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.

The answer to the question “Is freedom a radical idea” is:  no and yes. Let me explain.

Starting with the “no”:  Most children grow up learning the libertarian, or nonaggression, ethic. Parents say: “Don’t hit, don’t take other kids’ stuff without asking, and don’t break your promises.” Nothing radical – in the sense of out of the mainstream — there. It neatly translates into: Respect life, liberty, and property, and honor your contracts.

Most people carry these principles with them into adulthood. They avoid common-law crimes against persons and property, not because they are afraid of the cops but because criminal behavior conflicts with living the life they want to live.

Libertarianism can be seen therefore as merely a plea for the consistent application of these rules to and for everyone. It’s Spencer’s Law of Equal Liberty.

Now let’s move on to the “yes.” In the political realm, freedom has been a radical idea indeed, the exception. There the rules are different. The State — that is, certain special individuals — may “legitimately” do what you and I can’t do. If you or I kill when our lives are not in mortal danger, it is called murder. When the State does it, it is called war, or counterinsurgency, or capital punishment. If you or I, threatening force, demand money from our neighbors for their protection or to do good works, it is called robbery. When the State does it, it’s called taxation. If you or I impress someone into service against his or her will, it’s called slavery. If the State does it, it’s called conscription or national service. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Why these differences? Many reasons have been offered throughout the millennia. The State was said to be the deity’s agent on earth. It was said to embody the general will. And it was said to operate by the consent of the governed.

Regardless of the rationalization, the State, by a process of moral alchemy, or moral laundering, claims to turn bad things into good. By this ideology, rulers have kept the idea of freedom tightly contained, when it is in effect at all.

Freedom Far Removed

Thus throughout history, and with only the rarest of exceptions, freedom has been far removed from the center of political events — even during that ostensibly exceptional period, say, 1776-1901. This is not to say the idea of freedom played no role whatever (the Declaration of Independence was a gleaming embodiment of the idea), but most of the time, it did not play the fundamental role that we tend to believe.

Contrary to popular sentiment, for example, freedom was not the driving force along the road to the Constitution (pdf), which has been fairly called a counterrevolution. We need only remind ourselves that the Constitution came after the Articles of Confederation, which (for all its faults) had deprived the national quasigovernment of both the power to tax and the power to regulate trade. (Can you imagine?) Those omissions, which Madison, Hamilton, and other leading founders regretted so badly, were “corrected” in Philadelphia in 1787. (Albert Jay Nock called it a coup d’état.) The warnings of the prophetic Antifederalists were ignored, and except for Jeffersonian respites now and again, we’ve lived with the predictable consequences ever since. John Taylor of Caroline and others were complaining about big government in the early 1800s!

Well, as historian Merrill Jensen put it, the “founding fathers who wrote the Constitution of 1787 were quite a different set of men from those who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.”

Violations of Freedom

The U.S. government of course sanctioned chattel slavery for Africans until 1865 (with lesser oppressions later), the Indians were brutalized, and the rights of women were not recognized. These things and substantial economic intervention by the states kept freedom from its rightful place. And the period from 1870 to whenever the Progressive Era started? War is the health of the State, Randolph Bourne wisely wrote. That would cover Civil Wars too. Lincoln came to power filled with enthusiasm for the Whig Henry Clay’s American System: internal improvements, protective tariffs, and central banking. Intellectual monopoly (patents and copyrights), business subsidies, and land grants to cronies were cut from the same cloth. Add the war, the income tax (which later expired), the veterans pension program, and you have the makings of one big government. The benefits of a big business-big government relationship were not lost on those with power and influence. (“The tariff is the mother of trusts.”)

Here’s how Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. summed up the touted golden age of freedom in his not-to-be-missed classic, The Decline of American Liberalism (newly reissued):

[I]n the America of the [eighteen] eighties and nineties, doctrines of laissez faire and of the limited state were being twisted and distorted from their original meaning. Businessmen and judges took up the individualism of Jefferson and [Herbert] Spencer and converted it into a rationale for materialist exploitation. Resisting public intervention or government regulation when it confined or restrained special interests, the business community, however, could see no inconsistency in an acceptance of the stream of subsidies and tariffs, of which Henry George and other individualists complained.

It turns out that most business people in that period were like most in any period. If you can gain some shelter from competition through the State, why not? Rent-seekers exist at all times, and rulers happily oblige them. (Jonathan R. T. Hughes’s The Governmental Habit Redux is instructive. See also this perceptive 1984 Freeman article by Edmund Opitz, “The Robber Barons and the Real Gilded Age.”)

Undeniably, material conditions improved for most Americans throughout this time. A degree of economic freedom goes a long way, and entrepreneurship found ways around the powers that be. But in a fully competitive economy, living standards would have risen — but without the distortions of monopoly (as identified by Benjamin Tucker), protection, and subsidies (most egregiously and consequentially in transportation) — and with more opportunity, later on, to make a living independent of any corporate hierarchy. (Yet who would not accept a slower acceleration in living standards as the price for a greater degree of freedom and independence?)

