Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism Read online

  (Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared in the first edition of Clichés of Socialism. Barely a word has been changed and though a few numbers are dated, the essay’s wisdom is as timely and relevant today as it ever was.)

  SUMMARY

  •Explaining how a socialized activity could actually be done better by private, voluntary means in a free market is a little like telling a blind man what it would be like to see. But that doesn’t mean we just give up and remain blind

  •Examples of the wonders of free and willing exchange are all around us. We take them for granted. Just imagine what it would be like if shoes and socks had been a government monopoly for a couple hundred years, versus the variety and low cost of shoes as now provided in free countries by entrepreneurs

  •Free markets open the way for people to act morally but that doesn’t mean they always will, nor should we assume that when armed with power our behavior will suddenly become more moral

  #8

  “THE ECONOMY NEEDS MORE PLANNING—CENTRAL PLANNING, THAT IS”

  BY LAWRENCE W. REED

  THANKSGIVING IS JUST ONE DAY EACH YEAR. BUT BECAUSE WE HAVE SO MUCH TO be thankful for, maybe it ought to be every day.

  G. K. Chesterton once said, “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

  Think about that, especially Chesterton’s use of the word “wonder.” It means “awe” or “amazement.” The least thankful people tend to be those who are rarely awed or amazed, in spite of the extraordinary beauty, gifts and achievements that envelop us.

  A shortage of “wonder” is a source of considerable error and unhappiness in the world. What should astound us all, some take for granted or even expect as entitlements. Of those who believe more government is the answer to almost everything, some days I think they don’t even notice the endless wonders that result from things other than the political power they worship.

  We’re moved by great music, sometimes to tears. We enjoy an endless stream of labor-saving, life-enriching inventions. We’re surrounded by abundance in markets for everything from food to shoes to books. We travel in hours to distances that required a month of discomfort of our recent ancestors.

  In America, life expectancy at age 60 is up by about eight years since 1900, while life expectancy at birth has increased by an incredible 30 years. The top three causes of death in 1900 were pneumonia, tuberculosis and diarrhea. Today, we live healthier lives and long enough to die mainly from illnesses (like heart disease and cancer) that are degenerative, aging-related problems.

  Technology, communications and transportation progressed so much in the last century that hardly a library in the world could document the stunning accomplishments. I marvel that I can call a friend in China from my car or find the nearest coffee shop with an “app” on my iPhone. I’m amazed every time I take a coast-to-coast flight, while the unhappy guy next to me complains that the flight attendant doesn’t have any ketchup for his omelet.

  Have you ever seen a Sears catalog from 1915 and compared it to any department store catalog of today? In spite of what inflation has done to our money in the intervening century, would you rather spend a thousand dollars shopping in the 1915 catalog—with its washboards and plows—or in the catalog of today, where a thousand bucks can fetch you a wild array of electronics and labor-saving appliances?

  None of these things that should inspire wonderment were inevitable, automatic or guaranteed. Almost all of them come our way by incentive, self-interest and the profit motive—from people who give their creativity to us not because they are ordered to, but because of the reward and sense of accomplishment they derive when they do. Some see this and are astonished and grateful, happy and inspired. Others see it and are envious and unappreciative, angry and demanding. Still others hardly notice, and busy themselves trying to micromanage the world according to their own grand designs.

  My senses are always heightened when I’m outdoors, at least in terms of noticing nature. Plants, animals, the stars—all that “stuff” fascinates me. I want to know what this weed is called, where that bird is headed and why, and what the name of that star is. While walking my dogs recently, one natural wonder after another accosted me—fragrant honeysuckle in full bloom on a gorgeous Georgia morning, followed by a stunning spray of roses in a neighbor’s yard, and upon returning to my home, the intricate, colorful clematis and braided hibiscus I planted just weeks ago. I am in constant, obsessive awe of a world so far beyond my comprehension—and so remote from any mortal’s ability to duplicate or centrally plan.

  As an economist, I’m inevitably drawn to the economic implications of these observations. No economist ever said it as well as F. A. Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” In his memorable Nobel Prize acceptance speech delivered in 1974, Hayek illustrated the point brilliantly: “If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that . . . he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.”

  The central planner would undoubtedly note that like a perfectly shaped bonsai tree or rose bush, some humans need a good pruning (and that very same central planner would probably be the first in line to do it, enjoying every minute of it). You can take a bonsai tree or a rose bush, cut it back or tie it up with good results. But try something comparable to your fellow citizens and you just might find they’ll never leaf or bloom again.

