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Equality, Liberty, And Justice Caused – And Continue To Cause – Great Enrichment For All.

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The world is rich and will become still richer. Quit worrying.

Not all of us are rich yet, of course. A billion or so people on the planet drag along on the equivalent of $3 a day or less. But as recently as 1800, almost everybody did.

The Great Enrichment began in 17th-century Holland. By the 18th century, it had moved to England, Scotland and the American colonies, and now it has spread to much of the rest of the world.

Economists and historians agree on its startling magnitude: By 2010, the average daily income in a wide range of countries, including Japan, the United States, Botswana, and Brazil, had soared 1,000 to 3,000 percent over the levels of 1800. People moved from tents and mud huts to split-levels and city condominiums, from waterborne diseases to 80-year life spans, from ignorance to literacy.

You might think the rich have become richer and the poor even poorer. But by the standard of basic comfort in essentials, the poorest people on the planet have gained the most. In places like Ireland, Singapore, Finland, and Italy, even people who are relatively poor have adequate food, education, lodging, and medical care—none of which their ancestors had. Not remotely.

Inequality of financial wealth goes up and down, but over the long term it has been reduced. Financial inequality was greater in 1800 and 1900 than it is now, as even the French economist Thomas Piketty has acknowledged. By the more important standard of basic comfort in consumption, inequality within and between countries has fallen nearly continuously.

In any case, the problem is poverty, not inequality as such—not how many yachts the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt has, but whether the average Frenchwoman has enough to eat. At the time of Les Misérables, she didn’t. In the last 40 years, the World Bank estimates, the proportion of the population living on an appalling $1 or $2 a day has halved. Paul Collier, an Oxford economist, urges us to help the “bottom billion” of the more than seven billion people on earth. Of course. It is our duty. But he notes that 50 years ago, four billion out of five billion people lived in such miserable conditions. In 1800, it was 95 percent of one billion.

We can improve the conditions of the working class. Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little—and anyway, expropriation is a one-time trick. Enrichment from market-tested betterment will go on and on and, over the next century or so, will bring comfort in essentials to virtually everyone on the planet, and more to an expanding middle class.

Look at the astonishing improvements in China since 1978 and in India since 1991. Between them, they are home to about four out of every 10 humans. Even in the United States, real wages have continued in recent decades to grow—if slowly—contrary to what you might have heard. Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, and others who have looked beyond the superficial have shown that real wages are continuing to rise, thanks largely to major improvements in the quality of goods and services, and to nonwage benefits. Real purchasing power is double what it was in the fondly remembered 1950s—when many American children went to bed hungry.

What, then, caused this Great Enrichment?

Not exploitation of the poor, not investment, not existing institutions, but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic.

The liberal idea was spawned by some happy accidents in northwestern Europe from 1517 to 1789—namely, the four R’s: the Reformation, the Dutch Revolt, the revolutions of England and France, and the proliferation of reading. The four R’s liberated ordinary people, among them the venturing bourgeoisie. The Bourgeois Deal is, briefly, this: In the first act, let me try this or that improvement. I’ll keep the profit, thank you very much, though in the second act those pesky competitors will erode it by entering and disrupting (as Uber has done to the taxi industry). By the third act, after my betterments have spread, they will make you rich.

And they did.

You may object that ideas are a dime a dozen and that to make them fruitful we must start with adequate physical and human capital and good institutions. It’s a popular idea at the World Bank, but a mistaken one. True, we eventually need capital and institutions to embody the ideas, such as a marble building with central heating and cooling to house the Supreme Court. But the intermediate and dependent causes like capital and institutions have not been the root cause.

The root cause of enrichment was and is the liberal idea, spawning the university, the railway, the high-rise, the internet and, most important, our liberties. What original accumulation of capital inflamed the minds of William Lloyd Garrison and Sojourner Truth? What institutions, except the recent liberal ones of university education and uncensored book publishing, caused feminism or the antiwar movement? Since Karl Marx, we have made a habit of seeking material causes for human progress. But the modern world came from treating more and more people with respect.

