The Reversal: Liberty into Servitude

Dr. Carson has written and taught extensively, specializing in American intellectual history. His most recent book, The Rebirth of Liberty (1973), covers the founding of the American Republic from 1760 to 1800.

There are certain phrases which have a special place in the American lexicon. Among these the following rank high: "individual liberty," "the rights of the individual," "the worth of each individual," "the bill of rights," "constitutional guarantees of –," and "self-government." They have a special place because they bring to mind the ideas and ideals which animated the establishment of American independence, the drawing of the documents by which we are governed, and have provided guidelines for Americans over the years. When anyone uses these phrases in an approving manner he may be reasonably sure of evoking the desired response.

It is no new discovery of mine; however, that language is a tricky thing. The careless user of words and phrases may find himself saying something quite different from what he intended. The unwary listener or reader may nod approvingly to a presentation containing familiar phrases when an analysis would lead him to reject out of hand the meaning of the whole. The context, it is said, governs the meaning of words and phrases. So it does, but context can be a great deal more than the framework given them in a particular rendering. Words and phrases wear down with the passage of time, like coins, lose their sharpness, become fuzzy, pick up new connotations and lose old ones. In some sense, they are more like magnets than coins, picking up associations with things contacted and dropping off others. Indeed, phrases can, by subtle mutations, be turned into their opposites. Familiar and venerated phrases can be used so as to reverse the meanings they once conveyed.

What follows is an example of how this is done, taken from a popular high school textbook on American government. It is called Our American Government and was written by Stanley E. Dimond and Elmer P. Pflieger.’ The opening chapter is devoted to setting forth "The Fundamental Ideas of a Free People." They are, according to this account, that men can govern themselves, liberty, concern for each individual, concern for the general welfare, majority rule, and minority rights.

The elucidation of some of these ideas appears to place the account firmly within the American tradition. For example, Dimond and Pflieger say:

Liberty is one of the words used often by those who have tried to describe our way of life. Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death." The Declaration of Independence states that men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The Preamble to the Constitution speaks of "the blessings of liberty." The Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag ends with the words "with liberty and justice for all." (p. 4)

In like manner, they trace concern for the individual to profound sources. "Where does this concern for the individual come from?

“What is the source of this fundamental idea? While the idea is recorded in many famous documents, this belief in the worth and dignity of each individual comes from deep-seated religious beliefs. It is part of our inheritance from Christian and Jewish religions." (p. 6)

Rooted in Religion

Just so, the belief in the worth and dignity of each individual is rooted in religion. And, the present writer does not question the propriety of recognizing this source in a book on American government; indeed, he applauds it. Dimond and Pflieger, however, proceed to make a strange association of this religious idea with government when they say:

Each person, regardless of mental ability, physical condition, age, color, sex, or religion, is a person of great worth under our system of government. (p. 6)

There is a connection between the belief in the worth and dignity of the individual and protections of individual liberty from government. But that is not what is being said above. They are saying that a system of government attaches worth to the individual. The statement is, of course, nonsense, for systems do not have values. It is a personification of government or the state, a prerequisite to statism, or the worship of the state. By shifting the belief in the worth and dignity of the individual from religion and individuals to government, the way is prepared for the reversal of traditional meanings.

One of these shifts is made in the discussion of the Bill of Rights:

The liberties of free men are guaranteed to each citizen in the Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. These rights are also guaranteed in most state constitutions. (p. 4, emphasis added)

There are some guarantees, if the word be used loosely, in the Constitution, such as the right to trial by jury, but most of the Bill of Rights consists of prohibitions on the Federal government. A store which prohibited its employees from robbing patrons would not be guaranteeing the safety of patrons within the store. No more does the First Amendment when it says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…" guarantee freedom of religion. The distinction is important; it is the difference between the government being forbidden to do something and the government providing something. Phrases are being used to have them mean the opposite of what they once did.

Where this reversal is going begins to appear in the following:

One of the fundamental ideas which limits liberty is "concern for the general welfare." The Preamble to the Constitution says that government exists "to promote the general welfare." Sometimes this idea of the general welfare is referred to as "the common good."

