A Proper Government is a Project for the Future
by
Eric Paul Nolte
I sometimes despair that it is more likely that we can turn vultures into vegans than we can make governments behave properly.
How do we civilize government’s barbaric lust for power and restrain their tendency to grow like aggressive cancers, spreading madness, misery and mayhem in their wakes?
Well, you cannot turn a vulture into a vegan or convert a lion into a vegetarian. There never was a lion in the Garden of Eden who would peacefully lie down with a sheep. Can you spell “carnivore?”
And we the sheeple have mentally reverted to the clueless, dumbass, dysfunctional condition of Hobbes’ primordial state, where we are lacking any insight into the unprecedented and wonderful idea of John Locke’s formulation of natural human rights.
We the sheeple behave in the political arena as if we never heard of the idea of a natural, inalienable right to our own lives. We behave as if there are no facts of reality that should limit anybody’s claim on other people’s property. A huge majority feels entitled to use peaceful others against their will, so long as they say that the goodness of their goal justifies this Machiavellian abuse of others. Moreover, we are deaf, blind, and hostile to any argument to the contrary.
But human beings do sometimes change their minds. Sheep and lions can’t change their minds like humans because they have no powers of abstraction and no free will. But human beings do have both abstract knowledge and more than a whiff of free will, contrary to the dominant views of contemporary philosophers (whose arguments against free will must ironically count on the ability of their listeners to hear their arguments and thereby freely come to agree with them!) Free will is not a mystical blast from an unknowable dimension. Free will is simply the power of every normal human being to turn one’s attention from one thing to another. The basis of this power to change our minds, like the very relation of mind to body, remains something of a puzzle for science to unravel, but the existence of mind and will is directly available to us by introspection and our personal experience.
The proof of our free will is available to us in every slightest moment when we question anything and then apply logic to the evidence of experience.
Changing our minds about the Big Questions does not often happen, but it does happen occasionally. I myself experienced this transformation as I slowly moved away from the communist idealism of my youth for the humanist objectivism of my maturity.
When we change our minds on foundational issues, it usually happens in our lives at points of inflection and crisis.
The Problem of Enforcing Legitimate Limits on Government
The demagogue Donald Trump’s election is just such a crisis in the lives of many citizens.
On the one hand, we see protesting rioters and blood in the streets as a result of this election. But this crisis may also be a cause for hope because many people feel dizzy and confused as well as angry, and this confusion may lead many people to be more inclined to examine their deepest beliefs and to meditate on the enduring Big Questions of life, and perhaps to be open to less destructive and more life-serving ideas in the political arena.
Back to the matter of this heretofore impossible difficulty of restricting government to its legitimate functions: it is this difficulty of limiting government that made me sympathetic to the case for libertarian anarchy, as eloquently stated by Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell and others. But much as I tried to understand the case for anarcho-capitalism, in the end I failed to see how their policy of competing private defense agencies in the same neighborhood will not lead to old-time gang warfare, like competing mafiosi, warring illegal drug dealers, and the wreckage of Somalia’s anarchy.
So, is it true that restraining the predation of governments is as impossible as converting vultures into vegans?
No. I believe we can ultimately keep government within legitimate limits, even though most of the evidence says that the state will always be assaulting the rights of individuals to life, liberty, and property.
But … it always seemed impossible for humans to fly… until we figured out how to fly!
It has seemingly never been possible for human beings to create a government that would not ultimately descend into tyranny, but I believe that a blueprint for a proper government is now available to us and that we can hope to build this project in the future.
Tyranny is not the product of an inevitable aspect of human nature.
A Blueprint for Legitimately Limited Government
I believe that the blueprint for a properly limited government shows an estate built on the foundation of unwavering respect for the right of every individual to life, liberty, and property. I hold these rights to be sacred, not in a religious way, but in a secular sense, meaning “of the highest value.”
Hmm… we seem to have heard something like this before in the last few hundred years, no?
Yes, of course! It is the clangorous tolling of the glorious and unprecedented ideas of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, ideas which in America have been under attack and in mortal danger for more than a century of progressive ideology and politics.
But we never grasped or effectively implemented this idea of a right to liberty that would preclude a government’s claim to an individual’s property. What we have now is an endless war between irreconcilable and mutually exclusive definitions of rights: liberty rights versus welfare rights; or as political theorists now speak of the matter, negative rights versus positive rights.
