Here, in this land of the free, “we” as voters had amended the Constitution to punish conduct which “we”––as consumers––had been enjoying. If you point out that the Eighteenth Amendment had been inserted into the Constitution by majority vote, and that therefore “we” had done it to “ourselves,” you need to be reminded that the “we” who did it were not the same people as the “ourselves” to whom it was done!

The Eighteenth Amendment was annulled in 1933. Shortly thereafter another prohibition law was passed, this one a prohibition against owning gold. Under the earlier dispensation you could walk down the street with a pocketful of gold coins without breaking the law; but if you were caught carrying a bottle of whiskey you might be arrested.

Then the rules were changed, and you could carry all the whiskey you wanted, but if you had any gold in your pocket you could be thrown in jail!

Our scientists are exploring outer space looking for intelligent life on other planets. I hope they find some, because there’s none to spare on planet earth! With how little wisdom do we organize our lives, especially in the areas of government and the economy!

The fundamental issue in political philosophy is the limitation of governmental power; it is to determine the role of law, the functions appropriate to the political agency. The basic question may be phrased in a variety of ways: What things belong in the public domain? and What things are private? What tasks should be assigned to Washington or some lesser governmental agency, and in what sectors of life should people be free to pursue their own goals? When should legal coercion be used to force a person to do something against his will? In view of government’s nature, what is its competence? What are the criteria which enable us to distinguish a just law from an unjust law?

These are questions we cannot avoid. It is true that we don’t have to debate them, or even think about them; but we cannot help acting on them. Some theory about government is the hidden premise of all political action, and we’ll improve our action only as we refine our theory.

What Functions Are Appropriate?

In the light of government’s nature, what functions may we appropriately assign to it? This is the question, and there are two ways to approach it. The approach favored today is to count noses—find out what a majority of the people want from government, and then elect politicians who will give it to them! And believe me, they’ve been giving it to us! The party that wins an election is “swept into office on a ground swell of public opinion,” as popular mythology has it; and of course the winners have “a mandate from the people.” That’s spelled Peepul.

I do not accept this approach to political philosophy, and will offer some reasons for rejecting it. Neither did our forebears accept this approach. Every political thinker in the West from Plato down to modern times has taken a different tack. Now, the mere fact that something is enshrined by tradition is no reason for accepting it; we accept something because we believe it to be true. But anything which is both tried and true has a lot going for it. Let me try to sketch briefly the way our forebears went about the intellectual and moral problem of trying to figure out what government should do, and how we determine whether or not a law is just.

The backbone of any legal system is a set of prohibitions. The law forbids certain actions and punishes those who do them anyway. The solid core of any legal system, therefore, is the moral code, which, in our culture is conveyed to us by the Mosaic Law. The Sixth Commandment of The Decalogue says:“Thou shalt not commit murder,” and this moral imperative is built into every statute which prescribes punishment for homicide. The Eighth Commandment forbids stealing, and this moral norm gives rise to laws punishing theft. There is a moral law against murder because each human life is precious; and there is a moral law against theft because rightful property is an extension of the person.“ A possession, ”Aristotle writes, “is an instrument for maintaining life.” Deprive a person of the right to own property and he becomes something less than a person; he becomes someone else’s man. A man to whom we deny the rights of ownership must be owned by someone else; he becomes another man’s creature—a slave.The master-slave relation is a violation of the rightful order of things, that is, a violation of individual liberty and voluntary association.

The Gift of Life

Each human being has the gift of life and is charged with the responsibility of bringing his life to completion. He is also a steward of the earth’s scarce resources, which he must use wisely and economically.

Man is a responsible being, but no person can be held responsible for the way he lives his life and conserves his property unless he is free. Liberty, therefore, is a necessary corollary to Life and Property. Our forebears regarded Life, Liberty, and Property as natural rights, and the importance of these basic rights was stressed again and again in the oratory, the preaching, and the writings of the Eighteenth Century. “Life, Liberty and Property are the gifts of the Creator,” declared the Reverend Daniel Shute in 1767 from the pulpit which I occupied some 200 years later. Life, Liberty, and Property are the ideas of more than antiquarian interest; they are potent ideas because they transcribe into words an important aspect of the way things are.

Our ancestors intended to ground their legal and moral codes on the nature of things, just as students of the natural sciences intend their laws to be a transcription of the way things behave. For example: physical bodies throughout the universe attract each other, increasing with the mass of the attracting body and diminishing with the square of the distance. Sir Isaac Newton made some observations along these lines and gave us the law of gravity. How come gravitational attraction varies as the inverse-square of the distance, and not as the inverse-cube? One is as thinkable as the other, but it just happens that the universe is prejudiced in favor of the inverse-square in this instance; just as the universe is prejudiced against murder, has a strong bias in favor of property, and wills men to be free.

Immanuel Kant echoed an ancient sentiment when he declared that two things filled him with awe; the starry heavens without and the moral law within.The precision and order in nature manifest the Author of nature. The Creator is also the Author of our being and requires certain duties of us, his creatures. There is, thus, an outer reality joined to the reality within, and this twofold reality has an intelligible pattern, a coherent structure.

This dual arrangement is not made by human hands; it’s unchangeable, it’s not affected by our wishes, and it can’t be tampered with. It can, however, be misinterpreted, and it can be disobeyed. We consult certain portions of this pattern and draw up blueprints for building a bridge. If we misinterpret, the bridge collapses. And a society disintegrates if its members disobey the configuration laid down in the nature of things for our guidance. This configuration is the moral order, as interpreted by reason and tradition.

We’re in fairly deep water here, and this is as far into theology as I shall venture. The point, simply put, is that our forebears, when they wanted to get some clues for the regulating of their private and public lives, sought for answers in a reality beyond society. They believed in a sacred order which transcends the world, an order of creation, and believed that our duties within society reflect the mandates of this divine order.

Take a Poll

This view of one’s duty is quite in contrast to the method currently popular for determining what we should do, which is to conduct an opinion poll. Find out what the crowd wants, and then say, “Me too!” This is what the advice of certain political scientists boils down to. Here is Professor James MacGregor Burns, a certified liberal and the author of several highly touted books, such as The Deadlock of Democracy and a biography of John F. Kennedy. Liberals play what Burns calls “the numbers game.” “As a liberal I believe in majority rule,” he writes .“I believe that the great decisions should be made by numbers.” In other words, don’t think; count! “What does a majority have a right to do?” he asks. And he answers his own question. “A majority has the right to do anything in the economic and social arena that is relevant to our national problems and national purposes.” And then, realizing the enormity of what he has just said, he backs off: “…except to change the basic rules of the game.”

Burns’s final disclaimer sounds much like an afterthought, for some of his liberal cohorts support the idea of unqualified majority rule. The late Herman Finer, in his anti-Hayek book entitled Road to Reaction, declares, “For in a democracy, right is what the majority makes it to be” (p. 60). What we have here is an updating of the ancient “might makes right”doctrine. The majority does have more muscle than the minority, it has the power to carry out its will, and thus it is entitled to have its own way. If right is whatever the majority says it is, then whatever the majority does is O.K., by definition. Farewell, then, to individual rights, and farewell to the rights of the minorities; the majority is the group that has made it to the top, and the name of the game is winner take all.

The dictionary definition of a majority is 50 percent plus 1. But if you were to draw up an equation to diagram modern majoritarianism it would read:
50% + 1 = 100%; 50% – 1 = ZERO!

Amusing confirmation comes from a professor at Rutgers University, writing a letter to the Times. Several years ago considerable criticism was generated by the appointment of a certain man to a position in the national government. Such criticism is unwarranted, writes our political scientist, because the critics comprise “a public which, by virtue of having lost the last election, has no business approving or disapproving appointments by those who won.” This is a modern version of the old adage, “To the victor belong the spoils.” This Rutgers professor goes on to say,“ Contrary to President Lincoln’s famous but misleading phrase, ours is not a government by the people, but government by government.” So there!

The Nature of Government

What functions may we appropriately assign to the political agency? What should government do? Today’s answer is that government should do whatever a majority wants a government to do; find out what the Peepul want from government, and then give it to them. The older and truer answer is based upon the belief that the rules for living together in society may be discovered if we think hard and clearly about the matter, and the corollary that we can conform our lives to these rules if we resolve to do so. But I have said nothing so far about the nature or essence of government.

Americans are justly proud of our nation, but this pride sometimes blinds us to reality. How often have you heard someone declare, “In America, we are the government”? This assertion is demonstrably untrue; “We” are the society, all 215 million of us; but society and government are not at all the same entity. Society is all-of-us, whereas government is only some-of-us. The some-of-us who comprise government would begin with the President, Vice-President, and Cabinet; it would include Congress and the bureaucracy; it would descend through governors, mayors, and lesser officials, down to sheriffs and the cop on the beat.

Government is unique among the institutions of society, in that society has bestowed upon this one agency exclusive legal control over the weaponry, from clubs to hydrogen bombs. Governments do use persuasion, and they do rely on authority, legitimacy, and tradition—but so do other institutions like the Church and the School. But only one agency has the power to tax, the authority to operate the system of courts and jails, and a warrant for mobilizing the machinery for making war; that is government, the power structure. Governmental action is what it is, no matter what sanction might be offered to justify what it does. Government always acts with power; in the last resort government uses force to back up its decrees.

Society’s Power Structure

When I remind you that the government of a society is that society’s power structure, I am not offering you a novel theory, nor a fanciful political notion of my own. It is a truism that government is society’s legal agency of compulsion. Virtually every statesman and every political scientist—whether Left or Right—takes this for granted and does his theorizing from this as a base. “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,” wrote George Washington, “it is force.” Bertrand Russell, in a 1916 book, said, “The essence of the State is that it is the repository of the collective force of its citizens.”Ten years later, the Columbia University professor R. M. MacIver spoke of the state as “the authority which alone has compulsive power.” The English writer Alfred Cobban says that “the essence of the state, and of all political organizations, is power.”

But why labor the obvious except for the fact that so many of our contemporaries—those who say “we the government”—overlook it? What we are talking about is the power of man over man; government is the legal authorization which permits some men to use force on others. When we advocate a law to accomplish a certain goal, we advertise our inability to persuade people to act in the manner we recommend; so we’re going to force them to conform! As Sargent Shriver once put it, “In a democracy you don’t compel people to do something unless you are sure they won’t do it.”

In the liberal mythology of this century, government is all things to all men. Liberals think that government assumes whatever characteristics people wish upon it—like Proteus in Greek mythology who took on one shape after another, depending on the circumstances. But government is not an all-purpose tool; it has a specific nature, and its nature determines what government can accomplish. When properly limited, government serves a social end no other agency can achieve; its use of force is constructive. The alternatives here are law and tyranny—as the Greeks put it. This is how the playwright Aeschylus saw it in The Eumenides: “Let no man live uncurbed by law, nor curbed by tyranny.”

The Moral Code

If government is to serve a moral end it must not violate the moral code. The moral code tells us that human life is sacred, that liberty is precious, and that ownership of property is good. And by the same token, this moral code supplies a definition of criminal action; murder is a crime, theft is a crime, and it is criminal to abridge any person’s lawful freedom. It becomes a function of the law, then, in harmony with the moral code, to use force against criminal actions in order that peaceful citizens may go about their business. The use of legal force against criminals for the protection of the innocent is the earmark of a properly limited government.

