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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.

A Special Long Read For Our Times:Liberty’s Enemies Are Advancing, Which Makes Antonio Gramsci The Greatest Political Strategist In History.

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The year 2020 is not passing quietly. We are witnessing events unthinkable even a few months ago: keep your antisocial distance, wear a mask when entering a bank, follow the arrows on the floor of the supermarket, all sporting events cancelled, homeschooling—even for university students—is approved by all corners of government and society. Most relevant to this discussion: pot shops, liquor stores, and abortion clinics are essential; churches during Holy Week are not.

Add to this the protests—more specifically the riots. Police told by government officials to stand down. Those who intend to defend their lives and their property are the ones judged—by the media, and potentially by government prosecutors and courts. Oh, yes: protesting and rioting wards off viruses—no need for masks.

What, of all of this, is directly relevant to you? Why did I feel it appropriate to change the topic of this lecture in the last days? We are living through massive cultural changes. While culture always evolves, in the last several decades the changes have been revolutionary—and I use that term purposefully. These changes are aimed right at you and those who sat in your place over the last decades. The purpose is to create soldiers for the revolution.

What I hear of college, and it also is true in business and government, are stories of various cultural indoctrinations—made ever more intense given the pretext for these recent riots. Politically correct speech to include even compelled speech, cancel culture, self-flagellation, a fight for the gold medal in the oppression olympics. If you disagree with any of this, you are a fascist. To further cement this indoctrination, a requirement to take classes that tear down Western civilization—even saying those two words in anything other than a scornful tone could be costly.

There is a purpose behind this, a strategy. Events that we have been living through recently are not spontaneous or random. This is not accidental. These events are the result of a political strategy designed to strip us of our liberty. It is an insidious strategy. It is also very effective.

Whether knowingly or not, those carrying out this strategy are using the playbook of the most successful Marxist thinker in history. Given the damage this strategy has done to the freedoms of the West, I consider him to be the greatest political strategist in history.

And this is what I would like to discuss. Before beginning, I must give you fair warning on two points: First, much of this Marxist playbook sounds an awful lot like the wishes of simplistic libertarians—libertarianism for children, as a good friend once labeled this. I will come back to this point more than once.

Second, there will be a lot of discussion of Western tradition and culture in this lecture. Inherently this will include Christianity. But if you want to understand the enemy’s playbook, then this cannot be avoided.

Now, I know many libertarians push back hard on this topic: Christianity is unnecessary for liberty; in fact it is an enemy to liberty. I will only ask that you keep in mind: the most successful Marxist thinker in history believed that Christianity is the enemy of communism; it’s what stood in the way of communism’s advance in the West. For now, I ask that you stay open to the possibility that he was right—because, when I look around me today, he sure appears to have been right.

With this laborious introduction out of the way, let’s begin. The political strategist of whom I am speaking is Antonio Gramsci. Malachi Martin summarizes the importance of Gramsci, in his book The Keys of this Blood:

the political formula Gramsci devised has done much more than classical Leninism—and certainly more than Stalinism—to spread Marxism throughout the capitalist West.

What is that formula? Gary North explains: noting that Western society was deeply religious, Gramsci believed that

the only way to achieve a proletarian revolution would be to break the faith of the masses of Western voters in Christianity and the moral system derived from Christianity.

Religion and culture were at the base of the pyramid, the foundation. It was the culture, and not the economic condition of the working class, that was the key to bringing communism to the West. To be fair to Gramsci, he didn’t start this ball rolling; the West was doing a fine job of damaging its cultural tradition.

One can point to elements of medieval Catholicism, the Reformation and Renaissance, the Enlightenment (as I have previously discussed), and postmillennial pietist Protestants (as Murray Rothbard so clearly demonstrated) as all contributing to this destruction long before Gramsci hit the scene. But without these cracks in the armor, Gramsci would never have been successful.

What is our current condition relative to Gramsci’s objectives? I could speak to the destruction of the family, the loss of all meaningful intermediating governance institutions, the absurdity of a good portion of what passes for university studies today, especially in liberal arts and humanities—all of which are symptoms of the crumbling of the ultimate target at which Gramsci aimed. We have, this year, been given indisputable evidence as to the success of his political strategy in the response by Christian leaders to the coronavirus. Just as one example, from Kentucky:

When I asked [Bishop John Stowe of the Catholic Diocese of Lexington] what he would say to a pastor planning Easter worship, he was blunt: “I would say it’s irresponsible,” he said. “It’s jeopardizing people’s lives.”

I know we live in a fact-free world, but was it ever wise to believe that we were facing the Black Death? In premodern plagues, did Christian leaders act this way? The simple answer to both questions is no, yet we have churches closed during Holy Week. I cannot think of a better symbolic representation of the destruction of Christianity in the West. Such is the success of Antonio Gramsci.

Who is Antonio Gramsci? He was an Italian Marxist (more accurately, an Italian communist), writing on political theory, sociology, and linguistics. His work focused on the role that culture and tradition play in preventing communism from spreading through the West.

Gramsci was born in 1891 and died in 1937, the middle of seven children. Hunchbacked, either due to a malformed spine from birth or a childhood accident; it is not clear. One of the stories has him falling from the arms of a servant down a steep flight of stairs. Though his family gave him up for dead, his aunt anointed his feet with oil from a lamp dedicated to the Madonna. Ironic.

Continuously sickly, until the age of fourteen a coffin for him was kept at the ready in his bedroom. His father was thrown in prison for political cause and his mother, somehow, kept the family alive.

Prior to leaving Sardinia for Turin and university, he was a nationalist—Sardinia for the Sardinians. Upon arriving in Turin, he came upon the automotive factories of Fiat. It was here that he found the class struggle: workers and bosses.

World War I made this clear: half a million Italian peasants died, while the profits of industrialists rose. He left university and began writing. He founded a newspaper: L’Ordine nuovo, The New Order, with its first issue delivered on May Day 1919. He was a founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy, and a member of Parliament.

With parliamentary immunity suspended by Mussolini, he was sent to prison. Several years later, a prisoner exchange was proposed by the Vatican: send Gramsci to Moscow in exchange for a group of priests imprisoned in the Soviet Union. (Mussolini put a stop to these negotiations in early 1933.)

It was during his time in prison that he wrote his famous Prison Notebooks, describing the contents as “Everything that Concerns People.” It comprised over twenty-eight hundred handwritten pages. Twenty-one of the notebooks bear the stamp of prison authorities. Given the risk of censorship, he used bland terms in place of traditional Marxist terminology.

Though completed by 1935, these were only published in the years 1948–51, and not in English until the 1970s. By 1957, nearly four hundred thousand copies had been sold.

Suffering from various heart, respiratory, and digestive diseases, he was eventually transferred to a prison hospital facility. On April 25, 1937—the same day that he received news that he would be released—he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died two days later.

Through his notebooks, he introduced several ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory, and educational theory. Most important was the idea of cultural hegemony, which was the unifying idea of Gramsci’s work from 1917 until he died.

Cultural hegemony: Why hadn’t the Marxist revolution swept the West by the early twentieth century? Gramsci suggested that capitalists did not maintain control simply coercively—as Marx would describe it—but also ideologically. The values of the bourgeoisie were the common values of all. These values helped to maintain the status quo and limited any possibility of revolution.

While Lenin felt culture was ancillary to political objectives (as do many libertarians), Gramsci saw culture as the key. The working class would need to develop a culture of its own, separate and distinct from the common values of the larger society. Control their beliefs and you control the people. This was only possible if the hegemony of the ruling class was in crisis.

