Back to Basics

The fundamental difference between a free society and a nanny state, is that in a free society, negative rights are maximized between the individual and the government, and the individual and other individuals. In a nanny state, positive rights are maximized between the individual and the government, and both positive and negative rights are maximized between the individual and other individuals.

What does that mean? A negative right in relation to the government is a freedom from compulsion. Freedom of Speech is a negative right that prevents government from interfering with speech. Similarly freedom of religion and the right to bear arms create negative spaces in religion and firearms which the government may not intrude upon.

When you hear talk of a right to health care or a right to housing by the government, those are positive rights, creating an obligation on the part of the government to carry out a course of action, e.g. free  housing or cheap health care.

This is an obligation or entitlement by the government to you. But since all government rights devolve to the people, what this really means is that we are collectively obligated to provide health care or housing. And that we are enjoyed from collectively using the mechanisms of government to interfere with speech, religion or firearms ownership.

On an individual basis, negative rights are freedoms that I have from you, and positive rights are obligations that I have to you. A negative right prevents you from trespassing on my property, on the other hand a positive right demands that I put up bilingual signs out of respect for your culture.

A society where negative rights are maximized, values individuality over social harmony. However a society where positive rights are maximized values social harmony over individual freedom.

The major shift in American life has been from a social contract based on negative rights to one based on positive rights. Negative rights have been in decline for some time, even some amendments in the Bill of Rights have been severely weakened– and most of the civil rights debates today are over positive rights.

This is the victory of the French Revolution over the American Revolution. The American Revolution was aimed at a change of government, not a social transformation. It saw repression in political terms, that once removed and backed by negative rights, would enable a free society to maintain itself. But the French Revolution aimed at a complete social transformation, not merely deposing a king, but creating a new revolutionary consensus.

The fundamental difference between the American Bill of Rights and the French Rights of Man ,is that the former is unconcerned with the society, and the latter makes its principles and even most of its negative rights contingent on social harmony.

Consider the difference between the Declaration of Independence’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” and the Declaration of the Rights of Man’s “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.

The debt ceiling debate is less about spending than it is about the purpose of government. Under the impact of an economic recession, the train of the Great Society is approaching the edge of the New Frontier. Both sides are still trying to work out a New Deal, but another cuts and spending formula is not the solution. What we need is a serious and earnest discussion about why we are compulsively spending money.

A cocaine addict who runs out of money doesn’t have a spending problem, he has a drug problem. Telling him to cut back on how much money he spends on cocaine, or to shop around for cheaper cocaine isn’t the solution. It’s not about how much he’s spending, but about why. The problem isn’t in the math, it’s in the mindset.

Our cocaine is social justice. Like most junkies who are willing to sell anything and everything to keep the supply coming, Obama’s position in the budget debate is take everything– especially the military, but leave the social justice and the big government that administers it on the table. And also like most junkies, he has an endless supply of self-righteous speeches denouncing the people who just want him to stop.

In the rush of words, he postures, conflates compromise with confrontation, threatens and urges everyone to work together. There is no consistent message, only egotistical aggression and defensive need. Strip away the verbiage and you come away with a chorus of, “Mine, My Way, Mine”.

With all addictions, it is important to look for the root cause. The psychological weakness that allows the chemical rush to take over and become the defining principle of life. In this case it is a basic split over the purpose of government.

These competing visions of government are rival philosophies with differing views on human nature. They cannot even agree on what the nature of “fair” is and that makes reconciling on a national agenda nearly impossible. Is fairness socially determined or self-determined. Is it the function of government to spread the wealth or to protect a system where wealth acquisition is accessible. Is the economy a function of individual choices or organizational mandates.

Government as the caretaker of the system and of Big Aunty who uses the system to make society fairer. Both claim populist allegiances but any system that sets out to remake society is doomed to an elitist and totalitarian nature. The only authentic populists are protesting in reaction to Big Aunty and her nanny state.

The functional state is clashing with the utopian state. The functionalists want to trim back the utopian programs of the state and pare it back down to its vital functions. But the utopians don’t even recognize the economy as something apart from the dictates of the state. Spending never has to be regulated, because it is only a micro-function of their system whose negative effects can be nullified through other programs. Or, “Why cut spending when you can just print more money.”

The economic solipsism of the left may be irresponsible lunacy, but it is part and parcel of their approach to everything. Their utopian state and its philosopher-czars are given the power to alter everything without a single ray of light allowed to penetrate the gloom of their dogma.

