The reason goes back to a 1973 Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Enmons. The question in both cases is: when is it legitimate for a private group to initiate violence and threats of violence in pur­suit of its ends? A classical liberal’s answer is, of course, never, even if the ends being pursued are themselves legitimate. Alas, in Enmons the Court said that when unions initiate violence and threats of violence they are exempt from federal prosecution under the Hobbs Act as long as in doing so they pursue “legitimate” union objectives. The Scheidler case was about whether anti-abortion activist groups such as Operation Rescue should enjoy the same exemption to the rule of law given to unions in Enmons. The AFL-CIO said yes; NOW said no.

The Hobbs Act amended the federal Anti-Racketeering Act of 1934, which was aimed pri­marily at organized crime and prohibited violence, threats of violence, and other forms of extortion by indi­viduals and groups against other individuals and groups. As the 1934 Act was working its way through Congress, the American Federation of Labor objected that if applied to labor unions the law would thwart standard union practices in labor disputes. This explicit recogni­tion by the AFL that much of what it did was illicit under ordinary law got Congress to stipulate that unions would be exempt from the Act to the extent that they “lawfully” pursued “legitimate” union objectives.

In U.S. v. Local 807, International Brotherhood of Team­sters (1942), the Teamsters asserted that they were law­fully pursuing legitimate union objectives when, using threats and violence, they stopped trucks entering New York City and demanded that the owner-drivers pay tribute to the union equal to a full day’s wage before they were allowed to proceed. The Supreme Court agreed with the Teamsters. U.S. Rep. Sam Hobbs and several other members of Congress were outraged by this decision and prom­ulgated the Hobbs Act to reverse the Court. In the words of Rep. John Williams Gwynne, an ally of Hobbs, “I think the intent of the Congress in the 1934 statute was to protect the lawful activities of organized labor. The construction put on it by the Supreme Court would authorize unlawful acts—certainly never intended by this Congress” (empha­sis added). The Hobbs Act became law in 1946.

The Act says anyone who “in any way or degree obstructs, delays, or affects commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in com­merce, by robbery or extortion or attempts or conspires so to do, or commits or threatens physical violence to any person or property in furtherance of a plan or purpose to do anything in violation of this section shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.” While the Act did not “repeal, modify or affect” any provisions of such pro-union legislation as the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), it included no explicit exemptions for unions from federal anti-extortion legislation even in pursuit of “legitimate” union objectives.

The Enmons case involved a strike in which individ­ual unionists fired high-powered rifles at three utility company transformers, drained the oil from another transformer, and blew up a company transformer substa­tion, all in pursuit of a higher-pay union contract. The Court decided that such violence was exempt from Hobbs Act prosecution because it was in pursuit of a legitimate union objective. The Court asserted that the Act was meant only to bring union violence under the purview of federal anti-extortion legislation if it was in pursuit of illegitimate ends, such as, in Local 807, extort­ing money for work not performed. If the ends were legitimate there could be no extortion.The Court found that since the NLRA empowers unions to strike in pur­suit of higher-pay contracts, the use of violence in that pursuit was not extortion.

In dissent Justice William O. Douglas wrote, “[T]he Court today achieves by interpretation what those who were opposed to the Hobbs Act were unable to get Congress to do.” In Douglas’s view “the regime of vio­lence, whatever its precise objective, is a common device of extortion and is condemned by the Act.”Douglas was no classical liberal, but he at least understood that legit­imate ends do not justify illegitimate means.

The first Supreme Court decision in the Scheidler case was in 1994. In the late 1980s Joseph Scheidler, head of a coalition of anti-abortion groups called the Pro Life Action Network, and others were alleged to have attempted to shut down abortion clinics by picket­ing, demonstrating, threatening and, in some cases, hos­tile physical contact with both abortion providers and women seeking their services. These tactics are, of course, often employed by unions during strikes and other labor disputes. NOW, et al. sued Scheidler et al. alleging violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute and the Hobbs Act. The defendants argued that since their actions were not motivated by economic gain, RICO was not appli­cable. The Court’s 1994 decision was simply that “RICO contains no economic motive requirement.”

Case Remanded

The case was remanded to the trial court, which found that the anti-abortion protesters were guilty of 121 acts that violated RICO and/or the Hobbs Act. The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court upheld the judg­ment of the trial court. When the case returned to the Supreme Court in 2003, the Court found that, since the protesters did not receive any property from their vic­tims as a result of their violence and threats, none of the acts of the protesters involved extortion or robbery. Therefore the protesters did not violate RICO. Remaining, however, were four acts of violence and threats in which no allegation of extortion or robbery was made, but which could have violated the Hobbs Act. That was the issue decided by the Court in February.

NOW wanted the Act to be read to say that it pro­scribes any obstruction, delay, or interference with com­merce by any of three means: (1) robbery, (2) extortion, or (3) acts and threats of violence that do not involve robbery or extortion. The AFL-CIO didn’t want num­ber three to stand alone. It wanted robbery and/or extortion to be required before a violation of the Act can be found. If the Court accepted stand-alone vio­lence and threats as Hobbs violations, the Court may later decide to revisit its Enmons decision, which exempted unions from the Act on the grounds that vio­lent strike actions, by themselves, do not involve robbery or extortion when undertaken in pursuit of “legitimate” union objectives.

During oral argument Justice Stephen Breyer expressed concern that if NOW prevailed in Scheidler III, routine union violence during strikes could become “a major federal crime.” He and other seven justices who participated in the decision came down on the side of the AFL-CIO. Tragically, to protect the illicit privileges given to unions, the Court extended them to abortion protesters.

by Charlotte Twight

St. Martin’s Press/Palgrave • 2002 • 512 pages • $26.95 hardcover; $17.95 paperback

Reviewed by James Bovard

Charlotte Twight has written an excellent book to help Americans understand how the federal government is insidiously seizing control of their lives, year by year, edict by edict, emergency by emergency. Twight provides both a solid theoretical framework and bevies of examples to drive home the danger from Washington.

A professor of economics at Boise State University, she highlights how, “from the perspective of individual liberty,” the “authority to control, not the specific controls imposed at a particular point in time,” is the key issue. Her concern is “not only the growth of dependence but also the growth of an ideology of dependence—the normative judgment that broad governmental power creating pervasive dependence on government is desirable.”

The author shows how politicians and bureaucrats are continually slanting the playing field against individual freedom. Twight warns, “Deliberately manipulating our ability to stop their power quest, federal officials have used techniques that systematically increase people’s personal costs of resistance.”

Twight also shows how government grows by deception, for example, how presidents, congressmen, and bureaucrats conned Americans into accepting Social Security. The Social Security Administration for decades told people that their Social Security taxes were being held for each citizen in individual accounts; in reality, as soon as the money came in, politicians found ways to spend it. Social Security Commissioner Stanford Ross conceded in 1979 that “the mythology of Social Security contributed greatly to its success. . . . Strictly speaking, the system was never intended to return to individuals what they paid.” Ross said that Americans should forget the “myth” that Social Security is a pension plan and accept it as a tax on workers to provide for the “vulnerable of our society.”

American citizens now shoulder over $12 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities. If the defenders of Social Security insist that the fraud was justified, the question arises: What future limits should exist on government’s prerogative to deceive the people? If Social Security is an acceptable fraud, what would government have to do before it was considered to have gone too far?

Twight vivifies how the federal control of education has been increasing for decades. Public education is the most expensive “gift” that most Americans will ever receive. Government school systems are increasingly coercive and abusive both of parents and students. Government schools in most areas have been taken over by unions, judges, and grandstanding politicians. And the worse schools have failed, the more years of students’ lives they are commandeering. Unfortunately, regardless of the continual failures of Washington’s education programs, federal intervention has spread like kudzu through the nation’s schools.

One of the best parts of the book is the analysis and revelations about federal surveillance of average Americans. Twight drives home how the feds were already sticking their noses practically everywhere—even before 9/11, the Patriot Act, and Total Information Awareness.

Dependent on D.C. walks readers through how the government has acquired far more arbitrary power in recent decades—and why that power is a dire threat to the Constitution and Americans’ everyday life. Anything that increases dependency on government undermines liberty. How can a citizen help steer the ship of State at the same time that he has his hand out for another government benefit? Once a person becomes a government dependent, his moral standing to resist the expansion of government power is fatally compromised. Every increase in the number of government dependents means an increase in political power. Each increase in the number of government dependents means another person who sees limits on government power as a threat to his own personal well-being.

America is capsizing as a result of the vast increase in the number of government dependents and employees—a voting bloc that overwhelms every other potential force. H. L. Mencken quipped in the 1930s that the New Deal divided America into “those who work for a living and those who vote for a living”—a division more true now than ever before.

Hopefully, Americans will wake up to the danger of constantly growing government power before it is too late. However, as Twight’s book shows, that defense is becoming more difficult with each passing year.

James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights (1994) and Terrorism and Tyranny: How Bush’s Crusade Is Sabotaging Freedom, Justice, and Peace (St. Martin’s, forthcoming September 2003).

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt

by Paul E. Gottfried

University of Missouri Press • 2002 • 176 pages  • $29.95

Reviewed by George C. Leef

Recently the book The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg was denounced by the Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty. Without offering specifics, the committee said the book was “contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.” It hasn’t been banned or burned, but here is an official body endeavoring to tell people what thoughts are unacceptable.

It is part of a growing movement, here and in Europe, toward government management of people’s beliefs. In Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, Paul Gottfried writes about the mega-state’s embrace of that new role. Controlling people’s actions just isn’t enough for many modern “liberals”; they now wish also to regulate people’s thoughts and naturally have turned to government for the necessary enforcement powers. From campus speech codes in the United States to laws like that in France under which writer Michel Hoellebecq was recently charged for having written critically about Islam, we now face a steadily increasing array of sanctions for expressing “incorrect thoughts.”

Gottfried, a professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, began his project of describing the growth of what he calls “the managerial state” in his 1999 book After Liberalism (reviewed in the October 2000 issue). The current book extends Gottfried’s insights to a particularly troubling aspect thereof—its “therapeutic” side, which aims at “curing” people of their “bad” ideas. Gottfried explains: “Our welfare state since midcentury has become increasingly preoccupied with modifying social behavior. And while American administrative democracy has not gone as far economically in nationalizing production [as other governments], it has moved into socializing ‘citizens’ through publicly controlled education and wars against discrimination. Such reconstructionist initiatives have been taken in response to what the state, the media, and ‘victim’ groups designate as a crisis, a surging outburst of prejudice that supposedly must be contained and whose representatives need to be re-educated.”

