WEBVTT NOTE Liberty and Property 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.560 In the eyes of these Greek and Roman writers, freedom was not something that had to be granted to all men. 2 00:00:08.560 --> 00:00:14.000 It was a privilege of a minority to be with help from the majority. 3 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:20.480 What the Greeks called a democracy was in the light of present-day terminology, 4 00:00:20.480 --> 00:00:25.920 not what Lincoln called government by the people, but oligarchy, 5 00:00:25.920 --> 00:00:32.880 The sovereignty of the full-right citizens in a community in which the majority were 6 00:00:32.880 --> 00:00:41.760 the takes or slaves. Even this rather limited freedom after the fourth century before Christ 7 00:00:42.400 --> 00:00:48.240 was not dealt with by the philosophers, historians, and orators as a practicable 8 00:00:48.240 --> 00:00:56.240 and the Federal Constitutional Institution. As they saw it, it was a feature of the past, lost forever. 9 00:00:57.240 --> 00:01:02.240 They bemoaned the passing of this world and the thought of returning to it. 10 00:01:03.240 --> 00:01:12.240 The second notion of liberty was no less oligarchic, although it was not inspired by any literary reminiscences. 11 00:01:12.240 --> 00:01:25.240 It was the ambition of the Landek aristocracy, and sometimes also of urban patricians, to preserve their privilege against the rising power of royal absolutism. 12 00:01:25.240 --> 00:01:33.240 In most parts of continental Europe, the princes remained victorious in these conflicts. 13 00:01:33.240 --> 00:01:51.240 Only in England and in the Netherlands did the gentry and the patricians succeed in defeating the dynasties, but what they won was not freedom for all, but only freedom for an elite, for a minority of people. 14 00:01:51.240 --> 00:02:01.240 We must not condemn as hypocrites the men who in those ages praised liberty while they preserved 15 00:02:01.240 --> 00:02:06.240 the legal disabilities of the many, even serfdom and slavery. 16 00:02:06.240 --> 00:02:13.240 They were faced with a problem which they did not know how to solve satisfactorily. 17 00:02:13.240 --> 00:02:21.800 The traditional system of production was too narrow for a continually rising population. 18 00:02:21.800 --> 00:02:29.200 The number of people for whom there was, in the full sense of the term, no room left by 19 00:02:29.200 --> 00:02:35.920 the pre-capitalistic methods of agriculture and artisanship, was increasing. 20 00:02:35.920 --> 00:02:41.560 These supernumeraries were starving popes, they were a menace to the preservation of 21 00:02:41.560 --> 00:02:48.160 of the Existing Order of Society, and, for a long time, nobody could think of another 22 00:02:48.160 --> 00:02:54.160 order, a state of affairs that would feed also these poor wages. 23 00:02:54.160 --> 00:03:01.160 There could not be any question of granting them full civil rights, still less of giving 24 00:03:01.160 --> 00:03:05.360 them a share in the conduct of affairs of state. 25 00:03:05.360 --> 00:03:15.080 The only expedient the rulers knew was to keep them quiet by resorting to force. 26 00:03:15.080 --> 00:03:20.160 The pre-capitalistic system of production was restricted. 27 00:03:20.160 --> 00:03:24.400 The historical basis was military conquest. 28 00:03:24.400 --> 00:03:30.200 The victorious states had given the land to their paladins. 29 00:03:30.200 --> 00:03:36.720 These aristocrats were wrought in the literal sense of the word as they did not depend on 30 00:03:36.720 --> 00:03:43.080 the patronage of consumers buying or abstaining from buying on the market. 31 00:03:43.080 --> 00:03:49.400 On the other hand, they themselves were the main customers of the processing industries 32 00:03:49.400 --> 00:03:54.720 which under the gilt system were organized on a corporative basis. 33 00:03:54.720 --> 00:03:59.260 This scheme was opposed to innovation. 34 00:03:59.260 --> 00:04:03.900 forbids deviation from the traditional methods of production. 35 00:04:03.900 --> 00:04:13.460 The number of people for whom there were jobs either in agriculture or in the arts and crafts was strictly limited. 36 00:04:13.460 --> 00:04:26.060 Under these conditions, many a man, to use the words of Maltese, had to discover that at nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him, 37 00:04:26.060 --> 00:04:29.060 and that nature tells them to be warm. 38 00:04:30.560 --> 00:04:35.060 But some of these outcasts nevertheless managed to survive, 39 00:04:35.560 --> 00:04:42.060 begot children and made the number of the destitute grow hopelessly more and more. 40 00:04:43.860 --> 00:04:46.060 But then came capitalism. 41 00:04:47.360 --> 00:04:52.060 It is customary to see the radical innovation that capitalism brought about 42 00:04:52.060 --> 00:04:58.900 and the substitution of the mechanical factory for the more primitive and less efficient 43 00:04:58.900 --> 00:05:01.340 methods of the artisan shops. 44 00:05:01.340 --> 00:05:06.340 This is a rather superficial view. 45 00:05:06.340 --> 00:05:12.620 The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from pre-capitalistic methods 46 00:05:12.620 --> 00:05:18.900 of production was its new principle of marketing. 