3300 BC: government is invented in Mesopotamia; the purpose of this all-important institution is, loosely defined, social and economic organization and cooperation; government "keeps order" but does not yet much "defend liberty"; the first substantial city-states emerge; significant irrigation and canals begin to water vast amounts of now-domesticated plants and animals as hunter-gatherers become rancher-farmers; social and economic cooperation/competition is vastly expanded and changed; petty extended-families, clans, and tribes become possibly great nations; potentially bully-like alpha males, clan leaders, and tribal chiefs are replaced by potentially statesman-like kings; tribal councils become houses of nobles; witch doctors and medicine men become priests, as superstition and myth become polytheism and mythology; primitive real estate and property rights develop -- and even freedom of speech; as civilization and history begin, any number of other massive societal changes take place or start including: law, writing, the wheel, war, armies, police, jails, judges, patriotism, racism, slavery, and the much easier exploitation of women, children, animals, and pets; all told, the Governmental Revolution is far and away the greatest social change ever
3100 BC: government is copied from Mesopotamia to Egypt
2000s BC: government is copied to a variety of places including Crete, Canaan, Anatolia, Persia, and India
2000s BC: highly destructive and pointless wars rage in Mesopotamia; intense internecine competition causes many small empires to rise and fall as the region is rendered significantly impoverished and barbaric; the center of world civilization and progressive government moves elsewhere and never really returns
1700s BC: the code of Hammurabi is make by the king of Babylonia; written laws are everywhere in the West; these prove to be popular among the masses and far more conducive to individual liberty and justice -- and societal prosperity and progress -- than the whims of legislative/judicial princes and priests
683 BC: the Athenian monarchy is abolished, and replaced with yearly-elected leaders or "archons"
621 BC: Draco of Athens forbids family vendettas and individual revenge as a response to crime; he institutes public justice and a more-objective and written law code -- albeit a severe and cruel one
594 BC: Solon brings much more justice, individual rights, and equality of citizenship to Athens; he essentially becomes the worldwide "father of democracy"
567 BC: Peisistratus throws out a fair amount of the pro-liberty laws of Athens
500s BC: many other Greek city-states eliminate their monarchies and establish a wide variety of constitutional democracies
510 BC: Cleisthenes creates more freedom and democracy than ever in Athens
late 400s BC: liberty is so well established under Pericles that even in the midst of the horrific and mindless Peloponnesian War the political and military leaders of Athens are forced to sit tolerantly as they're criticized and mocked to their faces during theater plays; no such libertarian height is achieved by mankind again
late 300s BC: Alexander the Great, who loves Greece, nevertheless reduces almost all of it from democracy to mere kingdoms and emperorship; but Rome is rising and it detests kings
early 100s BC: Roman law, its constitution, and its wise republican Senate reach their zenith of justice and liberty; natural law and individual rights are gloriously invented -- and get added to Greek-style democracy in the magnificent country known as The Roman Republic; many dependent and allied nations clamor for their own local custom-and-tradition-based laws to be replaced by superior Roman interregional or "international" law
late 100s BC: Roman law becomes a bit less liberal as the country continues to grow rapidly by conquest; far-flung realms tend to be less justly and more corruptly ruled; ill-gotten war booty flows back to the heart of Rome and this windfall tends to erode and corrupt the previous self-discipline and Roman austerity of the central rulers, legislators, judges, etc. ; Roman legions learn to be loyal to their generals and not the people, Senate, or consuls; overall, individual liberty declines a bit
40s BC: political corruption and the military's disloyalty to the Roman people grow; finally, the Senate is solidly eclipsed and the traditional virtuous hostility to kings is mostly suppressed; the Roman Republic falls and a kind of monarchy/dictatorship is created by Caesar in 48 BC; this new style of rule is called, somewhat dishonestly, a "Principate"; four years later many unroman "honors" are deliberately heaped upon this mostly antifreedom "king" and he's soon assassinated
00s AD: Roman liberty, and concomitant culture, continue their long slow decline; Rome shrinks a bit in size
100s AD: many virtuous, talented, and freedom-loving emperors rule; the leadership succession problem is semi-solved via the adoption and grooming of unrelated, but talented, future-leader "sons" by the current emperors; the wary spirit of Rome rises somewhat; still, Rome is an emperorship with little democracy and republicanism, and only an emasculated Senate; hope for the future is basically low
200s AD: many bad military dictators rule Rome as liberty and justice decline precipitously; the assassination of emperors comes fast and furious; taxation and regulation of economic and social life rises terribly and becomes quite oppressive
