Letters from an Ohio Farmer

The American Conversation

To My Fellow Citizens:

It is Constitution Day again. Two-hundred-and-twenty-five years ago, on this day in 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Independence Hall in Philadelphia signed the document which, when ratified by the people, would become the "supreme Law of the Land." This act was the culminating episode in the historic drama begun in the same hall 11 years earlier when the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," proclaimed to the world the experiment in self-government being inaugurated by the newly sovereign American people.  

In 1776, the American Revolutionaries had pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to what Lincoln would later call America's "philosophical cause." At the heart of that cause was the central idea from which all other American political ideas radiate, the self-evident truth that "all men are created equal."  These most American words contain within themselves the idea of limited self-government—the idea of political freedom itself: All men are equally endowed with certain unalienable natural rights, governments are instituted with the limited purpose of securing these rights, and the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed.

In 1787-88, in the greatest constitutional conversation the world has yet seen, the American Framers would author and the American people would authorize a Constitution intended to establish forms through which Americans might more perfectly achieve the ends set forth in 1776. The Constitution would be an instrument by which the sovereign consent of the American people might govern not willfully, but reasonably, as the cool and deliberate sense of the country.  Governing ourselves through the forms of the Constitution we would make ourselves a constitutional people, demonstrating to ourselves and to the world, as it had never been done, the capacity of mankind for self-government. 

One-hundred years ago, in his successful 1912 presidential campaign under the banner of the "New Freedom," Woodrow Wilson repudiated this American constitutionalism and the American Constitution itself as outmoded ideas that needed to be replaced by continually new ideas to fit continually new times. He repudiated the Founders' appeals to the laws of nature and to natural rights in favor of the laws of evolution, the laws of History and Progress. More than any other figure, Wilson became responsible for bringing directly into American political life the idea of a "living constitution," a constitution to complement a government whose powers must continually "evolve" and expand to meet continually evolving and ever-expanding needs.  Wilson's New Freedom was the first wave of progressivism in what would become in decisive respects a progressive century.

The New Freedom was soon followed by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, in which FDR, bringing up to date the famous first 10 amendments to the Constitution, proclaimed a "second Bill of Rights"—an "economic bill of rights"—that continues to set the progressive agenda to this day. These alleged "rights"—which include, among other desirable things, a well-paying job, recreation, a decent home, a good education, and adequate medial care—have in the eyes of progressives assumed constitutional status under the living constitution. They achieved the status of "entitlements," not through any amendment procedure authorized by the Constitution, but through the mysterious amendment process of history with a capital H and progress with a capital P. To secure such vast entitlements, with which we are allegedly endowed by History and Progress, government must become vast—it must become the "welfare state," which has replaced the limited constitutional government constructed by the Founders to secure our natural rights and the civil rights following from them. 

A generation after Roosevelt's New Deal, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society aimed not only to complete the New Deal, but to expand it immeasurably. "The Great Society," said LBJ, "is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents . . . where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect . . . where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. . . ." LBJ's Great Society aimed not only to relieve all material needs, but to provide spiritual fulfillment to all Americans. To secure these hitherto unimaginable new entitlements would, of course, require government without limit. Limited constitutional government responsive to the cool and deliberate sense of the citizenry was buried under multiplying labyrinthine bureaucracies, staffed by supposed experts.

These three great waves of progressivism, each one offering new transformations of the Founders' Constitution, justified by endlessly evolving History and Progress, constitute an evolutionary revolution that has in the course of a century made limited constitutional government in America almost invisible. "Hope and Change" was intended as the next progressive wave. Barack Obama's promise just before his election in 2008 was perfectly in keeping with the spirit of his progressive predecessors: "We are five days away," he vowed, "from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." He wasted no time proving he meant exactly what he said.

The determined progressivism of the new President and his party sparked a widespread movement among American citizens to restore limited constitutional government in America. The historic 2010 elections brought into office a House of Representatives that insisted in unprecedented ways on respect for the Constitution. The constitutional seriousness of this movement and this Congress was greeted by progressive politicians and intellectuals with arrogant contempt. The arrogance came from the essential progressive article of faith—the belief that, above all, beliefs must go unquestioned—that history with a capital H and progress with a capital P are irrevocable, that "you can't turn back the clock."

But this could not be true, if the moral and political axioms of the American Revolution and Founding are true. Self-government and political freedom are not a wind-up clock. Repealing the President's disastrous progressive Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would be one effective way of proving this point, among innumerable other possibilities that present themselves to citizens and their representatives who are not frightened by the bogeyman of "History" and "Progress," and are determined and happy to think for themselves about what might be best for the country.  And so, a constitutional conversation began.

This is the kind of conversation the American people characteristically have at pivotal moments in our history—about the foundations, purposes, scope, and form of our government, about the rights and duties of citizens, and the responsibilities of their representatives. This series of essays modestly hopes to contribute to this urgently necessary American conversation.

Ohio Farmer

Justice and Limited Government

To My French Friend:

Thank you, Jean-Luc, for the report on the re-emergence of state run enterprises, or state capitalism, as it is called.  I had thought this phenomenon restricted to China, France, and a few other "backward" places, but now I see that it is widespread, a growing trend in Latin America and parts of Asia even beyond China.  And it is not at all considered backward but the newest way to wealth and happiness.  I discover that it is you and I who are backward, attached as we are to the idea that individual effort and responsibility are best.

To me the report shows that we are not mistaken.  It cites data showing that state controlled companies are much less productive than independent companies, for example.  This means that state controlled companies contribute less to economic well-being than independent companies.  The report does lend some support to those who argue for a larger state role by noting the ways that governments help economies grow, by administering the rule of law, building roads, and such things.  But in doing this, government is providing only some of the conditions that make economic success possible.  If it does more than that, it risks creating the conditions that stifle growth.

These notions, of course, bring to mind the remark of President Obama that, "if you've got a business—you didn't build that.  Somebody else made that happen." I am sure you have heard of this episode.  If the President meant to point to the help that government gives to all our endeavors, he would have said the obvious.  But his remark, the longer passage in which it occurred, as well as the controversy it generated, obscured a simple point.  All the money the government spends comes from the wealth created by the hard work of Americans.  It is the hard work and initiative of Americans that comes first and is the source of all wealth, even that used by the government to assist Americans.  That will be the case unless the government completely dominates the economy, which presumably the President is not advocating. 

If the initiative and hard work of Americans is the ultimate source of wealth, then the government should do nothing to discourage this initiative and hard work.  It should do only what is necessary, so that the initiative of citizens has the greatest possible scope.  In limiting its power, in leaving to each of us, in the greatest degree possible, the wealth our hard work has earned, a government does not only what is best for the creation of more wealth but also what justice demands. 

The connection between limited government and justice is a point too seldom noted, I think.  Most advocates of government intervention assume that such intervention will promote justice—social or economic justice, as it is now called.  But the opposite is really the case.  Have you and I not discussed many times how in France what can only be called a class of people moves from executive positions in government controlled businesses to executive positions in government ministries and then back again into the state owned firms?  Have we not noted how this class protects itself and its privileges?  Have senior positions in state enterprises in China not become the sinecures of those who run the government, the Communist party elite and their sons and daughters?  Whatever wealth or privileges a government controls, it will tend to distribute not according to the merits of those who receive it, but according to the interests of those who distribute it.  That is not justice.

You noted that the current fashion for government involvement in the economy puts an end to the Reagan-Thatcher revolution for smaller government.  I appreciate your allegiance to the Anglo-American leaders so often criticized in your own country.  But I think that the vogue for state capitalism is a threat to an older revolution, the American Revolution.  To those who fought the power of government then, its injustices were more evident.  Aristocratic privilege was embedded in law; means of redress were more limited.  Taxation without representation was a clear injustice.  But having won independence and the right of representation, the injustice inherent in the power of government remained.  Thomas Jefferson understood this.  That is why in his First Inaugural address he argued for what he called frugal government that "shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."  

I hope with you that the current fashion for more government, at least in the United States, is nothing more than a response to the recent recession and that we will soon turn toward smaller government.  Justice as much as economic well-being would be best served by such a turn.  We have, of course, moved far from what Jefferson meant by frugal government.  It may not be possible to return to that Jeffersonian standard, but there are good reasons to think that a smaller, less intrusive government will be both possible and necessary in the future.  I will write to you soon about my reasons for thinking so.  

Ohio Farmer

The Distributive Constitution and the Election of 2012

To My Fellow Citizens:

In recent letters (here and here), I reflected on the views of some of our learned fellow citizens on the left.  According to one of them, a professor at a public university, democracy requires that citizens enjoy material security.  Without material security, no one has the independence to be a citizen.  Without such security, a citizen lacks the self-respect to stand up for his rights.  A market economy does not provide material security.  It is too unpredictable in its support and leaves citizens at the mercy of a corporate oligarchy.  Since material security is necessary for democracy to function, and since the market cannot provide it, government must do so.  To provide this security, to which every citizen has a right, the government should redistribute wealth.

In response, I argued that what the leftist professor approves in American life would have been impossible, if his argument were correct.  If less well off citizens could not function effectively in a democracy and the corporate oligarchy was all powerful, how did laws favorable to working men get passed and candidates favoring their interests get elected?  That such laws have passed and such candidates have succeeded is a sufficient refutation of the professor's views.  Material security is not necessary for democracy, because those who passed the laws and elected the candidates did not have this security.  But consider this further evidence of how wrong the professor's critique of our democracy is.  Although the left rails that unequal wealth corrupts democracy by giving some more power than others, no one who has studied the connection between money and elections has been able to show that money can buy an election.  Favored candidates attract more money, but more money does not buy favor. 

The professor's claims about what ails our democracy are all wrong.  His remedy, redistribution of wealth, is therefore unnecessary.  If carried out, it would be paradoxical and dreadful in its consequences.  A moment's reflection will assure us that no government, no power on earth, can provide the material security he insists must be considered a right.  Any government with the power and ambition to try would become tyrannical.  The effort to insure democracy through the power of government would paradoxically extinguish freedom.

Arguments like those the left makes about redistribution and democracy do not occur only in theoretical discussions.   They apply directly to political issues.  For example, one of the professor's equally learned colleagues, a distinguished academic, a former President of the American Political Science Association, has written recently that redistribution is central to Affordable Care, the health plan passed by the Obama administration.  She criticizes her fellow leftists for their tepid support of the President.  More needs to be done, she agrees, but then admonishes them that "Affordable Care . . . is a redistributive and regulatory breakthrough" that deserves their support. 

More is at stake, however, in the Affordable Care act, she argues, than just health care.   "Affordable Care, on top of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, could strengthen the bond between middle class Americans and a national government that supports security for all."  The ultimate purpose of these distributive programs, then, is to bind Americans to the national government, to make them dependent on that government.           

A virtue of academics is that they will say clearly what politicians will obscure.  And so our learned friends on the left have posed the issue before us clearly.  For about 100 years, we have sought ways to manage the changes wrought by industrialization.  Those on the left have argued that the concentration of power in corporations brought about by industrialization requires a second revolution, a movement away from the principles of the first American Revolution, a movement away from individuals relying on themselves, their families, friends, and communities, to individuals depending on the government.  Politicians on the left have tended to shy away from talk of revolution, fearing perhaps to associate themselves with such a radical change.  Instead, they and their supporters have focused on specific changes, on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Affordable Care, for example, not the principle behind such programs, which academic leftists have candidly articulated. 

The piecemeal political approach to revolution worked for a long time.  The real costs were in the future and did not have to be faced.  But now the bills for a system of government dependence are mounting and coming due.  More important, as the pieces of the revolution come together, its character is harder to hide.  It is increasingly evident that it aims to transfer power from the people to the government, so the government can transfer wealth from those it supposes have too much to those it supposes have too little.   The revolution is necessary, the left tells us, to save our independence.  But we see ever more clearly that it aims to makes us dependent on the government.  We see ever more clearly that in the name of saving democracy it will destroy democracy.

As what is at stake becomes clear, it affects our politics.  We currently suffer from political paralysis and bitter political infighting not because of our system or the influence of the media or for any of the other reasons typically offered.  We suffer from paralysis because compromising will no longer work.  Lurking behind the compromises was a fundamental disagreement.  As long as we could afford to, we avoided facing that disagreement.  But as our finances grow threadbare and the threat to free government becomes more evident, the disagreement becomes more obvious, a choice less avoidable.  The learned left is clear again about this too.  "The stakes in 2012 are as high as in any pivotal election in U.S. history (except 1860)" one of them has recently written.