What advocates of liberty need to understand, Gottfried contends, is that the central planners have changed their objectives. Whereas the left has long pursued economic planning to eliminate the alleged unfairness of the market, its emphasis has been moving away from economic controls and toward behavioral controls. Politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair understand that they need the economic growth that only a relatively free economy provides to obtain revenue for their social projects. “What distinguishes third-way planners from earlier social democrats is a greater willingness to sacrifice economic collectivism for economic growth,” Gottfried writes. “Social control by the state does not presuppose a socialized economy, and government interventions into child rearing, spousal relations, and intergroup dynamics can now go forward in conjunction with market forces.”

The big selling point of old-style socialism was fear—fear of poverty, of “Robber Barons,” of the “chaos” of freedom. Like an advertising slogan that is so timeworn that it no longer brings in customers, “fear” has been dropped by the left and replaced with a new hook better suited to contemporary conditions: guilt. People must acquiesce in the new social regulation because they have to atone for a constellation of past wrongs. Gottfried writes, “The relevant political-moral attitude is an ostentatious guilt about the historical past that the majority society is supposed to exhibit.” The state and its allies parade before the public a steady stream of “politically correct martyrologies” to keep it compliant.

“By harping on the real or imagined evils of the past,” Gottfried writes, “proponents of state-controlled socialization appeal to the guilty conscience of their listeners.” He is surely correct in that assertion. Many colleges and universities now have freshman-orientation sessions that are reminiscent of Maoist re-education camps, where white students are harangued and berated so they will “understand” what it’s like to be a member of an oppressed group. Yet there is little opposition to those programs, the guiltmeisters having done their work well.

Gottfried’s analysis also has its foreign policy dimensions. If government power can be used to “do good” at home, why stop there? Thus we get military interventions abroad not because there is any conceivable threat to the United States, but because the people just aren’t behaving nicely. As the author puts it, “This new internationalism, as suggested by Clinton and Blair, aims at nothing less than a transformation of human consciousness.” So allied forces go into Kosovo because we have to stop ethnic hatreds, and European nations organize a campaign to punish Austria for electing a prime minister with unenlightened views.

Just as Europe was ahead of the United States in the old, purely economic kind of socialism, Europe has gone further into the therapeutic socialism about which Gottfried writes. There, people are actually fined and imprisoned for verbal offenses against “the antifascist order.” The First Amendment still offers us protection against the worst instincts of the thought controllers, but it would be good to remember that judicial “interpretation” that takes away constitutional protection for our liberties is nothing new.

A necessary and important book.

George Leef is book review editor of Ideas on Liberty.

The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken

by Terry Teachout

HarperCollins • 2002 • 349 pages plus notes and index • $29.95 hardcover

Reviewed by Sheldon Richman

Nearly half a century since his death, H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) continues to fascinate. What attracts so many to the audacious debunker of sham, the Colossus of literary, political, and social criticism from the 1910s into the 1930s?

His latest biographer, cultural critic Terry Teachout, provides some answers to that question. While not a full-blown biography, The Skeptic mines the most important areas of Mencken’s life and digs out much of interest pro and con. Mencken fans, of which there remains a legion, won’t always be pleased with Teachout’s findings or judgments.

As newspaperman, book author, and magazine writer and editor, Mencken courted controversy—deliberately: he celebrated Nietzsche in 1908; he wrote a paean to the Kaiser’s Germany in 1914; he offended Jews (though many of his best friends really were Jewish); he demeaned blacks (while publishing black authors); he derided Christianity; he promoted a literary naturalism that flaunted the underside of life; and he daily insulted the middle class as the “booboisie.” He was a man full of prejudices (Mencken’s word), who could be unjust to the targets of his gleefully mischievous pen, such as William Jennings Bryan and Calvin Coolidge. Teachout’s portrait is often unflattering, and for this some Mencken aficionados blame the biographer. But it is not entirely Teachout’s fault. In many ways, Mencken asked for it.

And yet something about him casts a spell. First, there is the quality of Mencken’s writing. His earthiness and gusto leave their mark on all who come in contact with him.

Second, he lived a life that many would love to live. Seemingly carefree, daring, and uninhibited, Mencken wrote what he wanted about anything he wanted and the consequences be damned. (Teachout shows us that a good deal of Mencken’s public persona didn’t square with his private life. Mencken was a respected man of his bourgeois community and lived quietly, in his boyhood Baltimore home, with his mother until she died when he was 45. His biographer believes he was a poseur in more ways than this.)

Third, for libertarians, Mencken was unequaled in capturing the spirit of American individualism. He was never a socialist and had no sympathy with the plans and pretenses of American politicians. (“We suffer most when the White House bursts with ideas.”) He valiantly battled censorship and Prohibition, the New Deal and FDR, the burgeoning bureaucracy and its penchant for smothering the creative individual. Many an advocate of the freedom philosophy could spend the day quoting him on the supremacy of liberty, the diabolical nature of government, and the threat from egalitarianism and democracy.

Put these three together, and any mystery concerning the Mencken allure evaporates. For some of us, they tote up to irresistibility. It surely explains why Mencken was so dominant a cultural figure in his heyday that a Hemingway character could say nonchalantly, “So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.”

The Skeptic is a hard book to get a handle on. While Teachout boasts that “Unlike Mencken’s previous biographers, I write, very broadly speaking, from his point of view,” one is hard pressed to find more than traces of empathy. More often, the reader gets the impression that Teachout doesn’t much like his subject. He assuredly admires how Mencken integrated style and substance. He is awed by Mencken’s prodigious energy and output. He respects many of Mencken’s accomplishments, such as helping to liberate American letters from a stultifying and censorial Puritanism and his path-breaking description of the “American language.” But he also levels serious and even shocking criticism: that Mencken was a bad magazine editor; that his literary self-education was woefully incomplete; that he misunderstood some of the writers he championed and panned; that he was not as dispassionate an observer as he appeared; that his goring of bourgeois America wore thin; and that, most egregiously, he misperceived the rise of fascism and Hitler. He goes so far as to blame the Mencken of the 1920s for helping “lay the intellectual groundwork for the America-hating adversary culture of the sixties.”

Mencken is a big subject made more difficult by his confounding contradictions. No biographer of his is to be envied. Much of Teachout’s material will cause the reader to grimace, but Mencken admirers will find that after 400 pages, even if their sense of the man is less clear, their admiration somehow survives.

Sheldon Richman is editor of Ideas on Liberty.

Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich

by Kevin Phillips

Broadway Books • 2002 • 472 pages  • $29.95 hardcover

Reviewed by Gregory Bresiger

Kevin Phillips, a Republican populist, keeps writing the same book. In several bestsellers in the 1990s, such as Arrogant Capital and The Politics of the Rich and Poor, Phillips has been describing the American economy in a way that could lead readers to think America is a giant Bolivia where only the superrich own any property of consequence. In his depiction of America, the rich get richer and the middle class works overtime and runs up endless debts. I can hardly recognize this nation. Phillips has evolved into a social democrat whether he acknowledges it or not.

His heroes, or at least those he constantly quotes, are those who battle “inequality.” They are mostly friends of big government. One is former New York governor Mario Cuomo. Phillips admires him and others like him because their social and economic policies are designed to knock the rich down a peg or two and thereby help the rest of us. The only problem with Cuomo’s reign in the Empire State is that it hurt the rest of us.

Phillips, a former Republican strategist, is also a fan of populists such as Ralph Nader. The reader is also treated to hymns to Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and other such tribunes who favored big government.

Phillips’s disdain for those who accumulate significant wealth is made clear when he approvingly quotes Benjamin Disraeli: “As a general rule, nobody has wealth who ought to have it.” (Phillips doesn’t inform the reader that Disraeli was notorious for dodging people he owed money to and finally solved his money problems by marrying a rich woman.)

The attentive reader should therefore not be surprised that Phillips also praises a politician, Richard Nixon, who admired Disraeli and wanted to outflank the left by becoming a twentieth century “Tory Democrat.” “As president,” Phillips writes in bragging that Nixon endorsed his ideas and previous books, “Nixon himself supported national health insurance, income maintenance for the poor, and higher taxation of unearned than earned income.”

Phillips leaves out a few things: Nixon ran huge deficits, pressured the Fed to follow loose monetary policies so he could be re-elected, and imposed wage and price controls, policies that gave the nation “stagflation” after Nixon was gone. Those policies hurt the middle class and working poor more than the rich, but Phillips is blind to that reality. Nixon also created the alternative minimum tax, another soak-the-rich device designed for millionaires that is now afflicting middle-class households.

What is Phillips’s solution to today’s problems of “inequality”? Unless there is another New Deal, another FDR, or a President Nader, Phillips warns, we should all prepare to become serfs in a modern feudal manor.

What is one to make of Phillips’s latest quasi-Marxist appeal? Remember the Al Smith line about the New Dealers stealing the socialists’ clothing? Michael Harrington, the American socialist leader who saw the Socialist Party defeated again and again, once argued that the way to advance American collectivism was for socialists to join the left wing of the Democratic party. It appears that Phillips—who spends a good part of more than 400 pages praising every “Republican progressive” with any socialist impulse—is doing the same yeoman work in the Republican party.

Gregory Bresiger is a business editor and writer living in Kew Gardens, New York.

Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

edited by Wendy McElroy

Ivan R. Dee • 2002 • 353 pages • $30.00 hardcover; $18.95 paperback

Reviewed by Bettina Bien Greaves

Admittedly, men and women are different. Women are from Venus, men from Mars. The French say, “vive la différence.” But today’s radical feminists exaggerate the difference and consider men and women two “separate and politically antagonistic classes.” Libertarians and individualists, on the other hand, look on all men and women as members of the same human race. Radical feminists advocate special treatment for women in the workplace, academia, and society; libertarians and individualists see the issue as government force versus freedom and seek equality for women under law.

