Old Freedoms vs New Freedoms. One is a set of timeless rights and values of the individual honed over millennia.

The other is an authoritarian management exercise by self-styled experts which fails universally and tragically.

​

A primary tenet of American Democratic Capitalism is one’s freedom to

live and act as they wish within the fair limits of the equal rights of all others.

By extension, the legitimate powers of government only stand to enforce against those acts that are injurious to another.

The law, therefore, is only valid when it does not violate the natural rights and freedoms of the individual, unless in defense of harm to another qualified party. Bureaucrats and sworn officers of the government have no immunity for unwarranted violation of the rights and freedoms of the citizens they represent.

​

'Old Freedoms’

​

There is a natural hierarchy to the Rights and Freedoms enshrined in the Founding Documents and those added by later Amendments to the Constitution beyond the Bill of Rights. Often conflated, rights, liberties and freedoms hold different meanings and import, though “Freedoms” often provides a shorthand for all.

  

• Natural Rights are paramount and inviolate. They reside with the Individual, with or without the involvement or presence of another.  They are bestowed on all humans by Nature’s God in the course and context of human events and are unalienable. They flow from ancient truths that are self-evident – beyond argument by reasonable and just minds. Americans share these rights with all people. Natural Rights occupy the top of the hierarchy relative to all other rights and freedoms, existing in the absence, and despite, government. Consider that Natural Rights adopt us more than we adopt them.

 

• Justice Under the Law ensures the balancing and sharing of Rights and Freedoms equally across the population by fair, impartial adjudication. American justice is designed to provide for the delivery and administration of equality to all its citizens under the proper and true laws common to all, where some or one’s actions or interest may conflict with another. It is key to the American exceptionalism.

 

• Compact Rights are tantamount to negotiated benefits and responsibilities between the body of citizens within a local or State jurisdiction and their duly elected representative government at that level. Liberties are the presence of Compact Rights.

 

• Individual Freedoms enable and enrich the Natural Rights and are the absence of restrictions such as those that might be imposed by a governing body or bureaucracy.  They enable the acts and practices of the people but may be subordinate to a higher right of another. Freedoms exist outside the compact between citizens and their government and require no permission or exaction from a higher authority save those with superior or antecedent rights. The primary freedoms we enjoy as Americans have been won by those patriots that gave that benefit to their fellow citizens:

 

• Speech - One is free to express sincere opinions and beliefs without attack, subject to reasoned counterargument, providing no interference with another’s right to listen.

• Information - True and freely available knowledge, subject to fair right-of-authorship and intellectual property rights.

• Communication - Common channels open to all, subject to carrier’s ownership rights.

• Peaceful Assembly - Ability to gather peacefully, without destruction or violence, subject to private property rights.

• Practice of Religion - All are free to hold spiritual beliefs and religious practice subject to respect for the practice of others.

• Privacy - One’s personal autonomy, information and practices are protected from public scrutiny, subject to limited and compelling interest by the government.

• Fair Commerce - Parties can engage in fair exchange, subject to the balanced and reasonable regulation of government.

• Movement - People are free to travel and move, subject to private property rights and the sovereignty of nations.

​

These freedoms expand and reinforce the effort and desire of the Founders who fought to abolish the Seven Enemies of Freedom that threatened the spirit of America at the dawn of the Republic:

​

• No monarch or dictating body should concentrate and wield power over the population unchecked.

Dictators are a predictable animal. Their power corrupts in lockstep with its increase.

 

• No castes or birth-right privilege to provide special treatment to some over others.

Only when we value rights over privileges can equality before the law be attainable for all.

 

• No ‘leveling’ of wealth to provide the unjust enrichment of unaccomplished individuals with the assets of those that, through fortune or effort, have improved theirs and their family’s lot in life.

American Democratic Capitalism promises equality of opportunity, not equality of result.

​

• No onerous regulations to unnecessarily stifle the fair market or the responsible pursuit of happiness.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others -

Thom.  Jefferson

 

• No unlimited government.

