The Art of Being Free - Wendy McElroy

8/16/2019 The Art of Being Free - Wendy McElroy

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The Art of Being Free

Politics versus the Everyman and Woman

Wendy McElroy

Copyright © 2012 by Wendy McElroy

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-62129-029-2

Published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/



CONTENTS

• Author’s Preface

• Section I: The Theoretical Footing of Freedom

o

It Usually Begins with Natural Lawo The Efficiency of Natural Rights

o Defining State and Society

o

Human Ignorance and Social Engineering

• Section II: Applying Theory to Issues

o Redeeming the Industrial Revolution

o The Modern Union versus Workers’ Rights

o The Immorality of Public Education

o

Ask Not for Whom the Drug Tolls

o

Passport to the Total State

o

The Post Office as a Violation of Constitutional Rightso

The Return of Debtors’ Prison

o

Decriminalize the Average American!

o

War, the External Enemy

o

War, the Internal Enemy

• Section III: Principles Work through People

o

Étienne de la Boétie: Why Do People Obey Unjust Laws?

o

François Marie Arouet de Voltaire: The Relationship between Freedom and Tolerance

o

Henry David Thoreau: Is There a Duty to Disobey Unjust Law?

o

William Lloyd Garrison: One Person Can Make a Difference

o

R.C. Hoiles: An Everyman of Excellence• Section IV: Getting There from Here

o

Is America Now a Police State?

o

Grappling with the Banality of Evil

o Why Good Men Do Nothing

o It Is Not Personal — It Is Institutional

o Contra Gradualism

o

In Praise of Working People

o

Boycott: A Nonviolent Revolt

• Conclusion

•

An Invitation from Wendy McElroy



AUTHOR’S PREFACE

At fifteen years old, I read the novel We The Living by Ayn Rand and, then, I read everything else I could find byher. It has been a wild intellectual ride in the decades between but one of the constants has been my deepconviction that there is something sacrosanct about the individual. Whatever happens within society — from

the free market to war — begins with the individual who agrees or dissents. The individual says yes or no and itis this lever of consent at which freedom lives or dies. To a real extent, it seems that simple to me. You havethe right to say yes or no on matters concerning your own body and property, or you don’t. The former isfreedom; the latter is enslavement. On this point, I have not changed much from that fifteen-year-old introvertwho read in bed with a flashlight when I was supposed to be sleeping.

The wild ride came from plunging into history, from wrestling with economic theory and from dealing with themany ethical questions that bluntly confronted my belief that the individual is sacrosanct. Over decades, I haveevolved a framework of answers and theories that may not always be definitive but which express the bestexplanations I know.

This book is a combination of theory, issues, profiles, and strategy, because I cannot separate the ideas fromthe people, the positions from a vision of the future. There is an invisible web that connects these four aspectsof freedom and combines them into an integrated whole called “life”.

First and foremost, I am interested in how freedom functions in real life — in the lives of average people —because I am an average person. I was born into a lower middle-class family in which my father made a livingwith his hands. Although I have published through venues like Penn State University and I often receive mailaddressed to “Dr. McElroy,” I am a high school dropout. I live quietly on a farm with my husband who iswondering, even as I write this, about what to buy me for our upcoming Silver Anniversary.

I do not believe freedom or justice are august concepts to be immortalized in awe-inspiring statutes. I thinkfreedom and justice belong on the streets and in the gutters because that is where real people live as they rush

from home to work, from work to pick up their children. I want a theory and reality of freedom that is basedupon and within the average working person.

The Rights of the Everyman and Woman

Your right to life and to liberty are not merely inalienable, they are also indivisible. A right to life means it isyour due as a human being to be left in peace by others so long as you respect their equal claim. A right toliberty means you are entitled to the peaceful use of whatever is yours — your body, your labor, your property.Freedom is not something for which you must negotiate or which you need to earn. You do not receive it froma government in return for citizenship. Rights are yours because you are a human being and every human hasthe same rights to the same degree regardless of race, gender, or nationality. No secondary characteristics can

affect the universality with which rights apply to humanity.

Civil and economic rights are often viewed as separable, with the latter deserving far less security. For example,freedom of religion and speech are venerated, and so given extra protection against infringement bygovernment. On the other hand, the freedom to contract your own labor or to sell a product you manufactureis highly regulated. Most people see no tension in these positions. After all, religion and free speech are seen ashuman rights whereas labor contracts and wages are viewed almost as societal arrangements or matters ofbusiness, which is why free speech is comparatively unprotected in the commercial realm.



Nothing could be further from the truth. Civil and economic rights are not separable. Both are human rightsand dependent upon each other. It makes no sense to tell a free man that he has freedom of speech but nosimilarly unrestricted right to use his own labor to make goods that he can freely sell. Both acts are peacefulexpressions of his own body. Being able to use his tongue to speak out is no more sacrosanct than being able touse his hands to contract labor on his own terms.

Indeed, if there is a theoretical distinction to be made between civil and economic liberties, it is this: economic

liberties are a necessary prerequisite to every other freedom that human beings can enjoy. In his book TheEthics of Liberty , the iconic Austrian economist Murray Rothbard wrote, “The key to the theory of liberty is theestablishment of the rights of private property, for each individual’s justified sphere of free action can only beset forth if his rights of property are analyzed and established”.

Popular wisdom perversely teaches the opposite. It teaches that civil liberties or human rights are threatenedby private property and market freedom. Minorities or other vulnerable segments of society are said to beespecially threatened. Therefore, government must force redistributions of private wealth through taxationand social programs so that property is taken from those who have produced it and given to those who havenot. Government, it is said, must legally pry open the doors of private enterprise to ensure that women arehired on an equal basis. Over and over, economic rights are attacked in the name of civil ones but the attack is

actually upon both.

The early 20th century British feminist Virginia Woolf elegantly stated the relationship between economic andcivil rights in an essay entitled “A Room of One’s Own.” (Sadly, she did not realize the implications of her ownwords.) Woolf looked at the circumstances facing women writers in the 1920s and concluded that “a womanmust have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” or, more generally, if she were to live withself-respect according to her own values. A woman (or man) needs a room with a lock — a safe place in whichto work and live without fear, a private place in which to think and thrive. In short, economic independence isthe bedrock of all other freedoms and the key to quality of life. Freedom of speech and assembly and the rightto a fair trial mean little to a man who is starving to death on a snowbank. First and foremost, people need thefreedom to provide for their own needs by using their wits and labor — the need for economic rights.

As I said, Woolf did not understand the full implications of her words. For one thing, she was among the luckyfew who inherited money, and so inherited a room of her own. Her less fortunate contemporaries were forcedto work for a living. Moreover, Woolf’s socialistic ideology deeply prejudiced her against the free market.

Woolf correctly denounced social prejudice as a barrier to women but the power of that barrier came fromhaving prejudice embedded into law. When women cannot own land or sign contracts with the same legalprotection as men, then they are trapped women in the kitchen or in unskilled, underpaid labor. The keyeconomic factor that frees women and makes them independent is not legal protection or privilege but theequal recognition of their economic rights. Whenever discriminatory laws against women were weakened,women surged as a labor force into rooms of their own. Unpleasantly, this point has escaped the notice ofWoolf’s descendants (mainstream feminists) who have lobbied insatiably for the restriction and regulation of

free employment, from affirmative action to pay equity, from mandated quotas to paid maternity leave.

I have had reason to notice. I once needed a room of my own. And I know on a deeply personal level how lawscan harm even those they are intended to protect. I ran away at 16 years old because the streets were saferthan my home. Unfortunately that home was Canada and it was December. Sleeping in a church with anopen-door policy was a stop-gap measure at best. It may have saved my life those first few nights but I neededa room with heat and a door that locked.

And, yet, I consider myself to be lucky because I was 16 years old. Child labor laws designed to protect children



from exploitation did not apply to me, and so I was able to get a minimum-wage job in a furniture store, filingyears worth of boxed papers. If I had been “protected” either as a child or as a female from being able tonegotiate for less money than any other applicant, I would not have been able to go on to rent a room in aboardinghouse. Instead, I would have been “protected” into begging, stealing, dealing drugs, or sex work. Whatother “work” would the law have left me once it had taken away my economic rights?

What saved me was the ability to contract on my own terms so that I could buy a room with a lock and, from

there go on to build a life of my own choosing. I went from a room of my own to a life of my own.

Since childhood, one of my favorite quotations has been a passage from Louisa May Alcott’s novel LittleWomen. The character Jo reads aloud from a short story she has written: “And the good fairy said, I won’t leaveyou money or pretty dresses, but I will leave you the spirit to seek your fortune from your own efforts”.

This book is addressed to men and women who have the spirit to seek their own fortune from their ownefforts.

It is divided into four distinct but interrelated sections: the underlying theory, a representative sample of issuesto which the theory is applied, profiles of people who personify freedom and through which the theory lives,

and a discussion of the strategy on getting from “here” to “there”.



SECTION I

THE THEORETICAL FOOTING OF FREEDOM

The world spins on ideas and ideologies. Although it has received “bad press” in the last century, an ideology isnothing more than a clearly defined set of ideas that express an integrated worldview. As such, the worth ofany particular ideology depends upon how closely it corresponds with reality and how successfully it answersthe basic questions of individuals within society: for example, “What is justice?”

Today, many political and economic strategists dismiss the importance of ideas to society, claiming that “themasses” are not interested in anything but “bread and circuses” — their own immediate self-interest andentertainment. The same strategists openly scorn expressions of ideology as counter-productive, dogmatic,unscientific, hate-filled or whatever political pejorative is in fassion.

What world do these people live in? I live in a world defined by ideologies that are embraced by the masses.

Two of the most powerful social forces in Western history are both deeply ideological. Both were embraced byaverage people: Christianity and Marxism. Marxism may have initially had the utilitarian lure of appealing tothe immediate self-interest of the proletariat but Christianity’s mass appeal has never been economic. Theultimate appeal of both systems is that they offer coherent, integrated worldviews through which people canmake sense of their own lives. The world views are as right or wrong as the ideas that form them but they are powerful precisely because people want to understand the world around them. The notion that “the masses”are not interested in ideology is bizarre.

Not merely personal beliefs are defined by ideology but all human history itself. Consider the AmericanRevolution, which many view as a defining moment in the history of freedom. In a famous passage, therevolutionary and Founding Father John Adams wrote, “What do we mean by the revolution? The War? Thatwas no part of the Revolution… The Revolution was in the minds of the people”. The event that was theRevolution may have been sparked by specific issues, such as the introduction of the Stamp Act, but it burstinto flame only because the groundwork of principles, of ideology had been laid.

And so the question is not whether people and history should be driven by ideology. They are. The question iswhich ideology maximizes the human potential for justice, prosperity and peace. In the broadest terms, Iembrace classical liberalism as the ideology with the greatest potential not merely to liberate but also to feedbillions of human beings.

In the first chapter of his book For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, the economist Murray Rothbarddefined classical liberal tradition that had emerged in the 17th century from the English Levellers and theEnglish Revolution. He wrote,

The object of the classical liberals was to bring about individual liberty in all of its interrelated aspects.In the economy, taxes were to be drastically reduced, controls and regulations eliminated, and humanenergy, enterprise, and markets set free to create and produce in exchanges that would benefiteveryone and the mass of consumers. Entrepreneurs were to be free at last to compete, to develop, tocreate. The shackles of control were to be lifted from land, labor, and capital alike. Personal freedomand civil liberty were to be guaranteed against the depredations and tyranny of the king or his minions.Religion, the source of bloody wars for centuries when sects were battling for control of the State, wasto be set free from State imposition or interference, so that all religions — or nonreligions — could



coexist in peace. Peace, too, was the foreign policy credo of the new classical liberals; the age-oldregime of imperial and State aggrandizement for power and pelf was to be replaced by a foreign policyof peace and free trade with all nations.

The historical pedigree of classical liberalism as an ideology that champions the average, working person isunparalleled. Whenever, wherever it has come to dominate, the ultimate result has been greater liberty,prosperity and peace.



It Usually Begins With Natural Law

The ideological framework from which I proceed can be labeled in various ways: classical liberalism,libertarianism or radical individualism. All are accurate. Advocates argue for freedom under many labels andcome from many directions but the most common foundation of argument is probably natural law. TheDeclaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were derived from this tradition as were such phrases as

“inalienable rights.” It should be noted, however, that it has also had vigorous opponents who believed, withthe early 19th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that the tradition was “nonsense on stilts”.

Although the term consists of only two words, the meaning of “natural law” has long been a semanticbattlefield.

The simplest word to grapple with is law. It is not used in a legal or authoritarian sense to mean legislation or acommand. Instead it refers to a principle, much as people speak of the laws of physics or the law of gravity.

The other word, natural , has a more controversial background. Such great debate has been waged over exactlywhat the term “natural” means that it is not clear whether there is one tradition or many traditions of natural

law.

Consider the question, “natural as opposed to what?” Some interpret the word within a theistic context thatviews reality and the nature of man to be expressions of God. Thus, the Declaration of Independence declares,“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by theirCreator with certain unalienable Rights …” To violate individual rights, therefore, is to go against the will ofGod.

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises offered the following criticism of natural law within his book Human Action,

There is … no … perennial standard of what is just and what is unjust. Nature is alien to the idea of rightand wrong. “Thou shalt not kill” is certainly not part of natural law. The characteristic feature of naturalconditions is that one animal is intent upon killing other animals …

Mises’s point is well taken if it is directed at the more extreme traditions of natural law theory which do cling,as he states, “to the doctrine that what is right and what is wrong is established from the dawn of the remotestages and for eternity.” Indeed, some natural law theorists go so far as to say that values are a category of fact.

But there is a more flexible interpretation of natural law theory which withstands Mises’s criticism. It makesthe far more reasonable statement that human values should be grounded in, or based upon, facts, anddiscovered through a process of reasoning. Such theorists tend to maintain that the word natural is used as aterm of distinction to distance it from the supernatural, or the will of God. Again, they attempt to root the ideaof individual rights in the principles of reality and in man’s nature.

This more flexible version of natural law does not assume God’s will or that justice exists as a form of fact. Itassumes that as human beings interact with each other some concept of right and wrong inevitably evolves.This contention is based largely on historical and cultural observation. Even the most primitive of humancultures evolved some standard of right and wrong behavior. The question becomes: if it is in the nature ofman within society to construct rules, then which are the ones that most accord with his nature?

The political significance of grounding values in fact is immense. For one thing, it allows people to use natural



law as a standard by which to judge the justice of the law of the land (positive law), or of the ruler, or of God. Inshort, natural law theory allows you to weigh whether or not the law is proper, or just. When the questionarises, “why should I obey the law of the land?” some people answer, “Because the law is the law,” or “Becauseyou will be punished if you don’t.” Classical liberals answer instead, “You should only obey the law if it is inaccord with nature”.

As the 19th century American individualist-anarchist Benjamin Tucker once exclaimed,

Law! Yes: but what law? The law of nature as developed out of a rational analysis of social force andbased upon the sovereignty of the individual, or some law manufactured for designing ends before wewere born and without our consent?… [I]t is absurd to talk about “making” laws. Laws are, and the onlyright of a human being is to search after them and obey them for himself, leaving others to do thesame, or contrarywise, at their own cost.

And, so, the search for “what laws” is afoot.

Natural Law and Natural Rights

The concept of natural rights, which is commonly called individual rights, emerges only when human beingsinteract with each other. In isolation, Robinson Crusoe would not need the concept of individual rights becausefreedom of speech or private property would never arise as issues. The need for rights arrived on the islandalong with Friday.

Thus, by individual rights I mean the rules by which human beings should deal with each other because theybest acknowledge and conform to human nature itself. An individual right is an enforceable claim that everyperson has against others, a claim that means others are not justified in using force but are constrained torespect his self-ownership. In practical terms, this means no one can make a proper claim upon you or yourproperty without your consent. Conversely, every right carries a responsibility. Each man has a duty to respectthe equal self-ownership and rights of others. You have no claim upon anyone else without their consent. Thismakes “consent” the key to harmonious interaction and the one factor that distinguishes a free man from aslave.

Such rules of society can be held as a matter of morality or of pure utility. Nevertheless, throughout history,whenever people have interacted, rules have emerged.

Even the most primitive and savage cultures evolve some standard of right and wrong behavior. The dictum“Thou shalt not kill” may not be written on a rock somewhere in nature, as Mises observed, but societiesacross culture and time have developed some prohibition against murder. One of the few points upon whichvirtually all societies agree is a default position of “it is wrong to kill an innocent human being.” In order tobypass the default position, a society has to argue that the person is not innocent; for example, he mayespouse the wrong religion or be an enemy in wartime.

Equally, some concept of right and wrong seems to evolve naturally within human psychology. A child who ishit for no reason has an automatic reaction that says, in effect, “I did not have that coming. The person shouldnot have hurt me.” The child feels wronged even if he cannot explain that feeling. This childlike response maybe crude but it shows that, on at least some level, considering the right and wrong of interactions is a basichuman response. We experience the initiation of force against us as wrong.

But why is it wrong to initiate force? The onus of proof is on an advocate of natural law to explain whyindividual rights are in people’s self-interest.



The question can be answered on utilitarian grounds; men should observe rights in order to promote their ownwell-being. Consider: why do people enter society in the first place? After all, a desert island offers unbridledindividual freedom whereas in society there is always the threat of violence. Why associate with people andrun such a risk?

The answer is clear. Society offers tremendous benefits, including friendship, expanded knowledge, a divisionof labor, and romantic love. Society can maximize your choices if only because many of your decisions, and

some of the most important ones, require the presence of other people; for example, the decision to have achild. Yet it is quite possible to imagine a society from which some people would gladly flee into solitude; afield slave might run from a plantation. To the extent a society relies on force and violates individual rights, itwithdraws or minimizes choices; it reverses the very advantages of society itself. Seen through this lens, rightsset a peaceful context which maximizes choice and, thus, maximizes the chances of individuals attaininghappiness within society.

The Moral Case for Individual Rights

Phrased in moral terms, the question becomes, “what about human nature makes it wrong for one person toinitiate force against another?”.

Self-ownership is one of the most commonly argued moral foundations for individual rights. Self-ownershipdeclares each man to have exclusive property in his own person and the products of his labor. This is not meantto reduce the human body or faculties to the status of goods; it is meant to establish the moral jurisdiction thateach human being has over his own person and whatever property results from his labor. Thus, “property” isused in the sense of “that which a person has the sole right to control”.

The argument for self-ownership can be made on strictly logical grounds. There are only three alternatives: youown yourself (freedom), someone else owns you (slavery), or you are unclaimed goods. The last alternative isbizarre and breaks down the first time control is exerted over a physical body; whoever is in control is claiming jurisdiction. And, so, the only two real alternatives people face are freedom or slavery. Again, on purely logicalgrounds, self-ownership is the one most rooted in the nature of man because no one but the individual himselfcan control everything under his skin, including thoughts and beliefs.

As an underlying theory, self-ownership has at least one decided advantage over other paths to individualrights: namely, clarity. In reducing freedom to self-ownership, it is possible to point to a real, physical entity —your body — and state unequivocally: “Everything under this skin belongs to me because it is me.” By contrast,arguments that proceed from justice or utility suffer from the disadvantage of being more theoretical. Eventhose who agree with the need for individual rights based on justice or utility may endlessly disagree on whatconstitutes those ideals. Next to no one disagrees on what constitutes your body as opposed to their own. Andeven a young child who is pushed to the ground by a bully knows that something “wrong” has happened tohim. Self-ownership has the advantage of being both obvious and intuitively grasped.

The concept also has a rich and deep history that has delivered the message of individual rights in effectiveways.

Self-ownership formed the moral and political backbone of the radical anti-slavery movement in Americaknown as abolitionism. Arising in the early 19th century, abolitionism viewed slavery as the theft of liberty andlife. Because black men and women had an equal claim to being human, they were self-owners and to stripthem of liberty was to steal their most intimate property — themselves. This is why slavery was often called“man-stealing.” (The abolitionists did not originate this term. The 17th century philosopher Hugo Grotiuswrote, “Those are men stealers who abduct, keep, sell, or buy slaves or free men. To steal a man is the highest



kind of theft” — by which he meant the “worst kind of theft”).

The abolitionist book The Bible Against Slavery (1837) by Rev. Theodore D. Weld accused the slaveholder ofviolating the Eighth Commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.” Arguing self-ownership on the grounds of God’swill, Weld wrote,

All a man’s powers are God’s gift to him. Each is a part of himself. All else that belongs to man is

acquired by the use of these powers.…Ownership of anything is ownership of its use. The right to useaccording to will is itself ownership.

A man’s right to himself is his only absolute right — his right to anything else is relative to this, isderived from it, and held only by virtue of it. Self-right [self-ownership] is the foundation right — thepost in the middle, to which all other rights are fastened.

Slaveholders — Weld did not call them slaveowners — were not merely thieves but also hypocrites because“when asserting their right to their slaves [they] always assume their own right to themselves.” But if one manbelongs to himself then all men are self-owners because all are born equal in the eyes of God. Thus, “if oneman’s title is valid, all are valid.” If one is invalidated, all are invalidated.

Weld continued by accusing slavery of violating the Tenth Commandment as well: “Thou shalt not covet thyneighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox,nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.” Weld commented, “Who ever made human beings slaves,without coveting them? Why take their time, labor, liberty, right of self-improvement, their right to acquireproperty, to worship according to conscience, to search the Scriptures, to live with their families, and their rightto their own bodies, if they do not desire them? They covet them for purposes of gain, convenience, lust ofdominion, of sensual gratification, of pride and ostentation”.

Belief in the Bible was not a prerequisite for viewing slavery as theft, however. On March 8, 1775, an essayentitled “Slavery in America” appeared in the Thomas Paine, who was famously critical of the Bible. His essayopened, “That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder forgain, is rather lamentable than strange.” Paine argued on the grounds of justice and humanity. Pennsylvania Journal. It was written by the deist.

Today’s Form of Slavery

Chattel slavery was driven from North American soil almost 150 years ago. A more subtle form of slavery hasarisen. Politicians declare themselves to be protectors of individual rights but governments at all levels — local,state and federal — claim an ever increasing percentage of society’s money and liberty. The government isassuming the role of thief and slaveholder. Your property and the exercise of your faculties and time are notmere societal niceties; they are your life. Yet the encroaching government declares, “It is my money, not yours.They are my faculties to control, not yours. It is my time, not yours.” The government has become a

man-stealer.



The Efficiency of Natural Rights

The conception of social principles as problem-solving devices — as morally neutral tools — is meant merely toexplore the more practical aspects of natural rights, and to provide new answers to old criticisms, such as thatembodied in Hobbesian state-of-nature arguments.

The 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes is renowned for the phrase a “war of all against all”which comes from his immensely influential book Leviathan. Here Hobbes developed the argument thatgovernment was necessary, and therefore legitimate because otherwise man would live in a state of nature. Hewrote,

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: andconsequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be importedby sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require muchforce; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; andwhich is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor,nasty, brutish, and short.

The Hobbesian contention is that an almost biological conflict of interests exists between human beings, whomust compete for the scarce goods necessary for survival. The idea of a natural conflict of interest betweenmen rather than a natural harmony is arguably the single most common argument for government and againstnatural rights. How, critics demand, in a Hobbesian state of nature in which one man’s life requires the deathof another, does it even make sense to speak of a natural right to life, liberty, or any other commodity? Natureherself seems to argue against the possibility. Therefore, considerable government may be required.

Mises Reverses the Hobbesian Argument

In his touchstone work, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises

suggests an ingenious approach by which natural rights theory is strengthened by a Hobbesian worldview,rather than destroyed by it.

In the section entitled “Catallactics or Economics of the Market Society,” Mises speaks of how widespreadeconomic cooperation within society springs directly from a Hobbesian state of nature. Indeed, he presents italmost as a prerequisite for the evolution of a market society. Under the section entitled “The Harmony of‘Rightly Understood’ Interests,” Mises argues that it is because “many people or even all people want … shoes,”that demand for these items inspires large-scale production. This, in turn, makes shoes more widely availableat lower costs than through small private production. Mises concluded, “The fact that my fellow man wants toacquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier … The catallactic competition ofthose who, like me, are eager to have shoes makes shoes cheaper, not more expensive”.

Mises summed up this insight, “What makes friendly relations between human beings possible is the higherproductivity of the division of labor. It removes the natural conflict of interests. For where there is a division oflabor, there is no longer question of the distribution of a supply not capable of enlargement.…theintensification of social cooperation becomes paramount and obliterates all essential collisions. Catallactic [oreconomic] competition is substituted for biological competition”.To those versed in Austrian economics, the preceding passage may sound like a trite statement of thebeneficent influence of the division of labor upon the availability of cheap goods. But Mises derives a deepermessage from the social dynamic. “The very condition from which the irreconcilable conflicts of biologicalcompetition arise — viz., the fact that all people by and large strive after the same things — is transformed into



a factor making for harmony of interests.…This is the meaning of the theorem of the harmony of the rightlyunderstood interests of all members of the market society”.

In other words, the Hobbesian war of all against all itself leads directly to, and perhaps even creates, the rightlyunderstood harmony of interests between all human beings.

Through this ingenious logic, Mises reverses the usual conclusion of state-of-nature critics. It is precisely

because man lives in a Hobbesian world that a market society naturally arises. Instead of killing each other tosecure the means of survival, human beings naturally cooperate out of pure selfishness. A free market societyoffers them otherwise unimaginable access to cheap goods. As a peaceful arrangement, the market societyalso provides the stability necessary to make long-range plans, such as raising a family.

In essence, Mises uses the division of labor as a principle of resolution, as a problem-solving device. He revealsthat social cooperation is a vastly more efficient means to achieve selfish desires than social conflict.

Principles as Problem-Solving Devices

Several decades earlier, another man advanced the idea that social principles are best viewed as

problem-solving devices. The 19th century individualist-anarchist Benjamin R. Tucker raised that approachwhile considering the question “What is property?” Specifically, he wondered, “What is intellectual property?”.

Those with whom Tucker debated believed patents and copyright were a form of wealth and its ownership wasacquired either through discovery or through labor.

But several aspects of intellectual property bothered Tucker and led him to address the more fundamentalproblem. He asked the question “What is property?” in a more philosophical sense. Why had the concept ofproperty originated within human society in the first place?

Tucker, like Mises, believed that ideas arose within man and persisted within society only because they serveda need; they answered a question.

He illustrated the purpose of ideas by postulating a universe parallel to our own which ran along differentmetaphysical rules; that is, the rules of reality differed. The inhabitants of this alternate universe filled theirneeds simply by wishing for goods and satisfaction. Food magically appeared in their hands, clothesmiraculously draped their limbs, and a bed popped into existence under their tired bodies. In such a society,Tucker claimed that the concept of money would not arise simply because there was no need for it to do so.That concept existed in our universe only because men had to solve the problem of transferring and storingwealth; the parallel universe had no such problem.

Tucker used the same problem-solving approach to analyze the concept of property. He asked, “What is itabout the nature of our universe and the nature of man which gives rise to the concept of property in the first

place?”.

It arose, he concluded, as a means of solving conflicts caused by scarcity. In our universe, most goods arescarce and this leads to a competition among human beings for their use — a Hobbesian state of nature, if youwill. Since the same chair cannot be used in the same manner at the same time by two individuals, it wasnecessary to determine who should use the chair. The concept of property resolved this problem. The owner ofthe chair is the one who should determine its use. “If it were possible,” wrote Tucker, “and if it had alwaysbeen possible, for an unlimited number of individuals to use to an unlimited extent and in an unlimited numberof places the same concrete thing at the same time, there would never have been any such thing as the



institution of property”.

Here, again, the Hobbesian state-of-nature argument has been reversed. It was not government but the natureof reality and man that gave rise to private property.

Conclusion

Whether they are viewed as problem-solving devices, moral principles or both (as I believe), natural rights canbe rationally defended.



Defining State and Society

Definitions may seem to be dry things but they offer the incalculable benefit of allowing you to know what youand others are talking about. They are essential to understanding and preserving your freedom.

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel of the future, 1984, the totalitarian state Oceania knew the danger of

definitions; namely, they provided distinctions, filling the world of words with subtlety and color. And,remember, the world of words is your ability to think. What cannot be expressed cannot be understood onanything but a visceral level. That’s why Oceania developed Newspeak — a language so stripped ofdifferentiation that there is only one word for pleasure: “good.” The only way to describe anything that is more pleasure than something else is to add the word “double” or “plus” as a prefix to “good.” This paucity oflanguage would devastate the ability to understand or enjoy the complexity of being human.

Equally, it would enslave you. In Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel, Anthem, the word “I” has been eliminated fromsociety. The protagonist Equality 7-2521 is tormented by his inability to express to himself what is wrong withhis totalitarian world. He expresses it only after discovering the words “I” and “mine.” He exclaims “I am. I think.I will. My hands.… My spirit.… My sky.… My forest.… This earth of mine. What must I say besides? These are thewords. This is the answer”.

The more clearly you think, the freer and richer life will be. Words and their definitions matter.

Two of the concepts upon which the analogy to slavery rests deserve deeper analysis: state and society (inmany instances, state can be used as a synonym for government ).

Often it is far from clear what any given person means in using those words. Part of the confusion stems fromthe fact that the definitions can shift dramatically depending upon a person’s ideology. A Marxist whoadvocates a strong state in order to redistribute wealth within society will have a different definition andattitude toward the state than a classical liberal or individualist who advocates a minimal government and a

free market.

Within classical liberalism, the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer spearheaded an analysis of the twoterms in his pivotal work The State (1914). He defined the state as “that summation of privileges anddominating positions which are brought into being by extra-economic power.” By “extra-economic” he meantpower that did not come from the act of creation or from free exchange. He defined society as “the totality ofconcepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man.” These institutions include thefree market, churches, the family, charities, and the arts. Society is what is often called the private sphere.

Oppenheimer then contrasted what he called “the political means” with “the economic means” of acquiringwealth or power.

The state uses the political means — in other words, force — to acquire wealth and power. It does not producewealth, nor does it trade for it in the marketplace. Instead, it takes wealth from the productive people whoconstituted society.

By contrast, society uses the economic means — in other words, creation and cooperation — to producewealth. Any power acquired by those in society is the result of earned wealth. Because the state drains society,Oppenheimer considered the two to be in basic conflict.

The American individualist Albert Jay Nock was one of the main conduits of Oppenheimer’s thought into the



United States. Nock captured his mentor’s political philosophy in a book entitled Our Enemy, The State (1935).He wrote, “Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way todifferentiate the activities of its founders, administrators, and beneficiaries from those of a professionalcriminal class.” Both the state and professional criminals steal wealth from productive people and both arewilling to use force to do so.

At this point in his argument, Nock introduced a third concept: government . To Nock, government unlike the

state, provides a valuable service. It protects the individual rights of society, presumably in exchange for a fee,such as that embodied in a reasonable tax rate.

Nock was not alone in distinguishing between government and the state, and in giving a nod to the formerwhile frowning upon the latter. Ayn Rand also embraced a limited government that would function as a nightwatchman who unobtrusively protects the person and property of those within his territory.

The contemporary philosopher Tibor Machan offered a further definitional distinction between the state andgovernment . The state is an institution that makes a claim to territorial sovereignty that persists through time.Thus, America as a state can trace its timeline from the American Revolution through the Constitution and upto modern day. Its claim to legitimacy rests upon that timeline. By contrast, government consists of the actual

agencies and individuals who carry out the business of the state. Thus, a government agency such as the PostOffice might be entirely replaced — for example, through privatization — but that would not impact theAmerican state.

Does the State Equal the Government?

The discussion of individual freedom returns inevitably to how the key concepts of state, society , andgovernment are defined. In his introduction to The State, Oppenheimer declared, “Others may call any form ofleadership and government or some other ideal the ‘State.’ That is a matter of personal style.” But thedifferences in definition are not semantics or a matter of personal style. They involve deep ideological andhistorical disagreements with equally profound implications.

The acceptance of a limited and legitimate government has been a litmus test and a dividing point withinlibertarianism. Those who accept the concept of government are often called minarchists; those who rejectboth the state and government — or who draw no hard distinction between them — are often considered tobe anarchists. The latter may not deny the value of some government services, like the post office or courtsystem, but they insist upon having them provided by the free market.

The Consent Theory of the State

John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government is a pivotal document in the history of individualism. PhilosopherKaren Vaughn observed of his Second Treatise, “Locke argues the case of individual natural rights, limitedgovernment depending on the consent of the governed, separation of powers within government, and most

radically, the right of people within society to depose rulers who fail to uphold their end of the social contract.”Locke’s work, from which both the French and American revolutions drew heavily, remains a touchstone forconsent theory within the classical liberal tradition.

Locke believed that God had given the world to all men in common, and he justified private property — theappropriation of a common good for personal use — by arguing that each man had an ownership claim to hisor her own person. Based on this self-ownership, Locke argued,

The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he



removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

The need to protect the property of “life, liberty, and estate” led men to form a government. In other words,the institution arose as a shield against the conflicts that naturally occur when individuals accumulate propertyin a world of scarce resources. Through an explicit social contract, men relinquished to the state the right toadjudicate their own disputes. For its part, the state pledged to rule in a manner that secured men’s claim to

their property; for example, through inheritance laws. Thus, for Locke, the existence of private property isalmost caused by the government.

Locke rejected the idea that the initial consent to the state, which was rendered by free individuals, could bindtheir children and succeeding generations. Instead, Locke developed a doctrine of tacit consent, which did bindeven people who did not explicitly consent. The doctrine claims that each person who lives in a community andaccepts its benefits is tacitly agreeing to the rules by which the community is governed.

Withdrawal of tacit consent is always possible. A man can relinquish his “estate” and leave the community,thus putting himself back into a state of nature in relationship to it. However, as long as he occupies land overwhich the government has jurisdiction, he tacitly accepts that jurisdiction. After all, Locke argued, the “good

title” of any property a person inherits comes from the government that has protected that wealth andregulated its just transfer to him. A similar argument could be made concerning wealth accumulated throughcontract: the contract has validity only because of the regulatory benefits provided by the government.

In essence, Locke believed that a civilized and satisfying society could not exist without government toadjudicate conflicts and to provide a legal context for property. Only when government ceases to fulfill its partof the social contract is the citizenry justified in rebelling against it. Otherwise, government (or the state) andsociety are engaged in a cooperative endeavor.

Whether or not Locke actually believed there had ever been an original government formed with the explicitconsent of everyone over which it claimed jurisdiction is a matter of debate. Clearly Locke used the contract asan analytical tool to explore the circumstances under which civil government could be justified. His theory canbe critiqued or embraced on either level.

The Conquest Theory of the State

The conquest theory of the state stands in sharp contrast to the Lockean model and attempts to ground theprimitive state in historical fact rather than political conjecture. A common expression of the conquest theoryruns as follows: Originally there were agricultural tribes that settled in certain areas where they becamedependent upon the land. Roving nomads, who were perhaps herders, waged war on the more sedentarytribes for the obvious economic benefits. At first the nomads killed and pillaged, but they discovered it was intheir long-term economic interest to enslave and exact tribute from the conquered populace instead.

The more extreme versions of conquest theory conclude that all states originate in conflict, not consent. Moremoderate forms argue that warfare plays a defining role in the formation and continued sustenance of thestate. Murray Rothbard in For A New Liberty advanced a modified version of the theory, which conceded thatsome states may have evolved in a different manner, but contended that the conquest theory was the typicalgenesis of the state. Thus, in its foundation and development, the state was never meant to preserve justice,property rights, or the peace. The motive behind the state was and is the desire to establish sovereignty andachieve wealth through the use of force. Any benefits that a state provides are tangential and non-essential toits nature.



In arguing for the conquest theory, Rothbard relied heavily upon Oppenheimer who argued for what he called“an economic impulse in man.” Oppenheimer believed that material need is the prime motivator of humanbeings and that both wealth and progress are produced by economic means, not by political ones. He rootedthe origin of the state in the desire of non-productive people to benefit from economic producers by using thepolitical means. He posited six stages through which a conquering group typically passes in order to become astate. At first, a warlike group raids and plunders a vulnerable group. Second, the victimized group ceases toactively resist. In response, the raiders now merely plunder the surplus, leaving their victims alive and with

enough food to ensure the production of future wealth to plunder. Eventually, the two groups come toacknowledge mutual interests, such as protecting the crops from a third group. Third, the victims offer tributeto the raiders, eliminating the need for violence. Fourth, the two groups merge territorially. Fifth, the warlikegroup assumes the right to arbitrate disputes.

Oppenheimer described the last stage in which both groups develop the “habit of rule”:

The two groups, separated to begin with, and then united on one territory, are at first merely laidalongside one another, then are scattered through one another.… [S]oon the bonds of relations unitedthe upper and lower strata.

Thus the state, which originated from external conquest, evolves into an agency of continuing internalconquest by which one group — or a coalition of groups — use the political means to attain wealth and powerat the expense of those who actually labor. In this view, the state arises and maintains itself as the enemy ofsociety.

The question becomes: what does the state do with a peaceful individual who rejects its jurisdictional claimsover his property and person? Locke would tell the individual to leave. Others maintain that to grant the statesuch territorial jurisdiction is to grant it de facto ownership of the land; the individual whose name is on agovernment deed is merely getting zero rent in exchange for obedience. They question how the state canacquire such monopoly jurisdiction simply in return for providing a service, even the important service ofprotecting property. After all, a doctor who saves your life does not acquire a continuing and monopoly claimover your body.

The answer to the question posed above, and related ones, may well lie in using words such as state andsociety in a clearly defined and precise manner.



Human Ignorance and Social Engineering

Throughout most of intellectual history, society has been considered to be the result of someone’s design. Inhis multi-volume Law, Legislation, and Liberty, the social theorist F.A. Hayek referred to this position as“constructivist rationalism” and argued vigorously against it. In his 1974 Nobel Memorial Lecture, titled “ThePretence of Knowledge”, Hayek expressed a different view of how society developed:

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society alesson in humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to controlsociety — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him thedestroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions ofindividuals.

Hayek opposed any attempt to engineer — that is, centrally to plan and to coordinate — the structure ofsociety. He believed that such engineering actually destroyed rather than created society, which was the resultof human action but not of human design. Alongside the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Hayek providedwhat are arguably the best critiques of the “constructivist” theories and policies that have grown in popularityduring the twentieth century.

Both Hayek and Mises had witnessed the devastation of classical liberalism by two world wars, but mostparticularly by World War I. Wartime governments had clamped centralized control over the private sector toensure a continuing flow of armaments and the other goods deemed necessary for victory. Governments hadinflated their money supplies to pay for massive military buildups. And war had strangled the flow of free tradethat classical liberals considered to be a prerequisite to peace, prosperity, and freedom. In short, both Hayekand Mises had watched twentieth-century statism replacing nineteenth-century classical liberalism.

If war is the health of the state, as the American individualist Randolph Bourne declared, then Hayek and Miseswitnessed the impact of an obvious corollary: namely, that war is the death of individual liberty. And socialengineering was a key mechanism through which that freedom was destroyed. Indeed, one of Mises’s earliest

works, Nation, State, and Economy (1919), analyzed the disastrous consequences of the central planningushered in by World War I.

But Hayek and Mises did not merely oppose social engineering on utilitarian grounds. Independently, they eachevolved complex and sophisticated systems of social theory to explain how the institutions of society naturallyevolved. They maintained that the institutions of a healthy society were the collective and unintended resultsof human action. Complex social phenomena — such as law, language, and money — were especially theunintended consequences of individual interactions. For example, no committee or central authority decidedto invent human speech, let alone to design a language as complicated as English. Acting solely to achieve theirown ends, individuals began making sounds to facilitate getting what they wanted from other people. Thus,speech was the result of human action but not of human design, and it naturally evolved into language. Theevolution may not have proceeded with scientific efficiency, but it was efficient enough to permit thedevelopment of civilization. The efficiency of government programs suffers by comparison.

Yet constructivists argued that an unplanned society is wasteful and chaotic. With sufficient knowledge, theycould engineer a perfectly efficient society. There would be no more surpluses or scarcities. Stock marketswould not crash, and currencies would not fluctuate. Perhaps society could even be designed so that itsmembers walked in unison toward desirable social goals, just as they had marched together toward victory inwartime.

Hayek bluntly stated that the knowledge constructivists sought was unattainable. It was not possible to plan



the dynamics of tomorrow based on how people acted yesterday. People were unpredictable. Human beingswere fundamentally different from the physical objects examined by the hard sciences. A scientist could learneverything he needed to know about the movement of an object, and his knowledge would not necessarilychange over time. But human beings acted on psychological factors and motivations that were hidden, ofteneven from themselves. Society did not consist of objects that could be neatly categorized and made to obey thelaws of science. Society consisted of erratic and unpredictable individuals.

Mises made a similar point in regard to monetary theory. He demonstrated that even the seemingly objectivetool of monetary calculation — the sort that people use informally to decide, say, whether to ask for a raise —is ineffective for broader social planning. At best, prices were a historical record; the price of bread is a pastprice, even if the past was very recent. This information could create anticipation of what the price of breadmight be tomorrow, but it could predict nothing. A bread shortage might make the price skyrocket. Moreover,using yesterday to engineer tomorrow went against a fundamental tenet of human action: the principle ofinevitable change.

In Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949), Mises commented, “Human action originates change. As faras there is human action there is no stability, but ceaseless alteration.… The prices of the market are historicalfacts expressive of a state of affairs that prevailed at a definite instant of the irreversible historical process.… In

the imaginary — and, of course, unrealizable — state of rigidity and stability there are no changes to bemeasured. In the actual world of permanent change there are no fixed points…”.

