Give Me Liberty

There is nothing new in planned and controlled economy. Human beings have lived under various forms of that social security for six thousand years. The new thing is the anarchy of individualism, which has been operating freely only in this country for a century and a half.

When I first wrote this book ten years ago, I asked myself whether individualism has enough social vitality to survive in a world turning back to the essentially medieval, static forms. Can individualism, which by its very nature has no organization and no leader, stand against the determined attack of a small group, organized, controlled, and fanatically sure that a strong man in power can give a people better lives than they can create for themselves?

The spirit of individualism is still here. There are some 130,000,000 human beings in these United States, and not one of us has escaped anxiety, and very few of us have not been forced to reduce our standard of living during these past few years. The number of us who have been out of work and facing actual hunger is not known; the largest estimate has been twelve million. Of this number, barely a third appeared on the reported relief rolls. Somewhere those millions in need of help, who were not helped, are still fighting through this depression on their own.

Millions of farmers are still lords on their own land; they are not receiving checks from the public funds to which they contribute their increasing taxes.

Millions of men and women have quietly been paying debts from which they asked no release; millions have cut expenses to the barest necessities, spending every dime in fear that soon they will have nothing, and somehow being cheerful in the daytime and finding God knows what strength or weakness in themselves during the black nights.

Americans are still paying the price of individual liberty, which is individual responsibility and insecurity.

These unnoticed Americans are defending the principle on which this republic was founded, the principle that created this country and has, in fact, brought the greatest good to the greatest number. By such courage and endurance, the American principle has been successfully defended, time after time, for more than a century.

We remember the Americans who died in the wars of this country. We build memorials to their memory and lay flowers on their graves. It was the Americans who lived and kept their fighting spirit through the hard and bitter times that followed every surge of prosperity, it was men and women who cared enough for their own personal freedom to take the risks of self-reliance and starve if they could not feed themselves, who created our country, the free country, the richest and the happiest country in the world.

But during that first century, the western world was turning toward genuine liberalism, toward releasing the individual from the grip of The State which used to be called tyranny and is now called “administrative law.” The test of strength comes now, when Europe, Asia, and many Americans have turned back from freedom and the dynamic modern world to the old static order in which individuals, no longer permitted to act freely, have no responsibility, but leave both the power and the burden to their rulers.