Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (21 page)

BOOK: Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto
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“The days of unfettered spying on the American people are numbered,” said Amash. “This is the bill the public has been waiting for. We now have legislation that ceases the government’s unconstitutional surveillance. I am confident that Americans and their representatives will rally behind it.”
20

The bill is a multi-pronged attack on the surveillance state. It ends the collection of Americans’ data by the NSA except in cases of suspected criminal activity; it requires FISA court decisions to be made available to Congress, and summaries of those opinions to be released to the public; it gives telecommunications companies more freedom to disclose information on government surveillance to the public; and it installs a special advocate to argue in favor of preserving Americans’ civil liberties before the FISA court.

9. E
ND
THE
F
ED
M
ONOPOLY

Monopolies don’t work very well when it comes to maintaining high quality and a low price. It’s the lack of accountability and competition that leads to expensive, inferior outputs. This seems like a good analogy to explain why the Federal Reserve has trashed the dollar. A lack of accountability and competition has degraded your purchasing power. A dollar’s just not “as good as gold” anymore.

This is one of the major problems with the Fed. It’s both “independent,” yet systematically manipulated by political insiders. Congress made things worse in 1977 when it amended the Federal Reserve Act to create a so-called dual mandate, which amounted to a blank check for the Fed to do just about whatever it wants. “The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production,” the mandate states, “so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates.”

If you wonder what exactly this means, you’re not alone. The only thing that is certain is that the ambiguity of “maximum employment” gives incredible discretion to Fed micromanagers operating in an incredibly secretive fashion. With a lack of supervision or oversight, there is no way of knowing what really goes on within its deified walls. The first step in eliminating the Fed’s monopoly is a comprehensive audit to find out exactly in which ways it has been mismanaging our currency, and how it is managing the $3.7 trillion in toxic assets from mortgage-backed securities it has acquired in recent years.

To the extent there is a central bank, its only job should be to protect the integrity of the currency, not to manipulate the dollar based on pressures from politicians and big investment banks. The Fed would be more accountable and predictable if it operated using rule-based monetary policy rather than the blank check discretionary power it has today. We should eliminate “maximum employment” from the Fed’s current dual mandate. Economists can’t even agree on what full employment actually is, let alone understand the infinitely complex price signals that drive market decisions. Giving the Fed a mandate to do whatever it wants leads to irresponsible abuses of the currency and drives the political business cycle of boom and bust.

Should we end the Fed outright? Should we adopt a gold standard that prevents the easy manipulation and expansion of a “paper” currency? I think we start by “denationalizing” money, an idea first proposed by F. A. Hayek. Let’s legalize gold and other electronic payment systems as a means of exchange. Let’s allow competition in currency. Choice, transparency, and competition would end the Fed monopoly, and stop the destructive boom and bust of monetary manipulation.

A monetary policy consistent with freedom rests firmly on the idea of sound money, free from manipulation by insiders, bureaucrats, and politicians. “Freedom of our currency is the fundamental issue,” wrote my college economics professor Hans Sennholz. “It is the keystone of a free society.”

10. A
VOID
E
NTANGLING
A
LLIANCES

Congress, more closely accountable to the people, should approve acts of war. Wars cost precious American lives, and will always drain our economy of resources.

Remember George Washington’s caution not to “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils” of other nations’ affairs. He was worried about the security of Americans first, and he knew that the budget implications of foreign entanglements mattered in a very real way. It is not isolationist, as some neo-conservatives accuse libertarians of being. It’s about opportunity costs, economic realities, and common sense. “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.”

In September 2013, President Obama seemed ready to go to war with Syria. The situation was a complex one, with rebel forces no more sympathetic to American interests than the incumbent regime. This echoed the situations in Egypt and Libya several years earlier, where American intervention clearly did not improve things either for our own interests, or that of those countries’ own citizens.

Recognizing that both Congress and the American people were overwhelmingly against the idea of intervention in Syria, the president verbally toyed with the idea of acting without congressional approval, in violation of the War Powers Act.

Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, but this was not an isolated incident. There has been a recent string of overseas military operations conducted without a formal declaration of war from Congress, ever since the War on Terror blurred the lines between enemy combatants and common criminals.

This is a dangerous precedent. James Madison once wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war to the Legislature.” Madison rightly recognized that the power to send soldiers to their deaths and drop bombs on other nations should not be vested in one man alone.

The American people knew better. Our national security depends on our economic strength and fiscal stability, and it would be reckless for Congress to bankrupt us in the process of becoming the world’s policeman in someone else’s civil war.

Accountability and a new restraint on executive branch power came from the people. As
National Review
put it: “The Phone Lines Melt,” referring to an unprecedented grass roots onslaught of opposition to the president’s proposed war. “And inboxes are inundated, as people urge their congressmen to oppose military action in Syria.”
21
Pretending that military measures won’t cost more than D.C. “experts” predict ignores
everything
conservatives already know about experts’ predictions. It doesn’t matter what government program we’re talking about—whether we’re debating Social Security, Medicaid, or therapeutic air strikes in the Levant. Costs always exceed illusory budget baselines.

