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Critical Advice on Precise Language

This is a post originally written for the Prometheus blog, but it no longer appears there so I thought I’d repost it.

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“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

At the gym the other day I overheard two older women talking as they ran on treadmills.  They were talking (quite loudly – I wasn’t straining to eavesdrop) about the current situation with banks and home mortgages.  They both agreed that many people with adjustable-rate mortgages were going to be struggling to make payments if rates continued to rise.  The culprit, they said, was greed.  The banks were greedy for giving adjustable rate loans to people who may have a high risk of default.

I tried to tune them out and focus on pumping up my already massive 157 body to no avail (both the tuning out and the pumping).  Their conversation moved on to last night’s TV viewing.  “I was watching that Deal or no Deal show, and I couldn’t believe it!”  She went on to share her absolute amazement and disgust with various contestants for choosing to pass up tens of thousands of dollars in order to try for more.  Both of the treading ladies agreed that this was “A shame”, and that it boiled down to “Greed.  Just pure greed.”

As I strained to lift the smallest denomination of barbells in the gym I thought about these nice old ladies, seemingly concerned with the welfare of all mankind.  What was so greedy?  Banks chose to loan money to people, which always bears a risk of default.  These women felt the default risk was too great and the loan shouldn’t have been made; the banks, apparently, did not.  Game show contestants were faced with a choice to take a sum of money and walk, or to risk walking with nothing for the chance of a larger sum.  The joggers thought they should take the money, they thought the risk of trying for more was too great; the contestants did not.

Both of these were instances where the risk preferences of the ladies differed from those whom they were criticizing as greedy.  Whose risk preference should be enforced?  If these ladies had their way, there might be laws and regulations imposing their risk preferences on everyone else.  Would we really be better off if the opinions of these women dictated who got a loan, rather the calculations of those who own the resources?  Would we be better off if game show contestants had to call the treadmill duo and ask permission to hit the big red ‘No deal’ button?

There are two problems with anti-greed sentiment that seeks government intervention.

1. One man’s greed is another man’s self-interest

Greed is an internal condition where a person wants more than is good for them or others.  Like lust, envy, or self-deception, it cannot be identified or defined from the outside.  Only the greedy person is really able to know whether or not they are greedy.  How is an outside observer to judge whether or not it is greedy for you to seek a pay raise, or try to find a cheaper car, or buy another song on iTunes?  They can’t.

2.  There are some things the law just can’t do

Even if we were able to find some objective, identifiable, universal definition of greed, how could it be enforced?  If the point is to make people less greedy when assessing risk and making decisions, how can any external punishment make them a better judge?  To add the additional risk of fine or imprisonment to behaviors deemed greedy (presumably because they bear more risk than the result warrants) the greedy person can still be perfectly greedy in choosing to abstain from the activity.  It is the self-interested or “greedy” desire to stay out of prison that motivates to obey the law.  Law cannot change the heart.

Both the bankers and the game show contestants were merely assessing risk, and choosing to do what they believed would give them the best result.  Isn’t that what we all do with every decision we make?

As one of the ladies stepped off the treadmill and into the tanning booth I wondered to myself if she felt greedy for doing so.  Her skin was tan enough already.  Artificial sunlight increases the risk of cancer.  She chose to engage in the risky behavior of tanning anyway, just to have more bronze.

Greed.  Just pure greed.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Moral Busybodies

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I love Students for Liberty and look forward to seeing how this organization will change the world in the future.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

My talk at the Students for Liberty Texas Conference 2010

Most human differences are set­tled peacefully. Collisions of in­terest occur sporadically, but when intelligence and good-will com­bine we work out a modus vi­vendi. Conflicting opinions are resolved by an appeal to reason; patience and persuasion ease the frictions arising out of personal encounters. Thus it is in most areas; we carve out survival pat­terns and get along with each other. But there are periods of history more violent than others when arbitration works poorly and conflict intensifies; we are living through one such.

Warfare of unusual ferocity has plagued the West for more than half a century—despite lip service to peace in the form of nominal pacifism and humanitarianism. But international strife is not the only plague; domestic ten­sions break out of bounds with increasing frequency; riots, dem­onstrations, assault, kidnappings, bombings, strikes, and acts of sabotage barely make the front pages, so commonplace have they become. Out of the woodwork come spellbinders to lecture uni­versity audiences on gun barrel politics, revolution for its own sake, and the beauties of violence. Professors of philosophy are in­voked to provide a specious ration­ale for destructionism. A cult of violence and systematic terror comes into being. There’s no longer time to take thought, we are told; men must act. Incessant and strident calls to action are directed toward the base emotions of hatred and fear, drowning out quiet appeals to the mind. The demand that we do something results in thoughtless action, and mindless violence breeds more of the same.

Violence Displaces Reason

What has brought about this state of affairs? How shall we ac­count for the increased violence that mars our land? It is obvious that violence and the cult of vio­lence expands as faith in reason declines—only when people are convinced that differences cannot be worked out intelligently do they resort to force. The restoration of reason to its proper role in human affairs is essential if we would live in peace, but first we must try to understand what has caused men of the modern era to distrust reason.

History is not simply what Gib­bon called it, a catalogue of "the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind"; but the human record is spotty and there has been vio­lence in every era. People differ, and occasional conflict is thus a built-in feature of human action. The species could not have sur­vived, of course, were there not a preponderance of cooperation and mutual aid in human affairs, but traces of friction remain even un­der the best of conditions. Abra­sive contacts between men may be eased by good will plus a disposi­tion to argue it out rather than fight it out, but when all strata­gems fail and flight is impossible human beings do resort to force. Violence, in other words, is an­cient in human experience—but as a last resort. It is today’s cult of violence that needs diagnosing.

A collision of interests devel­ops between two evenly matched men. Before any blows are struck one man says to his adversary, "Come let us reason together," or words to that effect. If this offer is accepted it is because both men hold certain assumptions in com­mon. Each man takes it for granted that he is a finite and fallible human being; he entertains a set of convictions on grounds he deems reasonable, but he has no im­mediate access to Universal Rea­son which might assure certitude. It is assumed that men are gifted with a divine spark, reason—a valid instrument for getting at the truth when used properly, that is, with due regard for logic and in good faith. Finally, it is assumed that the universe is ra­tionally structured, in the main, so that there is a correspondence between correct reasoning and the nature of things, enabling men who start from different places to think their way through to common ground.

The human reason, employed within these rules, may thus re­duce tensions and resolve conflict. It may firm up one’s own convictions, enhance appreciation of the opponent’s views, and persuade a man to ponder the rich diversity of mankind. Admittedly, even un­der the best of conditions men may not find a reasonable modus vivendi; words may lead to blows. But violence, if it occurs, is at any rate postponed to the last stage. It is not condoned.

Imagine another encounter. The antagonists this time do not share a common faith in the ef­ficacy of reason. Skeptical of rea­son as a useful means for thrash­ing out differences of opinion they are prepared to accept the alternative that differences can be settled only by the forced imposi­tion of one man’s or one party’s will over the other. Everything that denies or diminishes Mind, everything that downgrades rea­son, transforms a point of view—which is reasonable or amenable to reason—into a nonnegotiable demand for submission to supe­rior force. Men have a condition rather than an opinion; two states of mind confront each other.

Slogans to Live By

The True Believer does not en­tertain conclusions arrived at by marshalling the relevant evidence and drawing from it the correct inferences; to the contrary, he has been programmed with a set of armed doctrines picked up ready to use from the nearest intellec­tual arsenal—newspaper, TV, lib­eral journal, college, or whatever. Instead of ideas which might en­lighten, there are slogans, catch­words, and labels—a new set every few years—that nerve both sides for combat. When the pre­vailing ideology deters men from ventilating their differences rea­sonably they fight about their differences, hence the depressing increase of violence in our time. And the proceedings are rational­ized; hence the cult of violence.

Faith in reason is at a low ebb in modern man; Mind is bogged down in the snarled ideological skein of the twentieth century. The low estate of things mental is the consequence of a trend which has brought several sets of ideas together.

• Philosophical materialism and mechanism assumes that the ul­timate reality is non-mental; only bits of matter or electrical charges or whatever are, in the final analysis, real. If so, then thought is but a reflex of neural events. "Our mental conditions," wrote T. H. Huxley, "are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes which take place auto­matically in the organism." Fare­well to free will, if "the brain secretes thought as the liver se­cretes bile," as one materialist put it.

