Freedom in One Lesson

15.

Ideal Candidates versus
Ideal Government

One of the striking things about recent elections is the number of people who claim to be the ideal candidate for president. At the core of each of their campaigns is a promise to redistribute the economic pie to give a bigger piece to whomever is being addressed at the time. Each candidate becomes, in H.L. Mencken’s words, “a broker in pillage” and “every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods” (Mencken 1956).

What none of those self-proclaimed “ideal” directors of our lives seem to notice, however, is that their promises are entirely at odds with the functions of an ideal government. If they were to deliver on their promises, they would impose unjustified harm on others.

Few people have made that clearer than Leonard Read, whose 1958 collection of lectures Why Not Try Freedom? (Read 1958) opens with “Government—an Ideal Concept.” Revisiting Read’s insights is particularly important today when the ideal government is so distant from current reality and presidential office-seekers compete with promises about who will accelerate us faster in our mistaken direction.

Any person has a moral right to inhibit the destructive action of another or others. However, no person has a moral right to forcibly direct or to control what another shall invent, create, or discover; no right to dictate where he shall labor, how long he shall work, what his wage shall be, what and with whom he shall exchange, or what thoughts he shall entertain. No single person . . . no combination of persons . . . no agency, political or otherwise, has any such moral right.

. . . The moral sanction for establishing government springs from the right of the individual to inhibit or prohibit or restrain the destructive actions of others. . . .

. . . Removal of inhibitory influences—the kind imposed by man on men—serves to benefit all of us in common. . . .

. . . This can be accomplished by restraining aggressive force . . . [with] defensive or repellent force. . . .

. . . The rights to the fruits of one’s own labor involves the restraint or the removal of obstacles to . . . one’s own exchange, but also the obstacles to other people’s exchange . . . [because] every other person has a similar right. . . .

The source of all creative and variable human energy . . . rests in . . . the individual, in such voluntary and cooperative actions as he may freely choose to take. . . .This is the vast, unlimited area of liberty, of self-reliance, and of self-discipline. . . .

. . . Rules and prohibitions for social administration can logically serve only the purpose of deterring man’s destructive actions for the sake of giving full flower to his creative actions. . . . Government, within its proper bounds, can be but the protective servant of all individuals equally against antisocial marauders. . . .

. . . Cooperation for creative purposes requires, as an auxiliary, cooperation to annul destructive purposes. . . .

. . . Defensive force may be used to neutralize aggressive force, and such a use of forces serves a social end. This use of defensive force should be the guiding principle of the political agency. . . . The only dissenters would be those who want to live by predation. . . .

. . . Every human being is born with as much right to live his life creatively as any other man. Man, however, is incapable of protecting his life as a personal, individual project, and at the same time of realizing his human potential. . . . By reason of this social circumstance, he is committed, in principle, to cooperating with his fellow men in the protective project . . . where special privilege should be unknown.

. . . In short, the law’s limitation inheres in its justification.

Force is a dangerous thing. Therefore, society’s organized arm is a dangerous instrument. . . . When limited to its proper defensive scope, it is a positive good. When exceeding its proper limitations and becoming aggression, it is not a necessary but a positive evil.

. . . One of the most distressing fallacies having to do with government and liberty is the assumption that the State, an agency presumably of the people, has rights beyond those possessed by the people. . . . No reasonable person can logically believe that any such control belongs to a multitude of citizens. . . . It is an arrogation. . . .

Any person has the natural and moral right to use repellent or defensive force against any other person who would aggress against him. No person on this earth has any moral right of control over any other person superior to the defense of his own life and livelihood. . . .

. . . Every individual has a vested interest in common with all other men in restraining all inhibitory influences to creative energy and creative energy exchanges. . . . All else is individual, voluntary, and cooperative as individuals may choose.

Leonard Read provides a valuable touchstone for a government of self-owning individuals: universal protection against violations of liberty. But America’s recent candidates have behaved toward liberty as Superman does toward kryptonite. Liberty threatens to prevent the predation on others that their “superpowers” rely on. But no one whose campaign depends on violating the ideal form of government—by unjustly harming some citizens to buy support from others—can be an ideal candidate.