The battle for the preservation and advancement of liberty is a battle not against personalities but against opposing ideas. The French author Victor Hugo declared that “One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.” This is often rendered as, “More powerful than armies is an idea whose time has come.”

In the past ideas have had earthshaking consequences. They have determined the course of history.

The system of feudalism existed for a thousand years in large part because scholars, teachers, intellectuals, educators, clergymen, and politicians propagated feudalistic ideas. The notion “once a serf, always a serf” kept millions of people from ever questioning their station in life.

Under mercantilism, the widely accepted concept that the world’s wealth is fixed prompted men to take what they wanted from others in a long series of bloody wars.

The publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776 is a landmark in the history of the power of ideas. As Smith’s message of free trade spread, political barriers to peaceful cooperation collapsed, and virtually the whole world decided to try freedom for a change.

Marx and the Marxists would have us believe that socialism is inevitable, that it will embrace the world as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. As long as men have free will (the power to choose right from wrong), however, nothing that involves this human volition can ever be inevitable! If socialism comes it will come because men choose to embrace its principles.

Socialism is an age-old failure, yet the socialist idea constitutes the chief threat to liberty today. As I see it, socialism can be broken into five ideas.

1. The Pass-a-Law Syndrome. Passing laws has become a national pastime. Business in trouble? Pass a law to give it public subsidies or restrict its freedom of action. Poverty? Pass a law to abolish it. Perhaps America needs a law against passing more laws.

Almost invariably a new law means: a) more taxes to finance its administration; b) additional government officials to regulate some heretofore unregulated aspect of life; and c) new penalties for violating the law. In brief, more laws mean more regimentation, more coercion. Let there be no doubt about what the word coercion means: force, plunder, compulsion, restraint. Synonyms for the verb form of the word are even more instructive: impel, exact, subject, conscript, extort, wring, pry, twist, dragoon, bludgeon, and squeeze.

When government begins to intervene in the free economy, bureaucrats and politicians spend most of their time undoing their own handiwork. To repair the damage of Provision A, they pass Provision B. Then they find that to repair Provision B, they need Provision C, and to undo C, they need D, and so on until the alphabet and our freedoms are exhausted.

The Pass-a-Law Syndrome is evidence of a misplaced faith in the political process, a reliance on force, which is anathema to a free society.

2. The Get-Something-from-Government Fantasy. Government by definition has nothing to distribute except what it first takes from people. Taxes are not donations.

In the welfare state this basic fact gets lost in the rush for special favors and giveaways. People speak of “government money” as if it were truly free.

One who is thinking of accepting something from government that he could not acquire voluntarily should ask, “From whose pocket is it coming? Am I being robbed to pay for this benefit or is government robbing someone else on my behalf?” Frequently the answer will be both.

The end result of this “fantasy” is that everyone in society has his hands in someone else’s pockets.

Everyone Else’s Problem

3. The Pass-the-Buck Psychosis. Recently a welfare recipient wrote her welfare office and demanded, “This is my sixth child. What are you going to do about it?”

An individual is victim to the Pass-the-Buck Psychosis when he abandons himself as the solver of his problems. He might say, “My problems are really not mine at all. They are society’s, and if society doesn’t solve them and solve them quickly, there’s going to be trouble!”

Socialism thrives on the shirking of responsibility. When men lose their spirit of independence and initiative, their confidence in themselves, they become clay in the hands of tyrants and despots.

4. The Know-It-All Affliction. Leonard Read, in The Free Market and Its Enemy, identified “know-it-allness” as a central feature of the socialist idea. The know-it-all is a meddler in the affairs of others. His attitude can be expressed in this way: “I know what’s best for you, but I’m not content to merely convince you of my rightness; I’d rather force you to adopt my ways.” The know-it-all evinces arrogance and a lack of tolerance for the great diversity among people.

In government the know-it-all refrain sounds like this: “If I didn’t think of it, then it can’t be done, and since it can’t be done, we must prevent anyone from trying.” A group of West Coast businessmen once ran into this snag when their request to operate barge service between the Pacific Northwest and Southern California was denied by the (now-defunct) Interstate Commerce Commission because the agency felt the group could not operate such a service profitably.

