One of the recurrent phenomena of social life is a periodic swing in thought and attitudes between polar positions. In the arts the movement is from order to revolt, from tradition to experiment, and back again, In education the movement is from a curriculum of the tried and true fundamentals to varied and individually oriented offerings, from the discipline of method to the permissiveness of self-expression. In politics and economics today we are experiencing, at least in ideological emphasis, a reversion from the so-called welfare state to the liberal state of a century ago, from government conceived as an instrument of social progress and justice to government conceived merely as a watchman upholding public order.

The significance and infectious influence of Proposition 13 is currently being widely interpreted as a repudiation of the philosophy of the welfare state, of the role and rule of Big Government, bureaucratic intervention into the economy, over-regulation, and over-centralization. And oddly enough, almost everyone, including former opponents, seems to have become a partisan of Proposition 13, f iercely embattled against government intervention in the economy except, of course, where one's special economic interests are involved. Herbert Spencer Redivavus could well be the rallying cry of the ideological spokesmen of the flight from the welfare state.

The most paradoxical feature of the current attack on the welfare state is that it is being con-ducted under the rallying cry of "freedom." Freedom has become the shibboleth of the libertarian movement and all the prophets of the market-enterprise system. To the extent that this commitment to freedom is sincere, then we Social Democrats, who put freedom first, must meet the challenge posed by this attempt to undermine the precarious achievements of the welfare state, which from our point of view has still far to go to meet the legitimate expectations of free men and women. To us the opposite of the welfare state today is the ill-fare state, in-different to the remediable ills of its citizens.

To begin with, I for one wish to stress that I hold no brief for the present plethora of controls and regulations on current production and consumption. Many of them are unnecessary. Everyone can furnish his own illustration of bureaucratic ineptitude. As one who believes in the moral right to commit suicide, I myself see no need for a host of regulations and controls, provided things are properly labeled and identified, that would protect mature persons from the consequences of their own reflective decisions. Nor am I prepared to defend the whole complex of government supports and subsidies, many of which have been adopted at the bidding of special-interest groups who profit most from them. Here, an intelligent approach requires a case-by-case analysis and decision.

But the real target of the conservative and libertarian revival is not this or that particular government program or regulation. It is rather the whole policy of government intervention itself they wish to reverse.

It is one thing to introduce regulation of social and economic behavior in the interest of safety and informed risk. It is quite another thing to presume to dictate to citizens what their life-style should be on the basis of an arrogant and bureaucratic decision as to what is good for them. This is typified in the failure to distinguish between the regulations that prevent the distribution of drugs like thalidomide and those that would prevent the customary use of cyclamates and saccharin when these are properly labeled. Unfortunately socialism and even social democracy have been identified too much with wholesale regulation and control of human conduct and not enough with the expansion, the enrichment, and the varieties of personal freedom. Yet historically thesc socialist movement developed out of a protest against the indignities of an industrial system that tied workers to fixed schedules and modes of conduct whose deadening monotony was felt to be incompatible with natural growth and the spontaneity of freely selected vocation.

Common sense would indicate that in part a cost-benefit analysis be undertaken here as in all other situations in which we have to balance good against good when we cannot have both, or bad against worse when we must choose one or the other. But the so-called libertarian ideology rejects this approach because it assumes that the only alternative to existing bad regulation is necessarily no regulation rather than a better or worse regulation.

One would have thought that the regulations that were introduced after the Thalidomide disaster to insure greater safety in drug use would meet with no principled opposition. But even with respect to these regulations, it has been argued that they are unacceptable because their restrictions resulted in a severe reduction in the development and marketing of new drugs that allegedly could have saved more lives than were blasted by the monstrous deformities of Thalidomide-affected births. When those who hold this view are questioned, they point to the fact that in certain other countries new life-saving drugs were used before they were adopted in this country. But they play down the fact that in every one of these countries, regulatory controls on the marketing of dangerous drugs exist, so that even if one accepted all the factual allegations made, this would be no argument for the abandonment of regulations on drugs but only for more intelligent regulations. To the opponents of, regulation, the measure and content of freedom is determined not by specific consequences but by the degree to which the economy is free from any kind of direction or control. This in effect is to make a fetish of the free market, whereas for us the economy is the means by which a whole cluster of other human freedoms are furthered.

