NO. 1(1996)

Professor of Political Science

46-393 Holopu Place

Kaneohe, Hawaii 96744

Contents

Chapter 1. Why Is This Book Credible? 3

Chapter 2. What is Freedom and How Do We Get It? 6

Chapter 3. Freedom Solves the Problem of War 11

Chapter 4. Freedom Minimizes the Problem of Political Violence 22

Chapter 5. Freedom Virtually Eliminates Genocide and Mass Murder 30

Chapter 6. Freedom Produces Wealth and Prosperity 39

Chapter 7. Freedom Promotes Social Justice 50

Chapter 8. An Enlightened Foreign Policy 63

Chapter 9. But What About . . . ? 78

Annotated Bibliography 89

Bibliography 92

Chapter 1

Why is This Book Credible?

What you will read in this book will be both astounding and shocking. You will read that democracies do not make war on other democracies and rarely engage in lesser violence against each other. You also will read that the more a nation is democratically free, the less severe its foreign and internal political violence. Moreover, you will read that somewhere around 170,000,000 people have been murdered by their own governments, aside from war, and that the more democratic a nation the less it murders its own people. As if this were not enough, you will also read that democratic freedom promotes wealth and prosperity. Finally, you will read that our basic foreign policy should be to promote democratic freedom around the world. In short, you will read that were the world to become wholly democratic, then to the best of our knowledge war would be completely eliminated for the human species, lesser political violence, genocide and mass murder would be minimized and poverty and inequality would be sharply reduced.

After reading all this, you may well conclude that I do not know what I am writing about or am some kind of kook. Had I read this myself thirty years ago, I would have thought it at best idealistic but, in any case, too simplistic and misleading, even arrogant. I would not have believed anyone claiming that they have a solution to end war. And then for them to assert that this solution also will deal with other forms of political violence and reduce poverty. . . . well, at the least I would have believed they did not live in the real world. I was sure then that war and other forms of human violence were complex social and political phenomena, requiring an understanding of diverse conditions and causes to forecast and resolve. Any one factor explanation was simply absurd. Moreover, to claim as I will here that this one factor should be the paramount concern of American foreign policy was also, I would have thought then, to be really irresponsible about policies that, in a world of independent and powerful nations, can not only lead us astray, but endanger our security as a nation and risk war.

To at least provide the reader with some assurance that I did not dream all this up, therefore, let me give some background on how I came to these conclusions. But first, so there is no misunderstanding, I should point out that these conclusions are not mine alone, but now the product of the research of many people, that has accumulated over two decades. Indeed, many of those doing this research on war approached it with the same kind of skepticism you may presently have, but became convinced by their own research results, as I became convinced by mine, that there was a fantastic truth here. Nor is the idea that democracy will promote peace new. It goes back several centuries, as I will show. What is new is that the computer, statistical data collections and developments in methods of research since the 1960s have enabled us to scientifically test and validate this idea. I have been one researcher among many, therefore, who could have written this book, and my particular history in doing research on this may be shared by several colleagues.

During World War II I was a young boy highly influenced by anti-Japanese war propaganda. I saw the Japanese as buck toothed, monkey-like, inscrutable, cruel and devious, without feeling or sentiment. It was a cultural shock, therefore, to see the Japanese people as they really are while I was stationed in Japan during the Korean War. I found that the Japanese were nothing like my war engendered stereotypes. They could laugh and cry and love flowers and animals. They could be loving and considerate. Moreover, this period was close enough to the Second World War for me to see still the effects on the people and cities of American bombing. This experience had a life-long effect, for it made me ask myself why, if we are really all the same as human beings, we make war on each other.

After the Korean War I started college with a major in physics and mathematics. But my true interest was in reading about social and political matters, particularly about East Asia. So I decided in 1956 as a sophomore at the University of Hawaii to change my major to political science, and then happily discovered that in political science I could study war and peace within the subfield of international relations. From then on I focused my term papers, MA thesis, and Ph.D. dissertation on war and other forms of political violence. After getting my doctorate in 1963 and for the next thirteen years I received annual grants from the National Science Foundation and Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense to conduct research on the empirical dimensions of nations and their behavior, which for me was an attempt to delineate the context and conditions of conflict and war between and within nations. This turned out to be one of the largest social science projects of this kind. Its results have been published in numerous books, the most important of which are described in the bibliography. The essential findings were published in 1981 and are what you will read here: to foster nonviolence, promote freedom.

This result was so radical and seemed too ideological (particularly during the Cold War), that I had to assure myself further that it was sound. As a matter of course, I had already screened all the related research in the literature and so I redid this a second time and also replicated with new data the empirical results. The freedom factor, which is what I will now call it, held up without exception. But my research had been limited to violent conflict such as war, military action short of war, revolution, guerrilla warfare, rebellion and the like. Because I did not appreciate its extent, I had ignored democide, that is genocide and mass murder. But after this research some work on democide led me to realize that possibly more people were killed through government genocide and mass murder than in war. So with grants from the United States Institute of Peace I spent quite a few years collecting data on democide and then subjected them to a variety of empirical analysis. The results of this were also the same. The more democratic freedom, the less democide.

This brings me up to about 1993. Now I was ready to pull all this research—really my life-time research career—together in one volume to be called Power Kills (see the bibliography). In the process I again carried out a series of empirical replications and redid for the third time a systematic survey of the literature, with again the same results. The new findings reconfirmed what I will write here.

One final note: I have not personally done the research on the positive effects of freedom on wealth and prosperity. But I have followed research on this for three decades, since it shows a benefit of freedom that must be considered as important as eradicating violence. When I come to this I will present the central results of this work.

This book is meant to communicate in nontechnical terms the new and revolutionary results from research on war, other forms of political violence, and economic progress. I hope that the reader will gain a new appreciation of the miracle that is democratic freedom and realize that this now gives us the power of knowledge. This is knowing what now can be done to rid humanity of the horrors of war, to almost eliminate other forms of political violence, including genocide and mass murder and to sharply reduce world poverty.

Chapter 2

What is Freedom

and How do We Get It?

By freedom I mean liberal democratic freedom, or liberal democracy. And since I will argue that we should universalize such freedom, what does such democratization involve?

Democracy may be defined by its inherent nature and by its empirical conditions. As to its nature, Aristotle defined democracy as rule by the people (Greek demokratia: demos meaning people + -kratia, -cracy, meaning rule or governing body) and this idea that in some way the people govern themselves is still the core meaning of democracy. Around this concept of self-government have developed four themes that many democrats now believe integral to a particular form of democracy, which we call liberal democracy.

One is that the people govern themselves by regular elections through which their highest leaders and representatives are periodically determined (representative democracy) or directly by their votes on policy alternatives (direct democracy).

A second is that the right to vote includes virtually all adults. This near universal franchise is an entirely modern addition to the definition. Not so long ago governments that were called democratic excluded from the franchise all slaves and women, as well as all non-slave males that did not meet certain property or literacy requirements. We now consider it perverse to call democratic any country that so restricts the vote, as did the apartheid regime in South Africa that limited voting to minority whites.

A third theme is that there be certain civil and political democratic rights. These political rights include not only the right to vote, but also the rights to a secret ballot and to have one’s vote count equally, but also the right to run for the highest office, to organize political groups or parties, and to a transparent government, in particularly knowing how one's representatives voted and debated. Of great importance is that open competition be allowed for political office, which usually is translated to mean that there is more than one political party competing for power. The civil rights are those to freedom of speech, particularly the freedom of newspapers and other communication media to criticize government policies and leaders; freedom of religion; and the freedom to form unions and organize businesses. One of the most important civil rights is that to a fair trial.

And finally, there is rule by law. Above the state there must be a law that structures the government, elaborates the reciprocal rights and duties of government and the people, and which all governing officials and their policies must obey. This is a constitution, either in the form of a single document as for the United States, or a set of documents, statutes, and traditions, as for Great Britain.

Liberal democracy, therefore, now generally means that a people rule themselves through periodic elections of their highest leaders in which nearly all adults can participate, for which offices they are eligible, and under the rule of law which guarantees certain political and general rights.

And this defines what I mean by freedom here. These aspects of freedom are summarized in table 2.1.

Some countries may be called democracy but are not liberal democracies as defined here. These may have competitive elections, a secret ballot, and near universal franchise, but still there are arbitrary arrests, restrictions on or even terror against a minority, controlled speech, and so on. Both India and Colombia are examples of these nonliberal democracies.

Is therefore my definition of freedom as liberal democracy too narrow a definition of freedom, one that fits only Western European nations? Not at all. Consider Freedom House’s prestigious annual survey of freedom in the world, as published in each years first issue of their Freedom Review (formerly Freedom at Issue) and their yearbook Freedom in the World. They define freedom by the existence of civil liberties and political rights similar to those I list above. On these criteria they find that as of the beginning of 1994, 1,046,200,000 people lived under freedom, comprising seventy-two nations and forty-five related territories. Nearly twenty percent of the world’s population was thus free. And this excludes a number of democracies that are nonliberal. For example, democratic India is defined as only partially free, largely because of anti-Hindu killings, arson, and looting, in some cases involving the police, wide scale government corruption, and the direct takeover by the central government of rule over four of India's states. Moreover, Russia and many of her former Soviet Republics like Latvia, Ukraine, and Armenia have had democratic elections but still are not considered free. Similarly for former Yugoslavian Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Consequently, the claims I will make in this book about the benefits of democratic freedom should be understood to apply with main force to free countries, those that have a liberal democracy.

Who then are the free countries? They include, of course, those one would normally list—the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Great Britain, and other Western European nations. But they also now include Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guyana, and Uruguay in Latin America and most of the Caribbean Islands. In Eastern Europe they include Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria. There is also Cyprus in the Mediterranean and lone Israel in the Middle East. In addition to Japan in Asia there is now Mongolia and South Korea. And most Pacific island nations are free, such as the Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, and Nauru.