300s AD: philosophy falls and religion rises; traditional great Greek and Roman ideals and values decline hideously; liberal government gives way almost completely to a combination of old-style Persian/Mesopotamian dictatorship plus new-style Christian dictatorship
400s AD: Rome dies; the greatest country ever perishes ostensibly from a handful of "barbarians," but really from anti-liberty suicide; a terrible Dark Age descends upon world government, individual freedom, and the rest of society; this lasts for an unbelievable unspeakable millennium
500s: the magnificent Roman law partially survives the fall of Rome and is soon preserved in words by Byzantine emperor Justinian; but freedom and quality of life gradually deteriorates in the West to the level of the barbarians
600s: Feudalism, coercive labor Guilds, and coercive merchant Cartels are created in Europe; religion utterly dominates philosophy and politics as tyranny and superstition reign; basically, life is hell
800s: formal and created laws in Europe have become so tyrannical and corrupt that leading thinkers and men of virtue no longer even believe in them; they prefer that whatever honest judges possibly exist should instead just apply their reason directly to any given situation or case, based upon various unwritten "eternal" and "unchanging" principles
1215: the Magna Carta is signed by King John of England; many rights of the nobles and even peasants are guaranteed in writing by the government; liberty starts a long, very slow ascent
mid 1200s: an early version of Parliament is formed to check the abuses of Henry the 3rd of England
1300s: like the Roman Republic before it, "common" or universal law begins to build up and then dominate in England; the common law tends to be more liberal and just than the various often arbitrary and capricious local laws, customs, and traditions; unlike the rest of Europe, foreign property rights are generally respected, so entrepreneurs tend to flock to England, bringing considerable prosperity
1400s: "equity" law based on fairness starts to build up in England and the Court of Chancery; it improves upon, and generally merges with, the somewhat rigid, bureaucratic, and unthinking common law; equity law favors that which seems naturally just, right, and reasonable over the technical literal law
1640s: Parliament defeats the Monarchy in the English Civil War; Charles the First is executed and England, shockingly, goes without a king for 11 whole years but without any real problem; nonroyal Oliver Cromwell rules with the made-up title of "Lord Protector"
1688: the English Glorious Revolution gives still more powers to a relatively responsible responsive Parliament, and less powers to a relatively tyrannical royalty; King James the Second is deposed
1689: the English Bill of Rights emphatically increases freedom and individual rights in both the civic and political arena; William and Mary ascend to the now solidly Parliament-subservient Crown
1690: John Locke publishes 'Two Treatises on Civil Government' -- possibly the best pro-freedom document to date; this extremely rational and landmark book is a kind of political compliment to Isaac Newton's extremely rational and landmark scientific book 'Principles of Mathematics' published three years previous
1700s: Britain’s self-governing freedom-loving colonies in America start to flourish
1760s: the notably less free French are largely kicked out of the New World by the British; to help pay for the victory in the French and Indian War, new taxes are imposed on the American colonies from without -- to their outrage
1774: the Boston Tea Party protests "taxation without representation"
1776: the United States' Declaration of Independence is published: it's the best short pro-freedom political document to date; an almost impossible war with the superpower Britain begins in earnest
1776: the 16-article James Mason-written Virginia Bill of Rights is passed to great acclaim and debate on both sides of the Atlantic; it becomes the prototype of the latter American equivalent
1776: Adam Smith publishes 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations'; this pro-freedom economic theorist attacks government monopolies and absurd mercantilist theories, while championing a "laissez-faire" society and economy; it's one of the strongest pro-freedom documents ever
late 1770s: America suffers terribly in the war but perseveres "to win freedom for all mankind"; many in Britain and her military crucially sympathize with this
1783: Britain finally gives up; the Americans immediately set about trying to create the freest and best government on earth
1789: the generally pro-freedom 1777 Articles of Confederation are repealed, and the United States' Constitution is passed after massive and unprecedented popular debate; it's the strongest long pro-freedom document ever
1789: the wondrous American Revolution inspires the French Revolution to begin, and it starts off well and solidly pro-freedom
1791: the US Bill of Rights is passed -- as promised during the 1789 debates -- and it's a significant improvement over its British and Virginian antecedents; it's the strongest pro-freedom document ever
1791: the French 'Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen' is already somewhat inferior to the American documents of the 1770s and 1780s; individual rights begin to be replaced by socio-economic or "human" rights; the Enlightenment's noble political ideal of "life, liberty, and property" is replaced with the already communistic(!) "liberty, equality, fraternity"