In some ways this idea of the general welfare is exactly opposite of individual liberty. A worker muttered that his liberty was taken from him because he had to join a labor union in order to work in a certain factory…. A farmer complained that his liberty was gone because he couldn’t plant all the cotton he wanted….

The situations that caused these complaints developed because the general welfare was considered to be more important than the liberty of the individual. The good of all was thought by the framers of the Constitution to be superior to the rights of the individual. (pp. 8-9)

If the government guaranteed or provided rights and liberties it is quite possible that they would soon find these in conflict with the general welfare. However, confusion has been compounded in the above quotation by ripping both "liberty" and "general welfare" out of their original contexts, failing to define either with care, and imputing to the Founders preferences foreign to their way of thinking, if not abhorrent to it.

Dimond and Pflieger tell us what liberty is not but neglect to tell us what it is. They say it does not mean "the right to do as I please." To which one might retort with equal certainty, “ Liberty does not mean the right not to do as I please." In fact, the legal meaning of liberty, which is what is under discussion when the Constitution is at issue, is not being confined or imprisoned. Try to substitute any other meaning for it in the phrase "nor shall life, liberty, or property be taken without due process of law" and see how it turns out. With this legal definition in mind, it is not immediately clear why individual liberty is in conflict with the general welfare. Probably what could be meant is that individual rights could be in conflict with the general welfare. But the Founders did not consider them to be. They held that governments existed to "secure these rights," and that the general welfare was promoted by making natural rights secure within society.

Where Is the Evidence for the Welfare State?

No evidence comes to mind for the view that the "good of all was thought by the framers of the Constitution to be superior to the rights of the individual." The general welfare was not understood by the framers to be the opposite of individual rights. It was thought to be sometimes in conflict with the partial welfare of groups, regions, sections, and states; and when the two collided the Constitution provided that the general government acting in accord with its constitutional authority should prevail. Individual liberty or rights belong in the configuration of the general welfare, not in the welfare of a part, a configuration to which all governments — Federal, state, and local —were supposed also to belong.

By misconstruing the general welfare and individual liberty, Dimond and Pflieger have prepared the way for reversing the thrust of the government. They set the stage for the government to act in the supposed interest of groups, i. e., labor unions, farmers conceived as a class, and other minorities.

These actions are given a gloss of legitimacy in the discussion of majority rule:

When liberty and the general welfare conflict, we say that the majority shall rule…. The decision is left to the votes of the people or to the votes of those they have chosen to represent them. In our country the majority rules. (p. 10)

Fortunately, that is not the way the American system works at all. If liberty is understood as not being confined or imprisoned, any decision about it is not left to a majority in particular cases. For a man to be confined, he must, ordinarily, be found guilty of violating some standing law by a jury. The jury is usually expected to be unanimous if the person is found guilty and sentenced to be confined. The other ingredient in the taking away of liberty is the law, and the interpretation of that is supposed to be done by experts, not by the majority. The constitutional prohibition against bills of attainder is protection of the liberty of the individual against a majority of the legislature.

Minority Rights

Dimond and Pflieger make a final mutation by their discussion of minority rights. They say that their argument has gone full circle:

This means that we are back where we started…. We started with liberty. We described the relation of the Bill of Rights, the individual, and free enterprise to liberty. We showed that liberty is not unlimited and sometimes conflicts with the general welfare. We said that to keep liberty and general welfare in proper balance we use majority rule…. Then we returned to the fundamental of liberty by showing that the majority cannot take away the basic rights of the minority. (p. 14)

It may be that the authors have not intended to be disingenuous in their summary, but they have not accurately described their direction. Rather than going in a circle, they have moved from one point to a quite different one. Individual rights are not at all the same as minority rights. Individual rights are conceived as rights belonging to everyone. Minority rights, if the phrase once be admitted, must be rights belonging to one as a member of a minority. Such rights would be class rights, not individual rights. In fact, Dimond and Pflieger have proceeded by circumscribing individual rights by a posited opposition to the general welfare, made the majority the arbiter when differences occur, and, ended by empowering minorities. The balance of power, which Madison once argued would so work as to bring about the general welfare by negating special interests, has been shifted so as to be weighted in favor of special interests, here called minorities.

