Capitalism and Democracy

In the first place there is in any society - and certainly in those shaped by a liberal culture and institutions - a perennial anti-government constituency. Freedom is a great good. Constraints are onerous. Governments perform their functions through the enactment and implementation of laws. Laws, even those providing important benefits, always impose constraints in the form of prohibitions or obligations upon some or all those under the state’s jurisdiction. So at some level of our being, we are all anarchists. Laissez-faire. Leave us alone indeed. We want drunks off the roads, but we chafe at highway checkpoints. We want to reach our destinations as quickly as possible, so we dislike stop signs and are loath to find highway patrol cars along our path. We may want government services, but no one loves the IRS. People who live near public land are frustrated if they are not permitted to hunt there or cut timber there or graze their livestock there. So, even if we know better, we all have a piece of us that sympathizes with the ne’er do well who had suffered numerous unpleasant encounters with the law and who came upon the American revolutionary leader, and later to be President, John Adams on the road one evening in the fall of 1775. “Oh, Mr. Adams,” he reportedly exclaimed. “What great things have you and your colleagues done for us! We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no courts of justice now in this province, and I hope there will never be another!” Adams himself, conservative jurist that he was, was dismayed by this encounter.

But the profound natural desire to live without constraints has deep roots in the country whose independence he helped to achieve. Indeed, I think that one thing Alexis de Tocqueville got wrong in his account of American political mores and values was his claim that Americans - as citizens of the most democratic society of his day - had as their ruling political passion a love of equality, something they valued above all other goods including liberty. If anything, in my view, Tocqueville got it backwards. Yes, there is in American political culture a strong and enduring animus against political hierarchy and aristocracy. But the principal source of that animus is not so much some kind of passion for equality per se. Instead it embodies the recognition, born of painful experience and not logic alone, that the corrupt fruit of entrenched political inequality is domination by those on top. Dominion is control, and to be subject to the control of others is to be unfree. As Jefferson’s memorable analogy captures this dynamic, those at the top of a political hierarchy often act as if they had been “born booted and spurred, ready to ride others by the grace of God.” The ultimate source of the democratic and American animus against entrenched social and political inequality, then, is that such inequality enables the abridgment of liberty. Patrick Henry’s famous oration, after all, was “give me liberty or give me death”; and New Hampshire’s state motto is “live free or die”. They didn’t say “give me equality or give me death” or “live equal or die.”