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Author’s Note: Below is the text of my speech to the Jefferson Area Tea Party’s July 4 celebration in Charlottesville, Virginia.—Robert W. Tracinski
This year, we are called upon to decide the most important political issue there is: are there any limits on the power of government? The question is not, what are the limits on government? The question is: are there any limits at all?
What we have discovered in the last eighteen months is that there is a faction in American politics that wants to sweep away all limits on the state.
We saw this in the health care debate, when Democratic congressmen were quizzed on the constitutionality of the law and answered with a collective shrug of indifference. New York Congressman Charlie Rangel spoke for his colleagues when he cited their authority under the “good and welfare clause.” I’ll pause for all of you constitutional scholars out there to rack your brains trying to remember that one. In fact, there is no such clause. What he was referring to is actually the “general welfare” clause, which states that one of the goals of the Constitution is to “promote the general welfare.” This has been interpreted by the left as an unlimited grant of power for Congress to do whatever it likes to us, so long as they tell us it’s for our own good.
Or consider another example. In a revealing moment in the confirmation hearings for Obama’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan was asked whether there were any limits to federal power under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution—and she evaded the question, refusing to give an answer.
The interstate commerce clause was originally intended, not to expand the power of the federal government, but to limit the power of the states by preventing them from interfering with interstate commerce. But as Thomas Jefferson predicted, the interstate commerce clause became a kind of political game of “the house that Jack built.” That’s the old nursery rhyme, which goes something like, “This is the dog that chased the cat that ate the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.” The idea is that if you work hard enough, you can draw a connection from anything to anything, so there is no part of our lives, even the seemingly most personal and private, that cannot be connected somehow to interstate commerce. With ObamaCare, for example, an individual’s decision not to buy health insurance, to engage in no commerce at all, is said to affect interstate commerce. Under this kind of reasoning, there is absolutely nothing that is outside the reach of government.
Here’s one more example, and probably the biggest example: the EPA’s declaration that it has the power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions—regulations that will deeply affect everyone and give the EPA power over the entire economy—without any specific authorization from Congress.
In our system of government—or perhaps I should say, in our former system of government—there was a division of power between the legislature and the executive. Our nation’s Founders knew that if the executive branch could both write the laws and enforce them, there would be no limits on its power. They knew that a system in which all power is concentrated in one institution—an institution that is not composed of the representatives of the people—is a form of dictatorship.
That is precisely what we now have, if the EPA is allowed to get away with imposing its own rules on carbon dioxide.
There is a single theme to President Obama’s term in office: his attempt to break the last of the bonds that used to limit the power of government.
That’s the practice, and behind it is a theory, the moral theory behind all forms of dictatorship and totalitarianism. The left believes that the government has unlimited power, because they believe that the individual has no moral right to his own life.
The nomination of Elena Kagan has been instructive, because it has shown that even freedom of speech—the one area of liberty the old-fashioned “liberals” used to defend—is not immune from this theory of unlimited power. As the chief lawyer for the administration, Kagan argued before the Supreme Court that “whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.” Let me repeat that for you: a “balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.” The key phrase here is “the societal costs.” The individual no longer has a non-negotiable right to speak. Instead, he has to petition for permission from the government, which will decide based on a pragmatic calculation of the costs and benefits to “society” of his particular “category” of speech. The basic moral assumption is that there is no limit on the power of the collective over the individual.
Kagan has also written about how it would be legitimate for the government to engage in the “redistribution of speech opportunities” to serve the government’s social goals. Notice that the party that begins by advocating the redistribution of wealth ends up advocating the redistribution of speech.
If you want to know what this looks like in practice, consider the so-called DISCLOSE Act which passed in the House recently—with the support of [Virginia 5th District Congressman] Tom Perriello, I should add. It imposes costly bureaucratic restrictions on political speech and political activism, which are selectively applied, targeting groups the left doesn’t like, while leaving its favored groups free. So for example, if you do business with the government as part of a corporation, your right to political speech will be suppressed—but if you do business with the government as a member of a government employees’ union, you are free to engage in unlimited political activism.