The importance of the election of 2012 is one thing on which we and the left agree.  But we hope its outcome will be a turn away from the distributive constitution toward free government.

Ohio Farmer

Equality and Race

To My Fellow Citizens:

Recent controversy over the killing of a black teenager in Florida reminds us that America’s racial dilemmas did not end with the election of our first black president; they evolved. The episode is the latest intersection of equality, the general principle of democratic politics everywhere, and race, the particular issue that has been the greatest political challenge throughout America’s history.

Abraham Lincoln, who thought more profoundly than any figure in our history about the intertwined questions of equality and race, took the questions up in 1857 in a speech criticizing the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. The Court, and politicians like Lincoln’s great opponent Senator Stephen Douglas, who defended the Court’s decision, argued that when the American revolutionaries famously wrote that “all men are created equal,” they did not mean to include black men (this is a view still widely insisted on by many academics and intellectuals who write on these subjects).  Lincoln denied this.  As he said:

Chief Justice Taney … and [Senator] Douglas argue that the authors of [the Declaration] did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once, or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an equality with one or another.

It is worth quoting Lincoln at length explaining what the authors of the Declaration of Independence did mean:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".… They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.

Establishing a true understanding of equal human rights in the public mind was—and is—a mountainous challenge in itself. Giving the best possible effect to that truth in the “circumstances” in which the country finds itself at any given time can be an even greater challenge. Lincoln wrote that the Founders intended the enforcement of Americans’ equal natural rights to “follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” As he said repeatedly throughout the 1850s, this meant, among other things, that the Founders intended to put slavery in the “course of ultimate extinction.”

In Lincoln’s time, he and Stephen Douglas were politicians competing at the highest levels of American politics for the same mid-19th century voters, who were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly opposed to sharing their political and social rights with blacks. To gain advantage with such an electorate, Douglas—in Lincoln’s words— sought to exploit the “natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.” He did this by saying of those who, like Lincoln, affirmed that the declaration’s “all men are created equal” meant all men, that they “do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes!”

Appealing to the same voters, Lincoln protested “against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.” The only “preventive”—if there was any preventive—for amalgamation of the white and black races, he said, was the “separation of the races.” The only way—if there was any way—to effect the separation of the races was “colonization,” transporting “the African to his native clime” or to some other foreign parts that he would consent to go to.

With such appeals, Lincoln got himself elected president.  Secession and Civil War followed. The circumstances of the war made it possible for Lincoln to promote the immediate abolition of slavery; this led, quickly, to the constitutional guarantee of black citizenship and voting rights and, slowly, to the federal enforcement of those guarantees. After a century of the uncertain and painful unfolding of circumstances, in1964 Congress outlawed the local ordinances and private practices that required blacks to eat in separate sections of restaurants and sleep in separate sections of hotels. Three years later the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that legal restrictions on marriage, if based on race, were unconstitutional.

Nothing changes circumstances like war. By the time the Civil War ended it became clear that all the options Americans had been exploring were dead ends. We were not going (though the rebelling states tried) to split into two countries, one free and one slave. We were not going to exist in perpetuity as one country in which we agreed to disagree about slavery. A house divided against itself, half-slave and half-free, could not stand, as Lincoln had predicted. And we were not going to end slavery only to send the descendants of Africans who had been brought here against their will throughout the 17th and 18th centuries back to Africa or on to some other part of the world. The only option left was the one that most white Americans before the Civil War considered morally intolerable and practically impossible: find a way to make American democracy work in a nation where different ethnic and racial groups formed one people. Some thoughts on the course of that endeavor will be the subject of a future letter.

Ohio Farmer

 

Constitutional Letter and Constitutional Spirit

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

From my first letter, I have spoken of the need for attention to the Constitution if we are to continue to enjoy the blessings of limited government.  It was gratifying, then, to hear the Attorney General say in a recent speech that "our actions must always be grounded on the bedrock of the Constitution." 

The particular action the Attorney General was referring to was the execution of an American citizen without trial, solely on the order of the President of the United States.  On the face of it, nothing could seem less constitutional or legal.  The Constitution is the framework, the set of rules, that prescribes what the government may legitimately do in a regime dedicated to securing the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for its citizens.  These rights exist before and outside the Constitution; the Constitution is meant to serve and preserve them.  We never cede them to the government and we cannot be deprived of them without what the Constitution calls due process, which includes trial by jury. 

How then could the Attorney General claim that it was constitutional for the President to authorize the execution of an American without trial?  I have neglected to mention that the American executed was a terrorist, an American citizen "intent on murdering Americans" and taking a leading role in plotting such murders, as the Attorney General put it.  Moreover, the citizen carried on this plotting in places where it was not feasible to capture him for trial.  In such cases, when the threat to Americans is imminent, the courts have ruled that the normal procedures of due process do not apply.  In this case, "after a thorough and careful review," the President authorized the execution.  According to the Attorney General, citing Supreme Court decisions, this review met the constitutional requirement for due process, and such review will pass constitutional muster in other similar cases involving American citizens.

But how do we know that the American was a terrorist intent on murdering Americans?  The executive decided he was.  The executive branch acted as judge, jury, and executioner.  It thus exercised the powers of the judicial, as well as the executive branch.  A fundamental tenet of our Constitution is that limiting the power of the government to protect the rights of citizens requires separating the powers of government.  In grounding executive action on Court rulings, the Attorney General ignored the spirit of the Constitution.

What evidence did the executive rely on to order the execution of an American citizen?  It relied on intelligence, which includes what a court would call hearsay and would not allow in a trial.  We also know that intelligence may be wrong.  Was it wrong in the case the Attorney General refers to?  We do not know.  Nor will we know in future cases because intelligence is secret.  Not only is the Attorney General advocating a process that nullifies the separation of powers, he is advocating a secret process that defies our tradition of open trials.

The Attorney General assures us that we should not be concerned.  The executive branch orders executions only under "robust oversight."  Congress provides the oversight, "in keeping with the law and our constitutional system of checks and balances."  The Attorney General's words at this point in his speech are artful.  He says that the Executive informs the appropriate members of Congress about the legal framework for its execution of citizens.   Some members of Congress are told, apparently, only of the justification of targeting in general, not of the evidence that justifies targeting in any particular case.  This would be similar to a judge explaining to a jury what the law against murder means without allowing the jury to hear any of the evidence in the case before them.  Would such a proceeding ever be thought compatible with the rights of free men?

In addition, it is the peculiar function of the judicial branch to check and balance the power of the executive branch when the rights of citizens are at stake.  Congress, especially the members of the House of Representatives elected every two years, are too close to the passions of the people, too exposed to immediate political concerns, to protect the rights of someone accused of being a public enemy.  Again, the Attorney General ignored this fundamental tenet of our constitutional system.

But the Attorney General counsels us further about the Constitution.  He admonishes us that, however disturbing the process by which the President comes to order the execution of an American citizen, however contrary it seems to our most fundamental understanding of what a citizen is due—it is necessary.   We are at war and in war "real-time decisions" must be made, as opportunity dictates.  In these circumstances, the President cannot consult; he must act.

This is true but not relevant in this case.  Again, how do we know that the American citizen to be targeted is in fact a terrorist?  The Attorney General assures us a thorough review of available information takes place before an American is executed.  This takes time.  So does collecting the information on which the review depends.  The actual execution may occur because of an opportunity that must be seized immediately, but the process that leads to seizing that opportunity unfolds deliberately over time.  In this process, is there no opportunity for the judicial branch to play its constitutional role?

Playing such a role does not require a full trial.  In 1978, Congress passed a law that established judicial review of the executive branch's surveillance of individuals, including American citizens, in certain national security cases.  This judicial review is carried out without a trial, and has been done with secrecy and dispatch.  If judicial review is necessary and possible before an American falls under surveillance, should it not also be necessary before he falls under the gun?

It is good that the Attorney General should acknowledge the Constitution.  But it would be better if he and the executive branch were guided by its spirit.

Ohio Farmer

To Secure These Rights

To My Fellow Citizens:

Rights are at the heart of American politics. Anyone wanting to understand our experiment in self government must grasp what we meant when we began that experiment by proclaiming, as self-evident truths, "that all men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," and that it is "to secure these rights" that "Governments are instituted among Men."  In our last letter, we reflected that the phrase "among these" is evidence that the authors of the Declaration of Independence, when listing three rights any legitimate government exists to secure, did not want to rule out the possibility of other rights deserving protection—such as the right to property.

We see the same concern reflected in the Constitution's Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Both our great founding documents, then, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, sought to protect against the danger that future governments might construe too narrowly the rights that defined their duties and justified their powers. Both documents explicitly reject the idea that the natural rights they enumerate are necessarily the only unalienable rights that government must protect. What they did not do and could not do is provide an exhaustive list of such rights.

Enter Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. FDR's New Deal presented itself as a necessary updating of the American Founding's 18th century principles to make them applicable to urgent 20th century realities.  "This Republic had its beginning," said Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address, "and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights...." But,

As our nation has grown in size and stature... – as our industrial economy expanded – these political rights proved inadequate....

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all....

History had made "self-evident" to FDR and his progressive forebears that the self-evident truths of the American Founding were inadequate as a foundation for a just political order in our time. "Social justice," as Roosevelt had written in 1938, "is essentially a conception of this century. It was not visualized by the men who founded the nation." A re-founding was needed, and that is what the New Deal offered. Anyone resisting the new vision and wishing to return to the principles of the original Founding would be a reactionary.

Roosevelt's second Bill of Rights included rights to adequate employment, business opportunities, housing, medical care, education, and protection against old age, sickness, and unemployment. Those who find it hard to imagine a guarantee of economic security that is not included in this list are not thinking like New Dealers. A year before the 1944 State of the Union Address the National Resources Planning Board, an agency created to map out a domestic policy agenda for implementation after victory in World War II, had submitted a report to Congress with its own bill of social welfare rights. It included "The right to education, for work, for citizenship, and for personal growth and happiness," and "The right to rest, recreation, and adventure, the opportunity to enjoy life and take part in advancing civilization."

Replacing the Founders' understanding of unchanging natural rights with an ever-evolving wish-list under the name of rights is central to the modern liberal enterprise and is the key to understanding the boundlessness of that enterprise. The Obama administration recently demonstrated one of the problems with this approach: If any social policy goal may be proclaimed a right, any right may be regarded as just another policy goal. The Department of Health and Human Services navigated this two-way street by announcing that the Affordable Care Act required non-profit employers to offer contraceptive coverage to their employees, even if they have never done so in the past due to religious convictions. The rationale, according to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, was to strike "the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services." The implication is clear: The government is going to balance two commensurate things, religious freedom and the provision of important preventive services. For the latter to become a right, just like the former, the former needs to be whittled down to fit a domestic agenda, just like the latter.

The biggest problem with the HHS contraception rule is not that HHS made the wrong decision, but that HHS was wrong to make a decision. A properly constituted republican government protects, rather than occupying and managing, the space wherein citizens follow their consciences while securing the employment and insurance arrangements they desire. Such restraint comes naturally to a government that exists to secure a finite number of unchanging natural rights (even if it is imprudent to proclaim an exhaustive list of those rights) but is foreign to one that supposes historical progress vouchsafes an endless list of rights—so that, as a result, nothing is really a right.

Ohio Farmer

 

The Particular Glory of This Country

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

Of all the freedoms protected by our Constitution, none is more cherished – and sometimes more difficult to think through – than religious freedom. We have been reminded of this in the Obama administration's recent decision to require church-backed employers to provide employees with insurance coverage for contraception. After religious organizations protested that this rule would force them to act against their conscience, the administration changed its rule and reached what the President called an "accommodation." This may or may not have solved the immediate problem, but it definitely did not answer the bigger (and more important) question: When should religious groups get an exemption from the law for their beliefs and practices?

Constitutional thinking has not been as consistent as it might have been on this question. The Supreme Court, for example, said in 1963 that religious beliefs and practices deserve an exemption from a law if they are burdened by it. But in 1990 it declared by a split vote that no one has the constitutional right to an exemption from a generally-applicable criminal law, no matter how much it interferes with his beliefs or practices – and no matter how important those beliefs or practices are to his religion. Congress tried to respond in 1993 with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which said that states had to exempt religious practices and organizations from burdensome laws unless they had a compelling interest not to do so. But the Court struck down that law in 1997, claiming that Congress did not have the power to expand constitutional freedoms when dealing with the states. In 2006, however, the Court admitted that the Act did still apply to the Federal Government.

