The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tyranny of the State by Richard M. Ebeling

This November marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On November 9, 1989, as the shaky East German communist government resigned, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Large crowds formed on both sides of the Wall. East and West Berliners climbed on top, and then people began using sledgehammers and pickaxes to cut holes in it. People started to move back and forth through the Wall, capturing the spirit of a freedom to move without political barriers standing in the way.

It is worth recalling how and why the Berlin Wall was constructed in the first place, and what it meant in the great struggle between freedom and tyranny in the stream of 20th century political events.

On August 10, 1961, Nikita S. Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union, attended a birthday party in Moscow for Sergei S. Verentsov, the Soviet marshal in charge of the missile program of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Khrushchev informed the celebrating assembly of leading Soviet military and political dignitaries that something momentous was about to occur.

“We are going to close Berlin,” Khrushchev announced. “We’ll just put up serpentine barbed wire and the West will stand there like dumb sheep. And while they’re standing there, we’ll finish a wall.” The crowd broke into an enthusiastic applause.

The city of Berlin had been divided into four Allied occupation zones at the end of the Second World War in Europe. The eastern half of the city was the Soviet zone. The western half was divided into American, British, and French zones, surrounded by the Soviet zone of occupation in eastern Germany. The closest British or American zone of occupation in western Germany was 110 miles to the west. The Soviets had established a “people’s republic” in their zone — the German Democratic Republic, with East Berlin as its capital.

Between the late 1940s and 1961, more than 4 million East Germans and East Berliners took advantage of the relative ease of crossing from the Soviet zone in Berlin to one of the Western zones to “vote with their feet” not to live in the “workers’ paradise” that Moscow had been generous enough to impose upon them. This mass exodus was a huge embarrassment to both the Soviet and the East German governments. It also represented a huge loss in skilled labor and in many of the professional occupations.

The Soviets had been almost completely successful in keeping the secret that West Berlin was to be sealed. On Saturday, August 12, 1961, 1,573 East Germans crossed the line separating East and West Berlin and registered as refugees desiring to live in the West. They were the last group to be allowed to freely depart. The Soviets stretched barbed wire across the Brandenburg Gate facing the Western zones in the center of the city. And at 2:30 on the morning of August 13, the border between East and West Berlin was closed.


“Successes” and “Failures” of the Wall
Two days later, on August 15, work began on the Berlin Wall; it was made of brick and concrete and took two years to complete. When finished it was 28 miles long and 9 feet high, with barbed wire at the top. East German guards armed with machine guns fired upon any who attempted to cross it. There was also a 200-yard area leading up to the Wall covered with land mines and patrolled by police dogs.

Yet, in spite of this, during the 28 years of the Wall’s existence, between 1961 and 1989, an estimated 5,000 people managed to escape either over, under, or through the Wall. Some escaped through the sewer system under the Wall. Others dug tunnels — the longest one was 500 feet long through which 57 people made their getaway to West Berlin in 1964.

One woman sewed Soviet military uniforms for three male friends, who drove through one of the Wall’s border checkpoints with her crammed under the front seat. An archer used an arrow to shoot a cable over the Wall from a building in East Berlin and slid along it to freedom.

Some constructed hot-air balloons and crude flying machines using bicycle motors to power their flight over the Wall. Others swam across canals or rivers that separated parts of East and West Berlin.

There also emerged a smuggling business that ran ads in West German newspapers. One such company, Aramco, with headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, gave out press releases referring to their “most modern technical methods.” The company’s prices were not that unreasonable: $10,000 to $12,000 per person, with “quantity discounts” for families, payable into a numbered account in a Swiss bank. If an escape attempt failed, the company refunded most of the money to the person financially sponsoring the breakout.

The East German government issued “wanted” posters on the East Berlin side of Checkpoint Charlie, offering 500,000 German marks for the director of Aramco, Hans Ulrich Lenzlinger. The “wanted” posters negatively referred to him as a “trader in people.” In February 1979, someone collected the bounty on Lenzlinger’s head, after he was shot repeatedly in the chest and killed at his home in Zurich.

