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2007: Prospects for Liberty (Part I)
As usual, I begin the New Year with my annual essay on “The Prospects for Liberty.” Like the past three years, 2007 offers mixed prospects for those of us who are radical individualists and thus value the freedom of the individual as our highest political value – those of us who support what Thomas Jefferson called “the holy cause of freedom.” (For more on radical individualism, see my 2006 essay.) Although there is some room for optimism about freedom’s future, for the most part there are challenges to liberty on virtually all fronts which are as great as, if not greater than, the challenges freedom-loving individuals have faced throughout human history. In this year’s essay I’ll discuss liberty in terms of some of its many facets. There is, essentially, one fundamental right that human beings have, by their nature as human beings: the right to be free – the fundamental right, properly identified in the Declaration of Independence as a natural and an inalienable right, the right to liberty. Properly considered, that right consists of an individual’s freedom of action in a social context: the freedom to act as one wills, the freedom to act as one chooses to act. And, as political philosophers going as far back as John Locke have recognized, that freedom, being natural, is limited only by the fundamental law of nature: that no one, in exercising their freedom, ought to harm others; or, in other words, that one’s freedom of action must not interfere with other persons’ equally fundamental rights to life and to liberty. Within that fundamental limitation (which distinguishes true freedom or liberty from what America’s founders would call “licentiousness,” the abuse of one’s freedom to the harm of others), there’s plenty of room for individuals to live their lives as they choose, in harmony with other free individuals. Or so it would be, in an ideal society that truly protects freedom under law (as America’s founders intended the United States of America to be, in their best, most intellectually clear, moments). Although liberty is one basic right, as I have noted above, it has many -- indeed, an infinitely large number of -- aspects, for freedom takes many forms. And liberty is under assault from many directions, for there are many different enemies of freedom. Nevertheless, the enemies of freedom (and the dangers to liberty, in its many facets) all have one thing in common: they all are some form of collectivism, the enemy of individualism and, hence, the enemy of the freedom of the individual. Collectivists all favor the use of political power – the use of force, the coercive power of government, the antithesis of liberty – to achieve their political goals. As philosopher Ayn Rand famously observed, "The issue of freedom vs. statism – or individual rights vs. government controls, or capitalism vs. socialism – is the basic issue of political philosophy. It is the root, the start, the fundamental which is involved in every specific measure, by which all else is determined, by the side of which all other considerations are trivia.” (Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Newsletter). The different forms of liberty discussed below, and the different threats to liberty also identified below, overlap with one another, for these categories are necessarily arbitrary. Again, it should be emphasized that liberty is one basic right with many, many facets – just as statism, or collectivism, the basic enemy of individual freedom, has many facets of its own.
Economic Freedom vs. The Welfare State
An essential aspect of liberty – unfortunately, the one least respected by modern-day “liberals” and given the least protection under modern U.S. constitutional law – is economic freedom, which entails the freedom of individuals to produce things of value to other individuals and to buy and sell those things in a free, capitalist market. In other words, it entails the freedom of persons, either individually or in association with others (including in the form of such business entities as partnerships and corporations), to pursue livelihoods and, if successful, to earn profits. Economic freedom, in short, is the practical manifestation of the fundamental right of individuals to pursue their own happiness: it provides the material means by which they can pursue happiness, by free trade – value for value – with other free individuals, for their mutual benefit. As I have previously noted here, those politicians and political activists on the left side of the traditional political spectrum who call themselves “progressives” are really not progressive at all, in the true sense of the word, for they are really reactionary, calling for paternalistic government policies and programs that undermine individual freedom. (For more on this, see my essay “Reactionary `Progressives’,” March 16, 2006.) The 20th-century regulatory and “welfare” state – which was itself modeled after the statist policies of