Freedom, Individual Rights, Capitalism

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January/February 2005 -- America has been the land of the individual, and most Americans have thought of themselves as individualists. We still speak favorably of individual rights, individual initiative, individual responsibility, individual opportunity, and individual achievement.

But America's individualism is disappearing and with it our political freedom and the moral foundations of our society. This is because the economic and political manifestations of individualism—freedom and capitalism—cannot stand on their own; they require sound moral ideas of rational self-interest that are manifest in sound moral character. Those moral ideas justify this freedom, and that moral character requires the support of the culture and of institutions based on those ideas.

Today paternalist economic and political policies treat adults like infants who can't care for themselves without government help. Those policies, and the morality on which they are based, seduce too many independent achievers, turning them into to weak, sniveling, servile dependents of pandering ruling elites.

If our future is to be a bright one appropriate for human beings, proud Americans will need a consistent, explicit, and unapologetic new individualism that will restore political freedom and create a culture worth preserving.

America's Individualist Tradition

America is the quintessential individualist country. For our Founders, the purpose of government was to protect the life, liberty, and property of each individual and to otherwise leave us alone. For the first century and a half of our history the federal government remained relatively small and state and local governments provided only basic services, principally police protection and law courts.

The story of America has been one of millions of immigrants coming to these shores. What attracted them? Immigrants sought to escape the poverty and tyranny of their home countries, to improve their own economic conditions, to raise their own families, to start their own businesses, to farm their own land, to live according to their own religion or other beliefs, to enjoy their own lives.

Immigrants coming to America manifested the moral characteristics of all true individualists. Our ancestors wanted the best for themselves. They took the initiative needed to achieve their goals. They realized that nothing in life is guaranteed and that to achieve those goals they would need to take risks in a new country. Immigrants understood the need to think, to use their minds and their famed Yankee ingenuity. Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s understood the independent thinking of Americans; he found "that in most of the operations of the mind each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding." In other words, we think for ourselves.

Tocqueville described individual Americans in the new free country as "intoxicated with their new power. They entertain a presumptuous confidence in their own strength." These rugged individualists looked first to self but were hardly misanthropes, associating with others of their own choosing. Again from Tocqueville: "Individualism...disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself." Even when helping their neighbors, Americans "are fond of explaining almost all actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another."

That spirit of individualism allowed Americans to be pioneers in fields such as science and technology—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were scientists and inventors—industry, entertainment, and every other field that contributes to life and prosperity. America's national enterprise was really an enterprise of million of individuals living their own lives and pursuing their own goals. What is great and glorious about America comes from the freedom and dignity accorded to each individual.

American Confusion

That's not the America that we live in today. America in the early twenty-first century is a very politically and morally confusing place. The Republican Party, which traditionally stands for limited government, has been in the ascendancy since Ronald Reagan and under President George W. Bush has controlled both houses of Congress. Yet the size and burden of government have not been reduced; indeed, in many areas it has expanded. While President Reagan spoke of eliminating the federal Department of Education, President Bush has used it aggressively to impose policies on local schools. A look at non-defense spending in the first three years of each administration since Lyndon Johnson's shows a cumulative increase under Bush of 23.4 percent, second only to Johnson's 24.8 percent increase and comparing unfavorably with a decrease under Reagan.

Many commentators see the polarization of the country into Republican "red" states and Democratic "blue" states arising from underlying value differences. In the red states voters worry that freedom is threatened when a society loses the moral compass traditionally supplied by religion and long-standing customs, and drifts into moral relativism. They see such relativism as responsible for social pathologies like crime, youth violence, broken families, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, which in turn give rise to more government-assistance programs with accompanying tax hikes. They often favor policies of censorship or the regulation of morality on the strange-sounding premise that freedom must be limited in order to be preserved.

Often, perhaps out of frustration at a lack of control over the forces they see undermining public order, these citizens invest much emotion and effort in symbolic battles over values. They want to keep "under God" in the pledge of allegiance even though there is no evidence that kids' reciting those words each day make schools less violent or kids more likely to learn. They favor a display of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse lobby even though there is no evidence that this makes judges and lawyers more likely to respect the principles of the Constitution that they often ignore.

Voters in the blue states fear that traditional morality and religious dogma indeed will lead to intolerance and repression. They see social pathologies arising from material disadvantages and inequalities. An individual's economic status, they believe, determines his morals and behavior. Those with this view favor government-imposed economic regulations, welfare programs, and transfer payments. Yet this approach in the past has failed and in fact contributed to those pathologies by rewarding moral irresponsibility. Further, by its nature this approach limits the liberty of the entrepreneurs who create wealth to begin with, and it takes rather than protects the property of the citizens.

Today's political and moral confusion, which limits liberty, is in part the result of the disappearance from the public dialogue and consciousness—and thus from too many individual minds—of the concept of individualism.

Twentieth-Century Challenges

The erosion of liberty and its underlying moral foundation is in large part the result of the ideas in the twentieth century that challenged the prevailing individualism, especially during times of social stress and transformation. Further, until well into the twentieth century America's individualism was not philosophically defended. Indeed, Tocqueville's observation about the 1830s was applicable nearly into the 1930s: "In no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided."

The twentieth century saw challenges to the individualism from fascism, which placed the race, ethnic group, or state ahead of the individual, and communism, which placed economic class first and advocated the supremacy of the proletariat or "working" class. These systems were necessarily dictatorial; they sacrificed and enslaved millions of individuals. In the end, it was easy for most Americans to reject these challenges, and it is difficult for many young people today to appreciate that such challenges were ever taken seriously.

But the twentieth century also saw less harsh and thus more seductive challenges to individualism coming from socialist and the welfare state paternalism based on the moral premise that we are each our brother's keeper. In America, the Progressive Era, New Deal, and Great Society assigned to government the job of correcting the perceived failures of the free market and free institutions, and of actually caring for the material needs of individuals—for food, housing, education, jobs, medical care, retirement income, and the like—in the name of a better society but also in the name of a different, more relevant individualism.

In reaction to this challenge, thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek demonstrated that government economic planning must necessarily fail. The Public Choice school associated with James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock showed that government philosopher kings could not be impartial and above institutional interests as they devised and administered alleged solutions to social problems. Yet these defenses, as we shall see, ignored the moral arguments for individualism that were, in fact, provided by Ayn Rand [3], beginning most notably with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead [4]. But this crucial defense was ignored until recent decades.

Today's political and social landscape is largely defined by the paternalist or "collectivist lite" challenge to individualism.

The Current Political Landscape

In post-World War II America the political Right retained the vocabulary of individualism. Barry Goldwater's 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, served as the manifesto that propelled him to the 1964 Republican nomination for president. Concerning conservatives, Goldwater maintained that "the first thing he has learned about man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man's most sacred possession is his individual soul." Secondly, "the economic and spiritual aspects of man's nature are inextricably intertwined. He cannot be economically free...if he is enslaved politically; conversely, man's political freedom is illusory if he is dependent for his economic needs on the state." And finally, "man's development, in both its material and spiritual aspects, is not something that can be directed by outside forces. Every man, for his individual good and for the good of society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings."

That philosophy informed much of the modern conservative movement, which included the man who launched his own political career with his powerful speech in support of Goldwater's nomination: Ronald Reagan used similar rhetoric in his successful quest for the presidency.

In the years since Reagan, the collapse of Soviet communism has vindicated economic thinkers like Mises and Hayek. But ironically, in America and elsewhere the reality of individualism has faded in part because the economic and political cases for freedom were not based on a solid moral foundation. A survey of the political landscape today shows the status of individualism.

Libertarians. Libertarians for the most part are consistent advocates of individual liberty in the economic and political realms and the true heirs to America's individualist political tradition. Think tanks like the Cato Institute and Reason Foundation produce cutting-edge critiques of the failures of government programs that limit liberty, especially in the economic area, and the weakening of the rule of law by arbitrary government power.

