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What Price of Liberty? by Steven Yates
Anyone seeking to understand the premises of the leftist-neocon consensus that has taken up dominance in American centers of power need only study E.J. Dionne Jr.’s latest column on the "price of liberty." According to Dionne the "price of liberty" is statism! He doesn’t, of course, put it so forthrightly. He cites a work entitled The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes by two law professors, Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein. That he would enlist two members of today’s professorial class in support of his views doesn’t surprise me at all. Dionne’s point of departure is the looting of shops, government offices and museums that has characterized post-Saddam Baghdad. He uses these scenes to contrast the tyranny of Saddam and the brand of statism favored by the current consensus. "The alternative to tyranny is not the abolition of government," he writes. "Absent a government committed to the protection of rights, there are no rights." There you have it: the key to one of the fundamental premises of the post-9/11 world. A right is a fundamentally moral entity. Government, a political one. Dionne has just reduced social morality to politics. In this view, rights do not antecede institutions of government, which indeed have as a function the protection of rights. According to the current consensus, government creates rights. We would have no rights without government to give them to us. Read it again: "Absent a government … there are no rights." Now Dionne might respond that this is a horribly unfair characterization of his views. He might deny saying that, literally, human beings have no rights independent of government, i.e., of military might, political arrangements and police powers. Rather, he might say that without government there are no mechanisms in place to see to it that rights are respected and protected. This, though, is not saying, "There are no rights." Dionne’s statement above continues, "Without government, individuals have no way to vindicate their rights to property, to personal liberty, to life itself." This depends on the cash value of to vindicate. Let’s see. First off, does it make sense to say that rights exist even if a given power structure refuses to recognize them – or, perhaps, if there is no power structure at all? Of course it does. In the first case, this was the working premise of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, those mostly forgotten documents being trampled underfoot in our march toward global empire. It was the working premise of those who criticized the former Soviet Union and other dictatorships the world over, including the fallen regime of Saddam Hussein. In the second case, it is surely the premise of those who see something wrong with the looting of Baghdad shopkeepers. The demand that individual rights be respected is one of the moral checks on political might no less than on low-level criminal gangs. In this light, let us look anew at those looters Dionne and others have commented on. Let’s consider them in a larger context: that of the worldview that dominates that part of the world and their culture, Islam. Muslims are not exactly noted for their respect for such things as individual liberty and property rights – which is one reason the dream of establishing Western-style "democracy" in Iraq will probably remain just that: a dream. Islamic culture never produced a John Locke or a Thomas Jefferson or a James Madison. It certainly wasn’t going to produce a Ludwig von Mises or a Friedrich A. Hayek. Unable to create or sustain the prosperity only freedom can generate, in recent decades it has produced only theocratic dictatorships like the one in Iran or their secular counterparts such as that of Saddam Hussein. In such an environment, devoid of any longstanding individual-rights tradition, strong government probably is the only defense against chaos, at least in the short term. But it would be wrong to look at post-Saddam Baghdad and insinuate that such would be the result of a systematic dismantling of the choking government restrictions and sprawling, bureaucratic federal agencies here. After all, our history did produce a John Locke, a Thomas Jefferson and a James Madison, and even if the government schools do not teach them now, some Americans blessed with real patriotism are keeping their ideas alive. One of the consequences of a long historical memory is a deep and abiding resentment against our tyrannical tax system, plundering the fruits of the labors of every productive citizen. E.J. Dionne Jr. uses the Baghdad looters to rail against anti-tax groups in the United States: "No government, no property," he scolds. "No government, no security from looting, theft or violence. No government, no national defense. No government, no social stability." Etc., etc. Yet as James Bovard has documented – in books such as Lost Rights with thousands of examples – government routinely violates property rights. Our legal system has virtually destroyed the concept. If it had not, employers would not have to answer to bureaucratic overseers regarding the "diversity" of their workforces. We are not secure from "looting, theft or violence." Looting is done here quietly and oh, so legally. And while it is true that rampaging gangs usually do not run through the streets of American cities smashing windows (although occasionally they do just that), the difference is a matter of degree, not kind. Most Americans are afraid to walk down the streets of major cities at night – and sometimes even in broad daylight. Our government secures neither property nor safety nor social stability. In fact, there was much more of each when government was smaller and less intrusive. No government, no national defense, Dionne tells us. With our government’s program of open borders and unlimited immigration – possibly allowing would-be terrorists onto our soil to harm our native-born citizens – we do not have strong national defense. Homeland security could easily turn out to be a joke that is not the least bit funny if one of the long-term consequences of the Bush Administration’s war of aggression in Iraq is another deadly terrorist attack here. There are some warped writers – usually neocons – who say that we "paleos" secretly wish for something like this. Rubbish! While there may be some leftist Democrats who cynically wish any number of such things that would harm the Bush Administration just so they can get one of their own back in the White House, what we wish for is a return to a political order that honors and respects its Constitution – and the moral framework that underwrites Constitutional government. That means asking questions like: do such things as freedom from violence, national security, social stability, and so on, come from government? Or do they have some other source – with government, at the very best, as a mediator we dare not allow off a very short leash? They come from our tradition of individual rights and moral responsibilities as inhering in individuals (not groups or group identity), as cornerstones of the respect for the rule of law. This tradition is embodied in our founding documents. It may be argued that the embodiment is not perfect. It is true enough that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the U.S. Constitution could deliver a perfect social order. But this is just to observe that no document penned by human hands can overcome the lasting effects of original sin. Our tradition – rooted ultimately in a Christian view of things – was an attempt at a balancing act: balancing of powers within government, the concept of dual sovereignty, and so on, under the hope that the people’s religiosity and knack for enterprise and entrepreneurship would help control their vices. These balancing acts were always uneasy. Freedom is actually very fragile. But what freedom we secured with Constitutionally limited government did unleash prosperity. We established a spontaneous order and unleashed the power of the market which, carried forward by its own tremendous momentum, built the most prosperous civilization ever. Unfortunately, what we did not do is solve the most important problem of any political order – how to control those in its midst who want power, and who either become politicians or behind-the-scenes operatives. As the latter slowly commandeered our financial system, our media and our educational system, our civilization has more and more turned its back on its founding traditions. Our "intellectuals" have forsaken Christianity and embraced various forms of materialism and nihilism. Our political "leadership" has forgotten the idea that rights and other moral entities antecede government and – when they talk about such things at all – blithely assuming either that government creates them, or that they are meaningless abstractions without the heavy hand of government. Such views more and more control the thoughts of a public educated for job skills but not life a free society. Dionne is right when he says that "freedom isn’t free." But its price is different from what he says. We should not have to pay through the nose in taxes, controlled by a constantly shifting penumbra of laws that no one except tax lawyers and preparers can understand. We should not have to live in fear of an IRS audit. The price-tag of freedom is a moral populace, coupled with the vigilance Thomas Jefferson mentioned – and an idea I am sure will be as repugnant to Dionne as with everyone in the leftist-neocon consensus: that if we the people are sufficiently dissatisfied with our government we have the right to alter it, or abolish it, or organize and secede from it. Such ideas were there in the Declaration of Independence, and were implied in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. They are implied if rights pre-exist government, and are not created out of thin air by government. The track record of the American federal government in protecting rights has been rather shaky of late – to say the least! In the absence of a moral order with the above-named components, I wouldn’t count on it for protection in these troubled times. Centralization simply cannot deliver the goods, and can only subsist by plundering the good works of the many productive citizens who sustain it involuntarily. Many of those in the anti-tax groups Dionne rails against realize this. They realize, that is, that the many unconstitutional programs and agendas pursued by bloated federal agencies really amount to nothing more than a very sophisticated and legally backed form of looting. At least Baghdad’s looters are honest about it. April 24, 2003
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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Steven
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