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The Scientific Method of Deductive Reasoning Proves the Moral Foundation of Capitalism

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Near the end of Chapter 1, the author of Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind, Brad Thompson, makes an important distinction among two fundamental concepts,

Laws of nature are moral principles discovered by reason that help us achieve fundamental values. Rights of nature recognize certain requirements of human nature. These laws protect the rights of individuals, from which the laws of nature are deduced.

He goes on to say that “Locke describes these qualities not as moral principles but as facts of human nature that indicate certain moral principles. Locke has transitioned from what is (freedom and equality) to what ought to be (self-ownership). Which means that property is naturally just.” This is the perfect segue into Chapter 2 – Declaring the Laws of Nature.

Today, it doesn’t require amazing cognitive skills to see that ‘Laws of Nature’ is one step removed on the deductive reasoning ladder to ‘Independence’. Yet for Thomas Jefferson and his compatriots, it was a radical achievement. As Thompson writes about the Declaration’s first paragraph, “It’s purpose is to declare to the world. It’s principle is defined by the Laws of Nature. And it’s action is defined by the necessity to dissolve. In sum, reason is the means and nature is the the standard by which men must distinguish between freedom and slavery.”

In his Notes of the State of Virginia, Jefferson best relates the efficacy of reason,

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. They are the natural enemies of error. Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. Truth can stand by itself.

The importance of Jefferson’s assertion is boundless. If “knowledge and objective truth were open to all men” (as Thompson states about Locke’s epistemology in Chapter 1), and error naturally flees when “reason and experiment have been indulged,” (as Jefferson avers in Chapter 2), then any despot’s grip on political power is no stronger than the weak minds that sanction their own victimhood!

To America’s Revolutionary Minds, King George III and his mercantilists were running an 18th century protection racket; as were the Soviet Communists running a 20th century crime syndicate. In America today, its known as progressivism. Thompson informs us in Chapter 2, “To know what injustice and despotism are, one must also know what justice and freedom are.” Today’s progressive public education and media elites deny this.

In all cases, the fundamental principle at stake is individual property rights, whose primary fact is self-ownership. In contrast, all despots promote some form of collectivism, whose primary fact is duty to tribe, church, community, or party. Thompson continues, “Quite possibly the greatest achievement of the American Revolution was to free men to follow the dictates of their own minds.” Jefferson elaborates,

Men enjoying in ease and security the fruits of their own industry, enlisted by all their interests on the side of law and order, would be more easily governed than with minds nourished in error and debased by ignorance, indigence, and oppression.

In 1775, the Continental Congress composed its Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, and Jefferson then wrote about surrendering reason: man “has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. Gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.”

Fifty years earlier, in 1725, the co-editor of Jefferson’s Declaration, another Enlightenment hero named Benjamin Franklin wrote,

How exact and regular is the natural world. How wisely in every part contrived. All the heavenly Bodies are regulated with the utmost wisdom! And can we suppose less care to be taken in the order of the Moral than in the Natural System?

According to Thompson, Franklin “implied that the Americans were following the moral law of nature while the British were following the law of armed force.” He also adds, “Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries understood that there are two basic ways to deal with men in political society: either by faith and force or by reason and freedom.” These two concepts, reason and freedom, are the essential, codependent variables for the only morally defensible socioeconomic system for humanity – Capitalism.

To continue this line of thinking, Thompson again invokes John Adams, who “thought it possible to reason backward from effects to causes and then forward again to the principles that might guide human action.” He also recruits Ethan Allen of the Green Mountain Boys, and whose 1785 treatise titled Reason, The Only Oracle of Man makes reference to his Book of Nature. Thompson summarizes Allen saying, “all entities in nature are interconnected.”

It is this absence of force among interconnected human entities, united only in personal liberty, that is the essence of capitalism.

Consequently, following the great thought leaders of the Enlightenment, “eighteenth century Americans saw a direct relationship between the physical laws of nature and the moral laws of nature as they apply to human action.” It is no coincidence that the great Austrian economist and classical liberal philosopher Ludwig von Mises titled his signature achievement Human Action.

Mises was perhaps the world’s leading 20th century economist for government non-interventionism, objective law, free markets, price theory, and entrepreneurship. Yet a century before Mises was born, in 1775, John Zubly of Georgia presages the necessary conditions for capitalism to flourish,

The will, minds, tempers, dispositions, views and interests of men are so very different, and sometimes so opposite, that without law, which cements and binds all, every thing would be in endless disorder and confusion.

