I doubt whether any American would defend the police treatment of George Floyd that led to his death. But many Americans are supporting some of the responses to Floyd’s death — rioting, looting, wanton property destruction, assaults on police and other kinds of mayhem by both whites and blacks.

The pretense is that police conduct stands as the root of black problems. According to the NAACP, from 1882-1968, there were 3,446 black people lynched at the hands of whites. Today, being murdered by whites or policemen should be the least of black worries. In recent times, there is an average of 9,252 black-on-black murders every year. Over the past 35 years, that translates into nearly 324,000 blacks murdered at the hands of other blacks. Only a tiny percentage of blacks are killed by police. For example, in Chicago this year, there were 414 homicides, with a total of 2,078 people shot. So far in 2020, three people have been killed by police and four were shot. Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald reports that “a police officer is 181/2 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.” Crime is a major problem for many black communities, but how much of it can be attributed to causes such as institutional racism, systemic racism and white privilege?

The most devastating problem is the very weak black family structure. Less than a third of black children live in two-parent households and illegitimacy stands at 75%. The “legacy of slavery” is often blamed. Such an explanation turns out to be sheer nonsense when one examines black history. Even during slavery, where marriage was forbidden, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. Professor Herbert G. Gutman’s research in “The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925” found that in three-fourths of 19th-century slave families, all the children had the same mother and father. In New York City, in 1925, 85% of black households were two-parent. In fact, “Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents.” During slavery and as late as 1920, a black teenage girl raising a child without a man present was a rarity.

An 1880 study of family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of all black families were nuclear families. There were only slight differences in family structure between racial groups. The percentages of nuclear families were: black (75.2%), Irish (82.2%), German (84.5%) and native white Americans (73.1%). Only one-quarter of black families were female-headed. Female-headed families among Irish, German and native white Americans averaged 11%. According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, only 11% of black children and 3% of white children were born to unwed mothers. As Thomas Sowell reported: “Going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we find that census data of that era showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940.”

The absence of a father in the home predisposes children, especially boys, to academic failure, criminal behavior and economic hardship, not to mention an intergenerational repeating of handicaps. If today’s weak family structure is a legacy of slavery, then the people who make such a claim must tell us how it has managed to skip nearly five generations to have an effect.

There are problems such as grossly poor education, economic stagnation and poverty that impact the black community heavily. I would like someone to explain how tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson and Confederate generals help the black cause. Destruction of symbols of American history might help relieve the frustrations of all those white college students and their professors frustrated by the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. Problems that black people face give white leftists cover for their anti-American agenda.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at http://www.creators.com.

A healthy political party—just like a healthy individual—has certain traits and habits that nourish overall wellness. A diversity of interests, a sense of humor, a curious mind, a measured temperament, and an occasional endorphin-release from physical activity are just a few things that contribute to the fitness of a human being. The same kind of characteristics should be found on a collective scale in a thriving, muscular, and stable political party.

None of those qualities, however, can be detected in the present-day Democratic Party.

For all the squawking about Donald Trump’s alleged unfitness for office and insistence that the Republican Party is populated with zombie-like Trump cultists, in reality it is the Democratic Party that needs an extended stay at a detox facility to cleanse its sickly mind and body.

The party’s ailments have been on full display this week. Look no further than the freakish music video that closed out the first night of the Democratic National Convention. Billy Porter, a gay black Broadway star, and geriatric Steven Stills of Crosby, Stills, and Nash teamed up to remake Stills’ 1966 classic, “For What It’s Worth.”

The video was a performative display of the party’s schizophrenia: A white ’60s counterculture icon and a Dracula-costumed POC LGBTQ activist offering an inharmonious version of a Vietnam-era tune as the official anthem for the candidacy of a feeble establishment codger and his unaccomplished cackling sidekick quickly shredding their faux moderate façade in fealty to the party’s lunatic fringe of America-hating nihilists.

Days of (More) Rage
Somebody call a doctor.

The Democratic Party is not well. Joe Biden is neither mentally nor physically healthy enough to run the country, yet the party remains in denial. Biden’s conduct should raise all sorts of red flags but party stalwarts are hellbent on dragging him across the finish line in November in an almost cruel act of selfishness.

While Democrats willfully ignore Biden’s fragility, the party is fixated on every move, utterance, and tweet from Donald Trump in a way that any mental health professional would diagnose as obsessive.

Their rage often is expressed in alarming public outbursts. From tearing up a State of the Union address to threatening to “impeach the motherfucker” and calling for “unrest in the streets” against Trump supporters, the Democratic Party is controlled by emotionally unstable people who behave more like mad stalkers than rational adults.

They have one hallucination after another. For three years, Democrats rocked back and forth wrapped in a collusion straightjacket mumbling about the Russians(!) and lighting candles for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. One Democratic leader made up phone conversations between Trump and the Ukrainian president; one presidential candidate pretends to be Native American.

Now, metal mailboxes disappear before their very eyes.

Even the party’s aristocracy is ailing. Why exactly are the Obamas so angry? Barack Obama continues to escape any culpability for the rampant corruption that occurred on his watch, not the least of which was using the sweeping powers of the federal government to target his political foes both before and after the 2016 election. Michelle Obama recorded her dark convention message from their 30-acre, $12 million estate in Martha’s Vineyard. The pair signed a joint book deal for $65 million and a $50 million gig with Netflix.

I suppose Trump’s dismantling of Obama’s legacy might sting a bit, but it hardly justifies the doomsday scenarios both Obamas presented to the American people this week.

Yes, Mrs. Obama, many people believe this election will have serious consequences for America’s future but it has nothing to do with climate change or Trump’s tweets and everything to do with the threat posed by a lawless Democratic Party intent on tearing out the underpinnings of the country.

Normal People Don’t Act This Way
But it’s not just the big party names who need sedation. The rank-and-file are just as disturbed.

On a lovely summer Sunday last weekend, a large group of “protestors” gathered outside the North Carolina home of the U.S. postmaster to harass Louis DeJoy for his purported scheme to make the postal service unmanageable before the election. (Yes, that’s a joke.) Some agitators held signs that read “Protect Our Boys in Blue!” referring not to police officers but to mailmen.

That’s not how normal people spend a Sunday afternoon. Hounding public officials and their families, however, has become political chic in the Trump era. On a Sunday in July, crackpot Democrats congregated in the Virginia neighborhood where Chad Wolf, acting director of the Department of Homeland Security, lives with his family. The agitators were furious over Wolf’s comment to enforce federal law in unruly cities such as Portland.