• Evolutionism, popularly under­stood, conveys the idea that living things began as a stirring in the primeval ooze and became what they are now by random inter­action with the physicochemical environment, moved by no pur­pose, aiming at no goal. "Darwin banished Mind from the uni­verse," cried Samuel Butler. Man, wrote Bertrand Russell, is "but the outcome of accidental colloca­tions of atoms."

• From popular psychology comes the notion that reason is but ra­tionalization, that conscious men­tal processes are but a gloss for primitive and irrational impulses erupting from the unconscious mind. Psychoanalysis discredits mind by subordinating intellect to the Id.

• From Marxism comes the no­tion that class interest dictates a man’s thinking. There is one logic for the proletariat and another for the bourgeoisie, and the mode of production governs the philosoph­ical systems men erect, and their life goals as well. The unfortu­nately placed middle class forever gropes in darkness, unable to share the light revealed to Marx and his votaries.

These are some of the battle lines where men must fight to vindicate themselves as reasoning beings, possessed of free will, ca­pable of guiding their lives with intelligence and idealism. The Mind must be restored to its rightful place in the total scheme of things, and that place is central for, if the Mind be deemed un­trustworthy, who can then trust any conclusion? The centrality of Mind must be the keystone of any philosophy worth the allegiance of rational creatures, and this is the battle line behind all the others.

Overarching all other causes for the flight from reason is the decline of theism—an interpreta­tion of the cosmos which finds a mental or spiritual principle be­yond nature. If there is no God the cosmos is only, in the final analysis, brute fact, and a man’s thoughts are reduced to a bodily function. The thinking part of a man is validated ultimately by its kinship with the Divine Mind. Theism contends, as a mini­mum, that a Conscious Intelli­gence sustains all things, working out its purposes through man, na­ture, and society. This is to say that the universe is rationally structured, and this is why cor­rect reasoning pans a few pre­cious nuggets of truth. Restora­tion of faith in the efficacy of rea­son and a revival of theism go hand in hand. But this is not all. Acceptance of the Creator re­minds men of their own finitude; no man can believe in his own omnipotence who has any sense of God’s power. And finite men, aware of their limited vision, have a strong inducement to enrich their own outlook by cross fertili­zation from other points of view.

A revival of theism, in the third place, will curb utopianism. Men vainly dream that some combina­tion of political and scientific ex­pertise will usher in a heaven on earth, and they use this future possibility as an excuse for pres­ent tyranny. Under theism, they modestly seek to improve them­selves and their grasp of truth, thus making the human situation more tolerable, confident that the final issue is in God’s hands.

Originally published in the April 1971 edition of The Freeman. Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.

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Some Thoughts on Violence

An invitation to speak at Grove City College is a great honor, doubly so, in that I’ve been asked to talk about Ludwig von Mises. But I am humbled when I contrast the size of the debt I owe to Mises with the meager gesture that is all I am able to offer as a token payment.

I had read Mises’ major works before I met the man. I then had the rare privilege of getting to know one of the finest minds in our time, a man who belongs with the great masters of his discipline, Economics; a scholar who advanced that discipline in several particulars by his own genius. And not only that, Mises was an inspired teacher; from the days of his celebrated Vienna Seminar almost till the end of his life, men and women sat at his feet, and some of them have become famous in their own right. The Misesian influence spreads and will continue to manifest itself.

Mises lived his active life during the first two-thirds of this century—a period of world turmoil which affected him personally and tragically, forcing him out of his native land and finally out of Europe, losing most of his precious library and other belongings in the course of his escape. Some refugee scholars came to America in the late thirties and early forties and we rolled out the red carpet for them. But not for Mises. Mises had set his entire life resolutely against the ideological absurdities of the twentieth century which produced the totalitarian upheavals in Europe, as well as the milder but related political and social events in America.

Those European intellectuals who had opposed European fascism and communism in the name of socialism were welcomed here by their domestic counterparts—American socialists, liberals and New Dealers. Lectureships, academic appointments and other honors were made available to them. With Mises it was different. His teachings were a threat to every variety of statism, whatever the label: communism, fascism, Naziism, state interventionism, national planning.

Communist and fascist gangs fought pitched battles in the streets of European cities, but these brawlers were really brothers under the skin; both were statists and collectivists. They fought each other for power; they hankered for the authority to put a nation under red shirts versus brown shirts versus black shirts. But they had a common enemy, and they knew it. The common enemy of all the totalitarians was the old-fashioned Whig philosophy, which, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century began calling itself “liberalism.”

Classical Liberalism

Classical liberalism believed in liberty and justice for all; it severely restricted the role of government and politics; it stood for the Rule of Law, private property, and the free market economy. It designed a set of rules which maximized every person’s opportunity to pursue his personal goals; it worked for equal freedom by abolishing the legal privileges which had hitherto given some groups in society unfair advantages over others. It got rid of serfdom and slavery.

Mises was a liberal in this old-fashioned sense, at a time when the intellectual currents in Europe and America were nearly all moving in other directions. And so, his arrival in New York went almost without notice. But Mises did have readers in this country, and one of them was Henry Hazlitt, who had reviewed Mises’ great book, Socialism, shortly after the English translation became available. Mises and Hazlitt had exchanged letters, and Hazlitt tells about receiving a phone call one day in 1940, a short time after Dr. and Mrs. Mises arrived in Manhattan. “The voice at the other end of the line,” Hazlitt recalls, “said ‘This is Ludwig Mises.’ It had the same effect on me,” Hazlitt continues, “as if the voice had said ‘This is Adam Smith’.” Such—in the eyes of a select few—was the stature of the man who arrived in New York on the 2nd of August, 1940.

Cast your mind back about a quarter of a century, to the mid-fifties. Mises had been here for fifteen years, he had gained a number of friends and his influence was spreading. Yale University had published his monumental Human Action and reprinted his Theory of Money and Credit and Socialism. These are among the great books of our time, although their time is yet to come.

The news began to filter down into the universities that here was a man of massive intellect and broad cultivation who had devoted a lifetime of rigorous thought to expounding and defending the free market economy—call it capitalism—together with its correlate, the old-fashioned liberal social philosophy. This was but the echo of a forgotten language on most campuses, where orthodoxy in the social sciences included central planning of the society and governmental regulation of the economy among its basic tenets. It occurred to several faculties that it might be a nice gesture in the direction of academic balance to give Mises an hour on campus to tell the students all about capitalism.

Mises has told us why he refused to accept these invitations. “Some of these teachers,” he wrote, “try… to demonstrate their own impartiality by occasionally inviting a dissenting outsider to address their students. This is mere eyewash. One hour of sound economics against several years of indoctrination of errors!

“If it were possible to expound the operation of capitalism in one or two short addresses,” he continued, “it would be a waste of time to keep the students of economics for several years at the universities. It would be difficult to explain why voluminous textbooks have to be written about this subject. It is these reasons that impel me reluctantly to decline your kind invitation.”

I am in perfect accord with the sentiments expressed in this letter of Mises; Mises’ philosophy is not to be summarized; not in an hour, not in a semester. I shall not try; but if I succeed in intriguing even one person into reading Human Action who otherwise might have neglected it the purpose of this lecture will have been achieved.

Mises as a Man of Thought—A Man of Action

Ludwig von Mises was a man of action; but by action I do not mean “activity.” As the world tends to judge activity, men of action are presidents, generals, explorers, mountaineers, race car drivers and the like. Mises’ action was thought, and thought is the most intense form of action there is, and the most enduring. If some present day Emerson were to write an essay on Man: As Thinker, he could do no better than to hold up Mises as his exemplar. In Mises, thought and action joined, and were as one.

I do not mean to suggest that when Mises was asked to list his occupation he wrote in “Thinker,” or “Philosopher.” I suspect he wrote “Economist.” In popular understanding, an economist is someone who concerns himself with the workings of business, industry, and trade or one who forecasts the ups and downs of the stock market. Now, these are indeed important human concerns; and Mises did write several big books about production and distribution, capital and interest, money and credit, work and wages, the business cycle, and the several other topics dealt with in academic courses in economics. But Mises’ thought and his writings ranged over the whole spectrum of knowledge, from epistemology to history; he wrote about human action over time from the inner motivations which give rise to action to the remote consequences of a person’s decision to act one way rather than another.

