The happy slave

From Mises’ Liberalism-

As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Everything that goes beyond this is an evil. A government that, instead of fulfilling its task, sought to go so far as actually to infringe on personal security of life and health, freedom, and property would, of course, be altogether bad.

Still, as Jacob Burckhardt says, power is evil in itself, no matter who exercises it. It tends to corrupt those who wield it and leads to abuse. Not only absolute sovereigns and aristocrats, but the masses also, in whose hands democracy entrusts the supreme power of government, are only too easily inclined to excesses.

In the United States, the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages are prohibited. Other countries do not go so far, but nearly everywhere some restrictions are imposed on the sale of opium, cocaine, and similar narcotics. It is universally deemed one of the tasks of legislation and government to protect the individual from himself. Even those who otherwise generally have misgivings about extending the area of governmental activity consider it quite proper that the freedom of the individual should be curtailed in this respect, and they think that only a benighted doctrinairism could oppose such prohibitions. Indeed, so general is the acceptance of this kind of interference by the authorities in the life of the individual that those who, are opposed to liberalism on principle are prone to base their argument on the ostensibly undisputed acknowledgment of the necessity of such prohibitions and to draw from it the conclusion that complete freedom is an evil and that some measure of restriction must be imposed upon the freedom of the individual by the governmental authorities in their capacity as guardians of his welfare. The question cannot be whether the authorities ought to impose restrictions upon the freedom of the individual, but only how far they ought to go in this respect.

No words need be wasted over the fact that all these narcotics are harmful. The question whether even a small quantity of alcohol is harmful or whether the harm results only from the abuse of alcoholic beverages is not at issue here. It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices. But this is far from demonstrating that the authorities must interpose to suppress these vices by commercial prohibitions, nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of the government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora’s box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism.

Whoever is convinced that indulgence or excessive indulgence in these poisons is pernicious is not hindered from living abstemiously or temperately. This question cannot be treated exclusively in reference to alcoholism, morphinism, cocainism, etc., which all reasonable men acknowledge to be evils. For if the majority of citizens is, in principle, conceded the right to impose its way of life upon a minority, it is impossible to stop at prohibitions against indulgence in alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and similar poisons. Why should not what is valid for these poisons be valid also for nicotine, caffeine, and the like? Why should not the state generally prescribe which foods may be indulged in and which must be avoided because they are injurious? In sports too, many people are prone to carry their indulgence further than their strength will allow. Why should not the state interfere here as well? Few men know how to be temperate in their sexual life, and it seems especially difficult for aging persons to understand that they should cease entirely to indulge in such pleasures or, at least, do so in moderation. Should not the state intervene here too? More harmful still than all these pleasures, many will say, is the reading of evil literature. Should a press pandering to the lowest instincts of man be allowed to corrupt the soul? Should not the exhibition of pornographic pictures, of obscene plays, in short, of all allurements to immorality, be prohibited? And is not the dissemination of false sociological doctrines just as injurious to men and nations? Should men be permitted to incite others to civil war and to wars against foreign countries? And should scurrilous lampoons and blasphemous diatribes be allowed to undermine respect for God and the Church?

We see that as soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual’s mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail. The personal freedom of the individual is abrogated. He becomes a slave of the community, bound to obey the dictates of the majority. It is hardly necessary to expatiate on the ways in which such powers could be abused by malevolent persons in authority. The wielding, of powers of this kind even by men imbued with the best of intentions must needs reduce the world to a graveyard of the spirit. All mankind’s progress has been achieved as a result of the initiative of a small minority that began to deviate from the ideas and customs of the majority until their example finally moved the others to accept the innovation themselves. To give the majority the right to dictate to the minority what it is to think, to read, and to do is to put a stop to progress once and for all.

Let no one object that the struggle against morphinism and the struggle against “evil” literature are two quite different things. The only difference between them is that some of the same people who favor the prohibition of the former will not agree to the prohibition of the latter. In the United States, the Methodists and Fundamentalists, right after the passage of the law prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, took up the struggle for the suppression of the theory of evolution, and they have already succeeded in ousting Darwinism from the schools in a number of states. In Soviet Russia, every free expression of opinion is suppressed. Whether or not permission is granted for a book to be published depends on the discretion of a number of uneducated and uncultivated fanatics who have been placed in charge of the arm of the government empowered to concern itself with such matters.

The propensity of our contemporaries to demand authoritarian prohibition as soon as something does not please them, and their readiness to submit to such prohibitions even when what is prohibited is quite agreeable to them shows how deeply ingrained the spirit of servility still remains within them. It will require many long years of self-education until the subject can turn himself into the citizen. A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.

Given the fact that the US government murdered about 10,000 Americans (via Cafe Hayek) during the period of prohibition by deliberately poisoning industrial alcohol used by bootleggers-

The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. “The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol,” New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. “[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible.”

His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in whiskey circulating in the city: “[P]ractically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic,” read one 1928 alert. He publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for poisons—that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from studies done by the New York City medical examiner’s office.

Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate effect on the country’s poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened and dying were those “who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff.”

And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the use of lethal chemistry. “Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes,” proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.

Mises’ views on the subject are all the more compelling.

Value-free

Rothbard writing about his philosophical position vis-a-vis that of Mises-

Mises, despite his bitter criticisms (and correct ones) against the positivists, has accepted the crucial point of their position—that values are only subjective and a matter of taste or “emotion” that cannot be decided on rational grounds. What I have done is to go back to the “classical” ethical position that, aiming as we must at individual man’s happiness, there is a “science” of ethics, which can formulate the rules for such “virtuous” action.

If one looks at three people, Rand, Rothbard and Mises, one finds:
* in ethics, Rand and Rothbard (natural rights theory) vs. Mises (utilitarianism).
* in politics, Rand and Mises (limited government) vs. Rothbard (anarcho-capitalism).

Complete agreement on such issues, even among otherwise intelligent people, seems to be a rare commodity.

Some quotes from Mises

On the politician-

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

On paternalism-

Once you begin to admit that it is the duty of the government to control your consumption of alcohol, what can you reply to those who say the control of books and ideas is much more important?

On the free man (via the Mises blog)-

The propensity of our contemporaries to demand authoritarian prohibition as soon as something does not please them, and their readiness to submit to such prohibitions even when what is prohibited is quite agreeable to them shows how deeply ingrained the spirit of servility still remains within them…. A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.

The egoist

I was intrigued by the buzz surrounding Jennifer Burns’ book on Rand (the first chapter can be downloaded from Amazon [pdf]) and headed over to Google Books to see what it was all about. What was her opinion on Mises given the fact that he was a Kantian in metaphysics and epistemology, and a utilitarian in ethics?

Rand looked more favorably on Ludwig von Mises… As she explained to Leonard Read, Mises made mistakes when it came to morality, going “into thin air, into contradictions, into nonsense” whenever he discussed ethics. But at least he was “for the most part unimpeachable” on economics. Unlike Hayek, Mises was unwilling to consider political compromises that restricted the free market. Like Rand, he considered capitalism an absolute, and for that Rand was willing to forgive his failure to understand and reject altruism.

And Hayek? She saw through his ifs and buts and maybes-

Rand cast a gimlet eye on Hayek. In a letter to Rose Wilder Lane…she called him “pure poison” and “an example of our most pernicious enemy.” The problem was that Hayek was considered conservative, yet acknowledged there could be an important role for government-sponsored health care, unemployment insurance, and a minimum wage. “Here is where the whole case is given away,” Rand noted in her copy of The Road to Serfdom. Addressing Lane, she compared him to Communist “middle of the roaders” who were most effective as propagandists because they were not seen as Communists.

Our “moderates.” Further down the page-

“The man is an ass, with no conception of a free society at all,” she scribbled in the margin of his best-seller. She assaulted Hayek on multiple fronts. She reacted angrily whenever he discussed how competition or societies might be guided or planned, or when he spoke favorably of any government action. She was unwilling to admit he had a point: “When and how did governments have ‘powers for good?’”…When Hayek spoke about the needs of different people competing for available resources Rand retorted, “They don’t compete for the available resources—they create the resources. Here’s the socialist thinking again.” Hayek didn’t truly understand either competition or capitalism, she concluded.

—

Searching for Nietzsche, I came across this part about the plotting of The Fountainhead which comes early in the second chapter. A portrait of the egoist-

In its earliest incarnations the novel was Rand’s answer to Nietzsche. The famous herald of God’s death, Nietzsche himself was uninterested in creating a new morality to replace the desiccated husk of Christianity. His genealogy of morals, a devastating inquiry into the origins, usages. and value of traditional morality, was intended to clear a path for the “philosophers of the future.” Rand saw herself as one of those philosophers. In her first philosophical journal she had wondered if an individualistic morality was possible. A year later, starting work on her second novel, she knew it was.

“The first purpose of the book is a defense of egoism in its real meaning, egoism as a new faith,” she wrote in her first notes, which were prefaced by an aphorism from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Her novel was intended to dramatize, in didactic form, the advantages of egoism as morality. Howard Roark, the novel’s hero, was “what men should be.” At first he would appear “monstrously selfish.” By the end of the book her readers would understand that a traditional vice—selfishness—was actually a virtue.

To effect this transvaluation of values Rand had to carefully redefine selfishness itself. Egoism or selfishness typically described one who “puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself,” she wrote. “Fine!” But this understanding was missing something critical. The important element, ethically speaking, was “not what one does or how one does it, but why one does it.” Selfishness was a matter of motivation, not outcome. Therefore anyone who sought power for power’s sake was not truly selfish. Like Rand’s neighbor, the stereotypical egoist was seeking a goal defined by others, living as “they want him to live and conquer to the extent of a home, a yacht and a full stomach.” By contrast, a true egoist, in Rand’s sense of the term, would put “his own ‘I,’ his standard of values, above all things, and [conquer] to live as he pleases, as he chooses and as he believes.” Nor would a truly selfish person seek to dominate others, for that would mean living for others, adjusting his values and standards to maintain his superiority. Instead,”an egoist is a man who lives for himself.”

