Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (8 page)

Prohibiting members of the military to leave when their tours are up is essentially a de facto draft—this stop-loss program has been severely criticized by the personnel and the families who suffer from it.

With the current military exhausted and the increasing odds of armed conflict, the specter of the draft is once again raised. For now, though, the disastrously weak economy will serve the interest of the state by prompting many individuals to volunteer, despite the risks involved.

Conscription should never be part of a free society. It’s not permitted in the United States since our Constitution does not provide the authority to force someone into involuntary duty to fight a war. Slavery is precisely forbidden, and that’s what involuntary service is.

Countries that conscript or have the capacity to conscript are more likely to get involved in unnecessary political wars. Much more important than having a military made up of massive standing armies, navies, air forces, marines, military contractors, and the CIA to make us “safe” would be to have a foreign policy that makes sense. It would be a lot cheaper, and we would never have to resort to the draft to defend the country and keep us safe.

Ronald Reagan, among other conservatives, opposed the draft. Robert Taft (“Mr. Republican”) was a strong opponent. Hanging in my congressional office is the following quote from Taft: “A compulsory draft is… far more typical of
a totalitarian nation than of a democratic nation. The theory behind it leads directly to totalitarianism. It is absolutely opposed to the principle of individual liberty which has always been considered a part of American democracy” (August 14, 1940).

Henderson, David R. 2010. “From ‘Porous’ to ‘Ruthless’ Conscription, 1776–1917.”
Independent Review
.
http://www.independent.org
.

Higgs, Robert. 2005.
Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society
. Independent Institute.
http://www.independent.org
.

Webster, Daniel. 1814. “On Conscription,” reprinted in
Left and Right
, Volume 1, Number 2, Spring 1965.

P
olitics breeds demagogues—politicians and media pundits alike. The word “demagogue” itself dates to the ancient world because the phenomenon is that old. Demagogues seek influence and political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, and expectations of the public. They do not enlighten; they browbeat and play rhetorical games.

Demagoguery is the enemy of liberty and serves the interest of power seekers across the political spectrum. Government attracts all those who enjoy using power over others and those who convince themselves that average people need “smart” people to take care of them. And only the demagogues can provide the “wisdom” to appoint those who should rule over us. When the goal of political action is no longer the defense of liberty, no word other than demagoguery can describe the despicable nature of politics.

Demagogues manipulate a political issue in a manner to obscure or distort truth with emotionalism and prejudice. The goal of all demagogues is to achieve power at all costs.

Dictators accomplish this by brute force; in democracies,
demagogues do it the same way but camouflage the brute force with idealistic declarations of being humanitarian saviors. Even brutal dictators must convince a gullible public that the violence is required to do good for the people. This is true whether it’s Soviet-style communism, French Jacobinism, the environmental alarmists, the current neoconservatives, or the cradle-to-grave welfarists.

Though the demagogues on the right and left are true competitors for power, they share a belief in state power and the techniques and tools of the demagogue. The purpose is to take a principled stand by the proponents of liberty and reason and turn it into support for something ugly and mean by gross distortion of the truth.

The right is vocal in condemning opposition to the Bush-Obama doctrine of preventive war as being unpatriotic, un-American, and against the troops. If one opposes a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, it’s considered unpatriotic and un-American. If one lacks enthusiasm for the war on drugs, it’s charged that that person doesn’t care about kids and would promote drug use for them. Opposing foreign aid draws charges, from right and left, of nefarious motivations. Also, among this crowd, if you have doubts about using the federal government as an instrument for imposing a particular cultural or religious agenda, you are regarded with suspicion and called an opponent of uprightness and morality.

The left is every bit as aggressive in impugning their opponents’ character when criticizing a principled stand for private property. Defending states’ rights and the Tenth Amendment, according to the left, is to flirt with racism and even support slavery. But they get tongue-tied when challenged on
the issue by a state like California legalizing medicinal marijuana, whether or not they endorse the heavy hand of the Federal Drug Administration’s overriding of all state laws on the drug issue.

The great heinous thought crime related to race relations is to argue that private property owners have a right to use that property as they please, as long as they do not commit violence against another person. Strict private property control is now seen as the most evil position anyone can take. To argue for the freedom to choose, which necessarily means the freedom to include or exclude others, is seen as evidence of malice. Evidently, property can only be used by permission from the state. International, national, state, and local governments along with various courts “own” the land and all businesses, and we must answer to the bureaucrats to get legal permits to use it.

