There is a growing subset of consumers who would prefer not to buy their milk this way. They want it unpasteurized, unhomogenized—in a word, “raw.” They would prefer to drink their milk as humans have consumed it for centuries, which is also how every single signer of the U.S. Constitution drank it.

To procure such a basic product, however, these consumers—with some exceptions—are forced to break the law. The basic retail sale of raw milk for human consumption is legal in only eight states—Arizona, California, Connecticut, Maine, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New Mexico, and Washington. Its sale for human consumption across state lines is illegal nationwide. In some other states raw milk can be sold at the farm site only, sold through “cow share” programs, or legally marketed as “pet food.” Seventeen states completely forbid the sale of raw milk in any way.

How did this happen? We all learned in childhood about Louis Pasteur’s development of pasteurization in the mid-1800s. For mass-produced milk in an age before refrigeration, pasteurization was indeed a godsend. Early in the twentieth century, as people died at alarming rates due to contaminated milk from filthy urban dairy centers, pasteurization caught on as a hot market trend. In a time when milk collection and storage on large-scale farms was unsanitary and unrefrigerated (and when additives as diverse as marigold petals and animal brains were placed in milk to add body), pasteurization helped save lives. Thus people were willing to pay for it. But then one city after another began to mandate the process through legislation. In 1948 Michigan became the first state to ban the sale of unpasteurized milk, and other states soon followed suit. In 1986 a federal judge ordered that interstate shipments of raw milk be banned, further limiting supply for consumers.

Now, despite advances in dairy-production techniques, it doesn’t matter how clean the equipment or how healthy the cow; raw milk is either illegal or highly suspect, and state and federal bureaucracies see it as a threat to the population. Regulation overstepped the free market and did an end run around common sense.

Raw-milk advocates argue that milk in its pure state is quite beneficial to health. According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, a leading natural-foods organization, raw milk reduces the incidence of asthma, eczema, and hay fever in children. Unpasteurized milk also aids the body’s natural digestive system. Pasteurization, the Foundation insists, kills helpful bacteria and breaks down delicate proteins in milk, leading to the dairy intolerance seen in so many individuals in this modern age. Advocates also state that unpasteurized milk strengthens the immune system and provides optimal growth and development for young people.

The opinion of government officials, backed up by the bulk of the medical community, is that every bit of that is hogwash. A joint press release from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, dated March 1, 2007, reminds consumers “of the dangers of drinking milk that has not been pasteurized.” Among the litany of diseases said to be carried by raw milk are “listeriosis, salmonellosis, campylobacteriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria and brucellosis.” It is enough to make one wonder how Amish communities manage to survive.

The FDA/CDC claims that “There is no meaningful nutritional difference between pasteurized and raw milk.” The Price Foundation retorts that no research is cited by the FDA/CDC to substantiate such claims. The press release also states that “From 1998 to May 2005 CDC identified 45 outbreaks of foodborne illnesses,” accounting for “1,007 illnesses, 107 hospitalizations, and two deaths.” Aside from the fact that these are minuscule numbers for a population of nearly 300 million being tracked over seven years, there seems to be little evidence to back up the figures. Thomas Bartlett, in an article on raw milk (“The Raw Deal,” October 1, 2006), went looking for such cases of illness. In addition to finding no anecdotal evidence whatsoever, he also asked John Sheehan, then-director of the FDA’s dairy and egg safety division, for evidence linking raw milk to deadly disease outbreaks.

Sheehan admitted that he didn’t know of any such cases in the United States in the past 20 years. Nevertheless, the official line on raw milk is so ingrained as to be farcical. In interviewing a Maryland state health official about raw milk sales, Bartlett was told selling raw milk was as bad as selling marijuana, and the official compared such producers to heroin dealers.

Indeed, the question is far more important than, “Is raw milk beneficial?” or even, “Is raw milk safe?” It is this: What right does the state have to outlaw the sale of unpasteurized milk in the first place?

