CNN’s John King did
his best the other night, producing a question from one of his viewers:
“Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control, and if not, why?”
To their credit, no Republican candidate was inclined to accept the premise
of the question. King might have done better to put the issue to Danica
Patrick. For some reason, Michelle Fields of the Daily Caller sought
the views of the NASCAR driver and Sports Illustrated swimwear
model about “the Obama administration’s dictate that religious employers
provide health-care plans that cover contraceptives.” Miss Patrick, a
practicing Catholic, gave the perfect citizen’s response for the Age of Obama:
“I leave it up to the government to make good decisions for Americans.”
That’s the real “hot topic” here — whether a majority of citizens, in
America as elsewhere in the West, is willing to “leave it up to the government”
to make decisions on everything that matters. On the face of it, the choice
between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church should not be a tough
one. On the one hand, we have the plain language of the First Amendment as
stated in the U.S. Constitution since 1791: “Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof.”
On the other, we have a regulation invented by executive order under the vast powers given to Kathleen Sebelius under a 2,500-page catalogue of statist enforcement passed into law by a government party that didn’t even bother to read it.
Commissar Sebelius says that she is trying to “strike the appropriate
balance.” But these two things — a core, bedrock, constitutional principle, and
Section 47(e)viii of Micro-Regulation Four Bazillion and One issued by
Leviathan’s Bureau of Compliance — are not equal, and you can only “balance”
them by massively increasing state power and massively diminishing the
citizen’s. Or, to put it more benignly, by “leaving it up to the government to
make good decisions.”
Some of us have been here before. For most of the last five years, I’ve
been battling Canada’s so-called “human rights” commissions, and similar
thought police in Britain, Europe, and elsewhere. As I write this, I’m in
Australia, to talk up the cause of free speech, which is, alas, endangered even
in that great land. In that sense, the “latest hot topic” — the clash between
Obama and American Catholics — is, in fact, a perfect distillation of the
broader struggle in the West today. When it comes to human rights, I go back to
1215 and Magna Carta — or, to give it its full name, Magna Carta Libertatum.
My italics: I don’t think they had them back in 1215. But they understood that
“libertatum” is the word that matters. Back then, “human rights” were rights of
humans, of individuals — and restraints upon the king: They’re the rights that
matter: limitations upon kingly power. Eight centuries later, we have entirely
inverted the principle: “Rights” are now gifts that a benign king graciously
showers upon his subjects — the right to “free” health care, to affordable
housing, the “right of access to a free placement service” (to quote the
European Constitution’s “rights” for workers). The Democratic National
Committee understands the new school of rights very well: In its recent video,
Obama’s bureaucratic edict is upgraded into the “right to contraception
coverage at no additional cost.” And, up against a “human right” as basic as
that, how can such peripheral rights as freedom of conscience possibly compete?
The transformation of “human rights” from restraints upon state power into
a pretext for state power is nicely encapsulated in the language of Article 14
of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which states that
everyone has the right “to receive free compulsory education.” Got that? You
have the human right to be forced to do something by the government.
Commissar Sebelius isn’t the only one interested in “striking the
appropriate balance” between individual liberty and state compulsion. Everyone
talks like that these days. For Canada’s Chief Censor, Jennifer Lynch, freedom
of expression is just one menu item in the great all-you-can-eat salad bar of
rights, so don’t be surprised if we’re occasionally out of stock. Instead, why
not try one of our tasty nutritious rights du jour? Like the human right to a
transsexual labiaplasty, or the human right of McDonald’s employees not to have
to wash their hands after visiting the bathroom. Commissar Lynch puts it this
way: “The modern conception of rights is that of a matrix with different rights
and freedoms mutually reinforcing each other to build a strong and durable
human rights system.”
That would be a matrix as in some sort of intricate biological sequencing
very few people can understand? Or a Matrix as in the illusory world created to
maintain a supine citizenry by all-controlling government officials? The point
is, with so many pseudo-“rights” bouncing around, you need a bigger and bigger
state: Individual rights are less important than a “rights system” — i.e., a
government bureaucracy.
This perversion of rights is killing the Western world. First, unlike real
rights — to freedom of speech and freedom of religion — these new freedoms come
with quite a price tag. All the free stuff is free in the sense of those offers
that begin “You pay nothing now!” But you will eventually. No nation is rich
enough to give you all this “free” stuff year in, year out. Spain’s government
debt works out to $18,000 per person, France’s to $33,000, Greece’s to $39,000.
Thank God we’re not Greece, huh? Er, in fact, according to the Senate Budget
Committee, U.S. government debt is currently $44,215 per person. Going by the
official Obama budget numbers, it will rise over the next ten years to $75,000.
As I say, that’s per person: 75 grand in debt for every man, woman, and child,
not to mention every one of the ever-swelling ranks of retirees and disabled
Social Security recipients — or about $200,000 per household.
So maybe you’re not interested in philosophical notions of liberty vs.
statism — like Danica Patrick, tens of millions of people are happy to “leave
it up to the government to make good decisions.” Maybe you’re relatively
relaxed about the less theoretical encroachments of Big Government — the
diversion of so much American energy into “professional services,” all the
lawyering and bookkeeping and paperwork shuffling necessary to keep you and
your economic activity in full compliance with the Bureau of Compliance. But at
some point no matter how painless the seductions of statism, you run up against
the hard math: As those debt per capita numbers make plain, all this “free”
stuff is doing is mortgaging your liberty and lining up a future of serfdom.
I used to think that the U.S. Constitution would prove more resilient than
the less absolutist liberties of other Western nations. But the president has
calculated that, with Obamacare, the First Amendment and much else will crumble
before his will. And, given trends in U.S. jurisprudence, who’s to say he won’t
get his way? That’s the point about all this “free” stuff: Ultimately, it’s not
about your rights, but about his.
No comments:
Post a Comment