The miracle of the market is that when individuals are free to try, they can and do accomplish great things. Read’s well-known admonition that there should be “no man-concocted restraints against the release of creative energy” is a powerful rejection of the Know-It-All Affliction.

5. The Envy Obsession. Coveting the wealth and income of others has given rise to a sizable chunk of today’s socialist legislation. Envy is the fuel that runs the engine of redistribution. Surely, the many soak-the-rich schemes are rooted in envy and covetousness.

What happens when people are obsessed with envy? They blame those who are better off than themselves for their troubles. Society is fractured into classes and faction preys on faction. Civilizations have been known to crumble under the weight of envy and the disrespect for property it entails.

A common thread runs through these five socialist ideas. They all appeal to the darker side of man: the primitive, noncreative, slothful, dependent, demoralizing, unproductive, and destructive side of human nature. No society can long endure if its people practice such suicidal notions.

Consider the freedom philosophy. It is an uplifting, regenerative, motivating, creative, exciting philosophy. It appeals to and relies on the higher qualities of human nature such as self-reliance, personal responsibility, individual initiative, respect for property, and voluntary cooperation.

The outcome of the struggle between freedom and serfdom depends entirely on what percolates in the hearts and minds of men. At the present time the jury is still deliberating.

This is a rather extreme statement. Are governments really so tightly bound by the beliefs of the public? Anyone versed in Public Choice theory is likely to find Mises’s statement a bit much. After all, Public Choice demonstrates how incentive structures in the political system can lead to policies that are not in fact favored by the majority of citizens but are in the interest of a powerful few.

Public Choice analysis is incredibly useful to economists and laypeople alike. It has opened our eyes to the difficulty of government reaching its own stated ends because of incentive problems within the system of government itself. It has dispelled the myth that government ineptitude is simply the result of bad leaders. However, in all this emphasis on incentives and interests, Public Choice often overlooks or minimizes the role of ideas.

We cannot forget the power of ideas to overcome the bad incentives inherent in any system of government and to act as a roadblock to the seemingly inevitable expansion of State power.

Consider a rather silly example that illustrates the inability of Public Choice alone to explain the world of policies in which we live.

A billboard says, “Kicking chickens creates prosperity.”

This is part of a campaign sponsored by the Partnership for a Chicken-Free America. The group is made up of people who have an extreme dislike for chickens, and they are willing to put vast resources into reducing the well-being of such fowl. In fact, they advocate legislation to establish national Kick-A-Chick Day.

Most voters and members of the general public do not share this distaste for chickens. Then, again, most people are relatively indifferent when it comes to chicken happiness. With a few exceptions, it is not in an individual’s interest to spend resources on a counter-campaign or to hire lobbyists to oppose the Kick-A-Chick bill; the costs of doing so simply outweigh the benefits.

This is a classic case of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. The anti-chicken people derive tremendous happiness from harming chickens, making their campaign a worthwhile expenditure. Yet the general public gains little from preventing chicken kicking, and the cost of opposing it is very high.

On the other hand, the public loves prosperity. If they believed that punting hens created wealth, there is little reason to suspect they would not support the policy. A public-awareness campaign would be just the ticket.

Armed with Public Choice theory we can see the sad but likely result. The chicken-free association will exert its influence and get its bill. The public will either support what they believe to be a prosperity-creating policy or ignore it altogether because the cost of fighting is too high. The interests align in such a way that we can expect the anti-bird forces to get their way.

Of course this story is absurd and such a law would never be introduced, let alone pass. What makes it so obviously impossible?

Ideas.

People know there is no causal connection between kicking a chicken and enjoying a higher standard of living. That knowledge makes the campaign laughable. Regardless of how the interests are aligned, if people are educated enough to know that chicken kicking does not equal prosperity, such an absurd policy will not be enacted.

