One way for a government to control people is to threaten them with punishment for disobedience, Such a direct approach, though, often provokes strong opposition. A second, subtler way is to tax them, then allow them to have some money back only if they do as the government wishes. The federal government’s power to exercise the second kind of control grew alarmingly on May 23, 1991.

On that day, in the case of Rust v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court ruled that the government could restrict not just what subsidized family planning clinics may do, but what they may say to their clients. According to the ruling, a regulation by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which prohibits Federally funded clinics from providing information about abortion services or recommending abortion, is valid under the Constitution.

Many people on both sides saw this case as an “abortion issue.” Opponents of abortion cheered; advocates of the right to choose protested against the restriction on abortion rights. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Blackmun wrote that HHS regulation “has both the purpose and the effect of manipulating [a woman's] decision as to the continuance of her pregnancy.”

But in fact, the issue is not abortion but speech—specifically, speech by those who accept government subsidies. The Supreme Court’s ruling upheld the principle that when the government offers funds, it may include as a condition of funding that those who receive the money refrain from disseminating certain kinds of information, or expressing certain points of view. If the regulations had stated that the clinics couldn’t recommend even birth control pills—or if they had specified that only clinics that made abortion referrals could receive funds—the legal logic would have been the same.

Many of the critics have focused on the effect of the decision on women seeking help from the clinics, particularly women who are too poor or isolated to seek alternatives. Certainly these women have a vital interest in the case, and their options are diminished by the Court’s decision. But there is no such thing as a right to be provided with information, except by the agreement of the provider. Rust v. Sullivan cuts into not the right to receive information, but the right to give it.

The central issue of rights applies to the owners of the clinics and the professionals who practice there. In giving them money, may the government properly restrict the information that they are allowed to provide? The two focal points in the issue are funding and information; abortion is involved only incidentally.

As in many issues of this type, the main debate contains a false alternative. Recipients of governmental funding assume that they have an unconditional right to the money. Opponents of abortion regard tying strings to the money as a legitimate way to implement their policy. Both of these views are seriously flawed. One seeks to ignore, the other to exploit, the negative consequences of tax subsidies.

When the government funds an activity, it will exercise control over it. As the “Wizard of Id” comic strip once put it: “Remember the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.” The government must judge the qualifications of applicants on the basis of what they do, and choose to fund some and not others. The “right” to funding depends on how closely the applicant’s activities coincide with the goals and criteria of the government agency giving out the money. Value-neutral funding is impossible. The more the activity bears upon matters of strong personal concern, the more obvious the value preferences in the funding will be.

We can see the same phenomenon in other areas of governmental funding. The National Endowment for the Arts provides money for works that are deemed sufficiently “artistic,” according to the judgment of the officials in control of the money. The question of whether Congress or NEA officials should control that decision is merely a dispute between different branches of the government.

The more such precedents the government sets, the more it becomes protective of its power to control the beneficiaries. In the majority opinion in Rust v. Sullivan, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote: “To hold that the Government unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of viewpoint when it chooses to fund a program dedicated to advance certain permissible goals, because the program in advancing those goals necessarily dis courages alternate goals, would render numerous government programs constitutionally suspect. When Congress established a National Endowment for Democracy to encourage other countries to adopt democratic principles, it was not constitutionally required to fund a program to encourage competing lines of political philosophy such as Communism and Fascism.”

The implicit smear is ugly enough in itself, coming in an official statement by the Chief Justice. When the government permits those whom it funds to express only the official point of view, it excludes many philosophies that are not communistic or fascistic by any stretch of the imagination. But leaving this aside, his statement shows how the logic of power feeds on itself. Rather than err on the side of endangering current programs that permit the expression only of the official philosophy, the Court endorsed a further expansion of the government’s power to specify the content of the activities it subsidizes.

The impact of this decision is potentially devastating. Foes of abortion see only the immediate impact of the decision, and applaud it; but the power that the Court has granted the federal government can be used equally by the Left and the Right. The HHS restrictions, and the Court’s approval of them, tremendously increase the government’s power to control any kind of activity that it funds. As Justice Blackmun noted in his dissent: “Until today the Court never had upheld viewpoint-based suppression of speech simply because that suppression was a condition upon the acceptance of public funds. Whatever may be the Government’s power to condition the receipt of its largess upon the relinquishment of constitutional rights, it surely does not extend to a condition that suppresses the recipient’s cherished freedom of speech based solely upon the content or viewpoint of that speech.”

Yet in this formulation, Blackmun acknowledges that the government may call on recipients of subsidies to relinquish some of their constitutional rights. (For example, recipients of government money often are required to implement affirmative action programs, limiting their freedom to choose their employees.) Rust v. Sullivan expands this power disastrously; but the potential for the disaster existed from the day that governmental subsidies of private activity were first devised.

These subsidies, we must remember, come from taxation. To get one’s money back, one must meet the government’s qualifications for a subsidy. Thus, those who choose non-subsidized activities are, in effect, punished for their choices by having their money taken and not returned. Traditionally, the losers are people whose activities aren’t deemed sufficiently important to the “public interest.” After Rust v. Sullivan, though, the qualifications for activity in the “public interest” can include not only what one does but what one says. The government now can use the coercive power of taxation not just to benefit certain activities, but to promote certain ideas.

A New Threat

What is most frightening is the possibility of expanding Federal control of expression and information to private educational institutions that receive government money—meaning virtually all of them. Neither liberals nor conservatives have a monopoly on the desire to exercise control. Whether we see attempts to ban “racist” and “homophobic” courses and textbooks, or “blasphemous” and “obscene” ones, depends only on whether the politically correct Left or the fundamentalist Right acts first.

Neither side is likely to have much success in the immediate future. A major assault on our liberties always happens in stages. The first step is the establishment of a principle, and its application to one area where there is widespread support for the restriction. Next comes a period in which those who established the principle assure us that the disastrous consequences predicted by its critics won’t happen. Only after people get used to the principle, and after the critics have grown less vocal, does the government follow through in a major way. It was over 20 years after the establishment of governmental funding for the arts that the first explicit regulations concerning content were passed. And, ironically, the regulations requiring “decency” in art were quite different from any that the liberal advocates of artistic subsidies would have wanted.

By the time the principle of Rust v. Sullivan incubates and comes to maturity, there’s no telling what political fads will have arisen, and what kind of lobbies will be in a position to impose speech-based restrictions on funding.

The walls of academic freedom will take a long time to knock down. However, other recipients of governmental subsidies may be more vulnerable. The precedent set by the Supreme Court applies directly to the medical profession. It would be no great leap for a government agency to issue a regulation that forbids doctors who receive Medicaid or Medicare payments from discussing the option to withhold life-support with patients suffering from terminal diseases. A system of national health insurance would, of course, greatly increase the scope of this danger.