From Nation, State, and Economy through to his magnum opus, Human Action, Mises eloquently arguedagainst the possibility of acquiring enough knowledge to engineer society. Equally, from Hayek’s work TheSensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (1952, but apparently based on workhe did in 1919 and 1920) to his far more popular The Road to Serfdom (1944), he integrated such diverse fieldsas epistemology and economics to form a social theory that denied any validity to central planning.

Throughout the work of these theorists, two closely related concepts emerge again and again: methodologicalindividualism and spontaneous order. These concepts are key to understanding why Hayek and Mises soadamantly rejected social engineering.

Methodological Individualism

In Human Action, Mises offered a description of what he called “The Principle of MethodologicalIndividualism”: “First we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals.… If we scrutinize themeaning of the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn everything about theactions of collective wholes. For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individualmembers’ actions”.

Mises claimed that collective wholes — such as “the family” or “society” — are nothing more than the sumtotal of their individual members. Such wholes were abstractions useful for indicating the interaction of people

in a specific context. “Family” indicates one set of interactions, “bridge club” another.

In reducing group functioning to its most basic element — the acts of individuals — Mises did not deny theimportance of collective wholes. Quite the contrary. Mises explained, “Methodological individualism, far fromcontesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and toanalyze their becoming and their disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation. And it choosesthe only method fitted to solve this problem satisfactorily”.

In other words, methodological individualism was a powerful analytical tool that could be used to discover the



principles on which a group of people interacted. It was the best method by which to understand society.

Mises’s stress upon methodological individualism did not arise in a vacuum but rather in response to thetheory of social holism that had become popular in the early twentieth century. Social holists claimed thatcollective wholes had an existence far greater than the sum of their individual parts. They drew parallelsbetween the fields of biology and sociology. They argued that just as higher level principles of explanation wereneeded to describe a complex biological organism than were used to explain its constituent molecules, so too

with human society. New principles and characteristics emerged within a society that were entirely differentfrom those that applied to individuals. In other words, there were rules that applied only to collective wholesand not to individual members. Further, these emergent rules functioned along scientific lines and respondedto methods of planning.

The Individual as Abstraction

With the rise of Marxism, those who favored methodological individualism were often accused of “atomism” orreductionism. Marxists went so far as to assert that it was the individual, and not society, that was the trueabstraction. In its extreme form, these social holists even denied that the individual existed without society. AsMises observed, “The notion of an individual, say the critics, is an empty abstraction. Real man is necessarily

always a member of a social whole”.

Karl Marx argued this point by using a sort of Robinson Crusoe example. Marx contended that an individualwho grew up in isolation on a desert island would not be a human being. The crux of his argument was thathuman beings are social organisms — social constructs, if you will — who cannot be lifted from their definingcontext and remain human beings. The adult Robinson Crusoe was clearly a human being, but his humanityresulted from a prior history of socialization. Language, thought, art — all that made Crusoe human hadresulted from his life in community. Reversing Misesian logic, Marx claimed that the collective whole called“society” created its individual members, who could be understood only by examining the rules of that society.Marx went an extra step and tried to extend the principles and methodology of the hard sciences — such aspredictability and control — to society.

Classical liberals countered that a person who had been raised in utter isolation would still be a human being.For example, he would have a scale of preferences and would act to achieve the highest one first. True,without social interaction, major potentialities within the person’s humanity would never develop or beexpressed. For example, there would be no reason to develop language skills and no possibility of becoming aparent. Were the isolated individual to be rescued and placed within society, however, his unexpressedpotentials might well emerge. But whatever characteristics developed would emerge from his own inherentpotential as a human being and they would be the result of the individual interactions he experienced. Thecharacteristics would not emerge because a collective whole called “society” defined them into existence.

Classical liberals did not dispute the claim that groups had a cumulative dynamic that was different from thedynamic of man in isolation. After all, only in society did intellectual and economic exchanges arise. But they

believed that the differences could be explained by breaking the group dynamic down into the intricateinteractions of the individuals it comprised. For example, everything about a conversation could be brokendown into the statements, body language, and other actions of the individuals involved. Nothing about theconversation required further principles of explanation.

This methodological approach worked in analyzing even extremely complex collective wholes such as “thestate.” Everything the state did or was could be reduced to individual actions. As Mises explained, “Thehangman, not the state, executes a criminal. It is the meaning of those concerned that discerns in thehangman’s action an action of the state.” Individuals who look at the hangman see the state in action only



because an abstraction known as “the state” provides a context for his action. Equally, people never truly seeor hear a group conversation. All they see or hear are individuals speaking, and we label the sum of theirexchange a “group conversation”.

Methodological individualism had profound implications for social-engineering theory. If collective wholeswere a “mental process” within individuals rather than concrete entities with independent existence, then itmade no sense to claim there were unique rules and characteristics that applied to collectives and not to

individuals. Methodological individualism removed the collective wholes from an objective realm ruled byscientific principles and returned it to the subjective realm of human judgment and preference. Instead ofbeing able to design social institutions, such as banks, to run along scientific principles, social engineers werereduced to regulating individuals. They were engaged in planning how human beings would express theirpreferences in the future — a knowledge that individuals themselves rarely possessed.

And yet, a question remains. Without planning, how can society improve? Part of the answer is to be found inthe second concept running throughout the work of Hayek and Mises.

Spontaneous Order

During the eighteenth century, theorists like Adam Smith began to examine the impact that the unintendedconsequences of human action had upon society. These were the collective consequences that accrued as aresult of people pursuing their own individual interests. For example, if twenty people walked the shortestdistance across a field, a crude path through the field would be established. But forging the path would be anunintended consequence of each person’s conscious goal — to reach the other side quickly.

Smith came to believe that society and its institutions could be best understood by reference to suchunintended consequences. Consider the price of yesterday’s bread. No one legislated what you were willing topay for bread yesterday. That price resulted from such unpredictable factors as how highly you prized breadtwenty-four hours ago. The social institution of price, therefore, had been established spontaneously. It wasalso self-correcting; that is, the price spontaneously and rapidly fluctuated to reflect changing factors, such asthe availability of bread. And because such changes were unpredictable, only a spontaneous response — not apreplanned one — could adequately respond.

No contemporary writer has explored the idea of spontaneous and self-correcting social institutions in greaterdepth than Hayek. In his essay “Principles of a Liberal Social Order,” Hayek tackled an objection he oftenencountered. He wrote, “Much of the opposition to a system of freedom under general laws arises from theinability to conceive of an effective co-ordination of human activities without deliberate organization by acommanding intelligence” (Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Society , 1960).

For social holists, “order” and “efficiency” were concepts that seemed to be wedded together. Mises andHayek agreed, but they used a different definition of “order.” For social holists, the word seemed to conjure upquasi-military visions of society marching shoulder to shoulder toward a common goal. It was embodied in

five-year plans that reduced the functioning of society to mathematical equations. By contrast, the orderespoused by Mises and Hayek was a spontaneous one in which individuals pursued their own diverse interestswithout coordination by a central authority.

What does such an order look like? A classic example is the New York Stock Exchange, which was created as alocation at which stocks could be bought and sold Monday to Friday from 9:30 am to 4 pm. No overridingauthority set prices, volume limits, etc. These were established by pockets of people who pursued their ownpreferences in a manner resembling chaos. In yelling out on the floor that he was willing to buy ABC stock at Xprice, a trader intended to pursue nothing more than the preferences of his client. But an unintended



consequence of his action was the establishment of an overall price for ABC stock.

Spontaneous order can resemble chaos. In Hayek’s words, it is the sort of order “whose justification in theparticular instant may not be recognizable, and which will … often appear unintelligible and irrational”(“Individualism True and False” in Individualism and Economic Order , 1948). Ironically, this resemblance tochaos may indicate an aspect of why spontaneous order is efficient. After all, the shifting circumstances towhich this sort of order responds have no logical or predictable order. Just as the trading floor of a stock

exchange cannot be run according to Miss Manners’s rules of etiquette, so too does a dynamic society requireinstitutions with fluidity.

Indeed, the main advantage of a decentralized system of decision making may well be its ability to adjustconstantly and quickly to shifting circumstances. Where social engineering demands a stable future and agodlike knowledge of the present, spontaneous order recognizes and embodies the inevitability of change andthe inadequacy of human knowledge.

An individual knows as much as it is possible to know about his own preferences and future acts. The furtheryou move away from the individual, the less reliable the data become — and the less perfect the consequencesof decision making.

Diverging from a Common Point

There is a sense in which both Hayek and Mises based their arguments for individual liberty on humanignorance. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek acknowledges that the need for freedom “rests chieflyon the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which theachievement of our ends and welfare depends.” Ironically, constructivists make much the same argument fortheir position: human beings are not naturally perfect, therefore society must be engineered and designed.From a point of common agreement — namely, the inadequacy of human knowledge — the two sides reachdiametrically opposed conclusions.



SECTION II

APPLYING THEORY TO THE ISSUES

A theory is a connected body of ideas that are expressed as statements or propositions. Theories — political,psychological, economic, religious, aesthetic or otherwise — constantly confront you, although they may beexpressed in such popular terms that you do not recognize them as such; they may simply seem to be thestatus quo. For example, a TV news anchor may casually remark upon the need for democracy in Afghanistan.Whether or not he is correct, he is expressing a political theory in which democracy is superior to a tribalsystem.

Almost every story discussed as news in the media cannot only be expressed as a theory but also is likely tohave a complicated network of other issues or questions beneath the surface. Consider the proposition:teenagers should be saved from nicotine addiction by raising the age for purchasing cigarettes to 20 years old.This statement may seem to be nothing more than common sense mixed with a concern with children’s health.

But banning the sale or even the advertising of cigarettes to teens involves taking a position on many moreissues, if only implicitly. Those questions include: What is the age of consent?; And, what role shouldgovernment play (if any) in preventing addiction, especially pre-emptively? Should the government or parentsbe responsible for the oversight of children’s health? Moreover, a ban on advertising cigarettes would involvefurther prohibiting freedom of speech in commerce. A ban would also presuppose the validity of highlyquestioned “scientific” studies, some of which claim a cause-and-effect link between tobacco and cancer. Thepreceding are a mere sprinkling of the issues that can lie beneath the surface of what appears to be aninnocuous statement.

Unpacking the implications of the statements with which you are flooded is a daunting task. It can be hardwork to translate statements into their theoretical form, and then to sort through the questions being takenfor granted. It is also risky work because a similar skepticism should be applied to all theories, including ones ofwhich you may be fond. For better or worse, whenever you dissect a theory and hold it up to compare withreality, you run the risk of being proven wrong. Or right.

But the process is necessary. Comparing theory to fact and applying the results to issues is where the politicaltires hit the road. It tells us how well a set of ideas explains the world and lets us know whether the theoryhelps or hinders in detecting and resolving problems. If a theory is rooted in reality and the nature of man, thenit should take us in the right direction. If it does not, then the brakes should be applied.

Unfortunately, the average person will receive little assistance from today’s mainstream intelligentsia. Moderntheorists have largely divorced themselves from the everyday concerns of average people. Specializedscientists talk to themselves in highly technical language. Economists do mathematical modeling to “prove”

that reducing the debt requires more borrowing. Politicians pass telephone book length legislation that they donot bother to read. Psychologists do meta-studies — that is, the integration of data from other studies — anddraw conclusions without ever dealing with real people; field researchers propose projects based on what theybelieve will receive tax-funding and render results they believe will bring more; and, then, laws and policiesaffecting real people are based on their work. And least connected of all to reality are the specialists calledphilosophers.

Average people are on their own.



Instead of storming the Bastille, the masses today should storm the ivory towers of universities. We shouldyank theory out of academia and throw it back into the streets where it belongs. It belongs there alongsidetruth because that is where injustice happens, it is where the marketplace feeds people, it is where those whostruggle are seeking answers to why the world is falling apart. Theory and principles were never meant to bethe playthings of an elite class who tell the masses that they are too ignorant to understand sophisticatedconcepts like justice, economics, or even their own self-interest . Justice, economics and the public good mustbe fed through their own elite understanding and regurgitated in understandable form. And, yet, the elites do

not even know what the price of bread is.

The average person understands concepts like justice and their own self-interest very well indeed. Appeals toauthority by experts can be appropriate; a physicist may argue from specialized knowledge about particleaccelerators. But on concepts like justice or issues like the public school system, he is no more a specialist thanevery parent in America. Unlike physics, moral theory and political issues are not based on education or datathat is inaccessible to the average person. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to understand that murderis wrong or that your children are illiterate. First and foremost, the application of theory to issues should beconducted by the people who live with them and bear the consequences.

The articles in this section do exactly that: apply theory to a range of issues.



Redeeming the Industrial Revolution

The first step in applying theory to issues is often to strip away the existing explanations. In other words, it isnecessary to provide a critique of what is currently the most prevalent approach to the issue. This is similar toclearing away underbrush in order to replant.

Although the Industrial Revolution is properly viewed as a historical event or period, it is also an “issue” becausetoday’s predominant interpretation is widely used to discredit concepts such as capitalism or industrializationbased upon their allegedly wretched record. Quite the contrary is true of that record. And so the intellectualstripping begins.

A destructive myth has wrapped itself around the concept of laissez-faire capitalism — the economic system inwhich the free market is allowed to function in precisely that manner — freely. The myth is that laissez-fairecapitalism harms the “vulnerable” within society; specifically, it is said to harm women and children by cruellyexploiting their labor. The opposite is true. Laissez-faire capitalism offers the one element that the vulnerableneed most to survive and to advance: choice. The most liberating choice individuals can have is the ability tonegotiate their own labor, and so support themselves rather than be dependent upon anyone else for the foodgoing into their mouths.

Using this myth of destructive capitalism as their entering assumption, many historians have been extremelyharsh in analyzing one of the most liberating phenomena in Western history: the Industrial Revolution. Thisharshness comes despite the massive evidence of how beneficially the Industrial Revolution impacted theworld. From the 18th through the 19th century, human knowledge and efficiency surged forward intechnology, science, industry, medicine, transportation, trade, and life-changing innovations like cheap cottonclothing. Within two centuries, the worldwide per capita income is estimated to have increased tenfold and thepopulation sixfold. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. stated, “For the first time inhistory, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth….Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before”.

The dramatic advance was achieved without social engineering, centralized control or a declaration of war. Itcame from allowing human creativity and self-interest to run free at a glorious gallop. No wonder the greatestcritics of the Industrial Revolution are also great advocates of central planning: namely, socialists. The IndustrialRevolution proves them wrong and sits in the midst of history like a rebuking elephant.

There is no doubt that abuses occurred during the Industrial Revolution and they should not be ignored. Somecan be laid at the door of governmental attempts to harness the energy and profits of the marketplace. Otherabuses occurred simply because every society and economic arrangement includes some inhumane or amoralpeople who will act badly, especially for profit; this is not a criticism of the Industrial Revolution but of humannature. Yet another reason for abuses — or, at least, for unfortunate social circumstances — is the fact that

economic advances far outstripped changes in the Victorian attitudes of the day. In the 18th century, womenand children were viewed as second-class citizens and, sometimes, as chattel. Again, this is not the fault of theIndustrial Revolution. Indeed, the economic revolution was largely responsible for forcing the culture and lawto dramatically change, and so to facilitate the advance of women’s rights in the late 19th century. Whenwomen left the countryside to seek employment and education they became a social force that could not bedenied.

Unfortunately, the salutary connection between laissez-faire capitalism and the social improvements inwomen’s rights has not merely been lost but categorically denied. During the latter part of the 20st century,mainstream feminists — who were largely socialist in ideology — crusaded to reverse the engine that



contributed so heavily to women’s equal status. Instead of championing freedom in the market place, theysuccessfully embedded privilege for women into it through laws such as affirmative action. And they did so inthe name of equality.

A significant part of this process was the demonization of laissez-faire capitalism as a tool of oppression thatallegedly had to be blunted by laws, lawsuits, and labor regulations. The Industrial Revolution became anintellectual casualty of this demonization. In books and movies, lectures and university courses, the Industrial

Revolution has been portrayed as the Great Satan in regard to the welfare of women and children. Theportrayal relies upon the misrepresentation of fact and upon flawed ideology.

Misrepresentation of Facts Regarding Children

Hideous images immediately come to mind when children and the Industrial Revolution are mentioned in thesame sentence: a five-year-old being lowered by a rope into a coal mine, skeletal children working at unsafetextile mills, Dickens’s Oliver proffering a wooden bowl as he asks for another scoop of gruel. These images areused to condemn the free market and the Industrial Revolution; sometimes they are used to praise thehumanitarian politicians who passed child labor laws to curb the cruelty. This analysis draws powerfully uponthe understandable horror that decent people feel at the exploitation of any children. But it is seriously flawed.

One thing the analysis misses is a key distinction. Early 19th-century Britain had two forms of child labor: freechildren, and parish, or pauper, children who came under government auspices. Historians J.L. and BarbaraHammond, whose work on the British Industrial Revolution and child labor is considered definitive, recognizedthis distinction. The free-market economist Lawrence W. Reed, in his essay “Child Labor and the BritishIndustrial Revolution,” stressed the importance of the distinction. He wrote, “Free-labor children lived withtheir parents or guardians and worked during the day at wages agreeable to those adults. But parents oftenrefused to send their children into unusually harsh or dangerous work situations.” Reed notes, “Private factoryowners could not forcibly subjugate ‘free labour’ children; they could not compel them to work in conditionstheir parents found unacceptable”.

By contrast, parish children were under the direct authority of government officials. Parish workhouses hadexisted for centuries but sympathy for the downtrodden had been considerably lessened by the fact that taxesfor poor relief in 1832 were over five times higher than they had been in 1760. (Gertrude Himmelfarb’s bookThe Idea of Poverty chronicles this shift in attitude toward the poor from compassion to condemnation.) Thus,in 1832, partly at the behest of labor-hungry manufacturers, the Royal Poor Law Commission began an inquiryinto the “the practical operation of the laws for the relief of the poor.” Its report divided the poor into twobasic categories: lazy paupers who received governmental aid; and the industrious working poor who wereself-supporting. The result was the Poor Law of 1834, which statesman Benjamin Disraeli called anannouncement that “poverty is a crime”.

The Poor Law replaced outdoor relief (subsidies and handouts) with poor houses in which pauper children werevirtually imprisoned. There, the conditions were made purposely harsh to discourage people from applying for

entry. Nearly every parish in Britain had a stockpile of abandoned workhouse children who were virtuallybought and sold to factories; they experienced the deepest horrors of child labor.

Consider the wretched position of the “scavenger” in textile factories. Typically, scavengers were youngchildren — about six years old — who salvaged loose cotton from under the machinery. Because the machinerywas running, the job was dangerous and terrible injuries were commonplace. Fortunately for businessmenwilling to use the state to compel child labor, the government had no qualms about sending parish children towork under running machines. Most of the parish children had no alternative to such work other than a life ofstarvation or crime.



It is no coincidence that the first industrial novel published in Britain was Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy byFrances Trollope. Michael was apprenticed to an agency for pauper children. Nor is it a coincidence that OliverTwist was not abused by his parents nor by a private shopkeeper, but by brutal workhouse officials incomparison to whom Fagin was a bleeding-heart liberal. Remember that, at the age of twelve, with his familyin debtor’s prison, Dickens himself was a pauper child who slaved at a factory. Reed observes, the “first Act inBritain that applied to factory children was passed to protect these very parish apprentices, not ‘free labor’children.” The Act was explicit in doing so.

Thus, in advocating the regulation of child labor, social reformers asked government to remedy abuses forwhich government itself was largely responsible. Once more, government was a disease masquerading as itsown cure.

Misleading Ideology Regarding Women

The flawed presentation of facts regarding child labor and the Industrial Revolution is paralleled by the flawedideology by which the status of women is analyzed. Arguably, women were the primary economic beneficiariesof the Industrial Revolution. This was largely due to their low economic status in pre-Revolutionary times; theysimply had more to gain than men.

When women poured from the countryside into the cities to find work, they did so for many reasons. Again,government and law played a key role. For example, several Enclosure Acts restricted the amount of land towhich poor laborers had access to farm and raise animals. In short, the Enclosure Acts deprived them ofeconomic alternatives. By driving a glut of poor workers into the cities where they were forced to competewith each other for jobs, the Acts also lowered the wages for manufacturing and menial labor. And yet peopledid flood into cities because they considered the menial work to be the best alternative available to them.

Some women undoubtedly left rural life simply because of the comparative independence offered by cityopportunities. Some escaped from brutal marriages and families or from an otherwise dismal lifestyle. Theworking and living conditions in cities could be terrible. Many women turned to prostitution; even those withsteady work were often forced to prostitute themselves on the side to supplement starvation wages.

As terrible as the conditions might have been, however, a fundamental fact must not be ignored. The womenchose to come to cities and to stay there. To the extent that the choice was a forced one, the finger should bepointed at government and not the free market. Nevertheless, the women themselves believed that flight intofactories was their best alternative. Otherwise they would have not have made the journey nor would theyhave stayed. To say the Industrial Revolution harmed women is to ignore the demonstrated preference theythemselves expressed. It is to ignore the voice of their choices.

A substantial portion of gender and mainstream feminist history is an attempt to ignore the voices of actualwomen and of the choices they made. Or, rather, feminist historians seek to ignore women whose voices donot express realities that support their own ideological assumptions. A common method of dismissing women’s

inconvenient choices while, at the same time, not appearing to do so is to reinterpret the reality thatsurrounded those choices. Then, the reinterpretation can be used to “prove” that the choices were not free butactually coerced acts.

Historical reinterpretation of facts can a valid and valuable process. For example, historical understandingwould be nothing but enriched by evaluating the impact of the Enclosure Acts upon the flight of women intofactories. How many went simply because the government closed off the option of accessing formerly commonland that could have sustained them?



A different type of reinterpretation is at work in feminist histories, however. It is based on ideology rather thanfact.

A key work in understanding their historical analysis is Friedrich Engels’s much-quoted and immenselyinfluential book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Engels believed women’soppression sprang from the nuclear family but he dismissed the “notion” that all forms of the family hadsubordinated women throughout history. Instead, he blamed capitalism for destroying the prestige that

women had once enjoyed within the familial arrangement. Engels wrote,

That woman was the slave of man at the commencement of society is one of the most absurdnotions.… Women were not only free, but they held a highly respected position in the early stages ofcivilization and were the great power among the clans.

Thus, pre–Industrial Revolutionary times were romanticized as a period in which women were empowered. Bycontrast, Engels claimed that industrialization caused a separation between home and productive workthrough which the inequity known as the nuclear family evolved. Women’s labor became subordinate tomen’s; in fact, the purpose of her labor was to enable that of men through providing for male need. This, inturn, allowed the men to feed the capitalist machine as exploited laborers. Presumably, the undeniable

advances for women ushered in by the Industrial Revolution — including impressively extended life span —were purchased at too high a cost.

Conclusion

The Industrial Revolution has been slandered. Whether the slander is due to a misrepresentation (or ignorance)of fact or due to the imposition of ideology, the Industrial Revolution should bring a libel suit against history.Or, rather, it should demand an apology from the majority of historians. Without dismissing the injustices thatinevitably arise during any period, the Industrial Revolution established the freedom and prosperity to whichpeople today have become so accustomed that they can treat the source of it with contempt. Applause isappropriate.



The Modern Union Versus Workers’ Rights

Modern unions are widely viewed as protectors of the working man when they are actually usurpations ofworking people’s rights. The modern union is a misunderstood institution that arose during the Franklin D.Roosevelt presidential years as a coalition between Big Business, Big Labor and government. There weretensions within the coalition, to be sure, but each party benefited from the legal privileges given to some

workers and at the expense of others. The main victim of the modern union was and is the average workerwhose right to negotiate his own labor on his own terms was usurped.

I speak as a member of the lumpenconsumeriat. Lumpen is the plural of the German word Lump, which means“ragamuffin.” In Marxist theory, the term lumpenproletariat became (in)famous and originally referred to thelowest rung of people within society. Today it has become diluted through common use so thatlumpenproletariat usually refers to “the great unwashed masses.” It is vague about the people who fit into thatcategory, and yet still conveys the same sense of members being society’s underclass or underbelly — akin tothe term “white trash” without being so racially specific.

I am proud to be a modern version of the lumpenproletariat: the lumpenconsumeriat. I am proud to be in theranks of the great washed masses of everyday consumers who bathe before proceeding into the world to spend

hard-earned cash on food, gas, heat, shelter and medical care. The lumpenconsumeriat consists of workingclass people who are an economic underclass due to the self-enriching actions of government, of individualswho slurp at the tax-trough, and so-called “capitalists” who make a living off government privilege rather thanthe free market.

We are lied to as a matter of policy by politicians who vow on Bibles and the Constitution to protect ourinterests. It is in their interest to have us believe the economy is going through a little burble but, otherwise, it is just peachy. And, for them, I am sure it is. I am sure their children don’t lack for medical care, the best food, newshoes … These people tell the lumpenconsumeriat: Pay no attention to that printing press behind the curtain sothat you don’t understand that the inflated US currency has rendered every dollar you possess worth only a fraction compared to a few years ago.

Don’t listen to any more lies. Believe what you see at grocery stores, gas stations and every other place you buynecessities for your family. One of the biggest lies they tell you is that the modern union is an expression ofworker’s rights.

The current recession shines a bright and harsh light on public sector unions due to the unsustainable burdenthat their salaries, pensions and other benefits puts on the shoulders of taxpayers. Most commentatorsdistinguish public sector unions from private sector ones as though the two are fundamentally or, at least,substantially different. But the vested interests and history of the two types of union are much the same. Bothare expressions of what might be called “the modern union,” which came to dominate the American labor

movement through New Deal legislation in the 1930s.

Distinctions between the two types of union should be acknowledged, however. There is no question that thetax funding of public sector unions creates important differences from its private sector counterparts. For onething, private sector unions negotiate in the context of limited money; if they demand too much, then thecompany cannot compete against rivals and union members could find themselves unemployed. By contrastpublic sector unions have no clear limit on available money and government has no competitor. Thus publicsector unions receive higher compensation in all its manifestations, including job safety. No wonder theyremain loud voices for increasing the taxation through which the government sustains their wages and



benefits.

By contrast, reducing public sector wages and benefits has become a popular cause within the general public.This is largely because private sector workers (even unionized ones) make considerably less than thegovernment employees whom they are heavily taxed to support. In December 2009 the U.S. Bureau of LaborStatistics reported that government employees at the state and local levels earned an average of $39.60 anhour (including benefits), while private workers earned $27.42 — over 30 percent less. Moreover, according to

the BLS, private workers have a 20 percent chance of losing their jobs in any given year; public workers have a6 percent chance.

Although reducing the cost of public sector unions is an increasingly popular cause, reducing the power ofunions to “negotiate” is not. For example, collective bargaining “rights” still have general support with thepublic. There are at least two reasons for this. First, all modern unions, private or public, benefit from legalprivileges such as collective bargaining and the government certification that bestows a virtual bargainingmonopoly upon specific unions within specific industries or companies. Second, such prerogatives are widelyviewed as “workers’ rights” to be cherished in the same manner as constitutional rights.

But is it accurate to equate union powers such as collective bargaining with human rights or even with workers’

rights? Is it accurate to view public and private sector unions as distinct rather than as fundamentally thesame? The answers lie in history.

What Is a Union?

But, first, it is important to define unions.

In a free-market context a union is nothing more than a collective agency through which workers protectcommon interests and secure common advantages by negotiation or some other form of persuasion, such asboycotts or peaceful strikes. Individual workers assign their right to negotiate to a collective agency in muchthe same manner as they might assign a limited power of attorney in a class action suit; no one is forced to joinor to pay dues. Thus the union is a collective expression of the individual right to free association and of everyindividual to contract his own labor. On the other side of the equation, employers remain free to decline tonegotiate and to hire replacement workers.

Many would consider the foregoing definition of unions to be unrealistic. In his article “The Myth of theVoluntary Union,” economist Thomas DiLorenzo argues that those who believe unions can be voluntary arefalling into “an easy trap … detached from any reality and history.” He insists that “violence against competitorshas always been an inherent feature of unionism, even apart from the ‘violence’ of State-imposed legislativeprivileges that unions enjoy.” (Emphasis added.) DiLorenzo points specifically to the legal power of collectivebargaining and to a history of brutal strikes as proof of the inherent violence of unions.

Yet it is not clear that violence is inherent in unions.

Political Evolution

Could unions exist without legal privileges? Could they function in a society where employment relationshipswere not mandated, where there were no restrictions on self-employment or home industry? In short, arefree-market unions possible? Again, the answer is in history, and the answer is yes.The current paradigm of a modern union is rooted in the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It wascreated through New Deal legislation, especially the Wagner Act, which established the legal right of workerswithin an industry or company to unionize the entire operation if a majority of them voted in favor of doing so.



The entire process is an attack upon the free market and workers’ rights. For example a modern union receivesgovernment certification in order to engage in collective bargaining. In other words, the governmentauthorizes a union to be the sole representative of a set of workers and legally requires the employer to givethat monopoly union a seat at the negotiating table. This monopoly shuts out other groups or individualswithin the company from negotiating their own contracts on their own terms. In many cases individuals canchoose not to join a specific union where they work. But they remain bound, nevertheless, by union contractsand they are required to pay union fees. Thus the modern union represents a forced transfer of authority from

individual workers to a collective. Under the modern union, individual workers are de facto unable to negotiatefor themselves.

This is a different perspective on the modern union and workers’ rights than is usually presented. The publicschool system, which is operated by America’s strongest union, teaches that the New Deal transferred politicalpower from business to labor. And, without question, some of that happened. But the political-power transferwas far more complex and much of what was transferred away were the rights of the individual worker to BigLabor and Big Business.

The Wagner Act and Big Business

In his pivotal essay “Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model,” the libertarian theorist Kevin A. Carson argues thatthe Wagner Act was designed to centralize, bureaucratize, and tame the unions that then operated in a largelyfree market manner. This was done to create advantage to Big Business, which was already no stranger toprivilege and subsidy. This is why some of the most vigorous advocates for the modern union and the New Dealwere leaders of industry, such as President of General Electric Gerard Swope. The advantage to them was clear.By specifying who could negotiate terms and how strikes could occur, the Wagner Act removed the labormovement’s most powerful tactic. Carson comments, “The primary purpose of Wagner, in making theconventional strike the normal method of settling labor disputes, was to create stability and predictability inthe workplace in between strikes, and thereby secure management’s control of production” (emphasis inoriginal).

Moreover, certification created labor monopolies that eliminated the need for business to negotiate contractswith multiple groups or individuals within the same company. Business also benefited from the role of theunions as enforcement agents who policed their own members so that the workers complied with contractsthey themselves had not negotiated. The modern union prevented wildcat strikes; it punished boycotts, workslowdowns, and other labor tactics that had proven both popular and effective against business in the past.

Advocates of the modern union within the labor movement were well aware of the benefits they offered to BigBusiness. In Ethics and American Unionism (1958), the anarcho-syndicalist Sam Dolgoff wrote of John Lewiswho was president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) from 1920 to 1960,

In 1937, Lewis assured the employers that “a CIO contract is adequate to protect against sit-downs,lie-downs, or any other kind of strike.” … [T]he corporations accepted … “industrial unionism” because

the mass-production industries prefer to bargain with a strong international union able to dominate itslocals and keep them from disrupting production. [Emphasis added]

Dolgoff outlined the impact of the Wagner Act upon the UMWA. The organization had been a grassroots laborfederation that functioned under its parent union, the National Federation of Mine Laborers. By itsconstitution, “the Federation [UMWA] consisted of Lodges (Locals) and districts which vigilantly defended theirindependence from the domination of the National Office. Their insistence on autonomy and unity throughfederation (free agreement) was in keeping with the finest libertarian traditions of the American LaborMovement.… When Lewis became President in 1919 he did away with the federalist structure of the union,



rooted out autonomy and self-determination of locals, centralized and took complete control of the union.” Inshort, Lewis centralized the union under his control and destroyed its grassroots nature. The Wagner Actallowed him to complete the centralization.

Thus the modern union was an arrangement of shared advantage between Big Labor and Big Business. Thisdoes not mean the relationship between business and unions was necessarily cordial but it was convenient.Among those disadvantaged by the arrangement were smaller employers, the self-employed or non-unionized

workers, and the broader grassroots labor movement itself.

The Death of Grassroots Labor Movements

Nineteenth-century America was the heyday of the grassroots labor movement. Fueled by a massive influx ofimmigrant workers and the rapid development of industry, a system of vigorous and varied labor organizationsarose to address the specific needs of working people, which went far beyond a decent wage: Labororganizations often functioned as social and cultural support systems as well.

The most prominent nineteenth-century labor federation was the Knights of Labor. Established in 1869,membership reached 28,000 in 1880 and peaked at nearly 700,000 members in 1886. The primary demand of

the Knights was an eight-hour day, but it also campaigned on such issues as ending convict and child labor. TheKnights emphasized projects designed to empower its membership, both economically and socially, and toprovide security for families. Through local chapters, the Knights established worker-owned producercooperatives; it launched public education campaigns to raise awareness of and sympathy for labor issues; andit organized social support networks to insure against the injury or ill health of members. Indeed manyorganizations or unions began as “benevolent associations” intended to care for the families of deceased orincapacitated members.

In his article “Revolutionary Tendencies in American Labor — Part 1,” Dolgoff explained that the labormovement

created a network of corporative institutions of all kinds: schools, summer camps for children andadults, homes for the aged, health and cultural centers, insurance plans, technical education, housing,credit associations, etc. All these and many other essential services were provided by the peoplethemselves, long before the government monopolized social services, wasting untold billions on atop-heavy bureaucratic parasitical apparatus; long before the labor movement was corrupted by“business” unionism.

Although the Knights of Labor used pressure tactics such as boycotts and the endorsement of friendlypoliticians, they did not generally emphasize strikes. Indeed, Terence V. Powderly, who presided over theKnights during its ascendancy (1879–1893), openly opposed strikes, which he believed caused violence andincreased conflict; he favored peaceful negotiation instead. Some local leaders within the Knights disagreedand flexed their autonomy by pursuing local strikes. The internal conflict over strikes contributed to the

Knights’ ultimate decline.

Labor organizations within the nineteenth-century libertarian movement adopted much the same approach asPowderly — namely, they used mutual support, persuasion, and education as tools of labor reform.

Perhaps the most prominent of these organizations was the New England Labor Reform League (NELRL),established in Boston in 1869. Its membership boasted the well-known radical individualists Josiah Warren,William B. Greene, and Benjamin Tucker. Ezra Heywood’s The Word served as the NELRL’s publication. Thefoundational “Declaration of Sentiments” declared the League’s goals to be “Free contracts, free money, free



markets, free transit, and free land — by discussion, petition, remonstrance, and the ballot, to establish thesearticles of faith as a common need, and a common right, we avail ourselves of the advantages of associateeffort”.

One example of NELRL activity illustrates the broad manner in which the League defined labor activity. Alongwith his wife Angela, Heywood founded the Co-Operative Publishing Company from which pamphlets wereissued, including ones on birth control. The NELRL believed that women workers were victims of the poverty

created by unplanned children; thus, birth control fell within the realm of labor reform. “Lady Agents” weresent out to tour the factories and other working-class haunts of New England. Once they had found anaudience, the Lady Agents spoke on subjects that merged labor reform with family planning, all the whileoffering the Co-Operative pamphlets for sale.

The Labor Movement Begins to Threaten Government

With effective networks and diverse strategies, a broad grassroots labor movement grew in power; its threat toentrenched interests also grew. The threat came into glaring focus in 1877 and 1894 with two massive strikesthat involved violence on both sides. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began in West Virginia over a cut inwages; lasting 45 days, it was finally put down by federal troops who went from city to city to quash sympathy

strikes by industrial workers who had joined in. The Pullman Strike of 1894 began in Pullman, Illinois, again overa cut in wages. Spreading nationwide, it also attracted wildcat sympathy strikes and ultimately involved about250,000 workers in 27 states. Eventually President Grover Cleveland sent U.S. marshals and some 12,000troops to break the strikes.

By the turn of the twentieth century the labor movement — notably, the Industrial Workers of the World(IWW, or Wobblies) — had also become a political threat to the status quo. Organized in 1905, the Wobblieshad strong leaders but emphasized rank-and-file organization. Unlike the Knights of Labor, however, the IWWenthusiastically embraced strikes; indeed, it initially opposed the signing of all labor contracts specificallybecause they blunted the power to strike at will.

With a large immigrant membership and explicitly socialist principles, the IWW became a potent voice againstAmerica’s entry into World War I. It viewed the war as a conflict in which the workers of one nation werefighting the workers of another in order to profit the capitalists of both. Thus the IWW became a prime targetof the Department of Justice. In September 1917, 48 IWW meeting halls were raided and 165 leaders werearrested under the new Espionage Act. The next year 101 of them went on trial. All were convicted andreceived prison sentences of up to 20 years. Government repression effectively destroyed the IWW.

Both government and big business had learned a lesson: An uncontrolled labor movement was unpredictable,politically dangerous, and bad for commerce. This was a particularly important insight in the early 1930s, whenRoosevelt swept into power during the turmoil of the Great Depression.

In 1929 the stock market collapsed and people panicked, causing runs on banks and massive bank failures.

Unemployment rose as high as 25 percent while the personal income of those still employed declined. Largecities were hard hit, especially those dependent on heavy industries. Rural areas were devastated as cropprices tumbled and a severe drought turned farmland into dust. Hundreds of thousands of people were drivenfrom their homes in search of any work whatsoever. Still other people left because of bank foreclosures.

A massive and migrant army of unemployed is a formula for political revolt. Thus Roosevelt offered a New Dealto American workers; it was a series of interlocking economic programs that were implemented between 1933and 1936. Through them the federal government’s regulation of all aspects of commerce increaseddramatically; its purpose was to create stability, especially in the area of labor.



This is the context into which the modern union, or big labor, was born; it sprang from a governmental fear oflabor upheaval and a big-business desire for stability. The business elite may not have liked every aspect ofNew Deal policies, but it had long favored Roosevelt’s general approach to labor relations.

Conclusion

What exactly was created with the modern union, and what was lost?

In a voluntary union, the individual members willingly assign their rights of negotiation to a representative ofthe collective; they remain free to leave at any point and negotiate for themselves. The opposite processoccurs in modern unions. Some members may join freely but they cannot later negotiate for themselves if theydisagree with the union. Other members may be required to join as a condition of working in a specific industryor at a unionized company. Thus the modern union strips individual workers of their fundamental right of freeassociation and the right to contract their own labor. The modern union — whether of the public or privatesector — is the antithesis of workers’ rights. What was lost in the process was the individual.



The Immorality of Public Education

A mainstay of repressive government is the public school system through which the “correct” ideas andattitudes can be instilled within children. The purpose of the public schools is not so much to educate children sothat they become good individuals — that is, independent people — but to train them so as to produce “good”citizens. After all, individuals capable of critical thinking are more likely to question authority. The social critic

Albert Jay Nock commented,”Education… leads a person on to ask a great deal more from life … and it begetsdissatisfaction with the rewards that life holds out. Training tends to satisfy him with very moderate and simplereturns. A good income, a home and family, the usual run of comforts and conveniences, diversions addressedonly to the competitive or sporting spirit or else to raw sensation — training not only makes directly for gettingthese, but also for an inert and comfortable contentment with them. Well, these are all that our present societyhas to offer, so it is undeniably the best thing all round to keep people satisfied with them, which training does,and not to inject a subversive influence, like education, into this easy complacency. Politicians understand this.”

Given the importance of the public education system, remarkably few political commentators have disputed its fundamental worth or cried out against the involuntary taxation that sustains it. The task of questioning thebasics of public education has fallen to libertarians like the publisher R.C. Hoiles, who conducted a full-frontalattack on the immorality of the tax-funded public school system.

One reason Hoiles so thoroughly rejected the public school system is because it had betrayed him. In hismiddle-age, he launched into an intensive course of self-education, reading hundreds and hundreds of books. AsNock had predicted of education, their impact was “subversive.” Hoiles realized his former “education,”especially in grade school, had been strewn with lies and hypocrisies that impoverished anyone who believedthem because it hindered critical thought. Because I arrived at a similar conclusion, I have never felt the lack ofa university education. Indeed, I regret the irreplaceable childhood time I was forced to waste in grade school.

The libertarian publisher R.C. Hoiles insisted that the editorial page of his flagship California newspaper TheOrange County Register was “a daily school room made available to its subscribers.” In that schoolroom Hoiles

taught what he called “voluntaryism.” A November 1953 editorial, “Articles of Faith,” distilled its essence: “[A]government is a good government that only does what each and every individual has the moral and ethical and just right to do.” If it was not right for an individual to take money by force, then it was not right for agovernment to do so in the name of “taxation.” Another of the “Articles” stated, “I have faith that ourgovernment would better protect every person’s inalienable rights if it was supported on a voluntary basisrather than by taxes.”

Perhaps no single issue better captured the libertarian spirit of Hoiles than his feisty stand on education. The“Articles” declared, “I have faith that we will be better educated by voluntary, competitive schools than bygovernment schools.” This statement must have startled conservatives who viewed the public schools as asuccess story. Indeed, a then-favored conservative strategy was to enter school board races. By contrast, Hoiles

insisted he had no more right to vote for a school official than he did to vote for a trustee within agovernment-owned brothel. (Hoiles repeatedly compared public schooling to prostitution; he once declared,“A house of prostitution is voluntary, grade school is not.”)

