I was struck by the vehement opposition among some of my Australian friends to a proposed “Australian Bill of Rights”. Australia is the only Western country with neither a constitutional nor legislative bill of rights. I was familiar with the US Bill of Rights and could not quite understand why an equivalent set of provisions should be regarded as a menace to Australian liberty. It was not until I attended a talk by an Labor Party official (who uncharacteristically opposed it) and halfway through his presentation that I realized that the term “Bill of Rights” as used had almost exactly the opposite connotation in an Australian setting.
In the US, the Bill of Rights commonly refers to the first 10 amendments to the Constitution and are a list of limits on government. They are a decalogue of ‘thou shalt nots’. They are an enumeration of limits on government. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …or abridging the freedom of speech … the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed … the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated” etc. But in other political contexts, a bill of rights is a list of entitlements, such as the “right to health care”, “the right to a safe workplace”. In that situation, the fulfillment of “rights” becomes indistinguishable from a grant of power to government. In Australia some scholars are worried that a ‘bill of rights’ will give unelected judges too much power over the population; that rather than serving as a brake on state authority, it will only provide a pretext for increasing it. Professor John Kilcullen wrote:
The courts interpret the constitution, and from the highest court there is no appeal (though the Constitution can be amended — a difficult process). … To many it seems better to keep the courts free of politics and leave rights issues to the ordinary political process, in which politicians can be held responsible by the electorate — on this view the best safeguard of basic rights is the political culture of a democratic country.
By keeping the powers in legislature it was argued, the electorate could always change what they didn’t like. Given that Australian suspicion toward authority as background, it was interesting to learn that Cass Sunstein, the head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, actually argued that liberty was a function of dependency. In an essay entitled, Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes authored in 1999 Sunstein described his theory of liberty and his defense of “welfare rights”:
Who decides, in the United States, how to allocate our scarce public resources for the protection of which rights for whom? What principles are commonly invoked to guide these allocations? And can those principles be defended? These questions deserve more discussion than they usually receive, unclouded by the dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public fisc.
In any case, to recognize the dependency of property rights on the contributions of the whole community, managed by the government, is to repel the rhetorical attack on welfare rights as somehow deeply un-American, and totally alien or different in kind from classical or “real” rights. No right can be exercised independently, for every rights-holder has a claim on public resources–on money that has been extracted from citizens at large.
For all rights–call them negative, call them positive–have that effect. There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great Supreme Court justice, liked to say, taxes are “the price we pay for civilization.”
I think Sunstein has it backwards. People do not owe their existence to government. Government owes its existence to the people. If the mere existence of government guaranteed liberties, then Stalin’s USSR would have been the freest place on earth. Dependency is demonstrably not a sufficient condition for liberty. That a free people can exist prior to government seems settled historical fact; otherwise the United States would have sprung into existence ex nihilo. The Declaration of Independence — to my nonlawyerly mind — seems to maintain, contrary to Sunstein, that the freedom of people is not the consequence of the existence of government, but that representative government is the consequence of the existence of a free people.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Maybe it is a pedantic difference, but perhaps an important one. Just as rights defined as entitlements are different from those defined as restrictions on government, so is the idea that “there is no liberty without dependency” distinguishable from the notion that free association can only be granted by the exercise of liberty. You have to begin somewhere, and I think Sunstein starts at the wrong end. Perhaps the strongest refutation of the dependency theory of liberty is the loss of freedom experienced by those who come under the rule of an all-encompassing government. Recently in Venezuela the “Bolivarian” Hugo Chavez has been shutting down radio stations in order to “democratize” media ownership. Well given that ‘liberty is dependency’, why not?
CARACAS, Sept 5 (Reuters) – Venezuela will pull the plug on 29 more radio stations, a top official in President Hugo Chavez’s government said on Saturday, just weeks after dozens of other outlets were closed in a media clampdown.
Infrastructure Minister Diosdado Cabello closed 34 radio stations in July, saying the government was “democratizing” media ownership. Critics say the move limits freedom of expression and has taken critical voices off the airwaves.
The powerful Chavez ally has threatened to close over 100 stations in total, part of a long-term campaign against private media that the government says are biased against Chavez’s government.
In Orwell’s 1984, the Party’s proudest slogans are: “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.” One might object that “words matter”, but then maybe that’s only true sometimes.
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If Americans and the English are as Shaw said “two peoples separated by a common language” then how much more surprising is it when we find ourselves defining terms like “Rights” at cross purposes with the Australians. It is the assumption that we are speaking the same tongue that makes us fail to observe more closely. We think of each other as siblings and when we fail to communicate we can get impatient. Perhaps that is why people get angrier with family members then with strangers and civil wars are more horrible then foreign expeditions. Many Americans are just waking up to the realization that almost a third of the population of their own country agree with Sunstein and do not accept the most basic principles of our system that were taught in public schools when we were children.
Some here have used the acronym TWANLOC to refer to them but I reject that notion. They are and remain our countrymen. If we claim the right to deny them then we would be granting them the right to deny us and it follows then that we would helpless before them if they can but hold onto power. This struggle will continue and it may even cross many lines but at the end we must seek to reeducate those who have erred and to restore the Constitution as it was intended to be.
There is a price to pay for everything. For me, liberty is too high a price to pay for certain government “guaranteed” outcomes. “There is no liberty without dependence” – typical progressive mangling of meaning and selective (and limited) understanding of what liberty truly means, nevermind the price that must be paid for it. Too much will be lost without it.
Starting at the wrong end is what separates socialists from conservatives, so what else could one expect from the noted Hahvaad professor?
As to our Australian cousins discerning an opposite meaning to “bill of rights,” they are after all residents of the southern hemisphere and logically have a great excuse for seeing things upside down. But at least they look to the proper “end”.
A lot of political causes grab onto the title “…bill of right…”. We oft hear of a “patient’s bill of rights”, or a “airline passenger’s bill of rights” or a “taxpayer’s bill of rights” (which at least looks to limit government, but in my opinion is still poorly named).
The original bill of rights were intended to free us from the government, today’s used car dealers use “bill of rights” to try to take away our liberty.
It is all based on this general notion of “rights” good, and that is exactly why your friends Down Under don’t want such a thing, because they understand in today’s world this means dependency.
The biggest fault BHO finds in Our Constitution is it’s concern only with
“Negative Rights”
—
…Our God Given Liberties not up to the mark of what The One promises to provide “for all”
Employees of the federal government are called Civil Servants. It is the civil service based on the idea that government is given greater authority to serve the people.
One of the natural consequences of power is that those who wield it start to feel that they are better and have better ability to decide what is right despite what those they serve think. Thus the servant changes to be the master.
The American system of government is different from most in that the people loaned authority and have the right to rescind it. That applies to the police and their duties to enforce the law, to those we choose to make those laws.
When this situation comes about Jefferson’s dictum that Liberty needs to be watered with the blood of tyrants comes to mind.
This does not mean literally but instead a change in power structure.
Jackson broke the Bank of the US twice to destroy the cronyism culture that was solidifying. Plus he was feared due to his temper and penchant to challenge those who touched on his honor to a duel. Jackson killed several people in duels.
Jackson was a classic populist and he was not predictable. He probably saved the US from solidifying into an oligarchy earlier.
The current populist revolt with Tea Parties, the protest at town halls of the usurpation of freedom is a reoccurrence of this populace revolt over Obama’s road of transformation of the US economy into a state run enterprise.
Van Jones is an avowed Communist and ran the Ella Baker Center who was also an avowed communist that desired to change thing country into a better USSR.
With the implosion of the USSR, the communists in Europe and elsewhere ran to the Green movement since it had the most promise of installing state control and destruction of the capitalist economies by mandating energy reduction.
It was no chance that Van Jones, a communist, morphed into a Green Jobs advisor and had a lot to do with the push for cap and trade, which is designed to destroy industries and cripple our economy.
It was lucky that he mistakenly latched onto the truther propaganda as a means to instill distrust about the US government under Bush 43. It is still too recent in memory of the destruction of the towers and the Pentagon to be acceptable.
To be accused of engineering that destruction by a person in the White House is beyond the pale.
We can be thankful that the White House and Pelosi and friends are tone deaf and there were not subtler. Their constant abrasiveness calling America dumb, mobsters, shills and silly have enraged the populace into resistance.
There is little chance now that Cap and Trade will be enacted this term. It may change and be slipped slowly into another but popular opinion is turning against the canard of global warming, especially with a cool summer.
A new leader that resonates with the popular resistance that seems to understand in her heart that public service means that the servant duty is to the people and not for herself has emerged in the person of Sarah Palin.
Her public speeches and penchant to resign when need shows the humility needed to listen to the people and her understanding and quick wit to enunciate the issue with phrases like “death panels”.
That articulate the worry that the elderly have felt because they knew that they are the target of any reduction or rationing of health care.