Imagine the case of Mark Nolt of New Line, Pennsylvania. Nolt was arrested—arrested—last May in a sting operation in which undercover officials purchased raw milk from his farm. Nolt, a Mennonite farmer with ten children, was fined $4,040, had his equipment and products seized, and was threatened with jail if he tried to sell raw milk again. His case is not unique. Nolt’s spokesman at his trial, Jonas Stoltzfus, eloquently summed up the situation: “This issue has very little to do with raw milk and health, and everything to do with freedom.”

Controlling the Milk Supply

But why milk? Indeed, as the 2008 pepper scare has proven, harmful bacteria can find their way to many other food sources. However, milk is different from most other food products. It is a staple among staples. To control the milk supply is to control the food supply.

Pasteurization is not a cheap process, and therefore the legal demand for pasteurization favors large producers. A small, independent dairy farm may very well not be able to afford pasteurization equipment (not at government standards, at least), and thus micro-dairies can rarely operate legally on their own. With the dairy industry more centralized, it becomes easier to track and regulate—and control.

Control of the milk supply has been a primary step in the state’s efforts to control the larger food supply. Agriculture continues to fall further and further under the eye of government regulation, as do businesses as diverse as potato-chip manufacturers and fast-food restaurants. The USDA, FDA, and myriad other state and federal agencies make no bones about their goal of controlling every morsel Americans consume—all for our own good, of course.

And where better to start than with milk? Think of the psychological benefits for the state emanating from such regulation. If a product as central and wholesome as milk can only be safe through government control, reliance on the paternalistic state grows. Has it worked? Ask a random acquaintance if he would consider drinking unpasteurized milk. You may very well get a look of horror in return. Why do people feel that way? Simply because they have been indoctrinated to feel that way. Why not be just as accepting of government regulation over their mayonnaise or their chicken or their lettuce? How about their water supply or the cars they drive or how warm they keep their homes in the wintertime? Though not necessarily a conscious progression, control by the state, when left unchecked, simply grows and expands naturally.

As ingrained in our social conscience as pasteurization has become, it is hard for many to step back and realize just how preposterous milk laws happen to be. One must ask if the many citizen-farmers who valiantly fought for liberty two centuries ago could have ever envisioned a “free” state in which one citizen would be legally barred from selling milk from his cow to another citizen. Even King George III would have laughed at that idea.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) provides a useful example. Established as part of the New Deal in the 1930s, it was a favorite program of Franklin Roosevelt’s. Under the TVA the federal government built dams and generated hydroelectric power for residents of theTennessee Valley. In the 1920s President Calvin Coolidge vetoed a TVA bill twice, and President Hoover vetoed it once. Both men believed that federal funding was unconstitutional, but FDR disagreed and signed it into law in 1933.

Many historians have praised the TVA as a centerpiece of the New Deal. “The TVA,” wrote William Leuchtenburg, dean of New Deal historians, “was the most spectacularly successful of the New Deal agencies, not only because of its achievements in power and flood control, but because of its pioneering in areas from malaria control to library bookmobiles, from recreational lakes to architectural design.”

Most historians have agreed.

But as TVA grew, some observers noticed problems. Standard bureaucratic inefficiency was one. Second were the Tennesseans who had to be relocated because of the flooding of land and destruction of property. Third were the existing private companies, such as the Tennessee Electric Light and Power Company, that had to compete with the taxpayer-subsidized TVA.

In fact, the taxpayer subsidy for TVA created what economist Henry Hazlitt called an “optical illusion.” “Here is a mighty dam, a stupendous arc of steel and concrete . . . .” Hazlitt observed, “[a]nd it is all presented . . . as a net economic gain without offsets.”

But 98 percent of the American population was subsidizing the 2 percent in the Tennessee Valley. “Again,” Hazlitt concluded, “we must make an effort of the imagination to see the private power plants, the private homes, the typewriters and television sets that were never allowed to come into existence because of the money that was taken from people all over the country to build the photogenic Norris Dam.”

What appeared to some Tennesseans to be an “economic miracle” was merely a transfer of wealth. But the voters in Tennessee made sure that they protected the TVA subsidy, and it has persisted and increased over time.

