#BTColumn – What liberty means

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.

by Peter Webster

“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” – Nelson Mandela

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” – George Bernard Shaw

A friend recently sent me the following: “Liberty is responsibility assumed, not just to do your thing, because then everyone else’s liberty will impinge on and reduce the liberty of others. Liberty cannot survive in a degenerate society, far less thrive in such a society. We therefore cannot have self-government without self-control.”

As character degenerates, the Government and its bureaucracy must grow to cope with that societal decay. As Government grows, people begin to equate security with dependence on Government. So, the government begins to give to the people, and the people like it. But they fail to understand that the government cannot give them anything it doesn’t first take away because the Government itself produces little or nothing. As the government begins to take, then “give it back,” the citizenry are regulated, then controlled more and more (with less and less liberty).

In essence, the government should be a watchdog to be fed, not a cow to be milked.

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America understood that. Wisely, they wrote into the Preamble to the US Constitution what their government is actually for: to protect life and property.

Individuals cannot go out and raise an army to protect their land or be vigilantes carrying out street justice. The government is needed for that.

Government is to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. The US constitution did not say to provide the general welfare or sustain it.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. The Republic of the USA should be by a people of character, for a people of character, and only a people of character can keep it.”

The foregoing should apply to all democratically elected Governments. Unfortunately, the average citizen does not have a clue as to how unproductive most Governments’ bureaucracies really are. Bureaucracy as a political theory is mainly a centralized form of management. That such bureaucracies consist of good people makes no difference.

The unproductivity of the Soviet Union’s communist bureaucracy destroyed communism and seriously damaged its socialist variations because that form of Government could not produce and deliver the goods and services needed by its citizenry. That loss was unfortunate, because that form of Government possessed many great ideas and ideals which have since been suppressed if not lost.

At the same time, there is now nothing to counter rampant and rapacious capitalism.

Bureaucratic unproductivity includes that of the US Government in Washington and extends to all the international organisations like the United Nations and its plethora of agencies such as the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children’s Fund which costs a documented and monstrous 65 cents in administration out of every dollar it receives.

Compare this with the Salvation Army’s administration which costs eleven cents out of every dollar or the average private company which is 20 cents out of every dollar or they will not survive for very long.

The more centralized the Government’s bureaucracy, the more layers there are in its management, and the further removed the decision making power is from the average “man in the street”.

The Governments in the world that have achieved the greatest human development index for their people are those that have best balanced their private and public sectors by promoting their private sector and its productivity while keeping in check the creeping expansion of their unproductive public sector and its many layered, costly bureaucracy.

Peter Webster is a retired Portfolio Manager of the Caribbean Development Bank and a former Senior Agricultural Officer in the Ministry of Agriculture.