The ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 created
“a new nation, conceived in liberty,” said Abraham
Lincoln in his iconic Gettysburg Address. Lincoln’s focus
was not on the Constitution, however, but on the
revolution that had spawned it.
To Americans that event may be simply a proud chapter
from history; others may think of it as just another war.
But the American Revolution continues to transform
human self-rule in ways most people have probably
never considered. At stake both then and now is what
the Constitution’s preamble refers to as “the Blessings
of Liberty.”
The British colonials, whose vision created the United
States of America, had embarked on their liberty quest
in response to what Thomas Jefferson referred to as “a
long train of abuses and usurpations,” political and
economic, designed to place the American colonies
“under absolute despotism.” In the celebrated
Declaration of Independence, Jefferson went on to
rehearse the history of those “repeated injuries and
usurpations” by the government of King George III of
England—all, he declared, “having in direct object the
establishment of an absolute Tyranny.”
James Madison encapsulated the challenge that lay
before the colonists as they sought to devise an
alternative: “In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men, the great difficulty” is to
“first enable the government to control the governed;
and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Their
solution was to divide sovereignty between the federal
government and the various state governments, and to
further limit their power by separating government
functions into executive, legislative and judicial roles,
with checks and balances imposed on each.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Since the birth of the United States, other nations have
undergone revolutions of their own to form governments
that would ensure liberty. The principle on which such
governments are founded is embedded in an
underappreciated phrase of the U.S. Constitution: “We
the People.” Those three words set up a distinction
between people and their government, establishing the
idea that governments derive their power by consent
from the governed and that they exist to secure
fundamental human “rights.” As Jefferson eloquently
stated it, “whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to
alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing
its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The
preamble of the Charter of the United Nations similarly
establishes its powers from a “We the peoples of the
United Nations” statement.
It was this form of government that compelled Abraham
Lincoln to vow at Gettysburg “that government of the
people, by the people, for the people shall not perish
from the earth.” Today that statement seems like a
pronouncement from a prophet. For more than two
centuries now, people throughout the world have
engaged in their own pursuit of liberty and its blessings.
In the last decade of the 20th century it was the
nations of Eastern Europe. In 2011, governments in
Northern Africa and the Middle East are being abolished
and new ones instituted.
Without question, liberation from tyranny is essential to
securing what Jefferson described as the “unalienable
rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The question is whether free individual political choice
and the form of government by which people rule one
another are sufficient to achieve those ends. Can such a
simple formula transform tyranny into liberty and
thereby secure for us and our children its blessings?
Stripped of such blessings, among them sufficient
material prosperity to eliminate the oppression created
when we are deprived of life’s necessities, political
liberty means little. Economic freedom is therefore both
a result of and a reason for political liberation.
ENTER THE ECONOMISTS
The revolution in human government that began in 1776
is best understood if we appreciate another revolution
that had been advancing for some time: the Industrial
Revolution. While some historians describe it primarily
as a process of socio-economic change that spanned
more than two centuries, all agree that beginning in the
mid- to late 18th century, there was a shift from
manual and animal labor to machine-based
manufacturing that revolutionized virtually every aspect
of daily life in some way.
In his Lectures on Economic Growth, economist and
1995 Nobel laureate Robert E. Lucas Jr. wrote
concerning the past 200-plus years, “For the first time
in history, the living standards of masses of ordinary
people have begun to undergo sustained growth.” He
added that “nothing remotely like this economic
behavior” has happened before. Commerce existed in
the 18th century and had for some time, but it was
insignificant compared to the amount of production
slated for immediate consumption by the producers
themselves. Industrialization changed all of that. The
new technology meant that for the first time in history,
an overwhelming majority of commodities and services
were destined to be sold, bartered or exchanged in the
market.
What breathed real life into the industrial revolution was
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, an account of
economics at the dawn of the period. Published in 1776,
the same year the British colonies in America issued
their Declaration of Independence, Smith’s work
provided the science needed to exploit industrialization
and mass manufacturing. The Wealth of Nations
became, and remains, the foundation of economic
thought and the single most significant work on the rise
and applied principles of free-market capitalism. In
conjunction with the implementation of Smith’s other
principles, free-market capitalism meant that industrial
technology could be exploited to liberate people from a
subsistence-based life and to liberate the earth to
produce to its full potential.
Smith’s thesis is that we all act on the basis of self-
interest, and that when we are free to do so, whether
we intend it or not, we promote what is best for society
as a whole. He explains: “It is not from the benevolence
of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect
our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their
self-love. . . . Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend
chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.” On
that basis there is no need for the intervention of
government or for orders from the top down. Smith, in
fact, called such intervention “dangerous.”