47 00:05:18.900 --> 00:05:27.780 Production is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses. 48 00:05:27.780 --> 00:05:33.580 The arts and crafts of the good old days had catered almost exclusively to the wants of 49 00:05:33.580 --> 00:05:40.220 the well-to-do, but the factories produced cheap goods for the many. 50 00:05:40.220 --> 00:05:47.140 All that the early factories turned out was designed to serve the masses, the same strata 51 00:05:47.140 --> 00:06:02.140 that worked in the factories. They served them either by supplying them directly or indirectly by exporting and thus providing for them foreign food and foreign raw materials. 52 00:06:03.140 --> 00:06:10.140 This principle of marketing was the signature of early capitalism as it is of present-day capitalism. 53 00:06:10.140 --> 00:06:19.140 The employees are themselves the customers consuming the much greater part of all goods produced. 54 00:06:19.140 --> 00:06:24.140 They are the sovereign customers who are always right. 55 00:06:24.140 --> 00:06:33.140 Their buying or abstention from buying determines what has to be produced, in what quantity and of what quality. 56 00:06:33.140 --> 00:06:39.980 In buying what suits the invest, they make some enterprises profit and expand and make 57 00:06:39.980 --> 00:06:43.220 other enterprises lose money and shrink. 58 00:06:43.220 --> 00:06:49.340 Thereby, they are continually shifting control of the factors of production into the hands 59 00:06:49.340 --> 00:06:55.220 of those businessmen who are most successful in filling their wants. 60 00:06:55.220 --> 00:07:01.420 Under capitalism, private property of the factors of production is a social function. 61 00:07:01.420 --> 00:07:09.500 The entrepreneurs, capitalists and landowners are mandatory as it were of the consumers 62 00:07:09.500 --> 00:07:12.780 and their mandate is revocable. 63 00:07:12.780 --> 00:07:18.420 In order to be rich it is not sufficient to have once saved and accumulated capital. 64 00:07:18.420 --> 00:07:24.460 It is necessary to invest it again and again in those lines in which it best fills the 65 00:07:24.460 --> 00:07:27.860 wants of the consumers. 66 00:07:27.860 --> 00:07:35.260 The market process is a daily repeated plebiscite and it ejects inevitably from the ranks of 67 00:07:35.260 --> 00:07:42.180 the proclamated people those who do not employ their property according to the orders given 68 00:07:42.180 --> 00:07:43.180 by the public. 69 00:07:43.180 --> 00:07:50.540 Big business, the target of fanatical hatred on the part of all contemporary governments 70 00:07:50.540 --> 00:07:56.420 and self-styled intellectuals, acquires works for the masses. 71 00:07:56.420 --> 00:08:04.420 The plans that cater to the luxuries of the few never attained big size. 72 00:08:04.420 --> 00:08:10.420 The shortcoming of 19th century historians and politicians was that they failed to realize 73 00:08:10.420 --> 00:08:16.420 that the workers were the main consumers of the products of industry. 74 00:08:16.420 --> 00:08:24.420 In their view, the wage earner was a man poiling for the sole benefit of the parasitic leisure class. 75 00:08:24.420 --> 00:08:31.420 They labored under the delusion that the factories had impaired a lot of the manual workers. 76 00:08:31.420 --> 00:08:38.420 If they had paid any attention to statistics, they would have easily discovered the fallaciousness of their opinion. 77 00:08:38.420 --> 00:08:45.420 Infant mortality dropped, the average length of life was prolonged, population multiplied, 78 00:08:45.420 --> 00:08:53.420 and the average common man enjoyed amenities of which even the wealth to do of earlier ages did not dream. 79 00:08:53.420 --> 00:09:03.420 However, this unprecedented enrichment of the masses was merely a by-product of the 80 00:09:03.420 --> 00:09:04.420 Industrial Revolution. 81 00:09:04.420 --> 00:09:12.140 Its main achievement was the transfer of economic supremacy from the owners of land to the totality 82 00:09:12.140 --> 00:09:14.340 of the population. 83 00:09:14.340 --> 00:09:19.900 The common man was no longer a dredge who had to be satisfied with the crumbs that fell 84 00:09:19.900 --> 00:09:21.900 from the tables of the rich. 85 00:09:21.900 --> 00:09:30.240 The three higher castes which were characteristic of the pre-capitalistic ages, the slaves, 86 00:09:30.240 --> 00:09:37.260 the serfs and those people whom patristic and scholastic authors as well as British 87 00:09:37.260 --> 00:09:43.900 legislation from the 16th to the 19th century has appeared. 88 00:09:43.900 --> 00:09:50.540 Their science became into a new setting of business, not only free workers but also customers. 89 00:09:50.540 --> 00:09:57.140 This radical change was reflected in the emphasis laid by business on markets. 90 00:09:57.140 --> 00:10:04.340 What business needs first of all, they repeated again and again, is markets and again markets. 91 00:10:04.340 --> 00:10:07.140 This was the watchword of capitalistic enterprise. 92 00:10:07.140 --> 00:10:11.140 Markets, that means patrons, buyers, consumers. 93 00:10:11.140 --> 00:10:17.340 There is under capitalism only one way to wealth, to serve the consumers better and 94 00:10:17.340 --> 00:10:27.420 Within the shop and the factory, the owner or, in corporations, the representative of 95 00:10:27.420 --> 00:10:33.940 the shareholders, the president, is the boss, lest the mastership is merely apparent and 96 00:10:33.940 --> 00:10:34.940 conditional. 97 00:10:34.940 --> 00:10:39.020 He is subject to the supremacy of the consumers. 