1792: mob rule begins
1793: the Reign of Terror begins
1795-1799: France enjoys some political calm and consolidation of freedom -- but mainly it experiences corruption, rudderless drift, and semi-chaos
1798: the Alien and Sedition Act criminalizes spoken and written criticism of the US government; this brazen and shocking assault on freedom lasts for several years, and seems to prove definitively that you can never trust government to truly respect individual rights and liberties; instead, government seemingly must be forever watched like a hawk
1799: the semi-dictator Napoleon puts an end to the French Revolution and restores a less liberal and ambitious social order; but many pro-freedom reforms remain in place and are consolidated and institutionalized
1798 and 1803: the world's first modern political thinker and socio-economic theorist emerges; Robert Malthus publishes a gloomy book on population explosion and future doom; he invents the "Malthusian solution" and advocates a variety of collectivist and anti-freedom beliefs
1817: David Ricardo -- a fellow Englishman and close friend of Robert Malthus -- emerges as the world's first modern economist; he's the inventor of the now-ubiquitous "economic model" approach to politics; Ricardo has any number of collectivist and anti-freedom beliefs; he also has a considerable variety of odd and unlikely theories on prices, wages, rents, etc. -- the forerunner of today's convoluted, contradictory, and bizarre theories on everything economic; Malthus and Ricardo build upon the "laissez-faire" ideas of Adam Smith in the same sense that Hume and Kant build upon the "empiricist" ideas of John Locke
1829: London invents the police as we know it; the old and superior system of citizen, private, and public security guards is slowly replaced in the world with naturally tyrannical, fascist, criminal, incompetent, and corrupt "police officers;" altho' it isn't too bad initially, by 1844 even New York City has a police force to push around innocent people on the "public" (government monopoly) streets, and impose a pseudo-idealistic, coercive social order; today's mafia-like, brutal and grotesquely rude petty tyrants mostly deal with vice and car "crime"
1832: the welfare state begins; a pattern of coercive legislation and government interference is set for at least the next 250 years; landmark government hearings and the resultant Sadler Report reveal appalling work conditions in northern English factories; the British public and growing populist press are shocked; the government investigation reveals an open and deliberate management policy of wantonly mistreating children, women, and other factory workers; this purposefully cruel and inhumane treatment is the direct result of the fanciful absurdist new-fangled economic theorizing of Malthus, Ricardo, and other supposedly "classic" and "free-enterprise" thinkers; a rightfully outraged British public sees to it that the socialistic Farm Act is passed next year; this series of strong-arm laws awkwardly addresses with state coercion what is far better remedied with popular persuasion; the proper technique here is the utterly-efficacious "people power" phenomenon of social ostracism and economic boycott; but no deep thinker in the world, then or now, has the intellectual wherewithal to understand or explain this, and soon the tyrannical welfare state legislation is copied thruout Europe -- then the world
1840: popular French intellectual and activist Pierre Proudhon proclaims "property is theft"; virtually all intellectuals and laymen smile at this initially -- but an ever-growing number believe
1840: popular French intellectual and activist Louis Blanc claims to discover the perfect political and socio-economic system; his socialistic ideal is based upon "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs"
1840s: economist Claude-Frederic Bastiat goes heavily against the socialist tide and advances the theory of freedom while the practice of freedom slightly declines worldwide; he focuses on economic liberty while mostly ignoring social liberty; he also focuses on foreign policy while somewhat ignoring domestic policy; Bastiat enjoys his best success in promoting international free trade, and radically diminishing old-style Mercantilist merchant "protectionism" i.e. consumer destructionism; his rather brilliant triumph occurs first in France, then Europe, then the world; he also fights a heroic but rather scattered and inept rearguard action against rapidly growing Ricardoism
1847: Britain passes the Ten Hours Act which coercively limits the labor of women (and children) to 58 hours per week; the long-time freest nation on earth has now established, in principle, the Nanny State
1848: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish 'The Communist Manifesto' -- the definitive welfare state statement and the best pro-slavery document ever
1848: Europe explodes in welfare state revolutions
late 1800s: freedom and individual rights shrink steadily as tyranny and government grow; people's economic and social lives are ever more taxed and regulated by an ever more bureaucratic and corrupt political system; however, "minority" rights ascend, and move toward an increased parity for blacks, women, etc.