Obama’s advisors writings and utterances permeate with the idea of a static economy and do not understand the ability of capitalism to expand wealth, technological breakthroughs and innovation. That is a result of a communist mindset that wealth can be redistributed but not created. Health care can be redistributed but not expanded with supply and demand.
The tone deafness to the insult they perpetuate to the voters has also taught the voters an alert ear that is hearing the lies and vagueness that Obama uses to persuade. They are questioning the Constitution and people are waking up and thinking about our Constitution and the basis that our representatives serve us not the other way around.
Many are now question the very idea if it is legitimate to take from many to give to a few and what article is that authority given under the Constitution. Foolish representatives have retorted that Medicare is not Constitutional wither in attempt to divide the elderly from the rest. But that will not fly since that has been accepted and the new program is not yet accepted. Plus Social Security and Medicare was promised as an insurance program that the elderly earned. Of course it is a large Ponzi scheme. But the elderly now feel that the government is betraying the contract.
Obama and the progressives have outraged large segments of the electorate. They are scaring the elderly, liberals and the moderates. The conservative are energized and the large business may realize that they are endangers and cannot cut a deal. The betrayal of pharmaceuticals by Obama and Pelosi.
Unions thuggery has been are display and been used to try to intimidate the protesters and has lead to a reduction of support for the unions. Not only has Obama been divisive he is actively created huge swaths of the electorate to be his enemy. That does not bode well in 2010 for the Democrats.
BHO’s Motto is
“Be Prepared”
…with an ACORN powered Census, (estimate)
and Black Panther Poll Watchers.
What is the remedy?
Now that Van Jones has been dispatched, Cass Sunstein just went to the top of Glenn Beck’s list. It should be interesting.
No “human right” can exist which REQUIRES the labor of others. To believe otherwise is to support the necessity of SLAVERY.
Cass Susstein, a prominent advisor to our Dear Leader, now wants a new healthcare policy: that the State should be allowed to harvest your organs when you die “without your explicit consent”. In other words, unless you have explicitly left instructions that the State can’t take you body organs, the State shall be able to take you organs at will.
Another negative right to be taken from us by our Savior?
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/04/did-cass-sunstein-propose-taking-organs-against-peoples-will/
Anyone who thinks the whatever you want to call the current political debate will soon be over is, I think mistaken. The ideological struggle will be fought on each side with the peculiar sharpness, resourcefulness and stubborness of Americans. I know that it is almost blasphemous to say it, but the Van Jones’ of the world are a particularly American type of commie. There is despite the nature of his belief, a certain recognizable familiarity to him; a kind of yee-haw Bolshevism.
At a talk I gave recently, I explained that a shootout that occurred a mile from the place I grew up was several times more deadly than the Eureka Stockade “massacre” in Australia. I suppose I’m a foreigner everywere, and for that reason am most at home on the Internet where I can be a ghost; with a home, its true but on Pacific Daylight Time. A massacre? The Eureka stockade incident doesn’t even rate as a shootout in some countries. The fight between the US Army and Mormon church would dwarf the biggest internal military clash ever experienced in Australia. The United States is a singular place in its own way. Many things are done all out and all in. But certain restraints are curiously observed and it’s difficult to explain why. You just have to know. A friend of mine observed that many Western Europeans thought they understood America because they watched Hollywood shows and realized at some point that they didn’t. Eventually the realization sinks in that the place is not just a more picturesque version of England. It’s different; a space with its own destiny; its own dreams; and arguably, its own civilization. George Washington, Benedict Arnold, John Brown, Quantrell, Ronald Reagan and maybe even Barack Obama are threads in a saga that is by turns astounding, scary, disgusting and inspiring. You want to turn away, but you can’t. Because in some strange way it is the story of everyone, at least in part.
“The poor cook he caught the fits
And threw away all my grits
And then he took and he ate up all of my corn
Let me go home
Why dont they let me go home
This is the worst trip Ive ever been on”
—
Salt Lick:
Don’t forget a couple of week’s worth of drinking water,
and plenty of Beans and Rice.
The “father” of the US Civil Service was Chester Alan Arthur. He was a great man and a great President.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_A._Arthur
“In the US, the Bill of Rights commonly refers to the first 10 amendments to the Constitution and are a list of limits on government. They are a decalogue of ‘thou shalt nots’.”
I intend no disrespect when I say this (Switch of the bus) but Obama thinks this should be reversed.
“I think Sunstein has it backwards. People do not owe their existence to government. Government owes its existence to the people. ”
Maybe this is where Obama gets it from. Just think, Sunstein will be in a position to do major damage when he joins the administration.
Obama – the perfect storm.
It never ceases to amaze me how many Americans attempt to sell one thing or another based on European mores & standards. They forget US history and that the stock which settled this land were Euro Rejects, if not rejected by Europe they rejected Europe. Even at the start, the Pilgrims did not come to extend England’s influence, they came to get away from the influence.
Europe’s current state started out in an intial state of strongmen’s fiefdoms each watching over and taking care of the peasants, America was settled by those want to be free from European (and similar) strongmen. America’s vast wilderness gave those refuges space to find what they came for.
So, when someone comes up with a European program to shepherd the peasant’s is it any shock they are rejected?
“they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”
The center/right is largely composed of people who believe in God, wants freedom from government, and understands that our freedoms and rights come from God.
The left largely doesn’t believe in God, wants freedom from religion, and has convinced themselves that freedoms and rights are created by and granted by government.
per RAH @ 6: “We can be thankful that the White House and Pelosi and friends are tone deaf and there were not subtler. Their constant abrasiveness calling America dumb, mobsters, shills and silly have enraged the populace into resistance.”
The pig-headed stubbornness of Obama, Pelosi, Reid, et al, may be our saving grace. If they were just a little bit sneaky and subtle, they could screw us all right into the ground and we would never know it was happening. Instead, they seem to want to counter every bit of resistance with overwhelming force, and that only demonstrates publicly again and again just how clueless they are. The more thuggery they use to push back, the worse they look. They apparently still believe that the MSM running interference for them while they behave this way is covering their image, but it isn’t; there are too many other ways for the information to get out. But it would be a mistake to assume that they will stay this dumb forever. (I hope they do, though.) I would worry about the future direction of Federal communications policies. Hugo Chavez is showing us the future.
Let’s suppose for a minute that the Dems get obliterated in the 2010 off-year Congressional elections. I really hope that that happens, and the likelihood grows daily, mostly thanks to Dem obtuseness. Obama will have two choices: continue with his pig-headedness and veto everything, or, like Clinton, give in, and come out looking like a hero. I’d bet on option (1), but you never know. Suppose it’s option (2). Much of what we conservatives want to do is dismantle entitlements, and let’s suppose that happens. Does anybody here believe that that will go off without a hitch? The biggest reason Obama is in so much trouble is that he is destroying individuals’ wealth. Does anyone think it would go any better for conservatives when they start cutting peoples’ government jobs, welfare, and Social Security? Doesn’t matter that these things are leech policies sucking the Republic dry. These are peoples’ livelihoods. (Even welfare.) It would behoove us to think about just how a smaller government could ever be implemented, because it is going to be a really hard sell, and unless and until the Dems lose ALL credibility with nearly all voters, there will be little patience for conservative policies, and little stomach or patience for an incremental approach, which means that the Dems, once back in power again, will quickly put a stop to the dismantling.
So maybe Obama, apparently lacking ANY ability or inclination to compromise, is a godsend after all. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
The difference between the Negative Rights in the Constitution and those positive rights (entitlements) proposed by the authoritarians is that the negative rights can be exercised without impinging on the corresponding rights of other citizens.
If Australia proceeds with a Bill of Rights make sure that the legislature has a less than nuclear control over the judiciary. Politics can have a good effect in slowing the inevitable encroachment of the judiciary on the legislative. The March Through the Institutions happens in the courts as well.
I think Sunstein is/was at U of Chicago.
Wretchard, if someone in Parliament proposed a bill of rights exactly like that of the U.S. and brought it to a vote, would it pass, and if not, why not?
I don’t know. Honestly. My knowledge of Australian history falls far short of what it should be. But here’s my ignorant attempt to answer your question. Parliamentary democracies are designed differently from the US system. They are designed to do something; to wield power. For one thing, both the legislative and the executive branches are one and the same. For another, the prime ministers are selected by the parties. All the electorate gets to decide is which party is in power.
The US system of government, by contrast, is designed to fit a very great power. It is expressly designed not to do anything beyond its remit. It’s founders were revolutionaries who perhaps, among all the designers of government in the world, suspected and feared power the most. Feared it because they knew it would be near unto them. As a consequence, the US government is designed to do little else but protect the sphere of freedom which alone, or principally does most of the heavy lifting.
I am no scholar of comparative govement, but if I were to characterize the United States, it would be that of a people to whom government is but a necessary evil. If I were to describe Australia it would be as a people whose goverment was designed to extend the community.
