One Generation Away from Extinction

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If you look at history, freedom is not normal. Most people in most times and places lived under oppressive regimes where there was no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, and no due process. The government could lock you up and torture you at any time without having to give a reason, and in feudal Europe there was even the right of primis noctis which gave the lord first crack at deflowering your daughter. Even in today's America, most people want the government to prohibit others from doing things which they dislike, offering freedom for the things they do like as a consolation prize.

It's clear then why, in Ronald Reagan's words, "freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction." Freedom is rare and precarious, and we cannot be too careful about preserving the checks and balances that make it possible - including an armed population that can resist the power of the government if it ever becomes necessary. It might not be realistic, in the nuclear age, to expect the sort of weapons parity that would permit the people to beat the government in open combat, but they should at least be armed well enough that a would-be dictator would think twice before taking them on.

Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a novel about politics, freedom, and hospital gowns. Check it out on Amazon.com.

How Liberty is Lost

Some of my friends are skeptical. When I tell them that the 2012 presidential election will determine whether the United States of America continues to be a free country, they tell me our freedom isn’t even threatened.

I explain the threat in my novel, Full Asylum, in which I portray a future where America is no longer free. Government has become involved in every corner of our lives, and storm troopers called “CREEPS” are standing by to kick in our doors if we don’t fall in line. In this excerpt, I describe how we got to that point. It shows what happens when an economy fails to recover and politicians look for someone to blame. The setting is familiar to fans of the James Bond series — it’s the scene where the secret agent goes to his boss to get his orders:

“Good morning, sir,” said Dunn.         “Good morning, Beta Eleven,” said Alpha One. He sat at his massive oak desk in front of a painting of a fox hunt. “Sit down.”         Dunn sat in one of the leather wingback chairs in front of the desk. A small gentleman moldered in the other one. “You know Sir Brandon Pringle, Chancellor of the Exchequer,” Alpha One said.         “Chancellor,” said Dunn. Sir Brandon grunted.         “What do you know about economic sabotage?” Alpha One asked Dunn.         “It’s a new category of crime since the Financial Crises,” Dunn replied. “The Americans call it E.S. Individual saboteurs are referred to as sabos. After the Third Financial Meltdown, the G-20 powers responded with appropriate measures to expand the money supply and re-regulate out-of-control markets. Although there were some initial signs of their effectiveness, in the long run, the global economy did not improve. Eventually, governments around the world realized the reason. Their political opponents deliberately harmed their efforts: scared off investors, cut jobs, and even committed acts of vandalism.         “The sabo threat is particularly severe in the United States, where Congress responded by passing the Federal Economic Sabotage Act. The act, also called FESA, gave the government the powers necessary to combat the problem. One provision of the act prohibited criticism of government economic policy. There was a constitutional challenge to this, but the Supreme Court upheld the provision on the basis of the governmental interest in safeguarding the integrity of interstate commerce.         “To enforce the law, the government created an elite civilian military unit. The Coordinated Response Emergency Economic Protection Squad reports directly to the attorney general. Although its acronym should be pronounced CREE-TWO-P-S, certain elements of the public have taken to calling the unit members CREEPS, and this pronunciation has, regrettably, caught on. This new force has made significant inroads against the sabos; however, it has not been able to eradicate them entirely. I think that’s all, sir.”         “Yesterday afternoon,” said Sir Brandon, “the Advanced Missile Corporation filed for bankruptcy. Seventy-eight thousand people around the world are filing for unemployment compensation as we speak, fifteen thousand of them in England.”         Alpha One pressed a button on his desk. The fox hunt painting slid into the wall, revealing a large flat panel display. On the screen a photo sprang into view. It depicted a short, middle-aged woman in a fashionable red and black business suit. She had short dark hair and large dark eyes and was smoking a cigarette in a long black holder. Sir Brandon continued, “Iona Klimt, head of Klimt Defensive Software Corporation—KDS. Born in Soviet Russia, 1967. Emigrated to the US in the 1980s during the last days of the Cold War. Estimated net worth: 12.6 billion dollars.”         The picture morphed to an office park. There was a pond with a fountain and two green glass buildings. “KDS headquarters. Just outside Washington, DC. The company is…was…Advanced Missile’s largest competitor.”         “Iona Klimt is one of the leaders of the information revolution,” said Dunn. “Do we suspect she is engaged in economic sabotage?”         “That’s for you to find out,” said Alpha One. “You leave for America as soon as you draw your equipment from Double-G Branch. That’s all, Beta Eleven.”

