Letters from an 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

A Decent Respect

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

Following the killing of Osama bin Laden on the orders of the President of the United States, some prominent European politicians, clerics, and journalists condemned the act. Americans, many of whom continue publicly to applaud bin Laden’s death, were likened to “Muslims celebrating in the Gaza Strip” following the attacks on America on September 11, 2001. What should Americans think of such criticisms? How, more generally, should we regard the opinions of the peoples and governments of other nations?

To take the second question first, the natural American place to begin a response seems to be with the Declaration that announced our independence to the world in 1776, a declaration that was offered out of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” which “requires that [Americans] should declare the causes which impel them to the separation [from Great Britain].” Declaring the causes of our actions—giving reasons for them—was an act of respect for the opinions of mankind because it treated mankind as if their opinions could respond to reasons. This was a hopeful view of the human condition. It did honor to human nature and imposed expectations on human capacities.

The central idea proclaimed in the declaration—the main reason for our action—was the self evident truth that “all men are created equal,” that is, that all men everywhere and at all times possess by nature equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, this was an idea that seemed self-evidently untrue to the hereditary monarchs and nobility of Europe. So America showed its first respect for the opinions of mankind by disagreeing with most of them!—and in the same breath telling the peoples of the world how they might show greater respect for themselves, by recognizing and asserting the rights of their own humanity. 

Americans were keenly aware how difficult it would be to live up to the principle they were proclaiming—how heroic and continuous an effort would be required of themselves or any people that aspired to rise to equality. This very difficulty is partly what makes it such an “honorable determination  . . . to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”  As I have written in an earlier letter, “Any people that wished to be free, including the Americans, would have to demonstrate this capacity for themselves, and continue to demonstrate it each generation.”  What could be more honorable to human nature? What could show greater respect to mankind and their opinions?

The American experiment claims to be a glorious experiment because it aims, for the first time in human history, to make actual the potential for self government that we Americans insist human beings have by nature. This is what the founders meant when they soberly—and by no means arrogantly—reflected on the fact that it seems to have been reserved to “the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice.”

The greatest respect Americans can show for the opinions of mankind is to take responsibility for being the kind of self governing people we invite all people to be. Taking such responsibility may require, in the sometimes hard course of human events, the killing of the bin Ladens of this world. As I said in my last letter, our men who killed bin Laden 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.” How can the “authority of the people”—us—dignify such an act, raise it above the barbarism and savagery of bin Laden and all who support him and cheer him on? Only, I think, if “we the people” are the people we claimed to be, insisted on being, at our beginning—a people claiming the right to govern ourselves, as we proclaim and respect the same right for all other human beings; a people doing everything in our power to cultivate in ourselves the capacities necessary to vindicate this natural human right.  

Such a people will conduct themselves so that an attack upon them could never in truth be said to be a blessing to mankind; so that if they are compelled to some harsh measure like the killing of bin Laden, the world may truly be said to be better off because of it.  Such a people will arrange the political affairs of their land so that no one could with justice wish for the displacement of their rule by that of an enemy.  They will be neither self-aggrandizing nor self-sacrificing.  They will approach the world, in Washington’s words, as their "interest, guided by justice, shall counsel."

Such a people will understand that politics, though it must sometimes resort to harsh necessities like the killing of bin Ladens, is in the final analysis not reducible to such necessities.  Even Sun Tzu, that great teacher of the art of war, understood that "[t]hose who excel in war [must] first cultivate their own humanity and justice," that war is conducted ultimately for the sake of peace.  Closer to home, our own John Adams offered his American version of that human wisdom, when he reflected , “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy.” The successful practice of the arts of necessity—which are forced upon us by the needs of mere life—seems to be a necessary condition for the flourishing of the arts of freedom—which we pursue because they prepare us to deserve, by using well, "the blessings of liberty."

What about the more particular question, about American rejoicings at the killing of bin Laden? Of course, no self-respecting, self-governing people will condone dancing in the street to celebrate cruel necessities. Nor would it be a proud moment for such a people to make these cruel necessities applause lines in campaign rallies. But only a good people—a people able to take responsibility for choosing right over wrong—can be a self-governing people, and the world will be a sad place when good people can no longer rejoice at the triumph, however small and incomplete, of good over evil.

