If Men Were Angels (Part One)

Oh, I do hope this doesn’t seem too much like a college lecture to you! We tend to live in the here and now and think that the issues we face are unique and have never been faced before, but in reality, in one form or another, it is generally as Solomon preached, “…There is nothing new under the sun.” This is particularly true in the area of government and politics. From the time when there was more than one human being alive there became the need for the civil order we call government. As such “the oldest profession” might not be prostitution, but politics… come to think of it I guess one can be considered the same as the other.

We are not the first to experience the struggle between freedom and order that is Political Science, and many minds greater than mine have thought greater thoughts than I can think. So you will forgive, I hope, a few quotes from luminaries of the past whose ideas have stood the test of time.

It was James Madison who wrote in The Federalist Papers:

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

So our forefathers understood the type of governmental overreach that we are seeing today. They had seen it before, indeed, far worse than anything we have experienced. They knew that it was the way of men to accumulate more and more power, and in so doing, more and more corruption; and with corruption, an enlarged appetite for even more power. They built into our Constitution the formula for diminishing the rise of tyranny, and the remedies for it when it does arise. This is hardly the first time that we have seen government overreach in our history, nor is it the worst, and we have not to date seen the fall of the Republic. Oh, we have scars from the struggles, and we are tattered around the edges, but look to your friends and neighbors, not to the greedy or the layabouts that have always existed in any society; the heart of America is strong! Our nation is ill, but we insult our heritage when we despair of the remedies we have to work the cure. The Spirit of America may have slumbered in recent years, but it is far from dead. Inventing panic and crisis is not our way; we are better than that, and stronger. Despair does not become us. We have at our disposal more tools, technology, and education than was available at any time before to preserve the republic. “Quit ye like men, and be strong!”

The philosopher Immanuel Kant recognized three factors that combined in different ways to define four different models of governance. The factors are “Freedom”, “Law”, and “Force”.

Anarchy supposes that men can follow natural laws without the need for governments to enforce them, so in Kant’s model law and freedom without force equals anarchy.

Law and force without freedom is despotism, tyranny.

Force without freedom or law is barbarism.

The presence of all three, force, freedom, and law is a republic.

A capitalist republic assumes that men are neither angels nor often devils. It recognizes that people will generally cooperate with each other in enlightened self interest, but that occasionally the “self” will tip the scale from “enlightenment”, and so there need to be laws to define what is and isn’t acceptable. Further, since we are playing this game with real money and real interests, we can’t expect that people will always follow these laws voluntarily, hence the need for force or the threat of force, men are not angels! At the same time, monarchies, dictatorships, and tyrannies always have laws and force; what they lack is freedom. Freedom is a difficult one, because it is achieved by the absence of laws and force. You can’t give someone freedom except by taking away the things that take it away. So a free republic depends on the judicious use of law and force, preferably only to restrict citizens from restricting the freedom of other citizens. Any law or force that can’t be tied somehow to protecting one citizen from another moves our society away from freedom, and benevolent as it may be, toward tyranny, where it is assumed that a central authority is preferable to make decisions for you than you are for yourself. Freedom is left to be whatever the central authority chooses not to control.

For all but a few fanatical Ayn Rand devotees, the popularity of her literature, particularly “Atlas Shrugged”, does not lie in the excesses of her Objectivist philosophy, but rather on her lucid exposition of the threat of tyranny in the guise of benevolence:

“You better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law abiding citizens? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed, nor enforced or objectively interpreted- and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.”

I’m not quite as cynical as Ms. Rand when it comes to the plethora of legislation the nation is drowning in. Often enough the laws are well intentioned, and legislators are accused of not doing their jobs if they are not constantly producing new legislation. Unfortunately, often enough, legislation is motivated less by problem solving and more by political agendas, reelection, and pay-offs. Rarely is the question asked, is this a law we could live without? Rarer still is a law eliminated; and every line of laws, rules, and regulations is another lilliputian cord that binds us. Well meaning legislators and leaders, and some that are not so well meaning, hold in low regard the sanctity of freedom as the lifeblood of the Republic. A surgeon can’t be so intent on his operation that he allows the patient to bleed out.

IMHO: The coming controversy is an old one, the debate over the role of government in restricting individual freedom in pursuit of a nation that works better, in the opinion of some, for a larger majority of its citizens. We don’t often enough regard the confiscation of our wealth as a restriction of our freedom, though we really should, but we seem to have a harder time when we are required to do or not to do something. We are more willing to pay speeding fines than to stop speeding; to pay exorbitant prices on cigarettes than to stop smoking them, or even to pay our taxes than to fill out the endless paperwork. Had the government continued to simply take our money, we may have slept on. But with laws like Obamacare, the Safe Act, and even the outlawing of the incandescent light bulb, the anesthesia no longer keeps us sedated, and we see our liberty draining away. We can always make more money, but we can’t make more time; we can’t make more freedom. How do we stop the bleeding?

to be continued…