What does this tell us about freedom? It tells us that the good old days still lie ahead.

There was a time when I worried that the dependency and inefficiency caused by government interventions would create a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle that fueled more calls for even greater intervention—a process that would continue until the State suffocated all individualism and initiative. But I no longer believe that such a progression—or, better, retrogression—is inevitable.

Two reasons explain my change of mind. The first is observed reality, and the second is what I (perhaps too vainly) believe to be a better understanding of society, politics, and economics.

Let’s first look at reality. From at least the 1930s—or as scholars such as Arthur Ekirch argued, from a much earlier time—government’s role in the American economy has expanded dramatically. And yet we continue to grow more prosperous. Beyond any doubt, Americans of 2010 are better fed, clothed, housed, informed, educated, medically cared-for, traveled, rested, and entertained than were Americans of 1930—or even of 1980. Despite some tax relief and deregulation since the late 1970s, these improvements in our living standards occurred with government taxing and regulating and redistributing as never before in the United States.

Look also at other countries. Although ordinary people in nations such as France and Sweden aren’t as wealthy as ordinary Americans, they are nevertheless extraordinarily wealthy by historical standards. And they’re getting wealthier despite their governments’ heavy interventions in their economies.

It’s a fact that real and growing prosperity is not necessarily quashed by government intrusion.  This does not mean, of course, that these intrusions do not reduce the level of prosperity and the rate of economic growth. I’ve no doubt that they are harmful—that ordinary men and women would be wealthier and more secure (and freer) were the State to remove its tentacles and tax collectors from the economy.

But these tentacles and tax collectors are not necessarily fatal.

Nor are such interventions the leading edge of totalitarianism. As obnoxious and as intrusive as, say, the IRS and the FDA are, modern America is not remotely comparable to the Soviet Union under Stalin (or even under Gorbachev). Americans are incomparably more free than were the subjects of the Soviet regime.

Some readers of this magazine will dispute my observations of the real world. I report them not to be controversial but merely to be honest.

Assuming that my empirical observations are sound, what explains these facts? Why haven’t 80 years of a national government unmoored from constitutional restraints—and with an unending itch to poke, prod, and tax nearly every aspect of Americans’ lives—resulted in economic stagnation and Big Brother of the kind that haunts the characters in George Orwell’s great novel 1984?

I believe that the answer is the power of freedom.

Freedom is a beautiful flower with more robustness than crabgrass. Freedom is not delicate or easily uprooted. Like crabgrass, freedom is not indestructible; it can be killed. But freedom is not a frail institution that collapses and dies the moment it is attacked by some element foreign to its nature. If it were, we all would long ago have been well and truly enslaved.

The human spirit seizes opportunities to flourish even with less-than-maximum scope; it naturally resists being confined to the arbitrary will of others. We do not all fall in line behind the commissar or Congress’s commands simply because we’re ordered to do so. (How many Americans really care if the busboy at a restaurant is an “illegal” alien?) And even when we abide by the letter of legislation, we are wonderfully crafty at violating its spirit if that legislation is felt to be inappropriate.

So, too, with the free market. It is perhaps the most remarkably vigorous of all human institutions. Heavily taxed and loaded with arbitrary regulations, the market keeps on keeping on. Entrepreneurs creatively find ways around government intrusions or they discover techniques for reducing the intrusions’ ill effects.

Everyone who understands the logic of markets knows that, say, the unexpected destruction of a factory by an earthquake will barely slow the market’s relentless push to improve living standards. We understand that markets are remarkably resilient at dealing with—and reducing the bad effects of—natural obstacles such as mountains that separate suppliers from customers, or weather disasters that destroy existing inventories and supply lines.

Although we’d be even wealthier if these obstacles and weather disasters never materialized, their existence does not condemn us to everlasting poverty. Entrepreneurs—given sufficient freedom—are guided by prices and profits to overcome these obstacles. Likewise, entrepreneurs—given sufficient freedom—are guided by prices and profits to overcome government-erected obstacles.

The vital question here is, how much freedom is sufficient? I have no answer, except to say, ”Freedom is sufficient for economic growth even when it is far less than we should have and are capable of having.”

Many libertarians will read this column and wince, thinking I’m discounting the importance of freedom. But they would be mistaken.  In fact, the theme of this column is to celebrate the great and creative power of freedom. To point out that freedom can be hobbled and hamstrung by a predatory State and nevertheless continue to shower blessings on ordinary men and women is to praise freedom—to applaud it loudly and lovingly.

