Last month in the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank proffered an interesting claim—he doesn’t flesh it out enough to be an argument—that the left needs to reclaim the concept of freedom from the grasp of the right:
People working the freedom vein were numerous at the large protest that took place in Washington on Saturday. Sponsors included the Institute for Liberty, Let Freedom Ring, Young Americans for Liberty, the Campaign for Liberty, the Center for Individual Freedom, and BureauCrash a.k.a. “the Freedom Activist Network.” FreedomWorks, the grass-roots pressure group, prepared a video for the occasion which encouraged people to believe that the administration’s many policy “czars” revealed its kinship to the Russian autocracy of old.
That our ancestors could ever have understood freedom as something greater than the absence of the state would probably strike protesters as inconceivable. But they did. You can see it in that famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting from 1943: “Freedom from Want,” an illustration of one of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.” Strange though it might sound, this is a form of freedom that pretty much requires government to get involved in the economy in order to “secure to every nation,” as Roosevelt put it, “a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants.” The idea is still enshrined today in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
[ . . . ]
Today, of course, we know that the right’s tyranny-fears were nonsense. Most of Roosevelt’s innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.
Even such pits of statism as Britain and Canada remain free societies, generally speaking, despite having gone skipping blithely down the universal-health-care road to serfdom decades ago.
For the sort of people who gathered on the Mall last weekend, however, I doubt that such observations would matter in the least. Their conception of freedom soars on by a force all its own, carried aloft on the wings of pure abstract reasoning: Government intervention equals tyranny. Liberalism is forever a form of despotism-in-waiting.
Frank makes a limited, though valid, point. When pundits and protestors on the right drone on about government intervention leading to socialism and/or fascism it makes them look clueless and histrionic (particularly since few of them would be willing—truly willing—to dismantle Medicare and Social Security). When Americans are given the choice they almost always trade their abstract concept of freedom for a concrete social welfare program. Even Ayn Rand-loving college libertarians find it hard to hard to turn down Federal Pell Grants.
But while government intervention (read: overreach) doesn’t necessarily lead to tyranny, it does tend to lead to a form of soft despotism. But its a self-inflicted slavery, a tradeoff made by people who willingly allow their values and community bonds to be undermined in order to gain a modicum of economic “freedom.”
How then could we reframe the debate about government expansion and freedom in a way that truly resonates with the American public? In fifty words or less, how would you attempt to change the mind of someone persuaded by Frank’s underlying thesis that freedom from any economic wants is the greatest of freedoms—a freedom so great that it must be backed by a government guarantee?
October 14th, 2009 | 10:45 am
Thanks to you, Joe, and to the six other people who read Thomas Frank’s columns so I don’t have to, but the 800 lb. gorilla in the room is a stifling tax burden to pay for all that Uncle says we must have. With Obama, however, we may be looking at a tipping point in taxation: fortunately, the left just can’t help themselves!
October 14th, 2009 | 11:55 am
“Freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” “Freedom from” implies, and it’s a fool’s errand, the attempt to control other people. “Freedom to” is the scope to take morally legitimate measures to sustain life and liberty and pursue happiness.
Don’t expect this to persuade the far left, they seem to like the idea of controlling others [good luck /s/, in the long run]. But it’s the crux of my thinking.
October 14th, 2009 | 12:50 pm
The problem is scale. And politically the scaling problem is caused by the way the system allocates patronage.
There is nothing inherently wrong or socially problematic with a few people sharing food, lodging, and other resources of living — even to the point of incurring a recognized and mutually enforceable obligation to one another in that regard. But those obligations are scale dependent for their function. In the fullest sense what makes those structures function is as much the ties of blood (in the case of familial arrangements), or of concerted moral agreement about ways of life (in the case of religious communities) or more loosely in aligning merely economic or productive interests (in the case of business or charitable organizations) or more loosely yet in terms of networks of voluntary exchange of goods (in the case of markets) or networks of voluntary intellectual exchange (in the case of universities and the larger networks of lettered collective thought.)
You will note two trends: looseness of structure and predictive obligation increases with increases in size; the objects of obligation become increasing abstract, diffuse, larger in category, and less specific in reference.
