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Reactionary “Progressives”
It’s a point I’ve made a few times before on this blog, but it’s worth repeating: those people on the left-side of the traditional left-right political spectrum who call themselves and their policies “progressive” are abusing the word. Progressive, according to most dictionaries, means “favoring or advocating progress, change, improvement, or reform, as opposed to wishing to maintain things as they are,” “making progress toward better conditions, employing or advocating more enlightened ideas,” or “going forward or onward.” Rather than being truly “progressive,” those who label themselves by that word are, in fact, reactionaries: they adhere to, and they advocate a continuation and expansion, of the failed policies of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state. There’s nothing “progressive” about the socialist, paternalistic policies that American leftists advocate. The 20th-century regulatory/welfare state they want to expand was itself based on the 19th-century statist policies of Germany’s Otto von Bismarck; and Bismarck’s statism was the old European wine – the paternalism that for centuries had been the dominant public policy of the feudal monarchies of Europe – rebottled in 19th-century packaging. Like the conservatives (those on the right side of the traditional left-right political spectrum) whom they claim to oppose, left-liberal “progressives” are really advocates of paternalism and collectivism. Left-liberals and conservatives differ only in the type of 19th-century paternalism they want to continue or expand. Conservatives (paternalists/collectivists of the right) seek generally to use the coercive power of government to impose Victorian-era morals, while their brethren on the left seek generally to use the coercive power of the government to redistribute wealth. Both sides would willingly sacrifice individual freedom and self-responsibility in order to advance their collectivist agenda, their notion of the so-called “common good” of society.
“Progressive” reformers in the early 20th century
The political movement that was called “Progressive” in the early 20th century was an aggregate of diverse interest groups, some operating at the state or local level and others at the national level, that held in common a desire to “reform” society by giving government greater regulatory powers, usually in the name of bettering society generally or some abstract entity called the “public good” or “public interest.” What the early 20th-century Progressive movement really was, in practice, was an effort by various special-interest groups to use the coercive power of government to achieve certain desired results, usually the advancement of each group’s own private interest (or each group’s vision of a utopian system). The reformers claimed to act in the name of the “public good” or “public interest,” but of course there is no such thing: the “public,” or society generally, has no one single good or interest. Rather, society is a collection of diverse individuals, each with his or her own separate interests (and also his or her own beliefs about what is “good” for oneself and/or society). The early-20th-century “Progressive” movement included Populists (many of whom had formed their own third political party in the 1890s), preachers of the “Social Gospel” (i.e., socialist Christians), “muckraking” journalists, advocates of the welfare state (including some German immigrants who sought to emulate Bismarck’s policies in America), and middle-class urban reformers. Writing principally about the latter group in his classic book The Age of Reform (1955), historian Richard Hofstadter argued that many of the reformers were members of a frustrated and displaced “elite”: the sons and daughters (or grandsons and granddaughters) of political leaders in early American history who, thanks to the increased democratization of American politics (and the greater diversity of the electorate, due to the huge influx of immigrants), no longer enjoyed the natural “deference” that 18th-century Americans had given their ancestors. Many of them took up political activism as a way of channeling their energies – and living up to their family’s expectations that they take a “leadership” role in society. Not surprisingly, Progressive reformers generally held an elitist point of view, directly reflected in many of the policies they supported. In general, early-20th century Progressives advocated an expansion of the regulatory power of the state – the so-called “police power,” which traditionally was exercised in order to protect public health, safety, and morality – into a broad, virtually unlimited power of government to regulate all aspects of individuals’ lives, in order to promote the “public interest” or “common good.” They favored the enactment of new laws, generally called “social legislation,” modeled after the laws passed by the socialist welfare states of Europe: minimum-wage laws, maximum-hour laws and other laws restricting the labor of women and minors; workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance programs, as well as retirement pension programs (anticipating Social Security); and regulation of virtually any kind of business, again, in the name of protecting the “public interest,” through price controls, licensing laws, and other restrictions on entry into markets. In all this, they supported laws that abridged individuals’ freedom to enter into contracts, on terms mutually acceptable to both parties, and laws that in various ways limited the traditional economic freedoms, such as occupational freedom, the right to earn a living, the right of refusal to deal, and freedom to compete. “Progressive” reform policies included greater governmental control over not only business but also morals. The liquor prohibition movement, culminating in the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the Prohibition movement), was in many respects one of the biggest and most successful aspects of the Progressive movement. (Unlike other aspects of Progressivism, which generally evolved into FDR’s “New Deal” policies of the 1930s – which built upon, and expanded, many of the reforms of the 1910s and 1920s – of course, liquor prohibition was quickly recognized to be a disaster and thus was killed with the Twenty-First Amendment, repealing Prohibition, at the beginning of FDR’s presidency in 1933.) Other “morals” legislation sponsored by Progressive-era reformers included the first major federal drug prohibition law, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, and the federalization of criminal laws against prostitution with the Mann Act of 1910. The creation of the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), one of the earliest federal administrative agencies (or regulatory commissions), was a Progressive-era reform, as was the creation of the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Federal Radio Commission, which was the predecessor of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Indeed, the whole idea of Congress delegating to such regulatory agencies, composed of commissioners presumed to be “experts” in a given field, the powers to make and enforce regulations – in short, the whole field of modern administrative law – came out of the policies advocated by these reformers. The specific form of these agencies might have been new, but they had their antecedents in state regulatory commissions dating back to the early 19th century and, much further back, to various boards, councils, commissions, etc. created by Parliament and/or the monarch in England, dating back to medieval times. Again, paternalistic government control over citizens’ lives was not a new idea; it was a very old idea, given new applications by the Progressive-era reformers. In addition to Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment), the Progressive-era reforms brought two other important amendments to the U.S. Constitution: the Sixteenth Amendment, empowering Congress to levy income taxes (and thus enabling the huge growth in the size of the federal government and the share of the nation’s GNP that it consumes through taxation); and the Seventeenth Amendment, changing the method of choosing U.S. Senators to popular elections rather than by state legislatures (and thus depriving state governments of one of the key checks the framers of the Constitution sought to give them over the national government). The Seventeenth Amendment was part of another aspect of Progressive-era reforms in politics, which tended to move away from the Founders’ design of a republican (or representative) system of government and toward pure democracy, with greater (and more direct) popular control through such devices as the initiative, referendum, and recall elections. Notwithstanding these Progressive-era reforms toward greater democracy in politics, the general thrust of early-20th-century “Progressive” reformers’ efforts was to give greater political power to government officials, and particularly to regulators presumed to be “experts.” Thus, overall, these reforms tended to give government greater power and control over citizens’ lives – and to give ordinary Americans less freedom (and less responsibility) over their own lives. The free-thinking journalist and social commentator H. L. Mencken gave a pithy definition of the “Progressives” of the 1920s that was dead-on right in its accuracy. “A Progressive,” wrote Mencken, “is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty. In general, he would be inclined to regard the repeal of any tax as outrageous.” (Mencken, in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Jan. 19, 1926, quoted in The Quotable Conservative, edited by Rod L. Evans and Irwin M. Berent (1995), p. 145.)
