Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (9 page)

H
istory has proven it again and again: No system of government is a good one once the government grows too big and powerful. If the government is small and unintrusive, the form of government doesn’t matter that much. No one is seeking to overthrow the monarchy of Liechtenstein, for example, or uproot the system of oligarchical rotation of Costa Rica. The trouble with democracy is not so much its workings at any one time; the trouble is the dynamic it sets in place that gradually changes a small government into a big one. It was precisely to prevent that from happening that the founding generation in the United States borrowed the idea of a republic from the Roman experience. Not everything was to be subjected to mob rule; voting was in place to rotate the management of a small government that operated under strict rules.

Today that has changed, and not for the better. As much as I defend the freedoms of everyone, those freedoms should be limited in the following sense: People should not be able to vote to take away the rights of others. And yet this is what the slogan democracy has come to mean domestically. It does not
mean that the people prevail over the government; it means that the government prevails over the people by claiming the blessing of mass opinion. This form of government has no limit. Tyranny is not ruled out. Nothing is ruled out.

Perhaps more dangerous is the idea of exporting democracy. We’ve been told that one of the main reasons we’re in the Middle East and Central Asia is to spread America’s goodness and our political system of democracy. Among other lies, this justification for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has led to a huge sacrifice of American lives and wealth.

This argument fails to address the inconsistency of the United States in continuing to support many dictatorial governments, both past and present. I doubt many Americans truly believe that “spreading democracy” is the real reason we invade, occupy, and threaten numerous countries around the world. How could it be when you look at those we support around the world?

Less often, we hear that these invasions and occupations are necessary for national security purposes. Even if spreading democracy is the goal, we need to question the religious defense of the political system of democracy. It was Woodrow Wilson who originated this policy when he bluntly stated that World War I was a noble cause in our effort “to make the world safe for democracy.”

A noble cause of spreading liberty, not democracy, would make a lot more sense, if it was understood that violence and intimidation would never be used to pursue this goal. Besides, if it’s liberty we want to promote, it’s a republic that we should seek—not a democracy—and only persuasion and education would be used to spread this message. Threats and violence are
diametrically opposed to the message we would purport to be spreading.

The difference between a democracy and a republic is important. Pure democracy, in which the law itself is up for grabs based on legislative maneuvering, is the enemy of individual rights, and it victimizes the minority. Dictatorial powers, by gaining acceptance by 51 percent of voters and colluding to suppress minorities, are every bit as harmful as a single dictator. The “democratic mandate” is more seductive since the people too often are conditioned to accept the notion that as long as the consensus of 51 percent agree, something is morally acceptable. A militant dictator is more suspect, and when he abuses the rights of individuals, it is easier to understand who the abuser is. A republic, on the other hand, is a nonmonarchical system that makes no claim to somehow embody the will of the people; it is a system merely for the appointment of leaders and the administration of law.

This does not mean that democratic elections can’t be used to choose leaders whose job it should be is to promote liberty. But that is a far cry from allowing minorities to be victimized by a coalition making up the majority.

Even so, there are many practical concerns about the democratic election of leaders. Unfortunately, quite frequently, elections are not honest. Texas, Louisiana, Chicago, and others have had examples where the political machine not the votes, controls the outcome. Most historians acknowledge that the LBJ race for the Senate in 1948 against Coke Stevenson was stolen. The election was decided on eighty-seven votes, and though it was highly disputed, most people now concede that it was not a fair election. Without this victory, LBJ most likely
would have never been elected President, meaning the disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War might not have occurred.

I had my own experience with a “stolen election.” In 1976, I lost a race for Congress by more than 300 votes after a recount. Though we had proof of more than 1,300 fraudulent votes, we were never able to present the evidence in court. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of cases of questionable vote counts in our history.

Our CIA has been implicated many times in influencing elections around the world. It is not unusual for the United States to preach democratic elections to others. When they occur, if we are unhappy with the outcome, we refuse to recognize the winners and continue to support the losers.

We have spent billions of dollars supporting elections in Iraq. Many American lives have been lost in the process and massive casualties have been inflicted on the Iraqi people, all in the name of democratic elections. At the same time we continue to support dictators in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and other places around the world. Though we accept the premise that there’s not much choice in how to pick our leaders other than elections, elections are far from perfect. But the real danger of democracy is the ability of the majority to arbitrarily redefine individual rights.

Our Constitution was designed to protect individual rights, and the Founders knew clearly that they wanted a republic, not a democracy, where the majority could not dictate the definition of rights of the minority. They did a reasonably good job in writing the Constitution but yielded to the principle of democracy in compromising on the slavery issue. The majority voted for supporting second-class citizenship for blacks, a
compromise that we paid heavily for, not only in the 1860s but more than a hundred years later as well. It would have been better if we had stayed a loose-knit confederation and not allowed the failed principles of democracy and slavery to infect the Constitution.

From early on the principle of a republic was undermined, which unfortunately allowed the concept of democracy to flourish. How many times in the past ten years have we heard our leaders brag about our wonderful effort to institute democracy in the Middle East, while hearing nothing about promoting personal liberty, property rights, sound money, and free markets, or a republic?

