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Bad Signs for Liberty
 These
are discouraging days for anyone who
believes in liberty. At least so it seems to me. I can only hope I’m
missing some hopeful signs.
I do notice bad signs like the U.S.
Supreme Court’s recent 5-to-4 ruling in Kelo v. City of New
London, which turned the “takings” clause of the Fifth
Amendment  on
its head by holding that the
government may claim your property for anything it chooses to call
“public use,” even if that means turning it over to a private
business it thinks will pay more in taxes than you do. This decision has
produced more outrage than anything the Court has done in many years,
which is some consolation.
The recent Gulf Coast hurricanes
have provoked hysterical demands that the Federal Government take full
responsibility for natural disasters, even to the extent of rebuilding whole
cities below sea level, thereby inviting a recurrence of foreseeable disasters.
President Bush has pledged to spend whatever it takes, never mind
constitutional restraints. Or common sense.
Bush himself has been a disaster
for liberty. After eight years of Bill Clinton, he appeared to stand for a
return to limited government, in both foreign and domestic policy. Instead he
has given us a huge and needless war, a huge new bureaucracy in the
Department of Homeland Security, new violations of liberty in the Patriot
Acts, and new levels of Federal spending that have shocked even Democrats.
Writing in Freedom
Daily, Sheldon Richman reminds us of Murray Rothbard’s
insight “that every principle devised to limit the power of government
sooner or later becomes a way to expand it.” This can only bring a
blush to the cheek of anyone who has ever called for “a return to
limited government,” as I’ve spent most of my own writing
career doing. My own blushes run to a very deep crimson when I reflect that I
myself hoped Bush might achieve this.
It’s not that Bush himself is
a particularly bad man; neither was Bill Clinton, despite his corruption.
It’s that the whole idea of “limited, constitutional
government” seems to be an illusion.
![[Breaker quote for Bad Signs for Liberty: The advance of tyranny in America]](2005breakers/050929.gif) At
the same time, some governments
are worse than others, and I’m truly grateful to be living in this
country rather than in, say, North Korea. But it’s not quite as easy as
I used to think to explain why, even to myself. I start with the simple fact
that this government isn’t starving us to death.
Bad as it is in many ways, the
American state is still inhibited by the moral habits and legal traditions of
Christian civilization. There are some things we can usually be sure our rulers
won’t even try to do to us, though the old restraints are weakening
alarmingly and the law is increasingly the plaything of the strong. It’s
another bad sign that the decay of law is called “progress” and
“democracy.”
In a sense, of course, government
— the power of the strong — should be limited; the individual
should be able to defend himself against it. But government will never control
its own power, and we only confuse ourselves by talking as if it would or
could. We can only try to divide its power, keep it as local as possible, and
prevent its consolidation in a single center.
The Articles of Confederation
actually achieved this better than the U.S. Constitution, contrary to
everything we are taught about how the Constitution improved the old
system, creating “a more perfect union.” In time the
Constitution made a monopoly of power possible — the very sort of
“consolidated” government everyone professed to oppose at
the time it was adopted.
The victory of the North over the
South was actually the victory of the Union over the “free and
independent states” affirmed in the Declaration of Independence and
reaffirmed in the Articles; it denied the right of the states to secede under
any circumstances whatever. After the Union victory, the Constitution was
changed to weaken the states further, especially by the Fourteenth,
Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Amendments. More recently we’ve seen
the evisceration of the Second, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments, and lately, in
the Kelo case, the Fifth.
What some call the advance of
“progress” and “democracy” is really the long, sad
story of the increase of the government’s power over us. It has
happened in other ways in other countries, but this, in brief outline, is how it
has happened — and how it’s continuing, day by day — in
“the land of the free.”
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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