As Ameaças à Liberdade no Século XXI

Foi este o título do discurso do Presidente Checo durante a cerimónia de entrega do "Adam Smith Award" do FEE, cujo recipiente foi Walter E. Williams.
Para Vaclav Klaus essas ameaças não são de natureza diferente das que Adam Smith encontrou no seu tempo:

I see the threats – as always – in ideas, in policies (based on these ideas) and in human behavior influenced, motivated and justified by both these ideas and policies. The ideas and government policies I am afraid of are the ideas and policies which were criticized already by Adam Smith. Their basis are claims and presuppositions that following private interests is wrong, that the people are basically not rational and moral, that the people must be controlled, guided and made better by the annointed who know what is good for them, that the rulers act in public interest, that freedom and democracy is allowed to be restrained in favor of „higher goals and values“, etc. We lived in such a system but I see many symptoms of such a system again – in Europe and in this country as well.###

The whole issue cannot be systematically discussed in such a short speech. Let me touch only one problem which I see as extremely important. It is the emergence of new, partial, seemingly non-ideological but often very aggressive „isms“ (or ideologies). They are really new. They did not exist when I attended the university. I can only give their names. We all care for human rights (even if I would prefer to speak about civic rights) but I am afraid of human-rightism. We all want to have healthy environment but I see tremendous danger in environmentalism. To put it politically correctly I admire the second gender but I fear feminism. We are enriched by other cultures but not by multiculturalism. I respect homosexuality but not homosexualism. I am aware of the importance of voluntary associations, now fashionably called NGOs, but I consider NGOism to be another powerful threat to our liberty.


What should we do? Let's look at what Adam Smith wanted to tell us. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, he tried to understand the people who want to restrain freedom and liberty. He wrote that they want „to arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.“ And he added that they do „not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them but that in the great chess-board of human society every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislation might choose to impress upon it.“ I see the current, all-embracing legislation prepared by legislators who follow powerful pressure groups, representing the new isms that I mentioned, to be a real danger for the liberty of all of us. There is no other way than going back to the classical liberalism, to the ideas of Adam Smith and the FEE.