I used to walk past a store window in a town where I lived, in which was displayed a drawing of the old pirate symbol, a skull and crossbones. As you walked past this drawing of a death’s-head it changed, all of a sudden, as if by magic, into the portrait of a lovely woman. Change perspective and things have an entirely different focus. Misesian economics represents a new focus; the subject matter changes from a mere bread-and- butter affair into an affair of the mind and spirit; economics deals with valuing, purposeful, goal-seeking man.

“Production is not something physical, natural and external,” writes Mises, “it is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon. Its essential requisites are not human labor and external natural forces and things, but the decision of the mind to use these factors for the attainment of ends… The material changes are the outcome of spiritual changes.”

A Disposition Toward Freedom

Nearly everyone in the modern world has a disposition toward freedom, and this disposition is powerfully strengthened by the Christian philosophy. Nevertheless, freedom lives precariously in our time in the few places where it survives at all. Freedom may be lost because people do not care enough for it, but that is not our trouble. We want it, but perversely we try to implement freedom by social policies which inhibit and destroy it. There is an anti-economic mentality; it is a refusal to face up to the way-things- are in this significant portion of the human situation.

The theologian may give lip service to the idea of God’s overlordship of the whole of life yet in practice refuse to admit the existence of an economic realm in which prevails a regularity of phenomena to which he must adjust his action. Man may try to deny his creaturehood in this area, and think to annul economic laws by statute. But if there are regularities here, man must reckon with them; or they will have their reckoning with him.

It is a fact of the human situation as such—regardless of the nature of the social order—that mankind does not find, ready-made in its natural environment, the wherewithal to feed, house, and clothe itself. There are raw materials only, and most of these are not capable of satisfying human needs until someone works over these natural resources and transforms them into consumable goods. Man learns to cooperate with nature and make use of natural forces to serve his ends. He has to work in order to survive. Work is built into the human situation; the things by which we live do not come into existence unless someone grows them, harvests them, manufactures them, builds them, transports them.

Learning to Economize

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

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

The longest journey must begin with a single step, and it is a very long journey that leads from those primitive beginnings to the complex economic order of our time. But at every step along the way there is that human need to cope with scarcity, to satisfy creaturely needs, to provide for material well-being. And it is just as true now as it ever was that human labor is required before goods appear, and that prosperity depends upon productivity.

Signs of the Market

The visible signs of our economic activities are all about us; factories, stores, offices, farms, mines, transportation systems, power plants, and so on. These are the locations where work is performed, things transformed, services rendered, goods exchanged, wages earned, money spent. This is the economy, and the hallmark of the free society is that the economy is not under governmental control; politicians do not regulate the economy, consumers regulate the economy by their buying habits. The billions of consumer decisions made daily in the market place to buy or not to buy determine what goods will be produced, in what quantities, sizes and colors. Consumers, by their market- place decisions, determine who shall stay in business, and how large and prosperous a business shall be. The changing needs, desires, and tastes of consumers regulate wages and salaries. If an entrepreneur makes a profit it is a sign that consumers approve of the services he renders them. In the market place the consumer is sovereign.

The free society has an indispensable role for government. The law, in a society of free people, protects the life, liberty, and property of all persons alike, ensuring peaceful conditions within the community. Government performs as an impartial umpire, by interpreting and enforcing the previously agreed upon rules. A free society endeavors to secure and preserve freedom of personal action within the rules, and the rules are designed to maximize liberty and opportunity for everyone.

Government, in the interest of maximum freedom, uses lawful force against criminals in order that peaceful citizens may go about their business. The use of lawful force against criminals for the protection of the innocent is the earmark of a properly limited government, and it stands in utter contrast to the state’s use of tyrannical force on peaceful citizens—whatever the excuse for such action. It’s the contrast between defensive force and aggressive violence; it’s the rule of law versus oppression.

Laissez-faire Capitalism

In a society where people are free the economic order is referred to as capitalistic. Some prefer to call it the market economy, or the private property order. Laissez-faire capitalism—when the term is shorn of the pejorative connotations that opponents have injected into it—laissez-faire capitalism is the ideal of individual liberty and voluntary association applied to the workaday economic world. It is the economic counterpart of a social order where individual persons have maximum latitude to pursue their personal goals.

Mises believed in the unhampered market economy, and with enormous erudition in several large volumes he expounded the operations of this intricate system. Starting with the self-evident truth that people would rather be more prosperous than less prosperous, other things being equal, Mises demonstrated with devastating logic that every political interference with the market hurts some people and makes the entire society poorer. The way to make the nation richer and benefit everyone is to turn the market loose; remove every obstruction that interferes with people’s freedom in the market place and the nation’s wealth will be maximized. There is no way to upgrade the general welfare except by increasing productivity, and a free people is more productive than a politically regulated people.

Political Intervention

Government is not an economic institution; government is a political institution, and there’s no way that you can employ a political means to accomplish an economic end. All political interventions can do is transfer wealth from one set of people to another set; political action does not produce the wealth it redistributes. Furthermore, government is society’s power structure, and when the government uses a power play to garnishee wealth from producers it will redistribute that wealth to those who possess enough political clout to go to Washington and lobby for subsidies. And this will not be the poor.

The welfare state operates, ostensibly, for the benefit of “the poor,” but “the poor” are in reality its principal victims. Every economic program launched by government defeats the purposes for which the program is proposed. For example, government embarks on a vast public housing project, and Mises demonstrates that the end result will be a misallocation of resources and fewer housing units than would be available were housing left to the market.

The welfare state is a misnomer; a more apt label for what we have is the provider state. The theory back of the provider state is that government will supply the material wants of the people by way of food stamps, public housing, free schooling, medical care, direct relief, or whatever.

Now, the government has nothing of its own to give away so what it gives to Peter it must have first taken from Paul. The government takes from producers a portion of everything they manufacture or grow, and it takes a portion of everything people earn by rendering services of one kind or another. The government redistributes a portion of the wealth siphoned into its coffers by taxation, and thus another accurate label for the kind of government we now have is the redistributive state. The market place allocates rewards peacefully, and then government forcibly reshuffles the original apportionments.

It goes without saying that the market place does not always proportion reward to merit. But the state is not a meritocracy either! The populace, when free, rewards its heroes, and they may not be yours. On the other hand, the market place never punishes merit; the rack, the wheel, and the stake are exclusively instruments of the state. If the state is allowed autocratic power in the market place it will curb freedom everywhere else.

If the mood of the citizens is to demand or accept government handouts a new breed of politicians will emerge, soliciting votes on the promise of more government largess to satisfy the demands of the various pressure groups and lobbies. The siren song is: Vote yourself a raise in pay, or vote yourself better housing, cheaper food, free medical care, and the like.

What Government Gives, It Must First Take Away

Now we know that this world of ours is not run along the lines of something-for- nothing; there is always a quid pro quo. If government gives you something-for-nothing or something-for-less, it is obvious that this same government is forcing some of your fellow citizens to take nothing-for-something, or less-for-something. Your gain is another’s loss; you are living at the expense of someone else. Other people are being victimized for an assumed benefit you enjoy. This is unfair; it is immoral.

The ethical code is violated whenever you pick another person’s pocket or steal his purse, and the violation is compounded when you do it legally, that is, when you allow government to do your thieving for you. But only a people with larceny in their souls will write a form of theft into their statutes. Some cynic has suggested that robbery is the first laborsaving device. He’s at least half right. And if people do covet their neighbor’s property they will surely find legal ways to get their hands on it, and conscience will bend around to approve.

An exclusive preoccupation with economizing may lead some people to neglect ethical and other considerations in their single-minded drive to have their own way, to succeed, to get more for less—more reward for less effort; maximum gain, regardless; something for nothing, whenever possible. So economic science, from the very beginning, has been joined symbiotically to a philosophy of society called Whiggism or Whiggery in the eighteenth century, later to adopt a more fitting label, liberalism. The term, Whig, derives from Whiggamore, a label contemptuously applied to some of the seventeenth-century English Dissenters and Nonconformists who led the opposition to the court party. Adam Smith was a Whig, so was Edmund Burke, and so were most of the men we speak of as Founding Fathers. The Whig Party of England became the Liberal Party in 1829.

