The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty

In deze blogpost haal ik twaalf interessante artikelen uit de laatste edities van “The Freeman”, het maandblad van de New Yorkse denktank “Foundation for Economic Education”, aan. Abonnementen op dit tijdschrift kunnen hier aangevraagd worden. Het merendeel van hun teksten is eveneens vrij op hun website terug te vinden.

De notoire Amerikaanse feministe Wendy McElroy, die als onderzoekster o.a. aan het Californische “Independent Institute” verbonden is, bespreekt de desastreuze gevolgen van het Chinese gezinsbeleid waarbij ouders slechts één enkel kind op de wereld mogen zetten. Ook haalt zij de traditionele argumenten van schaarste en de nefaste consequenties van de vermeende overbevolking in de wereld onderuit.

The one-child policy has stirred worldwide controversy both for its violation of civil rights - including the forced abortion of “extra” children - and for its unintended consequences - for example, a preference for sons has created a sex ratio of almost 120 boys to every 100 girls born. (…) To this day no one knows precisely how many babies and women have died at the hands of the population control fanatics in China. What we do know is that this program will go down in history as one of the greatest abuses of human rights in the 20th century.

Robert Murphy, de auteur van de satirische bestseller "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism", wijdt een stuk aan de recente vastgoed- en kredietcrisis, en stelt klaar en duidelijk dat de overheid, én niet de vrije markt, voor deze situatie met de vinger gewezen moet worden.

Not only is the housing market continuing to fall, its drop is arguably accelerating. In this environment, it’s natural that the government—and in particular the presidential candidates—are offering their “solutions.” As we’ll see, most of these proposals would only make things worse. (...) Our current housing and credit crises are quite serious—perhaps the worst since the Great Depression. As usual, the free market is not to blame; numerous government policies caused or exacerbated the situation. The host of “solutions” being implemented or recommended will only make matters worse.

Gene Callahan, de auteur van "Economics for Real People" en één van mijn professoren tijdens "Freedom University", biedt ons de nodige inzichten in de klimaathype en reikt ons zelfs een échte oplossing aan: meer vrije markt!

The phrase“global warming” has been around for quite some time, but in the past year it has captured the spotlight as never before. (...) Thus far the typical libertarian response to the growing clamor has been to challenge the science behind it. Now it really is the scientific consensus that global warming occurred during the twentieth century. (...) Government programs don’t ameliorate world poverty or sickness, and no libertarian would deny that these are serious problems. So even if manmade global warming is a real threat, why should we expect governments to get it right on this issue?

Ook onze eigen Vlaamse libertariër, professor Frank Van Dun van de Universiteit Gent, komt ruimschoots aan bod. Hij behandelt één van de meest existentiële vragen onder libertariërs, namelijk of de mens wel écht vrij kan zijn als hij in de eerste plaats niet door Rede maar door zijn passies gedreven wordt.

Natural law refers to the principles of order (law) in the human world that the mind can discover, no matter how great the conflicts of interest and opinion among persons. The natural-law philosophy held that those principles ought to be respected by all because they are true principles. The advocates of natural law readily acknowledged that people might not always perceive a personal advantage in conforming their actions to the law. However, they were confident that enough people were sufficiently open to reason to accept the validity of the natural-law principles and to use them in their active life. (...) Freedom and justice are not served well by appeals to the universal consent of mankind, alias the sentiments of the rabble. If that wasn’t clear in David Hume’s time, it most certainly became clear in the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries. (...) It is one thing to mine Hume’s writings for nice quotes on freedom, justice, and property; it is another thing to assume that the philosophy he helped launch is an asset in the struggle for freedom, justice, and property.

De Australische professor Sudha Shenoy, die o.a. aan de LSE en de universiteit van Newcastle doceert, analyseert op meesterlijke wijze het inherente falen van het Scandinavische model ten overstaande de - min of meer - vrijemarktwerking in de Angelsaksische landen. Ook Jeffrey Sachs, de Harvard-econoom die alom gelauwerd wordt voor zijn werk rond de Oost-Europe economieën na de val van het IJzeren Gordijn, krijgt er van langs in dit artikel.

Jeffrey Sachs, economic consultant to governments and the UN, argues (yet again) for higher U.S. U.S. taxes and more government officials with ever-increasing powers over their subjects. These perennial and inevitable conclusions are hung on a Nordic peg. (...) Thus (according to Sachs) high taxes and high “social spending” have not “crippled prosperity” in the Nordic territories: “Von Hayek was wrong. In strong . . . democracies, a generous social-welfare state [is] a road to . . . fairness, . . . equality and international competitiveness,” not serfdom. (...) As a government adviser, Sachs must naturally see officials’ activities as the source of all goodness, including international competitiveness. The causation is rather the other way about. Successful integration into the international economic order produces output that officials then tax and remove from the people. Then officials (under the relevant authorizing legislation) use the revenues to support themselves (and their families), and to spend money or disburse it to authorized recipients under various authorized headings, namely, pensions, other incomes, schooling, medical and hospital services, aged care, child and after-school care, and so on. From the standpoint of government officials, and therefore their academic advisers, this is a delightful paradise. Naturally, therefore, Sachs describes this as “a generous social-welfare state . . . fairness. . . equality . . . international competitiveness.” This is exactly how it appears to the officials involved.

