The Art of Being Free

Politics versus the Everyman and Woman

Wendy McElroy

Copyright 2012 by Wendy McElroy

All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-1-62129-029-2
Published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

CONTENTS

Authors Preface
Section I: The Theoretical Footing of Freedom
o It Usually Begins with Natural Law
o The Efficiency of Natural Rights
o Defining State and Society
o Human Ignorance and Social Engineering
Section II: Applying Theory to Issues
o Redeeming the Industrial Revolution
o The Modern Union versus Workers Rights
o The Immorality of Public Education
o Ask Not for Whom the Drug Tolls
o Passport to the Total State
o The Post Office as a Violation of Constitutional Rights
o The Return of Debtors Prison
o Decriminalize the Average American!
o War, the External Enemy
o War, the Internal Enemy
Section III: Principles Work through People
o tienne de la Botie: Why Do People Obey Unjust Laws?
o Franois Marie Arouet de Voltaire: The Relationship between Freedom and Tolerance
o Henry David Thoreau: Is There a Duty to Disobey Unjust Law?
o William Lloyd Garrison: One Person Can Make a Difference
o R.C. Hoiles: An Everyman of Excellence
Section IV: Getting There from Here
o Is America Now a Police State?
o Grappling with the Banality of Evil
o Why Good Men Do Nothing
o It Is Not Personal It Is Institutional
o Contra Gradualism
o In Praise of Working People
o Boycott: A Nonviolent Revolt
Conclusion
An Invitation from Wendy McElroy

AUTHORS PREFACE
At fifteen years old, I read the novel We The Living by Ayn Rand and, then, I read everything else I could find by
her. It has been a wild intellectual ride in the decades between but one of the constants has been my deep
conviction that there is something sacrosanct about the individual. Whatever happens within society from
the free market to war begins with the individual who agrees or dissents. The individual says yes or no and it
is this lever of consent at which freedom lives or dies. To a real extent, it seems that simple to me. You have
the right to say yes or no on matters concerning your own body and property, or you dont. The former is
freedom; the latter is enslavement. On this point, I have not changed much from that fifteen-year-old introvert
who read in bed with a flashlight when I was supposed to be sleeping.
The wild ride came from plunging into history, from wrestling with economic theory and from dealing with the
many ethical questions that bluntly confronted my belief that the individual is sacrosanct. Over decades, I have
evolved a framework of answers and theories that may not always be definitive but which express the best
explanations I know.
This book is a combination of theory, issues, profiles, and strategy, because I cannot separate the ideas from
the people, the positions from a vision of the future. There is an invisible web that connects these four aspects
of freedom and combines them into an integrated whole called life.
First and foremost, I am interested in how freedom functions in real life in the lives of average people
because I am an average person. I was born into a lower middle-class family in which my father made a living
with his hands. Although I have published through venues like Penn State University and I often receive mail
addressed to Dr. McElroy, I am a high school dropout. I live quietly on a farm with my husband who is
wondering, even as I write this, about what to buy me for our upcoming Silver Anniversary.
I do not believe freedom or justice are august concepts to be immortalized in awe-inspiring statutes. I think
freedom and justice belong on the streets and in the gutters because that is where real people live as they rush
from home to work, from work to pick up their children. I want a theory and reality of freedom that is based
upon and within the average working person.
The Rights of the Everyman and Woman
Your right to life and to liberty are not merely inalienable, they are also indivisible. A right to life means it is
your due as a human being to be left in peace by others so long as you respect their equal claim. A right to
liberty means you are entitled to the peaceful use of whatever is yours your body, your labor, your property.
Freedom is not something for which you must negotiate or which you need to earn. You do not receive it from
a government in return for citizenship. Rights are yours because you are a human being and every human has
the same rights to the same degree regardless of race, gender, or nationality. No secondary characteristics can
affect the universality with which rights apply to humanity.
Civil and economic rights are often viewed as separable, with the latter deserving far less security. For example,
freedom of religion and speech are venerated, and so given extra protection against infringement by
government. On the other hand, the freedom to contract your own labor or to sell a product you manufacture
is highly regulated. Most people see no tension in these positions. After all, religion and free speech are seen as
human rights whereas labor contracts and wages are viewed almost as societal arrangements or matters of
business, which is why free speech is comparatively unprotected in the commercial realm.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Civil and economic rights are not separable. Both are human rights
and dependent upon each other. It makes no sense to tell a free man that he has freedom of speech but no
similarly unrestricted right to use his own labor to make goods that he can freely sell. Both acts are peaceful
expressions of his own body. Being able to use his tongue to speak out is no more sacrosanct than being able to
use his hands to contract labor on his own terms.
Indeed, if there is a theoretical distinction to be made between civil and economic liberties, it is this: economic
liberties are a necessary prerequisite to every other freedom that human beings can enjoy. In his book The
Ethics of Liberty, the iconic Austrian economist Murray Rothbard wrote, The key to the theory of liberty is the
establishment of the rights of private property, for each individuals justified sphere of free action can only be
set forth if his rights of property are analyzed and established.
Popular wisdom perversely teaches the opposite. It teaches that civil liberties or human rights are threatened
by private property and market freedom. Minorities or other vulnerable segments of society are said to be
especially threatened. Therefore, government must force redistributions of private wealth through taxation
and social programs so that property is taken from those who have produced it and given to those who have
not. Government, it is said, must legally pry open the doors of private enterprise to ensure that women are
hired on an equal basis. Over and over, economic rights are attacked in the name of civil ones but the attack is
actually upon both.
The early 20th century British feminist Virginia Woolf elegantly stated the relationship between economic and
civil rights in an essay entitled A Room of Ones Own. (Sadly, she did not realize the implications of her own
words.) Woolf looked at the circumstances facing women writers in the 1920s and concluded that a woman
must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction or, more generally, if she were to live with
self-respect according to her own values. A woman (or man) needs a room with a lock a safe place in which
to work and live without fear, a private place in which to think and thrive. In short, economic independence is
the bedrock of all other freedoms and the key to quality of life. Freedom of speech and assembly and the right
to a fair trial mean little to a man who is starving to death on a snowbank. First and foremost, people need the
freedom to provide for their own needs by using their wits and labor the need for economic rights.
As I said, Woolf did not understand the full implications of her words. For one thing, she was among the lucky
few who inherited money, and so inherited a room of her own. Her less fortunate contemporaries were forced
to work for a living. Moreover, Woolfs socialistic ideology deeply prejudiced her against the free market.
Woolf correctly denounced social prejudice as a barrier to women but the power of that barrier came from
having prejudice embedded into law. When women cannot own land or sign contracts with the same legal
protection as men, then they are trapped women in the kitchen or in unskilled, underpaid labor. The key
economic factor that frees women and makes them independent is not legal protection or privilege but the
equal recognition of their economic rights. Whenever discriminatory laws against women were weakened,
women surged as a labor force into rooms of their own. Unpleasantly, this point has escaped the notice of
Woolfs descendants (mainstream feminists) who have lobbied insatiably for the restriction and regulation of
free employment, from affirmative action to pay equity, from mandated quotas to paid maternity leave.
I have had reason to notice. I once needed a room of my own. And I know on a deeply personal level how laws
can harm even those they are intended to protect. I ran away at 16 years old because the streets were safer
than my home. Unfortunately that home was Canada and it was December. Sleeping in a church with an
open-door policy was a stop-gap measure at best. It may have saved my life those first few nights but I needed
a room with heat and a door that locked.
And, yet, I consider myself to be lucky because I was 16 years old. Child labor laws designed to protect children

from exploitation did not apply to me, and so I was able to get a minimum-wage job in a furniture store, filing
years worth of boxed papers. If I had been protected either as a child or as a female from being able to
negotiate for less money than any other applicant, I would not have been able to go on to rent a room in a
boardinghouse. Instead, I would have been protected into begging, stealing, dealing drugs, or sex work. What
other work would the law have left me once it had taken away my economic rights?
What saved me was the ability to contract on my own terms so that I could buy a room with a lock and, from
there go on to build a life of my own choosing. I went from a room of my own to a life of my own.
Since childhood, one of my favorite quotations has been a passage from Louisa May Alcotts novel Little
Women. The character Jo reads aloud from a short story she has written: And the good fairy said, I wont leave
you money or pretty dresses, but I will leave you the spirit to seek your fortune from your own efforts.
This book is addressed to men and women who have the spirit to seek their own fortune from their own
efforts.
It is divided into four distinct but interrelated sections: the underlying theory, a representative sample of issues
to which the theory is applied, profiles of people who personify freedom and through which the theory lives,
and a discussion of the strategy on getting from here to there.

SECTION I
THE THEORETICAL FOOTING OF FREEDOM
The world spins on ideas and ideologies. Although it has received bad press in the last century, an ideology is
nothing more than a clearly defined set of ideas that express an integrated worldview. As such, the worth of
any particular ideology depends upon how closely it corresponds with reality and how successfully it answers
the basic questions of individuals within society: for example, What is justice?
Today, many political and economic strategists dismiss the importance of ideas to society, claiming that the
masses are not interested in anything but bread and circuses their own immediate self-interest and
entertainment. The same strategists openly scorn expressions of ideology as counter-productive, dogmatic,
unscientific, hate-filled or whatever political pejorative is in fassion.
What world do these people live in? I live in a world defined by ideologies that are embraced by the masses.
Two of the most powerful social forces in Western history are both deeply ideological. Both were embraced by
average people: Christianity and Marxism. Marxism may have initially had the utilitarian lure of appealing to
the immediate self-interest of the proletariat but Christianitys mass appeal has never been economic. The
ultimate appeal of both systems is that they offer coherent, integrated worldviews through which people can
make sense of their own lives. The world views are as right or wrong as the ideas that form them but they are
powerful precisely because people want to understand the world around them. The notion that the masses
are not interested in ideology is bizarre.
Not merely personal beliefs are defined by ideology but all human history itself. Consider the American
Revolution, which many view as a defining moment in the history of freedom. In a famous passage, the
revolutionary and Founding Father John Adams wrote, What do we mean by the revolution? The War? That
was no part of the Revolution The Revolution was in the minds of the people. The event that was the
Revolution may have been sparked by specific issues, such as the introduction of the Stamp Act, but it burst
into flame only because the groundwork of principles, of ideology had been laid.
And so the question is not whether people and history should be driven by ideology. They are. The question is
which ideology maximizes the human potential for justice, prosperity and peace. In the broadest terms, I
embrace classical liberalism as the ideology with the greatest potential not merely to liberate but also to feed
billions of human beings.
In the first chapter of his book For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, the economist Murray Rothbard
defined classical liberal tradition that had emerged in the 17th century from the English Levellers and the
English Revolution. He wrote,
The object of the classical liberals was to bring about individual liberty in all of its interrelated aspects.
In the economy, taxes were to be drastically reduced, controls and regulations eliminated, and human
energy, enterprise, and markets set free to create and produce in exchanges that would benefit
everyone and the mass of consumers. Entrepreneurs were to be free at last to compete, to develop, to
create. The shackles of control were to be lifted from land, labor, and capital alike. Personal freedom
and civil liberty were to be guaranteed against the depredations and tyranny of the king or his minions.
Religion, the source of bloody wars for centuries when sects were battling for control of the State, was
to be set free from State imposition or interference, so that all religions or nonreligions could

coexist in peace. Peace, too, was the foreign policy credo of the new classical liberals; the age-old
regime of imperial and State aggrandizement for power and pelf was to be replaced by a foreign policy
of peace and free trade with all nations.
The historical pedigree of classical liberalism as an ideology that champions the average, working person is
unparalleled. Whenever, wherever it has come to dominate, the ultimate result has been greater liberty,
prosperity and peace.

It Usually Begins With Natural Law

The ideological framework from which I proceed can be labeled in various ways: classical liberalism,
libertarianism or radical individualism. All are accurate. Advocates argue for freedom under many labels and
come from many directions but the most common foundation of argument is probably natural law. The
Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were derived from this tradition as were such phrases as
inalienable rights. It should be noted, however, that it has also had vigorous opponents who believed, with
the early 19th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that the tradition was nonsense on stilts.

Although the term consists of only two words, the meaning of natural law has long been a semantic
battlefield.
The simplest word to grapple with is law. It is not used in a legal or authoritarian sense to mean legislation or a
command. Instead it refers to a principle, much as people speak of the laws of physics or the law of gravity.
The other word, natural, has a more controversial background. Such great debate has been waged over exactly
what the term natural means that it is not clear whether there is one tradition or many traditions of natural
law.
Consider the question, natural as opposed to what? Some interpret the word within a theistic context that
views reality and the nature of man to be expressions of God. Thus, the Declaration of Independence declares,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights To violate individual rights, therefore, is to go against the will of
God.
The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises offered the following criticism of natural law within his book Human
Action,
There is no perennial standard of what is just and what is unjust. Nature is alien to the idea of right
and wrong. Thou shalt not kill is certainly not part of natural law. The characteristic feature of natural
conditions is that one animal is intent upon killing other animals
Misess point is well taken if it is directed at the more extreme traditions of natural law theory which do cling,
as he states, to the doctrine that what is right and what is wrong is established from the dawn of the remotest
ages and for eternity. Indeed, some natural law theorists go so far as to say that values are a category of fact.
But there is a more flexible interpretation of natural law theory which withstands Misess criticism. It makes
the far more reasonable statement that human values should be grounded in, or based upon, facts, and
discovered through a process of reasoning. Such theorists tend to maintain that the word natural is used as a
term of distinction to distance it from the supernatural, or the will of God. Again, they attempt to root the idea
of individual rights in the principles of reality and in mans nature.
This more flexible version of natural law does not assume Gods will or that justice exists as a form of fact. It
assumes that as human beings interact with each other some concept of right and wrong inevitably evolves.
This contention is based largely on historical and cultural observation. Even the most primitive of human
cultures evolved some standard of right and wrong behavior. The question becomes: if it is in the nature of
man within society to construct rules, then which are the ones that most accord with his nature?
The political significance of grounding values in fact is immense. For one thing, it allows people to use natural

law as a standard by which to judge the justice of the law of the land (positive law), or of the ruler, or of God. In
short, natural law theory allows you to weigh whether or not the law is proper, or just. When the question
arises, why should I obey the law of the land? some people answer, Because the law is the law, or Because
you will be punished if you dont. Classical liberals answer instead, You should only obey the law if it is in
accord with nature.
As the 19th century American individualist-anarchist Benjamin Tucker once exclaimed,
Law! Yes: but what law? The law of nature as developed out of a rational analysis of social force and
based upon the sovereignty of the individual, or some law manufactured for designing ends before we
were born and without our consent? [I]t is absurd to talk about making laws. Laws are, and the only
right of a human being is to search after them and obey them for himself, leaving others to do the
same, or contrarywise, at their own cost.
And, so, the search for what laws is afoot.
Natural Law and Natural Rights
The concept of natural rights, which is commonly called individual rights, emerges only when human beings
interact with each other. In isolation, Robinson Crusoe would not need the concept of individual rights because
freedom of speech or private property would never arise as issues. The need for rights arrived on the island
along with Friday.
Thus, by individual rights I mean the rules by which human beings should deal with each other because they
best acknowledge and conform to human nature itself. An individual right is an enforceable claim that every
person has against others, a claim that means others are not justified in using force but are constrained to
respect his self-ownership. In practical terms, this means no one can make a proper claim upon you or your
property without your consent. Conversely, every right carries a responsibility. Each man has a duty to respect
the equal self-ownership and rights of others. You have no claim upon anyone else without their consent. This
makes consent the key to harmonious interaction and the one factor that distinguishes a free man from a
slave.
Such rules of society can be held as a matter of morality or of pure utility. Nevertheless, throughout history,
whenever people have interacted, rules have emerged.
Even the most primitive and savage cultures evolve some standard of right and wrong behavior. The dictum
Thou shalt not kill may not be written on a rock somewhere in nature, as Mises observed, but societies
across culture and time have developed some prohibition against murder. One of the few points upon which
virtually all societies agree is a default position of it is wrong to kill an innocent human being. In order to
bypass the default position, a society has to argue that the person is not innocent; for example, he may
espouse the wrong religion or be an enemy in wartime.
Equally, some concept of right and wrong seems to evolve naturally within human psychology. A child who is
hit for no reason has an automatic reaction that says, in effect, I did not have that coming. The person should
not have hurt me. The child feels wronged even if he cannot explain that feeling. This childlike response may
be crude but it shows that, on at least some level, considering the right and wrong of interactions is a basic
human response. We experience the initiation of force against us as wrong.
But why is it wrong to initiate force? The onus of proof is on an advocate of natural law to explain why
individual rights are in peoples self-interest.

The question can be answered on utilitarian grounds; men should observe rights in order to promote their own
well-being. Consider: why do people enter society in the first place? After all, a desert island offers unbridled
individual freedom whereas in society there is always the threat of violence. Why associate with people and
run such a risk?
The answer is clear. Society offers tremendous benefits, including friendship, expanded knowledge, a division
of labor, and romantic love. Society can maximize your choices if only because many of your decisions, and
some of the most important ones, require the presence of other people; for example, the decision to have a
child. Yet it is quite possible to imagine a society from which some people would gladly flee into solitude; a
field slave might run from a plantation. To the extent a society relies on force and violates individual rights, it
withdraws or minimizes choices; it reverses the very advantages of society itself. Seen through this lens, rights
set a peaceful context which maximizes choice and, thus, maximizes the chances of individuals attaining
happiness within society.
The Moral Case for Individual Rights
Phrased in moral terms, the question becomes, what about human nature makes it wrong for one person to
initiate force against another?.
Self-ownership is one of the most commonly argued moral foundations for individual rights. Self-ownership
declares each man to have exclusive property in his own person and the products of his labor. This is not meant
to reduce the human body or faculties to the status of goods; it is meant to establish the moral jurisdiction that
each human being has over his own person and whatever property results from his labor. Thus, property is
used in the sense of that which a person has the sole right to control.
The argument for self-ownership can be made on strictly logical grounds. There are only three alternatives: you
own yourself (freedom), someone else owns you (slavery), or you are unclaimed goods. The last alternative is
bizarre and breaks down the first time control is exerted over a physical body; whoever is in control is claiming
jurisdiction. And, so, the only two real alternatives people face are freedom or slavery. Again, on purely logical
grounds, self-ownership is the one most rooted in the nature of man because no one but the individual himself
can control everything under his skin, including thoughts and beliefs.
As an underlying theory, self-ownership has at least one decided advantage over other paths to individual
rights: namely, clarity. In reducing freedom to self-ownership, it is possible to point to a real, physical entity
your body and state unequivocally: Everything under this skin belongs to me because it is me. By contrast,
arguments that proceed from justice or utility suffer from the disadvantage of being more theoretical. Even
those who agree with the need for individual rights based on justice or utility may endlessly disagree on what
constitutes those ideals. Next to no one disagrees on what constitutes your body as opposed to their own. And
even a young child who is pushed to the ground by a bully knows that something wrong has happened to
him. Self-ownership has the advantage of being both obvious and intuitively grasped.
The concept also has a rich and deep history that has delivered the message of individual rights in effective
ways.
Self-ownership formed the moral and political backbone of the radical anti-slavery movement in America
known as abolitionism. Arising in the early 19th century, abolitionism viewed slavery as the theft of liberty and
life. Because black men and women had an equal claim to being human, they were self-owners and to strip
them of liberty was to steal their most intimate property themselves. This is why slavery was often called
man-stealing. (The abolitionists did not originate this term. The 17th century philosopher Hugo Grotius
wrote, Those are men stealers who abduct, keep, sell, or buy slaves or free men. To steal a man is the highest

kind of theft by which he meant the worst kind of theft).

The abolitionist book The Bible Against Slavery (1837) by Rev. Theodore D. Weld accused the slaveholder of
violating the Eighth Commandment: Thou shalt not steal. Arguing self-ownership on the grounds of Gods
will, Weld wrote,
All a mans powers are Gods gift to him. Each is a part of himself. All else that belongs to man is
acquired by the use of these powers.Ownership of anything is ownership of its use. The right to use
according to will is itself ownership.
A mans right to himself is his only absolute right his right to anything else is relative to this, is
derived from it, and held only by virtue of it. Self-right [self-ownership] is the foundation right the
post in the middle, to which all other rights are fastened.
Slaveholders Weld did not call them slaveowners were not merely thieves but also hypocrites because
when asserting their right to their slaves [they] always assume their own right to themselves. But if one man
belongs to himself then all men are self-owners because all are born equal in the eyes of God. Thus, if one
mans title is valid, all are valid. If one is invalidated, all are invalidated.
Weld continued by accusing slavery of violating the Tenth Commandment as well: Thou shalt not covet thy
neighbors house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox,
nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbors. Weld commented, Who ever made human beings slaves,
without coveting them? Why take their time, labor, liberty, right of self-improvement, their right to acquire
property, to worship according to conscience, to search the Scriptures, to live with their families, and their right
to their own bodies, if they do not desire them? They covet them for purposes of gain, convenience, lust of
dominion, of sensual gratification, of pride and ostentation.
Belief in the Bible was not a prerequisite for viewing slavery as theft, however. On March 8, 1775, an essay
entitled Slavery in America appeared in the Thomas Paine, who was famously critical of the Bible. His essay
opened, That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for
gain, is rather lamentable than strange. Paine argued on the grounds of justice and humanity. Pennsylvania
Journal. It was written by the deist.
Todays Form of Slavery
Chattel slavery was driven from North American soil almost 150 years ago. A more subtle form of slavery has
arisen. Politicians declare themselves to be protectors of individual rights but governments at all levels local,
state and federal claim an ever increasing percentage of societys money and liberty. The government is
assuming the role of thief and slaveholder. Your property and the exercise of your faculties and time are not
mere societal niceties; they are your life. Yet the encroaching government declares, It is my money, not yours.
They are my faculties to control, not yours. It is my time, not yours. The government has become a
man-stealer.

The Efficiency of Natural Rights

The conception of social principles as problem-solving devices as morally neutral tools is meant merely to
explore the more practical aspects of natural rights, and to provide new answers to old criticisms, such as that
embodied in Hobbesian state-of-nature arguments.

The 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes is renowned for the phrase a war of all against all
which comes from his immensely influential book Leviathan. Here Hobbes developed the argument that
government was necessary, and therefore legitimate because otherwise man would live in a state of nature. He
wrote,
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and
consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported
by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much
force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and
which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short.
The Hobbesian contention is that an almost biological conflict of interests exists between human beings, who
must compete for the scarce goods necessary for survival. The idea of a natural conflict of interest between
men rather than a natural harmony is arguably the single most common argument for government and against
natural rights. How, critics demand, in a Hobbesian state of nature in which one mans life requires the death
of another, does it even make sense to speak of a natural right to life, liberty, or any other commodity? Nature
herself seems to argue against the possibility. Therefore, considerable government may be required.
Mises Reverses the Hobbesian Argument
In his touchstone work, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises
suggests an ingenious approach by which natural rights theory is strengthened by a Hobbesian worldview,
rather than destroyed by it.
In the section entitled Catallactics or Economics of the Market Society, Mises speaks of how widespread
economic cooperation within society springs directly from a Hobbesian state of nature. Indeed, he presents it
almost as a prerequisite for the evolution of a market society. Under the section entitled The Harmony of
Rightly Understood Interests, Mises argues that it is because many people or even all people want shoes,
that demand for these items inspires large-scale production. This, in turn, makes shoes more widely available
at lower costs than through small private production. Mises concluded, The fact that my fellow man wants to
acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier The catallactic competition of
those who, like me, are eager to have shoes makes shoes cheaper, not more expensive.
Mises summed up this insight, What makes friendly relations between human beings possible is the higher
productivity of the division of labor. It removes the natural conflict of interests. For where there is a division of
labor, there is no longer question of the distribution of a supply not capable of enlargement.the
intensification of social cooperation becomes paramount and obliterates all essential collisions. Catallactic [or
economic] competition is substituted for biological competition.
To those versed in Austrian economics, the preceding passage may sound like a trite statement of the
beneficent influence of the division of labor upon the availability of cheap goods. But Mises derives a deeper
message from the social dynamic. The very condition from which the irreconcilable conflicts of biological
competition arise viz., the fact that all people by and large strive after the same things is transformed into

a factor making for harmony of interests.This is the meaning of the theorem of the harmony of the rightly
understood interests of all members of the market society.
In other words, the Hobbesian war of all against all itself leads directly to, and perhaps even creates, the rightly
understood harmony of interests between all human beings.
Through this ingenious logic, Mises reverses the usual conclusion of state-of-nature critics. It is precisely
because man lives in a Hobbesian world that a market society naturally arises. Instead of killing each other to
secure the means of survival, human beings naturally cooperate out of pure selfishness. A free market society
offers them otherwise unimaginable access to cheap goods. As a peaceful arrangement, the market society
also provides the stability necessary to make long-range plans, such as raising a family.
In essence, Mises uses the division of labor as a principle of resolution, as a problem-solving device. He reveals
that social cooperation is a vastly more efficient means to achieve selfish desires than social conflict.
Principles as Problem-Solving Devices
Several decades earlier, another man advanced the idea that social principles are best viewed as
problem-solving devices. The 19th century individualist-anarchist Benjamin R. Tucker raised that approach
while considering the question What is property? Specifically, he wondered, What is intellectual property?.
Those with whom Tucker debated believed patents and copyright were a form of wealth and its ownership was
acquired either through discovery or through labor.
But several aspects of intellectual property bothered Tucker and led him to address the more fundamental
problem. He asked the question What is property? in a more philosophical sense. Why had the concept of
property originated within human society in the first place?
Tucker, like Mises, believed that ideas arose within man and persisted within society only because they served
a need; they answered a question.
He illustrated the purpose of ideas by postulating a universe parallel to our own which ran along different
metaphysical rules; that is, the rules of reality differed. The inhabitants of this alternate universe filled their
needs simply by wishing for goods and satisfaction. Food magically appeared in their hands, clothes
miraculously draped their limbs, and a bed popped into existence under their tired bodies. In such a society,
Tucker claimed that the concept of money would not arise simply because there was no need for it to do so.
That concept existed in our universe only because men had to solve the problem of transferring and storing
wealth; the parallel universe had no such problem.
Tucker used the same problem-solving approach to analyze the concept of property. He asked, What is it
about the nature of our universe and the nature of man which gives rise to the concept of property in the first
place?.
It arose, he concluded, as a means of solving conflicts caused by scarcity. In our universe, most goods are
scarce and this leads to a competition among human beings for their use a Hobbesian state of nature, if you
will. Since the same chair cannot be used in the same manner at the same time by two individuals, it was
necessary to determine who should use the chair. The concept of property resolved this problem. The owner of
the chair is the one who should determine its use. If it were possible, wrote Tucker, and if it had always
been possible, for an unlimited number of individuals to use to an unlimited extent and in an unlimited number
of places the same concrete thing at the same time, there would never have been any such thing as the

institution of property.
Here, again, the Hobbesian state-of-nature argument has been reversed. It was not government but the nature
of reality and man that gave rise to private property.
Conclusion
Whether they are viewed as problem-solving devices, moral principles or both (as I believe), natural rights can
be rationally defended.

Defining State and Society

Definitions may seem to be dry things but they offer the incalculable benefit of allowing you to know what you
and others are talking about. They are essential to understanding and preserving your freedom.
In George Orwells dystopian novel of the future, 1984, the totalitarian state Oceania knew the danger of
definitions; namely, they provided distinctions, filling the world of words with subtlety and color. And,
remember, the world of words is your ability to think. What cannot be expressed cannot be understood on
anything but a visceral level. Thats why Oceania developed Newspeak a language so stripped of
differentiation that there is only one word for pleasure: good. The only way to describe anything that is more
pleasure than something else is to add the word double or plus as a prefix to good. This paucity of
language would devastate the ability to understand or enjoy the complexity of being human.
Equally, it would enslave you. In Ayn Rands dystopian novel, Anthem, the word I has been eliminated from
society. The protagonist Equality 7-2521 is tormented by his inability to express to himself what is wrong with
his totalitarian world. He expresses it only after discovering the words I and mine. He exclaims I am. I think.
I will. My hands. My spirit. My sky. My forest. This earth of mine. What must I say besides? These are the
words. This is the answer.
The more clearly you think, the freer and richer life will be. Words and their definitions matter.

Two of the concepts upon which the analogy to slavery rests deserve deeper analysis: state and society (in
many instances, state can be used as a synonym for government).
Often it is far from clear what any given person means in using those words. Part of the confusion stems from
the fact that the definitions can shift dramatically depending upon a persons ideology. A Marxist who
advocates a strong state in order to redistribute wealth within society will have a different definition and
attitude toward the state than a classical liberal or individualist who advocates a minimal government and a
free market.
Within classical liberalism, the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer spearheaded an analysis of the two
terms in his pivotal work The State (1914). He defined the state as that summation of privileges and
dominating positions which are brought into being by extra-economic power. By extra-economic he meant
power that did not come from the act of creation or from free exchange. He defined society as the totality of
concepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man. These institutions include the
free market, churches, the family, charities, and the arts. Society is what is often called the private sphere.
Oppenheimer then contrasted what he called the political means with the economic means of acquiring
wealth or power.
The state uses the political means in other words, force to acquire wealth and power. It does not produce
wealth, nor does it trade for it in the marketplace. Instead, it takes wealth from the productive people who
constituted society.
By contrast, society uses the economic means in other words, creation and cooperation to produce
wealth. Any power acquired by those in society is the result of earned wealth. Because the state drains society,
Oppenheimer considered the two to be in basic conflict.
The American individualist Albert Jay Nock was one of the main conduits of Oppenheimers thought into the

United States. Nock captured his mentors political philosophy in a book entitled Our Enemy, The State (1935).
He wrote, Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to
differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators, and beneficiaries from those of a professional
criminal class. Both the state and professional criminals steal wealth from productive people and both are
willing to use force to do so.
At this point in his argument, Nock introduced a third concept: government. To Nock, government unlike the
state, provides a valuable service. It protects the individual rights of society, presumably in exchange for a fee,
such as that embodied in a reasonable tax rate.
Nock was not alone in distinguishing between government and the state, and in giving a nod to the former
while frowning upon the latter. Ayn Rand also embraced a limited government that would function as a night
watchman who unobtrusively protects the person and property of those within his territory.
The contemporary philosopher Tibor Machan offered a further definitional distinction between the state and
government. The state is an institution that makes a claim to territorial sovereignty that persists through time.
Thus, America as a state can trace its timeline from the American Revolution through the Constitution and up
to modern day. Its claim to legitimacy rests upon that timeline. By contrast, government consists of the actual
agencies and individuals who carry out the business of the state. Thus, a government agency such as the Post
Office might be entirely replaced for example, through privatization but that would not impact the
American state.
Does the State Equal the Government?
The discussion of individual freedom returns inevitably to how the key concepts of state, society, and
government are defined. In his introduction to The State, Oppenheimer declared, Others may call any form of
leadership and government or some other ideal the State. That is a matter of personal style. But the
differences in definition are not semantics or a matter of personal style. They involve deep ideological and
historical disagreements with equally profound implications.
The acceptance of a limited and legitimate government has been a litmus test and a dividing point within
libertarianism. Those who accept the concept of government are often called minarchists; those who reject
both the state and government or who draw no hard distinction between them are often considered to
be anarchists. The latter may not deny the value of some government services, like the post office or court
system, but they insist upon having them provided by the free market.
The Consent Theory of the State
John Lockes Two Treatises of Government is a pivotal document in the history of individualism. Philosopher
Karen Vaughn observed of his Second Treatise, Locke argues the case of individual natural rights, limited
government depending on the consent of the governed, separation of powers within government, and most
radically, the right of people within society to depose rulers who fail to uphold their end of the social contract.
Lockes work, from which both the French and American revolutions drew heavily, remains a touchstone for
consent theory within the classical liberal tradition.
Locke believed that God had given the world to all men in common, and he justified private property the
appropriation of a common good for personal use by arguing that each man had an ownership claim to his
or her own person. Based on this self-ownership, Locke argued,
The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he

removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and
joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.
The need to protect the property of life, liberty, and estate led men to form a government. In other words,
the institution arose as a shield against the conflicts that naturally occur when individuals accumulate property
in a world of scarce resources. Through an explicit social contract, men relinquished to the state the right to
adjudicate their own disputes. For its part, the state pledged to rule in a manner that secured mens claim to
their property; for example, through inheritance laws. Thus, for Locke, the existence of private property is
almost caused by the government.
Locke rejected the idea that the initial consent to the state, which was rendered by free individuals, could bind
their children and succeeding generations. Instead, Locke developed a doctrine of tacit consent, which did bind
even people who did not explicitly consent. The doctrine claims that each person who lives in a community and
accepts its benefits is tacitly agreeing to the rules by which the community is governed.
Withdrawal of tacit consent is always possible. A man can relinquish his estate and leave the community,
thus putting himself back into a state of nature in relationship to it. However, as long as he occupies land over
which the government has jurisdiction, he tacitly accepts that jurisdiction. After all, Locke argued, the good
title of any property a person inherits comes from the government that has protected that wealth and
regulated its just transfer to him. A similar argument could be made concerning wealth accumulated through
contract: the contract has validity only because of the regulatory benefits provided by the government.
In essence, Locke believed that a civilized and satisfying society could not exist without government to
adjudicate conflicts and to provide a legal context for property. Only when government ceases to fulfill its part
of the social contract is the citizenry justified in rebelling against it. Otherwise, government (or the state) and
society are engaged in a cooperative endeavor.
Whether or not Locke actually believed there had ever been an original government formed with the explicit
consent of everyone over which it claimed jurisdiction is a matter of debate. Clearly Locke used the contract as
an analytical tool to explore the circumstances under which civil government could be justified. His theory can
be critiqued or embraced on either level.
The Conquest Theory of the State
The conquest theory of the state stands in sharp contrast to the Lockean model and attempts to ground the
primitive state in historical fact rather than political conjecture. A common expression of the conquest theory
runs as follows: Originally there were agricultural tribes that settled in certain areas where they became
dependent upon the land. Roving nomads, who were perhaps herders, waged war on the more sedentary
tribes for the obvious economic benefits. At first the nomads killed and pillaged, but they discovered it was in
their long-term economic interest to enslave and exact tribute from the conquered populace instead.
The more extreme versions of conquest theory conclude that all states originate in conflict, not consent. More
moderate forms argue that warfare plays a defining role in the formation and continued sustenance of the
state. Murray Rothbard in For A New Liberty advanced a modified version of the theory, which conceded that
some states may have evolved in a different manner, but contended that the conquest theory was the typical
genesis of the state. Thus, in its foundation and development, the state was never meant to preserve justice,
property rights, or the peace. The motive behind the state was and is the desire to establish sovereignty and
achieve wealth through the use of force. Any benefits that a state provides are tangential and non-essential to
its nature.

In arguing for the conquest theory, Rothbard relied heavily upon Oppenheimer who argued for what he called
an economic impulse in man. Oppenheimer believed that material need is the prime motivator of human
beings and that both wealth and progress are produced by economic means, not by political ones. He rooted
the origin of the state in the desire of non-productive people to benefit from economic producers by using the
political means. He posited six stages through which a conquering group typically passes in order to become a
state. At first, a warlike group raids and plunders a vulnerable group. Second, the victimized group ceases to
actively resist. In response, the raiders now merely plunder the surplus, leaving their victims alive and with
enough food to ensure the production of future wealth to plunder. Eventually, the two groups come to
acknowledge mutual interests, such as protecting the crops from a third group. Third, the victims offer tribute
to the raiders, eliminating the need for violence. Fourth, the two groups merge territorially. Fifth, the warlike
group assumes the right to arbitrate disputes.
Oppenheimer described the last stage in which both groups develop the habit of rule:
The two groups, separated to begin with, and then united on one territory, are at first merely laid
alongside one another, then are scattered through one another. [S]oon the bonds of relations united
the upper and lower strata.
Thus the state, which originated from external conquest, evolves into an agency of continuing internal
conquest by which one group or a coalition of groups use the political means to attain wealth and power
at the expense of those who actually labor. In this view, the state arises and maintains itself as the enemy of
society.
The question becomes: what does the state do with a peaceful individual who rejects its jurisdictional claims
over his property and person? Locke would tell the individual to leave. Others maintain that to grant the state
such territorial jurisdiction is to grant it de facto ownership of the land; the individual whose name is on a
government deed is merely getting zero rent in exchange for obedience. They question how the state can
acquire such monopoly jurisdiction simply in return for providing a service, even the important service of
protecting property. After all, a doctor who saves your life does not acquire a continuing and monopoly claim
over your body.
The answer to the question posed above, and related ones, may well lie in using words such as state and
society in a clearly defined and precise manner.