John Cammett expands on this point. Hegemony is described as an order diffused throughout society in all institutional and private manifestations. All tastes, morality, customs, including religious and political principles, are infused with its spirit. This tone is set from the top—one class or group over other classes. From Cammett:

The fundamental assumption behind Gramsci’s view of hegemony is that the working class, before it seizes State power, must establish its claim to be a ruling class in the political, cultural, and “ethical” fields.

There are three phases to the revolution in this regard: first, take claim to be the ruling class in culture; second, seize State power; third, transform completely the economic base. You can decide how far along we are in this path.

A second important idea was Gramsci’s focus on intellectuals. Gramsci believed that the working class would have to develop their own intellectuals, with values that were critical of the status quo. This would require the takeover of the educational establishment and institutions. These intellectuals, through the educational establishment and the state, had almost free reign to push forward the revolutionary idea.

Gramsci’s idea of intellectuals is much broader than academicians and the like. From the book Gramsci’s Politics, by Anne Sassoon, Gramsci identifies two groups of these intellectuals: organic intellectuals, coming from the working class, and traditional intellectuals—the clergy, philosophers, academicians. This latter group presents a false air of continuity from their predecessors. Today I would include thought leaders from entertainment, sports, business, and politics in one or the other of these two groups.

Gramsci is, perhaps, the foundational theorist for what we now call cultural Marxism. When it comes to the importance of the culture and the value of mass media in influencing the political and economic system of a country and economy, Gramsci’s work spurred the growth of an entire movement in the field of cultural studies.

Gary North describes Gramsci as “the most important anti-Marxist theorist ever to come out of the Marxist movement.” He was anti-Marxist, because, unlike Marx, he did not place the mode of production at the center of social development. Paul Piccone furthers this point: Gramsci’s vision contradicted official Marxist-Leninist ideology, providing an ethical and subjective dimension superior to the former’s materialism.

According to Angelo Codevilla, Gramsci even had scorn for Marxism’s focus on economic factors: “stuff like that is for common folks.” It was a little formula for half-baked intellectuals. Economic relations were just one part of social reality; the chief parts were intellectual and moral.

Many libertarians, like Marx, are equally focused on the mode of production as the key to liberty, but on the other side of the coin. They are focused on economic freedom as the means to deliver liberty for all, and, like Marx, they virtually ignore or even despise any cultural aspects. Gramsci knew better, and—as should be obvious by the comparison I am drawing—he offers a lesson for libertarians who believe that broader cultural questions beyond the non-aggression principle are irrelevant for liberty.

Continuing with North:

Gramsci argued, and the Frankfurt School followed his lead, that the way for Marxists to transform the West was through cultural revolution: the idea of cultural relativism. The argument was correct, but the argument was not Marxist. The argument was Hegelian.

The Frankfurt school further developed the concept of critical theory. Critical theory teaches one to be critical of every prevailing norm, attitude, and cultural attribute in society; the purpose is to challenge power structures and hierarchies. Spelling out precisely the discourse of tolerance that we are faced with today, Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt school would write:

the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, [and] opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.

Violent revolution was not the answer. From Malachi Martin:

While firmly committed to global Communism, [Gramsci] knew that violence would fail to win the West. American workers would never declare war on their middle-class neighbors as long as they shared common Christian values.

Martin continues:

The main weapons would be deception, manipulation and infiltration. Hiding their Marxist ideology, the new Communist warriors would seek positions of influence in seminaries, government, communities, and the media.

Gramsci agreed with Lenin that there was an inner force in man, driving him to the “Worker’s Paradise,” but he felt that the assumptions underlying this Marxian view were too basic and gratuitous. Yes, the great mass of the world’s population was made up of workers, but this was insufficient, as Martin would note:

What became clear to [Gramsci], however, was that nowhere—and especially not in Christian Europe—did the workers of the world see themselves as separated from the ruling classes by an ideological chasm.

These workers would not rise up against their coreligionists, those with whom they shared culture, custom, and tradition. They would certainly not offer a violent overthrow as long as these traditions were held in common. Again, citing Martin:

Because no matter how oppressed they might be, the “structure” of the working classes was defined not by their misery or their oppression but by their Christian faith and their Christian culture.

Gramsci found the logic of Marx as it found its home in Lenin to be futile and contradictory. Was it any wonder that the only state in which Marxism took hold was the state which held it together by force and terror? Without changing that formula, Marxism would have no future.

A common culture, grounded in Christianity, would always stand in the way, requiring ever increasing terror…or requiring a different path. Gramsci’s path. Murray Rothbard noted the Gramscian “long march through our institutions” in 1992, writing so colorfully: “Yes, yes, you rotten hypocritical liberals, it’s a culture war!”

Angelo Codevilla writes that there would be no need for brute force—at least not on the front end, again, contrary to the general Marxist view. Transform the enemy into the soldier you need; he will then do the rest. Gramsci’s method would be more Machiavellian than Marxist; in the place of the Prince, it would be the party.

This method would eliminate the very possibility of a cultural resistance to the communist’s progressivism. There would be no cultural force standing in its way. As Gramsci believed human nature is not fixed and immutable, it would be the modern Machiavellian prince’s job to change human nature.

Destroy the old laws, the accustomed ways of living; inculcate new ways of thinking and speaking—in essence, introduce an entirely new language. Language is the key to the mastery of consciousness. Language can achieve what force never could. Reform the morals; reform the intellect. In this way, people who would otherwise never spend a minute on such things would become the most rabid soldiers.

A blunt-force hammer would not work. Ranting about a revolution or a dictatorship of the proletariat would only make enemies of the working class. The educational system was the key. Gramsci’s path to revolution would take much longer than that proposed by Marx or Lenin, but it would be much more thorough and successful.

In the meantime, use their rules against them: the democratic process, lobbying and voting, full parliamentary participation. Behave just like the Western democrats—accept all political parties, forge alliances where convenient. Unlike the majority of Marxists, Gramsci would make common cause with all leftists—communist and noncommunist alike; every group with a bone to pick with tradition and Christian culture was an ally. Knowingly or unknowingly, they would assist in the communist cause. Martin writes:

Marxists must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws oppressive. They must adopt different tactics for different cultures and subcultures. They must never show an inappropriate face. And, in this manner, they must enter into every civil, cultural and political activity in every nation, patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens bread.

Regarding these alliances, Fr. James Thornton adds:

In Gramsci’s time these included, among others, various “anti-fascist” organizations, trade unions, and socialist political groups. In our time, alliances with the Left would include radical feminists, extremist environmentalists, “civil rights” movements, anti-police associations, internationalists, ultra-liberal church groups, and so forth. These organizations, along with open Communists, together create a united front working for the transformation of the old Christian culture.

The method would be described as seduction, as opposed to the rape advised by Marx and committed by Lenin and Stalin. This would subvert Western culture; it would redefine itself without the need for picking fights with it.

Gramsci was writing in the interwar years. Christianity was an already weakened foe: the Enlightenment divorced God from both the individual and reason. Nietzsche announced the death of God in the latter part of the nineteenth century. World War I was the crushing blow, leaving Christian Europe reeling. Gramsci spotted a wounded enemy, and he knew that this is where the fatal blow to the West must be struck.

Whatever was left of the Christian mind must be changed. Every individual, every group in every class, must think about life’s problems without reference to God and God’s laws. No Christian transcendence; at minimum, antipathy, and even positive opposition to any introduction of Christian ideals. These could not possibly be allowed in the conversation regarding the treatment and solution to the problems of modern life.

I could say the same things about many libertarians. Yet, who do you believe has a better understanding of human nature, of the direction where such a path leads: Antonio Gramsci or any libertarian who views the broader culture as ancillary or even irrelevant to liberty? The Christian culture is being destroyed; this we know. Who has been more successful given this path of removing Christianity? Is liberty—defined as rights in life and property—blossoming in the wreckage of its wake, or is it the other thing? To ask the question is to answer it. Martin continues:

All the meaning of human life and the answer to every human hope were contained within the boundaries of the visible, tangible, material world of the here and now.

