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

Lawrence Reed’s 10 Rules of Advancing Liberty

President of Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) Lawrence W. Reed offers his 10 Rules of Thumb for advancing the cause of liberty

As indispensable as liberty is to the progress of humanity, its future is never assured. Indeed, on most fronts, freedom has been in retreat for years—its light flickering against the winds of ignorance, irresponsibility, short-term gratification, and power lust. That’s why it’s all the more important that those of us who believe in liberty become more effective spokespersons. 

The Rules of Thumb

Toward that end, I offer the well-worn “top ten” list. These rules of thumb do not appear in any particular order. So I leave it to you, Dear Reader, to decide which ones are more important. (Because it’s not meant to be a final word on the matter, I also invite readers to add to the list.)

1. Get motivated. Liberty is more than a happy circumstance. It’s a moral imperative, worthy of every ounce of passion that good people can muster. It’s not just about getting keyed up in an election year, or responding to some issue of the day. It’s always the difference between choice and coercion, between living your life or others living it for you (and at your expense). If liberty is lost, it may never be restored in your time or in that of your children and grandchildren. For solving problems, avoiding conflict, and bringing people together, there’s no worse course than politics and force, and no better path than liberty for peaceful exchange and cooperation to flourish.

2. Learn. More precisely, never stop learning! To be an effective persuader, there’s no good substitute for commanding the facts and the foundations. Know our ideas backwards and forwards. You can never read or listen to too much economics, history, or philosophy to be the best persuader in your neighborhood. Let the other side talk in bumper stickers. Come armed with substance as opposed to slogans.

3. Be optimistic. It’s tiring and disheartening to hear the defeatists talk like this: “It’s over. The Republic is lost. There’s no turning back. Our goose is cooked. I’m leaving the country.” What’s the point of such talk? It certainly can’t be to inspire. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimists only disarm themselves and dispirit others; there’s nothing to be won by it. If you truly believe all is lost, the best thing to do is defer to the possibility that you may be wrong and let the optimists lead the way. (That means leaving pessimism at the door.)

4. Use humor. Even serious business needs moments of levity. Seasoning your case with humor can make it more appealing, more human. If you can’t smile when you’re making the case for liberty—if you can’t evoke a smile or a chuckle from the person you’re talking to—then you’re on the way to losing the battle. Humor breaks the ice.

5. Raise questions. You don’t have to lecture every potential convert. Learn to deploy the Socratic method, especially when you’re conversing with a rigid statist ideologue. Most of the time, such people hold the views they do not because they’re well acquainted with libertarian thought and have rejected it, but because they just don’t know our side. A skilled line of questioning can often prompt a person to think about their premises in ways they never have before.

6. Show you care. It’s been said that people don’t care what you know if they don’t know that you care. Focus on real people when you argue for liberty. Laws and policies inimical to liberty produce so much more than bad numbers; they crush the dreams of real people who want to improve their lives and the lives of those they love. Cite examples of people and what happened to them when government got in the way of their progress. That said, don’t dwell on the negative. Be just as generous in citing examples of what specific people have accomplished when they’ve been given the freedom to try.

7. Seize the moral high ground. Liberty is the one socioeconomic arrangement that demands high standards of moral character. It cannot survive if people are widely dishonest, impatient, arrogant, irresponsible, short-term focused, and disrespectful of the lives, rights and property of others. This truth speaks volumes about the moral superiority of liberty over all other “systems.” Humanity is composed of unique individuals; it is not an amorphous, collective lump to be pushed around by elitists who fancy themselves our masters and planners. Any arrangement that purées our distinct lives in a collectivist blender is a moral offense. Use this argument to strike at the very heart of any opponent’s case.

8. Develop an appealing persona. A libertarian who knows all the facts and theories can still be repulsive and ineffective if he’s condescending, vengeful, coarse or crude, self-righteous, or often in “attack” mode. This is why Dale Carnegie’s classic, How To Win Friends And Influence People, should be on every libertarian’s “must-read” list. Do you want to change the world or just beat your breast? Talk to others or talk to yourself?

And slow down on the negativity! Some libertarians only talk about bad news. These are the folks who see nothing good happening anywhere. This attitude comes across as if they’re telling you, “Stop having fun. The only good news is that there isn’t any. If you think there is good news, we’ll tell you why it isn’t.” This attitude wears badly and rarely wins converts. Heroes and heroic stories are all around us; don’t ignore them by dwelling on the scoundrels and the disappointments.

