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    A Moral Basis for Liberty
    A Moral Basis for Liberty
    A Moral Basis for Liberty
    Ebook62 pages1 hour

    A Moral Basis for Liberty

    By Robert Sirico

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    About this ebook

    An outline of the moral foundation of the free market economy, built upon respect for private property and voluntary activity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherActon Institute
    Release dateAug 26, 2012
    ISBN9781938948138
    A Moral Basis for Liberty
    Author

    Robert Sirico

    Rev. Robert A. Sirico is a Roman Catholic priest and the president and co-founder of the Acton Institute, a think-tank dedicated to promoting a free-market economic policy framed within a moral worldview. He is the author of several books, including Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy, and his writings have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the London Financial Times, and National Review, among numerous other publications. Fr. is regularly called upon to discuss economics, civil rights, and issues of religious concern and has provided commentary for CNN, ABC, the BBC, NPR, and CBS’ 60 Minutes.

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      Book preview

      A Moral Basis for Liberty - Robert Sirico

      A Moral Basis for Liberty

      Robert Sirico

      Foreword by Edmund A. Opitz

      Third Edition

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2012 by Acton Institute

      An imprint of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty

      Reproduced by permission of the Institute of Economic Affairs Health and Welfare Unit, London. Copyright © 1994. Revised Edition, The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1996.

      Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

      Foreword

      Edmund A. Opitz

      The three key sentences in Father Sirico’s finely crafted essay that constitute the theme of this book are: No civilization in history has survived or flourished without a religious foundation. Nor have great classical liberal thinkers neglected the spiritual dimension of man. From the writings of the late Scholastics to eighteenth-century British economists, they have always discovered a linkage between faith and freedom.

      I am honored and privileged to write an introduction to this important work from the skilled pen of an admired friend. What follows is merely a series of reflections inspired by my reading of this slender volume.

      The Pilgrims and Puritans who settled along the northeast coast of this country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had sailed across the rugged Atlantic seeking a piece of land where they might put their deepest religious convictions into practice. They were called Dissenters or Separatists; they were estranged from the doctrines and practices of the government church of the nation from which they fled. For their faith, they had suffered various hardships and some persecution. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing of the men and women who established Plymouth Colony observed: it was a purely intellectual craving that exiled them from the comforts of their former homes; and in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile their object was the triumph of an idea. That idea was conveyed by a motto that Thomas Jefferson used on his personal seal: Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

      These early settlers were not peasants or serfs; they were clergymen and teachers, farmers and men of business. Many had degrees from Cambridge University. The late Samuel Eliot Morison, a Harvard professor specializing in early Massachusetts history, declared that there was a higher percentage of PhDs in the Puritan population in the 1640s than in any time since, in this country.

      The idea referred to by Tocqueville had been spreading in England even before the Reformation; it bears directly on the English people having, for the first time, the Bible in their own tongue. The idea of a new commonwealth, fired by reading in the Old Testament of the people of the covenant, launched in America what Tocqueville described as a democracy more perfect than antiquity had dared dream of. John Cotton, who has been rightly called the patriarch of New England, served as minister of the First Church of Boston from 1633 until his death in 1653. Cotton Mather wrote that John Cotton propounded to them an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might be, to that which was the glory of Israel, the peculiar people.’

      The Puritan regime, taken by itself, might seem to us a pretty rigorous affair, but these people were in what might be termed a fortress-under-siege situation. The first order of business was survival under conditions more primitive than they had experienced in England. Most survived, more people arrived from abroad. They had an educated ministry in every town; they were readers; they had regular news sheets and engaged in vigorous pamphleteering. All towns had a large measure of self-government; they learned about self-government by practicing it in local town meetings. There were, in the pulpits of the time, vigorous and articulate spokesmen for liberty. Here, for instance, is Reverend Daniel Shute of the Second Parish in Hingham, in 1759: Life, Liberty, and Property are the gifts of the Creator, and again: "Mankind has no right voluntarily to give up to others those natural privileges, essential to their happiness, with which they are invested

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