{"id":12191,"date":"2018-05-26T08:51:37","date_gmt":"2018-05-26T12:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=12191"},"modified":"2018-05-26T08:51:37","modified_gmt":"2018-05-26T12:51:37","slug":"freedom-from-want-is-slavery-for-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/26\/freedom-from-want-is-slavery-for-all\/","title":{"rendered":"“Freedom from Want” is Slavery for All"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>The Mises Institute<\/a> reposted a 1999 article I wrote for Sheldon Richman<\/a> at The Freeman<\/strong> on how government handouts can subvert freedom. That piece was adapted from my book, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Individual<\/strong> <\/a>(St. Martin’s Press).\u00a0 Looking back on this 20 years later, I am surprised at the widespread\u00a0revival of socialist notions of freedom.<\/p>\n

“Freedom from Want” is Slavery for All<\/a><\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

“Freedom from want\u201d is one of the most frequently invoked notions of freedom in our time. However, it is a bogus freedom that politicians and socialists offer to lull people into accepting policies that destroy true freedom. Freedom from want has been most loudly advocated in this century by those who favored removing almost all limits from government power.<\/p>\n

For example, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, two of the founders of British socialism and authors of The Soviet Union: A New Civilization?, asserted in 1936: \u201cPersonal freedom means, in effect, the power of the individual to buy sufficient food, shelter and clothing.\u201d1<\/a><\/p>\n

The Webbs did not specify how many millions of people government should be permitted to kill in the name of \u201cfreedom from want.\u201d But during Stalin\u2019s bloodiest decade, they asserted that for government economic planning to succeed, \u201cpublic discussion must be suspended between the promulgation of the decision and the accomplishment of the task\u201d and that any criticisms of the master plan should be treated as \u201can act of disloyalty, or even of treachery.\u201d2<\/a><\/p>\n

For government to be able to liberate people with food and clothing, it must have the power to execute anyone who criticizes the official economic plan. After visiting the Ukraine, the Webbs endorsed Stalin\u2019s war on the kulaks (the least impoverished peasants), commenting that \u201cit must be recognized that the liquidation of the individual capitalist in agriculture had necessarily to be faced if the required increase of output was to be obtained.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Output plummeted.)<\/p>\n

Equating liberty with satisfactory living standards became far more common as the twentieth century went on. \u201cReal freedom means good wages, short hours, security in employment, good homes, opportunity for leisure and recreation with family and friends,\u201d wrote Sir Oswald Mosley, the most prominent British supporter of Nazi Germany, in his 1936 book, Fascism<\/em>.3<\/a><\/p>\n

James Gregor noted in his book The Ideology of Fascism<\/em> that fascism aimed at \u201crestraints which foster the increased effective freedom of the individual.\u201d4<\/a><\/p>\n

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt noted in 1937 that \u201ceven some of our own people may wonder whether democracy can match dictatorship in giving this generation the things it wants from government.\u201d5<\/a><\/p>\n

University of Chicago professor Leslie Pape noted in 1941 that \u201cdemocracies readily admit the claims of totalitarian states to great achievements in the cause of positive freedom.\u201d6<\/a><\/p>\n

British historian E.H. Carr, writing in 1951, observed that, for the modern era, \u201cfreedom from the economic constraint of want was clearly just as important as freedom from the political constraint of kings and tyrants.\u201d7<\/a><\/p>\n

Carr justified the array of economic controls in postwar Britain: \u201cThe price of liberty is the restriction of liberty. The price of some liberty for all is the restriction of the greater liberty of some.\u201d8<\/a><\/p>\n

However, with this standard, there is no limit to the amount of freedom that government can destroy in the name of creating \u201cgreater liberty for some.\u201d The British Labour government that Carr championed advanced freedom by conscripting labor for the coal mines and empowering the Ministry of Labour to direct workers to whatever employment was considered in the national interest\u2014empowering over 10,000 government officials to carry out searches (including of private homes) without warrants\u2014prohibiting restaurants from serving customer meals costing more than 5 shillings (less than $2 in 1947)\u2014and fining farmers who refused to plant the specific crops government demanded.9<\/a><\/p>\n

The government also \u201cnationalized all potential land uses in the United Kingdom, permitting only continuation of existing ones and requiring \u2018planning permission\u2019 for any others,\u201d as law professor Gideon Kanner noted.10<\/a><\/p>\n

