Those who advance this or similar lines of criticism are perfectly correct on one point: If there is to be an increase in political spending, there must be a consequent decrease in private spending; some people must do without. The well-being of individual persons in any society varies inversely with the money at the disposal of the political class. All money spent by the governing group is taken from private citizens—who otherwise would spend it quite differently on goods of their choice. The state lives on taxes (or what it borrows now and pays back with taxes later), and taxes are a charge against the economically productive part of society.
The Opulent State, fancied by progressives who criticize the Affluent Society, cannot exist except as a result of massive interference with free choice. To establish it, a society of freely choosing individuals must yield to a society in which the lives of the many are collectively planned and controlled by the few.
The state, in our Affluent Society, already deprives us of one-third and more of our substance (in both direct and indirect taxes and the costs of regulation and compliance it imposes). Not enough! say the critics. How much then? Fifty percent? A hundred? Enough, at any rate, so that no life shall go unplanned if they can help it. This is the ancient error of authoritarianism. The planning-inclined intellectual, from time immemorial, has dreamed up ethical and esthetic standards for the rest of mankind—only to have them ignored. His efforts to persuade people to embrace them meet with scant success. The masses are too ignorant to know what is good for them, so why not impose the right ideas on them by direct political action? The state is too weak and poor? Well, make it strong and rich, he urges, and so it is done. But the state acts from political and power motives and often devours even the intellectuals who argued on its behalf.
Every society devises some public means of protecting its peaceful citizens against the violent actions of others, but this is too limiting a role for government to satisfy the critics of the so-called Affluent Society. The massive state interference they advocate is designed, they say, to protect the people from the consequences of their own folly, and the way to do this is to pass anti-folly laws to prevent wrong choices.
There are degrees of wisdom, true, and some people are downright foolish. They spend their money at the races when the roof needs repair, or they install costly television services when they’re still making payments on their boat. In a free society, however, this is their right just as it is their right to say or print foolish or unpopular things. This is part of what it means to be free! The exercise of freedom invariably results in some choices that are unwise or wrong (Hey, is it any different in government?). But, by living with the consequences of his foolish choices a man learns to choose more wisely next time. Trial and error first; then, if he is free, trial and success later. But because no man is competent to manage another, persistent error and failure are built-in features of the Opulent State.
(Editor’s Note: This essay first appeared in the 1962 edition of Clichés of Socialism at a time when the fallacy it addresses was more widely proclaimed than it is today. John Kenneth Galbraith’s influential 1958 book, The Affluent Society, largely discredited in subsequent decades, was often and favorably cited in the early 1960s. Today, with government consuming considerably more of total income than it did half a century ago, and wasting much of it, it’s not so easy to argue that the public sector is being starved. That doesn’t stop progressives, however, from frequently claiming in various ways that government deserves even more.)
SUMMARY
•If the political class gets more to spend, that means that private individuals have exactly that much less to spend according to their own choices
•Authoritarianism always argues for more of what belongs to others; authoritarians never believe they have enough as long as anybody gets to make his own choices rather than having the State make those choices for him
•Freedom means spending your own money the way you choose, even if you sometimes choose foolishly. And there’s nothing about government that ensures that the people in it who spend other people’s money will spend it more wisely than would those who earned it in the first place
#25
“IF GOVERNMENT DOESN’T RELIEVE DISTRESS, WHO WILL?”
BY LEONARD E. READ
PRESIDENT GROVER CLEVELAND, VETOING A CONGRESSIONAL APPROPRIATION OF $10,000 to buy seed grain for drought-stricken Texans, may have given us all the answer we need to this cliché:
The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune . . . Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.
No doubt many of the congressmen who voted for this appropriation were sincerely asking, “If the federal government does not save these poor Texans, who will?” President Cleveland had only to veto the measure and write an explanation. But we private citizens have no power beyond reason and persuasion. What, then, might we have said? This would be one honest answer: “I am not clairvoyant and, thus, I do not know who will relieve these people. However, I do know that Texans acting on their own initiative and with their own resources will take care of themselves better than they will be taken care of by any number of politicians imitating Robin Hood.”
The question, “If government does not relieve distress, who will?” is illogical. No one can ever answer, who will. Thus, the cliché-maker wins his implied point without a struggle—unless one lays claim to clairvoyance or exposes the fakery of the question. (Furthermore, implicit in the question itself is the dubious assumption that if government does it, it will be done well, efficiently and without the corruption of politics.)
