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(Delivered at the Hungry Minds Discussion Club in Denver, Colorado, February 8, 2014)
This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. In June of 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, along with his wife, Sophie, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This set in motion a chain of events that in July and August 1914 brought all the Great Powers of Europe into war with each other.
Men marched off to war in all the major European capitals, cheered on by huge crowds. There was a joyous excitement among many that heroic adventures awaited them on the battlefields across the continent. Large numbers of those going off to war in each country were confident that God was on their side, and easy victories would soon be theirs. They would all be home by Christmas, their heads bearing laurels of military glory.
Reality soon confronted them all. The war did not end by Christmas time in 1914. It did not end in 1915, or 1916, or even 1917. It went on-and-on until they were mutually exhausted in terms of manpower and material ability to continue any longer. Finally, the Germans and Austrians, and their Turkish and Bulgarian allies sued for an armistice in November 1918, when the military and economic might of the United States – which had entered the war in April 1917 – turned the scales in favor of a British, French and Italian victory.
By the end of the conflict, all the warring nations had called up more than 60 million men to serve in the military, and at least 20 million soldiers and civilians had lost their lives. The total monetary cost of the war, estimated in the equivalent of 2013 dollars, was nearly $3.5 trillion.[1]
The Great War Released the Collectivist Demons
The First World War also set lose all the “demons” that ended up bringing so much horror to the 20th century. In the midst of the war, in November 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks succeeded in engineering a coup d’état in Russia that ushered in a nearly 75-year brutal communist dictatorship, which ended up threatening the freedom of the world until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In 1922, Benito Mussolini and his fascist movement engineered a political crisis in Italy that brought “Ill Duce” to power, and which raised the flag of an all-embracing collectivist nationalism for which Mussolini coined the term, “totalitarianism.” Like the communists in Russia, the fascists insisted that the individual had no life or meaning outside of the collective. The communists talked of “social classes” and “class conflict.” The fascists spoke of nation-states and global nationalist conflicts.
In defeated Germany, a postwar hyperinflation in the early 1920s undermined what remained of the middle class and the foundations of German civil society. In this weakened social state, and with the coming of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, a mesmerizing demagogue named Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 by playing upon the fears of wide segments of the German people with promises of full employment, decent standards of living, and a restoration of the German nation’s “greatness” through a purification of “the race.” The triumph of Hitler and the German National Socialist – Nazi – movement set in motion a sequence of events that lead to an even worse and more destructive Second World War.
In the United States, the Great Depression resulted in Franklin D. Roosevelt being elected president in 1932. Soon after coming to office in early 1933, FDR introduced the “New Deal” as his answer to America’s economic hardships. He implemented a series of government planning programs covering industry and agriculture that paralleled the fascist economic model of Mussolini’s Italy.
The Human Cost of Collectivism
Historians have attempted to add up the human cost of 20th century collectivism – whether in its communist, fascist, Nazi or general authoritarian forms. Their estimates suggest a a number of many as 250 million innocent and unarmed men, women, and children who were killed on the altars of creating a “new socialist man” or a “new master race,” or super powerful nation-states.
The largest numbers killed by execution, torture, slave labor, or government-created famines are estimated to be:
Communist China (1949-1976) under Mao Zedong – 80 million;
Soviet Union (1917-1991) under Lenin, Stalin, and their successors – 68 million;
Nazi Germany (1933-1945) under Hitler and his henchmen – 25 million.
Such numbers are more than the human mind can comprehend. It is worth remembering that each of these victims was an individual human being with hopes and dreams, plans and purposes for their life. Each one was someone’s mother or father, brother or sister, or aunt or uncle or cousin. Each was a unique individual person whose life was wiped out in the name of building a beautiful, bright Utopian future.[2]
In Western Europe and America the extreme forms of collectivism never were able to gain power. Yet, nonetheless, the socialist seeds took root and merely germinated into less totalitarian forms. They became what today we continue to call the interventionist-welfare state. The government regulates industry, trade, and commerce; it redistributes wealth; and its imposes various conceptions of “good behavior” and “right living” on the basis of a political paternalism that presumes that individuals may not be trusted to manage their own lives or freely choose their associations and relationships with others, both in the marketplace and the wider society.
How did this all come about? And why?
The Classical Liberal Era Before World War I
Any answers must see the First World War as a watershed separating two distinct epochs and eras in the recent history of mankind. The world before 1914 was in many ways far different from what we take for granted today, especially in terms of various personal, political and economic freedoms we have lost since then.
