What was true for an Englishman was true also for a citizen of the United States. There were unfortunately many in both countries who thought that freedom was not enough. They believed that in addition to liberty, people had also the right to a large measure of protection from the struggles and uncertainties of human existence. In America the crusade for a government large and powerful enough to offer such protection was led by the so-called Progressives. One of them, Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), later observed that the older faith was that human rulers’ limited moral and intellectual capacities could not safely be trusted with unlimited power. The Progressives believed, by contrast, that there were no limitations on man’s ability to rule others and therefore no need to limit the powers of government. They had renounced the wisdom of the ages, he said, in order to embrace errors that the ages had renounced.

That’s what Lippmann believed in 1937, when he was America’s most popular journalist. His “Today and Tomorrow” column was in 155 daily papers and would soon be in 200. At the height of his popularity he would have over 10 million readers, many of whom, it has been said, did not know how they should think about the issues of the day until they had read his comments. A lady in a New Yorker cartoon told a friend, “A cup of coffee and Walter Lippmann are all I need.”

His credentials as a libertarian were less than impeccable. As a student at Harvard he developed a fondness for the British Fabians, who believed they could overcome the prejudices and inefficiencies of popular democracy with a small core of selfless leaders. In 1914 he published Drift and Mastery, in which Frederick W. Taylor’s principles of scientific management were used to draw up a blueprint for the rational arrangement of society. (Editor’s note: See “Taylorism, Progressivism, and Rule by Experts,” by Kevin A. Carson, The Freeman, September 2011.)

Applying this blueprint, he said, would lead to an America in which the role of private entrepreneurs would be taken over by salaried bosses, government commissioners, and labor leaders. His Public Opinion appeared in 1922 and quickly became the subject of college courses, articles in scholarly journals, master’s theses, and even a few dissertations; it was described by John Dewey as “the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned.”

Lippmann spent most of his life, both before 1937 and afterward, writing things of which someone like Dewey would approve. His conversion to free-market principles was brief and fleeting. Still, it was sincere for as long as it lasted. It seems to have begun with his frustration over the blundering statism of Herbert Hoover. News of the stock market crash was still in the headlines when the President began a series of conferences in which he told industrial leaders that they must promise not to reduce wages. His Agricultural Marketing Act gave farmers a half-billion dollars in 1929 and another hundred million early in 1930. In 1931 he offered a nine-point program of government intervention, which broadened the range of those eligible for assistance of this kind.

As things grew worse Hoover justified himself with words remarkably similar to those of another troubled administration 80 years later: “We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin.” Instead of allowing things to take their course, he said, his administration had devised American history’s greatest program of economic defense. He blamed the problem on investors, criticized their interest in profit, and was amazed to see stock market prices continuing to fall.

Lippmann’s patience with all of this sagged rapidly and finally snapped when Hoover put his name to the Tariff Act of 1930 (aka the Smoot-Hawley Tariff), which raised the rate on some 20,000 imported goods to record levels. Hoover signed this despite the more than one thousand economists who endorsed a petition urging a veto. He could not, he said, go back on party pledges: “Platform promises must not be empty gestures.” The words were for Lippmann simply Hoover’s confession that his policies, far from being intended for the general good, were actually an appeal to special-interest groups.

Although he would later become what someone has described as “one of the Roosevelt administration’s most important journalistic assets,” he had no initial enthusiasm for Hoover’s replacement. Franklin Roosevelt, he said, was “a pleasant man without any important qualifications for the office, who would very much like to be president.” The New Deal, he observed, was little more than an extension of policies begun under Hoover, and it was in every way as much of an appeal to special interests. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, for example, helped large landowners at the expense of sharecroppers and agricultural laborers. Lippmann later attacked Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court and found himself assailed by the left-wing press as a reactionary.

For the first (and only) time in his life he was excluded from the inner circle of “the intellectual elite.” Upset and a little angry, he sat down to apply his wide reading and literary talents to a defense of ideas he had once opposed and a reconsideration of ideas he had once espoused. The result, The Good Society, was for the most part a brilliant examination of the intellectual, logical, and moral impossibilities of economic planning.

Social Planning: The Intellectual Impossibility

The intellectual problems with social planning are illustrated by Colbert’s troubles in managing the economy of Bourbon France. The regulations for the textile industry, to take one case, filled four volumes of 2,200 pages and three supplementary volumes. It was discovered in 1718 that planners had in spite of this neglected to include the number of threads appropriate for use in the cloth of Langogne, “a matter which must be attended to without fail.” The information for attending to it could be obtained only by means of reference to existing procedures, which was available only from established manufacturers, who were thus empowered to use the law for preventing innovative competitors from introducing new methods.

This points to the dark truth behind every “plan” for “improving society.” Governments, Lippmann said, are made up of people who meet to make speeches and write resolutions, of people who study papers, listen to complaints, and shuffle paperwork. These people suffer from indigestion, asthma, boredom, and headaches, and all of them would rather be making love than passing laws. They know whatever they have happened to learn, are aware of what they have happened to observe, and are interested in whatever has happened to catch their imagination. A power-holder may sometimes have high ideals, but he is in the end no more than a human being, “a little man in trousers, slightly jagged,” as William Vaughan Moody put it.

Such a person cannot possibly know enough to devise wide-ranging schemes for society as a whole. No matter what the source of their authority human rulers are human beings, and as such have only a severely limited understanding of the world in which they find themselves. The social planner sits down to a breakfast that is the final link in a chain stretching far beyond his comprehension. Society goes on as it does because of processes that are habitual and unconscious, and it is only because people can take so much for granted that they have the time to attend to anything. Anyone who attempts to plan everything is immediately trapped in a web of details. “The real, rather than the apparent, policy of any state will be determined by the limited competence of finite beings dealing with unlimited and infinite circumstances,” Lippmann wrote.

In his efforts to manage this complexity every ruler must imitate Colbert in calling on the expertise of those whose industry he hopes to regulate. In attempting to plan the production of cloth in eighteenth-century France the government got its advice from existing manufacturers and passed decrees that would protect them from competition. This led to laws against the production of printed calicoes, which then were all the rage. Attempting to regulate health care in early twenty-first-century America, the Obama administration accepted the advice (and contributions) of the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals. These represent the interests of large community hospitals, whose dominance is threatened by the emergence of smaller hospitals offering superior service in particular physician groups’ areas of expertise. With its provisions against the creation of any additional doctor-financed hospitals, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act might have been better named the Large Hospital and Inferior Service Protection Act.

