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Freedom and its Enemies

English Pages, 19. 11. 2003

I agree with one of my gurus, Friedrich von Hayek, that „freedom cannot endure unless every generation restates and reemphasizes its value“. I would extend his argument slightly by saying that these days such a restatement should be done also by those who had lived for decades in a non-free communist world. The reason for it is clear and straightforward. They were, paradoxically, enriched by their life in such a regime and due to it they don’t take freedom for granted. They are sensitive to all kinds of creeping, for other people almost invisible changes, which signal to them the future possibility of the weakening (and the potential loss) of freedom in the nominally free (because formally non-totalitarian) world.

I disagree with those who minimize or explicitly deny our comparative advantage in this respect, who assume that we should still be only taught what freedom really means and should not try to give warnings to those who have lived only in a free society. On one hand we were impoverished by our life in the communist society, we may be biased, we may underestimate some important things but on the other we have a unique experience, which should not be forgotten. I agree with the first Freedom Lecture speaker Michael Novak that “looking ahead to the twenty-first century, the problem that worries me most is the fragility of free societies” (from Awakening from Nihilism, Indianapolis, Crisis Books, 1995, p.41). I see many symptoms of freedom weakening attitudes, initiatives and activities and am convinced that they should be taken seriously. What follows is a brief summary of my position on those issues.

The Current Expansion of Attitudes Endangering Freedom

After decades spent in a collectivistic society, people like me believe more than those who were privileged not to go through this experience in the primacy of the individual and are, therefore, frustrated by a growing pressure to place individual rights and responsibilities below and behind group rights and entitlements. This is these days considered in the West to be modern, progressive and politically correct even if it undoubtedly directly endangers both the individual freedom and human liberty.

Together with Michael Novak I believe in the centrality of freedom and of human liberty as well as of democracy and am afraid when this is being denied or overlooked. It has many forms. E.g., the proponents of Third ways as Anthony Giddens (see his “The Third Way and Its Critics”) suddenly fight for “the democratization of democracy” which is a radically different concept and a project than freedom. We don’t need redefinition or reinterpretation of basic terms of classical liberalism because the original - which means uninnovated - idea of freedom, liberty, democracy and capitalism “is powerful and sufficiently robust”. However, “it must be continuously exposed, explained, and defended” (quotation from my speech at the James Madison Institute Center for World Capitalism in Jacksonville, Flo., in 1995). Otherwise it becomes forgotten or stolen (and filled with different meanings).

As I said, we believe in the classical understanding of freedom and are not in favor of unnecessary and often contradictory innovations. I don’t see the now fashionable ideology of human rights (not to speak about activist and radical “humanrightism”) to be a neutral and innocent concept. I see in it an alternative, purposefully rather fuzzy ideology and a political doctrine.

The same is true about markets. We believe in free markets, not in the dreams about convergence of economic systems, nor in the corporate social responsibility doctrine, which represents another attempt to control, regulate and mastermind markets. The danger connected with this is not understood by the government, by trade unions, by NGO´s, nor by leading representatives of corporations because they are, as Milton Friedman correctly stated, “pro business, not pro market”. Our experience with central planning and state ownership warns us against putting social responsibility before economic rationality, against misunderstandings of the philosophical and systemic implications of the economic science.

We believe in the primacy of human beings, not in slogans like “Earth First”, nor in the seductive concept of sustainable development, which is a misleading concept. It puts ahead neither nature nor the quality of environment but immodest constructivistic ambitions of those who want to gain control of all of us. They use nature and environment as their “hostages”, which becomes successful because we all place nature and environment very high on our list of priorities.

We are against all kinds of discrimination because we know what discrimination is but we cannot accept the currently popular principle of nondiscrimination. It reminds us of an almost Jacobinian principle of absolute equality, which is - as history teaches us - an opposite to freedom. We consider the people to be “natural equals” and consistently distinguish formal equality of opportunity from substantive equality of results. For a long time, we were dreaming about life in the first world but had to live in the second. We know as well that it established an enormous degree of inequality in our societies. This second concept is reflected in requirements to guarantee “equality before the law, equality under the law, and equal benefit of the law” (criticized by Sylvia LeRoy in “Equality: the Leviathan of Rights”, Fraser Forum, August, 2003, p.21). This substantive equality concept is in many circles heralded as a new era of social progressiveness and is connected with “the premise that government is ultimately a benevolent force, obliged to guarantee equal outcomes by redistributing benefits and privileges between individuals and groups” (p.28). We know that it does not work that way.

We all, undoubtedly, see the importance of moral and morality for the functioning of human “great society” (as compared to simple “face-to-face” societies) but we are against the rhetoric of moral righteousness on the side of public intellectuals, of the anointed (in the terminology of Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed, New York, Basic Books, 1995), of the Olympians (in the terminology of R. H. Bork, Judicial Imperialism, AEI Bradley Lecture, September 2003) because we feel in it a strong authoritarian temper of those who want to impose their values on others. They pretend to know better than the rest of us does what we need and what we want. And what is good for us. They want to protect us from ourselves. Antonio Martino once said (at the Mont Pelerin Society Meeting in Vienna, in 1996) that “we are heading toward a society where pedestrians will be required to have a license, obesity will be illegal and what we are allowed to eat will be determined by the National Dieting Board”. I don’t take these words as a science fiction, I see them already around. We don’t want, however, to be protected from ourselves. For us “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concepts of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Bork, p.5).