Control through funding bypasses all constitutional limitations. As Chief Justice Rehnquist argues, people still have a choice; they can decide not to accept governmental funding. The government doesn’t impose penalties on them for anything they might say; it merely takes their money and gives it to people who accept restrictions on what they may say. This moves the issue to the disparaged category of economic freedom. The principle of free speech is dangerous to challenge head-on; it’s much safer to act on the principle that the government may take people’s money and expend it for its own purposes.

Any successful challenge to the expansion of governmental power resulting from Rust v. Sullivan must challenge both the controls and the sub-sidles that make them possible. It must challenge the legitimacy of taking money by force from some people to promote the ends of other people. The owners of subsidized family planning clinics want freedom of choice, but they don’t want to grant freedom of choice to the people who are footing the bill—the taxpayers. They need to recognize that they can’t have it both ways. When they lobbied for government funding, they invited government control. If they now want freedom, they should call for an end to Federal subsidies.

The owners of the clinics probably would argue that they would be even less free without governmental money. They would have to call on private donations to provide low-cost services; and private donors might call for similar restrictions, or even more stringent ones, before donating any money.

But private donors are making a choice concerning their own money, not someone else’s. If a donor wants to give money only to organizations that meet his standards—however capricious they may seem to another person—that is his right. In the absence of governmental funding, the clinics still would be able to ask for money from anyone who wanted to give it, but they would not have the right to obtain money by compulsion.

To be free of governmental control, one must be independent of the government. Those who accept the idea that the government may take money from others to help them in promoting their goals are, whether they realize it or not, accepting the idea that the government can dictate their goals. Simply “reforming” the system by attempting to guarantee the independence of the recipients of the money isn’t a viable solution; the government will, in one way or another, control what it subsidizes.

Senator Strom Thurmond pointed this out in 1963, when he warned against governmental subsidies to the arts: “The Supreme Court has stated that the Federal Government has the power to control that which it subsidizes, and experience proves that when the Federal Government has the power, that power is eventually exercised.”

In any debate, it’s a great temptation to refute the other person on his own terms. Sometimes this is the right approach; if you and your opponent agree on a basic premise and disagree only on how to implement it, then it makes sense to show that your proposals are better by his standards. But if the disagreement is one of basic principles, and if beating your opponent on his own ground entails adopting his frame of reference, your victory may well be Pyrrhic. Even if you adopt his premise just for the purpose of showing his inconsistency, you’ve allowed the debate to be conducted on his terms, and you can easily lose sight of what you should really be proving: that he’s wrong not just in particulars, but in his basic approach.

For instance, an advocate of the free market and a socialist might agree that prosperity is desirable. if the socialist claims that his system will create prosperity, it’s proper to answer the claim on its own terms, showing that socialism in fact wouldn’t achieve the goal for which its advocate hopes. On the other hand, suppose the socialist claims that his system will provide a more just distribution of wealth. Anyone who knows a little history may see a chance for an easy comeback here and point to all the cases in which socialism has created its own privileged classes, thus showing that socialism fails to distribute wealth justly. But the person who follows this approach is granting a key element of the socialist’s argument: that there is some ethically proper mount of wealth that each person should have. This line of argument may indeed force him to admit that existing socialist societies haven’t measured up to the ideal, but he can respond that the remedy lies in a more consistent application of economic justice. Moreover, he can now take the offensive, pointing out that socialism at least aims at a “just distribution,” whereas capitalism leaves no room for the government to correct the alleged inequities created by the market.

The right way to approach a mistaken claim is to answer it at the most basic level at which it% mistaken, not to pick at its details. Neglecting this principle is sure to lead to fruitless debating of side issues and failure to recognize errors at their source.

A case in point is the implications that some advocates of the free market have seen in so-called “chaos theory.” This area of study has captured the interest of the educated lay public in the past few years, particularly as a result of James Gleick’s 1987 book, Chaos: Making a New Science. Aside from the mathematical fascination of the theory, it may have wide-ranging implications for deciding what kinds of problems are tractable. The theory suggests that certain types of systems, although they can be described mathematically, behave in such outrageous ways that predicting their future behavior mathematically is all but useless. However, it tells us that even such seemingly “chaotic” systems can be analyzed and described by applying new mathematical methods.

Traditionally, builders of mathematical models try to construct systems that are, so to speak, “well behaved.” A falling rock, for example, can be modeled in a well-behaved way. A fairly simple equation, taking into account gravity and air resistance, will predict how the rock will fall. Minor air currents or tiny errors will result in only slight deviations between the predicted and the actual result.

In contrast with well-behaved systems, some types of systems are “chaotic.” A tiny change in the system may result in large changes in its later behavior. The smoke rising from a cigarette is an example of a chaotic system. A little difference in the temperature of the smoke or the conditions of the air can result in a completely different pattern of smoke. A mistake in the ninth decimal place when calculating the behavior of a chaotic system may result in a 200 percent error in the outcome. Building a model that will accurately predict the behavior of this type of system is a virtually impossible task.

Long-range weather predictions also face the problems of chaotic systems. According to chaos theory, a sneeze in Minnesota may affect whether it will rain in Virginia three months later. Because of the practical impossibility of measuring the current situation with sufficient accuracy, and of carrying out the calculations to enough decimal places, accurate long-range weather forecasts may be beyond human reach.

Chaos and Economics

Do similar considerations apply to economics? Some advocates of the free market have suggested that they do. Chaos theory, they have suggested, rebuts those who want to model and centrally direct the economy on a mathematical basis. Tom G. Palmer, editor of the Humane Studies Review, says that chaos theory shows that “Technocratic prediction of the future—as would be necessary for a ‘planned’ society—is impossible on mathematical grounds. It turns out that certain systems are ‘initial condition sensitive,’ meaning that a tiny change in the initial conditions can produce enormous changes in the results.”

Noted libertarian economist Murray Rothbard writes in a similar vein: “The neo-classicals have for a long while employed their knowledge of math and their use of advanced mathematical techniques as a bludgeon to discredit Austrian [economists]; now come the most advanced mathematical theorists to replicate, unwittingly, some of the searching Austrian critiques of the unreality and distortions of orthodox neo-classical economics. In the current mathematical pecking order, fractals, non-linear thermodynamics, the Feigenbaum number, and all the rest rank far higher than the old-fashioned techniques of the neo-classicals.”