The Court should have listened all along to Congress, which was following the lead of the Father of the Constitution himself, James Madison. A concern for religious freedom pushed Madison into his first foray in politics, which came at the Virginia Assembly of May-June 1776. There he successfully moved to amend the Virginia Declaration of Rights to say that "all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience" – language that he cribbed from later, when he wrote the First Amendment in 1789.

One year after penning the First Amendment, Madison's principles got put to the test while he was serving in the House of Representatives. In December 1790, the House was debating who should serve in the federal militia when it received a petition from the Quakers, who asked to be exempt from military service on the ground that "all revenge, animosity, strife, and contention are utterly forbidden by Christ our Lord." Many Congressmen denounced the Quakers' request as unpatriotic and dangerous, but Madison took to the floor to say that they should be granted an exemption.

According to Madison, each of us has a fundamental natural right to our religious beliefs and practices, which can never be taken away or given up. This freedom includes the right to form and communicate our beliefs – and to practice them unless those practices harm "the rights of other citizens" or "the permanent and aggregate interests of the community," as Madison put it in Federalist 10.

Looking at the Quakers' request, Madison admitted that there were arguments on both sides, but he concluded that Congress should grant the exemption because it was necessary to protect the Quakers' religious freedom, and would not harm other citizens' rights nor undermine America's interest in a functioning militia. He knew that even if the Quakers did not serve in the militia, other citizens would do their "honorable duty"; and he understood that "by penalties we may oppress the Quakers, but by no means hitherto discovered, can you make them undertake the defense of this nation." They would go to jail rather than go against their conscience, which would not help anyone. Despite Madison's appeal, the Quakers did not get their exception. Congress voted to leave the matter to the states.

But Madison got the principle right, and we can apply it to our day. Consider the recent contraception controversy. Exempting religious organizations from providing contraception coverage protects their freedom and would not violate anyone's rights:  employees would still be free to buy and use contraceptives, just like people who are free to purchase other health care goods that aren't covered by their particular insurance plans.

Nor would an exemption hurt the "permanent and aggregate interests of the community." The health care system would not be harmed. Hawaii, for example, already permits religious employers to enroll workers in a plan with a reduced premium, and allows employees who want contraception to pay for the coverage out of their own pocket. Health care has not suffered in Hawaii, and those who want insurance coverage for contraceptives can have it.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration did not originally approach this issue with such principles in mind. Even the recent "accommodation" may not be enough. If Congress needs to respond with a law, it should.  The issue is simply too important. As Madison reminded his fellow Congressmen in 1790, religious liberty must have the full protection it deserves, especially in America, because "above all it is the particular glory of this country, to have secured the rights of conscience which in other nations are least understood or most strangely violated." His words are as true today as when he spoke them.

Ohio Farmer

Certain Unalienable Rights

To My Fellow Citizens:

Do we have a right to health care? 

In the debate over President Obama's health care law, we've heard a lot about costs and constitutionality, but we haven't heard enough about this more fundamental question, which underlies the whole health care debate.

Those in favor of the law join President Obama in insisting that health care "should be a right for every American" and that the federal government must secure that right for all. Those on the other side have usually avoided the larger question in favor of economic and legal arguments: "It will cost too much!"; "It will hurt medical care!"; "It is beyond the legal power of Congress!" These are powerful arguments and certainly need to be made, but they concede too much of the moral high ground.

To recapture that ground, we need to be clear about what we mean by a "right to health care." Americans certainly talk a lot about rights, which makes sense given that our Declaration of Independence proclaims that it is to secure their rights that "Governments are instituted among men." But are the advocates of the "right" to health care understanding rights as our Founders did? When the American revolutionaries talked about the rights governments are established to secure, they meant "natural rights," as we can see in the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 written by John Adams:

The end of the institution, maintenance and administration of government, is to secure the existence of the body-politic; to protect it; and to furnish the individuals who compose it, with the power of enjoying, in safety and tranquillity, their natural rights, and the blessings of life….

When President Obama talks about the "right" to health care, it is clear that he is talking about privileges or entitlements rather than natural rights. A privilege is a supposed good thing that is given and taken back at the will of the person who gives it. As every teenager has heard, "driving is a privilege." Parents can take away the keys to the car and a state government can change the age at which young people can drive. One can say this teenager or that teenager, or all teenagers, "should"or "should not" be granted the privilege of driving, as President Obama thinks all Americans "should be" granted health care.

Natural rights are not like that. All human beings are born with them—endowed with them by our Creator, as the Declaration of Independence says—not given them by any government.  It doesn’t make sense to say all Americans "should" have or "should not" have the right to life, for example: we "do" have it, as do all other human beings, simply by virtue of being human beings. Government exists to protect our natural rights, not to grant them. And certain of these rights, like the right to life, no one on earth can give or take away: they are "unalienable."

Just as natural rights are not privileges, they also should not be confused with entitlements. An entitlement is something that a person deserves to have given to him by someone else (and clearly this is much more what President Obama and his allies in the health care debate mean when they call health care a "right"). Natural rights are not entitlements. No human being or government can give them to us; we are born with them.

To think of health care as an entitlement, as President Obama does, is to think that all Americans somehow deserve to have health care given to us. But is that not absurd, and does it not tread heavily on our real rights? Health care is provided by people who choose to become doctors, nurses, therapists, and aides. What "right" do we have to force them to give us their services—anymore than they have a right to force us to give them our labor, whatever our job is? After all, if no one chooses to become a doctor, how could we demand to have a doctor's services given to us? Could we rightly force an unwilling person to become a doctor just so we could make her give us medical services? Of course not.

If Americans concede that health care is a "right," as understood by the advocates of ObamaCare, we will have greatly jeopardized the rights for which we instituted government in the first place. We will have greatly diminished the principled moral ground on which to resist government's growing power, not just over how we seek and provide health care, but over our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness altogether.  Getting clear on what we mean by "rights" is vital not only to knowing how to truly reform health care but to preserving limited, constitutional government.  

Ohio Farmer

Free Speech and Free Politics

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

"Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech."  Two years ago the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that important features of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 violated this First Amendment ban on laws abridging the freedom of speech. (As you know, this federal law is more commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act, after the two senators who sponsored it.)

McCain-Feingold prohibited labor unions and corporations, both for-profit and non-profit, from broadcasting "electioneering communications" that mentioned political candidates by name less than 60 days before a general election or 30 days before a primary election. In the course of enforcing the law the Federal Election Commission (FEC) told the non-profit organization Citizens United that its plan to run television commercials for its documentary, "Hillary: The Movie," would constitute an illegal electioneering communication during the 2008 presidential election.

No opponent of campaign finance regulation ever wounded that cause more than did one of its advocates, deputy solicitor general Malcolm Stewart. Defending the suppression of "Hillary: The Movie" before the Supreme Court in March 2009, Stewart said in response to the justices' questions that McCain-Feingold's electioneering communications provision was broad enough to authorize FEC to ban a corporation in the business of publishing books from bringing out a 500-page book if even one sentence discussed a candidate by name. Stewart's answer elicited audible gasps in the courtroom.

It was no surprise, then, when a majority of the Supreme Court struck down McCain-Feingold's restrictions on "independent expenditures" by unions and corporations. "If the First Amendment has any force," the majority opinion stated, "it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."

Not only did four justices dissent strongly from this view, but President Obama devoted a weekly radio address to attacking the ruling. The Court had opened "the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy," he said, giving "special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don't." Other critics were less measured, calling Citizens United a "devastating decision" that shows "we can't expect the judiciary to protect average citizens from the power of big money."

Two years of seething by Citizens United's opponents, however, have not produced a coherent response to it. Politicians and activists have proposed various constitutional amendments. One of the most sweeping stipulates that, rather than just limiting corporations' rights to participate in the political process, corporations shall have no constitutional rights, such as the due process right to sue if the government seizes their property.

One of the ironies of these efforts is that most of the advocacy groups behind them are incorporated, meaning their success would curtail their own ability to affect the political process. The Sierra Club, for example, was fined by FEC in 2006 for distributing pamphlets contrasting candidates' views on environmental issues. Another irony is that the Left's causes and candidates have relied as much as the Right's on political "venture capitalists." In 1967 a handful of millionaires opposed to the war in Vietnam contributed $1.5 million – worth about $10 million today – to bankroll Senator Eugene McCarthy's challenge to Lyndon Johnson for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. One of those wealthy contributors, an heir to a General Motors founder, bankrolled George McGovern's presidential campaign throughout 1971 until some primary victories in 1972 allowed it to attract other donations.

The range of political purposes advanced by donated money highlights the central failing of the campaign finance reform effort. Nearly 40 years after Watergate gave rise to the modern wave of reforms, we still have no idea what constitutes a fair campaign finance system. All attempts to define such a system in terms of political processes wind up proscribing or threatening activities, like publishing pamphlets comparing voting records or books critical of politicians, at the heart of both our inalienable rights and a vigorous democracy. In explaining how democracy became a social reality as well as a political one in the Jacksonian era, one historian wrote, "The way to get into American democracy was to get into it. Ask nobody's permission, defer to nobody's prior claim." The campaign finance reform project culminates in a frightening regime change, where the only way to get into American democracy is to get authorization from the political process hall monitors.

Since no one can explain what distinguishes licit from illicit political processes, it's hard not to suspect that the culmination of campaign finance reform is an intended set of political results. All the efforts to "level the playing field" proceed without reference to any standard of evenness or fairness lying beyond the playing field. The levelers who tilt the playing field this way and that will conclude their work is done when the right team wins, not when they've met some comprehensible criteria of procedural fairness. We need to amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United, one senator maintains, since that decision "tilted the balance of power toward the rich and the powerful at a time when the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good." We'll know we've tilted it back just far enough, apparently, when President Dennis Kucinich is delivering his inaugural address.

Ohio Farmer

 

Preserving the Constitution and the Nation

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

These letters hope to find, in the continually arising, pressing political questions and choices of the moment, those principles or observations that have always been and will always be necessary to our deliberations as a free people.  We think there may be a good occasion for this in the President's recent decision to sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

For some of the voters who were most enthusiastic about Barack Obama in 2008—those who have since then been disappointed by the President's decisions about enhanced interrogation, the detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and warrantless wiretapping, for example— this was the last straw. After first threatening to veto the bill, President Obama signed it into law, despite warnings from fellow Democrats, such as Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, that it would "essentially authorize the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens without charges." The New York Times editorialized against its "terrible new measures that will make indefinite detention and military trials a permanent part of American law."

These are minority positions, however, even among Democrats. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid joined John Boehner and Mitch McConnell in voting for NDAA. A liberal Democratic president, supported in the main by his party, has taken a position on calibrating civil liberties in light of national security imperatives that affirms more than it repudiates his conservative Republican predecessor's policies.

One explanation of this quasi-consensus in favor of giving the government the power to circumvent normal criminal procedure and circumscribe peacetime civil liberties is that national security is a hard, grave business. Candidates who spoke as glibly as bloggers and editorialists about respecting boundaries regardless of the consequences become far less categorical when they're in important positions of national power and must confront just how horrific those consequences might be.

Drawing the lines and rightly understanding the nation's exigencies is not merely a post-9/11 problem. The most famous example in our history is Abraham Lincoln suspending the writ of habeas corpus – first by executive order, later according to congressional enactment – as secession and civil war consumed the nation in 1861. He defended his actions in a message to Congress: Are "all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the [president's] official oath [of office] be broken, if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law, would tend to preserve it?"  Lincoln elaborated his point in 1864:

My oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government – that nation – of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation.

Of course, the government might mistakenly or cynically claim that the preservation of the nation mandates otherwise unconstitutional actions. In 1944 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sending over 100,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps after Pearl Harbor, a policy implemented by two of the great liberal heroes of the last century, President Franklin Roosevelt and Earl Warren, later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court but at the time the governor of California. Eight years later, however, the Court ruled that President Harry Truman had exceeded his constitutional and statutory authority when, during the Korean War, he issued orders nationalizing the steel industry to prevent a strike by the United Steelworkers from shutting down the mills.

The "war on terrorism," unlike the Civil War or World War II, is not going to conclude with a formal surrender. Since we won't know when it's over, we have reason to wonder if it will be over. The idea that otherwise unconstitutional measures might, because of an existential threat, become lawful means to preserving the nation requires a bigger, more difficult investment of citizens' faith if the existential threat is not an episode but an open-ended state of affairs.

Even if we're not at war in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that killed thousands of Americans in a single day, we all know we're at … something. There is no tidy formula that defines the circumstances under which otherwise unconstitutional actions may be rendered permissible, especially in the treacherous, uncharted waters we must navigate. In the absence of such a formula, the position of ardent civil libertarians is that the only way to avoid a slippery slope to tyranny is to insist that there are no circumstances, ever, where grave national threats justify ordinarily unconstitutional government actions.