Human Ignorance and Social Engineering

Throughout most of intellectual history, society has been considered to be the result of someones design. In
his multi-volume Law, Legislation, and Liberty, the social theorist F.A. Hayek referred to this position as
constructivist rationalism and argued vigorously against it. In his 1974 Nobel Memorial Lecture, titled The
Pretence of Knowledge, Hayek expressed a different view of how society developed:
The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a
lesson in humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in mens fatal striving to control
society a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the
destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of
individuals.
Hayek opposed any attempt to engineer that is, centrally to plan and to coordinate the structure of
society. He believed that such engineering actually destroyed rather than created society, which was the result
of human action but not of human design. Alongside the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Hayek provided
what are arguably the best critiques of the constructivist theories and policies that have grown in popularity
during the twentieth century.
Both Hayek and Mises had witnessed the devastation of classical liberalism by two world wars, but most
particularly by World War I. Wartime governments had clamped centralized control over the private sector to
ensure a continuing flow of armaments and the other goods deemed necessary for victory. Governments had
inflated their money supplies to pay for massive military buildups. And war had strangled the flow of free trade
that classical liberals considered to be a prerequisite to peace, prosperity, and freedom. In short, both Hayek
and Mises had watched twentieth-century statism replacing nineteenth-century classical liberalism.
If war is the health of the state, as the American individualist Randolph Bourne declared, then Hayek and Mises
witnessed the impact of an obvious corollary: namely, that war is the death of individual liberty. And social
engineering was a key mechanism through which that freedom was destroyed. Indeed, one of Misess earliest
works, Nation, State, and Economy (1919), analyzed the disastrous consequences of the central planning
ushered in by World War I.
But Hayek and Mises did not merely oppose social engineering on utilitarian grounds. Independently, they each
evolved complex and sophisticated systems of social theory to explain how the institutions of society naturally
evolved. They maintained that the institutions of a healthy society were the collective and unintended results
of human action. Complex social phenomena such as law, language, and money were especially the
unintended consequences of individual interactions. For example, no committee or central authority decided
to invent human speech, let alone to design a language as complicated as English. Acting solely to achieve their
own ends, individuals began making sounds to facilitate getting what they wanted from other people. Thus,
speech was the result of human action but not of human design, and it naturally evolved into language. The
evolution may not have proceeded with scientific efficiency, but it was efficient enough to permit the
development of civilization. The efficiency of government programs suffers by comparison.
Yet constructivists argued that an unplanned society is wasteful and chaotic. With sufficient knowledge, they
could engineer a perfectly efficient society. There would be no more surpluses or scarcities. Stock markets
would not crash, and currencies would not fluctuate. Perhaps society could even be designed so that its
members walked in unison toward desirable social goals, just as they had marched together toward victory in
wartime.
Hayek bluntly stated that the knowledge constructivists sought was unattainable. It was not possible to plan

the dynamics of tomorrow based on how people acted yesterday. People were unpredictable. Human beings
were fundamentally different from the physical objects examined by the hard sciences. A scientist could learn
everything he needed to know about the movement of an object, and his knowledge would not necessarily
change over time. But human beings acted on psychological factors and motivations that were hidden, often
even from themselves. Society did not consist of objects that could be neatly categorized and made to obey the
laws of science. Society consisted of erratic and unpredictable individuals.
Mises made a similar point in regard to monetary theory. He demonstrated that even the seemingly objective
tool of monetary calculation the sort that people use informally to decide, say, whether to ask for a raise
is ineffective for broader social planning. At best, prices were a historical record; the price of bread is a past
price, even if the past was very recent. This information could create anticipation of what the price of bread
might be tomorrow, but it could predict nothing. A bread shortage might make the price skyrocket. Moreover,
using yesterday to engineer tomorrow went against a fundamental tenet of human action: the principle of
inevitable change.
In Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949), Mises commented, Human action originates change. As far
as there is human action there is no stability, but ceaseless alteration. The prices of the market are historical
facts expressive of a state of affairs that prevailed at a definite instant of the irreversible historical process. In
the imaginary and, of course, unrealizable state of rigidity and stability there are no changes to be
measured. In the actual world of permanent change there are no fixed points.
From Nation, State, and Economy through to his magnum opus, Human Action, Mises eloquently argued
against the possibility of acquiring enough knowledge to engineer society. Equally, from Hayeks work The
Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (1952, but apparently based on work
he did in 1919 and 1920) to his far more popular The Road to Serfdom (1944), he integrated such diverse fields
as epistemology and economics to form a social theory that denied any validity to central planning.
Throughout the work of these theorists, two closely related concepts emerge again and again: methodological
individualism and spontaneous order. These concepts are key to understanding why Hayek and Mises so
adamantly rejected social engineering.
Methodological Individualism
In Human Action, Mises offered a description of what he called The Principle of Methodological
Individualism: First we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals. If we scrutinize the
meaning of the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn everything about the
actions of collective wholes. For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual
members actions.
Mises claimed that collective wholes such as the family or society are nothing more than the sum
total of their individual members. Such wholes were abstractions useful for indicating the interaction of people
in a specific context. Family indicates one set of interactions, bridge club another.
In reducing group functioning to its most basic element the acts of individuals Mises did not deny the
importance of collective wholes. Quite the contrary. Mises explained, Methodological individualism, far from
contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to
analyze their becoming and their disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation. And it chooses
the only method fitted to solve this problem satisfactorily.
In other words, methodological individualism was a powerful analytical tool that could be used to discover the

principles on which a group of people interacted. It was the best method by which to understand society.
Misess stress upon methodological individualism did not arise in a vacuum but rather in response to the
theory of social holism that had become popular in the early twentieth century. Social holists claimed that
collective wholes had an existence far greater than the sum of their individual parts. They drew parallels
between the fields of biology and sociology. They argued that just as higher level principles of explanation were
needed to describe a complex biological organism than were used to explain its constituent molecules, so too
with human society. New principles and characteristics emerged within a society that were entirely different
from those that applied to individuals. In other words, there were rules that applied only to collective wholes
and not to individual members. Further, these emergent rules functioned along scientific lines and responded
to methods of planning.
The Individual as Abstraction
With the rise of Marxism, those who favored methodological individualism were often accused of atomism or
reductionism. Marxists went so far as to assert that it was the individual, and not society, that was the true
abstraction. In its extreme form, these social holists even denied that the individual existed without society. As
Mises observed, The notion of an individual, say the critics, is an empty abstraction. Real man is necessarily
always a member of a social whole.
Karl Marx argued this point by using a sort of Robinson Crusoe example. Marx contended that an individual
who grew up in isolation on a desert island would not be a human being. The crux of his argument was that
human beings are social organisms social constructs, if you will who cannot be lifted from their defining
context and remain human beings. The adult Robinson Crusoe was clearly a human being, but his humanity
resulted from a prior history of socialization. Language, thought, art all that made Crusoe human had
resulted from his life in community. Reversing Misesian logic, Marx claimed that the collective whole called
society created its individual members, who could be understood only by examining the rules of that society.
Marx went an extra step and tried to extend the principles and methodology of the hard sciences such as
predictability and control to society.
Classical liberals countered that a person who had been raised in utter isolation would still be a human being.
For example, he would have a scale of preferences and would act to achieve the highest one first. True,
without social interaction, major potentialities within the persons humanity would never develop or be
expressed. For example, there would be no reason to develop language skills and no possibility of becoming a
parent. Were the isolated individual to be rescued and placed within society, however, his unexpressed
potentials might well emerge. But whatever characteristics developed would emerge from his own inherent
potential as a human being and they would be the result of the individual interactions he experienced. The
characteristics would not emerge because a collective whole called society defined them into existence.
Classical liberals did not dispute the claim that groups had a cumulative dynamic that was different from the
dynamic of man in isolation. After all, only in society did intellectual and economic exchanges arise. But they
believed that the differences could be explained by breaking the group dynamic down into the intricate
interactions of the individuals it comprised. For example, everything about a conversation could be broken
down into the statements, body language, and other actions of the individuals involved. Nothing about the
conversation required further principles of explanation.
This methodological approach worked in analyzing even extremely complex collective wholes such as the
state. Everything the state did or was could be reduced to individual actions. As Mises explained, The
hangman, not the state, executes a criminal. It is the meaning of those concerned that discerns in the
hangmans action an action of the state. Individuals who look at the hangman see the state in action only

because an abstraction known as the state provides a context for his action. Equally, people never truly see
or hear a group conversation. All they see or hear are individuals speaking, and we label the sum of their
exchange a group conversation.
Methodological individualism had profound implications for social-engineering theory. If collective wholes
were a mental process within individuals rather than concrete entities with independent existence, then it
made no sense to claim there were unique rules and characteristics that applied to collectives and not to
individuals. Methodological individualism removed the collective wholes from an objective realm ruled by
scientific principles and returned it to the subjective realm of human judgment and preference. Instead of
being able to design social institutions, such as banks, to run along scientific principles, social engineers were
reduced to regulating individuals. They were engaged in planning how human beings would express their
preferences in the future a knowledge that individuals themselves rarely possessed.
And yet, a question remains. Without planning, how can society improve? Part of the answer is to be found in
the second concept running throughout the work of Hayek and Mises.
Spontaneous Order
During the eighteenth century, theorists like Adam Smith began to examine the impact that the unintended
consequences of human action had upon society. These were the collective consequences that accrued as a
result of people pursuing their own individual interests. For example, if twenty people walked the shortest
distance across a field, a crude path through the field would be established. But forging the path would be an
unintended consequence of each persons conscious goal to reach the other side quickly.
Smith came to believe that society and its institutions could be best understood by reference to such
unintended consequences. Consider the price of yesterdays bread. No one legislated what you were willing to
pay for bread yesterday. That price resulted from such unpredictable factors as how highly you prized bread
twenty-four hours ago. The social institution of price, therefore, had been established spontaneously. It was
also self-correcting; that is, the price spontaneously and rapidly fluctuated to reflect changing factors, such as
the availability of bread. And because such changes were unpredictable, only a spontaneous response not a
preplanned one could adequately respond.
No contemporary writer has explored the idea of spontaneous and self-correcting social institutions in greater
depth than Hayek. In his essay Principles of a Liberal Social Order, Hayek tackled an objection he often
encountered. He wrote, Much of the opposition to a system of freedom under general laws arises from the
inability to conceive of an effective co-ordination of human activities without deliberate organization by a
commanding intelligence (Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Society, 1960).
For social holists, order and efficiency were concepts that seemed to be wedded together. Mises and
Hayek agreed, but they used a different definition of order. For social holists, the word seemed to conjure up
quasi-military visions of society marching shoulder to shoulder toward a common goal. It was embodied in
five-year plans that reduced the functioning of society to mathematical equations. By contrast, the order
espoused by Mises and Hayek was a spontaneous one in which individuals pursued their own diverse interests
without coordination by a central authority.
What does such an order look like? A classic example is the New York Stock Exchange, which was created as a
location at which stocks could be bought and sold Monday to Friday from 9:30 am to 4 pm. No overriding
authority set prices, volume limits, etc. These were established by pockets of people who pursued their own
preferences in a manner resembling chaos. In yelling out on the floor that he was willing to buy ABC stock at X
price, a trader intended to pursue nothing more than the preferences of his client. But an unintended

consequence of his action was the establishment of an overall price for ABC stock.
Spontaneous order can resemble chaos. In Hayeks words, it is the sort of order whose justification in the
particular instant may not be recognizable, and which will often appear unintelligible and irrational
(Individualism True and False in Individualism and Economic Order, 1948). Ironically, this resemblance to
chaos may indicate an aspect of why spontaneous order is efficient. After all, the shifting circumstances to
which this sort of order responds have no logical or predictable order. Just as the trading floor of a stock
exchange cannot be run according to Miss Mannerss rules of etiquette, so too does a dynamic society require
institutions with fluidity.
Indeed, the main advantage of a decentralized system of decision making may well be its ability to adjust
constantly and quickly to shifting circumstances. Where social engineering demands a stable future and a
godlike knowledge of the present, spontaneous order recognizes and embodies the inevitability of change and
the inadequacy of human knowledge.
An individual knows as much as it is possible to know about his own preferences and future acts. The further
you move away from the individual, the less reliable the data become and the less perfect the consequences
of decision making.
Diverging from a Common Point
There is a sense in which both Hayek and Mises based their arguments for individual liberty on human
ignorance. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek acknowledges that the need for freedom rests chiefly
on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the
achievement of our ends and welfare depends. Ironically, constructivists make much the same argument for
their position: human beings are not naturally perfect, therefore society must be engineered and designed.
From a point of common agreement namely, the inadequacy of human knowledge the two sides reach
diametrically opposed conclusions.

SECTION II
APPLYING THEORY TO THE ISSUES
A theory is a connected body of ideas that are expressed as statements or propositions. Theories political,
psychological, economic, religious, aesthetic or otherwise constantly confront you, although they may be
expressed in such popular terms that you do not recognize them as such; they may simply seem to be the
status quo. For example, a TV news anchor may casually remark upon the need for democracy in Afghanistan.
Whether or not he is correct, he is expressing a political theory in which democracy is superior to a tribal
system.
Almost every story discussed as news in the media cannot only be expressed as a theory but also is likely to
have a complicated network of other issues or questions beneath the surface. Consider the proposition:
teenagers should be saved from nicotine addiction by raising the age for purchasing cigarettes to 20 years old.
This statement may seem to be nothing more than common sense mixed with a concern with childrens health.
But banning the sale or even the advertising of cigarettes to teens involves taking a position on many more
issues, if only implicitly. Those questions include: What is the age of consent?; And, what role should
government play (if any) in preventing addiction, especially pre-emptively? Should the government or parents
be responsible for the oversight of childrens health? Moreover, a ban on advertising cigarettes would involve
further prohibiting freedom of speech in commerce. A ban would also presuppose the validity of highly
questioned scientific studies, some of which claim a cause-and-effect link between tobacco and cancer. The
preceding are a mere sprinkling of the issues that can lie beneath the surface of what appears to be an
innocuous statement.
Unpacking the implications of the statements with which you are flooded is a daunting task. It can be hard
work to translate statements into their theoretical form, and then to sort through the questions being taken
for granted. It is also risky work because a similar skepticism should be applied to all theories, including ones of
which you may be fond. For better or worse, whenever you dissect a theory and hold it up to compare with
reality, you run the risk of being proven wrong. Or right.
But the process is necessary. Comparing theory to fact and applying the results to issues is where the political
tires hit the road. It tells us how well a set of ideas explains the world and lets us know whether the theory
helps or hinders in detecting and resolving problems. If a theory is rooted in reality and the nature of man, then
it should take us in the right direction. If it does not, then the brakes should be applied.
Unfortunately, the average person will receive little assistance from todays mainstream intelligentsia. Modern
theorists have largely divorced themselves from the everyday concerns of average people. Specialized
scientists talk to themselves in highly technical language. Economists do mathematical modeling to prove
that reducing the debt requires more borrowing. Politicians pass telephone book length legislation that they do
not bother to read. Psychologists do meta-studies that is, the integration of data from other studies and
draw conclusions without ever dealing with real people; field researchers propose projects based on what they
believe will receive tax-funding and render results they believe will bring more; and, then, laws and policies
affecting real people are based on their work. And least connected of all to reality are the specialists called
philosophers.
Average people are on their own.

Instead of storming the Bastille, the masses today should storm the ivory towers of universities. We should
yank theory out of academia and throw it back into the streets where it belongs. It belongs there alongside
truth because that is where injustice happens, it is where the marketplace feeds people, it is where those who
struggle are seeking answers to why the world is falling apart. Theory and principles were never meant to be
the playthings of an elite class who tell the masses that they are too ignorant to understand sophisticated
concepts like justice, economics, or even their own self-interest. Justice, economics and the public good must
be fed through their own elite understanding and regurgitated in understandable form. And, yet, the elites do
not even know what the price of bread is.
The average person understands concepts like justice and their own self-interest very well indeed. Appeals to
authority by experts can be appropriate; a physicist may argue from specialized knowledge about particle
accelerators. But on concepts like justice or issues like the public school system, he is no more a specialist than
every parent in America. Unlike physics, moral theory and political issues are not based on education or data
that is inaccessible to the average person. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to understand that murder
is wrong or that your children are illiterate. First and foremost, the application of theory to issues should be
conducted by the people who live with them and bear the consequences.
The articles in this section do exactly that: apply theory to a range of issues.

Redeeming the Industrial Revolution

The first step in applying theory to issues is often to strip away the existing explanations. In other words, it is
necessary to provide a critique of what is currently the most prevalent approach to the issue. This is similar to
clearing away underbrush in order to replant.
Although the Industrial Revolution is properly viewed as a historical event or period, it is also an issue because
todays predominant interpretation is widely used to discredit concepts such as capitalism or industrialization
based upon their allegedly wretched record. Quite the contrary is true of that record. And so the intellectual
stripping begins.

A destructive myth has wrapped itself around the concept of laissez-faire capitalism the economic system in
which the free market is allowed to function in precisely that manner freely. The myth is that laissez-faire
capitalism harms the vulnerable within society; specifically, it is said to harm women and children by cruelly
exploiting their labor. The opposite is true. Laissez-faire capitalism offers the one element that the vulnerable
need most to survive and to advance: choice. The most liberating choice individuals can have is the ability to
negotiate their own labor, and so support themselves rather than be dependent upon anyone else for the food
going into their mouths.
Using this myth of destructive capitalism as their entering assumption, many historians have been extremely
harsh in analyzing one of the most liberating phenomena in Western history: the Industrial Revolution. This
harshness comes despite the massive evidence of how beneficially the Industrial Revolution impacted the
world. From the 18th through the 19th century, human knowledge and efficiency surged forward in
technology, science, industry, medicine, transportation, trade, and life-changing innovations like cheap cotton
clothing. Within two centuries, the worldwide per capita income is estimated to have increased tenfold and the
population sixfold. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. stated, For the first time in
history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth.
Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before.
The dramatic advance was achieved without social engineering, centralized control or a declaration of war. It
came from allowing human creativity and self-interest to run free at a glorious gallop. No wonder the greatest
critics of the Industrial Revolution are also great advocates of central planning: namely, socialists. The Industrial
Revolution proves them wrong and sits in the midst of history like a rebuking elephant.
There is no doubt that abuses occurred during the Industrial Revolution and they should not be ignored. Some
can be laid at the door of governmental attempts to harness the energy and profits of the marketplace. Other
abuses occurred simply because every society and economic arrangement includes some inhumane or amoral
people who will act badly, especially for profit; this is not a criticism of the Industrial Revolution but of human
nature. Yet another reason for abuses or, at least, for unfortunate social circumstances is the fact that
economic advances far outstripped changes in the Victorian attitudes of the day. In the 18th century, women
and children were viewed as second-class citizens and, sometimes, as chattel. Again, this is not the fault of the
Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the economic revolution was largely responsible for forcing the culture and law
to dramatically change, and so to facilitate the advance of womens rights in the late 19th century. When
women left the countryside to seek employment and education they became a social force that could not be
denied.
Unfortunately, the salutary connection between laissez-faire capitalism and the social improvements in
womens rights has not merely been lost but categorically denied. During the latter part of the 20st century,
mainstream feminists who were largely socialist in ideology crusaded to reverse the engine that

contributed so heavily to womens equal status. Instead of championing freedom in the market place, they
successfully embedded privilege for women into it through laws such as affirmative action. And they did so in
the name of equality.
A significant part of this process was the demonization of laissez-faire capitalism as a tool of oppression that
allegedly had to be blunted by laws, lawsuits, and labor regulations. The Industrial Revolution became an
intellectual casualty of this demonization. In books and movies, lectures and university courses, the Industrial
Revolution has been portrayed as the Great Satan in regard to the welfare of women and children. The
portrayal relies upon the misrepresentation of fact and upon flawed ideology.
Misrepresentation of Facts Regarding Children
Hideous images immediately come to mind when children and the Industrial Revolution are mentioned in the
same sentence: a five-year-old being lowered by a rope into a coal mine, skeletal children working at unsafe
textile mills, Dickenss Oliver proffering a wooden bowl as he asks for another scoop of gruel. These images are
used to condemn the free market and the Industrial Revolution; sometimes they are used to praise the
humanitarian politicians who passed child labor laws to curb the cruelty. This analysis draws powerfully upon
the understandable horror that decent people feel at the exploitation of any children. But it is seriously flawed.
One thing the analysis misses is a key distinction. Early 19th-century Britain had two forms of child labor: free
children, and parish, or pauper, children who came under government auspices. Historians J.L. and Barbara
Hammond, whose work on the British Industrial Revolution and child labor is considered definitive, recognized
this distinction. The free-market economist Lawrence W. Reed, in his essay Child Labor and the British
Industrial Revolution, stressed the importance of the distinction. He wrote, Free-labor children lived with
their parents or guardians and worked during the day at wages agreeable to those adults. But parents often
refused to send their children into unusually harsh or dangerous work situations. Reed notes, Private factory
owners could not forcibly subjugate free labour children; they could not compel them to work in conditions
their parents found unacceptable.
By contrast, parish children were under the direct authority of government officials. Parish workhouses had
existed for centuries but sympathy for the downtrodden had been considerably lessened by the fact that taxes
for poor relief in 1832 were over five times higher than they had been in 1760. (Gertrude Himmelfarbs book
The Idea of Poverty chronicles this shift in attitude toward the poor from compassion to condemnation.) Thus,
in 1832, partly at the behest of labor-hungry manufacturers, the Royal Poor Law Commission began an inquiry
into the the practical operation of the laws for the relief of the poor. Its report divided the poor into two
basic categories: lazy paupers who received governmental aid; and the industrious working poor who were
self-supporting. The result was the Poor Law of 1834, which statesman Benjamin Disraeli called an
announcement that poverty is a crime.
The Poor Law replaced outdoor relief (subsidies and handouts) with poor houses in which pauper children were
virtually imprisoned. There, the conditions were made purposely harsh to discourage people from applying for
entry. Nearly every parish in Britain had a stockpile of abandoned workhouse children who were virtually
bought and sold to factories; they experienced the deepest horrors of child labor.
Consider the wretched position of the scavenger in textile factories. Typically, scavengers were young
children about six years old who salvaged loose cotton from under the machinery. Because the machinery
was running, the job was dangerous and terrible injuries were commonplace. Fortunately for businessmen
willing to use the state to compel child labor, the government had no qualms about sending parish children to
work under running machines. Most of the parish children had no alternative to such work other than a life of
starvation or crime.

It is no coincidence that the first industrial novel published in Britain was Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy by
Frances Trollope. Michael was apprenticed to an agency for pauper children. Nor is it a coincidence that Oliver
Twist was not abused by his parents nor by a private shopkeeper, but by brutal workhouse officials in
comparison to whom Fagin was a bleeding-heart liberal. Remember that, at the age of twelve, with his family
in debtors prison, Dickens himself was a pauper child who slaved at a factory. Reed observes, the first Act in
Britain that applied to factory children was passed to protect these very parish apprentices, not free labor
children. The Act was explicit in doing so.
Thus, in advocating the regulation of child labor, social reformers asked government to remedy abuses for
which government itself was largely responsible. Once more, government was a disease masquerading as its
own cure.
Misleading Ideology Regarding Women
The flawed presentation of facts regarding child labor and the Industrial Revolution is paralleled by the flawed
ideology by which the status of women is analyzed. Arguably, women were the primary economic beneficiaries
of the Industrial Revolution. This was largely due to their low economic status in pre-Revolutionary times; they
simply had more to gain than men.
When women poured from the countryside into the cities to find work, they did so for many reasons. Again,
government and law played a key role. For example, several Enclosure Acts restricted the amount of land to
which poor laborers had access to farm and raise animals. In short, the Enclosure Acts deprived them of
economic alternatives. By driving a glut of poor workers into the cities where they were forced to compete
with each other for jobs, the Acts also lowered the wages for manufacturing and menial labor. And yet people
did flood into cities because they considered the menial work to be the best alternative available to them.
Some women undoubtedly left rural life simply because of the comparative independence offered by city
opportunities. Some escaped from brutal marriages and families or from an otherwise dismal lifestyle. The
working and living conditions in cities could be terrible. Many women turned to prostitution; even those with
steady work were often forced to prostitute themselves on the side to supplement starvation wages.
As terrible as the conditions might have been, however, a fundamental fact must not be ignored. The women
chose to come to cities and to stay there. To the extent that the choice was a forced one, the finger should be
pointed at government and not the free market. Nevertheless, the women themselves believed that flight into
factories was their best alternative. Otherwise they would have not have made the journey nor would they
have stayed. To say the Industrial Revolution harmed women is to ignore the demonstrated preference they
themselves expressed. It is to ignore the voice of their choices.
A substantial portion of gender and mainstream feminist history is an attempt to ignore the voices of actual
women and of the choices they made. Or, rather, feminist historians seek to ignore women whose voices do
not express realities that support their own ideological assumptions. A common method of dismissing womens
inconvenient choices while, at the same time, not appearing to do so is to reinterpret the reality that
surrounded those choices. Then, the reinterpretation can be used to prove that the choices were not free but
actually coerced acts.
Historical reinterpretation of facts can a valid and valuable process. For example, historical understanding
would be nothing but enriched by evaluating the impact of the Enclosure Acts upon the flight of women into
factories. How many went simply because the government closed off the option of accessing formerly common
land that could have sustained them?

A different type of reinterpretation is at work in feminist histories, however. It is based on ideology rather than
fact.
A key work in understanding their historical analysis is Friedrich Engelss much-quoted and immensely
influential book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Engels believed womens
oppression sprang from the nuclear family but he dismissed the notion that all forms of the family had
subordinated women throughout history. Instead, he blamed capitalism for destroying the prestige that
women had once enjoyed within the familial arrangement. Engels wrote,
That woman was the slave of man at the commencement of society is one of the most absurd
notions. Women were not only free, but they held a highly respected position in the early stages of
civilization and were the great power among the clans.
Thus, preIndustrial Revolutionary times were romanticized as a period in which women were empowered. By
contrast, Engels claimed that industrialization caused a separation between home and productive work
through which the inequity known as the nuclear family evolved. Womens labor became subordinate to
mens; in fact, the purpose of her labor was to enable that of men through providing for male need. This, in
turn, allowed the men to feed the capitalist machine as exploited laborers. Presumably, the undeniable
advances for women ushered in by the Industrial Revolution including impressively extended life span
were purchased at too high a cost.
Conclusion
The Industrial Revolution has been slandered. Whether the slander is due to a misrepresentation (or ignorance)
of fact or due to the imposition of ideology, the Industrial Revolution should bring a libel suit against history.
Or, rather, it should demand an apology from the majority of historians. Without dismissing the injustices that
inevitably arise during any period, the Industrial Revolution established the freedom and prosperity to which
people today have become so accustomed that they can treat the source of it with contempt. Applause is
appropriate.

The Modern Union Versus Workers Rights

Modern unions are widely viewed as protectors of the working man when they are actually usurpations of
working peoples rights. The modern union is a misunderstood institution that arose during the Franklin D.
Roosevelt presidential years as a coalition between Big Business, Big Labor and government. There were
tensions within the coalition, to be sure, but each party benefited from the legal privileges given to some
workers and at the expense of others. The main victim of the modern union was and is the average worker
whose right to negotiate his own labor on his own terms was usurped.
I speak as a member of the lumpenconsumeriat. Lumpen is the plural of the German word Lump, which means
ragamuffin. In Marxist theory, the term lumpenproletariat became (in)famous and originally referred to the
lowest rung of people within society. Today it has become diluted through common use so that
lumpenproletariat usually refers to the great unwashed masses. It is vague about the people who fit into that
category, and yet still conveys the same sense of members being societys underclass or underbelly akin to
the term white trash without being so racially specific.
I am proud to be a modern version of the lumpenproletariat: the lumpenconsumeriat. I am proud to be in the
ranks of the great washed masses of everyday consumers who bathe before proceeding into the world to spend
hard-earned cash on food, gas, heat, shelter and medical care. The lumpenconsumeriat consists of working
class people who are an economic underclass due to the self-enriching actions of government, of individuals
who slurp at the tax-trough, and so-called capitalists who make a living off government privilege rather than
the free market.
We are lied to as a matter of policy by politicians who vow on Bibles and the Constitution to protect our
interests. It is in their interest to have us believe the economy is going through a little burble but, otherwise, it is
just peachy. And, for them, I am sure it is. I am sure their children dont lack for medical care, the best food, new
shoes These people tell the lumpenconsumeriat: Pay no attention to that printing press behind the curtain so
that you dont understand that the inflated US currency has rendered every dollar you possess worth only a
fraction compared to a few years ago.
Dont listen to any more lies. Believe what you see at grocery stores, gas stations and every other place you buy
necessities for your family. One of the biggest lies they tell you is that the modern union is an expression of
workers rights.

The current recession shines a bright and harsh light on public sector unions due to the unsustainable burden
that their salaries, pensions and other benefits puts on the shoulders of taxpayers. Most commentators
distinguish public sector unions from private sector ones as though the two are fundamentally or, at least,
substantially different. But the vested interests and history of the two types of union are much the same. Both
are expressions of what might be called the modern union, which came to dominate the American labor
movement through New Deal legislation in the 1930s.
Distinctions between the two types of union should be acknowledged, however. There is no question that the
tax funding of public sector unions creates important differences from its private sector counterparts. For one
thing, private sector unions negotiate in the context of limited money; if they demand too much, then the
company cannot compete against rivals and union members could find themselves unemployed. By contrast
public sector unions have no clear limit on available money and government has no competitor. Thus public
sector unions receive higher compensation in all its manifestations, including job safety. No wonder they
remain loud voices for increasing the taxation through which the government sustains their wages and

benefits.
By contrast, reducing public sector wages and benefits has become a popular cause within the general public.
This is largely because private sector workers (even unionized ones) make considerably less than the
government employees whom they are heavily taxed to support. In December 2009 the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported that government employees at the state and local levels earned an average of $39.60 an
hour (including benefits), while private workers earned $27.42 over 30 percent less. Moreover, according to
the BLS, private workers have a 20 percent chance of losing their jobs in any given year; public workers have a
6 percent chance.
Although reducing the cost of public sector unions is an increasingly popular cause, reducing the power of
unions to negotiate is not. For example, collective bargaining rights still have general support with the
public. There are at least two reasons for this. First, all modern unions, private or public, benefit from legal
privileges such as collective bargaining and the government certification that bestows a virtual bargaining
monopoly upon specific unions within specific industries or companies. Second, such prerogatives are widely
viewed as workers rights to be cherished in the same manner as constitutional rights.
But is it accurate to equate union powers such as collective bargaining with human rights or even with workers
rights? Is it accurate to view public and private sector unions as distinct rather than as fundamentally the
same? The answers lie in history.
What Is a Union?
But, first, it is important to define unions.
In a free-market context a union is nothing more than a collective agency through which workers protect
common interests and secure common advantages by negotiation or some other form of persuasion, such as
boycotts or peaceful strikes. Individual workers assign their right to negotiate to a collective agency in much
the same manner as they might assign a limited power of attorney in a class action suit; no one is forced to join
or to pay dues. Thus the union is a collective expression of the individual right to free association and of every
individual to contract his own labor. On the other side of the equation, employers remain free to decline to
negotiate and to hire replacement workers.
Many would consider the foregoing definition of unions to be unrealistic. In his article The Myth of the
Voluntary Union, economist Thomas DiLorenzo argues that those who believe unions can be voluntary are
falling into an easy trap detached from any reality and history. He insists that violence against competitors
has always been an inherent feature of unionism, even apart from the violence of State-imposed legislative
privileges that unions enjoy. (Emphasis added.) DiLorenzo points specifically to the legal power of collective
bargaining and to a history of brutal strikes as proof of the inherent violence of unions.
Yet it is not clear that violence is inherent in unions.
Political Evolution
Could unions exist without legal privileges? Could they function in a society where employment relationships
were not mandated, where there were no restrictions on self-employment or home industry? In short, are
free-market unions possible? Again, the answer is in history, and the answer is yes.
The current paradigm of a modern union is rooted in the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was
created through New Deal legislation, especially the Wagner Act, which established the legal right of workers
within an industry or company to unionize the entire operation if a majority of them voted in favor of doing so.

The entire process is an attack upon the free market and workers rights. For example a modern union receives
government certification in order to engage in collective bargaining. In other words, the government
authorizes a union to be the sole representative of a set of workers and legally requires the employer to give
that monopoly union a seat at the negotiating table. This monopoly shuts out other groups or individuals
within the company from negotiating their own contracts on their own terms. In many cases individuals can
choose not to join a specific union where they work. But they remain bound, nevertheless, by union contracts
and they are required to pay union fees. Thus the modern union represents a forced transfer of authority from
individual workers to a collective. Under the modern union, individual workers are de facto unable to negotiate
for themselves.
This is a different perspective on the modern union and workers rights than is usually presented. The public
school system, which is operated by Americas strongest union, teaches that the New Deal transferred political
power from business to labor. And, without question, some of that happened. But the political-power transfer
was far more complex and much of what was transferred away were the rights of the individual worker to Big
Labor and Big Business.
The Wagner Act and Big Business
In his pivotal essay Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model, the libertarian theorist Kevin A. Carson argues that
the Wagner Act was designed to centralize, bureaucratize, and tame the unions that then operated in a largely
free market manner. This was done to create advantage to Big Business, which was already no stranger to
privilege and subsidy. This is why some of the most vigorous advocates for the modern union and the New Deal
were leaders of industry, such as President of General Electric Gerard Swope. The advantage to them was clear.
By specifying who could negotiate terms and how strikes could occur, the Wagner Act removed the labor
movements most powerful tactic. Carson comments, The primary purpose of Wagner, in making the
conventional strike the normal method of settling labor disputes, was to create stability and predictability in
the workplace in between strikes, and thereby secure managements control of production (emphasis in
original).
Moreover, certification created labor monopolies that eliminated the need for business to negotiate contracts
with multiple groups or individuals within the same company. Business also benefited from the role of the
unions as enforcement agents who policed their own members so that the workers complied with contracts
they themselves had not negotiated. The modern union prevented wildcat strikes; it punished boycotts, work
slowdowns, and other labor tactics that had proven both popular and effective against business in the past.
Advocates of the modern union within the labor movement were well aware of the benefits they offered to Big
Business. In Ethics and American Unionism (1958), the anarcho-syndicalist Sam Dolgoff wrote of John Lewis
who was president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) from 1920 to 1960,
In 1937, Lewis assured the employers that a CIO contract is adequate to protect against sit-downs,
lie-downs, or any other kind of strike. [T]he corporations accepted industrial unionism because
the mass-production industries prefer to bargain with a strong international union able to dominate its
locals and keep them from disrupting production. [Emphasis added]
Dolgoff outlined the impact of the Wagner Act upon the UMWA. The organization had been a grassroots labor
federation that functioned under its parent union, the National Federation of Mine Laborers. By its
constitution, the Federation [UMWA] consisted of Lodges (Locals) and districts which vigilantly defended their
independence from the domination of the National Office. Their insistence on autonomy and unity through
federation (free agreement) was in keeping with the finest libertarian traditions of the American Labor
Movement. When Lewis became President in 1919 he did away with the federalist structure of the union,

rooted out autonomy and self-determination of locals, centralized and took complete control of the union. In
short, Lewis centralized the union under his control and destroyed its grassroots nature. The Wagner Act
allowed him to complete the centralization.
Thus the modern union was an arrangement of shared advantage between Big Labor and Big Business. This
does not mean the relationship between business and unions was necessarily cordial but it was convenient.
Among those disadvantaged by the arrangement were smaller employers, the self-employed or non-unionized
workers, and the broader grassroots labor movement itself.
The Death of Grassroots Labor Movements
Nineteenth-century America was the heyday of the grassroots labor movement. Fueled by a massive influx of
immigrant workers and the rapid development of industry, a system of vigorous and varied labor organizations
arose to address the specific needs of working people, which went far beyond a decent wage: Labor
organizations often functioned as social and cultural support systems as well.
The most prominent nineteenth-century labor federation was the Knights of Labor. Established in 1869,
membership reached 28,000 in 1880 and peaked at nearly 700,000 members in 1886. The primary demand of
the Knights was an eight-hour day, but it also campaigned on such issues as ending convict and child labor. The
Knights emphasized projects designed to empower its membership, both economically and socially, and to
provide security for families. Through local chapters, the Knights established worker-owned producer
cooperatives; it launched public education campaigns to raise awareness of and sympathy for labor issues; and
it organized social support networks to insure against the injury or ill health of members. Indeed many
organizations or unions began as benevolent associations intended to care for the families of deceased or
incapacitated members.
In his article Revolutionary Tendencies in American Labor Part 1, Dolgoff explained that the labor
movement
created a network of corporative institutions of all kinds: schools, summer camps for children and
adults, homes for the aged, health and cultural centers, insurance plans, technical education, housing,
credit associations, etc. All these and many other essential services were provided by the people
themselves, long before the government monopolized social services, wasting untold billions on a
top-heavy bureaucratic parasitical apparatus; long before the labor movement was corrupted by
business unionism.
Although the Knights of Labor used pressure tactics such as boycotts and the endorsement of friendly
politicians, they did not generally emphasize strikes. Indeed, Terence V. Powderly, who presided over the
Knights during its ascendancy (18791893), openly opposed strikes, which he believed caused violence and
increased conflict; he favored peaceful negotiation instead. Some local leaders within the Knights disagreed
and flexed their autonomy by pursuing local strikes. The internal conflict over strikes contributed to the
Knights ultimate decline.
Labor organizations within the nineteenth-century libertarian movement adopted much the same approach as
Powderly namely, they used mutual support, persuasion, and education as tools of labor reform.
Perhaps the most prominent of these organizations was the New England Labor Reform League (NELRL),
established in Boston in 1869. Its membership boasted the well-known radical individualists Josiah Warren,
William B. Greene, and Benjamin Tucker. Ezra Heywoods The Word served as the NELRLs publication. The
foundational Declaration of Sentiments declared the Leagues goals to be Free contracts, free money, free

markets, free transit, and free land by discussion, petition, remonstrance, and the ballot, to establish these
articles of faith as a common need, and a common right, we avail ourselves of the advantages of associate
effort.
One example of NELRL activity illustrates the broad manner in which the League defined labor activity. Along
with his wife Angela, Heywood founded the Co-Operative Publishing Company from which pamphlets were
issued, including ones on birth control. The NELRL believed that women workers were victims of the poverty
created by unplanned children; thus, birth control fell within the realm of labor reform. Lady Agents were
sent out to tour the factories and other working-class haunts of New England. Once they had found an
audience, the Lady Agents spoke on subjects that merged labor reform with family planning, all the while
offering the Co-Operative pamphlets for sale.
The Labor Movement Begins to Threaten Government
With effective networks and diverse strategies, a broad grassroots labor movement grew in power; its threat to
entrenched interests also grew. The threat came into glaring focus in 1877 and 1894 with two massive strikes
that involved violence on both sides. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began in West Virginia over a cut in
wages; lasting 45 days, it was finally put down by federal troops who went from city to city to quash sympathy
strikes by industrial workers who had joined in. The Pullman Strike of 1894 began in Pullman, Illinois, again over
a cut in wages. Spreading nationwide, it also attracted wildcat sympathy strikes and ultimately involved about
250,000 workers in 27 states. Eventually President Grover Cleveland sent U.S. marshals and some 12,000
troops to break the strikes.
By the turn of the twentieth century the labor movement notably, the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW, or Wobblies) had also become a political threat to the status quo. Organized in 1905, the Wobblies
had strong leaders but emphasized rank-and-file organization. Unlike the Knights of Labor, however, the IWW
enthusiastically embraced strikes; indeed, it initially opposed the signing of all labor contracts specifically
because they blunted the power to strike at will.
With a large immigrant membership and explicitly socialist principles, the IWW became a potent voice against
Americas entry into World War I. It viewed the war as a conflict in which the workers of one nation were
fighting the workers of another in order to profit the capitalists of both. Thus the IWW became a prime target
of the Department of Justice. In September 1917, 48 IWW meeting halls were raided and 165 leaders were
arrested under the new Espionage Act. The next year 101 of them went on trial. All were convicted and
received prison sentences of up to 20 years. Government repression effectively destroyed the IWW.
Both government and big business had learned a lesson: An uncontrolled labor movement was unpredictable,
politically dangerous, and bad for commerce. This was a particularly important insight in the early 1930s, when
Roosevelt swept into power during the turmoil of the Great Depression.
In 1929 the stock market collapsed and people panicked, causing runs on banks and massive bank failures.
Unemployment rose as high as 25 percent while the personal income of those still employed declined. Large
cities were hard hit, especially those dependent on heavy industries. Rural areas were devastated as crop
prices tumbled and a severe drought turned farmland into dust. Hundreds of thousands of people were driven
from their homes in search of any work whatsoever. Still other people left because of bank foreclosures.
A massive and migrant army of unemployed is a formula for political revolt. Thus Roosevelt offered a New Deal
to American workers; it was a series of interlocking economic programs that were implemented between 1933
and 1936. Through them the federal governments regulation of all aspects of commerce increased
dramatically; its purpose was to create stability, especially in the area of labor.

This is the context into which the modern union, or big labor, was born; it sprang from a governmental fear of
labor upheaval and a big-business desire for stability. The business elite may not have liked every aspect of
New Deal policies, but it had long favored Roosevelts general approach to labor relations.
Conclusion
What exactly was created with the modern union, and what was lost?
In a voluntary union, the individual members willingly assign their rights of negotiation to a representative of
the collective; they remain free to leave at any point and negotiate for themselves. The opposite process
occurs in modern unions. Some members may join freely but they cannot later negotiate for themselves if they
disagree with the union. Other members may be required to join as a condition of working in a specific industry
or at a unionized company. Thus the modern union strips individual workers of their fundamental right of free
association and the right to contract their own labor. The modern union whether of the public or private
sector is the antithesis of workers rights. What was lost in the process was the individual.

The Immorality of Public Education

A mainstay of repressive government is the public school system through which the correct ideas and
attitudes can be instilled within children. The purpose of the public schools is not so much to educate children so
that they become good individuals that is, independent people but to train them so as to produce good
citizens. After all, individuals capable of critical thinking are more likely to question authority. The social critic
Albert Jay Nock commented,Education leads a person on to ask a great deal more from life and it begets
dissatisfaction with the rewards that life holds out. Training tends to satisfy him with very moderate and simple
returns. A good income, a home and family, the usual run of comforts and conveniences, diversions addressed
only to the competitive or sporting spirit or else to raw sensation training not only makes directly for getting
these, but also for an inert and comfortable contentment with them. Well, these are all that our present society
has to offer, so it is undeniably the best thing all round to keep people satisfied with them, which training does,
and not to inject a subversive influence, like education, into this easy complacency. Politicians understand this.
Given the importance of the public education system, remarkably few political commentators have disputed its
fundamental worth or cried out against the involuntary taxation that sustains it. The task of questioning the
basics of public education has fallen to libertarians like the publisher R.C. Hoiles, who conducted a full-frontal
attack on the immorality of the tax-funded public school system.
One reason Hoiles so thoroughly rejected the public school system is because it had betrayed him. In his
middle-age, he launched into an intensive course of self-education, reading hundreds and hundreds of books. As
Nock had predicted of education, their impact was subversive. Hoiles realized his former education,
especially in grade school, had been strewn with lies and hypocrisies that impoverished anyone who believed
them because it hindered critical thought. Because I arrived at a similar conclusion, I have never felt the lack of
a university education. Indeed, I regret the irreplaceable childhood time I was forced to waste in grade school.

The libertarian publisher R.C. Hoiles insisted that the editorial page of his flagship California newspaper The
Orange County Register was a daily school room made available to its subscribers. In that schoolroom Hoiles
taught what he called voluntaryism. A November 1953 editorial, Articles of Faith, distilled its essence: [A]
government is a good government that only does what each and every individual has the moral and ethical and
just right to do. If it was not right for an individual to take money by force, then it was not right for a
government to do so in the name of taxation. Another of the Articles stated, I have faith that our
government would better protect every persons inalienable rights if it was supported on a voluntary basis
rather than by taxes.
Perhaps no single issue better captured the libertarian spirit of Hoiles than his feisty stand on education. The
Articles declared, I have faith that we will be better educated by voluntary, competitive schools than by
government schools. This statement must have startled conservatives who viewed the public schools as a
success story. Indeed, a then-favored conservative strategy was to enter school board races. By contrast, Hoiles
insisted he had no more right to vote for a school official than he did to vote for a trustee within a
government-owned brothel. (Hoiles repeatedly compared public schooling to prostitution; he once declared,
A house of prostitution is voluntary, grade school is not.)
Opposition to tax-supported schools became a dominant theme in Hoiless writing; his last editorial in the
Register dealt with something-for-nothing schools that have had a great influence in conditioning pupils to
believe in something for nothing. On occasion, Hoiles even found it necessary to defend the considerable
amount of space school issues occupied in his paper. On October 15, 1945, he wrote, The amount of space the
Register is devoting to the junior college bond issue might cause some to think we are overestimating the
importance of the issue. There is nothing more important than the principles in back of the issue.