Let us grant that one of the major functions of government, even the major function, is to protect freedom. Let us also grant on the basis of logic and historical experience that unlimited government is evil because it countenances no checks on its power to restrict freedom. This is an undeniable truth. But no less undeniable is the truth that the unlimited absence of government would be even more oppressive than un-limited government because that would spell anarchy-the rule of a thousand despots.

Those who speak of government, the agency of organized society, as if it were an inherent foe of human freedom seem to me guilty of a fundamental error. They assume that freedom exists in a state of nature, that it is a natural good that comes with the environment, and that it is surrendered when human beings are organized under laws which necessarily limit some freedom of action. Unless one defines freedom as the right and power to do anything one pleases--which no one can consistently do who becomes a victim of the cruel or malicious action of others--this view of freedom is a myth. There is no human freedom in rerum natura: it is an outcome of society, of a free society. Government and the state are not artificial accretions to the human estate. Long ago Aristotle recognized that the individual as a human being, as distinct from a biological organism, could not exist out-side of society, that in such a situation he would have to be something more than man (divine) or less than man (animal).

To be sure governments can be restrictive and oppressive, and of such governments we can say that they are best when they govern least. But it is just as true to say that sometimes government can protect freedoms and not merely threaten them, that sometimes government can expand freedoms rather than restrict them. Whatever freedoms or rights we deem desirable, including the right to privacy, the right "to be left alone," governments and laws are necessary to secure them in a world where others are intent upon violating them. Our own historical experience is evidence of that. It was not the operation of the market that extended and protected the civil rights of the Negroes in the South but the government, and the central government at that. It was not the operation of the market but of the government that guaranteed the rights of the American working class to collective bargaining. Since there can be no government without law, what is true for government is analytically true for law. In a sense every law, no matter how wise and enlightened, restricts someone's freedom. As Bentham put it, "every law is contrary to [someone's] liberty," i.e., it is contrary to the liberty or freedom of those who would do what the law forbids them to do and who would interfere with us in the exercise and enjoyment of our rights. The government or the law can only protect our liberty by depriving others of their freedom to act as they please. That is why it is simply false to argue that there is always an inherent opposition between law and freedom, and that the more we have one the less we have of the other. Would any sensible person argue that the fewer the traffic laws, the greater the freedom motorists would enjoy in our crowded cities and highways to get to their destinations quickly and safely? And even if it were true for motorists, it would certainly not be true for pedestrians.

So long as human beings have conflicting desires, laws are inescapable, regulations are in-escapable. Legislation is or should be the process by which we determine what kind of trade-offs we wish to make in the conflict of freedoms, and which are to be given priority.

But the real gravamen of the criticisms of the conservatives against the program of the welfare state is that by its interference with a free-market economy it necessarily limits, coerces, and ultimately destroys human freedom which can flourish only on the basis of a market economy. This is the burden of William Simon's best selling A Time for Truth, enthusiastically endorsed in special introductions to the volume by the high priests of the free-market economy.

I propose that we take as our postulate the desirability of human freedom-which the free-market defenders also stress-and examine the bearings of the market economy on the freedom not only of those well-endowed with the goods of the world but of those who are not, on the freedom not only of the haves but of the have-nots. Is it true that all, or most, human beings are really free even--in an ideally perfect market economy? No action is free unless it is un-coerced, unless it is based upon freely given con-sent, If I have no food or water or the wherewithal to live for myself and my family, how free am I to exchange my services in bargaining with someone else who has more than enough to live on? What alternatives have Ito match his? In such bargaining situations, the individual who has more than he needs can command anything from me, including my freedom, for what sustains life. In an ideal free market, on paper everyone starts from scratch-everyone has equal means, equal needs, equal power. But in the real world, we do not start from scratch, there are great and growing disparities of power between those who have and those who have not that of ten make the notion of a fair and equal ex-change a myth.

Suppose a man says to me: "Your money or your life"--and I give him my money. He is caught and pleads that I gave the money to him freely, that I had a choice. According to him, I could have saved my money at the cost of my life. Would anyone else say that I was a free agent? To say so would sound like a macabre joke. Now suppose I am without any means in the free market, and someone offers me work for a bare pittance under humiliating conditions—and there is no other work available or work I can do--am I really a free agent in that case? The situation is such that I am essentially faced with the objective ultimatum: "Your labor or your life," actually "Your labor or your life and the lives of your dependents." The coercion of hunger or the fear of hunger can be just as persuasive, although different, as the coercion of physical violence or its threat. The chief difference is that one is long drawn out, the other sudden and more immediately painful.

