In an implicit acknowledgment of the failure of socialism, the communist regime in Cuba has announced that it is legalizing thousands of private businesses, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. The government wants to encourage more entrepreneurship with its legalization plan.
According to the article, “The government also underscored that private enterprise has a positive role to play in the island’s future, marking a change in tone after decades criticizing the free market as the work of U.S. imperialism.” A document issued by Cuba’s Communist Party Congress stated, “Private property in certain means of production contributes to employment, economic efficiency and well-being, in a context in which socialist property relationships predominate.”
What Cuba is obviously doing is following the China model — permitting people to exercise some degree of economic enterprise in order to alleviate the desperate economic conditions that have besieged the Cuban people ever since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, not only because of socialism but also because of the brutal U.S. economic embargo that U.S. officials have enforced for more than 50 years.
Now that Cuba is adopting some degree of economic enterprise, some Americans might be tempted to conclude that Cuba is embracing the libertarian concept of economic liberty.
Nothing could be further from the truth. And the same goes for China, notwithstanding the enormous amount of economic prosperity the Chinese people have experienced during the past 20 years.
The reason is expressed in the document that Americans will be celebrating next month: the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson made a profound and revolutionary observation.
Man’s rights do not come from government. Instead, they preexist government. They are independent of government. In fact, the only legitimate reason for government is to protect the exercise of these preexisting and independent rights. When government instead becomes destructive of man’s rights, it is the right of the people to alter or even abolish it, instituting new government that will protect, not destroy, people’s fundamental rights.
Among these rights are liberty. But what does that word mean? Does it only mean not being in a jail cell?
No, we all know it means much more than that. It includes, for example, such things as religious liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press — the fundamental rights enunciated in the First Amendment.
But liberty also encompasses the concept of economic liberty or freedom of trade. That means the right to sustain one’s life through labor, the right to enter into mutually beneficial trades with others, the right to accumulate the fruits of one’s earnings, and the right to do what one wants with his own money.
These aspects of liberty are as fundamental as freedom of religions, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech. They preexist government. They are independent of government.
Our American ancestors clearly understood the concept of rights. How do we know this? Because they carefully phrased the Bill of Rights to prohibit the federal government from depriving people of their (preexisting) rights. They carefully made sure that they weren’t saying that people’s rights come from the government.
That’s why the Cuban announcement is not freedom, just as the Chinese system is not freedom. When government is “letting” people engage in economic enterprise, that’s not the exercise of fundamental rights. That’s the government permitting people to do certain things, much as a child is permitted by his parents to do certain things.
If the Cuban people understood the right concept of rights, they would recognize that they don’t need the permission of their government to exercise their fundamental rights.
Wouldn’t we find it offensive if the government said it was letting us read certain books? Or letting us go to church? Or letting us protest governmental corruption and wrongdoing?
That’s because we understand that freedom is not something that government officials permit us to have. Freedom preexists government. It’s independent of government. The purpose of government is not to legalize freedom but instead to protect the exercise of rights that preexist government.
Another way we know that our ancestors understood that rights are not privileges was by virtue of the economic system they brought into existence — one in which people were free to engage in economic enterprise without governmental interference, keep everything they earn, and decide for themselves what to do with their own income and wealth.
That is, no income tax and no welfare state, no regulated or managed economy, and no national security state. A free enterprise system within a limited-government, constitutional republic. That was the most unique economic and political system in the history of man.
That’s what our ancestors celebrated every Fourth of July. They celebrated free enterprise, not “permitted” enterprise. They celebrated capitalism, not socialism. They celebrated freedom, not privilege.
