Our Lives and Goods; R. Bradford

But every man has his moment of truth, and Charles achieved his one grim day in 1649, on a scaf fold at Whitehall. There he spoke briefly as he faced his execution ers, making his profession of in nocence and his confession of faith. And there was another mat ter on his mind. "For the people," he said, "truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whatsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having those laws by which their Iives and goods may be most their own." Those laws by which their lives and goods may be most their own! What better statement could be Mr. Bradford is well known as a writer, speaker, and business organization consultant. He now lives in Ocala, Florida. 74 made concerning the proper end and aim of law and government? What happier expression could be found as to the nature of liberty? True, it is not couched in elevated language. There is no oratorical effect. After all, in just a few mo ments the weary prince was to kneel before the headsman's axe.

It was not a time for the careful choice of language. But as a for mulation of freedom's essence those words are hard to improve upon or equal. In the current j ar gon, Charles had put it all to gether. "Oh Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!" So spoke Madame Roland, also from the scaffold - or rather from the guillotine, for the scene was Paris. The doomed lady was no doubt correct in her bitter and much quoted apostrophe - and the crimes committed in Liberty's name have been rhetorical and literary as well as extra-legal and inhumane.

1974 OUR LIVES AND GOODS 75 freedom Personified A great deal of very high-flown rhetoric has been expended on the theme of liberty and freedom. Milton envisaged liberty as a beautiful mountain nymph. Pope sighed for "a hollow tree, a crust of bread and liberty." Thomas Campbell imagined that "Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell," and William Cowper insisted that Freedom "has a thousand charms to show." Freedom indeed has been personified in countless can vas and marble representations, usually as a beauteous and rather buxom female of ample charms. In New York harbor, and in a smaller rendering beside the Siene, Bartholdi's heroic sculpture presents Liberty Enlightening the World, with the Law in one hand and the torch of Freedom in the other. And this is all to the good! The spirit of liberty, the urge to be free, has been a moving force in the life of man. He has struggled for it, dreamed about it, fought for it - and died for it. It is fitting that a thing so central and pre cious should be expressed oft times in ideal, artistic and sym bolic terms.

But such expression, it must also be confessed, sometimes sets Liberty upon too tenuous a pedes tal. It glorifies Freedom now and then beyond the recognition of lTIen who live, after all, on a very lTIundane level and who, along 'with a keen interest in the bless ing of personal freedom, are also eoncerned necessarily with such prosaic matters as the level of taxes and the price of beans! ~4 Condition of Life Freedom is indeed a noble ab straction; but it is also a condi tion of life - a condition that may be curtailed or denied altogether by the governmental concepts and practices under which men live. It is for this reason that these last thoughts of Charles on the scaffold are pertinent to the present scene. :He was about to lose the greatest freedom of all - the freedom to live! And in that grim moment he saw with prophetic clarity that what the people of England really 'wanted was not alone the abstract blessings of political freedom.

What they wanted, then as now, like all men everywhere, was the condition of law under which their lives and goods might be most their own. It is an affectation of our times to pretend a lofty disdain for things material. Ardent advocates of achieving the good life for everybody through national bank ruptcy speak much of "human values"; and they postulate that these are somehow superior to and at variance with material values.

76 THE FREEMAN February This rather etherial cliche can, of course, be easily reduced to an absurdity. For aside from the priceless benefits of political and personal liberty, the much-talked of human values are simply mat ters of food, clothing, shelter, and the satisfactions of comfortable Iiving. They are the physical con veniences of life - modern plumb ing, central heat, air conditioning, radio, television, labor-saving ap pliances, motor cars. They are education and health. They are vacation trips and visits to the zoo. They are books and pictures. In short, they are largely things to be physically enjoyed. Charles understood this, as did most people of his day. He was not doing any specially "advanced" thinking when he equated the pos session of goods with freedom. In those times, and for long there after, men were not reticent about the value they placed upon what Charles called "goods" meaning material possessions. In deed, the very name he used for such possessions derived then as it does today from the esteem in which they have always been held.

They were looked upon as good things to have; they were there fore "goods." And the right to possess and enj oy them was a basic right, essential to liberty and the full life. What Thomas Jefferson eventually expressed as man's unalien able rights, Le., life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, had been rendered long before by John Locke as "life, liberty and prop erty." And during the decades when the American revolt against England was slowly brewing, the same idea found expression very often in a popular newspaper slo gan: "Liberty, Property - and No Stamps." The stamps, of course, were simply an annoying infringement of the property rights which the Colonials held so dear. Eventually those bits of sticky paper came to have a symbolism and mystique of their own, especially those that were senselessly and punitively applied to tea. But at the begin ning they were merely an impedi ment to the free exchange of goods, imposed without the con sent or approval of the colonists; and as such they were roundly and properly damned.

