TGIF: On Value and Freedom

To live is to act. To act is to choose. To choose is to prefer. To prefer is to pursue values—that is, to value. That's logic-guided observation. Ego sum, ergo aestimo: I am, therefore I value. (HT: Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises.)

Next: to think is to act. "[T]hinking itself [is] an action," Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action, "proceeding step by step from the less satisfactory state of insufficient cognizance to the more satisfactory state of better insight."

Shortcut: to think is to value. (James Ellias of Inductica calls this the "value axiom.") Like it or not, we're immersed in the world of "ought." To assert a proposition is to imply: "This is true, so you ought to pay heed." That's the case even if your proposition is something like, "'Ought' statements have no cognitive content." Hume and his fellow emotivists were and are wrong.

Aristotle noticed that human action in the pursuit of ends that are not sought for their own sake—but rather are sought as means to further ends—must aim at some ultimate end: the good life, happiness, contentment, call it what you will. Otherwise, you'd have an infinite series of means leading nowhere, which would make no sense. As he put it:

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.... [W]e call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.... Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for self and never for the sake of something else.... Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.

Note the irony: morality is associated with choice and free will. But "[f]or Aristotle, this ultimate end or good is not chosen; it is implicit in every desire and every choice, and all our other ends are to be understood as subordinate to it. The end is, as it were, forced on us; and the task of practical reason is simply to identify it," Roderick T. Long writes in Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand. (Emphasis added.) The ultimate end, therefore, is not pre-moral. Since we are fallible, we need practical reason to make sure the means we select are suited to the ultimate end.

This brings us to political theory and the objective case for freedom. Spoiler alert: as acting, thinking, choosing, valuing beings, we need liberty. But each person needs more than liberty for himself. He needs it for everyone else. Why? Because value pursuers need facts, knowledge, and truth (oh that word), and no individual can acquire all the relevant information on his own. 

I'm drawing on Frank Van Dun's 1986 paper "Economics and the Limits of Value-Free Science." Van Dun points out that economics is value-free in the sense that economists' values should not shape how they observe market phenomena. For example, even someone who dislikes markets for moral or aesthetic reasons should be able, in principle, to see that tariffs raise prices and shrink supply. However, no science, including economics—no truth-seeking project—can be value-free in a broader sense: its practitioners must value truth seeking and conduct themselves accordingly.

The bridge from there to politics is the fact that all truth seeking, even the mundane, everyday sort we all engage in, is a social process. This is not to deny individualism. It's a recognition that individuals cannot truth-seek alone. We learn from what others say and do. The self-interested truth seeker needs others to check him, for it is too easy to slip into complacency without realizing it. As Van Dun puts it,

There is no way an individual can break out of the prison of "the evident," no way he can even identify, let alone begin to question, his prejudices, unless he has come to understand that what is evident to him may not be evident to another and that his point of view is not the only one. Science is a dialogical undertaking: it requires that we make public what we think and try to refute what we believe we ought not to accept, and try to prove what we believe we ought to believe — it requires that we give our reasons.

...A dialogue is an argumentative, not a persuasive, not a rhetorical exchange: the aim of participation is to understand others in order to make one oneself understood in order to allow others the opportunity to indicate just why their understanding of one's point of view does or does not appear to them sufficient reason to share it.

John Stuart Mill put it nicely in On Liberty: "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."

This suggests a self-interested "ethics of dialogue," which a truth seeker is committed to by his own search for truth. (This is in the spirit of Aristotle; see Roderick Long's paper linked to above.) It is a code, Van Dun writes, "to allow others to question one's most sincere convictions … to refrain from using rewards or punishments—promises or threats—as means for securing the agreement of others; to refuse to argue against one's better judgment; and to insist that others do likewise. But most of all: to respect the dialogical rights of others—their right to speak or not to speak, to listen or not to listen, to use their own judgment."

That we ought to respect these rights, recognized in the practice of science, follows from the fundamental norm that we ought to be reasonable—that one ought to respect rational nature, both in oneself and in others; that one ought to cultivate one's own reason and ought to allow others to do the same. This requirement of respect for the rational autonomy of every participant turns the dialogue into the primary political institution for preventing prejudice from establishing itself as an impregnable barrier against free and independent thought, and so for making science possible.

Fine, the critic might say, but what has this got to do with the rights of people who are not scientists and philosophers? Van Dun anticipates this objection: "[T]he requirement of reasonableness applies across-the-board to every human endeavor. It applies to action no less than speech. Human action always rests upon and involves judgment. Scientific or theoretical knowledge is not essentially or qualitatively different from 'ordinary' or practical knowledge."

He quotes Ludwig von Mises in this regard: Production "is not something physical, material, and external; it is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon.... Man produces by dint of his reason...: the theories and poems, the cathedrals and the symphonies, the motor-cars and the airplane."

"There is, then," Van Dun adds, "a glaring inconsistency in the views of those who defend 'free speech' and 'the free market of ideas' but attack freedom of action and the free market in goods and services."

Respecting reason entails respecting persons. But respecting persons requires more than respecting their bodies. In pursuit of their projects in a finite world, people need to transform matter into means to their ends, endowing those things with purpose. They cannot pursue projects or respect others' pursuits if they cannot know what objects they may use by right, that is, without permission. "In order to respect others as rational agents we must know the distinction between 'mine' and 'thine,'" Van Dun writes. "…If we are to respect the person we ought to respect what is his, otherwise we would deny him the right to act on his own judgment, and thereby destroy the dialogical relationship."

