How We’ve Traded Freedom for ‘Equality’

“Our Enemy, the State” was the title of libertarian Albert Jay Nock’s classic that was once widely read by conservatives.

In the 1950s, there were men’s clubs and women’s clubs, WASP country clubs and law firms and Jewish country clubs and law firms. Black folks had their own restaurants, barber shops, movie theaters and churches.

We were a free country then. Did people use their freedom to discriminate? Undeniably. Did race discrimination need correcting? Undeniably. But in enlisting state power to end discrimination, we harnessed Leviathan. The left is now using the monster to reshape America. Thus is freedom, the cause of the American Revolution, supplanted by equality, the cause of the French Revolution.

The U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom by restricting the power of government, the source of tyranny: “Congress shall make no law …” Civil rights laws restrict freedom. Men are told they will face disgrace, fines, ruin if they act on their beliefs in deciding whom they will hire, whom they will serve in a bar or restaurant, or to whom they wish to sell or rent their homes.

If a man is free to hold beliefs we detest, and speak and write in ways we detest, why is he not free to live according to his beliefs – if we believe in freedom? Hopefully, we are becoming a better society, for we are surely becoming a less free society. Patrick J. Buchanan