Tyranny and Negative Liberties

Many people hear all of the ranting from those of us who are libertarians and they just hear politics.  When you mention Barak Obama in a negative way they figure you are either trying to win the next election for your side or you are a racist.  Not everybody, but a lot of people.

When Rush Limbaugh said he hoped Barak Obama failed, a lot of people were outraged because they could not understand why anyone would not want the president to succeed at what he was attempting to do.  They wrote Rush off as just being highly partisan (which he is) but they missed the essential point.

I do not agree with Barak Obama's basic philosophies.  He and I do not share core values.  I admit I think he loves his kids and wife and doesn't believe in rape or murder or stealing, but I am talking about his philosophies on government and society.

The folks who founded our nation took the time to carefully read all of the great philosophers that came before them, and then they discussed and debated and disagreed, and finally put together a set of principles.  Those principles became the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and Bill of Rights, and all of the great supporting documents like the Federalist Papers that explained what they wanted this country to be.

They forsaw a country built on a set of principles that was pretty unique in human history.  No king, no dictator, just free people going about their business, pursuing happiness without government dictating their every move.  They came from a place, and broke away from a King, who wanted to do just that.  The Monarch didd not like the colonists going about their business and not paying his taxes and doing what he said.

Communism and socialism are legitimate concepts, advanced by Marx and others, but these are not the concepts upon which this country was founded.  Hitler actually espoused fascism, and thought it would work well, so long as he was in control.  But we do not embrace fascism. 

The United States was founded on the concept of limited government.  It is the bedrock of who we are.  They went to great lengths to specify that the power of the federal government was to be limited, and spread out among three branches so that power would be diluted.  Yes, they feared Tyranny because they had experienced it.  They launched the Great Experiment, one where Democracy, Free Market Capitalism, Individual Liberty, and Limited Government were the cornerstones.

Some people don't like the system they set up.  Some people would like to live in a socialist, or fascist, or even a communist system.  And some people are not happy that our constitution is a document of "negative liberties", that is, the constitution tells the government what it CANNOT do.  Congress shall make no law resistricting our rights to free speech, free press, etc.  Some people feel that this was a big error in judgement on the part of the founders.

Who, you ask?  Barak Obama, who is an "expert" on constitutional law.  From an interview;

OBAMA: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.

So, yes, we disagree on core principles, and I want his ideas on redistribution of wealth to fail.  I am one of the people who see Tyranny lurking around every corner.  And I will point to the recent scandals as proof that this administration wants more power and does not see the Bill of Rights the same way as you or I do.  The Affordable Care Act is a massive expansion of government power. 

I think the founders would be horrified, and tea would be going into the harbor.

Drones, Guantanamo, and Rights

I am getting a little sick of people complaining that “President Obama is going to give people from other countries the same rights as Americans”.  Let me remind you, President Obama does not have the right to “give” rights to anyone.  Our rights as Americans do not come from President Obama, or Congress, or even from our Constitution or Declaration of Independence.  Those who think that way do not agree with what is actually the bedrock of our society, that “ALL men are endowed by THEIR CREATOR with certain INALIENABLE rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If a president can “give” those rights to someone from another country, then he can withhold them from any of us.  He has no such power.  Our rights do not come from Barak Obama, they are inalienable.  Sadly, this is often inconvenient.  And they chose, appropriately, to use the term “ALL MEN”, which for clarity includes all women and all blacks, despite the language about slaves that was included at the time.

If ALL MEN have rights that were not granted by government, but simply acknowledged by government, then someone will have to explain to me how that means “Americans only”.  The right to freedom of speech and religion and peaceable assembly are not granted by government to some groups but not others.

Of course, government has always been able to take away rights for just cause and after due process.  If you commit murder and are convicted your liberty is forfeited.  If you are a German soldier in World War 2, then we recognize that our soldiers have the right to take your life.  If someone breaks into your house to kill your children, your right to self defense trumps his right to live.  So drone strikes on enemy combatants, since we have indeed authorized war against the Taliban and insurgents in Afghanistan, is not a violation of our principles since they are enemy combatants, and this applies whether they are US citizens or not.  If a SWAT team could have taken out Timothy McVeigh and prevented the Oklahoma City tragedy then that would have been justified.

When we detain people in Guantanamo without charges or due process, we cheapen our own system.  We spit on our core principles.  ALL MEN means ALL MEN.  Those rights do not stop at our borders.

I do think I know where the confusion comes from.  The confusion comes when we do not understand the nature of God-given rights.  For example, the right to an education, or the right to health care, are not enumerated anywhere in our founding documents.  These things are not and can never be inalienable, and do not come from God or nature, nor for that matter do they  flow logically.  It is absurd to claim that someone from Afghanistan has a “right” to health care in the US, because NOBODY has the right to health care, period.  Education, health care, and housing are things that we all hope everyone has and they are good things, but they can never be guaranteed.  Our system, our philosophy of government and society never claimed or acknowledged such rights, because they cannot logically or morally do so.

These things that are so-called “rights” do and must come from government, and government must force one person to provide them for another person.  Whatever you call them, they are not inalienable, do not come naturally from God, and were not acknowledged by the founders.  And as such, there is no way to include the ALL MEN part when talking about health care.  Even those who tout health care as a human right have to acknowledge that the “right” only applies to Americans, not Mexicans or Afghans, because they realize we cannot afford to provide things for the whole world.  We should take that a step further and acknowledge that we cannot afford to provide them to all Americans either.

But true rights, the ones mentioned in our founding documents, which require no more than acknowledgement by our government and the freedom of people to live their lives in peace, those do not stop at any border and do indeed apply to all men, so stop talking about how non-Americans are not entitled to them.  They already have them, you just don’t wish to acknowledge it.