Wendy McElroy is a libertarian, an individualist feminist (“ifeminist”), and has written widely on the struggle of women for equal rights and opportunity. The contributors to Liberty for Women—university professors, lawyers, political scientists, economists, physicians, prostitutes, midwives, and even a president of the American Civil Liberties Union—cover many issues. According to McElroy, “all human beings have a right to the protection of their persons and property,” and this book applies that principle consistently.

The authors want to get government off women’s backs, recognize their “economic self-sufficiency [and] psychological independence,” and maintain “realistic attitudes toward female competence, achievement, and potential.” Law professor Richard Epstein, for one, advocates removing legal restrictions and allowing everyone, men and women alike, the freedom to enter into contracts to better themselves through voluntary transactions. He writes that this will “enhance the vitality of the social system as a whole” and that it “dovetails neatly into any and all theories that recognize the limits as well as the uses of markets.” As an example of the harm done when the government refuses to respect freedom of contract, consider the Supreme Court’s decision, which relied on the Civil Rights Act’s anti-discrimination Title VII (1964) and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978), to overturn a voluntarily agreed-on contract devised by a manufacturer of batteries to protect its women employees and their potential offspring from exposure to dangerous chemicals. What the government calls “discrimination” Epstein regards as mutually beneficial agreement.

Only a few of the essays in the collection can be mentioned in this short review.

Political scientist Ellen Frankel Paul explains that affirmative-action, comparable-worth, and sexual-harassment legislation increases the cost of hiring women, ensures that government’s “equal-opportunity regulators” will “remain forever enmeshed in the workplace,” and “exaggerates all the problems the women’s movement has been trying to change.”

“Equity feminist” Camille Paglia considers anti-pornography laws “inherently infantilizing.” Cato Institute research associate Cathy Young maintains that “an individual’s noncoercive sexual behavior is no one else’s business.”

The subject of abortion is discussed by economist Alexander Tabarrok. He writes that while ifeminists consider abortion “a private matter that must be left to the conscience of those directly involved . . . mainstream ‘pro-choice’ feminists consider the ‘right to an abortion’ to be an entitlement for which others may legitimately be forced to pay. . . . Ifeminists call for the government to get out of reproductive decision-making altogether—to neither subsidize nor tax abortion or other contraceptive choices.”

Concerning prostitution, University of Chicago Professor Martha C. Nussbaum argues “there is nothing per se wrong with taking money for the use of one’s body.” “[W]ith prostitution: what seems right is to use law to protect the bodily safety of prostitutes from assault, to protect their rights to their incomes against the extortionate behavior of pimps, to protect poor women in developing countries from forced trafficking and fraudulent offers, and to guarantee their full civil rights in the countries where they end up—to make them, in general, equals under the law, both civil and criminal.”

Norma Jean Almodovar, a prostitutes-rights activist and former call girl, argues that “So long as the sex is consensual it should not matter to anyone outside the relationship how many times the sexual activity occurs, or with how many sexual partners, or for whatever mutually agreed upon price.” Decriminalization of prostitution “would involve no new legislation to deal with prostitution per se, because there are already plenty of laws which cover problems such as fraud, force, theft negligence, and collusion.”

“[V]exing ethical questions” and “serious questions about individual rights and contract law” may be involved in the controversial new reproductive technologies, but McElroy holds that “like effective contraception and access to legal abortion, [they] seem to provide women with the ‘choice’ central to virtually all brands of feminism.. . . The true issue surrounding the new reproductive technologies remains ‘a woman’s body, a woman’s right.’”

For decades, radical feminists have misled women as to their interests. Liberty for Women explains that their true interests depend on removing legal obstacles to freedom.

Bettina Greaves was a senior staff member and resident scholar at FEE for more than four decades. Now living in North Carolina, she is a former member of FEE’s Board of Trustees.

Robert Nozick

edited by David Schmidtz

Cambridge University Press • 2002 • 230 pages  • $60.00 hardcover; $20.00 paperback

Reviewed by Eric Mack

This is a collection of original essays on the philosophical work of Robert Nozick, who died in the spring of 2002. Nozick rose to philosophical prominence with his first book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974. Contributor Philip Pettit aptly says that this book still “stands unchallenged as the most coherent statement available of the case for a rights-based defense of the minimal, libertarian state.” None of Nozick’s subsequent five books dealt directly with political philosophy, and during most of his ensuing philosophical career, he attempted to distance himself from Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU). Nevertheless, it is indicative of his failure to establish this distance that most of the essays in this volume focus on the libertarian doctrine of ASU. I shall follow suit by concentrating on the three strongest of the essays on Nozick’s political thought.

Loren Lomasky’s chapter, “Nozick’s Libertarian Utopia,” contends that Nozick’s discussion of libertarian utopia—which Nozick presented as a supplementary argument for the minimal state—is actually a crucial component of the main argument in ASU. Nozick says that his main argument for the minimal state is that it could arise by morally permissible steps from a stateless condition. Lomasky recognizes that showing that the minimal state could arise in this way is hardly decisive, for many radically different political structures could arise by permissible steps—if people freely take dumb enough steps. So Lomasky depicts Nozick’s appeal to the utopian aspects of the libertarian political framework as a way of revealing why this structure is more appealing than other structures that could also arise by permissible means. According to Lomasky, the minimal state is more appealing because it has the utopia-like, synergistic feature of promoting a social order in which each person’s well-being is likely to be good for other people too. These are not the important benefits for people that arise from trade or joint production. Rather, they are the vicarious benefits for people of others achieving their own diverse goods in their own ways.

In ASU Nozick rejects the consequentialist idea that rightness and wrongness in an action is entirely a matter of the value or disvalue of that action’s consequences. He holds, instead, that performing an action can be wrong even if its outcome would be more valuable than the outcome of not performing that action. For instance, it can be wrong for you to kill innocent person A even if your killing A would prevent someone else from killing innocent persons B and C. (Here we accept the conventional wisdom that it would be better for one innocent person, rather than two innocent people, to be killed.) According to Nozick, there are certain principles you ought to abide by—such as, do not kill innocents—even if your abiding by those principles does not maximize those principles being abided by.

Philip Pettit’s essay, “Non-Consequentialism and Political Philosophy,” focuses on and criticizes Nozick’s anti-consequentialism. Pettit does a nice job of laying out the standard—but, I think, mistaken—arguments for why everyone ultimately has to be a consequentialist.

The fundamental dispute between anti-consequentialists and consequentialists is a dispute about the nature of practical rationality. Is rationality in action entirely a matter of effectively attaining one’s goals? Or is it also in part a matter of abiding by certain principles—such as the principle against killing innocents—which may restrict the means one may use toward the attainment of one’s ends? Gerald Gaus’s essay, “Goals, Symbols, Principles: Nozick on Practical Rationality,” analyzes Nozick’s subsequently developed theory on this matter. Gaus shows that Nozick’s post-ASU dissatisfaction with libertarianism can be traced to this theory; for according to Nozick’s later doctrine, the only reason one has to act in conformity with a moral principle—such as, the principle of not coercing people to come to the aid of others—is the “symbolic utility” involved in the act of abiding by the principle. Hence, one should be prepared to violate that principle whenever the utility—especially the symbolic utility—of violating the principle is greater than the symbolic utility of abiding by the principle. For instance, one should be prepared to violate the principle of not coercing people to come to the aid of others whenever the symbolic utility of having official, public programs of assistance to the needy is greater than the symbolic utility involved in the act of abiding by the principle. Gaus points to deep flaws in Nozick’s later, essentially consequentialist, account of practical rationality.

Each of these strongest essays is difficult going. First read Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Then mull it over and read it again. Then go in search of interesting commentaries—three of which can be found in Schmidtz’s Robert Nozick.

Eric Mack is a professor of philosophy at Tulane University.

Unfortunately, this issue has become wrapped up with the abortion controversy. Both sides have sought to occupy the moral high ground. For its part, the Bush administration points to the use of UNFPA funds to support compulsory abortions in China. This should be uncontroversial to anyone outside the policy-making corridors of Beijing. It beggars the imagination that pro-choice advocates would support the use of force to require abortions, contraception, or sterilization.

From their side, population planners and reproductive-rights advocates insist that cutting funds will harm the interests of many women, especially in developing countries. Funding cuts are paired with horrific images of millions of unwanted pregnancies, related medical complications, and an unabated spread of AIDS. (See Nicholas D. Kristof’s op-ed “Devastated Women,” New York Times, April 26.)

The Bush administration might have found itself on more tenable ground if it shifted the debate toward the persistent negative image associated with population increases per se. For herein lies a truly prickly question. Neglected in this debate is that having more human beings actually constitutes a net gain. Instead, supporters of population planning (both voluntary or involuntary) start with the assumption that there are already too many of us on our fair earth. And there is surprisingly little dissent to this view. Sharp declines in infant mortality and improved health care have increased life spans and contributed to the population’s nearly quadrupling within a century, from around 1.6 billion in 1900 to almost 6 billion in 2000. Worries about a global population explosion brought warnings of worldwide famine and immiseration. Happily, these predictions have not been borne out. One eloquent body of work that should be more widely heeded is that of the late economist Julian Simon, who had a remarkably undismal view of the world. His optimism is best expressed in his book The Ultimate Resource. Therein, he identifies human beings as being capable of resolving most problems that confront us.

Ignoring the view of thinkers like Simon, political leaders in both India and China were caught in the trap of a negative logic that allowed abusive acts against their citizens in the name of “sound” public policy. Clearly, the forced sterilization and abortions they pursued were a violation of the most basic principles of human dignity. Their actions reflect a disregard for the value-added potential that is inherent in each and every human being. Yet they are obviously not alone. Even conventional economic data calculation reflects a negative bias against population growth.

Consider the calculation of per capita income whereby national income is divided by the size of the population. This means that an additional person will increase the denominator and reflect a decrease in the material well-being of a community. However, a batch of new puppies born to a breeder will increase the numerator and reflect an enhancement in economic conditions. Such an anomaly comes from ignoring the imputed present value of the future flow of benefits from a newly born human.

Despite their likely denials of such, there is an implicit racism in the demands of population-control advocates. Since many Western developed countries have shrinking populations, insistence on limiting population growth involves holding back the numbers of black, brown, and yellow peoples.

