|
The Patriot Act that was rammed through after the
September 2001 attacks was one of the more egregious blows against liberty in
our lifetimes. It shredded core rights and liberties that had been taken for
granted for centuries. Liberties are never lost all at once, but the Patriot
Act, as disgusting in its details as in its name and the rhetoric that
surrounded it, was for the United States the turning point, the law that best
exemplifies a full-scale embrace of statism as a
national ideology. It is a law so severe, so outlandish, as to cause people
to forget what it means to be free.
This is why I believe Ron Paul’s book Liberty Defined to be one of the most important statements of our
time. He defines liberty clearly and cleanly as freedom from coercive
interference from the state. That is how the liberal tradition from Aquinas
to Jefferson to Rothbard understood it, too, for
there is no greater threat to liberty than the state. Its powers must be
crushed if we are to revisit what liberty means.
Ron goes further to apply the principle of liberty
in many of the most controversial areas of modern life. The purpose here is
not to detail some governing blueprint. What Ron seeks to do is much more
important. He seeks to fire up the human imagination in ways that permit
people to think outside the prevailing statist norms.
In 1945, Ludwig von Mises
wrote a similar book called Omnipotent Government: The Rise of
the Total State and Total War. It is probably the most blistering and thorough
attack on National Socialism ever written. He details the peculiar
characteristics of Nazi-style statism (its
nationalism rooted in the worship of bloodlines). Just as importantly –
and very unusually for this genre of writing – Mises
sought to explain how Nazism is only a symptom of a larger problem, which is statism itself. He regarded statism
as a special doctrine that people come to embrace often without entirely
understanding its teaching and claims. It emerges within a context of
economic or security emergency.
There is always some great excuse for the trashing
of the human freedom that built civilization as we know it. If the state
cannot find one, it is glad to invent one. A population that is ideologically
gullible or afraid for its security can permit government to run roughshod
over people’s rights and liberties, and a government that gains such
power never gives it back on its own. Rights and liberties must be reclaimed
by the people themselves, and the spark that makes this happen is reversing
the conditions that permitted the rise of statism.
The people must lose their gullibility through ideological enlightenment, and
they must lose their sense of fear that the world will fall apart if the
tyrant is not in control.
Part of this process of enlightenment requires an
understanding of what was lost when we gave up liberty, and what can be
gained by reclaiming it. Mises’s book did not
overlook this task, with a pithy description of the traditional classical
liberal vision:
In order to grasp the meaning of this liberal
program we need to imagine a world order in which liberalism is supreme.
Either all the states in it are liberal, or enough are so that when united
they are able to repulse an attack of militarist aggressors. In this liberal
world, or liberal part of the world, there is private property in the means
of production. The working of the market is not hampered by government
interference. There are no trade barriers; men can live and work where they
want. Frontiers are drawn on the maps but they do not hinder the migrations
of men and shipping of commodities. Natives do not enjoy rights that are
denied to aliens. Governments and their servants restrict their activities to
the protection of life, health, and property against fraudulent or violent
aggression. They do not discriminate against foreigners. The courts are
independent and effectively protect everybody against the encroachments of
officialdom. Everyone is permitted to say, to write, and to print what he
likes. Education is not subject to government interference. Governments are
like night-watchmen whom the citizens have entrusted with the task of
handling the police power. The men in office are regarded as mortal men, not
as superhuman beings or as paternal authorities who have the right and duty
to hold the people in tutelage. Governments do not have the power to dictate
to the citizens what language they must use in their daily speech or in what
language they must bring up and educate their children. Administrative organs
and tribunals are bound to use each man's language in dealing with him,
provided this language is spoken in the district by a reasonable number of
residents.
We could add to this beautiful list of traits of a
liberal society. There is no welfare state (and there was not before Bismarck
and FDR).There are no passports (and there were not
before World War I). There are no government identification cards (there were
not before World War II). People can use any currency they want to use
(people could do so before the Civil War). They can accumulate wealth and
pass it on to their children with the full knowledge and expectation that
their children’s children will benefit too (so it was before World War
I). They can innovate in the commercial marketplace without fear of courts,
lawsuits, regulators, taxmen, and the customs house. They can negotiate all
contracts, associate or disassociate, and hire and fire as they see fit. They
do not hear government propaganda piped into stores and other public places.
They do not even have to care about politics because the state is so limited
and nearly powerless that not even the worst of people can change its
essential functioning.
This is not a far-flung dream. Mises’s
explanation here is a composite of how liberty has worked in various times
and various places over the last several hundred years. And he wrote this as
a reminder of what people have lost in surrendering their lives and the
functioning of society over to government power.
The point that Mises was
making with his book was that it is not enough to hate a particular regime;
we must oppose the ideological underpinnings of that regime and see what it
has in common with the universal experience of tyranny. Nor is it enough
merely to oppose government. We must also come to love liberty, to see and
understand how it works even though we live in times when liberty is ever
less seen, and ever less understood. This was the burden of his great book:
to highlight Nazism as a particular application of the broader menace of statism itself.
This is also the point of Ron Paul’s Liberty Defined. Yes, he opposes government as we know it. Much
more importantly and much more profoundly, he understands the liberty that we
do not know, and he strives to help us to love it, dream of it, and work for
its achievement.
It doesn’t surprise me that Ron’s own
son Rand Paul turns out to be the only member of the U.S. Senate to dare to
stand up to the Patriot Act and call it what it is. He has staked his
political career on his action to stop its reauthorization. It is truly the
case that if we can’t see what is wrong with the Patriot Act, we
can’t see what is wrong with any despotism in the past or the present.
If we can see what is wrong with it, we have a good start on beginning to see
what is right about human liberty.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr
LewRockwell.com
|