The basic point is incontrovertible. In any society, whether it possesses a market economy or a socialized economy, property is power. Whoever owns property has the power to exclude others from the use or possession of what is owned. Whoever owns property in the means of life which I must operate to earn a living-whether the property is owned by the state or an individual-has the legal right to exclude me from its use. Therefore property in things, especially in the social instruments of production, means power, power over human beings. In the very interest of the human freedom that up-holders of the free market advocate, we Social Democrats contend that such power must be made socially and morally responsible to those who are affected by its exercise.

This is not the place to demonstrate in detail the multiple ways in which a market economy functions to affect the lives and freedom of those who contract to work within it. (For a recent statement which also tracer, the deformations of the democratic process resulting from the market economy, see Politics and Markets by Charles E. Lindbloom, Basic Books, 1978. See also my "The Social Democratic Prospect,” a speech published by Social Democrats, USA,1976.) Take as a paradigm case the shut-down of a large plant in a community or town in which the plant or factory is the sole or chief supplier of employment. The individual worker in such situations is almost as helpless and unfree as he is in a natural castastrophe, with the normal expectations and life-style of himself and his family destroyed. The decision as to where to work, the conditions under which to work, and the rewards of work seem to be made by forces beyond his control. In the long run, the apologists of the free market argue, the individual will somewhere and somehow be able to find work again. But even if true, what happens until then? Even if true, who pays for the agony and costs of waiting for the market to stabilize itself? If we are to strengthen genuine freedom of choice and even approximate the equality of opportunity which the ideal market economy presupposes, we must do something to provide those who are thrown on the slag heap of the un-employed through no fault of their own, who are willing and able to work, with some alternative possibilities of existence.

After all, as a rule those who close down their enterprises because they are unprofitable, or not as profitable as other kinds of investment, have other means of existence at their disposal. In the very interest of freedom of choice, unemployment insurance and some kind of welfare payments seem required to redress the bargaining balance. But this and similar government interventions into the economy is precisely what the high priests of the market economy deplore.

Let us openly admit that we share with the conservatives a fear of concentrated government power, but on the same grounds we are fearful of large concentrations of private property that can also have oppressive effects. Like them we seek the dispersion of power, but unlike them we seek to avert those gross inequalities of power that unduly influence the political process in these days of multiple mass communication. Even Thomas Jefferson, in the days in which the economy war, mainly agricultural and rural, deplored extremes of wealth as subversive of the democratic spirit of a self-governing nation. The only way in which these extremes can be prevented today is through tax policy, through wiser and better government, not absence of government.

There are some concentrations of economic power that can be countered only by the power of government. It was none other than John Stuart Mill who proclaimed that "Society is fully entitled to abrogate or alter any particular right of property which on sufficient consideration it judges stands in the way of the public good." This recognizes that property is a human right but not all forms of it have the same weight and justification in the light of the public good.

The concept of the public good is a complex and difficult one, hard to define, except in terms of the reflective process in which we balance good against good and right against right. But without the existence and power of government, we could not peacefully determine or enforce the public good. Even those who would limit the power of government to that of watchman of the rules of the road, or to the exercise of police power, are committed to the notion of the public good.

Although it has been denied, I am prepared to show that even on the premises of the watchman theory of government, the public good requires some concern for public welfare, the extent of which depends on public resources. One form of this theory of the state and government professes a belief not only in equality before the law but in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. If we take equality of opportunity as an ideal, we must grant that so long as differences in family and home environment exist, as they always will, as well as extreme genetic variations in capacity, absolute or literal equality of opportunity is unattainable. But this is true of all ideals! That absolute health and wisdom are unattainable is no reason for not attempting to become healthier and wiser. The inability to establish absolute equality of opportunity is no justification for ceasing to move towards greater equality of opportunity. If democracy as away of life implies an equality of concern for all members of the community to develop themselves to their full capacities as human beings, then it is obligatory on the democratic community to move towards greater equality of opportunity in all areas, especially education, housing, health, and employment, required for the development of the individual's best potential. That is why the American slogan of equality of opportunity is one of the most far-reaching principles ever enunciated and expressive of the ethics of Social Democracy. It is a premise for continuous social reform. And that is why the most influential school of thought in the conservative revival is abandoning the principle of equality of opportunity, and insisting that the only kind of equality which is compatible with a truly liberal society is one in which there is simply and only equality before the law. In this view there is no such thing as "social justice" but only conflicting claims equally justified. Equality of opportunity is "a wholly illusory ideal." Justice is procedural, the impartialapp4cation of a rule or principle to all who fall under it regardless of the consequences of the rule.