98 00:10:39.020 --> 00:10:44.660 The consumer is king, is the real boss, and the manufacturer is done for if he does not 99 00:10:44.660 --> 00:10:55.860 It was this great economic transformation that changed the face of the world. 100 00:10:55.860 --> 00:11:02.380 It very soon transferred political power from the hands of a privileged minority into the 101 00:11:02.380 --> 00:11:04.100 hands of the people. 102 00:11:04.100 --> 00:11:10.420 Adult franchise followed in the way of industrial enfranchisement. 103 00:11:10.420 --> 00:11:15.820 The common man to whom the market process had given the power to choose the entrepreneurs 104 00:11:15.820 --> 00:11:21.740 and capitalists acquired the analogous power and the fee of government. 105 00:11:21.740 --> 00:11:25.260 He became a voter. 106 00:11:25.260 --> 00:11:31.100 It has been observed by eminent economists, I think first by the late Frank Fetter from 107 00:11:31.100 --> 00:11:38.060 Princeton, that the market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. 108 00:11:38.060 --> 00:11:44.340 It would be more correct to say that representative government by the people is an attempt to 109 00:11:44.340 --> 00:11:51.020 arrange constitutional affairs according to the model of the market, but that this design 110 00:11:51.020 --> 00:11:53.020 can never be fully achieved. 111 00:11:53.020 --> 00:12:00.140 In the political field, it is always the will of the majority that prevails, and the minorities 112 00:12:00.140 --> 00:12:02.140 must yield to it. 113 00:12:02.140 --> 00:12:07.140 The business caters not only to the desires of the majority. 114 00:12:07.140 --> 00:12:15.140 It serves also minorities, provided they are not so insignificant in numbers as to become negligible. 115 00:12:15.140 --> 00:12:23.140 The garment industry produces clothes not only for normal people, but also for the stout. 116 00:12:23.140 --> 00:12:33.140 The publishing trade publishes not only westerns and detective stories for the crowd, but also books for discriminating readers. 117 00:12:37.140 --> 00:12:51.140 There is a second important difference. In the political sphere, there is no means for an individual or a small group of individuals to disobey the will of the majority. 118 00:12:51.140 --> 00:12:56.460 But in the intellectual field, private property makes rebellion possible. 119 00:12:56.460 --> 00:13:00.060 The rebel has to pay a price for his independence. 120 00:13:00.060 --> 00:13:06.460 There are in this universe no prizes that can be won without sacrifices. 121 00:13:06.460 --> 00:13:16.260 But if a man is prepared to pay the price, he is free to deviate from the ruling orthodoxy or neo-orthodoxy. 122 00:13:16.260 --> 00:13:28.760 What would conditions have been in a socialist commonwealth for heretics like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Weblen or Freud, for Monet, Courbet, Wald, Wittmann, Rilfke or Kafka? 123 00:13:28.760 --> 00:13:40.760 In all ages, pioneers of new ways of thinking and acting could work only because private property made to some extent contempt of the majority's ways possible. 124 00:13:40.760 --> 00:13:50.760 Only a few of these separatists were themselves economically independent enough to defy the government and the opinions of the majority. 125 00:13:50.760 --> 00:13:58.760 As they found in the climate of the free economy, among the public people prepared to aid and support them. 126 00:13:58.760 --> 00:14:08.760 What would Marx have done without his patron, the manufacturer and exploiter, Friedrich Engels? 127 00:14:08.760 --> 00:14:15.560 What vitiates entirely the socialist economic critique of capitalism is their failure to 128 00:14:15.560 --> 00:14:19.960 grasp the sovereignty of the consumers and the market economy. 129 00:14:19.960 --> 00:14:26.840 They see only the hierarchical organization of the various enterprises and plants and 130 00:14:26.840 --> 00:14:33.920 are at a loss to realize that the profit system forces business to serve the consumers. 131 00:14:33.920 --> 00:14:39.720 In their dealings with the employers, the unions proceed as if only malice and greed 132 00:14:39.720 --> 00:14:46.240 were to prevent what they call management from paying higher wage rates. 133 00:14:46.240 --> 00:14:52.280 Their short-sightedness does not see anything beyond the doors of the factory. 134 00:14:52.280 --> 00:14:58.560 They and their henchmen talk about concentration of economic power and do not realize that 135 00:14:58.560 --> 00:15:04.000 This economic power is ultimately vested in the hands of the buying public, of which the 136 00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:07.800 employees themselves form the immense majority. 137 00:15:07.800 --> 00:15:16.360 Their inability to comprehend things as they are is reflected in such inappropriate metaphors 138 00:15:16.360 --> 00:15:19.160 as industrial kingdoms and duktums. 139 00:15:19.160 --> 00:15:26.320 They are too dull to see the difference between a sovereign king or duke who could be dispossessed 140 00:15:26.320 --> 00:15:34.240 only by a more powerful conqueror and a chocolate king who forfeits his kingdom as soon as the 141 00:15:34.240 --> 00:15:40.560 customers prefer to patronize another supplier. 142 00:15:40.560 --> 00:15:44.360 This distortion is at the bottom of all socialist plans. 