Much of the philosophy underlying chaos theory is attractive to anyone who distrusts the mathematization of economic systems. Gleick tells us that the theory may be “turning back a trend in science toward reductionism.” He echoes F. A. Hayek when he writes: “Yet order arises spontaneously out of these [chaotic] systems—chaos and order together. Only a new kind of science could begin to cross the great gulf between knowledge of what one thing does—one water molecule, one cell of heart tissue, one neuron—and what millions of them do.”

Rhetoric such as this is attractive, and can add to the temptation to challenge mathematical economists on their own ground by throwing still more complex mathematical systems against them. However, this attempt to enlist chaos theory is mistaken and potentially harmful to a proper defense of the free market. To see why, it’s necessary to understand just what chaos theory says and doesn’t say.

The contribution of chaos theory isn’t that it tells us that there are unpredictable systems. We’ve always known that. Rather, the theory applies to a certain type of system: one that can be described by a set of equations or a computer program. Set up the starting conditions, run the program or solve the equations, and you can see the system unfold itself.

Chaos theory’s point is that for some systems, the results of running the program won’t even be close to the real-life behavior of the system. The equations are perfectly legitimate, but the system is extremely sensitive to tiny perturbations. Unless every tiny input to the system is measured with impossible accuracy, and unless the calculations are performed with outrageous precision, the results will be completely wrong. How-ever—and this is crucial—such systems may still be susceptible to analysis by tools which belong neither to traditional deterministic mathematics nor to statistics.

As an example, consider the Japanese game called “pachinko.” In this game, a ball is launched with a spring, then falls through a field of pins. The player’s goal is to make it fall toward certain targets. Pachinko exhibits “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”; a tiny change in the force of launching the ball will make it fall a completely different way. Using traditional modeling methods, pachinko would be just a game of chance. There are, however, patterns in the relationship between the launching and the course the ball follows, and expert players can direct it toward the high-scoring targets. These players might be considered intuitive chaos theorists. They are able to find order where there seems to be none.

The mathematical systems that Keynesians and their allies have used to describe the economy, on the other hand, aren’t like a pachinko game. Their equations are completely well-behaved. Pump a nickel more or less into the economy, and nothing drastic will happen. If you decide not to go shopping on Tuesday, you don’t throw world trade into turmoil. Displayed on a chart, the Keynesian equations show a nice smooth relationship between input and output. The chart of a genuine chaotic system looks like something from a psychedelic art museum.

The mathematical economists’ equations should be challenged on a more basic level. The proper question to ask is whether they, or any set of equations, actually model the course of the economy. Before asking whether a mathematical model of the economy fails in its predictions because it is chaotic, we should ask whether any such model is valid in the first place.

An economic system is, in fact, the sum of a vast number of ongoing human choices. These choices aren’t totally arbitrary, but reflect people’s perceived needs and desires, so certain statistical generalizations can be made about them. Supply and demand curves can be drawn for particular commodities. These curves are, however, simply empirical generalizations reflecting the aggregate of people’s choices at a given time. Nothing says that their preferences will be the same next year. People’s desires may change, or new discoveries may lead to new options.

Ludwig von Mises wouldn’t accept the premise of mathematical economic models, and didn’t quibble over their accuracy. Rather, he challenged the premise at its root: “There is no such thing as quantitative economics. All economic quantifies we know about are data of economic history. No reasonable man can contend that the relation between price and supply is in general, or in respect of certain commodities, constant. We know, on the contrary, that external phenomena affect different people in different ways, that the reactions of the same people to the same external events vary, and that it is not possible to assign individuals to classes of men reacting in the same way.”

Human economic activity is “chaotic” in the sense that it is unpredictable and not subject to mathematical analysis, but this has nothing to do with chaos theory. Pachinko-like systems are completely determined by simple mechanical laws; their behavior depends entirely on the way they are set in motion, and chaos theory provides tools for analyzing them in spite of their apparent unpredictability. Human behavior, in contrast, is unpredictable not because its flow displays “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” but because it is not dependent on initial conditions at all. The future may change due to events that no amount of precise calculation can predict.

Chaos as a Planner’s Tool

Rather than being an argument against centralized planning based on economic models, chaos theory may offer the planners new weapons. For instance, Gleick discusses scientist Benoit Mandelbrot’s exploration in 1960 of cotton-price fluctuations. “Economists,” Gleick states, “generally assumed that the price of a commodity like cotton danced to two different beats, one orderly and one random. Over the long term, prices would be driven steadily by real forces in the economy—the rise and fall of the New England textile industry, or the opening of international trade routes. Over the short term, prices would bounce around more or less randomly.”

But Mandelbrot took a different view. “Instead of separating tiny changes from grand ones, his picture bound them together. He was looking for patterns not at one scale or another, but across every scale.” He found that “Each particular price change was random and unpredictable. But the sequence of changes was independent of scale: curves for daily price changes and monthly price changes matched perfectly.”

Independence of scale is a key idea in chaos theory. By using “fractals,” a kind of curve which contains miniature replicas of itself, which in turn contain yet smaller replicas of the same pattern, and so on, modelers can create pictures that are rich in detail out of relatively simple formulas. This permits great depth of detail without information overload. Fractal economics could create the ultimate nightmare for opponents of central planning: a model that claims to unite both the macro-eco-nomic and micro-economic realms, that describes not only the broad course of the economy but the detailed activities of each individual With such a model, planners could claim to know enough to delve into each person’s life, without having to know anything about that particular individual. Gleick cites mathematician Ralph Abraham’s dream of using mathematical models to “educate children to be better members of the board of directors of the planet.”

Advocates of government intervention have talked about “priming the pump” of the economy, only to be refuted by the impossibility of figuring out which pump should be primed and to what extent. But the ideas of chaos theory could encourage new variants on this model, replacing the old idea of priming the pump with one of flipping the handle of the pachinko machine. With these new tools, they might imagine, it will be possible to decide exactly how far to pull the handle, even though traditional analysis can’t offer a due. “Of all the possible pathways of disorder,” Gleick tells us, “nature favors just a few.” Economic planners, turning this idea into pop science, could easily conclude that the unpredictability of human activity is no obstacle to classifying and controlling human behavior.

Murray Rothbard regards the discovery of patterns in seemingly random events as a challenge to the idea that market expectations can accommodate “perfect knowledge” of the future apart from random, unpredictable fluctuations. Yet this seems odd. Chaos theory, far from challenging the predictability of future market behavior, claims to find patterns even in the variations that have previously been regarded as random. Whether these patterns really exist is a matter for study; if they do exist, then the investor who learns to predict them will have an advantage over people who use traditional analysis.