The rank-and-file Democrats are as much to blame for the toxic political climate as the news media or party leadership. They are the people banging on the doors of the Supreme Court, forcing their kids to attend Black Lives Matters marches, and posting Adam Schiff’s latest absurd conspiracy theory on their Facebook pages. Trump-hating Democrats are like junkies; they need a daily fix from the Washington Post and Rachel Maddow just to get through the day.

Teachers’ unions are a perfect example. Most schools were preparing plans to reopen this fall—until the Bad Orange Man weighed in. “Trump’s aggressive, often bellicose demands for reopening classrooms helped to harden the views of many educators that it would be unsafe—and give their powerful unions fodder to demand stronger safety measures or to resist efforts to physically reopen,” the New York Times reported August 13. “As the president has pushed for schools to reopen, key constituencies—parents and educators—have largely moved in the other direction.”

Now, think about that. The president correctly concluded that tens of millions of children must return to in-person classrooms after five months of isolation and irreversible educational setbacks but grown adults are so consumed with partisan rage that they instead choose to sacrifice the well-being of our kids to score political points against him.

Not healthy, not compassionate, and not sane.

“These People Are Insane”
Healthy people thrive on good habits and routine; unhealthy people sow chaos for themselves and for others. The Democratic Party is the home of monument-destroyers, Magnificent Mile looters, urban center occupiers, cop abusers, and thugs of all ages.

Democratic leaders are enablers of this mob-like behavior; in fact, they want more. Lawmakers pledge to defund local police, dismantle border patrols, and empty the prisons. If those promises are kept, the country as we know it will be gone for good. Democrat-run big cities are already disintegrating in rapid fashion due to failed leadership and policies; expect to see it in a small city or suburb near you if they get control in November.

The whole of the Democratic Party should be in a rubber room not anywhere near the levers of power. The only cure for what ails the Democratic Party is for voters to turn them out of office so they get the nice long rehab they need. As Trump said Thursday about the opposition party, “There was a certain sense of sanity 4 years ago. These people are insane.”

He is correct.

Julie Kelly

California has claimed victory over the horrible abuse and exploitation of workers at the hands of evil employers with a new bill, AB666, which will make it a crime to work for a living.

The new bill, signed into law by Governor Newsom Thursday, will stop the mistreatment of workers forever by making it illegal to work.

“Employers used to do bad things — well, not anymore,” said Newsom at the bill signing. “Not on my watch. This solution is guided by SCIENCE. Leading SCIENTISTS say that when you can’t work, you can’t be exploited by evil corporations and wicked billionaires.”

Newsom then put on some scientist-looking goggles and held up a beaker filled with a blue substance as the media applauded.

“This is a huge victory for workers,” said CA Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez. “If you want to exploit employees by paying them to work, you’ll have to move to another state.”

She then snapped her fingers in a Z formation as the media applauded.

California politicians were then baffled as millions of corporations and people moved to other states.

–Babylon Bee

The 20th century was the century of total war. Limitations on the scope of war, built up over many centuries, had already begun to break down in the 19th century, but they were altogether obliterated in the 20th. And of course the sheer amount of resources that centralized states could bring to bear in war, and the terrible new technologies of killing that became available to them, made the 20th a century of almost unimaginable horror.

It isn’t terribly often that people discuss the development of total war in tandem with the development of modern central banking, which — although antecedents existed long before — also came into its own in the 20th century. It’s no surprise that Ron Paul, the man in public life who has done more than anyone to break through the limits of what is permissible to say in polite society about both these things, has also been so insistent that the twin phenomena of war and central banking are linked. “It is no coincidence,” Dr. Paul said, “that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.”

He added:

If every American taxpayer had to submit an extra five or ten thousand dollars to the IRS this April to pay for the war, I’m quite certain it would end very quickly. The problem is that government finances war by borrowing and printing money, rather than presenting a bill directly in the form of higher taxes. When the costs are obscured, the question of whether any war is worth it becomes distorted.

For the sake of my remarks today I take it as given that Murray Rothbard’s analysis of the true functions of central banking is correct. Rothbard’s books The History of Money and Banking: The Colonial Era Through World War II, The Case Against the Fed, The Mystery of Banking, and What Has Government Done to Our Money? provide the logical case and the empirical evidence for this view, and I refer you to those sources for additional details.

For now I take it as uncontroversial that central banks perform three significant functions for the banking system and the government. First, they serve as lenders of last resort, which in practice means bailouts for the big financial firms. Second, they coordinate the inflation of the money supply by establishing a uniform rate at which the banks inflate, thereby making the fractional-reserve banking system less unstable and more consistently profitable than it would be without a central bank (which, by the way, is why the banks themselves always clamor for a central bank). Finally, they allow governments, via inflation, to finance their operations far more cheaply and surreptitiously than they otherwise could.

As an enabler of inflation, the Fed is ipso facto an enabler of war. Looking back on World War I, Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1919, “One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly; war weariness would set in much earlier.”

No government has ever said, “Because we want to go to war, we must abandon central banking,” or “Because we want to go to war, we must abandon inflation and the fiat money system.” Governments always say, “We must abandon the gold standard because we want to go to war.” That alone indicates the restraint that hard money places on governments. Precious metals cannot be created out of thin air, which is why governments chafe at monetary systems based on them.

Governments can raise revenue in three ways. Taxation is the most visible means of doing so, and it eventually meets with popular resistance. They can borrow the money they need, but this borrowing is likewise visible to the public in the form of higher interest rates — as the federal government competes for a limited amount of available credit, credit becomes scarcer for other borrowers.

Creating money out of thin air, the third option, is preferable for governments, since the process by which the political class siphons resources from society via inflation is far less direct and obvious than in the cases of taxation and borrowing. In the old days the kings clipped the coins, kept the shavings, then spent the coins back into circulation with the same nominal value. Once they have it, governments guard this power jealously. Mises once said that if the Bank of England had been available to King Charles I during the English Civil War of the 1640s, he could have crushed the parliamentary forces arrayed against him, and English history would have been much different.

Juan de Mariana, a Spanish Jesuit who wrote in the 16th and early 17th centuries, is best known in political philosophy for having defended regicide in his 1599 work De Rege. Casual students often assume that it must have been for this provocative claim that the Spanish government confined him for a time. But in fact it was his Treatise on the Alteration of Money, which condemned monetary inflation as a moral evil, that got him in trouble.

Think about that. Saying the king could be killed was one thing. But taking direct aim at inflation, the lifeblood of the regime? Now that was taking things too far.