This is an utterly different kind of procedure than the use of government force on peaceful citizens—whatever the excuse or rationalization. People should not be forced into conformity with any social blueprint; their private plans should not be overridden in the interests of some national plan or social goal. Government—the public power—should not be used for private advantage; it should not be used to protect people from themselves.

Well, what should the law do to peaceful, innocent citizens? It should let them alone! When government lets John Doe alone, and punishes anyone who refuses to let him alone, then John Doe is a free man.

In this country we have a republican form of government. The word “republic” is from the Latin words, res and publica, meaning the things or affairs which are common to all of us, the affairs which are in the public domain, in sharp contrast to matters which are private. Government, then, is “the public thing,” and this strong emphasis on public serves to delimit and set boundaries to governmental power, in the interest of preserving the integrity of the private domain.

What’s in a name? you might be thinking. Well, in this case, in the case of republic, a lot. The word “republic” encapsulates a political philosophy; it connotes the philosophy of government which would limit government to the defense of life, liberty, and property in order to serve the ends of justice. There’s no such connotation in the word “monarchy,” for example; or in aristocracy or oligarchy.

A monarch is the sole, supreme ruler of a country, and there is theoretically no area in the life of his citizens over which he may not hold sway.The king owns the country and his people belong to him.

Monarchical practice pretty well coincided with theory in what is called “Oriental Despotism,” but in Christendom the power of the kings was limited by the nobility on the one hand and the Emperor on the other; and all secular rulers had to take account of the power of the Papacy. Power was played off against power, to the advantage of the populace.

Individual Liberty

The most important social value in Western civilization is individual liberty. The human person is looked upon as God’s creature, gifted with free will which endows him with the capacity to choose what he will make of his life. Our inner, spiritual freedom must be matched by an outer and social liberty if man is to fulfill his duty toward his Maker. Creatures of the state cannot achieve their destiny as human beings; therefore, government must be limited to securing and preserving freedom of personal action, within the rules for maximizing liberty and opportunity for everyone.

Unless we are persuaded of the importance of freedom to the individual, it is obvious that we will not structure government around him to protect his private domain and secure his rights. The idea of individual liberty is old, but it was given a tremendous boost in the sixteenth century by the Reformation and the Renaissance.

The earliest manifestation of this renewed idea of liberty was in the area of religion, issuing in the conviction that a person should be allowed to worship God in his own way. This religious ferment in England gave us Puritanism, and early in the seventeenth century Puritanism projected a political movement whose members were contemptuously called Whiggamores—later shortened to Whigs—a word roughly equivalent to “cattle thieves.” The king’s men were called Tories—“highway robbers.” The Whigs worked for individual liberty and progress; the Tories defended the old order of the king, the landed aristocracy, and the established church.

One of the great writers and thinkers in the Puritan and Whig tradition was John Milton, who wrote his celebrated plea for the abolition of Parliamentary censorship of printed material in 1644, Areopagitica. Many skirmishes had to be fought before freedom of the press was finally accepted as one of the earmarks of a free society. Free speech is a corollary of press freedom, and I remind you of the statement attributed to Voltaire: “I disagree with everything you say, but I will defend with my life your right to say it.”

Adam Smith extended freedom to the economic order with The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 and warmly received in the thirteen colonies. Our population numbered about 3 million at this time; roughly one-third of these were Loyalists, that is, Tory in outlook, and besides, there was a war on. Despite these circumstances 2,500 sets of The Wealth of Nations were sold in the colonies within five years of its publication. The colonists had been practicing economic liberty for a long time, simply because their governments were too busy with other things to interfere—or too inefficient—and Adam Smith gave them a rationale.

The Bill of Rights

Ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted in 1791. Article the First reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .” The separation of Church and State enunciated here was a momentous first step in world history. Religious liberty, freedom of the press, free speech, and the free economy are four departments of the same liberating trend—the Whig movement.

The men we refer to as the Founding Fathers would have called themselves Whigs. Edmund Burke was the chief spokesman for a group in Parliament known as the Rockingham Whigs. In 1832 the Whig Party in England changed its name to one which more aptly described its emphasis on liberty. It became the Liberal Party, standing for free trade, religious liberty, the abolition of slavery, extension of the franchise and other reforms.

Classical Liberalism is not to be confused with the thing called “liberalism” in our time! Today’s “liberalism” is the exact opposite of historical Liberalism—which came out of the eighteenth-century Whiggism—which came out of the seventeenth-century Puritanism. The labels are the same; the realities are utterly different. Present-day liberals have trouble with ideas, as ideas, so they try to dispose of uncomfortable thoughts by pigeonholing them in a time slot. The ideas of individual liberty, inherent rights, limited government, and the free economy are, they say, eighteenth-century ideas. What a dumb comment! The proper test of an idea is not the test of time but the test of truth!

You may be wondering why I have not yet used the word “democracy,” although I’ve spoken of monarchy, oligarchy, and liberalism. Well, I’ll tell you. Our discussion has focused on the nature of government, and we have discovered that the essence of government is power, legal force.

Once this truth sinks in we take the next step, which is to figure out what functions may appropriately be assigned to the one social agency authorized to use force. This brings us back to the moral code and the primary values of life, liberty, and property. It is the function of the law to protect the life, liberty, and property of all persons alike in order that the human person may achieve his proper destiny.

Voting Is Appropriate for Choosing Office-Holders

There’s another question to resolve, tied in with the basic one, but much less important: How do you choose personnel for public office? After you have employed the relevant intellectual and moral criteria and confined public things to the public sector, leaving the major concerns of life in the private sector… once you’ve done this there’s still the matter of choosing people for office

One method is choice by bloodline. If your father is king, and if you are the eldest son, why you’ll be king when the old man dies. Limited monarchy still has its advocates, and kingship will work if a people embrace the monarchical ideology. Monarchy hasn’t always worked smoothly, however, else what would Shakespeare have done for his plays? Sometimes your mother’s lover will bump off the old man, or your kid brother might try to poison you.

There’s a better way to choose personnel for public office; let the people vote. Confine government within the limits dictated by reason and morals, lay down appropriate requirements, and then let voters go to the polls. The candidate who gets the majority of votes gets the job. This is democracy, and this is the right place for majority action. As Pericles put it 2,500 years ago, democracy is where the many participate in rule.

Voting is little more than a popularity contest, and the most popular man is not necessarily the best man, just as the most popular idea is not always the soundest idea. It is obvious, then, that balloting—or counting noses or taking a sampling of public opinion—is not the way to get at the fundamental question of the proper role of government within a society. We have to think hard about this one, which means we have to assemble the evidence; weigh, sift, and criticize it; compare notes with colleagues; and so on. In other words, this is an educational endeavor, a matter for the classroom, the study, the podium, the pulpit, the forum, the press. To count noses at this point is a cop out; there’s no place here for a Gallup Poll.

To summarize: The fundamental question has to do with the scope and functions of the political agency, and only hard thinking—education in the broad sense—can resolve this question. The lesser question has to do with the choice of personnel; and majority action—democratic decision—is the way to deal with it. But if we approach the first question with the mechanics appropriate to the second, we have confused the categories and we’re in for trouble.

Democratic Despotism

We began to confuse the categories more than 140 years ago, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed. His book Democracy in America warned us about the emergence here of what he called “democratic despotism,” which would “degrade men without tormenting them.” We were warned again in 1859 by a professor at Columbia University, Francis Lieber, in his book On Civil Liberty and Self-Government: “Woe to the country in which political hypocrisy first calls the people almighty, then teaches that the voice of the people is divine, then pretends to take a mere clamor for the true voice of the people, and lastly gets up the desired clamor.” Getting up the desired clamor is what we call “social engineering” or “the engineering of consent.”

What is called “a majority” in contemporary politics is almost invariably a numerical minority, whipped up by an even smaller minority of determined and sometimes unscrupulous men. There’s not a single plank in the platform of the welfare state that was put there because of a genuine majority. A welfarist government is always up for grabs, and various factions, pressure groups, special interests, causes, and ideologies seize the levers of government in order to impose their programs on the rest of the nation.

Let’s assume that we don’t like what’s going on today in this and other countries; we don’t like it because people are being violated, as well as principles. We know the government is off the track, and we want to get it back on; but we know in our bones that Edmund Burke was right when he said: “There never was, for any long time . . . a mean, sluggish, careless people that ever had a good government of any form.” Politics, in other words, reflects the character of people, and you cannot improve the tome of politics except as you elevate the character of a significant number of persons. The improvement of character is the hard task of religion, ethics, art, and education. When we do our work properly in these areas, our public life will automatically respond.

Large numbers are not required. A small number of men and women whose convictions are sound and clearly thought out, who can present their philosophy persuasively, and who manifest their ideas by the quality of their lives, can inspire the multitude whose ideas are too vague to generate convictions of any sort. A little leaven raises the entire lump of dough; a tiny flame starts a mighty conflagration; a small rudder turns a huge ship. And a handful of people possessed of ideas and a dream can change a nation–especially when that nation is searching for new answers and a new direction.

Mr. X manufactures gizmos in a plant which uses the varied skills of a thousand employees. These people might cheerfully acknowledge that they’d rather be sailing, or fishing, or whatever; but when it comes to supporting themselves they have chosen to work with Mr. X in preference to any known alternative. They are free to leave whenever a better opportunity offers, and many have indeed “graduated” into other forms of employment, to be replaced by people who have chosen to work with Mr. X as the best opportunity available to them. A lot of people find gizmos useful, and they are offered for sale at a price consumers can afford. So people buy, and Mr. X prospers. The relations between Mr. X and his employees are amicable; they are completely non-coercive and all arrangements are voluntary. Likewise all arrangements with customers. Mr. X is wholly dependent on willing customers, over whom he has no leverage except the appeal of his product, plus the persuasiveness of his advertising. Mr. X has a profitable business, and his customers profit too; owning a gizmo makes life more pleasant. There is an overall upgrading of the level of human satisfactions on the part of everyone involved: Mr. X, his employees, and the users of his product. By any definition of the term, Mr. X is performing a public service; everybody profits, nobody is coerced.

Mr. Y manufactures thingamajigs. There was once a brisk market for this gadget, but times have changed and the item is no longer fashionable. Sales decline steeply and the firm slumps into the red. Mr. Y’s firm is on the verge of failure. Now, no one likes to go down the drain, although in the profit and loss system of the free economy—usually called “capitalism”—some firms are bound to fail; customers simply stop buying, an act of free choice on their part, consumer sovereignty in action.

Mr. Y, although he has lost most of his former customers, has friends in Washington; so he lobbies for a handout. The politicians and bureaucrats respond by bailing him out with taxpayers’ money. What does this mean to the average citizen? People who had refused to voluntarily pay their hard-earned dollars for one of Mr. Y’s thingamajigs now have a portion of their earnings confiscated by the taxing authority in order to keep Mr. Y and his company afloat. Doesn’t seem right, does it?

As long as Messrs. X and Y operated in the private, voluntary sector of society they had no power to coerce anyone. Neither man could force anyone to work for him or buy his products. The rules of the marketplace forbid this. Under these rules Mr. Y faced failure, so he entered into an arrangement with government, and now the law forces every taxpayer to spend a fraction of his time working for Y, and another fraction to subsidize the sale of Y’s product.

