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A “Nation of Sheep” under the “Nanny State”
This essay reviews two recently-published books: Judge Andrew Napolitano’s A Nation of Sheep (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2007; hardcover, $25.99), and David Harsanyi’s Nanny State ( New York: Broadway Books, 2007; hardcover, $24.95). Both are excellent books that I highly recommend. Taken together, the two books discuss topics related to what I see as the most important crisis faced by people in the United States of America today. That crisis is “a moral crisis” (as philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand observed, nearly 50 years ago), one that I would describe essentially as the loss of the sense of individual responsibility. (It also can be described as a loss of the sense of individual freedom, for in a state of true individualism, responsibility and freedom go hand-in-hand. If individuals truly are free to live their own lives, they also must take responsibility for their lives, including all the actions they choose to do.) This underlying moral crisis is indeed reflected in economics, politics, and the law – not only because the modern American economic, political, and legal system reflects it, but also illustrates, and indeed, exacerbates, the crisis, in a myriad of ways. Increasingly, more and more Americans no longer live as if they are complete adult human beings – individual beings capable of rational thought, of volition (choice) and with freedom to live their own lives as they choose (that is, according to the choices they make). Rather, they are living as if they are not humans (farm animals, like the “sheep” Judge Napolitano discusses in his book), or at least not adult humans; rather, like animals or human children, they expect others – a “shepherd,” or a “parent” figure – to “take care of” them, to provide them with “security,” which really means to help them evade the responsibility for living their own lives. This crisis in individual responsibility is of profound importance. It’s far more important than any other “crisis” that’s discussed daily in the news media, whether it’s housing, health care, energy, the environment, etc., etc., for it’s the fundamental crisis that underlies all the other problems that people perceive in modern American society. Nevertheless, don’t expect to hear any of the politicians running for office this year – or any of the “mainstream” media sources – to discuss the crisis I’m describing here, because both politicians and the news media help to foster it. (Indeed, all three major Demopublican/Replicrat candidates for U.S. president today – Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, and Mr. McCain – all advocate government programs that would make the crisis even worse.) The principal reason for it? The growth of paternalistic government. For over a century now, since the rise of the regulatory/welfare state (what David Harsanyi aptly calls “The Nanny State”) in the early 20th century, the power of government to control our lives steadily has increased while the freedom of individuals to take responsibility for their lives steadily has decreased. It’s not just that we have “Big Government,” consuming a huge portion of the nation’s wealth (forcibly taken by taxes from the individuals who produced it); nor is it just that “Big Government” intrudes upon more and more aspects of our lives, denying us freedom to choose. It’s that government has become so big and so intrusive in order to “protect” us from ourselves: in the name of providing “security” to citizens, government today has deprived us of our basic rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness – the rights that define us as human beings. We’re becoming mere creatures of the State – a far cry from the nation of free individuals that America’s Founders meant to create.
“A Nation of Sheep” . . .
Andrew Napolitano was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in New Jersey history. A former adjunct professor of law at Seton Hall, where he taught constitutional law and jurisprudence, Judge Napolitano has been the senior judicial analyst for the Fox News Channel since 1998. Essentially libertarian in his political and legal philosophy, Judge Napolitano offers a fresh perspective – a real alternative to the standard “left” versus “right,” “liberal” versus “conservative” debates one hears – on current controversies, on such Fox programs as The Big Story, Fox & Friends, and The O’Reilly Factor. His two earlier books, Constitutional Chaos (2004) and The Constitution in Exile (2006), both warned about the loss of individual rights – and the failure of the U.S. Constitution to protect them – as the powers of government have increased, including (but not just limited to) the growth of government power, in the name of greater “national security” (but at the cost of losing important civil liberties), in response to the militant Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He continues this theme in A Nation of Sheep. In the introduction to the book, Judge Napolitano declares that he has written the book “to generate a debate about freedom; a debate, regrettably, that government does not want us to have.” Citing President Bush’s statement that his job is to “protect the homeland,” because government’s “most important job” is “to protect the American people,” the judge exposes the basic fallacy behind Bush’s rhetoric: it’s not the function of government to protect people or their “homeland” (which, as Napolitano notes, sounds disturbing “Teutonic”); rather, it’s the function of government (according to America’s founding principles) to protect people’s rights, including the freedoms guaranteed in the United States Constitution. Yet it’s those very rights, or freedoms, that are imperiled – in the name of “protecting” the people and their “homeland” – by the U.S. government’s so-called “War on Terror.” As Judge Napolitano notes in Chapter 6 (“Post-September 11th: An Orwellian New World?”), that so-called “War” really has become (with such legislation as the USA PATRIOT Act) “a war on Americans’ privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of thought, individuality, and civil liberties.” The title of the book is explained in Chapter 2 (“Are You a Wolf or a Sheep?”). Judge Napolitano observes that “[t]here are two types of people who stand out in the United States today: sheep and wolves”: “Sheep stay in their herd and follow their shepherd without questioning where he is leading them. Sheep trust that the shepherd looks out for their safety. Sheep believe that the shepherd would never do anything to cause them harm, that he only wants to protect them from the dangers of the world that lie outside the safety of his herd.
