Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (2 page)

BOOK: Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto
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We all agree that the first legitimate role of government force is to protect the lives of individual citizens. But things get more complicated when it comes to defending against “enemies foreign and domestic.”

In his 1796 Farewell Address, George Washington warned Americans not to “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils” of foreign ambitions, interests, and rivalries. “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

Our first president was hardly an isolationist, and his foreign policy views were guided, in large part, by common sense and pragmatism. One of his key considerations was the budgetary implications of overly ambitious foreign entanglements. “As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit,” Washington counseled. “One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace.”

You might interpret Washington’s skepticism, in a modern context, as warning against open-ended nation-building quagmires. Can we really establish a constitutional democracy in Iraq? Can we successfully mediate the violent disputes of warring factions in civil wars like the one going on today in Syria? Better yet, should we?

The principle of nonaggression means that we should only declare war on nations demonstrably seeking to do us harm. The men and women who volunteer for our military should not be put in harm’s way by their commander-in-chief without a clear and just purpose, without a plan or without an endgame. This is just common sense.

In an era in which our enemies are no longer just confined to nations, the other key question is the balance between security at home and the protection of our civil liberties, particularly our right to privacy and our right to due process. Massive expansions of the government’s surveillance authorities under the Patriot Act and recent amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act have civil libertarians of all ideological stripes worried that the government has crossed essential constitutional lines.

Defending America against the unchecked aggression of our enemies is a first responsibility of the federal government, but respecting the rights of individual citizens and checking the power of unelected employees at the National Security Agency is an equally important responsibility. I stand with Ben Franklin on this question. He said: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

We should always be skeptical of too much concentrated power in the hands of government agents. They will naturally abuse it. Outside government, an unnatural concentration of power—such as the extraordinary leverage wielded by mega-investment banks or government employees unions—is always in partnership with government power monopolists.

2. D
ON’T
T
AKE
P
EOPLE’S
S
TUFF

Life. Liberty. Property. While most of us are totally down with the first two tenets of America’s original business plan, the basis of property rights and our individual right to the fruits of our labors seems to be increasingly controversial. Do we have a right to our own stuff?

In our personal lives, taking from one person, by force, to give to another person is considered stealing. Stealing is wrong. It’s just not cool to take other people’s stuff, and we all agree that ripping off your neighbor, or your neighbor’s credit information online, or your neighbor’s local bank, is a crime that should be punished.

“There can be no proper motive for hurting our neighbour, there can be no incitement to do evil to another, which mankind will go along with, except just indignation for evil which that other has done to us,” argues Adam Smith. “To disturb his happiness merely because it stands in the way of our own, to take from him what is of real use to him merely because it may be of equal or of more use to us, or to indulge, in this manner, at the expense of other people, the natural preference which every man has for his own happiness above that of other people, is what no impartial spectator can go along with.”
4

But what if the stealer in question is the federal government? Is thieving wrong unless the thief is our duly elected representation in Washington, D.C., or some faceless “public servant” working at some alphabet-soup agency in the federal complex?

It seems to me that stealing is always wrong, and that you can’t outsource stealing to a third party, like a congressman, and expect to feel any better about your actions.

In the real world, where absolute power corrupts absolutely, there are no good government thieves or bad government thieves. There is only limited or unlimited government thievery.

The alternative to outsourced government thievery is a world where property rights are sacrosanct, where the promises you make to others through contracts are strictly enforced, and where the rule of law is simple and transparent and treats everyone the same under the laws of the land.

Government is, by definition, a monopoly on force.
5
Governments often hurt people and take their stuff. That’s why the political philosophy of liberty is focused on the rule of law. Government is dangerous, left unchecked. Consider the way too many examples from modern history to see the murderous results of too much unchecked government power: communists, fascists, Nazis, radical Islamist theocracies, and a broad array of Third World dictators who hide behind ideology or religion to justify the oppression and murder of their countrymen as a means to retain power.

All of these “isms” are really just about the dominance of government insiders over individuals, and the arbitrary rule of man over men. Unlimited governments always hurt people and always take their stuff, often in horrific and absolutely unintended ways. The architects of America’s business plan were keenly aware of the dangers of too much government and the arbitrary rule of man. James Madison states it well in
Federalist
51:

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Government should be limited, and it should never choose sides based on the color of your skin, who your parents are, how much money you make, or what you do for a living. And it should never, ever choose favorites, because those favorites will inevitably be the vested, the powerful, and the ones who know somebody in Washington, D.C.

That’s why our system is designed to protect individual liberty. “[I]n the federal republic of the United States,” Madison writes, “all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that
the rights of individuals,
or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.”

3. T
AKE
R
ESPONSIBILITY

Should you wait around for someone else to solve a problem, or should you get it done yourself? Liberty is an individual responsibility. The burden always sits upon your shoulders first. It is that inescapable accountability that stares you in the mirror every morning. If it didn’t get done, sometimes there’s no one to blame but yourself.

