The New Road to Serfdom Read Free

individuals regulated their own relations with the Almighty would tend, by nature, to be a society of sturdy and self-reliant citizens. If men were free to interpret the strictures of their Creator without intermediation, they would be equally assertive in politics. If congregations could elect their ministers, towns would expect to elect their magistrates.
    It is important to be clear about one thing at the outset. Neither the earliest Americans nor their heirs saw liberty simply as an absence of rules. (This Miltoncalled “license” and heartily disliked.) Liberty, for them, meant the virtuous application of informed judgment. Rather than an external discipline imposed by prelates and princes, their society would be governed by an internal discipline generated by personal morality. John Winthrop, who led the pilgrims to the New World, drew the distinction in the quotation that opens this chapter.
    As long as this form of liberty was secure, government would be constantly improved by the free exchange of ideas: a marketplace of creeds in which, over time, the good ideas would drive out the bad ones. As Milton put it: “Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.”
    This philosophy was given concrete form in the earliest North American settlements. Distant as they were from their king, the colonists fell into the habit of organizing their affairs at an extremely local level. With neither an episcopacy nor an aristocracy on their continent, they took naturally to the idea of self-government. When the U.S. Constitution enshrined the principles of decentralization and representative government, it was simply reiterating the long-standing customs of most Americans.
    To put it another way, the New World attracted those who sought freedom and independence. The conditions of the early settlements were conducive to these same values. So it is hardly surprising that these idealsshould in time have been codified in the U.S. Constitution.
    The United States is the realization of a libertarian archetype—both in theory and in practice. Its constitution, as we shall see, is unique in the emphasis it places on the individual rather than the government. And, unlike some constitutions, it is not simply an abstract or aspirational document. The freedoms it guarantees were very real to its framers and, by and large, have remained real to their successors.
    Loyalty to the nation implies allegiance to these ideas. American patriotism is, at least in part, a political statement. This gives it a different timbre to other national loyalties, rooted as they are in place and race.
    The Japanese, the Ethiopian, or the Swede might also be a convinced patriot, in the sense that he has a special affinity with his own state and its symbols. And so he should: It is proper and healthy to feel a particularly warm sentiment toward the land that shaped you. But there is, in this patriotism, something unconditional. These countries might be capitalist or socialist; they might be atheist or they might have state churches; they might be monarchies or republics; but they would still recognizably be the same countries. The United States is peculiar in that it is defined by the institutions of its government, and by the philosophy that they represent.
    This doesn’t mean that American patriotism is more valid than anyone else’s. I love my own nation verydearly. I am never happier than when tramping its countryside. I admire the character of my people: brave, morose, taciturn, stoic, drunk, belligerent, indignant at injustice. My feelings have little to do with the political institutions of the United Kingdom. Indeed, as I shall explain later on, I think that there is a great deal wrong with how Britain is currently governed. But it wouldn’t occur to me to live in another country simply because it was more congenially administered.
    __________
    America, as I say, is different. Allegiance to the United States means allegiance to its foundational texts