Scale is our problem, as Chesterton and Hakek both observed. As the frame of man will support the weight of a normal man of adult height and weight, it will becomes increasingly impaired if exceeds a certain scale. A man of ten feet in height collapses under his own weight — it is a material law that the structural capacity grows as the square while the structural burden grows as the cube.
At the federal level we have far exceeded that capacity — in many areas — resulting in government actions of increased lurching force and an increasingly arbitrary and intrusive nature. Without going into great dislocation the answer is simple — push these problematic areas back down to the States — not only have they no Constitutional issues in regard to such programs they operate at a lesser and therefore more human scale (perhaps still too large in some cases, but they are the ones who should decide that).
How to do it? Simple — a President committed to the Tenth Amendment and observing a due caution about what “faithful execution of the laws” entails, and where any doubt exists defer to the other constitutional executives in our system (the several States) to “observe the law of the land” in those regards — and then effectively serve the problematic agencies to them, state by state, in pro-rated pieces.
Not a social program abandoned, not a Social Security or Medicare check delayed, and the President can EVEN invite the governors of the several states to be receivers and transmitters of the federal revenue for those programs (or for ALL federal revenue, i.e. — Congress has no power to dictate to the Executive HOW authorized tax revenue should be collected — the IRS and Internal Revenue Code notwithstanding, Congress can authorize the IRS to exist, but it cannot dictate how the president employs it in effecting those collections, nor can it bar other methods the president may choose to employ — like cooperation with the executives of the several States) .
And that changes the game entirely. The present political system (as distinguished from, and operating within the Constitutional structure) is based on Congressional patronage through appropriations dispensed through quasi-legislative rule-making executive agencies. Congress has abandoned formal control (and therefore accountability) to the Executive in doing so.
The competition is therefore to see who can garner the greatest degree of that patronage in the existing political system. The dynamic driven by the structure of patronage is to increase centralized power. The stakes of the game are always rising because that is the only way to accommodate new players with demands for “their piece of the action.”
But the system can be reversed — but only by a right-minded President — no on in the current Congressional system can break out of the game, not with any lasting effect because the rest won;t go along. The Courts have abandoned these points of Constitutional principle as “political questions.” That leaves one federal political player — the President. But really, the President has natural political allies in the fellow Constitutional executives — the governors of the States — but he is not using them — because to use them changes the game. Time to change the game.
In the current system the President can only get more power if Congress lets him. By undertaking to GIVE UP practical control over any constitutionally questionable powers and associated agencies and revenue, the President becomes the new fountain of patronage — which Congress is powerless to control.
Once the political structures in the States have the scent of a source of new patronage as an end-run around the existing battlements of the Congressional/Agency dispensary system of political power — the jig is up. The political structures within the States will defend and actively seek to expand — politically — their retention of these new sources of patronage that THEY can dispense and at that point the centralization era is in the endgame.
Morally, theologically and Constitutionally, it is unassailable — the President gains political favor and the political power that goes with it, by expressly ABANDONING questionable Constitutional exercises of power that have preceded his undertaking of the office.
It is the most Christian approach to power- politics one could imagine — the one power in the world that no seeker of power can possibly defeat is — the willing surrender of power. Our supreme example of the exercise of that power defeated the Prince of this world.
October 14th, 2009 | 1:43 pm
To lovingly or unlovingly surrender or not surrender freely our selves or components thereof for the good of those who God brings us into relationship with. (This would seem to me God’s freedom granted to man. Likewise it would seem that the consequences matter both materially/spiritually and finitely/infinitely.).
October 14th, 2009 | 3:06 pm
Freedom from economic want, while certainly desirable, could hardly be considered part of having life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Freedom from economic want (by means of government intervention) *might* make one happy, but it would come at the expense of liberty for all.
October 14th, 2009 | 3:53 pm
Frank has deliberately pulled a verbal switch here that must be called out–he’s talking “freedoms” (as if they were things that can be pluralized in that way) rather than “rights.” It’s called the Bill of Rights, NOT the Bill of Freedoms. The Declaration of Independence talks about “unalienable Rights” NOT “unalienable Freedoms.” And so the question is, do you have a RIGHT to be FREE from want? And of course the answer is no, because that “right” would be dependent on someone else giving you something, and that’s not how rights work.