The best way to get a sense of what that now bygone age before World War I was like is to quote John Maynard Keynes, from his 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace:
“What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.”[3]
It was what another economist, Gustav Stolper, referred to in his book, This Age of Fable (1942) as the era of the three freedoms: the free movement of men, money, and goods.
“Everyone could leave his country when he wanted and travel or migrate wherever he pleased without a passport. The only European country that demanded passports (not even visas!) was Russia . . . Who wanted to travel to Russia anyway? . . . There were still customs barriers on the European continent, it is true. But the vast British Empire was free-trade territory open to all in free competition, and several other European countries, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia, came close to free trade . . . And the most natural of all was the freedom of movement of money. Year in, year out, billions were invested by the great industrial European Powers in foreign countries . . . These billions were regarded as safe investments with attractive yields, desirable for creditors as well as debtors, with no doubt about the eventual return of both interest and principle . . . The interest paid on these foreign investments [were] protected not only by [the] political and military might [of the great industrial Powers], but – more strongly – by the general, unquestioned acceptance of the fundamental capitalist principles: sanctity of treaties, abidance by internal law, and restraint of governments from interference in business.”[4]
What needs to be appreciated is that a hundred years earlier, in 1815, at the time of the defeat of Napoleon by Great Britain, Imperial Russia and their allies, most parts of Europe had none or few of such freedoms.
Throughout Europe absolute or near absolute monarchies reigned nearly supreme from one end of the continent to another. Governments regulated and restricted domestic and international trade, imposed wage and price controls, censored the press, and discriminated against individuals and groups on the basis of religion; civil liberties either were not respected or were easily abridged by governments on arbitrary grounds. In addition, slavery still existed around the world, including in the global empires of these European Great Powers.
America the Beacon of Individual Liberty
Only across the Atlantic, in that new nation of the United States of America, was there a written constitution that in principle and practice recognized the rights of individuals to their life, liberty and honestly acquired property. Only in America could an individual say and do virtually anything that he wanted, as long as it was peaceful and not an infringement on other citizens’ similar individual rights. Only in America was trade across this new and growing country free from government regulations and controls or oppressive taxes, so people could live, work and invest wherever they wanted, for any purpose that took their fancy or offered them profit.
Michel Chevalier, was a Frenchman who, like Alexis de Tocqueville, visited America in the 1830s, then returned to France and wrote a book about his impressions of the Society, Manners and Politics of the United States (1839). Chevalier explained to his French readers:
“The American is a model of industry . . . The manners and customs are altogether those of a working, busy society. At the age of fifteen years, a man is engaged in business; at twenty-one he is established, he has his farm, his workshop, his counting-room, or his office, in a word his employment, whatever it may be. He now also takes a wife, and at twenty-two is the father of a family, and consequently has a powerful stimulus to excite him to industry. A man who has no profession, and, which is the same thing, who is not married, enjoys little consideration; he, who is an active and useful member of society, who contributes his share to augment the national wealth and increase the numbers of the population, he only is looked upon with respect and favor. The American is educated with the idea that he will have some particular occupation, that he is to be a farmer, artisan, manufacturer, merchant, speculator, lawyer, physician, or minister, perhaps all in succession, and that, if he is active and intelligent, he will make his fortune. He has no conception of living without a profession, even when his family is rich, for he sees nobody about him not engaged in business. The man of leisure is a variety of the human species, of which the Yankee does not suspect the existence, and he knows that if rich today, his father may be ruined tomorrow. Besides, the father himself is engaged in business, according to custom, and does not think of dispossessing himself of his fortune; if the son wishes to have one at present, let him make it himself!”[5]
Chevalier also emphasized the competitive spirit of the American: “An American’s business is always to be on edge lest his neighbor get there before him. If a hundred Americans were about to go before a firing squad, they would start fighting for the privilege of going first, so used are they to competition”![6]
It may seem to many as a cliché, but in those decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when few migration restrictions barred the door, America stood out as a beacon of hope and promise. Here a man could have his “second chance.” He could leave behind the political tyranny, religious oppression and economic privileges of the “old country” to have a new start for himself and his family. Between 1840 and 1914, nearly 60 million people left the “old world” to make their new beginnings in other parts of the world, and almost 35 million of them came to America. Many of us are the lucky descendants of those earlier generations who came to “breathe free” in the United States.[7]
The Ancient Dream of Unfulfilled Freedom
Since ancient times, there have been some thinkers who dreamed of a world with greater freedom for all men. But for most of human history this remained only dreams. The ancient Greeks spoke of the importance of man’s reason and the need for freedom of thought if our minds were to challenge each other’s logic and understandings as we groped toward a more complete awareness of the objective world around us.
