Tibor R. Machan

In the book Reading Obama (Princeton, 2010), James T. Kloppenberg makes a case for how the kind of approach President Obama takes to public policy is now widely preferred, to put it paradoxically, on principle at the most prestigious universities. Obama’s rejection of general principles, the kind of we find stated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, is in sync with what has come to be mainstream philosophy in America.

Mind you this is no novel insight about American intellectual life. Pragmatism is, after all, America’s homegrown school of philosophy, one that on principle rejects the value of principled thinking! Now pragmatism has several versions but the one that has become fashionable is what such people as Paul Krugman ridicule by calling principled thinkers “fundamentalists” as if they were dogmatic, mindless, and doctrinaire.

Principled thinkers, such as the American founders, are nothing like this. The principles they found valid for governing a free society were learned from extensive studies of history, by philosophical education and reflection, and by reading a lot of others who embarked on inquiries about human affairs.

In a way those alleged fundamentalists whom at least the more vulgar type of pragmatists try to marginalize are like medical scientists. They learn about the criteria of good health and physical condition from their study of human life, a study that comes up with certain reasonably stable notions about what can be done to achieve and maintain good health. These notions are not Platonic forms, fixed in heaven forever and incapable of being modified and updated. But they aren’t the infinitely flexible ones that are preferred by those who scoff at principled thinking. Engineers, farmers, gardeners, pharmacists and others who take the findings of the various sciences and translate and apply them to problem solving aren’t doctrinaire or dogmatic for being guided by generalizations, principles that come out of those sciences and the experimentation that is part and parcel of them.

Indeed, all disciplines are comprised of more or less fundamental notions that come out of the studies being done in them and the practical implementation of the results of those studies. It is like a pyramid, with some very basic propositions that, to use a phrase the Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made prominent, “stand fast for us,” as well as ones that are less and less well established and more subject to revisions.

Instead of denying that there are fundamentals in fields like political economy and political science, embracing a vast Heraclitian flux that leaves everything indeterminate, ambiguous and open to infinite interpretation, depending upon the personal preferences of those concerned with a discipline, a better, contextual approach is warranted. Even pragmatists tip their hats to this when they for example refuse to be flexible about the viciousness of rape or murder. They know that some things do stand fast for us, including the value of human life, maybe even of human liberty!

However, those spending reams of paper apologizing for Barack Obama’s wobbly political economic decisions and policies act as if this abyss of pragmatically invented ideas could really guide public policy reasonably, productively. (Check out Sam Tanenhaus’s “Will the Tea Get Cold?” in the March 8, 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books as a good example!) They ought to check with those who study and practice such fields as medicine, engineering, farming, or auto mechanics and see if anything could be dealt with successfully without general principles, with well founded theories in them. They would find that none of these vital areas of concern can bear fruit without principled thought. And thus they could also realize that neither can the discipline of political economy.

To put the matter bluntly, so called market fundamentalists–as Krugman likes to call people who hold that the best economic arrangements in societies should rely on the free choices of economic agents–are on solid footing; it is sheer laziness not to seek out firm economic principles and theories and proceed by mere intuition, by, literally, nothing at all. Such nihilism hasn’t advanced any of the fields of study, research and reflection that human beings have relied upon to steer them toward a more and more successful way of living, including of organizing their communities.

And let us no kid ourselves: One reason the nihilist’s stance is attractive is that it supports the policy of arbitrary governing, governing that need not give any account of itself, governing that is, ultimately, autocratic and a matter of pure will. Yes, there are some authentic pragmatists and even nihilists but mostly these positions give aid and comfort to corrupt leaders and their cheerleaders in the academy.

Tibor R. Machan

I assume that writers like me want to be read, not ignored. But, alas, there isn’t much we can do about this except perhaps fine tune our craft. Even that merely improves the odds. None can make others read one’s works. Thousands are simply left unread. (Do they actually burn all those unread copies?)

Or take chefs who would naturally want the public to prefer their cuisine. Still, only a few customers will give it a shot. Or all those artists whose works hang in galleries but without being viewed by visitors. Or museums no one goes to. Or athletics no one cares much about, like the ones that were popular with my family, fencing and rowing. Just compare their fan base with football and baseball!

It’s all so unfair, one might shout out, especially if one is convinced that fairness is the highest value in society, which is the essential message of egalitarianism. From everything we know it is clear that life isn’t fair. What we forget is that there’s nothing wrong with that at all. People pick pretty or colorful flowers while weeds are not taken home and placed in vases, not most of the time. How unfair is that?! Most people have preferences for the company of certain types of other people, by no means for just anyone, let alone for everyone. Your favorite actor or comic or singer isn’t going to be everyone’s favorite. And so it goes, on and on without end.

As the title of one of the late Dr. Murray N. Rothbard’s books put it, “egalitarianism is a revolt against nature”. And some egalitarians are quite aware of this, which explains why under certain political regimes that want to transform societies to follow egalitarianism there is even a push not to allow parents to favor their own children with their love and care. When Mao was the dictator of communist China, news reports came out about a father who in a flood saved someone else’s and not his own child! This “father” was hailed as a hero!

That makes sense for a consistent egalitarian. As does the banning of friendship in a society since friends get special attention from us. Karl Marx’s preferred society was communism in which one had to love everyone equally! Which is why we hoped–indeed predicted–that communism will require a total transformation of human nature! And why under Joseph Stalin his pseudo-scientific agricultural guru, Lysenko, worked on manufacturing a society with everyone the same, with no unique individuals.

