History of Liberty

The European Miracle was one in which humans achieved sustained growth for the first time on earth. Why Europe? Because of European decentralization and private enterprise. Property rights were well-defined and well-defended. Feudalism was of the contract variety. City states and chartered towns arose. The freedoms that people fought for were primarily economic freedoms. Political freedoms followed. The middle ages were not the dark ages they were portrayed to be. The rule of law required little or no involvement of the state. The ruler was under the law. The West even held a social taboo on the expression of envy. Historian Ralph Raico explains why all of this contributed to the rise of human rights and economic prosperity in the West — and why it happened there first. From a lecture presented at the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

There was a natural law tradition from antiquity and the middle ages. Natural law is the oldest and most frequently used concept of political theory.  Natural law is the principles that are to be established if justice were to prevail. Or, it is the scientific laws of man and his environment.From the 5th century until the end of the 18th century the doctrine of natural law as a moral philosophy played a major role. Legislative law which rules today is the opposite of natural law.In some ways Aristotle was an ancestor to the natural rights tradition, seen clearly in his view of property rights. He preferred private property, common use. Most of us prefer private property, private use.  Christianity was born with the concept of natural law. It is at the center of our idea of individuality. This idea is linked to modern natural rights theory. Thomas Aquinas‘s pinnacle is the natural law doctrine. For him there was no conflict between faith and reason. Natural law is not God’s will. It is God’s plan. We call it freedom. Aquinas never imagined a coercive state.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

Thomas Sowell’s book, Civil Rights, lays bare many of the myths of the Great Society. What did ordinary people do before an advanced welfare state? Anti-poverty programs like the 1965 Job Corps did not turn out well. There was less poverty before the programs. Federal aid to education, like Head Start, did not stop any cycle of poverty. There was no difference in performance.Medicare for the elderly drove prices up everywhere while the average aged person was not better off. Medicaid for the poor was simply a transfer program. The poor were hooked on the handouts because they were rewarded for not working. Social welfare policy makes being poor attractive. Tax-free benefits gave recipients income that was well above what they could earn. Destructive signals are sent by underclass policies. Welfare spending drives out private charitable giving.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

Economic theory is essential for understanding history. It is difficult to interpret data without economic theory. Theory cannot come from data. All states are aggressive. All wars require economic resources. More liberal states will pursue more aggressive policies. The biggest bullies will get away with murder.Socialism created impoverishment because that system did not understand economic theory. Command economies create messes because all factors of production are government controlled. No private ownership in factors of production leads to no savings and no production. Without private property, there are never any prices paid for anything. You cannot possibly engage in cost accounting in order to know if your activity is worthwhile or wasteful of scarce resources.Presented at the History of Liberty seminar, 27 June 2001.

Murray Rothbard popularized the concept of the welfare-warfare state. He didn’t like either of them. He knew that if the state was doing anything there was plunder involved. Welfare was any handout from the government to anyone. One book that handled warfare and welfare systematically was Crisis and Leviathan by Robert Higgs.Imperialism and social reform cover the same relationships. Many tried to reconcile government with liberty. They called themselves Progressives. They’ve loved warfare and its welfare opportunities. The Cold War was perfect for this agenda until the Soviet collapse took away the enemy. Stromberg mentions many historians and their books on this topic.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

The role of the intellectual is a perennial question. Why do they act the way they do? Why are they hostile to the free market? Is the state really virtuous and the market really vicious? Mises thought the anti-capitalist mentality was rooted in envy. He also thought our entire culture was soaked in contempt for money-making.Intellectuals were so willing to accept any negative story about big business that the myth that German big business financed the Nazis is still holds sway. The people who determine ideology in our country are people who know nothing about business.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

Most of what is said about nation-states is not true. They are neither democracies nor republics nor nations nor states. There is no natural relationship between government and state. Men have been governed by many things that are not states. Throughout most of history man has lived without a state.But the modern state is a distinct form of government. Hobbes’ Leviathan is a brilliant reference to this issue. The contract is between the people themselves.  There are two features: 1) the state is vast, and 2) the state is “an artificial man”, a nation person.By the end of the Middle Ages the independence of the Church had been considerably weakened. The Thirty Years War reduced the Holy Roman Empire to a shadow. Absolute Monarchy (three generations old) was established. A system of large states was created, centralizing the King’s bureaucracy. Louis XIV was the most powerful monarch. Yet the state administrative system, with people called republicans, held that society must control the state with the single will of the French nation.The modern state destroys, creates problems, and then presents itself as the solution. The state cloaked itself in moral authority that was much greater than monarchs had imagined. But authority is based on nothing but opinion. Hegel described the state as that veritable God on earth.When the state could present itself with social authority, it could enforce unilateral taxation (1913), ultimate jurisdiction, and conscription (1873). Four times as many people have been killed by government than by war. The banality of evil arises from this artificial man.Small states cannot arise today without the right of secession.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

