Freedom of Choice: The Acid Test

What is the acid test of the validity of the pretension of a so­ciety to be free? Is it not to as­sure to its members the maximum degree of freedom of choice in spiritual and intellectual develop­ment, in work and recreation? In an age when the most complete forms of tyranny like to masquer­ade as freedom, when George Orwell's grim vision of 1984 as a year when a dictatorial party would post up as its slogans, "War is Peace . . . Freedom is Slavery

. . . Ignorance is Strength," is only too accurate a picture of con­ditions in large areas of the world, this test may at least be reason­ably applied to the competing claims of political and economic systems.

It has become fashionable, especially among some West Euro­pean intellectuals, to take the somewhat condescending position that the United States and the Soviet Union are really very much alike. Both countries, so the ar­gument runs, are industrial levi­ athans, run by a managerial elite. The Soviet Union has long for­ gotten the original communist de­mand for material equality and pays its political, military, and industrial ruling class out of all proportion to the earnings of the rank-and-file workers, employees, and peasants. In the United States the old-fashioned single owner of a business is giving way to the impersonal group manage­ment of the corporation board. Both in Russia and America the compulsions of modern technology make for somewhat similar ways or' life.

Moreover, both the United States and the Soviet Union oc­cupy continental dimensions and possess within their frontiers vast mineral and agricultural re­sources. Both advanced to the Pacific, the United States from the East, Russia from the West, by a process of combined con­quest, settlement, and coloniza­tion. Both are relatively young countries ; Europe was already a center of philosophic thought and literary creation, of political the­ory and mighty achievements in art and architecture when Amer­ica was first discovered ; and Rus­sia, crushed and shut off from Eu­rope by the Tatar conquest, was a landlocked, semi-Asiatic state with little to offer in the world of the mind and the spirit.

Americans and Russians, when the latter are not too much under state observation, are apt to be simple and direct in manner. And both countries have been caught up in the modern industrial sys­tem which imposes some similar­ities in the running of an indus­trial plant, whether it is managed by the representative of an in­dustrial company or of a state trust, whether the factory may be located in Pittsburgh or in Perm.

There is some truth in these considerations. One hundred and thirty years ago the incomparably brilliant French observer of hu­man affairs and institutions, Alexis de Tocqueville, foresaw the day when the United States and Russia would be two mighty world powers, each determining the destiny of half the world. But, if Tocqueville could return to earth today to find this part of his prophecy realized, he would also find no reason to change the observation which accompanied this prophecy : that the method of the Russian is servitude, of the Anglo-American, freedom.

The Greatest Crime

The similarities between Amer­ica and Russia seem less signifi­cant, the differences loom larger, if one uses the litmus paper com­parison summed up in three words: Freedom of Choice. It is denial of this principle that, in the last analysis, represents the greatest crime of communism - Soviet, Chinese, or any other brand - against the human spirit. It is the maintenance of this principle that gives the noncom­munist societies their principal moral justification.

To be sure, no one under any regime enjoys absolute freedom of choice in determining his ac­tions and shaping the course of his life. Everyone is influenced to some extent by such factors as home and school environment, heredity, human contacts, tastes, and abilities. And, if freedom of choice is not absolute under free political and economic institu­tions, it is not completely denied under communism. There, also, success or failure depend on ca­pacity, on adaptability to the special conditions created by a communist environment.

The issue is not between abso­lute freedom of choice for the individual and an absolute denial of this privilege. It has rather to be stated, like most issues, in relative terms. Under which sys­tem does the individual citizen enjoy more opportunity to make his own decisions, in big matters and small matters, in libertarian causes for which men have died, like political and religious free­dom, in lesser points, such as freedom to travel abroad or to make a choice of a place to live or of house furnishings ? Here the evidence is clear and over­whelming, as may be demon­strated from a number of concrete examples.

Ballot, Press, Religion

Consider the day of voting, for instance. The American goes into a closed booth, makes his choice between the candidates of two large parties and several smaller ones. On the surface the method of voting is the same in the So­viet Union. The voter also goes into a closed booth. But there he is given a single prepared list of candidates with a strict injunc­tion not to write in any unauthorized name. No wonder no one stays up at night for the returns of an election in a communist­ ruled country; the only question is whether the official list will get 99.6 per cent or 99.8 per cent of the votes cast.

Or take the choice of reading material. The American, or the citizen of any free country in Europe or other parts of the world, can go up to a newsstand or walk into a store and order any newspaper, any magazine or book that appeals to his taste or fancy. If he can read Russian, he can buy all the Soviet propaganda literature he wants, without let or hindrance. If he wants to lis­ten to transmissions from Moscow or Peiping on his radio, there will be none of the hindrance or hideous jamming which is the Soviet reaction to radio broad­casts from abroad.

The American or West Euro­pean may go to any church, syn­agogue, or other place of worship of his choice without fearing any consequences, and this is also true if he prefers not to attend any religious service. There are churches and synagogues in the Soviet Union; but there are pres­sures of varying degrees of strength against attending them. Many forms of social and educational activity which are part of the normal church program in free countries are forbidden un­der Soviet law. Young people know that their chances of getting into a desired higher school and of finding satisfactory employ­ment are not helped if they are known as religious believers. The state authorities go out of their way to hamper Jews from obtain­ing the special ritual foods which accompany certain holy days in Jewish religious observance.

