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Not Yours to Give
What It Means to Be an American
Dr. Richard M. Ebeling
The following is abridged from a speech
delivered at “Evenings at FEE” in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York in
November, 2003.
In the early 1950s, Leonard E. Read, the founder
and first president of the Foundation for Economic Education, began publishing
a bimonthly newsletter with the title “Notes from FEE.” He wanted to share
with friends of FEE ideas on the meaning and importance of human freedom.
He considered this to be especially important for
Americans because the United States was such a shining example of what a
society of free men could achieve. The great American experiment, which began
with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional order established
by the Founding Fathers, had produced a special country the likes of which had
never been seen anywhere or at anytime in human history.
America! For more than two hundred years the word
has represented hope, opportunity, a second chance, and freedom. In America
the accident of a man’s birth did not serve as an inescapable weight that
dictated a person’s fate or that of his family.
Once a newcomer stepped on American soil he left
the political tyrannies and economic barriers of the “old world” behind. A
willingness to work hard and to bear the risks of one’s own decisions, the
possession of a spirit of enterprise, and a little bit of luck were the keys
to the doors of success in their “new world” home.
Visitors from Europe traveling to America in the
19th century, Frenchmen like Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Chevalier,
marveled at the energy and adaptability of the ordinary American. An American
paid his own way, took responsibility for his actions, and showed versatility
in the face of change, often switching his occupation, profession, or trade
several times during his life, and frequently moving about from one part of
the country to another.
What’s more, individual Americans demonstrated a
generous spirit of charity and voluntary effort to assist those who had fallen
upon hard times, as well as to deal with a wide variety of common community
services in their cities, towns, and villages.
Those foreign observers of American life noted that
no man bowed to another because of the hereditary accident of birth. Each man
viewed himself as good as any other, to be judged on the basis of his talents
and abilities as well as his character and conduct as a human being.
Even the scar of slavery that blemished the
American landscape through more than half of the 19th century stood out as
something inherently inconsistent and untrue to the vision and conception of a
society of free men laid down by those Founding Fathers. The logic of liberty
meant that slavery would eventually have to end, in one way or another, if the
claim of freedom for all was not to remain confronted with a cruel hypocrisy
to the ideal.
What a glorious country this America was. Here was a land
of free men who were able to pursue their dreams and fulfill their peaceful
desires. They were free men who could put their own labor to work, acquire
property, accumulate wealth, and fashion their own lives. They associated on
the basis of freedom of exchange, and benefited each other by trading their
talents through a network of division of labor that was kept in order through
the competitive processes of market-guided supply and demand.
In this free marketplace, the creative entrepreneurial
spirit was set free. Every American was at liberty to try his hand, if he
chose, to start his own business and devise innovative ways to offer new and
better products to the market, through which he hoped to earn his living. No
man was bond to the soil upon which he was born or tied to an occupation or
profession inherited from his ancestors. Every individual had an opportunity
to be the master of his own fate, with the freedom to move where inclination
led him and choose the work that seemed most profitable and attractive.
The Turn Toward Collectivism
Then something began to happen in America. The socialist
and collectivist ideas that were growing in influence in Europe during the
last decades of the 19th century began to spread over to the United States.
Two generations of young American scholars went off to study in Europe,
particularly Germany, in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s. They became imbued
with socialist and state paternalistic conceptions, especially the
interventionist and welfare statist ideas that were being taught at the
universities in Bismarck’s Germany.
These scholars came back to the United States
enthusiastic about their newly learned ideas, convinced that the
“negative” idea of freedom dominant in America – an idea of freedom that
argued that government’s role was only to secure each individual in his
life, liberty, and property – needed to be replaced by a more “positive”
notion of freedom. Government should not merely protect citizens from violence
and fraud. It should guarantee their health care and retirement pensions; it
should regulate their industry and trade, including their wages and conditions
of work. The government needed to secure the members of society from all the
uncertainties of life, “from cradle to grave” – a phrase that was first
popularized during this time.
These European-trained students and academics soon
filled the teaching positions in the colleges and universities around the
country; they occupied a growing number of jobs in the federal and state
bureaucracies; they became the fashionable and “progressive”
forwardlooking authors of books and magazine articles; they came to dominate
the culture of ideas in America.
How did they sway an increasing number of
Americans? They asked people to look around them and observe the radical
changes in technologies and styles of life. They pointed to the rapid shift
from the countryside to growing urban areas. And they asked, how can such a
transformed and transforming society remain wedded to the ideas of men who had
lived so long ago, in the 18th century? How could a great and growing country
be tied down to a Constitution written for a bygone era?