Ideas and Public Opinion

This was an admittedly silly example. You could claim that the real reason such a stupid policy wouldn’t fly is not public opinion, but the fact that no real interest group would advocate for kicking chickens. But it is not hard to imagine other instances where a real interest would benefit from marketing a false cause-and-effect relationship, but where they simply cannot because the public knows enough not to buy it. Hotdog producers would gain if the consumption of one frankfurter per day were required by government. Why don’t they promote such a law? They could run ads saying, “If you eat a hotdog, a child will be cured of cancer.” It is not hard to see that, real or imagined, interest groups cannot get away with everything, even in the face of bad incentives.

Yesterday I saw a sign on the side of a bus that I found no less absurd than the chicken-kickers campaign. It read, “Converting buses creates jobs. What are we waiting for?” The ad was sponsored by a “clean air” association, no doubt consisting of members of the natural-gas industry and people for whom a reduction in fossil fuel use would bring some great personal pleasure.

Just like our chicken story, the incentives are aligned so that the benefits of bus-conversion mandates to the members of this small group exceed the cost of their advocacy efforts, while the benefits to individual citizens of stopping the mandates fall short of the cost of opposition. As far as incentives go, the situation seems pretty dire.

Unlike our chicken story, however, most people do not know there is no magical or “free” job creation when government mandates bus conversions. The resources used to convert the buses must be taken from somewhere, and it is as likely as not that there are many other jobs destroyed or never created in the first place when the resources are redirected. Furthermore, most people do not know that there is no causal connection between more jobs and more prosperity, or a higher standard of living. In fact, if a government mandate creates jobs, it is likely that it does so precisely because it is destroying wealth by moving it from more-productive to less-productive (and more labor intensive) uses.

This lack of knowledge is actually good news.

It means things are not as hopeless as pure Public Choice theory might suggest. Bad incentives can be overcome by good ideas. In our chicken story it was clear that interests alone were insufficient to enact policy. Knowledge of the policy’s incoherence trumped the incentive structure. With a grasp of basic economics, people may find the sign on the bus just as laughable as the idea of Kick-A-Chick Day.

Special interests can only appeal to things within the realm of accepted public opinion, which is shaped by public knowledge. We can affect public knowledge.

Special interests can do much to destroy liberty given the incentive structure in our political system. Indeed, with an ignorant populace there is little they cannot do. But even the most powerful interests ultimately answer to the ideas held by a majority of citizens. Policy follows the path blazed by belief.

In emphasizing the role of ideas in limiting the expansion of the State or the power of special interests I do not mean to say Public Choice is incorrect. It is a valuable toolkit that brings a dose of realism to our efforts at reforming the State. But it is most powerful when it recognizes and incorporates the power of ideas to change and shape interests, and to help people put aside their short-term interests and understand their long-term interests.

It was recognition of the power of ideas over interests that motivated Leonard Read to start the Foundation for Economic Education. It is because of the power of ideas that FEE has tirelessly educated individuals on economic principles for these many years. It is because of the power of ideas that we must continue our educational efforts, no matter how frustrating it may sometimes be.

When we succeed, all interventionist interest groups and their ploys will be shown to be just as ridiculous as the Partnership for a Chicken-Free America. No matter how powerful an interest, how strong its incentives, or how corrupt the system, government can ultimately only do what people permit it to; and people will only permit it to do what they believe it capable of doing. Through education we can demonstrate just how incapable government is. In the end, despite the very real power of interests, ideas win.

To paraphrase Victor Hugo, “More powerful than an army of special interest lobbyists, is an idea whose time has come.”

This is the essential element of all government: force, used with general consent.
Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom

What is the American constitution? The obvious answer is that it s the document written in 1787, amended 27 times since, and the original of which is housed in the National Archives. Judges, politicians, the news media—indeed, all Americans—talk of that 6,000+ word document as being the constitution.

This talk is mistaken. The constitution is neither a document nor the collection of words in a document. Instead, the constitution is the dominant ideology within us an ideology that determines what we permit each other to do, as well as what we permit government to do. No words on parchment, regardless of the pedigree of that parchment or of the men and women who composed those words, will ever override the prevailing belief system of the people who form a polity.