Opposition to tax-supported schools became a dominant theme in Hoiles’s writing; his last editorial in theRegister dealt with “something-for-nothing schools that have had a great influence in conditioning pupils tobelieve in something for nothing.” On occasion, Hoiles even found it necessary to defend the considerableamount of space school issues occupied in his paper. On October 15, 1945, he wrote, “The amount of space theRegister is devoting to the junior college bond issue might cause some to think we are overestimating theimportance of the issue. There is nothing more important than the principles in back of the issue”.



Hoiles’s Educational Background

Hoiles’s evolution on education began in a “little red schoolhouse” across from his family’s large farmhouse inAlliance, Ohio, where, he later explained, he learned “that the State, or a majority of citizens, had the right touse taxation to support the public school system.” His school texts exposed the political “error” of the divineright of kings but “they never explained the error in the divine right of the majority. It simply substituted thedivine right of the majority for the divine right of kings.” Nor did his school books explain “the basic principle

that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the individual; that the government had noright to do anything that each and every individual did not have the right to do. Instead, they had to teach thatthe government or the local school district, if the majority so willed, had a right to force a Catholic parent, or achildless person, or an old maid, or an old bachelor to help pay for government schools…”.

At the same time as they legitimized taxation, however, Hoiles’s teachers spoke of the Ten Commandments,including “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet.” He observed wryly, “[T]he government school Iattended made no attempt to be consistent and teach me to recognize contradictions.” The contradictions didnot surprise Hoiles, who explained, “They cannot teach the single standard of rightness because they arepracticing a double standard.” They could not teach moral values “any more than a robber can teach honesty”.

Hoiles’s higher education must have also imbued him with skepticism about government education. Theknowledge he valued most had been self-taught and it came directly from experience. While studying electricalengineering at the Methodist Mt. Union College (Alliance), Hoiles worked part time at his brother Frank’s dailypaper, the Alliance Review, and discovered what became a lifelong passion for the newspaper business. Hoilesmust have wondered if his college education had been wasted. Later in life he complained of the commonperception that “going through the public schools and colleges is education”.

In 1932 Hoiles temporarily left the newspaper business and began to read insatiably. Even though he hadshown little interest in philosophy to date, he acquired the background that allowed him to sprinkle his futurewriting with quotations from an amazing range of authors: from Frédéric Bastiat to Ayn Rand, from John Locketo Spinoza.

The most influential was Bastiat. In a 1955 editorial Hoiles wrote, “He was the first man who awakened me tothe errors, taught in government schools and more Protestant colleges, that the state doing things that wereimmoral if done by an individual made these acts become moral. In other words, he was the first man thatpointed out that there was only one standard of right and wrong”.

In 1935, at 56, Hoiles arrived in Orange County, California where he had purchased an established newspaper.With him, Hoiles brought not only his family but also an evolved philosophy of freedom, which he aggressivelyapplied, especially to public education.

A September 3, 1946 editorial in the Register entitled “Most Sacred of All Popular Idols, GovernmentEducation” typifies both Hoiles’s style and content in approaching the issue. The editorial is clearly answering

critics who argued that public education is a necessary good because it leads to a literate population.

Hoiles opened by quoting an anonymous “lover of freedom” (in truth it was his close friend and fellowlibertarian publisher Leonard Read) who defined the proper role of government as a “restraining force ratherthan a force to compel people to do good.” By “restraining,” Read meant that government should preventviolence against people and property rather than advocate or impose agendas. Considering governmenteducation from this angle, the “lover of freedom” concluded “it has all the characteristics of other forms ofsocialism”.



Some people, Hoiles continued, may see little difference between the earliest “red schoolhouses” that werevoluntarily supported and the subsequent tax-funded ones. “True,” he stated,

the socialism incident to the “little red school” was only a slight departure from the procedure of a fewneighbors pooling their resources, voluntarily, to employ a teacher to instruct their children. But oncethe socialistic principle is admitted, once the idea is sanctioned of using government’s powers ofcoercion to take the fruits of the individual’s labor for the “collective good,” there is no logical stopping

point.

Hoiles went on to quote Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine: “There can be no greater stretch ofarbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authoritiesdecree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.” Thus,continuing the quote, “[n]eighborly, small-scale socialism in education has expanded and developed until todaywe are faced with the disaster of national socialism in education”.

The “disaster” was partly economic. Hoiles cited statistics showing how the costs of educating one individualhad increased more than ten times from 1880 to 1940, with no corresponding increase in quality. Indeed,quality had declined — partly due to increased bureaucratization, partly to the severing of connection between

a teacher’s wages and his or her need to satisfy customers (the parents and children). Modern teachers neededonly to satisfy the government, their new source of income.

“Government educators are becoming less and less servants of those from whom revenues are extracted orfrom whom their pupil raw material is conscripted,” Hoiles wrote. “More and more they are becoming vestedinterests, concerned with their own employment and tenure. More and more they are allying themselves as apressure group with other bureaucratic interests. More and more they are using their strategic position to turnthe minds of the young towards statism and interventionism”.

Attacking on yet another front, Hoiles explained the terrible impact that government teachers have on thecharacter development of children.

I take the stand against tax-supported education because I believe … that the advantage of being able to readand write is far outweighed by the destruction of individual initiative, enterprise and responsibility broughtabout by government education’s poison of statist psychology. Practically every youth in the land is a socialistat heart. How can he help but be unless he comes from a family that is steeped in the belief in true liberty andthe dignity of man and recognizes that multiplying a robbery does not make it right?

The Context of R.C. Hoiles

It is not possible to understand the passion with which Hoiles addressed public education without establishingthe historical context in which he developed. In the early twentieth century, education in America underwent apolitical revolution, becoming the lynchpin of the Progressive Era — a period of social reform, from the 1880s

to the 1920s. A central tenet was that government needed to play a larger role in solving social problems and inpromoting the “social good.” “Popular,” or public, education was viewed as a prerequisite and the key toreconstructing society by molding generations to come. In his watershed book, Democracy and Education (1916), John Dewey advocated using popular education as a conscious tool to remove social evil and promotesocial good. Slowly, the classical curricula that aimed at rigorous education — such as familiarity with Latin, astress on history — were replaced by programs aimed at creating “good citizens”.

Hoiles was outraged by his children’s curriculum. In a 1961 editorial he reminisced about an incident involvinghis daughter Jane. After reviewing one of her school textbooks, he appeared before the directors of the Santa



Ana Chamber of Commerce to protest against school books that “set forth the principles of Karl Marx.” Hoiles’spurpose was not to ban or censor but to assert a parent’s right to guide his children’s education. Nevertheless,the book was pulled. Why, then, did Hoiles’s children attend public school? He told a Newsweek reporter,“There was no place else to send them”.

He spelled out a particularly provocative strategy in a letter to Read. Hoiles explained, “I have repeatedlyoffered a member of the Board of Education in Santa Ana, who is a preacher, $100 if he would publicly attempt

to harmonize tax-supported schools with quotations from Jesus. He will not undertake it. I also made the offerto the superintendent of schools. He will not undertake it.” Hoiles wondered if he should up the ante to $500and construct the discussion as a debate, perhaps with Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, or Read himself.Hoiles considered the offer a fail-proof maneuver. If the preacher accepted, the flaws in his argument would beexposed. If he refused, then the refusal would “cause the people of the community to wonder … whethertax-supported schools are doing what they think they are doing”.

And that was his goal. To make people consider taxation as theft. To make neighbors refrain from stealingmoney from each other under the guise of government.



Ask Not For Whom the Drug Tolls

Those who comprehend the deep devastation and suffering caused by the Drug War argue for thedecriminalization of drugs. It is less common to hear fundamental objections to modern pharmaceuticals thatrest upon the partnership between big drug companies and the government. Most critics of “Big Pharma” focuson pragmatic objections such as the high cost of patent drugs or the risk of over-medication. But just as

government’s prohibition of illegal substances has been a social disaster so, too, has its support of “legal”drugs. Both endanger lives and cause human suffering.

Government should have no part in the regulation of drugs, legal or illegal. And yet its role is increasing, asdrugs become the therapy of choice to cure psychological problems that amount to little more thaneccentricities or dissatisfactions with life. In recent decades, the medical establishment has dramaticallyexpanded the definition of disease and dysfunction to include everything from sexual disinterest to obesity, fromshyness to “hyper-activity” in children, with laziness now being discussed as “a neuro-developmentaldysfunction.” Studies of new medical dysfunctions are repeated rather than reported upon by a mainstreammedia that does not seem to read beyond press releases in order to announce sensational findings.

No one better explains the dangers of this trend and of the government-Pharma alliance than iconoclastic

psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. In a series of books like The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and The Manufacture ofMadness (1970), Szasz disputed the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry itself and presents modernmedicine as a form of social control. His “therapeutic state” is upon us.

“[F]ifty years ago, it made sense to assert that mental illnesses are not diseases, but it makes no sense to say sotoday. Debate about what counts as mental illness has been replaced by legislation about the medicalizationand demedicalization of behavior. Old diseases such as homosexuality and hysteria disappear. New diseasessuch as gambling and smoking appear.” So wrote the iconoclastic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.

Over fifty years ago, The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) by Szasz was published. It changed the political

framework in which mental illness was addressed by laying the foundation for a concept Szasz developedthrough a series of books, including The Manufacture of Madness (1970). That concept was “the therapeuticstate” — a collaboration between psychiatry and the state through which “undesirable” actions, thoughts andbehavior patterns were suppressed, increasingly through drugs. Thus, Szasz not only disputed the moral andscientific basis of psychiatry but also argued that modern medicine was becoming an engine of social control, inwhich pharmaceuticals were a primary tool.

A new slate of drugs now address a wide range of so-called disorders or dysfunctions that former generationsconsidered environmental problems or lifestyle choices: from obesity to attention deficit, from erectiledysfunction to social anxiety (shyness), from menopause to alcoholism. Indeed, laziness is now being discussedas “a neuro-developmental dysfunction” for which drugs are being developed. The current therapeutic state

may be best analyzed as a collaboration between modern medicine, the pharmaceutical industry and the state.

The debate stirred by Szasz has been muted largely because the medical establishment and the mediamainstream have become staunch advocates of the therapeutic state. These advocates dominate universities,research studies, prestigious committees, FDA hearings, and other governmental bodies. Since writing TheMyth, Szasz himself noted that “the formerly sharp distinctions between medical hospitals and mentalhospitals, voluntary and involuntary mental patients, and private and public psychiatry have blurred intononexistence. Virtually all medical and mental health care is now the responsibility of and is regulated by thefederal government, and its cost paid, in full or in part, by the federal government”.



Problems of everyday life have been medicalized and people are now viewed as having little or no ability ontheir own to “cure” conditions such as alcoholism or drug abuse. Szasz’s focus upon the responsibility that eachindividual should and must assume for his own dysfunctions has eroded away. Happily, a backlash against themedicalization of everyday life is occurring. Unhappily, it is being fought on the wrong ground.

Debate Is Re-engaged … on the Wrong Ground

A fascinating book was recently published; it exemplifies both the backlash and its mistaken direction. As such,it is useful to explore.

Sex Lies and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit from Female Sexual Dysfunction by RayMoynihan and Barbara Mintzes (2010) is a work of investigative journalism that explores the close financialrelationship between the medical experts who define and develop the “science” behind new dysfunctions andthe $500+ billion pharmaceutical industry who profit from treating them. For example, the book examines themakeup of experts on committees that define dysfunctions for the extremely influential “Diagnostic andStatistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)”; it is from the DSM that “social anxiety disorder” derives.(Interestingly, homosexuality was only delisted as a disorder in 1970.) Moynihan and Mintzes observe,

The DSM has been criticised for the closeness between the expert committees who write the definitionof diseases and the pharmaceutical companies that sell the drugs prescribed to treat them. One studythat looked closely at the affiliations of the men and women on those committees found that morethan half of them had ties to drug companies. On the committees revising mood disorders, includingdepression, the figure was closer to 100 per cent.

In short, they construct a strong case for endemic bias within the medical establishment in favor of drugcompanies and the creation of disease.

Sex Lies and Pharmaceuticals is far from the only sign of backlash. Everywhere grassroots rebellions arespringing up against specific “diseases,” such as the currently emerging “female sexual dysfunction,” andagainst the use of drugs, such as Ritalin, to “cure” Attention Deficit Disorder in young children. An example ofgrassroots backlash is the New View Campaign — a crusade against the very idea of Female Sexual Dysfunction— which is led by feminist-activist Leonore Tiefer . The New View website states, “The pharmaceutical industrywants people to think that sexual problems are simple medical matters, and it offers drugs as expensive magicfixes. But sexual problems are complicated, sexuality is diverse, and no drug is without side effects.” In 2004,Tiefer was instrumental in having the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reject a hormonereplacement patch for women being marketed by Proctor & Gamble.

A re-opening of debate on the medicalization of everyday life is to be applauded. But, unlike Szasz, the newcritics do not take aim at the therapeutic state, which has been formed by the partnership of medicine,pharmaceuticals and government. Instead, the critics focus on the therapeutic industry — that is, the flow ofmoney and power between the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical companies. The culpability of

government in the creation of a dysfunctional society is either marginalized or denied. Indeed, oftengovernment is viewed as the remedy for problems it has been instrumental in creating.

Moynihan and Mintzes exemplify this trend. In Sex Lies and Pharmaceuticals, they verge briefly upon criticizingthe American government but the criticism implies that the government should be more interventionist;instead they come close to accusing the government of cooperating in the marketing of new diseases. Forexample, they note, “Legally, pharmaceutical companies are prohibited from advertising these drugs [e.g.Viagra] for recreational use, even … where newspaper drug ads and television commercials are allowed.” Thenthey point to a high-profile television commercial for Viagra in which a man is window shopping and admiring



sexy lingerie. The voice-over asks, “Remember that guy who used to be called ‘The Wild Thing?’ The guy whowanted to spend the entire honeymoon indoors?” A trumpet blows in the background and the voice-overdeclares, “He’s back!” The situation is not limited to Viagra or its manufacturer Pfizer. A similar ad for Levitrafeatures a woman flashing back to romantic intervals and asks, “In the mood for something different? Howabout Levitra?” Moynihan and Mintzer conclude that the FCC is turning a blind eye to this particular form ofrecreational drug marketing.

Nevertheless, they seem to view these “incidents” as peripheral to the problem and repeatedly applaud thegovernment, especially in the form of the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

This is typical of “pharmaceutical dissidents” who tend to view the state as a solution, not as part of theproblem. For example, Tiefer, of the New View Campaign, works through the World Health Organization.Despite her previously stated objections to medicalizing female sexual dysfunction, she works with the WHO toimpose new legislation to promote such “rights” (or, rather, entitlements) as “the right to comprehensivesexuality education” and “the right to sexual health care, which should be available for prevention andtreatment of all sexual concerns, problems, and disorders”.

It is possible that critics like Moynihan, Mintzer and Tiefer will accomplish some “good.” For example, they may

be able to reduce the widespread prescribing of Ritalin to grade-school children. But without understandingthe essential role played by the governments and state agencies in the medicalization of everyday life, criticscan never strike at the root of the problem. Indeed, they may well worsen matters by shifting blame and givingmore authority to the very agencies most responsible for the pathologizing and medicalization of society.

The Therapeutic State

The focus of the re-emerging debate needs to shift onto Szaszian grounds, onto an analysis of the therapeuticstate. It needs to do so in at least four ways. First , it must be clearly acknowledged that government defines theframework for all medical practice within North America; nothing significant occurs without governmentregulation in one form or another. Second , the protection offered to pharmaceutical companies should beanalyzed as legal privileges to a special interest, and so the opposite of a free market or a truly competitiveindustry. Third , the relatively new and influential phenomenon called “private-public partnerships” — amarriage between the corporate sector and public institutions — should be examined, exposed and rejected.Fourth, the role government plays in “marketing” drugs through institutions like the public school system andsocial service agencies must be examined, exposed and rejected.

First , government defines the framework and allows no genuine competition in the practice of medicine or theadministration of drugs. From the corporate level down to the individual on the street, government regulatesmedical decisions such as which drugs can be ingested. Unlike food or shelter, which are decisions left to theindividual, medical care and the administration of drugs are monopolies that the government assigns to thosewho meet state requirements and abide by state rules. Thus the American Medical Association (AMA) is able toexert monopoly control of medical care, such as hospitalization, and has a long history of persecuting

competitors such as midwives.

But licensing and drug laws are only the most obvious ways in which the government defines medical care.Through various and labyrinthine ways, the medical establishment partners with state authority. Many if notmost of them are not obvious. In reporting on the AMA’s support of ObamaCare, for example, the Wall Street Journal (05/07/10) explained,

The organization [AMA] wants to protect a monopoly that the federal government has created for it —a medical coding system administered by the AMA that every health-care professional and hospital



must use if they wish to get paid for the services they provide. This monopoly generates income of $70million to $100 million annually for the AMA. That makes the AMA less an association looking out fordoctors and more a special-interest group beholden to Congress and the White House.

In short, ObamaCare is a financial windfall for the AMA — a windfall hidden from most public awareness.

Second , the government offers legal privileges to pharmaceutical companies. All prescription drugs must be

patented and approved by the FDA; but, again, the monopoly over dealing drugs in society is only the mostobvious privilege granted to the pharmaceutical industry. It hardly captures the extent of partnership.

Moynihan and Mintzer chronicle one of the less obvious “privileges” when they write about “one of the biggesthealthcare frauds in U.S. history. Pfizer was accused of illegally promoting an anti-arthritis drug for unapproveduses, creating a health risk to users. Pfizer admitted to a limited guilt and paid a criminal fine of $1.2 billion andcivil penalties of $1 billion.” Despite the hefty financial hit, not one executive faced a jail term; nor was a jailterm sought. The sentencing judge, District Court Justice Douglas Woodlock (Massachusetts) commented in hisconcluding remarks, “This is a case in which no human being, apparently, is going to be held responsible forsubstantial criminal activity by a corporation.” He notes that Pfizer absorbed the financial hit as a “cost of doingbusiness” and still managed to return record profits for that year. By contrast it is incomprehensible that the

government would not have prosecuted an unprivileged individual to the full extent possible under the law.

Third , there has been a recent rise in what is known as “private-public partnerships” (PPPs). A PPP is acollaboration between government and the private sector in which a venture is either a) funded (in part or full)by tax-dollars and operated through the private sector, or b) funded by capital raised by the private sectorbased upon a contract with the government to provide services to it.

Although PPPs are often associated with infrastructure matters, such as the repair of roads or building ofbridges, this sort of ersatz capitalism is rampant within medical research and drug promotion. Dr. John Dean, afamily physician with multiple ties to pharmaceutical companies, has stated that “private-public partnershipsbetween the corporate sector and public institutions are being actively encouraged at the highest level ofgovernment in many nations.” According to a 2001 study (Lasker, Weiss & Miller, p. 179) “hundreds of millionsof dollars” have been invested in the U.S. to promote partnerships around health issues, creating “thousands ofalliances, coalitions, consortia and other health partnerships.” That trend has only increased in the ensuingyears. Tax-funded research is commonly funneled through nominally private organizations or researchers.Conferences, studies, reports etc. are conducted at tax expense. Arguably, such funding constitutes thegreatest barrier to alternative, independent research. Such funding creates politicized medicine.

Fourth, the government is one of the leading “peddlers” of pharmaceuticals — otherwise known as drugpushers. It is not merely that private for-profit organizations have used tax dollars to climb aboard the publichealth bandwagon and pathologize massive categories of social behavior. It is also that the government uses itsagencies to create a market base for pharmaceutical companies.

Just one example is the role of the public school system as a “pusher” of Ritalin — a drug more potent thancocaine — to millions of school-age children even though the effects upon children are not known.Overwhelmingly, Ritalin is prescribed to boys who are viewed as unruly in class. A 2001 report stated, “IfHuckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were in a school in Massachusetts today, they’d be drugged with Ritalin … ”As a recent Huffington Post headline (09/17/10) stated, “Do 2.5 Million Children Really Need Ritalin?” Thearticle asked,

What is going on here? Have millions of our children become so hyperactive and unable to focus thatthey are incapable of succeeding at school or dealing with the demands of normal life? Or are we



creating an illness where there is none, calling normal variations in temperament and personality a“disease” that requires the intervention of long term, and extremely profitable, pharmaceuticalmedication?

The marketing of created disease is being driven by government agencies, like the public school system, thatprefer to drug “customers” rather than deal with them as complex human beings.

Conclusion

Monopoly, legal privileges, the rise of PPPs, the use of tax dollars to create disease and eliminate competition,the peddling of pharmaceuticals through government agencies … these issues must be prominent in anyproductive discussion of the medicalization of everyday life. If the discussion focuses on corporate greed, thenthe therapeutic state will have merely entered a new phase..

Szasz once observed, “Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiatesare the religion of the people.” It is also becoming a form of social control through which authorities andexperts usurp very personal decisions about what is in the best interest of the individual. Why? Because theindividual is not deemed competent to decide for himself.



Passport to the Total State

One of the myriad benefits of knowing the late, great Murray Rothbard is being able to view politicaldevelopments in economic terms. Thus, when a friend vented to me over the phone about an injustice done tohim, I immediately thought “transaction costs”.

The background: My American friend used to cross the Canadian-US border northward with ease in order tovisit my farm. However, new procedures came into force a few years back by which police and court records on American citizens are freely and easily accessed by Canadian customs agents, and vice versa. And so my friendexperienced a problem: an old DUI, for which he was denied entry. A DUI is now one of the infractions that cancause a de facto iron curtain to fall across the Canadian-US border, separating friends and family members;other infractions include possession of marijuana (perhaps in the ’70s), possession of a medical-marijuana card,shoplifting, and an arrest for attending a peace rally.

As I mentioned the phrase that came to my mind when I heard of my friend’s problem was “transaction costs.” A fairly standard definition is, “A transaction cost is a cost incurred in making an economic exchange.” Considerbuying an apple from a grocery store. The cost of doing so will be not only the price tag on the apple but alsothe time and gas it takes to travel from your house and back, as well as the time you spent waiting in line. These

costs — the ones over and above the price tag on the apple — are the transaction costs of your purchase. Suchcosts can become more expensive than the apple itself. For example, if the nearest grocery store is ten milesaway, the cost of gas may be far more significant than the price of fruit.

For years, I have been complaining to my husband that the transaction costs of being alive were soaring, andalmost always because of increased governmental requirements. Here’s one example: a few years ago, it tookme eight months to get a replacement birth certificate that I needed for no other reason than to meet therequirements of another government form. I needed to fill out the other government form in order to legallyengage in an activity that had previously required only the production of a driver’s license; now it required aseparate license.

To perform a single act that should never have been licensed at all, I had to wait eight months and fill out twoadditional forms. For the privilege of going through this infuriating process, I paid two fees. And then insult wasadded to injury: the whole process was just a prelude to filling out yet another government form and paying yetanother fee. The transaction costs of life are soaring.

I have never been arrested. The most legal attention I’ve gleaned has been a parking ticket. I am white,middle-class, and innocuous in appearance. A clean slate and an unimposing persona puts me in an enviable position: I will probably never be denied entrance at any border crossing in the world. Nevertheless, my freedomof travel is being denied, and that denial comes in the form of transaction costs. Government regulations aremaking the exercise of my rights so expensive in terms of additional fees, time, inconvenience, and sheerunpleasantness that these considerations are beginning to outweigh the actual cost of exercising my rights.

“Your papers!” In old movies, the demand is barked at trembling travelers by a Nazi with a guttural accent. Ifthe demand is made in the opening scene, then the audience knows immediately that they watching atotalitarian state in which travelers are in danger.

“Your papers!” now rings out at every American airport and border crossing. The accent is different buttravelers need to recognize with equal immediacy that a totalitarian state is playing out in front of their eyes,and they must be careful.



A passport is where the security theater begins. Indeed, without a passport those who wish to fly or cross aborder are not “allowed” to be scanned, searched, interrogated, or undergo a plethora of other indignitiesimposed by uniformed thugs. The hoops through which passport carriers jump are all prelude to “permitting”them to exercise a right belonging to every freeborn person: the right to travel.

America and the world were not always this way. It is important to remember that there once was a world inwhich people traveled freely across borders without paperwork to visit families, pursue education, conduct

business, and mingle. Freedom worked once. It enriched the world economically, culturally, andpsychologically.

War Converts Convenience into Blatant Abuse

The modern “passport” is commonly defined as, “an official document issued by a government, certifying theholder’s identity and citizenship and entitling them to travel under its protection to and from foreigncountries.” But are passport privileges to be conferred or denied by government, or are they mereconveniences that cannot be properly required for people to exercise the natural right to freedom ofmovement? Do they protect peaceful travelers or merely facilitate the state’s grip on the flow of people andproperty?

The foregoing descriptions of passports have all been true at some point in history.

Travel papers date back to antiquity and were generally intended to protect the bearer as he passed throughforeign territory. The King James Bible (Nehemiah 2:7) states,

I said unto the king, If it please the king, let letters be given me to the governors beyond the river, thatthey may convey me over till I come into Judah.

In some areas, the issuance of letters also served as social control. According to Wikipedia, “In the medievalIslamic Caliphate, a form of passport was used in the form of a bara’a, a receipt for taxes paid.” Those inarrears could not travel even within the Caliphate.

Henry V (1386–1422) is credited with creating the first Western passport, which was “designed to help provewho you were if you traveled to a foreign land” and to facilitate entry into the many walled cities of Europe.Indeed, the word “passport” is thought to derive from passing through the “porte” (doorway) of such cities.Unlike most earlier letters, however, the ones issued by Henry V were a general identification and did notspecify which locations the bearer could visit.

The passport as an official permission or protection, and not merely as identification, arose because of armedconflicts. In the 17th century, sea voyaging was key to trade, travel, and the maintenance of empire. With somefrequency, war interrupted that flow. Therefore, neutral vessels were granted passports or “sea letters” from aport of departure, which permitted them to journey in safety. (This is an alternate but less accepted theory of

the derivation of the word “passport.”) Civil authorities also issued “safe conducts” to individuals; typically, theindividual was a subject of one of the belligerents who needed to cross enemy territory. Many 17th-centurytreaties — e.g., the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), the commercial Treaty of Copenhagen (1670) — makeprominent mention of safe conducts, the violation of which was punished as a serious offense againstinternational law.The American Passport

The American passport was also rooted in war, specifically the American Revolution (1775–1783). The first onewas issued in 1783; based on the French “passport,” it was designed and printed by Benjamin Franklin. It was a



single page with a description of the bearer(s) and his or their signature(s). For example, when John Adams,Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay acted as ministers plenipotentiary in traveling to Great Britain to seal theterms of peace, all three names were on one passport. It was addressed “TO ALL Captains or Commanders ofships of war, privateers, or armed Vessels …”.

During the Articles of Confederation period (1781–1789), passports were issued but not required. When the USConstitution was ratified, creating a new government, passports continued to be issued but not required. Many

American states and cities also issued their own “voluntary” passports until 1856 when the Department ofState exerted a federal monopoly, ostensibly to eliminate confusion.

Nevertheless, passports were not mandatory except for a period during the American Civil War (1861–1865)and during World War I (1914–1918). The latter can be seen as the beginning of the current American passport.On December 15, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson issued Executive Order No. 2285, “[r]equiring Americancitizens traveling abroad to procure passports” and advising the

Secretary of State, in co-operation with the Secretary of the Treasury, will make arrangements for theinspection of passports of all persons, American or foreign, leaving this country.

This was followed in 1918 by an act of Congress granting the president authority to require passports duringtime of war. Passports remained mandatory until early 1921.

Thereafter, the United States continued its “no-passport-required” travel policy until another war: World War II(1939–1945). In 1941, passports became mandatory for travel abroad, and remain so to this day (travel toCanada used to be an exception; until recently, proof of citizenship was all that was required to cross theborder).

European Passports

European nations pioneered many if not most aspects of the modern passport. In his review of the book TheInvention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State by John Torpey, Albrecht Funk (Department ofPolitical Science, University of Pittsburgh) wrote,

He [Torpey] starts with the hectic endeavors in the French Revolution to issue passports andidentification papers that tried to secure the free movement of the citizen on the one hand and, on theother hand, kept the movements of those who were perceived as enemies of the revolution, undersurveillance, (aristocratic émigrés, insurrectionists of the Vendee, foreigners).

Here is the blatant use of passports to exert social control by refusing travel to “enemies of the state”.

But Europe differed from America in a key manner: a landmass with many nations, it relied on the trade andthe travel of skilled workers across borders. By the mid-19th century, mandatory passports had largely

disappeared, with Czarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire being prominent exceptions. The change was largelydue to three factors. First, governments were pressured to open up borders so that goods and services couldflow across an increasingly industrialized Europe. Second, the period between the last Napoleonic War (1815)and World War I was unusually peaceful. Third, railroads now dominated travel. Their speed and the sheernumber of travelers made traditional methods of checking documents impractical.

Thus, with trade and peace, mandatory passports declined.

War brought them back to life. With World War I, European nations once more imposed requirements not only



to identify “enemies of the state” (e.g., spies or the citizens of belligerents) but also to control the outwardflow of skilled labor in order to maintain their own workforces. In short, passports once again became socialcontrols and, like the United States, many European nations maintained their requirements after the War.

World War II made passports mandatory on a virtually worldwide basis. Although passport requirementsloosened once more after WWII, the war on terror in the wake of 9/11 has raised those requirements tounprecedented levels. The ebb and flow of passports is that of war itself.

Human Right or Social Control?

Passports clearly function as an essential and effective means through which a state can control the person andproperty of its residents. Consider the United States. No one can legally leave without one.

And yet passports can be denied for a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with being “an enemy of thestate” but rest strictly on statutory grounds. Common reasons for denial include owing money to the IRS, afederal arrest, a state-criminal court order existing, a drug arrest, being on parole or probation.Law-enforcement databases are routinely checked against both passports and applications to weed out thosewho have committed such offenses as being more than $2,500 behind on child-support payments. Passports

can also be revoked for several reasons, although revocation is far less common.

Those who meet the legal requirements for a passport move on to the next stage of social control. Afterhanding over documents, a traveler is questioned about the reasons for travel, how much money he carries, hisoccupation, and virtually any other question a border agent wishes to ask. The traveler’s person and propertyare “searched” in various ways, including a strip search at the agent’s discretion. If the traveler questions orevinces disapproval, then he could be denied the “right” to board a plane, thus wasting an expensive ticket. Orhe may be pulled aside for special treatment, including fines or interrogation by the police.

A question remains, however: do passports necessarily violate human rights? If passports are entirely voluntaryand those who refuse them bear no punishment, then clearly they do not violate human rights. They are auseful form of identification that a businessman who needs to definitively identify himself to banks in severalnations might welcome. It is the mandatory nature of any travel document that converts it into a violation ofrights.

With the exception of trespassing on private property, people have an absolute right to travel in peace and attheir own discretion. This right is an extension of self-ownership, which is the basis of libertarianism.Self-ownership means that all human beings, by virtue of being human, have a right to the full and peacefulcontrol of their persons and property. Traveling is nothing more than an expression of that control not onlyover your body but also over your goods, which may require transport. Requiring a passport as the key tofreedom of movement is akin to gagging someone while maintaining that he retains freedom of speech.

Denying a passport violates self-ownership in yet another manner: either every human being is a self-owner or

none are. Forbidding travel to some creates an unequal society, which violates the very concept ofself-ownership. It creates secondary citizens who can reclaim their status only by complying with statedemands, such as the payment of child support. This sleight of hand converts a right into a state-grantedprivilege to be doled out to the obedient.

Conclusion

The passport has grown into what is arguably the single most powerful tool of totalitarian America, second onlyto law enforcement itself. It no longer pretends to protect individuals; not a single terrorist has been



apprehended as a result of passport checks. But it does cement the totalitarian state. The mandatory passportshould be reviled and rejected as an abuse of human rights and common decency. A nation that requires onecannot be free.





imposed draconian fines on any private carrier who dared to offer better service at lower rates. Tuckerexplained, “as the carrying of each letter constituted a separate offence, the government was able to showerprosecutions on him [Spooner] and crush him in a few months by loading him with legal expenses”.

Spooner had been so effective in demonstrating the superiority of private mail, however, that the post officewas virtually compelled to lower its own rates significantly thereafter. Thus Tucker dubbed him “the father ofcheap postage in America”.

In his pamphlet “The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails,” Spoonerhighlighted the inefficiency guaranteed by the act of banning competition in postal service. Once there was anenforced monopoly, he stated, postal officials would “feel few quickening impulses to labor” or “to move at thespeed that commercial interests require.” The consequence would be “a cumbrous, clumsy, expensive anddilatory government system” that would be “nearly impossible to modify or materially improve” except byopening it up once more to “rivalry and free competition”.

But Spooner objected to a postal monopoly not merely or primarily because it cheated the public by requiringan extravagant fee for an inadequate service. His main objection was that the monopoly violated individual andconstitutional rights in at least three ways. First , Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution authorized Congress “to

establish post offices and post roads,” but it did not bar others from doing so as well. The power to create wasnot a power to prohibit. The Ninth Amendment states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights,shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”.

Second , freedom of the press and freedom of speech included — and, indeed, required — the right to privatelydistribute material to whomever wished to read it. A government postal monopoly would be able to banperiodicals from using one of the only legal channels of distribution. And, so, the monopoly constituted a directaffront to the First Amendment.

Third , a monopoly post office that can control the flow of information inevitably would be used to politicaladvantage by those in authority. In “Private Mails,” Spooner argued, “Its immense patronage and power, used,as they always will be, corruptly, make it [the monopoly post office] also a very great political evil.” Tuckerconcurred, and added that the reduction in rates that followed Spooner’s legal persecution had been a sopthrown to the public to keep them from calling for abolition of the monopoly.

Analyzing Spooner’s Arguments

Spooner’s claim is that a postal monopoly constitutes a standing threat to freedom of the press and freedom ofspeech. It was a power tool to control the spread of information and opinion throughout society. Theseobservations did not originate with Spooner. In colonial America the founding fathers were acutely aware ofthe censorious role played by British control of the post office. Sam Adams urged the creation of a parallel andprivate system so that information could flow freely from colony to colony in order to establish politicalcohesion. He insisted that the colonial post office deceived the people into believing it was a public utility when

its real purpose was to stop “the Channels of publick Intelligence and” to aid “the measures of Tyranny”.

It was no coincidence that one of the first resolutions passed by the Second Continental Congress led directlyto establishing the Constitutional Post as a reliable means of spreading information. Article IX of the Articles ofConfederation (1781) granted the “United States in Congress … the sole and exclusive right and power of …establishing or regulating post offices from one State to another, throughout all the United States, and exactingsuch postage on the papers passing through the same as may be requisite to defray the expenses of saidoffice.” An ordinance established the working rules of the post office, including a provision for licensing postriders to carry newspapers.



But another goal quickly emerged within the new postal service. In 1785, a resolution authorized the secretaryof the Department of Foreign Affairs to open and inspect any mail that related to the safety and interests of theUnited States. The ensuing inspections caused prominent men, such as George Washington, to complain ofmail tampering. According to the book Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office by Dorothy Ganfield Fowler,the Continental Congress was soon debating whether some communications should be deemed “unmailable”because their contents were too dangerous.

In practical terms, however, certain types of political expression were already de facto unmailable. After theUnited States Constitution was drafted, it was sent to the states for ratification. During the bitter politicaldebates, an ideological war broke out between the Federalists (who were pro-ratification) and theAnti-Federalists (who were anti-ratification). The Federalists dominated in the cities through which mail flowed.As a result, Anti-Federalists communications seemed to disappear or be strangely delayed. The FederalistPostmaster General Ebenezer Hazard came under particular attack for allegedly stopping the flow ofAnti-Federalist information, especially between newspapers that were eager to reprint each other’s articles.Under the pen name Centinel , an Anti-Federalist wrote, “Attempts to prevent discussion by shackling the pressought to be a signal of alarm to freemen.” He continued, “every avenue to information is so far as possible cutoff, the usual communication between the states through the medium of the press, is in a great measuredestroyed by a new arrangement at the Post Office, scarcely a newspaper is suffered to pass by this

conveyance”.

In 1797, with the new Constitution in force, Congress enacted the first law limiting what could be mailed. It wasa modest prohibition against newspapers with wet print because they tended to damage accompanying mail.But the definition of “unmailable” soon acquired political meaning.

In Andrew Jackson’s first annual message to Congress as President (1829), he declared of the Post Office: “In apolitical point of view this Department is chiefly important as affording the means of diffusing knowledge.…Through its agency we have secured to ourselves the full enjoyment of the blessings of a free press.” By 1835,however, Jackson’s address to Congress struck a different note concerning the post office and freedom of thepress.

Antislavery dissension was contributing to the tensions that would eventually lead to civil war. Some Southernpoliticians and postmasters called for a ban of seditious literature — namely, antislavery literature — from themails. Jackson recommended that Congress pass a law to allow the prohibition. A bill attempting to do so wasdefeated in the Senate on its third reading by a vote of 19 to 25. On a federal level, antislavery material wasdeemed “mailable.” On the state level, however, various Southern legislatures passed resolutions to restrict itscirculation. Thus some Southern postmasters were placed in the position of having to break state lawsrestricting antislavery literature if they wished to obey a federal order to circulate it.

Controlling Public Morality

The censorship exercised by the post office — sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially — was not merely

aimed at quashing political dissent and supporting political authority. Often the postal muscle was flexed tocontrol public morality and to prevent social reform.

In 1874 second-class postal rates were granted to newspapers and magazines that met four requirements.They had to issue at regular intervals of no less than four times annually; they needed to state the place ofpublication; they needed to have subscribers; and they had to disseminate “information of a public character,or [be] devoted to literature, the sciences, or some special industry”.

The last requirement would be used as a basis for granting low rates to desirable mail and denying it to the



undesirable. A year before, the Comstock Act of 1873 had provided a penalty of up to ten years’ imprisonmentfor intentionally mailing obscene material. Ominously, the word “obscene” had not been defined in the Act.But Anthony Comstock, a moving force behind censorship in late nineteenth-century America, had acquiredbroad power to interpret the word for himself. He defined obscenity in such a manner as to includebirth-control information and discussion of sexual issues, such as whether forced sex within marriage was rape.

Thus the post office exercised tremendous power over the public expression of sexual morality. Birth-control

information was especially targeted by two infamous state persecutions. In 1877, Ezra Heywood, editor andpublisher of the libertarian periodical The Word , was arrested for distributing a birth-control pamphlet titled“Cupid’s Yokes.” The pamphlet advocated the abolition of marriage and contained a scathing denunciation ofComstock. Heywood was fined and received a two-year prison sentence. Under extreme public pressure,including a petition reportedly signed by 70,000 people, President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Heywood.

Undaunted, Comstock successfully arrested others who distributed the same pamphlet and continued topersecute Heywood for years thereafter. In 1890 Heywood was once again found guilty of mailing obscenematerial to subscribers and received two years at hard labor, which he served in full.

The second state prosecution came in 1887. The editor and publisher of Lucifer the Light Bearer Moses Harman

was arrested for printing a letter that identified forced sex within marriage as rape. The grand jury indictedHarman on 270 counts of obscenity under the Comstock Act; the charges were eventually discarded. Not to bethwarted, the district attorney procured a new set of indictments, 216 counts in all. Due to public controversy,however, the case was continued over until 1890, when Harman was finally sentenced to five years’imprisonment, and then released on a technicality. In January 1891 Harman was sentenced to one year’simprisonment on another obscenity charge, with another writ of error ensuing. The legal persecutioncontinued for years.

Postal harassment preceded Harman’s final arrest in 1896. Lucifer had been denied the use of second-classmail rates until the matter had been successfully appealed to the authorities in Washington. Even then, thepost office in Chicago — the city in question — confiscated and destroyed every individual issue that itindependently declared “obscene.” One issue was destroyed because it contained an article by the veneratedfeminist Alice Stone Blackwell, which had been reprinted from the conservative Woman’s Journal .

Finally, at age 75 Harman was sentenced to, and served, one year at hard labor. From Cook County jail inChicago, Harman had explained that the cause of his persecution had been Lucifer ’s mission “to help woman tobreak the chains that for ages have bound her to the rack of man-made law, spiritual, economic, industrial,social and especially sexual, believing that until woman is roused to a sense of her own responsibility on alllines of human endeavor, and especially on lines of her special field, that of reproduction of the race, there willbe little if any real advancement toward a higher and truer civilization.” It was in reference to Harman’simprisonment under the U.S. postal laws that the British playwright George Bernard Shaw coined the term“Comstockery”.

The post office also routinely used repressive tactics against socialist and labor periodicals in the latenineteenth and early twentieth century to control the flow of politically radical opinions and movements. SuchComstockery continued past World War II as a policy of the Cold War. On October 11, 1962, for example, theCunningham Amendment — designed to restrict the circulation of communist literature that originated in aforeign country — became law. On a less official basis, the Post Office Department began to keep a list ofeveryone who received the questionable mail. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that the CunninghamAmendment was unconstitutional because it limited the First Amendment rights of the addressees.



Conclusion

Over and over, the USPS has collided with the First Amendment. Over and over, civil libertarians havedemanded to know whether freedom of speech extends to privately written words in letters as well as topublic written words in newspapers. And if not, why not? Arguably, the USPS also violates the FourthAmendment, which guarantees the right of people to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. Thepostal prerogative to open and examine letters raises this question. But if the USPS did not have the privileges

of a legal monopoly, then it could not enforce policies that violated the rights of its customers.