Publication of The Wealth of Nations could not have
been more perfectly timed. In the late 18th century the
sentiment was (with some good reason) that economic
oppression by the privileged ruling class was a source,
perhaps the source, of virtually all social injustice. The
masses reasoned that the excesses of monarchs and
the wealthy aristocracy resulted in the waste of national
resources, necessitating colonization and conquest and
thus perpetuating war. Perhaps, it was reasoned, if need
were rarer, life would be fairer and war a thing of the
past. So The Wealth of Nations, with its thesis rooted in
individual action apart from government intervention,
meshed nicely with the new political sentiment for
“government of the people, by the people, for the
people”—a new liberal economic model to create a new
economic reality within a new liberal political structure,
and all of it centered on individual choice.
A PERFECT WORLD?
The developed world now has more than two hundred
years of this kind of political and economic liberation
behind it. In that time we have seen people with free
economic choice also demand free political choice.
Likewise, the emancipation of peoples from political
tyranny has led to the pursuit of economic liberation.
These newfound liberties gave us hope—hope that we
could, through a government of our own making, create
a world capable of articulating a real law for all men.
U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke about
that world in his address to Congress on January 6,
1941, as America prepared to join the Allies in liberating
Europe from Hitler’s tyranny. Roosevelt saw a world of
man’s making founded on four essential freedoms:
freedom of speech and expression, freedom for every
person to worship God in his or her own way, freedom
to live a healthy, peaceful life free of want, and freedom
from fear provoked by war and the mere threat of war.
“That,” he declared, “is no vision of a distant
millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world
attainable in our own time and generation.” The vision
he articulated in that speech was not for America alone
but for people anywhere and everywhere. His “distant
millennium” was an allusion to the biblical promise of
the peaceful, prosperous, 1,000-year-long future world-
ruling government of Jesus Christ on this earth. In
Roosevelt’s view, men were competent, without a
Messiah, to create a world order based on “the
cooperation of free countries, working together in a
friendly, civilized society.”
The revolution that Roosevelt described as producing
that idyllic world order was to be perpetual, peaceful
and steadily adjusting itself to changing conditions
“without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the
ditch.” But that is not the nature of the current
revolutions in Northern Africa and the Middle East. It
was not the nature of revolution in Eastern Europe and
Russia in the last century. Nor, for that matter, was it
the nature of the American revolution against the British
crown in 1776.
We like to think of nations as cohesive groups of people
who are linked by ancestry, language and culture. As it
happens, mostly they are not. That fact has become
ever more apparent since the Cold War thawed and the
Berlin Wall came down in 1989. As an empire
succumbed to the tide of political change, new systems
of power and social organization emerged. And with
them, a less coherent and less manageable world has
materialized.
Government predicated on individual choice has only
exacerbated the problem. With such a form of
government came a rising tide of ethnic self-
determination that spawned intra-national conflict all
over the globe. The reason is simple: democracies
reward the majorities who hold power. That is the
tyranny of democracy. When those in the minority feel
they are not represented by their government, they
exercise their sovereign right to change their form of
government. So nations unravel strand by strand. And
as they do, international conflict ensues to prevent, if
possible, what U.S. statesman and former professor of
government Daniel Patrick Moynihan labeled
Pandaemonium, the capital of hell in John Milton’s
Paradise Lost . There is, it seems, no vision or belief, no
theory or structural scheme, whether economic or
political, acting in tandem or alone, capable of
suppressing this disintegration ( Proverbs 29:18 ). So
governments today, representative or not, are in crisis.
TYRANNY BY OUR OWN HAND
Roosevelt’s generation has passed. What remains is our
struggle with Madison’s “great difficulty”: how to frame
and enable a government administered by men over men
to control both the governed and itself. The truth is that
no form of human government can alter the nature of
man. And unless our nature changes, our individual
choices will only ensure our ultimate destruction
( Proverbs 14:12 ). When the choices are ours, the
tyranny is self-inflicted. How are we to be liberated
from oppression that comes on us by individual choice?
Here Adam Smith’s market economy based on self-
interest offers no help. Today, after three decades of
market triumphalism, we are living with the fallout from
an economic crisis created by market mania and
deregulation. First there was the free-market
fundamentalism of the Reagan-Thatcher years, the
decade of the 1980s. Then we witnessed the market-
friendly neo-liberalism of the Clinton-Blair years (most
of the 1990s). While that era moderated free markets, it
also consolidated the faith that markets are the primary
mechanism for achieving public good.
True to Smith’s vision, markets today, by design,
function primarily on the basis of human self-interest—
in a word, greed. In any other context, greed is seen as
an evil born of defective and undisciplined moral
character. Not so in the context of the market, where
the competing interests of buyer and seller in a shared
transaction are capable (we are told) of performing the
alchemy necessary for transforming an individual evil
into something for the overall good of society.