Although considerable evidence refutes the dismal view of population growth, it persists. Consider the fact that the areas of highest population density are the most prosperous and often the most hospitable. Amsterdam, Hong Kong, London, Singapore, and Tokyo are prime examples of this. And even though Bombay and Cairo are heavily polluted, they are both certainly more prosperous and productive than the surrounding countryside.

Exaggerated Dangers

Interestingly, advocates of population control are subject to strong personal incentives to exaggerate the dangers. Concocting horrific images of overpopulation allows politicians to lay claim to more resources from taxpayers (whose numbers they paradoxically wish to see increase!). Similarly, “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs) stand to gain funds by beating the same drum.

It turns out that population growth has internal checks. For example, people who are richer, healthier, and better educated tend to have smaller families. According to U.N. estimates, there will be little growth in the world’s population growth after 2100 and the population will be stable at just below 11 billion. This is because the population growth rate peaked at about 2 percent a year in the early 1960s and has been declining ever since. It is now 1.26 percent and is expected to fall to 0.46 percent in 2050. Countries where fertility rates are at sub-replacement levels constitute about 44 percent of the world’s total population and include many developing countries. On the one hand, high rates of economic development along with rising per capita income has heralded a declining pace of population growth due to rapid decreases in birthrates. On the other hand, it is troubling counterpoint that countries with lower levels of economic development are experiencing a discernible decline in life spans.

Many countries have population profiles that show increased aging. With progressive improvement in life expectancies and health conditions during long intervals of peace, the median age of many populations has increased. With more individuals able to better their lives, it can be said that the overall human condition has improved.

There are other ways to cope with local population growth. One of the simplest would be to allow more open immigration. However, populists mount opposition by invoking the fear of infiltration by terrorist organizations or the dilution of indigenous culture. These claims find eager support among trade unionists who want to keep out other workers who seek to improve their lot. Looking at it from a purely economic standpoint, there is considerable evidence that migration yields net benefits to receiving countries. Incoming migrants tend to be younger and healthier than the receiving population. And their choice to move away from the familiarities of their home country implies a high initiative to work. In all events, most economic migrants take up jobs that locals are unwilling or unable to fill.

The other way to offset the pressures of the peopling of the earth is to take steps to allow higher economic growth. There are various benefits from this. First, increases in average income tend to lead to declining birth rates. Second, higher levels of income provide both the desire and the means to solve a wide range of problems.

The perceived problems of global population growth are failures of governance. Instead of diverting resources toward population control, governments and NGOs should support open immigration and policies that promote economic growth.

Christopher Lingle is a professor of economics at Universidad Francisco Marroquín.

In the early months of 1889 a 37-year-old Swedish student named Knut Wicksell was walking through the streets of Berlin in Germany when he happened to notice in the window of a bookstore a recently published volume by the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk: The Positive Theory of Capital.

Wicksell later wrote to a friend that,

I procured a copy and was soon lost in the book. I understood most of it rather imperfectly, as can be seen from my notes in the margin. . . . Nonetheless the book came to me as a revelation. I had already tried on my own, with little success, to penetrate the phenomenon of interest and the general problem of economic distribution, when complicated by the existence of capital (as well as labor and natural resources). . . . It was as though I now saw with my own eyes the roof being put on a scientific construction, which no economist since the days of Ricardo had managed to raise above its lower floors.¹

This discovery put Knut Wicksell on an intellectual path that led to his becoming one of the great economists of the twentieth century. Through his writings and personal influence Wicksell provided a framework for monetary and business-cycle analysis that has served as the starting point for several generations of Swedish and Austrian economists. Knut Wicksell was born on December 20, 1851, in Stockholm. The sesquicentennial of his birth offers an appropriate occasion for an appreciation of some of his important contributions to economics.

Wicksell was born into a middle-class Swedish family. His father ran a grocery business and wisely invested the profits in real estate. Knut’s mother died when he was seven years old, and his father when he was 15. But he and his four siblings were left financially comfortable enough for them to get through high school and for Knut and his brother to attend the University of Uppsala, not far from Stockholm. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree, cum laude, after only two, instead of the usual four, years, having specialized in mathematics, physics, and astronomy.

But he began having doubts about his future. First, after an intense devotion to his Christian faith following his father’s death, he increasingly came to have doubts, and at the age of 23 became a “free thinker,” a position from which he never wavered for the rest of his life. Second, he doubted whether he could make any meaningful contributions to mathematics, if he chose that direction for his graduate studies.

At the same time, he began to be interested in the social and economic issues of the day, especially the relationship between drunkenness, prostitution, the condition of the poor, and overpopulation. The poor were driven to drink because of the apparent hopelessness of their economic condition. Many men in the lower middle class turned to alcohol and the services of prostitutes because they had no hope of earning a sufficient income that would make early marriage possible.

Wicksell concluded, therefore, that if these vices were to be ameliorated, population growth had to be slowed down so that the rate of capital formation would exceed the rate of increase in population, resulting in a relatively greater scarcity of labor in comparison to capital. This would raise the value of labor and wages relative to the value and price of capital. But Wicksell rejected Thomas Malthus’s famous prescription of “moral restraint” on the part of the members of society. Instead, he made the case for a wide distribution of contraceptives, and in later years advocated the legalization of abortions during the first three months of pregnancy.

For these and other “radical” social views that he put into print in the early 1880s, Wicksell was condemned by the professors at the University of Uppsala, censured by the Uppsala medical association, and warned that he was following a dangerous path in publicly advocating these ideas.

He made his living during these years as a journalist and read economics on his own. But in the mid-1880s and then again late in the decade he was awarded travel grants to study abroad that took him to London, Strasbourg, and Vienna. In Vienna he attended the lectures of Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school of economics. It was on the second of these travels that Wicksell came across Böhm-Bawerk’s work in a Berlin bookstore.

When he returned to Sweden he applied for a lectureship in economics at the University of Uppsala, but was turned down because of his political and social views. Nevertheless, he was recommended to apply to the university law school, where he was told that he could teach economics only if he had a law degree. So at the age of 45 he did what he had done as an undergraduate and crammed four years of study into two. He passed the law examination in 1899 and was appointed a lecturer in economics at the University of Uppsala the same year. The following year he accepted a professorship at the University of Lund, a position he held until his retirement in 1917 at age 65.

At Lund he continued to make controversial statements. At a May Day demonstration in 1904 he suggested that it was futile to imagine that Sweden could ever successfully defend itself against a determined, more powerful foreign enemy. Instead, he suggested that Sweden should abolish all military spending and invite Imperial Russia to annex the country. Russia would supply all necessary defense against would-be attackers, and the role of the Swedes would be to educate and civilize the rough and backward Russians in the ways of social freedom and democracy. He stepped back from this radical position after the First World War and became a strong proponent of the League of Nations.

Then in 1908 Wicksell took up the cause of an “anarchist agitator” who had “disturbed the religious peace” of the country with remarks declared to be blasphemous for which he was sent to prison. Insistent that this was a blatant and serious violation of freedom of expression and personal liberty, Wicksell delivered a public lecture in which, as an act of peaceful civil disobedience, he satirized the story of the Immaculate Conception. Wicksell was tried and convicted of blasphemy and after several appeals spent two months in prison in 1910.

He wrote widely on the problems of wartime inflation and postwar monetary problems following the First World War and suggested how the negative effects of the war could be minimized in neutral Sweden. He also turned out a string of seminal books on capital, money, interest, and public finance. On May 2, 1926, at the age of 74, he died from a stomach disorder that was complicated by pneumonia.

Major Works

Wicksell’s first major work was Value, Capital and Rent published in 1893.² The classical economists, from Adam Smith through David Ricardo to John Stuart Mill, had attempted to show that the relative prices of goods and the distribution of income among the factors of production (land, labor, and capital) were all ultimately determined by the quantity of labor (along with a few auxiliary assumptions) that was required for the manufacture of goods and the production of food. The “marginalist revolution” of the 1870s had shown that the value of goods and factors of production are ultimately based on the subjective valuations of demanders. Their marginal (or incremental) decisions concerning tradeoffs between units of commodities determine relative prices in the market.

What Wicksell did in his first book was to synthesize the mathematical general equilibrium theory of Léon Walras with Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of capital as a time-consuming, multistaged process of production. He explained how each factor of production received an income equal to its contribution (or marginal product) to the manufacture of a good. He also showed that even in a stationary equilibrium, interest income had to be earned as the incentive for replacing the capital consumed in the processes of production through time.

In his next major work, Studies in the Theory of Public Finance (1896), Wicksell innovatively applied the theory of marginal cost-benefit analysis to the process of government taxing and spending.³ Nobel laureate James Buchanan has emphasized Wicksell’s original and important contribution to political decision-making on fiscal matters:

Among fiscal theorists, Knut Wicksell holds the unique position of having carried his theoretical ideas through to an examination of the political structure within which fiscal decisions must be made and implemented. . . . Wicksell proposed, first of all, that the bridge between tax and expenditure sides of the fiscal account be made explicit. When a specific expenditure project was presented, a whole array of possible distributions of the required tax bill were also to be presented, with each array estimated to produce revenues sufficient to cover the outlay. The expenditure project was then to be voted on in the legislature, along with each one of the tax allocations, and when one such combination secured the unanimous approval of the assembly, it was to be adopted. If no single combination received unanimous support, the expenditure project was not to be undertaken and no tax was to be levied.⁴

Wicksell stepped back from the full unanimity principle to a less restrictive super-majority rule. But Buchanan highlighted that what was crucial to Wicksell’s contribution was his focusing on government fiscal issues in terms of the individual members of society who would either receive the expenditure benefits or bear the taxation costs. The preferences of real people affected by government fiscal policy could no longer be ignored, and economists could not simply view themselves as “proffering advice to nonexistent benevolent despots.”⁵

But the contribution for which Wicksell has received the most international recognition among economists for over a century now is his book Interest and Prices: A Study of the Causes Regulating the Value of Money (1898).⁶ In the first half of the nineteenth century a number of leading classical economists, including David Ricardo, had defended “the quantity theory of money” in understanding the inflation experienced during the Napoleonic Wars. They reasoned that a general rise in prices could not occur unless there was a sustained increase in the quantity of money. And they further argued that the only way to restrain government’s temptation to abuse the printing press was to link the currency to a commodity, such as gold. Thus they advocated the gold standard as an institutional means to prevent government-caused inflations. For a variety of reasons many economists had turned away from the logic of the quantity theory of money by the end of the nineteenth century.