To find out what happens when Dunn comes face-to-face with Iona Klimt, check out Full Asylum on Amazon.com.

Liberty and the Pill

Arguing about contraception and freedom is a little like dating. I have the same conversation over and over and I only occasionally get something out of it.

I thought it would be a great time saver to have all my arguments on this topic (freedom that is, not dating) in one place.

Any discussion of freedom (or any other subject for that matter) requires a solid intellectual foundation. Once the principles are in place, their application becomes obvious.

The right to freedom is a limited license. It is not the right to do anything you want. It is merely the right to do what is consistent with the rights of others. You are free to move your fist – but not if someone else’s face is in its path. This is because no system of rights can be self-contradictory - you cannot have some rights that violate other rights. Rights must be universal.

It follows that even though you have the right to do something, you do not have the right to force others to pay for it: that would violate their freedom to spend their own money. You have the right to travel to Hawaii. You don’t have the right to make someone else buy you a ticket (That's called a "nuance". Remember when Kerry criticized Bush for being impervious to "nuance". We don't hear much about "nuance" anymore). Another way of saying this is that there is no such thing as a “positive right”; there are only “negative rights”. I addressed positive and negative rights in my earlier blog entry, The “Right” to Health Care.

“But wait,” you say. “Doesn’t forcing pacifists, via taxation, to pay for the military violate their freedom?" No. A strong military is a pre-condition for freedom – as the French found out in 1940. It is therefore a contradiction in terms to talk about freedom from the obligation to pay for the military (A similar argument can be made for the police). The history of the world is littered with the corpses of free societies that had weak militaries. I can think of no example of a free society that stopped being a free society because its birth control program was weak.

I didn’t invent these ideas. They are the product of a long intellectual tradition, which starts with Aristotle and the Bible, and runs through the words of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson to Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan. One of the best presentations of them is Ayn Rand’s essay “Man’s Rights” which I highly recommend for a more in-depth treatment than is possible in a blog. It can be found in her collection The Virtue of Selfishness.

These thinkers created arguments that are devastating to the Left. Instead of refuting the arguments, the Left responded with a campaign of character assassination: the great voices of freedom were dead white men, or slaveowners, or fascists, or racists. In logic, this type of “argument” is called the Fallacy of the Abusive Ad Hominem.

It is a bad omen – both for freedom and logic – that this campaign has had remarkable success. These ideas - and why they’re important - are not widely understood. If they were, we would not see so many people lining up to throw away their liberty in exchange for the promise of free contraception - a promise that won’t be kept, by the way. There’s no such thing as a free birth control pill (but that’s an economic discussion, not a philosophical one).

It is clear from the principles I set down how the Obamacare contraception mandate impacts our freedom:

It is a violation of religious freedom to require someone who objects to contraception on religious grounds to pay for it, either directly or through their insurance companies.

If we do not mandate that insurers cover contraception, it does not follow that they won't. It simply means that insurers, employers, and patients will be free to work out among themselves what sort of insurance policy is best for them. There would probably be many choices, rather than the one-size-fits-all policy that the Obama administration is trying to force upon us.

It is not a violation of freedom to expect someone who wants contraception to pay for it - or purchase an insurance policy that does. If it were, that would violate the rights of those who have to do the paying. This does not prevent "access" to contraception. It is still a legal product, widely available at drug stores (that's another "nuance").

It would be a violation of freedom to ban contraception. Having said that, I don’t know anyone who wants to. Although my left-of-center friends accuse Republicans of harboring plans to outlaw the pill, when I ask them to name a major Republican politician (Senator, Governor, or Presidential candidate) who advocated this, they say they can’t, it’s just an “impression” they have. I asked some conservatives I met at CPAC what they thought of banning contraception. They either rolled their eyes or told me they were enthusiastically in favor of contraception - for liberals. The Republican “War on Women” is a myth.

Since it's an issue of universal rights, one of the arguments used by the left to defend the mandate - that few people are affected - is highly irrelevant. There's no quorum required, fortunately, for the exercise of our liberties.

All of the above applies equally to male and female contraceptives.

I think that covers it. I’ll add more from time to time.

Now if only I could master that dating thing.