(by Hoover Institute, Stanford University)
When the government of China tells people they can read state-run newspapers but not print and distribute Bibles, imprisoning and torturing dissenters; or have one child but not two, forcing women to have abortions; or watch state-run television but not listen to Radio Free Asia, jamming broadcast signals and threatening students--that is not freedom.
But the absence of centralized state control is not necessarily freedom, either. The people of Beirut are not free. Neither are the people of Medellin and Cartagena, the drug capitals of Colombia. Freedom is not anarchy, chaos, and mayhem. The freedom to "let soulless forces operate," as the great classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises termed it, is actually tyranny in another guise.
So what is freedom? How can a widely pluralistic society sustain freedom without degenerating into chaos? What is the moral basis of a free society? Today the citizens and leaders of every nation are looking to America for answers to these questions. From Mexico City to Moscow, from Johannesburg to Jerusalem, from Bombay to Beijing, people have an eye on America as they struggle to make the exciting but difficult transition to free markets, free elections, free speech, and free worship.
A Free Society
Americans have always defined true freedom as an environment in which one may resist evil and do what is right, noble, and good without fear of reprisal. It is the presence of justice tempered with mercy. It is a rule of law based on fundamental moral truths that are easily understood and fairly and effectively administered. It offers individuals and families equal opportunity to better their lives morally, spiritually, intellectually, and economically.
Freedom, in other words, is neither a commodity for dictators to distribute and deny at will nor a moral, spiritual, or political vacuum in which anything goes. Freedom is a priceless treasure that the state is supposed to safeguard. Why? Because human beings have an intrinsic right to be free, a right that comes not from the state but from God. To the Founding Fathers, this was a "self-evident" truth. It is the essence of the American experiment in self-government.
The Founders, even those most suspicious of organized religion, believed that man’s place in the universe was no accident--that man himself and the world in which he lived were created and sustained by a just and loving God. "It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being," wrote George Washington, "and it is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being." James Madison put it this way: "The belief in a God All Powerful, wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources."
To navigate the oceans without consulting fixed stars, Americans knew, is to risk being turned around by waves and wind, circling aimlessly with dwindling stores of food and water. To believe in the randomness of man’s appearance on the earth, the Founders likewise intuitively understood, would be to deny the existence of fixed moral truths, established outside of man’s own personal whims and predilections. In such a world, no one could judge with authority what is right or wrong because everyone would be entitled to his own personal system of values. Hence there could be no equality before the law, because the law would consist of whatever people in power declared it to be. That would elevate jungle law--what Darwin would later term "survival of the fittest"--over the rule of natural law. And that, in turn, would legitimize both the centralized European regimes of the Founders’ day and the anarchic Beiruts of our day, where the powerful rule over the weak, use force to obtain wealth, and use wealth to reinforce their power.
Instead, the Founding Fathers staked the future of the country on the principle that human beings are created by God, and therefore have certain intrinsic, absolute, nonnegotiable rights. "[A]ll men are created equal," reads the Declaration of Independence, and are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Government’s role in society, then, is to "secure" these rights, not create or dispense them. This is the moral basis of a free society.
The order of these rights--first life, then freedom, and then the equal opportunity to pursue one’s own happiness--was written with great care and precision, not haphazardly. The Founders understood the need to balance man’s right to be free with man’s responsibility to be honest, just, and fair. For example, if it makes you happy to shoot and kill someone while you rob a bank--well, the law says you’re out of luck. A person’s right to live supersedes your "freedom" to steal and murder. This may seem obvious, but it is profound. It is also the linchpin of Western civilization. Switch the order of these fundamental human rights--putting happiness before liberty, or liberty before life--and you end up with moral chaos and social anarchy. Deny the God-given nature of these rights and you open the door to tyranny.
"Can the liberties of a nation be sure when we remove their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that these liberties are the gift of God?" asked Thomas Jefferson. Or, as John Adams put it, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
The people of the former Soviet Union are discovering this the hard way, in a tragic drama we have been tracking with great interest and concern at Forbes magazine. Communism destroyed not only material progress there, but also the moral and spiritual foundations of the country. Trust between strangers, the fundamental moral component of a free-market economy, barely exists. Without trust, how do you sign or enforce business contracts? How do you operate a system of credit? How do you maintain a basic sense of order? The people of the former Soviet Union are discovering that a free, self-governing society is nearly impossible without a moral foundation. Theft is rampant. Their murder rate is several times higher than our own. Mafias are moving into the vacuum left by the fall of communism to seize control of vast sectors of economic activity. A Hobbesian world has emerged, where life is "nasty, brutish, and short."