If what I will say about the value of freedom is true, then how is this freedom to be achieved in nations? There appears to be no one process of such democratization. What agreement there is on how best to achieve a stable democracy favors slow incremental development. Great Britain is, of course, the example of this, with gradual change over centuries from absolute monarchy to one of the world’s most enduring liberal democracies. However, such an incremental process seems neither necessary nor sufficient for democracy or its stability. Great Britain is an example of a bottom-up process, where the non-governing elite or lower classes made incessant demands for an extension of rights and voting power, and, through government concessions, chipped away at ruling authority. Not all such democratization is so gradual, and indeed many appear revolutionary. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution of 1912, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 that preceded the Bolshevik coup are examples, only the first of which established a long lasting democracy.

The process of democratization may also be carried out by the governing elite themselves, as has often happened in South America, and indeed, one will find authoritarian leaders that claim their rule is required to create the conditions for democracy. However, this top-down process has more often ended in an unstable democracy, unless it has been responsive to revolutionary pressure and pro-democratic violence from those below.

Democracy may also be created and mid-wifed by foreign powers. In this way were created the democracies of Japan and West Germany. After the Second World War the United States occupied Japan and with the help of democratic minded Japanese intellectuals and politicians reconstructed the Japanese government, wrote the so-called MacArthur Constitution, and carried out social reforms, such as land reform, that would strengthen democracy. This top-down, foreign imposed democratization produced a democracy stable enough to see in 1993 one of the longest lasting and most powerful governing parties among democracies, the Liberal-Democrats that had governed since 1955, thrown out of power by the Japanese people. Similarly, the new post-World War II democratic West German government, erected with the help and under the watchful eyes of Great Britain, France, and the United States, has been stable and effective.

Colonization, especially by Great Britain, has provided an incubation period for democracy in a number of countries, which with independence became full fledged and stable democracies. Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are good examples. India is also an example, but of a democracy still with nonliberal aspects, as mentioned above. It has come under severe strain, and the survival of what democracy it has is all the more remarkable given its regional, religious, linguistic, and ethnic centrifugal forces.

Many have tried to define the empirical conditions necessary for the creation and success of democracy. In some of this work there tends to be confusion between the defining conditions of democracy itself, such as a free press and competitive elections, and that of democratization. If we understand the latter to involve those conditions that facilitate the creation of a stable democracy confusion can be avoided. For this most stress the importance of economic development, with the concomitant high levels of literacy and education, and modern communications. It is believed, and the empirical evidence strongly supports this, that democracy requires an aware and relatively educated electorate, and that moreover, where poverty and inequality are as severe as they are in the poorest nations, democracy cannot take root. Moreover, some also emphasize that there must be a civil society—diverse social groups and institutions independent of government—for democracy to take root and flourish.

But also there is the role of culture. Many democratic theorists now accept that democracy requires a political culture of negotiation, compromise, accommodation, and a willingness to lose. Where this culture is absent, democracy, even if created through revolution by the people themselves, cannot succeed. However, as one considers such democracies as Japan, France, Germany, or even early 19th century Great Britain, their pre-democratic cultures were most conducive to authoritarian rule of some kind. It is only with the development of democracy that their political cultures gradually became democratic. Whether political democracy or democratic culture came first is clearly a chicken and egg question, but whether it comes before or after democracy is created, it is widely recognized as essential to democratic stability and success.

Other conditions have been proposed, such as the importance of a vigorous, bourgeois middle class, or the necessity for a depoliticized military.

Whatever, I will argue that because of the ability of democratic freedom to solve mankind’s major and historical problems, that of war, violence, genocide and mass murder, and poverty, democratization must be the prime, front and center, crystal-clear goal of our foreign policy. Such a foreign policy must of course recognize what we have learned about the process of democratization and realize that a democracy imposed against a people’s wishes cannot long endure. But there is much that a foreign policy can do, and I will deal with this after I show why democratization should be seen as in our vital national interest.

Chapter 3

Freedom Solves

The Problem of War

War has been always with us and incredibly destructive of human lives. One cannot find a span of history, a region, or a culture that has been without its wars. There were the bloody wars among ancient civilizations, the classical Greek city-states; the Italian city-states Swiss forest states, and monarchies of the middle ages; and our modern nation-states. There were the wars among groups, tribes, principalities, empires, and civilizations in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa. There were the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, and the incredible bloody wars of transition from one empire to the next in China.

Among all these wars, one of the bloodiest was the Thirty Years War, fought from 1618 to 1648, an interconnected series of about a dozen wars between different powers and at different places in Europe. Together these wars wrecked much of Europe, killed millions of people, and forced the migration of many millions more. Some countries lost a huge proportion of their population, the German Empire alone suffering a population drop from about 21,000,000 in 1618 to less than 13,500,000 in 1648.

Then there were the Napoleonic Wars that over the years 1800-1814 were fought by France all over Europe and to Moscow and back. Some 2,000,000 died in battle and France alone lost about every one out of five of its soldiers to wounds or death. Just between these wars and World War I in 1914 there was the Crimean War, with about 785,000 battle-dead; the Seven Weeks War that killed in battle, as wars go, a small number—15,000. There was the Franco-Prussian War and 184,000 battle dead; the Russo-Japanese War with 160,000 more battle dead; and the Balkan Wars that cost an additional 462,000 battle dead. Yet this does not count the numerous small wars and clashes, and the colonial wars fought with indigenous people wanting nothing more that their freedom.

For all European nations alone and from 1300 to 1700, the average time nations were at war was over 50 percent. For the 18th century the duration dropped to 36 percent, and subsequently to 30 percent for the 19th century.

Then there is our century with its world wars. World War I alone wiped out some 9,000,000 people in battle. In one famous battle, the Verdun in 1916, about 976,000 French and German troops were killed and wounded in their trenches or as they tried to run the gauntlet of shell fire and bullets to reach the enemy’s. In the first battle of the Somme in the same year, the British alone lost 60,000 casualties, with 19,000 killed. Aside from the battle dead, just from the war induced and spread flu epidemic of 1918 as many as 20,000,000 men, women, and children died. And untold millions more perished from other diseases, famine, and dislocation.

Then there was World War II. What more need be said about this bloodiest and most total of wars. Its sheer destructiveness and horrors have been written on the minds of all readers through actual involvement or through television and in movie fictionalized accounts and documentaries. Its human cost alone is around 16,000,000 battle dead. By itself this exceeds the total population of many nations of the world and yet to this must be added the tens of millions of civilians that died from indiscriminate attacks, being caught up in battles, and war caused famine, disease, and dislocation. Some have placed the final toll at 40,000,000 to 60,000,000 dead.

What has been the historical toll of war? Exact calculations are impossible, but the roughest sort of estimates can be made. From the 30th century BC. through our century something like 151,000,000 may have died in war. If we look at the twentieth century alone, for which our calculations can be more exact, we find that international wars—World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iran-Iraq, USSR-Afghanistan, Japan-China, Japan-Russia, Israel versus her Arab neighbors, Cambodia-Vietnam, and so on—have killed about perhaps 111,000,000 people, around 4 percent of the world’s average population, 1900-1987. This means that a world citizen had a risk of 1 in 25 of being killed in war, not very good odds, considering that this is a matter of life or death. Even were one to survive, there is an unacceptable probability that loved ones may die in war.

The sheer destructiveness of war, its ferocity and wild killing, has been likened to a disease. It is a human plague that infects the mind and contaminates neighbors. It spreads, leaving mangled and bloody corpses in its wake and then disappears for awhile to again appear unpredictably in the same or a different place.

The best of our thinkers and scientists have tried to understand this plague, to control and even manipulate it, and above all to eliminate it. Solutions have been proposed, such as replacing the lust for battle with international sports, educating the young in the horrors of war and values of peace, equalizing international resources and wealth, reducing poverty, cultural exchange between nations to show that we all are alike, better international communication to avoid misperception, disarmament, arms control, trade, the creation of functional organizations that tie nations together, research into the causes and conditions of war, and so on and on. Surely any well stacked library has shelves and shelves of books written on what can and should be done to solve the problem of war or avoid it.

The favorite of all proposed solutions has been the belief that world government and associated international law would once and for all eliminate war. Constitutions for such a world government have been written and through the centuries many designs for such a government have been offered. No matter how carefully constructed, however, they have always raised the question as to how we get from where we are now to such a world government; and besides, there is also the question as to whether this would only get rid of wars by definition. While there would no longer be international wars, since independent nations would be subordinate to a world government, would not there now be bloody civil wars within this unified world community?

None of these solutions to the problem of war have worked out. They have been idealistic or impractical, like world government. Or they simply have been shown to be wrong, as with the belief in education or cultural exchange. But there was one solution proposed in the later 18th century that recent social science research has proved to be the answer. In his Perpetual Peace written in 1795, the great German Philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the way to universal peace lie in creating republics, what today we would call representative democracies. Kant wrote that

Note two things about this solution. One is that where people have equal rights and freely participate in their governance they will unlikely fight other such peoples. And two, the reason for this is that they will be unwilling to bear the personal cost in property and the lose of their lives and those of their loved ones. Where leaders are responsible to the people, they then will be reluctant to fight. And where the leaders of two nations are so restrained, then war between them is nearly out of the question.

That democracies are therefore inherently peaceful was not an idea lost to others. It became part of a more general philosophy of governance that Kant shared with liberals of the time, a system of belief we now call classical liberalism. These beliefs were promoted by Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill, John Locke, and many more influential thinkers of the time. At the core, they argued for the maximum freedom of the individual consistent with a like freedom of others, that is they believed in minimal government. They also supported free trade between nations and a free market within. Such freedom, they argued, would create a harmony among nations and promote peace. As Thomas Paine, a classical liberal and an American political philosopher wrote in his influential Rights of Man in 1791-1792,

And in this the classical liberals were right.

