Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (3 page)

Have you ever had to work for something, pushing against the disinterest and apathy of everyone around you? Maybe you were laughed at, but it didn’t really matter. You were out to prove yourself right. To create something. To achieve something. Entrepreneurs often fail, take their lumps, and move forward to disrupt the status quo. We don’t know what we don’t know, but entrepreneurs have the extraordinary judgment to see around the next corner.

“What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future,” says the great free market economist Ludwig von Mises. The entrepreneur “sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way. . . . No dullness and clumsiness on the part of the masses can stop the pioneers of improvement. There is no need for them to win the approval of inert people beforehand. They are free to embark upon their projects even if everyone else laughs at them.”
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Entrepreneurship can be a lonely business. It’s hard work. Entrepreneurship is knowing that a particular problem won’t be solved unless you solve it.

Part of being an entrepreneur is ignoring the naysayers, and staying fixed on a singular goal, looking around the corner of history and envisioning a better future. Working for it means responding to customer demand or creating solutions to still-unknown demands, seeing something that others can’t see but still wondering if you will fail.

Do you think our founding entrepreneurs were anxious when they put their “John Hancocks” on that parchment? They pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for a principle—that people should be free—utterly ignoring their slim odds of success.

It’s not so easy creating jobs, hiring new workers that become your extended family, and then lying awake at night wondering if you will make payroll on Friday. But that’s what working for it is all about.

Work is hard.

But the upside of work is so awesome. It’s all about the infinite potential that sits right around the next corner. You can go get it. You are free to work in pursuit of your own happiness, to associate with whomever you like, to take care of loved ones as your first priority, and to join in voluntary association with your neighbors, or your countrymen, in common cause, to make things better. Or not. It is up to you.

For all of the debate about “the rich” paying their fair share, the real question we are arguing about in America is not about the proper redistribution of the diminishing spoils between rich and poor. Every country throughout history has had its privileged class, usually favored and protected by government cronies. The real question is more fundamental: Are we still a country where anyone can get rich, where there are no government-enforced class distinctions that prevent the poor from climbing the economic ladder?

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, suggests that there is a good dose of karma in a book I coauthored in 2010,
Give Us Liberty
. “It is the Sanskrit word for ‘deed’ or ‘action,’ and the law of karma says that for every action, there is an equal and morally commensurate reaction,” he writes in the
Wall Street Journal
.
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“Kindness, honesty and hard work will (eventually) bring good fortune; cruelty, deceit and laziness will (eventually) bring suffering.” My opposition to Wall Street bailouts for the irresponsible and politically gamed rules that punish hard work? “Capitalist karma, in a nutshell,” Haidt concludes.

CALL IT WHATEVER YOU
like. Liberty defends “the minority,” the opportunity to work for it, the “underclass” with absolutely no political pull, the unconnected, and the rights of every single individual to make it. Liberty is color-blind. Liberty is a merit-based system, and it blindly measures all of us based on the content of our character.

Why would anyone want to live life any other way but free?

5. M
IND
Y
OUR
O
WN
B
USINESS

Free people live and let live. Free people don’t have any great designs on the freedoms of other people, and we expect them to return the favor. I figure I have enough on my plate just keeping myself straight, protecting the people I love, getting my work done.

How I live my own life, and how I choose to treat others, matters. How I achieve my goals defines who I am and who I will be on the day I die. As best I can, the hows and whats in my life hopefully reflect my core principles.

But is it really any of my business to mind the business of the millions of other people working out their own dreams? I don’t think so. I don’t have to accept their choices or their values. But as long as they tolerate mine, as long as they don’t try to hurt me or take my stuff, or try to petition the government to do it for them, why should I care?

Certainly other people will disagree with my live-and-let-live attitude. But the real question is about the proper role of government in limiting my personal decisions, or dictating my values, or the practice of my religion, or the redefinition of cherished social institutions, which have been developed and defended by people coming together in common cause.

Society should never be absorbed or distorted by the state, argues Ben Rogge, the late, great libertarian professor at Wabash College. “Society, with its full network of restraints on individual conduct, based on custom, tradition, religion, personal morality, a sense of style, and with all of its indeed powerful sanctions, is what makes the civilized life possible and meaningful.” Still, he argues, we do “not wish to see these influences on individual behavior institutionalized in the hands of the state. As I read history, I see that everywhere the generally accepted social processes have been made into law, civilization has ceased to advance.”

I, Ben Rogge, do not use marijuana nor do I approve of its use, but I am afraid that if I support laws against its use, some fool will insist as well on denying me my noble and useful gin and tonic. I believe that the typical Episcopal Church is somewhat higher on the scale of civilization than the snake-handling cults of West Virginia. Frankly I wouldn’t touch even a consecrated reptile with a ten-foot pole, or even a nine-iron, but as far as the Anglican Church is concerned, I am still an anti-anti-disestablishmentarian, if you know what I mean.
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Can the political process better arbitrate the definition of time-tested social mores? It seems like a ridiculous question to ask about 535 men and women who can’t even balance the federal budget. Why would we hope that they weigh in on the things that really matter to us personally?