The traducing of language by Dimond and Pflieger in a textbook on American government may be worthy of attention (after all, the young are taught from the book), but that is by no means the whole point of this piece. By analysis, the authors may appear to have done their job ineptly. Such is not the case, however. They have done a subtle and competent job of fitting much of contemporary American political practices and tendencies into the framework of the United States Constitution and fundamental ideas of a people. Anyone who believes that this would be an easy task should attempt it. Indeed, it is an impossible task, if the ideas held by the Founders be treated with fidelity and those advanced by contemporary reformers be stated clearly. The ideas do not mesh; earlier meanings have to be reversed to make them jibe with the contemporary context.

By the reversal, phrases which once supported individual liberty are used to support social servitude. The following quotation is from Dimond and Pflieger’s exposition of the Constitution:

This Constitution was to be the basis for building a nation in which the welfare of each person was to be the concern of all. The makers of the Constitution believed that whatever promoted the well-being of any individual helped the total group. (p. 37)

The belief in the worth and dignity of each individual has become "concern for each individual," and promoting the general welfare has become "the basis for building a nation in which the welfare of each person was to be the concern of all."

The Missing Step

There is a step missing from the above formulation, the step by which each of us becomes responsible for all of us and can be made to contribute from his resources to that well-being. The step does not have to be taken explicitly; it is supplied by the context. This is not a discussion of religious sentiment. It is a setting forth of the provisions of the United States Constitution which have to do with the vesting of political power. When the concern of each of us for all of us is translated into political terms, it either means that each of us may be forced to help all of us or it means nothing. In the Dimond Pflieger book, it means the former.

The following statements nail the point down:

"To promote the general welfare" — the writers of the Constitution stated this as one of the purposes of our government. They believed that one of the reasons for establishing the government of the United States was to provide services which would benefit all of the people….

As our nation has grown, the general welfare has become increasingly a most important objective. As local communities, as individual states, and as a nation we have tried to realize this objective in a variety of ways. We now provide many services which contribute to the general welfare, for the young and the old, for the rich and the poor, for both urban and rural people, for people in all walks of life. (pp. 664-65)

Why is this servitude? It is not direct servitude, ordinarily. Servitude means the compulsory serving of others by a person. Those who provide the services directly are not compelled to do so. That is, teachers are not compelled to teach by the state; they voluntarily entered upon the profession. The same can be said for physicians, dentists, social workers, attendants in homes for the aged, and so forth. The servitude is indirect. It is by way of taxation, by income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and any one of hundreds of variations. When one’s substance is taken from him to be used to provide services for others, that is a species of servitude. Presumably, he has served in order to acquire the substance. The amount of time and energy which he devoted to acquiring the substance forced from him to use for the service of others is the measure of the degree of servitude.

Welfare at Taxpayer’s Expense

The notion that ours is a welfare state is only a half-truth, if that, for a welfare state is a servile state, one maintained by the servitude of some portion of its citizens. If anyone believes that the state provides the welfare it dispenses, he is mistaken. States, or governments, do not have substance with which to pay for such services. They must extract it from the taxpayer, and they do that by force. The rightness or wrongness of this can be debated, but there is every good reason to describe the practice with the most accurate language available.

Language is a good and useful servant when it is used with care and precision. There is no other means by which man can draw conclusions and express the knowledge he has acquired. It is our prime means of communication. To realize how important, it is only necessary to observe someone who has reached an age where he might but cannot speak or hear. But language is a fearful master when improperly used. It takes only a little study of history to discover that however unworthy the cause, it had its rationale, justification, and, quite often, its "philosophy." The worst side can be made to appear the better by the skillful and unscrupulous use of language.

The difference between proper and improper use of language does not lie, of course, in the end for which it is used. Proper use of language occurs when the user attends to the meanings of words and combinations of them with others, when he does not allow them to shift in meaning as he employs them, when his rhetoric is consistently used to evoke the values which produced it, and when the reasoning is logical and inevitable. Whether language can be properly used in the service of a bad cause, I do not know. That it can be improperly so used, there is no doubt.

¹Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1971, revised edition.