A more comprehensive but less clear-cut position is that the idea of eternal vigilance being the price of liberty works two ways: First, we must be vigilant against all enemies, foreign and domestic, whose threats may sometimes require the government to preserve the nation by taking actions that would ordinarily be impermissible. Second, we must be vigilant against the government, especially when it claims that grave dangers justify extraordinary actions. There are no guarantees, but the continuous exercise of both kinds of vigilance gives us our best hope for preserving our freedoms, and the political order in which they are embedded. This dilemma is a permanent feature of the challenge to make an experiment in self-government succeed.

Lincoln asked 150 years ago, "Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?  Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?"  Our experiment in freedom, it seems, has always been and will always be in part an answer to that question.

Ohio Farmer

Progressives and Regressives

To My French Friend:

You raise lots of good questions, Jean-Luc, about my previous letter on the speeches of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama at Osawatomie.  For the moment, let me comment on just one.  

I think you are right to say that Mr. Obama drew a false parallel in his speech, when he compared himself to Roosevelt as he did.  Just as Roosevelt argued that the government had to have more power to counter the centralization in corporations of the wealth and power created by the industrial revolution, so did Obama argue that the government required yet more power to counter the centralization in corporations of the wealth and power created by the information revolution, the more recent transformation the President acknowledged our economy has gone through.  

The problem with this parallel is that the two revolutions are very different—in fact, they are opposed—in their effects.   Corporations centralized power during the industrial revolution because it was the most efficient way to get their work done.  All decisions, all actions require information.  Manufacturing a product requires thousands of decisions, for example, about raw materials, design, marketing, and many other things.  Getting the information to make those decisions is costly.  Bringing all those decisions and the processes they make possible under central control in a corporation reduces those costs.  Furthermore, when dealing with a mass of less skilled workers a hundred years ago, it made sense to give them simple tasks and to centralize control over them by giving them rules and regulations that they had to follow in carrying out those tasks.  The information revolution is changing all this. 

Consider your own situation.  You design and can manage industrial control systems for corporations around the world from France because the internet connects you to thousands of sensors that automatically feed you information.  The cost of gathering the information you need to decide and act on a problem in a California plant is a fraction of what it would have been even a few decades ago for the plant itself to do that work.  And you can do it more cheaply than they can because you can do it for many others at the same time.  Furthermore, you and your colleagues are skilled.  The company in California does not need to give you detailed rules on how to do your work.  In fact, such rules would make you less useful and productive.  They merely tell you what they want and they leave it to you to figure out how to do it.  The information revolution means that corporations can and need to decentralize, to disperse their power and authority. 

The administrative state of rules and regulations that Theodore Roosevelt championed was a response to industrialization.  The industrial age is ending, as the President himself acknowledged.  Shouldn’t the administrative state be ending as well then?  Instead, the President proposes more rules and regulations.  

Everywhere we look, whether the streets of Cairo or New York City, offices in France or family rooms in America, the information revolution is putting more information and thus more power into the hands of individuals.  Everywhere that is but in the minds of people like the President who acknowledge that our case is new, but who cannot think or act anew.  It is striking how backward looking, how trapped in the past so-called progressives are.   I agree with you that they should be called regressives. 

It is true, of course, that the transfer of power to individuals that I just spoke of will never be complete.  Neither you nor I are arguing for some kind of absolute individualism.  As I noted in my previous letter, we acknowledge, for example, that governmental action is necessary to ensure that none have unfair advantage.  But this does not mean that government action and power must always be the same or must always grow.  Given the information revolution, the transformation that the President acknowledged, our real task is not to keep building up the centralized industrial age bureaucracy but to figure out what aspects of that bureaucracy we can do without and what might need to be preserved but changed. 

The transformation we are going through has the potential to enhance human freedom, but while the President acknowledges the transformation, he does not acknowledge its potential.  At Osawatomie, he presented it not as an opportunity but as a problem that only government could fix.  If Jefferson were alive today, I think he would see this potential for freedom as he once saw such potential in America’s abundant land.  Living on one's own land, Jefferson thought, was the best way to ensure that citizens would live free and be safe in the enjoyment of what they labored to achieve.  Our circumstances have changed.  The age of the family farm has passed for most of us.  But the age-old longing for freedom and justice that Jefferson sought to satisfy can find fulfillment still, I believe, in the new forms made possible by the latest transformation of our lives.  Indeed, that transformation can give fresh life to individual liberty.  We should not let it be smothered in rules, regulations, and thinking suited to a by-gone era. 

There is more to say about all this, Jean-Luc, as you know, and I look forward to our future correspondence.

Ohio Farmer

 

Enlightened and Patriotic Councils

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

As we search for ways to restore constitutional self-government, our attention gravitates to questions of war and peace. Nothing is more urgent for a country than such questions, and yet what the Constitution says about war powers has been a source of controversy for almost as long as America has existed as a sovereign country.

The controversy seems to be rooted in the nature of the war power itself. What kind of power is it?  The political thinker John Locke, often consulted and quoted by the American Founders, wrote that "legislative power" is the power of a people to make the "established, settled, known law, allowed by common consent to be the standard of right and wrong, and the common measure to decide all controversies between them." As we know, Article I gives Congress "all legislative power herein granted." At the same time, Article II vests the president with the "executive Power," which is the power to give the law what Locke calls its "due execution." Is the war power a legislative or executive power?  

The Founders' answer seems to have been "neither" – or "both." Besides the legislative, executive, and judicial powers that we are all familiar with, there is another power of government that Locke describes as the "federative power." This "contains the power of war and peace, leagues and alliances, and all the transactions with all persons and communities [outside] the commonwealth." The federative power is something like the broad power of dealing with foreign affairs as a whole.

Our Constitution appears to divide what we might call the foreign affairs power – of which the war power is a part – between Congress and the president. On the one hand, Article I gives Congress the power to regulate commerce "with foreign Nations," "[t]o define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations," and, of course, "[t]o declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water."

On the other hand, in Article II the president is "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States," has "Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties… and appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls," and "shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers."

So Congress generally seems to have the aspects of the foreign affairs power that are legislative in character while the president has those that are executive in nature. That is, Congress has the powers that relate to making rules that govern the legal status of the U.S. or its citizens vis-à-vis other countries. At the same time, the president's foreign affairs powers concern matters that, as Alexander Hamilton says in Federalist 70, require "[d]ecision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch."

When we are trying to understand a particular application of the war power, then, and where the letter of the Constitution does not resolve the issue, the principles of the Constitution seem to invite us to ask: Is this exercise of war power legislative or executive in character? For example, if the president were to use American troops in such a way as to initiate hostilities against another country, under the law of nations he would be changing the legal status of the U.S. in its relations with that country from peace to war, which is a legislative power that he does not possess. But as James Madison said at the Philadelphia Convention, if the president were to use troops to "repel a sudden attack," he would be using a power that requires "decision" and "dispatch," which could only be done by an executive.  We could use this same standard to judge many other exercises of the war power by the president and Congress.  

This standard might have helped Congress and the general public, for example, give more serious constitutional consideration to the President's actions in Libya some time back. Most of the criticism focused on whether the military intervention was wise, not on whether the President had the constitutional power to intervene without authorization from Congress. However delicate or difficult such questions may be, our most basic civic responsibility seems to oblige us to address them.

Contrast our relative silence with the constitutional seriousness of President James Madison's appeal to Congress and the American people concerning war with Britain in 1812. Madison did not decide the issue himself; he knew that he did not have the power. More importantly, he knew that the people and their representatives needed to have open constitutional deliberation on such a momentous question. Self-government required it. Here are his words:

Whether the United States shall continue passive under these progressive usurpations and these accumulating wrongs, or, opposing force to force in defense of their national rights, shall commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of Events… is a solemn question which the Constitution wisely confides to the legislative department of the Government. In recommending it to their early deliberations I am happy in the assurance that the decision will be worthy the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous, a free, and a powerful nation.

In our efforts to revive constitutional self-government in America, we – Congress and the American people – certainly must focus, as have many of these letters, on the proper foundation and extent of the federal government's powers in domestic affairs. But we must also strive to be "enlightened and patriotic councils" in constitutional questions of war and peace – none are more fundamental to our freedom.

Ohio Farmer

 

Prosperity and Freedom

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

In the past few years, America's best minds have said about everything they could conceivably think of saying about the state of the economy.  But they don't seem to have achieved a meeting of the minds, and the economy still has a mind of its own, so maybe a few words can still profitably be said on the subject—in particular, about the relation of the economy to America's national security. What is the relation of our prosperity to our freedom?

In a speech he gave at West Point a couple of springs ago, the President said, "[A]t no time in human history has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy." There is an immediate surface plausibility in the President's words. It is clear, we say to ourselves, that economic prosperity is essential to the military strength that secures our freedom as a country. Whatever enhances America's commercial, financial, and industrial power increases its military potential.  

And the converse seems true, as well. We are pleased to hear the President's eagerness to maintain America's "political primacy," and to hear the realism with which he recognizes that this will depend on our military primacy. Military strength, we say to ourselves, is as essential to economic prosperity as it is to political primacy.  There can be no production without security; prosperity is the gift of freedom. Ninety-five percent of America's foreign trade, for example, comes and goes across the seas. We depend on the United States Navy to ensure the freedom of the seas that enables our maritime commerce and reciprocal trade to flourish. Because of this, the fact that we now have the smallest navy America has deployed in almost a century is a matter of concern, as is the President's apparent determination—shared with leaders in both parties—to continue to reduce American military power in general.

Many reasons are given for this bipartisan determination to reduce military expenditures. One of them has particularly to do with our theme of economics and military power. It is that America's security commitments have outstripped available economic resources—a mismatch between capabilities and commitments we understand some of the experts call "imperial overstretch." Some even suggest that this is what ails the American economy: that its fiscal problems arise from excessive spending on defense. Nonsense—if you will forgive our candor.

Cutting the entire budget for the Department of Defense would have little impact on the budget deficit and ultimately the national debt. We currently spend about 4.6 percent of America's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defense. Operational war costs are less than one percent of GDP. By 1945, at the end of World War II, America was spending almost 40 percent of GDP on defense. In peacetime over the past 60 years Americans spent on average 5.7 percent of GDP on defense. On the other side of the ledger, for all our economic woes, in 2007, America's GDP was $14.061 trillion; in 2010 it had increased to $14.870 trillion (not adjusted for inflation).

To give you some perspective on economic woes, in 1929, GDP was $103 billion; in 1933, it was $55 billion—a decline of 46 percent. The country's economy continued in the doldrums throughout the '30s, averaging a GDP of $77.5 billion, which is why the plausibility of the President's West Point remarks remains on the surface only. A nation whose "economic vitality" had been "diminished" more profoundly than at any time in its history immediately went on to fight and win the greatest war in history, preparing the way for the longest, most widely spread era of prosperity the country or the world has ever known. So there are some mysteries in the relationship between prosperity and freedom.

There is another way in which such reasoning is nonsense. The national debt that we are used to talking about is incommensurate with another much more important national debt. This is a debt by which we are ennobled and which we can never adequately repay. It is the debt each of us, enjoying the blessings of freedom each day, owes to those whose names we do not even know, who, from Valley Forge, to the beaches of Normandy, to the streets of Baghdad, offered and gave—and continue to offer and to give—the last full measure of devotion so that we can enjoy these blessings.

We can see how these two different national debts are incommensurate when we reflect that what we spend on national defense is in some ways entirely independent of economic considerations. The cost of providing for a successful defense of the country, no matter how high, will always pale in comparison with the loss of freedom, and all that comes with it, that is the cost of defeat. By the end of WWII, Americans were spending 86 percent of the federal budget on defense—perfectly sensibly.

Of course, we quite reasonably have never wanted to throw money at the military. But today, and in the days to come, we hope our elected representatives will not hesitate to say in public that Americans will be ashamed not to spend every cent necessary to equip their soldiers with ample—and even redundant—means to achieve victory with the least possible loss. If these expenditures should ever require us to be more self reliant at home and less dependent on this or that government assistance, remind us in cheerful tones that we should be grateful.  We should be grateful for the benefit to our characters and proud to share in our small way in the sacrifices of prosperity that may sometimes be necessary to preserve our freedom. And, who knows? In the mystery of human events, those very sacrifices, reminding us as they do that we are free people able to stand on our own two feet as Americans always have, may be one of the most important conditions for increasing both our prosperity and our freedom, down the road.