While many libertarians come from the natural-law and natural-rights tradition of America's Founders, others come from a limited, usually economic, utilitarian perspective. Their view of the free-market system, for example, in the words of Mises, "presupposes that people prefer life to death, health to sickness, nourishment to starvation, abundance to poverty. It teaches man how to act in accordance with these valuations." While this might be a good generalization, it does not take account of the real fact that many people would not make such choices. Islamists prefer strapping explosives to themselves or their children in order to kill other children. Less dramatic examples are individuals who would accept less abundance in the name of a "social justice" based on envy. Winston Churchill said, "socialism is the equal sharing of misery," and he was right that many opponents of freedom are not simply confused about the economic consequences of their policies—rather, they want to pull down the well-to-do more than to raise up those in need.

Thus, while libertarians tend to be consistent defenders of economic individualism and limited government, they often ignore the moral justification of such freedom. Further, while their impact on policy is growing, it is still less than that of traditional conservatives and neo-conservatives.

Traditional conservatives. While traditional conservatives do tend to acknowledge the importance of the individual—often from a religious understanding of the unique value of each person—they also fear power and the unrestrained ego. They see the abuses of a Hitler and Stalin and the murderous mobs in the streets during the French revolution as manifestations of the same evil. Such conservatives see the importance of religion, customs, and traditions, and private institutions such as families, fraternal organizations, and churches, in restraining the ego and providing a nurturing environment in which individuals can develop their virtues and live productive lives. Conservatives thus favor limited, constitutional governments with checks and balances.

But too often conservatives use government to support beliefs and institutions that they see as essential to restrain the ego. Further, they often treat these institutions as ends in themselves, sacrificing the individual and freedom for the good of society. These institutions and the attitudes, if not the laws, that support them can stifle individual creativity.

Further, many conservatives, often as a function of their religious perspective, are uncomfortable taking rational, individual self-interest too far. They feel they need to invoke some collective good to justify individual liberty. Thus, they might argue that tax cuts that their critics contend help the rich also help create job opportunities and lower prices for the poor. While this is true, the principal justification of economic freedom is that it is the individual's right, not some collective good.

Finally, justifying individual liberty based on religious beliefs or mere tradition will not convince those who do not share one's religion and for whom traditions hold little sway.

Compassionate and neo-conservatives. Neo-conservatives often are ex-leftists who have become aware of both the economic problems and the social pathologies created by traditional leftist policies. They tend to favor many elements of the social and political vision of traditional conservatives. But unlike traditional conservatives they do not have a general fear of big government. Irving Kristol, the godfather of the movement, says of neo-cons: "They are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on 'the road to serfdom.' Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed, inevitable.... People have always preferred strong government to weak.... Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not." This is why in the neo-con pantheon of political heroes men like "Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked."

Neo-conservatives, in fact, are social engineers on the Right. While particular policies that they favor might be more pro-individual than those of the Left, the neo-con view of government is fundamentally anti-individualistic.

What Is Individualism?

Given the problems and limitations of those on the Right who defend freedom in one form or another, it is necessary to define more exactly the nature of individualism. In particular it is necessary to understand the facts and ideas that necessitate and morally justify economic and political liberty for individuals.

Ayn Rand [3] offered the most consistent and integrated understanding of individualism. She began with the fact that the fundamental alternative for living creatures is life or death. But human beings are unique creatures. We have free will and a rational capacity. Indeed, the phenomenon of making value choices is only possible for beings who can understand that alternatives and choices are possible, i.e., living human beings. The standard of all values thus is human life, and the goal of survival is obtained through the exercise of reason, the discovery of what will be in our self-interest. But because we are humans with extraordinary and wonderful capacities, mere physical survival is not our goal; rather, it is a happy, joyous, and flourishing life.

Further, we each exist fundamentally as individuals. We survive physically as individuals even as others might die, and we die as individuals even as others might continue to live. Our bodies are healthy or sick as individuals. And, most importantly, we think and we will as individuals. We must be free to use the judgment of our own minds or else our survival is precarious and dependent on others.

From this understanding we can identify the basic elements of true individualism.

First, true individualists will understand and feel that their own lives are their highest value, that to be alive is to be blessed with the potential for happiness, that they should treat their own lives with respect, and that they should strive with joy for the best within them. It would be odd if a person who believed in the importance and dignity of each individual also believed that he or she personally was simply an agent who should serve others, with little concern for his or her own life, dreams, and happiness.

Second, true individualists will understand that to strive for the best within them, they must hold reason as their highest value because it is that capacity that allows them to reflect upon themselves, on their moral nature, and to discover the means for their survival and flourishing. It was no accident that out of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason came John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and many other giants in the battle for liberty.

Each individual's survival and well-being requires self-directed action toward those goals. That rules out the false subjectivist form of individualism that says, "Do what feels good," with the assumption that thinking is not necessary. True individualism also rules out the Nietzschean will to engage some master passion, usually the quest for power, as an end in itself. That path leads one away from achieving the greatest fulfillment possible in one's life and more often than not leads to misery. True, rational individualists are not slaves to their appetites; they check the whim of the moment and subject it to critical examination.

Consider the extreme example of mind-altering drugs. While libertarians can rightly oppose the drug war as both ineffective and a limitation on freedom, one must recognize that addiction to such drugs—or many other things—is destructive of the unique and defining attributes of individuals: the rational mind and the free will. Would rational individuals with the deepest sense of self-worth and dignity put poison in their brains? Would a drug addict be considered a true individualist?

But "reason" does not mean superficial judgments or arrogant rationalizations. Here conservatives can point to an all-too-real danger that negates a true life guided by thought. Hayek rightly denounced the false individualism of those who believed they could apply reason to build a prosperous and peaceful society through socialist planning the way engineers apply reason to build machines.

Reason means exercising the virtue of honesty, of always asking one's self, "Am I trying to understand the facts of reality, am I being truthful, am I willing to focus my mind and not evade?"

Third, true individualists understand that they are responsible for their own lives, actions, prosperity, and happiness. Rand said, "As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul." It is not simply our genetic makeup, economic class, environment, or other accidental factors that determine our character or beliefs. We each, as individuals, do so. Even in the most adverse circumstances individuals can take charge of their own souls; in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl describes how he discovered personal freedom in a concentration camp—a freedom of will and thought that even the Nazi torturers could not take away. While individualists will recognize that they certainly can benefit from good parents, friends, and teachers, we each must understand that ultimately we are responsible for our own character and actions.

Further, unlike lower animals, we must create the material means of our survival and flourishing. We must discover how to produce food, shelter, clothing, medicines, printing presses, electric power, automobiles, airplanes, spaceships, computers, and all those things that make survival and flourishing possible. The true individualist is a creator.

Fourth, true individualists take pride in their achievements. Such individuals welcome responsibility for their own lives because, as adults, responsibility is the opportunity and path to the joy of achievement. Achievements are manifestations of their virtues and right actions. It might involve inventing a new scientific device or making a new scientific discovery; designing a house or laying the bricks for a house; writing a poem or a business plan; making a statue or a satellite; nurturing a new business to profitability or a new child to adulthood. While we as individuals might appreciate the assistance of others, it is only what we create ourselves that can give us pride. If we win a lottery we might be happy but we cannot be proud, because chance, not our own conscious and guided actions, was responsible for our windfall. Similarly, while we might provide some guidance and assistance to loved ones, individualists will understand that others will gain the greatest sense of self-worth and self-actualization only if they take responsibility for themselves. After all, the goal of parents is to guide their children to become independent adults, not to keep them infantile.

True pride, which Aristotle called "the crown of all the virtues," is not boastful and does not first seek approval of others. It is first and foremost self-knowledge. And proud individuals will refuse to accept moral censure or guilt for their virtues and moral knowledge.

Fifth, in society true individualists will assert the right to their own lives. They need not answer to a king, government, their neighbors, or society. They can pursue their dreams as they see fit. They will recognize that their lives are not means to the ends of others. This means that we must each be free to live by our own independent judgment about what is in our best interest. After all, our individual autonomy is defined by our minds, and if we are not allowed to use our own judgment, our autonomy is destroyed.

Sixth, true individualists will respect the equal rights of others. If in our souls we have a strong, burning sense of justice, we would never wish the unearned for ourselves. The morality of true individualists precludes taking by force or fraud either material goods or responsibility for actions or achievements that are not one's own. That would undermine our pride in ourselves. Further, if we value reason, productivity, honesty, and the like, we will value and appreciate those virtues in others and will not wish to be the destroyer of these virtues. That is why we will not wish to initiate the use of force or fraud against others, because we would be harming ourselves and destroying those values that we love. In other words, all of our relationships with others should be based on mutual consent.