Our Dizzy Confusion About Rights Leads to Slavery—
Welfare Rights Versus Liberty Rights
Liberty rights mean the inherent ownership of all individuals to their own lives, liberty, and property. They are “negative” in the sense that they prohibit using other people against their will. These rights oblige inaction. Hands off!
Welfare rights are entitlements to goods and services. They are said to be “positive” because they oblige the action of taking goods from some individuals to satisfy the alleged entitlement of others to those goods.
Since goods can only come into being when they are produced by somebody’s work, when we say that some individuals are entitled to such goods and services as food, housing, education, healthcare, and so forth, it implies that this provision of welfare rights must mean that other people have an unchosen obligation to create and then surrender these goods, by force, if necessary.
Welfare rights therefore entail the outright destruction of liberty rights. If Peter is entitled to the property of Paul, Paul is saddled with an unchosen obligation to produce the property claimed by Peter. Paul’s liberty rights are thereby destroyed to that extent.
When one person produces goods and another person takes those goods, this condition is called slavery (do I need to remind you that this condition of slavery and involuntary servitude is prohibited in the first breath of the first clause of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution?) Slaves are people who are compelled to work for somebody else without consent or ownership of the things they produce.
Is it any less slavery when the master does not take the whole of the slave’s products? I think not. It is still the dynamic of master and slave when one person grabs the police power and compels the slaves to work against their will. It is no more or less tyrannical when it is a mafioso who offers “protection” from the death and destruction that will come unless his price is paid.
Of course, today, progressives and liberals, and most conservatives too, will say it is absurd and impracticable to say that people have an inalienable right to stop this government protection racket, to declare that the people have an inalienable right to their own life, liberty, and property.
Actually, progressives won’t phrase it this way, instead they will simply say that it would be morally abhorrent if liberty were allowed to deny people their right to all those goods and services they need so deeply. Need trumps liberty. The right to freedom is sometimes cynically lampooned as the right of poor people to sleep under an urban overpass.
There is no country on the planet where this idea of inalienable liberty rights is practiced consistently.
When progressives do agree that welfare rights destroy liberty rights, they think this is a good thing—as when dense thickets of government regulations choke off the freedom of producers and customers to do business throughout every sector of the economy. They believe that all these regulations are the only safeguard preventing greedy businesses from abusing and ripping off their customers. Progressives tend to believe that, outside mothers’ milk, all good things flow from government intervention, and that capitalism is the mother lode of wickedness from which only government can protect us.
In the end, progressives dismiss individual rights on moral grounds. They say, “we’re all in this together,” and we are, after all, our brothers’ keepers, right? And certainly the unassailable ground of morality begins with altruism and the bedrock belief that we must sacrifice ourselves for the lives of others. It would be selfish and wrong of us to deny others their entitlement to welfare goods and services.
Welfare rights have been the pole star of political ideology since at least the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, in which no mention was made of any inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and property.
In the name of Roosevelt’s “freedoms from want and fear,” we have been happy to write into law the welfare rights that destroy individual liberty rights.
In our postmodern world, reality is said to be a rainbow of prejudice woven on the loom of whichever race, class, and gender one happened to be born into, and where truth and falsehood, no less than right and wrong, are mostly arbitrary conventions agreed upon according to our particular tribe.
But there is an objective reality and there are facts of reality by which we can grasp things objectively.
This assertion will evoke howls from the postmodern keepers of that flame which is the identity politics, multiculturalism, relativism, subjectivism, and skepticism by which they deny the very possibility of objectivity regarding all of the Big Questions of existence. They say that the only certainty is that no one can know anything for certain.
Conservatives will also howl at my assertion of a worldly, secular power to achieve objectivity because they believe that, while there is indeed objective truth and morality, such truth must flow from the existence of God—their own one god, by the way, and not the gods of any of the other religions. How can they know that they are right? By faith. But faith means the belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence. There is no problem here, however, because they say that faith and reason are the coordinated and equal beating of two wings that keep the bird of truth aloft, to paraphrase the way a papal encyclical once put it.
This is not the place where I can mount a proper argument for this assertion of an objective reality, but I am persuaded that this case is ably demonstrated in the long stream of work that begins in Greek antiquity with Aristotle and comes of age with Ayn Rand and her preceding and continuing circles. We do not have the answers to everything, of course, but we do have some answers, and where so many questions remain open, we can by the appropriate declaration of, “I do not know,” leave open the possibility of better answers as we continue to search for them.
