Conscience of the Majority; L.E. Read

CONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY tg ofeonardG. Read IN his Education for Privacy Marten ten Hoor, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Alabama, decries dictatorships in these appropriate terms: "We are living in a world and in a time when power ful leaders with millions of fanatical followers are com mitted to the forcible regimentation of their fellow men, according to formulas which have no initial authority but that of their own private dogmatism. They not only refuse to recognize the right of private thought and per sonal conscience to be considered in the management of public affairs, but they have abolished the concept of the individual as a private personality and have re duced him to the level of the bee in the hive. To restore the individual to his former dignity as a human being is the urgent need of the day." Are majorities, when unlimited as to the areas of life they control, leading us down the same disastrous road as dictatorships? If so, what are the principles, the un94 CONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY 95 derstanding of which would answer ((the urgent need of the day"? These questions are the subject of this inquiry.

=I: =I: =I: DECLARED A PROFE~SOR of economics at one of our larger universities: "What government should do is whatever a majority of the people vote that it should." This teacher of young America was speaking the can· viction of a vast segment of today's voting public: The sole criterion of what government should do is whatever the voting majority demands of it. This belief that sov· ereignty exists exclusively in "the will of the majority" is the same as a belief in unlimited democratic govern ment ..Regardless of the popularity of this view, its short comings must be understood and explained unless we want the majority to be the ruler of our affairs, the manipulator of our lives, the shaper of our destinies. For, according to this notion, the majority is almighty; there is no moral authority above the majority; the scope of government is not limited by any principle, but only by the will of the majority.

The principle of limited government is elusive. Even some of the very men who wrote the principle into the Declaration of Independence in terms of the inalienable rights of individuals, promptly defied this principle by unlimiting majority rule, that is, by not applying the limiting principle to the democratic state. They reasoned that the rule of the majority (democracy) could not be intelligent without a well-educated electorate, so they 96 LEONARD E. READ proceeded to "secure" the required wisdom by a system of government education. 1 By doing this, they lowered the barriers they themselves had erected, permitting ma jority rule, in this precedent-setting instance, to get out of-bounds, to possess powers over individuals never in tended in their own distinctive design for limited gov ernment. Like their progeny down to this day, these sponsors of state education must have concluded that any goodness of which an individual is capable would show forth in the majority if all were educated in goodness.

These men failed to see that goodness is never evoked by coercion. 2 And they overlooked one striking fact: Whatever goodness may be manifested in individual action tends to be lost in mass action. The majority, re gardless of the people who compose it, is an amoral mechanism; a majority conclusion is a concentration an amalgam-of views which does not include the voice of individual conscience. This is a serious charge con sidering that we as a people are submitting ourselves to majority rule: a whole nation's destiny in the grip of a conscienceless force, an amoral mechanism that knows not right from wrong, incapable of learning, and power less to think or reason-like putting ourselves under the 1 "He [Thomas Jefferson] was the first American statesman to make education by the state a fundamental article of democratic faith." Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. XII. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1946.

2 The three distinguishing features of government education are coercive: compulsory attendance, curricula dictated by government, and the forcible collection of the wherewithal to pay the educa tional bill.

CONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY 97 rule of a robot! So, let us examine the charge that ma jority action displaces individual conscience. First, what is conscience? "A knowledge or feeling of right and wrong, with a compulsion to do right; moral judgment that prohibits or opposes the violation of a previously recognized ethical principle." Second, what or who is capable of having a conscience? Is it not self·evident that this is a quality or character istic that only an individual human being can possess? Third, what is a majority? It is the greater part of a number in excess of two. Obeying One's Own Conscience Let us now take a minimum grouping of three in dividuals-any three on earth-and reflect on their "knowledge or feeling of right and wrong," that is, let us take note of their several consciences. Our first dis covery is that no two are absolutely identical; no two among all who live are alike; no two have precisely the same concept of goodness or rightness or truth!

