Liberty and Responsibility: Inseparable Ideals

Ó 1995 by Max More

The founders of the American political and economic system felt a burning desire to establish a country of unprecedented liberty. Many of those who endured the arduous journey to the New World left behind religious oppression and rigid class systems. The high-handed rule of King George III and his demands for tribute sharpened resentment of State control. This country, rooted in an ideal of liberty for all, marked a proud step forward in the evolution of our political arrangements.

Americans’ enthusiasm for their country has declined. Though still an inspiration to those seeking escape from or reform of their own country’s political arrangements, America’s example no longer seems to shine as brightly. Still we see numerous examples of creativity, entrepreneurship, and invention. Yet we also see more criminals, more hopeless people, more dependents and outright parasites. Too many people spend their energy and money engaged in legal battles rather than in producing. A vast bureaucracy has grown: a bureaucracy devoted to controlling productive activity and to growing ever larger.

Do these problems stem from allowing people too much liberty? Social commentators of diverse affiliation often suggest this. They call for government programs, for regulation, for tougher measures. Both history and economic theory clearly show that such centralized approaches have failed and will fail. The solution lies not with central control but with the preservation and expansion of liberty. Vital to this solution is an appreciation of the relation between liberty and personal responsibility.

Over the course of this century the ideals of liberty and personal responsibility have increasingly drifted apart. This means both ideals, liberty and responsibility, have become distorted. Personal responsibility cannot exist without liberty, and liberty will not persist without responsibility. Liberty without responsibility is license. Liberty-as-license has become widespread in our culture. It manifests in many ways: In desires for freedom to do anything without restraint and without cost — the cost to be borne by someone else; the demand for income as a right—someone else to produce the income; the expectation of guaranteed commercial success — someone else to pay the costs of government subsidies and protection from foreign and "unfair" competition.

Liberty is not license. Liberty means freedom from compulsion. It means being free to choose your own actions, make your own plans, and act on your own beliefs and values. If social chaos and disintegration do not concern us, then we may demand freedom alone. If, however, we wish to live a productive, rewarding life in a flourishing society we will affirm that in demanding liberty we agree to take charge of ourselves. Freedom from outside control merely leaves a chaotic void if not replaced by control from within.

The survival of liberty requires personal responsibility. A demand for liberty without responsibility will be futile: The tree of liberty is rooted in and sustained by the soil of individual responsibility. Without this connection our political institutions, for example, become a means for the shifting of blame, for compelling others to fix our problems, and for living off the efforts of others. As responsibility declines, the political system grows increasingly oppressive and burdensome. Politicians pass more laws ordering people what to do and how to do it. Tax-funded handouts expand to support those who do not want to produce. The law increasingly allows unprincipled liability suits as the irresponsible seek an easy source of income. Government agencies take over, telling us what we can eat, what vitamins we may take, what risks we may assume, what we can read and what we can paint and say. Eventually individual choice dries up and everything not compulsory is forbidden.

Once we have secured liberty, we face an open landscape of choice. If we do not take charge of ourselves we will soon find ourselves devaluing liberty. Choice can be confusing and frightening to those unused to it. It requires practice and commitment until it comes to feel natural. I remember reading about a visitor to the USA from the Soviet Union (as it was then). The writer told of how the Soviet visitor entered a drugstore looking for toothpaste. The variety of types and brands shocked him. He exclaimed how much easier it was in the Soviet Union, where the choice had been made for you. For liberty to remain attractive then, we need to foster certain qualities of character.

What does personal responsibility involve? Responsible self-direction crucially involves rationality: a commitment to see the world as accurately as possible rather than believing what seems easiest. A corollary of this is self-control. Once we see what we need to do to successfully pursue our goals, we must firmly set aside incompatible desires and resist distractions. Being responsible for ourselves also implies the virtue of productiveness — creating values that we can trade for other values to sustain ourselves. The virtue of honesty is an aspect of rationality and means the refusal to deceive ourselves or others. Honesty involves taking responsibility for our role in any situation instead of avoiding it or shifting responsibility. Being responsible for our lives necessarily also requires perseverance and persistence. If, after choosing a goal, we soon give up on it, we will fail ourselves as well as showing our unreliability to others.

If these and other virtuous qualities of character disappear from a society, liberty will also fall. Irresponsible people cease to value liberty and the challenges it presents. So, the persistence of liberty requires a widespread acceptance of personal responsibility. The converse is also true.

Without the liberty to choose our own actions and make our own choices, we lose the qualities of responsibility and virtue that make us uniquely human. Only human beings possess self-consciousness. Only we can reflect on the options available to us. Only we have the capacity to step aside from our urges and emotions in order to choose freely. Animals are not responsible for their actions. They act on impulse, on instinct, or according to training. We cannot hold them ethically responsible for the way they act. Humans alone can choose to change their behavior. We alone can be responsible or irresponsible, virtuous or vicious.