Wicksell set about the task of rehabilitating it.⁷ He used Böhm-Bawerk’s idea of a period of production between the application of inputs and the availability of outputs to serve as the framework for restating his version of the theory. In a nutshell, Wicksell argued that if goods were traded directly in barter, there would be a tendency for market forces to establish an interest rate that balanced the supply and demand for real capital for investment purposes. And this equilibrium rate of interest is what Wicksell called the “natural rate.”⁸

However, in a complex economy goods are traded through a medium of exchange—money. If lenders lent their savings to borrowers in the form of money at a similar equilibrium rate of interest, then money would be “nothing more than a cloak” for the savings and investing of real resources for productive purposes. However, Wicksell says, “Liquid real capital (i.e., goods) are never lent. . . . [I]t is money which is lent, and then the commodity capital is then sold in exchange for this money.”⁹

Depressed Interest Rate

Since it is money that is lent, and not real capital, the monetary authority is able to increase the supply of money available for lending and lower the money rate of interest below the “natural rate” to attract borrowers. Anticipated yields or profits on potential investments will now seem greater than before the fall in the money rate of interest, meaning that at the margin some production projects will now appear attractive that did not seem profitable at the previous higher rate of interest. However, not all types of investments are affected equally by the change in the rate of interest. Those with longer time horizons—longer periods of production before their completion—will be influenced to a greater degree because the lowering of the rate of interest increases the present value of these longer-term investment projects.

Developing several different models using slightly different assumptions, Wicksell presents his theory of how this lowering of the interest rate affects market processes.¹⁰ But the crucial one that served as a springboard for later developments of the theory by other Austrian and Swedish economists is his two-period model.

Suppose, he says, that production processes normally take one year. But with the fall in the rate of interest because of the monetary expansion, two-year investment projects now appear profitable to some entrepreneurs. Using borrowed money, these entrepreneurs purchase and hire factors of production by bidding them away from their present employment in one-year projects. This means that at the end of the first year fewer goods and services will have been produced than would have been, because the required resources were drawn into projects that will not be completed for another year.

This greater scarcity of consumer goods, reflected in higher prices, “forces” society to save—that is, do without consumption goods they normally would have desired to purchase, but which are not available. But according to Wicksell, at the end of the second year, when the longer-term projects have been completed, society will be rewarded for this forced waiting with more and better goods made possible by the longer period of production.

Wicksell argued that if the monetary authority were to keep the money rate of interest constantly below the “natural rate” through continuous monetary expansion, a “cumulative process” of rising prices would be generated. The additions to the money supply would be borrowed by entrepreneurs who bid up the prices of the factors of production to keep or add them to their sectors of the economy. The workers and resource owners receiving those higher money incomes period after period would in turn, and in sequence, bid up the prices for the consumer goods they desire. Only an end to the monetary expansion and a rise in the rate of interest back to its “natural” level could bring the process to an end.

A few years later Wicksell restated his formulation of the Austrian theory of investment and the period of production, as well as his theory of money and how monetary changes influence production processes in his two-volume Lectures on Political Economy.¹¹

Wicksell’s outline of the way in which changes in the money supply modify the market rate of interest and influence the allocation of resources through the processes of production became the starting points for the Austrian and Swedish schools of economics in monetary and business-cycle theory. Ludwig von Mises in The Theory of Money and Credit, Monetary Stabilization and Cyclical Policy, and Human Action, and F.A. Hayek in Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle and Prices and Production adopted Wicksell’s framework for developing a theory of the business cycle.¹²

Mises’s and Hayek’s innovation was to demonstrate that there were market forces set in motion in Wicksell’s “cumulative process” that would bring it to an end before many of the longer-term investment projects could be brought to completion. Thus the inflationary upturn in investment activity carried with it the seeds for an eventual downturn and correction when these capital projects were shown to be malinvestments resulting from misdirection of resources due to the lack of real savings needed to bring them to, and maintain them after, completion.¹³

In the 1930s Wicksell’s ideas were developed in a slightly different direction by the Stockholm school of economists.¹⁴ Two of the most important contributors from this period were Gunnar Myrdal and Erik Lindahl. Myrdal formulated a theory of “monetary equilibrium,” in which he suggested the conditions that were required for avoiding Wicksell’s cumulative process.¹⁵ Lindahl accepted Wicksell’s basic framework and then analyzed the change in the cumulative process if there were less-than-full employment in either the consumer-goods or investment-goods sectors of the economy or both; Lindahl also developed a “period analysis” of sequential change over time.¹⁶ And in the late 1930s Bertil Ohlin defended the Swedish Wicksellian approach against the emerging Keynesian theory.¹⁷

Both the Austrian and Swedish variations and developments of Wicksell’s seminal ideas on money and the business cycle were submerged in the tidal wave of Keynesian macroeconomics during most of the post-World War II period.¹⁸ But in recent years there has been a renewed interest in Wicksell and his continuing relevance as found in the Austrian and Swedish variations on his themes.¹⁹ And most especially the new generation of Austrian economists has begun a revival of this insightful tradition.²⁰

Thus on the 150th anniversary of Knut Wicksell’s birth, his ideas have as much interest and offer as much insight at the beginning of the 21st century as when he was first penning them at the start of the twentieth.

Notes

1. Torsten Gardlund, The Life of Knut Wicksell (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1958), p. 118. The following account of Wicksell’s life and career are taken from Gardlund’s book and Carl G. Uhr, Economic Doctrines of Knut Wicksell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).
2. Knut Wicksell, Value, Capital and Rent (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970 [1893]).
3. This work has been partly translated as, Knut Wicksell, “A New Principle of Just Taxation” [1896], in R.A. Musgrave and A.T. Peacock, eds., Classics in the Theory of Public Finance (London: Macmillan, 1958), pp. 72–118.
4. James M. Buchanan, Public Finance in Democratic Process: Fiscal Institutions and Individual Choice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 115–16; see also Duncan Black, “Wicksell’s Principle in the Distribution of Taxation,” in J.K. Eastman, ed., Economic Essays in Commemoration of the Dundee School of Economics, 1931–1955 (London: Economists Bookshop for the LSE), pp. 20–21: “Inside Parliament Wicksell’s principle, by requiring a high majority for an increase of expenditure and a very small minority for a reduction, would make increases of expenditure far more difficult and reductions far easier than with the normal requirement of a simple majority. The bias would be toward curtailment and reduction.”
5. James M. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 6.
6. Knut Wicksell, Interest and Prices: A Study of the Causes Regulating the Value of Money (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965 [1898]). The ideas in this work were also summarized by Wicksell in journal form in “The Influence of the Rate of Interest on Commodity Prices” [1898] in Selected Papers on Economic Theory (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969 [1958]), pp. 67–89, and “The Influence of the Rate of Interest on Prices,” Economic Journal, June 1907, pp. 213–20.
7. See Richard M. Ebeling, “Knut Wicksell and the Classical Economists on Money, Credit, Interest and the Price Level” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, July 1999, pp. 471–79.
8. Wicksell’s use and meaning of the “natural rate” of interest is not without ambiguity. See Arthur W. Marget, The Theory of Prices, Vol. 2 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966 [1942]), pp. 201–204. Marget discerned at least eight different definitions of the concept in Wicksell’s writings.
9. Wicksell, Interest and Prices, pp. xxvi, 135.
10. A detailed breakdown of Wicksell’s analysis of different “periods” under “stationary” and “cumulative” conditions, as well as some of the inconsistencies to be found in his exposition, is presented in Uhr, pp. 235–45.
11. Knut Wicksell, Lectures on Political Economy, 2 vols. (Fairfield, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1977 [1901 and 1906]).
12. Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1981 [1912; 2nd ed.,1924; 3rd ed., 1953]); “Monetary Stabilization and Cycle Policy” in Percy L. Greaves, ed., Ludwig von Mises, On the Manipulation of Money and Credit (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Free Market Books, 1978 [1928]) pp. 57–171, and in Israel M. Kirzner, ed. Classics in Austrian Economics: Samplings in the History of a Tradition (London: William Pickering, 1994), pp. 33–111; and Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 4th ed. (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996), pp. 538–86; F.A. Hayek, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966 [1929]); and Prices and Production (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967 [1931; 2nd ed., 1935]).
13. For an exposition of the Austrian theory of the business cycle in contrast to the traditional Keynesian theory of the Great Depression, see Richard M. Ebeling, “The Austrian Economists and the Keynesian Revolution: The Great Depression and the Economics of the Short-Run,” in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Human Action: A 50-Year Tribute (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2000), pp. 15–110.
14. For an overview of the Swedish economists and their literature, see Richard M. Ebeling, “The Stockholm School of Economics: An Annotated Bibliography,” Austrian Economics Newsletter, Winter 1981, vol. 3, no. 2.
15. Gunnar Myrdal, Monetary Equilibrium (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965 [1933; 1939]).
16. Erik Lindahl, Studies in the Theory of Money and Capital (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970 [1939]).
17. Bertil Ohlin, “Some Notes on the Stockholm Theory of Savings and Investment” [1937], reprinted in Howard S. Ellis, ed., Readings in Business Cycle Theory (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), pp. 87–130.
18. For a comparison and contrast of the Swedish and Austrian contributions on the basis of Böhm-Bawerk’s and Wicksell’s theories, see Richard M. Ebeling, “Money, Economic Fluctuations, Expectations and Period Analysis: The Austrian and Swedish Economists in the Interwar Period,” in Willem Keizer, Bert Tieben, and Rudy ven Zijp, eds., Austrian Economics in Debate (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 42–74.
19. See David Laidler, Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution: Studies of the Inter-war Literature on Money, the Cycle, and Unemployment, Part I on “The Wicksellians,” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 25–75.
20. Most recently, Steven Horwitz, Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective (London/New York: Routledge, 2000); and Roger W. Garrison, Time and Money: The Macroeonomics of Capital Structure (London/New York: Routledge, 2001).

Also in 1979 “the International Year of the Child” the U.N. began discussion of a draft agreement on the rights of children, which resulted in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Adopted in November 1989, the CRC also remains unratified by the United States. Both documents have become flash points of controversy.

