Americans have lived with the welfare state for so long—more than 70 years—that for most, it is simply a fact of life. Asking whether it is justified would seem about as pointless as asking whether rain is justified. Furthermore, among the relatively few people who might be inclined to ponder the ethics of the welfare state, most subscribe to philosophies (for example, egalitarianism, positive-rights liberalism, and communitarianism) that find no fault with our panoply of welfare programs. Indeed, they generally favor expanding welfare.

Those of us who oppose the welfare state therefore have a Herculean task before us if we want to see voluntary programs replace coercive government ones. Fortunately, we have just gotten some help.

Professor Daniel Shapiro’s book, Is the Welfare State Justified?, makes a strong effort at persuading nonlibertarians that, based on their own philosophical principles, they ought to give up their support for government programs such as Social Security and Medicare. It is a first-rate effort that should get intellectually honest defenders of the welfare state saying, “Well, that is a good point. . . .”

Readers should understand, however, that this is a work of scholarship. If you’re simply looking for a few anti-welfare anecdotes to use against political opponents, you will have to go elsewhere. Throughout his analysis, Shapiro’s writing displays a refreshing humility; he isn’t looking for quick “gotcha!” points, but grapples earnestly with opposing perspectives.

Perhaps the reason Shapiro is so successful is that he used to be one of those liberal welfare advocates. But then he began to consider the libertarian critique. He writes, “Once I realized how free markets really worked, and how government programs that were supposed to realize their seemingly compassionate or just goals didn’t really do so, I realized that the attitude of distrust I had toward government power and the view I had about the value of individual freedom applied to economic as well as personal matters.” For quite a few years Shapiro (who teaches philosophy at West Virginia University) has been writing articles with titles like “Why Rawlsian Liberals Should Support Free Market Capitalism.” In this book he brings decades of professional thought to bear on this important project.

All right, then—is the welfare state justified? No, but a short review can’t do justice to Shapiro’s work. He covers a great array of philosophical arguments, objections to arguments, and rejoinders to objections.

Let’s briefly consider health care. Overwhelmingly, those on the political left reject free-market provision of health care, contending that everyone has a right to “adequate” medical services and concluding that we must adopt some version of a single-payer system to effectuate that claimed right. Shapiro responds that every sort of health-care system must deal with the rationing problem, then strongly argues that the free market more fairly solves that problem than any politically driven system can.

Similarly with old-age insurance and support for the indigent, Shapiro carefully shows why voluntary and market-based systems are preferable for meeting the needs of people—preferable from the standpoint of those who are inclined to believe that government does a better job.

In my view, Shapiro’s most devastating argument against all forms of government welfare is his observation that there is no such thing as a governmental welfare guarantee. Here is what he writes:

Exactly! It is merely an illusion that government can create rights to welfare. All that politicians can do is to promise that they (including future officeholders) will use their coercive powers in an effort to deliver money, medical care, or other things to certain members of the population. But political promises are completely unenforceable, unlike contracts. That’s one of the main reasons why Shapiro regards individual saving for retirement, medical care, and other needs as better than reliance on the state. With respect to money you have earned and saved, you really do have rights—contractual rights. You aren’t just a supplicant begging politicians to tax others for your benefit.

A splendid book that throws welfare state advocates on the defensive.

George Leef is book review editor of The Freeman.

In Milton Friedman: A Biography, Lanny Ebenstein presents a highly readable account of Friedman’s life and an introduction to his economics, including his advocacy of libertarian ideas and government reform. The book is based on published material and personal interviews, and it was completed shortly before Friedman’s death in late 2006. The appendix contains a “Bibliographical Essay” further elaborating on Friedman’s life, work, and influence.

The first chapters describe Friedman’s youth and early career. His family life, the TV program and book Free to Choose, his Nobel Prize, the Friedman Prize, and his work as adviser to Barry Goldwater and Presidents Nixon and Reagan are all discussed, but the book’s major focus is on Friedman’s mature career (1946–1976) at the University of Chicago. This is followed by a discussion of his life as a public figure following retirement.

Personal interviews reveal a number of interesting tidbits about him that will be new to most readers. For example, his family was apolitical and for much of his early life he was not much interested in politics.

Friedman is known worldwide now for his view that “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” His early views on inflation, however, were quite different. In congressional testimony on how to avoid inflation during the early years of World War II, he focused on taxation as a way to reduce consumer spending.

