The Conscience of Abe’s Turn freedom of speech, defense, and life

Jacob Hornberger hit the nail on the head regarding the relationship between economic rights and civil rights, speaking about a talk James Bovard gave at the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Economic Liberty Lecture Series last month.

There is no question but that liberals have a blind spot when it comes to economic liberty. They honestly believe that socialistic and interventionist programs are necessary to help the poor and equalize wealth. They cannot see the fundamental immorality of using force to make people do the right thing. They cannot see that their methods actually end up harming the very people they purport to want to help [just like drug prohibition]…

When it comes to civil liberty, however, the situation is reversed. Conservatives have a blind spot when it comes to civil liberties. Either they don’t care about civil liberties or they think that civil liberties are silly devices that simply let guilty people go free. Conservative denigration of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eight Amendments stretches back much further than 9/11…

The important thing to keep in mind is that people cannot be free without both economic liberty and civil liberty…

If people are prohibited from spending their own money they way they want, they cannot be considered free.

By the same token, if the government has the power to arrest anyone and keep him in jail for as long as it wants, simply by accusing of terrorism and denying him a trial, then people in that society cannot be considered free…

(Click here to read the whole article.)

Or as I put it during the recent election, the choice between Obama and McCain was whether you would rather be poor but free, or rich but in prison.

(But that was unfortunately just a rhetorical choice, as I expect Obama to be only marginally better than McCain would have been on civil-rights issues.)

This dichotomy becomes painfully obvious when civil-rights advocates start railing against the “military-industrial complex,” as though there were some grand conspiracy afoot to rule America from the corporate boardroom. This unfortunately makes the “Who shot JFK?” nuts seem like responsible investigators by comparison. The only thing corporate American stockholders and executives can be accused of is doing what any of us would do in their position: they saw government power being used to tell them how to live their lives, and they figured they’d better make their voices heard, and so they did. Ironically, civil-rights advocates helped bring this on, by de-prioritizing economic rights and by looking the other way when U.S. businessmen had their livelihoods invaded by government power. As usual, the problem is not abuse of power, but the power to abuse. The fact is that a truly free economic system helps everyone, especially those who cannot afford to hire lobbyists in Washington, D.C.

Always watching!
-TimK

P.S. Jacob Hornberger also has another recent post that explores the issue of economic rights, in the context of the recent bailouts: “I decide to take matters into my own hands. I hire some goons who proceed to go out in the street and begin accosting people. Holding a gun to their heads, they hold them up and extract $25 from each of them… It’s wrong for me to take someone else’s money by force. The fact that I’m saving my company and keeping thousands of people from being unemployed is irrelevant. That is not a legitimate defense to stealing and robbing… Even though the recipients of the bailout money are using government goons, rather than private goons, to do the dirty work, the moral principle is no different.”