Unfortunately for mankind, the belief in individual freedom was soon to be overtaken and overshadowed by various versions of socialism, including communism (or Marxism) and fascism. This was the view that government could be a tool to redesign society and create through the redistribution of wealth and the use of science and technology a more equitable and richer society. Capitalism—the free market—was seen as exploitive, the institutionalization of personal greed. By its nature capitalism was perceived as destructive of community values and a cause of war as capitalist fights capitalist for new markets.

Now socialism did not eclipse democracy and indeed, for many there was a marriage between democracy as the institutionalization of people-power and the ideals of socialism, what we call democratic socialism. This is a set of beliefs that have formed the platform of many past and present ruling parties in European democracies, and which have guided the creation of mixed free market-command economies. Moreover, notwithstanding the socialist view of capitalism as inherently belligerent, many people believed in their heart that liberal democratic nations were more peaceful than other forms of governance. And the philosophy of classical liberalism did not die; it mutated into contemporary libertarianism or modern conservatism.

But what was lost until recent decades was the hearts and minds of intellectuals. Not all or most intellectuals became socialists. Many continued to believe in freedom and its beneficial results. But what was largely lost was the belief in the peaceful nature of free peoples. The socialist critique of capitalism, especially on the supposed aggressiveness of such nations, as exemplified by their many colonial wars, won out. The many wars by democratic Great Britain, which has fought more wars than any other country, and those of the United States—the aggressiveness of the United States against Mexico in the last century and towards Spain, which eventuated in the Spanish-American War of 1898, not to mention the frequent American military interventions in Central and South America—seemed to give validity to the socialist argument. In any case, those who did not accept socialism were pulled by this critique and the evidence of history to take a middle position. Democracies were no more nor less belligerent than other people.

For intellectuals the Cold War gave particular emphasis to this belief. Although opposed to communism and strongly supportive of democratic freedoms, many intellectuals believed that talk about democratic peacefulness was simply Cold War propaganda. That, indeed, belief in this could lead to a democratic crusade that would endanger the peace and possibly lead to a World War III. After all, did not that classical liberal, President Wilson, make the United States entry into World War I a crusade to make the world safe for democracy.

There was also a conventional way of looking at nations that caused intellectuals and social scientists alike to miss the truth in Kant’s solution. The tendency was to look at nations in terms of their overall behavior and to focus on the large number of wars of specific nations, like Britain and the United States, rather than seeing wars bilaterally, in terms of the type of government of those who made war on each other. That is, while it was evident that Great Britain fought more wars than any other country, what was missed was that it fought no wars against other democracies once it became a full fledged democracy in the later 19th century. Nor once they became well established democracies—once democracy had a chance to become fully institutionalized and a democratic culture to develop, a process that might take several years—did France, Germany, or Japan make war on other democracies. Nor did the Unites States, in its full history, ever make war on another well established democracy.

Whatever the explanation, the truth in Kant’s solution and the classical liberals faith in the peacefulness of democracies was largely lost. Not until the 1960s was this solution resurrected and the research begun that would within three decades prove Kant correct. By then social scientists had amassed data on all wars that had occurred over the last several centuries. And by applying various statistical analyses to these data, social scientists had shown that there was no war between well established democracies. Moreover, through these techniques, they also proved that there was not a hidden factor accounting for this—that this was not due to the lack of common borders or the geographic distance between democracies. Nor was it due to the economic development of democracies or their international power. Or their resources. Pure and simple, well established democracies, democracies that have been in existence for several years, do not make wars on each other.

Table 3.1 provides some evidence on this. The table gives a simple count of the number of wars between democracies, democracies and nondemocracies, and nondemocracies from 1816 to 1991. As the table shows, among 353 wars for over a century and a half there was not one war in which well established democracies killed each other's citizens.

But might not this be due to chance? That is, since democracies are in a minority among nations and in previous centuries there have been only a handful of democracies at any one time, are not the odds against there being wars among democracies. One thing that can be done by statistical analysis is the calculation of the probability of events taking place. Calculating these probabilities for wars between democracies has shown that it is extremely unlikely by chance in general, with odds for some periods and wars of hundreds of thousands to one, that the lack of wars is a chance finding.

Table 3.1

Wars 1816-1991

Two works in particular provide the final evidence. In his Democracy and International Politics, James Lee Ray, Professor of Political Science at Florida State University, looked in detail at all alleged cases, twenty in total, in which democracies have made war on each other. These include the Athens-Syracuse War of 415-413 BC., the British-American War of 1812, the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Boer War of 1899 to 1902, World War I in which a possibly democratic Germany fought Britain and France, a democratic Finland versus the democratic allies in World War II, and Israel versus Lebanon in 1948 and 1967. After careful consideration of each case he had to conclude that not one really involved a war between two established democracies. Democracies do not make war on each other, without exception.

Dr. Spencer Weart, historian and physicist, director of the Center for History of Physics, provided the final evidence. In his book Never at War he did a thorough study of all possible cases of war between democracies in written history, beginning with the classical democratic city-states. He also found not one case of war between well established democratic states, democracies that had existed for around three years or more. Not one.

Moreover, adding considerable credibility to his findings, Weart saw that states would make war on each other right up to their becoming democracies and after democracy settled in there would be no more wars between them. Then, when one or the other or both became nondemocratic, wars between them would break out again. It was as though a higher being flipped a switch. Now war; then no war; then war again. The switch was democracy.

He also discovered something new and important to social scientists, i.e., that oligarchic republics also do not make war on each other. For Weart a democracy was one in which at least two-thirds of the adult males had equal rights and could participate in government. In an oligarchic republic no more than one-third of adult males could so participate and shared rights. A good example of such a government was pre-democratic South Africa under the white apartheid regime. The minority whites were democratic among themselves, but the greater majority of blacks were second class citizens, unable to vote. Weart discovered that such oligarchic republics almost never make war on each other, but such republics and democracies fight each other, sometimes tooth and nail.

Why should this be so? Indeed, why should free and democratic peoples not make war on each other at all. Remember Immanuel Kant’s hypothesis that people who are politically empowered would not want to bear the cost of wars and therefore would restrain their leaders? This seems on the surface a straight forward explanation, and it does help to understand why democracies do not make war on each other. But democratic people’s have also been jingoistic. They have favored war and encouraged their leaders to fight. Public outcry over the explosion aboard the American battleship Maine in a Cuban harbor and its sinking with a loss of 260 men in 1898, and horrible atrocities of Spanish forces against the Cuban people and rebels, pressured Congress and President McKinley to intervene in Cuba. As a result, McKinley requested and got congressional authority to do so, and Spain declared war.

American public opinion also strongly favored President Truman’s commission of American troops to the defense of South Korea against the North Korean invasion in 1950; and similarly favored President Johnson’s request of Congress for a blank check—the Tonkin Gulf resolution of 1964—to come to the defense of South Vietnam, then near collapse under the weight of North Vietnam’s aggression.

There is something much deeper than simply fear of death and destruction at work in preventing wars among democracies. This is an inhibition that works regardless of the basic disposition of a people towards war or peace, aggression or appeasement. Where democratic freedom flourishes in two countries, where there are relatively free markets, and freedom of religion, association, ideas, and speech, economic and social entrepreneurialship also flourishes. Corporations, partnerships, associations, societies, churches, schools, and clubs proliferate in and between the countries. Through their interests, work, and play, people become members of multiple groups and institutions, some localized in each country, some transcending the borders of both. These become separate pyramids of power, competing with each other and with their own and the other government. Both nations then really comprise one society, one crosscut by these multifold groups. The critical social dimensions of wealth, power, and prestige are then subdivided in many ways and, most important, this pluralism cross-pressures interests. That is, what people want, their desires and goals, are cut up into different pieces, each satisfied by a different group, such as their church on Sunday, their bowling league on Tuesday night, their factory or office for 40 hours, their child’s school and parent teacher association during some evenings, their political party mailings and election campaign, and, of course, their family at home. All are different, but overlapping interests, and all take time and energy.

This is true of government as well. After all, democratic government is not some monolith, a uniform pyramid of power. It is made up of many departments, agencies, and bureaus, all staffed with bureaucrats and political appointees, each with their own interest. Moreover, between two democratic governments numerous official and unofficial connections and linkages are made to achieve similar functions and satisfy mutual interests. Their militaries coordinate their strategies and may even share equipment in line with their mutual defense arrangements and perceived common dangers. Intelligence services will share some secrets and even in some cases agents. Health services will coordinate their studies, undertake common projects, and provide health supplies when needed. In other words, two democratic societies are tied to each other by multiple shared and cross-pressured interests. As a result politicians, leaders, and groups have a common interest in keeping the peace. And where conflict might escalate into violence, as over some trade issue or fishing grounds, interests are so cross-pressured by different groups and ties, the depth of feeling and single-minded devotion to the interest at stake is simply not there. Keep in mind that for democratic leaders to intentionally choose to make the huge jump to violence against another country demands almost fanatic dedication to the interests—the stakes—involved, almost to the exclusion of all else.

But there is also something about democratically free societies that is even more important than these links and cross-pressures. This is their culture. Where people are free, as in a free market, exchange dominates. "You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours." "You give me that and I’ll give you this." Money is often the currency of such exchange, but also so are privileges of one sort or another, benefits, positions, and so on. But except where such exchange is so standardized that there is little room for bargaining, as in buying a hamburger at the local fast food restaurant, the operating procedures for establishing an exchange involves offers, negotiation, compromise, and concessions. From the highest government officials to the lowest workman, from the consideration of bills in a legislature to the determination of who does the dishes after dinner, there is bargaining of one sort or another. Of course, some of this becomes regularized, as in the bargaining of unions and management in the United States structured by the Labor Relations Board, or that given by tradition which dictates in some families that the wife will always wash the dishes. But much also entails bargaining.

