The Meaning of the Term Government

There are, though, reasons for regretting that we in America ever adopted the word “government.” We borrowed an old-world term with all its connotations of “to govern,” “to rule,” in an overriding sense. Government with the aim of directing, controlling, steering is not what we really intended. We didn’t mean that our agency of common defense should “govern” us any more than we intend the factory guard to be the company’s general manager.

Actually, in spite of the original intent, government in the old-world sense is what we now have. Our federal agency and many of the state, district, and community agencies have far exceeded the bounds of protecting the life and property of all citizens equally, and invoking a common justice under law. They do far more than merely suppress and penalize fraud, violence, misrepresentation, and predatory practices. Today our federal agency and many of the others are the citizens’ general managers-and autocratic ones at that!

It is not government as general manager of America’s citizenry that is here defended. Rather, the aim is to present and defend an agency of limited scope, not unlike what the Founding Fathers originally intended—except for the slavery and tariff features, they being infractions or compromises of the original intentions.

Source: Leonard E. Read
Government—An Ideal Concept, pp. 13-14.

Topics: Government; Government, Limited

Right To Life

The right-to-life concept and its acceptance must serve as the premise for this point. If a person has a right to life, it follows that he has a right to protect and to sustain that life, the sustenance of life being nothing more nor less than the fruits of one’s labor — one’s honestly acquired property. The right to life without the right to protect and to sustain life is meaningless. ... it is impossible in a division-of-labor economy to sustain life on one’s own specialty. Energy exchanges are as vital as one’s own produce. Therefore, the right to the fruits of one’s own labor involves the restraint or the removal of obstacles to exchange—not merely the obstacles to one’s own exchange, but the obstacles to other people’s exchange within any given society.

Source: Leonard E. Read
Government—An Ideal Concept, pp. 36-37.

Topics: Rights

Two Types of Force

Force of the kind here discussed is of two types. There is repellent or defensive force. There is aggressive force. The latter is always evil. There are no exceptions. No man has any moral right to use aggressive force against any other man. Nor have any number of men, in or out of societal organizations, any moral right to use it. One of the most distressing fallacies having to do with government and liberty is the assumption that the state, an agency presumably of the people, has rights beyond those possessed by the people. For example, the state uses aggressive force against an individual, compelling him to exchange some of his income for the alleged prosperity of Tennessee Valley residents. No reasonable person would sanction such an aggressive action on the part of any single citizen. Therefore, no reasonable person can logically believe that any such control belongs to a multitude of citizens. From what source does this extracurricular “right” of the state to use aggressive force derive? It has no derivation. It is an arrogation. This arrogation is as untenable as the divine right of kings theory; indeed, it is the same thing with the divine excuse omitted.

Any person has the natural and moral right to use repellent or defensive force against any other person who would aggress against him. No person on this earth has any moral right of control over any other person superior to the defense of his own life and livelihood. Two persons banding together do not acquire moral rights of control over others superior to the rights held by each before their association. No increase in the number of individuals involved morally alters this in any way ... Rights not possessed by individuals cannot properly be delegated to an agency, political or otherwise. Society’s agency, then, will find the proper limits of its scope in exercising for everyone, without favor to any, the natural and moral rights inherent in its members.

Source: Leonard E. Read

Topics: Force; Rights

Liberty and Restraint

It is incorrect to think of liberty as synonymous with unrestrained action. Liberty does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the liberty of a single human being. To argue contrarily is to claim that liberty can be composed of liberty negations, patently absurd. Unrestraint carried to the point of impairing the liberty of others is the exercise of license, not liberty. To minimize the exercise of license is to maximize the area of liberty. Ideally, government would restrain license, not indulge in it; make it difficult, not easy; disgraceful, not popular. A government that does otherwise is licentious, not liberal.

Source: Leonard E. Read

Topics: Liberty

Direction through Aggression

This growing belief in the use of aggressive police action as a means to direct the creative activities of a people in society, and the consequent and corresponding loss in the belief that free men can direct their own creative activities, are understandable. The reason is this: When the state preempts any activity—that is, makes of it a state monopoly, such as carrying the mails—citizens cease their thinking on how the activity could be carried on as a private venture. Why waste time thinking about the impossible? With this absence of ideas as to how an affair could be conducted privately, there soon follows the belief that the activity cannot be conducted unless the state conducts it.

If, for example, the federal government had decreed at its inception that all boys and girls should be provided with shoes and stockings from birth to adulthood, and the practice of this subsidy had been going on for the last 165 years, one who challenged it today would be asked: “Oh! So you favor forcing boys and girls to go barefooted in the winter?”

Source: Leonard E. Read

Topics: Government; Government, Limited

The approval of the idea that the formal agency of society should collect an equitable tax from its members and the contention that the collection is not an aggressive but a defensive act will suggest to many persons that the agency can, with equal propriety, compel or draft its members for military service. On the contrary, no ideal agency of society can conscript any of its members for any kind of employment.

There is no need to discuss the superiority of volunteers over draftees for military service. Nor is it germane to this argument to explain why armed action, even for defense, should never precede a large-scale voluntary willingness to participate in the action. Suffice it to say that there never will be safeguards against war if a people can be committed to a war by a few persons—that is, if a people can be committed to a war short of a general willingness to risk, not someone else’s, but one’s own life and fortune.

Source: Leonard E. Read
Conscription

Topics: Draft; Involuntary Servitude

Obligation to Live or Right to Life?

The distinction between collecting taxes and compelling military service inheres in the difference between types of obligations and rights. As previously contended, one does have an obligation to society which justifies the payment and the collection, if necessary, of an equitable tax. The societal agency, in collecting the tax, is merely performing its proper role of defending its members against those who would unload their own obligations onto the shoulders of others. Bear in mind that the collection is in livelihood, not life.

However, no person has an obligation, other than to himself, to live. He may, and sometimes does, choose not to live—all suicides being examples. A person is not obligated to society in this respect. To live or not to live is an affair of individual choice. It is a matter between man and his God, not between man and society.

A person does not have an obligation to society to live. He has only the right to live if he so chooses. No societal organization would be justified among a people who had no desire to live. An organized arm of society is founded on and is justified exclusively by the will to live which exists in a people—precisely the same law of nature which attends to potential human energy’s becoming kinetic human energy—that is, which attends to communication and exchange among men.

Source: Leonard E. Read

Topics: Life; Right to Life; Rights

Liberty and Christianity

Liberty, like Christianity, has been tried but never wholly adopted. It isn’t that these ways of life have been found wanting. It is that they have been found difficult and rejected by many. ... To the extent that government takes sides among the citizens-plundering some for the “benefit” of others, granting special privileges-to that extent has government become incapable of performing its legitimate function of protecting the life and livelihood of all citizens equally. It is a self-evident fact that no person or agency can protect the honest fruits of one’s labor while at the same time forcibly taking the fruits of one’s labor. In short, the more government acts aggressively, the less it can act protectively or defensively.

The history of government’s acting aggressively coincides with the history of government. Is there a single instance where government has been limited to the defense of creative energy and its uninhibited exchange? Even in America in 1789—the nearest known approach to strict limitation—slavery and tariffs were acknowledged as appropriate aggressive acts of government. The principle of aggression, once admitted, had either to be denied and destroyed or approved and expanded. While Negro slavery was later denied and destroyed, the principle of government aggression was not stamped out. Some of the aggressive seed remained in embryonic stage; and by 1900, governmental actions were taken which led to the development of the embryo. By 1913 this perverse principle was so thoroughly established that we inscribed on our American banner—proclaimed and adopted as national policy—the Marxian ideal. This Marxian ideal, the Sixteenth Amendment—the progressive income tax—legalized a new slavery in lieu of the Negro slavery earlier disposed of.”

Source: Leonard E. Read
Government—An Ideal Concept, p76-77

Topics: Christianity; Income Tax; Liberty

Economics

Reporting on business activity in our argued-for free society would have only one purpose, namely, to aid in economic calculation on the part of participants. Whether the aggregate activity were high or low would be of little more than academic concern. It would only reflect the extent to which citizens wanted or did not want to produce and exchange. Business activity, unlike today, would not be a gauge of how ineffectively economic rigging is working. Nor would it, as today, be the source for exultation or fear. Relatively low business activity would not classify as “bust,” any more than an individual’s taking the day off would classify as personal failure.

Source: Leonard E. Read

Topics: Economics

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