The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith, writing in 1776, described the prevailing “mercantile system, in its nature and essence a system of restraint and regulation.” In contrast to this “system of restraint and regulation” Adam Smith offered “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” These words of Adam Smith shed a good deal of light on our efforts to understand what men like Mises mean by “laissez-faire capitalism.”

Laissez faire has never meant a free-for-all; capitalism has never implied the absence of rules. Adam Smith does speak of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way,” and if those words are lifted out of context they do suggest a desperate no- holds-barred, rough and tumble struggle for money and power. But when we know that these two lines I have quoted from Smith follow one another in the same sentence his meaning is unmistakable. He is advocating a society based on equality, liberty and justice.

Once you have a society whose rules are designed to offer equal justice for all persons, then everyone is free to pursue his personal goals. This is the free society of classical liberalism, and the free economy—or capitalism—is the only way a free people can conduct their economic affairs.

Spiritual Foundation

Classical liberalism presupposes a religious philosophy which regards man as a created being who bears a unique relation to God, being formed in His image—meaning that man possesses free will and the ability to initiate and command his own actions. This free being is under the moral law laid down in the original constitution of things, responsible for discovering this law and obeying it. He is given dominion over the earth. He is commanded to work in order that he might eat; he is the steward of the earth’s scarce re sources and held accountable for their economic use.

Classical liberalism, in other words, is the secular projection of Christian philosophy. The American Dream, as Jacques Maritain put it, kept “alive, in human history, a fraternal recognition of the dignity of man—in other words, the terrestrial hope of man (expressed) in the Gospel.” The thing called “liberalism” today, bears no resemblance whatsoever to classical liberalism; it has nothing in common with the Whiggism of Adam Smith or the liberalism of Ludwig von Mises.

Mises wrote a book entitled Liberalism, describing liberalism as “a doctrine directed entirely towards the conduct of men in this world . . . it has nothing else in view than the advancement of their outward, material welfare and does not con cern itself directly with their inner, spiritual and metaphysical needs.”

A Deeper Meaning

Now, some critics of classical liberalism have judged it to be crass, too neglectful of man’s higher nature. Not so, says Mises: “The critics who speak in this vein show only that they have a very imperfect and materialistic conception of these higher and nobler needs. Social policy with the means that are at its disposal, can make men rich or poor, but it can never succeed in making them happy or in satisfying their inmost yearnings . . . . All that social policy can do is . . . further a system that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and houses the homeless. Happiness and contentment do not depend on food, clothing and shelter, but, above all, on what a man cherishes within himself. It is not from disdain of spiritual goods that liberalism concerns itself exclusively with man’s material well- being, but from a conviction that what is highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by any outward regulation.”

Mises further describes some of the central principles of classical liberalism as individual liberty, equal treatment under the law, and the elimination of class privileges; private property, the free market, free trade, and the peaceful cooperation of all mankind. Most Americans still respond positively to these ideals because they are part of our heritage inscribed in our basic documents, celebrated on patriotic holidays.

Man has an innate urge to live better, including the drive to improve his material circumstances and enjoy more prosperity. To this end he has always engaged in some degree of specialization, and he’s traded and bartered things he wants less for whatever it is he wants more. These voluntary exchanges are market transactions.

The Cultural Framework

The market has always existed; voluntary exchanges occur among primitive peoples, and there is a brisk under-the-counter market in communist nations like Russia and China. But mere wishes do not transform the market into the market economy. The market economy emerges only when the cultural conditions prepare the ground for it, as was the situation in certain western nations in the eighteenth century.

When a nation’s cultural framework includes such spiritual ingredients as the rule of law, equal liberty, security for property, a high level of morality, and that respect for rationality which makes science and technology possible, then the impulses and incentives which everywhere produce the market will give rise to capitalism, or the market economy—which is the market institutionalized.

“The reformers of the oriental peoples want to secure for their fellow citizens the material well-being that the Western nations enjoy,” writes Mises, “. . . they think that all that is needed . . . is the introduction of European and Western technology.” What they really need, Mises continues, is “the social order which in addition to other achievements has generated this technological knowledge . . . . The East is foreign to the Western spirit that has created capitalism.”

How can a society whose world-view includes such doctrines as Maya, karma and caste produce the social structure upon which the market economy is based? Accept the idea of Maya and you exclude the idea of a rationally structured, cause and effect universe. The doctrine of karma makes it virtually impossible for individuals to have the necessary self-responsibility and will to succeed which are essentials for a going-concern economy. And caste divisions in a society are incompatible with the idea of inherent rights and equality before the law. Capitalism is rooted in the cultural heritage of the West, Christendom, and you can’t have the fruits without the roots; you cannot merely wish an end result—to will the end is to will the means.

A Creative Intelligence

The pivot on which Western culture has turned is the conviction that a Creative Intelligence is working out its purposes through nature, history and persons; and that every individual enjoys a unique relationship with this Power. Because he is a created being, there is a sacred essence in man, which, in the fullness of time was understood as conferring certain rights and immunities in the political sphere.

By the eighteenth century, our philosophical forebears regarded as self-evident the truth that all men are created equal, possessing certain rights endowed by the Creator. Government was to be structured around the sovereign person so as to secure his rights and protect his private domain. Americans organized themselves politically around a spiritual framework which, paradoxically, regarded politics as relatively unimportant. The law was to protect life, liberty and property, so that men and women could better attend to the more important things in life—such as religion, art, education, science, sociability and play.

The philosopher-king idea had prevailed in most ages: Find the wisest and best men and then give them power over the nation so as to magnify their capacity to do good. The American notion was just the opposite. Americans had had some experience of the corrupting influence of power, and they were aware of the depravity of human nature—that man is a fallen creature. So the brand new political idea adumbrated on these shores was to limit political power so drastically that even if evil men do seize power they can’t do much harm. I’d phrase their insight this way: Never advocate any more power for your best friends than you would want to have wielded by your worst enemies.

The Political and Economic Aspects of Freedom

Two centuries ago things came to a head, in two great social achievements. In the Declaration of Independence and Constitution we had the political philosophy and the legal structures for a society of free people. The economic counterpart of our unique politics was the free economy, which promised a society of prosperous people.

But at this very period, Western civilization was to undergo a process of radical secularization which virtually destroyed the ideas of human nature and destiny which undergirded our freedom and prosperity. The human person underwent a radical devaluation; once regarded as the lord of creation he came to be looked upon as the accidental end product of natural and social forces—“little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn.”

Gone was the idea of a moral law for man’s guidance and fulfillment; gone was the idea of free will: a man’s character was not made by him, but for him. Man was the mere creature of circumstance, deprived of initiative, he could not act, he could only react.

An English critic named Christopher Booker, writing on Samuel Johnson, makes reference to this enormous transformation in the human outlook. “On the eve of the French Revolution and the age of Romanticism, European civilization stood on the verge of one of the most astonishing and fundamental shifts in collective consciousness in history—the keynote of which was to be an almost exact reversal of every truth about human nature and experience which Johnson had fought through to with such remorseless honesty and pain . . . it was proclaimed that human happiness could be achieved by political means, that the causes of most human ills did not lie within us, but outside us. If there was one belief which was to characterize western civilization with ever increasing force from the time Johnson passed away, it was that most human suffering is caused by external factors. In Marx, in Freud, in almost every philosopher and thinker who has shaped western attitudes over the past two hundred years (with one or two towering exceptions, such as Dostoevsky), we find this same overpowering drive to offload the blame for all our guilt, our pain, onto others, onto society, onto our parents, onto political structures, onto our material circumstances.” (The American Spectator, October, 1978.)

The Consequences of Error

The religious and philosophical errors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced the social and personal disasters of the twentieth century—faulty thinking and fallacious ideas have come to violent issue in the wars of our time. We tried, and we erred; but we can learn from our mistakes. Try a new direction, and we may succeed. In deed, we are succeeding as more and more thoughtful people examine the philosophy of freedom in its several dimensions and deeper levels. And as they search, more and more people are encountering the towering figure of Ludwig von Mises. Here was a man of unwavering integrity, a man who lived the truths he taught.

It is impossible to summarize the philosophy of Ludwig von Mises, but I shall close with what might be construed as a personal testimony by Mises himself, which does sum up the character of the man. It is a paragraph from his little book Bureaucracy.