The Romans argued about a higher more universal or general law for men to live under, if only they came together to reason and agree about what could be a just “natural order” in society, given the nature of man. Jews and Christians appealed to a “higher law” concerning “right” and “justice” that was above the power of earthly kings and princes, and to which all men are subservient and responsible since it was given to them by the Creator of all things.[8]
But for all of human history men lived under the earthly powers of conquerors and kings who claimed “divine rights” to rule over them. They were objects to be used and abused for the ends of those who held the whips and swords over their heads. Their lives and their efforts were to serve and be sacrificed for something that was said to be greater than and above them.
Their lives were not their own. They belonged to another. They were slaves, regardless of the names and phrases used to describe and defend what was a master-servant relationship. Human society was a world of the unfree.
Then this began to change, first in men’s minds, then in their actions, and finally in the political and economic institutions under which people lived and worked.
Classical Liberalism and Natural Rights
While it is today often ridiculed or discounted by philosophers who often find it easier to speak about ethical nihilism and political relativism, the modern world of freedom had its origin in the conception of “natural rights.” Rights that reside in men by their “nature” as human beings, and which logically precede governments and any man-made laws that may or may not respect and enforce these rights.[9]
Political philosophers such as John Locke articulated them in the 1600s. “Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a ‘property’ in his own ‘person,’” insisted Locke. “This nobody has any right to but himself. The ‘labor’ of his body and the ‘work’ of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”
While every man has a natural right to protect his life and his peacefully produced or non-aggressively acquired property, men form political associations among themselves to better protect their respective rights. After all, a man may not be strong enough to protect himself from aggressors; and he cannot always be trusted when in the passion of the moment he uses defensive force against another that may not be reasonably proportional to the offense against him.[10]
Here in a nutshell is the origin of the ideas that germinated for nearly another century, and then inspired the Founding Fathers in the words of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, when they spoke of self-evident truths that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and for the preservation of which men form governments among themselves.
While every American schoolboy knows – or should I say, used to know – by heart those stirring words in the Declaration of Independence, what most Americans know less well is the remainder of the text of that document. Here the Founding Fathers enumerated their grievances against the British crown: taxation without representation; restrictions on the development of trade and industry within the British colonies and regulations on foreign commerce; a swarm of government bureaucrats intruding into the personal and daily affairs of the colonists; violations of basic civil liberties and freedoms.
What aroused their anger and resentment is that a large majority of these American colonists considered themselves to be British by birth or ancestry. And here was the British king and his Parliament denying or infringing upon what they considered to be their birthright – the customary and hard won “rights of an Englishman,” gained over several centuries of successful opposition against arbitrary monarchical power.
Freedom is the common intellectual inheritance left to us by the great thinkers of the West. But it is nonetheless the case that much that we consider and call individual rights and liberty had it impetuous in Great Britain, in the writings of the political philosophers like John Locke and David Hume, legal scholars like William Blackstone and Edward Coke, and moral philosophers and political economists like Adam Smith.
What their combined writings and that of many others gave the West and the world over the last three or four centuries has been the philosophy of political and economic liberalism.
The Liberal Crusade Against Slavery
What was the vision and agenda of 18th and 19th century liberalism? They may be understood under five headings:[11]
First, was the freedom of the individual as possessing a right to own himself. The great British liberal crusade in the second in the half of the 18th century and then in to the early decades of the 19th century was for the abolition of slavery. The words of the British poet William Cowper in 1785 became the rallying cry of the anti-slavery movement:
“We have no slaves at home – Then why aboard? Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free. They touch our country, and their shackles fall.”
The British Slave Trade Act of 1807 banned the slave trade, and British warships patrolled the west coast of Africa to interdict slave ships heading for the Americas. This culminated in the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which formally abolished slavery throughout the British Empire 180 years ago, on August 1, 1834.[12]
Though not overnight, the British example heralded the legal end to slavery by the close of the 19th century through most of the world that was touched by the Western nations. The unimaginable dream of a handful of people over thousands of years of human history finally became the reality for all under the inspiration and efforts of the 19th century liberal advocates of individual freedom.