The transforming ideology of the American Revolution consists of four elements: liberalism, republicanism, English law, and Protestantism. Liberalism was developed by the Levellers, saying that natural rights could be evolved from natural law.English law lends itself to the rights of Englishmen as the Colonists understood them. Constitutionalism held that certain laws were above the King. Protestantism created new occasions for state intervention. In New England the church and state largely merged in practice.Republicanism broadened the citizenship base. The Long Parliament in 1641 had a large Presbyterian section. Oliver Cromwell emerges out of all this and becomes a dictator. The new model Army wanted to make policy. Levellers come from this. The notion of self-ownership develops here. The Puritan Revolution is reined in by Cromwell. Republican ideas come into the picture by 1651 just before the restoration. Americans saw George III and his standing armies after 1763 undertaking the bad things they feared.The downside to republican theory was there was a theory of government but not of rights. That can go off into nationalism. They dreamed of an empire which remains republican.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

People learn their political views through what they believe about history. Memorials function to push certain interpretations, e.g. about the War Between the States and the greatness of rulers like Lincoln and FDR. During the early 19th century Benjamin Constant was a great Swiss-French political activist and historian, but he was never as well-known as Alexis de Tocqueville. Constant was one of the first thinkers to go by the name of Liberal. Madame de Stael was Constant’s partner. Ancient Liberty was not fitted to the Liberty of the Moderns which was based on individual civil liberties. Constant influenced a group called the Industrialists whose framework of history was the history of class conflict. Some classes like farmers and merchants were productive. Exploitive classes like the state used force to steal from the producers. Marx got the class conflict theory from these French classical liberals. Alexis de Tocqueville often created conflicting positions. His famous two-volume work, Democracy in America (1835), described America as a land of ploughshares and Russia as a land of swords. America a land of freedom; Russia a land of servitude. He admired Christianity, but was not a believer.  Lord Acton was most famous for the remark, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Acton was an historian and a moralist. To him, natural rights came from God. Too many historians exonerate bad men. Acton said that this should not happen. The courageous historian will dig deeply and lay it all out. From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

Certain themes that relate to the New Deal between 1933 and 1938 ended in 1938 when FDR moved on to repair all the problems of the world, not just the country. The Congress and the people were receptive to all proposals that they thought would benefit them directly. Agencies that were created in the first 100 days were from a mind-boggling assortment of enactments.Higgs divides these years into two New Deal parts (1933-1935; 1935-1938), set into motion by different factions. The main rubric was to attenuate or threaten private property rights. Roosevelt and the New Deal kept people impoverished much longer than they would have been without his interventionism in the economy.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

WWI was a kind of turning point. Bolshevism, National Socialism and fascism are related ideologies which surfaced after the war. Fascism was the wave of the future in 1920 with its notion of government central planning.Socialism was more ambiguous. Fascism did not become a wicked right-wing kind of ideology until the Nazis and Mussolini allied. The Bolshevists merely fumbled around. The Communist Party was a joke until the 30s when they were viewed as a force against fascists and were seen as a workers’ party. They were big winners after WWII.Totalitarian movements are all pretty much the same. They are dead ends and generally have to be forcibly removed.  But, the Soviet Union did not fall apart because of any invasion, it simply imploded from within. The Chinese government has evolved into something less brutal. Controlled thought is the main characteristic of totalitarian states. It is the way the left operates.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

Lessl’s field is rhetoric. The history of the relationship between faith and science shifted when the theological nucleus was removed and science was inserted. Rhetoric was left behind. Faith was erased in the middle of the nineteenth century. Kant was intensely hostile to Catholicism. He wanted to replace it with humanism.Science evolved in three stages: The Medieval Period during 1100-1600; Baconian science 1600-1750 aligns science with the Protestant Reformation; and Positive science circa mid-18th century during which science was seen as the stable foundation for an enlightened society.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

Natural law does not depend directly on God’s will. Natural law goes back to at least the scholastics and perhaps Thomas Aquinas. Modern Natural Rights theory began in 1625. Modern theory recognizes the institution the state. Natural law is thought to produce inalienable natural rights. They speak to the dignity of the individual and life and property. The close connection between liberty and property is part of this tradition.John Locke changed in 1689 the notions of the origin of private property. Locke’s doctrines became the basis of classical liberalism and libertarianism. The original acquisition had to be legitimate. Every man has a property in his own person. Self-ownership and homesteading were the foundation of private property. No natural rights are given up when individuals enter political society. You have the right to be protected by the government and the right to protect yourself from the government. You cannot divest yourself of these rights.In 1982 The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard took up Natural Rights.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