Hoiless Educational Background

Hoiless evolution on education began in a little red schoolhouse across from his familys large farmhouse in
Alliance, Ohio, where, he later explained, he learned that the State, or a majority of citizens, had the right to
use taxation to support the public school system. His school texts exposed the political error of the divine
right of kings but they never explained the error in the divine right of the majority. It simply substituted the
divine right of the majority for the divine right of kings. Nor did his school books explain the basic principle
that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the individual; that the government had no
right to do anything that each and every individual did not have the right to do. Instead, they had to teach that
the government or the local school district, if the majority so willed, had a right to force a Catholic parent, or a
childless person, or an old maid, or an old bachelor to help pay for government schools.
At the same time as they legitimized taxation, however, Hoiless teachers spoke of the Ten Commandments,
including Thou shalt not steal and Thou shalt not covet. He observed wryly, [T]he government school I
attended made no attempt to be consistent and teach me to recognize contradictions. The contradictions did
not surprise Hoiles, who explained, They cannot teach the single standard of rightness because they are
practicing a double standard. They could not teach moral values any more than a robber can teach honesty.
Hoiless higher education must have also imbued him with skepticism about government education. The
knowledge he valued most had been self-taught and it came directly from experience. While studying electrical
engineering at the Methodist Mt. Union College (Alliance), Hoiles worked part time at his brother Franks daily
paper, the Alliance Review, and discovered what became a lifelong passion for the newspaper business. Hoiles
must have wondered if his college education had been wasted. Later in life he complained of the common
perception that going through the public schools and colleges is education.
In 1932 Hoiles temporarily left the newspaper business and began to read insatiably. Even though he had
shown little interest in philosophy to date, he acquired the background that allowed him to sprinkle his future
writing with quotations from an amazing range of authors: from Frdric Bastiat to Ayn Rand, from John Locke
to Spinoza.
The most influential was Bastiat. In a 1955 editorial Hoiles wrote, He was the first man who awakened me to
the errors, taught in government schools and more Protestant colleges, that the state doing things that were
immoral if done by an individual made these acts become moral. In other words, he was the first man that
pointed out that there was only one standard of right and wrong.
In 1935, at 56, Hoiles arrived in Orange County, California where he had purchased an established newspaper.
With him, Hoiles brought not only his family but also an evolved philosophy of freedom, which he aggressively
applied, especially to public education.
A September 3, 1946 editorial in the Register entitled Most Sacred of All Popular Idols, Government
Education typifies both Hoiless style and content in approaching the issue. The editorial is clearly answering
critics who argued that public education is a necessary good because it leads to a literate population.
Hoiles opened by quoting an anonymous lover of freedom (in truth it was his close friend and fellow
libertarian publisher Leonard Read) who defined the proper role of government as a restraining force rather
than a force to compel people to do good. By restraining, Read meant that government should prevent
violence against people and property rather than advocate or impose agendas. Considering government
education from this angle, the lover of freedom concluded it has all the characteristics of other forms of
socialism.

Some people, Hoiles continued, may see little difference between the earliest red schoolhouses that were
voluntarily supported and the subsequent tax-funded ones. True, he stated,
the socialism incident to the little red school was only a slight departure from the procedure of a few
neighbors pooling their resources, voluntarily, to employ a teacher to instruct their children. But once
the socialistic principle is admitted, once the idea is sanctioned of using governments powers of
coercion to take the fruits of the individuals labor for the collective good, there is no logical stopping
point.
Hoiles went on to quote Isabel Patersons The God of the Machine: There can be no greater stretch of
arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities
decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure. Thus,
continuing the quote, [n]eighborly, small-scale socialism in education has expanded and developed until today
we are faced with the disaster of national socialism in education.
The disaster was partly economic. Hoiles cited statistics showing how the costs of educating one individual
had increased more than ten times from 1880 to 1940, with no corresponding increase in quality. Indeed,
quality had declined partly due to increased bureaucratization, partly to the severing of connection between
a teachers wages and his or her need to satisfy customers (the parents and children). Modern teachers needed
only to satisfy the government, their new source of income.
Government educators are becoming less and less servants of those from whom revenues are extracted or
from whom their pupil raw material is conscripted, Hoiles wrote. More and more they are becoming vested
interests, concerned with their own employment and tenure. More and more they are allying themselves as a
pressure group with other bureaucratic interests. More and more they are using their strategic position to turn
the minds of the young towards statism and interventionism.
Attacking on yet another front, Hoiles explained the terrible impact that government teachers have on the
character development of children.
I take the stand against tax-supported education because I believe that the advantage of being able to read
and write is far outweighed by the destruction of individual initiative, enterprise and responsibility brought
about by government educations poison of statist psychology. Practically every youth in the land is a socialist
at heart. How can he help but be unless he comes from a family that is steeped in the belief in true liberty and
the dignity of man and recognizes that multiplying a robbery does not make it right?
The Context of R.C. Hoiles
It is not possible to understand the passion with which Hoiles addressed public education without establishing
the historical context in which he developed. In the early twentieth century, education in America underwent a
political revolution, becoming the lynchpin of the Progressive Era a period of social reform, from the 1880s
to the 1920s. A central tenet was that government needed to play a larger role in solving social problems and in
promoting the social good. Popular, or public, education was viewed as a prerequisite and the key to
reconstructing society by molding generations to come. In his watershed book, Democracy and Education
(1916), John Dewey advocated using popular education as a conscious tool to remove social evil and promote
social good. Slowly, the classical curricula that aimed at rigorous education such as familiarity with Latin, a
stress on history were replaced by programs aimed at creating good citizens.
Hoiles was outraged by his childrens curriculum. In a 1961 editorial he reminisced about an incident involving
his daughter Jane. After reviewing one of her school textbooks, he appeared before the directors of the Santa

Ana Chamber of Commerce to protest against school books that set forth the principles of Karl Marx. Hoiless
purpose was not to ban or censor but to assert a parents right to guide his childrens education. Nevertheless,
the book was pulled. Why, then, did Hoiless children attend public school? He told a Newsweek reporter,
There was no place else to send them.
He spelled out a particularly provocative strategy in a letter to Read. Hoiles explained, I have repeatedly
offered a member of the Board of Education in Santa Ana, who is a preacher, $100 if he would publicly attempt
to harmonize tax-supported schools with quotations from Jesus. He will not undertake it. I also made the offer
to the superintendent of schools. He will not undertake it. Hoiles wondered if he should up the ante to $500
and construct the discussion as a debate, perhaps with Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, or Read himself.
Hoiles considered the offer a fail-proof maneuver. If the preacher accepted, the flaws in his argument would be
exposed. If he refused, then the refusal would cause the people of the community to wonder whether
tax-supported schools are doing what they think they are doing.
And that was his goal. To make people consider taxation as theft. To make neighbors refrain from stealing
money from each other under the guise of government.

Ask Not For Whom the Drug Tolls

Those who comprehend the deep devastation and suffering caused by the Drug War argue for the
decriminalization of drugs. It is less common to hear fundamental objections to modern pharmaceuticals that
rest upon the partnership between big drug companies and the government. Most critics of Big Pharma focus
on pragmatic objections such as the high cost of patent drugs or the risk of over-medication. But just as
governments prohibition of illegal substances has been a social disaster so, too, has its support of legal
drugs. Both endanger lives and cause human suffering.
Government should have no part in the regulation of drugs, legal or illegal. And yet its role is increasing, as
drugs become the therapy of choice to cure psychological problems that amount to little more than
eccentricities or dissatisfactions with life. In recent decades, the medical establishment has dramatically
expanded the definition of disease and dysfunction to include everything from sexual disinterest to obesity, from
shyness to hyper-activity in children, with laziness now being discussed as a neuro-developmental
dysfunction. Studies of new medical dysfunctions are repeated rather than reported upon by a mainstream
media that does not seem to read beyond press releases in order to announce sensational findings.
No one better explains the dangers of this trend and of the government-Pharma alliance than iconoclastic
psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. In a series of books like The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and The Manufacture of
Madness (1970), Szasz disputed the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry itself and presents modern
medicine as a form of social control. His therapeutic state is upon us.

[F]ifty years ago, it made sense to assert that mental illnesses are not diseases, but it makes no sense to say so
today. Debate about what counts as mental illness has been replaced by legislation about the medicalization
and demedicalization of behavior. Old diseases such as homosexuality and hysteria disappear. New diseases
such as gambling and smoking appear. So wrote the iconoclastic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.
Over fifty years ago, The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) by Szasz was published. It changed the political
framework in which mental illness was addressed by laying the foundation for a concept Szasz developed
through a series of books, including The Manufacture of Madness (1970). That concept was the therapeutic
state a collaboration between psychiatry and the state through which undesirable actions, thoughts and
behavior patterns were suppressed, increasingly through drugs. Thus, Szasz not only disputed the moral and
scientific basis of psychiatry but also argued that modern medicine was becoming an engine of social control, in
which pharmaceuticals were a primary tool.
A new slate of drugs now address a wide range of so-called disorders or dysfunctions that former generations
considered environmental problems or lifestyle choices: from obesity to attention deficit, from erectile
dysfunction to social anxiety (shyness), from menopause to alcoholism. Indeed, laziness is now being discussed
as a neuro-developmental dysfunction for which drugs are being developed. The current therapeutic state
may be best analyzed as a collaboration between modern medicine, the pharmaceutical industry and the state.
The debate stirred by Szasz has been muted largely because the medical establishment and the media
mainstream have become staunch advocates of the therapeutic state. These advocates dominate universities,
research studies, prestigious committees, FDA hearings, and other governmental bodies. Since writing The
Myth, Szasz himself noted that the formerly sharp distinctions between medical hospitals and mental
hospitals, voluntary and involuntary mental patients, and private and public psychiatry have blurred into
nonexistence. Virtually all medical and mental health care is now the responsibility of and is regulated by the
federal government, and its cost paid, in full or in part, by the federal government.

Problems of everyday life have been medicalized and people are now viewed as having little or no ability on
their own to cure conditions such as alcoholism or drug abuse. Szaszs focus upon the responsibility that each
individual should and must assume for his own dysfunctions has eroded away. Happily, a backlash against the
medicalization of everyday life is occurring. Unhappily, it is being fought on the wrong ground.
Debate Is Re-engaged on the Wrong Ground
A fascinating book was recently published; it exemplifies both the backlash and its mistaken direction. As such,
it is useful to explore.
Sex Lies and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit from Female Sexual Dysfunction by Ray
Moynihan and Barbara Mintzes (2010) is a work of investigative journalism that explores the close financial
relationship between the medical experts who define and develop the science behind new dysfunctions and
the $500+ billion pharmaceutical industry who profit from treating them. For example, the book examines the
makeup of experts on committees that define dysfunctions for the extremely influential Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); it is from the DSM that social anxiety disorder derives.
(Interestingly, homosexuality was only delisted as a disorder in 1970.) Moynihan and Mintzes observe,
The DSM has been criticised for the closeness between the expert committees who write the definition
of diseases and the pharmaceutical companies that sell the drugs prescribed to treat them. One study
that looked closely at the affiliations of the men and women on those committees found that more
than half of them had ties to drug companies. On the committees revising mood disorders, including
depression, the figure was closer to 100 per cent.
In short, they construct a strong case for endemic bias within the medical establishment in favor of drug
companies and the creation of disease.
Sex Lies and Pharmaceuticals is far from the only sign of backlash. Everywhere grassroots rebellions are
springing up against specific diseases, such as the currently emerging female sexual dysfunction, and
against the use of drugs, such as Ritalin, to cure Attention Deficit Disorder in young children. An example of
grassroots backlash is the New View Campaign a crusade against the very idea of Female Sexual Dysfunction
which is led by feminist-activist Leonore Tiefer . The New View website states, The pharmaceutical industry
wants people to think that sexual problems are simple medical matters, and it offers drugs as expensive magic
fixes. But sexual problems are complicated, sexuality is diverse, and no drug is without side effects. In 2004,
Tiefer was instrumental in having the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reject a hormone
replacement patch for women being marketed by Proctor & Gamble.
A re-opening of debate on the medicalization of everyday life is to be applauded. But, unlike Szasz, the new
critics do not take aim at the therapeutic state, which has been formed by the partnership of medicine,
pharmaceuticals and government. Instead, the critics focus on the therapeutic industry that is, the flow of
money and power between the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical companies. The culpability of
government in the creation of a dysfunctional society is either marginalized or denied. Indeed, often
government is viewed as the remedy for problems it has been instrumental in creating.
Moynihan and Mintzes exemplify this trend. In Sex Lies and Pharmaceuticals, they verge briefly upon criticizing
the American government but the criticism implies that the government should be more interventionist;
instead they come close to accusing the government of cooperating in the marketing of new diseases. For
example, they note, Legally, pharmaceutical companies are prohibited from advertising these drugs [e.g.
Viagra] for recreational use, even where newspaper drug ads and television commercials are allowed. Then
they point to a high-profile television commercial for Viagra in which a man is window shopping and admiring

sexy lingerie. The voice-over asks, Remember that guy who used to be called The Wild Thing? The guy who
wanted to spend the entire honeymoon indoors? A trumpet blows in the background and the voice-over
declares, Hes back! The situation is not limited to Viagra or its manufacturer Pfizer. A similar ad for Levitra
features a woman flashing back to romantic intervals and asks, In the mood for something different? How
about Levitra? Moynihan and Mintzer conclude that the FCC is turning a blind eye to this particular form of
recreational drug marketing.
Nevertheless, they seem to view these incidents as peripheral to the problem and repeatedly applaud the
government, especially in the form of the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
This is typical of pharmaceutical dissidents who tend to view the state as a solution, not as part of the
problem. For example, Tiefer, of the New View Campaign, works through the World Health Organization.
Despite her previously stated objections to medicalizing female sexual dysfunction, she works with the WHO to
impose new legislation to promote such rights (or, rather, entitlements) as the right to comprehensive
sexuality education and the right to sexual health care, which should be available for prevention and
treatment of all sexual concerns, problems, and disorders.
It is possible that critics like Moynihan, Mintzer and Tiefer will accomplish some good. For example, they may
be able to reduce the widespread prescribing of Ritalin to grade-school children. But without understanding
the essential role played by the governments and state agencies in the medicalization of everyday life, critics
can never strike at the root of the problem. Indeed, they may well worsen matters by shifting blame and giving
more authority to the very agencies most responsible for the pathologizing and medicalization of society.
The Therapeutic State
The focus of the re-emerging debate needs to shift onto Szaszian grounds, onto an analysis of the therapeutic
state. It needs to do so in at least four ways. First, it must be clearly acknowledged that government defines the
framework for all medical practice within North America; nothing significant occurs without government
regulation in one form or another. Second, the protection offered to pharmaceutical companies should be
analyzed as legal privileges to a special interest, and so the opposite of a free market or a truly competitive
industry. Third, the relatively new and influential phenomenon called private-public partnerships a
marriage between the corporate sector and public institutions should be examined, exposed and rejected.
Fourth, the role government plays in marketing drugs through institutions like the public school system and
social service agencies must be examined, exposed and rejected.
First, government defines the framework and allows no genuine competition in the practice of medicine or the
administration of drugs. From the corporate level down to the individual on the street, government regulates
medical decisions such as which drugs can be ingested. Unlike food or shelter, which are decisions left to the
individual, medical care and the administration of drugs are monopolies that the government assigns to those
who meet state requirements and abide by state rules. Thus the American Medical Association (AMA) is able to
exert monopoly control of medical care, such as hospitalization, and has a long history of persecuting
competitors such as midwives.
But licensing and drug laws are only the most obvious ways in which the government defines medical care.
Through various and labyrinthine ways, the medical establishment partners with state authority. Many if not
most of them are not obvious. In reporting on the AMAs support of ObamaCare, for example, the Wall Street
Journal (05/07/10) explained,
The organization [AMA] wants to protect a monopoly that the federal government has created for it
a medical coding system administered by the AMA that every health-care professional and hospital

must use if they wish to get paid for the services they provide. This monopoly generates income of $70
million to $100 million annually for the AMA. That makes the AMA less an association looking out for
doctors and more a special-interest group beholden to Congress and the White House.
In short, ObamaCare is a financial windfall for the AMA a windfall hidden from most public awareness.
Second, the government offers legal privileges to pharmaceutical companies. All prescription drugs must be
patented and approved by the FDA; but, again, the monopoly over dealing drugs in society is only the most
obvious privilege granted to the pharmaceutical industry. It hardly captures the extent of partnership.
Moynihan and Mintzer chronicle one of the less obvious privileges when they write about one of the biggest
healthcare frauds in U.S. history. Pfizer was accused of illegally promoting an anti-arthritis drug for unapproved
uses, creating a health risk to users. Pfizer admitted to a limited guilt and paid a criminal fine of $1.2 billion and
civil penalties of $1 billion. Despite the hefty financial hit, not one executive faced a jail term; nor was a jail
term sought. The sentencing judge, District Court Justice Douglas Woodlock (Massachusetts) commented in his
concluding remarks, This is a case in which no human being, apparently, is going to be held responsible for
substantial criminal activity by a corporation. He notes that Pfizer absorbed the financial hit as a cost of doing
business and still managed to return record profits for that year. By contrast it is incomprehensible that the
government would not have prosecuted an unprivileged individual to the full extent possible under the law.
Third, there has been a recent rise in what is known as private-public partnerships (PPPs). A PPP is a
collaboration between government and the private sector in which a venture is either a) funded (in part or full)
by tax-dollars and operated through the private sector, or b) funded by capital raised by the private sector
based upon a contract with the government to provide services to it.
Although PPPs are often associated with infrastructure matters, such as the repair of roads or building of
bridges, this sort of ersatz capitalism is rampant within medical research and drug promotion. Dr. John Dean, a
family physician with multiple ties to pharmaceutical companies, has stated that private-public partnerships
between the corporate sector and public institutions are being actively encouraged at the highest level of
government in many nations. According to a 2001 study (Lasker, Weiss & Miller, p. 179) hundreds of millions
of dollars have been invested in the U.S. to promote partnerships around health issues, creating thousands of
alliances, coalitions, consortia and other health partnerships. That trend has only increased in the ensuing
years. Tax-funded research is commonly funneled through nominally private organizations or researchers.
Conferences, studies, reports etc. are conducted at tax expense. Arguably, such funding constitutes the
greatest barrier to alternative, independent research. Such funding creates politicized medicine.
Fourth, the government is one of the leading peddlers of pharmaceuticals otherwise known as drug
pushers. It is not merely that private for-profit organizations have used tax dollars to climb aboard the public
health bandwagon and pathologize massive categories of social behavior. It is also that the government uses its
agencies to create a market base for pharmaceutical companies.
Just one example is the role of the public school system as a pusher of Ritalin a drug more potent than
cocaine to millions of school-age children even though the effects upon children are not known.
Overwhelmingly, Ritalin is prescribed to boys who are viewed as unruly in class. A 2001 report stated, If
Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were in a school in Massachusetts today, theyd be drugged with Ritalin
As a recent Huffington Post headline (09/17/10) stated, Do 2.5 Million Children Really Need Ritalin? The
article asked,
What is going on here? Have millions of our children become so hyperactive and unable to focus that
they are incapable of succeeding at school or dealing with the demands of normal life? Or are we

creating an illness where there is none, calling normal variations in temperament and personality a
disease that requires the intervention of long term, and extremely profitable, pharmaceutical
medication?
The marketing of created disease is being driven by government agencies, like the public school system, that
prefer to drug customers rather than deal with them as complex human beings.
Conclusion
Monopoly, legal privileges, the rise of PPPs, the use of tax dollars to create disease and eliminate competition,
the peddling of pharmaceuticals through government agencies these issues must be prominent in any
productive discussion of the medicalization of everyday life. If the discussion focuses on corporate greed, then
the therapeutic state will have merely entered a new phase..
Szasz once observed, Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates
are the religion of the people. It is also becoming a form of social control through which authorities and
experts usurp very personal decisions about what is in the best interest of the individual. Why? Because the
individual is not deemed competent to decide for himself.

Passport to the Total State

One of the myriad benefits of knowing the late, great Murray Rothbard is being able to view political
developments in economic terms. Thus, when a friend vented to me over the phone about an injustice done to
him, I immediately thought transaction costs.
The background: My American friend used to cross the Canadian-US border northward with ease in order to
visit my farm. However, new procedures came into force a few years back by which police and court records on
American citizens are freely and easily accessed by Canadian customs agents, and vice versa. And so my friend
experienced a problem: an old DUI, for which he was denied entry. A DUI is now one of the infractions that can
cause a de facto iron curtain to fall across the Canadian-US border, separating friends and family members;
other infractions include possession of marijuana (perhaps in the 70s), possession of a medical-marijuana card,
shoplifting, and an arrest for attending a peace rally.
As I mentioned the phrase that came to my mind when I heard of my friends problem was transaction costs.
A fairly standard definition is, A transaction cost is a cost incurred in making an economic exchange. Consider
buying an apple from a grocery store. The cost of doing so will be not only the price tag on the apple but also
the time and gas it takes to travel from your house and back, as well as the time you spent waiting in line. These
costs the ones over and above the price tag on the apple are the transaction costs of your purchase. Such
costs can become more expensive than the apple itself. For example, if the nearest grocery store is ten miles
away, the cost of gas may be far more significant than the price of fruit.
For years, I have been complaining to my husband that the transaction costs of being alive were soaring, and
almost always because of increased governmental requirements. Heres one example: a few years ago, it took
me eight months to get a replacement birth certificate that I needed for no other reason than to meet the
requirements of another government form. I needed to fill out the other government form in order to legally
engage in an activity that had previously required only the production of a drivers license; now it required a
separate license.
To perform a single act that should never have been licensed at all, I had to wait eight months and fill out two
additional forms. For the privilege of going through this infuriating process, I paid two fees. And then insult was
added to injury: the whole process was just a prelude to filling out yet another government form and paying yet
another fee. The transaction costs of life are soaring.
I have never been arrested. The most legal attention Ive gleaned has been a parking ticket. I am white,
middle-class, and innocuous in appearance. A clean slate and an unimposing persona puts me in an enviable
position: I will probably never be denied entrance at any border crossing in the world. Nevertheless, my freedom
of travel is being denied, and that denial comes in the form of transaction costs. Government regulations are
making the exercise of my rights so expensive in terms of additional fees, time, inconvenience, and sheer
unpleasantness that these considerations are beginning to outweigh the actual cost of exercising my rights.

Your papers! In old movies, the demand is barked at trembling travelers by a Nazi with a guttural accent. If
the demand is made in the opening scene, then the audience knows immediately that they watching a
totalitarian state in which travelers are in danger.
Your papers! now rings out at every American airport and border crossing. The accent is different but
travelers need to recognize with equal immediacy that a totalitarian state is playing out in front of their eyes,
and they must be careful.

A passport is where the security theater begins. Indeed, without a passport those who wish to fly or cross a
border are not allowed to be scanned, searched, interrogated, or undergo a plethora of other indignities
imposed by uniformed thugs. The hoops through which passport carriers jump are all prelude to permitting
them to exercise a right belonging to every freeborn person: the right to travel.
America and the world were not always this way. It is important to remember that there once was a world in
which people traveled freely across borders without paperwork to visit families, pursue education, conduct
business, and mingle. Freedom worked once. It enriched the world economically, culturally, and
psychologically.
War Converts Convenience into Blatant Abuse
The modern passport is commonly defined as, an official document issued by a government, certifying the
holders identity and citizenship and entitling them to travel under its protection to and from foreign
countries. But are passport privileges to be conferred or denied by government, or are they mere
conveniences that cannot be properly required for people to exercise the natural right to freedom of
movement? Do they protect peaceful travelers or merely facilitate the states grip on the flow of people and
property?
The foregoing descriptions of passports have all been true at some point in history.
Travel papers date back to antiquity and were generally intended to protect the bearer as he passed through
foreign territory. The King James Bible (Nehemiah 2:7) states,
I said unto the king, If it please the king, let letters be given me to the governors beyond the river, that
they may convey me over till I come into Judah.
In some areas, the issuance of letters also served as social control. According to Wikipedia, In the medieval
Islamic Caliphate, a form of passport was used in the form of a baraa, a receipt for taxes paid. Those in
arrears could not travel even within the Caliphate.
Henry V (13861422) is credited with creating the first Western passport, which was designed to help prove
who you were if you traveled to a foreign land and to facilitate entry into the many walled cities of Europe.
Indeed, the word passport is thought to derive from passing through the porte (doorway) of such cities.
Unlike most earlier letters, however, the ones issued by Henry V were a general identification and did not
specify which locations the bearer could visit.
The passport as an official permission or protection, and not merely as identification, arose because of armed
conflicts. In the 17th century, sea voyaging was key to trade, travel, and the maintenance of empire. With some
frequency, war interrupted that flow. Therefore, neutral vessels were granted passports or sea letters from a
port of departure, which permitted them to journey in safety. (This is an alternate but less accepted theory of
the derivation of the word passport.) Civil authorities also issued safe conducts to individuals; typically, the
individual was a subject of one of the belligerents who needed to cross enemy territory. Many 17th-century
treaties e.g., the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), the commercial Treaty of Copenhagen (1670) make
prominent mention of safe conducts, the violation of which was punished as a serious offense against
international law.
The American Passport
The American passport was also rooted in war, specifically the American Revolution (17751783). The first one
was issued in 1783; based on the French passport, it was designed and printed by Benjamin Franklin. It was a

single page with a description of the bearer(s) and his or their signature(s). For example, when John Adams,
Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay acted as ministers plenipotentiary in traveling to Great Britain to seal the
terms of peace, all three names were on one passport. It was addressed TO ALL Captains or Commanders of
ships of war, privateers, or armed Vessels .
During the Articles of Confederation period (17811789), passports were issued but not required. When the US
Constitution was ratified, creating a new government, passports continued to be issued but not required. Many
American states and cities also issued their own voluntary passports until 1856 when the Department of
State exerted a federal monopoly, ostensibly to eliminate confusion.
Nevertheless, passports were not mandatory except for a period during the American Civil War (18611865)
and during World War I (19141918). The latter can be seen as the beginning of the current American passport.
On December 15, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson issued Executive Order No. 2285, [r]equiring American
citizens traveling abroad to procure passports and advising the
Secretary of State, in co-operation with the Secretary of the Treasury, will make arrangements for the
inspection of passports of all persons, American or foreign, leaving this country.
This was followed in 1918 by an act of Congress granting the president authority to require passports during
time of war. Passports remained mandatory until early 1921.
Thereafter, the United States continued its no-passport-required travel policy until another war: World War II
(19391945). In 1941, passports became mandatory for travel abroad, and remain so to this day (travel to
Canada used to be an exception; until recently, proof of citizenship was all that was required to cross the
border).
European Passports
European nations pioneered many if not most aspects of the modern passport. In his review of the book The
Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State by John Torpey, Albrecht Funk (Department of
Political Science, University of Pittsburgh) wrote,
He [Torpey] starts with the hectic endeavors in the French Revolution to issue passports and
identification papers that tried to secure the free movement of the citizen on the one hand and, on the
other hand, kept the movements of those who were perceived as enemies of the revolution, under
surveillance, (aristocratic migrs, insurrectionists of the Vendee, foreigners).
Here is the blatant use of passports to exert social control by refusing travel to enemies of the state.
But Europe differed from America in a key manner: a landmass with many nations, it relied on the trade and
the travel of skilled workers across borders. By the mid-19th century, mandatory passports had largely
disappeared, with Czarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire being prominent exceptions. The change was largely
due to three factors. First, governments were pressured to open up borders so that goods and services could
flow across an increasingly industrialized Europe. Second, the period between the last Napoleonic War (1815)
and World War I was unusually peaceful. Third, railroads now dominated travel. Their speed and the sheer
number of travelers made traditional methods of checking documents impractical.
Thus, with trade and peace, mandatory passports declined.
War brought them back to life. With World War I, European nations once more imposed requirements not only

to identify enemies of the state (e.g., spies or the citizens of belligerents) but also to control the outward
flow of skilled labor in order to maintain their own workforces. In short, passports once again became social
controls and, like the United States, many European nations maintained their requirements after the War.
World War II made passports mandatory on a virtually worldwide basis. Although passport requirements
loosened once more after WWII, the war on terror in the wake of 9/11 has raised those requirements to
unprecedented levels. The ebb and flow of passports is that of war itself.
Human Right or Social Control?
Passports clearly function as an essential and effective means through which a state can control the person and
property of its residents. Consider the United States. No one can legally leave without one.
And yet passports can be denied for a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with being an enemy of the
state but rest strictly on statutory grounds. Common reasons for denial include owing money to the IRS, a
federal arrest, a state-criminal court order existing, a drug arrest, being on parole or probation.
Law-enforcement databases are routinely checked against both passports and applications to weed out those
who have committed such offenses as being more than $2,500 behind on child-support payments. Passports
can also be revoked for several reasons, although revocation is far less common.
Those who meet the legal requirements for a passport move on to the next stage of social control. After
handing over documents, a traveler is questioned about the reasons for travel, how much money he carries, his
occupation, and virtually any other question a border agent wishes to ask. The travelers person and property
are searched in various ways, including a strip search at the agents discretion. If the traveler questions or
evinces disapproval, then he could be denied the right to board a plane, thus wasting an expensive ticket. Or
he may be pulled aside for special treatment, including fines or interrogation by the police.
A question remains, however: do passports necessarily violate human rights? If passports are entirely voluntary
and those who refuse them bear no punishment, then clearly they do not violate human rights. They are a
useful form of identification that a businessman who needs to definitively identify himself to banks in several
nations might welcome. It is the mandatory nature of any travel document that converts it into a violation of
rights.
With the exception of trespassing on private property, people have an absolute right to travel in peace and at
their own discretion. This right is an extension of self-ownership, which is the basis of libertarianism.
Self-ownership means that all human beings, by virtue of being human, have a right to the full and peaceful
control of their persons and property. Traveling is nothing more than an expression of that control not only
over your body but also over your goods, which may require transport. Requiring a passport as the key to
freedom of movement is akin to gagging someone while maintaining that he retains freedom of speech.
Denying a passport violates self-ownership in yet another manner: either every human being is a self-owner or
none are. Forbidding travel to some creates an unequal society, which violates the very concept of
self-ownership. It creates secondary citizens who can reclaim their status only by complying with state
demands, such as the payment of child support. This sleight of hand converts a right into a state-granted
privilege to be doled out to the obedient.
Conclusion
The passport has grown into what is arguably the single most powerful tool of totalitarian America, second only
to law enforcement itself. It no longer pretends to protect individuals; not a single terrorist has been

apprehended as a result of passport checks. But it does cement the totalitarian state. The mandatory passport
should be reviled and rejected as an abuse of human rights and common decency. A nation that requires one
cannot be free.

The Post Office as a Violation of Constitutional Rights

A common justification for government services is that some of them provide true benefits. A common
example proffered is the post office, which is decried for its incompetence but not seen as basically harmful. It
is. All mail delivery needs to be privatized or, at bare minimum, opened to parallel institutions.
As a freedom strategy, parallel institutions refers to creating private agencies that perform the same
functions as government ones. A classic example is FedEx, which delivers packages in a manner similar to the
post office. A parallel institution like FedEx benefits freedom in at least two ways: It proves the free market can
successfully compete with, and often outdo, a government service even though the latter has the extreme
advantage of tax funding. It also hastens the demise of redundant, illegitimate government services.
Parallel institutions are not merely a strategy but also an irreplaceable building block of a free society. In his
essay Liberty and the New Left, economist Murray Rothbard observed,
The American Revolution occurred precisely by the people spontaneously and voluntarily creating
local and then regional committees and assemblies totally apart from the State apparatus, and
progressively taking on more and more of the States functions. But one of the key advantages of a
parallel institution is that its creators and users need not even be aware of how the institution benefits
freedom. The founders of FedEx wanted to make a profit; customers use the service because it is
inexpensive, convenient, and efficient.
The government agency is marginalized not because the hearts and souls of people have been converted
toward privatization or freedom but simply because the market offers them a better alternative. Nevertheless,
the political end result is the same.

The United States Post Service (USPS) is a government monopoly that is accustomed to operating at public
expense. Although the USPS currently receives no direct cash transfers from the government, it is exempt from
taxation and can borrow from the Treasury. Nevertheless, many people consider the main cost of the USPS to
be its inefficiency. To such people, the Postal Service is a relatively benevolent expression of government,
offering a vital service that would otherwise not exist on the free market.
The history of the USPS suggests differently. It chronicles centuries of civil-rights violations that began at the
very birth of a national postal system and which have nothing to do with providing a public service. Rather, the
USPS promoted and protected the interests of those in power. In doing so, it has been indifferent or hostile to
providing the best service at the lowest price and has used the law aggressively against those who would
compete.
An infamous case of this hostility occurred in 1845, when private mail companies operated with relative
freedom and were able to carry first-class mail over which the USPS now claims a monopoly. One such private
venture was the American Letter Mail Company, established by the noted libertarian legal theorist Lysander
Spooner. In his periodical Liberty, Benjamin Tucker described Spooners endeavor:
In 1844, he started a private mail between Boston and New York, and soon extended it to Philadelphia
and Baltimore, charging but five cents a letter between any of these points a very much smaller sum
than the government was then charging. The business was an immediate success and rapidly
extending.
In 1845, as a response to the fiscal threat posed by more efficient private companies, a congressional act

imposed draconian fines on any private carrier who dared to offer better service at lower rates. Tucker
explained, as the carrying of each letter constituted a separate offence, the government was able to shower
prosecutions on him [Spooner] and crush him in a few months by loading him with legal expenses.
Spooner had been so effective in demonstrating the superiority of private mail, however, that the post office
was virtually compelled to lower its own rates significantly thereafter. Thus Tucker dubbed him the father of
cheap postage in America.
In his pamphlet The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails, Spooner
highlighted the inefficiency guaranteed by the act of banning competition in postal service. Once there was an
enforced monopoly, he stated, postal officials would feel few quickening impulses to labor or to move at the
speed that commercial interests require. The consequence would be a cumbrous, clumsy, expensive and
dilatory government system that would be nearly impossible to modify or materially improve except by
opening it up once more to rivalry and free competition.
But Spooner objected to a postal monopoly not merely or primarily because it cheated the public by requiring
an extravagant fee for an inadequate service. His main objection was that the monopoly violated individual and
constitutional rights in at least three ways. First, Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution authorized Congress to
establish post offices and post roads, but it did not bar others from doing so as well. The power to create was
not a power to prohibit. The Ninth Amendment states, The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights,
shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Second, freedom of the press and freedom of speech included and, indeed, required the right to privately
distribute material to whomever wished to read it. A government postal monopoly would be able to ban
periodicals from using one of the only legal channels of distribution. And, so, the monopoly constituted a direct
affront to the First Amendment.
Third, a monopoly post office that can control the flow of information inevitably would be used to political
advantage by those in authority. In Private Mails, Spooner argued, Its immense patronage and power, used,
as they always will be, corruptly, make it [the monopoly post office] also a very great political evil. Tucker
concurred, and added that the reduction in rates that followed Spooners legal persecution had been a sop
thrown to the public to keep them from calling for abolition of the monopoly.
Analyzing Spooners Arguments
Spooners claim is that a postal monopoly constitutes a standing threat to freedom of the press and freedom of
speech. It was a power tool to control the spread of information and opinion throughout society. These
observations did not originate with Spooner. In colonial America the founding fathers were acutely aware of
the censorious role played by British control of the post office. Sam Adams urged the creation of a parallel and
private system so that information could flow freely from colony to colony in order to establish political
cohesion. He insisted that the colonial post office deceived the people into believing it was a public utility when
its real purpose was to stop the Channels of publick Intelligence and to aid the measures of Tyranny.
It was no coincidence that one of the first resolutions passed by the Second Continental Congress led directly
to establishing the Constitutional Post as a reliable means of spreading information. Article IX of the Articles of
Confederation (1781) granted the United States in Congress the sole and exclusive right and power of
establishing or regulating post offices from one State to another, throughout all the United States, and exacting
such postage on the papers passing through the same as may be requisite to defray the expenses of said
office. An ordinance established the working rules of the post office, including a provision for licensing post
riders to carry newspapers.

But another goal quickly emerged within the new postal service. In 1785, a resolution authorized the secretary
of the Department of Foreign Affairs to open and inspect any mail that related to the safety and interests of the
United States. The ensuing inspections caused prominent men, such as George Washington, to complain of
mail tampering. According to the book Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office by Dorothy Ganfield Fowler,
the Continental Congress was soon debating whether some communications should be deemed unmailable
because their contents were too dangerous.
In practical terms, however, certain types of political expression were already de facto unmailable. After the
United States Constitution was drafted, it was sent to the states for ratification. During the bitter political
debates, an ideological war broke out between the Federalists (who were pro-ratification) and the
Anti-Federalists (who were anti-ratification). The Federalists dominated in the cities through which mail flowed.
As a result, Anti-Federalists communications seemed to disappear or be strangely delayed. The Federalist
Postmaster General Ebenezer Hazard came under particular attack for allegedly stopping the flow of
Anti-Federalist information, especially between newspapers that were eager to reprint each others articles.
Under the pen name Centinel, an Anti-Federalist wrote, Attempts to prevent discussion by shackling the press
ought to be a signal of alarm to freemen. He continued, every avenue to information is so far as possible cut
off, the usual communication between the states through the medium of the press, is in a great measure
destroyed by a new arrangement at the Post Office, scarcely a newspaper is suffered to pass by this
conveyance.
In 1797, with the new Constitution in force, Congress enacted the first law limiting what could be mailed. It was
a modest prohibition against newspapers with wet print because they tended to damage accompanying mail.
But the definition of unmailable soon acquired political meaning.
In Andrew Jacksons first annual message to Congress as President (1829), he declared of the Post Office: In a
political point of view this Department is chiefly important as affording the means of diffusing knowledge.
Through its agency we have secured to ourselves the full enjoyment of the blessings of a free press. By 1835,
however, Jacksons address to Congress struck a different note concerning the post office and freedom of the
press.
Antislavery dissension was contributing to the tensions that would eventually lead to civil war. Some Southern
politicians and postmasters called for a ban of seditious literature namely, antislavery literature from the
mails. Jackson recommended that Congress pass a law to allow the prohibition. A bill attempting to do so was
defeated in the Senate on its third reading by a vote of 19 to 25. On a federal level, antislavery material was
deemed mailable. On the state level, however, various Southern legislatures passed resolutions to restrict its
circulation. Thus some Southern postmasters were placed in the position of having to break state laws
restricting antislavery literature if they wished to obey a federal order to circulate it.
Controlling Public Morality
The censorship exercised by the post office sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially was not merely
aimed at quashing political dissent and supporting political authority. Often the postal muscle was flexed to
control public morality and to prevent social reform.
In 1874 second-class postal rates were granted to newspapers and magazines that met four requirements.
They had to issue at regular intervals of no less than four times annually; they needed to state the place of
publication; they needed to have subscribers; and they had to disseminate information of a public character,
or [be] devoted to literature, the sciences, or some special industry.
The last requirement would be used as a basis for granting low rates to desirable mail and denying it to the

undesirable. A year before, the Comstock Act of 1873 had provided a penalty of up to ten years imprisonment
for intentionally mailing obscene material. Ominously, the word obscene had not been defined in the Act.
But Anthony Comstock, a moving force behind censorship in late nineteenth-century America, had acquired
broad power to interpret the word for himself. He defined obscenity in such a manner as to include
birth-control information and discussion of sexual issues, such as whether forced sex within marriage was rape.
Thus the post office exercised tremendous power over the public expression of sexual morality. Birth-control
information was especially targeted by two infamous state persecutions. In 1877, Ezra Heywood, editor and
publisher of the libertarian periodical The Word, was arrested for distributing a birth-control pamphlet titled
Cupids Yokes. The pamphlet advocated the abolition of marriage and contained a scathing denunciation of
Comstock. Heywood was fined and received a two-year prison sentence. Under extreme public pressure,
including a petition reportedly signed by 70,000 people, President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Heywood.
Undaunted, Comstock successfully arrested others who distributed the same pamphlet and continued to
persecute Heywood for years thereafter. In 1890 Heywood was once again found guilty of mailing obscene
material to subscribers and received two years at hard labor, which he served in full.
The second state prosecution came in 1887. The editor and publisher of Lucifer the Light Bearer Moses Harman
was arrested for printing a letter that identified forced sex within marriage as rape. The grand jury indicted
Harman on 270 counts of obscenity under the Comstock Act; the charges were eventually discarded. Not to be
thwarted, the district attorney procured a new set of indictments, 216 counts in all. Due to public controversy,
however, the case was continued over until 1890, when Harman was finally sentenced to five years
imprisonment, and then released on a technicality. In January 1891 Harman was sentenced to one years
imprisonment on another obscenity charge, with another writ of error ensuing. The legal persecution
continued for years.
Postal harassment preceded Harmans final arrest in 1896. Lucifer had been denied the use of second-class
mail rates until the matter had been successfully appealed to the authorities in Washington. Even then, the
post office in Chicago the city in question confiscated and destroyed every individual issue that it
independently declared obscene. One issue was destroyed because it contained an article by the venerated
feminist Alice Stone Blackwell, which had been reprinted from the conservative Womans Journal.
Finally, at age 75 Harman was sentenced to, and served, one year at hard labor. From Cook County jail in
Chicago, Harman had explained that the cause of his persecution had been Lucifers mission to help woman to
break the chains that for ages have bound her to the rack of man-made law, spiritual, economic, industrial,
social and especially sexual, believing that until woman is roused to a sense of her own responsibility on all
lines of human endeavor, and especially on lines of her special field, that of reproduction of the race, there will
be little if any real advancement toward a higher and truer civilization. It was in reference to Harmans
imprisonment under the U.S. postal laws that the British playwright George Bernard Shaw coined the term
Comstockery.
The post office also routinely used repressive tactics against socialist and labor periodicals in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century to control the flow of politically radical opinions and movements. Such
Comstockery continued past World War II as a policy of the Cold War. On October 11, 1962, for example, the
Cunningham Amendment designed to restrict the circulation of communist literature that originated in a
foreign country became law. On a less official basis, the Post Office Department began to keep a list of
everyone who received the questionable mail. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that the Cunningham
Amendment was unconstitutional because it limited the First Amendment rights of the addressees.

