Below I post Saifedean Ammous‘s article “Does Bitcoin’s Fixed Supply Make It Too Volatile to Be Money? A Response to Professor White” (Oct. 13, 2026) and some some related recent exchanges between Ammous and freebanker George Selgin.

Related

• Stephan Kinsella, The Great Fractional Reserve/Freebanking Debate (Jan. 29, 2016)
• ——, “Comments on Block and Barnett on the Optimum Quantity of Money,” StephanKinsella.com (March 26, 2021)
• ——, “On Gold, the Optimal Amount of Money, Hypersubjectivism, and Demonstrated Preference,” StephanKinsella.com (May 10, 2025)
• ——, On Coinbase, Bitcoin, Fractional-Reserve Banking, and Irregular Deposits (July 12, 2022)
• ——, “Musings on Fractional-Reserve Banking in a Bitcoin Age; Physicalist Metaphors” (May 8, 2023)
• Stephan Livera “In Defense of Bitcoin Full Reserve: Not Anti-Credit, but Anti-Fiduciary Media,” Bitcoin Magazine (July 28, 2022)

I’ve never come across an economist willing to explain clearly why Bitcoin’s fixed supply is a problem and why and how this compromises its operation.

It would be enormously valuable if someone literate could present that argument in a form more coherent than snarky eyerolls.

— Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean) October 19, 2019

The literature concerning why a constant money stock would pose problems is vast, with contributions from economists from numerous schools, including Hayek among other Austrians and sympathetic fellow travelers like the great Leland Yeager. https://t.co/ZNXSQX2TDu

— George Selgin (@GeorgeSelgin) October 13, 2026

Statements in Saifedean’s next paragraph suggest that he understands neither the meaning of monetary equilibrium nor that of the “demand for money.” The last means demand to _hold on to_ (HODL, if you will) money balances, not simply willingness to receive money! 1/2 https://t.co/XDL6CHkjFd

— George Selgin (@GeorgeSelgin) October 14, 2026

If Saifdean hasn’t “come across” these arguments, which pertain to any sort of fixed money stock regime (so it hardly matters that they don’t specifically refer to Bitcoin), it can only mean that he is woefully unfamiliar with the literature on monetary economics.

— George Selgin (@GeorgeSelgin) October 13, 2026

I have wasted enough time on Selgin’s snarky eyerolling. I flew to NYC to debate him on this and he got on stage and said he thinks bitcoin’s monetary policy is good and has no problems, and instead he repeated silly bcash shitcoiner talking points about bitcoin that have nothing to do with monetary policy. Then, behind the safety of his keyboard, he went back to snarky content-free eyerolling about bitcoin’s monetary policy, failing to make a single substantive point. You can search for our discussions and see the video below. I have a strict policy of never letting anyone waste my time twice in life, and Selgin blew his chance. I saw a comment from Larry White referencing his book, I will check that out and answer it.
https://t.co/sNqxAyITG1

— Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean) October 12, 2026

https://t.co/DtJw78w8iQ

— Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean) October 13, 2026

Does Bitcoin’s Fixed Supply Make It Too Volatile to Be Money? A Response to Professor White

Oct. 13, 2026
Saifedean Ammous

In response to my tweet [11] on the lack of a coherent argument against bitcoin’s fixed supply, Professor White has suggested to me that his book Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?[1] offers an explanation for why Bitcoin’s fixed supply makes it too volatile to function as a medium of exchange. I am grateful to Professor White for responding and for writing this book, as it represents the first coherent attempt I have encountered to present this argument. Yet I remain unpersuaded. Below is my response to him:

My disagreement begins with your explanation of gold’s monetary success. You treat its supply response as an advantage over Bitcoin, but resistance to supply expansion is precisely what distinguishes gold from inferior monetary commodities.

If a supply response were desirable in money, why did monetary competition favor the commodity whose existing stock was hardest to expand? Why gold rather than copper, iron, or tin? Divisibility, durability, and recognizability cannot explain this by themselves: other metals possess these properties. If responsiveness of supply to demand changes were desirable in money, then other metals would have been superior as money to gold and would have triumphed in the market competition. Yet the opposite happened; even though iron, copper, and silver were more commonly used as money in the distant past, they all eventually got demonetized and replaced by gold. My explanation is that gold’s extraordinarily low supply growth rate makes it the best physical money, precisely because it responds least to changes in demand. Your argument requires explaining why the characteristic that made gold superior to other commodities becomes a disadvantage when Bitcoin improves upon it.

More fundamentally, why must an increase in monetary demand be offset by additional production? With a fixed supply, greater demand raises money’s purchasing power. The existing stock can then accommodate larger real cash balances. Holders are rewarded for having saved. Nothing requires restoring the previous purchasing power by producing additional units.

I also reject the idea that there is any value from increasing the supply of money in principle. Of course demand for money is larger than the existing supply. Of course everyone would like more money. But the way to have more money is to produce things others value. It is an imperfection in money that it can be produced without providing value to others. So responsiveness to demand is truly undesirable, and gold emerged as money precisely because it is the least responsive to it. A supply response simply undermines the ability of the money to hold its value to the future. A revaluation response enhances it. Subjectively, I would prefer the revaluation response, but it does not matter what I prefer. The money that responds by revaluing upwards will hold and increase its value over time far better than the money that responds by increasing its supply, and this means, in the long run, the revaluing money will have a higher valuation, larger cash balances, and more moneyness.

The same logic applies when demand declines. Then, money becomes cheaper for people who wish to accumulate it. It is clear to me that the significant price response and limited supply response enhance gold’s monetary function and its operation as money: they encourage selling money when the demand rises, and they encourage buying money when the demand declines. Supply and demand adjust through price without the quantity needing to adjust. Neither adjustment requires industrial consumers or miners to rescue the monetary system. If the adjustment were desirable, gold would have been replaced by copper, silver, iron, or another metal.

I am not merely arguing that nonmonetary demand does not help gold’s monetary role; I am saying it undermines that role by making the value of money depend on factors unrelated to monetary demand, which is undesirable. Nonmonetary demand introduces its own uncertainties. A monetary asset exposed to industrial demand must respond to changing technologies, substitutes, and business conditions unrelated to people’s demand to hold money. Why should adding these disturbances produce greater monetary certainty? I believe ideal money is pure money, with a predictable supply and no industrial uses competing with its monetary function.