The case for the TVA (voters improving their lives through a federal subsidy) and the case against the TVA (bureaucratic inefficiencies plus the drain of taxpayer dollars) became standard arguments used to support or oppose other federal subsidies—both during and after the New Deal years.

Then came William U. Chandler with a devastating book, The Myth of TVA, written in 1983. Chandler said the problem was more complicated than that of the whole nation subsidizing a small part. He said the Tennessee Valley’s prosperity was actually being held back by the TVA.

Chandler’s evidence was astonishing. For example, Georgia, which had nothing equivalent to the TVA, and Tennessee had nearly identical levels of income before the TVA, but during the 1940s and 1950s Georgia (and other states nearby) began pulling ahead of Tennessee. “Among the nine states of the southeastern United States,” Chandler concluded, “there has been essentially an inverse relationship between income per capita and the extent to which the state was served by TVA. . . .”

How can receiving a giant dam and reduced costs of electricity stymie economic development? Chandler concluded that the cheap electricity gave farmers in Tennessee incentives to remain in small-scale agriculture rather than move into more promising areas of manufacturing, industry, and services. Meanwhile, many farmers in Georgia and North Carolina improved their education and moved to Atlanta, Raleigh, or Charlotte to start or work for businesses.

Chandler further discovered that people in the TVA area were even slower to adopt and use electricity than were people just outside the TVA area. With their ever-increasing incomes, Georgians and North Carolinians could afford more electricity than the more stagnant population in the Tennesse Valley

Chandler’s research should make all students of government intervention pause. The massive subsidy for the TVA hindered economic growth in the exact area targeted for federal help. If the TVA example is repeated elsewhere, that is a powerful argument against government subsidies—perhaps the strongest argument that can be made (outside the constitutional argument).

In fact, the TVA lesson does have widespread applicability. One of America’s first large subsidies was a multimillion-dollar gift to Edward Collins in the 1840s to build and operate four steamships to and from England to deliver passengers, freight, and mail. With the cushion of federal aid, Collins had no incentive to innovate with steel hulls or engine technology. Like the farmers of the Tennessee Valley, he could make do with federal help so why try something different? Within ten years Collins had lost the competitive race to Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had no federal subsidy but showed great innovation in steamship design and the economics of steamship operation.

The Union Pacific received tens of millions of dollars in federal aid and millions of acres of land to build a transcontinental railroad that was not as straight, not as well built, and not as stable as the Great Northern Railroad, which received not a cent of federal aid. The builders of the Union Pacific constructed their line to receive subsidies, not to transport passengers in the long run. James J. Hill had to compete with the Union Pacific, and he built the Great Northern piece by piece with the best track and over the best terrain possible. During the Panic of 1893, the Union Pacific went broke, but the Great Northern made profits each year. In some ways, the federal subsidy was actually the undoing of the Union Pacific.

Subsidies Change Behavior

Subsidies change the way the recipients behave, and these changes often work against, not for, them. That is the neglected argument against opening the door to federal aid in the first place; but it is an argument that needs to be studied and forcefully made.

The idea that recipients of subsidies are damaged by subsidies applies to individuals as well as businesses. The example of the rise of the welfare state is pertinent here. Americans naturally have compassion for people who are poor but who are trying to improve their lives. Federal aid, however, can stifle individual initiative. That is one reason charity was a private function in the United States so long. Private givers can more easily determine the quantity and duration of aid needed to restore broken lives.

During the 1960s, under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, money to unwed mothers increased substantially. As a result, recipients had an incentive not to get married or go to work because those activities would cause them to lose their federal assistance. Thus American taxpayers were not the only losers in the program. Recipients who never developed their talents were losers as well.

Most students of government intervention know that federal subsidies are a drain on those who pay for them. What needs more emphasis is that sometimes the recipients of tax dollars become worse off as well.

The debate over free trade is, and has been for over 200 years, quite contentious. In reading over the historical debates, it often seems as if no ground has been made by the advocates of a global, borderless economy. Indeed, this is what makes reading Adam Smith, John Bright, and Frédéric Bastiat essential even today—their arguments seem to have lost none of their relevancy.