The Liberal Crusade for Civil Liberties
The second great liberal crusade was for the recognition of and legal respect for civil liberties. Since Magna Carta in 1215, Englishmen had fought for monarchical recognition and respect for certain essential rights, including no unwarranted or arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. These came to include freedom of thought and religion, freedom of speech and the press, and freedom of association. Above it all was the wider idea of the Rule of Law, that justice was to be equal and impartial, and that all were answerable and accountable before the law, even those representing and enforcing the law in the name of the king.[13]
England in the 19th century became a refuge in Europe for many of those denied such civil liberties in their own lands. Karl Marx, for example, settled in and lived out the rest of his life in London in the middle of the 19th century, due to censorship and repression of his socialist ideas on the continent.
The Liberal Crusade for Economic Freedom
The third great liberal crusade was for freedom of enterprise and free trade. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries governments in Europe controlled, regulated and planned all the economic activities of their subjects and citizens as far as the arms of their political agents could reach.
Adam Smith and his Scottish and English allies demolished the assumptions and logic of Mercantilism, as the system of government planning was then called. They demonstrated that government planners and regulators have neither the wisdom, nor knowledge, nor the ability to direct the complex interdependent activities of humanity.
Furthermore, Adam Smith and his economist colleagues argued that social order was possible without political design. Indeed, “as if guided by an invisible hand,” when men are left free to direct their own affairs within an institutional setting of individual liberty, private property, voluntary exchange, and unrestricted competition, there spontaneously forms a “system of natural liberty” that generates more wealth and coordinated activity than any governmental guiding hand could ever provide.
The benefits of such economic liberty that made Great Britain and then the United States the industrial powerhouses of the world by the end of the 19th century, was rapidly doing the same, though at different rates, in other parts of Europe, and then, slowly, to other parts of the world, as well. Population sizes in the West grew far above anything known or imaged in the past, yet increased production and rising productivity were giving those tens of millions of more people an increasing standard and quality of living.
The Liberal Crusade for Political Freedom
The fourth liberal crusade was for greater political liberty. It was argued that if liberty meant that men were to be self-governing over their own lives, should that not also mean that they participate in the governing of the society in which they live, in the form of an enlarged voting franchise through which the governed selected those who held political office under their behalf?
Liberals condemned the corrupt and manipulated electoral process in Great Britain that gave office in Parliament to handpicked voices defending the narrow interests of the landed aristocracy at the expense of many others in society. So as the 19th and early 20th centuries progressed the right to vote moved more and more in the direction of universal suffrage.
It was not that liberals were unconcerned about the potential abuses from democratic majorities. In fact, John Stuart Mill, in his Considerations on Representative Government (1859) proposed that all those who received any form of financial subsidy or support from the government should be denied the voting franchise for as long as they were dependent in such a manner upon the taxpayers. There was too much of a possible conflict of interest when those who received such redistributive benefits could vote to pick the pockets of their fellow citizens. Alas, his wise advice was never followed.[14]
The Liberal Crusade for International Peace
Finally, the fifth of the liberal crusades of the 19th century was for, if not the abolition of war, then at least the reduction in the frequency of international conflicts among nations and the severity of damage that came with military combat.
And, in fact, during the century that separated the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the commencement of the First World War in 1914, wars at least among the European Powers were infrequent, relatively short in duration, and limited in their physical destruction and taking of human life.
It was argued that war was counter-productive to the interests of all nations and peoples. It prevented and disrupted the natural benefits that can and did improve the conditions of all men through peaceful production and trade based on an international division of labor in which all gained from the specializations of others in industry, agriculture, and the arts.[15]
Due to the liberal spirit of the time there were some successful attempts to arrange formal “rules of war” among governments under which the lives and property of innocent non-combatants would be respected even by conquering armies. There were treaties detailing how prisoners of war were to be humanely treated and cared for, as well as the banishing of certain forms of warfare deemed immoral and ungentlemanly.[16]
It would, of course, be an exaggeration and an absurdity to claim that 19th century liberalism fully triumphed in terms of its ideals or its goals of political and economic reform and change.
However, if there is any meaning to the notion of a prevailing “spirit of the age” that sets the tone and direction of a period of history, then it cannot be denied that classical liberalism was the predominate ideal in the early and middle decades of the 19th century. And that it changed the world in a truly transformative way. Whatever (properly understood) political, economic, and personal liberty we still possess today is due to that earlier classical liberal epoch of human history.
(It may also be argued that any extensions of the principles of individual rights and equality of treatment before the law relating to gender or race that occurred in the 20th century were the logical applications of those classical liberal principles.)