Those who argue that the worst sins of the USPS are its inefficiency and high cost are overlooking thepossibility that an efficient and cheap service is not its primary function. The USPS’s primary political purpose isto control the flow of information through defining what is “unmailable.” During periods of war, that purposeemerges openly. For example, “un-American political doctrines” were declared unmailable during World War I.Broadly defined “subversive propaganda” received similar treatment during World War II. Enforcing thoseprohibitions required widespread interception, monitoring, and censorship of private correspondence. Itrequired monopoly.

The question posed by Spooner over a century and a half ago remains unanswered: from which passage of the

Constitution can Congress claim this right for the USPS?



The Return of Debtors’ Prison

A key political freedom upon which America has prided itself is the right of all to due process. This right refers tothe guarantees or protections that individuals enjoy against being falsely or abusively prosecuted by the judicialsystem. The right to face your accuser, the presumption of innocence, a ban on double jeopardy … these arecommonly cited examples of due process. Yet due process has been under vicious and persistent attack from

various directions … and for years now. The following case illustrates the precarious and disappearing nature ofthe American right known as due process. The imprisonment examined is for civil contempt, which is currentlyone of the most common charges brought against average people. It covers those who do not pay child supportor court-ordered alimony.

No one knows how many people — almost all of them men — are being held indefinitely on contempt of civilcourt charges for which they do not have the due process protections offered to those accused of criminaloffenses. They have no right to a trial, an attorney, an appeal … in short, they have no due process. Most ofthese imprisonments are for non-compliance with court-ordered child support or alimony. It does not matter ifthe man is unable to comply due to poverty — e.g. from losing his job; he can be imprisoned anyway until he“pays up”.

In response to the following article I received an email from a woman whose husband was in jail for back childsupport which she said he did not owe. She stated, “If my husband had raped a woman he would be entitled toa trial by an impartial jury. He does not enjoy that right as a debtor. If my husband had sold drugs to children hewould be entitled to legal representation. He does not enjoy that right as a debtor. If my husband had molesteda child, he would be subject to no more than a maximum sentence allowed by the law. As a debtor he can beheld for the rest of his life”.

In 2009, former corporate lawyer H. Beatty Chadwick was freed from a Pennsylvania county jail, in which hespent over 14 years even though he had never been arrested, criminally accused, or tried. Chadwick wasimprisoned on contempt-of-court charges that sprang from a contentious divorce. His case dramatizes a

continuing debate over the use and misuse of civil-contempt imprisonment.

Many people view contempt of civil court as an uncommon and relatively trivial sanction that is flexed only toenforce court orders or respect for the court. Whenever the sanction is noticed by the public, it is usually inconnection with high-profile cases — for example, a journalist refuses to reveal his source and is imprisoneduntil he relents or until it becomes clear that further imprisonment will not compel compliance.

In reality civil contempt imprisonment is commonplace and it devastates lives. Arguably, the most prevalentform of civil imprisonment is for nonpayment of child support. When a “deadbeat” parent is jailed fornonpayment by a family-court judge, the actual charge is contempt of civil court. That is, the deadbeat parenthas disobeyed a court order to pay up. How many so-called deadbeats are imprisoned each year is unknown

because family courts are not required to maintain such records and they rarely do so. This means thatfamily-court judges act with less transparency and less accountability than those in other venues. Moreover,there is no national database of the deadbeat parents who are incarcerated each year. In short, there is anamazing lack of data on such imprisonment, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds ofthousands.

Dissecting Contempt of Court

What is contempt of court? The United States has two basic types of contempt: criminal and civil.



Contempt of court has been called the “Proteus” of the legal system because Proteus was the Greek sea godwho could change his shape at will. In short, contempt of court can assume many forms due to three factors:the judge is often the sole evaluator of when contempt has occurred; federal law differs from state laws, whichoften differ from each other; and criminal contempt is remedied differently from its civil parallel.

Nevertheless, all contempt charges share certain characteristics. In its most basic form, contempt of court is aruling through which a judge sanctions a deliberate act or omission to act that he or she considers to be

disobedient, obstructive, or disrespectful to the court. The ruling is the sternest remedy a judge can impose on“bad behavior,” such as refusing to obey a court order or uttering obscenities in court. Punishment can beimposed on anyone within the court, including attorneys, parties to a lawsuit or criminal action, witnesses, andspectators.

The focus here is upon civil contempt at the state level; criminal contempt is analyzed only by way of contrast.At least in theory, a key difference between the two is that criminal charges are more serious than civil onesand more often involve the loss of liberty. Thus criminal defendants have protections of due process that civildefendants do not enjoy. In an dramatically increasing number of cases, however, civil contempt involvesimprisonment, and the offender or contemnor has no legal protection or recourse except, of course, agreeingto comply.

What are some of the other key differences between civil and criminal contempt?

In both, contempt can be either direct or indirect. Direct contempt is committed in the presence of a presiding judge; for example, interrupting the judge. Indirect contempt is committed outside the presence of thepresiding judge, for example, neglecting to pay court-ordered child support.

In civil court, once the direct contemnor has been advised of the contempt, a fine and/or imprisonment may beimposed immediately. The imprisonment is generally for a few days but it can span months; in the case ofChadwick, it spanned 14 years. The direct contemnor has no legal right to an attorney, to a trial or to any otherdefense. The judge’s ruling cannot be appealed. Generally speaking, in indirect civil contempt, the contemnor isentitled to receive notice and to have a hearing at which he can present evidence and rebuttal. Then, at thesole discretion of the judge, the contemnor may be imprisoned until compliance is compelled. Withnoncompliant contemnors, imprisonment usually ends when the judge concludes that continuation isineffective. But, if the judge does not reach that conclusion, it is possible for the imprisonment to be indefinite.

By contrast, in direct or indirect criminal contempt, the contemnor retains the rights of due process. Thesentence, which is meant to punish rather than to compel compliance, is of a set length. Thus, in itsenforcement, a civil-contempt charge can be far more serious than a criminal one.

The Strange Case of H. Beatty Chadwick

Again consider H. Beatty Chadwick’s 14 years of imprisonment. The facts of his case are straightforward. In

1977 Chadwick married Barbara Jean Crowther. In 1992, she filed for divorce. In 1994 Barbara Chadwickinformed the court her husband had wired $2.5 million out of the country. The judge ordered him to retrievethe money and place it in a court-controlled account until the divorce was settled. Chadwick claimed that mostof the money had been lost in a foreign business deal gone bad; however, a small fraction of the moneyshowed up in a U.S. bank under his name, and the court did not believe his story. In April 1995 Chadwick wassentenced to imprisonment until the money was produced.

Traditionally, a contempt-of-court sentence continues only as long as there is a reasonable expectation ofcoercing compliance. Otherwise, the imprisonment becomes a punishment, which is a criminal sanction and



beyond the authority of civil courts. A 1974 New Jersey Supreme Court case, Catena v. Seidl , is often citedregarding this point in civil contempt. “It is abhorrent to our concept of personal freedom that the process ofcivil contempt can be used to jail a person indefinitely, possibly for life, even though he or she refuses tocomply with the court’s order.… [C]ontinued imprisonment may reach a point where it becomes morepunitive than coercive and thereby defeats the purpose of the commitment”.

In 2002 U.S. District Court Judge Norma Shapiro ordered Chadwick’s release on the grounds that continued

imprisonment would not compel compliance. That same year, then-Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals JudgeSamuel Alito overturned Shapiro. He said, “Because the state courts have repeatedly found that Mr. Chadwickhas the present ability to comply with the July 1994 state court order, we cannot disturb the state courts’decision that there is no federal constitutional bar to Mr. Chadwick’s indefinite confinement for civil contemptso long as he retains the ability to comply with the order requiring him to pay over the money at issue”.

Thus Alito, now a U.S. Supreme Court justice, asserted the right of a civil court to hold a contemnor in prison inperpetuity with no right of appeal. For Alito, the only question was whether the contemnor had the ability tocomply, not whether he was willing to do so.

In Chadwick’s case, his ability to comply is actually not clear. In 2003 former Pennsylvania Judge A. Leo Sereni

oversaw an 18-month investigation in which two accounting firms attempted to track down Chadwick’s money.No trace was found beyond what had been identified a decade before. Sereni recommended Chadwick’srelease, stating, “My God — if he had stolen $2 million, he would have been out a couple of years ago.”(Apparently, the state maximum for stealing $2 million is, or was, a seven-year term.) Chadwick’s lawyer addedthe humanitarian concern that his elderly client was suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and required“outside” medical attention.

Nevertheless, in February 2006, the presiding court held that Sereni had “overstepped his bounds” and thatChadwick’s incarceration should continue.

Aberration or Warning Bell?

Is the Chadwick case an aberration that has slipped through the cracks of an otherwise reasonable system? Oris it an extreme example of a commonplace occurrence that suggests family courts are out of control in the useof contempt imprisonment?

The “legal crack” theory confronts a problem. According to the Chicago Tribune, the case has produced “adozen pleas to the county courts, nine to state appeals courts, nine to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, six tothe nearby federal court, four to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and two to the U.S. Supreme Court.” For aninjustice to withstand sustained efforts to remedy it, the “crack” has to be both massive and widespread. Amere aberration should be easier to correct, and higher courts should not affirm it over and over again.

Yet if the Chadwick case points to widespread abuse, how should civil contempt be reformed? Or, more

fundamentally, should the sanction be abandoned entirely?

Abandoning civil contempt is not an absurd idea. After all, that specific power derives from British common law. Civil law — which is also known as Continental or Romano-Germanic law — is as widespread as commonlaw; for example, it is the basis of French Civil Law and the Swiss Civil Code. The fundamental differencebetween the two systems is that common law derives rules or precedents from specific cases; it evolvesprinciples on the basis of rulings. Civil law starts with rules and applies them to specific cases.

For the purposes of this article, however, the relevant difference is that most countries with Continental law do



not recognize civil imprisonment for contempt. In their book The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to theLegal Systems of Western Europe and Latin America, legal scholars John Merryman and Rogelio Perez-Perdomowrote,

Another fundamental difference between the civil law and common law traditions occurs inenforcement proceedings. Civil law jurisdictions have nothing comparable to the common law notionof civil contempt of court.… [I]n the common law a person can be compelled to act or to refrain from

acting by the threat of imprisonment or fine for contempt of court — that is, for refusing to obey acourt order addressed to him or her as a person.… The civil law, by way of contrast, knows no civilcontempt of court and tends to operate solely in rem. This means that regardless of the type of claimone has against another person, the only way one can collect the claim is by obtaining a money judgment.

Much of the world, including western Europe, functions without the common-law tradition of civilimprisonment. Thus it is not clear that eliminating the practice would harm North American jurisprudence or justice in any manner. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that eliminating the imprisonment wouldimprove justice in North America.

First and foremost, there is a deep human cost to civil contempt imprisonments. But this misery is the mostobvious human cost. Critics of civil contempt argue that such imprisonment is also a violation of theconstitutional rights that should apply not merely to criminal matters but also to civil ones — at least,constitutional rights should apply if the punishment involves the deprivation of liberty. These critics referprimarily to the due process rights protected by the Sixth Amendment but also to those guaranteed by the Fifthand Fourteenth Amendments.

The Sixth Amendment states, “In all criminal prosecution, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy andpublic trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed … and tohave the assistance of counsel.” Although civil contempt is not a criminal prosecution, the line between thetwo blurs when imprisonment is involved and when the penalty is imposed as a punishment rather than as aremedy.

The Fifth Amendment states, “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury … nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be awitness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shallprivate property be taken for public use without just compensation.” One of the traditional measures ofwhether a crime is “infamous” is the severity of punishment that may be imposed for its violation; thepunishment of indefinite imprisonment would seem to make civil contempt an “infamous crime”.

The relevant section of the Fourteenth Amendment reads, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shallabridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person oflife, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal

protection of the laws.” Again, imprisonment seems to require the observation of due process.

In theory a judge imposes contempt charges as a last resort and in a manner that respects rights. But when a judge (or any human being) is given absolute and virtually unaccountable power over another, frequent abuseis the predictable result. This is especially true when an act of contempt directly challenges a judge’s authorityor constitutes an insult. In short, the judge becomes the injured party; this fact alone should disqualify him orher from rendering a decision on the alleged injury. As Justice Hugo Black stated, “When the responsibilities oflawmaker, prosecutor, judge, jury and disciplinarian are thrust upon a judge he is obviously incapable ofholding the scales of justice perfectly fair and true and reflecting impartially on the guilt or innocence of the



accused. He truly becomes the judge of his own cause”.

Political Abuse of Process

It is not merely a judge who can abuse contempt of court charges; it is also politicians. A famous example ofcontempt of court being used for political advantage is the 1895 imprisonment of labor leader Eugene V. Debs.Debs was arrested both for conspiracy and for contempt of court following his prominent role in the Pullman

Strike, during which the American Railway Union refused to handle Pullman railroad cars or any cars attachedto them, including those that were carrying U.S. mail. The federal government obtained an injunction againstthe strike, and the Army was sent in to enforce it. On the charge of conspiracy, Debs had a jury trial in whichfamed civil rights attorney Clarence Darrow defended him; the case was dropped mid-trial. On the charge ofcontempt, the judge in his sole authority sentenced Debs to six months in prison. Thus the difference in dueprocess rights in criminal and civil matters was dramatically illustrated.

The danger of contempt-of-court charges being abused rises whenever the case being decided is controversialand open to political pressure.

The Good of Society

Can the good of society be balanced against the cost and danger of contempt of court to individuals?

In civil contempt the “good” is usually defined as “paying up” — for example, child support. But it is difficult tounderstand what “good” is accomplished by imprisoning nonviolent parents who are behind in payments.Although data on the number of “deadbeat” prisoners is vague and often anecdotal, “deadbeat” dads certainlyconstitute the majority of civil-contempt imprisonments. Often the stated goal is to pry loose hidden moneyfrom the parent. But there is no statistical proof or studies to indicate that imprisonment motivates a parentwho can pay up to do so. Moreover, society tracks wealth through bank accounts, tax returns, pay stubs, andmyriad paper trails; if wealth is not discoverable then surely there should be a presumption that it doesn’texist. The accused should not be guilty until proven innocent.

If “deadbeats” are being punished for their poverty, then America has reinstated debtors’ prisons and done sowith no due process for those victimized. A debtors’ prison is one that houses those who are unable to pay adebt. In 1833 the United States eliminated such institutions at the federal level. Most states followed suit,refusing to impose the criminal penalty of imprisonment on insolvent debtors. Currently, the typical wordingabout debtors’ prisons within state constitutions is, “No person shall be imprisoned for debt in any civil action,or mesne or final process, unless in cases of fraud.” It is still possible, however, to be incarcerated fornonfraudulent debts such as nonpayment of alimony or child support.

Imprisonment for civil contempt is an unnecessary and dangerous exception to the due process to which everyindividual is entitled both Constitutionally and by natural right. It also involves a confusing, inconstant maze oflaws that collapse the traditional distinction between criminal and civil courts. As Justice Black observed, “It

would be no overstatement … to say that the offense with the most ill-defined and elastic contours in our lawis now punished by the harshest procedures known to that law”.

Civil-contempt imprisonment is a legal aberration that imposes an artificial and arbitrary respect for courtsupon non-violent people. It is far from a benevolent or rarely flexed power. Unless the law is changed oreliminated, the Chadwicks of America will multiply. People will be placed in jail without ever being arrested orheard by a jury; tens of thousands — and, arguably, hundreds of thousands — of deadbeat parents ordeadbeat ex-spouses will be sent to the modern equivalent of debtors’ prison.



The power of a judge to imprison without due process or recourse should be eliminated.



Decriminalize the Average American!

As with the suspension of due process within the courts, the relationship between average Americans and the police and/or penal system has dramatically changed. And not for the better. Since 9/11, there has been a seachange in the institutions of America, including the militarization of law enforcement at all levels. The averageindividual is now treated as a criminal suspect in airports, at the entrance of public buildings, in the

ever-increasing requirement for ID, and during the exercise of so-called guaranteed rights such as peacefulassembly and bearing arms. Law enforcement now views the public as enemy combatants.

The goal of a police state is not the free flow of civil society but the polar opposite: social control. The goal of a police state is to preserve and augment its own political power. Because civil society considers government tobe its servant rather than a master, civil society constitutes a direct threat to the police state. Thus, the two areat war with each other and cannot co-exist. This characteristic distinguishes the police state from limitedgovernment: it wages war upon civil society, upon peaceful expression and behavior. In doing so, it wages waron individuals.

Today laws restrict almost every aspect of everyday life and have made the average American into a criminal,whether he knows it or not. America is disappearing day by day. I fervently hope that its disappearance is still

on the horizon and not already in the past, because if it is yet to come, those of us who notice may still be ableto reclaim a nation that was once as free as Nazi Germany once was cultured.

If you reside in America and it is dinnertime, you have almost certainly broken the law. In his book ThreeFelonies a Day , civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate estimates that the average person unknowingly breaksat least three federal criminal laws every day. This toll does not count an avalanche of other laws — forexample misdemeanors or civil violations such as disobeying a civil contempt order — all of which confrontaverage people at every turn.

An article in the Economist (July 22, 2010) entitled “Too many laws, too many prisoners” states,

Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on paroleor probation are included, one adult in 31 is under “correctional” supervision. As a proportion of itstotal population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more thanGermany and 12 times more than Japan.

By contrast, in 1970, less than one in 400 Americans was incarcerated. Why has the prison population morethan quadrupled over a few decades? Why have average people become daily felons who are more vulnerableto arrest in America than at any other time?

There is a simple answer but no single explanation as to how the situation arose or why it continues to

accelerate out of control. The answer: a constant flood of new and broadly interpreted laws are criminalizingentire categories of daily life while, at the same time, the standards required for arrest and conviction havebeen severely diluted. The result is that far too many people are arrested and imprisoned for acts that shouldnot be viewed as criminal at all or should receive minimal punishment, such as fines.

In some cases, the laws being violated are so obscure, vague, or complicated that even the police are ignorantof them. In other cases, outright innocence is not sufficient to escape the brutality of detention.



Some Sample Cases

Note: the following examples illustrate the wide range of criminalization that is occurring and so theircircumstances differ significantly. Nevertheless, the cases share certain factors: the criminalization of harmless,trivial acts; the enforcement of unreasonable rules; the severity with which any noncompliance is punished;and the indifference of authorities to the human devastation wrought by law.

Case Number One: In 2005, while a passenger in his family car, Anthony W. Florence was mistakenly arrestedfor a bench warrant on traffic tickets he had already satisfied; the proof of payment he carried was to no avail.During seven days in jail, Florence was strip-searched twice, even though the guards admitted they had noreasonable suspicion of contraband. He was otherwise deprived of rights; for example, guards watched himshower and forced him to undergo a routine delousing.

Although Florence was eventually released, the attempt to get justice has taken him years. On October 12,2011, the United States Supreme Court was scheduled to hear Florence v. Burlington, et al., in which thequestion is “whether the Fourth Amendment permits a jail to conduct a suspicionless strip search of everyindividual arrested for any minor offense no matter what the circumstances”.

According to his lawsuit, Florence is joined by people who were similarly treated after being arrested and jailedfor such crimes as “driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal, and riding a bicycle without anaudible bell”.

Case Number Two: In 2003, “three pickup trucks” with “six armed police in flak jackets” pulled up to66-year-old George Norris’s house in Texas.

Norris was detained for four hours while they ransacked his home and confiscated 37 boxes of possessionswithout offering a warrant or an explanation. In March 2004, Norris was indicted under the Convention onInternational Trade in Endangered Species for “smuggling” the orchids he had ordered and paid for to run aside business. Norris was thrown into the same cell as a suspected murder and two suspected drug dealers.

The Economist reported,

Prosecutors described Mr. Norris as the “kingpin” of an international smuggling ring. He wasdumbfounded: his annual profits were never more than about $20,000. When prosecutors suggestedthat he should inform on other smugglers in return for a lighter sentence, he refused, insisting he knewnothing beyond hearsay. He pleaded innocent. But an undercover federal agent had ordered someorchids from him, a few of which arrived without the correct papers. For this, he was charged withmaking a false statement to a government official, a federal crime punishable by up to five years inprison. Since he had communicated with his suppliers, he was charged with conspiracy, which alsocarries a potential five-year term.

Unable to pay legal bills, Norris pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 17 months. For bringing prescription pillsinto prison, he was thrown into solitary confinement for 71 days. But “[t]he prison was so crowded … that evenin solitary he had two roommates”.

Case Number Three: In 2000, a poor kid from foster care named T.J. Hill thought he had found a path to successwhen he received a wrestling scholarship to Cal State Fullerton. School did not work out, and he was arrestedin 2006 for possession of psilocybin (mushrooms). He was put on five years’ probation with a suspendedimposition of sentence. In other words, if he completed his probation successfully, he would not have acriminal record.



In November 2008, he left the state and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Although the original charge wasminor and no further illegal activity occurred, T.J. was jailed on $100,000 bail to prevent flight risk. His familyhas spent thousands on legal fees. T.J. is now well known for his volunteer work with children, and even policeofficers are hoping T.J. escapes more jail time. As one of them said, “He’s a good guy. He’s changed lives.”Whether he will be allowed to continue doing so or will become dehumanized through a senseless, brutalimprisonment waits to be seen.

Such stories abound with most of them sharing characteristics with the foregoing three. For example, thecriminal activity being punished is usually trivial and victimless — that is, it violates no one’s rights. The crimesare mala prohibita rather than mala in se. The first refers to crimes that exist only because rules were passedto control people’s nonviolent behavior, like the buying of orchids; the second refers to crimes that existbecause the acts are intrinsically wrong, like rape.

Another shared characteristic: the punishments are extreme and any attempt to correct them is usuallyruinously expensive in terms of time and money. Nevertheless, the ultimate punishment may be the policerecord that follows such “criminals” for life, shutting off worlds of opportunity that most people take forgranted.

How many Americans are different from Florence, with his paid-up-but-still-punished traffic tickets? Or fromNorris, who accidentally purchased a harmless but illegal flower? Or from T.J., who made a mistake by breakinga malum prohibitum law against drugs?

If something similar happens to your children, do you want their lives to be destroyed by clerical error, anunderstandable ignorance of a complex law, or by a youthful mistake? With every passing law, that prospectbecomes more probable.

What Path to Justice?

Even thinking about how to shift a government system toward freedom or justice can be exhausting. The penalsystem is particularly daunting because its raw brutality seems to leave no room for reason. Fortunately, thebest approach may be to address the penal system’s precursors: the legislatures that create laws, along withthe police officers and the court system that impose them. Without fundamental change at the early stages,effective change at the final stage of imprisonment is unlikely.

Libertarianism has evolved sophisticated theories of what constitutes a proper justice system and how toimplement it. One of the most popular theories is based on restitution, rather than retribution or punishment.Restitution is the legal system in which a person “makes good” on a harm or wrong done to another individual,and does so directly; if you steal $100, then you pay back $100 and reasonable damages directly to the victimof your theft. You do not pay a debt to society or to the state by going to prison. You do not undergo“punishment” other than the damages assessed. You make your victim “whole” and somewhat more for histrouble and aggravation.

Restitution is inherently self-limiting in how much the perpetrator is processed by the system. Beyond what isnecessary to make sure the harm or wrong is repaired, there is no need for a perpetrator to relinquish any ofhis rights. A thief need not be caged to pay back $100 plus damages; all he needs to do is pay it back. There isno need for a vast prison industry nor for the degradation of society that comes with creating criminals.

To accomplish a justice system based on restitution, legal scholar Randy Barnett has advocated sweeping awaythe entire criminal justice system. In its place, he proposes a broadened civil-court system that adjudicates civilliabilities and damages. On the other hand, many libertarians object to the pure restitution model; for example,



they claim restitution cannot adequately redress crimes like murder. Whatever the merits of such objections,however, it is clear that restitution can address the great majority of genuine harms and wrongs.

Small Steps toward Justice

Fortunately, much smaller steps than an outright revolution in the court system can offer relief to the manypeople who are now suffering from the travesty of America’s legal and penal systems. These steps include

• A sunset provision attached to all new or amended laws. This clause provides an expiration date for alaw unless action is taken to renew it. Today most laws are in effect indefinitely.

• The elimination of civil-contempt imprisonments, which most commonly occur in family courts. That is,men who are unable to pay court-ordered spousal or child support can be indefinitely imprisoned for“contempt” without a trial or appeal process. This converts the penal system into a debtor’s prison.

• The elimination of a double standard in the law for those who are involved in law enforcement. Forexample, the elimination of personal immunity for the willful wrongdoing of police officers on duty andfor district attorneys who pursue blatantly flimsy cases. Such immunity skews incentives in favor of

brutality and overly aggressive prosecution.

• Reinstatement of the mens rea safeguard. Mens rea means that if there was no “guilty mind” when anact occurred then there was no crime committed even though civil liabilities may well exist. Forexample, if a man bumps into another car without noticing it, he should not be charged with leavingthe scene of an accident. He is civilly liable for damages but he is not criminally liable. A concertedattack on mens rea is underway so that people are held criminally guilty despite their non-criminalintent.

• Establishment of an “ignorance-of-the-law” defense. This differs from mens rea. For example, if a manknows he hit a car and leaves the scene, an “ignorance” defense would be “I didn’t know doing so was

illegal.” His defense would be invalid because everyone in our society is reasonably presumed to knowthat damaging property is wrong. But there are now myriad laws of which reasonable people areignorant, and it is currently impossible for anyone — including the police — to know the content ofevery law. Moreover, the principle of “ignorance of the law is no excuse” comes from 17th-centuryphilosopher Thomas Hobbes who addressed willful ignorance of laws that were either well-known or amatter of common sense. Thus the claim “I didn’t know rape was wrong” is invalid whereas “I didn’tknow buying an orchid was wrong” would be valid even to Hobbes.

• The elimination of criminal charges for all nonviolent “wrongdoing” toward law-enforcement agents.Such charges currently include obstruction of justice, and peacefully resisting arrest. Obstruction of justice often refers to nothing more than asking an officer questions.

•

The decriminalization of all drugs.

• A return to the traditional rules of statutory interpretation by which criminal statutes are narrowlyconstrued.

The list could be much longer. But the implementation of any one of the foregoing simple protections of justicecould save misery or ruination for many thousands of average Americans.



Conclusion

Unfortunately, legislators have a strong incentive to call constantly for more laws and stricter enforcement.Until a large enough voter or other protest base has felt the bite of bad law and demand change, politicians willcontinue to be rewarded for a “tough on crime” call. Moreover, hordes of unionized people in the legal andpenal systems now have well-paid jobs with great benefits. If 90 percent of arrests and imprisonments wereeliminated, then 90 percent of those jobs might disappear. Rolling back the police state America is becoming

will be difficult work … but what is the alternative?



War, the External Enemy

In analyzing war, it is useful to divide the issue into two sharp parts: the conflict with an external enemy; and,the conflict with those who internally dissent — for example, by resisting a draft. The most obvious enemy is theexternal one, whether it consists of another nation or of an idea like terrorism. But those who believe in thenon-initiation of force are immediately confronted by political and moral quandaries.

The so-called libertarian defense of war reduces to the following argument: because an individual has a right touse deadly force in self-defense, a state (which can be defined as a collection of individuals) has the collectiveright to defend itself through war. Only one of the things wrong with this argument is that it equates states ornations with individuals as though a nation’s alleged “rights” are identical to those possessed by an individual.

Pro-war “libertarians” embrace a limited government that supposedly embodies a form of individual rights. Ifthis is true, then a truly minimal government could not launch or sustain war. War requires the ability tocommand goods and services through procedures like taxation. If a state or nation has identical (and no more)rights than an individual, then the demand for goods and services cannot be justified and war cannot be waged.Pro-war libertarians can’t have it both ways. If nations have the same rights as individuals, if war is justified onthe basis of an individual’s right to self-defense, then the resources upon which war rests must also be

eschewed on the basis of an individual’s right to retain their own property.

Can a principled libertarian go to war? Restating this question: Is a libertarian just war possible?

To answer this question requires a definition of war itself. According to the traditional definition, war involvesthe declaration of hostilities by one state against another, in which the state commits the people and resourcesunder its jurisdiction to hostilities against the opponent’s people and resources. When two individuals or smallgroups fight, it is called a brawl or a feud, not a war. Thus, war seems inextricably entangled with the conceptof nation-states that command, to varying degrees, the wealth, property, and bodies of those within theirborders. Historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel correctly describes war as a situation in which each state has

declared hostilities on three fronts (at least): against the combatant state; against the innocent people withinthe combatant state; and against its own dissenting citizens.

If the preceding definition and description of war apply, then it is difficult to imagine a libertarian just war.

Nevertheless, in theory, it is possible to imagine a war without nation-states in the same manner libertarianshypothesize about legal and court systems without government. If the laws and courts can be divorced fromthe context of a state, then perhaps warfare can be as well. Even the quintessential isolationist MurrayRothbard once stated, “if you didn’t have State war, if States were eliminated or if you are only talking aboutprivate marauders versus private defenders, then the situation completely changes.” Nor is it difficult toenvision libertarians killing people en masse under certain circumstances. Libertarianism embraces a right of

self-defense that allows the killing of an aggressor who uses lethal force. Nothing within libertarianismprecludes the possibility of people assigning this right to a collective entity who could exercise self-defense ontheir behalf. As long as every individual a private defense agency claims to represent has voluntarily assignedhis right of self-defense to it, then the agency is justified in acting against an invader. Moreover, if the agencyacts only against invading individuals — that is, the actual aggressors — all objections that revolved aroundinnocent civilians are avoided. If the aggressors attack in large numbers, then killing them in large numbers ispolitically and morally justified.

Thus, at least in theory, libertarianism seems to accept the possibility of a just war. (Of course, this does not



necessarily justify any war that has ever occurred in human history, but it opens up discussion and allows forthe remote possibility of a future just war.) But what would a libertarian war look like?

The idea of a “just war” is well-trodden ground for some Christian theorists who share the libertarian refusal tospill innocent blood. Their presentations of just war provide an excellent starting point for analysis. In his bookWar and Conscience, the minister Allen Isbell asks,

When and how may a State legitimately engage in a war? This has been a prime topic of discussion inChristian ethics for sixteen centuries. From this continuing conversation within Christendom, a doctrineof justifiable war has evolved.

Isbell goes on to list eight Christian requirements for a just war: it must be the last resort; you must be on theside that is justified in fighting; it must have adequate cause; it must have a legitimate aim; the war must bewaged with a proper spirit; it must be waged by a proper authority; the execution must be just; and it mustpromise beneficial victory.

What would be the equivalent libertarian requirements for a just war? At minimum, they would include thefollowing:

• The war must have a just origin.

The initiation of force is the only circumstance that justifies the use of violence as an act ofself-defense. If the aggression against you is immediate — for example, you are being raped — then animmediate and direct response of violence is appropriate. If the violence against you is not immediate— for example, you discover that someone stole your wallet yesterday — then your act of self-defenseconsists of going through a legal process to gain redress. If there is a direct assault by an invading force,no libertarian could object to repelling it. But many if not most causes of war are akin to the crimes forwhich you should seek legal remedy: broken treaties, disputed territory, a desire for resources, etc.Many if not most causes leading to war require time and information in order to even know if they are

causes rather than excuses.

• The war must be declared by a proper authority, and against a proper enemy.

In libertarianism, there are two possible authorities. The individual(s) against whom the violence isbeing initiated and anyone who has been designated as an agent by the individual(s) to defend them.The definition of “proper enemy” is equally restricted. Individuals or an agency can act only againstthose who are committing the aggression and against no others. Moreover, the agency must conductthe war in such a manner as to stay within the parameters of the self-defense rights assigned to it. Itcannot act with more or greater violence than the assigning individuals are justified in committing.Moreover, as with other assignments of rights like powers of attorney, the assignee can cancel thearrangement and opt out.

• Those who do not assign their rights to an agency must be allowed to remain neutral or otherwiseoutside of the conflict.

Nonassignees must be absolutely free to be neutral.

• The rights of innocent “others” must be respected.

This is “the civilian problem,” which Rothbard expressed well:



I don’t see why civilians have to be injured at all. After all, look at private crime now: supposesomebody beats somebody over the head and steals his pocketbook and runs down the street.The police right now do not spray machine-gun fire on the entire crowd in order to shoot downthe criminal. The principle is that no innocent person can get killed, and if the criminal escapes,it’s tough luck, because the most important principle for the libertarian and among thedomestic police is not to use force against noncriminals.

A just war would have to be conducted in a manner akin to the 19th-century ones in which civilians picnickedbeside battlefields because the military on both sides respected the distinction between civilians andcombatants. Today, “respect” for civilians usually means that the military behaves in such a way as to reducecivilian casualties. That way, the “collateral damage” in terms of innocent bodies can be called “unintended.”But the unintended deaths of civilians is unacceptable. “Unintended” does not mean unpredictable orunforeseeable. If an action will predictably lead to the death or of innocents, then it cannot be justified withinthe framework of libertarianism.

At this point, some libertarians might shift the ground of argument on “the civilian problem” from principle toutilitarianism. If an enemy is willing to use indiscriminate weaponry, they might argue, we must respond in kindor be devastated.

I make no comment here on whether this argument is true nor do I offer a critique of its flaws. Instead, Istrongly suggest that those who believe the argument to be true should abandon the label “libertarian.”Libertarianism is the political system organized around the principle of non-aggression, and you cannot run acost-benefit analysis as a way to justify killing innocent people without stepping outside of libertarianism. Theboundaries of its theory are not flexible enough to embrace the murder of innocents as collateral damage.

Many would consider the foregoing to be an ivory-tower position. They argue that when your life isthreatened, you have a right to respond defensively, even if the response entails firing into a crowded streetand killing innocent pedestrians; the responsibility for their deaths lies with the aggressor, not with you.

If this argument is true, an interesting question of math arises. How many bystanders are you justified inmurdering in order to eliminate someone trying to kill you? By what standard do you calculate that number? Asfew as necessary? But what if the number comes to 10,000? What if I know the aspiring assassin is in aparticular movie theater and the only way to be sure to kill him is to blow the place up? Or, perhaps, I know heis somewhere in Chicago; am I justified in nuking the city? And if not, why not? Once I abandon the principle ofnot harming innocents, we are talking about math and utility, not ethics. Presumably, everyone would valuetheir own lives so much as to be willing to drive the casualty figures rather high.

Of course, every innocent person whose life is endangered by your act of “self-defense” would also have a rightto kill you for aggressing against them. By this logic, the residents of Chicago would have a right topre-emptively bomb your home city. And, so, the justified murdering of innocents could spread like a virus untilthe world resembled a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all.

To conclude: A libertarian just war would have to be declared in response to an act of aggression that could notbe remedied by a lesser level of defensive violence. It would have to be declared by an agency on behalf ofpeople who had assigned their rights of self defense. The war could be declared only on behalf of thoseassignees. Dissenters would have to be left in peace to defend themselves or not. The declaration of war wouldbe against the individuals responsible for an attack but not against the “enemy” civilian population. And,finally, the war would have to be conducted with strategies and weaponry that could not foreseeably involveinjuring or killing innocents.



Given these requirements, a libertarian just war is unimaginable.



War, the Internal Enemy

A State at war devastates its own population in at least two ways: it destroys freedom and prosperity bycollapsing the division between the public and private sector; and, it engages in open combat againstindividuals who oppose its policies, even verbally. Thus the internal enemies of a warring state are (1) the private sector, or society, which functions outside the bounds of the State, and (2) those individuals who speak

or act against official policy. Society is usually controlled through massive regulation and monitoring thatestablishes a de facto state control over and usurpation of the private sector. Dissenting individuals are usuallycontrolled by intimidation or outright brutality such as arrest.

The First Internal Enemy: Society

“War is the health of the State.” The famous seven words appeared in an unfinished manuscript written duringWorld War I by the progressive essayist Randolph Silliman Bourne (1886-1918). The sentence contains acomplexity of meaning that is often overlooked. For one, it refers to the destruction of the moral, political andeconomic structure of a free society through the state’s usurpation of the private sector, including itsintellectuals.

In times of peace, Bourne believed the majority of people pursued their own interests according to their ownvalues. They worked and cooperated with each other, married and raised children without paying muchattention to the state. Instead, they dealt with the government. Bourne defined government (as opposed tothe State) as

a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is theidea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men.

Government was the practical day-to-day “offices and functions” of a state such as the post office or the publicschool system, with which people came into contact as they simply pursued life. The civil servants whose jobs

make government function — for example, post office workers — had no sense of sanctity about them. Indeed,Bourne described them as “common and unsanctified men.” He believed this was a salutary situation and areflection of America’s happy egalitarianism.

Meanwhile, the average person rarely dealt with the State — that is, with the public institutions that were sanctified such as the Supreme Court. These were the institutions and agencies that expressed and embodiedthe “enduring” state, such as Congress. Thus in times of peace in a relatively free society, Bourne believed “thesense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men” who, nevertheless, deal with government inacquiring driver’s licenses, etc.

In other words, the state is more of a concept than a physical reality. In the United States, it is the political

structure established after the American Revolution that is embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Itclaims a chain of legitimacy that dates back to President George Washington. While governments constantlycome and go through elections, the state remains essentially the same, and tends to grow only stronger withtime. It is the state rather than government that inspires emotions such as patriotism; it is a Senator ratherthan a postman who inspires awe. And it is to the concept of the American state — not to any particulargovernment, Republican or Democratic — to which people pledge allegiance with hands placed over theirhearts.

Meanwhile, “society” functions differently from either the state or government. By society, Bourne refers tothe collection of factors that constitute American life. They include characteristic attitudes, business practices,



common lore and literature, the price of bread, religious convictions, a shared history, and the prevailingcultural norms. A specifically American society is composed of the nonpolitical factors that make Americadifferent from China or France. Society consists of the private sector. In times of peace, Bourne believed mostpeople identified far more closely with society than they did with either government or the State. Most peopledefined themselves in relationship to family, a community, a religion, or ethnic heritage rather than to apolitical party.

Although Bourne believed that society could function well under a government — the loose administration ofreasonable laws — he did not believe it could coexist with a sanctified State. The first section of his essay “TheState” is entitled “War is the health of the State.” Bourne observes of society, which he refers to as “country”,

Country is a concept of peace, tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept ofpower, of competition; it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune ofbeing born not only into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle the twofeelings into a hopeless confusion.

To sum up Bourne’s preceding argument: in times of peace, people pursue their own self-interest, identify withsociety, interact with government, and only occasionally encounter the sanctified state.

Society During a State of War

Bourne defined war as the ultimate act of statehood, as the utmost act of “a group in its aggressive aspects.”He wrote, “War is a function … of States.” Bourne argued that war erases the lines that separate governmentfrom the state and separate both of them from society. The act of erasure happens largely within the individualhimself. Stoked by emotion, the average person fills with patriotism and loses “all sense of the distinctionbetween State, nation and government.” Bourne described the process:

Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusionbetween the relations which the individual bears and should bear towards the society of which he is a part.

In times of war, the government and state become virtually identical, so that to oppose the government (anylaw or regulation) becomes an act of disloyalty to the sanctified State. For example, although criticizing thePresident is a right regularly exercised by Americans in peace time, such criticism becomes an act of treasonwhen war is declared. As Bourne explained,

objections to the war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, aremade subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding in severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes.

Moreover, in wartime, individuals who only casually interacted with the government now become ferviddefenders of the state.

Every individual citizen who in peace times had no function to perform by which he could imagine himself anexpression or living fragment of the State becomes an active amateur agent … in reporting spies anddisloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating such measures as are considered necessary byofficialdom.

The activities of society — from the words spoken at pulpits to those written in newspapers, from economicexchanges to entertainment — begin to conform with the purposes of the state rather than the self-interest ofindividuals. This process can be particularly prominent in the business world from which the State must drainresources to maintain the expensive activity of war. The State does so through myriad means including



regulation, taxation, and the usurpation of decision-making.

As both society and government merge with the state, the individual himself begins to disappear. Theindividual becomes part of what Bourne called “the herd” or masses which the State organizes “to actoffensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized.” For example, the state used powerfulinducements to convince people to “choose” to support the war effort. Individuals usually agreed, reluctantlyor not, because in “a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely

strengthened in that identification”.

But if an individual refused to join the herd and instead refused his support, then the state revealed that choice was never a real issue.

Men are told simultaneously that they will enter the military establishment of their own volition, as theirsplendid sacrifice for their country’s welfare, and that if they do not enter they will be hunted down andpunished with the most horrid penalties.

And, so, individuals obey wartime measures even to the point of risking their lives on battlefields. People ceaseto be individuals acting in their own self-interest and become citizens of the state acting in concert. The man

who dissents and remains an individual feels “forlorn and helpless,” while those who think and feel collectivelyhave “the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing irresponsibility of protection”.

This is the theoretical meaning of “war is the health of the State.” In times of peace, people are largely definedby self-interest and by society; they interact casually with government, giving little thought to the State. Intimes of war, everything reverses to the benefit of the state. As for the impact on the individual, if war is thehealth of the state, then war is also the death of individual rights.

The Second Internal Enemy: The Persistent Individual

In every war, there are individuals who refuse to join “the herd.” Instead they persist in acting as free humanbeings with the freedom to speak, to judge and to control their own peaceful behavior. If their actions directlyconfront State policy or harm it in any way — e.g. by reducing the money flowing into war chests — then theState moves to crush these individuals. History is the best teacher on this point.