In those days, if a war were to be funded partly by monetary debasement, the process was direct and not difficult to understand. The sequence of events today is more complicated, but as I’ve said, not fundamentally different. What happens today is not that the government needs to pay for a war, comes up short, and simply prints the money to make up the difference. The process is not quite so crude. But when we examine it carefully, it turns out to be essentially the same thing.

Central banks, established by the world’s governments, allow those governments to spend more than they receive in taxes. Borrowing allowed them to spend more than they received in taxes, but government borrowing led to higher interest rates, which in turn can provoke the public in undesirable ways. When central banks create money and inject it into the banking system, they serve the purposes of governments by pushing those interest rates back down, thereby concealing the effects of government borrowing.

But central banking does more than this. It essentially prints up money and hands it to the government, though not quite so directly and obviously.

First, the federal government is able to sell its bonds at artificially high prices (and correspondingly low interest rates) because the buyers of its debt know they can turn around and sell to the Federal Reserve. It’s true that the federal government has to pay interest on the securities the Federal Reserve owns, but at the end of the year the Fed pays that money back to the Treasury, minus its trivial operating expenses. That takes care of the interest. And in case you’re thinking that the federal government still has to pay out at least the principal, it really doesn’t. The government can roll over its existing debt when it comes due, issuing a new bond to pay off the principal of the old one.

Through this convoluted process — a process, not coincidentally, that the general public is unlikely to know about or understand — the federal government is in fact able to do the equivalent of printing money and spending it. While everyone else has to acquire resources by spending money they earned in a productive enterprise — in other words, they first have to produce something for society, and then they may consume — government may acquire resources without first having produced anything. Money creation via government monopoly thus becomes another mechanism whereby the exploitative relationship between government and the public is perpetuated.

Now because the central bank allows the government to conceal the cost of everything it does, it provides an incentive for governments to engage in additional spending in all kinds of areas, not just war. But because war is enormously expensive and because the sacrifices that accompany it place such a strain on the public, it is wartime expenditures for which the assistance of the central bank is especially welcome for any government.

The Federal Reserve System, which was established in late 1913 and opened its doors the following year, was first put to the test during World War I. Unlike some countries, the United States did not abandon the gold standard during the war, but it was not operating under a pure 100 percent gold standard in any case. The Fed could and did engage in credit expansion. On Mises.org we feature an article by John Paul Koning that takes the reader through the exact process by which the Fed carried out its monetary inflation in those early years. In brief, the Fed essentially created money and used it to add war bonds to its balance sheet. Benjamin Anderson, the Austrian-sympathetic economist, observed at the time, “The growth in virtually all the items of the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve System since the United States entered the war has been very great indeed.”

The Fed’s accommodating role was not confined to wartime itself. In America’s Money Machine, Elgin Groseclose wrote,

Although the war was over in 1918, in a fighting sense, it was not over in a financial sense. The Treasury still had enormous obligations to meet, which were eventually covered by a Victory loan. The main support in the market again was the Federal Reserve.

Monetary expansion was especially helpful to the US government during the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson could have both his Great Society programs and his overseas war, and the strain on the public was kept — at first, at least — within manageable limits.

So confident had the Keynesian economic planners become that by 1970, Arthur Okun, one of the decade’s key presidential advisers on the economy, was noting in a published retrospective that wise economic management seemed to have done away with the business cycle. But reality could not be evaded forever, and the apparently strong war economy of the 1960s gave way to the stagnation of the 1970s.

There is a law of the universe according to which every time the public is promised that the boom-bust business cycle has been banished forever, a bust is right around the corner. One month after Okun’s rosy book was published, the recession began.

Americans paid a steep cost for the inflation of the 1960s. The loss of life resulting from the war itself was the most gruesome and horrific of these costs, but the economic devastation cannot be ignored. As many of us well remember, years of unemployment and high inflation plagued the US economy. The stock market fared even worse. Mark Thornton points out that

in May 1970, a portfolio consisting of one share of every stock listed on the Big Board was worth just about half of what it would have been worth at the start of 1969. The high flyers that had led the market of 1967 and 1968 — conglomerates, computer leasers, far-out electronics companies, franchisers — were precipitously down from their peaks. Nor were they down 25 percent, like the Dow, but 80, 90, or 95 percent.

… The Dow index shows that stocks tended to trade in a wide channel for much of the period between 1965 and 1984. However, if you adjust the value of stocks by price inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index, a clearer and more disturbing picture emerges. The inflation-adjusted or real purchasing power measure of the Dow indicates that it lost nearly 80% of its peak value.

And for all the talk of the Fed’s alleged independence, it is not even possible to imagine the Fed maintaining a tight-money stance when the regime demands stimulus, or when the troops are in the field. It has been more than accommodating during the so-called War on Terror. Consider the amount of debt purchased every year by the Fed, and compare it to that year’s war expenditures, and you will get a sense of the Fed’s enabling role.

Now while it’s true that a gold standard restrains governments, it’s also true that governments have little difficulty finding pretexts — war chief among them — to abandon the gold standard. For that reason, the gold standard in and of itself is not a sufficient restraint on the government’s ambitions, at home and abroad.

As we look to the future, we must cast aside all timidity in our proposals for monetary reform. We do not seek a gold-exchange standard, as existed under the Bretton Woods system. We do not seek to use the price of gold as a calibration device to assist the monetary authority in its decisions on how much money to create. We do not even seek the restoration of the classical gold standard, great though its merits are.

In the 1830s, the hard-money Jacksonian monetary theorists coined the marvelous phrase “separation of bank and state.” That would be a start.

What we need today is the separation of money and state.

There are some ways in which money is unique among goods. For one thing, money is valued not for its own sake but for its use in exchange. For another, money is not consumed, but rather is handed on from one person to another. And all other goods in the economy have their prices expressed in terms of this good.

But there is nothing about money — or anything else, for that matter — that should make us think its production must be carried out by the government or its designated monopoly grantee. Money constitutes one-half of every non-barter market transaction. People who believe in the market economy, and yet who are prepared to hand over to the state the custodianship of this most crucial good, ought to think again.

Interventionists sometimes claim that a particular good is just too important to be left to the market. The standard free-market reply turns this argument around: the more important a commodity is, the more essential it is for the government not to produce it, and to leave its production to the market instead.

Nowhere is this more true than in the case of money. As Ludwig von Mises once said, the history of money is the history of government efforts to destroy money. Government control of money has yielded monetary debasement, the impoverishment of society relative to the state, devastating business cycles, financial bubbles, capital consumption (because of falsified profit-and-loss accounting), moral hazard, and — most germane to my topic today — the expropriation of the public in ways they are unlikely to understand. It is this silent expropriation that has made possible some of the state’s greatest enormities, including its wars, and it is all of these offenses combined that constitute a compelling popular brief against the current system and in favor of a market substitute.