The most pervasive myth of the welfare state is the altruism of the public sector. In this mythology, the private sector is run by a bunch of greedy businessmen who get rich by making money off people’s misery. While the public sector is run by altruists who want nothing except to help those left behind by the private sector. Capitalists meet the Anti-Capitalists.

But actually it’s the public sector that does a much better job of making money off people’s misery. Some parts of the private sector do deliberately seek out ways to feed off poverty and keep their victims poor, most notably in the lending and financial services industry, but for the most part the private sector makes money off willing customers. How do you sell products and services to people who can’t afford them? Unless you trap them into a cycle of obligation, you can’t. And such cycles are finite. Eventually the people you’re feeding off have nothing more to give you. That’s not an ideal business model for corporations who generally look for ways to build life-long relationships. To make money selling products and services, you need repeat customers who can afford what you’re offering.

For the private sector to succeed, it needs a prosperous customer base. The public sector doesn’t. It just needs a collective ‘Them’ to pay the bills. The public sector makes its money from failure. Human suffering creates more demand for its services. The more people are out of work, can’t pay their bills and need help– the more the public sector grows.

The PayDay loan industry and Fannie Mae both preyed on minorities and the poor. But the latter’s business model was completely unsustainable and its greed was completely irresponsible. Yet all this was concealed under the veneer of altruism.

The public sector altruism myth is just that, a myth. It’s a destructive myth because of the basic conflict between its inner and outer goals.

The outer goal of a car company might be to sell more cars. Its inner goal is to sell enough cars that it can hire more workers and its executives can go to the Bahamas next month. There’s no major conflict between these two goals. Not unless everyone there decides to make bad cars and misrepresent them, and then use the money to expand the assembly line and go to the Bahamas anyway. There are businesses that work that way, but they don’t have much of a future. Sell people bad cars and you’ll lose customers. And then the only way you can stay in business is if the public sector begins subsidizing your company. A bad company is either a rolling scam that depends on luring in gullible new customers or a public sector charity case.

The outer goal of a welfare program might be to help its clients. But its inner goal is to get more funding so as to add jobs and so whoever is at the top can go to the Bahamas next month for a conference on global poverty.

Proof that you don’’t have to live in New York or Hollywood to be a left-wing knothead was the decision by a Chicago high school to boycott a basketball tournament in Arizona because someone — the principal perhaps — opposed Arizona’s immigration policy. A policy, as we all know, that is the mirror image of federal law. Then, having shown the world what they think of those racists in Arizona, they went off to play an exhibition game in a country that serves as a role model for freedom-loving people everywhere…China!

Leftists like to think of themselves as clear-thinking realists who are sensitive to nuance and irony. In reality, they are like little children who regard fairy tales as non-fiction. For instance, they champion socialism even though the past hundred years have proven time and again that it doesn’t work in practice the way it does in theory. On the contrary, in every country where it has existed, it has inevitably led to loss of liberty, widespread poverty and mass murder on a scale that has no parallel in human history. Point out this obvious fact to a liberal, and once he gets done calling you a greedy, heartless, bloodthirsty reactionary, he’ll insist that we haven’t yet seen true socialism. Actually, we have, though. We’ve seen it in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, in China, Cambodia, North Korea and Cuba.

The reason that capitalism works and socialism doesn’t is because, unlike the former, the latter doesn’t factor in human nature. Most people want to compete — whether it’s for status, glory or riches — and they want for themselves and their children the opportunity to excel to the best of their ability.

What conservatives object to isn’t a level playing field, but a game in which they’re expected to take a dive, lest the lazy, the inept and the selfish, wind up feeling like losers.

Conservatives don’t even object to the redistribution of wealth. But they want to be in control of how much they distribute and to whom, and not leave those decisions in the hands of Washington weasels. It’s what conservatives, the most generous people in America, refer to as charity. As they see it, their hard-earned money should go to the elderly and the infirm, not to the young and able-bodied who regard themselves as entitled simply because of their race or country of origin. Just because some people wallow in self-pity, portraying themselves as victims of an oppressive society, doesn’t make it so. As I see it, they and their outlandish demands should be ignored or, better yet, ridiculed.

Which reminds me, it recently occurred to me why among my least favorite musical genres is the one known as the blues. It’s because the songs all reek of self-pity, which is one of the most nauseating of all human emotions.

Finally, the mass media spent an inordinate amount of time trying to force George W. Bush to fess up to his mistakes. But I notice that nobody ever asks that of Barack Obama. At long last, the reason dawned on me.

