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Our Country Needs A Serious Anti-Lockdown Movement.

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This country needs a serious anti-lockdown movement, one that is not just political but cultural and intellectual, one that is deeply educated on history, philosophy, law, economics, and all sciences, and can rally around traditional American civic postulates concerning individual freedom and the limits of governments, and also around universal principles of human rights. If liberty means anything, it means that we are not locked down. It means, moreover, that lockdowns are unconscionable.

What should this movement – which need not be formally organized – study, believe, and teach?

Because property rights are the first violated in lockdown, the movement needs to embrace and champion the right of private ownership and control: of businesses, homes, and ourselves. The liberal tradition has long affirmed this principle, and it is nothing but appalling that the lockdowns took place as if private property doesn’t exist. Suddenly everything and everyone belonged to the state, and it would be the state to declare what is or is not essential, or even what is elective vs. nonelective for your medical care.

It should embrace the freedom to choose our associations, since that is what came under attack next: we couldn’t gather in groups, hold conferences, go to the movies, do anything not “socially distant” (I’m so sick of that phrase, with dubious origins, that I could barely type it), or even go to another state to visit friends and relatives.

This movement needs to celebrate and defend religious freedom, since, incredibly, most houses of worship were forcibly closed by government. The modern idea of freedom came about in the late Middle Ages when exhaustion from religious wars gradually gave rise to the idea of tolerance. Religious toleration was the first great freedom that came to be codified in law. It’s stunning that it was so flagrantly violated this year.

It must come to terms with free enterprise and the innovation that comes with it. How much wealth and creativity has been lost in the lockdowns? It’s unfathomable. The biggest victims have been small and medium-sized businesses, whereas the large tech firms have thrived. To start and manage a commercial enterprise is a human right, the realization of which was the great achievement of modern life, as it spread prosperity throughout the world and lifted up the world’s people from the state of nature and to levels of the entrenched hierarchies of old.

Part of this liberal ideal is free trade, which has come under fire from both the left and right. Don’t forget that Donald Trump kicked off this dictatorial frenzy with his sudden and shocking bans of travel from China and Europe, which resulted in a frenzied and frantic mass crowding of airports in the days following. He did it with a stroke of a pen, overriding all his advisors. He still brags about it.

How much did his extreme reaction here inspire governors to do the same? Of course, his actions reflect his persistent isolationism on not only trade but immigration too. Even now, Trump is refusing to allow foreign workers into the U.S. (except for emergency cases) because he incorrectly believes this will help the American job market. It’s an outrage: free enterprise entitles the employment of anyone from anywhere. This is a policy that is good for everyone.

So long as we are talking about freedom fundamentals, let’s talk about masks. They have become exactly what the New England Journal of Medicine called them: a talisman. They are symbols of social commitment and political loyalty. A free society rallies around individual choice, so if masks make a person feel safe, or if it makes them feel they are keeping others safe from their breath, fine. But when people attack others for resisting wearing them, and are apparently upset at the seeming appearance of rebellion from rules, this is imposition and intolerance – perhaps understandable given the times, but still illiberal.

Laws requiring face coverings in public would never have been tolerated even six months ago. And yet here we are, not only with laws but a growing number of recruits within the public to enforce them with appalling rudeness. It’s hardly the first time in history. American sumptuary laws in Colonial times mandated that people not dress in fancy clothes for reasons of piety and social conformism. Part of the capitalist revolution included the freedom to dress as one wants and the mass availability of fashion for everyone. The mandatory mask movement and its shock troops among the public is but a revival of puritanism.

The lockdowns crushed the economic prospects of millions, and government attempted to make up for that with wild spending of other people’s money and an unprecedented use of the printing press, as if government can somehow paper over the destruction it caused. Therefore, the anti-lockdown movement needs a commitment to fiscal sanity and sound money. We now know that a government with the capacity to create unlimited amounts of paper money cannot be constrained. This needs to be fixed.

As for health, the topic or excuse that unleashed the lockdowns in the first place, we surely should learn from this experience that politics and medicine need to be separated with a high wall. We have medical professionals who are traditionally in charge of mitigating disease, and they do so in line with their own professional associations and best judgement. Politics should never override the doctor/patient relationship, nor presume to know what is better for us than our own physicians.