The U.N. itself evolved from the Declaration of United Nations, signed in 1942, through which 26 nations pledged to support the Allies during World War II and to work toward peace thereafter.

Libertarians have long been critical of the U.N., viewing it as a step toward a collective global government. The criticism became outright condemnation as the U.N.’s peacekeeping role assumed a more military air. For example, SFOR – the “Stabilization Force” of tens of thousands of troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina – operated under the authority of a U.N. Security Council Resolution. The fear of World Government was made more real by the Millennium Summit (2000) at which the U.N. assembly considered proposals to establish a U.N. bank that issued currency, a permanent standing army of its own, and U.N. control of international financial institutions.

Today, influential conservative groups are adding their own unique criticisms of the U.N. Specifically, the Family Research Council (FRC; www.frc.org) and the Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org) accuse factions within the U.N. of interpreting both the CRC and CEDAW according to a radical feminist ideology that seeks to subvert the family, national sovereignty, and religion. The FRC recently published a collection of essays titled Fifty Years after the Declaration: The United Nations’ Record on Human Rights (University Press of America, 2000). In the book nearly two dozens experts roundly criticize the recent social policies of the U.N. as they relate to women, abortion, and children’s rights.

Meanwhile, on February 5 the Heritage Foundation issued the report “How U.N. Conventions on Women’s and Children’s Rights Undermine Family, Religion, and Sovereignty” by Patrick F. Fagan, an official in George H.W. Bush’s administration. (See www.heritage.org/library/backgrounder/bg1407es.html.) The Heritage report claims that under “the political cover of international treaties that promote women’s and children’s rights,” the committees that “oversee implementation of U.N. treaties in social policy areas and the special-interest groups assisting them” are pressuring nations to change their laws in a manner that reflects an anti-family, pro-feminist ideology. To such conservative organizations, the U.N. has become anti-family.

Perhaps a more accurate statement is that the U.N. is currently experiencing an ideological conflict between committees that condemn the traditional family and powerful forces within the organization that call on it to protect the family. Indeed, the conflict has become so public, and the right-wing so effective, that radical feminists – who generally pursue a strategy of ignoring opposing opinions – have issued their own reports on what they call an “anti-feminist” onslaught. For example, in the wake of the 44th session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (March 2000), Anick Druelle prepared a report entitled “Right-Wing Anti-Feminist Groups at the United Nations,” which was funded by the Canadian government (http://netfemmes.cdeacf.ca/documents/Anti-Feminist%20Groups-USLetter.pdf).

It has taken years for the conflict over family within the U.N. to emerge publicly, and the shift toward anti-family policies has been gradual. For example, the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) proclaims that the “family” is entitled to protection by society and state, and speaks of nurturing motherhood.

Especially since the Fourth U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), however, that provision has come under increasing assault. The U.N.’s new feminist agenda has taken a low profile, using vague and seemingly innocuous terms such as “gender mainstreaming.” Moreover, these terms are often embedded deeply in tedious mega-documents that most members of the U.N. probably do not read in toto.

But now that the light of controversy is shed on U.N. policies regarding family, let us consider whether the influential feminist groups operating within the U.N. are, in fact, anti-family.

Feminism Within the U.N.

The Beijing conference on women was pivotal. For many months preceding the conference, feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in America drafted a Platform for Action. The Platform was presented to the U.N. at a special session. In the document that resulted, the U.N. stated its determination to “ensure the success of the Platform for Action, which will require a strong commitment on the part of Governments, international organizations and institutions at all levels” (www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/declar.htm). Calling itself “an agenda for women’s empowerment,” the Platform for Action demanded the establishment, by government, “of the principle of shared power and responsibility “between women and men at home, in the workplace and in the wider national and international communities” (www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/plat1.htm#statement).

An intrusion into the personal arrangement of households was called for in the section “Women in Power and Decision-Making,” which reads in part, “The unequal division of labour and responsibilities within households based on unequal power relations also limits women’s potential to find the time and develop the skills required for participation in decision-making in wider public forums.”

The section on “Institutional Arrangements” declares that “Implementation [of the Platform] is primarily the responsibility of Governments. . . . Governments, the United Nations system and all other relevant organizations should promote an active and visible policy of mainstreaming a gender perspective.” When speaking more specifically about implementation, the document uses words like “monitoring” and “reallocation of resources,” and speaks of the need for feminist groups “to organize networks” and for governments to integrate “a gender perspective in budgetary decisions.”

Such plans for carrying out the Platform’s aims may seem harmless because U.N. resolutions do not have the power of law. But nations (especially poor ones) that wish to receive aid or other benefits from the U.N. would certainly feel pressured to comply. After all, in signing the CRC and CEDAW, nations had agreed to abide by its provisions. Moreover, U.N. resolutions have been used recently by various international agencies and governments to justify the use of force against weaker governments that do not live up to certain standards of human rights.

The standard in question is that of gender equity. It is important to understand that, in current “U.N. speak” – the use of buzzwords and phrases that often sound innocuous but that are politically charged – gender is considered a social construct. That is, it does not refer to the biological difference between male and female, but rather to the sex roles – such as “male” or “heterosexual” – that (allegedly) have been artificially constructed by social institutions and imposed on individuals. According to the U.N. Office of the Special Advisor on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women, gender is defined as “the social attributes and opportunities associated with being male and female. . . . These attributes, opportunities and relationships are socially constructed and are learned through socialization processes.”

“Gender as a social construct” is the polar opposite of what has been called “sexual essentialism” – the theory that sex is a natural force that exists prior to society. Sexual essentialism claims that sexuality and sex roles are based in biology, rather than determined by culture; that is, such phenomena as motherhood, family ties, and heterosexuality are biologically driven.

By contrast, radical feminists maintain that even deeply felt urges like motherhood and heterosexuality are the results of a cultural indoctrination engendered by patriarchy (white male culture). If gender has been constructed, this is good news for radical feminism because then it can be deconstructed and put back together according to a politically correct design. The key to this deconstruction and reassembly lies in controlling the institutions of society. It is especially important to control the law and its administration. The strategy being used by feminists who wish to do precisely that is an ongoing and politically correct reinterpretation of the CRC and CEDAW during the regularly scheduled follow-up U.N. conferences designed to monitor the implementation of those Conventions.

In his paper “Toward a Permanent United Nations Pro-Family Bloc,” Austin Ruse – president of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute – described the modus operandi of the committees involved in these matters. In essence, they assume broad powers to reinterpret the meaning of the CRC and CEDAW. Thus Ruse observes, “The CEDAW committee has ordered the government of China to legalize prostitution even though the Convention expressly forbids the trafficing [sic] and prostitution of women. Moreover, and most egregious, the committee has ordered the government of Libya to reinterpret the Koran so that it falls within Committee guidelines” (http://reagan.com/HotTopics.main/HotMike/document-6.19.2000.2.html).

From a radical feminist perspective, one of the institutions most responsible for the subjugation of women is the traditional family. It is seen as the foundation of patriarchy. In her essay “Liberalism and the Death of Feminism,” the legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon describes the radical feminist agenda that analyzes “war as male ejaculation. It criticized marriage and family as institutional crucibles of male privilege. . . . Some criticized sex, including the institution of intercourse, as a strategy and practice in subordination.”

The debate over the family in the U.N. is an ideological conflict. When pro-family advocates view issues such as domestic violence they see a deviation from the norm that can be corrected through the existing legal system. When radical feminists view domestic violence they see a crime that typifies marriage, a crime against women that must be confronted in the political arena by creating new nonpatriarchal institutions. And by disabling old patriarchal institutions such as the family.

Narrowing the matter down to two issues – children’s rights and stay-at-home mothers – what is the substance of the charges being leveled by conservatives against the U.N.? In particular, how are the CRC and CEDWA being used to destroy the traditional family?

The Convention on the Rights of the Child

In recent years, a great deal of attention has justly focused on the plight of children who are refugees or who are forced into prostitution. The U.N. has also been concerned by reports of high infant mortality and the lack of health care and education for children in Third World nations. The CRC was meant to be a definitive and specific statement of children’s rights that could be enforced under international law. By the end of 1995, six years after its adoption, 185 countries had ratified it, thus binding themselves to implement its provisions.

States Parties (signatories) are required to advance legislation and administrative policies that conform to the Convention to the “maximum extent of their available resources and, where needed, within the framework of international cooperation.” That is, governments are expected to revise their laws to ensure that the CRC is being implemented. It is also expected to properly train those who may be working with children, including teachers, psychologists, social workers, and police so that they can enforce the Concluding Observations. Indeed, within in two years of signing the CRC, every government signatory agrees to submit a report on the compliance measures taken and to submit a report every five years thereafter.

Four general principles form the backbone of the CRC. Article 2 states that “No child should suffer discrimination” because of such characteristics as race, language, or religion. Article 3 prescribes “the best interests of the child” as the “primary consideration” to be used by state authorities in making decisions affecting children. Article 6 declares that the “right to life, survival and development” should be ensured “to the maximum extent possible.” Article 12 states that the opinions of children “in all matters affecting them . . . should be given due weight” and that children have a right to be heard in “any judicial or administrative proceedings affecting them.”

How do these goals translate into what the Heritage Foundation report calls “a campaign to undermine the foundations of society”? Despite repeated language that renders a nod of recognition to the importance of family, influential forces within the U.N. clearly wish to transfer current parental rights of supervision to the state in the name of children’s rights. For example, in February 1995 a CRC Committee (8th Session) in its “Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,” criticized the UK for allowing parents to withdraw their children from sex-education in schools, most of which are government supported. (“Concluding Observations” are especially significant because they are widely publicized and governments that have signed an agreement, such as the CRC, are expected to abide by the committee’s conclusions.)

Article 9 deals with the separation of a child from a parent. It says, in part, that States Parties will not separate a child from its parents “except when competent authorities subject to judicial review determine, in accordance with applicable law and procedures, that such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child.” Factors that constitute the best interests of the child are “respect for the views of the child” and the right to “appropriate” information, such as sex education, and to abortion and birth control without parental consent. This interpretation of “best interests” provides great latitude for the state to override the authority of parents despite assurances elsewhere that parental rights will be respected.