This upends a common argument against private property, namely, that a land owner aggresses against others by excluding them; thus, it is said, nonaggression implies collective ownership. But this is wrong. The first to mix his labor with an unowned parcel transforms a mere thing into a means to an end. Further, the homesteader aggresses against no one in the process. If someone else interferes, he is the aggressor by withholding respect from the homesteader. This is not a matter of arbitrary definition. It is a fact—for if the first person to transform the parcel has no right to it, how can the second person to come along have a right? (This is not to deny that property law is complicated and that details would be shaped by local custom. But a coercive monopoly government is unqualified for that job. It takes a competitive market to get it right. See David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom for details.)

The appeal of Van Dun's argument is palpable. It might look like an additional case for freedom, but it seems more like another demonstration that freedom is an objective condition for the life of man qua rational being. (I commend Rand's case read in conjunction with Roderick Long's Reason and Value. By the way, Van Dun's case is not to be confused with dubious "argumentation ethics," which holds that the very act of making an argument logically commits one to the self-ownership rights of one's interlocutor. That's reality-detached rationalism.)

The upshot is that a truth seeker undercuts his own project when he advocates government interference with other truth seekers, aka everyone else. He thereby relinquishes his truth-seeker credentials.

(I first explored Van Dun's paper years ago at the Foundation for Economic Education website.)

"Capitalism" Is about Freedom, Not Capital

 "Why 'capitalism'? Words have an unfortunate tendency to confuse. Free market capitalism is not really about capital, it is about handing control of the economy from the top to billions of independent consumers, entrepreneurs and workers, and allowing them to make their own decisions about what they think will improve their lives. So careless talk about 'taking control of capitalism' actually means that governments take control of citizens.

"But it doesn't sound like it, does it? One of my intellectual heroes, Deirdre McCloskey, complains that the word capitalism gives the misleading impression that it is about the rule of capital, rather than liberating people to make their own economic decisions, which is really what the free market is about: 'Capitalism' is a scientific mistake compressed into a single word, a dramatically misleading coinage by our enemies, and still used by the sadly misled among out friends.' So why do I use it? Because, no matter what we think of it, and no matter which word we would prefer for a system of private property and free markets, this is the word that has become inextricably linked to it, and if its supporters don't fill that word with meaning, its opponents will."

--Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto, 2023

TGIF: The Populist Trap

If you care about individual freedom and general prosperity, you'll want to avoid all shades of populism like the plague. It is economic illiteracy proudly proclaimed and writ large. As an alternative to libertarianism, it is bad in its own right—freedom is not on its agenda—but it is bad also because it is wedded to nationalism. That is, it treats the nation-state—not individuals and their projects—as the fundamental unit. It's ours against theirs. Disregard the hosannas to persons, families, and local communities. It's the nation that matters. 

Don't believe me? Then why do populists always want to interfere with people's right to trade as they wish regardless of borders? Never mind that protectionism holds the seeds of economic and military conflict and that unmanaged global trade is global cooperation.

I'm tempted to say that basically, the populist believes that scarcity is a capitalist plot. (There's some unwitting vulgar Marxism in that.) Populism presents itself as the politics of grievance: "working people" are fed up with an elite conspiracy of elected officials, bureaucrats, and "corporate" cronies who enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary people.

Bailouts and subsidies give the grievance some credence, but it's exaggerated. The unnamed culprit is market dynamism—or freedom. Entrepreneurship, innovation, and consumer sovereignty bring change in the demand for goods, which understandably makes people nervous. The bias favors the status quo. Blacksmiths and assembly-line workers are no longer wanted.

Anyway, since coercive government power is the only way to grab privileges at other people's expense, power itself should be—but never is—the villain. Greedy "Big Business" is the target. No distinction is made between bigness achieved through successful service to consumers and bigness achieved through anticompetitive government interference with market relations.

What is the populists' alternative? They say they want a government that serves working people. Never mind that people produce to consume, not vice versa. How do they intend to get the government and economy they want? Through democracy, though they ignore the elitism inherent in any political system. Politicians in a democratic republic need to cobble together majorities to get elected and reelected, but when in office they have elbow room to set the agenda for the one-size-fits-all program that they decide best serves the people's needs. Since people don't understand economics and are biased against markets and foreigners, the program brings tariffs (which hurt American consumers and workers by raising prices and provoking retaliation), bailouts, and deficit spending financed through the hidden inflation tax. Fiscal restraint is not a priority. Every penny of the budget has a constituency behind it.

We find populist agitation within what is misleadingly called the "right-wing" and "left-wing." On the left, the populists try to counterbalance inane identity politics, which in their view has pushed class politics off the agenda. They seem not to realize that class politics is an earlier form of identity politics; it holds, wrongly, that an inherent and irreconcilable conflict exists between haves and have-nots, between employers and employees, that can only be rectified by making the state more powerful than it is today. Never mind that mass production must come before mass consumption, and markets have wiped out much poverty worldwide. The headline-rich "inequality" red herring will keep everyone distracted.

When a Republican populist (say, J. D. Vance) hears the term economic freedom, he is likely to envision unilateral scope for the sovereign state: specifically, a strong leader who wields tariffs, trade quotas, sanctions, antitrust prosecution (which protects inferior competitors, not consumers), and more in his crusade to strengthen the "U.S. economy" by increasing exports (by muscle if necessary), blocking imports, saving or restoring "American jobs," and punishing businesses that provide superior consumer service. What he doesn't envision is free individuals trading goods, services, and labor with whomever they want, including new immigrants who seek a better life without government permission.

The populist can't tolerate individual freedom because, in his view, that would be chaos. He rejects consumer sovereignty, so he goes with the only thing left: the state. He has yet to learn what has been known at least since the Scottish Enlightenment of the late 1700s: that the best kind of social order is spontaneous order, the order that results from free, cooperative, commercial human interaction, not central planning or industrial policy.