Mises seems to agree. In Chapter 13 of The Theory of Money and Credit, he described as “considerable disadvantages” the influence on money’s value of “fluctuations in the conditions of production of the metal and variations in the industrial demand for it.” [4] He observed that these effects were relatively small for gold and silver, and argued that these metals are desirable as money precisely because these fluctuations are so small compared to the fluctuations government control of money would produce. In other words, the industrial and mining variations in gold and silver are imperfections, not desirable features. Gold and silver are money despite these factors, because all other moneys (until then) had these imperfections to a larger degree. Bitcoin advances that monetary ideal: predictable issuance, no industrial demand, and no discretionary issuer.

I think the gold-mining numbers support my argument. The World Gold Council estimates average stock growth of only 1.7% annually over the past 25 years. At that rate, even a 10% increase in annual production adds only 0.17 percentage points to stock growth. [2] I do not see how these tiny variations explain monetary stability against the enormous demand disturbances caused by government monetary manipulation. This is also a self-defeating dynamic: every additional ounce enlarges the stock, making it necessary to produce still more just to maintain the same percentage growth rate. Because of gold’s indestructibility, the growth rate stays bound in the same range and seems essentially unrelated to increases in price, which means the supply response to increased demand does not really exist. It’s held to the 1-2% range throughout the entire last 125 years, with two world wars, demonetization of gold, great depressions, stagflation, and much more. Gold production in 1980 was lower than it was in 1970, even though the price had increased ~20x in the period. The annual growth rate in gold supply during the 1970s, when gold rose from $35 to $800, was around 1.34%, but in the 1980s, when the price declined from $800 to $380, it was 1.39%. Both of these numbers are practically rounding errors next to the enormous variations in demand caused by monetary factors. If a ~20-fold increase in price over a decade elicited roughly the same supply response as a 50% decline over another decade, then the supply response is practically nonexistent. The literature on gold supply elasticity finds no effect, a very small effect, or a very small effect after several years or decades [10], suggesting the effect is largely irrelevant to responsiveness to market conditions. If supply takes a decade or two to respond, monetary demand and price will have responded, and monetary conditions will likely have reversed before any supply response makes a difference. It is difficult to see how this supply response works, which makes it even harder to imagine that it is what makes gold a superior money. Gold’s supply increases by about 1.5 to 2% every year, regardless of market demand or monetary policy.

The short-run argument about converting jewelry into monetary gold is also unpersuasive. People hold jewelry to preserve wealth, so it functions as a monetary asset as well. Melting a necklace into a coin changes its form without creating additional gold or adding to monetary wealth. Your chapter itself notes the use of gold jewelry as collateral for loans. Further, industrial uses of gold are historically an insignificant source of demand for gold. Most of these uses emerged in the twentieth century with modern technology, and with the demonetization of gold, making it doubly unlikely they reinforce its monetary role. Gold served as money for thousands of years before modern industrial applications emerged. Industrial demand neither created gold’s monetary role nor explains its enormous liquidity and relative stability. These emerged from the accumulation of monetary cash balances, made possible by gold’s resistance to supply expansion. [3]

My explanation of monetary stability therefore runs in the opposite direction from yours. Resistance to dilution makes an asset attractive for saving. Growing demand raises its value, allowing it to hold larger cash balances. Those balances support deeper liquidity, narrower bid-ask spreads, and greater salability. Stability emerges as this monetary market grows. Your diagrams do not explain how resistance to dilution affects the demand to hold money. The size and persistence of cash balances depend on the monetary properties that make people willing to accumulate them over the long term, and that allow the money to hold and increase its value over time.

Gold earned its monetary position through its exceptional hardness; attributing that position to its tiny, almost imperceptible supply elasticity is like saying Usain Bolt won the 100m dash because he slowed down near the finish line. Yes, he slowed down, but he won because he is the fastest. If you invented a synthetic Usain Bolt that didn’t slow down near the finish line, he would beat the real Usain Bolt.

Your chapter rejects the claim that rising capitalization reduces Bitcoin’s volatility, stating: “In fact, as its market capitalization has grown over the years, Bitcoin’s volatility has not declined.” This was likely wrong when you published it if you had zoomed out, but by now, it is extremely difficult to substantiate.

Fidelity documents a long-term decline in realized volatility as you can see in this chart. [5] @JPMayall has shown that bitcoin’s 252-day realized volatility has now declined to only 1.52 times gold’s. [6] Kim-Oanh Do recently published an important paper showing that bitcoin’s mean daily realized volatility is declining significantly, while bid-ask spreads are narrowing, price impact and illiquidity have decreased, and volatility shocks are having smaller, less persistent effects on liquidity. [7] Charles Schwab also finds a significant reduction in annualized historical volatility. [8] Huda Aldhahi finds similar results from hourly observations. [9] More such studies can be found.

Bitcoin’s market capitalization and liquidity have grown while its volatility has declined markedly. This is exactly what I would expect. Gold did not become the least volatile monetary asset because it had the best supply response, but because it had the worst supply response. Since bitcoin has invented an even worse supply response, I would expect it to become even less volatile when it matures and becomes larger in market capitalization than gold.

Holding bitcoin is using bitcoin as money, and its lack of widespread use as a method of payment is no evidence against its monetization unfolding. Someone holding Bitcoin to preserve purchasing power for future expenditure is holding a monetary balance. Calling that person an investor does not remove the monetary purpose of the holding. Accumulating savings is central to how an emerging money develops the liquidity needed for widespread exchange. Bitcoin is still around 1% of global cash balances, but it is growing fast. Expecting it to have widespread payment adoption before it develops significant cash balances puts the cart before the horse.

This also answers your Tesla comparison: you argue that the rise in Tesla stock will not turn it into money. A share’s value depends on a company’s profits, costs, management, competitors, and issuance decisions. These introduce countless nonmonetary influences. A company facing enormous demand for its shares as money can issue more shares to finance its operations, compromising the scarcity that attracted monetary holders. Bitcoin has neither that issuer nor that exposure to a particular business. Comparing their capitalization without considering these differences misses the argument.

I expect continued Bitcoin monetization to produce larger cash balances, deeper liquidity, and lower volatility. Its transition from a newly invented asset to global money necessarily involves substantial appreciation and price discovery. In a mature Bitcoin standard, I expect appreciation to become slow and steady, reflecting economic growth rather than the rapid acquisition of monetary demand. There is no reason to assume the transition’s volatility describes the destination.

