State of the Union: Lawlessness Pretending to Be Civility

Here’s a good response to the nonsense spouted in Obama’s tax-and-spend State of the Union address. It’s not from some mealy-mouthed Republican, but from one of the better social-political thinkers of all time, nineteenth century French thinker Frederic Bastiat:

What, then, is the law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. … since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individual groups. … But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.

We could use Bastiat’s thinking in America today. If that thinking prevailed, there would be no President Obama (or President Bush, either) and spending/taxing would be on its way down, instead of constantly up, and up and up.

Bastiat is right that the law has been used to destroy its own objective. Originally, in civil society, the law existed to protect private property. The moment government began to redistribute private property via political considerations was the moment freedom began its slow decline in America. The concept “law” became less objective and, increasingly, a matter of opinion and who you know — or what pressure group you belong to, and how much sway that pressure group holds in Washington or the state government. Today’s politicians, Obama included, merely cash in — quite literally — on the destruction of the law. They’re less the cause of what went wrong than the embodiment of it.

To most people, sadly, it’s a self-evident given that government exists to take forty or fifty or even seventy percent of the nation’s wealth and do with it what it sees fit. That’s the whole problem. That’s why Obama is so arrogant and smug, and why he doesn’t care about recent election results. In his mind, he’s morally justified to spend other people’s money as he sees fit. It’s government’s mission, to him. Nobody will challenge him on this claim, which is why he’s such a runaway spender and taxer. He believes it’s the people’s entitlement — his people’s entitlement, the 51 percent or so who keep supporting people like him. It’s not individual rights or universal justice he’s after; it’s simply loot and plunder for the constituents who keep people like him in power. (Republicans are no different.)

Bastiat is getting to the fundamentals, something nobody in the mainstream is (yet) willing to do. There is no such thing as a right to another’s money or property. The “right” to health care enslaves doctors, and ultimately patients as well when government becomes the sole provider of medicine. The “right” to a home or a college education must be financed by somebody else. Ditto for any other “right” that government and the media make up or exaggerate into a crisis. By what right does the government determine who must finance these things for other people? What does that have to do with the protection of private property and individual rights and sovereignty under the law?

And forget about “the rich” financing all of this. There will never be enough rich to finance all the obligations and entitlements the federal government has taken on. That’s why the national debt is in the trillions of dollars, growing daily. The interesting thing is that nobody is talking about it. Both parties act and speak as if the debt doesn’t matter.

My question is this: If the national debt doesn’t matter, then why don’t we just subsidize everything imaginable by debt? Why should there be a debt limit at all? We keep raising the debt limit every year anyway, and nobody even contests that fact any longer. Haven’t we, in effect, decided that government may finance and borrow whatever it wishes, without limit? Why fight over the proposals Obama puts out? Just raise the debt into infinity. It doesn’t matter, right?

Of course, the problem is more than fiscal. It’s moral as well. When government intervenes and interferes in private activity — activity where there’s no force or fraud being committed by anyone –it can no longer act as an arbiter of justice. This would be like a policeman collecting bribes from certain citizens, and then being expected to act impartially when it comes time to arrest a crook, a thief or a murderer. There’s a reason why, even today, we don’t permit police and judges to take bribes. But politicians bribe constituent groups every day with billions of dollars in this or that pet project; and voters bribe them back by keeping them in office, decade after decade.

Is this law — or lawlessness? Is this pull and manipulation masquerading as civility and justice?

Most people seem to sense that something is terribly wrong with our whole government and society. Yet they don’t know who to blame. They tend to assume that it’s just the way it us. The more cynical among us have concluded that there cannot be a free society, not ever, because there are no principles by which one can sustain itself.

Yet there are. The United States sustained itself as a limited government for a long time. Only the remnants of that experiment remain. To restore civility and equal individual rights for all, we need merely demand that our politicians phase out all activities of government that don’t relate to keeping people free from violent or fraudulent criminals. Unfortunately, most people will not do this. They’re afraid and they’re ignorant. But they continue to resent how bad things are.

Notice Bastiat’s comment that such a government seeks to impose its will without risk. That’s exactly right. Remember, the politicians we elect have no risks. We give them power over money and resources they never created, and for which they never held responsibility. Wealth redistribution is really seizure, plain and simple. We’re no longer a nation of laws. Laws were supposed to protect rights, not spend other people’s money. Obama is not a president, other than in name. He’s a glorified pimp presiding over trillions of dollars in largely borrowed plunder. But his successors will be no better, unless we restore the concept of law as Bastiat described it.

 

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