Tag: liberty

People may love freedom, but they don’t always love the responsibility that freedom demands

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859) was a French diplomat, political philosopher and historian, best known for his works ‘Democracy in America’ and ‘The Old Regime and the Revolution’.  According to Mani Basharzad, what Tocqueville teaches us was echoed in Sir Roger Scruton, the torchbearer of conservative thought in England in the last century.

Using Tocqueville’s philosophy, Basharzad explains how freedom is lost through the lack of taking personal responsibility.

The Psychology of Freedom

The following is an extract from the article ‘Psychology, Security, and the Subtle Surrender of Freedom’ written by Mani Basharzad and published by The Daily Exonomy.  You can read the full article HERE.

Tocqueville’s special contribution lies in showing us the psychology of freedom. For him, liberty was not only a matter of institutions and individual rights, but also of the deeper attitudes that hold everything together and make freedom work. On this basis, we arrive at one of the most disturbing parts of Tocqueville’s thought: freedom can be lost in democracies through democratic means. It is not only overthrown by revolutions, coups or violent movements; it can disappear in a calm, civil and apparently legitimate way.

The shift of consciousness Tocqueville described is this: people may love freedom, but they do not always love the responsibility that freedom demands. They look for someone else to bear the responsibility that comes with freedom. And what better candidate than government? Do not trouble yourself about the uncertain future; we will decide for you. Do not worry about the consequences of your choices; we will absorb them. We will shield you from danger.All we require is a little more power, a little more of your decision-making capacity. In this world, governments do not seize liberty; people surrender it voluntarily – a ‘Brave New World’ where people love their servitude, a painless concentration camp in which, as Huxley wrote, people “in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.”

This undermines one of liberty’s strongest safeguards: community. As government replaces community, people lose the habit of solving local problems themselves and they begin to surrender their agency, expecting the state to act in their place. Eventually, they reach the condition in which, as Tocqueville wrote, “they can do almost nothing by themselves.” If citizens forget the art of cooperating with one another, of pursuing common goals and solving their own problems, Tocqueville warned that “civilisation itself would be in peril.” Citizens grow weaker, more dependent and less capable. This is not the result of brute force, but of their own choice to substitute state power for individual autonomy, community and responsibility. They give up their freedom and allow others to choose for them, lulled by the illusion that life will be easier.

At its core, the loss of freedom is psychological. It is rooted in the failure to act, the failure to exercise personal autonomy, the failure to participate in community and the constant deferral of responsibility in the hope that someone else will solve our problems. The result, Tocqueville feared, would be “an insupportable tyranny even without wishing to.” A tyranny no one wanted, yet to which everyone contributed, step by step. Freedom is lost in the same manner Hemingway’s banker went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.

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How To Make America Great Again

Donald Trump and his supporters were certain that by restoring him to the presidency, they could make America great again. They are going to be as sorely disappointed at the end of Trump’s term in office as they were after his first term in office. Trump will not make America great again.

The problem, however, is not Donald Trump. The fact is that no one can make America great again — at least not if America maintains the same political and economic systems that have characterized our nation for almost 100 years. It is those systems that constitute an insurmountable obstacle to making America great again, no matter who is elected president.

Unfortunately, however, conservative Americans are not ready to accept that. They are convinced that by electing Trump and then vesting him with unchecked, omnipotent power, he will be the “man on the white horse” who will make America great again.

It won’t happen. At the end of this road to national “greatness” lies an increasingly weakened, dysfunctional society — one in which liberty and privacy have been destroyed — one in which the American people will be existing as subservient, dependent, and fearful serfs whose purpose in life is simply to serve the state and the greater good of society.

There is one — and only one — way for America to be great again. That way is to restore the sound, founding principles of liberty of our nation and then build on them.

Obviously, this entails deep soul-searching of how we started as a nation and how we ended up where we are today. It also requires Americans to think at a higher level — one that involves principles and ideals. Let’s examine what needs to be done to restore greatness to our land.

The national-security state

America’s founding political system was a limited-government republic, one that was characterized by three separate and independent branches, with a very small military force falling under the control of the executive branch. The Constitution, which called the federal government into existence, prohibited the government from killing people without “due process of law,” a term that encompasses notice of charges and a hearing or trial where the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused has committed some crime. The Bill of Rights guaranteed that the accused had the right to trial by a jury composed at random from regular citizens in the community. The Bill of Rights also prohibited the imposition of cruel and unusual punishments.

All that changed in the late 1940s, when the federal government was converted into what is called a national-security state. It effectively involved a fourth branch of government consisting of the Pentagon, a vast and powerful military establishment, an empire of domestic and foreign military bases, the CIA, the NSA, and, to a certain extent, the FBI.