“Social Doctors”
Another libertarian writer – a “liberal” in the true sense of the word (as discussed below) – who understood the paternalism at the root of “Progressive” reform was that great advocate of “laissez-faire” policies in the late-19th century, William Graham Sumner. In Sumner’s splendid little book What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883), he describes reformers as “social doctors” who are unmindful of the single great duty that all individuals owe one another in society – Sumner’s version of the Golden Rule – which is: “Mind your own business.” Instead, Sumner observed: “[W]e are constantly annoyed, and the legislatures are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel everybody else to live in their way. Some people [for example] have decided to spend Sunday in a certain way, and they want laws passed to make other people spend Sunday in that same way. Some people have resolved to be teetotalers, and they want a law passed to make everybody else a teetotaler. . . .
“The amateur social doctors are like the amateur physicians – they always begin with the question of remedies, and they go at this without any diagnosis or any knowledge of the anatomy or physiology of society. They never have any doubt of the efficacy of their remedies. They never take account of any ulterior effects which may be apprehended from the remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstruction of human nature. . . .
“The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be more moral or more enlightened than their fellow-men. They are able to see what other men ought to do when the other men do not see it. An examination of the work of the social doctors, however, shows that they are only more ignorant and more presumptuous than other people.”
Sumner identified what he called the “radical vice,” or “fallacy,” in all reformers’ schemes: that they ignore the “worthy, industrious, independent, and self-supporting” (in other words, the self-responsible) individual, whom Sumner called “The Forgotten Man” – the man who “minds his own business, and makes no complaint,” and who is the true victim of the “social doctors”’ schemes. “The fallacy of all prohibitory, sumptuary, and moral legislation is the same,” Sumner observed, using as his example the leading “Progressive” reform idea of his time, liquor prohibition: “Their schemes . . . may always be reduced to this type – that A and B [these are the reformers, or “social doctors”] decide what C [the “Forgotten Man”] shall do for D [the “poor man, the purported beneficiary of their reform law]. . . . [For example] A and B determine to be teetotalers, which is often a wise determination, and sometimes a necessary one. . . . But A and B put their heads together to get a law passed which shall force C to be a teetotaler for the sake of D [the “poor man”-- in this case, the alcoholic], who is in danger of drinking too much. . . . Who is C? He is the man who wants alcoholic liquors for any honest purpose whatsoever, who would use his liberty without abusing it, who would occasion no public question, and trouble nobody at all. He is the Forgotten Man . . . .”
Sumner’s “Forgotten Man” model is very useful. It applies to the reform schemes proposed in his time – not only liquor prohibition but the protective tariff, which he condemned as “jobbery” (a scheme using the coercive power of government – here, levying taxes on certain imported goods – to enrich some at the expense of others). The model also applies, as I like to point out to my students, to many issues in public policy today. For example, one might say that the “radical vice” of Social Security is not just that it prevents all Americans from investing as they see fit that portion of his income confiscated by FICA taxes, but that in the name of helping D, the “poor man” (the irresponsible person who fails to plan for his retirement income), it redistributes the wealth earned by C, the “forgotten man” (who does plan for his retirement and does not need Social Security), and forcibly transfers it to D, who did not earn it.
Achieving order in society: Two competing approaches
To understand fully why the so-called “progressive” approach to public policy – expanding the regulatory power of government – is so reactionary and thus, in fact, not truly progressive at all, we need to first understand a basic truth about society and politics. In general, there are two ways to achieve order in society – which is to say, two ways to attempt to coordinate the actions of the individuals who compose society. One is to use force – the coercive power of law, or government – to compel individuals to act in certain ways, against their will; that is, to do things they do not wish to do or to refrain from doing things they do wish to do. This first way I’ll call the “police state” approach, for it relies on governmental power (the regulatory power that legal theorists call the “police power” of the State). The alternative, other way to provide order in society minimizes the use of force – limiting the role of government to those powers necessary to protect individuals from harming one another – and otherwise allows individuals to act as they wish, cooperating on those things they are willing to do together by their voluntary agreement, for their mutual benefit. This second way I’ll call the “free-market” approach, for it is possible only in a capitalistic free society, for it relies on the free market itself – the economic system that coordinates individuals’ desires, according to objective, impersonal forces such as the law of supply and demand – to provide order in society, rather than trying to impose that order through the coercive power of government.