But if the ideological battle is still in its early stages, the scope and depth of free trade has zoomed ahead. As much as libertarians may complain about the rise of supra-organizations like the WTO and bilateral trade agreements supervised by government and corporate interests, it’s hard to argue with the data: the world is perhaps witnessing the freest movement of goods and people in history. It is worth taking stock of this fact before we go back to haranguing the Lou Dobbses of the world.

The problem, however, with reaching a new level of anything positive is the tendency to get complacent and admire the view.

Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard, seems to think that we’ve reached the End of Free Trade History. In an op-ed penned last March for the Financial Times, he argued: “[N]o country’s growth prospects are significantly constrained today by the lack of openness of the international economy. Even if [the] Doha [round of trade talks] fails, poor countries will have enough access to rich country markets to achieve what countries like China, Vietnam, and India have been able to do. Closed markets may have been a fundamental problem during the 1950s and 1960s—in the early days of the current wave of globalization; it is hard to believe that they still are.”

Can this be so? Have we had so much global integration that we can kick back, consolidate the growth, and live fat and happy from here until eternity? While we may one day reach a point when all the world can buy goods from whomever it wishes, the young 21st century is far from that ideal.

The first, and most obvious, rebuttal is that it’s no great feat to reach the income levels of India, China, and Vietnam. China, the country from which I write, is incredibly poor. While the view out the window of my Shanghai apartment is glitz and glamour, a short trip out of the city and into the Chinese countryside would persuade anyone to postpone popping the champagne. According to the most recent data, China’s per capita GDP is $7,600, while in the United States it’s around $43,000.

India fares much worse, despite the best efforts of Tom Friedman to position the country as the greatest economic competitor to the United States. While to many the entire country is epitomized by the call centers of Bangalore, India is astoundingly poor. Its GDP has not yet reached $1 trillion, even with the second largest population in the world. What countries like India and China have achieved is remarkable, but they could still use a heavy dose of trade-led development.

Next, it’s hard to grasp exactly what Rodrik means when he asserts that developing nations have as much access to the global economy as they need. Enough for what? the reader is tempted to ask. Even the wealthiest societies on the planet could benefit from a rapid and complete opening up of trade. As the division of labor expands and individuals are allowed to further specialize, society benefits from the increased production and efficiency. The more individuals that are brought within this fold, the greater the benefits to all of society. Within the United States, billions of dollars are lost to stupid and wasteful protectionist programs (the much-maligned agriculture subsidies being but one such example). And if the country stands to gain significantly from opening up even further, imagine the benefits that could accrue to less-developed nations.

Part of the problem (or more accurately, part of the misunderstanding) stems from the habit of social scientists to view independent political units as the most important variable. But free trade is important to individuals, not nations. Thus while comparative advantage is usually discussed in reference to Country X producing widgets and Country Y producing ridgets, it’s more to the point to say that individuals specialize in producing certain goods. (As Kierkegaard seemed to suggest, society is an abstraction without hands.)

Take one group of individuals who would greatly benefit from increased access to the world’s economy: poor Third World farmers. According to Kym Anderson and Ernesto Valenzuela of the World Bank, “[D]eveloping country farmers . . . account for 43 percent of global employment, 64 percent of global agricultural value added, and a similarly large share of global poverty as measured by earnings of less than $1 a day.” The scandal of rich-country agricultural protectionism is now notorious, with all sides of the political spectrum seemingly in agreement that the barriers to trade must come down. Anderson and Valenzuela estimate that an end to protectionism (that is, full liberalization) would provide an incredible boost to the output of developing countries.

What He Got Right

While I’ve focused mainly on what Rodrik got wrong in his piece, it’s worth mentioning what he got right. His main thrust was that the cheerleaders of globalization, those who unquestioningly support the current modus operandi of globalization, will ultimately undermine free trade. Here Rodrik may be right, but for the wrong reasons. Rich nations, he argues, should be allowed wiggle room in trade agreements to boost their welfare state (or as he calls it, their social contract). The trade-at-all-cost element blocks this meaningful reform, he argues. But the real reason the current cheerleaders of globalization threaten free trade is that they so often fail to point out how rigged the system is. While many may feel that to criticize the WTO is to provide succor to the protectionists, the truth is that by not giving the WTO the hairy eyeball, the true goal of free trade is obscured or even lost.