Our nature allows and requires us to make conscious choices rather than programming us for automatic responses. As a result, persons form differing purposes and goals. Political and economic liberty makes it possible for us to pursue these divergent ends. Without this freedom we find our choices constrained or distorted to fit the purposes of others. The more others force us to act for purposes not our own, the less able we will be to choose and pursue our own goals. If we are not allowed to exercise liberty and to learn from our mistakes, we will become infantile and dependent. Stealing our liberty inevitably leads to the destruction of our ability to direct our own lives.

If we force a person to do "the right thing", we can have little confidence in the moral worth of that action. Why? Because we will not be able to tell whether that person would have done the right thing voluntarily. If they did it only because we compelled or coerced them, all we know is that they acted in a way that protected them from us. Only freely chosen actions reflect our character. Only when we do the "right thing" freely can we have confidence in the person’s character. If they act as we think they should, and they do so out of virtues such as benevolence, productiveness, and integrity, then we know their good action resulted from a good character. If they took the action out of fear, then we can know nothing about the goodness of their character. All we will know is that we have removed an opportunity for the free exercise of virtue.

For most of us, license always feels easier than liberty. License means taking without giving, consuming without producing, and faking instead of facing reality. License has taken over from liberty in part because of the doctrine that there is no rational basis for values. If nothing is truly good or bad, if it’s all a matter of opinion, then why not follow your whims?

Magnifying the effects of this false subjectivist doctrine are our political and economic arrangements. Government intervention in the economy and personal life and the establishment of the welfare state have undermined responsibility. The government produces nothing; it takes from some by taxation and regulation, and gives what it has taken to others (after taking a cut for itself). Since each new tax and each new regulation imposes costs on some of us, interventionism leads to a scramble to grab what we can before it’s taken from us. Government intervention thereby encourages us to focus on what we can get, rather than what we can create.

Welfarism and interventionism have both ignited claims to "positive rights" — rights to be given or guaranteed something. (The original constitutional rights were "negative" — rights to be free of interference, such as theft, government oppression, and fraud.) The United States government acts as if there are positive rights: a right to a guaranteed income or to health care (at someone else’s expense), a right to an apartment at a certain maximum rent, a right to get a job even against an employers wishes, or a right to sell a product without having to compete against overseas companies.

These economic and social policies gradually break down the virtues needed for responsibility. Being responsible increasingly means giving up these short-term benefits. As each of us sees others being given money taken from us by taxation, or sees companies protected by subsidy or import controls, we begin to feel left out. We feel pressured to join in and grab our share, rather than work hard while others reap the benefits. Interventionism and welfarism act as a tax on responsibility. The higher this tax, the less responsibility we will see. This simple economic insight shows why, once the forces are set in motion, the overall level of intervention grows. As intervention grows, so does dissatisfaction and demands for "parity" or "fairness".

I described the acceptance of these government "benefits" as short-term benefits. We can resist their temptations better if we bear in mind their heavy longer-term costs. Protectionism and industrial subsidies lead to complacency, stagnation, and slow growth. The high taxation needed to pay for intervention and welfare reduces savings, thereby making investment funds expensive. Living on welfare breeds passivity and removes one from the learning process and destroys work habits essential to adaptation and employment.

These interventionist government practices foster envy and resentment. Many Americans no longer feel they should have to earn their income: we have heard repeatedly that we are each entitled to a slice of "the" pie. (As if there were a single collectively owned and created pie, rather than individually created and owned goods and abilities.) Increasingly Americans, like people all around the world, have latched onto the socialist doctrine of entitlement. It embodies license, not liberty. However, the belief in such entitlements is corrupting our character. If we do not have what we think we are "entitled" to, then someone is withholding it from us. Envy festers within us. Resentment of other’s success replaces admiration.

American was founded on an ideal of liberty. We have seen that liberty necessarily goes hand in hand with personal responsibility. Personal responsibility requires effort and so is always vulnerable to decay into mere license. Government policies that offer something (apparently) for nothing can be tempting. Americans have increasingly sought security over liberty. More and more of us demand the abolition of risk, the prevention of failure. But failure is an essential part of the learning process. If we do not allow anyone to fail, no one can truly succeed. The history of the Soviet Union up to its final demise served as a living portrait of the results of trying to abolish failure.

Let us continue to stress the central place of liberty in the American political system. Let us add to this a renewed appreciation of the vital connection of liberty and personal responsibility. When implemented personally and politically and economically, we can expect a renewal of this country’s vigor, confidence, and pride.