Monthly Archives: December 2011

Natural Rights, Our Social Compact, and “Rights”

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The principles statement of our social compact acknowledges that all humans are endowed with certain inalienable, natural rights, and the entirety of our social compact seeks to apply those natural rights in a concrete way to the members of our compact, us American citizens.  Our Declaration of Independence says of this:

…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed[.]

Our principles statement acknowledges further that, when an instituted government fails in its purpose, it is both our right and our duty to replace it with one that will do better, but that’s a subject of a different discussion.

On the matter of Happiness, John Adams was clear that this was—and is—more than simple personal pleasure and pecuniary wealth; although these are certainly part.  But Happiness includes far more, and far more important components, also:

All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

However, today (indeed, for the last 80 years, with rapidly increasing national cost, and failure) some want government to guarantee such things as jobs, retirements, and so on; they assert these to be “rights,” a continuation of Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights, which included such things as employment, housing, and social security.

In fact, such manufactured “rights” cannot be achieved by award from government, whether directly by fiat or indirectly by managing our economy; our government in the end is nothing more than our employee and so possessed of no more power than that.  Moreover, the thing which our government gives to one of us (vis., a retirement pension check, or an artificially cheap house), it must first take from another of us (not least in the form of tax money); it must take from one of its employers.

These “economic rights,” these “social rights,” of Roosevelt’s and today’s Progressive’s invention, though, are nothing more, and nothing less, than the inevitable output of our individual efforts when those efforts are carried out within the framework of our inalienable rights.  In the end, the obligation, freedoms, and power of American citizenship—our Happiness—under our social compact results not through the mechanism of Government as Giver of Rights, but through minimal government interference with our own efforts as we act politically and economically for our individual needs and wants.

Many, though, who were actually taught such governmental guarantees in our public schools and institutions of “higher” education, are discovering that these invented “rights,” in fact, are not automatically available, and so they think they are being denied in some way.  Their disappointment is all the more bitter because they’ve been promised that government—not they, themselves—is the proper guarantor of their prosperity and security and liberty.

In order for government to guarantee security, though, it must have complete control over individual behaviors and decisions, and so there can be no liberty.  And without liberty, there can be no prosperity, since no man then will be free to pursue his own need or his own Happiness; no man will be free to show the best that there is in him.  And without liberty, or without prosperity—much less without both—there can be no security.

This contradiction of government as the font of prosperity, liberty, and security, and that earlier described  confusion of the prior with the result, are both individually and together the source of the failure of invented guarantees.

Liberals and Tea Parties

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“Liberals need a tea party, damn it,” wrote Jonah Goldberg in a recent National Review, and thus “have embraced the [Occupy] movement…with the understanding that they’ll worry about the details later, if at all.”

So why don’t Liberals, generally, or the Democratic Party, specifically, have anything other than the Occupiers and the public service unions that are, more and more, running the Occupy “movement?”

Because, unlike modern Conservatives, generally, or tea partiers, specifically (who, it turns out, are main stream America), Liberals don’t have any tenets that are foundational to individual liberty, to individual responsibility.  All they have is a fundamental belief in big government and an equally fundamental distrust of their fellow citizens’ judgment.

Tea partiers, modern conservatives, are whole-hearted supporters of such basic principles of liberty as freedom of speech, freedom of religion (the positive freedom actually to practice their own, not the negative freedom of no one else’s being visible), equal opportunity for all individuals, and most of all, these two things: freedom from government interference with these, and the primacy of individual responsibility.  In short, tea partiers hold out for the continued implementation of the Declaration of Independence’s acknowledgment

that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Tea partiers, mainstream Americans, understand that they are far better suited to determine how their lives should be lived and how their resources should be allocated than any government can hope to be.

Liberals, on the other hand, are the quintessential big government believers.  It’s Liberals who insist on wealth redistribution programs—run entirely by government—as the only legitimate means of leveling wealth and income.  It’s Liberals who insist on these equal outcome goals of wealth redistribution, at the expense of equal opportunity for all Americans.  It’s Liberals who insist that government must be the means of first resort for those who need a hand up, and not the means of last resort.  It’s Liberals, also, who insist that government keep giving those hands up (which can come only at the expense of other Americans) to the point they stop being hands up and become permanent handouts.

All of this flows from that fundamental Liberal distrust of ordinary Americans, it comes from their foundational belief that some Americans are better suited to govern and to make decisions about individual lives than are common Americans.