Seventh, all true individualists will want a government that limits itself to protecting the life, liberty, and property of all individuals—not trying to run our lives and treating us in a paternalistic manner. They will see the government not as an agent to relieve them of responsibility for their lives and their neighbors of their wealth and liberty but as an agent to protect them from the initiation of force and to establish the general rules to facilitate relationships with others based on mutual consent.

Eighth, true individualists will want to live in a society of other individualists. They will benefit from trading goods and services with others. They will be educated, entertained, enlightened, and inspired by the achievements of others—by plays, movies, music, scientific discoveries, engineering feats, and every form of human achievement, which the true individualist will celebrate.

In The Fountainhead [4], one of Ayn Rand [3]'s characters muses, "Don't work for my happiness, my brothers—show me your achievements—and the knowledge will give me the courage for mine." This expresses the thoughts and sentiments of true individualists. They will love such a society because of the individuals who make it up and will fight to preserve it from any threat in the same way they would fight to preserve specific attacks on their personal liberty.

Ninthly, true individualists will exercise the virtue of benevolence. They will understand that through their actions, example, and treatment of others, they can foster a society that gives them the means of material well-being and spiritual fulfillment.

This review of the elements of individualism shows that political freedom is not a starting point but, rather, an end point based on the nature of the individual and what is in the rational self-interest of each of us. This review also suggests that our need for freedom arises from our nature and the nature of moral principles, and that those principles must be manifest in the character of individuals if, in a society, citizens are to respect one another's rights and demand political freedom.

This review also suggests that where these ideas are absent from the minds of individuals and these moral principles absent from their souls and characters, freedom in societies will erode. The elements of individualism, unfortunately, today tend to be weak or missing from most of the political ideologies that are considered defenders of freedom, and that is why political liberty is weakened.

The Paternalist Threat

This understanding suggests that perhaps the greatest threat to individualism today comes from what can be described as political and moral paternalism, principally from the political Left but aided by moderates and "good government" politicians of all parties. Paternalists are would-be ruling elites who would treat adults as if they were children who are unable to run their own lives for themselves; these elites maintain that they want to care for such dependents, provide for their material and other needs, and regulate their lives for their—the dependents'—own good.

Past collectivist challenges to individualism—communism, fascism—were paternalist as well but also extremely brutal and thus easy for anyone with a semblance of reason and moral principles to reject. The welfare state and socialism might be thought of as the kinder, gentler forms that are thus more subtle and seductive, less obvious enemies; that are in some ways more dangerous because they are not seen as great threats. But their danger goes much deeper than limiting economic liberty.

On the surface it seems that paternalists simply wish to help others deal with problems such as unemployment, access to education and training, medical and retirement costs, and the like. In fact most paternalist elites also seek prestige—really, a false sense of self-worth—power, and income, and these require the existence of groups in need. To this end, they must curtail the liberty of individuals, eliminate the economic independence of individuals, and undermine the ethos of individualism. The problem for the paternalist is that in a free society, individuals who wish to prosper can work hard, improve their knowledge and skills, and advance their station in life, as our immigrant ancestors and so many Americans each day so dramatically demonstrate.

But the economic method of paternalism ensures economic dependence by ensuring that the economy will not function at its best. The immediate victims of redistribution and regulation will be those who have their money taken and their freedom curtailed. But the ripple effects of these policies will rob others of opportunities. For example, minimum-wage hikes often mean that businesses will cut work hours and employment for marginal workers. The adverse effects of these policies will create the illusion of "market failures," a pool of dependents, and thus a perceived requirement for more government intervention. Many individuals, viewing this system in action but not understanding that it is of the paternalists' own making, will come away with the mistaken belief that in the economic realm they cannot take responsibility for their own lives.

The paternalists can also expand the dependent class by offering programs, initially to help the "poorest of the poor"—free school lunches for kids, social security, college loans—but then extend those programs to higher-income individuals as a means to secure political support.

In other words, the paternalist is like a quack doctor who breaks a patient's leg in order to have patients, doesn't fix the leg, and charges a hefty price for aspirin to reduce the pain.

Undermining Individualist Ideas and Character

But the maintenance of a dependent class requires more than the weakening of economic independence. Paternalists must also corrupt moral ideas and moral character, that is, must undermine the elements of individualism that support political and economic liberty.

The paternalist, for example, feels—and wants his dependents to feel—that somehow it is "unjust" for some individuals to prosper—even through their own efforts—while others do not—even if it is through their own flaws or errors. Thus, they posit a right of all individuals to certain goods—medical care, retirement income, job training—and to certain economic outcomes—a distribution of wealth that does not leave too many rich or poor individuals. In other words, they want individuals to believe that need equals entitlement. This false idea undermines the individualist belief that in society we each have a right to our own life. It is the corrupted belief that tells us, "Yes, you have certain rights but you also have obligations to others—other than to respect their equal right to freedom." Individuals who accept this corrupted belief will find it difficult to argue against encroachments on their liberty. This moral confusion will mean that they feel guilty about acting fully in accordance with rational self-interest and often will not have the will or emotional commitment to fight such encroachments.

Essential to the maintenance of a paternalist system is an undermining of the morality of the mind - an essential aspect of the individualist morality. Paternalists wish individuals to approach moral and economic issues not with thought but, rather, with emotions not subject to rational evaluation. Demagogues have been with us since the first democracies in Greece. The particular appeals offered by paternalists today include a sense of entitlement, envy, and indignation, which are meant to stop the thinking process and warp the moral sense.

The sense of entitlement in the context of a paternalist system is the emotion of a child. A child feels—not thinks, but feels—that "I have desires, and someone must fulfill them." Mature adults graduate to an individualist understanding that they are the principal agents responsible for satisfying their desires and questioning whether those desires are in their true self-interest to begin with.

Envy usually denotes the feeling that someone owns something that the envier wants, often accompanied by the feeling that somehow the owner does not deserve it. Envy thus often entails more of a desire to pull others down rather than to raise one's self or others up. In its most virulent form, envy is the emotion and moral choice of those who know, implicitly or explicitly, that their problems are of their own making and that the prosperity and happiness of others is of theirs. The envious individual desires to destroy that which is a reproach and reminder to them of their own failings. As Ayn Rand [3] explained, envy is "hatred of the good for being the good."

The paternalist must foster envy. To the extent that dependents accept the paternalist's immoral premises and thus manifest the emotion of envy, they will react with moral indignation at those who hesitate not only to acknowledge their right to taxpayer dollars but also their status as victims and thus their moral superiority. Watch a demonstration of screaming, chanting poverty activists who feel they are slighted and that their handouts are too small. Their emotions are required to short-circuit their thought processes. (This was the function of the "Two Minutes Hate" in George Orwell's 1984.)

Further, the paternalist must foster in the individuals who are envied a sense of guilt, which will prevent them from rejecting envious individuals' emotions in favor of a reasoned approach to moral principles.

Most middle-class Americans are in fact hardworking, conscientious, good to their families, and the like; in these things they are members of the productive, responsible class of individualists who live for the most part by their own efforts—not the extreme haters of achievement. To keep control, paternalists need to control these individuals as well. They do so by feeding them small benefits that can build up over time. They might offer their kids free lunches in school. They might offer the company for which they work government subsidies, trade protection, or other such assistance. If these individuals lose their jobs, paternalists will give them government unemployment benefits, and when they retire, paternalists will offer them social security and Medicare—paid for by making it difficult for these individuals to afford these things for themselves. Such Americans might feel that they paid for these benefits out of deductions from their paychecks. But more and more add-ons such as the new prescription drug benefit show these to be welfare programs.

Such individuals find themselves in a state of ethical insecurity and without the ideas and understanding to counter their situation. They do not want to think of themselves as parasites and victims, for they still take some pride in their personal efficacy, at least in some realms of their lives. Perhaps they look with scorn on blatant cases of irresponsible individuals who manifest the worst of the parasites—for example, fat welfare mothers with a dozen kids by a dozen different fathers, using their welfare money to purchase liquor and lottery tickets.