Personally I think an Australian “bill of rights” would be a mistake because it essentially disturbs the architecture of parliamentary supremacy. In the US system, a bill of rights is more sand in the gears, and therefore, a feature, not a bug.
Parenthetically, I would add that all great political innovators were distinguished as much as by the way they suppressed power as by the way they gave it scope. The United States is a great power and requires the special handling — indeed the limitations — foreseen by its founders. Like Frodo it cannot trust the ring. Australia is a regional power; it will always wear a lesser ring, such as Galadriel wore. To Australia is given the small power to order its garden; no great darkness need weigh on it. To America has been given a great ring of power. This “gift” it can never wield in peace.
Our bill of rights, as a bill of attainder is a curious Point Of View.
Just stop suckling and chew.
Not trusting our humanity keeps Columbia’s torch undimmed.
Dependency requires liberty be trimmed.
Born of fear, Is it is a determinedly adolescent perspective,.
Not a capable being, able to live.
Trust Not invested in one another is a thing found only on legal tender.
To earn one another’s trust we endeavor?
Truther suspected Communists v. Capitalists supposed insiders.
Lady Liberty nee teen aged break down.
Wretchard-
Thanks, and the LOTR analogy really helps to understand.
By now many Americans are regretting our victory in World War II, turning us into dependents of our government. America is not Europe or anywhere else for that matter and we still have the opportunity to right our ship, restore the Republic. But it will require real upheaval. This superb post reveals one strand of the threat posed by this administration, a different threat from the mindless, workless viciousness of its predecessor, namely the influence of people like the President himself, Cass Sunstein and dozens more, people who have never worked a day in their lives. Not one. Admittedly intelligent, possibly even well meaning, I do not know that, they actually believe they know what is right for us, to make us better people and citizens. We have heavy lifting to do to get rif of them, the entire political class. America needs an upheaval and I believe we have one more in us. Just watch the next decade.
Where in his op-ed does Sunstein argue that “the mere existence of government guaranteed liberties”? His argument is not that dependency leads to liberty per se, but that some dependency on government is necessary for the liberty enjoyed by the citizens of a “civilized” nation. Nothing in Sustein’s article suggests that dependency could not potentially lead to totalitarianism as well.
Just as I am dependent on the train to get me to and from work, all citizens are dependent upon government to secure our rights. This does not mean that we the people exist for the government’s sake, anymore than I exist for the sake of the train system. Quite the contrary – the government exists for the benefit of all citizens. Again, the author makes no claim that we exist for government’s sake.
Sustein suggests that dependency is a choice a free people make when forming a government. This follows directly from Jefferson’s line from the Declaration of Independence: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” Neither Sustein nor Jefferson is saying the government is capable of granting the people rights, as our rights are natural, but that government’s role is to SECURE those rights.
Jefferson’s choice of the word “secure” as opposed to “protect” is profound. In once sense, security means protection, and implies that it is governments role to protect the natural rights of it’s citizens from outside forces and even from the government itself. But secure also means to bring into effect. This implies an active role of government in assisting citizens in making their natural rights a reality.
Jefferson remains broad on the topic of how a people ought to secure their rights, stating that the citizenry should grant powers to government “as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” There are many Americans who believe that government programs such as those that give assistance to the unemployed, shelter to the homeless, better access to education for students, etc. are exactly the kinds of powers that best affect our safety and happiness. I think debates about such ideas as national health care get derailed when the right of government to enact such a program is called into question. The question is not CAN enact such a program, but determining which (if any) proposed programs best benefit the people of the United States.
wretchard, you ever read Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Lila? Curious guy, of course, but he made one point that has stayed with me about the American character, which is that it differs from its British and European roots (no comment on its non-European roots!) exactly by the addition of the stoicism and other properties of the Native Americans. Call that naturalism, or wildness, or what have you. Not sure I can really justify it, but it seems to have just enough truth that the comment stays with me and nags me at the oddest times.
America and the One Ring? Has never seemed that way to me. I’ve always been very skeptical about “American exceptionalism” and like that, by which I mean skeptical that it plays any great role in our politics or society.
btw, your comments on Sunstein, I think are just exactly right on!
Given recent (and rising) premonitions voiced here and elsewhere, you probably shouldn’t omit John Moses Browning from that list.
Canada, it seems to one who lives here, has not grown more free since the adoption of the constitutional Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 which, among other things, guarantees us “Life, Liberty, and Security of the Person” and only limits on our freedoms that can be justified in a “free and democratic society”.
One thing that has definitely changed is that the courts have become much more influential and the legislatures declined accordingly. And in an age when the left has a very expansive idea of “rights”, tied to its victimary thinking, and one has a Charter that bans “discrimination” by the government along all sorts of lines, the “right” to some normative equality imposed by the state (the courts being part of the state) becomes common sense to a lot of people.
However, similar developments have of course occurred in the U.S. It used to be a common expression in Canada that nothing could or should be done about xyz because “it’s a free country”. One doesn’t hear that anymore. Australia strikes me as a place somewhat freer, but I’ve never been so lucky to visit.
If you do get a Charter of Rights, be sure to include property rights. That’s one thing Trudeau wouldn’t give us and it is one thing I think we could seriously use in an age of big government.
Where in his op-ed does Sunstein argue that “the mere existence of government guaranteed liberties”?
In the phrase “There is no liberty without dependency” from which it follows that in order to be free I must first be dependent. Government therefore is the pre-condition for liberty, which is a nonsense, because where does the first freely chosen government come from, if freedom depends on its pre-existence? Logically the only free people are a subset of those who are already governed, because they must be first be dependent in order to have liberty.
Sunstein’s mistake is this: while governments are sometimes necessary to preserve liberty, they are not the originators of it. People can be free just because they are; and subsequently they institute governments to secure their rights, but their rights do not proceed from dependency. Rather they are unalienable, unless Sunstein takes that to simply be a figure of speech. Bureaucracies are an afterthought, not the source of liberty themselves. If dependency was requisite to liberty, then only among the governed should we hope to find free men.
If Sunstein were right then given enough dependency, enough government, we would inevitably find liberty. On the other hand, without dependency, without government, we should never hope to find it. But that’s not true and hence, Sunstein is wrong.
There is another aspect to this which I am not enough of a scholar to address. It was the idea that liberty should be based on property. The idea that a man was free flowed from the assertion that he owned himself, so to that extent he had a God-given liberty, because God gave him himself. The notion that man does not own himself unless it is validated by an external authority is an interesting one, but my own feeling is that is a dangerous concept, and counterintuitive to boot.
We bind ourselves together to remain ourselves. But we are who we are before we meet others, whatever Sunstein may think.
InstaPundit had this fantastic quote yesterday that speaks to what citizens owe to their government, and vice versa:
“MISTER, WE COULD USE SOME MEN LIKE GROVER CLEVELAND AGAIN. “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should I think be steadfastly resisted to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the government the government should not support the people.”
///
Observations about Australia that may be wrong because I have never been there:
(1) There’s a certain psychological tendency among Aussies to tug at their forelock and bow in deference that I think must stem from some sort of embarrassment at being a counry founded by rejected convicts. While Americans celebrate our familial horsethieves as interesting entrepreneurs (old Joe Kennedy and all the different robber barons), Australians don’t like to talk about their forebears or their misdeeds.
(2) Australia is working very hard on creating its own race card situation in the form of how the government treats its aborigine population. Historically, Australia has treated its aborigines with the same sort of disdain and disgust as America treated its Indian and black populations, and it’s only in the last 10 years or less that those policies have begun to change. So far, the aborigines are declining to play the government’s game to civilize them — maybe someone needs to fill them in on the concept of “reparations”. This means Obama could always find a job as a community organizer in Australia once he’s finally thrown out of the United States.
What sets governments apart from other entities, is the ability to use physical force *legally*.
A corporation can attempt to persuade you to purchase their products, a charity to support their cause, an individual to come to their house for dinner. But in all cases persuasion is all that can be offered. Physical force (and fraud, its corollary) are in all cases out of bounds.
Governments are wholly different. EVERY regulation, law, and court decree can be implemented using physical force should compliance not be forthcoming.
Take something silly like a city ordinance on how wide grocery aisles have to be. If the proprietor refuses to agree, he’ll be cited. If he refuses to pay the fine and make the adjustment, he’ll eventually be closed. If he tries to keep his doors open, police will show up. Press further, and it’s off to jail.
At the end of *every* law, regulation and decree, ultimately lies a gun. Our Founding Fathers recognizied this fact, and understood the danger government poses because of this unique attribute.
Now, I’m not an anarchist; far from it. There is one realm where the use of force is justified: to protect individual rights.
Hence, the proper roles of goverment: Police to protect us from thieves and murderers BY FORCE, Courts to impartially enforce contracts BY FORCE, and the Military to protect us from foreign invaders BY FORCE.
