Capitol Ideas: Freedom and Its Enemies

...Construed broadly, property sprawls across many disciplines — history, politics, economics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology are only the first that come to mind—and so wide ranging a project can Toss BETHELL is TAS's Washington correspondent...

...The search for large truths should not be deterred by the fear of small errors...

...The people know, and can only know, a tiny fraction of what Leviathan does, and what they know is what these partisans tell them...

...Many were his references to books that I had not come across...

...It is driven by a voracious alliance of government's own employees, and those who receive benefits from the state...

...For centuries, in patrimonial Russia, sovereign power ignored the boundaries of property...

...It might almost seem superfluous to insist upon this connection, were it not for the frequency with which intellectuals over the past zoo years have disparaged property without grasping the consequences for freedom...

...And during the seven decades of Communist rule, she deprived her people of liberties to an extent previously unknown in world history...

...Later, Russia's prime minister Peter Stolypin saw that privatization could create a conservative rural class and a bulwark against revolution...

...His wealth of illustration is what we have come to expect from him...

...Economic theory suggests that the charter would have given the owners a more direct interest in the economic well-being of their serfs, whose lives should then have improved...

...Martin's Press...

...At a key moment in 1785, a charter of rights and freedoms was promulgated by Catherine the Great, who understood property's role as the foundation of prosperity...

...Pipes's brief history of Russian property is of great interest...

...His thesis is that without private property there can be no liberty, and this he amply demonstrates...

...He was born in Romania...

...Crucial support to Leviathan comes from our morally ambitious communicator class whose members restlessly seek what they construe to be the well-being of strangers...

...Here,perhaps, is a rarely formulated argument for immigration: Those who have tasted something else, and something worse, often have a better understanding of the American way of life than those who were born here and attended the best schools...

...Pipes hints that the problem may have lain with the peasant communes, which "could up to a point protect the peasant household from landlord interference...

...No Gulag, evidently, can deter the advocates of state power from believing in their own virtue and in the morality of the power they exercise...

...No government has ever commanded the resources at the disposal of our ungodly Leviathan, which consumes about 25 percent of the product of the world's richest country...

...The ACLU's longtime support of "civil liberties" was always belied by its indifference or antagonism to property...

...How long this will last we cannot say, but has there ever been an intelligentsia so relentlessly dedicated to the promotion of state power...

...In 1907 peasants were allowed to claim title to their allotments and withdraw from the commune...

...Where it is scarce in relation to population "institutions of adjudication" become essential...

...Property rights in Russia "became associated with the consolidation of the nobility's power over the peasants and the abuses of the serf system...

...Democracy turns out to be rule by publicity...

...Pipes, too, is concerned that despite the collapse of Communism and the failure of "the most determined effort ever undertaken to condition people's thought and behavior," the "legislative frenzy of modern times" continues unabated...

...Ayn Rand saw that "without property rights, no other rights are possible...

...Now the ruling class owned their estates outright and enjoyed civil rights...

...For most native-born, twentieth-century Americans, however, the blessings of property and freedom tend to be taken for granted...

...The American Spectator June 1999 19...

...Their origins were not incidental to their interests...

...At least 90 million Americans either depend directly on government handouts or jobs, and each private worker must support not only himself and his family, but also carry a government worker on his shoulders...

...Martin's Press, $26.95...

...The authorities who had advocated real privatization "were overruled partly for ideological reasons (the influence of Slavophile intellectuals who admired the commune)," and in the end it was the commune that received title...

...For Pipes, the Russian Revolution was not so much the fulfillment of an intellectual fantasy, as it was the continuation of Russia under the old regime...

...Ultimately, as economist Douglass North has suggested, the question why the institutions that are conducive to peace, freedom, and prosperity were developed in some countries ahead of others, and in others scarcely at all, is the great unresolved question of political and economic history...

...To that end we are now raining bombs down on Serbia, to cite just one of millions of things your government is doing for you today...

...only be undertaken in a spirit of boldness...

...In the age of absolutism, Russia's sovereigns exercised authority in a more absolute manner than their Western counterparts...

...But most of those "took title only to sell the land," and were viewed by the remnant as "thieves of common property...

...He offers his findings "with some trepidation," for expert eyes may find grounds to quibble...

...Pipes's long chapter on "England and the Birth of Parliamentary Democracy" has many interesting things to say, but one suspects that the crucial developments occurred not so much in the struggle between king and parliament as in the courts of law, and perhaps earlier than is recognized...

...This would ensure that concessions were no longer in any owner's interest...

...Virtue is presumed to reside in the state...

...Lenin "had no clue of the function that property and law perform in economic life," but expropriated it with fanatical zeal because he had been persuaded by Marx "that all previous attempts at social revolution had failed by stopping halfway...

...All of which underscores Pipes's thesis that private property was neither well respected nor well developed before the revolution...