Ohio Farmer

Promises and Politics

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

"The Pledge," in most political news stories today, refers to the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, promoted and monitored by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). This group, headed for the entirety of its 26-year existence by Grover Norquist, invites candidates around the country—for the U.S. House and Senate, governorships, and the state legislatures—to promise to oppose any and all tax increases by signing the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Only six Republicans in the House of Representatives and seven GOP senators have not signed it, compared to exactly three of the 246 elected Democrats on Capitol Hill who have. When ATR believes that a pledge-signer has supported a tax increase, or is about to, it is not bashful about reminding the politician and his electors about the broken promise.

When the "super committee" of six Democratic and six Republican members of Congress recently failed to reach a "grand bargain" on reducing the federal government's borrowing, many Democrats blamed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Without it, the argument went, those Republicans who were willing to raise taxes if it meant cutting spending could have worked out a deal with those Democrats who were willing to cut spending in order to raise taxes. Because no Republicans chose to violate the Taxpayer Protection Pledge all such deals became impossible. As Senator John Kerry (D - Mass.), one of the super committee members, complained, "Grover Norquist has been the 13th member of this committee without being there. I can't tell you how many times we hear about 'the pledge, the pledge.' Well all of us took a pledge to uphold the Constitution and to full and faithfully and well-execute our duties and I think that requires us to try and reach an agreement. So we have to compromise."

One critic of the Pledge attacked it by invoking Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British statesman and modern American conservative hero. His famous speech in 1774 laid out the nature and the limits of an elected politician’s obligations to those who elect him. "It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own," Burke argued. "But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living…. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

Therefore, according to Burke, it was pernicious for voters to issue "authoritative instructions"and "mandates" to their elected officials, in the expectation that the politicians would be "bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience." The dots aren't hard to connect: Any Republican politician who takes and honors the Taxpayer Protection Pledge is blindly obeying voters' instructions rather than following his own judgment and conscience.

To use Edmund Burke against Grover Norquist in this way is an example of an argument that, as they say in the law schools, proves too much. It is certainly true that the idea of "representative"government should not be understood in a fanatically literal way. We don't "present" our opinions to our elected officials, and then insist they do no more than "re-present" them in the halls of government.

It doesn't follow from that premise, however, that correctly calibrating governors' democratic accountability to the governed means that citizens have no questions to ask of political candidates beyond whether they have good heads and hearts. It would be one thing if the Taxpayer Protection Pledge were a category unto itself, the only promise American politicians made to the voters. But, of course, lots of politicians make lots of promises about what they'll enact and oppose, perpetuate and eliminate. As a presidential candidate, for example, Barack Obama promised frequently and forcefully to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility by the end of his first year in the White House. Arguments over that promise extend to whether such a closing would be advisable or dangerous, and whether President Obama should have done more to fulfill it. No one, however, took the position that a presidential candidate had no business telling the voters his intentions about an important policy question, and should have confined himself to saying that he would consider the future of Guantanamo carefully but owed it to the voters not to tip his hand.

We do nothing to gainsay Edmund Burke's greatness by noting that his political career unfolded when aristocracy was only beginning to yield to the advance of democracy. It is not surprising that he viewed democratic accountability in the context of aristocratic premises. The best should rule, as before, but with the new twist that the rulers were periodically answerable to the people rather than allowed to perpetuate their power on the basis of ancient traditions or unfalsifiable justifications like "divine right." During that era when the new claims of democracy were being slowly, reluctantly conceded, many believed that for rulers to descend to making specific promises they were expected to keep, or for voters to make equally specific demands, would have been vulgar and the beginning of a descent into mob rule.

The assumptions of that age are not the assumptions of this one. America has now had 183 years of vigorous, unapologetic democratic politics since Andrew Jackson's successful presidential campaign of 1828. The politicians who ask to govern us by our consent, expressed through our votes, can no longer expect to close the sale by offering their eminence and good judgment, with the policy details to be filled in after the votes are counted. Voters aren't shy about demanding specifics from politicians; the prospective office-seekers who considered such questions an affront have all gone into other lines of work. No candidate is obligated to take the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, as no voter is obligated to consider whether a candidate has signed, spurned, or even broken it. Given those undiminished possibilities for free democratic expression, there is no reason why one promise on one issue should be singled out as a threat to popular government… unless all promises on all issues are.

Ohio Farmer

The Shades at Osawatomie

To My Fellow Citizens:

On August 31, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt gave a revolutionary speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, and a couple of weeks ago President Barack Obama visited Osawatomie and wrapped himself in the mantle of Roosevelt's revolutionary progressivism. Thomas Jefferson saw it coming. 

Jefferson did not predict that Roosevelt would make a speech at Osawatomie. He merely predicted the subject of Roosevelt's speech. Jefferson feared that at some point social and economic change would call into question the character of the American republic, portending a revolution that would change it fundamentally. He feared this because he talked to a French peasant woman. 

Jefferson was then Ambassador to the Court of Louis XVI. Representing a poor government, Jefferson was not able to afford the display thought necessary for the French Court’s most elaborate ceremonies. So, one day, instead of attending such a ceremony, Jefferson took a walk in the countryside near Versailles. He happened upon an old peasant woman. Falling into conversation with her, he listened as she spoke of her difficulties. As Jefferson later wrote to a friend, he learned that she had no land and was not allowed onto the vast lands held by the nobility who used them only for sport, riding at their pleasure and hunting wild game. She was entirely dependent on the hand-outs and odd jobs the aristocrats deigned to give her. Her children, she told Jefferson, often went to bed hungry. 

Jefferson was appalled by the destitution of the woman. He told his friend that the critical difference between France—indeed the rest of the world—and America was that in America land was available to all who wished to work it. The land gave opportunity—equality and liberty—to all and secured to Americans the blessings of republican government. And so it would be, Jefferson wrote, until the land was used up. 

As it turned out, industrialization, not population growth, used up the land, so to speak. As America industrialized, people left their farms. As they did so, the wealth generated by industrialization spread to all but unequally. Individuals and corporations amassed great sums. Theodore Roosevelt and people like him, who called themselves Progressives, believed that the old limited national government championed by Jefferson was no longer adequate to these new circumstances. At Osawatomie, as the shade of Jefferson hovered over him, Roosevelt announced the New Nationalism. 

By the New Nationalism, Roosevelt meant a powerful president acting in the name and on the behalf of the people who would control the "special interests" (Roosevelt's term) to ensure equality of opportunity. At Osawatomie, in the spirit of Jefferson, Roosevelt spoke of "the triumph of a real democracy, . . . of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him." Roosevelt understood, as Jefferson did, that opportunity so understood satisfied the age-old longing for justice and at the same time encouraged our virtue—the best there is in us.

The revolution in our government foreseen by Jefferson and announced by Roosevelt did not concern its goal—equality of opportunity—but the means to achieve that goal. Jefferson as much as Roosevelt thought government should prevent monopolies. But beyond this Jefferson believed that liberty itself was equality of opportunity and limiting the power of government would maximize liberty. Roosevelt believed that the great wealth and power of individuals and corporations required a powerful central government to ensure equality of opportunity for everyone else. 

But the progressive revolution did not stop with the means our government used. Over time, gradually but inevitably, it sought to change its goal. How do we know that there is equality of opportunity? Is it enough to pass laws and impose regulations? If we do so, and inequalities persist or reappear, then perhaps government must do more. It must not simply ensure an equal playing field but a more equal score at the end of the game. 

This is the view President Obama expressed in his speech at Osawatomie. With the shades of Jefferson and Roosevelt hovering over him, he said that the fundamental issue was that inequality of outcome meant there could be no equality of opportunity.  "Gaping inequality," he announced, "gives lie to the promise that's at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try." 

Like Jefferson and Roosevelt, Obama sees equality of opportunity ("you can make it if you try") as the heart of America. Unlike his predecessors, however, he believes that inequality of outcome or wealth denies equality of opportunity. If it does, then to save the heart of America, the government must work to prevent inequality of outcome.

Let us note immediately that the President made no argument to prove that inequality in wealth, "gaping" or otherwise, reduces opportunity. He merely asserted what has become a Progressive dogma, one that revolutionizes the goal of our government as much as Roosevelt revolutionized the means.

What are we to make of these revolutions? Let us acknowledge that governmental action was and is necessary to ensure that none has unfair advantage. All agree on this. But let us also acknowledge the contradiction at the core of Roosevelt's revolution: restricting liberty cannot create opportunity. The power of government, therefore, should be as limited as possible, so the heart of America, opportunity for all, beats as strongly as possible. Let us acknowledge, finally, that a government that works to equalize outcomes, the hope of Obama's revolution, will need to exercise such power that it will imperil opportunity and thus both justice and virtue even more than Roosevelt's revolution did. This above all was the revolution Jefferson feared as he walked with the peasant woman and looked to the future.

Ohio Farmer

 

Equality and Opportunity

To My French Friend:

Yes, Jean-Luc, I did read the President's recent speech.  And I did notice that he referred to the same statistics from the Congressional Budget Office that I did in my last letter to you.  But did you notice the sleight of hand?  The President said that "over the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent," as the report indeed notes.  But then the President said "over the last decade, the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6 percent."  In other words, the President used two different standards to compare income (income over several decades and income over one decade) and presented them as if they were the same.  

As I noted in my letter to you, what the budget office found was that over the last few decades, the income of the poorest Americans increased by 18 percent and American households experienced an average increase of 62 percent in their wealth.   As for the time period that the President refers to, a Federal Reserve study found that the poorest Americans actually lost less in the recent recession than did the wealthiest and that income in the United States has actually become more equal over the past few years.  This should not surprise us.  If you owned a house, you lost a lot when the housing market collapsed.   If you didn't own a home, you lost much less. 

I will leave it to more subtle continental minds like yours to figure out how such manipulation can be a basis for bringing us together, a major theme of the President's speech, or how condemning morally those who disagree with you, as the President also did, contributes to that end.  For my part, I would rather consider a point that the President and I agree on, the importance of opportunity.   This consideration allows me as well to address your concern that what once made America great may be slipping away.

I did indeed consult the World Bank report you mentioned.  And it does indeed show that in the last four years we have fallen among countries in the ranking of ease of starting a business from third to thirteenth.  I was also surprised to confirm, as you noted, that the report shows that the tax burden on businesses in the United States, while lower than it is in France, is higher than it is in the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and even Romania, among other countries. 

This is important because, as the report points out, as taxes go up, the number of new businesses go down because it becomes too costly to start a business.  Not only does that make it hard for entrepreneurs (a fine French word!) like you to start businesses; it makes it harder for those out of work to find jobs, because no one is creating them.  

But there is more at stake than just new businesses and jobs, as important as those are.  What we are talking about—opportunity—is at the heart of our republican governments and way of life.  What good does it do to declare all created equal, if all do not have the opportunity to earn their daily bread and improve themselves through their own effort?  Without opportunity, our principles would have no practical effect. 

The President is right, therefore, to say that creating opportunity is critical to the success of our republican experiment.  How then do we create opportunity? 

The President wants to tax and then have the government spend on education, infrastructure, and research.  He wants more laws and regulations to prevent those he calls greedy from taking advantage of the rest of us.  Such increases in the power of government will create opportunities, he insists in his speech.  All of this is necessary, he tells us, because the old way does not work.  His proof, it seems, is his claim that while a few got richer, most got poorer. 

But as we have seen, he can make this claim only because he manipulated the statistics.  In fact, without the new taxing and laws and regulations that the President wants, American households got richer over the last few decades—on average 62 percent richer.  Moreover, the American economy that produced this wealth was not built on the Federal government’s spending on education, infrastructure, and research.  The Federal government historically has had little to do with education, and most infrastructure and research has been funded by the private sector. 

Through your frustrated efforts to start a business in a country with higher taxes and more regulations than America (and more unemployment!), I am sure, my friend, that you appreciate what will be the result of the President's plans.  We are already starting to see their bad effects.  The increased regulation already imposed on the financial industry has contributed to less financial support for new companies, the companies that create the most jobs. 

Why does the President not see this?  I cannot say for sure.  But he does seem more interested in making sure that no one has too much than in making sure that everyone has a chance to get more.  This means the President wants to limit opportunity to create more equality of outcome.  In doing so, he will only make more poverty for all. And by limiting opportunity, he will enfeeble our republican way of life. 

If I lack the skills of entrepreneurs like you, Jean-Luc, I share their hope and optimism, believing that my fellow citizens will not go where their President is trying to lead them.

