A
government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain
rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.
Do
men need such an institution—and why?
Since
man’s mind is his basic tool of survival, his means of gaining knowledge to
guide his actions-the basic condition he requires is the freedom to think and
to act according to his rational judgment. This does not mean that a man must
live alone and that a desert island is the environment best suited to his
needs. Men can derive enormous benefits from dealing with one another. A social
environment is most conducive to their successful survival—but only on
certain conditions.
“The
two great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade.
Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge
from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is
greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man
gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The
second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his
effort to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in
other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to
achieve a greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than
they could achieve if each had to produce everything he needs, on a desert
island or on a self-sustaining farm.
“But
these very benefits indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of
value to one another and in what kind of society: only rational, productive,
independent men in a rational, productive, free society.” (“The Objectivist
Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness)
A
society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him,
or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his
own rational judgment-a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and
the requirements of man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a
mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all
the values of human coexistence, has no possible justification and represents,
not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to man’s survival. Life on a
desert island is safer than and incomparably preferable to existence in Soviet Russia
or Nazi Germany.
If
men are to live together in a peaceful, productive, rational society and deal
with one another to mutual benefit, they must accept the basic social principle
without which no moral or civilized society is possible: the principle of
individual rights.
To
recognize individual rights means to recognize and accept the conditions
required by man’s nature for his proper survival.
Man’s
rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means
of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him,
or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act
against his own rational judgment.
The
precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from
social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal
with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion,
persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.
The
necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a
civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those
who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical
force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.
If
some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be
left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such
a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing
evil, it would encourage and reward it.
If
a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every
citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any
strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who
would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the
degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by
brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistoric savages.
The
use of physical force—even its retaliatory use—cannot be left at the discretion
of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live
under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his
neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad,
whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by
a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice-the use of
force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.
Visualize,
for example, what would happen if a man missed his wallet, concluded that he
had been robbed, broke into every house in the neighborhood to search it, and
shot the first man who gave him a dirty look, taking the look to be a proof of
guilt.
The
retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to
establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it,
as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement
procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a
lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of
individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an
endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.
If
physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an
institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective
code of rules.
This is the task of a
government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral
justification and the reason why men do need a government.
A
government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under
objective control—i.e.,
under objectively defined laws.
The
fundamental difference between private action and governmental action—a
difference thoroughly ignored and evaded today—lies in the fact that a
government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. It has to hold
such a monopoly, since it is the agent of restraining and combating the use of
force; and for that very same reason, its actions have to be rigidly defined,
delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim or caprice should be permitted in
its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only
motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.
Under
a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action
he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a
government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private
individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a
government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.
This
is the means of subordinating “might” to “right.” This is the American concept
of “a government of laws and not of men.”
The
nature of the laws proper to a free society and the source of its government’s
authority are both to be derived from the nature and purpose of a proper
government. The basic principle of both is indicated in the Declaration of
Independence: “to secure these [individual] rights, governments are instituted
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”
Since
the protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government,
it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on
individual rights and aimed at their protection. All laws must be objective
(and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking
an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime
and what penalty they will incur if they commit it.
The
source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.” This
means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent
of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the
rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.
There
is only one basic principle to which an individual must consent if he wishes to
live in a free, civilized society: the principle of renouncing the use of
physical force and delegating to the government his right of physical
self-defense, for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined
enforcement. Or, to put it another way, he must accept the separation of
force and whim (any whim, including his own).
Now
what happens in case of a disagreement between two men about an undertaking in
which both are involved?
In
a free society, men are not forced to deal with one another. They do so only by
voluntary agreement and, when a time element is involved, by contract.
If a contract is broken by the arbitrary decision of one man, it may cause a
disastrous financial injury to the other—and the victim would have no recourse
except to seize the offender’s property as compensation. But here again, the
use of force cannot be left to the decision of private individuals. And this
leads to one of the most important and most complex functions of the
government: to the function of an arbiter who settles disputes among men according
to objective laws.
Criminals
are a small minority in any semicivilized society. But the protection and
enforcement of contracts through courts of civil law is the most crucial need
of a peaceful society; without such protection, no civilization could be
developed or maintained.
Man
cannot survive, as animals do, by acting on the range of the immediate moment.
Man has to project his goals and achieve them across a span of time; he has to
calculate his actions and plan his life long-range. The better a man’s mind and
the greater his knowledge, the longer the range of his planning. The higher or
more complex a civilization, the longer the range of activity it requires—and,
therefore, the longer the range of contractual agreements among men, and the
more urgent their need of protection for the security of such agreements.