Ideas are not all sweet, of course. Fascism, racism, eugenics, and nationalism are ideas with alarming recent popularity. But sweet practical ideas for profitable technologies and institutions, and the liberal idea that allowed ordinary people for the first time to have a go, caused the Great Enrichment. We need to inspirit masses of people, not the elite, who are plenty inspirited already. Equality before the law and equality of social dignity are still the root of economic, as well as spiritual, flourishing—whatever tyrants may think to the contrary.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, adjunct in classics and philosophy, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Throughout History, Free Market Policing Has Proven To Be A Better Solution.

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Recent riots in Louisville were only the latest in a long string of violent, raging mob riots by the criminal Marxist BLM movement, their mostly-white “antifa” thuggish allies, and assorted looters. In this case, “Two police officers have been shot in Louisville, Ky., amid riots following the announcement of an indictment in the shooting of Breonna Taylor. Louisville chief of police Robert Schroeder confirmed that the officers were shot and were taken to a local hospital. Schroeder told reporters that one of the officers was undergoing surgery but in stable condition, while the other was alert and stable. Police have arrested one suspect in the shooting. . . after a grand jury charged just one of the officers involved in the shooting of Taylor in a botched drug bust. Rioters clashed with police throughout Louisville, burning trash cans and calling to defund the city police department.”

Last May, hundreds of businesses in the state’s Twin Cities — Minneapolis and St. Paul — were damaged or looted during four days of unrest. In Los Angeles, “National Guard troops arrived in the nation’s second-largest city overnight after a fourth day of protests Saturday saw demonstrators clash repeatedly with officers, torch police vehicles and pillage businesses. Mayor Eric Garcetti said he asked Gov. Gavin Newsom for 500 to 700 members of the Guard to assist the 10,000 Los Angeles Police Department officers. The California National Guard is being deployed to Los Angeles overnight to support our local response to maintain peace and safety on the streets of our city,’ said the mayor, who ordered a rare citywide curfew until Sunday morning. Firefighters responded to dozens of fires, and scores of businesses were damaged. One of the hardest-hit areas was the area around the Grove, a popular high-end outdoor mall west of downtown where hundreds of protesters swarmed the area, showering police with rocks and other objects and vandalizing shops. About 3,000 protesters demonstrated in Brooklyn, and were pushed back by NYPD officers releasing chemical mace after the protests turned violent. A woman was arrested and charged with attempted murder after she threw a Molotov cocktail into an occupied police car.

Things are likely to get worse. A story in The New York Times, a paper very sympathetic to the BLM hoodlums, admits that rioters plan to assault suburban white areas. They will demand that the white residents, who are often elderly, bow down to them and surrender their homes. “Nearly four months after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, some protesters against police brutality are taking a more confrontational — and personal — approach. The marches in Portland are increasingly moving to residential and largely white neighborhoods, where demonstrators with bullhorns shout for people to come ‘out of your house and into the street’ and demonstrate their support. These more aggressive protests target ordinary people going about their lives, especially those who decline to demonstrate allegiance to the cause. That includes a diner in Washington who refused to raise her fist to show support for Black Lives Matter, or, in several cities, confused drivers who happened upon the protests.”

Ordinary Americans cannot rely on the police to protect them. In many cases, leftwing governors and mayors have ordered to police to stand down. For them, solidarity with the rioters is more important than the lives and property of decent citizens. We have seen the absurdity of rioters being called “peaceful protestors” when videos show cities aflame. When the police do their duty and counter the violence of the thugs, they are vilified as racists, indicted, and even shot at and killed. In these circumstances, they are hardly likely to stay on the job. If the police don’t protect you, you have no legal recourse, and in some places, police won’t even investigate cases of looting. “’Neither the Constitution, nor state law, imposes a general duty upon police officers or other governmental officials to protect individual persons from harm — even when they know the harm will occur,’ said Darren L. Hutchinson, a professor and associate dean at the University of Florida School of Law. ‘Police can watch someone attack you, refuse to intervene and not violate the Constitution.’ The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government has only a duty to protect persons who are ‘in custody,’ he pointed out.”