Conclusion
Over and over, the USPS has collided with the First Amendment. Over and over, civil libertarians have
demanded to know whether freedom of speech extends to privately written words in letters as well as to
public written words in newspapers. And if not, why not? Arguably, the USPS also violates the Fourth
Amendment, which guarantees the right of people to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. The
postal prerogative to open and examine letters raises this question. But if the USPS did not have the privileges
of a legal monopoly, then it could not enforce policies that violated the rights of its customers.
Those who argue that the worst sins of the USPS are its inefficiency and high cost are overlooking the
possibility that an efficient and cheap service is not its primary function. The USPSs primary political purpose is
to control the flow of information through defining what is unmailable. During periods of war, that purpose
emerges openly. For example, un-American political doctrines were declared unmailable during World War I.
Broadly defined subversive propaganda received similar treatment during World War II. Enforcing those
prohibitions required widespread interception, monitoring, and censorship of private correspondence. It
required monopoly.
The question posed by Spooner over a century and a half ago remains unanswered: from which passage of the
Constitution can Congress claim this right for the USPS?

The Return of Debtors Prison

A key political freedom upon which America has prided itself is the right of all to due process. This right refers to
the guarantees or protections that individuals enjoy against being falsely or abusively prosecuted by the judicial
system. The right to face your accuser, the presumption of innocence, a ban on double jeopardy these are
commonly cited examples of due process. Yet due process has been under vicious and persistent attack from
various directions and for years now. The following case illustrates the precarious and disappearing nature of
the American right known as due process. The imprisonment examined is for civil contempt, which is currently
one of the most common charges brought against average people. It covers those who do not pay child support
or court-ordered alimony.
No one knows how many people almost all of them men are being held indefinitely on contempt of civil
court charges for which they do not have the due process protections offered to those accused of criminal
offenses. They have no right to a trial, an attorney, an appeal in short, they have no due process. Most of
these imprisonments are for non-compliance with court-ordered child support or alimony. It does not matter if
the man is unable to comply due to poverty e.g. from losing his job; he can be imprisoned anyway until he
pays up.
In response to the following article I received an email from a woman whose husband was in jail for back child
support which she said he did not owe. She stated, If my husband had raped a woman he would be entitled to
a trial by an impartial jury. He does not enjoy that right as a debtor. If my husband had sold drugs to children he
would be entitled to legal representation. He does not enjoy that right as a debtor. If my husband had molested
a child, he would be subject to no more than a maximum sentence allowed by the law. As a debtor he can be
held for the rest of his life.

In 2009, former corporate lawyer H. Beatty Chadwick was freed from a Pennsylvania county jail, in which he
spent over 14 years even though he had never been arrested, criminally accused, or tried. Chadwick was
imprisoned on contempt-of-court charges that sprang from a contentious divorce. His case dramatizes a
continuing debate over the use and misuse of civil-contempt imprisonment.
Many people view contempt of civil court as an uncommon and relatively trivial sanction that is flexed only to
enforce court orders or respect for the court. Whenever the sanction is noticed by the public, it is usually in
connection with high-profile cases for example, a journalist refuses to reveal his source and is imprisoned
until he relents or until it becomes clear that further imprisonment will not compel compliance.
In reality civil contempt imprisonment is commonplace and it devastates lives. Arguably, the most prevalent
form of civil imprisonment is for nonpayment of child support. When a deadbeat parent is jailed for
nonpayment by a family-court judge, the actual charge is contempt of civil court. That is, the deadbeat parent
has disobeyed a court order to pay up. How many so-called deadbeats are imprisoned each year is unknown
because family courts are not required to maintain such records and they rarely do so. This means that
family-court judges act with less transparency and less accountability than those in other venues. Moreover,
there is no national database of the deadbeat parents who are incarcerated each year. In short, there is an
amazing lack of data on such imprisonment, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of
thousands.
Dissecting Contempt of Court
What is contempt of court? The United States has two basic types of contempt: criminal and civil.

Contempt of court has been called the Proteus of the legal system because Proteus was the Greek sea god
who could change his shape at will. In short, contempt of court can assume many forms due to three factors:
the judge is often the sole evaluator of when contempt has occurred; federal law differs from state laws, which
often differ from each other; and criminal contempt is remedied differently from its civil parallel.
Nevertheless, all contempt charges share certain characteristics. In its most basic form, contempt of court is a
ruling through which a judge sanctions a deliberate act or omission to act that he or she considers to be
disobedient, obstructive, or disrespectful to the court. The ruling is the sternest remedy a judge can impose on
bad behavior, such as refusing to obey a court order or uttering obscenities in court. Punishment can be
imposed on anyone within the court, including attorneys, parties to a lawsuit or criminal action, witnesses, and
spectators.
The focus here is upon civil contempt at the state level; criminal contempt is analyzed only by way of contrast.
At least in theory, a key difference between the two is that criminal charges are more serious than civil ones
and more often involve the loss of liberty. Thus criminal defendants have protections of due process that civil
defendants do not enjoy. In an dramatically increasing number of cases, however, civil contempt involves
imprisonment, and the offender or contemnor has no legal protection or recourse except, of course, agreeing
to comply.
What are some of the other key differences between civil and criminal contempt?
In both, contempt can be either direct or indirect. Direct contempt is committed in the presence of a presiding
judge; for example, interrupting the judge. Indirect contempt is committed outside the presence of the
presiding judge, for example, neglecting to pay court-ordered child support.
In civil court, once the direct contemnor has been advised of the contempt, a fine and/or imprisonment may be
imposed immediately. The imprisonment is generally for a few days but it can span months; in the case of
Chadwick, it spanned 14 years. The direct contemnor has no legal right to an attorney, to a trial or to any other
defense. The judges ruling cannot be appealed. Generally speaking, in indirect civil contempt, the contemnor is
entitled to receive notice and to have a hearing at which he can present evidence and rebuttal. Then, at the
sole discretion of the judge, the contemnor may be imprisoned until compliance is compelled. With
noncompliant contemnors, imprisonment usually ends when the judge concludes that continuation is
ineffective. But, if the judge does not reach that conclusion, it is possible for the imprisonment to be indefinite.
By contrast, in direct or indirect criminal contempt, the contemnor retains the rights of due process. The
sentence, which is meant to punish rather than to compel compliance, is of a set length. Thus, in its
enforcement, a civil-contempt charge can be far more serious than a criminal one.
The Strange Case of H. Beatty Chadwick
Again consider H. Beatty Chadwicks 14 years of imprisonment. The facts of his case are straightforward. In
1977 Chadwick married Barbara Jean Crowther. In 1992, she filed for divorce. In 1994 Barbara Chadwick
informed the court her husband had wired $2.5 million out of the country. The judge ordered him to retrieve
the money and place it in a court-controlled account until the divorce was settled. Chadwick claimed that most
of the money had been lost in a foreign business deal gone bad; however, a small fraction of the money
showed up in a U.S. bank under his name, and the court did not believe his story. In April 1995 Chadwick was
sentenced to imprisonment until the money was produced.
Traditionally, a contempt-of-court sentence continues only as long as there is a reasonable expectation of
coercing compliance. Otherwise, the imprisonment becomes a punishment, which is a criminal sanction and

beyond the authority of civil courts. A 1974 New Jersey Supreme Court case, Catena v. Seidl, is often cited
regarding this point in civil contempt. It is abhorrent to our concept of personal freedom that the process of
civil contempt can be used to jail a person indefinitely, possibly for life, even though he or she refuses to
comply with the courts order. [C]ontinued imprisonment may reach a point where it becomes more
punitive than coercive and thereby defeats the purpose of the commitment.
In 2002 U.S. District Court Judge Norma Shapiro ordered Chadwicks release on the grounds that continued
imprisonment would not compel compliance. That same year, then-Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge
Samuel Alito overturned Shapiro. He said, Because the state courts have repeatedly found that Mr. Chadwick
has the present ability to comply with the July 1994 state court order, we cannot disturb the state courts
decision that there is no federal constitutional bar to Mr. Chadwicks indefinite confinement for civil contempt
so long as he retains the ability to comply with the order requiring him to pay over the money at issue.
Thus Alito, now a U.S. Supreme Court justice, asserted the right of a civil court to hold a contemnor in prison in
perpetuity with no right of appeal. For Alito, the only question was whether the contemnor had the ability to
comply, not whether he was willing to do so.
In Chadwicks case, his ability to comply is actually not clear. In 2003 former Pennsylvania Judge A. Leo Sereni
oversaw an 18-month investigation in which two accounting firms attempted to track down Chadwicks money.
No trace was found beyond what had been identified a decade before. Sereni recommended Chadwicks
release, stating, My God if he had stolen $2 million, he would have been out a couple of years ago.
(Apparently, the state maximum for stealing $2 million is, or was, a seven-year term.) Chadwicks lawyer added
the humanitarian concern that his elderly client was suffering from non-Hodgkins lymphoma and required
outside medical attention.
Nevertheless, in February 2006, the presiding court held that Sereni had overstepped his bounds and that
Chadwicks incarceration should continue.
Aberration or Warning Bell?
Is the Chadwick case an aberration that has slipped through the cracks of an otherwise reasonable system? Or
is it an extreme example of a commonplace occurrence that suggests family courts are out of control in the use
of contempt imprisonment?
The legal crack theory confronts a problem. According to the Chicago Tribune, the case has produced a
dozen pleas to the county courts, nine to state appeals courts, nine to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, six to
the nearby federal court, four to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and two to the U.S. Supreme Court. For an
injustice to withstand sustained efforts to remedy it, the crack has to be both massive and widespread. A
mere aberration should be easier to correct, and higher courts should not affirm it over and over again.
Yet if the Chadwick case points to widespread abuse, how should civil contempt be reformed? Or, more
fundamentally, should the sanction be abandoned entirely?
Abandoning civil contempt is not an absurd idea. After all, that specific power derives from British common
law. Civil law which is also known as Continental or Romano-Germanic law is as widespread as common
law; for example, it is the basis of French Civil Law and the Swiss Civil Code. The fundamental difference
between the two systems is that common law derives rules or precedents from specific cases; it evolves
principles on the basis of rulings. Civil law starts with rules and applies them to specific cases.
For the purposes of this article, however, the relevant difference is that most countries with Continental law do

not recognize civil imprisonment for contempt. In their book The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the
Legal Systems of Western Europe and Latin America, legal scholars John Merryman and Rogelio Perez-Perdomo
wrote,
Another fundamental difference between the civil law and common law traditions occurs in
enforcement proceedings. Civil law jurisdictions have nothing comparable to the common law notion
of civil contempt of court. [I]n the common law a person can be compelled to act or to refrain from
acting by the threat of imprisonment or fine for contempt of court that is, for refusing to obey a
court order addressed to him or her as a person. The civil law, by way of contrast, knows no civil
contempt of court and tends to operate solely in rem. This means that regardless of the type of claim
one has against another person, the only way one can collect the claim is by obtaining a money
judgment.
Much of the world, including western Europe, functions without the common-law tradition of civil
imprisonment. Thus it is not clear that eliminating the practice would harm North American jurisprudence or
justice in any manner. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that eliminating the imprisonment would
improve justice in North America.
First and foremost, there is a deep human cost to civil contempt imprisonments. But this misery is the most
obvious human cost. Critics of civil contempt argue that such imprisonment is also a violation of the
constitutional rights that should apply not merely to criminal matters but also to civil ones at least,
constitutional rights should apply if the punishment involves the deprivation of liberty. These critics refer
primarily to the due process rights protected by the Sixth Amendment but also to those guaranteed by the Fifth
and Fourteenth Amendments.
The Sixth Amendment states, In all criminal prosecution, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and
public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed and to
have the assistance of counsel. Although civil contempt is not a criminal prosecution, the line between the
two blurs when imprisonment is involved and when the penalty is imposed as a punishment rather than as a
remedy.
The Fifth Amendment states, No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,
unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a
witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall
private property be taken for public use without just compensation. One of the traditional measures of
whether a crime is infamous is the severity of punishment that may be imposed for its violation; the
punishment of indefinite imprisonment would seem to make civil contempt an infamous crime.
The relevant section of the Fourteenth Amendment reads, No State shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws. Again, imprisonment seems to require the observation of due process.
In theory a judge imposes contempt charges as a last resort and in a manner that respects rights. But when a
judge (or any human being) is given absolute and virtually unaccountable power over another, frequent abuse
is the predictable result. This is especially true when an act of contempt directly challenges a judges authority
or constitutes an insult. In short, the judge becomes the injured party; this fact alone should disqualify him or
her from rendering a decision on the alleged injury. As Justice Hugo Black stated, When the responsibilities of
lawmaker, prosecutor, judge, jury and disciplinarian are thrust upon a judge he is obviously incapable of
holding the scales of justice perfectly fair and true and reflecting impartially on the guilt or innocence of the

accused. He truly becomes the judge of his own cause.

Political Abuse of Process
It is not merely a judge who can abuse contempt of court charges; it is also politicians. A famous example of
contempt of court being used for political advantage is the 1895 imprisonment of labor leader Eugene V. Debs.
Debs was arrested both for conspiracy and for contempt of court following his prominent role in the Pullman
Strike, during which the American Railway Union refused to handle Pullman railroad cars or any cars attached
to them, including those that were carrying U.S. mail. The federal government obtained an injunction against
the strike, and the Army was sent in to enforce it. On the charge of conspiracy, Debs had a jury trial in which
famed civil rights attorney Clarence Darrow defended him; the case was dropped mid-trial. On the charge of
contempt, the judge in his sole authority sentenced Debs to six months in prison. Thus the difference in due
process rights in criminal and civil matters was dramatically illustrated.
The danger of contempt-of-court charges being abused rises whenever the case being decided is controversial
and open to political pressure.
The Good of Society
Can the good of society be balanced against the cost and danger of contempt of court to individuals?
In civil contempt the good is usually defined as paying up for example, child support. But it is difficult to
understand what good is accomplished by imprisoning nonviolent parents who are behind in payments.
Although data on the number of deadbeat prisoners is vague and often anecdotal, deadbeat dads certainly
constitute the majority of civil-contempt imprisonments. Often the stated goal is to pry loose hidden money
from the parent. But there is no statistical proof or studies to indicate that imprisonment motivates a parent
who can pay up to do so. Moreover, society tracks wealth through bank accounts, tax returns, pay stubs, and
myriad paper trails; if wealth is not discoverable then surely there should be a presumption that it doesnt
exist. The accused should not be guilty until proven innocent.
If deadbeats are being punished for their poverty, then America has reinstated debtors prisons and done so
with no due process for those victimized. A debtors prison is one that houses those who are unable to pay a
debt. In 1833 the United States eliminated such institutions at the federal level. Most states followed suit,
refusing to impose the criminal penalty of imprisonment on insolvent debtors. Currently, the typical wording
about debtors prisons within state constitutions is, No person shall be imprisoned for debt in any civil action,
or mesne or final process, unless in cases of fraud. It is still possible, however, to be incarcerated for
nonfraudulent debts such as nonpayment of alimony or child support.
Imprisonment for civil contempt is an unnecessary and dangerous exception to the due process to which every
individual is entitled both Constitutionally and by natural right. It also involves a confusing, inconstant maze of
laws that collapse the traditional distinction between criminal and civil courts. As Justice Black observed, It
would be no overstatement to say that the offense with the most ill-defined and elastic contours in our law
is now punished by the harshest procedures known to that law.
Civil-contempt imprisonment is a legal aberration that imposes an artificial and arbitrary respect for courts
upon non-violent people. It is far from a benevolent or rarely flexed power. Unless the law is changed or
eliminated, the Chadwicks of America will multiply. People will be placed in jail without ever being arrested or
heard by a jury; tens of thousands and, arguably, hundreds of thousands of deadbeat parents or
deadbeat ex-spouses will be sent to the modern equivalent of debtors prison.

The power of a judge to imprison without due process or recourse should be eliminated.

Decriminalize the Average American!

As with the suspension of due process within the courts, the relationship between average Americans and the
police and/or penal system has dramatically changed. And not for the better. Since 9/11, there has been a sea
change in the institutions of America, including the militarization of law enforcement at all levels. The average
individual is now treated as a criminal suspect in airports, at the entrance of public buildings, in the
ever-increasing requirement for ID, and during the exercise of so-called guaranteed rights such as peaceful
assembly and bearing arms. Law enforcement now views the public as enemy combatants.
The goal of a police state is not the free flow of civil society but the polar opposite: social control. The goal of a
police state is to preserve and augment its own political power. Because civil society considers government to
be its servant rather than a master, civil society constitutes a direct threat to the police state. Thus, the two are
at war with each other and cannot co-exist. This characteristic distinguishes the police state from limited
government: it wages war upon civil society, upon peaceful expression and behavior. In doing so, it wages war
on individuals.
Today laws restrict almost every aspect of everyday life and have made the average American into a criminal,
whether he knows it or not. America is disappearing day by day. I fervently hope that its disappearance is still
on the horizon and not already in the past, because if it is yet to come, those of us who notice may still be able
to reclaim a nation that was once as free as Nazi Germany once was cultured.

If you reside in America and it is dinnertime, you have almost certainly broken the law. In his book Three
Felonies a Day, civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate estimates that the average person unknowingly breaks
at least three federal criminal laws every day. This toll does not count an avalanche of other laws for
example misdemeanors or civil violations such as disobeying a civil contempt order all of which confront
average people at every turn.
An article in the Economist (July 22, 2010) entitled Too many laws, too many prisoners states,
Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole
or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under correctional supervision. As a proportion of its
total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than
Germany and 12 times more than Japan.
By contrast, in 1970, less than one in 400 Americans was incarcerated. Why has the prison population more
than quadrupled over a few decades? Why have average people become daily felons who are more vulnerable
to arrest in America than at any other time?
There is a simple answer but no single explanation as to how the situation arose or why it continues to
accelerate out of control. The answer: a constant flood of new and broadly interpreted laws are criminalizing
entire categories of daily life while, at the same time, the standards required for arrest and conviction have
been severely diluted. The result is that far too many people are arrested and imprisoned for acts that should
not be viewed as criminal at all or should receive minimal punishment, such as fines.
In some cases, the laws being violated are so obscure, vague, or complicated that even the police are ignorant
of them. In other cases, outright innocence is not sufficient to escape the brutality of detention.

Some Sample Cases

Note: the following examples illustrate the wide range of criminalization that is occurring and so their
circumstances differ significantly. Nevertheless, the cases share certain factors: the criminalization of harmless,
trivial acts; the enforcement of unreasonable rules; the severity with which any noncompliance is punished;
and the indifference of authorities to the human devastation wrought by law.
Case Number One: In 2005, while a passenger in his family car, Anthony W. Florence was mistakenly arrested
for a bench warrant on traffic tickets he had already satisfied; the proof of payment he carried was to no avail.
During seven days in jail, Florence was strip-searched twice, even though the guards admitted they had no
reasonable suspicion of contraband. He was otherwise deprived of rights; for example, guards watched him
shower and forced him to undergo a routine delousing.
Although Florence was eventually released, the attempt to get justice has taken him years. On October 12,
2011, the United States Supreme Court was scheduled to hear Florence v. Burlington, et al., in which the
question is whether the Fourth Amendment permits a jail to conduct a suspicionless strip search of every
individual arrested for any minor offense no matter what the circumstances.
According to his lawsuit, Florence is joined by people who were similarly treated after being arrested and jailed
for such crimes as driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal, and riding a bicycle without an
audible bell.
Case Number Two: In 2003, three pickup trucks with six armed police in flak jackets pulled up to
66-year-old George Norriss house in Texas.
Norris was detained for four hours while they ransacked his home and confiscated 37 boxes of possessions
without offering a warrant or an explanation. In March 2004, Norris was indicted under the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species for smuggling the orchids he had ordered and paid for to run a
side business. Norris was thrown into the same cell as a suspected murder and two suspected drug dealers.
The Economist reported,
Prosecutors described Mr. Norris as the kingpin of an international smuggling ring. He was
dumbfounded: his annual profits were never more than about $20,000. When prosecutors suggested
that he should inform on other smugglers in return for a lighter sentence, he refused, insisting he knew
nothing beyond hearsay. He pleaded innocent. But an undercover federal agent had ordered some
orchids from him, a few of which arrived without the correct papers. For this, he was charged with
making a false statement to a government official, a federal crime punishable by up to five years in
prison. Since he had communicated with his suppliers, he was charged with conspiracy, which also
carries a potential five-year term.
Unable to pay legal bills, Norris pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 17 months. For bringing prescription pills
into prison, he was thrown into solitary confinement for 71 days. But [t]he prison was so crowded that even
in solitary he had two roommates.
Case Number Three: In 2000, a poor kid from foster care named T.J. Hill thought he had found a path to success
when he received a wrestling scholarship to Cal State Fullerton. School did not work out, and he was arrested
in 2006 for possession of psilocybin (mushrooms). He was put on five years probation with a suspended
imposition of sentence. In other words, if he completed his probation successfully, he would not have a
criminal record.

In November 2008, he left the state and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Although the original charge was
minor and no further illegal activity occurred, T.J. was jailed on $100,000 bail to prevent flight risk. His family
has spent thousands on legal fees. T.J. is now well known for his volunteer work with children, and even police
officers are hoping T.J. escapes more jail time. As one of them said, Hes a good guy. Hes changed lives.
Whether he will be allowed to continue doing so or will become dehumanized through a senseless, brutal
imprisonment waits to be seen.
Such stories abound with most of them sharing characteristics with the foregoing three. For example, the
criminal activity being punished is usually trivial and victimless that is, it violates no ones rights. The crimes
are mala prohibita rather than mala in se. The first refers to crimes that exist only because rules were passed
to control peoples nonviolent behavior, like the buying of orchids; the second refers to crimes that exist
because the acts are intrinsically wrong, like rape.
Another shared characteristic: the punishments are extreme and any attempt to correct them is usually
ruinously expensive in terms of time and money. Nevertheless, the ultimate punishment may be the police
record that follows such criminals for life, shutting off worlds of opportunity that most people take for
granted.
How many Americans are different from Florence, with his paid-up-but-still-punished traffic tickets? Or from
Norris, who accidentally purchased a harmless but illegal flower? Or from T.J., who made a mistake by breaking
a malum prohibitum law against drugs?
If something similar happens to your children, do you want their lives to be destroyed by clerical error, an
understandable ignorance of a complex law, or by a youthful mistake? With every passing law, that prospect
becomes more probable.
What Path to Justice?
Even thinking about how to shift a government system toward freedom or justice can be exhausting. The penal
system is particularly daunting because its raw brutality seems to leave no room for reason. Fortunately, the
best approach may be to address the penal systems precursors: the legislatures that create laws, along with
the police officers and the court system that impose them. Without fundamental change at the early stages,
effective change at the final stage of imprisonment is unlikely.
Libertarianism has evolved sophisticated theories of what constitutes a proper justice system and how to
implement it. One of the most popular theories is based on restitution, rather than retribution or punishment.
Restitution is the legal system in which a person makes good on a harm or wrong done to another individual,
and does so directly; if you steal $100, then you pay back $100 and reasonable damages directly to the victim
of your theft. You do not pay a debt to society or to the state by going to prison. You do not undergo
punishment other than the damages assessed. You make your victim whole and somewhat more for his
trouble and aggravation.
Restitution is inherently self-limiting in how much the perpetrator is processed by the system. Beyond what is
necessary to make sure the harm or wrong is repaired, there is no need for a perpetrator to relinquish any of
his rights. A thief need not be caged to pay back $100 plus damages; all he needs to do is pay it back. There is
no need for a vast prison industry nor for the degradation of society that comes with creating criminals.
To accomplish a justice system based on restitution, legal scholar Randy Barnett has advocated sweeping away
the entire criminal justice system. In its place, he proposes a broadened civil-court system that adjudicates civil
liabilities and damages. On the other hand, many libertarians object to the pure restitution model; for example,

they claim restitution cannot adequately redress crimes like murder. Whatever the merits of such objections,
however, it is clear that restitution can address the great majority of genuine harms and wrongs.
Small Steps toward Justice
Fortunately, much smaller steps than an outright revolution in the court system can offer relief to the many
people who are now suffering from the travesty of Americas legal and penal systems. These steps include

A sunset provision attached to all new or amended laws. This clause provides an expiration date for a
law unless action is taken to renew it. Today most laws are in effect indefinitely.

The elimination of civil-contempt imprisonments, which most commonly occur in family courts. That is,
men who are unable to pay court-ordered spousal or child support can be indefinitely imprisoned for
contempt without a trial or appeal process. This converts the penal system into a debtors prison.

The elimination of a double standard in the law for those who are involved in law enforcement. For
example, the elimination of personal immunity for the willful wrongdoing of police officers on duty and
for district attorneys who pursue blatantly flimsy cases. Such immunity skews incentives in favor of
brutality and overly aggressive prosecution.

Reinstatement of the mens rea safeguard. Mens rea means that if there was no guilty mind when an
act occurred then there was no crime committed even though civil liabilities may well exist. For
example, if a man bumps into another car without noticing it, he should not be charged with leaving
the scene of an accident. He is civilly liable for damages but he is not criminally liable. A concerted
attack on mens rea is underway so that people are held criminally guilty despite their non-criminal
intent.

Establishment of an ignorance-of-the-law defense. This differs from mens rea. For example, if a man
knows he hit a car and leaves the scene, an ignorance defense would be I didnt know doing so was
illegal. His defense would be invalid because everyone in our society is reasonably presumed to know
that damaging property is wrong. But there are now myriad laws of which reasonable people are
ignorant, and it is currently impossible for anyone including the police to know the content of
every law. Moreover, the principle of ignorance of the law is no excuse comes from 17th-century
philosopher Thomas Hobbes who addressed willful ignorance of laws that were either well-known or a
matter of common sense. Thus the claim I didnt know rape was wrong is invalid whereas I didnt
know buying an orchid was wrong would be valid even to Hobbes.

The elimination of criminal charges for all nonviolent wrongdoing toward law-enforcement agents.
Such charges currently include obstruction of justice, and peacefully resisting arrest. Obstruction of
justice often refers to nothing more than asking an officer questions.

The decriminalization of all drugs.

A return to the traditional rules of statutory interpretation by which criminal statutes are narrowly
construed.

The list could be much longer. But the implementation of any one of the foregoing simple protections of justice
could save misery or ruination for many thousands of average Americans.

Conclusion
Unfortunately, legislators have a strong incentive to call constantly for more laws and stricter enforcement.
Until a large enough voter or other protest base has felt the bite of bad law and demand change, politicians will
continue to be rewarded for a tough on crime call. Moreover, hordes of unionized people in the legal and
penal systems now have well-paid jobs with great benefits. If 90 percent of arrests and imprisonments were
eliminated, then 90 percent of those jobs might disappear. Rolling back the police state America is becoming
will be difficult work but what is the alternative?

War, the External Enemy

In analyzing war, it is useful to divide the issue into two sharp parts: the conflict with an external enemy; and,
the conflict with those who internally dissent for example, by resisting a draft. The most obvious enemy is the
external one, whether it consists of another nation or of an idea like terrorism. But those who believe in the
non-initiation of force are immediately confronted by political and moral quandaries.
The so-called libertarian defense of war reduces to the following argument: because an individual has a right to
use deadly force in self-defense, a state (which can be defined as a collection of individuals) has the collective
right to defend itself through war. Only one of the things wrong with this argument is that it equates states or
nations with individuals as though a nations alleged rights are identical to those possessed by an individual.
Pro-war libertarians embrace a limited government that supposedly embodies a form of individual rights. If
this is true, then a truly minimal government could not launch or sustain war. War requires the ability to
command goods and services through procedures like taxation. If a state or nation has identical (and no more)
rights than an individual, then the demand for goods and services cannot be justified and war cannot be waged.
Pro-war libertarians cant have it both ways. If nations have the same rights as individuals, if war is justified on
the basis of an individuals right to self-defense, then the resources upon which war rests must also be
eschewed on the basis of an individuals right to retain their own property.

Can a principled libertarian go to war? Restating this question: Is a libertarian just war possible?
To answer this question requires a definition of war itself. According to the traditional definition, war involves
the declaration of hostilities by one state against another, in which the state commits the people and resources
under its jurisdiction to hostilities against the opponents people and resources. When two individuals or small
groups fight, it is called a brawl or a feud, not a war. Thus, war seems inextricably entangled with the concept
of nation-states that command, to varying degrees, the wealth, property, and bodies of those within their
borders. Historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel correctly describes war as a situation in which each state has
declared hostilities on three fronts (at least): against the combatant state; against the innocent people within
the combatant state; and against its own dissenting citizens.
If the preceding definition and description of war apply, then it is difficult to imagine a libertarian just war.
Nevertheless, in theory, it is possible to imagine a war without nation-states in the same manner libertarians
hypothesize about legal and court systems without government. If the laws and courts can be divorced from
the context of a state, then perhaps warfare can be as well. Even the quintessential isolationist Murray
Rothbard once stated, if you didnt have State war, if States were eliminated or if you are only talking about
private marauders versus private defenders, then the situation completely changes. Nor is it difficult to
envision libertarians killing people en masse under certain circumstances. Libertarianism embraces a right of
self-defense that allows the killing of an aggressor who uses lethal force. Nothing within libertarianism
precludes the possibility of people assigning this right to a collective entity who could exercise self-defense on
their behalf. As long as every individual a private defense agency claims to represent has voluntarily assigned
his right of self-defense to it, then the agency is justified in acting against an invader. Moreover, if the agency
acts only against invading individuals that is, the actual aggressors all objections that revolved around
innocent civilians are avoided. If the aggressors attack in large numbers, then killing them in large numbers is
politically and morally justified.
Thus, at least in theory, libertarianism seems to accept the possibility of a just war. (Of course, this does not

necessarily justify any war that has ever occurred in human history, but it opens up discussion and allows for
the remote possibility of a future just war.) But what would a libertarian war look like?
The idea of a just war is well-trodden ground for some Christian theorists who share the libertarian refusal to
spill innocent blood. Their presentations of just war provide an excellent starting point for analysis. In his book
War and Conscience, the minister Allen Isbell asks,
When and how may a State legitimately engage in a war? This has been a prime topic of discussion in
Christian ethics for sixteen centuries. From this continuing conversation within Christendom, a doctrine
of justifiable war has evolved.
Isbell goes on to list eight Christian requirements for a just war: it must be the last resort; you must be on the
side that is justified in fighting; it must have adequate cause; it must have a legitimate aim; the war must be
waged with a proper spirit; it must be waged by a proper authority; the execution must be just; and it must
promise beneficial victory.
What would be the equivalent libertarian requirements for a just war? At minimum, they would include the
following:

The war must have a just origin.

The initiation of force is the only circumstance that justifies the use of violence as an act of
self-defense. If the aggression against you is immediate for example, you are being raped then an
immediate and direct response of violence is appropriate. If the violence against you is not immediate
for example, you discover that someone stole your wallet yesterday then your act of self-defense
consists of going through a legal process to gain redress. If there is a direct assault by an invading force,
no libertarian could object to repelling it. But many if not most causes of war are akin to the crimes for
which you should seek legal remedy: broken treaties, disputed territory, a desire for resources, etc.
Many if not most causes leading to war require time and information in order to even know if they are
causes rather than excuses.

The war must be declared by a proper authority, and against a proper enemy.
In libertarianism, there are two possible authorities. The individual(s) against whom the violence is
being initiated and anyone who has been designated as an agent by the individual(s) to defend them.
The definition of proper enemy is equally restricted. Individuals or an agency can act only against
those who are committing the aggression and against no others. Moreover, the agency must conduct
the war in such a manner as to stay within the parameters of the self-defense rights assigned to it. It
cannot act with more or greater violence than the assigning individuals are justified in committing.
Moreover, as with other assignments of rights like powers of attorney, the assignee can cancel the
arrangement and opt out.

Those who do not assign their rights to an agency must be allowed to remain neutral or otherwise
outside of the conflict.
Nonassignees must be absolutely free to be neutral.

The rights of innocent others must be respected.

This is the civilian problem, which Rothbard expressed well:

I dont see why civilians have to be injured at all. After all, look at private crime now: suppose
somebody beats somebody over the head and steals his pocketbook and runs down the street.
The police right now do not spray machine-gun fire on the entire crowd in order to shoot down
the criminal. The principle is that no innocent person can get killed, and if the criminal escapes,
its tough luck, because the most important principle for the libertarian and among the
domestic police is not to use force against noncriminals.
A just war would have to be conducted in a manner akin to the 19th-century ones in which civilians picnicked
beside battlefields because the military on both sides respected the distinction between civilians and
combatants. Today, respect for civilians usually means that the military behaves in such a way as to reduce
civilian casualties. That way, the collateral damage in terms of innocent bodies can be called unintended.
But the unintended deaths of civilians is unacceptable. Unintended does not mean unpredictable or
unforeseeable. If an action will predictably lead to the death or of innocents, then it cannot be justified within
the framework of libertarianism.
At this point, some libertarians might shift the ground of argument on the civilian problem from principle to
utilitarianism. If an enemy is willing to use indiscriminate weaponry, they might argue, we must respond in kind
or be devastated.
I make no comment here on whether this argument is true nor do I offer a critique of its flaws. Instead, I
strongly suggest that those who believe the argument to be true should abandon the label libertarian.
Libertarianism is the political system organized around the principle of non-aggression, and you cannot run a
cost-benefit analysis as a way to justify killing innocent people without stepping outside of libertarianism. The
boundaries of its theory are not flexible enough to embrace the murder of innocents as collateral damage.
Many would consider the foregoing to be an ivory-tower position. They argue that when your life is
threatened, you have a right to respond defensively, even if the response entails firing into a crowded street
and killing innocent pedestrians; the responsibility for their deaths lies with the aggressor, not with you.
If this argument is true, an interesting question of math arises. How many bystanders are you justified in
murdering in order to eliminate someone trying to kill you? By what standard do you calculate that number? As
few as necessary? But what if the number comes to 10,000? What if I know the aspiring assassin is in a
particular movie theater and the only way to be sure to kill him is to blow the place up? Or, perhaps, I know he
is somewhere in Chicago; am I justified in nuking the city? And if not, why not? Once I abandon the principle of
not harming innocents, we are talking about math and utility, not ethics. Presumably, everyone would value
their own lives so much as to be willing to drive the casualty figures rather high.
Of course, every innocent person whose life is endangered by your act of self-defense would also have a right
to kill you for aggressing against them. By this logic, the residents of Chicago would have a right to
pre-emptively bomb your home city. And, so, the justified murdering of innocents could spread like a virus until
the world resembled a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all.
To conclude: A libertarian just war would have to be declared in response to an act of aggression that could not
be remedied by a lesser level of defensive violence. It would have to be declared by an agency on behalf of
people who had assigned their rights of self defense. The war could be declared only on behalf of those
assignees. Dissenters would have to be left in peace to defend themselves or not. The declaration of war would
be against the individuals responsible for an attack but not against the enemy civilian population. And,
finally, the war would have to be conducted with strategies and weaponry that could not foreseeably involve
injuring or killing innocents.

Given these requirements, a libertarian just war is unimaginable.

War, the Internal Enemy

A State at war devastates its own population in at least two ways: it destroys freedom and prosperity by
collapsing the division between the public and private sector; and, it engages in open combat against
individuals who oppose its policies, even verbally. Thus the internal enemies of a warring state are (1) the
private sector, or society, which functions outside the bounds of the State, and (2) those individuals who speak
or act against official policy. Society is usually controlled through massive regulation and monitoring that
establishes a de facto state control over and usurpation of the private sector. Dissenting individuals are usually
controlled by intimidation or outright brutality such as arrest.

The First Internal Enemy: Society

War is the health of the State. The famous seven words appeared in an unfinished manuscript written during
World War I by the progressive essayist Randolph Silliman Bourne (1886-1918). The sentence contains a
complexity of meaning that is often overlooked. For one, it refers to the destruction of the moral, political and
economic structure of a free society through the states usurpation of the private sector, including its
intellectuals.
In times of peace, Bourne believed the majority of people pursued their own interests according to their own
values. They worked and cooperated with each other, married and raised children without paying much
attention to the state. Instead, they dealt with the government. Bourne defined government (as opposed to
the State) as
a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is the
idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men.
Government was the practical day-to-day offices and functions of a state such as the post office or the public
school system, with which people came into contact as they simply pursued life. The civil servants whose jobs
make government function for example, post office workers had no sense of sanctity about them. Indeed,
Bourne described them as common and unsanctified men. He believed this was a salutary situation and a
reflection of Americas happy egalitarianism.
Meanwhile, the average person rarely dealt with the State that is, with the public institutions that were
sanctified such as the Supreme Court. These were the institutions and agencies that expressed and embodied
the enduring state, such as Congress. Thus in times of peace in a relatively free society, Bourne believed the
sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men who, nevertheless, deal with government in
acquiring drivers licenses, etc.
In other words, the state is more of a concept than a physical reality. In the United States, it is the political
structure established after the American Revolution that is embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It
claims a chain of legitimacy that dates back to President George Washington. While governments constantly
come and go through elections, the state remains essentially the same, and tends to grow only stronger with
time. It is the state rather than government that inspires emotions such as patriotism; it is a Senator rather
than a postman who inspires awe. And it is to the concept of the American state not to any particular
government, Republican or Democratic to which people pledge allegiance with hands placed over their
hearts.
Meanwhile, society functions differently from either the state or government. By society, Bourne refers to
the collection of factors that constitute American life. They include characteristic attitudes, business practices,

common lore and literature, the price of bread, religious convictions, a shared history, and the prevailing
cultural norms. A specifically American society is composed of the nonpolitical factors that make America
different from China or France. Society consists of the private sector. In times of peace, Bourne believed most
people identified far more closely with society than they did with either government or the State. Most people
defined themselves in relationship to family, a community, a religion, or ethnic heritage rather than to a
political party.
Although Bourne believed that society could function well under a government the loose administration of
reasonable laws he did not believe it could coexist with a sanctified State. The first section of his essay The
State is entitled War is the health of the State. Bourne observes of society, which he refers to as country,
Country is a concept of peace, tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept of
power, of competition; it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of
being born not only into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle the two
feelings into a hopeless confusion.
To sum up Bournes preceding argument: in times of peace, people pursue their own self-interest, identify with
society, interact with government, and only occasionally encounter the sanctified state.
Society During a State of War
Bourne defined war as the ultimate act of statehood, as the utmost act of a group in its aggressive aspects.
He wrote, War is a function of States. Bourne argued that war erases the lines that separate government
from the state and separate both of them from society. The act of erasure happens largely within the individual
himself. Stoked by emotion, the average person fills with patriotism and loses all sense of the distinction
between State, nation and government. Bourne described the process:
Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion
between the relations which the individual bears and should bear towards the society of which he is a part.
In times of war, the government and state become virtually identical, so that to oppose the government (any
law or regulation) becomes an act of disloyalty to the sanctified State. For example, although criticizing the
President is a right regularly exercised by Americans in peace time, such criticism becomes an act of treason
when war is declared. As Bourne explained,
objections to the war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, are
made subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding in severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes.
Moreover, in wartime, individuals who only casually interacted with the government now become fervid
defenders of the state.
Every individual citizen who in peace times had no function to perform by which he could imagine himself an
expression or living fragment of the State becomes an active amateur agent in reporting spies and
disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating such measures as are considered necessary by
officialdom.
The activities of society from the words spoken at pulpits to those written in newspapers, from economic
exchanges to entertainment begin to conform with the purposes of the state rather than the self-interest of
individuals. This process can be particularly prominent in the business world from which the State must drain
resources to maintain the expensive activity of war. The State does so through myriad means including

regulation, taxation, and the usurpation of decision-making.

