Lew Rockwell has posted a brilliant piece on conservatism and American values. It is the text of a speech delivered at the Jeremy Davis Mises Circle in Houston, Texas, on January 23, 2010.
Rockwell neatly summarizes most of what I’ve been saying in this blog in one simple speech. It is a must-read for conservatives. Liberals should not read it because their heads will explode if they try to understand it.
Excerpts:
It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It is a fascinating thing to behold.
- People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure without massive invasions of our privacy at every step, and even being strip-searched before boarding airplanes, even though private institutions manage much greater security without any invasions of human rights;
- People can no longer remember how a true free market in medical care would work, even though all the problems of the current system were created by government interventions in the first place;
- People imagine that we need 700 military bases around the world, and endless wars in the Middle East, for “security,” though safe Switzerland doesn’t;
- People think it is insane to think of life without central banks, even though they are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency;
- Even meddlesome agencies like the Consumer Products Safety Commission or the Federal Trade Commission strike most people as absolutely essential, even though it is not they who catch the thieves and frauds, but private institutions;
- The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both;
- People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn’t create in America the world’s most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.
This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom – the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself – is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration.
If the role of the state is to ferret out evil thoughts and bad ideas, it must necessarily become totalitarian. If the goal of the state is that all citizens must come to hold the same values as the great leader, whether economic, moral, or cultural, the state must necessarily become totalitarian. If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning.
I draw attention to this absurdity to make a more general point. What seems to have escaped the current generation is the notion that was once called freedom. Let me be clear on what I mean by freedom. I mean a social or political condition in which people exercise their own choices concerning what they do with their lives and property. People are permitted to trade and exchange goods and services without impediment or violent interference. They can associate or not associate with anyone of their own choosing. They can arrange their own lives and businesses. They can build, move, innovate, save, invest, and consume on terms that they themselves define.
What will be the results? We cannot predict them, any more than I can know when everyone in this room will wake up tomorrow morning, or what you will have for breakfast. Human choice works this way. There are as many patterns of human choice as there are humans who make choices.
The only real question we should ask is whether the results will be orderly – consistent with peace and prosperity – or chaotic, and thereby at war with human flourishing. The great burden born by the classical liberal tradition, stretching from medieval times to our own, is to make believable the otherwise improbable claim that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of orderliness.
This is only the most visible cost. As Frédéric Bastiat emphasized, the enormity of the costs of the state can only be discovered in considering its unseen costs: the inventions not brought to market, the businesses not opened, the people whose lives were cut short so that they could not enjoy their full potential, the wealth not used for productive purposes but rather taxed away, the capital accumulation through savings not undertaken because the currency was destroyed and the interest rate held near zero, among an infinitely expandable list of unknowns.
And what did economics contribute to human sciences? What was the value that it added? It demonstrated the orderliness of the material world through a careful look at the operation of the price system and the forces that work to organize the production and distribution of scarce goods.
Its main lesson was taught again and again for centuries: government cannot improve on the results of human action achieved through voluntary trade and association. This was its contribution. This was its argument. This was its warning to every would-be social planner: your dreams of domination must be curbed.
In effect, this was a message of freedom, one that inspired revolution after revolution, each of which stemmed from the conviction that humankind would be better off in the absence of rule than in its tyrannical presence. But consider that what had to come before the real revolutions: there had to be this intellectual work that prepared the field of battle, the epic struggle that lasted centuries and continues to this day, between the nation-state and the market economy.
Now, we might laugh about this, but consider the problem from the point of view of the state. The whole reason you are in office is control. You are there to manage society. What you really and truly fear is that by relinquishing control of people’s movement, you are effectively turning the whole of society over to the wiles of the mob. All order is lost. All security is gone. People make terrible mistakes with their lives. They blame the government for failing to control them. And then what happens? The regime loses power.
In the end, this is what it always comes down to for the state: the preservation of its own power. Everything it does, it does to secure its power and to forestall the diminution of its power. I submit to you that everything else you hear, in the end, is a cover for that fundamental motive.
The goal of both the left and right is that we make our political choices based on these fears. It doesn’t matter so much which package of fear you choose; what matters is that you support a state that purports to keep your nightmare from becoming a reality.
Is there an alternative to fear? Here is where matters become a bit more difficult. We must begin again to imagine that freedom itself could work. In order to do this, we must learn economics. We must come to understand history better. We must study the sciences of human action to re-learn what Juan de Mariana, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Frédéric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Murray N. Rothbard, and the entire liberal tradition understood.
What they knew is the great secret of the ages: society contains within itself the capacity for self-management, and there is nothing that government can do to improve on the results of the voluntary association, exchange, creativity, and choices of every member of the human family.
If you know this lesson, if you believe this lesson, you are part of the great liberal tradition. You are also a threat to the regime, not only the one we live under currently, but every regime all over the world, in every time and place. In fact, the greatest guarantor of liberty is an entire population that is a relentless and daily threat to the regime precisely because they embrace this dream of liberty.
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1 user commented in " Mandatory Reading for Conservatives: The Misesian Vision "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThank you for this post — and the part at the end that emphasizes that *THIS* is the TRUE definition of LIBERALISM.
It is a sad day when you reflect on the fact that our forefathers were liberals but that the current breed of liberals, who are in fact evolutionary socialists, have so hijacked the term and turned it into such a by-word that it becomes virtually synonymous with statism.
Several years back in my first PoliSci class I learned the true definitions and background of liberalism, progressivism, and social-welfare-liberalism, and was fascinated that even though those terms are correctly taught in a sophomore class as a typical community college, the American people by-and-large are still duped into believing they mean something completely different.
I listen to Beck, Limbaugh, et al, quite a lot and am forever frustrated when liberalism is equated with statism, social-welfare-liberalism, and progressivism (Beck, thankfully, is *not* guilty of this as long as you listen to him long enough to actually understand his message). I give a pass to Limbaugh and others because the common parlance of the term liberal *is* social-welfarist, etc. But it still continues to frustrate me.
The public just doesn't realize that the current crop of 'liberals' are no liberals — they are merely wolves in sheeps clothing, having hijacked the tradition of our forefathers for their own sick power games.
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