“Mankind would never have reached the present state of civilization without heroism and self-sacrifice on the part of an elite. Every step forward on the way toward an improvement of moral conditions has been an achievement of men who were ready to sacrifice their own well-being, their health, and their lives for the sake of a cause that they considered just and beneficial. They did what they considered their duty without bothering whether they themselves would not be victimized. These people did not work for the sake of reward, they served their cause unto death.”

Originally published in the July 1980 edition of The Freeman. Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

The Philosophy of Ludwig von Mises

The term Weltanschauung is nothing more than a highfalutin label for “world view.” Everyone has a world view, although not everyone is fully conscious of it or aware of its implications. In other words, everyone conducts his life on the basis of some fundamental premises he takes for granted. The premises may not be explicitly stated, in which case they can be deduced from observations of the way a person habitually acts. Your Weltanschauung is analogous to the contact lenses you are wearing; you don’t see the lenses while you are using them to see other things. The late Cornell philosopher E. A. Burtt put it well when he said: “In the last analysis it is the ultimate picture which an age forms of the nature of the world that is its most fundamental possession. It is the final controlling factor in all thinking whatever.” That is why it is so important.

We are in the midst of a battle for men’s minds. This is obvious at the level of the news, where we read and hear about a confrontation between Communism and what, for want of a better term, is labeled The Free World. The battle for the mind goes on at the level of official propaganda, and it is also fought out in the classroom, on the podium, from the pulpit, in books—wherever the intellect is engaged and ideas are wrestled with.

The Communists are pretty clear about their world view, Dialectical Materialism, and strongly motivated by it. The people of The Free World, on the other hand, are so unclear about their basic beliefs that little dedication is aroused. Once it was different. Two centuries ago the philosophy of freedom was in the ascendant and clear thinkers declared that “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” And they spelled them out in detail. The Free World today gives little more than lip service to its heritage, half-heartedly accepts a milk and water version of the opposition’s world view. That makes for a lopsided contest, for the side that seems to be in focus and dynamic can always recruit fellow travelers from among the lackadaisical.

Two world views are in conflict: Materialism, intellectually insubstantial but passionately adhered to, versus non-Materialism, which generates only lukewarm devotion despite its intellectual and moral strengths. This paper exposes the weakness of the Materialist’s case and demonstrates the strengths of the contrary world view.

Everyone, to repeat, entertains some picture of the entire scheme of things; everyone has a mental image of what the cosmic totality is like — in the final analysis. During the past couple of centuries the most popular world view has conceived the universe along the lines of a mechanism — an immense and intricate piece of clockwork, each cog and gear meshing with the others in a self-contained system. If you like labels, this world view has been called Mechanism by some, Positivism by some, Materialism by others. Karl Marx adopted the belief that only matter is genuinely real, and he gave this doctrine enormous momentum. The Marxist version of this theory is called Dialectical Materialism, and Dialectical Materialism is the most widespread religion in the world today, numbering among its adherents millions who are not Marxists — except at the rock-bottom level of believing that matter is the fundamental reality in this universe.

I believe that Materialism is intellectually incoherent and demonstrably untrue in four essential areas. In the first place, this world view has no genuine place within it where mind, reason, and free will can find their rightful niche. Secondly, Materialism cannot accommodate the idea of inherent rights — immunities belonging to each person in virtue of his humanity. Thirdly, the idea of a moral order is incompatible with the notion that only material things are real. And finally, no one can achieve a proper view of himself as a person who accepts the Materialist teaching that he is merely a chance collocation of atoms, a by-product of physiochemical interactions. Materialism is genuinely compatible with collectivism, but it is incompatible with the freedom philosophy. The free society and market, economy need a world view which has a sound theory of mind, reason and free will; a logically grounded doctrine of inherent rights; a firmly based belief in the moral order; and an authentic understanding of personhood.

If we believe that only matter is genuinely real, we are logically committed to the corollary that mind is secondary, a derived thing dependent on that which is more basic than itself, namely matter. Mind, then, is not sui generis; it does not exist in its own right; it is not a primary ingredient of the cosmos. Mind, for the Materialist, is merely an epiphenomenon; it is matter in a late stage of development. Mind, intellect, consciousness, cognition, tea-son, rationality, will — are offshoots of matter; shadow, not substance. The really fundamental stuff of the universe — according to this theory — consists of the particles of matter which we can see, touch, count, weigh and measure.

The Reality of Matter Depends upon Reason

It is a peculiar quirk of the modern mentality to affirm without question the reality of matter, but to deny reality to mind. The catch is that it is only by using our mind that we know that matter exists! A rock does not know that stars exist; a tree is unaware of the oceans. Only we human beings know these and other things, and we know them by exercising our cognitive faculties upon the impressions gained through the senses. But our own mind is so close to us, it is so intimately a part of our very self, that we allow ourselves to be misled into downgrading our minds into something subservient to matter.

Matter is indisputably real; that is obvious. But the reality of the mental activity by which we come to know this is equally obvious; every attempt to prove otherwise must be self- defeating. Downgrade the mind, even by the tiniest degree, and you discredit any conclusion you presume to reach by the exercise of your mental powers. A rational case against reason is a contradiction in terms, for the more airtight your argument against reason the stronger the proof — contrary to your intention — of the efficacy of reason.

My proposition may be put in the form of Aristotle’s Law of Identity: Mind is Mind. Mind is not a mere attribute of something sub-mental. Mind is a primordial ingredient of the universe at the most basic level. To reduce Mind to the non-mental is to declare that Mind is non-Mind, which is nonsense. Because Mind is Mind we human beings are able to understand, to make choices, to take charge of our own lives, and to order our lives in line with human purposes. If we believe anything less than this about ourselves we lower our capacity to resist those misguided authoritarians who would make us their creatures.

Our Declaration of Independence talks about “unalienable rights . . . endowed by the Creator,” then goes on to say that governments are instituted to secure these rights. It appears to be one of those self-evident truths that no people would make a valiant effort to structure the laws of their society so as to protect each person’s private domain and render justice for all, unless they first believe in individual rights — the idea that each person possesses an inviolable region at the core of his being. The old-fashioned Whig idea of the Founding Fathers was to limit the reach of the law to the task of securing and preserving freedom of individual action within the rules of the game, and the rules were designed to maximize liberty and opportunity for everyone, allowing everyone the elbow room each of us needs to pursue his personal goals. Only thus may each person’s rights be secured.

The Nature of Rights

The word “liberal” today is the opposite of what the word meant when it first entered the vocabulary about two centuries ago, and a similar fate has befallen the word “rights.” Formerly, rights signified individual freedom and personal immunity from arbitrary interference with peaceful action; the popular belief today is that “rights” are legal privileges entitling people to housing, medical care, education, equal pay, or whatever. How may we recover the sounder idea which was once the keystone of our political system?

There are three schools of thought as to the nature of rights. The popular “liberal” belief today is that society is the dispenser of rights, but this viewpoint depends on the verbal sleight of hand which confuses rights as immunities with “rights” as entitlements. If you define words to mean whatever suits your purpose, anything can be made to mean anything else. As Dr. Johnson said, if you call stones plums you can make plum pudding out of stones!

The second school of thought declares that nature is the source of rights. Let it be noted that rights, whatever they might be, are not material objects. Your liver, your brain, your heart are material objects; they have mass and extension, and can be weighed and measured. Likewise your body; when life has departed, your carcass can be reduced to $1.98 worth of chemicals! But your rights are like your ideas, in that neither your rights nor your ideas occupy space, nor can either be reduced to a chemical formula.

Now, nature is the material world; it’s a marvelously intricate combination and recombination of the 105 chemical elements from actinium to zirconium. To speak of chemicals as the source of our rights makes as little sense as to speak of the chemical origin of mind and thought. Nor does it make much sense for the Materialist to speak of human nature as the source of man’s rights, because his philosophy has first subordinated human nature itself to physical nature.

The world view of Materialism, I argued earlier, has no genuine place within it for Mind and thought; nor does it have a valid ground for the concept of rights—which is why it twists them into entitlements. There is a radical alternative to Materialism, but what shall we call this other world view? Call it whatever you like, but it’s the religious or theistic world view in its affirmation of the reality of a non-material, mental, or spiritual dimension of the universe. Call it the sacred or divine order, if you like. Or refer to the Mysterium Tremendum Fascinans explored by Rudolph Otto in his seminal book The Idea of the Holy.