late-19th-century German prime minister Otto von Bismarck – is the greatest enemy of economic freedom today; and unfortunately, the 20th-century welfare state seems to be expanding, as political developments in the 21st century thus far show continued retrogression (expanding the paternalism of the regulatory/welfare state), rather than genuine progress in favor of individual liberty. The victories that Democrats had in the November 2006 elections – and particularly their recapture of control over both houses of the U.S. Congress in 2007 – do not bode well for economic freedom this year. Perhaps the issue that best illustrates this is one of the pet policies of the Democrats, increasing the minimum wage. Voters in several states this fall approved increases in the state-mandated minimum wage, and the new Democrat leadership in Congress has made an increase in the federal minimum wage a top priority. Minimum-wage laws are among the worst forms of abridging individuals’ economic freedom, for their essence is to forbid persons whose labor is not worth the legally-mandated minimum from being able to earn a livelihood. (By abridging their economic freedom, such laws also violate individuals’ basic rights of autonomy – as well as their ownership of their own labor, their use of their own bodies and minds, and thus may rightly be considered an egregious violation of individual “privacy” rights – a fact that left-liberals refuse to acknowledge.) Minimum-wage laws thus harm younger, less-skilled workers, preventing them to acquire work experience and so trapping them into continued unemployment and dependence upon government “relief” programs – other harmful aspects of the welfare state – and thus, minimum-wage laws have the truly perverse effect of harming most those persons they are supposed to help. (For more on the harmful effects of minimum wage laws, see my essay “Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly,” October 20, 2006.) Democrats have been the principal advocates of increases in the minimum wage, in part because the policy is consistent with their general disdain for economic freedom (and hence their advocacy of government paternalism) and in part because minimum-wage laws also have the economic effect of strengthening the power of labor unions, a key constituency of the modern Democratic party. Although marginally better on this and many other related issues than Democrats, Republicans in general aren’t much better than Democrats in supporting individuals’ economic freedom. That’s because far too many Republicans – not only RINOs (“moderate” Republicans “In Name Only,” whose policies are virtually indistinguishable from those of Democrats), but even many social conservatives and so-called “neoconservative” Republicans – have made their peace with welfare state policies. (True, limited-government conservative and libertarian Republicans increasingly feel, with good reason, that they have lost control of the GOP.) Thus, although Republicans aren’t vocal advocates of increases in the minimum wage, neither are they principled opponents of this and other welfare-state follies. Both major American political parties – that is, both parts of the Demopublican-Replicrat coalition that controls American government (discussed below) – to the extent that they support welfare-state paternalism, are enemies of economic freedom. It’s just that on issues like the minimum wage, the Democrats are more dangerous enemies than Republicans, in general. With Democrats controlling Congress and many statehouses across the country, we can expect further erosion in the economic freedom of Americans, through the proliferation of minimum-wage laws, other labor laws (aimed at increasing the virtual monopoly powers that labor unions have in many states), laws and government regulations imposed on businesses (particularly mandates imposed on employers, which especially burden small businesses), and a myriad of other types of laws that restrict economic freedom, such as occupational licensing laws.
Freedom to Earn vs. Socialist Redistributionist Schemes
One of the most important aspects of economic freedom is the ability of individuals to be free not only to earn a livelihood but also to keep, as their own property, that which they have earned. This aspect of freedom, too, has been put in jeopardy with the rise of the welfare state in the early 20th century – and particularly because of one of the pet policies of early-20th-century “progressive” reformers, the Sixteenth Amendment and the federal income tax that it made possible. Not only does the income tax make it more politically feasible for government to forcibly seize, through the tax laws, the wealth that productive Americans have earned, but it also makes it easier to use government’s tax-and-spend powers to forcibly redistribute wealth, taking it from the productive people who created and earned it and giving it to the beneficiaries of government “entitlement” programs, who did not either create or earn it. Thus do the