In any event, statistical patterns are meaningful only for large numbers of stocks (or other commodities) over long periods of time. The rise or fall of a particular commodity% price is the result of particular events and people’s response to them, not of abstract mathematical forces. People who anticipate these events and responses will do better than the average investor; those who follow statistical averages will simply obtain average results. Again, the key to refuting the claim that statistics provide perfect knowledge lies in recognizing that they are simply mathematical descriptions, not in trying to one-up existing descriptions with new ones.

In fact, though, chaos has no more to offer to the planners than it offers to the free market. In analyzing a particular phenomenon under steady conditions, Mandelbrot’s methods may well produce a description that closely matches the observed phenomena. But these methods can provide no information about the phenomena of human action which affect an economy in vital ways. A new invention, the emergence of a new political movement, changing economic habits resulting from changing philosophies of life, and similar phenomena are not simply random fluctuations, or even new inputs to a mechanistic system; the analysis of unconscious systems has only limited applicability to the realm of human choice. The modeler can only devise formulas after the fact to fit the data, with no guarantees that these formulas will describe the future.

Chaos theory is a fascinating area to study, and it is very likely to have applications in the analysis of current trends. However, it offers neither support nor refutation to the idea that an economy can be mathematically planned. It doesn’t refute classical methods of mathematical planning, because it simply doesn’t apply to them. Nor does it provide new methods of plotting an economy’s long-term course, because it is as helpless as any other mathematical method to anticipate the consequences of changing choices and emerging knowledge. The best strategy for advocates of the free market is to stick with the basic principles that have shown its moral and economic superiority, and to avoid trying to undercut the champions of mathematical planning on their ground. 

Amajor influence in my teenage years was Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. This splendid play deals with a Norwegian doctor named Thomas Stockmann who discovers an inconvenient fact: that the local baths, which he had helped to establish and are economically vital to the town, are dangerously contaminated. His supporters drop away from him as the town’s leaders put pressure on them, until he is left alone to address a public meeting on the subject.

At the meeting, Dr. Stockmann is forbidden even to state the case which he came to present. Instead, he speaks on an even deadlier pollution: the power of the “compact majority” to stifle dissent. He is branded an “enemy of the people” and is driven out of the meeting; yet, in the courage and confidence which he shows, he is the clear moral victor.

For me, Dr. Stockmann was only a fictional character; things like that could happen, but only somewhere else in the world. Or so I thought, until I experienced a taste of his ordeal in my own town.

The story starts with a frustrated board of library trustees in Hollis, New Hampshire. For year after year, they have been trying to get the town to approve an expansion program which would double the size of the existing library. Year after year, it has been voted down. This year, they decided to take a more active role in shaping public opinion. They issued a series of flyers, in the name of the Hollis Social Library, and mailed with its bulk mailing permit, urging the people of the town to vote for the library expansion.

It seemed to me that political advocacy by a government agency is something which everyone would recognize as plainly wrong, though perhaps they needed to have the issue named for them. In view of this, I devoted an installment of my column in the local newspaper to this issue. In my column, I pointed out how such a practice could spread to every government agency if not opposed.

The column drew a response from one of the trustees, who defended their action, claiming that “it is the elected responsibility of the Trustees to be advocates for the library,” and that engaging in political advertising is “a standard and continuing fulfillment of the Board’s obligations to the citizens of Hollis.” He stated that no tax money was used for the mailings, but that income from the library’s trust fund was used, in addition to donated services. As further evidence that they were indifferent to my arguments, the library trustees sent out another mailing the week before the town meeting, again explicitly soliciting votes in favor of the expenditure.

The next step in the battle was the town meeting. After throwing out draft after draft, I devised a short speech that would, I hoped, convince an honest person that a government agency could not morally engage in political advocacy, whether it used tax money or solicited contributions for the purpose. The site was a crowded high school gym, not unlike many others across the country where town-sized democracy has been exercised. As I waited for my chance to speak, I kept scratching at my draft, taking out anything that didn’t strictly address the point. Finally I had my turn at the microphone.

I said: “I’m Gary McGath of 5 Ames Road. I’d like to address the issue of morality in politics. We’re concerned with high taxes—they’re bad enough—but the activity which the library trustees have been engaging in, in order to promote the warrant issue, I think is far worse. We’re supposed to be a government of the people, not people of the government, but the library trustees have put out a whole series of flyers promoting their political position. [One of the library trustees] wrote a letter to the Hollis Times telling us that this money came out of the library trust fund, and thus presumably originated in contributions. But even so, a government does not have any business engaging in political advertising. Either they solicited contributions for political activity, or they solicited contributions that were not for political activity and then spent it on political activity. I consider either one to be entirely immoral. In today’s morality, people tend to ask, ‘What do we want?’ and ‘How can I get it?’ and it seems as though that’s about as much as the library trustees have been asking; and they figure . . .”

That was as much as I was allowed to say. The moderator of the meeting told me that the library trustees were not immoral, that he objected to my terminology, and that I had been given a sufficient opportunity to make my point. When I asked to be permitted to close out my remarks, he told me that if I repeated that the library trustees were immoral, lie would make me sit down.

I fell into the trap. I hadn’t said that the trustees were immoral, only that their actions were, so I couldn’t very well repeat a statement I hadn’t made. But my concern was with not being cowed, rather than with being lured into a statement that could be construed as a personal attack. I answered, “The library trustees are immoral.” Outraged at being disobeyed, he told me to sit down. About half the crowd applauded him. No one said a word in my defense. I did not sit down; I left the meeting.

On my way out, I realized that in my haste I had forgotten my jacket. When I turned back to get it, a couple of undersized cops, trying very hard to look tough, stopped me. One of them got my jacket for me, but they had provided the final proof for me of how low Hollis had sunk; I was excluded from a public meeting, even if it was one I was only trying to leave. I had, in effect, been declared an Enemy of the People.

From here, the story stops following Ibsen. Noone has slashed my tires, thrown rocks through my window, or strangled my cats. Some people have offered me encouragement. But the shock of seeing people applaud the silencing of a political opponent has stayed with me.

At the Expense of Others

What makes people act this way? The desire for something at the expense of others is an obvious factor; when people want what they know others aren’t willing to offer, it becomes tempting to resort to subterfuge. The open exchange of information is valuable to people who deal with one another by consent; it is a danger to people who want what others won’t consent to. The crowd mentality is obviously operative as well; people will often stick with the group rather than appear different.

But these factors are symptoms of weakness rather than strength. People who want the unearned are dependent on those who provide it, and specifically on their ignorance. They must—as this meeting showed—turn to desperate measures to keep people from understanding the issues and making an independent decision. People who follow the “compact majority” have no enduring motivation; when the crowd sways in another di rection, they must sway with the crowd or fall on their faces.