143 00:15:44.360 --> 00:15:51.000 If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would 144 00:15:51.000 --> 00:15:56.240 have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers. 145 00:15:56.240 --> 00:16:10.540 Lenin's ideal was to build a nation's production effort according to the model of the post-office, 146 00:16:10.540 --> 00:16:18.440 an outfit that does not depend on the consumers because its deficits are covered by the compulsory 147 00:16:18.440 --> 00:16:21.720 collection of taxes. 148 00:16:21.720 --> 00:16:28.120 The whole of society, he said, was to become one office and one factory. 149 00:16:28.120 --> 00:16:33.960 He did not see that the very character of the office and the factory is entirely changed 150 00:16:33.960 --> 00:16:39.840 when it is alone in the world and no longer grants to people the opportunity to choose 151 00:16:39.840 --> 00:16:43.960 among the products and services of various enterprises. 152 00:16:43.960 --> 00:16:50.920 Because his blindness made it impossible for him to see the role the market and the consumer's 153 00:16:50.920 --> 00:17:18.040 Socialism substitutes the sovereignty of a dictator or a committee of dictators for 154 00:17:18.040 --> 00:17:24.200 of the Sovereignty of the Consumers. Along with the economic sovereignty of the citizens 155 00:17:24.200 --> 00:17:30.800 disappears also their political sovereignty. To the unique production plan that annuls 156 00:17:30.800 --> 00:17:36.840 any planning on the part of the consumers corresponds in the constitutional sphere the 157 00:17:36.840 --> 00:17:43.720 one-party principle that deprives the citizens of any opportunity to plan the course of public 158 00:17:43.720 --> 00:17:51.200 Freedom is indivisible. He who has not the faculty to choose among various brands of 159 00:17:51.200 --> 00:17:57.400 canned food or soap is also deprived of the power to choose between various political 160 00:17:57.400 --> 00:18:05.400 parties and programs and to elect the officeholders. He is no longer a man, he becomes a pawn in 161 00:18:05.400 --> 00:18:11.480 the hands of the supreme social engineer. Even his freedom to wear progeny will be taken 162 00:18:11.480 --> 00:18:21.360 are very value genics. Of course, the socialist leaders occasionally assure us that dictatorial 163 00:18:21.360 --> 00:18:27.200 tyranny is to last only for the period of transition from capitalism and representative 164 00:18:27.200 --> 00:18:34.760 government to the socialist millennium in which everybody wants and wishes will be fully 165 00:18:34.760 --> 00:18:44.280 Once the socialist regime is sufficiently secure to risk capitalism, Ms. Joan Robinson, the 166 00:18:44.280 --> 00:18:52.280 eminent representative of the British Neocambridge School, is kind enough to promise us even 167 00:18:52.280 --> 00:18:57.720 independent philharmonic societies will be allowed to exist. 168 00:18:57.720 --> 00:19:03.240 Thus the liquidation of all dissenters is the condition that will bring us what the 169 00:19:03.240 --> 00:19:21.240 from this point of view we may also understand what another distinguished Englishman Mr. Crota had in mind when he praised inquisition as beneficial to science when it protects a rising class. 170 00:19:21.240 --> 00:19:32.240 The meaning of all this is clear. When all people meekly bow to the dictator, there will no longer be any dissenters left for liquidation. 171 00:19:32.240 --> 00:19:40.600 Caligula, Torquemada and Robespierre would have agreed with this solution. 172 00:19:40.600 --> 00:19:46.560 The socialists have engineered a semantic revolution, converting the meaning of terms 173 00:19:46.560 --> 00:19:48.760 into their opposite. 174 00:19:48.760 --> 00:19:55.200 In the vocabulary of their new speech, as George Orwell called it, there is a term, 175 00:19:55.200 --> 00:19:58.040 the one-party principle. 176 00:19:58.040 --> 00:20:03.160 Now, etymologically, party is derived from the noun part. 177 00:20:03.160 --> 00:20:08.640 A brotherless part is no longer different from its antonym to role. 178 00:20:08.640 --> 00:20:10.840 It is identically related. 179 00:20:10.840 --> 00:20:17.360 A brotherless party is not a party, and the one-party principle is in fact a no-party principle. 180 00:20:17.360 --> 00:20:21.360 It is the suppression of any kind of opposition. 181 00:20:21.360 --> 00:20:26.080 Freedom implies the right to choose between assent and dissent. 182 00:20:26.080 --> 00:20:33.080 But in new speech it means the duty to assent unconditionally and the strict interdiction 183 00:20:33.080 --> 00:20:34.080 of dissent. 184 00:20:34.080 --> 00:20:40.440 This reversal of the traditional connotation of all wars of the political terminology is 185 00:20:40.440 --> 00:20:46.280 not merely a peculiarity of the language of the Russian communists and their fascist and 186 00:20:46.280 --> 00:20:47.280 Nazi disciples. 187 00:20:47.280 --> 00:20:55.520 A social order that in abolishing private property deprives the consumers of their autonomy 188 00:20:55.520 --> 00:21:21.520 The Socialists would have never duped the voters if they had openly told them that their ultimate end is to cast them into bondage. 189 00:21:21.520 --> 00:21:27.640 For exoteric use, they were forced to pay lip service to the traditional appreciation 190 00:21:27.640 --> 00:21:28.640 of liberty. 191 00:21:28.640 --> 00:21:36.960 It was different in the esoteric discussions among the inner circles of the great conspiracy. 192 00:21:36.960 --> 00:21:42.480 There the initiator did not disassemble their intentions concerning liberty. 