Given the obvious exclusion from the global trading order that so many from the developing world face, Rodrik should know better than to argue that they’re players in the world economy. For myriad reasons, governments across the globe keep their subjects from interacting fully with individuals beyond their political borders. This is a human-rights abuse in the true sense of the term.

For centuries liberalism has meant a faith in individual liberty—the greatest possible freedom from both private dictation and from regulation by the government. Historic liberals have opposed increased taxing and spending and lawmaking by political rulers because these always restricted the ability of the individual to live his own life.

Yet today, many of those in America who call themselves liberals advocate programs the effect of which is to tax away more and more of everyone’s income and to spend more and more billions of dollars regulating the living, working, and thinking of not only all Americans, but all the rest of the world.

Of course, this false liberalism throws a smoke screen of “national defense” in front of its conniving to socialize the industries and government of the United States. There is a serious conflict of opinion as to how and where and when the enemies of our free people are planning to strike and will strike the most effective blows against our liberties.

We can, however, separate the two areas in which the war to overthrow our government and to enslave our people will be waged indeed, is being waged. We can assign to the armed forces only the military defense of the geographical area of the United States. We can assign to ourselves the responsibility for a civilian defense of the American people against their most dangerous enemies. These are the foes of our own household. These are the aggressive American socialists who call themselves liberals, but who have been working for a generation with tragic success to corrupt the minds of the American people, to submerge our love of liberty in a desire for security, to destroy our faith in ourselves as individuals, to destroy our confidence in a free economy, and to transform the limited powers of our free government into the unlimited tyrannical powers of a socialistic state.

This has not been a vast conspiracy in which millions of people have intentionally played a part. Instead of willful subversion there has been, on the contrary, a gradual conversion of millions of people, in one minority group after another, to a state paternalism that they believed would relieve them of burdens and problems that seemed too heavy for them to handle by themselves.

To gain a common understanding of what happened, let us glance back over the years between the beginning of the Great Depression in I929 and the end of the Second World War in 1945. Despite the lavish outpouring of public funds, the spending of higher taxes, and the Increased mortgaging of our future, there was no adequate relief of the depression in America until preparations for war, and then war itself, set the government free to raise taxes and borrow money and make expenditures utterly beyond even political justification, except by the magic of those words: “Necessary for national defense and self-preservation.” This whole experience might well have provided a great lesson in liberalism if our politicians and our educators had been inclined to teach this lesson. It would have been so easy to point out that we were achieving full employment and prosperity on a temporary inflationary stimulant which could not be wisely established as a permanent policy. But who can convince a man drinking his fourth cocktail that he should quit drinking liquor tonight and cut it out entirely tomorrow?

So when the war ended, millions of people had been unconsciously converted to state socialism. They repeated day after day the stock arguments of socialists: The problems of the modern world are too great for individuals. They can be solved only by collective action. Collective action on a large scale must be government action. It needs the support of government money raising and spending and, above all, it needs the support of government coercion. The citizen will only accept a limited discipline in voluntary organizations; and therefore to subject him to adequate collective action in the modern world he must come under the enforced discipline of government operations. This is, in pleasing, insidious language, the justification of a slave state.

Today, the state socialism our backsliding liberals still admire must be given a more acceptable name. So we have now the Welfare State, which in simple language means a half socialist state. This is a project of the character of Fabian socialism. We move gradually down the primrose path, denying all the time that that is what we are doing. We do not take over government operation of all public utilities. We simply go into the business of owning and operating public utilities to a sufficiently large extent so as to use their tax free, subsidized service to discredit private operation and to discourage or prevent private expansion.

