What others have said about liberty. Those of us who call ourselves libertarian, and who are interested in human freedom, often make our analysis and argument sound as though we had invented it, and that is not true.
Down through the ages, many men have had various things to say about liberty which have a direct bearing and undoubtedly occupy a causation position in respect to the modern libertarian mind.
I thought that it would be of great assistance to bring to your attention some of the things
that others have had to say in this area, so that you would know the thing to the position
relating to the idea of human liberty.
Actually there are two basic areas which concern us here.
One is the area of government and the other is the area of the economy.
In both of these areas, human beings in general are broadly uninformed.
They simply do not know how the economy would work if it were a free economy, one that was
a natural economy based upon the laws of nature and operated without intervention.
And therefore, there tend to be fears about a free economy, and it causes people, as a
result of their fears, to call for some type of intervention.
Even in the area of government, the same general ignorance and lack of information is apparent
because government has set itself up as an all-purpose mechanism to create perfection
for human beings.
And this is something that it cannot do.
As a matter of fact, perfection is probably impossible for human beings no matter how
you try to arrange it, but government proposes to solve problems.
It does not solve problems, but it creates the illusion that everything is being taken
care of correctly, and of course it is not.
Now I've selected in general two types of quotations to offer you.
One relates to the economy itself, to show the general attitude that people have had
and possibly still have in respect to economic matters, and the other set of quotations relate
primarily to government and what government is and what government does according to very
wise men who have lived prior to our time.
Let me begin by offering the world's oldest specification for steelmaking.
I am indebted to William J. Colson for this contribution.
In 1895, someone digging in the ruins of an armorer's workshop in Tyre, Syria, found
and sword blades in several stages of manufacture. He also discovered rolled up in a copper tube
a parchment containing the following instructions in ancient Syrian characters. And this gives
us a bit of an idea of the ancient view of how to get things done in a marketplace.
Let the high dignitary furnish an Ethiope a fair frame and let him be bound down shoulders
Let the master workman, having cold-hammered the blade to a smooth and thin edge, thrust it into the fire of the cedarwood coals, in and out, the while reciting the prayer to the god Baal-Hal.
Until the steel be of the color of the red of the rising sun, when he comes up over the desert toward the east.
And then with a quick motion, pass the same from the heel thereof to the point, six times through the most fleshly portion of the slave's back and thighs, when it shall have become the color of the purple of the king.
Then if with one swing and one stroke of the right arm of the master workman, it severs the head of the slave from his body, and display not nick nor crack along the edge, and the blade may be bent round about the body of the man, and break not, it shall be accepted as a perfect weapon, sacred to the service of the god Baal-Hal, and the owner thereof may thrust it into a scabbard of asseskin, brazen with brass, and hung to a girdle of camel's wool, dyed in the royal purple.
End of the quotation.
Now if you can consider this procedure strictly from the steelmaking standpoint, you'll notice
that it covers the complete manufacture of a steel product, including cold working to
given tolerances, heat treatment for a specified time, a delayed quench to a specific color,
quality control and even packaging.
Yet we have learned that that is not the best way to operate an economy.
Actually it would work, but anyone who cares to argue that an economic system should function
on the basis of force is going to have to accept this proposition because what it does
is to completely disregard the rights of some in order to attain an objective that others
find satisfactory.
Surely with the understanding that is now available to us, we understand and we indeed
believe profoundly that human beings will not adopt that method when they are free.
It is the man who is not free who is operating under the command of a king or under the command
of some economic czar that might endeavor to take the shortcut envisioned by this ancient
Syrian workman.
Here is a quotation from Tom Paine.
Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government.
It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of men.
It existed prior to government and would exist if the formality of government were abolished.
The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man and all the parts of
of Civilized Community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds
it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchants, the tradesmen,
and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other and from
the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns and forms their law, and the laws
which common usage ordain have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society
performs for itself, almost everything which is ascribed to government.
To give you a little bit of an insight as to the political point of view relating to
economics, I have here an extract from a joint congressional committee investigation that
occurred back in 1875 in respect to the development of the horseless carriage. This was nearly
A new source of power which burns a distillate of kerosene, called gasoline, has been produced
by a Boston engineer. Instead of burning the fuel under a boiler, it is exploded inside
This so-called internal combustion engine may be used under certain conditions to supplement steam engines. Experiments are underway to use such an engine to propel a vehicle.