Finally, dollar stablecoins are economically a new form of fiat checking balance. Their transaction volumes belong to the already dominant fiat monetary network, which is of course far larger than that of bitcoin. Their popularity tells us that people use dollars and appreciate better ways to transfer them. It does not establish that Bitcoin needs an elastic supply, any more than the popularity of ordinary checking accounts does.

The question remains: gold’s outstanding monetary characteristic was how difficult its stock was to expand. Why should eliminating the remaining possibility of dilution make a better version of that monetary property into a defect?

References

1. Lawrence H. White (2023), Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?, Chapter 6, “Comparing and Contrasting Gold and Bitcoin Standards,” Cambridge University Press.
2. World Gold Council (2026), Gold’s Key Attributes: Return. Documents average annual above-ground gold stock growth of approximately 1.7% over the preceding 25 years. https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/gold-strategic-asset-2026-edition/20447
3. U.S. Geological Survey, Gold Statistics and Information. Discusses gold’s historical monetary role and its emergence as an important industrial metal in the late twentieth century. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/gold-statistics-and-information
4. Ludwig von Mises (1912), The Theory of Money and Credit, Part II, Chapter 13, “Monetary Policy,” Section 5. English translation by H. E. Batson, Liberty Fund edition. Full Mises quote:
   

   “The significance of adherence to a metallic-money system lies in the freedom of the value of money from state influence that such a system guarantees. Beyond doubt, considerable disadvantages are involved in the fact that not only fluctuations in the ratio of the supply of money and the demand for it, but also fluctuations in the conditions of production of the metal and variations in the industrial demand for it, exert an influence on the determination of the value of money. It is true that these effects, in the case of gold (and even in the case of silver), are not immoderately great, and these are the only two monetary metals that need be considered in modern times. But even if the effects were greater, such a money would still deserve preference over one subject to state intervention, since the latter sort of money would be subject to still greater fluctuations.”

   https://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msT.html?chapter_num=17

5. See: https://institutional.fidelity.com/app/proxy/content?literatureURL=%2F9922887.PDF
   Also: Zack Wainwright (May 1, 2024), A Closer Look at Bitcoin’s Volatility, Fidelity Digital Assets. Documents Bitcoin’s declining realized volatility over time, including comparisons at similar price levels in different market cycles. https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/research-and-insights/closer-look-bitcoins-volatility
6. https://x.com/jpmayall/status/2107851442031566871
7. Kim-Oanh Do (2026), Maturation of Bitcoin Market Microstructure: Evidence of Institutional-Grade Liquidity and Efficiency (2012–2025), Borsa Istanbul Review, 26(5), 100869. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221484502600089X
8. https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/bitcoin-volatility-shrinks-to-magnificent-7-levels
9. https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/19/9/707
10. Here is an AI summary of the literature on gold supply responsiveness:
    The empirical literature finds that gold supply responds to its real price late and weakly. For the classical gold standard, Rockoff (1984), the usual source for an induced response, presents no regression. He argues that the Klondike discoveries and the cyanide process were price-induced, and concludes that “the long and uncertain lags that marked the supply response hardly seem acceptable in an impatient age” (p. 640). The one regression from the period is an unpublished estimate by Rush, reported by Barro in his comment on Rockoff. It uses seventeen annual observations (1897–1913) and gives an output elasticity of 0.3 in the short run and 1.7 in the long run, with simultaneity unaddressed. Bordo (1981) correlates the detrended world monetary gold stock with the purchasing power of gold over 1821–1914. He finds that purchasing power leads the stock by 25 years (r = 0.44), or by 16 years for 1879–1914 (r = 0.86); his stronger result runs the other way, with the stock leading purchasing power by two years (r = −0.64). Cagan (1965) declined to compute a correlation and reported only that the relation was positive with a long lag: prices fell from the early 1870s, but output did not expand appreciably until after 1890. Eichengreen and McLean (1994) conclude that the influence of real gold prices on production “is not dominant” and that conditions such as prior settlement mattered.
    Modern studies point the same way. In the short run the response is zero or negative. Marsh (1983) confirms Keynes’s observation that a higher price leads mines to work lower-grade ore and produce less. Cooper (1982) notes that world output declined through the 1970s while the real price rose four- to fivefold. Schwartz (1987, p. 386) writes that production “responds sluggishly to changes in market price and since the 1960s has responded perversely.” A positive response appears only after several years. Selvanathan and Selvanathan (1999) find none within a year and roughly unit elasticity after five in Western Australia (1948–94). Rockerbie (1999) finds about eight years for South Africa (1970–95), and the World Gold Council (2026) puts the lag at “at least six years.” Nearly all of this work measures mine output, not the stock. Of these studies, only Bordo searches across lags, and none estimates how much of a price reversal the added supply accounts for.
11. https://x.com/saifedean/status/2109259766895988815

One of the best things you can do for yourself intellectually is to stop worshipping your political tribe.

Better still, refuse to become a tribalist in the first place.

That sounds simple enough. Most people would probably insist they're independent thinkers, perfectly capable of criticizing their own side. Yet political discourse suggests that this independence often disappears the moment someone challenges a politician, party, or movement with which they identify.

Suddenly, principles become negotiable. Contradictions become nuances. What was an outrage yesterday becomes a necessary compromise today.

And the only thing that changed was the identity of the person committing the offense.

The Comfortable Hypocrisy of Belonging

It's remarkably easy to identify hypocrisy, dishonesty, corruption, and economic ignorance in your political opponents.

In fact, you probably don't even have to try.

Your mind is already inclined to notice their contradictions because you expect to find them. Every mistake confirms what you already believe about them.

The more difficult exercise is recognizing those same faults in people you support.

That's where intellectual independence is actually tested.

If you condemn censorship when Democrats advocate it but excuse it when Republicans do, you're defending a team rather than freedom of expression.

If you oppose government subsidies when they benefit industries you dislike but celebrate them when they benefit industries you favor, you're defending political favoritism rather than capitalism.

If you condemn politicians for using government power to punish their enemies but applaud them for punishing yours, you have abandoned the very principle that supposedly justified your original objection.

The standard hasn't changed. Your willingness to apply it has.

And that should concern you far more than anything your political opponents are doing.

How Republicans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Economic Intervention

Consider the evolution of Republican economic rhetoric.

For decades, Republicans presented themselves as defenders of capitalism, free enterprise, limited government, and individual responsibility.

Their actual record was considerably less impressive.

Government spending continued. Subsidies survived. Regulations multiplied. Protectionist instincts never entirely disappeared.

Nevertheless, capitalism remained something Republican politicians were expected to praise, even when their policies contradicted it.