We do not collectivize our farms or nationalize our industries. We simply make all farmers dependent on the government. We simply regulate and tax all business in great detail and authorize organized labor monopolies to hamper and coerce private enterprise, so that eventually it may be found necessary to “liberate” business altogether from private management.

We do not fix wages for labor, but simply fix a minimum wage as a basis for all wages and then do everything we can politically to aid labor unions to dictate terms of employment to industrial management.

How absurd it is to call this gradual creation of a socialist state the advance of liberalism! It is a fact, boasted by the American boss of the Communist party, that we have moved further along the road to state socialism than even Great Britain did with a socialist government. Yet, a large majority of those who support the socialist program of a welfare state do so in a blissful delusion that they are liberal thinkers. The truth is that they are reactionaries who are selling their liberties for a temporary gain of self-interest, and justifying their folly as humanitarianism.

It is easy to understand how farmers can be induced to vote for a man who promises a government guarantee of a fair price, or how workers can be seduced by government support in raising wages. It is easy to understand how the aged, the sick, the unemployed, or unemployable will vote for government relief of the unfortunate. It is easy to see how government favoritism for many minorities that are distressed, or feel themselves oppressed, will add up to a favoritism for a substantial majority of voters who will in grateful blindness support a paternalistic government.

But the total result of these and similar expansions of government is to weaken the nation’s productive energies which rise out of individual self-reliance and initiative. We make more and more millions of voters dependent largely on government favor until eventually, to use an old but solid phrase, we make the ruling class, which is the government, the masters instead of the servants of the people. No man with an educated intelligence and a proclaimed intellectual capacity can be excused for telling a people that they can go into debt indefinitely because they owe the money to themselves. No such man can be excused for advising labor unions to raise wages so high as to price their product out of the market. No such man can be excused for criticizing profits as wrongful when they are purely voluntary compensation for the use of private property. No such man can be excused for denying or concealing the fact that the maintenance of rights of private property is essential to the maintenance of liberty. No such man can be excused for deceiving poor people with claims that they do not pay taxes just because they have an income tax exemption. No such man can be excused for defending the fraud of a public social security reserve that provides no reserve and no security.

To sum it all up, no such man can be excused for arguing that a retreat to the historically proven failure of a socialistic state is a liberal advance for a free people.

Recently, walking down a busy street in one of our largest cities, I observed the thousands of free men and women crowding the stores to buy what they wanted to buy. I passed restaurants jammed with people eating the food they chose to eat. I thought of the hundreds of thousands of workers in factories, in shops, and in transportation, earning the highest wages paid in the world and working at jobs for which they were chosen in an actual competition of employers to obtain capable helpers. It suddenly struck me how amazingly free millions of American workers and their families were in cities and on farms throughout the United States. They were freer than workers anywhere else in the world to seek and obtain, in a competitive system, the best employment of which they were capable; and free to improve themselves and demonstrate their capacity for better employment.

Then I thought how shrunken would be the lives and liberties and ambitions of all these people under a socialist dictatorship; how they would be confined by thousands of regulations and dictations of bureaucrats to accept the jobs and the wages, the living and working conditions fixed for them by political judgments and, worst of all, by inevitable political favoritism.

So the thought came to me suddenly and clearly that the overwhelming majority of mature Americans don’t want socialism, don’t want to be dependent upon the political rulers of government. If there were visible armed forces marching against them to subject them to a socialistic tyranny, they would take up arms and fight to the death to preserve their individual liberties and to save themselves from the oppression of an all-powerful government.

But that is not the way in which the chief enemy of the American people is gradually gathering power to destroy their liberties. True it is that the militant socialists of Russia, the communists, inspire us with fear that they may embark upon the physical conquest of the United States by the gathering of armed forces. But a far greater threat confronts us in the weakening of our resistance to any foreign aggression by the corruption of our thinking by ourselves, by the brainwashing of the American people by continual internal propaganda in favor of the gradual transformation of our government from a protector of individual liberty into the paternalistic ruler of our lives.