This is not to suggest that truth itself is variable, but that fallible human beings will vary in their knowledge of and proximity to truth, even though each were to do his very best at all times. A person behaves conscien tiously only insofar as he obeys his own conscience, wherever it leads. His only alternative would be to act unconscionably. Therefore, except in matters where no controversy exists-like two plus two equals four or the blending of blue and yellow makes green-the averaging 98 LEONARD E. READ of two varying consciences must, perforce, result in a conclusion which tends to disenfranchise conscience. Example: The chairman appoints a committee to pre pare a report on what the nation's tariff policy should be. It is a foregone conclusion that the conceptions of right policy are, to some degree, at variance. For instance: A believes in private property, namely, that each in dividual has a moral right to the fruits of his own labor, and further believes that this right includes the right to control the exchanges thereof; that any forcible shifting of control to others is an infraction of the private prop erty principle. He stands for free exchange and, thus, rejects the tariff idea.

B believes, just as sincerely, that domestic producers must be protected against all foreign competitors who pay lower wages than are paid at home. C accurately reflecting what his conscience dictates as right, favors "reciprocal trade agreements." The committee, however, has accepted the responsi bility of submitting a report. Finally, after discovering that precise agreement is impossible, Band C effect a compromise: Tariffs should be hiked on all foreign products that are showing a competitive advantage over home products (or anyone of countless other possible compromises). Band C, of course, vote "yea," A votes "nay." The majority carries· the day. Their compromise becomes the committee's report. Be it noted that the report-like all majority reports where the issues are in controversy-is not an accurate reflection of what is regarded as right by A or B or C.

CONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY 99 All connection with conscience, that is, with the in dividual's precise conception of rightness, has been sev ered. It is this severing that makes a conscienceless mech anism of the majority. It should be borne in mind that the amorality of a majority is not overcome by increasing its number, whether it be upped to ten or to the number in .a na tional plebiscite. Indeed, the more persons involved, the greater is the likelihood that the majority conclusions will be worsened - in all events made devoid of conscience. Government's Role When we consider the extent to which public policy in the U.S. A. today is decided by majority vote, and when we recognize the conscienceless ness of this mechan ism, we need not be surprised at a decaying individual re sponsibility and at. our descent into socialism. Rather, we should count ourselves blessed in having some re maining time to put this conscienceless force in its proper place. It does have a place.

Assuredly, it will take a lot of doing to unfasten the grip of this amoral force on ourselves. Perhaps the un tangling should begin by reflecting on the basic question that democracy poses: Who should rule? The answer it gives is: The majority. There is an enormous enthusiasm for this answer, and not without reason. For, the alterna tive, increasingly in evidence, is the. dreaded one-man say-so, dictatorship. Not only is that the way most peo100 LEONARD E. READ pIe see it but, unfortunately, that is the only way most people see it. Their high preference for democracy over dictatorship has effectively blinded them to a far more important question than who shall rule: Regardless of who rules J what shall be the extent of the rule? If the question as to the extent of governmental rule is not posed and properly answered, the conscienceless majority will continue its rampage unabated. U nre strained, knowing no bounds, this amoral, political mechanism can and will be-indeed, is-as vicious, as ty rannical, and as destructive of the rights of man as any culprit having a monopoly of the police power has ever been.

Very well. If democracy poses and answers the ques tion of who shall rule, what is it that poses and answers the question of what shall be the extent or the scope of the rule? As we have observed, it is not democracy. The ma jority, when operating in its political magnitude-a force severed from conscience and reason-cannot possibly know its place. It will steal and kill with the same reck less abandon as a bank bandit and with the same ignor ance of its crimes as a mob or a runaway truck. 3 Democ3 This is no exaggeration. A majority through the instrumental ity of the State will take property without consent for golf courses, for paying farmers not to produce, for building baths for Egyptian camel riders, or for whatever. The participating individuals have no more sense of wrongdoing than does a member -of a lynching party. If asked, "Who did it?" he will reply, "The lynching party."

There is more truth than exaggeration in Aldous Huxley's com ment, "Humanity is in inverse proportion to numbers; a mob is no more human than an avalanche."

CONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY 101 racy or majority rule, as. applied to political action, is powerless to limit itself. Popular elections in our times attest to this observation. Liberalis1nNot the Answer And, contrary to the claims of Ortega, liberalism does not contain the limiting principle. (Ortega used the term in its classical and finest sense.)4 Liberalism, which in sists on the rights of the individual and a severe limita tion of the State, does not go beyond the rationality of man for the source of its strength. 5 While the genuine brand of liberalism does pose and satisfactorily answers the question in an arbitrary way, the answer is founded more on a splendid opinion than on a fundamental principle. Nor does the term "Americanism" indicate the prin ciple that prescribes governmental limitation. American ism has almost as many meanings as there are people who use the term. It means everything from constitu tional government to vacations with pay to a democratic attitude of people toward each other to TVA to private enterprise to a melting poL Americanism neither theo retically nor practically explains what shall be the ex tent or scope of government.

