To The Editor
My Favorite Magazine
Ever since John Williams began writing for The Freeman, I’ve gained tremendous knowledge of the freedom philosophy. His articles are most lucid and it would be difficult to pose arguments against his many theses.
I was particularly impressed with “The Disease From Which Civilizations Die,” (September 1985). The messages contained should be shouted from the housetops.
I was fortunate to attend a FEE seminar in 1972 on a scholarship when the late Leonard Read was president. What a gifted man he was in explaining the freedom philosophy.
Thanks to John Williams and your other contributors for such carefully thought out ideas which appear in The Freeman. It is my favorite magazine, and one which I promote among my friends.
Irene Green
Coeur D’Alene, Idaho
Productive Justice
The Freeman is to be commended for providing an unabashed flee-market analysis of the recent draft of the Catholic bishops’ pastoral on the U.S. economy. Both Messrs. Baird and Kern raise a number of important questions which one hopes will be taken into consideration by the bishops in the subsequent and final draft. Indeed, it would appear that, at least in some respects, the bishops have taken to heart a few of the concerns expressed by advocates of the free-market, concerns which were glaringly absent in the previous draft. While there appears to be a move toward utilizing private sector solutions to social problems, the bishops continue to approach the question of economics as though it were a zero-sum game, which leads them to presume that if someone has more, this can only be the result of the fact that someone else has less. Such an assumption on their part should, at the very least, be questioned and defended, yet in this regard they are silent. Great things could happen if the bishops came to see that the market is not stagnant. It is dynamic and growing: people really do “make money.”
Mr. Baird notes that at the heart of the bishops’ concern is what an economic system does for and to people, and as teachers of the Gospel they rightly focus their attention on poor people. The question is, then, how can the poor be lifted from their poverty? The answer clearly is, produce more wealth. Yet this is not the primary answer the bishops give. In favoring governmental (i.e., non-productive) solutions, and rarely exploring market (i.e., productive) possibilities, the bishops tend to fall back on various kinds of governmental experiments which distribute rather than produce wealth. The readers of The Freeman are all too familiar with what happens to the productive sector when this occurs.
The Church has developed a keen sense of distributive justice. When will they explore the possibilities of productive justice?
Robert A. Sirico
Washington, D. C.
Freedom and the Law
Professor Joseph Fulda has provided a valuable contribution to libertarian legal theory in his article on “Declar- ative Law” (November). The superiority of a system which holds people responsible for their actions, rather than merely ordering them about, is one which cannot be stressed enough.
What is not discussed is the difficulty of imposing legislative notions of legal responsibility upon spontaneously evolving legal processes. While the legislative and executive branches may properly assume a role in codifying principles which develop through judicial decision-making, they may cause more harm than good when they attempt to reconstruct the common law. Ignorance of this principle flies in the face of such landmark works as Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law, and Friedrich Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty.
While Professor Fulda does much to illuminate the form which a just and libertarian law code would take—that its laws would be declarative and be founded upon the notion of responsibility-he does little to address the way in which the system would develop. By stressing the means by which legislators can reinstitute the “declarative law,” he obscures the importance of spontaneously grown legal standards.
Kenneth L. Marcus
Williams College
Williamstown, Massachusetts
The American Republic
Has The Freeman lost its way? Recently I have noticed essays that elevate the notion of democracy.
Kenneth McDonald’s essay, “America’s Two Elites” (November)’ goes so far as to state, “America, after all, is a democracy.” Sorry, Mr. McDonald, but the United States of America is a republic. Read the Constitution of the United States. The words democracy and democratic are not part of the text.
Democracy is majority rule and democracies ultimately crush the rights of the minority: Unfortunately, we have become more democratic in recent years; and because we have become more democratic we have suffered a significant loss of liberty and gained a weighty burden of forced collectivism.
William F. Kerschner
Elm Grove, Wisconsin
Misgivings
I have misgivings about the inclusion of letters in The Freeman. I’m afraid they will dilute and detract from the flavor unique to your monthly.
Of course, you will probably print this and set up a contradictory self-reference thereby. Ha-ha. []
Robert Goodman
Bronx, New York
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