The warring State’s repression of both society and the individual is rooted deep within American history andpolitics. From 1798 to 1800, the United States and France were involved in an undeclared war now known asthe Quasi-War. The conflict grew out of America’s increasingly close ties with Britain — the enemy of bothFrance and Ireland. Americans began to view with suspicion the many French and Irish immigrants in theirmidst; politicians began to worry about civil unrest and dissent. And so, “loyalty legislation” was pushedthrough Congress in 1798.

The Alien and Sedition Acts consisted of four laws. The most explosive one was officially entitled “An Act for

the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States,” or, unofficially, the Sedition Act. It provided finesand jail terms for anyone who “shall write, print, utter or publish … false, scandalous and malicious writing orwritings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress … or the President …with intent to defame … or to bring them … into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them … the hatredof the good people of the United States…”.

The Acts had been championed by the Federalists who then dominated Congress and favored a strong federalgovernment with a loose interpretation of the Constitution. Their key political rivals were the Republicans,including Vice President Thomas Jefferson. The Republicans denounced the Acts as unconstitutional and the



new powers granted to President John Adams as monarchical. For such statements, several prominentRepublicans were arrested under the Sedition Act. Publishers and editors were targeted especially. When apublic backlash helped Jefferson to win the presidency in 1800, he pardoned those who had been convictedunder the Sedition Act.

On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war on Germany, and America officially entered World War I. On June 15, afederal loyalty law called the Espionage Act became one of America’s first pieces of wartime legislation. Along

with an 1918 amendment called the Sedition Act, the Espionage Act immediately became one of the mostcontroversial measures in American history, not because of how it dealt with foreign espionage but because ofhow it affected the freedom of speech of publishers, journalists, anti-war activists, labor reformers, socialists,and the average American.

In his essay “Not Just Japanese Americans: The Untold Story of U.S. Repression during ‘The Good War,’” thehistorian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel described the three key features of the 1917 Act:

(1) a true espionage law, which punished spying and wartime sabotage, (2) a neutrality law, whichrestricted the non-neutral acts of private citizens in foreign conflicts, and (3) a sedition law, providingup to twenty years in jail and a $10,000 fine for aiding the enemy with “false reports or false

statements,” for obstructing recruiting, or for causing insubordination, disloyalty, or mutiny in the U.S.armed forces. The act also empowered the Postmaster General to exclude from the mail issues ofnewspapers and periodicals that he felt were subversive.

Under the Sedition Act it became illegal to:

• make false reports, or false statements … with the intent to obstruct the sale by the United States ofbonds

• utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form ofgovernment of the United States, or the Constitution … or the military or naval forces … or the flag … or

the uniform of the Army or Navy … or any language intended to bring the form of government … or theConstitution … or the military or naval forces … or the flag … into contempt, scorn, contumely, ordisrepute

• willfully display the flag of a foreign enemy

• urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things …necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war.

The Woodrow Wilson administration was determined to “protect” America against itself; that is, to protect itagainst wrong ideas and from those who would spread them. Wilson referred to the dissemination of wrongideas as “the insidious methods of internal hostile activities.” Attorney General Thomas Gregory called it“warfare by propaganda”.

What constituted propaganda varied but it shared a common theme: namely, opposition to the wartime State.Virtually every form of resistance to or criticism became a potential felony. In a 1988 analysis, the conservativesociologist Robert Nisbet commented, [when] “America was introduced to the War State in 1917, it wasintroduced also to what would later be known as the total, or totalitarian, state”.

An officially sanctioned patriotic hysteria swept America. Legislatures outlawed teaching German or publiclyplaying “German music,” such as Wagner or Beethoven. German books were removed from public libraries.



German-sounding streets were renamed, and sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage.” The Red Cross barredthose with German last names from joining. German immigrants or their descendants were viciously attackedwith their attackers suffering no consequences. In Minnesota, a minister was tarred and feathered for prayingin German with a dying woman.

After the Bolshevik (Red) Revolution shook global politics to its roots, socialists became special targets, withmen being beaten in the streets for no more than wearing a red tie or for refusing to buy a war bond.

The law imposed an official censorship as well. The government seized a film entitled The Spirit of ‘76 becauseit depicted cruelty committed against the colonists by the British, America’s wartime ally; the producerreceived a ten-year prison sentence. A federal court upheld the seizure; the sentence was commuted to threeyears upon appeal.

The sheer number and scope of imprisonments make the telling of it difficult. One segment of societyepitomizes the repression, however: the anti-war movement. Anti-war voices were particularly vulnerablebecause so many came from socialist or labor-reform ranks toward whom the Wilson administration wasalready antagonistic. Perhaps the most prominent imprisonment was the 10-year sentence of the socialistleader and former presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. His crime? He criticized the Espionage Act as

unconstitutional.

A backlash began to coalesce, including prominent voices such as pacifist Norman Thomas, birth-controlactivist Margaret Sanger, feminist Alice Stone Blackwell, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, and RogerBaldwin, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Indeed, the ACLU itself sprang from the National CivilLiberties Bureau, formed in 1917 to provide legal assistance to those prosecuted under the Espionage Acts.

The League for Amnesty of Political Prisoners issued a leaflet entitled “Is Opinion a Crime?” The question was aresponse to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision in Abrams v. United States (1919 ). Abrams rested onwhether political speech was protected by the First Amendment or whether it was a crime under the EspionageAct. The Supreme Court answered, “It is a crime.” In a famous dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver WendellHolmes clarified his “clear and present danger test” for free speech, “Only the emergency that makes itimmediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels … warrants making any exception to thesweeping command, ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech’” (several other importantU.S. Supreme Court decisions affirmed aspects of the Espionage Act).

Meanwhile, the arrest of hundreds of conscientious objectors occurred, including women. For example, RosePastor Stokes was sentenced to 10 years for stating in a letter to the Kansas City Star that “no governmentwhich is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people while the government is for theprofiteers”.

The labor-reform movement was heavily targeted for at least four reasons: it was largely socialist; it containedmany foreigners; it engaged in the disruption of production through strikes; it was anti-war because it viewed

the German people as “fellow-workers” of the world, not enemy combatants.

Across America, the meeting halls of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were raided simultaneously. In1917, 165 prominent IWW members were arrested. In April 1918, 101 defendants went on trial, including IWWhead Big Bill Haywood. After five months, all were found guilty, with Haywood and fourteen others eachreceiving twenty year sentences. Collectively, the defendants were fined $2,500,000. From a membership ofmore than 100,000 in early 1917, the IWW was effectively destroyed.

Even after World War I ended, ultra-patriotism led to the persecution of un-Americanism. This period became



known as the Red Scare (1919–1920) and reached its zenith with the Palmer Raids. Under the supervision ofAttorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his special assistant J. Edgar Hoover, a vicious campaign was launchedagainst radicals and included the deportation of dissident immigrants; even American citizenship did notprotect against deportation, as Emma Goldman discovered.

The fever of war eventually faded. In 1920, most of those sentenced during the Red Scare were freed. Debshimself was released in 1921 by Warren Harding. In 1921 the Sedition Act was also repealed, although other

provisions of the Espionage Act remained intact.

The Espionage Act Today

Through World War II to the present day, the Espionage Act has been both amended and invoked to quashpolitical dissent and discussion during time of war.

In June 1971, during the Vietnam War, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg and his colleague Anthony Russo werecharged under the Espionage Act for publishing the classified documents known as the Pentagon Papers. TheNew York Times was threatened under the Act for publishing them. In the end, Ellsberg and Russo were freedowing to irregularity in the government’s case, which led to the declaration of a mistrial.

A political hysteria and repression akin to the one that produced the Espionage Act currently grips America.The heightened political atmosphere has allowed the passage of broad legislation that establishes the “right”of the State to indefinitely detain American citizens without charges, trial or an appeal process.

War is the health of the State. War is not merely a declaration of a State’s hostility against an external enemybut also against its own citizenry. It is the death of society, of freedom and of individual rights.



SECTION III

PRINCIPLES WORK THROUGH PEOPLE

Principles live through human beings; they have no existence without people. Ideas have no reality except asthey are embodied or expressed through art and manufacturing, music and machines, literature and math. Inshort, ideas must be man made and maintained. If you want to understand how ideas and ideology functionand flow in the real world, then it is valuable to read biographies to watch how principles function in the livesand minds of other people.

It is also one of the great pleasures of life because books are time machines. You can eavesdrop on ThomasJefferson by reading the correspondence in which he explained the American Revolution to his Europeanfriends. Through Thomas Paine you can “hear” the same words that sparked the revolution when they werenailed defiantly on fenceposts and taverns. You can share the joy and struggle of people you admire by readingtheir diaries and papers. If you have trouble with an emotional problem, like mourning, then you can re-read

William Godwin’s amazing tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft upon her death. All of history is available to befriend.

And sometimes you will need a friend. Standing up for yourself can be frustrating and unpleasant . The worldcan brutalize people intellectually as surely as it does physically. For friendship and solace, for knowledge andcompanionship, it is not possible to say enough about the benevolence of books. And, especially, ofbiographies.

In this Section, I introduce some of the historical friends from whom I have drawn insight and inspiration as Iread how the principles we share impelled their lives.



Étienne de la Boétie: Why Do People Obey Unjust Laws?

A 16th-century essay changed my life. It answered the question “Why do people obey unjust laws?” better thananything else I had read or heard. The principle or concept that Étienne de la Boétie expressed so brilliantly isknown as “voluntary servitude”; people consent to their own enslavement. La Boétie also explains why.

One of his explanations was of particular value to me; namely, the role that habit plays in people’s lives. Thesedays, the word “habit” has fallen on hard times and is most often used in a negative sense; la Boétie may givethe same impression. But in classical Greek philosophy habits were neither good nor bad but powerful tools that people could use either to good or bad ends. In answer to the question “How do human beings achievehappiness?” Aristotle answered that happiness was the result of good habits in pursuing actions and endeavorsof substance and in the right amount. To some extent, this is true of achieving freedom as well. La Boétiestresses the role of habit in developing obedience but habits can be equally important in becoming andremaining liberated. For example, develop the habit of questioning authority even if the question is askedquietly or only of yourself.

The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by the French jurist Étienne de La Boétie(1530–1563) discusses a question that haunts those who love liberty: Why do people obey unjust laws? TheDiscourse offers insight. It examines the psychology of those who obey, those who command, and those whoresist. La Boétie was particularly interested in why people obey. He asked, “If a tyrant is one man and hissubjects are many, why do they consent to their own enslavement?”.

La Boétie did not believe the state ruled primarily through force. For one thing, there were many more peopleenslaved than there were agents of the state: if even a small percentage of the populace refused to obey a law,that law would become unenforceable. Moreover, most people obeyed without being forced to do so. LaBoétie evolved an alternate explanation that he called “voluntary servitude”.

La Boétie acquired his renown on the basis of one short essay that argued tyranny is “automatically defeated”

when people refuse to consent to their own enslavement. His argument has led many to conclude thatnonviolent resistance and civil disobedience are the best strategies with which to oppose state power.

Discourse first circulated privately in France (circa 1553) against a backdrop of foreign war and domesticconflict. European nation states — governments that claimed sweeping powers within defined territories —were on the rise. Absolute monarchs clashed with each other and with their own citizens, from whom theydemanded money and obedience. The 16th century gave birth to the tyranny that eventually led to the FrenchRevolution.

La Boétie’s Background

La Boétie was well placed to observe the society around him, which was then governed by King Francis I. Borninto an affluent and politically connected family, La Boétie escaped the illiteracy, misery, and disease that befellmost of his countrymen. Famine was so common that men carved crosses on newly baked bread to symbolizethe sacredness of food. Plague erupted repeatedly. As the peasant struggled to survive, state taxes consumedone third or more of his income, with church tithes absorbing another tenth. Roving bands of soldiers stolefood at will and kidnapped young sons to fill their ranks. Nevertheless, 16th-century France, with an estimatedpopulation of 16 million, was the richest, most civilized, most populous nation in Europe.

France was also an absolute monarchy, which meant that national power was not distributed betweenparliaments or local authorities but rested with the king alone. To raise money for war, Francis sold titles to the



“nouveaux riche” who formed a new aristocracy. Meanwhile, the ranks of lawyers swelled as theyadministered the growing state.

Peasants existed at near-starvation level because of taxation in its myriad forms. The collection process wasparticularly brutal because tax collectors were “entrepreneurs” who paid the king a flat amount for theprivilege of collecting taxes; anything over that amount became profit. This provided a great incentive toovertax and to vigorously collect.

Some of the taxes were quite creative. For example, there was a salt monopoly tax by which everyone over theage of 7 was required to purchase several pounds of highly inferior government salt every year. The law alsoprescribed how the salt could be used and imposed heavy fines for misuse, such as in the preservation of meat.Many other commodities had their own separate taxes. Fees were levied at every stage of manufacture, upontransportation, at time of sale to retailers, and then again to customers. It has been estimated that these taxesdoubled the cost of goods. The list of impositions scrolls on and on, and it includes many customs duties thatwere imposed not merely at national borders but also at the boundaries between different provinces withinFrance.

And, of course, there was the constant bribery and other unofficial theft by authorities, for which France was

notorious. Unfortunately, it is impossible to even estimate how much this corruption cost the average person.

In this atmosphere of looting almost everything a worker produced, the obedience of the common man wasessential to state authority. But there were conflicting claims upon workers’ loyalty. God demanded obedience,to be sure, but the absolute monarch — a more secular authority — was anointed by God and blessed by theCatholic Church. (Indeed, the rise of Protestants in France — called Huguenots — was partly in backlash; itmeant that a growing segment of society did not recognize the king’s divine authority.) There were alsoprovincial loyalties. Most Frenchmen gave primary fealty to the province of their birth rather than to the nationor to the king; the provinces varied widely in customs, religious practices, and language. Both the Huguenotsand provincial loyalties led the king to fear that foreign powers would align with rebellious provinces, especiallythose who had tendencies toward Protestantism.

Obedience became ever more essential, but the invention of the printing press made it ever more difficult toprocure. For this, the printing press has been called the most revolutionary tool the world has known. Aspublications spread, so did attempts at censorship. In 1559, the first papal list of prohibited books waspublished.

Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Discourse was most likely written while La Boétie was a law student at the University of Orléans, renowned forHuguenot activity. Indeed, one of his professors would be later burned at the stake for heresy. The essay was inresponse to a specific event — the Revolt de Gabelle in Bordeaux. The Gabelle was the aforementioned salt tax,which was much hated. Protesters killed the Gabelle’s director general along with two of his officers. In

retaliation, 140 commoners were killed, many others were whipped, and exorbitant fines were imposed.

La Boétie was an acute observer of the competing demands on people’s obedience. He watched and wonderedwhy the state seemed able to do anything it wanted, no matter how tyrannical. When the people did finallyrebel and were quashed, he wondered why did they not rise up again, this time en masse? As a result of suchspeculation, La Boétie wrote what the French historian Pierre Mesnard has called “the humanist solution to theproblem of authority”: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.

Why do people willingly consent to their own enslavement? For La Boétie, the collective obedience of society



came from “a vice for which no term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tonguesrefuse to name.” La Boétie called this monstrous vice “voluntary servitude”.

But why is voluntary servitude a vice rather than a virtue? Because it contradicts nature, La Boétie explained.Each man is given his own ability to reason, and virtue lies in cultivating his own innate independence. Evenwithin the lower animals, there is a strong and natural urge to remain autonomous, to be free. Animals whohave tasted freedom resist entrapment, although it might cost them their lives. La Boétie exclaimed,

Since the very beasts, although made for the service of man, cannot become accustomed to controlwithout protest, what evil chance has so denatured man that he, the only creature really born to befree, lacks the memory of his original condition and the desire to return to it?

Man’s liberty required the death of tyranny. Advocating tyrannicide against a ruler who had broken the laws ofGod was nothing new in European theory but La Boétie had a different slant: the way to “kill” a tyrant was todestroy his power through non-violent resistance. In that manner, the people killed not merely a man but thevery tyranny itself. Liberty required only that enough people withdraw their consent and cooperation. After all,

he who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body … ; he has indeed

nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enougheyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beatyou with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does heget them if they are not your own?

Yet farmers continued to sow crops that were confiscated. People accumulated goods for soldiers to pillageand raised daughters for them to rape. People watched as sons were kidnapped into the military and diedfighting someone else’s battles. La Boétie addressed the peasant,

You yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he [the tyrant or the state] may indulge in hisdelights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the strongerand the mightier to hold you in check.

To understand why people consented to their own enslavement, La Boétie first considered the flip side of theissue: the psychology of the tyrant.

The Psychology of the Tyrant

Traditional political theory defined tyranny with reference to the source of a ruler’s power. Tyrants fell intothree categories: those elected to power, those who inherited power, and those who claimed it by force. Thefirst two sources of power gave the king legitimacy in the eyes of the people. This was especially true ofinherited power because it meant the tyrant ruled through the sanction of God. Thus, he was was deemed torule justly even if he ruled badly.

By contrast, La Boétie declared the origin of power to be irrelevant to the definition of tyranny. If a man ruled justly, then he was legitimate; if he ruled badly, then he was a tyrant and illegitimate.

La Boétie refused to give importance to the means by which tyrants achieved power because what wasimportant was their method of ruling after they had achieved it.

Nevertheless the psychology of elected rulers piqued La Boétie’s interest in particular because it seemed logicalthat a ruler whose power came from the people would be more bearable than other rulers. After all, such a



man ought to be grateful to the people, or at least he would be aware of his dependency upon their good will.Yet La Boétie found that when the elected ruler tasted power, “he plans never to relinquish his position” inwhich he did not necessarily function any better than others. For an elected tyrant, however, engineering thepeople’s future consent to his continuing power was of paramount importance.

La Boétie explored the major ways in which a ruler engineered consent.

The beginning of a tyrant’s rule was the most difficult period because those who had not consented to his rulewould obey reluctantly, and brute force might be necessary. Brute force could put down dissent in the shortterm but it was never a good long-term option. The violence committed by the ruler would bred martyrs andcould very well increase popular resistance. Moreover, violent suppression showed the ugly face of power tooclearly, making people withdraw their support.

As time passed, however, the tyrant’s task became easier. Through conditioning and training, futuregenerations would accept authority passively and they would automatically obey. La Boétie observed, “It isincredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of itsfreedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one isled to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its

enslavement”.

Generations that were born “under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery” accepted theircondition as natural. Thus, “custom” or habit was the first explanation of voluntary servitude.

In an essay entitled “Of Custom,” the Renaissance thinker Michel de Montaigne, who was La Boétie’s bestfriend, dramatized the incredible power of habit. “He seems to have had a right and true apprehension of thepower of custom, who first invented the story of a country-woman who, having accustomed herself to playwith and carry a young calf in her arms, and daily continuing to do so as it grew up, obtained this by custom,that, when grown to be a great ox, she was still able to bear it”.

Nevertheless, there would always be a few subjects who would try to shake off their enslavement. Some ofthem would do so because they remembered their ancestors and their former ways of freedom. Aware ofhistory, these dissenters would compare the past to the present, and so dare to long for a better future. LaBoétie commented, “These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them bystudy and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it.” Throughbooks, the men who invented their own freedom would teach others about human nature and this, in turn,would led to a detestation of tyranny.

Control of Information

After instilling the custom of servitude into the majority of people, therefore, the ruler’s next challenge was tocontrol the flow of information in order to minimize dissent.

The most basic control was achieved in two ways: by censoring the press and by monopolizing education. If hecould limit what was printed and taught, then the tyrant could prevent people from comparing the past withthe present. He could control what people believed was possible in the future.

Moreover, the people could be carefully educated to believe that the tyrant was a benefactor who acted onlyto further public welfare. He could inculcate the belief that his administration was a living embodiment ofnoble concepts such as justice, tradition, patriotism, law and order, or the public good. And, if the tyrant was the embodiment of all things noble, then opposing him would be tantamount to opposing “goodness” itself.



The people themselves would turn on the tyrant’s critics and defend him.

At this point, a process of mystification could occur in which the people began to view the tyrant as larger thanlife. Mystification occurred in several ways. The tyrant aligned with religion and so drew upon the veneration ofGod. He swore to uphold the law of the land, and wrapped himself in the authority of a constitution orfounding document. He appealed to the nation’s traditions, claiming to be their caretaker. The tyrant presidedover widely publicized displays of pomp and power. His agents were dressed in intimidating uniforms and

enjoyed privileges that marked them as “special” simply because they served him. Awe-inspiring monumentsto his rule were constructed, including the courts and other buildings in which the business of state — his business — was conducted.

This was the second reason people rendered automatic obedience. A regulated press and school system hadconvinced them that the ruler’s authority was legitimate. But the people’s “education” did not stop when theyreached the point of legitimizing the tyrant. It continued into a mystification that led people to be awed by thetyrant’s authority and to view him as something more than a mere fallible human being as they werethemselves.

Bribery

But what of those people who still remained free because they could not be tamed by habit or by beinginstilled with awe? La Boétie believed the wise tyrant would also engage in faux largesse.

La Boétie pointed to the state-sponsored “plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures,and other such opiates” used by “ancient peoples.” These distractions were “the bait toward slavery.” Thepeople became so engrossed in their own pleasures that they did not notice the chains on their bodies. Alongwith state-sponsored distractions, the wise tyrant also provided for the basic needs of people. For example, hedistributed stocks of food. “And then everybody would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the King!’” La Boétieremarked scornfully. “The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their ownproperty, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken itfrom them.” By providing bread and circuses — state welfare and popular distractions — the people werebribed into surrendering their liberty.

The direct bribery paled in significance, however, beside an indirect form that La Boétie called “the mainspringand the secret of domination, the support and foundation of tyranny.” This was an institutionalized briberythrough which millions of people were employed at state jobs and depended on tax funds in order to pay theirbills. Owing their livelihoods to the tyrant and with many holding positions they could not have earned by meremerit, the employees would cleave to the tyrant, offering him their loyalty. Some state employees, such aspolice officers, became the hands of the state, reaching throughout society to implement laws and policies.Tax-supported intellectuals, such as university professors and recipients of government grants, became thevoice of the state, defending its legitimacy. Still others, working as clerks or minor agents, made the dailymachinery of the state grind on and on.

Over generations, a vast new class of people would emerge within society: people who served the state inexchange for a tax-funded salary. This class of people willingly destroyed their own liberty and that of theirneighbors for the profits they received from the tyrant. They would do so with no scruples or hesitationbecause the force of custom and state education had led them to believe things had always been this way andalways would be.



Conclusion

What was La Boétie’s solution to voluntary servitude? The people should rise out of enslavement bywithdrawing their consent and cooperation from the tyrant. La Boétie advised, “I do not ask that you placehands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him,like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces”.

If La Boétie is right, if freedom is a natural human urge, then nature herself argues the logic of not cooperatingwith tyranny. There is something within both man and beast that resists the tension of a leash. Rather thanbreak the tension by attacking whomever holds the reins, La Boétie told people to just let the tension go slack.Refuse both violence or submission. Simply say no.

In that word, freedom lives.



François Marie Arouet de Voltaire: The Relationship Between Freedom and Tolerance

Today it is commonplace for people to view freedom as the enemy of tolerance, and government as its friend.Thus law is called upon to mandate “respect” for minorities, women and other groups who are said to require protection. Thus affirmative action, hate speech laws, equal pay legislation … Freedom, the politically correctassure us, brings exploitation and intolerance, especially in the free market. History does not smile upon that

theory because it is the opposite of what has historically occurred.

One man dramatically highlighted the true relationship between freedom and tolerance or, more specifically,between the free market and religious tolerance. The Enlightenment giant Voltaire demonstrated that it wasthe free market that ensured tolerance; it was government interference that was tolerance’s death knell.

If anything, I think Voltaire understated his defense of the free market’s unintentional but morally salutaryaffects upon society. A friend recently stated, “Thank God for the free market. It keeps away evil.” The spark forhis comment was a campaign of slander being conducted by a malicious group of people who wished to harm people they disliked for the sheer joy of harming them. In a closed society, personal grudges and prejudicesloom large and this allows malicious people to inflict damage on targets by blocking employment, cutting offservices and otherwise disrupting their lives. Their reason for doing so could be one of a thousand: the color of

their skin, the content of their beliefs, a spurned romance, a dispute over money.

But in an open society, such as that created by freedom and trade, the malicious become toothless because the free market is a neutral mechanism. It is huge and it does not care for anything but merit and payment. Thegarage that hires a man as a mechanic does not care about the rumors spread by an ex-wife; it wants him toshow up on time and repair cars. The grocer who sells him a tomato does want to hear anyone’s side of aconflict; he wants to pocket the money, bag the tomato and move on to the next customer. Some see theneutrality of the free market as cold and impersonal. I believe my friend is correct. It is a protection against evil.

In 1733 the philosopher credited with ushering in the French Enlightenment, François Marie Arouet de Voltaire

(1694-1778), published Letters Concerning the English Nation. It was a pivotal work that created a sensation.Although written in French, the 24 letters were first issued from London in an English translation. The reason?The material was considered too politically dangerous for the author or any French printer to have the work toappear within France itself.

Voltaire was no stranger to controversy. Some years before, after being beaten up by the hirelings of anaristocrat whom he had offended, Voltaire had been thrown into the Bastille (for the second time). He wasreleased after pledging to stay at least 50 leagues away from Paris. Voltaire chose to go as far as England,where he stayed for roughly two-and-a-half years. The result of the sojourn was the Letters on English religionand politics, which were written as though to explain English society to a friend back in France. They finallyappeared in France in 1734 as Lettres philosophiques, or Philosophical Letters.

Letter five, “On the Church of England,” began with the observation, “This is the country of sects. AnEnglishman, as a freeman, goes to Heaven by whatever road he pleases.” The statement had profoundimplications for any citizen of France — a nation that had almost destroyed itself in order to establishCatholicism as the only practiced religion. In the early 16th century, the writings of John Calvin galvanized manyFrench who converted to Protestantism and were known as Huguenots. The state and Catholic Churchresponded with a campaign of bloody religious persecution. By 1700, a few decades before the Lettersappeared, an estimated 200,000 had been driven from France. An unknown number had been killed in the noless than eight civil wars that erupted.



It becomes easy to understand, therefore, why the French authorities were both threatened and outraged bythe next paragraph of Letter five. Voltaire examined the intellectual and institutional foundation of England’sreligious tolerance and did so in a revolutionary manner. First, he rejected a political explanation for England’sreligious tolerance. Referring to the established Church of England, he explained that politics strongly favoredprejudice rather than tolerance. He wrote, “No one can hold office in England or in Ireland unless he is afaithful Anglican.” Such political exclusion hardly promoted religious good will between religions. Moreover,the observation would have resonated in France where Catholicism held similar sway.

Nor did the religious preaching of the dominant church lead the nation toward toleration. According toVoltaire, the Anglican clergy worked “up in their flocks as much holy zeal against nonconformists as possible.”Yet in recent decades, the “fury of the sects … went no further than sometimes breaking the windows ofheretical chapels”.

What, then, accounted for the extreme religious toleration in the streets of London as compared to those ofParis?

The Peace of Commerce

In Letter six, “On the Presbyterians,” Voltaire ascribed the “peace” in which “they [Englishmen of differentreligions] lived happily together” to a mechanism that must have shocked readers. He pointed to the LondonStock Exchange, a prominent expression of capitalism. In the most famous passage from Philosophical Letters,Voltaire observed, “Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you willsee representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, theMahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve thename of infidel for those who go bankrupt”.

The observation is all the more important because, legally and historically, England was no bastion of religioustoleration. Laws against nonconformists and atheists were still in force during Voltaire’s stay. Yet in England,and not in France, there was an air of toleration on the street despite the law. The comparative lack of a classstructure was one reason. Even though both countries had pronounced aristocracies, England was notburdened with the same unyielding class laws that crippled social and economic mobility in France. As Voltairewrote in Letter nine, “On the Government”: “You hear no talk in this country [England] of high, middle, and low justice, nor of the right of hunting over the property of a citizen who himself has not the liberty of firing a shotin his own field”.

The true key to the difference between England and France lay in the English system of commerce and in thecomparatively high regard in which the English held their merchants. (This is not meant to slight the substantialdifferences between the English and French governments — especially the constitutional ones — upon whichVoltaire dwelled.) In France, aristocrats and the other elites of society regarded those in commerce withunalloyed contempt. In Letter ten, “On Commerce,” Voltaire pointedly commented on the French attitude:“The merchant himself so often hears his profession spoken of disdainfully that he is fool enough to blush.” Yet

in England, the “merchant justly proud” compares himself “not without some reason, to a Roman citizen.”Indeed, the younger sons of English nobility often entered commerce or took up a profession. This difference inattitude was a large factor in explaining the extraordinary rise of the English middle class that derived itswealth from trade. When the French derided England as a nation of shopkeepers, which they often did,Voltaire thought the slur was a compliment. He commented that if the English were able to sell themselves, itproved that they were worth something.

Commerce, or shopkeeping, established an arena within which people dealt with each other solely foreconomic benefit and, so, ignored extraneous factors such as the other party’s religious practices. On the floor



of the London Stock Exchange, religious differences disappeared into background noise as people scrambled tomake a profit from one another. The economic self-interest of the Christian and the Jew outweighed theprejudice that might otherwise sour personal relations between them. They intersected and cooperated on apoint of common interest: “the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Church of England man accepts thepromise of the Quaker,” Voltaire wrote in “On the Presbyterians”.

Voltaire versus Marx

Ironically, Voltaire singled out for praise precisely the same aspect of commerce — the London Stock Exchange— that Karl Marx later condemned. Both viewed the marketplace as impersonal or, in more negative Marxistterms, dehumanizing. For Marx, people in the marketplace ceased to be individuals expressing their humanityand became interchangeable units who bought and sold goods. To Voltaire, the impersonal nature of trade wasa good thing and, perhaps, its best feature. It allowed people to disregard the human conflicts that hadhistorically disrupted society, such as differences of religion and class. The very fact that a Christian who wishedto profit from a Jew, and vice versa, had to disregard the religious differences and deal with him civilly waswhat recommended the London Stock Exchange to Voltaire.

In this, Voltaire’s voice is reminiscent of Adam Smith in his most popular work, The Wealth of Nations. Smith

outlined how everyone in a civilized market society is dependent on the cooperation of multitudes eventhough his friends may number no more than a dozen or so. A marketplace requires the participation ofthrongs of people, most of whom one never directly encounters. It would be folly for any man to expectmultitudes of strangers to benefit him out of sheer benevolence or because they like him. The cooperation ofthe butcher or the brewer, said Smith, was ensured by their simple self-interest. Thus, those who entered themarketplace did not need the approval or favor of those with whom they dealt. They needed only to pay theirbills.

The toleration created by the London Stock Exchange extended far beyond its doors. After conducting businesswith each other, the Christian and the Jew went their separate ways. As Voltaire phrased it, “On leaving thesepeaceable and free assemblies, some go to the synagogue, others in search of a drink.…” In the end, “all aresatisfied”.

The French Revolution

The Philosophical Letters — Voltaire’s tribute to the English middle class, their commerce, and their society —created an enormous impact on the European intellectual scene. Calling the work “a declaration of war and amap of campaign,” Will and Ariel Durant commented: “Rousseau said of these letters that they played a largepart in the awakening of his mind; there must have been thousands of young Frenchmen who owed the book asimilar debt. Lafayette said it made him a republican at the age of nine. [Heinrich] Heine thought ‘it was notnecessary for the censor to condemn this book; it would have been read without that’”.

Nevertheless, French censors seemed eager to condemn it. The printer was imprisoned in the Bastille. A lettre

de cachet for the elusive Voltaire’s immediate arrest was issued. By a legislative order, all known copies of thework were confiscated and burned in front of the Palais de Justice. Through the intercession of powerfulfriends, the lettre de cachet was withdrawn, again on the promise that he remain safely outside the limits ofParis. In this manner did the French church and state respond to Voltaire’s salute to toleration.

But the themes of the Philosophical Letters resounded deeply within the consciousness of Europe for manydecades to come. One of its themes was that freedom — especially freedom of commerce — was the truewellspring of religious toleration and of a peaceful civil society. The insight was nothing short of revolutionarybecause it reversed the accepted argument and policies on how to create a harmonious society. Traditionally,



France (along with most other European nations) attempted to enforce a homogeneous system of values on itspeople in the belief that common values were necessary to ensure peace and harmony, the social glue thatheld together the social fabric. This was thought to be particularly true of religious values.

This was not a moral argument, but a practical one: society would collapse into open violence without thecohesion provided by common values. Thus, those in authority needed to centrally plan and rigorously enforcethe values that should be taught to and practiced by the masses. After all, if people were allowed to choose

their own religious values, if values became a commodity open to competition, then civil chaos and conflictwould inevitably ensue.

Voltaire argued that precisely the opposite was true. The process of imposing homogeneous values led only toconflict and religious wars. The result was a society intellectually stagnant and morally corrupt, because doubtor dissent was suppressed. It was diversity and freedom that created a thriving and peaceful society. Voltaireended his most-quoted letter, “On the Presbyterians,” by observing: “If there were only one religion inEngland, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but thereare thirty, and they live happily together in peace”.

Perhaps one reason that Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters created such a backlash from the French leviathan was

that the book’s logic, if carried beyond religion, would strike at any government attempt to impose commonvalues or practices on the people. Indeed, Voltaire’s argument against homogeneity continues to have deepimplications for the centralized policies of all governments. Those citizens who reject imposed homogeneity inreligion might well be prompted to question the wisdom of many other government institutions, includingpublic schools, which are often justified by the declared need for common values. The freedom of individualsto decide matters of value for themselves could easily prompt them to demand the right to live according tothose values and to teach them to their children. Thus the system of centralized control could unravel.



Henry David Thoreau: Is There A Duty to Disobey Unjust Laws?

La Boétie presented the dynamics of voluntary servitude and the solution to it: withdraw your consent. But atwhat point, if any, does the denial of consent require not merely withdrawal but also active disobedience?Through his remarkable life and writings, Henry David Thoreau offers an answer.

In his essay “On Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau also offers an insight that all opponents of state power shouldheed. After being released from jail for what may be the world’s most famous act of civil disobedience, Thoreauwent about “the business of living.” He believed man was not put on earth to confront his neighbor or to railagainst injustice but to enjoy the simple, rich pleasures of life. His insight: People should be primarily occupiedby the business of living and only pay attention to the state when it comes knocking at your door, demandingyour property or your co-operation in an immoral act, such as financing a war. As Thoreau stated, “I came intothis world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad”.

A friend of mine once made a related point when we discussed the overwhelming time that many freedomadvocates lavish upon critiquing the state. What would happen to them if the state disappeared overnight?Would their purpose for living disappear with it? He assured me there is an Italian saying that roughlytranslates as “It is raining again … pig of a government!” His point: many people tend to blame the state for

every woe and, so, they give it an undeserved prominence in their lives. Hands-on problem solving — forexample, getting out of the rain — would be a better focus. A far better one, yet, are the myriad pleasures life proffers, from walking a dog to laughing with friends. Do not become so involved in the fight against injusticethat you forget to live.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an introspective man who wandered the woods surrounding the smallvillage of Concord, Massachusetts, recording the daily growth of plants and the migration of birds in hisever-present journal. Why, then, did he profoundly influence such political giants as Mohandas Gandhi, LeoTolstoy and Martin Luther King?

The answer lies in a brief essay that has been variously titled but which is often referred to simply as “CivilDisobedience” (1849). Americans know Thoreau primarily as the author of the book Walden, or Life in theWoods (1854) but it is “Civil Disobedience” that established his reputation in the wider political world. It is oneof the most influential political tracts ever written by an American.

“Civil Disobedience” is an analysis of the individual’s relationship to the state, which focuses on why men obeygovernmental law even when they believe it to be unjust. It also presents the point at which Thoreau believedthere was a moral duty to disobey.

But “Civil Disobedience” is not an essay of abstract theory. It is Thoreau’s extremely personal response to beingimprisoned for breaking the law. Because he detested slavery and tax revenues contributed to the support of

it, Thoreau decided to become a tax rebel. There were no income taxes and Thoreau did not own enough landto worry about property taxes but there was a hated poll tax — a capital tax levied equally on all adults within acommunity.

Thoreau declined to pay it and, so, in July of 1846 he was arrested and jailed. He was supposed to remain in jailuntil a fine was paid which he also declined to do. Without his knowledge or consent, however, relativessettled the “debt” and a disgruntled Thoreau was released after only one night.

The incarceration may have been brief but its effects have endured through his essay “Civil Disobedience.” To



understand why the essay has exerted such a powerful force over time and across cultures, it is necessary toexamine both Thoreau the man and the circumstances of his arrest.

Thoreau, the Man

Henry David Thoreau was born into the modest New England family of a pen-maker. With a childhoodsurrounded by rivers, woods, and meadows, he became an avid student of nature. His friend and mentor, the

equally famous essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson offered the following psychological portrait of Thoreau:

“He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; herefused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; andthough a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely no doubt for himself, to be the bachelor ofthought and Nature.… No truer American existed than Thoreau”.

If it is possible for one word to summarize a man, then that word would be the advice he offered in Walden:“Simplify, simplify, simplify.” Thoreau was a self-consciously simple man who organized his life around basictruths. He listened to the inner voice of his conscience, a voice all men possess but few men follow. As heexplained in Walden, “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school,

but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity andtrust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically”.

Thoreau’s attempt to apply principles to his daily life is what led to his imprisonment and to “CivilDisobedience.” Oddly enough, Thoreau’s contemporaries did not see him as a political theorist or as a radical.They viewed him instead as a naturalist, either dismissing or ignoring his political essays, including “CivilDisobedience.” The only two books published in his lifetime — Walden and A Week on the Concord andMerrimack Rivers (1849) — both dealt with nature in which he loved to wander.

He did not have to wander far to find intellectual stimulation as well. During the early 19th century, NewEngland was the center of an intellectual movement called Transcendentalism. In 1834, while Thoreau was astudent at Harvard, the leading Transcendentalist moved into a substantial house at the outskirts of Concord,thus converting the village into the heart of this influential movement. That man was Emerson.

There has never been rigorous agreement on the definition of Transcendentalism, partly because Emersonrefused to be systematic. But there are broad areas of agreement between Transcendentalists. As aphilosophy, it emphasizes idealism rather than materialism — that is, it views the world as an expression ofspirit and every individual as an expression of a common humanity. To be human is to be born with moralimperatives that are not learned from experience but which are discovered through introspection. Therefore,everyone must be free to act according to his conscience in order to find the truth buried within.

Although Emerson’s focus on the individual must have appealed to Thoreau, there was an inherent tensionbetween Thoreau’s practical, earthy ways and the abstract quality of Transcendentalism. Thoreau wanted to

incorporate principles into daily life; he wanted to taste and feel principles in the air around him. He wrote inWalden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, andsee if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had notlived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation,unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live sosturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, todrive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get



the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, toknow it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it …

Despite their differences, however, Thoreau was deeply influenced by Emerson whom he met in 1837 througha mutual friend. Four years later, Thoreau moved into the Emerson house and assumed responsibility for manyof the practical details of Emerson’s life.

Transcendentalism became Thoreau’s intellectual training ground. His first appearance in print was a poementitled “Sympathy” published in the first issue of the Dial , a Transcendentalist paper. As Transcendentalistsmigrated to the mecca of Concord, one by one, Thoreau was exposed to all facets of the movement and tookhis place in its inner circle. At Emerson’s suggestion he kept a daily journal from which most of Walden waseventually culled.

But Thoreau still longed for a life both concrete and spiritual. He wanted to translate his thoughts into action.While Transcendentalists praised nature, Thoreau walked through it.

Especially in his later years, Emerson seemed distant from Thoreau’s lusty approach to life, which he describedas “the doctrine of activity.” Given this difference of approach, it is no wonder that Emerson did not embrace

the ideas within “Civil Disobedience.” Nor did he approve of Thoreau’s decision to be imprisoned.

Improisoned for One Night

“Civil Disobedience” was Thoreau’s response to his 1846 imprisonment for refusing to pay a poll tax thatviolated his conscience. He exclaimed in “Civil Disobedience”,

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Whyhas every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is notdesirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have aright to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

Imprisonment was Thoreau’s first direct experience of State power and, in typical fashion he analyzed it:

the state never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, hissenses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not bornto be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

Prior to his arrest, Thoreau had lived a quiet, solitary life at Walden — an isolated pond in the woods about amile and a half from Concord. Thoreau now returned to Walden to mull over two questions: (1) Why do somemen obey laws without ever asking if the laws are just or unjust; and (2) why do others obey laws they thinkare wrong?

In attempting to answer these questions, Thoreau’s view of the state did not alter. It was that view, after all,that led Thoreau into prison in the first place. Moreover, judging from the rather dry, journalistic account of jail, his emotional reaction did not seem to alter significantly; he was not embittered by the experience. Themain criticism he expressed was aimed at those who presumed to pay his fine; an act that the jailer said “madehim mad as the devil”.

Toward the men who were his jailers, Thoreau seemed to have felt more disdain than anger, stating,

They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every



threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was tostand the other side of that stone wall … I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lonewoman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all myremaining respect for it, and pitied it.

It was the reaction of the townspeople of Concord — his neighbors — which most distressed Thoreau; hedissected the experience so as to understand their behavior. He ended his short matter-of-fact account of jail

with a commentary on the townsfolk. It expressed how his eyes had been opened.

