At the core of classical-liberal arguments, especially in the nineteenth century, was what economists Sandra Peart and David Levy call “analytical egalitarianism.” Classical liberals, going back at least as far as John Locke, began their analysis of the social world by assuming that human beings were equal both in their moral standing (everyone’s preferences count equally) and in their capacity for making economic decisions. As Adam Smith phrased it, there was no difference between the street porter and the philosopher.

Peart and Levy contrast “analytical egalitarianism” with what they call “analytical hierarchicalism,” in which some people are thought to be different from others and therefore, in the view of those at the time, superior or inferior. Such differences might be attributed to any variety of inborn traits, from race to ethnicity to gender. By contrast, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and other classical liberals believed that the observed differences among human beings were not due to inborn traits and capacities, but rather to factors such as incentives, luck, and history, as Peart and Levy put it. In the view of most early classical liberals, no inborn trait or capacity consigns some groups to inferiority while marking others for superiority. In understanding the social world, we must treat people as equal with respect to the things that matter for our theories and therefore for the policy conclusions that emerge from them.

Racial Equality

As Levy demonstrated in an earlier book, this mattered at a practical level in the nineteenth-century debates over racial equality. Classical liberals such as Mill supported racial equality because they believed race was irrelevant to people’s moral standing and capacity for choice. Classical economics assumed its models applied to all human beings, including the theorists themselves. They believed that free markets and a free society were desirable because all people were equal and capable of acting in the way their theories described, leading to the peaceful and prosperous world they promised. By contrast the Romantic critics of capitalism hated it for exactly those reasons: Their starting point was the assumption of hierarchy, specifically among the races, and they understood correctly that free markets would undermine that hierarchy, which is why they opposed it. This is also why the Romantics called economics the “dismal science” – they saw a future without hierarchy as dismal. (See David Levy’s Freeman article on the subject.)

If there really were morally relevant differences among human beings, or if some groups were unable to engage in reasonably rational decision-making, it would be easier to construct an argument that these humans should ruled by their superiors – and this is precisely the argument that a good number of critics of classical liberalism constructed. They wanted the State to treat some people differently from others because some groups were not equal to others in their capacity for free choice. Lest you think this went on only in the nineteenth century, these views manifested themselves again in the early twentieth century, as Progressive Era critics of capitalism used eugenic arguments to limit the economic rights of nonwhites and women.

Two Principles

The classical-liberal argument for freedom was premised on equality, both in people’s moral worth and in their capacity for free choice. In other words, the arguments for equality came first and the desirability of liberty followed from them. (See also Roderick Long’s “Liberty: The Other  Equality.”) Classical liberalism’s critics denied that people should be free because they denied that people were equal. It was classical liberalism that defended the principles of both equality and freedom.

No doubt the concept of equality has been altered in the last 150 years. Too often it is used to mean “equalizing outcomes” by the hand of the State as opposed to treating people equally and accepting that unequal, but just and socially desirable, outcomes will result. Libertarians who rightly defend such inequalities of outcomes need to recognize that those are only possible in a world where the assumption of analytical egalitarianism operates and where the State treats all humans as having equal moral standing and equal capacity for free choice. Equality should not be a dirty word for libertarians since equality of liberty and equality before the law are in our intellectual DNA. Equality is one of our foundational concepts without which the argument for freedom would be that much weaker, if not nonexistent.

I thank Aeon Skoble for comments on an earlier draft.

One example of media complicity is a Thanksgiving Day column in which Debra Saunders called the enhanced pat-downs “freedom fondles.” Reason editor Matt Welch assembled two sets of links for the Hit & Run blog cataloguing favorable media statements about the new techniques. We have been advised by the Los Angeles Times to “shut up and be scanned.” The Santa Fe New Mexican tells us we should “stand, or bend over, on principle and suffer attendant indignities,” while the Rochester Post-Bulletin tells us to “grin and bear it.” The Louisville Courier-Journal asks, “At what point did Americans turn into a nation of crybabies?”

