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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.

The Only Role Of Government Should Be To Promote The Economic Life Of The Community, Not To Save Lives.

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It is tempting to oppose the harmful effects of COVID-related lockdowns with arguments couched in terms of tradeoffs.

We may contend that when public authorities promote the benefits of “flattening the curve,” they fail to properly take into account the actual costs of imposing business closures and of forced social distancing: the coming economic depression will lead to mass unemployment, rising poverty, suicides, domestic abuse, alcoholism, and myriad other potential causes of death and suffering which could be considerably worse than the harms of the pandemic itself, especially if we consider the spontaneous mitigation that people normally apply under the circumstances.

While I have no doubt that lockdown policies can and will have serious deleterious consequences, I believe that the emphasis on tradeoffs is misguided and counterproductive. It immediately invites a utilitarian calculus: How many deaths and how much suffering will be caused by lockdowns? How many deaths and how much suffering would occur without the lockdowns? How exactly are we to measure the total harm? What time frame should we consider when we ponder the costs of one option versus the other?

It’s easy to see that no one can have any firm answers to those questions. No one can convincingly make the case that one policy is better than the other on utilitarian grounds, which is what tradeoff language encourages us to do. That is especially true if we consider that lockdown policies are invariably modified in response to changing circumstances and aim toward ever shifting goalposts.

This goes to the heart of Ludwig von Mises’s criticism of the empiricists and behaviorists of his day: they could only conceive of social phenomena in mechanical terms and failed to see that human action makes the planning of human affairs irreducible to predictive calculus. Things have not changed. Ludicrous presumptions hide behind mathematical wizardry and statistical modeling continues to rule.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE ECONOMY

On what grounds, then, should we oppose lockdowns if not by calling attention to the great harms that will ensue?

It seems to me that lockdowns should be opposed not by arguing in terms of “quantity of harm,” but by pointing out that the only role for government—whether in pandemic times or not—is actually to promote the economy.

But we need to understand what the economy is to begin with.

In its broader, original meaning, the economy is not simply a sum total of exchanges of material goods and services among consumers, businesses, and governments, to be measured as a “GDP.” That is the concept that the utilitarians are accustomed to, and it’s how mainstream political philosophy conceives of the economy. Originally, however, the Greek term Oîkonomia meant “household affairs” and came to refer, by extension, to the entire life of the community as such.

The reason to consider the life of the community as such is that the human being is, by nature, a social animal who depends essentially on the division of labor that takes place within an integrated and wholly interconnected society. We depend on the division of labor from the moment we are born: we need parents who can feed us, and our parents themselves need the specialized work of others to survive—specialized work that invariably crosses different generations. The division of labor forms a more or less tight-knit “political” community that promotes and defends the interests of its own members. That community may be a small primitive tribe or a huge nation-state, it is nevertheless one community engaged in the division of labor in its own unique way.

The division of labor, then, is not a matter of personal choice. Being connected to a community is not an option that one can choose to either engage in or refrain from. No one can live as an outcast. Even the hermit depends on others, and therefore on society. True ostracism is a death sentence, and involuntary partial ostracism (imprisonment) is a most severe punishment. The economy is as necessary to human life as oxygen or water are.

For that reason, the famous evolutionary sociobiologist E.O. Wilson has changed his perspective on the human race. He has taken the position that human beings are a “eusocial species,” whose members are totally dependent on a complex, intergenerational division of labor in much the same way that bees are dependent on other bees. Man is indeed a very social animal.

THE TRUE COMMON GOOD

The broad division of labor on which we all essentially depend amounts to far more than the accounting transactions that occupy the attention of professional econometricians. It includes the myriad ways in which we depend on others, ways which may be at once measurable yet uncountable, self-interested yet gratuitous. Understood properly, the economy points to the true common good, the good that unites us as the eusocial animals that we are. That true common good does not distinguish between “essential” and “nonessential” worker or activity.

That understanding of the common good is a far cry from the perverted notion of it that dominates modern political thought: a stock of material goods or services to be taken from some and redistributed to others by the government according to “shared interests” and “rights.” We should be especially fearful of that notion given that the same government determines what those shared interests and rights are based on mechanistic, utilitarian norms—norms that invariably garner votes.

If the government’s role is to safeguard the true common good, then it should do so primarily by safeguarding the integrity of the society, in which the division of labor naturally takes place. Government acts properly when that integrity is threatened, either from within (by criminal activity) or from without (by outside invaders or aggressors). Its role is to deter or defend from those threats when private efforts cannot prevail. The role of government is not to defend or promote the particular goods of certain individuals. That’s an abomination!

Even individual lives are not for the government to “save,” because efforts by the government to save the lives of some invariably infringe on the goods and sometimes on the lives of others. The saving of individual lives cannot possibly be a promotion of the true common good.

But does not the saving of lives help safeguard the integrity of society?

Not really. To see this we must distinguish secondary effects from primary ones. For example, imagine that the police successfully intervene to stop Smith from murdering Jones. Did they act because the police has a mission to save Jones’s life? No. The primary effect of the police action is to protect the integrity of the community by putting Smith and his sociopathic behavior out of commission. It is not, per se, to save Jones’ life—even if he should be so lucky.

Likewise, when soldiers are deployed against an invading army, the primary aim is to defend the integrity of society. Military defense is not carried out primarily to save individual lives or reduce individual suffering: more lives might conceivably be lost and more individual suffering occasioned in the process of defending the country than if the country were to capitulate and allow the invader to take over.

BEWARE OF METAPHORS

Might one argue that a pandemic threatens the integrity of society precisely as a foreign invader would? Doesn’t the COVID-19, then, warrant government action for that very reason?

I don’t believe so. Such an argument falls into the metaphorical trap of considering the COVID-19 virus in martial terms. The virus is not an invader. It has no intention of destroying or taking over society. In fact, as Jörg Guido Hüllsman recently pointed out, it has no intention whatsoever. It is not even alive! To be sure, SARS-CoV-2 is a very dangerous and transmissible pollutant that can cause much harm and many deaths. But it is not, as such, a threat to the integrity of society.

It is the true economy and the integrity of society that the government should protect or promote. Lockdowns do the exact opposite. They fracture us, harm us, and weaken us all. If maintained long enough, they will disintegrate us. In the meantime, they undoubtedly obstruct our efforts to find the best way to respond to pandemics. They should be opposed—not because of tradeoffs—but because they are antithetical to the economy, that is, to the good of society.

Michel Accad, MD, practices cardiology and internal medicine in San Francisco, offering individualized care in a free-market setting. His blog about health care and medicine is AlertandOriented.com. He also co-hosts the Accad And Koa Report podcast.

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