Earlier in his life Lippmann had endorsed a policy of gradual collectivism. He had never admitted to being a socialist, but he had argued that the government should gradually assume control of the economy, if not through outright ownership, then at least by means of detailed regulations. There should be a survey of all the available resources, and then national authorities should put together a plan for developing them. By the time he wrote The Good Society he had come to realize that such a plan would be flawed from the outset. The planners’ limited information must necessarily put them under the influence of such organized interests. “In practice,” he wrote, “gradual collectivism is not an ordered scheme of social reconstruction. It is the polity of pressure groups.”

Though they demand different things, these pressure groups agree in asserting that their interest is identical to the national interest. Those who believe the national interest is best served by means of cheap steel for the automobile industry, however, and those who believe it is best served by fixed and protected prices for the sake of the steel manufacturers, cannot both be right. Every new regulation, Lippmann said, is a decision in favor of some interest and against others.

Those who believe they have been harmed will react by seeking to protect their interests as well as they can. New laws lead to new violations, and these in turn to more new laws. In early eighteenth-century France lawsuits over methods for the production of cloth were endless. Observing that smuggling and bootlegging had become standard business practices Colbert decided to put the power of the State behind his decrees. An estimated 16,000 people were killed in his war on printed calicoes. A much larger number were punished somewhat less severely, though still with great cruelty. On one occasion 77 were hanged, 58 were broken on the wheel, 631 were sentenced to the galleys, one was set free, and none were pardoned. One assumes the Obama administration’s attempts to regulate health care will be less violent.

Social Planning: The Logical Impossibility

During the twelfth century there were 19 stations at which merchants travelling along the Rhine had to stop and pay a toll. Twenty-five more stations sprang up during the thirteenth century and 20 more during the fourteenth, all backed by the firepower of fortresses built for the purpose. Many of these were in the Duchy of Cleves, where they were referred to as the “treasure.” They were a treasure, though, only to the people involved in collecting the tolls. They added nothing to the peace or prosperity of Europe. They were merely a means for the forcible transfer of wealth. That, Lippmann said, is the real meaning of “economic planning.” The government does not produce anything. All it does is take from one group and give to another.

Even as he wrote, the policy of handing out money to appease the farm lobby, first planted by Hoover, was blossoming under Roosevelt. At the beginning of the twenty-first century’s second decade it has spread even beyond our shores. The Department of Agriculture gives American cotton planters about $3 billion a year. These handouts encourage overproduction, lower world cotton prices, and ruin small farmers in many Third World countries. In 2005 the World Trade Organization upheld a Brazilian challenge to these subsidies, but the United States ignored the ruling. When Brazil was granted the right to impose punitive tariffs and lift patent protections on a wide range of U.S. nonfarm products, Congress responded with a proposal to offer over $147 million a year to Brazilian farmers. Rather than eliminate a ruinous and unjust policy, our representatives wanted to expand the list of those who could make claims on it. In terms of Lippmann’s illustration, they decided that instead of abolishing the toll stations and tearing down the castles, they would “turn every cottage into a castle with a toll station of its own.”

The problem with such policies lies in the fact that the owners of these toll stations are the beneficiaries of a government-backed guarantee that they will receive additional income in exchange for reduced effort. Each is promised that his share of the national wealth will increase even though his contribution to that wealth has declined and perhaps even if he makes no contribution at all. This works for each of the stations for as long as there are only a few of them. Unfortunately they multiply. The granting of special treatment in one case is soon followed by the demand for similar grants to others, as in the case of the Brazilian farmers. There cannot in the end be more for everyone if everyone has been granted the privilege of producing less. Soon everyone, perhaps even the average toll station owner, is poorer than he would otherwise have been.

Social Planning: The Moral Impossibility

Specific economic contradictions may be eliminated by changing specific policies. Deeper and more difficult to eliminate is the effect of such policies on the character of the people. It is evident in the case of the cotton subsidy that it is gigantically helpful to the fewer than 20,000 planters who benefit from it. Nonbeneficiaries see this and come to the conclusion that the government has a magical power to create wealth. They forget about the iron chain that binds prosperity to production. They forget that wealth is the result of thought, effort, innovation, and thrift, and are gradually convinced that the path to abundance lies in the power of the State. They once understood that they could advance themselves only by increasing their service. They now believe that they must do it by imposing their will on those around them.

The greater the extent to which this idea is accepted, the more intense the struggle for power becomes. It goes on and must go on because the members of contending factions have been tempted to ignore the logic of their own beliefs. If power allows them to disregard other people’s preferences, their own preferences may be similarly disregarded by some third faction that has more power than they do. If they think about it, they will begin to see that their own liberty is ultimately dependent on their willingness to allow others similar freedom. In Lippmann’s terms, each man’s right to freedom from arbitrary treatment at the hands of his neighbor has an “inescapable corollary . . . the duty of man not to deal arbitrarily with others.”

Lippmann said he had been brought up to believe there was no such thing as a self-evident truth, but this seems to be one. It is also the most ancient axiom of morality. “What you do not want done to yourself,” Confucius told his followers, “do not do unto others.” Mohammed said, “Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself.” A Buddhist text says, “Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” The same truth appears even more tellingly in the Upanishads, in the teaching of Hillel, and of course in the words of Jesus: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do for you, do ye even so unto them.”

Adam Smith’s notoriously self-interested butcher and baker understood this. They understood that they would have to close their shops if they did not succeed in delivering something their customers would like. The Golden Rule of morality is the golden rule of economics, and it works because it respects the free choices of everyone involved. Every economic plan that depends on the coercive power of the State, on the other hand, tends toward disaster because it is in the final analysis immoral. “Though it is momentarily triumphant,” Lippmann concluded, “it is a failure, and it must fail, because it rests upon a radically false conception of the economy, of law, of government, and of human nature.”

—Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

Perhaps no author better chronicled the disastrous, soul-crushing European political experiments of the middle half of the twentieth century than Arthur Koestler. The Hungarian-born author wrote magisterially (in English, no less; he first published in Hungarian, German, and Russian) of the follies of the Pink Decade of the 1930s in a series of political novels. Unfortunately, they’re all but forgotten in today’s university curricula. The world requires constant reminders of what actually happens once citizens acquiesce to big-government solutions.

George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and Koestler’s body of work from the 1930s to 1950s proves the contemporary relevance of Santayana’s admonition. Perhaps in no other time besides the era in which they were originally published are Koestler’s literary themes more topical than the present, as our own government expands exponentially to bail out and control our country’s financial and automotive industries; mire other industries to the point of stagnation with cumbersome regulations; redefine such basic individual choices as health care and education as prescribed “rights”; and enact wide-ranging schemes to insinuate bureaucratic reach into nearly every aspect of our lives, from the Internet and use of recreational and/or medicinal inebriants to surveillance cameras at every traffic stop.

As this year officially marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Koestler’s seminal novel, Darkness at Noon, and the 60th anniversary of his essay “The Initiates,” it’s a convenient opportunity to revisit both works as a reminder of what awaits all democratic societies eager to abandon liberties for the sake of utopian ideologies.