Although this conversion took place without a constitutional amendment, it constituted the most radical change in America’s political system in the history of the country. Over time, the national-security branch became the most powerful branch — the branch to which the other three branches defer, especially in foreign affairs.

Moreover, the constitutional limitations on the power of the federal government disintegrated with the conversion to a national-security state. The Pentagon and the CIA now wielded the power to engage in state-sponsored assassinations, thereby nullifying the constitutional prohibition against killing people without due process of law. They also wielded the power to inflict cruel and unusual punishments on people, including torture. They also now had the power to keep people incarcerated for as long as they wanted, ignoring the constitutional prohibition against indefinite incarceration without trial. They also wielded the power to engage in mass secret surveillance, especially through the NSA. Moreover, once U.S. officials launched their “war on terrorism” after the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon and the CIA wielded the power to nullify the right of trial by jury and employ trial by military tribunal instead.

It is worth mentioning that all of these omnipotent, dark-side powers apply not just to foreigners but also to American citizens. The fact is that Americans now live under a national-security state system in which their very own government wields the power to assassinate, torture, surveil, and indefinitely detain them. What makes the whole thing so perverse is that Americans have been indoctrinated into believing that all this tyranny is “freedom.”

It’s also worth mentioning that the conversion to a national-security state was accompanied by a foreign policy of foreign wars and interventions, as well as an empire of foreign military bases, which have been used to inflict massive death and destruction on people in foreign lands.

There is one solution to all this: Dismantle the national-security state and restore America’s founding system of a limited-government republic, with just a relatively small, basic military force — one that lacks the capability to engage in foreign wars, interventions, coups, and wars of aggression.

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A Police State Coming to a Town Near You

We have seen this before.

A foreign entity attacks American persons or property and the government warns that its sleeper cells have infiltrated the United States and it is somehow necessary to expand the powers of the government and shrink protections for civil liberties — and this shrinkage will somehow keep us all safe.

The premise of this deeply flawed argument is that less liberty produces more safety. That premise is historically and morally erroneous. Even if we had cops watching us on every street corner or F.B.I. agents virtually in every home, who will keep us safe from them? And who would want to live, who could be private and free, in such an environment?

Here is the backstory.

When James Madison referred to the creation of the American republic as an inversion, he must have been met with quizzical looks and curious laughter. He meant that throughout history, popular governments came about by monarchs and despots — the sovereign — begrudgingly giving up power. This was, to Madison, power giving liberty.

In America, however, Madison argued — following his neighbor and good friend Thomas Jefferson, who maintained that individual persons are sovereign — the government came about by an inversion of the old way. In America, liberty gave power.

Thus, at the end of the American war for independence, which began 250 years ago, there was no central government here. The king’s agents and soldiers had been chased back to England, and many of his judicial and administrative officials retreated into private life or suddenly became patriots.

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Compromised integrity: Medical professionals failed to uphold ethics and freedoms during covid

The covid pandemic exposed the ease with which democratic societies can abandon ethical principles and human rights under collective fear, with a response driven more by authoritarian impulses than science.

The medical profession failed to uphold its ethical principles, with many doctors and medical bodies complicit in enforcing government policies that disregarded patient autonomy and scientific integrity.

To reclaim ethics and freedom, the medical profession and society must speak truth to power and defend principles such as informed consent, patient autonomy and free scientific discourse.

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Perilous Times for Personal Liberty

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a socialist.|
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”
~ Rev. Martin Niemoller (1892-1984)

The history of human freedom is long, tortuous and not gratifying. It consists essentially in governments trampling the laws enacted to restrain them. It is the profound clash of natural personal freedom and the commands of the state backed by force. The constitutions of totalitarian countries are papered over with restraints on the state, but the restraints are toothless. The state does what it wants. It doesn’t take rights seriously.

In liberal democracies – with the separation of powers, and checks and balances – the state is theoretically restrained. Yet often, there, too, the restraints are paper tigers. There, too, HERE, too, the state does not take rights seriously.

Thomas Jefferson argued that in the long march of history, personal liberty shrinks and state power grows. He famously believed that only a revolution can bring about a proper reset.

All of this history and theory came into sharp focus in the past two weeks when the feds arrested a Syrian graduate student in his student housing at Columbia University in New York City and shipped him to an immigration jail in Louisiana. He is married to a native-born American, they are expecting a child in April, and he is a permanent resident alien.

Last week, the federal government arrested a Lebanese physician at Logan Airport in Boston. She is a professor of medicine at Brown University, and she, too, is a permanent resident alien.

The student was charged with immigration violations. The physician was summarily deported to Paris and then to her native Lebanon.