early 1860s: during the American civil war, President Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus and has the military arrest thousands of Northern civilians including dozens of newspaper publishers, state legislators, mayors, and congressmen solely for opposing his war and domestic policies; many languish in jails for years altho' no warrants are ever issued and no charges are ever brought; this egregiously unconstitutional criminality goes completely unpunished -- but it does successfully pave the way in a general but quite serious way for such future tyranny as the seminal issues of military draft and income taxation; the philosophy of American government basically changes from libertarianism to egalitarianism
1865: slavery is ended in the US -- a rare victory for freedom in the post-Enlightenment Dark Age era
1890: the Sherman Antitrust Act is passed, based upon the theory that private(!) companies can create and maintain monopolies via persuasion, just like government can do so via coercion; many supporters and opponents openly brag that this outrageous new law is an empty gesture and threat which will never be invoked; but this new "trust-busting" government power is used soon enough and eventually supplemented by the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act and the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act; to this day government reserves the right (sic) to smash apart any big successful company it wishes "for the public/greater good"
1899: Britain passes the Adulteration Of Food Or Drink Act as well as the Sale Of Food And Drugs Act; the good name and reputation of British manufacturers and merchants is thus successfully attacked and weakened -- as is the intelligence and moral strength of the British consumer
early 1900s: socialist parties ascend all around the world, even in America; eventually most fade -- but only after their evil, tyrannical, welfare state agenda is assumed by all the other political parties and movements
early 1900s: US president Teddy Roosevelt energetically "busts trusts" with government coercion but doesn't realize that, to the extent that they're actually bad, only government coercion creates and maintains them in the first place; a thousand tiny laws are the unknown enemy here
1906: the US copies the UK and passes the Pure Food And Drug Act; this establishes a big bureaucracy plus the general principle that Big Brother has the 'right' to inspect all of our businesses -- and all of our lives; soon enough, the purity floor of the law becomes almost the ceiling as businesses quietly rebel against this tyranny, and the general public suffers in food and drug quality
1908: a coercive national police force called the Federal Bureau of Investigation is established in the U.S.; the FBI "makes its bones" in the '20s and '30s by persecuting peaceable alcohol buyers/sellers and other "victimless crime" innocents; the FBI's power, corruption, and unconstitutional tyranny grow rapidly under notoriously illiberal director J. Edgar Hoover; he rules like a tin-pot dictator from 1924 to his death in 1972, bullying many presidents and top officials along the way
1914: World War I causes welfare statism and tyranny to increase rapidly; some coercive laws are repealed after 1917 as the war ends -- but most remain as "clever" and "good" ideas; central banking grows rapidly and the gold standard is repealed in most countries after the conflict; this horrific war was fought "to make the world safe for democracy" -- but not freedom; one result of this is that history's most evil, tyrannical, welfare state country is born: The Soviet Union; everyone finds this "experiment" to be idealistic and a great hope for the future -- especially Western intellectuals and political experts
1919: thousands of years of human history and freedom is stood on its head as alcohol is banned in the US; this "noble experiment" and new "beneficial" tyranny causes crime and corruption to soar for many decades; Prohibition is finally repealed in 1933, but new and even more tyrannical drug prohibitions are quickly put in its place with identical results; today, hundreds of thousands of innocents a year needlessly die in the US from alcohol and tobacco, because they can't easily get the virtually-harmless marijuana and cocaine which they rightly highly prefer, and which only kills a few thousand
1922: Ludwig von Mises, the greatest economist ever, publishes the opus 'Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis'; this devastates anti-freedom economic theory, but no one is listening; his book errs slightly in favoring economics over sociology, practice over theory -- and in being rather morally silent on the value/virtue of individualism/self-interest
1927: Ludwig von Mises publishes another magnificent opus, 'Liberalism'; it has all the same small-but-important errors as before, but is still the strongest pro-freedom economic book ever written
1928: a woman's right to vote is finally respected in the US -- a rare victory for freedom in the Dark Age era of Marx and Lenin
1930s: the First Socialist Wave takes place in America and the world; Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" vastly increases Big Brother while profoundly deepening and lengthening The Depression; government grows from 3% of GDP to 10%; worldwide welfare statism considerably enhances the chance for by far the worst war ever