Our forebears were not afraid of using three-letter words in public so they used the term God for the creative Power. This Power also worked within — the word enthusiasm is derived from two Greek words meaning “the god within” — and thus each person participates in an order of reality beyond society and beyond nature. He is thereby endowed with an inner sanctum which is his alone, any trespass upon which is taboo. His rights are endowed by the creative Power.

The world view which declares that only material things are real, has no place for an independent moral order, and this leads to moral relativism. Theories of moral relativism have seeped into the popular mentality to emerge as slogans and bumper stickers such as “Whatever turns you on,” “If it feels good, do it,” “Do your own thing.” The result is that the shrewd, the wily, the clever, the unscrupulous doing their thing have the rest of us over a barrel.

Moral Relativism

The U.S. News and World Report for October 8, 1984 has a story headlined “Nearly 1 in 3 Gets U.S. Benefits.” It listed the eleven biggest programs from Social Security to infants’ nutrition, involving 66 million people. Many of these recipients are into several programs, for 129,299,000 checks are mailed out from Washington regularly to these 66 million people. The report did not cover farm families, or union members, or the government bureaucrats, or those employed in schools paid for by taxpayers, or people in tariff protected industries, like those in Detroit who charge us thousands of dollars extra for the cars we buy. And there are others. We are now a nation where almost everyone is trying to live at the expense of everyone else. We have written a form of theft into our statutes. Why? Because there’s a little larceny in our souls!

It’s too easy, and too false, to blame the politicians. They’re only our hired hit men, and in cases of this sort the principal is at least as guilty as his agent. Large chunks of the American electorate decided that living off government handouts is easier than working for a living and safer than stealing, so they created political parties in their own image and elected politicians who promise them an inside track to the public treasury.

Moralists in former periods inveighed against this sort of thing, but in the modern world they were no match for the theoreticians of communism and socialism who convinced almost everyone that legal plundering was the wonderful wave of the future. Intellectuals today are not so sure, and many now side with the free society-market economy team. And it is our good fortune that many men and women in public life, people of integrity and intelligence, are fighting in their own way the same battle we are waging.

Reason to Believe in An Objective Moral Order

Is there an objective moral order? That is not possible within the world view of Materialism! Is it probable within a theistic world view? I think so. Your individual physical survival depends on several factors. You need so many cubic feet of air per hour, or you suffocate. You need a minimum number of calories per day, or you starve. If you lack certain vitamins and minerals, specific diseases appear. There is a temperature range within which human life is possible; too low and you freeze, too high and you roast. These are some of the requirements you must meet for individual bodily survival. They are not statutory requirements; nor are they mere custom. They are laws of this universe; they are built into the nature of things. This is obvious.

And it is just as obvious that there are certain requirements and rules built into the nature of things which must be met if we are to survive as a civilization characterized by personal freedom, private property, and social cooperation under the division of labor. It would be impossible to have any kind of a society where most people are constantly on the prowl for opportunities to murder, assault, lie and steal. A good society is possible only if most people most of the time do not murder, assault, steal and lie. A good society is one where most people most of the time tell the truth, keep their word, fulfill their contracts, don’t covet their neighbor’s goods, and occasionally lend a helping hand.

No society will ever eliminate crime completely, but any society where more than a tiny fraction of the population exercises criminal tendencies is on the skids. To affirm a moral order is to say, in effect, that this universe has a deep prejudice against murder, a strong bias in favor of private property, and hates a lie. We may not like living in a stringent universe which lays down a tough set of rules for individual and social survival. But let’s face it; nobody has ever come up with a better alternative to living here and now.

Of course we know that this planetary home of ours is where we belong; and it’s a pretty good place to be, even if at times it’s a pretty tough test run. Each of us came into this world chock full of potentialities and with an immense capacity for learning. At birth we were, in effect, handed a do-it-yourself kit, a do-it-yourself kit for the manufacture of a human being. And then we were given a life sentence in order to transform this raw material into a full-fledged mature adult. In the nature of the case this has to be an inside job, for each person is the custodian of the time, energies and talents which are uniquely his own. Each individual is in charge of his own life, constructing, by the choices he makes hourly and daily, the person he has it in him to become. No outsider can take over this responsibility for us.

The collectivist promise that if we give them the power they will fashion a new social environment which will create a new humanity, is a damnable lie — and I’ve chosen the word deliberately.

Becoming a human being is a full time job, and it’s for life. But there is that perennial urge in the human psyche egging us on to bigger things, like the latest dream of empire, like a “brave new world,” like one more desperate try at some newfangled model of the Tower of Babel. Every collapse of these megalomaniac dreams hurts, but it does provide some people with a clue that human fulfillment lies in a different direction; we have to begin from within. Gerald Heard used to say that we must grow as big inside as the whale has grown outside! A cartoon shows a man paying the final installment on his psychiatrist’s bill. As he hands over the money the former patient says to the doctor: “You call this a cure? When I came to you I was Napoleon; now I’m nobody.” We know that this former patient is on his way, but a gain of this sort feels at first like a loss!

Man is not God; he did not create himself, nor did he write the laws of his being; but men and women do make themselves. And as we seriously take ourselves in hand, we begin to discover who we are and what we may become. “That wonderful structure, Man,” wrote Edmund Burke, “whose prerogative it is to be in a great degree a creature of his own working, and who, when made as he ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place in the creation.”

Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.

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Battle for the Mind

At its core, Jacob’s book addresses in brief the history of classical liberalism and the libertarian movement, explains the basics of the philosophy of liberty, and tells the stories of a number of modern libertarian organizations at work right now. It’s wonderfully entertaining, easy to read, and splendidly pithy.

Among Huebert’s most salient points is his excoriation of “conservatism” and its relationship to libertarianism. He completely demolishes the myth that Ronald Reagan was even close to a libertarian, and hopefully such words will shock conservatives into realizing that most, if not all, of “traditional conservatism” as enshrined in Reagan is nothing short of a lie.

I’m a particular fan of the chapter on war (read an excerpt here); it’s so great that I have to quote the first paragraph in full:

Libertarianism and war are not compatible. One reason why should be obvious: In war, governments commit legalized mass-murder. In modern warfare especially, war is not just waged among voluntary combatants, but kills, maims, and otherwise harms innocent people. Then, of course, wars must be funded through taxes, which are extracted from U.S. citizens by force — a form of legalized theft, as far as libertarians are concerned. And, historically, the U.S. has used conscription — legalized slavery — to force people to fight and die. In addition, an interventionist foreign policy makes civilians targets for retaliation, so governments indirectly cause more violence against their own people when they become involved in other countries’ affairs. Plus, war is always accompanied by many other new restrictions on liberty, many of which are sold as supposedly temporary wartime measures but then never go away.

And now I… have nothing else to say. This is it. This is what we need to communicate to everybody. War kills. War is immoral. To the Christian, aggressive war is among the greatest of all evils humans can commit. Peace is our code. Period.

Another great part of Jacob’s book is his chapter on education. Public, compulsory schooling is not libertarian. And guess what, vouchers are not a viable alternative. This principle is somewhat difficult to explain to many people, but I have contended for years that vouchers are just another back door for government control of education. Huebert does a much better job of explaining it than I ever have.

I could go on and on just describing the chapters themselves, but I want to give you a concise flavor for the book so I will stop with the praise here. However, there are a few weaknesses to the book that I would be remiss not to point out. First, I think that Jacob was a bit too critical of the Libertarian Party, and a bit too kind to the Campaign for Liberty. It’s true that the LP has not lived up to the radical vision of its founders at times, and there are questions that I still have about its future. Nevertheless, it continues to be the home of a huge number of amazing activists and thinkers, and we dismiss the effect that it can have. The LP will only fail to live up to its original purpose if we let it – Murray Rothbard said as much many years ago and prominent LP members such as Mary Ruwart and Lee Wrights say the same today.

In contrast, despite the influence of Ron Paul and the large amount of money initially invested, I am a bit underwhelmed by what the Campaign for Liberty has been able to do at the national level. In truth, the awareness that America now has of the Federal Reserve and its criminal nature is incredible, but is this the result of C4L or is it just the momentum from 2008? I personally wish C4L would be more a hub of local activism rather than another organization trying to take on the House of Representatives. Don’t get me wrong, I want to see C4L succeed, but I also want to make sure that local efforts are well-funded and well-staffed.

