individual rights Archives — Laissez FaireLaissez Faire

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If you saw a three-hundred pound prize fighter pummeling a small child, would your main concern be that the kid’s pocket change was spilling onto the ground? That’s how I feel about the debate over entitlements. It takes place almost purely on a narrow, economic level. How much does Social Security cost? How much of that cost is funded? Is there a trust fund or a pile of worthless IOUs waiting for us down the road?

Those are all fair questions, but they aren’t the most important questions. The entitlement state is at odds with something even more profound than our paychecks. It’s at odds with the whole American way of life.

What is that way of life, and how does the entitlement state undermine it? The key to understanding the American way of life is to understand that America was a commercial society. The business of America was business. Our focus, as individuals and as a culture, was on creating wealth or, to put it bluntly, on making money. As Tocqueville noted of nineteenth century America:

In democracies nothing is greater or more brilliant than commerce; it attracts the attention of the public and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic passions are directed towards it. . . .

[They are] led to engage in commerce, not only for the sake of the profit it holds out to them, but for the love of the constant excitement occasioned by that pursuit.

It’s hard today for us to understand just how central business was to American life during the first century and a half of this country. People during that era showed up to cheer the launch of new bridges and trains the way Americans today greet the Super Bowl. Popular music didn’t celebrate gangster “culture,” but technological achievements such as the telephone and the automobile. Daniel Yergin notes in his history of oil that during the late nineteenth century “Americans danced to the ‘American Petroleum Polka’ and the ‘Oil Fever Gallop,’ and they sang such songs as ‘Famous Oil Firms’ and ‘Oil on the Brain.’”

The reason why commerce came to have such a revered place in America was due to the astonishing fact that, in a commercial society, everyone could get better off at the same time, each taking responsibility for his own life and prosperity. People didn’t have to fight over a relatively fixed amount of wealth, as in aristocratic societies. In America, they had both the freedom and the incentive to create vast amounts of new wealth. It was a revolution in human relationships. For the first time in history, men had discovered how to live together voluntarily.

The result of a commercial society was a seemingly unstoppable process of industrial progress. Human life was getting better at a pace the world had never seen or even imagined.

The intellectual foundation of all this was the political principles laid down by America’s Founding Fathers—above all the principle that the individual has a right to exist for the sake of his own happiness, and that his right to private property is inviolate. Those principles protected and sanctioned the commercial society by ensuring that each individual had both the freedom and the incentive to improve his own life through productive pursuits.

The entitlement state has its origins in an ideological attack on those principles that began at the end of the nineteenth century. America’s intellectuals—deeply influenced by European thinkers—declared that the individual was secondary to the group, that “property” was not an inalienable right but an immoral conceit of the rich, and that commerce itself was disreputable, materialistic, and even immoral.

What America got was a two-pronged attack on the commercial society: a swiftly expanding regulatory state, to rein in businessmen, and a slowly growing entitlement state, to redistribute wealth from the pockets of earners.

The entitlement state, then, is not tick embedded in the American system. It represents the abandonment of the American system.

• The commercial society says you can better yourself by creating wealth. The entitlement society says you are basically helpless unless society provides you with wealth and opportunity wrestled from others.
• The commercial society has a profound respect for the individual and his property. The entitlement society regards individuals and their property as means to society’s ends.
• The commercial society is based on the conviction that there is a harmony of interests among men, who can therefore live together voluntarily. The entitlement society regards conflicts of interest as inherent in human relationships, and thereby unleashes a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.
• The commercial society protects and encourages the independent individual, who rationally plans and governs his own life. The entitlement society enshrines the chronically passive person who would rather not be burdened with such a profound responsibility.

Instead of a commercial nation rooted in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, America is becoming an entitlement nation filled with dependents.

That is what’s at issue in the debate over entitlements. The stakes could not be higher.

If you would like to ask me a question, you can submit it here.

Yaron debates David Schweickart on the morality of capitalism at Loyola University Chicago. The event was held March 17, 2013.

If you would like to ask me a question, you can submit it here.