That why “positive” rights, right TOO something, are a contradition in terms. My “right” to some goody requires the government take it from someone else, ultimately by force. Such a case inverts rights, and makes the government the destroyer of rights, not the protector.
One thing that I notice that the French do well is invent persuasive intellectual rationalizations for what is pragmatically decided to be done by the “ruling elite” of that country.
The French decided to go “all nuclear” in their needs for electrical generation, and since then, have devised all sorts of intellectual rationalizations (including AGW) to continue to justify it on esoteric grounds, rather than just that is made good economic sense.
Likewise, their vociferous opposition to OIF in 2003 has more to do with their pragmatic needs to do business with the wider Arab world, and the uncertainty that our invasion and removal of Saddam’s Baathist dictatorship created in the business realm. A lot of spurious pseudo intellectualism and moralizing has since ensued.
The point of this, then, is to consider how we tend to “backwards rationalize” what seems to work in a pragmatic way, and invent elaborate intellectual justifications (to keep people like Cass Sunstein employed) rather than just accept “this seems to be working, let’s not mess with it too much”?
In biology, I tend to conclude that the vast number of mutations in the realm of species evolution have negative results. Likewise in politics, most of the clever ideas (mutations?) of the so-called progressives don’t and will not really work.
The Constitution of 1789 was something of a long simmering reaction to the Revolutionary War and the failure of the first Federal Articles of Confederation. Was is really a revolutionary idea, or just an evolutionary political idea?
Obama and his crew are pushing a whole raft of political “mutations” to the American political system. Some people are all ready to accept them, even though they have never been proven to work right anywhere (in the long run), and certainly not on the economic scale of the American Republic. Yet here we stand, on the precipice. Will we really topple over? Will we teter along the edge for a decade or more, sorting out the good and bad ideas? Can really bad ideas be objectively discarded, forever?
When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history” back in the early ’90′s, it wasn’t the end of bad ideas, or a great elevation of human thought. It was just a gimicky slogan to fit into a an age filled with silly slogans.
“It takes a village!”
“All the old paradigms are changing!”
“The age of big government is over!”
“I did not have sex with that woman!”
Time marches on. Turn the page.
The Hawke government tried to sell a Bill of Rights but it was defeated when put to the Australian population. The details are a bit fuzzy and I am too tired to look it up, but consensus at the time seemed to be that stating the rights explicitly limited our rights to those enumerated – we felt we were better off with the status quo. I will vote against any attempt to install a bill of rights here.
E.Nigma – I take it you decline to “Celebrate Diversity”?
The courts interpret the constitution, and from the highest court there is no … To many it seems better to keep the courts free of politics and leave rights issues to the ordinary political process, in which politicians can be held responsible by the electorate
The observation that there’s no reasonable avenue of correcting a bad high court decision is relevant. The Left has been playing this game for a couple of generations now. My home town once voted to give exceptionally generous handouts to homeless people. The predictable result was a huge increase in homelessness, a ruinous increase in the cost of the handout program, and soon after a new city council that quickly voted to eliminate the program. Troublemakers sued, and the initial judge ruled that the city had, ahem, violated the rights of the homeless people by eliminating the program (I think it was “due process” rights, but can’t remember for sure). Eventually sanity prevailed in a higher court, but that was years ago and the march of Leftists through the courts has continued since then.
In the rock-paper-scissors structure created by the Founders to divide up governmental power and set those divided powers against one another (so that they would not turn on the people), the courts have become a sort of super-scissors, able to cut rock as well as paper. Among the other corrections we need to make in re-righting the ship, we’ve got to make sure the rock can smash the scissors again.
NahnCee,
Diversity is in the eye of the beholder.My next door neighbors are Chinese, but I just see “people”. We talk. Our sons go to school together and play videogames together.
Sure, we have the “right” to be different, but the most “different” guy in my neighborhood is ostracized (to a degree) because his yard looks like a weed pit, not because of any ethnic or racial identity. He treated his wife like crap and one day she just walked out with the kids. He’s weird. It’s not any more complicated than that.
Short answer. No, I do not celebrate diversity.
It seemed to me the worst politicians wore their vices on their sleeve. Their followers and supporters felt they could get good kharma from putting up with inexcusable behavior … e.i. Ted Kennedy.
I hate to pull a Godwin here, but it’s like George Orwell said about the goosestep. It wasn’t supposed to be beautiful; the uglyness dares you to laugh. And when you see no one laughing, you feel the naked power of the thing.
Obama has spent his campaign being beautiful. Now we will see how busy he is when he is ugly.
NahnCee,
I celebrate my diversity. The fact is I am more diverse than any female on the planet. I have an X and a Y.
Exceedingly diverse, Yippy. So there.
Wade – I read something some where along the line that the X and the Y chromosome merely prove that men are born with innate birth defects, since they can’t manage to make matching chromosomes, when every other bodily feature is either dual-but-the-same (eyes and ears) or singular (nose and mouth). Therefore, the Y chromosome must be a defect.
(Back in pre-neo-feminist days, I also remember reading how stupid was it that Nature evolved so that the male reproductive organs are out in the open and upfront where they are easily attacked, while Nature did a much better job on the female reproductive organs which are nicely hidden, tucked away and protected.)
Some Scouts sat around the campfire singing about the Titanic; we sat around the campfire singing You Are My Sunshine. The following must be sung to make any sense at all.
You are my Sunstein, my only Sunstein
I make you happy when tax I pay
You’ll never know dear how much I love you
Please come take my Sunstein away
The other night dear as I lay sleeping
I dreamed that welfare rights were gone
When I awoke dear I was mistaken
Please come take my Sunstein away
Big Brother Chavez says airwaves closing
He says opposing him no way
To show affection for what he’s doing
Please come take my Chavez away
Of course Obama plan something like that
He make Lloyd Clark the FCC
Lloyd Clark say Limbaugh off air be taken
Please come take Obama away
These liberal lawyers say we’re dependent
That slavery is our highest goal
And Mr. Sunstein say he will guide us
Please come take my Sunstein away
I am uncomfortable when I hear someone say “Government should protect my rights.” You even hear conservative commentators say this in the context of limiting the power of government to that. At best this is baffling. At worst that way lies madness.
The Declaration of Independence is a statement of philosophy, not a plan for governance. The Constitution defines the basic structure of the government and its limitations. In this same spirit, government should enforce the detailed laws at the local level, period. If someone trys to deprive me of my gun, there are laws against theft and they should be enforced. That someone has no more right to take my gun than he does my couch or tennis shoes. If he does take my gun, law enforcement authorities should arrest him, and barring that, I should be able to put on my tennis shoes, get off my couch, go buy another gun, and then proceed to liberate my stolen property.
The idea that the cops were charged with violating Rodney King’s civil rights by the Federal Government is absurd. If some law enforcement agency wants to investigate and charge another with corruption, incompetence, or brutality they should be able to do that, but an individual’s civil rights should not enter into it. If you try it, then the “rights” are sure to increase vastly in scope and number.
On the FahrenHype 911 video they show an interview with a couple war protestor types. The woman is saying “If a dictator gives free health care, then I like that dictator. If a dictator gives a free college education, I like that dictator.” Aside from the alarming fact that people are willing to give up their liberty for freebies, it is absurd to think you would want such things as provided by a dictator anyway. What is the “Free” stuff going to be like if provided by a governmental structure that has at its core such contempt for human beings? It may be easy to conjure up a dictatorship headed by, say, Ralph Nader, which rules with an iron hand and that is also gentle, even-handed, caring – and competent, but it is less likely than one ruled by King Arthur and defended by knights riding flying dragons.
Wretcherd at 20
I respectfully must disagree. Tyranny can come from any form of government if the government’s relationship with the citizen is not constrained. The American Bill of Rights can easily be applied to any government in the Anglosphere and the country where it is applied will prosper if it is honored altogether. We in America have elevated parts of the Bill to primacy and ignored others and allowed the courts to twist others beyond recognition. (Which is what I noted above about the need for a non-nuclear alternative to impeachment for judges. [H/T JMH above])
Countries outside the Anglosphere may take some work.
Britain does not have a written Bill of Rights, but if they did they wouldn’t have a quarter of the stupidity coming from their Political Correctness Police. They wouldn’t have an unarmed populace cowering in the face of an armed criminal class. I hear that Australia took up all the handguns a few years ago. How’d that help the armed robbery and murder rates?
The constraint on the government hardwired into the American Constitution is one of the foundations of American Exceptionalism.
I dont see how a Bill of Rights, properly drawn, could hurt a parliament.
In the phrase “There is no liberty without dependency” from which it follows that in order to be free I must first be dependent.