193 00:21:42.480 --> 00:21:49.280 Liberty was in their opinion certainly a good feature in the past, in the frame of bourgeois 194 00:21:49.280 --> 00:21:56.960 Society, because it provided them with the opportunity to embark upon their schemes. 195 00:21:56.960 --> 00:22:02.640 But once socialism has triumphed, there is no longer any need for free thought and autonomous 196 00:22:02.640 --> 00:22:05.680 action on the part of individuals. 197 00:22:05.680 --> 00:22:12.960 Any further change can only be a deviation from the perfect state that mankind has attained 198 00:22:12.960 --> 00:22:16.120 in reaching the bliss of socialism. 199 00:22:16.120 --> 00:22:24.360 Under such conditions, it would be simply lunacy to tolerate dissent. 200 00:22:24.360 --> 00:22:30.160 The admirers of the Soviet system tell us again and again that freedom is not the supreme 201 00:22:30.160 --> 00:22:31.160 good. 202 00:22:31.160 --> 00:22:35.840 It is not worth having if it implies poverty. 203 00:22:35.840 --> 00:22:44.120 To sacrifice it in order to attain wealth for the masses is in their eyes fully justified. 204 00:22:44.120 --> 00:22:51.200 But for a few unruly individualists who cannot adjust themselves to the days of regular fellows, 205 00:22:51.200 --> 00:22:55.000 all people in Russia are perfectly happy. 206 00:22:55.000 --> 00:23:00.920 We may leave it undecided whether this happiness was also shared by the millions of Ukrainian 207 00:23:00.920 --> 00:23:06.960 peasants who died from starvation, by the inmates of the forced labor camps and by the 208 00:23:06.960 --> 00:23:09.360 Marxian leaders who were perished. 209 00:23:09.360 --> 00:23:15.120 But we cannot pass over the fact that the average standard of living is incomparably 210 00:23:15.120 --> 00:23:20.360 higher in the free countries of the West than in the communist fields. 211 00:23:20.360 --> 00:23:25.400 In giving away liberty as the price to be paid for the acquisition of prosperity, the 212 00:23:25.400 --> 00:23:27.920 Russians made a poor bargain. 213 00:23:27.920 --> 00:23:33.920 They now have neither the one nor the other. 214 00:23:33.920 --> 00:23:40.080 Ludwig's philosophy labored under the illusion that in the early ages of history the individual 215 00:23:40.080 --> 00:23:46.760 was free and that the course of historical evolution had deprived him of his primordial 216 00:23:46.760 --> 00:23:47.760 innate liberty. 217 00:23:47.760 --> 00:23:56.160 As Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw it, nature accorded man freedom and society and slavery. 218 00:23:56.160 --> 00:24:02.000 In fact, pre-amiable man was at the mercy of every fellow who was stronger and therefore 219 00:24:02.000 --> 00:24:07.000 could slouch away from him the scarce means of subsistence. 220 00:24:07.000 --> 00:24:12.000 There is in nature nothing that can be called liberty. 221 00:24:12.000 --> 00:24:18.000 The concept of freedom always refers to social relations between men. 222 00:24:18.000 --> 00:24:26.000 Two, society cannot realize the illusory concept of the individual's absolute independence. 223 00:24:26.000 --> 00:24:33.880 Within society, everyone depends on what other people are prepared to contribute to his well-being 224 00:24:33.880 --> 00:24:40.520 in return for his own contributions to their well-being. 225 00:24:40.520 --> 00:24:46.960 Society is essentially the mutual exchange of services. 226 00:24:46.960 --> 00:24:52.480 As far as the individuals have the opportunity to choose, they are free. 227 00:24:52.480 --> 00:24:59.440 If they are forced by violence or threat of violence to surrender to the terms of an exchange, 228 00:24:59.440 --> 00:25:03.280 no matter how they feel about it, they lack freedom. 229 00:25:03.280 --> 00:25:09.520 The slave is unfree precisely because the master assigns him his tasks and determines 230 00:25:09.520 --> 00:25:15.640 what he has to receive if he fulfills it. 231 00:25:15.640 --> 00:25:21.880 As regards the social apparatus of repression and coercion to the government, there cannot 232 00:25:21.880 --> 00:25:28.880 There should not be any question of freedom. Government is essentially the negation of liberty. 233 00:25:28.880 --> 00:25:38.880 It is the recourse to violence or the threat of violence in order to make all people obey the orders of the government, whether they like it or not. 234 00:25:38.880 --> 00:25:44.880 As far as the government's jurisdiction extends, there is coercion and not freedom. 235 00:25:44.880 --> 00:25:50.560 Government is a necessary institution, the means to make the social system of cooperation 236 00:25:50.560 --> 00:25:56.960 work smoothly, without being disturbed by violent acts on the part of gangsters, 237 00:25:56.960 --> 00:26:00.480 maker of domestic or foreign origin. 238 00:26:00.480 --> 00:26:05.120 Government is not, as some people like to say, a necessary evil. 239 00:26:05.120 --> 00:26:14.800 It is not an evil, but a means, the only means available to make peaceful human coexistence possible. 240 00:26:14.800 --> 00:26:19.800 But it is the opposite of liberty. It is beating, imprisoning, hanging. 241 00:26:19.800 --> 00:26:26.800 Whatever a government does is ultimately supported by the actions of armed constables. 242 00:26:26.800 --> 00:26:39.800 If the government operates a school or a hospital, the funds required are collected by taxes that is by payments exacted from the citizens. 