...The nineteenth-century disciples of progress believed that socialism could and one day would replace an economy based on private property, but first, human nature would have to be changed...

...Decades ago, he writes, it occurred to him that property, broadly defined, was the guarantor of liberty or, as it has been said, property is the "custodian of every other right...

...she was born in Russia...

...In 1991, Boris Yeltsin spoke of the Soviet experience precisely as an "experiment...

...Some, to be sure, may have grasped it but not minded, for they have no doubt held liberty in as low regard as property...

...Pipes had no idea how difficult a subject it would turn out to be, he writes...

...Other sparsely populated countries tend tohave weak property rights, and are more prone to famine than densely populated ones...

...Richard Pipes grew up in Poland...

...suggesting an undisclosed agenda tangential (at best) to liberty...

...Our communicators, oddly employed in the private sector, work tirelessly to ensure that state control is maintained, our taxes stay high, the official message is promoted...

...18 June 1999 The American Spectator arise in the 13o years that elapsed before the Bolsheviks seized power...

...Likewise, when the serfs were emancipated in 1861, "the land was given not to the individual households but to the communes," Pipes writes...

...It's possible that the communes, like excessively powerful labor unions, worked against the individual interest, by insisting that potential benefits to a family had to be shared by the entire commune...

...Today democracy is constantly touted as the highest good, but as Pipes says, elites in democratic regimes have devised "ways of shaping and bending the law in their favor...

...It was not until a society without private property was realized, under Communism, that many intellectuals recognized property's true role...

...Ever since then, I can only assume, he must have accumulated material on property and political institutions...

...Pipes argues that, with the charter, czarist authorities surrendered their sovereignty over the serfs—half the population —and this "intensified" their plight for they became private property themselves...

...Its reliance on compulsion is seen as fulfilling, not undermining, morality...

...We are all Hobbesians now...

...James Bovard explores closely related themes in his new book, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (St...

...It turns out that Property and Freedom (Knopf, $3o) is a most stimulating and original book, shedding light wherever the author ventures...

...He limited its scope, but it is still vast...

...One would like to know more...

...The abundance of land may have played a role...

...CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell Freedom and Its Enemies ichard Pipes, a professor of history at R Harvard, has written many books on Russia and is perhaps the preeminent historian of the Bolshevik revolution...

...Bovard urges us to prefer "self-reliant liberty" to the government-issue variety...

...They, it turned out, were particularly vulnerable...

...The huge (and still rising) percentage of GNP captured by governments all over the Western world since World War II attests to this, even in the democracies...

...It is not cynical, he concludes, to have more faith in freedom than in subjugation...

...Thus, as I see it, the Soviet Union became the experimental venue for the formation of this New Man, in whom both Marx and Trotsky had believed...

...Over 5o percent of all tax payments now go directly to the benefit of government workers and government dependents...

...Having covered some of the same ground in my book on property published last year, I can attest that his reading has been wide indeed...

...But he need not have worried...

...His latest book, The Noblest Triumph, was recently published by St...

...It is a wide-ranging study of the institution of property in different countries and different ages, with special attention to England and Russia...

...in the age of democracy, Russia clung to absolutism longer than any other European country...

...So why did civil society not Property protects freedom, but the state is unchained...

...Some other factor must have been at work...

...The very extent of the land persuaded the Russian peasant that the soil had been created for the benefit of all, and so could not be owned...

...He calls for a redress in the balance of rights, with civil rights construed more narrowly, property rights more broadly...

...The trend of our day seems to indicate "that citizens of democracies are willing heedlessly to surrender their freedoms to purchase social equality (along with economic security), apparently oblivious of the consequences...

...0 f all ages, Pipes writes, "the twentieth century has been the least favorable to the institution of private property...

...His new book on a much broader theme—property—will no doubt come as a surprise to many...

...More than anything, however, what was absent in Russia was the idea of equality before the law, which had taken root in English common law hundreds of years earlier, and was in fact its great achievement...

...But he concluded that the project he first had in mind "would require teams of historians...

...And I thought I had overturned whole libraries in search of relevant material...

...If the portents for property and freedom today are not what we would wish, we should be grateful that these two writers have so eloquently drawn attention to the problem...

...Bovard says that the state has been "by far the largest recipient of intellectual charity in the twentieth century...

...Federal appeals court judge Alex Kozinski has noted how easily an unruly intelligentsia in a Communist regime can be denied access to printing presses, ink, and paper...

...Stolypin's reform came too late...

...His vast research, compressed into Soo pages, has yielded one of the most valuable volumes on property yet written...

...A researcher whose curiosity never flags, he documents the federal government's extensive control over our lives...

...Although the egalitarian dream will never be realized, it transfers vast powers to elites who "claim for themselves privileges that lift them high above the common herd...