Category Archives: rights

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.

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 He Said

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Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) has some thoughts in a Washington Post op-ed on the needed direction of the Republican Party, if it’s to recover its roots, and the mechanics of achieving that new direction.

Herewith, some excerpts.  RTWT.

Free-market policies expand opportunity, produce prosperity and improve lives, especially for those working to climb the economic ladder.

And

On the flip side, widespread economic redistribution places enormous burdens on small businesses, kills jobs and rarely helps the recipients of government largess.

Dependency is corrosive. Ask any abuela if she wants her grandchildren dependent on government. Dependency saps spirit and diminishes self-respect.

And

Americans want to stand on their own feet, and Republicans need to champion policies that enable us to do so: ownership, choice and individual responsibility.

And some mechanics for achieving that:

Republicans shouldn’t just assail excessive financial and environmental regulations; we should explain how those regulations kill jobs and restrict Americans’ ability to buy their first home.

Don’t just say no to new taxes—fundamentally reform the tax code so that every American can file his taxes on a postcard.  Eliminate the corporate welfare and complexity that enrich only accountants and lawyers.

Don’t just criticize union bosses; explain how closed shops confiscate wages and make it harder for low-skilled workers to get jobs.

Don’t talk generically about education; advocate school choice to empower parents and expand opportunity for children struggling to get ahead.

Don’t just dwell on the long-term solvency of Social Security; promote personal accounts to allow low-income Americans to accumulate wealth and pass it on to future generations.

Republicans ought to view, and explain, every policy through the lens of economic mobility.  Conservative policies help those struggling to climb the economic ladder, and liberal policies hurt them.

What he said.

Do Away with our Constitution

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That’s what Louis Michael Seidman, writing in the New York Times last week, wants to do.  He claims to have been teaching Constitutional law for quite a long time, but that’s hard to believe, after reading his epistle (though, in fact it’s true–at Georgetown, where he teaches Constitutional law, but from this writing, it seems to me he teaches very little of the Constitution).  On the other hand, another great Constitutional scholar, Ezra Klein, agrees with him.

Here are some of Seidman’s…rationales.

Imagine that after careful study a government official—say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress—reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country.  Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action.  Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

Well, since that disagreement actually was centered on what the Constitution, the supreme Law of the Land, allows, yeah, he would have to give up his divination.  Especially since the Constitution was designed to maximize the likelihood that he represents American citizens, his collective bosses, and to ensure that their view of what is best for the country outweighs his own.  Suppose, contra, that after a careful study a government official—say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress—reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for him personally.  Should that judgment be allowed to stand?

Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the Republic.  In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional disobedience.  When George Washington and the other framers went to Philadelphia in 1787, they were instructed to suggest amendments to the Articles of Confederation, which would have had to be ratified by the legislatures of all 13 states.  Instead, in violation of their mandate, they abandoned the Articles, wrote a new Constitution and provided that it would take effect after ratification by only nine states, and by conventions in those states rather than the state legislatures.

And how terrible that was.  Instead of being approved by the conclave of diplomats that was all that the Congress was under the Articles, or by unanimous approval of 13 disparate and independent States’ legislatures, it was approved by something far closer to the people themselves—those conventions, which were selected by an especially broad franchise of voters and one far more broad than the franchise that was allowed to select Seidman’s precious legislators.  It was the Sovereign people who ratified the new Constitution, thereby explicitly validating the decisions of those constitutional disobeyers.  Moreover, the remaining four States were not bound by a Constitution which their citizens did not ratify; they were free to go their own way, as the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations did for quite a few years before seeing the political and economic advantages of joining the union.  That separate way also included the option of continuing under the Articles, with a Congress now consisting of diplomatsdelegates from those four States, and a new effort at amendment.  In the end, though, the citizens of all thirteen States individually and separately ratified the Constitution, adding to the validation.

No sooner was the Constitution in place than our leaders began ignoring it.  John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.  Thomas Jefferson thought every constitution should expire after a single generation.  He believed the most consequential act of his presidency—the purchase of the Louisiana Territory—exceeded his constitutional powers.

And all of these men’s relevant actions or failures to act were overridden by the existence of that Constitution—which also acts as a brake against Seidman’s “considered judgment” government official.  Moreover, that these men had feet of clay (including his slave owners) is an argument for holding government men fettered by a Constitution, not for allowing them freedom to run riot.  As one of those disdained “white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves” but who could foresee the future of a society governed by men, noted,

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.  In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Thus, that document that some find confusing because it was written more than one hundred years ago.  And which has stood us in good stead since was ratified.

Returning to Seidman’s words:

Before the Civil War, abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison conceded that the Constitution protected slavery, but denounced it as a pact with the devil that should be ignored.