The “Police State” approach
The “police state” approach is what modern so-called “progressive” reformers advocate; but it is neither truly progressive nor truly a reform because it’s the centuries-old way that human societies have attempted to achieve order. It’s as old as government itself; it’s been the way human societies have tried to order themselves as long as they recognized leaders – whether they were called “kings,” “pharaohs,” “emperors,” “czars,” “dictators,” or “chairmen” – and gave those leaders the coercive power of government, to impose their will on society. Governmental controls over the economy, over religion, over virtually all aspects of citizens’ lives in society, has been the traditional way that human societies have attempted to achieve order – to impose it, by the coercive power of law, by the monopoly that government holds on the legitimate use of force – for not only centuries but millennia. The only major change or advance in the “police state” approach – the only true “progress,” in the true sense of the word – in political science, with regard to the police state approach, over the past few centuries, has been the shift from absolute monarchies (or “mixed governments,” combining monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements) to republican (or representative) or democratic government. The form of government has changed, allowing the mass of the people – ordinary citizens, not just monarchs or aristocrats – an increasingly greater role in framing the laws and the policies that the government imposes on its citizenry. But this has been a change only in the composition of those who rule; it has not changed the basic “police power” approach, to use the coercive power of government to force individuals to act in certain ways, rather than giving them the freedom to act as they wish. In Western society – that is, largely in Europe and in the Americas – republican governments, representative of the great mass of the people in each society, mostly have supplanted the monarchies of old. And thanks to such intellectual movements as the Reformation and Renaissance in the history of Christianity, the role of government with regard to religion (that is, the extent to which the coercive power of the state has been used to impose religion by force on its citizenry) has generally lessened, over the past few centuries. But government still largely controls the economy, even in Western democracies; the “police power” approach remains dominant, especially since its resurgence in the 20th century. Indeed, the democratization of politics in the United States and Europe has made governmental power even more dangerous than it was under the “old regimes” of monarchy and aristocracy. When the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831-32, he recognized that “democratic societies,” in which political power was vested in the mass of the people, posed a grave danger to the rights and freedoms of individuals. In his classic book, Democracy in America (1835), he coined a phrase to describe this danger: the “tyranny of the majority.” Tocqueville warned that when legislatures in democratic societies passed laws supported by majority public opinion and enacted in the name of promoting “the people’s” interest, they could exercise virtually unlimited power. Thus, he added, “the rights of private persons among democratic nations are commonly of small importance, of recent growth, and extremely precarious”; and so, “the true friends of liberty and the greatness of man ought constantly to be on the alert to prevent the power of government from lightly sacrificing the private rights of individuals to the general execution of its designs.” The “reformer” whose solution to some perceived social problem is to have the government pass a law compelling or prohibition some action – in other words, those who succumb to what I call the “There-ought-to-be-a-law” impulse – may think he’s proposing something “new”; but in reality, he’s suggesting only a new form of that age-old approach to social problems, the “police power” approach. Instead of having a king or dictator impose the new rule compelling citizens’ behavior, the modern police-state reformer would have the people’s own democratically-elected legislature impose it. But it’s still the traditional old approach, of relying on force or coercion to accomplish the reformer’s objective – in other words, to impose the reformer’s idea of what’s “good” for society on his fellow citizens – rather than trusting them to do as they wish. Such a “reformer” also holds an elitist, paternalistic view, for he does not trust ordinary citizens to be competent enough to live their lives freely, as they wish. Early 20th-century “Progressives” – like the political activists who today call themselves “progressive” – have no confidence in the ability of ordinary citizens to govern their own lives, but they have virtually unlimited confidence in the ability of government – including regulatory agencies, staffed by supposed “experts” in whatever field they’re controlling – to govern other peoples’ lives. Under the “police state” approach, for example, they do not think the average American is competent to decide what foods he eats, what drugs he takes, or generally what substances he ingests in his own body (as all Americans were free to do before the 20th century, before federal government regulation of drugs became the norm). Rather, they believe that government regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must control the quality of foods and drugs; indeed, they believe that no new drug or medical device ought to be marketed in the U.S. – which is to say, they believe that no American ought to be free to decide, for himself (whether or not in consultation with his doctor), to try a new (and perhaps, potentially life-saving) drug – unless and until the FDA approves it. I cite this one example because it vividly illustrates the costs of the “police state” approach to ordering society: what many critics of the FDA have pointed out, that the monopoly the FDA has on the introduction of new drugs into the American market has literally costs many lives (often, merely because of the enormous delays that result from the tedious FDA drug-approval process). And without question it has limited all Americans’ freedom. The 20th-century “nanny state” is just a more thorough, or comprehensive, form of paternalism than that which existed in Western society in the early modern period (the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries). In 16th-century England, Queen Elizabeth I, with the support of a compliant Parliament, exercised near-dictatorial powers over her subjects, whom she claimed to love as a parent loves her children. “I do assure you that there is no prince that loveth his subjects better,” she claimed in her “Golden Speech” of 1601, adding “My heart was never set on worldly goods, but only for my subjects’ good.” Under that pretense, she presided over the beginning of the “welfare state” in English-speaking societies (the Elizabethan poor law, the Poor Relief Act of 1598), authorized wage and price controls (the Statute of Artificers of 1563), determined the doctrines and liturgy of the established religion (the Act of Uniformity of 1559), suppressed “seditious” and “treasonous” books (various Star Chamber decrees concerning books), and granted monopolies over trade and the manufacture of certain commodities to her favorite courtiers. Government in Tudor England was quite paternalistic; and although Elizabeth was personally popular, the paternalistic policies of her government – particularly insofar as they interfered with the economic freedom of her subjects – clashed with the developing capitalist, market economy that was making the old medieval, feudal paternalistic monarchical state rapidly obsolete. The underlying tension between the developing money economy and royal paternalism finally reached a crisis point a half-century after Elizabeth’s death, with the mid-17th-century English Revolution, or Civil War, which was a rebellion against the absolute powers claimed by Elizabeth’s Stuart successor, Charles I – in effect, a rebellion against monarchical paternalism. Modern-day proponents of the “nanny state” are just as paternalistic – for they regard the adult citizens of society as children, incapable of looking out for themselves – but instead of a near-absolute monarch ruling over his or her subjects paternalistically, they have substituted an abstraction, called the State, which rules just as paternalistically, in the name of “the public interest” or “common good,” and under the sanction of “the people.” The policies that Progressive-era reformers pushed in early 20th-century America were not essentially different from the paternalistic policies of Tudor and Stuart England: minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, workmen’s comp and unemployment insurance, and Social Security are simply grandiose expansions of the old Elizabethan poor laws and labor laws; regulatory agencies like the FDA, the FTC, the FCC, or SEC are simply more ambitious ways of granting monopolies and regulating pricing, market entry, and the conduct of certain industries, than the boards or committees that ruled under the auspices of the royal Privy Council; and liquor Prohibition and the federal laws criminalizing drugs are simply newer versions of the old sumptuary laws. Modern Americans do have more freedom of speech and freedom of religion than Elizabeth I’s subjects in England had; but in the early 20th century, we still use the criminal laws to punish dangerous speech (the World War I-era Espionage and Sedition Acts and the Cold War-era Smith Act), and religious free-exercise claims have been held by the Supreme Court to be insufficient to justify exemption from general “police power” regulations. As I wrote near the beginning of this essay, the “nanny state” supported by today’s so-called “progressives” is really just an expansion of the 19th-century statist policies of Germany’s Otto von Bismarck; and Bismarck’s statism was the old European wine – the paternalism that for centuries had been the dominant public policy of the feudal monarchies of Europe – rebottled in 19th-century packaging.
