Comes The Dawn
7. Pre-Emptors: Agents of Destruction
PRE-EMPTORS: AGENTS OF DESTRUCTION
You can only make men free when they are inwardly bound by their own sense of responsibility.
—WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING
I am indebted to Verna Hall for a profound bit of wisdom:
To the extent that an individual turns the responsibility for self over to another or allows government to take it away, to that extent is the very essence of one’s being removed.
With this insight, let us reflect on the radically contrasted types of society in which men have found themselves. The most common type, by far, is the Command Society, bearing many names: Serfdom, Feudalism, Mercantilism, Socialism, Nazism, Fascism, Communism, the Planned Economy, the Welfare State. This type is featured by commanders ranging from kings and commissars to present-day politicians and bureaucrats—all engaged in running people’s lives. The Command Society has never been totally imposed, but only approximated; if fully implemented, everyone would perish! Even in Russia and China there has been and still is an enormous leakage of creative human energy.
The alternative is the Free Society, with each individual in charge of his own life. This is an ideal, in a sense—never fully achieved—most nearly approximated for a time in England and even more so in the U.S.A.
So-called “citizens” of the Command Society are responsible to political overlords. Self-realization is the exception and not the rule. The highest expectations for the vast majority are crumbs from the ruler’s table. Can this be all there is to man’s earthly purpose?
The essential feature of a Free Society is responsibility for self. I am responsible, not for you or anyone else, but solely for my own growth in awareness, perception, consciousness. My responsibility is thus to truth, righteousness, Infinite Consciousness. Responsibility for self is the very essence of individuality. It is the intellectual, moral, and spiritual rock that serves as the foundation for human emergence. As Hocking wrote, men are only “free when they are inwardly bound by their own sense of responsibility.”
This thesis requires answers to at least three questions:
1. Why are pre-emptors agents of destruction?
2. Who, aside from political dictocrats, are pre-emptors?
3. What might the remedies be?
Take note of this fact: Any time any activity is pre-empted, all thought as to how it would be conducted by free and self-responsible people is deadened. For instance, when governments take command of welfare problems—pre-empts them—citizens tend to lose personal concern for those in distress. “That’s the government’s problem!” This is how political and bureaucratic authors of state welfarism become agents of destruction. What have they destroyed? Nearly all thought as to how citizens would behave in the absence of such political intervention. How might you and I otherwise tend to act? We would share our last loaf of bread with a neighbor in distress. The practice of Judeo-Christian charity would be extravagant beyond all present expectations. Why, then, is private charity so little in evidence today? Because governments have pre-empted that function.
For another example that more clearly makes the point, consider mail delivery.
Our postal system is a socialistic institution—a mechanism of the Command Society. Its record? As all users know, a dramatic increase in rates, enormous deficits mounting annually, and service deteriorating rather than improving.
Observe the effect of this pre-emption: no intelligent thought of what this type of communication would be like among a free and self-responsible people. And for more reasons, far more, than first meets the eye. Conceded, there are many among us who urge the total abandonment of this Command Society mechanism but without the slightest idea of what the freedom alternative would be. Why this blindness as to the results of freedom? The answer is: the actions of free men are quite impossible to foresee!
It is one thing to believe that competition affords more efficient service than does a monopoly. Indeed, this very belief is implicit in the arguments of government officials who refuse to permit private delivery of mail: the U.S. Postal Service couldn’t stand the competition; someone else would do it more efficiently and at less cost to the customer. But as long as the monopoly is coercively maintained, there is no legal way to prove that the cost of performing an identical service would be lower under competition—or how much lower. Nor can it be proved beyond doubt that competitive private enterprise would indeed perform precisely the same services now available through the Postal monopoly.
But this is the whole point of anyone who believes in the blessings of competition as the most efficient way to provide the goods and services customers are willing and able to pay for. Such faith must concede that no one knows or can know in advance just the form in which the postal service would emerge and develop were everyone free to devote his own ingenuity and time and scarce resources toward serving the ever-changing demands of willing customers in a free market.
If all those changing conditions could be foreseen by any one individual, there is no logical reason why he could not make socialism work. But that is the whole case against socialism and for competitive private enterprise: the unknown is not foreseeable or predictable with certainty; conditions change, and freedom affords us the best possible chance to cope with those changes. If one believes the Postal monopoly should be abolished, it is in part because he has witnessed miraculous market developments in the delivery of items other than mail.
Take voice delivery. How far could the human voice be delivered prior to the beginning of the Bell system a century ago? Perhaps 50 yards! In the meantime—the miracle of the market—around the earth, not at the speed of sound but at the speed of light, that is, in the same fraction of a second you could hear my voice half the span of a football field. Those who find this not particularly amazing are nonetheless reluctant to entrust the delivery of mail to the unhampered and unpredictable ingenuity of a free and self-responsible people!
