be sure, economic theory has not ignored the fact that it is the government that gives people the practical power to avoid constraint on the part of other people on the market. Robbins aptly emphasized this in his essay, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Political Economy (London, 1952), noting that “we would get an entirely distorted view” of the significance of the doctrine of what Marshall called the system of economic freedom “unless we see it in combination with the theory of law and the functions of government which its authors (from Smith onwards) also propounded.” As Robbins says, “the idea of freedom in vacuo was entirely alien to their conceptions.” But Professor Robbins also pointed out, in Economic Planning and International Order (London, 1937), that the classical economists paid too little attention to the fact that international trade could not emerge as a simple consequence of the theorem of comparative costs, but required some kind of international legal organization to ward off the enemies of international free trade, who, to a certain extent, are comparable to such enemies of the free market within a nation as robbers or thieves.
On the other hand, the very fact that constraint is in some way inevitably linked with “freedom” in all political societies gave rise to or at least favored the idea that “increasing freedom” could be somehow compatible in those societies with “increasing constraint.” This idea was, in its turn, connected with a confusion about the meaning of the terms “constraint” and “freedom” which is chiefly due, not to propaganda, but to the uncertainties that can arise about the meaning of these words in ordinary usage.
Professor Mises says that “freedom” is a human concept. We must add that it is human in so far as some preference on the part of men is always implied when we use that term in ordinary language. But this does not mean that a man can be said to be “free” only from the power of other men. A man also can be said to be “free” from a disease, from fear, from want, as these phrases are employed in ordinary language. This has encouraged some people to consider “freedom from other men's constraint” on a par with, say, “freedom from want,” without observing that the latter kind of “freedom” may have nothing to do with the former. An explorer may be starving in the desert where he wanted to go alone without being constrained by anybody else. Now, he is not “free from hunger,” but he is, as he was before, completely “free from coercion or constraint” on the part of other people.
Several thinkers, ancient as well as modern, have tried to connect the fact that some people are not free from hunger or from disease with the fact that other people in the same society are not free from the constraint of their fellow men. Of course, the connection is obvious when someone is in bondage to other people who treat him badly and let him die, for instance, through starvation. But the connection is not at all obvious when people are not in bondage to others. However, some thinkers have erroneously believed that whenever someone lacks something he needs or simply desires, he has been unjustly “deprived” of that very thing by the people who do have it.
History is so full of examples of violence, robbery, invasions of land, and so on, that many thinkers have felt justified in saying that the origin of private property is simply violence and that it is therefore to be regarded as irremediably illicit at present as well as in primitive times. The Stoics, for example, imagined that all the land on earth was originally common to all men. They called this legendary condition communis possessio originaria. Certain Fathers of the Christian Church, particularly in the Latin countries, echoed this assumption. Thus, Saint Ambrose, the famous archbishop of Milan, could write in the fifth century C. E. that while Nature had provided for things to be common to all, private property rights were due to usurpation. He quotes the Stoics, who maintained, as he says, that everything in the earth and in the seas was created for the common use of all human beings. A disciple of Saint Ambrose, called the Ambrosiaster, says that God gave everything to men in common and that this applies to the sun and to the rain as well as to the land. The same thing is said by Saint Zeno of Verona (for whom one of the most magnificent churches in the world is named) in reference to the men of very ancient times: “They had no private property, but they had everything in common, like sun, days, nights, rain, life, and death, as all those things had been given to them in equal degree, without any exception, by the divine providence.” And the same saint adds, obviously accepting the idea that private property is the result of constraint and of tyranny: “The private owner is without doubt similar to a tyrant, having himself alone the total control of things that would be useful to several other people.” Almost the same idea can be found some centuries later in the works of certain canonists. For instance, the author of the first systemization of the rules of the Church, the so-called decretum Gratiani, says: “Whoever is determined to keep more things than he needs is a robber.”
Modern socialists, including Marx, have simply produced a revised version of this same idea. For instance, Marx distinguishes various stages in the history of mankind: a first stage, in which the production relations had been those of cooperation, and a second stage, in which some people acquired for the first time control of the factors of production, thereby placing a minority in the position of being fed by the majority. The old Archbishop of Milan would say in less complicated and more effective language: “Nature is responsible for a law of things in common; usurpation is responsible for private law.”
Of course, we can ask how it is possible to speak of “things common to all.” Who decreed that all things are “common” to all men, and why” The usual reply given by the Stoics and their disciples, the Christian Fathers in the first centuries after Christ, was that, just as the moon and the sun and the rain are common to all men, so there is no reason to maintain that other things, such as land, are not also common. These advocates of communism did not bother to make a semantic analysis of the word “common.” Otherwise they would have discovered that land cannot be “common” to all men in the same sense in which the sun and the moon are and that it is therefore not altogether the same thing to let people cultivate land in common as it is to let them use moonlight or sunlight or fresh air when they go out for a walk. Modern economists explain the difference by pointing out that there is no scarcity of moonlight, while there is a scarcity of land. Notwithstanding the truistic nature of this statement, a purported analogy between scarce things like arable land and abundant things like moonlight has always been a good reason in the eyes of many people for maintaining that the “have-nots” have been “constrained” by the “haves,” that the latter have illicitly deprived the former of certain things originally “common” to all men. The semantic confusion in the use of the word “common” introduced by the Stoics and the early Christian Fathers in this connection has been retained by modern socialists of all kinds and lies, I believe, at the origin of the tendency, manifested particularly in recent times, to use the word “freedom” in an equivocal sense that relates “freedom from want” with “freedom from other people's constraint.”
This confusion is connected, in its turn, with another. When a grocer or a doctor or a lawyer waits for customers or clients, each of them may feel dependent on the latter for his living. This is quite true. But if no customer or client makes his appearance, it would be an abuse of language to assert that the customers or clients who do not appear constrain the grocer or the doctor or the lawyer to die by starvation. In fact, no one committed any constraint against him for the simple reason that no one put in an appearance. To put the matter in the simplest possible terms, the customers or clients did not exist at all. If we now suppose that a client puts in an appearance and offers a very small fee to the doctor or the lawyer, it is not possible to say that this particular client is “constraining” the doctor or the lawyer to accept his fee. We may despise a man who can swim and does not save a fellow man whom he sees drowning in a river, but it would be an abuse of language to assert that in failing to save the drowning man he was “constraining” the latter to drown. In this connection I must agree with a famous German jurist of the nineteenth century, Rudolph Jhering, who was indignant at the unfairness of the argument advanced by Portia against Shylock and on behalf of Antonio in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. We may despise Shylock, but we cannot say that he “constrained” Antonio or anybody else to make an agreement with him—an agreement that implied, under