What kind of grass roots movement might support that?

Anger in the EU

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But it’s misplaced, and perhaps driven by embarrassment.  Great Britain refused, a few days ago, to go along with a proposal to alter the fundamental European Union treaty to allow for the creation of a fiscal union, touted as a solution to the existing EU sovereign debt crisis.

The petulance of others of the EU leadership is illustrated with these examples:

Le Canard Enchaine (The Chained Duck) reports that French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Great Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, a “stubborn child.”  Apparently, Sarkozy went on: Cameron had only one goal, that of “protecting the (London) City, which wants to continue to behave like a tax oasis.”  As if either of these—protecting his capital city, and maintaining a tax oasis (if that’s what he was doing)—were a bad thing.

And this: Guy Verhofstadt, the head of ALDE (Alliance for Liberals and Democrats for Europe), a liberal group in the European Parliament, spoke on the matter in his native Flemish Wednesday: he didn’t think English would be an “appropriate language.”

Others have insisted that Great Britain now must quit the EU.

But Cameron isn’t so alone (at least not yet) as his detractors insist.  Ireland has said that it must submit the matter to a national referendum.  Recall that the continent had a negative attitude toward the Greek government’s attempt to refer bailout terms to their people for consent or rejection.  Similarly, the Czech Republic and Sweden now insist on involving their respective parliaments in any decision to go along with a fiscal union.  Indeed, the Czech Republic has gone further, insisting that any union should apply only to members of the euro zone, and Hungary has joined them in this assessment.  Both the Czechs and the Hungarians also are on record as rejecting coordinating—”harmonizing”—national tax policies, a key parameter of a fiscal union.  Such a thing, they say, can “bring nothing positive, nothing good.”  The Czech Republic has gone yet further: they will discuss the matter, but they will take no decision for or against the union until they know the details of the pact—including those heretofore undefined “sanctions.”

Given that the proposed fiscal union cannot succeed and does not actually address the present crisis (it can only face the inevitable next one), and given that part of the demand for the treaty change involved demands for tax changes that would have hit Great Britain disproportionately, Prime Minister David Cameron was right to make the moves he did.

And given that the proposed fiscal union cannot succeed and does not actually address the present crisis, and these are becoming increasingly clear as other members of the EU share British concerns about the efficacy of the pact, the detractors are beginning to see the blunder they’ve committed with this “union.”  They’re expressing their embarrassment as anger and frustration—a sign, not of their obstinacy, but of their continued failure fully to realize their error.  That realization is only just beginning.

Religious Freedom, Government, and Moral Equivalence

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The Daily Caller reports on a series of meetings between our government and representatives from several Islamic governments that have pressed us for years to terminate our ability to speak freely about Islam’s history and obligations.  We might think it’s entirely appropriate that we should engage those governments on the matter of religious and speech freedoms, the United States Constitution, and what must occur within our borders regarding our acknowledged inalienable rights.

Among other things under serious discussion, though, is those nations’ support for a UN resolution—which our government seems not to be opposing—titled “Combating Intolerance, Negative Stereotyping and Stigmatization of, and Discrimination, Incitement to Violence and Violence Against, Persons Based on Religion or Belief.”  While claiming to urge tolerance of all believers, though, it also urges all governments to counter “Islamophobia,” and declare opposition to “derogatory stereotyping, negative profiling and stigmatization of persons based on their religion or belief” (nor does it urge governments to counter “Christianophobia,” or “Judeophobia,” or Buddhisophobia,” or “atheistophobia,” or…).  Notice that: this isn’t a call for government-funded outreach programs (however ill-conceived government funding of such programs might be in the first place) with which private citizens might voluntarily engage, or not; this is simply a disguised effort to have government authorities dictate what is permitted speech.  The resolution, for instance, calls on government to define “derogatory” and “negative profiling” and “stigmatizing.”  Individual Americans (or Englishmen, or Frenchmen, or etc.) are not to be trusted to arrive at their own definitions and usages.

Hannah Rosenthal, head of the State Department’s Office To Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism(!?), reassures us, though.  This resolution carries no threat to our freedom of speech because, “[The government] would protect free speech.”  But then she says that hateful and Islamophobic speech needs to be called out, and when invited to define “hateful,” she insisted with a straight face that if critics of Islam’s ideology

are just taking out the hateful parts [of the Quran] or claiming [they’re] all superior to them…that can be very damaging.

