The idea and principles of liberty never change. The times always do. How we express and defend the message of liberty should change as needed.
The first lines of F.A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty:
"If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they much be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations...The underlying ideas many be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction."
There are everyday opportunities to engage people through personal relationships and social media outlets, connecting with people on a real life basis. Like any substantial social movement, for change to be substantive and lasting it has to start from the grassroots, in the minds of We the People. How we engage those around us (physically and on the social media web) on the terms of real life situations is important.
An honest, enthusiastic, and optimistic explanation of freedom on an individual basis is the best way to "market" freedom. In the end, you are the packaging liberty needs. In the New Year let's do our homework and stay enthusiastically engaged.
"Hence the familiar fact that the more the state 'plans,' the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."~~~F.A. Hayek The Road to Serfdom
Most Americans dearly hold to their rights articulated in and protected by the First Amendment. Put another way, few Americans would quietly abide the unwarranted government violation of the following:
Not having a state-mandated religion
Their right to freely worship or not worship God as they see fit without government intervention
Speaking freely, with no state prevention or persecution thereof
A free press, neither controlled nor manipulated by government
The right to peacefully assemble
The right to petition government for correction of government abuses
When it comes to our First Amendment "rights" we have little toleration for government meddling; this is a very good thing. Our dogged adherence to these limitations on the power of government is almost like a political and cultural religion. Here we are and there is government, and we correctly cry Thou Shall Not! at the appropriate times.
So why, then, don't we get all wrapped around the axle when government intrudes upon other very personal and private matters? If we've so jealously fenced off our religion, speech, and press from the meddling of the state on the one hand, why are we so indifferent to state interference of our private, peaceful interactions on the other hand?
Every time government intervenes in "the market" it interferes and adversely affects you in an intimate way. Why? Because you are the market! What else is "the market" but 300 million plus people making millions of decisions on a minute-by-minute basis and acting freely and cooperatively upon those decisions in pursuit of their respective self-interests? This amazing process occurs successfully when people are free enough to make it all happen; conversely, every time government takes it upon itself to plan, manipulate, order, and coerce the market into prosperity the opposite of prosperity occurs---I give you the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, and the United States during the Great Depression.
When government intervenes and places top-down decrees as to how goods are to be made, at what price transactions occur (like minimum wage laws), subsidies one producer and places other producers at a competitive disadvantage, bails out failing companies, and artificially affects the market forces and prices (which always go up--think of college tuition, health care services, and housing), the prices of goods and services have to match up to the actual costs involved and those costs go up.
And who pays for the increase in costs? You, the consumer who is always on the receiving end of unnecessarily high costs reflected in prices and you, the taxpayer who has to fund the regulatory regime that continues to expand with the ever-expanding size of the federal government.
If we were limited to the churches we could attend due to some government mandates would e sit by in quite acquiescence? If government limited what we could say and when we could say it would we not be openly outraged? If only we held all our liberties as dearly as we hold our right to free speech and freedom of religion.
The federal government has the constitutional authority and responsibility to regulate interstate commerce but no authority, neither constitutional nor moral, to directly interfere with the workings of that commerce, that is, our free assembling cooperatively and freely in pursuit of our respective self-interests and---gasp!---profits. Perhaps if such a restriction were included in the First Amendment and not Article 1 we'd jealously keep government out of our market affairs, too.
As they say in New Jersey, I'm not sayin,' I'm just sayin'...
"The much decried 'mechanism' of the free market leaves only one way open to the acquisition of wealth, viz., to succeed in serving the consumers in the best possible and cheapest way."~~~Ludwig von Mises Liberalism: The Classical Tradition
You've probably watched it and you'll probably watch it again. A Christmas Carol is looping on cable along with the other classic Christmas movies.
Over the years I've watched the George C. Scott version several times. Something always unsettled me about the story, and I just now can put my finger on it: the entire premise that Scrooge and his dead partner, Marley, did not provide good for their fellow creatures is just wrong. The underlying theme is economically unsound and historically inaccurate. It all adds to our general misunderstanding of free market capitalism.
That theme? Whenever we focus too much on our own material welfare we cause harm to or deprive others of good.
To this we can assuredly reply, Bah-Humbug!
The scene with the apparition of Marley, Scrooge's erstwhile business partner, sets this errant premise upon which the entire transformation of Scrooge takes place.
Here is a clip of the scene:
Leaving aside the complete lack of Biblical evidence of Marley's quasi-purgatorial punishment (introduced, in all places, in a literary work constructed around the celebratory season of Christ's incarnation), think about what Marley conveys to Scrooge about his time on earth as a successful businessman of market enterprise:
"Business?! Mankind was my business! The common welfare was my business...The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
We are being told Marley's life of pursuing a profit and focusing his energies primarily therein neglected mankind.
