Great National Purposes Mean Less Freedom

Richard Ebeling emails:

Dear Bob,

I have a new article on the news and commentary website, “EpicTimes,” on, “Great National Purposes Mean Less Freedom.”

This September 2015 marks seventy-five years since the end of the Second World War. In commenting on this event, some commentators have bemoaned the loss of “common causes” and “great national purposes,” such as was shared and experienced in the united fight against Nazi and Japanese aggression and tyranny during the war years.

But it should be remembered that common causes and shared national purposes meant then, and mean now, the government imposing a single scale or hierarchy of values and goals upon all in society, and to which all are expected and compelled to conform.

The more complex and diverse the modern, market-based society, the more multitudes of millions of individual citizen’s goals, purposes and ideals must be sacrificed and submerged under the government’s imposition of its declared common cause to which all are made to get behind and serve.

To pursue such national purposes and common causes inescapably requires the loss of individual freedom to find and follow your own goals, purposes and causes on your own or in peaceful and voluntary association with others in the society.

The common values that should bind all freedom-loving people in society are the procedural rules, similar to the “rules of the road,” that define the social processes through which individuals are at liberty to follow their own ends while respecting the rights of others to do the same, with minimized conflict or confusion among men.

Politically imposed national purposes and common causes always imply and require substantive rules, or directing commands, that specify how, when, where and for what concrete ends or goals individuals are compelled to act and interact to assure the government-imposed purpose and cause.

National purposes and common causes, whatever their rationale and appeal, carry with them the use of force and the loss of freedom, and therefore are incompatible with the ideal of a true society of human liberty.

http://www.epictimes.com/richardebeling/2015/08/great-national-purposes-mean-less-freedom/


Best,
Richard