On the other side of the religion coin is this,  concerning atheism.  Fox News‘ online facility carries this story about atheist messages having displaced most of the Christmas Nativity scenes that local churches had placed in a Santa Monica, CA, park for the last 60 years.  Some background: there are 21 spaces for such messages allotted in the park, and until this year, the churches had faced little competition for them, so they usually were able to put Nativity scenes into 14 of them (they never tried for more…).  This year, due to a much larger demand for the limited number of spaces, the city decided to allot them via lottery, with no single individual eligible to “win” more than 9.  Eighteen of the spaces were “won” by two atheists.  Leaving aside the legitimacy of such a lottery (that outcome is statistically possible), what else is going on here?

Damon Vix, reputedly behind this effort, says

For 60 years, it’s almost exclusively been the point of view of Christians putting up nativity scenes for a whole city block….

This year, by design, it will be even more “exclusively the point of view of atheists” that will be represented.

Hmm….

We cannot accept moral equivalency.  There is no such thing.  Some morals, some cultures, are superior to others.  Was it acceptable, for instance, that the Aztecs engaged in human sacrifice, just because that was a religious imperative for them?  Was it acceptable for NAZIs to butcher Jews, just because that was the internal affair of a sovereign nation?  Is it acceptable to mutilate women with female circumcision because a religious tenet demands it?  Is it acceptable to murder women for going against a man’s demands just because a religious tenet demands it?  Is it acceptable to send agents into another sovereign nation to murder a person who speaks against Mohammed or posts an image of him?

Religious freedom has nothing at all to do with individual criticism of religion generally or of another’s religion in particular.  It has nothing at all to do with the free competition of ideas or the free competition among differing religions, differing moral systems.  It has everything to do with proscribing a government role in the competition.

In the end, who is it that’s afraid of such competition?  Only those harboring a nagging fear that their own tenets won’t measure up, and so they demand special protections from that competition.  Let, for instance, an atheist’s message sit next to a religious message in the public square; let both of them especially into the public square.  The differences will be clear.  As will be the winners of such a competition.

It’s such a simple law.  It can’t be that hard to enforce.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof[.]

Thoughts on Free Speech

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Here is some action on the free speech front, particularly involving the Internet and piracy and government efforts to impose control on both.

These offerings from our government are pertinent: the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the House of Representatives’ parallel effort, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  Unfortunately, they’re not tightly written to address actual piracy, or theft of copyrighted material.  With their too-broad reach, each of these bills can also achieve the following (whether this potential use is deliberate or simply the result of routine political pandering and/or incompetence, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader).

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe suggests this:

SOPA provides that a complaining party can file a notice alleging that it is harmed by the activities occurring on the site “or portion thereof.”  Conceivably, an entire website containing tens of thousands of pages could be targeted if only a single page were accused of infringement. Such an approach would create severe practical problems for sites with substantial user-generated content, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and for blogs that allow users to post videos, photos, and other materials.

And

The notice-and-termination procedure…runs afoul of the “prior restraint” doctrine, because it delegates to a private party the power to suppress speech without prior notice and a judicial hearing. This provision of the bill would give complaining parties the power to stop online advertisers and credit card processors from doing business with a website, merely by filing a unilateral notice accusing the site of being “dedicated to theft of U.S. property” — even if no court has actually found any infringement.

Wow.  Guilt by accusation; we’ll sort out the damages from false or erroneous accusations later.  In the meantime, we’ll shut down the whole site, and RICO-like, cutoff the financial resources of the accused.  Solely on the accuser’s say-so; he don’t need no stinkin’ courts.

By closing an entire facility over an (alleged) infraction by one individual or involving just a few documents, an entire avenue of speech is shut down: not just the speech of the Web site’s operators, but the speech choices of those who wish to hear (read) what contributors to such a Web site has to say, on any subject.  Imagine a closely contested election in which a Web site favors one candidate over another.  One of those “other materials” is claimed by the other candidate to be harming his campaign.  Where might the greater harm be occurring?

Oh, but I’m overreacting.  Ex-Senator Chris Dodd (D, CT) has the answer.  The bills are only asking for the same power the People’s Republic of China has for Internet censorship:

When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.

Hmm….

We don’t need any more free speech laws, or government intervention into free speech.  We have too much of this, already.  Besides, we already have a fine free speech law, one that doesn’t run to 2,000 or more pages worth of…speech:

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press[.]

And it took our Founders only 14 words, and rather less than a single page, to write it.

Update: Added some final thoughts.