With this material view offering the limits of our meaning, is it merely coincidence that the West is at the same time going through a crisis of meaning? We have no idea who we are, where we come from, or where we are going. Given that we are told to believe that we are nothing but the result of random atoms smashing together randomly, why would we?

Another utopia, requiring yet another new man. The perfectibility of man was now man’s responsibility, not God’s. We have a war on cancer, a war on drugs, a war on poverty, a war on terror, a war on a virus. We must eliminate bigotry, racism, prejudice. We must embrace diversity: we are all different. In the same head and at the same time we must embrace equality: we are all the same.

Academic institutions were already well on their way. Proud of their position as vanguards of forward-looking thinking, these new Marxist interpretations of history, law, and religion were like red meat to a hungry lion. Throw in easy-to-get student loans, extend the college experience to all, and add a couple million newly indoctrinated crusaders every year to the cause.

Secularization in Catholic and Protestant churches would aid and accelerate this reform. Everything is material; nothing is transcendent. In case this wasn’t obvious to us before, what could be more secular than Christian churches closing during Holy Week—the week that gives meaning to the entirety of Christianity? How pathetic we must appear to Christians from centuries past, who comforted the sick during real pandemics.

Speak of man’s dignity and man’s rights. Speak of these without reference to the Christian transcendence that underpins these; in fact, speak of the Christian transcendence as standing in the way of these.

Tim Cook of Apple gave a speech that was precisely along these lines: man’s dignity and rights. While finding a way to mention Muslims and Jews, he made no mention of Christianity. As Jonathan Pageau offers, what Cook is describing is a totalizing system, a system that includes everything—except Christianity.

From Cook’s speech, there are only two values that matter: total inclusivity, and don’t oppose the system. Total inclusivity means no borders: not physical—whether state or private property—not mental, not emotional. Not even of your body. If you don’t embrace total inclusivity, by definition you are opposing the system; therefore you are to be excluded. This was Gramsci’s message—and it is Cook’s.

Consider all of the systems of belief and thought that find common cause with Gramsci’s grand strategy: secular humanism, materialism, progressivism, the new atheists, various new age religions, critical theory, postmodernism, even those libertarian strands that find an enemy in Christianity and in traditional norms.

Jeff Deist describes such libertarians, who believe that

liberty will work when humans finally shed their stubborn old ideas about family and tribe, become purely rational freethinkers, reject the mythology of religion and faith, and give up their outdated ethnic or nationalist or cultural alliances for the new hyper-individualist creed. We need people to drop their old-fashioned sexual hang-ups and bourgeois values, except for materialism.

I will ask you to read this quote again, but just replace the first word, “liberty,” with the word “communism.” The sentence works perfectly for Gramsci. This “hyper-individualist” that many libertarians have in view was precisely the type of individual Gramsci desired for his project. From Piccone:

Gramsci considered the constitution of individuality resulting from the revolutionary process to be an irreversible development preventing any subsequent disintegration. For Gramsci, the fully individualized ego is not the starting point of sociopolitical revolution, but the result.

Hans Hoppe also offers that libertarianism is logically consistent with almost any attitude toward culture and religion. He writes:

logically one can be—and indeed most libertarians in fact are: hedonists, libertines, immoralists, militant enemies of religion in general and Christianity in particular—and still be consistent adherents of libertarian politics.

Hoppe says libertarians can be this way in theory, but liberty will not be the result:

You cannot be a consistent left-libertarian, because the left-libertarian doctrine, even if unintended, promotes Statist, i.e., un-libertarian, ends.

Gramsci understood exactly that which Deist and Hoppe describe. Gramsci believed that the destruction of these traditional values would lead to communism; many libertarians believe that destruction of these same values will lead to liberty. Who do you think knows better?

Murray Rothbard would add:

Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture….usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions.

Rothbard offers that Gramsci’s hyperindividual is not a human being; yet hyperindividualism is the view of many “contemporary libertarians.” Hoppe summarizes, regarding what are known as left-libertarian positions, from his book Democracy: The God That Failed:

The views held by left-libertarians in this regard are not entirely uniform, but they typically differ little from those promoted by cultural Marxists.

In other words, the cultural views of libertarians such as these cannot be differentiated from Gramsci’s. This is not to say that these libertarians have communism in their sights. Yet look around us today: Is freedom advancing or retreating? We are sitting at a time when the evidence could not be more clear.

We live in a narrative. The West had a narrative. There will always be a narrative. Destroying the traditional narrative will not leave a void; a new narrative will take hold. We see it on the street: kneeling, the washing of feet, sitting with arms raised to heaven, the sainting of a Minneapolis martyr.

Once we lose our story, our narrative, our tradition, we are lost. We are easily manipulated, not having any foundation of meaning. With no foundation, we blow freely in the direction of the new, loudest narrative.

Narratives are always exclusionary—and if you don’t embrace the total inclusivity of this new narrative, you will be excluded. Christianity teaches one way of handling those who are excluded, those on the margins: love. This new narrative teaches another, and it does not bode well for liberty…or life. Returning to Gramsci, from Martin:

Total materialism was freely, peacefully and agreeably adopted everywhere in the name of man’s dignity and rights…autonomy and freedom from outside constraints. Above all, as Gramsci had planned, this was done in the name of freedom from the laws and constraints of Christianity.

Create the autonomous, completely sovereign individual, freed from all hierarchies and freed from all responsibilities. Martin continues:

By just that process, authored by Antonio Gramsci…has Western culture deprived itself of its lifeblood.

There is only one way to fight this battle—an embrace of objective values in ethics. Murray Rothbard knew it. He would write:

What I have been trying to say is that Mises’s utilitarian, relativist approach to ethics is not nearly enough to establish a full case for liberty. It must be supplemented by an absolutist ethic—an ethic of liberty, as well as of other values needed for the health and development of the individual—grounded on natural law, i.e., discovery of the laws of man’s nature.

Natural law. Ethics beyond the nonaggression principle. I seem to recall hearing something about this earlier this week. An idea flowing from Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, and Murray Rothbard—among many others. Available for all to discover—Christian and non-Christian alike—through right reason.

It strikes me that the true political divide in society today is not based on the stereotypical left and right or liberal and conservative labels, or even libertarian and statist, but based on where one sits regarding natural law and objective ethics.

Rothbard takes this idea of natural law and objective ethics quite seriously:

I at no time believed that value-free analysis or economics or utilitarianism (the standard social philosophy of economists) can ever suffice to establish the case for liberty.

Rothbard makes a more blunt point in his book For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto:

the natural law provides the only sure ground for a continuing critique of governmental laws and decrees.

Conclusion

Friedrich Nietzsche would write, in Twilight of the Idols: “If you give up Christian faith, you pull the right to Christian morality out from under your feet.”

What is Christian morality, if not, at minimum, the non-aggression principle? Antonio Gramsci understood this more than eighty years ago. It is his political strategy that is at the root of what we see happening today in universities, government, and society more broadly speaking.

I hope it is helpful to you to understand this background, and also, perhaps, gain some insight into why libertarians such as Hoppe and Rothbard concern themselves with matters of culture, tradition, and objective values when it comes to law and liberty.

In any case, it would be helpful if more libertarians took Gramsci seriously. Liberty’s enemies certainly are doing so, and by doing so, they are advancing. And this is what makes Antonio Gramsci the greatest political strategist in history.

 

This lecture was presented on July 18, 2020 at the 2020 Mises University, by Daniel Ajamian. Reproduced with permission.

Eschew News. Embrace Frugality. Fight For Liberty And Freedom. Three Lessons From The Government Lockdowns.