W, I think you mis-state Sunstein’s argument. His main point is that govt protects people’s rights and liberties and taxes enable the govt to do so. He doesn’t really address the source of those rights. In his statement “There is no liberty without dependency” by liberty he clearly means things like property rights and freedom of speech. By dependency he means that there must be a govt in place that protects those rights. In modern times that seems self-evident.
There might be people living on Pitcairn Island or in the great north woods that consider themselves free people, but without police and courts to guarantee freedoms they are susceptible to lose their freedoms or properties to anyone with a gun bigger than theirs.
Countries like KSA where people pay no taxes are not free. They live under a tyranny where the rulers do what they like without answering to the people. Taxes do tie the govt to the people in a beneficial manner. Any country where the govt gets its revenues from oil rather than taxes is a tyranny or rapidly becoming one.
Walt: G-R-O-A-N!
Wretchard, see if you can find a copy of “Albion’s Seed” by David Hackett Fischer.
Concerns the founding of the American cultural matrix. Most complete study on the subject that I know of.
One thing that struck me about Puritans, Quakers, Cavaliers and Borderers alike was a
universal belief in natural rights. So when those old timers talked about rights they all meant that which exists (comes from God) and any legislation on the subject had to be for the purpose of keeping the state from trampling on those rights and helping to secure them from aggressors.
Where that sine qua non was not/ is not embedded in the surrounding culture, the concept of rights is limited to civil (government granted) rights. This of necessity means passing out the privilege of committing agression in order to get the gratification(s) desired.
And in the US, there were those who opposed the Bill of Rights on the grounds that it would weaken the Doctrine of Enumerated Powers
that was thought to be the firewall against statism.
Over in the Philippines, Manuel L. Quezon, (a very admirable figure IME) was on record as saying he believed the 1935 Philippine Constitution to be superior to that of the US because the latter concerned itself with the happiness of the individual while the former was concerned with the security of the state.
I believe that culturally-based concept to be the prime cause of Philippine troubles from 1946 on.
The concept of civil rights is valid only in one context: When there is a systematic and/or systemic violation of natural rights,
corrective legislation may be passed and enforced in order to correct matters. Other than that, civil rights is a deathtrap.
Hope this isn’t too off topic, but you did mention Chavez and his silencing of 29 radio stations in Venzuela in order to “democratize” media:
Want to get your blood boiling? Here’s the aforementioned Mr. Chavez, just a few miles away from me, at the Venice (CA) film festival today, strolling the red carpet with Oliver Stone, enjoying a hero’s welcome from the useful idiots in Santa Monica:
Chavez in L.A.
Right in front of you face, the ultra-chic American Left celebrating their favorite 3rd World tyrannt. Makes me sick to my stomach.
I think Wretchard laid the crux of it down by quoting the slogans of Oceania from Orwell’s 1984 at the end of his post.
Remember what Winston Smith said? (I’m probably mangling the quote) “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4. From that all else follows . . .”
Sunstein’s contention seems to be that there can be no freedom unless the government can decree that 2 + 2 = 5, and you will actually believe it.
The truth, as it is defined by your rulers, is the only thing that can set you free.
All things considered, I tend to agree with the fictional Winston Smith rather than with Mr. Sunstein.
Too many people put an emotional connotation upon the concept of “government.” Actually its just something that a group of people ingests. It may be poisonous, neutral like sand, or actually something nutritious. And sometimes, that which they seek to ingest actually eats them, like when a sardine attempts to eat a shark.
But once its eaten, its in the body, for good or ill.
And with that tortured analogy, I shall end this rambling comment.
One wonders why some will go to such great lengths to contend there is little difference between men like Sunstein and Obama and our founders.
Of one thing I am sure:
They make my head hurt.
Dave: For a bigger picture get “The Foundations of the America Order” by Russel Kirk. Picks up the Ideas that under-gird the structure from the Jews and Greeks and Gospels (!) and brings them down through the Reformation and the Enlightenment. I could understand most of it.
Tcobb: I used to have a dog. Ate anything. He had to be wormed occasionally. The analogy aint that bad.
One wonders why some will go to such great lengths to contend there is little difference between men like Sunstein and Obama and our founders.
To confer cultural political legitimacy upon cultural political barbarians that are waiting for someone to open the gates so they can ride in and conquer.
Come here little girl, your parents sent me to pick you up. I have candy for you too. Just get in the car. Come on sweet baby, you’re going to like the ride.
[Sunstein's] main point is that govt protects people’s rights and liberties and taxes enable the govt to do so. He doesn’t really address the source of those rights.
Yes – this seems to be the main thrust of Sunstein’s article. People are born with rights, and government’s role is to ensure they are able to exercise those rights.
Dave @ 44:
That is what I was trying to get at in my comment at #31, but you were much clearer and had a good book to cite, too.
Kudos, I agree.
We can’t glue our specific ideas and concepts of government onto a culture that is so dissimilar as to reject it as a foreign infection. It’s not that our ideas are bad, but the specific aspects have grown out of the unique culture and society that they were nurtured in. And it’s why many think of Obama and his followers as alien to America, because they are espousing ideas that are anathema to many Americans, whether they be Democrats or Republicans.
And in a narrower sense, that is the underlying idea regarding the American concept of Federalism, which is also an idea that has been trashed but needs to be revived.
Wretchard: “That a free people can exist prior to government seems settled historical fact; otherwise the United States would have sprung into existence ex nihilo. ”
False. What came to be known as the American people were subjects of the British crown and under the King’s tyranny. This is elementary. Every people in whatever form of society must have some rules, mores, or social codes to distinguish them from a mindless mob. The more sophisticated the people, the more complex the society, the more rules and government they have to regulate behavior. Regulations and rules expand with technology and complexity. Don’t want government? Try the badlands of Somalia, the Congo, Yemen. Wretchard, can you name a people that were “born free”?
Wretchard at 28: “We bind ourselves together to remain ourselves. But we are who we are before we meet others, whatever Sunstein may think.”
False. We are born into society and are socialized animals, not feral children. We’ve seen what happens to such poor autistic creatures and it is not pretty. As Aristotle noted, a man born outside of human society is a beast in human form. The first people we “meet” are our parents and socialization precedes from there.
Wretchard at 20: “I am no scholar of comparative govement, but if I were to characterize the United States, it would be that of a people to whom government is but a necessary evil.”
I think it would be important to note that, as the scholar Rogers Smith notes, there are multiple political traditions in the USA — one of the reasons why liberals, conservatives and libertarians can barely talk to one another. Teddy Roosevelt ranted against class war, but as President he read Herbert Croly and adapted more than a few progressive principles and programs. National Parks, as Ken Burns argues, are government as a positive good.
So too with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society: millions supported and benefitted from activists government, especially such programs as the GI Bill, Social Security, Medicare (which George W. Bush and Tom DeLay massively expanded under MMA, seemingly forgetting that Reagan had railed against the program). Whitaker Chambers noted that his Maryland neighbor-farmers hated liberals and welfare, but sure did love agricultural subsidies. This is now a firmly entrenched American tradition, that one can trace back to John C. Calhoun working hand in hand with Albert Gallatin and the Army Corps of Engineers to build American canal and road infrastructure. You may very well disagree, but millions see thes as traditions that have benefitted their families.
American conservatives forget this tradition at their own peril, especially when they strengthen it without knowing their own histories (e.g. Medicare Prescription Drugs, No Child Left Behind, TARP, etc. etc.)
Today’s Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll Index has BHO at -13% and the trends are consistent, have blogged on this before on my site.
solon 2040 writes:
Regulations and rules expand with technology and complexity. Don’t want government? Try the badlands of Somalia, the Congo, Yemen.
Sir, I doubt that much of anyone who posts on this site is an anarchist. You are deflecting the question. The question is not whether there should be a government, the question is what LIMITS should be placed upon the government to govern, and what sanctions (if any) will be placed upon the PEOPLE who run the government when they exceed those limits.
If you can’t understand this concept I apologize, but I can’t get this message across easily in words with only one syllable.
“What came to be known as the American people were subjects of the British crown and under the King’s tyranny.”
Well, yes, but even at that they were freer than we can conceive of today. They were “subjects” and the King could do all sorts of things to them without their having recourse, but in comparison to today’s bewildering array of taxes, laws, regulations, judicial rulings, and unfunded mandates they were pretty darn unencumbered. That they chafed under the King’s distant rule shows how free in heart and mind they really were.
In principle they were less free than we, being subjects rather than citizens or simply free men. In practice, we are more enslaved than the slaves of that day. We just get to vote into place our far more numerous and influential masters.
“American conservatives forget this tradition at their own peril, especially when they strengthen it without knowing their own histories (e.g. Medicare Prescription Drugs, No Child Left Behind, TARP, etc. etc.)”
Conservatives are responsible for No Child Left Behind and TARP? That’s an interesting construction to make an argument. Sort of invalidates pretty much everything else Solon said, but then I sort of think Solon is just yammering and prancing, trying to prove how smart s/he is in comparison to Wretchard.
