It has become painfully obvious to me, that Conservatives
are not prepared to meet our ideological foes head on in the field of
ideas. Sure, we have a few warriors out
in the field – talk radio and the blogosphere, but our political leaders aren’t
up to the task. The Progressives liken
themselves to Mao. They’re on the “long
march” to positive law.
The Statist goal is to obliterate our
Constitution. They’ve been whittling
away at it for over a century. Now, they’re
smelling victory. Their chance has come
and they’re going to take it.
Marxist
professors and newspaper editors have called for an outright repeal of the
Constitution. Our politicians dismiss it
completely. President Barack Obama implements
laws by circumventing Congress. The
Senate originates spending bills, when the Constitution specifically mandates that
responsibility to the House. And now,
the Democrats are encouraging the president to unilaterally raise the debt
ceiling by implementing the 14th Amendment, when it’s quite obvious
that the clause referenced was to be used only for Civil War debt, not by
irresponsible politicians a century and a half later.
And now they’re coming after our rights. The Democrats are using tragedy and passions
to capitalize on the fears of others.
The goal of the statist is to disarm the citizenry, and from there they
can inflict their “positive law” without fear of rebellion.
[W]e have no government armed with power
capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. .
. . Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is
wholly inadequate to the government of any other. – John Adams
Our founding was revolutionary, not just in war, but
ideas. The belief in individualism and
self-government is pervasive in their writings and deeds. Natural Rights and Natural Law are paramount;
positive law shunned and despised. Here
are a couple of excerpts from Murray Rothbard’s Introduction to Natural Law:
It was, in contrast, the Levellers and
particularly John Locke in seventeenth-century England who transformed
classical natural law into a theory grounded on methodological and hence
political individualism. From the Lockean emphasis on the individual as the
unit of action, as the entity who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts, stemmed his
conception of natural law in politics as establishing the natural rights of
each individual. It was the Lockean individualist tradition that profoundly
influenced the later American revolutionaries and the dominant tradition of
libertarian political thought in the revolutionary new nation. It is this
tradition of natural-rights libertarianism upon which the present volume
attempts to build.
If,
as we have seen, natural law is essentially a revolutionary theory, then so a
fortiori is its individualist, natural-rights branch. As the
nineteenth-century American natural-rights theorist Elisha P. Hurlbut put it:
The laws shall be merely declaratory of
natural rights and natural wrongs, and … whatever is indifferent to the laws of
nature shall be left unnoticed by human legislation … and legal tyranny arises
whenever there is a departure from this simple principle.[50]
A notable example of the revolutionary use
of natural rights is, of course, the American Revolution, which was grounded in
a radically revolutionary development of Lockean theory during the eighteenth
century.[51] The famous words of the Declaration of
Independence, as Jefferson himself made clear, were enunciating nothing new,
but were simply a brilliantly written distillation of the views held by the
Americans of the day:
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness [the more common triad at the lime
was "Life, Liberty and Property"]. That to secure these
rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or to abolish
it.
Particularly striking is the flaming prose
of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, applying natural-rights
theory in a revolutionary way to the question of slavery:
The right to enjoy liberty is inalienable.
… Every man has a right to his own body — to the products of his own labor — to
the protection of law. … That all these laws which are now in force, admitting
the right of slavery are, therefore, before God, utterly null and void … and
therefore they ought instantly to be abrogated.[52]
We shall be speaking throughout this work
of "rights," in particular the rights of individuals to property in
their persons and in material objects. But how do we define "rights"?
"Right" has cogently and trenchantly been defined by Professor
Sadowsky:
When we say that one has the right to do
certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for
another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of
physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man
makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral
use.
Personal property, responsibility, and
morality are an ambiguous concept to Progressives. To them everything is a shade of gray;
colored by positive law.