redistributionist policies of the welfare state not only abridge people’s property and economic freedom rights, but also violate fundamental principles of morality. (Income taxation is a form of legalized theft that also violates a fundamental principle of America’s founding, expressed in the Declaration of Independence – that the legitimate powers of government derive from the consent of the governed – as well as another fundamental principle of American government, the equal protection of the laws. Income taxation, by its very nature, permits a majority of lower-income persons to impose unequal burdens, in the form of taxes, on a small fraction of higher-income taxpayers, whose payments fund the vast majority of government programs, without their consent. For more on the injustice of the income tax, see my previous entry, “Those Damn Taxes,” April 15, 2004, as well as my 2001 op-ed, “Wealthy Americans Deserve Real Tax Relief.”) The small cuts in federal income taxes that President Bush pushed through a Republican-controlled Congress helped alleviate, but only in a miniscule way, this basic inequity in the way the federal government funds most of its programs. (In fact, notwithstanding Democrat propaganda to the contrary, the Bush tax cuts actually increased the inequity, for the percentage of federal revenue paid by the wealthiest of Americans through income taxation actually has increased over the past few years.) Only real tax reform – a “flat” income tax that applies the same rate to all income, or better yet, abolition of the income tax altogether, replacing it with a national sales tax – can truly alleviate the inequity of federal income taxation. Unfortunately, hopes for real reform are now dashed, with a new Democrat-controlled Congress, that’s likely to try to reverse the Bush tax cuts – that is, to raise federal income taxes, putting an even heavier burden on upper-income Americans (that is, the most productive among us) and so exacerbating the fundamental inequity of the current tax system. Social Security, Medicare, and other federally-funded “entitlement” programs represent another issue on which we can expect only further retrogression, rather than any genuine progress, in the new Democrat-controlled Congress. Like the minimum wage, Social Security epitomizes what’s wrong – and, in fact, evil – about the 20th-century welfare state: it uses the coercive power of government, exercised through the income tax on payrolls, to take wealth earned by younger workers and redistribute it to the elderly “beneficiaries” of the system; and moreover, it deprives all workers of the freedom to earn a far greater return on their income, what they could have earned if they were free to invest it themselves instead of being forced to “contribute” their Social Security taxes to a fictional “trust fund” that has a paltry rate of return. (The program really ought to be called “Socialist Insecure Shitty,” for it is each of these three things, as I argued in my essay “Socialist Insecurity,” February 15, 2005.) / President Bush still deserves to be commended for his courage, early in his presidency, to put the issue of Social Security reform on the table and for proposing the only true way of reforming the system, by privatizing it (albeit a modest proposal for partial privatization that would be only the beginning of genuine reform); but, unfortunately, Bush’s drive to reform Social Security failed, even in a Republican-controlled Congress (another sign of how far most Republican politicians have abandoned their limited-government principles and instead made peace with the welfare state). Indeed, Mr. Bush has signaled that he may be willing to make deals with Democrats – among them, a deal to increase payroll taxes on upper-income Americans by abolishing the current ceiling on Social Security payroll taxes – which would enable both parts of the Demopublican/Replicrat coalition to say they’ve “fixed” the Social Security crisis, when in fact all they’ve done is further exacerbate the program’s inequity and postponed, perhaps indefinitely, any genuine reform. As Philip Klein notes in an excellent article, “The Politics of Entitlement Reform,” in the November 2006 American Spectator, “the prospects for constructive reform remain bleaker than ever.” (Klein points out how Republicans in Congress “proved weak-kneed by abandoning the push for reform without even putting up a fight.” Moreover, he notes, “by flirting with Social Security reform and then abandoning it, Republicans enabled Democrats to scare voters, and because nothing passed, there was no reality check to demonstrate to voters that those scare tactics were baseless.” Klein concludes, presciently, that “[i]f a weakened President Bush is unable to tackle entitlements in his last two years in office, his failed bid for Social Security reform will forever symbolize how quickly his post-[2004] reelection ebullience faded, and his legacy on entitlements will be that he did more to expand them any president since Lyndon Johnson.”)