There are many real-life situations that parallel the case of Mr. Y. Most recently in the news, and therefore fresh in our memories, is the Chrysler caper. The firm is a large one, and its products have merit. But for a complex set of reasons the American public turned to other makes of automobiles. The free market—which is the playing field where the rules of business hold sway—began telling Chrysler to go into some other line of business, or fail.

This adverse business judgment on its products turned Chrysler toward politics. The several hundred thousands of people who make up Chrysler—management, labor, and stockholders—refused to accept the verdict of consumers, who chose to buy other makes of cars. Instead, they turned to Washington and got help. They got a political remedy for economic failure, as have countless others.

Unbusinesslike Conduct

A business or industry endures only so long as it pleases customers. When a business ceases to please customers it ceases to exist as a business. At this stage of the game it may succeed in pleasing politicians, who have the power to force taxpayers to support the new operation. This is a different ball game. A failed business propped up by a government handout is no longer a business; it’s a hybrid which deserves criticism as an unethical raid on the public treasury. It doesn’t matter much what you label this politicized industry, so long as you realize that it operates in defiance of the rules which define a business or industry in a free society.

A businessman per se operates within the framework of rules laid down by “the market”; when he operates outside this framework, and by a different set of rules, he is something other than a businessman. “The market” describes the process of social cooperation under the division of labor, where free and virtuous people specialize in a complex variety of tasks in anticipation of a consumer demand for the goods and services they produce. This is stage one of the market, and it is followed by stage two—multiple voluntary exchanges of these goods and services where people give over something they value for whatever it is they value more. The end they have in view is maximum satisfaction of creaturely needs for food, clothing, shelter, recreation, or whatever.

Most of those involved in business, industry, and trade operate within the framework laid down by “the market.” They have a genuine desire to serve consumers; they take a craftsman’s pride in the honest workmanship embodied in quality products which make the life of all of us safer, healthier, or more pleasant. And they feel a moral obligation to give value for value received; they have adopted and try to live up to a code of “business ethics,” a praiseworthy effort, at which most businessmen succeed far better than many in other walks of life.

I was discussing this ethical point with a friend who had taught economics to a generation of students at a fine midwestern college, where he also served for some years as Dean. We were talking about our two professions—teaching and preaching—some of whose seamier sides we had experienced from the inside. “You know, Ed,” he said to me, “a thoroughly dishonest man can last longer as a professor or a preacher than as a used car salesman!” I had to admit that there was more than a grain of truth in Ben’s cynical observation; and further, that these same intellectuals have a tendency to look down their noses at business, industry, and trade, as if the people involved in commercial activity are a lesser breed—a mean and mistaken opinion which I reject completely.

The Customer Is Boss

In a genuinely free society, a laissez faire society in the early sense of this much-abused phrase, the businessman is a mandatary of consumers; the customer is boss. Consumer sovereignty! Is this the way the businessman likes it? Of course not. Our businessman would like to think of himself as the man in charge, hands on the reins, running a tight ship. But who is he kidding? He doesn’t have even the power to set wages in his own factory, or fix the prices he’ll charge for his products! His competition, his employees, and his customers make those decisions for him. If he tries to lower wages he will lose his best workers to his competition who pay the going rate or more. If he tries to raise prices people buy elsewhere. He’s stymied, and that’s why he’s tempted on occasion to persuade some politician to bend the rules in his favor, just enough to give him a little “fair advantage.” But when a businessman yields to this temptation he forfeits his standing as a businessman and becomes something else—a branch of the government bureaucracy with a status similar to the postal service. Wealth has a universal appeal, but wealth production is a dull affair. There’s nothing about work to make the adrenalin flow or the heart to leap; there’s no poetry, dash, or glamour about commercial transactions—which is why the literary tribe turns its back on the realm of trade.

John Ruskin, for example, admired the buccaneer and freebooter type, calling him the Baron of the Crags—the knight with his castle atop a hill. The modern man of wealth Ruskin referred to contemptuously as the Baron of the Bags—moneybags, that is. The businessman tends to accept this caricature of himself and his function, vainly trying to conceal it under a false and somewhat ridiculous image. If only business radiated some of the magic that invests royalty, or reflected some of the panache of the military! So dreams the man of business, who then finds wish fulfillment, of sorts, in assuming titles such as The Spaghetti King, The Chewing Gum Czar, The Fast Food Tycoon, and so on. Captains of Industry meet with their Lieutenants at the Admirals’ Club to work out the strategy and tactics of the next “trade war.” Inside the plant or in the boardroom our tiger is referred to with affectionate dread as The Boss, or The Old Man.

The Function of the Businessman Is to Serve the Customer

There is an inversion of values here, as well as a gross misunderstanding of the role of the businessman in society, a misunderstanding on the part of the businessman himself, which is shared by friends and enemies alike. Kings and dukes in the precapitalistic ages did not produce or earn the wealth they enjoyed; they seized the wealth produced by others. They lived by “The good old rule, The simple plan, That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can.”

Royalty and the nobility exercised vital functions at the time, but work was not one of them; and the same might be said of the military. As necessary as a military establishment is for the defense of the nation, is it not obvious that military action results in the consumption and destruction of wealth? The businessman appeared on the scene as a different breed altogether; the businessman earns whatever wealth he obtains, and the method he employs increases the well-being of others. He is on an ethical par, to say the very least, with those who rule and those who fight!

“I take what I want,” said Frederick the Great. “I can always get some pedant to justify my actions.” The thief also takes what he wants, and so does the pirate and the racketeer. The king, the crook, the buccaneer and the gangster pursue their naked self-interest directly, operating in terms of a ruthless egoistic hedonism. Bemused by these glamorous figures, apologists for capitalism have explained the motivation of the businessman in terms of the same egoistic hedonism. With friends like this the businessman doesn’t need enemies! It is a truism to say that everyone tries to improve his circumstances, to upgrade his level of well-being. The question is How? Pursuing one’s self-interest directly, at the expense of other people, is the way of the powerful and the crooked. Serving one’s self indirectly by advancing the well-being of other people is the operational principle of the free-market economy.

To illustrate: the successful buggy manufacturer with a deep personal commitment to this means of transport and pride in his product finds business falling off. Consumer taste is gravitating toward the new-fangled horseless carriage. Our entrepreneur, if he wants to stay in business, must swallow his pride and put his time, talents, and capital at the service of those who want automobiles. The ruler of this tiny industrial empire, as he fancies himself, surrenders, and agrees to put himself at the disposal of consumers. Everyone’s welfare is upgraded in the only way possible for this to occur.

The Good Society

The latter part of the 18th century marks a watershed in human history. Walter Lippmann, writing about the capitalistic era which opened two hundred years ago, utters an incandescent truth about this startlingly novel way of conducting our economic affairs: “For the first time in human history men had come upon a way of producing wealth in which the good fortune of others multiplied their own.” Read that one again, for it is the basic axiom of the free market economy, so fundamental that it is overlooked by friend and foe alike. Lippmann continues: “For the first time men could conceive a social order in which the ancient moral aspiration for liberty, equality, and fraternity was consistent with the abolition of poverty and the increase of wealth” (The Good Society, pp. 193–94).

This was the social order originally known as Classical Liberalism, built around the conviction that there is an inviolable essence in each person, which it is the function of the Law to protect. When the Law is limited to the administration of justice by securing the life, liberty and property of all persons alike, then people are free to peacefully pursue their personal goals, each respecting the right of every other to do the same. This is the good society operating under the moral law, the only kind of society in which a complex division-of-labor economy can flourish.

There is a moral law whose mandates are binding on every one of us. The moral law within each person—his individual conscience—instructs us to “injure no man.” It obligates us to work for justice and fair play in human affairs; to speak the truth in charity, keep our word and fulfill our contracts. This ancient code forbids murder, assault, theft, and covetousness. These are the most important items in any ethical code, so universal as to seem part of human nature itself, and so compelling that most of us acknowledge them as binding even while we fail to obey them.

There is not a separate ethic or set of moral principles trimmed or adapted to this group or that in society, even though our common speech seems to suggest this. It is improper, strictly speaking, to talk about “legal ethics,” “medical ethics,” “business ethics,” or the like. Lawyers, doctors, businessmen are judged by the same moral law that applies to all the rest of us. Free-market rules of business fall well within the moral law; and individual businessmen, large as well as small—so long as they stick to their last—measure up at least as well as members of other trades and professions. Only when a government grant of privilege is obtained is a moral principle violated. But when this happens the violator is no longer a businessman.

Leonard started out as a farm boy in the small town of Hubbardston, Michigan. There are always chores on a farm, and Leonard learned early on that time was not to be wasted. Leonard’s father died when the boy was ten. From then on Leonard shouldered the role of a responsible adult. In addition to farm chores, Leonard also clerked in the local store. As he remembered those days, Leonard remarked that his was a 102-hour work week!

There was a one-room schoolhouse in Hubbardston and, of course, church on Sunday and Bible school. Meager resources, these, but they did feed Leonard’s lust for knowledge and gave him the basic tools of learning: the three R’s—reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. His high-school years were spent at nearby Ferris Institute, where he earned his way by keeping the building in shape, looking after the furnace, and grooming the grounds. He had a room and cooked his own meals. He graduated from Ferris and joined the Air Corps.

During World War I, his troopship, the Tuscania, was sunk off the coast of Scotland. Leonard was among the survivors and went to an airbase in England. After the war, Leonard was sent to Germany to serve for another year in the army of occupation. He was about 20 years of age when he returned to his home state and opened a wholesale produce business in Ann Arbor. Before dawn he drove to the Detroit wholesale market and back to Ann Arbor to sell his commodities to grocery stores, fruit stands, and the like. It was backbreaking, heartbreaking work, but he stuck to it till he realized that the market was trying to tell him that peddling groceries was a misuse of his unique talents.

So he packed his wife and two sons into his car and drove to California. He eventually was able to get a job with the tiny Burlingame Chamber of Commerce outside of San Francisco, where he did well enough to be invited to head the much more active Palo Alto Chamber. He was now on the first rung of his remarkable career. Destiny, it seems, had tapped him on the right shoulder.

Leonard was now in his mid-twenties; handsome, strongly built, articulate, suave, well-groomed, energetic, and well-spoken. The total package was attractive to men and women alike, especially so because one sensed that this man had ordered his soul aright and had his priorities straightened out. His dedication was palpable, which made him all the more persuasive.

Mr. Herbert Hoover lived near Palo Alto and was already acknowledged to be the likely Republican candidate in the 1928 race for office of President of the United States. He won, which fact gave Leonard an impossible dream: why not hire a train to take a crowd of people from California to Washington to participate in the inaugural ceremonies? Could be a flop, of course; but when Leonard evolved a strong belief in something, a mysterious alchemy would somehow transform his vision into reality. It may be presumed that Leonard sounded out some of his friends and acquaintances, got some positive responses, and decided to go for broke; the whole package included a luxury Pullman with 16 cars, quality service and gourmet meals, nurse and doctor aboard, and a daily mimeographed bulletin, which Leonard edited. Once in the nation’s capital there would be special rates in first-class hotels, tickets for the parade, reservations for the Inaugural Ball . . . and who knows what else? It caught the eyes of the nation’s press, and the young man from Palo Alto was praised for his innovative mind and the sagacity he displayed in the execution of his plans.

Mr. Hoover conveyed his best thanks to Leonard, and the two saw each other occasionally until the death of the ex-president in 1964. There’s a story that Mr. Hoover submitted (decreed?) an article for publication in The Freeman—which Leonard turned down. Mr. Hoover accepted the rejection slip gracefully!

