Former US Attorney General , US senator and Governor from Missouri, John Ashcroft, really got me thinking this week. Near the end of a 40 minute speech he made to the Young America Foundation, which was dated 19 Apr 2007 in the podcast on which I listened to it, he made two points about liberty in the US that I found to have profound implications.
The first now, the second later…
On the idea of a balance between liberty and security:
First of all, as Michele Malkin rightly notes in her insightful post here, the Ben Franklin quote so often cited linking these two ideas is often cited wrong:
Here's the paraphrase the left uses: Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither
Here's the actual Ben Franklin Quote: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Did you note that Franklin conceived of some liberties as non-essential? I suppose it is a God-given human right to button your shirts from the bottom up if you choose. If you gave up that right in exchange for a little personal security or for any other reason would you really be losing much? OK, so that's a misleading question because it's hard to imagine anyone taking away your RIGHT to button your shirt up any way you please (or not at all! And I'll just hope you're wearing something modest underneath…). But how about the choice then? Could you choose to button a different way in exchange for something? Of course--that's the very definition of liberty: exchanging your resources for advantages.
Did you also note that Franklin recognized degrees of safety and gradations of time to remain safe? These are also important considerations when balancing choices about what to give up in exchange for security. Should we give up some freedoms for permanent safety? For an almost certain total security for a time? What freedoms? Even an essential one?
In the original context of this sound byte of a proverb from such a legendary visionary on the role of government as Benjamin Franklin it is clear that the point wasn't freedom over safety at all. The 1759 An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (whose authorship is apparently in dispute to boot) is essentially a complaint to the king in the colonies' run up to independence from that king who cared enough to tax, but who would not defend or secure his colonies adequately to the satisfaction of his subjects on the ground. The well-turned truism points out that safety should be the permanent goal of freemen (and freewomen!) who should therefore act to manage common threats and risks (in this case: the Indians) for security's sake without waiting upon a recalcitrant government to control those risks, without which action freedom itself would be imperiled. In other words, the context of the quote is one of one branch of government chiding other for NOT doing its job, where liberals would have you believe that the quote was intended to stop the state from doing ANYTHING. In order to secure the Freemen of Pennsylvania better, the Assembly of the day would have had to go beyond its constitutional boundaries in protecting these frontier peoples, perhaps even restricting their inherent rights of freedom of movement, association, even property in the process. The Assembly stopped short of that, and petitioned for proper military protection, begging for the king to do his duty, pending which as many citizens were armed as would be. Can you see how, in context, this is NOT about the state overstepping its bounds, but rather about why the state should DO its protective duty?
Ashcroft doesn't even get into the context, and takes it rather on its face, even granting the warped paraphrase that civil liberties activists brandish like a weapon. But he still throws it back in their face, because to him liberty and security are NOT of equal value, since security without liberty is Orwellian. For Ashcroft, liberty is the only thing truly worth securing; therefore the purpose of all measures of security must serve freedom or be rejected. This might seem astonishing coming from one of the chief purveyors of the Patriot Act and the NSA wiretapping program (which are NOT domestic spying programs, despite the studied propagandistic mischaracterizations of the "drive-by" media), but if you really think about it, he's right. Every law restricts some freedom--I don't have the freedom to kill or enslave anyone, for example--but those restrictions serve liberty since they create an environment where more basic freedoms (freedom to live, freedom to own property) are expanded. I give up my right to drive at my whimsy at every red light, because I know that an arbitrary system of turn-taking ultimately serves and expands my freedom to drive where I want AND arrive alive. So I agree with Ashcroft that ultimately the idea of balance is false; there is only liberty.
More on Aschroft and liberty later...
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