Why All of Us Should Mistrust the Government
It should come as no surprise that President Obama told Ohio State students at graduation ceremonies last week that they should not question authority and they should reject the calls of those who do. He argued that “our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule” has been so successful that trusting the government is the same as trusting ourselves; hence, challenging the government is the same as challenging ourselves. And he blasted those who incessantly warn of government tyranny.
Yet, mistrust of government is as old as America itself. America was born out of mistrust of government. The revolution that was fought in the 1770s and 1780s was actually won in the minds of colonists in the mid-1760s when the British imposed the Stamp Act and used writs of assistance to enforce it. The Stamp Act required all persons in the colonies to have government-sold stamps on all documents in their possession, and writs of assistance permitted search warrants written by British troops in which they authorized themselves to enter private homes ostensibly to look for the stamps.
These two pieces of legislation were so unpopular here that Parliament actually rescinded the Stamp Act, and the king’s ministers reduced the use of soldier-written search warrants. But the searches for the stamps turned the tide of colonial opinion irreversibly against the king.
The same king also prosecuted his political adversaries in Great Britain and here for what he called “seditious libel” — basically, criticizing the government. Often that criticism spread and led to civil disobedience, so the British sought to punish it at its source. The prosecutions were so unpopular here, and so contrary to the spirit of what would become the Declaration of Independence, that when the British went home and the Framers wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was added, the First Amendment assured that the new government could not punish speech.
Yet barely 10 years into “our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule,” in the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, Congress at the instigation of President John Adams criminalized free speech that was critical of the new government.
How did it come about that members of the same generation — in some cases the very same human beings — that declared in the First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” in fact enacted laws that did just that?
As morally wrong, as violative of the natural law, as unconstitutional as these laws were, they were not historical incongruities. Thomas Jefferson — who opposed and condemned the acts (he was Adams’ vice president at the time) — warned that it is the nature of government over time to increase and of liberty to decrease. And that’s why we should not trust government. In the same era, James Madison himself agreed when he wrote, “All men having power should be distrusted to a certain degree.”
The Alien and Sedition Acts were but the beginning of a long train of government abuses visited upon people in America as a consequence of the “experiment in self-rule.” I am not quoting Obama’s Ohio State speech to nitpick, but rather to establish a base line for my argument that he rejects core principles and historical lessons and, most troubling, the natural law itself when he opines that government should be trusted because it has gained power via self-rule.
Self-rule alone is hardly a basis for governmental legitimacy, unless it is accompanied by fidelity to the natural law and to the rule of law. The rule of law here means fidelity to the Constitution, that all laws are just and apply to everyone, so no one is excused from obeying the laws and no one is excluded from their protections. Yet, self-rule here has been unjust and has brought us the tyranny of the majority. And that tyranny has brought us slavery, unjust wars, Jim Crow laws, domestic concentration camps in wartime, slaughter of babies in the womb, domestic spying without search warrants, torture and death by drones — just to name a few.
The reason Obama likes government and the reason it is “a dangerous fire,” as George Washington warned, and the reason I have been warning against government tyranny in my public work is all the same: The government rejects the natural law because it is an obstacle to its control over us. The natural law is divinely embedded in our souls. It is manifested by the universal yearning for freedom and justice. It consists of areas of human behavior — thought, expression, religion, self-defense, travel, acquisition and use of property, privacy, for example — in which our behavior is subject only to the exercise of our free will and not the permission of our neighbors or regulation by the government. The natural law, properly understood, is a restraint on the government.
Yet, government in America — whether it consists of Congress protecting the slave trade, or John Adams or Abraham Lincoln or Woodrow Wilson prosecuting political speech, or FDR incarcerating Japanese-Americans, or George W. Bush promising immunity for torturers and domestic warrantless spies, or Obama killing whomever he chooses with drones — has never hesitated to reject the natural law. All of these violations of the natural law were approved by the majority when undertaken. The government’s persistent and systematic rejection of the natural law is alone sufficient to mistrust government and reject Obama’s Ohio State advice.
The government that has come about by self-rule derives its powers from the consent of the governed. Because the tyranny of the majority can be as dangerous to freedom as the tyranny of a madman, all use of governmental power should be challenged and questioned. Government is essentially the negation of liberty. If we fail to challenge government at every turn, there will be no liberty remaining for us to defend when the government tries to negate it.
I can’t even articulate how much I detest Barack Obama.
(via therepublitarian)
"[E]ven as Obama said that “a decade of war is now ending” in his inauguration speech, a drone strike killed three suspected Al Qaeda members in Yemen. […]
If George W. Bush were doing this sort of thing, we’d be marching in the streets about it. Why does Obama get a free pass? (And on Bradley Manning? And on Guantanamo?) Anyone in the press want to ask the President about the legality & moral stickiness of drone strikes at his next press conference?"
kottke.org: Obama’s overlooked war and lethal Presidency (via hipsterlibertarian)
(via hipsterlibertarian)
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience."