What sounded simple was in fact a subtle, complicated, and potentially confusing system. Rand’s novel reversed traditional definitions of selfishness and egoism, in itself an ambitious and difficult goal. It also redefined the meaning and purpose of morality by excluding all social concerns. “A man has a code of ethics primarily for his own sake, not for anyone else’s,” Rand asserted. Her ideas also reversed traditional understandings of human behavior by exalting a psychological mindset utterly divorced from anything outside the self.

As Rand described Howard Roark, she reverted to her earlier celebration of the pathological Hickman from “The Little Street” again mixing in strong scorn for emotions. “He was born without the ability to consider others,” she wrote of Roark. “His emotions are entirely controlled by his logic…he does not suffer, because he does not believe in suffering.” She also relied liberally on Nietzsche to characterize Roark. As she jotted down notes on Roark’s personality she told herself, “See Nietzsche about laughter.” The book’s famous first line indicates the centrality of this connection: “Howard Roark laughed.”

“De­mocracy too is not divine”

I noticed this phrase because someone was searching for it. Its from Mises’ Omnipotent Government-

The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.

But not every apparatus of compulsion and coercion is called a state. Only one which is powerful enough to maintain its existence, for some time at least, by its own force is commonly called a state. A gang of robbers, which because of the comparative weakness of its forces has no prospect of successfully resisting for any length of time the forces of another organization, is not entitled to be called a state. The state will either smash or tolerate a gang. In the first case the gang is not a state because its independence lasts for a short time only; in the second case it is not a state because it does not stand on its own might. The pogrom gangs in imperial Russia were not a state because they could kill and plunder only thanks to the connivance of the government.

This restriction of the notion of the state leads directly to the concepts of state territory and sovereignty. Standing on its own power implies that there is a space on the earth’s surface where the operation of the apparatus is not restricted by the intervention of another organization; this space is the state’s territory. Sovereignty (suprema potestas, supreme power) signifies that the organization stands on its own legs. A state without territory is an empty con­cept. A state without sovereignty is a contradiction in terms.

The total complex of the rules according to which those at the helm employ compulsion and coercion is called law. Yet the char­acteristic feature of the state is not these rules, as such, but the application or threat of violence. A state whose chiefs recognize but one rule, to do whatever seems at the moment to be expedient in their eyes, is a state without law. It does not make any difference whether or not these tyrants are “benevolent.”

The term law is used in a second meaning too. We call international law the complex of agreements which sovereign states have concluded expressly or tacitly in regard to their mutual relations. It is not, however, essential to the statehood of an organization that other states should recognize its existence through the conclusion of such agreements. It is the fact of sovereignty within a territory that is essential, not the formalities.

The people handling the state machinery may take over other functions, duties, and activities. The government may own and operate schools, railroads, hospitals, and orphan asylums. Such activities are only incidental to the conception of a state. Whatever other functions it may assume, the state is always characterized by the compulsion and coercion exercised.

With human nature as it is, the state is a necessary and indis­pensable institution. The state is, if properly administered, the foundation of society, of human coöperation and civilization. It is the most beneficial and most useful instrument in the endeavors of man to promote human happiness and welfare. But it is a tool and a means only, not the ultimate goal. It is not God. It is simply com­pulsion and coercion; it is the police power.

It has been necessary to dwell upon these truisms because the mythologies and metaphysics of etatism have succeeded in wrap­ping them in mystery. The state is a human institution, not a superhuman being. He who says “state” means coercion and com­pulsion. He who says: There should be a law concerning this mat­ter, means: The armed men of the government should force people to do what they do not want to do, or not to do what they like. He who says: This law should be better enforced, means: The police should force people to obey this law. He who says: The state is God, deifies arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad govern­ments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

The apparatus of compulsion and coercion is always operated by mortal men. It has happened time and again that rulers have ex­celled their contemporaries and fellow citizens both in competence and in fairness. But there is ample historical evidence to the con­trary too. The thesis of etatism that the members of the government and its assistants are more intelligent than the people, and that they know better what is good for the individual than he him­self knows, is pure nonsense. The Führers and the Duces are neither God nor God’s vicars.

The essential characteristic features of state and government do not depend on their particular structure and constitution. They are present both in despotic and in democratic governments. De­mocracy too is not divine. We shall later deal with the benefits that society derives from democratic government. But great as these advantages are, it should never be forgotten that majorities are no less exposed to error and frustration than kings and dictators. That a fact is deemed true by the majority does not prove its truth. That a policy is deemed expedient by the majority does not prove its expediency. The individuals who form the majority are not gods, and their joint conclusions are not necessarily godlike.