The successful candidates are those who most persuasively promise what voters believe government should deliver; politicians operate on that slippery spectrum bounded, on the one hand, by what voters expect and demand of government, and by what they will put up with from government, on the other. A nation tends to get the government it deserves, in the sense that pressure groups will eventually organize to make wrongful demands upon government, unless the nation’s “aristocracy of virtue and talent” — men with the ability to teach what expectations and demands are legitimate — are heeded.

When educators, philosophers, and men of letters fail to properly nourish the intellect, the conscience and the imagination of significant segments of a society, they betray a sacred trust as teachers of mankind, and in the wake of their defection a secular religiousness becomes the popular faith. Leviathan — the omnipotent State — is the god of this faith. Men serve Leviathan in the confident expectation that he will provide his votaries with ease, comfort, security, and prosperity. The modern world does indeed provide more of these things for more people than earlier periods, but it also exacts a toll in the form of perpetual warfare, social unrest, hardening of the arteries, softening of the brain, and a troubled spirit.

We Are the Enemy

When we attempt to assess the modern malaise we are tempted to say: “An enemy hath done this thing.” But the truth of the matter is that we have done it to ourselves — the actively guilty, the passively guilty, the ignorant, the stupid, and all the innocent bystanders — we are all in this thing together.

Every society has its characteristic pecking order, and ours is no exception. Certain men, certain ideas, certain life styles are at the top of the pecking order; the masses admire and seek to emulate these men, ideas and life styles. If these ideas and styles are not life enhancing, there is frustration and thwarting at the deep levels of human nature and a whole society is sidetracked. The Remnant who keep the faith are superfluous; society has no use for their services. Such a society will necessarily get Leviathan — a government which matches its warped and ill-favored nature. Edmund Burke puts the matter plainly in a letter to constituents in Bristol:

“Believe me, it is a great truth, that there never was, for any long time, a corrupt representative of a virtuous people; or a mean, sluggish, careless people that ever had a good government of any form.”

Civilizations rise and fall, nations come and go. Why this occurs is the subject of learned speculation and debate. There is little unanimity among scholars, who disagree among themselves even as to the yardsticks by which decline and progress might be measured. But even though the overall movement of a civilization is difficult to detect, there are two trends in the modern world in all progressive countries, where the facts are clear; the first has to do with politics, the second with economics.

The thrust of eighteenth century Whiggery and of Classical Liberalism was to pry various sectors of life out from under the yoke of the State, to free them from political controls. The aim was to shrink government to a limited, constabulary function. The twentieth century has reversed this trend, with a vengeance. The theory of the free society has come under increasing attack, and totalitarian governments have emerged in nation after nation.

As Classical Liberalism expanded the voluntary sector of society the economic controls of the Mercantilist era were removed from business, industry, and agriculture. Adam Smith demonstrated that — within the framework of the Rule of Law, which Liberalism supplied — the economic order was subtly regulated by the buying habits of consumers; and the free economy began to emerge within western nations. Freedom in economic transactions was never fully achieved in any nation, but we made greater progress in that direction in the United States than elsewhere, and we paid lip service to the ideal of the market economy. But ideals change.

National Planning

The new freedom did not bring about utopia, or a paradise on earth, and in the aftermath of this disappointment, a new scheme captured the imagination of the intellectuals—nation-wide planning for the achievement of national purposes and goals. The New Deal marked a major change in the popular attitude toward the free economy; efforts to frame the rules necessary for attaining competition in the marketplace gave way to the urge to put the marketplace under bureaucratic regulation. The free economy was to be phased out, step by step.

I am a believer in the free society and in the free economy. The free society is to my taste because I like its variety, I like the diversity it encourages, I like the spontaneity it permits. I also like the free economy. I like it because it is more productive than any alternative; people eat better, have more things, are more secure in their possessions. Freedom works, and therefore I resist the collectivizing trends of the twentieth century which would transform people into creatures of the State. But my belief in freedom is grounded, ultimately, on my reading of the nature of the human person.

Man, I believe, is a created being; there is a sacred essence in him. Man is on this planet in consequence of a mighty plan-of whose outlines we may gain faint intimations — and his life is used to further a vast purpose-of which we are given an occasional clue. If man is indeed a created being, and the members of a society act upon their belief that such is their nature, they will begin to frame political theories consonant with their convictions. They will erect political structures designed to safeguard the sacred essence in each person; the law will attempt to maximize each person’s opportunity to realize his earthly goals.

Believing that God wills men to be free, such a society will regard any trespass on the true liberty of even the lowliest individual to be a thwarting of some intent of the Creator. The deep conviction that each human being is a person and not a thing will generate ideas of equal, inherent rights; and this central dogma will exert pressure on personal attitude and conduct, on government and law, on every level of the free society, to bring all into harmony with the key belief that man is a created being.

But suppose man is not a created being. Suppose the human being is not a person, but a thing. If the universe is simply brute fact, mindless and meaningless; reducible in the final analysis to mass and motion — then man is a thing just like any other item in the catalogue of the planet’s inhabitants.

The Materialistic Concept of Human Beings

Suppose we assume — as do many of our contemporaries – that man is the chance product of the random movement of material particles. Man’s haphazard appearance on a fifth rate planet is, then, a fluke; he just happened to occur, as the accidental by-product of physical and chemical forces. He’s merely a part of nature, like every other species on the planet. Except that the human species is more foolish than the rest, loves to be bamboozled, and, has such a gift for make- believe that its continued existence is problematic!

When we confront a strange object we try to size it up, so we’ll know better how to deal with it. If it’s a person we get onto a person-to-per-son basis; but if it’s a thing we treat it like a thing. We make a crucial decision here, and the way we decide depends upon our basic philosophy, our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.

If we have embraced some variety of Materialism as our philosophy then we must eventually come to the logical conclusion that human beings are things, and once we conclude this we’ll begin to treat people as things. People then come to be regarded as units of the State, as objects to be manipulated, as pawns in a political game to be used up in some national plan, as guinea pigs for experiments in genetic engineering, as robots programmed for utopia. Shades of 1984!

I am prepared to argue that we get the free society only after the consensus has firm convictions about the sacredness of persons, and that we get the free economy only after we have the free society. Now, when we reflect on the nature of persons we involve ourselves in some pretty deep philosophical and theological questions, and some of our contemporaries are impatient with such speculation. They believe that the intellectual opponents of the free market can be devastated by straightforward economic arguments, and once we have the free market everybody will be doing his own thing and we’ll get the free society as a matter of course. Things are not this simple; if they were, freedom in human affairs would be the rule; voluntary transactions and ‘unhampered exchange would then mark the economic life of all nations. The reverse is true: freedom has always been in jeopardy, and the liberties which expanded during the Classical Liberal Era are now contracting everywhere.

The Conditions of Freedom

There is a deep-rooted urge in each person to be unhampered in the pursuit of his own life goals, but this individual instinct for freedom has only rarely in history been institutionalized as the free society. Likewise, each person has a deeply rooted desire to conserve his energy and improve his material well-being; trade and barter are as old as mankind. But despite the economizing urge the free economy seldom appears on this planet.

The free society and the free economy did emerge in the eighteenth century and freedom expanded during the nineteenth. An excellent literature came into being to expound and defend political and economic freedom, despite which freedom retreated during the twentieth century because there was a leak at the philosophical level, where we deal with the nature of personhood and the meaning of life.

The economizing spirit is concerned to save energy and resources; it strives ceaselessly to diminish inputs and maximize outputs. Which is to say that economics is the drive to get more for less. Now, unless this more-for-less impulse is counterbalanced by non-economic forces it develops into a something-for-nothing mentality. And when the some-thing-for-nothing mentality takes over the free economy dies of autointoxication.

The advice to “do your own thing” has been repeated so often as to be an incantation, and if freedom could be had by casting a spell then the free society would be a shoo-in. But the free society cannot be sustained by magic, and lacking a philosophy of personhood, the advice to “do your own thing” is an invitation to disaster. The weak doing their thing are at the mercy of the strong doing theirs, and the unscrupulous have the upper hand over the rest.

I belong to a bicycle club and have two friends with whom I ride. Joe is a weightlifter, a powerful man, and a “square.” Fred is a middle-aged retiree with strong affinities for the youthful life styles of today. We three were in a resort town for a bike rally, and in addition to cyclists there were many young people whose sartorial and tonsorial disarray proclaimed their devotion to individual liberty. The three of us stopped for refreshments at a soft drink stand and watched the passers-by. A pair of especially unkempt and unwashed young men strolled by, and Joe—the muscular “square”—muttered, half under his breath, “I’d like to wring their necks!” Fred, a gentle and sympathetic soul, said, “But, Joe, they’re only doing their thing.” To which my obvious retort was, “Yes, Fred, but Joe’s thing is wringing hippies’ necks!”