Ohio Farmer

Changing Direction

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

Much good has been done in Washington recently.  I do not refer to the details of the debt reduction agreement, some of which we have already noted, but to the change it signifies—a change of course for the country. Turning around a fleet of aircraft carriers is child's play compared to turning around the ship of state, but I believe we see before our eyes the signs of a great, ponderous movement of America in the right direction. We owe this hopeful movement largely to the determination of the constitutional conservatives within the GOP and to the good judgment of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives.

If you wonder why liberals are in a funk, why the President's approval ratings are hitting rock-bottom, why he signed off on the debt reduction agreement in virtual secrecy, why he is being criticized openly by progressives and even being compared to the feckless Jimmy Carter, why there is disarray within the Democratic Party, you need look no further than to those who elected a GOP majority in the House, the courage of the Representatives who were elected, and the prudence of Speaker Boehner.  He got almost everything he could reasonably have hoped for in the debt reduction agreement, producing the most radical reorientation of government in our generation. President Obama and the Democrats agreed to massive spending cuts, with more to come, and no tax increases.

This is a strategic and tactical disaster for the progressives and the Democrats, but, far more important is that the debt ceiling debate exposed what Speaker Boehner calls "the arrogant habits of Washington" and opened fundamental political and constitutional questions.  The debate in Washington is shifting away from the favors government might bestow to the question of the proper role of government. As satisfying as his political victory must be, Boehner should be most encouraged by the opening now created to begin a broader conversation about big-government liberalism—really limitless-government liberalism—and why it must be reined in.

If those who brought this about remain resolute, there is a chance of bringing American government back within the bounds of the Constitution.  Boehner and his Republican supporters are beginning to disprove an assumption held by progressives and liberals (and the media) since the New Deal: that government will always grow in size and scope, that all spending increases are permanent. This is a historic change, a movement toward re-establishing public recognition that there are some things it is better not to ask government to do (see Constitutional Lines). The ear of the public is now listening to the argument for limited self-government. If their elected representatives and other public leaders can continue to explain why limiting the power of the federal government is a good thing, we have the opportunity to form public sentiment into a durable governing consensus.

During the debate over the debt ceiling, much was said about how our government is so divided that it is dysfunctional, and how the solution to the perceived problem is bi-partisanship. Some went so far as to assert that the purpose of government is efficiency. Others argued or implied that a parliamentary system would be preferable to the constitutional one we have. After all, there are problems in the world, and our government is not solving them. 

We continue to hear such assertions on a daily basis, but they miss the point. The fact is that our Constitution builds in division (see The Sense of the People); it deliberately makes it difficult to form majorities, and even more difficult to hold them. The Constitution's purpose is not efficiency.  Our constitutional government is not unified, as is, for example, the British Parliamentary regime (we note in passing that the British prime minister speaks for the government, while our president speaks for his administration, only a part of the government). With its federalism, separation of powers, bi-cameralism, and other inventions of prudence, our republican regime intentionally divides, checks, and balances power, so that,

in the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good.

Of course, this means that large issues cannot be quickly resolved. Changing direction in our constitutional regime is wonderfully and deliberately complicated.

The easiest and quickest way to form part of our constitutional majority is through the House of Representatives.  Should we be surprised that the new majority in the House—formed but two years into the majority that won the presidency and both branches of Congress for the Democrats—should assert itself?  And should we be surprised that the President's response is to ask this newest majority to become bi-partisan (read "Democrat")?  Politics is not rocket science.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, along with the first Republican Senate majority since 1954, alerted us to divisions in the American electorate that had been muffled during the prior fifty years. Since then noisy debates have continued, with Republicans losing the Senate, then regaining it, losing the presidency, then winning the House, then losing it, and so on. We will need more than a few electoral cycles—and continued conversation and persuasion from the Republicans—to see whether the determination to limit government will take root in public opinion and become the principle of a new governing majority in American politics. In the meantime, let the divisions and the arguments for and against constitutional limits continue. Public reflection and constitutional deliberation is our strength, not our weakness.

Ohio Farmer

In Search of Monsters

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

"Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States." This is the first sentence in President Obama's recently issued Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities.  Is it true?

It seems that there have always been, and until human nature changes there will always be, monstrous tyrants in the world doing monstrous things to anyone they can get in the grip of their claws. Whole nations seem capable of becoming bloodthirsty mobs.  Some rather nasty tyrants have been in the headlines lately.  Presumably Americans, who don’t like tyranny of any degree and who began our progress in the world proclaiming the natural right to overthrow tyrants, are especially opposed to tyranny that is atrocious and genocidal.  We could probably get 100% of sane Americans to agree that it is desirable to prevent it. But does this make preventing it a "core national security interest" and a "core moral responsibility" of the country?  

If men were angels there would be no atrocities to trouble us, but until men become angels, to implement this Directive will require endless American intervention across the sinful and suffering world.  America would have to become the "universal landlord," to use a colorful Shakespearean phrase, and this would be neither morally desirable nor strategically feasible, even assuming we were determined to exert all our means to this end.  If—unmindful of these moral and strategic truths—we actually meant what we say in the Directive, we would need urgently and radically to increase American spending on our armed forces.  We are certainly not going to do that. To the contrary, the President and his entire administration have taken pains to make clear that they intend to reduce American military power.  The President issued the Directive at the very time when he was emphatically making known his willingness to cut American defense spending drastically as part of his domestic negotiations over the debt ceiling. So, we do not mean what we say in this Directive, and everyone can see that. America is announcing its obligation to intervene to prevent evil in the world at the very same time that it is diminishing its ability to do anything about it. This is not "moral responsibility" but the height of moral irresponsibility.  It is moralistic boastfulness.

Given America's deteriorating defense posture, the President's Directive seems perfectly calculated to achieve moral bankruptcy in the eyes of the world to complement our actual bankruptcy at home.  From the victims of tyrants and their sympathizers it will bring resentment as they see us giving mere lip service to our moralistic commitment. From the tyrants—who are not in the habit of paying heed to weakness—it will bring increasing contempt for our boastful limp-wristed moralizing that speaks loudly and carries no stick.  

The President’s Directive also represents a further subordination of American foreign policy to the dictates of international institutions, especially the United Nations.  There is nothing morally responsible about submitting America's actions in the world to the judgment of this body.  Many of its influential members are the very tyrannies committing the atrocities the President wants to make pronouncements about.

There is an old saying about the world of nations. In that world, "the strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must." This is not a cynical principle, but a candid observation of the facts. It is an expression of moral and strategic modesty. When you are weak, you are in no position to prevent injustices in the world, even injustices to yourself. If America wants to do any good in the world, for itself or anyone else, it is paramount that we be strong. Thus in its infancy, when the United States was weak, George Washington in his famous Farewell Address looked forward to a time when America would be strong enough to have "command of its own fortunes," and when  "we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel."

Within the memory of the older generation in America, the United States became the most powerful nation on earth, and it remains so.  But this is no cause for such boastful and empty pronouncements as the President's Directive. Especially as we recklessly fritter away the strength we have acquired with such effort and good fortune.

If we might more modestly suggest what is "our core moral responsibility," to ourselves and to mankind, we would say as we did in an earlier letter: It is to succeed in our own experiment in freedom. If we can show by the enduring success of our experiment that free government can be good government, this will be the greatest benefit Americans can bestow on their fellow human beings—our own political well being will be a constant act of philanthropy. 

Americans should intervene in the world when intervening enhances the prospects of the American experiment. To commit to more than that betrays America's national security interest and our core moral responsibility to ourselves and our fellow human beings. Much better than the boastful posturing of the President's Directive are the modest words of John Quincy Adams: America "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all [but]…the champion and vindicator only of her own."  If we vindicate our own freedom by securing it and using it well, it will be, as it has been from the beginning, a blessing and an inspiration to the world. It is as true today as it was when newly elected President Thomas Jefferson said it in his first inaugural: we are "the world's best hope."

Ohio Farmer

The Sense of the People

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

In the negotiations over increasing the national debt ceiling, one fact is so obvious it has barely been mentioned: America has a government that can be, and currently is, divided. A Democratic president and Senate majority leader sit at the table with a Republican Speaker of the House.

Were the configuration otherwise, as it was between the 2008 and 2010 elections when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives as well as the Senate and the presidency, the debt ceiling debate would probably not be taking place at all. When Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress passed an increase in the debt ceiling in 2010, Republican legislators made some critical speeches but the bill moved swiftly to President Obama's desk for signature.

The possibility of divided government inheres in a constitutional republic where both houses of a bicameral legislature and the head of the executive branch are all elected by the people, but not by the same people at the same time. As our civics textbooks teach us, each Representative is elected for two years by voters in one of the 435 congressional districts. Senators are elected every six years, state-by-state. Because those six-year terms are staggered, only one third of the Senate faces the voters in any given election, while the entire membership of the House does. Presidents are elected every four years by the entire, constitutionally organized, national electorate.

Divisions like America's could never occur in a parliamentary democracy where the people elect the entire legislature at once. The party that wins a majority forms a government, and the prime minister – a member of the legislature, as are all the cabinet members – submits legislation that his party invariably passes. Such systems have been described as "dictatorships punctuated by elections."

More than a century ago, the American Progressives began their historic assault on our constitutional system, yearning for the clarity and dispatch of a parliamentary system. Woodrow Wilson, for example, sought sweeping reforms that would "make self-government among us a straightforward thing of simple method, single, unstinted power, and clear responsibility." H.L. Mencken, Wilson's contemporary, offered a less celebratory expression of the same idea: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

One strand of the political philosophy woven into the Constitution is that sometimes the people don't know what they want, and other times they think they do, only to wind up regretting their "settled" opinions after some reassessment. The Constitution's authors believed, as one of them stated in Federalist 63, that "where the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies [such as the House and Senate] is required in every public act," the republic is best prepared to navigate "particular moments in public affairs when the people . . . may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn." The objective, as we have had several occasions to observe in these letters, is that "the cool and deliberate sense of the community" will "ultimately prevail."

Each party would clearly prefer to deal with the debt ceiling, and the nation's long-term fiscal problems, on its own terms, with both houses of Congress and the presidency under its control. If the Democrats had their way, that would mean higher taxes, especially on the rich; more borrowing, especially until the unemployment rate is much lower; and few spending cuts, especially from domestic programs. If Republicans controlled both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, they would emphasize spending cuts, especially to domestic programs; less borrowing; tax reforms to apply lower, simpler tax rates to a broader, more vigorous tax base; and regulatory reforms to stimulate economic growth.

Which approach best reflects "the will of the people"? That may be a question that doesn't, at least for the moment, really have an answer. It's not as though either party's philosophy has been hidden over the past years, or undergone profound changes. The voters knew what they were getting when they gave Republicans control over all the federal elected branches from 2002 to 2006, and then when they disliked the results, and chose to check a Republican president with a Democratic House and Senate. The voters knew, or should have known, what they were getting when they empowered Democrats to run everything in 2008, and then again two years later when they decided to return the Republicans to a majority in the House to curtail the Democrats' policy-making latitude.

It would be fair to say, in other words, that the electorate has serious misgivings about both the Democrats' "big government" approach and the Republicans' "limited government" one. After signing up for either, the people quickly succumb to buyer's remorse and avail themselves of the opportunity to weaken or impede the "mandate" they conferred an election or two ago.

Americans didn't used to hedge their political bets this way. From 1900 to 1980 the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives were controlled by the same party for a total of 56 years, 70% of the time. Those 56 years included 14 consecutive years of Democratic control, from 1932 to 1946, when the New Deal was launched, and eight more from 1960 to 1968, which saw the beginning of the Great Society.

By the time the ballots from the 2012 election are counted, the same party will have controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency for only 8 of the preceding 32 years, or 25% of the time. This new era, in which divided government is the rule rather than the exception, was ushered in by the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, and GOP victories that gave the party its first Senate majority since 1954.

It's hard to believe that these two developments – the emergence of a credible conservative opposition to the governmental activism promoted by FDR and LBJ, and the beginning of a long era in which partisan majorities are rare and transient – are coincidental. Roosevelt and Johnson spoke to and for an American majority that liked the benefactions big government bestowed. Reagan spoke to and for a majority grown skeptical about the taxes, borrowing, and regulatory intrusions big government required.

That skepticism was sufficient to slow the growth of big government, but not to dismantle the New Deal/Great Society. For the past thirty-one years the American people have straddled an untenable position: voting in favor of most of what big government does, but against most of what big government requires. The debate in Washington over the debt ceiling is an echo of the debate, across America, over the proper scope and cost of government, a debate that seeks a resolution it has not yet found. The cool and deliberate sense of the national community will ultimately prevail, but it must first settle on one or the other of two alternatives that are fundamentally opposed.

