Ideas on Liberty

BY WILLIAM H. PETERSON

IBELIEVE that economic freedom and political freedom are indivisible, that neither can exist without the other, that economic democracy and political democracy are both governed by individual choice—the one in the marketplace and the other in the polling booth—that if capitalism did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.

I believe that human rights rest on private property rights, that your home is your castle, that your greatest property or trust is yourself, that civil rights and property rights are inseparably joined, that liberty and privacy are two sides of the same coin.

I believe that rights confer duties, that liberty without conscience, without moral obligation, becomes license, that freedom requires civility and decorum and sensitivity for the rights of others, that it calls for, ideally, cheerfulness, that life is after all a celebration. I believe that duty is personal, that we are individually, privately, our brother’s keeper, that the three ultimate Rs are reverence, respect, and responsibility.

I believe in the individual, in his dignity, uniqueness, and potential. Organization is necessary but I place the individual above the organization, and hold that only the individual can feel and think and truly choose and act. I believe that an organization—including society and the family—is in essence an aggregation of individuals, each with a mind of his own, that any organization is the product of individuals, of human design, of human action, that the direction of that organization is in the hands of those individuals—in their leadership, their minds, their ideas, their philosophies, their esprit de corps, their sense of obligation to each other.

I believe in the power of choice, of the human mind, for good or evil, that the mind, perceiving cause and effect, rightly or wrongly, directs choices—including, in the words of Ludwig von Mises, “the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble.” I believe that the mind can be moved by ideas, the young mind more so, and hence that the role of education, of the transmission of accumulated knowledge and wisdom, is critical to the course of human events.

I believe that your future is what you make it, that as you invest in yourself so your potential rises, that you can will your will, that man is the architect of his lot and not the prisoner of his environment—that character is destiny. I believe with Einstein that God does not play dice with the world, that chance plays but a secondary role in life and history.

I believe that history, whether personal or organizational or national, is not the result of blind forces but the product of the human mind, of human action. I believe that it is good and bad ideas, values, customs, institutions, and traditions—including the tyranny of the status quo, to borrow the phrase of Rose and Milton Friedman—that shape the present and the future rather than the other way around.

I believe in the creative individual, in what Shakespeare said of man some four centuries ago: “How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!” Or in what Alexis de Tocqueville said in Democracy in America some 150 years ago: “No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man, and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.”

I believe in entrepreneurship. The entrepreneur is the spark, the leader, the innovator who creates new resources, new products, new services, new production techniques, new marketing methods, new financial tools, new industries, new jobs—all those new and better ways to serve mankind. The entrepreneur, under competition, is the agent and, in effect, the employee of the sovereign consumer who, through the power of the purse, rules the marketplace.

I believe in free trade, in voluntary and mutually beneficial exchanges, whether domestic or international. I believe that merchants are ambassadors of good will, of economic development, that the road to world peace lies in world trade, that, in the dictum of French economist Frederic Bastiat, “when goods can’t cross frontiers, armies will.”

I believe in Adam Smith’s concept of “the invisible hand” as the quintessence of free enterprise, that as you pursue your self-interest in the marketplace, in the absence of fraud or force, you necessarily cooperate with others—indeed, consciously or unconsciously cater to their wants—and thus help achieve a spontaneous economic order and serve the public interest, the common good, the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

I believe in Jean Baptiste Say’s “law of markets” as also the quintessence of free enterprise, that supply creates equivalent demand, that in the marketplace, and in the human mind, trade-offs prevail, always, that to get you must give, that something is only for something, nothing is ever for nothing—that there is no free lunch, never.

I believe in government, but in constitutionally limited government, in government whose guiding principle for civil behavior is, as Leonard Read put it, anything that’s peaceful, in government by law as opposed to government by men, in the idea that government intervention in peaceful private activity tends to make things worse rather than better. I believe that government alone possesses the double-edged sword of the legal power of coercion, that lawmakers, majorities, and minorities, like individuals, can advance social cooperation—i.e., peace and prosperity—or they can fall prey to fallacy, to what F. A. Hayek calls “the pretense of knowledge,” to policies leading to failure or disaster, to the corruptibility of power, especially the power to tax, to build bureaucratic empires, buy votes, and subvert the independent citizen.

There are more beliefs, of course. But these, to me, are at the heart of the American Constitutional system of free markets, private property, and government constrained by checks and balances, as envisioned and bequeathed by the Constitutional Framers 200 years ago.

Professor Peterson is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.