Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism

by Mark R. Levin

  Oppositely, the spectacular economic advancement that was unleashed by the industrial revolution and continues to this day, and which has massively increased the quality of life for ordinary Americans, is subjected to the progressive’s constant torrent of criticism and negative charges. Therefore, a brief defense is compelled—although one would think it is unnecessary inasmuch as Americans are surrounded by and benefit from its infinite wonders.

  In his book Lectures on Economic Growth (2004), Nobel laureate in economics and University of Chicago professor Robert E. Lucas Jr. argues that the industrial revolution was the most miraculous improvement of the standard of living and economic progress the world has ever known. “From the earliest historical times until around the beginning of the nineteenth century, the number of people in the world and the volume of goods and services they produced grew at roughly equal, slowly increasing rates. The living standards of ordinary people in eighteenth-century Europe were about the same as those of people in contemporary China or ancient Rome or, indeed, as those of people in the poorest countries in the world today. Then, during the last 200 years, both production and population growth have accelerated dramatically, and production has begun to grow much more rapidly than population. For the first time in history, the living standards of masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth. The novelty of the discovery that a human society has this potential for generating sustained improvement in the ma­terial aspects of the lives of all of its members, not just of a ruling elite, cannot be overstressed. We have entered an entirely new phase in our economic history.”30

  In his essay “An Audacious Promise: The Moral Case for Capitalism” (2012), Yeshiva University professor James R. Otteson explains: “Since 1800, the world’s population has increased sixfold; yet despite this enormous increase, real income per person has increased approximately 16-fold. . . . In America, the increase is even more dramatic: in 1800, the total population in America was 5.3 million, life expectancy was 39, and the real gross domestic product per capita was $1,343 (in 2010 dollars); in 2011, our population was 308 million, our life expectancy was 78, and our GDP was $48,800. Thus even while the population increased 58-fold, our life expectancy doubled, and our GDP per capita increased almost 36-fold. Such growth is unprecedented in the history of humankind. Considering the worldwide per-capita real income for the previous 99.9 percent of human existence averaged consistently around $1 per day. That is extraordinary. What explains it? It would seem that it is due principally to the complex of institutions usually included under the term ‘capitalism,’ since the main thing that changed between 200 years ago and the previous 100,000 years of human history was the introduction and embrace of so-called capitalist ­institutions—­particularly, private property and markets. One central promise of capitalism has been that it will lead to increasing material prosperity. . . .”31

  As I argued in Liberty and Tyranny, “[t]he free market is the most transformative of economic systems. It fosters creativity and inventiveness. It produces new industries, products, and services, as it improves upon existing ones. With millions of individuals freely engaged in an infinite number and variety of transactions each day, it is impossible to even conceive all the changes and plans for changes occurring in our economy at any given time. The free market creates more wealth and opportunities for more people than any other economic model.”32

  For the progressive, of course, this is a dire problem. Participatory republicanism and participatory market capitalism empower the individual and improve society. Despite the radical egalitarian and class-warfare attacks of the progressives condemning capitalism as serving mostly the interests of the wealthy and promoting income inequality and social injustice, economist George Reisman, in his treatise on economics, Capitalism (1996), succinctly builds an overwhelming case for its universal benefits:

  Industrial civilization has radically increased life expectancy: from about thirty years in the mid-eighteenth century to about seventy-five years today. In the twentieth century, in the United States, it has increased life expectancy from about forty-six years in 1900 to the present seventy-five years. The enormous contribution of industrial civilization to human life is further illustrated by the fact that the average newborn American child has a greater chance of living to age sixty-five than the average newborn child of a nonindustrial society has of living to age five. The marvelous results have come about because of an ever improving supply of food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and all the conveniences of life, and the progressive reduction in human fatigue and exhaustion. All of this has taken place on a foundation of [actual] science, technology, and capitalism, which have made possible the continuous development and introduction of new and improved products and more efficient methods of production.