But these individuals might become indignant when discussing their need for government help with their medical bills or with tuition for their kids at college. They don't want to consider whether those bills are so high because of government programs and policies. In any case, what can they do to change things? They are simply victims of the system. In this case we see how paternalism has undermined the ethos of individualism.

Restoring Individualism

The restoration of individual freedom and overthrow of the paternalist regime and ethos will require battles in several arenas. The intellectual battle for political and economic freedom has been won. The collapse of Soviet-style communism proved economists like Mises and Hayek to be correct. Theories purporting to show how political elites can successfully manage economies—for example, those of the Keynesian school—have been discredited. Scholarship and experience demonstrate the adverse effects of regulations of many industries and sectors, as well as the flexibility and vibrancy of market institutions. While there is still a need to get this information into more schools and universities and into the minds of politicians, journalists, community and opinion leaders, and the like, the intellectual case is beyond serious dispute.

The political battle has been tough going. One reason is that vested interest groups—paternalist patrons and their clients—resist giving up their special privileges. But the battle for freedom will also require that the moral ideas at the basis of individualism be clearly articulated and used to counter the assumptions of paternalism. These ideas will encounter the moral sense and emotions in individuals that run counter to individualist principles. Creative ways of arguing and appeals to what remains of sound moral principles in individuals' minds and habits in their souls will be necessary. Further, it will be necessary to address the paternalist assumptions as they are manifest in the culture and to counter them with individualist visions of what a culture can and should be.

Supporting Self-Interest. At the philosophical level, but with arguments that can be brought to bear on the political and social controversies of the day, it is necessary to reinforce the notion that we each as individuals have an unequivocal right to our own lives and thus can act in our rational self-interest without guilt. Most Americans are comfortable with self-interest in economics. We seek the highest salaries possible in professions we choose. We seek the lowest prices for goods and services of the quality we desire. Adam Smith expressed the maxim of economic self-interest when he wrote: "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, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages." This must not simply be the view in economic aspects of the lives of individuals but in every aspect.

Key to countering paternalism is to deal with the ideas and feelings that individuals usually have about their obligations to others. Even when individuals do not feel guilty for living their own lives as they see fit, and even when they understand that many individuals find themselves in need through flaws in their own moral code, character or actions, they feel - perhaps grudgingly - that they have a duty to help them out of their situation.

Obviously with family members or friends that we value, such help might be a good investment, since we would be saving a loved one that we value. But an individualist would understand not only that each individual ultimately must take responsibility for their own lives but also that paternalists have created the culture and ethos that make it harder for individuals to appreciate the need to pull themselves together and straighten out their lives. After all, paternalists need a dependent class.

It is also useful to emphasize that in a society of true individualists we would have far fewer social pathologies - individual failings, really -- since individuals would have such respect for themselves that they would live to their highest potential and not allow themselves to fall into such situations. Such a society would be one truly worth living in and would be in our true self-interest, since we would be educated, entertained, inspired, and enlightened by the achievements of our fellows.

Pride versus Paternalist Pandering. Another way to counter the paternalist pandering of the present system is to identify clearly its moral premises—a view of adults as children - and counter them with an appeal to pride. Most politicians appeal to voters and supporters with never-ending laundry lists of promised benefits and handouts. "If elected, I will make certain that every American has..." fill in the blank with any kind of material good or program. There is no end game for the paternalist since there is no end to the lists of desires that pandering politicians might dream up.

Since many citizens are very much mixed in their morality, appeals to shame and pride can be important weapons against the paternalist strategy. We might point out how citizens are being treated like infants. The paternalist says: "There, there little boys and girls. We know you're not up to the burden of raising your own children, earning enough money to educate them, insuring yourselves against illness or unemployment, saving for your retirement, tying your own shoes, or wiping your own noses without our help. Don't worry, we'll give you all you need." Proud individualists would find such paternalism a personal insult.

Paternalism is particularly dangerous because government benefits have been doled out gradually and built up, dragging individuals further down into the depths of dependency. Many Americans concede liberty but console themselves by pleading for the return of some of their money in the form of government benefits. As responsible individuals we should feel anger and resentment at the politicians who created and perpetuated this system, who are turning us into beggars. When such politicians offer us more handouts, we should react as we would if they offered us heroin. We should see politicians as pushers who addict us to government. They destroy our economic autonomy like heavy drug users destroying their autonomous minds. How many citizens want to think of themselves as pathetic, morally cripples created to serve the needs of paternalists?

Cultural Battles. Another battleground for reestablishing support for individual liberty is the culture. For individuals who are not professional philosophers or thinkers, values are usually communicated and reinforced in their moral habits through culture. and thus, this is a field to which the friends of freedom must pay increased attention. So we must attend to what values are celebrated in art, movies, TV shows and to what individuals are praised for, what achievements, in the media, in church sermons, by colleagues, friends, and family.

Of course, culture is not an arena in which one can fight battles the way one might do over a public policy before a legislative body. But consider just a small example of how that battle might be fought. Statues are meant to represent heroes, those whom we should honor for great achievements. Usually statues are of politicians or military leaders. Sometimes they are of artists, composers, or great authors: Michelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare. We need more statues of business leaders and entrepreneurs who communicate important values concerning man the creator. For example, currently the pharmaceutical industry is under attack for problems with some products. But this is an industry that more than nearly any other, has saved lives, eased suffering, and improved the quality of life. Citizens wishing to fight for an individualist culture might raise money to erect statues to individual men and women who have made great discoveries in the field of medicine.

The best example of cultural as well as intellectual promotion of individualism is found in the novels of Ayn Rand [3]. Presenting her themes in stories made the individualist morality more real than expositions in philosophical textbooks. We see in motion pictures today some of these individualist themes being taken up the notion of excellence in The Incredibles and love for one's work in The Aviator. For individualists, the arts are a cultural battleground they must move into.

A New Individualism

Individualism has political, ethical, and cultural meanings. Politically, it stands for individual liberty, the notion that each of us should be free to live our own lives as we see fit, as long as we respect the equal rights of others. Ethically, it means valuing ourselves; taking responsibility for our own happiness; striving for the best within us; taking pride in our achievement; and never accepting guilt for our virtues. Culturally, it means fostering, reinforcing, and celebrating the elements of individualism.

Today, libertarians make valid economic and political arguments for freedom but often ignore that case. Conservatives understand the need for a moral foundation but often favor religion and tradition, which are often unconvincing to many if not just plain wrong. A new individualism would provide that moral basis to buttress freedom and a society of proud achievers who would never tolerate limits on their legitimate liberty.

Political freedom cannot be maintained without individualist ideas and morality in the hearts and minds of enough people in a society. Thus, as we fight for freedom in this country, we must fight for a new individualism that will serve as the foundation for that freedom.

[1]

By David N. Mayer [2]

"The road is cleared."

"When forced to assume [self-government], we were novices in its science. Its principles and forms had entered little into our former education. We established, however, some, although not all its important principles."
--Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824.

It was in honor of the 50^th anniversary of the American Revolution that Thomas Jefferson wrote, in his last public letter: “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. . . . . All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.”

It is noteworthy that Jefferson qualified his pronouncement: “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.” Notwithstanding his characteristic optimism, Jefferson shared with his fellow Americans of the founding generation a realization that the Revolution they began in 1776 was still incomplete a half-century later. During his presidency and retirement years, he continued to believe that America had a mission to prove to the world “the degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave its individual members.” Indeed, as author of the Declaration of Independence, he was perhaps even more aware of how imperfectly the ideals of that founding document had been realized in American legal and political institutions. And he certainly was aware of the need for future constitutional change – of the need for laws and institutions to advance “with the progress of the human mind.”

Ayn Rand [3]clearly shared with Jefferson and other Founders the hope that America would serve as a model for the rest of the world. She began the conclusion to her March 6, 1974 address to the cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point by saying, “The United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.” Although her magnificent novel, Atlas Shrugged [4], depicts the United States in decline, at various places throughout the book Rand reminds her readers of the nobility of America’s founding ideals. One of the novel’s principal heroes, Francisco d’Anconia, describes this country as one “built on the supremacy of reason – and for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world.”