The Labour government offered freedom via the solidarity of standing in the same rationing line\u2014liberation via deprivation. (A 1998 New York Times article cited the Labour government\u2019s postwar food rationing, which continued into the 1950s, as a contributing factor to the long-term decline of British cuisine.11<\/a><\/p>\n

The more politicians promise to give, the more they entitle themselves to take.<\/strong> Carr, serving in 1945 as chairman of the UNESCO Committee on the Principles of the Rights of Man, declared that \u201cno society can guarantee the enjoyment of such rights [to government handouts] unless it in turn has the right to call upon and direct the productive capacities of the individuals enjoying them.\u201d12<\/a><\/p>\n

Thus, the price of government benefits is unlimited political control over people\u2019s paychecks and work lives.<\/p>\n

Once freedom is equated with a certain material standard of living, confiscation becomes the path to liberation.<\/strong> Thus, the more avidly a politician raises taxes, the greater his apparent love for liberty. In the name of providing \u201cfreedom from want,\u201d the politician acquires a pretext to destroy the basis of private citizens\u2019 independence. \u201cFreedom from want\u201d becomes a license for politicians, rather than a declaration of rights of citizens.<\/p>\n

Anyone who does not have certain possessions is assumed not to be free\u2014and in need of political rescue. President Johnson, justifying a vast expansion of government social programs, declared in 1965, \u201cNegroes are trapped\u2014as many whites are trapped\u2014in inherited, gateless poverty. . . . Public and private poverty combine to cripple their capacities.\u201d13<\/a><\/p>\n

Vice President Hubert Humphrey defined a poor person as \u201cthe man who for reasons beyond his control cannot help himself.\u201d This perspective on poverty and self-help mocks all of American history. It implies that any individual who earns less than $7,890 a year (the official poverty line for a single person) is incapable of any discipline or resolution.<\/p>\n

While advocates of positive freedom insist that government must intervene so that each person \u201ccan be all that they can be,\u201d government aid programs are notorious for rewarding people for making the least of themselves. President Roosevelt warned in 1935 that \u201ccontinued dependence on relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.\u201d14<\/a><\/p>\n

President Clinton declared in 1996: \u201cFor decades now, welfare has too often been a trap, consigning generation after generation to a cycle of dependency. The children of welfare are more likely to drop out of school, to run afoul of the law, to become teen parents, to raise their own children on welfare.\u201d15<\/a><\/p>\n

A rising tide no longer lifts all boats when the government rewards people for scuttling their own ships.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Faith in freedom from want depends on a political myopia that focuses devoutly on only one side of the ledger of government action. This is measuring freedom according to how much government does for people, and totally disregarding what government does to people. Government provides \u201cfreedom\u201d for the welfare recipient by imposing tax servitude on the worker.<\/strong> In an age of unprecedented prosperity, government tax policies have turned the average citizen\u2019s life into a financial struggle and insured that he will likely become a ward of the state in his last decades.<\/p>\n

Some statists insist that taxation is irrelevant to freedom. According to sociologist Robert Goodin,<\/p>\n

If what the rich man loses when his property is redistributed is described as a loss of freedom, then the gain to the poor must similarly be described as a gain of freedom. . . . No net loss of freedom for society as a whole, as distinct from individuals within it, is involved in redistributive taxation. Thus, there is no basis in terms of freedom . . . for objecting to it.16<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What does Goodin mean by \u201cfreedom for society as a whole\u201d? By this standard, slavery would not reduce a society\u2019s freedom, since the slave\u2019s loss of freedom would be equaled by the slave owner\u2019s gain. Nor is there any difference, vis-\u00e0-vis freedom, between permitting people to retain their earnings and spend them as they choose, and government confiscating their money to hire more regulators, inspectors, and informants to better repress the citizenry.<\/p>\n

What are the practical results of the modern \u201cfreedom from want\u201d? Economist Edgar Browning, writing in 1993, examined the marginal cost of redistribution\u2014defined as \u201cthe ratio of the aggregate loss to the top four quintiles of households to the aggregate gain to the bottom quintile of households.\u201d17\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>Browning estimated that the marginal cost to the most affluent 80 percent of households of increasing the income of the poorest 20 percent by $1 was $7.82.18<\/a><\/p>\n

The marginal costs of redistribution are much larger than people might presume because of reduced incentives to work, both among the taxpayers and recipients. Also, as Browning noted, \u201cmarginal tax rates must be increased very sharply relative to the amount of income that is redistributed.\u201d Combining Browning\u2019s analysis and Goodin\u2019s definition, confiscatory redistribution destroys almost eight times as much \u201cfreedom\u201d as it creates.<\/p>\n