The Rule of Law

Classical Liberalism was built around the idea of the Rule of Law, equal justice for all, and thus it erected certain guidelines and standards, whose observation maximized each man’s liberty in society. And it framed these rules because each person is a sacrosanct individual, free in virtue of his very nature. When convictions about the sacredness and mystery of person-hood are energized, then men will seek to erect institutional safeguards around each individual, and we move toward the free society. But if the prevailing philosophy has a faulty doctrine of personhood, then people lose that sense of their true humanness which would lead them to strive for an ordered liberty, and we lapse into the closed society.

Modern thought, the ideology which has prevailed during the past two centuries, has many facets and some undeniable strengths. But it has one glaring defect, it has no adequate doctrine of personhood. This ideology is reductionist in tendency, whenever it contemplates the Self. It reduces men to animals and animals to machines. It defines thought as subvocal activity, dismisses reason as rationalization, explains mind as a mere reflex of activity among the brain cells, and invokes the conditioned reflex to account for every variety of behavior.

I am painting with a broad brush in order to highlight a drift or tendency in modern thought, “a mean, sluggish, careless” streak in the realm of ideas. When a thinker uses a finely tuned instrument his mind—to reach the conclusion that thought cannot be trusted, we have evidence of corruption in philosophy. Let me illustrate.

Philosopher Kings

There are philosophers of considerable and deserved reputation who have dreamed up world views in which human beings figure as creatures of a lesser stature than persons. Be it noted, however, that the philosopher guilty of devaluating personhood generously exempts himself from the strictures he applies to others! Given his blind spot, he concludes that it is only other people, the mass of mankind, who fall within the scheme of manipulable objects; the philosopher who regards us as un-persons finds another category for himself. He’s the philosopher king!

Bertrand Russell, in a celebrated essay entitled “A Free Man’s Worship,” declares that “Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves, and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.” In short, we are — along with our beliefs — merely the end result of a chance arrangement of material particles.

It follows, on Lord Russell’s own showing, that his opinion that such is the case is itself only a reflex of an “accidental collocation of atoms.” What point is there in publishing this opinion unless its author regards it as being closer to the truth than alternative views? But can the designation true or false be applied to an “accidental collocation of atoms” or any product thereof? By the internal showing of Russell’s statement, his own beliefs are below the idea level; they are sub-reason. Furthermore, the publishing of these words bespeaks a wish on the author’s part to persuade other people of the validity of his position. But why bother to offer enlightenment to creatures whose beliefs are nothing but the chance result of blind forces?

Bertrand Russell was immensely gifted as a philosopher and mathematician, but his philosophy is deficient in its attempts to account for self-hood; it has no adequate place for persons. And if Russell is deficient here, how much more deficient are the lesser men who instruct us in the meaning of life!

Philosophical Entrapment

The widespread irrationalism of the present day represents the dead end of a philosophy which developed a world view wherein was no proper niche for the creator of that world view—the philosopher himself! It takes a brilliant and ingenious mind to arrive at such a paradoxical conclusion which so blatantly denied the obvious. Any fool knows that white is white and black, black; so does the wise man. But in between the fool and the wise man are those who are able to argue with perverse brilliance that white is a kind of black.

C. A. Campbell, emeritus professor of philosophy at Glasgow University, makes a sound observation: “As history amply testifies, it is from powerful, original and ingenious thinkers that the queerest aberrations of philosophic theory often emanate. Indeed it may be said to require a thinker exceptionally endowed in these respects if the more paradoxical type of theory is to be expounded in a way which will make it seem tenable even to its author—let alone to the general philosophic public.”

To be a man is to search for meaning. Philosophy begins in wonder, and we can’t help wondering what life is all about, and how human life fits into the total scheme of things. We try to decipher the mysteries of the universe, hoping to obtain a few clues to help us play our roles in life with zest and joy. We wonder if human values and ideals find reinforcement in the nature of things, and if the values that concern us most deeply—love and honor, truth, beauty and goodness—are realities. Or are they merely illusions we cling to for comfort in an otherwise cheerless existence?