Bah-Humbug! As Walter E. Williams says, if you want to help your fellow man go earn a profit providing them what they want and need.
Dickens' A Christmas Carol has been viewed as a rebuke of the industrial capitalism of the 1800s. Marley's ill-founded remarks could easily be the reason for this view.
Given that Marley and Scrooge's efforts took place during a relatively free period in English history wherein countless hordes of people were further removed from the hand-to-mouth existence that had plagued society for, well, ever, their business activities contributed a great deal of good to society, even if that good was not directly observed. Dickens' novel takes place in Victorian England, a time when a burgeoning population had its material welfare provided by the workings of industrial capitalism. That "comprehensive ocean" of business involved many thousands of unseen affects; a market, after all, involves more people, decisions, actions, and ripple effects than immediately meets the eye.
Marley seems to believe his efforts and time were compartmentalized and not part of a larger whole out of which many thousands of positive economic activities took place. In short, he focused on himself and thereby did not help mankind. Since no one earns a profit in a bubble, Marley and Scrooge got "rich" by devoting their time to facilitating one part of the larger mechanism of the market of satisfying the wants and needs of the consumers.
And who were the consumers in Victorian England after which businessmen scurried to satisfy in their respective pursuit of individual wealth? The masses of people who in the pre-capitalist times were doomed to life sentences of serfdom and beggary. And the first thing the masses wanted were to no longer be masses of poor, wretched serfs. (Indoor plumbing, leisure time, electricity, and cheese-filled hot dogs all came along later.)
In 2010 we consumers want new apps for our Apple I Phones; back then they wanted apples to keep from starving. What's the difference between then and now? Capitalism has continued to allow some of us to provide the rest of us what we want, resulting in unbelievable standards of living, in spite of all the government intervention.
Mises reminds us:
"The greatness of the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the first World War consisted precisely in the fact that the social ideal after the realization of which the most eminent men were striving was free trade in a peaceful world of free nations. It was an age of unprecedented improvement in the standard of living for a rapidly increasing population. It was the age of [classical] liberalism."
The movie ends with Scrooge merrily contributing to philanthropic ventures. The narrator comments that Scrooge went on to be society's foremost benefactor and so on and so on. That's all good but what is left open-ended is whether or not he resumed his business enterprises and continued to provide for a common good not immediately seen and tangible. If he quit cold turkey under the assumption he could do more good by dissipating his accumulated wealth for philanthropic good before his eyes, much unseen good would have been withheld from society at large.
And if that were the case, Scrooge well deserves our hearty Bah-Humbug!
"Side by side with the word 'property' in the program of [classical] liberalism one may quite appropriately place the words 'freedom' and 'peace.' "~~~Ludwig von Mises Liberalism: The Classical Tradition
Have you ever wondered if your property is, well, actually your property? Silly question, right? By definition, if something belongs to you that something is your "property"; the word, "property" denotes ownership by someone somewhere. So the phrase "your property" is somewhat redundant, a bit like "wet fish."
All fish are wet so why, then, are you being asked to doubt ownership of your property?
Because pundits and politicians are talking about income and estate taxes! I've found people generally do not think of their income and their estates---the products and fruits of their labor, time, and talents---as their property. Your income is your property; it is the monetary compensation of your time and efforts.
Our vote-fishing representatives in Congress never refer to your income as property. If they were to refer to property as "property," they would have a terribly difficult time explaining why you are being permitted to keep x% of your property versus y% for blah, blah, blah reasons. Chances are their reasons would come across as thinly-veiled demagoguery.
More difficult still would be the job of justifying the noxious and logically flawed premise that underpins the income and estate tax. That premise? If government has a moral right to 1% of your property it has a moral right to 100% of our property. All the public wrangling is simply about numbers and details.
Consider all the political claptrap that orbs around the income tax debates as you view this commentary by Brit Hume. And this holiday season, please don't thank your government for the gift of your own property, whatever the tax schedule for 2011.
Talk of the "private sector" is just irksome. When I hear it tossed around I wince, much when the phrases a whole nother, suposebly, or anywho crops up within earshot. Fingernails down a chalkboard would be an euphonious melody if said fingernails were raking and slashing these phrases on the chalkboard, starting with "private sector."
There is no such thing as a "private sector" of the economy. The phrase implies the economy has parts and that private free enterprise is just one part of the overall economy. Further implied is that the economy would be incomplete or unbalanced if "the private sector" was responsible for all economic activity.