The war machine and the money machine, in short, are intimately linked. It is vain to denounce the moral grotesqueries of the US empire without at the same time taking aim at the indispensable support that makes it all possible. If we wish to oppose the state and all its manifestations — its imperial adventures, its domestic subsidies, its unstoppable spending and debt accumulation — we must point to their source, the central bank, the mechanism that the state and its kept media and economists will defend to their dying days.

The state has persuaded the people that its own interests are identical with theirs. It seeks to promote their welfare. Its wars are their wars. It is the great benefactor, and the people are to be content in their role as its contented subjects.

Ours is a different view. The state’s relationship to the people is not benign, it is not one of magnanimous giver and grateful recipient. It is an exploitative relationship, whereby an array of self-perpetuating fiefdoms that produce nothing live at the expense of the toiling majority. Its wars do not protect the public; they fleece it. Its subsidies do not promote the so-called public good; they undermine it. Why should we expect its production of money to be an exception to this general pattern?

As F.A. Hayek said, it is not reasonable to think that the state has any interest in giving us a “good money.” What the state wants is to produce the money or have a privileged position vis-à-vis the source of the money, so it can dispense largesse to its favored constituencies. We should not be anxious to accommodate it.

The state does not compromise, and neither should we. In the struggle of liberty against power, few enough will oppose the state and the conventional wisdom it urges us to adopt. Fewer still will reject the state and its programs root and branch. We must be those few, as we work toward a future in which we are the many.

This is our mission today, as it has been the mission of the Mises Institute for the past 30 years. With your support, we shall at this critical moment carry on publishing our books and periodicals, aiding research and teaching in Austrian economics, promoting the Austrian School to the public, and training tomorrow’s champions of the economics of freedom.

[Originally published under the title “Twin Demons.”]

Author:
Contact Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of LewRockwell.com.

Creative Commons Licence

Imagine being a Latin American immigrant to the United States who arrived fifty years ago, worked six days a week—every week—to establish a small business, and has now achieved some modicum of financial security. But now you’re being told every every time you turn on the news that you are on the hook for a $12 trillion “reparations” payment (or $35,000 for every American) to be paid out, because you have to make amends for slavery. (The $12 trillion dollar figure—being promoted by economist William Darity — is the latest figure being offered as the minimum sum necessary for mitigating the lingering effects of slavery in America.)

Never mind, of course, that slavery was outlawed decades before you ever arrived in the United States. And never mind that you came to this country with almost nothing. What wealth you have managed to acquire in the decades since is now apparently fair game to a Congress which plans to “set things right” through just another massive transfer payments program.

This sum—obviously—is not to be paid merely by those who owned slaves at some point, or by those who are their heirs. No, the modern idea of reparations most often promoted is one in which the American taxpayers overall —regardless of their background or origins—must be forced to pay. That is, in this view, countless millions of Americans descended from people who only arrived in the US after slavery was outlawed are to be taxed to pay for crimes for which they could not possibly have been responsible.

A Proper Definition of “Reparations”
This isn’t to say there is no proper role for reparations for past injustices. Any decent legal system would provide for a victim of kidnapping and forced labor to obtain repayment for the time and labor stolen from him by the kidnapper.

As Walter Block writes:

Justified reparations are nothing more and nothing less than the forced return of stolen property—even after a significant amount of time has passed. For example, if my grandfather stole a ring from your grandfather, and then bequeathed it to me through the intermediation of my father, then I am, presently, the illegitimate owner of that piece of jewelry. To take the position that reparations are always and forever unjustified is to give an imprimatur to theft, provided a sufficient time period has elapsed. In the just society, your father would have inherited the ring from his own parent, and then given it to you. It is thus not a violation of property rights, but a logical implication of them, to force me to give over this ill-gotten gain to you.

It may be both necessary and desirable to seek reparations not just from living persons but from their descendants as well.

But in order to do this with an eye toward justice, one must identify specific victims and specific perpetrators. Reparations cannot justly be paid in the abstract. As Chris Calton has noted, property rights, properly understood, are

based on concretely identifiable property rights. When a violation of a person’s property rights takes place, restitution is the logical means of compensating the victim….

But in the real world [on matters of slavery] such a claim is incredibly difficult to prove. And failure to prove a legitimate property claim means that the currently recognized property title holds. Anything else would be committing a new injustice to give the illusion of correcting an old one.

These notions are certainly nothing new. In the seventeenth century, the English philosopher John Locke had already considered the matter, as well summarized by philosopher Grant Havers:

In his Second Treatise on Government, Locke wrote that the act of “reparation…belongs only to the injured party.” Moreover, this “damnified Person has this Power of appropriating to himself, the Goods or Service of the Offender, by Right of Self-Preservation.” In short, if one person steals the property of another, then the “injured party” has every right to take it back. Yet Locke stipulated that this act of “reparation” applies only to the “injured party” who clearly participates in an exchange of goods or services….Locke’s idea of reparation, then, applies only to those who are either a first or second party to an exchange of property, not a third party.

The Moral Absurdity of Reparations from Third Parties: The Case of Immigrants
In the case of slavery in America, there are the slaves, who are the ones who were wrongfully imprisoned and who had the fruits of their labor stolen. And then there are the slave owners: those who committed the theft and the false imprisonment. Yet modern-day restitution claims are primarily based on forcing third parties to pay for wrongs to which few of today’s taxpayers have any connection.

Among these third parties are the nearly one-fifth of the US population composed of Americans who arrived from somewhere else over the past fifty years or are their descendants. According to Pew Research:

Between 1965 and 2015, new immigrants, their children and their grandchildren accounted for 55% of U.S. population growth. They added 72 million people to the nation’s population as it grew from 193 million in 1965 to 324 million in 2015.

But of course these relatively recent arrivals are not the only ones who entered the US after the thirteenth amendment was ratified. Naturally, if we extend the time horizon further back in time, the number of “new” Americans only get larger.

Between 1870 and 1900, nearly 12 million immigrants arrived, more foreign-born people than had come to the country in the preceding seventy years. If that doesn’t seem like a large number, remember that the entire population of the United States was only 38.5 million in 1870. After 1900, and until 1915, another 15 million arrived.

