Cook-outs, fireworks, parades. For all too many Americans, that’s what Independence Day is all about. Oh, excuse me. The 4th of July. Don’t want to be caught promoting actual “independence” on a government-sanctioned holiday.
Still, for those who today celebrate the Declaration of Independence - NOT the Declaration of July 4th - it’s important to reflect not only on the epic battle for freedom our Founders fought and won on our behalf, but the slow erosion of those freedoms ever since, an erosion fully anticipated by the Founders.
Thomas Jefferson, you’ll recall, warned us that “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” In other words, if we don’t keep our eyes open and stay on guard constantly, we could well end up losing the freedoms way too many of us now take for granted.
And Ben Franklin famously replied, when asked what type of government the Founders had established for us at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” The key words, of course, are “if you can keep it.” Franklin, too, realized that eternal vigilance and hard work would be necessary to keep a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
So how goes our eternal vigilance these days? Not so hot.
Columnist Steven Greenhut of the Orange County Register reminds us today that the government established by our Founders isn’t quite the same government we have today. As you grill up those burgers and oooh-and-ahhh the fireworks tonight, you’d do well to consider the Founders’ historical warnings and Greenhut’s modern-day observations. Eternal vigilance demands it, lest we lose our Republic. From Greenhut’s column this past Sunday…
“Clearly, by comparison with most countries, Americans do pretty well. There’s no Gestapo, dictator or prison camps for dissidents. There’s talk of building a wall at the border, but to keep people from coming in, not to keep them from getting out. Still, I think Americans would benefit from thinking more closely about the state of our liberty. Every few years, I write a column that updates the erosion of our freedoms. It mostly deals with simple, everyday stuff, but it’s rather telling. Here is my latest installment:
“If I want to build a new house, I need to petition any number of government agencies and commissions, and can build only what they allow. Those agencies decide not only if my project conforms to some basic, easily understood rules, but whether it conforms to their own preferences regarding style, color, historical influences, size, number of stories, and so forth. If I ever want to add on or improve that house, I must wait until a government inspector approves it. If I am a developer, and want to build a larger number of properties on a site, I must fight for years to get approvals – and usually the final project will bear little resemblance in style or design to my original vision.
“If I want to start a new business, I not only will have to pay a large portion of any earnings to the government, but I must first get all the necessary approvals from myriad governments. I must pay my employees a minimum rate determined by the government. They may only work the number of hours set by the government. If it’s a restaurant or business that serves the public, I must get a conditional-use permit – a long list of conditions that micromanage exactly how I run the place, from the hours to the number of tables, based on the whims of the commissioners who must approve the business.
“The government can, at any time, take my home or business and give it to someone else if officials, for any reason, prefer the new use to my use. The government can, at its discretion, steal all the value from my property by declaring it a wetland or by finding on it some ‘endangered’ rodent or other species. No compensation need be paid as long as I still have any use of the land.
“The government’s officers can launch a ‘no-knock’ raid of my home (if they get a tip about, say, a drug deal) and can shoot and kill me if they say that they viewed me as a threat. Abusive federal agents or local police officers can, by law in California, keep all their disciplinary records secret. Those same agents can arrest me and throw me in jail for decades for possessing those ‘drugs’ that the government determines to be illegal. Meanwhile, the government maintains files on all my personal and financial data and will use them to assure that I pay the amount of taxes the government determines that I must pay.
“If I refuse to pay the full amount, I will become a ward of one of the biggest growth industries in the country: the government-run prison system. I am free to pay about half of all my earnings to the government, which will use those taxes to erect a multitude of offices and pay its workers salaries and benefits that are far more than most of us will ever earn. The government’s ‘child protective services’ workers are free to take anyone’s children away from them based on their discretion. Parents are then forced into a totally secret court system, in which they must prove their innocence rather than having the government being forced to prove guilt.
“We are all free to travel where we choose after government agencies search, poke and prod us. We can drive on government roads, pay government tolls, fly out of government-owned airports and pay for government-issued bond debt. We are free to pay for the government schools, which teach our children what the government wants them to learn.
“The government can seize our personal property and not give it back even if we are cleared of any crime, and even place us in permanent detention, without any hope of legal representation, if the government determines that we are an enemy combatant. The government can bomb any government it chooses, based on any shoddy pretext (i.e., weapons of mass destruction). We are free to speak and write as we choose as long as the government doesn’t decide that we broke campaign-finance laws or engaged in ‘hate speech.’
“The 18th century German poet Johann Goethe said: ‘None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.’ Am I off-base to wonder whether we are careening down that road?”
As Yogi Berra might say, if Jefferson and Franklin were alive today they’d be rolling in their graves.
Posted on July 4th, 2007 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: National
Hard to believe, but Steven Greenhut voted for the people that did all this to him.
There is a flight out of Orange County Airport to Canada tonight at 2000 hrs.
At least he doesn’t live at Lake Tahoe. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency decided that if trees were cut down, erosion would result, the runoff would go into the lake, and the clarity of the water would diminish. As a result, last week’s Angora fire saw 3100 acres burned up and 300+ residential and commercial buildings destroyed. But hey, at least the water’s still clear.