Today, a growing faction of Republican politics seems increasingly comfortable abandoning even that pretense.

Tariffs are celebrated as instruments of national prosperity. Industrial subsidies are defended as strategic investments. Politicians openly advocate directing production, influencing corporate decisions, and using economic coercion to achieve political objectives.

These ideas are increasingly sold to conservative voters as evidence of strength, patriotism, and economic wisdom.

How remarkable.

For years, Republicans warned Americans about politicians attempting to manage the economy from Washington.

Now some are asking their voters to celebrate precisely that, provided the politicians doing the managing are Republicans.

The principles supposedly haven't changed.

Only the excuses have.

And this is precisely why political tribalism is so dangerous.

A voter committed to capitalism would recognize the contradiction immediately. A voter committed primarily to Republicans must find some way to rationalize it.

The Opposition Is Not Your Moral Compass

One of the most intellectually destructive habits in politics is deciding what you believe by first discovering what your opponents believe.

If Democrats support something, Republicans must oppose it.

If Republicans support something, Democrats must condemn it.

This produces an extraordinary situation in which millions of people effectively outsource their judgment to the people they claim to distrust most.

Their political opponents determine their positions simply by taking the opposite side.

That's a peculiar definition of independent thinking.

Worse, it allows political movements to change their positions without requiring their followers to reconsider anything.

All that matters is maintaining the distinction between us and them.

A policy can be condemned as socialism one year and celebrated as economic patriotism the next.

A politician can violate a principle repeatedly and remain a champion of that principle in the eyes of supporters who have confused personal loyalty with intellectual consistency.

And whenever someone points out the contradiction, the response is depressingly predictable:

But what about the other side?

As though the misconduct of one politician somehow absolves another.

As though two wrongs establish a right.

As though identifying hypocrisy in your opponents excuses practicing it yourself.

Principles Are Supposed to Be Inconvenient

There's a reason principles matter.

They establish standards that remain applicable regardless of our immediate preferences, political loyalties, or personal interests.

A principle that applies only when convenient is little more than a preference wearing a respectable disguise.

If you believe in freedom of speech, you must defend that freedom even when the speaker expresses ideas you despise.

If you believe in property rights, you must respect them even when the owner is wealthy, unpopular, or politically opposed to you.

If you believe government should protect individual rights rather than distribute political favors, that restriction must apply to politicians you admire just as firmly as those you detest.

Indeed, it should be especially important when dealing with your political allies.

Why?

Because your opponents already have critics.

They have people watching for mistakes, exposing contradictions, and challenging their arguments.

Your own side has something far more dangerous: people who are emotionally invested in explaining away its failures.

And if you're unwilling to challenge those failures, you become one of them.

You Can Have Convictions Without Having a Tribe

Rejecting tribalism doesn't require pretending all political ideas are equally valid.

Some ideas are demonstrably better than others. Some political philosophies are internally contradictory. Some policies violate individual rights, undermine prosperity, or produce consequences their advocates refuse to acknowledge.

You can recognize these distinctions without surrendering your independence to a political movement.

I advocate capitalism because I believe individual rights, private property, voluntary exchange, and freedom from coercion provide the proper foundation for a civilized society.

That doesn't oblige me to defend every politician who calls himself a capitalist.

Nor does it require me to oppose an argument merely because it comes from a socialist.

If a socialist correctly identifies a government subsidy as political favoritism, I can agree with that criticism while rejecting his proposed solution of expanding government control.

If a Republican advocates tariffs, I can condemn the policy without pretending that opposition makes me a Democrat.

And if someone claiming to defend capitalism advocates violating individual rights, I have every reason to challenge him.

The label is irrelevant to the principle.

In fact, the more closely someone claims to represent your values, the more carefully you should examine whether their actions actually reflect them.

Otherwise, your principles become marketing material for politicians who have little intention of respecting them.

The Greatest Threat to Your Convictions May Come From Those Who Claim to Share Them

Political opponents rarely persuade you to abandon your principles outright.

You already distrust their arguments.

Your allies, however, can convince you to compromise those principles gradually, one supposedly necessary exception at a time.

A little protectionism for national security.

A few subsidies for strategic industries.

Some censorship to protect society.

A little economic coercion for the greater good.

Each exception arrives wrapped in the familiar language of your own political movement.

And because you trust the people presenting it, you become less inclined to question the underlying premise.

Eventually, you may find yourself defending policies you once condemned, without ever consciously deciding to abandon the principles that made you oppose them.

That's the real danger of political tribalism.

It allows people to surrender their convictions while maintaining the comforting illusion that they've remained faithful to them.

Think for Yourself, Especially When It's Uncomfortable

You should question your own side at least as much as you question the opposition.

Preferably more.

Your opponents don't need your assistance exposing their flaws. You're already motivated to find them.

Your allies are where your intellectual honesty faces its greatest test.

Ask yourself whether you'd defend the same policy if your political opponents proposed it.

Whether you'd excuse the same behavior if a politician you despised committed it.

Whether your arguments would survive if every party label and political personality were removed.

And perhaps most importantly, whether you're defending a principle because you believe it's true or defending a politician because you want him to be right.

You don't need to abandon your convictions to become intellectually independent.

You need to take them seriously enough to apply them consistently.

Your political convictions should determine whom you support. The moment those you support begin determining your convictions, you've stopped thinking for yourself.

*I have one small request of readers at The Redneck Intellectual. I would be most appreciative if you would please share this essay with as many people as you can. Thanks.

**Audio recording is below.

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Over the course of the previous six essays in this series on the nature and meaning of marriage in a free society (see here, here, here, here, here, and here), we have examined various aspects of what marriage is and is not and why marriage properly defined and understood is crucial to a healthy and civil society. In our concluding series of essays on marriage, we shift gears and consider two final questions: first, what is the proper role of government in marriage, and second, will laws supporting what we have called postmodern “marriage” expand or contract the sphere of freedom in America?

To help us answer these two questions, we shall reconsider the all-too-common question posed by the Boston Globe that we examined in our previous essay on “Marriage Nihilism.” The Globe asked: “How would gay civil marriage affect your lives, liberties, or opportunities, or your own marriages?” This is an important question that must be answered.

In our two previous essays on “The Meaning of Marriage Equality” and “Marriage Nihilism,” we considered how same-sex marriage would affect the institution of marriage morally and socially. In the next few essays, we shall consider how metaphysical and postmodern marriage would affect our lives, our liberties, and our opportunities politically and legally. Specifically, we want to know whether government in a free society should have the power to coerce people into accepting postmodern marriage via laws, indoctrination, and censorship. Let us recall that one of the principal arguments for postmodern marriage is that Americans should be free to live however they choose and to love whomever they choose. In other words, does postmodern marriage expand or diminish freedom?