Interestingly, despite the fact that President Obama and his team of intellectual backers make a lot of noise in favor of equality–just go back and listen to the most recent state of the union speech which stressed egalitarian themes at every turn–the Republicans hardly touch the topic. They should critique it all over the place, point out some of the stuff Dr. Rothbard covered and is mentioned here! But either their advisers are falling down on their jobs or are scared of the topic since sadly a good many citizens, not to mention college professors in fields like moral and political philosophy, sociology, and the like, do hold such egalitarian ideals, at least implicitly, never mind how fantastic it all is.

Once I had a discussion with someone who defended Karl Marx, saying he was really quite democratic and advocated peaceful revolutions, not violent ones. Never mind the scholarship here, although there is something to it; the problem is that when one’s political ideal is so skewed, so much “against nature,” the only way to attempt to implement it is by means of massive violence, via a totalitarian police state. Everyone must be cut to the same size, made to fit the unrealistic vision of all citizens being fully equal. (Never mind that this bring about the most insidious inequality of all, some in society having inordinately more coercive power than do others!)

Why don’t the Republicans point this out against their political adversaries in any of their speeches and in the “debates”? Is it perhaps because they too have dreams of remaking society to fit some alternative vision that goes against human nature? Perhaps unlike liberal democrats and the fierce socialist among them, many Republicans and conservatives really want to bring about a society regimented along lines of spiritual equality, with everyone forced to get ready for their perfect afterlife!

Tibor R. Machan

Freedom Revived

Few can deny that human beings care about liberty. There are, of course, different senses in which the term “liberty” is used. One sense of it means being without obstacles in life; another, to be able to develop fully with as little hindrance as can be achieved through collective action; or, again, to have the chance to obtain from others their surplus wealth and labor-power.

The sense of the term employed in classical liberal political theory, usually interchangeable with “freedom,” has meant the condition that obtains when one is not intruded upon by other human beings who can choose how they will treat other people.

My main focus here will be on this last sense of the concept “liberty,” the sort of liberty that can obtain among human beings. The sort of liberty at issue concerns what we can do something about by an act of mere will or self-discipline, namely, not intruding on each others’ lives, not encroaching upon one another’s sovereignty. I will also touch on another topic that is related to this sort of liberty, namely, free will or the human capacity to act on one’s own initiative, without being driven to behave by forces apart from oneself. These two notions of liberty or freedom are both vital top human living as well as closely related.

The basic motivation for addressing these topics is to explore why human beings have cared about liberty? The issue hardly ever goes away—every new generation seems to need to consider its significance and ramifications.

Human Nature at Issue

To start with, one needs to examine human nature, although that, too, immediately poses some challenges since to many the very idea of human nature seems obscure. This is, in part, because they expect that in trying to identify human nature, one is seeking a Platonic form, a abstract, universal, perfect, and timeless

1. This essay is based on a presentation made to the International Society for Individual Liberty (October 1996), in Athens, Greece.

metaphysical essence. Despite the prominence of this idea of what “the nature of X” has meant in Western intellectual history, that is not what the idea has to mean. Rather “the nature of X” can mean “what we know to be central to being X, what unites, in every age and ever place, all Xs.” In the case of human nature, we can mean “whatever we know, up to date, renders something human.” And what we know to be so can gradually change, either because nature itself changes or because we learn more about the subject.

Having a clear idea of human nature in that sense should help reveal why human liberty—in the sense of our personal jurisdiction others must gain our permission in order to enter and our free will or capacity to engage in initiated, original behavior—makes such a difference to us. It should indicate, also, why ignoring or denying it has given rise to massive misgivings and even disaster, why even the few achievements that follow from violating liberty are paid for dearly so the prize is never worth the price.

Political Liberty

First of all, political liberty—not having others in organized human communities usurp one’s sovereignty, one’s status as the governor of one’s life—is not just a preference, as some would have it. Preferences are just that, not needed, not even firmly wanted, only something that some people wish for while others can do without. Nor is it just one of the many values that can benefit us in our lives.

As F. A. Hayek observed, “That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values—indeed not merely one value among many but the source of all values—is almost self-evident. It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values, to contribute to their further growth, and the earn moral merit.”2 Political freedom, then, is more of

2 F. A. Hayek, “The Moral Element in Free Enterprise,” in F. A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), pp. 230. Hayek continues: “It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values, to contribute to their futher growth, and to earn moral credit. Obedience has moral value only where it is a matter of choice and not of coercion.” (ibid) Hayek also observes that “It would be impossible to assert that a free society will always and necessarily develop values of which we would approve, or even…that it will maintain values which are compatible with the preservation of freedom.” (ibid)

a precondition of acting, not one of many goals one might try to attain.
It is evident both from analysis and experience that one can’t just dispense with what is usually called negative freedom, freedom from others’ intrusions. (In contrast, positive freedom, gaining guaranteed support from others, is something at least many of us can live with). Why is that so? What is it about human beings that requires that they be granted this fundamental condition from others?

And why is free will so much a part of human living? Why do millions want, over and over, to have their own status as sovereign initiators—as creators or as originators in their lives—respected and protected? Even when they cave in, quite inconsistently, to certain pleas for systems of coercion or intrusiveness, they can’t stand it very long. They change their minds and demand this fundamental condition of being treated as creative original things. Why is that?

Reasons for Freedom

Almost any other animal has a facility for succumbing to a state of servitude. They can be domesticated, eventually, with a little behavior modification of course. Even they don’t like it all the time. But human beings seem to be unable to adjust for very long to a condition of servitude. They may be defeated in their resistance by more powerful people but the resistance to violating individual liberty has been nearly universal throughout human history. This is not an accident.

In order to get a start on answering the question “Why Freedom?” it is not too difficult to find a laboratory because we are dealing with ourselves. We can observe ourselves directly, at every moment of our waking hours. We are this laboratory, so it is not like talking about fossils from 5 million years ago. Every reader of this essay can check some of the things that I’m going to say, which is as it should be because there are no special experts about this topic, only folks who choose to address it more or less intensely in their own lives.