According to the Heritage Foundation report, the U.N. is pressuring States Parties to give the following “rights” to children: “The right to privacy, even in the household; the right to professional counseling without parental consent or guidance; the full right to abortion and contraceptives, even when that would violate the parents’ ethics and desires; the right to full freedom of expression at home and in school; the legal mechanisms to challenge in court their parent’s authority in the home.”

In terms of specific recommendations to States Parties, the U.N. has urged Belize, for example, to prohibit corporal punishment within the family and to set up “legal mechanisms” that allow children to challenge their parents in court. Children should be allowed to seek medical and legal counseling without parental consent. To Japan, the Committee on the Rights of the Child suggested that additional measures be taken, “including legislative ones, to guarantee the child’s right to privacy, especially in the family.” Mali was urged “to develop youth-friendly counseling, care and rehabilitation facilities for adolescents that would be accessible without parental consent.” In short, the U.N. committees recommend decreasing parental authority over children in their own homes and within society.

The target at which the U.N. radicals are aiming is the traditional family. To illustrate the depth of this attack, consider how the “stay-at-home” mother has come under U.N. scrutiny.

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

One of the main accusations leveled against the U.N. by the Heritage Foundation is that current policies constitute an attack on traditional motherhood and encourage women to leave the home for the workplace. Fagan wrote, “The U.N. criticized the republic of Georgia, for example, for ‘the prevalence of stereotyped roles of women in Government policies, in the family, in public life based on patterns of behavior and attitudes that overemphasize the role of women as mothers.’ One country report even criticized the observance of Mother’s Day.”

In session after session, the feminist-driven CEDAW committee has urged the restructuring of social norms concerning men and women. For example, Armenia was asked to combat the stereotype of motherhood through education and to increase the responsibility of fathers as parents. Azerbaijan was encouraged to establish a national plan “to enhance gender awareness and to promote the campaign to combat traditional stereotypes regarding the roles of women and men.” Belarus was publicly criticized for “such symbols as a Mothers’ Day and a Mothers’ Award,” which promoted women’s traditional roles. Colombia was urged to eliminate all sexist stereotypes in the media. The CEDAW committee expressed concerns that German “measures aimed at the reconciliation of family and work entrench stereotypical expectations for women and men.” The list of recommendations to States Parties on the elimination of the stereotypes of women and motherhood scroll on. (See the paper by Fagan cited above.)

The U.N. actively encourages women to leave the home and enter the workforce by insisting that governments change their laws and constitutions in order to provide such incentives as state-sponsored childcare. Thus formative children are further placed under the umbrella of government and further removed from the influence of parents.

For those who still envision the U.N. as a peacekeeping organization dedicated to state sovereignty, it may seem unbelievable that the U.N. is trying to dictate family policy and moral codes to countries. After all, in recognition of state sovereignty the U.N. Charter itself states that “Nothing contained [herein] shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

By contrast, however, the CRC and CEDAW Committees demand that states conform domestic matters such as religious and moral attitudes to U.N. recommendations. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this demand is the issue of abortion. The U.N. has recommended that Catholic hospitals, such as those in Italy, offer abortion services even though the medical personnel have religious objections to performing the procedure. The principle of national sovereignty has not only been turned upside down, the U.N. is also reaching down to the individual level and declaring the right to decide moral matters.

As Fagan concludes in his excellent critique, “If the objective is to increase state control of all functions of society, then the U.N. approach makes sense.”

Typical was the New York Times editorial of January 24, which said, “It is a form of arrogance to impose a gag rule on doctors and health advocates in other countries as the price of receiving vital assistance for its poorest and most defenseless citizens, particularly its women, especially when it involves an activity that is constitutionally protected in the United States.” (Emphasis added.)

Let’s start by pointing out that this is not an article about the moral status of abortion. It’s about taxpayer funding of abortion (and by implication, of anything else). One’s position on abortion per se logically should have no bearing on one’s position on the matter I am about to discuss.

In the 1980s President Reagan adopted what came to be known as the Mexico City policy; it barred taxpayer subsidies to Planned Parenthood and other groups that do abortion counseling abroad as a method of family planning. It was already contrary to law for those organizations to use tax money for abortion. But since money is fungible, the Reagan administration extended the policy to bar subsidies altogether.

That policy was reversed by President Clinton. Now the reversal has been reversed. In doing so, Mr. Bush said, “taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortions either here or abroad.” It is puzzling why he included the word “here,” when his order affects only activities abroad. The federal government still subsidizes domestic family-planning clinics that offer abortion counseling and services (Clinton reversed Reagan’s ban on that), and Medicaid still pays for abortions. Moreover, foreign aid still goes to governments that pay for abortions.

Nevertheless, the policy stops the flow of taxpayer money to private abortion counselors and practitioners in foreign countries.

This is a good thing. Why? Because some of the people whose money finances those activities believe abortion is murder. Whether we agree with them or not on that question, we should be able to agree that people ought not to be forced to pay for what they regard as murder. It is ironic that abortion-rights advocates (properly) object to having other people’s religious views forced on them, but they think nothing of forcing their moral views on others through compulsory financing. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, compelling people to finance causes they disagree with is “sinful and tyrannical.”

Proponents of taxpayer funding of abortion, such as the Times, obfuscate by fusing the freedom to do something with taxpayer funding. They argue that withdrawing subsidies is equivalent to banning abortions. Notice how the editorial invokes the constitutionality of abortion—as though if something is constitutional, it ought to be subsidized. A similar argument is made by those who say that failing to subsidize a particular artist is “censorship.” Of course, that’s absurd. Lots of things that are unsubsidized are done legally every day. The issues are entirely separable. The Times knows that, but its political agenda depends on not acknowledging it.

It doesn’t take much intellectual candlepower to see that there’s a huge gulf between stopping someone from doing something and abstaining from lending a hand—or from forcing others to do so. In a society widely touted as free, that should be a rather elementary distinction. What are we to make of those who are determined not to see it?

The idea that the withdrawal of subsidies constitutes a “gag rule” is ludicrous. No one is stopped from promoting abortion by Mr. Bush’s order. Those who today promote abortion can continue until they run out of breath. They just can’t have the taxpayers’ money if they do so. That rule violates no one’s freedom.

As for those who are concerned about government’s attaching strings to the money it gives away, welcome to the real world. It has always done so. What would you expect? Let no one forget my colleague Beth Hoffman’s favorite quotation from a U.S. Supreme Court opinion, “It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate that which it subsidizes” (Justice Robert H. Jackson in Wickard v. Filburn, 1942). You don’t like the rules? Don’t take the subsidies.

Why Abortion?

Some might ask why start with subsidies for abortion? Mr. Bush has his reasons. But as advocates of limiting government power, we need not care what his reasons are. The point is, he chose the issue, and we must seize opportunities to roll back government as we find them. Had he picked art subsidies, we could have jumped on that issue.

The Bush policy provides a news hook to point out that it’s wrong to force people to finance what they disapprove of. There are many more examples besides abortion, but we have to start somewhere. We should be ready to up the ante by showing that opponents of abortion are not the only people who deserve to have their sensibilities—not to mention their rights—respected. It has always been part of the classical-liberal, or libertarian, case that big government necessarily violates freedom of conscience. Here is an excellent example.

It has been pointed out that through selective subsidies, government can be highly manipulative and that it should not have the power to carry out a particular moral agenda by banning subsidies to particular activities, as Mr. Bush has done. Clearly, the best solution is to end all subsidies of private activities. No one has a right to other people’s money without their consent. But it does not make sense to say that no subsidies should be ended until all subsidies can be ended. That is a blueprint for perpetual subsidies.

Libertarianism, or true liberalism, as Jeffrey Rogers Hummel reminds us, is simply a plea for consistency. No one believes that a woman personally has a right to force her neighbors to pay for her abortion. No private group of women can have rights not possessed by any of its members. Thus no nation of women (and men) can legitimately vote to force their neighbors to pay for abortions. When it comes to other people, all we have a right to do is try to persuade—no more. If we fail, that’s too bad. But basic civility dictates that we not resort to force.

Today we are concerned about issues such as doctor-assisted suicide, abortion, the use of fetal tissue, genetic screening, birth control and sterilization, health-care rationing and the ethics of medical research on animals and humans. These subjects are major challenges in both ethics and economics at the end of the twentieth century. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the desire to create a more scientific medical practice and research had already raised the issues of euthanasia, eugenics, and medical experimentation on human subjects. In addition, the increasing involvement of the German government in medical care and funding medical research established the government-medical complex that the National Socialists later used to execute their extermination policies.

The German social insurance and health care system began in the 1880s under Bismarck. Ironically, it was part of Bismarck’s “anti-socialist” legislation, adopted under the theory that a little socialism would prevent the rise of a more virulent socialism.

By the time of Weimar, German doctors had become accustomed to cooperating with the government in the provision of medical care. The reforms of the Weimar Republic following the medical crises of World War I included government policies to provide health care services to all citizens. Socially minded physicians placed great hope in a new health care system, calling for a single state agency to overcome fragmentation and the lack of influence of individual practitioners and local services. The focus of medicine shifted from private practice to public health and from treating disease to preventable health care. During the German “economic consolidation” of 1924-1928, public health improved under new laws against tuberculosis, venereal disease, and alcoholism, with new advisory centers for chemical dependency and counseling bureaus for marriage and sexual problems.

Medical concerns which had largely been in the private domain in the nineteenth century increasingly became a concern of the state. The physician began to be transformed into a functionary of state-initiated laws and policies. Doctors slowly began to see themselves as more responsible for the public health of the nation than for the individual health of the patient. It is one thing to see oneself as responsible for the “nation’s health” and quite another to be responsible for an individual patient’s health. It is one thing to be employed by an individual, another to be employed by the government.

Under the Weimar Republic these reforms resulted in clearly improved public health. However, the creativity, energy, and fundamental reforms found in social medicine during the Weimar Republic seem in retrospect a short and deceptive illusion. Medical reformers had wanted to counter the misery inherited from the first World War and the Second Empire on the basis of comprehensive disease prevention programs. In the few years available to the social reformers, they had remarkable success. But in connection with these reforms the doctor’s role changed from that of advocate, adviser, and partner of the patient to a partner of the state.