In today’s essay, I examine the role of government in metaphysical or true marriage (i.e., the union of one man and one woman that is monogamous, sexually exclusive, and permanent).

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Metaphysical Marriage and Government

On the metaphysical view, government has a legitimate but limited role to play in marriage. Let’s begin by stating clearly what the government of a free society must not do relative to marriage.

Generally speaking, government should not be in the business of defining and enforcing the content of private, non-contractual human relationships. It should not determine, for instance, what it means to be a friend, a brother or sister, a lover, or a son or daughter. These relationships can be just as intense and important to the individuals involved in them as those of a married man and woman, and yet we do not and would not want the government regulating such relationships. The manners and mores associated with such relationships are best regulated through informal cultural norms and individual choices. The same is true of romantic, non-marital sexual relationships. In a free society, the State has no business in either endorsing or forbidding certain kinds of voluntary relationships between consenting adults. Nor should government be involved in propping up the self-esteem and dignity of certain individuals or groups.

Likewise, government should never attempt to create a social institution like marriage simply by ordering it into being and forcing individuals to accept it. This much is therefore certain: first, marriage is not and should not be created by government; and second, government should not function as a social engineer regulating the content of private, voluntary associations. Instead, its proper role should be limited to serving as a rights-protecting, rights-enforcing agency that ensures all adult relationships are voluntary and that the rights of children are protected.

The government of a free society may, however, recognize and facilitate certain kinds of relationships by providing them with a legal framework through which their forms and formalities are defined objectively and protected either by law or through written contracts. In order to fulfill this role, however, the government must know what marriage is. There is no time or place in world history where governments did not draw a line and say “this is marriage” to the exclusion of all other relationships. Governments do the same, for instance, regarding driver’s licenses and restrictions on who can vote. Even today, some proponents of same-sex marriage want to draw a line in the sand and exclude (which means to discriminate against) polygamous and polyamorous relationships from the status of marriage.

For marriage to be recognized in law, it must be understood and identified as some particular thing as opposed to something else or to nothing at all, and it must have a definition that distinguishes it from all other relationships. This is the only way that contracts or laws could be made to identify, distinguish, and protect marriage from all other relationships. The alternative to defining marriage as something particular (i.e., as having objectively grounded characteristics rather than whims and desires) is to say that it is nothing in particular and thereby obliterate its meaning altogether.

Regarding metaphysical marriage (i.e., true marriage), government has a strictly delimited role as a rights-respecting, rights-protecting agency. In other words, the proper role of government in marriage should be largely laissez-faire. From the perspective of the men and women who seek conjugal union, the rights-protecting role of government in marriage is twofold: first, to recognize and then protect the rights of married couples as a marital unit from outside interference, i.e., the right to their marital union, and, second, to serve as a neutral arbiter in settling legal disputes between husbands and wives as separate individuals.

In the first instance, government recognizes marriage through registration and licensing. In doing so, it protects the status and interests of married couples as a single, integrated unit against third parties who may seek to interfere in their marital union (e.g., legal cases involving next of kin); it assists in transferring property from one generation to another; and it supports their right to raise any children born of their conjugal union free of outside interference.

In the second instance, government recognizes marriage by providing a default legal framework for adjudicating disputes between husbands and wives. Marriage is—in part—a contract between a man and a woman, which means that its general rights and responsibilities should be known and spelled out in advance, such that the role of the government is limited to ensuring that the union is consensual and that its terms are known to both parties and enforced if necessary. Men and women who seek a permanent and exclusive union look to the government to serve as a neutral third party in adjudicating disputes that may arise between husbands and wives (e.g., joint property issues, spousal abuse, divorce, alimony, child custody and support, etc.).

But there is another important perspective from which to view the role of government in marriage, i.e., from the perspective of any children born to a married couple. The rights of children must be protected as well. Children come into the world defenseless and dependent on their parents, and the parents have a moral and a legal responsibility to protect their children’s right to life, and they also have a moral and legal right to be the adults who do so. Sadly, not all parents fulfill their responsibility. As part of its legitimate oversight role in marriage, government is therefore properly concerned with protecting the rights of children from abuse, neglect, or abandonment.

Public recognition of marriage permits governments to identify the parents of children. Without it, governments would face a difficult, if not a nearly impossible, task of determining the paternity of abandoned or abused children. Marriage solves that problem. The first line of defense in protecting the rights of children is for government to know who their biological parents are. Government-recognized marriage therefore acknowledges the procreative potential of heterosexual relationships, and it provides a legal structure that protects the bearing and rearing of children by their natural parents. The presumption of marriage is that husbands and wives will only have children within the context of their conjugal relationship, and they will raise them together as a family.

Thus, a proper government may issue marriage licenses with the ultimate goal of protecting children from abandonment, neglect, and abuse. Marriage joins husbands and wives together to become lifelong mothers and fathers. Were it not for children, there would be no need for the government to be in the marriage business other than to adjudicate what could otherwise be private contracts. If marriage were simply about defining the relational rights and responsibilities of two adults, pooling their resources, and sharing experiences and love, then again there would be no reason to have marriage recognized with its own distinct legal structure as opposed to a private contract.

In a free society, government should not regulate private relationships other than to adjudicate contracts between private parties. Moreover, a proper government should not be in the business of recognizing or sanctioning love, feelings, affection, self-esteem, or friendship. Proponents of a free society should not want the government issuing “friendship licenses” or “romance licenses,” for instance. While governments should have no interest in friendships, romantic unions (including even the most intense and intimate relationships heterosexual or homosexual), and the consensual sexual relationships of adults, they do have a vested interest in marriages. In fact, marriage is the only private personal relationship for which a government has a legitimate interest in providing some minimal degree of public recognition beyond mere contractual adjudication. Government has a vested interest in the perpetuation of the society over which it governs, and so it has a special interest in providing a salutary legal structure for the social relationship most responsible for reproducing and educating the individuals who make up the society. In other words, it has a special interest in the health and well-being of marriages by protecting the rights of married couples.

