Father Sirico of the Acton Institute spoke on Saturday and I found what he said interesting, for as much what he didn’t say as for what he did. As a Catholic Father one would expect him to be rather preachy but he wasn’t unless pressed on the matter of faith. His main focus was consistently on the importance of Liberty.

What I found particularly interesting was when he recounted his personal history and how at one time in his youth he was an atheist, socialist activist. He said that if there was a demonstration somewhere if he wasn’t leading it he was a part of it.

This experience parallels the experience of so many I run across in this liberty, free-market, think-tank world. Many of us, my self included, started out as well-trained liberals who through logic and experience came to understand that THAT world (the liberal one) is wrong. That using government to dictate the action and outcomes of people, businesses, corporations and institutions isn’t just wrong, it is extra-ordinarily inefficient. Individual freedom is really the best way to accomplish all of these things. Sometimes it takes a lot of experience to realize this truth.

Lord Acton, who the Acton Institute that Father Sirico runs is named after, is responsible for one of the most quoted phrases known, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This is what most people remember.

The whole quote is more instructive though, “"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end ... liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition ... The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The important difference is that it starts with the subject “Liberty.” And Lord Acton had something to say about this as well, “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”

This is the heart of the concept of morality and was the subject that I wish Father Sirico had spoken more about and only touched peripherally in answer to a question. The relationship between morality and Liberty.

Without Liberty a person cannot be truly moral. It order to be moral one must be free to make the choice. If the state is taking all your money for the “public welfare” and giving it to others to provide for their sustenance then what is left over to practice “charity?”

If the state dictates your every action, all of your behavior, then what choice remains in which to act in a “moral” manner? There is none. If a person decides to fight the state in order to unfetter individuals to live in liberty then that is a moral act, no matter what the state might say.

This is the conundrum that all people must face. To follow the law, since it is supposed to be moral to follow the law, or to follow Liberty, since there can be no morality without Liberty.

Thus, in the final analysis, advocating individual Liberty is the most moral choice there is. It leaves other people free to choose the course of their own lives and every individual to figure out what he or she “ought” to do.

The beauty of Liberty is not only is it the most moral system ever devised, it is also the most efficient. Never has any system ever produced as much prosperity as Freedom, as has Liberty. We need to remind ourselves of this everyday of the year, not just on our national birthday.

Don Newman, senior policy analyst for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii can be reached at: mailto:don@grassrootinstitute.org