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Many millions of people have spent the last four months in sadness and depression. It’s hard to watch the world shattered by the bad behavior of governments – and to see too many among us cheer the destruction – and not feel a sense of despair.
And yet the human mind is an incredible thing. If we work at it, we can figure out a good takeaway from terrible events. Doing so – it takes effort – can brighten the spirits and point the way forward out of the morass.I’ve taken three positives out of this experience.
First, I’m completely over my decades-old addiction to news. I always loved the news, even from when I was a kid. For years, I read the Washington Post with my morning coffee. Then I switched to the New York Times, and learned how to tease truth out of their biased but comprehensive coverage. Then I added the Wall Street Journal. When home assistants came along, I programmed mine to play 8 hours (if I needed it) of nonstop news: BBC, NPR, NYT, and so many others. It felt like such a luxury.The turning point came for me on February 28, 2020, when the New York Times podcast (which used to be my favorite) sent out a piece of panic porn that predicted that the coronavirus would kill 8.25 million Americans, or “six of your friends.”It came as a shock suddenly to realize that they turned over their main podcast to whipping up a public fear to back a lockdown. Explicitly. This was the agenda. They more or less admitted it. I knew at that moment that the paper had signed up to contribute to a malicious plot to enact an unprecedented social/political experiment.The Times led the way. Pretty soon, the mainstream media became universally pro-lockdown, probably for political reasons. A widespread and mild virus, dangerous mostly to a particular demographic with low life expectancy and nearly harmless to everyone else, was rendered daily and hourly as a new bubonic plague.

I might have listened for a couple of more days. Then I stopped. The scales fell from my eyes. I decided, suddenly and shockingly for me, to stop filling my head with nonsense. The “news” was not getting me information to help me understand the world; it was clouding my ability to think clearly. A few months later, like clockwork, the revolution at the New York Times was complete when its opinion editor, hired to diversify the opinions in the paper, was unceremoniously fired for diversifying opinion in the paper. (The critical theory crowd has discovered new love for the right of institutions to fire people, contradicting decades of left-wing opposition to the same.)

I started getting my information by digging for it, finding reliable accounts on Twitter to follow, spending my time on statistical pages, and otherwise finding facts, reading history, and educating myself more deeply rather than just trust the media.

An exception here: the Wall Street Journal, which performed heroically throughout.

At this point, I can say that I’m never going back. My addiction to “the news” is over. I’m better off for it. It was painful but I’m glad.

Some readers are now saying: it’s about time. The news has always been about getting eyes and ears and selling advertising. It’s just entertainment. It became especially true with the 24-hour news cycle.

I don’t disagree. I should have given it up years ago. Even now, I can almost immediately tell the difference between a person who watches TV news or listens to mainstream radio vs. those are actually informed about what’s going on.

In any case, I count this as a real victory, courtesy of the lockdown.

Second, I’ve saved a tremendous amount of money from not going to restaurants, bars, and movies. I’m sad for all the places that have closed. It’s unjust and evil. But from my own perspective, I’ve learned to live a good life while spending probably 30% less than I did before. I’ve fallen back in love with cooking, homespun cocktails, and reading.

It’s all to the good. I doubt that I will go back, now that I can make all my favorite meals at a fraction of the price I used to pay. Now that things are opening, I perhaps will make my way out to some restaurants but I doubt I will ever go back to the way things were.

Third, I’ve learned a hugely valuable lesson that civilization can be dismantled in a matter of months. It can happen again if there are not passionate voices out there who understand its basis and can defend it with intellectual integrity, facts, and rhetorical power. I never imagined that anything like this could happen. I thought it was impossible with a Constitution, a tradition of liberty, and a people who would never allow human rights to be taken away so suddenly and cruelly. It did happen, and knowing this has given me renewed passion for my lifetime project of loving, understanding, and spreading the idea of liberty.

It’s remarkable how it all happened.

The government and its champions took on a subject about which the public is today largely ignorant and fearful – a virus and the claim that 8.25 million Americans will die – and exploited that ignorance to cause people to give up their rights. Even though this whole thing was mapped out 14 years ago, perhaps as a way of finding some rationale for continued and growing presence of government in our lives despite its otherwise growing irrelevance, many on the pro-liberty side of things were caught off guard and didn’t know how to respond.

Many people – even people employed with the job of “promoting liberty” – just went silent. For months. Just when their voices were most needed. That was a tragedy. I’ll be forever grateful to the pages of AIER which at times in these months felt like a lone voice of sanity out there.

This third lesson – to be grateful for our liberties and civilization and never think they can be taken for granted – is perhaps the most valuable. I’m thinking too that my experience in learning these lessons is not unique. I suspect that many intelligent people have lost faith in the news, rediscovered frugality, and found a new way to commit themselves to the defense of liberty and human rights. In the coming days, we are going to need stronger and smarter minds to fight the battles of the future. These terrible months might have been the preparation we need to make sure that truth and freedom eventually prevail.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research, where this article first appeared.

It’s Now Clear That China Is No Partner To The United States. A Difficult, But Necessary, Separation Lies Ahead.

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The era of globalization may finally be coming to an end. The Wuhan Virus and the attendant misery that the Chinese communist state has unleashed upon the world (very much including its own people) has laid bare a core structural flaw in the assumptions underpinning globalization. It turns out that the radical interweaving of markets—which was supposed to lead to the “complex interdependence” that IR theorists have been predicting for the better part of the century would lead to an increase in global stability as countries’ fates are proven to be dependent on each other’s fortunes—has instead created an inherently fragile and teetering structure that is exacerbating uncertainty in a time of crisis.

That this has turned out to be so should not be surprising. The logic that has driven globalized supply chains has all but eliminated redundancies across the world in the pursuit of efficiency. That efficiency has been found by locating links of the supply chain in places where labor costs have been low. In theory, anyway, this should not have been problematic: as one country grew its economy and ascended out of poverty, its low-wage sector would get outcompeted by other poor countries, by which it could be replaced in the supply chain. Similarly, by this logic, if robots become permanently competitive with low-skilled workers, so be it. A more efficient way of producing something is always favorable in this way of thinking.

Such thinking largely ignores geopolitics. By striving to “flatten” the world (in Thomas Friedman’s memorable phrase) into a single, borderless entity in pursuit of nothing but profit and prosperity, this worldview has created huge blind spots. For example, it was powerless to predict that China would build on its early advantage in sheer numbers of low-skilled workers to lock in a dominant and increasingly powerful position for itself in global supply chains. Economies of scale played their part, as did the complementarity of the various manufacturing sectors the country strategically developed, not to mention China’s bullying and corrupting practices. The end result was that the costs of shifting to poorer countries would be unappetizing to corporate supply chain managers. Worse still, such thinking could not account for the fact that behind the scores of successful companies lay a monolithic, totalitarian, nationalist entity with a vision for restoring China’s role in the world: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

When bereft of redundancies, networks devolve to hierarchies, which in turn create winners and losers. Hierarchies do not diminish the key importance of state power in international relations. On the contrary, they enable it. As China has grown to become the seemingly irreplaceable core of a globalized economy, the CCP has pursued predatory mercantilism in its commercial relations with the West, in the process tilting the hard power balance in its favor. In an economic system that allows for the flow of technology and capital across national borders, redundancies in the supply chain are essential to the preservation of state sovereignty and government capacity to act in a crisis. The Wuhan Virus pandemic is proving so devastating because the radical centralization of market networks has allowed for failure at a single point in our supply chain to leave the system with no capacity to off-load demand onto redundant networks. The Wuhan Virus pandemic is proving so devastating because the radical centralization of market networks has allowed for failure at a single point in our supply chain to leave the system with no capacity to off-load demand onto redundant networks.