Leonard’s next move was to Seattle as assistant manager of the Western Division of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which extended its jurisdiction over the huge wedge of territory in our Northwest. From there Leonard moved back to San Francisco as manager of the Western Division, a portent perhaps, of even bigger things to come.

California is a state of mind, or a mental state—take your pick. There was—especially in southern California—a mixed bag of share-the-wealth enthusiasts: Marxists, socialists, social creditors, Townsendites, technocrats, followers of Upton Sinclair, and the like. The New Deal, with its myriad alphabet agencies, was sending its tentacles in every direction. The Chamber of Commerce would have nothing to do with the communists or socialists, but Chamber policy tended to favor national recovery programs, which seemed to be lending a helping hand to some sectors of business, as well as offering aid to farmers. And Chamber policies were, for young Read, gospel truth. If the Chamber favored some New Deal policies, so did Read!

Meeting Bill Mullendore

But there was in the Los Angeles area a small cadre of businessmen who were critical of all New Deal policies. The most articulate man in this group was W. C. Mullendore, an executive with Southern California Edison. Leonard journeyed to Los Angeles to meet with this man Mullendore and straighten him out. As Leonard tells this story, he spent ten minutes explaining Chamber policies, and the next few minutes trying to rationalize them. And began to stumble! His sound instincts began to send up warning signals. At which point Mr. Mullendore took over, ripped the Chamber’s position to shreds, and went on to demonstrate that the New Deal was riddled with fallacies and fantasies. Money is unjustly taxed away from those who earn it and unjustly given to those who lobby for it. And in effecting these transfers government itself becomes rich and powerful while the country at large suffers a drop in productivity, as well as an impairment of personal freedom.

Whatever the words uttered by Mr. Mullendore, they had an overwhelming effect on Read; they changed his life by altering his thinking. He began to study and then wrote a book in order to clarify his philosophy. The result was The Romance of Reality, published in 1937 by Dodd, Mead Company.

Under the prodding of Mr. Mullendore and others of like mind, Chamber policy began to shift away from campaigns that touted the climate, the oranges, the movies, and such, to serious efforts to change the climate of opinion by means of the written and the spoken word. The man to guide the Los Angeles Chamber in its new orientation was to be, of course, Leonard Read, who became general manager of the nation’s largest Chamber in 1939, when he was 41 years old. He was the right man, at the right time, in a strategic post. It was important that the Los Angeles Times was what we might call a conservative paper, which gave Read a fairly friendly press. The Register of Orange County was outspokenly libertarian; its publisher, R.C. Hoiles, was a dynamo. He and Read must have become allies early on.

And Leonard’s pastor, Reverend James W. Fifield, minister of the 4,000-member First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, with a Saturday evening radio hour heard from San Francisco to San Diego, was a foe of the New Deal and critical of the “Social Gospel” trend in the churches. To counter the “Social Gospel” Fifield sent a black minister, the Reverend Irving Merchant of his staff, around the country to meet with ministerial associations and explain its errors. Pastor Merchant collected some 17,000 signed cards of endorsement from ministers affirming their allegiance to a resistance movement (I’ve seen the cards!), which came to be called “Mobilization for Spiritual Ideals.” In short, the vineyard in southern California had reached a stage where a man like Leonard could make optimum use of his talents with support offered by the business and ecclesiastical communities. Leonard served on the board of First Church.

Enter Bastiat

And now Bastiat enters the picture. Thomas Nixon Carver, distinguished professor of economics at Harvard who championed the free-market economy during the ’20s and ’30s, had retired to southern California. Carver attended a luncheon at which Leonard was the speaker. After the talk Carver approached Leonard and said, “Mr. Read, you sound like Frederic Bastiat.” “Who is Bastiat?” inquired Leonard. Carver responded and promised to mail Bastiat’s booklet titled “Communism versus Free Trade.” Leonard loved it and soon issued it under the imprint of Pamphleteers, Inc., a small group of friends of liberty within the Chamber orbit who, in their “ninth-floor underground,” occasionally chipped in to print short works that otherwise might be neglected, like Rose Wilder Lane’s Give Me Liberty and Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Not long after this, Mr. Hoiles reprinted three of Bastiat’s books in the English translation of about 130 years ago. Several years after founding FEE, Leonard published Dean Russell’s robust translation of Bastiat’s The Law. Well over 500,000 copies have been circulated.

The public (or government) schools of Leonard’s boyhood offered a fairly sound curriculum; students were exposed to the basic public documents of this nation. The Declaration of Independence was Leonard’s favorite. Permit me to quote from Read’s interpretation of a portion of one sentence. “. . . in the fraction of one sentence written into the Declaration of Independence,” Read declared, “was stated the real American Revolution, the new idea, and it was this: ‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ That was it. This is the essence of Americanism. This is the rock upon which the whole ‘American miracle’ was founded.

“This revolutionary concept was at once a spiritual, a political, and an economic concept. It was spiritual in that the writers of the Declaration recognized and publicly proclaimed that the Creator was the endower of man’s rights, and thus the Creator is sovereign.

“It was political in implicitly denying that the state is the endower of man’s rights, thus declaring that the state is not sovereign.

“It was economic in the sense that if an individual has a right to his life, it follows that he has a right to sustain his life—the sustenance of life being nothing more nor less than the fruits of one’s own labor.”

These words are lifted from Leonard’s lecture “The Essence of Americanism,” his opening speech at virtually every one of our several hundred seminars (see page 527).

Liberty Cannot Be Sold

During Leonard’s five years as general manager of the Los Angeles Chamber, his mind sharpened and deepened; he grew and he outgrew. New insights developed as he pondered the question of how the freedom philosophy could best be advanced. In his earlier professional positions he had become well acquainted with advertising and promotional techniques. But the idea of individual liberty cannot be “sold” as if it were a cake of soap; it has to be explained—and explained in such a manner that the reader or hearer gains an intimate insight into the plain truth of the matter. The idea of “freedom” is more caught than taught; it’s analogous to a benign contagion spreading from person to person, until a few begin to say: “By George, I think I’ve got it!”

It was some years later that Leonard came across a confirmation of his own thoughts in a few words from Albert Schweitzer’s great 1923 book, Civilization and Ethics: “Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it. A new public opinion must be created privately and unobtrusively. The existing one is maintained by the press, by propaganda, by organization, and by financial and other influences at its disposal. . . . This unnatural way of spreading ideas must be opposed by the natural one, which goes from person to person and relies solely on the truth of the thoughts and the hearer’s receptiveness for new truth.”

Albert Jay Nock’s widely circulated essay, “Isaiah’s Job,” conveyed much the same message as the words of Schweitzer. Leonard has said that the unique stance of FEE was inspired by reading this essay by Nock. The first contact between the two men may have been in 1935 or 1936. Leonard told me that he read Nock’s Our Enemy, the State shortly after it came out and wrote a letter to Mr. Nock: “I’ve just read your Our Enemy, the State. It is a perfectly splendid book. But how can a brilliant man like you advocate the Single Tax?” Back came a letter from AJN: “Dear Mr. Read: I do not advocate the Single Tax: I merely believe in it.” Yours very truly, Albert Jay Nock. Leonard was, from then on, free from the distemper of mere advocacy.

The ice once broken, the relationship between the two men strengthened. Whenever Leonard came to New York he tried to arrange to have dinner with AJN. Nock published his magnificent Memoirs of a Superfluous Man in 1943. He sent a copy to Leonard inscribed, “If this book is good enough for Leonard E. Read, it’s good enough for me.” Signed, Albert Jay Nock. FEE is now the central source for Nock’s books; and there is a Nockian Society at 42 Leathers Road, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky 41017.

Leonard finally came to the conclusion that the institution he envisioned as a proper vehicle to advance the freedom philosophy could not operate as a facet of another type of institution . . . it had to be autonomous.

The bout with Bill Mullendore started it all. Leonard continued his own search for wisdom, reaching for new ideas and better ways to present them. He firmly grasped the profound truth that the advancement of human liberty is a learning process and not a selling problem.

What the freedom philosophy needed was “a local habitation and a name.” Fifty-two years ago, in 1946, it found both in Irvington, New York. FEE has been a wellspring of ideas of liberty since its inception—and the tradition continues.

Postscript: A fine, full-scale biography of Leonard Read written by Mary Sennholz, his secretary in the early days of FEE, is available from the Foundation. Highly recommended.

The Reverend Mr. Opitz served on the senior staff of The Foundation for Economic Education for 37 years. Now retired, he continues to serve FEE as a Trustee, and as a contributing editor of The Freeman.

The Disadvantages of Being Educated is an event, of sorts; it gathers together essays little noticed, perhaps, nor long remembered . . . except by those who have come to appreciate Albert Jay Nock’s vast learning, his wit, and his unembroidered literary style. This book is good news; the editor is thoroughly familiar with the entire range of Nock’s writing, and it may be assumed that these essays are his favorites.

Robert Thornton, the editor of this admirable collection, was the prime mover behind the scenes of the Nock renewal that began to surface during the late fifties. In 1963 he, a businessman, assembled two kindred spirits—a neurosurgeon and a minister—and over a convivial luncheon the Nockian Society began to emerge. It was not to be just another organization: God forbid! The three of us contemplated a kind of clearinghouse operation with an occasional newsletter carrying items of interest to men and women who had been touched by Nock’s writing. On our masthead were the words: No Meetings; No Officers; No Dues. This was to be a society that kept out of members’ way; the next best thing, observed someone, to no society at all! It was basically a mailing list plus a real person to answer the phone. Over the years the Society’s mailing list grew to nearly 700 names.

The Society had no expenses except postage. Members, from time to time, would send a gift to cover that. Occasionally we would turn up a rare, out-of-print Nock title and auction it off through the newsletter. Our first Society publication was a wonderful collection of Nock’s thoughts on a variety of topics, assembled by Robert Thornton and entitled Cogitations from Albert Jay Nock, 120 pages. This appeared in 1970 to mark the centenary of Nock’s birth. It has gone through three printings: our bestseller.

Most readers of this review know Nock, at least by name. One hopes that they gained some acquaintance with the man himself, and his career, in Jim Powell’s splendid essay on Nock in the March 1997 Freeman. In the same issue is a reprint of Nock’s most popular essay, Isaiah’s Job, which first appeared in print in Harper’s in 1936. The Foundation for Economic Education issued it in pamphlet form in the early fifties and has put nearly a million copies into print during the past 45 years.

