The great American virtue of liberty is dying and the healers are drunk with apathy. In 1776, our founders proclaimed liberty the primary American virtue. This declaration brought with it unlimited potential and unlimited responsibility for every American. All the achievements of mankind have depended upon one essential condition: liberty, a condition in which one has the power to act without confinement, servitude, or control. It has been, and will continue to be, through liberty that the creative power of the human mind is unleashed by experimentation and entrepreneurship. Today liberty is dying. New laws, ordinances, and regulations conjured up by politicians are eroding our foundation of liberty under the illusion of good intentions. Encroachment or degradation of liberty leads to the stagnation of the people because it robs them of their ability to learn through agency and experience. If unchecked, this stagnation grows into, at minimum, dependence upon the state and at worst, slavery. Few scenarios justify this forfeiture of liberty. Scenarios requiring the encroachment of the liberty of the people demand serious thought and vigorous debate before liberty is sacrificed. There are two justifications for this sacrifice: the protection of the liberty of the people as a whole, and the protection of an individual’s liberty. In America today, our lawmakers disregard these limits; they find innumerable ways to reach into our lives and rob us of the inalienable right of liberty.
First, let’s clarify the two cases in which liberty may be appropriately infringed. Liberty of the individual may be temporarily restricted when the liberty of the people as a whole is at risk and protection from imminent threat is required. When threatened in this way, mechanisms for the rescinding of these encroachments must be put into place to ensure the liberty of the people, as the proper state, is respected and restored. A clear example of this occurred during WWII for our national defense. President Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Services Act of 1940 which drafted citizens into our military forces, an encroachment of individual liberty. This action was justifiable because of the clear and present danger of Germany and Japan to the survival of our nation and its people. The act had important restraining provisions including the limiting of service to 12 months and the conscientious objection clause. While some may debate whether these provisions went far enough, they are an acknowledgement that even in times of national emergency all aspects of liberty may not be wholly discarded and that time limits on encroachments of liberty are proper.
The second way in which liberty may be appropriately infringed is for the protection of another individual’s liberty; societies cannot allow one individual to overpower and force another into submission on the grounds of liberty. In this type of society anyone could be found in the position of the slave and therefore liberty is secured for none. Therefore, liberty’s power ends where the liberty of another begins. In practice, great care must be taken in the evaluation of this limit. There is a significant difference between what does affect another’s liberty and what may affect another liberty. Laws are appropriate in the former and rarely in the later. Increasingly, legislators have allowed lesser virtues such as compassion and equality to rob the greater virtue of liberty of its power. Allow me to provide an illustration: an employer may grant to an employee extra vacation days because his child has a severe illness. This is an act of compassion that came as the exercise of liberty on the part of the employer. Both parties have been edified because liberty was employed rather than overruled. However, if the government, knowing that many people have children and many of those children may have illnesses, mandates extra vacation days then what has occurred is that compassion, in the name of what might be, has robbed liberty. One party has been robbed of liberty and the other has provided that which was not required. Providing for those who are not in need or who have not endeavored to provide for themselves feeds dependence and the mentality of entitlement; both debilitating vices. Entitlement is the claim to an item of value without regard to how that item should be earned. Entitlement rewards men for reasons other than industry. Independence and liberty are virtuous because they enable and require men to be industrious. Entitlement is the enemy of independence and liberty.
Liberty is the primary American virtue. We declare it on every coin and monetary bill. It is upon liberty that all other virtues depend. Without liberty the myriad of other virtues that we hold dear: tolerance, compassion, honesty, justice, and the conditions which are derived from them: diversity, friendship, education, religion, entertainment, competition, speech, etc. lose much or potentially all of their value for the simple reason that we may not be able to realize these conditions, and many cannot exist without liberty. Speech may be outlawed, friendships may be predetermined or restricted, education may be indoctrination or propaganda, diversity may be prevented, and so forth. All of these things can only be experienced to the fullest with the catalyst of liberty. The more liberty is restricted, the more one prevents growth of both the individual and of society, because all other virtues are restricted as a result.