Andrew Moriss, een bekende energiespecialist en professor aan de University of Illinois, hekelt in zijn essay "Putting a bureaucrat in your tank" de overregulering van de gas- en benzinemarkt, en reikt vrijemarktoplossingen aan om uit de spiraal van immer stijgende energieprijzen te geraken.

Energy markets have demonstrated the power of private enterprise each time they have been permitted to function freely. A waste product, gasoline, became a valuable commodity, and production yields soared. Better engines required higher octane, and the quality of gasoline increased dramatically. But as this brief account describes, the American gasoline market has moved away from a national market and toward a series of fragmented regional markets. Further, domestic refining capacity is well below what a free market in gasoline would have produced in the absence of the pervasive government interference of the 1960s and 1970s. The combination leaves the market fragmented and vulnerable to price spikes caused by everything from hurricanes to refinery fires. If we want to fix gasoline markets, the first step is to take the bureaucrats out of the process.

De Californische columnist en bekende voorvechter van het recht op thuisonderwijs Steven Greenhut geeft ons inzichten in de recente ontwikkelingen in de "Golden State" op het gebied van homeschooling en de regulering daarvan.

Anyone interested in the nearly criminal mismanagement of the nation’s government-run schools need only do research on the acronym LAUSD. In March 2006 Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraiogosa gave a speech blasting the LAUSD—Los Angeles Unified School District—for its “culture of complacency” and described the dropout problem in the district as “the new civil rights issue of our time.” These aren’t the words of a conservative education reformer, but of a liberal Democratic mayor with close ties to the teachers’ union. He is the latest in a string of LA mayors who have tried to deal with a school system that’s immune from serious reform, not to mention unable to keep students safe. (...) I offer this as a background to an article on homeschooling for this simple reason: California officials operate some of the worst education bureaucracies in the nation.

David Boaz, de ondervoorzitter en woordvoerder van het "Cato Institute", vat zijn eigen boek "The Politics of Freedom" samen in een gelijknamig essay, en ook een ander intellectueel idool van mij, professor Walter Williams van George Mason University, krijgt in "The Freeman" andermaal een forum voor zijn radicale visie op de samenleving. Niet enkel trekt hij van leer tegen het vermeende "recht op gezondheidszorg", maar hij neemt ook de "intellectuele verdediging van de vrijheid" op zich.

Critics of the U.S. health-care system often suggest that we should adopt the single-payer universal systems of other countries. The serious problems encountered by those systems are increasingly documented and well known, such as the long waiting lists, restrictions on physician choice, and rationing. (...) charitable efforts to help one’s fellow man in need are noble. Reaching into one’s own pockets to help is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else’s pockets to do so is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

All too often defenders of free-market capitalism base their defense on the demonstration that free markets allocate resources more efficiently and hence lead to greater wealth than socialism and other forms of statism. While that is true, as Professor Milton Friedman frequently pointed out, economic efficiency and greater wealth should be seen and praised as simply a side benefit of free markets. The intellectual defense should focus on its moral superiority. Even if free markets were not more efficient and not engines for growth, they are morally superior to other forms of human organization because they are rooted in voluntary peaceable relationships rather than force and coercion. They respect the sanctity of the individual. (...) Societies with a tradition of freedom, such as the United States, have found it an insufficient safeguard against encroachment by the state. Why? Compelling evidence suggests that a general atmosphere of personal freedom does not meet what might be considered its stability conditions. As is often the case, political liberty is used to stifle economic liberty, which in turn reduces political liberty.

De uittredende FEE-voorzitter Richard Ebeling gebruikt zijn maandelijkse vaste column voor een vlijmscherpe analyse van de mensenrechtensituatie in China en doet een oproep om de volkswil ten alle tijden te vrijwaren, en secessiebewegingen dus te steunen, ook in Tibet.

The most guarded prerogative of every government is its legitimized monopoly over the use of force within its territorial jurisdiction. The second most important prerogative is its exclusive control over all its territory. By implication, governments therefore claim an exclusive right over the political, economic, and cultural destinies of the people under their control. If people may not voluntarily and peacefully separate from the state in which they live, then it is tacitly claiming ownership over them. (...) Of course, the most fundamental right of self-determination is the individual’s right to live his life as he chooses, as long as he does not violate any other person’s right to life, liberty, and honestly acquired property. In other words, the core principle underlying any free society is the right of self-ownership. The individual is not the property of the state, any collective group, or any other individual. Without this principle, freedom is unsustainable in the long run. (...) Alas, neither the government of China nor other governments seem ready or willing to respect the sovereignty of their citizens, which individual freedom and self-determination require. We continue to live in a time when governments presume to claim ownership over all they administer, including the people.

En tenslotte komt ook Ebelings opvolger aan het hoofd van de FEE, Lawrence Reed, nog aan bod in deze artikelenreeks. Zijn artikel "History for sale, why not?" behandelt de recente veilingverkoop van een originele kopie van de Magna Carta aan een schatrijke Amerikaanse advocaat, die het manuscript nadien permanent én gratis in bruikleen gaf aan het "Smithsonian Institution" in Washington, een publieke museuminstelling, en zo bewees dat er in een overheidsloze vrijemarktsamenleving ook plaats en geld zal blijven zijn voor erfstukken en kunst.

A privately owned Magna Carta? Aren’t such important things supposed to be public property? (...) 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? 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.