Property Rights vs. The Planners
Although usually regarded as a separate right, the right to property – that is, the right of individuals exclusively to possess, use, and transfer property in all forms (both material and intangible, real and personal) – is another fundamentally important aspect of liberty. No one can be considered truly free if they do not have full ownership rights over their own property, including exclusive rights to what they create and produce. (Communist systems are inherently tyrannical because they do not recognize private property rights. Socialist and fascist systems, which nominally recognize private property, so subordinate property rights to collective demands that, in practice, they render property rights virtually meaningless. “Mixed” systems, like those in the United States and Europe, are free societies only to the extent that they truly respect private property rights and the free economic markets that make capitalism and property rights viable.) And yet, like economic freedom, the right to property is not much respected by modern-day “liberals” – or in modern American constitutional law. Although the framers of the U.S. Constitution explicitly protected property rights as fundamental rights in many respects, those provisions of the Constitution – such as the so-called “Takings Clause” of the Fifth Amendment – have been largely ignored or misinterpreted by the Supreme Court and other courts. Rather than following the text of the Constitution and the restrictions it places on government “takings” of private property (the Fifth Amendment limits takings to “public uses” and requires just compensation to be paid to property owners), courts have allowed government to regulate the use of property, through zoning laws and environmental laws, holding that such regulation does not constitute “taking” of the property; courts also have upheld the use of eminent domain power – that is, they have authorized government seizure of private property – even when not for a true “public use,” but merely for supposed “public purposes.” What this means, in general, is that courts have subordinated property rights to supposed “public” interests, another way in which individual rights have been sacrificed to collectivism. Rather than the property-rights system envisioned by America’s founders – in which property owners themselves ultimately decide how their own property is to be used – the 20th-century regulatory state has created a system in which those decisions are made, ultimately, by government “planners” (zoning boards, redevelopment commissions, and the like). The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Kelo v. City of New London in 2005, ironically, has re-energized the modern property-rights movement. In that decision, the majority of justices upheld a Connecticut local government’s use of the eminent domain power to seize fifteen homes in order to try to turn around a failing local economy – and thus permitted government, despite the Fifth Amendment’s public-use limitation, to use eminent domain powers to transfer property from one owner to another, in order to foster economic development. Although a huge setback for property owners (and Fifth Amendment rights), the decision ignited more controversy than any other case decided by the Court in recent years. The reaction against Kelo broadened the property-rights movement: Not just wealthy Easterners or Western ranchers, but a broad coalition of activists – including advocates for low-income, minority, and/or politically powerless groups – have jumped on the bandwagon, in criticizing the Kelo decision and in demanding greater legal and constitutional protections for the rights of property owners against government’s abuse of its eminent domain powers. (One reason why Kelo has so energized and broadened the property-rights movement is that, as Justices Thomas and O’Connor pointed out in their cogent dissenting opinions, it’s the poorer or less politically powerful citizens who are most likely to have their homes seized by the government, as the City of New London did, in order to foster economic development of so-called “blighted” urban neighborhoods. As the Thomas and O’Connor dissents pointed out, under the rationale of the Kelo majority, no one’s right to their own home is secure. What the planners call “blight,” is in the eyes of the homeowners, simply “the old neighborhood.”) Thus, in backlash against the Kelo decision, one important aspect of property rights in America – the right of homeowners not to have their property taken away from them, except by legitimate exercise of government’s eminent domain powers – has been given new life. Other courts, especially state supreme courts, in enforcing provisions in state constitutions equivalent to the Fifth Amendment – such as Michigan’s supreme court, in an important decision before Kelo, and Ohio’s supreme court, in an important decision last year – have taken more seriously the “public use” limitation on eminent domain powers, restricting the ability of government to seize property simply for purposes of economic development. And in November voters in nine states passed referenda to restrict governments from abusing eminent domain powers. The reaction against Kelo, and in favor of property owners’ rights, is likely to continue and to expand during the coming year, as more Americans realize the importance of protecting property rights – that is, of protecting the rights of individual property owners, and of limiting the powers of local government “planners.”
Self-Ownership vs. The Health Police
Another fundamental aspect of individuals’ right to liberty is their freedom to “own” themselves – to use their own bodies and minds as they wish. This freedom includes the ability to eat or drink, or otherwise to ingest into our bodies, whatever substances one wishes – yet another freedom that has been under assault since the rise of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state. The principal threat to this freedom has come in the form of government regulations supposed to protect “public health,” but the concept of “public health” is a nebulous one, which has been broadened to virtually limitless scope by modern-day paternalists, the activists whom I call “the health police.” The threat posed to this aspect of liberty has a fairly recent history in the United States, extending back only about a century. At one time, when American legislatures and courts recognized constitutional limitations on government’s so-called “police power,” government protection of “public health” was limited, properly, to protection against direct threats to the health of the general public: laws and regulations protecting public water supplies from the microbes that cause infectious diseases like dysentery or cholera, for