Welfare Reductions and False Recoveries: Why Natural Liberty Isn't Enough

There is a line in the United States Declaration of Independence that runs:

'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.' [ed - emphasis mine]

During the Age of Enlightenment, the idea that human beings had a fundamental right to certain unalienable freedoms served as a powerful force in combating the established power and rights of monarchs. However, the idea of 'natural' liberty also bred a problematic distrust for organisations, particularly government.

'Natural' liberty only allows for the removal of restrictions, leaving people to the struggle that lies beyond. In that struggle people are vulnerable to the inequality and unfairness of a way of life without safety nets, and where people are only restrained by the limits of their own power.

These concerns are as vital as ever as we see the ideology of natural liberty being brought to bear in government policy. The government's welfare reforms, criticised as 'overambitious and poor value for money', and involving deep cutbacks, have finally started to roll out in earnest (Sergeant, 2013). The reduction of safeguards would be bad enough at any time. However, when there is a weak - what some have even denounced as false - economic recovery under way, individuals and communities are placed in great danger as the weakening of safeguards threatens to send them back into trouble (Elliott, 2013).

Enlightenment writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau were amongst those who argued that there were limits to the freedoms that natural liberty could offer to individuals. They argued that what was needed instead was a social contract - an agreed set of laws that could govern a state by protecting the ability of individuals to exercise their rights without infringing upon those of others.

John Stuart Mill called this the harm principle. Mill set out that this limitation of the absolute freedom of people was of great importance. That, without checks, the exercise of unrestrained action on the part of one could override the ability of another to exercise their rights.

In On Liberty, Mill laid out why ensuring the liberty of all individuals is essential:

'The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State, which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.'

The essence of negative liberty, freedom from restrictions, is not enough. People must be free to choose, and to think for themselves, because in that freedom, in those choices, is the path along which people develop into rational and critical thinking individuals. And those skills are essential for innovation, for remaking the world in better forms.

To find that path, a more positive liberty is needed - one where people are enabled. A social contract, with the harm principle built in, that seeks to construct the right surroundings for humans to find and develop the absolute best of themselves. Enlightenment thinking, inherited by the ideology of liberalism developed in the 19th century, described those free institutions as those that left people free to make their own choices and protected them against those things that might prevent them from doing so (Collins, 1971). At times those impediments might even be the structure of the system itself. As Thomas Paine described:

'Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.'

We need to foster the development of systems of government that address the domination of individuals and subversion of their freedom. This means restraining the ability of the strength of one, some, or many, to overmaster the essential right of an individual to decide for themselves, about their own lives. But in doing so we must not forget the weakness of natural liberty and of focussing only on removing restrictions: the suffering, poverty, and exploitation imposed by competition. We must not forget those who need enabling action on the part of others to exercise those same essential rights.

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References:
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+ Mike Sergeant's 'Universal Credit scheme rolls out'; on the BBC; 28 October 2013.

+ Larry Elliott's 'UK economic recovery built on shaky foundations - again'; in The Guardian; 27 October 2013.

+ Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'The Social Contract'; 1762.

+ John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'; 1859.

+ Thomas Paine's 'Agrarian Justice'; 1795.

+ Irene Collins' 'Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe'; The Historical Association; 1971.