Pursuit of various visions of social justice probably accounts for most human misery. What's more, the historical pattern that has emerged has been one whereby one form of injustice is replaced by one that is far worse. Russia's 1917 revolution expelling the Czars, and their injustices, ushered in Lenin, Stalin and a succession of brutal dictators who murdered tens of millions in the name of the proletariat revolution. The injustices of Chiang Kai-shek were replaced with those of Mao Tse-tung; Castro's ousting of Batista or Ayatollah Khomeini's toppling of the Shah of Iran produced regimes far more brutal. In Africa, after independence, the injustices of colonial powers were replaced with those of brutal dictators. The slaughter of nearly 200 million poor souls, not including war deaths, during the 20th century, was a direct result of pursuit of visions of social justice such as income equality, promoting the common good and fighting the so-called evils of capitalism. As if by design, measures taken to produce what was seen as the good society lowered both the common man's human rights protections and his standard of living.
By contrast, after the American revolution, we laid the groundwork that produced the world's freest people. However, for most of the 20th century, we have been losing ground. If you ask the question which way are we heading - away from totalitarianism or towards it - there is no question that, by tiny steps at a time, we are heading towards totalitarianism and arbitrary governmental abuse and control. Some Americans are naive enough to think that the oppression seen in other countries can't happen here. But let's not forget that the country that gave the world great men like Goethe, von Humboldt, Beethoven, Bach and Schiller also gave us Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Triblinka. Keep also in mind that it was German-Americans who helped create the underground railroad to assist runaway slaves and it was German-Americans who had the best reputation for getting along with the Indians. Let's also not forget that pre-Nazi Germany provided Jews with one of the most hospitable climates in Europe, so much so that during the early 1900s, in nearly one-half of all Jewish marriages one of the spouses was German.
If social justice has any operational meaning at all, it means that there is a system of governance where the purpose of laws is to prevent one person from violating another person's right to acquire, keep and dispose of property in any manner so long as he doesn't violate another's simultaneously held rights. In other words, laws should be written to prevent force and fraud. Laws that force one person to serve the purposes of another are immoral. This value, expressed as unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in our Declaration of Independence, guided the Framers in the writing of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Today, our government has become increasingly destructive of the ends it was created to serve. Americans have become increasingly hostile and alien to the liberties envisioned by the Framers. We have disregarded the inscription that graces the wall at the U.S. Department of Justice warning, "Where the law ends tyranny begins."
Most people agree that slavery is immoral. But what makes it so? Slavery denies a person the right to use his property (body) and the fruits of his labor the way he sees fit. Slavery forcibly uses one person to serve the purposes of another. Tragically, most Americans, including blacks, whose ancestors have suffered from gross property right violations, think it quite proper that one person be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another. That's what income redistribution really is. That's also what theft and robbery is. We could call slavery income redistribution. Income redistribution, theft and slavery are all practices where the fruits of one person's labor are confiscated for the benefit of another.
Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution enumerates the functions of the federal government and gives the federal government taxing authority to carry out these functions. For the most part these enumerated functions are related to national defense, establishing federal courts, establishing copyrights and patents, coining money, borrowing and a few other activities. With even a cursory reading of the Constitution, one cannot find any authority for Congress to confiscate the property of one American and give it to another to whom it does not belong. This activity now constitutes over two-thirds of federal expenditures that will top $1.7 trillion dollars in 1998. Expenditures that have that characteristic include Social Security, food stamps, farm subsidies, business bailouts and subsidies, disaster insurance, and expenditures by the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Commerce and Education. These government activities and many others have been justified in the name of promoting social justice.
In our pursuit of social justice, personal liberty has become a secondary or tertiary matter. Consider the following as just one example: Suppose a citizen, as an emancipated adult, sent the following affidavit to Congress: "I hereby renounce any claim to Social Security benefits and Medicare services. If I don't prepare for my later years or poor health, I shall depend on the charity of others or suffer the alternative. Release me from further Social Security and Medicare "contributions". A safe bet is that Congress would greet such an affidavit with contempt.
Suppose I refused to make payments into Social Security. What would happen to me? First, a fine would be assessed. Suppose I refused to pay the fine? I'd be threatened with property confiscation. Then suppose I tried to protect my property from the actions of the agents of Congress? I would surely be killed.
You say, "But Williams, you're violating the law; people can't go about deciding which laws they will obey!" My response is that laws do not determine what is or is not moral conduct. In Nazi-Germany, there were laws that required the reporting of a person hiding a Jew. In our country, the Fugitive Slave Act made assisting runaway slaves a crime. In apartheid South Africa, hiring blacks for certain work was illegal. In the former East Germany, assisting people in their efforts to escape to the West was illegal. Would any decent person demand that any of these laws be obeyed? Decent people must always ask: Does the law have a moral basis?
Liberty is not mankind's normal state of affairs. Liberty is fragile. Our liberties are under siege because most Americans are ignorant about our Constitution and its philosophical underpinnigs. Thus, we fall easy prey to political charlatans and quacks all too ready to exploit this ignorance in their quest for power and to satisfy popular visions of social justice.
Walter E. Williams
Ideas on Liberty, July 1998
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