The Constitution, these “progressives” argued,
had to reflect the changing times – it had to be a “living” and
“evolving” document. Progress, for these proselytizers of Prussian
paternalism, required a new political elite who would guide and lead the
nation into a more collectivist future.
Results of Collectivism in America
The fruits of their work are, now, after a century, all
around us. At the beginning of the 20th century all levels of government in
the United States took in taxes an amount less than 10 percent of the
people’s wealth and income. Now all levels of government extract over fifty
percent of our earnings, in one way or another. One hundred years ago,
government hardly regulated and controlled any of the personal and commercial
affairs of the American citizenry. Now, government’s hand intrudes into
every corner of our private, business, and social affairs. Indeed, it is hard
to find one area of our daily lives that does not pass through the
interventionist sieve of state management, oversight, restriction, and
command.
Perhaps worst of all, too many of our fellow
Americans have become accustomed to and, indeed, demanding of government
protection or subsidy of their personal and economic affairs. We are no longer
free, self-supporting individuals who solely make our ways through the
peaceful transactions and exchanges of the marketplace. We have become
collective “interest groups” who lobby and pressure those in political
office for favors and privileges at the expense of our neighbors. And the
political officeholders are only too happy to grant these political gifts to
those who supply campaign contributions and votes as the avenue to their own
desires for power and control over those whom they claim to serve.
It is sometimes said, “But we are still the
freest country in the world. Our wealth and standard of living are the envy of
tens of millions all around the globe. We should be proud of what and who we
are.”
The Standard for Judging America
Our present greatness in terms of these things, however,
is only relative to how much farther other countries have gone down the path
of government paternalism and regulation during these past one hundred years.
The benchmark of comparison should not be America in relation to other
countries in the contemporary world. The standard by which we should judge our
freedom should be how much freer the American people were from the
stranglehold of government more than one hundred years ago, before those
proselytizers of paternalism began to change the political and cultural
character of the United States. By this standard, today’s American people
are extremely unfree. We have all become wards of the state. And like the
convict who has spent so many years in prison that he is afraid of being
released and no longer having his jail keepers to tell him what to do and how
to live, we are fearful of even the thought of a life without government
caring for us, protecting us, subsidizing us, guiding us, and educating us.
Too many in the older generation in America have
lost their understanding of what freedom means and why constitutionally
limited government is both necessary and desirable. And the vast majority of
the young have never been taught in our government-run schools the ideas,
ideals, and political institutional foundations upon which this country of
ours was created. They have been taught to think that there are no absolute
truths or any important insights from long human experience concerning why
individual freedom is a valuable and precious thing.
What those earlier German-trained political and
cultural relativists set out to do in America at the beginning of the 20 th
century has been to a great extent accomplished. We are threatened with
becoming a rootless people who have no sense of an invariant nature of man,
and who possess no idea of those values and attitudes in the human character
so necessary for preserving freedom and prosperity.
The Founding Fathers were not unaware that “times
change.” But in the whirlwind of life they saw that reason and experience
could and had demonstrated that there were unchanging qualities to the human
condition. They understood the various mantles that tyranny could take on –
including the cloak of false benevolence. They established a Constitutional
order that was meant to guard us from the plunder of violent and greedy men,
while leaving each of us that wide latitude of personal and economic freedom
in which we could find our own meanings for life, and adapt to new
circumstances consistent with our conscience and concerns.
This is what made America great. This is what made
a country in which individuals could say without embarrassment or conceit that
they were proud to be Americans.
Our Task at FEE
The task for those of us who have not yet lost that true
sense of the meaning of freedom is to dedicate ourselves to restoring and
refining that noble American ideal of individual liberty. It is the American
ideal that inspired and guided Leonard E. Read when he established the
Foundation for Economic Education more than 55 years ago, in 1946. It is the
purpose that continues to direct what we do at FEE every day. Let us work
together to be the stewards of liberty so that freedom may, once again,
rekindle its consistent and bright torch in the America of the 21 st century.
In the pursuit of this goal let us use as our motto
and inspiration the words of George Washington, words that are inscribed above
the fireplace in the library at FEE:
"If to please the people, we offer what we
ourselves disapprove, how can we afterward defend our work? Let us raise a
standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The rest is in the hands
of God."
 Dr.
Richard Ebeling was named the president of the Foundation for Economic
Education in May, 2003. He formerly was the Ludwig von Mises Professor of
Economics at Hillsdale College. He is the author of Austrian Economics and
the Political Economy of Freedom (Edward Elgar, 2003), and editor of the
three-volume Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises (Liberty Fund). He
lectures extensively on a wide variety of free-market themes in the US, Latin
America, and Eastern Europe.
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