Early on he proposed the free market as the most suitable vehicle to achieve “political freedom, economic efficiency, and substantial equality of economic power,” even though he supported the welfare aspects of Roosevelt’s New Deal as a young man. At the time the conventional wisdom among the public, as well as economists, was that government could manage the economy better than the market order could.

Friedman identified the Chicago school of economics with three attributes—efficacy of free markets, skepticism of government regulation, and emphasis on quantity of money in producing inflation. He contended that the University of Chicago was never primarily free market in outlook, but only seemed so; the distinguishing characteristic of Chicago “was not the presence of market-oriented scholars at Chicago but rather the absence of them elsewhere.”

Friedman’s A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, coauthored with Anna Schwartz, was a major critique of Keynesianism. That work suggested that the economic turmoil of the 1930s was not due to excesses in the market order, but Federal Reserve policy that allowed the money supply to fall, which turned what might have been an ordinary recession into the Great Depression. This book had an important effect on economists’ views on the appropriate role of government generally, but Ebenstein says little about the policy implications drawn by Friedman from the pathbreaking work in A Monetary History.

For much of his professional career Friedman was viewed as a heretic on the fringe of economics. It is hard to overstate the hostility to his policy ideas when Capitalism and Freedom—a libertarian guide to public policy—was published in 1962. It was reviewed only by the American Economic Review, even though accessible to a wide audience.

Ebenstein stresses Friedman’s philosophical debt to F. A. Hayek, a colleague at Chicago from 1950 to 1962. Friedman considered Hayek the most important intellectual figure in the worldwide movement toward freer markets. Although each favored freer markets and less government, Hayek disagreed with Friedman’s monetarism and his positivist approach to economics. Friedman, in contrast, considered his work in positive economics to be his primary intellectual contribution. Ebenstein discusses the shortcomings of the Hayekian subjectivist approach to economic analysis, but a similar discussion of the limitations of Friedman’s positivist approach would have been informative.

The book’s shortcomings mainly relate to what is omitted—discussion of Austrian, Keynesian, and other critiques of Friedman’s work. It would have been interesting, for example, if Ebenstein had queried Friedman on his response to the Austrian position that governmental control over the supply of money and credit is so dangerous to economic stability that we would be better off if we could replace the Federal Reserve with some market alternative. Friedman once said that the gold standard led to the waste of resources in mining gold, but even if that is a waste, how does it compare with the damage done by governmental manipulation of money and credit?

Friedman’s libertarian ethical view of the world was rooted in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Most readers will be surprised to learn that Mill put forth the idea of school vouchers almost a century before Friedman. Friedman’s views on the financing of education evolved over time, and eventually he came to view vouchers as a means, not an end; by 2005 his ideal was government completely out of education.

Readers interested in Friedman’s ideas, work, and personal life will gain by reading this book.

E. C. Pasour, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University.

“If you’re depressed about the state of politics these days, read The Commanding Heights. . . . Step back and look at the big picture, a picture that spans the whole planet and comes into focus over decades. Look at the big picture and see that our side—the side of human freedom—is winning.” This review, written by Brink Lindsey in Reason in 1998 could be the first paragraph of his The Age of Abundance, a book that celebrates the virtues of liberty.

Lindsey, vice president for research at the Cato Institute, documents the advances in human freedom that Americans have enjoyed during the past century. He sees this age as one in which “most Americans were insulated from nature by an enormous edifice of human-created technologies and institutions.” America’s “age of abundance,” he contends, is a product of and a contributor to Western modernity, whose four key elements are: reliance on open-ended experimentation rather than received knowledge; reliance on free markets and the trust required for their functioning rather than on command and personal ties; a political system in which government (at least in principle) arises from and answers to the people rather than despotism; and a social life in which individual and group advancement challenges traditional stratification.

In one of the book’s many felicitous phrases, Lindsey asserts, “Despite all of the talk of raging ‘culture wars,’ most Americans are nonbelligerents.” He concludes that most Americans are libertarians, happy to enjoy the economic fruits of the market system and willing to accept, if not embrace, the social diversity that system engenders.

Lindsey acknowledges the existence and importance of the culture wars. Indeed, he states the dilemma of the libertarian majority in an unpromising fashion: “The prevailing ideologies of left and right are mirror images of one another. . . . The . . . left celebrates mass affluence’s diversity and inclusiveness, while lacking due appreciation for the institutional and moral framework that sustains and advances progressive values. The right . . . defends that framework, but does so on the basis of dogmatic beliefs that remain unreconciled to mass affluence’s cultural openness. [Politically, those in the libertarian majority must] choose which illiberal bedfellows they dislike least.”