What we are searching for may be said to have no 4 See pp. 125-126 of Invertebrate Spain by Jose Ortega y Gasset. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1937. 5 For an example of this type of rationality at its best, see F. A. Hayek's reasoning on "the rule of law" in his The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960. 570 pp.

102 LEONARD E. READ name at all. A certain something-an idea or a concept momentarily, almost fleetingly, insinuated itself into the consciousness of a few persons who happened to be Americans-and a miracle was wrought! People became so fascinated with the miracle's material outpouring that they failed to reflect on the mysterious concept which conferred these blessings. The concept flitted in and out of consciousness so rapidly-like a dream or an idea that is promptly forgotten-that no one ever gave it a name. A Happy Sequence More often than not the good things which happen to us are over and beyond our own creation. Minor in advertencies or happenstances, of little significance when viewed separately, sometimes combine or occur in cer tain sequences with the most unexpected, astounding, and efficacious results. If we are observant enough to take note or discover what minor events combined to form the grand result, perhaps we can, by their repeti tion, continue to enjoy the blessings they confer. Stated another way, mankind advances by developing laws or theories on the basis of observed fact and successful practice. A splendid example of theory devised after the fact was cited by Eugen von B6hm-Bawerk. Said this wise theoretician of free market economics: "... he [the common man] practiced the doctrine of marginal utility before economic theory discovered it."

It is my contention that a sequence of seeming inadCONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY 103 vertencies-an at-random combination-taking place be tween 1620 and 1791, if viewed in their wholeness, con tains the answer we are seeking. 6 We shall find in the combination of these events the only principle for the proper limitation of government or, in other words, the answer to the question, What shall be the ex tent of the rule? Two facts, relevant to this thesis, stand out: (1) For a time, government in the U. S. A. was more limited than ever before in any other country, and (2) there followed an outburst of creative energy and an accep tance of personal responsibility unprecedented in all history. As in so many cases, most of us have attributed these phenomena to something peculiarly brilliant in our own makeup. But such credit has no more validity than did the observation of the fly on the chariot wheel, "Look at all the dust I am making." As I believe, and hope to demonstrate, the outburst of energy was the ef fect of the limitation. But, what was responsible for the limitation?

Part one of the unforeseen combination probably oc curred during the first three decades of the seventeenth century. An excellent case in point followed the landing of our Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock. The members of this little Colony began their life together in a state of communism. For, regardless of what each Pilgrim produced, all the produce went into a common ware6 The idea I am trying to convey was well phrased by Adam Ferguson: "how nations stumble upon establishments which are indeed the result of human action but not the execution of human design." Quoted by Hayek in his The Constitution of Liberty, p 57.

104 LEONARD E. READ house under authority, and the proceeds of the ware house were doled out as the need seemed to require. In short, they tried to live by a principle which, more than two centuries later, Karl Marx set forth as the ideal of the Communist Party, ufrom each according to ability, to each according to need." Return to Freedol1~ There was a compelling reason why the Pilgrims threw overboard this communal or communistic practice. Many of them were starving and dying! It seemed that when they organized themselves in this manner, the warehouse was always running out of provender. The needy be came everyone. During the third winter Governor Bradford met with the remaining members of his Colony. They agreed to quit the idea of "from each according to ability, to each according to need" and would, come spring, try the idea of to each according to merit. To each according to meritl It is inconceivable that these people were fully aware of what they were saying.