  In the last two centuries, loyalty to the values of science, technology, and capitalism has enabled man in the industrialized countries of the Western world to put an end to famines and plagues, and to eliminate the once dreaded diseases of cholera, diphtheria, smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever, among others. Famine has been ended, because industrial civilization has produced the greatest abundance and variety of food in the history of the world, and has created the storage and transportation systems required to bring it to everyone. This same industrial civilization has produced the greatest abundance of clothing and shoes, and of housing, in the history of the world. And while some people in the industrialized countries may be hungry or homeless . . . it is certain that no one in the industrialized countries needs to be hungry or homeless. Industrial civilization has also produced the iron and steel pipe, the chemical purification and pumping systems, and the boilers, that enable everyone to have instant access to safe drinking water, hot or cold, every minute of the day. It has produced the sewage systems and the automobiles that have removed filth of human and animal waste from the streets of cities and towns. It has produced the vaccines, anesthesias, antibiotics, and all the other “wonder drugs” of modern times, along with all kinds of new and improved diagnostic and surgical equipment. It is such accomplishments in the foundations of public health and in medicine, along with improved nutrition, clothing, and shelter, that have put an end to plagues and radically reduced the incident of almost every type of disease.

  As a result of industrialized civilization, not only do billions more people survive, but in the advanced countries they do so on a level far exceeding that of kings and emperors in all previous ages—on a level that just a few generations ago would have been regarded as possible only in a world of science fiction. With the turn of a key, the push of a pedal, and the touch of a steering wheel, they drive along highways in wondrous machines at sixty miles an hour. With the flick of a switch, they light a room in the middle of darkness. With the touch of a button, they watch events taking place ten thousand miles away. With the touch of a few other buttons, they talk to other people across town or across the world. They even fly through the air at six hundred miles per hour, forty thousand feet up, watching movies and sipping martinis in air-conditioned comfort as they do so. In the United States, most people can have all this, and spacious homes or apartments, carpeted and fully furnished, with indoor plumbing, central heating, air conditioning, refrigerators, freezers, and gas or electric stoves, and also personal libraries of hundreds of books, records, compact disks, and tape recordings; they can have all this, as well as long life and good health—as the result of working forty hours a week.

  The achievement of this marvelous state of affairs has been made possible by the use of ever improved machinery and equipment, which has been the focal point of scientific and technological progress. The use of this ever improved machinery and equipment is what has enabled human beings to accomplish ever greater results with the application of less and less muscular exertion.33

  Lucas observes that the key to economic growth and prosperity, and the remarkable technological and other advances that have improved the human condition, was the recognition
and legal protection of private property rights. “[T]he industrial revolution was not exclusively, or even primarily, a technological event. Important changes in technology have occurred throughout history, yet the sustained growth in living standards is an event of the last 200 years. The invention of agriculture, the domestication of animals, the invention of language, writing, mathematics, and printing, the utilization of the power of fire, wind, and water, all led to major improvements in the ability to produce enormous growth in population. Depending on where such inventions occurred, some of them induced important shifts in the relative power of different societies. By the seventeenth century, indeed, their ability to generate new technology had enabled the Europeans to conquer much of the world. Yet none of these inventions led to any substantial increase in the living standards of ordinary people, Europeans or otherwise. . . . Of course this is not to say that prior to the last two centuries everyone lived at a level of subsistence. . . . Wherever property rights in land and other resources have been established, property owners have enjoyed incomes in excess of, often far in excess of, subsistence.”34

  Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist and president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, agrees with Lucas but goes a step further. He explains in his book The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (2000) that property rights means more than ownership. The property holder must have the legal ability to protect his ownership right and to use his property to generate economic activity, including the creation of capital, which leads to further investments and economic growth. “In the West . . . every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, assets can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence. They can be used as collateral for credit. The single most important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur’s house. These assets can also provide a link to the owner’s credit history, an accountable address for the collection of debts and taxes, the basis for the creation of reliable and universal public utilities, and the foundation for the creation of securities (like mortgage-backed bonds) that can then be rediscounted and sold in secondary markets. By this process the West injects life into assets that makes them generate capital. Third World and former communist nations do not have this representational process. As a result, most of them are undercapitalized, in the same way that a firm is undercapitalized when it issues fewer securities than its income and assets would justify. The enterprises of the poor are very much like corporations that cannot issue shares or bonds to obtain new investment and finance. Without representations, their assets are dead capital. This is the mystery of capital. Solving it requires an understanding of why Westerners, by representing assets with titles, are able to see and draw out capital from them. One of the greatest challenges to the human mind is to comprehend and to gain access to those things we know exist but cannot see. . . .”35

  De Soto observes that “[t]he absence of this process in the poorer regions of the world—where two-thirds of humanity live—is not the consequence of some Western monopolistic conspiracy. It is rather that they have lost all awareness of its existence. Although it is huge, nobody sees it, including the Americans, Europeans, and Japanese, who owe all their wealth to their ability to use it. It is an implicit legal infrastructure hidden deep within their property systems—of which ownership is but the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is an intricate man-made process that can transform assets and labor into capital. This process was not created from a blueprint and it is not described in a glossy brochure. Its origins are obscure and its significance buried in the economic subconscious of Western capitalist nations.”36