As both society and government merge with the state, the individual himself begins to disappear. The
individual becomes part of what Bourne called the herd or masses which the State organizes to act
offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized. For example, the state used powerful
inducements to convince people to choose to support the war effort. Individuals usually agreed, reluctantly
or not, because in a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely
strengthened in that identification.
But if an individual refused to join the herd and instead refused his support, then the state revealed that choice
was never a real issue.
Men are told simultaneously that they will enter the military establishment of their own volition, as their
splendid sacrifice for their countrys welfare, and that if they do not enter they will be hunted down and
punished with the most horrid penalties.
And, so, individuals obey wartime measures even to the point of risking their lives on battlefields. People cease
to be individuals acting in their own self-interest and become citizens of the state acting in concert. The man
who dissents and remains an individual feels forlorn and helpless, while those who think and feel collectively
have the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing irresponsibility of protection.
This is the theoretical meaning of war is the health of the State. In times of peace, people are largely defined
by self-interest and by society; they interact casually with government, giving little thought to the State. In
times of war, everything reverses to the benefit of the state. As for the impact on the individual, if war is the
health of the state, then war is also the death of individual rights.
The Second Internal Enemy: The Persistent Individual
In every war, there are individuals who refuse to join the herd. Instead they persist in acting as free human
beings with the freedom to speak, to judge and to control their own peaceful behavior. If their actions directly
confront State policy or harm it in any way e.g. by reducing the money flowing into war chests then the
State moves to crush these individuals. History is the best teacher on this point.
The warring States repression of both society and the individual is rooted deep within American history and
politics. From 1798 to 1800, the United States and France were involved in an undeclared war now known as
the Quasi-War. The conflict grew out of Americas increasingly close ties with Britain the enemy of both
France and Ireland. Americans began to view with suspicion the many French and Irish immigrants in their
midst; politicians began to worry about civil unrest and dissent. And so, loyalty legislation was pushed
through Congress in 1798.
The Alien and Sedition Acts consisted of four laws. The most explosive one was officially entitled An Act for
the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States, or, unofficially, the Sedition Act. It provided fines
and jail terms for anyone who shall write, print, utter or publish false, scandalous and malicious writing or
writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress or the President
with intent to defame or to bring them into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them the hatred
of the good people of the United States.
The Acts had been championed by the Federalists who then dominated Congress and favored a strong federal
government with a loose interpretation of the Constitution. Their key political rivals were the Republicans,
including Vice President Thomas Jefferson. The Republicans denounced the Acts as unconstitutional and the

new powers granted to President John Adams as monarchical. For such statements, several prominent
Republicans were arrested under the Sedition Act. Publishers and editors were targeted especially. When a
public backlash helped Jefferson to win the presidency in 1800, he pardoned those who had been convicted
under the Sedition Act.
On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war on Germany, and America officially entered World War I. On June 15, a
federal loyalty law called the Espionage Act became one of Americas first pieces of wartime legislation. Along
with an 1918 amendment called the Sedition Act, the Espionage Act immediately became one of the most
controversial measures in American history, not because of how it dealt with foreign espionage but because of
how it affected the freedom of speech of publishers, journalists, anti-war activists, labor reformers, socialists,
and the average American.
In his essay Not Just Japanese Americans: The Untold Story of U.S. Repression during The Good War, the
historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel described the three key features of the 1917 Act:
(1) a true espionage law, which punished spying and wartime sabotage, (2) a neutrality law, which
restricted the non-neutral acts of private citizens in foreign conflicts, and (3) a sedition law, providing
up to twenty years in jail and a $10,000 fine for aiding the enemy with false reports or false
statements, for obstructing recruiting, or for causing insubordination, disloyalty, or mutiny in the U.S.
armed forces. The act also empowered the Postmaster General to exclude from the mail issues of
newspapers and periodicals that he felt were subversive.
Under the Sedition Act it became illegal to:

make false reports, or false statements with the intent to obstruct the sale by the United States of
bonds

utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of
government of the United States, or the Constitution or the military or naval forces or the flag or
the uniform of the Army or Navy or any language intended to bring the form of government or the
Constitution or the military or naval forces or the flag into contempt, scorn, contumely, or
disrepute

willfully display the flag of a foreign enemy

urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things
necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war.

The Woodrow Wilson administration was determined to protect America against itself; that is, to protect it
against wrong ideas and from those who would spread them. Wilson referred to the dissemination of wrong
ideas as the insidious methods of internal hostile activities. Attorney General Thomas Gregory called it
warfare by propaganda.
What constituted propaganda varied but it shared a common theme: namely, opposition to the wartime State.
Virtually every form of resistance to or criticism became a potential felony. In a 1988 analysis, the conservative
sociologist Robert Nisbet commented, [when] America was introduced to the War State in 1917, it was
introduced also to what would later be known as the total, or totalitarian, state.
An officially sanctioned patriotic hysteria swept America. Legislatures outlawed teaching German or publicly
playing German music, such as Wagner or Beethoven. German books were removed from public libraries.

German-sounding streets were renamed, and sauerkraut became liberty cabbage. The Red Cross barred
those with German last names from joining. German immigrants or their descendants were viciously attacked
with their attackers suffering no consequences. In Minnesota, a minister was tarred and feathered for praying
in German with a dying woman.
After the Bolshevik (Red) Revolution shook global politics to its roots, socialists became special targets, with
men being beaten in the streets for no more than wearing a red tie or for refusing to buy a war bond.
The law imposed an official censorship as well. The government seized a film entitled The Spirit of 76 because
it depicted cruelty committed against the colonists by the British, Americas wartime ally; the producer
received a ten-year prison sentence. A federal court upheld the seizure; the sentence was commuted to three
years upon appeal.
The sheer number and scope of imprisonments make the telling of it difficult. One segment of society
epitomizes the repression, however: the anti-war movement. Anti-war voices were particularly vulnerable
because so many came from socialist or labor-reform ranks toward whom the Wilson administration was
already antagonistic. Perhaps the most prominent imprisonment was the 10-year sentence of the socialist
leader and former presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. His crime? He criticized the Espionage Act as
unconstitutional.
A backlash began to coalesce, including prominent voices such as pacifist Norman Thomas, birth-control
activist Margaret Sanger, feminist Alice Stone Blackwell, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, and Roger
Baldwin, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Indeed, the ACLU itself sprang from the National Civil
Liberties Bureau, formed in 1917 to provide legal assistance to those prosecuted under the Espionage Acts.
The League for Amnesty of Political Prisoners issued a leaflet entitled Is Opinion a Crime? The question was a
response to the U.S. Supreme Courts 7-2 decision in Abrams v. United States (1919 ). Abrams rested on
whether political speech was protected by the First Amendment or whether it was a crime under the Espionage
Act. The Supreme Court answered, It is a crime. In a famous dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes clarified his clear and present danger test for free speech, Only the emergency that makes it
immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels warrants making any exception to the
sweeping command, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech (several other important
U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirmed aspects of the Espionage Act).
Meanwhile, the arrest of hundreds of conscientious objectors occurred, including women. For example, Rose
Pastor Stokes was sentenced to 10 years for stating in a letter to the Kansas City Star that no government
which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people while the government is for the
profiteers.
The labor-reform movement was heavily targeted for at least four reasons: it was largely socialist; it contained
many foreigners; it engaged in the disruption of production through strikes; it was anti-war because it viewed
the German people as fellow-workers of the world, not enemy combatants.
Across America, the meeting halls of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were raided simultaneously. In
1917, 165 prominent IWW members were arrested. In April 1918, 101 defendants went on trial, including IWW
head Big Bill Haywood. After five months, all were found guilty, with Haywood and fourteen others each
receiving twenty year sentences. Collectively, the defendants were fined $2,500,000. From a membership of
more than 100,000 in early 1917, the IWW was effectively destroyed.
Even after World War I ended, ultra-patriotism led to the persecution of un-Americanism. This period became

known as the Red Scare (19191920) and reached its zenith with the Palmer Raids. Under the supervision of
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his special assistant J. Edgar Hoover, a vicious campaign was launched
against radicals and included the deportation of dissident immigrants; even American citizenship did not
protect against deportation, as Emma Goldman discovered.
The fever of war eventually faded. In 1920, most of those sentenced during the Red Scare were freed. Debs
himself was released in 1921 by Warren Harding. In 1921 the Sedition Act was also repealed, although other
provisions of the Espionage Act remained intact.
The Espionage Act Today
Through World War II to the present day, the Espionage Act has been both amended and invoked to quash
political dissent and discussion during time of war.
In June 1971, during the Vietnam War, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg and his colleague Anthony Russo were
charged under the Espionage Act for publishing the classified documents known as the Pentagon Papers. The
New York Times was threatened under the Act for publishing them. In the end, Ellsberg and Russo were freed
owing to irregularity in the governments case, which led to the declaration of a mistrial.
A political hysteria and repression akin to the one that produced the Espionage Act currently grips America.
The heightened political atmosphere has allowed the passage of broad legislation that establishes the right
of the State to indefinitely detain American citizens without charges, trial or an appeal process.
War is the health of the State. War is not merely a declaration of a States hostility against an external enemy
but also against its own citizenry. It is the death of society, of freedom and of individual rights.

SECTION III
PRINCIPLES WORK THROUGH PEOPLE
Principles live through human beings; they have no existence without people. Ideas have no reality except as
they are embodied or expressed through art and manufacturing, music and machines, literature and math. In
short, ideas must be man made and maintained. If you want to understand how ideas and ideology function
and flow in the real world, then it is valuable to read biographies to watch how principles function in the lives
and minds of other people.
It is also one of the great pleasures of life because books are time machines. You can eavesdrop on Thomas
Jefferson by reading the correspondence in which he explained the American Revolution to his European
friends. Through Thomas Paine you can hear the same words that sparked the revolution when they were
nailed defiantly on fenceposts and taverns. You can share the joy and struggle of people you admire by reading
their diaries and papers. If you have trouble with an emotional problem, like mourning, then you can re-read
William Godwins amazing tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft upon her death. All of history is available to befriend.
And sometimes you will need a friend. Standing up for yourself can be frustrating and unpleasant. The world
can brutalize people intellectually as surely as it does physically. For friendship and solace, for knowledge and
companionship, it is not possible to say enough about the benevolence of books. And, especially, of
biographies.
In this Section, I introduce some of the historical friends from whom I have drawn insight and inspiration as I
read how the principles we share impelled their lives.

tienne de la Botie: Why Do People Obey Unjust Laws?

A 16th-century essay changed my life. It answered the question Why do people obey unjust laws? better than
anything else I had read or heard. The principle or concept that tienne de la Botie expressed so brilliantly is
known as voluntary servitude; people consent to their own enslavement. La Botie also explains why.
One of his explanations was of particular value to me; namely, the role that habit plays in peoples lives. These
days, the word habit has fallen on hard times and is most often used in a negative sense; la Botie may give
the same impression. But in classical Greek philosophy habits were neither good nor bad but powerful tools that
people could use either to good or bad ends. In answer to the question How do human beings achieve
happiness? Aristotle answered that happiness was the result of good habits in pursuing actions and endeavors
of substance and in the right amount. To some extent, this is true of achieving freedom as well. La Botie
stresses the role of habit in developing obedience but habits can be equally important in becoming and
remaining liberated. For example, develop the habit of questioning authority even if the question is asked
quietly or only of yourself.

The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by the French jurist tienne de La Botie
(15301563) discusses a question that haunts those who love liberty: Why do people obey unjust laws? The
Discourse offers insight. It examines the psychology of those who obey, those who command, and those who
resist. La Botie was particularly interested in why people obey. He asked, If a tyrant is one man and his
subjects are many, why do they consent to their own enslavement?.
La Botie did not believe the state ruled primarily through force. For one thing, there were many more people
enslaved than there were agents of the state: if even a small percentage of the populace refused to obey a law,
that law would become unenforceable. Moreover, most people obeyed without being forced to do so. La
Botie evolved an alternate explanation that he called voluntary servitude.
La Botie acquired his renown on the basis of one short essay that argued tyranny is automatically defeated
when people refuse to consent to their own enslavement. His argument has led many to conclude that
nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience are the best strategies with which to oppose state power.
Discourse first circulated privately in France (circa 1553) against a backdrop of foreign war and domestic
conflict. European nation states governments that claimed sweeping powers within defined territories
were on the rise. Absolute monarchs clashed with each other and with their own citizens, from whom they
demanded money and obedience. The 16th century gave birth to the tyranny that eventually led to the French
Revolution.
La Boties Background
La Botie was well placed to observe the society around him, which was then governed by King Francis I. Born
into an affluent and politically connected family, La Botie escaped the illiteracy, misery, and disease that befell
most of his countrymen. Famine was so common that men carved crosses on newly baked bread to symbolize
the sacredness of food. Plague erupted repeatedly. As the peasant struggled to survive, state taxes consumed
one third or more of his income, with church tithes absorbing another tenth. Roving bands of soldiers stole
food at will and kidnapped young sons to fill their ranks. Nevertheless, 16th-century France, with an estimated
population of 16 million, was the richest, most civilized, most populous nation in Europe.
France was also an absolute monarchy, which meant that national power was not distributed between
parliaments or local authorities but rested with the king alone. To raise money for war, Francis sold titles to the

nouveaux riche who formed a new aristocracy. Meanwhile, the ranks of lawyers swelled as they
administered the growing state.
Peasants existed at near-starvation level because of taxation in its myriad forms. The collection process was
particularly brutal because tax collectors were entrepreneurs who paid the king a flat amount for the
privilege of collecting taxes; anything over that amount became profit. This provided a great incentive to
overtax and to vigorously collect.
Some of the taxes were quite creative. For example, there was a salt monopoly tax by which everyone over the
age of 7 was required to purchase several pounds of highly inferior government salt every year. The law also
prescribed how the salt could be used and imposed heavy fines for misuse, such as in the preservation of meat.
Many other commodities had their own separate taxes. Fees were levied at every stage of manufacture, upon
transportation, at time of sale to retailers, and then again to customers. It has been estimated that these taxes
doubled the cost of goods. The list of impositions scrolls on and on, and it includes many customs duties that
were imposed not merely at national borders but also at the boundaries between different provinces within
France.
And, of course, there was the constant bribery and other unofficial theft by authorities, for which France was
notorious. Unfortunately, it is impossible to even estimate how much this corruption cost the average person.
In this atmosphere of looting almost everything a worker produced, the obedience of the common man was
essential to state authority. But there were conflicting claims upon workers loyalty. God demanded obedience,
to be sure, but the absolute monarch a more secular authority was anointed by God and blessed by the
Catholic Church. (Indeed, the rise of Protestants in France called Huguenots was partly in backlash; it
meant that a growing segment of society did not recognize the kings divine authority.) There were also
provincial loyalties. Most Frenchmen gave primary fealty to the province of their birth rather than to the nation
or to the king; the provinces varied widely in customs, religious practices, and language. Both the Huguenots
and provincial loyalties led the king to fear that foreign powers would align with rebellious provinces, especially
those who had tendencies toward Protestantism.
Obedience became ever more essential, but the invention of the printing press made it ever more difficult to
procure. For this, the printing press has been called the most revolutionary tool the world has known. As
publications spread, so did attempts at censorship. In 1559, the first papal list of prohibited books was
published.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
Discourse was most likely written while La Botie was a law student at the University of Orlans, renowned for
Huguenot activity. Indeed, one of his professors would be later burned at the stake for heresy. The essay was in
response to a specific event the Revolt de Gabelle in Bordeaux. The Gabelle was the aforementioned salt tax,
which was much hated. Protesters killed the Gabelles director general along with two of his officers. In
retaliation, 140 commoners were killed, many others were whipped, and exorbitant fines were imposed.
La Botie was an acute observer of the competing demands on peoples obedience. He watched and wondered
why the state seemed able to do anything it wanted, no matter how tyrannical. When the people did finally
rebel and were quashed, he wondered why did they not rise up again, this time en masse? As a result of such
speculation, La Botie wrote what the French historian Pierre Mesnard has called the humanist solution to the
problem of authority: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.
Why do people willingly consent to their own enslavement? For La Botie, the collective obedience of society

came from a vice for which no term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tongues
refuse to name. La Botie called this monstrous vice voluntary servitude.
But why is voluntary servitude a vice rather than a virtue? Because it contradicts nature, La Botie explained.
Each man is given his own ability to reason, and virtue lies in cultivating his own innate independence. Even
within the lower animals, there is a strong and natural urge to remain autonomous, to be free. Animals who
have tasted freedom resist entrapment, although it might cost them their lives. La Botie exclaimed,
Since the very beasts, although made for the service of man, cannot become accustomed to control
without protest, what evil chance has so denatured man that he, the only creature really born to be
free, lacks the memory of his original condition and the desire to return to it?
Mans liberty required the death of tyranny. Advocating tyrannicide against a ruler who had broken the laws of
God was nothing new in European theory but La Botie had a different slant: the way to kill a tyrant was to
destroy his power through non-violent resistance. In that manner, the people killed not merely a man but the
very tyranny itself. Liberty required only that enough people withdraw their consent and cooperation. After all,
he who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body ; he has indeed
nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough
eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat
you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he
get them if they are not your own?
Yet farmers continued to sow crops that were confiscated. People accumulated goods for soldiers to pillage
and raised daughters for them to rape. People watched as sons were kidnapped into the military and died
fighting someone elses battles. La Botie addressed the peasant,
You yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he [the tyrant or the state] may indulge in his
delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger
and the mightier to hold you in check.
To understand why people consented to their own enslavement, La Botie first considered the flip side of the
issue: the psychology of the tyrant.
The Psychology of the Tyrant
Traditional political theory defined tyranny with reference to the source of a rulers power. Tyrants fell into
three categories: those elected to power, those who inherited power, and those who claimed it by force. The
first two sources of power gave the king legitimacy in the eyes of the people. This was especially true of
inherited power because it meant the tyrant ruled through the sanction of God. Thus, he was was deemed to
rule justly even if he ruled badly.
By contrast, La Botie declared the origin of power to be irrelevant to the definition of tyranny. If a man ruled
justly, then he was legitimate; if he ruled badly, then he was a tyrant and illegitimate.
La Botie refused to give importance to the means by which tyrants achieved power because what was
important was their method of ruling after they had achieved it.
Nevertheless the psychology of elected rulers piqued La Boties interest in particular because it seemed logical
that a ruler whose power came from the people would be more bearable than other rulers. After all, such a

man ought to be grateful to the people, or at least he would be aware of his dependency upon their good will.
Yet La Botie found that when the elected ruler tasted power, he plans never to relinquish his position in
which he did not necessarily function any better than others. For an elected tyrant, however, engineering the
peoples future consent to his continuing power was of paramount importance.
La Botie explored the major ways in which a ruler engineered consent.
The beginning of a tyrants rule was the most difficult period because those who had not consented to his rule
would obey reluctantly, and brute force might be necessary. Brute force could put down dissent in the short
term but it was never a good long-term option. The violence committed by the ruler would bred martyrs and
could very well increase popular resistance. Moreover, violent suppression showed the ugly face of power too
clearly, making people withdraw their support.
As time passed, however, the tyrants task became easier. Through conditioning and training, future
generations would accept authority passively and they would automatically obey. La Botie observed, It is
incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its
freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is
led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its
enslavement.
Generations that were born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery accepted their
condition as natural. Thus, custom or habit was the first explanation of voluntary servitude.
In an essay entitled Of Custom, the Renaissance thinker Michel de Montaigne, who was La Boties best
friend, dramatized the incredible power of habit. He seems to have had a right and true apprehension of the
power of custom, who first invented the story of a country-woman who, having accustomed herself to play
with and carry a young calf in her arms, and daily continuing to do so as it grew up, obtained this by custom,
that, when grown to be a great ox, she was still able to bear it.
Nevertheless, there would always be a few subjects who would try to shake off their enslavement. Some of
them would do so because they remembered their ancestors and their former ways of freedom. Aware of
history, these dissenters would compare the past to the present, and so dare to long for a better future. La
Botie commented, These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by
study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. Through
books, the men who invented their own freedom would teach others about human nature and this, in turn,
would led to a detestation of tyranny.
Control of Information
After instilling the custom of servitude into the majority of people, therefore, the rulers next challenge was to
control the flow of information in order to minimize dissent.
The most basic control was achieved in two ways: by censoring the press and by monopolizing education. If he
could limit what was printed and taught, then the tyrant could prevent people from comparing the past with
the present. He could control what people believed was possible in the future.
Moreover, the people could be carefully educated to believe that the tyrant was a benefactor who acted only
to further public welfare. He could inculcate the belief that his administration was a living embodiment of
noble concepts such as justice, tradition, patriotism, law and order, or the public good. And, if the tyrant was
the embodiment of all things noble, then opposing him would be tantamount to opposing goodness itself.

The people themselves would turn on the tyrants critics and defend him.
At this point, a process of mystification could occur in which the people began to view the tyrant as larger than
life. Mystification occurred in several ways. The tyrant aligned with religion and so drew upon the veneration of
God. He swore to uphold the law of the land, and wrapped himself in the authority of a constitution or
founding document. He appealed to the nations traditions, claiming to be their caretaker. The tyrant presided
over widely publicized displays of pomp and power. His agents were dressed in intimidating uniforms and
enjoyed privileges that marked them as special simply because they served him. Awe-inspiring monuments
to his rule were constructed, including the courts and other buildings in which the business of state his
business was conducted.
This was the second reason people rendered automatic obedience. A regulated press and school system had
convinced them that the rulers authority was legitimate. But the peoples education did not stop when they
reached the point of legitimizing the tyrant. It continued into a mystification that led people to be awed by the
tyrants authority and to view him as something more than a mere fallible human being as they were
themselves.
Bribery
But what of those people who still remained free because they could not be tamed by habit or by being
instilled with awe? La Botie believed the wise tyrant would also engage in faux largesse.
La Botie pointed to the state-sponsored plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures,
and other such opiates used by ancient peoples. These distractions were the bait toward slavery. The
people became so engrossed in their own pleasures that they did not notice the chains on their bodies. Along
with state-sponsored distractions, the wise tyrant also provided for the basic needs of people. For example, he
distributed stocks of food. And then everybody would shamelessly cry, Long live the King! La Botie
remarked scornfully. The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own
property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it
from them. By providing bread and circuses state welfare and popular distractions the people were
bribed into surrendering their liberty.
The direct bribery paled in significance, however, beside an indirect form that La Botie called the mainspring
and the secret of domination, the support and foundation of tyranny. This was an institutionalized bribery
through which millions of people were employed at state jobs and depended on tax funds in order to pay their
bills. Owing their livelihoods to the tyrant and with many holding positions they could not have earned by mere
merit, the employees would cleave to the tyrant, offering him their loyalty. Some state employees, such as
police officers, became the hands of the state, reaching throughout society to implement laws and policies.
Tax-supported intellectuals, such as university professors and recipients of government grants, became the
voice of the state, defending its legitimacy. Still others, working as clerks or minor agents, made the daily
machinery of the state grind on and on.
Over generations, a vast new class of people would emerge within society: people who served the state in
exchange for a tax-funded salary. This class of people willingly destroyed their own liberty and that of their
neighbors for the profits they received from the tyrant. They would do so with no scruples or hesitation
because the force of custom and state education had led them to believe things had always been this way and
always would be.

Conclusion
What was La Boties solution to voluntary servitude? The people should rise out of enslavement by
withdrawing their consent and cooperation from the tyrant. La Botie advised, I do not ask that you place
hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him,
like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.
If La Botie is right, if freedom is a natural human urge, then nature herself argues the logic of not cooperating
with tyranny. There is something within both man and beast that resists the tension of a leash. Rather than
break the tension by attacking whomever holds the reins, La Botie told people to just let the tension go slack.
Refuse both violence or submission. Simply say no.
In that word, freedom lives.

Franois Marie Arouet de Voltaire: The Relationship Between Freedom and Tolerance
Today it is commonplace for people to view freedom as the enemy of tolerance, and government as its friend.
Thus law is called upon to mandate respect for minorities, women and other groups who are said to require
protection. Thus affirmative action, hate speech laws, equal pay legislation Freedom, the politically correct
assure us, brings exploitation and intolerance, especially in the free market. History does not smile upon that
theory because it is the opposite of what has historically occurred.
One man dramatically highlighted the true relationship between freedom and tolerance or, more specifically,
between the free market and religious tolerance. The Enlightenment giant Voltaire demonstrated that it was
the free market that ensured tolerance; it was government interference that was tolerances death knell.
If anything, I think Voltaire understated his defense of the free markets unintentional but morally salutary
affects upon society. A friend recently stated, Thank God for the free market. It keeps away evil. The spark for
his comment was a campaign of slander being conducted by a malicious group of people who wished to harm
people they disliked for the sheer joy of harming them. In a closed society, personal grudges and prejudices
loom large and this allows malicious people to inflict damage on targets by blocking employment, cutting off
services and otherwise disrupting their lives. Their reason for doing so could be one of a thousand: the color of
their skin, the content of their beliefs, a spurned romance, a dispute over money.
But in an open society, such as that created by freedom and trade, the malicious become toothless because the
free market is a neutral mechanism. It is huge and it does not care for anything but merit and payment. The
garage that hires a man as a mechanic does not care about the rumors spread by an ex-wife; it wants him to
show up on time and repair cars. The grocer who sells him a tomato does want to hear anyones side of a
conflict; he wants to pocket the money, bag the tomato and move on to the next customer. Some see the
neutrality of the free market as cold and impersonal. I believe my friend is correct. It is a protection against evil.

In 1733 the philosopher credited with ushering in the French Enlightenment, Franois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
(1694-1778), published Letters Concerning the English Nation. It was a pivotal work that created a sensation.
Although written in French, the 24 letters were first issued from London in an English translation. The reason?
The material was considered too politically dangerous for the author or any French printer to have the work to
appear within France itself.
Voltaire was no stranger to controversy. Some years before, after being beaten up by the hirelings of an
aristocrat whom he had offended, Voltaire had been thrown into the Bastille (for the second time). He was
released after pledging to stay at least 50 leagues away from Paris. Voltaire chose to go as far as England,
where he stayed for roughly two-and-a-half years. The result of the sojourn was the Letters on English religion
and politics, which were written as though to explain English society to a friend back in France. They finally
appeared in France in 1734 as Lettres philosophiques, or Philosophical Letters.
Letter five, On the Church of England, began with the observation, This is the country of sects. An
Englishman, as a freeman, goes to Heaven by whatever road he pleases. The statement had profound
implications for any citizen of France a nation that had almost destroyed itself in order to establish
Catholicism as the only practiced religion. In the early 16th century, the writings of John Calvin galvanized many
French who converted to Protestantism and were known as Huguenots. The state and Catholic Church
responded with a campaign of bloody religious persecution. By 1700, a few decades before the Letters
appeared, an estimated 200,000 had been driven from France. An unknown number had been killed in the no
less than eight civil wars that erupted.

It becomes easy to understand, therefore, why the French authorities were both threatened and outraged by
the next paragraph of Letter five. Voltaire examined the intellectual and institutional foundation of Englands
religious tolerance and did so in a revolutionary manner. First, he rejected a political explanation for Englands
religious tolerance. Referring to the established Church of England, he explained that politics strongly favored
prejudice rather than tolerance. He wrote, No one can hold office in England or in Ireland unless he is a
faithful Anglican. Such political exclusion hardly promoted religious good will between religions. Moreover,
the observation would have resonated in France where Catholicism held similar sway.
Nor did the religious preaching of the dominant church lead the nation toward toleration. According to
Voltaire, the Anglican clergy worked up in their flocks as much holy zeal against nonconformists as possible.
Yet in recent decades, the fury of the sects went no further than sometimes breaking the windows of
heretical chapels.
What, then, accounted for the extreme religious toleration in the streets of London as compared to those of
Paris?
The Peace of Commerce
In Letter six, On the Presbyterians, Voltaire ascribed the peace in which they [Englishmen of different
religions] lived happily together to a mechanism that must have shocked readers. He pointed to the London
Stock Exchange, a prominent expression of capitalism. In the most famous passage from Philosophical Letters,
Voltaire observed, Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will
see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the
Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the
name of infidel for those who go bankrupt.
The observation is all the more important because, legally and historically, England was no bastion of religious
toleration. Laws against nonconformists and atheists were still in force during Voltaires stay. Yet in England,
and not in France, there was an air of toleration on the street despite the law. The comparative lack of a class
structure was one reason. Even though both countries had pronounced aristocracies, England was not
burdened with the same unyielding class laws that crippled social and economic mobility in France. As Voltaire
wrote in Letter nine, On the Government: You hear no talk in this country [England] of high, middle, and low
justice, nor of the right of hunting over the property of a citizen who himself has not the liberty of firing a shot
in his own field.
The true key to the difference between England and France lay in the English system of commerce and in the
comparatively high regard in which the English held their merchants. (This is not meant to slight the substantial
differences between the English and French governments especially the constitutional ones upon which
Voltaire dwelled.) In France, aristocrats and the other elites of society regarded those in commerce with
unalloyed contempt. In Letter ten, On Commerce, Voltaire pointedly commented on the French attitude:
The merchant himself so often hears his profession spoken of disdainfully that he is fool enough to blush. Yet
in England, the merchant justly proud compares himself not without some reason, to a Roman citizen.
Indeed, the younger sons of English nobility often entered commerce or took up a profession. This difference in
attitude was a large factor in explaining the extraordinary rise of the English middle class that derived its
wealth from trade. When the French derided England as a nation of shopkeepers, which they often did,
Voltaire thought the slur was a compliment. He commented that if the English were able to sell themselves, it
proved that they were worth something.
Commerce, or shopkeeping, established an arena within which people dealt with each other solely for
economic benefit and, so, ignored extraneous factors such as the other partys religious practices. On the floor

of the London Stock Exchange, religious differences disappeared into background noise as people scrambled to
make a profit from one another. The economic self-interest of the Christian and the Jew outweighed the
prejudice that might otherwise sour personal relations between them. They intersected and cooperated on a
point of common interest: the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Church of England man accepts the
promise of the Quaker, Voltaire wrote in On the Presbyterians.
Voltaire versus Marx
Ironically, Voltaire singled out for praise precisely the same aspect of commerce the London Stock Exchange
that Karl Marx later condemned. Both viewed the marketplace as impersonal or, in more negative Marxist
terms, dehumanizing. For Marx, people in the marketplace ceased to be individuals expressing their humanity
and became interchangeable units who bought and sold goods. To Voltaire, the impersonal nature of trade was
a good thing and, perhaps, its best feature. It allowed people to disregard the human conflicts that had
historically disrupted society, such as differences of religion and class. The very fact that a Christian who wished
to profit from a Jew, and vice versa, had to disregard the religious differences and deal with him civilly was
what recommended the London Stock Exchange to Voltaire.
In this, Voltaires voice is reminiscent of Adam Smith in his most popular work, The Wealth of Nations. Smith
outlined how everyone in a civilized market society is dependent on the cooperation of multitudes even
though his friends may number no more than a dozen or so. A marketplace requires the participation of
throngs of people, most of whom one never directly encounters. It would be folly for any man to expect
multitudes of strangers to benefit him out of sheer benevolence or because they like him. The cooperation of
the butcher or the brewer, said Smith, was ensured by their simple self-interest. Thus, those who entered the
marketplace did not need the approval or favor of those with whom they dealt. They needed only to pay their
bills.
The toleration created by the London Stock Exchange extended far beyond its doors. After conducting business
with each other, the Christian and the Jew went their separate ways. As Voltaire phrased it, On leaving these
peaceable and free assemblies, some go to the synagogue, others in search of a drink. In the end, all are
satisfied.
The French Revolution
The Philosophical Letters Voltaires tribute to the English middle class, their commerce, and their society
created an enormous impact on the European intellectual scene. Calling the work a declaration of war and a
map of campaign, Will and Ariel Durant commented: Rousseau said of these letters that they played a large
part in the awakening of his mind; there must have been thousands of young Frenchmen who owed the book a
similar debt. Lafayette said it made him a republican at the age of nine. [Heinrich] Heine thought it was not
necessary for the censor to condemn this book; it would have been read without that.
Nevertheless, French censors seemed eager to condemn it. The printer was imprisoned in the Bastille. A lettre
de cachet for the elusive Voltaires immediate arrest was issued. By a legislative order, all known copies of the
work were confiscated and burned in front of the Palais de Justice. Through the intercession of powerful
friends, the lettre de cachet was withdrawn, again on the promise that he remain safely outside the limits of
Paris. In this manner did the French church and state respond to Voltaires salute to toleration.
But the themes of the Philosophical Letters resounded deeply within the consciousness of Europe for many
decades to come. One of its themes was that freedom especially freedom of commerce was the true
wellspring of religious toleration and of a peaceful civil society. The insight was nothing short of revolutionary
because it reversed the accepted argument and policies on how to create a harmonious society. Traditionally,

France (along with most other European nations) attempted to enforce a homogeneous system of values on its
people in the belief that common values were necessary to ensure peace and harmony, the social glue that
held together the social fabric. This was thought to be particularly true of religious values.
This was not a moral argument, but a practical one: society would collapse into open violence without the
cohesion provided by common values. Thus, those in authority needed to centrally plan and rigorously enforce
the values that should be taught to and practiced by the masses. After all, if people were allowed to choose
their own religious values, if values became a commodity open to competition, then civil chaos and conflict
would inevitably ensue.
Voltaire argued that precisely the opposite was true. The process of imposing homogeneous values led only to
conflict and religious wars. The result was a society intellectually stagnant and morally corrupt, because doubt
or dissent was suppressed. It was diversity and freedom that created a thriving and peaceful society. Voltaire
ended his most-quoted letter, On the Presbyterians, by observing: If there were only one religion in
England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each others throats; but there
are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.
Perhaps one reason that Voltaires Philosophical Letters created such a backlash from the French leviathan was
that the books logic, if carried beyond religion, would strike at any government attempt to impose common
values or practices on the people. Indeed, Voltaires argument against homogeneity continues to have deep
implications for the centralized policies of all governments. Those citizens who reject imposed homogeneity in
religion might well be prompted to question the wisdom of many other government institutions, including
public schools, which are often justified by the declared need for common values. The freedom of individuals
to decide matters of value for themselves could easily prompt them to demand the right to live according to
those values and to teach them to their children. Thus the system of centralized control could unravel.

Henry David Thoreau: Is There A Duty to Disobey Unjust Laws?

La Botie presented the dynamics of voluntary servitude and the solution to it: withdraw your consent. But at
what point, if any, does the denial of consent require not merely withdrawal but also active disobedience?
Through his remarkable life and writings, Henry David Thoreau offers an answer.
In his essay On Civil Disobedience, Thoreau also offers an insight that all opponents of state power should
heed. After being released from jail for what may be the worlds most famous act of civil disobedience, Thoreau
went about the business of living. He believed man was not put on earth to confront his neighbor or to rail
against injustice but to enjoy the simple, rich pleasures of life. His insight: People should be primarily occupied
by the business of living and only pay attention to the state when it comes knocking at your door, demanding
your property or your co-operation in an immoral act, such as financing a war. As Thoreau stated, I came into
this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
A friend of mine once made a related point when we discussed the overwhelming time that many freedom
advocates lavish upon critiquing the state. What would happen to them if the state disappeared overnight?
Would their purpose for living disappear with it? He assured me there is an Italian saying that roughly
translates as It is raining again pig of a government! His point: many people tend to blame the state for
every woe and, so, they give it an undeserved prominence in their lives. Hands-on problem solving for
example, getting out of the rain would be a better focus. A far better one, yet, are the myriad pleasures life
proffers, from walking a dog to laughing with friends. Do not become so involved in the fight against injustice
that you forget to live.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an introspective man who wandered the woods surrounding the small
village of Concord, Massachusetts, recording the daily growth of plants and the migration of birds in his
ever-present journal. Why, then, did he profoundly influence such political giants as Mohandas Gandhi, Leo
Tolstoy and Martin Luther King?
The answer lies in a brief essay that has been variously titled but which is often referred to simply as Civil
Disobedience (1849). Americans know Thoreau primarily as the author of the book Walden, or Life in the
Woods (1854) but it is Civil Disobedience that established his reputation in the wider political world. It is one
of the most influential political tracts ever written by an American.
Civil Disobedience is an analysis of the individuals relationship to the state, which focuses on why men obey
governmental law even when they believe it to be unjust. It also presents the point at which Thoreau believed
there was a moral duty to disobey.
But Civil Disobedience is not an essay of abstract theory. It is Thoreaus extremely personal response to being
imprisoned for breaking the law. Because he detested slavery and tax revenues contributed to the support of
it, Thoreau decided to become a tax rebel. There were no income taxes and Thoreau did not own enough land
to worry about property taxes but there was a hated poll tax a capital tax levied equally on all adults within a
community.
Thoreau declined to pay it and, so, in July of 1846 he was arrested and jailed. He was supposed to remain in jail
until a fine was paid which he also declined to do. Without his knowledge or consent, however, relatives
settled the debt and a disgruntled Thoreau was released after only one night.
The incarceration may have been brief but its effects have endured through his essay Civil Disobedience. To

understand why the essay has exerted such a powerful force over time and across cultures, it is necessary to
examine both Thoreau the man and the circumstances of his arrest.
Thoreau, the Man
Henry David Thoreau was born into the modest New England family of a pen-maker. With a childhood
surrounded by rivers, woods, and meadows, he became an avid student of nature. His friend and mentor, the
equally famous essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson offered the following psychological portrait of Thoreau:
He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he
refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and
though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely no doubt for himself, to be the bachelor of
thought and Nature. No truer American existed than Thoreau.
If it is possible for one word to summarize a man, then that word would be the advice he offered in Walden:
Simplify, simplify, simplify. Thoreau was a self-consciously simple man who organized his life around basic
truths. He listened to the inner voice of his conscience, a voice all men possess but few men follow. As he
explained in Walden, To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school,
but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and
trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
Thoreaus attempt to apply principles to his daily life is what led to his imprisonment and to Civil
Disobedience. Oddly enough, Thoreaus contemporaries did not see him as a political theorist or as a radical.
They viewed him instead as a naturalist, either dismissing or ignoring his political essays, including Civil
Disobedience. The only two books published in his lifetime Walden and A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers (1849) both dealt with nature in which he loved to wander.
He did not have to wander far to find intellectual stimulation as well. During the early 19th century, New
England was the center of an intellectual movement called Transcendentalism. In 1834, while Thoreau was a
student at Harvard, the leading Transcendentalist moved into a substantial house at the outskirts of Concord,
thus converting the village into the heart of this influential movement. That man was Emerson.
There has never been rigorous agreement on the definition of Transcendentalism, partly because Emerson
refused to be systematic. But there are broad areas of agreement between Transcendentalists. As a
philosophy, it emphasizes idealism rather than materialism that is, it views the world as an expression of
spirit and every individual as an expression of a common humanity. To be human is to be born with moral
imperatives that are not learned from experience but which are discovered through introspection. Therefore,
everyone must be free to act according to his conscience in order to find the truth buried within.
Although Emersons focus on the individual must have appealed to Thoreau, there was an inherent tension
between Thoreaus practical, earthy ways and the abstract quality of Transcendentalism. Thoreau wanted to
incorporate principles into daily life; he wanted to taste and feel principles in the air around him. He wrote in
Walden:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and
see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not
lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation,
unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so
sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to
drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get

the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to
know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it
Despite their differences, however, Thoreau was deeply influenced by Emerson whom he met in 1837 through
a mutual friend. Four years later, Thoreau moved into the Emerson house and assumed responsibility for many
of the practical details of Emersons life.
Transcendentalism became Thoreaus intellectual training ground. His first appearance in print was a poem
entitled Sympathy published in the first issue of the Dial, a Transcendentalist paper. As Transcendentalists
migrated to the mecca of Concord, one by one, Thoreau was exposed to all facets of the movement and took
his place in its inner circle. At Emersons suggestion he kept a daily journal from which most of Walden was
eventually culled.
But Thoreau still longed for a life both concrete and spiritual. He wanted to translate his thoughts into action.
While Transcendentalists praised nature, Thoreau walked through it.
Especially in his later years, Emerson seemed distant from Thoreaus lusty approach to life, which he described
as the doctrine of activity. Given this difference of approach, it is no wonder that Emerson did not embrace
the ideas within Civil Disobedience. Nor did he approve of Thoreaus decision to be imprisoned.
Improisoned for One Night
Civil Disobedience was Thoreaus response to his 1846 imprisonment for refusing to pay a poll tax that
violated his conscience. He exclaimed in Civil Disobedience,
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why
has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not
desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a
right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
Imprisonment was Thoreaus first direct experience of State power and, in typical fashion he analyzed it:
the state never intentionally confronts a mans sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his
senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born
to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
Prior to his arrest, Thoreau had lived a quiet, solitary life at Walden an isolated pond in the woods about a
mile and a half from Concord. Thoreau now returned to Walden to mull over two questions: (1) Why do some
men obey laws without ever asking if the laws are just or unjust; and (2) why do others obey laws they think
are wrong?
In attempting to answer these questions, Thoreaus view of the state did not alter. It was that view, after all,
that led Thoreau into prison in the first place. Moreover, judging from the rather dry, journalistic account of
jail, his emotional reaction did not seem to alter significantly; he was not embittered by the experience. The
main criticism he expressed was aimed at those who presumed to pay his fine; an act that the jailer said made
him mad as the devil.
Toward the men who were his jailers, Thoreau seemed to have felt more disdain than anger, stating,
They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every

threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to
stand the other side of that stone wall I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone
woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my
remaining respect for it, and pitied it.
It was the reaction of the townspeople of Concord his neighbors which most distressed Thoreau; he
dissected the experience so as to understand their behavior. He ended his short matter-of-fact account of jail
with a commentary on the townsfolk. It expressed how his eyes had been opened.
I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their
friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a
distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions.
There is no cynicism in Thoreaus description of his neighbors, whom he admits he may be judging harshly
since many of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village. Instead
Thoreau was unsettled by the realization that there was a moral and political wall between him and the
townsfolk, a wall that Gandhi referred to in an account of his own imprisonment in South Africa. Gandhi wrote,
Placed in a similar position for refusing his poll tax, the American citizen Thoreau expressed similar
thought in 1849. Seeing the wall of the cell in which he was confined, made of solid stone 2 or 3 feet
thick, and the door of wood and iron a foot thick, he said to himself, If there were a wall of stone
between me and my townsmen, there was still a more difficult one to climb or break through before
they could get to be as free as I was.
Thoreau may have also brooded over the reaction of Emerson who criticized the imprisonment as pointless.
According to some accounts, Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, Henry, what are you doing in there?
Thoreau replied, Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there? Emerson was out there because he
believed it was shortsighted to protest an isolated evil; society required an entire rebirth of spirituality.
Emerson missed the point of Thoreaus protest, which was not intended to reform society; it was simply an act
of conscience. If we do not distinguish right from wrong, Thoreau argued, then we will eventually lose the
capacity to make that distinction and become, instead, morally numb. Near the end of his life, Thoreau was
asked, Have you made your peace with God? He replied, I have never quarreled with him. For Thoreau,
that would have been the real cost of paying his poll tax; it would have meant quarreling with his own
conscience, quarreling with God.
Civil Disobedience ends on a happy note. After his release and unpleasant experience with his neighbors, the
children of Concord had brightened Thoreaus mood by urging him to join a huckleberry hunt. Huckleberrying
was one of Thoreaus valued pastimes and his skill at locating fruit-laden bushes made him a favorite with
children. And, should a child stumble, spilling berries, Thoreau would kneel by the weeping child and explain
that if children did not stumble, then berries would never scatter and grow into new bushes.
Thoreau ended his chronicle of prison, [I] joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves
under my conduct; and in half an hour was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two
miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
Thus, Thoreau shed the experience of prison but he could not shed the insight he had gained on his neighbors
nor the questions that accompanied his new perspective. The text of Civil Disobedience constitutes the
answers he discovered by listening to the quiet voice within.