I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that theirfriendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were adistinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions.…

There is no cynicism in Thoreau’s description of his neighbors, whom he admits he may be judging “harshly”since “many of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village.” InsteadThoreau was unsettled by the realization that there was a moral and political wall between him and thetownsfolk, a wall that Gandhi referred to in an account of his own imprisonment in South Africa. Gandhi wrote,

Placed in a similar position for refusing his poll tax, the American citizen Thoreau expressed similarthought in 1849. Seeing the wall of the cell in which he was confined, made of solid stone 2 or 3 feetthick, and the door of wood and iron a foot thick, he said to himself, “If there were a wall of stonebetween me and my townsmen, there was still a more difficult one to climb or break through beforethey could get to be as free as I was”.

Thoreau may have also brooded over the reaction of Emerson who criticized the imprisonment as pointless.According to some accounts, Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?”Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?” Emerson was “out there” because hebelieved it was shortsighted to protest an isolated evil; society required an entire rebirth of spirituality.

Emerson missed the point of Thoreau’s protest, which was not intended to reform society; it was simply an actof conscience. If we do not distinguish right from wrong, Thoreau argued, then we will eventually lose thecapacity to make that distinction and become, instead, morally numb. Near the end of his life, Thoreau wasasked, “Have you made your peace with God?” He replied, “I have never quarreled with him.” For Thoreau,that would have been the real cost of paying his poll tax; it would have meant quarreling with his ownconscience, quarreling with God.

“Civil Disobedience” ends on a happy note. After his release and unpleasant experience with his neighbors, thechildren of Concord had brightened Thoreau’s mood by urging him to join a huckleberry hunt. Huckleberryingwas one of Thoreau’s valued pastimes and his skill at locating fruit-laden bushes made him a favorite withchildren. And, should a child stumble, spilling berries, Thoreau would kneel by the weeping child and explainthat if children did not stumble, then berries would never scatter and grow into new bushes.

Thoreau ended his chronicle of prison, “[I] joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselvesunder my conduct; and in half an hour … was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, twomiles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen”.

Thus, Thoreau shed the experience of prison but he could not shed the insight he had gained on his neighborsnor the questions that accompanied his new perspective. The text of “Civil Disobedience” constitutes theanswers he discovered by listening to the “quiet voice within”.



The Message of “Civil Disobedience”

Although many Quaker writers had argued for civil disobedience against war and slavery on the grounds ofconscience, the “Civil Disobedience” essay is not tied to a particular religion or to a specific issue. It is a secularcall for the inviolability of conscience on all issues, and this aspect may account for some of the essay’senduring legacy. The highly personal nature of “Civil Disobedience” also contributes to its impact as the essayexudes a sincerity more commonly found in diaries and correspondence than in political tracts.

The opening sentence of “Civil Disobedience” sets the tone by endorsing Thomas Jefferson’s much quotedsentiment on government — “That government is best which governs least.” But Thoreau carries Jefferson’slogic one step farther, “Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — ‘That government is bestwhich governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which theywill have. Government is at best but an expedient…”.

After what appears to be a call for anarchism, Thoreau pulls back and dissociates himself from “no-governmentmen.” Speaking in practical terms and “as a citizen,” he states, “I ask for, not at once no government, but atonce a better government”.

Whatever his ultimate position on government, one point is clear: Thoreau denies the right of any governmentto automatic and unthinking obedience. Obedience should be earned; it should be withheld from an unjustgovernment. To drive this point home, “Civil Disobedience” dwells upon how the Founding Fathers rebelledagainst an unjust government and, so, raises the question of when rebellion is justified.

To answer, Thoreau compares government to a machine and the problems of government to “friction.” Frictionis normal to a machine so that its mere presence cannot justify revolution. But open rebellion does become justified in two cases: first, when the friction comes to have its own machine — that is, when the injustice is nolonger occasional but a defining characteristic; and, second, when the machine demands that peoplepersonally cooperate in committing an injustice. Thoreau declared that, if the government “requires you to bethe agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop themachine”.

This is the key to Thoreau’s political philosophy. The individual and his conscience is the final judge of right andwrong. But Thoreau asserts more than this; since only individuals act only individuals can act unjustly, and soindividuals are responsible for their own acts and cannot blame them upon government. When thegovernment knocks on your front door, it is an individual in the form of a postman or tax collector whose handhits the wood. He is not exonerated from responsibility because “it is his job” because he has voluntarilyassumed the job. Before Thoreau’s imprisonment, when a confused taxman had wondered aloud about how tohandle his refusal to pay, Thoreau had advised the man, “Resign.” If a man chose to be an agent of injustice,then Thoreau insisted on confronting him with the fact that he was making a choice. As Thoreau explained, “Itis, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel — and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent ofthe government”.

But if government is “the voice or will of the people,” as it is often called, shouldn’t that voice be heeded?Thoreau admits that government may express the will of the majority but it may also express nothing morethan the will of elite politicians. Even a good form of government is “liable to be abused and perverted beforethe people can act through it.” Moreover, even if a government did express the voice of the people, this factwould not compel the obedience of individuals who disagree with what is being said. As long as his actionswere peaceful, each individual needed to act in accord with his own conscience. The majority may be powerfulbut it is not necessarily right.



What, then, is the proper relationship between the individual and the government?

The Role of Government

Perhaps the best description of Thoreau’s ideal relationship occurs in his description of “a really free andenlightened State” that recognizes “the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its ownpower and authority are derived.” It is a State that “can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual

with respect as a neighbor,” allowing those who did not embrace it to live “aloof”.

According to Thoreau, the government of his day did not come close to this ideal for two basic reasons: slaveryand the Mexican-American war.

It is important to remember that, although Thoreau’s imprisonment was a protest against slavery, “CivilDisobedience” — written after the outbreak of the Mexican-American war — protests both slavery and war. Infact, the opening paragraph of the essay mentions the war while saying nothing of slavery.

“Civil Disobedience” portrays the Mexican-American war as an evil comparable to slavery. The 1840s expresseda spirit of expansion called “Manifest Destiny” — the idea that it was the destiny of Americans to expand

across the continent, civilizing the wilderness and the natives as they went. Part of the expansion was anannexation of Texas, which sparked a war with Mexico, which also claimed the area. The annexation wasdoubly offensive to Thoreau because it permitted slavery to expand into the new territory. Moreover, thedomestic consequences of the conflict deeply disturbed him. Taxes soared; the country assumed a military air.Thoreau was horrified to learn that some of his neighbors actively supported the war. He was perplexed bythose who did not support the war but who financed it through the taxes they paid. After all, he considered thewar to be “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.” Withoutco-operation from the masses of people, “a few individuals” would not succeed in wielding that tool.

In fact, the co-operation of the tool itself — the standing army — was required; it, too, consisted of individualsresponsible for their own actions. Thoreau wondered about the psychology of men who would fight a war and,perhaps, kill others out of obedience. How could a man willingly kill a stranger who had done him no personalharm? Thoreau concluded that soldiers, by virtue of their absolute obedience to the state, become somewhatless than human beings with a functioning conscience. He wrote,

Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of someunscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an Americangovernment can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts — a mere shadow andreminiscence of humanity …

This is how “the mass of men” employed by the state render service to it, “not as men mainly, but as machines,with their bodies.” In doing so, the men relinquish the free exercise of their moral sense and, so “putthemselves on a level with wood and earth and stones”.

Thoreau asked, “How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, thathe cannot without disgrace be associated with it”.

But his “well-meaning” neighbors — even those who were allegedly opposed to slavery and theMexican-American war — did associate with and obey the American government. Thoreau ascribed theirbehavior to ignorance and generously concluded, “they would do better if they knew how”.

But a problem remained. Why do people like Emerson — who cannot be called ignorant — render obedience



to laws with which they disagreed?

One reason is obvious: the people who believe they need a government are willing to accept an imperfect one.Such people, Thoreau explained, accept government as a “necessary evil.” Other people supportedgovernment out of self-interest; Thoreau specifically mentions merchants and farmers in Massachusetts whoprofited from the war and from slavery.

Still others obeyed because they feared the consequences of disobedience. This was the neighbor who said, “ifI deny the authority of the state when it presents a tax bill, then it will soon confiscate my property and harassmy family.” Thoreau knew that his neighbor was correct in his assessment of what might happen to hisproperty and family. “When I converse with the freest of my neighbors,” he wrote, “I perceive that … theydread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience.…This is hard. This makes it impossiblefor a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.” By his own lights, Thoreauwas fortunate in this respect. He had neither property to be seized nor children to go hungry. Accordingly, hedid not criticize men who reluctantly obeyed an unjust law out of fear for their families.

Our Enemy, the State

Instead, Thoreau’s criticism was aimed at the form of obedience that sprang from a genuine respect for theauthority of the state. This form of obedience says, “The law is the law, and should be respected regardless ofcontent.” Through such attitudes, otherwise good men become agents of injustice.

“The law is the law and should be respected” — Thoreau dissected this notion. For one thing, not all laws areequal in their purpose or their justice. Some laws exist for no other reason than to protect the government; forexample, laws against tax evasion, treason, or contempt of court. Such laws often have more severe penaltiesthan those that protect individuals against violence.

Moreover, the proscribed penalties for denying government’s authority are often so vague and sweeping as toinvite arbitrary sentences from the court. Lawyers and the courts are part of the state’s defensive machinery.Thoreau concluded, “The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.… He welldeserves to be called … the Defender of the Constitution. Still thinking of the sanction which the Constitutiongives to slavery, he says, ‘Because it was part of the original compact — let it stand’ … [H]e is unable to take afact out of its merely political relations”.

Such courts offered no protection to Thoreau who refused to respect their authority. But Thoreau took hisrefusal one step farther, albeit a logical one. He not only rejected unjust laws but also the men who createdthem. He withdrew his support from politicians who “rarely make any moral distinctions” and “are as likely toserve the devil, without intending it , as God.” (Emphasis added.) Thoreau’s use of the word “intending” issignificant. Even well-intentioned politicians stand so completely within the institution of government that theynever distinctly and nakedly behold it. Whatever they intend, they serve the government’s ends.

Thoreau’s disdain for politicians may seem to be a logical extension of his disrespect for “the law” but manyreformers found it possible to disrespect the law without holding lawmakers personally responsible. Theviewpoint of such people overlooked the role of “choice,” Thoreau argued. Every politician who created a lawchose to do so and was paid for his actions; every agent who enforces a law chooses to do so and defends hisactions. If they created or enforced a law with which they themselves disagreed, then they surrendered theirconscience to the state. The surrender was irrelevant, however, to their personal responsibility for their ownacts. They should be held personally responsible for whatever they personally do.

Holding politicians personally responsible was not the last step in Thoreau’s withdrawal of support. He denied



the authority of government itself. Again, rejecting politicians may logically seem to imply the rejection ofgovernment; but, again, many reformers rejected politicians without rejecting politics.

Thoreau held such reformers personally responsible as well.

Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegianceand support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles

to reform.

Thoreau specifically addressed fellow-abolitionists who called for the immediate cessation of slavery. Insteadof petitioning the government to dissolve the Union with slaveholders, Thoreau believed those reformersshould dissolve “the union between themselves and the State — and refuse to pay their quota into itstreasury.” Petitions only strengthened the authority of the government by recognizing its authority andhonoring the will of the majority. “[A]ny man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of onealready,” he observes.

The reformers who petition government for permission, “love better to talk” about justice than to act on it.Thus, Thoreau concluded, “Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.” To men

who prefer a safe strategy, voting becomes a substitute for action and politics becomes a sort of game, likecheckers or backgammon, only with a slight moral tinge. To Thoreau, anyone willing to leave moral decisions tothe will of the majority was not really concerned that right should prevail. When resisting the poll tax, Thoreaudid not consult the majority; he acted according to his conscience. If a man allowed the majority to decidewhether or not he should pay, then, by his own standards, he would have shown no regard for what is right.

Moreover, Thoreau considered voting to be a poor vehicle for reform because voting follows real change; itdoes not precede or cause it. “When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery,” Thoreauwrote, “it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to beabolished by their vote.…” As for the other means that the State provides for changes to itself, they areextraordinarily slow. Thoreau noted, “They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone”.

Does this mean men have a duty to pitch their lives against an unjust state?

The Duty of Resistance?

“Civil Disobedience” speaks to the individual’s right to resist the state, but Thoreau did not considerdisobedience to be an overriding duty. Thoreau understood that men are involved in the business of living andhe thought this was proper … even for a dogged reformer like him. He wrote, “I came into this world, notchiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.” First and foremost, Thoreauclearly stated, people should live their lives.

This is a crucial distinction. If a man is fortunate enough to be in circumstances that resemble Thoreau’s

huckleberry field where “the State was nowhere to be seen,” then he has no duty to seek it out, but should,instead, go about the business of living. Thoreau defied the state only when it came to him, when it knocked onhis door and demanded his money in support of an institution he considered to be unjust: slavery. Thereafter,when the state ignored him, Thoreau ignored it even though his neighbors were taxed around him.

Thus, although “Civil Disobedience” is sometimes entitled “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” the latter title issomewhat misleading. Where does the word “duty” come from? It may have derived from a critique within“Civil Disobedience” through which Thoreau rejected a chapter from William Paley’s book Principles of Moraland Political Philosophy ; Paley’s chapter was entitled “Duty of Submission to Civil Government.” According to



Thoreau’s interpretation of the 18th century philosopher, Paley argued that all civil obligations derive fromexpediency. Since Thoreau attempted to show the opposite — that civil obedience is morally grounded — thetitle “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” may have been a play on Paley’s title.

Nevertheless, “Civil Disobedience” does not espouse a duty to seek out the State for confrontation, to protest awrong done to your neighbor, nor even to resist the State in matters that do not violate conscience, such asbuying a postage stamp or using a public road.

The only political duty of a man is to correct any injustice he directly causes and to deny his co-operation toother injustice. This is the conclusion at which “Civil Disobedience” arrives. “If I devote myself to other pursuitsand contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. Imust get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.… If I have unjustly wrested a plank from adrowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself”.

In short, Thoreau believed the state should never rank above the individual conscience or the business of living.Indeed, men should live as though there were no state. But if the state came to a man and demanded that heviolate his conscience and participate in an injustice, then that man should disobey … not through violence butby actively removing his co-operation.

Thoreau’s Legacy

Thoreau’s political theories were not well known during his own lifetime. They were usually presented aslectures to small audiences or as articles buried in small-circulation periodicals. “Civil Disobedience,” forexample was first rendered as a lecture at the Concord Meeting Hall. In 1849, it was published under the title“Resistance to Civil Government” in the first and only issue of the periodical “Boston Aesthetic Papers.” AfterThoreau’s death, his sister Sophia prepared his uncollected works for posthumous publication in multiplevolumes by the publisher Ticknor and Fields. The political essays were held until last and, even then, theyseemed to be added on. The last volume was entitled “A Yankee in Canada with Anti-Slavery and ReformPapers” (1866) and it included “Civil Disobedience,” which was retitled “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”.

Why were these essays published last? Possibly because they were not considered representative of Thoreau.Perhaps because many of them were written in response to specific events and, so, seemed dated. Or,perhaps, because their political slant was so unpopular that some people wished they had died with the man.

In 1890, Henry Salt published a collection of Thoreau’s political essays, including “Civil Disobedience.” The bookprofoundly influenced a young lawyer in South Africa who was protesting that government’s treatment ofimmigrant workers from India. The lawyer was Mohandas K. Gandhi, who would go on to create a massmovement of non-violent resistance in India. The young Gandhi found in Thoreau the techniques that he woulduse to good advantage in his subsequent struggle for Indian independence from British rule. Years later, Gandhithanked the American people for Thoreau, saying, “you have given me a teacher in Thoreau, who furnished methrough his essay on the ‘Duty of Civil Disobedience’ scientific confirmation of what I was doing in South

Africa.” By embracing Thoreau’s message and expanding the strategy of civil disobedience, Gandhi focusedworld attention on the shy Yankee philosopher who lived without real fame in his own nation, in his own time.

Conclusion

Nevertheless, Thoreau’s death itself had gone relatively unnoticed. In November 1860, he caught a severe coldthat slowly deepened into consumption from which he never recovered. On May 6th, 1862, at the age of 44,Henry David Thoreau died.



Months later, Emerson published a eulogy that concluded, “The country knows not yet, or in the least part,how great a son it has lost.…His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted thecapabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, hewill find a home”.

As always, Thoreau said it more simply, “For joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried in it”.



William Lloyd Garrison: One Person Can Make a Difference

Two of the most destructive notions to the pursuit of freedom are that “you cannot fight city hall” and that one person cannot make a difference. Both statements are not only false but also arguments used to dissuade people from standing up for what they know is right. The American anthropologist Margaret Mead famouslystated, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is

the only thing that ever has”.

Mead is correct but is there another and, perhaps, a more crucial reason why people should stand up for theirbeliefs even if everyone else remains seated: personal integrity. Quite apart from seeking social change, it isimportant for people to keep the truth alive within them. I vividly remember a now-respected economics professor on whom I eavesdropped as he clarified why he was not known as an Austrian economist. When hewas an undergrad, he explained, being discreet about his beliefs was important in order to get into grad school.When he was in grad school, being silent was close to a requirement for dealing with his advisor. To get hired bya good university, he presented a “good” face, the face the university wanted. It was a face he kept on until hereceived tenure some 12 years later. Tenure was the point at which he had intended, as an undergrad, to leteverything rip loose and say whatever he wanted to. Strangely — or, perhaps, predictably — he no longer had“fire in his belly” for the ideas of Austrian economics. As far as I know, he has written nothing on the subject.

Truth and passion need stoking or they will die within you.

William Lloyd Garrison is the polar opposite of that economics professor, in that he may have overstoked his passion for truth and justice. Both La Boétie and Thoreau addressed the idea of civil disobedience — ofindividuals saying no to the injustice of a tyrant or a government. Garrison is a flesh-and-blood example of howeffective one man can be in fighting against a massive injustice. Mead was correct but she was not radicalenough in her analysis. The smallest “group” with an amazing ability to change the world is the person of principle who will not surrender. No force is stronger. Garrison’s life is a proof of this principle.

On January 1, 1831, the first issue of a modest weekly newspaper entitled The Liberator appeared in Boston.

The editor took the occasion to clear his conscience:

In Park-Street Church, on the Fourth of July, 1829, I unreflectingly assented to the popular butpernicious doctrine of gradual abolition [of slavery]. I seize this moment to make a full and unequivocalrecantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren the poorslaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice, and absurdity. My conscience is nowsatisfied.

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I willbe as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or tospeak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm;

tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to graduallyextricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in acause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat asingle inch — and I will be heard .

The editor was William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) who demanded an immediate end to slavery. During theLiberator ’s 35-year life span (1831-1865), it spoke out passionately against slavery in America and Garrison was heard. He was heard so well that eleven months after the paper’s debut the pro-slavery State of Georgiapassed the following resolution, “Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Georgia



and general assembly met that the sum of $5,000 be and the same is hereby appropriated to be paid to anyperson or persons who shall arrest, bring to trial and prosecute to conviction the editor or publisher of acertain paper called The Liberator or any other person or persons who shall utter, publish or circulate withinthe limits of this State said paper called The Liberator”.

The history of the Liberator is that of the American anti-slavery movement as much as it is of the editor. Assuch it is necessary to present some background on slavery in America.

American Slavery

The pre-Revolutionary American colonies differed from each other in their treatment of slaves. Some coloniesadopted the basic code of the British colony in Barbados. But Barbados was slavery at its worst. There, slavesoutnumbered whites and severe laws were deemed necessary to quash the very possibility of a rebellion. Asimilar severity was reflected in some of the American colonies in which slaves were numerous. For example, inadopting the Barbados model, South Carolina imposed no penalty if a slave died during punishment, and itdefined the rape of a female slave by a non-owner as a form of trespass against her master. In the Northerncolonies, where the black population was smaller, the laws tended to be milder.

Two consistent aspects of slavery in America, however, helped to weave it solidly into the fabric of society.First, slaves were not emancipated even if they converted to Christianity, which some other culturesconsidered to be grounds for liberation. Second, the status of the child followed that of the mother even if thefather was white or free. Thus the “peculiar institution” (as it was called) was perpetuated through thegenerations.

Outside of Quaker circles, there was little anti-slavery activity before the American Revolution. The revolutionmust have caused optimism in those ranks because its principles were in direct conflict with slavery. TheDeclaration of Independence opens with the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men arecreated equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these areLife, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Nevertheless, the ensuing Constitution denied to slaves what theDeclaration of Independence seemed to offer. A compromise on slavery had been necessary to unite thecolonies in the face of sectional differences.

John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, believed that slavery cast a shadow over the entireConstitution. His words were enshrined on the Liberator ’s masthead. Adams declared,

Yes! it cannot be denied — the slaveholding lords of the south prescribed, as a condition of their assentto the Constitution; three special provisions to secure the perpetuity of their dominion over theirslaves.…To call government thus constituted a democracy, is to insult the understanding of mankind.

As slavery expanded so did the anti-slavery movement, which evolved into one of the most successfulmovements for social reform that America has ever seen. Within the movement, Garrison exercised a defining

factor. Under his editorship, the Liberator became the main vehicle of American abolitionism, the radical wingof the anti-slavery movement that demanded the immediate cessation to slavery on the grounds that allhuman beings are self-owners, all human beings have a natural right to their own bodies, to their own labor,and to the fruits of that labor. No moral or practical consideration outweighed the slave’s self-ownership.

William Lloyd Garrison, the Man

On December 10, 1805, Garrison was born into modest circumstances in Newburyport, Massachusetts. In1818, Garrison found his niche in life when he was apprenticed to the printing office of the Newburyport



Herald . His anti-slavery career was undoubtedly an outgrowth of the protests over the institution that hewitnessed in Massachusetts during this period. But the specific spark was his acquaintance with BenjaminLundy, a Quaker who dedicated himself to arguing against slavery. Lundy had begun publication of hisnewspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, from Ohio in 1821. It began with six subscribers and a20-mile walk to the printer. Garrison was 22 when Lundy arrived in Boston and stayed at the sameboarding-house at which Garrison lived. His admiration for Lundy was immediate and immense; he commented“never was moral sublimity of character better illustrated”.

Garrison accepted Lundy’s invitation to co-edit a revived Genius from Baltimore. But there was a problem.Lundy was a colonizationist; this meant he wished to establish foreign colonies of free blacks so that aslave-owner could free his slaves and send them out of the country. Garrison rejected this approach; a slaveborn in America was as American as a white man and he should live anywhere he wished. The two mencompromised by writing their own articles and taking no responsibility for opinions expressed by the other.

In the first issue, Lundy made a simple statement of his views. Garrison published a credo. He declared: (1)slaves “were entitled to immediate and complete emancipation”; (2) “the question of expediency has nothingto do with that of right and it is not for those who tyrannize to say when they may safely break the chains oftheir subjects” no more than it is for a thief to decide when to stop stealing; (3) “on the ground of expediency it

would be wiser to set all the slaves free today than tomorrow”; and (4) since many slaves had been born onAmerican soil, “they are at liberty to choose their own dwelling place.” This was one of the first abolitioniststatements to appear in America.

Lundy and Garrison both witnessed gut-wrenching slave auctions as well as the shipment of slaves fromBaltimore to the market in New Orleans. After a badly beaten slave sought sanctuary with Lundy and Garrison,Garrison published an impassioned attack on Francis Todd, the owner of a slave ship. He declared Todd to bean enemy of his own species who deserved solitary confinement for life. Todd responded with a libel suit,which he won. Unable to pay, Garrison was imprisoned for over six weeks until a fellow abolitionist paid thefine. Garrison left Baltimore to avoid a second trial, and so he lost that case by default. The Genius had ceasedpublication a few months before.

From Washington, D.C., Garrison announced a new paper that would be entitled The Public Liberator and Journal of the Times. Upon learning that Lundy also planned to publish a paper from Washington, however,Garrison shifted his home base to Boston.

On January 1st, 1831 — with no subscribers other than friends, and in partnership with anotherpoverty-stricken abolitionist, Isaac Knapp — Garrison published the first issue of the Liberator . The front pagehad a plain black letter heading with the motto, “Our country is the world. Our countrymen are mankind.”Garrison and Knapp were named as publishers; Garrison as editor. The second page reported on the trial thatGarrison had lost because he had missed it. The third page was entitled “Journal of the Times.” The fourth,“Literary, Miscellaneous, and Moral.” This neatly printed newspaper — four columns across — issued from aroom at the Merchant’s Hall, which functioned as both an office and a home to the two publishers, with the

floor becoming a bed at night.

A visitor described the office and Garrison. “It was a pretty large room but there was nothing in it to relieve itsdreariness but two or three very common chairs and a pine desk in the far corner at which a pale, delicate andapparently over-tasked gentleman was sitting. I never was more astonished. All my preconceptions were atfault. My ideal of the man was that a stout, rugged, dark-visaged desperado, something like we picture apirate. Here was a quiet, gentle and I might say handsome man. A gentleman indeed in every sense of theword”.



The next issue included a strong attack on the allegedly anti-slavery American Colonization Society, a societythat Garrison declared “wrong in principle” and “impotent in design.” Garrison declared that the Liberator would disclose the Society’s true nature, especially the fact that so many of its members were prominentslave-owners interested in deporting free blacks. This attack raised complaints against Garrison which would bebecome common. For example, his language was said to be too blunt. He was accused of attacking individualsinstead of institutions and principles, thus causing personal offense.

Garrison disagreed, “The public shall not be imposed upon and men and things shall be called by their truenames. I retract nothing. I blot out nothing. My language is exactly such as suits me. It will displease many Iknow. To displease them is my intention.” Garrison thanked God that no one accused him of being lukewarm.To critics he explained that he needed to be “all on fire” because there were “mountains of ice” around him tobe melted.

The debut of the Liberator was unfortunately timed. “Walker’s Appeal” — a pamphlet written by a free black —was panicking the slave states. The pamphlet flaunted black superiority and called for insurrection in the South.While the Liberator was being launched, the legislature of North Carolina was meeting behind closed doors toconsider a message from the governor regarding “Walker’s Appeal.” Moreover, Nat Turner — a Virginia slave— instigated a revolt. On August 31, 1831, Turner and other slaves killed a slave-owning family. Moving from

plantation to plantation, the band that followed him grew to 60 or 70 strong and the number of their victimsexceeded 50. The Southern states reacted with rage and repression.

Some pointed accusing fingers at Northern abolitionists, and most especially at Garrison. In typical fashion,Garrison responded by making the Liberator more radical. By the 17th issue, The Liberator’ s plain heading hadchanged to an ornamental one, surmounted by a woodcut representing a slave auction. The newspaper openlycourted subscriptions from free blacks for whom it provided a voice. The paper also called for controversialmeasures, such the repeal of statutes against inter-racial marriage. More than a few people wished to silencesuch calls. For example, Georgetown in D.C. passed a law prohibiting any free black from taking the Liberator from the post office on pain of a $20 fine or 30 days imprisonment.

By the end of the first volume, the Liberator had accomplished several goals. It had stirred up the South. It hadsubstantially increased its subscription base. A new England Anti-Slavery Society had been formed with thegoal of immediate emancipation and with the Liberator as its voice.

Can Voting End Slavery? Garrison Says No!

Despite internal conflicts, anti-slavery groups spread rapidly. Change was in the air, especially political change.

Up until the Liberator , the political creed of abolitionism had been simply been to not vote for anyone who waspro-slavery. The preferred abolitionist strategy was anti-slavery petitions, which Congress was now gagging byblocking discussion. Anti-slavery societies in New York began to grumble about the need for an anti-slaverypolitical party.

But Garrison rejected electoral politics altogether because he believed reform was accomplished only bychanging the hearts and souls of people. His approach was known as “moral suasion” which was the core ofabolitionist strategy. He and anti-slavery activist Henry Stanton faced off on the issue of electoral politics at the1839 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The Constitution of the Society pledged itself to influenceCongress and Stanton took this as a mandate for electoral activity including the establishment of a thirdpolitical party. Garrison observed that there were many ways to influence Congress without runningcandidates. The controversy came to a head at the next year’s meeting in 1840.



In preparation for the conflict, Garrison’s old friend William Goodell had printed an attack on him, which theLiberator reprinted. In this atmosphere of personal ill will, politically inclined abolitionists walked out of the1840 convention on its first day because Garrison managed to block their efforts to endorse political strategy.The departing defectors went on to form a separate group from which The Liberty Party sprang, establishingelectoral politics as a major approach to achieving anti-slavery goals. When the Liberty Party nominatedWilliam Goodell for President in 1852, Garrison called the situation “a farce in one act”.

Internal Conflicts versus External Threats

Internal conflicts within the anti-slavery movement were often smoothed over by external attacks that drewthe movement together. Anti-slavery meetings and lectures continued to attract angry mobs; even ministerswere assaulted and dragged from their pulpits. Abolitionists were tarred and feathered. Then, Elijah Lovejoy —the editor of an anti-slavery paper entitled the Alton Observer — was murdered by a mob that came to destroyhis printing press. Having had his press destroyed before, Lovejoy had exchanged gun fire with the latest moband was fatally shot in the process.

Lovejoy’s death made the North aware of the lengths to which the pro-slavery zealots would go but it could nothave surprised Garrison who knew about mob violence first-hand. On his first trip to England, Garrison had

delivered a lecture in London on the subject of “America’s Shame” — namely, slavery. He was attacked enmasse. To attack America in a foreign country was considered to be an act of high treason by the Americanpress; Garrison was lambasted at home.

Garrison also encountered mob violence on U.S. soil. At the same time his ship from England was docking inNew York harbor, a public meeting to form a New York City Anti-Slavery Society was about to commence.Garrison made his way to the advertised hall but the door was locked. Permission to hold the meeting hadbeen withdrawn and the anti-slavery group had moved to a nearby chapel instead. A mob burst through thechapel door, cursing and calling out for Garrison, who was not present. The rest of the assembly escapedwithout injury.

A similar mood awaited Garrison in Boston. A handbill called for “patriots” to mob the Liberator ’s office,admonishing them to arrive with plenty of tar and feathers. That night, a dense mob surrounded Garrison’soffice, but nothing happened. When the British abolitionist George Thompson arrived in America, however, heset off another chain of violence. How dare a foreigner lecture Americans on morality? The mood became sohostile toward all abolitionists that Garrison had to leave Boston several times for his own safety.

Upon returning after one such flight, Garrison attended a meeting of the Female Boston Anti-Slavery Society.This meeting combined two controversial issues: anti-slavery and women’s activism both of which hesupported. Pro-slavery notices had announced a further incendiary aspect of the meeting: Thompson would bepresent. A purse of $100 was offered to the first man who laid violent hands upon him.

A mob estimated variously at 2,000 to 5,000 surrounded the meeting place. Although Thompson never showed

up, Garrison did and joined the 15 or 20 women who sat amidst noisy hecklers. Suddenly, Garrison wasrecognized and withdrew hastily to another room, locking the door behind him. An assault was made upon thelocked door by a mob crying out “Lynch him!” Garrison dropped out a back window onto a shed, racing up aflight of stairs, and then simply hid. Nevertheless, he was discovered. Garrison wrote, “On seeing me, three orfour of the rioters, uttering a yell, furiously dragged me to the window with the intention of hurling me fromthat height to the ground. But one of them relented and said, ‘don’t let us kill him outright.’ So they drew meback and coiled a rope about my body probably to drag me through the streets.” The rioters tore Garrison’sclothes but before more damage could be done, he was spirited off for safe keeping to the mayor’s office. Arowdy mob gathered there as well, threatening to tear down the building. For his own safety, Garrison was put



in jail and the situation calmed. No subsequent action was taken against the mob or its ringleaders, and Bostonnewspapers criticized the abolitionists for having provoked a riot.

If abolitionists sometimes forgot that the enemy was slavery and not their fellow abolitionists, mobs and thegovernment reminded them. Indeed, President Andrew Jackson’s message to Congress in 1835 implicitlyapproved of mob violence against abolitionists.

No Union with Slaveholders

Garrison responded to the growing hostility by calling for disunion; the North should secede from the South. Ayear later, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society passed a resolution written by Garrison that soon found ahome in The Liberator’ s masthead. It read, in part, “Resolved, that the compact which exists between the Northand the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell — involving both parties in atrociouscriminality — and should be immediately annulled”.

No union with slaveholders! became Garrison’s new cry. Letters of protest from more moderate anti-slaveryadvocates flooded The Liberator; not all members of the society agreed with disunion, the protesting letterscautioned. Disunion was an impractical goal that would cripple the society’s influence, they declared. Besides,

wasn’t disunion precisely what the South wanted? Still others considered the disunion crusade to be a slap atthe Liberty Party.

Garrison stood firm and, ultimately, the American Anti-Slavery Society ratified Garrison’s call for disunion, 250in favor, 24 against. Now, both anti-slavery radicals in the North and pro-slavery radicals in the South lookedforward to the death of the United States of America.

Yet, even though Garrison favored Northern secession, he denied a similar right to the South. Why? Becauseonly the causes set forth in the Declaration of Independence justified secession; for example, the government’sdenial of inalienable rights. The North had this complaint against the South, Garrison argued, while the Southhad only slavery.

A bloody solution seemed inevitable but Garrison cautioned abolitionists against embracing this method aswell. “We are growing more and more warlike. Just in proportion as this spirit prevails, I feel that our moralpower is departing and will depart. I say this not so much as an Abolitionist but as a man. I believe in the spiritof peace, and in sole and absolute reliance on truth and the application of it to the hearts and consciences ofthe people. I do not believe that the weapons of liberty ever have been, or ever can be, the weapons ofdespotism. I know that those of despotism are the sword, the revolver, the cannon, the bomb-shell; and,therefore, the weapons to which tyrants cling, and upon which they depend, are not the weapons for me, as afriend of liberty”.

War Intervenes

Tension increased as both pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces stepped up their campaigns. Anti-slavery feelingsreached fever-pitch with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Twenty thousand copies sold within threeweeks, four times as many by the twelfth week. England reported nearly 500,000 in circulation. Afterrequesting a copy of the Liberator , the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe met Garrison inBoston. She became, in her own words, a constant reader of the Liberator .

When a fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, was arrested in Boston, abolitionists tried to stop his extradition to theSouth. Wendell Phillips, a colleague of Garrison’s, urged people to do everything short of violence to aid Burns.Nevertheless, he was sent back into slavery. Appeal to government was no longer possible, Phillips declared,



for government was the servant of slavery. “Indeed, the Government has fallen into the hands of the SlavePower completely. So far as national politics are concerned, we are beaten — there’s no hope. Events hurryforward with amazing rapidity. We live fast here. The future seems to unfold a vast slave empire. Our Union, allconfess, must sever finally on this question. It is now with nine-tenths only a question of time”.

In this spirit, Garrison held up a copy of the Constitution at an anti-slavery gathering and burned it to asheswith the words, “So perish all compromises with tyranny.” Cries of “Amen” greeted the act.

Under constant pressure from anti-slavery advocates, Massachusetts passed the Personal Liberty Law of 1855,making the return of fugitive slaves more difficult. The South called this a declaration of disunion, anddemanded retaliation against Massachusetts, including the exclusion of the state’s representatives in Congress.

National attention soon turned to Kansas, or “bloody Kansas,” as it was to be called. The immenseKansas-Nebraska territory, formerly closed to slavery under the Missouri Compromise, was now up for politicalgrabs and the outcome would deeply impact the balance of power in Congress. Would Kansas enter the Unionas a free state or as a slave state? Resident voters would determine. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces floodedinto Kansas in an effort to decide the election. Violence and terror erupted, and voting irregularities wererampant.

The election of President Buchanan, who was regarded as a friend to slavery, further angered Garrison. In thefirst issue of its twenty-seventh year, the Liberator announced a State Disunion convention to consider thepracticality, probability, and expediency of immediate disunion. The last resolution of this convention wassignificant. “Resolved, that the sooner the separation takes place, the more peaceful it will be; but that peaceor war is a secondary consideration in view of our present perils. Slavery must be conquered, peacefully if wecan, forcibly if we must.” The pacifism of the younger Garrison had gone by the wayside.

The turbulent decade of the 1850s saw significant shifts in political alliances. A disorganized Democratic party,unable to retain its Northern support, split its ticket in 1860, thereby throwing the election to the relativelyunknown Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln. The deep South regarded the Republican party as sectional,enjoying support only in the North. When South Carolina seceded after Lincoln’s election, the conflict at FortSumter prompted other states in the upper South to follow suit.

Lincoln was an extreme gradualist in his anti-slavery views, calling for the elimination of slavery over the periodof a century. His focus to preserve the Union. Lincoln wrote, “If I could save the Union without freeing anyslave, I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would also do that. What I do about slavery andthe colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union.” Nevertheless, abolitionists viewed the waras an opportunity to end slavery.

Awkwardly, Garrison supported the war without renouncing his anti-war principles. Garrison had a candidword for those who criticized his sudden war-spirit.

Well ladies and gentlemen, you remember what Benedict in the play says: “When I said I would die a bachelor,I did not think I should live till I were married.” And when I said I would not sustain the Constitution because itwas a covenant with death and an agreement with hell, I had no idea that I should live to see death and hellsecede. Hence it is that I am now with the Government, to enable it to constitutionally stop the further ravagesof death and to extinguish the flames of hell forever.

War correspondence became a standard feature of the Liberator and Garrison enthusiastically printed lettersfrom black soldiers. He grudgingly inserted the complaints of pacifists as well.



On January 1st, 1863, Garrison was sitting in the balcony of the Music Hall, listening to Beethoven’s FifthSymphony, when news arrived: Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Garrison now committedhimself to Lincoln despite the reservations of other abolitionists. The Liberator became a virtual campaignsheet for Lincoln’s re-election. Garrison’s faith seemed to be rewarded when the Thirteenth Amendment wasratified in December, 1865, thereby ending the constitutional support for slavery. He exclaimed, “With our ownhands we have put in type this unspeakably cheering and important official announcement that, at last, the oldcovenant with death is annulled, and the agreement with hell no longer stands. Not a slave is left to clank his

fetters, of the millions that were lately held in seemingly hopeless bondage. Rejoice and give praise and gloryto God. Having sown in tears, now reap in joy”.

Shortly thereafter, at midnight on December 29th, 1865, Garrison sat at his desk composing The Liberator’ sValedictory address. Printers waited at his elbow to snatch each sheet as it was completed. Having put theLiberator to bed for the last time, the sixty-year-old editor went home and put himself to bed as well. “Thepresent number of the Liberator is the completion of its thirty-fifth volume, and the termination of itsexistence. I began the publication of the Liberator without a subscriber, and I end it — it gives me unalloyedsatisfaction to say — without a farthing as the pecuniary result of the patronage extended to it duringthirty-five years of unremitted labors”.

Garrison pursued various reforms until the end of his life. He was raising money to settle former slaves inKansas when he fell ill in April 1879. It was evident he would not recover. On May 23rd, he fell into a coma.Twenty-four hours later, the voice that had been as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice wassilenced forever.



R.C. Hoiles: An Everyman of Excellence

The preceding profiles feature a jurist who writes in anonymity for fear of controversy (La Boétie), a philosopherwho must flee his native land for safety abroad (Voltaire), a naturalist who goes to jail for his principles(Thoreau), and an activist who sacrificed his personal life in order to work for a cause (Garrison). One lesson a

reader might carry away from these examples is that principles endanger and impoverish you personally.Raymond Cyrus Hoiles dispels that possibility. Through consistently applying his freedom principles to his dailybasis, R.C. (as he preferred to be called) richly prospered in family, finance and the respect of his associates.Living freedom does not mean sacrifice; it means enrichment both personally, professionally and financially.

The libertarian publishing giant Raymond Cyrus Hoiles (1878–1970) epitomizes the American dream. Born intocomfortable but modest circumstances, he rose through hard work and merit. At his death at the age of 91, hiscorporation, Freedom Newspapers, Inc., owned 16 daily newspapers, including the influential Orange CountyRegister (originally the Santa Ana Register ). The revered patriarch of a large family that continued his empireafter his death, R.C. also earned the respect of associates. The California Press Association honored himposthumously as a “Great Crusader for Individual Freedom” who was respected for “his conservatism.” R.C.was not only a remarkably successful man who lived on his own terms, he was also a remarkably happy one.

R.C. Hoiles, the Man

Hoiles’s career expressed a joy in hard work, a love of humanity and an unshakeable belief in the power oftruth.

R.C. began his newspaper career by working for the Alliance Review (Ohio), a daily owned by his brother Frank.In 1919, he and Frank bought the Lorain Times Herald , (Ohio), of which R.C. owned two-thirds. In 1921, theyeach purchased a one-third share in the Mansfield News (Ohio), of which R.C. became a hands-on publisher. Hewanted to use the News to speak out against oppressive labor unions but Frank refused to print such articles.

The disagreement led to a professional break in which R.C. received Frank’s interest in the Herald and theNews, eventually becoming sole owner of both. Then, in 1927, R.C. purchased the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum (Ohio), which was managed by his son Clarence under R.C.’s direction from Mansfield, where he lived.

A colorful page in Ohio newspaper history followed. The Herald had exposed the fraudulent awarding of apaving contract to a Cleveland company despite the presence of a lower bid; public pressure resulted in thelower bid’s being accepted. The enraged owner of the Cleveland company, S.A. Horowitz, purchased rivalpapers in both Lorain and Mansfield in order to run R.C. out of business. The attempt failed and the conflictblazed on. In his essay “The Uncompromising R.C. Hoiles,” biographer Carl Watner highlighted its bitterness:

[The] front porch of the Hoiles home was destroyed by an explosion in November 1928, Hoiles’s car

was wired with dynamite (which fortunately failed to detonate), and a dud bomb was discovered in theoffice of the Mansfield News. None of this gangsterism was ever explained, but it did motivate R.C. intoselling the papers in Mansfield and Lorain.