There was an early Freeman launched in 1920 with Nock as editor. He authored many articles in addition to his editorials. Funds ran out in 1924 and Nock sailed off for the Continent, where he lived during most of the next 16 years. It was a period of intense literary activity. In 1926, his classic Jefferson appeared, to mark the centenary of our third president’s death. Half a dozen years later he gave a course of lectures at the University of Virginia, which became the book The Theory of Education in the United States. A steady flow of essays from Nock’s pen during the 1930s appeared in quality magazines and then in book form. He wrote a learned book on Rabelais and in 1931 published a definitive annotated edition of The Works of Francis Rabelais in two huge volumes. Our Enemy, the State appeared in 1935 and has been the subject of some controversy ever since concerning the distinction Nock makes between Government and The State; essentially it is the same distinction made by Bastiat between The Law, whose purpose is justice between persons, and The Law perverted to advantage some at the expense of others. This arrangement is clear in the case of the Norman Conquest of England. The Normans parceled out the land—20 percent to the king, 25 percent to The Church, and the rest to 170 Norman noblemen. Such a regime is The State, and may have been the kind of thing that Ludwig von Mises had in mind when he pointed out that All ownership derives from occupation and violence. (Socialism, p. 32 and Human Action, p. 679) Nock’s words clarify the issue: . . . when society deprives The State of the power to make positive interventions on the individual—power to exercise positive coercion on him in his economic and social life—then at once the State goes out of existence, and what remains is government . . . government as contemplated by Mr. Jefferson in the Declaration, by Paine, by Franklin, and the 18th century British Whigs and Liberals. That’s all. But, as Nock pointed out in another context, most people do not want a government that will let them alone; they want a government they can use to their own advantage, and at the expense of everyone else, i.e., they want The State.

After Nock returned to the United States in 1940, an old publisher friend began badgering him to write his autobiography. Nock had always felt that his private life was nobody’s business but his own. So the publisher tried a different tack: Why not make this the autobiography of a mind; how you arrived at the philosophy you live by, how you would explain and defend the ideas you’ve made your own, what first attracted you to them, and how they have served you? Nock was intrigued and set to work on what became Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. It’s a dull fellow indeed who can read this book and not be deeply moved by it. Ideas begin to bulge and fever in the brain; there are birth pangs, growth hurts! Your reading program changes as you chase down some of the titles Nock discusses; you are going through what might be termed a semi-religious experience. Nock never did seek a following in the customary understanding of that term. What he did was generate new perspectives in a reader, and a new mood; operate on your own steam and you begin to develop strength from within, also from around and above. There are Nockians and incipient Nockians in unexpected places; a zestful crew if ever there was one!

So, how does one get started? Well, you start by reading the essays, seventeen of them, in The Disadvantages of Being Educated, 221 pages of superb writing. The friendly publisher has designed a very attractive high-quality paperback, and Mr. Thornton, the secretary of The Nockian Society, contributes a fine introduction. You may contact The Nockian Society at 42 Leathers Road, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky 41017. Intellectual adventure lies ahead.

      In addition to editing the book review section of The Freeman, Dr. Batemarco is a marketing research manager in New York City and teaches economics at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York.

May FEE’s next fifty years build upon the framework it has laid in its first fifty. —RB

—Edmund A. Opitz

This paper was delivered at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas.

A few years ago there was an immensely popular television series, named after Dallas. The central character of this show was a powerful and unscrupulous businessman who got that way by climbing over the backs of rivals, manipulating politicians, and wheeling and dealing with shadowy figures on the fringes of the underworld. J. R. Ewing finally got in the way of a bullet, and for months this nation was racked by the question: “Who shot J.R.?” But the civilized man could only wonder why the trigger man waited so long!

Business and the businessman have had a bad press, almost uniformly. Do you remember the television show whose hero was a businessman? The show that portrayed this businessman as a person of integrity and vision, who labored long hours to produce a product that supplied a genuine need, which he marketed at prices people could afford? Who treated his employees with generosity and consideration, and his customers with unfailing courtesy? Who was a devoted family man, active in civic affairs, and a churchman? Who could recite Shakespeare by the yard, relaxed by listening to his fine collection of recorded symphony music, and could tell a Corot from a Monet? Do you remember that show? Perhaps it was a movie? Actually it was neither. Such a show was never produced; the subject is taboo, by today’s mores.

The businessman has rarely if ever been treated fairly and accurately in drama or fiction. Is this because there are no men and women of superior intellect and high character in the world of business, industry, and trade? Not at all. Has the world of business no dramatic possibilities? Of course it has. But the fictional businessman invariably turns out to be the villain. There is a reason why this is so; the businessman is portrayed as a scoundrel because there is an almost universal bias against business on the part of novelists and dramatists. Businessmen do not get a fair shake because novelists and dramatists—with rare exceptions—have an ideological axe to grind.

This is the impression that emerges from our casual contact with the world of popular entertainment, the world of television, films, and fiction. This impression is confirmed in an unpretentious little volume by Ben Stein entitled The View from Sunset Boulevard. Stein interviewed a number of Hollywood writers and producers of television shows in order to find out how they viewed the various aspects of American life. If a visitor from England were to spend a little time watching television, what image of America would he come away with? Stein deals with television’s treatment of crime, the police, government, the army, the family, and other aspects of American life, including business. How do the people in Hollywood regard business? “One of the clearest messages of television,” Stein writes, “is that businessmen are bad, evil people, and that big businessmen are the worst of all . . . the murderous, duplicitous, cynical businessman is about the only kind of businessman there is on TV adventure shows, just as the cunning, trickster businessman shares the stage with the pompous buffoon businessman in situation come-dies.” A well known producer, Stanley Kramer, sees business as “part of a very great power structure which wields enormous power over the people.” And beyond that, Kramer implies, there is an “arrangement” between business and organized crime: “the Mafia is part of the entire corporate entity now.”

The warped feelings of wealthy and talented Hollywood writers and producers did not spring into existence unaided; it is one of the calculated end results of an intense propaganda effort that has been hacking away at the roots of Western society since the middle of the last century—attacking its religious origin, its values, and what is perceived as the last bastion of the bourgeoisie, business. A scholarly work which meticulously researched this vast literature appeared in 1954, by Professor James Desmond Glover of the Harvard Business School, entitled The Attack on Big Business. Professor Glover writes: “In volumes upon volumes of testimony before Congressional committees, in popular novels, in learned treatises and textbooks, in poetry, in sermons, in opinions of Supreme Court justices, ‘big business’ and its works are seen as evil and attacked. The literature of criticism of ‘big business,’ and of the civilization it has done so much to bring into being, represents by now a perfectly staggering mass of material.”

The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality

What is the rationale for this widespread antagonism toward the business system, otherwise known as capitalism? I don’t profess to understand all the reasons for the anti-capitalistic mentality, but the root cause of the antipathy is surely the perception, the mistaken perception, that the relation between employer and employee is that of exploiter to victim. The employer may intend no harm, he may intend only good to those who work for him, but in the capitalistic mode of production Karl Marx contended the worker is denied the full fruits of his labor; a portion of every wage earner’s product is garnished by his boss. To simplify Marxist theory, we might say that John Smith who runs a machine in a shoe factory—punches the clock at eight o’clock in the morning and works till noon. During these four hours he produces six palm of shoes, which represent his wage for the day. John Smith returns to his bench and works four more hours in the afternoon, but the shoes he produces during these four hours are expropriated by his employer.

This is a summary statement of the surplus value theory, otherwise known as Marx’s exploitation theory. It is a central contention of Marxism that labor alone creates value, the value of a commodity being measured by the quantity of labor normally necessary to produce it. But if it is labor alone that creates value, the value created should belong exclusively to labor. It does not, however; the lion’s share is grabbed by the employer while the real producer is paid only a subsistence wage.

This theory overlooks the role of tools and machinery in production. The tool user in this generation is many times more productive than his counterpart of a few generations ago. Why is this? His naked labor power is no greater than that of people over the ages. The enhanced productivity of labor today is due to the tools and machinery at the disposal of every one of us—and those tools are the fruits of the labor of earlier generations. If today’s “worker” retained the full product of his individual effort, and only that, the poor fellow would starve.

A contemporary of Marx, the celebrated Austrian economist Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, demolished the surplus value theory in a book entitled Capital and Interest, published in 1884, the year after Marx died. The demolition job has been repeated many times since the appearance of Bohm-Bawerk’s great book, and the consensus of opinion among independent economists is that the surplus value theory does not hold water. The exploitation theory has great propaganda value, however, and it is used unthinkingly by those who are acting out a grudge against business, which, in their distorted vision, keeps the poor locked in their poverty in order that others might be rich.

Ben Stein, in the book mentioned earlier, records a portion of his conversation with television writer Bob Weiskopf:

“Q. Why are people poor in America?

“A. Because I don’t think the system could function if everyone was well off.

“Q. What do you mean?

“A. I think you have to have poor people in a capitalist society.

“Q. Why?

“A. To exploit. The rich people can’t exploit each other. Consequently they always exploit the poor.”

It is not only Hollywood script writers who profess to believe that the rich get richer only by making the poor poorer. The coordinator of the National Council of Churches’ Anti-Poverty Task Force asserts that, “Poverty would not continue to exist if those in power did not feel it was good for them.” A moment’s reflection will reveal this insulting accusation for the silly sentiment it is. We live in a commercial and manufacturing society. Our economy is featured by mass production, not only in factories but also in agriculture. The products of mass production flood our stores and supermarkets and showrooms, to be bought by the mass of consumers. Mass production cannot continue unless there is mass consumption; and the masses of people cannot consume the output of our mass production factories and fields unless they possess pur chasing power—the money to buy the goods of their choice. To suggest that those who have goods and services to sell have some sinister interest in keeping their potential customers too poor to buy is sheer nonsense! If the president of General Motors wants to sell you a Cadillac or a Buick or a Chevrolet—which he does—then he wants you to be rich enough to buy. in the free economy, everyone has a stake in the economic well-being of every other person.

It is in the immediate interest of business and businessmen that the masses of people be well off; people who are poor are poor customers, and business cannot survive without customers. Business has no stake in poverty; but there is a class of people who do need the poor, who do have an interest in keeping them poor. Permit me, in a slight digression, to offer you a few words on this point by the celebrated economist Thomas Sowell: “To be blunt, the poor are a gold mine. By the time they are studied, advised, experimented with and administered, the poor have helped many a middle class liberal to achieve affluence with government money. The total amount of money the government spends on its ‘anti-poverty’ efforts is three times what would be required to lift every man, woman, and child in America above the poverty line by simply sending money to the poor.”

Back now to the widespread animus against business, stemming from the false idea that labor is the sole source of value but is not allowed to keep what it produces. In the distorted vision of Karl Marx, business, industry, and trade—as these economic activities are organized in the free world—re intrinsically evil, and the businessman is a parasite and predator. Similar notions are entertained by many a man in the street who has never read a line of Marx, as well as by intellectuals who regard themselves as anti-Communists. Given this climate of opinion, the term “ethical businessman” is a contradiction in terms; it is the figure of speech known to English teachers as an oxymoron—a figure which juxtaposes incongruous terms like “virtuous thief” or “honest liar.”

Now, if businessmen are involved in activities which are intrinsically crooked, evil by their very nature, then it is pointless to discuss the ethical situations of business or the moral dilemmas businessmen sometimes face. It would be like instructing a thief on how to rob banks honestly! So I propose to spend a few minutes trying to understand the nature of the economic activities that engage businessmen, while touching upon some of the values that are implicated in the production of goods and services.

All Are Sinners

You have a right to know the direction from which I am coming at you, to know my bias. I have examined the catalogue of sins of which businessmen are allegedly guilty, and Lo! they are the very same sins exhibited by people in every other walk of life. We all break the Commandments now and then, every one of us. Businessmen have no monopoly on sin. My mind goes back to a conversation I had several years ago with a professor of economics with years of teaching behind him, who had also served for many years as the academic dean of a prestigious midwestern college. He said to me, “You know, Ed, a thoroughly dishonest man can last a lot longer in teaching or preaching than as a used car salesman.” There may be some hyperbole here, but my friend has a point. There are good and bad in all walks of life, and there are very few saints anywhere; but in the eyes of the law all are equal. The law should mete out justice upon the guilty party with impartiality. It should punish those who harass, steal, defraud, breach a contract, assault, or murder. This is the rule of law in action.

