As Americans transition into 2022, many people will consider making New Year’s resolutions. If history is any guide, however, little of their focus will be on addressing the cognitive dissonance between personal resolutions to be good and do good for others and the many political resolutions to harm others to feather one’s own nest that always attract substantial support. Such reflection might benefit us by improving both our personal and political behavior. So perhaps what we could use are new years’ resolutions to recommit ourselves to wisdom we seem to have forgotten.
A good example comes from Leonard Read’s “To Each His Own,” written over a half century ago in his Accent on the Right. Its focus was that the biggest problems that arise with government, as well as some of the biggest problems we face as individuals, trace back to violating the commandments not to covet and not to steal, because coveting provides the impetus for seeking to benefit ourselves at others’ expense and stealing is the action triggered by that covetousness.
The prevention of such violations is a central task of government, which can advance the general welfare by more effectively protecting all of our property from invasions by others, which better enables all the voluntary relationships property rights make possible. This is illustrated by the few enumerated functions of our federal government (e.g., national defense is protection of you and your property from foreigners), as well as the traditional functions of state and local governments (e.g., police, courts and prisons provide similar protection from your neighbors’ violations). But unfortunately, government has become a supposedly “respectable” way to violate what its job is to defend.
Consider Leonard Read’s insights into the importance of those two commandments for the existence of, or advances in, real civilization.
THOU shalt not steal! To know that stealing is wrong…implies knowledge of an alternative that is right…to each his own, usually referred to as private ownership. The ancient taboo against stealing presupposes that an individual has a right to the fruits of his own labor.
Recognizing as evil the taking of that which belongs to another certainly antedated The Decalogue by many centuries.
There is every reason to believe that the observance of this taboo, this respect for the principle of private ownership, marked the dawn of civilization. Whether this thou-shalt-not is honored or breached primarily determines the rise or fall of civilization.
True, “thou shalt not covet” is even more basic than “thou shalt not steal”; if no one coveted the possessions of another, there would be no thievery.
To refrain from stealing is the genesis of civilizations!...First, civilizations rise and fall with the rise and fall of individual freedom. Second, individual freedom rises and falls to the degree that private ownership--the absence of stealing--is respected and adhered to. Individual freedom is out of the question wherever and whenever private ownership does not prevail!
Creative outbursts--the mark of civilization--bear a direct correlation with increase in individual freedom.
This private ownership thesis rests, fundamentally, on [the] assumption…that one person has as much right to his life as any other. If an individual has a right to his life, it logically follows that he has an equal right to sustain his life, the sustenance of life being the fruit of one’s own labor or what can be obtained for it in peaceful exchange.
Not to steal is to respect life; it is to endorse and to hold sacrosanct the institution of private ownership.
No civilization could be born without the observance of this taboo. The institution of private ownership--to each his own--has spawned all civilizations!
Were [thievery] the general practice, we would quickly descend into another dark age. A resort to law would be useless; the gendarmerie also would be thieves!
While the institution of private ownership has been given lip service over the centuries, by the people and governments alike, actual observance has been more of form than of substance.
Few among us understand that private ownership can be universally endorsed in principle and completely obliterated in practice. Nor is it widely understood that the forcible taking of income, beyond that required for the principled functions of government, has the same eroding effects on private ownership as stealing. Legalizing the compulsory transfer of control still amounts to the destruction of private ownership.
Realize that individual freedom and, thus, the flowering of civilization are possible only where private ownership prevails. Merely imagine owning absolutely nothing required for your own livelihood. Your life would be in the hands of others.
Leonard Read saw the twin sins of coveting and theft as the greatest threats to real civilization. The latter, motivated by the former, undermines the fundamental basis of the voluntary arrangements that create civilization--private property. As a result, he recognized that the essential function of government was to maintain the principle of “to each his own,” and that any time government fails to defend that principle from others’ invasions, or itself commits such infringements, it impedes rather than advances civilization. That is “a fundamental maxim for civilized men,” reflected in the unalienable rights of our Declaration of Independence, a “new world” resolution that was to define American government. Supporting that far older resolution, increasingly violated rather than followed, would make an excellent resolution for the new year.