  Admittedly, the human/natural world analogy is fraught with limitations. I intend it only to provoke the reader to think, and take it as far as it holds. In the process, it will be useful to remember that humans by their very nature are not robots. We’re not so easily planned for as a programmer programs a machine. When we’re children, parents are our central planners but the point of adulthood is that at some point, parents should leave us alone. We tend to go further when the environment allows each of us the freedom to plan for ourselves. Amazing things happen when we do.

  Leonard E. Read, FEE’s founder, wrote a classic essay (“I, Pencil”) in 1958 that explains an exquisite fact: No one person in the world knows how to make a simple pencil, yet pencils and far more complicated things are produced by the boatload every day. That should be a humbling thought if you think you can somehow plan an economy for millions of people.

  The more one allows the world’s wonders to witness to him, the less he’ll want to play God with other people’s lives or the economy that their trillions of individual decisions create.

  One more point about “planning.” The question is never whether there will be planning but rather, as wise observers of human society have pointed out, whether the plans of some individuals with little power are displaced by those who have more power. “The more the State ‘plans,’” wrote Hayek, “the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”

  The progressive intellectuals and their followers are in awe of what they think they might accomplish through the use of government power. They might benefit if they stopped to smell the roses. Like the rest of the natural world, what real life in a free environment actually accomplishes is much more awesome.

  SUMMARY

  •Consider the wonders all around you. Perhaps far more than you ever imagined are the result not of some top-down, central plan imposed by wise schemers in government but rather, of the dreams and plans of individuals and their personal initiative

  •Central planning as an economic framework is rooted in what Hayek would call “a pretense to knowledge.” No group of people, no matter how much government power they possess, can possibly know more than an infinitesimal fraction of the knowledg
e they would have to possess to plan an economy

  #9

  “HUMAN RIGHTS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PROPERTY RIGHTS”

  BY PAUL L. POIROT

  It is not the right of property which is protected, but the right to property. Property, per se, has no rights; but the individual—the man—has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to his life, the right to his liberty, the right to his property. . . . The three rights are so bound to together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave

  —U.S. Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland

  TRICKY PHRASES WITH FAVORABLE MEANINGS AND EMOTIONAL APPEAL ARE BEING used today to imply a distinction between property rights and human rights.

  By implication, there are two sets of rights—one belonging to human beings and the other to property. Since human beings are more important, it is natural for the unwary to react in favor of human rights.

  Actually, there is no such distinction between property rights and human rights. The term property has no significance except as it applies to something owned by someone. Property itself has neither rights nor value, except as human interests are involved. There are no rights but human rights, and what are spoken of as property rights are only the human rights of individuals to property.

  What are the property rights thus disparaged by being set apart from human rights? They are among the most ancient and basic of human rights, and among the most essential to freedom and progress. They are the privileges of private ownership which give meaning to the right to the product of one’s labor—privileges which men have always regarded instinctively as belonging to them almost as intimately and inseparably as their own bodies. Unless people can feel secure in their ability to retain the fruits of their labor, there is little incentive to save and expand the fund of capital—the tools and equipment for production and for better living.

  The Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution recognizes no distinction between property rights and other human rights. The ban against unreasonable search and seizure covers “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” without discrimination. No person may, without due process of law, be deprived of “life, liberty or property”; all are equally inviolable. The right to trial by jury is assured in criminal and civil cases alike. Excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments are grouped in a single prohibition. The Founding Fathers realized that a man or woman without property rights—without the right to the product of his own labor—is not a free man.

  These constitutional rights all have two characteristics in common. First, they apply equally to all persons. Second, they are, without exception, guarantees of freedom or immunity from governmental interference. They are not assertions of claims against others, individually or collectively. They merely say, in effect, that there are certain human liberties, including some pertaining to property, which are essential to free citizens and upon which the state shall not infringe.

  Now what about the so-called human rights that are represented as superior to property rights? What about the “right” to a job, the “right” to a standard of living, the “right” to a minimum wage or a maximum work week, the right to a “fair” price, the “right” to bargain collectively, the “right” to security against the adversities and hazards of life, such as old age and disability?

  The framers of the Constitution would have been astonished to hear these things spoken of as rights. They are not immunities from governmental compulsion; on the contrary, they are demands for new forms of governmental compulsion. They are not claims to the product of one’s own labor; they are, in some if not in most cases, claims to the products of other people’s labor.