In short, globalization, as preached and practiced over the past four decades, has been shown for what it has always been: profiteering off of a vast pool of centrally controlled labor. While many vast fortunes have been made in the West as a result, and as American consumers binged on low-cost goods, the biggest winner has naturally been the Chinese Communist Party elite. And though even before the 2016 U.S. election there was a growing realization among Western captains of industry that something was not quite right with China’s role in the system, few were willing to ask big enough questions about the system as a whole.

The fundamental question is one of values: Is this kind of globalization compatible with liberty and democratic governance? My simple answer is no. By ignoring the role of nations in the international system—or, if not ignoring, indeed prophesying the nation’s demise—globalization’s boosters have implicitly, if perhaps unwittingly, lessened the accountability of elites and downgraded the voice of voters in these matters. No citizenry, if asked, would vote for the status quo—their working-class communities gutted, their security endangered, and their country made dependent on an adversarial foreign power.

We need to start re-shoring our manufacturing and investing in the regional diffusion of supply chains. The imperative of hard decoupling from China is as strong as it’s ever been. Getting there, however, will not be easy. “Re-shoring” is itself a tidy phrase for a complicated process that will take years to bear fruit. Change will require incentives, both positive and negative, including changes to our corporate tax code, subsidies, penalties, and perhaps even concerted efforts to shame American companies into different behavior. And beyond policy, leadership will be required. All this will have to be explained and communicated to the American people. We will simply have to absorb the costs of this, even if it means prices going up for various goods that we have become accustomed to consuming cheaply.

Especially in areas critical to national security and defense, the United States must preserve a degree of autarky that will allow us, should the extreme happen, the sovereign freedom to act.  Re-shoring our manufacturing will have the added benefit of eliminating the “technological bleed” that has accompanied globalization over the past 30 years. Although innovative design is vital to cutting-edge technologies, much of what has undergirded America’s technological superiority thus far is contained in processes, materials, alloys, and skillsets—what can be broadly described as our technological culture. As we look at the qualitative improvements in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and Navy (PLAN) weapons systems over the past three decades, it’s impossible to miss where these have come from. I am not advocating that we stop selling products to China outright, but we need to separate sales from the attendant technology transfers. For example, Boeing can sell their airliners to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but should have never allowed for its aircraft to be manufactured there. Western intellectual property has been forcibly transferred or simply stolen by the PRC, and has in turn been used for military applications. Companies have been waking up to this reality. According to a recent survey of the Global CFO Council, last year one in five American companies doing business in the People’s Republic of China had their intellectual property stolen, with Western IP extorted by the Chinese for market access in a large number of cases.

Of course, the decision to bring our production back to the United States assumes that the PRC would stand by and watch as American corporations depart. If U.S. companies start pulling out of China, we will learn soon enough to what extent the CCP actually respects property rights. That said, should Beijing try to seize Western property—and given how many Western companies have unwisely entered into joint ventures with the Chinese state through the years, it may even do much of it legally—such behavior ought to further inflame Western sentiments. Machines and equipment can be re-purchased, but the era of “designed in California, made in China” will have taken a perhaps fatal body blow.

The re-shoring of U.S. manufacturing should prompt us to rehabilitate our rotting infrastructure.  Today is precisely the time for the U.S. government to invest in rebuilding our roads, our rail networks, and above all our energy grid. A 21st-century energy policy that would reduce pollution and ensure we eventually move off petrochemicals lies in nuclear power. Today’s small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) used by the U.S. military point to the future—the U.S. Navy has been operating and perfecting SMRs for 75 years. We are also uniquely positioned by virtue of our size and low population density overall to deal with nuclear waste storage more effectively than our competitors.

It is worth noting that China is already moving fast on its third-generation SMRs developed by the state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation; in 2019 it announced that the first application of its ACP100 reactor will be to replace coal-fired boilers to generate heat for a residential district in Hainan province. Likewise, in December 2019, Russia turned on its first floating nuclear power plant to generate electricity from a boat off the coast of Russia’s Far East; the reactor is set to replace coal, with enough capacity to power a city of 100,000. Moscow and Beijing seem determined to make nuclear power an integral part of their energy policy going forward.

Next, Congress needs to move to restrict access by Chinese students and researchers to our premier educational and research institutions and our engineering and science labs.  The idea that we continue to educate scientists and engineers who will then work for companies owned by the Chinese communist regime defies common sense. In 2019 the PRC sent some 370,000 students to U.S. universities, compared to 98,000 ten years earlier—close to a four-fold increase in just one decade. Worse yet, there has been a massive corrupting influence of Chinese direct funding of U.S. advanced research.  The CCP has been pushing money for research at U.S. universities and labs, directly or indirectly paying American scientists to do contract work for Chinese state companies. Last fall, a report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations showed that Beijing’s so-called “talent plans” included contracts for American researchers requiring that they transfer intellectual property rights to their Chinese partners, avoid commenting on the PRC’s internal affairs, and keep such contracts confidential. Or witness the recent arrest of the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department on charges of concealing funding he received from China.

In effect, what was once considered espionage has become mainstream in our educational and research institutions. All this has to stop. It is borderline absurd that we would continue to train future weapons designers for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and Navy, giving them a window into our best and most sophisticated research into defense-related technologies.

The imperative to end China’s theft of our intellectual property by way of our universities and research labs must be accompanied by a thorough reform of our system of higher education, which for the past three decades has managed to saddle American college graduates with unsustainable levels of debt, in many cases permanently handicapping their career prospects, while delivering often worthless and unmarketable degrees. We need a massive reinvestment in STEM curricula in our high schools and in science and engineering programs at our colleges and universities, so as to expand the available labor and management pools for our re-shored companies.  Again, it will take a concerted effort by Congress, the U.S. Department of Education, and especially parents and alumni donors to restore colleges to their proper place of teaching and learning, which at one time decades ago produced the best professional and managerial classes in the world.

Finally, a strategy for American renewal requires a foreign and security policy that puts a premium on alliances and partnerships with those countries that share our values and/or interests, even if at times only the latter applies. Our historical European allies and partners will remain among our closest allies, and a revitalized NATO is key. Still, we need straight talk with our allies and partners in Europe about shared interests, rather than wasting time by endlessly wringing our hands over the supposed demise of multilateralism. Furthermore, we should not hesitate to leverage our relationships with countries that can significantly improve our overall global position with respect to China and Russia.

In other words, we need to return the sovereign nation-state back to the center of the international system. And while we continue to seek international cooperation on a range of issues that concern us all, we should treat with requisite humility the expectations of what experiments in supranational governance can achieve. They can never replace self-constituting nations, and if forcibly imposed will routinely morph into rigid and ineffective top-down bureaucratized structures. Most of all, we need allies and partners across the globe who share our interest in preserving freedom in the world, and who understand that what the CCP is proffering as an alternative is a Beijing-controlled global supply chain, where state-owned markets and de facto serfs would replace free-market societies and autonomous citizenry.

If there is any good to come from the devastating impact on our nation of this pandemic brought about by the Chinese communist regime through its malice and incompetence, it will be the likely demise of enthusiasm for globalization as we know it across the West. After three decades of intellectual gymnastics aimed at convincing Americans that the off-shoring of manufacturing and the attendant deindustrialization of the country are good for us, the time has come for a reckoning. After three decades of intellectual gymnastics aimed at convincing Americans that the off-shoring of manufacturing and the attendant deindustrialization of the country are good for us, the time has come for a reckoning.

Since the end of the Cold War, Western elites seem to have been in thrall to the idea that various “natural forces” in the economy and politics were propelling us forward to a digitally interconnected brave new world, one in which traditional considerations of national interest, national economic policy, national security, and national culture would soon be eclipsed by an emergent peaceful global reality. This virus crisis is a wake-up call, and while some argue we are waking up too late to effectively counter current trends, my money is on the ability of the American people to rally in a crisis and on the resilience of Western democratic institutions.

