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On Liberty
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Posted on Jul 12 1999
The other day I had a conversation with my friend Harry M. on the issue of Social Security, which I addressed in a recent column.
Unfortunately, Harry disagreed with my position that Social Security should be abolished and completely privatized. He maintained that the poor and unfortunate must be protected from even greater conditions of poverty.
A number of people, I am sure, share precisely the same position. They believe that it is right and just to practice socialism; that we have an altruistic moral duty to look after the welfare of others, especially the most downtrodden members of “our society.” To such people, the amelioration of poverty remains an overriding political consideration.
To such people, I feel compelled to offer the following inspirational quote from Cicero: “He who forfeits Liberty for fear of poverty will be a slave forever.”
The bottom line is the issue of government coercion–the compulsion factor.
Each of us should not be forced to pay for someone else’s retirement, for someone else’s shelter, or for someone else’s education. We each have an inalienable right to live for our own sake: to pursue our own individual happiness and prosperity, so long as we do not violate the rights of others in the process.
This is the most basic creed of the Libertarian movement. It is the very essence of the classical liberal tradition from John Locke on up to Ayn Rand. It is the classic rights-based argument that once so defined America. It is basically the politics (and the economics) of “leave me alone” (Laissez-faire).
When our elected leaders celebrated the Fourth of July last weekend, they should have kept that vital notion of Liberty firmly in mind. They should have asked themselves whether they were actually working to protect genuine individual rights–or whether they were violating those rights and fabricating dubious, insidious ones instead.
America is already lost in a befuddling, Byzantine maze of onerous taxes and regulations that can only be successfully negotiated by the educated, bureaucratic elite. Let’s keep Saipan free.