As a result, in a free society a culture of bargaining, what might be called an exchange or democratic culture, develops. This is part of the settling in that takes place when a state first becomes democratic. Authoritarian practices, doing things by orders, decrees, and commands sent down a hierarchy gradually gets replaced by many hierarchies of power and the use of bargaining and its techniques of negotiation and compromise to get things done. One soon comes to expect that issues will be negotiated and that through concessions and the splitting of differences conflict will be settled. These expectations become hardened into customs and perception. Thus democratic peoples see each other as willing to compromise and negotiate issues rather than wanting to fight over differences. No matter the conflict, they do not expect war. For most important, they see each other as of the same kind, part of one’s in-group, one’s moral universe. They each share not only socially, in overlapping groups, functions, and linkages, but also in culture. As we no more expect that American Senators Mitchell and Dole will punch each other over President Clinton’s health care proposal, Americans and Canadians have no expectation of fighting each other over trade restrictions. Both see each other as similarly free and democratic, and willing to bargain.

Finally, one should give a strong role to the ideology of democratic liberalism itself. Democratic liberals believe in democracy—the right of people to make their voices heard, to have a role in government, and to be free. Such liberals, which in domestic policy may be conservative or progressive, Democrat or Republican, strongly oppose any violence against other democracies. If such were contemplated by those in power the democratic liberals would call on allies in the media, legislature, and bureaucracy to arouse a storm of protest against such action.

But what about oligarchic republics, in which, be it recalled, only a minority have democratic freedom. Here also similar factors operate. Among the politically equal and participating minority there is the same exchange culture and the expectation of nonviolence and negotiation that we find in democracies. This minority sees other oligarchic republics as of the same kind; sharing the same culture and philosophy of rule; participating in the same moral universe. And thus these republics avoid war among themselves.

But as for democracies, they are different. All people are free and equal and oligarchic republics not only see them as morally and culturally different, but also as a moral and physical threat to their minority rule. Thus relations are constrained, interaction limited, and the danger of war implicit in their relations. Of course, democracies reciprocate this latent and sometimes overt hostility.

For recent decades, one only need point out the hostility of the democracies against oligarchic South Africa. Not only was strong pressure applied to the South African white government to democratize, but overt sanctions were applied and trade was boycotted. The headquarters of multinational companies in democracies had pressure brought on them to cease business in South Africa and in many cases such business was made illegal. Obviously, South Africa was seen not only as of a different kind, an out-group, but by virtue of the exclusion of the majority blacks from power, utterly racist and thus doubly immoral. Although it did not come to war between democracies and South Africa, had not the white regime liberalized and negotiated to enable a truly democratic election involving all South Africans, war at some point was not out of the question, especially if the white government had escalated violence against blacks to maintain their oligarchy.

All considered, then, why is there no war between democracies and virtually none between oligarchic republics? Because of the equal rights and free participation in governance of a sizable group of citizens. This creates a multitude of groups that produce diverse linkages across borders, cross-pressured interests, and make for an exchange culture of negotiation and compromise. Democracies (or oligarchies) see each other of the same kind, as morally similar, as negotiators rather than aggressors, and therefore have no expectation of war; and there is a prevalent ideology of democratic liberalism that believes in democratic freedom and opposes violence between democracies. Thus the interdemocratic or interoligarchic peace.

Then why do nondemocracies make war on each other. Do not dictators see each other as of the same kind, sharing the same coercive culture. Yes, and that is precisely the problem for them. They live by the use of coercion and force; they are used to sycophantic underlings and manipulation through lies and deceit. In his Special Tasks, the recent memoirs of the high level Soviet spymaster, Pavel Sudoplatov, he well displays what life was like in such a system. He wrote that

Commands and decrees are the operational routine of dictators, and if they do undertake negotiations they are often seen as a battle ground on which one uses all the technique of subterfuge, misinformation, stalling, and manipulation to win.

Diplomacy by dictators with other countries is no different: it is seen as the continuation of war by other means. Only under threat of greater force will true negotiations take place. Thus the recognition of others as also nondemocratic, as dictators or monarchs, is to recognize that war is possible, that coercion will be necessary, and that any concession from the other side will have to be studied from all angles to find hidden traps. A dictators promise is as good as the cannon he sees sighted on him.

Were all to be said about freedom that democracies don’t make war on each other, it would be revolutionary and we should all be ecstatic. After all the centuries through which a solution to war has been sought; through all the struggle to identify the causes and conditions of war, to collect data on war and subject them to scientific analysis; through all the effort people have made to manage crises and avoid war; it comes down to this simple, practical factor. Promote civil and political rights, that is, promote freedom.

Perhaps the reader feels as I would if I had read this several decades ago. First, is not war so complex and its causes and conditions so diverse and situational, that this is much too simplistic? Can we really believe it all reduces to the one factor of freedom? The answer is categorically yes. The research results on this are consistent. But perhaps part of the conceptual problem is in understanding precisely what kind of cause democratic freedom is.

I am not arguing that war necessarily will occur between two countries if one or both are not democratic. I am only arguing that two countries being democratic is a necessary condition for an assured peace between them. The empirical results of the study of all wars and democracies shows conclusively that if war occurs between two states, one of them at least must not be a democracy. But lack of democracy is not a sufficient condition for war. War may not occur between nondemocracies for many reasons, such as both being very small and weak countries distant from each other, as are Yemen and Uruguay. Or they may have certain strongly shared interests, with one dominating the relationship, as between Vietnam and Laos. War or peace among democracies in fact may demand the multivariable and well nuanced analysis and explanation that historians and foreign policy practitioners often demand. But we can say this. If the nations are democratic we know that war will not occur, as much as we know anything about human behavior. And this simple factor of democratic freedom is, as best we can forecast from our experience and understanding into the future to solve our problems, all we need to know to eliminate war.

Chapter 4

Freedom Minimizes

The Problem of Political Violence

Wars exist or they do not. A country is democratic or it is not. For this reason, as startling and important is it to know that democracies do not make war on each other, democracy as a solution to war has two limitations. One is that were this all we could say, then it is not sufficient for countries to move toward democracy or to be partially free for the effects of democracy to kick in. This means that to end war we would have to not just foster freedom, but make sure nearly all countries are free.

Second is that there are many other kinds of violence than international war. There is violence between nations short of war, such as American jets shooting down Iraqi fighter planes that violate the United Nations defined no-fly zone over southern Iraq, or, the blowing up of a South Korean passenger jet by North Korean agents, or, military action by Cuban forces against Somalia during the Ethiopia-Somalia War over the Ogaden (Cuba actually lost about 1,000 battle dead). And then there are the civil wars, guerrilla wars, revolutionary wars, violent coup d’états, and the like within nations. What about all these kinds of violence?

Here also freedom works its magic. But to understand this magic correctly, we now have to stop thinking about war in terms of a single event that occurs or not. Rather we should think of war as a concept covering the most severe forms of political violence between and within nations. We should understand that there are wars of differing severity, that we can have as a war the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II in which the latter lost some 7,500,000 battle-dead; and we also can call a war that between India and China in 1962 in which each lost around 500 dead. Both are wars. But now let us focus on the severity of military violence between nations in terms of the number killed. Let us also do the same thing for domestic political violence, and consider the total people killed in all internal political violence, such as that directed by the government at some groups, as of guerrillas or rebels in a peasant uprising, or that violence directed at government officials, institutions, or forces.

Then, first, as far as our data on violence can reach, we find that for any two nations, the more democratically free both are, the less likely there has been severe violence between them. This is shown in figure 4.1 for all wars in this century.

At one end we have two nations that are both democratically free and fight no wars and have, if any violence at all, very minor violence between them and marginal democracies. At the other end we have nations in which there are no civil rights and political liberties, no free market, and the government coercively commands all other socially significant activity and groups. At this end, where we have two totalitarian governments, they are most likely to have the most intense violence. World War II involving totalitarian Germany and the Soviet Union is a case in point. No other pair of nations has lost as many people in fighting against each other than have these two. As mentioned, the totalitarian Soviet Union lost 7,500,000 in battle; and totalitarian Nazi Germany lost about 3,500,000 battle dead, most of them on the Soviet front.

Second, we find that the more democratic a country is, the less intense has been the foreign violence in which it has engaged. Another way of putting this is that the more freedom a nation has the less its leaders squander the lives of their people in foreign violence and war. Figure 4.2 shows this for all nations from 1900 to 1980.

This is not to say that democracies are entirely pacifist. They have of course engaged in bloody wars, usually to fight aggression and defend themselves and other democracies. Sometimes, however, democracies have also been the aggressors, as was the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, and the Grenada and Panama interventions. In general, however, on the average, democracies fight less severe wars and are thus more careful about the lives of their citizens. Totalitarian regimes, the least free, use their people en mass, often to throw at the enemy in human waves, in order to win their battles and wars.

And third, we now know that the more democratic a country the less severe its internal political violence. This is shown in figure 4.3.

This is also a statistical fact. There are, of course, exceptions to this, such as the American civil war. Although one might argue that this was fought over individual freedom itself—the right of a people to be free of slavery—it was still a most violent war in which Americans killed almost 500,000 other Americans. And there has been continuous mixed political-ethnic-religious violence in India, the guerrilla warfare that occurred in democratic El Salvador and Peru, and so on. But then there are the greater number of democratically free countries like Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Switzerland in which political violence is virtually absent. And there are or have been the nondemocratic countries like Burma, Cambodia, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia, pre-democratic Colombia, and so on, in which violence has been endemic.