Albion’s Seed is a great book about the four migration folkways into the colonies from Great Britain during 1629 through 1775. The groups had many characteristics in common which may be what made future union possible, but the groups were also different. Puritans hated Quakers. Everybody hated Catholics. The competing regional cultures created quite a laissez-faire outcome between the community-based groups and more individualistic groups.The Revolution had been profoundly argued well in advance. It wanted to conserve the good things of their past British lives. In the 1830s disputes centered on the United States being either a compact school of independent states forming a confederation or a nationalist school of a single people in the aggregate. The British thought they were dealing with thirteen independent and sovereign states.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

This is a federal constitution. Federalism is the most important idea for liberty. You must maximize your choices and you need meaningful choices, made against a cultural background. Federalism requires such moral correctness that it makes it the most difficult system to maintain. Federalism always fights consolidation.States had a positive duty to intervene between citizens and the central government when unconstitutional acts were attempted. The Principles of ‘98 (The Kentucky Resolutions) were used for interposition and nullification. The 10th Amendment was the foundation of America. States were sovereign. Each state knew that it had a right to secede from the Federal Constitution because there was no time limit, like ninety-nine years, placed upon the compact.Federalism was never restored. The states all looked to the Federal level to see what their rights were. Centralization was the process of modernity.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

Jeffersonian States Rights Doctrine until the Civil War was grounded in three freedom documents: The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, and The Treaty of Paris of 1783. Those documents emphasized independent states, not a single nation or union.Many people in America thought that authority still derived from the King. Others understood that authority was vested in the people of the state. It took five years for the Articles to be unanimously approved. In 1786-87 there was no popular demand for a strong and energetic government. Very secretly a constitution was created through compromise. Hamilton inveigled the world into federalism.The anti-federalists were mostly independent land owners. They never had a book of their views like the federalists. They liked the Articles. They believed that a weak federal government was the source of liberty. They thought the Philadelphia creation would end up a dictatorship. They feared federal bureaucracy. The federalists gave the anti-federalists The Bill of Rights as a compromise. Thomas Jefferson shared most of the anti-federalists’ views.The 1798 Kentucky Resolutions defined "States Rights". They were the basis of nullification. There was no common judge. This became the standard view of federal-state relations in the South. The theory of sovereignty did not come up. The rise of Lincoln reduced the southern states into a minority position.Authentic federalism is a States Rights interpretation of the Constitution. From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

You can’t take Southern secession seriously because of slavery. Illinois is worth pondering because Lincoln supported the laws against blacks because he did not think that free blacks could ever mix with whites. A superior position was assigned to the white race. Lincoln meant every word. He voted against every suggested improvement for blacks. He saw universal emancipation as impossible.As a moral solution he considered gradual emancipation along with apprenticeships, compensation to slaveholders, and deportation of Africans out of the United States. But Lincoln played the slavery card to ignite his own moribund political position.As far as the federal government was concerned slavery would have continued as long as the states desired if the South had stayed in the Union. There was no serious opposition to slavery in any political party. The North did not invade the South over slavery. There was no single reason for states to secede. Secession was an American thing. The South was deeply American. The forty-year fight between the North and the South over tariffs was probably the prime cause of the war. None of this had anything to do with the moral issue of slavery.The humanity of the South is missing from history. But, there were blacks who loved their country. American Indians who loved their country. Jews who loved their country. Secession in 1860 would have been a good thing. This needs to be understood. The forced union suffocated all. Centralism was imperialism. From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

The Progressive Era covered the turn of the 19th-20th centuries until about WWI. It delivered such delights as the Federal Reserve. Accelerated statism with a philosophical veneer favored experts on boards making economic decisions efficiently. This era birthed the regulatory state.Executive Orders came into being in 1793 under Washington. They set a bad precedent. Few were created until Theodore Roosevelt issued 1,006. Taft was alarmed at this trend of Executive Orders. Progressives loathed Jefferson, individualism, strict construction of the Constitution, and local government. Progressives want a socially desirable redistribution of wealth. From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

One of the problems of the American Empire is that there is a lot of empire denial going around. You cannot want to rule the world and yet say that what you value is laissez-faire economics (like National Review does).How do you distinguish empire from imperialism? In the 18th century an empire was any large state somewhere. Imperialism generally meant somewhere overseas. The court party has overall gained and never suffered a setback. We must force others to enjoy all the benefits we have.We acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba (in a fashion). No former enemies are in the anti-imperialism faction. The Philippines were given all the Bill of Rights but trial by jury and right to bear arms.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.

The 1917 Revolution gave birth to both the reality and the myth of the Bolsheviks and the democratic left. The social democrats rejected the violence which was part of the communist party. They claimed to follow a democratic path to socialism. They turned Marx into a wise man that should not be taken too literally.A coalition against fascists arose. Social democrats made common cause with the communists. There is reason to suspect that Stalin knew what he was doing bringing Hitler to power. Since the 1930s the enemy of the left has been fascism. The social democrats successfully split from the communists. The end of the cold war looks like the end of WWII. The left won the cold war. The right disappeared.From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.