Even
a primitive barter society could not function if a man agreed to trade a bushel
of potatoes for a basket of eggs and, having received the eggs, refused to
deliver the potatoes. Visualize what this sort of whim-directed action would
mean in an industrial society where men deliver a billion dollars’ worth of
goods on credit, or contract to build multimillion-dollar structures, or sign
ninety-nine-year leases.
A
unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it
consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or
services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by
force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them
without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of
force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner’s consent,
under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an
indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in
exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.
Some
of these actions are obviously criminal. Others, such as a unilateral breach of
contract, may not be criminally motivated, but may be caused by
irresponsibility and irrationality. Still others may be complex issues with
some claim to justice on both sides. But whatever the case may be, all such
issues have to be made subject to objectively defined laws and have to be resolved
by an impartial arbiter, administering the laws, i.e., by a judge (and a
jury, when appropriate).
Observe
the basic principle governing justice in all these cases: it is the principle
that no man may obtain any values from others without the owners’ consent—and,
as a corollary, that a man’s rights may not be left at the mercy of the
unilateral decision, the arbitrary choice, the irrationality, the whim
of another man.
Such,
in essence, is the proper purpose of a government: to make social existence possible
to men, by protecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause
to one another.
The
proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them
involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the
police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect
men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men
according to objective laws.
These
three categories involve many corollary and derivative issues—and their implementation
in practice, in the form of specific legislation, is enormously complex. It
belongs to the field of a special science: the philosophy of law. Many errors
and many disagreements are possible in the field of implementation, but what is
essential here is the principle to be implemented: the principle that the
purpose of law and of government is the protection of individual rights.
Today,
this principle is forgotten, ignored and evaded. The result is the present
state of the world, with mankind’s retrogression to the lawlessness of
absolutist tyranny, to the primitive savagery of rule by brute force.
In
unthinking protest against this trend, some people are raising the question of
whether government as such is evil by nature and whether anarchy is the ideal
social system. Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating
abstraction: for all the reasons discussed above, a society without an
organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along
and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the
possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a
society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not
function in a state of anarchy: it is the need of objective laws and of
an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the
establishment of a government.
A
recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger
advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called “competing governments.”
Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists—who see no difference
between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between
force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business—the
proponents of “competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and
declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be
applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they
declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same
geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with
every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.
Remember
that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer.
Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.
One
cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is obviously devoid
of any understanding of the terms “competition” and “government.” Nor can one
call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or
reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or
approximately. One illustration will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a
customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a
customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr.
Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that
they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize
the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.
The
evolution of the concept of “government” has had a long, tortuous history. Some
glimmer of the government’s proper function seems to have existed in every
organized society, manifesting itself in such phenomena as the recognition of
some implicit (if often nonexistent) difference between a government and a
robber gang—the aura of respect and of moral authority granted to the
government as the guardian of “law and order”-the fact that even the most evil
types of government found it necessary to maintain some semblance of order and
some pretense at justice, if only by routine and tradition, and to claim some
sort of moral justification for their power, of a mystical or social nature.
Just as the absolute monarchs of France had to invoke “The Divine Right of
Kings,” so the modern dictators of Soviet Russia have to spend fortunes on
propaganda to justify their rule in the eyes of their enslaved subjects.
In
mankind’s history, the understanding of the government’s proper function is a
very recent achievement: it is only two hundred years old and it dates from the
Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Not only did they identify the
nature and the needs of a free society, but they devised the means to translate
it into practice. A free society—like any other human product—cannot be
achieved by random means, by mere wishing or by the leaders’ “good intentions.”
A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is
required to make a society free and to keep it free-a system that does
not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given
official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the
development of tyranny.
The
American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And
although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for
the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a
constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the
government.
Today,
when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated
too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on
private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private
individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for
government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the
government.
Now
consider the extent of the moral and political inversion in today’s prevalent
view of government. Instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the
government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding
freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from
the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force
and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the
instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is
creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of
nonobjective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of
random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the
government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim—so that we are
fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the
government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act
only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human
history, the stage of rule by brute force.
It
has often been remarked that in spite of its material progress, mankind has not
achieved any comparable degree of moral progress. That remark is usually
followed by some pessimistic conclusion about human nature. It is true that the
moral state of mankind is disgracefully low. But if one considers the monstrous
moral inversions of the governments (made possible by the altruist-collectivist
morality) under which mankind has had to live through most of its history, one
begins to wonder how men have managed to preserve even a semblance of
civilization, and what indestructible vestige of self-esteem has kept them
walking upright on two feet.
One
also begins to see more clearly the nature of the political principles that
have to be accepted and advocated, as part of the battle for man’s intellectual
Renaissance.
(December
1963)
“The
Nature of Government,” from The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand.
Copyright (c) 1961, 1964, by Ayn Rand. used by permission of Dutton Signet, a
division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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