Another danger comes from judicial activism (or judicial imperialism as it is called by Robert H. Bork), which leads to “an usurpation by judges of powers rightly belonging, in a democracy, to the political branches” of the government (p.2). This issue relates to the topics of judicial accountability, of judicial activism or judicial restraint, and of individual or group freedoms. I agree with Neil Seeman that “judicial activism, when it undermines parliamentary intent, is necessarily anti-democratic, since it elevates the judiciary to the role of political actor capable of usurping the political process” (“Taking Judicial Activism Seriously”, Fraser Forum, August, 2003, p.17) and I am afraid that “it signifies a deeply troubling democracy gap” (p.4).

It seems to me as well that we are witnesses of the crowding out of standard democratic methods by alternative political procedures based on communitarism, NGO´ism, corporativism. The Gresham´s Law is valid here not less than in the sphere of currency where it was discovered. The alternative procedures are worse than the original once. Because of that the political power moves into the hands of rent-seeking coalitions, of various pressure groups and of vested interest institutions. It creates a new feudalisation of society (as the term was understood by Ludwig Erhard in Germany in the seventies).

Another dimension of freedom weakening activities lies in attempts to suppress the role of national states and to internationalize issues. It leads to the undermining of the standard democratic accountability, which exists in national states. But this is not my special topic here today. It will certainly be possible to expand this list of un- or antifreedom attitudes, but the real danger is in their synergy. It is made possible by the activities of a very wide coalition of antimarket, antibourgeois, antifreedom, elitist scribes and intellectuals. We should pay attention to their motives.

The Causes of Such Attitudes

I see three basic groups of causes. They are based on ideas, interests and fears.

As regard ideas, the main influence has the belief in the market failure doctrine accompanied by the presumption that politically organized correction for market failures would work perfectly. This is what all kinds of socialists repeat again and again. It is, however, wrong. As James Buchanan puts it: “market failures were set against an idealized politics” (in Public Choice - Politics Without Romance, Policy, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2003, p.16), which is an incorrect comparison. This idealist theory of the state has been in the past decades successfully criticized by the Public Choice School of Buchanan and Tullock and by many other thinkers but it is still with us. The serious analysis of the behavior of persons acting politically – voters, politicians or bureaucrats – has not succeeded in rejecting the romantic mythology of the state and of the motivations and possibilities of politicians and their bureaucrats. I agree with Buchanan that the public is now “more critical about politics and politicians, more cynical about the motivation of political action, and less naive in thinking that political nostrums offer easy solutions to social problems” (p.17) than half a century ago, but the old dreams are still there. Even the failure of socialism did not bring about a collapse and disappearance of this set of ideas. The Hayekian “fatal conceit” remains to govern the world of ideas and brings a lot of people into the camp of statism.

Some people are personally motivated to be in favor of a different world than a free society (in the classical liberal meaning of the term, see J. Buchanan, Classical Liberalism as an Organizing Ideal, speech at the Mont Pelerin Society Meeting, Chattanooga, September 18, 2003) because they hope they will gain from it. They hope there will be a demand for their activities there. Centrally organized, regulated and controlled society offers an enormous opportunity for some people to give ideas, advice, recommendations, by doing it they can reconstruct the world according to their own ideas and at the same time be paid for it. My favourite American public philosopher Eric Hoffer said in 1977 in a similar argumentation: “There are quite a number of people who have vested interest in the stuff and make a noble living out of it”. This is true and well-known in many societies and historical periods but the most visible recent example is the new European political, bureaucratic and even intellectual institution, the European Union. Its formation and expansion is accompanied by a huge demand for ideas, advice, defence and justification (of its existence). The real motivation for the deepening and widening of EU is different from the nominal interpretation of it. The interest and especially self-interest is more important than the ideas.

Finally, there is a fear. Fear of those who don’t believe in themselves, who are afraid of openness, of freedom, of markets, of competition, who hope that someone else will help them, will take care of them, will be responsible for them, who believe in the rhetoric of those who promise them the life without full responsibility for it. I don’t speak about those who are really weak, ill, old, handicapped (they do need our help) but about those who are willing to substitute freedom and responsibility for the paternalistic state. In their attitudes, they are - perhaps unconsciously - significant supporters of the anointed, of the Olympians, of the advocates of the state and its interventionism. Without those who are afraid of freedom the success of statists would not be possible.

It is our task to understand and explain the impact of this special coalition of ideas, interests and fears and to come with a clear, straightforward and feasible alternative. It must be based on the return to the classical liberalism.

Václav Klaus, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C., 19. November 2003