Through the uniquely effective mode of communication afforded by fiction-writing, particularly in the form of a novel, Rand presents her readers with a vision of America as it is today as well as a vision of what it could—and should—be. It is a utopian novel, in a sense; but unlike other classic works in that genre, it is not merely a radical critique of the status quo. Here it may be helpful to note the relevance of the symbolism of the Atlantis myth—a lost land populated by heroes—which Rand employs as a key theme throughout the novel. Atlas Shrugged [4] itself is Atlantis: its critique of modern America is presented in terms of the degree to which the nation has fallen short of its founders' vision, which is also Rand's. In this sense, the novel is at once radical and conservative—much like the American Revolution itself, as discussed below. Perhaps this feature of the novel explains both the breadth and the depth of its appeal, at least to American readers: Americans who read Atlas Shrugged [4] sense that the radically different philosophical vision Rand offers in the book is not entirely new but is rather the fulfillment of the Founders' vision, one that somehow had become lost by the last half of the twentieth century.

Rand was also aware that the American Revolution had been incomplete, and this awareness was part of her purpose for writing Atlas Shrugged [4]. As she stated in her essay “For the New Intellectual,” just a few years after the novel’s publication:

The world crisis of today is a moral crisis--and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution.

In so identifying the “moral crisis” of today and the “moral revolution” needed to resolve it, Rand was echoing the statements made by two of the principal heroes of Atlas Shrugged [4], John Galt and Francisco d’Anconia. Indeed, the heroes of the novel may be seen, essentially, as the Patriot leaders of a second American Revolution, to complete the first. Atlas Shrugged [4] is a significant book in many respects; one of its most significant aspects is the way Rand uses the novel to show us not only that the American Revolution was incomplete but also we must do to complete the Revolution—that is, to complete the unfinished work of 1776 and the hope that it represents to the world. This article discusses the historical background necessary to a full understanding of how the novel accomplishes this purpose.

Part One discusses the truly radical nature of the Revolution: the philosophy of government of America's Founders, who put the rights of the individual first and then attempted to design a system of government that would safeguard rather than destroy those rights. This revolution in the philosophy of government was neither sudden nor rapid. It did not happen on July 4, 1776, with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, for that was the culmination of a series of events traceable back to the founding of the English colonies in America. Nor was the revolution fully accomplished with the mere declaration of American independence: it required not only the successful waging of the Revolutionary War, but also the successful establishment and maintenance of new constitutions to help safeguard the Founders' vision of limited government.

That vision, however, was quite imperfect; and the Founders' revolution in the philosophy of government was incomplete, as the dramatic growth in the size and pervasiveness of governmental power (at all levels, and particularly the national government) in the twentieth century so vividly has illustrated. The American Revolution was incomplete – and the Founders' carefully devised constitutions failed – because the Founders' generation had no consensus about where exactly to draw the line between individual liberty and the coercive power of law, especially in the realm of economics. They failed, in short, to have a coherent theory of individual rights. This failure can be explained by two "gaps" in American thought, one in ethics and the other in politics.

Part Two discusses the first aspect in which the American Revolution was incomplete: the non-existent moral revolution. America's Founders compromised the premises on which their individualistic political philosophy rested by continuing to adhere to a profoundly anti-individualistic moral code, rooted in Judeo-Christian religion. Because that anti-individualistic moral code remained not only dominant but also virtually unchallenged in early American culture and intellectual thought, Americans continued to regard capitalism, money, and the profit motive as base, immoral, and even downright evil.

Part Three explores the second aspect in which the American Revolution was incomplete: the incomplete revolution in political thought and the law. Notwithstanding the Founders’ efforts to “Americanize” their political and legal systems, many ideas and institutions inherited from England—from a feudal, paternalistic society that by the eighteenth century had only partially shifted to a capitalist, individualistic society—persisted in early American politics and law. This section focuses on two important illustrations of the persistence of Old World, paternalistic, anti-capitalist or anti-individualist, notions in American politics and the law: the concepts of the so-called "public interest" and of "monopoly." These two concepts lie at the heart of government regulation of businesses "affected with the public interest" and the antitrust laws—the regulations and laws which today continue to severely limit the freedom of American businessmen and which formed the real-world inspiration for the horror stories Rand presents in Atlas Shrugged. [4]

Part Three also briefly discusses the failure of American constitutional law to safeguard individual rights against the rise of the twentieth century regulatory and welfare state. The so-called “New Deal revolution” on the U.S. Supreme Court in the late 1930s marked the modern Court’s failure to enforce the Constitution’s limits on the powers of government and its protection of economic liberty and property rights.

Finally, Part Four briefly discusses what must be done to complete the American Revolution, and the relevance of Atlas Shrugged [4] and of the Objectivist philosophy it presents, to accomplish that end.

I. RADICALISM OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The American Revolution was unlike any other great revolution in human history. Some scholars have characterized it as conservative, for—apart from the long, bloody war for independence from Great Britain—it lacked the cataclysmic social upheaval that characterized the later French and Russian revolutions. Yet the changes it brought to American society, governmental institutions, and philosophical thought were profound. Despite its apparent conservatism, the American Revolution was truly radical, in the literal sense of the term. Radical derives from the Latin word radix, meaning "root, base, foundation"; to be radical is to get to the root of the matter. The Revolutionaries of 1776, although influenced by a variety of classical political writings going as far back as Aristotle, managed to transcend much of the dogma of traditional western political thought and to profoundly rethink the origins, purpose, and limitations of government.

America's Founders established—for the first time in the history of the world—a society whose government was founded on recognition of the inherent, natural, and inalienable rights of the individual. They asserted the "self-evident" truths that Thomas Jefferson had stated in the Declaration of Independence: that "all men are created equal” and are endowed with “inherent and inalienable rights" of "life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness"; that "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"; and that "whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it."

A good society, the Founders believed, would have few laws.

The Founders institutionalized these principles by establishing written constitutions, founded on "the consent of the governed," and containing various institutional checks on the power of government designed to prevent it from being abused, for the Founders understood that, paradoxically, it was government—which was created to protect, or "secure," individual rights—that poses the greatest danger to them. The reason was the unique nature of political power: that government, alone of all institutions in society, may legitimately use force to achieve its ends. A good society, the Founders believed, would have few laws—laws that were clear to, and respected by, the people. Accordingly, they sought to create a "new science of politics" that not only checked the power of government, through constitutions, but also minimized the role of government (at all levels, but especially the national government) to a few, essential and legitimate functions.

These truly revolutionary changes did not all suddenly happen in 1776, however. The Declaration of Independence was the culmination of a series of events which may be traced back to the founding of the English colonies in North America. "What do we mean by the American Revolution?" John Adams rhetorically asked one of his correspondents, late in life. "The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations. . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution."

Although they considered themselves loyal subjects of the British king, colonial Americans were separated from their Old World countrymen by more than geography. The English colonies in North America each had its own unique history, but all had certain basic features in common. They were settled by people who, for one reason or another, were leaving Europe to find a new life in the wild lands across the Atlantic Ocean; to the settlers, it was quite literally a "New World." Some of the settlers were dissenters from England's established church—both Catholics and radical Protestant nonconformists—and thus came to America for religious freedom, or at least a greater degree of religious freedom than the laws of England permitted. Other settlers came to America seeking wealth: to them, the wilderness across the seas—as to later generations of Americans, the wilderness across the mountains, in the trans-Appalachian West—represented economic opportunity. Like the religious dissenters, those who came to America for economic reasons also sought a greater degree of freedom than was permitted under the stifling paternalism of English law. Whatever their reasons for emigrating to America, the English settlers generally might be regarded as a kind of distillate of people who somehow did not fit – or did not want to fit – in English society.

Significantly, the early colonization of North America coincided with one of the most turbulent time periods in English history: the seventeenth century, a century of revolution, which included not only the English Revolution, or Civil War, in mid-century but also the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, as well as the unstable years of the early eighteenth century following the Hanoverian succession. Most dramatically, this era witnessed the trial and execution of King Charles I and, for the eleven years of the Commonwealth (1649-60), England transformed from a monarchy to a republican form of government. Accompanying the political unrest of the times was a remarkably rich ferment of ideas. Writers such as Thomas Hobbes, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke questioned basic assumptions about the origin, purpose, and structure of government: Why have government at all? Which form of government is best, and why?

