A half-century ago, the Oxford political theorist Isaiah Berlin drew a sharp distinction between “negative” and “positive” liberties. The former are individual rights that require the state to back off. Whether or not that’s easy, such a concept is simple to enforce.
Positive rights, however, require the state to actively intervene to provide services. But this proves trickier: Just expenditure isn’t enough. If India still thinks that just spending money will enable learning, we’ve hardly reformed since 1991.
Long before Isaiah Berlin, it was Frederic Bastiat who wrote that The Law must always be negative. He explained it thus:
The Law exists to prohibit certain actions we all agree should be prohibited. It can do no more good than that. That is why the Ten Commandments all begin with “Thou shalt not …” The Law can only prohibit. The Law only says what we must not do. Everything else is “feasible.” The Law can never say what we must do.
It cannot be The Law that everybody must work, be well fed, or well educated: these are to be accomplished by individuals, through virtuous conduct. These cannot be accomplished through the force of law. These lie within the province of Liberty and individual action.
Bastiat is unmatched in his language and his passion for Justice. The socialists in his times were passing all kinds of socialist legislation like a “right to food,” a “right to work” and a “right to education.” This was France in the 1840s – and it looks quite like Chacha Manmohan’s socialist The State today.
On the right to food, Bastiat asked: “Does the law have lacteal veins within its breast with which to feed the hungry?”
On the right to work, he said it is foolish to maximize “effort”; rather, we must maximize the “results” of the effort. We must think as consumers, of consumption. Work is disutility.
On the right to education, Bastiat was equally clear in his thinking. He asked: “Is the law a lamp of learning?”
Is our The State a “lamp of learning”? – we Indians must ask ourselves today.
And is this “good law”? – all these meaningless and nonsensical rights while Property is not secure.
And Chacha wants to spend 1,50,000 crores on citizen ID cards.
And there are no roads.
And there are no land titles.
And they want to teach socialist theories and values by force to every single child, uniformly throughout the land. Each with his ID card.
This means that our “politics” will never be reformed. Seems like these great “liberalizers” are not “liberal” at all. Indeed, they are sworn enemies of liberalism. If there is any evidence we needed, this is it. As the Mint editorial concluded, “we’ve hardly reformed since 1991.”
PS: I quoted Bastiat from his little booklet, The Law, published in India by Liberty Institute, with my foreword, 15 years ago.
You can download The Law here.
Happy reading. This immortal defence of Property and Liberty, this clear conception of Justice, will be “compulsory reading” in my Institute of Catallactics. It explodes thousands of light bulbs in the head. And it kills “positive legislation.”
This essay is also to be found in my collection, The Essential Frederic Bastiat, published by Liberty Institute in 2007. I recommend this collection to all our youth; indeed, the first essay therein is titled “To the youth.”
Now, there’s an incentive to dump boring socialist economics and “civics” and study the classics of Liberalism – at least the latter are highly enjoyable to read!
Your move, Chacha.
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