Today, while battling the Wuhan Virus consumes the attention of our government agencies and health care systems, we should not lose sight of the foundational strategic challenge confronting the West in the emerging post-globalization era: We are in a long twilight competition with the Chinese communist regime, a struggle we cannot escape, whether we like it or not. Now is the time to wake up, develop a new strategy for victory, and to move forward.

Published on: April 8, 2020 at The American Interest.
Andrew A. Michta is the dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

The Left Forgets What Martin Luther King Stood For.

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As the nation celebrates the birth of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the progressive left will again seize the moment to twist the story of black Americans’ struggle, to the detriment of those who suffered most in that struggle. They’ll put all the attention on the oppressive conditions faced by black freedom fighters—what white racists did to them—rather than on their own spirit in fighting to gain equal rights under the law. Instead of celebrating blacks’ achievements and the progress made toward delivering on America’s promissory note, the left will transport yesterday’s real injustices into today’s false social-justice narrative, ignoring the principles that were so crucial to Dr. King.

History is full of inspiring examples of black people succeeding against the odds, including building their own schools, hotels, railroads and banking systems when doors were closed to them. According to the economist Thomas Sowell, “the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960.”

These accomplishments were made possible by a set of values cherished among the blacks of the time: self-determination, resiliency, personal virtue, honesty, honor and accountability. Dr. King understood that these values would be the bedrock for black success once true equality was won. As early as 1953, he warned that “one of the most common tendencies of human nature is that of placing responsibility on some external agency for sins we have committed or mistakes we have made.”

Today the progressive left wants to ignore the achievements and pretend that blacks are perpetual victims of white racism. The New York Times’s “1619 Project” essay series is the latest salvo in this attack on America’s history and founding, claiming “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” This statement is an abomination of everything Dr. King stood for. Further, the left’s disinterest in historical accuracy—as evinced in the Times’s dismissal of corrections sought by prominent historians—and its frequent perversion of blacks’ story will have grave consequences not only for blacks but the nation as a whole.

In sharp contrast to the claims of the “1619 Project”—which disparages the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence and insists America is hopelessly racist—Dr. King believed deeply in the need to remain true to the Founders’ vision, the “patriot dream that sees beyond the years.” To him, that was the only avenue toward fulfilling America’s promise. As he wrote in his 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”:

“One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation,” he wrote, “because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny.”

Dr. King, who sought full participation in America, would never have indulged today’s grievance-based identity politics, whose social-justice warriors use race as a battering ram against the country. In fact, in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” Dr. King explicitly warned against the type of groupthink that characterizes identity politics: “Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”

Yesterday’s values prepared blacks to walk through the doors of opportunity opened to them through civil rights. Family, faith, character and moral behavior were all crucial to their victories. Today’s social-justice warriors trade on the currency of oppression, deriding the concept of personal responsibility and always blaming external forces. I can think of no better way to instill hopelessness and fear in a young person than to tell him he is a victim, powerless to change his circumstance.

During the civil-rights movement blacks never permitted oppression to define who we were. Instead we cultivated moral competence, enterprise and thrift, and viewed oppression as a stumbling block, not an excuse.

Dr. King would have refused to participate in today’s identity politics gamesmanship because it frames its grievances in opposition to the American principles of freedom and equality that he sought to redeem. He upheld the country’s founding principles and sought to destroy only what got in the way of delivering the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as well as the recognition that all men are created equal.

Last month the school board of Westfield, N.J., approved a history course on critical race theory, which is the embodiment of the oppressor narrative embraced by the left. At the board meeting a young woman spoke passionately in favor of the course, ending her comments by blaming slavery for the absence of black fathers in the home. This is how successful the left, with its lethal message of despair and distortion of history, has been at undermining agency within the black community.

To honor the legacy of Dr. King, we must not only acknowledge the evil he confronted, but also focus on his example in overcoming it. He persevered and triumphed in the face of evil because he was beholden to truth, honor and love for all mankind, driven as he was to see blacks share fully in the American dream. We must not let the purveyors of identity politics fudge the record: Martin Luther King Jr. believed in the promise of America. In fact, he helped to fulfill it.

Mr. Woodson is president and founder of the Woodson Center. This article appeared at wsj.com.

 

It Is Important For Progress That We Each Retain the Courage To Be Utopian.

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Hayek famously penned the essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” I have often argued that folks need to read that essay in conjunction with his “Errors of Constructivism” to get a good sense of his position on why as true radical liberals we must be willing to question all existing political and social values, and submit them to critical evaluation, but also why epistemologically we cannot do so while assuming any “Archimedean point” from which to commence our evaluation.

We must always question within specific contexts, and criticize on the margin while holding other values as given at that moment if we are to avoid serious errors in our reasoning about society. Root-and-branch constructivism is merely an illusion of the revolutionary, and a dangerous illusion at that. But that doesn’t mean we are trapped in the status quo either.

Hayek is giving us a framework for engaging in social criticism from a radical liberal perspective that is within our epistemological boundaries of the humanly possible. Think about that. Now think long and hard about this passage from “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”

But the main point about liberalism is that it wants to go elsewhere, not to stand still. Though today the contrary impression may sometimes be caused by the fact that there was a time when liberalism was more widely accepted and some of its objectives closer to being achieved, it has never been a backward-looking doctrine. There has never been a time when liberal ideas were fully realized and liberalism did not look forward to further improvement of institutions. Liberalism is not averse to evolution and change; and where spontaneous change has been smothered by government control, it wants a great deal of change of policy. So far as much of current governmental action is concerned, there is in the present world very little reason for the liberal to wish to preserve things as they are. It would seem to the liberal, indeed, that what is most urgently needed in most parts of the world is a thorough sweeping-away of the obstacles to free growth. (The Constitution of Liberty, 1960)

This sense of excitement about the voyage into the unknown future, and the embrace of the possibility of discovery and creativity that the liberal society makes possible, is one reason among many I am excited to get my hands on Deirdre McCloskey’s forthcoming book, Why Liberalism Works.

Liberalism is a social philosophy that is grounded in the recognition of its constant need for renewal and reconstruction. It is never a fixed doctrine standing still and telling the context of history — STOP. It is, instead, a welcoming of the new and novel, of the fulfillment of its ideals, and the greater recognition that we are one another’s dignified equals.

Liberalism says YES, and the cosmopolitan liberal order turns strangers into friends and enemies into partners. It is an emancipation doctrine — from dogma of the altar, from repression by the crown, from violence by the sword, and from exploitation by the privileged mercantilist class.

It is an ongoing project, and will always fall short of complete fulfillment of its vision of peaceful social cooperation; change is ceaseless, and the effort to improve institutions is constant. Hayek’s great intellectual gift isn’t a completed system, but an intellectual framework which can aid future generations in their unique effort to reconstruct the principles of justice and political economy.

As Hayek told his readers in the first paragraph of The Constitution of Liberty:

If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations. What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction; the arguments do not move in a context familiar to us; and they rarely give us direct answers to the questions we are asking. This may be inevitable because no statement of an ideal that is likely to sway men’s minds can be complete: it must be adapted to a given climate of opinion, presuppose much that is accepted by all men of the time, and illustrate general principles in terms of issues with which they are concerned.

It had been a long time, Hayek continued, since the ideals of liberalism had been effectively restated. He made that judgment close to 60 years ago. He himself took several stabs at providing that restatement — The Road to Serfdom, The Constitution of Liberty, and Law, Legislation and Liberty — each with great strengths and some glaring weaknesses. Our times, I would say, do not need naysayers, but the articulation of a vision of the rights and dignity of all individuals, and invitation (in fact a welcoming hand) to all who seek to escape the oppression of dogma, of violence, of crushing poverty.