The Message of Civil Disobedience

Although many Quaker writers had argued for civil disobedience against war and slavery on the grounds of
conscience, the Civil Disobedience essay is not tied to a particular religion or to a specific issue. It is a secular
call for the inviolability of conscience on all issues, and this aspect may account for some of the essays
enduring legacy. The highly personal nature of Civil Disobedience also contributes to its impact as the essay
exudes a sincerity more commonly found in diaries and correspondence than in political tracts.
The opening sentence of Civil Disobedience sets the tone by endorsing Thomas Jeffersons much quoted
sentiment on government That government is best which governs least. But Thoreau carries Jeffersons
logic one step farther, Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe That government is best
which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they
will have. Government is at best but an expedient.
After what appears to be a call for anarchism, Thoreau pulls back and dissociates himself from no-government
men. Speaking in practical terms and as a citizen, he states, I ask for, not at once no government, but at
once a better government.
Whatever his ultimate position on government, one point is clear: Thoreau denies the right of any government
to automatic and unthinking obedience. Obedience should be earned; it should be withheld from an unjust
government. To drive this point home, Civil Disobedience dwells upon how the Founding Fathers rebelled
against an unjust government and, so, raises the question of when rebellion is justified.
To answer, Thoreau compares government to a machine and the problems of government to friction. Friction
is normal to a machine so that its mere presence cannot justify revolution. But open rebellion does become
justified in two cases: first, when the friction comes to have its own machine that is, when the injustice is no
longer occasional but a defining characteristic; and, second, when the machine demands that people
personally cooperate in committing an injustice. Thoreau declared that, if the government requires you to be
the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the
machine.
This is the key to Thoreaus political philosophy. The individual and his conscience is the final judge of right and
wrong. But Thoreau asserts more than this; since only individuals act only individuals can act unjustly, and so
individuals are responsible for their own acts and cannot blame them upon government. When the
government knocks on your front door, it is an individual in the form of a postman or tax collector whose hand
hits the wood. He is not exonerated from responsibility because it is his job because he has voluntarily
assumed the job. Before Thoreaus imprisonment, when a confused taxman had wondered aloud about how to
handle his refusal to pay, Thoreau had advised the man, Resign. If a man chose to be an agent of injustice,
then Thoreau insisted on confronting him with the fact that he was making a choice. As Thoreau explained, It
is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of
the government.
But if government is the voice or will of the people, as it is often called, shouldnt that voice be heeded?
Thoreau admits that government may express the will of the majority but it may also express nothing more
than the will of elite politicians. Even a good form of government is liable to be abused and perverted before
the people can act through it. Moreover, even if a government did express the voice of the people, this fact
would not compel the obedience of individuals who disagree with what is being said. As long as his actions
were peaceful, each individual needed to act in accord with his own conscience. The majority may be powerful
but it is not necessarily right.

What, then, is the proper relationship between the individual and the government?
The Role of Government
Perhaps the best description of Thoreaus ideal relationship occurs in his description of a really free and
enlightened State that recognizes the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own
power and authority are derived. It is a State that can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual
with respect as a neighbor, allowing those who did not embrace it to live aloof.
According to Thoreau, the government of his day did not come close to this ideal for two basic reasons: slavery
and the Mexican-American war.
It is important to remember that, although Thoreaus imprisonment was a protest against slavery, Civil
Disobedience written after the outbreak of the Mexican-American war protests both slavery and war. In
fact, the opening paragraph of the essay mentions the war while saying nothing of slavery.
Civil Disobedience portrays the Mexican-American war as an evil comparable to slavery. The 1840s expressed
a spirit of expansion called Manifest Destiny the idea that it was the destiny of Americans to expand
across the continent, civilizing the wilderness and the natives as they went. Part of the expansion was an
annexation of Texas, which sparked a war with Mexico, which also claimed the area. The annexation was
doubly offensive to Thoreau because it permitted slavery to expand into the new territory. Moreover, the
domestic consequences of the conflict deeply disturbed him. Taxes soared; the country assumed a military air.
Thoreau was horrified to learn that some of his neighbors actively supported the war. He was perplexed by
those who did not support the war but who financed it through the taxes they paid. After all, he considered the
war to be the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool. Without
co-operation from the masses of people, a few individuals would not succeed in wielding that tool.
In fact, the co-operation of the tool itself the standing army was required; it, too, consisted of individuals
responsible for their own actions. Thoreau wondered about the psychology of men who would fight a war and,
perhaps, kill others out of obedience. How could a man willingly kill a stranger who had done him no personal
harm? Thoreau concluded that soldiers, by virtue of their absolute obedience to the state, become somewhat
less than human beings with a functioning conscience. He wrote,
Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some
unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American
government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts a mere shadow and
reminiscence of humanity
This is how the mass of men employed by the state render service to it, not as men mainly, but as machines,
with their bodies. In doing so, the men relinquish the free exercise of their moral sense and, so put
themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones.
Thoreau asked, How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that
he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
But his well-meaning neighbors even those who were allegedly opposed to slavery and the
Mexican-American war did associate with and obey the American government. Thoreau ascribed their
behavior to ignorance and generously concluded, they would do better if they knew how.
But a problem remained. Why do people like Emerson who cannot be called ignorant render obedience

to laws with which they disagreed?

One reason is obvious: the people who believe they need a government are willing to accept an imperfect one.
Such people, Thoreau explained, accept government as a necessary evil. Other people supported
government out of self-interest; Thoreau specifically mentions merchants and farmers in Massachusetts who
profited from the war and from slavery.
Still others obeyed because they feared the consequences of disobedience. This was the neighbor who said, if
I deny the authority of the state when it presents a tax bill, then it will soon confiscate my property and harass
my family. Thoreau knew that his neighbor was correct in his assessment of what might happen to his
property and family. When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, he wrote, I perceive that they
dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience.This is hard. This makes it impossible
for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. By his own lights, Thoreau
was fortunate in this respect. He had neither property to be seized nor children to go hungry. Accordingly, he
did not criticize men who reluctantly obeyed an unjust law out of fear for their families.
Our Enemy, the State
Instead, Thoreaus criticism was aimed at the form of obedience that sprang from a genuine respect for the
authority of the state. This form of obedience says, The law is the law, and should be respected regardless of
content. Through such attitudes, otherwise good men become agents of injustice.
The law is the law and should be respected Thoreau dissected this notion. For one thing, not all laws are
equal in their purpose or their justice. Some laws exist for no other reason than to protect the government; for
example, laws against tax evasion, treason, or contempt of court. Such laws often have more severe penalties
than those that protect individuals against violence.
Moreover, the proscribed penalties for denying governments authority are often so vague and sweeping as to
invite arbitrary sentences from the court. Lawyers and the courts are part of the states defensive machinery.
Thoreau concluded, The lawyers truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency. He well
deserves to be called the Defender of the Constitution. Still thinking of the sanction which the Constitution
gives to slavery, he says, Because it was part of the original compact let it stand [H]e is unable to take a
fact out of its merely political relations.
Such courts offered no protection to Thoreau who refused to respect their authority. But Thoreau took his
refusal one step farther, albeit a logical one. He not only rejected unjust laws but also the men who created
them. He withdrew his support from politicians who rarely make any moral distinctions and are as likely to
serve the devil, without intending it, as God. (Emphasis added.) Thoreaus use of the word intending is
significant. Even well-intentioned politicians stand so completely within the institution of government that they
never distinctly and nakedly behold it. Whatever they intend, they serve the governments ends.
Thoreaus disdain for politicians may seem to be a logical extension of his disrespect for the law but many
reformers found it possible to disrespect the law without holding lawmakers personally responsible. The
viewpoint of such people overlooked the role of choice, Thoreau argued. Every politician who created a law
chose to do so and was paid for his actions; every agent who enforces a law chooses to do so and defends his
actions. If they created or enforced a law with which they themselves disagreed, then they surrendered their
conscience to the state. The surrender was irrelevant, however, to their personal responsibility for their own
acts. They should be held personally responsible for whatever they personally do.
Holding politicians personally responsible was not the last step in Thoreaus withdrawal of support. He denied

the authority of government itself. Again, rejecting politicians may logically seem to imply the rejection of
government; but, again, many reformers rejected politicians without rejecting politics.
Thoreau held such reformers personally responsible as well.
Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance
and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles
to reform.
Thoreau specifically addressed fellow-abolitionists who called for the immediate cessation of slavery. Instead
of petitioning the government to dissolve the Union with slaveholders, Thoreau believed those reformers
should dissolve the union between themselves and the State and refuse to pay their quota into its
treasury. Petitions only strengthened the authority of the government by recognizing its authority and
honoring the will of the majority. [A]ny man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one
already, he observes.
The reformers who petition government for permission, love better to talk about justice than to act on it.
Thus, Thoreau concluded, Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. To men
who prefer a safe strategy, voting becomes a substitute for action and politics becomes a sort of game, like
checkers or backgammon, only with a slight moral tinge. To Thoreau, anyone willing to leave moral decisions to
the will of the majority was not really concerned that right should prevail. When resisting the poll tax, Thoreau
did not consult the majority; he acted according to his conscience. If a man allowed the majority to decide
whether or not he should pay, then, by his own standards, he would have shown no regard for what is right.
Moreover, Thoreau considered voting to be a poor vehicle for reform because voting follows real change; it
does not precede or cause it. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, Thoreau
wrote, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be
abolished by their vote. As for the other means that the State provides for changes to itself, they are
extraordinarily slow. Thoreau noted, They take too much time, and a mans life will be gone.
Does this mean men have a duty to pitch their lives against an unjust state?
The Duty of Resistance?
Civil Disobedience speaks to the individuals right to resist the state, but Thoreau did not consider
disobedience to be an overriding duty. Thoreau understood that men are involved in the business of living and
he thought this was proper even for a dogged reformer like him. He wrote, I came into this world, not
chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. First and foremost, Thoreau
clearly stated, people should live their lives.
This is a crucial distinction. If a man is fortunate enough to be in circumstances that resemble Thoreaus
huckleberry field where the State was nowhere to be seen, then he has no duty to seek it out, but should,
instead, go about the business of living. Thoreau defied the state only when it came to him, when it knocked on
his door and demanded his money in support of an institution he considered to be unjust: slavery. Thereafter,
when the state ignored him, Thoreau ignored it even though his neighbors were taxed around him.
Thus, although Civil Disobedience is sometimes entitled On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, the latter title is
somewhat misleading. Where does the word duty come from? It may have derived from a critique within
Civil Disobedience through which Thoreau rejected a chapter from William Paleys book Principles of Moral
and Political Philosophy; Paleys chapter was entitled Duty of Submission to Civil Government. According to

Thoreaus interpretation of the 18th century philosopher, Paley argued that all civil obligations derive from
expediency. Since Thoreau attempted to show the opposite that civil obedience is morally grounded the
title On the Duty of Civil Disobedience may have been a play on Paleys title.
Nevertheless, Civil Disobedience does not espouse a duty to seek out the State for confrontation, to protest a
wrong done to your neighbor, nor even to resist the State in matters that do not violate conscience, such as
buying a postage stamp or using a public road.
The only political duty of a man is to correct any injustice he directly causes and to deny his co-operation to
other injustice. This is the conclusion at which Civil Disobedience arrives. If I devote myself to other pursuits
and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another mans shoulders. I
must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a
drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.
In short, Thoreau believed the state should never rank above the individual conscience or the business of living.
Indeed, men should live as though there were no state. But if the state came to a man and demanded that he
violate his conscience and participate in an injustice, then that man should disobey not through violence but
by actively removing his co-operation.
Thoreaus Legacy
Thoreaus political theories were not well known during his own lifetime. They were usually presented as
lectures to small audiences or as articles buried in small-circulation periodicals. Civil Disobedience, for
example was first rendered as a lecture at the Concord Meeting Hall. In 1849, it was published under the title
Resistance to Civil Government in the first and only issue of the periodical Boston Aesthetic Papers. After
Thoreaus death, his sister Sophia prepared his uncollected works for posthumous publication in multiple
volumes by the publisher Ticknor and Fields. The political essays were held until last and, even then, they
seemed to be added on. The last volume was entitled A Yankee in Canada with Anti-Slavery and Reform
Papers (1866) and it included Civil Disobedience, which was retitled On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.
Why were these essays published last? Possibly because they were not considered representative of Thoreau.
Perhaps because many of them were written in response to specific events and, so, seemed dated. Or,
perhaps, because their political slant was so unpopular that some people wished they had died with the man.
In 1890, Henry Salt published a collection of Thoreaus political essays, including Civil Disobedience. The book
profoundly influenced a young lawyer in South Africa who was protesting that governments treatment of
immigrant workers from India. The lawyer was Mohandas K. Gandhi, who would go on to create a mass
movement of non-violent resistance in India. The young Gandhi found in Thoreau the techniques that he would
use to good advantage in his subsequent struggle for Indian independence from British rule. Years later, Gandhi
thanked the American people for Thoreau, saying, you have given me a teacher in Thoreau, who furnished me
through his essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience scientific confirmation of what I was doing in South
Africa. By embracing Thoreaus message and expanding the strategy of civil disobedience, Gandhi focused
world attention on the shy Yankee philosopher who lived without real fame in his own nation, in his own time.
Conclusion
Nevertheless, Thoreaus death itself had gone relatively unnoticed. In November 1860, he caught a severe cold
that slowly deepened into consumption from which he never recovered. On May 6th, 1862, at the age of 44,
Henry David Thoreau died.

Months later, Emerson published a eulogy that concluded, The country knows not yet, or in the least part,
how great a son it has lost.His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the
capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he
will find a home.
As always, Thoreau said it more simply, For joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried in it.

William Lloyd Garrison: One Person Can Make a Difference

Two of the most destructive notions to the pursuit of freedom are that you cannot fight city hall and that one
person cannot make a difference. Both statements are not only false but also arguments used to dissuade
people from standing up for what they know is right. The American anthropologist Margaret Mead famously
stated, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is
the only thing that ever has.
Mead is correct but is there another and, perhaps, a more crucial reason why people should stand up for their
beliefs even if everyone else remains seated: personal integrity. Quite apart from seeking social change, it is
important for people to keep the truth alive within them. I vividly remember a now-respected economics
professor on whom I eavesdropped as he clarified why he was not known as an Austrian economist. When he
was an undergrad, he explained, being discreet about his beliefs was important in order to get into grad school.
When he was in grad school, being silent was close to a requirement for dealing with his advisor. To get hired by
a good university, he presented a good face, the face the university wanted. It was a face he kept on until he
received tenure some 12 years later. Tenure was the point at which he had intended, as an undergrad, to let
everything rip loose and say whatever he wanted to. Strangely or, perhaps, predictably he no longer had
fire in his belly for the ideas of Austrian economics. As far as I know, he has written nothing on the subject.
Truth and passion need stoking or they will die within you.
William Lloyd Garrison is the polar opposite of that economics professor, in that he may have overstoked his
passion for truth and justice. Both La Botie and Thoreau addressed the idea of civil disobedience of
individuals saying no to the injustice of a tyrant or a government. Garrison is a flesh-and-blood example of how
effective one man can be in fighting against a massive injustice. Mead was correct but she was not radical
enough in her analysis. The smallest group with an amazing ability to change the world is the person of
principle who will not surrender. No force is stronger. Garrisons life is a proof of this principle.

On January 1, 1831, the first issue of a modest weekly newspaper entitled The Liberator appeared in Boston.
The editor took the occasion to clear his conscience:
In Park-Street Church, on the Fourth of July, 1829, I unreflectingly assented to the popular but
pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition [of slavery]. I seize this moment to make a full and unequivocal
recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren the poor
slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice, and absurdity. My conscience is now
satisfied.
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will
be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to
speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm;
tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually
extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a
cause like the present. I am in earnest I will not equivocate I will not excuse I will not retreat a
single inch and I will be heard.
The editor was William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) who demanded an immediate end to slavery. During the
Liberators 35-year life span (1831-1865), it spoke out passionately against slavery in America and Garrison was
heard. He was heard so well that eleven months after the papers debut the pro-slavery State of Georgia
passed the following resolution, Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Georgia

and general assembly met that the sum of $5,000 be and the same is hereby appropriated to be paid to any
person or persons who shall arrest, bring to trial and prosecute to conviction the editor or publisher of a
certain paper called The Liberator or any other person or persons who shall utter, publish or circulate within
the limits of this State said paper called The Liberator.
The history of the Liberator is that of the American anti-slavery movement as much as it is of the editor. As
such it is necessary to present some background on slavery in America.
American Slavery
The pre-Revolutionary American colonies differed from each other in their treatment of slaves. Some colonies
adopted the basic code of the British colony in Barbados. But Barbados was slavery at its worst. There, slaves
outnumbered whites and severe laws were deemed necessary to quash the very possibility of a rebellion. A
similar severity was reflected in some of the American colonies in which slaves were numerous. For example, in
adopting the Barbados model, South Carolina imposed no penalty if a slave died during punishment, and it
defined the rape of a female slave by a non-owner as a form of trespass against her master. In the Northern
colonies, where the black population was smaller, the laws tended to be milder.
Two consistent aspects of slavery in America, however, helped to weave it solidly into the fabric of society.
First, slaves were not emancipated even if they converted to Christianity, which some other cultures
considered to be grounds for liberation. Second, the status of the child followed that of the mother even if the
father was white or free. Thus the peculiar institution (as it was called) was perpetuated through the
generations.
Outside of Quaker circles, there was little anti-slavery activity before the American Revolution. The revolution
must have caused optimism in those ranks because its principles were in direct conflict with slavery. The
Declaration of Independence opens with the words, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Nevertheless, the ensuing Constitution denied to slaves what the
Declaration of Independence seemed to offer. A compromise on slavery had been necessary to unite the
colonies in the face of sectional differences.
John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, believed that slavery cast a shadow over the entire
Constitution. His words were enshrined on the Liberators masthead. Adams declared,
Yes! it cannot be denied the slaveholding lords of the south prescribed, as a condition of their assent
to the Constitution; three special provisions to secure the perpetuity of their dominion over their
slaves.To call government thus constituted a democracy, is to insult the understanding of mankind.
As slavery expanded so did the anti-slavery movement, which evolved into one of the most successful
movements for social reform that America has ever seen. Within the movement, Garrison exercised a defining
factor. Under his editorship, the Liberator became the main vehicle of American abolitionism, the radical wing
of the anti-slavery movement that demanded the immediate cessation to slavery on the grounds that all
human beings are self-owners, all human beings have a natural right to their own bodies, to their own labor,
and to the fruits of that labor. No moral or practical consideration outweighed the slaves self-ownership.
William Lloyd Garrison, the Man
On December 10, 1805, Garrison was born into modest circumstances in Newburyport, Massachusetts. In
1818, Garrison found his niche in life when he was apprenticed to the printing office of the Newburyport

Herald. His anti-slavery career was undoubtedly an outgrowth of the protests over the institution that he
witnessed in Massachusetts during this period. But the specific spark was his acquaintance with Benjamin
Lundy, a Quaker who dedicated himself to arguing against slavery. Lundy had begun publication of his
newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, from Ohio in 1821. It began with six subscribers and a
20-mile walk to the printer. Garrison was 22 when Lundy arrived in Boston and stayed at the same
boarding-house at which Garrison lived. His admiration for Lundy was immediate and immense; he commented
never was moral sublimity of character better illustrated.
Garrison accepted Lundys invitation to co-edit a revived Genius from Baltimore. But there was a problem.
Lundy was a colonizationist; this meant he wished to establish foreign colonies of free blacks so that a
slave-owner could free his slaves and send them out of the country. Garrison rejected this approach; a slave
born in America was as American as a white man and he should live anywhere he wished. The two men
compromised by writing their own articles and taking no responsibility for opinions expressed by the other.
In the first issue, Lundy made a simple statement of his views. Garrison published a credo. He declared: (1)
slaves were entitled to immediate and complete emancipation; (2) the question of expediency has nothing
to do with that of right and it is not for those who tyrannize to say when they may safely break the chains of
their subjects no more than it is for a thief to decide when to stop stealing; (3) on the ground of expediency it
would be wiser to set all the slaves free today than tomorrow; and (4) since many slaves had been born on
American soil, they are at liberty to choose their own dwelling place. This was one of the first abolitionist
statements to appear in America.
Lundy and Garrison both witnessed gut-wrenching slave auctions as well as the shipment of slaves from
Baltimore to the market in New Orleans. After a badly beaten slave sought sanctuary with Lundy and Garrison,
Garrison published an impassioned attack on Francis Todd, the owner of a slave ship. He declared Todd to be
an enemy of his own species who deserved solitary confinement for life. Todd responded with a libel suit,
which he won. Unable to pay, Garrison was imprisoned for over six weeks until a fellow abolitionist paid the
fine. Garrison left Baltimore to avoid a second trial, and so he lost that case by default. The Genius had ceased
publication a few months before.
From Washington, D.C., Garrison announced a new paper that would be entitled The Public Liberator and
Journal of the Times. Upon learning that Lundy also planned to publish a paper from Washington, however,
Garrison shifted his home base to Boston.
On January 1st, 1831 with no subscribers other than friends, and in partnership with another
poverty-stricken abolitionist, Isaac Knapp Garrison published the first issue of the Liberator. The front page
had a plain black letter heading with the motto, Our country is the world. Our countrymen are mankind.
Garrison and Knapp were named as publishers; Garrison as editor. The second page reported on the trial that
Garrison had lost because he had missed it. The third page was entitled Journal of the Times. The fourth,
Literary, Miscellaneous, and Moral. This neatly printed newspaper four columns across issued from a
room at the Merchants Hall, which functioned as both an office and a home to the two publishers, with the
floor becoming a bed at night.
A visitor described the office and Garrison. It was a pretty large room but there was nothing in it to relieve its
dreariness but two or three very common chairs and a pine desk in the far corner at which a pale, delicate and
apparently over-tasked gentleman was sitting. I never was more astonished. All my preconceptions were at
fault. My ideal of the man was that a stout, rugged, dark-visaged desperado, something like we picture a
pirate. Here was a quiet, gentle and I might say handsome man. A gentleman indeed in every sense of the
word.

The next issue included a strong attack on the allegedly anti-slavery American Colonization Society, a society
that Garrison declared wrong in principle and impotent in design. Garrison declared that the Liberator
would disclose the Societys true nature, especially the fact that so many of its members were prominent
slave-owners interested in deporting free blacks. This attack raised complaints against Garrison which would be
become common. For example, his language was said to be too blunt. He was accused of attacking individuals
instead of institutions and principles, thus causing personal offense.
Garrison disagreed, The public shall not be imposed upon and men and things shall be called by their true
names. I retract nothing. I blot out nothing. My language is exactly such as suits me. It will displease many I
know. To displease them is my intention. Garrison thanked God that no one accused him of being lukewarm.
To critics he explained that he needed to be all on fire because there were mountains of ice around him to
be melted.
The debut of the Liberator was unfortunately timed. Walkers Appeal a pamphlet written by a free black
was panicking the slave states. The pamphlet flaunted black superiority and called for insurrection in the South.
While the Liberator was being launched, the legislature of North Carolina was meeting behind closed doors to
consider a message from the governor regarding Walkers Appeal. Moreover, Nat Turner a Virginia slave
instigated a revolt. On August 31, 1831, Turner and other slaves killed a slave-owning family. Moving from
plantation to plantation, the band that followed him grew to 60 or 70 strong and the number of their victims
exceeded 50. The Southern states reacted with rage and repression.
Some pointed accusing fingers at Northern abolitionists, and most especially at Garrison. In typical fashion,
Garrison responded by making the Liberator more radical. By the 17th issue, The Liberators plain heading had
changed to an ornamental one, surmounted by a woodcut representing a slave auction. The newspaper openly
courted subscriptions from free blacks for whom it provided a voice. The paper also called for controversial
measures, such the repeal of statutes against inter-racial marriage. More than a few people wished to silence
such calls. For example, Georgetown in D.C. passed a law prohibiting any free black from taking the Liberator
from the post office on pain of a $20 fine or 30 days imprisonment.
By the end of the first volume, the Liberator had accomplished several goals. It had stirred up the South. It had
substantially increased its subscription base. A new England Anti-Slavery Society had been formed with the
goal of immediate emancipation and with the Liberator as its voice.
Can Voting End Slavery? Garrison Says No!
Despite internal conflicts, anti-slavery groups spread rapidly. Change was in the air, especially political change.
Up until the Liberator, the political creed of abolitionism had been simply been to not vote for anyone who was
pro-slavery. The preferred abolitionist strategy was anti-slavery petitions, which Congress was now gagging by
blocking discussion. Anti-slavery societies in New York began to grumble about the need for an anti-slavery
political party.
But Garrison rejected electoral politics altogether because he believed reform was accomplished only by
changing the hearts and souls of people. His approach was known as moral suasion which was the core of
abolitionist strategy. He and anti-slavery activist Henry Stanton faced off on the issue of electoral politics at the
1839 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The Constitution of the Society pledged itself to influence
Congress and Stanton took this as a mandate for electoral activity including the establishment of a third
political party. Garrison observed that there were many ways to influence Congress without running
candidates. The controversy came to a head at the next years meeting in 1840.

In preparation for the conflict, Garrisons old friend William Goodell had printed an attack on him, which the
Liberator reprinted. In this atmosphere of personal ill will, politically inclined abolitionists walked out of the
1840 convention on its first day because Garrison managed to block their efforts to endorse political strategy.
The departing defectors went on to form a separate group from which The Liberty Party sprang, establishing
electoral politics as a major approach to achieving anti-slavery goals. When the Liberty Party nominated
William Goodell for President in 1852, Garrison called the situation a farce in one act.
Internal Conflicts versus External Threats
Internal conflicts within the anti-slavery movement were often smoothed over by external attacks that drew
the movement together. Anti-slavery meetings and lectures continued to attract angry mobs; even ministers
were assaulted and dragged from their pulpits. Abolitionists were tarred and feathered. Then, Elijah Lovejoy
the editor of an anti-slavery paper entitled the Alton Observer was murdered by a mob that came to destroy
his printing press. Having had his press destroyed before, Lovejoy had exchanged gun fire with the latest mob
and was fatally shot in the process.
Lovejoys death made the North aware of the lengths to which the pro-slavery zealots would go but it could not
have surprised Garrison who knew about mob violence first-hand. On his first trip to England, Garrison had
delivered a lecture in London on the subject of Americas Shame namely, slavery. He was attacked en
masse. To attack America in a foreign country was considered to be an act of high treason by the American
press; Garrison was lambasted at home.
Garrison also encountered mob violence on U.S. soil. At the same time his ship from England was docking in
New York harbor, a public meeting to form a New York City Anti-Slavery Society was about to commence.
Garrison made his way to the advertised hall but the door was locked. Permission to hold the meeting had
been withdrawn and the anti-slavery group had moved to a nearby chapel instead. A mob burst through the
chapel door, cursing and calling out for Garrison, who was not present. The rest of the assembly escaped
without injury.
A similar mood awaited Garrison in Boston. A handbill called for patriots to mob the Liberators office,
admonishing them to arrive with plenty of tar and feathers. That night, a dense mob surrounded Garrisons
office, but nothing happened. When the British abolitionist George Thompson arrived in America, however, he
set off another chain of violence. How dare a foreigner lecture Americans on morality? The mood became so
hostile toward all abolitionists that Garrison had to leave Boston several times for his own safety.
Upon returning after one such flight, Garrison attended a meeting of the Female Boston Anti-Slavery Society.
This meeting combined two controversial issues: anti-slavery and womens activism both of which he
supported. Pro-slavery notices had announced a further incendiary aspect of the meeting: Thompson would be
present. A purse of $100 was offered to the first man who laid violent hands upon him.
A mob estimated variously at 2,000 to 5,000 surrounded the meeting place. Although Thompson never showed
up, Garrison did and joined the 15 or 20 women who sat amidst noisy hecklers. Suddenly, Garrison was
recognized and withdrew hastily to another room, locking the door behind him. An assault was made upon the
locked door by a mob crying out Lynch him! Garrison dropped out a back window onto a shed, racing up a
flight of stairs, and then simply hid. Nevertheless, he was discovered. Garrison wrote, On seeing me, three or
four of the rioters, uttering a yell, furiously dragged me to the window with the intention of hurling me from
that height to the ground. But one of them relented and said, dont let us kill him outright. So they drew me
back and coiled a rope about my body probably to drag me through the streets. The rioters tore Garrisons
clothes but before more damage could be done, he was spirited off for safe keeping to the mayors office. A
rowdy mob gathered there as well, threatening to tear down the building. For his own safety, Garrison was put

in jail and the situation calmed. No subsequent action was taken against the mob or its ringleaders, and Boston
newspapers criticized the abolitionists for having provoked a riot.
If abolitionists sometimes forgot that the enemy was slavery and not their fellow abolitionists, mobs and the
government reminded them. Indeed, President Andrew Jacksons message to Congress in 1835 implicitly
approved of mob violence against abolitionists.
No Union with Slaveholders
Garrison responded to the growing hostility by calling for disunion; the North should secede from the South. A
year later, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society passed a resolution written by Garrison that soon found a
home in The Liberators masthead. It read, in part, Resolved, that the compact which exists between the North
and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell involving both parties in atrocious
criminality and should be immediately annulled.
No union with slaveholders! became Garrisons new cry. Letters of protest from more moderate anti-slavery
advocates flooded The Liberator; not all members of the society agreed with disunion, the protesting letters
cautioned. Disunion was an impractical goal that would cripple the societys influence, they declared. Besides,
wasnt disunion precisely what the South wanted? Still others considered the disunion crusade to be a slap at
the Liberty Party.
Garrison stood firm and, ultimately, the American Anti-Slavery Society ratified Garrisons call for disunion, 250
in favor, 24 against. Now, both anti-slavery radicals in the North and pro-slavery radicals in the South looked
forward to the death of the United States of America.
Yet, even though Garrison favored Northern secession, he denied a similar right to the South. Why? Because
only the causes set forth in the Declaration of Independence justified secession; for example, the governments
denial of inalienable rights. The North had this complaint against the South, Garrison argued, while the South
had only slavery.
A bloody solution seemed inevitable but Garrison cautioned abolitionists against embracing this method as
well. We are growing more and more warlike. Just in proportion as this spirit prevails, I feel that our moral
power is departing and will depart. I say this not so much as an Abolitionist but as a man. I believe in the spirit
of peace, and in sole and absolute reliance on truth and the application of it to the hearts and consciences of
the people. I do not believe that the weapons of liberty ever have been, or ever can be, the weapons of
despotism. I know that those of despotism are the sword, the revolver, the cannon, the bomb-shell; and,
therefore, the weapons to which tyrants cling, and upon which they depend, are not the weapons for me, as a
friend of liberty.
War Intervenes
Tension increased as both pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces stepped up their campaigns. Anti-slavery feelings
reached fever-pitch with the publication of Uncle Toms Cabin. Twenty thousand copies sold within three
weeks, four times as many by the twelfth week. England reported nearly 500,000 in circulation. After
requesting a copy of the Liberator, the author of Uncle Toms Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe met Garrison in
Boston. She became, in her own words, a constant reader of the Liberator.
When a fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, was arrested in Boston, abolitionists tried to stop his extradition to the
South. Wendell Phillips, a colleague of Garrisons, urged people to do everything short of violence to aid Burns.
Nevertheless, he was sent back into slavery. Appeal to government was no longer possible, Phillips declared,

for government was the servant of slavery. Indeed, the Government has fallen into the hands of the Slave
Power completely. So far as national politics are concerned, we are beaten theres no hope. Events hurry
forward with amazing rapidity. We live fast here. The future seems to unfold a vast slave empire. Our Union, all
confess, must sever finally on this question. It is now with nine-tenths only a question of time.
In this spirit, Garrison held up a copy of the Constitution at an anti-slavery gathering and burned it to ashes
with the words, So perish all compromises with tyranny. Cries of Amen greeted the act.
Under constant pressure from anti-slavery advocates, Massachusetts passed the Personal Liberty Law of 1855,
making the return of fugitive slaves more difficult. The South called this a declaration of disunion, and
demanded retaliation against Massachusetts, including the exclusion of the states representatives in Congress.
National attention soon turned to Kansas, or bloody Kansas, as it was to be called. The immense
Kansas-Nebraska territory, formerly closed to slavery under the Missouri Compromise, was now up for political
grabs and the outcome would deeply impact the balance of power in Congress. Would Kansas enter the Union
as a free state or as a slave state? Resident voters would determine. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces flooded
into Kansas in an effort to decide the election. Violence and terror erupted, and voting irregularities were
rampant.
The election of President Buchanan, who was regarded as a friend to slavery, further angered Garrison. In the
first issue of its twenty-seventh year, the Liberator announced a State Disunion convention to consider the
practicality, probability, and expediency of immediate disunion. The last resolution of this convention was
significant. Resolved, that the sooner the separation takes place, the more peaceful it will be; but that peace
or war is a secondary consideration in view of our present perils. Slavery must be conquered, peacefully if we
can, forcibly if we must. The pacifism of the younger Garrison had gone by the wayside.
The turbulent decade of the 1850s saw significant shifts in political alliances. A disorganized Democratic party,
unable to retain its Northern support, split its ticket in 1860, thereby throwing the election to the relatively
unknown Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln. The deep South regarded the Republican party as sectional,
enjoying support only in the North. When South Carolina seceded after Lincolns election, the conflict at Fort
Sumter prompted other states in the upper South to follow suit.
Lincoln was an extreme gradualist in his anti-slavery views, calling for the elimination of slavery over the period
of a century. His focus to preserve the Union. Lincoln wrote, If I could save the Union without freeing any
slave, I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and
the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union. Nevertheless, abolitionists viewed the war
as an opportunity to end slavery.
Awkwardly, Garrison supported the war without renouncing his anti-war principles. Garrison had a candid
word for those who criticized his sudden war-spirit.
Well ladies and gentlemen, you remember what Benedict in the play says: When I said I would die a bachelor,
I did not think I should live till I were married. And when I said I would not sustain the Constitution because it
was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell, I had no idea that I should live to see death and hell
secede. Hence it is that I am now with the Government, to enable it to constitutionally stop the further ravages
of death and to extinguish the flames of hell forever.
War correspondence became a standard feature of the Liberator and Garrison enthusiastically printed letters
from black soldiers. He grudgingly inserted the complaints of pacifists as well.

On January 1st, 1863, Garrison was sitting in the balcony of the Music Hall, listening to Beethovens Fifth
Symphony, when news arrived: Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Garrison now committed
himself to Lincoln despite the reservations of other abolitionists. The Liberator became a virtual campaign
sheet for Lincolns re-election. Garrisons faith seemed to be rewarded when the Thirteenth Amendment was
ratified in December, 1865, thereby ending the constitutional support for slavery. He exclaimed, With our own
hands we have put in type this unspeakably cheering and important official announcement that, at last, the old
covenant with death is annulled, and the agreement with hell no longer stands. Not a slave is left to clank his
fetters, of the millions that were lately held in seemingly hopeless bondage. Rejoice and give praise and glory
to God. Having sown in tears, now reap in joy.
Shortly thereafter, at midnight on December 29th, 1865, Garrison sat at his desk composing The Liberators
Valedictory address. Printers waited at his elbow to snatch each sheet as it was completed. Having put the
Liberator to bed for the last time, the sixty-year-old editor went home and put himself to bed as well. The
present number of the Liberator is the completion of its thirty-fifth volume, and the termination of its
existence. I began the publication of the Liberator without a subscriber, and I end it it gives me unalloyed
satisfaction to say without a farthing as the pecuniary result of the patronage extended to it during
thirty-five years of unremitted labors.
Garrison pursued various reforms until the end of his life. He was raising money to settle former slaves in
Kansas when he fell ill in April 1879. It was evident he would not recover. On May 23rd, he fell into a coma.
Twenty-four hours later, the voice that had been as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice was
silenced forever.

R.C. Hoiles: An Everyman of Excellence

The preceding profiles feature a jurist who writes in anonymity for fear of controversy (La Botie), a philosopher
who must flee his native land for safety abroad (Voltaire), a naturalist who goes to jail for his principles
(Thoreau), and an activist who sacrificed his personal life in order to work for a cause (Garrison). One lesson a
reader might carry away from these examples is that principles endanger and impoverish you personally.
Raymond Cyrus Hoiles dispels that possibility. Through consistently applying his freedom principles to his daily
basis, R.C. (as he preferred to be called) richly prospered in family, finance and the respect of his associates.
Living freedom does not mean sacrifice; it means enrichment both personally, professionally and financially.

The libertarian publishing giant Raymond Cyrus Hoiles (18781970) epitomizes the American dream. Born into
comfortable but modest circumstances, he rose through hard work and merit. At his death at the age of 91, his
corporation, Freedom Newspapers, Inc., owned 16 daily newspapers, including the influential Orange County
Register (originally the Santa Ana Register). The revered patriarch of a large family that continued his empire
after his death, R.C. also earned the respect of associates. The California Press Association honored him
posthumously as a Great Crusader for Individual Freedom who was respected for his conservatism. R.C.
was not only a remarkably successful man who lived on his own terms, he was also a remarkably happy one.
R.C. Hoiles, the Man
Hoiless career expressed a joy in hard work, a love of humanity and an unshakeable belief in the power of
truth.
R.C. began his newspaper career by working for the Alliance Review (Ohio), a daily owned by his brother Frank.
In 1919, he and Frank bought the Lorain Times Herald, (Ohio), of which R.C. owned two-thirds. In 1921, they
each purchased a one-third share in the Mansfield News (Ohio), of which R.C. became a hands-on publisher. He
wanted to use the News to speak out against oppressive labor unions but Frank refused to print such articles.
The disagreement led to a professional break in which R.C. received Franks interest in the Herald and the
News, eventually becoming sole owner of both. Then, in 1927, R.C. purchased the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum
(Ohio), which was managed by his son Clarence under R.C.s direction from Mansfield, where he lived.
A colorful page in Ohio newspaper history followed. The Herald had exposed the fraudulent awarding of a
paving contract to a Cleveland company despite the presence of a lower bid; public pressure resulted in the
lower bids being accepted. The enraged owner of the Cleveland company, S.A. Horowitz, purchased rival
papers in both Lorain and Mansfield in order to run R.C. out of business. The attempt failed and the conflict
blazed on. In his essay The Uncompromising R.C. Hoiles, biographer Carl Watner highlighted its bitterness:
[The] front porch of the Hoiles home was destroyed by an explosion in November 1928, Hoiless car
was wired with dynamite (which fortunately failed to detonate), and a dud bomb was discovered in the
office of the Mansfield News. None of this gangsterism was ever explained, but it did motivate R.C. into
selling the papers in Mansfield and Lorain.
R.C. purchased a bullet-proof automobile and hired an armed guard to accompany him. Some blamed
Horowitz; some blamed the labor unions that Hoiles lambasted. Hoiles held firm. Of labor unions, he stated,
I dont believe in unions, in a closed-shop. Never did and never will. Oh, I dont object to the principle of
someone representing an employee if that employee wants representation. But thats not how unions work.

