Tag Archives: freedom

Texas on Gun Control

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Copied shamelessly from Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s Facebook post.

You’ll fit right in here in Texas!

Here in Texas, you will have the liberty and the opportunity to achieve your dreams. On top of that, we have no income tax, yet still manage to have a multi-billion dollar budget surplus.

We have right to work laws and a reasonable regulatory environment. Texas has created more than 275,000 jobs in the last year alone! And we’ll fight like hell to protect your rights.

You’ll also get to keep more of what you earn and use some of that extra money to buy more ammo.

I hope to see you soon in Texas. In the meantime, sign up to show your support for our second amendment rights.

Sincerely,Attorney General of Texas

Take careful note of the details.

Freedom and Liberal Big Government

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Joel Mathis, in has some thoughts on the wonders of the Nanny State.

Why I’m a liberal? I believe you can have freedom and care about reducing income inequality.  I believe you can have liberty and smaller soda sizes.  I believe you can throw off tyranny and still have a smarter health care system that delivers care to more people.  I’m a liberal because even though conservatives and libertarians can sometimes come up with good ideas to address these problems, mostly you sense they’d rather not be bothered.  Which leaves good old-fashioned Big Government as the most likely option to actually fix stuff.

Nannies don’t imprison you, after all, and they never did.  Their job is to help you stand on your own.

Setting aside Mathis’ slur that our disagreement with him means we can’t be bothered, the problem of Nanny-ism has been recognized for some time.  Lionel Trilling suggested in his 1950 book, The Liberal Imagination, that liberalism itself had become stuck in its ways and had lost its ability to think freely.  He expanded on this years later, observing

this dull, repressive tendency of opinion which was coming to dominate the old ethos of liberal enlightenment [, and that liberal thought was losing its place as] a political position which affirmed the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity, and difficulty.

Exactly the sort of stultifying loss of flexibility and creativity—freedom of thought and of action—that liberals’ cumulative Big Government impositions (fall or a good cause, though) have on the freedom of all of us.

As Stephen Hayward noted at Power  Line,

[A]m I really less of a free person if I can’t buy a 32-oz soda?  Or [can’t] get a plastic bag in my local store?   In isolation, not really.  But what about when I can’t buy a 32-oz soda, can’t burn a fire in my home’s fireplace (now an air quality regulation in many places), can’t build a spiral staircase from my back deck (as I learn this morning from the San Luis Obispo County planning department), can’t own a gun (New York, Chicago), can’t get plastic bags at the store any more (even though I not only recycle them but reuse them for many of my own purposes), can’t patronize Ubercars because the incumbent taxicab monopoly gets the city council to block the new business in the name of “consumer protection” (naturally), or can’t start a small business except with great difficulty and dead-weight expense to the local bureaucracies?  And on the other side of the ledger, large bureaucratic interventions like Obamacare…stifle marketplace discovery and adaptation….

After a while, you’re not “standing on your own” any more.  The nanny hasn’t put you in prison, but it has changed a lot of things in a significant way.

Big Government, by insisting on making these decisions for ordinary citizens, by relieving men of their own responsibilities and freedom of action—including the freedom to be wrong (at least as liberals like Mathis define “wrong”)—reduces them to dependents on government for their welfare.  Even their Happiness (contra John Adams and the rest of our 18th Century Liberal forebears) is determined by Big Government.

No, Nannies don’t imprison us, at least not by putting us behind bars.  Instead, they imprison us by circumscribing our freedom of thought, our ability to rely on ourselves rather than on those Nannies.  They help us, permanently, to stand so that we never learn to not need their help.

In the end, dependents aren’t “unfree.”  They cannot be, as they have no conception of what it is to be free.

Compromise in a Free Market

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Me: I have this bushel of corn to sell you.

You: I have this fifty-cent piece I’ll give you if you give me that corn.

Me: Can’t do that; this corn cost me more than that in time, money, and equipment to grow.  Ten bucks works.