There is an opportunity cost to war. Resources directed toward building tanks and bombs cannot be used for more productive purposes. As every freshman economics textbook once held, if you want more guns you have to give up some butter.

Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Obama, has argued that America’s debt is the single largest threat to our national security. The economic strength of our nation is the basis of our leadership in the world. Mullen says:

[
T
]
he most significant threat to our national security is our national debt. . . . That’s why it’s so important that the economy move in the right direction, because the strength and the support and the resources that our military uses are directly related to the health of our economy over time.
22

A foreign policy based on the ideals of freedom would address these problems. The use of military force is a serious thing not to be employed lightly. It is a mistake, therefore, to get involved in entangling alliances that force our troops to act when doing so is not in the national interest, when there is no clear objective or definition of victory, and when the lives of innocent civilians would be unnecessarily forfeit as a result.

11. D
ON’T
T
AKE
P
EOPLE’S
S
TUFF

The right to be secure in your property is the cornerstone of a free society. The founders knew this, and for most Americans this is a commonsense proposition that keeps the government from arbitrarily taking their stuff. Yet today private property rights are being threatened by an expanding and unresponsive government. More and more citizens are finding their property under attack, either through a growing web of onerous regulation, or outright seizure through aggressive use of eminent domain and civil forfeiture laws.

Property rights were a core issue for the thirteen colonies chafing under British rule. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton wrote extensively on the importance of private property, and asserted that you didn’t need the government to grant you rights in your property; property rights precede government and are inherent to the rights of all individuals. This view helped frame the U.S. Constitution and its constraints on government power. In fact, six of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights touch on the question of property.

The most explicit protection of private property in the U.S. Constitution is the Fifth Amendment, including the famous “takings” clause, which states, “No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor shall property be taken for public use without just compensation.” The founders saw the government’s potential to expropriate property and drafted the Constitution to limit this possibility.

Yet as government grew, the protections of private property enshrined in the Constitution were weakened by legal decisions and the growing scope of the regulatory state. Today, numerous government actions threaten the private property of individuals, whether through excessive regulation, expanding government control of our nation’s resources, or abuses of the legal system that take our property rights.

Eminent domain abuse has been on the rise, with many individuals losing their property as local governments seize it in the name of economic development. The developers win, but homeowners often get the short end of the stick. As of late 2013, the Institute for Justice was suing seven U.S. cities over their attempts to seize private property, but the issue first came to popular attention when the Supreme Court upheld the
Kelo v. City of New London
decision in 2005, which allowed city officials in New London, Connecticut, to seize homes and businesses on the pure assertion that new development would provide jobs and new revenue for the city.

The decision stacked the deck in favor of business interests at the expense of small property owners. As noted in Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s dissent to the court’s opinion, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result.”
23

The release of the
Kelo
decision created a surge of public outcry against governments taking private property. Unfortunately, the outrage has dissipated with time, and eminent domain abuse continues to cause problems. While some states have attempted to address the issue, strong federal legislation would help us all sleep more soundly. Passing the Private Property Rights Protection Act would be an important step forward.

Perhaps more disconcerting is the rise in civil forfeitures, where law enforcement and other agencies seize property from criminal enterprises. More and more innocent people are being caught in an ill-defined dragnet that has stripped them of their property. Consider the recent case of a grocer in Michigan. Despite receiving a clean bill of health from the IRS less than a year before, the local family business had its bank account wiped out in January 2013 after a secret warrant was issued over deposit transactions that allegedly violated banking laws. In fact, there were no violations, and the activity in question was due to the need to comply with the store’s insurance policy. Yet that grocer in Michigan is still waiting for a day in court to plead his case.
24

The vast increase in data collection by the federal government and the rise of the government’s Big Data policies are putting more and more people under a spotlight. Unfortunately, they may never know, because many of these decisions are made by faceless bureaucrats with warrants granted by secret courts. Civil forfeiture laws should be wiped from the books; without being convicted of a crime, no individual should have to hand over his private property to the government.

Besides outright takings of property, the growing regulatory state that we live in also threatens our property and livelihoods. The federal government has stopped people from building homes in the name of environmental protection; local governments are passing new laws to keep food trucks from competing against local restaurants, alternatives to taxis, such as Uber, are being threatened with regulation prompted by taxicabs, and the IRS is now deciding to issue new regulations about who can be a tax preparer. At every turn the growth of regulation is a threat to our property and our liberty. And more often than not, it is wielded by those with political clout against those without. The regulatory state offers political insiders more levers to press and more avenues of access in order to protect their interests from new businesses trying to enter the market. Paring back the regulatory state—which costs the nation $1.2 trillion a year—is a sure way to enhance the freedoms we enjoy.

BOOK: Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto
13.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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