Neither that they were abolitionists or that they “conceded” anything did not make them right.  In the event, slavery should have died out (literally) by 1808, but the slave States reneged on that bargain.  In the end, the Constitution was Amended, after that Civil War, to explicitly abolish slavery.  The argument simply to ignore the law was found as wanting then as it is now.

The fact that dissenting justices regularly, publicly and vociferously assert that their colleagues have ignored the Constitution…should give us pause.  The two main rival interpretive methods, “originalism” (divining the framers’ intent) and “living constitutionalism” (reinterpreting the text in light of modern demands), cannot be reconciled.  Some decisions have been grounded in one school of thought, and some in the other.  Whichever your philosophy, many of the results—by definition—must be wrong.

Nor need the two schools be reconciled.  Judicial activism is wrong.  Judges’ oaths of office commit them, on their honor, to uphold the Constitution, not to amend it ab ecclesia de banco.  Moreover, the Constitution is a living document, as Seidman and his “living constitutionalists” aver; however, it is that same Constitution’s Article V which shows how it thrives and evolves.  As one of Seidman’s living constitutionalists, Justice Robert H Jackson, said, the Constitution (Jackson actually was referring to the Bill of Rights) is not a suicide pact.  Jackson was right; however, what is suicide is deviating from the Constitution—including altering it without the requirements of Article V.

I could go on, but that’ll do for now.  The rest of his diatribe is of a piece.

In the end, our Constitution is all that stands between us as a nation of laws and us as a nation governed by a few men who make the laws; it is all that stands between us as a nation whose government protects those individual rights, liberties, and duties that are part of our Creator’s endowment and us as a nation whose government presumes to grant (or withdraw) our rights, liberties, and duties.

If Seidman is dissatisfied with our Constitution, I’d like to see the text of his proposed Amendment(s).  Article V, after all, as he well knows, is how our Constitution lives.  That our Constitution causes so much frustration by getting so far in the way of facile “solutions” is one of its strengths.  In the end, if he can’t convince mere men of the greatness of his ideas, perhaps his ideas aren’t so great.

Oh, one more thing.  Seidman opens his piece with this:

[A]lmost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

But nowhere in the rest of writing does he name any of those “evil provisions,” or even any of the “archaic, idiosyncratic” ones.  That’s the integrity of leveling a charge and then declining to support it.

Some Thoughts on a Pseudo-Wonk’s Thoughts on the Coming Fiscal Cliff

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I don’t ordinarily take guys like Ezra Klein seriously.  He is, after all, the pseudo-wonk who claimed in all seriousness, during a December 2010 interview on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown,” that our Constitution doesn’t matter; it’s just an inconvenient scrap of paper too often in the way of the Progressives’ Proper Way:

[The Constitution of the United States] has no binding power on anything.  …the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago….

However, since he is taken seriously by so many on the Left, and he’s just written another tendentious piece of misunderstanding, I find myself drawn to comment.  In writing for Newsday just after Christmas, he made the remarks described below.

I’ll begin by briefly addressing Klein’s windy argument concerning Conservative distrust of Democrats’ spending cut promises.  Klein insists that welching on such promises is a good thing:

The point of austerity is to solve a deficit problem, not yoke the future to the imperfect forecasts of the past.  Once the deficit problem goes away, so too does the reason for austerity.

He also makes his view of the moral appropriateness of breaking promises explicit:

After 1997, spending rose.  But by then, the economy was roaring, and within a few years, we were at surpluses.  So why shouldn’t Congress have been a bit looser with the purse?

And

But if the economy in eight years is far better than we expect it to be today, Congress should change course.  If the cuts to spending don’t need to be so deep, then huzzah! Ratchet them back.

Because—well, Klein never offers a reason.  For him, Big Government spending Americans’ money is the Natural Order.  Big Government is its own raison d’être.

I’ll address his disingenuousness in claiming that leaving more money in the hands of Americans, rather than those of Big Government—reducing government spending, making possible reducing taxes—is somehow austere later.  First, I’ll talk about his outright lie:

[Conservatives’] goal isn’t to reduce deficits.  If it was, they’d be open to tax increases.

And

[Conservatives’] real goal: Not smaller deficits, but smaller government.

Because raising taxes is the One True Way to reduce deficits.

Actually, on one level, Klein’s charge isn’t a malicious slur, at all: Conservatives aren’t interested in reducing deficits; they’re interested in eliminating them altogether.  But Klein wasn’t going there.  Here’s the thing: Conservatives are interested in…reducing…deficits, by cutting spending.  Conservatives also see the optimal long-term path to this—especially in light of Progressives’ view that breaking promises is morally sound—as being to shrink government back to a small, limited entity that the Sovereign people can better control.  The existence of these alternate paths proves the lie in Klein’s charge.