R.C. purchased a bullet-proof automobile and hired an armed guard to accompany him. Some blamedHorowitz; some blamed the labor unions that Hoiles lambasted. Hoiles held firm. Of labor unions, he stated,

I don’t believe in unions, in a closed-shop. Never did and never will. Oh, I don’t object to the principle ofsomeone representing an employee if that employee wants representation. But that’s not how unions work.



They force the representation on you whether you want it or not. And I didn’t want it.

In 1932, Hoiles sold the other papers for reasons that are not clear. Perhaps it was because of the stress of thesituation. Perhaps, as a June 4, 1986, letter from R.C.’s son Harry to Carl Watner suggests, it was because thepapers had ceased to be sufficiently profitable.

Hoiles spent much of the next three years poring through the books that created a libertarian fervor within

him. In a 1955 editorial, he explained,

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the first libertarians who aroused my interest in liberty and how agovernment should be limited.… Then I ran across Herbert Spencer.… Then a socialist told me thatFrederic Bastiat made the best explanation of the disadvantages that come from protective tariff.…Bastiat so impressed me that I republished his Social Fallacies (Economic Sophisms) and his Harmoniesof Political Economy in two volumes, and his essay entitled The Law.

Events in his personal life contributed to Hoiles’s disillusionment with government. According to a term of thesale, R.C. was not to receive full payment for his two newspapers until 1935. Meanwhile, New Deal legislationenacted under Franklin Roosevelt caused the value of the dollar to plunge on one hand and the gold clause to

be nullified on the other. Gold clauses were common with business contracts of the day and gave a creditor theoption of receiving payment in gold or gold equivalent. In a letter written on February 4, 1964, to RobertLeFevre, R.C. explained that as a result of “the government abrogation of contracts.… I lost $240,000.”

When he bought the Orange County, California, newspaper Santa Ana Register in 1935, R.C. imported his viewsof labor to the West Coast.

A 1961 policy statement expressed the positions he held without waiver from 1935 until his death in 1970.That statement referred to the “Three Guides to Morality”: the Ten Commandments (the Decalogue); theGolden Rule (the Sermon on the Mount); and the Declaration of Independence. In his interpretation, all of theguides declared men to be born with equal and inalienable rights that “are not the gift of any government”.

An Integrated System of Beliefs

Hoiles is often mischaracterized as conservative because people find it difficult to fit his positions into anythingother than political stereotypes. At a quick glance, the confusion is understandable. For one thing, OrangeCounty, California — R.C.’s home for decades — became a center of conservatism following World War II. Asthe county’s foremost newspaper, the Register often ran conservative columnists and letters to the editor. ButHoiles’s voice was radically libertarian.

Both anti-privilege for business and anti-union, Hoiles may seem to be an economic enigma until the simpleprinciples from which he proceeded are understood. At that point, his position becomes an intelligible andobvious whole.

R.C. consciously developed an integrated system of beliefs about government, society, morality, and humannature.

His theory of government was rooted in the Declaration of Independence — a document he quoted frequently.Specifically, he drew upon the passage that claimed government derives its just power from the consent of thepeople and, ultimately, from the consent of the individual himself who possesses inalienable rights.

A November 1953 editorial entitled “Articles of Faith” expressed R.C.’s theory of society : “[G ] aining



understanding of nature’s laws is the best way to be useful to one’s self and to his fellow man.” One of nature’sfundamental laws was “the superiority of voluntary, competitive human endeavor over compulsory activity.”Freedom of association, including a free market, fueled the goodwill that civil society depended on; forcedassociation destroyed it.

Hoiles based his morality largely on the Ten Commandments and insisted on “a single standard”: Everyonewithout exception should act according to the same moral code. What was wrong for a private individual was

equally wrong for a government official. In a later policy statement, Hoiles offered the essence of this universalcode: the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and the Declaration of Independence.

His theory of human nature stressed the perfectibility of man through effort and the exercise of moralcharacter. He believed this perfectibility resided in equal measure for each human being, which seemed tomake him somewhat blind to differences of race, gender, and social status. Former employees oftencommented on how he would engage a janitor in intellectual discussion as quickly as he would a writer.

Politically speaking, no belief was more important to R.C. Hoiles than the rejection of a double standard ofmorality for individuals and for groups. In an editorial entitled “The Most Harmful Error Most Honest PeopleMake” (December 17, 1956), which appeared in the Santa Ana Register , Hoiles explained the error “is the

belief that a group or a government can do things that would be harmful and wicked if done by an individualand produce results that are not harmful, unjust and wicked. It is the belief that a number of people doing athing that is wrong for an individual to do, can make it right and just”.

An example of this double standard is taxation. Taking wealth by force is called theft when committed by anindividual, but it is widely deemed appropriate when done by government. This double standard regardingtaxation produces “harmful, unjust and wicked” results.

An October 31, 1958, editorial in the Register explained just one of those harms: “It is our belief that anyperson who creates wealth and gains understanding injures no one, but benefits himself and everyone else inthe world.” Hoiles believed the “profit motive” was more accurately called the “hope of rewards” and that aman worked for one of two reasons: “Either he has hope of rewards or he is forced.” The former was freedom;the latter was slavery. Applying a double standard to individuals and to government in regard to expropriatingwealth created slavery.

Government violated the “hope of rewards” not only through taxation but also by granting legal privileges thatconstituted a form of theft because they robbed creators of the right to compete fairly and, so, receive therewards of merit (by “creators,” Hoiles referred not merely to businessmen but also to working people whotraded their labor for wages).

Hoiles explained (the Register , January 11, 1944), “It is time we as individuals take a stand to limit ourgovernment to setting us free from men rather than taking from A to give to B, thereby taking from A hisnatural rights, and calling it orderly adjustment, orderly market, collective bargaining or any other false name

that destroys individual freedom.” Its true name was what Hoiles’s associate D.R. Segal once called the“penalizing of success and subsidizing of robbery”.

What a businessman or laborer could not gain through merit should never be granted through force or fraud.Hoiles applied this principle equally to both, but he recognized the practical differences between the twogroups.



Hoiles on Business

Hoiles insisted that all goods and services be provided on a competitive basis without governmentinvolvement; that is, by private contract. The depth of his commitment to what he called economic“voluntaryism” was reflected in an exchange of correspondence with the noted Austrian economist Ludwig vonMises, which occurred in May 1962. Hoiles wrote to comment on an article by Mises entitled “A DangerousRecommendation for High School Economics.” Declaring the piece to be “a splendid representation,” Hoiles

took exception to one paragraph. Mises had written,

[There] are things that private enterprise cannot achieve, e.g., police protection and provision ofnational defense.… No reasonable man ever suggested that the essential function of state andgovernment, protection of the smooth operation of the social system against domestic gangsters andforeign aggressors, should be entrusted to private business.

Hoiles certainly considered himself a reasonable man. In a letter to Mises dated May 21, he insisted that eventhe services of police and national defense should be provided privately and competitively. He explained,

The insurance companies should take care of the fire department, and insurance companies should

take care of protecting your life and property. And if you didn’t like the service the one insurancecompany was giving you, you would employ another insurance company to help protect your life andproperty. Of course, there is no such thing as absolute protection, but we’d get more protection by avoluntary basis than by the coercion of the majority.

Elsewhere Hoiles expanded on the primary importance of free competition: “[There] must be competition orthe threat of competition in order to have a true value of the worth of the service. When there is nocompetition, there is no true value…”.

Another means through which government prevented competition and the “hope of rewards” was the grantingof privileges to specific businesses or businessmen. The privileges might be embedded in law — for example, atariff; or they might occur on a case-by-case basis — for example, a municipal contract awarded for a politicalkickback. Whatever the form of privilege, it was the honest businessman and the working man in the role ofconsumer or taxpayer who suffered.

Hoiles on Labor Unions

Hoiles’s opposition to labor unions must be understood in the context of the tactics used by unions of his dayand the legal status they came to enjoy.

In its most basic form, a labor union is nothing more than an organization of workers who come together toachieve common goals such as higher pay or better working conditions. In America of the 1930s, however,unions began using force in various forms. (In fairness, some force was in response to the unjustified violence

of businessmen who often enjoyed the protection of law.) For example, one tactic of the emerging unions wasthe “sit-down strike” during which workers remained inside places of employment but refused to work. Thus,employers could neither produce nor replace the work force. When workers were forcibly expelled, theyformed picket lines to prevent replacement labor from entering the workplace and sometimes beat up thosewho tried to cross the line.

Under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, labor unions also received legal privileges. In 1935, a federal lawknown both as the National Labor Relations Act and as the Wagner Act limited the ways in which an employercould respond to workers in the private sector who engaged in collective bargaining, strikes, or other union



activity. For example, the Act defined “refusing to bargain collectively with the representative of theemployer’s employees” as an unfair and prohibited business practice. In short, the Act protected workers as aclass.

During the 1930s, Hoiles gained the newspaper experience that would result in a media empire; it included 16newspapers at the time of his death in 1970. By all accounts, despite his considerable wealth and stature, heconsistently displayed an egalitarian attitude toward employees. From editors to secretaries, from writers to

janitors, he treated employees as intellectual equals and never failed to engage them in conversation or toproffer a book, urging them to give him feedback. Hoiles deeply respected the working man and, yet, hedespised labor unions. All of his newspapers were open shop.

Hoiles rejected unions on two grounds. First, they violated the Golden Rule, which was a foundation of hismoral code; and, second, they invited government intervention or force into human relationships.

The Golden Rule is stated in Matthew 7:12: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do toyou, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets” (King James Version). Hoiles called uponworkers to treat employers as they themselves wished to be treated; in other words, they should engage infree negotiation that acknowledged each party’s right to say “no.” Of equal importance, union members should

respect the rights of the nonunion workers who were willing to assume the jobs and contracts that the unionsrejected. Union members were claiming a right that they denied to others, which meant they were claiming aprivilege.

This claim of privilege — which led to a partnership with government — was the second reason Hoiles rejectedlabor unions. One result of the partnership: a manufacturer had the right to refuse to negotiate workingconditions with an individual employee but he had no similar right regarding the group called “a union.” Thelaw forced him to negotiate. This was the double standard by which a group is allowed to act in a manner thatwas improper for individuals.

And, again, union privileges inflicted harm on the nonunion worker. In a 1937 editorial entitled “Whom Will aWorker Obey?” Hoiles expounded on the “harm” collective bargaining inflicted on working people:

Collective bargaining advocates delude the poor, honest working man, who has not had time to study the matter through, with the idea that giving them the right to regulate his life — tell him at what hemust work, for what price and how long — they will greatly add to his comfort of life. [Emphasisadded.]

The phrase “who has not had time to study” is key. In a July 1938 editorial, Hoiles explained that the purpose ofhis columns was to make people think. Elsewhere, in a 1940 editorial, he stated, “Collective bargaining makesits members collectivists and tyrants instead of Americans and true Christians”.

Hoiles’s newspaper chain experienced repeated strikes but his office in Orange County was picketed by the

union only once. D.R. Segal explained why “only once.” He wrote, “After the first few days the pickets quit andrefused to come back. They said R.C. walked with them, lecturing to them, handing out pamphlets andobviously having the time of his life with a captive audience. They said the hell with it and called off the picketline”.

The view of picket lines that Hoiles undoubtedly presented to the protesters as he marched at their side couldnot have been popular. An advocate of crossing picket lines, he declared picketing to be “nothing but a racket.It throws wages out of balance, causes unemployment, poverty, misery.…” An editorial entitled “Pickets Hitler’sReal Aid” (February 12, 1941) called picketers “leeches and parasites on society … traitors to the principle of



equal freedom and the American way” who try “to persuade other people not to work or buy from the firmthat does not consent to pay tribute to their arbitrary, coercive demands”.

No wonder that, after one such anti-union editorial, thousands of union members canceled their subscriptionsto the Register. Undeterred and perhaps roused by opposition, Hoiles personally went house to house to getsignatures to put “right to work” legislation on the California ballot.

Hoiles even managed to sway some union members to his perspective. In an article entitled “What Would YouCall Mr. Hoiles?” Thaddeus Ashby described R.C.’s modus operandi. “One of the first things Hoiles does whenhe buys a newspaper is to refuse to sign a closed shop contract with the union. He has a strike on his hands”.

Ashby recounted the words of a man who had lost his job because of one such strike:

I was in sympathy with the union. Of course, I quit when the strike was called. I went to … work on a unionpaper. I soon got tired of it. I could do as much work in an hour as a union man did all day. They told me to slowdown. Then, one warm day I opened a window and was promptly informed by the shop steward that there wasa union man who got paid for opening windows, and was I trying to throw him out of work? I came back toHoiles. I like working here and wouldn’t go back to a union shop under any circumstances.

Hoiles never deviated from his early beliefs and experiences regarding business and labor. His economic credoremained: America’s enviable standard of living owed nothing to governmental laws and regulations. It wasentirely due to the voluntary exchanges, contracts, production, inventions, and investments that resulted frommen who were free to choose for themselves.

As important as economic discussion may be, it can lose the more human face that underlies matters of dollarsand cents. Thaddeus Ashby was once asked about Hoiles’s economic stance that both excoriated business andlabor and championed them. Was he a scoundrel? Was he a genius? What human being lay beneath theeconomic theories?

Ashby answered,

He’s the kindest man I ever met. You’ve heard he’s against tax-supported schools, tax-supported old agepensions, social security, child labor laws, taxes of any kind. You’ve heard how he throws labor unions out ontheir ears. But I say he is kind because he respects men as individuals. You feel he wants to find the best that’sin you and drag it out of you where you both can stand and admire it. He looks for the truth in a man.

One episode dramatically illustrates the depth of R.C.’s kindness and his commitment to liberty: the Masudastory.

The Masuda Story

The story of Kazuo and Mary Masuda is both a cautionary and inspiring tale. The brother and sister were niseiand, as 2nd generation Japanese-Americans, they were targeted by their own government for brutaloppression during World War II; their story cautions us against judging people based on ancestry or skin color,especially during times of crisis when emotions too easily substitute for reason. Their story also inspires usthrough the bravery and dignity displayed by Kazuo and Mary. Equally inspiring are the rare individuals whospoke up on their behalf, not years afterward when the political “error” had become clear and defending niseiwas safe but while the injustices were actually occurring. Loudest among those rare voices was R.C. Hoiles.

The tale begins abruptly on the morning of Sunday, December 7th, 1941. In a speech delivered at 12:30p.m.



the next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the 7th “a date which will live in infamy.” He referred to asurprise aerial attack by the Japanese against the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which crippledthe U.S. fleet. At the time of the attack, World War II had been raging for over two years. Although Americawas clearly supportive of the Allies against the Axis Powers, the U.S. had not entered the war and there wassignificant domestic resistance to doing so. Within an hour of the President’s speech, however, Congressformally declared war against Japan; on 11th December 1941, Germany responded by declaring war on the US.

The Masuda family did not have to wait a day to realize the full impact of Pearl Harbor upon their lives. On theevening of December 7th, Gensuke (George) and Tamae Masuda were at their farmhouse in Talbert, OrangeCounty, California when there was a knock on the door. At that time, Orange County was an agricultural areawith the soil constituting its wealth. According to a 1940 census, the Japanese-American community comprised1,855 people, most of whom were engaged in farming. Many were issei — first generation Japanese who hadimmigrated. Gensuke had arrived in America in 1898 to work on a railroad in Oregon, and then he moved toTalbert, where he leased 200 acres and eventually purchased 10 more; his 5 sons and 4 daughters farmed theland as a family.

Sheriff deputies were the ones who knocked. Without explanation, they took Gensuke and loaded him onto abus with other issei. Ten days later — without trial, legal representation or right of appeal — Gensuke was

accused of “subversive activity” and incarcerated in a stockade at Ft. Missoula, Montana. The authoritiesrefused to state specific reasons for the accusation but there was a general fear that a Japanese invasion of theWest Coast was imminent and would be assisted by resident Japanese citizens, such as Gensuke.

The news of his father’s imprisonment incensed Kazuo, who had not been present at the farmhouse with otherfamily members. On October 17, he and his brother Takashi had boarded a train to report for military duty attheir respective basic training camps. Through the proper authorities at Fort Ord, Kazuo Masuda (Pvt.39,166,362) wrote a letter to Washington D.C. in which he professed his father’s allegiance to America. Kazuo’sletter is credited for Gensuke’s early release, at which time he joined Tamae and the family in Fresno wherethey had retreated to live with a relative for safety. It would be short-lived.

On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that gave the War Department authority at theirsole discretion to exclude any “persons” from prescribed areas, including much of the West Coast. The Orderwas the basis of a campaign of relocation and mass detention aimed at both issei and nisei. In October 1942,the Masuda family joined thousands of other Japanese-Americans at the Fresno County Fairgrounds wherethey were ordered to assemble. They were held 56 days before being loaded onto trains for the five-day trip tothe Jerome Relocation Center, a 10,000 acre internment camp that stretched over three southern Arkansascounties. Thus, the Masuda family joined over 110,000 Japanese-Americans who involuntarily left their homesand businesses to be interned behind barbed wire by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) in ten primitive“relocation” centers in Colorado, California, Wyoming, Utah, Arkansas, Idaho and Arizona. The vast majority ofthe internees were American citizens; their detention lasted three years, from 1942 to 1945.

During the upheaval what did the major newspapers say? Next to no one spoke out against the massive

violation of civil liberties, especially no one on the West Coast. A March 6, 1942 editorial in the San FranciscoNews was typical in arguing: “Japanese leaders in California who are counseling their people, both aliens andnative-born, to cooperate with the Army in carrying out the evacuation plans are, in effect, offering the bestpossible way for all Japanese to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States”.

The feisty libertarian R.C. Hoiles was a rare exception. On Feb. 5, before the internment order was announced,Hoiles declared in the Orange County Register : “The recommendation of the grand jury to have all alienenemies removed from Orange County calls for a difficult undertaking. Every bit of wealth that these workersare prevented from creating, which we so badly need during the war, will have to be created by the labor of



some other worker. … Of course, there is no such thing as absolute security. We must run some risks in everymove. Risks are life itself. It would seem that we should not become too skeptical of the loyalty of those peoplewho were born in a foreign country and have lived in the country as good citizens for many years. It is very hardto believe that they are dangerous”.

As the internments became law, Hoiles became more aggressive in his defense of Japanese-Americans; In anOctober 14th column, again in the Register , Hoiles called the evacuations “unconstitutional” and an error “we

should make every effort possible to correct … as rapidly as possible.” He argued that “convicting people ofdisloyalty to our country without having specific evidence against them is too foreign to our way of life and tooclose akin to the kind of government we are fighting.…We cannot help but believe that we would shorten thewar and lose fewer lives and less property if we would rescind the order and let the Japanese return and go towork, until such time as we have reason to suspect any individuals of being guilty of being disloyal to America”.

Meanwhile, Kazuo experienced his own personal battles in the military. Although he ranked first in Morse codeclasses, the Signal Corps rejected him and he was offered, instead, work as a gardener . When the 442ndInfantry Regiment was formed at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, Kazuo quickly joined and rose to the rank of StaffSergeant. The 442nd was formed in early February 1943 to establish an all Japanese-American combat unit. Itsubsequently became known as the “Go for Broke Regiment” because of its extreme valor. The book Honor By

Fire by Lyn Crost — the definitive work on the 442nd — explains that it was the most decorated unit of its sizeand length of service in U.S. military history. Crost reported that it was collectively awarded 18,143decorations, including 9,486 Purple Hearts.

On furlough, before going into active battle in Italy, Kazuo visited his family in block 15-03-D in Jerome.Thereafter the Masudas were moved to the Gila River Relocation Center, in the hot Arizona desert. There theywould stay in block 49-11-D of Butte, the larger of the two camps at Gila until their release in the summer of1945.

It was at Gila that Tamae received a Western Union telegram from the War Department in which her name wasmisspelled. “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son Staff Sgt. Kazuo Masudawas killed in action on 27th August in Italy. Letter follows.” Kazuo was 25 years old. The subsequent one-pageletter offered little additional information, claiming that “reports of this nature contain only the briefest detailsas they are prepared under battle conditions and the means of transmission are limited”.

An article in the Fifth Army News filled in the blanks when it reported on Kazuo being posthumously awardedthe Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism in action. He had already received the EuropeanTheater Ribbon with a battle star, the Combat Infantryman Badge, the American Defense Ribbon and the GoodConduct Medal; he would later be awarded a Purple Heart. The article read, in part,

While the 442nd was attached to the 34th Red Bull Division, Masuda was operating from a forwardobservation post but enemy shells cut communication lines, making the OP useless. Unwilling to riskthe lives of members of his mortar crew, he obtained a mortar tube, 20 rounds of ammunition and an

extra helmet. With his load, Masuda walked 200 yards through enemy fire.

Using the helmet packed with dirt as a baseplate, he went into action when the enemy attacked, firingall 20 rounds and repulsing the Germans. The Nazis located his position and subjected him to anintense mortar and artillery fire but Masuda held his ground, returning to his line for moreammunition. His fire was so effective, another attack did not even threaten the company line. In theaction in which he subsequently was killed, Masuda crawled ahead of his men when they heard noises.He discovered himself only five yards from the enemy. Firing his submachine gun, Masuda called to hismen to withdraw. They, thinking he was following, retired. Next day, they found Masuda dead, with his



sub-machine gun in his hands and facing the enemy, lying over a dead German machine pistoloperator.

At Gila, the Masudas held a Buddhist memorial which was rendered all the more significant by the fact thatanother son, Masao, was due to report for duty.

In early May, 1945, Mary Masuda was granted permission to travel to Talbert in order to prepare the way for

her parents’ return to the farm. Her return was not welcomed by all. Nor was the hostility she experienced anisolated event. In reporting the threats against Mary, the Utah Nippo (Salt Lake City) stated on May 18, 1945,“The new incidents are in addition to 15 shooting attacks, one attempted dynamiting, three arson cases, andfive threatening visits … in California in the last four months”.

Why was there such hostility toward returnees? One reason was economic. Secretary of Interior Harold L. Ickesis quoted as saying, “The hoodlums grow more desperate in their lawlessness as some of them see that theywill not be able to establish an economic beachhead on the property of the evacuees they vainly hoped wouldsell out or run out”.

Mary discovered that someone, without paying rent or receiving authorization, had farmed the Masuda land

and lived in their home. On the first evening of her return, she was “visited” by five men who threatened herwith bodily harm if she did not leave town; the Gila News-Courier (May 15, 1945) identified the men as “severalOrange County farmers.” When Mary reported the incident to the police, she was told that nothing could bedone about it.

The sheriff changed his mind several days later due to both public and official pressure.

R.C. Hoiles spearheaded the public pressure by featuring a photo of Mary and Masao on the front page of thethen-Santa Ana Register (now the Orange County Register ). He also published lengthy commentaries by Mary,as well as columns defending the returnees and their property rights. On June 6th, in a letter-to-the-editor,Mary expressed her gratitude to Hoiles. “This letter should have been written long ago and I hope you willforgive me for my negligence,” she wrote. “The fine publicity of my incident, along with the large picture ofMasao and myself appearing in the front page of your newspaper was indeed a great honor and I am deeplygrateful to you.… It is truly gratifying to know that an influential concern as your newspaper is standing by theminority group, for the democratic principles so that our gallant men who are giving their supreme sacrificesare not dying in vain”.

The official pressure came from government officials, especially from within the War Department and WRA,who saw the postwar wisdom of reversing the hostility toward Japanese-Americans which they had beeninstrumental in creating. Whereas Hoiles publicized the injustice being done to returnees without fanfare,those with more political motives trumpeted the Masuda case. On December 8th, Four Star General Joseph W.Stilwell, accompanied by General Arthur E. Easterbrook, took the unprecedented step of flying 3,000 milesfrom Washington, D.C. to visit the Masuda farm which had been returned to the family. There he presented

Mary with a Purple Heart on behalf of Kazuo. Usually such medals are presented by the highest ranking officerin the area at the nearest army installation; traditionally, the medal is given to a parent, and both of themattended the December 8th ceremony. Arguably, however, Mary was the more press-worthy family memberdue to her earlier news coverage.

In 1948, Kazuo’s body was brought home from Italy for burial in Westminster Memorial Park, Orange County.But the controversy over his nisei status did not end with death. A November 20, 1948 headline in the Citizen read, “Home Town Cemetery Bars Burial of Nisei War Hero.” The article explained that Kazuo could not beburied in a “desirable” plot with trees and lawns because of a restrictive covenant against those of Japanese



ancestry. Due to intervention by Gen. Mark Clark under whom Kazuo had fought, the cemetery relented. Kazuowas buried in a “desirable” plot with full military honors. His grave became a gathering point for annualceremonies honoring nisei veterans who died in the war.

In 1957, the Kazuo Masuda Memorial VFW Post 3670 was founded in Orange County. On December 17, 1975,the Kazuo Masuda School was dedicated and became the first American public school named for a nisei.

In a public ceremony in November 2005, Mas Masuda thanked R.C. Hoiles on behalf of his family, stating, “Weare very grateful for what he did”.

What R.C. Hoiles did was to speak out against an injustice that had overwhelming public support. After the war,it became popular and politic to defend the nisei. But Hoiles spoke when it counted most — while the injusticewas happening. He did not act in self-promotion or to erase a mistake; he spoke out of simple decency.

When the nisei veterans returned from Italy in July 1946, President Harry S. Truman stated, “You fought notonly the enemy, but you fought prejudice — and you have won”.

Three years earlier, in a letter sent to Mary while she was in a detention camp, Kazuo wrote, “I’ll be alright

wherever I may be. I can take care of myself. Of course, no one likes this war, no one likes to fight and die if hedoesn’t have to, but it is much easier if one knows what he is in here for. Myself and the rest of the CombatTeam, I believe, know for what he fights. It is for us, our future in America.…Of course, we haven’t been treatedexactly fair, we’ve been kicked around. We know that. But we can take it on the chin and come up fighting andwe will win out in the end”.

To this day, Japanese-Americans lay flowers on the grave of R.C. Hoiles.



SECTION IV

GETTING THERE FROM HERE

I am told I laugh in my sleep. That is because I am an optimist by nature.

But these are terrible times that are especially difficult for people who treasure peace and freedom. Nothingshocked me as much as the events of the morning of September 11, 2001, when I sat sipping coffee in myfarmhouse kitchen, watching the news on television, as the World Trade Center collapsed before my eyes. Theworld it left behind is new and frightening because it is so unpredictable. For example, I would never haveimagined that airports could become mini-police states in which customers are treated like criminals andparents stand by as strangers pat down their children’s genitals. I would have argued with my last breath, “That couldn’t happen in America!” I would have insisted that the roots of individualism and freedom are sunk sodeeply into American soil that they could never be uprooted.

I was wrong. America is now a police state. It happened overnight and it happened with next to no protest.Since then, every day seems to bring an acceleration in the tumult, political corruption and economic insanitythat is choking the world. No one knows what to expect in the next few weeks, let alone the next few years.

Nevertheless, I am an optimist.

My optimism comes from turning one question over and over in my mind like a worry bead. The question is,“What can be accomplished right here and now in my own backyard?” When I look at the world at large, Idespair. But I am responsible for my own despair because I allow situations over which I have no control todrain away happiness and energy from the daily life in which I am effective. I cannot control what happens inthe Middle East, Iran, Syria … But, then, I never could. The most I can do is speak out loudly and clearly eventhough I have no expectation of being able to affect anything. I speak out in the hope that the cumulativevoices of reason will prevail at some point.

But what I focus energy upon are the things I can affect and change for the better. I concentrate on grassrootsmovements in which individual voices are the driving force and individuals make an incredible difference. It isin the grassroots movements that are springing up and spreading like fire across North America that I see thefuture of liberty. I see it in the growing number of parents who reject public education and homeschoolinstead. It is alive in the father’s rights movement, especially within the dads who confront the anti-male bias infamily courts. Freedom is active in every group that hits the streets to record police abuse even though theyrisk arrest. It glows within those who protect their privacy through encryption and those who share (whatshould be) public data through strategies like Wikileaks. Freedom may be dead within the institutions likegovernment but it is unquenchable within people. It lives in the grassroots.

What is a grassroots movement? It begins with isolated individuals who are desperately dissatisfied with anissue that deeply affects their lives. Perhaps it is the the public school system that does not teach basic literacyor numeracy to their children. It could be minimum sentencing laws through which a daughter or son has beentossed in with violent criminals and violent prison guards for a victimless crime. It starts with an issue so deeplypersonal that people who have never said “no” to authority before, stand up and refuse to sit down.Grassroots movements usually begin by saying “no” on a local level, to a local school board, at a town meetingor to district court. Sometimes they never proceed beyond the local level. But if the injustice they areconfronting is widespread, then the voices multiply and spread. They become the most powerful political force



on the face of the earth: the voice of the people.

One of the political beauties of libertarianism is that it is a populist ideology. It deals with fundamental rightsthat are possessed by all human beings; it defends everyone’s life, liberty, and property equally. It says to thepoorest, most disadvantaged person in society, “You have the same due process rights as a billionaire.”Libertarianism is a profoundly non-elitist. It is profoundly the politics of the everyman.

Grassroots movements are the path from here to there.

This section analyzes the “from here to there” question from two basic perspectives. First, what are thebarriers? Second, what are the solutions?



Is America Now a Police State?

I have thought on and off about one book for years now. Defying Hitler is a mesmerizing memoir written by theGerman journalist Sebastian Haffner (a pseudonym for Raimund Pretzel) shortly after he emigrated fromGermany to England with his Jewish wife in 1938. In it, Haffner examines how a highly cultured and civilizednation could slip so quickly into the barbaric totalitarianism of Nazi rule. My version of this question is, how

could America, a nation with deep roots in individual freedom, so quickly slide into a police state?

A common explanation is that they do not notice. Unless they are steeped in history, those accustomed toliberty or civility can be blithely unaware of the importance of mechanisms like due process; it is those who livedwithout such “legal niceties” who knew full well that the likes of habeas corpus are protections upon which thelife or death of innocent people will hinge.

Many of those who do notice refuse to believe their freedom will deteriorate beyond a certain point. Haffnernotes how his educated associates constantly ridiculed the Nazis as a passing phase. I hear much the same fromassociates in the United States who dismiss the rise of totalitarianism with the words “But this is America! Itcannot happen here”.

Still others who notice are convinced by the fear tactics of authorities that surrendering rights is necessary toensure their continued comfort and safety. In Germany, the crisis exploited was the devastation caused by the punitive terms of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles. The rise of socialism and the presence of “theother,” especially Jews, were used both to stir anger against a common enemy and to scare people intosubservience.

Haffner also speaks of the “automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any lively, forceful reactionagainst the horror” of Hitler. This may be true of many Americans as well, who see the erosion of freedom on adaily basis. Nevertheless — because they wake up in their own homes, eat the same cereal for breakfast, workat the same boring job to which they drive down familiar streets — they have a sense that everything is as it hasalways been. The fact that the legal structure, political protections, and other institutions that guarded their

freedoms are going, going, gone is nowhere near as real to them as are their daily routines.

Does America now qualify as a police state? And, if so, where do you — or will you — personally draw a hardline and say, “No! That is a law or a police order I refuse to obey”?

In every state, the law is ultimately backed by police force against the body or property of a transgressor. If thelaw is used only against those who violate the person or property of others, then the use of force is to beapplauded. When the law is used against peaceful people, however, then the police have crossed the line frompreventing crime to imposing social control. Past that line, I see only differences of degree, not of kind in howtotalitarian a state may be. Differences of degree should not be trivialized, however. Even small differences in

the degree of repression imposed on people can be matters of life or death.

A police state is commonly described as a totalitarian government that exerts extreme social, political, andeconomic control. It maintains this control by a pervasive surveillance of its own citizenry, by draconian lawenforcement, and by granting or withholding “privileges” such the ability to travel. Typically, there is a specialpolice force, such as the Stasi, that operates with no transparency and few restraints. Unlike traditionalpolicemen, who respond to crime, the entire purpose of such state police is to monitor and control society.

To restate the opening question: does America now embody this common description of a police state?



Clearly it does. The American government exerts extreme control over society, down to dictating which foodsmay be eaten. The government’s control over the flow of money and goods is close to absolute. It evenpoliticizes and presides over the traditional bastion of privacy — the family. Surveillance of daily life is now agiven, with the Supreme Court recently expanding the “right” of police to perform warrantless searches.Enforcement is so draconian that the United States has more prisoners per capita than any other nation in theworld. Over the last few years, the police have deliberately militarized their procedures and attitudes. Travel,formerly a right, is now a privilege granted by government agents at their whim.

One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is prominently on display. Several huge law-enforcement agenciesoperate with no transparency and few restraints. Their entire purpose is to monitor the peaceful behavior ofcitizens, with no pretense of preventing violence. These agencies operate largely outside the restrictions of theConstitution; for example, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) conducts arbitrary searches inviolation of Fourth Amendment guarantees.

The Internet would run out of electrons before I could complete a list of the specifics that constitute anemerging Police America. The extent to which you are personally oppressed by the state, however, can beroughly estimated by answering four questions:

•

How many peaceful activities would now make you a criminal if you choose to do them?

• How much of your life is now spent working to pay a wide variety of taxes and other government fees?

• How freely can you relocate your assets and person outside state jurisdiction?

• How freely can you use your assets and person within state jurisdiction?

Few people can answer these questions in a way that makes them feel anything but economically enslaved andphysically trapped.

Personal Responses to the Police State

No one should have to choose between their freedom and the state, nor their wealth and the law. Whenconfronted by such choices, there is no easy or correct answer. An increasing number of Americans arebecoming expatriates for their own safety and that of their families. But the great majority of people arerooted in place by extended family, friends, work, inertia, emotional attachments, or other compelling reasons.

Those who recognize the emergence of Police America and yet feel a need to stay should ask themselves aquestion: where is the limit at which you withdraw your cooperation and say “No!” to a state law or a stateagent’s order? Would you inform on a neighbor, as the authorities already urge you to do? Would you assist afriend or family member even if it made you criminally an accessory? If you would do so, then for whom wouldyou do it? A brother? A cousin? Would you steal from or harm an innocent person if a state agent commandedyou? If ordered, would you assist a police officer to harm an innocent person, or would you decline andbecome vulnerable to a charge of “obstructing justice”?

There are several reasons for asking yourself such questions here and now. They include:

• The consequences of your act may depend not merely on where you draw a line but also on how youdo so. Planning can help you draw your line in a prudent way.

• You may be reluctant to draw the lines you believe are appropriate because you fear endangering your



loved ones, your wealth, or something else of value. If possible, secure these valuables in advance.Prepare.

• If you don’t know where the lines are, then you are far more likely to act against your own principles orinterests when suddenly confronted by a distressing, demanding situation like an officer barkingcommands.

•

Knowing where your limits are makes it more possible to avoid situations that trigger them.

• You should pay a price as soon as possible because it costs less overall. It will never be easier for you toconsider this question than right now, in privacy and comfort.

There are no correct answers. The purpose of the exercise is merely to become more aware of how you,personally, could live under a police state while retaining your safety and your self-respect.



Grappling With the Banality of Evil

Everyone who works for a better world must confront the undeniable presence and power of evil. I do not usethe word “evil” in a Biblical sense but to indicate those people who are so profoundly anti-life that they receive joy from destruction. Concepts like justice and human decency mean nothing to such people, and so they makea desert wherever they go.

Fortunately, truly sadistic people are rare. Unfortunately, tendencies toward cruelty and depraved indifferenceexist within all of us; they define one extreme within human psychology. A civilized society is one in which thevicious side of human psychology is discouraged and the co-operative side is rewarded. As a general rule ofthumb, the more force a society tolerates — in the form of law, military incursions or other violence — the morevicious its members become. When the force is institutionalized, in the form of a massive prison system forexample, then those with anti-social and sadistic tendencies have found a home. They have found a place thatrewards them for their depraved indifference.

It is necessary to look evil directly in the face.

A headline from the UK newspaper the Guardian (March 23, 2011) read, “US soldier admits killing unarmedAfghans for sport.” That is what Jeremy Morlock respectfully told an army judge about his participation in a“kill team” of soldiers in Afghanistan who targeted harmless civilians and then staged the corpses to look likedead insurgents. “The plan was to kill people, sir,” he said. Members of the kill team took trophy photos of themurdered civilians; some kept body parts as mementos.

The foregoing describes evil . The word is not in fashion today, perhaps because it is too closely associated withthe evangelical right, or perhaps because it has been overused to the point of exhaustion.

Defining Evil

What is meant by evil in this context?

This article uses a (Ayn) Randian framework to define evil as an act that is profoundly anti-life and is inflictedwithout just cause. It refers exclusively to human behavior that is intentional, not accidental, and excludes actscaused by extreme mental conditions, such as schizophrenia. It refers to people who make the intentional anduncoerced choice to destroy innocent life for pleasure or other profit.

Human behavior and psychology are so vast and elastic that there will always be a certain number of peoplewho choose evil. Two authors are particularly valuable in grappling to understand the nature of evil and whysome people choose it: Hannah Arendt and Henry David Thoreau.

Hannah Arendt

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) the German-American politicaltheorist Hannah Arendt opened a unique window through which to gaze upon evil. Jewish by birth, Arendtescaped Nazi Europe in 1941 and later became a naturalized American citizen. In 1961, on behalf of the NewYorker magazine, Arendt reported on the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-level bureaucrat who hadbeen instrumental in administering the Nazi death camps.

She opened the trial’s transcript in order to examine a sadistic monster; she closed it without finding one. Like



his fellow Nazi Heinrich Himmler, who went from being a chicken farmer to heading the notoriously brutal SS,Eichmann seemed to be an ordinary man with a talent for carrying out orders. Arendt coined a term — the“banality of evil” — partly as a way to describe Eichmann’s demeanor during the trial, in which he denied allresponsibility for the mass murders on the grounds that he was just following orders; he was obeying the law.

In page after page, Eichmann evinced no guilt, malice, or insanity. Indeed, as a man on trial, the mostremarkable emotion he displayed was a tendency to brag; Arendt called bragging “the vice that was

Eichmann’s undoing” because it led him to speak of atrocities that he had not been ordered to commit. ToArendt, it seemed Eichmann would rather die as a war criminal than live as a nobody.

Arendt continued to elaborate on how seemingly ordinary people can commit terrible acts simply becausethose acts were performed in a systematic manner and within a sanctioned context — a context thatdiscouraged accountability by rewarding obedience. Thus, unthinkable acts became acceptable because theyconstituted “just the way things are.” A reviewer of Arendt’s book observed that the Nazis had “normalized theunthinkable”.

Arendt’s insights also applied to the more mundane acts of evil committed during Hitler’s reign. For example,the sudden seizure of Jewish property ceased to be theft if it was done through “proper” paperwork, stamped

and filled out in triplicate by a government clerk. Those who processed the forms or inventoried the goodswere simply doing paperwork and inventory; they were “honest” people doing their jobs. Of course, as a resultof their “honest” labor, innocent people were stripped of their property and lives. The same was true of prisonguards, special police forces, and an obedient judiciary. They obeyed laws without question. For them, the lawassumed the role that conscience plays in other people. It told them what is right or wrong, and they obeyed.

People decided to obey for many reasons, of course. Some see it as a path to success or importance. Othersfear the consequences of disobedience. Many, like those who do the paperwork to facilitate theft or murder,view their jobs as routine and as far from evil as imaginable. They simply want to collect a paycheck or acquirea pension; and they give no thought to the content or consequences of their actions. Indeed, they wouldprobably be offended by anyone who suggested they should.

Arendt’s complex explanation of “the banality of evil” offers insight into Morlock and his kill team inAfghanistan. They were in an environment that systematically dehumanized the average Afghan. Morlock wasalso part of a military culture that systematically erased a sense of personal responsibility and the individual’smoral conscience.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau offered insight into the military mindset that allows people to kill strangers who havedone them no harm—and so, by extension, into the mind of Morlock. In his work On Civil Disobedience,Thoreau objected to majority rule because the views of the majority do not always coincide with what ismorally correct. Every human being has a fundamental obligation to discover for himself what is just and then

to act according to his conscience, even if it contradicts the majority or the law. It is precisely his moralconscience that makes a man fully human and not merely another animal.

It is within the military that Thoreau saw the greatest relinquishment of moral conscience because the militaryproclaims “obeying orders” to be the highest ideal and duty of a soldier. Thoreau contemplated especiallythose men who march off to kill strangers, and perhaps to die themselves, in conflicts that they had called“unjust” as civilians. The answer was clear; they replaced their own moral judgment with the dictates oflegislators and other authorities. Thoreau wondered whether the soldiers retained or relinquished theirhumanity in doing so. Thoreau concluded that once a man abandons his moral judgment, he ceased to be fully



human and became a machine; his body became a mere tool to be used by others.

Thoreau wrote,

Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of someunscrupulous man in power?…

The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.… In mostcases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they putthemselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps bemanufactured that will serve the purpose as well.

Many consider “service” to their country to be an automatic virtue; Thoreau believed it was a dehumanizingvice if it involved the abandonment of conscience. The military demanded precisely such abandonment.

Few activities can be as dehumanizing as patrolling foreign streets in the role of an occupying force. On a dailybasis, soldiers like Morlock point guns at strangers who have done them no harm; they are taught that everywoman or young child could be an enemy waiting to cause death. When you strip away a man’s conscience,

hand him a gun with little accountability, and then tell him he is surrounded by the enemy, the worst within hishumanity is likely to surface. Or perhaps Thoreau is correct: his humanity itself may disappear.