This is what Dr. Stockmann came to understand after he was declared an “enemy of the people.” He discovered that each person who denounced him or stopped doing business with him was acting simply out of fear of his neighbors. He realized that he was temporarily stymied, but that he was the only person in town who knew how to take action on his own initiative. He formulated a plan to start a new school, in the very hall where he had been denounced, in which he and his family would teach poor boys from the streets to be free thinkers, until one day they would be strong enough to drive the “wolves” away.

As he made his plans, he was confident, not afraid, because of a “great secret” he had discovered: that “the strongest man in the world is the one who stands alone.” Such a statement may seem paradoxical, especially to those of us who have stood alone in opposition to governmental encroachment and lost. But it is a truth which has shaped the world. Individuals standing alone have always been the initiators of change; those who follow the crowd are merely acted upon, and those who purport to lead the crowd must constantly run to arrive where the crowd is going to be next. Anyone who hopes to see the world or a community move in a new direction must be the first to go in that direction and must be willing to stand on nothing more than his own judgment, presenting a case and setting an example which others will eventually understand.

No Quick Fixes

Some people hope for quick fixes to society through the political process. But before political change can happen, there must be change in the minds of people. Without this, the crowd will turn away from attempts at change. With it, nothing can stop the change; witness the events in the Communist world today.

The key element in Ibsen’s “strongest man” is certainty without pretense. This does not mean regarding oneself as infallible; that sort of certainty is the most pretentious and vulnerable of all. It means not shrinking from the facts, not disguising one’s own knowledge, but at the same time re-examining every piece of that knowledge whenever possible. Only knowledge that has survived the most difficult tests in one’s own mind will survive in public debate.

To reach people by standing alone, it’s necessary to reach them when they’re standing alone, that is, one person at a time. It’s possible to sway a crowd with an emotional appeal, but reaching people with reason is a much slower process. Creating a free society is a “bottom-up” process, one that proceeds from the individual to the social organization, not a “top-down” process of changing the individual by changing society. People who depend on the crowd for their thoughts may adopt the slogans of freedom, but they won’t understand its substance,

This approach doesn’t preclude addressing large audiences, but it requires addressing the reasoning power of each individual, not appealing to mob instincts or disguising one’s message as something fashionable.

It requires staying calm under stress, in order to be able to address the issue rather than the crowd. This can be the most difficult task of all, and a lapse can allow clever leaders to maneuver the debate to their advantage; failing to remember this was certainly my own greatest mistake in that town meeting.

It requires not overestimating the power of the crowd. It can seem, when facing a crowd alone, that the whole world has turned against you and that nothing you can say will ever make a difference to anyone. It’s important to remember that there are still people with minds, even if they aren’t present or if they lack the courage to speak in your defense, and that even people who cheer with the mob may reconsider in privacy.

High-definition television (HDTV) promises to be the biggest breakthrough in video broadcasting since color. It will offer wider pictures with much more detail and clarity; watching TV will be almost like seeing a movie in a theater.

The technology for HDTV exists today, and it is even in operation in Japan. Unfortunately, there isn’t an industry standard for American HDTV. In accordance with conventional wisdom on broadcasting, the Federal Communications Commission has to approve a standard. There is no shortage of ideas—the FCC has about 20 proposals under consideration.

The problem is one of trade-offs between the higher quality offered by HDTV and compatibility with the existing National Television System Committee (NTSC) technical standards adopted by the FCC in 1941. A TV channel occupies a certain bandwidth, a “space” in the spectrum of broadcast frequencies, If HDTV signals could occupy more than one channel’s bandwidth, the task of sending a high-quality picture would be easier; but then fewer stations could operate in a given geographic area without interfering with one another.

Ideally, a broadcast signal would occupy the same bandwidth as an existing TV channel, would be received by existing TV sets, and would contain extra information that the new HDTV sets could receive. But trying to do this brings technology up against certain limits. According to a mathematical principle called Shannon’s Law, for a given bandwidth and a given ratio of signal strength to interfering noise, there is a maximum amount of information that can be transmitted in a given time. Whether it’s possible to meet the physical limitations and provide full compatibility with existing TV is a hotly debated question. If it isn’t possible, the signal either has to use more than one channel or give up full compatibility with today’s broadcasting.

Complex trade-offs like these are involved in most technological standards. It’s easy to suppose that the best way to deal with these trade-offs is to let the government decide for everyone and guarantee that different companies won’t produce equipment that meets different and incompatible specifications.

But the market is capable of resolving competition among proposed standards; it produces results that are acceptable to consumers. When the government sets the standards, there is no reason to suppose that its choices will reflect what buy-crs actually want.

As an example of how the market works, consider the case of VCR’s. Initially, there were two standards, the Beta and VHS systems. Today, VIIS is the dear winner, not by anyone’s deere, e, but by the people’s choice to buy it. The Beta purchasers may appear to be the victims of inefficient competition; but I still have a Beta recorder in my living room, and mail-order catalogues still offer a wide selection of Beta tapes. No doubt these will dwindle away in time, but by then I’ll be ready to buy a next-generation VIIS recorder. Although other formats have appeared from time to time, they have succumbed to the buyers’ judgment that the improvements they offered weren’t worth the investment in new equipment.

VHS isn’t necessarily the optimal solution; many people consider Beta tapes superior. But most people couldn’t tell the difference; VHS was satisfactory, and it was better positioned in the market, so it became the de facto standard.

Satisfying the Consumer

Commercially successful standards like VHS satisfy the consumer; government-mandated standards may satisfy only the wishes of the people who devise them. An example of the latter is the computer programming language Ada, which is the standard for Defense Department computer work. Not surprisingly, it’s one of the most complicated computer languages ever devised; it has provisions for doing virtually anything, often in several ways. Any commercial implementation must pass rigorous tests for compatibility before it can be called “Ada.” Outside of government-related work, Ada gets little use; it’s too complicated to learn and too costly in computer resources.

The proposals before the FCC will put an initial premium of $500 to $1,500 on an HDTV set compared to a conventional set, even though studies have indicated that most people who are shown both images don’t consider the improvement worth more than $100. The costs of new technologies decrease with time only if they find a market to begin with. The new broadcasting equipment for HDTV also will be expensive; a large potential audience will be needed to justify its cost. If the FCC selects a system that no one is willing to pay for, it will go nowhere.

