Salter: The important connection between freedom and order
“Order is the first need of the commonwealth,” wrote Russell Kirk, the great scholar of Anglo-American conservatism. Without order, “it is not possible for us to live in peace with one another.” A good society has a high degree of order. But it also, libertarians insist, has a high degree of freedom. Is there a tradeoff here? Must we sacrifice freedom to secure order?
Perhaps in dire circumstances, such as a war for national survival, we would face this painful choice. But in surprisingly many cases, freedom and order reinforce each other. One of the most important discoveries of modern social science is that freedom is orderly. Liberty is a necessary component of social harmony.
Hierarchy is the most familiar kind of order. What makes businesses function efficiently? How do militaries carry out precise operations? The answer in both cases is the same: there’s somebody issuing commands. Well-regulated social groups frequently have a regulator.
But not always. In fact, the more expansive forms of order could not exist if we tried to run the country like a barracks. Society-wide order is the unintended result of innumerable free human choices. This is called spontaneous order—in the words of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson, “the product of human action, but not of human design.”
Markets are the classic example of spontaneous order. Every week, thousands of supermarkets across the nation put about as much milk on their shelves as customers want to buy. Shortages and surpluses are rare. Yet nobody calls the supermarket beforehand to reserve a gallon of milk. We show up assuming the milk will be there, and most of the time we’re right. You can thank the market price system, the most sophisticated communications network ever devised by man, for this small miracle and millions like it.
If the price of milk were too high, customers would purchase less than the supermarket wanted to sell. If the price of milk were too low, the supermarket would sell less than customers wanted to buy. Only when the price is just right is there a balance between supply and demand. Decentralized coordination through commercial transactions is how we all get milk, as well as iPhones, Hawaiian vacations, and blockbuster movies. Markets are far too complex to plan from the top-down. Coordination happens spontaneously from the bottom-up.
All well and good, the liberty skeptics reply, but markets can only exist in a society that’s already orderly. Commerce presupposes property rights and the rule of law, forms of order that must be imposed by the government. Without these prerequisites, we couldn’t sustain an advanced division of labor. Freedom still depends on order.
There’s something to this objection. But less than the liberty skeptics think. Historically, commerce and law grew up together. For example, going back to the Middle Ages, international traders used a noncompulsory legal system to resolve their disputes. Called the lex mercatoria, or “law merchant,” its precedents were based on specialist commercial judges’ decisions in voluntary proceedings. Ornery traders who decided to ignore the rulings were not actively punished. But their fellow merchants would ostracize them. The prospect of losing future business, and hence profits, gave everyone an incentive to play nice.
Even today, most international trade is privately governed. This shouldn’t surprise us: its global character means no national court has clear jurisdiction. Yet despite these anarchic conditions, commerce across national boundaries has been orderly for centuries. Even great wars do not completely shut it down. Spontaneous order can work for the “rules of the game,” too.
Libertarians don’t dispute the need for order. We simply deny it extends from the barrel of a gun. David Friedman, a libertarian legal theorist, put it best: “The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.” The ultimate form of disorder is not anarchy, but tyranny.
Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and a community member of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal editorial board. The views in this column are solely his own.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Alexander Salter the important connection between freedom and order