What’s particularly stunning is how often these defenses of TSA procedures came from the (so-called) liberal press, such as the New York Times or the Nation. Actress Whoopi Goldberg and her left-leaning colleagues on ABC’s The View agreed that those protesting the invasive techniques by slowing down the process at airports are equivalent to terrorists. It is striking how quickly the left adopts “America: love it or leave it” and forgets that dissent is the highest form of patriotism when their guys are in power. Would these people be bending over backward to excuse the TSA if a Republican were in the White House? We don’t think so.

Beyond the media treatments, the idea that we should trade off a little liberty to get more security presents a false choice. The TSA does not provide security. It provides what security experts like Bruce Schneier call “security theater.” As one of us (Carden) wrote recently, the TSA agent with his hand in your pants is not there for your safety. He is there to give you the illusion of safety. The TSA dog-and-pony show is just the government’s very expensive way of saying, “We’re doing something about this.”

If we were serious about security, we would do three things. First, we would eliminate the TSA. It makes flying less convenient and gives people an incentive to drive. Per passenger mile, driving is far more dangerous than flying. The evidence suggests that more people will die on the roads than would have died in terrorist attacks on planes because they are discouraged from flying by the TSA and its new, more invasive procedures.

Second, we should give the airlines responsibility for security. The discovery process of genuine market competition among airlines would determine the degree of security passengers are comfortable with, while also avoiding techniques they find invasive. What profit-seeking firm would want to alienate its customers by taking nearly nude photos or touching “their junk”?

It’s the airlines that stand to lose physical capital and reputation, so they have every reason to get it right. They will certainly be more responsive to fliers’ needs than a monopoly would.

This second point is the response to the claim that we are corporate shills looking to advance a privatization agenda. While there might be some cost savings from privatization, this might also do more harm than good since a “privatized” TSA would do a lot of the same invasive things, only the State would be able to shift blame to the private sector. As a monopoly, a “privatized” TSA would still lack the ability to respond to customers’ desired tradeoffs. What we need is not “privatization” but “de-monopolization.”

Finally, we would get serious about using decision markets for terrorism detection. This idea met with fierce resistance when first introduced—politicians and pundits said no one should “profit from terrorism.” These critics missed the point, though. As economist Robin Hanson has written, decision markets are a very high-efficiency way to obtain information, even when the payouts are small.

Hanson points out that a crucial failing of international intelligence gathering is that information is incomplete and/or flawed. Ironically (and tragically), the political outcry over the Policy Analysis Market (PAM; summarized on Hanson’s website) demonstrated precisely why such a market is necessary. In the face of incomplete and incorrect information and in the presence of important cognitive biases, sources of reliable and unbiased information are indispensable—especially when so many lives are on the line.

The PAM started as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project to allow people to purchase very small contracts that would pay out in the event of a given combination of outcomes. The project drew fundamentally on the insights of F. A. Hayek and James Buchanan, who argued that the process of exchange itself reveals crucial information and generates order. In the early trials of the project, traders were asked to predict different combinations of events that might result from adopting a particular policy.

The Need for Information

As an aside, the furor over the Policy Analysis Market and the ratcheted-up procedures by the TSA are especially interesting in light of the controversy over WikiLeaks. Some have denounced WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, for endangering American lives, and we remain agnostic on this until the fury has settled. Even if WikiLeaks is morally culpable for endangering innocent people through its leaked documents, we would be willing to bet that those who were instrumental in canceling the PAM in 2003, thereby thwarting the open flow of information, are responsible for more casualties by several orders of magnitude. As a rule, more information is better than less.

Bruce Schneier and others argue that the best way to fight terrorism is to identify terrorists rather than scanning grandmothers or treating someone’s urostomy bag as if it were a possible explosive device. One of the best ways to do this would be to develop a terrorism prediction market like the one proposed by Hanson.

The TSA should be abolished and serious, competitive alternatives should be explored. As Carden argued on Forbes.com, “Full Frontal Nudity Will Not Make Us Safer: Abolish the TSA” (emphasis added). The problem with government-run airport security is that it eliminates the market’s search process that would otherwise allow people to discover the most effective and customer-friendly security methods.

