{"id":189,"date":"2011-08-10T21:31:09","date_gmt":"2011-08-11T01:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=189"},"modified":"2011-08-10T21:31:09","modified_gmt":"2011-08-11T01:31:09","slug":"black-and-libertarian-a-look-at-walter-e-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/08\/black-and-libertarian-a-look-at-walter-e-williams.html","title":{"rendered":"Black and Libertarian: A Look at Walter E. Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walter E. Williams is associated with that paradoxical phenomenon typically known as \u201cblack conservatism.\u201d\u00a0 However, while Williams is a fierce opponent of the leftist political ideology that has overcome the majority of his fellow black Americans\u2014he is<\/em> a rightist\u2014it is not altogether accurate to describe him as a conservative.<\/p>\n

Unlike such black thinkers as George Schuyler and Thomas Sowell, as far as his ethical and political philosophical principles are concerned, the most appropriate label to ascribe to Williams is that of libertarian.\u00a0 <\/em>What this means is that he is a liberal in the classical sense of that term.<\/p>\n

The concept of \u201ctradition\u201d or \u201chabit\u201d or \u201ccustom\u201d has historically figured prominently, even centrally, in conservative thought.\u00a0 With respect to libertarianism or classical liberalism, in contrast, matters are otherwise.\u00a0 There need not be an adversarial relationship between libertarianism and tradition, it is true, but it is abstract principles, <\/em>principles whose jurisdiction encompasses all<\/em> human beings, irrespective of their culture or time, for which the libertarian tends to reserve a place of preeminence.<\/p>\n

If Edmund Burke can be said to be \u201cthe patron saint\u201d of conservatism, John Locke can claim this distinction vis-\u00e0-vis libertarianism.\u00a0 In Do the Right Thing, <\/em>a collection of his essays, Williams dispels any confusion as to which of these two philosophers has won over his sympathies.\u00a0 It is worth quoting him here at length.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the root of my values system is the principle of natural law as expounded by philosophers like John Locke and William Blackstone and adopted by early American notables such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine, among others, and captured simply, elegantly, and compellingly in our Declaration of Independence in the phrase \u2018We 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Williams correctly observes, Locke\u2019s vision exerted no small measure of influence over many ofAmerica\u2019s founders, and the Declaration of Independence specifically.\u00a0 Yet \u201cthe right\u201d to \u201cthe Pursuit of Happiness\u201d was a modification of Locke\u2019s \u201cright to property\u201d\u2014a fact of which Williams is well aware and which he enthusiastically embraces.<\/p>\n

Speaking as a true Lockean, he writes: \u201cThe first principle of natural law holds that each person owns himself.\u201d\u00a0 It is from this \u201cfirst principle\u201d that the individual right to property flows.\u00a0 Recalling Locke, Williams refers to \u201cthe state of nature,\u201d a pre-political situation that functioned as a sort of theoretical first step in the deliberations of many a thinker in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.\u00a0 In \u201cthe state of nature,\u201d he says, \u201call people are free and equal,\u201d yes, but they are \u201cinsecure<\/em>\u201d (emphasis mine).\u00a0 They are insecure because they know \u201cthat other people may not respect\u201d their \u201cself-ownership rights and, through intimidation, threats, and coercion, wrongly confiscate\u201d their \u201cproperty and violate\u201d their \u201cpersons.\u201d\u00a0 In order to abate this precarious condition, the inhabitants of the state of nature agree to \u201cform governments\u201d to which they will grant \u201ccertain limited powers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The principle of self-ownership is the principle that all <\/em>people own themselves.\u00a0 This in turn implies that \u201cwe all have the right to protect ourselves, family, and property from encroachment by others.\u201d\u00a0 To the governments that we create \u201cwe grant these rights\u2026in exchange for the guarantee that the state will perform these security functions.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, it is only <\/em>these rights that we grant.\u00a0 \u201cWe give up only the rights necessary for government to perform its only function\u2014protecting our security.\u201d\u00a0 Most Americans, black, white, and other, have forgotten this.\u00a0 Williams puts the matter even more bluntly, blasting Americans with having jettisoned \u201cthose basic ideals and principles on which our prosperous nation was built\u201d for the sake of \u201cother ideals, such as equality of income, sex and race balance, orderly markets, consumer protection, energy conservation, and environmentalism, just to name a few [.]\u201d\u00a0 The problem is that in order to realize these goals, our government that is supposed to be grounded in the consent of agents who own themselves necessarily transforms itself into something vastly more ambitious in scope, a tyrannical leviathan that has no option but to \u201cconfiscate\u2026through intimidation, threats, and coercion\u201d the legitimately acquired resources of its citizens.<\/p>\n

Williams reasons that if redistributive measures of the sort that most Americans have come to expect from their government are morally impermissible when employed by individual agents, they cannot be made right just because they have been enacted into law.\u00a0 \u201cAmericans must ask whether an act clearly immoral and criminal when done privately becomes moral when done collectively and given legal sanction.\u201d\u00a0 The answer to this question, Williams asserts, is a no-brainer.\u00a0 \u201cThe unambiguous answer will be that legality is a poor guide to morality.\u201d\u00a0 History supplies no small number of examples to illustrate this contention.\u00a0 \u201cAfter all, slavery and apartheid were legal, as were the Nazi persecution of Jews and the Stalinist and Maoist purges.\u201d\u00a0 Still, \u201cthe fact of being legal did not make them moral acts.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Williams echoes the sentiments of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and many other Christian thinkers who declared that an unjust law was no law at all.\u00a0 \u201cImmoral laws,\u201d he states, \u201caren\u2019t worthy of obedience.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

If anything discloses the libertarian character of Williams\u2019 thought it is his position on the criminalization of \u201cvices.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cFor the government to declare a vice a crime is to violate those natural law guarantees of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, which are enunciated in our Declaration of Independence.\u201d\u00a0 Williams\u2019 argument here is straightforward: Since no individual has the right to punish others for their vices, and since the only rights that government possesses are those that it derives from its citizens, government doesn\u2019t have the right to punish individuals for their vices.\u00a0 Thus, prostitution, drug usage, and discrimination in the private sector are among those activities that theUnited Statesgovernment illegitimately proscribes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Walter E. Williams is to be commended for the courage that he has exhibited in his lifelong campaign to combat the leftist illusions that have seized the minds of millions of his fellow Americans, white and black.\u00a0 But it is important to recognize that while the substance<\/em> of his positions on social issues is virtually identical to that of, say, Thomas Sowell, Williams arrives at many of his conclusions by means of premises reflective of his allegiance to, not conservatism, but libertarianism or classical liberalism.<\/p>\n

Jack Kerwick,\u00a0Ph.D.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walter E. Williams is associated with that paradoxical phenomenon typically known as \u201cblack conservatism.\u201d\u00a0 However, while Williams is a fierce opponent of the leftist political ideology that has overcome the majority of his fellow black Americans\u2014he is a rightist\u2014it is not altogether accurate to describe him as a conservative. Unlike such black thinkers as George…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBlack and Libertarian: A Look at Walter E. 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