The most extreme cases of internal political violence between the government and armed groups have been in the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, China, Sudan, Somalia, and Burma, totalitarian or near totalitarian all. But there is also the violence in authoritarian nations. The Mexican revolution from 1910 to 1920 killed about 2,000,000 people and the la violencia—terrorism, assassinations, and civil violence—in Columbia from 1949 to 1962 killed perhaps some 300,000 people. And then there was the violence under Idi Amin of Uganda and his successors, in which in total perhaps near 750,000 people were killed. When free societies are compared to such violent countries, even the most civil or politically violent nations like the United States do not seem to have that much violence after all.

The freedom factor is thus a freedom continuum. A continuum of diminishing violence. The less the freedom of a people, the less their civil and political rights, then the more likely they will lose their lives in foreign military action or be caught up in internal political violence. This is to say that freedom minimizes such violence. It does not necessarily end it. Some minor violence may still occur between democracies and internal violence—rioting, terrorism, and even civil war—might still occur. Freedom is no guarantee against this. In the world at large, with all the issues people and governments may fight over, we have no proven and practical means of ending political violence forever, everywhere. But we now know that we can sharply reduce such violence to a minimum through the practice of freedom.

Here we have the same question as the question regarding the lack of war among democracies. How do we understand this reduction in violence? And the answer is the same. Democracies have numerous bonds and linkages among themselves that inhibit violence. More importantly, they share democratic culture and recognize each other as of the same kind. They expect to bargain away and compromise their conflicts, and violence is not ordinarily an option. Then why does some violence occur, even though limited? In those cases in which violence has taken place, such as in Turkey sinking a Greek boat, or Israel accidentally firing on the British while both were allied against the United Arab Republic (Egypt) in the Suez War, it is almost always between countries just marginally democratic or in very unusual circumstances, such as in a war.

But what about the other side of this. Why is there a scale such that at the extreme nonfree end, governments are likely to have the most foreign and internal violence? If we could only explain the dampening effect of freedom on violence in terms of freedom alone, this would only be half an explanation. What is it about decreasing freedom, about nonfreedom, that causes violence? The answer is power.

Now power comes in many forms. Among the most important is exchange power that underlies the diversity and culture of free societies. There is also authoritative power, or the ability to get others to do what one wants them to do because of one’s credentials or position. This is the power of an hereditary monarch, a teacher in class, or a judge in his courtroom.

The powers of concern here, however, are coercion and force. These are the means by which a dictator and totalitarian ruler enforces obedience to their commands. Obey or suffer the consequences. And often this will be prison, torture, and possibly death. The worst of these regimes command their people and organize society according to ideological imperatives. Be they Marxism-Leninism and the drive for true communism, socialist equalitarianism, racial purity, the glory of the nation, economic development and modernization, or the realization of God’s will, their modus operandi are the same: a hierarchical command structure. There are no civil rights or political liberties—little or no freedom. People must do what they are told to do under the threat of sanctions, including prison or even death.

The result of such a command structure is that society becomes polarized. First, the competing pyramids of power that discipline, check, and balance government in a free society no longer exist. There is now only one pyramid of power, with the dictator or ruling elite at the top and the mass of subjects at the bottom.

Second, where in a free society independent cross-cutting groups service diverse interests, there is now in effect only one division in society: that between those who command and those who must obey. Where one’s job depends on the political regime, where one’s food comes from its stores, where it produces and censures all one’s newspapers, books, movies and television programs, where it strictly controls all schooling and writes all textbooks, and where it manages all religion, society is polarized. Major interests align into two opposing camps along only one conflict front, that between "them" and "us". Any relatively minor issue, therefore, can become a matter of regime power, legitimacy, or credibility. A strike in one small town can become a matter of such concern to the regime that major force must be used to put it down. For the people, such a strike may be symbolic, and a display of resistance that should be supported, and therefore the strike may spread along the fault line between the regime and people. In any case, the regime cannot afford to let any resistance, any display of independence, anywhere by anybody, go unchallenged. Force must be used to suppress such strikes, and any other demonstrations, for to allow them to go on unchallenged is to weaken one’s reputation for power. And that will only encourage more resistance and opposition.

So coercion and force is the nature of such rule; violence a natural concomitant. But there is more to this. As a culture of accommodation is a corollary of freedom, a culture of force and violence is a consequence of dictatorial rule. Where such rule is absolute, we find a culture of fear—not knowing when one might do something perceived as wrong and reported to the police, uncertainty as to whether one’s ancestors or race or religion is or will become a black mark, and insecurity about the lives of one’s loved ones, who may be dragged off to serve in the military, disappear because of something they said, or become the plaything of some official. The fear exists up and down the command structure. Generals may be shot for jokes about the "Great Leader", top government functionaries may be jailed and tortured because of a rumored plot, and the dictator himself must always fear that those around him with guns to protect him will turn them on him.

There is still another aspect to this. The dictator has the power to move people around like chessmen, to use them as tools to carry out his whims. Those that get in his way, those that resist, that thwart his desire, can therefore easily be eliminated. Moreover, when the dictator’s will is strengthened and justified by some consuming ideology, when the dictator can believe that his will is that which will promote justice and happiness for his people or the world, then there is no stopping him from having peaceful demonstrators machine gunned, shooting farmers and their families resisting collectivization, or invading and taking over a neighboring country.

To be sure, I am drawing extremes here to make my point. Where power becomes absolute, killing en mass follows. Of course there are partially free regimes and those also in which there is little freedom, but the regime is an authoritarian monarchy ruling according to tradition and custom, as in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. Power in this case is more authoritarian, obeyed because it conforms with tradition, than coercive. But we find that the less free a society and the more it is controlled by coercive commands, then the greater the polarization and culture of fear and violence, and the more that violence will occur.

The continuum of freedom thus runs from free democratic societies at one end to strictly totalitarian societies at the other. The closer two nations are to the totalitarian end, the more likely violence will occur between them; the closer to the free democratic end, the less likely such violence. Moreover, the less free and more totalitarian a society, the more severe its foreign and internal political violence are likely to be.

There is one aspect of this explanation that some readers may question. Those that have been brought up in democracies, with their relative free markets, civil rights, and representative and limited government, have difficulty accepting how absolute some governments can and have become. Although the age of true totalitarianism may be behind us, not so long ago there were governments that controlled every aspect of a person’s life. The government literally ran everything. There was no private business, nor independent schools, athletics, newspapers, movies, or books. For travel from one village, city, or town to another, one had to get government permission. Homes and apartments were even government owned and in many places, as in the Soviet Union or communist China under Mao, the government kept track of the visitors to one’s home. Some of these totalitarian countries required that in some locations or occupations, such as farming, even living and eating had to be done communally, in dormitories and mess halls. For one communist regime, that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, in some regions people were forbidden to own more than a spoon, and could not scrounge food for themselves in Cambodia’s lush forests without fear of being shot. In this Cambodia it was even dangerous to laugh with people or to say honeyed words to loved ones, because that could show less serious dedication to the regime. All this is documented and I need not exaggerate at all to make my point. Under such hellish regimes violence is a way of life.

I will pay particular attention to a type of such regimes in the next chapter, the most totalitarian and the most violent, the communist ones.

Chapter 5

Freedom Virtually Eliminates

Genocide and Mass Murder

The leaders of some governments have been mass murderers. They have killed their own citizens and foreigners, all unarmed and helplessly in their control. By shooting, drowning, burying alive, slicing, stabbing, torturing, beating, suffocating, starving, exposing, poisoning, crushing, and all the other myriad ways that lives can be wiped out, intentionally, and with forethought.

It seems difficult for those having lived in democracies all their lives to accept the simple truth of this. I know that even some of my political science colleagues resist the thought. I can see them wince when at a conference or meeting, for example, I say outright that Kim Il-sung, the recently deceased dictator of North Korea who was responsible for something like 1,700,000 dead, was a murderer. For some reason we can easily apply this to an individual committing serial murders, such as London’s famous "Jack the Ripper" who killed six or seven people in 1888, or the "Boston Strangler" DeSalvo who in 1962-1964 killed thirteen people. But we resist calling a dictator a mass murderer, even Idi Amin when he ruled Uganda, who may have physically participated in some of the murders carried out by his regime and was ultimately responsible for the deaths of some 300,000 of his subjects.

I call murder by a regime democide. This means any intentional killing of unarmed people and includes, as it does in American civil law, deaths due to the intentional and wanton risk of human lives. Thus Nazi Germany putting people in concentration camps where they died from overwork, disease, and exposure, or letting people starve to death as the Soviet Union did in the Ukraine in 1932-1933, is murder. And, of course, so is machine gunning POWs alongside a ditch; executing political opponents; shooting people to death because of their race, religion, or ethnicity; hanging people picked up at random in retaliation for attacks on soldiers; and so on and so on for all the means by which people can be killed by those with power over them.

I will deal first with the most murderous regimes of them all, the communist ones. This is in order to display the shocking product of absolute power and to nail down the virtue of freedom too widely unappreciated. I first will do this through four true examples of democide. Two will be taken from Stalin’s Soviet Union, one from Mao’s communist China, and the other from the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia.

During the 1930s a number of purges of presumed enemies of the people were carried out under Stalin’s orders. On the flimsiest presumptions and in many cases without any evidence of any wrong doing at all, people were arrested and tortured until they would admit to whatever the interrogator demanded.