The settlers were a people who somehow did not fit-or did not want to fit-in English society.

Some, like Sidney, who was executed for treason in 1683, even lost their lives for their boldness in challenging orthodoxy. Political stability returned with the post-1689 settlement, which established the modern English constitutional system, with powers of the monarch greatly circumscribed and subordinated to those of Parliament. Radical dissent, once started, was not easily stopped, however; and in the 18th century new generations of dissenters from mainstream politics – the second and third generations of the "Commonwealthmen," or English radical Whigs, whom historian Caroline Robbins and other scholars have described – found a ready audience for their ideas in a small minority of their fellow Englishmen and in far greater numbers of their countrymen across the Atlantic.

The founding of the English colonies in North America and their evolution into mature political societies also corresponded in time with perhaps the most significant philosophical movement of the modern era, the Enlightenment. The American colonists were also profoundly influenced by the writings of Enlightenment rationalists, whose texts were cited along with those of the English radical Whigs, particularly when Americans argued for the legal recognition of their natural rights. The thinkers of the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment—Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and other lesser writers—also influenced American understanding of the social order and limited government.

The Declaration of Independence itself directly reflected the influence of Enlightenment ideas on the leaders of American Revolution. In drafting the Declaration, Jefferson employed the language of eighteenth century logic and rhetoric to present the argument for American independence; indeed, the overall argument of the Declaration is in the form of a syllogism—with a major premise, minor premise, and conclusion. Moreover, ideas expressed in the Declaration were given added persuasive power by their adherence to the best contemporary standards of mathematical and scientific demonstration; for example, in calling the key propositions of the major premise "self-evident truths," Jefferson used a term with a precise, technical meaning, which told his audience that they were like the axioms of Newtonian science. The grievances against George III in the main body of the Declaration were not only tyrannical acts which would justify rebellion against a monarch, under established principles of English constitutionalism, but also complaints that the King, in conspiracy with "others" (namely, his ministers and Parliament) had deprived Americans of their natural rights, including economic freedom.

The American Revolution was not quite radical enough.

As historian Gordon Wood has shown, the American Revolution was far more radical than commonly believed. Wood considers the Revolution to be "as radical as any revolution in history" as well as "the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history," altering not only the form of government—by eliminating monarchy and creating republics—but also Americans' view of governmental power. "Most important," he adds, "it made the interests and prosperity of ordinary people – their pursuits of happiness – the goal of society and government."

By rejecting the British monarchical system, America’s founders also rejected the paternalism through which the British system operated in the realms of law and politics. The rejection of paternalism was manifest in many developments in Revolutionary-era society, among them the rise of contracts and even the growing popularity of laissez-faire economics, perhaps best illustrated by the Philadelphia merchants' opposition to price controls in 1777-78. Moreover, Wood adds, "[t]he Revolution did not merely create a political and legal environment conducive to economic expansion; it also released powerful popular entrepreneurial and commercial energies that few realized existed and transformed the economic landscape of the country."

The far-reaching social changes that came into being with the American Revolution also were accompanied by correspondingly significant changes in law and constitutionalism. With independence, the American legal system—and particularly the constitutional system—was free to depart dramatically from its English roots. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," wrote Thomas Paine, succinctly describing the unprecedented opportunity Americans had after 1776 to frame new forms of government with written constitutions.

The first American constitutions were framed largely by a process of trial and error, as their framers experimented with a variety of devices to check governmental power, both to prevent it from being abused and to safeguard the rights of individuals. As previously noted, the Founders understood the essential paradox of government: that the very institution created to secure individual rights itself posed the greatest danger to them. Influenced by the English radical Whig political tradition, they understood that government, by its very nature – given its monopoly on the legitimate use of force in society—inherently threatened liberty and would abuse its power unless constrained by institutional checks.

Accordingly, they incorporated into the early American constitutions various devices for limiting power and safeguarding against its abuse. These included federalism (the division of powers between the national government and the states), the principle of separation of powers (at each level of government, separating its powers among three distinct and independent functional branches, legislative, executive, and judicial), frequent elections and "rotation in office" (what we call "term limits"), explicit rights guarantees in bills of rights, and the power of the people both to ratify and to amend the constitution.

The framers of the federal Constitution of 1787 benefited from the experience of Congress’s governance under our first national constitution, the Articles of Confederation, as well as the experience of the majority of the states, which had framed state constitutions during the period between 1776 and 1787. Hence, the Constitution of the United States utilized more of these devices for limiting power or safeguarding rights than did the early state constitutions, which were framed at a time when Americans were, in Jefferson’s words, “novices in the science of government.” State constitutions, for example, generally failed to enumerate legislative powers, vesting state legislatures with the broad, loosely-defined regulatory power known as the “police power.” Although most did follow the principle of separation of powers, they generally did not supplement it with checks and balances, as the federal Constitution did. Only in one respect was the federal Constitution lacking—the document as adopted by the Constitutional Convention failed to include a separate bill of rights—but that omission was quickly remedied by the addition of the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

Even with their new constitutions, however, Americans of the early national period struggled to fully implement in politics and law the radical changes resulting from American independence. During the 1790s, the first decade of national government under the new Constitution of the United States, the two-party American political system emerged from Americans’ competing visions about how to “secure” the Revolution. When the opposition party led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—their self-described “republican” party—defeated the previously-dominant Federalist Party in the elections of 1800, Jefferson called their victory “the revolution of 1800.” He saw it as a vindication of the American Revolution, “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.”

The Federalists had failed to fully grasp the radical promise of the American Revolution, or to fully reject the English paternalistic view of government; their principles, rooted in what Jefferson called the “doctrines of Europe,” emphasized use of the coercive power of government to order society. The Jeffersonian Republicans, in contrast, distrusted political power (even when they wielded it) and emphasized instead the ability of people to govern themselves and of a free-market society to order itself. The Republicans’ political ascendancy after 1801—the Federalists became a permanent minority party at the national level and disappeared altogether by the 1820s, the “era of good feelings”—signaled to Jefferson a magnificent opportunity for America. Its mission, as he frequently noted in his writings during the first two and half decades of the nineteenth century, was to prove to the world “what is the degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave it’s [sic] individual members.”

When the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831-32, he was so struck by the profound differences between America and Europe that he wrote a book, his famous Democracy in America, to warn his countrymen of the tremendous changes that the American Revolution had wrought. He began the book by noting that among those differences "nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people." He described the people in America as free, independent individuals who not only held equal rights under the law but also related to one another as social equals—in vivid contrast to his native society, where notwithstanding the egalitarian impulses of the French Revolution, people still thought in terms of rigid social classes. Indeed, he coined the term individualism to describe Americans’ attitude about themselves: “They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.”

America’s Founders indeed had radically transformed traditional ideas about the individual, society, and the role of government; their new nation offered proof to the world that it was possible for people to create, in Jefferson’s words, something “new under the sun.” Notwithstanding the profound changes they had made in politics and law—particularly with the novelty of written constitutions, with various devices for limiting governmental power and keeping it accountable to the people—the Founders’ revolution was not complete. In many important ways, they failed to fully transcend the Old World from which they had rebelled. Not only in law and politics, but in other important fields, the American Revolution was not quite radical enough. The result was that the principles of 1776, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, were quite imperfectly realized in American politics and law. Government, which was supposed to be instituted in order to “secure” the natural rights of the individual, continued to pose the greatest threat to those rights, especially in the sphere of economics. As the Industrial Revolution swept over the United States during the late nineteenth century, the rights of all Americans—including the businessmen who were bringing about the industrialization of America—were only marginally more secure here than they were in Europe. The mixed ideology in American political thought of the Founding period and the nineteenth century made possible the so-called "mixed economy" of the twentieth century.

II. THE NON-EXISTENT MORAL REVOLUTION

Unfortunately, the American political revolution was not accompanied by a revolution in moral philosophy. Many of the Founders adhered to traditional Judeo-Christian ethics based on altruism. Others, as "free-thinking" students of the Scottish Enlightenment—men such as Thomas Jefferson—instead naively believed that humans had an instinctive "moral sense" that vaguely inculcated one's moral "duties" to others. Under either the traditional or the "enlightened" ethics, it was regarded as "immoral" for an individual to pursue his own self-interest, even if he did so in such a way as not to harm others or even to interfere with the equal freedom of others to do the same. To be "moral," it was assumed, one must sacrifice one's self-interest to the "needs" of others.