The populists, "left" and "right" point to people's economic hardship, but it never occurs to them that government intervention, of which there is no shortage, could be at fault. Are housing prices too high? They blame immigrants (who improve our lives along with their own), not the myriad government building restrictions. Are supermarket prices rising? Blame corporate greed and ignore the money-creating Federal Reserve. This blindness to government intervention is on display with every issue. The populists never see the straitjacketed markets, only too little democracy. But democracy can't get us out of the mess it's got us into. Virtually everything the government does affects market relations. Yet voters know nothing about economics. They don't even know that prices fall when supply rises.

The populists find industrial policy more to their liking than freedom. That's central planning—economic and social engineering, "picking winners"—without nationalization. It's subtle socialism, and it has the same flaws. No one can know enough to plan the economic interactions of billions of people. Anyone delusional enough to think he and some "experts" could manage that task should be laughed off the stage. Aside from the knowledge problem, the incentive problem will always plague us. We know what Lord Acton said about how power corrupts. But power also attracts the already corrupted.

But aren't the populists at least antiwar? Sometimes. They tend to oppose U.S. participation in the Ukraine-Russia war—now. But they can't be relied on. They tend to favor arming Israel in its Gaza onslaught. As nationalists, they always present a potential for conflict, these days with China and Iran. We saw that in Trump's term as president. He cannot be counted on to dismantle the trip-wire alliance system, and he's enthusiastic about the de facto alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Think of the arms sales! That's good for American workers, right?

Let's not forget the link between border security, which populists demand, and the drug war, which they also love. That link offers populist leaders many opportunities for bloody intervention south of the border. One more thing we can be sure of: the populists do not see global trade as a peace-maker, or trade restrictions as a source of conflict. Globalization, even without a government role, is a dirty word. I see no reason for comfort here.

Even when the populists oppose wars (did Trump oppose any?), it is not so that the taxpayers can keep their money and spend it as they like. No, the populists stand with progressives: they want to transfer the money from the Pentagon and CIA to domestic departments. Details may differ, but that's all.

The best reason to oppose war and the preparation for it, aside from the obvious one, is that they require a bloated, intrusive government, battalions of bumbling bureaucrats, and the diversion of scarce resources from consumers to military contractors. Populists just want to redistribute the bloat.

It may be that the "right-wing" populist leaders are phonies and don't mean what they say. Some in the "left-wing" tribe say that about Trump and his running mate, Vance. Maybe that's true. But if they are liars who stand for something else, we can be certain they don't stand for shrinking the state and expanding individual liberty. That's not on the menu these days.

TGIF: Social Order through Liberty

Human beings are self-actualizing social animals. We need to cooperate with others to flourish fully and (but?) we also need the freedom to make of ourselves the persons we wish to be; we need autonomy.

Can we do both liberty and social order? The answer is yes, and that is where rights come into play. I'll go with Ayn Rand's definition: "A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context." Also, "Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival." Although rights theory is fraught with the potential for abuse -- many many counterfeit "rights" have been conjured -- it's difficult to abandon the concept.

Liberty and social order are often seen as in conflict with each other. The conservatives' fondness for the phrase ordered liberty. It is meant to suggest that liberty too easily becomes license and chaos. So we often hear that rights must be balanced against one another or against other considerations (such as state interest), indicating that all people could not possibly exercise their rights at the same time because that would produce intolerable social conflict. Hence the need for external limits.

But thanks to the work of genuine liberals -- that is, libertarians, we have good reason to reject this concern.

One of the great synthesizers of individual and social welfare was one of the most unjustly reviled political thinkers in history: Herbert Spencer. In discussing the human "tendency toward individuation in his 1851 (and first) book, Social Statics, Spencer wrote:

[The person] is self-conscious; that is, he recognizes his own individuality. . . . [W]hat we call the moral law—the law of equal freedom—is the law under which individuation becomes perfect, and that ability to act up to this law is the final endowment of humanity.... The increasing assertion of personal rights is an increasing demand that the external conditions needful to a complete unfolding of the individuality shall be respected. Not only is there now a consciousness of individuality and an intelligence whereby individuality may be preserved, but there is a perception that the sphere of action requisite for due development of the individuality may be claimed, and a correlative desire to claim it. And when the change at present going on is complete—when each possesses an active instinct of freedom, together with an active sympathy—then will all the still existing limitations to individuality, be they governmental restraints or be they the aggressions of men on one another, cease. Then none will be hindered from duly unfolding their natures.

"None will be hindered"? Even with "activity sympathy," how then can "an active instinct of freedom be reconciled with required social harmony? Spencer addresses the paradox:

Yet must this higher individuation be joined with the greatest mutual dependence. Paradoxical though the assertion looks, the progress is at once toward complete separateness and complete union. But the separateness is of a kind consistent with the most complex combinations for fulfilling social wants; and the union is of a kind that does not hinder entire development of each personality. Civilization is evolving a state of things and a kind of character in which two apparently conflicting requirements are reconciled.

It may sound odd, but Spencer anticipated “at once perfect individuation and perfect mutual dependence.” He wrote:

Just that kind of individuality will be acquired which finds in the most highly organized community the fittest sphere for its manifestation, which finds in each social arrangement a condition answering to some faculty in itself, which could not, in fact, expand at all if otherwise circumstanced. The ultimate man will be one whose private requirements coincide with public ones. He will be that manner of man who, in spontaneously fulfilling his own nature, incidentally performs the functions of a social unit, and yet is only enabled so to fulfill his own nature by all others doing the like.

This reminds me of Spinoza's belief that to be fully rational an individual must be surrounded by other rational free, individuals with whom he interacts respectfully through reason, persuasion, contract, and trade, not force.