Every reader of these lines can prove to himself, by reflecting on personal experiences, that the relief of distress is an unpredictable event. Time after time, each of us, with no preconception, has observed distress and then taken steps to relieve it—with his own income! (Editor’s Note: Author Marvin Olasky in his 1999 book, The American Leadership Tradition, notes that the private, voluntary donations that poured in to help Texas after Cleveland’s veto amounted to at least ten times what the President had vetoed.)
Prior to the 1930s, before the federal government assumed responsibility for “relief,” no one could have foretold who would come to whose rescue; yet, since 1623, there is no record of famine or starvation in this country. Among a people where the principles of freedom were more widely practiced and government more limited than elsewhere, there has been less distress and more general well-being than history had ever recorded. Societies saddled with bureaucracy have no record of coming to the aid of free societies; it has always been the other way around.
Charity is a personal virtue. When government does not undertake coercively-funded grants-in-aid (“relief”), millions of adults stand as guardians against distress. Their available charitable energy is totally at work observing distress in its neighborly detail, judging and coming to the rescue with the fruits of the labor of each charitable person. And on occasions of major disaster, there has been a voluntary pooling of individual resources, often extravagant.
What happens when government takes over? Charity gives way to politics. Funds coercively collected are dispensed to individuals according to group, class, or occupational category. This has no semblance of charity; it is the robbery of Peter to pay Paul. Further, when government constructs a feeding trough and fills it with fruits extorted from the citizenry, it creates new claimants and aggravates the problem it set out to solve.
It is not only the so-called “relief” projects that are based on this same tired cliché, but most other cases of government intervention in our society: “If the government doesn’t do the job, who will?” If the government doesn’t level mountains and fill valleys, drain swamps and water deserts, bu
ild highways over waters and seaways over land, subsidize failure and penalize productivity and thrift, send men to the moon and promise the moon to mankind, and a thousand and one other projects—if the government doesn’t do these things, that is, force taxpayers to do them, who will? And more often than not the answer is that probably no one in his right mind would ever think of doing such things—at his own risk, with his own money. Eventually, a time might come when some ingenious person would see a way to do one or more of these jobs, in hope of profit, and would take the chance.
But there is no way to determine in advance who that pioneer might be. The most that can be done is to leave men free, for only among free men do pioneers emerge. Freedom affords every opportunity, in charitable enterprises or on the market, for the best—not the worst—to rise topside.
(Editor’s Note: A version of this essay first appeared in FEE’s book, Clichés of Socialism, in 1962.)
SUMMARY
•Nobody can name the names in advance of those who might come to the aid of fellow citizens in distress. The question is illogical
•Without government assistance, a massive amount of private, voluntary aid has poured forth from American citizens since the first settlement here. Is there any reason to suppose that politicians are more caring, compassionate or effective in providing relief with other people’s money than are the individuals who elected them in the first place, and who get personally involved in the relief of citizens nearby?
•Government is not true charity and it politicizes everything it touches
#26
“HISTORICAL PRESERVATION WON’T HAPPEN UNLESS THE GOVERNMENT TAKES CHARGE”
BY LAWRENCE W. REED
“SOLD!” CRIED THE SOTHEBY’S AUCTIONEER ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 18, 2007, as one of history’s oldest political documents changed hands. It was the Magna Carta, or rather a copy of it that dated to 1297. The buyer was not a government but an individual, a Washington lawyer named David Rubenstein. He paid $21.3 million for it and promptly announced he wanted his newly acquired private property to stay on public view at the National Archives in the nation’s capital.
A privately owned Magna Carta? Aren’t such important things supposed to be public property? A couple of American students visiting Britain certainly thought so. For a story that aired on CNN about the auction at Sotheby’s, they were interviewed at the British Library in London while gazing on another of the great charter’s copies on display there.
“I couldn’t imagine that there is still a privately owned copy of the Magna Carta floating around the world. It seems really incredible that any one person should actually have that in their possession,” one of the young scholars pronounced. “Personally, I hope the government or some charitable foundation gets a hold of it so that everybody can enjoy seeing it,” chimed the other. Both assumed that private property and public benefit, at least with regard to historical preservation, were incompatible.
The Magna Carta copy that Rubenstein bought will not be spirited into his closet because it is the new owner’s wish that it be preserved for public display. While some might say humanity lucked out in this particular instance, it really is just the latest in a rich heritage of private care of documents, manuscripts, and objects of historical significance. Indeed, the very copy Rubenstein bought was previously owned by businessman Ross Perot’s foundation, which in turn had acquired it in 1984 from yet another private owner, the Brudenell family of Britain. Given that record, those students should have sung hosannas to private efforts like that of Rubenstein’s.