Ohio Farmer

Capacities of Mankind

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

In recent weeks, the course of human events—from Tunisia, to Libya, to Egypt, to Syria—reminds Americans once again that tyranny is common in the world, that it is hard to remove, and that it is even harder to replace it with freedom and good government. We Americans, of every political stripe, generally like to consider ourselves enemies of tyranny and friends of freedom in the world. Of course, we have lots of debates among ourselves (and with others) about what this means and what this requires of American foreign policy. These debates have been rekindled lately, and I take this occasion to recollect that America came into existence by overthrowing a tyranny and that we have had our own struggles replacing it with freedom and good government.

Our success in these struggles—to the extent that we have met with success—is due to moral and political habits and dispositions that arise from principles that must be learned. These principles and dispositions are the most essential conditions of freedom. Everything else is secondary. Without them, you might exchange an unpopular for a popular tyranny, an incompetent and destitute tyranny for a competent and wealthy one. But you will never have free government.

America began its experiment in freedom with what has become and will forever remain the most characteristic and defining American affirmation:  “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”  The truth of human equality and liberty was asserted against all tyrannies—whether of race, class, or religion, one, few, or many.

That men throughout history tyrannized one another in an infinite variety of ways was not proof to the American founders that human beings do not possess equal rights by nature—rather it was proof of how rare and difficult a thing it is to secure them.  It is proof of the philosophic rigor, the moral discipline, the political sagacity, and the beneficence of opportunity that are required for reflection and free choice to prevail over ignorance, prejudice, accident, and force.

Proclaiming that all men everywhere and at all times possess by nature equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the American founders undertook the historic effort to secure these rights, so far as they thought they could then be secured, to a small people at a particular place and time.  They were acutely conscious of the limits of their ability to secure these rights.  When they were able to establish a “more perfect union” they understood full well how far from perfection they remained.  It was all the new republic could do in the first century of its existence to keep the American experiment in freedom from failing miserably at home while other less fortunate experiments struggled to give birth to  freedom in other parts of the world.

In the course of its history, the American people have many times fallen beneath the high standards they set for themselves at the beginning.  They have strayed from those principles, and they have forgotten them, and become confused about them, and allowed misunderstood self-interest to obscure them.  Our own experience has confirmed for us that democracy requires more of its citizens than any other form of government and that it is no accident that history provides so few examples of successful and enduring democracies.  We count our blessings—the blessings of liberty—when we reflect with John Adams, "how few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children," and how few have chosen well.

The “genius” of the American people at the time of the American revolution and founding made it both possible and necessary to establish a country based on the republican principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.  As Jefferson said in explaining the genesis of the Declaration, the ideas expressed in it were “the common sense of the subject” in America.  He was merely expressing “the American mind.”  It was only because the American people had learned to embrace republican principles that it was possible to establish an American republic.  I mentioned in an earlier letter the American founders’ “honorable determination  . . . to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” This was a determination, James Madison affirmed, “which animates every votary of freedom.”  But the founders understood that any people that wished to be free, including the Americans, would have to demonstrate this capacity for themselves, and continue to demonstrate it each generation.  

As the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, the just powers of government are derived from "the consent of the governed."  Only a people prepared to consent to a free government are capable of establishing one; and once they have established it, as Ben Franklin never ceases to remind us, they will need to have what it takes to “keep it.”  At the least, this means a people must be prepared to recognize their own humanity and that of their fellow citizens; they will neither aspire to be masters nor submit to be slaves; they must be prepared to rule and be ruled in turn and to abide by the laws they claim the right to make for themselves.

We know from our own American case, even with all the natural and historical advantages we have had, that it is not easy to achieve or to keep and pass on these capacities for self government. Experience and common sense tell us that these capacities are going to be even harder to achieve without the great advantages we have had. So let us be patient and moderate in our expectations from those who may face great disadvantages.

Ohio Farmer