Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (3 page)

Paul, Ron. 1983.
Abortion and Liberty
. Lake Jackson: Foundation for Rational Economics and Education.

A
foreign policy that endorses worldwide intervention and occupation requires that people live in perpetual fear of supposed enemies. In the post–9/11 period, proponents of such policies have been quite able to promote the fear needed for the American people to accept policies they otherwise would have rebelled against. Fear has enabled permanent runaway domestic surveillance and the sacrifice of privacy through legislation such as the Patriot Act. A citizen walking through the airport today is bombarded with
1984
-style propaganda messages that are designed to make us fear some amorphous threat and also be suspicious of others. The government designs these messages to make us feel dependent and heavily lorded over in every aspect of our lives. These messages are becoming ever more pervasive, hitting us even in grocery stores when we are shopping.

If we are fearful enough, we are willing to tolerate what might otherwise be regarded as immoral means of dealing with the enemy. For example, the use of torture to combat evildoers has been accepted by a large number of otherwise
reasonable Americans as a result of those who purposely, successfully used fear as a tactic to achieve their mischievous goals. And now we are moving toward the acceptance of assassinations of American citizens as necessary to provide national security, as I will show below. This, to me, signifies that we are no longer a nation of laws but rather a nation of people who act outside the law without restraint. The corruption in ideals has been so grave that many conservatives regard criticism of assassination as a sign of liberal wimpiness and sentimentality. In fact, we are dealing with a fundamental issue of human rights here.

We are told we are at war—against terrorism. Yet terrorism is a tactic and described in federal law as a crime. The war is “worldwide,” so lawlessness by our government can be perpetuated anywhere in the world, including within the borders of the United States. In wartime, the government assumes greater emergency powers to make secret arrests, build secret prisons, torture, and use secret rendition allowing other, more ruthless countries to do our dirty work.

The term “war on terror” should never be used as anything more than a cliché, like “war on” drugs, poverty, illiteracy, etc. But its use is deliberate, even in these symbolic usages, to con the people into thinking that all citizens must cooperate and sacrifice our liberties to “win” the war. Though these violations are fully endorsed by the Obama administration, they were introduced and generally used by the Bush administration.

We’ve moved much further along in the disintegration of American jurisprudence. Indefinite detention without charges or a right to counsel is now an established precedent for
anyone in the world, including an American citizen, declared “an enemy combatant” by a single U.S. official. It has been acknowledged by the Obama administration that the current policy permits the assassination of any suspect anywhere in the world, including an American citizen.
¹
This, they argue, is crucial to keep all Americans safe. Somewhere along the way we forgot that the enemies of our Constitution are both foreign and domestic. It appears that many people in government want us to believe that the greater danger is coming from people like the underwear bomber rather than from our own government.

Our government has, for years, been involved in “regime change” around the world, which includes the use of assassination. But up until February 3, 2010, there was no admission to such a policy or recognition of its illegality. On this date, before the House Intelligence Committee, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis C. Blair admitted that indeed such a policy existed. American citizens can be assassinated at the direction of the U.S. government with the authority probably coming from the DNI. As he put it: “Being a U.S. citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives.”
²

No longer trying to keep assassination top secret and even admitting it can involve an American citizen is a bold and scary change in attitude. Many people now believe that it is proper under the law, necessary for our security, and condoned
by both the people and their elected representatives in the Congress. Even more frightening is that the previously ridiculous notion that torture is legal is now more or less true—a rather sorry state of affairs.

Who would have ever believed that we could fall so far? The basic principle of the writ of habeas corpus has been around for 800 years, and so has the right not be in indefinite detention without charges. The justification for such abuse of the rule of law is all based on concocted fear by false claims associated with a lack of respect and understanding of what liberty is all about. It is constantly argued that danger in this post–9/11 period demands a different code of conduct to assure the people’s safety. Possibly so. But it is further argued that only a few Americans are on the target list for assassination.

Possibly so, but so what? Tyranny always begins with oppression of unpopular minorities. If we wait for tyranny to target the mainstream and the majority, it will be too late. These targeted individuals are “suspects,” not convicted criminals; nor, for the most part, are they even charged with a crime. Many innocent people have been held in secret prisons and tortured without legal counsel.

The perpetrators of the first Twin Towers bombing in 1993 were arrested, tried in New York City, and sentenced to life in prison. It is important that even the guilty have their day in court—not so much out of sympathy, for many are known to be evil, wicked men, but to keep us from ever slipping into a situation in which American citizens lose their right to have their day in court. Literally hundreds of terrorists have been tried in civilian courts in this country and convicted and did not have to be tried in secret military courts.

