Germ-o-Phobia and Liberty

"[E]veryone is a 'progressive' by their own lights."  Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

I'm a germ-o-phobe.   I also love liberty.  Enjoy the confluence.

Progress and the status quo are primarily antithetical of one another.  Primarily because the goal at which one wishes to inch along society might well be something worth preserving or, put another way, not progressing away from.

Example: C.S. Lewis reminds us that washing the bacteria from our hands is a way of maintaining a very important status quo, the status quo of clean hands that predate dirty hands.  Every time we wash our hands we are retarding the progress of bacterial growth, hoping to regress toward the clean hands we had at one point in time before we had to interact with all those other germ-toting agents of disease we call other people in the petri dish we call society.

But regressing bacteria on one's hands and, consequently, one's community is a very progressive thing to do to.  Only a regenerate, uncouth, backwards-looking reprobate would knowingly build up and spread around bacteria in society.   Taken to an extreme, such a person could be considered a purveyor of biological warfare.

That would definitely be regressive.

(Side note: For the love of Pete please wash your hands after using the restroom,  blowing your nose, or touching anything you would not put directly into your own mouth.  If you think it is none of my business to request so much, think how many other people will have to touch the same door knobs and dollar bills that you grace with your disgusting fingers.  Come on, it's not 1802 anymore.  Don't let Louis Pasteur's life's work be in vain...) 

As Thomas Sowell points out in Intellectuals and Society, everyone believes they are progressive.  We all have an ideal for society we think best.  For self-described "progressives" that ideal is a society whose organization is primarily controlled--that is, regulated--by the decisions and planning of an elite few.

The crescendo of such command-and-control of society in the United States occurred during the New Deal of the 1930s.  The extent to which elites in government controlled everything from the price of pressing suits to how many hogs would be slaughtered while millions wallowed in hunger is what was new about the New Deal.  These drastic power grabs were certainly a break from the status quo of a primarily free market and concomitantly American free society.  And we have never washed our hands of the overreaching legacies of the New Deal.

Taking the long (and sad) view of freedom in world history, however, we need to ask: Just how progressive was the New Deal?  In this light, is such government control of society ever really a step forward?  

"Progressive" for liberty-minded conservatives, libertarians, and constitutionalists is a progressing away from the New Deal center of politics whereby state-control of the direction of the economy and society is the default setting for government policy.  Free and responsible people cooperating peacefully is the best way to organize society.  It's work every time it has been tried.  As Milton Friendman remarked, distrust of the "private sector" or "the market" is nothing less than a distrust of freedom itself, and a distrust of people to be trusted with freedom.  That's terribly patronizing and elitist, in addition to being regressive.  

Considering how America has always been the world's freest society (the New Deal notwithstanding) diminishing liberty was a terribly regressive policy, then and now.  And since the redistributive, bureaucratic model has had its tentacles in D.C. for over seventy years, at this point in time it would be very progressive to move beyond its premises and (re)embrace freedom.

To return to Lewis' analogy, if we are going to wash our cultural and political hands we have a great deal of government bacteria to wash off.  Ever since the New Deal, such infringement of liberty has been caking up like so many layers of germs eating away at liberty.  Clean hands would be nice, but at this point I'd be happy with cleaner hands.

Now go was your hands, America, both literally and figuratively.

Regressive, Not Progressive

"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."
C. S. Lewis 

I've been thinking about MSNBC's new tag line, "Lean Forward" with its progressive political implications and was reminded of a past post here.  Progressive policies and moving forward as a society are antithetical, not complimentary.  Delving into the topic is a wonderful opportunity to rediscover both the principled and utilitarian reasons for embracing freedom.  Below is a Chalk Talk post from July: 

Regressive, Not Progressive
Progress is the act of moving forward toward good things. Regress is the act of sliding backwards away from good things already enjoyed.

With this understanding of progress in mind, turn the clock back to 1700. Turn it back further, to the Middle Ages. Keep going backward.

Do we see anywhere in the world economic prosperity, affluent societies, and high standards of living? Do we see sustainable and forward-looking economies? Do we see the flowering of the sciences, arts, and learning?

No, we don’t.

When did social progress begin? Where in history do we see the liberation of millions from hand-to-mouth existences, poverty, and static societies?

Societies progressed by embracing freedom. Progress began wherever there were free markets, free trade, and government policies that allowed for the unplanned progress of society. Regress occurs every time governments suppress freedom and seek to turn the clock back to the mercantile-style government planning of economies, and attempt to shape societies into the image of their choosing.

Back to historical examples.

Prior to the expansion of free market capitalism in19th century Europe, economic activity was dictated by the mercantile policies of a handful of people in governments. In Liberalism, The Classical Tradition, Ludwig von Mises reminds us that for western Europeans in the period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the beginning of the first World War (1914) an unprecedented improvement in the standard of living took place alongside a quickly rising population.

Mises explains that, because of free market capitalism, millions of would-be serfs became the consumers businesses sought to please. Because people wanted a higher standard of living and because other people were free to provide so much for them, society progressed. This “democracy of the market” unleashed the creative and productive power of societies: "By the time of the start of the Great War, the average industrial worker in England and the U.S. lived better and more graciously than the nobleman of not too long before.”

In Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell highlights the rapid progress countries experience when they loosen government restrictions on trade and price controls. India, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, South Korea, and China all experienced progress by permitting more freedom, not less, in their economies. In 1978, for example, “less than 10 percent of China’s agricultural output was sold in open markets, but, by 1990, 80 percent was.”

This increase in output and resulting boon to the living conditions of everyday Chinese citizens was the result of more freedom, not less. From 1978 to 1995 China experienced an annual economic growth rate of 9 percent.

As for aversion to freedom and regressive policies think of the living conditions in Cuba, North Korea, the former eastern European communist countries, and third world countries ruled by authoritarian governments. The contrast could not be sharper. These examples mark a regression to precapitalistic times, that is, before freedom in the market place was tried and embraced.

Listen to Milton Friedman’s summation of the issue:




It is interesting, if not befuddling, then, that the economic and social policies of self-described “progressives” (or, generically, “liberals”) point us backward to the kinds of mercantilistic, central planning authority in governments that predates any real progress in the world.  Viewed in light of human progress, their economic solutions and initiatives are regressive.

Returning to Friedman, he bemoans a similar frustration with the term “liberal”:

“In the name of welfare and equality, the twentieth-century liberal has come to favor a revival of the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought. In the very act of turning the clock back to seventeenth-century mercantilism, he is fond of castigating true liberals as reactionary!”

Liberal has come to mean illiberal, and progressive has come to mean regressive.

The more Americans understand that freedom is not an abstraction but at the heart of the only real progress in the world, the closer we’ll come to approximating a reinvigorated belief in freedom into real policy. We still live in a constitutional republic, and when the voice of the people is consistent enough and clear enough, public opinion will echo in the halls of legislatures.

A belief in freedom is a belief in the resourceful, creative, and productive powers of Americans themselves. Insisting on a policy of freedom is our best way of progressing forward.

Otherwise, we have no where to go but backward.