Spencer, of course, is well known for what in Social Statics he called the law of equal freedom: "Every man has freedom to do all he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.” This sounds good, and it is. But Murray Rothbard, in his discussion of the impossibility and hence senselessness of egalitarianism (in Power and Market: Government and the Economy), made an important observation about Spencer's law. Rothbard wrote:

This goal [equality of liberty] does not attempt to make every individual’s total condition equal—an absolutely impossible task; instead, it advocates liberty—a condition of absence of coercion over person and property for every man.

Rothbard pointed out that the terms equality before the law and equality of rights "are ambiguous and misleading. The former could be taken to mean equality of slavery as well as liberty and has, in fact, been so narrowed down in recent years as to be." He also wrote that the term equal is problematic in the study of human affairs because it suggests a unit of measure that does not exist. (For libertarianism conceived at equality of authority, see Roderick Long's "Liberty: The Other Equality" and "Equality: The Unknown Ideal.")

Finally, Rothbard wrote:

Spencer’s Law of Equal Freedom is redundant. For if every man has freedom to do all that he wills, it follows from this very premise that no man’s freedom has been infringed or invaded. The whole second clause of the law after “wills” is redundant and unnecessary. Since the formulation of Spencer’s Law, opponents of Spencer have used the qualifying clause to drive holes into the libertarian philosophy. Yet all this time they were hitting at an encumbrance, not at the essence of the law. The concept of “equality” has no rightful place in the “Law of Equal Freedom,” being replaceable by the logical quantifier “every.” The “Law of Equal Freedom” could well be renamed “The Law of Total Freedom.”

Rothbard credits the point to Clara Dixon Davidson, who in 1892 wrote in Benjamin Tucker's magazine, Liberty:

The law of equal freedom, “Every one is free to do whatsoever he wills,” appears to me to be the primary condition to happiness. If I fail to add the remainder of Herbert Spencer’s celebrated law of equal freedom, I shall only risk being misinterpreted by persons who cannot understand that the opening affirmation includes what follows, since, if any one did infringe upon the freedom of another, all would not be equally free. [Emphsis added.]

This leads to the conclusion that all people may be free to exercise their rights simultaneously without jeopardy to life-serving social order. No need for balancing rights exists. If all "ordered liberty" means is liberty that is consistent with social order, then we can rest easy so long as people think soundly about liberty. How surprising is this? After all, the very notion of rights stems from each individual's need to act in the world without conflicting with others. (This insight about rights theory has been called "compossibility" by the Georgist libertarian Hillel Steiner. For an opposing view to the Davidson-Rothbard argument, see this from Matt Zwolinski.)

This does not mean the boundaries between people's zones of freedom are always immediately clear -- far from it. Disagreements (both good faith and malicious) are inevitable. That's why, in addition to liberal customs, free societies will have contracts, formal associations, policing agencies, insurance, mediators, arbiters, and judges. Governance does not require government.

It seems that Benjamin Tucker's magazine motto (borrowed from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) had it right: "Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order."

TGIF: Alito's Challenge to Libertarians

In his recently leaked first draft of an opinion that would reverse the abortion-rights cases Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito gives Americans a choice between judges who read their personal preferences into the Constitution and judges who recognize only rights that they find "rooted in [our] history and tradition" and deem "essential to our Nation's 'scheme of ordered Liberty.'"

Is that it? Neither choice seems an adequate safeguard for individual freedom.

Whether one likes the result or not, Alito's draft in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization raises important issues apart from abortion. Indeed, he unintendedly draws attention to whether the Constitution can be relied on to protect liberty. Unsurprisingly, Alito is not concerned with rights as a philosophical matter. That's not his job. Rather, he's concerned only with constitutional rights -- liberties that satisfy criteria making them worthy of protection by the government. By that standard, an otherwise perfectly defensible right might not qualify. That would be left to the legislative process. That's the constitutional game. The framers understood this, though some libertarians do not.

The Constitution may seem to clearly endorse a general notion of liberty in the 14th Amendment's due process clause, but does it really? Alito, like other conservatives, thinks not:

Historical inquiries ... are essential whenever we are asked to recognize a new component of the “liberty” protected by the Due Process Clause because the term “liberty” alone provides little guidance. “Liberty” is a capacious term. As Lincoln once said: “We all declare for Liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing” In a well-known essay, Isaiah Berlin reported that “[h]istorians of ideas” had catalogued more than 200 different senses in which the terms had been used.

In interpreting what is meant by the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to “liberty,” we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy. That is why the Court has long been “reluctant” to recognize rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution.

So, Alito writes elsewhere in his opinion, "[G]uided by the history and tradition that map the essential components of our Nation's concept of ordered liberty, we must ask what the Fourteenth Amendment means by the term 'liberty' when the issue involves putative rights not named in the Constitution" -- such as a woman's putative right terminate a pregnancy.

Note that Alito uses the term ordered liberty. That's a concept in the case law, apparently first enunciated in 1937, that "sets limits and defines the boundary between competing interests.” Why must the term liberty be so qualified? Because, he writes, “attempts to justify abortion [and other things --SR] through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one's 'concept of existence' prove too much. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like. None of these rights has any claim to being deeply rooted in history."

If that counts as "proving too much," libertarians would say let's do it.

Alito hastens to add that other court-protected rights that are not deeply rooted in history -- such as the rights to contraception, interracial marriage, and same-sex marriage -- are not jeopardized by his opinion because abortion is unique. How confident can others be about that?

Putting on his historian's hat, Alito accuses the majority in Roe of misstating history and writes that abortion even at an early stage was never regarded as a right in Anglo-American common or statutory law and was generally illegal throughout the United States. Not everyone agrees with Alito's historical account.

