FUTURE OF FREEDOM

May 2016

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The Future of Freedom Foundation

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Variety is the essence of life, competition the life of trade.

— Paul L. Poirot

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The Future of Freedom Foundation

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Why I Favor Limited Government, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Bipartisan Battering of Freedom

by James Bovard

Conservatism and Libertarianism

by Laurence M. Vance

Regulatory Tyranny

by David S. D’Amato

The Revolution of Rising Expectations

by Wendy McElroy

The Empire versus Little America: Conference Remarks

by Bill Kauffman

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Why I Favor Limited Government, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger

There are two important points that one should recognize about the anarchy paradigm.

First, under anarchy, there would no longer be a United States of America, and no longer would there be any U.S. citizens. There also would no longer be any states. All

of those governmental structures, along with their long-established judicial systems, which are based on centuries of legal development and evolution, would suddenly be gone, automatically dismantled upon adoption of the anarchy paradigm. There would also be, needless to say, no more state courts and no more federal courts, including the federal courts of appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. They would all become nothing more than historical curiosities.

What would be left under anarchy would be an enormous geographic territory that previously constituted the United States of America. Let’s call it the North American Geographic Territory (NAGT).

Second, under anarchy everyone — and I do mean everyone — would have the right to compete in the provision of law-enforcement and judicial services. Equally important, each competing service would have the right to enforce its rulings, holdings, and judgments through the use of force, just as the U.S. federal courts and various state courts have today.

Perhaps most important, each entity would have the right to define and establish its own jurisdiction over crimes committed by or against its members or within its zone of operations.

Recall that in part one of this series, I pointed out that while most people in life are peaceful in nature, there will always be a small percentage of people who violate the rights of others in the form of murder, rape, assault, theft, burglary, robbery, fraud, and the like. In part one, I hypothesized that that peaceful percentage of people constituted about 98 percent of the populace and the violent percentage about 2 percent.

As I also pointed out, under the right of self-defense, when the 2 percent commit a crime, the 98 percent have the right to forcibly bring them to justice and, if convicted, punish them through incarceration, fine, restitution, or other means. At both the federal and state levels, there is an established procedure for accomplishing that, which incorporates judicial principles that stretch back through centuries of American and British legal development. For example, at the federal level, a magistrate issues a warrant of arrest for the person who is accused of a crime, which must be based on a sworn statement by a law-enforcement officer establishing what the law calls “probable cause” that the accused really did commit the crime. The same procedure is used at the state level with state judges and sheriff’s departments.

Under limited government, of course, that’s not the end of the matter. There is still the problem of establishing whether the person really did commit the crime. That’s what a trial is all about. Here in the United States, no matter how convinced people are of the guilt of an accused, he is nonetheless guaranteed procedural protections that stretch all the way back to Magna Carta in the year 1215, many of which are set forth in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Freedom, not justice

Now, I repeat: Under anarchy, everyone has the right to compete in the provision of law-enforcement services and judicial services. When I say “everyone,” I mean everyone.

Why is that important? Because under anarchy, not only do the 98 percent have the right to establish their own police forces and judicial systems in competition against everyone else, so do the 2 percent! That is, there is nothing in anarchy that prevents the 2 percent from competing by establishing their own law-enforcement agencies and judicial systems and, equally important, determining the rules and procedures for determining jurisdiction, guilt, and the conditions under which force will be employed to enforce rulings and judgments.

Anarchists respond by saying that that is not something that should concern people because under principles of competition and the free market, the bad police forces and judicial systems will be run out of business for lack of customers and support, much as what happens in the free-market production of computers and restaurants. If some judicial system is being run in a crooked, corrupt manner, anarchists say, it won’t last for long in a competitive market.

But first things first. The preliminary issue is not whether the 2 percent will succeed in a free market. The preliminary issue is whether under anarchy they have the right to compete. And the fact is that they do. Everyone has the right to compete under anarchy, whether he is able to succeed or not. Under anarchy, murderers, robbers, rapists, and thieves — or, more accurately, people who are going to murder, rob, or steal at some time in the future — have the right to compete in the marketplace of law enforcement and judicial services. Everyone, including the 2 percent, has the right to set up his own police force, judicial system, rules and procedures for determining guilt, rules on jurisdiction, and rules on when force can be employed against others.

Keep in mind, after all, that no one can predict with any degree of certainty who exactly are going to be the murderers, rapists, and robbers in a society. Keep in mind, also, that on the day anarchy is adopted, all the state and federal penitentiaries are dismantled and all the convicted felons, including the convicted serial killers, would be released, all of whom would then be free to compete by establishing their own law-enforcement agencies and their own judicial systems.

Would the systems rendering bad justice go out of business owing to a lack of customers or to social ostracism, as anarchists assert? Actually, given human nature, it’s a virtual certainty that the exact opposite will happen. The crooked and corrupt judicial systems will be doing gangbuster business while entities that are rendering justice and fairness are the ones that are likely to falter in the competitive marketplace.

One of the most famous and successful criminal-defense lawyers in U.S. history, a Texas lawyer named Percy Foreman, who is now deceased, explained the reason for this phenomenon in a very succinct way: “My clients don’t want justice; they want freedom.”

Most people — i.e., the 98 percent — have the general desire to have a fair and just judicial system. That’s why we have the type of judicial system that exists in the United States today, one that aims to punish the guilty but with built-in procedural mechanisms to diminish the chances that innocent people are convicted and punished.

On the other hand, the 2 percent have little interest in a fair and just judicial system. As Foreman pointed out, when they’re caught, the last thing they want is justice. They only want freedom or at least leniency. That’s why they secure the best lawyer they can. That’s why they want their lawyer to search for every technicality that can secure their release, such as the suppression of evidence as a result of an illegal search. That’s why they choose the most sympathetic jury. When caught, the 2 percent want freedom, not justice.

But there is something else to keep in mind here: The principle enunciated by Foreman applies to the 98 percent too! Or to be more precise, it applies to those people within the 98 percent who are accused of crimes. At the moment someone within the 98 percent is accused of a crime, he goes from the group that favors a fair and just judicial system to one that gives him the best chance to avoid being convicted. Like the traditional bad guy — e.g., the serial killer — the last thing that the wife who has just killed her abusive husband wants is justice. At that moment, she only wants freedom and wants her lawyer to take advantage of every opportunity to secure her freedom.

Therefore, I submit that the judicial entities that would have lots of customers under anarchy would not be the ones that are dispensing justice in an even-handed manner but rather the ones that are dispensing freedom and leniency. Ask yourself: If you were accused of a crime, rightly or wrongly, which judicial system would you prefer — the one dispensing justice or the one dispensing freedom?

There is another major problem with respect to crimes that arises under anarchy: the fact that each person not only has the right to compete in the provision of judicial services but also has the right to determine the judicial procedures that are going to be used to determine whether he really is guilty of having committed the crime.

As I previously pointed out, here in the United States we have judicial systems at both the federal and state levels that incorporate procedures that go back centuries into British jurisprudence. They include the rights and guarantees formulated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as well as others: trial by jury; right to bail; protections against illegal searches and seizures; a prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments; a presumption of innocence; grand-jury indictments; the right to confront and cross-examine witnesses; the right to remain silent or to testify in one’s own behalf; and a right to an attorney to argue on one’s behalf.