Additionally, those persons who recognize the resilience and vigor of freedom and free markets gain even greater credibility when insisting that the role of the State should be reduced. If it were true that the slightest burden government placed on freedom led inexorably to tyranny and poverty, then anyone who champions freedom might be thought to do so for purely pragmatic reasons. But the champion of freedom who recognizes that the economy might still be reasonably dynamic in the face of government regulations, and who doubts that such regulations will lead to his or her being tyrannized, is an even more believable spokesperson for freedom, for that person can speak more from principle than from narrow pragmatism.

He or she can say, ”Look, even though eliminating this tax or repealing that regulation will not mean the difference between poverty and plenty, I still believe that the tax should be eliminated or the regulation repealed. The reason is that they are immoral. There’s a practical case for reducing government’s role, but even when practical considerations do not loom large, ethical considerations do. Even though this tax or that regulation won’t condemn us to a material hell, they nevertheless violate human rights that ought never be violated.”

Careless language (or, even worse, verbal legerdemain) often turns words or phrases with positive connotations into Trojan horses that sneak mistaken, vague, or confusing notions into our thought processes.

A familiar example is the word “fair.” By definition, “fair” denotes something desirable. So by attaching the word to any noun or verb, a speaker anoints the thing as something good. The speaker is subtly instructing the listener simply to accept without question that the thing described by the word is good. A careless listener, then, is at high risk of accepting a conclusion that, with careful thought or without having heard the word “fair,” he might not accept.

Consider the frequently heard phrase “fair wage.” If Sen. Jones explains his support for raising the legislated minimum wage, he’s sure to insist that his goal is for low-skilled workers to receive a “fair wage.” Scholars seeking to explain the consequences of minimum-wage legislation objectively then have to overcome the emotional bias that the word “fair” smuggles into the conversation.

Another example is the phrase “secure our borders.” Opponents of open immigration frequently allege that illegal immigrants are proof that America’s borders aren’t “secure” and that those of us who wish to abolish numerical limits on immigration are insensitive to the need for government to “secure our borders.”

Such allegations, however, sneak in so many implicit presumptions that rational discussion becomes quite difficult.

The very phrase “insecure borders” conjures an image of government failing at its most fundamental responsibility—namely, protecting citizens from invading marauders. People see in their minds’ eyes an America increasingly at risk of being conquered by foreigners, leaving Americans at the mercy of invading rapists, plunderers, and murderers.

Immigrants, however, aren’t invaders, much less warriors in a conquering army.

Reasonable people can disagree over what kinds of national-security protections should exist on America’s borders and what sorts of screening of would-be immigrants should be done to reduce the risks of terrorist attacks on American soil. But it is not reasonable to imply that immigration is chiefly, or even mostly, an issue of national security. Unfortunately, such an unreasonable implication is precisely what people who frame immigration as a matter of border security sneak into the discussion.

For perspective, ask if America’s borders were insecure until 1921 when, with the Emergency Quota Act, Uncle Sam first began seriously to restrict the number of immigrants allowed into the United States. Were Americans, until just 90 years ago, living in peril of their lives and livelihoods because U.S. borders were “insecure”?

Or ask this question: Does the fact that Uncle Sam imposes no numerical limits on foreign visitors to the United States mean that American borders are insecure? Short of the U.S. government’s imposing draconian restrictions (to be enforced with draconian measures) on visitors—say, admitting only 1,000 visitors annually, each of whom must first get a high-security clearance from the State Department—it’s almost impossible to see how numerical restrictions on foreign visitors would make America’s borders more secure. Therefore, anyone who would now seriously suggest that the lack of numerical restrictions on foreign visitors to America is evidence that U.S. borders are “insecure” or “broken” would justifiably be ridiculed.

Keep these points in mind when you encounter debates over immigration policy.

My proposal is to return to the policies under which anyone who wanted to immigrate to America could do so as long as he or she had no serious communicable disease and was not a terrorist.

That policy was much like the one we have today for foreign visitors to the United States: Anyone may visit America as long as he or she likely poses no serious threat to Americans. So, too, before 1882 anyone could immigrate to America as long as he or she posed no serious threat to Americans. (This policy actually continued largely unchanged until 1921, with the horrid exception of would-be immigrants from China. Starting in 1882 Uncle Sam imposed severe restrictions on Chinese people’s ability to immigrate into America.)

In fact, the security of American borders—if by this phrase we mean genuinely decreased risks to Americans’ persons and property—would almost certainly rise with open borders.

Points of immigrants’ entry, such as Ellis Island, would be reestablished. All peaceful persons immigrating to America would flow in through these points, be checked for communicable diseases and for ties to terrorist organizations, and, if cleared on both fronts, enter the United States. Uncle Sam would no longer spend hundreds of millions of dollars policing the borders, catching “illegal” immigrants, deporting them back to Mexico, and monitoring employers who might have hired “illegal” immigrants. Those resources could be used instead to seek out and to apprehend terrorists.