He was not the only victim of escape attempts. During those 28 years of the Wall’s existence, 80 people lost their lives trying to get to the western side of the Wall. And more than 100 others lost their lives trying to escape along other points of the highly fortified East German border.

One of the most inhuman border killings happened in August 1962. Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old bricklayer, was shot while attempting to climb over the Wall. For 50 minutes he begged for help as he slowly bled to death from his wounds in sight of soldiers and journalists watching from one of the western border checkpoints. Only after he died did the East German guards retrieve his body.

The Berlin Wall came to symbolize the Cold War and its division of the world into halves, one half still relatively free and the other half under the most brutal and comprehensive tyranny ever experienced by man in modern history. Nothing was supposed to cross the Iron Curtain of barbed- wire fences, land-mined farm fields, and machine-gun watchtowers that cut across central Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea, without the permission of the Soviet masters in Moscow.


The Wall vs. the Right to Move
What the Berlin Wall epitomized was the 20th century idea of the individual as the property of the state. Behind that Wall the East German government told the people where to live and work, what goods they could consume, and what enjoyments and entertainments they would be permitted. The state determined what they read and watched and said. And they could not leave the country — either for a visit or forever — unless it served the goals and interests of their political masters. And if anyone attempted to leave without permission, he could be shot and left to die, alone and helpless, with others forced to stand by as horrified observers.

In the 19th century, the great triumph of classical liberalism had been the abolition of the last of the ancient restrictions on the right of the individual to his life, liberty, and honestly acquired property. This had included the right of people to freely travel without undo government interference or control.

In earlier times not only the physical difficulties of transportation prevented men from widely moving from one region or continent to another. Matching these physical barriers were the legal barriers of taxes, tolls, passports, and serfdom, which bound the vast majority of people to the land owned by the privileged and titled political castes.

Classical liberals and classical economists of the early 19th century argued for the removal of such restraints on people’s freedom. The guiding principle was that a man has a property right in himself, that he owns himself. As the classical economist John R. McCulloch expressed it in the 1820s:

"Of all the species of property which a man can possess, the faculties of his mind and the powers of his body are the most particularly his own; and these he should be permitted to enjoy, that is, to use and exert, at his discretion . . . in any way, not injurious to others, [as] he considers most beneficial for himself."

A logical extension of the right of self-ownership over one’s mind and body and its use to further his personal and peaceful purposes was the right to move to where he believed he could best improve his circumstances. As the 19th century progressed the various restrictions on the freedom to move were removed. Passports were virtually eliminated throughout the major countries of Europe and North America, and legal barriers to both emigration and immigration were almost completely abolished in these same nations.

Tens of millions of people, on their own personal account and with private funding, left their places of birth in pursuit of better lives and fortunes in countries and on continents of their own choice. Free trade in people matched the increasingly free trade in goods and capital. About 60 million people took advantage of the greater freedom of movement between 1840 and 1914, when the First World War began.


Barriers to Freedom
But with the coming of World War I, governments reinstituted passport and other restrictions on the freedom of movement. And with the rise of the totalitarian ideologies in the years following the end of the First World War, the freedom to move was abolished. Communism, fascism, and Nazism all worked from the premise that the individual was subordinate to and lived and worked only for the advancement of the interests of the state. As an “object” owned by government, the individual stayed put or was forcibly removed to some other location under the brutal orders of the political authority.

Even outside the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, barriers to migration have been logical extensions of the emergence and growth of the interventionist-welfare state. When the government influences the direction of production, has responsibility for both the amount and types of employment in the society, and is the paternalistic administrator of a redistribution of wealth and income for retirement, health care, unemployment, housing, and education, it is inevitable that the same government will be concerned about and responsible for the amount, types, and demographics of any individuals or groups desiring to move into a country under that government’s jurisdiction.