It was believed among top communists that there was a certain percentage of the population that opposed the regime and had to be done away with. But in typical communist fashion, this was not something that could be left to the discretion of low level cadre. After all, iron, steel, pigs, wheat production, and virtually everything else economically had to be defined by a quota to assure that lower level cadre were guided in their work. It may be utterly incomprehensible to those outside such a totalitarian system that such cadre were also given quotas of people to murder, but it was consistent with the idea of central planning and control. From Moscow NKVD (a predecessor to the KGB) headquarters an order would go out to some small towns or villages to kill so many "enemies of the people," and soon enough the local henchmen would report back that the task was completed.

That such orders would be given is incredible enough. That the local official would obey them is unbelievable. Why did "quite ordinary decent human beings, with a normal hatred of injustice and cruelty" carry out these merciless purges and executions? Simple: through sweating, trembling, fear. Consider what Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, in their book appropriately titled Empire of Fear, wrote about what a friend, who is called M—, said of his experience,

Throughout this period Stalin was particularly concerned about Ukrainian nationalism and their opposition to collectivization. This was a major reason for Ukrainian opposition to Moscow and a source of support for Ukrainian exiles abroad planning for an independent Ukraine, and being given aid to that end by Nazi Germany. One strong base for this opposition was the peasant and for this reason when a drought hit the Ukraine in the early 1930s Stalin purposely exacerbated the resulting famine. He blockaded the Ukraine and would not let food in, and he sent cadre on systematic forays against the peasants to uncover any food they might be hiding. Even warm bread was taken off peasants tables and seed grain for the next planting was expropriated; dogs and cats were shot and when the peasants started to eat birds, these too were shot from the trees. About 5,000,000 Ukrainians died from hunger and disease as a result.

But, there was another source of nationalism, its culture-carriers. The communists therefore shot Ukrainian writers, historians and composers, Ukrainian officials too considerate of the Ukraine; and even itinerant, blind folk singers. Those with "bourgeoisie sensitivities" might find the following from the memoirs of composer Dmitri Shostakovich to have its own chilling horror.

Turning now to communist China, its Cultural Revolution during the 1960s was a tumultuous period. The communist party was split between those who supported Mao’s desire to continue the glorious communist revolution and those who were more pragmatic, the so called "capitalist roaders." No one could be neutral in the bloody conflict for power between these two groups. Military units fought each other, even with cannon and tanks; students waged pitched battles with machine guns and grenades given them by military sympathizers. The victors in one battle or another would then often systematically purge the opposition, subjecting them to torture and mass execution. How many died in this internal conflagration cannot be counted. Perhaps 1,600,000; even possibly 10,000,000.

In this struggle, Mao and his supporters could trust no intellectual or scientist of any sort, especially in the governing of any organization. For this reason it was customary in these years to put fanatical communist radicals, regardless of their lack of experience or knowledge of their job, in charge of universities, schools, scientific institutes, hospitals, and intellectual associations of one sort or another. Consider the following experience related by a Chinese scientist when Shan Guizhang, a fanatic and ignorant radical, was appointed to head one of China's most prestigious of institutes, the Institute of Optics and Precision Instruments in Changchun.

Now Shan had read Tales of the Plum Flower Society, a spy thriller about an entirely fictional effort to break a Kuomintang espionage network in the Academy of Sciences. The chief Kuomintang agent was named Peng Jiamu, also a name, unfortunately, of a real scientist working at the institute. Incredibly, Shan believed that scientist Peng was in fact the real life spy in the book. So, fully understandable in the context of the "Cultural Revolution," Shan had 166 scientists at the institute arrested as spies, along with local accountants, policemen, workers, and even nursery attendants. Some were beaten to death; some others committed suicide. Sufficient proof of spying was the existence of a radio or camera at home or the ability of a person to speak a foreign language. After thus purging the institute of these "spies," Shan was promoted to a provincial Party committee.

The killing in Cambodia is the most extreme case of democide in this century. The Khmwe Rouge murdered perhaps one-third of the Cambodian people from April 1975 to their defeat in a war with Vietnam during the first days of 1979. In 1946 the Khmer Rouge militarily overthrew U.S. supported General Lon Nol, took control of the government, and in the next few days evacuated all the cities they newly controlled, including the millions in Phnom Penh, the capital. They forced all these city-folk or refugees to join the peasants and work the soil from morning to night. All that was grown and harvested was seized by the Khmer Rouge. What the new and old peasants were fed in return was often insufficient to sustain life or protect them against disease. As a result at least 1,000,000 starved to death or died from associated disease.

The Khmer Rouge also committed outright genocide, as of the Muslim Chams, Cambodian-Vietnamese, and Buddhist Monks. They murdered all officers who had served in the Lon Nol army or police. They killed those Cambodians having any college or professional education, or speaking a foreign language. They executed anyone suspected of plots against the regime, or violating any one of the plethora of rules and regulations. They also killed people for laziness, complaining, wrong attitudes, insufficient enthusiasm, or unsatisfactory work.

I will give only one example of this, but as a teacher, it is for me the most hideous of all the accounts I have read. This is the Buddhist monk Hem Samluat’s description of an execution he witnessed in the village of Do Nauy.

Few would deny any longer what these examples attest, that communism—Marxism-Leninism and its variants—meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. What was this human cost of totalitarian communism?

Table 5.1 lists all communist governments that have committed any form of democide and gives their estimated total domestic and foreign democide and its annual rate (the percent of a government’s domestic population murdered per year). It also shows the total for communist guerrillas (including quasi-governments, such as the Mao soviets in China prior to the communist victory in 1949) and the world total for all governments and guerrillas (including such quasi-governments as the White Armies during the Russian civil war in 1917-1922). Figure 5.1 graphs the communist megamurderers and compares this to the communist and world totals.

These estimates have been pieced together from hundreds of sources and in determining the final figures I have tried to be prudent and avoid exaggeration. Nonetheless, all these figures and their graph are only rough approximations. Even were we to have total access to all communist archives we still would not be able to calculate precisely how many the communists murdered. We can, however, get a probable order of magnitude and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range. And that is what the estimates in the table and figure are meant to be. Their apparent precision is only due to the total for most communist governments being the summation of dozens of subtotals (as of forced labor deaths each year) and calculations (as in extrapolating scholarly estimates of executions or massacres).

With this understood, the Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all, apparently killing over 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Of all the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Korea and Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Obviously the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, of all countries in this century, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of an initial population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot’s rule of slightly over 2 to 1.

In sum the communists probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or nearly two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself it shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century’s international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone—one communist country—well surpasses this cost of war. And those of communist China almost equal it.

How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with absolute power. Communists believed that they knew

the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government—the Communist Party—was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were like lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.

Constructing this utopia was seen as a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia justified all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism, in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 during 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead during 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.

But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters have proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that? In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven and indicated the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers.

What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state’s instruments of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family. The result is what we see in table 5.1.

Communism has been human kinds greatest social engineering experiment. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed about 110,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology and that is that no one can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power the political regime has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or decree the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering freedom.

And consistent with this, communism does not stand alone in such mass murder. We do have the example of totalitarian Nazi Germany, which may have itself murdered some 20,000,000 Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, Germans, and other nationalities. Then there is the authoritarian Nationalist government of China under Chiang Kai-shek, which murdered nearly 10,000,000 Chinese from 1928 to 1949, and the totalitarian Japanese militarists who murdered almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and others during World War II. And then we have the 1,000,000 or more Bengalis and Hindus killed in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 by the Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, particularly by the authoritarian Polish government as it seized the German Eastern Territories, killing perhaps over 1,000,000 of them. Nor should we ignore the 1,000,000 plus deaths in authoritarian Mexico from 1900 to 1920, which includes many poor Indians and peasants being killed by forced labor on barbaric haciendas. One could go on and on to detail various kinds of noncommunist democide.

But what connects them all is this. As a government’s power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and, as it is less democratically free, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires or to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite has it, other causes and conditions can operate to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted.

All this gives no better utilitarian argument for freedom. It preserves and secures life.

Chapter 6

Freedom Produces

Wealth and Prosperity

Universal freedom would not only end war as we know it, it would reduce to a minimum political violence, and practically eliminate genocide and mass murder. As if this were not enough, it also promotes wealth and prosperity. Freedom is an economic engine of jobs, wages, increased earnings, new technology, and greater human choice.

What has often been called the technological revolution of the 18th and 19th century was really a revolution in freedom. As government loosened its strangle hold on national economies and foreign trade, as it allowed the forces of entrepeneuralship and creativity to develop and flourish, there was a takeoff in new inventions, new businesses, and the earnings and wages of the poor. Before this revolution the poor were tied to a farm or manor and lived the most basic and poorest of lives. They often faced the threat of starvation if a harvest was meager, if they lost or broke their tools, or were dispossessed of their land. And they would wear the most basic and plainest of clothes and eat the simplest and cheapest food. What the revolution of freedom did is to free these poor from this kind of servitude, assure them of basic wage, and enable them to improve their consumption. Much to the complaint of the upper classes, who saw this as putting on airs, the poor began to dress in more colorful and better clothes and to eat a greater variety of food.

All of us are the inheritors of this economic revolution, of this free market. The automobiles we drive, the television we watch, the movies we see, the computers we use, the telephones we answer, the planes we fly, and the diverse and wholesome food we eat, all owe their development and availability to the free market. At the most basic level, the operation of the free market can be seen best in the availability of an incredible variety of cheap food for the poor and lower middle class. An American supermarket is a cornucopia of agricultural wealth, with choices of fruits, vegetables, meats, cereals, breads, wines, and so on from throughout the United States and, indeed, from many countries of the world. The same is true of a department store, which shelves, hangs, and displays a rich variety of goods. To truly see the results of freedom is to shop in a supermarket or department store.