There is one obvious and fatal flaw in any conception of justice that makes it merely procedural--the impartial application of a rule. It cannot distinguish between the just and unjust rules and cannot grasp the difference insignificance between the statement that "Justice consists in treating all persons in the same or relevantly similar circumstances equally" and the statement "justice consists in mistreating all persons in the same or relevantly similar circumstances equally." Equality is a necessary, but not a Sufficient, condition of any intelligible theory of justice. Over and above formal legal equality, the just law must concern itself with the effects of law on human weal and woe. What modern day conservatism fails to realize is that the pursuit of justice can be distinguished from, but ultimately not separated from, the pursuit of happiness or human welfare. No one in the world is really a self-made man or woman. When we consider what we owe to the community-our language without which there could be no thought, our skills that are dependent upon the cumulative traditions forged by generations of early pioneers, our knowledge most of which we have inherited, our safety, health, and even our goods possessed not only in virtue of our own efforts but because of the activities and forbearances of others-we become conscious ofa debt that cannot be discharged if we are indifferent to the fate of our fellows. Concern for the public welfare does not require self-sacrifice but the wisdom of common sense that recognizes the obligation of unpaid debts and the dictates of enlightened self-interest.

As if this were not confusion enough, there has developed, out of inability to see how differences among men can be resolved by rational moral principles, a call for a return to transcendental religion. It is alleged that all our social problems and evils are a consequence of failure to grasp the supernatural truths concerning God's existence and his supreme goodness as well as power. The failure of moral nerve in the West and the cult of irresponsibility and hedonistic abandon, with all their degrading side effects, are attributed to the loss of religious faith. We are told that a politics oriented towards man and the fulfiliment of his needs on this earth can end only in the worship of Caesar.

With the profoundest respect for the great moral figure of our time who has recently articulated this point of view, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, we must repudiate it on many grounds. First of all, it is irrelevant to the basic issues that divide the free world from its chief totalitarian enemy. Those issues are rooted in freedom of choice. In a free and open society, freedom of religion is central to be sure, but freedom of religion means not only the right to worship God according to one's conscience, but the right not to worship, the right to believe in one, many, or no Gods.

Secondly, it is historically false to assert that religious faith is necessarily on the side of a free hurnan society. The totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and of the fascist states both in the past and present has had -its religious defenders. Hewlett Johnson, the red Dean of Canterbury, and Karl Barth, the existentialist theologian, were ardent defenders of Stalin.

Thirdly, it is logically false to make any kind of religious belief the basis of human morality because men build their gods in their own moral image. What makes an action good or bad is not any divine command but the intrinsic nature of the act and its consequences for human weal and woe. It is not true that morality logically depends on religion. It is the other way around. We must first know what the good is before we seek its alleged source.

Finally, to introduce religious faith as a necessary condition of a humane society is divisive. We can rally mankind around a program of autonomous human rights. In a world of conflicting religions in which Christians are a minority, in a world of conflicting faiths even among Christians, it is wishful thinking to expect agreement on any transcendental dogmas. If we can agree and unite on the basis of acceptance of universal human rights, we do not have to agree on their religious or philosophical justifications.

As Social Democrats we yield to none in the cause of freedom-whether moral or political. And we repudiate as unfounded, indeed untrue, the conservative view that we need the unconscious help either of a pure market economy or a Supreme Being to realize that freedom in our institutions. It is true that we cannot properly plan for an entire society. Nor can we rebuild any aspects of it without regard for human history and the limitations of human nature and power. It is true that human reason is neither all powerful nor infallible. But these truths are no grounds to forego the use of intelligence and the self-corrective methods of experience in trying to cope with the problems of our economy-the chief of which are to provide full employment at an adequate wage level, economic growth, and minimal inflation.