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Marriage is different—radically different—from all other kinds of relationships. It is different from friendships and non-marital romantic relationships (heterosexual and homosexual). These different kinds of relationships can be just as intense, close, and loving as those of married couples. And yet, we do not permit or want the State to regulate friendships or romantic relationships (heterosexual and homosexual) above and beyond any contractual arrangements concerning the disposition of property, next of kin, and power of attorney. Government recognizes different kinds of contractual relationships, but it does not call them marriage. They go by different names because they are different kinds of association serving different ends.

Marriage, unlike other personal relationships, serves an objective public good: responsible procreation so that children are not hurt and society is perpetuated. This is one of the few instances in which we can say that a government policy is in the “public interest.” Only the most radical nihilists would oppose the protection of children and the preservation of civil society if not the species. (And yet, such people do exist, and they pose an existential threat to a free society.)

On the metaphysical view, government therefore has what we might call a minimal, “Night Watchman” role in overseeing the conditions necessary for the creation of families and the rearing of children. A properly limited, rights-respecting government has an interest in providing the basic legal scaffolding supporting the natural family, particularly regarding the entry and exit points (i.e., marriage, divorce, and death).

One of the important virtues of marriage as a social institution is that it facilitates a great deal of voluntary cooperation with a minimal legal structure and interference by the government. It sanctions and protects millions of mini societies (or “little platoons,” as Burke called them) made up of married mothers and fathers and their biological children. These small social units serve to educate children to become self-governing adults, and they are how a community of individuals perpetuates itself. If a husband and wife fulfill their basic responsibilities as parents, the government should have no interest in their marriage. In this way, marriage is the ultimate instantiation of the Hayekian system of spontaneous order: it is a bottom-up, self-regulating, self-replicating, voluntary system of long-term cooperative action that requires no guidance from the State. It only asks of the government that the metaphysically grounded rights associated with marriage be protected.

Not all romantic relationships in a free society, however, will result in marriage. Non-marital romantic relationships can be heterosexual, homosexual, polygamous, and polyamorous, and sometimes those relationships will seek to imitate or replicate some or all of the characteristics and protections of marriage (e.g., a legally recognized union that is monogamous, sexually exclusive, and permanent).

How might the government of a free society deal with these kinds of relationships?

Let’s consider the case of same-sex relationships. In a free society, recognizing and protecting the rights of individuals is the only proper foundation of justice, which includes protecting the right to freedom of association and the corollary right to form contracts. Regarding romantic and sexual unions, that which is done between consenting adults in the privacy and sanctity of one’s home should be no business of the government. Every individual adult living in the United States should feel free and safe to experience and fulfill their various romantic and sexual needs unregulated by government and without fear of punishment. This we should do with all due and deliberate speed.

In a free society, there are many different kinds of relationships that are or can be defined by contracts and deserving of a separate and distinct legal status, including long-term, even permanent romantic relationships of various descriptions, e.g., common-law “marriages,” same-sex relationships, polyamorous, and polygamous relationships. Romantic homosexual unions are real, and they can be just as intense as heterosexual relationships, just as meaningful to the individuals who experience them and just as long-lasting as marriages, but they are a different kind of relationship and so they deserve a different kind of legal status.

The proponents of a free society should support liberalizing and/or expanding the law to include the recognition of such relationships. We should work quickly to ensure that homosexuals do in fact have the same rights to make contracts that heterosexuals do. Homosexual partners in a permanent romantic union should have the freedom to form private contracts that would recognize their right to establish a legal, next-of-kin relationship different from their birth status. (This right should also be extended to unmarried heterosexual couples as well.) Furthermore, they should be granted legal provisions guaranteeing their rights relative to inheritance and tax law and to issues concerning, for instance, hospital-visitation rights. Homosexuals, like heterosexuals, should not be the object of State force that violates their right of free association, nor should they be denied the ability to form private contracts.

Expanding the regime of justice does not, however, require a state-mandated change in the definition of marriage. Other than enforcing private contracts, the State should have no legitimate interest in the private life of a long-term homosexual union. To all intents and purposes, properly designed civil unions afford homosexuals equal treatment under the law. In fact, most, if not all, of the legal goals of the postmodern marriage movement could be achieved in the absence of same-sex marriage.

In a free society, a wide range of romantic and non-romantic relationships could and should take legally recognized and legally binding vows that consummate mutual pledges of loyalty and support. This would allow polygamous and polyamorous relationships, for instance, to form as “civil partnerships” dedicated to securing various legal and personal protections for their relationships. In fact, such protections could be extended to a wide variety of non-marital relationships, including those of heterosexual siblings or friends who might wish to provide or care for each other throughout life and who might want to establish one or the other as legal “next of kin.”

An objective approach takes the moral condemnation of homosexuality, polygamy, polyamory, and other forms of romantic association out of the legal-political sphere. In a truly free society, individuals will remain free to engage in these relationships while other individuals will be equally free to judge and condemn those relationships if they find them abhorrent. What cannot be permitted in a free society is using the coercive force of the State to either criminalize such relationships or to criminalize the thought, speech, and actions of those who do not sanction them. In other words, Christian traditionalists may not use the coercive force of the State to outlaw homosexual acts just as secular Leftists may not use the coercive force of the State to outlaw Christian traditionalists from expressing and acting on their principles.

The approach I’m suggesting has the virtue of requiring only small changes to the law and to society, and it would require no expansion of the State, nor the violation of anyone’s rights. In fact, it is the one and only solution that expands the rights of individuals. It is a Hayekian solution to a Hayekian problem. It is the solution that would give everyone what they want (if what they want is really what they say they want), but it would not disrupt or upend society and cause social civil war. More importantly, it is the solution most in accord with the principles and institutions of a free society. The objective case against postmodern marriage is strengthened if we expand the category of civil union to include those appropriate legal rights from which same-sex couples and polygamous and polyamorous relationships may have been unjustly excluded in the past.

Here’s the audio recording of “Marriage and the Role of Government in a Free Society.” Because of the importance of the topic, I’m making it free for unpaid subscribers in the hope that you will share the essay and recording far and wide.

The Redneck Intellectual is providing content that you won’t find anywhere else on the internet, or with Super Intelligence, or in America’s college classrooms, or from the so-called “intellectual” class. In light of that fact, I wonder if you wouldn’t consider a paid subscription to help with date night at Chick-fil-A with Mrs. Redneck!?!?

Skeptic Magazine commissioned the following essay for a special issue on the theme of nationalism, (vol. 27, no. 4 / Dec. 2022). We are pleased to reprint a slightly revised version of the essay, with permission, in New Ideal. Part II will appear next week.

