Chapter One

Liberty Is Built By Neighbors

If you live alone, you have complete liberty. It is not until you live in a society with others that there are limits placed on what you can do. The American experiment has always fascinated me because it asks a question that almost no other civilization has dared to ask: Can people govern themselves?

Not merely elect their rulers, because then it’s the rulers who govern. Not replace one political party with another. Not write constitutions or overthrow kings. Those things are important, but they are secondary. The deeper question is whether free people can create a society that remains orderly, prosperous, just and compassionate without requiring excessive authority?

For most of human history, the answer was assumed to be no.

People suffered the governance of Kings and Emperors ruled because people crave security. Humans have always sought assurances that “everything is going to work out.” Even societies that valued liberty generally believed it needed to exist under the supervision of an authority capable of stepping in whenever people proved incapable of governing themselves justly.

The American Founders proposed something astonishingly different. They suggested that government existed not because people were incapable of governing themselves, but because free people occasionally needed a limited institution to perform those few tasks that could not reasonably be accomplished individually. Government, in this view, was not the master of society. It was its servant. George Washington put this beautifully:

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

That idea changed history.

It also created a problem that, I believe, we still struggle to understand today.

The Constitution is rightly celebrated as one of humanity’s greatest political achievements. It divides power among competing institutions, deliberately slows the exercise of authority, and recognizes rights that government does not create and therefore cannot legitimately revoke. It is a document written by people who deeply understood the dangers of concentrated political power.

But constitutions are not magical. They cannot defend themselves.

A constitution ultimately survives only if the people living under it continue to believe in the principles that gave it life. If citizens continually demand that government solve every problem, regulate every risk, and settle every disagreement, no document—however brilliantly written—can preserve liberty forever. That realization eventually led me to try to understand a question that I think receives far too little attention.

Why do people ask government to solve so many problems in the first place?

The answer, I believe, has almost nothing to do with ideology.

People rarely wake up in the morning hoping for more bureaucracy. They don’t dream of filling out additional forms or living under more regulations. Most expansions of government begin somewhere much more human than that. Someone has been hurt. Someone has been cheated. Someone feels unsafe. Someone has watched a voluntary institution fail and concludes that only government possesses the authority to prevent it from happening again.

In other words, government usually grows because people are trying to solve real problems.

That observation changed the way I think about liberty.

For years I believed the central task of those who valued freedom was to argue against government expansion. Now I think that conversation begins one step too late. By the time people are asking government to intervene, something else has already failed. A family has failed. A community has failed. A market has failed. A charitable institution has failed. Or perhaps trust itself has failed. Government is often not the cause of that failure. It is the consequence.

This leads to an idea that has become one of the organizing principles of my thinking: political power is a closed system. In physics a closed system is one one which energy is never created or destroyed — only transferred from one area to another. The people are filled with potential energy. They can, via organization and

Government never creates political power. It only acquires it. Every authority government exercises is authority that individuals no longer possess themselves. Likewise, every freedom retained by the people is power government does not hold.

Political power cannot simply appear. It can only be transferred. And why would people be willing to transfer power from themselves to a government en masse? Liberty is not merely the absence of government. Liberty is the amount of decision-making authority that remains in the hands of ordinary people.

Once I began thinking about political power this way, another realization followed naturally. If we want government to possess less power, society must become capable of carrying more responsibility. That responsibility cannot simply be wished into existence. It has to be cultivated.

Which brings us, perhaps surprisingly, to kindness.

When people hear the word “kindness,” they often imagine sentimentality or personal morality. I mean something far more practical. Every time neighbors solve problems voluntarily instead of demanding political solutions, they strengthen the foundations of a free society. Every time a family cares for an aging parent, every time a church organizes meals for struggling families, every time a local charity helps someone back onto their feet, every time a business owner treats employees fairly without being compelled by regulation, society demonstrates that free people are capable of caring for one another.

Those acts do more than improve individual lives.

They reduce fear.

And fear, more than almost anything else, is what drives people to surrender liberty.

This, I think, is where many defenders of freedom unintentionally lose the argument. We spend tremendous energy explaining why government should be smaller. Far less energy explaining how society must become stronger.

Liberty is not sustained simply because people admire freedom. It is sustained because people feel secure enough to live with it.

If your neighbors cannot be trusted, you ask for more policing. If businesses cannot be trusted, you ask for more regulation. If communities cannot be trusted to care for the vulnerable, you ask government to do it instead. Whether those requests are justified is almost beside the point. The important observation is that every expansion of political authority begins with a perceived failure somewhere else.

That has led me to a conclusion that surprised even me.

Kindness is not merely compatible with liberty.

It is one of liberty’s prerequisites.

The purpose of this book is not to argue that government is inherently evil, nor that markets are magically capable of solving every human problem. Rather, it is an exploration of the many small virtues and institutions that make freedom politically sustainable. Consent. Tolerance. Responsibility. Trust. Charity. Property. Markets. Due process. Community. Humility.

Each is only a piece.

Together, they create a society confident enough to leave people free.