There is no justification for the assumption that all businessmen are evil people who must therefore be regulated, i.e., adjudged guilty until proven innocent. There is no more reason for regulating businessmen than for regulating clergymen or teachers!

Who Decides?

The free market economic system produces goods and services in abundance, and it rewards every participant according to his individual contribution—as his peers judge that contribution. “To the producer belongs the fruits of his toil,” is an ancient bit of wisdom, as true now as when first uttered. The relation between an individual’s effort and the eventual reward of his exertions is fairly clear in a simple situation like subsistence farming. You work by yourself, preparing the ground in the spring, seeding and tilling it, watering the furrows with your sweat during the heat of summer, reaping in the fall. The abundance of your harvest is directly traceable to your skills and the amount of work you put forth. The greater your effort the more ample your harvest—other things being equal. The harvest is your wage, and your wage in this instance is pretty much determined by your own skill and your own exertions; the more you put in the more you will take out. What you take out is your wage, the economic equivalent of your contribution.

How is your wage determined in a complex division of labor society such as ours? Justice still demands that every participant in the economy be rewarded according to his contribution to the productive process. But how shall we identify each individual’s contribution in order to reward him commensurately? Economists from Adam Smith to Ludwig von Mises to F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman have worked this question over and come up with an answer that is completely democratic and economically efficient, while encouraging every person in the full exercise of his lawful liberties. The answer provided by the economist is: Let the market decide what each person’s contribution is worth and reward him accordingly. “The market” describes the process of social cooperation under the division of labor where free people specialize in a complex variety of tasks in anticipation of a consumer demand for the goods and services they produce—followed by multiple voluntary exchanges of these products in which persons give over something they value for whatever they value more. This market process will reward people unequally, but it will reward them equitably, compensating each person in a measure equal to his peers’ evaluation of his services.

The eminent economist Frank H. Knight, founder of the Chicago School, put the matter in these words: “It is a proposition of elementary economics that ideal market competition will force entrepreneurs to pay every productive agent employed what his cooperation adds to the total, the difference between what it can be with him and what it would be without him. This is his own product in the only meaning the word can have where persons or their resources act jointly.” In short, each person will get his fair share, defined as what others will voluntarily offer for his goods and services—provided there is general freedom.

Each one of us is judged by his peers; our offerings of goods and services are evaluated by consumers who give us what they think our offerings are worth to them, and not a penny more. This is a democratic judgment on the value of the products of our labor—one dollar, one vote—and it is made by consumers who are, as everyone knows, ignorant, venal, superstitious, neurotic, biased, and stupid. In other words, people just like us—because every one of us is a consumer! When it is a question of the wage we earn we are dependent on consumers, who couldn’t care less that we are upright men of sterling character; their sole concern is: Do we have a product or service they want? If we do, they reward us handsomely. If we don’t, it matters not that we have labored long and painfully over our brainchild; if the customers don’t want it, we’re stuck with it. This is consumer sovereignty.

Consumers run the free economy; producers cater to their demands. It’s their show. What kind of a show do they put on? Not always a good one, I’m sorry to say. But I’ll say one thing for consumer sovereignty: it sure beats the alternative.

Freedom to Excel and Fail

Freedom is a costly thing, and we cannot keep it unless we are willing to pay the price. It is required of each one of us that we firmly adhere to the processes of freedom, even when we can barely stand some of the products of freedom—the products being what people do when given their “dru-thers.” The freer the society the more things people will do that we might find distasteful; this is one of the consequences of freedom, and we have to school ourselves to accept it. This we have learned to do in two important areas—freedom of the press and freedom of worship. We must learn to be equally tolerant in the areas of business, industry, and trade.

How fares the written word when the masses are relatively literate and free to pick their own reading material, where they themselves select the men and women who will do their writing for them? The highest paid writers may be those whose subliterary efforts jam the boob tube, some of whose opinions I quoted earlier. The magazines and newspapers of largest circulation may be those which cater to our prurient interests. Best-selling novels are forgotten by next year. But as much as anyone might deplore the decline of reading and the low estate of publishing—now that the press is free—no one with any sense would wish to add a Department of Censorship to the already overgrown government bureaucracy. To put the press under a Ministry of Information and Propaganda would be disastrous. Freedom of the press may give every idiocy a voice; authors may not reap a monetary reward commensurate with their literary talents; so be it, we say; it’s the price we pay willingly for freedom of the press. Freedom merely allows the budding genius the elbow room he needs to live, and breathe, and write. And books of solid scholarly competence still appear regularly for the small audience which needs the nourishment only the word can provide. My mind goes back to an observation of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:—never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these [works] come duly down, for the sake of those few persons . . . .”

Take the matter of religious liberty, the separation of church and state. In a free society people are not punished for belonging to the “wrong” church. They belong to the church of their own choice, or they belong to no church, as the case might be. In any event, the law pays no attention, so long as no injury is done to person or property. What happens when people are free in the area of religion? First of all, they mangle the phrase “separation of church and state” into my least favorite American shibboleth! Even people who should know better distort and misuse the phrase.

Then there are the so-called “electronic churches,” the spellbinders who appear in television; there are the “hot gospellers” who dominate radio every Sunday morning; there are the cults in which people give over their souls to some figure of dubious charismatic allure; there is the new appeal of mystical imports from the exotic Orient; the occult flourishes, along with magic and superstition. And the mainline churches, in many instances, have subordinated theology to dubious economic and political theory. Church bodies support and help finance revolutionary and guerrilla activities. But is anyone campaigning to establish a government Department of Religion? Not to my knowledge. However much we may dislike certain manifestations of religion when belief is free, we shrug our shoulders and tolerate what we dislike as the price of religious liberty.

Some of these same considerations apply to the realm of business, industry, and trade, where, as H. L. Mencken once wryly observed: “Nobody ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public.” This is all too obvious in what is called the entertainment industry. Here is a hyperkinetic young man, lacking in musical sense, who makes eight million dollars a year by howling and gyrating in public places. Here’s another young man, gifted with a high musical I.Q. and years of study behind him. A handful of people appreciate his organ virtuosity and his sensitive interpretation of Bach. He earns a living as a bank teller, directs a choir, and gives an occasional free organ recital. Young people pay millions of dollars to hear the Rolling Stones, while the Boston Symphony has to pass the hat in order to survive. Is this fair? No. Is it a matter for political solution? That would be an even greater travesty of justice.

The Market Economy

Human beings everywhere have engaged in trade and barter. There is some specialization and a division of labor even among primitive people, with a consequent exchange of the fruits of specialization. The voluntary exchange of goods and services is the market in operation, and the market is everywhere. But the market does not spontaneously or automatically transform itself into the market economy; the market economy emerges only when the moral, political, and legal conditions are right. This occurred under the Whig philosophy of men like Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. These men drew up a frame of government whose main purpose was to secure each person in his life, liberty, and property. This political idea of limited, constitutional government is grounded on the religious conviction that we are God’s creatures, possessing immortal souls. The conviction that persons are sacred is politically translated into our Creator- endowed rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Adam Smith referred to his “liberal plan of liberty, equality and justice,” with the free market as the economic counterpart to political liberty. The rule of law replaces the arbitrary will of rulers and personal freedom expands. It is significant that The Wealth of Nations appeared in the same year as the Declaration of Independence.

The discipline of economics as a separate subject matter was almost non-existent prior to Adam Smith. Virtually starting from scratch, Smith created nearly the whole edifice of economics. Adam Smith presupposed the legal framework of the Whig jurists, where the law would eliminate force from the marketplace, punish fraud, and enforce contracts. He also presupposed a high level of probity in the general population. Given these conditions, the market is self-starting and self-regulating; the buying habits of consumers guide producers, determining how the entrepreneur will decide to combine scarce resources for the maximum satisfaction of consumer needs. There will be a harmony in these diverse activities of millions of participants as if everything were directed by “an invisible hand.” The market economy—dubbed “capitalism” by its enemies about a century after Smith—contained the promise of prosperity for the multitudes. These same masses composed a self-governing people. Political liberty expanded and people had lots of elbow room to pick and choose and plan their own lives.

The Declaration and the Constitution created the political frame for a people who aspired to the ideal of”liberty and justice for all.” Political liberty assured freedom in economic transactions between employer and employee, seller and buyer. The work ethic was enshrined in America and wages doubled, redoubled, and doubled again during the nineteenth century—an eightfold increase in real wages. For the first time in history the masses glimpsed the possibility of pulling themselves out of poverty and creating new opportunities for their children. America’s schools and churches sought to shore up the traditional value structure of our culture and to orient the newly enlarged popular freedom toward virtue. Their success, needless to say, was only partial.

Was there ugliness in American life? Of course there was. Freedom was misused; the scramble for wealth was sometimes pretty crass. The newly rich were vulgar; plunderers bought and sold politicians, and fortunes were scooped out of the public treasury—all in violation of Whig theory and free market economics. But you cannot blame capitalism for the miscreants who refuse to abide by its rules.

Despite the gray and black areas in our history, there was still open opportunity on these shores, in comparison to what was available in other parts of the globe. Thirty-three million people told us so by coming here as immigrants during the half century before World War I. They came because life here—although far from perfect—was far better for them than life elsewhere.

The business of America is not business. It never was. The business of America is individual liberty, with the law enforcing an even-handed justice among equal persons. When the law provides a free field and no favor—which was the original implication of laissez faire—the economic order is the free market.

The market economy does not carry any implication that business may act irresponsibly with impunity. If, for example, industrial wastes are disposed of in such a way that persons are injured or property damaged, the law should punish those responsible and offer redress to the injured party. If a seller misrepresents a product he is guilty of fraud and the buyer’s injury should be redressed. If a businessman solicits and obtains a subsidy from government, or if government gives him monopolistic advantages over his competition enabling him to exact a higher price from his customers, he has forfeited his status as a businessman. A businessman as such has no power over anyone, his only leverage being the quality of his goods and the persuasiveness of his advertising. The businessman has the same rights and the same responsibilities as every other member of society, no more and no less.

Lord Acton’s aphorism about power has been overquoted, but it is still terribly true. Power must be curbed if we will that people shall be free, and an independent economic order does put fetters on governmental power. People who control their own livelihood have little to fear from rulers; but political control of the economic life of a nation is totalitarian rule. The market economy curbs power in another way as well; it channels the activities of energetic, ambitious, and competitive personalities into the production of goods and services and away from politics. The rich in a free economy get that way because consumers appreciate the goods and services they offer; and if these few wish their descendants to enjoy this wealth the bulk of it must be invested in industries producing goods for the masses.

The End of Liberty

Let us give credit where credit is due; business, industry, and trade have made us into a prosperous nation. But our wealth has not made us a happy nation, or a contented one. We have proved once again—as if any further proof were needed—that prosperity and worldly success are, at best, a means to ends beyond themselves. Refine and im prove a means as you will, it still remains only a means, needing a worthy end if it is to be meaningful. There is a discipline that deals with ends and goals, with the purposes that make life significant; it is called reli-gion- though not everything bearing that label qualifies. But genuine Christianity is at a low ebb in the modern world; we have lost that vital contact with God and the moral law which energized our ancestors and made life for them an adventure in destiny. The decadence of Christianity is the root cause of the modern malaise; Plato argued two millennia ago that disorder in society is a reflection of disorder in the soul, that is, in our defective thinking and misguided loyalties. The work of renewal must begin here, with individual persons, and then go on to a restoration of the theological foundation necessary to a free society.