America is being torn apart. Amid growing strife, many people are experiencing angst concerning the future of this country, a country once renowned for its exuberant spirit of discovery, progress, liberty. From across the increasingly tribal political landscape, one can observe attacks on the ideas that fueled America’s spectacular rise: reason, individualism, and political freedom. From the illiberal left the “woke” phenomenon has emerged, rising to dominance in cultural institutions and calling for “canceling” those institutions, symbols, and even thoughts it deems heretical. Standing in opposition to it is another new movement that promises to reunite us and rebuild a society true to the American vision. That latter promise calls for embracing the ideology of nationalism.

The movement to rehabilitate nationalism has a fervent vanguard. Among its leaders is the scholar Yoram Hazony, and his organization, the Edmund Burke Foundation. Under the banner of “national conservatism,” the Foundation has sponsored major international conferences. The most recent event in Miami, FL, featured more than 100 speakers, including keynote talks by Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Josh Hawley, and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. The national conservatives are joined by still other factions, who often describe themselves as the “illiberal right.” And it was a significant moment when then-president Donald Trump thrilled a crowd at one of his rallies by telling them that he’s a nationalist.1

The reemergence of nationalism is a worse problem than it may seem. Nationalism in the last century ravaged Europe. Nationalists today would have us believe their agenda will somehow lead to different results. Despite wrapping themselves in the Stars and Stripes, they push essentially the same destructive ideas. The more power and influence nationalism gains, the bleaker our future. What’s needed to counter this movement is a deeper understanding of, and a commitment to fully realize, the Enlightenment ideals at the foundation of the American experiment.

America’s Foundation: Reason and Individual Rights

The original American political system was an innovation in political thought. For most of human history, government was an instrument of domination over the individual. Individuals were duty bound to kneel before some authority, whether embodied in a tribe, throne or church. The individual was literally a pawn at the disposal of the rulers. With the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, however, the ground began to shift. Thinkers such as John Locke advocated a fundamentally different view of the relation between individual citizens and the state. That political shift stemmed from a philosophical emphasis on reason. The individual, these thinkers believed, is capable of observing the world, understanding it and discovering truths; and so, people could use their reason to guide their own lives. What emerged was a recognition of the individual as sovereign — in thought and in action.

Consequently, a new view came into focus regarding the individual’s relation to the state. The state’s purpose was not to dominate and exploit, but rather to protect the individual’s sovereignty. This view informed the Founders, and it reverberates in the words of the Declaration of Independence. The individual — every individual — has the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and government exists “to secure these rights.” When government “becomes destructive of these ends,” it is the right of the governed to abolish it and institute a better system that “shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.” Thus, the state’s raison d’être is to protect individual rights, that is, to protect individuals’ freedom to pursue life and happiness based on their rational judgment.

It is important to recognize, however, that in the implementation of America’s founding principles there were contradictions and moral failings. The most obvious was the institution of slavery, which persisted until the Emancipation Proclamation (which only freed slaves in those territories still under Confederate control) and the ratification of the 13th Amendment (which abolished slavery throughout the entire nation). Even after those landmark actions, Jim Crow laws, which institutionalized legal racial segregation, remained on the books through the mid-20th century. It took the 19th Amendment, which was ratified just one hundred years ago, to enable women to vote. These were genuine, if much belated, steps toward a more consistent application of the principle of individual rights.

One feature of the original American system deserves special emphasis: the safeguarding of intellectual freedom. The principle of church/state separation fenced religion off from political power.

The First Amendment leaves individuals free to form their own conclusions and to express their ideas — emphatically including criticism of religion and the state. This reflects a view of the individual as capable of rational thought, owing no submission to dogma, and, above all, entitled to pursue the truth by their own best judgment. The unshackling of individuals to gain new knowledge about the world, without fear of retribution from religious leaders, would prove to be both a cause and an accelerant of progress. 

Despite failing to protect the rights of all individuals, the United States remains a stunning example of the power of (albeit incomplete) liberty to fuel progress. Once a backwater of the British Empire, the United States became the world’s most scientifically, technologically and economically advanced nation. The Scientific Revolution not only accelerated human knowledge but also instilled a cultural norm of truth seeking, replacing conformity to the specific dogmas of the dominant church. The Industrial Revolution, coupled with a significant degree of economic liberty, supercharged economic progress.

The myriad advances in science, technology and industry demonstrated the power of the rational mind to understand nature and reshape it to serve the goal of improving life. Look around at the world we live in: Life expectancy in the twentieth century has roughly doubled. Refrigerators, microwave ovens, air-conditioning, televisions and mobile phones are fixtures even in the homes of Americans who live in poverty. Thanks to the pioneers of Silicon Valley, the number of digital screens — smartphones, tablets, laptops — outnumber the occupants of a typical household, putting at our fingertips access to practically all music, films, books and the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Medical science has tamed or cured terrible diseases. And during a once-in-a-century pandemic, biotech companies were able to produce not just one, but multiple, vaccines for COVID-19 in a matter of months rather than years.

These material advances, coupled with a culture in which liberty is protected, have made the United States a beacon to the rest of the world, an inspiration to be emulated. That is why the brightest and most ambitious people from all over the world have sought and continue to seek to immigrate to America. What made America such a success story? Its foundational ideals of reason, individualism, and freedom — and the human spirit they unleash.

Nationalism is hostile to all of those.

What is Nationalism?

Nationalism is not synonymous with loyalty to one’s own country; it is a specific political-social doctrine. The essential feature of nationalism is the very un-American notion of elevating the group over the individual.

German romanticists — the original nationalists — held that the “nation-state or folk-state was not a societal organization based upon human law with the purpose of assuring man’s liberty, security and happiness, but an organic personality, God’s creation like the individual himself. . . .”2 The German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, a major influence on both nationalism and Marxism, did not see the state as an association of individuals, but rather as a kind “person” transcending and subsuming them. “A single person . . . is something subordinate,” Hegel wrote, “and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it.”3 The state, in Hegel’s view “is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.”4

Because nationalism devalues the individual, it is at odds with the principle of protecting individual liberty. Indeed, nationalism is best understood as a species of collectivism. Fundamentally, writes the philosopher Leonard Peikoff, collectivism “holds that in human affairs, the collective — society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. — is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it.” It is predicated, observed Ayn Rand, “on the view of man as a congenital incompetent, a helpless, mindless creature who must be fooled and ruled by a special elite with some unspecified claim to superior wisdom and a lust for power.”5

Nationalism is thus a cousin of tribalism. Both define membership based on accidental or unchosen characteristics (place of birth; “race,” ancestry, language). Both demand unthinking loyalty, obedience and self-sacrifice, one to the “nation,” the other to the “race,” family, clan, tribe. Nationalism, unlike tribalism, typically relies on some theoretical scaffolding, enabling today’s advocates of nationalism to pass off their ideology as civilized. But nationalism, like tribalism, has a bloody legacy. 