“Wolves, on the other hand, do not aimlessly follow a shepherd. In the darkness of night, wolves howl, alerting the shepherd to their presence. Wolves are the people who do not passively accept the rules and direction of the shepherd without questioning his decisions. Wolves question the shepherd and act in a way that forces the shepherd also to question his decisions. Wolves challenge government regulations, reject government assistance, and demand that the government recognize and protect their natural rights. They are rugged individualists.”
More fully explaining his analogy (or, more precisely, his metaphors), Napolitano adds that the sheep are “the millions of American citizens blindly following all levels of the government,” while the wolves are “the people and the groups within America that continuously question and challenge the decisions of the government.” Sadly, he observes, “the majority of Americans are sheep”: “How else can you explain the lack of outrage regarding the National Security Agency’s having access to our telephone records, e-mails, financial documents, credit card numbers, medical records, and mail? How else can you account for the sheeplike acquiescence to unwarranted surveillance of public gatherings by police departments, random bag searches on subways and buses, and cameras on nearly every street corner?”
People once cared about protecting their constitutional rights; but today, “alas, people are too busy panicking about terrorism to pay much attention to reality – too busy being sheep.” The federal government, at the same time, uses “fearmongering as a tactic to seduce the sheep into compliance with unconstitutional laws; and it has worked!” Throughout most of the rest of the book, Judge Napolitano discusses the various ways in which the so-called “War on Terror” has provided the government a pretext for violating the rights of the American people. In my favorite chapter (Chapter 11, “Everyday Life as a Sheep”), he analyzes “the slow, ineffective, and invasive screening process” of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the new federal bureaucracy supposedly created to provide airport security but which, for many of us, has ruined air travel – without making it much safer at all. And although most of the book discusses the consequences of the “War on Terror,” the final section of this chapter discusses at least one other way in which government has taken away fundamental rights: the loss of property rights, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrously broad interpretation of the government’s eminent domain (or “takings”) power, in the Court’s 2005 Kelo v. City of New London decision. As correct as I believe Judge Napolitano is in his analysis – and indeed, as apt as I think the “sheep” metaphor is, as a description of most Americans today – the problem I find with the book is that he does not go far enough in his analysis. Of course, the Bush Administration and Congress has overreacted to the events of 9/11 – and the consequence of that overreaction has been a far greater “hit” on Americans’ freedoms than anything that al-Qaeda, or any other militant Islamic terrorist group, could commit. The so-called “War on Terrorism” (truly a misnomer, because terrorism is only a tactic, one that is used by the Islamic religious fanatics who are the true enemies) indeed did exacerbate the problem of growth in governmental power while civil liberties shrink. But, as I’d emphasize, that problem was only exacerbated by the political response to 9/11: what makes legislation like the Patriot Act truly dangerous (and what also has made it politically palatable to America’s “sheep”) have been a series of government programs and policies, over the past century or so, and especially in the last half of the 20th century. Those programs and policies include other “wars” supposedly waged by the U.S. government – the “War on Poverty,” which brought us Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal “welfare” (or so-called “entitlement” programs) on top of the “welfare state” programs created in the 1930s as part of FDR’s “New Deal”; or the “War on Drugs,” which started in the early 20th century with the Harrison Narcotic Act (1914) but really took off in the 1970s with the federal Controlled Substances Act and the “drug police” policies of virtually every presidential administration since Nixon’s. (Indeed, many of the horribles now authorized by the Patriot Act, such as the warrantless searches and government surveillance of e-mail and bank records, were first proposed by the Clinton administration and earlier presidential administrations to help further the federal “war” on drugs.) The chief reason why we are “a nation of sheep” today isn’t just post-9/11 fear of “terrorism”; it’s the cumulative effect of a century of policies and programs, since the rise of the regulatory/welfare state in the early 20th century, that have trained Americans – like Pavlovian dogs – to look to the government to make them “safe” and “secure,” to “protect” them, not only from criminals who threaten to kill or terrorize them, but even from themselves, from their own folly (such as, for example, their failure to save money to help pay the costs of living in their old age, or their failure to buy sufficient insurance). Another problem I have with Judge Napolitano’s thesis is the “wolf” part of his metaphor. With due respect to the judge’s apt characterization of the “sheep,” I think he errs in considering their opposites to be “wolves.” In particular, I don’t regard the “rugged individualists” whom he describes – activists on behalf of individual freedom and limited, constitutional government – to be “wolves”; certainly, that’s not how I see myself (though I do regard myself as such an activist). Wolves are predators who survive at the cost of killing their prey; true individualists do not further their own interests at the expense of anyone else but rather deal with others as beings who must be treated with respect, for they have equal rights, and enter into contracts with others for their mutual advantage. Wolves are no more “human,” essentially, than are sheep. The “rugged individualist” stereotype (both as Judge Napolitano seems to use it and as it’s generally used today) is quite misleading, for it ignores the value of free associations that true individualists find in human society. Human beings, if they live the lives proper to human beings, are not animals of any type (other than human); they are neither “sheep” nor “wolves,” but are men (or women), in the true sense of the term. The greatest harm done by the regulatory/welfare state over the past century in the United States is that it has practically destroyed the moral character – the humanity – of a large part of the American people, by transforming many of them into “sheep,” or into “wolves” or even into “shepherds” – that is, into beings that, rather than living lives of their own, are dependent upon others (typically, the government – which in turn means dependent upon a coercive system that forces self-reliant persons to sacrifice a part of what they achieve for the sake of others whose only claim is their professed “need”). The modern regulatory/welfare state (what David Harsanyi in his book aptly calls the “Nanny State”) has transformed free, responsible adult Americans (with the freedom to live their own lives as they choose and the responsibility for their own lives and actions that freedom entails) into a nation of animals – or, worse, a nation of children, dependent upon a “nanny” government that treats them as mere wards of the state.
. . . under the “Nanny State”
David Harsanyi is a journalist in Denver, Colorado; a staff columnist at the Denver Post, he has written op-eds published in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, National Review, and the Christian Science Monitor. In his fascinating book, Nanny State, he details the myriad ways in which Big Brother is intruding upon Americans’ lives – stripping us of our liberties, robbing us of the freedom to make our own decisions, and turning America into a nation of children. All this is being done because there’s an insidious group in American politics – the “nannies,” whom he’s quick to point out aren’t “the stroller-pushing set,” but rather the “busybodies,” both politicians and social activists – who are popping up all over the country. What these “nannies” have in common is a desire to enact more laws – their constant refrain is “There ought to be a law,” to do X – typically, in the name of protecting people’s health, safety, or “decency.” The subtitle of the book puts it aptly: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America into a Nation of Children. (A brief historical note: The “nannies” whom Mr. Harsanyi describes aren’t a new, or even a recent, phenomenon in American politics. Their forerunners were the social activists or “reformers” whom William Graham Sumner contemptuously described as “social doctors” in his 1883 book, What Social Classes Owe To Each Other. These “social doctors” were activists, first, in the so-called Populist movement of the late 19th century and the so-called “Progressive” movement of the early 20th century. Like today’s self-described “progressives,” they truly weren’t progressive at all; rather, they were reactionaries who harkened back to the old paternalistic policies of medieval, feudal, pre-capitalist Europe – just as the “welfare state” programs so venerated by self-described “progressives” today, programs such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, and government-provided health care, really owe their origins to Otto von Bismarck’s fascist state in 19th-century Germany. For more on this, see my previous entry, “Reactionary `Progressives’,” March 16, 2006. As I concluded in that essay, the only people today who can truly call themselves “progressive” are libertarians or radical individualists – people who reject the paternalistic policies advocated by the “nannies” because they have confidence in the ability of ordinary persons to make choices for their own good (as they see it) and who, accordingly, support free markets. It is the free market system which coordinates the millions and millions of various choices, desires, and hopes of free, responsible persons in society – and which coordinates them in the fairest, most just way possible, according to the objective, impersonal economic laws of supply and demand. To have confidence in the market system is to have confidence in the ability of individuals to govern themselves, free of the heavy, coercive hand of governmental controls.) Among the various examples Harsanyi cites of the “Nanny State” today are the following:
(As Harsanyi observes, America’s experiment with liquor prohibition in the 1920s – the Eighteenth Amendment – was “the most infamous and counterproductive intrusion into lifestyle choices” in American history,” from which, unfortunately, today’s neo-prohibitionists have failed to draw the appropriate lessons. Especially insightful is his criticism of such groups as MADD, whose “zero-tolerance” approach to the real problem of drunk driving, has made us all less safe.)
(Focusing especially on the bans on public smoking that several cities and states have enacted in recent years, Harsanyi notes that the campaign “to transform the trivial dangers of secondhand smoke into a national trauma,” has denied both employees and customers of business their freedom to choose what risks they’re willing to take with their own health and lives. (For more on this issue, also see my previous entry, “Smokers’ Rights as Everyone’s Rights,” Oct. 31, 2006.) I also agree with Harsanyi when he writes that his basic view toward smoking was nicely summed up by an axiom he saw on someone’s T-shirt in a Washington, D.C. bar: “Smoking Is Healthier Than Fascism.”)
(As Hansanyi documents, after Congress enhanced the FCC’s powers to sanction “indecency,” the Commission went on a “witch hunt” against broadcasters that has amounted to “nothing more than censorship,” as the FCC “takes on the task of deciding what is essential, artistic, educational, smart, or even profane,” resulting in the absurdity of banning such words as bullshit or fucking (even when used as an adjective) from the airwaves. For more on this issue, see my previous entry, “Abolish the F*CCing FCC!” Feb. 8, 2006.))
(He discusses how the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), created under the 1966 federal Highway Safety Act and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, has imposed this and other mandates through its powers to set automotive industry and highway standards that supposedly keep us “safe.” With good reason, he questions whether regulations such as the air-bag mandate or state seat-belt laws (which the feds “blackmail” the states to pass under the threat of withholding highway funding) really have made us safer. They certainly have made us less free. As he writes, “Two decades ago wearing a seat belt was a choice and the now-forgotten distinction between personal and public safety was still well-defined. . . . [Today], two decades after such laws were codified, I bitterly protest mandatory seat-belt laws as an inexcusable intrusion on my personal liberty. Whether I want to protect myself in such a manner is nobody’s business but my own.”) Countless other examples, not cited or just briefly mentioned in Harsanyi’s book, come to mind. These include state occupational licensing laws that limit entry into all sorts of ordinary occupations (Harsanyi briefly discusses the Institute for Justice’s litigation to help free African-style hairbraiders from the onerous requirement, imposed by several states, that they obtain full cosmetology licenses, before they can braid hair); “water-saving” mandates imposed by the federal government that have resulted in toilets that don’t properly flush or washing machines that don’t properly wash clothes, or “energy-saving” mandates (such as those in the recently-passed energy bill) that dictate what kinds of light bulbs Americans must use in their own homes. As these examples show, today’s “nannies” – advocates and enablers of the “Nanny State” – come from both sides of the traditional liberal versus conservative political spectrum; they include both left-liberals (so-called “progressives,” who are really reactionaries, as discussed above) and conservatives, that is, both paternalists of the “left” and paternalists of the “right.” And their tyranny is perhaps the worst form of tyranny of all, as a quotation from C.S. Lewis at the beginning of the book (on its frontispiece page) notes: “Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