Civilizations, societies, and individuals live within a complex hierarchy of virtues. Virtues are numerous and the virtuous principals we live by are as vast and varied as there are people to define them. Many societies hold common virtues but they are not held in the same priority. Throughout life there are many scenarios wherein we find virtues in conflict with each other. At these moments what do we do? How do we know which virtue to honor and which to momentarily discard? All virtuous behavior is not equal; for example, most people would agree the virtuous behavior of ‘don’t push people’ is lesser than the virtuous behavior of ‘save innocent life.’ Finding ourselves in the situation wherein an innocent person would be rundown by a car unless we push them out of the way, the proper resolution of the virtue conflict should be apparent. We honor our greater virtue and save the innocent person by discarding our lesser virtue and push the person out of the way. Collisions of virtues are common in our complex lives and unless we acknowledge and anticipate these events we invite the risk of allowing our greater virtues to be held hostage to our lesser virtues. In the aftermath of such hostage scenarios we are left only with the defense that we held true to the lesser virtue. This defense upon examination is easily found wanting. This hierarchy of virtues is the model upon which we construct the laws for our society. All laws are the product of someone making a moral judgment. Lawmakers have determined that the virtue of honesty outweighs the virtue of liberty (i.e. free speech) in a courtroom and have enacted laws against perjury. This is justified because during a trial the liberty of another is at risk. Outside the courtroom the same moral judgment is not made. We do not know that someone telling falsehoods on the street would risk another’s liberty, only that it might, and so perjury does not apply.
When a society becomes as affluent as America has, it is easy to desire that many virtues gain equal stature with liberty. Equality is another virtue which is battling for supremacy over the greater virtue of liberty. The 14th amendment of the constitution has granted equality under the law to each of us. It is foolish, but increasingly popular, to demand greater jurisdiction for equality. If pressed further, the demand for economic equality pulls us into dangerous waters, risking the expedition which thus far has been fruitful. This Sirens song of economic equality if pursed will cause the ship of liberty upon which we sojourn to break into pieces. Economic equality can only be accomplished at the expense of liberty. If we were to pursue economic equality it would require taking from those that have and distributing it to those that have not until a balance is found and equality is achieved. What is most misleading about this idea is that the momentary equality realized cannot be maintained without an even further restriction of liberty to ensure that the imbalance doesn’t manifest itself again. Liberty and equality are not harmonious; when free men exercise their agency in pursuit of their dreams in accordance to their individual appetites the destinies they realize will be as varied as the men who pursue them and thereby vastly unequal. This is good and right.
Public policy should either compel or incent citizens to act; policy which does not compel or incent is vacuous. The question of when to compel and when to incent is a question of when to deny the individual the primary American virtue of liberty. The way in which governments compel is to threaten to take some or all of an individual’s liberty, including property – for property is simply an enabler of liberty. Good government should only compel in two cases: when the liberty of the people as a whole is at risk, or in protection of another individual’s liberty. In other cases good government should either incent citizens to act for good by establishing, through policy, reasonable incentives that reward certain behaviors, or do nothing. This ensures that the primary virtue of liberty is protected. When virtues conflict, we must be deliberate in the evaluation of the situation, for it is easy to make the mistake of believing a higher virtue is at risk when in fact this probability is low, and thereby the impact acceptable. Take the example of outlawing cell phones while driving. We could easily believe, but falsely so, that we are sacrificing the highest virtue of liberty in order to properly honor another great virtue of protection of human life. The problem here is that we are acting on what may happen rather than what will happen. If talking on a cell phone while driving is guaranteed to or has a very high probability of death of an innocent life, then the argument has merit. Cell phones while driving would need to be outlawed. The reality however, is that in the vast majority of cases, the use of a cell phone will not harm innocent life. According to the Harvard Center of Risk Analysis [1] cell phone use contributes to an estimated 6 percent of all 10 million crashes per year in the U.S., and of those 6 percent, only 0.4 percent resulted in the loss of life. Is then, the government justified in infringing the liberty of the nearly 200 million drivers in the country to protect the life of less than one half of one percent of them? Some would still argue yes, providing the ‘if it only saves one life’ argument, but I would disagree. The value of life degrades as the value of liberty degrades. In these cases of ‘might happen’ or low probability, the government can incent people to not use cell phones but should not compel them. The fine line between what is high probability verses low probability will appropriately be the area of much public debate. Unfortunately, in the defense of lesser virtues our government has been more and more willing to compel citizens by instituting laws that would result in punitive restrictions on liberty in the event they do not comply. These policies directed at lesser virtues often sacrifice the greater virtues, chief among them being the primary virtue of liberty.
