Wait. A. Minute.
How can we have real liberty if we lack safety?
How is a man free to “pursue happiness” — another key phrase to our country’s Founders, if his house may be burned or his family killed?

Safety is a necessary condition to liberty. Not a sufficient condition, of course, but necessary. And we cannot have safety without our criminal code, which means “tough on crime” and docket management. Granted, there must always be a balance between safety and liberty, but they are not always at odds. Without safety, there can be no liberty. Without safety, any liberty we might have is an empty notion of what might have been.

There are a number of issues one might take with this.  For that reason, I decided to blog my response, rather than leave what would only be an overlong comment.

It’s difficult to know where to start with this.  Mark Bennett makes a good start in his own responsive comment. As Mark impliedly notes, there is no metaphysical or logical connection between being free and being safe. Sometimes, as Mark states, we deliberately move beyond a place of safety in pursuit of freedom.

What is not so clearly stated is that no absolute level of safety can ever be achieved.  Even in the most “locked down” of cultures, someone may burn your house, or kill you and your family.  You could even assign a police officer to every home — don’t worry, we’re getting there — and still not be completely safe.  Assuming the officer could protect you from your son, daughter, mother, or father, who’s to protect you from the officer?

The more that the rules or laws of a particular country attempt to lock things down “in the interest of safety,” the less freedom exists.  And, frankly, the pursuit of “safety” in the United States has reached the level of insanity.  Petty officials such as the Presiding Judge of the Fresno County Superior Court routinely ignore the constitutional requirements of the Fourth Amendment because it’s apparently reasonable to expect that anyone entering the courthouse might be armed and dangerous.  We’ve forgotten that the Constitution required probable cause particularized to the individual being searched, not a belief that it was reasonable to think some person entering a courthouse might have a weapon.

It was against the very idea of indiscriminate searches on baseless suspicion — fishing expeditions, you might call them — that our Founders rebelled.  It was this very sort of attempt at making sure all the rules are followed by everyone all the time — and overbroad rules like the “search all persons entering the courthouse” rules we’re increasingly running into now — through the application of arbitrary and indiscriminate searches that our Founders revolted.  Yes, revolted.  As in, “they started a revolution and overthrew the government.”

In spite of a Constitution which requires particularized reasons to subject a citizen to a search, we are routinely subjected to searches while moving from one area to another.  Try to fly without being searched.  Try to enter any government building without being searched.

The government gets away with this for two reasons.

First, on the whole, we are sheep.  We’re not actually citizens, we’re submitizens.  When some new procedure or directive comes down from “on high” requiring us to empty our pockets, strip off our clothing, or otherwise submit to interference in our personal lives from the government, the majority of us don’t even ask why.  We just do it.  Those of us who don’t, suffer the full wrath of the government because the majority of us are submitizens.  Why should the government fear acting as if there were no Constitution, when it knows the submitizens will let them get away with it?

Second, if someone actually does resist and takes the issue to court, the court (which, incidentally, is still the government) simply redefines the term “search.”  Somehow, someway, going through people’s things and making them empty their pockets is not a search.

This is okay, “Y” tells us.  Y?  Because we must have safety before we can have freedom.

But since we can never be safe, I guess what “Y” means is that we can never be free.

It always puzzles me that some of my (economically) middle- and lower-class friends, none of whom ever seem to do any reading on the subject, believe that Republicans have a better handle on things like lowering taxes, spurring job growth, and just generally protecting our standard of living.  I haven’t lived very long — just a half century so far — but even I have noticed that whenever we have a Republican President, things tank.  Whenever we get a Democrat in the White House, things improve. All the way around.

The current administration has, however, far surpassed past Republican administrations in damaging our country on just about every front imaginable.  Perhaps this is not surprising. After all, influential Republican adviser Grover Norquist once famously said one goal was,

to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.  (Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber, Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State (2004) p. 6.)

