Free Market Institute Blog
Argumentum Ad Hitlerum
“Don’t know much about history,” crooned Paul Simon in 2012, but everyone seems to know about Adolf Hitler. I’ve found that Hitler is the “go to” example people bring up when they are citing examples of tyranny. And I hasten to add that Simon's song disparaged other subjects like French, science, and biology as well, and he only sang that song (apparently trumpeter Herb Alpert and songwriter Sam Cooke had a hand in writing it). But when you ask for egregious examples of tyrannical behavior, Adolf is often the first person to pop up in one’s mind. That’s some history we all know!
Hitler’s condemnation is justified and nearly universal, but what does it have to do with Walmart in Vermont?
It’s rather easy to cite Nazi Germany as THE example of tyranny, and it is worthwhile to ask how Germans in the early 1930s, “fell for” the Nazi nonsense. But every day infringements on liberty rarely reach the Hitler litmus test.
But Walmart?
In a constitutional republic (or liberal democracy…take your pick) such as the United States, it might be more worthwhile to look at seemingly little infringements on our rights rather than mustachioed monsters like Hitler.
Charles Fried, who was Solicitor General under President Reagan and is a law professor at Harvard, reminds us in his book Modern Liberty that we should think of smaller, less Gestapo-esque challenges to freedom: he calls these “gentle challenges” to our liberty.
One of those is Vermont’s exclusion of Walmart prior to 1993.
And what was wrong with that? Vermont is a scenic state, and it seems that blocking a proliferation of Walmarts (and, even worse, Dollar Stores!), might be appropriate. Walmart’s low prices, boxy buildings, and occasionally eccentric-looking shoppers can challenge quaint, and often beautiful, long-established smaller businesses.
Let’s think about this for a minute.
I get it on one level. I seldom enjoy strolling the aisles of Walmart, which is a scant mile from my residence; the food items are carb-y, processed, and sweet invitations to diabetes. Half the time I feel I need to close my eyes, lest I be tempted to shorten my lifespan. And where’d those Walmart greeters go?
But “common” products have a right to exist—or, more precisely, people who choose those products.
Fried argues that excluding Walmart does, in fact, challenge our freedoms. The “greatest enemy of liberty today,” he writes, “isn’t evil people who have a totalitarian bent” (though, I might add, they do exist), “but people with a vision of the good,” [emphases mine] whose visions end up “enlisting us into a cause that we don’t share.” We are used for others’ visions.
This problem becomes more acute as our diversity increases.
If we all were alike, and each of us were able to pay for the ambiance of small-town stores with high prices, boutique items, friendly employees, all artfully displayed in a designated historical landmark building, excluding ugly box stores wouldn’t be an issue, simply because they wouldn’t get any business.
Keep in mind that while individual’s votes in the political sphere rarely change political outcomes, each of our dollars is a vote that always brings us what we want given our constrained choices in a world characterized by scarcity.
But we don’t live in that homogeneous world. Some of us—many, in fact—would prefer driving to an ugly box store filled with very inexpensive do-dabs that make our little castles more livable, and even more beautiful. Others might snicker at those polyester blankets showing dogs playing poker, ($9.93 at Walmart, by the way) but they make many of us happy.
“Liberty,” Fried adds, “is about how others use me.” If I foist my ideas of beauty on others, it creates division and resentment. And in a nod to an important Academy “Star,” he adds that “liberty is individuality made normative.” Individuality and liberty are fraternal twins.
And that is what federalism is all about. The founders devised a marvelous system that celebrated diversity and gave each of us the ability to maximize our individual choices at a local level. I may not like the Dollar Store that opens up shop in my town, but I have the right (if I have the funds) to move to Boutiqueville. The homes are pricey, as are its stores’ wares, but I can stroll downtown and enjoy the aesthetic pleasures surrounding me.
Meanwhile, Bob might not enjoy (or be able to afford) Boutiqueville. His mobile home is his castle. The decorations may not be featured in Martha Stewart’s or Joanna Gaines’s catalogs of exquisite taste, but he’s happy spending his hard-earned time off from his daily drudgery in what he considers to be beautiful, given his own particular constraints.
And judging Bob to be a boor is elitist, akin to expecting every town to be as pristinely beautiful as Kohler.
The state, which has always been liberty’s greatest violator, is also (or at least should be!) its greatest protector. “Where there is no law,” Locke wrote, “there is no freedom.”
There’s a litmus test worth thinking about. When someone says “There outta be a law,” ask, will this proposed law increase individual freedoms?
When people interfere with our peaceful plans, or when we interfere with their peaceful plans, we are both less free and less happy, and given that the function of government is to secure these rights, and one of those is to pursue happiness, Walmart’s “spend a little less” experience might just bring us a little more happiness, even if that means we’re snuggling under the polyester poker playing dogs.