This leads me to another minor oversight in the book: the lack of discussion of local activism. Don’t get me wrong, I despise politics and the electoral process is completely inane. Moreover, I readily admit national politics stinks and is frequently a waste of money except in very specific situations (the Ron Paul Presidential Campaign being the most spectacular example). But on a local level (i.e. states, counties, cities) individuals can have very real impacts that truly promote liberty and help people live more freely. I wish Jacob had explored this more thoroughly, because I imagine that concrete examples of success would inspire people to get out there and make a difference.

Finally, the price tag is a bit stiff, but I still contend that you need this book on your bookshelf to have, read, and lend out. While Amazon.com generally sells the book for $35, you can get a paperback copy for $25 at the Mises Institute Store. No matter what you choose, the knowledge you will gain from reading this is totally worth it.

Please consider buying Libertarianism Today at Amazon.com and LCC will then get a small kick-back from the sale. Remember, LCC receives a small percentage of any shopping you do at Amazon when you go through an LCC link. Help keep LCC growing and growing; your support is much appreciated!

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

What is the best book on the essentials of libertarianism?

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) had an enormous impact upon the history of theology and western philosophy (besides having some really cool names). They may have been contemporaries, but they developed their ideas in tremendously different circumstances and cultural backdrops. Both had great success with their respective cultures as well, so we would be wise to understand their work.

Schleiermacher lived in a time and place where Christianity was despised by the culture because of the conflict it supposedly had wrought among them. He writes in a German culture strongly affected by the memory of the Thirty Years War, one of the most destructive conflicts in history during which Protestants and Catholics were convinced to kill each other at the whim of their corrupt political leaders. If religious diversity – a seemingly good thing – could cause so much death and destruction, then why give it any credence at all?

Kierkegaard, however, comes later in the Enlightenment era, post-Immanuel Kant. His culture in Denmark was questioning how faith was even possible in their brave new world of knowledge. Kant had cast much doubt on being certain of God, and Kierkegaard was responding to this influence (but others as well).

Their different cultural situations resulted in different doctrinal emphases. For Schleiermacher, the important point to convey was that all men had an awareness of absolute reality, of absolute truth. If men would just see this as their starting point, perhaps they could move past their conflicts. Kierkegaard, however, was primarily interested in people ceasing their indifference to religion and making a choice. He believed that God meets you when you take a leap in faith toward him, because God never enforces himself upon anyone. He wants to tell others that faith is not irrational , but rather not approached in the realm of rational-irrational dichotomies at all.

If I am certain of one thing about American culture (no offense, international readers, this may be exactly true of your culture as well), it is that American culture is not uniform. In my hometown of Austin, Texas for instance, you can walk through a grocery store and hear five different languages before you reach the bread aisle. Your colleagues at work could include three or four cultures you’ve never experienced in your life. I think we live in a culture that reflects aspects of both Schleiermacher’s and Kierkegaard’s times. Many people see religion as divisive and conflict-inducing, and thus they reject Christianity as part of the problem. Others are simply indifferent to religion, or see faith as irrelevant.

Schleiermacher’s approach may appeal to the former group – the modern “cultured despisers” of Christianity. His emphasis on inner awareness could help them to understand that Christianity doesn’t need to be about causing destruction (though Leo Tolstoy would probably do it just as well or better). The danger, though, is that an attitude that suggests “all religions are created equal” could emerge and “New Age” attitudes de-emphasizing absolute truth could develop. This is an undesirable result, but can be avoided with careful teaching.

Kierkegaard’s approach may appeal to the latter group – those who simply do not care and those who see faith as irrational. Kierkegaard pushes people to cease indifference and consider a life of faith more carefully. He challenges those who conveniently do not believe by showing them that they have a kind of religious anxiety, like any other person, and that their disbelief is primarily a matter of laziness rather than intellect. In a way, Kierkegaard frees us from solely appealing to apologetical arguments, in favor of experiencing God in the leap of faith. The danger, however, is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Reason is ultimately on the side of the Christian, and should never be abandoned. Kierkegaard reminds us that there is more than one way to talk to people about God.

Does any of this resonate with you? What questions does this bring to mind? Please encourage more discussion by commenting below…

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

The Lasting Influence of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard

Libertarianism is founded on the belief that individuals have universal rights – specifically rights to life, liberty, and the possession of property. Despite fairly widespread recognition of these rights, their universal defense (that is, an explanation of why these rights apply at all times and in all places) can often be difficult to articulate. Three predominant sub-groups within libertarianism attempt such a defense, each with a unique approach. Consequentialist libertarians focus on utility, deontological libertarians look to nature, and Ayn Rand’s followers turn to what they term ethical egoism. At first glance, each of these seems to offer a reasonable defense of universal rights; but closer inspection reveals their flaws. Conscientious defenders of liberty realize that without a solid defense, protection and preservation of rights cannot be guaranteed. Fortunately, there is a firm defense to be found within the pages of God’s Word. In the Bible, God lays out laws and moral constraints, commanding humans to obey. In so doing, God establishes man’s basic human rights; these rights are based on morality and morality originates in God. Therefore, the origin and only solid defense of rights are found, not in utilitarian economics, nature, or egoism, but in the Word of God.

Consequentialist libertarians would disagree, believing they need only look as far as the utility of rights in order to find a suitable defense of them. They believe that rights of life, liberty, and property ownership should be protected because those rights lead to positive utilities, such as prosperity, efficiency, or happiness. The argument quickly falls apart, however, as soon as one realizes that there is no practical unit of measurement for utility. Neoclassical economists devised a unit called a utile, but this concept should be discarded as nonsense. The utility of rights is ultimately immeasurable because happiness, efficiency, and prosperity are impossible to quantify.  Even if one could measure a single individual’s happiness, prosperity, or efficiency, these things could not be aggregated across all people. The total utility of rights for a society is indeterminable, and therefore, the consequentialist defense must necessarily be discarded, at least insofar as using it as a solid defense of universal rights is concerned.

Deontological libertarianism’s argument is not quite so easily dismissed, though ultimately, it, too, is a flawed defense. Deontological libertarianism claims that rights are based on the moral principle of non-aggression: You leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone; to do otherwise would be immoral. This principle is derived from the concept of self-ownership, meaning that a person ought to be the exclusive controller of his own body and life. Murray Rothbard argued that self-ownership is a natural law because it is what is naturally best for man. In his essay, “Justice and Property Rights,” Rothbard writes:

Since the nature of man is such that each individual must use his mind to learn about himself and the world, to select values, and to choose ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives each man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation.

In Rothbard’s estimation, man’s end goal is “to survive and flourish,” and rights must be preserved and defended as a means to that end. If, however, there is a single case in which ignoring rights helps a man to survive and flourish, then logically, rights cannot be considered universal because they would no longer be applicable at all times and in all places or for all people. The unfortunate truth is that there are plenty of instances in which infringing upon another’s rights can secure one’s own survival. That is precisely how nature operates: survival of the fittest. If stealing or killing advances one’s position, then nature seems to encourage the decision to do so. Nature, then, can be deemed as neither the source of nor a defense of universal rights, as “rights” by nature’s standard are entirely situational. Because that which is situational cannot also be universal, it is necessary to conclude that situational rights are no rights at all.[i]

Ayn Rand’s view is even less helpful in the search for a defense of rights because her argument based on ethical egoism, like deontological libertarianism, actually contradicts the universality of rights. At first glance, Rand’s worship of life as mankind’s highest goal and value seemingly implies that rights are also to be valued. After all, life and happiness are relatively difficult to attain if one doesn’t first have the right to pursue them. However, an ethical egoist does not believe he is morally bound to respect the rights of others if doing so would end his own life or happiness. Thus, to the ethical egoist, rights are not universal, but situational. This is a frightening thought – it is impossible to expect one’s rights to be respected by others if there is no actual reason or motivation for others to do so. Without universal constraints on people’s interpersonal moral decisions, universal rights cannot be effectively defended.