Suppose Leonardo da Vinci, who believed that men might some day fly like birds, had been clairvoyant enough to see five centuries into the future. We can imagine his amazement at today’s planes and their performance. Yet we lack the imagination to visualize the future of mail delivery, and so we lack the courage and faith to trust the job to the miraculous market.
Why this fear to try—this lack of faith in the potential wonders that might be ours? There are at least two reasons: (1) we cannot foresee the unknown and, thus, we are not attracted to the unimaginable, and (2) the moment a miracle is wrought, we take it as much for granted as the air we breathe. Who stands today in wonder and respect at getting a friend on the phone in Hong Kong as quickly as one can call a next-door neighbor? The miracle is old hat! We no longer give it a second thought—unless the phone goes dead.
To me, the Command Society is a carry-over of barbarism, whereas the Free Society is the flowering of civilization. Why, then, so much more widespread approval of the former than the latter? The reason, as I now see it, is this: The way the free market works its wonders is a phenomenon so far advanced in human evolution that it borders on the celestial! Some of us understand that it does work these wonders but do not understand how to clearly explain this process which ranks so high in the spiritual realm.
Years ago, I observed that no person knows how to make such a “simple” thing as an ordinary wooden lead pencil.1 Yet, that year, we made 1,600,000,000 pencils in the U.S.A. Were we to grasp this single miracle of the free market, we would know that there is not a person who knows how to operate a postal service or how to deliver the human voice at the speed of light. No one knows for sure what electricity is! Make a jet plane? It is to laugh! The only reason why a Command Society can deliver mail at all is because there is a leakage of creative human energy.
Why the claim that this phenomenon is so high in the spiritual realm? Ludwig von Mises gives us the answer:
Production [a pencil, mail delivery, a jet plane] is a spiritual, intellectual, and ideological phenomenon. . . . What distinguishes our conditions [the Free Society] from those of our ancestors who lived one thousand or twenty thousand years ago [the Command Society] is not something material but something spiritual. The material changes are the outcome of spiritual changes.2
Everything by which we live and thrive—the material—has its origin in the spiritual, in the sense that an idea is spiritual, or an invention, discovery, insight, intuitive flash.
Why, then, does the Free Society work its wonders? Why, when no one knows how to make a pencil, do we have such a proliferation of goods and services? The spiritual forces—tiny ideas by everyone—are free to flow! Result of this free flow? Ideas configurate and show forth in everything from billions of pencils to jet planes. This explains why the wisdom of the free market is infinitely greater than that which exists in a Socrates or Edison or any one person.
Now the question: Why are the dictocrats—the pre-emptors—agents of destruction? What do they destroy? The spiritual—the very essence of one’s being! There may be a few exceptions but most people fail to generate ideas on activities that have been pre-empted.
Aside from members of our present Command Society, who are these pre-emptors? All persons who turn to the dictocrats seeking their own gain at the expense of others. And it matters not whether the “gains” sought are food stamps, or tariffs, or higher than market wages, or a Gateway Arch, or whatever. By such actions, they ally themselves with the Command Society.
It should be noted with regard to all governmental welfare programs that function by the formula, “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” that these “needy” allies of the Command Society have no limit. They feed and multiply upon the subsidies until they become wholly useless to themselves or to anyone else—except as voters bribed to keep their political benefactors in power. This is the tremendous political appeal of socialism—parasitism pursued to the death of the last host, and last hope.
Finally, what might the remedies be? How are the pre-emptors to be unseated? Should we expect Command Society personnel to take the initiative in ridding themselves of coercive powers? Indeed not, for they have substituted self-exaltation for self-realization and, thus, are addicted to their dictatorial role. Lording it over us for our benefit, or so they naively believe.
And expect no initiative from their pre-empting allies. The “guaranteed life” is for them an attractive way of life or they would not have sought it in the first place.
Where look for the remedy? To the few who have gained an awareness of how the free market works its wonders. Purists? Maybe, at least in their singleness of purpose and the wholeness of their understanding. But hardly so in their manner of living, for they too must live in the world as it is. And that world often compels them to engage in ways of life that strain their concepts of righteousness. To name but a single item, I use the postal service of the Command Society. Where lies the opportunity for consistency? In our proclaimed positions! Continue to stand against, rather than embrace and espouse, these errors with which we presently are compelled to live.3
Let only a few achieve enough understanding of how the free market works its wonders, along with the ability to explain the reasons, and the pre-emptors will fade into oblivion. Darkness always gives way to light. Similarly, the error of the Command Society has no resistance to the light and truth of the Free Society.