Continued.....http://blogs.northwood.edu/indefens...of-classical-liberalism-by-richard-m-ebeling/
This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. In June of 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, along with his wife, Sophie, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This set in motion a chain of events that in July and August 1914 brought all the Great Powers of Europe into war with each other.
Men marched off to war in all the major European capitals, cheered on by huge crowds. There was a joyous excitement among many that heroic adventures awaited them on the battlefields across the continent. Large numbers of those going off to war in each country were confident that God was on their side, and easy victories would soon be theirs. They would all be home by Christmas, their heads bearing laurels of military glory.
Reality soon confronted them all. The war did not end by Christmas time in 1914. It did not end in 1915, or 1916, or even 1917. It went on-and-on until they were mutually exhausted in terms of manpower and material ability to continue any longer. Finally, the Germans and Austrians, and their Turkish and Bulgarian allies sued for an armistice in November 1918, when the military and economic might of the United States – which had entered the war in April 1917 – turned the scales in favor of a British, French and Italian victory.
By the end of the conflict, all the warring nations had called up more than 60 million men to serve in the military, and at least 20 million soldiers and civilians had lost their lives. The total monetary cost of the war, estimated in the equivalent of 2013 dollars, was nearly $3.5 trillion.[1]
The Great War Released the Collectivist Demons
The First World War also set lose all the “demons” that ended up bringing so much horror to the 20th century. In the midst of the war, in November 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks succeeded in engineering a coup d’état in Russia that ushered in a nearly 75-year brutal communist dictatorship, which ended up threatening the freedom of the world until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In 1922, Benito Mussolini and his fascist movement engineered a political crisis in Italy that brought “Ill Duce” to power, and which raised the flag of an all-embracing collectivist nationalism for which Mussolini coined the term, “totalitarianism.” Like the communists in Russia, the fascists insisted that the individual had no life or meaning outside of the collective. The communists talked of “social classes” and “class conflict.” The fascists spoke of nation-states and global nationalist conflicts.
In defeated Germany, a postwar hyperinflation in the early 1920s undermined what remained of the middle class and the foundations of German civil society. In this weakened social state, and with the coming of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, a mesmerizing demagogue named Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 by playing upon the fears of wide segments of the German people with promises of full employment, decent standards of living, and a restoration of the German nation’s “greatness” through a purification of “the race.” The triumph of Hitler and the German National Socialist – Nazi – movement set in motion a sequence of events that lead to an even worse and more destructive Second World War.
In the United States, the Great Depression resulted in Franklin D. Roosevelt being elected president in 1932. Soon after coming to office in early 1933, FDR introduced the “New Deal” as his answer to America’s economic hardships. He implemented a series of government planning programs covering industry and agriculture that paralleled the fascist economic model of Mussolini’s Italy.
The Human Cost of Collectivism
Historians have attempted to add up the human cost of 20th century collectivism – whether in its communist, fascist, Nazi or general authoritarian forms. Their estimates suggest a a number of many as 250 million innocent and unarmed men, women, and children who were killed on the altars of creating a “new socialist man” or a “new master race,” or super powerful nation-states.
The largest numbers killed by execution, torture, slave labor, or government-created famines are estimated to be:
Communist China (1949-1976) under Mao Zedong – 80 million;
Soviet Union (1917-1991) under Lenin, Stalin, and their successors – 68 million;
Nazi Germany (1933-1945) under Hitler and his henchmen – 25 million.
Such numbers are more than the human mind can comprehend. It is worth remembering that each of these victims was an individual human being with hopes and dreams, plans and purposes for their life. Each one was someone’s mother or father, brother or sister, or aunt or uncle or cousin. Each was a unique individual person whose life was wiped out in the name of building a beautiful, bright Utopian future.[2]
In Western Europe and America the extreme forms of collectivism never were able to gain power. Yet, nonetheless, the socialist seeds took root and merely germinated into less totalitarian forms. They became what today we continue to call the interventionist-welfare state. The government regulates industry, trade, and commerce; it redistributes wealth; and its imposes various conceptions of “good behavior” and “right living” on the basis of a political paternalism that presumes that individuals may not be trusted to manage their own lives or freely choose their associations and relationships with others, both in the marketplace and the wider society.
How did this all come about? And why?
The Classical Liberal Era Before World War I
Any answers must see the First World War as a watershed separating two distinct epochs and eras in the recent history of mankind. The world before 1914 was in many ways far different from what we take for granted today, especially in terms of various personal, political and economic freedoms we have lost since then.