Alito asserts that when justices ignored history, they engaged in "the freewheeling judicial policymaking that characterized discredited decisions such as Lochner v. New York." That was the highly influential 1905 case in which the Court struck down a state law limiting the hours that bakers could work per day and per week because the law violated freedom of contract under the 14th Amendment. Progressives hated the ruling from the start, but some conservatives later came to hate it too because it relied on the concept of substantive due process, by which judges could invent rights that conservatives abhorred. Libertarians also ought to have apprehensions about substantive due process. Such seemingly benign legal notions, including "unenumerated rights," are double-edged swords.

The juridical problem in distinguishing putative rights that are constitutionally protected from those that are not is that no constitution could name more than a few rights. Where does that leave all the rights left out? (We could say there is only one right, namely, the right not to be subjected to aggression, and that anything more specific rights are examples of the principle. But that would incite a never-ending controversy over what constitutes aggression.)

The Ninth Amendment, which says that rights not mentioned were still retained by the people, seemed to be the solution to the problem. That amendment has not played an important role in constitutional law to the frustration of libertarians, but danger lies in that amendment if it were to be taken seriously. The danger is that pseudo-rights could be embraced by Supreme Court justices. Rights theory is like a butterfly. You may lovingly nurture the egg, larva, and pupa, but once the butterfly emerges from the cocoon, it will fly where it likes or be blown about by the wind, logic or no logic. (It's been pointed out that the Bill of Rights has turned out to be a tragic distraction. Instead of the government having the burden of justifying any power it wishes to exercise, the people have had to justify any claimed right by finding supporting text in the Bill of Rights. Maybe we'd have been better off without it.)

It's tempting for each of us to think that our own theory of rights or liberty just happens to be the one that perfectly aligns with the intent of the framers or with the common understanding of the constitutional text in 1789. But how likely is that? The framers didn't agree philosophically on everything and people often understand words and sentences differently among themselves. In other words, originalism isn't a neat solution.

As noted, Alito's alternative to judges who impose their personal views about liberty is judges who stick exclusively to rights deeply rooted in the country's history and tradition. But this is also unsatisfying because it imprisons us in the thinking of long-dead individuals whose understanding of liberty might have been incomplete. Why assume that the framers understood every implication of the nature of freedom? As Thomas Paine wrote in The Rights of Man:

There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.... It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.

It's true that constitutions can be amended and the framers' shortcomings addressed, but that process is always costly and difficult. In the meantime, people suffer from the deprivation of their liberty.

Alito's choice between the alternatives is clear, but the Constitution contains no guide to interpretation. Even if it did, how would that help? Any guide to interpretation would itself be open to interpretation. We'd end up with an infinite series of guides.

So where does that leave us? Apparently with two choices: an un-elected national super-legislature free to invent rights or a federal court guided by an emaciated, tradition-bound notion of liberty and unchained state legislatures free to grant (revocable) "rights" by majority vote. Neither seems ideal, but the ideal seems not to be on the menu today. I recorded my thoughts on perhaps the short-term second-best solution in "Disagreement without Conflict."

(See my book America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited.)

TGIF: Utopianism May Be Hazardous to Your Health

Beware those who claim to have a detailed blueprint for the ideal society. If such a person thinks you stand in the way, you may get run over. That's how it is with utopians. They want everything just so, and woe betide those who disagree.

The repeated attempts at creating ideal societies haven't gone so well. To name just a few, see France 1789, Russia 1917, Italy 1922, Germany 1933, Eastern Europe 1945, China 1949, Cambodia 1976, Venezuela 1999.

The problem is that the architects of utopia have little tolerance for those who aren't wholeheartedly with the program. Any departure from the plan is a move away from the ideal. Dissenters must be dealt with.

In The Road to Serfdom, which still belongs on everyone's reading list, F. A. Hayek pointed out that a big problem with socialist or fascist central planning -- which is another way of saying utopianism -- is that regular people will assuredly upset the plan just by attending to their own lives -- so they cannot be left free to do so.

Hayek also noted that even if everyone agreed in principle that some kind of top-down social plan was desirable, they certainly would not agree on its details. In a world of scarcity, that would be a problem because everyone's preferences couldn't be accommodated. Moreover, Hayek went on, the endless debates over the plan could well give rise to a dictator who promised to stop the idle chatter and act decisively. So much for the promise of democratic planning.

Not everyone aspires to design their whole society. But some want to do something similar on a smaller scale. They seek to shape their local social environment (including their social-media environment) by expecting and insisting that everyone with whom they come into contact affirm their view of themselves and of how the world should be. One way to do this is to demonize and marginalize dissenters. While such micro-planning may seem largely harmless, it could have its risks as it gains momentum. Politics professor Eric Kaufmann, the author of Whiteshift, writes that the "principal threat to liberalism today is an emergent authoritarianism, not a top-down form of the kind we find in China or Turkey."

Intolerance toward dissenters can manifest itself in demands that we use language in novel and loaded ways favored by an interest group. This is often part of a utopian strategy to change government policy in oppressive ways. These days people can lose their jobs or access to online communities for using words (or having done so years before) in a newly forbidden manner.

But controlling language, which really means language users, is like herding cats. Language is a decentralized institution under no one's control. The meanings of words can change in their own time, but meanings are not determined by diktat. Most people will continue to speak as they are accustomed to speaking regardless of the activists' strident demands that we not only say, to use Orwell's example in Nineteen Eighty-Four, that 2+2=5 but also believe it.

Today's equivalents of 2+2=5 include: "The signs of a climate disaster are all around us and beyond debate"; "Sex is changeable or nonbinary or a social construct"; "Straight-white-cis-male supremacy explains all you'll ever need to know about Western civilization and contemporary American society"; and "Those who disagree with [name a group] are deplorable."

