Positive Liberty

It strikes me that we may have reached an important moment for libertarianism.

Suddenly it seems like everyone who is not in the government, or on the take, is thinking like a libertarian, or wishing that he could, or else just shambling vaguely in our direction: We shouldn’t use the state to protect people from their own irresponsibility. Fiscal discipline matters. There’s a difference between earning money honestly and decently — and getting a government handout. This is common sense, and it’s what we’ve been saying all along.

Conservatives, liberals, and the vast majority of ordinary folks: We libertarians bid you welcome. Pull up a chair. Have a cigar. Don’t worry; the first one’s just tobacco. Cheap tobacco, given the times. Now let’s you and I go on a brief reading excursion…

A good place to start is with Cato’s Letters, one of the foundational texts of classical liberalism, a key influence on the American Revolution, and to this day an important text of libertarian thought. In the third letter of the series, we find the following, written in 1720:

The law is the great rule in every country, at least in every free country, by which private property is ascertained, and the publick good, which is the great end of all laws, is secured; and the religious observance of this rule, is what alone makes the difference between good laws, and none. The terror and sanctity of the laws are shewn by the execution of them; and to a contempt of the laws, or to a direct dispensing with them, have been owing most of the shocks and revolutions, that we have, for many ages, sustained in England.

Some laws are, indeed, unwarily made, being procured by passion, craft, or surprize; but such are generally either suffered to wax obsolete, or are repealed, as we have seen in many instances, and may yet see in more.

But I speak here of those laws which have a direct and known tendency to secure to us what we have, and to preserve us what we are: A free people are kept so, by no other means than an equal distribution of property; every man, who has a share of property, having a proportionable share of power; and the first seeds of anarchy (which, for the most part, ends in tyranny) are produced from hence, that some are ungovernably rich, and many more are miserably poor; that is, some are masters of all means of oppression, and others want all the means of self-defence.

What progress we have lately made in England, towards such a blessed state of confusion and misery, by the credulity of the people, throwing their all upon the mercy of base-spirited, hard-hearted villains, mischievously trusted with a power to undo them, is too manifest from the woeful condition that we are in. The ruin is general, and every man has the miserable consolation to see his neighbour undone: For as to that class of ravens, whose wealth has cost the nation its all, as they are manifest enemies to God and man, no man can call them his neighbours: They are rogues of prey, they are stock-jobbers, they are a conspiracy of stock-jobbers! A name which carries along with it such a detestable and deadly image, that it exceeds all human invention to aggravate it; nor can nature, with all her variety and stores, furnish out any thing to illustrate its deformities; nay, it gains visible advantage by the worst comparisons that you can make: Your terror lessens, when you liken them to crocodiles and cannibals, who feed, for hunger, on human bodies. . . .

How’d things come to such a pass? The problem was the South Sea Company — an early target, justly chosen, of libertarian ire. A product of too-cozy relations between business interests and government. The recommended remedy? Hanging.

The problem wasn’t capitalism. It was simply this: Capitalism for thee, but not for me. The word of the day is corporatism, and since the days of the South Sea Company, we’ve never really been without it. Corporations have always used their power to try to win favors from the government, while leaving all the rest of us still subject to the vicissitudes of the market. That’s the essence of corporatism.

Corporatism isn’t an ideology. It’s the ideology of the free market — with a special exemption for one’s friends. As such, it gives the genuine free market a bad name, even to the point where a genuine free market is thought not to exist, and where its advocates are thought simply members of the corporatist elite, or to be their well-paid apologists.

Real libertarians have hated corporatism for centuries, as Jefferson did. Nor is the twentieth exempted. Here’s Ludwig von Mises, often considered the most important libertarian of that unfortunate era:

[T]he present-day bourgeois, those who are already wealthy capitalists and entrepreneurs, are in their capacity as bourgeois not selfishly interested in the preservation of laissez faire. Under laissez faire their eminent position is daily threatened anew by the ambitions of impecunious newcomers. Laws that put obstacles in the way of talented upstarts are detrimental to the interests of the consumers but they protect those who have already established their position in business against the competition of intruders. In making it more difficult for a businessman to reap profit and in taxing away the greater part of the profits made, they prevent the accumulation of capital by newcomers and thus remove the inducement that impels old firms toward the utmost exertion in serving consumers.

We’ve always opposed this sort of double standard. Now you can too. Unless you’re on the take, of course.

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