We have at hand ready proof that the constitution is ideology rather than words in a document. Read the document popularly called “the Constitution” and ask if it accurately describes the law of the land. Your answer will almost certainly be no. That document clearly gives to the national government only very limited powers for example, to coin money, to operate post offices, and to supply national-defense services. Today, however, Washington knows almost no restraints on how deeply its regulatory arms reach into the lives of American citizens. No species of economic regulation is off-limits to the national government. Likewise, Washington routinely and without a whiff of apology exercises governmental powers clearly intended by the framers of the Constitutional document to be reserved to each state.

It’s true that some provisions in the Constitutional document are respected. If Congress today passed a statute outlawing publication of Cosmopolitan magazine, a sufficiently large number of Americans would resist this attempt by government to control what is printed. But the fact that some parts of the Constitutional document have some teeth doesn’t mean that the document itself is “the law of the land.”

Those instances in which the Constitutional document has teeth (such as the First Amendment’s prohibition of government interference with the press) are those instances in which the prevailing ideology of the American people happens to correspond with what’s written in the Constitutional document. But in those many instances when the prevailing ideology runs counter to the text of the Constitutional document, the document is toothless.

Again, the American Constitution is nothing more or less than Americans’ prevailing ideology. And this ideology—as any ideology comes from ideas about what is proper and improper, acceptable and unacceptable, desirable and undesirable, practical and impractical, noble and ignoble.

Most Americans today have the idea that Congress is perfectly justified in delegating its legislative authority to federal agencies. Therefore, despite the complete lack of any language in the Constitutional document authorizing independent agencies, Washington is planted thick with federal agencies exercising legislative powers. No one today suggests that these agencies are unconstitutional.

Most Americans today have the idea that the national government is authorized to dictate the details—from gasoline mileage to the number of airbags per vehicle of how automobiles are to be manufactured. Despite the Constitutional document very clearly not giving authority over such matters to Washington, the national government exercises such authority and almost no one today regards this exercise of authority as unconstitutional.

Most Americans today accept the idea that government should tell people what they can or cannot ingest. Most Americans accept the idea that minimum-wage legislation is desirable. Most Americans accept the idea that protecting property rights is less noble than protecting plant and animal species.

Thousands more such examples can be listed.

In the past, when I got furious at the government for doing things clearly prohibited by the Constitutional document, I would declare “That’s unconstitutional!”

I was wrong. Those innumerable government actions that are at odds with the Constitutional document as well as with the principles of a free society are in fact constitutional. These actions are constitutional because the constitution is the actual legal framework of our society—and the actual legal framework in America today grants to government extraordinarily vast powers for intruding into the lives of peaceful people.

Again, the reason is that most Americans today have the idea that it is desirable, or at least not inappropriate, for government to exercise an authority immensely larger than was contemplated by Americans of the founding generation. If, instead, today’s Americans had the idea that government’s only legitimate function was to keep the peace, there could be no doubt that politicians who attempted to enforce, say, the Americans With Disabilities Act would get nowhere. It’s not so much that these politicians would get voted from office; instead, ordinary people would simply refuse to comply with the statute.

If you doubt this, ask what would happen if Congress enacted legislation banning interstate travel by Americans. Can you imagine Americans today respecting such an odious statute? Of course not, despite the fact that the Constitutional document does not explicitly prevent Congress from passing such legislation. To avoid enforcement of this statute we wouldn’t have to wait to throw from office the bums who enacted it. Because of the prevailing American ideology, which is hostile to such legislation, this statute would be a nullity from the moment the President signed it.

It follows that ideas matter enormously. Ideas, not words, are the principal ingredient of the American constitution. If ideas change, so does the constitution. And the only way really to change the constitution is to change the ideas accepted by the great swath of citizens.