According to Dennis Blair, the justification for deciding who is to be assassinated is to declare an individual a “threat.” No charges of a crime or plan to commit a crime are needed. Being a “threat” is a purely subjective term and is totally ambiguous. Casual acquaintance or associations based on false information can easily lead to deadly mistakes.

Certainly, speech that does not echo the party line or information that truthfully explains the nature and cause of anti-American activity can easily be construed as a threat to American policy overseas and a challenge to the current government. Blair claims that no one will be targeted for “free speech.” I guess that is supposed to make us all rest more peacefully.

Anwar-al-Awlaki, the American citizen targeted by a CIA drone in Yemen, was never charged with a crime. The attack against Awlaki failed to kill him, but several others who were killed are now listed as statistics of collateral damage. More hatred of Americans will surely be generated by these constant events.

Government, once given power thought to be very limited in scope, is never restrained in expanding the use of its new-gotten power. Some people have perpetual desires for expanding government power and they frankly admit that, to achieve their goals, they never want any crisis to go to waste.

Enough Americans need to wake up and change this dangerous trend. But first they have to come to understand why no person should be exempt from the Bill of Rights when charged with violating U.S. law. The Constitution protects “persons,” not just “citizens.”

The war on terror slogan says “we are at war,” and therefore
protection of civil liberties is to be forfeited. But here is a fact: No war has been declared. The executive branch cannot ordain a war. The Congress and the courts are derelict in their duty if they do nothing to stop the madness of targeting American citizens for assassination before this evil precedent is perpetuated and more frequently used.

Belfield, Richard. 2005.
The Assassination Business: A History of State-Sponsored Murder
. New York: Carroll & Graf.

Napolitano, Andrew. 2006.
The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land
. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.

T
he phrase “Austrian School” or “Austrian economics” is not something I ever expected would enter into the vocabulary of politics or media culture. But since 2008, it has. Reporters use it with some degree of understanding, and with an expectation that readers and viewers will understand it too. This is just thrilling to me, for I am a long-time student of the Austrian tradition of thought.

The phrase is often used as a synonym for free market economics. I don’t object to this characterization, but it isn’t exactly precise. It is possible to appreciate the role of markets without actually embracing the Austrian tradition, and it is possible to learn from the Austrian tradition without holding a particular political position. Nonetheless, the tradition has much to teach us and it goes far beyond the mere appreciation and defense of free enterprise.

The school of thought is named for the country of its modern founder, Carl Menger (1840–1921), an economist at the University of Vienna who made great contributions to the theory of value. He wrote that economic value extends from
the human mind alone and is not something that exists as an inherent part of goods and services; valuation changes according to social needs and circumstances. We need markets to reveal to us the valuations of consumers and producers in the form of the price system that works within a market setting. In saying these things, he was really recapturing lost wisdom that had earlier been understood by Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850), J. B. Say (1767–1832), A. R. J. Turgot (1727–1781), and many more throughout history. But history needs people like Menger to rediscover forgotten wisdom.

Menger built up a new school of thought in Austria with thinkers such as Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851–1914), F. A. Hayek (1899–1992), Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993), Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), and Hans Sennholz (1922–2007) and gave rise to a huge number of philosophers, writers, financial analysts, and many others today who have learned from the tradition. The Austrian School champions private property, free markets, sound money, and the liberal society generally. It provides a way of looking at economics that takes into account the unpredictability of human action (absolutely no one can quantitatively know the future) and the huge role of human choice in the way economies work (in markets, consumers drive decisions over production), and explains how it is that order can emerge out of the seeming chaos of individual action. In short, the Austrian School provides the most robust defense of the economic system of the free society that has ever been made. This is why I often refer people to the Austrian School rather than speak about Adam Smith and the classical school, much less other schools of thought such as the Keynesian or Marxist schools.

People often forget that economists are not mere technicians who follow numbers. They are philosophers of sorts, thinkers who carry around certain assumptions about the way the economy works and society is built. The Austrian School had achieved mainstream status before the so-called Keynesian Revolution of the 1930s swept away the older wisdom. John Maynard Keynes turned truth on its head, arguing that saving is not a precursor to investment but rather a drag on the economy. He conceived of the various sectors of the economy (saving, investment, consumption, production, borrowing, lending) not as integrated through the price system but as homogeneous aggregates that are constantly colliding with one another. He imagined that wise central planners could know more than irrational market participants and correct for macroeconomic imbalances through manipulating market signals. More often than not, he proposed credit expansion as the solution to all that ails us. This entire agenda presumes the existence of a wise activist state that is involved in every level of economic life. Liberty was not an issue that concerned him.