The idea of liberty emerged in the struggle between the forces of collectivism and individualism. It is the idea that each of us has a rightful sphere of autonomy in which we may be free from aggression.  In politics this manifested itself as liberal democracy, in economics as market competition, and in the broader social realm as scientific advance, artistic expression, and religious tolerance.

In his concise masterpiece, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne explains just how, long after the fall of the western Roman empire, the liberal idea gradually reemerged and how this was directly tied to the birth of the modern city.

The Decline of Cities and Civilization

Between AD 400 and 900 cities virtually disappeared from Europe.  Even in Rome, which at its height had a population of one million, the population fell to mere thousands – most of whom were either Churchmen or those who served them.  Bishops and clerics dominated urban life, while princes, who had little reason to spend time in dreary medieval towns, focused attention on protecting their feudal estates, earning tribute from their vassals, and exploiting the labor of their serfs.

Then as now, nobles followed wealth, and in the Middle Ages, as trade among cities dwindled, the basis for wealth went from money to land.  Money, liquid and essential for commerce, became superfluous, while control and acquisition of land became paramount.  This land-based economy tied not only serfs to the service of their lords via ancient contracts, but also bound lord to serf and to the static hierarchy of the manorial system, generation after generation.  Meanwhile, those who did inhabit the changeless towns were virtual prisoners there.

The Rise of the Middle Class and the Modern City

Then, with the reawakening of trade in the tenth and eleventh centuries – first among Hanseatic towns, regional fairs, and eventually through longer-distance trade – Europe began the slow transition back from land-based to money-based economy.  Serfs could pay their rent in coin, liberating them from direct service to their lords, towns offered commoners opportunities for profitable trade and an urban lifestyle that had been absent for centuries, and the urban social structure had to accommodate something that had also been lost since Roman times, a rising merchant and middle class – not among the elite in town centers but in the suburbs, “below the city.”  Not surprisingly, princes and bishops began to pay more attention to the new market-driven, wealth-creating cities.

As commerce provided a greater share of life’s necessities, the feudal manor declined in social, economic, and political importance. And so to the first estate of the nobility and the second estate of the Churchmen had to be added the burghers and merchants of the middle class, “although the third in dignity, the first in importance.”  Cities became “civilized” once again, and in a way we would recognize today.

More than this, however, as business contracts extended over greater distances and for longer periods of time, it was critical to merchants and their sons to be able to read and write, and in the vernacular rather than Latin.  The demand for books and printed material created a market for Gutenberg’s printing presses.  Also, as business began to flourish recordkeeping and numeracy became essential skills as well as, in some cases, the mechanical arts.  Traditional educational forms and curricula were no longer adequate.  New local schools and, in the thirteenth century, the great universities were founded in Bologna, Paris, and Cambridge and Oxford, breeding grounds for ideas that challenged the established order.

Growing literacy and numeracy among wealthy burgesses, the humanistic emphasis in education and religion, and the ability to publish on a scale theretofore unknown set the stage for revolutions in the Church with Luther, in science with Bacon and Newton, and in the arts, where the very idea of the artist, godlike in his creative powers, was born.  And all these radical changes either took place or were conceived in the ferment of the modern city.

Radical Social Change and the Idea of Liberty

Money, literacy, art, science and mathematics, and the radical criticism and radical toleration of differences were irrelevant in the land-based rural society of the Middle Ages.  Even the concept of property rights, in all its complexities and contingencies we associate with it today, was rooted in densely populated settlements where conflict might otherwise have been an everyday occurrence.  The rural peasant, of course, benefited from — indeed, was liberated by — these ideas and the technical advances that arose from them.

And although Pirenne argues that the middle class tried to claim a monopoly on what they saw as its unique privileges, “nevertheless, to that middle class was reserved the mission of spreading the idea of liberty far and wide and of becoming, without having consciously desired to be, the means of the gradual enfranchisement of the rural classes.”

So with the rebirth of the city came the rediscovery of liberty.

