At this month’s annual benefit, on September 13, we celebrated sixteen years of research and advocacy. Anniversaries are always a good occasion to reflect on first principles, what we have achieved, and what we have lost.
The Heartland Institute, like other nonprofit organizations, was founded to advance a certain set of ideas, not to sell goods or services. What distinguishes us from all but a handful of other nonprofit organizations is that our ideas all track back to just one: that respect for individual freedom ought to guide public policies at every level of government.
We could have chosen some other idea to advocate–fraternity, equality, social justice . . . there are plenty to choose from–so why did we choose freedom?
Why Freedom?
The United States was the first country in recorded history to be founded on respect for individual freedom. At the time, the ideas that men had a God-given right to freedom, and that governments existed solely to protect that freedom, were hardly self-evident. In fact, the United States of America was a bold departure from every other form of government history had ever seen.
The freedoms the Founding Fathers called “self-evident” were in fact purchased with the blood of millions of martyrs for freedom–men and women who died during slave uprisings during the Roman Empire, who courageously opposed royal absolutism in the Middle Ages, who lost homes and loved ones again and again over the centuries in pitched battles to establish just one freedom, the freedom to worship.
The Founding Fathers proposed a novel answer to the age-old question of what form of government is best. They limited the power of government in a written Constitution so that even large majorities of the voting public could not create new powers. They enumerated the powers of the central government, so that necessity could not be raised as an excuse for giving government more power. And they divided the powers of government into separate branches and levels, so that competition among them would check and balance the authority of each.
How Does Freedom Fare?
How well has the experiment worked? Depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist, the glass is either half full or half empty.
America is the most prosperous and, by many measures, the freest nation on Earth. We are free to worship in the churches of our choice, to choose the careers that suit us, to spend and invest most of our incomes as we please, to travel and live where we want, to criticize or support our elected representatives, and even to own guns and advocate unpopular causes. Many of us have lived for years without having so much as a conversation with a uniformed law enforcement agent, and longer still without talking to an active member of the armed forces.
There is no other country in the world where that can be said. This absence of the visible signs of a police state would, I am sure, have pleased the Founding Fathers immensely.
But the pessimist must be heard, too. Evidence abounds that our freedoms are eroding. We’re less free today than our parents were 30 years ago, and they, than their parents. Taxes take a higher portion of national income than at any other time in American history. Our political institutions are less accountable–the evidence ranges from the 95 percent reelection rate of incumbent Congressmen, to the vast grants of authority Congress gives to bureaucracies such as the EPA, FEC, and FCC, to the President’s misuse of executive orders to lock up public lands, to the Justice Department’s failure to take action against corruption in the executive branch.
We’re seeing more no-knock police raids, local police forces using paramilitary weapons and techniques, and the federalization of one crime after another. The friendly small-town police officer of yesteryear is long gone. The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Easter weekend raid to snatch 6-year-old Elian Gonzales from his relatives, I think, shows just where this trend is taking us.
A record two million American citizens are in prison today, many of them for victimless crimes, caught up in our national anti-drug hysteria. A record percent of land is in government hands and off-limits to logging, mining, and increasingly even recreation. Half of our nation’s health system is now government-financed and -regulated, and every day we hear bipartisan calls for more subsidies, more regulation, less consumer choice.
This is the sad and disturbing state of freedom in America at the start of the twenty-first century.
Liberty’s Bridge
The American system of political liberty can be likened to a bridge across time, linking us to the first free civilization, ancient Athens, to Great Britain’s Magna Carta, and to the thoughts of John Locke, Adam Smith, and the founding fathers. It is an amazing structure because it consists of ideas of justice and rights that exist in our minds but not in the physical world. Other bridges have been built out of force and envy, but time has shown those building materials to be vastly inferior.
Political liberty is like a bridge, too, because it connects our individual aspirations to the needs and values of others who have a stake in the future of the society we constitute. We need such a bridge because we need cooperation, mutual respect, and rules that everyone agrees to follow. It is of Liberty’s Bridge that we refer when we speak of “ordered liberty” as distinct from license or anarchy.
Liberty’s Bridge made the last century America’s Century. But unless we act, it won’t be strong enough to carry us and our children into the twenty-first century.
Those of us who understand that the system of freedom in the United States is under attack and needs to be defended and rebuilt can run for elective office or support those who do and who share our views. We can lobby for the repeal of bad laws and adoption of good laws. We can live our own lives in ways that shun privilege and entitlements and that instead reinforce the institutions of civil society. We can teach others that the freedom philosophy is the only path to a just and prosperous society.
It is that final method–teaching others the freedom philosophy–that The Heartland Institute has pursued for the past 16 years. We’ve done it not by preaching the freedom philosophy (there are other groups that can do that better than we can), but instead by finding and promoting solutions, based on individual freedom to many of society’s social and economic problems.
Better Ideas
This is what we mean by “empowering people with better ideas.” Thomas Jefferson told us again and again that an uneducated and unaware people would soon become an enslaved people. It is necessary to educate people for freedom–it is not a natural state of affairs.
The education must be on-going, because people forget the reasons why freedom is so important, how governments in the past have been freedom’s most grave threat, and how war and corruption destroy Liberty’s Bridge, war from without, corruption from within. Educating for freedom is a never-ending job; eternal vigilance is the price of our liberty.
Our Founding Fathers built Liberty’s Bridge. We at The Heartland Institute see as our duty its maintenance and preservation, so that the generations that follow us will also be able to cross it to a land of freedom. No doubt, in the wake of the flawed experiments that characterized the past century, much work needs to be done to shore up Liberty’s Bridge.
So on this, Heartland’s sixteenth anniversary, I express my deep appreciation for the financial support of those who are Heartland donors and members. With your help we have defended Liberty’s Bridge from some of the most damaging attacks, and we’ve lightened its load by fending off groups who would otherwise have caused its collapse.
There is no higher calling than to fight for the liberation of men from the arbitrary and unjust control of others. It was true when Socrates said it 25 centuries ago, and (amazingly, perhaps) it is still true today.