What then are we supposed to do? In an interview on the Tucker Carlson show September 23, Danny Coulson, a retired Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI, condemned the rioters. But he thought that there was something even worse than the burning and looting, and this was the main reason he condemned them. Their actions might lead to “vigilante justice”. People must not take the law into their own hands—that could lead to chaos. Instead, we must unify around support of the police.

His advice is useless, and it rests on a false premise. How can we support the police, when they aren’t protecting us? His advice is like urging us to put out a fire with a hose unattached to a hydrant. The false premise is that vigilante justice is bad. Is it? Let’s look at the definition of the term: “Vigilantism is the act of enforcement, investigation or punishment of perceived offenses without legal authority. A vigilante (from Spanish vigilante) is practitioner of vigilantism.”

In other words, you are a vigilante if you exercise your basic right of self-defense, without the permission of the predatory State that support the rioters and looters. In fact, if people defended and protected themselves, the result would not be chaos, but a far better system than we have now. As the great Murray Rothbard explained, people in a free market society would defend themselves by hiring private protection agencies. The agencies would compete to provide the services customers wanted, rather than cater to the whim of a mob or promote venality and power-seeking, as officials of the State do now. As Murray again and again stressed, the free market is always better at supplying goods and services than the State, and protection and defense are no exceptions.

He explains in For A New Liberty, “Free-market police would not only be efficient, they would have a strong incentive to be courteous and to refrain from brutality against either their clients or their clients’ friends or customers. A private Central Park would be guarded efficiently in order to maximize park revenue, rather than have a prohibitive curfew imposed on innocent—and paying—customers. A free market in police would reward efficient and courteous police protection to customers and penalize any falling off from this standard. No longer would there be the current disjunction between service and payment inherent in all government operations, a disjunction which means that police, like all other government agencies, acquire their revenue, not voluntarily and competitively from consumers, but from the taxpayers coercively. In fact, as government police have become increasingly inefficient, consumers have been turning more and more to private forms of protection. We have already mentioned block or neighborhood protection. There are also private guards, insurance companies, private detectives, and such increasingly sophisticated equipment as safes, locks, and closed-circuit TV and burglar alarms. . . Every reader of detective fiction knows that private insurance detectives are far more efficient than the police in recovering stolen property. Not only is the insurance company impelled by economics to serve the consumer—and thereby try to avoid paying benefits—but the major focus of the insurance company is very different from that of the police. The police, standing as they do for a mythical ‘society,’ are primarily interested in catching and punishing the criminal; restoring the stolen loot to the victim is strictly secondary. To the insurance company and its detectives, on the other hand, the prime concern is recovery of the loot, and apprehension and punishment of the criminal is secondary to the prime purpose of aiding the victim of crime. Here we see again the difference between a private firm impelled to serve the customer-victim of crime and the public police, which is under no such economic compulsion.”

Private law enforcement isn’t just a theoretical idea, as we can see from British and American history. In Britain, “Throughout the period 1674 to 1829 many victims of crime were able to identify and apprehend the culprits before contacting a constable or a justice of the peace to secure their arrest. . . Londoners continued to help apprehend suspected criminals. As the Proceedings frequently illustrate, cries of ‘stop thief!’ or ‘murder!’ from victims often successfully elicited the assistance of passers-by. . . victims frequently paid thief-takers to locate and apprehend suspects. Moreover, the difficulties the authorities had in identifying and apprehending criminals led them to offer rewards to those whose arrests led to the conviction of serious criminals, and pardons to accomplices who were willing to turn in their confederates. Increasingly, ordinary Londoners left the task of securing criminals to people who were motivated to do so by the prospect of financial or other rewards.”We see the same thing in America. “The development of policing in the United States closely followed the development of policing in England. In the early colonies policing took two forms. It was both informal and communal, which is referred to as the ‘Watch,’ or private-for-profit policing, which is called ‘The Big Stick’ . . . These informal modalities of policing continued well after the American Revolution. It was not until the 1830s that the idea of a centralized municipal police department first emerged in the United States.”