We at FEE are in the business of constitutional amendment–changing the ideas that people have about freedom, about property, about politics, and about government. If we succeed in restoring the idea that free people are more prosperous, peaceful, and culturally vigorous than those who rely on government, we will have done nothing less than to amend the American constitution in a way that secures liberty. We will also have re-created the Constitution that James Madison and other founding-era Americans intended.

Liberty cannot be secured by asking its foe–the state–for more respect. Liberty cannot be secured at ballot boxes or in courtrooms. Liberty must reside in the hearts of people if it is to reign. And the only way that liberty can find its way into the hearts of people is through the promulgation and circulation of the ideas of liberty. In these ideas lies liberty’s only hope.

Donald J. Boudreaux
President

As veteran readers of The Freeman know, ideas are what matter most. Pointing fingers, naming names, and unmasking duplicitous politicians can never by themselves win the battle for liberty. Indeed, such tactics can be counterproductive when they lull people into thinking that changing faces in government is enough to change results. Ideas must change, and if they do, the faces will take care of themselves.

For some, focusing on ideas seems to be an unbearably long-term strategy. They yearn for the magic button that, when pressed, will make things better. They think everything depends on who gets into office in the next election. They want to win elections now, so they put their money and time into yard signs and bumper stickers instead of books, articles, seminars, and other educational tools.

These impatient friends fail to understand that politicians rarely operate outside a box framed by public opinion which, translated, means the demands and expectations of those politicians’ particular constituencies. One wealthy patron of hundreds of candidates over the years recently expressed this frustration to me: I wish I could do something so that once the people I support get elected I won’t have to keep calling them to find out why they cast so many bad votes and make so many wrong decisions. I told him that the one most effective thing he could do is to invest in ideas. Give someone a book, I told him, not a bumper sticker.

What better evidence do we have of the importance of education than the experience of the 104th Congress? The Republicans ousted the Democrats for control of both houses, for the first time in 40 years. Most of the freshman class elected in that tumultuous year of 1994 pledged themselves to shrinking the federal government and turning power back to the states and to the people.

But by early 1996, enthusiasm gave way to disappointment. Government had been nicked here, shaved a little there, but the revolution had fizzled. The more thoughtful among the revolutionaries didn’t lay the blame on the president or the media; they knew they had been thwarted by the sunshine patriots back home—people who buy the rhetoric of less government but run in the other direction at the prospect of actually achieving the real thing. This suggests that much work remains to be done on the idea front. People must deepen their understanding of liberty so they’ll stick with it when the going gets rough.

Making the case for liberty stick, so that it isn’t simply some short-term rhetorical exercise, is a multi-faceted task. It draws support from a range of intellectual disciplines—economics, political science, sociology, and history, to name a few. It requires a nurturing of many personal virtues—self-reliance, enterprise, respect for others and their property, moral inspiration, and optimism about what free people can accomplish. It encourages a patient, long-term perspective over the instant gratification of short-term obsessions. To this list I add one more ingredient that is worthy of our increased attention—demystifying government.

Too many battles are lost to statists because of a misplaced and hard-to-shake faith in government itself. For all its endless failures, now more widely perceived than at any time in decades, government is still regarded as real and tangible while free-market alternatives are often thought of as nebulous and imaginary.

For example, take Social Security. Most Americans now acknowledge its inherent flaws and impending debacle. Suggest ending Social Security and making retirement security a purely personal and market-based responsibility and many of those same people wince in fear. Who would take care of Grandma? they ask. Of course, they want you to answer with a list of names and addresses; anything less will leave them in grudging acceptance of the status quo.

Far too many Americans think that if government provides education, it may do so ineffectively but at least some basic level of schooling will exist. Likewise, they think that if government gets into the low-income housing business, the result may be scandal-ridden but at least the poor will be housed.

It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions. Many times, for instance, I’ve heard people say, A free market in education is a bad idea because some child somewhere might fall through the cracks, even though in today’s government schools, millions of children are falling through the cracks every day.