The “busybodies’” arguments on behalf of “Nanny State” programs or policies generally proceed from two erroneous assumptions about the role of government in American society. First, they assume that it’s proper for government to “legislate morality,” whether it’s the “traditional,” “family-values,” Judeo-Christian religious morality asserted by conservatives or the secular, “politically correct” values asserted by left-liberals. But, as noted more fully below, government does not properly concern itself with morality at all; its sole function is to protect individuals’ rights. Some actions (like theft or murder) are not only immoral but also violate other people’s rights; they are within the proper scope of the criminal laws, not because of the former but only because of the latter. Other actions (including many things that some people might find immoral, “indecent,” or offensive) that do not violate anyone’s rights are not legitimately within the scope of government’s powers at all, even if virtually everyone in society regards them as “wrong,” in a moral sense. (The sanction for such “wrongful” acts is not to be found in the realm of politics – that is, in the law and the legal system, which has the power to impose force – but rather in the realms of ethics or etiquette, which do not have the power to impose force. An immoral person ought not to be fined or jailed; but he may legitimately be subjected to others’ criticism or to ostracism – that is, to the sanctions that other individuals can impose, in a non-coercive way, by simply refusing to deal with someone who’s immoral.) The fallacy behind the notion that it’s proper to “legislate morality” is that it confuses the realms of ethics and politics. Actions that are “wrong,” in a moral sense, but which nevertheless violate no one’s rights are not within the legitimate scope of the law (or government), properly considered. The second, and even more fundamental, erroneous assumption about the role of government is that it exists to “protect” people from all sorts of harm – the fallacy that President Bush committed when rationalizing the “War on Terror,” as identified by Judge Napolitano in the discussion above. According to America’s founding principles – the philosophy of government held by the consensus of America’s founders and expressed so eloquently in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence – the legitimate function of government is not to “protect people” but rather to protect people’s rights. Moreover, “rights,” properly speaking (not the pseudo-rights that “nannies” advocate such as the so-called “right to housing,” or a “right to a living wage,” or a “right to health care”) involve an individual’s freedom of action, in a social context: legitimate rights are all aspects of the fundamental, natural, inalienable rights that human beings have – the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (including property rights). As Thomas Jefferson observed, the legitimate powers of government extend only to such actions as are injurious to others – actions that deprive others of these fundamental rights (such as murder, kidnapping, theft, invasion of privacy, destruction of property, etc.). The legitimate powers of government, including those broad regulatory powers of the state collectively called “the police power,” do not extend to any actions not harmful (in a direct, physical way) to others; they do not extend to actions that only indirectly harm others (under some sort of imagined harm to “society”), and they certainly do not extend to actions that only directly harm oneself. Yet a vast number of the “Nanny State” laws passed over the past several decades – such as the drug laws, smoking bans, highway safety laws (laws mandating seat-belt use or motorcyclists’ helmets), labor laws (such as minimum-wage laws, or mandatory overtime or sick leave laws, or OSHA regulations), or mandatory “insurance” programs like workers compensation programs for employers or Social Security for both employers and employees – all involve, essentially, protecting people from themselves; that is, they limit the freedom of individuals to choose what risks they are willing to take with their own lives. Thus, rather than protecting people’s rights, these laws instead violate them. Government has ceased being the entity created to “secure” individuals’ rights, as it is described in the Declaration of Independence; rather, it is the entity in modern society that poses the most danger to all of our genuine rights. It’s not a “protector”; rather, it’s an aggressor – merely a criminal, but an especially dangerous criminal, because every crime it commits against individual rights is sheltered under the sanction of the law. Ultimately, government today is no less tyrannical than the British government against which our American founders rebelled: like that government, as described in the Declaration of Independence, modern “Nanny State” government has become “destructive” of the “ends” for which American government was created. The “Nanny State” thus is not just bad public policy that’s destroying the humanity of the American people. It’s also, quite literally, un-American.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday, April 30, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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