Popular Slavery: why the pursuit of positive liberty leads to bondage

We must be cautious about sacrificing our liberty in exchange for government care

Slavery is the antithesis of liberty. There is nothing more degrading to the human spirit, more insulting to human dignity, or more contrary to human nature. A slave has minimal power to direct his or her own life and is seen as nothing but a means to an end. Their ability to make decisions and forge a unique path in the world is trivialized and they are forced to work for the benefit of others in exchange for the basic elements of survival.

America itself has had a dark history of slavery; one that we are still trying to understand and overcome. Despite our record of failing to live up to our ideal “that all men are created equal,” it remains our responsibility to identify and eliminate slavery in all its forms.

Though the methods of enslavement have changed over the centuries, the arguments used to justify it have remained the same.

Freedom vs. comfort

Southern aristocrats in pre-civil-war America claimed that far from being inhumane, slavery was actually natural and good. They argued that human happiness was best achieved, not when individuals were free from oppression, but when individuals were free from want and free from fear. They believed that the promise of a comfortable life was more important than a guarantee of freedom; that the right to security was more valuable than the right to choose.

George Fitzhugh, a pro-slavery sociologist and ardent critic of capitalism, argued that the black slaves of the South were actually more free than the white wage workers of the North. He justified this claim by saying that when a slave’s day of work is done “the master provides food, raiment, house, fuel, and everything else necessary to the physical well-being of [the slave].” Whereas a “free” wage worker is left to “take care of himself,” being “overburdened with the cares of family and household, which make his freedom an empty and delusive mockery.”

Fitzhugh firmly believed that the freedom to choose was an impediment to the happiness and wellbeing of most people. Liberty involves too much uncertainty. It adds unnecessary stress to the lives of common people. The majority, he thought, would rather work as slaves, having all their needs provided for.

A shift to positive rights

During the great depression, many felt that the American promise of free-market prosperity had failed, and that greater government intervention was needed to protect them from difficulty and discomfort. A desire for the government to assume the responsibility for social improvement increased dramatically.

During this era, progressives argued that the classical liberal vision of government—that it exists solely to protect negative rights, such as life, liberty and property—was too narrow, and that a modern society had an obligation to provide, through positive rights, more equal footing upon which its citizens could stand.

Negative rights are, according to presidential economic advisor Gene Sperling, those rights which provide “protection from government and market abuse,” and positive rights are those which require “the affirmative use of public resources to ensure the basic elements of economic security and economic opportunity.”

Negative rights protect individuals from others who would infringe upon their basic freedoms; they represent freedom from tyranny. Positive rights, on the other hand, provide individuals with access to services and benefits; they represent freedom from want.

With his sprawling New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed that in addition to the negative rights protected by the constitution, we accept a second bill of rights, one oriented towards providing the American people with positive rights.

According to Sperling, FDR believed “that the negative freedom and political rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights had ‘proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.’” In addition to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, FDR claimed that every American had the right to “education, health care, social insurance, housing, and a living wage.”

FDR’s ideas were popular among Americans for obvious reasons. Life was hard. Wouldn’t it be easier if the government did more work for the people and gave them the things they most desperately needed?

Popular slavery

This view of government has continued into the twenty-first century. Government is no longer seen as it once was, as a necessary evil, existing only to protect citizens from foreign powers, self-interested factions, and corporate exploitation. Popular opinion seems to be, that in addition to this role, it is the government’s job to provide positive rights, including “food, raiment, house, fuel, and everything else necessary to [our] physical well-being.”

This entitled mindset, though often championed as being more compassionate and egalitarian, slowly leads a nation to slavery—slavery by popular consent.

Free-market thinker William G. Sumner predicted that as our government took upon itself the role of caretaker, people would begin to think that “they have a right, not only to pursue happiness, but to get it; and if they fail to get it, [to] think they have a claim to the aid of other men…to get it for them.”

As the word “rights” is used to describe an ever-growing number of things people can demand from the government, so grows the government's power to take from some through taxes, and give to others through government aid.

The more we rely on the government to make life less risky and more comfortable, the more politicians will be able to claim that we “owe” the government our labor. If the majority of people someday decide that the government should provide us with all we need to live, we will then “owe” all of our labor to the government. The government will then be to us what the master was to the southern slave.

As the English philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote, “it matters not whether [our] master is a single person or a society. If, without option, [we must] labour for the society, and [receive] from the general stock such portion as the society awards [us], [we become slaves] to the society.”

One could argue that paying taxes is part of the social contract we have all agreed to as citizens of the United States. However, whether you agree to it or not, being forced to work on behalf of another and losing the freedom to decide what is to be done with your own property is slavery. According to Libertarian Writer Albert Jay Nock, “Slavery is slavery whether it be voluntary or involuntary… A man is in slavery when all his rights lie at the arbitrary discretion of some agency other than himself.”

Although allowing the government to create generous programs and policies can seem like the moral thing to do, we must be cautious about sacrificing our liberty in exchange for government care. William G. Sumner forcefully stated, “It is not to be admitted for a moment that liberty [becomes] a means to social ends.” The minute your liberty—your freedom to live how you see fit—becomes a means to social ends, you become a means to social ends; a servant to the common good, being exploited by the government in the name of positive rights.

Liberty vs. equity

In a recent campaign video, vice president-elect Kamala Harris claims that it is the government’s responsibility to create an equitable society or, as she says in the video, a society where “we all end up in the same place.” She believes that the government can, and should, eliminate inequality by “giving people the resources and the support they need."

In a society focused on equity, the government must determine which people deserve additional “support”, and from whom the needed “resources” must be taken. Karl Marx founded communism upon this idea of equity, saying that resources should be redistributed from “each according to their ability, [and] to each according to their needs”.

Politicians like Kamala Harris attempt to convince people that this form of slavery, rebranded as “equity”, is ethical because it allows everyone to begin on equal footing and enjoy similar outcomes. Although the ideal of equal opportunity is one towards which we must all strive, it cannot be achieved through government power.

Equality of opportunity, America’s ideal, can only be achieved through good education, a free market, and a virtuous population. Three things the government cannot create.

The best we can do to make the world a better place—a world free of tyranny, exploitation, and discrimination—is to protect negative rights at all costs and encourage the development of moral virtue among ourselves. We can’t rely on the government to provide the charity we fail to give and eliminate the suffering we choose to ignore. We must be the kind of people that create a tolerant and equitable society; not through government control, but through individual good will.

Human flourishing has always been the result of increased liberty and individual virtue, not the result of comfort and security provided by the government. This is the idea upon which America was founded, and it is the idea upon which it must continue to stand if it is to avoid its greatest enemy, slavery.

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