243 00:26:39.800 --> 00:26:47.280 If we take into account the fact that as human nature is, there can neither be civilization 244 00:26:47.280 --> 00:26:54.520 nor peace without the functioning of the government apparatus of violent action, we may call government 245 00:26:54.520 --> 00:26:57.240 the most beneficial human institution. 246 00:26:57.240 --> 00:27:03.400 But the fact remains that government is repression and not freedom. 247 00:27:03.400 --> 00:27:09.560 Freedom is to be found only in the sphere in which government does not interfere. 248 00:27:09.560 --> 00:27:16.560 There is always freedom from the government. It's the restriction of the government's interference. 249 00:27:16.560 --> 00:27:26.560 It prevails only in the fields in which the citizens have the opportunity to choose the way in which they want to proceed. 250 00:27:26.560 --> 00:27:34.560 Civil rights are the statutes that precisely circumscribe the sphere in which the men conducting the affairs of state 251 00:27:34.560 --> 00:27:48.760 The ultimate end that men aim at by establishing government is to make possible the operation 252 00:27:48.760 --> 00:27:54.800 of a definite system of social cooperation under the principle of the division of labor. 253 00:27:54.800 --> 00:28:00.240 If the social system which people want to have is socialism, communism, planning, there 254 00:28:00.240 --> 00:28:03.280 is no sphere of freedom left. 255 00:28:03.280 --> 00:28:08.480 All citizens are in every regard subject to the orders of the government. 256 00:28:08.480 --> 00:28:14.080 The state is a total state, the regime is totalitarian. 257 00:28:14.080 --> 00:28:21.160 The government alone plans and forces everybody to behave in accordance with this unique plan. 258 00:28:21.160 --> 00:28:26.080 In the market economy, the individuals are free to choose the way in which they want 259 00:28:26.080 --> 00:28:31.320 to integrate themselves into the frame of social cooperation. 260 00:28:31.320 --> 00:28:37.600 As far as the sphere of market exchange extends, there is spontaneous action on the part of 261 00:28:37.600 --> 00:28:40.200 individuals. 262 00:28:40.200 --> 00:28:45.320 Under this system that is called laissez-faire and which Ferdinand Lassalle dubbed as the 263 00:28:45.320 --> 00:28:51.280 night watchman state, there is freedom because there is a field in which the individuals 264 00:28:51.280 --> 00:28:57.320 are free to plan for themselves. 265 00:28:57.320 --> 00:29:03.120 The socialists must admit that there cannot be any freedom under the socialist system. 266 00:29:03.120 --> 00:29:09.960 But they try to obliterate the difference between the state of unfreedom and economic 267 00:29:09.960 --> 00:29:16.240 freedom by denying that there is any freedom in the mutual exchange of commodities and 268 00:29:16.240 --> 00:29:19.320 services on the market. 269 00:29:19.320 --> 00:29:28.160 Why market exchange is, in the words of a school of pro-socialist lawyers, a coercion 270 00:29:28.160 --> 00:29:30.440 over other people's liberty. 271 00:29:30.440 --> 00:29:37.160 There is, in their eyes, no difference what mentioning between a man spaying a tax or 272 00:29:37.160 --> 00:29:43.880 a fine imposed by a magistrate, or his buying a newspaper or admission to a movie. 273 00:29:43.880 --> 00:29:49.880 In each of these cases, the man is subject to governing power. 274 00:29:49.880 --> 00:30:00.280 He is not free, for, as Professor Hale says, a man's freedom means the absence of any obstacle 275 00:30:00.280 --> 00:30:04.240 to his use of material goods. 276 00:30:04.240 --> 00:30:10.880 This means, I am not free because a woman who had knitted a sweater as a birthday present 277 00:30:10.880 --> 00:30:18.400 for Arrestment puts an obstacle to my use of it. I myself am restricting all other people's 278 00:30:18.400 --> 00:30:26.040 freedom because I object to their using my toothbrush. In doing this, I am, according 279 00:30:26.040 --> 00:30:34.120 to this doctrine, exercising private governing power, which is analogous to public government 280 00:30:34.120 --> 00:30:41.120 and Power, the power that the government exercises in imprisoning a man in think-sink. 281 00:30:43.120 --> 00:30:50.120 Those expounding this amazing doctrine consistently conclude that liberty is nowhere to be found. 282 00:30:50.120 --> 00:30:56.120 They assert that what they call economic pressures do not essentially differ from the pressures 283 00:30:56.120 --> 00:31:00.120 the masters practice with regard to their slaves. 284 00:31:00.120 --> 00:31:06.840 They reject what they call private governmental power, but they do not object to restriction 285 00:31:06.840 --> 00:31:10.440 of liberty by public governmental power. 286 00:31:10.440 --> 00:31:16.920 They want to concentrate all that they call restrictions of liberty in the hands of the 287 00:31:16.920 --> 00:31:17.920 government. 288 00:31:17.920 --> 00:31:25.960 They attack the institution of private property and the laws that, as they say, stand ready 289 00:31:25.960 --> 00:31:46.600 A generation ago, all housewives prepared soup by proceeding in accordance with the recipes 290 00:31:46.600 --> 00:31:50.840 that they had bought from their mothers or from the cookbook. 291 00:31:50.840 --> 00:31:58.040 Today many housewives prefer to buy a canned soup to warm it and to serve it to their family. 292 00:31:58.040 --> 00:32:06.120 Let's say our learned doctors, the Kenny Corporation is in a position to restrict the housewife's freedom 293 00:32:06.120 --> 00:32:15.080 because in asking a price for this tin can, it puts an obstacle to have use of it. 294 00:32:15.080 --> 00:32:22.120 People who did not enjoy the great privilege of being tutored by these eminent teachers of law 295 00:32:22.120 --> 00:32:26.680 would say that the canned product was burned out by the cannery 296 00:32:26.680 --> 00:32:32.280 and that the corporation in producing it removed the greatest obstacle 297 00:32:32.280 --> 00:32:39.080 to a consumer's getting and using a can to with its non-existence. 298 00:32:39.080 --> 00:32:45.080 The mere essence of a product cannot gratify anybody without its existence. 299 00:32:45.080 --> 00:32:48.080 But they are wrong, say the doctors. 300 00:32:48.080 --> 00:32:56.080 The corporation dominates the housewife, it destroys by its excessive concentrated power her individual freedom, 301 00:32:56.080 --> 00:33:01.080 and it is the duty of the government to prevent such a gross offense. 302 00:33:01.080 --> 00:33:07.080 Corporation says that the auspices of the Farb Foundation and other of this group of lawyers, 303 00:33:07.080 --> 00:33:13.080 Professor Bierly, must be subject to the control of the government. 304 00:33:13.080 --> 00:33:22.080 Why does our housewife buy the canned product rather than cling to the methods of her mother and grandmother? 305 00:33:22.080 --> 00:33:31.080 No doubt because she thinks that this way of acting is more advantageous for her than the traditional question. 306 00:33:31.080 --> 00:33:33.080 Nobody forced this lady. 307 00:33:33.080 --> 00:33:41.080 There were people, they are mostly called jobbers, promoters, capitalists, speculators, stock exchange gamblers, 308 00:33:41.080 --> 00:33:50.080 who had the idea of satisfying a latent wish of millions of housewives by investing in the cannery industry. 309 00:33:50.080 --> 00:34:00.080 And there are other equally selfish capitalists who in many hundreds of other corporations provide the consumers with many hundreds of other things. 310 00:34:01.080 --> 00:34:07.080 The better a corporation serves the public, the more customers it gets, the bigger it grows. 311 00:34:08.080 --> 00:34:16.080 Go into the home of the average American family and you will see for whom the wheels of the machines are turning. 312 00:34:16.080 --> 00:34:23.880 In a free country nobody is prevented from acquiring riches by serving the consumers 313 00:34:23.880 --> 00:34:27.560 better than they are served already. 314 00:34:27.560 --> 00:34:31.840 What he needs is only brains and hard work. 315 00:34:31.840 --> 00:34:40.000 Modern civilization, nearly all civilization, said Edwin Cannon, the last of the long line 316 00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:48.160 of Eminent British Economists is based on the principle of making things pleasant for those 317 00:34:48.160 --> 00:34:54.880 who please the market and unpleasant for those who fail to do so. 318 00:34:54.880 --> 00:34:59.400 All this talk about the concentration of economic power is vain. 319 00:34:59.400 --> 00:35:06.160 The bigger a corporation is, the more people it serves, the more does it depend on pleasing 320 00:35:06.160 --> 00:35:18.160 is the consumers, the many, the masses. Economic power is in the market economy, in the hands of the consumers. 321 00:35:18.160 --> 00:35:24.160 Capitalistic business is not continuation in the once attained state of production. 322 00:35:24.160 --> 00:35:32.160 It is rather ceaseless innovation, daily repeated attempts to improve the provision of the consumers 323 00:35:32.160 --> 00:35:36.160 by New, Better and Cheaper Products. 324 00:35:36.160 --> 00:35:41.160 Any actual state of production activities is merely transitory. 325 00:35:41.160 --> 00:35:50.160 There prevails incessantly the tendency to supplant what is already achieved by something that serves the consumers better. 326 00:35:50.160 --> 00:35:56.160 There is consequently, under capitalism, a continuous circulation des elites. 327 00:35:56.160 --> 00:36:07.160 What characterizes the men whom one calls the captains of industry is their ability to contrive new ideas and to put them to work. 328 00:36:07.160 --> 00:36:20.160 However big a corporation may be, it is doomed as soon as it does not succeed in adjusting itself daily and new to the best possible methods of serving the consumers. 329 00:36:20.160 --> 00:36:27.320 But the politicians and other would-be reformers see only the structure of industry as it exists 330 00:36:27.320 --> 00:36:28.320 today. 331 00:36:28.320 --> 00:36:33.880 They think that they themselves are clever enough to snatch from business control of 332 00:36:33.880 --> 00:36:40.000 the plants as they are today and to manage them by sticking to the already established 333 00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:41.000 routine. 334 00:36:41.000 --> 00:36:48.120 While the ambitious newcomer, who will be the tycoon of tomorrow, is already preparing 335 00:36:48.120 --> 00:36:55.400 and plans for things unheard of before, all they have in mind is to conduct affairs along 336 00:36:55.400 --> 00:36:57.000 tracks already beaten. 337 00:36:57.000 --> 00:37:02.920 There is no record of an industrial innovation contrived and put into practice by bureaucrats. 