The Free Market approach
In contrast, the “free-market” approach is a relatively new idea in human history. It’s truly “liberal” and “progressive,” in the literal senses of those words, for it was discovered as part of the great philosophical movement of the 18th and 19th centuries that scholars identify as the “liberal” movement. Today, especially in America, where the term “liberal” (like “progressive”) has been co-opted by leftist advocates of the police state, the great liberal tradition of the 18th and 19th century is often called the “classical liberal” tradition, to distinguish it from the way liberal is used in contemporary politics. (Even the term classical liberal can be a bit misleading, however. David Boaz, in his book Libertarianism: A Primer (1997), observes that “in this era of historical illiteracy, if you call yourself a classical liberal, most people think you’re an admirer of Teddy Kennedy!”) Classical liberalism – or libertarianism, as it is generally referred to today – has been described by Ludwig von Mises, one of its leading 20th-century exponents, as “the great political and intellectual movement that substituted free enterprise and the market economy for the precapitalistic methods of production; constitutional representative government for the absolutism of kings or oligarchies; and freedom of all individuals from slavery, serfdom, and other forms of bondage.” The philosophers who were the intellectual leaders of classical liberalism challenged centuries-old assumptions about the role of government in human society and so brought about a revolution in ideas. As Mises suggests, it was the liberal revolution that introduced constitutional representative government, replacing the absolute power of kings and/or aristocrats that had dominated Western politics since the Dark Ages. It also was the liberal revolution that stressed the individuality of human beings, breaking the chains that had bound them to the social classes to which they were born and allowing them equal freedom as individuals. It was liberalism that brought an end to slavery in the Western world; it also was liberalism that began the women’s rights movement in the early 19th century. And it was liberalism that gave full sanction to capitalism – as Mises notes, to “free enterprise and the market economy” – overturning the precapitalist methods of production, feudalism and mercantilism. Adam Smith was one of the most famous classical liberal philosophers, and his great work of political economy, The Wealth of Nations, was published in 1776, the same year that America declared its independence from not only Great Britain but also from Old World politics. It was Smith who coined the famous term “the invisible hand” to describe the order that results from the natural operation of free economic markets. Smith understood that civilized society was based on the principle he identified as “division of labour”: with each person doing that thing (producing certain goods or providing certain services) that he does best, that gives the most “value” to other people in society, and with all being equally free to trade, value for value. In a free capitalist society, organized according to this principle, each person’s pursuit of his own self-interest benefits everyone else. As Smith famously observed, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” Every individual endeavors as best he can to produce the greatest value; he does so, not to promote “the public interest” but rather to promote “his own gain.” In this, nevertheless, as in many other cases, Smith found, he is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” because “by pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” Smith had discovered that order comes from the free operation of markets in society; he called this order “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” and he concluded that the most prosperous societies were those that allowed this natural system to operate free of governmental intrusion. (Hence the title of his book: The “Wealth of Nations” is best promoted by allowing free markets to operate.) Accordingly, he favored limiting government to three basic, legitimate functions: protecting society as a whole from external violence and invasion (national defense), protecting each member of society from “the injustice or oppression” of other members (a court system, to administer justice), and “erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions” that the market cannot provide (what economists today call “public goods”). Beyond those legitimate functions of government, Smith advocated allowing individuals the freedom to live as they please: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.” In discussing his principle of the “invisible hand,” Smith added an observation that anticipated William Graham Sumner’s criticism of the “social doctors” and their tinkering with society. “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good,” Smith noted. Indeed, one might say that those who claim to act for the “public good” (or “common good,” or “public interest”) – whether they’re self-professed “humanitarian” businessmen, or social activists, or politicians and government bureaucrats – really do much less good (and often do far more harm) in society than do ordinarily successful businessmen, who seek only to maximize their profits. By earning their profits – that is, by providing goods or services that are of such high value to their fellow citizens – businessmen (as Smith noted) promote not only their interest but also the interest, or well-being, of society at large. By earning profits, they not only enrich themselves (or stockholders in their company) but also their customers and other businessmen with whom they trade. Thus, as Smith described, free markets enrich everyone. And, one might add, in the fairest (or most just) way possible, for such enrichment comes not at anyone’s expense, but according to the free, voluntary acts of persons trading with one another in society for their mutual benefit. In contrast, when “social doctors” (whether philanthropists, political activists, or government officials) purport to act on behalf of the “public interest” (which, as I’ve already noted, usually really means acting on behalf of certain unidentified private interests), they do not produce any new goods or services – as “non-profits,” they create nothing on which profits can be earned – but typically, take wealth earned by one group of people and transfer it to others. Philanthropists do this with their own wealth (or with the wealth of others whom they persuade to join in their philanthropy); political activists and politicians do it with taxpayers’ wealth, which they use the coercive power of government first to forcibly expropriate and second to redistribute to the persons they’ve chosen to be the “beneficiaries” of these government programs. They do not add any net wealth to society; they merely redistribute it – and in a free society, that means taking it from those who earned it and transferring to those who did not earn it. Classical liberal thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries, like today’s libertarians, understood that when markets are allowed to operate freely – that is, when individuals are free to trade with one another, value for value, voluntarily, for their mutual benefit – not only is everyone in society enriched, but also that society (that is, all its individual members) can order, or organize, itself. Thus, through free markets, societies themselves can provide the order that in earlier ages in human history was imposed through the coercive power of government – and moreover, that society can do so better, in a fairer and more just way. In 1776, the same year that Adam Smith wrote about the “system of natural liberty” in The Wealth of Nations, Thomas Paine expressed essentially the same idea in his pamphlet Common Sense, which was so instrumental in influencing American public opinion in support of independence. Paine distinguished “society” from “government”: the former resulted from the voluntary, cooperative actions of individuals in society; the latter held a monopoly on the use of force in society. Society, said Paine, “is produced by our wants” and “promotes our happiness positively by uniting out affections”; government, on the other hand, is produced by “our wickedness” and promotes our happiness “negatively by restraining our vices.” Thus, Paine concluded in famous words, “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.” It’s no mere coincidence that both Smith and Paine extolled the value of society, as opposed to government, in 1776 – the same year that the Second Continental Congress passed a resolution declaring the British colonies in America to be independent and adopted the text of Thomas Jefferson’s draft of their Declaration of Independence. The Declaration stated the founding principles of the United States – and those principles, the principles of the American Revolution, of 1776 – were also a part of the great classic “liberal” revolution, perhaps its greatest manifestation. As I wrote in my previous entry, “The Meaning of Independence Day” (June 30, 2005), those principles truly were revolutionary: all other societies in human history have been based on some collectivist premise, but the United States was the first nation to be founded explicitly on the primacy of the individual. The Declaration