Danny Coulson was horror-stricken about people hiring private bodyguards, but what is wrong with that? Instead, we should support our basic right to self-defense. This is guaranteed by the Second Amendment, but our rights don’t depend on the State and its Constitution. By the way, the recently sainted Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted to end the individual right to keep and bear arms. Our rights come from natural law, and only the free market can enforce them and protect us.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr is Chairman of the Mises Institute. This article first appeared at lewrockwell.com.

Justice And Social Justice Have Nothing In Common. They Are Opposites.

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Social justice is a political and social ideology that advocates for the equal redistribution of wealth, equal access to economic opportunities, and the reduction of unfair privileges within a society. The central argument used by social justice advocates is that the government has the moral obligation to equalize access to wealth, opportunities, and privileges.

In abstract, to many people, this ideology seems morally right. In practice though, social justice has done more harm to those it intended to help and has hindered society’s advancement as a whole. But to fully comprehend the reason why social justice is a problem; it is helpful to understand its origins.

The Origins of Social Justice

To understand social justice, we first need to define what justice is. Justice is a concept under which wrongs committed against one party by another party are “set right,” either through restitution or punishment. Justice is generally administered by an institution — law courts, for example —  in which a third-party impartially adjudicates a dispute. The purpose of adjudicating this dispute is to determine how a victim might be repaid for a loss or private property or bodily harm. Justice, properly understood, therefore assumes there must be an identifiable victim, and that some third party will ensure the proper steps are taken to repair the harm.

Social justice as a concept arose in the early nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution and subsequent civil revolutions throughout Europe, which aimed to create more egalitarian societies and remedy capitalistic exploitation of human labor. Indeed, the concept of social justice is rooted in the Marxist theory of man-made exploitation. Advocates of social justice argue that social inequalities are based upon the fact that those who have access to resources, do so because they have deprived the have-nots of these same opportunities. Consequently, social justice advocates argue that the government has the moral obligation to rectify that injustice. Unlike true justice, however, reparations in the name of social justice do not involve a specific victim or a specific perpetrator. Instead, the guilty party is said to be an entire class of people, many of whom have never been shown to have exploited any specific person at all.

In America, social justice has become the new go-to “solution” to alleviate economic inequalities between people and social classes. The current trend of social justice in the United States underlies the misleading premise that the top 1 percent controls all the wealth while the bottom 99 percent produces that wealth. Moreover, this fallacious premise builds upon the myth that most millionaires and billionaires have inherited the wealth that they have today from their predecessors. But, according to a 2017 survey from Fidelity Investments, 88 percent of millionaires in America are self-made. Most did not grow up in exclusive country club neighborhoods. Needless to say, most millionaires started out within the 99 percent then worked their way up by climbing the social ladder. Yet social justice proponents argue that the wealthy — merely by being wealthy — have deprived those from lower social classes of wealth and capital. To fix that “injustice,” policies such as a progressive income tax have been imposed at the national level and in most states.

Note also that the moral system undergirding social justice requires immorality on the part of the state. Since the state produces no wealth of its own, it can only “create” wealth for the less-wealthy by taking wealth and property from the more-wealthy. Thus, social justice is founded on the idea of the state using violence to take from one group and give to another.  Since no specific victim and no specific crime has been identified, this is no case of reparation as exists under real justice. It is simply a transfer of wealth from one group to another based on some sort of general “exploitation.”