Nothing in anarchy requires any judicial entity to incorporate any of those principles into its judicial system. They might, but they also might not. If some people are sick and tired of what they consider are those old “technicalities” that used to exist under the Constitution (which, of course, would be gone under anarchy) and that were supposedly used to coddle criminals, they would be free to establish judicial systems that rejected any and all of those judicial principles. They would, for example, be free to establish systems that rely on tribunals rather than juries, a presumption of guilt, tortured confessions, and hearsay. They also would even be free to prohibit accused criminals from employing lawyers to defend themselves.

Under anarchy each competing entity would be free to establish its own procedures for determining people’s guilt. In the extreme case, there would be nothing to preclude a person from establishing a judicial system in which he himself serves as judge, jury, and prosecutor. Anarchists would say that that person’s judicial system wouldn’t last for long in a competitive system and that he would be socially ostracized for having a judicial system that is based on clear ethical conflicts of interest. But that might not matter much to a person who has just murdered someone and who wants to remain free.

Foreign “competition”

Under anarchy, there is another big problem that arises with respect to crimes — open borders or, to be more exact, no borders at all, because there would be no more United States of America, no more states, and no more counties. Remember: Everyone has the right to compete under anarchy. That includes not only people who used to be American citizens (including former U.S. officials who used to run the “judicial” system at Guantanamo Bay) but also people and governments from around the world. Keep in mind that although the American people will have chosen to dismantle their governmental structures in favor of anarchy, foreign countries would not necessarily choose to do likewise. While there would no longer be a United States of America under anarchy, there would still be governments in countries like North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Vietnam, and Egypt. Under anarchy, they would all have the right to come to the NAGT and establish communities with police forces and judicial systems in competition with all the others.

No, I’m not raising the prospect of a military invasion of the North American Geographic Territory — that is an entirely different problem under anarchy. I’m talking about the right to peacefully compete under anarchy in the provision of police and judicial services.

Let’s assume, for example, that China decides that it wants to compete by providing a police force and judicial system in the NAGT. Representatives of the Chinese government travel to the NAGT and peacefully purchase large tracts of land with billions of dollars of tax monies that have been extracted from Chinese citizens. The Chinese authorities then establish a chain of settlements across the NAGT, each one populated by 100,000 Chinese citizens as well as tens of thousands of Chinese troops to serve as police and to enforce judicial rulings.

The same for North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and others. Each of them establishes the same type of judicial system that they have in their respective countries. The Iranian authorities establish their system based on sharia law. The Chinese system is based on secret detentions, secret courts, and secret evidence. In the North Korean systems, the state wields the full authority to do whatever it wants to accused criminals, with defense lawyers being illegal. The Cuban system is based on a presumption of guilt and the use of hearsay evidence and evidence acquired by torture to convict people.

Upon settling in the NAGT, the head of the North Korean delegation issues the following public statement: “Here are the rules and procedures for our system, all of which will be enforced through the use of force by our soldiers, our policemen, and our intelligence units, just as they are back in our home country. Anyone who violates any of our rules and regulations will experience the full deployment of force against him in order to bring him to justice and, upon conviction, to ensure that the appropriate punishment is meted out to him. Anyone caught committing a crime, including former citizens of what once constituted the United States of America, against any of our members or anywhere within our jurisdiction will be dealt with harshly. There will be no compromises and no appeals from judgments and rulings of our trial tribunals.”

One day a North Korean woman is raped and accuses a young man who is a member of the Minnesota Defense League (MDL) of the crime. Agents of the North Korean Defense League (NKDL) sneak into the MDL territory, kidnap the man, and bring him back to the North Korean zone. He is quickly put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to die within 24 hours.

Upon hearing of this, the head of the MDL heads over to the North Korean zone and meets with the head of the NKDL. The MDL head explains that the young man has a perfect alibi, with three people ready to testify that he was with them at the time of the crime. He also explains that the NKDL’s kidnapping of the man was illegal under the rules of the MDL and, therefore, that the man must be released immediately.

The North Korean official politely explains that the young man raised the kidnapping issue at his trial and that the tribunal judge rejected its validity. It’s also too late to bring up the alibi witnesses, he explains, because the trial is already over. Anyway, he says, the North Korean woman definitely identified the young man as the rapist and, therefore, the alibi witnesses are clearly lying. The MDL official is informed that the young man is going to be executed at dawn.

That evening, the entire 100-man enforcement arm of the MDL appears at the front gate of the NKDL and demands the immediate release of their member. They encounter 10,000 fully armed North Korean soldiers.

Later that night, a young North Korean man is arrested within the MDL zone on suspicion of armed robbery. The head of the MDL sends a message to his counterpart at the North Korea zone stating that he is amenable to a trade of the two young men. The North Korean official politely declines the offer. Within an hour, 8,000 North Korean soldiers march to the front gate of the MDL where they are confronted by the MDL’s entire 100-man MDL enforcement arm. A North Korean general says to the head of the MDL law-enforcement unit, “Release our member or experience the full force of our 8,000-man law-enforcement unit.”

We will examine the possible outcomes of these two anarchy situations and others like them, not only in criminal cases but also in civil cases, in part 4.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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NEXT MONTH:

“Why I Favor Limited Government, Part 4”

by Jacob G. Hornberger

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Bipartisan Battering of Freedom

by James Bovard

For more than 40 years, Republicans have been promising to cut federal spending. In the same period, federal outlays have inched up by a few trillion dollars. But the Grand Old Party continues singing the same song — though voters may finally be losing confidence in the opposition team.

The latest pratfall occurred last December, once again illustrating that Republican congressional leaders are like a football coach who believes the secret to winning is to punt early and often. House Speaker Paul Ryan and others claimed victory regarding a 2,000+page appropriations bill, but it is a “no boondoggle left behind” $1.1 trillion nightmare.

The House Appropriations Committee chairman, Hal Rogers, claims the omnibus bill “helps to stop waste and administrative overreach.” Instead, the bill ravages both paychecks and freedom. No wonder White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest gushed, “We feel good about the outcome.” Republicans seemed willing to pay any price to avoid being embarrassed by being blamed for a government shut-down. Barack Obama exploited their willies to ram through a host of noxious policies.

Here’s the tip of the iceberg of the bill’s outrages:

• The bill failed to block Obama from delivering an amount approaching $3 billion to the United Nations Green Climate, one of the fruits of the Paris climate summit. Republicans initially planned to block such funding unless the Senate was permitted to vote on the UN climate treaty. But since the omnibus bill failed to prohibit such payments, Obama will soon deliver $500 million in U.S. tax money to the fund — despite the legendary record of UN programs for corruption worse than Chicago. As the evidence of man-made climate change becomes shakier, Washington politicians rush to burn more tax dollars regardless.

•The bill fails to block perhaps the EPA’s greatest land grab — its “Waters of the United States” decree that places under federal jurisdiction more than 20 million acres that are sometimes wet. The EPA’s wetland crackdowns have been trounced by numerous judges. Republicans faltered even though the Government Accountability Office reported in December that the EPA had engaged in illegal “covert propaganda” to promote its policy. This could have been one of the most important property-rights victories in recent years. Instead, Republicans took a dive and bureaucrats will continue to hammer property owners around the nation.

• It provides more than $3 billion for economic and military aid to Afghanistan even though an Agency for International Development (AID) internal study recently warned that some projects “actually had the perverse effect of increasing support for the Taliban.” Afghan relief continues to be a hopeless mess; the AID inspector general reported last week that the agency’s highly touted new monitoring system was used for fewer than 1 percent of grants and contracts. Many companies and contractors who are collecting windfalls from Afghan aid will very likely show their gratitude to members of Congress with contributions for their reelection campaign.

• It fails to block the imminent proclamation of Food and Drug Administration regulations that could prohibit the sale of most of the cigars now marketed in the United States, as well as ravaging the burgeoning e-cigarette industry (which most experts believe provides a healthier alternative to cigarettes). The fact that politicians did not even have the gumption to stand up for cigar smokers is proof of their callousness to one of the nation’s least recognized persecuted minorities.

• The omnibus bill failed to include a provision to end Operation Chokepoint, a Justice Department Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation crackdown that pressured banks to cancel the accounts of gun stores, coin dealers, payday lenders and other disfavored industries in what Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wisc.) derided as “weaponizing government to meet their ideological beliefs.” The crackdown has disrupted businesses across the nation and spurred fears that the government could soon add other groups and businesses to the hit list. Even though ample evidence of heavy-handed abuses has come out, Congress chose to do nothing.

• On average, federal workers in Washington are already paid more than $100,000 a year (not including lavish benefits), but the budget deal failed to block Obama from giving them another 1.5 percent raise — even though many, if not most, taxpayers received zilch raise this year. This is typical of how the Obama administration and Congress are far more caring for the government’s own than for average Americans.

• The bill extends the Earned Income Tax Credit without reforming it — even though the IRS estimates that as many as 25 percent of all handouts under the law are fraudulent or otherwise improper. The Earned Income Tax Credit is also proven to have a profound work-disincentive effect because of how it raises de facto marginal tax rates. But this particular handout is popular with both parties so nothing got fixed.

• The omnibus bill dropped a House provision that would have required stronger evidence for federally proclaimed Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Earlier official dietary guidelines have been widely discredited and are often blamed for contributing to the nation’s obesity crisis, but the same dubious evidence standard can be used in the future. Republicans took a dive even though the mainstream media has pounded the guidelines’ adverse effects in prior months.

Subjugating the American people

• The bill provides almost $27 billion for public housing and Section 8. There is almost a half-billion dollar increase for subsidized rental vouchers, despite the long record of havoc in neighborhoods where recipients cluster. (Section 8 played a role in destabilizing Baltimore before the riots there in April 2015.) The omnibus bill also dropped provisions to curb the Department of Housing and Urban Development from bankrolling “fair-housing” entrapment-like operations or enforcing new regulations to bludgeon localities with a lower percentage of minorities than the national averages. This particular policy is one of the Obama administration’s most brazen power grabs to manipulate life in the suburbs. But Republicans simply did not have the courage to stand against it.

• Some provisions of the bill seem harebrained even by Beltway standards. Republicans were justifiably outraged by the federal Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms “Fast and Furious” operation, which authorized sending more than a thousand guns to Mexican drug cartels, resulting in hundreds of Mexican deaths. The policy was so controversial that the House of Representatives voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for withholding documents on the scandal. (Naturally, the Justice Department refused to take any action against its boss despite the House vote.) Section 276 of the omnibus bill prohibits a federal agent from providing guns to anyone he “knows or suspects ... is an agent of a drug cartel, unless law enforcement personnel of the United States continuously monitor or control the firearm at all times.” So the G-man is supposed to keep his finger on the suspect’s trigger at all times, or what? Perhaps it would be too easy to cease giving weapons to drug cartels. Instead, Congress has renewed the license to meddle even after widespread carnage south of the U.S. border.

• The omnibus bill included the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) — intensely controversial legislation that authorizes tech and communication companies to secretly provide people’s email and vast amounts of other personal data to federal agencies — no search warrant required. The bill also specified that citizens would never be able to learn of such betrayals by using the Freedom of Information Act requests to government agencies, which will have an easier time strong-arming private companies into betraying their customers.

The American Civil Liberties Union warned that information disclosed thanks to the new act “can be used for criminal prosecutions unrelated to cyber security, including the targeting of whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act.” Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) warned that a vote for the omnibus bill is a “vote to support unconstitutional surveillance on law-abiding Americans.” But few members of Congress were concerned about privacy and the objections did nothing to slow the legislative juggernaut. There had been widespread controversy when the Obama administration and allies tried to push this bill through Congress earlier in 2015. But the omnibus bill and a cowardly Republican leadership provided an opportunity ripe for grabbing.

While Congress made little or no effort to protect average Americans from rampaging regulators, it did take one brave stand for freedom. Controversy erupted the previous winter when children were blocked from sled riding on Capitol Hill, so the 2015 omnibus bill included a provision requesting the Capitol Police to relent. The so-called “sled free or die” provision was a “bipartisan win,” according to the Washington Post. It is regrettable that there was little or no bipartisan interest in curbing federal power beyond spitting distance from the Capitol Dome.

House Freedom Caucus member Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) summarized the GOP leadership’s wacky reasoning: “Give the Democrats what they want now so next time they won’t want as much.” Republicans have been thunderously promising for decades to protect Americans against federal waste, fraud, and abuse. At the current rate, Republicans’ credibility gap will soon rival the $18 trillion federal debt.

Few congressmen had the chance to read the hefty bill before voting for or against it. Admittedly, there is nothing in congressmen’s oath of office that requires them to actually read legislation before they vote on it. But that continues to be one of the most appalling symptoms of Attention Deficit Democracy.

Some idealists may believe that a sufficient number of scoldings by editorial pages and talk-show hosts will spur members of Congress to repent of their reckless ways. But thanks to pervasive gerrymandering, most of them have seats that are sufficiently secure that they have nothing to fear as long as they are not indicted on at least half a dozen criminal charges. Members harvest a flood of campaign contributions for the favors they disburse. Congress’s gross negligence helps explain the widespread anger against Washington that is driving the 2016 presidential campaign thus far.

James Bovard serves as policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation and is the author of a new ebook memoir, Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, and eight other books.

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NEXT MONTH:

“The TSA Treats Americans Like Gitmo Detainees”

by James Bovard

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Conservatism and Libertarianism

by Laurence M. Vance

When conservative politicians are trying to get the votes of libertarians and “libertarian-leaning” Republicans, they often tout the supposed affinity between conservatism and libertarianism. They claim that there is a conservative and libertarian confluence of thought on many issues. They maintain that because the real enemy of conservatism and libertarianism is liberalism, conservatives and libertarians stand on common ground. Conservatives are not averse to using libertarian rhetoric to portray themselves as advocates of libertarian principles. They often recite their mantra of the Constitution, private property, the free market, individual liberty, and limited government — as if they actually followed the Constitution, believed in the inviolability of private property, desired a free market in everything, believed in the freedom of individuals to do anything that’s peaceful, and wanted a government limited to anything but one controlled by conservatives.

Reaganism

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) is a conservative icon. Conservatives revere him as they revere the Constitution. They consider Reagan to be one of the greatest American presidents in history. And as the late president’s son, Michael Reagan, has pointed out, “Conservatives love to drop my father’s name and try to find candidates that act and think like he did.” Conservative Republicans who want to sucker their fellow Republicans to get their votes often call themselves Reagan conservatives or Reagan Republicans. Even some libertarians romanticize Reagan.