Ohio Farmer

The Just Powers of Government

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

In the last letter, I considered why and how it is that in the American logic of freedom, the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed. In this letter, I am concerned with a current development in our politics that threatens dangerously to remove our government from our consent. If the letter seems painfully burdened with acronyms, please forgive the fact as a vice inseparable from the subject.

Several lawsuits have been filed against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or "Obamacare") since it was enacted in March 2010.  The ones that have worked their way into the federal court system so far contest the law's "individual mandate," which subjects people to monetary fines if they fail or refuse to enroll in a health insurance policy.  The lawsuits' question, which the court and the people must consider, is whether the legitimate powers of the federal government respect or traduce the inalienable rights of the people by requiring them to buy a financial product from a private vendor.

One lawsuit against PPACA raises a different and equally important question: Does the law violate the constitutional principle of separation of powers?  The Goldwater Institute challenges, specifically, the constitutionality of PPACA's "Independent Payment Advisory Board" (IPAB). The Board is the law's chief mechanism for bending the medical cost curve downward by reducing the growth rate of Medicare outlays to the rate at which the Gross Domestic Product increases, plus one percent.  IPAB's 15 members will be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.  Since it won’t adjust the premiums or deductibles paid by Americans enrolled in Medicare, IPAB's power derives from its mandate to set the rates at which Medicare reimburses doctors for the various services or procedures they perform.

IPAB's power is buttressed by PPACA's extraordinary protections for it, whose constitutionality is at issue.  Even though IPAB is an executive branch agency, its "legislative proposals" – the PPACA uses the term repeatedly – become law unless Congress passes a bill that cuts medical spending by an amount equal to the IPAB proposal. They become law, that is, if Congress does nothing.  If Congress tries to do something, its alternative can prevail over the IPAB proposal only if the former garners a three-fifths majority in the Senate.  The law makes no provision for citizens, such as doctors, to challenge IPAB's determinations administratively or judicially.  Furthermore, PPACA asserts the right to dictate what future Congresses may do, and when: IPAB can only be abolished, according to its provisions, by legislation introduced and enacted between February 1, 2017 and August 15, 2017.  Even if enacted in that small window, the abolition cannot take effect until 2020.

Peter Orszag, President Obama's director of the Office of Management and Budget at the time PPACA was enacted, said, "I believe [IPAB] is the largest yielding of sovereignty from the Congress since the creation of the Federal Reserve."  He was speaking approvingly.  Democratic congressman Pete Stark, who got a 90% rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action in 2010, made the same point about IPAB far less fondly, calling it "an unprecedented abrogation of Congressional authority to an unelected, unaccountable body of so-called experts."

In a nation founded upon the principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, the decision by Congress to yield so much of its sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable body is really a decision to yield the people's sovereignty for them.  Thus, if PPACA withstands all its challenges in federal courts, an outraged public could elect a ferociously anti-IPAB Congress in 2012 and 2014 – to no avail whatsoever.  The Board remains beyond the voters' reach until after the 2016 elections – and then only for a 6½-month period, after which the door slams shut again, bolted against meddling by mere citizens for the duration of the republic.  

Like most bad ideas, IPAB is the elaboration of a less bad idea.  Its predecessors include such bodies as the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which drew up lists of military bases for the Pentagon to close, lists that Congress could accept or reject in their entirety, but could not add to or subtract from.  If Congress did nothing, the BRAC proposal was enacted. 

"Stop us before we pander again," seems to be the legislative principle embedded in these commissions.   Or do you think that is an unfair assessment?  It seems to me that when Congress voluntarily surrenders some of its legislative power to a commission, it is admitting that rendering good government as good politics is too daunting and risky.  Wise and judicious policies, you seem to be saying, might prove to be too hard to explain to the voters; or they might be criticized by a political opponent in a 30-second television ad.  Better, then, to leave the tough calls to commissioners who derive their powers from the consent of the governed in arcane, impenetrable ways.  

Once entrenched, it is doubtful that government of the people by the commissions will ever be dislodged.  The threat comes not only from the prospect that the commissioners' power will tend to corrupt them, but from the citizenry's passive acquiescence in the attenuation of their own sovereignty.  At the heart of the American experiment is the belief that democratic government can also be good government.  If it turns out that only philosopher-kings, benevolent dictators, or unaccountable experts can provide good government, the experiment will have failed. 

IPAB, then, is not just outrageous, it is contemptible.  By out-sourcing its legislative power Congress is saying that it doesn't trust the people to make wise decisions, and doesn't trust itself to explain such decisions to them.  If IPAB stands unchallenged, the American polity will have suffered a grievous blow.

Ohio Farmer

Our Justice

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

The attackers would come out of the forest, sweeping across a settlement or isolated homestead, killing and burning as they went.  Depending on their strength, the attackers might move far into settled territory or simply withdraw after the destruction of one settler family.  But sooner or later they would disappear into the wilderness from which they had come. 

The settlers fortified their homes and formed militias to defend themselves.  But the attackers struck without warning and, if they withdrew quickly, could avoid the organized defense of the settlers.  It became necessary, then, to attack the attackers.  They seldom stood and fought in the European way.  They preferred ambush and skirmish, so the settlers fought this way too.  They also attacked their enemy’s settlements, destroying crops and inhabitants, old and young, male and female.  Sometimes the enemy could be found not too far away.  Other times it was necessary to track them deep into the wilderness.

This was a brutal business, not the almost gentlemanly endeavor that organized eighteenth-century warfare aspired to.  Its necessity did not disguise its brutality or even excuse all instances of it.     

This kind of fighting began shortly after the founding of the first settlements and continued episodically for 100 years or so after the founding of the nation.  That such fighting was part of the American experience and has become part of it again can tell us something about “who we are,” a phrase President Obama has used more than once when discussing the killing of bin Laden. 

First, those in frontier settlements open to attack had an immediate experience of perhaps the most basic account we offer of ourselves.  We join together for our common defense and common good, since no individual or single family is alone sufficient to achieve such ends.  The frontier militia consisting of all able-bodied men was a direct expression of this idea, embodying in a more effective form the right of every individual to self-defense.  More broadly, we hold, all legitimate government rests on the same idea.  The government has only the authority that we give it.

Much has changed in the more than 200 years since the founding of the United States, but this elemental idea about the relationship of citizens to their government has not changed.   Those who killed bin Laden carried weapons but were armed above all with the authority of the people of the United States.  That is what dignified their violence and distinguished it from the brutality authored by their target.

The killing of bin Laden was not only authorized; it was also just.  It may turn out that bin Laden was still involved in active plotting against the United States.  If so, his killing was an act of self-defense, no less necessary and just than the raids Americans carried out against their enemies in the forested wilderness long ago. 

But whether or not bin Laden was plotting against us, his death was still just.  It was an act of revenge; and revenge, giving someone what he deserves, is a form of justice.  We may hope that bin Laden’s death will discourage others from continuing his work, but that was not the point of killing bin Laden.  Revenge, even more than self-defense, is an assertion of self-worth.  Its principal audience is not those on whom vengeance falls, but those in whose name vengeance is carried out.  It is their statement above all to themselves that they are not the sort to be affronted or assaulted.  “The world is what it is,” the poet has written, “and those who are nothing or allow themselves to become nothing have no place in it.”  Those who take revenge testify that they are something rather than nothing.  The more dogged and unrelenting the pursuit in the wilderness, the more spectacular its culmination, the greater is the testimony of who they are. 

The good of revenge requires something more elemental still.  Taking revenge takes courage.  It took courage to authorize the attack.  It took courage to carry it out.  Courage is perhaps the most elemental virtue but without it, there can be no others.  It is what holds an individual as well as a nation together in the face of life’s dangers.  Done in our name, with our authority, the killing of bin Laden should encourage us for the dangers we yet face.

Ohio Farmer

The Course of Human Events

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

How endlessly interesting and full of surprises is the course of human events. For the past two weeks, in hundreds of Congressional districts throughout the 50 states, we citizens witnessed lawmakers of both parties, on recess, engaging their constituents in conversations about the nation’s business in town hall meetings and other forums. The President was hosting his own town hall meetings, from Virginia to Facebook headquarters in California, and conducting interviews with local television stations in cities across the country. The central issue was the budget of the United States Government for the fiscal year 2012, and the conversation was shaped primarily by two competing proposals for that budget, the one put forward by President Obama on February 14, the other put forward in early April by the House Budget Committee chaired by Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and approved by the House on April 15. In light of the country’s debt and deficit crises, barring surprises in the course of human events, this looked likely to be the big issue of the coming months, leading up to the 2012 elections.

The issue is urgent and complicated (to say the least!) and the conversations were lively. For the most part, they seemed like a healthy spectacle of James Madison’s extended republic at work: a wide variety of contending interests and opinions jostling with one another in a robust American way, from which one might reasonably hope that eventually the “cool and deliberate sense” of the community would make some progress toward the public good.  Certainly—you not being angels, and this being free, democratic politics—one could witness displays among the lawmakers of what Publius called “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity.” I needn’t name names here, and can put it down to an excess of zeal to please us, the people. And as for us citizens, in more than one instance, unfortunately, some of us became so animated that we had to be removed from the premises by the police.  In fairness to the parties involved in these cases, those who had to be removed seemed to be on one side of the issue. But similar behavior, certainly, could be attributed to those on the other side on other occasions. We are, after all, “the people,” and no more angelic than our elected representatives, and sometimes our democratic behavior does not reflect very well on our human nature.

One of the hopes of these letters is to connect our contemporary political conversation with the tradition of American political discourse that has enriched our politics for over two centuries. In this instance, it may be helpful to observe that, by our less than angelic behavior, we merely confirm Publius’s observation, that in “cases of great national discussion” we should not be surprised if a “torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose,” or that the opposing parties “mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives.”  

Maybe our political passions will be calmed somewhat by the wise and beautiful lessons of moderation offered by Alexander Hamilton (a man himself perhaps not always moderate) in Federalist 1: 

So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists.

James Madison adds his own moderating wisdom in Federalist 37:

It is a misfortune, inseparable from human affairs, that public measures are rarely investigated with that spirit of moderation which is essential to a just estimate of their real tendency to advance or obstruct the public good; and that this spirit is more apt to be diminished than promoted, by those occasions which require an unusual exercise of it.

Our civic moderation might be further strengthened by the reminder we received on Sunday night that, whatever the lively differences among ourselves in our pursuit of happiness, we are at war—and have been ever since that surprising turn in the course of human events on September 11, 2001.  Whatever our differences, we join past generations of Americans, going back to the Revolutionary generation, in mutually pledging to one another "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." The sacrifices of many patriots teach us constantly that this is no vagrant commitment, that there is some enduring thing in our country for the sake of which Americans make such a pledge, generation after generation, each to all and all to each. They teach us to summon the better angels of our nature to our national conversations as we pursue our happiness in freedom.

A young Abraham Lincoln instructed a group of high school students over 170 years ago that "[w]e find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us." Like Lincoln, our generation of Americans inherited these blessings of liberty. There is no greater earthly bequest we can have received. It is our greatest duty and our highest honor as Americans to pass on this inheritance unimpaired—indeed, strengthened and improved in every way possible, to our children. This seems to me to be what our great national conversation is about.  Let’s rise to the seriousness of the question. 

Ohio Farmer

A Republic If We Can Keep It

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

That America is emphatically an “experiment” in self government is a prominent theme of these letters. It is a noble experiment. We are honorably determined to stake the fate of our country on the capacity of Americans to govern themselves, knowing full well that this capacity is a rare and difficult thing for human beings to achieve and maintain. The capacity to govern ourselves is the capacity to set reasonable limits for ourselves. Our greatest act of self government in this sense was the act by which “we, the people” submitted our sovereign power to the Constitution, which is at once our creation and the Supreme Law over us.  We have seen in earlier letters various ways in which the Progressive project—which produced the New Deal, the Great Society, and their contemporary successors—aims to replace the Constitution with a “living constitution,” removing in principle all limits on what government might do or how it might do it. This has been the great challenge to self government for the past century. It remains the great challenge for us. It has not been, and it will not be, easy to meet it.

In his speech on April 13 at George Washington University, President Obama explained in his own way why this is the case. “You see,” he said, by way of explaining America’s deficit problem, “most Americans tend to dislike government spending in the abstract, but like the stuff that it buys.” Here, I think, the President is saying essentially what former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, meant by his most quoted maxim: “All politics is local.” The Progressive agenda counts on the fact that we Americans like the stuff government spending buys, just as Tip O’Neill counted on all politics being local. 

