I came upon this posting by Andrew McCarthy a while ago and just ran into it again. It struck me the first time and this second time, decided to post it up.
It truly points out the stark difference between how government is perceived by Conservatives and Liberals, and how far our government has strayed from what the Founding Fathers hoped it would be:
As Obama sees it, the Warren Court failed to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.” The judges instead clung to the hoary construction of the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties” — one that says only what government “can’t do to you.” For Obama, economic justice demands the positive case: what government “must do on your behalf” (emphasis added).
True to form, Obama has twisted the most elementary points. First, the Framers viewed government as a necessary evil: required for a free people’s collective security but, if insufficiently checked, guaranteed to devour liberty. The purpose of the Constitution was not to make the positive case for government but for freedom. Freedom cannot exist without order, and thus implies some measure of government. But it is a limited government, vested with only the powers expressly enumerated. As the framers knew, a government that strays beyond those powers is necessarily treading on freedom’s territory. It is certain to erode the very “Blessings of Liberty” the Constitution was designed to secure.
Relatedly, the Constitution does state the positive case for government in its opening lines. Government is required to safeguard the rule of law and the national security. These injunctions are vital: there is no liberty without them. Why, then, do Obama and other Leftists ignore them? Because they don’t involve picking winners and losers; they eschew social engineering. These guarantees, instead, are for everyone, uniformly: Government must “provide for the common defense” and “promote the general welfare” (emphasis added). The Blessings of Liberty are to be secured “to ourselves and to our posterity”—not to yourself at the expense of my posterity.
The question isn’t what government “must do on your behalf.” It is what government must do on our behalf. In general, the positive power of government is for the body politic, not the individual. Of course individuals have rights. But those rights comprise a sphere of personal liberty against government. In that sphere, each individual Joe the Plumber is free to work hard, or not; to make of his life what he will, bearing personally the consequences of his choices. Freedom, after all, includes the freedom to fail. Pace Obama, failure is a part of life — there is no right against it.
The framers understood that there is no societal good in a government that “must do” for individuals and factions. “Doing” is a zero-sum game. Government does not inherently have anything to give. What it awards you it must seize from me. What it gives one faction it must deny to others. Such an arrangement is inimical to the Constitution’s purpose “to form a more perfect union.” It is, in fact, a prescription for disunion, for a house divided.
Freedom accepts that we are different. The endless variety of life assures that. I had every opportunity to become just as good a basketball player as Michael Jordan, but he has natural gifts and worked harder. If we played a hundred times, he would whip me a hundred times by about 500 points. No Change, no matter how rapturously framed, could alter that result without chaining him to the bench and rendering the game no longer recognizable as basketball. That would be perversion, not justice.
Yet, this is just what Obama’s “economic justice” envisions: that the government can hamstring Michael Jordan and give me enough freebies that, despite his talent and industry, he can only play me to a tie, destroying his incentive to excel while the Bulls go out of business, no longer able to afford even my mediocrity. Naturally, such an absurd system requires change. Redistribution smothers the freedom our Constitution is designed to foster. It is therefore antithetical to our law.
The time of FDR (and his mentor, Woodrow Wilson before him) radically changed the relationship of government to those governed. From what was a relatively small footprint entity became much more intrusive into the lives of its citizens; the Great Society of LBJ extended that flaw (and with as miserable results as FDR’s, as neither administration solved what it thought was it’s main purpose – the Great Depression of FDR and War on Poverty of LBJ). They tried to take government into realms into which government will fail.
The question of the day is whether or not our citizenry will recognize the inanity of trying the same things that yielded such poor results the first time. Or, have we as a society, become so enthralled with the idea that we will be taken care of like little children, we won’t care.
If the latter, our Founding Fathers will say that we have failed them, and not the other way around. We will have lost sight of that most precious right – freedom, for the sake of a few crumbs and the illusion of security.