Seventy years ago, as war engulfed nearly every continent and the Axis peril seemed poised to destroy two millennia of civilization, Koestler published Darkness at Noon on another, completely different threat to individual freedom: communism. Ten years later “The Initiates” appeared as one of six essays in The God That Failed, a volume featuring the voices of many of the twentieth century’s greatest writers who had embraced the Stalinist enterprise as the singular political corrective to economic misery before abandoning it as contrary to human nature and profoundly detrimental to humanity in general. However, none of Koestler’s fellow travelers—Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Andre Gide, Louis Fisher, Stephen Spender—wrote more authoritatively or convincingly against communism than he.

Darkness at Noon is the third novel in Koestler’s quartet depicting what occurs when centralized governments seize control of the means of production and attempt to mitigate the individualist impulse. Briefly, Darkness is bookended by The Gladiators (1938) and Arrival and Departure (1943), and followed by The Age of Longing (1951). In the first, Koestler novelizes the slave revolt commanded by the gladiator Spartacus; in Arrival and Departure he conjectures on the psychological motivations behind a character who alternately embraces communist and Nazi ideologies; and The Age of Longing is a futuristic novel exploring the irreconcilable nature of religious faith and totalitarianism in Paris of the mid-1950s. But it is in Darkness, in my humble estimation, that Koestler succeeds most in capturing the mindset of the collectivist fantasy in order to completely dispel its flawed precepts.

Encapsulating a Century

“If any figure could claim to have encapsulated in his own life—and recorded—the political, intellectual, and emotional tribulations of the twentieth century, it is [Koestler],” wrote Theodore Dalrymple in “A Drinker of Infinity,” an essay that appeared in The City Journal, Spring 2007, and that took its title from a later work by Koestler.

Koestler’s life leading up to the writing of Darkness at Noon reads like a novel (or several) itself. Born to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1905, he displayed an affinity for math and science that led him to study engineering in Vienna. Before he could graduate, however, Koestler embraced radical Zionism (although biographies report he wasn’t an observant Jew), which led him to live briefly on a kibbutz in Palestine. He subsequently became the Palestine correspondent for a German newspaper group, the Ullstein Trust, was based for a while in Paris, and wound up simultaneously serving as science editor and foreign correspondent for two Ullstein-owned newspapers in Germany.

After Ullstein fired Koestler (some sources assert he resigned) for his political leanings, the writer threw the full weight of his intellectual and physical energies behind Marxism (fully detailed in “The Initiates”). He traveled extensively throughout the USSR in 1932 and 1933 at the invitation of the Revolutionary Writers of Germany, a Comintern front agency. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936 Koestler was writing communist propaganda in Paris and accepted an assignment from a British newspaper to file reports from Francisco Franco’s fascist army headquarters. In Spain he was arrested as a communist spy and sentenced to death. He documented his internment in Spanish Testament (1937). Once released—through international efforts resulting in a Republican swap of Koestler for a fascist prisoner—he returned to France to continue writing for the communist cause. He severed ties with the party over his disagreement with the 1938 Soviet show trials and set about writing Darkness at Noon.

Koestler again found himself imprisoned—this time in a French concentration camp, as a hostile alien—in the first months of World War II. After another international effort, he was released and sought to avoid another arrest by joining the French Foreign Legion. He made his way to Lisbon, then illegally flew to London. British authorities promptly arrested him; he corrected galleys of Darkness at Noon during his six-week incarceration.

“The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian,” George Orwell wrote in an essay on Koestler’s early works. “In 1937 Koestler already knew this, but did not feel free to say so.” By 1938, however, Koestler had broken with the Communist Party and sought to educate Western Europe and the New World on happenings in the Soviet Union.

Darkness centers on the incarceration of Rubashov, a Bolshevik from the 1917 Revolution, for presumed counterrevolutionary activities and sentiments. Although the reader sympathizes with Rubashov, as one would for any prisoner condemned without due process, his significant shortcomings readily become apparent. For one, he served on the Central Committee in the early years of Hitler’s Germany, expeditiously silencing operatives no longer possessing Party utility by betraying them to Nazi police. Even though Rubashov convinces himself these actions are the justified means by which the revolution’s ends will be met, his conscience is haunted by his betrayal of his secretary and lover, Arlova.

The Here and Now

Rubashov is based loosely on Nikolai Bukharin, a Bolshevik who became president of the Soviet Comintern. According to Goronwy Rees, Bukharin’s 1938 arrest, trial, confession, and execution represented “a kind of monstrous reductio ad absurdum of the Great Purge, in which it was proved to everyone’s satisfaction that not only the whole of the original leadership of the Bolshevik Party had become spies and traitors but that the case against them had been conducted by one who shared in exactly the same crimes.” Critics note that Koestler lifted the bulk of Rubashov’s confession from Bukharin’s real-life document.

Two of Koestler’s acquaintances contributed the necessary details of Soviet oppression. Painter and ceramicist Eva Weissberg, a childhood friend, emigrated to the Soviet Union with her husband, physicist Alexander Weissberg, who became a researcher at the Ukrainian Institute for Physics and Technology. Eva related the Weissbergs’ subsequent persecution during Stalin’s Great Purges to Koestler, who used the experiences as background material. His own solitary confinement in Spain lent credibility to his descriptions of Rubashov’s incarceration.

What differentiates Koestler’s work from other highly lauded literary attacks on collectivism by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Stanislaw Lem is perspective. Whereas the other writers projected the results of communism in novels depicting dystopian futures—Lem by necessity since he was living in Soviet-controlled Poland; Orwell and Huxley by choice—Koestler, recognizing the Soviet Central Committee’s initiatives to reconstruct all history as a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, documented what had already occurred under Stalin’s reign of terror during a decade of famine, the Great Purge, and the Moscow show trials. While the famines and purges resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Soviets, the show trials are characterized as an absurd travesty of Kafkaesque proportions in which Soviet apparatchiks obtained public confessions from old-guard Bolsheviks on trumped-up charges, resulting in the coerced “confessions” of counterrevolutionary activities and subsequent executions.

The historical perspective speaks to readers sympathetic to the Soviet cause but baffled as to why multitudes of Old Guard Bolsheviks would confess to crimes against the State for almost certain execution. For those readers unsympathetic to or unaware of Uncle Joe’s brand of totalitarianism, Koestler depicted the result of clashing Marxist-inspired ideologies—paranoia and death on the one hand and paranoia, deprivation, and inhumanity on the other. Koestler portrays the former as no longer willing to accept that all means justify Stalinist ends, and conversely portrays those who accept all means to further the Soviet agenda as amoral monsters:

[I]n the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about 10 million people to do forced labor in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under the conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the highest officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalists counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. . . . We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and with the most refined scientific system of physical and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future of happiness, which only we can see. . . .