Whenever it was that O’Neill uttered that nugget, he was speaking as a politician, not a political scientist.  A Democrat who won his first election—to the Massachusetts legislature—in 1936, the year voters endorsed the New Deal by overwhelmingly reelecting President Franklin Roosevelt, O’Neill won his last election—to a 17th term in Congress—in 1984, the year Ronald Reagan won his landslide reelection by challenging the propriety and feasibility of continuing the New Deal’s commitment to activist government.  In saying that all politics was local, O’Neill was pushing back against Reaganism, insisting that even if Americans had become dubious about activist government in general, they were still good New Dealers when it came to the particular benefits their own towns and neighborhoods could receive from government programs.  Like Tip O’Neill, President Obama thinks—and not without reason—that Americans will be good New Dealers when push comes to shove. They will like the “stuff” they can get from government so much that, despite their self governing inclinations, they will not be able to resist making themselves more and more dependent on government. 

Reagan and O’Neill, the two antagonists of the 1980s, fought to a draw.  Government spending on social programs grew more slowly under Reagan than under any other modern president, but he was never able to make good on the promise, announced in his first inaugural address, “to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment.”  At the same time, the nation remained so wary of government’s ambitions that two years after O’Neill’s death a Democratic president, at the start of his own reelection campaign, found it necessary to declare, “The era of big government is over.” 

This political ambivalence, in which Americans have been constitutionalists in principle but Progressives in practice (recognizing the dangers of unlimited government in the abstract, but liking “the stuff that it buys”) has been durable, but there are signs it is becoming untenable.  At the “local” level, the New York Times reported last year that many bond market experts “fear that as states struggle with their growing debts, investors could decide not to buy the debt of the weakest state or local governments,” which “would force a crisis, since states cannot operate if they cannot borrow.”  The crisis seems most formidable in states like California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York—“blue” states, where big government remains very popular.  

At the national level, we read of numbers that tend to numb the minds of even the most public-spirited citizens: the Congressional Budget Office recently forecast that the path charted in President Obama’s 2012 budget would require the federal government to borrow $9.5 trillion over the next ten years.  Federal government debt held by the public equaled 36% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product in 2007, before the recession began, and 62% of GDP in 2010.  By 2021 (just ten years from now), according to the CBO’s scenario, it will equal 87% of GDP, $20.8 trillion, a level most economists believe would be debilitating, especially since the forces increasing federal deficits are likely to be even stronger in the third decade of this century than in the second.  To cite just one problem, CBO projects interest payments on the national debt will rise from 1.7% of GDP in 2012 to 3.9% in 2021, by which time they will exceed $900 billion per year. That’s just the interest, as the President reminded us. 

It will not be easy for Americans to be constitutionalists in theory and Progressives in practice if our elected government cannot pay its bills.  If the lenders it depends on grow deeply skeptical about its ability to raise taxes or control spending, they will refuse to buy government bonds.  (The manager of the world’s largest bond fund recently reduced the percentage of its holdings in U.S. government-issued debt to zero.)  Less drastically, lenders will demand a costly interest premium to offset the risk of default by state and local governments, or of inflation sponsored by a federal government to reduce its debt by devaluing the currency.  At some point, the question becomes, not whether people like it when the government gives things to us and does things for us—as the President knows, both logic and experience demonstrate conclusively that we do—the crucial question becomes whether people like Progressive government’s endeavors enough to pay for them.  

If we don’t, if it becomes democratically impossible either to raise the taxes necessary to fund the government’s operations, or to reduce the scope of its activities to a level that can be accommodated by the taxes the people are willing to pay, then the Progressive project collapses.  The people will no longer mediate the disparity between what they demand from government and what they surrender to it.  Instead, decisive power over governance will pass to the lenders who keep public-sector operations afloat.   

Such a result would be a financial debacle.  The hard choices the people and their elected representatives now refuse to make will, in retrospect, be far easier than the policy changes an unsentimental bond market insists on as the price for further credit.  But the political failure will be even more deplorable.  In the well-known anecdote already recalled in these letters and sure to be noted again, Benjamin Franklin, upon being asked after the final meeting at Independence Hall in 1787 what kind of government the constitutional convention had fashioned, is supposed to have said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”  It is to America’s credit that we have kept the republic, and in many ways strengthened and improved it, for 224 years.  But we won’t be able to keep it for many more years if we do not return to our self governing ways. 

Ohio Farmer

"The Kind of Country We Believe In"

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

On Wednesday last in his speech at George Washington University, President Obama observed that Americans are engaged in “one of the most important debates we can have.” It is specifically a debate about “the size and role of government,” but more generally, in the President’s words, it is about “the kind of country that we believe in.” He almost begins to sound like an Ohio Farmer!  But seriously, it seems to me that the President is right about this and that it behooves us to take him and his words seriously—and to expect him to take himself seriously.  This is not a time for sound bites and talking points, when words, as we all know is so often the case, are wielded as mere partisan weapons or are uttered to be forgotten.

The President tells us that he wants to “keep the dream of our founding alive” and “pass it on to our children.” He invites Americans to be “patriotic,” to have a “sense of responsibility—to each other and to our country.”  This all sounds pretty appealing—where is the debate? I think we find it in what the President means by this “sense of responsibility.”  

Americans, he says, have always “put faith in free markets and free enterprise”; “we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.” Amen. But, he adds immediately, America is also a country with federal programs “which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work . . . [protect] us against unexpected job loss . . . [and provide] care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, [and] those with disabilities.”  America, he takes great trouble to emphasize, “would not be a great country without these commitments.”

It is in these “commitments” that the President locates our “responsibility” as citizens. He would enlist our patriotism in upholding these commitments, without which he thinks America would not be great.  Here, to speak plainly, the President’s “vision for America” (as he calls it) departs radically and self-consciously from the Founders’ America and from all of American history until America was transformed by the New Deal and the Great Society beyond anything the Founders would recognize. In the President’s vision, it is the New Deal and the Great Society that made America great, made it the kind of country he believes in.

All Americans are aware that decent medical care, good jobs, comfortable homes, and college educations are widely desired, and that countries are generally regarded as successful when, like America, they manage to make such desired things widely available. But all Americans also know that the Founders never supposed that the federal government should “guarantee” these and countless other social and economic goods as “rights” or “entitlements.” It was the great triumph of the New Deal, extended by the Great Society, to establish these widely desired things as a new kind of rights—rights created by the state—as part of what Franklin Roosevelt called a “new constitutional order.”

None of these New Deal or Great Society “rights” was obtained by actually amending the Constitution. They were assertions of what Progressives think of as the “living constitution,” that is a constitution that is subject to continual change as leaders with “vision” see where the path of Progress leads. In this Progressive notion of a living constitution there is practically no limit to the “size and role of government.”  

So successful have the Progressives been that hardly anyone in either party batted a law-abiding eye at the constitutionally shocking financial bailouts and rewriting of the bankruptcy law in just the past few years. The very idea of the rule of law disappears in the shadow of the living constitution. This is why supporters of the President’s health care plan have reacted with stunned incredulity when asked where in the Constitution is the authority to enact such a plan.  This is also why it is a substantial—though very incomplete—political victory just to raise that question.  The great debate is between defenders of the Constitution and advocates of the living constitution, which renders the Constitution meaningless.  The question of the size and role of government will be decided by the more fundamental debate.

Since the President raises the subject, is it really these New Deal commitments that make America great?  Or would America enable itself to recover some of its greatness if it could free itself somewhat from the shackles of these commitments? These “commitments” teach an increasing number of Americans to wake every day looking to the federal government to take care of their basic needs and angrily resenting their country and their fellow citizens if they don’t get what they want in a hurry. President Obama invites us to celebrate this dependency as our greatness.  In his “vision,” the more power we give the federal government—the more Americans are made dependent on the federal government—the greater we are as a people and a country.  There is much willfulness in that vision. These Progressive “rights” and “entitlements” teach Americans, very successfully, to think of themselves as organized interests—according to their jobs, race, gender, age, infirmities, and so on—interest groups clamoring incessantly for government to use its power over other citizens to better secure the “rights” of the interests.  Is this a “sense of responsibility” that a great country could take pride in?

Ohio Farmer

America and the World

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

America, on the president’s orders, has intervened militarily in Libya; the president has given a speech explaining the intervention and the manner of it; the country and the world debate the matter as events unfold; the outcome remains uncertain.  In his speech, the president insisted that, because the Libyan people faced "the prospect of violence on a horrific scale," America had a responsibility to act. "To brush aside...our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are.” 

These letters are particularly concerned with “who we are” as a people and what this requires of our politics, domestic and foreign. So I leave aside for now the many other interesting and important questions swirling around the president’s words and deeds, including his deference to the United Nations and his neglect of the United States Congress. 

What does “who we are” tell us about how we should act toward the rest of the world? The president doesn’t say much about what it is that makes us who we are, though he seems now to be affirming, on behalf of our fellow human beings, a kind of American exceptionalism, about which he had been studiously ambiguous in the past. We might begin to think about who we are by considering the two most important ideas in American political life.  The first is found in the Declaration of Independence, which was cited in the last letter and will surely be cited often in future letters—the idea that “all men are created equal.” The second is derived from this idea and is found in the opening phrase of the Constitution: it is the idea of consent expressed in the familiar words, “We the People of the United States.”  These are words and ideas, not to conjure with, but to consider carefully as events demand our attention and action at home and abroad. As long as Americans are Americans, these ideas will certainly continue to be essential ingredients of who we are. So what do they tell us about us? 

The immediate practical purpose of the Declaration was to establish the right of the colonists to separate from the British Empire and its hereditary monarchy.  In this case, declaring all men equal meant that God did not give one man or his family a divine right to rule other men.  Human equality meant that government derived its powers justly only from “the consent of the governed.”  The claim that men were equal meant that not the accident of birth but the deliberate consent of men—“We the People”— was the only rightful basis for government. 

The Declaration had a larger purpose, a broader reach, than the dispute between Great Britain and the United States of America.  Its declaration of human equality denied not only a right to rule based on birth but a right to rule based on race or religion.  Declaring all men equal meant that a common humanity was more fundamental than the accidents of race or religion that separated human beings.  

The universality of this founding principle explains something of the claim the world has on American sympathies.  Having based our national life on the equality of all men, we recognize that in principle any human being is a potential citizen of the United States. We feel an affinity with people around the world, especially those struggling for freedom or stricken by natural or manmade disasters.  In our common humanity, we believe somehow that our hopes and fortunes are tied to theirs.  These feelings can give rise to a sense of obligation that seems to be what President Obama has in mind—our “responsibilities to our fellow human beings,” which he invokes when he says it would be a betrayal of who we are if we didn’t intervene in the way he chose to do in Libya. 

But in fact, of course, only Americans are American citizens.  Our revolution began with a universal claim about human equality, but it culminated necessarily in the establishment of a particular nation.  “We the People of the United States” are distinct from the other peoples of the world not by birth, race, or religion, but by the deliberate act of establishing ourselves as a different people.  By this act of consent, the people of the United States committed themselves to each other, as distinct from all the others who live outside the bond of citizenship.  In a world where freedom was scarce and tyranny commonplace (a world, in this respect, very like the one in which we continue to abide), we committed ourselves to establishing our own freedom and preserving the blessings of liberty in the United States, not to assisting the democratic aspirations of others or their recovery from disaster, however sympathetic we may be to the plight of our fellow men and however eager we may be to help them. 

No model or mathematical formula can help us strike the proper balance between what we owe to our fellow men and what we owe to ourselves.  Such balance is a matter for judgment and deliberation, as circumstances arise.  This judgment will take into account the diverging claims of equality and consent, the former what Americans share with other peoples, the latter how we distinguished ourselves from them.  These two American principles temper each other as we deliberate about how we as a people should act in a dangerous world of potential fellow citizens. 

Our deliberations will be well served by reflecting that the American founders thought the best thing Americans could do for the rest of the world was to succeed in our own experiment in freedom. As the founders thought of it, the American cause—the cause of liberty— is the cause of mankind.  If we could show by the success of our experiment that free government could be good government, this would be the greatest gift Americans could give to their fellow human beings—our own political well being would be a constant act of philanthropy.  America’s success would be cause for all men to rejoice. By the same token, failure of the American experiment in freedom would “deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”  

From this point of view, Americans should want to know how our intervention in Libya enhances the prospects of the American experiment. If it does, the world will be a better place. If it doesn’t, it betrays America’s primary responsibility to our fellow human beings.

Ohio Farmer