On the feudal manor or the clerical town, the liberty of the common man had no place.  Only in the commercial society of the cities, which then as today attracted the ambitious, the talented, and the misfit, did liberty have a real meaning and substance.  Only if you can “vote with your feet,” leave the manor or village to pursue your dreams, or simply travel (and have a reason to travel) from place to place, are you really free.  That is what the city fundamentally represents.  As the old saying goes,

Stadtluft macht Frei!

But “city air” didn’t simply make us free.  It gave us the chance to think about freedom, as well as the means to articulate its philosophy and, in the dense social networks of cities, to spread the idea.

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith lamented what he called the other two forces hindering the preservation of economic freedom: “the prejudices of the public” and “the power of the interests.” By the prejudices of the public, Smith meant the difficulty that many people have in following the logical arguments of the advocates of freedom, and the ease with which they fall victim to the demagogic appeals of those who promise short-run political favors and privileges at the expense of longer-run liberty and prosperity.

And by the power of the interests, Smith was referring to the influence of special groups who receive political benefits from the government in the form of regulations and subsidies at the expense of the rest of the society. Smith warned that they will use all the means at their deposal to destroy those who threaten the continuance of their privileges. Indeed, nothing can save the opponent of government privileges from “the most infamous abuse and detraction, from personal insults, nor sometimes from real danger, arising from the insolent outrage of furious and disappointed monopolists.”

John Stossel of ABC News has experienced the wrath of all three of these antimarket forces. In this recent book, Give Me a Break, he recounts his odyssey as a television news journalist who has traveled from being a typical anti-capitalist “liberal” to a staunchly pro-market libertarian.

He first made his fame as an “in-your-face” investigative reporter on New York television who went after con artists, crooks, and corrupt businessmen. Stossel tracked them down and exposed their rip-offs of innocent and often naïve consumers. What struck him was their total amoralism, as reflected in their wanton ability to lie right into the camera with no remorse or apparent sense of guilt.

He assumed that what was needed was ever-stronger government regulation and policing of the marketplace to curb the unbridled criminality of the “greedy” and anti-social conduct of too many businessmen. But then he began to look into the conduct and motivations of the regulators and bureaucrats from whom he expected a solution to these “market failures.” Stossel soon discovered that they either had their own agendas for power and control, or served the anticompetitive actions of selected specialinterest business groups. So he decided to investigate and report on the nature of government in practice, as well as the ideas and ideologies behind political intrusiveness in society.

Rather quickly, Stossel came face to face with Adam Smith’s “man of system,” the ideological social engineer. He unearthed the twisting of facts justifying the regulation and control over such things as consumer choice, market-driven production decisions, and the environment. His exposés resulted in an avalanche of accusations that he was in the pay of business interests and that he was against the poor and the public good. In other words, he was a dangerous “enemy of the people.”

Then he faced the “prejudices of the public.” He received hate mail from viewers of his television specials demanding that he be fired, killed, or, at the very least, exiled from the human race. How could he question the good intentions of the government or the desirable results of the regulatory state unless he was, at the minimum, unbelievably stupid or, more likely, the incarnation of evil in the world?

Finally, he faced the “power of the interests.” Unions, business interests, and professional associations that eat at the government trough attacked him as a vile and dangerous threat to the “working man” and the betterment of America. In addition, the politicians and bureaucrats, whose anticompetitive policies he put into the public eye, tried to squelch his television specials.

But in spite of the most determined attempts to gag him, or to get him removed from his high-profile television position, he has survived. His television specials unmasking leftist ideologies and lies, and the abuse of political power, have had consistently high ratings.

Page after page recounts the details of his encounters with politically corrupt businessmen and power-lusting bureaucrats. He exposes the fraudulent methods used to spread myths and create fears about the extent of poverty and the quality of life in America, and the safety of products available to the average citizen in the marketplace. And he highlights the absolute contempt for the rights of others shown by those who use the state for their own purposes. Stossel ends his book with a series of clear, crisp chapters defending the logic and benefits of the free market, the importance of personal and civil liberties, and the underlying value of freedom in general. John Stossel’s journey in the world of television journalism is proof that truth can win out.

