The American Integration of Integrity, Independence, and Happiness
Every three months, investment management firms publish their quarterly Economic Outlook. The reports begin with a summary of what just happened, and are followed by detailed charts. They all predict continued short-term stock market volatility, steady interest rate policy, and moderate long-term economic growth.
Don’t forget the universal disclaimer: ‘we are cautiously optimistic.’ For investors making decisions about their futures and happiness, this passes for an advice model that is easy to understand and reliable for no one. Like celebrating Mass in Latin, these reports are loyal to government policymakers and loaded with complexity.
The common wisdom is the 19th century’s Age of Invention, the one fueled by the moral foundations of the gold standard, was just too darned successful for humanity, so government needed a bigger piece of the action.
Because it’s human nature to dwell on the recent past, economic forecasts are mostly backward looking, and the good ones get that part right. For much needed contrast, in Chapter 7 of America’s Revolutionary Mind, author Brad Thompson gives readers a forward-looking orientation, from an 18th century perspective, on the astounding economic, social, and artistic achievements of the 19th century,
The English notion of rights was inherently conservative and backward-looking. The Provincials new understanding, as anchored in nature, was inherently revolutionary and forward-looking. It provided the Americans with a moral standard by which to organize their society.
One of the leading Provincials was John Adams, who claimed, “Liberty is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent.” The power of this statement lies in its dependence on reason. In other words, independence and integrity “implies thought and choice and power.” Thompson summarizes Reverend Levi Hart’s and John Adams’ essential message as,
Free will must be consciously activated and self-directed. Given that man is a rational and volitional being, to deny him the freedom to think, choose, and act is to deny him his nature and his means of survival. The “is” of liberty implies the “ought” of liberty.
Levi Hart continues, “civil liberty does not consist in freedom from all law and government, but in a freedom from unjust law and tyrannical government.” Like the “is” of freedom naturally includes the “ought” of responsibility, the boundaries that protect individuals from each other include boundaries that define “good government.”
However, good government is not the end, but the beginning, as Reverend John Tucker explained to his Massachusetts government in 1771, and summarized by Thompson as,
Liberty corrupted by the spirit of faction and discontent leads first to anarchy and then to tyranny. By contrast, liberty rightly understood and rightly institutionalized is the animating soul of a free state.”
The spectacle of America in 2020–21 is our case study for faction, discontent, anarchy, and then tyranny. In fact, years before the imperial crisis in Boston, a writer “offering some general Thoughts Upon Liberty” wrote about today’s emotionalism, “It is no great Privilege to be free from external Violence if the Dictates of the Mind are controlled by a force within, which exerts itself above Reason.”
Thompson explains why reason matters most, using Dan Foster’s A Short Essay on Civil Government, on an individual’s right to his own property,
‘An equal right among all mankind cannot be accounted any right at all.’ Whig revolutionaries viewed the right to property as the linchpin connecting life and liberty on one hand and the pursuit of happiness on the other.
Fortunately for us, the students, scholars, practioners, and guardians of the moral foundations of personal liberty - America’s revolutionaries, were able to assimilate many great minds into a coherent framework for government.
In Common Sense, Thomas Paine quoted Italian writer Giancito Dragonetti, who in a 1766 essay, Virtues and Reward, told readers ‘those men would deserve gratitude of ages who should discover the greatest sum of individual happiness, with the least national expense.’
As Thompson explains, the consequence of the pursuit of happiness is “to break up the barriers to property ownership and wealth creation.” America’s genius was the erection of the barriers that protect individual rights that also removed the barriers to individual happiness.
Yet, independence is also fuel for today’s pandemic of self-righteous indignation over the inequalities of ability and tenacity among people. Even more profoundly, in 1792, Vermont’s Nathaniel Chapman anticipated the rise of 20th century totalitarianism,
If we make equality of property necessary in a society, we must employ force against both the industrious and the indolent. On the one hand, the industrious must be restrained , the indolent must be forcibly stimulated.
In Federalist №10, to protect natural law rooted in the laws of nature, “Madison suggested that the ‘first object of government’ is to protect the ‘diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate.’ In Madison’s view, government in a free society recognizes and protects unequal property as an act of justice.”
Thompson continues, “Paine, Adams, and Jefferson all suggested that there was a science of happiness, which was connected to both the science of government and the science of freedom.” However, the science-deniers of emotionalism are a resilient lot. Despite the crushing defeat of national socialism in 1945, and the Soviet Great Terror in 1989, the communists have rebranded themselves as progressives, and rationalize power under the guise of ‘economic equality.’
The difference is that the progressive’s ‘indolent’ will not be ‘forcibly stimulated.’ Quite the opposite, indolence will be given status, and their elites will be worshipped for their mediocrity, such as during election season and news broadcasts. In contrast, Thompson relates an essentially American founding principle from Thomas Jefferson,
The man of constant virtue most often achieves happiness. Virtue’s path to happiness is, however, always full of obstacles and challenges. ‘Though the knot which you thought a Gordian one, will untie itself before you.’ There is no self-interest in lying, cheating, and stealing.
Here, Jefferson makes a critical distinction. True selfishness, aka rational self-interest, is rooted in integrity, and essential for the pursuit of one’s happiness.
For investors making decisions about their own futures and happiness, use your intellectual agency to control what you can, not faith in the indolence of big bank forecasters and their funny money. As long as American law protects property rights better than any other country, its the best place to be invested.