Taking nothing from the substantial literary accomplishments of Orwell, Huxley, and Lem, the sheer headline immediacy and empirical evidence substantiating the claims of Darkness at Noon’s protagonist, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, in the above speech given to his old comrade and current prosecutor, Ivanov, conveys a verisimilitude seldom attainable in speculative fiction.

Orwell wrote that no Englishman could’ve written Darkness at Noon, as his countrymen only experienced Soviet duplicity and deceit peripherally as part of the communists’ alliance with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. H. G. Wells, for example, could acknowledge Soviet cruelty while simultaneously justifying it: “Much that the Red terror did was cruel and frightful. It was largely controlled by narrow-minded men, and many of its officials were inspired by social hatred and fear of counter-revolution,” adding, “Apart from individual atrocities it did on the whole kill for a reason and to an end.”

As today’s political systems totter once again toward statist cardiac arrest, albeit masked at first as more kind and gentle than the Soviet model—at least until government coercion increasingly becomes imperative to enforce its rule—we should heed Santayana and remember the history documented by a writer who was able to divorce himself from the Soviet lie. Arthur Koestler suffered from none of the delusions Wells formulated from afar. He had seen firsthand the horrors of the twentieth century and documented its cruelties and dehumanization from the insidious interior chambers of collectivism’s heart of darkness.

The war damaged the country forever, as I suggested in Tethered Citizens (Future of Freedom Foundation, 2001). Here’s an excerpt:

“While early America always had its advocates of activist government, that view becomes more prominent after the Civil War. . . .

“The Civil War itself and its militaristic effect on American society had important consequences for the nationalist collectivization of America that occurred in the following decades: It encouraged collectivist intellectuals to vigorously promote their reform visions, and it won thinkers to a collectivist cause. It even convinced some individualists that the world had changed, making their worldview outdated.

“The war’s military collectivization of society profoundly impressed some Northern intellectuals, giving them visions of a new world. The war effort devalued the individualism that had characterized the earlier Jeffersonian America. Service to the Union became the reigning ideal. Order, explicit planning, and regimentation rose in value. Independent thought seemed more a liability than an asset.

“The war, wrote the historian Allan Nevins, ‘transformed an inchoate nation, individualistic in temper and wedded to improvisation, into a shaped and disciplined nation, increasingly aware of the importance of plan and control.’

“A symbol of that change in mindset is Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist author of Self-Reliance, who before the war represented a distinctively American cantankerous individualism opposed to institutions and their impositions on the person. When the war came along, Emerson expressed approval that it imposed obligations on everyone. He hoped no one would be exempt from ‘the public duty.’ In a 180-degree turn, he assigned government and civilization priority over ‘the private man.’ In ‘American Civilization,’ written in 1862, he was willing to grant government ‘the absolute power of a dictator’ in a crisis. ‘Emerson’s characteristic emphasis on individualism and anarchism disappeared.’ [George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union.]

“In Emerson’s words, ‘War organizes [and] forces individuals and states to combine and act with larger views.’ Self-reliance was now replaced by service and obedience, particularly in the military. His new views influenced his outlook on culture, as evidenced by his support for a State-created National Academy of Literature and Art. A new era required new thinking.

“After the war, intellectuals were more interested in a strong central government and nationalism. Jeffersonian decentralization and individual liberty were seen as a part of the old ways, made obsolete in the new postwar America. The Declaration of Independence became old-fashioned. . . .

“Unlike poetry before the war, poetry now rhapsodized on the glory of the nation. Herman Melville wrote about empire, not freedom. The crushing of the Southern secession demonstrated the need for strong government and citizen compliance with the State. . . .

“The collectivist intellectuals believed that the Civil War held important lessons for the new America. It wasn’t war itself that they valued, but the things that war brought. John W. Draper, for example, wrote that war taught subordination and stimulated an appreciation of order. Men, said Draper, ‘love to obey’ those they believe are their intellectual superiors. ‘In military life they learn to practice that obedience openly,’ he said, adding that individualism was to blame for the war.

“What intellectuals such as Francis A. Walker, Charles Francis Adams Jr., and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wished for was, in [George] Frederickson’s words, a ‘continuance . . . of the crisis mentality of war.’ That mentality would maintain the sense of duty to society that was palpable during the war. While those men wanted conservative objectives served, others, such as John Wesley Powell, had ‘humanitarian ends’ in mind.

“The problem for these thinkers was that peacetime did not inspire service and sacrifice. People became centered on their own lives, their families, and immediate communities. But war was a call to duty and the ‘strenuous life.’ If only a substitute for war could be found, a call to duty that did not involve bloodshed. ‘There is one thing I do not doubt,’ said Holmes, ‘and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.’”

* * *

Following is Burton W. Folsom, Jr.’s assessment of the economic costs of the war.

Next, Bradley Birzer documents another sort of cost: the sacrifice of republican principles through the Reconstruction.

Joseph Stromberg then examines the political economy that arose during and emerged from the Civil War, with particular attention to the ensuing Gilded Age.

Finally, Hummel returns to look at the issue of slavery in order to sort out the reasons for secession and war.

Warren Gibson concludes his two-part series on gold and money.

Our columnists have also been hard at work. Lawrence Reed warns that rising gasoline prices can be counted on to bring out the political opportunists. Stephen Davies explains how maps serve the interests of power. John Stossel reports on another assault by the prohibitionists. David Henderson reminds us that war is a government program. And Fred Foldvary, confronting a claim that central banking is superior to free banking, responds, “It Just Ain’t So!”

Books on domestic surveillance, the financial crisis, Marxism, and private roads occupy our reviewers.

Although the book has attracted some zealous followers, it is a difficult read. One wades through lengthy and tiring discussions of Foucault, debates with Sartre, attempts to refashion Marxist theory, and then, sandwiched in between, hopeful tales about the restoration of “authentic identity” among the Maya and lengthy, optimistic claims about how the people of Cochabamba are progressing from “antimodernity” toward “altermodernity.” One suspects that the authors understand that their ideas won’t hold up well if stated in plain English, so they resort to an obscure but intimidating style. Amidst all of this, and among many other intellectual detours, stands a full-blown chapter on Spinoza’s concept of love. Suffice it to say that Hardt and Negri argue that people must be trained and educated in love in order to fight the evil forces of private property.

The authors assume (but don’t bother to argue) that property and market exchange block and destroy genuine human relationships. Marx had this general insight correct, they believe, but they suggest that his analysis needs to be corrected and updated in its details to fit our postindustrial age. Hardt and Negri claim that Marx’s theory of alienation, for example, must be further developed from an analysis of competitive separation of people and estrangement of the fruits of their labor to an “alienation of one’s thought” itself. Exactly what that means isn’t clear, but I think they’re suggesting that our thoughts aren’t truly our own, but are created by the capitalist system that allegedly controls us.

