“When I say I believe in a square deal I do not mean . . . to give every man the best hand. If the cards do not come to any man, or if they do come, and he has not got the power to play them, that is his affair. All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness in the dealing.”

Attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, the above quote should serve as a motto for every government everywhere. What does this mean, though? Roosevelt does not advocate a handout, that every person in this metaphorical game of cards deserves to win; rather, each person should have an equality of opportunity to win: each person should have the same chances for success. Of course, no entity short of God himself can guarantee success for everyone.

TR did not suggest that everyone is capable of the same level of success or that everyone should have the same level of success. What we all ought to have is the equal chance to use our different gifts to our own individual potential, and this is the key: the individual ability to succeed or fail.

Take a marathon. All the participants in a marathon have different abilities, and not everyone will finish first. Indeed, only one person can finish first. Let us call this aspect of the race the “nature” aspect; each person is endowed, by virtue of his physical composition – over which he has no control – with different abilities. Also, each person in a marathon will experience the event differently, and these experiences will be based on chance. One runner may experience a sudden cramp, another may trip and fall, while another surges forward, having spent the race shielded from the drag of the wind by runners ahead of him. Let us call this aspect “nurture”: that which a person experiences. A man also has no control over nurture, for the events of his life affect him completely at random. Nonetheless, his nature will determine how he deals with the problems of his nurture.

Regardless of nature or nurture, everyone begins the marathon on an equal playing field: the starting line. This is the only certainty that the runners have: that they all begin at the same place. This provides a maximum of personal liberty – the ability to succeed or fail – and equality of opportunity. The race officials, however, cannot guarantee victory for everyone. All that they can guarantee is that everyone has the same ability to use his or her gifts to succeed.

Guaranteeing success is an affront to personal liberty – it requires an external force to manipulate the dealing of the cards (to use TR’s metaphor) so that one person wins and one person necessarily loses. The affront is to the loser, who was essentially cheated out of his ability to use his talents to determine his own fate. His fate was decided for him by someone else, and his fate was determined to be that of the loser. Individual liberty – the ability to determine what you want to do with your life and how you want to do it – is the most important thing that a human being can have. Starting the race on an equal line is okay; ending it that way is not, since it is the agency of the people themselves that determines the outcome of the race.

What role, then, must government play in ensuring that such a “square deal” exists? A government, in the ideal, exists to protect the rights of its citizens from infringement by other citizens and other governments. It tells you what you cannot do because these things are affronts to others’ liberty. What, then, are the powers of the ideal government? It must, first and foremost, ensure that the people are free to use their individual natures to determine their own futures and it must defend individuals against those who would take that freedom away or limit those liberties.

A government is obligated to provide education to all its citizens. Education is the greatest equalizer, the most important requirement for success in civil society. In times past, he who had the largest army or the biggest gun was the one who held all the power; the human race has advanced to the point where merit is the criterion of a person’s success in society, and more education creates more merit – in a general sense. Of course having a higher-level education does not automatically mean that one is the most qualified member of a society. It does mean that that person, generally speaking, of course (as there are exceptions to every rule), is more qualified than someone who never had a higher-level education. A government must provide its citizens with the skills necessary to live in civil society: literacy and an understanding of mathematics (“reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic,” as they used to say). People, of course, are free to use their individual judgment to decide whether or not they want to be educated, and that is their prerogative.

A government is not allowed to make moral judgments. No moral is absolute, for what I may consider right is not what others consider to be right. With this statement comes the caveat that the purpose of a government is to protect the individual liberty of its citizens, and thus any action which hinders the liberty of those citizens should be punished or should be punishable so as to deter such acts from happening. Murder, theft, and other such crimes are not crimes against morality but crimes against individual liberty. The use of force to override merit and individual liberty cannot stand as a valid method of success. This said, the people may otherwise decide what morals they have, respectively. The only thing the government may do is take actions that allow the people to exercise their own individual liberty or punish those that limit others’ liberty.

TR never believed in handouts; he believed in hard work. But he also believed, in an age of unfair working practices, that people should not have artificial hindrances to their success: how can a worker achieve success with a pittance wage? How can consumers be successful when faced with monopolies and trusts that artificially increase prices? TR’s Square Deal is not Marxism (“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”), for it does not depend on the doctrine of need: “I deserve this because I need it”; rather, it depends on the doctrine of equality of opportunity: “I deserve this because I work hard, but my liberty is being usurped by forces beyond my control.” The true Marxism is the elimination of individual liberty in favor of collective equality, exactly the opposite of the TR ideal.