Respect for Individual Rights
is the Purpose of Government
Eric
Paul Nolte
I often hear it said that taxation is the price of
civilization. Well, they had taxation in
every totalitarian dictatorship, and I hardly think that it was their taxation
that was the active ingredient that allowed those bloody pits of death and
destruction to lay any claim to being civilized. I believe that only a profound confusion over
the nature of rights and civilization could lead to such a silly pronouncement. Rather, I believe that it is respect for
individual rights that is the price of an optimal civilization.
It
appears that the American people are so confused about the legitimate purpose,
powers, and capability of government that we now believe government should do
anything that sounds like a good thing to do.
Moreover, if you tell an American that you
are against the government’s doing something that would make the world a better
place, it will sound as if you just said you are opposed to the thing itself.
This confusion is so pronounced that you could say you’re
against having a bricklayer as your surgeon, and be understood as saying you’re
against surgery.
So, for a more realistic example, it now
seems impossible for you to say that you are opposed to the government’s virtual
monopoly in education without being understood as having said that you are
opposed to education itself.
If you say that you believe education is
far too important to be left in the hands of government bureaucrats and union
bosses, people will think you just said that you’re not only against education but
they will likely assume that you also want poor children to remain ignorant,
and, moreover, surely the only reason you could say something so cruel and
stupid is that you are an ignorant racist pig who probably voted for Romney.
But you may not be a racist, you may not
have voted for Romney, and you certainly are not against education for poor
children. So how can you have been so
deeply misunderstood on several levels at once?
Because,
for one thing, we the people appear to have lost any coherent idea of the
legitimate purpose of government. We
have no idea what its powers should be.
We have not a clue about what should be the fundamental relationship
between the citizen and the government.
There is no widespread understanding of what government is capable of
doing, and there is no agreement over what it should attempt to do.
Barack Obama told the American people,
five days before the 2008 presidential election, that his election would mark
the beginning of a “fundamental transformation of America.”
Well,
he missed the transformation! It was
already long since in motion! The
fundamental transformation of America began more than a century ago, and some
will point to elements of this sea change that were present in the ideas of
some of the founding fathers.
Of course, it can be seen by anybody who
read Obama’s books that the Hope and Change on which he campaigned in 2008 were
a vision of America morphing into something rather more like France than the
America of 1787 or 1865. America’s
regulatory-welfare-warfare state may not be as highly developed as that of
France or Germany, but we are not very far behind. If we were to adopt the government of Germany
or France today, this would not represent as fundamental a transformation as
what has already happened in America between 1865 and today. The fundamental transformation of America was
already beginning with the first generation of progressives, in the late 19th
century, such as James Dewey, William James, Louis Brandeis, Walter Lippmann,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.
By 1870, a generation of young Americans was
going to Europe for university, many to Germany, and they came home infected by
German philosophy of a Kantian flavor, and a fevered enthusiasm for the
economics of Marx, the politics of
Chancellor Bismarck’s welfare state, and the idea of public schools as the
conduit by which children could be torn from their mother’s breasts and
transformed by the “right ideas” into becoming obedient soldiers and docile
citizens. Many of these young American
thinkers became progressives and influenced others to join them.
By the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s New
Deal, 80 years ago, the idea of citizens as sheep and government as the
Shepherd directing and protecting his flock was already well established, if
not wholly unopposed. But the opponents
were few and largely unequipped to fight the Red Decade’s passionate arguments
for scientific socialism, and the political left was widely perceived to have
captured the moral high ground from the Neanderthal right.
The formation of an outright totalitarian
dictatorship in America today would represent much less of a fundamental
transformation than would a government that suddenly began to behave as if it
cherished the inalienable right of its citizens to their own lives, liberty,
and property.
It would represent a radical change today
for our government to declare that it would no longer operate as an instrument
of plunder and stop looting its citizens and bullying them in every area of
their lives.
But it would be an unimaginable
transformation for the government to fire its czars and disband its bureaus and
alphabet agencies of coercion.
It would be a wonderful change if our
government were to recognize that individual liberty and responsibility are the first virtues, without which no
others can count for much of anything.
But such a transformation will never come
without enshrining the inviolate right of every peaceful individual to his or
her own life, liberty, and property.
This respect for individual rights will
never come until we renounce forever the idea that one person may use others
against their will for predatory advantage.
We must renounce the idea that governments
are endowed with some special power, infused metaphysically by some magical
cosmic pixie dust, that justifies its forcing peaceful citizens to bend to its
will.
This renunciation of government coercion
as legitimate will never happen unless we come to abandon our faith that it is
acceptable to treat citizens as sacrificial animals on the alter of the common
good.
Until we reject the idea that
self-sacrifice for random others is the starting point of morality, government
will never respect our rights as inviolable.
I believe that there is little hope for a
peaceful world until we embrace the idea that the essence of morality must
begin with the celebration of the sanctity of every individual as a unique and
irreplaceable entity whose right to life, liberty, and property must never be
violated by anyone, least of all by the government whose sole purpose must be as
the protector of those rights.
When the starting point of morality is
held to be the sacrifice of oneself to everybody else, morality becomes the
enemy of one’s own interests, but the world’s moral authorities have beaten us
into accepting this suicidal idea. Now
it’s one thing to condemn predatory exploitation of others, but another to
reject the pursuit of one’s own happiness as being the foundation of
morality. Notwithstanding that the
pursuit of happiness is written into the American declaration of independence,
the world’s moral authorities continue to treat altruism and self-sacrifice for
others as the essence of the good, and one’s self-interest as, at best, morally
neutral, and more often as the essence of evil.