Because all legitimate steps to secure the borders would aim only at reducing Americans’ risk of being violated in their persons and property, government’s policing efforts would—with the open-borders regime I recommend—focus on this goal. Such worthy efforts would not get mixed in with, or be confused with, efforts to prevent peaceful people from coming to America and finding gainful employment here.

With government enforcement efforts concentrated on securing us from criminal violence and theft, we would be more secure than we are now with so many resources and so much manpower instead concentrated on “protecting” us from people whose only crime is to seek out better economic opportunities.

The first, Race & Liberty in America, is an anthology edited by Jonathan Bean, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University. It includes dozens of selections, from 1776 to today, arguing eloquently for colorblind equality before the law and against slavery, Jim Crow, and racial preferences (affirmative action). Fittingly, Bean also includes much from the immigration context. (Bean earlier authored another important book in this area, Big Government and Affirmative Action: The Scandalous History of the Small Business Administration.)

In his introduction, “Civil Rights and Classical Liberalism,” Bean notes that, given the domination today of “the politically correct view that left-wing liberals or radicals completely dominated the struggle for racial freedom,” it is no surprise that “classical liberals are the invisible men and women of the long civil rights movement.” Bean illuminates their role in the fight against government discrimination.

Some of the names and selections in the book are unsurprising. There are several pieces by Frederick Douglass, for example, and the “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. But there are also some surprises, like the excerpts from Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Most of the pieces pertain to the oppression of blacks, but there are several excellent ones regarding government discrimination against Asians, especially the Chinese. The point is unmistakable: Those who hold a principled belief in liberty oppose all government oppression.

Especially useful are the selections Bean includes that show how the business community, so often accused of being in favor of racial discrimination, often opposed it. A series of letters regarding imposed segregation in trolley cars, for example, proved to be an eye-opener.

Bean balances readable and relatively short excerpts with intelligent commentary in the introductions. The big message of the book is that many of our great thinkers shared the vision that equality and progress will result from freedom, not the heavy and coercive hand of the State.

That’s also the thrust of Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America by Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey state judge and frequent commentator on the Fox News Channel. Napolitano claims in his introduction, “The real culprit throughout our racial history has been the government,” and his book accordingly documents and condemns a variety of bad government policies and actions from the colonial era to today.

Freeman readers will not be surprised to hear that governments, rather than the private sector, have been the most systematic and powerful purveyors of racism and discrimination. (This theme is both explicit and implicit in Bean’s book as well.) Conversely, slavery, Jim Crow regulations, and our current mania for racial preferences would have been much more difficult or impossible under a system that limited government power to its proper defensive functions and maximized individual freedom.

In other ways, too, there is considerable overlap in the two books. Both Napolitano and Bean abhor racial discrimination as not only unconstitutional but deeply immoral as well.

Despite the fact that I’m sympathetic to Napolitano’s instincts, I cannot recommend his book for a number of reasons. He believes courts should ignore the Constitution if it is inconsistent with the judge’s view of what natural law requires, which is an endorsement of judicial activism. His historical arguments conflate the failure of federal government intervention with active discrimination. And sometimes Napolitano tries to get by with assertion where proof is called for.

So the cost-conscious libertarian (is there any other kind?) should purchase Bean’s book rather than Napolitano’s. To be fair, no matter how persuasive Napolitano’s opinions were, they would not be as valuable as the treasury of original sources that Bean has compiled. Napolitano himself—as well as Shelby Steele, Richard Epstein, Linda Chavez, Stephan Thernstrom, and Ward Connerly, among many others—favorably blurbs Bean’s book, calling it “a history buff’s dream,” and he’s right.

Friedman’s starting point is the idea that when people experience rising incomes and economic improvement, they tend to be both more generous and more benevolent toward their fellow men. On the other hand, when they view their present and future economic prospects as either stagnant or regressive, they tend to be stingier and less sensitive to others.

Friedman then translates this into a policy prescription for government to foster increasing economic growth, without which, he contends, many in society will be less open to “tolerance,” “fairness,” and “democracy.” To demonstrate this, he takes the reader through a lengthy, and often disjointed and meandering, account of American and European history during the last 300 years.

Long periods of sustained economic growth, Friedman argues, provide people with a psychology of economic security and confidence that makes them less fearful that continuing social change may undermine their material status. In other words, high economic growth makes people view change as a “positive-sum” game in which everyone can be better off at the same time. Low or no economic growth makes people feel that change is a “zero-sum” game in which others must be getting ahead at their or somebody else’s expense. Low growth, therefore, creates a culture and politics of mean-spiritedness.

He tries to show that it has been during periods of sustained economic growth that people have been less racist and sexist, more willing to pay taxes for the social “safety-nets” of the welfare state, and supportive of “activist” government steering society toward desirable “social ends.” During periods of prolonged slow growth, people become “anti-government,” wanting to hold on to what they have and not “share” with those who are less well off.

