Was the Statue of Liberty a gift from the people of France?

History
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LadyWithAPastWhile visiting France recently, I posted to my blog about seeing Lady Liberty in Paris. I’m afraid I offhandedly gave a bit of false history in that post: on the subject of the Statue of Liberty I wrote, “The one in New York Harbor was a gift from the French government, so I can imagine Parisians consider Lady Liberty to be as much a French symbol as an American one.”

But the statue was not, in fact, a gift from the French government. I believe my mistake is based on a 20th-century reading of a 19th-century idiom.

The National Park Service, which maintains the monument, makes the claim I learned in grammar school: “The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World was a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States.…”

To quote Max Borders from the Freeman, “There is probably no greater threat to real community than the conflation of community with State power.”

And yet that conflation surrounds us. I certainly grew up with it as a common refrain in my schooling. Most of the time when the teacher said “the people,” she meant the state.

Really, how can “the people of France” give anything to anyone? I just assumed it was the standard rhetorical trick, using the people as a euphemism for the government.

The real history turns out to be much more interesting. According to Lady with a Past by Elizabeth Mitchell, the statue’s designer, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, wanted wealth and world renown for building a celebrated colossus, and he was willing to shop the idea around. He was not a fan of the American people and wasn’t even particularly devoted to the idea of liberty: “The Americans believe that it is Liberty that illumines the world, but, in reality, it is my genius.”

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The Case for Independence

War
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On July 4th some Americans celebrate the rejection of empire. Politicians more likely see it as the US government’s birthday. Libertarians must decide which legacy the day truly commemorates, and celebrate or mourn appropriately.

If this is a day to remember liberation, disunion, the idea that a house divided might be more civil, peaceful and secure than one kept together by force—if we are to focus on the subversion of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence more than its inconsistencies—we should consider the benefits of reclaiming and radicalizing the spirit of 1776 and applying its principles to the present day. We should contemplate the possibility that what Americans and foreigners need is independence from the empire.

The American colonists had been particularly irked by the British government’s hypocrisy regarding the liberal tradition. The British prided themselves on having a liberal and enlightened political culture, complete with checks and balances, due process and the like. But they did not grant such privileges and immunities to their colonial subjects. They preached freedom and toleration but practiced international despotism. Edmund Burke, one of the most consistent proponents of liberty in Britain, decried this colonial hypocrisy as an enormous scandal.

Today, the US empire is everything the British empire was: It claims the banner of constitutional justice at home, it feigns interest in freedom abroad, it poses as the embodiment of liberty itself. But it treats those in its clutches, especially those in its remote grasp, as dispensable means to an imperial end. It slaughters civilians with no regard for the number. It enforces martial law in its exploits abroad. It is the champion and vindicator, not of foreign liberty, but of theocracies and socialist states everywhere. In the course of its reign, it has laid waste to millions of lives.

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Does capitalism make us dumb?

(Austrian) Economics, History, Technology
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The anti-capitalists contend that the market fosters whatever has the broadest appeal, even when the lowest common denominator indulges our basest appetites.

Defenders of freedom and markets tend to fall back on one of two strategies: either explaining why capitalism’s apparent vice is really a virtue (would we really prefer a system in which a self-selected elite got to plan the supply independent of demand?), or championing the products impugned by capitalism’s critics.

Ludwig von Mises took the first position. In The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, he defended the popularity of detective stories not because of any inherent virtue in the genre but because murder mysteries were what the reading public wanted, whether or not the literati approved of their preferences.

Attempts at the second approach include compelling defenses of car culture, panegyrics to the Twinkie, even praise for shoddy products.

Some targets of disparagement, however, deserve a third approach.

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Sustainable Living, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Urban Farms

Environment
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In Oakland, California, not far from where I live, urban homesteading – growing food on private land for small-scale trade and consumption – has become so common the city government was forced to back off for once. In a rare triumph for sanity and freedom, anachronistic zoning ordinances from 1965 were liberalized to accommodate the city farmers. Molly Samuel explained at KQED:

“The city has already made some changes; it’s now legal to grow and sell vegetables on an empty lot with a conditional use permit. . . . Oakland North reports one of the hotly debated topics [at a city meeting] was animal husbandry: Should Oaklanders be permitted to raise, slaughter, and sell animals? Or not?”

Despite the remaining government bureaucracy, we have to cheer on the homesteaders. They are so impossible to ignore, hundreds of them flooding a city meeting, that the tyranny of zoning is being ratcheted back for once.

And although it has a leftish quality, libertarians ought to take notice of this counter-cultural movement, whose localizing agenda poses profound implications for the future of liberty. With the economic forecasts dire and the corporatist system of mega-farms firmly gripping the Obama administration and all federal politics for the foreseeable future, our rights and perhaps very lives may depend on the freedom to farm at home.

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dirty work

(Austrian) Economics, History
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I first heard of Steven Johnson’s 2006 book The Ghost Map from a George Will piece called “Survival of the Sudsiest.” The book’s full title is The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. Will describes it as “a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water.”

In the “The Books of Summer” (Liberty, July 2007), Bruce Ramsey also recommends it:

It tells the tale of the deadly outbreak of cholera in London in 1854, and how two men, a doctor and a preacher, proved how it was spread.… In parallel to the detective story is a revolting description of London in the early industrial age. The industrial revolution made London the earth’s largest city with the earth’s largest waste problem. Libertarians will note that market mechanisms did arise to handle this, though they were, in the author’s estimation, not so good. They will note that the first solution imposed by government made matters worse — but that the second one was better. The book also shows how the provision of sewers and a clean water supply ended cholera epidemics by the last quarter of the 19th century.

I’m finally getting around to reading The Ghost Map, and while it is compelling and enjoyable from the first page, it is also an excellent example of why it helps to have some economic literacy to be able to read popular history critically.

Both Johnson’s masterly prose and his questionable economics are evident from the first. Here’s his opening:

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