In addition to using libertarian rhetoric and reciting their phony laissez-faire mantra, conservatives are also fond of quoting what Reagan said during an interview with Reason magazine back in 1975:

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Reagan also said he believed that libertarianism and conservatism were traveling “the same path.”

Yet, the path Reagan trod was anything but libertarian.

As a two-term governor of California, Reagan presided over a state budget increase from $5.7 to $10.8 billion. He was a tax cutter in some areas (property tax) but a tax raiser in others (sales tax). He introduced withholding to the state income-tax system. Under his administration, government funding for primary and secondary public education increased 105 percent, government support for junior colleges increased 323 percent, and government grants and loans to college students increased 900 percent. Reagan overhauled the state welfare system, reducing total welfare caseload, but also raised benefits by 30 percent and increased administrative costs. He vetoed legislation to reduce marijuana possession to a misdemeanor and signed legislation to sharply increase penalties for drug dealers.

As president, Reagan is famously remembered as a tax cutter. But, again, he was also a tax raiser. He supported the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit; eliminated “loopholes” that allowed taxpayers to hold on to more of their money; and increased corporate income taxes, Medicare taxes, Social Security taxes, and capital gains taxes. He also began the practice of taxing Social Security benefits.

The Reagan record is anything but fiscal conservatism. During his tenure, federal expenditures increased by more than 60 percent, spending on education increased by 68 percent, and health-care spending increased by 71 percent.

Reagan’s deregulatory policies have been grossly overstated. During the 1980s, the Code of Federal Regulations increased in size by roughly 20 percent. Reagan also increased import barriers and quotas and expanded the agricultural subsidies.

And even though he said in a 1981 speech that “government’s first duty is to protect people, not run their lives,” he didn’t practice what he preached when it came to drugs. Federal spending on law enforcement, prisons, and the war on drugs greatly increased, as did incarceration rates. Reagan signed legislation reinstating civil asset-forfeiture laws and mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes.

His support for gun rights is mixed. And as Reagan’s budget director David Stockman tells us, “Reagan tripled the size of the U.S. defense budget based on a totally phony neocon claim that the Soviet Union was on the verge of military superiority and nuclear first-strike capacity.”

Doesn’t sound like Reagan’s conservatism was too libertarian.

Conservatism

What, then, is conservatism? Ask a hundred conservatives and you may get a hundred different answers. In his book The Conservative Mind, first published in 1953, conservative godfather Russell Kirk (1918–1994) listed and described “six canons of conservative thought” that he considered to be a summary of themes common to conservative thinkers:

1. Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.

2. Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.

3. Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a “classless society.”

4. Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.

5. Faith in prescription and distrust of “sophisters, calculators, and economists” who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs.

6. Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.

In the chapter “Ten Conservative Principles” in his 1993 and last book, The Politics of Prudence, Kirk said that the canons in The Conservative Mind differed “somewhat from edition to edition.” He also mentioned that in his 1982 anthology, The Portable Conservative Reader, he offered “variations upon this theme” of his canons. In The Politics of Prudence, Kirk presented “a summary of conservative assumptions differing somewhat from my canons in those two books of mine.” In introducing his new “ten articles of belief,” he said that they “reflect the emphases of conservatives in America nowadays”:

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.

Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.

Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription.

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.

Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.

Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.

For a more recent description of conservatism, we can consult the 2006 work American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia. Here are some brief excerpts from the entry on “conservatism”:

Conservatism is a philosophy that seeks to maintain and enrich societies characterized by respect for inherited institutions, beliefs and practices, in which individuals develop good character by cooperating with one another in primary, local associations such as families, churches and social groups aimed at furthering the common good in a manner pleasing to God.

Conservatives are attached, not so much to any particular regime or form of government, as to what they believe are the requirements for a good life for all peoples. In the American context, conservatives defend the ordered liberty established by the Constitution and the traditions and practices on which that constitution was built.

Conservatives’ rejection of liberals’ claims that they may, if only given the political power, reshape individuals into more caring, healthy members of richer communities rests in part on an appreciation of the importance of private property and free markets. These social institutions serve as important bulwarks of individual and group initiative against state planning.

Conservatives believe that there is a natural order to the universe, governed by a natural law that gives mankind general rules concerning how to shape their lives in common as individuals. The natural law is not a detailed code, spelling out how men should act in every possible situation. But it provides general guidelines prohibiting acts such as murder and indicating the central importance of moral decency (best summed up in the Golden Rule) and of institutions, like the family, in which alone decent character can be formed.

One of the problems with conservatism is that it has no coherent, consistent (or concise) definition or description. In “Ten Conservative Principles,” Kirk remarked, “The diversity of ways in which conservative views may find expression is itself proof that conservatism is no fixed ideology. What particular principles conservatives emphasize during any given time will vary with the circumstances and necessities of that era.” That is why George W. Bush could say during a CNN interview in 2008, “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” And that is why he could remark the next year at the unveiling of the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University, “I went against my free-market instincts and approved a temporary government intervention.”

The problem with “American conservatism,” as concisely sum-med up by Ludwig von Mises Institute chairman, Lew Rockwell,

is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one soul to heresy. It has never understood the idea of freedom as a self-ordering principle of society. It has never seen the state as the enemy of what conservatives purport to favor. It has always looked to presidential power as the saving grace of what is right and true about America.

Libertarianism

Contrast conservatism with the simplicity of libertarianism. Libertarianism is a political philosophy which says that people should be free from government interference to live their lives any way they desire, pursue their own happiness, make their own choices, engage in any economic activity for their profit, and spend the fruits of their labor as they see fit as long as their actions are peaceful, their associations are voluntary, their interactions are consensual, and they don’t violate the personal or property rights of others.

Libertarianism is the philosophy of nonaggression, whether that aggression be theft, fraud, the initiation of nonconsensual violence against person or property, or the threat of nonconsensual violence. The initiation or threat of aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong, even when done by government. Aggression is justified only in defense of one’s person or property or in retaliation in response to aggression against them.

Libertarianism has nothing to do with one’s lifestyle, tastes, vices, sexual orientation or practices, traditions, religion, aesthetics, sensibilities, social attitudes, or cultural norms. It has nothing to do with libertinism, greed, selfishness, hedonism, licentiousness, nihilism, moral relativism, egalitarianism, antinomianism, anarchy, materialism, or utopianism. It is neither naive about human nature nor inimical to organized religion. It neither disdains tradition nor rejects moral absolutes. Libertarianism is not low-tax liberalism, and a libertarian is not a conservative who is socially liberal.

Libertarianism has everything to do with individual liberty, private property, free markets, free enterprise, free exchange, individual responsibility, personal freedom, free association, voluntary interaction, freedom of conscience, free expression, and peaceful activity — as long as those things don’t violate the personal or property rights of others.

Conservatism and libertarianism

So, is libertarianism “the very heart and soul of conservatism”? Is the basis of conservatism “a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom”? Do conservatives have an “appreciation of the importance of private property and free markets”? Do “conservatives defend the ordered liberty established by the Constitution”? Are libertarianism and conservatism traveling “the same path”?