The best way to get a sense of what that now bygone age before World War I was like is to quote John Maynard Keynes, from his 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace:
“What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.”[3]
It was what another economist, Gustav Stolper, referred to in his book, This Age of Fable (1942) as the era of the three freedoms: the free movement of men, money, and goods.
“Everyone could leave his country when he wanted and travel or migrate wherever he pleased without a passport. The only European country that demanded passports (not even visas!) was Russia . . . Who wanted to travel to Russia anyway? . . . There were still customs barriers on the European continent, it is true. But the vast British Empire was free-trade territory open to all in free competition, and several other European countries, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia, came close to free trade . . . And the most natural of all was the freedom of movement of money. Year in, year out, billions were invested by the great industrial European Powers in foreign countries . . . These billions were regarded as safe investments with attractive yields, desirable for creditors as well as debtors, with no doubt about the eventual return of both interest and principle . . . The interest paid on these foreign investments [were] protected not only by [the] political and military might [of the great industrial Powers], but – more strongly – by the general, unquestioned acceptance of the fundamental capitalist principles: sanctity of treaties, abidance by internal law, and restraint of governments from interference in business.”[4]
What needs to be appreciated is that a hundred years earlier, in 1815, at the time of the defeat of Napoleon by Great Britain, Imperial Russia and their allies, most parts of Europe had none or few of such freedoms.
Throughout Europe absolute or near absolute monarchies reigned nearly supreme from one end of the continent to another. Governments regulated and restricted domestic and international trade, imposed wage and price controls, censored the press, and discriminated against individuals and groups on the basis of religion; civil liberties either were not respected or were easily abridged by governments on arbitrary grounds. In addition, slavery still existed around the world, including in the global empires of these European Great Powers.
America the Beacon of Individual Liberty
Only across the Atlantic, in that new nation of the United States of America, was there a written constitution that in principle and practice recognized the rights of individuals to their life, liberty and honestly acquired property. Only in America could an individual say and do virtually anything that he wanted, as long as it was peaceful and not an infringement on other citizens’ similar individual rights. Only in America was trade across this new and growing country free from government regulations and controls or oppressive taxes, so people could live, work and invest wherever they wanted, for any purpose that took their fancy or offered them profit.
Michel Chevalier, was a Frenchman who, like Alexis de Tocqueville, visited America in the 1830s, then returned to France and wrote a book about his impressions of the Society, Manners and Politics of the United States (1839). Chevalier explained to his French readers:
“The American is a model of industry . . . The manners and customs are altogether those of a working, busy society. At the age of fifteen years, a man is engaged in business; at twenty-one he is established, he has his farm, his workshop, his counting-room, or his office, in a word his employment, whatever it may be. He now also takes a wife, and at twenty-two is the father of a family, and consequently has a powerful stimulus to excite him to industry. A man who has no profession, and, which is the same thing, who is not married, enjoys little consideration; he, who is an active and useful member of society, who contributes his share to augment the national wealth and increase the numbers of the population, he only is looked upon with respect and favor. The American is educated with the idea that he will have some particular occupation, that he is to be a farmer, artisan, manufacturer, merchant, speculator, lawyer, physician, or minister, perhaps all in succession, and that, if he is active and intelligent, he will make his fortune. He has no conception of living without a profession, even when his family is rich, for he sees nobody about him not engaged in business. The man of leisure is a variety of the human species, of which the Yankee does not suspect the existence, and he knows that if rich today, his father may be ruined tomorrow. Besides, the father himself is engaged in business, according to custom, and does not think of dispossessing himself of his fortune; if the son wishes to have one at present, let him make it himself!”[5]
Chevalier also emphasized the competitive spirit of the American: “An American’s business is always to be on edge lest his neighbor get there before him. If a hundred Americans were about to go before a firing squad, they would start fighting for the privilege of going first, so used are they to competition”![6]
It may seem to many as a cliché, but in those decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when few migration restrictions barred the door, America stood out as a beacon of hope and promise. Here a man could have his “second chance.” He could leave behind the political tyranny, religious oppression and economic privileges of the “old country” to have a new start for himself and his family. Between 1840 and 1914, nearly 60 million people left the “old world” to make their new beginnings in other parts of the world, and almost 35 million of them came to America. Many of us are the lucky descendants of those earlier generations who came to “breathe free” in the United States.[7]
The Ancient Dream of Unfulfilled Freedom
Since ancient times, there have been some thinkers who dreamed of a world with greater freedom for all men. But for most of human history this remained only dreams. The ancient Greeks spoke of the importance of man’s reason and the need for freedom of thought if our minds were to challenge each other’s logic and understandings as we groped toward a more complete awareness of the objective world around us.