Not.
RWE: ” In practice, we are more enslaved than the slaves of that day. We just get to vote into place our far more numerous and influential masters.”
Could you please expand on that a bit more, for it seems to me to be rather lacking in the historical record. Obviously, blacks in America were not more free in 1775 and its hard to claim that women enjoyed the drudgery of housework more in 1775 than their positions (professional or domestic) in 2009. That’s over 50% of the population right there. Let’s not forget indentured servitude, which was misery — read how much Ben Franklin enjoyed his under his elder brother in Franklin’s autobiography, and remember that many men never left such apprenticeships, life expectancy being what it was. In histories I’ve read, colonial life expectancy ranged from 28-35years.
It’s bizarre to claim that the hard and days-long demands of a life of substinence farming, which most Americans engaged in our colonial past, provided more freedom than today’s 9-5 comforts. I suspect, RWE, that you’ve not visited much of the third world, for to claim that modern Americans are suffering “enslavement” worse than the slaves of 18th century shows a lack of familiarity with real poverty, especially in the DR and Haiti. (The Trujillos and Duvaliers screwed those people but good!) If I’m wrong then please elaborate for me on our conditions of “slavery”. Thanks for your time.
Solon:
Interesting that you cant reach any further back than TR to document American totalitarianism.
I never heard of “scholar Rogers Smith.” I’m an engineer but I look around a lot and am sort of familiar with the American theoretical landscape but WhoDat?
Autistic=Feral? Careful, dude, you have no idea the fire mission you just called on your position.
‘Nuff of the easy stuff. The US didnt come about ‘ex nihilo.’ It came as an logical outcome from the English Common Law and ‘Unwritten BOR’, the English Enlightenment, the European Enlightenment, The Reformation, Christianity through the Church Fathers (StAugustine, et al), Roman and Greek Law and the Law of Moses. It is a tide that came ashore here. Oz was not yet ripe for it, other places were not bare enough. Those that deny the thrust of this are operating on an agenda that denies history.
Heres a penny. Back under the bridge.
The founding documents of the USA were a reflection of the dominant religions of the USA at the time of the revolution. Most of them were Calvinist. The Calvinists were the great losers in the European wars of the 1600s in Europe. All of them came to the USA. These included the Dutch German Swiss and Swedish Reformed churches, the French Huguenots, the Scotish Presbyterians and of course the Puritans. The church of england at the time reflected the theology of the dominant culture (as it does to this day.) At that time the dominant culture was Calvinist.
The Synod of Dort set
forth the Reformed doctrine on each point of Calvinism, namely: total
depravity, unconditional
election, limited
atonement, irresistible (or irrevocable) grace, and the
perseverance
of the saints. These are sometimes referred to as the Five
points of Calvinism and remembered by many using the mnemonic
“TULIP”.
It should be remembered that almost from the moment the revolution was completed the USA began its long march away from Calvinism.
Only in recent years– likely because of the total corruption of so many liberal denominations– Calvinism is coming back into favor.
However, the dominant religion of the USA at the time of the revolution was Calvinism. Calvinists were the great losers of the religious wars of the 1600′s. All these folk migrated.
#57
Its amazing how thoughts shift. There’s the idea of absolute poverty–not having enough to eat, and the idea of “relative poverty,” that being I have shelter, food, and the necessities of life, — but most people around me can afford to buy $200 tennis shoes but I can’t, and therefore I live in poverty.
Don’t blend the terms–they aren’t the same, but that’s just what your doing. It either exhibits stupidity or dishonesty on your part. I don’t know which.
If you really want to get down to it, the slave plantations in the antebellum South of the USA were essentially no different than the forced agricultural communes in the USSR or those in China under Mao, except that they usually had a higher survival rate for the folks who had to involuntarily work in them.
Obama is heading to the asylum, to lead the proceedings for a day.
Obama To The U.N.
We’ve got to turn this around in 2010.
bob,
Maybe Obama is hoping to fulfill Woodrow Wilson’s unrealized dreams. Wilson was interesting. Unlike BHO he had a great resume. That was because he kept getting kicked upstairs. He was an unwelcome presence around the Court House as a lawyer so he was slid into a job as a Law Professor. He was unwelcome in the faculty lounge and the classroom so he got sent to sit behind a desk as President of Princeton University. The Trustees were soon enough eager to get him out of their hair so he got fobbed of on the State of New Jersey as Governor. Desperate to get him out of town the politicians pulled enough strings to ship him off to Washington as President of the United States. The Senate was on the verge of accepting the Treaty of Versailles so that we could join the League of Nations in the expectation that Woody would leave the country if offered the title of President of the World. That proved more then Henry Cabot Lodge could swallow so he put a fork in the whole project.
Now that we are stuck with the UN anyway perhaps we can talk BHO into considering a move to Secretary General. The job is perfect for him. It is all prestige and no one expects any results. We should insist that he moves to Geneva.
Is it me, or do some folks confuse the idea of freedom, that is, the ability to choose as one sees fit, with the availability of choices. Huck and Jim were free as birds on their raft, but had little choice in where the raft would take them.
And I see Tcobb said it better anyway.
Tyranny is far easier to prevent than to reverse.
Democracy and tyranny are not opposites, for they answer two completely different questions: WHO has power … and HOW MUCH power do they have.
America is the only nation in history to have been founded upon an IDEA. A great part of that idea is that my rights require nobody to do anything except leave me alone. The one exception is trial by jury.
Our liberty is a great aberration in the history of human affairs. It is preserved by three boxes — the ballot box, the soap box, and the ammo box.
We are on the soap box already, and have one more chance at the ballot box.
The job is perfect for him. It is all prestige and no one expects any results.
Well that’s certainly right. The U.N. is the place for him.
Drudge has a post up that quotes Obamas friend Chavez saying that “we have to help him”. I guess the NYTimes will miss this also. What will they do when the red flag with the hammer and sickle thing goes up over the white house?
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA)
You say:
America is the only nation in history to have been founded upon an IDEA.
In that I do not quite agree with you. Other nations have been founded upon similar ideas. Look at the Constitution of Mexico. Ideas mean nothing if they must always be relegated to the world of tomorrow, because tomorrow, like the speed of light, is forever unobtainable. What is great about America is that culturally, the IDEA is a promise that is meant to be kept NOW.
Other than that, I agree with you.
The Synod of Dort in Holland in 1619 established the Reformed
doctrine on each point of Calvinism, namely:
total depravity, unconditional election,
limited atonement, irresistible (or irrevocable)
grace, and the perseverance of the saints. These are sometimes
referred to as the Five points of Calvinism and remembered by many
using the mnemonic“TULIP”.
NahnCee
AUSTRALIA – Come Visit!
No way do we “tug the forelock” NO WAY!!
- “rejected convicts”? The vast majority young and chosen for the skills they could bring to the establishment of the colony.
- Aborigines “treated with the same sort of disdain and disgust”? Maybe you are reading this in the “Black Arm Band” Histories written post 1960 but this is just part of the Victim Politics that we are coming out of. It is a phase. Earlier histories also record respect and admiration. As do personal diaries and newspapers.
The Enlightenment and the 200 years between the founding of the US and that of Australia make it difficult to draw parallels.
W. thank you for the Kilcullen link, and for the insight into the US Bill of Rights and what is being proposed in Australia. For some (many) the idea that we are going to be “given” these rights (by the courts) is a little galling.
Love the idea of reading a US blog to learn about the Australian bill of Rights. Thank you to all.
Where did this distrust of human nature come from that so animated the founders that this distrust was coded into the founding documents of the USA.
This distrust comes from one of the five points of calvinism that involves the fall of man. Its called Total Depravity.
According to Wikipedia
Total depravity is the fallen state of man as a result of original sin. The doctrine of total depravity asserts that people are by nature not inclined to love God wholly with heart, mind, and strength, but rather all are inclined to serve their own interests over those of their neighbor and to reject the rule of God. Even religion and philanthropy are destructive to the extent that these originate from a human imagination, passions, and will. Therefore, in Reformed theology, God must predestine individuals into salvation since man is incapable of choosing God.[5]
Total depravity does not mean, however, that people are as evil as possible. Rather, it means that even the good which a person may intend is faulty in its premise, false in its motive, and weak in its implementation; and there is no mere refinement of natural capacities that can correct this condition. Thus, even acts of generosity and altruism are in fact egoist acts in disguise.[6]
This idea can be illustrated by a glass of wine with a few drops of deadly poison in it: Although not all the liquid is poison, all the liquid is poisoned. In the same way, while not all of human nature is depraved, all human nature is totally affected by depravity.
Nonetheless, the doctrine teaches optimism concerning God’s love for what he has made and God’s ability to accomplish the ultimate good that he intends for his creation. In particular, in the process of salvation, God overcomes man’s inability with his divine grace and enables men and women to choose to follow him, though the precise means of this overcoming varies between the theological systems.
