Dual Threats to Liberty
Nick Gillespie | April 17, 2007, 12:21pm
Columnist Ron Hart looks at both Dems and Reps lately and starts shaking his libertarian head:
As a result of the populist pandering of both parties, our country's future is at stake here. If you look at other cultures and democracies in history, they tend to flourish up until the point where voters determine that they can elect leaders who will give them the most generous payouts from the public treasury. Voices of reason and economic sensibility do not get elected until it is too late....Every great civilization's lifecycle appear to follow a similar trajectory. One cycle ascribed to Alexander Tyler identified the process as follows: "from bondage to spiritual faith; from faith to courage from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; & from apathy to dependence; from dependence back into bondage."
Note that liberty leads to abundance. And liberty - the freedom of people to choose and do as they will - is what libertarians stand for. We must not lose sight of that, and when our politicians want to take away our liberties under the guise of national security or expediency, we must not allow it.
Whole column here.
Pro Libertate | April 17, 2007, 1:00pm | #
Well, the examples in history are rife, the most telling for our little experiment being what happened to the Roman Republic. The Gracci, Marius, Sulla, Caesar, et al. all saw the opportunity for extra-constitutional personal power by catering to the masses. Free bread, land distribution, etc. There's a big difference, of course, between the people at large having rights (or even providing them with social services) and buying off their votes/inaction/action with a panoply of promises and/or scare tactics. Whether you agree with the immediate stated goals of the parties, you must recognize that these tactics present at least a potential threat to the concept of limited government. Not just the libertarian vision of that but the Constitutional vision as well. Is it so inconceivable that someone will take advantage of the ever-increasing power in DC to seize absolute power in some sort of emergency?
In the United States, the recognition that we do respect democratic principles up to a certain point has historically had an opposing tension that we want our system to be balanced--not based on rule by the mob, by authoritarians, or by "aristocrats" but by some blend of the three. We are not merely a democracy, though, even now. Nor is any other major country. The variations on the Western theme all center on the old idea that the government is a
res publica--a public thing. It's our creation and subject, ultimately, to our will, but it is not a direct instrument of democratic rule.
Anyway, if the Roman Republic was undermined by using the populace to circumvent constitutional limits, that failing is important to us, because, of course, their republic had a significant influence on the design of
our republic.
WLC | April 17, 2007, 3:28pm | #
Sorry about the long post, but I've always thought (with a few exceptions) Alexis de Tocqueville had it nailed:
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.
Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.