As Hayek wrote in the concluding paragraphs of his essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism” (1949):

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. The practical compromises they must leave to the politicians. Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may arouse the imaginations of large numbers, but a mere “reasonable freedom of trade” or a mere “relaxation of controls” is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm.

The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this had rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

Here’s Another Call For the Proud And Enthusiastic Embrace of Individualism.

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Some are fighting an uphill battle to restore the word “liberalism” to “true” (that is: classical) liberals. Labeling in politics is always a complicated issue, and at the end of the day what really matters is how other people see you. In a sense, labeling someone, or even labeling yourself, is a “positional” effort: it is needed to put you in relation with others. You can use one word or another depending on how other people use them, and what really matters is the meaning _they_ attach to them.

For this reason, I find intriguing a proposal by Steve Davies, that in a recent piece masterfully argue for adopting the word “individualism”.

Using “classical liberal” is – Davies writes – problematic, as it is ‘essentially a historical term, referring to the ideas and personalities of a specific historical period (broadly the 1780s to the 1900s). The danger with using this as a label is that it implies you are advocating a kind of embalmed truth rather than a living intellectual tradition.’ At the same time, ‘simply using the term “liberal” without qualification is attractive, but there is a definite tradition of collectivist liberalism now and this means a constant need to explain how your own position is different from that, or a qualification of the core individualist perspective.’ The term “libertarian” has some problems too: for Davies, mainly that it is colored in such a way that it gives prominence to the economic side of liberalism at the expense of its cultural, or more broadly defined, political side. That is, “libertarian” would be very close to “free market” and, given the long standing association of free markets and the right, you could paradoxically end up with a “libertarian nationalism.” I think that is actually country-dependent. Davies is writing about the Anglo-sphere, whereas in Italy the problem is the opposite one: “libertarian” is a semi-substitute for libertine, with a strong emphasis on individual (civil) rights and little regard for the economic dimension of liberty.

What is the best label we can use then?

Davies’s answer will surprise many. ‘There was always another label available to’ Anglophone classical liberals ‘and for a long time they made enthusiastic use of it. This was the term “individualism” and the associated “individualist.”’

Individualism was a word that had undergone the change from being a term of opprobrium to one of positive identity. It had originally had connotations of selfishness and egoism but by the 1870s had been adopted by a number of radical liberals as a label for their views, on both sides of the Atlantic (and, interestingly, particularly in France).

In the 1880s and 1890s there was a vigorous intellectual debate on both sides of the Atlantic between the self-defined individualists on one side and the self-defined “collectivists” (in the UK, Canada, and Europe) or “progressives” (in the U.S.) on the other. Subsequently the terms “individualist” and “individualism” remained the main labels used by advocates of the radical case for personal, individual liberty. This was true in the 1920s and even as late as the 1940s and early 1950s (Friedrich Hayek used the term for example and spoke of “those of us who adhere to the individualist position”).

Then quite suddenly, in the middle of the 1950s, all of this changed. People who had described themselves as individualists and identified with that label suddenly stopped using it (with a very few exceptions such as Frank Chodorow). Many adopted the label “conservative,” particularly in the U.S. Most however took to calling themselves classical liberals or libertarians (a word that had previously referred to communist anarchists of the Peter Kropotkin type). The term “individualist,” which had been used until then by both friends and critics, almost vanished.

I like that. In part for historical reasons: I have lots of sympathy for “Individualists” such as Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, or Ernest Benn for that matter. In part because if there is something that is apparent, in “individualism”, is the word: individual. And the “individual” (the real, present, acting individual: not a future “new” man, suited to live in a happily transformed society) is exactly what we oppose to grand collective catchwords, such as nation, country, the working class, et cetera.

The Modern World Is Doing Spectacularly Well. New Graduates Shouldn’t Think They Can Change It In Their First Weeks Out Of School.

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It is graduation season, and with it comes the inevitable commencement speeches that encourage the new graduates to go forth bravely into the world, transform it, and leave their marks.

I doubt any college administrators will ever invite someone like me to give such a speech. In some ways, it is for the best. I would have a hard time telling 20-somethings that the whole world is in dire need of wholesale change.

In fact, I would tell them that while many things could be better, overall, we in the modern world are doing spectacularly well. I would explain just how much better off we are than were our grandparents or even our parents a mere two or three decades ago. Life is good.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just spend 30 minutes browsing the Cato Institute’s Human Progress website. You will learn that as world population rises, more children are surviving into adulthood, more diseases are being conquered, and women’s postnatal health care worldwide is at an all-time high. You will learn about all the improvements in human well-being in the 21st century, such as the 33 percent decline in undernourishment among the food-deprived, the 36 percent decline in maternal mortality, and the 55 percent decline in the poverty headcount ratio.

You will learn also about heroes of progress such as Abel Wolman and Linn Enslow, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering, and Malcom McLean — individuals whose creativity and gumption enriched the lives of millions. But such individuals don’t develop overnight.

Which leads me to another theme you would not find in my speech. Students who are just out of college should not believe that they already possess the tools they need to change the world. Yes, they could — and should — aspire to be one day listed among the great heroes of human progress. But it won’t happen right after college. Misleading students that they already have the tools to achieve greatness immediately would be detrimental to their future success.

Urging students to understand all the things one does not know may not make for a great speech, but it makes for a better life and it will transform one into a better colleague, professional, and leader. If you decide to become an economist, for instance, it will make you a better and more respectable and inspiring one.

As economist Russ Roberts once wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The economy is a complex system, our data are imperfect and our models inevitably fail to account for all the interactions. The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists. Economics is a powerful tool, a lens for organizing one’s thinking about the complexity of the world around us. That should be enough. We should be honest about what we know, what we don’t know and what we may never know. Admitting that publicly is the first step toward respectability.”

In the same vein, I would urge new graduates to be skeptical of those in power who flatter them with the lie that they can, if only they are sufficiently resolute, solve big social problems through government interventions. The truth is that even the best-intentioned government officials do not — indeed, cannot possibly — have the knowledge necessary to deliver on any grand promises.

Sadly, this lack of knowledge never stops politicians from spending all of their time pretending that they know it all and none of their time humbly reflecting on the arrogance of attempts to boss the rest of us around. Making matters worse is the fact that the decision-making process in government is not conducive to the best policies. Quite the opposite, in fact. See, politicians spend other people’s money and are unduly influenced by special interests. As such, their interests are never served by their taking account of the true costs of their programs, or acknowledging the (too-often invisible) victims of their interventions.

It’s probably why, taking issue with a frequent theme heard at commencement speeches, the great Thomas Sowell warned against believing that it “is morally superior to be in organizations consuming output produced by others than to be in organizations which produce that output.”

Unfortunately, you don’t often hear commencement speakers praise pursuing a life in the private sector, and big firms in particular. It’s a shame since, as George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen reminds us in his new book, big business is a true source of greatness, wealth, accomplishment, and human flourishing.

But I wouldn’t end my speech on a negative note. I would again encourage the graduates to marvel at the modern world, but not to be complacent. I would make clear that the best way for them to change the world — really, the only way to change it for the better — is to work to strengthen and spread the commitment to individual liberty and free markets.

By clearing space for fellow human beings to interact with each other peacefully, as each sees fit rather than as compelled by state officials, the result will be countless incremental improvements that, when today’s graduates attend the graduations of their grandchildren, will have added up to magnificent change — change truly worth celebrating.

AOC IS Your Commander: The Green New Deal Is A War Economy Plan With Authoritarian Enforcement.

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“Until you do it, I’m the boss,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist congresswoman from the Bronx, responding to critics of her Green New Deal in February. Later that night, the freshman congresswoman doubled down on her comment, tweeting that people who “don’t like the #GreenNewDeal” should “come up with your own ambitious, on-scale proposal to address the global climate crisis. Until then, we’re in charge—and you’re just shouting from the cheap seats.”

