You want your rights? You can’t handle your rights!

Rights have existed from time immemorial, and they’ll continue into the indefinite future.  Real rights, that is:  Those fundamental incidents of simply being human – the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (according to some dead white European guys at least).

Comprehensive and systematic protection of those rights?   Mmmm . . . that’s a relatively recent development in human history.  And just because we enjoy that protection now does not mean it will necessarily always be so.  We should recall, from time to time, that we live in a historical anomaly and that no one can vouchsafe to us the future protection of our rights.

We rely on our constitutions (federal and state) as the bulwarks against governmental usurpation.  But those are, ultimately, just papers.  They have no force of their own.  They depend entirely on our will to read them faithfully and apply them justly.  What happens when the people we select to put the constitutions’ promises into action have, shall we say, something less than a complete commitment to protecting our rights?

Last week I attended a dinner at which Justice Samuel Alito was the featured speaker.  Recounting a handful of arguments presented to the Supreme Court over the last year (and one from a few terms back), he described what the current administration thinks of your rights.  The individual arguments were surprising enough, but taking a few steps back to look at them as a whole created a pointillist effect that was truly disturbing.  Here are a few of the arguments he noted.

The Obama administration told the Supreme Court that books that mention political candidates enjoy no constitutional protection.  (Citizens United v. FEC)  Book banning, Justice Alito drily noted, would seem to be incompatible with the First Amendment.  The whole purpose of the First Amendment, of course, is to prevent the government from telling us what we may say or write about the government or politicians.

The Citizens United case was a rich source of suspect arguments.  The administration also said that corporations may not say anything about politics – forgetting, apparently, that CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the rest of the establishment media are all . . . corporations.  Well, perhaps the administration would be willing to waive the ban on First Amendment activity so at least some corporations could report on our government and representatives’ doings.

In United States v. Jones, the administration told the Supreme Court justices that it could put a GPS tracking device on any American’s car and track their every movement for as long as it wished.  It said it did not even need permission from a court to do so.  If it seems useful to keep constant surveillance on you, or federal agents are just curious about what you’re doing, the administration says it may snoop to its heart’s content.

The administration has been trying to dispense with your property rights, too.  The EPA is of the opinion that it may prevent you from building a house on your property if it decides it gets wet too frequently.  They’ve been asserting that power for quite some time – what’s new is the administration’s argument that you may not go to court to challenge the EPA’s decision (see Sacket v. EPA).  Nice.  A federal bureaucracy entirely unanswerable to the courts with the power to destroy the largest investments most Americans will ever make.

The administration has also been taking a dim view of your freedom of religion.  In Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, it argued the federal government can control a religious institution’s decisions on who may serve as religious leaders.  It already tells churches they may not engage in political speech, so perhaps the administration just saw this as a natural extension of its control over what churches do.

And finally, there is the question of whether the government should trust you to spend your money appropriately.  In NFIB v. Sebelius, the administration said the federal government has the power not just to regulate commerce, but to decide for you what you must purchase.  Too many of you weren’t buying health insurance, so the administration said the legislature could force you to buy it against your will.

Stepping back to allow these points to resolve into a picture, this is what we get:  The current administration says it may ban politically-oriented books, pick and choose which corporations will be allowed to talk politics, follow you wherever you go for any or no reason at all, prevent you from building a house on your own property with no opportunity to challenge its decision, tell you whom you may have as your religious leader, and decide for you how you spend your own money.

Justice Alito, in his typically understated way, said these arguments suggest a vision of society “in which the federal government towers over people.”  Fortunately, these arguments met with no success in the Supreme Court – this year at least.  But the same people making these arguments will be responsible for choosing who will sit on that court when future vacancies arise (and a few will likely come up pretty soon).

Constitutions are useful tools in protecting our rights, but they can’t wield themselves.  They are animated and applied by people who are products of our culture.  If we do not value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness enough to develop and maintain a culture that respects those rights, the government will be only too happy to relieve us of them.

We’d best get to work on that renewed moral consensus.

