The evolution of the concept of “government” has had a long, tortuous history. Some glimmer of the government’s proper function seems to have existed in every organized society, manifesting itself in such phenomena as the recognition of some implicit (if often non-existent) difference between a government and a robber gang—the aura of respect and of moral authority granted to the government as the guardian of “law and order”—the fact that even the most evil types of government found it necessary to maintain some semblance of order and some pretense at justice, if only by routine and tradition, and to claim some sort of moral justification for their power, of a mystical or social nature. Just as the absolute monarchs of France had to invoke “The Divine Right of Kings,” so the modern dictators of Soviet Russia have to spend fortunes on propaganda to justify their rule in the eyes of their enslaved subjects.
In mankind’s history, the understanding of the government’s proper function is a very recent achievement: it is only two hundred years old and it dates from the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Not only did they identify the nature and the needs of a free society, but they devised the means to translate it into practice. A free society— like any other human product—cannot be achieved by random means, by mere wishing or by the leaders’ “good intentions.” A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free—a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.
. .The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government.
Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals— that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.
Now consider the extent of the moral and political inversion in today’s prevalent view of government Instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of non-objective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim—so that we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
It has often been remarked that in spite of its material progress, mankind has not achieved any comparable degree of moral progress. That remark is usually followed by some pessimistic conclusion about human nature. It is true that the moral state of mankind is disgracefully low. But if one considers the monstrous moral inversions of the governments (made possible by the altruist-collectivist morality) under which mankind has had to live through most of its history, one begins to wonder how men have managed to preserve even a semblance of civilization, and what indestructible vestige of self-esteem has kept them walking upright on two feet.
One also begins to see more clearly the nature of the political principles that have to be accepted and advocated, as part of the battle for man’s intellectual Renaissance.
RECOMMENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY
For a study of Objectivism:
Branden, Nathaniel, Who Is Ayn Rand?, New York: Random
House, 1962; Paperback Library, 1964. The Objectivist, a monthly journal published by The Objectivist,
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, The Fountainhead, New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company,
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, The Virtue of Selfishness, New York: The New American
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, We the Living, New York: Random House, 1959; New
York: The New American Library (Signet), 1960.
The following authors are not exponents of Objectivism, and these recommendations should not be understood as an unqualified endorsement of their total intellectual positions.
Anderson, Benjamin M., Economics and the Public Welfare: Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914-1946, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1949.
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Buer, Mabel C, Health, Wealth and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1815, London: George Routledge & Sons, 1926.
Chu, Valentin, Ta Ta, Tan Tan (Fight fight, talk talk); The Inside Story of Communist China, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963.
Crocker, George N., Roosevelt’s Road to Russia, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959.
Dallin, David J., and Nicolaevsky, Boris I., Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1947.
Ekirch, Arthur A., Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism, New York: Longmans, Green A Co., 1955.
Fertig, Lawrence, Prosperity Through Freedom, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1961.
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Flynn, John T., The Roosevelt Myth, revised edition. New York: The Devin-Adalr Co.. 1956.
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Hazlitt, Henry, ed., The Critics of Keynesian Economics, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.
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, The Failure of the “New Economics”: An Analysis of the
Keynesian Fallacies, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1959.
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Hewitt, Margaret, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry, London: Rockliff. 1958.
Keller, Werner, East Minus West = Zero: Russia’s Debt to the Western World. 862-1962, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962. (Published in Great Britain as Are the Russians Ten Feet Tall?, London: Thome* and Hudson, 1961.)
Kubek, Anthony, How the Far East Was Lost: American Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941-1949, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co* 1963.
Lynch, Matthew J., and Raphael, Stanley S., Medicine and the State, Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1963.
Mason, Lowell B., The Language of Dissent, New Canaan, Connecticut: The Long House. (Originally published Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Co., 1959.)
Neale, A. D., The Antitrust Laws of the United States of America: A Study of Competition Enforced by Law, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, I960.
Paterson, Isabel, The God of the Machine, Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1964. (Originally published New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943.)
Snyder, Carl, Capitalism the Creaton The Economic Foundations of Modern Industrial Society, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940.
von Mises, Ludwig, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1956
, Bureaucracy, New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale
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, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, New Haven, Con
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, Omnipotent Government, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
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, Planning for Freedom, 2nd edition, South Holland, Illinois:
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, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, New