9. Don’t demand total and immediate acceptance. Have you ever run into a libertarian who lets you know that unless you fully confess all your intellectual sins and repent on the spot, you’re a pariah? The history of progress in ideas provides few examples of wrong-on-everything transforming into right-on-everything in a momentary leap. We must be patient, inviting, and understanding. Know when the cracks are appearing in an opponent’s wall and give him room to tear it down himself. Remember that all of us hold views today that we didn’t accept in our past. None of us came out of the womb with a copy of The Road to Serfdom in our hands.

10. Make allies, not enemies. A handful of cloistered, ineffective—but noisy—libertarians fancy themselves keepers of the faith. They behave as though the greater enemy is not those who embrace no libertarian precepts at all, but rather those who embrace many, but not all, libertarian precepts. So when they find a fellow libertarian who once held different views, or departs from orthodoxy on an issue or two, they start to vilify him. It makes them feel good, but works against the larger cause. If we say we want to make the world a better, more libertarian place, we can’t make it painful for anyone to move in the right direction.

While Mr. Reed’s guidelines are ideal, it’s hard not to ruffle emotional feathers especially when dealing with entrenched political and economic beliefs. For instance, a big factor in Facebook "unfriends" have been due to politics.

Following the above will actually depend on one’s personality, depth of knowledge on liberty (philosophical, political or economics) and one's tolerance levels to emotionally charged objections. 

Nonetheless, education of the truth is the only way to uphold and preach the cause of liberty. The difference lies on the medium or the delivery of the message.

To quote Ordoliberalist (German variant of Neoliberalism) Wilhelm Ropke (source Café Hayek’s Don Boudreaux)

The true task of economics appears to me to be quite different, especially in a modern mass democracy.  Its unglamorous but all the more useful mission is to make the logic of things heard in the midst of the passions and interests of public life, to bring to light inconvenient facts and relationships, to weigh everything and assign it due place, to prick bubbles and expose illusions and confusions, and to counter political enthusiasm and its possible aberrations with economic reason and demagogy with truth.

Some Independence Day Passages

From 30^th US President Calvin Coolidge (who incidentally was born on the 4^th of July) (Heritage Foundation) (Emphasis added)

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

Anthony Gregory on why popular knowledge of history about Independence Day has been a sham. (Emphasis added)

In the first five U.S. presidencies, we see the American empire, albeit in embryonic form, begin its centuries-long crusade of aggressive expansion and centralization of power in the capital. George Washington cracked down on the libertarian Whiskey Rebellion, created a national bank, and put Alexander Hamilton, a centralizing statist, in charge of the Treasury. John Adams blatantly violated the First Amendment as much as any president since with his notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. Thomas Jefferson deployed the Marines on an ultimately failed mission in the Barbary war, attempted to suspend habeas corpus and create a department of education, imposed a brutal embargo on English goods that decimated the economy and destroyed privacy rights, and conducted the Louisiana Purchase in bold defiance of the Constitution. James Madison invaded Canada in his war with England, a war in which martial law was enforced in New Orleans and a judge was jailed merely for issuing a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a newspaper editor whose only crime was criticizing the war. Under James Monroe, the U.S. invaded Spanish Florida and adopted a doctrine whereby the U.S. would essentially claim prerogative over the whole of the Western Hemisphere, a colonial pretension whose bloody legacy continues to this day. This could all be blamed on the Constitution rather than the American Revolution itself, but it was the war that brought the "Founding Fathers" to power and allowed them to consolidate authority and take over the nation.

July Fourth celebrations did not become tacky or hypocritical only recently. The day was always a dubious cause of commemoration. The word "holiday" – holy day – clearly has a religious connotation. It is a day set aside for sacred observation. Those who regard Independence Day revisionism as profane should ask themselves which religion is sacrosanct to them. The Fourth of July is ultimately a celebration of the American nation-state’s birthday. It is a ritual in the U.S. civic religion. This is why it has been a militarist tradition since 1777, when the occasion was marked in Philadelphia with 13-gun salutes and imagery of the battle flag everywhere. The greeting card holidays might seem unworthy of mention alongside Christmas, Hanukkah and Easter. But Independence Day, even more than the politically correct and secular days celebrated every year, resembles an actual incidence of blasphemy.