The disproportionate influence of voices on the left and right militates against the articulation of the liberal position that Lindsey thinks those in the upwardly mobile middle class would favor.

As a result, “the modus vivendi that has emerged . . . is an unspoken and unloved compromise rather than a well-articulated and widely embraced consensus.”
Here the author might have fruitfully incorporated some insights offered by Bryan Caplan in his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter. Caplan’s analysis warns that the problem is not just lack of confidence. Rather, the average voter’s economic sophistication compares to the average flat-earther’s geographic sophistication. This endemic lack of sophistication, coupled with the strength with which statists hold on to their views, suggests that Lindsey’s admirable attempt to show the way to a truly liberal society will convince too few.

The book’s generally excellent review of history suffers from a related pair of weaknesses. His treatment of labor reads like New Deal court history. “Confrontations between capital and labor were frequently bloody,” says Lindsey. Then he cites cases that actually show that the violence was among laborers: “On May 3, 1884, labor trouble . . . sparked a confrontation between locked-out workmen and strikebreakers.” The ingrained notion that workers and capitalists are opponents is an obstacle to a more liberal society, but unfortunately Lindsey gives it some support.

A second point is that much of the advancement by minorities before 1950 is underplayed. Thomas Sowell has shown that economic progress among blacks was substantially greater prior to the Great Society programs aimed at assisting them, but he isn’t mentioned. This early progress strongly backs Lindsey’s thesis that freedom works.

Readers, libertarian or otherwise, will find The Age of Abundance a pleasure to read. Almost every page contains at least one phrase that either amuses or enlightens—sometimes both. Entertaining anecdotes and witty writing pepper the book throughout. On a single page, for example, Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner, Peyton Place, Brigitte Bardot, and “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” appear. Lindsey also weaves together disparate and seemingly unrelated events, such as the “Human Be-In” in Berkeley and the founding of Oral Roberts University in 1967. These and other memorable illustrations add to the considerable enjoyment of this book.

J. Wilson Mixon is Dana Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Berry College.

It is a rare book that treats readers—even those who’ve never taken economics—to a comprehensive understanding of the forces and policies that ultimately determine prosperity and liberty for themselves and future generations. The Big Three in Economics by Mark Skousen accomplishes that, supplying essential historical perspective on the best-known names and evolutionary developments in economics.

This fascinating study focuses on the luminaries that have dominated economic conversations and debates since 1776. Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century Wealth of Nations inquires into and documents the causes of wealth and prosperity. Karl Marx’s nineteenth-century Das Kapital is a treatise on victimization by an economic system rooted in individual property rights and “natural liberty.” It calls for centralization of authority in government that would facilitate redistribution of income and wealth. J. M. Keynes’s twentieth-century General Theory outlines a framework to justify specific policy prescriptions for reestablishing systemic stability and maintaining economic security during business cycles.

Not only do Skousen’s succinct examinations of the “Big Three” clarify the principles of economics for unsophisticated readers, they also furnish insights into and resonate marvelously with 2008′s election-year polemics. The entire book crystallizes basic economic issues and delivers the intellectual tools to differentiate rhetoric from reality. For example, during 2008 alone, we’ve had the spectacle of one presidential candidate labeling the oil industry’s barely average profit margins “egregious,” while the other candidate (along with Congress and various regulatory bureaucracies) fingers so-called “oil speculators” for possible criminal investigations. Thanks to Skousen’s research and dozens of prescient quotations, the curious investigator—layman or Ph.D. economist—can separate hyperbole and scapegoating from objective analysis.

Equally enlightening, Skousen surrounds Smith, Marx, and Keynes with their contemporary and historical disciples, who served to reinforce the message. An excellent example of this “reinforcement” effect, which helped Adam Smith’s economic principles win the day, is the work of Jean-Baptiste Say.

Despite its title, the book isn’t exclusively about Smith, Marx, and Keynes. It describes the influence of David Hume and the French Physiocrats on Adam Smith; the impact of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, and Friedrich Engels on Marx; and the works of Alfred Marshall plus the English marginalist school, which provided the broad shoulders on which Keynes stood.