I was with Greenhut right up until he started spewing the Pacifist-Left/Paul line on foreign policy - what the great Jeane Kirkpatrick referred to as the “Blame America First” lobby: “The government can bomb any government it chooses, based on any shoddy pretext (i.e., weapons of mass destruction).”
I would like to ask Mr. Greenhut what, specifically, he finds “shoddy” about the threat of WMDs as a justification for knocking out a dictator - assuming he’s referring to Saddam Hussein here. The only valid criticism one can make of the WMD pretext for invading Iraq was that it was unneccessary - there was ample justification for deposing Hussein on the grounds of human rights alone.
When a political leader sets himself up as a de facto dictator and suspends all human rights, it is a vapid contradiction to assert that that same dictator can somehow make a claim of national sovereignty - which concept is based upon the very rights he himself has declared null and void. What it amounts to is the assertion that there can be “a right to violate rights.” In logic it’s called the “stolen concept fallacy”; in practice it’s called totalitarianism.
The result can no longer be called a nation, rather a country-sized concentration camp that begs liberation by any nation with the means and inclination to do so. There is no *obligation* to do so as an act of altruism - as Clinton asserted in Kosovo and Bosnia - but neither can there be any moral prohibition against it. On a political plane Washington’s admonition against “entangling alliances” certainly comes into play and so can the isolationist view. But again, a regime that subordinates rights to tyranny cannot itself lay claim to rights and aside from the peripheral issue of war finance there is no immoral component to the decision. For a discussion of moral culpability for “collateral damage” in civilian deaths resulting from military action, I can honestly make no improvement on the November 2001 article “The Justice of War” by Patrick Stephens. (Google it.)
Beyond all of that we have Greenhut’s 20/20 hindsight - willful evasion of the fact that, based on *the intel available at the time* nearly every major D.C. politician of every ideological stripe went on record declaring Hussein’s apparent WMD program as a clear and present danger to the United States and its allies. I for one grow weary of having to remind fashionable pacifists of this fact of recent history. It’s a little like trying to teach a cat to fetch - the idiot will just sit there, crosseyed, and stare at your finger.
Arrgh.
An ostrich-mode foreign policy was only practicable when crossing an ocean was a matter of months. In an era when trans-oceanic transportation is a matter of hours and communication a matter of nanoseconds, it can only be described as suicide, or more precisely, “victim-assisted homicide.” It’s sad that an article with such valuable insight is marred by such a horrific gaffe.
TheObjectiveEye: So when do you propose we invade Iran, North Korea, Sudan and all the other countries whose governments we have “ample justification for deposing…on the grounds of human rights alone”?
Once…again:
The instant they pose a clear and present danger to the United States and/or its allies.
The - ball - is - over - *there*.
…and just for the sake of contemplating the rhetorical question Mr. Smith would rather that people not ask:
So presumably you are an advocate of locating and installing a replacement dictatorship in Iraq that also uses nerve gas on entire cities and rips out tongues, performs Gibsonesque floggings, feeds into industrial plastic shredders, tortures with electric drills, electrocutes, binds and pushes off of fifty-foot rooftops, performs routine rapes in rooms designed for the purpose on any dissenters, and periodically threatens neighboring nations with obliteration?
Nice to know where you stand on this, thanks.
TheObjectiveEye: First you write, “The only valid criticism one can make of the WMD pretext for invading Iraq was that it was unneccessary - there was ample justification for deposing Hussein on the grounds of human rights alone.”
Then you write that we should invade Iran, North Korea, Sudan, etc., “The instant they pose a clear and present danger to the United States and/or its allies.”
What happened to your original premise that invasions of countries to remove totalitarian regimes could be justified “on the grounds of human rights alone,” regardless of these countries’ capabilities (or lack thereof) to attack the US?
Also, I’m a little unclear on the concept of “a clear and present danger to the United States and/or its allies.” Which allies are you talking about, and when did the US ever invade another country because the country posed a clear and present danger to one of our allies? Hypothetically, if North Korea has nukes, and also has the capability of launching these nukes against Japan, and also is led by a madman, at what point do you propose that the US invade North Korea?
TheObjectiveEye: “…and just for the sake of contemplating the rhetorical question Mr. Smith would rather that people not ask”
I have absolutely no problem with your rhetorical question. As I asked in my previous posting, when do you propose we invade Iran, North Korea, Sudan and all the other countries whose governments we have “ample justification for deposing…on the grounds of human rights alone”? Is this a case of you justifying the need to invade Iraq to eliminate human rights abuses in that country, but you feel no need invade other countries because of their human rights abuses? Or do you feel that the other countries are committing lesser and thus more acceptable degrees of human rights abuses so we wouldn’t be justified in invading them?
Someone is not bothering to read very carefully, and failing to do so intentionally. So I’ll ask him to pay attention this time ’cause I really don’t care to repeat this yet again after JohnSmith posts his apparently obligatory schoolyard Last Word…
Original premise - without Smith’s editing in service of the Straw Man: “…there was ample justification for deposing Hussein on the grounds of human rights alone… There is no *obligation* to do so as an act of altruism - as Clinton asserted in Kosovo and Bosnia - but neither can there be any moral prohibition against it.”