And journalist Elizabeth Drew noted that,

It’s not just because taxes are irritating and unpopular and all that.  He [Norquist] has a long-term view, which is the lower the revenues that the government takes in, the less spending it will be able to do, the less money will go to the groups that he sees as the base of the Democratic party and its power—the teachers’ unions, welfare workers, municipal workers and so on.  This is the big, long-term war.  It’s total.  It’s Armageddon.  And I have to say that the people on the right, I think, have thought this through much more than their opponents on the other side who really don’t much know what they do and how the opposition thinks and are just waking up to it.  (Elizabeth Drew, Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Political Power in America, quoted in Banana Republicans, p. 7.)

I can only hope that people will start to wake up to what’s happening.  I’m personally concerned that the United States cannot survive another Republican President, not even one from the great hockey-playing, moose-shooting state of Alaska.  (Yeah, truth is, Obama isn’t running against McCain; he’s running against Palin.  Because while I’m concerned about whether the United States can survive another Republican President, I’m convinced that his health and age make it unlikely McCain will.)

Maybe it’s time we recognize that there’s a reason George W. Bush continues smiling and appears to be unconcerned about the severity of the problems into which he’s gotten us.  The reason is at least as old as the recognition that Rome needed a more robust fire department. I doubt it’s a mistake that Grover Norquist was once called “Field Marshall” of the Bush economic plan. And people think the administration doesn’t know what it’s doing.  Bush continues to smile and nod and grin and bob his head because everything is going exactly according to plan.

So I’m not surprised at either the economic devastation that we’ve seen under Bush’s watch, nor at his apparent lack of concern.  I suspect there may well be private parties in the now anything-but-transparent White House where Bush gleefully fiddles away, impervious to the vagaries of the economy he and his friends are helping to destabilize.

What does surprise me is the lack of recognition on the part of everyone else that this mess is caused by eight years of unbridled Republican policies. What does surprise me is that middle- and lower-income voters can’t see in their own lives what economists have long recognized:

The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House.  (Larry Bartels, “Inequalities” (April 27, 2008) New York Times Magazine.)

Unfortunately, the thing that has created this mess is what will also make it virtually impossible for a true government bail-out.  For that, we need only look at the now-historic (and thus largely forgotten) Great Depression.  Only the oldest amongst us really remembers — and understands — the depth of that depression, the key cause of which was “an expansion of the money supply in the 1920s that led to an unsustainable credit-driven boom.”

The factors noted by the Austrian School economists, primarily Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) and Murray Rothbard (A History of Money and Banking in the United States), are present again today.  And the government is trying the same things it tried after the crash of 1929 that preceded the Great Depression.

But forget that for now.  If you’ve ever tried to balance a checkbook, or run a household, just think about this:  George W. Bush has spent years — almost eight of them — cutting taxes.  Forget also, for the moment, that those tax cuts have largely benefitted the rich, and not the rest of us — seriously, forget that part for now.  Just think of it this way: Bush has cut the “income” of the United States government.  At the same time, he started a war that costs billions per day to run.  Coupled with that, he and his friends have failed to regulate lenders, effectively removing the controls that kept the kids from dipping into the piggy bank whenever they ran low on cash.

How long would your household last before you lost everything, if you did the same things our government is doing?

Even now I can see Dick Cheney and Grover Norquist sitting in a bathtub, clinking glasses, toasting one another, while George Bush fiddles (read that however you want) in the background.

Suggested Reading

The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents–The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek)	A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II	Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

The people of America had been bred up in the same prejudices against France, which at that time characterized the people of England; but experience and an acquaintance with the French Nation have most effectually shown to the Americans the falsehood of those prejudices; and I do not believe that a more cordial and confidential intercourse exists between any two countries than between America and France. Thomas Paine, Preface to the English Edition of Rights of Man, in Rights of Man; Common Sense; and Other Political Writings 83, 85 (Mark Philp, ed., 1995).

Without the French, the United States would possibly never have existed. Like us, they championed liberty — and gave us the Statue of Liberty:

[R]eflecting on the centennial of American independence only 11 years in the future, Laboulaye commented, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people in France gave the United States a great monument as a lasting memorial to independence and thereby showed that the French government was also dedicated to the idea of human liberty?” History: Statue of Liberty, American Park Network, ¶ 4 (2001), last visited 23 September 2004.

Some things, though, never change.

That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between Nations, it becomes more unpardonable. Thomas Paine, supra, at pp. 87-88.

Something to think about.