The charging documents filed against the student allege no crime or personal misbehavior, point to no statutory violations, and offer no evidence of the student’s danger to persons or property or the government. The papers claim that Secretary of State Marco Rubio believes that this student’s presence on the Columbia campus – given his outspoken support for a Palestinian state, the existence of which has been the public policy of the U.S. for generations – is a material impediment to the execution of American foreign policy.

There are no charging papers filed against the physician, but the government leaked that when federal agents seized her mobile phone, they determined that she had been at the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the recently murdered head of Hezbollah. She was there along with more than one million others. When asked about this, according to the government leakers, she stated that she followed Nasrallah’s religious teachings but not his political ones.

While the physician was confined at Logan, her attorneys obtained an order from a federal judge prohibiting her deportation until a hearing could be held before him. The government ignored the order.

These two arrests implicate numerous constitutionally guaranteed rights, which are generally taken for granted here.

The first is the freedom of speech. We know from the writings of James Madison – who authored the Bill of Rights – that the Founders regarded the freedom of speech as a personal individual natural right. It is also, of course, expressly protected from government interference and reprisal in the First Amendment. The courts have ruled that it protects all persons – no matter their immigration status – who may think as they wish, say what they think, publish what they say, worship or not and associate with whomever they choose.

If the government can punish the speech it or its friends and benefactors hate and fear, then the First Amendment is useless and democracy is a sham.

Also implicated in these arrests is freedom of religion and assembly. Just as the student can make any public political statement he wishes – no matter how offensive or provocative it may be to his immediate or a distant audience – the physician can attend any funeral she wishes, can associate with any mourners of her choosing, can embrace any religion and can follow any preacher.

The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of speech, religion and assembly. Without government fidelity to it, America is no longer a democracy but rather some form of conformist secular theocracy that rejects the basic values protected by the Constitution – and changes with every election.

Also implicated by these arrests is due process, guaranteed to all persons by the Fifth Amendment. At its rudimentary base, due process requires a fair hearing before a neutral arbiter before the government may interfere with life, liberty or property – and at which the government must prove personal fault.

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Why Equality Is Bad

Many people oppose the free market because it leads to inequality of wealth and income. It is unfair, they say, that some people have vastly more money than others. Some defenders of the free market respond that these inequalities, while undesirable in themselves, make the poor better off than they would be otherwise, and so should be accepted. Another argument made by defenders of the free market is that restricting inequality would interfere liberty, so that, although inequality is bad, we have to put up with it.

While it is true that inequality makes the poor better off and that restricting inequality interferes with liberty, these are not the best arguments that defenders of the free market should use. They accept that inequality is bad, but we should reject this assumption. There is nothing bad about inequality.

People are unequal in every dimension of their being, including weight, height, muscle build, intelligence, and so on. This just the way the world is. Why should we try to change it? People who attempt this have a grudge against the world. They are not satisfied with the way God created it.

And of course they can’t succeed. As the great Murray Rothbard points out, absolute equality is impossible. No two places on earth, for example, offer precisely the same view.

If we shouldn’t defend the free market by arguing that it decreases equality, what should we do? Fortunately, there are many better arguments available. I’m going to list a number of them, but if you want more details, you should read Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market and Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action.

One of the best of these arguments is that the free market makes possible mutually beneficial gains from trade. If I have something that you want and you have something I want, we can make an exchange, so we are both better off. But what if our exchange makes someone else worse off? This question is a version of the “externalities” or “market failure” argument. The claim is that some of our activities, including trade, impose costs on others. If so, this indicates a failure to define property rights. Once we do so, the so-called “problem” dissolves.

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The Many Roads To Liberty For A More Ethical Society

Most readers of my weekly column already favor a libertarian society, with either a strictly limited government or no government at all. They realize what a disaster the state has been. What are the philosophical foundations of this outlook? There are many possible answers, but in this column, I’m going to discuss three of the most important of these, the way Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe address this issue. I’m not going to take a stand on which is best but just set forward the different views and leave the choice to you.

I’ll begin with Mises, as most readers will find this the easiest to understand. Suppose you want to do something, e.g., go for a drive in the country. Why do you want to do it? There are any number of possible answers to this. We can continue to ask why you want this goal, but we can’t go on forever. Eventually, you will reach a goal which doesn’t aim at achieving anything else. You just want it. Mises calls this “an ultimate value judgment.” According to Mises, there is no way of arguing about such judgments. I can say that what you want won’t get you that value, but then your judgment isn’t ultimate.

This seems to leave us in a quandary. Do we just have people reiterating their ultimate value judgments? Mises has an ingenious answer. Regardless of their ultimate value judgments, almost everybody needs peace and prosperity to achieve them. We can all work for peace and prosperity, and Mises goes on to argue that this is through establishing and sustaining a free market economy in which the government is strictly limited in its functions to the legal system and defense.