  While all these superb thinkers are surely right, even more critical to understanding the American economic revolution, including the industrial revolution, is the extent of the integration and confluence of natural law principles, including unalienable rights and an eternal moral order, the evolution of the civil society, and the application of republicanism to a constitutional governing structure; and the weaving of private property rights, including commerce, trade, and mobility, into the fabric of society and institutionalized in the law. This extraordinary intertwining and aggregation of events is an essential character of the American republic. It has led to an explosion of individual ingenuity and productivity, and a fantastic quality of life for the broadest population of Americans, the likes of which the world has never before experienced.

  Moreover, these confluences strengthen the character and well-being of a nation. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu wrote of the role of commerce in a civil society. He explained that “the spirit of commerce brings with it the spirit of frugality, economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tranquility, order, and rule. . . .”37 “Commerce cures destructive prejudices, and it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores. . . .”38 “In short, one’s belief that one’s prosperity is more certain in these states makes one undertake everything, and because one believes that what one has acquired is secure, one dares to expose it in order to acquire more; only the means for acquisition are at risk; now, men expect much of their future. . . . As for the despotic states, it is useless to talk about it. General rule: in a nation that is in servitude, one works more to preserve than to acquire; in a free nation, one works more to acquire that to preserve.”39

  What of society’s poor? Montesquieu wrote of two kinds of poor, those who live a hopeless existence under authoritarian rule and those for whom opportunity exists in a free society. “There are two sorts of poor peoples: some are made so by the harshness of the government, and these people are capable of almost no virtue because their poverty is part of their servitude; the others are poor only because they have disdained or because they did not know the comforts of life, and these last can do great things because this poverty is part of their liberty.”40 Indeed, commerce promotes individual and societal industriousness, improvement, and progress. “Men, by their care and their good laws, have made the earth more fit to be their home. We see rivers flowing where there were lakes and marshes; it is a good that nature did not make, but which is maintained by nature. When the Persians were the masters of Asia, they permitted those who diverted the water from its source to a place that had not yet been watered to enjoy it for five generations, and, as many streams flow from the Taurus mountains, they spared no expense in getting water from there. Today, one finds it in one’s fields and gardens without knowing where it comes from. Thus, just as destructive nations do evil things that last longer than themselves, there are industrious nations that do good things that do not end with themselves.”41 And commerce is natural to man and a natural characteristic of republican government. “Commerce is related to the constitution. In government by one alone, it is ordinarily founded on luxury, and though it is also founded on real needs, its principal object is to procure for the nation engaging in it all that serves its arrogance, its delights, and its fancies. In government by many, it is more often founded on economy. Traders, eyeing all the nations of earth, take to one what they bring from another. . . .”42

  A vibrant economy and healthy society, where the people are generally productive, satisfied, and happy, is a society upon which voluntary or willing societal transformation becomes more difficult. The people, or Marx’s “proletariat” working class, are actually invested in such a society because they helped build it and enjoy a higher standard of living than most. They will not rise up to lead a revolution against their best interests and to empower politicians and bureaucrats. But the progressive has decided in advance that societal transformation is necessary. Therefore he must employ various forms of usurpation and subterfuge to stir discontent and ba
lkanize the citizenry (race, gender, income, age, religion, etc.). The individual’s imperfections and the imperfections of republican institutions must be exploited, and visions of the perfect society, albeit impossible, supposedly guaranteed by the progressive’s enterprise, must be propped up. The future is always said to be better than the present, but only if the individual surrenders more of his liberty and property to the state and conforms to the demands of the state. Ultimately, if persuasion by exploitation and propaganda is ineffective, the citizenry must be forced to bend to the progressive’s plans by the might of government’s extraconstitutional administrative means.

  The philosopher Karl Popper wrote in The Poverty of Historicism (1957) that the human factor must be controlled “by institutional means, and to extend his program so as to embrace not only the transformation of society . . . but also the transformation of man. The political problem, therefore, is to organize human impulses in such a way that they will direct their energy to the right strategic points, and steer the total process of development in the desired direction. It seems to escape the well-meaning Utopianist that his program implies an admission of failure, even before he launches. For it substitutes for his demand that we build a new society, fit for men and women to live in, the demand that we ‘mould’ these men and women to fit into the new society.”43