My own view is much closer to the second claim than the first. While I recognize the depressing frequency of pork-barrel legislation and numerous regulations that are structured to benefit special interests rather than the so-called public interest, I believe that the broad thrust of policy responds to the desires of the general public. Given this view, I believe that the road to greater freedom in America is to encourage a broader consensus for freedom that will in turn get translated into more limited government via the political process.

While reasonable people may disagree on these differing perceptions of the nature of the American political process, I think it’s undeniable that the average American is considerably more comfortable with an activist role for government rather than a more limited role. Why is this the case? Why don’t my fellow citizens prefer more limited government?

At first glance, liberty should be wildly popular. Each of us loves it and expects it for ourselves. Few of us want to be bossed around or treated like a child. There is a strong human urge to have our own way without restraint, and it starts young. As a parent, I see this desire in action constantly. Simply tell a baby “no” to any desire, be it for more food or something as simple as climbing the stairs, and you can see the desire for freedom in action. If anything, this resentment of authority grows stronger with time. I don’t have teenagers yet, but I hear they’re pretty willful. How do these creatures of desire, these babies and adolescents, mature into voters who support candidates who constantly advocate and implement restrictions on freedom — from drug laws to labor regulations to high tax rates?

There are many explanations for why activist government is not only prevalent in our times but popular. But one answer lies within each of us, working to counteract that same internal force working for liberty. There is one urge that may be equally strong as the desire to have your own way, and that’s the urge to impose your will on others. Again, parenting gives us insight into this urge, but from the other side of the highchair. We want our children to do what we tell them. Parental discipline may be weaker and punishment less corporal today than in past times, but we as parents still spend a great deal of time bossing our kids around or at least trying to.

When our children obey us, we feel good for two reasons. The first is altruistic, but the second is a little less attractive. Yes, we tell our children to stop playing in traffic for their own good. Yes, we refuse them the second ice-cream cone for reasons of health or the creation of self-discipline. But we also try to manipulate our children for our own benefit. We ask our children to quiet down because we’d like a more peaceful home. We tell them to sit rather than roughhousing with each other. We tell them to read this book or that because we want them to be more like us. We send them to bed earlier than they’d like because they need a good night’s sleep, yes, but also because we like a little private time with our spouses.

Power is an intoxicating elixir. One of the secrets of good parenting is restraining the urge to impose authority on our children simply because it is gratifying to have obedient children.

I’m not suggesting that we should indulge our children in order to let them enjoy freedom. I’m arguing that even the best of parents resents a child’s disobedience. We don’t like having our will thwarted as adults any more than we did as children. One challenge of being a parent is not to impose our will on our children just for the sake of being in control. This desire for control and the seductiveness of power can conflict with what is best for our children.

And of course, this phenomenon of imposing our will on others doesn’t stop at our children. We want our spouse to act in ways that we deem desirable, our co-workers to recognize our wisdom and act in ways that we feel is best for the organization, and so on. We even want people to vote the way we do and support the policies we think are best for the country and the world.

The Public Arena

The conflict between the desire to be free and the desire to impose our will on others plays itself out in the public arena. We want our Scotch, but think it right to make cocaine illegal. We want to go skiing, but we force others to wear their seatbelts. We want to eat our ice cream, but think it’s okay to ban smoking.

Mencken defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. A paternalistic government plays into the Puritanism most of us harbor somewhere deep inside. Not content with mere disapproval, we use force via the political process to restrain others.

Next time you’re in the grocery and you see a stressed-out mom or dad screaming at the kid who naturally wants to play with the candy at the check-out line, you’re seeing the roots of big government.

For normal human beings and decent parents, those grocery-store-type moments are few and far between. Love restrains us from indulging our urge to boss our children around for our good rather than theirs. Love for our children encourages us to let them begin to make their own choices as they grow up and head toward adulthood.

I long for a world where we show the same restraint in the political arena. One way to get to that world is to remind our fellow citizens of the virtues of adulthood. As an adult, I make my own decisions and deal with the consequences. Why do we want a political system that treats us like children?