Then compare this with what happened under the former command economies of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Mao tse-tung’s China, and elsewhere. Here the opposite of a free market was imposed. Government owned and ran all sources of production and all stores. In the worst of the command economies there were no private businesses, no entrepreneurs, no private farms, and no automatic balancing of supply and demand, except in a black market. In the best of them some private farming was allowed, but prices and distribution were tightly controlled by the government. All experienced shortages of basic goods and in some cases their resulting economies were driven to the point of collapse.

By the 1980s the standard of living of Soviet citizens was not much better than it had been in Czarist times, even after some sixty-years of communist control over the economy (Westerners were often misled by what they saw in Moscow, but Moscow was a show place and was in comparison to the rest of the Soviet Union like a developed country compared to the Third World). In China by the 1970s, the standard of living of the average Chinese was below what it had been before the Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937. We all have heard the stories of life in typical communist countries, of lines after lines of people waiting to buy scarce goods; of days spent just to find toilet paper, sausages, or shoes; of a line for a ticket to buy an item, a line to pick up the item, and yet a third line to pay for it. We have also heard of the special privileges the ruling elite had, their own restaurants, their own stores to shop in with the best of goods, their chauffeured cars and villas or retreats. But few people know about the worst that has happened in some of these countries under a nonfree economy.

Even the introduction of a semi-command structure can wreck agriculture, as happened during the Russian Civil War. From 1921 to 1922 the communist government under Lenin not only confiscated food from the peasants to feed people in the cities and the Red Army, but also seized large farms without compensation and introduced massive price and production controls on the peasants. Of course, the deleterious effects of this were made worse by the dislocations caused in many regions of Russia by the civil war, as one army or another would control food producing areas. All told perhaps some 5,000,000 people starved to death or died from associated diseases. The toll would have been millions higher had not the American government provided massive aid to the starving.

But this was not the worst. I have already mentioned the intentional communist made famine in the Soviet Union during which some 5,000,000 Ukrainians were starved to death or died of associated diseases. This also was the period when peasants throughout the Soviet Union were undergoing forced collectivization. They were being driven off the farms, their livestock and tools confiscated, and forced to work within collectives. The idea here was simple. This was an attempt to multiply food production through the supposed efficiency and economy achieved by one very large farm replacing many small ones. Tractors (which were impractical on very small farms) could then be used, the food production planned, and farms assigned appropriate tasks depending upon what needed to be done and upon peasant skills.

This is one of those appealing ideas in the abstract, which fail completely when applied. These collective farms robbed the farmer of the incentive to work hard, but more importantly, the central planners in Moscow tried to fit all collectives into one plan, one set of rules. Down from Moscow would come orders for soil preparation, planting, fertilizing, and harvesting, when, where, and how. Local weather, soil, and topography were hardly taken into account by Moscow bureaucrats. The result at first was disastrous for agriculture and when a mild drought occurred that peasants in the past would have been able to wait out, the effects of the drought were multiplied by collectivization and caused a serious famine. Moreover, as mentioned, Stalin purposely aggravated this famine in the Ukraine, but in the North Caucasus and elsewhere some 2,000,000 people also died from this famine and its effects.

The Soviets tried to adjust their way of running these collective farms to make them more productive and did improve their production to a certain extent, but there were still local famines and another big one several years after World War II in which perhaps 2,000,000 or more died. Nothing helped agricultural productivity as much as giving farmers on the collectives the right on their time off to plant food on a little plot nearby. As one who has lived under a free market would expect, these became highly productive and by the time communism collapsed were accounting for most of the food produced in the Soviet Union.

But the total suppression of the agricultural free market by the Soviets was only one gigantic human experiment with productivity by command. Unwilling to learn from these disastrous results, blinded by their love of Marxism, the Chinese communists did the same thing once they had gained complete control over mainland China and had prepared their peasants. Within a few years all land and farms were taken over by the government, collectives called communes were built, and all farmers became, in effect, not only factory workers, but forced conscripts in a national agricultural army. In many communes they lived in dormitories, woke to bugles, ate their food in mess halls, and lined up after breakfast to be marched off with flags flying to carry out their group tasks and meet the commune’s quota.

This was true communism. It was the dream of those who believed that government could build a society to improve the lot of the poor and feed the needy. Here was total reconstruction, the revolution for which Mao tse-tung had worked and fought. Of course, what this meant was that those communist officials put in charge of a commune or agricultural region, could not afford to underfill their quotas. All, thus, exceeded them and food production soared. China was becoming an agriculturally rich country. The experiment had worked, or so it seemed to the government and to well wishers abroad. But all these statistics were a sham. They were only on paper.

The actual results were absolutely disastrous. Catastrophic. Men, women, and children starved to death in the communes and fields, in the villages and towns, and cities. While food production records were being broken the emaciated bodies began to pile up and soon their numbers, even to top party rulers, became undeniable. By 1962 the worst famine in world history was underway.

How many died in this is much in dispute. There are figures as high as 40,000,000 dead. A well documented estimate is 27,000,000. If we take this figure as close to the actual number, it is as though the total population of Canada had starved to death in two or three years.

There have been other famines caused by anti-free market policies. Africa is a good case in point. If one tracks where and when famines have occurred in Africa, one will find that they usually stem from government agricultural controls, particularly over prices, production, and distribution of food, and in some cases the added dislocation of a civil war. Somalia is the more recent example, but Ethiopia stands out for the extent of controls the communists put in place over agricultural production and the resulting famine. During the 1980s over 1,000,000 Ethiopians starved to death or died from related diseases. This is out of a population of 33,500,000 people, which makes its famine nearly proportionally as great as that of China.

These greatest of economic experiments in world history, this rebuilding of whole societies to match some abstract plan in which people are fitted, this attempt to do better, by command from the top, what free people can do spontaneously for themselves, has completely failed. All one need do is think of the market place in any free society compared to the shortages, long lines, limited choices, and massive famines of command economies.

There is a joke about the command economy that was heard from Eastern Europeans when they lived under communism. This is that if a communist country were to take over the great Sahara desert, you would hear nothing about it for ten years and then there would be a sudden shortage of sand.

It is no accident of history that the most developed and technologically advanced nations are democratic. Nor it is by chance that the poorest nations are those in which there is little or no open economic competition, in which people are limited or prevented from freely buying and selling goods, and in which to get anything done one has to bribe government bureaucrats or their relatives. In some other countries, such as India, until recently, even though it was democratic, a socialist angst had infused the governing and bureaucratic elite’s view of the economy. This severely limited India’s economic growth, while what economic freedom was allowed kept mass hunger at bay.

More specifically, consider the economic miracles that are Germany and Japan. Their economies and infrastructures were thoroughly destroyed during World War II yet both had to absorb millions of returning soldiers and civilians; in the case of West Germany it was something like 8,000,000 ethnic and Reich Germans expelled from the Eastern German territories by Poland and from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. How did they recover as fast as they did from being among the most devastated of nations in 1945 to being, in the early 1990s, among the most economically powerful states? The answer in each case: a relatively free market.

But we can go further than this in showing the positive results of a free market. There is also rapid economic growth and modernization of now democratic South Korea. Compared to an annual average world growth rate in domestic product of 2.3 percent for the years 1950 to 1985, South Korea grew at an annual rate of 5.3 percent, in spite of the very destructive Korean War at the beginning of this period. Korea is now becoming a close competitor to Japan.

There is also the example of now democratic Taiwan, which over this period has grown at a rate of 7 percent, and which must be now classified as nearly among the developed nations.

Then there is, of course, the "Asian tiger" that is Singapore, which, in spite of an authoritarian government, has allowed the market to be relatively free, and, as a result, has become an economic jewel of Southeast Asia. Over the same period of 1950 to 1985 it grew at a rate of 7.9 percent, making it economically the fastest growing country in the world. And we cannot ignore the British colony of Hong Kong. Located on a series of small islands and a small strip of mainland China, it comprises only 397 square miles. In 1945 it had a population of under 600,000 Chinese, but through natural population growth and by absorbing millions of refugees fleeing communist China its population has swelled to over 6,000,000. This many on this small bit of land, yet there is little unemployment, a bustling, productive, and continually growing economy, and an annual growth rate of 6.9 percent, only slightly behind Singapore and Taiwan.

And there is also Chile, which, under the military government of Augusto Pinochet (from 1973 to 1989), brought in a group of free market economists from the University of Chicago and, with their advice, freed Chile’s economy from the controls and regulations that had crippled it. This policy has in the main been followed by now democratic Chile and, as a result, the country is a shining example to the rest of South America of a relatively free market at work.

Note also that once communist China liberalized its economy and introduced a modified, semicontrolled free market in many areas of the country, the economy has taken off. Year after year, now, China is growing at or near a double digit rate. Cities are literally being rebuilt, investments and businesses from abroad are competing with a new class of Chinese investors and businessmen, and, compared with just a couple of decades ago, people now have plenty of food. The visitor returning to China after twenty years is astounded by the signs of economic vigor and growth.

Such power of even a limited free market is greatly enhanced when it is part of the civil and political freedoms comprising liberal democracy. When we deal with such freedom globally and through time, we find that economic growth and relative wealth are at their greatest in free nations. In particular, for 113 nations from 1950 to 1985 the amount of their annual economic growth in terms of real domestic product, an excellent indicator of the wealth of a nation, goes down as their democratic freedom decreases. This is shown in figure 6.1 for an average of thirty-two liberal democracies, fifty-one authoritarian and thirty totalitarian regimes.

Note that communist countries have been excluded from this plot. It became clear after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, their statistics were largely a fraud. While they showed a greater average growth rate than free nations, their economies were in fact either near collapse or at Third World levels. Moreover, Middle Eastern major oil producing countries, such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait are also omitted, since their wealth and growth is largely a happenstance result of their huge oil fields.

