“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”
Liberty. An American will put his life in jeopardy for it and declare the pursuit of happiness impossible without it. For us, the very sound of the word makes the heart beat a little faster, the shoulders square to support an incomparable value. There can be no doubt of our intention to support it—or of our resolve. And as for understanding it—we believe we understand it better than any other people. Why, we created the very model of liberty: the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And yet, we stand by, helplessly confused in the face of crisis after crisis: abroad—the issue of ownership of the Panama Canal, detente with the Russians versus military preparedness, the Iranian seizure of our embassy; at home—an inability to evaluate the merits of wage and price controls, gasoline rationing, and welfare programs. In the face of each issue we are unable to discern what action will support liberty and the political rights that implement it. Clearly the deficiency we must repair is in understanding; in order to know what action to take we must first gain a more thorough understanding of what liberty is, and as a consequence what it requires.
At the center of the idea of liberty is the idea of political rights: A man who is free has rights, and a man who does not have them cannot be free. But here also there is confusion; should we respect the public’s right to unbiased news or the publisher’s right of free speech? Does a worker have the right to a job or does his employer have the right to fire him? Are rights always more important than other considerations—like providing for the poor?
We can evaluate political rights only by evaluating the underlying moral code of which they are the implementation. A physician evaluates a drug by its ability to implement his underlying professional code of ethics: to heal the sick. Without reference to this underlying code he would have no basis upon which to judge any particular drug. Americans are unable to judge between two radically different evaluations of political rights because most Americans believe in elements of two mutually exclusive moral codes.
The man who upholds the first of these two moral codes holds as his supreme value—as the primary value against which all else is measured as good or evil—his own life, its furtherance and fulfillment. The man who upholds this moral code, rational selfishness, must evaluate political rights as a necessity, for without political rights he does not have the right to take the actions necessary to support and further his life, nor the right to keep the products of his labor.
The second moral code is the only other possible alternative: If a man does not hold his own life as his highest value, then something else must occupy that position. But selection of a primary value (that is, a value standard) determines the value of all else by the criterion of how well it serves the primary value. If the primary value selected is the public good, then everything else including a man’s life must be judged by how well it serves the public good. According to such a moral code, rights are a value only so long as they coincide with the public good—or with what a majority believes is the public good, or with what politicians declare it is. Regardless what is chosen as the primary value—whether a deity, the Aryan race, or the common good—if that value is anything other than man’s life, his life must be held as potentially expendable. The physician who holds the advancement of medical knowledge as his primary professional ethic must sacrifice his patients to any experiment that may advance medical knowledge.
Nor is it possible to combine two moral codes that have differing primary values. The physician who holds medical progress as his primary value in patient care may argue that this is compatible with consistently beneficial patient care. But there will always be cases in which he must choose between the two values, and if he insists upon not choosing between them—not relegating one to a lesser position of value—he will lose the ability to make consistent decisions. He will sometimes act in the support of one and sometimes in the support of the other; sometimes he will experiment on his patients and sometimes not. The attempt to combine two value standards in a political system must fail for the same reason: Whenever two opposing actions in support of two differing value standards present themselves, it is necessary to choose between them. If the public good will be served by taxing the middle class to support the poor, and the individual’s good by allowing him to spend his money as he sees fit, the political system can take the individual or the public good as its value standard. It cannot simultaneously do both. In America, it vacillates—sometimes recognizing the rights of the individual and sometimes sacrificing them to the “higher” value. In Russia, the value standard of the public good is far more consistently applied—with the inevitable consequence of the sacrifice of the individual and the rights that protect him.
The results of the moral code of altruism, regardless what value standard is chosen as “higher” than man’s life and the rights that make his proper survival possible, have been demonstrated in China and Russia. The results of the attempt to mix altruism and rational selfishness are now apparent in our own country—the unstable mixed economy that results from a mixture of moral codes, the mixed concept of rights that attempts to keep the concept of rights and of liberty without holding man’s life as a consistent value standard, the mixed foreign policy that is the result of the attempt to consistently defend liberty without first defining precisely what it is and what actions it requires. There is only one other alternative to be tried: a return to the political system that was inaugurated with the American Bill of Rights, a return to the economic system of laissez-faire capitalism, and a return to a foreign policy whose purpose is to protect our rights from dangers abroad—but this time with the full knowledge and acknowledgment of the moral code of which it is an expression: the moral code of rational selfishness. Let us examine whether a strict adherence to political rights as the implementation of such a moral code can provide us with a political ideology that will solve our present confusions.
The moral code of rational selfishness acknowledges that mankind’s primary tool of survival is his mind; that the proper method of survival for a rational species is rational thought; and that his survival requires his freedom to act on the judgment of his mind. It is for the purpose of implementing this natural right of man that mankind invented political rights: “that all men are created equal…with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…” When an individual is faced with force by another man he calls the police and invokes the criminal law; when he is faced with force by the government he invokes the Bill of Rights.
A consistent definition of political rights as freedom from force by any man or group (including the government) results in a very specific concept of political rights. The right to free speech guarantees that no man will be silenced by force; it does not obligate him to speak nor to listen, to publish a newspaper nor to buy the one his neighbor publishes. It obligates him in only one way: not to use force to prevent anyone’s free speech in any form. A man’s right to freedom of speech is absolute; he doesn’t lose it if no one listens to him, if he gains a very great following, or if he becomes a broadcaster or a publisher or businessman. This means that even if a town has only one newspaper, the publisher may not be compelled to reflect the views of his readers. Whether the readers themselves force him or whether a government bureaucrat does, the result is an infringement of his right to free speech. Government violation of the right to free speech is widely practiced today—particularly in broadcasting, where it is referred to as the public’s “right” to unbiased programming. A legitimate right always protects against the use of force; a “right” that initiates force cannot be legitimate. The right to act preserves to the individual the widest possible choice of action. For this reason it cannot govern the results of his actions: The freedom to act guarantees that any individuals can interact in any way (except by using force); each can buy from, sell, or give to the other his labor or any possession. But it does not guarantee that any man will do any of these things; an individual has the right to offer his labor on the market but not a right to a job, which would compel another to hire him. Government violation of the right to act is widespread, especially in the economic sphere. For example, a company that succeeds in generating a large volume of sales (a voluntary transaction by each buyer) may be accused by the government of violating its competitors’ “right” to a fair share of the market. The only way such a “right” can be implemented is by the use of force against the owners of the successful company and the customers who prefer their products. The right to own property guarantees the continued possession and right of disposal of whatever a man possesses by purchase, gift, or inheritance. Appropriation of privately owned wealth to “redistribute” it among others is an example of our government’s violation of this right.
Only after acknowledging the nature of individual rights at home is it rationally possible to defend American property rights and lives abroad. Only by recognizing that government’s only proper function is to protect man’s rights will we come to an accurate evaluation of any foreign government that systematically denies the rights of its subjects.
Neither the intention nor the resolve to defend liberty was sufficient to create America. The bravery of the American revolutionaries could not have created it. Nor will good intentions, resolution, and courage save it. To save liberty requires the use of the same arduous faculty that created it—the clearest and most rigorous understanding of its nature.