Tag: liberty

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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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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