Our Creative Initiative

The first thing that you can notice is that as you are reading or listening to anyone, you are or could be making a critical judgment. You are engaging in something active not just responsive, not just passive. You are doing more than just noticing a smell, registering a
sight. You are giving meaning to things. Not arbitrarily, not capriciously; but you are the one who is identifying the meaning of your world. That’s a creative, inventive act, not mere automatic reaction.

In short, human beings can always take a first step, bringing something about that hasn’t been there before. This is the quintessential aspect of human existence, the primary thing that distinguishes us from so many other entities in nature.

In lots of respects we are, of course, just like dogs and cats and giraffes and stuff. If you are cut, you bleed. We all have to eat. We are, indeed, very much like the rest of the animals. Except, we don’t seem to have many of their limitations, nor their abundant built in attributes for staying alive and, especially, for flourishing. We alone need to take the initiative to learn how to do this. In order for us to make any headway in any department of life, whether it is art, science, philosophy, automotive engineering, cooking or raising children—believe me, raising children—we have to make the effort to be there, to address the matter, to attend, not just attend, sit there, but attend by paying attention.

This sort of personal, individual initiative is something that other living things do not make use of, although there are some borderline cases where some evidence for it exists: you can get an ape into a lab and pound into it some awareness of this kind. But it is no life necessity for them as it is for us. We don’t live very well, nor long, if we do so passively. Even if get away doing so, it means some form of parasitism, dependence on someone else’s active engagement with the world.

This element of initiative that is so crucial to human existence and human flourishing is the first type of freedom that I want to identify here. It is what is usually referred to as free will and means that we are in charge of some of the vital things we do. So, we, individually, are the ones who take the ultimate initiative in life. But that idea is a very controversial one throughout the history of philosophy. In the last 400 years especially, it’s been extremely difficult to sustain a case for free will. One reason that the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant has been so important is that he found some way of making room for free will in the midst of an intellectual era where it was really pretty much precluded by everything that people were beginning to believe. The mechanistic world, the world of Isaac Newton, certainly didn’t leave much room for the idea that there
could be something in nature that could take the initiative, that could move on it’s own power, as it were. (Newton did accord this power to God, though.)

Science versus Liberty

This is very difficult to think of even in our time and many social scientists, including economists, have a hard time fathoming the notion that human beings don’t behave just like much of the rest of nature—reacting to pressures they experience—but have the capacity to act freely. Certainly we can see wherever we live that the culture widely embraces the idea that we are moved by such pressure. In contrast, individual responsibility is passé, especially as far as many experts see the situation. We are all victims, as they say—yet the idea of victim doesn’t even make sense in that context because a victim needs a culprit, something that is impossible without free will. There cannot be culprits in a fully mechanistic world. We are all just billiard balls moving around by the forces that shove us.

This view, from which Kant could only break by dividing the world into two parts, one in which determinism reigns firmly and another in which freedom does, seemed very sensible for a long time because certain areas of nature certainly seemed to be very much in accord with that perspective. And, indeed, by recognizing the mechanical forces of the world, we managed very well to manipulate nature to our own purposes. The entire scientific-industrial revolution and the vast advances of technology, testify to the usefulness of looking at some of nature in the light that the Newtonian framework recommends.

So you can see the impetus, emotional, intellectual for wishing to carry that much further. Social engineering is the extension and result of that impetus. The extrapolation from astronomy and from classical mechanics into the area of human affairs was done mostly innocently. Folks just thought this would be a way to solve problems. Among other things debilitating diseases came to be subject to successful manipulation because of this scientific understanding of human life. Poverty was widely abated, comfort was secured, and work was made more enjoyable; human life improved considerably. So the scientistic mentality cannot be dismissed as mere trifle, some kind of unwise hubris, as some contend.

Scientism, not Science Proper

The trouble is it was a hurried action, the consequence of a hasty generalization: A fallacy of reasoning to think that just because some entities in nature were under the jurisdiction of the principles of classical mechanics therefore all of them had to be.
Not even in all of physics does that appear to be true.

When we consider that the human brain is probably the most complicated entity in the universe, it would not be surprising that it exhibited certain principles that are somewhat different from the behavior of other things in nature. But, that came only recently. One had to have great confidence in one’s introspective evidence—the kind I pointed to earlier that comes from observing oneself as an active agent. Such self-knowledge wasn’t enough to resist all the very heavy scientific and philosophical sophistication coming from those who championed the Newtonian picture.

Freedom’s Compatibility with Nature

Nevertheless, that’s the conclusion that we now have to reach, namely, that there is, indeed, a certain irreducible element of freedom that every human being who is not suffering from major brain damage is subject to. That irreducible element is what in fact defines you as a person, what gives rise to the notion of human dignity.3 Unless we divide ourselves into a comprehensible natural part and one that is totally mysterious and beyond us—the solution proposed by Kant— we must now conclude that there is a unity between our free and our predictable determined nature.

As I noted earlier, the first piece of evidence that everyone can lay a hand on is oneself. One can tell from just seeing how one lives, what one does on almost every wakeful occasion that a fundamental

3. Some of the works that give strong support to this contention and take issue with the widespread reductionist view that it contradicts include, Steven Rose, Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism (London: Oxford University Press, 1998); Roger W. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), A. R. Louch, Explanation and Human Action (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), H. Harre and P. F. Secord, The Explanation of Social Behavior (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), and Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biological Basis of Human Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956.) See, also, Tibor R. Machan, The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974).

condition of one’s life is to be free. Equally important is the realization that nature itself is highly varied—some things are inert, some mineral, some organic, some biological, some swim and others fly and so on. So there is nothing odd about the presence of an entity that could exercise initiative in its life and not simply follow impulses acting upon it. In the multi-facetedness of nature, free will is not an anomaly, only a novelty.