Government, like fire and water, serves to sustain, but all become

exponentially more dangerous as they increase in volume. – Steven Jewett

 

• No restriction on the free flow of Information.

Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light – Geo. Washington

 

• No Federal rights above the Citizenry.

The way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one; but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the National government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police and administration of what concerns the states generally; the Counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each Ward direct the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great National one down thro’ all its subordinates, until it ends in the administration of every man’s farm and affairs by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. – Thom. Jefferson

 

The blood, sweat and tears of the early patriots and those that followed have, over two and a half centuries, built our society into the envy of most others in the world and largely achieved the Vision of the Founders. The safeguards of our rights and freedoms, enshrined in the Founding Documents, have served as a levee against encroachment by the relentless tide of tyrants and collectivists. The enemies of freedom that the First American Revolution sought to defeat, have not been vanquished so much as they were subdued for a time. It is the allure of excessive power and materiality that those enemies always lurk in the shadows, plotting their return.    

​​

​

The insidious infestation of Administrative Rule

​

The U.S. Constitution made no provision for any kind of federal government beyond that elected by the people, save the judiciary appointed by the people’s representatives. For our first hundred years the practice was for the newly elected president to hire his own staff and advisors to execute political priorities, understanding that it would not be a permanent job, ending with the term of the president.

​

But the ethos of everything began to change once technological innovation kicked into overdrive in the period after the Civil War. These times saw the birth of new and exciting advances and inventions in numerous areas: running water and sanitation, weaponry, communication, electricity, architecture, structural steel, steam and internal combustion engines, and eventually even flight and sound recording. There was a growing sense of awe and wonderment throughout the culture in the West of the very idea of progress through engineering, technical skill, and expertise.

   

During this time of advancement and the introduction of more complex systems, it may have seemed reasonable to dispense with what was then decried as the “spoils system” in the Federal civilian workforce, and instead, turn toward a permanent civil service to bring science and skill to matters of government. Certainly the “experts” were needed to regulate the disheveled population and properly channel the golden goose of Capitalism. The new and shiny tools developed by the ingenuity of the American economy, must be steered by the intellectual elite lest they be used for unjust enrichment outside of the beneficent and all-knowing government.

​

Existing from the start of the republic, civil service evolved along with the country, growing exponentially during times of war and other emergencies. After the reported abuses of the post-civil war period, it was reformed in 1883 with the Pendleton Act. Initially covering about 10% of the 132,000 Federal employees, the Act sought to eliminate patronage and political coercion in the ranks of the governmental workers. Sounds reasonable, right?

​

Like most bureaucratic constructs, however, civil service, and the administrative state it populates, grew and transformed into something else entirely. It became the insatiable Beast without a master, nourished and enabled by both arms of the political body, but not properly trained or fenced by either. This ongoing abdication of responsibility by the elected representatives to an unresponsive and unaccountable mass of bureaucrats is a violation of the highest order in a free society.

 

The modern U.S. civil service system differs from the Pendleton Act era in several ways. Gone is the original Civil Service Commission, replaced in 1978 by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and multiple ancillary agencies, now covering nearly 3 million direct Federal workers across over 2,000 Federal departments, agencies, bureaus and commissions. Nobody knows the actual numbers for certain. The blended workforce that now includes contract and grant workers adds double the number of direct Federal civilian employees, now at a combined total of 11+ million and growing. At the time of the Pendleton Act, Federal civilian workers numbered one for every 380 Americans. Current figures now show one Federal worker for every 30 residents (excludes sworn military, postal and appointed personnel).  Most federal employees are no longer hired through competitive examinations. Civil servants now have the right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining. Stronger protections are in place against dismissal and political interference. Increased focus on diversity and equal opportunity in hiring prevails. This bureaucratic animal has grown its own protective shell.