The authors insist that life—genuine, loving human relationships—is nestled in “the common.” The common consists of those institutions beyond private and public ownership of the means of production and, it appears, the fruits of labor, too. (One of the book’s many confusing aspects is that the meaning of “the common” is vague and shifting.) In Hardt and Negri’s view private property is the essence of capitalism, public property the essence of socialism, and the common is the essence of—you guessed it—communism. With this concept the authors try to break from the totalitarian consequences of “the victorious revolutions” of Russia, China, and Cuba. They claim to be optimistic that the revolution is imminent and, at long last, emancipating.

Nowhere do the authors consider the possibility that their revolution might lead to adverse results. Nor do they ever come to terms with the knowledge-communicating properties of voluntary and open exchanges of property rights. The coordination of plans, which is ultimately coordination of thoughts and expectations, is completely ignored in the book. How this can happen without private property and exchange is a mystery.

The common, the authors proclaim, is the ground of freedom and voluntarism. Activities within the common are the source of true wealth (hence the book’s title). The freedom of the common is the freedom to find and develop love, and it provides the source of the multitude’s supposed creative power. But “capital,” that meaningless collectivist concept that goes back to Marx himself, disrupts the common. Capital, they assert, exploits the multitude, the truly productive.

And the multitude is huddled and gathered mainly in cities, in “the metropolis,” used as another collectivistic concept. Marx focused on the factory, but Hardt and Negri claim that the metropolis is supposedly the current site of “hierarchy and exploitation, violence and suffering, fear and pain,” and therefore will be the site of the impending revolt. The authors have absolutely no sense of cities as spontaneous orders where millions cooperate for mutual gain. Maybe people keep going to cities because they are alienated from their own thoughts.

Hardt and Negri try to impress with their knowledge of Foucault, Laclan, Derrida, and Viveiros de Castro, but where’s Smith? Where’s Hayek? Where’s Jacobs? They never address the spontaneous and invisible-hand-like nature of markets, the communicative and wealth-enhancing nature of exchange, the role that cities play in such exchange, and the notion of civil society, an independent sector that is not fundamentally organized through commercial activity or the violent compulsion of the State. Are they even aware of the counterargument? And if so, when do they plan to address it?

Commonwealth is a pitiable effort at resuscitating Marx. But it was a lost cause to begin with.

In our first issue, on October 2, 1950, we published an editorial called “The Faith of the Freeman,” in which we outlined our fundamental economic, political and moral philosophy. In the fifteen months since then our articles and editorials, we trust, have made that basic philosophy and its practical application increasingly clear.

Now, at the completion of our first full calendar year of existence, we think it appropriate to say something about our function. That function is in one respect obvious. It is to propagate our announced philosophy, and to apply it, as we have been doing, to current issues as they arise. On the constructive and positive side, in other words, our function is to expound and apply the principles of traditional liberalism and individual freedom. On the negative side, it is to expose the errors of collectivism of all shades—of statism, “planning,” controllism, socialism, fascism and communism. One of our central aims is, on the one hand, to hearten and strengthen those who already accept most of the philosophy of individual freedom and to help them to clarify their own thinking; and, on the other hand, to convert open-minded collectivists to the philosophy of freedom.

The mere announcement of such an aim is likely to be followed by immediate expressions of skepticism or incredulity. Some of our correspondents tell us, for example, that a magazine like The Freeman is read only by those who already believe in its aims, and therefore we are doing nothing more than “talking to ourselves.” But even if this were true, which we do not believe, we would still be performing a very important function. It is imperative that those who already believe in a market economy, limited government and individual freedom should have the constant encouragement of knowing that they do not stand alone, that there is high hope for their cause. It is imperative that all such people keep abreast of current developments and know their correct interpretation, and that, through constant restatement and mutual criticism of each other’s ideas; they continue to clarify, improve, and perfect their understanding. Only if they do this can they be counted upon to remain true to a libertarian philosophy, and be proof against collectivist fallacies. Only if those on “our side” do this can we even hope to hold our ranks together and cease constantly to lose converts, as in the past, to collectivism.

But the function of a journal of opinion like The Freeman only begins here; it does not stop here. It is necessary for the believers in a free system to do far more than hold their present thin ranks together. If they hope to see their ideas triumph, it is imperative that they make converts themselves from the philosophy of collectivism, “security” and serfdom that dominates the world today.

They can do this only if they themselves have a deeper understanding than the collectivists, and are able not only to recognize the collectivist errors, but to refute them in such a way that the more intelligent and well-meaning collectivists themselves will recognize, acknowledge and renounce them as errors. And those on “our side” cannot do this, cannot live up to their responsibilities, unless they have troubled to keep themselves informed to make their ideas clearer and their understanding deeper than those of the collectivists. For our side can hope to grow only if it attracts and keeps adherents who in turn will become, not blind or one-eyed partisans, but enlightened and able expositors, teachers, disseminators, proselytizers.

To make this possible, it is essential that there should exist a prospering periodical with the aims of The Freeman.

* * *

Children’s books about the environment are so dull and devoid of active people that Andrew Morriss hopes kids are playing video games rather than reading that stuff.

A report claiming that the tax burden is the lightest since the Truman administration gave Progressive talk-show hosts something to beat the tax-cutters over the head with—until the report was debunked. As D. W. MacKenzie points out, it’s easy to make the tax burden look small if you don’t count all the taxes.

Government schooling has been subjected to all kinds of criticisms. Michael Bors shows that Public Choice arguments shed further light on why the schools are bad and don’t improve.

This sounds like a bad dream, but people inside and outside of government are actually proposing that the failing newspaper business be bailed out by the taxpayers. Edward López shows why that’s a terrible idea.

The Glass-Steagall Act was the major banking regulation of the New Deal. In 1999 a key part was repealed. Was that repeal responsible for the recent financial debacle? Warren Gibson and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel have the skinny.

The welfare state isn’t just wasteful and larcenous. It’s morally corrupting. Richard Fulmer tells why.

Police departments have ways to keep abusive officers’ names out of the papers. Wendy McElroy says that denies citizens one of their greatest protections against police misconduct.

Contrary to Lord Keynes’s maxim that in the long run we’re all dead, his spirit is alive and well more than 64 years after his death. Richard McKenzie looks into this curiosity.

Our columnists have plenty to talk about: Lawrence Reed reveals his sympathies for Marxism. Thomas Szasz scrutinizes the medicalization of suicide. Burton Folsom has a few choice words about Theodore Roosevelt. John Stossel catalogues attacks on our freedom. Walter Williams exposes some Washington lies. And Mark Skousen, hearing for the nth time that consumer spending drives the economy, objects, “It Just Ain’t So!”

