A New Way to Look at History

ChrisR — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:10:00 GMT

Murray Rothbard wrote that Lao-Tzu was the first libertarian intellectual. I recently read Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching and received some real insight from the following passage: (Note: "Tao" is the word that Lao-Tzu used to describe God):

"Things in harmony with the Tao remain;

things that are forced grow for a while,

but then wither away."

Prior to reading the above passage, whenever I thought of history, I thought of the rise and fall of empires, the endless wars, the shifts in power, etc. Rose Wilder Lane described it best in The Discovery of Freedom:

"They replace the priest by a king, the king by an oligarchy, the oligarchs by a despot, the despot by an aristocracy, the aristocrats by a majority, the majority by a tyrant, the tyrant by oligarchs, the oligarchs by aristocrats, the aristocrats by a king, the king by a parliament, the parliament by a dictator, the dictator by a king, the king by - there's six thousand years of it, in every language.
Every imaginable kind of living Authority has been tried, and is still being tried somewhere on earth now."

To me, this was man's history.

But Lao-Tzu's words helped me to realize that I was only focusing on the "things that are forced" and that "wither away." In the meantime, I was forgetting the things that have endured and "remain."

So what exactly has remained?

Here are a few of the major things that came to mind:

Free Will - Despite every minute regulation, each person is still free to think and choose.
Voluntary Exchange - Despite every form of interventionism and protectionism, the marketplace and its wonderful bounties, has endured and remains.
Gold - Despite every attempt, over thousands of years, to abandon the medium of exchange chosen by free individuals, gold has always made its return. Even today, gold is priced as a currency in the marketplace, rather than exclusively for its direct and industrial uses.
Peace - Despite the countless wars that have been fought, peace has yet to be stamped out.

When looked at from this point of view, history takes on a new light.

Love of Liberty : history

A New Way to Look at History