Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/37

 they affect the special interests of certain individuals or groups.

To keep order without unnecessary interference with personal liberty may be said to include the duty of preserving the rights of the person, of preventing monopoly, of arranging just taxation, of sanitation and education, and the duty of terminating unemployment.

The facilitation of production and exchange throws upon the state such proper tasks as drainage, reclamation, reforestation and irrigation, the construction of highways and harbors, the protection of our sea-borne traffic, and—most important of all—the guarding against any impairment or repudiation of our tokens of value.

These two groups comprise our duty to our fellow-citizens in that they ensure, as far as possible, order and consequent freedom of movement.

To permit no avoidable barriers to advantageous markets and to scrutinize our would-be citizens are also duties to our fellows, and possibly cover our whole duty to our neighbor. It is probable, too, that the fulfillment of all the duties enumerated above will discharge any responsibility we have toward posterity.

Apart from the safeguarding of the person of the citizen by the state, the first duty is the prevention of any power sufficiently great to challenge or usurp the functions of the state. We have granted to the state the right of coercion only that order may be preserved, but it is a fatal right to yield to any man or group of men within the political boundaries of the country. This our fathers realized and they endeavored to guard the rights of individuals against such a menace as far as possible, though they were more afraid of the state itself developing tyrannous power than they were of any group within the state. Despite their precautions, led by optimists and would-be miracle workers, we are now, unfortunately, engaged in throwing down some of the safeguards they erected.

If it seemed necessary to be on guard against the possibility of state-coercion, which is ostensibly unselfish, how much more