Our reviewers dissect books on the financial mess, British libertarian Arthur Seldon, antipsychiatry, and public schooling.

Europe had not experienced a prolonged and massively destructive war since the defeat of Napoleon one hundred years earlier. To be sure, there had been some wars and civil wars, especially in central and eastern Europe during the nineteenth century. But they were relatively short and, compared to what were experienced in the twentieth century, rather limited in their destruction of life and property. “Rules of warfare” recognized the rights of neutrals and noncombatants in Europe, though not in the colonial areas of Asia and Africa.

But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, beneath the appearance of a classical-liberal utopia of freedom, peace, and prosperity, new ideological forces had been winning the hearts and minds of a growing number of people. These forces were socialism, nationalism, and imperialism—in a word, philosophical, political, and economic collectivism.

The air was filled with calls to arms in the name of national greatness and glory, talk of a higher social good more important than the “mere” interests of individuals, and the notion that peoples discovered their “destinies” not in peaceful industry, but on battlefields amid the thrust of bayonets.

Four years after the war began, by the autumn of 1918, more than 20 million Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians Italians, Russians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Serbs, Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, and many others were dead. European industry and agriculture were ruined, and a good part of the accumulated wealth of a century had been consumed.

Jim Powell, in his book Wilson’s War, tells the story of how this came about, what the consequences were, and the role Woodrow Wilson played in making this entire catastrophe worse than it might have been.

While not ignoring Imperial German militarism, aggressiveness, and bellicosity in the decades before World War I, Powell emphasizes the various nationalist ambitions and secret alliances among all the major belligerents that kept the war from being simply “Germany’s fault.” Battlefield incompetence by generals and political arrogance and stubbornness by national leaders on both sides dragged the war on and on in the face of mounting casualties and growing economic hardship unknown in living memory.

At first, Powell explains, Wilson—a vain and often vengeful man—claimed the role of impartial arbiter to bring the war to a negotiated conclusion. But soon both he and his circle of cabinet members and advisers decided that victory should belong to Great Britain and France. Finally, after winning reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson had Congress declare war on Germany in April 1917, although neither Germany nor any of its allies had attacked or threatened the United States. At the peace conference that followed the November 1918 armistice, Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric was drowned out by the imperial and territorial ambitions of the British and French that left Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires in a shambles.

Powell persuasively suggests that if America had stayed out of the war the belligerents, exhausted and with no hope of a clear battlefield victory, might have accepted the need to end the conflict without any winner. Had that happened, there might well have been no Bolshevik revolution in Russia and therefore no deadly 75-year “experiment” in Soviet communism under Lenin, Stalin, and those who followed them. If Germany had not been humiliated, stripped of 13 percent of its territory, burdened with “war guilt” and heavy reparations, and left in political and economic chaos, a demagogue like Hitler, with his Nazi ideology of racism and blood lust for revenge and conquest through a new war, might not have come to power.

Had America not taken the path of foreign intervention in 1917, it might not have set the precedent of assuming the mantle of global policeman throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and now into the 21st century. In the world Woodrow Wilson did so much to create, the United States suffered not only hundreds of thousands of casualties in two global wars, but also over a hundred thousand additional deaths in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Nor should it be forgotten that this U.S. role has cost Americans dearly in other ways: hundreds of billions of dollars in tax money; the growth and increased intrusiveness of the federal government; and their placement in harm’s way throughout the world. This has been a heavy price to pay for Woodrow Wilson’s war ambitions.

Born in 1886 on an island in the middle of Lake Huron, the frontier of untamed Canada left an indelible mark on Paterson. After working for a series of newspapers on the American west coast, she migrated east — to New York City — where she eventually found her way to the Herald-Tribune and ultimately to nationwide fame. While ostensibly a book-review column, her weekly “Turns With a Bookworm” provided a regular forum for her views on just about everything, from a libertarian perspective. Signed I.M.P., “Turns” became one of the most influential literary columns in America.

Paterson’s name survives today, however, primarily because of The God of the Machine, her magnum opus written in 1943. For the aspiring libertarian, it has almost become required reading. Written during the dark epoch of World War II, it, along with Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority, was one of the three books published that year which helped ignite the modern libertarian movement. The book is a magisterial attempt to chart the course of human energy, both free and unfree. In Paterson’s writing, we see great passion, wit, and verve. To her, Plato’s Republic was a “paper scheme,” while “Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission.” Her belief in human freedom was as strong as her distaste for socialism, interventionism, and the welfare state, and it is no wonder she converted so many to the cause of liberty.

Yet there has been comparatively little written on Paterson. Stephen Cox’s new biography corrects this intellectual sin of omission.

Charting the course of her life from the wilds of Canada to the hubris of intellectual cocktail parties in New York City, Cox weaves an intricate picture of this iconoclast’s life. For those who came to Paterson through The God of the Machine, Cox’s book reminds us that she was firmly established as an important libertarian intellectual even before its publication. Her columns covered war, peace, trade, and socialism from the stance of a libertarian individualist fighting the tide of collectivism.

Cox, a professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, understands that what Paterson wrote was equally as important as when she wrote it. If alive and writing today, Isabel Paterson would be an important and courageous thinker. She was all the more so given that she was virtually alone in her politics—doubly so, considering her gender—during the New Deal and world war. She proudly proclaimed her belief in “the Rights of Man, personal liberty and private property” when the literary world was infatuated with the “new man” of the Soviet Union. This, along with her strong position against entry into the war and her dislike of militant anticommunism, won her enemies on all sides. Like Mencken, she traveled in a world hostile to her ideas, and her unyielding belief in liberty and limited government marginalized her in many people’s eyes.

Much of the material for the book was drawn from Paterson’s personal correspondence, and that consequently gives it a strongly partisan feel—with Cox firmly ensconced in Paterson’s corner. Some of Cox’s conclusions seem a bit strained. For example, he asserts that Paterson was the guiding force behind Rand’s political development. He writes, “If there was a crucial, external influence on Rand’s political development, Paterson was that influence.” His evidence to support this statement is weak—an inscription in Paterson’s copy of The Fountainhead that reads, “You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated.” This is certainly a touching sentiment, but it’s hardly enough evidence to support the contention.

When the masterful and detailed study of twentieth-century communist regimes, The Black Book of Communism, was first published in France in the 1990s, for instance, one French leftist tried to rationalize the human cost of socialist tyranny by arguing: “Agreed, both Nazis and communists killed. But while the Nazis killed from hatred of humanity, the communists killed from love.”

