Right-wing libertarians, Tea Party activists, and the cynical corporate front organizations that love (and fund) them all like to talk about "individual freedoms." For them, human beings are born with an innate quality of liberty, and this liberty is degraded by the authority of government. The Constitution, therefore, recognizes only negative rights, not positive ones - what the government cannot do to us, rather than what it must do for us, or what we must do for each other. We are atomized individuals seeking only to maximize our own interests, with no responsibilities to each other. Our relations should therefore be governed by the impartial and always-just judgments of the market. A fair price, with all the implications that concept has for human social and political organization, is always and absolutely the price at which a buyer is willing to buy and a seller to sell. Any government intrusion that imposes obligations or regulates market forces is tyranny.
This model of the individual and of society is not, by the way, the social model of Adam Smith. Nor, contra Glenn Beck, of the American Founding Fathers, who were deeply influenced by the communitarian culture of Presbyterianism. Nor even of the right-wing hero and political philosopher of the market Friedrich Hayek, if you read him carefully, although he has been much misunderstood by the right.
But beyond its historical precedents, this individualistic, negative-rights-and-obligations model of human society is a failed model. It fails because while we do live our lives as individuals - and while individual rights are clearly fundamental to freedom - we do not exist solely as individuals. Human beings, as a species, have been profoundly shaped by evolution to be social animals, and we cannot escape each other. Our obligations to each other are not discretionary, as Smith well understood. Freedom - or the lack thereof - is a social phenomenon.
This is easy to prove. Imagine a man all alone on a desert island. Is he free or unfree? The question is meaningless. Freedom is something that happens between and among people.
If government were the only threat to human freedom, the right-wing libertarians would be justified in opposing any positive conception of rights. In the real world of complex social and economic relationships, there are many other threats to freedom. Players in the market - and especially in the labor market - rarely negotiate at the table of the price mechanism from equal positions of power. In the absence of any positive regulation, the "freedom" that the right-wing absolutists envision is the freedom of the rich and powerful to control, crush, and humiliate the less-rich and less-powerful.
Let's be clear: The free market is a necessary condition of freedom. You don't have political liberty without it, for reasons that Smith and Hayek explained very convincingly. But it is not by itself an adequate condition of freedom. Consider what our social and economic relations looked like when we indeed had a less-regulated economy and no positive obligations, no social safety net. We had 8-year-olds working 12-hour shifts in coal mines. And why not? The mine owners could pay them less than adults, and their families were grateful for the necessary income.
When child labor was fully ended by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the mine owners were outraged. "Communism!" they screamed. How dare the government tell them whom they could employ?
The point is not only that the families of child mine workers had nowhere near the coercive power to put a price on labor that the mine owners had. It is that these children and their families were, in very meaningful ways, less free to make choices about their lives - less free to develop themselves as autonomous individuals - then workers are today, now that the government has interfered with the mine owners' "personal liberty" by banning child labor and insisting on schooling for all children, now that there are options other than child labor or starvation, now that we have some minimal public retirement security. Perhaps libertarians Ron Paul and Dick Armey and Pat Toomey - the free-market absolutist running for the Senate in Pennsylvania - don't see children working in coal mines as a freedom issue. But if it concerns them at all, then the onus is on them to explain how a completely free market could stop it.
In fact, there is plenty of evidence that social democracy (the non-totalitarian, democratic form of socialism) has done more for human freedom than all the free market activism of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. Social democracy has given us unions and labor laws, which have, in turn, given us weekends and allowed workers some minimal say in the return to labor on production. It has given us workplace grievance procedures and workplace safety laws: The management practices of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory are now illegal, a grievous infringement on the rights of employers. It has, in the rest of the developed world, given people socialized medicine that, contrary to Republican propaganda, has led to populations that are healthier and longer-lived than ours, at far lower cost than American expenditures on health care. And social democratic ideas were behind the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It was social democracy that insisted that equality and human dignity trumped even the right of private business to discriminate, and that government was justified in making laws to that effect (a position that Ron Paul's son, Rand, rejects.)
I am not saying - or not only saying - that improved material conditions are the same thing as greater freedom. Freedom is more than material conditions. But improved material conditions do make greater freedoms possible, because they allow for expanded individual autonomy. What the rich people behind the Tea Party movement really don't want to address is the fact that freedom is often zero-sum. The freedom of the mine owners to make choices about their own lives is inversely and inextricably proportionate to the freedom of the miners to do the same thing.
The "freedom" that Pat Toomey represents is very definitely the freedom of the mine owners, of the rich and powerful. It's the freedom to roll back environmental legislation that protects the health of workers' children, the freedom to pay women less than men. Ultimately, it's the freedom of large corporations to write their own regulatory legislation, as Newt Gingrich invited them to do in 1995. It is plutocracy.