Meanwhile, out west the Mexican Revolution convinced hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to move to the United States. From 1910 to 1930, “the number of Mexican immigrants counted by the U.S. census tripled from 200,000 to 600,000. The actual number was probably far greater.” By the 1920s, the US was experiencing a sixteenfold increase in Mexican immigration compared to the first decade of the twentieth century.1

Yet advocates for a national reparations program would have us believe that these people and their descendants are somehow morally responsible for slavery. But how to make the case that a middle-class Mexican American, descended from refugees fleeing the Mexican Revolution, ought to be paying thousands on reparations? In many cases, this problem is simply ignored by those pushing for reparations. But in other cases they’ve invented a wide variety of new theories.

Chief among these is the idea that the US economy was built by slaves. This claim, however, is demonstrably false. The slave economy during the nineteenth century was backward, inefficient, and hardly provided a foundation for the Northern economy, which was rapidly industrializing thanks primarily to technological innovation and the superiority of free labor. When slavery was finally abolished, the Northern economy just kept growing.2

[RELATED: “Why They Keep Trying to Blame Capitalists for Slavery” by Ryan McMaken]

Proreparations advocates are unlikely to relent on this, however, because if the proreparations side can win this argument, they can then claim that all those immigrants who prospered in American over the past 150 years somehow owe their prosperity to the foundation laid by slaves decades earlier. The proreparations party is basically saying to immigrants and their descendants “That wealth you acquired since coming to America? You didn’t build that.”

There are other “arguments” as well. The “white privilege” claim can be used to assert that many immigrants—now matter how impoverished or illiterate they were when they arrived here—somehow prospered at the expense of slaves and former slaves. Superficially, this claim is relatively easy to make in the case of Irish Americans and eastern Europeans who arrived a century ago. The proreparations camp insists these immigrants were nonetheless “white presenting” and thus able to integrate easily. Their whiteness gave them access to the benefits of American capitalism—capitalism built on slavery—and thus we’re back again to concluding that even immigrants owe their prosperity to the slavery of ages past.

But not all immigrants are “white presenting.” Hispanics and Asian Americans combined make up nearly one-quarter of the US population today. Many clearly do not have a stereotypical white appearance and presumably are unable to take advantage of the free pass to riches that is “white privilege.” Moreover members of the ethnic groups within the Latin American and Asian immigrant groups have been historically faced with a wide variety of legal and cultural barriers designed to stymie their access to capital and social benefits. Yet the millions of Americans within these demographic groups are expected to foot the reparations bill as well.

The Problem with Specifics
While the case of immigrants presents an especially compelling case against forcing third parties to pay reparations for slavery, the reality is that the situation for other populations is not much more clear cut.

There is no doubt that some Americans who lived in the antebellum United States benefited from slavery, but the degree to which these populations benefited was quite diverse. Poor families in Appalachia, for example, were hardly getting rich off the toil of slaves. In fact, slavery drove down the wages of workers who had to compete with slave labor. The number of whites—both north and south—who found themselves in this position was substantial.3

Moreover, slavery was primarily a regional phenomenon and hardly something that could be described as inherently “American.” After all, by the time of the Civil War, the overwhelming majority of the US population lived in states where slavery was illegal. By midcentury, some Northern states had even refused to comply with the fugitive slave laws.

Nor were the slave patrols—an institution central to preventing and punishing slave rebellions—something that received national support. Slave patrols were staffed at the state level, often by conscripts forced into service by the state legislatures.

Given this, there is scant reason to conclude that a farmer in western Pennsylvania in 1860, where the state government had nullified the fugitive slave acts, and where slavery was illegal, is somehow legally, morally, or financially responsible for slavery.

The reason for this insistence on blaming all Americans—both past and present—has a long history. To assuage their consciences, the slave owners of old concocted all sorts of half-baked theories designed to place the blame for slavery on people other than themselves. But nowadays, this impulse is tied to the need to find as many people as possible who can pay in to a reparations program. Even if Congress were to pave the way legally for lawsuits against the heirs of slave owners of old, the obstacles to obtaining any sizable cash settlement are large. Even if specific parties could be identified today, there’s no reason to assume these people have particularly deep pockets. The US government, on the other hand, has access to trillions of dollars. It makes sense to go to where the money is, even if that means sticking a hundred million immigrant families with the bill.

1.David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York, Basic Books, 2005), p. 150.
2.It should also be noted that the population of the slave states—including slaves—was considerably smaller than the population in free states. The population of the US in 1860 was 31 million. Of those, only 12 million lived in slave states, including 4 million slaves. In the decades following emancipation, most of the immense number of new immigrants moved to what had been non-slave states before the war.
3.As historian Keri Leigh Merritt describes in detail in her book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), nonslaveholding whites in the South—who constituted a majority of the population—received far lower wages than they would have had they not been forced to compete with slave labor by a legal system designed to favor slave owners.

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Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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Cancel culture in America is picking up speed, but Superman himself, actor Dean Cain, told “Fox and Friends” that it needs to end in Hollywood.

“This cancel culture within Hollywood, it is a cancer,” he said. “It’s McCarthyism and it’s threatening people [by saying] ‘look, I’m going to take away your ability to make a living, your livelihood if you don’t toe the party line.’ And it’s not going to end well, I promise you.”

Dean Cain: What a brave, rare, independent soul. Leftism is an irrational ideology overtaking society just like Hitler’s hatred enveloped Germany. These cancel culture people have no souls, not if souls consist of thinking and empathy. They are dreary nothings–and yet we allow these tortured, toxic abusers to control and intimidate us.

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

This was Samuel Johnson’s bitter rhetorical question about the American revolution, and the conflict it identifies has never been far from the surface of American political and intellectual life. Compared with the societies of 18th and 19th century Europe, the United States was unusually obsessed with the idea of liberty and unusually economically dependent on slave labor. Sometimes Americans like to tell ourselves that the revolutionary idea of liberty is what finally made abolition possible two generations later, but that sidesteps the paradox that the U.S. was one of the last countries to abolish slavery, and did so only after a decades-long expansion.

The great historical sociologist Orlando Patterson provided an important answer to Johnson’s question in his landmark study Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. Across the centuries, from ancient Greece to modern America, “people came to value freedom, to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life, as a result of their experience of, and response to, slavery or its recombinant form, serfdom, in their roles as masters, slaves, and nonslaves.” It is precisely in slave societies, confronted with the reality of slavery, that people most acutely perceive the importance of freedom, most clearly articulate defenses of it, and most passionately demand it. Sometimes it is slaves or ex-slaves who do so. But often it is masters. Understanding all too well how they rule over other human beings, they identify being ruled like that as the great social evil, and they fiercely refuse to be subjected to it. Slaveowners and their neighbors can see what unfreedom is like, and they resist it for themselves. This is only partly because they come to identify their freedom as their freedom to own and rule slaves, and are desperate to protect their status as masters. In a more general way, they become very sensitive to anyone proposing to treat them as they treat slaves.

