We Should Make the Founding Fathers Proud

And that includes not making the same mistakes they made. (DN 1.2)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2

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Chapter 1: WHY

1.2 — Getting Rights Right, Part 1

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At this juncture, a quick aside is required…

I just finished reading Enemy of the State, the first in F. Paul Wilson’s “Lanague Federation” series. It is anarchocapitalist sci-fi, so it is obviously right up my street. And if you are reading this (and go in for that sort of thing), there’s a good chance you would love it too.

SPOILER ALERT. Please skip the next two paragraphs if you plan to read the book.

In the story, a series of planets are menaced by an oppressive government (surprise, surprise!) called The Outworld Imperium. The final phase of Peter Lanague’s complex and brilliant strategy for bringing down this government involves a series of recordings—to be broadcast at exactly the right moment for maximum effect.

At the last minute, however, Peter’s wife, Maura, watches the recordings and realizes that they are not going to work. Simply put, they are too philosophical. The arguments are perfect and undeniable, but Maura, in her wisdom, understands that perfect logical arguments are not what work on most people. She replaces them with her own message, which combines the philosophy with a more visceral, emotional appeal. And she ends up saving the day.

END SPOILERS

The point was not lost on me. I know full-well that logical argumentation just doesn’t work for some people, even when it reaches undeniable conclusions. I myself am a blend of thinking and feeling, so I get it.

That said, logical arguments are an essential component in developing and testing principles. Feelings are important, but on their own, they can lead just about anywhere.

Ideally, we use feelings as fuel to send us on a search for truth and then employ logic to confirm our discoveries. A one-two punch. Once we have grounded our beliefs in solid reasoning, we can feel all the more passionate knowing we’ve gotten it right!

So…

If you are more moved by emotions than logic, great! We need emotional appeals, and feeling people, in this movement. Hopefully I can provide grounding that leads to even more confidence about what your intuition is already telling you.

And if you are searching for answers through logic and coming to similar conclusions, but by a different road, that is fine too. In fact, it is more than fine. It is further evidence that our perceptions of natural law are leading us to the correct conclusions. We are stronger together.

The point of this aside is simply this:

We do not solely want to feel or suspect that our principles might be true. We need to know. To that end, a few more philosophical arguments are needed, and will appear here and there throughout this chapter. But fear not—it is not all going to be like that.

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Okay, so with that out of the way…

Why are we here all here, reading (and writing) this book? We obviously have a complaint of some sort. There is something we feel needs to be fixed. What is it?

I would be willing to bet that if each of us were to take all our complaints and keep boiling them down until we reached their essence, that essence would be something like this:

“My rights are being violated.”

On a fundamental level, that is the problem that needs to get fixed. That is the purpose the distributed nation ultimately hopes to serve—to help properly protect your rights.

To finally get it right.

Don’t get me wrong—the American Founders, and the many classical-liberal philosophers from whose wellsprings they drew, took us a good distance toward that goal. But they were still products of the time in which they lived. Contrary to our patriotic impulses, classical-liberal thinking did not stop in 1776. We know more now.

And we know that there is something they didn’t get quite right…

The Founders, and the natural lawyers of the Enlightenment, believed that in the absence of government (which they called the state of nature), there would be enough disorder that people will actually prefer to surrender some of their rights to a government in order to preserve the rest.

Here’s Locke, from his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689):

Absolute arbitrary power, or governing without settled standing laws, can neither of them consist with the ends of society and government, which men would not quit the freedom of the state of Nature for, and tie themselves up under, were it not to preserve their lives, liberties, and fortunes, and by stated rules of right and property to secure their peace and quiet.

What he means (once we’ve waded through his syntactical thicket) is simply this: no one is going to sacrifice the freedom of the state of nature and surrender a portion of his rights to a government unless he expects that, on balance, that government will protect more of his rights than it will violate. In other words, government has to be a better deal than anarchy or it’s not worth it.

He, the rest of the natural lawyers, the American Founders, and all who have since emulated them thus proceeded with two assumptions:

1. It is possible to create and maintain a sufficiently limited government, and

2. It is not possible to create or maintain sufficient order without some government.

Both of these appear to be incorrect (albeit understandable).

They knew government was a dangerous beast. But in their era, no one had yet thought of any way to maintain sufficient order without government. In the absence of being able to think of an alternative, they accepted the Faustian bargain.

This forced them into the unenviable position of having to hold their noses and impose a “social contract” by force, and then to claim that your consent to it is “tacit” and “implied.”

Deep down, they surely must have known that this was a tawdry workaround for the conundrum. Even in the most charitable reading, it is a philosophical cheat-code—to get around the problem that the thing they were creating would be violating, as a normal part of is functions, the very thing they sought to protect. The thing they cherished most. Our natural rights.

In the following century, classical-liberal thinkers such as Lysander Spooner and Auberon Herbert began to pull on that thread, and in the century-plus since, others have unravelled it completely. There is good reason to believe that order can be maintained without empowering a government that violates individual rights every day, as a part of its normal operations. (We will get to all that later.)

More than one politician has said, without a trace of irony, that we must limit freedom in order to save freedom, and other words to that effect. (In fact, I have some recollection of either B. Obama or H. Clinton saying something very much like this. If anyone knows the quote, please let me know.) That is not a bargain that any classical liberal should want to make—especially if there is even a slight chance of an alternative that can maintain order without trashing human consent.

Most of the American Founders (maybe not Hamilton) would have listened most eagerly to any such alternative. We owe it to them, and all they did for us, not to freeze their work in amber, but instead to take it to the next level.

Ultimately, they wanted to protect rights, and that is what we want too. So let’s make them proud.

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