09 November, 2007

A Second-Class Kind of Freedom

In an exceptional article written last December, On Milton Friedman’s Unfinished Work, Clive Crook wrote:

It is still true, despite Friedman’s best efforts, that economic liberty is widely regarded as very much a second-class kind of freedom—if it counts as freedom at all. When the government infringes on civil liberties—to help it prosecute the war on terror, let’s say—there is an outcry, and rightly so. In this country, most infringements of free speech are simply unthinkable. But a tax increase (a confiscation of private property), or an import quota (a prohibition to spend your money as you wish), or a mandated company benefit, or any number of other economic directives and interventions, whether justified on balance or not, are infringements of liberty too.

Even to point this out (which one must be careful to do only now and then) stains you as a libertarian zealot, somebody quite beyond the normal realm of political discourse. A tax increase might be bad if it harms incentives to work, or if it unduly burdens the poor; an import quota might be costly and inefficient; and so forth. But how often does it occur to anybody to object to such policies as simple infringements of one’s freedom—not all that different, in some ways, from the infringements of civil liberty that respectable opinion finds so scandalous?

Indeed, Crook’s words serve as a rebuke to me as well, for when I speak against high taxes or barriers to trade, I generally take a consequentialist position, pointing out the harm that such policies do, and not the moral one. The moral position is this: anything that involves coercion is wrong. Taxes necessarily transgress on an individual’s right to self-ownership, as do all restraints on trade.

But we are so used to taxes and a mai-baap government that to question their moral basis makes us seem goofy. Crook’s observations, thus, are eminently valid for India, where freedom in all its senses is rarely defended. What a pity.

(Crook’s article wasn’t available for free anywhere on the net, and I’ve linked to a cached version above. However, it was one of his shortlisted pieces for this year’s Bastiat Prize, and you can download this pdf to read it, and all the others. Also, Crook recently started a blog, one that I’ll be reading regularly with great interest.

You can read more about libertarianism here.)