There is a heroic side to the American Revolution, and surely no U.S. war since has been nearly as just in its cause. But the political shenanigans that led to war, the war itself, and its aftermath all deserve more criticism. Sadly enough, those who support the federal government’s domestic ambitions and foreign occupations while waving the flag on Independence Day are only as hypocritical as the colonists who tarred and feathered their antiwar countrymen in the name of liberty, the soldiers who invaded Canada in the name of anti-imperialism, the rebels who destroyed privately owned tea in the name of property rights, the Founders who waged a war against tyranny only to create a regime as formidable as King George’s, or the Father of our Country who started an unnecessary and tragic world war and then led a revolution in refusal to pay the bills for it.

Professor Gary North on why he doesn’t celebrate Independence Day... (Emphasis added)

The Continental Congress declared independence on July 2, 1776. Some members signed the Declaration on July 4. The public in general believed the leaders at the Continental Congress. They did not understand what they were about to give up. They could not see what price in blood and treasure and debt they would soon pay. And they did not foresee the tax burden in the new nation after 1783.

In an article on taxation in that era, Rabushka gets to the point.

“historians have written that taxes in the new American nation rose and remained considerably higher, perhaps three times higher, than they were under British rule. More money was required for national defense than previously needed to defend the frontier from Indians and the French, and the new nation faced other expenses.”

So, as a result of the American Revolution, the tax burden tripled.

The debt burden soared as soon as the Revolution began. Monetary inflation wiped out the currency system. Price controls in 1777 produced the debacle of Valley Forge...

That the largest signature on the Declaration of Independence was signed by the richest smuggler in North America was no coincidence. He was hopping mad. Parliament in 1773 had cut the tax on tea imported by the British East India Company, so the cost of British tea went lower than the smugglers' cost on non-British tea. This had cost Hancock a pretty penny. The Tea Party had stopped the unloading of the tea by throwing privately owned tea off a privately owned ship – a ship in competition with Hancock's ships. The Boston Tea Party was in fact a well-organized protest against lower prices stemming from lower taxes.

So, once again, I shall not celebrate the fourth of July.

Finally, along with the US, this week China also commemorates the 90^th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

However, Cato’s David Boaz sees the light on how China’s path towards economic freedom may possibly influence her political institutions.

From Prof Boaz (Emphasis added)

China of course followed a different vision. Take the speech of Mao Zedong on July 1, 1949, as his Communist armies neared victory. The speech was titled, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.” Instead of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it spoke of “the extinction of classes, state power and parties,” of “a socialist and communist society,” of the nationalization of private enterprise and the socialization of agriculture, of a “great and splendid socialist state” in Russia, and especially of “a powerful state apparatus” in the hands of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.”

Tragically, unbelievably, this vision appealed not only to many Chinese but even to Americans and Europeans, some of them prominent. But from the beginning it went terribly wrong, as really should have been predicted. Communism created desperate poverty in China. The “Great Leap Forward” led to mass starvation. The Cultural Revolution unleashed “an extended paroxysm of revolutionary madness” in which “tens of millions of innocent victims were persecuted, professionally ruined, mentally deranged, physically maimed and even killed.” Estimates of the number of unnatural deaths during Mao’s tenure range from 15 million to 80 million. This is so monstrous that we can’t really comprehend it. What inspired many American and European leftists was that Mao really seemed to believe in the communist vision. And the attempt to actually implement communism leads to disaster and death.

When Mao died in 1976, China changed rapidly. His old comrade Deng Xiaoping, a victim of the Cultural Revolution, had learned something from the 30 years of calamity. He began to implement policies he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which looked a lot like freer markets — decollectivization and the “responsibility system” in agriculture, privatization of enterprises, international trade, liberalization of residency requirements.

The changes in China over the past generation are the greatest story in the world—more than a billion people brought from totalitarianism to a largely capitalist economic system that is eroding the continuing authoritarianism of the political system. On its 90th birthday, the CCP still rules China with an iron fist. There is no open political opposition, and no independent judges or media...

The CCP remains in control. But it struggles to protect its people from acquiring information, routinely battling with Google, Star TV, and other media. Howard French notes that “the country now has 165,000 registered lawyers, a five-fold increase since 1990, and average people have hired them to press for enforcement of rights inscribed in the Chinese Constitution.” People get used to making their own decisions in many areas of life and wonder why they are restricted in other ways. I am hopeful that the 100th anniversary of the CCP in 2021 will be of interest mainly to historians of China’s past and that the Chinese people will by then enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under a government that derives its powers from the consent of the governed.

I may be late, as I am writing from sickbed but nonetheless...

“Happy Freedom Day!”