Much has rightly been made of the Green New Deal’s fuzzy-headed utopianism and its impossible goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero in 10 years. But we should also pay close attention to the plan’s authoritarian impulses, particularly in light of its historical inspirations: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the command economy he established during the Second World War.

If proponents of the Green New Deal are serious—and there’s no reason to doubt them—then they’re proposing a return to a militaristic America where Uncle Sam’s heavy hand intervenes in all aspects of life, curtailing individual freedom in pursuit of their collectivist goals. And like the planners of the Roosevelt years, their intentions are clear and grandiose: They want the power to regiment a society of nearly 330 million people in pursuit of a pipe dream they liken to a war for survival.

‘The New Deal and the Analogue of War’

After FDR defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932, the new president rolled out his first New Deal to confront the Great Depression. Roosevelt saw the economic collapse as directly analogous to war. In his first inaugural address, he said that Americans “must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.”

Like President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, President Roosevelt and his New Dealers moved to cartelize the economy with the enthusiastic support of business executives such as Gerard Swope, president of General Electric. “There was scarcely a New Deal act or agency that did not owe something to the experience of World War I,” according to FDR scholar William E. Leuchtenburg in an excellent paper published in 1964, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War.”

The best example of this was the creation of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which was essentially a peacetime version of Wilson’s War Industries Board (WIB). Headed by the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the WIB coordinated purchases, allocated commodities, and fixed “prices and priorities in production” while guaranteeing a profit to the big business that helped fuel the war machine.

If the WIB could coordinate an economic mobilization during wartime, the Roosevelt administration thought, then a peacetime equivalent could defeat the Great Depression by mobilizing America’s productive powers. The NRA held industries to “codes of fair competition,” which set wages, working hours, and prices. By doing so, Roosevelt and his New Dealers believed they were overthrowing the cut-throat and chaotic competition they blamed for the Depression.

Companies that didn’t cooperate with the NRA were ostracized. Under the NRA’s Blue Eagle Campaign, businesses that played ball were given a blue eagle symbol for their windows and packages to advertise their adherence to the administration’s rules and regulations. Those that didn’t faced boycotts. As General Hugh Johnson, head of the NRA, put it, “Those who are not with us are against us.” Some businessmen who violated NRA regulations were arrested.

Socialist leader Norman Thomas called this “a scheme which in essence is fascist.” The NRA itself issued a report that stated, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.” In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled the NRA’s “codes of fair competition” unconstitutional, saying they violating the Constitution’s separation of powers as well as the Commerce Clause. Small wonder that New Left historians accused the agency of championing a corporatist economy.

The Green New Dealers should also be wary of using the original New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which sent young unemployed and unmarried men onto federal, state, and local government lands for conservation purposes, as a model. In her defense of the Green New Deal at The Intercept—aptly titled “The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal”—Naomi Klein cites the CCC as an inspiration, noting that it began with 200,000 volunteers but then expanded dramatically due to its popularity. She doesn’t mention that the CCC was really an Army program with a titular civilian head.

Leuchtenburg points out that the CCC was “consciously devised to provide the moral equivalent to war” and that it “aimed to install martial virtues in the nation’s youth.” When the men woke up in their army tents in camp, they heard “Reveille.” During lights out, they heard “Taps.” It shouldn’t be surprising that when the draft returned in 1940, as Charles E. Heller writes, CCC alumni “provided the pretrained manpower to fill the U.S. Army’s ranks upon mobilization with men who readily assumed the role of Non-Commissioned Officers.”

The World War II Homefront

But then, the Green New Dealers seem to see that war as a model for domestic policy. In a widely lampooned FAQ document that an Ocasio-Cortez advisor erroneously claimed was a hoax, the Green New Deal is called a “10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all.”

Americans should pay attention to what the country was like on the homefront during World War II. Prosperity it was not.

Unemployment did come down—to less than 2 percent—though that’s largely because more than a fifth of the U.S. workforce was conscripted and sent overseas to sacrifice life and limb. The workers who remained were focused on producing military goods, such as guns and ammunition, while consumer goods were either underproduced or not produced at all. Other goods—such as gasoline, tires, nylon, shoes, bicycles, sugar, meat, canned fish, cheese, and canned milk—were strictly rationed. Income tax rates applied to more and more people, including lower-income earners; hit confiscatory levels, with the highest marginal tax rate rising to 94 percent; and were rigorously enforced by the IRS through a new system of automatic payroll deductions.

American people did extraordinary things to win World War II, but it took an authoritarian society to achieve it—one that nobody should want to return to.

When the United States goes abroad to do widescale social engineering, that’s rightly called imperialism by libertarians and socialists alike. But when widespread social engineering is done at home through the federal government, people like Ocasio-Cortez call it progressivism and point to the New Deal and World War II to sell the plan.

When she says “I’m the boss,” pay attention. She’s describing America under a Green New Deal: a place where you’ll do as you’re told.

Perhaps Liberty Is No Longer The Right Word

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Liberty is one of our unalienable rights, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Yet there doesn’t seem to be much demand for it these days.

In politics, the Libertarian Party, which supposedly stands for more liberty and less government, gets very few votes. Virtually all of the votes go to the two wings of the Ever-Bigger Government Party, the Democrats and Republicans.

In Economics – the essence of civilization and of man’s human existence, according to Ludwig von Mises – we also seem to reject liberty. There is a well-established science of the role of free markets in raising the quality of everyone’s lives, and of the role of creative and ethical entrepreneurship in promoting justice and well-being. Yet we hamper free markets and shackle our entrepreneurs in regulations and legislative interference.

Where Are The Heroes Of Liberty?

It’s hard for most people to identify heroes of liberty today. Ron Paul made a strong splash but now ploughs a lone furrow. Inspiring individuals like Tom Woods have a following, but it’s small compared to mainstream media and late-night comedians. There are magnificent institutions like Mises Institute and the Foundation For Economic Education; they do great work for liberty and free markets and individual freedom, but they are hardly prominent in the grand scheme of Americans’ awareness.

If we look at this situation through a marketing lens, we would conclude that the product, liberty, lacks demand. It’s not persuasive. It doesn’t meet a compelling need on the part of target consumers.

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Let’s Use Language That Reflects What People Want.

So what do these target consumers want? A 2013 Pew Research Center report told us (among other things) that “Polls show they just want a better chance of achieving success themselves – they do not want redistributive government policies, they want ones that give everyone a fair shot at success, reflecting bedrock American belief in the individual’s ability to succeed through hard work.”

This is a highly revealing and encouraging insight from one of America’s truly non-partisan think tanks. It is highly consistent with our Hayekian bent at Center For Individualism, favoring rules of just conduct that provide inducements for all to try to identify their chance at success and work, through trial and error and long term effort, to seize the opportunity they are able to identify. There are no guaranteed outcomes, but there is the assurance that everyone has an equal likelihood to benefit from their own hard work. Skill and luck also play a part, and so there is no sense in calling the outcome either just or unjust. It’s the equal opportunity to try. The fact that Americans embrace this idea, making it a “bedrock belief”, is what makes America great.

What Americans are able to achieve via this bedrock belief is a spontaneous order that delivers the best result to the most people via the fairest shot at success, as opposed to the destructive and vindictive central planning wars that politicians promote. Should we place the word “liberty” on this system of social order? It might have had that meaning in 1776, when linked to the pursuit of happiness, but the word seems to have lost its attraction for people.

Our Word Is Individualism.

We prefer the term Individualism – “Individualism True” as Hayek wrote – to capture the idea of the individual’s ability to succeed through hard work. You can check out our manifesto for Individualism here. We hope you will join us.

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