Thompson adds, “Zubly assumed that law and liberty are ‘perfectly consistent, well regulated liberty of individuals is the natural offspring of laws.” Also, it was common for 18th century Americans to publish editorials under pseudonyms, and writing in Boston’s Continental Journal, “Benevolus” is summarized saying, “The most common violation of of the laws of nature is the theft of property.”

He concludes Chapter 2 with a powerful summary about the Revolutionary War period, one that through deductive reasoning, guarantees the individual property rights inherent to self-ownership and voluntary trade free of force,

Americans believed there are moral laws of nature that transcend the laws of men. Such laws must be discovered through reason. They describe cause and effect relationships, between man and nature and between man and man. They prescribe principles of action, and such laws are fixed, absolute, universal, and eternal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It Is Self-Evident That No Person Is By Nature The Ruler Of Other People.

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Why does the Declaration of Independence proclaim “We hold these truths to be self-evident” instead of simply stating that “We believe it is true”?

This is actually a good question.  Answering it can teach us a lot about the Founding.

When we recall what the world was like in the Founders’ time, the answer becomes clear. The world in those days operated on the basis of utter inequality. Whether the ruler was a king who claimed to rule by divine right or an emperor who claimed the mandate of Heaven, society was essentially the same everywhere, consisting of monarchs and their subjects, rulers and the ruled. This was simply accepted as the way of things.

The Declaration offered the world a new vision. The Founders did not limit themselves to declaring that Americans no longer wanted or needed a king to rule over them. That alone would have been a radical challenge to monarchs everywhere. The Founders went much, much further. They did not merely claim they believed all men, all people, are created equal; they claimed it is self-evidently true that all are created equal. They declared the truth of equality in a world that believed in inequality.  America was not simply choosing to opt out of the belief system that sustained monarchs everywhere; the Founders were declaring that the world-system was based on a false belief.

Make no mistake, the Founders understood America’s significance for all humankind. Here is how Thomas Jefferson put it, near the end of his life:

“All eyes are open to or opening to…the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

At the time of the Founding, people everywhere were operating according to the belief that God had put saddles on their backs and rulers in the saddle. Jefferson declared the beginning of the end of the hereditary monarch propped up by an official state religion.

The Declaration’s statement that “We hold these truths to be self-evident” goes to the heart of the teaching mission of the Founders. By stating that these were self-evident truths, the Founders staked out a position far in advance of the way people were thinking in their time. By declaring those truths to be self-evident, they gave the rest of the world the opportunity to realize the truths they were announcing to the world. In the meantime, and until the world caught up with them, they would hold to the truths they were proclaiming.

That is what discoverers do. The American Revolution, like the Copernican Revolution, changed how people everywhere understood the world—but not overnight. A great revolution in thought begins with a few who declare what they have discovered and then stand by the truth of what they have discovered until the world learns to think anew. At first, only a few embraced the idea that the Earth orbited our sun and that the apparent motion of our sun was the result of the Earth’s rotation on its axis. Copernicus published his model in 1543; the Copernican Revolution was not complete until the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, and not accepted by everyone even then.

Just as Copernicus put the belief that our sun orbited the Earth on the road to extinction, the Founders put the world of royals and subjects on the road to extinction. Foreign observers confidently predicted America would fail without a king, but that is not how it turned out. Today, except in a handful of Islamic countries, monarchs are gone or reduced to mere ceremonial figures, made illegitimate by America’s shining example.

Because the Founders’ idea of government by, for, and of the people is so deeply ingrained in our imaginations, it is difficult for us to conceive of human life as it once was. The belief that the person called the king or queen or emperor is the State, and the descendants of that person will be the State in perpetuity strikes us today as odd. In the time of the Founders, the idea that no one was born to rule and no one born to be ruled, was odder still.

Even the people of the thirteen colonies needed help to break free of the idea that they were royal subjects. As Gordon Wood writes in The American Revolution:

“Since the king, in the words of the English jurist William Blackstone, was the ‘pater familias of the nation,’ to be a subject was in fact to be a kind of child…[The people] had to be held together from above, by the power of kings who created trains of dependencies and inequalities, supported by standing armies, strong religious establishments, and a dazzling array of titles, rituals, and ceremonies.”

Tom Paine’s world-changing book Common Sense helped Americans learn to think like citizens instead of subjects. In America, sovereign citizens replaced the royal sovereign. Politics was no longer about the king’s will and the king’s glory, but the well-being of the citizens. Citizens talking to their neighbors, reading newspapers, and considering the proposals of their fellow citizens who were running for political office replaced royals conferring with their courtiers.

