On The Objective Standard blog yesterday there was a post on Auberon Herbert who was a 19th Century British political philosopher and advocate of personal liberty. For those who are fans of Ayn Rand, you will find much that is familiar to you in the words of this man who lived and worked decades before Atlas Shrugged. I encourage everyone to take the time to read it.

Being intrigued by what was offered in the blog post, I was very pleased to find that there are a couple of Herbert’s works available on Amazon for the Kindle. The one today’s quotation comes from is Auberon Herbert: Selected Writings from a Reluctant Anarchist. In the first essay, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, answering the common question of whether the state should pass laws to restrict liberty in order to protect people at least “to some extent from their own folly and wrongdoing,” he says:

It is true that by tying his hands you may, as long as your knots happen to hold fast, prevent his committing a murder or of taking what belongs to someone else; but do not for a moment believe that in so doing you have made a better or more intelligent man of him. … It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can be only submissive wearing of cords that others have tied around our hands. …

[E]ven if you believed you could make men wise and good by depriving them of liberty of action, you have no right to do so. Who has given you a commission to decide what your brother man shall or shall not do? Who has given you charge of his life and his faculties and his happiness as well as your own? Perhaps you think yourself wiser and better fitted to judge than he is; but so did all those of old days – kings, emperors, and heads of dominant churches – who possessed power, and never scrupled to compress and shape their fellow-men as they themselves though best, by means of that power.

If only more, heck any, politicians today would read, understand, and act out of this sort of understanding.

If only more, heck any, people realized that they cannot, with impunity, vote to tie their fellow citizens’ hands, regardless of how “noble” the purpose. They will soon find their hands tied as well.