Freedom and Ethics

It is interesting that this very quickly then leads to another fact that one can apprehend just by looking at one’s life. It is that this condition of fundamental freedom lands us in a state of enormous responsibility: It is, in short, up to us to find out what we ought to do. Birds, in contrast, don’t have to worry about “should I pick seeds, or should I build a nest”, ducks don’t have to worry about, “should I fly North or South at any time.” They do what they have to.

Any nature show makes this quickly enough evident, namely, just how wonderfully the animal world works out, how little mental consternation they experience in their lives.4 None need to sit around wondering “What should I do, God, I can’t make up my mind here.” This is not a problem for non-humans. They’ve got the blueprint and it’s hardwired.
We human beings don’t. We have got to concerns ourselves about every big or little thing. To start with, we must consider what is true–that we are free or that we are not free? Right there we need to choose and no built in, automatic, hard wired answer is provided to us. As to less abstract ways of facing one’s freedom, just consider a test I and many others have encountered, when it turned out that the best way to deal with a 16 year old child is to refrain from doing exactly what one would most like to do.5 People have to make such

4 Some researchers deny this. On a recent television program it was
argued that great apes experience severe psychological trauma when the dominant male is threatened by an up and coming young contender. Yet all the evidence presented was various types of behavior associated with human anxiety, such as rapid eye movements, walking in circles, etc. That there is reason to attribute some emotional anxiety to animals does not show the presence of moral consternation. In my case it was not to say anything to my daughter for over 600 miles of driving, with her next to me! I had to choose to sit on my lips, which in my case was supreme self-control, discipline, and an extreme exercise of personal initiative.

difficult choices in the face of all kinds of tests, as when they resist the temptation of drugs, alcohol, smoking, bad habits and practices, or when they need to change their minds in the face of new evidence and arguments, etc.

So we human beings constantly face the issue of choosing between alternatives, of exercising this free will responsibly, of being a moral agent, an ethical being, an ethical animal. As Mary Midgley puts it in her book, The Ethical Primate, we must really face up to the fact that we are not living by instinct, but by choice.

That is the second answer to the question, “Why is freedom important? Why the fuss?” Because while we have it, we are facing incredible alternatives, some of them devastating for ourselves, for those we love, for those we cherish, for ideals we revere. And if we don’t do the right thing of our own initiative—if each of us fails to live up to this challenge—there are devastating consequences.

So another reason then that freedom is significant is that it is intimately, essentially connected with ethics, with morality. There is no such thing as guilt, regret, apology, pride, sense of achievement, if there is no free will, if human beings aren’t at liberty to choose. You cannot meaningfully say to someone “You ought to have done better,” if there was no choice—be this in politics, parenting, medicine, education, science, art or athletics. It makes no sense. It amounts to nothing but wishful thinking. If we aren’t free to take the initiative, all this comes to no more than witchcraft or demonology. Ethics would have to be a bogus enterprise in human life if freedom were not a reality.

Now this doesn’t prove that free will exists, but it does indicate why it is important if one is concerned about ethical matters, if one is concerned about oughts and ought nots in life.

Let us recall that even the determinist—who is trying to make us change our minds so that we abandon the concept of free will and embrace the concept of determinism—is invoking an ought. What the determinist is saying is that you ought to believe in determinism, not in your free will. That is how fundamental the fact of free will is. The point here isn’t some trick but an illustration of how basic this notion of freedom is: Even to talk about it invokes it. It’s indispensable.

Freedom and Individualism

Another thing. Freedom is also intimately connected with individualism. I am not talking about the caricature of individualism that has us all live isolated, self-sufficient lives apart from one another. The individualism at issue is the idea that each person matters as an individual not just as a member of some group, nation, tribe, or even family.

That ancient idea, invoked in novels and plays and political discussions, namely, of human dignity, comes to the fore here. This is that we really deserve a certain kind of basic respect when our sheer potentialities are being considered. Human beings are full of such potential and to deal with them properly, this cannot be overlooked. Even someone who is accused of the most severe crime is owed the respect due to a human being as such: due process in the law is in part a recognition of this fact.

So individualism of the most elementary sort—concerned with our basic rights to be treated with dignity—is intimately tied to free will. This is the notion that you can make up your mind and that you ought to be respected as a being who can make up his or her mind. This is what is ultimately indispensable to individualism, the social philosophy and ultimately the central political concept that has reached near-maturity with the founding of the American republic.

Not that such individualism hasn’t been on the minds of social thinkers and commentators until now. It was on Hesiod’s mind, in ancient Greece, in his Works and Days. Aristotle struggled with it, in his exchange with the Greek sophist Lykkophron.

But, the idea of the sovereign individual reached prominent emancipation only in the last 250 years. As the Harvard economist Amartya Sen noted, this basic idea about human beings and their need for freedom transcends cultural and national boundaries.6 It is where the idea of human rights arises.

But it is faltering, also, in many, many places. There are people across the world, prominent people, who are once again claiming that the individual is an invention, not a discovery. The human individual, as Marx argued, was supposedly invented around the 16th Century, as an ideological tool by which to motivate productivity. Communitarianism, the current political hope of many academic intellectuals in America, holds that an individual human being is probably only a convenient, helpful fiction. That we are, as Marx argued—perhaps in a more bellicose fashion than some of the

6. Amartya K. Sen, “Human Rights and Asian Values,” in The New Republic (July 14-24, 1997).

communitarians right now do, such as Charles Taylor, Amitai Etzioni and Robert Bellah—the cells of the larger organic hole of humanity or the tribe or the nation or the family or some other group. “That the human essence is the true collectivity of man,”7 as Marx put it.