We consult the philosophers, and all too many of them are mired in the cults of unreason, meaninglessness, and absurdity. Man is a cosmic accident, they assure us; the universe is a moral and aesthetic blank, completely alien to us. We cannot trust our own thought processes, they say, as they simultaneously downgrade mind and insist that we accept their theories! Well, they can’t have it both ways! Of course, if matter is the ultimate reality, mind is discredited. But if this discredited instrument is all we have to rely on, how can we put any confidence in its findings? If untrustworthy reason tells us that we cannot trust reason, then we have no logical ground for accepting the conclusion that reason is untrustworthy!

Well, I don’t trust the reasoning of people who champion the irrational, and I do know that our reasoning powers may be—like anything else—misused. But when human thought is guided by the rules of logic, undertaken in good faith, and tested by experience and tradition, it is an instrument capable of expanding the domain of truth. Reason is not infallible, but it is infinitely more to be trusted than nonreason!

A Religious World View

Deep down within us we know with solid assurance that we really do belong on this planet; that we are the key component of the total richness. We know this, but we need reminding—as in these words from the gifted and unorthodox thinker, Anthony M. Ludovici:

The profound and cultivated man of wanton spirits, whose sense of self is the outcome of healthy impulses springing from the abundant energy and serenity of his being, not only affirms his own self and the universe with every breath he takes, but, by the intimate knowledge he acquires of life through the intensity of his own vitality, he feels deeply at one with everything else that lives. The intensity of his feeling of life helps him to perceive, behind the external differences of living phenomena, that quality and power which unites him to them. The luxuriant profligacy of nature finds a reflection in his soul, but it also finds an answering note in his feelings. Profound enough not to be deceived by surfaces, he feels the dark mystery behind himself and the rest of life, and what is more important, guesses at the truth that he himself cannot, any more than the daisy or the antelope, stand alone, or dispense with the power which is enveloped in that dark mystery. (Man: An Indictment, p. 204)

These are the authentic accents of a religious world view, and a citizenry in whom this vision lives will invest each person with a sacredness, a protected private domain, a body of rights and immunities. The law, then, is established to secure these prerogatives of the person, and government is limited to those functions which maximize liberty and justice for all. This is Jefferson’s “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion.” This is the free society, and it is not an autonomous social order, suspended in midair, it is based necessarily on a religious foundation.

Freedom in the Market when Options Are Open

Even less autonomous is the free market. Freedom of action in the economic sphere does not beget itself, but a society which maximizes liberty for all persons equally has freedom in economic transactions as well. The free economy, in other words, is simply the label attached to human behavior in the marketplace when our options are open, as they should be.

“The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre observe degree, priority and place.” Shakespeare was right; there is an over-arching Order and Pattern built into the nature of things. Everything has its rightful place in that Order, and each thing after its own kind manifests its peculiar nature — except man.

Man does not simply and naturally manifest his own nature; he is open-ended! Unlike the other orders of creation, man is not infallibly guided by instinct—he is free. Not being locked into a behavior pattern, he has to establish contact with his deeper self, and then properly interpret and carry out its mandates. Only then may he learn to express his true being by conforming himself and all his works to the universal Pattern.

Plato, in the Laws, refers to an ancient saying that God, who holds in his hands beginning, end and middle of all that is, moves through the cycle of nature, straight to His end. And Plato adds:

Justice always follows Him and punishes those who fall short of the divine law. To that Law, he who would be happy holds fast and follows it in all humility and order; but he who is lifted up with pride or money or honour or beauty, who has a soul hot with folly and youth and insolence, and thinks that he has no need of a guide or ruler, but is able of himself to be the guide of others, he, I say, is deserted of God; and being thus deserted he takes to himself others who are like him, and jumps about, throwing all things into confusion, and many think he is a great man. But in a short time he pays the penalty of justice and is utterly destroyed and his family and state with him. (Laws, IV, 716)

We are the architects of our own Leviathan. Whenever a people goes slack, whenever the mean, sluggish, and careless are moved up to the top of the pecking order, then we get an unlovely society to match our own ill nature. But this need not be. The way we express our nature is not fixed in one mode only; we are free to change the pattern of our lives. There is a right way, a way that is good for man, a way that meets the needs and demands of human nature and the human condition, a way that fulfills the law of our being. Walking in that way, men and women find their proper happiness in a free and prosperous commonwealth.

Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

The Person and His Society

Lewis, of course, is well-respected among Christians for his excellent stories and compelling explication of theology. Turns out he also favored liberty as a defining characteristic of civilized society. He reaches this conclusion through a consistent application of natural law.

Moreover, he does not see the State as a friend to liberty. The state uses a form of moral relativism – that the ends of “protection,” for instance, justify the means of aggression – to guide its actions. Collectivism ultimately leads to all forms of oppression. Classical individualism is the answer.

Lewis clearly appreciates science, but has a great disdain for scientism (using the positivist method of natural science as the ultimate analysis tool for man). He understood that governments could “pull the wool over the people’s eyes” by appealing to “science” for their oppressive ends. “Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about science. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.” Such policies are rooted in the pursuit of power, which Lewis absolutely despised. All power and glory belong to God alone, not the State.

Read Part 1 here, on liberty and natural law.

Read Part 2 here, on moral relativism and statism.

Read Part 3 here, on scientism, the “managing” of society, and the corruption of power.

I will be very curious to hear what my friend Jaired thinks about these articles. He knows Lewis’s writings better than I do, so I’m sure he will have something to say in response.

Many thanks to Mr. Theroux for his excellent work. Now if only we can get him to write something special for LCC sometime…

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Narnians Hate the State Too!

How public education cripples our kids, and why

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else’s. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools – with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers – as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight – simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

But we don’t do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the “problem” of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no “problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would “leave no child behind”? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken’s reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann’s “Seventh Annual Report” to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington’s aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German- speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens – all in order to render the populace “manageable.”

It was from James Bryant Conant – president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century – that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant’s 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a “revolution” engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which “one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary.”

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose – the actual purpose – of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

There you have it. Now you know. We don’t need Karl Marx’s conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that “efficiency” is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era – marketing.

Now, you needn’t have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley – who was dean of Stanford’s School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant’s friend and correspondent at Harvard – had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: “Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”

It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to “be careful what you say,” even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author of The Underground History of American Public Education, Dumbing Us Down, and most recently Weapons of Mass Instruction. Visit his website here.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Classic Essay: Against School

Rent-seeking refers to the behavior of individuals or groups expending resources to achieve public policy decisions that transfer wealth to them at the expense of others. Some examples:

• A nonprofit organization might seek for the government to spend taxpayer money on their pet cause, such as protecting the environment or researching a disease.
• A workers’ union might want the government to force employers to provide higher wages, more benefits and greater job security.
• A corporation might seek subsidization to support an unsustainable business model instead of working to become more profitable.

While the rent-seekers should be faulted for the behavior, it is the government granting rent-seekers what they want that is the real problem. As it shells out more benefits and privileges, government has to collect more taxes to administer and pay for them, thus vastly increasing its size and scope.

Rent-seeking is theft. A rent-seeker wants to achieve a wealth transfer in his favor without having to provide value in return. In a mixed economy, companies and organizations find it more effective to petition the government for protection (i.e. subsidies, tariffs, entry barriers, regulations, etc.) than to compete by providing goods and services that consumers want to pay for. Since in a free market the choices of other individuals might not go in his favor, the rent-seeker would rather have the government initiate force against those individuals. The free market, on the other hand, is predicated upon and respects individuals’ free choices. Rent-seekers hinder the dynamism of the free market. When you and I trade in the free market, we each give the other something the other wants more than we want it, relative to what we receive in exchange. By contrast, when the government initiates force in favor of a rent-seeker, it makes everybody but the rent-seeker worse off. It leaves the rent-seeker’s competitors worse off, because the rent-seeker now has a government-enforced advantage, whether in the form of a government-approved monopoly, or stifling regulations faced by would-be entrepreneurs. Because market forces and signals are hindered and distorted, this leaves consumers worse off. They are forced to pay higher prices for poorer quality goods and services.

Rent-seeking harms economic growth. Instead of companies investing their money in new technology, new jobs, offering consumers better products and better prices, or increasing their employees’ pay, the money ends up in the pockets of lobbyists and the politicians able to grant favors. Consumers are forced to pay more for goods and services and taxpayers have to foot the bill for the rent-seekers’ government-enforced advantage. So, over time, as government arbitrarily favors one group over another and expands in size in order to pay for rents, rent-seeking erodes the mechanisms that make economic growth and wealth creation possible: the impartial rule of law, limited government and individual rights.