Perhaps the best way to see whether those things are true is by simply looking at what conservatism and libertarianism say about certain issues. Here are twenty-five of them, some general and some specific — enough to show beyond a shadow of a doubt that conservatism and libertarianism are not brothers, cousins, or related in any way.

Conservatism says that the government is entitled to a portion of every American’s income through taxation. Libertarianism says that taxation is simply government theft, and that all Americans should be allowed to keep the fruits of their labor and spend their money as they see fit.

Conservatism says that Social Security should be “saved” so that future generations of the elderly can be supported by the young. Libertarianism says that Social Security is an intergenerational, income-transfer, wealth-redistribution welfare program that should be abolished.

Conservatism says that the defense budget should be increased and tied to the nation’s GDP. Libertarianism says that the defense budget should be decreased and the military used for defensive purposes only.

Conservatism says that the government should prohibit people from selling their organs both while they are alive and after they are dead. Libertarianism says that your body is your own and, alive or dead, you should be able to do whatever you want with all or part of it.

Conservatism says that the government should take money out of the pockets of American taxpayers and put it in the hands of corrupt foreign governments and organizations in the form of foreign aid. Libertarianism says that because it is not the proper role of government to give out any foreign aid, the decision to give money to foreigners should be an individual one, and no country should receive foreign aid from the U.S. government in any amount, at any time, for any reason.

Conservatism says that the government should expend resources, arrest, fine, or imprison people for growing, manufacturing, buying, selling, using, or possessing drugs it has deemed to be illegal. Libertarianism says that the war on drugs is a war on freedom and that government has no business being concerned about the commercial, medical, or recreational use of drugs.

Conservatism says that most federal gun laws, including the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, should be retained. Libertarianism says that the federal government has no authority whatsoever to pass any laws that relate in any way to weapons, ammunition, waiting periods, or background checks.

Conservatism says that the government should take money from those who work and transfer it to those who don’t by means of unemployment benefits. Libertarianism says that unemployment insurance should be private and that government has no business paying people for not working.

Conservatism says that laws prohibiting discrimination against someone because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin should be enforced and that no one should legally be able to refuse someone service, entrance, or membership on account of those things. Libertarianism says that all discrimination laws should be repealed because they destroy the rights of private property, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, free enterprise, and freedom of contract.

Conservatism says that the government should establish overtime rules and a minimum wage if it is not too high or burdensome to small businesses. Libertarianism says that those things should be negotiated between employers and employees on an individual or group basis without any government involvement whatsoever.

Conservatism says that the government should have refundable tax credits so that “the poor” can get a refund of taxes that were never withheld from their paychecks. Libertarianism says that refundable tax credits are a form of welfare and that the government should never issue a tax refund in excess of what is withheld from paychecks.

Conservatism says that government should take money out of the pockets of American taxpayers and use it to give out grants for scientific and medical research. Libertarianism says that all scientific and medical research should be privately funded and conducted.

Conservatism says that the government should take money from some Americans to feed other Americans by means of food stamps or school breakfasts and lunches. Libertarianism says that all food aid should be private and voluntary and that the government should have nothing to do with feeding students, the poor, or anyone else.

Conservatism says that the government should regulate some, and prohibit other, forms of gambling. Libertarianism says that all gambling laws should be repealed because they are gross violations of individual liberty and property rights.

Conservatism says that the government should take money from some Americans to educate the children of other Americans in public schools or by means of educational vouchers. Libertarianism says that the government should have nothing whatsoever to do with schools, education, teachers, student loans, testing, or standards.

Conservatism says that the United States should continue its military alliances with many countries around the world and come to their defense if necessary. Libertarianism says that the United States should not make entangling alliances and should observe a foreign policy of strict neutrality.

Conservatism says that the government should take money out of the pockets of American taxpayers to explore space and conduct experiments on a space station. Libertarianism says that all space exploration and experimentation should be privately funded and conducted.

Conservatism says that the government should take money out of the pockets of American taxpayers and use it to provide disaster relief in foreign countries. Libertarianism says that because it is not the proper role of government to provide disaster relief — even to its own citizens — the decision to provide disaster relief to foreigners should be an individual one, and no country should receive disaster relief from the U.S. government in any amount, at any time, for any reason.

Conservatism says that the United States should have an interventionist foreign policy and police the world. Libertarianism says that the United States should have a noninterventionist foreign policy and mind its own business.

Conservatism says that the government should provide the poor and farmers a safety net. Libertarianism says that the government should not give or lend money to, or subsidize the poor or any particular group.

Conservatism says that the United States should maintain an empire of troops and bases around the world. Libertarianism says that all foreign bases should be closed and all U.S. troops brought home.

Conservatism says that “the rich” should pay their “fair share” of taxes by paying a higher percentage of their income to the government than “the poor” or by forgoing certain deductions, exemptions, and credits that the government grants to them. Libertarianism says that a progressive tax system is Marxist and that neither “the rich” nor “the poor” should be taxed on their income.

Conservatism says that the government should take money out of the pockets of Americans who “have” and redistribute it to other Americans who “have not” by means of WIC, TANF, Section 8 rent subsidies, SSI, and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Libertarianism says that the welfare state is immoral because taking resources from people to give to those in need is not a noble act of charity but engaging in theft, and that all charity should be entirely private and voluntary.

Conservatism says that the government should make and enforce laws against victimless crimes. Libertarianism says that there is no such thing as nebulous crimes against nature, society, or the state, and that every crime should have a tangible and identifiable victim.

Conservatism says that the government should take money from some Americans to pay for the health care and health insurance of other Americans by means of SCHIP, Medicaid, and Medicare. Libertarianism says that the government shouldn’t subsidize anyone’s health care or health insurance and that the government should have absolutely nothing to do with either one.

What are we to conclude from this comparison between conservatism and libertarianism but that conservatism is merely one of many varieties of statism? Indeed, the very heart and soul of conservatism is statism. Conservatism deems it completely appropriate for government to punish people for engaging in peaceful, voluntary, and consensual actions it doesn’t approve of and to take people’s resources against their will and transfer or redistribute them to others as it sees fit. Ronald Reagan was wrong. There is an incontrovertible divide that exists between conservatism and libertarianism. The two are following opposite paths. It is libertarianism alone that desires less government interference, less centralized authority, and more individual freedom.

Laurence M. Vance is a columnist and policy advisor for the Future of Freedom Foundation, an associated scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and a columnist, blogger, and book reviewer at LewRockwell.com. Visit his website: www.vancepublications.com. Send him email: lmvance@laurencemvance.com.

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NEXT MONTH:

“Free Trade Is Fair Trade

by Laurence M. Vance

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All of the States [except] Virginia ... had ... de-lineated ... unceded portions of right, and ... fences against wrong, which they meant to exempt from the power of their governors, in instruments called declarations of rights & constitutions: and as they did this by Conventions which they appointed for the express purpose of reserving these rights, and of delegating others to their ordinary legislative, executive and judiciary bodies, none of the reserved rights can be touched without resorting to the people to appoint another convention for the express purpose of permitting it. Where the constitutions then have been so formed by conventions named for this express purpose they are fixed and unalterable but by a convention or other body to be specially authorized.