The growth and development of the regulated economy, in other words, has provided the rationale for barriers to free migration. They stand as legal and political walls far higher that the Berlin Wall in preventing people from passing freely and unmolested from one part of the world to another. The passport that each and every one of us is forced to apply for and carry on our person whenever traveling outside the territorial jurisdiction of our own country, and which we must present upon our attempt to return to our own land, clearly shows that we are all in fact subjects under — not citizens above — the political authorities controlling our lives.

The conservative, German free market economist, Wilhelm Roepke, once pointed out that,

“Modern nationalism and collectivism have, by the restriction of migration, perhaps come nearest to the ‘servile state.’. . . Man can hardly be reduced more to a mere wheel in the clockwork of the national collectivist state than being deprived of the freedom to move. . . . Feeling that he belongs now to his nation, body and soul, we will be more easily subdued to the obedient state serf which nationalist and collectivist governments demand.”

It has become a cliché that the world, every day, becomes a little smaller. Methods of global transportation improve the quality of travel and reduce the time between any two distances around the world. Computer technology — the Internet and email — have made virtually everything written, said, or photographed a simple and almost instantaneous mouse click away. The expanding worldwide network of business, trade, and capital markets is increasingly making the globe a single market for commerce and culture.

On this 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we should remember all that it represented as a symbol of tyranny under which the individual was marked with the label: property of the state. He not only was controlled in everything he did and publically said, but his every movement was watched, commanded or restricted.

Freedom in all its forms – to speak, write, associate, and worship as we want; to pursue any occupation, profession, or private enterprise that inclination and opportunity suggests to us; and to visit, live, and work were our dreams and desires lead us to look for a better life – are precious things.

The history of the Berlin Wall and the collectivist ideology behind it should remind us of how important a loss any of our freedom can be as we determine in what direction – toward greater individual freedom and private enterprise or more government command and control – we wish our country to move in the 21st century.


(A slightly different version of this essay appeared in Freedom Daily [November 2001], published by the Future of Freedom Foundation, Fairfax, Virginia.)

John Stuart Mill and the Dangers to LIberty by Richard M. Ebeling

This year marks the 150th anniversary of John Stuart Mill’s famous essay “On Liberty.” Originally published in 1859, it remains one of the most enduring and powerful defenses of individual liberty ever penned. Both advocates and enemies of personal freedom have challenged either the premises or the logic in Mill’s argument. They have pointed out inconsistencies or incompleteness in his reasoning. But the fact remains that a century and a half after its appearance, few essays continue to justify being read and pondered with the same care and attention as “On Liberty.”

Mill’s essay takes on particular significance and importance at the present time when governments around the world, including in the United States, are hell-bent on extending their power and control over the economic and social affairs of ordinary men and women.

Everywhere we look, government is claiming the duty and responsibility to care for our old age; manage our health care; regulate our industry and the wages we earn through the presidential appointment of various political planning “czars.” The government controls what we eat; oversees what we buy; paternalistically supervises with whom and how we interact with others in society. The government also educates our children and determines what they learn. And the government may soon subsidize and therefore influence what we read in our local newspapers.

John Stuart Mill focused on several dangers to our liberty. He started with the importance of freedom of thought, and went on to analyze the dangers from the tyranny of the minority, the tyranny of the majority, and the tyranny from rigid customs and traditions that stifle the individual’s ability for self-expression and action.

Mill defended freedom of thought on several grounds. First, we should accept the fact that none of us can claim an infallibility of knowledge or a final and definite insight into ultimate truth. Thus, we should value and defend liberty of thought and argument because a dissenter or a critic of conventional and generally accepted views may offer reasons for disagreeing that correct our own errors of knowledge and mistakes in judgment about the truth of things.

Second, sometimes the truth about things exists as half-truths held by different people, and through controversy the truth in the parts can be made into a great unified truth of the whole.

And, third, even if we are really certain that we have the truth and a correct understanding of things, unless we are open to challenging and rethinking that which we take for granted, our ideas and beliefs can easily become atrophied dogmas. The people in each generation must be taught to think and reason for themselves. If ideas and beliefs are to remain living and meaningful, people must arrive at their own conclusions through reflection and thought.

Mill not only defended freedom of thought but liberty of action as well. To make men conform to a uniformity in their conduct would prevent that which is an inherent hallmark of each of us as a human being: our individuality. The libertarian political philosopher and free-market economist, Murray Rothbard, once neatly expressed Mill’s point on this theme:

"If men were like ants, there would be no interest in human freedom. If individual men, like ants, were uniform, interchangeable, devoid of specific personality traits of their own, then who would care whether they were free or not? Who, indeed, would care if they lived or died? The glory of the human race is the uniqueness of each individual, the fact that every person, though similar in many ways to others, possesses a completely individuated personality of his own. It is the fact of each person’s uniqueness — the fact that no two people can be wholly interchangeable — that makes each and every man irreplaceable and that makes us care whether he lives or dies, whether he is happy or oppressed. And, finally, it is the fact that these unique personalities need freedom for their full development that constitutes one of the major arguments for a free society...."

Every man must have freedom, must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

Classical liberals have often pointed out that a weak link in Mill’s argument is the vagueness or inconsistency in how he defines the arena within which the individual may claim protection from political infringements on his individual freedom of action.

But in the broadest sense, Mill defines the range of a person’s right to unrestrained liberty over his own choices as extending to that point at which his actions would infringe upon and violate the equal rights of other people to their freedom.

And the weakest point in Mill’s defense of individual liberty is his failure to clearly align his case for human freedom with the right to private property and its use in all ways that do not violate the comparable individual rights of others.

But within the context of his own premises, Mill was a fairly strong advocate of much of what today we usually call civil liberties. Thus, for example, he opposed the attempt by some to prohibit the consumption of alcohol by others, insisting that it was an inappropriate restraint on individual freedom of choice.

Men of the most honest intentions and goodwill may reason with their fellow human beings and offer their own lives as examples of better ways of living. But it would be an unjustifiable violation of another’s personal freedom to coercively attempt to prevent him from ingesting some substance that he — however wrong-headedly from the critic’s perspective — finds desirable, useful, or pleasurable.

But Mill, unfortunately, conceded to the government as necessary responsibilities far more powers of intervention into social and economic affairs than most modern classical liberals and libertarians consider justifiable.

Three forms of tyranny
And this gets to the issue of what can stifle or prevent an individual from exercising his personal freedom in the manner he wants. Mill argued that there were, historically, three forms of tyranny that have endangered liberty through the ages.

The oldest was the tyranny of the one or the few over the many. A single dictator or an oligarchy imposed prohibitions on or commanded certain forms of behavior over the majority of the society. The spontaneous individualism and individuality of each person was denied. The one or the few determined how others might live and what they might say and do and, therefore, in what forms their human potential would be allowed to develop.

The newer form of tyranny, Mill said, was the rule of the many over the one. The revolt against the tyranny of the one or the few resulted in the growing idea that the people should rule themselves. And since the people, surely, could not tyrannize themselves, the unrestrained will of the people became the ideal of those who advocated unlimited democracy.

But in practice this inevitably became the rule of the majority over the minority. Individual freedom was denied purely on the basis of numbers, that is, on the basis of which group or coalition of groups formed that larger number of people dominating the political process. Their ideas, ideals, and values were to be imposed on all those representing less than 50 percent of the electorate.

But whether it was the tyranny of the few over the many or the many over the few, the source of their tyrannical power was the control and use of political coercion. State power is what enabled some to deny liberty to others. The threat or the use of force by government is what enabled freedom to be taken away from individuals who believed in ideas, ideals, or values different from those holding the reins of political power.


The “tyranny” of custom and tradition
Mill also said that there was a third source of tyranny over the individual in society, and this was the tyranny of custom and tradition. He argued:

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than the customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement.... Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom.... All deviations ... come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature.