People should be free to believe those things if they want to, but they should also be free to disbelieve them and say so without fear of harassment, physical threats, or legal penalties. Those who know that 2+2=4 should inform the utopians that they have the burden of proving why anyone should pretend otherwise. "Gaslighting" needs cooperative victims.

A society, like a language, can't really be centrally planned, although the attempt will be lethal. The contrary idea gets encouragement from a misapplication of enlightenment principles. That the hard sciences can furnish the means to control natural forces, i.e., inanimate things, for the betterment of all is no reason for thinking that the social sciences can or should furnish the means to control social forces, i.e., people. Hayek called this misguided conviction scientism. No one has put the point better than Adam Smith in his other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

The man of system [i.e., the central planner] ... is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess–board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess–board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it.

The alternative to utopianism, then, is Smith's "system of natural liberty" with its emergent, undesigned, and bottom-up order. Or in other words: individual sovereignty, free association, cooperation, competition, and contract.

So, people, believe what you want and recognize everyone else's right to the same freedom. Replace your divots! Don't be fragile -- be antifragile; in order for someone to give offense it is necessary that someone else take it. Don't be that someone. Don't look for your identity or life's meaning in what you take offense at.

Finally, let's each of us agree not to turn to the state to support "my tribe."

TGIF: Safety in Freedom

With the emergence of the Omicron COVID-19 variant, renewed restrictions on liberty or calls for their reinstatement have broken out around the world. The new wave is probably only beginning, and with it will surely come sermons on how we must face trade-offs between liberty and safety. This seems to be the new normal.

The usual justifications for this purported necessity always feel inadequate, with gaping holes in the case for expanding government power to extraordinary lengths. Since we all now have a good deal of experience with COVID under our belts, let's hope that the public's doubts about any new power grab will be strong and loudly expressed.

What brought this subject to mind was a recent Oxford Union debate, which I ran across on YouTube. While I've watched only a little, it quickly occurred to me that the case for a necessary trade-off between liberty and safety runs aground with the realization that liberty is a necessary condition for safety. After all, it's not always clear how one can best stay safe in a situation: that requires thought, discourse, action, and therefore liberty.

Moreover, that matter is separate from the question of how safe any particular person may wish to be. Indeed, people have different preferences with respect to risk and safety in part because life is complicated and trade-offs are ubiquitous. Increasing one's safety in some measure by abstaining from some desirable activity will likely require too big a sacrifice for some people, although for others the benefit will be well worth the cost. (A person cannot violate his own freedom.) So who's to decide? Why should a faceless bureaucrat or a charismatic politician make the call?

Few people understand that there's safety in liberty, specifically, the freedom to think, improvise, and innovate. This is true for individuals, but when the potential danger is social or global, the case for liberty is equally clear. That's precisely when we all need many minds searching for solutions without central direction. Knowledge is dispersed, and no one can say who will have a key insight. Competition is the universal solvent. And to be effective, thinking requires freedom of action.

Matt Ridley and Julian Simon before him elaborated how we all benefit from the often unintentional combination of ideas generated in different and unlikely places. By now, the serendipity that freedom produces ought to be expected. The results often are imaginative approaches to vexing problems that few would have dreamed possible.

The case for giving up freedom to acquire a measure of safety is actually an appeal to trust in an anointed central authority. And that means a threat of force is at least implied.

But where is the actual safety in that arrangement? Why should anyone believe that the anointed know what they are doing? They operate in a centralized, bureaucratic environment. The rulers expect the ruled to behave like children who have been told that all will be fine if they obey. Unfortunately, the ruled often think of themselves as children when it comes to the latest risk proclaimed by their rulers.

So are people really safer than they would have been in a free, decentralized, and competitive environment? We find no evidence for this in places that imposed harsh restrictions on liberty in response to COVID-19. Lockdowns, vaccine and mask mandates, and travel bans show no signs of delivering on the politicians' promises. There just is no good substitute for freedom at every level because no central authority is knowledgeable enough.

Finally, what about the risks that individuals might present to others and not just to themselves? There are big differences between 1) the potential risks to others that anyone may pose in simply going about the normal business of life and 2) the dangers produced by aggression, gross negligence, and inadvertent toxic pollution, where identifiable individuals entitled to due process can be shown to present demonstrable peril to others. For one thing, in the first case, people are not passive victims-in-waiting but generally informed agents capable of taking precautions against infection. Imagine the nightmare that would come from the principle that everyone in society may be viewed as a threat to everyone else merely by breathing. We don't have to imagine it, do we? That's how most governments throughout the world -- blunt instruments that they are -- responded to the pandemic. As a result, our livelihoods -- our lives-- are now subject to cancellation without notice.

(Photo credit: Dev Asangbam, Unsplash License)

TGIF: What Now, Libertarians?

The prospects for individual liberty and the required rollback of the government seem as bleak as ever, but we can't let appearances, no matter how pervasive, be decisive. The spark within most people--the longing to chart one's course in life--never really dies. We've got to remember this as we search for new and innovative ways to make our case to an apparently uninterested public.

But I admit that things don't look good. We might have expected the four-year circus presided over by Donald Trump to sour people on the very idea of government. I always thought that was an unrealistic expectation. A yearning for a return to "normal" seemed more likely--and in this context "normal" means a conventional politician. Politically speaking, pre-Trump normal is bad, which is why we got the contemptible Trump in the first place. Yet normal is what we have now in the creature of Washington who is now the government's chief executive. (By the way and strictly speaking, if you're not in the military you have no commander-in-chief, and since the president presides as chief executive officer of the government, not the country, private citizens have no president either. A pet peeve of mine is people who call any president "my president" or "my commander-in-chief.")