To prove this Friedman must perform a variety of interesting intellectual contortions. For instance, the expansion of government during FDR’s New Deal in the “bad times” of the 1930s becomes, supposedly, the “exception” that proves the rule. He also contends that people turned against Keynesian economics in the 1970s because they felt worse off during the decade’s inflation. The unstated presumption, therefore, is that Milton Friedman must not have received sufficient raises from the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. Why else would he have been so “negative” about society that he devised the monetarist case against discretionary macroeconomic policy?

And we have an internationally known Harvard economist bemoan the fact that during the “uncaring” and clearly “cruel” years of the Reagan administration, the national minimum wage was not increased. One can only conclude that the laws of supply and demand, and the harm from pricing people out of the market by mandating a wage above where the market would have set it, are fundamental truths that have been forgotten by at least some of the members of the Harvard economics department.

Benjamin Friedman rationalizes government intervention to foster continuing economic growth by arguing that such growth is a “public good” that would be “undersupplied” if left to private decision-making. Since growth generates the morally desirable side effects of “tolerance,”“fairness,” and “democracy,” for which there are no market prices, private individuals may choose to save, invest, and educate at levels below some rate of “optimal” economic growth. (The mantra of “tolerance,” “fairness” and “democracy,” which is repeated throughout the book, is merely Friedman’s Orwellian “newspeak” for all the welfare-state policies he likes.)

Friedman admits that government deficits are “bad” because they divert some of society’s resources away from future-oriented private-sector investment. But rather than cut spending so the government would borrow less, he wants those recent tax cuts for “the rich” reversed to pay for increased federal largess. The supply-side economists’ arguments over the last 30 years that raising marginal tax rates reduces the incentives for work, saving, and investment seem not to have penetrated the walls of Friedman’s office at Harvard.

And what exactly does he want government to do? He wants it to foster more college education through student loans and tuition subsidies; and private employers should be induced through tax-breaks to offer more on-the-job training. He does concede that the quality of public education is less than desirable and could be improved through competition. But he wants any “school choice” to be limited to government-run schools. Better-educated and -trained young people, you see, will generate the economic growth in coming years that will provide the wealth to support the continuation of Social Security and government health care.

Through all the hundreds of pages in Friedman’s book, there is one word that rarely appears: liberty. The only freedom that matters to him is that old New Deal notion of “freedom from want.”

That individuals should be free to retain the income they have honestly earned in the marketplace and to make their own choices concerning work, saving, and investment never even enters the discussion as a serious option. That individuals should have the freedom to decide for themselves the degree of benevolence and charity they wish to undertake is treated as something supplemental to government’s responsibility. Nor does Friedman even conceive of the possibility that education can and should be left to the market.

Friedman’s mindset is typical of the social engineer who views the members of society as puppets to be manipulated through government “pro-growth” policies in order to generate the wealth needed to fund the welfare state and to induce the right psychology so they will be willing and happy to be taxed to pay for it.

At a deeper level, therefore, Friedman operates on the basis of an almost crude “materialist” philosophy of history. How individuals think about freedom, society, and the nature and role of government is assumed to depend almost completely on their perception of whether their standard of living is rising, falling, or stagnant. Change the rate of economic growth, and you modify people’s beliefs and attitudes about the size and function of government. Get the economy moving along a faster growth path, and “the people” will want and support big government, like some version of Pavlov’s dog under the right stimulus.

Maybe if we could get Harvard University to cut back on Benjamin Friedman’s pay raises he would become disgruntled enough to write a new book, this time in defense of less government and more individual liberty!

That opponents of big government would support immigration control is surprising on its face.  Enforcing such laws requires governments, federal or state, to exercise powers that small-government advocates should reject.  It’s not that immigration law requires enormous expenditures, or that it dramatically increases the size of government.  But it does increase the scope of government power.

This distinction between scale and scope is made by Robert Higgs in his masterful Crisis and Leviathan.  The real damage to freedom comes not necessarily from government growing bigger but rather from Big Government.  The former is about scale, the latter about scope.  So much of the Tea Party talk seems to be about scale:  how much government spends, taxes, and borrows.  Little of it has been about scope:  the powers that government has to interfere with the rights of individuals.

The Arizona law will cost little and will not necessarily require more police, but it gives a great deal more power to the existing government.  The same is true of building border fences or stricter labor regulations.  Their direct expenses are not that large (compared to bailouts and stimuli anyway!), and they often get passed on to firms and consumers.  But they expand State power in way that should concern those who oppose big government.

