I have been reading Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny and though he and I don’t agree on everything we certainly agree on an outright rejection of socialism. In the chapter titled On The Free Market, Levin included a great quote from Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom. Hayek’s oft-quoted book is on the shelf behind me as well but I am not sure where the original quote is in his book so I will quote Mark Levin quoting Friedrich Hayek quoting (and commenting on) Alexis de Toqueville’s Democracy in America:
Nobody saw this more clearly than the great political thinker de Toqueville that democracy stands in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism: “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom,” he said. “Democracy attaches all possible value to each man,” he said in 1848, “while socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives – the craving for freedom – socialists began to increasingly make use of the promise of a “new freedom.” Socialism was to bring “economic freedom,” without which political freedom was “not worth having.”
To make this argument sound plausible, the word “freedom” was subjected to a subtle change in meaning. The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men. Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth.
Excellent.
I once had a long argument with my one liberal brother and his (pretty much marxist) significant other where I tried to make this very point. I tried to explain that if we gathered up all of the things that people like to call “rights” there would be a clear line down the center that divides these so-called rights very unambiguously. On one side of that line are legitimate rights; exercising these rights only requires that people stay out of your way (avoiding the “arbitrary power of men”, as Hayek put it). On the other side of that dividing line are rights that require that someone do something for you. I argued strenuously that any right that requires that someone take action or fund your “right” is not a right at all. For example, you have a right to free speech but no one is required to provide you with a soapbox on which to stand. You have a right to keep and bear arms but we do not have to buy your gun for you. On the other side of that line, you do not have any “right” to expect anyone to subsidize your lifestyle by, for example, paying for your health care. Calling something like that a “right” is simply dressing up the act of using government to take another person’s property.