Here is where backsliding liberals are doing the greatest harm to the American people. They misdirect public opinion on the recurring issues as to how far the government should go in protecting and promoting the general welfare, and how far such government activities destroy self-reliance and deny fundamental freedoms. Worse than this, they never admit but always deny that they are leading us deeper and deeper into the tyranny of a totalitarian government. []

From an address to the Wausau, Wisconsin, Chamber of Commerce, March 1, 1955.

Restrained By Law

Do you realize how much your economic freedom is restrained by law? The law regulates prices, hours of labor, wage rates, income which you can retain, inheritance, importation, interest rates, education, gifts, banking, installment selling, railroad rates, prices of farm products, insurance, employment. You must get a permit to enter business, to enter a profession, to establish a bus line. There are export subsidies, domestic subsidies, excise taxes. To enforce the legal interferences with trade, you support an army of agents, lawyers, judges, collectors, inspectors, clerks, arbitrators, conciliators, tax gatherers, and members of innumerable boards and commissions. You are enmeshed in reports, forms, questionnaires, indictments, complaints, laws, regulations, hearings, conferences, and court trials. These interventions are worse than useless; they reduce output, obstruct trade, paralyze enterprise.

John W. Scoville, Labor Monopolies—or Freedom.
New York: Committee for Constitutional Government

He’s the one from whom the money is taken to subsidize the others

A nation begins to decline when it neglects its own classics. But no trend is necessarily permanent, and classics can come back. Take the case of William Graham Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, for example. Published originally in 1883, this little classic of individualism was long unavailable to the general reader. But in the last few years, it has been made available by several different organizations.

What Social Classes Owe to Each Other has had the strangest of histories. It was written at a time when the fallacies of Welfare State thinking were just beginning to take hold in America. A professor of economics at Yale in the early Eighties, Sumner sensed the oncoming socialistic deluge when it was the merest trickle. He could hardly know in 1883 that Edward Bellamy was already meditating in Boston on the notions of the Utopian socialists, and getting ready to write his Looking Backward: 2000-1887, a book which does its best to suffuse the idea of the regi mented slave state with a romantic glow. He could hardly have been aware that out in Chicago young Henry Demarest Lloyd was predicting (in the Chicago Tribune, of all places) that “the unnatural principles of the competitive economy of John Stuart Mill will be as obsolete as the rules of war by which Caesar slaughtered the fair-haired men, women and children of Germania.” Nor could he have known that in Indiana, Socialist Eugene V. Debs was taking his first flier in politics, as city clerk of Terre Haute. Yet Sumner felt in his bones that the world of his youth was about to shift on its axis. Faith in individualism was weakening; Sumner knew it from reading the accounts of speeches in the papers. The willingness of the Gilded Age plutocracy to accept government favors in the form of tariffs also impressed him as a sign of decadence; no free society, as he well knew, could be built on hypocrisy.

A profound student of veering social currents, Sumner set his face uncompromisingly against the rising Welfare State principles of the New Day. The record of history told him that the Welfare State inevitably becomes the Ill-fare State. In What Social Classes Owe to Each Other Sumner tried to underscore the lesson of history by bringing simple arithmetic to bear on the Welfarists’ proposition. The state, as Sumner said, is All-of-Us organized to protect the rights of Each-of-Us. But when Some-of-Us try by political manipulation to live off Others-of-Us, rights necessarily go out the window. In Sumner’s estimation the type and formula of most Welfare—or Illfare—State schemes come down to this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The vice of such scheming is that C is never consulted in the matter; he is simply clubbed by the police power of the state into diverting a part of his earnings to someone he has never seen. C is very likely a most responsible citizen; he is generally the type of person who supports himself uncomplainingly, sees to it that his children are educated, and contributes to the voluntary charities of his neighborhood. If C has any surplus over what it takes to live and provide for his children and his locality, he generally saves it and invests it, thereby adding to the capital equipment by which the nation’s standard of living is maintained and raised.