A Proper Government is a Project for the Future:
The Pole Star of Reality, Reason, and Individual Rights
A proper government does not exist today.
A proper government remains for some future day when we can move forward and implement the better ideas we have been coming to learn since the time of Locke.
I believe the better day will come and that this better government will require us to write into law the bedrock purpose of government as the protection of the inherent rights of every individual to life, liberty, and property.
The American founders started out in this direction of government for the purpose of protecting individual rights and for more than a century mostly continued in the direction of extending this franchise of rights to all human beings. But the system was saddled with a number of flaws that would eventually destroy the whole project and deliver us into the hands of confused but relentless tyrants from both the left and right.
So how can we create a government that will be invulnerable to morphing into tyranny?
We begin with reality and reason, which grasps (not invents) reality, and add individual rights to locate our pole star.
Individual rights allow the enormous creative energy of individuals to be released in the world. Freedom of exchange, genuinely free markets and a government designed to restrain the predators, protect the nation from foreign aggressors, and help individuals and companies sort out their differences by means of objective laws, courts, arbitration and negotiation.
In short, we need legitimate government to be the police, the military, and the courts.
To prevent tyranny, we must chain government down to a thick wall on a short leash, and the means for doing this must lie in this legitimate formulation of the state.
When governments attempt to do more than these limited functions, they attract predatory rent seekers and lobbyists who are eager to win votes by promising to provide one group of people with goods and services they steal from other groups of people.
The way out of this inevitably predatory dynamic is to write a proper formulation of human rights.
And what would this formulation be?
First, clearly show that by the nature of reality and our humanness, we are all endowed with this natural right to our lives! Individual rights—our life, liberty, and property—are requirements of survival itself, they are the preconditions for pursuing the happiness possible to us when we unfold our gifts in the world and achieve a flourishing life. These rights protect us all because they make it wrong for anyone to use other people against their will for any predatory advantage.
The Basic Evil is Predation: Forcing Others Against Their Will;
and the Antidote Against It
By my lights, the predatory use of other people against their will is the fundamental evil in the world! Murder, genocide, slavery, rape, theft, and fraud are all examples of this evil.
The way out of this mess lies in writing laws that clearly restrain such predatory behavior. We must have laws to show how it is a tyrannical abuse of some citizens to dragoon them into an unchosen obligation to provide their fellow citizens with goods and services. It is wrong to allow one group of citizens to vote themselves material benefits they take out of the hides of their fellow citizens.
Of course, many of these predator-restraining ideas have already been written into our constitution, but so much of this document has been ignored for more than a century now that I believe we may have to recast this document. Principally I believe that what must be freshly written into our defining document must be the essential idea that animated Jefferson’s declaration of independence, namely, as I say, that all of us are endowed by our very nature to unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property so as to pursue our own happiness.
I recently re-read our constitution, and I can find not a word of this declaration of unalienable rights that made its way into the constitution!
Finally, to be legitimate, government must be funded voluntarily.
How can this voluntary funding of government work?
Voluntary funding can work because the size of a properly limited government would be a tiny fraction of the monster that now rules us, and it would cost a tiny fraction of today’s government. Free and rational citizens will understand that it is in their self-interest to pay for good government and they would cheerfully give of themselves to achieve it, in the same way that charities receive donations, and how religions are funded by tithing. We Americans are the most generous people in the world and we give enormous amounts of money to the causes we champion. I can think of no reason that a proper government would not freely arouse such support. Would there be free riders? Doubtlessly. But it only makes sense that free people, unmolested by tyrants, will be far more generous than the same people when they are bossed around by meddlesome bureaucrats backed up by the police power.
I have read proposals too that government could be funded by charging the citizens for its services. For example, the courts could charge companies for the service of resolving disputes. A company would be free not to pay, but then they would not be allowed to go to the court for help with their disputes.
Working out the details of such voluntary relations is work for future thought, but the principle is clear: the moral government must not be empowered to coerce its peaceful citizens into doing or not doing anything except to restrain the predators and frauds.
Governments must never be allowed to grab the power to use peaceful citizens against their will, no matter how noble the government claims its goals to be.
Very crucially, it would finally be recognized that the only equality that can be produced by the quest for economic equality is the equal misery that we see in every country that has gone very far down this road of attempting to create economic equality. Why? Because we are none of us equal in our gifts, energy, ambition, or luck in the circumstances of our birth.