Our task as friends of the free market is to reverse this state of affairs. We must portray the promises of government and politicized society for what they are—nebulous and imaginary. We must explain the benefits of free markets and civil society for precisely what they are—real and tangible. After all, isn’t the evidence on these points overwhelming? Where do oppressed people flee when given the chance—to free countries or socialist countries? Where do they conquer more poverty by producing more goods that sustain life the longest and at the highest levels? In which environment do people attain the greatest satisfaction and self-fulfillment—an environment of dependency and sloth, or one of self-reliance and effort? Americans should be embarrassed even to ask such questions.

The Myth of the Magical Bureaucracy, a recent booklet co-authored by Congressmen Pete Hoekstra, Mark Neumann, Sam Brownback, and Mark Souder, demystifies the federal government with a goldmine of facts and figures. For example, Americans have come to assume that since Washington became involved in education in the mid-1960s, education has been advanced; efforts to abolish the Department of Education and its 760 separate programs have been met with stiff resistance.

The facts, however, are these: Educational performance in the United States has been in steady decline since the mid-1960s. Average SAT scores have dropped 35 points since 1972. Sixty-six percent of 17-year-olds do not read at a proficient level. U.S. students scored worse in math than all other large countries except Spain. And 30 percent of all college freshmen must take remedial classes.

For another example, consider the AmeriCorps program, which propagates the myth that magical bureaucrats can create a renewed volunteer spirit in America. The facts are these: AmeriCorps displaces true volunteerism by paying people with tax money to do good. Designed just three years ago to cost taxpayers only $16,000 per volunteer, it now costs between $25,797 and $31,017 per volunteer. Worse yet, only $14,000 of that money goes to the actual volunteer, while the remaining $11,000 to $17,000 goes to overhead and administration!

Making the case for liberty stick will take a lot more of this sort of compelling analysis, marketed in an articulate fashion. The Emperor has no clothes; we merely have to encourage people to take their blinders off and see reality.

Packaging counts. This maxim of marketing applies to ideas as well as goods and services. As F.A. Hayek pointed out, there is a confusion of language in political thought. People of different political and philosophical perspectives often use merit words (words that a psychologist would say have positive affect) like rights and freedom to sell their very different, incompatible points of view. When classical liberals try to expose what they consider the interventionists’ misuse of such merit words, they get caught in a semantic trap that makes their arguments harder to sell. In this essay I discuss such a semantic trap and recommend a way to avoid it.

Negative and Positive Rights

Rights is definitely a merit word. People of all political persuasions talk about human rights and alleged trespasses against them. But what are they? Here is how a classical liberal might answer that question.

In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote about unalienable rights that all individuals have irrespective of government. These rights are logically prior to government. Government has no legitimate authority to add to or subtract from such rights. Its role is to protect them.

Following John Locke, Jefferson would say that if X is a human right it must apply to all individuals in exactly the same way. Later, Immanuel Kant said that to be legitimate a right had to be generalizable to all humans. If Jones has a right, all other humans must logically have the same right. One cannot, without self-contradiction, claim a human right for himself and deny it to other humans. Moreover, it must be possible for all individuals to exercise the claimed right simultaneously without logical contradiction.

For example, is there any job-related human right in the Jeffersonian sense? Yes. It is the right of all individuals to offer to buy or sell labor services at any terms they choose. Jones has a right to offer to sell his labor services, or buy the services of others, at any terms he likes. So, too, does Smith. We all do. Those to whom we extend our offers are free to reject them. In exercising this right we impose no duty to undertake any positive action on any other person.

Political philosophers often call this a negative right because the only duty imposed on others thereby is a duty to refrain from interfering with the person exercising the right (e.g., to refrain from preventing others from making job offers). Smith has no duty to do anything under Jones’s rights claim in this sense; rather, he has a duty not to do something.

Interventionists typically assert that people have rights in the sense of entitlement to the means to fulfill their wants. They assert that Jones and Smith have a right to a job, a right to an education, a right to health care, or a right to food. At the 1994 U.N. conference in Cairo on population every person was even granted the right to a satisfying and safe sex life.