1933: after the vast social hypocrisy and state tyranny of alcohol Prohibition is finally repealed, a new respect for the law returns and crime in the U.S. falls by more than half over the next 6 years
1939: the National Socialist party in Germany inaugurates World War Two
early 1940s: thruout the war, government grows immensely in power and scope as liberty and justice go into a concomitant retreat; most "reforms" are kept after the war -- despite explicit, emphatic promises from government of the contrary
late 1940s: China and half of Europe embrace communism -- the most morally depraved, practically unworkable socio-economic and political system in the history of man
1947: the U.S. establishes the inept and bureaucratic Central Intelligence Agency to fight the Cold War; this hapless, lawless, "civilian" group mostly replaces the various far superior military intelligence groups; this ghastly agency shamelessly violates rights everywhere in the world, blackening the eye of freedom and America horribly; the world's most hated and counterproductive government group undermines and savages U.S. prestige, policy, and interests everywhere it goes -- which is everywhere; the supposed purpose of the CIA is intelligence-gathering in aid of policy, but instead it mostly makes policy and even carries it out(!); the uniformly-corrupt CIA, stunningly, has its own private military, and operates almost entirely out of legitimate control and without benefit of oversight or legality
1950s: benevolent beneficial Colonialism is condemned vociferously everywhere by lowlife nationalists and welfare statists; they viciously vaguely call it "hegemonist," "imperialist," "exploitive" etc. ; many African, Arabic, and Oceanic countries become "free" (independent) as their real freedom, wealth, and quality of life almost immediately plummet
1960s: the trends of the 1950s continue apace; most of the world is thoroughly enslaved; nuclear Armageddon looms before an utterly defenseless Western "civilization"
1962: the Cuban Missile Crisis almost kills hundreds of millions
late 1964: the "Civil Rights" movement brutally attacks civil rights; blacks and women go from being persecuted to being the persecutors; the world is visited with the magnificent ugliness of "quotas," "affirmative action," "set-asides," "goals and timetables," "minority scholarships," "norming," etc.
mid 1960s: the revolutionary proto-liberal "Objectivist" movement begins; laissez-faire capitalism has its best champion ever in intellectually-charismatic Ayn Rand; but her reason/individualism/freedom movement descends into cultism after a few years -- where it largely remains to this day
late 1960s: the Second Socialist Wave takes place in America and the world; Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" (sic) vastly expands the scope and power of government as liberty and justice decline concomitantly; the governmental and social pseudo-ideals of "peace," "stability," "equality," and "democracy" have eviscerated the only proper one which is individual liberty
1970s: the evil black and women's movements expand and become entrenched; but sexuality in the media is considerably liberated -- a rare victory for freedom in the Dark Age century of Stalin and Hitler
1971: the revolutionary proto-liberal "Libertarian" movement begins with the formation of the Libertarian Party in the United States; but it isn't very principled or honest about its radical and fundamentalist nature; the Party has a strong tendency to descend into anarchism and pacifism, if not "moral equivalency" and "cultural relativism"
mid 1980s: slavery rules the world; government evil reaches its zenith; Big Brother is everywhere -- even in America, where the vision of the Founding Fathers lays shattered; but, astonishingly, secret libertarian Mikhail Gorbachev emerges as the leader of the Soviet Union
1989: many European nations free themselves from militant welfare statism courtesy of a semi-liberated Russia -- and courtesy of an ugly, narrow, local nationalism which rejects the ideals of international communism for the wrong reasons; because of the practical fall of socialism in Eastern Europe the ideals of socialism also decline worldwide
1990s: many Western governments finally start to pay down their bloated national debts; but the size and scope of the evil worldwide welfare state remain the same even tho' the rhetoric of social libertarianism and, especially, economic capitalism becomes much more prominent
2002: the revolutionary proto-liberal movements of "Objectivism" and "Libertarianism" remain largely feckless and impotent; but true political liberalism -- the definitive last word on government and freedom -- finally, tentatively emerges in its full form as an avant-garde intellectual movement
2100s: after 5400 years of trying, humans finally get it right; a social, economic, and political system of governmental perfection and pure freedom begins; it will never to be lost; this 100% voluntary, completely laissez-faire system features pure social libertarianism and pure economic capitalism with liberty for the individual to the point of infinity; it's based upon the Sacred Self's absolute and inalienable right to life, liberty, property, privacy, prejudice, stupidity, and evil; this pure liberalism features zero taxation and zero regulation of the sacrosanct individual's social and economic activity