I remember when the George W. Bush administration implemented its faith-based initiative as part of a campaign of “compassionate conservatism.” Whatever its good intentions, this program effectively began the process of politicizing faith-based community service. It was no longer about individuals volunteering their time and money to solve problems. By 2008, this federal program became a competitive scrum for federal grants to well-connected “faith-based” organizations. Under Barack Obama, the program was renamed and repopulated with interests and organizations to better promote his administration’s priorities.

Wouldn’t it be better not to set up a new program that will inevitably become politicized, corrupting everything it touches?

Consider the definition of marriage. Why does the federal government have an opinion about my marriage? Why do government bureaucrats and politicians have a right to have an opinion about, or control over, the most important personal relationship in my life? Why would we want the federal government, with all of its competing agendas and interests other than your own, involved? I think it’s a really bad idea, and the fact that I had to get a license to get married to the love of my life felt somehow degrading to my most sacred bond.

I was young and idealistic when Terry and I got engaged. At the time I had made my carefully researched, impeccably principled arguments about not demeaning the sacred bond between us, and how getting the government’s approval was wrong. I lost, of course. We got the government’s license, on the government’s terms. And we got married. Let’s just say that I respect my wife’s authority and her grandma’s authority over my life far more than I resent the federal government’s claimed but illegitimate right to dictate the terms of my personal relationships.

So yes, even I compromise on principle.

Do to others what you would have them do to you. This, of course, is the Golden Rule, and you can find iterations of it throughout the New Testament of the Bible. I would like other people, and the government, to stay out of my personal business. I plan to return the favor.

6. F
IGHT
THE
P
OWER

Lord Acton, the great classical liberal political philosopher, famously warned that “power tends to corrupt” and “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
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“The chief evil is unlimited government,” argues F. A. Hayek, “and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.”
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This too seems like common sense, and Americans have a healthy distrust of big, obtrusive government that seems genetically encoded in our DNA. Our system of constitutional checks and balances, and adversarial and separate branches of government, is intended to limit monopoly government power.

Notice that the goal is not electing better angels to benevolently wield power
for the right reasons
. There is some confusion about this, a difference that Hayek addresses eloquently in his most important essay on political philosophy, “Why I Am Not a Conservative”:

[
T
]
he conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not to be too much restricted by rigid rules. Since he is essentially opportunist and lacks principles, his main hope must be that the wise and the good will rule—not merely by example, as we all must wish, but by authority given to them and enforced by them. Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.
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Remember that, in the European context, “liberal” means pro-freedom. “Conservative” means something more like what we would call
progressive.

So there are rules. But the architects of this model always understood that accountability rested in the hands of the customers: American shareholders who have a right, and an obligation, to check the bad management decisions made in Washington, D.C. Our representatives work for us, and we should have the right to review their job performance and fire underperformers.

The challenge of knowing what it is that our public officials are up to has always been the biggest barrier to accountability. Quite often, busy people with jobs and families and all sorts of personal dreams and pursuits just couldn’t get good, timely information about what our representation—our employees—were up to behind the cloistered halls of the marble Senate office buildings and windowless federal agencies. What were they doing in there? We would usually find out about bad decisions, made for the benefit of someone else’s parochial interests, after the legislation was signed, sealed, and delivered.

So normal Americans were too busy, and the barriers of entry into our participatory republic were too high for us to know. But the insiders, and the well-heeled interests that wanted a special deal, or a subsidy, or a carve-out, or an earmark, or an exemption, always showed up in Washington, hat in hand. Why? Because the return on the investment made cozying up to Washington a very profitable “business” proposition. Public choice economists refer to this perverse incentive structure as the “concentrated benefits” of D.C. power players versus “dispersed costs” incurred by anyone paying taxes.

In other words, you get screwed. This isn’t a Republican versus Democrat thing. It’s more about who manages to get a seat at the table first. Typically, you won’t find your chair available when things really matter.

This process, more than anything else, explains all of the bailouts and debt and seemingly mindless expansion of government into our personal and economic lives.

The answer, today, is to fight the power. Government goes to those who show up. The old dismal calculus of big government is being undermined by the Internet, the decentralization of knowledge, the breakup of the old media cartel, social media that lets us easily connect with other concerned and newly activated citizen shareholders. The democratization of politics is shifting power away from insiders, back to the shareholders.

But you still have to step up and take personal responsibility. No one’s going to do it for you. You can’t proxy-vote your shares in America’s future to some third party. If you don’t like the direction your country is taking, if you don’t like the dominance of D.C. insiders, senators-for-life, and super-lobbyists who get special access to the West Wing, it’s time to take a look in the mirror.

The burden of individual responsibility means that sometimes there’s no one else to blame but yourself.

Before you convince yourself that it’s impossible to change things, think about Samuel Adams, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Lech Walesa or any other lonely activist that has done the undoable through peaceful resistance to government power.

Before you tell yourself, after years of fighting, that it’s just too hard, think about the price Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. paid for his willingness to step up.

This burden, the weight of liberty, is what has driven a small minority, those special few freedom fighters over history, to buck the status quo, often at extraordinary personal costs. Those who step up, in an act of lonely entrepreneurship, and fix “unfixable” problems even as the anointed experts “laugh at them.” Would you be willing to risk your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor for the principle that individuals should be left free, provided that they don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff?