There was once a time when religious liberty had never before been considered. Throughout history, people lived under political systems in which government and religion were combined. Since it was the system under which they had been born and raised and which existed all over the world, people just didn’t give any thought to an alternative. Then one day, after centuries of conflict, discord, and corruption, someone came along with a radical idea: let’s separate religion and the state. Let’s relegate religious activity to the private sector and prohibit the government from controlling or regulating it. Let’s establish freedom of religion.
That principle, of course, was firmly established when our American ancestors called the federal government into existence. First of all, the power to establish, control, or regulate religious activity was not among the powers delegated to the federal government in the Constitution. Second, to make sure federal officials got the point, the First Amendment expressly guaranteed religious liberty for the United States.
It was among the greatest gifts that our ancestors could have ever bequeathed us, ensuring that future generations of Americans would be spared the horrific consequences that inevitably flow from a combination of church and state. But it was made possible only by people who were willing to raise their vision to a higher level, one that went beyond trying to reform the state religion system and instead separated religion and the state.
That is what we Americans living today should do with respect to the welfare-warfare state under which we have been born and raised. Instead of developing ways to reform and fix welfare-warfare state programs, we should instead lift our vision to a higher level, one that brings economic liberty and a limited-government republic to the United States. It would be among the greatest gifts we could ever give ourselves and succeeding generations.
We have all been born and raised in a welfare state, a way of life in which the federal government is charged with the responsibility of collecting taxes from people with the aim of giving the money to others. We are taught that the primary aim of this system is to help the poor, but we all know that the welfare-state money also goes to people who are not poor, including rich corporations, the middle class, foreign dictators, multimillionaire seniors, large contributors to political campaigns, and a host of other people who have the right political connections.
The welfare state also encompasses the tens of thousands of regulations that govern economic activity, including minimum-wage laws, tariffs, sanctions, and embargoes.
It also includes the decades-long war on drugs, a war that purports to protect us from ourselves by sending us to jail for long periods if we are caught selling, possessing, or ingesting illicit substances.
No different is the warfare, or the national-security, state, under which most of us have also been born and raised. It consists of an enormous standing army, a military-industrial complex, the CIA, the NSA, and a vast empire of military bases that spans the globe. In the name of “national security,” the warfare state has long engaged in a vast array of operations in foreign countries, including regime-change operations, assassinations, support of dictatorial regimes, foreign interventions, invasions, occupations, and interference with the political affairs of other countries.
Here at home, as a consequence of its foreign activities, the national- security state now wields omnipotent powers that have traditionally been wielded by totalitarian dictatorships. They include the power to spy on, monitor, and collect information on everyone’s personal activity; to take people into custody and incarcerate them indefinitely in military installations; to torture people; and even to assassinate them. It’s all justified under the name of “national security,” a term that isn’t even found in the Constitution.
Genuine freedom
The questions that every American should be confronting are: What does it really mean to be free? Does a free society entail the power of government to force people to be good, caring, and compassionate? Does freedom entail the power of government to seize money from one group of people and give it to another group? Does freedom entail the power of government to interfere with peaceful economic transactions? Does freedom entail the power of government to punish a person for ingesting what some people consider to be harmful substances? Does freedom entail living under a government that wields the same powers that totalitarian dictators wield? Can people truly be considered free when their own government claims the powers to assassinate them, spy on them, monitor and collect information on their personal lives, torture them, and incarcerate them indefinitely in installations run by the military and CIA?
None of that is genuine freedom. True freedom involves the right of people to engage in any peaceful activity without the interference of government. That includes not just religious activity but also economic activity. What a person does with the economic aspects of his life is as personal as what he does in the religious parts of his life.
Genuine freedom entails the right of people to freely enter into economic exchanges with others, to accumulate the fruits of their earnings, and to decide what to do with their own money — donate, spend, save, or invest it.
True freedom entails the right of a person to ingest anything he wants to ingest, without being punished for it by the government.
Real freedom also entails living under a governmental system whose powers are divided and strictly limited to protecting people from frauds, murderers, rapists, and other violent people. Freedom entails a governmental structure based on the principles of a republic, not an empire. Thus, freedom necessarily entails a central government with few powers, one without a vast standing army, military-industrial complex, CIA, NSA, or foreign military empire.
What Americans are living under today is really just one great big racket that permits the people in the nonproductive sector of society — i.e., the welfare-warfare sector — to live off the trillions in taxes collected from the productive sector — i.e., the private sector.
To keep the racket going, the nonproductive sector needs the support of the productive sector. For the past several decades, the welfare-warfare sector has been remarkably successful in inducing people in the productive sector to continue the welfare-warfare racket.
One of the principal ways that welfare-warfare statists garner the support of people in the private sector to sustain the racket is to convince them that a welfare state is necessary and essential to the survival and well-being of society.
Without a welfare state, Americans are told, people would be dying in the streets from starvation, illness, neglect, and homelessness.
If there were no minimum-wage laws, employers would drive wages down to subsistence levels. The laws of supply and demand just don’t apply to labor markets, the welfare statists say.
If drugs were legalized, everyone would immediately rush to the nearest drug facility and begin smoking dope, snorting cocaine, and injecting heroin.
That is all nonsense, but the fact that so many Americans have bought into it reflects the degree to which they have lost confidence in freedom, free will, freedom of choice, and a genuine free-market system. A true free-enterprise society — one in which the government is prohibited from infringing on economic liberty — not only produces the wealth and prosperity that raises people’s standard of living, especially that of the poor, it also lifts people’s sense of conscience, responsibility, and moral duty to their fellow man.
When it comes to the warfare state, fear and doubt are also the coins of the realm. If the national- security state were dismantled, apologists say, the United States would be taken over by the communists, terrorists, drug dealers, or some other scary creatures. To make certain that people remain agitated and afraid, the warfare state provokes or seizes upon an endless series of crises, which provide officials the opportunity to rally the people to the government as part of their “patriotic” duty.
Perhaps the state’s best tactic for garnering the support of the private sector for its racket is to keep the people unaware of their real plight. That tactic is realized through indoctrination, which is what the state’s schooling system is all about. The process starts in the first grade, when every student in the country begins to be inculcated with the notion that he lives in a free society. Think of the Pledge of Allegiance, a pledge crafted by a dyed-in-the-wool socialist and which students are encouraged to recite every morning in their formative years: “with liberty and justice for all.”
If a person’s mindset is molded so that he believes he is free, isn’t he likely to believe also that the governmental structure under which he has been born and raised is what government in a free country is like? In the case of the United States, that means the welfare-warfare state.
By the time students graduate high school, most of them have no doubt that America is a free country, and they are thankful for that. They are grateful they live in a society in which the government takes care of people and keeps them safe from the communists, terrorists, drug dealers, and illegal aliens. They go to sports events and, with tears in their eyes, stand and sing with 100 percent conviction, “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” They don’t realize that their plight is that which was described by the German thinker Johann von Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
The power of ideas
Those are the principal obstacles that libertarians must overcome if we are to achieve a free society — that is, a society without a welfare-warfare state. They are indeed enormous obstacles but they are not insurmountable. After all, many libertarians felt inadequate, afraid, and unaware before they achieved the “breakthrough” to libertarianism. If they can do it, anyone can do it.
That’s where the power of truth and ideas on liberty comes into play. Truth enables people to recognize their situation for what it is. If they are able to see that the welfare-warfare way of life under which they have been born and raised does not constitute genuine freedom — that they have been lied to — then they are faced with a choice: Do I want to be free or not? If they decide that they want a life of freedom, then they realize that the only way to accomplish that is by a dismantling, not a reform, of the welfare-warfare way of life.
But something more is required. People must conquer the fears that the welfare-warfare statists have implanted in them — the fear that people will die in the streets without the welfare state, that workers will barely eke out a living without minimum-wage laws, that everyone will go on drugs in the absence of a drug war, or that America will be invaded and conquered by the communists or terrorists in the absence of national-security state.
To achieve freedom, Americans must understand what freedom is, believe in it, and want it. We should lead the world out of the welfare-warfare morass that has brought nothing but destitution, poverty, conflict, and discord. We should raise our vision to a higher level, just as our ancestors did with religion, and lead the world to freedom, prosperity, peace, and harmony.
This article was originally published in the April 2014 edition of Future of Freedom.