Not only did these policy-wonk questions intrigue pundits, they inspired such events in British history as the Long Parliament, the Puritan Revolution, the Commonwealth, and so on. In The Politics of Liberty, Professor Lee Ward, who teaches political science at Campion College, University of Regina (Canada), correlates his philosophical history to the political one and coincidentally proves how very much ideas really matter. He traces the development of thought, repellant though it is, on the extent and morality of the state’s authority from Sir Robert Filmer, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas Hobbes through Samuel Pufendorf and such Whig philosophers as James Tyrrell, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and Cato (that is, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, authors of Cato’s Letters). His book concludes with the transformation of these ideas by James Otis, Thomas Paine,Thomas Jefferson, and other Americans.

And thank heaven they were transformed. Filmer argues unabashedly that the monarch is sovereign. Indeed, his king sits so far above the law that the royal nostrils may bleed. Filmer credits the biblical account of Adam’s creation for this. Supposedly, when God gave Adam dominion over the earth (Gen 1: 28–29), Adam became a literal and utter dictator.

Never mind that the context of these verses is dominion over the natural world, not the political one. God is not establishing Adam as a sort of primeval Stalin; rather, Adam is humanity’s representative, with God offering nature to mankind so that we may harness it for our advantage.

Ward next shows how Hobbes and Grotius fine tuned Filmer’s points. For example, they debate endlessly whether subjects have any right to rebel, even under the worst of conditions, including the threat of imminent death.

The early Whigs don’t offer much refuge from such lunacy. James Tyrrell wastes time and energy proving that Adam’s authority over his sons was a general one common to all fathers, rather than a specific right granted to Adam alone. He frets over whether human liberty is alienable and decides it is, though no man would be foolish enough to give away his freedom. Perhaps not, but some philosophers are foolish enough to abet those who steal it.

To this point, the quibbling resembles that between modern Republicans and Democrats, with all the nonsensical nuances of the argument over Social Security, for instance. And just as the parties don’t step back from the trees long enough to recommend clear-cutting the forest, neither do these philosophers. Bit by bit, they feed off and slightly temper the others’ enthusiasm for government. Along the way, almost accidentally, they take baby steps toward stifling the state.

With Algernon Sidney, however, comes a giant leap for mankind. He slashes and burns Filmer with a point-by-point refutation from the Bible. Locke, Cato, and the Americans take an even bigger leap into territory more familiar to us and far more palatable.

Professor Ward tells a tale that begins so sickeningly it makes tough reading for anyone who loves liberty. But hang in there: things improve in the middle and wax positively rosy by the time Locke and company ride to the rescue.

The Politics of Liberty explains some of the baffling reverence for government plaguing us today. Much of it can be traced to Filmer, Hobbes, and the other apologists for government whom Ward discusses. Their pernicious presuppositions still stalk among us like vampires. Understanding these presuppositions allows us to track the vampires to their lairs so we can drive stakes through their hearts. This book provides not only a map to the lairs, but the stakes as well.

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!

But things may not have been quite as they were reported. Largely ignored by the major world media were comments of a Nigerian Muslim leader, Nabiu Baba Ahmed. He told the South African Press Association that the source of the trouble was not the offensive article but rather, government sponsorship of the pageant itself.

“It is true we have been having pageants in Nigeria for almost 40 years but that has never bothered us as Muslims because they were privately organized,” Ahmed explained. “But this time it is systematically funded by the government using taxpayers’ money and its agencies . . . which is unacceptable.” He added that the government made matters worse by its involvement in scheduling the pageant during the holy fasting month of Ramadan. This information doesn’t excuse the rioting, and neither did Ahmed, but it does suggest that we shouldn’t accept what’s in the newspapers as the definitive story.

Indeed, if full and accurate reporting from Africa were the norm, we’d be reading about a 33-year-old Nigerian named Thompson Ayodele. I predict that we soon will. A journalist for a major newspaper in Lagos, he is busy planting intellectual seeds in fertile soil—seeds that in time will yield big, positive changes for Africa’s most populous nation. In 2001 he formed the Institute of Public Policy Analysis in Lagos. A private, nonprofit think tank, IPPA’s objective as described on its website (www. ippanigeria.org) is “to provide market-oriented analysis of current and emerging policy issues, with a view to influencing the public debate and the political decisionmaking process.”