Government approval of a standard doesn’t automatically lead to market success, as is illustrated by the FCC’s early experience with color television. In 1950, the FCC approved the CBS system for color TV, which involved a color wheel rotating in synchronization with successive frames of the picture. Not only was this method incompatible with existing black-and-white sets, but it also added a major mechanical component to the TV sets of the day. Because the CBS sys-tem was a commercial failure, the FCC reversed itself in 1953 and approved RCA’s system, which is the one used today. When the government sets standards, it isn’t likely to resist political favoritism. There are currently about 20 major television manufacturers in the United States; of these, Zenith is the only one that is domestically owned. Not surprisingly, Zenith’s proposal is one of the leading candidates—perhaps because it really is one of the best, though it’s hard to avoid the impression that its political position plays a major role.

Because many people in the U.S. electronics industry see HDTV as a chance to make a comeback against the Japanese, this will lead government organizations to favor home-grown technology, whether it’s better or not. Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher has said, “I believe that we should insist that United States firms closely benefit from the [HDTV] effort.”

The ideal implicit in the FCC’s approach is a single standard that would serve the country for the next 30 years or so. Fixed standards offer some significant economic advantages: people don’t have to replace obsolete equipment or get multiple sets to receive incompatible formats. The equipment, however, becomes obsolescent, and nothing can replace it. Today’s National Television System Committee broadcasting standard is in fact ancient technology, established in the early days of television. If computers had suffered the same fate, we’d still be using room-sized machines with less power than today’s five-pound portables.

It may be that the market would have taken the same route. Perhaps the established base of TV sets would have precluded significant changes in technology until a major leap in quality became possible. On the other hand, an evolutionary market might have resulted in TV sets today that would provide movie-theater quality for the same price that we actually have now.

Letting the Market Decide

What path might HDTV follow, if it were left to the choices of the market? Its first appearance wouldn’t be on the broadcast market, but on a market like cable where there is a greater emphasis on quality and a closer link between the viewer and the broadcaster. Viewers could be guaranteed a full schedule of HDTV programming, and could be directly billed for premium-quality broadcasting. Cable networks would have an incentive to make the necessary capital investment. We could expect to see cable companies offer discounts for advance subscriptions, enabling them to raise capital, and to determine whether the market really is there.

Of course, the cable companies may choose a standard unsuitable for broadcast TV. Since the developers of the technology would want the widest possible market, this isn’t very likely, but it could happen. Although this would be a disaster for lovers of homogeneity, the investors whose financial future is at stake would have judged that the over-regulated, overcrowded, commercial-laden world of broadcast television is a dying medium, without enough of a future to justify holding cable technology back to its level.

A non-broadcast path to HDTV could open up remarkable possibilities. Fairly soon, fiber optics—fine strands of transparent material that carry light, instead of electricity, through cables—may replace metal wire for non-broadcast communications. If this happens, tremendous amounts of bandwidth will be available, and true digital television would become possible. Finding bandwidth for signals sent over the airwaves would become as obsolete an exercise as finding a hitching post. But if the FCC holds non-broad-cast TV back to the level of the broadcast medium, this won’t happen.

Ten years ago, hardly anyone had heard of software piracy. Today, it is a household word and a household crime. People who wouldn’t think of sneaking merchandise out of a store or burgling a house regularly obtain copies of computer programs which they haven’t paid for. Why does this happen, and what is necessary to stop it?

If we consider “software” in a broad sense, the problem goes beyond computer programs. The same issues and the same psychology arise in obtaining unpurchased copies of audio and video recordings. Software, in this more general sense, means any kind of information stored in a form which can be readily copied.

There are two kinds of software pirates: hobbyists and business users. Hobbyists go largely after computer games and often obtain copies of virtually every game available. Business pirates acquire copies of high-priced business software. Sometimes they get all the free copies they want from an accomplice, and sometimes they buy one copy of a program and then copy it onto every computer they own. The business pirates are undoubtedly the more harmful in terms of economic impact on software producers.

Software publishers often try to protect themselves by means of copy protection and “shrink-wrap” license agreements. Neither method has proved effective. Copy protection consists of modifying the program disk so that it physically cannot be copied. Such schemes can always be overcome, and legitimate users are injured by being unable to make a back-up copy against the failure of the original disk, or a copy to the hard disk which stores all their programs.

“Shrink-wrap” licenses are terms of use which are enclosed with the package, and which the publisher asserts the user has agreed to by opening the package. But these licenses have not been thoroughly tested by the courts, and in any event are useless against pirates who aren’t caught. Very few pirates are caught.

The software pirate has a ready set of excuses for his actions: prices are too high; the company doesn’t provide decent support; I’m only going to use it once in a while. But the distinguishing feature of software, which allows its theft to seem less bad than other kinds of theft, is that nothing is physically taken from the owner. There is no immediate, physical effect on the inventory or productive capacity of the creator of a piece of software if someone 500 miles away copies a disk and starts using it.

There is, of course, a cumulative economic effect on the producer. The more people make unauthorized copies, the fewer copies tend to be sold, and the less money the producer receives for his effort and expense. But pirates often rationalize that they wouldn’t have bought the program anyway, so they aren’t cutting into the producer’s revenue.

The attitude of software pirates is partly due to the widespread hostility to property rights in today’s culture, but more specifically due to a misunderstanding of the nature of those rights. To the average person, property is primarily or exclusively material in nature. A piece of property is a physical thing, such as a kettle, a car, or a plot of land. A computer program or a recorded performance is not a physical thing, hence it does not appear so clearly to be property.

But property is not a concept pertaining to matter alone. There is no purely physical fact, unrelated to the human mind, which corresponds to ownership. Possession is not the same as ownership; if someone breaks into my car and drives away with it, I am still its owner even though the thief has seized possession.

Principles of Ownership

Ownership is a concept pertaining to a just mode of interaction among human beings, and it arises out of the fact that people live by creating things of value for their own use or for trade with others. Creation, in this sense, does not mean bringing matter into existence, but rather changing the form of matter in accor dance with an idea and a purpose. It is the idea, not the object, which a person actually brings into existence when he creates. By conceiving of a particular arrangement of matter and reducing that concept to practice, a person creates something which he can use directly for his own purposes, or which he can offer to others in exchange for what he needs.

Most commonly, the actual cost of this process is concentrated in the production of individual items. Designing a good chair does take a certain amount of time, effort, and cost in materials, but the major part of the cost lies in the production of each chair. With software, the reverse is true; the cost of producing copies is negligible compared with the cost of devising the form of the product.

In both cases, though, the only way a producer can benefit from offering his product in trade is for others to respect his right to it and to obtain it only on his terms. A person may have other reasons for distributing software than expectation of payment, and there is in fact a large amount of legitimately free software available; but if people are going to make the production of software a full-time occupation, they must and should expect a return for their efforts from the people who benefit thereby. If they do not receive a return, they will have to switch to a different sort of activity if they want to keep eating.