The Romans argued about a higher more universal or general law for men to live under, if only they came together to reason and agree about what could be a just “natural order” in society, given the nature of man. Jews and Christians appealed to a “higher law” concerning “right” and “justice” that was above the power of earthly kings and princes, and to which all men are subservient and responsible since it was given to them by the Creator of all things.[8]
But for all of human history men lived under the earthly powers of conquerors and kings who claimed “divine rights” to rule over them. They were objects to be used and abused for the ends of those who held the whips and swords over their heads. Their lives and their efforts were to serve and be sacrificed for something that was said to be greater than and above them.
Their lives were not their own. They belonged to another. They were slaves, regardless of the names and phrases used to describe and defend what was a master-servant relationship. Human society was a world of the unfree.
Then this began to change, first in men’s minds, then in their actions, and finally in the political and economic institutions under which people lived and worked.
Classical Liberalism and Natural Rights
While it is today often ridiculed or discounted by philosophers who often find it easier to speak about ethical nihilism and political relativism, the modern world of freedom had its origin in the conception of “natural rights.” Rights that reside in men by their “nature” as human beings, and which logically precede governments and any man-made laws that may or may not respect and enforce these rights.[9]
Political philosophers such as John Locke articulated them in the 1600s. “Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a ‘property’ in his own ‘person,’” insisted Locke. “This nobody has any right to but himself. The ‘labor’ of his body and the ‘work’ of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”
While every man has a natural right to protect his life and his peacefully produced or non-aggressively acquired property, men form political associations among themselves to better protect their respective rights. After all, a man may not be strong enough to protect himself from aggressors; and he cannot always be trusted when in the passion of the moment he uses defensive force against another that may not be reasonably proportional to the offense against him.[10]
Here in a nutshell is the origin of the ideas that germinated for nearly another century, and then inspired the Founding Fathers in the words of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, when they spoke of self-evident truths that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and for the preservation of which men form governments among themselves.
While every American schoolboy knows – or should I say, used to know – by heart those stirring words in the Declaration of Independence, what most Americans know less well is the remainder of the text of that document. Here the Founding Fathers enumerated their grievances against the British crown: taxation without representation; restrictions on the development of trade and industry within the British colonies and regulations on foreign commerce; a swarm of government bureaucrats intruding into the personal and daily affairs of the colonists; violations of basic civil liberties and freedoms.
What aroused their anger and resentment is that a large majority of these American colonists considered themselves to be British by birth or ancestry. And here was the British king and his Parliament denying or infringing upon what they considered to be their birthright – the customary and hard won “rights of an Englishman,” gained over several centuries of successful opposition against arbitrary monarchical power.
Freedom is the common intellectual inheritance left to us by the great thinkers of the West. But it is nonetheless the case that much that we consider and call individual rights and liberty had it impetuous in Great Britain, in the writings of the political philosophers like John Locke and David Hume, legal scholars like William Blackstone and Edward Coke, and moral philosophers and political economists like Adam Smith.
What their combined writings and that of many others gave the West and the world over the last three or four centuries has been the philosophy of political and economic liberalism.
The Liberal Crusade Against Slavery
What was the vision and agenda of 18th and 19th century liberalism? They may be understood under five headings:[11]
First, was the freedom of the individual as possessing a right to own himself. The great British liberal crusade in the second in the half of the 18th century and then in to the early decades of the 19th century was for the abolition of slavery. The words of the British poet William Cowper in 1785 became the rallying cry of the anti-slavery movement:
“We have no slaves at home – Then why aboard? Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free. They touch our country, and their shackles fall.”
The British Slave Trade Act of 1807 banned the slave trade, and British warships patrolled the west coast of Africa to interdict slave ships heading for the Americas. This culminated in the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which formally abolished slavery throughout the British Empire 180 years ago, on August 1, 1834.[12]
Though not overnight, the British example heralded the legal end to slavery by the close of the 19th century through most of the world that was touched by the Western nations. The unimaginable dream of a handful of people over thousands of years of human history finally became the reality for all under the inspiration and efforts of the 19th century liberal advocates of individual freedom.