338 00:37:02.920 --> 00:37:10.440 If one does not want to plunge into stagnation, a free hand must be left to those, today unknown 339 00:37:10.440 --> 00:37:18.800 and Man, who have the ingenuity to lead mankind forward on the way toward more and more satisfactory 340 00:37:18.800 --> 00:37:19.800 conditions. 341 00:37:19.800 --> 00:37:27.000 This is the main problem of a nation's economic organization. 342 00:37:27.000 --> 00:37:31.720 Private property of the material factors of production is not a restriction of the freedom 343 00:37:31.720 --> 00:37:35.880 of all other people to choose what suits them best. 344 00:37:35.880 --> 00:37:42.560 It is, on the contrary, the means that assigns to the common man in his capacity as a buyer 345 00:37:42.560 --> 00:37:45.800 supremacy in all economic affairs. 346 00:37:45.800 --> 00:37:52.560 It is the means to stimulate a nation's most enterprising men to exert themselves to the 347 00:37:52.560 --> 00:37:59.840 best of their abilities in the service of all of the people. 348 00:37:59.840 --> 00:38:05.080 The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. 349 00:38:05.080 --> 00:38:21.080 It aims at the creation of a sphere in which the individual is free to think, to choose, and to act without being restrained by the interference of the social apparatus of coercion and oppression to the State. 350 00:38:21.080 --> 00:38:32.080 All the spiritual and material achievements of Western civilization were the result of the operation of this idea of liberty. 351 00:38:32.080 --> 00:38:48.080 The doctrine and the policies of individualism and of capitalism, its application to economic matters, do not need any apologists or propagandists. The achievements speak for themselves. 352 00:38:48.080 --> 00:39:00.080 The case for capitalism and private property rests apart from other considerations, also upon the incomparable efficiency of its productive effort. 353 00:39:00.080 --> 00:39:07.360 It is this efficiency that makes it possible for capitalistic business to support a rapidly 354 00:39:07.360 --> 00:39:13.800 increasing population at a continually improving standard of living. 355 00:39:13.800 --> 00:39:20.080 The resulting progressive prosperity of the masses creates a social environment in which 356 00:39:20.080 --> 00:39:26.680 the exceptionally gifted individuals are free to give to their fellow citizens all they are 357 00:39:26.680 --> 00:39:37.240 The social system of private property and limited government is the only system that tends to 358 00:39:37.240 --> 00:39:46.480 debarbarize all those who have the innate capacity to acquire personal culture. 359 00:39:46.480 --> 00:39:53.680 It is a gratuitous pastime to belittle the material achievements of capitalism by observing 360 00:39:53.680 --> 00:40:08.680 That there are things that are more essential for mankind than bigger and speedier motor cars and homes equipped with central heating, air conditioning, refrigerators, washing machines and television sets. 361 00:40:08.680 --> 00:40:13.680 There certainly are such higher and nobler pursuits. 362 00:40:13.680 --> 00:40:22.380 that they are higher and nobler precisely because they cannot be aspired to by any external effort 363 00:40:22.380 --> 00:40:29.280 that requires the individual's personal determination and exertion. 364 00:40:29.280 --> 00:40:36.880 Those leveling this approach against capitalism display a rather crude and materialistic view 365 00:40:36.880 --> 00:40:44.200 in assuming that moral and spiritual culture could be built either by the government or 366 00:40:44.200 --> 00:40:48.640 by the organization of production activities. 367 00:40:48.640 --> 00:40:54.760 All that is in this regard is to bring about an environment and a competence which offer 368 00:40:54.760 --> 00:41:03.520 the individuals the opportunity to work at their own personal perfection and edification. 369 00:41:03.520 --> 00:41:11.000 It is not the fault of capitalism that the masses prefer a boxing match to a performance 370 00:41:11.000 --> 00:41:18.960 of Sophocles' Antigone, jazz music to Beethoven's symphonies and comics to poetry. 371 00:41:18.960 --> 00:41:24.560 But it is certain that while pre-capitalistic conditions as they still prevail in the much 372 00:41:24.560 --> 00:41:32.680 greater part of the world, makes these good things accessible only to a small minority 373 00:41:32.680 --> 00:41:44.280 of People, Capitalism gives to the many a favorable chance of striving after thing. 374 00:41:44.280 --> 00:41:50.040 From whatever angle we may look upon capitalism, there is no reason to lament the passing of 375 00:41:50.040 --> 00:41:52.720 the allegedly good old days. 376 00:41:52.720 --> 00:42:00.600 Still less is it justified to love for the totalitarian utopias, whether of the Nazi 377 00:42:00.600 --> 00:42:05.280 or of the Soviet type. 378 00:42:05.280 --> 00:42:10.120 We are inaugurating tonight the ninth meeting of the Monterey society. 379 00:42:10.120 --> 00:42:18.200 It is fitting to remember on this occasion that meetings of this kind, in which opinions 380 00:42:18.200 --> 00:42:26.400 opposed to those of the majority of our contemporaries and to those of their governments are advanced, 381 00:42:26.400 --> 00:42:36.400 are possible only in the climate of liberty and freedom that is the most precious mark of Western civilization. 382 00:42:36.400 --> 00:42:42.400 Let us hope that this right to dissent will never disappear.