Free people step up to help our neighbors when bad things happen; no one needs to tell us to do that. We defend, sometimes at great personal sacrifice, what makes America so special. Freedom works to make our communities a better place, by working together voluntarily, solving problems from the bottom up.

This is the “I” in community. Communities are made up of individuals and families and volunteers and local organizations and time-tested institutions that have been around since long before you were born. All of these things work together to solve problems, build things, and create better opportunities. But notice a pattern that should be self-evident: Families are made up of free people. So are churches and synagogues, local firehouses and volunteer soup kitchens, and the countless community service projects that happen every weekend. All of these social units, no matter how you parse it, are made up of individuals working together, by choice. It does take a village, but villages are made up of people choosing to voluntarily associate with one another.

I was introduced to the philosophy of liberty by Ayn Rand. I found her work compelling because it focused on individual responsibility. Do you own yourself and the product of your work, she asked, or does someone else have a first claim on your life? I thought the answer was obvious.

Rand’s critics love to attack her views that individuals matter, and that you have both ownership of and a responsibility for your own life. They usually set up a straw man: the caricature of “rugged individualism” and the false claim that everyone is an island, uncaring of anyone or anything, willing to do anything to get ahead.

“Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up,” Barack Obama tells
Rolling Stone
. “Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity—that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America.”
6

Of course it isn’t, Mr. President. In Obama’s simplistic configuration, there is only the “narrow vision” of the individual, and the seemingly limitless wisdom of the collective. Progressives and advocates of more government involvement like to suggest that there is a dichotomy, or at least a direct trade-off, between individual liberty and a robust sense of community.

It’s easy to kick down straw men, I suppose, but the real question stands: Can governments require that people care, or force people to volunteer? It seems like such a silly question, but some seem to think the answer is “yes.”

Some people just don’t see the link between individual initiative and the cohesion of a community.

Justice means treating everyone just like everyone else under the laws of the land. No exceptions, no favors. “Social justice,” as best I can tell, means exactly the opposite. It means treating everyone differently, usually by redistributing wealth and outcomes in society by force.

The term “social justice” was first coined by the Jesuit philosopher Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, who argued, “A society cannot exist without an authority that creates harmony in it.” Someone needs to be in charge, he assumed, and someone needs to direct things. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt quoted Taparelli in a speech in 1932, to help justify the extraordinary, and often unconstitutional, actions taken by his administration to consolidate power in the federal government: “[T]he right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching.”
7

Forty years later, John Rawls would expand on this idea in his influential book
A Theory of Justice.
“Social and economic inequalities,” he asserted, “are to be arranged so that they are to be of the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society.”
8

Can you mandate compassion? Can you outsource charity by insisting that the political process expropriate the wealth of someone you don’t know to solve someone else’s need? Austrian economist F. A. Hayek, ever quick to spot the logical flaws of his ideological opponents, said that social justice was “much the worst use of the word ‘social’ ” and that it “wholly destroys” the meaning of the word it qualifies.
9

The process of getting to the “right” outcomes, the properly reengineered social order, is never well defined. But the social justice crowd is convinced that some people just know better. They are certain that some people are better trusted with the power to rearrange things. As former U.S. representative Barney Frank used to say: “Government is what we call those things we do together.”
10

If you don’t believe in individual liberty, things get complicated quick. “Social justice,” the seeming opposite of plain old justice, requires someone to rearrange things by force. It’s all about power, and who gets to assert their power over you. The rules are always situational, and your situation is always less important than the situations the deciders find themselves in. Someone else, defined by someone else’s values, gets to decide.

Of course, if someone else is in charge, we always, conveniently, have someone else to blame. Not left free, we might just wait around for someone else to take care of it. We might not step up. We might not get involved. We might outsource personal responsibility to a third party, paid for with someone else’s hard work and property.

Without liberty, any sense of community that binds us might just unravel.

4. W
ORK
FOR
I
T

Liberty is a weight.

If you have ever tried to do something you’ve never done before, or tried to start a new business venture, or created new jobs and hired new workers, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The weight. The same is true for people who step up to solve a community problem or serve other folks in trouble. How about peacefully petitioning your government for a “redress of grievances,” a right guaranteed by the First Amendment, only to be met by federal park police with preprinted “shutdown” signs and plasticuffs?

These are all acts of risk taking, an attempt to serve a need or disrupt the status quo. These are acts of entrepreneurship. And it’s all hard work.

But work is cool, too, and even some Hollywood superstars seem to get it. “I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work,” Ashton Kutcher told the audience of screaming teenagers at the 2013 Teen Choice Awards in Hollywood. “I’ve never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job. And every job I had was a stepping-stone to my next job, and I never quit my job until I had my next job. And so opportunities look a lot like work.”
11

BOOK: Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto
8.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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