Yes Virtue is a Prerequisite of Liberty, but Liberty Encourages Virtue

Remembering a brilliant essay by Charles Murray on landlords and public morality

Here Sam Karnick joins in an ongoing discussion of whether a virtuous people is a precondition for a republic, quoting at length what appear to be quite interesting essays from Samuel Gregg of the American Institute for Economic Research. Both men, on the whole, come down for the notion that only a virtuous people are fit for republican government, or government according to classical liberal ideas.

I don’t disagree, but the discussion did trigger a memory of a quite brilliant piece Charles Murray wrote for the New Republic, so long ago that I can’t name the decade. (I asked ChatGPT to find it for me, and it couldn’t). The idea of the piece was that state and municipal governments should stop making it so hard for landlords to evict bad tenants. Strict landlords, he argued, help a community maintain standards of behavior that benefit most people in a community, including other tenants.

Destructive or even non-paying tenants are bad not only for others who dwell in the same building, they are likely to practice anti-social behaviors elsewhere as well. Getting them out of the building is doing a favor to the neighborhood.

In my memory of the piece (which ChatGPT says I imagined) a deeper point emerged. The strict landlord may help not only the community at large, but the unruly, or potentially unruly, tenant himself. Rules with consequences help form habits of virtue. If violating standards brings one sort of consequence, such losing an apartment, and that experience or the threat of it, modifies the person’s behavior, he may be less likely to get fired from a job for breaking norms, or even less likely to be arrested.

What does this have to do with liberty. Rules that make it hard to evict ill-behaved tenants are premised on the notion that landlords may be unfair or arbitrary, and the government needs to step in to make landlords behave. But in a free society with a free market, the landlord’s own interests in keeping up his rent rolls is a far better check on arbitrary behavior than a government nanny.

Good habits are formed by high standards readily enforced. As a product of Catholic schools, it long ago occurred to me how brilliant it was of the sisters to so diligently enforce rules against minor misbehaviors. This served two purposes. By defining deviance up, we could be rebels—which kids need to be—by chewing gum or rolling up our shirt sleeves. But it also kept the guardrails against really bad behavior high and tight.

Free people operating in free markets naturally tend to do this. The landlord does not want his apartments destroyed; he enforces rules against much lesser bad behaviors well short of that, such as not allowing excessive noise, or rowdy visitors. Tenants, confronted immediate consequences, learn better behavior. A city bureaucrat interfering in the landlords swift judgement helps neither the community nor the tenant.

Free people acting in free markets do this sort of behavioral reinforcement routinely. Freedom not only depends on virtuous citizens, it tends to make them.