How can we “spread our goodness” around the world through occupation and violence when here at home we have squandered our liberties and wealth? American political culture, unfortunately, has come to worship at the altar of democratic majoritarianism. This has made the concept of rights arbitrary and capricious, and individual and natural rights are no longer cherished or understood.

It is this failed understanding that permits the welfare-warfare state while destroying the concept of civil liberties and personal self-ownership and responsibility.

Today the majority can do just about anything it wants. If the majority, or a well-organized minority that buys votes, wants to use government force to dictate to every American what they can eat or smoke, they are now able to do it. Voluntary associations, economic and social, are routinely regulated by government even when force and fraud are not involved. Victimless crimes are routinely punished by government, while it pays less attention to those individuals committing violent acts.

One tragic example came to my attention when a fundamentalist Christian minister came to my office to ask for help for his son, who had been imprisoned by federal authorities. He knew the typical conservative member of Congress would have no sympathy for his plight. His adult son, in his twenties, who from birth suffered from a mental deficiency, was completely dependent on his parents. He had access to a computer and visited child pornography web pages. The authorities found out and he was arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned. His father’s request to me was to get the prison officials to allow his son to take his hormonal medications that he had been dependent on since birth. This needless prohibition made the situation much worse for the prisoner and devastated his family. He never committed an act of violence and had no real understanding of the “crime” he committed, but a lot of money was spent investigating, trying, and imprisoning an individual who was no threat to anyone. Surely a free society can distinguish between a crime of producing and distributing child pornography and happening across random images on a digital delivery system. Surely we can grant that the producer is the problem here, not the casual web surfer.

The majority, or what people see as the majority, or even just what people perceive as conventional wisdom, now defines what rights are: What people want, demand, need, or wish for can be declared a right by merely writing a law. This breeds coalition building and incestuous bipartisanship where various groups get together and push for their handouts. That’s why the loot is passed out to the special interest groups in the “pork barrel.”

A precise definition and understanding of what our rights
are would prevent this. Since both the rich and the poor endorse this principle, they share in the benefits. Trouble is, the poor are deceived into believing taxes on the rich will serve their interest. The rich, symbolized by the Goldman Sachs elite, end up the winners in the scramble to sit at the table where the “free lunch” is served.

Some say that members of Congress should listen to the people and vote accordingly. Listening to the people when they are right makes sense, but if the majority of the people demand unconstitutional and immoral transfer programs, the member of Congress has an obligation to live up to his or her oath of office and campaign promises. If ten thousand people in a district can be organized to demand that a member of Congress support a special handout, and the rest of the people in the district are apathetic and pay no attention to the lobbying effort of a pressure group, “listening to his constituents” would invite legalized looting (as it already has).

Even if a true majority of a district demanded support for unconstitutional spending, the rule of law is undermined if the member of Congress complies with the demands. Unfortunately, that’s what has been happening for a long time. The “will of the people” is being invoked to pass unconstitutional measures. The majority (all the various interest groups) gangs up on the minority as it rewrites the rules that were supposed to have been written in the Constitution to constrain the arbitrary dictatorial powers of the government, the majority, and the special interests. The result is that pure democracy replaces the supposedly strict restraints placed in the Constitution on the ability of the majority to rule at will. This limitation on the power of the federal government was put
there with the belief that “their just powers” were only those consented to by the governed.

Nineteenth-century lawyer Lysander Spooner carried this argument one step further. He believed that only a “few” consented.
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Therefore, the Constitution should not apply to those who did not give their personal consent to cede any personal liberty (power) to the state. This is an interesting argument, but it’s not likely to make much headway at this stage in our history. Enforcing the Tenth Amendment is a big enough challenge to us for now.

Today, as a result of our careless thinking, our desire for government assistance, and the emphasis on unearned economic benefits over free markets and self-reliance, we have a society made up of various special interest groups demanding their “rights.”

My guess is that the majority of Americans believe that citizens—especially if in need—have a “right” to medical care, free education, a house, subsidized food, and endless other services. What they don’t want to hear is that governments have nothing to pass out, since they produce nothing. Anytime government provides a benefit, it must first steal it from someone else who is producing it, thus violating the rights of that individual. It is important to remember that.

A majority vote should never be used to justify the undermining of human rights. That is what the philosophy of socialism, welfarism, and all other forms of authoritarianism depend on. This same principle allows wars to be fought for reasons
unrelated to national defense. Governments are very sophisticated in confiscating wealth from one segment of society and transferring it to another. When the country is wealthy, the victims are complacent and allow the process to expand massively. Taxation, borrowing, and inflating are all used as the deceptive tactics to disguise who is the actual victim, but the complacency ends when the productive capacity of a nation can no longer keep up with the demands and promises made.

This dilemma elicits many suggestions on how to solve the problem of diminished resources. But the real solution requires a revolutionary change in understanding what individual rights are, and why the obsession with democracy is not the same as freedom and prosperity. In the nearly two-year debate on revamping a failed health-care system, almost no one in Washington was willing to entertain the thought that medical care is not a right and should not be provided by government. I’ve never heard a major politician state this truth. Even those who oppose President Obama’s health-care plan do so on less principled grounds and do not question the fundamental assumption that government is somehow responsible for providing a system of universal health-care delivery.