explicitly put individuals and their rights first: it proclaimed the “self-evident” truth that all persons are equally free and independent; that as human beings they hold the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that government is created, deriving its just powers from the consent of the government, for the purpose of “securing” individuals’ rights. America’s Founders were self-consciously pioneers in a “new science of politics,” one that was based on these (classical) liberal principles. Free-market capitalism, as the system that results from realization of individualism in society, economically and politically, thus was another key achievement of the American Revolution, along with the idea of constitutionally limited government. The new written constitutions that the Founders’ generation adopted were intended to limit the power of government to its few legitimate functions and otherwise to protect the fundamental natural rights of all individuals, including the freedom to enter into contracts with other persons, and thus to provide order through free markets rather than by the “Old World” method of using the power of government to impose order on society. Thomas Jefferson, for example, soon after becoming president observed that it was America’s mission to demonstrate to the world “what is the degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave it’s individual members.” In contrast with early 20th-century “social doctors,” Jefferson had confidence in ordinary Americans’ ability to live their lives as they saw fit; he believed “our people in a body are wise, because they are under the unrestrained and unperverted operation of their own understanding.” (Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, June 19, 1802.) And later in his life, when Jefferson read a treatise on economics written by the French free-market theorist Destutt de Tracy, he agreed wholeheartedly with Tracy’s notion that free commerce was “not only the foundation and basis of society” but also “the fabric itself” of society. Thomas Paine, in his 1791 book The Rights of Man (another text enthusiastically recommended by Jefferson), explained how much of the order found in society arises spontaneously from the voluntary relationships formed by individuals: “Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of Government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to Government and would exist if the formality of Government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of a civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which custom usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of Government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to Government.” Adam Smith also had elaborated this concept in his book The Wealth of Nations. As David Boaz has observed, Smith’s most important contribution to classical liberal, or libertarian, theory was the development of the idea of spontaneous order. Boaz aptly sums up this idea as follows: “Let people interact freely with each other, protect their rights to liberty and property, and order will emerge without central direction.” (Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, pp. 40-41.) This notion of order created spontaneously by the voluntary relationships among free individuals in society was further developed by other classical liberal philosophers, from the 18th century to today. The notion of “spontaneous order” that writers like Smith and Paine discussed in the 18th century has been elaborated into a fundamental principle of modern-day libertarianism by such thinkers as Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. Indeed, Hayek coined a new word, catallaxy (derived from the Greek verb katallattein or katallassein, which meant not only “to exchange” but also “to admit into the community” and “to change from enemy to friend”), to describe the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market. Thus, to Hayek, catallaxy meant “the special kind of spontaneous order produced by the market through people acting within the rules of the law of property, tort, and contract.” (Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 2 (1976), quoted in The Libertarian Reader (David Boaz ed., 1997, pp. 304-305.) As the 19th century progressed – that is, as the Industrial Revolution had transformed society in Great Britain, western Europe, and America – classical liberal theorists limited the legitimate role of government even further than did Adam Smith and America’s Founders. The British philosopher John Stuart Mill, in his classic book On Liberty (first published in 1859) limited government to the role of protecting individuals from harm. “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. . . . [T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent hard to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. . . . Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” Later in the century, in his famous book Social Statics (1892), another British philosopher, Herbert Spencer, took this concept of limited government to its logical conclusion by formulating his “Law of Equal Freedom”: under this principle, each individual should be guaranteed “the fullest freedom for the exercise of his faculties compatible with the equal freedom of all others.” Many modern libertarian thinkers formulate this as the “No Harm” principle: that everyone ought to be free to do as he pleases, so long as he does not harm anyone else. Although the “No Harm” principle, or the “Law of Equal Freedom,” are relatively new concepts in the history of ideas, they are based on the understanding of “liberty” that prevailed among English and American philosophers of the 18th century, particularly that group of thinkers known as the English “radical Whigs,” who included the famous 17th-century philosopher John Locke and the early-18th century writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who wrote a series of essays under the pseudonym “Cato” which were well-known in 18th-century America as “Cato’s Letters.” Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government (1690), described the “natural law” that governed individuals living in a “state of nature” as follows: “being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.” And in a January 20, 1721 essay on “The Nature and Extent of Liberty,” the authors of Cato’s Letters defined liberty as “the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruits of his Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys.” Modern libertarians have simply taken this radical Whig understanding of “liberty,” rightly considered, to its logical conclusion, regarding the limits it implies on the legitimate powers of government. 19th- and 20th- century classical liberals, or libertarians, do disagree about the legitimacy of government. Some have taken the concepts of spontaneous order and limited government so far as to deny altogether the need to have government; that is, the need to create an institution (government) that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in society. These “anarcho-capitalists,” or anarchist libertarians, would rely entirely on the spontaneous order of a free-market society (including competing legal systems, including courts for the resolution of disputes and law-enforcement agencies to protect individuals’ rights). (For more on the anarchist libertarian view, see Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (1998); Bruce L. Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State (1990).) Other libertarians see a legitimate role for government in protecting individuals from the harmful acts of others; they are “minarchists,” or minimal-government libertarians, who would limit government to those functions necessary to fulfill that role. Whether they are anarchists or minarchists, true “liberals,” in this classical, libertarian tradition, understand that “spontaneous order,” the order that emerges naturally from the operation of free markets in society, means that as society advances, the role of government – that is, the need to use the coercive power of the law, or force, to compel individual action in certain ways – diminishes in importance. Not surprisingly, then, as the Industrial Revolution transformed Western society, classical liberal thinkers saw less need for government, or for the coercive power of law, to provide order in society. Put another way, the more complex a society becomes – and an industrial society is much more complex than a simple agrarian society – fewer laws are needed to regulate individuals’ lives. That’s because as the opportunities provided by the market system (for individuals to exercise their free choices) increase, the efficacy of the market system to provide order (through operation of natural economic laws such as supply and demand) also increases. Writing in her great book The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority (1934), the great 20th-century individualist Rose Wilder Lane (the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie books) described true progress in this way: “The true revolutionary course which must be followed toward a free world is a cautious, experimental process of further decreasing the uses of force which individuals permit to Government; of increasing the prohibitions of Government’s action, and thus decreasing the use of brute force in human affairs. This is the only course toward a richer world.”