From the left’s perspective, this makes sense. The unions, well, they’re the good guys, so their speech serves the interests of the collective. But the views of businessmen and investors, that’s just “corporate speech,” driven by “greed” and corruption. Whatever value their speech may have is outweighed by its “societal costs,” so it can be banned.
There you see at work the basic moral premise behind this administration and its policies. Every aspect of our lives is to be judged, not according to the rights and freedoms of the individual, but according to its supposed social utility. What this means is that all of your most important, most deeply held personal values are subject to be sacrifice, casually and without notice, if they are deemed not to serve the interests of “society” at large.
The deepest issue that we’re facing this year issue is the moral issue behind all of the political controversies. That issue is: does the individual have a moral right to exist for his own sake, or are we just cogs in the collective, whose every choice to be judged according to its value to society? If you thought we settled that question once and for all, in the Cold War battle against Communism, think again. They’re back. The Obama administration has revived the moral doctrines of real, serious, consistent collectivism.
But we also have to be careful that we ourselves do not give inadvertent moral support to these notions. We have to reject any variation of the idea that the individual has no moral right to his own life and happiness, that the individual exists to serve others.
Thomas Jefferson had something to say about this. When the issue of demands for “public service” came up, he replied, in a letter to James Monroe, “If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater [degree] are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose a man has less right in himself than one of his neighbors or all of them put together. This would be slavery and not that liberty which the Bill of Rights has made inviolable and for the preservation of which our government has been changed.”
And so it’s no wonder that Jefferson chose to include, in the Declaration of Independence, not only our rights to life and liberty, but our right to “the pursuit of happiness.” He chose to emphasize the moral issue that the individual is an end in himself, that the moral purpose of liberty is to make it possible for us to pursue our own happiness.
Of course, Jefferson did devote a significant portion of his life to the benefit of his nation, for which all of us are deeply grateful. But to keep the issue clear, we should remember the distinction made by a later defender of liberty, the great 20th-century philosopher of individualism, Ayn Rand. As she put it, the real moral issue is not whether you give a dime to a beggar—or it’s not whether you choose to volunteer your time and effort in some other way, out of good will to your fellow man. The issue, she said, is whether you have a right to exist if you don’t.
That is a real question, and let me give you a concrete example which will also remind us that things can get worse, if we don’t take action to turn back from the course we’re on. You may all have heard about the economic turmoil in Europe, which is being caused by the collapse of the European welfare state. The worst case is Greece, which has a system that might sound familiar. There are generous unemployment benefits, a nationalized health care system, and a pension system where the average retirement age is 61 years old, but government employees can start collecting their benefits at 58—and one out of every three workers is employed by the government. The result is out of control spending, a government budget deficit that was spiraling toward 15 percent of the Greek economy, and a total debt at more than 100 percent of the country’s annual output.
This is basically what President Obama has been doing here in America, but the Greeks just went a bit farther down the road, and they ended up so deep in debt that the government can no longer pay its bills.
But the Greek disaster isn’t just a warning about the economic consequences of the socialist welfare state. Notice what happened when Greece was forced to start considering cutting some of the welfare benefits it is paying out. The recipients of those benefits rioted in the streets, throwing firebombs at banks in the financial district of Athens, killing three people. This is the real meaning of the idea that we don’t have a right to exist unless we pledge ourselves to unlimited service to “society”—which means, in practice, service to the parasites who live off of the government dole. It means that they assert a total claim on our lives and effort, and they enforce that claim through force and violence
The Greek rioters put us all on notice that as far as they’re concerned, the shop owners whose windows they smashed, the bankers whose buildings they firebombed, the poor conscientious employees they burned to death—all of these people, the ones who pay the bills for everyone else’s welfare benefits, have no right to exist.
That’s the next step on the road that President Obama and the Democratic Congress are pushing us down. It is the logical consequence of their basic moral theory, and it that theory, the collectivist view that the individual exists only to serve society, that we have to reject.
Today, this year, in this election, we are called upon to fight once again the basic issue of the American Revolution. To preserve the liberties our Founding Fathers fought to secure for us, we have to uphold the individual’s moral right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Reminder note: The above was authored by TIA Daily editor Robert Tracinski, and appears here courtesy of him.
– Mark Kalinowski
North New Jersey Tea Party Group
Liberty, Free Markets, and Individual Rights
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