For the record, Trump certainly could have done far worse than he did as president (that should have been his campaign slogan), but that is faint praise indeed. He was hardly dedicated to pushing back the limits of the bloated central state--far from it. For each of the very few positive things he did (some deregulation happened), he did a dozen rotten things, not to mention the toxic atmosphere he helped generate. (As someone said, he also brings out the worst in his enemies, but that's another story.)

We live in a time when most people believe that government spending and borrowing need have no limits. Of course they believe this: they are told this day after day by the pundits, politicians, and bureaucrats. Almost any excuse will do to increase borrowing and spending and to impose extraordinary restrictions and prohibitions on peaceful activities, but the COVID-19 pandemic was ready-made for this. If government officials, backed by some scientists, can scare enough people into believing they will die if they so much as step outside their homes, never mind go about their normal business, they'll win support for a wholesale shutdown of society. Then the government will have an excuse to intervene on an enormous scale in order to provide "relief" for the very ills it caused. We are encouraged to pretend that sky's-the-limit fiscal and monetary policies will have no consequences for our children and grandchildren.

Yes, a few people have objected to all this, but where are the mass (and peaceful) street demonstrations against what amounts to a society-wide quarantine? They don't happen because government-anointed experts have spoken. It almost doesn't matter that comparably credentialed experts dissent from the official line because they will be defamed and stigmatized as ideologues or industry lackeys who put almost anything ahead of the facts. Nevertheless, "believe the science" is worthless advice when competent scientists are on different sides of a question.

A pandemic of course is not the only way to have the population to capitulate to extraordinary interventions. A terrorist action or failure of financial institutions may also do the trick. Politicians are inventive that way.

So it's easy to scare people into surrendering their liberty, and politicians, bureaucrats, and special interests will never tire of looking for things to scare us about. Remember Rahm Emanuel's admonition to never let a good crisis go to waste. (This is a good time to tout Robert Higgs's classic, Crisis and Leviathan.)

And yet ... after all this, most people won't be thrilled with the idea of spending their lives scared and being bossed around by a cold bureaucracy. People in the United States like the words of the Declaration of Independence that refer to the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (I presume many people outside of the United States get a warm feeling about this philosophy too.) And that's what we libertarians have going for us. Most people never really reject liberty deep down. They may not understand how liberty works in the social sense, which keeps them from embracing it completely. But that's where we libertarians come in. Our job is to show them that liberty is not just the right thing but the practical thing. The moral is the practical. (See my book What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.)

We have something else going for us, which we shouldn't forget: most people observe libertarian principles in their private spheres. They don't kill, coerce, or steal. The problem is that they have a different standard when it comes to politicians and bureaucrats. So our task is to point out that government officials are just people, so no double standard is permissible. If we can't do it, they can't do it.

Think of it this way: libertarians must teach people that one moral code exists for all. Politicians and bureaucrats are not really a class apart from the rest of us with special rules governing their conduct. That's not too tough a lesson to teach. It's an appealing idea actually.

The double standard is sometimes justified by the democratic representation principle. It will be argued that government officials can do things we can't because according to the principles of democracy, the people anointed their lawfully selected representatives with those powers.

Sorry, no cigar. No representatives can be democratically delegated powers or rights not possessed by the constituency that selected them by majority vote. You cannot delegate authority or rights you don't have. Even if a people band together to pick a representative, that person can only do what the group had the right to do as individuals. Democratic theory is political alchemy.

The idea of representation is coherent in nonpolitical circumstances, of course. But it falls apart when it comes to government. A member of the House of Representatives theoretically speaks for nearly 800,000 diverse individuals who may agree over very little. How can that be accomplished? The theory of representation was just a device to stifle dissent against the government after the divine right of kings fell out of favor. After all, how can you criticize the government if in fact it is you and your fellow citizens are really the government? This is obvious nonsense, but it works to keep dissatisfaction in check. Libertarians need to teach this lesson over and over.

I have no glib answers for how to reach people. It's a trial-and-error process all the way. Find ways to talk and write to people that will be fresh and attention-grabbing. Point to the real-world benefits of market activity in action. Remind people that trade occurs only when mutual benefit is anticipated by both parties to a transaction. Demonstrate how market incentives work to direct scarce resources toward making thing that consumers most want. Explain that privilege and shelter from creative competition are creatures of government policy, not of private consensual activity. Introduce people to the non-intuitive idea of spontaneous order--Adam Smith's invisible hand--which is essential to understanding how societies work. And emphasize that libertarianism isn't just about markets but covers all of free and peaceful cooperation.

Of course, always respect your audience. You'll never succeed otherwise.

One final note: it's not enough to sow distrust of government. If anything because that won't necessarily lead to individual freedom and voluntary social cooperation through the market and other forums. We must first directly nurture a love of liberty, respect for others, and reason. The love of liberty flows from those things.

It's easy to get discouraged, but remember what someone (apparently not Pericles) once said: “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.”

TGIF--The Goal Is Freedom--appears occasionally on Fridays.

Take That, Sartre

When someone solves an algebra problem for you and you understand why x=2, your believing that x=2 requires no extra step. That is, to understand is to believe. Once you understand, you are not free to believe otherwise. To modify Martin Luther: Here I understand. I can do no other, so help me Nature.

TGIF: Tucker Carlson Needs Love from His Leaders

Fox News host and Trump cheerleader Tucker Carlson is a culturally conservative, big-government, nationalist populist. As such, he’s upset that establishment politicians and their sponsoring elite don’t care enough to promote his and his fellow Americans’ happiness. 

That’s weird. Why would he want them to?

