Free Market Essentials Part 6: Morality and a Higher Power

By: R.J. Moeller

We've come to the end of our 6-part series on "Essentials of the Free Market". It has been our intent throughout to define the parameters of what is needed for free enterprise to be possible (and to flourish). We've covered topics such as property rights and the rule of law, and today we close things out with the least understood, but probably the most important, area of all: Morality and a Higher Power.

Thomas Jefferson was a lawyer. He was a brilliant man who did more than almost anyone else when it came to communicating the underlying, core principles of the American revolution to the world. As a student of the law and of history, Jefferson knew that in the Declaration of Independence he needed to strongly state the case for why the colonies deserved to be free.

Here is how he began his argument to the court of world opinion:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

At the very epicenter of that case is this: "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."

The American love affair with personal liberty, a non-negotiable pre-requisite for a free market economy to be possible, is grounded in the idea that our Rights come from a Higher Source than the State.

Here are a few thoughts from our Founders on that very subject:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” –John Adams

"For my own part, I sincerely esteem it [the Constitution] a system which without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests." -Alexander Hamilton

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God?” -Thomas Jefferson

“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” -James Madison

The intent here is not to castigate or marginalize the non-religious among us. The Founders, like the overwhelming majority of Americans today, simply acknowledged that belief in a Higher Power was important to them, and important to maintaining a civil society (as best we can in an imperfect world).

The thing about freedom is that it isn't free. It requires something of the people who enjoy its benefits and luxuries. It certainly requires law and order from a legal, governmental standpoint; but the citizenry must hold themselves to a higher standard. This is not possible without morality. It is not possible without values, and the values that have dominated the American historical narrative are unequivocally Judeo-Christian.

Another amazingly beneficial thing about the free market is that it is the ultimate facilitator of what we would call the "melting pot." A Hindu originally from India answers phones for a corporation created by a Catholic man from Boston, and that is now run by an agnostic woman from San Francisco. A Jewish tailor mends the suit of a Muslim accountant, and neither men know the difference. Baptists on a road trip buy gas from a Lutheran's filling station...

You get the idea.

While everyone is welcome in a free market economy and liberty-loving society, not all ideas, values, and faiths have led to freer markets and liberty-rich societies. Ours have. There are reasons for that reality.

America's people aren't better than those of any other nation; Her ideas, ideals, and values most definitely are.