Suppose Jones claims a right to a job. If that claim means that Jones will be employed anytime he wishes to be (on whatever terms he wishes?), there must be some other person, perhaps Smith, who has the duty to provide the job. But, then, Smith does not have the same right. Jones’s right is to be employed, Smith’s right is to provide the job. Political philosophers often refer to such a claim by Jones as a positive rights claim because Jones’s claimed right creates a duty for Smith to undertake some positive action that he may not want to undertake.

Classical liberals argue that positive rights are contradictory because they are not generalizable. They cannot be legitimate human rights because not all humans can exercise them in the same sense at the same time. Jones’s positive rights claims necessarily deny the same rights claims to Smith. Classical liberal economists argue that only negative rights are consistent with the principles of voluntary exchange.

Now, what is wrong with this way of expressing the argument? Only the packaging. Classical liberals come out defending negative rights, while interventionists come out defending positive rights. To the man on the street positive usually means desirable, and negative usually means undesirable. This language handicaps the classical liberals’ argument and gives the advantage to the interventionists.

Negative and Positive Freedom

There is no word with more positive affect than freedom. Everyone is in favor of it; no one wants to appear to be arguing against it. Even the rulers of the former Soviet empire claimed to be in favor of freedom (e.g., freedom from hunger). But what is freedom? Here is how a classical liberal might answer that question.

Jones is free if he can pursue his goals, without interference from others, using whatever means are at his disposal, so long as he does not engage any other person in any involuntary exchange. Political philosophers often call this negative freedom because it requires (a) the absence of interference from others and (b) Jones to abstain from imposing involuntary exchange on others. Negative freedom is generalizable. We each can exercise a negative freedom without denying the freedom of others to do the same.

The freedoms guaranteed to Americans by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press—are all negative freedoms. We each can exercise free choice of religion without denying that freedom to others. Note, however, we are not entitled to join a religious organization that doesn’t want to accept us. We each can associate with any individuals or groups, but only so long as they are willing to associate with us. Exercising that freedom does not make it impossible for others to do the same. We each can say what we like without denying that same freedom to others. Note again, however, we may not force people to listen, or to provide us with a forum in which to speak. We each are free to try to assemble the necessary resources, by voluntary agreements with others, to publish a newspaper or a magazine. But we have no right to force people to provide those necessary resources or to purchase or read our publications.

Interventionists assert that Jones is free if he is able to do or obtain what he would like to do or obtain. This is freedom in the sense of power. A poor man is not free in this sense because he has, for example, insufficient means to live in the type of house he would like. Political philosophers often refer to this as positive freedom because its exercise requires the presence of means. Of course, if Jones lacks the necessary means, he can be free in this sense only if he has an entitlement to receive the means from others whether they like it or not. But then those others are not free because they must give up means which would empower them to do or obtain what they would like. Jones’s positive freedom can be guaranteed only by the loss of at least some of Smith’s positive freedom.

While classical liberals can rightly argue that freedom for Jones at the expense of freedom for Smith is not really human freedom, the language of the dispute gives the advantage to those who defend positive freedom.

An Alternative Vocabulary

The common characteristic of negative rights and negative freedom is that they can be generalized to all people without logical contradiction. All people can exercise them simultaneously. One person’s exercise of a negative right or a negative freedom does not diminish the ability of others to do exactly the same. Fellow economist Dwight Lee suggested to me that the language of public goods is particularly apt. One characteristic of a public good is nonrivalrous consumption. All parties may consume the benefits of the good simultaneously, and one person’s consumption does not diminish the consumption of others.

We recommend that classical liberals, philosophers as well as economists, who try to clarify the alternative definitions of rights and freedom henceforth substitute nonrivalrous for negative and rivalrous for positive. Nonrivalrous rights and freedom are those that can be exercised by all people simultaneously. One person’s exercise of them does not diminish the ability of anyone else to do the same. When anyone exercises rivalrous rights and freedom, he does so only by reducing the ability of others to do the same.

The man on the street understands rivalry and nonrivalry to mean exactly what we wish to convey in this discussion. At the very least our suggestion would remove the semantic advantage that interventionists have hitherto enjoyed.