The alchemist’s formula is flawed, however. Questions
concerning what we ought to do in society and in
politics are unarguably moral and ethical and not, per
se, economical. Moral and ethical choices demand
values-based education, and decisions that are values-
based often require us to subordinate self-interest, to
exercise patience and defer personal gratification. But
the market does not teach us to behave on the basis of
values, nor can it. Market-based solutions dictate that
decisions are arrived at on the basis of balancing costs
and benefits. Most of us will choose a path that
appears to provide us with the greatest benefit in the
shortest period of time. This rarely produces the best
result for us or for society as a whole. And if market-
based incentives are necessary to provide us with the
motivation to do the right thing, then what choice will
we make when those incentives are not present and the
only thought pattern we know is to choose what
appears to provide us soonest with the greatest benefit
at the lowest personal cost?
The most significant flaw in the alchemist’s formula is
its failure to recognize that markets change the way we
think. In our market-based world we are constantly
compelled to assign value to commodities that we need
or want and then to act on the basis of whether they
are worth their cost. If the market were restricted to
“things,” perhaps Smith’s formula would have some
value. But the market’s reach is much greater. Today
the market ethos has been introduced into schools:
students are paid if they improve their academic
performance. Health-care institutions, prisons and
charitable organizations have likewise adopted the
market model for their operations. On a national level,
war, once fought by patriots, is now outsourced to
private military contractors. And one leading economist,
Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, has suggested that the
United States solve its immigration problems by putting
U.S. citizenship on sale.
The fact that market principles have been adopted to
resolve problems in these areas of life is sufficient to
demonstrate that the market affects the way we think
and how we assign value to not just things but people
and their lives. And that is the point: markets are
supposed to affect what we value and how we
determine the worth of what we value. That is the
market’s primary function. Simply put, what we do
affects how and what we think. Markets, because they
are expansive and self-reinforcing, cannot liberate us.
They can only enslave us to ourselves—a self-imposed
tyranny.
And what of the earth that sustains our lives?
Industrialization and a free-market economy were
supposed to have liberated it as well. But the earth’s
resources are pushed to produce so much, so fast, that
even renewable resources often have no time to
regenerate. Industrialization and its pollution are altering
our environment in unpredictable ways, and not for the
better. We are tyrannizing the only planet we have to
live on. Our pursuit of the blessings of liberty has defiled
the earth and violated a covenant about which we are
mostly ignorant. As a result, the Bible says “the earth
lies defiled under its inhabitants” ( Isaiah 24:5 , English
Standard Version). And as our planet struggles to free
itself from the bondage to which we have subjected it,
we seem cursed by the “natural disasters” that plague
us.
NEEDED: A NEW MODEL
The liberty that people hoped a government and an
economy based on individual choice could create has
simply not materialized. No one can deny the need for
people to participate in governing themselves, nor the
need for markets. With respect to government and
man’s tortured history with it, the fundamental question
is whether we are actually capable of governing
ourselves, others and the earth. With respect to markets,
we need to realize that there are spheres of life in which
they do not belong.
Now the democracy of self-determination is supplanting
representative forms of government that have shaped
the past two centuries while capitalism cuts across
cultures and defines the values of every generation
within its reach. Left in the wake of these two forces are
generations of children brought up to believe that there
is no social process beyond politics, that there are no
spiritual values or truths beyond those they define for
themselves or those imposed by the natural forces of
the market.
The liberation movements that began in 1776 are not
the last, best hope of man or the earth. There is one
remaining alternative that humankind has not yet tried.
The principles upon which that government and its
economy are founded are outlined in a legislative
scheme given to another nation “conceived in liberty,”
the ancient nation of Israel. The structure of its
government was values-based, provided for the exercise
of individual choice, and accommodated markets. It also
provided the means that, if followed, would balance
power systems and social structures to protect the
weak and support the poor and disenfranchised. Its
most amazing feature was its legislative scheme to
reset society and economy for each generation. Its
purpose was to liberate the people from the tyranny of
their own choices—the very tyranny to which our
revolution of liberation has subjected us today. But
because that legislation was, to our knowledge, never
fully implemented, it never did have its intended effect
on the conscience of individuals or the nation.
In our age, the search for peaceful cohabitation between
the nations of the world is as urgent as it ever has
been. What is needed is a model from which to fashion
a global community that will, for generation after
generation, live so that all may live. The tragic truth is
that this world’s peacemakers are thwarted by
governments and institutions that mock even the idea of
peace.
Such a model does exist. And while its implementation
will meet resistance, its eventual establishment is
certain. That government will provide the liberty and the
blessings that have eluded man’s efforts. In the next
issue, we will explore that government.
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