​

This Beast must be fed. The regulatory machine generates both direct and indirect costs to the country. The regulatory compliance burden imposed on the economy has averaged an added $220 Million per year over the past three presidential administrations, accelerating rapidly in recent years. Beyond voluminous paperwork requirements and exactions, there are the added opportunity costs of unnecessary regulation that serve to handicap and stifle the advances and energy that fuels American Democratic Capitalism.

 Worse, the Enemies of Freedom that had once haunted the American conscience leading to armed revolt, are reemergent. Unlimited government and onerous regulations were known by the Founders to be wholly incompatible with the ideals of a free and fair society. The Beast is jealous and openly hostile to Individual Freedoms it sees as an existential threat, seeking to severely restrict or even extinguish them.

​

​

The harbinger of the bloated U.S. administrative state is Woodrow Wilson, elected President in 1912. His political opposition was split, allowing him to win the election that year without a majority of popular votes. Though mostly unpopular, Wilson took power and embarked on a mission to install a radically new ideology, using the misdirection of social justice and the cover of authoritative science. Wilson’s 1913 book “New Freedom” is utterly disdainful of the past, particularly as regards the old freedoms.

​

“We used to say that the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with,” he wrote, “except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government was the government that did as little governing as possible.

That was the idea that obtained in Jefferson’s time. But we are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions under which we may live,

the conditions which will make it tolerable for us to live.”

​

What is New Freedom? It is a management exercise:

​

 “Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.”

 

And who would do the adjusting? The experts, of course, with credentials, high learning, access to resources, and lots of executive power. This was the essence of Wilson’s administration. Very quickly, we saw the tariff replaced by the income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve, which was supposed to control business cycles and tamp down inflation and bank failures. Also, he helped bring about the 17th Amendment, which converted the U. S. Senate from an appointed body representing the whole of the states to yet another popularly elected version of the House of Representatives.

​

This cluster of changes upended the constitutional constraints on government put in place by the Founders. To add insult to injury, his administration saw the adoption of Prohibition through the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. That insult to the population was later repealed but the others live on.

​

Over the next century, America would become the victim of its own success as the bureaucratic beast employed to tame and harness the capitalist machine and its new tools of innovation would grow to its illogical extreme. The IRS is expanding at a frightening pace to meet the challenge of feeding the Beast. Its rules of engagement often trample on the Constitutional protections of its targets with little redress.  The Federal Reserve system has extinguished the intrinsic-value currency in favor of a fiat currency and corrosive digital credit. Paper and digital money are being created to fuel higher governmental spending. The national debt is barreling towards $40 Trillion by the nation’s 250th Anniversary in 2026, inviting the collapse of the financial system and the hobbling of entitlements and Defense. History predicts that such an emergency will birth a governmental solution to the crisis that will dwarf the pernicious remedies of old. Welcome to the warm and welcome lie of Central Bank Digital Currency. Perhaps the ultimate tool of an authoritarian state, combining easy access to money with complete bureaucratic surveillance and control. The modern version of the Intolerable Acts by the British monarchy that accelerated and energized the First American Revolution.

​

It is instructive to look to the events in Russia that overlap the introduction period of the ‘New Freedom’. The mass movement there against the regime of Czar Nicholas II, leading to the Russian Revolution, was generally thought by western liberals as a step toward modernizing the country. Respectable intellectuals who would never call themselves communists regarded Vladimir Lenin as an enlightened figure, someone who would bring the glories of modern science and technology to a country long dominated by peasants and backward authoritarian rule. They had little care or understanding of the brutality going on behind the scenes and simply could not imagine the horrors that awaited in the period of Soviet Communism.

​

Lenin played to his audience, there and in the West. In his first address after taking power, he addressed the great question of what communism in Russia would mean. He defaulted to a cliché (“dictatorship by the proletariat”) and technocracy: He announced the grand plan for the electrification of Russia. He pitched communism as nothing other than a big infrastructure program. In this, his views were not unlike the fashionable progressivism in the West, then and now.