They force the representation on you whether you want it or not. And I didnt want it.
In 1932, Hoiles sold the other papers for reasons that are not clear. Perhaps it was because of the stress of the
situation. Perhaps, as a June 4, 1986, letter from R.C.s son Harry to Carl Watner suggests, it was because the
papers had ceased to be sufficiently profitable.
Hoiles spent much of the next three years poring through the books that created a libertarian fervor within
him. In a 1955 editorial, he explained,
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the first libertarians who aroused my interest in liberty and how a
government should be limited. Then I ran across Herbert Spencer. Then a socialist told me that
Frederic Bastiat made the best explanation of the disadvantages that come from protective tariff.
Bastiat so impressed me that I republished his Social Fallacies (Economic Sophisms) and his Harmonies
of Political Economy in two volumes, and his essay entitled The Law.
Events in his personal life contributed to Hoiless disillusionment with government. According to a term of the
sale, R.C. was not to receive full payment for his two newspapers until 1935. Meanwhile, New Deal legislation
enacted under Franklin Roosevelt caused the value of the dollar to plunge on one hand and the gold clause to
be nullified on the other. Gold clauses were common with business contracts of the day and gave a creditor the
option of receiving payment in gold or gold equivalent. In a letter written on February 4, 1964, to Robert
LeFevre, R.C. explained that as a result of the government abrogation of contracts. I lost $240,000.
When he bought the Orange County, California, newspaper Santa Ana Register in 1935, R.C. imported his views
of labor to the West Coast.
A 1961 policy statement expressed the positions he held without waiver from 1935 until his death in 1970.
That statement referred to the Three Guides to Morality: the Ten Commandments (the Decalogue); the
Golden Rule (the Sermon on the Mount); and the Declaration of Independence. In his interpretation, all of the
guides declared men to be born with equal and inalienable rights that are not the gift of any government.
An Integrated System of Beliefs
Hoiles is often mischaracterized as conservative because people find it difficult to fit his positions into anything
other than political stereotypes. At a quick glance, the confusion is understandable. For one thing, Orange
County, California R.C.s home for decades became a center of conservatism following World War II. As
the countys foremost newspaper, the Register often ran conservative columnists and letters to the editor. But
Hoiless voice was radically libertarian.
Both anti-privilege for business and anti-union, Hoiles may seem to be an economic enigma until the simple
principles from which he proceeded are understood. At that point, his position becomes an intelligible and
obvious whole.
R.C. consciously developed an integrated system of beliefs about government, society, morality, and human
nature.
His theory of government was rooted in the Declaration of Independence a document he quoted frequently.
Specifically, he drew upon the passage that claimed government derives its just power from the consent of the
people and, ultimately, from the consent of the individual himself who possesses inalienable rights.
A November 1953 editorial entitled Articles of Faith expressed R.C.s theory of society: [G ] aining

understanding of natures laws is the best way to be useful to ones self and to his fellow man. One of natures
fundamental laws was the superiority of voluntary, competitive human endeavor over compulsory activity.
Freedom of association, including a free market, fueled the goodwill that civil society depended on; forced
association destroyed it.
Hoiles based his morality largely on the Ten Commandments and insisted on a single standard: Everyone
without exception should act according to the same moral code. What was wrong for a private individual was
equally wrong for a government official. In a later policy statement, Hoiles offered the essence of this universal
code: the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and the Declaration of Independence.
His theory of human nature stressed the perfectibility of man through effort and the exercise of moral
character. He believed this perfectibility resided in equal measure for each human being, which seemed to
make him somewhat blind to differences of race, gender, and social status. Former employees often
commented on how he would engage a janitor in intellectual discussion as quickly as he would a writer.
Politically speaking, no belief was more important to R.C. Hoiles than the rejection of a double standard of
morality for individuals and for groups. In an editorial entitled The Most Harmful Error Most Honest People
Make (December 17, 1956), which appeared in the Santa Ana Register, Hoiles explained the error is the
belief that a group or a government can do things that would be harmful and wicked if done by an individual
and produce results that are not harmful, unjust and wicked. It is the belief that a number of people doing a
thing that is wrong for an individual to do, can make it right and just.
An example of this double standard is taxation. Taking wealth by force is called theft when committed by an
individual, but it is widely deemed appropriate when done by government. This double standard regarding
taxation produces harmful, unjust and wicked results.
An October 31, 1958, editorial in the Register explained just one of those harms: It is our belief that any
person who creates wealth and gains understanding injures no one, but benefits himself and everyone else in
the world. Hoiles believed the profit motive was more accurately called the hope of rewards and that a
man worked for one of two reasons: Either he has hope of rewards or he is forced. The former was freedom;
the latter was slavery. Applying a double standard to individuals and to government in regard to expropriating
wealth created slavery.
Government violated the hope of rewards not only through taxation but also by granting legal privileges that
constituted a form of theft because they robbed creators of the right to compete fairly and, so, receive the
rewards of merit (by creators, Hoiles referred not merely to businessmen but also to working people who
traded their labor for wages).
Hoiles explained (the Register, January 11, 1944), It is time we as individuals take a stand to limit our
government to setting us free from men rather than taking from A to give to B, thereby taking from A his
natural rights, and calling it orderly adjustment, orderly market, collective bargaining or any other false name
that destroys individual freedom. Its true name was what Hoiless associate D.R. Segal once called the
penalizing of success and subsidizing of robbery.
What a businessman or laborer could not gain through merit should never be granted through force or fraud.
Hoiles applied this principle equally to both, but he recognized the practical differences between the two
groups.

Hoiles on Business
Hoiles insisted that all goods and services be provided on a competitive basis without government
involvement; that is, by private contract. The depth of his commitment to what he called economic
voluntaryism was reflected in an exchange of correspondence with the noted Austrian economist Ludwig von
Mises, which occurred in May 1962. Hoiles wrote to comment on an article by Mises entitled A Dangerous
Recommendation for High School Economics. Declaring the piece to be a splendid representation, Hoiles
took exception to one paragraph. Mises had written,
[There] are things that private enterprise cannot achieve, e.g., police protection and provision of
national defense. No reasonable man ever suggested that the essential function of state and
government, protection of the smooth operation of the social system against domestic gangsters and
foreign aggressors, should be entrusted to private business.
Hoiles certainly considered himself a reasonable man. In a letter to Mises dated May 21, he insisted that even
the services of police and national defense should be provided privately and competitively. He explained,
The insurance companies should take care of the fire department, and insurance companies should
take care of protecting your life and property. And if you didnt like the service the one insurance
company was giving you, you would employ another insurance company to help protect your life and
property. Of course, there is no such thing as absolute protection, but wed get more protection by a
voluntary basis than by the coercion of the majority.
Elsewhere Hoiles expanded on the primary importance of free competition: [There] must be competition or
the threat of competition in order to have a true value of the worth of the service. When there is no
competition, there is no true value.
Another means through which government prevented competition and the hope of rewards was the granting
of privileges to specific businesses or businessmen. The privileges might be embedded in law for example, a
tariff; or they might occur on a case-by-case basis for example, a municipal contract awarded for a political
kickback. Whatever the form of privilege, it was the honest businessman and the working man in the role of
consumer or taxpayer who suffered.
Hoiles on Labor Unions
Hoiless opposition to labor unions must be understood in the context of the tactics used by unions of his day
and the legal status they came to enjoy.
In its most basic form, a labor union is nothing more than an organization of workers who come together to
achieve common goals such as higher pay or better working conditions. In America of the 1930s, however,
unions began using force in various forms. (In fairness, some force was in response to the unjustified violence
of businessmen who often enjoyed the protection of law.) For example, one tactic of the emerging unions was
the sit-down strike during which workers remained inside places of employment but refused to work. Thus,
employers could neither produce nor replace the work force. When workers were forcibly expelled, they
formed picket lines to prevent replacement labor from entering the workplace and sometimes beat up those
who tried to cross the line.
Under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, labor unions also received legal privileges. In 1935, a federal law
known both as the National Labor Relations Act and as the Wagner Act limited the ways in which an employer
could respond to workers in the private sector who engaged in collective bargaining, strikes, or other union

activity. For example, the Act defined refusing to bargain collectively with the representative of the
employers employees as an unfair and prohibited business practice. In short, the Act protected workers as a
class.
During the 1930s, Hoiles gained the newspaper experience that would result in a media empire; it included 16
newspapers at the time of his death in 1970. By all accounts, despite his considerable wealth and stature, he
consistently displayed an egalitarian attitude toward employees. From editors to secretaries, from writers to
janitors, he treated employees as intellectual equals and never failed to engage them in conversation or to
proffer a book, urging them to give him feedback. Hoiles deeply respected the working man and, yet, he
despised labor unions. All of his newspapers were open shop.
Hoiles rejected unions on two grounds. First, they violated the Golden Rule, which was a foundation of his
moral code; and, second, they invited government intervention or force into human relationships.
The Golden Rule is stated in Matthew 7:12: Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to
you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets (King James Version). Hoiles called upon
workers to treat employers as they themselves wished to be treated; in other words, they should engage in
free negotiation that acknowledged each partys right to say no. Of equal importance, union members should
respect the rights of the nonunion workers who were willing to assume the jobs and contracts that the unions
rejected. Union members were claiming a right that they denied to others, which meant they were claiming a
privilege.
This claim of privilege which led to a partnership with government was the second reason Hoiles rejected
labor unions. One result of the partnership: a manufacturer had the right to refuse to negotiate working
conditions with an individual employee but he had no similar right regarding the group called a union. The
law forced him to negotiate. This was the double standard by which a group is allowed to act in a manner that
was improper for individuals.
And, again, union privileges inflicted harm on the nonunion worker. In a 1937 editorial entitled Whom Will a
Worker Obey? Hoiles expounded on the harm collective bargaining inflicted on working people:
Collective bargaining advocates delude the poor, honest working man, who has not had time to study
the matter through, with the idea that giving them the right to regulate his life tell him at what he
must work, for what price and how long they will greatly add to his comfort of life. [Emphasis
added.]
The phrase who has not had time to study is key. In a July 1938 editorial, Hoiles explained that the purpose of
his columns was to make people think. Elsewhere, in a 1940 editorial, he stated, Collective bargaining makes
its members collectivists and tyrants instead of Americans and true Christians.
Hoiless newspaper chain experienced repeated strikes but his office in Orange County was picketed by the
union only once. D.R. Segal explained why only once. He wrote, After the first few days the pickets quit and
refused to come back. They said R.C. walked with them, lecturing to them, handing out pamphlets and
obviously having the time of his life with a captive audience. They said the hell with it and called off the picket
line.
The view of picket lines that Hoiles undoubtedly presented to the protesters as he marched at their side could
not have been popular. An advocate of crossing picket lines, he declared picketing to be nothing but a racket.
It throws wages out of balance, causes unemployment, poverty, misery. An editorial entitled Pickets Hitlers
Real Aid (February 12, 1941) called picketers leeches and parasites on society traitors to the principle of

equal freedom and the American way who try to persuade other people not to work or buy from the firm
that does not consent to pay tribute to their arbitrary, coercive demands.
No wonder that, after one such anti-union editorial, thousands of union members canceled their subscriptions
to the Register. Undeterred and perhaps roused by opposition, Hoiles personally went house to house to get
signatures to put right to work legislation on the California ballot.
Hoiles even managed to sway some union members to his perspective. In an article entitled What Would You
Call Mr. Hoiles? Thaddeus Ashby described R.C.s modus operandi. One of the first things Hoiles does when
he buys a newspaper is to refuse to sign a closed shop contract with the union. He has a strike on his hands.
Ashby recounted the words of a man who had lost his job because of one such strike:
I was in sympathy with the union. Of course, I quit when the strike was called. I went to work on a union
paper. I soon got tired of it. I could do as much work in an hour as a union man did all day. They told me to slow
down. Then, one warm day I opened a window and was promptly informed by the shop steward that there was
a union man who got paid for opening windows, and was I trying to throw him out of work? I came back to
Hoiles. I like working here and wouldnt go back to a union shop under any circumstances.
Hoiles never deviated from his early beliefs and experiences regarding business and labor. His economic credo
remained: Americas enviable standard of living owed nothing to governmental laws and regulations. It was
entirely due to the voluntary exchanges, contracts, production, inventions, and investments that resulted from
men who were free to choose for themselves.
As important as economic discussion may be, it can lose the more human face that underlies matters of dollars
and cents. Thaddeus Ashby was once asked about Hoiless economic stance that both excoriated business and
labor and championed them. Was he a scoundrel? Was he a genius? What human being lay beneath the
economic theories?
Ashby answered,
Hes the kindest man I ever met. Youve heard hes against tax-supported schools, tax-supported old age
pensions, social security, child labor laws, taxes of any kind. Youve heard how he throws labor unions out on
their ears. But I say he is kind because he respects men as individuals. You feel he wants to find the best thats
in you and drag it out of you where you both can stand and admire it. He looks for the truth in a man.
One episode dramatically illustrates the depth of R.C.s kindness and his commitment to liberty: the Masuda
story.
The Masuda Story
The story of Kazuo and Mary Masuda is both a cautionary and inspiring tale. The brother and sister were nisei
and, as 2nd generation Japanese-Americans, they were targeted by their own government for brutal
oppression during World War II; their story cautions us against judging people based on ancestry or skin color,
especially during times of crisis when emotions too easily substitute for reason. Their story also inspires us
through the bravery and dignity displayed by Kazuo and Mary. Equally inspiring are the rare individuals who
spoke up on their behalf, not years afterward when the political error had become clear and defending nisei
was safe but while the injustices were actually occurring. Loudest among those rare voices was R.C. Hoiles.
The tale begins abruptly on the morning of Sunday, December 7th, 1941. In a speech delivered at 12:30p.m.

the next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the 7th a date which will live in infamy. He referred to a
surprise aerial attack by the Japanese against the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which crippled
the U.S. fleet. At the time of the attack, World War II had been raging for over two years. Although America
was clearly supportive of the Allies against the Axis Powers, the U.S. had not entered the war and there was
significant domestic resistance to doing so. Within an hour of the Presidents speech, however, Congress
formally declared war against Japan; on 11th December 1941, Germany responded by declaring war on the US.
The Masuda family did not have to wait a day to realize the full impact of Pearl Harbor upon their lives. On the
evening of December 7th, Gensuke (George) and Tamae Masuda were at their farmhouse in Talbert, Orange
County, California when there was a knock on the door. At that time, Orange County was an agricultural area
with the soil constituting its wealth. According to a 1940 census, the Japanese-American community comprised
1,855 people, most of whom were engaged in farming. Many were issei first generation Japanese who had
immigrated. Gensuke had arrived in America in 1898 to work on a railroad in Oregon, and then he moved to
Talbert, where he leased 200 acres and eventually purchased 10 more; his 5 sons and 4 daughters farmed the
land as a family.
Sheriff deputies were the ones who knocked. Without explanation, they took Gensuke and loaded him onto a
bus with other issei. Ten days later without trial, legal representation or right of appeal Gensuke was
accused of subversive activity and incarcerated in a stockade at Ft. Missoula, Montana. The authorities
refused to state specific reasons for the accusation but there was a general fear that a Japanese invasion of the
West Coast was imminent and would be assisted by resident Japanese citizens, such as Gensuke.
The news of his fathers imprisonment incensed Kazuo, who had not been present at the farmhouse with other
family members. On October 17, he and his brother Takashi had boarded a train to report for military duty at
their respective basic training camps. Through the proper authorities at Fort Ord, Kazuo Masuda (Pvt.
39,166,362) wrote a letter to Washington D.C. in which he professed his fathers allegiance to America. Kazuos
letter is credited for Gensukes early release, at which time he joined Tamae and the family in Fresno where
they had retreated to live with a relative for safety. It would be short-lived.
On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that gave the War Department authority at their
sole discretion to exclude any persons from prescribed areas, including much of the West Coast. The Order
was the basis of a campaign of relocation and mass detention aimed at both issei and nisei. In October 1942,
the Masuda family joined thousands of other Japanese-Americans at the Fresno County Fairgrounds where
they were ordered to assemble. They were held 56 days before being loaded onto trains for the five-day trip to
the Jerome Relocation Center, a 10,000 acre internment camp that stretched over three southern Arkansas
counties. Thus, the Masuda family joined over 110,000 Japanese-Americans who involuntarily left their homes
and businesses to be interned behind barbed wire by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) in ten primitive
relocation centers in Colorado, California, Wyoming, Utah, Arkansas, Idaho and Arizona. The vast majority of
the internees were American citizens; their detention lasted three years, from 1942 to 1945.
During the upheaval what did the major newspapers say? Next to no one spoke out against the massive
violation of civil liberties, especially no one on the West Coast. A March 6, 1942 editorial in the San Francisco
News was typical in arguing: Japanese leaders in California who are counseling their people, both aliens and
native-born, to cooperate with the Army in carrying out the evacuation plans are, in effect, offering the best
possible way for all Japanese to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States.
The feisty libertarian R.C. Hoiles was a rare exception. On Feb. 5, before the internment order was announced,
Hoiles declared in the Orange County Register: The recommendation of the grand jury to have all alien
enemies removed from Orange County calls for a difficult undertaking. Every bit of wealth that these workers
are prevented from creating, which we so badly need during the war, will have to be created by the labor of

some other worker. Of course, there is no such thing as absolute security. We must run some risks in every
move. Risks are life itself. It would seem that we should not become too skeptical of the loyalty of those people
who were born in a foreign country and have lived in the country as good citizens for many years. It is very hard
to believe that they are dangerous.
As the internments became law, Hoiles became more aggressive in his defense of Japanese-Americans; In an
October 14th column, again in the Register, Hoiles called the evacuations unconstitutional and an error we
should make every effort possible to correct as rapidly as possible. He argued that convicting people of
disloyalty to our country without having specific evidence against them is too foreign to our way of life and too
close akin to the kind of government we are fighting.We cannot help but believe that we would shorten the
war and lose fewer lives and less property if we would rescind the order and let the Japanese return and go to
work, until such time as we have reason to suspect any individuals of being guilty of being disloyal to America.
Meanwhile, Kazuo experienced his own personal battles in the military. Although he ranked first in Morse code
classes, the Signal Corps rejected him and he was offered, instead, work as a gardener . When the 442nd
Infantry Regiment was formed at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, Kazuo quickly joined and rose to the rank of Staff
Sergeant. The 442nd was formed in early February 1943 to establish an all Japanese-American combat unit. It
subsequently became known as the Go for Broke Regiment because of its extreme valor. The book Honor By
Fire by Lyn Crost the definitive work on the 442nd explains that it was the most decorated unit of its size
and length of service in U.S. military history. Crost reported that it was collectively awarded 18,143
decorations, including 9,486 Purple Hearts.
On furlough, before going into active battle in Italy, Kazuo visited his family in block 15-03-D in Jerome.
Thereafter the Masudas were moved to the Gila River Relocation Center, in the hot Arizona desert. There they
would stay in block 49-11-D of Butte, the larger of the two camps at Gila until their release in the summer of
1945.
It was at Gila that Tamae received a Western Union telegram from the War Department in which her name was
misspelled. The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son Staff Sgt. Kazuo Masuda
was killed in action on 27th August in Italy. Letter follows. Kazuo was 25 years old. The subsequent one-page
letter offered little additional information, claiming that reports of this nature contain only the briefest details
as they are prepared under battle conditions and the means of transmission are limited.
An article in the Fifth Army News filled in the blanks when it reported on Kazuo being posthumously awarded
the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism in action. He had already received the European
Theater Ribbon with a battle star, the Combat Infantryman Badge, the American Defense Ribbon and the Good
Conduct Medal; he would later be awarded a Purple Heart. The article read, in part,
While the 442nd was attached to the 34th Red Bull Division, Masuda was operating from a forward
observation post but enemy shells cut communication lines, making the OP useless. Unwilling to risk
the lives of members of his mortar crew, he obtained a mortar tube, 20 rounds of ammunition and an
extra helmet. With his load, Masuda walked 200 yards through enemy fire.
Using the helmet packed with dirt as a baseplate, he went into action when the enemy attacked, firing
all 20 rounds and repulsing the Germans. The Nazis located his position and subjected him to an
intense mortar and artillery fire but Masuda held his ground, returning to his line for more
ammunition. His fire was so effective, another attack did not even threaten the company line. In the
action in which he subsequently was killed, Masuda crawled ahead of his men when they heard noises.
He discovered himself only five yards from the enemy. Firing his submachine gun, Masuda called to his
men to withdraw. They, thinking he was following, retired. Next day, they found Masuda dead, with his

sub-machine gun in his hands and facing the enemy, lying over a dead German machine pistol
operator.
At Gila, the Masudas held a Buddhist memorial which was rendered all the more significant by the fact that
another son, Masao, was due to report for duty.
In early May, 1945, Mary Masuda was granted permission to travel to Talbert in order to prepare the way for
her parents return to the farm. Her return was not welcomed by all. Nor was the hostility she experienced an
isolated event. In reporting the threats against Mary, the Utah Nippo (Salt Lake City) stated on May 18, 1945,
The new incidents are in addition to 15 shooting attacks, one attempted dynamiting, three arson cases, and
five threatening visits in California in the last four months.
Why was there such hostility toward returnees? One reason was economic. Secretary of Interior Harold L. Ickes
is quoted as saying, The hoodlums grow more desperate in their lawlessness as some of them see that they
will not be able to establish an economic beachhead on the property of the evacuees they vainly hoped would
sell out or run out.
Mary discovered that someone, without paying rent or receiving authorization, had farmed the Masuda land
and lived in their home. On the first evening of her return, she was visited by five men who threatened her
with bodily harm if she did not leave town; the Gila News-Courier (May 15, 1945) identified the men as several
Orange County farmers. When Mary reported the incident to the police, she was told that nothing could be
done about it.
The sheriff changed his mind several days later due to both public and official pressure.
R.C. Hoiles spearheaded the public pressure by featuring a photo of Mary and Masao on the front page of the
then-Santa Ana Register (now the Orange County Register). He also published lengthy commentaries by Mary,
as well as columns defending the returnees and their property rights. On June 6th, in a letter-to-the-editor,
Mary expressed her gratitude to Hoiles. This letter should have been written long ago and I hope you will
forgive me for my negligence, she wrote. The fine publicity of my incident, along with the large picture of
Masao and myself appearing in the front page of your newspaper was indeed a great honor and I am deeply
grateful to you. It is truly gratifying to know that an influential concern as your newspaper is standing by the
minority group, for the democratic principles so that our gallant men who are giving their supreme sacrifices
are not dying in vain.
The official pressure came from government officials, especially from within the War Department and WRA,
who saw the postwar wisdom of reversing the hostility toward Japanese-Americans which they had been
instrumental in creating. Whereas Hoiles publicized the injustice being done to returnees without fanfare,
those with more political motives trumpeted the Masuda case. On December 8th, Four Star General Joseph W.
Stilwell, accompanied by General Arthur E. Easterbrook, took the unprecedented step of flying 3,000 miles
from Washington, D.C. to visit the Masuda farm which had been returned to the family. There he presented
Mary with a Purple Heart on behalf of Kazuo. Usually such medals are presented by the highest ranking officer
in the area at the nearest army installation; traditionally, the medal is given to a parent, and both of them
attended the December 8th ceremony. Arguably, however, Mary was the more press-worthy family member
due to her earlier news coverage.
In 1948, Kazuos body was brought home from Italy for burial in Westminster Memorial Park, Orange County.
But the controversy over his nisei status did not end with death. A November 20, 1948 headline in the Citizen
read, Home Town Cemetery Bars Burial of Nisei War Hero. The article explained that Kazuo could not be
buried in a desirable plot with trees and lawns because of a restrictive covenant against those of Japanese

ancestry. Due to intervention by Gen. Mark Clark under whom Kazuo had fought, the cemetery relented. Kazuo
was buried in a desirable plot with full military honors. His grave became a gathering point for annual
ceremonies honoring nisei veterans who died in the war.
In 1957, the Kazuo Masuda Memorial VFW Post 3670 was founded in Orange County. On December 17, 1975,
the Kazuo Masuda School was dedicated and became the first American public school named for a nisei.
In a public ceremony in November 2005, Mas Masuda thanked R.C. Hoiles on behalf of his family, stating, We
are very grateful for what he did.
What R.C. Hoiles did was to speak out against an injustice that had overwhelming public support. After the war,
it became popular and politic to defend the nisei. But Hoiles spoke when it counted most while the injustice
was happening. He did not act in self-promotion or to erase a mistake; he spoke out of simple decency.
When the nisei veterans returned from Italy in July 1946, President Harry S. Truman stated, You fought not
only the enemy, but you fought prejudice and you have won.
Three years earlier, in a letter sent to Mary while she was in a detention camp, Kazuo wrote, Ill be alright
wherever I may be. I can take care of myself. Of course, no one likes this war, no one likes to fight and die if he
doesnt have to, but it is much easier if one knows what he is in here for. Myself and the rest of the Combat
Team, I believe, know for what he fights. It is for us, our future in America.Of course, we havent been treated
exactly fair, weve been kicked around. We know that. But we can take it on the chin and come up fighting and
we will win out in the end.
To this day, Japanese-Americans lay flowers on the grave of R.C. Hoiles.

SECTION IV
GETTING THERE FROM HERE
I am told I laugh in my sleep. That is because I am an optimist by nature.
But these are terrible times that are especially difficult for people who treasure peace and freedom. Nothing
shocked me as much as the events of the morning of September 11, 2001, when I sat sipping coffee in my
farmhouse kitchen, watching the news on television, as the World Trade Center collapsed before my eyes. The
world it left behind is new and frightening because it is so unpredictable. For example, I would never have
imagined that airports could become mini-police states in which customers are treated like criminals and
parents stand by as strangers pat down their childrens genitals. I would have argued with my last breath, That
couldnt happen in America! I would have insisted that the roots of individualism and freedom are sunk so
deeply into American soil that they could never be uprooted.
I was wrong. America is now a police state. It happened overnight and it happened with next to no protest.
Since then, every day seems to bring an acceleration in the tumult, political corruption and economic insanity
that is choking the world. No one knows what to expect in the next few weeks, let alone the next few years.
Nevertheless, I am an optimist.
My optimism comes from turning one question over and over in my mind like a worry bead. The question is,
What can be accomplished right here and now in my own backyard? When I look at the world at large, I
despair. But I am responsible for my own despair because I allow situations over which I have no control to
drain away happiness and energy from the daily life in which I am effective. I cannot control what happens in
the Middle East, Iran, Syria But, then, I never could. The most I can do is speak out loudly and clearly even
though I have no expectation of being able to affect anything. I speak out in the hope that the cumulative
voices of reason will prevail at some point.
But what I focus energy upon are the things I can affect and change for the better. I concentrate on grassroots
movements in which individual voices are the driving force and individuals make an incredible difference. It is
in the grassroots movements that are springing up and spreading like fire across North America that I see the
future of liberty. I see it in the growing number of parents who reject public education and homeschool
instead. It is alive in the fathers rights movement, especially within the dads who confront the anti-male bias in
family courts. Freedom is active in every group that hits the streets to record police abuse even though they
risk arrest. It glows within those who protect their privacy through encryption and those who share (what
should be) public data through strategies like Wikileaks. Freedom may be dead within the institutions like
government but it is unquenchable within people. It lives in the grassroots.
What is a grassroots movement? It begins with isolated individuals who are desperately dissatisfied with an
issue that deeply affects their lives. Perhaps it is the the public school system that does not teach basic literacy
or numeracy to their children. It could be minimum sentencing laws through which a daughter or son has been
tossed in with violent criminals and violent prison guards for a victimless crime. It starts with an issue so deeply
personal that people who have never said no to authority before, stand up and refuse to sit down.
Grassroots movements usually begin by saying no on a local level, to a local school board, at a town meeting
or to district court. Sometimes they never proceed beyond the local level. But if the injustice they are
confronting is widespread, then the voices multiply and spread. They become the most powerful political force

on the face of the earth: the voice of the people.

One of the political beauties of libertarianism is that it is a populist ideology. It deals with fundamental rights
that are possessed by all human beings; it defends everyones life, liberty, and property equally. It says to the
poorest, most disadvantaged person in society, You have the same due process rights as a billionaire.
Libertarianism is a profoundly non-elitist. It is profoundly the politics of the everyman.
Grassroots movements are the path from here to there.
This section analyzes the from here to there question from two basic perspectives. First, what are the
barriers? Second, what are the solutions?

Is America Now a Police State?

I have thought on and off about one book for years now. Defying Hitler is a mesmerizing memoir written by the
German journalist Sebastian Haffner (a pseudonym for Raimund Pretzel) shortly after he emigrated from
Germany to England with his Jewish wife in 1938. In it, Haffner examines how a highly cultured and civilized
nation could slip so quickly into the barbaric totalitarianism of Nazi rule. My version of this question is, how
could America, a nation with deep roots in individual freedom, so quickly slide into a police state?
A common explanation is that they do not notice. Unless they are steeped in history, those accustomed to
liberty or civility can be blithely unaware of the importance of mechanisms like due process; it is those who lived
without such legal niceties who knew full well that the likes of habeas corpus are protections upon which the
life or death of innocent people will hinge.
Many of those who do notice refuse to believe their freedom will deteriorate beyond a certain point. Haffner
notes how his educated associates constantly ridiculed the Nazis as a passing phase. I hear much the same from
associates in the United States who dismiss the rise of totalitarianism with the words But this is America! It
cannot happen here.
Still others who notice are convinced by the fear tactics of authorities that surrendering rights is necessary to
ensure their continued comfort and safety. In Germany, the crisis exploited was the devastation caused by the
punitive terms of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles. The rise of socialism and the presence of the
other, especially Jews, were used both to stir anger against a common enemy and to scare people into
subservience.
Haffner also speaks of the automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any lively, forceful reaction
against the horror of Hitler. This may be true of many Americans as well, who see the erosion of freedom on a
daily basis. Nevertheless because they wake up in their own homes, eat the same cereal for breakfast, work
at the same boring job to which they drive down familiar streets they have a sense that everything is as it has
always been. The fact that the legal structure, political protections, and other institutions that guarded their
freedoms are going, going, gone is nowhere near as real to them as are their daily routines.

Does America now qualify as a police state? And, if so, where do you or will you personally draw a hard
line and say, No! That is a law or a police order I refuse to obey?
In every state, the law is ultimately backed by police force against the body or property of a transgressor. If the
law is used only against those who violate the person or property of others, then the use of force is to be
applauded. When the law is used against peaceful people, however, then the police have crossed the line from
preventing crime to imposing social control. Past that line, I see only differences of degree, not of kind in how
totalitarian a state may be. Differences of degree should not be trivialized, however. Even small differences in
the degree of repression imposed on people can be matters of life or death.
A police state is commonly described as a totalitarian government that exerts extreme social, political, and
economic control. It maintains this control by a pervasive surveillance of its own citizenry, by draconian law
enforcement, and by granting or withholding privileges such the ability to travel. Typically, there is a special
police force, such as the Stasi, that operates with no transparency and few restraints. Unlike traditional
policemen, who respond to crime, the entire purpose of such state police is to monitor and control society.
To restate the opening question: does America now embody this common description of a police state?

Clearly it does. The American government exerts extreme control over society, down to dictating which foods
may be eaten. The governments control over the flow of money and goods is close to absolute. It even
politicizes and presides over the traditional bastion of privacy the family. Surveillance of daily life is now a
given, with the Supreme Court recently expanding the right of police to perform warrantless searches.
Enforcement is so draconian that the United States has more prisoners per capita than any other nation in the
world. Over the last few years, the police have deliberately militarized their procedures and attitudes. Travel,
formerly a right, is now a privilege granted by government agents at their whim.
One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is prominently on display. Several huge law-enforcement agencies
operate with no transparency and few restraints. Their entire purpose is to monitor the peaceful behavior of
citizens, with no pretense of preventing violence. These agencies operate largely outside the restrictions of the
Constitution; for example, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) conducts arbitrary searches in
violation of Fourth Amendment guarantees.
The Internet would run out of electrons before I could complete a list of the specifics that constitute an
emerging Police America. The extent to which you are personally oppressed by the state, however, can be
roughly estimated by answering four questions:

How many peaceful activities would now make you a criminal if you choose to do them?

How much of your life is now spent working to pay a wide variety of taxes and other government fees?

How freely can you relocate your assets and person outside state jurisdiction?

How freely can you use your assets and person within state jurisdiction?

Few people can answer these questions in a way that makes them feel anything but economically enslaved and
physically trapped.
Personal Responses to the Police State
No one should have to choose between their freedom and the state, nor their wealth and the law. When
confronted by such choices, there is no easy or correct answer. An increasing number of Americans are
becoming expatriates for their own safety and that of their families. But the great majority of people are
rooted in place by extended family, friends, work, inertia, emotional attachments, or other compelling reasons.
Those who recognize the emergence of Police America and yet feel a need to stay should ask themselves a
question: where is the limit at which you withdraw your cooperation and say No! to a state law or a state
agents order? Would you inform on a neighbor, as the authorities already urge you to do? Would you assist a
friend or family member even if it made you criminally an accessory? If you would do so, then for whom would
you do it? A brother? A cousin? Would you steal from or harm an innocent person if a state agent commanded
you? If ordered, would you assist a police officer to harm an innocent person, or would you decline and
become vulnerable to a charge of obstructing justice?
There are several reasons for asking yourself such questions here and now. They include:

The consequences of your act may depend not merely on where you draw a line but also on how you
do so. Planning can help you draw your line in a prudent way.

You may be reluctant to draw the lines you believe are appropriate because you fear endangering your

loved ones, your wealth, or something else of value. If possible, secure these valuables in advance.
Prepare.

If you dont know where the lines are, then you are far more likely to act against your own principles or
interests when suddenly confronted by a distressing, demanding situation like an officer barking
commands.

Knowing where your limits are makes it more possible to avoid situations that trigger them.

You should pay a price as soon as possible because it costs less overall. It will never be easier for you to
consider this question than right now, in privacy and comfort.

There are no correct answers. The purpose of the exercise is merely to become more aware of how you,
personally, could live under a police state while retaining your safety and your self-respect.

Grappling With the Banality of Evil

Everyone who works for a better world must confront the undeniable presence and power of evil. I do not use
the word evil in a Biblical sense but to indicate those people who are so profoundly anti-life that they receive
joy from destruction. Concepts like justice and human decency mean nothing to such people, and so they make
a desert wherever they go.
Fortunately, truly sadistic people are rare. Unfortunately, tendencies toward cruelty and depraved indifference
exist within all of us; they define one extreme within human psychology. A civilized society is one in which the
vicious side of human psychology is discouraged and the co-operative side is rewarded. As a general rule of
thumb, the more force a society tolerates in the form of law, military incursions or other violence the more
vicious its members become. When the force is institutionalized, in the form of a massive prison system for
example, then those with anti-social and sadistic tendencies have found a home. They have found a place that
rewards them for their depraved indifference.
It is necessary to look evil directly in the face.

A headline from the UK newspaper the Guardian (March 23, 2011) read, US soldier admits killing unarmed
Afghans for sport. That is what Jeremy Morlock respectfully told an army judge about his participation in a
kill team of soldiers in Afghanistan who targeted harmless civilians and then staged the corpses to look like
dead insurgents. The plan was to kill people, sir, he said. Members of the kill team took trophy photos of the
murdered civilians; some kept body parts as mementos.
The foregoing describes evil. The word is not in fashion today, perhaps because it is too closely associated with
the evangelical right, or perhaps because it has been overused to the point of exhaustion.
Defining Evil
What is meant by evil in this context?
This article uses a (Ayn) Randian framework to define evil as an act that is profoundly anti-life and is inflicted
without just cause. It refers exclusively to human behavior that is intentional, not accidental, and excludes acts
caused by extreme mental conditions, such as schizophrenia. It refers to people who make the intentional and
uncoerced choice to destroy innocent life for pleasure or other profit.
Human behavior and psychology are so vast and elastic that there will always be a certain number of people
who choose evil. Two authors are particularly valuable in grappling to understand the nature of evil and why
some people choose it: Hannah Arendt and Henry David Thoreau.
Hannah Arendt
In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) the German-American political
theorist Hannah Arendt opened a unique window through which to gaze upon evil. Jewish by birth, Arendt
escaped Nazi Europe in 1941 and later became a naturalized American citizen. In 1961, on behalf of the New
Yorker magazine, Arendt reported on the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-level bureaucrat who had
been instrumental in administering the Nazi death camps.
She opened the trials transcript in order to examine a sadistic monster; she closed it without finding one. Like

his fellow Nazi Heinrich Himmler, who went from being a chicken farmer to heading the notoriously brutal SS,
Eichmann seemed to be an ordinary man with a talent for carrying out orders. Arendt coined a term the
banality of evil partly as a way to describe Eichmanns demeanor during the trial, in which he denied all
responsibility for the mass murders on the grounds that he was just following orders; he was obeying the law.
In page after page, Eichmann evinced no guilt, malice, or insanity. Indeed, as a man on trial, the most
remarkable emotion he displayed was a tendency to brag; Arendt called bragging the vice that was
Eichmanns undoing because it led him to speak of atrocities that he had not been ordered to commit. To
Arendt, it seemed Eichmann would rather die as a war criminal than live as a nobody.
Arendt continued to elaborate on how seemingly ordinary people can commit terrible acts simply because
those acts were performed in a systematic manner and within a sanctioned context a context that
discouraged accountability by rewarding obedience. Thus, unthinkable acts became acceptable because they
constituted just the way things are. A reviewer of Arendts book observed that the Nazis had normalized the
unthinkable.
Arendts insights also applied to the more mundane acts of evil committed during Hitlers reign. For example,
the sudden seizure of Jewish property ceased to be theft if it was done through proper paperwork, stamped
and filled out in triplicate by a government clerk. Those who processed the forms or inventoried the goods
were simply doing paperwork and inventory; they were honest people doing their jobs. Of course, as a result
of their honest labor, innocent people were stripped of their property and lives. The same was true of prison
guards, special police forces, and an obedient judiciary. They obeyed laws without question. For them, the law
assumed the role that conscience plays in other people. It told them what is right or wrong, and they obeyed.
People decided to obey for many reasons, of course. Some see it as a path to success or importance. Others
fear the consequences of disobedience. Many, like those who do the paperwork to facilitate theft or murder,
view their jobs as routine and as far from evil as imaginable. They simply want to collect a paycheck or acquire
a pension; and they give no thought to the content or consequences of their actions. Indeed, they would
probably be offended by anyone who suggested they should.
Arendts complex explanation of the banality of evil offers insight into Morlock and his kill team in
Afghanistan. They were in an environment that systematically dehumanized the average Afghan. Morlock was
also part of a military culture that systematically erased a sense of personal responsibility and the individuals
moral conscience.
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau offered insight into the military mindset that allows people to kill strangers who have
done them no harmand so, by extension, into the mind of Morlock. In his work On Civil Disobedience,
Thoreau objected to majority rule because the views of the majority do not always coincide with what is
morally correct. Every human being has a fundamental obligation to discover for himself what is just and then
to act according to his conscience, even if it contradicts the majority or the law. It is precisely his moral
conscience that makes a man fully human and not merely another animal.
It is within the military that Thoreau saw the greatest relinquishment of moral conscience because the military
proclaims obeying orders to be the highest ideal and duty of a soldier. Thoreau contemplated especially
those men who march off to kill strangers, and perhaps to die themselves, in conflicts that they had called
unjust as civilians. The answer was clear; they replaced their own moral judgment with the dictates of
legislators and other authorities. Thoreau wondered whether the soldiers retained or relinquished their
humanity in doing so. Thoreau concluded that once a man abandons his moral judgment, he ceased to be fully

human and became a machine; his body became a mere tool to be used by others.
Thoreau wrote,
Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some
unscrupulous man in power?
The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. In most
cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put
themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be
manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.
Many consider service to their country to be an automatic virtue; Thoreau believed it was a dehumanizing
vice if it involved the abandonment of conscience. The military demanded precisely such abandonment.
Few activities can be as dehumanizing as patrolling foreign streets in the role of an occupying force. On a daily
basis, soldiers like Morlock point guns at strangers who have done them no harm; they are taught that every
woman or young child could be an enemy waiting to cause death. When you strip away a mans conscience,
hand him a gun with little accountability, and then tell him he is surrounded by the enemy, the worst within his
humanity is likely to surface. Or perhaps Thoreau is correct: his humanity itself may disappear.
Arendt once stated, The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be
good or evil. If so, then the first step toward evil for most people is agreeing to blind themselves to that
distinction.
Open your eyes. Because you are one of the good people upon whom the rest of us are relying.