This is not the task of business, industry, and trade; the economic order has a more humble role to play. Business and the free economy beget a prosperous society which provides people the leisure they need to cultivate those goods which mark a high civilization: religion and worship, education and science, arts and crafts, conversation and play. These are the areas where people exercise their freedom most creatively, where they discover the goals proper to human life. Responsible freedom in the economic realm has the important role of supplying the indispensable means for these ends.

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

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

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

Liberty Lost

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

Liberty Regained

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

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

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

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

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

“Social Utility” Trap

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

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

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

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

Competing Ethical Codes

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

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

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

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

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

The Lack of an Ethical Consensus

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing Christianity

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

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

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

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

Utilitarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The City of God and The City of Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This essay is adapted from an article that appeared in the January 1977 issue of The Freeman.

Lord Northcliffe, the publisher of the London Times, came to this country a few years after World War I. A banquet in his honor was held in New York City, and at the appropriate time he rose to his feet to propose a toast. Prohibition was in effect, you will recall, and the beverage customarily drunk by Northcliffe in his homeland was not available here. So Northcliffe raised his glass of water and said: “Here’s to America, where you do as you please. And if you don’t, they make you!”

Here, in this land of the free, “we” as voters had amended the Constitution to punish conduct which “we”—as consumers—had been enjoying. If you point out that the 18th Amendment had been inserted into the Constitution by majority vote, and that therefore “we” had done it to “ourselves,” you need to be reminded that the “we” who did it were not the same people as the “ourselves” to whom it was done!

The 18th Amendment was repealed by passage of the 21st Amendment in 1933. Shortly thereafter another prohibition law was passed, this one a prohibition against owning gold. Under the earlier dispensation you could walk down the street with a pocketful of gold coins without breaking the law; but if you were caught carrying a bottle of whiskey you might be arrested. Then the legal switcheroo occurred, and you could carry all the whiskey you wanted, but if you had any gold in your pocket you could be thrown in jail!

Our scientists are exploring outer space looking for intelligent life on other planets. I hope they find some, because there’s none to spare on planet Earth! With how little wisdom do we organize our lives, especially in the areas of government and the economy. We’ve been going by dead reckoning for too long, and our dumb luck has just about run out.

Our present subject is political philosophy. This is a complex subject, so we shall do no more than ponder the first step. The big question in any serious theory of politics is to decide what’s political and what’s private. In a totalitarian nation there is no sector of life which is intrinsically private; the whole of life is politicized. The State controls economic life; there is a State Church; there is a controlled press; the schools are all run by government. Big Brother oversees every activity. When people in such a nation decide to move in the direction of a free society, they do so by carving private sectors out of what had hitherto been 100 percent public.

You’re all familiar with the division of society into the private, voluntary sector, in contrast to the public, governmental, coercive sector; and you know that “the history of liberty is the history of the limitations placed upon governmental power.” it is obvious that the more things the law commands you to do the fewer the things you may do freely, on your own initiative. If the public, governmental sector extends over 50 percent of the society, this means that the people of this society, are half free and half unfree. We become freer only as we limit government to its proper competence. But what is government’s proper competence?

In the 18th century they put the question as follows: What shall be the extent of rule? This is the fundamental, primordial question in political philosophy, but we’d phrase it differently. What are the functions appropriate to the political agency? we would ask. What is the role of the law? What tasks should be assigned to Washington or some lesser governmental agency, and in what sectors of life should people be free to pursue their own goals? When should legal coercion be used to force a person to do something against his will?

What Functions Are Appropriate?

In the light of government’s nature, what functions may we appropriately assign to it? This is the question, and there are two ways to approach it. The approach favored today is to count noses—find out what a majority of the people want from government, and then elect politicians who will give it to them! And believe me, they’ve been giving it to us!

The other approach, the one favored by our ancestors, was to think about the matte~ employing relevant intellectual and moral considerations in order to decide what the law should and should not do. The backbone of every legal system is a set of prohibitions, a series of”Thou Shalt Not’s.” The law forbids certain actions and punishes those who persist in them, so we need to know what actions should be forbidden. Our moral code prescribes what not to do, so the solid core of any legal system is the moral code, which, in our culture is conveyed to us by the Mosaic Law: the Ten Commandments. The Sixth Commandment of The Decalogue says: “Thou shalt not commit murder,” and this moral imperative against murder is built into every statute which prescribes punishment for homicide. The Eighth Commandment says: “Thou shalt not steal,” and this moral norm gives rise to laws punishing theft.

There is a moral law against murder because each human life is precious; and there is a moral law against theft because rightful property is an extension of the person. “A possession,” Aristotle writes, “is an instrument for maintaining life.” Deprive a person of the right to own property and for his own survival he has to become the property of someone else—a slave. The master-slave relation is a violation of the rightful order of things, the rightful order being individual liberty and voluntary association.

The Gift of Life

We’ve taken care of the right to life and the right to property; what about liberty? Reflect on the fact that every human being has the gift of life, and each of us is charged with the primary responsibility of bringing his own life to completion. Each one of us is also a steward of the earth’s scarce resources, which we must use wisely and economically. In short, we are responsible beings. But no person can be held responsible for the way he lives his life and conserves his property, unless he is free. Responsibility—Freedom; two sides of one coin. Liberty, therefore, is a necessary corollary to Life and Property. Our forebears regarded Life, Liberty, and Property as natural fights, and the importance of these basic rights was stressed again and again in the oratory, the preaching, and the writings of the 18th century. Life, Liberty, and Property are potent ideas because they transcribe into words an important aspect of the way things are.

Our ancestors founded their legal and moral codes on the nature of things, on what they believed to be real—just as students of the natural sciences frame their scientific laws to describe the way things behave. For example: physical bodies throughout the universe attract one another; the attraction increases with the mass of the attracting bodies and diminishes with the square of the distance between them. This has always been so, but it was Sir Isaac Newton who made some observations along these lines and gave us the law of gravitation. How come gravitational attraction varies as the inverse square of the distance, and not as the inverse cube? One is as thinkable as the other; but it just happens that the universe is prejudiced against the inverse-cube in this instance; precisely as this same universe is prejudiced against murder, has a strong bias in favor of property, and wills that men and women be free.

Immanuel Kant echoed an ancient sentiment when he declared that two things filled him with awe: the starry heavens without, and the moral law within. The precision and order in nature manifest the Author of nature, the Creator. The Creator is also the Author of our being and requires certain duties of us, his creatures. There is, thus, a reality outside of us joined to the reality within, and this twofold reality—inner and outer—has an intelligible pattern, a coherent structure. This dual arrangement is not made by human hands; it’s unchangeable, it’s not affected by our wishes, and it can’t be tampered with. It can, however, be misinterpreted, and it may be disobeyed. We consult certain portions of the exterior pattern and draw up blueprints for building a bridge. If we misinterpret, the bridge collapses. And a society disintegrates if its members disobey the configuration laid down in the nature of things for our guidance. This configuration is the moral order, as interpreted by reason and tradition.

The point, simply put, is that our forebears, when they wanted some clues for regulating their private and public lives, anchored their beliefs in a reality beyond society and superior to government. They thought their way through to the idea of a sacred order which overarches the world—the order of creation. They figured out that our duties within society reflect the mandates of this divine order.

Take a Poll

This view of one’s duty is quite in contrast to the method currently popular for determining what we should do politically, which is to conduct an opinion poll. Find out what the crowd wants, and then say, “Me too!” This is what the advice of certain political scientists boils down to. Here is Professor James MacGregor Burns, a self- professed liberal and the author of several highly touted books, including The Deadlock of Democracy and a biography of John F. Kennedy. Liberals play what Burns calls “the numbers game.” “As a liberal I believe in majority rule,” he writes. “I believe that the great decisions should be made by numbers.” In other words, don’t bother to think; just count! “What does a majority have a right to do?” he asks. And he answers his own question. “A majority has the right to do anything in the economic and social arena that is relevant to our national problems and national purposes.” And then, realizing the enormity of what he has just said, he backs off: “. . . except to change the basic rules of the game.”

Burns’s final disclaimer sounds much like an afterthought, for some of his liberal cohorts sup-port the idea of unqualified majority rule. The late Herman Finer, in his anti-Hayek book entitled Road to Reaction, declares “For in a democracy, right is what the majority makes it to be.” (p. 60) What we have here is an updating of the ancient “might makes right” doctrine. The majority does have more muscle than the minority, it has the power to carry out its will, and thus it is entitled to have its own way. If right is whatever the majority says it is, then whatever the majority does is O.K., by definition. Farewell, then, to individual rights, and farewell to the rights of minorities; the majority is the group that has made it to the top, and the name of the game is winner take all.

The dictionary definition of a majority is 50 percent plus 1. But if you were to draw up an equation to diagram modern majoritarianism it would read:

50% plus 1 = 100%

50% minus 1 = 0

Amusing confirmation comes from a professor at Rutgers University, writing a letter to The Times. Several years ago considerable criticism was generated by the appointment of a certain man to a position in the national government. Such criticism is unwarranted, writes our political scientist, because the critics comprise “a public which, by virtue of having lost the last election, has no business approving or disapproving appointments by those who won.” This is a modern version of the old adage, “To the victor belong the spoils.” This Rutgers professor goes on to say, “Contrary to President Lincoln’s famous but misleading phrase, ours is not a government by the people, but government by government.” So there!

The Nature of Government

What functions may we appropriately assign to the political agency? What should government do? Today’s answer is that government should do whatever a majority wants a government to do; find out what the people want from government, and then give it to them. The older and truer answer is based upon the belief that the rules of living together in society may be discovered if we think hard and clearly about the matter and the corollary that we can conform our lives to these rules if we resolve to do so. But I have said nothing so far about the nature or essence of government.

Americans are justly proud of our nation, but this pride sometimes blinds us to reality. How often have you heard someone declare, “In America, ‘We’ are the government.” This assertion is demonstrably untrue; “we” are the society, all 250 million of us; but society and government are not at all the same entity. Society is all-of-us, whereas the government is only some-of-us. The some-of-us who make up government would begin with the President, Vice-President, and Cabinet; it would include Congress and the bureaucracy; it would descend through governors, mayors and lesser officials, down to sheriffs and the cop on the beat.

A Unique Institution

Government is unique among all the institutions of society; society has bestowed upon this one agency, government, the exclusive right to use legal force in specified situations. Governments use persuasion and they employ advertising technicians and public relations experts. They invoke the symbols of authority, legitimacy, and tradition-as do institutions like the Church and the School. But only one agency has the power to tax; only one agency has the authority to operate the system of courts and jails; only one agency has a warrant for mobilizing the machinery for making war; and that is government, the power structure. Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—it doesn’t matter. Governmental action is what it is, no matter what rationale might be offered to justify what it does. Government always acts with power; in the last resort government uses force to back up its decrees.

