FREEDOM: THE GROOVE THAT BECAME A RUT
Wellesley, Sir Arthur
F R E E D O M : T H E G R O O V E T H A T B E C A M E A R U T BY S m Arthuh Wellesley The crisis of our time, boiled down and stripped of ideological rhetoric, is the battle to maintain and...
...Father Stanley Parry, chairman of the government department at the University of Notre Dame, explains well conservatism's affinity for the free market system...
...When Negroes have been denied their rights it is because government has failed in its duty to treat people equally — providing some the protection of the law while refusing it to others...
...Liberals contend they, and not the conservatives, are progressive...
...Conservatives have opposed the recent aggrandizement of power granted to the Federal government through the civil rights acts precisely because they fully comprehend that human rights cannot be preserved through the power of government but through its absence...
...Conformity, democratic or dictatorial, is conservatism's enemy...
...Capitalism is anathema to liberals because they cannot compel the individual to accept their ideas of what he should buy...
...Herbert Hoover observed "in all bureaucracies there are three implacable spirits — self-perpetuation, expansion and an incessant demand for more power...
...Order, imposed by government, is the obsession of liberalism, justified on the grounds that the individual is incapable of directing his life...
...In the latter case he starves...
...If it becomes imjust, who shall trust it...
...Government's role, as conservatives conceive it, is to use the minimum power necessary to insure domestic tranquility so that the individual, to the maximum extent possible, is free to pursue his interests as he sees them, as long as they do not interfere with the rights of others...
...Capitalism, on the other hand, can cater to a variety of tastes...
...In other words, rational planning cannot operate unless it restricts the number of variables, thus reducing the variety of products that can be produced...
...It is time to hold the line, less the Republic go imder...
...General Eisenhower, understood this fact and confined his actions to the role of a "whig" president...
...it was conceived as an instrumentality to insure fair play and the absence of fraud, not as one to guarantee the economic or social success of individual or cooperative endeavor, nor as one to mitigate the burden created by the failure of such endeavor...
...The competition of free enterprise produces a variety of goods from which the customer may choose...
...The country will be the beneficiary if Nixon learned something from his association with the General...
...The mistakes of an omnipotent elite offer little possibility for redressing grievances since the new class cannot admit mistakes and continue to pose as the unerring leader of the masses...
...Diversity, the salient feature of freedom, is a necessity for improving the human condition...
...The enemy is m o d e m liberalism, flying the red flag and proclaiming the goal of socialism, whether the democratic domestic variety or the totalitarian strain of the Soviet Union...
...John Kenneth Galbraith, a member of the new class, argues that people should not be allowed to waste money on insolent chariots...
...Liberals, Buckley observes, fear the volimtary approach to society because when individuals are free of government coercion they cannot be ordered and molded in the Utopian image of liberal fantasy...
...of the right of people peacefully to assemble (militant demonstrators might note the word "peacefully") and to petition the govem— Continued on Page 12 Page 11...
...I beseech you, watch and guard with sleepless dread that corporation which can make all property and rights, all states and people, and all liberty and hope, its playthings in an hour and its victims forever...
...Capitalism causes producers to respond to customer needs at competitive prices or go out of business...
...Consequently, it is held, any rational planning of economic activity will either suppress these variables, and so freedom, or else it will create disorder by its neglect of variables...
...or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press...
...But what is progressive about creating a secular version of medieval society...
...If this great, ambitious, ever-growing corporation becomes oppressive, w ho shall check it...
...The freedom to work out his own destiny has always been man's most progressive goal, yet liberals would stifle freedom in a welfare state in which the individual is protected from himself — for his own good, of course...
...In fact, nonconformity is a sin to be eradicated because it endangers the infallibility of the new class and its right to rule...
...Or, he can buy a black V W beetle...
...For this reason conservatives endorse the free enterprise system...
...Since the elite knows best, there is no necessity to deviate from its established norms...
...In capitalism the individual customer is king...
...That corporation is the Federal government...
...He can, if he chooses, select a mauve-colored, insolent chariot, decked with fins, fake air scoop and acres of chrome...
...Conservatives, whether tradition-oriented like Russell Kirk or liberatarian like Frank Meyer, are united in the fight against the power accumulation in the hands of a governmental elite, however benevolent its intentions...
...For nearly 150 years in a most remarkable feat, the United States froze the swing of that awful pendulum at its nadir...
...Though for utter absurdity I am unable to match such fustian as the 1823 "Society for Distressed and Decayed Harbor Pilots," "The National Council of Churches," and "The Black Panther Party," genuflecting before almost two hundred years of imbecility I submit the following: SURFERS CLUB OF GREATER BOISE COMMITTEE FOR A SAVAGE NUCLEAR POLICY (SANE) EDSEL RACING DIVISION WOMEN CONCERNED WITH TURNING-ON UBANGIS (WCTU) ADDLEBRAINS FOR DEMOCRATIC ACTION (ADA) BROTHERHOOD OF RAILROAD FEATHERBEDDERS FRATERNAL ORDER OF ARTICHOKE HEARTS BROTHERHOOD OF WINE TESTERS, SEED SPITTERS AND GRAPE PICKERS OF DELANO, CALIFORNIA Continued from Page 5 FREEDOM which the direction of economic activity requires...