Nazis, it seems, had bad intentions and used bad methods. Communists, on the other hand, had good intentions–they loved their fellow man and wanted to create a utopia for him–they just made an unfortunate error in selecting less-than-desirable means. Oh, well, back to the drawing board!

Richard Overy’s recent work, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, is the most detailed and methodical study, so far, of what the two totalitarian regimes shared in common and in what ways they differed. Indeed, there are few aspects of political, economic, social, and cultural life in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that do not receive meticulous analysis from the author.

It is in the concluding chapter of the book that one discovers what Overy considers the most fundamental premises of the two regimes. Both the Nazis and the communists, he argues, were guided by the spirit of scientism: the misplaced application of the methods of the natural sciences to the arena of human life. Marxian socialists were convinced that they could deduce the “laws” of historical development that necessitated the inevitable triumph of “the workers” over their capitalist exploiters. In addition, they believed that once the revolution had been orchestrated, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” had the ability to remake man and transform society into a collectivist paradise.

The Nazis also believed in the power of science, but in their case it was a “racial science” that defined different human groups and their hierarchical relationships to each other. Through application of eugenics, a purified “master race” could be socially engineered, with “the Germans” being the superior breed meant to rule the world.

Communism and Nazism, therefore, were variations on the same collectivist theme, in which the individual and his identity as a person were determined by either his “class” or “race.” Both were paranoid in their outlook on life. Nazis saw racial threats everywhere, in the form of inferior groups that could defile Germany’s blood purity. Communists saw class enemies surrounding and threatening the existence of the Soviet workers’ state. Vigilance at the borders and secret-police terror internally were essential for the regimes to preserve either the master race or the proletarian paradise.

Hitler and Stalin were convinced of their unique and irreplaceable roles in making history. Hitler believed that just as there is a master race among humanity, so there is a master leader within the master race, who through intuition, insight, and will power knows what is needed to assure the rightful place and destiny of the German people. Fate had called him to that task. Following in Lenin’s footsteps, Stalin believed that socialist victory was impossible without professional revolutionaries who served as the vanguard of the proletariat. Among the vanguard there was the necessity for one determined leader to head the movement, with “history” having assigned Stalin this momentous duty.

For Hitler and Stalin, their ruthlessness and disregard of human life were essential to fulfill their role as leaders of the Nazi and communist causes. What was, perhaps, most dangerous in both men was that they believed in what they were doing to bring their versions of utopia into existence. Hitler and Stalin were “true believers.”

The power of “scientific” social engineering was present in everything that they commanded for the reconstruction of German and Soviet society. Stalin introduced five-year central plans in 1929; Hitler imposed four-year central plans in 1936. Nothing was outside the orbit of control and command, from the most mundane consumer goods to the redesigning of whole cities and the wider countryside. Art, literature, music, sports, and leisure were all used to mold the tens of millions of subjects under their power into the desired shape for a beautiful tomorrow.

As Overy carefully recounts, there was little that was random in the Nazi and Soviet use of terror and imprisonment. Those, too, were planned with a purpose in mind. They targeted the designated “enemies of the people” to isolate and destroy all who opposed “the brave new world” in the making. But those arrested and sent off to concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were also viewed as forced labor for building the Nazi and Soviet societies. The victims were all part of the same central plan, whether for work or extermination.

Overy also highlights the degree of popularity that both the Nazis and communists achieved in German and Soviet society. The secret police were tiny fractions of those populations. With little prodding people willingly spied and informed on their friends, relatives, and neighbors. Both regimes promised and seemed to deliver a new ideal of “equality” in which devotion and hard work in the service of “the cause” assured that even the lowly could find status, position, and reward, now that the old class distinctions were swept away. The state monopoly over news and information succeeded in persuading millions of the truth and justice of the regimes under which they lived. The “masses” in both countries passively or actively worked for the system, with little resistance or opposition.

The Nazi and Soviet regimes have passed away, their cruelties fading in memory. Yet one wonders–if such ideologies could once before mesmerize so many, could they not do so again? Under the right circumstance, could not the appeal of utopia drag humanity once more into a vortex of destruction?

That man was Karl Marx.

Advocates of liberty often suffer bouts of despair. How can the cause of freedom ever triumph in a world so dominated by interventionist and welfare-statist ideas? Governments often give lip service to the benefits of free markets and the sanctity of personal and civil liberties. In practice, however, those same governments continue to encroach on individual freedom, restrict and regulate the world of commerce and industry, and redistribute the wealth of society to those with political power and influence. The cause of freedom seems to be a lost cause, with merely temporary rear-guard successes against the continuing growth of government.

What friends of freedom need to remember is that trends can change, that they have in the past and will again in the future. If this seems farfetched, place yourself in the position of a socialist at the time that Marx died in 1883, and imagine that you are an honest and sincere advocate of socialism. As a socialist, you live in a world that is predominantely classical liberal, with governments in general only intervening in minimal ways in commercial affairs. Most people—including those in the “working class”—believe that it is not the responsibility of the state to redistribute wealth or nationalize industry and agriculture, and are suspicious of government paternalism.

How could socialism ever be victorious in such a world so fully dominated by the “capitalist” mindset? Even “the workers” don’t understand the evils of capitalism and the benefits of a socialist future! Such a sincere socialist could only hope that Marx was right and that socialism would have to come—someday—due to inescapable “laws of history.”

Yet within 30 years the socialist idea came to dominate the world. By World War I the notion of paternalistic government had captured the minds of intellectuals and was gaining increasing support among the general population. Welfare-statist interventionism was replacing the earlier relatively free-market environment. And the socialist ideal of government planning was put into effect as part of the wartime policies of the belligerent powers beginning in 1914.

Socialism triumphed during that period because while socialists advocated collectivism, they practiced a politics of individualism. They understood that “history” would not move in their direction unless they changed popular opinion. And implicitly they understood that this meant changing the minds of millions of individual people.

So they went out and spoke and debated with their friends and neighbors. They contributed to public lectures and the publishing of pamphlets and books. They founded newspapers and magazines, and distributed them to anyone who would be willing to read them. They understood that the world ultimately changes one mind at a time—in spite of their emphasis on “social classes.”

They overcame the prevailing public opinion, defeated powerful special interests, and never lost sight of their long-term goal of the socialist society to come, which was the motivation and the compass for all their actions.

The Superiority of Freedom

What do friends of freedom have to learn from the successes of our socialist opponents? First, we must fully believe in the moral and practical superiority of freedom and the free market over all forms of collectivism. We must be neither embarrassed nor intimidated by the arguments of the collectivists, interventionists, and welfare statists. Once any compromise is made in the case for freedom, the opponents of liberty will have attained the high ground and will set the terms of the debate.