Skousen is at his best when he describes the lives of the three economists. For example, we learn the personal story of Marx and his life as a writer-agitator-
theorist. At one point, Skousen quotes Marx’s mother who complained: “If only Karl had made capital instead of writing about it!” Several documents from Marx’s pen are so shocking they cannot be reproduced in this review.

By acquainting us with the dichotomy between what Marx envisioned and modeled versus how he behaved, Skousen’s manuscript becomes a true guidebook. Beware hypocrisy, the author seems to say. Scrutinize those who expound elaborate economic theories and then violate them at their earliest convenience. Marx condemned stock-market trading yet indulged fully in the buying and selling of shares. While excoriating the capitalist system, he exploited the accumulated wealth of his in-laws, father, and closest associate.

An important spin-off from this three-century tour of economic thought is the growth of and respect for economics as a science. A particular strength of the book is how Skousen traces the continuity of economic challenges and problem-solving across the centuries. Readers will see how advances in economic thinking made it possible for later economists to resolve questions that befuddled Smith, Marx, and Keynes. Moreover, readers will be surprised by how many of today’s populist political campaign slogans (such as “change” and “race to the bottom”) were common parlance more than 150 years ago.

Of the many moments of delight and edification, I especially enjoyed Skousen’s elegant construction of Milton Friedman’s refutation of Keynesian theory and its so-called “revolution.” Contributions largely from Friedman’s Chicago School disciples and other Nobel laureates conclude the final chapter on a hopeful note. With overwhelming relevance to our nation’s current economic challenges, Skousen recapitulates Adam Smith’s fundamental theme underscoring the prescription for growth and material well-being of nations: “Peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.”

David Littmann is senior economist with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

One of the most amazing things about the many organizations and individuals who designate themselves “civil libertarians” (with the ACLU, naturally, being the most emblematic) is the utter absence of educational liberty from their shared agenda. It’s not even a blip on their screen. Why? Because it’s not explicitly mentioned in the Bill of Rights? These activists have no problem defending as civil liberties such phenomena as sexuality and abortion, neither of which is explicitly enumerated. So why not defend educational liberty with the same commitment given to, say, religious liberty?

There’s an even better question: Why defend religious liberty? No one asks it nowadays because we consider it a settled matter: “It’s in the Constitution!” But that’s not the way it was at the beginning, when people wanted to hear reasons—independently valid principles—that would explain why involvement with religion was not among “the rightful purposes of civil government” (Jefferson). And our Founding Fathers, notably Jefferson and Madison, provided those reasons—a good many. We should never forget what these reasons are, nor fail to consider their implications for (and thus application to) matters other than religion—such as, indeed, education.

First, however, we must consider what the Founders meant by religious “liberty.” The First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .” Religious liberty includes both the freedom and the non-establishment of religion. Thus educational liberty would include not only the right of parents to determine the education of their children, but also the absence of any “public” (government) school system and its apparatus of compulsory attendance and taxation. Or as many describe it: the separation of school and state, on par with the separation of church and state.

Now, with that said . . .

Competition Improves Performance

In his “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” (1777), one of the three achievements (with the Declaration of Independence and the University of Virginia) of which he was most proud, Jefferson argued that by forcing a man to support (via taxation) “this or that teacher” (of religion), he is denied “the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions” to one of his own choosing. This guaranteed funding in turn eliminates the incentive (“rewards”) for such teachers to earn their wages through “earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind.” Furthermore, such government funding constitutes the “bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments,” of these teachers, which tends “to corrupt the principles” of their profession—with the government itself corrupted by its part in this bribery. Here is a critique of state cartelization equally applicable to all teachers—theological, academic, and otherwise.

In his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (1785), written in response to a proposed bill for a tax to fund Christian denominations in Virginia, Madison echoed Jefferson on this point (as he did on many others). He invites us (Point 7) to observe that establishment, “instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy” of religion, has had the opposite effect: “pride and indolence” and “ignorance and servility.” He wryly notes that if one asks people when Christianity “appeared in its greatest lustre,” they will invariably “point to the ages prior to its incorporation with Civil policy.” Yet if one then suggests a return of the church to its status in that earlier epoch, “many of them predict its downfall.” Similarly, while no one could seriously fault the supply and quality of private education in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America,* many today believe that privatization would destroy education for all but the wealthy.

Government Support Not Necessary

In his “Memorial,” Madison noted (Point 6) that Christianity had “both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human [that is, political] laws, but in spite of every opposition from them. . . . Nay, it is a contradiction in terms; for a Religion not invented by human policy, must have pre-existed and been supported, before it was established [socialized] by human policy.”