Anti-immigration laws restrict the freedom of at least two groups.  One is American employers who want to hire immigrant workers.  Laws that restrict immigration to officially approved people or that punish firms for hiring those who aren’t approved limit the economic freedom of employers.   (By doing so, they also limit cost-cutting competition by firms, which lowers prices for American consumers.)  Tea Partiers who wave Gadsen flags might consider the ways in which immigration law treads on the freedom of their friends and neighbors who are employers.  If one really supports free enterprise, one should support the right of voluntary contract among any and all consenting adults, regardless of which side of an arbitrary political border they were born or live.

Immigrants’ Rights

Too often forgotten in these debates are the rights of immigrants.  Libertarians believe in human rights, not just citizens’ rights or Americans’ rights.  People everywhere have, or should have, the right to travel where they wish and to contract for work with whomever they wish.  On what grounds do those who profess a belief in freedom prohibit them from doing so?  (To anticipate a possible objection:  Illegal immigrants are not more likely to commit crimes, and the U.S. crime rate has fallen since the 1987 amnesty program.)  People who break the law to look for work in America are mostly trying to make a better life for themselves and their families.  Why risk life and limb to come here to go on welfare when they can do the same thing at home without risk?  And by what right do we prevent them from trying to make better lives for themselves, just as we would wish for American citizens?  The reverence with which supposed opponents of big government treat the artificial lines governments draw is yet another puzzle.

Enforcing immigration laws, including the new Arizona law, often requires encroaching on constitutional rights.  Tea Partiers claim devotion to the Constitution, but those who support the Arizona law apparently missed the Fourth Amendment’s protection of privacy.  Again, asking people for proof of citizenship is not going to add anything noticeable to the Arizona state budget, or the federal deficit if done on a national scale, but it does expand the scope of government power in a way that turns it from just being “big” to being “Big.”

Tea Partiers need to decide just what they are worried about.  Is their opposition to big government coming from a principled objection to the larger scope of government power at all levels to interfere with the freedoms of all people (that is, Big Government), or are they just upset about the growth in federal giveaways that don’t benefit them?

Pay attention and you’ll see the ways we’re not free. Some of these predate the 1950s. If you have school-aged children, you can’t legally decide not to send them to school. You can’t, for example, have your 17-year-old kids work in your business instead of attending school. At best, you can home-school them, and even that option is limited in some states. Buying liquor is legal only from a licensed dealer, and in many states, licenses are often impossible to get. Forget about using marijuana or cocaine. If you want to get certain medicines, you must first get a doctor’s permission, even if all he does is listen to you ask him to prescribe it.

But many of life’s daily restrictions on freedom are much more recent. If you go to a restaurant, chances are that it’s one in which a state or local government has banned smoking. In my city of Pacific Grove, California, people can’t buy food at a Taco Bell or a Burger King because the city council decided a few years ago not to let those chains in. The government of New York City banned certain kinds of fats in meals, thus reducing the freedom of producers and consumers who want to produce or consume those fats. If you want to travel by air, the government insists that you get permission from a TSA employee, and to get that permission you must submit to a body search and, maybe soon, an X-ray so that a government employee can see your naked body. And don’t dare make fun of that government employee or you might go to jail.

Significant Gains in Freedom

It’s true that over the last 40 years there also have been major increases in freedom, economic and otherwise. Consider the draft. Americans of my generation, if they were unlucky enough to be male and healthy, knew that when they turned 18, the U.S. government could forcibly put them in the military. During the Vietnam war, in which more than 58,000 Americans were killed, that was a scary prospect. Another major increase in freedom was for black and white people who wished to marry. In many states anti-miscegenation laws were on the books as late as the 1960s.

On the issue of race another major increase in freedom came in the 1960s, when businesses in the southern United States were no longer forced to discriminate against potential customers who were black. This was a major increase in freedom both for businesses and for blacks, who had been prevented from engaging in mutually beneficial exchange. Unfortunately, the U.S. government did not just overturn the laws that had required discrimination but went further and prohibited discrimination on racial grounds. So the discrimination that had been required by law was now prohibited by law. Simple freedom of association was never tried.

There have been other increases in freedom, as well. Until the early 1970s, the telephone company had a monopoly on long-distance service and used that monopoly to set high prices. By the late 1980s much of that government-granted monopoly power had disappeared. Also, a federal agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) regulated the airline industry, requiring an airline that wanted to fly between two cities to get permission to do so. Permission was often refused. The CAB also required airlines to file their fares before changing them, and competing airlines could protest these fares and often did so if they were “too low.” Starting in 1978 and finishing in 1984, the federal government ended these restrictions. Although the Federal Aviation Administration still regulates safety, the CAB was eliminated on December 31, 1984. Airlines have much more freedom to enter markets and cut prices, with travelers being the major beneficiaries. There was similar deregulation in surface transportation around the same time.

