Chapter 2: Freedom Is Not "Public Policy"

Among the greatest failures of the free-market intellectual movement has been allowing its ideas to be categorized as a "public policy" option. The formulation implies a concession that it is up to the state--its managers and kept intellectuals—to decide how, when, and where freedom is to be permitted. It further implies that the purpose of freedom, private ownership, and market incentives is the superior management of society, that is, to allow the current regime to operate more efficiently.

This kind of thinking has been around a while Murray Rothbard had noted back in the 1950s that economists, even those favoring markets, had become "efficiency experts for the state " There is a small step from that unfortunate stance to providing a free market rhetorical cover for the state to do what it wants to do anyway, which is surely the ultimate compromise

Such was at the heart of the Reagan Revolution, when tax cuts were first proposed as a tool to bring in more revenue. Who said that the purpose of freedom was to ensure more lavish funding for the state? And what if the funding didn't materialize? Does that mean that the tax cuts failed? Twenty years later, of course, we see that the strategy was a disaster because it turned out that there is a far surer way to collect more revenue: to collect more revenue.

There are many examples of this awful concession operating today. In policy circles, people use the word privatization to mean not the bowing out of government from a particular aspect of social and economic life, but merely the contracting out of statist priorities to politically connected private enterprise.

School vouchers and Social Security "privatization" are the most notorious examples at the national level. At the state and local levels, any government contract awarded to a grafting business interest is deemed "privatization." A Washington think tank recently proposed that the CIA could become more efficient by contracting out to Washington think tanks.

What's at stake is the very conception of the role of freedom in political, economic, and social life. Do we regard freedom as a useful device within the existing structure, or as an alternative to the current political system? This is not a matter of bickering libertarian sects. The very future of the idea of free markets is at stake.

In a decade of market-oriented reform, capitalism has been seen as a mechanism that might make it possible for failed sectors to continue to do what they have always done. In truth, free-market reforms are far more fundamental.

Free markets are not just about generating profits and productivity. They aren't just about spurring innovation and competition. To make a transition from statism to the market economy means a complete revolution in economic and political life, from a system where the state and its interests rule to a system where the power of the state plays no role. Freedom is not a public-policy option. It is the end of public policy itself. It is time for us to take that next step and call for precisely that.

Chapter 4: subsection - ABOLISH PUBLIC POLICY

The main debate in our time thus concerns the direction and pace of reform toward market economics. This is all to the good, and yet I would like to highlight what strikes me as a great confusion. The reformers here and abroad are widely under the impression that the liberty they seek for their societies can be imposed in much the way that socialist systems of old were imposed. The idea is that if Congress, the president, and the courts would just get hip to the program, they could fix what's wrong with the country in a jiffy. Thus we need only elect liberty-minded politicians, support a president trained in the merit of market incentives, and confirm judges who know all about the Chicago School of Economics.

It cannot be, and I predict that if we continue to go down the path, we will replace one bad form of central planning with another. Genuine liberty is not just another form of government management. It is this theme that I would like to pursue further.

I can present my own perspective on this up front: all reform in all areas of politics, economics, and society should be in one direction: toward more freedom for individuals and less power for government. I will go further to say that individuals ought to enjoy as much freedom as possible and government as little power as possible.

Yes, that position qualifies me as a libertarian. But I fear that this word does not have the explanatory power that it might have once had. There is in Washington a tendency to see libertarianism as a flavor of public-policy soda, or just another grab bag of policy proposals, ones that emphasize free enterprise and personal liberties as opposed to bureaucratic regimentation.

Libertarianism doesn't propose any plan for reorganizing government; it calls for the plan to be abandoned. It doesn't propose that market incentives be employed in the formulation of public policy; it rather hopes for a society in which there is no public policy as that term is usually understood.

The natural right to freedom need not be granted or earned or conferred. It need only be recognized as fact. It is something that exists in the absence of a systematic effort to take it away. The role of government is neither to grant rights nor to offer them some kind of permission to exist, but to restrain from violating them.

The idea of the American Revolution was not to fight for certain rights to be given or imposed on the people. It was not for a positive form of liberty to be imposed on society. It was purely negative in its ideological outlook. It sought to end the oppression, to clip the chains, to throw off the yoke, to set people free. It sought an end to governance by the state and a beginning to governance by people in their private associations.