Sumner called C the Forgotten Man. The phrase was doubly prophetic; for by a most ironical sequel Franklin D. Roosevelt picked it up in the Nineteen-thirties and applied it, not to Sumner’s C, but to Sumner’s D. This simple act of misappropriation, which made C more forgotten than ever, did much to get the Welfare State notions of the New Deal accepted by a troubled nation. Misapplied or not, there’s nothing like a good phrase backed by a golden voice to win votes.

The attempted rehabilitation of D at the expense of C never even really served its alleged purpose of helping D. It is written in the arithmetic books of the seventh grade that D is hurt, not helped, when A and B scheme to mulct C of the fruits of his toil. Now it cannot be that Americans have actually forgotten their seventh-grade arithmetic; they have merely ceased to apply it to their thinking on social matters. Any child ought to be able to see that if C has, let us say, $3000, it will buy just $3000 worth of goods and no more. Let us say that A and B take $1000 of C’s money to spend on D. Some of the $1000 must be used to support the sterile machinery of state collection, bookkeeping, and redistribution. But after the politicians and their office-holding dependents have taken their cut of the $1000, D gets some of the money. In the natural course of events he uses it—to consume. What is left to C of the original $3000 also goes largely into consumption; there simply isn’t enough left of the total to enable C to save anything out for investment. So under Welfare politics there is no addition out of the $3000 to the capital stock of the nation. Thus, because of the schemings of A and B allegedly in behalf of D, the industrial system does not expand. The upshot of this is that D is prevented from getting a job. He remains at the mercy of A and B, who continue to take it out on C.

Since A and B are of the predatory type of do-gooder who insists on being unselfish with other people’s money, they are not likely to get around to taking a refresher course in seventh-grade arithmetic. But if D has any pride at all, he must someday begin to apply what he learned in the seventh grade to his own social plight. Does he want forever to remain a ward of A and B, getting a continually decreasing portion of consumer goods as the population grows and presses against the limits of a static industrial system? Wouldn’t it be far better for him to throw in his lot with C in an effort to expand the capital plant and so create a productive niche for himself in society?

The reason why D has not been able to see that his welfare depends on making a common front with C is that A and B have learned to delude him with inflationary tricks. A and B are always pointing out that the “gross national product” is up by so many billions of dollars over the product of ten years ago. What they do not bother to tell D is that the value of the dollar has been debauched, and that it is no longer a good measuring stick for anything. It is true enough that the gross national product of the United States has continued to increase. Despite the scheming of A and B, the Forgotten Man has been able to squeeze out some money for investment even after he has paid most of his savings out to support D. But by all the logic of arithmetic the United States would be far richer today in capital equipment if Franklin Roosevelt had made the correct identification of William Graham Sumner’s Forgotten Man. If C had been left un-mulcted, there would be more for everybody.

Sumner is usually thought of as a heartless logician, a basically uncharitable man. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other is, however, almost Biblical in its understanding of the “law of sympathy.” At the very best, says Sumner, one of us fails in one way and another in another, “if we do not fail altogether.” It will not do to condone failure abstractly; but if a man happens to be pinned to earth by a fallen tree, it is scarcely appropriate to his immediate predicament to deliver him a lecture on carelessness. True, the man may have been careless; but a lecture won’t get the tree off his leg. Amid the chances and perils of life, says Sumner, men owe to other men their aid and sympathy. But aid and sympathy must operate in the field of private and personal relationships under the regulation of reason and conscience. If men trust to the state to supply “reason and conscience,” they so deaden them-selves that the “law of sympathy” ceases to operate anywhere. Men who shrug off their personal obligations become hard and unfeeling, and it is small wonder then that they are entirely willing to go along with hard and unfeeling politics. It is when he decides to “let the state do it” that the humanitarian ends up by condoning the use of the guillotine for the “betterment” of man.

So far as I am aware, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other is not used as a text in any college in the country. If it is reprinted often enough, however, the time will come when it will make its way back to the campus. Students are curious even when they are deluded and misled; and when books are available, students will find their way to them. []

“William Graham Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, 146 pages, paper-bound, may be secured from FEE, Irvington-on-Hudson, N. Y., $1.25 each.

Robert Frost, from “The Listener,” August 26, 1954

William Graham Sumner