So, when a high-income person pays a higher rate of income tax to support a government program designed to increase inequality, we are not transferring wealth from individuals shown to have “exploited” others. Nor is there evidence that every recipient who benefits from these programs has been victimized by some sort of economic exploitation. Instead, it is merely assumed that those who pay more tax are guilty of exploiting others, while those who receive the wealth were exploited. These, of course, are not good assumptions, and are not based on any sort of judicial proceeding or examination of evidence, as would be the case of administering what is properly known as justice.

Germinal G. Van is an author and scholar from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa.

Bernie Sanders And The Left Get Morality 100% Wrong.

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Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has served to once again confirm that his – and those of the ‘democratic socialist’ and ‘progressive’ movements’ – vision for society endorses an aggressive threat of violence against innocent individuals, and seeks to negate morality itself.

While often declaring goods like health care and daycare “rights,” Sanders also insists that political solutions, rather than voluntary charity, are the only truly moral means of achieving justice.

For instance, Sanders recently tweeted that his Medicare for All plan is “the moral thing to do.”

Compare this to Sanders’ longstanding aversion to private charity. Despite his status as a millionaire, Sanders is notoriously stingy in giving to charity, and has a past of being downright hostile to it.

”I don’t believe in charities,” Sanders told a crowd gathered at a local 1981 United Way fundraiser, when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. According to the New York Times, Sanders “went on to question the ‘fundamental concepts on which charities are based’ and contended that government, rather than charity organizations, should take over responsibility for social programs.”

In other words, Sanders would have us believe the only moral avenue to help the needy in through political means. Somehow the “fundamental concepts” of private charities are not sufficient in Sanders’ view.

To evaluate these claims, we can compare the two institutional frameworks constituting the hero and villain in Sanders’ narrative: government programs versus voluntary, private charity.

The use of force backed by the threat of violence is the bedrock upon which all government programs are built. Their very existence relies on compelling citizens to pay their taxes lest they be punished for their resistance. And to be clear, such threats are not leveled against the perpetrators of any crime, but rather against innocent victims who have aggressed against no one.

By contrast, private charity programs rely on peaceful, voluntary donations for their existence. Donors are free to refrain from turning over their money to an organization which they object to the goods or services being provided, or feel the organization is not effectively using funds to benefit those in need.

Contrast that with how the government would react if you decided to stop paying taxes because you don’t like the services it offers and provides in return. Agents of the government would descend upon you and threaten fines and imprisonment – resorting to physical assault if necessary – if you didn’t obey.

So, without you having threatened or aggressed against anyone, but merely by boycotting the submission of your property (via taxes) to the government, this organization would not stop short of invading your property and initiating violence against you.

Such is the true nature of how to achieve Sanders’ “moral code” of “economic rights.” This is what progressives often refer to as “social justice.”

I prefer the definition of justice offered by George Mason University professor and columnist Walter Williams: “What’s just has been debated for centuries but let me offer you my definition of social justice: ‘I keep what I earn, and you keep what you earn.’ Do you disagree? Well, then, tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you – and why.”

Finally, Sanders’ brand of “morality” not only extols the use of aggressive violence against innocents, but it would also run the risk of extinguishing the ability of individuals to exercise moral judgment, thus negating real morality. True morality and charity for those in need is housed in the hearts of individuals expressing their own compassion, not in response to political orders.

As noted economist and political philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek stated, “Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of duty not exacted by compulsion, but the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.”

Or, as Murray Rothbard so succinctly wrote: “No action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen.”

Humans act in accordance with their own judgment. This includes judgment about helping others in need, as determined by one’s own conscience. Government, however, interferes with the connection between judgment and action. As the state forcibly outsources the exercise of moral compassion, individuals’ ability to do so atrophies.

Sanders’ and other progressives’ blustering about “morality” is really a smokescreen designed to distract from their vision of a society organized around the threat of government aggression against innocents and devoid of the exercise of individuals freely expressing true moral acts.

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