Kaine vs. Jefferson

Recently Senator Kaine of Virginia said that people’s rights are creations of their government. Conservatives then griped that he was denying  the divine endowment of those rights. What they and others should have been objecting to is that what he said is fundamentally wrong and deeply illiberal. Whether one believes in individual rights out of religious conviction or from secular philosophical considerations is irrelevant in the context of rejecting Kaine’s claim. People own their own lives and have their unalienable rights regardless of the actions of their governments. Slaves in Cuba or North Korea have the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as citizens of the United States. They are unfortunate in being subject to tyrannies that violate those rights, while Americans are lucky in having a government that generally respects them. But the rights of human beings are the same everywhere. Better governments respect them. Worse governments suppress their exercise. No government creates them, and governments can justify and legitimatize themselves only by securing them. Better Virginians than Kaine have understood that.

 

That Knock in the Night

On the public record Roger Stone is a colorful and even somewhat flamboyant person who has spent his adult life as a lobbyist and political operator.  One gets the impression that he is at least a little shady, though it is hard to tell how much of that is due to prejudiced and slanted reporting, since he has worked mainly with Republicans and against Democrats.  I have no idea if he is guilty of real crimes,  insignificant technical violations amplified by Mueller’s  team of Democrats for political reasons,  or nothing at all.  I do know that he is a sixty  six years old public figure, has a permanent address that is not a bunker or fortified compound, and shows no evidence of being either Bonnie or Clyde, let alone John Dillinger.

Yet when the Mueller gang decided it arrest him, they did not have a couple of people knock on his door at a reasonable hour and serve him with a warrant or arrest him while he was out in public.   Instead an armed squadron of enforcers in tactical gear stormed his house around dawn one morning and carted him off in chains while a crew from CNN filmed the whole thing. It is hard to think of a purpose in that except intimidation – intimidation of Stone, of Trump’s other associates, of people who may support Trump, of anyone who might think of crossing  the establishment or “deep state” in Washington.

One should be careful about likening  things happening here  to the tactics of the Gestapo or the KGB, but sometimes and to some degree, the shoe fits. This is one of those times. That should worry and infuriate Americans of liberal sentiments, regardless of their politics or what they think of Trump, Stone, or anyone in the present administration. That knock on the door in the middle of the night  and a cowered populace’s terror of it are things  out of the dark days of Europe in the 20^th Century.  We don’t want a return to the practice or a reappearance of the fear here.  Americans need to make  their refusal to  allow it plain to those in the government who want to try it. 

A Simple Solution

In several cases in recent news, Christian business people such as florists and bakers have gotten in trouble with local authorities for refusing to sell goods and services to weddings between homosexuals. A pizza joint in Indiana was threatened and pressured to close after its owner said she would not want to cater the wedding of a homosexual couple.  In an attempt to turn the tables, a Christian asked various bakeries to produce cakes featuring quotes from the Bible condemning homosexuality and filed complaints with authorities when he was turned down. Presumed mainly Christian sympathizers with the owners of the pizza place raised almost a million dollars for them with an online appeal. Things seem to be both getting hot and being heated up by both conservatives and leftists in the media.

To libertarians the means of dealing with such disputes are  obvious. Simply leave people alone and let them make their own decisions about what they want to do. If a Christian or Muslim baker does not want to bake a cake for the wedding of a homosexual couple,  let him lose the business, and let the people getting married go find a willing vendor and make their purchase from him.  If people find the actions of the baker objectionable and bigoted, let them decide not to patronize his  store and go buy  their cookies and pastries elsewhere.   

That is how such a dispute would be handled in a free and civil society.   In our present environment which is not fully free and far from civil, we often get instead antagonistic groups fighting to use the coercive power of government to make other people obey their dictates.  Such a condition, besides being wrong and violating the rights of the losers, is dangerous for the winners. Political winds change, and a government that can force a Christian to act against his principles today can force someone else to act against his next month or next year.  It is not only more ethical but more prudent to respect and demand respect for the rights of all, including the rights of those who do things one disapproves of. 