Statists, whether out of distrust of individuals or faith in the ability of the government, prefer that the state controls people instead of people controlling themselves; they opt for government intervention rather than individual liberty. Statist policies can include regulation of the economy, provision of social goods, and control over personal behaviors. Many political ideologies can be subsumed under the label “statist” — communism, fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism. Even a democracy can become statist if it does not create or does not follow constitutional safeguards against the majority imposing its will without regard for the individual rights of the minority.

Statism is anti-liberty. Individuals have property in themselves, also called self-ownership, which entails they should be free to control their bodies, their minds and their lives. The only way to interfere with that freedom is by means of physical force. The job of governments is to defend individual rights by protecting individuals against the initiation of physical force. However, when governments institute statist policies, they initiate force against individuals who are not infringing on the liberty of others and thus violate individual rights. For instance, regulations, tariffs and subsidies for businesses violate the rights of entrepreneurs and consumers, who both are prevented from voluntarily determining the terms of their interactions with others. If I choose to not give my money to a certain business, government has no authority to overrule that decision. It violates my freedom of choice and deprives others of the property they would have gained in the absence of government interference. Immigration restrictions violate the rights of individuals, since they are prevented from peacefully living and working where they choose to. Bans on smoking and the use of other drugs, speed limits and seat belt requirements, and laws preventing the sale of organs violate your rights since you are prevented from making decisions about your own body.

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Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Stop Rent-seeking

Smoking bans have gone into effect in many jurisdictions, mostly indoors (bars, restaurants, workplaces, casinos, even apartments and condos) but also outdoors (beaches, in front of public buildings, parks and stadiums). Under the auspices of “protecting people” the government tries to discourage individuals from smoking by levying “sin taxes” on the cigarettes they buy and prohibits smokers from lighting up in places they share with non-smokers. To dissuade people—especially young folks—from starting to smoke, the government has banned cigarette advertising from TV and radio.

Why we oppose anti-smoking legislation:

Smoking bans violate property rights. By legislating against smoking, the government initiates force. It initiates force against property owners—owners of bars, restaurants, private workplaces, apartments and condos—by prohibiting them from deciding whether to allow their employees, customers, guests and tenants to smoke. By contrast, none of these people are violating anyone’s rights because they are not initiating physical force. Smokers are not forcing anyone to endure their smoking; people are free to leave a smoky environment. No employer is forcing anyone to work in a place where many people smoke. More importantly, those who choose to work in establishments where smoking is allowed did just that—choose. There is no right to a job, and the employee freely weighed the pros and cons prior to taking the position. The government also initiates force against cigarette manufacturers and broadcasters by banning them from advertising on TV and radio even though an advertisement does not force anyone to smoke. So, the government is unjustly violating citizens’ rights by legislating against smoking.

Smoking bans violate self-ownership. The government does not have the right to protect you from doing what you want with your own body. Smoking may be unhealthy, but acknowledging and taking that risk is your choice. The government uses a gun to prevent you from harming yourself—now that is irony!

Smoking bans only further entrench the Nanny State. Anti-smoking legislation is a blatant example of the government using force to arbitrarily prevent people from doing things that the government deems harmful. Consider, for example, that the government does not prevent you from consuming alcohol, bungee jumping, becoming a fireman or a coal miner, or sky diving all activities that are potentially damaging to one’s health.

Smoking bans distort the free market. Many people realize that smoking can be a nuisance to nonsmokers. Hence, many restaurants had voluntarily become smoke-free absent of government coercion simply because of customer demand. Many workplaces had already made rules about where to smoke to address the needs of their nonsmoking employees. Many home owners ask guests not to smoke in their homes, and many smokers do not smoke in their home because they have nonsmokers living there. Many parents, even those who smoke, are perfectly willing to limit their children’s exposure to smoke if they believe it is harmful; no law is needed when a mother’s protective instinct is already operative.

Smoking bans aren’t supported by science. As for the dangers of second-hand smoke, while it is unpleasant, most studies investigating its effects looked at people who are exposed to it on a daily and prolonged basis, such as individuals who live with smokers, not people who go to bars, restaurants or are outside in the immediate vicinity of a smoker. Those studies did not always find that second-hand smoke harmed anyone.

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Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Smoking is Healthier than Fascism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you agree with the mission of YAL and other organizations teaching students about the virtues of liberty, please consider donating to the cause today!