FEE’s founder, the late Leonard E. Read, once warned of sinking in a sea of “buts.” I believe in freedom and self-responsibility, “but” we need some minimum government social “safety net.” I believe in the free market, “but” we need some limited regulation for the “public good.” I believe in free trade, “but” we should have some form of protectionism for “essential” industries and jobs. Before you know it, Read warned, the case for freedom has been submerged in an ocean of exceptions.

Each of us, given the constraints on his time, must try to become as informed as possible about the case for freedom. Here, again, Read pointed out the importance of self-education and self-improvement. The more knowledgeable and articulate we each become in explaining the benefits of the free society and the harm from all forms of collectivism, the more we will have the ability to attract people who may want to hear what we have to say.

Another lesson to be learned from the earlier generation of socialists is not to be disheartened by the apparent continuing political climate that surrounds us. We must have confidence in the truth of what we say, to know in our minds and hearts that freedom can and will win in the battle of ideas. We must focus on that point on the horizon that represents the ideal of individual liberty and the free society, regardless of how many twists and turns everyday political currents seem to be following. National, state, and local elections merely reflect prevailing political attitudes and beliefs. Our task is to influence the future and not allow ourselves to be distracted or discouraged by who gets elected today and on what policy platform.

Let us remember that over the last hundred years virtually every form of collectivism has been tried—socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism, interventionism, welfare statism—and each has failed. There are very few today who wax with sincere enthusiasm that government is some great secular god that can solve all of mankind’s problems. Statist policies and attitudes continue to prevail because of institutional and special-interest inertia; they no longer possess the political, philosophical, and ideological fervor that brought them to power in earlier times.

There is only one “ism” left to fill this vacuum in the face of collectivism’s failures. It is classical liberalism, with its conception of the free man in the free society, grounded in the idea of consent, peaceful association, and individual rights. If we keep that before us, we can and will win.

Brooks is certainly right that no “health care reform” proposal with any chance in mainstream partisan politics promises any fundamental change to the status quo. What we have had is a system where pervasive government regulation, subsidy, and mandated captive markets corral workers into an industry driven by sky-high costs, managed by bureaucratic pencil-pushing and corporate economizing (often at the expense of innocent people’s health or lives), and owned by a handful of uncompetitive, well-entrenched incumbent corporations. No mainstream “reform” proposal would have changed anything about that. The proposals mainly concerned themselves with introducing new government subsidies and new captive-market mandates to force yet more workers and money into the broken system.

But Brooks took all this as a sign that the health care debate was about fundamental “values.” I think it was a sign that conventional political debate was a superficial squabble over meaningless details. The real debate was about grammar.

Brooks sees “a debate about what kind of country we want America to be”: Although “many of us” thought “we” were in a regulatory sweet spot in which “we” could extend coverage to the uninsured but also lower costs, “we” were wrong; “we” cannot make gains without substantial costs. So “we” face a “brutal choice”—a tradeoff between economic “vitality” and “security.” “Vitality” for “America” means an “unforgiving nation” but also a more “vibrant” one; security means “a more decent society” but also one where “more of the nation’s wealth would be siphoned off from productive uses and shifted into a still wasteful health care system” (emphasis added). We are told that “we all” have to decide what “we” want—for “America.”

Remarkably, among Brooks’s 800 words, supposedly on a debate about deeply held convictions, the word “I” never shows up in the author’s own voice. (The single “I” appears in a quotation.) Lost in this thicket of plural pronouns, “nations,” and “societies” is any notion that I might settle on different preferences from you, or that you might have a right to decide for yourself which preference to pursue. There is only one path for all, and “we” are left only with the engineering decision of which output to optimize for: “vitality or security.”

Mind Your Me’s and You’s

For the individualist, half of human decency in political thinking is just learning to keep your personal pronouns straight. There is no right outcome in this debate except to reject the conventional political premise that “we all” need to decide on anything when it comes to health care. Life is full of tradeoffs. But the right question to ask is not which choice to take, but rather who should choose and who should bear the costs of the choice taken. And the answer is that each person should choose how much of her own resources she wants to devote to health care and to insuring against future disasters. These tradeoffs only become “brutal” when I am forced to take your risks or you are forced to fund my security.

Brooks might reply, “Ah, you claim to avoid the hard choice here with a free market. But really you are making a choice without admitting it. Free markets mean everyone is limited to her own resources to meet medical bills; but by definition poor people have no real resources to fall back on. So really you’re just advocating one option: a system that chooses vitality and growth over security and care for the vulnerable.” Indeed, Brooks insists that “The unregulated market wants to direct capital to the productive and the young” and confusedly suggests that this is more or less the kind of “vitality”-oriented system that America has had and will continue to have unless government forces taxpayers to chip in for more extensive government “welfare policies” in health care.

That might seem true if the corporate health care system we face emerged from “the unregulated market.” But it didn’t. Government licensure controls who practices medicine, and where and how they practice it. Government prohibitions restrict which drugs are produced and where to get them because government thinks it knows better than you what drugs you should take and because it is engaged in a deliberate effort to raise drug prices through a system of patents. Federal tax loopholes and regulatory micromanagement make most full-time workers dependent on their bosses for health insurance and force most other workers to deal with government health insurance or none at all. There is a “market” of a sort here, but it’s far from a free market: It’s a rigged market, shaped by government regulation, funded by government subsidy, and owned by government agencies and government-privileged corporations.

The Meaning of a Freed Market

Pervasive confusion of the existing government-supported anticompetitive corporate health care market with health care provided by a genuinely freed market leads to two related confusions about what a real market in medicine would mean.

First is the widespread but ultimately ridiculous notion that free markets would require individual workers to rely only on personal savings or expensive corporate health insurance to cover high medical costs. In fact in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, freer medical markets actually offered many competitive, noncorporate means for working folks to get affordable, decent health care for themselves by pooling resources through free-market bargaining and free association. As the libertarian scholars David Beito and Roderick Long have discussed, “contract practice” agreements, organized by low-income workers and primarily negotiated through unions, mutual-aid societies, and fraternal lodges, provided reliable medical care for 20 to 50 percent of workers in English-speaking countries for about one day’s wages per year. These affordable arrangements were ultimately driven out, not by the ruthlessness of the free market, but rather by deliberate assaults by government and the government-privileged medical guilds.

Second, if we recognize the importance of freed markets to the prospect for a civilized solution to the health care crisis, it also quickly becomes obvious that there are many opportunities for “reform” that simply do not present the kind of tradeoff that Brooks wrings his hands over—specifically, “reforms” that get rid of the government interventions that cause costs to skyrocket in the first place.

There is a clash of fundamental values in the health care debate, but it’s not a clash within conventional electoral politics. The real debate is between
politics as a means of providing health care and a freer, more humane alternative: consensual social organization.