The Constitution of Liberty summary

Like all good things in life, liberty comes at a cost. And that cost is responsibility. If we’re free to choose, we should be held accountable for our choices. This is what responsibility is all about. It reminds people that their actions have consequences. 

But there’s a flip side to the idea of responsibility. It makes some of us afraid of liberty. That’s why many people choose a nine-to-five job over the risk of building their own business – they give up some of their freedom in exchange for greater security. Societies as a whole fall into this trap, too. They choose policies that place social and economic security over individual liberty.

Why should societies as a whole care about the liberties of individuals? To answer this question, we need to consider the links between free people and free nations. 

There are two schools of thought here. The French tradition goes back to Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He argued that it should be possible to construct a free society from scratch; we could use reason to design perfect institutions. His idea of liberty operates at the state level – a strong government can, and should, make wise decisions. 

In a free society, only the government has the right to coerce people. It uses this power of coercion to make the society work – forcing people to pay taxes, for instance, or making sure that criminals get punished. 

This coercion operates through laws. But what laws should the government enforce? As we already know, societies evolve over time. Laws, too, are never set in stone. We shouldn’t expect to design perfect laws on the first try. Instead, we should agree on some general principles that guide the people who write new legislation – and then let the laws evolve over time, through trial and error. 

European countries like France, Britain, and Germany were built on a foundation of liberty and protected by the rule of law. But this approach turned out to be short-lived. 

In eighteenth-century France, revolutionaries first demanded equality before the law. But this quickly turned into a desire for equality in all aspects of life. And immediately after the revolution, France’s new ruler, Napoleon, turned himself into a dictator. 

Even a free society can’t function without some governmental intervention. You can’t have basic services without some taxation, and it’s the government’s job to create a stable monetary system. A free market, with no government involvement, would also struggle to provide things like roads and sanitation.

But many Western states today, inspired by socialist ideas, go a whole lot further than that – and they do so to the detriment of liberty. Let’s look at one prominent example of this: progressive taxation. 

Arguing against the welfare state doesn’t mean arguing against welfare as such. A wealthy society should still provide for its least fortunate citizens. And there’s also a good argument for the idea that people should be required to pay into insurance for sickness and old age. 

German politicians pioneered the concept of “social insurance” in the 1880s. But by the time it reached the US in 1935, the social security scheme had become completely detached from the idea of “insurance.” 

The modern welfare state has a tendency to meddle in lots of things that would be best regulated by free markets. 

We already know how this harms health care and retirement support – but governments unnecessarily intervene in plenty of other areas, too. These include housing, education, and union rights.