The dangers of relinquishing liberty for a quiet and “safe” life
In recent months, it has become increasingly clear that religious freedom, or any individual liberties for that matter, are best respected in lands where private property and financial resources are respected by the state. Mark Steyn explores the themes of private property and financial responsibility in this speech describing the dangers other nations are facing when they fail to respect these boundaries. I would encourage you to read the speech in its entirety. Editor
The following excerpts are from a speech Mark Steyn gave at Hillsdale College on March 9, 2009. You can read the full article here.
“In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it’s effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct.”
…
“And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it’s another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ’s Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that’s underway. The 44th president’s multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can’t make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it’s about 40%. In four years’ time, that number will be trending very Swede-like.”
…
“That’s Stage Two of societal enervation—when the state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior. Free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very quickly to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life. When President Bush talked about promoting democracy in the Middle East, there was a phrase he liked to use: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Really? It’s unclear whether that’s really the case in Gaza and the Pakistani tribal lands. But it’s absolutely certain that it’s not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, New Orleans and Buffalo. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. It’s ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world’s wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.
“And don’t be too sure you’ll get to choose your record collection in the end. That’s Stage Three: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it’s a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts. When my anglophone friends in the Province of Quebec used to complain about the lack of English signs in Quebec hospitals, my response was that, if you allow the government to be the sole provider of health care, why be surprised that they’re allowed to decide the language they’ll give it in? But, as I’ve learned during my year in the hellhole of Canadian “human rights” law, that’s true in a broader sense. In the interests of “cultural protection,” the Canadian state keeps foreign newspaper owners, foreign TV operators, and foreign bookstore owners out of Canada. Why shouldn’t it, in return, assume the right to police the ideas disseminated through those newspapers, bookstores and TV networks it graciously agrees to permit?
“When Maclean’s magazine and I were hauled up in 2007 for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia,” it quickly became very clear that, for members of a profession that brags about its “courage” incessantly (far more than, say, firemen do), an awful lot of journalists are quite content to be the eunuchs in the politically correct harem. A distressing number of Western journalists see no conflict between attending lunches for World Press Freedom Day every month and agreeing to be micro-regulated by the state. The big problem for those of us arguing for classical liberalism is that in modern Canada there’s hardly anything left that isn’t on the state dripfeed to one degree or another: Too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it. Up north, “intellectual freedom” means the relevant film-funding agency—Cinedole Canada or whatever it’s called—gives you a check to enable you to continue making so-called “bold, brave, transgressive” films that discombobulate state power not a whit.
“And then comes Stage Four, in which dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as “hatred.” In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control. Despite the smiley-face banalities, the tyranny becomes more naked: In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard’s Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator is invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but is banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported.”
MARK STEYN’S column appears in several newspapers, including the Washington Times, Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin, and the Orange County Register. In addition, he writes for The New Criterion, Maclean’s in Canada, the Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and Hawke’s Bay Today in New Zealand.
Read the full article at http://www.hillsdale.edu/images/userImages/mvanderwei/Page_4221/ImprimisApril09.pdf
RITSEMA: Supreme Court deals death blow to the 4th Amendment (Civics News)
Scott Ritsema
CIVICS NEWS.com
January 15, 2008
The “conservatives” on the Supreme Court have again voted in favor of big government and against liberty. They have ruled against the Fourth Amendment and in favor of the police state. (See AP report and USA Today report, “Supreme Court OKs Use of Evidence from Illegal Search.”)
For years, the courts have rightly refused to convict somebody based upon evidence that was obtained through an illegal, unconstitutional search. A legal search obeys the Fourth Amendment, which requires the search to be based upon probable cause and backed up by a warrant. The courts have gotten this one right over the years, refusing to accept evidence in court that failed to meet the criteria for a legitimate search. This way, law enforcement had an incentive to obey the Constitution, and do proper searches, rather than illegal searches.
But no more. The Fourth Amendment has been effectively repealed. Now, any the time that law enforcement makes a “mistake” that prevents them from doing a proper search, they will get away with it, and the evidence can be admitted into the court proceedings. The incentive to do the search in a legal fashion has now been removed; instead, and an incentive to do illegal searches and then say “oops” has now been introduced.
What is particularly astounding is that the reasoning of the majority had nothing to do with fidelity to the Constitution. As USA Today reports, “The Roberts majority focused on the societal costs of excluding drugs and other evidence seized.” Where did the Supreme Court derive the authority to rule based upon the perceived social costs and benefits of their decision? Aren’t these judges? …And aren’t judges supposed to interpret the law and rule based upon the Constitution? Or are they legislators now?
Conservatives rightly gripe about liberals who legislate from the bench. But they need to look in the mirror: “conservatives” have just legislated from the bench, and in doing so, have giving another tool to the police state. They have made it that much easier for the state to act in a lawless manner, further stripping the people of their individual liberties.
Balancing Government Secrecy and Accountability – What Should the Next President Do?
In attempting to increase national security, has the Bush administration gone too far in sacrificing accountability for secrecy? What does this mean for the next president?
The American Constitution Society (ACS) has recently published a new issue brief by Geoff Stone, entitled, On Secrecy and Transparency: Thoughts for Congress and a New Administration, in which Stone argues that the Bush administration’s insistence on national security at the expense of keeping citizens, or even Congress informed, has opened the door for torture, surveillance, and even threats to prosecute members of the press for getting too close to security issues.
In order to do so, Stone argues, the administration has relied on expansive definitions of executive immunity and the state secrets doctrine. Is it an understandable response to threats of future terrorist attacks or a fundamental shift in the way the nation works?
Stone’s document is about 12 pages long, but well worth checking out.
http://www.acslaw.org/files/Geoff%20Stone%20Issue%20Brief.pdf
NEWS BRIEFS: Global Privacy, Free Speech Issues
Study secretly tracks cell phone users outside US (AP)
Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.
The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/04/national/a100140D77.DTL
Water Crisis to be Biggest World Risk (London Telegraph)
A catastrophic water shortage could prove an even bigger threat to mankind this century than soaring food prices and the relentless exhaustion of energy reserves, according to a panel of global experts at the Goldman Sachs “Top Five Risks” conference.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/06/05/ccwater105.xml
American Blogger Released on Bail in Singapore
A US-based blogger who allegedly accused a Singapore judge of “prostituting herself” was released on bail Thursday and had his passport confiscated.A judge ordered Gopalan Nair, a former Singapore lawyer who is now a US citizen, to be released on 5,000 dollars bail (3,676 US) after more than four days in custody.
A prosecutor told the court there was no need for him to be detained while further investigations were carried out.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080605082122.yhz5ise8&show_article=1
The Unitary Executive – At the Zenith of His Powers
By Michael D. Peabody, Esq.
Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, politicians rushed to their podiums to urge people to continue living their lives as normally as possible. If the way of life changed, politicians warned, the terrorists would have won. After the initial shock subsided, most Americans resumed their traveling, shopping, and recreation as they applauded the military response overseas.
Although people gradually stopped scanning the skies for low-flying aircraft, a panic-stricken administration decided, in the interest of national security, that the
Definitions Matter
By Michael Peabody
In the book, 1984, George Orwell paints a bleak portrait of a future where Big Brother is watching everything you do, and the thought police can practically read your mind. In order to gain the support of the population, an ironically named Ministry of Truth twists the meaning of words to make terrible concepts seem acceptable with slogans such as War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; and Ignorance is Strength.
<!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–> Read more