During the transition from limited government to the welfare state, freedom has come to mean freedom from responsibility. Such freedom, however, is not true freedom but a form of tyranny, which creates moral and social chaos.
The modern liberal’s vision of government is based on a twisted understanding of rights and justice—an understanding that clashes with the principle of freedom inherent in the higher law of the Constitution. Welfare rights, or entitlements, are “imperfect rights,” or pseudo-rights; they can be exercised only by violating what legal scholars call the “perfect right” to private property. Rights to welfare—whether to food stamps, public housing, health care, or business subsidies—create a legal obligation to help others. In contrast, the right to property, understood in the Lockean sense, merely obligates individuals to refrain from taking what is not theirs. For the modern liberal, justice refers to “social (or distributive) justice”—an amorphous term, subject to all sorts of abuse if made the goal of public policy, as F. A. Hayek has aptly noted in The Constitution of Liberty and other writings. As a norm for action, the concept of “social justice” leads to uncertainty and competition for government favors. The result is bigger government and corruption. The cost of the pursuit of social justice is the loss of freedom. Instead of creating certainty by limiting the range of government actions under a just rule of law, the modern “liberal” State has produced discord. Indeed, when the role of government is to do good with other people’s money, there is no end to the mischief government can cause.