On the matter of education, governors all over the country cruelly locked down all the schools, though there is near-zero threat to kids from the virus and there is no verified case of a child passing C-19 to an adult. Perhaps a small silver lining is that we have learned more about how parents can exercise more control over education than they have previously had. The anti-lockdown movement needs to embrace a multiplicity of educational alternatives including the possibility of full privatization so that education can again be part of the free enterprise matrix.

It’s true that anti-lockdown carries a negative connotation. Is there a better word to convey the positive dimension? My preference: liberalism. Progressives have abandoned it. It is also correct from a historical and international perspective. Liberalism and modernity are inextricably linked in history, says Benjamin Constant. A liberalism of the future needs to be prepared to understand, advocate, and fight for freedom in a non-lockdown world. No exceptions.

Which takes us to the final point. Whether this movement is working in the realms of academia, culture, journalism, or politics, there is an absolute urgency that it exercise unrelenting moral courage and integrity. Ferociously. It should be uncompromising on crucial points. It must be willing to speak even when it is unfashionable to do so, even when the media is screaming the opposite, even when the Twitter mob floods your notifications, even when you are shamed for thinking for yourself.

This time around, as you have surely noticed, even the voices of good people with good ideas fell silent in fear. This fear must be banished. The blowback against this despotism will come but it is not enough. We need character, integrity, courage, and truth, and this perhaps matters more than ideology and knowledge. Knowledge without the willingness and courage to speak is useless, because (as E.C. Harwood taught us) for integrity there is no substitute.

In the end, the case for unlocking society is a spiritual matter. What is your life worth and how do you want to live it? How important are the hard-won freedoms you exercise daily? What of the lives and liberties of others? These are everything. Freedom has never prevailed without passionate and courageous voices to defend it. We have the tools now, many more than before. They can throttle us but can’t finally shut us down. The notion that we would fail to speak for fear of the Twitter mob is absurd.

This movement, whether it is called anti-lockdown or just plain liberalism, must reject the wickedness and compulsion of this current moment in American life. It needs to counter the brutalism of lockdowns. It needs to speak and act with humane understanding and high regard for social functioning under freedom, and the hope for the future that comes with it. The enemies of freedom and human rights have revealed themselves for the world to see. Let there be justice. The well-being of us all is at stake.

 

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. This article first appeared at aier.org, and has been shortened.

The Way Out Of The Current Crisis Lies In The Fundamental American Principle Of Individualism.

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There is only one way out of our current crisis, but it is not a message that the people are in the mood to hear right now. With images of police killings, calls to defund the police, mass protests, rioting, looting, and generalized mayhem on our minds, most Americans are not in the mood to hear that the answer lies in us. It lies in each of us. It lies in the fundamental American principle of individualism.
On all sides, Americans are hearing the opposite message right now. They are hearing that what matters most is their group identity: their racial identity, their socio-economic identity, their gender, their age. Americans have additionally been lumped into groups in the response to the coronavirus pandemic. We are told, in the most intimate ways, whether we can work, where we can eat, whether we can socialize or come together to see sporting events or plays or engage in religious observances (but protests are okay).
The answer to all these problems, we are told, lies in collectively restricting our liberty.It is in this dry-tinder atmosphere that the police killing of George Floyd is the spark that has set our society aflame.The answer, although Americans don’t want to hear it right now, is individualism. Still, it merits saying now so that when passions are cooler, we can consider it and begin to use this principle to restore our society.
The principle is individualism, as in “the individual versus the collective.” America was founded on the principle that the government has only one purpose: to protect the rights of individual Americans. It was not to protect groups of Americans as such, whether identified by race, gender, socio-economic status, age, or any other designation. The relevant unit is the individual, not the collective.
The government protects the individual by protecting our individual rights. In the original formulation by the philosopher and political theorist John Locke, this is our individual right to life, liberty, and property. It is these principles that became the inspiration for the principles enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And in calling for a revolution against British tyranny and the formation of a new American government, our Declaration said, “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”This principle has always only been imperfectly applied within the United States. It was not applied to African-Americans, and a civil war and long civil rights struggle had to happen to begin to make this so. It did not fully apply to women, and the women’s suffrage and women’s rights movements had to happen before women were fully included. But the principle was first implemented here, in the United States, where an entire society built on this principle of individualism appeared for the first time in history.The root of the principle of individual rights is that it is the individual that matters, not the collective that he or she belongs to. Only an individual can act to pursue his or her own happiness, and it is only by protecting an individual’s rights that his or her happiness can be pursued. A collective does not have feelings of happiness or anything else. Only individuals do.