Interestingly, Klein makes his lie as if he believes, in all sincerity, that smaller government is somehow bad.  But one of his movement’s founding forebears, Herb Croly, has already enshrined that concept in the Progressive religion:

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy.  But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of constructive national democracy….  [T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

Klein argues, to return to the question of austerity and to questions of spending, taxes, and Big Government:

The point of austerity is to solve a deficit problem, not yoke the future to the imperfect forecasts of the past.  Once the deficit problem goes away, so too does the reason for austerity.

Of course, it should go the other way, too. The Bush tax cuts, which were passed to pay down a surplus, should be rescinded now that deficits have returned.  But Republicans don’t see it that way.

Based on what theory, exactly, should taxes be increased?  Klein declines to offer any support at all for this bald, unsubstantiated claim.  Not the first particle of a fact, not a single line of logic.  Part of his failure, though, stems from his misunderstanding that the Bush tax cuts were intended to “pay down a surplus” (has there been a more cynically offered non sequitur—”pay down a surplus?”) rather than to leave more of Americans’ money in their own hands.  But this is symptomatic of Klein’s blinders (yes, that’s contradictory.  Deal with it).  Big Government is such an obviously positive wonder that explanation seems contained in the statement.

He adds to his curious remark above this:

Rather, austerity is one of many arguments marshaled toward the long-term end of shrinking the size of government.  That’s why a deal that solves the deficit problem and then sees government spending rise in its eight year is a failure rather than a success—it betrayed the actual goal of shrinking the size of the government, even if it succeeded in the putative goal of balancing the budget.

Here’s the cynicism of his austerity claims.  Klein conflates austerity with reduced government spending, austerity with leaving more money in the hands of the individuals otherwise taxed—as though more money in private hands makes somehow for a more limited existence.  No, what is austere is taking money away from those who already are paying far more than their share by raising taxes on them; or taking money away from anyone by raising taxes in the middle of a failed recovery or while deficit spending remains out of control.

He does states a truth, yet fails to recognize it.  A budget that grows government is, rather tautologically, a failure.  One of the points of the goal of shrinking the size of government (beyond facilitating the preservation of individual freedoms and duties) is to exercise better control over its budget—so as to eliminate deficits (not just reduce them), so as to pay down (if not eliminate, from time to time) the debt and keep it under control.

Moreover, Conservatives don’t see the effectivity of raising taxes in times of deficits.  Of course, they don’t—spending cuts also reduce/eliminate deficits, and more efficiently so.  Spending cuts are immediate and direct (note that I’m talking about actual cuts, not the accounting games that both parties play, wherein they claim a reduction in the rise in spending rate is a cut).  Tax increases, though, however well-intended, get diverted into funding another neat program—there’s always a neat program waiting for money—rather than get used to reduce deficits.

But Klein, like all pseudo-wonks of the Left, simply can’t conceive of spending cuts.  He can’t conceive of letting Americans see to their own ends without (his) Big Government hanging over their shoulder making sure that the ends are appropriate and that their satisfaction is via an approved means.

Klein concludes

There’s little doubt that a mixture of tax increases and spending cuts could bring deficits to manageable levels within a few years.  Add in some stimulus and we could even protect the recovery between here and there.  Moreover, since the discretionary spending cuts have already been made, the next set of spending cuts will likely focus on entitlements.

“Add in some stimulus….”  So much for the spending cuts.  He just doesn’t understand the whole premise of reducing spending.  But economics also is more than 100 years old, and so confusing to someone who finds it inconvenient.

And, yes, Ezra, there is considerable doubt that “a mixture of tax increases and spending cuts could bring deficits to manageable levels.”  That’s why there’s this debate in DC.

Finally: shrinking government would accomplish all of this, too, and it would make the manageability of the deficits more permanent.  But Klein ignores the larger point (I’m confident that he sees it, for all his confusion): even a manageable deficit represents debt growth, and our current debt of $161/3 trillion and growing already is at unsustainable levels—interest payments alone currently run to $220 billion/year and that’s only going to get worse as the coming Bernanke Inflation begins to take hold, driving up interest rates.  Imagine the precious entitlements that could be funded with that money were it not wasted on the debt of the profligate.  Imagine the national defense capability that could be had for that kind of money (which would represent a one-third increase in the 2012 DoD budget).  Imagine the real stimulus our economy could have were that money committed to a $220 billion reduction in the taxes Americans pay to Klein’s bloated government.

Spending cuts, though, as the means to eliminate deficits in order to enable paying down national debt, and shrinking government to a proper size so as to maintain that reduced spending and taxation, is inconceivable to today’s Progressives.