The state did not invent the church. It did not invent the school. Education, in a myriad of forms, existed before government and often in opposition to it. A recent example of the latter (in addition to private schools) would be parents who, at odds with the look-say, or “whole language,” reading methods used in the socialized schools, purchase the many commercial teach-your-child-phonics programs. Madison also warned that establishment would “foster in those who still reject [Christianity], a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.” We ourselves might wonder why the advocates of “whole language” (or any other pedagogical approach) are afraid “to trust it to its own merits” in a free market of education.

At this point we should probably address the many who from the beginning have been thinking, “But Madison and Jefferson supported public education!” True. However, Madison’s concerns about the future of education proved to be unfounded for a reason that he himself (in a March 19, 1823, letter to Edward Everett) understood in its relation to religion: “[T]here are causes in the human breast, which ensure the perpetuity of religion without the aid of the law.” The same “human breast” that provided its children with churches and bibles, provided them with schoolhouses and primers. The point is, just because the Founders didn’t connect every dot in their political philosophy, doesn’t mean we can’t. Not many of the civil libertarians who fairly worship Thomas “Wall of Separation” Jefferson would care to recall his views on “sodomy.”

The Limits of Limited Government

In The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (1996), Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore write:

··The conviction that religion lay outside the provenance of government rested for Madison, as for Jefferson, on Lockean liberalism. The purpose of the civil state, Madison wrote, was “to protect the property of every sort,” which included “the rights of persons to their external goods” and to the “enjoyment and communication of their opinions.” Opinions and conscience were also sacred forms of individual property, as crucial to one’s sense of self as material possessions were. Government, then, according to Madison, had no more right to invade or regulate “a man’s conscience” than “his castle,” both of which were his “natural and unalienable rights.”

If government is limited to the protection of the rights of each man to his opinions and possessions, then it violates those limits by doing anything else, including the establishing of anything, be it religion, education, or what have you. Jefferson, in his chapter on religion in “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1781), relates this point to the prohibiting of the free exercise of anything that does not violate those rights: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Similarly, “it does me no injury” if my neighbor provides his child with a Hindu education or a purely secular one. In stark contrast, public education, with its compulsory taxation and attendance laws, very much “picks my pocket” and “breaks my leg,” that is, threatens me with coercion.

Just as government is not to suppress the opinions of anyone, so it is not to promote the opinions of anyone. Jefferson’s “Bill” unequivocally declares “that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” If we grant that, then it should make no difference whether those same opinions are propagated by a tax-funded state church or a tax-funded state school.

Equality Before the Law

In Point 4 of the “Memorial,” Madison avers that “the Bill [“Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion”] violates that equality which ought to be the basis of every law . . . by subjecting some to peculiar burdens . . . [and] granting to others peculiar exemptions.” Some parishioners will have their preferred teachers (of religion) recognized, and thus funded, by the government, while others won’t—a perfect analogue to today’s situation in education, where some parents (who in conscience approve what is taught in public schools) have their preferred teachers paid with tax dollars, while others don’t.

Madison commended the Quakers and Mennonites, by no means all wealthy people, for thinking “compulsive support . . . unnecessary and unwarrantable.” Shouldn’t we likewise commend the many parents, hardly all Rockefellers, who reject the educational establishment and assume the responsibility of providing for the instruction of their own children?

In his notes on the debate over religion in the Virginia General Assembly in December 1784, Madison fretted over the many conflicts that would attend an establishment of religion: what school of theology to be adopted (“Is it Trinitarianism, arianism, Socinianism?”), what version of the bible to be used (“Hebrew, Septuagint, or vulgate?—what copy—what translation? What books canonical, what apocryphal?”), what method of interpretation to be employed (“In what light are they to be viewed . . . ?”), what doctrines to be deemed factual (“What sense the true one[?] . . . [W]hat is orthodoxy, what heresy?”).