You: Too much.  You can amortize those costs over all your corn; you’re only trying to sell me a single bushel.  Six-fifty.

Me: Done.

But that was a case where both parties were willing and interested in reaching an agreement.  In DC, Progressive compromise means “Do it my way, or no deal.”

Gun Control and the Purpose of Guns

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Governor Mario Cuomo (D, NY) has demanded we “end the madness now” and surrender control of our firearms to government.

No one hunts with an assault rifle.  No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer.

The tragic events of just the last few weeks in Newtown, CT, and West Webster, NY, have indelibly taught us guns can cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment[.]

A couple of things about this.

First, government doesn’t get to dictate to us our purpose in owning firearms or our purpose in owning magazines with capacities of our choosing.  Leaving aside the reason for the 2nd Amendment in the first place, which was to allow a population to protect itself from an overreaching government more than to put victuals on the table, this goes beyond the 2nd Amendment.  If we let government determine our reasons for owning or not owning a thing, it becomes a very short step to letting government determine what me must own or not own, what we must buy or not buy.  Like health insurance.

Second, Cuomo is right that guns can “cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment.”  When the murdering begins, and help is summoned, the responding police will be only minutes away.  In those intervening moments, though, the killing of the unarmed, including unarmed adults also on the scene, continues apace.  It’s the folks present at the start who are in the best position promptly to interfere with the killer, but when they’ve been carefully disarmed by a Know Better government, they’re as helpless as those children.

What Are They Prepared to Do?

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Kimberly Strassel asked this, and three specific questions, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week.

Her questions:

Question one: Do they mean it?  In the abstract, the debt ceiling is a powerful tool for forcing the president to give in to spending cuts. …

In the non-abstract, failure to raise government borrowing limits means US default—and with it potential credit downgrades, market panic and resulting economic distress.  Is the GOP willing to inflict that on the economy?  If Republican members instead run for cover, as they did with the cliff, the GOP will have been exposed as bluffers, and the administration will never again have to fear the debt ceiling.

Then,

Question two: What do they want?  Throughout the fiscal-cliff negotiations…the GOP shrunk from laying out its specific demands on Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.

Do House Republicans have the courage to lay out big demands (say, premium support for Medicare or block grants for Medicaid), send a bill to the Senate, and sell entitlement reform to the public?  If they can’t face the demagoguery that Democrats will use against them for making substantive proposals on entitlements….

Finally,

Question three: What other hostages are Republicans willing to see shot?  Knowing he has lost his tax trump card, Mr Obama seamlessly moved on this week to the defense budget.  …Mr Obama intends to make further tax hikes the price….

Are the GOP’s defense hawks willing to stomach those cuts as a price for entitlement reform?  Having publicly campaigned against this slashing of the military, can the party stare down the president with a unified position?  Mr Obama is betting they can’t….

It’s pretty clear from the Republicans’ past performances in showdowns with Obama that all they’ll do is run for cover—too much of the party consists only of bluffers.  During the just concluded tax cliff matter, hey could have put up big demands concerning tax structure and tax rate reductions—just putting forward the Romney tax plan would have sufficed—but they quailed at the thought and shrank from their duty.  They also could have put up big demands concerning spending cuts—just putting forward the Ryan plan would have sufficed on entitlements—and big demands concerning so-called discretionary spending (so-called because all government spending is at the discretion of the Congress).  After all, Obama was publicly willing to conclude such a “grand bargain;” the Republicans should have held him to his word.  But they failed here, also.

On the matter of selling their position to the public, it’s pretty clear the Republicans have no capability for that, even if they had an actual position to sell.  They’re still not talking to us.

Vernon Pinkley, on walking the Republican halls of the House (or of the Senate), might ask, “Very pretty, Speaker/Minority Leader. Very pretty.  But, can they fight?”  The answer is, “No.”

I pointed out nearby the necessary and encouraging words of a rookie Republican Senator from Texas.  Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe there are enough more Republicans like him to accomplish much of anything.