Tag: liberty

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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Defending Individual Liberty

The ideal of individual liberty is perennially under attack not only from socialists, as one might logically expect, but also from conservatives who regard individualism as a form of selfishness. The ordinary meaning of selfishness is “caring only about what you want or need without any thought for the needs or wishes of other people,” and many conservatives see this as a major contributing factor in social decline. The conservative British journalist Nick Timothy attributes many social ills to selfishness, arguing that “our society has become more about ‘me’ than ‘we’,” leading to higher rates of crime, antisocial behavior, and a ballooning welfare state as selfish people try to take as much as possible from the public purse while contributing little or nothing to it.

This school of conservative thought regards “excessive individualism” or “hyperindividualism” as a cause of social decay. Its proponents fear that the me-me-me society is partly to blame for the decline of Western civilization and therefore argue that defending individual liberty will only fuel further societal breakdown. As the family continues to be undermined by public policy, books like #MeFirst! A Manifesto for Female Selfishness, which promote “self-worship” and advise women not to have children, are seen as the logical result of individualism. Individualism is often referred to in this context as “rampant individualism” or “atomistic individualism,” which is associated with unhappy outcomes such as increasing loneliness and depression.

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35 of Ayn Rand’s Most Insightful Quotes on Rights, Individualism, and Government

Alisa Rosenbaum was one of the most controversial writers in America’s history. Why, then, have few people heard of her? Because both people’s plaudits and their intemperate attacks have been aimed at the new name she adopted after leaving Russia for America—Ayn Rand. 

Her influence is beyond question. She sold more than 30 million books, and decades after her 1982 death, hundreds of thousands more sell each year. Atlas Shrugged has been ranked behind only the Bible as a book that influenced readers’ lives.

Some are devoted enough that Randian has become a descriptive term. Others use her name only to disparage opponents. Still others disagree with some of her ideas (e.g., while Rand was an often-strident atheist, capitalism is clearly defensible on Christian principles, and most historical defenses of liberty employed Christian rationales which conflict with Rand’s reasoning), yet find a great deal of insight in her analysis of liberty, rights and government.

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