It is a measure of how little American society has preserved its industrial-era class consciousness that the working-class Tea Party activists don't see this, that they believe that greater freedom for their bosses means greater freedom for them. It doesn't, but FreedomWorks and the Koch Brothers aren't exactly rushing to share their real plans with those they have deceived. Gramsci was right.
For many of us, however, freedom does not mean complete freedom for some at the expense of any meaningful freedom for most. It means maximizing freedom, the possibility of controlling our own lives, for all. This may sometimes require restricting the freedom of the powerful to control others. Social democrats do not object to this. Freedom-hating bullies like Pat Toomey do.
http://www.freetheworld.com/2010/reports/world/EFW2010_BOOK.pdf
http://www.heritage.org/index/Explore.aspx
Not only are the countries with the most economic freedom more prosperous but are more EGALITARIAN meaning a smaller gap between rich and poor compared to countries with a heavier government burden. The free market creates equality not the state.
"I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property ... Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed. "
But the observation is valid. Jefferson favored a progressive tax system and even exempting the poorest people from paying taxes. Thus, in the US today, we have a progressive tax system and almost 50% of the population pay no net federal income tax.
You can support many sides of a discussion with selective quotes from Jefferson:
"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association--’the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."
The idea that progressives favor stealing income from hard workers to give money to those who refuse to work is one in a long line of straw man insults they lobby against the poor. That has never and will never be the argument. Instead what we are saying is what Jefferson was saying - that those who labor deserve to prosper and a society organized so as to disallow this is a "violation of natural right".
So question time: Why are conservatives so dishonest in their presentation of Jefferson's point of view? Why do we never hear it balanced with the TRUTH that Jefferson absolutely and definitively favored progressive taxation? And in fact, he believed it was a necessary basis for "natural rights". Is it because without cherrypicking, the revered Founding Fathers can't be used to justify their selfish ideology?
A society based on individual liberty has a greater need and recognition of our responsibilities to each other than any other form. The only chance that such a society has to succeed is to accept these responsibilities in our daily lives and our common interactions.
The debate is not about whether these obligations exist, but how they should be fulfilled and to what extent they should be enforced. The debate is not about whether we should surrender some of our liberty to government, but how much. The debate is not about whether government regulation is needed in the free market, but when it has gone too far.
The biggest difference between the right and left is that progressives see no need to distinguish between society and government - for them they are one and the same. The founders of this country understood that this was the wrong approach. They chartered a limited government based on "negative rights" because they believed that the responsibility for society's evolution had to be placed on the people. A free people with a great responsibility.
Gramsci was right, but his greatest accomplishment was to inspire Lenin to establish the Soviet Russia. It's safe to say that didn't work out very
To head off the usual counterargument - yes, we're better off than when our ancestors were feudal serfs, but I honestly don't think that's what the Founding Fathers were trying to establish.
I agree that's what the debate SHOULD be about. It is not what the Tea Partiers believe it should be about. I could find you any number of quotes from Tea Party types claiming that people should "seek only to maximize our own interests, with no responsibilities to each other".
"The biggest difference between the right and left is that progressives see no need to distinguish between society and government - for them they are one and the same."
I absolutely disagree with this. It is not what I believe and I do not think it is what "the left" believes -- if there is such a thing that can be said to agree with itself to any extent. If I were in an ungenerous mood, I would call this "a fabrication designed to mislead." But I'd rather say simply that WilliamBradford is mistaken.
I do think, however, that in a democracy government should represent and serve society's aspirations, the peoples' consensus desires about what sort of society we should have. That is different from believing that government and society are the same.
and the left wants the US to be more like France? no thank you. if you want France - move there- let the Constittion be the law here
http://www.dailytargum.com/opinions/tea-party-s-idea-of-government-wrong-1.2176443
1 Accusations of tax fraud and money laundering
2 U.S. politics and elections
2.1 Climate Change Legislation
2.1.1 Citizen action against the Chamber of Commerce's stance on climate change
2.1.1.1 Yes Men stage fake Chamber of Commerce press conference
2.1.1.2 Grassroots campaigns against the Chamber
2.2 Employee Free Choice Act
2.3 Political campaign spending
2.4 Political action committee
2.5 VoteForBusiness
2.6 Electioneering shell game
( continued )
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._Chamber_of_Commerce
The Ayn Rand objectivist philosophy of rational self interest was a failed attempt by an embittered anarchist and atheist to have us believe that a 19th century agrarian utopia was possible in the nuclear age.
Add to this the author's praise of positive rights and you have everyone obligated to everyone else, with the government and the banks in control of the obligations. Way to go NOT! Citing child labour and other forms of abuse of economic power and then turning around and flouting positive rights as the way to less servitude is absurd.
Show me a positive right that exists naturally, and I will show you a superhuman being. Otherwise we were all created equal in our rights and can not impose our will (positive right) on any others by force. Force does not make up for what the creator did not give you!!!