The Principle of Ownership A point to remember is that all this represented an unabashed de votion to the principle of owner ship - a devotion that man has evinced all through his history. He worked; he made things; he bartered them for other things he needed or wanted more, or for a medi urn of exchange (a shell, a bead, a minted coin) which he 1974 OUR LIVES AND GOODS 77 could use in future exchanges of like nature. And he wanted no in terference with this simple and useful process of making, selling, bartering, buying and using the things he called "goods." So it did no violence to reality for Charles to lump "goods" and life itself together as the two things men wanted to be "most their own" - by which he meant, of course, least interfered with, least minimized, least withheld and diluted by the State. For life, after all, is in itself a species of possession - the quintessential good thing that a man can call his own. To be sure, it h~s a mystical quality that transcends all materi ality, even as it passes all under standing and defies all explanation.

That a few pounds of elemental substance should by some strange alchemy coalesce into the miracle of a human life - this has always been and perhaps always will be the first and final mystery. Confronted with this enigma, man gropes beyond the physically obvious and seeks answer in the supernatural. Unable to explain or even to comprehend the intri cate processes that combine to make a man, he turns to the idea of special creation, not as a chemi cal formulation, but as an act of God. Thus groping, thus hoping, man comforts and ennobles himself; and in the exercise of hope he dis lnisses or evades the despair of ignorance. In the end he achieves a sense of origin that transcends atom and protoplasm and relates him filially to God. He becomes the Final Result of the First Cause! But he is also a physical animal, with every hungry cell demanding :sustenance. If he does not live by bread alone neither can he subsist solely on a diet of philosophy or :spiritual contemplation. Moments of ultra-physical comprehension come and go, with their ecstasies and torments; but his stomach re mains fairly constant in its demands.

Human Nature So man ekes out his days and drifts finally into the limbo of things forgotten, sustained equally by his spiritual concepts· and by his use and enjoyment of what he makes and earns. There is no sepa ration or distinction of values as between the material and the "hu man." All his needs are human needs; and they are satisfied alike by his intellectual or spiritual per ceptions, and by his ownership and consumption of the "goods" he has created or acquired. The essential condition of free dom is not to live without fear, but to live without un-natural fear. That man should fear wild beasts, 78 THE FREEMAN February or robbers, or the scourge of pestilence - this is a natural heri tage of his mortality. To fear the unknown, or adverse fortune, or pain, or death - these also are fears natural to man. But it is not natural, or should not be, to fear government, which is an instru mentali ty man has himself cre ated, not for his oppression, but for his protection. To the degree that government at any time ren ders the citizen apprehensive as to his life and possessions, it has betrayed its purpose and disserved its sole reason for being.

The government that curtails or cancels man's right to own and enjoy his material possessions such a government has diminished or destroyed his freedom as truly as though it had denied his right to think, or speak, or vote, or pray. Common sense and the sanc tion of long usage, to be sure, dic tate that the citizen will surrender a portion of his earnings in return for the protection and stability of an organized society. This is the essence of the implied agreement between the citizen and the State that is known to scholars as the Social Contract. The Overpowering State But when the State constantly takes more from the citizen than is needed for the normal' act of governing; when in the name of social progress it piles debt on debt and sets the printing presses to work grinding out paper money of ever~diminishing value; when its leaders rashly undertake to substitute their puny economic guesses for the impartial wisdom of the free market; and especially when, with callous arrogance, they presume to instruct the people how their savings shall be dis posed of, or whether, indeed, they shall be allowed to have any sav ings at aU - when such usurpa tions occur, under whatever pre text or camouflage, then the Social Contract has been violated, and the State is no longer a govern ment in the historic and tradi tional sense. Instead, it is an ex pensive and dangerous experi mental laboratory in which the citizens not only pay the cost but serve as the guinea pigs!

A Legacy of Truth January is usually cold and raw in London, and in 1649 its last day but one was doubtless no ex ception. Whitehall itself was a chill and gloomy pile. Charles probably welcomed the brisk walk across from St. James, where he had been held prisoner . It is of record that he asked his guards pleasantly to "walk apace." What were his thoughts in that last hour? Regret? Remorse? Did all his intrigues come forth to ac19·'74 OUR LIVES AND GOODS 79 cuse him? Did he lament his own perfidy in letting the faithful Strafford go to the block? Was he sustained by the knowledge that his private life had been austere and blalnelescs? Who knows? He is dead now these three hundred years and more. About all we can say for sure is that he met his end well, AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENT is well known to be the instrument by which man's freedom to act peacefully is most often hindered or prevented.