In the Old World it had never been that way. Govern ments were sovereign. One kept whatever of his product the State allowed. It can be assumed that to each accord ing to merit was conjured up in desperation. Perhaps it can be said that famine uncovered one of the principles leading to plenty. Using hindsight-which we can do and Governor Brad ford could not-to each according to merit is an excelCONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY 105 lent definition of the private property principle. It is another way of saying that each individual has a right to the fruits of his own labor. "Each of you is to have what you yourselves produce" was the sense of the Gov ernor's conclusion that third winter. What happened came the spring? Read Governor Bradford's own words: The women now wente willingly into ye feild, and tooke their little-ons with them to set corne, which before would aledg weaknes, and inabilitie; whom to have compelled would have bene thought great tiranie and oppression. '1 The result of practicing the private property principle: By this time harvest was come, and in stead of famine, now God gave them plentie, and ye face of things was changed, to ye rejoysing of ye harts of many, for which they blessed God. And ye effect of their particuler [private] planting was well seene, for all had, one way & other, pretty well to bring ye year aboute, and some of ye abler sorte and more indus trious had to spare, and sell to others, so as any generall wante or famine hath not been amongest them since to this day.8 One cannot read this statement by Governor Bradford without detecting his sense of amaz.ement that any such "plentie" had come about. These colonists attributed the outcome, if you please, to God, a confession that it was not of their own creation. This practice of the pri vate property principle, I am submitting, was but the first in a sequence of happy actions which made for a '1 Taken from Bradford's History uof Plimoth Plantation" from the original manuscript. Printed under the direction of the Secre tary of the Commonwealth by. order of the General Court. Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Company, State Printers, 1901. p. 162.

8 Ibid., p. 167.

106 LEONARD E. READ combination that contains the key to a principled limi tation of the State. Had Governor Bradford been able to glimpse the latter half of the next century he would have seen that his words, "so as any generall wante or famine hath not been amongest them since to this day," were, indeed, prophetic. For, after him and the other Plymouth colon ists, and by reason of the practice of the private property principle which they had so fortunately hit upon, came decades of growth, development, progress. Here was something new, but something which could not be pre served under any of the Old-World forms of unlimited government. Early Americans were keenly conscious of this fact. It was this consciousness, a magnificent politi cal skepticism, inspiring a dread of state interventionism -to use a present-day term-which accounted for their long delay in forming a government. ('('Endowed by Their Creator"

Then came the second in the sequence of happy ac tions-the American Revolution! The real American Revolution was not the armed conflict with King George III. That was a relatively un important incident. It was, instead, a concept which, when understood, is seen to be a fundamental principle. To fully appreciate the fundamental nature of this revo lutionary principle, it is necessary to keep in mind that in other lands and during previous times mankind had been contending with and slaying each other by the milCONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY 107 lions over the age-old question of which among the nu merous forms of authoritarianism-that is, man·made authority-should preside as sovereign over man. Then, in 1776, in a fraction of one sentence, was re corded the real essence of the American Revolution concisely and solemnly stating for the first time in any significant political action 9-the idea which rejected the ancien regime: H •••they [men] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . .."10 There you have itI This is The Principle~ the very es sence of the American miracle.

Endowed by their Creatorl Was this an at-random ac tion, that is, an action which was not consciously re lated to the grand combination? There appears little evidence to the contrary. For decades American thinkers had been examining and rejecting one form of authori· tarian government after another. From what form, among them all, was man endowed with his right to life, liberty, and property? What previous form of gov ernment would preserve "to each according to merit"? Not a single onel From where, then, come these rights? There are such things as rights. Therefore, there must 9 The Declaration· of Independence, in a sense, was a climax to the Whig revolution that had been under way in England through out the preceding generations-the theoretical break with abso lutism. 10 There seems little doubt that the. authors and signers of the Declaration considered the protection of private property of utmost importance, equivalent to their "pursuit of happiness." See .R. Car ter Pittman, "Equality Versus Liberty: The Eternal. Conflict,"

p. 122 of this volume.

108 LEONARD E. READ be a source. Ah, the Creator; that's it. Some of the eighteenth century clergy were saying this. That would dispense with the whole squabble over the forms of au thori tarian governments. This is no attempt to belittle the spiritual faith of our Founding Fathers. Some were devoutly spiritual; others, it has been suggested, were agnostic or deistic. No, this claim that "endowed by their Creator" was, in a sense, an inadvertency is based on the conviction that the writers of the Declaration were not wholly aware that they had written the principle on which all sound po litical thinking must be premised! They could not have been aware of the significance of their act because, by itself, without the third action which was to come later, "endowed by their Creator" was, from a practical and a political standpoint, little more than graceful phrasing. Before going to the third action in our remarkable se quence, let us reflect further on this revolutionary con cept, this break with all political history. Men are en dowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among them are the right to life, liberty ... is at once a spiritual, a political, and an economic principle.