The need for a free-market economy to secure peace and prosperity is easy to make. There are only two possible ways of organized a complex economy—capitalism and socialism. No third system is possible. And socialism, Mises’s calculation argument shows leads to complete chaos. Introducing a government intervention into the economy won’t work. It will fail to accomplish its purpose. A minimum wage law, e.g., will cause unemployment. New interventions will try to cure the problems of the first intervention, but these won’t work either. If this process continues, full-scale socialism will soon result.

Rothbard agrees with Mises’s argument, except that he thinks there are some people who don’t value peace and prosperity. They live for the moment and don’t care about whether the long-term consequences of attaining their momentary goals can be sustained. But most people aren’t like this.

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When Government Becomes The Enemy Of Liberty, Principles Are The Antidote to Politics

Only four percent “of US adults say the political system is working extremely or very well.” Sixty-five percent say we “always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics.” Yet, we keep doubling down, thinking that more attention on politics will somehow fix what ails society.

In 2020, candidates spent over $14 billion seeking the presidency. This was double the amount spent in 2016. The 2024 presidential campaign is far from over. How much will candidates spend this time to fix our attention on politics?

If you are one of those who find politics dispiriting, C. S. Lewis would understand. In his essay “Membership,” contained in his collection The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis wrote, “A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other.” Politics, Lewis explained, is not “the natural food of the mind” but a “necessary evil.” However, too much emphasis on politics has become “a new and deadly disease.”

Lewis compared fresh fruit to canned fruit. The latter can be necessary for storage, but Lewis observed he had met people who learned to prefer the tinned fruit to the fresh.

Similarly, among us are those who prefer to weigh the promises of candidates as a pathway to societal advancement rather than shore up the foundations of a free society.

If candidates still fix your mind on their empty promises, Ralph Waldo Emerson has an instant mindset cure. In his essay “Experience,” he wrote, “A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveler, but soon became narrow and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-track, and ran up a tree.”

Running ourselves up trees has consequences. Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom warned, “The use of political channels, while inevitable, tends to strain the social cohesion essential for a stable society.”

Friedman continued, “Every extension of the range of issues for which explicit agreement is sought strains further the delicate threads that hold society together.”

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TGIF: The Economic Is Personal

Contrary to accepted doctrine, we have no grounds for regarding so-called economic liberties as less important or less worthy of protection than so-called personal, or civil, liberties. That’s because we have no essential grounds for distinguishing so-called economic ends from so-called personal ends. (Let’s dispense with the “so-called” qualifier for the sake of fluency.)

Each of us pursues ends, full stop. Our ends vary widely in content and time required for accomplishment. Some are achieved quickly; others require prolonged effort and can be called projects. Some directly involve money-making; others don’t. What could be more personal than deciding how to earn a living? Why should the sort of end sought matter to the discussion of liberty?

Ends imply action, purposeful behavior. The laws and logic of human action — praxeology, Ludwig von Mises called it — thus apply to all action (the word purposeful is redundant) no matter what is sought and by whom, whether it’s Jeff Bezos or whoever succeeded Mother Teresa. The involvement of money is irrelevant. Ends, means, costs (opportunities forgone), profit, loss, and time (explicit or implicit interest) are all relevant concepts regardless of the ends we seek. As the British economist Philip Wicksteed put it, “The general principles which regulate our conduct in business are identical with those which regulate our deliberations, our selections between alternatives, and our decisions, in all other branches of life.”

Economics as an important discipline, Thomas Sowell emphasizes, is a way to analyze action, no matter its objective. It is how we understand the unplanned social consequences and institutions — property, markets, money, prices, and so on — that unfold when diverse people with divergent personal preferences aim at objectives using scarce resources that could be used in multiple ways. It’s the study of the social cooperation that emerges among widely dispersed strangers as an unintended byproduct of individuals’ pursuit of happiness. It’s not the particular objective that makes an activity “economic.” It’s an aspect of human action in itself.

Nevertheless, it is common in government offices and many people’s minds to rank economic liberty below personal liberty. Samuel Johnson said, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money,” but many disagree.

An infamous footnote in a New Deal-era Supreme Court decision, which upheld a federal ban on interstate trade in filled milk, formalized and reinforced the ominous distinction between economic and personal liberty, which had replaced an earlier more fully pro-liberty view. The footnote seemed to say that while the government probably can’t interfere with, for example, the exercise of religion or expression, it probably can interfere with the exercise of commerce and manufacturing. In the latter activities only, the government should be allowed great leeway to interfere.

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