Government Is the Greatest Rights Violator
Once you see it, you cannot un-see it.
It’s #MemeMonday! (Discussion below.)
There is a wide variety of different routes we could take in discussing today’s meme—it is pregnant with meaning.
I will follow just one of those paths here: the possible objection that some conservatives might have to the notion that government is the entity with the greatest power to violate your rights.
First, the backstory…
The majority of conservatives and libertarians recognize that rights are natural—that you have your rights as an ineluctable consequence of your very existence, no matter what government or anyone else says. In an entirely related phenomenon, the majority of conservatives and libertarians also believe that freedom is the highest political value.
A defining characteristic of the right, therefore, is the willingness to sacrifice security in order to maximize our degree of liberty. Indeed, that is why we seek to limit government—we know that government and freedom are in inverse proportion to one another:
The left, generally speaking, take the opposite view. They want more security (economic, personal, the security of the collective, etc.) and are willing to sacrifice freedom to get it. That is why they prefer larger government:
(Note: The charts above are from Chapter 18 of the book “The Freedom Scale,” installments of which I am currently posting at a rate of one per week. We are currently in Chapter 4. The charts will make even more sense when we get to Chapter 18.)
These predispositions of left and right are rooted not only in ideology and philosophy, but also very likely in personality: internal vs. external locus of control, degree of focus on individuals vs. the collective, etc.
Unfortunately, most conservatives are stuck believing some other ideas that aren’t quite right…
They tend to believe the Founders’ notion that voting constitutes the “consent of the governed.” It doesn’t (and some of the Founders almost certainly knew it at the time). This is a complex topic—one that we have discussed here at length and will continue to do so. In brief…it isn’t true, but it was also the best the Founders could do given their era of history.
They tend to believe the Lockean-Enlightenment notion that our only choice, in order to escape the “insecurity” of the “state of nature,” is to agree to a “social contract” empowering a small government to which we must surrender a certain amount of our freedom and property. This too was likely the best the Enlightenment-era philosophers and natural lawyers could have come up with for their time in history…but it wasn’t quite right. Unfortunately, another conservative trait—the temperamental impulse to preserve old things—is holding them back from seeing that, as good as it was, it is not the final chapter in freedom’s story.
They tend to believe—all evidence to the contrary—that we can some how get back to, or closer to, some “original” condition of the American constitutional republic if we just vote hard enough. The believe we can restore “limited” government and then somehow keep it “limited.” And that that quixotic hell-scape is the best we can do.
Most conservatives have not yet realized that the natural lawyers were wrong when they claimed that our only two choices are government or the chaos of the state of nature. They have never heard that order can be maintained in other ways, and the conservative temperament keeps many of them from being willing to look into it further. (If they did, and if they carried their own principles out to their logical conclusions, they would likely become anarchists, just as I did!)
As a result, many conservatives still believe that as bad as government is, the rights violators who would run rampant in government’s absence would be even worse.
I (via the meme I made) am not saying that no rights-violators would exist in government’s absence. That would be utopian nonsense. Rather, I am saying that the entity with the GREATEST ability to violate rights would be gone. That is an essential distinction.
Until conservatives get that—and stop freezing 1789 in amber as the best we can ever do!—our problems will continue. Yet conservatives are many in number and great lovers of freedom, and once they finally do begin to recognize all this, there will be no stopping us!
At that time, the next evolution will become inevitable.
We are told that government creates freedom, rights, jobs, prosperity... The only thing that government really creates is more government.
The idea of real self-governance is intriguing, and let’s say the moon, stars and planets align creating the ability to build from scratch.
What about prisons? Privatizing prisons did not work well due to the usual human trait of greed, so while I totally get the idea that private free market works best (and I agree) there are things that could easily go south.
Suppose millions of immigrants flood into America illegally. (Yeah, right.) What if China, Iran and Russia unite and invade America? What about National Defense?
And, there’s the (uncomfortable) fact that America is a very big and diverse country, unlike the countries that always win the happiest country rankings that are the complete opposite: homogenous and small. Like-minded people with a common culture tend to get along better. America’s diverse bubbling lava is just waiting for the next spark to ignite into madness. How do we even get people to the table?