Eric Garner and the Cops

People in New York are protesting in the streets after  the decision not to prosecute the cops who killed Eric Garner. They are right to do so.  This case does not have the ambiguity of the more publicized killing in Ferguson, Missouri. The event  was recorded  on video. Garner was not doing anything  actually wrong or harmful to anyone.  His so-called crime was selling untaxed cigarettes, and a group of cops jumped him, choked him as he shouted he could not breathe, and killed him. As a writer at Reason magazine said, harshly but accurately, he was in  a sense killed for city of New York revenue enhancement.

 

One can agree with conservative apologists for the police that Garner made a pragmatic mistake when he resisted (though it is easy to see how a person fed up with continued bullying and harassment might put pragmatism aside and imprudently but bravely stand up for himself) without thinking that absolves the cops who started the trouble by hassling Garner for no good reason and then brutalized and killed him.  It is usually imprudent  to resist the demands of armed and dangerous cops just as in a police state it is usually a bad idea to try to run when the Gestapo officers surround you and say “papiere, bitte”, but such practical considerations miss the point.   In a free society there are  no Gestapos, and the cops do not have the authority  to accost or abuse  or kill citizens who are not doing anyone harm.  America is far from  a police state, but neither is it a fully free society. It is somewhere in between, and since 2001 it has moved in the wrong direction.

As a start toward correcting  things,  Americans need to oppose and reverse the militarization of the police, the expansion of police powers  at all levels of government, and  the tendency to give enforcers of laws and rules  too much authority and leeway and to fail to hold them accountable for their misdeeds. It will not be easy. Too  many leftists tend to ignore or excuse abuses and  thuggery when the enforcers are employed by the federal government or the victims are people they hold in contempt (such as a Randy Weaver),  while too many conservatives tend to ignore or excuse abuses and thuggery when the enforcers are employed by local governments or  the victims are people they hold in contempt (such as an Eric Garner).   Both need to realize that dangerous police power is dangerous, and their friends will not always be the ones wielding it. 

Practical Politics

Conservatives are rightly concerned that governments are punishing  religious people for declining  to sell their goods or services for use in weddings between homosexuals, in clear violation of those religious people’s rights. However, not too long ago governments in many states - often at the insistence of religious conservatives - had laws forbidding homosexual activity, in a clear violation of homosexuals’ rights. Someone defending individual rights consistently would have spoken up against both sets of violations. There are people who did, but they usually are not people of power and influence in society. The more common response was to decry one and accept or even approve of the other, depending on how one  felt about the opinions and actions of those affected, under the assumption that it is all right to use the power of the state to force one’s notions about propriety onto others.

I and many people of liberal opinions believe that assumption is wrong. What I want to show now is that, its wrongness aside, it is also dangerous and often counterproductive. It is natural and unavoidable that people will have widely differing notions about what are the proper ways to live and behave, and that the practices and opinions of some people will be repugnant to others. This produces discord in society, but as long as people respect others’ rights to their lives, lifestyles, and opinions, it does not have to produce strife. (For example, while there is a variety of strongly held opinions on religion in this country, the principle and practice of full freedom of religious opinion for all within a secular republic has led to almost no serious religious conflicts in our history  and avoided the large religious wars, pogroms, and massacres so common in the history of Europe, Asia, and Africa.) Strife does come when people decide to use the power of the state to force others to conform to their desires. Each group of partisans  then likely will feel that if someone’s notions of  proper thought and behavior are going to be forced on society, it surely had better be theirs, and act accordingly.

When this happens, some people will win and get the power of the state  behind them for a while. They will have the satisfaction not only of being able to behave the way they want but also of forbidding others from doing things they disapprove of. The risk is that if the political mechanism exists for them to dictate to others, it exists for others to take control of and use to dictate to them. Political pendulums do swing, and the excesses of one group can increase the resentment and, once control of the government changes, the excesses of the opponents. Assuming that most people are more strongly interesting in being able to do what they want than in being able to dictate what their neighbors do, we have an almost game theoretic solution that  the safe policy is one of mutual tolerance where no group tries  to use the power of the state to force its opinions onto others, and indeed, there is no mechanism within the state for doing so.  Of course there are people more interested in causing others trouble than in seeing to their own business and interests, but these people are, to one degree or another, sociopaths, irrespective of what title or political office they hold.