This is a very, very appealing pitch–don’t misunderstand. I don’t want to leave the impression that our community lives are not crucial to us. We are all extremely fond of many people around us, or at least a few, and we are linked to their lives as well as the lives of millions of people we do not directly know. We love them, we depend upon them, we want them, we serve them, we expect from them many good deeds, and we are constantly flourishing with the aid and assistance and thoughtfulness of other human beings. We are, to some extent, social animals. Marx called us “Species Beings”7 meaning that we are the only beings that truly flourish only when the entire species does. This is wrong but you can see the appeal because in its micro manifestation it is so true.

A kind of communalism is clearly part of human life—Aristotle was very, very good at noticing this when he discussed nature of the polis and how human beings are by nature social animals. This is both intellectually and emotionally very attractive. So it very difficult in the face of this attractiveness to make a serious niche for the individuality that is also essential and perhaps even more fundamental than our sociality.

But this individuality is indeed the driving motor of all the social values that we embrace, that we champion. It is this initiative, it’s because our friends, our family, our neighbors, our colleagues, our associates, our fellow human beings have things to offer that haven’t been there before, that we value them.

I don’t mean just in the economic sense, although that’s a very important part of it. Let us never demean money.8 Let us just remind people that it is there to buy things with, to enable you to visit friends, to hang out with them, to travel, to go to the museum, to go to the theater. Let us champion economic prosperity but, partly because it’s a means to ends that we want and often ought to pursue. Without

7. Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx, Selected Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 126.

8. Money is to goods and services what theater tickets are to the show or train tickets to the ride. Because people have confidence in the intimate connection between the two, they often insist on saving up, even hoarding, the former so as to prepare for later obtaining the latter.

this individual capacity to contribute to society, to contribute to their fellow human beings and to lead and guide their own lives and enhance themselves, the notion of society would be really very empty, kind of flat. It’s like being in a large colony of people who are suffering from extreme sleepiness. It would be dull.

What many champions of community values fail to appreciate is that human community life is exciting and promising mainly because individual human beings have chosen it for themselves for sensible reasons. And their individuality is fundamentally important because they’re creative agents, because they put new things into the world, including their self-governance. They are not simply responsive, reactive beings.

Liberty and Politics

Now I come to the thing that unites people in the Western liberal political tradition, especially those calling themselves classical liberals or libertarians, even though on other issues they may differ. There are among champions of the right to individual liberty utilitarians, positivists, existentialists, people with diverse religious and other views—yet they still embrace the ideal of the basic, universal individual right to such liberty. This is the idea that a society with organized legal principles ought to have at it’s pinnacle, the principle that you never subject anyone to involuntary servitude.

It’s inconvenient for champions of the welfare state to talk about involuntary servitude, because it could lead many to suddenly realized that one crucial component of welfare, namely, freedom of choice, is not embraced in their system of justice. This component is the prohibition of involuntary servitude. Although many who proselytize for the welfare state think it promotes charity, compassion and generosity, far from it: it promotes, in fact, the vile institution of involuntary servitude whereby individuals are forced, against their will—by political leaders in the name of the people—to do works for others. Despite the fact that rejecting such a policy is perhaps the central distinction of the American political tradition and that American fought a bloody civil war in part to put an end to a version of the practice, chattel slavery, involuntary servitude is all around us. Indeed, by some accounts, we are supposed to be by nature all part of a system of involuntary servitude; servicing any Tom, Dick and Harry who comes around and wants something from us.

It’s the denial of that social practice that unites classical liberals or libertarians.

That’s the last element of liberty that I will mention. It is also the one that most readers will be quite familiar with, so I will not dwell on it further. There are others. But all relate to the issue that the ideal of human liberty—that each of us has a right to it and may exercise it even when we are not behaving as well as we should, even when millions of others don’t like it—is vital to human living anytime, anywhere, even where it has been suppressed with a good deal of success. That is why there is such a fuss about it, always, even while a great deal of energy is expanded in silencing that fuss, using both outright physical force as well as sophisticated rhetoric.

Tibor R. Machan

However much one learns to squirm out of one’s inconsistencies, logic usually bites one in the butt. Of course, strictly speaking logic is the formal system that’s supposed to guide our reasoning process and on its own doesn’t serve much more than that vital, indispensable task. That is why it is usually studied in symbolic form–As and Bs or ps and qs. When one complains that someone is being illogical, it means that he or she isn’t following the guidelines of logic.

In any case, the discussion of President Obama’s federal policy requiring that everyone obtain health insurance has frequently focused on the fact that either an employer or individual would be forced to obtain private health insurance instead of, as Wikipedia points it out, “or in addition to the institution of a national health service of insurance”. And many have suggested that this is a very unusual measure since it mandates specific performance from citizens, contrary to the legal tradition of the country. One may be forced to give up property but never to carry out a task, something that is reminiscent of slavery or involuntary servitude and thus directly in conflict with the idea of a free society.

It has been noted, now and then, that some laws do require specific performance despite all this, such as being forced to prepare tax returns, but this has been dismissed as rather trivial. However, there is a requirement imposed upon nearly every citizen, namely jury duty and complying with subpoenas–which often takes several days, even weeks from one’s life and imposes specific conduct that one must perform. Is this not just like the individual mandate to obtain health insurance–to go out and purchase this service?

In America jury duty has been objected to mainly by libertarians who have a firm conviction that the right to liberty is a natural–and should be a constitutional–right. Thus to coerce someone to serve on a jury in opposition to what he or she chooses to do would be to subject the person to a form of–maybe not Draconian but still significant–involuntary servitude.

Thus, the argument goes, as a matter of consistency the USA is already awash with a type of compulsory individual mandate and those who complain that Obamacare is breaking with a powerful American principle and tradition are wrong. Or, put more precisely, there is strong precedence for doing this so Obamacare isn’t something extraordinary in requiring specific performance from the citizenry.