There are two ways you might accidentally find yourself in a socialist economic system.  One, you might live through a revolution, such as occurred in Russia and China.  Or you might gradually, unknowingly, back your way into it while pursuing goals that seem benign and benevolent.

We seem to be taking the latter approach.  Our government’s focus on “compassionate” social policies – that is, taking from each according to his means and giving to each according to his needs – is fundamentally changing our economic structure (I put “compassionate” in quotes because, as I have said before, those policies do not and cannot have anything to do with compassion).  As a consequence of these policies, our economy is taking on more of socialism’s distinctives as it casts off those of capitalism.

In polite circles it is fashionable to laud socialism as an economic arrangement morally superior to capitalism.  Just ask the poli-sci professor in his elbow-patched tweeds.  Or the Chavez-loving Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover or Oliver Stone.  Or the socialist revolutionary-wannabe wearing the Che Gueverra t-shirt (brought to you, of course, by a host of profit-making capitalist companies).

But is that superiority, well . . . please forgive my directness . . . true?  Look, before we follow moral titans like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Venezuela into the promised land of liberty, equality, and prosperity, we might want to check on socialism’s moral bona fides.

Perusing socialism’s moral implications is not something one ought to attempt in a blog post.  It’s a book-length project, at least.  What I’ll do instead is a series of posts that will survey some of the more obvious moral features.  By necessity, these posts will be just conversation-starters.  But I believe you’ll find enough to challenge some of the conventional wisdom about socialism’s supposed superiority.

Let’s start with a few quick definitions.  For the purpose of this conversation, “socialism” is an economic structure featuring common ownership of the means of production, and distribution of goods according to the Marxist dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”  Capitalism, on the other hand, is the private ownership of the means of production, with goods distributed through voluntary transactions in a free market.  Let’s see how they stack up.

Today’s exercise is to determine whether freedom and socialism are compatible.  If liberty is an essential part of a moral economic order, socialism stumbles right out of the gate.  Its primary feature – the common ownership of the means of production (traditionally encompassing factories, machines, and tools) – creates a dilemma that can be resolved only by extinguishing liberty.  Stick with me as I describe why; we’ll have to work a little backwards to find the key.

We’ll start with the purpose behind the “common ownership” requirement.  It’s pretty simple, really.  If the state is going to distribute goods based on need, it must first own them.  Otherwise you just have an organized criminal gang writ large, stealing from one group to give to another.  So the trick is to produce goods that don’t belong to individuals, thereby making them available for state-directed distribution without offending anyone’s property interest.

The socialist recipe for commonly-owned goods, therefore, involves feeding individual abilities into one end of the commonly owned means of production, and squeezing the product out the other end.  Commonly owned means of production, so the recipe says, beget commonly owned products.  And why not, if there is no individual ownership contaminating the process?  So the products are ready for state distribution because they bear no taint of individual ownership, yes?

Mmmmm . . . no.  Well, it’s “no” if we are going to account for your involvement in the process.

If liberty means anything, it must mean that no one can claim to own you.  So the abilities and resources fed into the system – your abilities and your resources – belong to you.  Using commonly-owned tools to turn them into automobiles and air-conditioners does not make your abilities or resources any less yours.  So one of two things must follow.  Either your ownership interest in what you contribute follows through to the goods you produce, or you receive a freely-negotiated compensation for the release of that interest.

Socialism, however, provides for neither.  You receive according to your needs, not according to your valuation of your services.  So there is no negotiated release of your ownership rights.  But neither do you have any recognized ownership in the produced goods because the whole point of using commonly-owned means of production was to strip away that interest.  There is a way, however, to make this work.  And that is to have common ownership of not just the means of production as we traditionally define them (factories, machines, tools), but all of the means.

The profound secret hiding in the very bones of socialism is that when it speaks of the common ownership of the means of production, it’s talking about common ownership of you.  You bring the creative talent.  You contribute the resources.  You work the factories, and machines, and tools.  And from that comes the goods.