— Thomas Jefferson

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Regulatory Tyranny

by David S. D’Amato

Having considered the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1937 case of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish in the March 2016 issue of Future of Freedom, a case in which the jurisprudential tide turned in favor of deference to comprehensive social and economic legislation, a look at the earlier case of Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States is in order. Unlike West Coast Hotel, Schechter finds the Court loath to yield to economic intervention, particularly where that intervention has troubling implications for the separation of powers.

At issue in the case were provisions of the “Live Poultry Code,” a regulatory framework set forth by the Roosevelt administration, that is, by the executive branch. Passed by Congress in 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act gave the president the power to formulate and enforce new rules related to health, safety, and competition practices. Through an executive order in the spring of 1934, Franklin Roosevelt approved the code, creating a broad catalog of new rules. Among many other provisions, it established maximum working hours, a minimum wage, and a maximum number of workers that one slaughterhouse could employ, which number was to be tied to that house’s average weekly sales. The defendants, A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corporation and Schechter Live Poultry Market, were poultry wholesalers in Brooklyn, purchasing live birds for slaughter and sale. They were charged with several violations of the code and convicted at their trial in federal court. The Supreme Court of the United States agreed to hear the case in April 1935.

Appealing to “the grave national crisis” of the Depression, the government argued that flexibility and discretion were necessary to nurture recovery in delicate economic conditions. The law, the government urged, was designed to promote “cooperative effort” in “the adoption of codes” within a given industry, a worthy end to which the Court should defer. For the Court, though, matters were not so simple. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes’s majority opinion pointed out that, contrary to the government’s arguments, the law’s project was “not simply one for [promoting] voluntary effort.” Rather, the statute “involved the coercive exercise of the lawmaking power,” binding everyone whether they assented or not.

The fourth branch

Turning to the separation of powers question, the Court reaffirmed the principle that the Constitution forbids the transferal or abdication of Congress’s “essential legislative functions.” Reversing the convictions, the Court held that “Congress cannot delegate legislative power to the President to exercise an unfettered discretion,” that “[such] a delegation of legislative power is unknown to our law” and incompatible with the Constitution. This basic idea is known as the nondelegation doctrine. Regrettably, the view of nondelegation pronounced in Schechter is, as many legal scholars have observed, effectively defunct, replaced by a rather extreme judicial deference to administrative entities. Today, the 1984 case Chevron v. NRDC is perhaps the most important opinion in administrative law and a key source of that deference. In Chevron, the Supreme Court concocted a two-step analysis through which courts determine whether the actions of an administrative agency are appropriate (as opposed to a usurpation of legislative power rightly reserved for Congress). Under the Chevron test, the first question asks “whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue.” If so, the administrative body must adhere to the guidelines that Congress has specified. If not, however, the test moves to the question of whether the agency’s is a “permissible construction of the statute.” On its face, this test seems eminently reasonable, consistent with fundamental constitutional values. But in its application, the Chevron test often — indeed, according to one 2008 study, more than three-quarters of the time — means an easy legal victory for the regulatory agency.

The system advocated by free-market libertarians is decidedly not one without regulation, devoid of rules that protect consumers from unsafe practices and corner-cutting by self-interested business. Instead, libertarians reject simply the idea that a single monopoly entity — government — ought to have the arbitrary and almost limitless power to compel compliance with its rules through violence. Libertarians propose a system much like the one for which the government claimed to argue in Schechter.

In such a genuine free-market politico-economic system, it is likely that there would be myriad industry groups and trade associations developing and publishing regulations, model rules, and guidelines, though none of the groups would have the unique and destructive power that defines the state. That is the power to aggress against peaceful individuals, to use violence against people who haven’t actually harmed anyone. Just as trifurcated government, the United States’s distinctive separation of powers, acts as a buffer against government overreach and arbitrariness, so too does the free market’s decentralized system of private regulation render smarter rules and safer products and services for consumers.

It is a great, pernicious myth that unification of power in a single hierarchical structure leads to regularity and stability. Everywhere we look, quite the opposite is true. We find that rigid centralization and fixed hierarchical chains of command stultify and paralyze, that they impede the free flow of information and frustrate the processes through which errors are discovered and corrective actions undertaken. Like the economic system more generally, the regulatory schema cannot be pre-planned and foisted upon the voluntary exchanges that make up the marketplace from without. With regulatory power monopolized and consolidated in bodies that have no incentive to craft sensible rules, risk of regulatory capture and rulemaking that actually makes consumers less safe is greatly magnified.

A large and growing body of research testifies to the economic damage that can and does result from needless and nonsensical regulations. For example, a study from the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that the total cost of regulations to the U.S. economy approaches a staggering $2 trillion. Research furthermore suggests that when politicians’ hands are tied on spending, they regulate, and that the powerful use access to federal agencies to “regulate away” threats from smaller competitors. A 2015 study from the Mercatus Center shows “fewer new firm births and slower employment growth” in more-regulated sectors, as well as a troubling contrast in the relative abilities of small and large firms to absorb the costs associated with new regulations; it will surprise few that, from 1998 to 2011, new rules had a greater negative impact on employment growth in smaller companies.

A fading order

The New Deal era witnessed significant expansions of the administrative state, broadening the foundations of the particular form of economic fascism the United States has today. And, indeed, to call it fascism is no exaggeration. The mutual admiration between Roosevelt’s White House and the fascists of Europe is now well documented. The political economy of the New Deal aggrandized the federal government in unprecedented ways, grounded upon ideas that Friedrich Hayek called scientism. The scientism of the New Deal saw state power as the instrument through which social and economic relations were to be rationally ordered. The bureaucracy, staffed by “experts,” was to allocate manpower and resources, to make the decisions that are properly left to the price system.

Under this emerging system, as Richard Epstein recently remarked in discussing Woodrow Wilson, “traditional views of separation of powers and federalism are a mere irritation that we have to overcome.” Many of the new executive powers that appeared during World War II never fully subsided. The increase in the power of the executive branch relative to the other two branches troubled many old-fashioned liberals, whose ideas on the role of government and the rule of law made them enemies of the New Deal. Through much of the 1930s, the Supreme Court was famously hostile to Roosevelt’s signature policy package, recognizing that it set the country on a dangerous new path to bureaucratic authoritarianism. Schechter represents that hostility.

Examined retrospectively, though, Schechter seems like the last gasp of a rapidly fading constitutional order. As Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg observes, Schechter “marks the last time the Court held a statute unconstitutional under Article I, Section 1.” Despite its bastardy — its questionable constitutional extraction — the Supreme Court has long since embraced the modern administrative state. Unauthorized and unlawful, this fourth branch of government today enjoys broad discretion to issue its own rules and operate an extensive system of administrative courts. Its nominal home, the executive branch, employs millions of people. And as Robert Higgs reminds us, “True government employment is much greater than officially reported.”

Seduced and deceived by the apparent exigencies of endless war, the American people were vulnerable, abandoning the constitutional separation of powers in favor of the modern administrative state. As a practical matter, regulatory bureaucracies now live in a kind of legal limbo, regularly exercising the powers of all three branches, positioned quite outside the traditional constitutional framework. To whom they answer is unclear. Ostensibly, the bureaucracy answers to the president, yet as Ronald J. Pestritto observes, its “powers are often exercised in a manner that is largely independent of presidential control and altogether independent of political control.”

Even the faintest possibility of a free society with a limited government vanishes in a political culture that treats this kind of unaccountable power as legitimate. Compromise with or submission to such power does not befit a free people. Though the administrative state may appear permanent and immovable, its many ineptitudes are today more stark than ever.

