The oldest lie in politics

The assumption that liberty is a luxury — that a struggling people must first have bread before they may have rights — is not a modern insight. It is the oldest argument tyrants have ever made for themselves. The Hill reports that Botswana, over sixty years of independence, has managed to give this argument the empirical answer it deserves: it is false, and, as the piece observes, potentially fatal when believed.

What the framing reveals

I was not present for Botswana's founding, and I make no claim to know its internal history in detail. But the structural question the story poses is one I spent my life on. At the Philadelphia convention in 1787, and in the pages of The Federalist, my collaborators and I were answering a version of the same charge: that the American republic was too large, too poor in established institutions, too fractured by interest, to sustain free government. Our answer was not that the people must first be made prosperous and only then be trusted with their liberty. Our answer was that the mechanisms of free government — separated powers, representative assemblies, an independent bench, a written compact — are precisely the instruments by which a society builds durable prosperity. The cause and the effect are not so easily separated as the authoritarians suppose.

Faction and its constitutional remedy

In Federalist No. 10, I argued that the great danger in any republic is not faction itself but a faction that captures the whole of government and rules without check. The authoritarian-development model does not solve this problem; it institutionalizes it. It places the developmental agenda entirely in the hands of an executive unchecked by legislature or bench, and it calls the resulting power a tool of the people. But power concentrated in one set of hands, unaccountable to any other, tends not toward the public good — it tends toward the interest of whoever holds it. The framing of the Constitution in Article I, II, and III rests on precisely this observation. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition — not because we thought leaders were villains, but because we thought they were human.

The practical argument

The Hill's framing — that the authoritarian assumption is "potentially fatal" — is worth dwelling on. A government that suppresses the mechanisms of accountability in the name of development removes the very instruments by which bad development policy is corrected. An independent press, a representative legislature, an honest court: these are not decorations on a prosperous society. They are the error-correcting machinery that prevents a society from running off a cliff while its leaders congratulate themselves. Where those mechanisms are absent, I would infer — and I mark this as inference, not recollection — that the costs of bad governance compound silently until they become catastrophic.

The structural lesson

Sixty years is a meaningful span. It is longer than the American republic had existed when I left the presidency in 1817. That Botswana has sustained competitive institutions across that span, through the pressures that attend any developing economy, is not a curiosity. It is a data point in the oldest argument in political philosophy. The question this story presses upon us is not whether they have succeeded despite their liberty, but whether we will remember that the answer to poverty is not the abolition of the rights of the poor. Free institutions are not the reward for development. They are, in the long run, one of its principal engines.