But what does this mean to the would-be user of software? The producer’s problem is not his; should he concern himself with whether the programmers at Microsoft will be laid off or the owners of Podunk Programming will go out of business? With most kinds of theft, the likelihood of punishment provides a specific deterrent to taking other people’s products without payment; the risk of such penalties is negligible for software thieves. The likelihood that a given pirate’s actions will break a software company, and thus injure the pirate, is also negligible.

Risk of peer disapproval is potentially a more effective factor. However, with moral uncertainty being the watchword of the day, most people simply will look the other way when a person steals a program; pirates can even bring up their actions in normal conversation without much fear of disapproval.

In some cases, employers even feel that they can intimidate employees into becoming their accomplices. An anonymous letter in MacWorld magazine stated, “I recently had a nasty experience with my boss when I refused to make him a copy of Works [a program for the Macintosh computer], which I’d bought for my own use. (He later got a copy from another employee.)”

But there is a more basic deterrent to theft than the risk of getting caught or of suffering disapproval. A person can fake what he is to others, but not to himself. A person cannot escape the knowledge of whether his existence is sustained by his own efforts, or whether he is a dependent who relies on the productive ability of others and on their blindness to the fact that he is living off them.

I am not speaking here of conscience—there are people who apparently have none—but of something even more fundamental, self-knowledge. The person who steals, or who gains admiration by lies, or who obtains his living through a do-nothing job, is inevitably aware that he is living not by his own efforts, but by someone else’s, and that he must rely on other people’s ignorance of his act in order to maintain this state of affairs; or if he avoids this knowledge, he does so only by severely curtailing his ability to recognize reality. Such a person cannot escape the sense of being out of place in the world, since he maintains an antagonistic relationship toward those who benefit him.

Seeking Rationalization for Theft

The evidence for this lies in the, fact that thieves, and software pirates in particular, always seek rationalizations for their actions. Muggers try to think of their victims as despicable enemies; politicians imagine that they are serving the “greater good”; and software pirates say that the product is overpriced or that a true hacker would work solely for the pleasure of programming. Some may make peace with their excuses, bolstering their sense of self-sufficiency with a prop made out of ignorance; others will realize in the back of their minds that they have what they have only through the folly of others and will wonder why they always resent people’s success. In either case, self-knowledge becomes a danger to them.

Thieves who abandon the pretense of honesty often fall back on the pretense of being smart: “It’s stupid to buy something when you can just take it.” They attempt to see themselves as attaining their goals by being more clever than the people who buy, and thus as existing by their own wits in the sense of avoiding costs and evading detection. But this is also a pretense; they know, unless they work at shutting down their minds, that their own “cleverness” works only because of the “stupidity” of others who pay for what they buy and who don’t notice or care about the thieves. They are counting on the failure of the very people whose successful efforts they use.

(This needs some clarification; a person who makes a living by understanding some phenomenon better than others is not dependent on their lack of knowledge in this way. A doctor who treats people for injuries they incurred through ignorance is benefiting from their belated intelligence in seeking to solve their problem; he is not relying on their continuing failure to recognize reality. In contrast, a doctor who urged his patients to continue being reckless so that he could treat them again would be actively promoting stupidity, and would be entering an adversarial relationship with the people providing him with a living. Software pirates likewise depend on publishers’ and honest users’ continuing ignorance of or indifference to their actions, and are threatened rather than benefited when people catch on to their mistakes.)

The best defense against software piracy lies neither in physical hindrances to copying nor in stiffer penalties. The first have been shown to be ineffective in preventing theft and inconvenient to legitimate users. The second are useless if the pirates won’t be caught anyway. The primary deterrent to theft in stores—at least in the more peaceful neighborhoods—isn’t the presence of guards and magnetic detectors, but the fact that most people have no desire to steal. The best way to stop piracy is to instill a similar frame of mind among software users. This means breaking down the web of excuses by which pirates justify their actions, and leaving them to recognize what they are. Ultimately, this is the most important defense against any violation of people’s rights; without an honest majority, no amount of effort by the police will be effective. []

Ideas On Liberty

Alfred North Whitehead

A paradox of our time is that newspapers and other publications—which are private businesses—are so often hostile to private business. It would seem natural for publishers to take a pro-business stance, if only to defend their own interests. Yet far more often, they attack business and private property with no apparent concern that they might become the victims of what they advocate. They show no fear that their own businesses might be subjected to the regulation, punitive taxation, and harassment which they recommend for business in general.

There is an explanation for this paradox. Publishers believe that their own freedom differs in its source from the freedom of others, and therefore that their attacks on business do not apply to themselves. They believe that they are protected by their own special wall of defense, called “freedom of the press.”

The obvious explanation for this point of view is that the First Amendment singles out this freedom for explicit protection. While the forgotten Ninth and Tenth Amendments make it clear that the Constitution recognizes other rights as well, the First Amendment rights certainly have fared better under the law than the unnamed ones. But there is a further reason why the press so often regards its freedom as something private and isolated.

A particularly good illustration of the philosophy which grants a special status to press freedom is provided in Editor and Publisher, the nation’s leading newspaper trade journal, in an article presenting the views of Harvard Constitutional Law professor Laurence Tribe:

President John F. Kennedy said that “every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated.”^[1] The political consequence of the philosophy behind this statement has been rapid growth in government control, as politicians have worked to make people do what others wish them to do. Any statement about rights is not simply a political statement, but an ethical one as well. And the effects of such ideas go beyond politics. Although Kennedy clearly intended that the government would be the enforcer of this “right,” many people have drawn a further inference: that if the government is lax in enforcing it, there is little or nothing wrong with taking personal action to make sure one is treated as he would like to be.

This view of rights stands in sharp contrast to the kind of rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. The rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” come from the laissez-faire view of rights—that is, the view that rights are a moral sanction on one’s freedom to live and act without unwanted interference from others. On the other hand, the “right to be treated as one would wish to be treated” implies an obligation on the part of others not only to refrain from interfering, but to engage in positive action as required by the claimant of the right. This formulation stems from what might well be called the devez-faire (“must do”) view of rights in contrast with the laissez-faire or “let do” view.

Sometimes the devez-faire theory of rights serves as an explicit justification for committing crimes; politically motivated groups that take over buildings and offices in order to press their demands on the owners of the property are an obvious example. The more typical way in which it encourages crime, though, is simply through giving a stamp of legitimacy to a person’s desire to attain his goals by illegitimate means.

