Letters from an 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

 

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

War and the American Character

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

Can a free, democratic people possess the martial virtues needed to defend their interests in the hard world?  Early observers of the American republic doubted it. Some believed that a commercial people like the Americans were not cut out for war. Some thought that the American Constitution and federalism further disabled the country from waging war successfully.

That great student of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, thought that "The most important of all the actions that can mark the life of a people is war." (We are inclined to think that the most important of a people's actions necessarily take place in the peace achieved by war, but let’s set that aside for another letter.) Tocqueville's famous study of America had led him in the 1830s to the conclusion that "in the midst of a great war," confusions in America's Federal and state constitutions would cause either liberty or the American Union to crumble. American republicanism, he thought, would be saved only by geography: far from the rest of the dangerous world, it was the "great good fortune of the United States…not to have hit upon a federal constitution that enables it to endure a great war, but rather to be so situated that it need not fear such a war."

The many failures of American arms during the War of 1812 seemed to have validated Tocqueville's view, but only a decade after he wrote, American success during the war against Mexico suggested that there may be more to be said on the question. Americans are, indeed, a people who prefer peace and the prosperity that comes with it, but if our history so far is any indication, we seem to be a people who are not necessarily spoiled by those conditions. When aroused to action, Americans have traditionally responded with alacrity and courage, as they did after Pearl Harbor and again after 9/11. And contrary to Tocqueville’s expectations, the Federal Constitution has enabled the United States to wage war successfully without destroying liberty at home.

We approach the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  America has been waging war for a decade. Our experience in this war confirms a long-standing conviction of the American people.  From the time of the American Revolution, Americans have acted on the fundamental belief that the virtues needed for war are not the exclusive property of a professional military establishment—a "standing army"—but can be found in the citizens of the republic at large. Today’s American military is clearly “professional” in the sense that service members are long-term volunteers, but those who serve understand themselves to be every bit the citizen soldiers their forebears were during World War II. This is a force of republican citizens motivated by a deep sense of duty and loyalty to their fellow citizens.

After 9/11, many Americans who could have avoided military service chose to enlist in the military and to fight the wars on which the United States has embarked over the past ten years. It is a tribute to the character of Americans—citizens of all backgrounds—that many chose to forego comfort, safety, and livelihood to engage America's enemies.

The cost has been high. Nearly 4500 Americans have died in Iraq and another nearly 1200 have given the last full measure of devotion in Afghanistan. In the most recent war news, details continue to emerge of the loss of 30 Americans, including 17 Navy SEALs, in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.  Many thousands more have been wounded. Yet even as casualties were rising during the darkest days in Iraq before the "surge" took effect, the services—including those whose members routinely face the greatest danger in the kind of war we are now fighting, the Army and Marines—were meeting their recruiting requirements while retaining large numbers of those eligible to leave the service. These numbers speak eloquently to the martial character of the American people.

The United States is fortunate to be defended by such men as the SEALs who gave their lives in Afghanistan. The quality of today's American military as a whole is extraordinary, and these SEALs and the other "special operators" like them are by consensus the very "best of the best." We mourn their deaths—and the deaths of all who serve the good cause of our country. In honor to this cause, let us mourn them as the heroes they are, and not treat them as some in the country once treated those who served in Vietnam: as "victims."

Our warriors, brought to manhood in the bosom of the American Republic, understand—as we their fellow citizens sometimes forget—that war will always be with us. Civilized peoples will need to be prepared for war so long as savagery and barbarism exist in the world. We can defeat the barbarians and savages when they threaten, but, human nature being what it is, they will always arise among us again in one form or another.

So long as there are people who will kill for gain and power, America will need soldiers who will kill to stop them. But this requires honesty about war and its costs. When we send our fellow citizens into war we must have a clear idea of what we are asking them to do, and must do all in our power to equip them to succeed. Above all, we must do our part to keep the country they serve worthy of their sacrifices.

Ohio Farmer