Against Liberty

Yesterday was Patriots Day, the day when New England residents commemorate the beginning of the American Revolution, the war “for American liberty.” I don’t want to in any way disparage the contribution of Paul Revere and his fellow revolutionary patriots, but I take issue with the rhetorical justification usually offered for their rebellion. I am against liberty.

I don’t mean to say that we were better off with George III. Quite the contrary: the problem was precisely that the British were availing themselves of too much liberty. For example, British soldiers took the liberty of staying in houses without the consent of the owners. And while the Declaration of Independence pays lip service to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” its list of George’s tyrannies is not so much about excessive restrictions on liberty as about refusal to allow appropriate restrictions, beginning with, “He has refuted his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”

When we speak of any tyrant – Hitler and Stalin in the 20th century being perhaps better examples than George in the 18th – it is often suggested that this tyrant committed a great evil by depriving people of their liberties. But the greatest evils these tyrants committed were the things they did, not the things they prevented others from doing. The Nazi holocaust, and the Stalinist purges, these were liberties that should not have been permitted.

I don’t deny that liberty can be useful. It is useful to allow people to make decisions for themselves because they have the best information about their own needs and the strongest motivation to take care of those needs. It is useful to allow markets to function freely because free markets are an efficient way to optimize production and distribution. Liberty, in my view, is a necessary evil – not exactly necessary, really, but something often worthy to be tolerated for the benefits it confers rather than for any inherent virtue.

If, however, you want to argue for limited government (and all civilized people, I think, believe that government should have some limitations), it makes little sense to me to argue that limiting government promotes liberty. To limit government is to restrict the government’s liberty. Limiting government may in many cases have the beneficial side effect of increasing economic efficiency, but that is not the best reason to advocate it. The best reason is that limitations on government take away the government’s liberty to do horrible things.