Recent Losses

But notice that most of the gain in freedom started in the late 1960s and concluded by the mid-1980s. Since then, most of the changes have been toward less freedom. Think of the increasing bureaucratization of life, most of which is due to government. If I want to cut off a tree branch that is more than four inches in diameter–even in my own yard–I must get the city government’s permission and pay for that permission. In the city of Monterey, California, someone who wants to install a new dishwasher must get government permission to do so. I’m sure that few people bother because the requirement is so hard to enforce, but it’s a requirement. Under a law passed in 2008 the Consumer Product Safety Commission warned that children’s books published before 1985 are not safe and cannot be sold unless the seller does expensive testing to make sure they don’t contain lead. This is so even though, as Walter Olson has written, “no one seems to have been able to produce a single instance in which an American child has been made ill by the lead in old book illustrations.”

Credentialism is also reducing our freedom, and one interesting recent illustration was in President Obama’s speech to U.S. schools at the start of the 2009-10 school year. What received the publicity at the time was the controversy about whether it was proper for a U.S. president to address the students and for the U.S. Department of Education to put together exercises for the teachers to conduct after the speech on how the students could help Obama achieve his goals. What went unnoted was Obama’s statement that students should finish high school because otherwise they will not be able to pursue the careers of their choice. Obama gave seven examples of such careers: lawyer, doctor, nurse, teacher, architect, police officer, and military. Why is that remarkable? The reason people need a high school diploma to enter the first five of those seven occupations is that governments require them to. And the reason people need a diploma to be police officers or to advance in the military is not only that the employer requires it but that in both cases, the employer is the government. You don’t need a high-school diploma to write software because the government hasn’t gotten around to regulating that occupation–yet.

Let’s put the truth back in the expression “It’s a free country.”

It’s an important question that always produces revealing answers and sometimes some fascinating stories. Liberty, keep in mind, is not automatic or guaranteed. Few people who have lived have actually possessed it; most have been serfs, slaves, or “subjects” of one sort or another. It’s not exactly a message that rolls off the tongues of most university professors, government school teachers, or media personalities these days. It takes a lot of work to get the message out. Like the seeds in the New Testament parable about the sower, ideas don’t always fall on fertile ground.

I’ve heard plenty of answers over the years: parents, a book, instinct, an article, a friend. And yes, on occasion, even a teacher or a professor. Maybe I’m unusual (I’ve been accused of much worse!) but for me it was a movie. Here’s my story.

My family never showed much interest in politics or philosophy. I don’t know of anybody on either my mother’s side (English and German) or my father’s side (Scot-Irish) who ran for office, wrote a book, or raised a public fuss of any kind. As far as I know, going back more than a century, my relatives were mostly farmers and small shopkeepers who worked hard, kept quiet, and minded their own business. The only time I can recall my dad making a political statement during my childhood was when the school principal called to tell him he couldn’t take me out of school for a week to visit relatives in Florida. He told the principal, “He’s my son, not yours, and he’s going to Florida. Don’t call here again!” Click.

In the summer of 1965, as I was nearing my 12th birthday, my mother announced one day that she was taking my younger sister and me to a theater in Pittsburgh, 40 miles from our home, to see a new film called The Sound of Music. I knew nothing of it other than that a lot of singing was involved. To my mind, that was a good enough reason to stay home. I went reluctantly—and was enthralled. The music and the scenery were memorable, but it was the plot and message that changed my life. I think it must have been the first time I really had to think about the fact that the freedom I took for granted was not the norm in the world.

The movie quickly became the box office king of 1965. An American movie aimed primarily at an American audience, it loosely told the story of the von Trapps of Austria and how the family escaped Hitler’s grasp. The beauty of the Alpine mountains and the village of Salzburg spurred a pilgrimage of American tourists to Austria that continues to this day. Todd S. Purdum of the New York Times refers to the film as “the last picture show of its kind, a triumph of craftsmanship and the apogee of the studio system that produced the kind of entertainment that dominated mid-20th-century mass culture.”

For me, The Sound of Music was a rude awakening. This wasn’t a school telling me that I couldn’t take a vacation. This was a foreign regime absorbing a peaceful, neighboring country and a father facing orders to abandon his family and serve in its military. Something sparked inside me, and it has stayed lit ever since. I wanted to know more about the history of that period, and I began reading everything I could get my hands on, including William L. Shirer’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Stories of people yearning for freedom and going to great lengths to secure it captivated me. Socialism, communism, fascism, and all the collectivist isms became anathema. They reduced to A pushing B around because A thinks he’s got a good idea.

Then came the “Prague Spring” of early 1968. It wasn’t Austria, but it was right next door. The news of the stirrings of liberty in communist Czechoslovakia dominated the newspapers and television. I cheered as the Czechs boldly rattled their Soviet cage. When Moscow crushed Czech liberties with troops and tanks, I was outraged and eager to say so. Within days, a blurb in the local newspaper mentioned that an organization called Young Americans for Freedom would be holding a rally in Mellon Square in downtown Pittsburgh to protest the invasion. I bought my first bus ticket. We burned a Soviet flag and carried placards calling for the liberation of Czechoslovakia.

