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FFF Email Update — July 3, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
Lessons from the Fourth of July
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The true revolutionary aspect of the Fourth of July was not the military battles that the English colonists waged against the British Empire. Instead, it was the notion that was expressed in the Declaration of Independence: man’s rights do not come from government but rather from nature and God.
Throughout history, people have been taught to believe that their government is the source of their rights. The consequence of that mindset is logical — people express gratitude to their public officials for their freedom.
Along came the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, and that notion of people’s rights was upended by a truth that would forever send shivers of fear through every statist official throughout the world. Since man’s rights are inherent, fundamental, natural, and God-given, there’s no need for people to ever be grateful to public officials for such rights.
More important, since such rights are God-given and natural, public officials have no business interfering with them, manipulating them, and infringing upon them. In fact, as the Declaration of Independence indicates, people call government into existence to protect the exercise of such rights, not to regulate or interfere with them.
Contrary to popular misconception, the American Revolution was not fought by Americans against some foreign government. Instead, it was fought by Englishmen against their own government. The signers of the Declaration were as much English citizens as you and I are American citizens.
Those Englishmen understood an important point, one that all too many modern-day Americans unfortunately have forgotten: that the biggest threat to the freedom and well-being of a citizenry lie not with foreign regimes or foreign citizens (including terrorists). Instead, it lies with one’s very own government.
As the Declaration of Independence points out, whenever any government becomes destructive of the rights and liberties of the people, it is the right of the people to alter and abolish such government and to institute new government that is limited to its proper role of protecting, not destroying, the rights of the people.
That’s in fact what the Constitution is all about, which must be construed in the context of the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution called into existence a new government whose powers would be expressly limited to those enumerated in the document itself.
But even that wasn’t sufficient for our American ancestors, who held grave reservations about calling into existence a federal government, again because of the threat it posed to their fundamental rights and freedoms. That’s why they insisted on the Bill of Rights as a condition for approving the Constitution.
The First Amendment expressly acknowledges that the biggest threat to such fundamental rights as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and peaceable assembly is the U.S. Congress and, by implication, the rest of the federal government. One of the primary purposes of the First Amendment is to ensure that the citizenry can bring peaceful change in government policies through the exposition of truth and the dissemination of ideas. When people are free to criticize government actions, then there is the potential for change in a positive direction. Even totalitarian regimes — those with total power and all the guns — understand this principle well, given their propensity to shut down articles, speeches, and peaceful demonstrations.
Obviously the First Amendment is insufficient if the government has the power to seize people, lock them up without a trial, and torture them into falsely confessing their guilt to bogus crimes. That’s what the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments are all about. Again, those amendments were an express acknowledgement by our American ancestors that Americans faced a constant threat on the part of their own government to do these types of things to the citizenry.
And of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the Second Amendment, which actually should have been made the First Amendment, given its supreme importance. For when the citizens are free to keep and bear arms, would-be tyrants, for obvious reasons, think twice about depriving well-armed citizens of their fundamental, God-given rights.
On the Fourth of July, let us celebrate the courage and wisdom of our American ancestors, who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in the defense of the most radical exposition of rights and liberties in history. Let us also pledge to do all we can to build on what they began, with the aim of taking America to the highest reaches of freedom ever seen by mankind.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
The Banality of Evil Applies to Everyone
by Jacob G. Hornberger
One of the aspects of the Iraq War that has fascinated me the most is how CIA agents and U.S. soldiers could actually bring themselves to kill, torture, and sexually abuse Iraqis. After all, don’t forget that neither the Iraqi people nor their government participated in the 9/11 attacks. The worst “crime” that any Iraqi committed against any American was resisting an unlawful invasion of his country.
Nonetheless, even though the Iraqi people were innocent of any attacks on the United States, many CIA agents and most U.S. soldiers have been able to bring themselves to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in an invasion and occupation of a country that never attacked the United States, and murder, torture, and sexually abuse dozens of Iraqis detainees and prisoners.
How is a government able to bring men and women to do such things to people who never did anything to harm the United States?
I’m currently reading a fascinating book entitled Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning. It’s about a police unit from Hamburg, Germany, which was assigned the task of rounding up hundreds of Jews in villages in Poland and shooting them at point-blank range.
What makes the book interesting is that the members of the unit were not hard-core SS troops or Gestapo members but rather ordinary middle-aged German men, many of whom had regular jobs at home and were simply members of a reserve police unit.
When the German unit arrived at a Polish village called Jozefow, it soon learned the nature of its mission from its battalion commander, a 53-year old German captain, Wilhelm Trapp, who was an ordinary career policeman back home.
Trapp explained to his men that they were to search targeted homes in Jozefow for Jews, round them up, march them into the forest, and kill them by shooting them at point-blank range. Elderly Jews and infants were to be killed on the spot in their homes.
Appreciating the difficult nature of this task, Trapp offered his men the opportunity to opt out of the mission, which undoubtedly was one of the reasons that two of his subordinate officers later described him as weak and unmilitary. A few men opted out of the mission.
As the round-ups and shootings proceeded, however, more men began dropping out, unable to stomach the point-blank shootings of defenseless men, women, and children. They were accused of being cowardly and weak by their fellow soldiers who continued to do the shootings.