I have the right to worship in any way I see fit, and I can do so whether I live in Hawaii or Maine. I have the right to say the president is a fool, and I can do so whether I live in Washington or Florida (and whether it’s January 1 or November 1, so take that Supreme Court!). I have the right not to be forced to testify against myself in court, whether I live in Texas or New York.
I do NOT have the “right” to get the latest medication for $1, and it is absurd to think so. First, that would imply that people who lived before this pill was invented were having their rights violated (since they could not get this medicine that I think I have a right to), and second of all, because I am not some pathetic dependent of the state who needs my “rights” distributed to me. I have my rights. They are mine. I don’t have to wait in line to get them. Anything that someone gives me is patently NOT a “right” even if I think I’d be more “free” if they do. Quite the opposite, in fact.
October 14th, 2009 | 6:38 pm
A person can be rendered unfree by indoctrination, especially by subtle indoctrination embedded in education, entertainment, and sources of news and information. One particularly effective tactic is to force parents to submit their children to indoctrination in order to secure a public education. This is already happening in the United States. Another effective method is expansion of federal control over earning power – a power that will corrupt absolutely. James Kalb writes that “Advanced liberal society is reproducing the error of socialism – the attempt to administer and radically alter things that are too complex to be known, grasped, and controlled” as the socialists did with economics “but on a far grander scale.” When principled, respectful opposition to homosexual marriage, to consider one example, is “medicalized as fear of change” or “criminalized as hate speech”, the citizens of that society have then become profoundly unfree. This is also true when individuals are denied ability to choose alternate schooling for their children by a powerful corporation of teachers. When “change” is a euphemism for subtle replacement of religious freedom with a government “credo” then we are truly facing tyranny.
October 14th, 2009 | 7:41 pm
Wow, Joe, no contributions from statists. The average statist is not very literate. The vast majority are either on the government dole, work for the government, are in a union, or are unhappy in their job because they don’t have a healthy capitalistic competitive spirit…the only innovating they do is how to extort a handout, or how to hide their true agenda in making steps towards sabotaging the free market to engineer a socialist nanny state.
Hey, one of your heroes came out of the closet, you should too:
Paul Krugman Admits on the Joey Panto Show the Real Reason he Likes Inflation – It will bring about an Egalitarian Utopia
http://02e56fa.netsolhost.com/blog1/index.php/2009/10/14/paul-krugman-admits-the-real-reason-he-l
October 15th, 2009 | 2:26 am
Freedom from want as provided by the govt, only makes one subservient to the govt evermore.
We so deeply cherish our comfort, but as the Holy Father has put it: The world offers us comfort, but we were not made for comfort, we were made for greatness.
And furthermore, it is a plan fact to anyone with eyes, that we will not see freedom from want on this side of the eschaton.
October 15th, 2009 | 7:34 pm
I find the argument that the Left is interested in controlling people, not caring for them, offeinsive. In a word, it’s unkind. It’s believing the worst about people.
October 15th, 2009 | 7:46 pm
“I do NOT have the “right” to get the latest medication for $1, and it is absurd to think so. First, that would imply that people who lived before this pill was invented were having their rights violated (since they could not get this medicine that I think I have a right to), and second of all, because I am not some pathetic dependent of the state who needs my “rights” distributed to me.”
What’s absurd is to think that having a right to something that exists implies that people had a right to it before it existed. And the state, in the Left’s thinking, is not distributing your rights, it is providing for you — via Medicare and Medicaid, for example — what your rights entitle you to.
I don’t make the rights argument myself, I make the obligation argument. No one has a right to what’s legally mine, but I have an obligation to provide for the needy.
October 18th, 2009 | 11:37 pm
Freedom from want is a vastly different animal than freedom FOR responsibility.
Freedom from want comes at the cost of someone else’s gain, their freedom, if you will, to produce more than is necessary for their own needs. With this excess, the free individual can determine according to his own tastes and principles to consume or to give to those whom he deems merit his largesse.
When the state confiscates the excess of the free individual, it decides the allocation of the fruits of freemen, leaving freemen to slave ultimately for policies of which they may find abhorent to their moral sensibilities.
Whatever else one calls this, it is not freedom.
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