Where traditional individual ethics and Christian charity had once stood, the reformers posited a collective ethic for the benefit of the general population. Private charity and welfare were nationalized. The mentally ill, for example, having been literally released from their chains in the nineteenth century and placed in local communities and boarding houses in regular contact with others (the so-called “moral therapy”), were returned to state institutions to become the ultimate victims of state “solutions.”

With the world economic crisis of 1929, welfare state expenditures had to be reduced for housing, nutrition, support payments, recreation and rehabilitation, and maternal and child health. What remained of the humanistic goals of reform were state mechanisms for inspection and regulation of public health and medical practice. Economic efficiency became the major concern, and health care became primarily a question of cost-benefit analysis. Under the socialist policies of the period, this analysis was necessarily applied to the selection of strong persons, deemed worthy of support, and the elimination of weak and “unproductive” people. The scientific underpinning of cost-benefit analyses to political medical care was provided by the new fields of genetics and eugenics.

Genetics and Eugenics

At the same time as these economic and political developments, the application of nineteenth- century scientific discoveries began to make their way into twentieth-century public health and medical practice. Charles Darwin’s studies on natural selection were of course based upon animal populations living in nature and not human populations living in complex societies. But the biological basis of natural selection gave rise to a concept of “survival of the fittest” in human civilizations. This term was coined by the British social anthropologist Herbert Spencer, and the concept led to “Social Darwinism.”

Darwin’s theories (developed in parallel with Alfred Russel Wallace—another British natural scientist) had been published prior to full elucidation of the principles of genetics. With subsequent understanding and acceptance of the science of genetics, the underlying basis of natural selection could more completely be described. While scientists still did not understand what made up the gene (awaiting Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA in the 1950s) they began to search for outward expression of inner genetic tendencies. In the absence of being able to pinpoint individual genes, they sought outward expression of genetic “types.” These “typologies” were largely based upon external measurements of the body.

Much of this work was carried out by German anthropologists and physicians (often one and the same at that time) in newly acquired colonies in German East and Southwest Africa, prior to the loss of these colonies to Allied protectorates in World War I. Such work resumed following the war, however, and by 1927 the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics was celebrated in Berlin as the advent of the “German Oxford.” The annual report of the Institute in 1932 stated: “The term eugenics means to establish a connection between the results of the studies in human genetics and practical measures in population policy.”

Under the new “scientific understanding” of human biology provided by genetics and its implementation under eugenics, poverty, for example, would become merely an expression of degeneracy (Entartung) and genetic inferiority. “Inferior” and “superior” became natural terms used by persons of nearly all political persuasions, as readily as the terms “handicapped,” “impaired,” “socially dependent,” or “disadvantaged” are used today.

Life Unworthy of Living

Following World War I there had been concern among some in Germany that the war had decimated the ranks of the qualified and strong while weak, unqualified, and inferior people had been spared. Many felt that scant resources should not be wasted on the sick and suffering. The philosophy of the unimportance of the individual in favor of the people (das Volk) led to the belief that individuals who had become “worthless, defective parts” had to be “sacrificed or discarded.”

Alfred Hoche, a neuropathologist (as Freud had been) and Karl Binding, a lawyer, published a pamphlet in 1922, The Sanctioning of the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living. Binding relativized the legal and moral prohibition, “Thou shalt not kill,” and Hoche alternated between economic and medical arguments. Neurologists in Saxony formally discussed the topic, “Are Doctors Allowed to Kill?” A physician in Dresden pointed out “the contradiction that many persons (reformers) demand an end to the death penalty for crimes, but the same people are for putting imbeciles [sic] to death.” By the time the National Socialist Party came to power in Germany, the mentally ill and the mentally retarded had begun to be sterilized and to be subjected to euthanasia in large numbers in German government institutions.

National Socialism and the Nation’s Health

No profession in Germany became so numerically attached to National Socialism in both its leadership and membership as was the medical profession. Because of their philosophical orientation toward finding a more scientific basis for medical research and practice, government funding for research, and the practical benefits of acquiring university positions and medical practices from the many banned and exiled German Jewish doctors, many physicians supported Nazi policies. One of the first Nazi laws, passed July 14, 1933, was the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny of Hereditary Disease,” intended to “consolidate” social and health policies in the German population and prohibit the right of reproduction for persons defined as “genetically inferior.” After 1933, the connection between the theory and practice of politicized medicine advocated by many in Weimar Germany became actual in Nazi Germany.

A “Genetic Health Court” consisting of judges and doctors made decisions about forcible sterilization. As “advocates of the state,” doctors prosecuted those persons charged with being “genetically ill” in sessions lasting generally no more than ten minutes and from which the public was barred. In 1935, an adjunct law allowed forcible abortion in such cases up to the sixth month of pregnancy. A total of 300,000 to 400,000 were sterilized and approximately 5,000 (nearly all women) died as a result of these operations. After 1945, it was argued to the Restitution Claims Commission of the German Bundestag that the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny of Hereditary Disease” not be considered in the same category as subsequent National Socialist race laws and other Nazi abuses. The sterilization law had been drafted earlier under the Weimar Republic as part of progressive health reform, and as late as 1961 was defended by an expert at the Max Planck Institute on the basis that “every cultured nation needs eugenics, and in the atomic age, more so than ever before.”

German Youth and Euthanasia

Following the sterilization laws, the National Socialists next implemented a strategy of euthanasia to solve the remaining problem of those whose conception and birth had preceded these laws. The pediatrician Ernst Wentzler, while developing plans to improve care in the German Children’s Hospitals in Berlin, personally decided (as consultant to Hitler’s Chancellery) on the deaths of thousands of handicapped children. Hans Nachtsheim placed delivery orders for handicapped children for his pressure chamber experiments on epilepsy. Joseph Mengele delivered genetic and anthropological “material” from Auschwitz to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and conducted his infamous twin experiments on the child victims of the Holocaust.

Julius Hallervorden at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research at Berlin-Buch carried out several research projects based on euthanasia programs. Hallervorden and others systematically collected the brains of their patients who had been killed, taught the murdering doctors how to dissect, and cooperated closely with institutions where murdered children had previously been given thorough examinations and tests. During interrogation by an American officer in 1945, he stated, “I heard that they were going to do that . . . and told them . . . if you are going to kill all these people, at least take the brains . . . . There was wonderful material among these brains beautiful mental defectives, malformations and early infantile disease. I accepted these brains, of course. Where they came from and how they came to me, was really none of my business.” The collection was until recently kept by the Max Planck Institute (formerly the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute) in Frankfurt and used for brain research.

In a system in which so many were routinely condemned to die, the temptation proved strong to use human subjects in medical experimentation prior to their tragic and terrible deaths.

The Luftwaffe had developed aircraft which could climb to altitudes of nearly 60,000 feet, altitudes unattainable by Allied fighter aircraft. However, tolerance of these altitudes on the part of pilots had not yet been tested. Trials on volunteers at altitudes above 36,000 feet had to be discontinued due to severe pain. For this reason, lethal altitude experiments in pressure chambers were conducted on 200 victims held prisoner in Dachau concentration camp in a program called: “Trials for Saving Persons at High Altitude.”

Many German ships were also being sunk in the North Atlantic and North Sea, and the same group of medical investigators conducted painful ice bath experiments on 300 Dachau prisoners in a research program entitled “Avoidance and Treatment of Hypothermia in Water.” Other medical experiments were carried out with chemical and biological warfare agents and infectious diseases.

Following World War II much of this data was kept classified by Allied military authorities on the basis of national security. Debate continues to this day on the validity of these experiments and the ethical implications of any use of such data.

The Banality of Evil

We now know the end of this historical horror story of massive crimes against humanity and the leader of the thousand-year Reich burning in a bunker in Berlin. But it is not so easy to recognize the steps on the path down the slippery slope when we don’t yet know the end of the story—as today we do not know which social health reforms in combination with which new medical technologies have the potential to plunge modern society over a brink in which disaster might result. Is legalized abortion a new form of medicide? Is doctor-assisted suicide a step toward positive euthanasia? Is modern genetic testing and the Human Genome Project the first step to a new eugenics? Is health care rationing, which is always a result of government involvement in medical care, a step toward the new definition of”life unworthy of living” ? Is our present “quality of life index” a new way of saying it?

Nazi medicine was implemented by a political-medical complex—on the basis of political health care—a scientific and social philosophy imposed by a totalitarian regime. It should never happen again, but could it ever happen again?

In the United States the medical profession operates in a mixed (not a national socialist) economy which does not yet have the institutionalized mechanisms of control and regulation of Weimar Germany and in a democratic political system which thankfully does not have the political ideology of the Third Reich. But the “banality of evil” described by Hannah Arendt in the Third Reich may stem largely from a government bureaucracy in which 90 percent of the people think 90 percent of the time about process—not purpose. Does the modern bureaucratization of medicine hold any real risk for a possible return with new health reforms and new medical technologies—to some of the horrors of National Socialist medicine? Removal of personal responsibility (“I was only following orders”), personal authority, and personal choice in a bureaucratized system may leave less and less room for individual ethics in the conduct of medical science and practice.

Politicized medicine is not a sufficient cause of the mass extermination of human beings, but it seems to be a necessary cause. The Nazi Holocaust did not happen for some inexplicable German reason; it is not an event that we can afford to ignore because we are not Germans or not Nazis. The history of Germany from 1914 to 1945 is a telescoping of modernity from monarchy, war, and collapse to democracy and the welfare state, and finally to dictatorship, war, and death.

Medical ethics is the responsibility of all members of a society, not just doctors and scientists. Medicine and science alone do not have the answers to such questions as: When does life begin? When should it end? Are humans just the sum of their genetic parts or genetic programs? While bioethicists debate, individual medical choices are made a million times a day among doctors, patients, their families, and increasingly the government. The product of all these choices ultimately constitutes the ethical, legal, and social framework in which the practice of medicine and of medical research are conducted. In the end it is the preservation of freedom that will guide us to the best application of new health reforms and technologies in the future.

Dr. Robert Ritter of the German National Department of Health (right) and his associates carried out anthropological measurements and genealogical research. They prepared fingerprints and photographs in order to ascertain the “proportion of gypsy blood” in all of the Sinti and Roma of “Greater Germany.”

Nazi medicine was implemented by a political-medical complex, a scientific and social philosophy imposed by a totalitarian regime.

From The Exhibition, “The Value of the Human Being.”