Freedom Is Not Compatible with Government’s Initiation of Force against Innocent People
By Robert Higgs • Wednesday January 26, 2011 8:53 AM PDT • 12 Comments
In yesterday’s New York Times appears an op-ed article by Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard. Glaeser’s article is remarkable because arguments in favor of freedom, insisting that economic analysis implicitly rests on a moral presumption that individual freedom has fundamental value, do not appear every day—or every month—in “the newspaper of record.” So, I am glad to give two cheers to Glaeser, one for his theme and another for his courage in placing the argument in such a hostile outlet.
I cannot give Glaeser a third cheer, however, because toward the end of the article he inserts a concession that I find wholly inconsistent with the rest of the argument. He writes:
Economists’ fondness for freedom rarely implies any particular policy program. A fondness for freedom is perfectly compatible with favoring redistribution, which can be seen as increasing one person’s choices at the expense of the choices of another, or with Keynesianism and its emphasis on anticyclical public spending.
Many regulations can even be seen as force for freedom, like financial rules that help give all investors the freedom to invest in stocks by trying to level the playing field.
To be sure, many mainstream economists do think about policy just as Glaeser says they do. But in doing so, they are mistaken. I find it difficult to believe that a man of Glaeser’s intelligence has really given much thought to what he is saying in these passages.
In fact, a presumption in favor of freedom rules out virtually everything that modern governments do, certainly nearly everything they do in interfering in economic affairs. Redistribution of income, for example, requires that the government rob Peter in order to benefit Paul (and its own functionaries, who serve as middlemen in this transfer). This action is not freedom; it is a crime against Peter, a raw violation of his right to his own legitimate property. Keynesian countercyclical spending requires the government to spend borrowed money whose acquisition is premised on future taxation (that is, robbery) of taxpayers in order to service the debt and repay the principal. Again, innocent persons have their rights violated. How can anyone fail to see that robbery is incompatible with freedom? Finally, the financial rules that Glaeser finds compatible with freedom entail threats of violence against financial transactors who do not follow arbitrary government rules—often extremely foolish and even destructive rules—in making their transactions, notwithstanding the fact that the parties to the transaction may be perfectly willing to proceed without such regulatory compliance. Such regulation is the very opposite of freedom; it is instead the sheer imposition of outside force, intruding on willing transactors, and thereby discouraging them to some extent, if not entirely, with consequent loss of the wealth that such transactions would have created, in addition to the loss of liberty.
Perhaps it is unseemly for someone such as I to make a recommendation to a Harvard professor, yet I cannot resist the urge to suggest that Glaeser read, say, Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market. Expositions of that sort would help him to gain a clearer vision of the distinction between individual freedom and state domination in economic affairs. Glaeser quotes Milton Friedman to good effect in his article, but Friedman’s writings ought to be the beginning, rather than the end of wisdom in this area. In regard to freedom, Friedman’s arguments were good as far as they went, but they did not go nearly far enough. Like Glaser, Friedman was prepared to make many concessions to state power, and his focus on utilitarian arguments, as opposed to moral principles, diminished the intellectual force of his laudable efforts to enlarge the scope of liberty in economic affairs.
Tags: Economics, Free Market, Liberty, Morality, Personal Liberty, Property Rights, Regulation, Taxation, The State, Utilitarianism, Welfare 
I agree. My conversion to full anarchism was a long and arduous one. It was Rothbard’s irrefutable logic that finally convinced me.
In short, initiating violence against the innocent is always wrong, no matter the circumstances. The state, by its very nature, requires violence or its threat, regardless of how well intentioned its ends might be.
Maybe Mr. Glaeser will come around, but I doubt it. The image of a Hobbesian all against all world of chaos is quite compelling for those unwilling to question conventional wisdom.
Steve Hogan | Jan 26, 2011 | Reply
“Until the end of World War I, the overwhelming majority of the public in Europe accepted monarchical rule as legitimate (Etienne de la Boetie, The Politics of Obedience; David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary)” (quoted from Hoppe in Democracy: The God That Failed).
As long as the system “works,” most people, including professors, do not look at things in a principled or moral way.
pinkteddybear888 | Jan 26, 2011 | Reply
Maybe the concept of freedom of Glaeser is different from the one hard-core libertarians like Mr. Higgs defend.
In Glaeser’s article I didn’t fully understand the fact that neoclassical microeconomic analysis rests on the principle of individual freedom. He says:
“Improvements in welfare occur when there are improvements in utility, and those occur only when an individual gets an option that wasn’t previously available. We typically prove that someone’s welfare has increased when the person has an increased set of choices.
When we make that assumption (which is hotly contested by some people, especially psychologists), we essentially assume that the fundamental objective of public policy is to increase freedom of choice.”
But, really? Modern welfare microeconomics has very little to do with individual freedom, I might say. Moreover, if I am not mistaken, it was this kind of analysis that socialists like Oskar Lange used to defend central planning.
Angel Martin | Jan 27, 2011 | Reply
“Redistribution of income, for example, requires that the government rob Peter in order to benefit Paul.”
Of course, that is true. What goes unsaid, but is just as true:
“Landed Property, for example, requires that the government rob Indians in order to benefit Settlers.”
White Indian | Jan 27, 2011 | Reply
The key here, and the point that Glaeser is missing, is that with redistributive taxation and welfare one person gains choices (wealth, money, power) at the expense of another’s (wealth, money, power).
The next step in that logic, that ALL government action is redistributive, leads thought closer to anarcho-capitalism.
Chris Breaux | Jan 27, 2011 | Reply
Angel,
Of course, Professor Glaeser’s idea of individual freedom differs from my own idea. But as Pierre Lemieux has shown in an excellent recent article, neoclassical welfare economics cannot escape the need for normative underpinnings. Its pose of value neutrality is without solid foundation, even within its own terms of reference. So, one need not invoke natural rights, Austrian economics, or anything else outside the orthodoxy to show the bankruptcy of neoclassical welfare economics. Lemieux’s article may be found at http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_11_01_02_lemieux.pdf .
Robert Higgs | Jan 27, 2011 | Reply
Thank you very much for the reference, Bob.
Angel Martin | Jan 27, 2011 | Reply
I’m reminded of “the forgotten man” — not the perversion of FDR but the 1883 essay by William Graham Sumner.
Basically, “A and B decide what C shall do for D”. C, the forgotten man, is the one without a choice. Maybe Prof. Glaeser needs to read that.
Novista | Jan 29, 2011 | Reply
Freedom is a policy that prohibits (any and all other) policy. Policy is anti-freedom PER SE, since policy is a code word for forcing someone to do other than what he wants to do, or prohibiting him from doing something that impairs no one else’s rights.
N. Joseph Potts | Jan 29, 2011 | Reply