With its stress on “race,” language and ascriptive group identity, nationalism is primed for in-group supremacism and out-group conflict. In Germany, the National Socialist party built a totalitarian state, in keeping with the idea that the individual citizen is but a cell in the organic nation. It was essential, in Hitler’s words, that the individual should “realize that his own ego is unimportant when compared with the existence of the whole people, and that therefore the position of this single ego is exclusively determined by the interests of the people as a whole, . . . above all he must realize that the freedom of the mind and will of a nation are to be valued more highly than the individual's freedom of mind and will.”6

When German citizens are merely fragments of the “nation’s mind and will,” and when non-Aryans are dehumanized as vermin, it is left to the incarnation of the nation’s Will to restore the nation’s glory, ensure its purity and provide for its needs. Pan-Germanism, which predated the Nazis and influenced Hitler, had “demanded above all a Greater German Lebensraum (living space), overseas colonies, and a big navy.”7 The Nazi regime infamously pursued “Lebensraum,” it exterminated human beings by the millions, and it fought to realize the dream of German domination.

The twentieth century was blighted with still other forms of nationalism. Japan’s form of nationalism featured worship of a god-like emperor. Arab Nationalism, infused with socialism and Islam, gained authoritarian power in Egypt and Syria, where it led to stagnation, the exploitation of the subject population and regional wars.

By the early 1970s there were assorted nationalist movements making separatist demands, often using violent means; for instance in Canada (Quebec), Spain’s Basque region, and the perpetually restive Balkans. The term Balkanization entered the lexicon as a byword for the disintegration of Western societies into warring tribal and nationalist factions.

Today, nationalism can be seen in Russian belligerence. It is a major part of Vladimir Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine. In a long essay, Putin claims that Russia and Ukraine are essentially one nation. Ukraine, he contends, is an artificial creation, which must be reunited with Russia, regardless of the cost in individual lives.8

Nationalism is a repudiation of the sovereign individual, the ideal central to a free society. Whatever semblance of credibility nationalism may have had in the last century, it lost that on Europe’s corpse-strewn battlefields and in the gas chambers. Today, at the forefront of the campaign to revive nationalism are the self-described “national conservatives.” What reason if any is there to believe that their ideas will lead to a different outcome?

"And he is, after all, a politician, so I will give him the highest praise I give to any politician: I’m really looking forward to finding out how he will disappoint me."

~ Robert Tracinski on politician John Ossoff in his post 'We Need an Article I Election'

"[T]HE BRITISH EMPIRE ... CONTAINED ITS FAIR share of errors, failures, and evils—both innocently inadvertent and culpable. That should not surprise or horrify ...

"But that is only half the story. For ... the British Empire was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading and slavery in the early 1800s. It then spent the second half of its life leading the campaign to suppress slavery the world over ... all during a period when the British government’s resources were but a quarter of what they are now.

"In addition, the Empire suppressed the self-immolation of widows and female infanticide in India and female genital mutilation in Africa.

"It moderated the disruptive impact of the inevitable arrival of Western modernity upon very unmodern societies in North America and especially Australia.

"It created regional peace by imposing an overarching imperial authority on multiple, warring peoples—unifying, for example, much of the Indian subcontinent.

"It promoted a worldwide free market, protected by the Royal Navy, that gave native producers and entrepreneurs in India and West Africa new economic opportunities. It made foreign investment attractive by reducing risk through establishing political stability and the rule of law. Consequently, Australia’s gross domestic product per capita became the highest in the world by 1890, and by 1914 India was the world’s fourth largest textile-producer.

"The Empire built canals in India, bringing five times as much land under irrigation as the Mughals had in the 18th century. By 1900 it had figured out how to prevent food shortage escalating into famine there and went on to fight disease in tropical Africa.

"It provided a civil service and judiciary that was generally and extraordinarily incorrupt.

"It introduced liberal ideas and liberal institutions of a free press and representative government to places that had never known them. New Zealand was the first country in the world to grant the vote to men and women on equal terms, in 1893, and by 1935 electoral democracy had been established in Indian provinces.

"From May 1940, when France fell, to June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, The British Empire offered Nazi Germany the only military resistance—with the sole exception of Greece.

"Inspired by the ideal of the Commonwealth, it helped to plan and realise the League of Nations after the First World War and the United Nations after 1945.

"And it brought up three of the most prosperous and liberal states in the world—Canada, Australia and New Zealand—and gave birth to one more, the United States. ... 

"SO, HOW CAN WE MAKE OVERALL ethical sense of the British Empire? Can we say that it achieved more good than evil or vice-versa? No, because the goods and evils that the Empire caused, intentionally or not, are of such different kinds that they cannot be measured against one another. They are incommensurable. How much chalk is worth so much cheese? How much racial prejudice is worth so much immunisation against disease? How many unjustly killed people are worth the blessings of imperially imposed peace? How much humanitarian anti-slavery would make up for the evils of slavery? Such varied good and evils as to conclude that one set ‘outweighs’ the other. Here, as often elsewhere, a utilitarian calculation cannot be conducted rationally. ...

"What we can say, however, is that, notwithstanding its very human mixture of virtue and vice, good and evil, the British Empire did display something of a “progression in virtue”.[vii] First came the movement to abolish slavery in the late 1700s. Then came the extension of humanitarian concern to indigenous peoples in the 1830s. With the granting of ‘dominion’ status to Canada in 1867, the idea of the Empire evolving into a voluntary association of independent states began to take root, acquiring the title of the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ in 1917. From 1919 India was put on track to become a ‘dominion’ and by the mid-1930s it had acquired the beginnings of representative democracy. In 1939, the British Empire showed its mature, liberal character by committing itself to oppose the massively murderous, racist, totalitarian regime in Nazi Berlin. And after 1945, Britain did not use violence to resist the demand for independence in India and Africa. ...

"THE BRITISH EMPIRE'S HISTORICAL LEGACY CONTAINS virtuous people, noble deeds, and major humanitarian achievements. To admire them is not to indulge in ‘imperial nostalgia’. It is to do them justice."

~ Nigel Biggar from his post 'Empire and Identity'