But we are profoundly confused about self-interest. Selfishness is the only word we have to
denote the activities of individuals pursuing their personal interests. But the connotation of selfishness is imbued
with every aspect of evil itself. To be
selfish is to be a predator, a greedy,
brutal, grasping bastard who is eager to rape, rob, and murder to get
his own way.
We need another word to denote the peaceful pursuit of
one’s own unfolding and happiness. We
can describe this concept in a phrase, but we have no one word. The closest term is Ayn Rand’s formulation of
“rational happiness,” which she wrote about at book length in a volume with the
inflammatory and provocative title, The
Virtue of Selfishness, a title that was guaranteed to shock and repel many
who might otherwise have been willing to give her a hearing.
Until
morality includes one’s own unfolding and happiness as the starting point, much
as Rand defined rational self-interest, we will always be vulnerable to
governments that treat its citizens as sacrificial animals, and citizens will
more likely submit meekly to state coercion and exploitation, feeling as if they had no right to resist.
But rights are conditions of survival! We are endowed to the right to be free
because we would die without the freedom to act on the thoughts by which we figure
out how to live, love, and work. The
right to liberty is therefore an aspect of our nature as a human being.
The truly fundamental transformation of America would be to
have a political class and a polity that began to understand this almost utterly
forgotten, bedrock feature of our republic.
If we understood that our rights are an aspect of human
nature, we might remember that the purpose of government is to protect those
rights from violation, and government would no longer be the primary enemy of
our rights.
If
we understood that rights are inviolable, we would suffer no confusion between
liberty rights and so-called welfare rights.
Liberty
rights mean the entitlement of every individual to life, liberty, and
property. Welfare rights mean the
entitlement of individuals to various goods and services. But there is an insurmountable problem here:
goods and services must be produced by people.
If one person is entitled to the goods produced by another person, that
other person’s right to liberty and property is shattered. It is certainly a good thing for people to
choose to help each other out, but it is another thing altogether to say that one
person can be entitled to another person’s stuff.
If we understood that we are entitled to our own lives,
freedom, and property, we would understand that we are not entitled to other
people’s property. That would be a
contradiction, if all people are entitled to liberty by their nature as humans. An entitlement to other people’s stuff would
violate their fundamental rights by dragooning them, under threat of jail or
fines, into providing those things as an unchosen obligation to the recipients
of those goods.
An understanding of the inviolate rights of individuals
would make so many aspects of life clear!
If we
understood individual rights, we could scale back government to a size that is
appropriate to the legitimate purposes of the state. This is very important to understand: that
limiting government to its legitimate functions would preclude having a
government of warring special interests competing to see which gang of thugs
can grab the levers of power this election cycle and begin dispensing favors
and punishments in preparation for the next election cycle.
As
Friedrich Hayek pointed out, if government had not usurped the power to do
enormous good, it would never have acquired the power to make or break any
person or corporation at any moment, according to its fancy. Neither would big government have become the
beacon attracting the slimiest creatures to come crawling out from under their
rocks in an effort to grab the levers of power.
Hayek understood that it was largely well-intentioned but misguided people
who created these vast powers of government, and that others would then be attracted
to that power, others who often had less scruples than the well-intended creators
of this machinery of power. Hayek knew
that in many countries, these power-hungry politicians were happy to kill the
high-minded founders to gain power.
An understanding of the legitimate rights of individuals
would finally make it clear what a proper government should do, and equally
importantly, what it should not do.
We
would understand that if the government is the protector and not the violator
of its own citizens’ rights, it may not engage in foreign adventures waging
wars willy nilly as the world’s policeman.
We
would understand that the powers of a government, whose purpose is the protection
of its citizens’ rights, would be limited to the protection of those rights. A written constitution would sanctify and
spell out the citizens’ rights and the limits of the state’s powers. The system of laws could not be written to
overstep these limits. A
system of courts would exist to help citizens work out their disputes. A police system would exist to restrain the
predators among us. A military would exist
to protect us from foreign aggression. A
treasury department would surely have to exist in order to receive the funds
required to run the government.
Now I
hasten to add that while we would need a treasury department, there could not
be an IRS, at least not as the instrument of coercion it is today. Even a ninny who understood the nature of
legitimate rights would plainly see that the IRS violates the citizens’ rights
on a massive scale. Taxation, as the
involuntary taking of money from citizens, would be seen for the theft it
plainly is, not as the alleged price of civilization, as many argue.
Respect
for individual rights is the price of civilization, and honest citizens would
be happy to volunteer something like a tithe to the government that protects
their rights from violation.
If
rights were properly understood, the government would not be tempted to
overstep its bounds in any other area either, and citizens would not be so
willing to tolerate the government’s disdainful and arrogant violation of their
rights.
As for such
other matters as the provision of infrastructure and the care of the poor and
disabled, I trust the generous hearts of citizens more than the machinations of
far-flung central planning bureaucrats.
For all goods and services, I trust the profit-seeking of businesses a
million times more than I trust government bureaucrats to steer scarce
resources most efficiently into creating the goods and services that real
people want and need most urgently.
The
major point is that nothing matters more in politics than understanding this
rational formulation of rights.
A close
study of Rand, Mises, and so many others in this stream of thought, can make
these matters clear.
E P N
Revised 2015.1103
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