Forcing People to Be Free

The coercive nature of modern liberalism
Forcing People to Be Free

America is a country that is fundamentally divided between two general worldviews and opposing ideologies.  On the one hand, we have those – small-government conservatives, constitutionalists, biblical Christians, libertarians, patriots, what I generally refer to under the heading of “liberty lovers” – who tend to support greater respect for the natural rights of the individual, limits placed on the government by the rule of law, more power for the people themselves over and against the agents and officers of the state, and greater objective freedom for the average citizen to live his or her life as they want.



On the other hand, we have the opposite – liberals, left-wingers, socialists, communists, big-government “conservatives,” and the like – who are diametrically opposed to natural freedom.  They support more government, more regulation, more intrusion, less privacy, more power over our lives by the officers of the ever-enlarging state.

This divide is an old one – there have been self-styled “progressives” and socialists as far back as the last half of the 19th century who have seen natural rights and the Constitution as an impediment to their plans.  The notion of using the government to make people do certain things “for their own good” or “to help others” is not new.  Neither are the virulence and the destructiveness of these efforts when put into practice – the more vigorously they are implemented, the more human lives and freedom are obliterated.

And let’s face it – force, coercion, the threat of punishment for non-compliance, these are the tools of today’s modern liberal.

These are the folks who want to microregulate what people can eat and drink.  Liberals, not conservatives or liberty lovers, are the ones who impose regulatory burdens onto people and businesses by banning salt, trans-fats, upsized sodas, etc. etc.  It is at the behest of left-wingers that militarized federal police swarm into Amish dairies and dump out thousands of gallons of fresh milk, combating the “crime” of selling unpasteurized fresh milk to willing buyers who will presumably be consuming it that same day.  It was a Democrat-controlled Congress that sent the bill to be signed by a Democrat President that criminalizes selling homegrown food to others, which could be used to outlaw farmer’s markets, and which has even been interpreted as allowing the government to outlaw all private gardening.

Left-wingers are the ones who passed the law that will destroy America’s health care system, all the while forcing you to purchase increasingly expensive health insurance – a mandate that you can only opt out of by paying an onerous fine.  The statists are the ones who tell you what you can and can’t do with your land.  They’re the ones perennially trying to outlaw speech that they don’t like from the radio and other broadcast media.  The Left is the side that thinks it’s fine to force business owners to operate against their personal convictions.  They’re the people who think that if you think the wrong way, it’s legitimate to punish you for it.  They’re the people who think it’s fine for the government to spy on all Americans, for “security.”

The examples of the coercive nature of modern liberalism could go on for pages.  Ultimately, though, what these examples of compulsion and intimidation boil down to is this: modern liberals hold to a very illiberal view of what is meant by terms like “liberty,” “freedom,” and “rights.

Liberals believe in what is termed “positive liberty.”  This means that “liberty” is the use of government to give to people things that they do not have, or at least which they don’t get for free.  “Liberty” means “positive action” where you have to do something for someone else.  In the liberal mindset, if you are “freeing” people, it is by giving them free goodies of some sort or another, paid for by other people.  This is why left-wingers speak of “the right to free health care” or “the right to free housing.”  Refusing to contribute the funds to pay for these “rights,” then, is described by liberals as “oppression.”

You don’t support “freedom” if you don’t think we should give everyone free meals, birth control, and whatever else they may want.  Likewise, you don’t support “freedom” if you refuse to provide goods or services to someone else, even if the provision of these goes against your own will and conscience.  Ironically, by standing for your own personal choice of action, you are “denying liberty” to someone else by not giving them what they want.

Obviously, this is the mindset of the criminal

Obviously, this is the mindset of the criminal.  I’m sure many a burglar, armed robber, and rapist have justified their actions by deluding themselves into believing that their victims owed them what was being taken.  In a sense, modern American liberalism is just ideological robbery and rape writ large.

Conservatives and liberty lovers, on the other hand, believe in what is termed “negative liberty,” which is largely defined by delineating what you cannot do to or take from other people, especially with reference to the government.  When we say that every individual has a natural right to life, for instance, this means that there is no justification for harming the person or life of another person who has not committed a criminal act his or herself.  To speak of a natural right to property means that it is illegitimate to try to justify taking away someone else’s money, land, ideas, or labor to benefit someone else by means of wealth redistribution or transfer payments.  These rights are negative because they don’t let you do things to other people, or use the power of government to take things from them.  Each person is secure in his or her individual life, property, and other rights.