The parallels to these conflicts in the establishment of education have become part of our latter-day “culture wars.” What school of pedagogy should be adopted by the public schools—classical, progressive, instrumentalist? Which thinkers should be consulted—Pestalozzi, Froebel, Herbart, Montessori, Adler? What methods of discipline are to be employed by teachers? How should reading be taught—phonics or “whole language”? What textbooks should be used? Which historians’ interpretations should be taught as history? What should be taught as science—evolution, creationism, both, or neither? What should be taught in sex education—abstinence, birth control, both, or neither? Should religion be taught about—and if so, how? These are actually but a few of the ever more numerous and more polarizing controversies that different parents—and different special-interest groups—demand be resolved in their favor. Madison understood that establishment would “destroy that moderation and harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion has produced” (“Memorial,” Point 11). Today, it is through laws that “intermeddle” with education that establishment is undermining the “moderation and harmony” of our society.

Why is there an establishment of education? Jefferson (“Notes”) offered insights that can explain why education, like religion, would come under government control: [W]hy subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature. . . . Difference of opinion is advantageous. . . . The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable?

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.

Many contemporary public-school apologists, well aware of and thoroughly embarrassed by the role that public education played in the past to impose conformity (to an ideal of WASP America), boast that now the schools teach “diversity.” But what is a monolithic establishment of education that teaches “diversity” except the counterpart to a monolithic establishment of religion that preaches polytheism? Neither can seriously claim neutrality, and in both cases the only way to truly achieve diversity is through disestablishment.

Madison (in the same notes) harbored no illusions as to who would ultimately decide the innumerable dilemmas created by establishment: “Courts of law to Judge.” Likewise, government officials, from the state level to the Supreme Court, will determine what is to be taught (implicitly as well as explicitly) as truth—in history, morality, science, and so on—in the public schools. In the “Bill,” Jefferson expounded the nature of the injustice involved: “[T]o suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own.”

Interestingly, our civil libertarians have recognized that the validity of this argument applies, not only to religious liberty, but to all intellectual liberty, hence their commitment to “freedom of expression.” Having showered their blessing on the generality of the principle, they have concomitantly doused any exclusion of education.

The Mind Requires Freedom

Jefferson began his “Bill” with the acknowledgment “that the opinions and beliefs of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness.”

And in his December 16, 1786, letter to Madison about the reception given his “Bill” in Europe, he wrote: “In fact it is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests and nobles: and it is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who has had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions.”

A question: What are the objectives of the various ideological groups that are fighting to get their agendas into the public school system if not to “influence”—control—the minds of the young people therein conscripted? If it’s thought control when the government forces religious thought on these students (or anyone else)—something no civil libertarian disputes—it is because it’s thought control when the government forces any kind of thought on them. Let families choose their educational affiliations the way they choose their religious affiliations and then we can say that Americans are fully trusted with the formation of their own opinions.

One popular theory assigns to the public school the role of establishing and imparting valuable truths that might otherwise not be taught (or worse, might be contradicted by what is taught) by the family, the church, and other social institutions. But what will really be the effect of compulsory education on Johnny, who may indeed hold beliefs contrary to the school curriculum? Again, Jefferson (“Notes”) provides an answer:

Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man. It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but will not cure them. Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true [idea], by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. . . . [T]he Newtonian principle of gravitation is now more firmly established, on the basis of reason, than it would be were the government to step in, and to make it an article of necessary faith. Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

Precisely which truths do the defenders of public education imagine can not stand by themselves? As we’ve seen, everyone has his own notion, as will every judge. None of which makes any difference: If people do not believe the theory of evolution when it is verified by physical scientists—or the doctrine of creation when it is preached by gospel ministers—will they believe it when it is recited by civil servants? The imprimatur of the state is not proof of anything, and coercion by its nature, forces a man to submit not to truth (or beauty), but only to itself.

Parents’ Rights Violated

Another reason Jefferson (“Notes”) opposed laws denying religious liberty was their cruel punishments, including: “A father’s right to the custody of his own children being founded in law on his right of guardianship, this being taken away, they may of course be severed from him, and put, by the authority of a court, into more orthodox hands.”

Those who’ve been taught that Jefferson fully envisioned and endorsed our contemporary model of public education will doubtless be surprised to learn that his reason for opposing heresy laws was also his reason for opposing compulsory attendance laws: “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.”

Another consideration in this regard takes us back to the very beginning (Point 1) of the “Memorial”: Madison’s insight “that Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” For many, the education of their children—what should and should not be taught—is the duty that they owe to their Creator. If, as Madison continues, the “Religion then of every man must be left to [his] conviction and conscience,” the education then of every man’s children must also “be left to [his] conviction and conscience.” Observe that the inherent religious aspect of education is confirmed even by the atheist, who also thinks his religious liberty violated when the public schools teach his children ideas that deny his beliefs. Indeed, how could we ever imagine education as a matter to be directed, not by the “reason and conviction” of parents, but by the force and violence of the state?