The Liberal Crusade for Civil Liberties
The second great liberal crusade was for the recognition of and legal respect for civil liberties. Since Magna Carta in 1215, Englishmen had fought for monarchical recognition and respect for certain essential rights, including no unwarranted or arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. These came to include freedom of thought and religion, freedom of speech and the press, and freedom of association. Above it all was the wider idea of the Rule of Law, that justice was to be equal and impartial, and that all were answerable and accountable before the law, even those representing and enforcing the law in the name of the king.[13]
England in the 19th century became a refuge in Europe for many of those denied such civil liberties in their own lands. Karl Marx, for example, settled in and lived out the rest of his life in London in the middle of the 19th century, due to censorship and repression of his socialist ideas on the continent.
The Liberal Crusade for Economic Freedom
The third great liberal crusade was for freedom of enterprise and free trade. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries governments in Europe controlled, regulated and planned all the economic activities of their subjects and citizens as far as the arms of their political agents could reach.
Adam Smith and his Scottish and English allies demolished the assumptions and logic of Mercantilism, as the system of government planning was then called. They demonstrated that government planners and regulators have neither the wisdom, nor knowledge, nor the ability to direct the complex interdependent activities of humanity.
Furthermore, Adam Smith and his economist colleagues argued that social order was possible without political design. Indeed, “as if guided by an invisible hand,” when men are left free to direct their own affairs within an institutional setting of individual liberty, private property, voluntary exchange, and unrestricted competition, there spontaneously forms a “system of natural liberty” that generates more wealth and coordinated activity than any governmental guiding hand could ever provide.
The benefits of such economic liberty that made Great Britain and then the United States the industrial powerhouses of the world by the end of the 19th century, was rapidly doing the same, though at different rates, in other parts of Europe, and then, slowly, to other parts of the world, as well. Population sizes in the West grew far above anything known or imaged in the past, yet increased production and rising productivity were giving those tens of millions of more people an increasing standard and quality of living.
The Liberal Crusade for Political Freedom
The fourth liberal crusade was for greater political liberty. It was argued that if liberty meant that men were to be self-governing over their own lives, should that not also mean that they participate in the governing of the society in which they live, in the form of an enlarged voting franchise through which the governed selected those who held political office under their behalf?
Liberals condemned the corrupt and manipulated electoral process in Great Britain that gave office in Parliament to handpicked voices defending the narrow interests of the landed aristocracy at the expense of many others in society. So as the 19th and early 20th centuries progressed the right to vote moved more and more in the direction of universal suffrage.
It was not that liberals were unconcerned about the potential abuses from democratic majorities. In fact, John Stuart Mill, in his Considerations on Representative Government (1859) proposed that all those who received any form of financial subsidy or support from the government should be denied the voting franchise for as long as they were dependent in such a manner upon the taxpayers. There was too much of a possible conflict of interest when those who received such redistributive benefits could vote to pick the pockets of their fellow citizens. Alas, his wise advice was never followed.[14]
The Liberal Crusade for International Peace
Finally, the fifth of the liberal crusades of the 19th century was for, if not the abolition of war, then at least the reduction in the frequency of international conflicts among nations and the severity of damage that came with military combat.
And, in fact, during the century that separated the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the commencement of the First World War in 1914, wars at least among the European Powers were infrequent, relatively short in duration, and limited in their physical destruction and taking of human life.
It was argued that war was counter-productive to the interests of all nations and peoples. It prevented and disrupted the natural benefits that can and did improve the conditions of all men through peaceful production and trade based on an international division of labor in which all gained from the specializations of others in industry, agriculture, and the arts.[15]
Due to the liberal spirit of the time there were some successful attempts to arrange formal “rules of war” among governments under which the lives and property of innocent non-combatants would be respected even by conquering armies. There were treaties detailing how prisoners of war were to be humanely treated and cared for, as well as the banishing of certain forms of warfare deemed immoral and ungentlemanly.[16]
It would, of course, be an exaggeration and an absurdity to claim that 19th century liberalism fully triumphed in terms of its ideals or its goals of political and economic reform and change.
However, if there is any meaning to the notion of a prevailing “spirit of the age” that sets the tone and direction of a period of history, then it cannot be denied that classical liberalism was the predominate ideal in the early and middle decades of the 19th century. And that it changed the world in a truly transformative way. Whatever (properly understood) political, economic, and personal liberty we still possess today is due to that earlier classical liberal epoch of human history.
(It may also be argued that any extensions of the principles of individual rights and equality of treatment before the law relating to gender or race that occurred in the 20th century were the logical applications of those classical liberal principles.)
Continued.....http://blogs.northwood.edu/indefens...of-classical-liberalism-by-richard-m-ebeling/
