The Road to Freedom (2 page)

There's only one kind of argument that will shake people awake: a
moral
one. Free enterprise advocates need to build the
moral case
to remind Americans why the future of the nation is worth more to each of us than a few short-term government benefits. To get off the path to social democracy or long-term austerity, all of us who love freedom must be able to express what is written on our hearts about what our Founders struggled to give us, what the culture of free enterprise has brought to our lives, and about the opportunity society we want to leave our children.

A LOT OF PEOPLE
are reluctant to talk about morals or make a moral case for anything in politics and policy. We're willing to talk about principles, perhaps. Values, maybe. But morals? Especially among conservatives, morality evokes unpleasant memories of the “culture wars” of the 1990s, which focused on schismatic issues like abortion and homosexuality. As a result, many who believe in free enterprise steer clear of all public moral arguments.

This is a mistake and a missed opportunity. A great deal of research shows that people from all walks of life demand a system that is morally legitimate, not just efficient.
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The moral legitimacy of free enterprise depends largely on how the system enables
people to flourish, whether the system is fair, and how the system treats the least fortunate in society.

Privately, free enterprise's champions talk about these things incessantly. While they generally believe in the need for a safety net, they celebrate capitalism because they believe that succeeding on merit, doing something meaningful, seeing the poor rise by their hard work and virtue, and having control over life are essential to happiness and fulfillment. But in public debate, they often fall back on capitalism's superiority to other systems just in terms of productivity and economic efficiency. What moves them is the story of their immigrant grandparents who came to America to be free; but what they talk about is the most efficacious way to achieve a balanced budget.

The dogged reliance on materialistic arguments is a gift to statists. It allows them to paint free enterprise advocates as selfish and motivated only by money. Those who would expand the government have successfully appropriated the language of morality for their own political ends; redistributionist policies, they have claimed to great effect, are fairer, kinder, and more virtuous.
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Too frequently, the rejoinder to these moral claims has been either dumbfounded silence or even
more
data on economic growth and fiscal consolidation.

Average Americans are thus too often left with two lousy choices in the current policy debates: the moral left versus the materialistic right. The public hears a heartfelt redistributionist argument from the left that leads to the type of failed public policies all around us today. But sometimes it feels as if the alternative comes from morally bereft conservatives who were raised by wolves and don't understand basic moral principles.

No wonder the general public is paralyzed into inaction, even when dissatisfaction with government is at an all-time high. There
just doesn't seem to be a good alternative to the “statist quo,” and as a consequence, the country is slipping toward a system that few people actually like. Most people, for instance, intuitively understand the urgent need for entitlement reform. But do you seriously expect Grandma to sit idly by and let free-marketeers tinker with her Medicare coverage so her great grandkids can get a slightly better mortgage rate? Not a chance—at least, not without a moral reason.

AMERICANS HAVE
actually forgotten what the Founders knew well. They understood the need to make the moral argument for freedom, and they were not afraid to do so. In fact, they put a moral promise front and center in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
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These famous words were not entirely original. Less than a month before Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence for the United States, George Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, containing this passage:

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
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The emphasis on property came from the philosopher John Locke, who believed that all men had the natural rights to acquire, protect, and dispose of property. But Jefferson decided to focus just on the
pursuit of happiness
instead.

The shift in emphasis away from material property and toward the pursuit of happiness was a shift from materialism to morality. America was intended as the greatest experiment in liberty in the history of the world. Property was the “what” of this experiment. The pursuit of happiness was the “why.” When asked years later what explained this formulation, Jefferson called it “an expression of the American mind.”
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In truth, it was an expression of the American heart—and still is.

The Founders did not promise happiness itself, only its pursuit, leaving it to us to define happiness any way we see fit, matching our skills with our passions. This was the moral promise of the nation to its people: the promise of life and liberty that would allow the possibility of self-realization to a virtuous people.

We rarely contemplate how radical the promise of the pursuit of happiness is. And indeed, the closest our allies ever came to America's New Age creed was “liberté, égalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, fraternity) in France; “life, liberty, and prosperity” in Australia; and from our Canadian cousins, “peace, order, and good government.” (Inspiring, eh?)

This is not to say that Americans are the only people capable of making the moral case for freedom. At about the same time Jefferson was writing the Declaration, other pioneers in freedom were making the same argument in Europe. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, did not just offer his audience invisible hands and cold capitalist calculations. Seventeen years before
The Wealth of Nations
, Smith wrote
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
, in which he brilliantly argued that humans are social
animals, and that their moral ideas and actions are thus an inherent aspect of their nature. Smith believed that if people were left free to live their lives as they saw fit but were forbidden to use force or fraud, mankind would naturally form a rich and fulfilling community. Smith made the moral case for freedom long before he made the economic case for it.

Anyone who reads the words of the Founders—or Adam Smith—cannot miss their keen emphasis on the morality of the systems they intended to create. Our ideas about free enterprise and liberty were born from a sense of what is right and what helps us to thrive as people, not from a monomaniacal obsession with what makes us rich.