Mill argued with great passion that societal customs and traditions could, indeed, very often be the worst tyranny of all. They were binding rules on conduct and belief that owed their force not to coercion but to their being the shared ideas of the right and proper held by the vast majority in the society. They represent what the ancient Greek Pericles referred to as “that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.”

Customs and traditions weigh down on the individual, they stifle his sense and desire to be different, to experiment with the new, to creatively design ways of doing things that have not been tried before, and to break out of the confinement of conformity. Custom and tradition can be the straitjacket that restricts a person’s cry for his peaceful and nonviolent individuality.

But while customs and traditions may hold such power over men, because of their fear of disgrace and ostracism by family, friends, and neighbors, they are still not coercion. No matter how strong a hold custom and tradition may have over men’s minds and therefore their conduct in society, an individual can still choose to go his own way and be the eccentric and outcast, if he is willing to pay the price in terms of the disapproval of others in his community. Political force is not the weapon that ensures obedience. The power of custom and tradition comes from social and psychological pressure and the human desire to avoid being shunned by those whose association is wanted.


Private property and the free market
What Mill does not give emphasis to or fully appreciate in his essay “On Liberty” is that what enables an individual to follow his own path even in the face of strong customs and traditions is the institution of private property and the free and voluntary relationships of the market economy.

Private property gives an individual ownership and control of a portion of the means of production through which he may then choose how and for what purposes he will live his life. Private property gives him a “territory” that is under his own jurisdiction for a degree of “self-rule.” In his home and on his property, in the free society he can design his one-person “country” to fit his values, ideals, and desires. What the customs of others consider eccentric can be lived as the norm and the normal on the territory of his private property.

It is true that no man is an island. Unless an individual wishes to attempt existence in self-sufficient isolation, he must participate in the interdependent social system of the division of labor.

But the advantage of the market economy is that an individual can choose how and in what form he will find his niche in the nexus of voluntary exchange to acquire those things that will enable him to fulfill his own vision of the good life and its purposes.

This will not come without a cost. To earn the income that permits him, as a consumer, to buy the things that will enable him to live that unconventional life may require him to work as a producer at tasks he finds irksome or unattractive.

On the other hand, he can choose to earn a living doing something he enjoys more, but then he may have to forgo the higher income that he could have earned if he had produced and supplied something that potential customers might have valued more highly.

The market economy also offers the individual a degree of anonymity that helps shield and guard him from prying eyes and the imposed values of others.

Rarely do the consumers of multitudes of market-supplied goods and services know or care about the values, beliefs, or lifestyles of those in the production process who participate in bringing demanded commodities to the buying public.

A person can earn a living making a product to finance his personal vision of the good life, even when many of the buyers of his product would, perhaps, radically disapprove of the way he leads his life with the income he has earned serving their wants.

It is precisely this type of freedom that the market economy makes possible to all its participants that arouses the disapproval and anger of those who resent the ability of some to flaunt the customs and traditions believed in and practiced by many if not most of the other members of society.

The danger to liberty arises when those who resent breaches of tradition cry for coercion to be used to impose obedience to custom. Only then does the tyranny of custom, as understood by Mill, become the coercion of the many over the few. Only then is freedom denied, indeed suffocated, by politically enforced conformity.

It is the misuse and abuse of political power — the threat or the application of legitimized force by a government within a geographical area — that always has been the greatest threat to liberty. All tyranny, whether it be the few over the many or the many over the few, results from the use of force to make others conform to the conduct desired by the rulers, even when those being coerced have done nothing to violate the rights of others.

That John Stuart Mill failed to sufficiently see this and defend liberty on this basis does not detract from the fact that “On Liberty” remains one of the greatest works that has been written in behalf of individual freedom during the last 150 years.

And with the continuing growth of "Big Government" in our own time, his classic essay remains as fresh and relevant as when it first appeared in 1859.

(An slightly different version of this article originally appeared in Freedom Daily (February 1993) published by the Future of Freedom Foundation, Fairfax, Virginia.)