It is a truism that government is society’s legal agency of compulsion. Virtually every statesman and every political scientist—whether Left or Right—takes this for granted and does his theorizing from this as a base. “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,” wrote George Washington; “it is force.” Bertrand Russell, in a 1916 book, said, “The essence of the State is that it is the repository of the collective force of its citizens.” Ten years later, Columbia University professor R. M. MacIver spoke of the state as “the authority which alone has compulsive power.” The English writer Alfred Cobban says that “the essence of the State, and of all political organizations, is power.”

But why belabor the obvious except for the fact that so many of our contemporaries—those who say “we are the government”—overlook it? What we are talking about here is the power of man overman; government is the legal authorization which permits some men to use force on others. Whenever we advocate a law to accomplish a certain goal, we advertise our inability to persuade people to act in the manner we recommend, so we’re going to force them to conform! As Sargent Striver once put it, “In a democracy you don’t compel people to do something, unless you are sure they won’t do it.”

In the liberal mythology of this century, government is all things to all men. Liberals think that government assumes whatever characteristics people wish upon it—like Proteus in Greek mythology who took on one shape after another, depending on the circumstances. But government is not an all-purpose tool; it has a specific nature, and the nature of government determines what government can accomplish. When properly limited, government uses lawful force to annul violence and redress injury, thus limited government serves a social end no other agency—call it what you will—an achieve. But when the proper limits are overstepped, a government’s use of force is destructive. The alternatives here are defensive force versus aggressive force; or law versus tyanny-as the Greeks would have put it. Here’s how Aeschylus saw it in his drama The Eumenides: “Let no man live uncurbed by law, nor curbed by tyranny.”

The Moral Code

If the political agency is to serve a moral end it must not violate the moral code. The moral code tells us that human life is sacred, that liberty is precious, and that ownership of property is good. And by the same token, this moral code supplies a definition of criminal action; murder is a crime, theft is a crime, and it is criminal to abridge any person’s lawful freedom. It is the essential function of government, then, in harmony with the moral code, to use lawful force against criminals in order that peaceful citizens may go about their business. The use of lawful force against criminals for the protection of the innocent is the earmark of a properly limited government. Standing in utter contrast is the State’s use of tyrannical force on peaceful citizens—whatever the excuse, or whatever the rationalization. It’s the contrast between defense and aggression, between the rule of law and oppression.

People should not be forced into conformity with any social blueprint; their private plans should not be overridden in the interests of some national plan or social goal. Government—the public power—should never be used for private advantage; it should not be used to protect people from themselves. Well, then, what should the law do to peaceful, innocent citizens? It should let ‘em alone! When government lets John Doe alone, and punishes anyone who refuses to let him alone, then John Doe is a free man.

In this country we have a republican form of government. The word “republic” is from the Latin words, res and publica, meaning the things or affairs which are common to all of us, the affairs which are in the public domain, in sharp contrast to matters which are private. Government, then, is “the public thing,” and this strong emphasis on public serves to delimit and set boundaries to governmental power, in the interest of preserving the integrity of the private domain.

What’s in a name? you might be thinking. Well, in this case, in the case of republic, a lot. The word “republic” encapsulates a political philosophy; it connotes the philosophy of government that would limit government to the defense of life, liberty, and property in order to serve the ends of justice. There’s no such connotation in the word “monarchy,” for example; or in aristocracy or oligarchy.

A monarch is the sole, supreme ruler of a country, and there is theoretically no area in the life of his citizens over which he may not hold sway. The king owns the country and his people belong to him. Monarchical practice pretty well coincided with theory in what is called “Oriental Despotism,” but in Christendom the power of the kings was limited by the nobility on the one hand, and the Emperor on the other; and all secular rulers had to take account of the power of the Papacy. Power was thus played off against power, to the advantage of the populace.

Individual Liberty

The most important social value in Western civilization, historically, is the idea of individual liberty. The human person was looked upon as God’s creature, gifted with free will which endows him with the capacity to choose what he will make of his life. This is our inner, spiritual freedom and it must be matched by an outer and social liberty if man is to fulfill his duty toward his Maker. Creatures of the state cannot achieve their destiny as human beings; therefore, government must be limited to securing and preserving freedom of personal action within the rules, and the rules must be designed to maximize liberty and opportunity for everyone.

Now, unless we are persuaded of the importance of freedom to the individual, it is obvious that we will not bother to structure government around him to protect his private domain and secure his rights. So, the idea of individual liberty is the key. This idea is as old as Christianity but it was given a tremendous boost in the 16th century by the Reformation and the Renaissance. The earliest manifestation of this renewed idea of individual liberty was in the area of religion, issuing in the conviction that every person should be allowed to worship God in his own way. This religious ferment in 16th-century England gave us Puritanism. Early in the 17th-century, Puritanism projected a political movement whose members were contemptuously called Whiggamores—later shortened to Whigs—a word roughly equivalent to “cattle thieves.” The king’s men were called Tories—“highway robbers.” The Whigs worked for individual liberty and progress; the Tories defended the old order of the king, the landed aristocracy, and the established church.

One of the great writers and thinkers in the Puritan and Whig tradition was John Milton, who wrote his celebrated plea for the abolition of Parliamentary censorship of printed material in 1644, Areopagitica. Many skirmishes had to be fought before freedom of the press was finally accepted as one of the earmarks of a free society. Free speech is a corollary of press freedom, and I remind you of the statement attributed to Voltaire: “I disagree with everything you say, but I will defend with my life your right to say it.”

Adam Smith extended freedom to the economic order with The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 and warmly received in the thirteen colonies. The colonists had been practicing economic liberty for a long time, simply because their governments were too busy with other things to interfere—or too inefficient—and Adam Smith gave them a rationale.

Ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted in 1791. Article the First reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .” The separation of Church and State enunciated here was a momentous first step in world history. Religious liberty, freedom of the press, free speech, and the free economy are four departments of the same liberating trend—the Whig movement.

The men we refer to as the Founding Fathers would have called themselves Whigs. Edmund Burke was the chief spokesman for a group in Parliament known as The Rockingham Whigs. In 1832 the Whig Party in England changed its name to one which more aptly described its emphasis on liberty, it became the Liberal Party, standing for free trade, religious liberty, the abolition of slavery, extension of the franchise and other reforms.

Classical Liberalism is not to be confused with the thing called “liberalism” in our time! Today’s “liberalism” is the exact opposite of historical Liberalism—which came out of the 18th-century Whiggism—which came out of the 17th-century Puritanism. The labels are the same; the realities are utterly different. Present-day liberals have trouble with ideas as ideas, so they try to dispose of uncomfortable thoughts by pigeonholing them in a time slot. The ideas of individual liberty, inherent rights, limited government, and the free economy are dismissed by contemporary liberals as “18th-century ideas.” What a dumb comment! The proper test of an idea is the test of truth. Is the idea sound, does it hold water? You do not judge the quality of an idea by pigeonholing it in a particular time slot; you don’t dispose of an idea by relegating it to the historical period when the idea emerged and became influential. But this is a typical liberal tactic.

The Proper Role of Government

Our discussion has focused on the nature of government, and we have come to realize that government is society’s power structure constitutionally authorized to use legal force in certain last-resort situations. Once this truth sinks in we take the next step, which is to figure out what functions are properly assigned to the one social agency authorized to use force. This brings us back to the moral code and the primary values of life, liberty, and property. It is the function of the law to protect the life, liberty, and property of all persons alike in order that each human being has maximum opportunity to achieve his proper destiny. This is the thesis of Classical Liberalism, and I buy it.

There’s a second political question to resolve, tied in with the basic one, but much less important: How do you choose personnel for public office? Once you have employed the relevant intellectual and moral criteria and confined public things to the public sector, leaving the major concerns of life free in the private sector . . . once you’ve done this there’s still the matter of choosing people for public office. One method is choice by bloodline. If your father is king, and if you are the eldest son, why you’ll be king when the old man dies. Limited monarchy still has its advocates, and kingship will work if a people embrace the monarchical ideology. Monarchy hasn’t always worked smoothly, however, else what would Shakespeare have done for his plays? Sometimes your mother’s lover will bump off the old man, or your kid brother may try to poison you.

There’s a better way to choose personnel for public office: Let the people vote. Confine government within the limits dictated by reason and morals, lay down appropriate requirements for exercising the franchise, and then let voters go to the polls. The candidate who gets the majority of votes gets the job. This is democracy, and this is the right place for majority action. As Pericles put it 2,500 years ago, democracy is where the many participate in rule.

Voting today is little more than a popularity contest, and the most popular man is not necessarily the best man, just as the most popular idea is not always the soundest idea. It is obvious, then, that balloting—r counting noses or taking a sampling of public opinion—is not the way to get at the fundamental question of the proper role of government within a society. We have to think hard about this one, which means we have to assemble the evidence; weigh, sift, and criticize it; compare notes with colleagues, and so on. in other words, determining the proper role for government is an educational endeavor, a matter for the classroom, the study, the podium, the pulpit, the forum, the press. To count noses at this point is a cop out; there’s no place here for a Gallup Poll.

To summarize: The fundamental question in political philosophy has to do with the scope and functions of the political agency. Only hard thinking—education in the broad sense—can resolve this question. The lesser question has to do with the choice of personnel, and majority action—democratic decision-making—is the way to deal with it. But if we approach the first question with the mechanics appropriate to the second, we have confused the categories and we’re in for trouble.

“Democratic Despotism”

We began to confuse the categories more than a century and a half ago, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed. His book, Democracy in America, warned us about the emergence here of what he called “democratic despotism,” which would not shatter the wills of men, but merely soften and bend them. It would “degrade men without tormenting them.”

We were warned again in 1859 by a professor at Columbia University, Francis Lieber, in his book On Civil Liberty and Self-Government: “Woe to the country in which political hypocrisy first calls the people almighty, then teaches that the voice of the people is divine, then pretends to take a mere clamor for the true voice of the people, and lastly gets up the desired clamor.” Getting up the desired clamor is what we today call “social engineering,” or “the engineering of consent.” What is called “a majority” in contemporary politics is almost invariably a numerical minority, whipped up by an even smaller minority of determined and sometimes unscrupulous men. There’s not a single plank in the platform of the welfare state that was put there because of a genuine demand by a genuine majority. A welfarist government is always up for grabs; and various factions, pressure groups, special interests, causes, ideologies seize the levers of government in order to impose their programs on the rest of the nation. Formula for present-day liberalism: “Somebody’s program at everybody’s expense!”

Let’s assume that we don’t like what’s going on today in this and other countries; we don’t like it because people are being violated, as well as principles. We know the government is off the track, and we want to get it back on, but we know in our bones that Edmund Burke was right when he said, “There never was, for any long time . . . a mean, sluggish, careless people that ever had a good government of any form.” The politics of a nation reflects the character of a people, and you cannot improve the tone of politics except as you elevate the character of a significant number of persons. The improvement of character is the hard task of religion, ethics, art, and education. When we do our work properly in these areas, our public life will automatically respond.

Large numbers are not required. A small number of men and women whose convictions are sound and clearly thought out, who can present their philosophy persuasively, and who manifest their ideas by the quality of their lives . . . such people can inspire the multitude whose ideas are too vague to generate convictions one way or another. A little leaven raises the entire lump of dough; a small rudder turns a huge ship. And a handful of people possessed of ideas and a dream has got hold of the handle which can turn a nation around—especially a nation that is searching for new answers and a new direction.

The Reverend Mr. Opitz is a member of the staff of The Foundation for Economic Education and is the author of the book Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies.