Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto Read online

  3. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY

  Should you wait around for someone else to solve a problem, or should you get it done yourself? Liberty is an individual responsibility. The burden always sits upon your shoulders first. It is that inescapable accountability that stares you in the mirror every morning. If it didn’t get done, sometimes there’s no one to blame but yourself.

  Free people step up to help our neighbors when bad things happen; no one needs to tell us to do that. We defend, sometimes at great personal sacrifice, what makes America so special. Freedom works to make our communities a better place, by working together voluntarily, solving problems from the bottom up.

  This is the “I” in community. Communities are made up of individuals and families and volunteers and local organizations and time-tested institutions that have been around since long before you were born. All of these things work together to solve problems, build things, and create better opportunities. But notice a pattern that should be self-evident: Families are made up of free people. So are churches and synagogues, local firehouses and volunteer soup kitchens, and the countless community service projects that happen every weekend. All of these social units, no matter how you parse it, are made up of individuals working together, by choice. It does take a village, but villages are made up of people choosing to voluntarily associate with one another.

  I was introduced to the philosophy of liberty by Ayn Rand. I found her work compelling because it focused on individual responsibility. Do you own yourself and the product of your work, she asked, or does someone else have a first claim on your life? I thought the answer was obvious.

  Rand’s critics love to attack her views that individuals matter, and that you have both ownership of and a responsibility for your own life. They usually set up a straw man: the caricature of “rugged individualism” and the false claim that everyone is an island, uncaring of anyone or anything, willing to do anything to get ahead.

  “Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up,” Barack Obama tells Rolling Stone. “Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity—that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America.”6

  Of course it isn’t, Mr. President. In Obama’s simplistic configuration, there is only the “narrow vision” of the individual, and the seemingly limitless wisdom of the collective. Progressives and advocates of more government involvement like to suggest that there is a dichotomy, or at least a direct trade-off, between individual liberty and a robust sense of community.

  It’s easy to kick down straw men, I suppose, but the real question stands: Can governments require that people care, or force people to volunteer? It seems like such a silly question, but some seem to think the answer is “yes.”

  Some people just don’t see the link between individual initiative and the cohesion of a community.

  Justice means treating everyone just like everyone else under the laws of the land. No exceptions, no favors. “Social justice,” as best I can tell, means exactly the opposite. It means treating everyone differently, usually by redistributing wealth and outcomes in society by force.

  The term “social justice” was first coined by the Jesuit philosopher Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, who argued, “A society cannot exist without an authority that creates harmony in it.” Someone needs to be in charge, he assumed, and someone needs to direct things. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt quoted Taparelli in a speech in 1932, to help justify the extraordinary, and often unconstitutional, actions taken by his administration to consolidate power in the federal government: “[T]he right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching.”7

  Forty years later, John Rawls would expand on this idea in his influential book A Theory of Justice. “Social and economic inequalities,” he asserted, “are to be arranged so that they are to be of the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society.”8

  Can you mandate compassion? Can you outsource charity by insisting that the political process expropriate the wealth of someone you don’t know to solve someone else’s need? Austrian economist F. A. Hayek, ever quick to spot the logical flaws of his ideological opponents, said that social justice was “much the worst use of the word ‘social’ ” and that it “wholly destroys” the meaning of the word it qualifies.9

  The process of getting to the “right” outcomes, the properly reengineered social order, is never well defined. But the social justice crowd is convinced that some people just know better. They are certain that some people are better trusted with the power to rearrange things. As former U.S. representative Barney Frank used to say: “Government is what we call those things we do together.”10

  If you don’t believe in individual liberty, things get complicated quick. “Social justice,” the seeming opposite of plain old justice, requires someone to rearrange things by force. It’s all about power, and who gets to assert their power over you. The rules are always situational, and your situation is always less important than the situations the deciders find themselves in. Someone else, defined by someone else’s values, gets to decide.

  Of course, if someone else is in charge, we always, conveniently, have someone else to blame. Not left free, we might just wait around for someone else to take care of it. We might not step up. We might not get involved. We might outsource personal responsibility to a third party, paid for with someone else’s hard work and property.

  Without liberty, any sense of community that binds us might just unravel.

  4. WORK FOR IT

  Liberty is a weight.

  If you have ever tried to do something you’ve never done before, or tried to start a new business venture, or created new jobs and hired new workers, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The weight. The same is true for people who step up to solve a community problem or serve other folks in trouble. How about peacefully petitioning your government for a “redress of grievances,” a right guaranteed by the First Amendment, only to be met by federal park police with preprinted “shutdown” signs and plasticuffs?

  These are all acts of risk taking, an attempt to serve a need or disrupt the status quo. These are acts of entrepreneurship. And it’s all hard work.

  But work is cool, too, and even some Hollywood superstars seem to get it. “I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work,” Ashton Kutcher told the audience of screaming teenagers at the 2013 Teen Choice Awards in Hollywood. “I’ve never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job. And every job I had was a stepping-stone to my next job, and I never quit my job until I had my next job. And so opportunities look a lot like work.”11

  Have you ever had to work for something, pushing against the disinterest and apathy of everyone around you? Maybe you were laughed at, but it didn’t really matter. You were out to prove yourself right. To create something. To achieve something. Entrepreneurs often fail, take their lumps, and move forward to disrupt the status quo. We don’t know what we don’t know, but entrepreneurs have the extraordinary judgment to see around the next corner.

  “What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future,” says the great free market economist Ludwig von Mises. The entrepreneur “sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way. . . . No dullness and clumsiness on the part of the masses can stop the pioneers of improvement. There is no need for them to win th
e approval of inert people beforehand. They are free to embark upon their projects even if everyone else laughs at them.”12

  Entrepreneurship can be a lonely business. It’s hard work. Entrepreneurship is knowing that a particular problem won’t be solved unless you solve it.

  Part of being an entrepreneur is ignoring the naysayers, and staying fixed on a singular goal, looking around the corner of history and envisioning a better future. Working for it means responding to customer demand or creating solutions to still-unknown demands, seeing something that others can’t see but still wondering if you will fail.

  Do you think our founding entrepreneurs were anxious when they put their “John Hancocks” on that parchment? They pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for a principle—that people should be free—utterly ignoring their slim odds of success.

  It’s not so easy creating jobs, hiring new workers that become your extended family, and then lying awake at night wondering if you will make payroll on Friday. But that’s what working for it is all about.

  Work is hard.

  But the upside of work is so awesome. It’s all about the infinite potential that sits right around the next corner. You can go get it. You are free to work in pursuit of your own happiness, to associate with whomever you like, to take care of loved ones as your first priority, and to join in voluntary association with your neighbors, or your countrymen, in common cause, to make things better. Or not. It is up to you.

  For all of the debate about “the rich” paying their fair share, the real question we are arguing about in America is not about the proper redistribution of the diminishing spoils between rich and poor. Every country throughout history has had its privileged class, usually favored and protected by government cronies. The real question is more fundamental: Are we still a country where anyone can get rich, where there are no government-enforced class distinctions that prevent the poor from climbing the economic ladder?

  Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, suggests that there is a good dose of karma in a book I coauthored in 2010, Give Us Liberty. “It is the Sanskrit word for ‘deed’ or ‘action,’ and the law of karma says that for every action, there is an equal and morally commensurate reaction,” he writes in the Wall Street Journal.13 “Kindness, honesty and hard work will (eventually) bring good fortune; cruelty, deceit and laziness will (eventually) bring suffering.” My opposition to Wall Street bailouts for the irresponsible and politically gamed rules that punish hard work? “Capitalist karma, in a nutshell,” Haidt concludes.

  CALL IT WHATEVER YOU like. Liberty defends “the minority,” the opportunity to work for it, the “underclass” with absolutely no political pull, the unconnected, and the rights of every single individual to make it. Liberty is color-blind. Liberty is a merit-based system, and it blindly measures all of us based on the content of our character.

  Why would anyone want to live life any other way but free?

  5. MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS

  Free people live and let live. Free people don’t have any great designs on the freedoms of other people, and we expect them to return the favor. I figure I have enough on my plate just keeping myself straight, protecting the people I love, getting my work done.

  How I live my own life, and how I choose to treat others, matters. How I achieve my goals defines who I am and who I will be on the day I die. As best I can, the hows and whats in my life hopefully reflect my core principles.

  But is it really any of my business to mind the business of the millions of other people working out their own dreams? I don’t think so. I don’t have to accept their choices or their values. But as long as they tolerate mine, as long as they don’t try to hurt me or take my stuff, or try to petition the government to do it for them, why should I care?

  Certainly other people will disagree with my live-and-let-live attitude. But the real question is about the proper role of government in limiting my personal decisions, or dictating my values, or the practice of my religion, or the redefinition of cherished social institutions, which have been developed and defended by people coming together in common cause.

  Society should never be absorbed or distorted by the state, argues Ben Rogge, the late, great libertarian professor at Wabash College. “Society, with its full network of restraints on individual conduct, based on custom, tradition, religion, personal morality, a sense of style, and with all of its indeed powerful sanctions, is what makes the civilized life possible and meaningful.” Still, he argues, we do “not wish to see these influences on individual behavior institutionalized in the hands of the state. As I read history, I see that everywhere the generally accepted social processes have been made into law, civilization has ceased to advance.”

  I, Ben Rogge, do not use marijuana nor do I approve of its use, but I am afraid that if I support laws against its use, some fool will insist as well on denying me my noble and useful gin and tonic. I believe that the typical Episcopal Church is somewhat higher on the scale of civilization than the snake-handling cults of West Virginia. Frankly I wouldn’t touch even a consecrated reptile with a ten-foot pole, or even a nine-iron, but as far as the Anglican Church is concerned, I am still an anti-anti-disestablishmentarian, if you know what I mean.14

  Can the political process better arbitrate the definition of time-tested social mores? It seems like a ridiculous question to ask about 535 men and women who can’t even balance the federal budget. Why would we hope that they weigh in on the things that really matter to us personally?

  I remember when the George W. Bush administration implemented its faith-based initiative as part of a campaign of “compassionate conservatism.” Whatever its good intentions, this program effectively began the process of politicizing faith-based community service. It was no longer about individuals volunteering their time and money to solve problems. By 2008, this federal program became a competitive scrum for federal grants to well-connected “faith-based” organizations. Under Barack Obama, the program was renamed and repopulated with interests and organizations to better promote his administration’s priorities.

  Wouldn’t it be better not to set up a new program that will inevitably become politicized, corrupting everything it touches?

  Consider the definition of marriage. Why does the federal government have an opinion about my marriage? Why do government bureaucrats and politicians have a right to have an opinion about, or control over, the most important personal relationship in my life? Why would we want the federal government, with all of its competing agendas and interests other than your own, involved? I think it’s a really bad idea, and the fact that I had to get a license to get married to the love of my life felt somehow degrading to my most sacred bond.

  I was young and idealistic when Terry and I got engaged. At the time I had made my carefully researched, impeccably principled arguments about not demeaning the sacred bond between us, and how getting the government’s approval was wrong. I lost, of course. We got the government’s license, on the government’s terms. And we got married. Let’s just say that I respect my wife’s authority and her grandma’s authority over my life far more than I resent the federal government’s claimed but illegitimate right to dictate the terms of my personal relationships.

  So yes, even I compromise on principle.

  Do to others what you would have them do to you. This, of course, is the Golden Rule, and you can find iterations of it throughout the New Testament of the Bible. I would like other people, and the government, to stay out of my personal business. I plan to return the favor.

  6. FIGHT THE POWER

  Lord Acton, the great classical liberal political philosopher, famously warned that “power tends to corrupt” and “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”15 “The chief evil is unlimited government,” argues F. A. Hayek, “and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.”16

  This too seems like common sense, and Americans have a healthy distrust of big, obtrusive government that seems gene
tically encoded in our DNA. Our system of constitutional checks and balances, and adversarial and separate branches of government, is intended to limit monopoly government power.

  Notice that the goal is not electing better angels to benevolently wield power for the right reasons. There is some confusion about this, a difference that Hayek addresses eloquently in his most important essay on political philosophy, “Why I Am Not a Conservative”:

  [T]he conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not to be too much restricted by rigid rules. Since he is essentially opportunist and lacks principles, his main hope must be that the wise and the good will rule—not merely by example, as we all must wish, but by authority given to them and enforced by them. Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.17

  Remember that, in the European context, “liberal” means pro-freedom. “Conservative” means something more like what we would call progressive.

  So there are rules. But the architects of this model always understood that accountability rested in the hands of the customers: American shareholders who have a right, and an obligation, to check the bad management decisions made in Washington, D.C. Our representatives work for us, and we should have the right to review their job performance and fire underperformers.

  The challenge of knowing what it is that our public officials are up to has always been the biggest barrier to accountability. Quite often, busy people with jobs and families and all sorts of personal dreams and pursuits just couldn’t get good, timely information about what our representation—our employees—were up to behind the cloistered halls of the marble Senate office buildings and windowless federal agencies. What were they doing in there? We would usually find out about bad decisions, made for the benefit of someone else’s parochial interests, after the legislation was signed, sealed, and delivered.