Positive Liberty

I want to add a few thoughts to Dr. Kuznicki’s great post about the Nineteenth Century.

First, I think it’s really naive to say, as Matt Zeitlin does, that “[w]hat makes the 19th century so unappealing to American liberals is not that it was laissez faire, per se, but that to the extent there was any government intervention, that intervention was on the behalf of the powerful and wealthy.” If that were true, liberals would not be liberals, they would be libertarians. Liberals object to government aiding the powerful and wealthy sometimes. But this has never been a consistent or even central part of their critique of either the nineteenth century as a historical period or of America’s mixed economy as a political system. Nor has their critique of this facet of intervention been consistent, since they are all for government aiding the powerful and wealthy if they are the powerful and wealthy that the liberals approve of—labor unions, for example. Labor unions are powerful engines for exploiting the working class. They, uniquely among American corporations (and yes, they’re corporations) have the power to force workers to hand over their earnings against their will. These unions then use the money—in secrecy, refusing to report what they do with it—to support political causes that the workers themselves often disapprove of. The unions are exempt from the antitrust laws that Mr. Zeitlin appears to endorse. They advocate and usually obtain policies that punish the poor and immigrants severely by curtailing employment; job security schemes, for example, that create powerful disincentives to hiring new and untrained labor. They do all these things only because the government intercedes on their side. And liberals are absolutely silent about these abuses. In fact, in 1994, when the Republican Congress sought to investigate union political spending, Democratic Congressmen walked out of the hearings.

Another problem with the liberal critique of the nineteenth century interventionist corporate state is that they mix up the legitimate uses of government authority—in defense of property rights, for example—with illegitimate powers. Zeitlin, for example, claims that the government “was happy to step in for union busting or to subsidize railroads.” These are to essentially different issues, however. Subdidizing railroads was certainly illegitimate and a violation of property rights. It was an instance of government intervening in the economy to benefit politically powerful classes at the expense of the less influential. It was an abuse. But “union busting” is a smear term designed to obscure what was really going on. Unions demanded the power to organize on the job even in spite of the employer’s contract with the workers. They often demanded the power to picket or protest on the employers’ property. They often used (and still often use) violence against so-called “scabs” (that is, workers who choose of their own free will not to join in a strike). They often committed destruction against the property of employers. Employers would lock them out of the building or fire them—which they had the complete right to do—because they did not want to have to deal with unions. Whether you think unionizing is a good idea or a bad idea, any regime of property rights and liberty is one in which the employer has the right to do these things. For the government to enjoin a union from violating an employer’s property rights is not unjust intervention—it is protecting freedom in just the way government ought to do. The employer would certainly have no right to break into the worker’s house and commit similar acts against him; but to liberals, the employer is wealthy and therefore his rights count for less.

What’s more, a union is a labor cartel designed to raise the price of labor by preventing employers from shopping elsewhere. It is literally a monopoly—a conspiracy to restrain trade. Early court decisions finding unions in violation of the Sherman Act were exactly correct: they simply were monopolies in interstate commerce. Yet liberals decry these decisions on the grounds that the court didn’t bend the rules or excuse the unions from the Sherman Act’s literal language. That is not intellectually honest.

The fact that the left has never centered its critique of nineteenth century practices around the injustice of governments’ intervention on behalf of the wealthy is typified by Friedrich Engels’ reaction to the repeal of the corn laws. The corn laws, of course, were a typical intervention by government on behalf of powerful business lobbyists, raising the price of wheat and thus harming the working class for the benefit of the wealthy. Any person genuinely concerned with the betterment of the working class should applaud the repeal of the corn laws, and libertarians often use it as an example of how tariffs and other government interventions essentially tax the poor to support the wealthy. But what was Engels’ reaction?

If now one asks what has been the motive of this colossal movement…it must be acknowledged that this motive is the private interest of the industrial and commercial middle class of Great Britain. For this class it is of the greatest importance to have a system which, as it believes at least, ensures it for all time a world monopoly of trade and industry by enabling it to pay just as low wages as its competitors and to exploit all the advantages that England possesses as a result of its 80 years’ start in the development of modern industry. From this point of view the middle class alone, and not the people, benefits from. the abolition of the Corn Laws…. The abolition of the Corn Laws would deal a fatal blow to the political power of the landowners in the Lower House, and hence in fact in the whole English legislature, since it would make the tenant-farmers independent of the landowners. It would proclaim capital to be the supreme power in England, but at the same time it would shake the English Constitution to its foundations; it would rob an essential constituent of the legislative body, viz. the landed aristocracy, of all wealth and all power, and thereby exert a different and greater influence on the future of England than many other political measures. Once again, however, we find that from this aspect too the abolition of the Corn Laws’ offers no advantage to the people.

Engels, and his intellectual descendants—today’s liberals—was more concerned about class warfare, and sticking it to the wealthy, than about actually improving the lot of the poor. Here was a great moment in legal reform, which ensured a more plentiful supply of food at lower prices, and Engels says it “offers no advantage to the people” because it is simply a pro-free market measure, and the free market is bad because it’s all about greed instead of self-sacrifice.

More recently we’ve seen the same myopia in eminent domain reform. The liberals think Kelo is bad because it benefitted the wealthy and hurt poor people like Mrs. Kelo—but they don’t want serious eminent domain reform because they don’t want to protect private property rights, which are bad because they’re all about greed instead of self-sacrifice, and because if we protect people’s property against regulatory takings, why then we wouldn’t be able to force people to provide us with wildlife sanctuaries at their own expense.

It’s things like this that make me hesitate to embrace liberals as we’ve been encouraged to do by some prominent libertarians. Liberals are more our friends than conservatives are, no doubt, because liberalism is a cousin of libertarianism. But for all their talk about freedom, they are not basically interested in liberty—they, like conservatives, are interested in liberty for those of whom they approve, but not of those they don’t like. And their attitudes toward the nineteenth century reflect that.

That said, I think there’s an important point to be made with regard to that era. Libertarians do not advocate a return to the ninteenth century. We advocate the free market–something that the ninteenth century was not; it was groping toward it, but it was not a libertarian model by any stretch of the imagination. We libertarians do ourselves a disservice when we talk about “restoring” a Constitution or going back to a free market era or something. We look toward something new–toward the future, not the past. Our ideas are new and untried paths to wealth and peace, and we ought to advocate them in precisely those terms.

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