Private enterprise and the market---you, me, and every other individual voluntarily participating as producers, consumers, and savers---isthe economy. The market is the sum total of the free actions of individuals who participate and contribute to its existence and movement. Without individuals seeking their self interests there would be no market. This is no mere sector of the economy.
(Did one day, deep in the past, government authorities somewhere declare, "Let an economy come forth from nothingness, and we shall determine which sector will be private"? Or did individuals, respectively seeking their own self interests and making mutually beneficial transactions voluntarily cooperate themselves, and thus their societies, out of hand-to-mouth existences?)
Furthermore, when individuals voluntarily participate in the market, of which they are by definition a part, they can only contribute to the the economy. By contrast, when government "participates" in the economy, it, by definition of being outside the market that is had nothing to do in creating, can only interfere with the operations and voluntary interactions of individuals, that is, the market. And when it interferes, it does so using the force of law and regulative coercion, something individuals in the market cannot do, minus the legislative assistance of the government. (Think of GE lobbyists stealthily working for Cap and Trade legislation.)
Basically, individuals create wealth, therefore economic activity. Government confiscates, retards, and interferes with wealth creation, therefore creating uncertainty and instability in the economy. These two mutually opposed entities cannot therefore constitute two sectors of the same enterprise. There is the market and there is the government.
Yes, government has a role in the economy, but that role is always from outside, hence its role is interference. How much interference is desirable, just, counterproductive, etc. is a matter for another time. One might even say it is a matter for a whole nother Chalk Talk.
The Federal Highway Administration is ordering, with the coercive arm of the federal government, all local governments to buy new street signs. What's so important that the federal government had to force itself into local affairs? Street signs should have mixed lettering, not just all CAPS.
Whew! At least we can rest assured this coercive, unconstitutional, bureaucratic fiat is for high and good purposes. (What's that old authoritarian maxim about the means and ends...)
Let's repeat this situation in different terms: Local governments, funded by local taxpayers, have been ordered by an unelected bureaucratic wing of the central government to use local tax dollars to remove all existing street signs and replace said signs with new street signs. (The term "federal government" will hereby be changed, by fiat of the author, to "central government" for the remainder of this post, for reasons that will be easily inferred by the reader.)
Are local and city governments incapable of deciding for themselves which signs best suit their traffic conditions? Put another way, is a categorical, one-size-fits-all federalgovernment central government edict going to work out best for every single local municipality across the country?
And what about that whole federalism thingy set up in the Constitution? The federal government central government is allotted specific tasks it is constitutionally empowered to pursue. Everything else, by default, falls to the state and local governments. Skipping right over the state government and ordering local municipalities what to do and how to do it is an even broader, bolder slap to federalism than, say, arm-twisting state governments with federal highway funding.
But wait! It gets even worse. Pick up at the 0:55 mark of the Fox News video below to hear about the private company that helped to fund the so-called research that went into this very important task of the central government that had to take place during a recession:
The 3M company that just happens to make the new-and-improved reflective material now mandated by the central government contributed to the research that revealed that every local government in the country just had to purchase and install new signs. 3M could deserve the good citizen award, one could suppose, for being so concerned about traffic safety they cut into their profit margin to help fund such research. One big problem: 3M happens to make the reflective material that will be used in the manufacturing of all those signs that local governments are required by law to purchase.
As Dana Carvey's beloved Church Lady used to say, "Well isn't that conveeeeeenient?"
Side-stepping honest competition in an openly competitive market and using the force of government to corner the market and regulate out of business pesky little competitors is nothing new. Ever since the federal government central government began interfering in the otherwise free and cooperative interactions of free individuals--the market--corporations have parlayed the regulative apparatus of the federal government central government to legally leverage for profits. In other words, some corporations find it more convenient to use the coercive power of the federal government central government to make competition illegal and/or force the purchase of their products than compete openly by persuading consumers to freely purchase their goods.
As Tim Carney makes abundantly clear in his invaluable book, The Big Ripoff, the history of big government is the history of big business, and consumers and taxpayers have been paying a higher and higher price for the unholy alliance.
Who suffers in this anti-free market game? We the People suffer, once as consumers paying artificially high prices for goods and a second time as taxpayers burdened with funding the bureaucracies and regulations that is at the heart of this mess. And the bigger the federal government central government gets, the worse that problem.
If you have not read Carney's book, please buy a copy and do so. There will soon be bright new street signs that show you the way to your local bookstore!
I'm having a root canal done this morning, in the chair at 7 a.m. What a way to start the day!
If some thoughts concerning free society crop ups while under or recovering from sedation, I'll report forthwith. (Or at least when the drooling ceases long enough to type.)
, the history of big government is the history of big business, and consumers and taxpayers have been paying a higher and higher price for the unholy alliance. 