Arendt once stated, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to begood or evil.” If so, then the first step toward evil for most people is agreeing to blind themselves to thatdistinction.

Open your eyes. Because you are one of the good people upon whom the rest of us are relying.



Why Good Men Do Nothing

This is a key question for those who dream of a better world. Overwhelmingly, the people you meet in daily lifeare decent human beings. You buy groceries and gas from them; you entrust your children to teachers andbaby-sitters; you lend a co-worker $5 with no doubt in your mind that he will pay you back with thanks; yourdog wanders off and the person who finds him calls so you can pick up the miscreant. And yet this world of

decent people is overflowing with man-made misery, injustice and gratuitous cruelty — in short, with evil. Howcan the two be reconciled?

One reason is that good people too often do nothing to prevent evil from prevailing. For many, the inertiacomes from what is called learned helplessness.

One reason is that good people too often do nothing to prevent evil from prevailing. For many, the inertiacomes from what is called learned helplessness.

In his book Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents (1770), the British philosopher Edmund Burke wrote,

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one … ” This sentiment hassurvived as “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing”.

Why do good men do nothing in the face of evil, especially when evil aggressively invades their lives? Forexample, the good German citizen under Hitler or the average Russian under Stalinism.

The question has red-hot relevance to those who value the tradition of individual freedom into which Americawas born — a tradition that includes freedom of speech and the right to bear arms and demand due process.The traditional freedoms are crumbling under a runaway government. Through dozens of “alphabet agencies”— the IRS, BATF, CPS, DHS — government is entering the lives of good men who often seem to do nothing toprotect themselves or their families from evil.

Why? Some people are paralyzed by fear; some by denial. But many others are immobilized by an apathy thatstrips away the emotional will to act in self-defense.

In psychological terms, apathy is a state of constant indifference that is generally associated with depression.Apathy leaves an individual unresponsive to the world and creates a disconnect between what he believes,how he feels and which actions he takes. For example, a man might fully recognize that food is necessary to lifebut, because he doesn’t care, he doesn’t eat.

Translated into political terms, he might realize that a gluttonous government is feasting on his liberty, hiswealth, and even on his children’s future but, because he feels only numbness toward government, he doesn’tact in self-defense. He obeys authority even when the command is self-destructive and harmful to his family.

The question of why people passively obey government has haunted the history of political discourse. In 1552,Étienne de la Boétie addressed what he called the most important problem confronting freedom: peopleconsent to their own enslavement. His analysis of “why” resulted in the world’s first book on nonviolentresistance, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.

Modern historians ask the same question. During the mass arrests of Stalinist Russia, people reportedly slept intheir clothing — not in order to flee more easily but in order to be fully dressed when seized. In Hitler’s Europe,Jews obeyed commands to report to deportation centers that led them to their deaths and that of their



children. Why? Even dispassionate observers feel the urge to scream the word “Why?”.

Part of the complex answer lies in what psychologists call “object specific” apathy. That is, a person’s numbnessis directed toward a specific situation, and is not necessarily manifested in other areas of his life. The same manwho is passionate about music or his wife may feel impotent in his career. An athlete may be fearless on a fieldof sport and, yet, be the victim of domestic violence at the hands of his wife. A lawyer who is aggressive in thecourtroom may be so paralyzed about demanding his own freedom that he cannot even feel the urge to do so.

This response is a form of what is called “learned helplessness.” It is learned because the response comes froman individual being thoroughly, relentlessly taught that he has no control over a situation and, so, his effortsare futile. What can one person accomplish? You can’t fight city hall. This is learned helplessness, learnedimpotence.

The original and now-famous experiment from which the term “learned helplessness” derives involvedshocking dogs with electricity until they developed the psychology of submission. When applied to humanbeings, “learned helplessness” is most often used to describe people who have been institutionalized — forexample, in prisons, mental institutions, or orphanages. There, the regimentation strips an individual of thesmallest choice and punishes the expression of preference. In time, many institutionalized people accept the

inevitability of their environment. Some of them lose all ability even to feel their own preferences.

The depth of learned helplessness that comes from being institutionalized is rare. But most of us absorb adegree of this apathy through constant exposure to a society that attempts to control almost every choice indaily life: smoking, eating fast food, gun ownership, telling a rude joke at work, marriage and divorce, boardingan airplane, medical care, banking … It is difficult to find a choice that is not scrutinized by bureaucracy andcovered by some form of government control. The message is clear: Conformity is rewarded; the wrong choicesare punished or otherwise discouraged. The public school system is just one example of what could be calledthe institutionalizing or bureaucratizing of daily life that leads to learned helplessness.

The Castle, a brilliant novel by Franz Kafka, offers a window into what happens to the psychology of a man whoconfronts bureaucracy. Due a mistake in paperwork, the main character K. is summoned to work in a village asa surveyor but ends up as a janitor. The Castle is the summoning authority with which K. must but cannot dealbecause he cannot contact the proper official. K.’s long and agonizing exercise in futility reveals the impact thatbureaucracy has upon the human soul: it deadens.

K.’s error was to accept the authority of the Castle in the first place.

The foregoing observation contains good news: bureaucracy and authority require consent. And, if thatconsent is learned behavior, then it can also be unlearned.

Something within the human spirit seems to want to shake off destructive programming. Call it a survivalinstinct. Perhaps it is the inbred urge revealed by every two-year-old who yells no over and over again for the

simple joy of exercising a veto over his own life.

Adults need to recapture the childlike joy and power of saying no. The words most feared by those in authorityare “I won’t.” Individuals with the habit of obedience may need to start by saying no on small matters likerefusing to fill in racial information on application forms. They may be shocked by how difficult it is to say “Iwon’t” even to petty demands. But the difficulty is a sign of how important it is. Only when a person is able tosay no can he say yes and have the word mean more than the obedient response of a servant. Yes only hasmeaning when it is the affirmation of a free man.



It Is Not Personal — It Is Institutional

The previous article points to “the institutionalizing or bureaucratizing of daily life” as one of the main reasonswhy good people do nothing. By acting within the framework of an institution, decent people believe theyrelinquish all personal responsibility for their own actions. “I am only doing my job,” they protest. “I was justobeying orders,” they counter. And, yet, when the job or the orders require committing an injustice against

someone who has done you no wrong, there can be no relinquishment of responsibility. Why should there be?Why does receiving a salary and pension for wronging others make that wrong less egregious? Surely it makesit worse. Every human being is directly responsible for the actions he or she chooses to take.

“My husband is a good man!”

The indignation came from an email acquaintance to whom I had explained one of the reasons I reject thepublic school system — namely, rather than educate children, it indoctrinates them and teaches unthinkingobedience. As it happened, her husband was a grade-school teacher.

My opposition to the public schools is not a personal attack upon those who work within that institution orwithin others I consider harmful. Decrying the role that an individual plays when he joins the state apparatus isnot tantamount to condemning his motives or his character. It would be far easier if it were. I would deeplyappreciate it if agents of the state, such as grade-school teachers, twirled their mustaches, wore black hats,and laughed like the Wicked Witch of the West. They would be easier to spot and far more pleasant to criticize.As it is, I understand that good people with fine intentions become schoolteachers and policemen. But, as longas they act within the rules of their employment, their intentions do not change the role they play.

Rather than being a personal attack, this approach is known as “institutional analysis.” The approach examinesthe dynamics by which the institutions of a society express its laws, customs, and culture. Ultimately, thedynamics come down to the individuals who choose to act through those institutions and, so to perpetuatethem. Without these individuals there would be no institutions, no state.

Institutional Analysis

What is the purpose of an institution, what are the rules by which it functions? And, for that matter, whatconstitutes an institution?

The Random House dictionary defines an “institution” as “a well-established and structured pattern ofbehavior or of relationships that is accepted as a fundamental part of a culture, such as marriage.” Aninstitution is any stable and widely accepted mechanism within a culture for achieving social, economic orpolitical goals. The word applies to such wide-ranging concepts as “the family,” “the free market,” “commonlaw,” “religion,” and “the state”.

The unique structure and procedures of a specific institution will determine the results it produces. As long asthe structure and procedures are followed, the motives of those participating in the institution are irrelevant.For example, a man may work in a candy factory with the announced intention of producing Tupperware, but— as long as he follows the workplace rules — he will produce candy. Likewise, a police officer may truly wishto promote a libertarian view of justice, but — as long as he enforces the laws of the state — he will producethe antithesis of justice. It is the institution and not the character of its servants that defines the overall results.Only by breaking the rules can good men produce, incidentally, good results.



The irrelevance of intentions can be a salutary factor if the institution is one that promotes freedom orprosperity. Consider the free market. As long as everyone respects the rules of the free market by tradingvoluntarily, then it will function as a mechanism that enriches everyone. It doesn’t matter if some of the buyersand sellers are vile human beings while others are saints. You can buy goods from a man whom you wouldnever allow into your home, and he can dislike you personally even as the money changes hands. Beyonddemanding voluntaryism, the free market does not care about intentions.

Types of Institutions

In general, institutions can be broken into two kinds. The first and perhaps the most important division isbetween “spontaneous” and “designed” institutions. An example of a spontaneous institution is the family. Atleast in Western culture, no one predetermines who you will marry and whether you will have children; thosedecisions are left entirely to the individuals involved.

An example of a designed institution is the public school system, which is entirely defined by rules that acentralized authority imposes from on high upon the individuals who participate.

Designed institutions can be further subdivided into two kinds, because not all of them are coercive. An

example of a voluntary designed institution would be a car manufacturer. In order to produce a specificproduct, like a Toyota car, a business must establish rigid rules and require workers to follow them. And, yet,the business remains voluntary and all who associate with it do so of their own free will. This is the secondgeneral distinction between institutions: if it is a designed institution, is it voluntary or coerced?

All spontaneous institutions and uncoerced designed ones are libertarian in their functioning; that is, it violatesno rights. And, again, the intentions of those involved are irrelevant. An institution may be repugnant in itspurpose. It may be a press that promotes religious intolerance or racial bigotry, and so should be opposed onmoral grounds. But as long as it never uses coercion to do so, then its means of functioning is libertarian.

Equally, all designed institutions that rest upon coercion are antithetical to libertarianism in their functioning.Again, a man may join a vicious state apparatus, such as the public school system, with the conscious intent ofdoing “good” but his intentions will not matter any more than it matters with the candy worker who intends toproduce Tupperware. As long as good men obey the procedures of bad institutions, they will produce badresults. Good men acting through the state will strengthen its legitimacy and power.

Moreover, a good man’s participation in coercive institutions weakens any competing alternative ones; itweakens the institutions that could fulfill society’s needs without coercion. The existence of tax-funded publicschools harms private ones that are forced to compete at an economic disadvantage; parents who choseprivate schools are forced to pay for the same “service” twice.

Nineteenth-Century Radical Individualism

Nineteenth-century radical individualism in America was very sound on one point that historians often miss.

In the 19th century, most radicals and reformers along the political spectrum were calling for new systems ofgovernment, societal structures or specific organizations. For example, anarcho-syndicalists believed a bravenew world required their “progressive” vision of industrial relations.

Meanwhile, the individualists had a remarkable insight. They claimed that the institution necessary to secure justice was already present and functioning: the free market. They argued that you did not need an entirelynew blueprint. What you needed is to get rid of the state and to allow the free market to function fully and



spontaneously. The mechanism through which it would function was also already present: the contract, whichwas each individual’s expression of consent. Indeed, the individualists believed so strongly in the power ofcontract that the ideal society was called “society by contract”.

The free market could satisfy not only economic goals but social ones, such as justice. To this end, the 19thcentury individualists provided an excellent discussion of the various means through which a private-courtsystem could arbitrate and adjudicate conflicts.

Thus, the solution to injustice and tyranny was not the Herculean task of creating something new under thesun. The solution was to clear away the obstacles to the institutions of freedom that already existed.Overwhelmingly, this meant clearing away the state. In this task, “good” men who lent their respectability tothe state were, arguably, among the worst obstacles. At bare minimum, their actions made the state function,and their good intentions gave a patina of legitimacy to the injustice and obstructiveness of the state.

And so, to the woman who says, “My husband is a good man!” I must reluctantly repeat the answer, “It doesnot matter”.



Contra Gradualism

Another reason good men do nothing is because they believe in gradualism; that is, they believe it is notnecessary or even desirable to act immediately against an evil like taxation. Even if they oppose public schoolson principle, they think the system should be phased out over time. This means that the system (and the evil) is perpetuated and they continue to act in a manner that offers de facto support of it. Gradualism in theory

become perpetuity in practice. The opposite of gradualism is abolitionism.

It is 1858 and you are living in a Northern town. A man has arrived at your door with papers documenting hisownership of a runaway slave whom you are sheltering. The slave throws himself at your feet, begging to staywhile the slave owner reasons with you. Being a philosophically inclined man, he comments on the political andsocial necessity of preserving slavery for the time being. He assures you he is personally opposed to theinstitution but that, without it, the economy of the South would shrivel and crimes of passion by blacks againstwhites would abound. Slavery must be phased out over time and with proper precautions. After this particularslave has learned a trade to support himself, then and only then should he be freed.

If you reply, “There is no moral or practical consideration that overrides the escaped slave’s right to his ownbody and his own life,” you are an abolitionist.

If you reply, “I am opposed to slavery, but the consequences of immediately ending it would be disastrous;therefore, I will return your slave for the transition period,” you are a gradualist.

The abolition of slavery was the core issue around which libertarians of the early 19th century rallied. Theyopposed phasing out slavery just as they would have opposed phasing out rape. Both are moral abominationson which the only proper position is immediate cessation; that is, it should be stopped as fast as is humanlypossible and no one should participate in anything that acts to continue it.

Before proceeding, it is useful to distinguish gradualism as a policy from gradualism as a statement about how

the real world functions. In terms of real world functioning, gradualists make the common sense observationthat, try as you may, it will take time to implement ideas or achieve results. The transition to an entirely freemarket society would not occur overnight for no other reason than it could not. It will take time to clear awaythe state, due to the temporal reality in which we live. If this is all that is meant by gradualism — if it meant “asfast as possible” — then there is no quarrel between “gradualists” and “abolitionists”.

This is not the formulation of gradualism with which abolitionists take issue. Abolitionists do not deny temporalreality or that change may take some time. But they insist that individual rights must be given priority over allother moral and practical considerations. Abolitionists of the 19th century, for example, realized that thecessation of slavery would take time, but their message was that the deliberate continuation of slavery as apolicy could not be justified. They demanded the abolition of slavery not the mere reduction of it — no “ifs,”

“ands,” or “buts”.

Gradualists stress the “ifs,” “ands,” or “buts” in their preference to gradually phase out unjust laws or agencies.Consider the modern version of slavery: taxation. If taxes were to cease abruptly, it is claimed, theconsequences upon those who have paid into Social Security would be calamitous. Therefore taxes must bephased out over a long period of time. In practice this creates a social system in which new generationsbecome tax-slaves to support “fairness” to older tax-payers. Gradualism in principle becomes perpetuity inpractice, and so the injustice continues indefinitely.



A litmus test to separate a gradualist from an abolitionist is how each would answer the key question, “Is itever too soon to eliminate an unjust law or agency?” The abolitionist gives an unqualified “no, it could never betoo soon.” The gradualist answers either “yes” or “maybe.” For example, he might agree that taxation is theftbut insist that some people might starve if it ceased abruptly. Therefore, he concludes the theft must bephased out (please note: concern for starving people is a laudable reaction but the use of force is not thecorrect solution).

Here the gradualist is not denying taxation violates rights; he is claiming that there is a social good with higherpriority than individual rights: namely, providing for people who might starve. Moreover, he argues for thecontinuation of a government solution as the only way to handle the problem. By posing a dilemma that onlygovernment can solve, the gradualist can justify using force and even do so with an air of moral superiority.Abolition would result in social chaos, he insists; thus, we need a “transition” period during which consciousand deliberate violations of right would continue.

The myth of the transition period accomplishes at least two things. First, it converts libertarianism from apersonal philosophy and obligation that should be consistently lived on a day-to-day basis and makes it,instead, into a vague social goal, a light at the end of a social tunnel. That is, individuals are told to participatein the violation of rights in order to humanely achieve a society in which rights are respected. An abolitionist

like Mohandas Gandhi would object that “the means are the ends in progress.” In other words, you can neverarrive at peace through war or respect for rights through their violation. The means used will determine theresults.

The second feat accomplished by the myth of the transition period is a sleight of hand. By positing the need forsuch a period, the continuing violation of human rights is suddenly shifted into a strategic matter rather than amoral question. In this manner, the gradualist eliminates precisely the issue that is in dispute; can you properlyviolate human rights as a social strategy?

Once you admit the principle of subordinating rights to a social good, there is no way to draw the line. If myrights are violated through taxation to protect the interests of those who are poised to receive Social Security,then why wouldn’t the same principle be applied to me? That is, why shouldn’t I receive money stolen from ayounger generation? This approach doctrine fosters an infinite regress of injustice. The only way to stop aninjustice is to stop the injustice.



In Praise of Working People

The radical individualist Benjamin Tucker was not interested in any strategy that could not be used by the manon the street. He proclaimed this in response to the then-common utopian communities into which kindredspirits would withdraw from society. Tucker did not want to withdraw one whit. He wanted to walk on the samesidewalk as working people, discuss politics and morality with them, hear their opinions and share in their

futures.

By contrast, modern experts and other elites seem to have contempt for the average man for whom they “dumbdown” their messages, if they deign to speak to him at all. Unfortunately, the average person seems also tohave lost confidence in his ability to understand so-called complex political and economic issues. This is yetanother reason why good men do nothing against injustice; they have been conditioned to respect authorityand not to trust themselves. Often those authorities or elites drape themselves in such impenetrablebureaucracy that the average person throws up his hands in impotent confusion.

But no one deserves more respect than people who produce with their own hands or their own minds. They arethe true movers and shakers of the world. In getting from here to there, few steps are more important thanreclaiming respect for working people.

A prominent difference between the 19th-century libertarian movement and the contemporary one lies intheir attitudes toward working people. These are the great majority of people who are not primarily interestedin reading economic or political theory but who focus their energies instead on making a decent living or raisinga healthy family. These are intelligent people who understand the impact of laws and government on their livesbut who concentrate on controlling the more personal factors involved in their own well-being. They areconcerned with what Henry David Thoreau would call “the business of living”.

The 19th-century movement considered working people to be the best and firmest foundation on which tobuild a free society. The two periodicals that constitute a chronicle of earlier libertarianism — The Word and

Liberty — consciously addressed working men and women rather than the elites. Indeed, both The Word andLiberty would probably never have existed if their editors had not previously been active in the New EnglandLabor Reform Association, which aimed at improving the conditions of the working poor. Even Liberty , whichespoused the lofty-sounding “philosophical anarchism,” did not talk down to the laborers who were the bulk ofits subscribers. Instead, it went out of its way to include them; for example, it created a parallelGerman-language publication entitled Libertas so that the large number of German immigrants who generallyworked in factory jobs could access the content.

By contrast, contemporary libertarianism often seems to dismiss working people, sometimes with disdain.Perhaps this attitude comes from Ayn Rand and her portrayals of a solitary hero, like Howard Roark or JohnGalt, who rises like cream from milk above the commonplace. Her novels portray the masses in an incredibly

unflattering light.

But, for those who promote the free market and individualism, there is a great tension involved in dismissingthe concerns of working people. The free market is not an expression of elitism but of the everyman and theeverywoman. It does not function according to the dictates of an elite but according to the needs and desiresof common people. And individual rights, which place the same political value on every single human being, areblind to whether someone teaches at a university or digs ditches.



Ideology and the Everyman

According to elites, the masses are either uninterested in or unable to understand complex concepts like justice or the free market. The masses are said to respond only to matters that directly affect their materialwell-being, like the price of bread. Thus popular issues are phrased in utterly utilitarian or simplistic terms withalmost no surrounding context provided. To the extent ideology is presented, it is done so in the form of vague,rousing appeals to America the Beautiful , the flag or “our boys in uniform.” Of course, such vague appeals are

not ideology at all but merely tired rhetoric.

An ideology is a body of interconnected ideas that form the foundation of a political, economic and moralsystem. A successful ideology combines all three into an integrated whole. As discussed elsewhere in this book,the notion that the masses are not interested in ideology is not merely false but bizarre. The two mostpowerful and revolutionary social forces in Western history are both profoundly ideological and they were bothembraced by working people: Christianity and Marxism.

What was arguably the most successful working people’s cause of 19th-century America was also ideological. Itspoke to average people through a periodical entitled Working Man’s Advocate. This was the land-reformmovement called “homesteading” that grew under the careful stewardship of the libertarian George Henry

Evans. Evans demanded that all land titles be held by the people, not by the government nor by large businessinterests that enjoyed government privilege such as the railroads. In 1829, when Evans organized the AgrarianLeague, he commanded the attention of less than a handful of newspapers. After three decades, of theapproximately 2,000 newspapers published in America, more than 600 of them vocally supported Evans’s landreform. In 1862, Congress passed the first homestead law providing that any citizen who was either 21 yearsold or the head of a family could acquire title to a parcel of federal public land, not to exceed 160 acres.Unfortunately, Evans had died several years earlier.

Other impressive accomplishments of 19th-century libertarianism relate directly to their appeal to the workingperson. For example, the adult education movement arose from the tenements of American cities and had itsroots in the working class Mechanic’s Institutes and Workingman’s Institutes of Scotland and England. Theappeal of grassroots causes should not be dismissed as a 19th-century phenomenon. Today, the most fruitfulavenues for libertarian change may well be the grassroots concerns of average people which are expressedthrough practices like homeschooling. Their appeal is simple; they allow people to reassert control over theirown lives; they facilitate people taking back their lives from government.

Much of classic liberal theory is based on trusting working people more than members of the elite. Forexample, the trial by jury lauded by 19th century legal theorist Lysander Spooner was meant to placecommunity opinion as a safeguard between the individual and the state. As Spooner explained, “The trial by jury is a trial by the country — that is, by the people — as distinguished from a trial by the government.… Theobject … is to guard against every species of oppression by the government.” In short, trial by jury provided aninstitutional procedure through which the community passed judgment on the justice of government law.Thus, no law that was vague, unpopular, or counter to common sense could be enforced. Working people were

a barrier against state oppression.

The Ascendency and Myth of Specialization

Another reason working people are dismissed is that the elite believe specialized knowledge or training isnecessary to understand sophisticated political and moral principles. I think precisely the opposite is true. Ibelieve basic principles are easier to grasp than the issues. Why? Many issues require specialized informationthat average people lack because it is of little practical value to them and, so, there is little incentive to acquireit. In a discussion about Syria, for example, an extensive knowledge of that nation’s history might be required in



order to grasp the points being made. But broad moral questions such as “Is murder justified?” do not requirespecialized information. The fundamental questions are far more intuitive, deriving from both common senseand common decency. A philosopher or legal scholar may have given more thought to the issue of murder buthis reasoning and arguments come from observing the same human nature with which everyone is familiar. Inshort, fundamental moral and political principles offer the extreme advantage of requiring no specializedknowledge to be understood. That is why virtually all human beings come to some conclusion about thepropriety of murder, even though far few may have an opinion on Syria’s future. The more basic the political

issue or principle, the more likely it is to be understood by most people.



Boycott: A Nonviolent Revolt

A goal of libertarianism is to persuade people to look to the economic means, to nonviolent means in order toachieve their goals. When this is achieved, society will be both peaceful and voluntary. For this to happen,however, it is necessary to demonstrate that effective nonviolent strategies can provide social change andredress wrongs. Fortunately, libertarianism has used nonviolence for centuries and its history is a textbook rich

in such strategies. One of them is the boycott.

Ostracism and boycott are such closely related social reform tactics that one is often considered to be a form ofthe other. Ostracism dates back to ancient Greece (at least) and refers to the act of excluding an unacceptableperson from the fellowship of society through general consent.

The term “boycott” was coined in 1880 by the Irish Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell to describe theversion of ostracism that was being used against a certain Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott by his Irishneighbors. This specific form of ostracism became an effective tactic in the struggle of the Irish peasantsagainst English landlords who enjoyed immense legal privileges. By contrast, Irish tenants faced legal barriersto land ownership and were forced to pay huge rents that left them near starvation. In response, in 1879,Parnell and Michael Davitt founded the Land League in order to achieve the three “Fs”: fair rent, free sale, andfixity of tenure. The League evolved into a widespread peasant rebellion — the first peaceful mass uprising thatIreland had enjoyed.

The campaign against Captain Boycott was the League’s most notable early victory. The captain was amuch-hated overseer for Lord Erne, an absentee landlord with holdings in County Mayo. In 1880, when herefused to lower rents for the tenants, an audacious scheme was hatched. Servants no longer worked in hishouse, stores sold him nothing, no mail was delivered, and laborers refused to bring in the harvest. Boycottimported more politically friendly labor from the Protestant county of Ulster but the expense of doing soproved disastrous to him. Eventually, a humiliated Boycott was forced to leave Ireland. The successful rebelliongalvanized Ireland and boycotts erupted across the island. For example, landlords who evicted tenants

suddenly found that no other family would move into the vacated house.

A basic difference between ostracism and boycott becomes clear through this example. Ostracism is often nomore than the punishment of an individual for unacceptable behavior while boycott aims at social change.Since boycott is pursued to achieve a separate goal, it has a better claim to the word “strategy.” In a moregeneral sense, boycott can be defined as “a refusal to associate with someone or to purchase or participate insomething as an act of protest aimed at changing a policy or practice”.

America and Boycott

Boycott was a popular strategy with the 19th-century radicals who congregated around Benjamin Tucker’s

pivotal periodical Liberty. Indeed, it had been well received by the earlier New England Labor Reform Leaguefor which Ezra Heywood’s periodical The Word served as a voice. Boycott seemed to provide a peaceful socialmeans by which people could address actions they considered so immoral as to be intolerable. Without such ameans, libertarians feared that people would turn to government for relief.

Tucker was fascinated by the Irish “no-rent” movement, the main organ of which was Patrick Ford’s IrishWorld . “Liberty is not always satisfied with it [Irish World ],” Tucker wrote, “but, all things considered, deems itthe most potent agency for good now at work on this planet.” Of the Irish Land League, he wrote, “Ireland’strue order: the wonderful Land League, the nearest approach, on a large scale, to perfect Anarchisticorganization…”.



Tucker was not alone in his admiration. Two of Liberty ’s most frequent contributors — Henry Appleton andSidney H. Morse — also wrote columns for Irish World under the pseudonyms of Honorius and Phillip,respectively. Tucker eventually became disillusioned with the Land League.

But the Land League had vindicated the strategy of boycott in the minds of 19th-century American libertarians.Tucker later commented on what he called Ireland’s shortest road to success: “no payment of rent now orhereafter; no payment of compulsory taxes now or hereafter; utter disregard of the British parliament and its

so-called laws; entire abstention from the polls henceforth; rigorous but non-invasive “boycotting” ofdeserters, cowards, traitors, and oppressors…”.

Boycott was an integral part of the “passive but stubborn resistance” that Tucker considered to be the onlystrategic alternative to open revolution and terror, both of which he rejected. He favored passive resistance,which he called “the most potent weapon ever wielded by man against oppression” and “prominent featuresof every great national movement”.

Not all of Tucker’s circle was as enthusiastic about boycott, however. Indeed, some contributors considered thetactic to be invasive because it interfered with another’s ability to make a living. Again and again, Tuckerstaunchly insisted that everyone had the right to ignore others and that such treatment could not constitute

invasion or interference. No one had the right to demand someone else associate with him.

Secondary Boycotts

Other contributors to Liberty accepted primary boycott — that is, the personal refusal to deal with people oragencies — but rejected secondary boycott — that is, the use of strikes or blacklists. The latter tactics weretermed “secondary” because they were often used to aid and expand a “primary” boycott. Many had greatreservations about “secondary” boycott. Nevertheless, Tucker defended even blacklists as nothing more than aform of “employer boycott” and repeated that the refusal to cooperate or associate could never be a form ofcoercion.

A century later, free-market economist Murray Rothbard would echo Tucker. In The Ethics of Liberty , Rothbardwrote, “Furthermore, “secondary” boycotts are also legitimate.… In a secondary boycott, labor unions try topersuade consumers not to buy from firms who deal with non-union (primary boycotted) firms.… [It] should betheir right to try such persuasion, just as it is the right of their opponents to counter with an opposing boycott”.

Addressing what is probably the most hated type of boycott, Rothbard observed, “The blacklist — a form ofboycott — would be legal in a free society.” The only problem Rothbard perceived with any form of boycott layin the practices that were closely associated with the strategy but were entirely separable from it. For example,the common practice of picketing during strikes might be invasive if it blocked access to private property or if itconstituted a threat to so-called “scabs” who crossed the line. But these associated practices did not reflectbadly upon boycott itself. Rothbard concluded, “The important thing about the boycott is that it is purelyvoluntary, an act of attempted persuasion, and therefore that it is a perfectly legal and licit instrument of

action”.

Why, then, can boycotts in the form of strikes and blacklists elicit such public condemnation? The 19th-centurylibertarian Steven Byington offered one explanation: “The State is afraid of it. The boycott offers a means formaking another do as you wish without calling in the State’s aid.” Byington believed that the state recognizedthe boycott as a powerful competitor with whom it could not deal effectively. “They [statists] have theadvantage” in the use of force but “they are paralyzed” when confronted by “non-invasive methods.” Theimpotence of the state when confronted with noncooperation is one of the things that prompted it to commitviolence and pass laws against strikers in the late 19th century. The inexcusable violence of many strikers who



attacked or otherwise interfered with replacement workers justified such laws in the eyes of the public.

Boycott in Modern Times

Much of the modern backlash against strikes and blacklists comes from the fact that they are often backed bygovernment privilege. Unions have collective bargaining “rights” and blacklists (as in the McCarthy era) aresometimes pursued by government agencies for political purposes. In short, a tool by which society could

reform the government has been usurped and made coercive.

Boycott has also been used by governments as a form of foreign policy in terms of blockading or otherwisehindering goods from entering “hostile” nations. These imposed boycotts or embargoes not only violate therights of those who wish to trade with people in the targeted nations, but they are also largely ineffective. Aneffective boycott requires voluntary nonassociation on the part of the boycotters who actively refuse to buy orsell or serve. If the noncooperation is forced, then black marketeers merely skirt the restrictions and cash in onthe higher profits brought by scarcity and the higher risk.

Another form of boycott that has fallen into general disfavor is the social boycott or ostracism. Yet the refusalto continue social relations with an unacceptable person was a mainstay of 19th-century libertarian strategy. In

his publication The Periodical Letter on the Principles and Progress of the Equity Movement (1854-58), thelibertarian Josiah Warren described the workings of an experimental community named Modern Times. In itspages, a member of the community explained how Modern Times protected itself against disruptive individualsand preserved the core vision:

When we wish to rid ourselves of unpleasant persons, we simply let them alone. We buy nothing ofthem, sell them nothing, exchange no words with them — in short, by establishing a complete systemof non-interference with them we show them unmistakably that they are not wanted here, and theyusually go away on their own accord.

Yet social boycott is used to achieve more goals than merely excluding undesirables from a community. In part2 of his definitive three-volume work on strategy, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp addressedthree ways in which resistance movements have used social boycott effectively. In some cases, the ostracismpressured people into inclusion, rather than exclusion. That is, ostracism or its threat was used to “induce largesections of a population to join” a resistance movement, such as Gandhi’s crusade to oust the British fromIndia, or the French Resistance during World War II. A second goal was to induce people to refrain fromcollaboration with an enemy such as an occupying army. Thirdly, social ostracism has been used “to applypressure on … the opponent’s representatives, especially his police or troops.” Thus, police officers who arebrutal to peaceful protesters might find their photos published on websites, urging communities not to dealwith them.

Social boycott as a strategy is sometimes considered obsolete due to today’s massive populations and the easeof mobility. Being ostracized is no longer a hardship, it is claimed, because it is painless for people to move to

another community where they are strangers. Unless the ostracism is pervasive throughout a society — as withthe government-enforced sex offender registries — it can have no impact.

To be effective, however, social boycott need not be conducted on a massive scale. Indeed, ostracism on asmall scale occurs almost naturally within most organizations and social groups, where it is sometimes called“peer pressure.” The strength of social boycott is indicated by the fact that peer pressure occurs spontaneouslythroughout all levels of human interaction. Thus, social boycott can be viewed as the coordination within agroup of what is a naturally occurring response within individuals: the demand and desire to conform or fit in.



The 19th-century individualist feminist Gertrude Kelly considered peer pressure to be so powerful a forcewithin society that she called it the foremost reason women did not rise to equality with men. Kelly declared,

Men … have always denied to women the opportunity to think; and, if some women have had courageenough to dare public opinion, and insist upon thinking for themselves, they have been so beaten bythat most powerful weapon in society’s arsenal, ridicule, that it has effectively prevented the greatmajority from making any attempt to come out of slavery.

Fortunately, such pressure can also be used to liberate rather than to enslave.

Redeeming the Boycott

The best argument as to why economic boycott should be redeemed within libertarian strategy may be to listits diversity. Putting aside “secondary boycott” (e.g., the strike), Gene Sharp discussed a myriad of refinementson the basic economic boycott — that is, refusing to buy, sell, or engage in services. These refinements include:

Action by consumers:

•

Consumer boycotts• Nonconsumption of boycotted goods

• Policy of austerity

• Refusal to rent

• National consumers’ boycott

• International consumers’ boycott

Action by workers and producers:

• Workmen’s boycott

• Producers’ boycott

Action by middlemen:

• Suppliers’ and handlers’ boycott

Action by owners and management:

• Traders’ boycott

• Refusal to let or sell property

• Lockout

• Refusal of industrial assistance

•

Merchants’ “general strike”

Action by holders of financial resources:

• Withdrawal of bank deposits

• Severance of funds and credit

• Revenue refusal



Conclusion

As political disillusionment spreads throughout America, it is necessary to remember that society — notgovernment — is the true engine of social change. Unfortunately, one of the obstacles to freedom is thetendency to dismiss nonviolent, non-political strategies. The application of boycott in its many forms has beenrefined and sophisticated through centuries of use. Like any other strategy, boycott will not address everysituation and it can fail. But the greatest strategic failure would be to dismiss it out of hand.



CONCLUSION

So much of The Art of Being Free is devoted to critiques and criticisms of the State that a reader might be leftwith a clearer impression of what is wrong with life and society than the joy of them. This is a pitfall of caringpassionately for freedom and being politically active: sometimes you forget to live. You forget that life is not

about opposing things but embracing them.

An old friend, Samuel E. Konkin III (SEK3), forged his life so thoroughly around an opposition to governmentthat, instead of answering his phone with “hello,” he would answer, “Smash the State.” I never saw SEK3wearing anything but black — a symbol of anarchism. At parties, he would sit in a chair with his omnipresentpipe and “hold court”; that is, he would take the other guests on, one by one, and argue them into the politicaldust. I remember one duly dusted arguer who wandered my way with a dazed expression and the comment, “Ihaven’t had a discussion like that since I was in the college dorm at night”.

I used to wonder who SEK3 would be if he ever succeeded and the state withered away. Would SEK3 witheraway as well? After all these years, could he bring himself to wear blue and green and yellow? Or would he goto the Old Anarchists Home and tell war stories of his glory days? SEK3 seemed to be a walking, talkingcautionary tale against defining your life around what you reject.

Then science fiction was mentioned in his presence and I met an entirely different man. His eyes lit up, hischeeks flushed and the timbre of his voice lightened. If the state defined what SEK3 was against , then SFdefined what he was passionately for in life. It represented hope, the future, innovation, man overcomingchallenges, man’s mind scaling barriers … SEK3’s knowledge of the literature was encyclopedic and his praisefor writers like Doc Smith and Robert Anton Wilson seemed endless. Here was a subject that made SEK3 glowlike a lightbulb. If the state withered away, then SEK3 would plunge himself even deeper into the other passionof his life: reading and writing science fiction. SEK3 had remembered to live after all!

I want to return to a question asked earlier in the book: “What is your relationship to the State?” To that

question, I add another, “What is your relationship to being alive?”.

The answer I like best to both questions is the one given by the 19th-century American anarchist Henry DavidThoreau. The answer is explored in an earlier essay in this book, which I will recap briefly. To Thoreau, “thebusiness of living” was immensely more important than politics.

Thoreau’s famous act of civil disobedience — his refusal to pay a tax that supported war — was not the act of adetermined political dissident, although he had spoken out against war before. His one night in jail came aboutonly because the state literally knocked on his front door in the form of a tax collector. At that point, whenlooking the state in the face, Thoreau had to make a choice.

Thoreau probably asked himself a question that appeared earlier in the book: At what point do you draw theline and refuse to co-operate with a state law, refuse to obey a state agent? Thoreau believed theMexican-American War was immoral: it violated both his sense of decency and his theory of rights. As long asThoreau was not forced to participate in this “evil” by supporting it, he seemed content to go about thebusiness of living — of enjoying nature, family, and friends. Participation in the oppression of others, however,was where Thoreau drew a hard line, because it went against his duty to live honestly. His tax money wouldhave supported the war.

But when Thoreau was released from jail, he did not file a grievance. He immediately went on a berry huntwith a swarm of young boys. No bitterness. No brooding. No lingering resentment. Without missing a beat,



Thoreau simply returned to living deeply. This post-jail quest for berries occasioned my favorite line from all ofThoreau’s writings. As he tramped the trails in search of juicy treasure, Thoreau found himself standing on ahigh point in a field. He gazed about at the continuous, sprawling beauty that surrounded him and observed“the State was nowhere to be seen”.

It is far more difficult today than in Thoreau’s time to find places where the state cannot be seen. Some wouldsay it is nigh on impossible. But perhaps this only makes it more important to try.

The state can still disappear. For many people, the state disappears in the conduct of their private lives withfamily and friends, where the bonds of affection and trust have nothing whatsoever to do with governmentlaw. When they read bedtime stories to their children, plan a birthday party for a relative, or simply have a cupof coffee with a friend … here the state is nowhere to be seen.

Other people lose themselves in hobbies like model aircraft, breeding dogs, gardening or (my favorite) ethniccooking. As long as there is no fiscal profit being reaped, then here, too, the state is nowhere to be seen.

Many of us have work about which we are passionate. Since the age of five I have wanted to be nothing otherthan a writer, to work with words and ideas. My husband has a similar and bottomless fascination with

electronics and computers. Both of us will go to our graves working with words and electrons … not becauseSocial Security has collapsed but because our passion for those pursuits is integral to who we are, to whatmakes us get up in the morning. If you freed me from a life of writing in order to make a living, then I would usethe liberated time in order to write. For one thing, I’m still fascinated by ideas and theories … especiallysystems of theory, such as Marxism or Objectivism, that offer an integrated explanation of the world fromepistemology to art. Politics — the theory of man’s relationship to society — is an essential part of thatexplanation. And I can’t imagine living without the fun and fascination of ideas.

Thoreau’s berry-picking insight is profound. There is no duty to confront the state except when it seeks tomake you an active accomplice in the oppression of others. Those who stand up against the injustice of othersare to be applauded. But they should not do so at the expense of their primary duty: to live deeply andhonestly. This duty involves pushing back or walking away (when possible) from the areas of life in which thestate commands jurisdiction.

Again, it is more difficult to shrug off the State today than it was in Thoreau’s time.

I cannot tell anyone what to do with their lives. I can only tell you what I do. I take nothing from the State. Iaccept no tax-dollar wages, no grants or entitlements. I do not use the court system nor have I filed a policereport despite the fact that I have been physically attacked and I’ve had property stolen. The only time I haveused a lawyer was when someone threatened a lawsuit against me. In my personal life and relationships, I actas though the State does not exist.

Many, many people do not have this luxury. They battle ex-wives or -husbands to see their children, they are

imprisoned for victimless crimes like smoking marijuana, they confront the IRS who wants to drain theirlife-savings … Walking away from the state isn’t an option for these people, and I do not make light of theirnon-options.

It is precisely because of such people that I haven’t abandoned political activism. But it is important not toforget “the business of living,” the challenge of investing in those things and people I care for rather than instrangers for whom I advocate. The personal is what sustains you; strangers can drain your life away.

And, so, the closing words of “The Art of Being Free” are … Make space for the “business of living” — the areas



of life that allow you to say “Here, the state is nowhere to be seen”.



AN INVITATION FROM WENDY MCELROY

I am tired of just talking about freedom. I am still passionate about the ideas of liberty, but I also want to be free in my own lifetime.

Nothing in decades has excited me about the possibility of living freedom as much as the Laissez Faire Club.Even though it has just been established, the Club is already a thriving concern because it fills a yawning gapboth in the publishing world and in the need for community. Without stinting on intellectual stimulation, theClub offers books, forums, and services that teach members the dynamics of how to be free. This includeseconomic independence, knowledge of your rights, and the good fellowship of a community that welcomesand supports you.

If you have enjoyed The Art of Being Free, then please drop by and check out the Laissez Faire Club. It isamazingly inexpensive to be part of this revolution; it costs less than buying one book in a regular store. Andthe Club offers so much more than products.

When you knock on the door, I will be there blogging and discussing books, events, ideas — but my focus willbe on providing and receiving the knowledge of how to achieve practical freedom.

Freedom needs the Laissez Faire Club; freedom needs you.

http://lfb.org/WendyMcElroy

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