Professional Documents
Culture Documents
CHAPTER 1
of
By George Reisman**
Understanding History
***
***
***
In the same way, if I ask a woman to marry me, and she says
no, my freedom is not violated. It is only violated if she says
yes, and the government then stops me from marrying her—
say, by virtue of a law concerning marriages among people of
different races, religions, or blood types. Or, finally, if I want
to travel somewhere, but lack the ability to pay the cost of
doing so, my freedom of travel is in no way violated. But
suppose I do have the ability to pay the cost, and want to pay
it, but the government stops me—say, with a wall around my
city (as existed until recently in East Berlin), a passport
restriction, or a price control on oil and oil products that
creates a shortage of gasoline and aviation fuel and thus
stops me from driving and the airlines from flying—then my
freedom of travel is violated.
What is essential in all these cases is not the fact that there is
something I cannot do for one reason or another, but what it
is, specifically, that stops me. Only if what stops me is the
initiation of physical force—by the government in particular—
is my freedom violated.
The extent to which this can happen, and thus the future of
freedom in the United States, depends first of all on the
concept of freedom being properly understood, and then on
its being upheld without compromise in every instance in
which freedom is violated or threatened, from the police
turning their backs on campus disruptions and even open
rioting and looting in major cities, to income tax audits and
the ever growing array of government regulations.
One should ask how the United States' economy got from
where it was then to where it is even now. One should ask
how Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas came to be the
great cities they all were, not very long ago, and, for the most
part, still are. One should ask how New York City grew from a
population of twenty thousand to eight million, and how
Boston and Philadelphia could increase in size thirty-five and
one hundred times over. One should ask where all the means
of transportation and communication, all the farms and
factories, houses and stores, and all the incredible goods that
fill them came from.
***
This book makes clear that the cause of such problems is the
progressive abandonment of capitalism and the undermining
of its institutions over a period of several generations. This is
a process that has finally assumed dimensions so great as to
jeopardize the continued functioning of the economic system.
This book flies in the face of all such anticapitalistic ideas and
demands. Its thesis implies that never have so many people
been so ignorant and confused about a subject so important,
as most people now are about economics and capitalism. It
shows that in its logically consistent form of laissez-
fairecapitalism—that is, with the powers of government
limited to those of national defense and the administration of
justice—capitalism is a system of economic progress and
prosperity for all, and is a precondition of world peace.
***
***
Notes
10. For elaboration, see below, pp. 42-49 and 542-559. 11.
See the writings of Ayn Rand for a consistent elaboration of
the "benevolent universe premise" across the entire range of
human activity.
28. Ibid.
45. See von Mises, Human Action, pp. 258-259. Also, see
below, pp. 263-264.