To suggest that, in a free society where property is owned by the people, the owners of a business establishment have a right to pick and choose customers and workers and to make only mutually agreed-to economic transactions is seen as the worst possible gaffe. In fact, this right is at the core of the libertarian position. It is the essence of the freedom of association. There is no getting around it: Freedom of association also implies the freedom not to associate. To restrict this association based on some subjective evaluation of a person’s motivations is necessarily to impose on the freedom and rights of others.

A serious-minded liberal or progressive, not the demagogue, should consider the analogy of the First Amendment. It is a well-known and accepted tenet of the left that the First
Amendment is designed to protect controversial and disagreeable speech. Benign conversation needs no protection. All religions and political beliefs are protected, even those considered bizarre, as long as they are nonviolent in nature.

Use of property should be viewed the same way. In fact, free speech is protected by a clear right of private property. The properties that house magazines, newspapers, electronic media, the Internet, and churches are (supposed to be) immune from government surveillance and control. Prior restraint in the propagation of information is prohibited. If property is protected for these purposes, it shouldn’t be such a giant leap to understand why all property should be equally protected.

For this reason, people who burn American flags, provided that they own them and burn them on their own property, are deserving of defense. I’m never so embarrassed by the Republican Party than when it demagogues issues like flag burning and saying the Pledge of Allegiance. These are despicable campaign tactics.

Americans should be willing to stand up for the rights of all. So it is with many private acts we might otherwise object to. The home must be protected. We pick our friends, our partners, our guests, and our sexual practices. We decide who enters and who must leave, and we set the rules of behavior.

What’s the magic difference between a church, a school, a home, a newspaper, or a radio or TV station, and a commercial business? From my point of view, these are all institutions rooted in private property. The authoritarian disagrees and wants to dictate all the rules regarding both hiring practices and who must be served in private commercial establishments; at the same time, conservative authoritarians never hesitate to
dictate smoking, drinking, drug use, and sexual habits on private property.

What liberal authoritarians don’t quite understand is that, if government has the power to control business establishments and all their decisions, they have justified the intrusion of government in every social aspect of our lives—an authority that they now essentially assume.

But the character of the demagogue explains the inconsistent position. If a political enemy can be accused of racism or as supporting drugs for children, demagoguing the issue is a convenient tool for maintaining or gaining power in the political process. The principle of private ownership and personal choice is of no interest to the demagogues. In the long run, though, the goals of honest liberals, conservatives, and progressives alike are undermined.

The politicians and friendly media work together to promote an agreed-to agenda. Though the demagogic process is of epidemic proportions, fortunately for the future of mankind, there are honest, decent people who disagree and have the integrity to not resort to the dishonesty of a demagogue and who abhor the process. Instead they use rational discourse in an attempt to influence others. The common use of demagoguing by politicians and their media allies keeps many decent people from getting their hands dirty in the political process. However, there’s still a lot of room outside of politics for these decent individuals to use their talents in education and journalism to influence change.

Anyone who even questions the drug war, the war on pornography, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or any war is regarded
as an evil opponent of law and order and civilization. These are perfect examples of how honest discussions are kept at bay by the demagogue. The shutting down of discussion of these topics is all about trying to maintain bugaboos that people can blame their problems on.

H. L. Mencken offered the following harsh judgment of Americans and their willingness to listen to demagogues:

Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase, and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!” It has been so in the United States since the earliest days. The whole history of the country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree, the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon, John Bull, the hell hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler, Pancho Villa, German spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism. The list might be lengthened indefinitely; a complete chronicle of the Republic could be written in terms of it, and without omitting a single important episode.

The influence that the religious, intellectual, and political demagogues have in a free society poses a much greater danger to mankind than the risk of allowing a businessman to use his property as he chooses. Yet the left is hysterical over the
“grave” danger they envision from business people “owning” their property without regulations and control by bureaucrats and politicians.

La Boétie, Étienne de. [1553] 2008.
The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute.

Mencken, H. L. [1926] 2009.
Notes on Democracy
. New York: Dissident Books.