I have met Ayodele on several occasions in the past year. He visited my organization in Michigan and attended one of our training seminars for free-market leaders. With great confidence I can say that he has what it takes to bring an idea revolution to his country— vision, passion, eloquence, and total commitment. Like his friend James Shikwati in Kenya (see my column last May, “A Leonard Read for Africa”), he is part of a new generation of Africans eager to liberate the continent from the shackles of failed socialist policies.

Ayodele’s task is no small one, but he is invigorated by the challenge. In the last half-century, Nigeria’s 130 million people suffered under a succession of corrupt, strife-ridden, statist regimes and a military dictatorship until 1999, when a peaceful transition to civilian government took place. The current administration is making some progress toward political stability and a freer economy, but in the face of ethnic and religious tensions, it desperately needs thinkers and activists like Ayodele to educate the public about free markets. “What Nigeria needs,” he says, “is the economic freedom that will result if government abolishes its many obnoxious laws that hinder private initiatives and innovations.”

Thompson himself is the product of the power of ideas. Several years ago, and with no formal training in economics or philosophy, he was struck by an article in the Times of London by Julian Morris of the London-based International Policy Network (IPN). Morris explained how an international ban on the ivory trade would produce new incentives for profits in poaching and that the best way to save the elephants was to “privatize” them through a system of property rights and private ownership. Fascinated by this approach, Ayodele contacted Morris, who in turn put him in touch with free-market think-tank leaders in Britain and the United States. Ever since, he has immersed himself in reading and learning free-market economics and has become an articulate public spokesman in the Nigerian media.

IPN chairman Linda Whetstone lauds Ayodele for the network he is building within Nigeria: “He is managing to get the message out, despite enormous difficulties, and to explain that it is only the institutions of the free society that can help Nigerians— limited government, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, property rights, free enterprise, and freedom of speech.”

In its first year the IPPA has sponsored two well-attended seminars for policy leaders that caught the attention of leaders in the Nigerian government. Udo Udoma, chairman of the Nigerian Senate’s powerful appropriations committee, offered this glowing endorsement: “What IPPA represents, il core values and ideas, also represents m own long-cherished ideas and values wit which Nigeria can be made great and prosperous.”

Ripe for Liberalism

Public opinion suggests that ordinar Nigerians may be ripe for free-market ideas Ayodele notes that the public exhibits ; nearly total lack of confidence in govern ment promises. Rich and poor in great num bers are opting for private education. Peopli know that government enterprises have beei huge and expensive failures. The receptioi Ayodele gets when he speaks to audience: around the country is, he says, “positive anc optimistic because Nigerians have seen ever} type of government failure imaginable anc they are willing to try something that the) see has worked in other parts of the world.’ He plans commentaries and conferences ir coming months that will explain the wisdorr of free trade, deregulation, and the expansion of private property rights.

Considering the history of Africa, the significance of Ayodele’s work in Nigeria is enormous. With nary an exception, countries that gained their independence from colonial powers in the 1960s turned immediately to socialist central planning. The intellectual classes were nearly unanimous in their support for socialism and thoughtful opposition was virtually nonexistent. Now, the abysmal poverty and corruption those policies produced are animating a whole new class of activists and intellectuals on behalf of free-market alternatives. Almost all of the new think tanks springing up, like IPPA in Nigeria and Inter-Region Economic Network in Kenya, are committed to thrusting a stake through the heart of the socialist idea.

The liberation of a continent, one nation at a time, may have begun.

Labels such as “libertarian” aren’t always illuminating. Sometimes they serve as expedient substitutes for thought—as in, “Oh, he’s one of those!” When pressed to cough up a label to describe myself, I sometimes employ “libertarian” but not without adding a caveat or two so no one assumes I’m referring to a political party or that my position on certain hot-button issues must be this or that. On other occasions I call myself a “classical liberal,” but unless I have time to explain it, confused listeners wonder how that differs from the “liberals” of today. “Voluntaryist” (of the British philosopher Auberon Herbert variety) describes my political, ethical, and economic leanings most accurately—unfortunately, though, few people have ever heard the term.