Mankind has been searching for the perfect government, longer than it has been searching for the ability to transmute lead into gold. But while transmutation can turn lead into gold, no amount of energy in the world can make a government perfect. The atomic structures of every metal are a known quantity, but human beings are not. And never can be.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies not just to electrons, but even more so to the paired entanglement of government and the governed. No system that rules over men can ever work perfectly. Nor was it ever meant to. But that hasn’t stopped progressive ideologies and philosophies from trying over and over again in age after age. Their goal is to create a perfect government that can then turn out perfect men.

Most such philosophies seek to use the power of government to regiment and thereby uplift man by imposing their system on him. Society is their petri dish. The citizens are their microbes. Squirt a drop here or there to see what develops. If the American experiment was in self-government, most of its modernist counterparts were experiments in comprehensive government. In the absolute imposition of modern scientific government to make its citizens better people.

The problem with setting out to create the perfect government is that it demands perfect people, among both government and the governed. You can turn government into a machine, but you can’t turn the people who run it or the people who live under it into machines. Most governments, even the bad ones, recognize this. A tyrant knows his limits, a progressive does not. His goal passes beyond the relative power of a tyrant, to the absolute power of a god. The tyrant seeks to dominate men. The progressive wants to recreate them.

The perfect government represents an idea in its chrysalis. It is more than a set of offices, rather it is a set of beliefs about how people should live. The perfect government is a plan for making perfect men. It is a plan that never succeeds, but its moral authority nevertheless derives from that plan.

The people of the Soviet Union did not live under Communism. They lived under a Communist government whose goal was to one day achieve true Communism, at which point the whole system of authority wielded by the Party would no longer be needed. The rulers always assured the people that True Communism was only a generation away. Like a mirage, the perfect system, whether it is Communist or any other, is always on the horizon. And always just out of reach. When the idealists die off or are sent away to the Gulags, it recedes into nothing more than a justification for holding power.

Ideological government exists for the sake of the plan. Every time Obama gets up and delivers another teleprompter fed speech full of grandiose yet pointless spending plans, he is keeping hope alive in the plan.

The chaos in Egypt has brought forth pious praises of democracy. “So what if the Muslim Brotherhood seizes power,” the pundits ask, “as long as there are democratic elections.” But what is the virtue of democracy anyway?

The one fundamental virtue of democracy is that it is the widest possible means of distributing power within a system. And that leads to a system that is only as good and bad as the sum of its voters. It is possible to have a democracy of cannibals, so long as the majority agrees that’s the way to go. Or a democracy in which a quarter of the population has no legal or civil rights whatsoever. So long as that is the expressed will of the majority.

Democracy is a tool. It is a means, not the end. During the Bush Administration, democracy was treated as an end. The embedded assumption was that the average Arab-Muslim wanted the same things we did. A condensed version of the American Dream with jobs and freedom for everyone. And when given a chance at a voting booth, tyranny and terrorism would blow away like smoke, as a liberated electorate would choose leaders who would give them these things.

That universalization of the American Dream is part of the immigration narrative. It’s a powerfully appealing idea complicated by an uncomfortable reality. The reality that much of the rest of the world may not see things the way we do. They may want the same things, but they don’t want the same way or on the same terms. Our narrative tangles material success with political freedom. Theirs associates material success with honor and public order. The American Dream is not the same thing as the Muslim Dream. The conflict is apparent in the Clash of Civilizations. If we use our democracy to protect the American Dream, they will use theirs to protect the Muslim Dream.

As a means, democracy is only a tool for distributing power. And even our own country is torn apart by deep divisions over how that power should be distributed. The entire ObamaCare debate, the gap between rights and entitlements, is a continuation of an ongoing 20th century debate over what the ‘end’ of government should be. Such debates are fairly rare outside of a handful of Western countries. The assumption throughout most of the world is that the role of government is to regulate everything for the benefit of the public. Even the current unrest in the Middle East is driven less by human rights, and more by frustration over the failure of regional governments to maintain low food and fuel prices. (It seems like quite a contrast when compared with the Tea Party, which protests to demand less regulation.)

Those for whom the distribution of power is a means not an end, will exploit democratic elections as a means, while still imposing authoritarian rule. Islamist movements have exploited populism to get to power, but their philosophy of power is not populist, it is still top-down rule.

Some of you, despite being persons of reason, may still ask the question – what is so wrong with arbitrary rules. Although I am not certain how anyone of reason could still be asking such a question, I will indulge it briefly.