Although America has made tremendous progress in extending and fully protecting individual rights, for example by extending them to African-Americans and women, in our culture, sadly, we are now moving away from the principle of individualism.

In the response to the coronavirus pandemic and the George Floyd killing, but even earlier, we are being pressured on all sides to identify ourselves fundamentally, not as individuals, but by our group identity. We are asked to identify ourselves primarily by our skin color, our socio-economic “class,” our gender, whether we are a foreigner or native-born, whether we are Red-state, or Blue-state, and whether we deserve such collective guilt-inducing labels as “privilege” or “oppressor” or its opposite, “victim.”

Mass protests and mob violence further pressure Americans, almost as a self-defense mechanism, to identify themselves by group affiliation. There is psychological safety in numbers. This is a profoundly unAmerican way in which to view ourselves. It has and will lead to disaffection, violence, and maybe even a new civil war. It certainly is playing itself out in an intensely polarized group-versus-group politics. In the midst of all this, the rights of the individual are lost.

The slogans and protests and violence all have the effect of pulling us to identify ourselves primarily by our membership in a particular group, not to identify each of us by our own unique, individual identity. George Floyd had his individual rights violated. Yet, the collective memes and protests are trying to make us forget our individual identities and accept blame or to seek comfort and protection solely on the basis of group identity.

This can only lead to a war of all against all.

We must assert and demand that our individual rights are protected, both by the state and from the state. But before we can do this, we must remember that what matters is our fundamental identity as individuals, not the characteristics we share with a group. One’s characteristics — including characteristics of race, gender, and socio-economic status — are characteristics possessed by each of us. But such characteristics are irrelevant for our character, which is ours alone, and is the result of our choices.

It is with regard to our character that we must judge ourselves and others. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech captured this idea when he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

We must judge ourselves and others by the content of our character, not by the color of our skin, our gender, socio-economic class, or any other group characteristic.

We Must Turn to Individualism to Find the Way Out

Consider some ways (this is not an exhaustive list, just examples) that applying the principle of individualism and its corollary — individual rights — can help navigate a way out of the current crisis.

Take the killing of George Floyd, and all unjust killings and uses of force by the police. Individualism can begin to point the way to a solution of this problem. The most important individualist principle is individual justice. The police officers responsible for George Floyd’s death have been arrested and will face trial in a courtroom.

Longer-term, laws must be eliminated that create unnecessary encounters with the police. Each encounter with police is potentially violent, and the fewer of them the better. Along these lines, eliminate the host of unnecessary laws against commerce that invite unnecessary interactions with the police.

An example is the laws that criminalize everyday economic activities, such as the unnecessary, silly and ultimately deadly law against selling individual untaxed cigarettes that led to the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York City six years ago. There are many more such laws that criminalize ordinary commerce and unnecessarily invite interactions with police. These laws violate individual rights. They should be repealed.

On a much larger scale, we must recognize that our right to life means that we own our own bodies. Ingesting particular drugs, whether alcohol, marijuana, or heroin, is a personal choice and an aspect of a person’s right to their body. Eliminate the drug laws that result in the unnecessary arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of people. Fully 46% of federal prisonersand 20% of all 2.3 million prisoners at all levels, federal, state, and local, are incarcerated due to drug laws. 38% of all prisoners are African-Americans and many of them are in jail for drug offenses.

Respecting this individual right by repealing the drug laws will reduce the number of encounters with police, each of which carries the risk of excessive use of force.

The principle of individualism says that each one of us is responsible for our own health. We can choose whether and how to protect ourselves from coronavirus by using masks, socially distancing, and avoiding large crowds. The government lockdown has unjustly impoverished millions by shutting down their businesses and preventing them from working. It is this atmosphere of mass unemployment and shuttered businesses that helped create the tinder for such a widespread reaction of looting and violence in response to the George Floyd killing.

The solution to our country’s problems lies in individualism. Empower the individual by repealing laws that violate the individual right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Enforce justice when those rights are violated. This is the way forward out of this crisis, not group identity politics.

Raymond C. Niles is a Senior Fellow the American Institute for Economic Research and Assistant Professor of Economics & Management at DePauw University.

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