The Freedom of the Masters and the Rhetoric of Liberty

These intellectual and cultural paradoxes in antebellum America survived abolition, and in mutated form survive to this day. The language of freedom in American political discourse has very often been appropriated for the defense of white supremacy. We have often heard the loudest yelps for liberty among those trying to protect the terror and apartheid states of the Jim Crow south, the quasi-serfdom of sharecropping, segregated schools, miscegenation laws, and the suppression of black votes. Particular types of freedom or particular strategies for limiting governmental power—freedom of association, religious liberty, federalism, bicameralism, and so on—all came to be identified at one point or another primarily as ways to prevent the federal government from breaking the power of white rule, just as before the war the protection of private property rights had so often been identified primarily with the protection of slaveowners’ supposed property in other human beings.

None of this means that liberty is not a worthwhile, and true, ideal.

Like Adam Smith, I believe that we often engage in real moral learning by negative example. We learn the value of mercy and kindness through witnessing or understanding cruelty. We learn about justice by being exposed to gross injustice. Patterson’s theory of how we learn about liberty doesn’t mean that we don’t thereby genuinely learn something important. But this history does mean that the public language of liberty in American politics is often not to be trusted. Not to put too fine a point on it, those who proclaim their commitment to freedom have all too often assessed threats to freedom as if those facing African-Americans don’t count —as if black liberty does not matter.

Treating Black Liberty Like it Doesn’t Matter Distorts the Picture of American Freedom

This exclusion of African-Americans from the calculus of American freedom extends far beyond the questions that most obviously connect to the legacy of Jim Crow, such as voting rights, and far beyond the borders of the old Confederacy.

The way we think about American freedom over time, or in comparison to the rest of the world, ought to be deeply structured by the rise of mass incarceration in the last three decades. It’s not—not in triumphalist narratives about revitalized market liberalism since the late 1970s or since 1989, not in comparative rankings and indices of freedom around the world, and certainly not in the unshakeable American public language that the United States is the freest nation on earth. At the level of gross political generalization, it’s common to encounter the idea that European and Canadian social democracies have chosen to make equality a priority, whereas the U.S. is committed to liberty. The distinctive policing and carceral practices of the American state, the ways that the U.S. is extraordinarily unfree, are nowhere to be seen in the comparison.

That is not to say that people who talk about freedom in American politics have nothing to say about the crises of mass incarceration and of violent, invasive, and militarized policing. American libertarians have always rejected the drug war that contributed so much to these crises. And libertarians have been happy enough to note the disproportionate impact of the drug war on African-Americans and Hispanics. But we have too often treated this as a rhetorical bonus on top of a pre-existing objection to the drug war.

Prisoners returning from forced labor, Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2011.
Prisoners returning from forced labor, Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2011.

What has been much too rare is an understanding of racism as a cause of the drug war and of mass incarceration. Nixon aide John Erhlichman was belatedly explicit about this. After the civil rights movement, the Nixon administration couldn’t openly admit that it aimed to subject African-Americans to greater policing and control or to mobilize white voters by fear of blacks. The crackdown on hard drugs provided the needed fig leaf. As has so often been true, racism was a cause of the expansion of American state power, a cause of unfreedom. The centuries-old appropriation of the language of liberty by the defenders of white supremacy obscures this, over and over again.

This brings me to two recent and awkwardly-connected controversies within, and about, American libertarianism.

Nancy MacLean Missed the Story on Libertarianism’s Race Problem

The more prominent is the debate about Nancy MacLean’s book on James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and a founder of public choice theory. In Democracy in Chains, MacLean alleges that Buchanan was significantly inspired by the Confederate nostalgia of the Southern Agrarian school, and that his creation of the original ideas and institutions of public choice theory was very much tied up with Virginian resistance to Brown v Board and the civil rights movement. She treats Buchanan as the architect of a decades-long conspiratorial strategy to advance a political agenda that was both anti-democratic and compatible with (indeed possibly supportive of) the maintenance of Jim Crow. I did not know Buchanan and am not much influenced by public choice theory, but those who did and those who are have dealt devastating blows to the credibility of this story. See these two essays co-authored by Crooked Timber’s Harry Farrell and my Niskanen colleague Steven Teles. See also this review essay by my Bleeding Hearts Libertarian co-blogger Steven Horwitz in The Cato Journal and this one by another co-blogger, Michael Munger, in The Independent Review. I will not try to add to these critiques, which I find entirely persuasive about Democracy in Chains’ details and core claims alike.

But part of what is so strange about Democracy in Chains is its choice of targets. The claims MacLean makes are untrue about Buchanan. But the history of the postwar libertarian movement is rich with moments of flirtation or outright entanglement with the defenders of white supremacy. This is most conspicuous today in the explicit sympathy for the Confederacy in some quarters, a problem I’ve written about before. There’d be no trouble writing a better book than MacLean’s about the dark history of libertarian politics that ran from Murray Rothbard’s support for Strom Thurmond’s presidential campaign to Lew Rockwell’s celebration to the beating of Rodney King to the racism that went out under Ron Paul’s name in his newsletters in the 1980s and 90s to the case of then-aide to Rand Paul Jack Hunter. The generalized distrust of institutions that can be part of anti-statism easily falls back on the fantasy of a unified pre-political national people, and that populist nationalism in America is almost definitionally white populist nationalism.

The particular fascination with Abraham Lincoln’s (genuine but far from unique) violations of civil liberties, the celebration of secession, the insistence on discussing the Civil Rights Act primarily in terms of freedom of association (as if white supremacy in the Jim Crow south were just a private taste that some people indulged), and an interest in freedom of speech that focuses disproportionately on the freedom to indulge in racially-charged “political incorrectness” could all figure in such a book. Rothbard was a decisive figure in the development of organized libertarianism, and the Pauls are hardly minor characters in libertarian and quasi-libertarian politics. I suspect they were less appealing to MacLean because Buchanan was close to Charles and David Koch for decades after Rothbard and his circle went to ideological war against them, and the Kochs were the exciting target for her to try to implicate.