But the state cannot distribute those goods unless it owns them, and the only way it can own them is if it also owned everything that went into their production.  To the extent the goods incorporate something the state did not own, it’s stealing.  So if the state is to avoid stealing the goods, it must own you.

But that’s just backing up the theft one step, isn’t it?  There is a reason countries following the socialist path have had a liberty deficit.  Soviets were not free to leave their country, East Berliners were literally fenced in, and but for the moat surrounding Cuba, it would be a depopulated island today.  Apologists for socialism, when pressed on this history, mumble something about transitional periods, or imperfect application of the doctrine, or capitalistic sabotage.

But the truth is that socialism is genetically illiberal.  State ownership of the economic part of your life is necessary to ensure the goods you produce are owned in common so that the state – not you – can decide how to distribute them.

Socialism’s first act, therefore, is the theft of your liberty.  I’ll get to some of socialism’s other moral implications (such as the instrumentalization of the individual, the rejection of equality, and the institutionalization of greed) in future posts.  Until then, I’ll look forward to your thoughts.

David French, on The Corner, has some ideas on what building a consensus might include.  Note especially the latter part of this paragraph addressing real compassion:

Majority ideologies are built over generations, not overnight, and it means breaking the public-school monopoly, influencing public schools even while we work to diminish their influence, sending our best and brightest young writers and actors into the lion’s den of Hollywood, working to reform higher education and breaking the ideological hammerlock of the hard Left on faculties, and working hard — very hard — to tell the true story of conservative compassion for the “least of these,” a story featuring the efficiency and creativity of private philanthropy combined with Christ-centered love and concern for the individual.

We have the better message. Now we have to make sure our fellow citizens see it as empowering, not terrifying.

Via The Corner – National Review Online.

He’s right.  We have the better message, and the story of creative, private, Christ-centered philanthropy is true.

But it needs to grow to such a mammoth proportion that it becomes the gravitational center of how we care for our neighbors.  When it does, then governmental “compassion” will be revealed as the profoundly uncompassionate and destructive force it really is.

Church, I believe your phone is ringing.

Kyle, you say:

“No” the majority of our country does not feel entitled to handouts.

I think that’s right, but I also think a majority of our country believes people are entitled to handouts.  And when we get to handouts as massive as we have, welfare becomes socialism.

There are only a small percentage of people in this country who are self-starting entrepreneur types. People need some help.

If that is true, and by “help” you mean a government program, it is a profound indictment of a people gone to seed.  This country was not founded, populated, or made great by people who believed people need some help from government.

It is true that there will always be people who need help.  I believe Jesus said as much. But to the extent we conclude from that datum that government must intervene, we do a disservice to those we are supposedly helping, as well as the people from whom we are stealing to provide the “help.”

Politicians shouldn’t be yelling at people in need; nor should they be promising to lift their neighbors’ wallets to alleviate their poverty.  They should be getting out of the way so Burke’s “little platoons” can provide real help.

When once a politician picks a pocket to satisfy a constituent, he will never stop . . . and the only limiting principle becomes how much he can pinch without getting punched.

Father Sirico, over on The Corner, says one of the reasons Romney did not win yesterday is that the church has failed to play a robust role in the civic life of our society.  I couldn’t say it better myself, and so I’ll let him:

Finally, and with specific application to our religious institutions, now under more governmental  threat than at most any other time in the history of the Republic, there must be a recognition of failure on our part to make persuasive, compelling, and authentic the message and identity we bear. The very existence of our social-service institutions is taken for granted at the moment that these have themselves lost their own rasion d’être (witness the wholesale sell-out of Catholic Bishops by the Catholic Hospital Association in the face of the HHS mandate, among others). At least with regards to the Catholic bishops in the United States, along with various movements of Evangelical Protestants, there is a growing recognition of a failure in our role in forming a clear, vibrant, winsome, and effective “world view.” The recognition is growing, as I say, but what this election gives evidence of is that we have a great deal more yet to accomplish.

I hope it’s not too late.