Why Good Men Do Nothing

This is a key question for those who dream of a better world. Overwhelmingly, the people you meet in daily life
are decent human beings. You buy groceries and gas from them; you entrust your children to teachers and
baby-sitters; you lend a co-worker $5 with no doubt in your mind that he will pay you back with thanks; your
dog wanders off and the person who finds him calls so you can pick up the miscreant. And yet this world of
decent people is overflowing with man-made misery, injustice and gratuitous cruelty in short, with evil. How
can the two be reconciled?
One reason is that good people too often do nothing to prevent evil from prevailing. For many, the inertia
comes from what is called learned helplessness.

One reason is that good people too often do nothing to prevent evil from prevailing. For many, the inertia
comes from what is called learned helplessness.
In his book Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents (1770), the British philosopher Edmund Burke wrote,
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one This sentiment has
survived as All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.
Why do good men do nothing in the face of evil, especially when evil aggressively invades their lives? For
example, the good German citizen under Hitler or the average Russian under Stalinism.
The question has red-hot relevance to those who value the tradition of individual freedom into which America
was born a tradition that includes freedom of speech and the right to bear arms and demand due process.
The traditional freedoms are crumbling under a runaway government. Through dozens of alphabet agencies
the IRS, BATF, CPS, DHS government is entering the lives of good men who often seem to do nothing to
protect themselves or their families from evil.
Why? Some people are paralyzed by fear; some by denial. But many others are immobilized by an apathy that
strips away the emotional will to act in self-defense.
In psychological terms, apathy is a state of constant indifference that is generally associated with depression.
Apathy leaves an individual unresponsive to the world and creates a disconnect between what he believes,
how he feels and which actions he takes. For example, a man might fully recognize that food is necessary to life
but, because he doesnt care, he doesnt eat.
Translated into political terms, he might realize that a gluttonous government is feasting on his liberty, his
wealth, and even on his childrens future but, because he feels only numbness toward government, he doesnt
act in self-defense. He obeys authority even when the command is self-destructive and harmful to his family.
The question of why people passively obey government has haunted the history of political discourse. In 1552,
tienne de la Botie addressed what he called the most important problem confronting freedom: people
consent to their own enslavement. His analysis of why resulted in the worlds first book on nonviolent
resistance, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.
Modern historians ask the same question. During the mass arrests of Stalinist Russia, people reportedly slept in
their clothing not in order to flee more easily but in order to be fully dressed when seized. In Hitlers Europe,
Jews obeyed commands to report to deportation centers that led them to their deaths and that of their

children. Why? Even dispassionate observers feel the urge to scream the word Why?.
Part of the complex answer lies in what psychologists call object specific apathy. That is, a persons numbness
is directed toward a specific situation, and is not necessarily manifested in other areas of his life. The same man
who is passionate about music or his wife may feel impotent in his career. An athlete may be fearless on a field
of sport and, yet, be the victim of domestic violence at the hands of his wife. A lawyer who is aggressive in the
courtroom may be so paralyzed about demanding his own freedom that he cannot even feel the urge to do so.
This response is a form of what is called learned helplessness. It is learned because the response comes from
an individual being thoroughly, relentlessly taught that he has no control over a situation and, so, his efforts
are futile. What can one person accomplish? You cant fight city hall. This is learned helplessness, learned
impotence.
The original and now-famous experiment from which the term learned helplessness derives involved
shocking dogs with electricity until they developed the psychology of submission. When applied to human
beings, learned helplessness is most often used to describe people who have been institutionalized for
example, in prisons, mental institutions, or orphanages. There, the regimentation strips an individual of the
smallest choice and punishes the expression of preference. In time, many institutionalized people accept the
inevitability of their environment. Some of them lose all ability even to feel their own preferences.
The depth of learned helplessness that comes from being institutionalized is rare. But most of us absorb a
degree of this apathy through constant exposure to a society that attempts to control almost every choice in
daily life: smoking, eating fast food, gun ownership, telling a rude joke at work, marriage and divorce, boarding
an airplane, medical care, banking It is difficult to find a choice that is not scrutinized by bureaucracy and
covered by some form of government control. The message is clear: Conformity is rewarded; the wrong choices
are punished or otherwise discouraged. The public school system is just one example of what could be called
the institutionalizing or bureaucratizing of daily life that leads to learned helplessness.
The Castle, a brilliant novel by Franz Kafka, offers a window into what happens to the psychology of a man who
confronts bureaucracy. Due a mistake in paperwork, the main character K. is summoned to work in a village as
a surveyor but ends up as a janitor. The Castle is the summoning authority with which K. must but cannot deal
because he cannot contact the proper official. K.s long and agonizing exercise in futility reveals the impact that
bureaucracy has upon the human soul: it deadens.
K.s error was to accept the authority of the Castle in the first place.
The foregoing observation contains good news: bureaucracy and authority require consent. And, if that
consent is learned behavior, then it can also be unlearned.
Something within the human spirit seems to want to shake off destructive programming. Call it a survival
instinct. Perhaps it is the inbred urge revealed by every two-year-old who yells no over and over again for the
simple joy of exercising a veto over his own life.
Adults need to recapture the childlike joy and power of saying no. The words most feared by those in authority
are I wont. Individuals with the habit of obedience may need to start by saying no on small matters like
refusing to fill in racial information on application forms. They may be shocked by how difficult it is to say I
wont even to petty demands. But the difficulty is a sign of how important it is. Only when a person is able to
say no can he say yes and have the word mean more than the obedient response of a servant. Yes only has
meaning when it is the affirmation of a free man.

It Is Not Personal It Is Institutional

The previous article points to the institutionalizing or bureaucratizing of daily life as one of the main reasons
why good people do nothing. By acting within the framework of an institution, decent people believe they
relinquish all personal responsibility for their own actions. I am only doing my job, they protest. I was just
obeying orders, they counter. And, yet, when the job or the orders require committing an injustice against
someone who has done you no wrong, there can be no relinquishment of responsibility. Why should there be?
Why does receiving a salary and pension for wronging others make that wrong less egregious? Surely it makes
it worse. Every human being is directly responsible for the actions he or she chooses to take.

My husband is a good man!

The indignation came from an email acquaintance to whom I had explained one of the reasons I reject the
public school system namely, rather than educate children, it indoctrinates them and teaches unthinking
obedience. As it happened, her husband was a grade-school teacher.
My opposition to the public schools is not a personal attack upon those who work within that institution or
within others I consider harmful. Decrying the role that an individual plays when he joins the state apparatus is
not tantamount to condemning his motives or his character. It would be far easier if it were. I would deeply
appreciate it if agents of the state, such as grade-school teachers, twirled their mustaches, wore black hats,
and laughed like the Wicked Witch of the West. They would be easier to spot and far more pleasant to criticize.
As it is, I understand that good people with fine intentions become schoolteachers and policemen. But, as long
as they act within the rules of their employment, their intentions do not change the role they play.
Rather than being a personal attack, this approach is known as institutional analysis. The approach examines
the dynamics by which the institutions of a society express its laws, customs, and culture. Ultimately, the
dynamics come down to the individuals who choose to act through those institutions and, so to perpetuate
them. Without these individuals there would be no institutions, no state.
Institutional Analysis
What is the purpose of an institution, what are the rules by which it functions? And, for that matter, what
constitutes an institution?
The Random House dictionary defines an institution as a well-established and structured pattern of
behavior or of relationships that is accepted as a fundamental part of a culture, such as marriage. An
institution is any stable and widely accepted mechanism within a culture for achieving social, economic or
political goals. The word applies to such wide-ranging concepts as the family, the free market, common
law, religion, and the state.
The unique structure and procedures of a specific institution will determine the results it produces. As long as
the structure and procedures are followed, the motives of those participating in the institution are irrelevant.
For example, a man may work in a candy factory with the announced intention of producing Tupperware, but
as long as he follows the workplace rules he will produce candy. Likewise, a police officer may truly wish
to promote a libertarian view of justice, but as long as he enforces the laws of the state he will produce
the antithesis of justice. It is the institution and not the character of its servants that defines the overall results.
Only by breaking the rules can good men produce, incidentally, good results.

The irrelevance of intentions can be a salutary factor if the institution is one that promotes freedom or
prosperity. Consider the free market. As long as everyone respects the rules of the free market by trading
voluntarily, then it will function as a mechanism that enriches everyone. It doesnt matter if some of the buyers
and sellers are vile human beings while others are saints. You can buy goods from a man whom you would
never allow into your home, and he can dislike you personally even as the money changes hands. Beyond
demanding voluntaryism, the free market does not care about intentions.
Types of Institutions
In general, institutions can be broken into two kinds. The first and perhaps the most important division is
between spontaneous and designed institutions. An example of a spontaneous institution is the family. At
least in Western culture, no one predetermines who you will marry and whether you will have children; those
decisions are left entirely to the individuals involved.
An example of a designed institution is the public school system, which is entirely defined by rules that a
centralized authority imposes from on high upon the individuals who participate.
Designed institutions can be further subdivided into two kinds, because not all of them are coercive. An
example of a voluntary designed institution would be a car manufacturer. In order to produce a specific
product, like a Toyota car, a business must establish rigid rules and require workers to follow them. And, yet,
the business remains voluntary and all who associate with it do so of their own free will. This is the second
general distinction between institutions: if it is a designed institution, is it voluntary or coerced?
All spontaneous institutions and uncoerced designed ones are libertarian in their functioning; that is, it violates
no rights. And, again, the intentions of those involved are irrelevant. An institution may be repugnant in its
purpose. It may be a press that promotes religious intolerance or racial bigotry, and so should be opposed on
moral grounds. But as long as it never uses coercion to do so, then its means of functioning is libertarian.
Equally, all designed institutions that rest upon coercion are antithetical to libertarianism in their functioning.
Again, a man may join a vicious state apparatus, such as the public school system, with the conscious intent of
doing good but his intentions will not matter any more than it matters with the candy worker who intends to
produce Tupperware. As long as good men obey the procedures of bad institutions, they will produce bad
results. Good men acting through the state will strengthen its legitimacy and power.
Moreover, a good mans participation in coercive institutions weakens any competing alternative ones; it
weakens the institutions that could fulfill societys needs without coercion. The existence of tax-funded public
schools harms private ones that are forced to compete at an economic disadvantage; parents who chose
private schools are forced to pay for the same service twice.
Nineteenth-Century Radical Individualism
Nineteenth-century radical individualism in America was very sound on one point that historians often miss.
In the 19th century, most radicals and reformers along the political spectrum were calling for new systems of
government, societal structures or specific organizations. For example, anarcho-syndicalists believed a brave
new world required their progressive vision of industrial relations.
Meanwhile, the individualists had a remarkable insight. They claimed that the institution necessary to secure
justice was already present and functioning: the free market. They argued that you did not need an entirely
new blueprint. What you needed is to get rid of the state and to allow the free market to function fully and

spontaneously. The mechanism through which it would function was also already present: the contract, which
was each individuals expression of consent. Indeed, the individualists believed so strongly in the power of
contract that the ideal society was called society by contract.
The free market could satisfy not only economic goals but social ones, such as justice. To this end, the 19th
century individualists provided an excellent discussion of the various means through which a private-court
system could arbitrate and adjudicate conflicts.
Thus, the solution to injustice and tyranny was not the Herculean task of creating something new under the
sun. The solution was to clear away the obstacles to the institutions of freedom that already existed.
Overwhelmingly, this meant clearing away the state. In this task, good men who lent their respectability to
the state were, arguably, among the worst obstacles. At bare minimum, their actions made the state function,
and their good intentions gave a patina of legitimacy to the injustice and obstructiveness of the state.
And so, to the woman who says, My husband is a good man! I must reluctantly repeat the answer, It does
not matter.

Contra Gradualism
Another reason good men do nothing is because they believe in gradualism; that is, they believe it is not
necessary or even desirable to act immediately against an evil like taxation. Even if they oppose public schools
on principle, they think the system should be phased out over time. This means that the system (and the evil) is
perpetuated and they continue to act in a manner that offers de facto support of it. Gradualism in theory
become perpetuity in practice. The opposite of gradualism is abolitionism.

It is 1858 and you are living in a Northern town. A man has arrived at your door with papers documenting his
ownership of a runaway slave whom you are sheltering. The slave throws himself at your feet, begging to stay
while the slave owner reasons with you. Being a philosophically inclined man, he comments on the political and
social necessity of preserving slavery for the time being. He assures you he is personally opposed to the
institution but that, without it, the economy of the South would shrivel and crimes of passion by blacks against
whites would abound. Slavery must be phased out over time and with proper precautions. After this particular
slave has learned a trade to support himself, then and only then should he be freed.
If you reply, There is no moral or practical consideration that overrides the escaped slaves right to his own
body and his own life, you are an abolitionist.
If you reply, I am opposed to slavery, but the consequences of immediately ending it would be disastrous;
therefore, I will return your slave for the transition period, you are a gradualist.
The abolition of slavery was the core issue around which libertarians of the early 19th century rallied. They
opposed phasing out slavery just as they would have opposed phasing out rape. Both are moral abominations
on which the only proper position is immediate cessation; that is, it should be stopped as fast as is humanly
possible and no one should participate in anything that acts to continue it.
Before proceeding, it is useful to distinguish gradualism as a policy from gradualism as a statement about how
the real world functions. In terms of real world functioning, gradualists make the common sense observation
that, try as you may, it will take time to implement ideas or achieve results. The transition to an entirely free
market society would not occur overnight for no other reason than it could not. It will take time to clear away
the state, due to the temporal reality in which we live. If this is all that is meant by gradualism if it meant as
fast as possible then there is no quarrel between gradualists and abolitionists.
This is not the formulation of gradualism with which abolitionists take issue. Abolitionists do not deny temporal
reality or that change may take some time. But they insist that individual rights must be given priority over all
other moral and practical considerations. Abolitionists of the 19th century, for example, realized that the
cessation of slavery would take time, but their message was that the deliberate continuation of slavery as a
policy could not be justified. They demanded the abolition of slavery not the mere reduction of it no ifs,
ands, or buts.
Gradualists stress the ifs, ands, or buts in their preference to gradually phase out unjust laws or agencies.
Consider the modern version of slavery: taxation. If taxes were to cease abruptly, it is claimed, the
consequences upon those who have paid into Social Security would be calamitous. Therefore taxes must be
phased out over a long period of time. In practice this creates a social system in which new generations
become tax-slaves to support fairness to older tax-payers. Gradualism in principle becomes perpetuity in
practice, and so the injustice continues indefinitely.

A litmus test to separate a gradualist from an abolitionist is how each would answer the key question, Is it
ever too soon to eliminate an unjust law or agency? The abolitionist gives an unqualified no, it could never be
too soon. The gradualist answers either yes or maybe. For example, he might agree that taxation is theft
but insist that some people might starve if it ceased abruptly. Therefore, he concludes the theft must be
phased out (please note: concern for starving people is a laudable reaction but the use of force is not the
correct solution).
Here the gradualist is not denying taxation violates rights; he is claiming that there is a social good with higher
priority than individual rights: namely, providing for people who might starve. Moreover, he argues for the
continuation of a government solution as the only way to handle the problem. By posing a dilemma that only
government can solve, the gradualist can justify using force and even do so with an air of moral superiority.
Abolition would result in social chaos, he insists; thus, we need a transition period during which conscious
and deliberate violations of right would continue.
The myth of the transition period accomplishes at least two things. First, it converts libertarianism from a
personal philosophy and obligation that should be consistently lived on a day-to-day basis and makes it,
instead, into a vague social goal, a light at the end of a social tunnel. That is, individuals are told to participate
in the violation of rights in order to humanely achieve a society in which rights are respected. An abolitionist
like Mohandas Gandhi would object that the means are the ends in progress. In other words, you can never
arrive at peace through war or respect for rights through their violation. The means used will determine the
results.
The second feat accomplished by the myth of the transition period is a sleight of hand. By positing the need for
such a period, the continuing violation of human rights is suddenly shifted into a strategic matter rather than a
moral question. In this manner, the gradualist eliminates precisely the issue that is in dispute; can you properly
violate human rights as a social strategy?
Once you admit the principle of subordinating rights to a social good, there is no way to draw the line. If my
rights are violated through taxation to protect the interests of those who are poised to receive Social Security,
then why wouldnt the same principle be applied to me? That is, why shouldnt I receive money stolen from a
younger generation? This approach doctrine fosters an infinite regress of injustice. The only way to stop an
injustice is to stop the injustice.

In Praise of Working People

The radical individualist Benjamin Tucker was not interested in any strategy that could not be used by the man
on the street. He proclaimed this in response to the then-common utopian communities into which kindred
spirits would withdraw from society. Tucker did not want to withdraw one whit. He wanted to walk on the same
sidewalk as working people, discuss politics and morality with them, hear their opinions and share in their
futures.
By contrast, modern experts and other elites seem to have contempt for the average man for whom they dumb
down their messages, if they deign to speak to him at all. Unfortunately, the average person seems also to
have lost confidence in his ability to understand so-called complex political and economic issues. This is yet
another reason why good men do nothing against injustice; they have been conditioned to respect authority
and not to trust themselves. Often those authorities or elites drape themselves in such impenetrable
bureaucracy that the average person throws up his hands in impotent confusion.
But no one deserves more respect than people who produce with their own hands or their own minds. They are
the true movers and shakers of the world. In getting from here to there, few steps are more important than
reclaiming respect for working people.

A prominent difference between the 19th-century libertarian movement and the contemporary one lies in
their attitudes toward working people. These are the great majority of people who are not primarily interested
in reading economic or political theory but who focus their energies instead on making a decent living or raising
a healthy family. These are intelligent people who understand the impact of laws and government on their lives
but who concentrate on controlling the more personal factors involved in their own well-being. They are
concerned with what Henry David Thoreau would call the business of living.
The 19th-century movement considered working people to be the best and firmest foundation on which to
build a free society. The two periodicals that constitute a chronicle of earlier libertarianism The Word and
Liberty consciously addressed working men and women rather than the elites. Indeed, both The Word and
Liberty would probably never have existed if their editors had not previously been active in the New England
Labor Reform Association, which aimed at improving the conditions of the working poor. Even Liberty, which
espoused the lofty-sounding philosophical anarchism, did not talk down to the laborers who were the bulk of
its subscribers. Instead, it went out of its way to include them; for example, it created a parallel
German-language publication entitled Libertas so that the large number of German immigrants who generally
worked in factory jobs could access the content.
By contrast, contemporary libertarianism often seems to dismiss working people, sometimes with disdain.
Perhaps this attitude comes from Ayn Rand and her portrayals of a solitary hero, like Howard Roark or John
Galt, who rises like cream from milk above the commonplace. Her novels portray the masses in an incredibly
unflattering light.
But, for those who promote the free market and individualism, there is a great tension involved in dismissing
the concerns of working people. The free market is not an expression of elitism but of the everyman and the
everywoman. It does not function according to the dictates of an elite but according to the needs and desires
of common people. And individual rights, which place the same political value on every single human being, are
blind to whether someone teaches at a university or digs ditches.

Ideology and the Everyman

According to elites, the masses are either uninterested in or unable to understand complex concepts like
justice or the free market. The masses are said to respond only to matters that directly affect their material
well-being, like the price of bread. Thus popular issues are phrased in utterly utilitarian or simplistic terms with
almost no surrounding context provided. To the extent ideology is presented, it is done so in the form of vague,
rousing appeals to America the Beautiful, the flag or our boys in uniform. Of course, such vague appeals are
not ideology at all but merely tired rhetoric.
An ideology is a body of interconnected ideas that form the foundation of a political, economic and moral
system. A successful ideology combines all three into an integrated whole. As discussed elsewhere in this book,
the notion that the masses are not interested in ideology is not merely false but bizarre. The two most
powerful and revolutionary social forces in Western history are both profoundly ideological and they were both
embraced by working people: Christianity and Marxism.
What was arguably the most successful working peoples cause of 19th-century America was also ideological. It
spoke to average people through a periodical entitled Working Mans Advocate. This was the land-reform
movement called homesteading that grew under the careful stewardship of the libertarian George Henry
Evans. Evans demanded that all land titles be held by the people, not by the government nor by large business
interests that enjoyed government privilege such as the railroads. In 1829, when Evans organized the Agrarian
League, he commanded the attention of less than a handful of newspapers. After three decades, of the
approximately 2,000 newspapers published in America, more than 600 of them vocally supported Evanss land
reform. In 1862, Congress passed the first homestead law providing that any citizen who was either 21 years
old or the head of a family could acquire title to a parcel of federal public land, not to exceed 160 acres.
Unfortunately, Evans had died several years earlier.
Other impressive accomplishments of 19th-century libertarianism relate directly to their appeal to the working
person. For example, the adult education movement arose from the tenements of American cities and had its
roots in the working class Mechanics Institutes and Workingmans Institutes of Scotland and England. The
appeal of grassroots causes should not be dismissed as a 19th-century phenomenon. Today, the most fruitful
avenues for libertarian change may well be the grassroots concerns of average people which are expressed
through practices like homeschooling. Their appeal is simple; they allow people to reassert control over their
own lives; they facilitate people taking back their lives from government.
Much of classic liberal theory is based on trusting working people more than members of the elite. For
example, the trial by jury lauded by 19th century legal theorist Lysander Spooner was meant to place
community opinion as a safeguard between the individual and the state. As Spooner explained, The trial by
jury is a trial by the country that is, by the people as distinguished from a trial by the government. The
object is to guard against every species of oppression by the government. In short, trial by jury provided an
institutional procedure through which the community passed judgment on the justice of government law.
Thus, no law that was vague, unpopular, or counter to common sense could be enforced. Working people were
a barrier against state oppression.
The Ascendency and Myth of Specialization
Another reason working people are dismissed is that the elite believe specialized knowledge or training is
necessary to understand sophisticated political and moral principles. I think precisely the opposite is true. I
believe basic principles are easier to grasp than the issues. Why? Many issues require specialized information
that average people lack because it is of little practical value to them and, so, there is little incentive to acquire
it. In a discussion about Syria, for example, an extensive knowledge of that nations history might be required in

order to grasp the points being made. But broad moral questions such as Is murder justified? do not require
specialized information. The fundamental questions are far more intuitive, deriving from both common sense
and common decency. A philosopher or legal scholar may have given more thought to the issue of murder but
his reasoning and arguments come from observing the same human nature with which everyone is familiar. In
short, fundamental moral and political principles offer the extreme advantage of requiring no specialized
knowledge to be understood. That is why virtually all human beings come to some conclusion about the
propriety of murder, even though far few may have an opinion on Syrias future. The more basic the political
issue or principle, the more likely it is to be understood by most people.

Boycott: A Nonviolent Revolt

A goal of libertarianism is to persuade people to look to the economic means, to nonviolent means in order to
achieve their goals. When this is achieved, society will be both peaceful and voluntary. For this to happen,
however, it is necessary to demonstrate that effective nonviolent strategies can provide social change and
redress wrongs. Fortunately, libertarianism has used nonviolence for centuries and its history is a textbook rich
in such strategies. One of them is the boycott.

Ostracism and boycott are such closely related social reform tactics that one is often considered to be a form of
the other. Ostracism dates back to ancient Greece (at least) and refers to the act of excluding an unacceptable
person from the fellowship of society through general consent.
The term boycott was coined in 1880 by the Irish Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell to describe the
version of ostracism that was being used against a certain Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott by his Irish
neighbors. This specific form of ostracism became an effective tactic in the struggle of the Irish peasants
against English landlords who enjoyed immense legal privileges. By contrast, Irish tenants faced legal barriers
to land ownership and were forced to pay huge rents that left them near starvation. In response, in 1879,
Parnell and Michael Davitt founded the Land League in order to achieve the three Fs: fair rent, free sale, and
fixity of tenure. The League evolved into a widespread peasant rebellion the first peaceful mass uprising that
Ireland had enjoyed.
The campaign against Captain Boycott was the Leagues most notable early victory. The captain was a
much-hated overseer for Lord Erne, an absentee landlord with holdings in County Mayo. In 1880, when he
refused to lower rents for the tenants, an audacious scheme was hatched. Servants no longer worked in his
house, stores sold him nothing, no mail was delivered, and laborers refused to bring in the harvest. Boycott
imported more politically friendly labor from the Protestant county of Ulster but the expense of doing so
proved disastrous to him. Eventually, a humiliated Boycott was forced to leave Ireland. The successful rebellion
galvanized Ireland and boycotts erupted across the island. For example, landlords who evicted tenants
suddenly found that no other family would move into the vacated house.
A basic difference between ostracism and boycott becomes clear through this example. Ostracism is often no
more than the punishment of an individual for unacceptable behavior while boycott aims at social change.
Since boycott is pursued to achieve a separate goal, it has a better claim to the word strategy. In a more
general sense, boycott can be defined as a refusal to associate with someone or to purchase or participate in
something as an act of protest aimed at changing a policy or practice.
America and Boycott
Boycott was a popular strategy with the 19th-century radicals who congregated around Benjamin Tuckers
pivotal periodical Liberty. Indeed, it had been well received by the earlier New England Labor Reform League
for which Ezra Heywoods periodical The Word served as a voice. Boycott seemed to provide a peaceful social
means by which people could address actions they considered so immoral as to be intolerable. Without such a
means, libertarians feared that people would turn to government for relief.
Tucker was fascinated by the Irish no-rent movement, the main organ of which was Patrick Fords Irish
World. Liberty is not always satisfied with it [Irish World], Tucker wrote, but, all things considered, deems it
the most potent agency for good now at work on this planet. Of the Irish Land League, he wrote, Irelands
true order: the wonderful Land League, the nearest approach, on a large scale, to perfect Anarchistic
organization.

Tucker was not alone in his admiration. Two of Libertys most frequent contributors Henry Appleton and
Sidney H. Morse also wrote columns for Irish World under the pseudonyms of Honorius and Phillip,
respectively. Tucker eventually became disillusioned with the Land League.
But the Land League had vindicated the strategy of boycott in the minds of 19th-century American libertarians.
Tucker later commented on what he called Irelands shortest road to success: no payment of rent now or
hereafter; no payment of compulsory taxes now or hereafter; utter disregard of the British parliament and its
so-called laws; entire abstention from the polls henceforth; rigorous but non-invasive boycotting of
deserters, cowards, traitors, and oppressors.
Boycott was an integral part of the passive but stubborn resistance that Tucker considered to be the only
strategic alternative to open revolution and terror, both of which he rejected. He favored passive resistance,
which he called the most potent weapon ever wielded by man against oppression and prominent features
of every great national movement.
Not all of Tuckers circle was as enthusiastic about boycott, however. Indeed, some contributors considered the
tactic to be invasive because it interfered with anothers ability to make a living. Again and again, Tucker
staunchly insisted that everyone had the right to ignore others and that such treatment could not constitute
invasion or interference. No one had the right to demand someone else associate with him.
Secondary Boycotts
Other contributors to Liberty accepted primary boycott that is, the personal refusal to deal with people or
agencies but rejected secondary boycott that is, the use of strikes or blacklists. The latter tactics were
termed secondary because they were often used to aid and expand a primary boycott. Many had great
reservations about secondary boycott. Nevertheless, Tucker defended even blacklists as nothing more than a
form of employer boycott and repeated that the refusal to cooperate or associate could never be a form of
coercion.
A century later, free-market economist Murray Rothbard would echo Tucker. In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard
wrote, Furthermore, secondary boycotts are also legitimate. In a secondary boycott, labor unions try to
persuade consumers not to buy from firms who deal with non-union (primary boycotted) firms. [It] should be
their right to try such persuasion, just as it is the right of their opponents to counter with an opposing boycott.
Addressing what is probably the most hated type of boycott, Rothbard observed, The blacklist a form of
boycott would be legal in a free society. The only problem Rothbard perceived with any form of boycott lay
in the practices that were closely associated with the strategy but were entirely separable from it. For example,
the common practice of picketing during strikes might be invasive if it blocked access to private property or if it
constituted a threat to so-called scabs who crossed the line. But these associated practices did not reflect
badly upon boycott itself. Rothbard concluded, The important thing about the boycott is that it is purely
voluntary, an act of attempted persuasion, and therefore that it is a perfectly legal and licit instrument of
action.
Why, then, can boycotts in the form of strikes and blacklists elicit such public condemnation? The 19th-century
libertarian Steven Byington offered one explanation: The State is afraid of it. The boycott offers a means for
making another do as you wish without calling in the States aid. Byington believed that the state recognized
the boycott as a powerful competitor with whom it could not deal effectively. They [statists] have the
advantage in the use of force but they are paralyzed when confronted by non-invasive methods. The
impotence of the state when confronted with noncooperation is one of the things that prompted it to commit
violence and pass laws against strikers in the late 19th century. The inexcusable violence of many strikers who

attacked or otherwise interfered with replacement workers justified such laws in the eyes of the public.
Boycott in Modern Times
Much of the modern backlash against strikes and blacklists comes from the fact that they are often backed by
government privilege. Unions have collective bargaining rights and blacklists (as in the McCarthy era) are
sometimes pursued by government agencies for political purposes. In short, a tool by which society could
reform the government has been usurped and made coercive.
Boycott has also been used by governments as a form of foreign policy in terms of blockading or otherwise
hindering goods from entering hostile nations. These imposed boycotts or embargoes not only violate the
rights of those who wish to trade with people in the targeted nations, but they are also largely ineffective. An
effective boycott requires voluntary nonassociation on the part of the boycotters who actively refuse to buy or
sell or serve. If the noncooperation is forced, then black marketeers merely skirt the restrictions and cash in on
the higher profits brought by scarcity and the higher risk.
Another form of boycott that has fallen into general disfavor is the social boycott or ostracism. Yet the refusal
to continue social relations with an unacceptable person was a mainstay of 19th-century libertarian strategy. In
his publication The Periodical Letter on the Principles and Progress of the Equity Movement (1854-58), the
libertarian Josiah Warren described the workings of an experimental community named Modern Times. In its
pages, a member of the community explained how Modern Times protected itself against disruptive individuals
and preserved the core vision:
When we wish to rid ourselves of unpleasant persons, we simply let them alone. We buy nothing of
them, sell them nothing, exchange no words with them in short, by establishing a complete system
of non-interference with them we show them unmistakably that they are not wanted here, and they
usually go away on their own accord.
Yet social boycott is used to achieve more goals than merely excluding undesirables from a community. In part
2 of his definitive three-volume work on strategy, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp addressed
three ways in which resistance movements have used social boycott effectively. In some cases, the ostracism
pressured people into inclusion, rather than exclusion. That is, ostracism or its threat was used to induce large
sections of a population to join a resistance movement, such as Gandhis crusade to oust the British from
India, or the French Resistance during World War II. A second goal was to induce people to refrain from
collaboration with an enemy such as an occupying army. Thirdly, social ostracism has been used to apply
pressure on the opponents representatives, especially his police or troops. Thus, police officers who are
brutal to peaceful protesters might find their photos published on websites, urging communities not to deal
with them.
Social boycott as a strategy is sometimes considered obsolete due to todays massive populations and the ease
of mobility. Being ostracized is no longer a hardship, it is claimed, because it is painless for people to move to
another community where they are strangers. Unless the ostracism is pervasive throughout a society as with
the government-enforced sex offender registries it can have no impact.
To be effective, however, social boycott need not be conducted on a massive scale. Indeed, ostracism on a
small scale occurs almost naturally within most organizations and social groups, where it is sometimes called
peer pressure. The strength of social boycott is indicated by the fact that peer pressure occurs spontaneously
throughout all levels of human interaction. Thus, social boycott can be viewed as the coordination within a
group of what is a naturally occurring response within individuals: the demand and desire to conform or fit in.

The 19th-century individualist feminist Gertrude Kelly considered peer pressure to be so powerful a force
within society that she called it the foremost reason women did not rise to equality with men. Kelly declared,
Men have always denied to women the opportunity to think; and, if some women have had courage
enough to dare public opinion, and insist upon thinking for themselves, they have been so beaten by
that most powerful weapon in societys arsenal, ridicule, that it has effectively prevented the great
majority from making any attempt to come out of slavery.
Fortunately, such pressure can also be used to liberate rather than to enslave.
Redeeming the Boycott
The best argument as to why economic boycott should be redeemed within libertarian strategy may be to list
its diversity. Putting aside secondary boycott (e.g., the strike), Gene Sharp discussed a myriad of refinements
on the basic economic boycott that is, refusing to buy, sell, or engage in services. These refinements include:
Action by consumers:

Consumer boycotts
Nonconsumption of boycotted goods
Policy of austerity
Refusal to rent
National consumers boycott
International consumers boycott

Action by workers and producers:

Workmens boycott
Producers boycott

Action by middlemen:

Suppliers and handlers boycott

Action by owners and management:

Traders boycott
Refusal to let or sell property
Lockout
Refusal of industrial assistance
Merchants general strike

Action by holders of financial resources:

Withdrawal of bank deposits

Severance of funds and credit
Revenue refusal

Conclusion
As political disillusionment spreads throughout America, it is necessary to remember that society not
government is the true engine of social change. Unfortunately, one of the obstacles to freedom is the
tendency to dismiss nonviolent, non-political strategies. The application of boycott in its many forms has been
refined and sophisticated through centuries of use. Like any other strategy, boycott will not address every
situation and it can fail. But the greatest strategic failure would be to dismiss it out of hand.

CONCLUSION
So much of The Art of Being Free is devoted to critiques and criticisms of the State that a reader might be left
with a clearer impression of what is wrong with life and society than the joy of them. This is a pitfall of caring
passionately for freedom and being politically active: sometimes you forget to live. You forget that life is not
about opposing things but embracing them.
An old friend, Samuel E. Konkin III (SEK3), forged his life so thoroughly around an opposition to government
that, instead of answering his phone with hello, he would answer, Smash the State. I never saw SEK3
wearing anything but black a symbol of anarchism. At parties, he would sit in a chair with his omnipresent
pipe and hold court; that is, he would take the other guests on, one by one, and argue them into the political
dust. I remember one duly dusted arguer who wandered my way with a dazed expression and the comment, I
havent had a discussion like that since I was in the college dorm at night.
I used to wonder who SEK3 would be if he ever succeeded and the state withered away. Would SEK3 wither
away as well? After all these years, could he bring himself to wear blue and green and yellow? Or would he go
to the Old Anarchists Home and tell war stories of his glory days? SEK3 seemed to be a walking, talking
cautionary tale against defining your life around what you reject.
Then science fiction was mentioned in his presence and I met an entirely different man. His eyes lit up, his
cheeks flushed and the timbre of his voice lightened. If the state defined what SEK3 was against, then SF
defined what he was passionately for in life. It represented hope, the future, innovation, man overcoming
challenges, mans mind scaling barriers SEK3s knowledge of the literature was encyclopedic and his praise
for writers like Doc Smith and Robert Anton Wilson seemed endless. Here was a subject that made SEK3 glow
like a lightbulb. If the state withered away, then SEK3 would plunge himself even deeper into the other passion
of his life: reading and writing science fiction. SEK3 had remembered to live after all!
I want to return to a question asked earlier in the book: What is your relationship to the State? To that
question, I add another, What is your relationship to being alive?.
The answer I like best to both questions is the one given by the 19th-century American anarchist Henry David
Thoreau. The answer is explored in an earlier essay in this book, which I will recap briefly. To Thoreau, the
business of living was immensely more important than politics.
Thoreaus famous act of civil disobedience his refusal to pay a tax that supported war was not the act of a
determined political dissident, although he had spoken out against war before. His one night in jail came about
only because the state literally knocked on his front door in the form of a tax collector. At that point, when
looking the state in the face, Thoreau had to make a choice.
Thoreau probably asked himself a question that appeared earlier in the book: At what point do you draw the
line and refuse to co-operate with a state law, refuse to obey a state agent? Thoreau believed the
Mexican-American War was immoral: it violated both his sense of decency and his theory of rights. As long as
Thoreau was not forced to participate in this evil by supporting it, he seemed content to go about the
business of living of enjoying nature, family, and friends. Participation in the oppression of others, however,
was where Thoreau drew a hard line, because it went against his duty to live honestly. His tax money would
have supported the war.
But when Thoreau was released from jail, he did not file a grievance. He immediately went on a berry hunt
with a swarm of young boys. No bitterness. No brooding. No lingering resentment. Without missing a beat,

Thoreau simply returned to living deeply. This post-jail quest for berries occasioned my favorite line from all of
Thoreaus writings. As he tramped the trails in search of juicy treasure, Thoreau found himself standing on a
high point in a field. He gazed about at the continuous, sprawling beauty that surrounded him and observed
the State was nowhere to be seen.
It is far more difficult today than in Thoreaus time to find places where the state cannot be seen. Some would
say it is nigh on impossible. But perhaps this only makes it more important to try.
The state can still disappear. For many people, the state disappears in the conduct of their private lives with
family and friends, where the bonds of affection and trust have nothing whatsoever to do with government
law. When they read bedtime stories to their children, plan a birthday party for a relative, or simply have a cup
of coffee with a friend here the state is nowhere to be seen.
Other people lose themselves in hobbies like model aircraft, breeding dogs, gardening or (my favorite) ethnic
cooking. As long as there is no fiscal profit being reaped, then here, too, the state is nowhere to be seen.
Many of us have work about which we are passionate. Since the age of five I have wanted to be nothing other
than a writer, to work with words and ideas. My husband has a similar and bottomless fascination with
electronics and computers. Both of us will go to our graves working with words and electrons not because
Social Security has collapsed but because our passion for those pursuits is integral to who we are, to what
makes us get up in the morning. If you freed me from a life of writing in order to make a living, then I would use
the liberated time in order to write. For one thing, Im still fascinated by ideas and theories especially
systems of theory, such as Marxism or Objectivism, that offer an integrated explanation of the world from
epistemology to art. Politics the theory of mans relationship to society is an essential part of that
explanation. And I cant imagine living without the fun and fascination of ideas.
Thoreaus berry-picking insight is profound. There is no duty to confront the state except when it seeks to
make you an active accomplice in the oppression of others. Those who stand up against the injustice of others
are to be applauded. But they should not do so at the expense of their primary duty: to live deeply and
honestly. This duty involves pushing back or walking away (when possible) from the areas of life in which the
state commands jurisdiction.
Again, it is more difficult to shrug off the State today than it was in Thoreaus time.
I cannot tell anyone what to do with their lives. I can only tell you what I do. I take nothing from the State. I
accept no tax-dollar wages, no grants or entitlements. I do not use the court system nor have I filed a police
report despite the fact that I have been physically attacked and Ive had property stolen. The only time I have
used a lawyer was when someone threatened a lawsuit against me. In my personal life and relationships, I act
as though the State does not exist.
Many, many people do not have this luxury. They battle ex-wives or -husbands to see their children, they are
imprisoned for victimless crimes like smoking marijuana, they confront the IRS who wants to drain their
life-savings Walking away from the state isnt an option for these people, and I do not make light of their
non-options.
It is precisely because of such people that I havent abandoned political activism. But it is important not to
forget the business of living, the challenge of investing in those things and people I care for rather than in
strangers for whom I advocate. The personal is what sustains you; strangers can drain your life away.
And, so, the closing words of The Art of Being Free are Make space for the business of living the areas

of life that allow you to say Here, the state is nowhere to be seen.

AN INVITATION FROM WENDY MCELROY

I am tired of just talking about freedom. I am still passionate about the ideas of liberty, but I also want to be
free in my own lifetime.
Nothing in decades has excited me about the possibility of living freedom as much as the Laissez Faire Club.
Even though it has just been established, the Club is already a thriving concern because it fills a yawning gap
both in the publishing world and in the need for community. Without stinting on intellectual stimulation, the
Club offers books, forums, and services that teach members the dynamics of how to be free. This includes
economic independence, knowledge of your rights, and the good fellowship of a community that welcomes
and supports you.
If you have enjoyed The Art of Being Free, then please drop by and check out the Laissez Faire Club. It is
amazingly inexpensive to be part of this revolution; it costs less than buying one book in a regular store. And
the Club offers so much more than products.
When you knock on the door, I will be there blogging and discussing books, events, ideas but my focus will
be on providing and receiving the knowledge of how to achieve practical freedom.
Freedom needs the Laissez Faire Club; freedom needs you.
http://lfb.org/WendyMcElroy