It is spiritual in that it proclaims the Creator as the endower of men's rights and, thus, as sovereign; political in the sense that such an acknowledgment implicitly denies the State as the endower of men's rights and, thus, the State-be it managed by a dictator or a ma jority~is not sovereign; and economic in this way: If a man has a right to his life, it follows that he -has a right to sustain his life, the sustenance of life being nothing CONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY 109 more nor less than the fruits of one's own labor. Note the relationship here to the private property principle "to each according to merit." The first in the sequence of revealing actions took place in 1623,11 the second in 1776. The third came to pass during the following fifteen years. Without Benefit of Hindsight The Constitution and the Bill of Rights may not be generally thought of as an at-random action. Nearly everyone will claim that the framers of these documents were fully conscious of what they were doing. In a way, yes. But were they not thinking more about how best to implement "That government is best which governs least" than deductively reasoning from the premise, "Men are endowed by their Creator"? There is no evi dence that they were aware that their work was the last in a series of three political moves which, separately, were more or less insignificant and unenduring but which, if pieced together, understood and believed in by their progeny, would present a picture making per fect political sense. Their progeny could use hindsight in assaying the significance of their actions; they could not.

To recapitulate: In the early 1600's, the principle of private property took its root in this land of ours, a po11 It is not my contention that the Plymouth Colony experience was the sole source of the private property idea but, rather, to represent it as typical of what was going on in early seventeenth century America-at Jamestown and, no doubt, in many other circles. The Plymouth experience is used because its records are so well preserved.

110 LEONARD E. READ litical acknowledgment that each individual had a right to the fruits of his own labor. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence, a political document, identified the Creator as the source of this and other rights, thus deny ing the State or any other human authority as the source. Practically, the Creator as the endower of rights has no meaning unless men and their political agencies abdicate the role of Creator, that is, remove from themselves any pretense of serving as the endower of rights. That the Constitution and the Bill of Rights-the third in the sequence-were perfect complements to the right to the fruits of one's own labor and to the concept that the Creator is the endower of rights, there can be no doubt. These political instruments were essentially a set of prohibitions not against the citizenry but against the thing the citizens had learned from their Old-World experience to fear, namely, over-extended government. 12 They more severely limited government than govern ment had ever before been limited. They deposed gov ernment as the endower of rights. Furthermore, govern ment was shorn of the responsibility for the people's security, welfare, and prosperity.

There were remarkable benefits which flowed from this severe limitation of government. First, when govern ment is so limited that it has nothing on hand to dis pense nor the power to take from some that it may give 12 The words "no" and "not," employed in restraint of govern mental power, occur 24 time& in the 7 original articles of our Constitution. In the Bill of Rights the words "no" and "not" and the correlatives "or" and "nor"-all in restraint of government appear 22 times.

CONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY III to others, to whom or to what do a people turn? They turn to themselves! As a result, there developed among early Americans a quality of character which Emerson later praised, "self-reliance." Americans earned a world· wide reputation for being a self-reliant people. Second, when government is limited to the only prin· cipled function it possesses, that is, when it is limited to restraining and penalizing fraud, violence,13 predation, misrepresentation, and to the invoking of a common jus tice, there follows as a consequence of that limitation a freeing, a releasing, of such creative energies as are in the people. When government duly inhibits the desttnc tive actions of people, there is no force inhibiting 'the creative actions. A Burst of Creative Energy I t was this freeing of ~e~ti~~'" h~~an energy on an unprecedented sca1ti,{lffi€Jn,g,(l,cseU-f;f11,ia11;t,peop}f1, that accounted for ~e gre~t~st, ,9;ut1?;Y';r$t'o,f:,pro,duct~Ye.a[1~ creativecppoergyever,i1<.nqw;lil.,.T4e;A.~eriH4tn IIl;iracl~ CttII:le about',Cilsa,consequ~J;l,ce, /pf,tpre,c, political a~tionsta.king; plac;ejjn.,~t fQrtJlitqJl:SS,eqlJ.e,l;lC~j a3is<tq4enc~ thatiA-meri canSr<;lid,:qo,;t,·c;qntriye:.nQf; \p1an, );).01: ;~ven,;:p.a;w.e)4 13Vio1ence" a~ h~re used,. is ,Ill.~ant;to i~c,l~d~' f?r~ign as well as domestic threats to ',lifeantl, property. " ' 1~ )i\merka'8 '. fQrtuilQus; 'coP1l;bipa,tiQP~ .1eft:D;aIJ;1~less, ,accQunts, for' t~e wi~le varietyo,finc~ITect ;an~ mi~lea~iIl~; ti~l~s usedt()jde~tify tneAinerican ideal:·' Democracy, 'Republ:ica'rrForm"of Government, Systqm o£, Cllef1<;s.', a.npBalaI}ce$, .. Cop~Jitutiop.~l; G<fy~rnmentj·. an<i so. qu.. ~ny one of these, at best, is but a pa;rt of spIJ;lething tnuch more' pro£dund. "