That is where Scripture comes in. Scripture provides the moral constraints necessary to establish the existence of and the defense of universal rights. Three examples of interpersonal moral constraints laid out by God in the Bible are “thou shalt not kill,” “thou shalt not steal,” and “love thy neighbor as thyself.” The first two laws[ii] establish individuals’ rights to life and to the possession of property. The third provides the moral constraint that allows men to expect their rights to be recognized by others. When a man loves his neighbor as he loves himself, he understands that any action that would be detrimental to himself should never be taken against others. No one wants to be harmed, therefore no one should initiate harm on another. The moral constraints against killing, stealing, and so forth, are primary ethical norms. They are, to coin a term, “non-rights.” Man does not have the right to kill or to steal. From these Biblical maxims, one can logically derive the universal rights of life, liberty, and property.

Whenever it is said that one ought or ought not to perform some action, there must be a reason or motivation to abide by such a statement. The motive to restrain oneself from infringing upon the recognized rights of others is simple and entirely self-serving. Simply put, abiding by ethical laws is in alignment with man’s most basic ethical goal: his own best interests. Generally speaking, a man will seek what is best for himself. Perhaps this means seeking utilities such as happiness and prosperity. Perhaps it means “to survive and flourish.” It stands to reason that as man’s creator, God is also aware of that which is best for man. Scripture declares that a right relationship with God should be man’s highest goal. A relationship with his Creator endows a man with fulfillment, wholeness, and happiness. A relationship with God sets man up to survive and flourish eternally. While mankind’s eternal salvation has been secured by the death and resurrection of Christ, man is still responsible for living out his life on earth in a way that is God-pleasing (man does this not to earn salvation, but in response to that which has been done on his behalf). The deepest kind of satisfaction can be attained in both this life and the life to come, but only if one has a right relationship with God. Recognizing and respecting the moral constraints God established is part of that.[iii] If a man is motivated to achieve his goal of happiness and satisfaction, then logically, he should seek to remain in a right relationship with the One who can provide that desired end result, both now and in eternity.

A person whose only goal is his own self-interest in this earthly life could easily believe that rules, ethics, and rights can all be violated for his own sake. Any system, then, that sets a goal solely applicable in this life necessarily excludes acknowledging rights. If man’s goal is “goodness” or “happiness” only in this life, then he need only acknowledge the rights of others when it is in his own best interest, and never otherwise. In that case, rights are no longer universally applicable rules to follow and are therefore no longer rights. If life ends at death, then it makes perfect sense that one should do whatever he can to make himself happy during his lifetime, even if that means causing harm to others. However, Scripture reveals that there is more to life than the years spent on Earth. Life extends into eternity and man does not have to sacrifice his acknowledgement of rights in his earthly life in order to reach his goal of happiness and fulfillment in eternal life. A person whose goal is his own self-interest in this earthly life AND in eternal life will recognize that the means to this end goal involve the recognition and defense of rules, ethics, and rights – not as way of earning eternal life, but as a way of enjoying completeness with the Creator, Savior God.

Scripture, then, acts as revelation to Christians. It reveals man’s universal rights and identifies God as their source. It provides awareness of the possibility of eternal life and of the beauty of a relationship with God. With that knowledge comes a motivation for respecting the rights of others. The origin of and motivation for respecting the rights of mankind combine to form a solid basis for the universal defense of the rights Libertarians hold so dear.

So ultimately, rights are not something that should be defended simply by observing their utility within a society. Nor are rights something that can be defended solely by saying they come from nature, for nature would more often have men violate each other’s rights in an effort to survive. Rights are instead established by God Himself and preserved for posterity in the Bible. Scripture provides the origin of rights and the defense of their universality. Rights do not have to be ignored in certain cases in order to reach the end goal of happiness or fulfillment because life does not end with death, and happiness and fulfillment are found in a right relationship with God. And a right relationship with God is attained through Spirit-inspired faith and obedience to God’s Word. Libertarians who desire to know and discuss the source of their inalienable rights should therefore look not to worldly philosophical arguments, but to the Bible and its author, our author, God the Creator.

[i] Another problem inherent in Rothbard’s view is that it doesn’t give self-ownership to those who by nature can’t “choose ends and means in order to survive and flourish.” Therefore, in his view, a person in a coma has no rights, nor does a fetus, nor an infant. Only the Christian view is consistent, giving all humans rights at all times and in all conditions.

[ii] Not all of the laws in the Bible establish rights, only those that deal with interpersonal action. The law to remember the Sabbath and the law against worshipping idols are personal, not interpersonal. Although breaking these laws may indirectly affect other people, the laws themselves are not direct moral constraints on interpersonal interaction. Therefore, it must be noted that Biblical Law goes beyond interpersonal actions and addresses personal concerns as well. In this sense, libertarian rights are established from only a subset of the laws of God.

[iii] To preemptively address a potential issue, it may be important to note that rights only exist as they apply to relationships among men, as morality only applies to men. Rights don’t constrain God, nor do they constrain nature. To say that man has a right to life means that all other people ought not to kill man; it does not mean that God ought not to kill man nor that an animal or a volcano ought not to kill man.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

The Proper Origin of Rights

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was a French sociologist, philosopher, and theologian, but his main profession was teaching law at the University of Bordeaux. He held strong views about the nature of government as antithetical to Christian faith, and is counted among the 20th century Christian anarchists.

Anarchy and Christianity is a short work presenting the essentials of Ellul’s political philosophy with respect to Scripture. It reads in a scholarly manner, especially with his references to historical and textual criticism and the assumption that the reader knows something about Marxian class theory, historical theological traditions, and even a bit of Greek. One must be prepared to encounter someone distant from the American evangelical theology that we are so familiar with. I’d be hard-pressed to say he is a “theological liberal,” but he is different. Despite the qualms I have with certain elements of Ellul’s thought, I found the book to be a very enjoyable read and it enlivened Scriptures that I had not paid due attention in the past. Since it isn’t that long, I think anyone can gain a lot from reading this book.

The book contains three main parts, plus an appendix for further thoughts. First, Ellul includes a personal introduction to demonstrate why the political question of anarchy is still important to the church today. He begins: “The question I am posing is the more difficult because fixed opinions have long since been reached on both sides and have never been subjected to the least examination.” If anything, the question is not settled (not even with him). He reveals some of his personal history, including his time participating in Marxist movements before converting to Christianity. Even though he admired Marx, he was also very familiar with Proudhon (“Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order.”) and therefore never really considered himself a strict Marxist/communist even while sympathetic to the ideas.

Part 1 is entitled “Anarchy from a Christian Standpoint” and outlines what anarchy actually is, describes why he considers himself and anarchist, and answers some anarchist objections to Christianity. To Ellul, the essential element of anarchy is not the caricature of a bomb-throwing revolter but a rejection of violence and aggression as a means of accomplishing political goals. “No matter what the motivation, however, I am against violence and aggression. I am against it on two levels. The first is simply tactical… My second reason is obviously a Christian one. Biblically, love is the way, not violence.” Ellul then addresses the charge of non-Christian anarchists that Christianity itself is antithetical to freedom, even going so far as to address briefly the “problem of evil.”

I love this paragraph where he defends the position that God is the great liberator:

But why freedom? If we accept that God is love, and that it is human beings who are to respond to this love, the explanation is simple. Love cannot be forced, ordered, or made obligatory. It is necessarily free. If God liberates, it is because he expects and hopes that we will come to know him and love him. He cannot lead us to do so by terrorizing us.

The subject of Part 2 is “The Bible as the Source of Anarchy,” where Ellul shows via what he calls a “naïve reading” of the Bible that typical interpretations of pro-state Christians are wrongheaded. He surveys both the Old and New Testaments, answering a variety of questions that seemingly pro-state Scriptures bring to the forefront. Without giving too much away, he addresses 1 Samuel, the Prophets, the teachings of Jesus, Paul, Peter, and Revelation. Some of his interpretations are what I expected, others are quite surprising. I will leave it to you to discover and enjoy.

In summary, Ellul’s work is quality material for the Christian libertarian. His chief flaw – and this flaw is certainly not trivial from my point of view – is a lack of understanding about the free market as the great vehicle of practicing freedom. I think it very likely that he is caricaturing corporatism as capitalism, but nevertheless a steadier free market principle would be help bolster his ideas to contemporary libertarians of all backgrounds. But most importantly, he gives an thought-provoking case that the State is from any point of view the enemy of freedom and of God.

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Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Anarchy and Christianity