But there are ways to neglect black liberty that are subtler than the white nationalism of the Confederatistas. Think about the different ways that market liberals and libertarians talk about “welfare” from how they talk about other kinds of government redistribution. There’s no talk of the culture of dependence among farmers, although they receive far more government aid per capita than do the urban poor. Libertarians absolutely and clearly oppose corporate welfare, but they don’t do so in the paternalistic language that corporate welfare recipients are morally hurt by being on the dole. The white welfare state of the 1930s-60s that channeled government support for, e.g., housing, urban development, and higher education through segregated institutions has a way of disappearing from the historical memory; the degrees earned and homes bought get remembered as hard work contributing to the American dream. But too many libertarians and their market-oriented allies among postwar conservatives treated the more racially inclusive welfare state of the 1960s and 70s as different in kind. White recipients of housing subsidies hadn’t been imagined to become dependent, non-autonomous, or unfree. When the FHA was insisting that neighborhoods be segregated in order to be eligible for mortgage or building subsidies, it contributed a great deal to the racial wealth gap that persists to this day. No free-marketeers of the era felt the need to engage in brave, politically incorrect inquiries into the lower intelligence of new white homeowners that might explain their long-term dependence. But once the imagined typical welfare recipient was a black mother, welfare became a matter not just of economic or constitutional concern but of moral panic about parasites, fraud, and the long-term collapse of self-reliance.

The Language of Liberty and the Rise of the Alt-Right

Returning for a moment to the overt white nationalists allows us to also think about the other recent dispute about libertarian politics: the embarrassingly large number of people associated with the racist alt-right who once identified as libertarians, or (even worse) still do. Some of this is just the inevitable sociology of the fringe. Those who join smaller political movements tend to come to think that mainstream sources of information and ideology aren’t to be trusted. They tend to be unmoored from a society’s dominant values and intellectual positions. And so, as they change their mind about things (and most people do, from time to time), they’re disproportionately likely to end up attached to other fringe movements. That’s just a selection effect about what kind of people join fringe movements, and it doesn’t say anything about the content of either movement’s ideas.

But it seems pretty plausible to me that there’s something more to be said. The capture of the language of freedom by the defenders of white supremacy and the Confederacy is a major fact about American political language and its history, and there’s a small but vocal group of self-identified libertarians who participate in it and perpetuate it. The racialization of the discourse around redistribution, such that people who think of themselves as committed to small government in general have a special visceral reaction against what they call “welfare” that doesn’t extend to the far larger redistributive activities of the state, is a major fact about more recent American political language. And the conviction that freedom of speech is mostly threatened by “political correctness” in American life, that saying racist things is a brave stand against censorship, that calling what someone else says “racist” is pretty much like censoring them—these are important facts about American political discourse today. Organized libertarianism partakes of all of these. I have argued elsewhere that American libertarianism’s dependence on Lockean traditions brings with it the fantasy of a unified pre-political people that might reclaim its liberty from distrusted governing institutions. And in the American political tradition, that kind of holist populist nationalism has always been white nationalism.

Re-imagining Libertarian Politics as if Black Liberty Matters

Now, libertarian, individualist, and market-liberal ideas, concepts, slogans, and advocates aren’t alone in having a history that is entangled with white supremacy. Hardly any set of social ideas in American intellectual history lacks such an entanglement. This is as true of the technocratic progressivism associated with the racist Woodrow Wilson as it is of the populist democracy associated with the racist Andrew Jackson. If federalism is tainted by Jim Crow, so is centralization by the Fugitive Slave Act and the white welfare state of the 1930s onward, among other things. (We can, of course, say something similar about the state and federal governments’ histories of crimes against Indians.) A particularly silly move made by some of MacLean’s defenders recently has been the insistence that constitutional restraints on racist majorities don’t count as counter-majoritarian or limits on democracy, as if “democracy” could only refer to some ideal state of affairs innocent of a history of herrenvolk democracy. The early American republic, and especially the Jacksonian republic, was at once much more democratic than any European state of the same era and much more racist, and these were not unrelated. A hierarchical society with countless small social gradations can treat racial subordination as continuous with many other kinds of subordination. A levelled hierarchy among whites sharpens the distinction at the edges of that category; a social hill is replaced by a social plateau that ends in cliffs. The expanding rights and proud equal dignity of lower-class whites came to consist precisely in their equal claim to whiteness; this became a foundational fact of American democratic equality. There’s no good reason to sever “democracy” or “progressivism” from their complicated genealogies while tying “federalism” or “freedom of association” to theirs.

As a scholar, I’m interested in all these histories. As an advocate, I have to be especially interested in the history of classical and market liberalism. I don’t want the convincing intellectual victory over Democracy in Chains to fool us into thinking that there’s no problem. I don’t want the forceful, true, statement that libertarian principles are incompatible with white supremacy to fool us into overlooking a morally compromised history and sociological and psychological patterns about how those principles turn into general political discourse.

Reimagining libertarian politics in light of the truth that black liberty matters will take a lot of intellectual and moral work. And this task, reorienting a set of ideas and ideals in light of a morally compromised history, of understanding what lessons need to be learned from it, of separating the arguments for liberty from the yelps, is insiders’ work. No one else is going to do it for us.

—

Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds at McGill University; author of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom and scholarly articles including, most recently,”Contra Politanism”; a blogger at Bleeding Heart Libertarians; and a Niskanen Center Senior Fellow and Advisory Board Member.

“The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

–Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

At first I thought this was satire from The Onion or Babylon Bee. But,no, it’s the rantings of a lunatic professor of ethics, Parker Crutchfield, at Western Michigan.–A/D

COVID is a collective risk. It threatens everyone, and we all must cooperate to lower the chance that the coronavirus harms any one individual. Among other things, that means keeping safe social distances and wearing masks. But many people choose not to do these things, making spread of infection more likely.

When someone chooses not to follow public health guidelines around the coronavirus, they’re defecting from the public good. It’s the moral equivalent of the tragedy of the commons: If everyone shares the same pasture for their individual flocks, some people are going to graze their animals longer, or let them eat more than their fair share, ruining the commons in the process. Selfish and self-defeating behavior undermines the pursuit of something from which everyone can benefit.

Democratically enacted enforceable rules – mandating things like mask wearing and social distancing – might work, if defectors could be coerced into adhering to them. But not all states have opted to pass them or to enforce the rules that are in place.

My research in bioethics focuses on questions like how to induce those who are noncooperative to get on board with doing what’s best for the public good. To me, it seems the problem of coronavirus defectors could be solved by moral enhancement: like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behavior. Could a psychoactive pill be the solution to the pandemic?

It’s a far-out proposal that’s bound to be controversial, but one I believe is worth at least considering, given the importance of social cooperation in the struggle to get COVID-19 under control.

Protesters outside California state capital building
People in California protested stay-at-home orders in May – prioritizing the personal over the collective. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
Public goods games show scale of the problem
Evidence from experimental economics shows that defections are common to situations in which people face collective risks. Economists use public goods games to measure how people behave in various scenarios to lower collective risks such as from climate change or a pandemic and to prevent the loss of public and private goods.