Madison keenly recognized (Point 9) that “establishment is a departure from that generous policy [of religious liberty], which, offering an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion, promised a lustre to our country. . . . [In contrast to freedom of religion, establishment] is itself a signal of persecution. It degrades from the equal rank of citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the Legislative authority. Distant as it may be, in its present form, from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance.”

By virtue of a number of Supreme Court decisions—namely, Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), and Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972)—Americans have freedom of education: Parents do not have to send their children to public schools. But it is a freedom of education that is chained to an establishment of education, a situation identical to that of the many European nations (such as the United Kingdom and Norway) that have both freedom of religion and an established church. The reasons why Madison opposed establishment of religion are the reasons why we must oppose—and change—establishment of education. Where is the logic in ensuring equal justice by granting freedom of education to all, only then, through establishment, to make a mockery of that equality for “those whose opinions”—in education—“do not bend to those of the Legislative authority”? And if we continue to accept as valid the premises that justify the violation of educational liberty by establishment—“the first step”—will the logic of those premises not lead us inexorably to the violation of educational liberty by the outright abolition of freedom of education?

If freedom of education, like freedom of religion, is to have a future, it will be one without state establishment. Civil libertarians who applauded Sweden’s disestablishment of its long-standing national church should be cheering on the effort to disestablish America’s long-standing public school system.

Encouraging the Violation of Other Rights

Madison (Point 3) grasped that law was a matter of what we would call “first principles”: “[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. . . . The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it. Who does not see that the same authority . . . which can force a citizen [to support one religious establishment], may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?”

One establishment is a precedent for another. If we can have an establishment of education, then why not an establishment of religion? And if we can consider the former compatible with freedom of education, then why not the latter with freedom of religion? Or: If we were consequently to extend government control to all education, then why not to all religion? The bottom line: If the principles above are to be jettisoned from the ship of state when the law centers on education, where will they be found when it comes round to religion . . . or any other liberty?

In Point 15, the final of the “Memorial,” Madison declared that religious liberty “is held by the same tenure with all our other rights. If we recur to its origin, it is equally the gift of nature; if we weigh its importance, it cannot be less dear to us. . . . Either then, we must say, that . . . [the Legislature] may sweep away all our fundamental rights; or, that they are bound to leave this particular right untouched and sacred[.]”

Over the past ten or so years, the ACLU and its fellow travelers have gained a reputation for being “politicized,” for having their civil libertarianism—their commitment to all “our fundamental rights”—take a back seat to the imperatives of various left-of-center ideologies. In this case that means sacrificing the civil liberty of full freedom of education to the welfare-entitlement of a “right to an education,” among other justifications for “free and compulsory” schooling. It’s the fundamental “mixed economy” conflict: freedom versus statism within one system. Recently, however, something happened that put the priorities of these activists to the test. President George W. Bush proposed that “faith-based” (church-affiliated) charities should be eligible to receive federal funding. To a man, they condemned this measure as a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. For many, it was probably the only time in their political lives that they ever opposed a social spending program. Still, the principle was, implicitly yet inexorably, set: When the push of civil liberty comes to the shove of welfarism (or any equivalent), it is the latter that must yield. Anyone who doubts the importance of this as a precedent need only conceive the implications were it reversed.

Perhaps there is one other, final thing to conceive—the implications of the ideas of Benjamin Rush, a contemporary of Jefferson and Madison, who may well be the intellectual founding father of the union of school and state:

··Public education will “convert men into republican machines. This must be done if we expect them to perform their parts properly in the great machine of the government of the state.”

··“Society owes a great deal of its order and happiness to the deficiencies of parental government being supplied by those habits of obedience and subordination which are contracted at schools.”
··“Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.”

··“It is necessary to impose upon [students] the doctrines and discipline of a particular church. Man is naturally an ungovernable animal, and observations on particular societies and countries will teach us that when we add the restraints of ecclesiastical to those of domestic and civil government, we produce in him the highest degree of order and virtue.”

Can anyone doubt the consequences if the premises behind these statements were ever applied to the matter of religion . . . or any other liberty?

*See Sheldon Richman, Separating School and State: How to Liberate America’s Families (Fairfax, Va.: The Future of Freedom Foundation, 1994), pp. 37–39.