Here in the United States, we are fortunate to have, codified in our Constitution, certain rights. These rights are not granted by the Constitution but recognized by it; they describe not things Americans are allowed to do or promised to receive but things the government is prohibited from interfering with. These include, among others, the right to speak freely, the right to arm ourselves in our defense and the defense of our families and our communities, the right to peaceably assemble, the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure, and so on.
What's missing is the right to commerce. One could argue that this is covered in the Tenth Amendment, but the Tenth Amendment is roundly ignored by Washington these days, and there are many jurisdictions where the citizens' ability to conduct unfettered commerce is restricted unfairly.
Should the right to commerce be explicitly recognized with a constitutional amendment?
In her novel "Atlas Shrugged," author Ayn Rand describes an America taken over by a collectivist, totalitarian government, which finally collapses under the weight of its own failures. Note that Ayn Rand grew up in the Soviet Union, so she knew of what she wrote; her fiction is tedious in places and her characters somewhat one-dimensional, but there are nevertheless some interesting governmental and philosophical principles explored therein.
At the end of the tome, following the collapse, Rand's heroes - the business leaders, intellectuals, and legal minds who escaped the collapse - emerge to rebuild an America based on free trade and free enterprise. As a part of the rebuilding, one of the legal minds, a renowned judge and constitutional scholar, adds to the new constitution a right to commerce:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.
Is this a good idea? Granted, the odds of this actually being made a constitutional amendment are somewhere between slim and none; the left would be in lockstep against it, as most of them see production and trade as irredeemable evils, unless one is sucking up a couple of billion in government subsidies to build windmills or solar panels. But it's important to remember: Rights are not granted by government. They may be recognized by the government, they may be unfairly denied by the government, they may be ignored by the government, but rights are inherent in our humanity; they exist regardless of government, anywhere. The lowliest peasant in a mud-floored hut in Lower Slobovia is entitled to those rights just as an American in a Manhattan penthouse, or a farmer in Kansas, or a writer sitting in a small office in Alaska. They may be unfairly denied those rights by their government, but they are entitled to them all the same.
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That includes a right to commerce - a right to use one's talents, skills, abilities, and knowledge for their gain. It's not only a human right, but it makes good economic sense. People will always work hardest for their own gain; that is an aspect of human nature that socialism ignores, and that's why socialism always fails, everywhere it's tried. That's why it failed in Rand's novel, and that's why it failed in the Soviet Union; that's why collectivism in any form always has and always will fail.
Should we attempt such a move? To enshrine a right to commerce in the Constitution? A constitutional amendment enshrining the right to commerce would be great, although I suspect it’s impossible in our current political climate. But commerce and trade should be enshrined and recognized as a fundamental human right for two reasons, one philosophical and one economic:
- Commerce – free trade – is a fundamental aspect of liberty; a truly free people should be able to make their own decisions on how to best utilize their own skills, abilities, talents and resources in free, open trade. No government official, functionary or elected employee has the right to interfere in free trade.
- Free trade has lifted more people out of poverty and more nations into the developed world than any other economic system in the history of mankind.
Commerce, or free trade, is a human right. If a trade involves deception, then it is fraud; if it involves force, then it is theft. In all other cases, in any transaction involving a free trade between consenting individuals in which both realize a perceived gain, those people are exercising a fundamental human right - and it's about time we recognized it as such. And, if the political environment ever would allow it, we could do a lot worse than to word it as Rand did:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.