What is at issue here is not the psychology of criminals—a matter on which I claim no expertise—but the logical consequences of certain moral premises which are widely accepted today. The argument that these premises promote crime rests only on the observation that they offer encouragement and vindication to people who are inclined to crime, and that they make the victims of crime feel less sure that they can really regard themselves as victims. Certainly other factors also contribute to the decision to resort to crime; but anyone who has any capacity for self-esteem on the one hand or guilt on the other has to be affected by his view of the moral rightness of his actions.

The average mugger or burglar is not a philosopher; but for exactly the reason that he is not, he passively absorbs the influences around him and lets other people’s beliefs mold his own moral values. When a person with no convictions of his own hears that people who are better off than himself are robbing him of what is rightfully his, he will see little reason to balk at taking it “back.”

Anyone who has not descended to the mental state of an animal must recognize, however vaguely, that he has to follow certain principles to exist, whether he lives in isolation or in a society. A person who realizes that people cannot live together without property rights may still decide to steal, but he is likely to be discouraged by his knowledge that everyone else in the world can legitimately regard him as an enemy. If, on the other hand, one believes that people who own property are already his enemies because they have what he doesn’t have, then he may as well take their property as not; he may even think he increases his self-respect by righting the “injustice” they are doing to him.

Devez-Faire vs. Property Rights

The devez-faire view of rights undercuts the principle of property rights and thereby lends an air of legitimacy to crime. The right to property is a laissez-faire right; the obligation it imposes is the obligation not to take or damage another person’s property. Under a devez- faire theory, the right to property is a conditional one at best, since a person’s right to his property may be overridden by another person’s “right” to be provided for. A thoroughgoing advocate of this theory may even regard property as an ira-pediment to the implementation of rights.

Proudhon’s dictum that “property is theft” has been absorbed—to the extent that a mind can absorb contradictions—by a large part of our culture. Businessmen are reluctant to use the principle of property rights in their own defense. Many self-proclaimed defenders of capitalism avoid the issue of property rights, preferring to talk about secondary social issues rather than to upset people. The Supreme Court has told us that “neither property rights nor contract rights are absolute.”^[2]

Attacks on property are often based on the egalitarian variation of the devez-faire view of rights—on the notion that everyone is entitled to the same degree of well-being, whether he has earned it or not. By this criterion, a person who is more successful than the average, and who keeps what he earns, is depriving others of their rightful share of the products of his effort. In granting him the right to keep his property, the government is helping him toop press those who want it.

What gives egalitarianism its appeal is the belief that one person can gain in society only through someone else’s loss. This idea effectively wipes out the concept of productivity, leaving distribution as the only issue. If one person’s gain were always another’s loss, there would be no basis either for trade or for property rights, since the only way to acquire wealth would be to take it from someone else. The concept of property (as well as that of theft, which means the taking of someone’s property) would become meaningless, leaving only the concepts of possession at a given time and of force as the sole means of gaining possession.

A Distorted View

This “zero-sum” view of society cannot stand up to examination; when people engage in productive activity, they do not simply redistribute what already exists, but create new wealth. Those who believe that wealth is static regard the possession of it as the mark of a looter. Therefore, they speak of businesses “exploiting” workers or “ripping off’ customers in the course of voluntary transactions, and they cannot see any moral difference between the source of a well-paid business employee’s money and the source of a thief’s income. Since wealth is not created, but only transferred, some of them conclude, the fairest thing to do with it is to distribute it equally among all people. Others who share this belief draw the conclusion that the only right is the right of superior force. An opportunistically inclined person can switch at will between these two conclusions.

A genuine egalitarian society would not reward anyone for his achievements or permit anyone to benefit from his own efforts; to do so would be to acknowledge the existence of productivity and to permit inequality. The idea of such a society ought to horrify anyone who fully understands it, but it can be attractive to a person who ignores its ultimate implications. In popular language, egalitarianism takes the form of denouncing the “injustice” in differences between the rich and the poor. A thief does not have to understand the theory of egalitarianism to get the message that he should resent those who have what he doesn’t.

Arguing Against Crime

If someone accepts the egalitarian philosophy and sees others earning more than he does, what reason can we offer as to why he should not take it from them?

Can we tell him that he should not use force to attain his goals? Modern usage has so diluted the concept of “force” that it has become nearly meaningless. The society that does not provide a person with as pleasant a job as he would like is said to force him to take the job he is offered. The property owner who does not allow people to use his property for their political purposes is said to force his views on them.

This broadening of the idea of force comes from the devez-faire view that a person can have a natural claim on the services of others. Under laissez-faire theory, rights are negatives- prohibitions on what one person may do to another—and force is a positive action against a person’s rights. The devez-faire view, on the other hand, makes rights into positive claims on people, and correspondingly expands the definition of force to include the failure to satisfy the claims that people make by right.

A thief who has heard the word “force” applied so broadly is not going to regard his own use of force as particularly distinctive or reprehensible. “I force people to give me their wallets?” he might say. “So what? They force me to live in a dump!”

Can we morally deter the criminal by telling him that he should obey the law? It would not help, at least not in the United States; Americans have never placed a high value on obedience to authority, except when they have been convinced that its demands are justified. If they do not believe there is a good reason for a law, they will not give it their support. This characteristic of Americans may, in fact, be the reason why crime is a worse problem here than in many other parts of the world. In Europe, people are more likely to wait for the government to provide the property of others which they are told is rightfully theirs. In many other parts of the world, they are apt to join revolutionary movements in order to create a government that will provide it to them. Both of these kinds of people think in terms of having an authority set things right rather than doing it for themselves.

In the United States, though, people are more likely to act on their own initiative. If they do not reject force as a means to their ends, then they may decide to correct their “inequities” by direct and forcible action. The source of American initiative is, in fact, the laissez-faire principle; Americans have recognized that they do not have a claim on other people to give them what they want, and that no one has the right to direct their actions, so they have gone out and done things for themselves.

Today, however, many people who reject laissez-faire have learned to take matters into their own hands; they have seen, without understanding its source, the example of those who live by their own initiative. People of this sort are likely to be only a transitional phase if cur rent trends continue; the next step beyond the criminal’s pseudo-independence is the mentality that clamors for a dictator. It is not much of a consolation, though, to think of this as a long-term solution to crime.

The devez-faire principle simply does not offer any solid moral arguments against seizing people’s property. At most, it can serve as a basis for arguing that the government should be doing the seizing and that individuals should not make up their own distribution plans for society.

Legal remedies alone will not stop crime. As long as criminals can believe that what they are doing is right, punishment alone will not discourage them. Only the laissez-faire principle of rights provides a fully satisfactory reason why theft is wrong; thus, this principle is as ira- portant a weapon against crime as it is against dictatorship.