capitalism

Editor’s Introduction
xxiii
I alone see fit conflicts with your right to a superhighway.
For once it is conceded that rights, of necessity,
compete, there can be only one referee, and that is the
modern democratic state.
In the past 100 years, the language of politics has
become so mutilated by politicians and their ideological
henchmen that no principled position makes
sense, and we are reduced to a war of all against all in
which the battlegrounds are our periodic elections.
The result is the creation of a leviathan state that
attempts to cater to an increasingly broad spectrum of
more specialized interests. Even with the end of a
world conflict to which the federal government had
dedicated the blood and treasure of its citizens, the
various levels of American government currently
expend no less than 32% of all the goods and services
produced in the nation. This scenario is hardly what
the Founders had in mind when it limited the functions
of government to securing the lives, liberties,
and estates of its citizens. Nor is there any truth to the
vicious canard, so often broadcast without the least
evidence, that in the absence of a massive government
apparatus the charity and compassion of private individuals
would be insufficient to help the needy.
What this volume seeks to do is to offer a series
of brief articles on the historical, sociological, and
economic aspects of libertarianism and to place them
within their broader context. They offer a commentary
on the unending attempts of countless individuals to
emancipate themselves from the control of an oppressive
and overweening state, whether one is controlled
by a despot or one is acting in the name of the wishes
of the people. What these articles have in common is
the search for a world in which man’s subjection to the
will of others is brought to a minimum. We do not
seek, as those who would malign us claim, emancipation
from the laws of God or the forces of nature, to
which we are all, depending on our beliefs and our circumstances,
more or less subject. Rather, we wish an
open and divergent society, in which each may act as
he thinks best, despite the consequences of his actions.
We may exhort others from acting in ways that we feel
may harm them, but we cannot use the police power of
the state to punish them from so acting. This open society,
to which Periclean Athens inclined, was, we are
told, an education to all of Greece. So there was a time
when America was an education to the world, and it is
to this time to which we seek to return.
Ronald Hamowy
Rockville, Maryland