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Edmund Opitz – Minister to Liberty

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.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Happy Texas Independence Day!

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.

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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

Only recently have I learned of Edmund Opitz, ordained Congregational minister and one of the great spokesmen of the liberty movement in the 20th century. Opitz was the resident theologian for the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), and a long-time senior staff member there. He helped found The “Nockian Society,” which helped keep Albert Jay Nock’s writings in print, and “the Remnant,” a small organization named for the subject of Nock’s essay entitled Isaiah’s Job. He was a good friend of Murray Rothbard and many, many others in the liberty movement. He joined his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in glory in 2006, leaving this world much better than he found it.

The Libertarian Theology of Freedom is a compilation of seven essays from Opitz’s other books: The Powers That Be, The Kingdom Without God, and Religion: Foundation of a Free Society. (He has another highly regarded book not represented here: Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies.) For essentially a collection of republished essays, the quotes that line the covers indicate how highly regarded Opitz was – and still is:

“A must read to better comprehend the important linkage between religious principles and individual liberty.” – Ron Paul

“A wonderful book – each sentence a testament to Reverend Opitz’s cool head and warm heart.” – Thomas Szasz, M.D. Professor of Psychiatry

Much of the book addresses the so-called “social gospel,” a major theme of Opitz’s work throughout his life. Opitz exposes how the social gospel is built on a faulty view of Scripture and human nature, and of course a deficient understanding of economics (chapters 3 & 4). What is more, he has traced the history of thought that led to the social gospel movement in the early 20th century (chapter 5). This is something I have never seen presented before, not even in my class on Christianity in America. Insights such as these are critical as we combat the resurgence of social gospel advocates like Jim Wallis and his “Sojourners” crowd of state-loving neo-liberal Christians. The social gospel is socialism with a Christian veneer.

Opitz is a serious and vigorous defender of economic freedom and private property (or do I repeat myself?). He shows himself a respectful debater in his exchange of letters with Rev. John Bennett of Union Theological Seminary in chapter 1. It is almost embarrassing to see the opposing side smashed so readily. Opitz demonstrates clearly the compatibility of Christian faith with libertarian thought, and that with sharp wit. He calls Bennett out for having two standards of morality – one for individuals and one for those in power. In doing so he challenges the very notion of the State itself, for what is the State but a group of people who make certain actions illegal for others but legal for themselves to do?

“Power ministers to human pride and results in spiritual disaster.” – Edmund Opitz

Opitz understands the meaning of individualism, a concept that is often lost in the modern church. We frequently hear that “there is no place for individualism in the church,” but this constitutes a misunderstanding of individualism. What those people mean is, “You cannot be in Christ without the body of Christ – his church,” and this is absolutely true. However, this is taken much too far and has resulted in fuzzy philosophy and theology – promoting collectivism rather than community. At its core, individualism means the individual is responsible for his own actions, in particular before God, and thus individual liberty is important for living out the dictates of conscience. Individualism is not atomism: “We have no inclination to be hermits; we are social creatures, and we achieve our full humanity only in association, in mutuality, and in community.” Voluntary action is the very essence of community, and thus the collectivist is actually acting against the true community he seeks to promote.

The Libertarian Theology of Freedom is an important book for the libertarian Christian to have on his bookshelf. It accomplishes its goal of introducing a new reader to Edmund Opitz and his work, even though one can find each of these essays in other books as well. I highly recommend it for any thinking Christian.

As I mentioned, the work of Edmund Opitz is a new discovery for me. I had no idea that he existed mere months ago. Once again, I am thrilled to find out that great men of faith have been paving the way for liberty, and it shows that we have a superb intellectual tradition within the body of Christ to assist our efforts now. I plan to get my hands on whatever I can find from Opitz and help spread his work to others. I hope you also will pick up his books and gain as much as I have from them.

“In today’s world, the term ‘libertarian Christian’ seems to many people to be an oxymoron. It is not. It exemplifies nothing less than the true meaning of the teachings of Jesus.” – Charles Hallberg, from the Foreward to The Libertarian Theology of Freedom.

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UPDATE: It can be somewhat difficult to find Opitz’s books on Amazon, but make sure to check out the Amazon Marketplace sellers and you can save yourself some cash. For instance, there are right now 13 copies of The Libertarian Theology of Freedom available on Amazon Marketplace for less than $5 plus shipping.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

The Libertarian Theology of Freedom