Specific religious observances are forbidden in American schools; but there is no advocacy of unbelief. Nor are there any obstacles if groups of citizens wish to set up schools and colleges dedicated to their form of re­ligious faith. In the Soviet Union, teaching in the schools is aggres­sively atheistic and there is no toleration for religious schools. The freedom of the individual to decide, as he matures, on his own religious faith or lack of faith, is very sharply limited under com­munism ; the cards are heavily stacked in favor of dogmatic, officially propagated atheism.

Education, Travel

What is true of freedom of choice in religion is equally true in education. If American par­ents are not satisfied with the type of school to which their children are assigned, they have al­ternatives in a wide variety of other schools, state and private, religious and secular. Nowhere is the denial of freedom of choice under communist systems more rigorously enforced than in the organization of education. No private schools of any kind are tolerated; all students must pass through the indoctrination of the uniform state educational system.

If the American or West Euro­pean wishes to travel abroad, he faces no obstacles in realizing his desire. He applies for a passport, buys his ticket, and goes. It is very different in communist-ruled countries where travel outside the frontier is a rare privilege, not an elementary right. The most drastic curtailment of free­dom of choice in travel is sym­bolized by the hideous wall that separates one part of Berlin from the other and makes the whole of the Soviet Zone of Germany one big penitentiary. Many Germans have been shot down trying to escape from this penitentiary, either at the wall or at other points along a border guarded, on the communist side, by barbed wire, minefields, police dogs, and armed guards. The same condi­tions prevail along the borders of other Iron Curtain countries, such as Hungary and Czechoslo­vakia.

A humorous story that has leaked out of Russia shows that the Soviet younger generation, stirring uneasily after the long torpor induced by Stalin's ter­rorism, is conscious of the limita­tions on its desire to see foreign countries. According to the story, a Soviet professor, speaking en­thusiastically about Soviet achievements in space travel, tells his students ·that they will soon be able to take trips to Mars, to Venus, to the Moon. "Yes, Pro­fessor," says a timid voice, "but when can we go to Vienna?"

It is true that the United States imposes restrictions on travel to Cuba and to Communist China. Whether these restrictions are wise or necessary is a matter of opinion. But there can be no rea­sonable comparison between the blanket denial of the right of for­eign travel, relaxed only for a few favored individuals in communist­ ruled countries, and the Ameri­can prohibition of unauthorized travel in hostile lands where it is obviously impossible to give any diplomatic protection.

The Blight Is Total

 Freedom is integral ; if it pre­vails in one field, it usually pre­vails in others ; if it is denied in politics, it is almost invariably denied in economics. One of the biggest contrasts that strikes the least observant traveler in making the transition from the noncom­munist to the communist world - from West Berlin to East Berlin, for instance, or from the Zurich airport to the Prague or Warsaw airport -- is the absence on the communist side of a thousand and one little conveniences that are taken for granted on the free enterprise side of the Iron Cur­tain.

In the West, factories and stores set as their first goal the satisfaction of the needs of the consumer. This not out of altru­ism, but because failure is the penalty for not measuring up to this standard in a competitive world. Consequently, in America - and Europe in this respect is developing more and more along American lines - there is con­stant experimentation in devis­ing more efficient forms of pro­duction and service.

But in the communist economy the satisfaction of the needs of the consumer receives a very low priority, far behind the needs of a huge military establishment and the requirements of a planned industrialization that constantly sacrifices the needs of the pres­ ent to the hopes of the future. The people have long been ac­customed to receive not what they want but what far-removed state planning bodies think they ought to have. So, while industry and trade in the West exist to attract and satisfy customers, the situ­ation in communist-dominated lands is almost the reverse. Here is the basic explanation of that bare, bleak impression which most foreign travelers bring back from a tour in the Soviet Union, even though they have been given the best the country can offer.

Domestic: Problems as Well

 This question of freedom of choice should not be considered merely an issue in the East-West struggle, although it is on this plane that the strongest contrasts may be observed. It is also an in­ternal issue in the United States and in other Western countries. Advocates of state economic plan­ning of individual life, who usu­ally call themselves socialists in Europe and try to masquerade as advanced liberals or progressives in the United States, try to sub­stitute the judgment of faceless bureaucrats for the individual's own personal tastes and desires. Their weapons are deprivation of the individual of niore and more of the fruits of his labor through ever-higher spending for welfare state purposes, paid for by more and more ruthless state expropriation of the fruits of in­dividual labor.

We can see from the example of the final stage of statism-communism, where the individual has no rights whatever that the state is bound to respect, how important it is to subject exist­ing systems of government to the test of the "freedom of choice" yardstick. Even a socialist government, such as England experi­enced during the first six years after the end of World War II, although it did not employ the terrorist methods of communism, bit deeply into vital areas of in­dividual freedom.

By rationing, maintained long after it was abol­ished on the continent, by an un­precedented multitude of prohi­bitions and restrictions, it pre­vented the individual from eating what he wanted or building where and what he wanted: His freedom to travel abroad was severely cur­tailed by the practice of ex­change control; which very much diminished the real convertibility of the pound.

Similar danger signals have been flying in the United States, in the form of coercive state measures against farmers who do not go along with regulation and innumerable trade-union re­strictions on freedom of labor and enterprise. "Freedom of Choice" is a good standard to ap­ply to any society, and to every piece of proposed legislation.