As powerful as the old paradigm once was, it is easy for you and for me to see through it today.  For us, the Founders’ paradigm seems simply obvious. Here is how Harry Jaffa states it in his book A New Birth of Freedom:

“The queen bee is marked out by nature for her function in the hive.  Human queens (or kings) are not so marked.  Their rule is conventional, not natural.  As we have seen Jefferson say, human beings are not born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them.  These are facts accessible to everyone.  They are truths that are self-evident.”

Obvious to us now, and self-evident all along. It is self-evident that no person is by nature the ruler of other people in the way that people are by nature the rulers of their horses and their cattle. It is, as the Founders proclaimed, a self-evident truth.

In the Founders’ day, declaring the self-evident truth that all men are created equal was a rebuke to monarchs everywhere. Today, America’s founding truth is a rebuke to tyrants everywhere, in China, in Iran, and everywhere rulers oppress their people and crush dissent. It is also a rebuke to Americans on the Left who are keen to tear down the system of governance that is the magnificent gift of the Founders—and a reminder that we must follow the Founders’ example in our time by holding to those self-evident truths and resisting those who would return us to the world of rulers and ruled.

Robert Curry serves on the board of directors of the Claremont Institute and is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea

The 1776 Project: Jefferson And Smith. Who Was The Greater Libertarian?

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No American must be reminded that the year 1776 was momentous. But few Americans realize just how momentous it was. That year witnessed the publication not only of Thomas Jefferson’s eloquent Declaration of Independence; it was also the year of Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Jefferson’s document founded a new nation: the United States. Smith’s book founded a new discipline: economics. Both works were inspired by the spirit of liberty.

Jefferson wrote that individuals “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.”

Note carefully Jefferson’s words. Our rights aren’t given to us by government. The state is merely an organization for helping us, as individuals, to protect our rights. Attempts by government to act beyond this narrow purpose are violations of the very rights it is instituted to secure.

Freedom equals productivity

Jefferson and America’s other founders understood that individuals who are free to conduct their own affairs as they see fit are far more likely to be productive and to form mutually advantageous social and economic arrangements than if they must run a gamut of government-imposed prohibitions and requirements.

Adam Smith was of the same mind when he celebrated, with an eloquence equal to that of Jefferson, “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” in which all special privileges and restraints on consensual economic activity are “completely taken away.”

With this liberty, wrote Smith, “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society.”

Founders had confidence in freedom

It’s often said that America’s founders had “faith” in freedom. But because of Smith’s work, a better term is confidence in freedom. Smith explained how private property rights, freedom of contract, economic competition, and market prices peacefully direct each individual who is pursuing his own goals to achieve those goals only by helping countless other individuals to achieve their goals. The result is a beautiful process of mutual assistance.

In one of Smith’s most quoted passages, he observed that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Businesses in free markets prosper only by satisfying consumers – and the more that businesses satisfy consumers, the more those businesses, their workers, and their customers will prosper.

And while Smith was a realist who knew that markets always work imperfectly, he argued that in most cases government intervention makes matters worse. Even if politicians were miraculously to become immune to pressure from special-interest groups, their knowledge of how best to use scarce resources is far too scant to enable them, or the bureaucrats whom they employ, to improve upon market outcomes.

In 2020, alas, this deep wisdom from 1776 is largely lost. Politicians and pundits today, from left to right, see ordinary men and women as hapless victims of forces beyond their control. These pathetic creatures, it is assumed, need not protection of their rights but, instead, provision of their sustenance.

American prosperity at stake

People across the political spectrum increasingly believe that the state must superintend and often override the choices that we individuals make as workers, entrepreneurs, and consumers. Those with this view are blind to the enormous prosperity created by free markets. If you doubt this prosperity, just look around your house and marvel at the appliances, the pantry full of food, and the closets full of clothing that are, for most Americans, commonplace.

Those with this expansive vision of state power are blind also to the dangers that power poses to this prosperity. As Adam Smith taught – and as Jefferson understood – markets saddled with tariffs, poisoned with subsidies, and buffeted about by the inevitable arbitrariness of bureaucratic interventions cannot possibly produce as much prosperity for ordinary people as is produced by free markets.

 

 

Donald J. Boudreaux is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and a professor at George Mason University. This article appeared at realclearhistory.com

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