​

And what was the core of progressivism? Once you get past the specific policies and get to the crux, it comes down to a passionate belief that the right experts, with enough resources and power, could manage the social and economic order better than the seeming anarchy of freedom and democracy. This belief, which amounted to a kind of religious faith, was the animating principle of the age, a core doctrine that enticed an entire generation.

​

The allegory provided by George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ offers a cautionary tale for those who look to understand the Russian Revolution and the subsequent rise of totalitarianism under Joseph Stalin following the Russian Civil War. The story follows a group of farm animals who overthrow their human farmer, Mr. Jones, with the hope of establishing a society based on equality and shared prosperity. However, as the pigs seize control, the farm's ideals are corrupted, leading to a regime that mirrors the oppression they initially sought to escape. The parallels between this escape from one perceived problem or injustice into the tyranny of another can illustrate the path from messy democracy to management of the national order by the administrative state.

   

The next step in the advance of ‘New Freedom’ was to enter the Great War that had emerged in Europe the year after Wilson’s ascent to power, bringing this “new” expertise to world affairs. Following the war, Wilson exercised the main controlling power to impose the new map of Europe. That simply could not last because of the deep ignorance of European history that was behind the new border lines and country names. When reality collides with dogmatic ideology, chaos and suffering ensue.

​

The failure became evident as the conditions for a repeat of world war gathered following the Great Depression. Each of these disasters that unfolded following the imposition of the “new freedom” only ended in expanding and entrenching the role of expertise backed by power and resources.

​

Liberalism had converted itself into progressivism, which ended up being nothing other than rule by administrative agencies. This failed template of turning a small problem into an even greater debacle by imposing an administrative solution would characterize the efforts of the Left well into the 21st Century.

​

Wilson's ‘New Freedom’ represented a progressive vision that sought to use expanded government power to create economic opportunities and social justice, moving away from the more individualistic and limited-government approach of the past. Its’ stated aim was to adapt American governance to the challenges of the industrial age while preserving democratic values. Tepid success in the first case. Tragic failure in the second.

​

​

Summary –

​

The fundamental contrast between ‘Old Freedom’ and ‘New Freedom’:

​

Old Freedom:

• Emphasized laissez-faire capitalism and limited government intervention in the economy.

• Limited federal government social involvement allowing states' rights and individualism.

• Decentralized banking system with the currency based on the gold standard.

• Based on natural rights and social compact theory, emphasizing individual liberty.

​

New Freedom:

• Calls for government regulation to attempt economic fairness and social justice.

• Expanded federal government role in the economy and control of business entities.

• Created the Federal Reserve system to provide more flexible currency and accessible credit.

• Views liberty as collective under majority rule, evolving with historical circumstances.

 

Wilson’s ‘New Freedom’ platform created the contrast with Old Freedoms in some ostensibly well-intentioned but unfortunate ways. Coming ultimately at the expense and erosion of fundamental freedoms. These reforms sought to create a more competitive economy, reduce the power of large corporations, and provide greater economic opportunities for small businesses and individuals. The vehicle of this movement would be the rapid expansion of the cauldron that is the Federal government.

​

Looking back at many of the founding documents of liberty and freedom, one finds nothing in them about how credentialed, permanent, resourceful, and powerful experts will run our societies for us. That ethos of the elite is not a “new freedom”; it is a reversion to the old world of despotism and feudalism except under the cover of science and social justice. The information age and new communication tools have exposed the game of the progressives, of not just one administrative empire but all of them at once. The next rampart against the onslaught of the progressive evolution is the rejection of Globalism, the metastasized promotion of the progressive agenda around the world. Care should be taken to keep honest and true news and information platforms free to provide unbiased flow of knowledge and encourage reasoned discourse. This is the essential issue of the day.

​

Liberalism gradually came to mean something other than what it was, and we are all paying the price for this now. Woodrow Wilson wrote with confidence that he would usher in a “new freedom,” but his ideology, widely shared among his class then and now, leads civilization into a morass of failure with far less freedom than was enjoyed before this experiment began.

​

​