Once the notion of \u201cfreedom from want\u201d is accepted as the pre-eminent freedom, it becomes a wish list justifying endless political forays deeper and deeper into people\u2019s lives. Princeton professor Amy Gutmann, in her 1980 book, Liberal Equality<\/em>, declared: \u201cLiberal egalitarians want to say that freedom of choice is not very meaningful without a right to those goods necessary to life itself.\u201d19<\/a><\/p>\n

\u200bGutmann\u2019s elaboration of \u201cnecessary goods\u201d reveals how government would be obliged to control almost everything: \u201cSupplying the poorest with more primary goods will be insufficient if their sense of self-worth or their very desire to pursue their conceptions of the good is undercut by self-doubt.\u201d20<\/a><\/p>\n

By this standard, freedom is violated when people suffer self-doubt, and the government is obliged to forcibly intervene to guarantee that all people think well of themselves.<\/p>\n

Political scientist Alan Wolfe, a self-described \u201cwelfare liberal,\u201d asserted in 1995 that \u201cpeople need a modicum of security and income maintenance, underwritten by government, in order to fulfill the ideal of negative liberty, which is self-sufficiency.\u201d21<\/a><\/p>\n

Government dependency is the new, improved form of self-reliance<\/strong>: dependency on government doesn\u2019t count because government is a better friend to you than you are yourself. But the more dependent people become on government, the more susceptible they are to political and bureaucratic abuse. Freedom from want is conceivable only so long as people are allowed to want only what the government thinks they should have.<\/p>\n

Freedom from want supposedly results from government taking away what a person owns so that it can give him back what it thinks he deserves.<\/strong> The welfare state is either a way to force people to finance their own benefits via political-bureaucratic bagmen, or it is a way to force some people to labor for other people\u2019s benefit. In the first case, government sacrifices the person\u2019s freedom to the fraud that government must tax him to subsidize him; in the second, government sacrifices the person\u2019s freedom in order to \u201cliberate\u201d someone else\u2014often someone who chooses not to work. If someone pays the taxes that finance the government benefits he receives, he is less free than he would otherwise have been.<\/p>\n

Some \u201cfreedom from want\u201d advocates imply that government is a great benefactor when it promises citizens \u201cthree hots and a cot\u201d\u2014the old-time recruiting slogan of the Marine Corps. But trading freedom for a full belly is a worse bargain now than ever before<\/strong>. As economist F.A. Hayek observed, \u201cAs the result of the growth of free markets, the reward of manual labor has during the past hundred and fifty years experienced an increase unknown in any earlier period in history.\u201d22<\/a><\/p>\n

The average worker in industrialized countries can purchase the bare necessities of life with fewer hours of labor than ever before. Comparing current wages and prices with those of 1800, economist Julian Simon found that the average American worker today needs to labor less than one-tenth the time to earn enough to purchase a bushel of wheat than his predecessors did two centuries ago.23\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>While the real price of food has plummeted (in spite of government farm policies), the \u201creal price\u201d of political servitude has not diminished.<\/p>\n

It is understandable that some well-intentioned people assume that \u201cfreedom from want\u201d is the most important freedom. It is difficult for many people to conceive of enjoying anything (much less their freedom) if they lack food, clothing, or shelter. However, freedom is not a guarantee of prosperity for every citizen; the fact that some people have meager incomes does not prove that they are shackled. It is a cardinal error to confuse freedom with the things that free individuals can achieve or produce, and then to sacrifice the reality of freedom in a deluded shortcut to the bounty of freedom. Freedom is not measured by how much a person possesses, but by the restrictions and shackles under which he lives<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Throughout history, politicians have used other people\u2019s property to buy themselves power. That is the primary achievement of the welfare state. The danger of government handouts to freedom was clear to some political writers hundreds of years ago. The French writer Etienne de la Bo\u00e9tie, in his 1577 Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, noted of ancient Rome: \u201cTyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine . . . and then everybody would shamelessly cry, \u2018Long live the King!\u2019 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.\u201d24<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cFreedom from want\u201d is not possible unless the government is allowed to control all things people want.<\/strong> Americans must beware of Trojan-horse definitions of freedom that allow bureaucrats to take over everyone\u2019s life.<\/strong> Government handouts insinuate political power into the deepest recesses of a person\u2019s life. And when the time is ripe, politicians take command where they previously lavished their gifts.<\/p>\n

Originally published as “Bogus Freedom” in The Freeman May, 1999<\/a><\/em><\/h6>\n