112 LEONARD E. READ Suffice it to say, government today in the U. S. A. is again unlimited. The rights of man are now thought to derive from the State. Democracy reigns! The answer it gives to the question as to who shall rule is the ma jority. The extent of the rule, today, is whatever the conscienceless majority decides. That the road we are on must lead to disasters common to all Old-World political arrangements is evident enough. In principle, there is no distinction-none whatsoever-between our form of ql~~y men playing the Creator role and their form of o~e :::Iij.an playing the Creator role. Ask yourself, what pr~cis:~J¥ (;lr~ the essential differences between the divine right >()~) the' majority and the "divine right of kings"? If finding no differences, why, then, should we not suf fer the fate of the Old-World arrangements? The Simple Lesson .. /.; J ;:" (~.' {':' -:: r 1 1CHcHveV'er/itis\nht, n:ecessaryidiflt w;~;suffer the fate of Olicll Wdtlcl! i~6'cieti.es. j O'l!J.·ill(!)wn/!Histoty~!h}as'a lesson to teath lUg:'if '#e wilFbu:topeh':o-ari mirtds'f6'itriTne lesson isVsi1bple:''The; Creclto,,\;n;et~ the:Sto)teJ"ts}'t:he"eridfi'wer of niiFn}sL~ighlsl AsLitfother aspeclsUo{Hfe)Iso'ni the;politi cal aspet-C"O'f''life, ',this"'1!S.thJ'pfimatY:·ipifincrp;fefa",uttd; which all else must be built.

iiYhis cori~~pt:~iih)a niiA~m~mrl'P(£i'T~fl~c:tign;\ '~h~uld') b~i,:a~~epta~,le;:t{):"~~s ~l ':~~?~lel:.f~~r~.,~~.~e l ~~;~~1!ll~tiv~ 'j,t~i thi.~ is;'.:t~e ,'.~i~:tf~~;;'.a;,mart-icoJl~q~i(j~':i ~ir~ng~~~~ t~: "~{;'; ~4~i ',':'eJ)i.~ dd~er.·,o.£,'ft1'etll:~:rig~ts.:Is:.~t\n6t~le~a:r ... thatrii·all)~?es.·1nbt: oibtain his rlght' to iife, f~r i~stanc~~ 'fr~m ·anY'pa~tic~lar:..

CONSCIENCE OF THE MAJORITY 113 Joe Doakes or from any two Joes or from any 182 mil~ lion Joes? How, then, can any Joe-contrived agency, gov~ ernment or otherwise, gain an endowership which does not exist in the Joes who form the agency? Going one step further, if the State or the majority does not and cannot grant the right to life, does it not follow, logi cally, that they do not possess the moral right to deprive anyone of life and liberty and the means to sustain them?15 Once the Creator concept is settled on, the rights which are socially inalienable· become quickly apparent. Society, regardless of how it organizes itself, cannot take life, liberty, or the means to sustain them. People are free to act creatively as they please. The moral ques tions, so far as they pertain to society, are settled in the acceptance of the ,Creator Principle. There are no moral principles remaining for the amoral mechanism, the con~ scienceless majority, to vote on.

15 This is a tricky point and, at first blush, would seem to deny government the right to impose penalties of any kind whatsoever. My own thoughts on the matter go like this: if a man has a right to life, liberty, and property, he has a right to defend his life, liberty, and property. Also, it is not improper that he delegate this right of defense to a formal agency-government. In short, man, or the government which man organizes, has a right to employ defensive or repellent force against aggressive force, that is, against any person or persons who would take life, liberty, and property. T.hose who employ aggressive force initiate the action. Any truly defensive force remains inactive until aggressive force appears. Thus, if aggressors are killed or otherwise penalized in the employ ment of defensive action against them, they are killed or penalized by an action which they initiated-by their own hands, as in suicide.