  These “human rights” are indeed different from property rights, for they rest on a denial of the basic concept of property rights. They are not freedoms or immunities assured to all persons alike. They are special privileges conferred upon some persons at the expense of others. The real distinction is not between property rights and human rights, but between equality of protection from governmental compulsion on the one hand and demands for the exercise of such compulsion for the benefit of favored groups on the other.

  (Editor’s Note: This essay was first published in 1962.)

  SUMMARY

  •You own yourself and you own those material things you’ve created or traded for freely with others. These are rights to property—property in yourself and in your possessions—and cannot be separated from human rights

  •America’s Founders made no distinction between “human rights” and “property rights” for good reason: there aren’t any. They are one and the same

  •Your right to what’s yours is very different from a claim on the person or property of others

  #10

  “I HAVE A RIGHT!”

  BY CHARLES W. BAIRD

  LOTS OF PEOPLE MAKE THIS CLAIM WITHOUT EVEN THINKING ABOUT THE NATURE and source of rights. What are rights, and where do they come from?

  The progressive or interventionist view is that so long as legislation is adopted under the rules of procedural due process, government creates and extinguishes rights. For example, Congress, by following the rules of legislative process outlined in the Constitution, can create or extinguish a right to a job, a right to an education, or a right to food.

  When progressives wish to expand the scope of government they often make a distinction between a “privilege” and a “right.” In this view, something is a privilege only if a person can acquire it through his own means; and something is a right if government uses tax money or other coercive powers to provide it to individuals irrespective of their means. Really important things, they say, ought to be rights, not privileges. Thus health care in America was once a privilege, but now it’s touted in both rhetoric and law as a right.

  In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote about “unalienable” rights that all individuals have irrespective of government. According to him, all humans are “endowed” with these rights by God. Some of Jefferson’s colleagues said that “nature” endowed humans with rights—i.e., that rights are inherent in human nature. In either case, rights are logically prior to government. Government has no legitimate authority to add to or subtract from such rights. Its role is to protect them.

  If something is a human right in the Jeffersonian sense, it applies to all individuals merely by virtue of their humanity. If one person has such a right, all other humans must logically have the same right. One cannot, without self-contradiction, claim a human right for himself and deny it to others. To do so would be to admit that the right is not a “human” right.

  Moreover, it must be possible for all individuals to exercise the claimed right simultaneously without logical contradiction. If when I exercise a right I have claimed, it is thereby impossible for someone else to exercise the identical right at the same time, my action implies that the alleged right does not inhere in human nature. My action implies that it is my right and not the right of the other person.

  For example, suppose I claim a right to a job. If that claim means that I will be employed any time I wish to be (what else could it mean?), there must be some other person who has the duty to provide the job. But then that other person does not have the same right I have. My right is to be employed, his “right” is to provide the job. My right creates a duty for him to undertake some positive action that he may not want to undertake. Notwithstanding that we both are human, his freedom of choice is subordinated to my freedom of choice.

  Is there any job-related fundamental human right in the Jeffersonian sense? Yes, it is the right of all individuals to offer to buy or sell labor services at any terms they choose. I have a right to offer to sell my labor services at terms I like, and so do you. We all can exerc
ise that right without thereby denying it to anyone else. I have a right to offer to buy (employ) the labor services of any other person at terms I like, and so do you. We can do so without thereby denying the right to anyone else. Those to whom you and I extend our offers are free to reject them. In exercising these rights we impose no duty to undertake any positive action on any other person.

  Apply the same test to the right to food, the right to an education, and the right to health care. Are any of these fundamental human rights? If they are interpreted to mean that individuals will receive food, education, and health care no matter what other people want, they are not fundamental human rights. We all have a fundamental right to offer to buy or sell food, education services, and health care at any terms we like, but if we cannot find others who are willing to accept our offers, we have no right to force them to do so.

  Apply the same test to the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment: freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. These are all fundamental human rights. We each can exercise free choice of religion without denying that right to others. Note, however, we have no right to join a religious organization that doesn’t want to accept us. We each can associate with any individuals or groups, but only so long as they are willing to associate with us. Exercising that right does not make it impossible for others to do the same. We each can say what we like without denying that same right to others. Note again, however, we have no right to force people to listen, or to provide us with a forum in which to speak. We each are free to try to assemble the necessary resources, by voluntary agreements with others, to publish a newspaper or a magazine (or a blog). But we have no right to force people to provide those necessary resources or to purchase or read our publications.