If life should be like a game and have rules that should govern it like such a contest, is it conceivable that one may participate and have a chance at victory if the rules are to change from start to finish? Is it conceivable to imagine that one may be able to plan for the future and plot a course to victory if the laws are subject to change, perhaps in favor of the opponent, upon the whims of those in charge?

Of course not. And life is indeed like a game played on any field, table or board.

Only when rules are immutable can one, except by the sheer preponderance of luck or through the exertion of influence upon the judges, hope to have any chance at obtaining their pursuit be it victory in the game or a shot at their own happiness. Thus arbitrary rules are abhorrent to any reasoned man and we shall lay such foolishness that may promote otherwise to rest.

You no doubt have the reason to understand why inalienable rights exist and why their pursuit and defense once captured by the public is true and noble. As a reasoned being you have no doubt the wisdom to understand that of which I just spoke where societies that promote liberty are good and those that seek oppression are bad and that such good or bad stems from how well inalienable rights are preserved within the citizenry.

But indulge me if you will as I put my own thoughts, which I am sure are your own, out before you naked and boldly for the purpose already stated; to leave no doubt that such is not illogic masquerading as reason.

I hold not that inalienable rights are best because they are simply said to be immutable. Perish that thought from you minds, because anything can be contrived as being such. Rather I hold that they are best because they are just as well as truly immutable.

One must consider diligently what the best foundation for a society to be based on is. Should it be based on the foundation of simple decrees by a man or groups of men as to what the rules for the day should be? Would these rules most likely be as ever changing as the loose and shifting sand on the beach as it is pounded by the ocean waves? Would they not stand the highest chance of change with each new ruler bringing in a new tide?

What becomes of any structure based on such a foundation? Does it not crack and eventually fall if the groundwork is not sound and immutable?

But immutability alone is not, as I have said, a good enough standard. For it is true that a long succession of like minded rulers unkind to liberty would likely maintain potentially very similar rules, if not exactly the same ones, if all were inclined to the same purpose. If such rules, which are now essentially immutable, are bad the structure that is built upon them, such as any foundation poorly constructed, may not fall at the moment but those living within would surely suffer. This is true because in the long term these rules shall fail to properly support the society.

So I say and confirm your own reasoned thoughts that only immutable and good laws provide the stable foundation for any structure and also a good quality of living for those within it. At the risk of offending those in the vast minority who have decided that they shall not believe in the clear and present God, I submit that such laws from God fit just such a purpose and a means by which to build a great society. Such laws become inalienable; beyond the reach of any man or society of men to grasp and take away.

I submit to you that God in commandments five through ten speaks of how man should interact with his fellow man.

My fellow Americans, I appeal to you that reason dictates to all that men can only exist in one of a few limited conditions while they are upon this Earth. I also submit to you for your consideration, and ultimately your acceptance after reasonable debate, that illogic and non-reason will masquerade in the guise of reason to try and subvert any discussion of this truth and that it will seek to lead us to the most unwelcome and unkind of these conditions. Further, I believe, that we all can accept that it is important that when seeking to tell right from wrong, reason from illogic, that it is important to see if there is indeed a mask to be lifted on that which comes before you and claims to be reason.

This is why I ask your indulgence with the following dissertation. Because I want you to be confident inasmuch as what I am about to discuss is reason and not illogic hidden behind a mask to deceive you into making a non-reasoned and ill advised choice.

With regards to the conditions in which man can exist in I submit that there are in truth but only three.

First, is that they can exist in a state of absolute anarchy; unbridled freedom where all men constantly look out for only their own betterment in an irrational and chaotic ballet. In such a state each man rises or falls purely by his own strength and cunning only to be outdone by one that is more so than he. While this sounds grand to a point, there is a downside when explored further. In such a state the only rights that any man has are those that he is able to take and hold by his own prowess. All persons must therefore constantly look over his or her own shoulders for the next threat to what he has or she has gained and be prepared to defend their gains by force.

Here, in this state of existence, if one can take a tract of land and defend it from all others that would desire that land then one inherently has a “right” to that land until someone else is able to take it from him. Here a man or woman only has a right to live so long as no other person wishes him or her dead and is capable of completing such a task.

While man can certainly exist in such a condition, I suggest that he does not and cannot remain there for more than an instance of history because of man’s social nature and intelligence. These things make it impossible for absolute anarchy to remain viable because the intelligence of those who are weaker individually allows them learn quickly that the best means to compete against the stronger, more cunning and better equipped is to form some sense of an accord and enter into a tribe or other type of society.