Again, as (true) liberals see it, as society gets more advanced, there should be fewer, not more, laws limiting individuals’ freedom of action. Just a few “Simple Rules for a Complex World” are needed, as libertarian legal scholar Richard A. Epstein put it in the title of his 1995 book. Needless to say, that vision of the appropriate role of government and the coercive power of law is at odds with the reality of modern American society, where the number of laws – especially those passed by Congress and by the various federal regulatory agencies to which Congress has delegated law-making or regulatory power – has increased tremendously over the past 100 years, far beyond what America’s Founders ever would have imagined, in their greatest nightmares.
True progressives versus reactionary “Progressives”
In American politics today, the only policies that truly deserve to be called “progressive” are those that continue the radical individualism that’s the heart of the American Revolution. These are the “radical Whig” principles of America’s Founders, the political principles of 1776, the principles held by those who are “liberal” in the classic sense of the term – in other words, by libertarians or (the term I prefer to use to identify this political philosophy) “radical individualists.” These are the people today who see the American Revolution not as the end of progress in political science but, rather, as only its beginning. The American Revolution, in many respects, was incomplete. America’s Founders, being human (and thus subject to the all-too human defects of finite knowledge and bias), did not fully realize the radical implications of the new political philosophy – particularly, the theories of individual rights and limited, constitutional government – of 1776, the classical-liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence. They did realize one important principle – the idea of limitations on the power of government, memorialized in a written constitution that functioned as “higher law” (that is, law governing the government itself) – but even in that one significant achievement, the drafting of early American constitutions, the Founders’ generation acted by a process of trial and error, experimenting with various devices for limiting powers, including some that eventually became the key foundational principles of the U.S. Constitution, such as federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances. But all these devices were imperfect checks on the abuse of government’s powers; and the early American constitutions – including the U.S. Constitution of 1787 – all gave government too many powers, including many powers that were neither necessary nor legitimate under radical Whig principles. The problems with these imperfect American constitutions were compounded by American law, which included many political and constitutional ideas inherited from the English common law system that had no place in the radical individualist, free-market society that the American Revolution had tried to create. (It is a common myth among some scholars that the Revolution was “conservative”; that is, that it changed only the source of authority of law from the British monarch (or custom or tradition) to the “sovereign power” (and consent) of “the people” – but did not change the substance of law itself. However, many scholars of early American law have convincingly argued that the “Americanization” of the English common law had begun during the colonial period, well before 1776. And as historian Gordon Wood persuasively shows in his book The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), the American Revolution was "as radical as any revolution in history" and was "the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history," altering not only the form of government--by eliminating monarchy and creating republics--but also Americans' conception of public or state power. "Most important," he adds, "it made the interests and prosperity of ordinary people--their pursuits of happiness--the goal of society and government.") In early American history, although (as Professor Wood shows in his book) the Revolution brought more economic as well as political freedom to average Americans (through, for example, an end to price controls that had been imposed on certain businesses in colonial America), many other paternalist policies inherited from English law persisted. The English common law – which defined basic principles of the law of contracts, property, torts, and even criminal law – was “Americanized” somewhat, by adapting it to the new conditions that prevailed in the United States; both American courts and legislatures changed English common-law rules in some respects, but retained them largely unchanged in others. In post-Civil War America, industrialization caused many people – in part, because of an irrational dislike of commercial activity (ironic, given that commerce was an integral part of American culture from the very beginning of English colonization of North America), and in part because of paranoia about corporations and other big business entities – to believe that new laws were needed to supplement traditional common-law doctrines, in order to keep pace with the changes brought about by industrialization. Thus was born the notion that I call “the myth of complexity” – a notion directly contrary to what classical liberals believe – the notion that as society becomes more complex, as it moves from a “simple” agrarian society to a “complex” industrial (or as some might allege today, a “post-industrial”) society, there is a greater need for government to interfere with free markets, a need for more laws, a need to use force (or coercion) more, in imposing order on society, rather than relying on the spontaneous order of the market. Much of the modern, 20th-century regulatory/”welfare state” has been based on this myth. In the late 19th century, government regulatory commissions were created, especially to control the railroad industry, which played a vital role in the industrialization of America but which many policy-makers believed to pose unprecedented “problems” for the application of traditional legal doctrines. These commissions, created first at the state level and then, in 1887, at the federal level, with the Interstate Commerce Act (creating the ICC, the first great federal administrative agency), were given the power to regulate railroads, including the rates they charged their customers. Drawing upon 17th-century English law (and specifically a treatise written during the time of the Stuart monarchy as a justification of broad monarchical authority), the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1877 decision in Munn v. Illinois adopted the English doctrine of “business affected with a public interest” to justify an Illinois law that capped the prices that grain elevators in Chicago could charge their customers. Thus was an important new category added to the state legislatures’ “police powers,” their traditional (and broad) authority to pass laws regulating conduct (and thus limiting individuals’ freedom) in order to protect public health, safety, and morality. Also in the late 19th-century, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, the first major antitrust law, which its proponents claimed to be based on familiar English common-law concepts (“restraint of trade” and “monopoly”) that were, in fact, much in dispute in American law at that time. (These concepts had their origin in English feudal and monarchical society, in the pre-capitalist era; they had little application, in their original sense, to industrial free-market American society of the 19th and 20th centuries. Applied to free markets – that is, to markets for which there are no legal barriers to entry – antitrust laws permit unsuccessful competitors to use the coercive power of government to punish successful business enterprises, simply because they are successful, as many modern-day critics of the antitrust laws, including former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, have pointed out.) “Reformers” of the so-called “Progressive era” of the early 20th-century – those proponents of bigger, more paternalistic government whom I have discussed above – generally relied on the “myth of complexity” to justify the new laws they were pressuring state legislatures and Congress to pass. Not surprisingly, the two “Progressive” U.S. presidents in the early 20th century, Republican Teddy Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson, were avid “trust-busters” who supported vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws against successful businesses (for example, TR’s war against James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway trust company) and even expansion of the antitrust laws (as in Wilson’s support for the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act). In justifying his so-called “New Freedom” program (his euphemistic name for his paternalistic policies), Woodrow Wilson in 1912 argued: “You know that one of the interesting things that Mr. Jefferson said in those early days of simplicity which marked the beginnings of our government was that the best government consisted in as little governing as possible. And there is still a sense in which that is true. It is still intolerable for the government to interfere with our individual activities except where it is necessary to interfere with them in order to free them. But I feel confident that if Mr. Jefferson were living in our day, we would see what we see: that the individual is caught in a great confused nexus of all sorts of complicated circumstances, and that to let him alone is to leave him helpless as against the obstacles with which he has to contend; and that, therefore, law in our day must come to the assistance of the individual. It must come to his assistance to see that he gets fair play; that is all, but that is much. Without the watchful interference, the resolute interference, of the government, there can be no fair play between individuals and such powerful institutions as the trusts. Freedom today is something more than being let alone. The program of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative merely.”
