The American Idea; R. Bradford

That was the real American Idea the idea of the Free Market. To some people that phrase had, and still has, only a commercial connotation; but in reality it had, and still has, a much broader significance. It refers not only to the free trading of goods in Ralph Bradford, noted poet, writer, speaker and busi ness organization consultant, is now retired in Ocala, Florida. the market pl8!ce, but to the un trammeled exch~nge of ideas, and to the fullest possible development of the human min4 and spirit. It refers to such added aspects of liberty as freedom of spee~h and of the press. It means also fr~edom to write, and to create a literature. That was the true essence and spirit of the Amer ican Revolution. Such concepts, it must be noted, were not new in 1 the world. Here and there they had blossomed, and men had grown in spirit, and had pros pered materially. We know this be cause, wherever and whenever this occurred, men were free in the large sense to followthe creative urge that resides deep in the human heart.

They made pict1.Jlres,they carved im ages, and, sooner or later, they wrote!

628 THE FREEMAN October On the skins of animals, on papyrus, on rock walls, on stone steles, on clay tablets-they wrote! Using pic tures, or crude cursive script, or ideograms, or hieroglyphics, or cu neiform indentations-they wrote! What the chief said, what the king decreed, what the priests pro nounced, what the artisan created, whether the harvest was good or bad, what the laws were-they wrote! They set it down. And thus in signs and symbols we have history far 'be yond any literature or language of the present century, or in the his toricage of man. Flashes of Freedom Yes, freedom, which is a timeless torch, glowed brightly here and there through the centuries-obscured and destroyed now and then in one black era after another, to reappear and relive elsewhere as the fortunes of man, the developing animal, rose and fell with the ages. But it had never been so carefully expressed, or as extensively imple mented, as it was in America. It had even gained a foothold in parts of Europe for a time; but it was snuffed out there in the dark medieval cen turies, and as a consequence the scale of human production, comfort and well-being had sunk to the level of general impoverishment and priva tion.

By the same token, the literary output of those times is practically nonexistent. Only the troubadours survived the general intellectual impoverishment; and their songs, while sometimes poetically beauti ful, are concerned mainly with the ephemeral splendors of court life, and with the evanescent beauties and languors of romantic love, usually of an illicit and clandestine character. Getting back to America, it should be noted that the recent departures from the original American Idea namely, the so-called "modern" no tions about the need for governmen tal management and supervision of all our' economic processes, are not modern at all. Incidentally, they are not "lib eral," either, though they are so termed by their supporters. The classical liberal concept was that of a government of sharply limited powers. The true liberal, from Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wil son, was afraid of big government.

Jefferson, indeed, was afraid of any government. "The best governed," he once declared, "are the least gov erned." And as for Wilson, he wrote: "The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it." And as to the "managed econ omy"-the idea of substituting the decisions of bureaucrats for the op eration of the free market-all this is not new, or modern, or original, but very old. Examples are not hard to find, both in the literature of the 1982 THE AMERICAN IDEA 629 Romans and in that about the Ro mans. In the latter category, Gib bons' Decline and Fall is perhaps the most voluminous-and ponderous. Much easier to handle and digest is a book called The History ofthe World in 300 Pages, translated from the French of Rene Sedilot. In one sec tion he describes the situation in an cient Rome. It sums up thus: Under the Emperor Alexander Severus laws were decreed to control all businesses that were operated on accumulated capital, and loans were made by the government to people in certain categories for use in buy ing land. Under Domitian, in order to prevent overproduction of wine the State ordered a portion of the grape vines to be uprooted. Under Vespasian, on the theory of spread ing employment, a ban was laid on mechanization. Under Diocletian, in an effort to keep down the cost of living, both wages and prices were fixed by a state official.

Needless to say, all this created a vast and expensive bureaucracy. It also resulted in debt, inflation, and monetary devaluation. The denar ius had its silver content progres sively reduced. The weight of gold coins was scaled down by 50 per cent. Rome's balance of payments (due partly to her extensive foreign op erations) showed a mounting deficit; and her gold and silver reserves melted away. Need I go on? It all sounds very "modern," doesn't it? Yet it hap pened many yealis ago! And of course it had all occurred in similar fashion long before that+-as in the state so cialism of Egypt~ with its "ever nor mal granary" op~ration; or as in the pre-Babylonianiculture of the Su merians, arounq 3000 B.C. It was also repeated la~er, with many re pressive variatiqns, in the guild sys tems of Europe's! Middle Ages. That Sumeria.n culture, by the way, has been substantially recon structed by ent~rprising archeolo gists. They not ~nly unearthed the capital city of Lagash, but found and deciphered the Irecords of the Su merian people. )And it is in those records that we fjnd some of the first expressions of what I consider to be the essence of i what became the American Idea.