To be "moral," was it was assumed, one must sacrifice one's self-interest to the "needs" of others.

Such a moral philosophy—rooted in older visions of a homogeneous communitarian society—was hardly compatible with the reality of American capitalism: the free, robust society of energetic, enterprising individuals, mutually profiting from each others' pursuit of their self-interests—the society described in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Indeed, just as Tocqueville had to coin the term individualism to describe the unique way he observed Americans relating to one another in society, he also invented a concept that he called “the principle of interest rightly understood” to describe Americans’ moral code. As Tocqueville understood it, this principle moderated or tempered American individualism; it produced “no great acts of self-sacrifice” but prompted “daily small acts of self-denial.”

The persistent and pervasive influence of the Judeo-Christian altruistic moral code in American society should not be surprising, given the strong hold that Christian religion had on most Americans, particularly after the Second Great Awakening and other religious revivals in the nineteenth century. These revival movements were followed by the so-called “social gospel” movement, which sought to give Christianity a greater “social relevance” by preaching the ethics of Jesus, the values of altruism and self-sacrifice. Preachers of the social gospel were among the leading proponents of the regulatory/welfare state—and the leading critics of individualism.

When the great American classical liberal philosopher, William Graham Sumner, defended American capitalism in the late nineteenth century—including not only the free-market system but also specifically the rights of capitalists to keep the wealth they had earned—he conceded that it was difficult for Americans to overcome what he called “the old ecclesiastical prejudice in favor of the poor against the rich.” Without directly challenging the traditional Christian altruistic moral code, Sumner nevertheless suggested that in ethics as well as in public policy, American society needed a new code, based on his vision of the Golden Rule: “Laissez-faire,” or translated “into blunt English,” as he put it, “Mind your own business”—the “doctrine of liberty” and personal responsibility.

III. THE INCOMPLETE LEGAL AND POLITICAL REVOLUTION

To paraphrase a late-eighteenth century English radical Whig: America's Founding Fathers were provident, but not provident enough. They created written constitutions with various devices designed to check the abuse of power and to safeguard individual rights; but their handiwork was imperfect in many ways. As noted in Part I, the Founders were, in Jefferson's words, "novices in the science of government"; the early American constitutions—including the United States Constitution of 1789, as amended by the Bill of Rights in 1791—were often more the product of experimentation, of trial and error, or even of political compromise than of deliberate design. Even after Jefferson's so-called "revolution of 1800" and the reinvigoration of first principles he believed it represented, there were many unresolved fundamental problems and inconsistencies in American government and law.

Economic liberty and property rights were imperfectly protected by American constitutions, both state and federal.

Among the most important of these were the various ways in which economic liberty and property rights were imperfectly protected by American constitutions, both state and federal. Notwithstanding explicit protections of liberty and property rights, generally—most notably, under the Fifth Amendment due process clause of the federal constitution and its equivalent provision in most state constitutions—American constitutional law in the nineteenth century permitted both state and federal governments to regulate business in various ways reminiscent of the old English paternalistic system. As the United States became more industrialized by the late nineteenth century, government regulation of business expanded in scope, both quantitatively and qualitatively, under two general rationales: government regulation of businesses "affected with the public interest" and government prohibition of “monopolies” through the antitrust laws.

A. Civic Republicanism and the Chimera of "Public Interest"

In American political thought, coexistent with the dominant radical Whig, or libertarian, political tradition—with its emphasis on individual rights—there was an older, competing tradition. This tradition, which scholars have called the "civic republican" tradition, traceable back to ancient Rome, preached civic "virtue" as consisting in the subordination of self-interest to the "public interest," or "common good." This notion was central to sixteenth and seventeenth century paternalistic theories of government. An interesting example in English law is the 1606 decision by the Exchequer Court in Bate's Case, upholding the power of King James I, without consent of Parliament, to impose a tax on imported goods, under the rationale that the king had virtually unlimited discretionary power when he was acting for the “general benefit of the people.”

The "public welfare" is an elastic concept which justified virtually limitless expansion of the police power.

The concept of the “public interest” or “common good” being paramount to private interests, unfortunately, persisted in American political thought and in American law. One consequence was a hostile attitude toward commerce and commercial activities that long has been part of American culture but which, too, was incompatible with a capitalist, "free enterprise" economy. Another consequence was an ambiguity inherent in the definition of the “police power,” the general regulatory power vested in state legislatures to pass laws limiting individual freedom and property rights. Traditionally, the police power was exercised to protect public health, safety, and morals. Courts and legal commentators in the nineteenth century justified the exercise of the power in terms of the old common-law principle of nuisance, which limited uses of one’s property that were harmful to other persons or the general public. The scope of the police power, however, “proved incapable of precise delineation,” in the words of a modern legal scholar. Not only were the traditional categories of public health, safety, and morals ill-defined, but the courts added new categories—including, by the early twentieth century, the category of “public welfare,” the elastic concept which justified virtually limitless expansion of the police power.

The rise of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century, during the several decades following the end of the Civil War, was accompanied by a growth in government regulation of business, at both the state and federal levels, under expansive definitions of the states' "police power" and Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. Not surprisingly, the railroad industry was the first major industry in the United States subjected to regulation by government commissions, first at the state level and then at the federal level with the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887.

The Supreme Court, in a series of decisions beginning in the 1870s, sanctioned this expanded role of government by applying the old, seventeenth century English concept of "public interest"—particularly, "business affected with a public interest"—to undercut the constitutional safeguards given property and economic liberty through the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. For example, in the early landmark case of Munn v. Illinois, the Court uphold an Illinois law, passed at the behest of the farmers’ association known as the Grange, which set maximum rates that grain elevators could charge in Chicago. Citing seventeenth century English precedents, the majority of the justices held that the law was a legitimate exercise of the police power, under the rationale that the storage of grain (in elevators owned by railroad companies) was a “business affected with a public interest.” Although the Court in a series of decisions during the first three decades of the twentieth century tried to delineate the scope of this concept, by the mid-1930s the majority of the justices concluded that there was “no closed class or category of businesses affected with a public interest,” thus opening the floodgates to all sorts of government regulation, including the licensing of a wide variety of occupations.

B. Antitrust vs. Capitalism

The rise of "trusts"—business combinations, such as holding companies, designed to enhance efficiency—was a response by businesses to the intense competition that characterized most major American industries in the late 19th century. Populists and other proponents of bigger government during the so-called "Progressive" era often exploited the public's fear of big business in making the case for their political programs. Responding to American public opinion—which was profoundly distrustful, indeed paranoid, about "big" business—as well as political pressure from various special interest groups, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, allegedly to "protect" competition from the supposed threats of the trusts. Unfortunately, when it passed the Sherman Act, Congress deliberately used vague terms such as monopoly and restraint of trade, the meaning of which were undergoing substantial changes in popular and legal culture at the time. Thus Congress left for the courts the crucial task of interpreting the provisions of the law and so determining precisely what sort of business practices it made criminal.

Antirust law subjected American businessmen to vague legal standards.

Antitrust law, together with the law of unfair trade practices, subjected American businessmen in the twentieth century to vague legal standards, under which entrepreneurs may be penalized for being too effective, or too good, as competitors. Consider, for example, the problem of pricing one's goods or services. Ayn Rand [3] only slightly exaggerated the dilemma that the antitrust laws created when she described it this way:

If [a businessman] charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly, or, rather, for a successful “intent to monopolize"; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “unfair competition” or “restraint of trade”; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “collusion” or “conspiracy."

Rand also aptly described the precarious position in which the law leaves American businessmen:

This means that a businessman has no way of knowing in advance whether the action he takes is legal or illegal, whether he is guilty or innocent. It means that a businessman has to live under the threat of a sudden, unpredictable disaster, taking the risk of losing everything he owns or being sentenced to jail, with his career, his reputation, his property, his fortune, the achievement of his whole lifetime left at the mercy of any ambitious young bureaucrat who, for any reason, public or private, may choose to start proceedings against him.

Essentially the same criticism has been made by modern economists critical of the antitrust laws.

