Quote of the Day: Why Health Care Is Not a Right

The problem with his statement is that rights aren't the government's to give. John Locke, the 17th century English philosopher, wrote about inalienable rights: God-given rights that can't be taken away. (Agnostics and atheists may prefer to think of these rights as inherent in nature.) Locke considered life, liberty and property to be among such natural rights.

A century later, Thomas Jefferson adopted Locke's definition when he drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence, citing "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as inalienable rights. Government's role is "to secure these Rights," Jefferson wrote, not to create new ones.

The Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, enumerates some of these natural rights: freedom of speech and religion; a free press and free assembly; and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Even more important, the Bill of Rights prohibits Congress from enacting any law interfering with the exercise of these freedoms. (I'll leave the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment's right to bear arms to Constitutional scholars.)

That hasn't stopped Progressives from creating all kinds of new rights: a right to a job, a right to a minimum wage, a right to health care.

These aren't rights as conceived by the Founding Fathers. A right is something we can all exercise simultaneously without imposing a burden on someone else. The only obligation, in fact, is that others not interfere with an individual's exercise of his rights.

That concise concept of rights, sometimes referred to as negative rights, comes from the book, Clichés of Politics, a collection of essays published by the Foundation for Economic Education. It provides a simple basis for determining what constitutes a right.

Many politicians insist on transforming every privilege or benefit or entitlement into a right.

(bold added) 

This excerpt is from an article by mainstream commentator, former Bloomberg analyst, Caroline Baum at EC21.org on first presidential debate of the Democratic Party

Why Small is Beautiful

At the Daily Reckoning, Dominic Frisby has a splendid article on why small societies have mostly been prosperous

First Mr. Frisby notes of the role played by decentralization and centralization in shaping Italy's present conditions

In the story of man, Italy has twice been the global center of innovation and invention — once under the Romans, and then again during the Renaissance, when it produced such great men as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Galileo. No other part of the world can claim such an emphatic double — not China, not Britain, not the USA. You cannot doubt the potential of the Italian people. You cannot doubt their talent.

Yet throughout the 20th century, Italy has been (and still is) a cradle of corruption, political infighting, bureaucracy, crime (think Mafia and Camorra), corruption, rent-seeking, inflations, division, fascism, communism and goodness knows what else. Its state is bloated, its political system dysfunctional. The country might be nominally unified, but in reality it is anything but.

Where did Italy go wrong? The answer: It unified.

Admittedly, this unification was forced on it. As the city-states lost their independence, it came under foreign domination, first under Spain (1559-1713), then Austria (1713-1796), then France, then the Austrians again. Finally, in the mid-19th century, came the Italian Wars of Independence, unification, and birth of the Italy we know today.

Next he narrates a short history of "small is beautiful" in the global context.

Small is beautiful. In A.D. 1000, Europeans had a per capita income below the average of the rest of the world. China, India, and the Muslim world were richer and had superior technology: China had had the printing press for 400 years. Her navy “ruled the waves.” Even as late as 1400, the highest standards of living were found in China, in the robust economies of places like Nanjing. But the empires of the East became centralized and burdened with bureaucracy and taxes.

In Western Europe, however, made up of many tiny nation-states, power was spread. There was no single ruling body except for the Roman Catholic Church. If people, ideas, or innovation were suppressed in one state, they could quickly move to another, so there was competition. The cities, communes, and maritime republics that made up what we now call Italy — Genoa, Rome, and Florence, for example — became immensely prosperous. Venice in particular showed great innovation in turning apparently useless marsh and islands into a unique, thriving metropolis that would become the wealthiest place in the world.

In the 16th century, the repressive forces of Roman Catholicism, which was becoming corrupt, began to be overturned in Northern Europe. The Bible was translated into local vernacular. The Protestant movement saw deregulation and liberalization. Gutenberg’s printing press, invented a century earlier, was furthering the spread of knowledge and new ideas — and thus the decentralization of power.

Over the next two hundred years, Northern Europe caught up with Southern Europe, which remained Catholic, and then overtook it. First, it was the Dutch, also made up of many small states. Then, in the 18th century, it was England, which, in spite of its union with Scotland and its later empire building, had further dispersed centralized power by reducing the authorities of the monarch after the civil war of 1642-51 and by linking its money to gold.

Meanwhile, out East, the Ottoman Empire and China went into a relative dark age, centrally governed by autocratic or imperial elites, burdened with heavy taxes and slow to react and unable to cope with the plagues and wars that befell them. By 1950, the average Chinese, according to author Douglas Carswell, was as poor, if not poorer, than someone living there a thousand years before.

Third, Small is beautiful exists until today…

Nothing changes… The success of small nation-states continues even today. If you look at the World Bank’s list of the richest nations in the world (as measured by GPD per capita at purchasing power parity), you see Luxembourg, Qatar, Macau, Singapore, Norway, Kuwait, Brunei, Switzerland, and Hong Kong. Perhaps Macau and Hong Kong, as parts of China, should not be included, in which case you add the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates (similar nations appear on the International Monetary Fund’s list).