I am also other things as well. I’m an “Austrian” economist (while appreciating numerous positive contributions from other schools of thought). I’m a Christian who is also a rationalist because I believe reason in an ordered universe is a divine gift. Though I don’t embrace Ayn Rand’s atheism, like her I am a fervent advocate of capitalism who endorses man’s inalienable rights, the roles of the producer and entrepreneur, and the magnificence of the creative mind. I’m a conservative in the sense that I value many time-tested traditions, even if I oppose mandating them by legislative fiat. I’m a moralist because I think moral principles like honesty, independence, courage, and self-discipline are both good and indispensable ingredients for a free society. Readers might recall that in the January issue I happily labeled myself a latter-day “Locofoco.”

Each person’s order of values, focus of attention, and expertise are unique to him—so one can be a libertarian, broadly speaking, and still call himself an Objectivist or an Austrian or a voluntaryist or a classical liberal or a Christian or an atheist or a moralist or a conservative or even two or more of those things.

Blessed with many friends in all these camps, I endeavor to make enemies in none. I lament those occasions when disagreement leads to hostility between people who are otherwise allies on most issues. If you aim to make progress for the larger cause, then tolerance, bridge-building, and finding common ground (none of which necessitates compromise on fundamental principles) seem more appropriate than picking fights. What’s the point of self-righteous breast-beating?

While I don’t label myself an Objectivist, I love this quote (and many others) from Ayn Rand: “When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.”

A friend posted this on Facebook recently: “If FEE and other libertarian-leaning orgs would drop all their religious baggage, I could support them wholeheartedly.” I felt compelled to reply, “No one at FEE claims that you must be ‘religious’ to value and support liberty. We respect all people of faith, or no faith, so long as they do not initiate force against their fellow citizens. And because we judge people for the individuals they are, not for the ‘group’ someone says they’re in or by the label somebody attaches to them, we don’t condemn all people of faith for the wrongs of a few any more than we would condemn all atheists for the wrongs of a Stalin or a Mao. A person’s faith or lack thereof is just that—personal—and not a requirement to support property rights.”

I wasn’t trying to convert that person to my faith, nor did I seek to escalate the exchange into a parting of the ways. I attempted to defuse it by emphasizing what I thought was friendly territory: Both of us would like to see much less initiation of force in society. We live in a world where lots of misguided people are not satisfied that there’s enough of it yet. They advocate more initiation of force, as evidenced by their desires to deal with every problem under the sun by creating another tax-supported government program. I saw this Facebook acquaintance as an ally not an enemy. And that’s the way it ought to be, it seems to me, if those of us who believe in liberty really want to win.

Allow me to share with you a few paragraphs from my May 2007 Freeman column. They might form a basis for more amicable relations between factions that now see themselves as opponents:

A mature, responsible adult neither seeks undue power over other adults nor wishes to see others subjected to anyone’s controlling schemes and fantasies: This is the traditional meaning of liberty. It’s the rationale for limiting the force of government in our lives. In a free society the power of love, not the love of power, governs our behavior.

Consider what we do in our political lives these days—and an unfortunate erosion of freedom becomes painfully evident. It’s a commentary on the ascendancy of the love of power over the power of love. We have granted command of over 40 percent of our incomes to federal, state, and local governments, compared to 6 or 7 percent a century ago. And more than a few Americans seem to think that 40 percent still isn’t enough.

We claim to love our fellow citizens while we hand government ever more power over their lives, hopes, and pocketbooks. We’ve erected what Margaret Thatcher derisively termed the “nanny state,” in which we as adults are pushed around, dictated to, hemmed in, and smothered with good intentions as if we’re still children.

It boils down to this: I don’t much care what you call yourself, but if you want to see a hefty reduction in the initiation of force in society, then you’re an ally I want to collaborate with. Let’s focus not on our differences but on changing the ideas of those who are working in the other direction.