Spurred on by listening to and reading Samuel Gregg, I’ve been making my way through Wilhelm Ropke’s A Humane Economy which is really a special book.
The following passage (on p. 69) really caught my attention with regard to our current situation:
Democracy is, in the long run, compatible with freedom only on condition that all, or at least most, voters are agreed that certain supreme norms and principles of public life and economic order must remain outside the sphere of democratic decisions . . . It is this fundamental agreement which imbues the concept of inviolable law as such with an absolute content, and once it can no longer be taken for granted, we are in the presence of mass democracy of a pretotalitarian kind.
Ropke is making a very important point here. We are naturally quite comfortable with saying that certain rights are not really within the ambit of the democratic process. For example, a simple majority cannot take away my right to stand on a soapbox on a street corner and declaim on American politics. The right of free speech has our fundamental agreement, despite the fact that our mood may change from time to time. The right is firmly enshrined. But shouldn’t that same agreement hold with regard to our economic freedom? What good are our so-called civil rights if we enact a system that continues to eat up giant chunks of our economic prerogatives?
The Supreme Court, for example, has made much of how important it is that we each be able to make our own decisions about the mysteries of sex and reproduction. Are the questions of how we earn our living, how we plan for our financial future, how we choose to protect ourselves against health problems, and the ability to start a business without excessive encumbrance from the government not equally massive in their implications?