A notorious example of the injustice of antitrust law from the turn of the last century involved the man who probably was the real-life model for Nathaniel Taggart: James J. Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railroad Company, the only major transcontinental line built entirely by private capital, without federal land grants or other government subsidies. When Hill created the Northern Securities Company, a holding company combining his and his partners' railroads into a larger company in order to avert a takeover attempt by the Harriman interests who controlled the Union Pacific, the Company was immediately targeted by President Teddy Roosevelt's "trust-busting" campaign. The Justice Department brought suit under the Sherman Act; and the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 opinion written by Justice Harlan, found the Company in violation of the Act as a "restraint of trade," even though the creation of the Company in fact had enhanced competition.

Another oft-cited example is that of ALCOA, found guilty of antitrust violations in the 1945 case, United States v. Aluminum Company of America, because, in the words of Judge Learned Hand in his opinion for the court, the company produced more of its product to meet the public demand:

It [ALCOA] insists that it never excluded competitors; but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections, and the elite of personnel.

Thus has antitrust law been used in the twentieth century to penalize, for their ability, men of magnificent productive achievement: whether James J. Hill at the beginning of the century, or men such as Bill Gates today.

Application of the antitrust laws to Gates’ company, Microsoft, in recent years has prompted many commentators to question particularly the application of antitrust laws to high-technology industries. The Microsoft case, moreover, has prompted not just academics, but also “mainstream media” commentators to question the wisdom of the antitrust laws generally.

Ayn Rand [3]was a good student of American business history. The world she portrayed in Atlas Shrugged [4], of course, exaggerated this fatal flaw in the law – but only slightly. As she said in her 1964 lecture "Is Atlas Shrugging?", "the principles of every edict and every directive presented in Atlas Shrugged—such as `The Equalization of Opportunity Bill' or `Directive 10-289'—can be found, and in cruder forms, in our antitrust laws."

C. The Failure of the Constitution

The rise of the twentieth century regulatory/welfare state also can be explained in terms of the failure of the Constitution, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, to curb the power of government, particularly the federal government, and to safeguard individual rights, particularly property rights and economic liberty. Although the Court’s sanctioning of broad federal regulatory power over business can be traced to a series of cases in the late nineteenth century and the early decades (the so-called “Progressive era”) of the twentieth century, the significant shift in the Court’s interpretation of key constitutional provisions occurred in the so-called “New Deal revolution” of the late 1930s. Prior to a series of landmark decisions in 1937, the Court had protected economic liberty and property rights as part of the “liberty of contract” it had recognized as a fundamental right safeguarded by the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment, against federal and state regulatory laws that went beyond the traditional confines of the police power. The Court also had applied the Tenth Amendment—which reserves powers not granted to the federal government to either the states or to “the people”—to limit the reach of Congress’s powers to regulate interstate commerce and to spend the money it collected through federal taxes. After 1937, the Court ceased to protect liberty of contract as a fundamental right; it also allowed Congress to exercise broad, virtually unlimited, powers to regulate commerce and to spend money—upholding, among other things, federal labor laws and the Social Security Act.

After 1937, the Court ceased to protect liberty of contract as a fundamental right.

The Supreme Court’s post-1937 “liberal” constitutionalism generally has meant not only that Congress has virtually unlimited powers to regulate business but that a double standard exists in the Court’s protection of individual rights. Those “preferred freedoms,” which is to say those rights that left-liberal judges value most—First Amendment freedom of speech and the press, certain rights of accused persons under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual” punishments, and the unenumerated “right to privacy”—have been broadly protected, as fundamental rights, against laws that lack a “compelling” governmental interest to justify limiting individual freedom. On the other hand, those rights not favored by left-liberal judges—including economic liberty and property rights—have been given minimal, if any, constitutional protection; these rights can be restricted by any laws meeting the modern Court’s minimal “rational basis” test—that is, any government regulation deemed “reasonable in relation to its subject” and “adopted in the interests of the community.” Under this broad standard, virtually all kinds of government regulation of business have been upheld by the courts against constitutional challenges.

The Court’s failure to protect economic liberty and property rights against expanding governmental powers can be explained in various ways: for example, as a result of changes in personnel on the Court, or as a result of the justices’ historical tendency to give little regard for individual rights, generally. In a 1973 essay, Ayn Rand [3] offered an especially insightful explanation of the Court’s failure to protect individual rights, when she found that the justices generally were guilty of “context-dropping”—that is, of failing to appreciate the importance of context—in interpreting the Constitution. One could say that it is not just justices on the Supreme Court but also other judges, lawyers, legal scholars and commentators—indeed, virtually all players in the modern debate over constitutional interpretation—who have failed to take a contextual view of the Constitution and its essential function, to protect individual rights.

IV. CONLCUSION: COMPLETING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

To be sure, Atlas Shrugged [4] portrays America in decline, as the inevitable consequence of its “mixed economy.” But the significance of the novel goes far beyond its critique of the modern regulatory/welfare state. Rand herself noted that the story of Atlas Shrugged [4] "demonstrates that the basic conflict of our age is not merely political or economic, but moral and philosophical," the conflict between "two opposite schools of philosophy, or two opposite attitudes toward life": what she called the "reason-individualism-capitalism axis" and the "mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis." That conflict is at the heart of the basic contradictions in American law and constitutionalism discussed in the previous sections.

To resolve the conflict, and to place the Founders' "new science of politics" upon a firm philosophical footing—and thus to complete the work of the American Revolution—we need not only to reaffirm the Founders' commitment to individual rights but to ground that commitment in a coherent theory of rights. Constitutional protections of life, liberty, and property have been proven insufficient to guard individuals from the tyranny of the so-called "common good" or the "public interest"; we must realize, as clearly and as fully as Rand did, that there is no such thing, that it is an undefined and an indefinable concept, and that this "tribal notion" indeed "has served as the moral justification of most social systems—and of all tyrannies—in history."

By presenting a new code of ethics—the morality of rational self-interest—Rand’s novel helps to provide what the Founders failed to grasp, the missing element of the American Revolution: the moral justification of capitalism, and with it, of the rights of all persons—including the American businessman. Although Atlas Shrugged [4] outlines the essential principles of Objectivism [5]as a philosophical system, the format of a novel—even one as philosophical as Atlas – has inherent limitations. As David Kelley, founder of The Atlas Society, has observed, the complete development of a new philosophy, particularly one based on reason as Objectivism [5] is, requires much work by many thinkers. Like the American Revolution, Objectivism [5] is incomplete: among the many areas where gaps or inconsistencies appear in Rand’s presentation of the philosophy, not only in Atlas Shrugged [4]but in her subsequent non-fiction works, are many of the areas most relevant to the completion of the American Revolution: political philosophy and philosophy of law. Among other things, a comprehensive theory of rights (particularly of constitutional rights, or rights against the government) and a contextualist theory of constitutional interpretation need to be developed. The Constitution of the United States needs to be rediscovered, not just as it was meant to be understood by its framers but also as the text of the document calls for, as a limitation on the powers of government and a safeguard of individual rights. To fully protect property rights and all aspects of the basic right to liberty, including economic liberty, it might even be necessary to add such provisions to the text as the amendment suggested by Judge Narragansett, in the concluding section of Atlas Shrugged: [4] “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.”

To complete the American Revolution, much work has yet to be done. Thanks to Ayn Rand [3]’s magnificent novel, however, we can identify the path along which we must travel to reach that destination. As John Galt states in the closing lines of the novel, “The road is cleared.”

David N. Mayer is professor of law and history at Capital University Law School. He teaches courses in constitutional history, copyright law, law and american history, legal history, unfair trade practice, and a seminar in libertarianism and the law. Mayer is the author of The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson [6] and Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right. [7]

This article was published in the Spring 2009 print edition of The New Individualist magazine, a publication of The Atlas Society. This essay expands upon the paper that the author presented at The Atlas Society’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, held in Washington, D.C. on October 6, 2007. The essay first appeared in the Spring 2008 edition of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Copyright © 2008 David N. Mayer.

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

--Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1792.

Demands for Social Justice

Welfarism: the unchosen obligation

Egalitarianism: “fair” distribution

Toward an individualist ethics

The trader principle

Benevolence as a chosen value

The fourth revolution

The Need for a New Individualism