There is a good case to be made to counter this, however. Both jury duty and complying with a subpoena do demand specific performance from American citizens, yes, but arguably in consequence of a voluntary commitment they have made in choosing to be citizens of the country. Both jury duty and complying with subpoenas are deemed as necessary for the pursuit of justice. And citizenship in a free country has exactly that as its central purpose, namely, to secure justice for everyone.

So if someone has witnessed a crime and is the only one who can provide testimony about it, refusing to do so is arguably going back on the free choice of a citizen of the country committed to securing justice for all. Refusal to serve on a jury might be so construed as well, although in that case the particular individual’s compliance could well be dispensed with. One could obtain the service involved by hiring a fellow citizen to sit on the jury. This is no option in most cases that one is subpoenaed to testify about what one has witnessed.

In any case, when one performs jury duty or testifies in response to a subpoena, it could be construed as fulfilling a implied promise one has made by becoming or being a citizen of a country the legal system of which is committed to securing justice for all. And that is clearly not involved in the individual mandate that’s part of Obamacare.

Obamacare would, in fact, set at least a federal precedent by compelling citizens to follow a mandate they haven’t consented to follow, to submit to the demand for involuntary servitude!

Tibor R. Machan

By most accounts there is little good news about any progress toward a freer society, quite the contrary.  Around the globe, of course, there are some regions that are making small moves away from tyranny but even in those few, human freedom doesn’t appear to be a priority.  Instead tribal and religious conflicts are the rule, even as the more vicious rulers are losing their grip on their populations.  In Syria the tyrant is hanging on by a very thin thread yet elsewhere it’s mob rule that has replaced dictatorships.

In the USA, which at one time had the justified distinction of aspiring toward a fully free society–”leader of the free world”–the system and those who administer it pay hardly any heed to human liberty; the leadership is either wallowing in calls for economic equality (as if George Orwell had never written Animal Farm) or embarking wrangles about social and religious issues.  (These Republicans certainly know how to drop the ball and miss opportunities!)  Every problem that gains serious attention seems to call forth simply more statism from the elite; the possibility of turning toward more freedom is routinely denounced by prominent commentators.  (I cannot get over Paul Krugman’s widely respected yet totally preposterous complaints about “market fundamentalism,” something he keeps alleging has gripped the country even though no evidence of it exists anywhere.)

Despite all this, there is reason to be hopeful.  First, there is that proverbial long run to keep in mind; anyone who takes a close look at the sweep of human political history has to grant that there exists at least a “two steps forward, one back” phenomenon when it comes to the progress of freedom.  Then there is the recent emergence of substantial respectability for libertarianism, with the likes of Ron Paul and his son Rand championing it openly among mainstream politicians and with the likes of Fox TV’s Judge Andrew Napolitano, John Stossel and others making a libertarian pitch on a very successful cable network, with regular appearances by and interviews with consistent, uncompromising champions of the fully free society.  All those Reason Magazine and Reason.com folks certainly are a very welcome presence “on the air,” repeatedly, making their points very cogently.  Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, is going to give it a shot as the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, lending his sharp message–one I consider more coherent and on point than those of Ron Paul whose is marred by both certain domestic conservative themes and somewhat over the top ideas on international affairs–to the growing demands for freedom coming from America’s main street (as against the insistent statism we get from too many prominent academics).  And there is the growing acknowledgement from many corners that the profligacy of government just cannot be sustained, not without the serious threat of a police state that would be needed to coerce us all into compliance with the resulting grotesque economic policies such as increasing taxes on productive citizens and clamping down on all efforts to resist confiscatory tax policies around the country and abroad.  (It bears remembering that John Maynard Keynes considered the Third Reich as a very promising place for his policies of economic meddling by the state–see the Introduction he wrote for the German translation of The General Theory!) Also, the general population seems to be tiring of rich bashing, although there are those, like the Occupy Wall Street bunch, who continue to be ignorantly deluded about the desirability and feasibility of economic leveling.

It is wise also, I think, to keep in mind that massive semi-democratic systems are very unlikely to ever settle into a sensible political regime, given all the conflicting and often bizarre influences that guide public policies and produce truly awful elected officials–think Barney Frank here. Nonetheless over the long haul freedom is making progress. Not in all places, for sure, and with major gaps not just at the national level but in our backyards.  When a totally corrupt and counterproductive war on drugs can continue in force, it does appear to be hopeless to expect increasing sanity in the country.

Yet, all in all, the trend, albeit a slow one with many detours and interruptions, does seem to be pointing toward a freer world than before.

Tibor R. Machan

One of my books is a collection of prominent essays by mostly contemporary libertarian political-economic thinkers. Its title, The Libertarian Reader (1982), was so well chosen that years later someone quite prominent, David Boaz of the Cato Institute, also used it for a collection of essays he put together, The Libertarian Reader (1998). (Just in case you didn’t know, in the publishing world it is acceptable to make us of the titles of already published books.)

One of the hopes of authors and editors of books is of course that these will be bought and read, not to mention in huge numbers. But unless one is a famous author or so dedicated to learning of the fate of one’s works, it is rare that one learns whether they have made the rounds. (In the academic world, of course, professors often assign books they have written or edited in their classes, although such self-dealing is widely frowned upon.)

I do know that another book of mine was at least considered for display in a movie or TV program because some years ago I received a form letter asking that I give permission for a producer to do just that with my The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner, originally published by Arlington House of New Rochelle, NY (later reprinted by the University Press of America) and once reviewed very favorably in by Robert W. Proctor and Daniel J. Weeks in The American Journal Of Psychology (Summer 1990). But I never learned if this ever came to pass.