Free from Oppr~ssion, Free to Achieve; I said at the outset that that Idea was freedom, bu~ we need to be ex plicit as to what we mean by that term. We associaJtefreedom with the abstractions ofpqliticalliberty - very properly so. How~ver, that is not the entire meaning ~nd content of free dom. To be free ~s not just to escape oppression. The ~rue free man is free from something, of course-from tyranny, from aUuse, from overtax ation; but he islalso free for some thing - free for the purpose of self development, of fulfillment, of self630 THE FREEMAN October expression. He is free to think, to question, to doubt, to believe, to speak, to write. But the word "freedom" was not written down by some scribe for the inspiration and guidance of our co lonial ancestors. It didn't have to be! They knew it, as it were, by instinct. It was born with them by reason of what they and their ancestors had suffered in its denial.

I have no wish to over-idealize those colonial days. Some of them were very dark days, indeed. There was privation, and hardship, and danger; there were cruelties and treacheries-for our ancestors were not all great and noble. Some came here to enjoy religious liberty, only to deny it to others who desired to live among them. But if I am realis tic about the seamy side, I am also not disposed to discount the impor tance of those days in making pos sible the miraculous decades that followed. Self-ResponsibleIndividuals The secret was that in the devel opment of most of North America men were on their own. This was not true farther south. The Spaniards and Portuguese were nearly all sent out by the state, and that meant a curtailment of freedom at the very outset. When Columbus set out on his voyage, Queen Isabella fur nished the ships and paid the crews. Columbus was to get a cut and receive certain honors; but he didn't defray the cost. In contrast, Queen Elizabeth didn't outfit Sir Walter Raleigh when he headed for what was to become Virginia. He had to "find" his outfit.

The same thing was true with re spect to the other colonies in the North. They were "chartered" by the King or Queen, of course, but the state didn't finance the enterprise. That was done privately. Companies were formed. Shares were sold. Those who put their money into such en terprises were known as "adventur ers" -not because they were person ally going offto settle the wilderness, but because as investors they had "adventured" their money. If the trip paid off, if the Colony was success ful, well and good. They would get their money back with interest and maybe with a profit. But they had no guarantee. The thing was not un derwritten by the State. If it failed they took the loss. And it was similarly so with the colonists themselves. Nobody guar anteed them against failure. They were face to face with wilderness reality. It was sink or swim. It was root hog or die. It was a rough, tough school; and of course it would be ut terly repugnant to a certain type of politician and intellectual today people who want the State to be a kind of universal Sugar Daddy. But it taught a great lesson. It was the essential conditioning for what fol1982 THE AMERICAN IDEA 631 lowed-namely, the formalization and institutionalization of the American Idea in a structure of gov ernment. This was the mechanism for realizing the American Heri tage.

In part, to be sure, that heritage consisted of a vast new continent, enormously rich in natural re sources. But the same thing could be said of other lands-of South Amer ica, of Africa, of India. What made the difference? Freedom! Not just freedom from colonialism, not just political liberty, but freedom for growth, for development; freedom for the individual life to develop its ca pacities. How? Through freedom from too much government! The FoundersHesitatedto Put Their Trust in Government Now to a generation that has grown up under an almost ceaseless propaganda for more and more gov ernment, it comes as a profound shock when I assert that the Archi tects of the American State had a deep distrust of government itself. But so it was; and the quotations I have cited above from Jefferson and Wilson were fairly representative of the attitude of most of the Founders. It was in their bones, from the talk of fathers and grandfathers, who told vividly of State usurpations in the older countries. The Founders them selves had lived their lives under the relatively pettYibut persistent and cumulative tyra~nies of the British Crown. They w~re determined that the new State they were creating should be limitea. in its powers, re sponsible to thel people, and never allowed to dominate and control the lives of its citizens.

So what happ~ned? It is no form of jingoism but a simple statement ofhistoric fact to say that in less than 200 years the people of this country achieved a great~r efficiency in pro duction, and a more abundant dis tribution of the necessities, comforts and luxuries of !life than had been attained anywh~re, at any time, in all the centuries! of history taken to gether. The explanation of this paradox includes a numb~r of factors; but the overriding elem~nt is the simple fact that we have b~en free to make a better use of 04r energies and re sources than most other peoples. And that freedom came from the circum stance that in aJI the period of our great growth and expansion as a na tion, our government, by the delib erate design of i~s founders, gave us the protection of.aw-and left us free to achieve. That was the! American Idea in principle and tqat was the Ameri can Idea in prac~ice.

Shall we keep i~ that way-or shall we trade it for the imagined com forts and benefitsiofthe welfare state?, A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK Back to Basics JOHN CHAMBERLAIN IT has been called the Reagan Rev olution. But the movement that Burton Yale Pines describes and analyzes in his Back to Basics (New York: William Morrow, 349 pp., $13.50) goes much deeper than poli tics. It is a cultural movement that is invoking a return to tradition in religion and ethics and educational methods; and its support of free market economics has more to do with its belief in the moral value of free choice than with any purely economic concern with efficiency. Mr. Pines once wrote cover stories for Time magazine, which presum ably brought him into prolonged contact with Eastern Establishment ways of looking at things. But some where along the line he began to have sympathy for the large groups in so ciety that had a feeling the so-called counterculture was pushing them to the brink. A first-rate reporter, he persuaded the American Enterprise Institute in Washington to support him in an eighteen-month job of measuring the depth of the tradi tionalist resurgence.