(Emphasis added.) Wilson’s Orwellian transformation of the word freedom into its opposite was typical of the tactics used by leftist advocates of the nanny state in the early 20th century. Trying to disassociate themselves from communists, anarchists, and other violent anti-capitalists, socialists in both Britain and the United States tried to hide their socialism by co-opting the political language of liberalism. The term liberal underwent a change in the early 20th century, when people on the left side of the traditional political spectrum – that is, people who advocated more governmental control over economic markets – started calling themselves “liberals.” Many of these new “liberals” were outright, unabashed socialists, who urged government control of all means of production; others disclaimed socialism, for they would allow continued private ownership, but subject to pervasive government controls. One British politician from that country’s Liberal party, in a brief fit of honesty, acknowledged that in early 20th-century British politics (when members of all three major parties – paternalistic Tories, “moderate” Liberals, and of course, socialist Labourites – supported the rise of the “welfare state”), “We are all socialists now!” And as economist Joseph Schumpeter noted, “As a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.” British philosopher and political activist Thomas Hill Green, in an essay disingenuously titled “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,” wrote about what he called “true freedom”: not “merely freedom from restraint or compulsion” nor “merely freedom to do what we like irrespectively of what it is that we like” (what some leftists came to call, rather contemptuously “negative freedom”), but rather “a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying,” and moreover, “something that we do or enjoy in common with others,” “a power which each man exercises through the help or security given him by hid fellow-men, and which he in turn helps to secure for them.” Green thus sought to strip the word freedom of its essential and inherently individualist meaning – for true freedom is, of course, the ability of an individual to do as he or she chooses to do – and instead give the word a collectivist meaning, to justify the police state. Laws that limit individuals’ freedom of action really didn’t inhibit “true” freedom, leftist philosophers like Green insisted, because they contributed to this “positive freedom” of being part of a community. And so more laws, limiting individuals’ freedom in more and more ways, really didn’t take away freedom, Green maintained. Moreover, even though the collectivist ideology he was preaching really was reactionary – for it was just a new variant on the centuries-old communitarian philosophy that the individual is nothing outside of the polis, the state or the collective – Green cloaked its reactionary nature by redefining it as “progress” and then turning on its head the (classical) liberal definition of progress. “When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to the social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves,” Green argued. Hence, the “mere removal of compulsion, the mere enabling of a man to do as he likes, is in itself no contribution to true freedom.” There was nothing truly “liberal” or “progressive” about Green’s notion of “true” or “positive” freedom: limiting the ability of individuals to do as they choose in the name of advancing some collectivist or communitarian notion of the “good” is an old idea, one that leftists share with the same social conservatives whom they have denounced as “reactionary.” But collectivism, in any form, is truly reactionary, from the perspective of liberalism rightly considered (that is, the true liberal – the “classical” liberal, or libertarian, philosophy) for it challenges the real progress that Western society (and especially American society) has made since the 18th century in expanding individual freedom, in the true sense (the sense that Green and his ilk blithely dismiss as merely “negative” freedom, but the only sense in which freedom has any real meaning). Indeed, those 20th-century societies that most fully attempted to realize Green’s ideal of a “free” society were the oppressive dictatorships of both the left and the right: Hitler’s National Socialist, or Nazi, state in Germany, Mussolini’s Fascist state in Italy, Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Communist state in Russia, and Mao’s Communist state in China. Nazism, Fascism, and Communism are nothing more than new versions of the old collectivist, communitarian ideology that regards the individual (his desires, his choices, his hopes and his dreams) as nothing, when weighed against the good of the collective, whether the collective was identified as the “folk,” the “state,” or the “proletariat.” In this sense, these modern forms of collectivism are essentially no different from other collectivist societies of the past, which similarly sacrificed individual freedom to some communal ideal, whether based on class or status (the old aristocratic/monarchic states of Europe) or religion (medieval Christian Europe, utopian communal societies like 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts or 19th-century Mormon Utah, or today’s Islamic states). As the regulatory/”welfare state” grew in the United States in the 20th century – that is, as the “Progressive” reformers saw their programs being implemented, particularly after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president and his implementation of “Progressive” reforms on a grand scale through his so-called “New Deal” program – critics of the new paternalism were denounced as “reactionary,” whether they were true conservatives or liberals in the classical sense. Thus, when a four-justice block of conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court voted consistently against New Deal programs when their constitutionality was challenged before the Court, journalists sympathetic to FDR’s policies contemptuously called the justices “The Four Horsemen” (a derogatory reference to the Biblical “four horsemen” of the Apocalypse – a real insult to four jurists whose only crime was to enforce traditional constitutional limits on the powers of government). Other critics of FDR’s “New Deal,” including many of his fellow Democrats (such as Congressman Samuel B. Pettengill, author of the book Jefferson, the Forgotten Man (1938)), pointed out how how far Roosevelt’s police-state policies had betrayed the limited-government principles on which both major American political parties had been founded. (Pettengill’s book was dedicated to both “Jeffersonian Democrats and Lincoln Republicans.”) Individualist or libertarian writers pointed out, more broadly, how far American politics had strayed from the truly liberal, limited-government, pro-freedom ideals of the American Revolution. These writers included three women who were staunch advocates of individualism and who all published important books in the midst of World War II, in the year 1943: Rose Wilder Lane, whose book, The Discovery of Freedom, is mentioned above; Isabel Patterson, author of The God and the Machine; and Ayn Rand, author of the novel, The Fountainhead. These writers also included F.A. Hayek, whose great book The Road to Serfdom, published just at the end of World War II argued that the U.S. and its allies, by embracing socialism, were betraying the cause of freedom in which they had claimed to fight. For this, they too were denounced as “reactionary,” when