But a few days ago I was watching the coverage of the Republican presidential primaries and as I looked at the bookshelf behind Representative Ron Paul as he was being interviewed, I noticed that The Libertarian Reader was among the books on his shelves. Well, that was gratifying, so much so that I paused my TV and took a picture of it all with my cell phone camera. (It didn’t come out well but still, there it is, in living, albeit blurry, color.)

Of course, Ron Paul is known as a libertarian–he once was nominated for president by the national libertarian party. I think I even met him once when he visited Auburn, Alabama, where the Ludwig von Mises Institute has its headquarters–Paul is close to the folks at that think tank. So it would be easy to indulge in some fantasies about how he may actually have read and been influenced by some of the works collected in my book, although that would be a bit over the top. It is much more likely that he has read into another work I edited, namely, The Libertarian Alternative, published by Nelson Hall Co. of Chicago back in 1973. That was my very first book and came about because Nelson Hall just started out and sent out a notice to academics around the country, soliciting submissions of book ideas. I jumped at the chance and lo and behold got the idea accepted and the volume published. (As the later collection, this one also contains some really fine essays on libertarian political philosophy and jurisprudence.)

So although my books, now numbering in the several dozens–with around 50 featured at Amazon.com–aren’t so popular and prominent as those by Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, or even Richard Epstein, at least one managed to surface in a prominent enough place, suggesting that some others might have done likewise. Not that I wrote or edited them for fame and fortune–though I wouldn’t shy from these were some to have helped to achieve them–it is still quite gratifying to see at least one make it center stage in a popular forum.

Like with happiness, so with fame and fortune, they better be the side effects of one’s dedication and passion. That way even if one fails to make it big with one’s writings, one will at least have had the satisfaction of having contributed to a good cause, namely, the exploration of the subject matter of the works one has produced.

Tibor R. Machan

Seeing that it looks like Mitt Romney may well win the Republican nomination–though it’s too early to be sure about that–It has been a concern of freedom loving Americans whether the nod given to human individual liberty by the Tea Party back in 2010 will have staying power. When the Republicans began their primaries it looked like one or another of the champions of serious liberty, such as former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson or Texas representative Ron Paul, could either make it or at least have an influence on who will. This last is still a possibility but not very likely now. With Gingrich injecting the influence of the Beltway Republican insiders into the race and with Mitt Romney derailing any progress toward a consistent political philosophy of liberty among Republicans, prospects for repeating, let alone enhancing, the central trends represented by the Tea Party–which itself has never been fully focused on true liberty–are waning. And that is very disturbing because it looks more and more like Barack Obama has no interest whatever in individual rights, in a bona fide free society and market, or even in civil liberties. What he is after is a populist reformation of the American polity, one that will usher in democratic socialism, with its confusing “market” socialism added.

This is the politics of soft Marxism; which is to say it aims to establish a legal order that’s basically collectivist, communitarian to the core. The idea is that all Americans should be treated as one huge team lead by Obama or some similar minded politician and his or her cronies, with all property (including human labor) treated as public or social, with the serious implementation of the major step Marx and Engels identified on the road to socialism, namely, the abolition of the right to private property. The modern explication of this idea was laid out by NYU professors Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, in their book The Myth of Ownership (Oxford 2002). It is an unabashed attack on the principles of free market economics and individualism (i.e., on a system of law based on Lockean individual rights).

OK, is there any chance to nipping all this in the bud? I can only think of one way to do it, namely, to conduct a political campaign that is relentlessly focused on the threat of the loss of American liberty not just in American but around the globe. This liberty is the true hope of humanity, no the egalitarian nonsense that Obama & Co. preach. What it needed is to run an articulate, self-confident, and unapologetic campaign that emphasizes the minimalist thesis of liberty as against the totalitarian thesis that all of us must be herded into a collective mass (of which the best current manifestation is North Korea).

If the Republican candidate for the presidency, or per chance someone else with sufficient support, keeps to this theme and forthrightly refuses to get entangled with side issues like illegal immigration, funding Planned Parenthood, etc., etc.–details that can easily be made to serve to distract Americans from what really is politically important–there is a chance of unseating Obama and his team in time to continue the momentum of the American revolution. The candidate to do this may not yet be in evidence but whoever it will be needs to focus clearly and be superbly articulate and intellectually competent in the effort to advance the cause of liberty.

Now Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney do not sound bad in debate and on the campaign trail but their ideas are muddled and so their leadership is seriously wanting when it comes to opposing Obama’s populist appeal. That appeal rests on phony hopes and aspirations, on false promises and on magical economics. But packaged in the cool style and rhetoric of Obama and absent competent challenge, it can continue to take the country toward a major setback on the road to realizing its destiny, the fulfillment of the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and, less exactly, the Bill of Rights. It is this mission that must be the candidate’s central purpose, put in the clearest and most informed terms that American citizens can appreciate and support. I am convinced it has a chance in November.

Tibor R. Machan

Since the Fall of 1966 (if memory serves me right) I have been a columnist at what was then The Santa Ana but is now the Orange County Register. I cannot count how many columns I produced, nearly all of them concerned with demonstrating the superiority of the free society as understood in libertarianism. (Two books I edited contain some of the columns, Liberty and Culture, Essays on the Idea of a Free Society [Prometheus Books, 1983] and Neither Left nor Right, Selected Columns [Hoover Institution Press, 2004].)

None of the columns I wrote for the paper has ever been rejected or significantly altered by the editors. I am quite amazed by this but couldn’t complain, that’s for certain. It has been an amazing run and I am very grateful I was given the opportunity to be a part of the company’s efforts to promote individual liberty. Unfortunately, however, the current management has decided that they no longer wish to publish my columns. Given that Freedom Communications, Inc., that owns The Register and a slew of other papers around the country, has been abandoning it’s libertarian bearings over the last couple of years–the Hoiles family lost all control over the company–this is no great surprise.