Technology has empowered individuals to discover, innovate, and exchange at a speed with which the lumbering regulatory state cannot keep pace. Given the unpromising prospects of reform from the political branches and the Supreme Court’s complicity in the system as it stands, libertarians might look outside the legal and political structure for solutions. Recently Charles Murray has suggested that Americans expose the weaknesses of the regulatory system through calculated disobedience, arguing that, confronted with widespread nonobservance, administrative agencies will be powerless to enforce their rules. Rather than (or, perhaps, in addition to) seeking to influence politics or the courts, simply ignore the state and work to fortify peaceful social counter-power. Libertarianism celebrates the separation of powers, both in the United States’s governmental system and as a general political and economic principle. The Schechter case reminds us of a time when that principle was still taken seriously in establishment quarters. For that reason alone, it is worth remembering.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney with an LL.M. in international law and business.

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Let woman then go on — not asking favors, but claiming as a right the removal of all hindrances to her elevation in the scale of being — let her receive encouragement for the proper cultivation of all her powers, so that she may enter profitably into the active business of life.... Then in the marriage union, the independence of husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.

— Lucretia Coffin Mott

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The Revolution of Rising Expectations

by Wendy McElroy

Starving peasants storm the Bastille because oppression has driven them beyond the limits of human endurance. It is the quintessential image of political revolution. But what if it is wrong? Or what if there is an equally powerful force that also creates revolution and contradicts this received image?

The phrase “a revolution of rising expectations” became popular after World War II. It refers to a situation in which a rise in prosperity and freedom leads people to believe they can improve life for themselves and their families. It leads them to seek political changes that will allow them to pursue opportunity. World War II destabilized the power structure of the world. Former colonies threw off the old imperialism and embraced the prospect of independence, all the while longing for the prosperity of the West. Average people in poor and oppressed nations began to hope for a sliver more of prosperity and freedom.

In the 1950s, a revolution of rising expectations and demands created political revolutions from the Far East to Latin America and Africa. The political instability often ended badly, as revolutions that turn violent do, but that fact makes the phenomenon no less remarkable.

It is a truth that tyrants and despots have long known: downtrodden people obey because they believe there is no option; no other action is likely to better their lives. Totalitarian regimes quash any sparkle of nonconformity because it expresses choice and it cannot be controlled.

The same is true of hope. Hopeful people want to control their own lives, and they demand or simply take the political space to do so. They are especially prone to doing so when culture and news flow freely around the globe, allowing people to compare their standard of living and freedoms with those of others. That makes control of information a top priority for regimes that wish to maintain power. Happily, few things are as difficult to contain.

All that means that improving the lives of average people is a profoundly revolutionary act whether or not those who do so intend it as such. The mere act of producing goods and services produces freedom as well because it makes people aware of their choices and the possibility of expanding them. The opportunities ushered in by the free market establish a thirst for more. Unless a person is willing to cheat and steal, the “more” requires freedom.

History of rising expectations

The idea of “a revolution of rising expectations” has been dated back to insights offered by the historian Alexis de Tocqueville in his book L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) — The Old Regime and the French Revolution.

The aristocratic Tocqueville, whose mother and father were imprisoned and nearly executed in the French Revolution, commented on a dynamic that might seem counterintuitive. Most histories of that revolution dwell upon the hideous deprivations of the French peasants — and rightly so — but Tocqueville noted something odd. The strongest revolutionary sentiment was found in regions where prosperity had been growing. People for whom the bonds of servitude had recently loosened were the loudest voices for change.

Tocqueville wrote that

it is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into a revolution. It happens most often that a people, which has supported without complaint, as if they were not felt, the most oppressive laws, violently throws them off as soon as their weight is lightened.

The revolution results from the realization of alternatives and possibilities. Freedom breeds freedom so surely that Tocqueville concluded, “Only a great genius can save a prince who undertakes to relieve his subjects after a long oppression. The evil, which was suffered patiently as inevitable, seems unendurable as soon as the idea of escaping from it is conceived.”

It is a different approach to analyzing revolution. Karl Marx believed that worsening conditions drove the engine of revolt. Arguably, that meant that the worse things become, the better things become, because the day of freedom draws closer.

But what if the better things become, the better things become? What if despair, stagnation, and fatalism are the props of authoritarian rule and not the inspiration for freedom? If that analysis is correct, then every person who produces a good or service, every individual who adds a choice to the lives of others is a revolutionary. The fact that he or she profits by doing so is to be applauded.

Analyzing the dynamic

The revolution of rising expectations is often broken into two initial stages. First, a modest increase in prosperity and freedom raises the average person’s expectation of what is possible in life. Second, greater access to resources, especially education and information, raises that person’s awareness of oppression and his unwillingness to tolerate it.

Perhaps that explains why social revolt so often brews in places of opportunity rather than ones of stark oppression. Revolutions flow from universities, where comparatively privileged young people believe change is possible and within their grasp. Revolutionaries notoriously come from the upper or middle class; they are usually people who cannot claim the victimization experienced by the poverty-stricken.

The oppressed are often uninterested in working for social change. Marx called them the “lumpenproletariat” and scorned them for not understanding their own class interest well enough to rise up against the state.

In a sense, this is bad news — or, at least, it has an unfortunate implication. Authoritarian regimes may refuse to loosen their control on the grounds that freedom begets freedom. That scenario was lent credibility by a relatively recent event. On January 1, 2014, a headline in the Washington Examiner read, “China May Face a Revolution of Rising Expectations.”

The article explains that, in 2013, “leading members of the Politburo recommended that underlings read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Old Regime and the French Revolution.” The leaders wanted to drive a point home. When social conditions improved, revolution followed. It was part of their argument against granting the demands for freedom that had surrounded the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989.

“Since Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms started in 1978,” the piece argued, there had been an impressive increase in prosperity due to China’s manufacturing exports. The prosperity was accompanied by a hope for greater freedom. But, the article continues,

Repression seems to have worked. The Tiananmen massacre came only 11 years after the beginning of Deng’s reforms. Since then another 24 years have passed, with the regime still in power.

The Washington Examiner elucidated the Chinese government’s perspective:

The Chinese people have come to expect rapidly rising living standards, and may abandon the regime if it doesn’t produce. Regime elites must be careful … or the rulers will lose everything and chaos will be unleashed on China.

At the same time as underling bureaucrats were advised to read Tocqueville, the leadership was also “circulating a six-part TV documentary blaming the collapse of the Soviet Union on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and softness. Message: Avoid democracy or political freedom.”

Conclusion

The standard view of revolution has been forged by the Left, especially by Marx. At best, it is inadequate. At worst, it is the opposite of what is correct.

Revolution comes from hope and a taste of freedom. It comes when the forces of freedom offer people a glimpse of something better. Violent revolt is the result of despair and rage. The latter is not revolution in the true sense because it merely replaces one form of brute force with another, as though the cast of characters were what mattered. Instead of viewing the Bastille as the quintessential image of revolution, people should look to the farmers in prosperous regions of France who said, “my children will live in freedom and fare better than I.” They were the true revolutionaries.

Wendy McElroy is a fellow of the Independent Institute and the author of The Art of Being Free.