There are multiple reasons for this distressing development of liberty infringement. Chief among them being the self-preservational instincts of professional politicians combined with the constitutional illiteracy of the public. One of the great early debates among our founding fathers was over the concept of term limits. Term limits have been part of Republics and Democracies dating back to Athens, Sparta, and Rome. Thomas Jefferson urged for term limits “to prevent every danger which might arise to American freedom by continuing too long in office.” [2] Benjamin Franklin was also an advocate of term limits; “In free governments, the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors. For the former to return among the latter does not degrade, but promote them.” [3] George Mason stated that “nothing is so essential to the preservation of the Republican government as a periodic rotation.” [4] This unfortunate oversight in the formation of our federal government has allowed for the rise of the professional politician and with it came the systemic dependency upon re-election financing. In 1995 the United States Supreme Court placed another obstacle in between the people and term limits when they ruled that States cannot impose term limits on their federal representatives in the case of U.S. Term Limits Inc. v. Thornton. Those in congress are caught in a system which practically force feeds them the drug of re-election financing. For this drug they must become slaves to those individuals and organizations with money, lots of money, and spend most of their time pleading for this money. They are dependent on it, and dependency is the enemy of liberty. This money rarely comes without obligation and therefore since the desire for self-preservation is so primal the aforementioned hierarchy of virtues often gets set aside, all other virtues being held hostage for the sake of self-preservation. The professional politician in return for this campaign financing returns pork monies to the contributors interests and quickly the heard of swine develops, running frantically from trough to trough. This freedom of perpetual re-election is putting the sovereignty and liberty of the people at risk. This dependence turns the hearts and minds of the politicians to their money machines. The only hope the people have at freeing the Republic from this systemic dependency is to remove the option of self-preservation, or halt the money sources that come with obligations, or ideally both. Only then can we return to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. A government wherein representatives honestly represent the hierarchy of virtues the people champion and respect their sovereignty. The trump card of self-preservation will be removed from the deck.
Politicians are not the only culprit in this fall from a people’s government into a landscape of corrupt placation. The people are apathetic conspirators. The people are sovereign, but oblivious to this most critical detail of the Republic. With this sovereignty comes the awesome responsibility of oversight. This responsibility has been almost completely dismissed by the public. At times the people have had an ally in the press but this no longer can be relied upon. The press has their own addiction; ratings. Ratings are driven by the eye of the public. The public eye – the vainest and most superficial of all the senses – delights in flashing lights and pretty colors and provides a watchdog which is easily distracted and void of serious reflection. The result of this lazy eye of watchfulness is that the people send the least offensive characters to Washington and then prefer not to be bothered again. We would rather keep an accounting of our American Idols and Crime Scene Investigations where we are handed quick answers in attractive packages. The public is too comfortable and lazy under the sedative of entertainment. Those few who do seek for the truth often find only subsets of it from the factionalized content providers that are increasing in numbers daily. This “new media” ocean is filled with blogs and political commentators dripping with bias. It is difficult for the seeker of truth to find unspoiled sources. If we cannot become a people free from addiction, dependency, and bias and create constructive conversation to take seriously the responsibilities this Republic demands, then this great nation will fail.
The people of this great Republic must awake and remember the primary virtue of liberty upon which we were founded. We must protect her and seek out her enemies, chief among them being dependency, entitlement, ignorance, and indifference. When found, we must be bold and aggressive in destroying these vices. We must find leaders that will ride at the head of the charge and keep our eyes fixed on the goal. We must remove those who would protect the flaws in the system that allow them comfortable dependence. We have been a free people, and can ensure that it will ever be so if we will take on the mantel of sovereignty and sail America away from the shallow waters of lesser virtues and into the deep waters of the future, being pulled first and foremost by the sails of liberty.