LOTM @ 1:
I will take exception in this, we shall say they remain our countrymen but do they? The Statist will shake your hand, rip the arm from the socket and beat you to death with it for some small perceived advantage. All you have to do is see Rahm E. stabbing the table and saying this and the other person is dead. He is serious and would kill them if he thought he could get away with it. These are dangerous people playing for all the marbles.
And the Ayers crowd would reeducate us also. If we take the education then we are okay otherwise they are perfectly ready to kill. What was the figure? 25 million?
No thanks. Me, I’ll keep my arm. Where did I get the allegorical arm above? From my Father, the Communist.
Marcus Aurelius @ 15:
Worse than that. Some of those EUropeon bastards tried to starve my folk when there was plenty to be had. F-kc them all, the lousy buggers. They would do it again, have no doubt.
Liberty is an inherent individual right, but it is not unconstrained. Individuals are only human when part of a community (whether external or internalized). Thus liberty is not a sort of chaotic freedom, but is bounded by responsibilities to the community. Community is the sea in which liberty swims, it is the context within which it acts.
Freedom exists within the individual, the individual is responsible for that freedom, in its exercise, its assertion and its defense. Government is not responsible for defending my individual freedom, I am, and so on with all my inalienable rights. Once I assign defense of my rights to the State, the State has become the arbiter of my rights, which is to say, I am the slave of the State.
Unlike the individual, the Government has no inherent rights, only those granted it by the People through the Constitution. Theoretically the powers that the Government has arrogated to itself outside the limits imposed by the Constitution the People can rescind. Carrying out such a task, well, it would be interesting. The time for that has come, and we are very much getting back to the basics of “Live Free or Die.”
The colonists were also British citizens, which led them to believe they had the traditional rights of British citizens, and they had voted since the colonies were established. It was the shock of discovering that Britain did not see things that way that lead to the Revolution.
The freedom of Americans is dependent on tradition and law as much as on the Bill of Rights. It really started before 1066, expanded notably in the Glorious Revolution and with the Constitution and with the Emancipation Proclamation. And it continues to develop, as with the voting rights acts of ’64, etc. Supreme Court decisions have also expanded the meaning of the Bill of Rights.
But it is not unreasonable to say that American freedoms were also expanded by restrictions on the contracts we could engage in with employers. If I have to sell my soul to get a job, just because someone else is willing to do so, then I am forced to give up my freedom because my labor is nothing but a commodity. It’s a good discussion for Labor Day. Dependency to that extent makes us more free, not less. The traditional balance we have developed between the mechanisms of state protection and the guarantees of certain liberties is hard to parse and subject to argument, but it is not to be lightly adjusted. We hold the state at bay on one side and chaos at bay on the other. I’m sure Australia does the same in different ways.
E. Nigma: “The Constitution of 1789 was something of a long simmering reaction to the Revolutionary War and the failure of the first Federal Articles of Confederation.”
I disagree with this contention. The Articles did not fail. The basic problem the Americans faced in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War was the problem with paying down war debt and with the money supply. The Articles of Confederation were sound in that they provided only for a weak central government under the direct control of the States (one vote per state, by the way). The Convention in 1787 was only supposed to tinker with the Articles to deal with the debt and money supply problems, but Hamilton and Madison were able to take this meeting in a different direction. The result was the foundation for an eventually powerful central state.
Everything that American conservatives hate about our Leviathan State is rooted in the 1787 Constitution. Go read the original Articles–they are easily found on the net.
I recommend two recent books to understand these issues better: Unruly Americans by Woody Holton and Liberty’s Blueprint by Michael Meyerson. Both authors support the Constitution, but describe the problems and opposing viewpoints of this period pretty well.
The Convention in 1787 was only supposed to tinker with the Articles to deal with the debt and money supply problems
I think this is a sound contention. And wasn’t there a problem with the farmers in the states always voting themselves an exit from their own debts?
TCOBB: At least one anarchist does post here. Me.
Being an anarchist is something I picked up under the influence of Murray Rothbard and Robert Heinlein.
I hold that NOTHING worth doing always has to be done by government. That is by statist dynamics. I hold that all ethical endeavors
have at least the potential to be accomplished under marketplace discipline.
(That is how I came up with my theory of proper foreign policy——anarcho imperialism.)
Now will we ever reach the point where all these things are in fact done by free market endeavors? And having achieved that (presumbably) happy state of affairs, can we maintain it? You know, those are a couple of darned good questions. I wish I knew the answers.
Of course, the majority of people who style themselves anarchists do so because that is how they wish to deny goods and services to others because they do not like the goods and services in question. The government does it? Then you can’t have it!
The above are wannabe anarchists. I sir, am the Real McCoy operating in the finest traditions of Professor Bernardo de la Paz!
In all seriousness, I do think that my outlook makes me a better problem-solver than would otherwise would be the case. I am able to focus on what should be done, not on political positioning.
Thank you for this opportunity to publicly expose my proudest secret.
BTW: Maman finds out what is happening to Australia through an American blog run by a Filipino expatriate currently residing Down Under. Ah! Anarcho-imperialism in action!
Robohobo,
Please do not assume that our positions are incompatible. Nothing I said implies that I doubt the danger posed by Mr Ayers and Mr Emanuel and the potential risk that the struggle could end in a resort to force. Even in the worst case, which I pray does not happen, even if there was another Civil War they would at the end of it be Americans. They may be casualties or in prison or they could deny their heritage and emigrate but we must treat them a priori as citizens and our equals. Lincoln was right about this. If those we disagree with are not our fellow citizens at the end of the day, even if they seek to deny us, then we must allow and even encourage them to peacefully separate or we must depart. While some here have groused about separating Red from Blue I would oppose that now as America opposed that 150 years ago.
Solon 57:
So the lack of freedom imposed by cold cruel reality is equivalent to the lack of freedom imposed by oppressive masters?
So if you are not hungry you are free?
So the inmates in Gitmo are freer than the average colonist in 18776 because they have running water, electricity, 3 squares a day and a roof over their heads?
Interesting thought process. You would make a good dictator’s spokesperson.
Obviously, you have spent no time in DC watching the sausage being made, but I can assure you that the burden on the people does not enter into those bureaucrats’ minds for an instant. Compare the amount of work demanded from the slaves of the antebellum South with the tax and regulatory burden of the average citizen of the USA today and you will find it is no contest – and it is by your own measure, the amount of physical work people had to do to survive.
Herb @ 58: “Interesting that you cant reach any further back than TR to document American totalitarianism.”
I’d argue that I’m not pointing to “totalitarianism” but the American tradition of viewing government (in some aspect, or writ large) as a positive good. If you’d read my post, you’d note the names Albert Gallatin and John C. Calhoun, and if you knew any American history, you’d know that they were PRIOR to TR. You might also read up a bit on one Alexander Hamilton and his theories of expansive government.
Herb: “The US didnt come about ‘ex nihilo.’ It came as an logical outcome from the English Common Law and ‘Unwritten BOR’, the English Enlightenment, the European Enlightenment . . .”
Exactly. That’s precisely what I’m saying. The American colonists were constituted as a people, as a society by law and tradition, and many found those laws and traditions repressive.
Nahncee @ 56:”Conservatives are responsible for No Child Left Behind and TARP? That’s an interesting construction to make an argument.”
Nahncee, when did George W. Bush quit being a “conservative”? Why did Tom DeLay twists arms for new Medicare entitlements? Why did Lawrence Kudlow and Hank Paulson support TARP? They are not entirely responsible, I did not write that, but you can find many conservatives who supported the positions I mentioned. Why did they do so?
re #52 Solon 2040:
“Every people in whatever form of society must have some rules, mores, or social codes to distinguish them from a mindless mob. The more sophisticated the people, the more complex the society, the more rules and government they have to regulate behavior. Regulations and rules expand with technology and complexity”
Rules – yes, but which is more important mores, values, culture etc. that I would call internal self-regulation or government regulation which I would call external. If by sophisticated you mean a hive, then I could agree. If you mean humans, then I disagree.
The more mature (emotionally, spiritually, etc.) the person, the less government they will need. The more immature the person, the more governing they need.
The constitution seems geared toward giving the mature the best shot at governing the immature, and leaving the rest of us alone; or more in Charles’ terms, giving the good leaders a chance and limiting the damage that evil men can do.
The impulse toward more government and more regulation thus seems like an effort to infantilize us, or worse to enslave us.
Fascinating post, Wretchard, and timely, considering that Sept. 17th is “Constitution Day,” in the U.S.