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The Empire versus Little America: Conference Remarks

by Bill Kauffman

Former Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright said in 1967, “The price of empire is America’s soul, and that price is too high.”

War, expansion, the maintenance of a large standing army: these corrupt a country, as poets from James Russell Lowell to Wendell Berry have tried to tell us. The Vietnam or Iraq War may level villages across the sea but back home, in our villages, they unleash an insidious poison, too. They make our places less liveable. From the pit of the Cold War Edmund Wilson, the Sage of Boonville, New York, lamented that “our country has become today a huge blundering power unit controlled more and more by bureaucracies whose rule is making it more and more difficult to carry on the tradition of American individualism.”

In Boonville as in Emporia as in Sauk Centre, the little places that give America soul were ravaged and denuded by the machine of perpetual war.

War effaces and perverts the very bases of healthy community life. It elevates impermanence and rootlessness to virtues. It forcibly uproots people; it distorts natural economic patterns, causing artificial regional booms and busts — witness the histories of Detroit and Kentucky; it spreads venereal disease, if not democracy; it separates husbands from wives and parents from children; it leads to a spike in the divorce rate among service personnel and it nationalizes their children in what the Pentagon, with its usual tone-deafness to Orwellian rings, calls “the Total Army Family.” Welcome to the Brave New World.

A militaristic state is a centripetal machine that sucks all power to the center. Smaller bodies, grass-roots democratic institutions, are devitalized, wiped out. All political decisions of consequence are made at a level impossibly remote from real life. People we don’t know — people who have no desire or even means to know us — make life or death decisions about us.

America is the sum of a thousand and one little, individuated places, each with its own history and accent and stories. A politician who understands this will act in ways that protect and preserve these real places. He will ask the question that never gets injected into national debates over the wisdom of America’s constant wars — namely, What are the domestic costs? Loving his block, he will not wish to bomb Iraq. Loyal to a neighborhood, he will not send its young men and women across the sea to kill and die for causes wholly unrelated to local life.

It’s been a long time since a Republican or Democratic presidential nominee acknowledged the primacy of home over the empire. Today we have these rootless politicos babbling on about “the homeland” — a creepy totalitarian phrase that, pre-Bush, was never applied to our country and which we should ridicule at every opportunity before it is permanently implanted in our national vocabulary. As the manufacture of political opinions and the directing of the political parties has become centralized in imperial Washington, the old skepticism of a powerful central state and respect for out-of-the-way places, the provinces, has seemingly vanished.

But it is in these places — and they are urban as well as rural — that a healthy anti-war movement can grow. I say “healthy” because it is more than just “anti” something; it is based in love. This sentiment has suffused anti-expansion and anti-war movements throughout our history. It was captured in G.K. Chesterton’s wonderful novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, when he said that “the supreme psychological fact about patriotism [is] that the patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it.”

The real homeland

This was the kind of patriotism that animated the Anti-Imperialist League, which in opposing U.S. conquest of the Philippines spoke for a Little America, a land of creeks, not oceans; shops, not factories; modesty and sly humor, not bluster and brass. The Anti-Imperialists thought that, say, Indianans had enough to occupy them in Indiana — they had rich-enough lives in the Hoosier state — that they did not need to send their young men across the sea to kill foreigners and plant the American flag atop a mound of Filipino corpses.

George W. Bush, McCain, Hillary Clinton, Obama — the rootless class that runs this government — what do they love, other than the wielding of power? They stand on nothing. They have no ground under their feet. They have tanks and bombs but they have no soul.

They view Little America as a source of cannon fodder and tax dollars, though they are occasionally frustrated by our “isolationism” — that is, our reluctance to kill or be killed by foreigners. This is benighted. So we are hectored to take our eyes off those things nighest and focus them on Baghdad, Hanoi, Teheran, who knows what’s next. A warfare state centralizes and vulgarizes culture; it despises the local, exalts the national, focuses on the remote. So cherishing, protecting, little and local things becomes a subversive act. Love, finally, is the most potent enemy of the empire.

And the love which sustains this Little America is reasserting itself. At farm markets. In community-supported agriculture. Home-schooling. The reflorescence of regional literature. Something is happening and Mr. Jones — or Mr. Obama, or Mr. Romney — doesn’t know what it is. Wendell Berry calls this new decentralism a “redemptive” movement, though he acknowledges that “in terms of standing and influence [it] is hardly a side at all. It doesn’t have a significant political presence. It is virtually unrepresented in our state and federal governments. Most of its concerns are not on the agenda of either major party.”

But it’s out there. And a mind-our-own-business, stay-out-of-foreign-wars, love-what-is-nighest-unto-you ethos is part of this emerging decentralist spirit. The Little America is waking up. And it is fertile territory in which to plant the flag of peace.

Bill Kauffman is the author of eleven books, among them Ain’t My America and Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, as well as the screenplay of the movie Copperhead. This is an excerpt from the book Historic and Current Opposition to U.S. Wars and How a Coalition of Citizens from the Political Right and Left Can End American Empire, edited by George D. O’Neill, Jr., Paul Buhle, Bill Kauffman, and Kevin Zeese, and published by ComeHomeAmerica.us. Reprinted with permission.

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In the eleventh and twelfth centuries famine [in England] is recorded every fourteen years, on an average, and the people suffered twenty years of famine in two hundred years. In the thirteenth century the list exhibits the same proportion of famine; the addition of high prices made the proportion greater. Upon the whole, scarcities decreased during the three following centuries; but the average from 1201 to 1600 is the same, namely, seven famines and ten years of famine in a century.

— William Farr

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QUOTES

Variety is the essence of life, competition the life of trade.

— Paul L. Poirot

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All of the States [except] Virginia ... had ... de-lineated ... unceded portions of right, and ... fences against wrong, which they meant to exempt from the power of their governors, in instruments called declarations of rights & constitutions: and as they did this by Conventions which they appointed for the express purpose of reserving these rights, and of delegating others to their ordinary legislative, executive and judiciary bodies, none of the reserved rights can be touched without resorting to the people to appoint another convention for the express purpose of permitting it. Where the constitutions then have been so formed by conventions named for this express purpose they are fixed and unalterable but by a convention or other body to be specially authorized.

— Thomas Jefferson

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Let woman then go on — not asking favors, but claiming as a right the removal of all hindrances to her elevation in the scale of being — let her receive encouragement for the proper cultivation of all her powers, so that she may enter profitably into the active business of life.... Then in the marriage union, the independence of husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.

— Lucretia Coffin Mott

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In the eleventh and twelfth centuries famine [in England] is recorded every fourteen years, on an average, and the people suffered twenty years of famine in two hundred years. In the thirteenth century the list exhibits the same proportion of famine; the addition of high prices made the proportion greater. Upon the whole, scarcities decreased during the three following centuries; but the average from 1201 to 1600 is the same, namely, seven famines and ten years of famine in a century.

— William Farr

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Table of Contents

The Future of Freedom Foundation

Why I Favor Limited Government, Part 3 by Jacob G. Hornberger

Bipartisan Battering of Freedom by James Bovard

Conservatism and Libertarianism by Laurence M. Vance

Regulatory Tyranny by David S. D’Amato

The Revolution of Rising Expectations by Wendy McElroy

The Empire versus Little America: Conference Remarks by Bill Kauffman

QUOTES