The Case for Economic Freedom – Part 1

Originally printed in The Freeman: By Benjamin A. Rogge • September 1963 • Volume: 13 • Issue: 9

My economic philosophy is here offered with full knowledge that it is not generally accepted as the right one. On the contrary, my brand of economics has now become Brand X, the one that is never selected as the whitest by the housewife, the one that is said to be slow acting, the one that contains no miracle ingredient. It loses nine times out of ten in the popularity polls run on Election Day, and, in most elections, it doesn’t even present a candidate.

I shall identify my brand of economics as that of economic freedom, and I shall define economic freedom as that set of economic arrangements that would exist in a society in which the government’s only function would be to prevent one man from using force or fraud against another—including within this, of course, the task of national defense. So that there can be no misunderstanding here, let me say that this is pure, uncompromising laissez faire economics. It is not the mixed economy; it is the unmixed economy.

I readily admit that I do not expect to see such an economy in my lifetime or in anyone’s lifetime in the infinity of years ahead of us. I present it rather as the ideal we should strive for and should be disappointed in never fully attaining. Human society is not destroyed by men who have ideals but find that they cannot, in their imperfection, always attain them; rather it is destroyed by men who have no ideals, by men who have no benchmarks against which to measure their own performances.

The tragedy of the classical socialist is that he has false ideals; the threat to society of the modern liberal is that so often he has no ideals, no guides to conduct, other than political expediency and a spurious realism. The man who insists that he will walk the middle of the road has his path determined for him by those who define the ditches, and never then takes a step of his own real choosing.

To put it another way: I am not frustrated by the fact that politicians often pass laws that do violence to the free market. I am frustrated by the fact that so many people do not know that violence has been done, that so few feel any sense of uneasiness at the departure from the ideal.

I am convinced that we continue to move away from the free market because few of the leaders of opinion even know or understand the ideal of the free market, because the ideal itself is no longer accepted as a basic guide to action. We drift toward socialism, not because we consciously wish to go there, but because we no longer know or care where our own home is.

How has this come about? Who has done us in? The fact is, of course, that we have done ourselves in. We have not been betrayed by subversives. We have been betrayed by our own indolence, by our preoccupation with profiting individually from the government interventions we deplore, by our failure to prepare and present the case for economic freedom as powerfully and persuasively as possible. The cure must start within each of us individually and not with programs to reform everyone else.

Where do we find the most powerful and persuasive case for economic freedom? I don’t know; probably it hasn’t been prepared yet, and each concerned person should work at it himself. Certainly it is unlikely that the case I present is the definitive one. However, it is the one that is persuasive with me, that leads me to my own deep commitment to the free market. I present it as grist for your own mill and not as the divinely inspired last word on the subject.

The Moral Case for Economic Freedom

You will note as I develop my case that I attach relatively little importance to the demonstrated efficiency of the free market system in promoting economic growth, in raising levels of living. In fact, my central thesis is that the most important part of the case for economic freedom is not its vaunted efficiency as a system for organizing resources, not its dramatic success in promoting economic growth, but rather its consistency with certain fundamental moral principles of life itself.

I say, “the most important part of the case” for two reasons. First, the significance I attach to those moral principles would lead me to prefer the free enterprise system even if it were demonstrably less efficient than alternative systems, even if it were to produce a slower rate of economic growth than systems of central direction and control. Second, the great mass of the people of any country is never really going to understand the purely economic workings of any economic system, be it free enterprise or socialism. Hence, most people are going to judge an economic system by its consistency with their moral principles rather than by its purely scientific operating characteristics. If economic freedom survives in the years ahead, it will be only because a majority of the people accept its basic morality. The success of the system in bringing ever higher levels of living will be no more persuasive in the future than it has been in the past.

Let me illustrate: ‘The doctrine of man held in general in nineteenth century America argued that each man was ultimately responsible for what happened to him, for his own salvation, both in the here and now and in the hereafter. Thus, whether a man prospered or failed in economic life was each man’s individual responsibility: each man had a right to the rewards for success and, in the same sense, deserved the punishment that came with failure. It followed as well that it is explicitly immoral to use the power of government to take from one man to give to another, to legalize Robin Hood. This doctrine of man found its economic counterpart in the system of free enterprise and, hence, the system of free enterprise was accepted and respected by many who had no real understanding of its subtleties as a technique for organizing resources.

As this doctrine of man was replaced by one (largely reflecting Freudian psychology and sociology) which made of man a helpless victim of his subconscious and his environment—responsible for neither his successes nor his failures—the free enterprise system came to be rejected by many who still had no real understanding of its actual operating characteristics.

Dr. Benjamin A. Rogge (1920-1980) was dean and professor of economics at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana and a longtime trustee of FEE. This lecture, printed in Freeman magazine in 1963, was delivered at several FEE seminars and on other occasions. It set forth the Rogge ideal of the unmixed, free economy.