This discovery begins a new era in the history of civilization. It may someday prove to be more revolutionary in the development of human society than the invention of the wheel, the use of metals, or the steam engine.
Engine. Never in history has society been confronted with a power so full of potential
danger and at the same time so full of promise for the future of man and for the peace of
the world. The dangers are obvious. Stores of gasoline in the hands of the people interested
primarily in profit would constitute a fire and explosive hazard of the first rank. Horseless
Most carriages propelled by gasoline engines might attain speeds of 15 or even 20 miles
per hour. The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets
and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action even
if the military and economic implications were not so overwhelming. The Secretary of
War has testified before us and has pointed out the destructive effects of the use of
of such vehicles in battle, a few of them with a small cannon mounted behind a steel shield could destroy infantry, break up a cavalry charge, and even seriously threaten field artillery by lightning-like flank attacks.
Furthermore, our supplies of petroleum, from which gasoline can be extracted only in limited quantities, make it imperative that the defense forces should have first call on the limited supply.
Furthermore, the cost of producing it is far beyond the financial capacity of private industry,
yet the safety of the nation demands that an adequate supply should be produced.
In addition, the development of this new power may displace the use of horses, which would
wreck our agriculture.
We therefore earnestly recommend that Congress set up a horseless carriage commission, which
shall have complete control of all sources of gasoline and similar explosive elements
and all activities connected with their development and use in the United States. These measures
may seem drastic and far-reaching, but the discovery with which we are dealing involves
forces of a nature too dangerous to fit into any of our usual concepts. There we see the
typical political point of view as it relates to the operations of a free market. Note particularly
the assumption that stores of gasoline in the hands of people interested primarily in
and profit would constitute a fire and explosive hazard of the first rank.
In actual fact, if a bit of analysis were provided, one would discover that people interested
primarily in profit would be the first to protect their stores of gasoline from fire
and explosion, because if they did so, they would lose and not make profits.
But the assumption is so typically political that anybody who is seeking profit is going
to be careless.
The reverse is true.
The person seeking profit cannot afford to be careless.
Also, you will have noted the assumption that only the government could provide the necessary
funds to make gasoline available.
That is a typical political view.
Very well.
Who did provide the funds to make gasoline readily available?
It wasn't government.
It was the free market.
And of course, the assumption that change would wreck an existing industry.
the assumption that if horses are replaced by gasoline engines, this would wreck agriculture.
As a matter of fact, it has not wrecked it. It has made it a far more practicable and
a far more profitable and efficient type of industry. But these are the typical political
views and they are the kind of views that many unthinking people accept, of course,
adopted in part by politicians.
Here's a quotation from a very well-known and often not too thoroughly respected British
philosopher, and yet I find many of the things that he said very much worthwhile.
I'm speaking of Herbert Spencer, and here is something taken from his work, Man versus
the State.
There seems no getting people to accept the truth, which nevertheless is conspicuous enough,
that the welfare of a society and the justice of its arrangements are at bottom dependent
on the characters of its members, and that improvement in neither can take place without
that improvement in character which results from carrying on peaceful industry under the
restraints imposed by an orderly social life.
The belief, not only of the socialists, but also of those so-called liberals who are diligently
One of my favorite authors is a man who is little
Heng Feng was a Chinese philosopher of well-nigh a hundred years old. The emperor once said
said to him, Hung, ninety years of study and observation must have made you wise. Tell me, what is the great danger of government?
Well, quoth Hung, it's the rat in the statue.
The rat in the statue, repeated the emperor, what do you mean?
Why, retorted Hung, you know we build statues to the memory of our ancestors. They are made of wood and are hollow and painted.
Now, if a rat gets into one, you can't smoke it out, it's the image of your father.
You can't plunge it into the water, that would wash off the paint.
So the rat is safe because the image is sacred.
Perhaps that's a little subtle.
There's another quotation that I'm reminded of that comes from the well-thumbed copy of
Epictetus, which I have, Epictetus being one of the great stoics who, when challenged by
by one of his followers had this to say, the follower in a discussion with Epictetus concerning
the necessity of government and the relative merit of it, finally in exasperation said,
but Epictetus, you know that you have to respect government. Remember in the final analysis,
it can kill you. And Epictetus replied, then yes, that is true. So let us build a statue
to Diphtheria. Here is a quotation taken from Ludwig von Mises, the great intellectual and
the great economist of the Austrian School. Here is what he has had to say about the current
situation.
The intellectuals, not the populace, are molding public opinion. It is a lame excuse of the
intellectuals that they must yield to the masses. They themselves have generated the
and the socialist ideas, and indoctrinated the masses with them.
No proletarian or son of a proletarian has contributed to the elaboration of the interventionist
and socialist programs.
The esoteric writings of dialectical materialism, of Hegel, the father both of Marxism and of
German aggressive nationalism, the books of Georges Sorel, of Gentile and of Spengler,
were not read by the average man.
They did not move the masses directly.
It was the intellectuals who polarized them. The intellectual leaders of the peoples have
produced and propagated the fallacies which are on the point of destroying liberty and
Western civilization. The intellectuals alone are responsible for the mass slaughters which
are the characteristic mark of our century. They alone can reverse the trend and pave
the way for a resurrection of freedom.
One of my students, a doctor named Badeker, came up with an excellent summation of the
difference between a socialist and a libertarian. He put it this way, a socialist is one who
seeks to avoid the retributions of nature by promoting the retributions of men. A libertarian
is one who seeks to avoid the retributions of both men and nature by observing natural
Law and Acting in Accordance with It. Here's a quotation that is a pet of mine. It was
written by William Lloyd Garrison just prior to the Civil War.
I believe in the spirit of peace and in soul and absolute reliance on the truth and the
application of it to the hearts and consciences of the people. I do not believe that the weapons
of liberty have ever been or ever can be the weapons of despotism. I know that those of
The weapons of despotism are the sword, the revolver, the cannon, the bombshell, and therefore the weapons to which tyrants cling, and upon which they depend, are not the weapons for me, as a friend of liberty.
Perhaps blood will flow. God knows I do not. But it shall not flow through any counsel of mine. Much as I detest the oppression exercised by the slaveholder, he is also a man, sacred before me.
He is a man not to be harmed by my hand nor with my consent. He is a man who is grievously and wickedly trampling upon the rights of his fellow man. But all I have to do with him is to rebuke his sin, to call him to repentance, and to leave him without excuse for his tyranny.
Stephen Pearl Andrews was a very brilliant writer, dating back to about the same time as Wendell Phillips.
Mr. Andrews was an atheist, and he looked at things in his own particular light.
He was definitely an individualist, and here is one of his very perceptive observations.
The doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual, in one sense itself a principle, grows out
of the still more fundamental principle of individuality that pervades universal nature.
Individuality is positively the most fundamental and universal principle which the finite mind
seems capable of discovering, and the best image of the infinite.
There are no two objects in the universe which are precisely alike.
Each has its own constitution and peculiarities which distinguish it from every other. Infinite
diversity is the universal law. In the multitude of human countenances, for example, there
are no two alike, and in the multitude of human characters there is the same variety.
It applies equally to persons, to things, and to events. There have been no two occurrences
which were precisely alike during all the cycling periods of time. No action, transaction,
or set of circumstances whatsoever ever correspond precisely to any other action, transaction
or set of circumstances. Had I a precise knowledge of all the occurrences which have ever taken
place up to this hour, it would not suffice to enable me to make a law which would be
applicable in all respects to the very next occurrence which shall take place, nor to
any one of the infinite millions of events which shall occur hereafter. This diversity
reigns throughout every kingdom of nature, and mocks at all human attempts to make laws
or constitutions or regulations or governmental institutions of any sort, which shall work
justly and harmoniously amidst the unforeseen contingencies of the future.
H. L. Mencken, known as the Sage of Baltimore, and for a long time the editorial writer for
for the Old Baltimore Sun was a somewhat acerbic gentleman who, so far as I know, wrote and
published a single book entitled Minority Report.
Here are a few quotations taken from it.
Is a young man bound to serve his country in war?
In addition to his legal duty, there is perhaps also a moral duty, but it is very obscure.
What is called his country is only its government, and that government consists merely of professional
Here is another quotation from Mr. Menken.
If you were against the New Deal and its wholesale buying of pauper votes, then you were against Christian charity.
If you were against the gross injustices and dishonesties of the Wagner Labor Act, then you were against labor.
If you were against packing the Supreme Court, then you were in favor of letting Wall Street do it.
If you were against using Dr. Quack's cancer salve, then you were in favor of letting Uncle Julius die.
If you were against Holy Church or Christian science, then you were against God.
And it is an old, old argument.
And again Mencken, the effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the
criminal class.
It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that it is neither
virtuous nor necessary to suffer and do without.
All the old American virtues thus become ignominious, and if the thing goes on, Benjamin Franklin
will turn into a comic and even a sinister character.
The criminal believes, like the demagogue's client, that the world owes him a living,
and that it is not immoral for a have-not to seize the property of a have. Neither the
criminal nor the demagogue makes any distinction between haves who acquired their property
honestly, and those who obtained it by fraud. It is sufficient that they have it, and can
be made to disgorge it.
And here is Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. That is the real issue that will continue
It is the eternal struggle between these two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world.
These are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time.
The one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine right of kings.
It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself.
It is the same spirit that says, you toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it.
and I'll eat it.
Robert Ardrey, the sensational author of several new works, including his latest, The Social
Contract, wrote something called African Genesis a short while ago that plummeted him into
national prominence. Here is a quotation taken from it that applies precisely to our time.
It is the superb paradox of our time that in a single century we have proceeded from
From the first ironclad warship to the first hydrogen bomb and from the first telegraphic
communication to the beginnings of the conquest of space. Yet in the understanding of our
own natures, we have proceeded almost nowhere. It is an ignorance that has become institutionalized
and sanctified. It is an ignorance that transcends national or racial boundaries and leaps happily
over iron curtains as if they did not exist. Were a brotherhood of man to be formed today,
and its only possible common bond would be ignorance of what man is.
Any number of devout Christians have also sensed the importance of human liberty.
Among the most imposing is Count Leo Tolstoy, who was profoundly Christian in his doctrine
and has come up with, I think, one of the most moving and meaningful descriptions of
The processes that will have to be followed if man is ever to be free.
Men in their present condition are like a swarm of bees hanging in a cluster to a branch.
The position of the bees on the branch is temporary and must inevitably be changed.
They must start off and find themselves a habitation.
Each of the bees knows this and desires to change her own and the other's position, but
no one of them can do it till the rest of them do it.
They cannot all start off at once because one hangs on to another and hinders her from
separating from the swarm, and therefore they all continue to hang there.
It would seem that the bees could never escape from their position, just as it seems that
worldly men, caught in the toils of the state conception of life, can never escape.
And there would be no escape for the bees if each of them were not a living, separate
creature endowed with wings of its own.
Similarly, there would be no escape for men if each were not a living being endowed with
the faculty of entering into the Christian conception of life.
If every bee who could fly did not try to fly, the others too would never be stirred,
and the swarm would never change its position.
And if the man who has mastered the Christian conception of life would not, without waiting
for other people, begin to live in accordance with its conception, mankind would never change
its position.
But only let one bee spread her wings, start off and fly away, and after her another, and
another, and the clinging, inert cluster would become a freely flying swarm of bees.
Just in the same way, only let one man look at life as Christianity teaches him to look
at it, and after him let another, and another do the same, and the enchanted circle of existence
in the state conception of life, from which there seem no escape, will be broken through.
Here is Henry C. Wright, another man who took a strong Christian position.
The powers assumed by all human governments to be essential to their existence and execution
have been proved to be wrong, and the practices of such governments, without which they cannot
exist, have been proved to be hostile to the spirit and positive commands of Christianity.
Therefore, human government is a wrong in itself.
Let me conclude with a statement from Thomas Jefferson.
I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in
the political world as storms are in the physical.
Unsuccessful rebellions indeed generally establish the encroachments on the rights of people
which have produced them.
An observation of this truth should render honest Republican governors so mild in their
punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much.
is a medicine necessary for the sound health of governments.