example. However, with the rise of such welfare-state institutions like the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the role of government expanded, to include regulation of things only indirectly related to the public health. Moreover – and this was the truly ominous shift in government “police power” regulation – new laws were passed not only to protect persons from harming others (the legitimate scope of the police power, under its historic rationale) but also to protect persons, supposedly, from harming themselves. The new paternalism of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state meant that legislators and bureaucrats (like FDA commissioners) would decide what foods, drugs, or other substances were “safe” for adult Americans to use – rather than allowing adult Americans to make these decisions for themselves. Beginning with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, the federal “war on drugs” has deprived individuals of the freedom they had, in earlier American history, to use whatever drugs they wish to use, either for recreational or medicinal use. Thus, not only have Americans been prohibited from using certain drugs – like cocaine, heroin and other illegal narcotics, marijuana, and alcohol (banned for all Americans, during Prohibition, and for adult Americans under the age of 21, today) – but their use of other, legal drugs has been regulated (most commonly, by requiring physicians’ prescriptions for access to the drugs). Moreover, no American has the right to use any new drug or medical device not approved by the FDA – which is why many Americans must, literally, cross borders in order to get access to life-saving drugs or medical procedures. The “war on drugs” – that is, this basic abridgement of Americans’ fundamental right of self-ownership – is likely to continue in the foreseeable future, for it has bipartisan support from politicians. (As with so many other welfare-state issues, bipartisan support is a sure sign of bad public policy, violating individual freedom; for, it can be argued, the best laws – laws that actually expand individual freedom, through genuine reform, repealing paternalistic laws – come not with bipartisan support, but only with support from pro-individualism “extremists” in either major party.) Thus, under the new Democrat-controlled Congress, we can expect further erosions in this aspect of freedom – especially at the federal level, given Democrats’ general tendency to be even less concerned than are Republicans about the constitutional limitations on federal government powers. Another, related “war” being waged by the “health police” in recent years, and which unfortunately, is likely to continue, at an accelerated pace, is the so-called “war on tobacco” – the drive by anti-smoking and anti-tobacco activists to limit smoking and, eventually, to prohibit altogether the use of tobacco products. Several cities and states in the U.S. have banned smoking in “public places,” depriving not only smokers of their right to enjoy tobacco products but also depriving business owners of their right to determine themselves whether or not to allow smoking on their own premises (yet another way in which property rights have eroded). Such bans, justified on spurious grounds (misuse of epidemiological evidence supposedly showing the adverse health effects of secondhand smoke on non-smokers), violate everyone’s rights, as I’ve previously discussed here (see “Smokers’ Rights as Everyone’s Rights,” October 31). And they push governmental paternalism to a dangerous new level of omnipotence, justified on the grounds that it’s legitimate – as a protection of “public health” -- for government to control people’s lives, in order to lessen their risks of developing particular health problems. (Tobacco products, by themselves, are not lethal: even if all the epidemiological evidence truly shows what the anti-tobacco Nazis claim it does, at most use of tobacco products merely increases the risks of people, both smokers and non-smokers, to develop problems like heart or lung disease or cancer.) Thus, the “war on tobacco” thus far in the 21st century has taken 20th-century paternalism to a dangerous new level: not only “protecting” people from harming themselves; but also “protecting” them from doing things not directly harmful at all, but which only might increase the risk of being harmed. Rather than allowing people to decide for themselves what risks they wish to take, voluntarily, with their own health, the new paternalistic state prohibits them from doing anything that the government “health police” believe might be too risky, with theirs or other peoples’ health! When the anti-tobacco activists first proposed banning smoking in public places, opponents maintained that smoking bans would lead to the slippery-slope problem: Under the same rationale, of “protecting public health,” how far would prohibition go? Would government try to ban smoking in private places? Would government try to ban foods and other substances that might increase people’s risks of developing health problems, even when these foods aren’t dangerous in themselves? Well, as recent developments show, these fears were well-founded. Proposals have been made in some communities to ban smoking in motor vehicles, even in private homes, when children are present – thus breaking down the public/private distinction and having government intervene – under the dangerous rationale of “protecting the children” – into the privacy of people’s homes and cars. And, under a recent order by the New York City Board of Health, restaurants in the city must cease using so-called “trans fats” (certain kinds of fats produced by hydrogenization of vegetable oils, as a less-expensive alternative to animal fats in cooking and baking), because the “health police” have concluded that trans fats might elevate people’s levels of “bad” cholesterol. Thus, again, government is banning something that’s not dangerous in itself but which merely may increase the risks of consumers developing health problems in the future – all in the name of protecting “public health,” but really abridging the freedom of restaurants and their customers to decide for themselves what ingredients to use in their foods. The ominous implications of the New York trans fat ban were aptly summed up by Rick Berman, of the Center for Consumer Freedom (quoted in USA Today on Dec. 6): “[T]his opens the door to caffeine, sugar, salt, alcohol, whole milk and any other ingredients these lunatics want to attack.” One of the greatest challenges facing defenders of liberty in 2007 and in coming years will be to stop the “health police” from controlling virtually every aspect of Americans’ lives, in the name of protecting people from themselves – in other words, to fight against the omnipotent paternalistic state.
