Citizens Must Fight For Their Freedoms or Lose Them

Ludwig von Mises, known in his native Austria as the “knight of liberalism,” had the important insight that “governments are never liberal from inclination.” They become liberal, he observed, “only when forced to by the citizens.”

Mises was conscious that the fruits of nineteenth century liberalism (classical liberalism) were hard-fought-for and hard-won. The pivot to free trade, laissez fair capitalism, equality before the law and increased personal liberties came in the face of vigorous opposition from conservative regimes and religious establishments and, later in the century, the growing popularity of socialist ideas.

He wrote these words in the context of World War II, a period in which liberal gains in Europe were threatened from both an illiberal left and an illiberal right, a context not unlike our own today.

This Misesian insight about the illiberal inclinations of government found support in Hungarian political philosopher Anthony de Jasay, who, in The State (1985), observed that governments, while ostensibly representing the will of the people, actually develop interests of their own separate from, and in competition to, those of the people. The primary interest of the party that finds itself in control of the resources and apparatus of the state, naturally, is to stay in power, which it accomplishes, at least in a democracy, through a competitive auction of state resources and benefits.

The democratic state, in de Jasay’s view, inevitably descends into a race to the bottom between parties representing sectional interests which compete to buy the votes of a sufficient collection of disparate interests to secure the 50.1% vote that constitutes legitimacy in the democratic myth that is the official state ideology of polities like Australia.

This led him to coin the term “adversarial state” to describe a situation in which a rivalrous Brahman class of interested party apparatchiks serve and service the narrow interests of their clients through the extraction of state wealth and resources, a problem aptly described by Milton Friedman as “concentrated benefits and diffused costs.”

German private law society theorist Hans-Hermann Hoppe added to this picture with the observation that in a democracy, in contrast to a medieval monarchy in which the state is effectively privately owned by the ruling family, those in control of resources do not own what they expend and dispense. Because the medieval monarch personally owned the wealth of the state, he (and sometimes she) had a natural interest in its long-term sustainability. The problem with democracy, as Hoppe provocatively put it in Democracy: The God that Failed (2001), is that the democratic ruler “owns the current use of government resources, but not their capital value.” Any debts incurred by the democratic ruler are “public,” not private, and therefore to be repaid by future governments, or in reality, future citizens.

Hoppe maintained that there is absolutely no incentive for the democratic leader to adhere to sustainable extraction, expenditure and dispensation of state resources, because every ill-conceived and irresponsible policy can be justified in the name of that wonderfully amorphous notion of the “public interest.” As Ayn Rand noted in The Fountainhead (1943), “the ‘common good’ of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny established over men.”

Australia is beginning to enter its latest period of competitive auction ahead of an impending federal election, with the Coalition seeing Labor’s unfunded $8.5 billion Medicare spend and raising it to $9 billion, with allusions to funding it through unspecified public service cuts. The situation is only more dire in America, with DOGE revelations of the gravy train that is (was) USAID and the sober realisation that men and women of relatively modest means have been entering the front door of Congress only to exit the back door as multi-millionaires. Serving the “public interest” is a lucrative business, it seems.

And still academics, mainstream media curators and other earnest, yet naïve, pontificators continue to scratch their head at the visceral anger and disenchantment that is fuelling populism from America to Germany.

Mises’s warning, in conjunction with de Jasay’s insights about the adversarial nature of the state, and the perverse incentives identified by Hoppe, provide a warning and clarion call for libertarians today. The freedom that exists in Western “liberal” democracies is fragile. The freedoms currently enjoyed by citizens did not arise spontaneously, nor as part of some historical process inexorably charting a path towards progress. They were won through the conscious and deliberate reform efforts of thinkers, activists and, yes, even politicians of eras bygone. Freedom cannot be taken for granted.

Maintaining such freedoms as exist, let alone extending them by rolling back the overweening state, can only be accomplished by fighting for them. The expansion of personal freedoms, the protection of private property and shrinking the apparatus of the state will be resisted at every turn by the vested interests that have captured the enormous wealth and resources now concentrated in its hands, with an array of contracts, grants, benefits and sinecures to be dispensed to party friends and clients, along with the vast apparatus of coercion and compulsion that tickles the erogenous zone of the left and right’s army of budding social engineers.

The truth is that freedom must be seized and then defended. The government must be dragged kicking and screaming to its proper, humble role as night-watchman. Governments are never liberal from inclination.