The content of books from the ancient world appears to have been brought into the digital age largely through private efforts. Through various eras, libraries, scribes, and printers were supported to a great extent through private patronage. Ecclesiastical institutions were critical in preserving texts that are important to the Western tradition, points out Dr. Ryan Olson of the Kern Family Foundation in Wisconsin and holder of a doctorate in the classics from Oxford University.
For example, Olson says, in the sixth century Cassiodorus finished his career as a government official in Ravenna and organized monastic efforts to copy Christian and classical texts. Some work of his monks seems to have ended up in Rome, where it could be more influential. Though the history of transmission can be difficult to trace, scholars have argued that at least one classical work, by Cato, seems to have survived to this day because of Cassiodorus’s efforts. “It is our intention,” Cassiodorus wrote shortly before his death, “to weave into one fabric and assign to proper usage whatever the ancients have handed down to modern custom.”
I also learned from Olson that the Roman politician, lawyer, and author Cicero revealed in his letters a network of extensive personal libraries. Those private collections preserved important books that could be read by members of the public and even borrowed and sent with messengers. Books could be consulted or copied for one’s own library and returned to the owner. If one wanted to look at several books, a personal visit to a private library could be arranged.
The Bodleian Library at Oxford, where Olson once studied, was founded by Sir Thomas Bodley and dedicated in 1602. King James I, on entering the library in August 1605, said its founder should be dubbed “Sir Thomas Godly.” Bodley had spent his considerable personal wealth acquiring books and early manuscripts that have formed the core of one of the most extensive collections in the world. That collection includes among its innumerable treasures a first edition of Don Quixote, a manuscript of Confucius acquired at a time when few could read its Chinese characters, a fourteenth-century copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, as well as first editions of the works of John Milton, who called the library a “most sacred centre,” a “glorious treasure-house” of “the best Memorials of Man.”
Additional examples of historical preservation through private means are, it turns out, legion. Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon acquired a massive assortment of prized artwork. He donated his entire collection (plus $10 million for construction) to start the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Tens of thousands of historic homes and buildings all across America are owned and maintained privately, many of them refurbished and open for public viewing. Even historic lighthouses, once largely public property, are being preserved today by private owners after decades of neglect by government authorities. On and on it goes.
Think about this: Private historians all over the world, every single day, are turning out articles and books that dust off bits of the past and, in a new form, put them in front of new generations of readers—preserving history in the process. The idea that government subsidies are necessary to get historians to write history is absurd.
The more one looks into this, the more apparent it is that private efforts have not just been a sideshow in historical preservation. They have been the centerpiece. And why should it be otherwise? Private owners invest their own resources, acquiring an instant and personal interest in the “capital” value of the historical asset. Being a government employee does not make one more interested in, or better equipped to care for, the things we regard as historically valuable than those many private citizens who put their own resources on the line.
By the way, have you ever noticed that the greatest book-burners in history have been governments, not private individuals?
By way of prices, markets send signals about what should be preserved and what should be discarded. The scarcer something valuable becomes, the more the price of any one of its dwindling supply will rise. That’s an incentive for private parties to buy and hold, and also to exhibit if others value it enough to want to see it. Government ownership means we have to trust to bureaucrats to preserve what they don’t personally own.
So what’s the problem with a copy of Magna Carta being purchased by a private citizen? Nothing at all. To suggest otherwise is simply to repeat an uninformed and antiquated prejudice. In a civil society of free people, that prejudice should be rare enough to be a museum piece.
SUMMARY
•Why sell people and markets short when it comes to history? Examples are endless of private preservation and restoration
•Private efforts have not just been a sideshow in historical preservation. They have been the centerpiece
•By way of prices, markets send signals about what should be preserved and what should be discarded
•Private ownership means somebody has a direct incentive to preserve; if government owns it, we all have incentives to use and maybe even abuse something that is historically valuable. Government ownership means we have to trust to bureaucrats to preserve what they don’t personally own
#27
“GOVERNMENT MUST HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE PEOPLE TAKE BETTER CARE OF THEMSELVES”
BY LAWRENCE W. REED
A FEW MONTHS AGO, I WALKED INTO A RESTAURANT IN FLORIDA, AND SAID, “A nonsmoking table for two, please.” The greeter replied, “No problem. All restaurants in Florida are nonsmoking by law. Follow me.”
For a brief moment as we walked to our table, I thought to myself: “Good! No chance of even a whiff of a cigarette. I like that!”
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism Page 10