The measure of democratic freedom is based on the Freedom House annual ratings that were described in chapter 2. These ratings go back only to 1973, but their annual average is largely applicable from 1950 to 1972 as well.

Economic growth rate is only one measure. A more important one is the actual average level of wealth, which is plotted in figure 6.2. The measure for this is the average real gross domestic product of nations per person in U.S. dollars. As can be seen so clearly, the more democratic freedom, the more wealthy the people are on the average, with a huge gap between the most free and the least: $7,300 average wealth, 1950-1985, for the most free thirty-two nations versus an average of $900 for the thirty least free. Those that live in democratically free nations are on the average eight times wealthier in gross domestic product per person than those in the least democratic nations.

Economic productivity and growth and a stable and incredibly varied supply of food and other goods are only some of the benefits of a democracy and its free market. There is also the great stimulus to new inventions and innovation. And there is the continuous reduction of the cost of goods compared to the average wage (inflation aside, which, after, is all caused by government printing too much money), such that even the most complex and advanced products are available to the common man.

Consider the hand held calculator, for example. When I was a graduate student and had to calculate statistics for my MA thesis in 1960, I used a large, desktop, Monroe mechanical calculator with a crank. In retrospect it was painfully slow, but better than doing the arithmetic by hand. The machine cost about $1,100 new. In proportion to the inflationary growth in average American personal income since then, this would be about $13,000 in current money. On it I could calculate sums, cross-products, and correlations, and it took me about two months to do all the calculations needed. By the early 1970s, I could pick up a hand held Hewlett Packard electronic calculator that would do all these calculations and many more (such as logarithms and trigonometric functions), and store one figure or calculation in memory. It cost about $400 (about $1,400 in current prices relative to income). Now one can get such an hand calculator for $10, and paying slightly more will get one a calculator that will do much more then that Hewlett Packard. And for $1,100 I could now buy a personal computer that has a capability undreamed of a mere decade ago and on which I could have done all the needed calculations for my MA thesis in seconds, not months. It is as though the free market, through innovation and competition, had brought the price of a vastly improved new automobile in 1960 down to the cost of a new shirt (which makes one wonder what in fact the price of an automobile now would be without any government regulations on its production and quality).

Also, I did my Ph.D. dissertation on the Northwestern University hard frame central IBM computer worth tens of millions of dollars in current money. It had a memory of 36,000 bytes and took up a huge air conditioned room with its blinking lights, spinning tapes, massive central processor, printer, batch input and output devices, and bustling attendants. The computer had an almost spiritual mystery about it. To use it one had to learn FORTRAN, and to change some of its functions there was a board or two that one had to physically rewire. That was in 1962-1963. Today I sit before a fourteen inch color screen with a new Macintosh Quadra 650 that has an 8 megabyte memory (expanded to 16 megabytes by virtual memory) and a 260 megabyte hard disk. The cost was several thousand dollars. Unbelievable power at an unbelievablely low cost compared to about a generation ago. Such are the fruits of freedom.

But why should freedom be so productive? One reason is that people have an incentive to work and produce because they are personally rewarded. If they can produce something that other people want at a reasonable cost, they can be rewarded handsomely, and, indeed, even become quite rich. There is something more here than simply material rewards. One takes care of one’s own. It is like driving a rented automobile versus one’s own—in subtle, perhaps even some extreme ways, one is inclined to be rougher with the rented car. After all, nothing is lost by rapid starts, fast cornering, screeching tires, grinding gears, ignoring potholes, and letting it get filthy. The rental cost is the same regardless.

This is like the commons. One takes care of one's house and yard. It is personal property and a reflection of the inner self, a matter of personal pride. As a result, the house will last longer and the yard will be noticed and will be a source of compliments. But the commons is owned by the public and therefore, no one person. The government that is the steward over such property, which means the bureaucrats have a different incentive. That is, they wish to do the least work for the most money.

Now I have seldom met bureaucrats that mistreated me, that were not friendly, and that I felt I would dislike if I got to know them. But nonetheless, their motivations are in general perverse. The public property of which they are the custodians is not their's personally and they do not have the prime motivation to take care of and improve it. Their personal motivation is usually to do the least work at the best wage, and, even if it is to do the best job possible, it is to do no more than necessary. Consequently, one sees trees and flowers that are planted along newly built public roads wither and die for lack of water; one sees grassy areas in parks soon overgrown with weeds and littered with paper cups and plates, beer cans, and all the debris of people who use facilities that they do not own.

The problem of the commons pervades all government activity, even when the lives of human beings are at stake. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago described how any of us might behave like the guards responsible for taking care of prisoners being transported in cattle cars to forced labor camps. Each car would be packed with prisoners, with perhaps one toilet at one end or a toilet for several cars. The guards would be responsible for not only preventing escape, but for the care of each prisoner, such as escorting them once a day to the one toilet at the end of the car, waiting for them to finish ("Hurry, hurry, you’ve done enough now, get out!"), returning them to their cells and bringing them food and water. These were difficult chores, tiring when a train was filled with hundreds of prisoners, especially the doling out of water. This might involve taking a heavy barrel of water from cell to cell in each car and ladling out the water to each prisoner, a slow, cumbersome, and tiring task. The prisoners were, of course, unappreciative of the guards efforts, and would yell and scream for the water, jostle and fight for their cup or hand full, and demand more when in the jostling they spilled most of it. As day after day and sometimes week after week the loaded trains worked their way toward some labor or dispersal camp, cannot one understand why occasionally the guards would forget the water, cuss out and hurry up the prisoners, or dole out less water than they needed? The prisoners were not their property and while the guards were given the responsibility of taking care of the prisoners, this was only a job. Aside from any humanity a guard might have had, the only major motivation was fear of what would happen to him if a prisoner escaped. There was little concern over the state of the prisoners when camp was reached or the number that died, for this was something of which their superiors took little notice.

We have here some understanding of why slaves bought by plantation owners would often be well taken care of, although they might be punished severely for stepping out of line, while the biggest slave establishment of modern times, the Soviet gulag (forced labor camp system) with its 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 prisoners at any one time from the middle 1930s to the mid-1950s, let their forced laborers die by the millions. These people were often worked to death or died of hunger and exposure. Their life expectancy in some camps, especially the mining camps in Kolyma was a matter of months. Throughout much of the gulag about 20 percent of the prisoners died each year to total, by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, around 39,000,000 dead. These poor people were killed by a bureaucracy that saw them as rocks and bricks, as lumber and nails, to use to achieve a camp’s work quota. The incentive for the camp managers was to get the most out of the workers for the least cost (which often then could be pocketed). This was the very worst of the commons.

There is more to freedom than the incentive of private ownership that comes with a free market. There is also the fact that each of us is an individual with our own perceptions and experience. While we share much with our neighbors, friends, and loved ones, we also are different. Each of our paths through life is unique. This means that we alone can best judge what we desire, want, and can do. To borrow a useful cliché, we alone know where the shoe pinches.

This is more fundamental than it may at first seem. In the free market we are free to buy and sell, to create and build, only restrained by the like freedom of others and government restraints that may protect us all against some negative effects of freedom, such as pollution and the exploitation of lower animals, as in dog fighting. This freedom enables us to best adjust to the world around us in terms of our interests and values.

Moreover, we can take account of our own experiences and learning in what we chose to do, whether at work or play. Thus, a farmer who has learned from his parents and his own direct experience how to till the unique soil of northeastern Ohio, to read the local weather patterns, and to plant and fertilize the seeds that will grow well in the rocky soil, will best know how to make his farm productive. No government official far away in Columbus, Ohio, or Washington, D.C., can do as well. And indeed, were they to command him as to how to farm, not only would his incentive to produce be lost, but even were he to work hard at the soil, the productivity of the farm would be reduced, if not destroyed. The loss of freedom by the people is a loss of knowledge and values that cannot be replaced by government commands.

Where there is a free market there is an automatic balancing of what goods cost and how willing the people are to pay for them. If the prices of goods get too low given the demand, the goods become scarce and it is then profitable for the prices to be raised. But higher prices attract more businesses to produce the product, which makes more of the product available. As this larger number of goods at the higher price begins to exceed demand the price will have to be lowered to compensate, perhaps forcing some less efficient producers out of the market, and so on. At some point a stable price may be reached which just matches the demand.

This dynamic nature of freedom has many consequences. One of which is that it is often more profitable to sell many of some product at a small profit than few at a high profit. This encourages lower prices and cheaper goods to meet the mass demand of poorer people. Of course, some producers will specialize in building yachts and make a profit at it. That is what they do best. But many others will find it most profitable to market cheap clothes, fast food, games, and a thousand and one devices that make life easier. They will constantly produce more, cheaper, and with better quality. We have seen this with regard to computers. Quality and capability have gone up unbelievably, while prices continue to drop sharply. A personal computer system selling for around $8,000 just three years ago is now superseded by a much better computer system presently selling for $2,000.

Second, this free market price mechanism is a massive, economy wide message system. It communicates shortages, where things are cheap, where production might be profitable enough for a business to move into the market; it also communicates where demand is slack and production might be cut back. In other words, prices tell business what to put on the supermarket shelves where and when and at how much.

And, as a result, the free market is equally a massive distribution system. Stop and think about this for the moment. Consider the miracle of the thousands of goods on the supermarket shelves, many from other countries and far away states. Who decides this? What great mind or computer figures out what is to be sold in what market for how much and when? This is with no shortages, no long lines waiting for a supply truck to arrive, as in command economies, and with relatively little wastage. How is this done? It is done automatically and spontaneously, by the decisions of hundreds of thousands of independent producers, suppliers, truckers, and market managers, all responding to different prices and demand.

This is precisely why the command market and government intervention fail to improve prices and allocation over the free market. No government officials, no social scientists, no c