in fact they were reacting against the truly reactionary collectivist policies of the Left. Writing in response to the charge that as a defender of the ideals of the American Revolution, she and others like her were called “reactionaries” by the advocates of socialism, Isabel Patterson noted: "If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress." This pithy comment nicely exposes the hypocrisy of leftist intellectuals and politicians of today, who claim to be “progressive” but who – by betraying the great liberal movement of the 18th and 19th centuries and all the genuine progress that movement has made in freeing individuals from the chains of collectivism – are, in fact, the real reactionaries, for they would return us to the paternalistic policies of medieval Europe. Socialism, in all its forms (whether the “National Socialism” of Hitler or the modified Marxism of Lenin or Mao or the watered-down socialism of Britain’s Labour Party or the U.S. Democratic Party of today), is (as I have noted at the beginning of this essay) nothing more than the old collectivist wine in new bottles. As the great 20th-century philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (a true “liberal,” in the proper sense of the term) observed, the essential political question of today is the same as it has been throughout human history: the individual versus the collective. Every political issue can be reduced down to this fundamental question. As seen from the perspective of individualism (liberalism and “progress,” rightly considered), there really is no essential difference between the “Far Right” (military dictatorships, Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany or Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy, or Islamic “republics” today) and the “Far Left” (communist dictatorships, whether in the Soviet Union, Red China, or even Castro’s Cuba) – all forms of collectivism, whether of the “right” or the “left” (whether they are policies advocated by left-liberals or by social conservatives) – are anathema to individualism, to true freedom and true progress. By advocating less freedom for the individual, paternalistic “liberals” or “progressives” also would undermine individual responsibility. Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand; as F.A. Hayek has observed, "Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions and will receive praise or blame for them. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable" (Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960). Free, responsible persons are “sovereigns” over themselves (to use John Stuart Mill’s apt term). They are fully accountable for their actions; they not only reap the benefits of their labors, and of their wise or prudent choices, but also bear the costs of their laziness, and of their foolish or imprudent choices. To deprive persons of responsibility for their actions is tantamount to depriving them of their liberty -- whether done by other persons or by government, through the coercive power of law. In their elitist arrogance, so-called “liberal” or “progressive” political activists believe that their notion of the “good” life is superior to all others; moreover, they would use the coercive power of government to impose their notion on everyone, substituting their values for the choices, wishes, and dreams of ordinary persons. T.H. Green’s writings, again, nicely illustrate this trait. In advocating “an effectual liquor law” – by which he meant a law prohibiting the sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic beverages – Green called it “the necessary complement of our factory acts, or education acts, our public health acts.” Denying the existence of a “right to freedom in the purchase and sale of a particular commodity,” Green argued that allowing such freedom – that is, allowing individuals themselves to decide what beverages they would consume – would “detract from freedom in the higher sense, from the general power of men to make the best of themselves.” Speaking on behalf of his fellow prohibitionists, Green concluded, “We ask [the people of England] further to limit, or even altogether to give up, the not very precious liberty of buying and selling alcohol, in order that they become more free to exercise the faculties and improve the talents which God has given them.” The appropriate question to ask in reading such arguments is, “By whose standards?” Obviously, “reformers” like Green were seeking to impose their values – their notion of what is “good” for mankind – one everyone else, by using the coercive power of law. What arrogance! And what lack of confidence in the ability of individuals to decide what’s best for themselves! Supporters of individualism (of maximizing both individual freedom and responsibility) and of the free market approach to public policy questions, in contrast, do trust average persons to be competent to decide for themselves such things as what beverages they drink, or what foods and drugs they ingest, or how they can earn an income (including for what wages and under what working conditions they will work), and so on. Because they have confidence in the ability of ordinary persons to make choices for their own good (as they see it), supporters of individualism and of free markets – who are the true “liberals” or “progressives” of today – also have confidence in the market system itself, for it is the free market system which coordinates the millions and millions of various choices, desires, and hopes of free, responsible persons in society – and which coordinates them in the fairest, most just way possible, according to the objective, impersonal economic laws of supply and demand. To have confidence in the market system is to have confidence in the ability of individuals to govern themselves, free of the heavy, coercive hand of governmental controls. The program of a true “liberal” or “progressive” – the policies that are truly liberal or progressive – has little relation to the program or policies supported by today’s left-liberals and those who call themselves “progressives.” Some indeed may be supported by left-wing liberals and “progressives” today, but the vast majority of true liberal or progressive policies (because they would free individuals from paternalistic governmental controls and thus follow the “free market” approach to ordering society) would be vigorously opposed by today’s left-liberals and so-called “progressives” as anathema to their elitist, paternalistic impulses. Truly liberal or progressive policies do not increase the number of laws or expand the coercive powers of government; truly progressive policies reduce the restrictions that government controls put on the freedom of individuals. Truly liberal or progressive policies would further the “true revolutionary course . . . toward a free world” that Rose Wilder Lane identified: “further decreasing the uses of force which individuals permit to Government,” by “increasing the prohibitions of Government’s action” and thus “decreasing the use of brute force in human affairs,” and therefore allowing free markets to provide order in society justly, by coordinating the wishes of all individuals. In other words, truly liberal or progressive policies would decrease governmental control and instead maximize individual freedom and responsibility.
True liberal or progressive policies would include the following:
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, March 16, 2006 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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