Albert Camus (via libertariancontrarian)
(Source: quotableskeptics, via libertariancontrarian)
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."
Martin Luther King Jr. [From A Time to Break Silence] (via statistsgonnastate)
"Technically speaking, it’s more like fascism. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it — and that’s what’s happening with our health care programs and these reforms."
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey On ObamaCare
Later, he clarified:
“Well, I think that was a bad choice of words on my part … that word [fascism] has an association with of course dictatorships in the 20th century like Germany and Spain, and Italy. What I know is that we no longer have free enterprise capitalism in health care, it’s not a system any longer where people are able to innovate, it’s not based on voluntary exchange. The government is directing it. So we need a new word for it. I don’t know what the right word is.”
The more appropriate term he’s looking for is probably corporatism or crony capitalism. But the thing is: he’s not wrong calling it fascism, particularly as differentiated from socialism. As I’ve previously noted: “Crony capitalism (aka ‘state capitalism’ or ‘corporatism’)… is the economic framework of fascism. Free market capitalism, on the other hand, is the economic framework of liberty.”
(via laliberty)
(via laliberty)
"Watch money. Money is the barometer of society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."
Ayn Rand (via libertariancontrarian)
(Source: quotableskeptics, via libertariancontrarian)
"Government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way"
Henry David Thoreau (via libertarianfolkster)
(via robot-notes)
Ayn Rand on Feminism and Equal Opportunity Employment
“All you have to do is show your ability. If someone is prejudiced and doesn’t hire you, the intelligent employer will.”
(Source: moralanarchism)
(Source: hipsterlibertarian, via the-altar)
"To put it succinctly: The goal of libertarianism is freedom, period. No more and no less. Anything less is a betrayal; but anything more is equally a betrayal of liberty, because it implies imposing our own goals on others. To be a libertarian must mean that one upholds liberty as the highest political end not necessarily one’s highest personal end. To confuse the issue, to mix in any sort of vision — technocratic or futuristic or any other — with politics, is to abandon liberty as that highest political goal, and at the very least to destroy the very meaning of a political movement or organisation."
Murray Rothbard (via anarchei)
Feds label liberty lovers 'terrorists' ... again
“Examples of what START considers to be “right-wing” include “groups that believe that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack and is either already lost or that the threat is imminent.” The report also goes on to describe right-wing “terrorists” as those who are reverent of individual liberty and suspicious of centralized federal authority.
When defining “left-wing,” START said it wanted “to bring about change through violent revolution rather than through established political processes. This category also includes secular left-wing groups that rely heavily on terrorism to overthrow the capitalist system and either establish ‘a dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Marxist-Leninists) or, much more rarely, a decentralized, non-hierarchical political system (anarchists).”
(Source: thinksquad, via tall-deactivated20130328)
(Source: the-altar, via libertariancontrarian)
Villagers join al-Qaeda after deadly US strike
I believe this would be called blow back. Something the war mongers don’t understand. The more the US military bombs and murders the more terrorists they are creating.
Recently villagers in Sabul, about 15 kilometres from Radda, reported hearing US drones fly over the area, often up to four times a day. ”It burns my blood every time I see or hear the airplanes,” said Ali Ahmed Mukhbil, a 40-year-old farmer.
Nasser Rubaih, a 26-year-old farmer, was working in the valley on the day the truck was hit. He heard the explosions and ran to the site and, like others, threw sand into the burning vehicle to douse the flames. As he sifted through the charred bodies lying on the road, he recognised his brother Abdullah from his clothes. Mr Mukhbil’s brother Masood was also dead.
The Yemeni government publicly apologised for the attack and sent 101 guns to tribal leaders in the area, which in Yemeni culture is an admission of guilt. But a government inquiry into the strike appears to be stalled. After a December 2009 air strike killed dozens of civilians in the southern town of al-Majala, the government also took responsibility.
”We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” the then dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh told General David Petraeus, then the head of US Central Command, according to a US embassy email leaked by WikiLeaks.
Three weeks after the Radda attack, Mr Hadi visited Washington and praised the accuracy of US drone strikes. ”They pinpoint the target and have zero margin of error, if you know what target you’re aiming at,” he told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars.
Al-Qaeda sent emissaries to Sabul to offer compensation to victims’ relatives, in comparison to the government that provided nothing. Some relatives have already joined the terrorist group since the attack, Radda’s security chief, Hamoud Mohamed al-Ammari, said. Others may follow. ”If I am sure the Americans are the ones who killed my brother, I will join al-Qaeda and fight against America,” Mr Rubaih said.
