The Only Issue That Matters by Robert Gore

The most radical idea in human history is that might does not make right. For centuries the contrary tenet has held brutal sway. History book are chronicles of rulers and ruled, conquests, empires, and inevitably, failure and collapse. If people’s histories had been written by the forerunners of Howard Zinn, they would have detailed lives of subjugation and misery. The common folks were fodder for their rulers, who exercised first claim on their lives and property. The only checks on power were the occasional insurrection or military defeat, but the new boss was usually the same as the old boss.

The printing press was probably the most significant invention in human history. At the time (1439), the concept of individual rights was heresy, treason, or both. Its fragile shoots first poked through during the Reformation and grew during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Europe’s clergy and aristocracy, their entitlements supposedly granted by God, fought the idea ferociously. However, challenges to privilege, along with both intellectual and emotional arguments for individual rights, enjoyed widespread appeal among the subjugated, but increasingly literate (thanks to Gutenberg), masses.

The American Revolution was definitely the most significant revolution in human history. Any freshman political science major can point out where actual practice of the Founding Fathers diverged from the stated ideals and aims of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The breathtaking historical departure was that those ideals and aims had been declared as a basis for the colonists’ rebellion and then incorporated into a charter of government. The design— separation of powers, checks and balances, explicit limitations on the government’s power, explicit protection of individual rights—was the product of elaborate compromises among strongly held passions, but no longer would might make right. Might was to be put in service of rights and subordinated to them.

By 1835, when Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of Democracy in America, it was clear to this astute foreign observer that something extraordinary was happening in America. Freedom was breeding a new kind of person—the autonomous and empowered individual, who wanted the government to maintain public order and not do much else. The flow of immigrants from Europe, which would later become a flood from all over the world, recognized an unprecedented opportunity to live their lives and improve their situations almost completely unhindered by the governing power. This was the bedrock of American exceptionalism: freedom and its consequent opportunities. Tocqueville argued that slaves would never be as productive as free workers and that the north’s industrializing economy had already eclipsed the agrarian south’s. Slavery, the most glaring contradiction to our founding ideals, was doomed, and that economic divergence would have ended it if the Civil War had not. As it was, northern industry and transportation systems proved decisive in the war.

Freedom and the economics of freedom—capitalism—produced the wonder of the Industrial Revolution. The forty-eight-year period after the Civil War was stunning testament to what a free people could do. It is no exaggeration to say that science, technology, industry, productive capacity, and the average standard of living advanced more in that period than they had during all the centuries prior. The period came to an abrupt end in 1913, when the ratification of the 16th Amendment gave the government the power to levy income taxes and the establishment of the Federal Reserve led to the gradual imposition of fiat money.

Over the next one hundred-and-one years the freedom that had worked spectacularly well was abandoned for a grab bag of doomed-to-fail political philosophies. The twentieth century was easily history’s bloodiest, with one particularly malignant doctrine—communism—responsible for an estimated 60 to 100 million deaths. The defining feature of the grab bag was reversion to historical type: might once again made right. Individuals are again subservient to the state, whatever its governing philosophy. They pay taxes; fund vote buying, forced redistribution, corruption, and cronyism; obey arbitrary laws and regulations; fight wars; cower in civil-liberties-stripping fear of whatever their leaders say they should be afraid of, and mouth stale pieties that provide those leaders with a veneer of legitimacy.

When your freedom is gone, it doesn’t matter who took it or what “ism” they spout. All you see is the gun. Freedom has one foot in the grave in the US and the eventual coup de grâce will amount to a trivial irrelevance. Perhaps it will be the masters of our police state apparatus going full rogue, some sort of outrage by a group the government labels as terrorist, the threat of an epidemic, or something else, but only the stubbornly myopic do not see the totalitarianism on the horizon. While “freedom” and “liberty” occasionally appear in campaign materials, in actual practice they are kept hidden away, treated as one treats embarrassing photographs from one’s younger days. In the younger days of what used to be our republic (mob rule is the best description of what we have now), an infringement of the people’s liberty could be invoked as an argument against the government’s expansion. Nowadays such invocations are treated as appeals to the lunatic fringe.

The 2014 election has shaped up as a content-free contest between the parties to prove which of them dislikes President Obama and his policies more. The Republicans have the natural advantage and the polls indicate they may pick up a Senate majority. This will leave Washington gridlocked, but nothing checks the government’s nonstop, liberty-destroying usurpation of power. Freedom versus coercion and its corollary—the individual versus the state—have been the leitmotifs of history. Whatever else the candidates blather about, restoring the Founders’ towering legacy—liberty, individual rights, subordinated and limited government—is the only issue that matters. By ignoring it, we ensure that our government will end up on the same scrap heap as all those other doomed-to-fail governments.

See Batting 1000 by Robert Gore

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