The evidence from these experiments is no cause for optimism. Usually everyone loses because people won’t cooperate. This research suggests it’s not surprising people aren’t wearing masks or social distancing – lots of people defect from groups when facing a collective risk. By the same token, I’d expect that, as a group, we will fail at addressing the collective risk of COVID-19, because groups usually fail. For more than 150,000 Americans so far, this has meant losing everything there is to lose.

But don’t abandon all hope. In some of these experiments, the groups win and successfully prevent the losses associated with the collective risk. What makes winning more likely? Things like keeping a running tally of what others are contributing, observing others’ behaviors, communication and coordination before and during play, and democratic implementation of an enforceable rule requiring contributions.

For those of us in the United States, these conditions are out of reach when it comes to COVID-19. You can’t know what others are contributing to the fight against the coronavirus, especially if you socially distance yourself. It’s impossible to keep a running tally of what the other 328 million people in the U.S. are doing. And communication and coordination are not feasible outside of your own small group.

Even if these factors were achievable, they still require the very cooperative behavior that’s in short supply. The scale of the pandemic is simply too great for any of this to be possible.

Promoting cooperation with moral enhancement
It seems that the U.S. is not currently equipped to cooperatively lower the risk confronting us. Many are instead pinning their hopes on the rapid development and distribution of an enhancement to the immune system – a vaccine.

But I believe society may be better off, both in the short term as well as the long, by boosting not the body’s ability to fight off disease but the brain’s ability to cooperate with others. What if researchers developed and delivered a moral enhancer rather than an immunity enhancer?

Moral enhancement is the use of substances to make you more moral. The psychoactive substances act on your ability to reason about what the right thing to do is, or your ability to be empathetic or altruistic or cooperative.

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For example, oxytocin, the chemical that, among other things, can induce labor or increase the bond between mother and child, may cause a person to be more empathetic and altruistic, more giving and generous. The same goes for psilocybin, the active component of “magic mushrooms.” These substances have been shown to lower aggressive behavior in those with antisocial personality disorder and to improve the ability of sociopaths to recognize emotion in others.

These substances interact directly with the psychological underpinnings of moral behavior; others that make you more rational could also help. Then, perhaps, the people who choose to go maskless or flout social distancing guidelines would better understand that everyone, including them, is better off when they contribute, and rationalize that the best thing to do is cooperate.

Hand injecting a shot into a bare upper arm
A moral booster rather than an immunological one? Jeffrey Hamilton/DigitalVision via Getty Images
Moral enhancement as an alternative to vaccines
There are of course pitfalls to moral enhancement.

One is that the science isn’t developed enough. For example, while oxytocin may cause some people to be more pro-social, it also appears to encourage ethnocentrism, and so is probably a bad candidate for a widely distributed moral enhancement. But this doesn’t mean that a morality pill is impossible. The solution to the underdeveloped science isn’t to quit on it, but to direct resources to related research in neuroscience, psychology or one of the behavioral sciences.

Another challenge is that the defectors who need moral enhancement are also the least likely to sign up for it. As some have argued, a solution would be to make moral enhancement compulsory or administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply. These actions require weighing other values. Does the good of covertly dosing the public with a drug that would change people’s behavior outweigh individuals’ autonomy to choose whether to participate? Does the good associated with wearing a mask outweigh an individual’s autonomy to not wear one?

The scenario in which the government forces an immunity booster upon everyone is plausible. And the military has been forcing enhancements like vaccines or “uppers” upon soldiers for a long time. The scenario in which the government forces a morality booster upon everyone is far-fetched. But a strategy like this one could be a way out of this pandemic, a future outbreak or the suffering associated with climate change. That’s why we should be thinking of it now.

I hate to say “I told you so”, BUT…

Years ago, most state and local governments outlawed smoking in public places, such as restaurants. Like millions of people (including even some smokers), I much prefer public places without smoking. It’s hard to believe there was a time when you ate in a restaurant and had to inhale these fumes. But still: I opposed the non-smoking mandates. People thought I was crazy. “Do you LIKE to smell smoke when you’re in a public place?” Of course not. But it was up to the individual business owner to decide. Because of changes in cultural attitudes about smoking, probably many places would have outlawed smoking in their establishments. Others would cater to a smoking market, and leave it that way. The point is: It’s up to PEOPLE to decide, not governments. I finally gave up on arguing with people about it. I wanted to convince them that the principle of the thing mattered. All they cared about was, “If I don’t like smoking in public, then I’m glad it’s illegal.” Principle was beside the point. I tried to say, “But if you concede the principle on smoking, then the stage is set for future mandates you might NOT like.” No answer. Usually, just a shrug or a sneer.

Now, 20 years later, we have new mandates. Way, way beyond smoking. We have mask mandates. We have closed church mandates. We have no public gatherings over X number of people mandates. In California, police (I thought they were outlawed?) are raiding homes with parties the government considers too big. Federal and local officials talk openly of mandating mask-wearing IN YOUR HOUSE. Even during sex! National sports games — beloved by millions — have essentially been outlawed. Don’t even talk about schools and universities. They will not be normal or open again, not for a long time, if ever. These mandates are not limited and specific. They are open ended, indefinite. They have the feel of permanency. The unspoken and often spoken attitude of governors throughout the country is, “Do this because I say so.” People shout at strangers, “Wear your goddam mask.” There’s no sense of choice. There’s no sense of rational weighing. It’s all command. And control.

This is not freedom. This is not liberty. This is not rationality. And if you think it’s temporary, you’re crazy. The rationale for mandates is nonspecific. The rationale is, “Do as I say, and do as you’re told.” Millions comply. That’s how dictatorships work…not free countries.

I tried to warn people when we passed non-smoking mandates. Now the mandates are everywhere. And they’re just getting started. Mandates, like any malignancy, will grow. So long as we let them. I’m still waiting for mass disobedience, mass rebellion, mass outrage. The mental health of people cannot be good. They’re being forced to give up everything that made this country so wonderful and great. At the core of it all was freedom and liberty, the simple things in daily life. Most of those are gone. Instead of a Puritanical religious dictatorship, we got the exact same thing, only it’s a pseudo-medical, pseudo-scientific tyranny.

Our liberties are not gone for any delimited, rational or temporary reason. They’re gone because we’re told they’re gone. We operate 100 percent with the consent and permission of the rulers. If you’re OK with that, then I don’t want to know you.

Michael J. Hurd