In those days, YAF provided its new recruits with a wealth of books, magazines, and articles—most notably for me, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Henry Grady Weaver’s The Mainspring of Human Progress, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, and a subscription to The Freeman. The message was simple: If you want to be an effective anticommunist, you had better know something about philosophy and economics.

Reading all that material taught me some critically important things:

• Ideas rule the world. Tyranny rests on bad ideas; freedom depends on good ones, such as personal responsibility and limited government.

• Freedom is never automatic. You have to work at it, endure setbacks and assaults, and resist the temptation to let somebody else fight freedom’s battles for you.

• Government unchecked is freedom’s greatest enemy. Expecting too much from government and too little from ourselves is the surest path to tyranny, even though the government’s promises of welfare and security may sound attractive.

Those ideas, and many of their corollaries, led me to pursue an economics degree at a place that teaches the values of liberty: Grove City College in Pennsylvania. From there I went on to be a teacher myself, first at Northwood University and then as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Liberty has been a common theme of my political thought through all those years.

If my mother had not insisted on making the trek to Pittsburgh to see The Sound of Music, maybe I would have become a promoter of freedom by some other route. But in hindsight, I have my doubts. It seems more likely that I’d be a photographer or a veterinarian today. Those are respectable and fulfilling professions, to be sure, but they’re not what I chose.

So I owe much of my last 40 years to a couple of hours in front of the big screen. Some say The Sound of Music was corny, but for me it was an epiphany. It’s my favorite film, and it always will be.

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall effectively ceased to exist. Remember the sequence: Communist Hungary started letting people pass into Austria and to freedom. Captives of the Soviet bloc left in droves. East Germans, too—thousands of them. The Hungarian government tried to stanch the flow, but the dam had been breached. With one dictator having resigned, a panicky East German regime began making concessions, hoping to mollify the people. They would not be placated. Thousands—and in one case, a million—took to the streets, shouting, “We want out!” Things were getting out of hand. So, on November 9, the government fumblingly announced it would lift travel restrictions to West Berlin and West Germany. It was all over but the demolition.I don’t know why it seems so much longer ago that we saw those inspiring celebrations, when East Berliners, joined by their countrymen from the western side, danced on the wall while others whacked at it with axes and sledge hammers. The crowds, the singing, the joyful cries of “Freedom!”, the sections of wall toppling—I remember watching the scenes on television with my then-six-year-old, Jennifer. If you can watch them on YouTube today without tearing up, I don’t know what to say.It’s hard to believe that today’s 19-year-olds were born into a world without a Berlin Wall and 17-year-olds were born into a world without the Soviet Union. When my generation was growing up, the Iron Curtain and USSR seemed like permanent fixtures of life.Yes, we really did have air-raid drills in school. (Looking back, I can see they were insidious, ridiculous propaganda stunts.) Some of us wished, at most, for what was called peaceful coexistence. Others thought “we” could roll “them” back. War—which a few, amazingly, actually welcomed—would have been catastrophic beyond imagination. We dared not hope for a bloodless dissolution of totalitarianism. Yet that, more or less, is what we got.Those of us who believe in full individual liberty have been dismayed to learn that revulsion with dictatorship does not equate to a wholehearted embrace of freedom. None of the former Soviet-bloc countries has thoroughly foresworn state-capitalist welfarism, and some have traveled only a short distance along the road from serfdom. Central planning is dead as an ideal, but the regulatory state lives, as does what Thomas Szasz calls the Therapeutic State. This is disappointing, but it would be difficult for a resident of the United States to criticize others for failing to resist overbearing government. The longing for security, combined with the absurd notion that only ignorant and force-wielding bureaucrats can provide it, dies hard.The fall of the Iron Curtain has been heralded as the failure of socialism, but this is a more complicated matter. Strictly speaking, there has been much less socialism in the world than it might appear since Lenin gave it up for the New Economic Policy in 1921. Remember, Marx envisioned the abolition of the market, including money and exchange. The economy was to be centrally planned—literally. But when the Bolsheviks tried it, they ended up, as Trotsky said, “staring into the abyss.” Lenin was savvy enough to back away from oblivion and reintroduce aspects of the market, including a gold ruble. What followed for the next seven decades was a heavily bureaucratized, de facto quasi-market economy, existing in a world of prices in which The Plan was adjusted ex post to reflect reality and black-market “corruption” kept things going. Ludwig von Mises could not have been surprised.Such an economy was doomed to fail, but perhaps with a little less intervention and a dollop of political freedom, it might have muddled through a bit longer. The market can put up with a lot of harassment, which means people can resourcefully get around a lot of government obstacles when they want to. Look at the U.S. economy.