On Liberty's liberty.

• Author: Braun, Carlos Rodriguez
• Position: PREDECESSORS - Report

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty supports drug legalization because there is no reason why the state should block citizens from consuming any substance they choose at their own risk. It attacks general public education as little more than a ploy to make every citizen the same, molding them into whatever form pleases the government. It argues that if political power is centralized, or if the roads, rails, businesses, universities, and beneficence organizations belong to the state, the country may have freedom of the press and a democratic parliament and still not be a free country. It opposes bureaucracy, social rights, wage equality, and tariff protectionism. The author, a renowned defender of women's rights and enemy of slavery, also warned of the risks that socialism poses to economic prosperity and, more important, to individual liberty. He criticized opponents of the free market and competition, fought progressive taxation--in particular, taxes on salaries--and defended capitalists' private property and a greater freedom to buy and sell, with a general rule of laissez-faire. Mill believed democracy could become oppressive, and he proposed severe limits to keep it from restricting freedom. For example, he recommended that individuals who did not pay taxes should not be represented in parliament. Published in 1859, On Liberty is a radical defense of freedom of thought, expression, and action. Its thesis can be summarized in a few brief lines from the first chapter: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant" (Mill 1963-91, 18:223, hereafter cited as CW, referring to the Collected Works).

It is easy to understand why Mill was thought to be a follower of the classical-liberal Manchester School, why Milton Friedman ranked On Liberty second among his favorite classical liberal books, behind only Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and why Marx held a deep disdain for Mill. Ludwig von Mises, however, had this to say: "Mill is the great advocate of socialism. All the arguments that could be advanced in favor of socialism are elaborated by him with loving care. In comparison with Mill all other socialist writers--even Marx, Engels, and Lassalle--are scarcely of any importance" (2005, 154; see also Mises 1981, 154-55, Flew 1983, 57, and Rothbard 2000, 2, 307). F. A. Hayek agreed: Mill "probably led more intellectuals into socialism than any other single person" (1988, 149; see also Hayek 1993, 2:111,186).

The fact is that Mill's notion of liberty coexists with antiliberal ideas, some of which are profoundly hostile to freedom. He defended the private property of capitalists, but not that of landowners, an inconsistency shared by most nineteenth-century liberals and one that opened the door to interventionism in our time. He criticized protectionism, but he made an exception for infant industries. He defended competition, but he set limits on it. He anticipated current interventionist fallacies, condemning exaggerated consumption and praising a supposedly idyllic stationary state. He criticized general public education, but he allowed the state to force citizens to study. He defended women and men's freedom, but not their freedom to choose the number of children they would have or to decide on their education or to bequeath goods to them. He said that parting from laissez-faire was bad unless it produced some good. He warned of the dangers of socialism, but he flirted with the advantages of experimentation with this system, which proved to be the most criminal in history. This great friend of liberty could not find the logic in family, marriage, religion, tradition, morality, and custom; he saw them--and we still suffer from this enlightened error--as repressive obstacles to freedom, never mentioning that they might be the bulwarks of liberty.

Trapped between social romanticism and utilitarian rationalism, Mill appears to be an imprecise eclectic aiming simultaneously at the supremacy of the individual and the greatest happiness of the greatest number, standing between liberty as a principle and the denial of nonlegal rights (Winch 1970, 15; Rees 1985, 8).

With his distinction between laws of production and laws of distribution (CW, 2:199), Mill inaugurated the doctrinal and academic respectability of income redistribution that became predominant in almost every political position up to the present day. In his 1848 Principles of Political Economy, he analyzes interventionism, starting with the one based on false theories, such as protectionism, which he criticizes except for the protection necessary to help start-up industries get on their feet. Such protectionism is nuanced and temporary, but it is protectionism all the same and cannot be ignored because it has proved to be long-lasting: although there is a context of more or less general support for free trade, in practice there have been and continue to be protected activities that consumers are forced to pay for.

Leaving aside erroneous theories, Mill postulated two classes of acceptable interventions: the necessary and the optional. For the necessary ones, he relied on Adam Smith: markets require respect for property rights and contract enforcement, which means that the state must intervene to establish a legal framework and to provide justice, defense, and security. Again, however, land is an exception. But it follows that if one type of property is excluded, other types logically may be excluded, too, as in fact they have been (Rodriguez Braun 2008, 87, 93). Although Mill argues that the free market ought to be the general rule, he goes on to propose so many exceptions that it is appropriate to view him as the founder of the theory of market failures and state interventionism (Bowley 1967, 265; Schwartz 1972, 116; Platteau 1991, 121). He examined various types of market failure that over time would be exhaustively analyzed: information, divisibility of factors of production, discrimination among goods, and various cases of externalities. The idea of market failure would prove most successful, as would be the economics of welfare: when politicians today defend the market "but with limits, because there are things the free market cannot provide," they are repeating, as Keynes said, the ideas of a defunct economist: in this case, John Stuart Mill.

Some economists--neoinstitutionalists, public-choice analysts, Austrian school followers, and others--have challenged this vision. Ronald Coase shows that market failures arc often failures of the institutional framework; for example, private-property rights may not be well defined and enforced. It is unclear, therefore, that the state should intervene in every instance of a seeming market failure and, by its action, rule out the possibility of negotiation among the affected parties. The idea that certain goods and services are by their nature public, in the sense that the market cannot adequately supply them, is a popular one. From Mill to Samuelson, economists have used examples such as the lighthouse: given the difficulty of charging the people who benefit from a lighthouse and the virtual impossibility of excluding those who benefit from it but do not pay for that benefit, it seems clear that the state should finance the lighthouse. But this conclusion is wrong. Coase (1974) shows that many lighthouses at the time Mill was writing were private and financed by port fees, as they are today, although all the ports now arc public and back then they were not. The argument for public goods is far from evident, but its weight in economic and political analysis has been and continues to be extraordinary (sec also de Jasay 1990).

Notions of Liberty

The two most intuitive and widespread notions about liberty are that it is something exercised on an individual level and that it is limited by that fact for everyone else. Mill follows this two-pronged approach. In chapter 1 of On Liberty, he writes, "the individual is sovereign," and in chapter 5, "liberty consists in doing what one desires" (CW, 18:224, 294). In regard to the crucial question of the limits placed on the individual exercise of liberty, Mill puts forward in the first chapter,

[O]ne very simple principle ... the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the...