TRUE LIBERALISM If this idea sounds radical and even crazy today, it would not have sounded so to eighteenth-century thinkers. The hallmark of Thomas Jefferson’s theory of politics—drawn from John Locke and the English liberal tradition, which in turn derived it from a Continental theory of politics that dates to the late Middle Ages at the birth of modernity itself—is that freedom is a natural right. It precedes politics and it precedes the state. The natural right to freedom need not be granted or earned or conferred. It need only be recognized as fact. It is something that exists in the absence of a systematic effort to take it away. The role of government is neither to grant rights nor to offer them some kind of permission to exist, but to restrain from violating them. The liberal tradition of the eighteenth century and following observed that it was government that has engaged in the most systematic efforts to rob people of their natural rights—the right to life, liberty, and property—and this is why the state must exist only with the permission of the people and be strictly limited to performing only essential tasks. To this agenda was this movement wholly and completely committed. The idea of the American Revolution was not to fight for certain rights to be given or imposed on the people. It was not for a positive form of liberty to be imposed on society. It was purely negative in its ideological outlook. It sought to end the oppression, to clip the chains, to throw off the yoke, to set people free. It sought an end to governance by the state and a beginning to governance by people in their private associations. For a demonstration of how this operated in practice, we need not look any further than the Articles of Confederation, which had no provisions for a substantive central government at all. This is usually considered its failing. We should give the revolutionaries more credit than that. The Articles were the embodiment of a radical theory that asserted that society does not need any kind of social management. Society is held together not by a state but by the cooperative daily actions of its members. The nation needed no Caesar, nor president, nor single will to bring about the blessings of liberty. Those blessings flow from liberty itself, which, as American essayist Pierre Joseph Proudhon wrote, is the mother, not the daughter of order. This principle was illustrated well during the whole of the Colonial Era and in the years before the Constitution. But we need not look back that far to see how liberty is a self-organizing principle. In millions of privately owned subdivisions around the country, communities have managed to create order out of a property-rights-based liberty, and the residents would have it no other way. In their private lives and as members of private communities, it may appear that they have seceded from government. The movement to gated communities has been condemned across the political spectrum but evidently consumers disagree. The market has provided a form of security that the government has failed to provide. Another example of the capacity of people to organize themselves through trade and exchange is shown in modern technological innovations. The web is largely self-organizing, and some communities of commerce such as eBay have become larger and more expansive than entire countries once were. Firms such as Microsoft or Sun Microsystems are themselves communities of self-organizing individuals, operating under rules and enforcements that are largely private. The innovations available to us in our times are so astonishing that our times have been called revolutionary, and truly they are. But in what sense has government contributed to it? I recall a few years ago that the Post Office suggested that it provide people email addresses, but that was a one-day wonder, since the idea was forgotten amidst all the derisive laughter that greeted the idea. Modern life has become so imbued with these smaller spheres of authority—spheres of authority born of liberty—that it resembles many aspects of the Colonial period with sectors and complexities. All the great institutions of our epoch—from huge and innovative technology firms to retailers such as Wal-Mart to massive international charitable organizations—are organized on the basis of voluntarism and exchange. They were not created by the state and they are not managed in their daily operations by the state. Rockwell Jr., Llewellyn H. (2010-05-24). The Left, the Right, and the State (pp. 20-22). Ludwig von Mises Institute. Kindle Edition.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 05:29:00 +0000
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