I would have welcomed knowing exactly what brought about the decision but as someone who holds firmly that those who hire one are fully within their rights to let you go (unless some contract specifies otherwise, which in my case doesn’t apply)–just as are you to leave them–I have no complaints apart from finding it uncool to provide no reason after having been with the company for such a long time and having never been told of any dissatisfaction with my work by anyone there. But it’s a free country–up to a point–and people in any line of work, including journalism, are or should be at liberty to peacefully misbehave. I would be first in line to defend their right to do so even when I regard what they do objectionable. (And whoever welcomes being fired, especially summarily, never mind that by this time they paid me only a nominal fee for my work?)

The only reason this is worth a bit of public discussion is that The Register and other Freedom Communications, Inc., newspapers have been a rare libertarian voice in an admittedly shrinking newspaper-land. Indeed, Freedom Newspapers has been a rarity, founded by R. C. Hoiles back in the 1920s, consistently and unrelentingly championing individual liberty.

In 1997 I was hired with the title “Advisor on Libertarian Issues” to work for the company, over and above the writing of my columns, and this came to an end in 2010 when the company pretty much fell apart as the distinct entity it had been, championing liberty more than any other media outfit had done.

It is not easy to gauge the impact of Freedom’s hundreds of editorials and columns discussing various aspects of the free society but it’s probably fair to say that at least it has given a strong and lively voice to a fully libertarian viewpoint more than any other prominent media organization in the land. It has also made room on its pages to columnists like me, some far more prominent in their fields of specialization, such Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, James Doti, et al.

Just when the company abandoned its consistent editorial stance in favor of liberty some other major media organizations did, fortunately, begin to give voice to the freedom philosophy (as we liked to refer to the R. C Hoiles brand of libertarianism). Fox TV News has welcomed quite a few libertarians, such as Judge Andrew Napolitano and John Stossel, and their slate of libertarian scholars and other guest commentators. The editors of Reason Magazine, which I helped built up in 1970 and which in time has become a formidable libertarian publication, appear on Fox TV regularly; so it seems that there will continue to be voices championing liberty even without Freedom Communications, Inc., committed to doing so as intensely as it had been since its founding.

Anyway, so long and good bye Orange County Register. You have been a sharp and diligent champion of liberty even when that was hardly welcome in the USA, even in conservative (but not quite libertarian) Orange County. I am grateful for having been part of your team for quite a few years.

Tibor R. Machan

Economic fairness is impossible: an oxymoron. Since economic activities are inherently varied and often competitive and since one size doesn’t fit all and not everyone can win in a competition, no such thing as fairness is possible unless it simply means no one may be prevented from taking part. Certainly, however, the outcome will most likely be very different for different participants.

The sort of fairness and equality President Obama and his supporters are after maybe achieved around a family or fraternity dinner table or in a last will and testament where goods are being distributed among family members who each expect the fulfillment of an implied promise from elders to receive a “fair share” of the wealth left to them. “Fair” here makes sense since the idea is that no one is going to get much less or more than another. But no such expectation makes any sense throughout a country! The government owns nothing and can thus leave nothing to the citizenry without engaging in massive redistribution of wealth it doesn’t have any authority to distribute or redistribute.

When fairness is demanded, it implies that the government does have the authority to assign winners and losers in the economic sphere. As if we still lived in a monarchy awaiting the decision of the king as to who will be the beneficiary of his largess. All the subjects can hope they will receive a fair share of the wealth of the country.

But in a free country, with the principle of private property rights as the law of the land, the king or government has no business engaging in wealth distribution so the issue of fairness is entirely moot. It’s a dream and where attempted, it leads to a police state. All that Mr. Obama needs to do to appreciate this is to read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a wonderful parable about what happens when equality is demanded and government tries to produce it. He might also check out the late Robert Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain example, from this book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1973) where he shows that when goodies are fairly distributed among people they will turn right around a rearrange it all so the “fair” distribution is completely upset.

Or if he wants real life cases from which to take lessons, Obama & Co. might remember the Soviet Union and investigate how things are panning out in that heavenly egalitarian country, North Korea. They could perhaps consider that in Cuba the rulers are finally realizing the futility of the socialist-egalitarian ideal and are making changes to turn the place into more and more of a free market system.

Still, there will always be those who want to level the economy. The main reason is the misguided conviction that we are, after all, in the same boat, just as are the children in a family. But the government isn’t like our parents who have made a promise to care for all their children. We aren’t the children of Mr. Obama and his administration! To try to serve us all with all the benefits that parents owe to their offspring would be futile and invites totalitarianism.

Parents, after all, own their resources and owe some of it to their children; this is not the case with governments and the citizenry. They don’t own anything at all without confiscating it. At most they may do this up to what is needed for administering the laws of the land–providing the citizenry with national defense and a sound legal system and its maintenance. Even some of this can be achieved without much government management. After all, who is the government but other citizens who have been hired to do a rather limited job in the country. It is up to the citizenry to secure for themselves economic growth, solvency, innovation, investment, etc. To attempt anything more would involve the government in tasks that free citizens aren’t entitled to.

Sadly Obama & Co. see the country as it if were some club or team where everyone is part of it and needs the same treatment as everyone else. But a country is not a club or a team–those are the results of free men and women coming together voluntarily for a great variety of purposes. The government of such free men and women must not get involved with what the clubs are embarking upon, be it business, athletics, education, entertainment or whatever else peaceful such folks will embark upon. Like the proverbial cop on the beat, the government isn’t there to pick the goals and tasks of those whom they serve in a limited capacity of securing their rights. It’s there to keep the peace, that is all!