Why is being small beautiful?

In a small state, there is less of a gap between those at the top and bottom, there is more transparency and accountability, it is harder for the state to hide things, there is more monitoring, less waste and more dynamism. Small is flexible, small is competitive — small really is, as economist E.F. Schumacher said, beautiful.

Read the rest here

Small is beautiful because of decentralization. Decentralization promotes a culture of spontaneous diversity, heterogeneity, specialization, tolerance of failure, trial and error, and competition necessary for greater efficiency in the allocation of resources and innovation.

Decentralization thus extrapolates to individual advancement that accrues to, and reflects on the society level.

In short, small is beautiful because it is a bottom up dynamic where commerce or free markets drive real (not statistical) prosperity

Importantly decentralization disperses risks and promotes legal institutions which have mostly been attuned with local customs, traditions and grassroots social interactions.

Decentralization also is an optimum way for people to convert localized knowledge into productive activities.

As the great Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek wrote: (bold mine)

If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. 

In centralized political systems, “small is beautiful” can be seen in the informal economy.

And with the fast advancing information age, the world will eventually evolve towards decentralization. But the transition will not be smooth as the friction from the resistance to change by 20th century based centralized political systems vis-à-vis technology based decentralization have only intensified.

Video: The Conversation

From the Foundation for Harmony and Prosperity (hat tip EPJ)

Quote of the Day: Law is the unconscious creation of society

Law is not a body of commands imposed upon society from without, either by an individual sovereign or superior, or by a sovereign body constituted by representatives of society itself.  It exists at all times as one of the elements of society springing directly from habit and custom.  It is therefore the unconscious creation of society, or in other words, a growth.

This is from page 21 of the American Bar Association’s publication of James C. Carter’s 1890 essay “The Ideal and the Actual in the Law“. The source of the above quote Café Hayek’s prolific blogger and economic professor Don Boudreaux expounds on the James Carter quote

Legislators are legislation-makers; they are not lawmakers.

True law can no more be consciously designed and created outside of the myriad social interactions that give rise to true law than can a true price be consciously chosen outside of the myriad economic interactions that give rise to true prices.  Commands that look to some people like law can be, and are, consciously designed and created.  But these are not law.  And because commands typically run against the spontaneous forces that give rise to law, such commands are typically against the law – just as a government-imposed price (or price control) results in something that looks like a price but is, in fact, not a true price at all.

Quote of the Day: Jefferson is weeping

The government the Framers gave us was not one that had the power and ability to decide how much freedom each of us should have, but rather one in which we individually and then collectively decided how much power the government should have. That, of course, is also recognized in the Declaration, wherein Jefferson wrote that the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed.

To what governmental powers may the governed morally consent in a free society? We can consent to the powers necessary to protect us from force and fraud, and to the means of revenue to pay for a government to exercise those powers. But no one can consent to the diminution of anyone else’s natural rights, because, as Jefferson wrote and the Congress enacted, they are inalienable.

Just as I cannot morally consent to give the government the power to take your freedom of speech or travel or privacy, you cannot consent to give the government the power to take mine. This is the principle of the natural law: We all have areas of human behavior in which each of us is sovereign and for the exercise of which we do not need the government’s permission. Those areas are immune from government interference.

That is at least the theory of the Declaration of Independence, and that is the basis for our 237-year-old American experiment in limited government, and it is the system to which everyone who works for the government today pledges fidelity.

Regrettably, today we have the opposite of what the Framers gave us. Today we have a government that alone decides how much wealth we can retain, how much free expression we can exercise, how much privacy we can enjoy…

The litany of the loss of freedom is sad and unconstitutional and irreversible. The government does whatever it can to retain its power, and it continues so long as it can get away with it. It can listen to your phone calls, read your emails, seize your DNA and challenge your silence, all in violation of the Constitution. Bitterly and ironically, the government Jefferson wrought is proving the accuracy of Jefferson’s prediction that in the long march of history, government grows and liberty shrinks. Somewhere Jefferson is weeping.

This is the fourth of July message from Judge Andrew P. Napolitano writing at the lewrockwell.com

Quote of the Day: The State is Not an Instrument of Justice; It's an Instrument of Power

Think about it. If you steal my chicken or I steal your cow, this is a dispute between us; what does the government care about it? The answer should be it doesn't care at all but because the state loves power and the state does not like to share power, it likes to resolve all disputes the way it wants to resolve them. This drives up the cost and diminishes justice because it forces the disputants to follow the state's rule and the state's command and the state's way, and this does not inure to politeness, civility or even the idea that a dispute could possibly be resolved amicably and justly, without the state being involved.

The state is not an instrument of justice; it's an instrument of power

This is from Judge P. Andrew Napolitano interviewed by Anthony Wile at the Daily Bell (source lewrockwell.com)