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

Tyranny and Cooperation

Social phenomena -- both good and bad -- cannot happen without cooperation -- that is, without people doing things uncoerced. This is especially clear with bad phenomena. How much havoc could a Stalin, a Hitler, a Mao Zedong, or a Pol Pot wreak alone or with just a few trusted deputies? Obviously, a ruler needs many others to cooperate with him. Importantly, cooperation does not require understanding. Most people will not grasp the tyrant’s project, much less endorse it. But one way or another they will go along actively and passively (abstaining from resistance). Why? Because they have learned -- from parents, teachers, youth-group leaders, peers -- that that is just what one does: one respects the “law of the land,” which is seen as the will of the legitimate ruler(s) or of the people, depending on the reigning ideology, but is in fact merely a series of decrees (statutes, executive orders, etc.) widely believed to be authoritative. So coercion is unnecessary. But even when it is required, the tyrant still needs the cooperation of those called on to enforce the decrees. Should they defy their orders, the cooperation of others will be relied on to have those orders carried out. Etc. The ruled always outnumber the rulers. If no one cooperates, the tyrant must abandon his project or do his own dirty work. But that means the damage he could inflict would necessarily be small-scale. Moreover, acting alone, the tyrant would be exposed as a fraud, a mere freelance thug. In the end, evil systems can exist only because enough unthoughtful people cooperate with authority, unthoughtful in Hannah Arendt's sense, that is, in the sense that they never ask themselves if they have a better reason to respect the authority's decrees than “it’s the law.” I think this is what Arendt meant by “the banality of evil.”

(For more, see my "Come and See the Anarchy Inherent in the System!" and the chapter "The Constitution of Anarchy" in my book America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited.)

Protectionism, Freedom, and a Frustrating Day at the Pipe Shop

One of my haunts is a local tobacco shop, where I regularly drop in to smoke a few bowls of fine pipe tobacco and talk to a fine group of friends and acquaintances. I go there to relax, which is what pipe smoking is all about, but part of yesterday's visit was anything but relaxing.

I happened to bring up Trump's new tariffs on washing-machine and solar-panel imports, pointing out, of course, that the tariffs are a tax on American consumers and a slap at all Americans who don't make their living in the washing-machine and solar-panel industries. In other words, the special interests triumphed over individual and general welfare.

To my (naive) surprise, the small group of people sitting around what we affectionately call "the table of knowledge" couldn't believe what I was saying. They favored the tariffs because they believed Trump's action would help all Americans and punish the Chinese. That's all they "knew" or needed to know.

When I tried to explain that their belief was mistaken, they would not hear it. It had apparently never occurred to them that the action would harm consumers and Americans who make things other than the targeted goods, that is, the vast majority of the people in the country. (Some America First policy, right?)

It also never occurred to them that we live in a world of scarcity. If Americans and resources are employed to make washing machines and solar panels, they can't be employed to make other things. (That's physics as well as economics.) So my friends did not see that if we buy washing machines and solar panels from somewhere other than America, we can have them plus the other things Americans would produce. But if the government raises the prices of the imports to keep domestic firms going -- which is the point of tariffs -- we won't get those other things.

In other words, along with scarcity, my tobacco brotherhood had no appreciation of the division of labor.

They also did not see that if we have to spend more money on washing machines and solar panels, we'll have less money to spend on other goods and services, harming us both as consumers and as producers of those other goods and services. Nor did they grasp that tariffs reduce the number of dollars foreigners have with which to buy American exports or that an ensuing trade war would also harm American exporters.

To use Paul Heyne's expression, my friends were strangers to the economic way of thinking. They are hardly unusual in that respect. Most people have had no contact with the economic way of thinking when it comes to government policy, although they engage in it whenever they shop.

Think of what this means for the theory of representative democracy? Much of what the government does is interfere with our economic pursuits. Therefore, most of what "our" so-called representatives -- I call them misrepresentatives -- do is enact legislation consciously designed for such interference. That means candidates for office ought to be judged on what they know about basic economics and the consequences of interference. How can we expect people to be competent participants -- informed voters -- in this system if they don't understand the most basic economic principles?

Needless to say, the matter of individual liberty made no difference in the discussion. All they saw was Trump helping "Americans" and slamming foreigners.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Institute.

The United States Again Fails to Make the Top 10 Freest Countries

My latest column for the American Institute for Economic Research is "The United States Again Fails to Make the Top 10 Freest Countries."

Hey, Trump

Let's not make America great. Let's make Americans free. Greatness will take care of itself.

TGIF: The Choice Is between Government and Liberty

An article by George H. Smith from a few years ago makes a distinction about freedom that seems worth pursuing. In “Jack and Jill and Two Kinds of Freedom” (also a podcast), Smith distinguishes between (as the title indicates) two kinds of freedom, or between freedom and liberty. He tells the story of Jack, who wants to climb a hill to fetch a pail of water and needs Jill’s help to bring the heavy pail back down. Being a “moral nihilist,” Jack is just as willing to force Jill to help him as he is to persuade her. It all depends on his cost-benefit calculation at the time. In Smith’s story, Jack chooses persuasion and succeeds, so he does not need to resort to Plan B, compulsion. Jill, by the way, does not know that Jack would have forced her.

Jill, on the other hand, is a libertarian who believes in rights and justice. Had the tables been turned and she needed Jack’s help, her only acceptable course would have been persuasion.

How Much for that Freedom in the Window?

Okay, freedom -- more precisely, the maintenance thereof -- isn't free. But must we pay a monopoly price?

TGIF: The Moral Case for Freedom Is the Practical Case for Freedom

So I, for one, don’t accept the division of the case for freedom into “the moral” and “the practical.” It’s a mistake, not to mention harmful to the cause.

Read it here.

TGIF: So What If Freedom Isn't Free?

My reply to those who admonish us libertarians that freedom isn't free.

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