Hume on the arbitrary power of tyrannical government

The excerpt below is from FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education, from "David Hume Believed in the Miracle of Commerce" by Richard M. Ebeling. My remarks appear on the white background.

The FEE Excerpt		My Response

David Hume emphasized that commerce and trade were among the most important avenues to offer opportunities to raise people’s standards of living, and to bring refinement and cultural betterment to a growing portion of a nation’s population.

I accept Hume's view that commerce and trade did offer good opportunities for people to improve their living standards in the 1750s when he wrote about it. There are still opportunities today.

Commerce also served as an important leveler of the material inequality of a society based on political privilege and government-bestowed monopoly. Through trade, a wider variety and quality of goods became available to a growing number of the people in any society, fostering the development of a “middle class.”

I do not dispute Hume's view that commerce played a powerful role in reducing inequality in the 1750s and for many decades thereafter. But the US middle class has been shrinking for half a century now.

At the same time, growing wealth among more and more members of society acted as a means to restrain and weaken the arbitrary power of tyrannical governments, as a larger percentage of the population had the means to free themselves from government dependency and control...

The growth and distribution of wealth helped to keep the arbitrary power of tyrannical governments at bay for generations. But in our time, failing growth and the concentration of wealth have encouraged tyranny and the abuse of power.

... government dependency and control. Or as Hume expressed it in his essay, “Of the Refinement in the Arts”:

“But where luxury nourishes commerce and industry, the peasants, by a proper cultivation of the land, become rich and independent; while the tradesmen and merchants acquire a share of the property, and draw authority and consideration to that middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest basis of public liberty.

The decline of the middle class -- the middling rank, Hume says -- brings with it the decline of "the best and firmest basis of public liberty."

“These submit not to slavery, like the peasants, from poverty and meanness of spirit; and having no hopes of tyrannizing over others, like the barons, they are not tempted, for the sake of that gratification, to submit to the tyranny of their sovereign. They covet equal laws, which may secure their property, and preserve them from monarchical, as well as aristocratical tyranny.”

That is the best paragraph in the excerpt. The best in the post. And Hume wrote it about us: the middle class, and those who want to take back our place in the middle class.

Governments and special interest groups, Hume feared, are always want to use and abuse political authority and influence to gain much for themselves at the expense of the ordinary, or common, members of society. And as a society grows in wealth there is more for the government to siphon off through taxes for its own purposes and for interested groups to use the state to plunder and manipulate. But with the emergence of a middle class that is increasingly supporting itself through commerce and industry, they have the financial means to resist these encroachments by the state. Or as Hume said in his essay “Of Commerce”: “So the luxury of the individuals must diminish the force, and check the ambition of the sovereign.”