Liberals hate the idea of negative rights for two reasons.

First, their view of “positive rights” emphasizes dealing with people as groups, tribes, constituencies, and so forth, while the “negative rights” view looks at us as individuals.  The word “individual” is a dirty word to most left-wingers.  Liberals love it when people think of themselves in terms of some mass of humanity larger than themselves.  Incidentally, this is why radical Islam and modern liberalism get along so well, despite the many seeming points of disagreement they would have: both act to dehumanize the individual and subsume him into a greater whole that negates his own individuality at the expense of the tribe.

Government is not supposed to set or to benefit some groups over and against others so as to divide and conquer the people

But this brings me to the second, and concomitant, reason why liberals hate negative rights – the mass of humanity liberals want you to identify with must not be the nation as a whole, but some subset of people within the nation who can be set against other subsets and used as a tool for punishing the “wrong” groups of people.  Yet, negative rights emphasize the notion that each individual person has natural rights ex Deo that exist entirely apart from belonging to some subset that “deserves” wealth redistribution or other benefits because of past injustices, real or imagined.

Further, the negative rights view understands the Lockean proposition that each individual has joined with all others in a commonwealth that exists for the mutual defense and advancement of each individual member of that body.  Under this view, while we are not anarchists who want to destroy all government, we know that government is supposed to exist to benefit all members of society by protecting them in the exercise of their natural, inborn rights.  Government is not supposed to set or to benefit some groups over and against others so as to divide and conquer the people and bring them under the total control of the state, which is what those on the Left want to see happen.

So we come to the question – what should conservatives and liberty lovers do in response to the current state of affairs in our country?  The answer is nothing less than to force people to be free – by our definition of the term.

Whenever and wherever conservatives and liberty lovers get into positions of power, they must use their positions to ruthlessly, relentlessly, uncompromisingly advance our agenda of real, natural rights-based liberty.  We must force liberals to accept that the 2nd amendment affirms our God-given right to defend ourselves from criminals, both in and out of the government – and if they don’t like the laws we pass that extend greater freedom to all Americans to exercise this right, then too bad.

We must seek to force left-wingers to accept that the productive classes will have to survive with less taxation and that the work-capable welfare addicts and corporate tax-recipient friends-of-Obama “green” companies like Solyndra and LightSquared will have to survive standing on their own two feet instead of picking someone else’s pockets.

We need to force homosexuals to accept the sad reality that other people can say what they like too, inside and outside of their churches, and that freedom of speech and religion extends to everyone.  In every area where the Left intrudes itself unjustly into our lives, we have to force, coerce, and require liberals to accept that they can no longer micromanage, over-regulate, and dominate our lives.

This is as it should be because real, negative, natural rights-based freedom harms no one else
This is as it should be because real, negative, natural rights-based freedom harms no one else.  For example, an able-bodied man sitting at home collecting his welfare check and watching reality television will not be harmed when that check stops coming – instead it will do him good because he will have to learn to stand on his own and make his own way, instead of stealing from other people who work for their livings.  He may not like that the government no longer forces other people to subsidize his laziness, but it does him no real harm to have to take responsibility for his own life.  And it will help the people whose natural right to the fruits of their own labor is being infringed to not have this happen anymore.

In short, it doesn’t hurt you to accept that other people have and can enjoy their natural rights.  You are not harmed by not being allowed to intrude yourself into other people’s lives and property.  Unlike the use of that word by the Left, the freedom that we on the Right argue for is true freedom, it allows every individual to prosper, to enterprise, to work, to achieve with their own lives as much as they are able and willing to try to.  The “freedom” that the Left proposes serves only to harm, and eventually destroy, the productive classes in society – the people who build, grow, and advance our society through their efforts.  Eventually, as the history of Communism the world over demonstrates, this ends up hurting everyone when they are brought under tyranny and into the poverty of equal socialist misery.

Ours is the better way, and it’s time we got serious about forcing people to refrain from intruding into our lives and fortunes, forcing them to be free.