Most of Unit 101 continued performing their assigned task. They convinced themselves that it was okay to continue following orders because Germany was at war, the Jews were part of the enemy, and the enemy was killing Germans every day.
The Iraqi people never did anything bad to the American people. In fact, many Iraqis admired and respected the United States. Yet, CIA agents and U.S. soldiers had no moral reservations whatsoever in following orders to attack and occupy Iraq and kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the process.
Moreover, the CIA agents and U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib obviously had no moral reservations about the murder, torture, and sex abuse committed against Iraqi prisoners, notwithstanding the fact that the Iraqis, again, had never attacked the United States. The thought that Iraqi prisoners should be treated with decency and respect, especially given that they were the defenders, not the attackers, obviously never even entered the minds of the CIA agents and U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib.
The rationales for the killings, murders, torture, and sex abuse varied from agent to agent and soldier to soldier. Some said, “We’re doing it because Saddam Hussein was about to attack the U.S. with WMDs.” Others said, “We’re doing it because Islam is at war against the West.” Others said, “We’re doing it to stop them from killing us here.” Others said, “We’re doing it to bring democracy to their land.” Others said, “We’re doing it because of what al-Qaeda did on 9/11.” Others said, “We’re doing it for freedom.” The more honest of them said, “We’re doing it because we’ve been ordered to do it.”
Today, many U.S. officials are cavalierly claiming that the invasion and occupation of Iraq — along with the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people — have been worth it because “democracy” has been brought to Iraq. Clearly they would not be saying the same if it had been hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and CIA agents who had been killed, maimed, and tortured instead.
Of course, this mindset of callous indifference toward Iraqi life didn’t begin with the U.S. war of aggression on Iraq. Many years ago, it was also reflected by the mindset of U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright, who announced to the world that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the U.S. and UN sanctions on Iraq had been “worth it.”
With the phrase “the banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt explained that the great evils of history are not executed by evil sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who meekly accept the rationales of their government and who participate in the evil under the belief that their actions are normal.
Arendt’s concept applies not just to Germans, but to everyone else as well.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Health Care Is Not a Right
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Amidst all the health care debate, there is one underlying assumption that hardly anyone challenges: the notion that people have a right to health care. The truth is that it’s a nonsensical notion. People no more have a right to health care than they have a right to education, food, or clothing.
After all, what does a right to health care mean? If I have a right to something, then doesn’t that mean that you have a correlative duty to provide it? If you’re a doctor, then it means that you are required to serve my needs, like it or not. If I need an operation, then you cannot say “no” because that would be denying me my right to health care.
Thus, isn’t the right to health care actually a power to force doctors to provide people with medical services?
Now, the proponent of health care as a right might say, “That’s not what I mean. Why, to force doctors to provide health care services to others would be akin to slavery, especially if it’s for free. I think that doctors deserve to be paid for their services.”
Fair enough. But then doesn’t the right to health care entail the power to force someone else to pay for it? Let’s assume, for example, that I need hip-replacement surgery that will cost $25,000 and that I don’t have the money to pay for it. Since I have a right to health care, that means that I have a right to get the money from you to pay for my operation. It also means that you can’t say no because that would be interfering with my right to health care.
Thus, the right to health care entails the power of everyone to get into the pocketbooks of everyone else. That’s not only a ridiculous notion of rights but also a highly destructive one. Since obviously people can’t go and take the money from others directly, it inevitably entails converting government into an engine of seizure and redistribution. Or to paraphrase Bastiat, such a concept of rights converts government into a fiction by which everyone is doing his best to live at the expense of everyone else.
Meanwhile, while everyone is using government to get into everyone else’s pocketbook to pay for his health care expenses, he is simultaneously doing his best to protect his own income and assets from being plundered by the government to fund everyone else’s health care bills.
Over time, it is easy to see how such a system devolves in everyone’s warring against everyone else. It is also easy to see that such a system obviously does not nurture friendly and harmonious relations between people. This is especially true when these types of “rights” expand to such areas as education, food, clothing, and housing.
The true nature of rights — the type of rights the Founding Fathers believed in — involved the right of people to pursue such things as health care, education, clothing, and food and that government cannot legitimately interfere with their ability to do so.
Thus, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as described in the Declaration of Independence, doesn’t mean that someone else is forced to provide you with the means to sustain or improve your life. It means that government cannot enact laws, rules, or regulations that interfere with or infringe upon your right to pursue such things.
When Americans began looking upon rights as some sort of positive duty on others to provide them with certain things, that was when the quality of health care in America began plummeting. That was what Medicare and Medicaid were all about — the so-called right of poor people and the elderly to health care. It is not a coincidence that what began has the finest health care system in the world has turned into a system that is now in perpetual crisis.
There is one — and only one — solution to America’s health care woes — and it lies not in a government takeover of health care. In fact, the solution is the exact opposite: It is the end of all government involvement in health care — a total separation of health care and the state. That would entail not a reform or improvement of Medicare and Medicaid but rather their total repeal.
At its core, the solution to America’s health care crisis lies in the abandonment of the notion that health care is a right. Once people reach this fundamental realization, as our American ancestors did, the nation can get back on the road toward to a healthy, prosperous, and harmonious society.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.