MORAL ARGUMENTS
for freedom have always proven more powerful than material ones in moving ordinary people around the world to act in courageous ways. Evidence of this fact is everywhere. Consider the case of Tunisia's recent revolution.

In the last days of 2010, few people had ever heard of Mohamed Bouazizi. He was just a twenty-six-year-old street vendor in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid who sold vegetables, as he had done since the age of ten. Each day, he would buy vegetables at the supermarket, load them into his wooden cart, and push the cart two kilometers to the city where he would sell them to passersby.
¹⁵

The local people knew and liked Bouazizi because, despite his own poverty, he gave free vegetables to families who were even poorer than his own. The trouble he had was with the police, who made his life miserable. They constantly harassed and bullied him—regularly confiscating his produce and scales, humiliating him in public, and fining him for various arbitrary offenses against the bureaucratic codes that governed commercial life in Tunisia.

On December 17, 2010, a policewoman stopped Bouazizi on his way to the market—par for the course for the past sixteen years of his life. She demanded that he give her his scale. On this day, for some reason, Bouazizi decided he had had enough—and he refused. Shocked by his insubordination, the police officer slapped him and called in reinforcements who pushed him to the ground. In a show of raw power intended to crush his will, they took away not just his scale but all his merchandise as well.

Bouazizi walked to the city hall and asked to meet with an official for recourse. He was denied even a meeting. What came next shocked the world. Bouazizi went to a local store, bought a can of paint thinner, and returned to the street in front of city hall. He soaked himself in fuel and set himself on fire. He died eighteen days later.

The fire that burned Bouazizi to death ignited the Tunisian revolution. Tunisians rose up against the police, the kleptocratic bureaucrats, and the president who had given them license to crush honest men like Bouazizi. Within a month, they had scattered the police and arrested the president.

The story of Mohamed Bouazizi is not primarily economic; it is
moral
. Bouazizi didn't set himself on fire because he wanted to make more money. He did so to make a point about his right to live his life and take care of his family, free from arbitrary harassment. The Tunisian people rose up in moral revolt. The policewoman, the government officials of Tunisia, and their corrupt president were morally degenerate, and revolution was what they deserved. Although the initial dispute was over commerce, it was not money that inspired the uprising. Indeed, the rebels' slogan was “dignity before bread!”

Around the world, it is the moral case, not an economic one, that leads people to take risks for freedom. The collapse of the
Soviet Union was not due to the arms race or ruinous economic planning, as many in the West believe. It was the outcome of a moral belief that swept through the population and eventually penetrated the Soviet leadership itself. Premier Mikhail Gorbachev declared
glasnost
(openness) and democratization to be the foundation of his
perestroika
(restructuring) of Soviet society. “A new moral atmosphere is taking shape in the country,” he declared. “A reappraisal of values and their creative rethinking is under way.” For Gorbachev, this was not a pragmatic policy to maximize incomes and outputs; he called it his “moral position.”
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In American politics and public policy, the same has always held true. Advances in the cause of freedom and free enterprise—while less dramatic than the collapse of communism—have succeeded when advocates have made a compelling moral case for it.

Consider the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. Ronald Reagan came into office with a landslide victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, after Carter's deeply unpopular handling of virtually all areas of policy, from economics to national defense. Central to Reagan's victory was his celebration of free enterprise
as a moral system
— not simply a financial one. In his words, “The responsibility of freedom presses us towards higher knowledge and, I believe, moral and spiritual greatness. Through lower taxes and smaller government, government has its ways of freeing people's spirits. But only we, each of us, can let the spirit soar against our own individual standards. Excellence is what makes freedom ring.”
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In the 1990s, welfare reform was likewise achieved through
moral
argument. The American welfare system had expanded enormously in the post–World War II period, largely directing financial and other support to fatherless families in poverty. Critics of the system argued that in addition to costing taxpayers hundreds of
millions of dollars a year, generations of Americans were alienated from the workforce as a result.
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Whole classes defined themselves as claimants on the U.S. government, and millions were consigned to squalid government housing and dignity-stripping income programs. Welfare programs created a permanent underclass: the unemployed received unearned support, lost job skills (or never acquired them), and thus became unable to gain stable employment, making them chronically, miserably, reliant on state aid.

Hundreds of years before, Thomas Jefferson cautioned that “dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”
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Even Franklin Roosevelt had warned in his 1935 State of the Union address that “continued dependence on [government support] induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”
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With Jefferson's and Roosevelt's moral admonitions forgotten, the American welfare system grew and grew throughout the 1970s. Many leaders complained that it was a colossal waste of money, but their complaints were insufficient to make any meaningful change.

What finally changed the system was an influential book, entitled
Losing Ground
, by social scientist Charles Murray. Published in 1984,
Losing Ground
made the argument that the problem with the welfare system was not primarily an economic one. The problem was moral. The welfare policies of the 1960s changed the rules of the game for poor people, making it rational in the short term to behave in ways that would ensure poverty and dependency in the long term. “The most troubling aspect of social policy toward the poor,” Murray wrote, “is not how much it costs, but what it has bought.”
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