Now, to draw a straight line to the ball, maybe with raw catnip: We needn’t have invaded Iraq when we did - and I would argue that Iran, not Iraq, presented and still presents a greater threat to America and the West, even had Hussein been found with WMDs other than his chemical weapons. But there is no moral prohibition against our having invaded Iraq given Hussein’s human rights violations.
And again, what Mr.Smith is strenuously evading here - along with the entire history of two World Wars - is his own unstated premise that Hussein, Kim, and Ahmad-in-a-jar, Castro, Chavez and half a dozen lesser others have a legitimate right to commit atrocities, including genocide, against forcibly-detained populations as a matter of state policy.
For that, inescapably, is what Mr. Smith is arguing here.
Now recess is over, I’ll leave John to plow through another Last Word. Have at it.
John Smith,
I’m with you, “OE” changed his argument and as Ihave been told, thatis the practice of one who is losing their argument…..clearly he limited his debate to humanitary intervention.
As to WMD debate, it is not relevent. As former Treasurer Paul O’Neil and others have memorialized, the first meeting of the NSA dealt with attacking Iraq. Others memorialized Bush’s intention to attack Iraq even before he was elected;
” Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.
“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.” bushautobiography
Southy: Thanks, it’s good to be on your side for a change.
TheObjectiveEye: There’s no need for me to get in the Last Word. I’m more than happy for the readers of this website to peruse your comments and draw their own conclusions.
Neener neener, now you can ring the bell and call us all back into class. Unless of course you want to continue the game of attributing opinions to me that I don’t hold.
I knew this would devolve into yet another exercise in 20/20-hindsight Bush-bashing, but a bit of blatant falsehood needs to be illuminated, namely southy’s claim that “‘OE’ changed his argument” and “clearly he limited his debate to humanitary intervention.”
As Mr. Smith has said, the posts here speak for themselves - though I prefer Jon Anderson’s reference to Asimov’s Foundation: “The truth is written all along the page.” I addressed both the political and the ethical in my original post. Take a look. So much for “‘OE’ changed his argument.”
The confusion being cultivated by these two arises from the fact that there are two related components, the moral and the practical, to any evaluation of jus ad bellum. Ethics must precede Politics logicallly, but this latter, as a practical application of ethics, is subject to context. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Ron Paul’s otherwise stellar platform is marred by a kind of Kantian imperative on foreign policy: isolationism in militant defiance of context, a.k.a. Ostrich Mode.
The United States, in defense of a vital ally that Iran’s dictator has openly and repeatedly sworn to obliterate with the nukes he is developing as you read this, should have destroyed Iranian nuclear weapons facilities immediately after we had confirmation of their existence and function. To paraphrase economist and columnist Walter Williams, we needn’t even go to war with Iran, rather send in some cruise missiles “and just bomb the hell out of them.” Then send a mild-mannered communique to the effect that any future attempt to develop nuclear weapons will produce the same result, and have a nice day. Hopefully someone in the Administration will come to their senses and get this done before Israel - or Manhattan or D.C. - is incinerated as a direct result of inaction.
North Korea is even worse, having attempted (with almost comedic failure,) to test missile systems for nuclear delivery - not to mention concentration camps reportedly as vast as metropolitan Washington. North Korea’s context, however, is significantly more difficult due to the rather delicate proximity and relationship we’re maintaining with communist China. I am not privy to the classified strategic details of that complex balancing act, but the context dictates diplomatic pressure to bring about some improvement in the situation between Mr. Kim’s ears, if at all possible. As a last resort a full-blown military strike - perhaps even in conjunction with China - cannot be taken off the table. Assuming we value the lives of the residents of Southeast Asia, that is.
What I’m smelling from the pacifists here is the odor of moral relativism - the unspoken premise that there are no absolutes, that there are no good nations (such as th United States or Israel or our other allies,) and no evil nations (such as Hussein’s Iraq, Kim’s N. Korea, Ahmad-in-a-jar’s Iran, Castro’s Cuba, etc.) and that therefore “Who are we to say anyone else is wrong?”
Yet there is a fact of life that cannot be long evaded: Evil, like Good, is a perennial element of the human condition, one of two options in man’s hard-wired faculty of volition.
Evil must be fought tirelessly and in every era or it will destroy the good through the only power at its disposal: default. The childlike naïveté of pacifism and isolationism is, as I said above, suicidal. Ordinarily a suicide doesn’t affect anyone but the one committing the act; suicidal foreign policy not only endangers the lives of millions of other people, it’s an abdication of the very purpose for which governments are formed. As Mr. Stephens put it shortly after the 9-11 atrocity:
“…allowing the threat of future attacks to remain, would be a horrible abdication of the government’s responsibility to its citizens. Peace, no less than war, may be unjust. Not only must a nation forbear from an unjust war, it must also forbear from an unjust peace.”
I agree fully.