Freedom to Cross Borders vs. Protectionism
Expatriation – the freedom of individuals to renounce their citizenship in one nation and to emigrate to another nation – is another essential aspect of liberty. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson regarded expatriation as a natural right, as he maintained in his 1774 essay, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. The United States, literally, is a nation of immigrants: a nation historically based on people in foreign nations exercising their right of expatriation, coming to America to live, to work, and eventually to become American citizens. And an important aspect of economic freedom is the right of both workers and employers to freely bargain with one another, which includes the rights of willing employers to hire willing workers, even if they are not U.S. citizens and who might not even be “legal” immigrants (that is, in compliance with the arbitrary laws passed by Congress restricting entry into the U.S.). Of all the major issues in domestic politics today, perhaps the most overrated “problem” is that of so-called “illegal immigration.” Although many Americans – mostly conservative and/or Republican – believe it to be a genuine problem, it’s really not. Much of the concern over immigration is directed at Spanish-speaking immigrants coming from Mexico and, frankly, is a phobia based largely on bigotry. (In that respect, it’s not unlike other anti-immigrant movements in American history that earlier targeted Irish immigrants or Catholic immigrants – again, based on phobias rooted in bigotry.) Even when not rooted in bigotry, the impulse to limit immigration in order to “protect American jobs” is a form of protectionism – and thus, an abuse of government’s powers, restricting some persons’ rights of economic freedom in order to prevent them from competing with others. From a libertarian standpoint, it’s clear that efforts to limit entry into the United States – such as the quotas Congress has placed on “legal” immigration from particular countries, since the early 20th century – abridge people’s rights, particularly their freedom to cross national borders in order to live and work as they please (a freedom that, like other legitimate exercises of the basic right to liberty, is limited only by those actions that violate others’ rights). For more on why having “open borders” is a legitimate aspect of liberty, read the Independent Institute’s “Open Letter on Immigration” (June 19, 2006) that I’ve happily co-signed. One of the few positive results of Democrat control of Congress is that it’s more likely now to pass a more sensible, less draconian, immigration law, perhaps incorporating President Bush’s reasonable proposal to permit more foreign “guest workers” to reside in the United States. (At the very least, we can hope that the new Congress will abandon the silly idea of spending billions of dollars to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border or to expand border patrols – expensive “solutions” to a phony “problem” that ought to be among the least of the worries of members of Congress.) On the other hand, the new Democrat leadership in Congress would be more likely to pass other kinds of protectionist measures – such as restrictions on free trade and on the ability of American companies to “outsource” labor outside the U.S. – in order to appease Big Labor, which would be an equally pernicious form of protectionism that also abridges the freedom to cross borders. Although the Constitution grants Congress the power to pass naturalization laws, that power arguably does not include the power to restrict immigration. Thus, although Congress may legitimately limit U.S. citizenship, it cannot legitimately dictate who may or may not enter into, or reside in, the United States, absent some other legitimate constitutional power. Thus, properly speaking, there should be no distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration. The only legitimate purpose for which Congress may limit entry into the United States is national defense – and today, there are legitimate concerns about Islamic militants entering the country in order to commit terrorist acts, as the criminals responsible for the 9/11/01 murders did. (No one has the right to cross borders in order to commit criminal acts – but that’s a consequence of the general limit on all liberty rights, that no one may legitimately claim the freedom to harm others.) But legitimate security concerns and the types of border controls necessary to address them – requiring visitors to the U.S. to show proper identification and barring entry to known Islamic militants, for example -- do not justify Congress to otherwise abridge the freedom of all persons, both Americans and non-Americans, to cross the border in order to exercise their legitimate rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
To Be Continued Part II, to be posted next week, continues discussing the prospects for other aspects of liberty, including: the freedom to exploit natural resources (vs. radical environmentalism), the freedom of self-defense (vs. advocates of government control of guns), sexual freedom (vs. the “morality police”), freedom of expression (vs. censorship), individualism (vs. group-identity politics), and freedom of thought (vs. religion).
| Link to this Entry | Posted Friday, January 12, 2007 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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