John Stuart Mill and the Dangers from Unrestrained Government

Editorial by Richard Ebeling

One of the great voices for personal liberty was that of the British economist and political philosopher, John Stuart Mill. His essay, "On Liberty," though penned well over 150 years ago, is a classic statement that the individual should be respected in his right of freedom of thought, speech and action.

But John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was also one of the most important economists of the nineteenth century. His Principles of Political Economy, originally published in 1848, became the leading textbook for at least two generations of students, from which they learned the nature of a market economy and its alternatives.

J. S. Mill's Sympathies for Socialism and "Distributive Justice"

Mill has been a highly controversial figure among friends of freedom because while strongly endorsing the autonomy of the individual in thought and deed, he believed (and even hoped) that someday in the future human nature might have changed enough to be compatible with elements of the socialist idea of an altruistic good society.

He also argued that while the physical laws of production (the technological requirements of producing goods from resources and raw materials) are beyond man's control to arbitrarily change, the "laws of distribution" were open to human choice and manipulation, given any social values people may have.

That is, after the output of goods has been produced, it is a matter of "society's" preference to decide how to distribute it among the members of any community. This led the Austrian economist, F. A. Hayek, to argue that Mill's "advocacy of distributive justice and a general sympathetic attitude towards socialist aspirations in some of his other writings, prepared the gradual transition of a large part of the liberal intellectuals to a moderate socialism."

And it is certainly the case that in his Principles of Political Economy, Mill argued for numerous exceptions to the laissez-faire principle of governments being limited to the protection of life, liberty and peacefully acquired property. Most current-day classical liberals find many, if not most, of these exceptions unpersuasive in the light of more than a century with the experience of government intervention in education, business regulation, the labor market and welfare state "social safety nets."

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