I built the following site as per federal requirement: http://edsitement.neh.gov/ConstitutionDay/default.asp
The meaning of individual “rights” has indeed been transformed in recent decades, so I can understand Australian alarm over the issue. Even in America, there has been an attitudinal change among many citizens about confusing entitlements for rights. I have seen well-meaning people here occasionally post suggestions that we need a new constitutional convention; that would be a very bad, very stupid idea. NO constituional convention, period — this would only open up the can of worms Australians are fearing.
Our bill of rights became a virtual necessity for getting the Constitution ratified, especially to assuage the fears of the anti-federalists who preferred to stay with the Articles of Confederation than go with the new “naked” Constitution unconstrained by a bill of rights. One note federalist, Alexander Hamilton, dismissed the need for these 10 amendments. Fortunately, Madison and Washington prevailed: http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=799
PressingTowardTheMark,
The distinction is between what Weber called Mechanical Solidarity and Organic Solidarity. Mechanical is associated with more primitive societies and designates external controls on conduct while the Organic level of solidarity is found in more advanced societies and indicates that the rules have been internalized. For a democracy to work the people must have attained a level of Organic Solidarity. The rules are transmuted by means of the quality of “Charisma” which in a primitive society is embodied in the heroic leader but which becomes institutionalized over time, first in the monarchy and then in the aristocracy and eventually in the bureaucracy. When the people are not just the objects but the source of the rules and the charisma is held by the State that is created as an expression of the popular will then you have a democracy. This does not refute Solon 2040‘s contention that a state is needed to be a free citizen but he does get the source of authority, that is the locus of charisma, wrong and he misconstrues the need for coercive or mechanical regulation by the State in the mature democracy.
JMH –
I would guess the reason the public welfare benefit debacle went wrong was because of a violation of “procedural due process.” If the gov’t gives benefits away, the gov’t cannot arbitrarily or illegally take them away – there must be sufficient fairness in the process, any applicable laws must be followed, and there has to be opportunity for those losing their benefits to seek review of the decision (generally speaking).
Which actually leads into an interesting comment by JJ Mollo @ 74 – RE: labor protection laws
I was actually thinking about those laws recently, and their place in constitutional law. When you study U.S. constitutional law, you learn about the case of “Lochner v. New York,” an early 20th century Supreme Court case. In Lochner, the Court struck down labor laws designed for worker protection. Things like “minors under 16 can’t work 15 hours a day” sort of stuff, minimum workplace safety standards, etc.
In striking down these laws, the Court cited the “freedom of contract” principles embedded throughout the Constitution. Thus, state laws trying to limit the exploitation of labor could be said to impair an individual’s freedom to contract for employment. So Lochner gave us protection for an individual’s “freedom of contract” – all well and good?
Maybe not. The Lochner Court, in striking down these laws, did something fairly unique in Constitutional jurisprudence – this case is said to be one of the first decision based on “substantive due process.” Substantive due process is the protection of individual rights not explicitly laid out in the Constitution. So “freedom of contract” is the grandfather of the penumbral rights like “freedom to abort unborn children.”
Even though the rationale of Lochner was mostly abandoned (obviously we have labor protection statutes today), substantive due process lives on. Like JJ Mollo said, “the people” have to draw the appropriate lines on how far to go with government interference in the lives of its citizens. Most of us here would agree that the balance has intolerably tipped on the State interference side of the equation.
“In the US, the Bill of Rights commonly refers to the first 10 amendments to the Constitution and are a list of limits on government. They are a decalogue of ‘thou shalt nots’.”
The American Bill of Rights is an elaboration and differentiation of our God-given natural right to liberty, and as such it is an extension of the Declaration of Independence. In the American Bill of Rights, the individual’s right to free speech is acknowledged to be pre-existing and not conferred by the Constitution or Bill of Rights; Freedom of speech comes from God, not from government; we are born free.
Long ago on the planet Vulcan, after a long and finally successful struggle against tyranny, the Vulcans began a salutation which I’ll state in its origional form: “Live long, live free, and prosper.” (Life, Liberty and Private Property creatively earned through individual labor – Pursuit of Happiness).
“By His order and about His business, they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our’s…The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…“ John Locke
“The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.” Samuel Adams
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” Thomas Jefferson
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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…” Thomas Jefferson
RWE: “The Declaration of Independence is a statement of philosophy, not a plan for governance.”
The Declaration of Independence is the basis for our American Revolution which is first and foremost a revolution in human rights, i.e.: our rights to life, liberty and private property are of Divine origin, not rights conferred by government. The American Revolution is also a revolution in human government, i.e.: government power must secure (not destroy) our Divinely ordained rights to life, liberty and property; and its power must derive through (not against) the consent of the governed.
The American Revolution has declared a mandate for rational secular government to secure Divine human rights; and while our Constitution separates Church from State, our Declaration joins God to State.
“On the distinctive principles of the Government … of the U. States, the best guides are to be found in… The Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental Act of Union of these States.” James Madison
81 Pressing Towards the Mark: “The more mature (emotionally, spiritually, etc.) the person, the less government they will need. The more immature the person, the more governing they need.”
I think it important to draw a distinction between a mature individual and an aggregate people forming a society. For example, a mature person living in the badlands of Afghanistan or Pakistan would probably appreciate a fair and well-run legal order over the present violent chaos. Many societies are filled with immature people of mature age and it is an anthropological fact that well-run, low crime, advanced industrial societies are heavily regulated. Civilization is composed of rules, laws and regulations, one of the key distinctions from barbarism. If you disagree, then perhaps you could produce an example of an orderly and prosperous society with little law or regulation. It surely ain’t the USA, Japan, Western Europe or Australia, that’s for sure.
Civilization is composed of people who cooperate with each other. They do express that in laws that they willingly obey. If they have to be coerced into obeying, is that still civilization? It is a continuum: not enough agreement (laws and regs) is bad and too much is bad. The reality is that at some point the overburden of laws and regs is too much and people will rebel.
The early U.S. did pretty good with a lot less laws and regs. The more people have tried to game the system, the more laws are multiplied. Which is what I said before only a different way. It requires a moral people for the U.S. constitutional republic to work at its best.
Moral = mature
Trying to see what you can get away with = immature
Giving me a chance to be civilized and letting me prosper = good government.
Putting me under the thumb of too many laws = enslavement and tyranny
“Civilization is composed of rules, laws and regulations, one of the key distinctions from barbarism.”
True, but the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, King George III and the British Empire were “civilizations.” The American form of government is in between Authoritarian/Totalitarian governments on the one hand, and anarchy on the other.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODJfwa9XKZQ
Authoritarian/Totalitarian governments have been responsible for hundreds of millions of innocent civilians, a much worse evil than that of anarchy; and I fear the former much more than the latter.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM
http://theblackbook.wordpress.com/2006/11/22/excerpt-from-introduction-the-crimes-of-communism-by-stephane-courtois/
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” George Washington
“I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.” Thomas Jefferson
“Most bad government has grown out of too much government.” Thomas Jefferson
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” Thomas Jefferson
“I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” Thomas Jefferson
“The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.” Thomas Jefferson
“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” Thomas Jefferson
“That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.” Thomas Jefferson
Correction: Authoritarian/Totalitarian governments have been responsible for the murder of hundreds of millions of innocent civilians, a much worse evil than that of anarchy; and I fear the former much more than the latter.
Solon, given your parameters, you must think that Saudi Arabia with its Shariah law and rules and regulations on EVERYthing including how to go to the bathroom must be heaven on earth.
Given your name choice, am I correct in thinking that you prefer to be the rule-maker or, even better, the rule-enforcer, rather than the rule-follower?
In the end there are only two forms of government: Elite Oligarchy (left or right) and a Constitutional Republic. Medieval European Monarchies were, on a functional level, really oligarchies since the King needed a cadre of Judges, Clerics, Nobles and Soldiers to carry out his will. Oligarchy must be divided into “right” and “left” with the former (Monarchy or Fascist) in violation of our Constitution by rejecting fair elections; and the latter in violation by rejecting our tenth amendment – thereby creating a massive un-Constitutional, social-engineering federal bureaucracy. “Rightist” Oligarchy stays in power by taxing a homogeneous population for the straightforward benefit of the ruling class; whereas the “Leftist” Oligarchy stays in power through class struggle – dividing a population into middle class and proletariat, and then robbing property (excessive taxation) from the former and redistributing property to the latter in return for votes – a property-related perversion of the electoral process – the “Marxist Shuffle.”
So, there are functional differences between “right” and “left” oligarchies, but they are both elitist systems of government which rule without the consent of the majority; and they are both enemies of the individual’s sacred rights to life, liberty and private property (pursuit of happiness).
On a scale measuring State Power with 100% power on the left and 0% power on the right, Monarchy, Oligarchy, Communism, Marxism, Socialism and Fascism would all be located on the left side – call them all Statist. Anarchy (0% State power which eventually leads to something on the left side) would be located on the right side of the scale and our Constitutional Republic would be somewhere in the middle.