On this point, do not miss Don Watkins and Yaron Brooke’s, Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality.
However, if we are all held to be equal before the law, and if the laws are just, we can show up in the world as peaceful, productive, self-responsible actors who will cooperate and trade with each other, voluntarily, and to mutual benefit.
There has never been a country that has fully put into practice this formulation of good government as the protector of individual rights, but to the degree that governments have approached this ideal, they have prospered vastly more than those that do not approach this ideal.
Ayn Rand’s Vision and Creating the Better Day
I believe that the better day coming will uphold something like Ayn Rand’s vision of the good life. Rand persuaded me that if we want to live and flourish most successfully, the primary values must be reason, purpose and self-esteem. The primary virtues one must practice in order to achieve these values must be rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, productiveness, justice, and pride. I find it among Rand’s most stunning insights that virtues are finally seen to be the means by which we achieve values, and not merely as dreary obligations to sacrifice ourselves for others.
By Rand’s code of morality, we will guide our lives by reason, meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience. Reason is a human being’s principle means for grasping and interpreting the material provided by our sense-perception. We must discover for ourselves an honorable purpose in life. We can earn our self-esteem by showing up in the world with the virtues that success demands of us, namely: by guiding our lives by rationality; by practicing independence of mind; by displaying the integrity to walk our talk; by honesty (meaning the unflinching respect for reality); by productiveness (which means being responsible for ourselves to the extent that this is possible); by practicing justice in dealing with others; and withal earning our own pride, which Rand called the sum of all virtues. There are countless other virtues, of course, such as benevolence, generosity, cleanliness and practicing good hygiene, running a ship-shape and well organized life, but the foregoing are the primary virtues.
I say we should strive to discover and unfold our talents in the world, we should live and let live, lend a helping hand wherever we believe this is right to do and where we are able, and we should deal with everybody with good will and an eye towards acting always for mutual benefit, and never, never, never for using other people against their will or for any predatory advantage.
Conclusion: The Moral is the Practical, as Ayn Rand Said
These are not dubious, pie-in-the sky, impracticable ideals. These are reasonable, realistic and attainable ideas which are consistent with human nature and the realities of existence. These are ideas that would benefit everybody, especially the poor and downtrodden who, since the dawn of the industrial revolution two hundred years ago, (as compared with the great masses of humanity everywhere before that time) have seen their comforts and life spans more than doubled in those countries, and only in those countries, where a semblance of free markets and unhampered capitalism have been allowed to operate. These ideas of free minds and free markets would also greatly benefit not only the great middle class of people as well, but also the geniuses in our midst, upon whom all the big advances for humanity have always depended.
It is no great comfort that we the sheeple have dodged the bullet of a shooting war with Russia as a result of Secretary Clinton’s defeat. She was certainly a lying, corrupt criminal and totalitarian-minded progressive whose principles and policies contradict the best and most important ideas that animated the creation of America: the ideal of individual rights as an inalienable aspect of human nature.
It is little comfort that we were saved from Secretary Clinton by the election of a man of mixed principles, an orange-haired blowhard of demagogic tendencies, but it may work out that Trump might actually save us for the better day that can now come in the future.
Americans were not so much for Trump, but against Clinton.
Clinton and the Democratic Party would surely have continued marching us relentlessly farther down Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
Will the progressives’ fear come true that Trump, the demagogue, may become a strongman, a dictator?
I can’t know that Trump won’t veer off into his own brand of tyranny, but it is worth revisiting my evaluation of the matter last week:
We had a choice in this election between a loose cannon and a battery of artillery aimed at the heart of America, namely, the attack by Clinton, Obama, and the Democratic party against the unprecedented and inspiring ideas that animated the creation of the United States of America. Clinton represents a continuation of Obama’s policies. They might be appalled to hear their ideas so described, but any fool can see that the last eight years of the Democrats’ “hope and change” for the purpose of moving “forward” with a “fundamental transformation of America” does not mean a celebration of the fundamental idea of individual rights and liberty that animated the creation of America.
Notwithstanding the sky-high stock market, it is mostly the Democrats who gave us a zombie economy like Japan’s, and a spirit of national defense against Islamic totalitarianism as suicidal as Europe’s.
The better day will come with an evolution of consciousness that will lead to an ethos of reason, purpose, self-esteem, and the benevolent spirit of live and let live that encourages people to come together and experience each other as treasured partners in the search for wisdom, joy, and meaning.
E P N
2016.1119