...As Sen...
...Under this system, the elite (state) and not the customer (the individual) is king...
...Jefferson added a note of warning: "Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we would soon want bread...
...Government must coerce people to work at certain jobs or the plan fails, thereby restricting the freedom of the individual to work where and how he wishes...
...This is precisely what the new class intends...
...It was not by accident but design that the founding fathers, in drafting the Bill of Rights, stated in Article I that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
...In state-directed economies, the customer has little or no choice...
...Liberals seek to create a society in which uniformity is the highest virtue...
...Since the 1930's it has begun to move dangerously close to mobocracy, the welfare state, with all its attendant evils...
...The clash between planning and democracy arises simply from the fact that the latter is an obstacle to the suppression of freedom — Continued on Page 11 Page 5 D O W N WITH OCHLOCRACY Continued from Page 10 to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, under Adams' sway, accomplished what no similar body before or since has mastered: they stopped that historical cycle from "tyranny back to tyranny" at midpoint — between oligarchy and mobocracy...
...The new class is convinced that it knows better than the individual how his life should be directed — an arrogant assumption which justifies forcing Americans to restrict their travels abroad or starving Russian peasants who refuse to accept communization of their farms...
...Strom Thurmond, "is to codify and then inhibit all destructive actions while leaving all creative and productive actions, including welfare, charity, security and prosperity, to citizens acting voluntarily, privately, cooperatively or competitively, as they freely choose . . . The government was clearly conceived as an umpire, not as a participant (which is the view of the liberals), in the activities of society...
...It is a struggle which engages all conservatives...
...Government's legitimate purpose, as contemplated by the Constitution," according to Sen...
...Because of the corrosive influence of power, conservatives agree with Thomas Jefferson who advised "that government governs best which governs least...
...While exclaiming profusely a concern for the individual's rights, liberals are generating governmental power which is slowly strangling every man's freedom...
...Competition is viewed as a waste of resources since the new class is confident it alone knows what should be built, produced and cultivated...
...F R E E D O M : T H E G R O O V E T H A T B E C A M E A R U T BY S m Arthuh Wellesley The crisis of our time, boiled down and stripped of ideological rhetoric, is the battle to maintain and strengthen individual freedom...
...Claiming to create freedom for Negroes through Federal intervention, liberals are enslaving blacks and whites alike in an omnipotent state...
...These are human urges and are supported by a conviction, sometimes justified, that they know what is good for us...
...In the process of making a profit, an industry is compelled to improve its product to keep up with competitors...
...The last Republican president...
...If industry and labor are left to their own courses," wrote James Madison, "they will gener— Continued on Page 5 1964: W E L L E S L E Y SAILS F O R A U S T R A L I A ally be directed to those objects which are most productive, and this in a more certain and direct manner than the wisdom of the most enlightened legislature could point out...
...If it becomes wayward, who shall control it...
...H e must be led and channeled by government which, of course, is manipulated by a bureaucratic elite of the new class of liberals...
...Perhaps Galbraith has superior tastes, but the elite can have tastes as gross as they are pervasive...
...yet nobody has yet seriously suggested that legislation should be delegated to a body of experts . . . Our point...
...Classical economic thinkers, he states, "are pre-occupied with an almost technical limit to practical reason, the inability of the human mind to understand and handle the infinite number of variables that go to (foto courtesy Baron Von Kaimon collection) make up a free economy...
...Benjamin Harvey Hill warned a century ago: "There is a corporation we may all dread...
...Historically, conservatives have been aware, as the historian Lord Acton once stated, that "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely...
...He and the new class would uplift people's taste (whether they liked it or not...
...Stalin's purges of the thirties represent only the more extreme course of action to obtain uniformity...
...He determnes what will be produced...
...Briefly, economic planning requires coercion...
...Liberalism, however, seeks to replace freedom with security and in the process wants to return to conditions of an earlier time...
...Since the state controls production, the individual must produce for the state or not produce at all...
...If all the variables of a free market system are allowed to operate, there will be too many to permit the finite knowledge of m a n to plan the economy...
...From its aggression there can be no safety . . Let us be sure we keep it always within its limit...
...Arguing against a planned economy Frederick Hayek pointed out in "The Road to Serfdom" that "alterations in the structure of civil law are no less technical and no more difficult to appreciate in all their implications (than they are in the structure of an economy...
...In America there is room for the gingerbread homes of the 1890's and the structures of Frank Lloyd Wright...
...In their mass action, they become the veritable exponents of political tyranny...
...It can be as banal as the wedding-cake architecture of Stalin's Russia from which no deviation was allowed — Stalin obviously possessed no knowledge of architecture, but his barbaric tastes nonetheless were inflicted on the people who paid for such monstrosities as the University of Moscow...
...If government can compel one to work, it also can deprive that individual of a job if he does not please the state...
...is not that dictatorship must inevitably extirpate freedom but rather that planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible...
...I N C I T E S BY George Nathan Recently I offered possible names for those future asinine organizations Americans are so wont to concoct, and the response was thunderous...
...Nevertheless, these spirits are potent and possess a dictatorial complex . . . Power is the Page 4 father of impatience with human faults, and impatience breeds arrogance...
Vol. 2 • December 1968 • No. 3
