Freedom in One Lesson

67.

The Love of Liberty and the
Limitation of Government

Can you defend what you do not understand? Sometimes. For instance, to do his job, a soldier does not need to completely understand why his side is fighting. But when it comes to liberty, understanding it is a prerequisite for effectively protecting it. Leonard Read makes that case in “The Love of Liberty,” from his 1975 book of the same name (Read 1975b).

Is there knowledge of what liberty is? On the part of a few, yes; the multitude, no! . . . For the most part, . . . [we] bow to the shadow while trampling the very substance of liberty.

Our misunderstanding of liberty largely arises from misunderstanding government and the role it must play to be consistent with liberty. If we fail to recognize this clearly, it is possible to accept a rhetoric of liberty and not see how it undermines the reality of liberty.

What advantages ensue from organizing people and resources via government rather than voluntarily? This is important to ask because government has no resources except what it commandeers from citizens. And if government organization does not create more resources than there would be in its absence, then the only way it can advance the general welfare—that is, both your welfare and mine rather than yours at my expense—is to make more efficient use of existing resources. So, where does government have a comparative advantage over other organizations, and what does that imply?

One cannot intelligently decide what government should and should not do unless one knows what government is and is not. What is government? I take my cue from Wood-row Wilson: ‘Government, in the last analysis, is organized force.’ In essence, it is a series of edicts backed by a constabulary—a physical force. Obey, or take the consequences! Let’s symbolize this physical force by the clenched fist. Find out what the fist can and cannot do and you will know what government should and should not do, not necessarily what it will and will not do.

In other words, since the arrangements citizens can make must be mutually agreed to, government’s only comparative advantage relative to its citizens is in the use of coercion. But when does government’s ability to coerce improve the well-being of its citizens? Most people would not consider themselves better off if they were told how to dress, what to eat, where to live, or what job to work and how long to work it. (Of course, they may find it advantageous to be in a position to choose such things for others.)

To make better sense of this, Read uses an analogy to a fist. When you make a fist, what can you do more effectively than before? Not much. With your hands in fists, you can’t type a magnum opus, perform award-winning music, paint the Mona Lisa, manufacture goods and services, or shake hands, among many other things. But fists can allow you to enforce more effectively your decisions on those who would choose differently—that is, to coerce others better.

What can the fist do? It can inhibit, restrain, prohibit, penalize. What, in all good conscience, should be restrained and penalized? The answer is to be found in the moral codes: fraud, violence, misrepresentations, stealing, predations, killing, that is, all destructive activities.

What can the fist, this physical force, not do? It cannot create. The creative force, in all instances, is a spiritual rather than a physical force, in the sense that discoveries, inventions, insights, intuitive flashes are spiritual. Everything by which we live has its origin in the spiritual before it shows forth in the material. . . .

So, how do I draw the line between what government should and should not do? I would have government limited to inhibiting and penalizing the destructive actions; leave all creative activities—without exception . . . —to citizens acting freely, cooperatively, competitively, voluntarily, privately.

We all gain from government’s fist when it is used to restrain destructive acts and thereby expand our ability to create and cooperate with one another. But that fist does not expand the creative ideas and innovations that advance the quantity and quality of goods and services. As government expands its actions beyond the restraint of destructive acts, it intrudes into and thereby contracts its citizens’ scope for creative actions. Fewer ideas will be imagined and implemented; our creative and cooperative endeavors, on which the general welfare is built, will be reduced; and liberty, not only a means to a valuable end but also an extremely valuable end in itself, will be reduced along with our creative efforts.

Is it liberty if no one is free to act creatively as he pleases? If politicians and bureaucrats are dictating what everyone may and may not produce and exchange, and at what prices? . . .

. . . The dominating influence . . . is ignorance parading as infinite wisdom. [Some] proclaim that they can run our lives better than we can. . . .

Liberty is impossible in such a situation. . . .

. . . Everyone loves liberty. Were we to know what it is, aware of the social structure in which it thrives, and willing to pay the price, it is liberty we would have. . . .

. . . Liberty is freedom of choice. Everyone loves freedom of choice for himself, if not for others. . . .

If there be anyone who does not favor freedom of choice as much as I do, that person is unknown to me.

When government grows beyond its one comparative advantage of punishing destructive behavior, both our liberty and our jointly productive activities suffer. But why doesn’t this negative consequence lead people to resist the expansion? As government’s fist expands beyond its legitimate role and its payoff increases, more people who want to dictate to others— dictocrats, in Read’s terminology—enter the political arena. As government does worse by its citizens, “the worst get on top,” in Friedrich Hayek’s famous line from The Road to Serfdom (Hayek 1944).

While everyone loves liberty for self, there are ever so many who are unwilling to accord freedom of choice to others. Merely take note of those who favor and endorse wage and price controls, privileges, supports, subsidies, tariffs, quotas, embargoes, the coercive taking from some and giving to others, restrictions on competition; indeed, all deviations from the free market, private ownership, limited government way of life. Note these, and one will have a fair estimate of the number of those who love liberty for self but not for others. They love liberty but they live license.

Thus, the love of liberty for self and not for others is but a selfish, greedy, and unattainable dream.

The one-sided liberty by which some expand their freedom to dictate to others is inconsistent with an inalienable right to liberty (and justice) for all. Domination enforced by government coercion expands along with government; therefore, to reverse such domination involves restricting government to its sole defensible role as defender against destructive actions, essentially extending the golden rule to government as well as citizens.

Do not to others [even via government] that which you would not have them do unto you. Or, in this context, expect not from others that which you will not happily, graciously, intelligently accord to them! This is how the lovers of liberty may experience what they love. There is no other way.