Prior to an important meeting of prominent advocates of freedom, Mises stated roughly, that:
- Laissez-faire means ‘let the consumer decide’, it does not mean chaos prevails.
I translate this more clearly and accurately as ‘a responsible parent forces her child to make decisions’ so that inter-temporal decision making becomes one of the child’s most adept skills. The civic republican tradition states that if a man is successful in life his duty is to help parent, ie: manage and govern, the society, thus spreading his wisdom to others in the community. This is quite contrary to the democratic religion of secular humanism that states that all men have equal merit in political actions.
- Hayek’s plan relies upon the support of that segment of the population that is comfortable as they are, but not willing to muster the political effort to preserve the freedom that gives them that comfort.
I state this fact more simply: ‘Freedom is, has been, and will be, the desire of the creative minority.’
Civilizations are ruled by minorities willing to use violence or fraud to maintain their positions. Since fraud is expressly what the creative minority seeks to avoid, because trade without recourse to violence requires refraining from fraud, the creative minority can retain it’s freedom only by force, or be constrained by the force or fraud of others.
It is because violence is both meritocratic and epistemologically fruitful when combined with the need to enfranchise sufficient numbers of the minority to maintain rule. That is why the creative, competitive, and military class built western society. Secular humanism is simply a system of fraud that seeks to transform those costs for maintaining social order into a system of fraud or financial coercion. Violence that is used to defend the system of voluntary trade we call Laissez-Faire, is the most honest of human actions. Pacifism and monotheistic religion are simply a cost reduction effort on the part of the ruling class so that fraud can be supplanted for violence.
The purpose of the creative class then is to maintain sufficient capacity for violence that it can maintain sufficient capacity to rule, and as rulers, preserve their freedom.
The use of violence is necessary in order to create the freedom needed to unleash the societies’ creative forces while oppressing its tendency to corruption. Corruption is the normal human response to lower risk and labor in an effort to circumvent the market economy while forcing others to participate in the market economy.
Violence applied to preserve freedom, that is, voluntary trade and property, is not only honest, it is constructive, and it is the optimum method for human prosperity and cooperation.
One need not force all men to be free. One need only have sufficient force that he is free.