Editor's Notes: Good Citizens Fight for Liberty

By Kevin Rollins

On the cover of this issue, we have an image of the “Good Citizen.” Fat and recumbent, he lounges in the hands of tyranny, absorbed by television-watching, and is blissfully apathetic to his status as serf. While obviously ironic and undesirable, I fear that we will see more and more of our fellows emulating the behavior of the “Good Citizen.”

Meanwhile, our representatives in government are working daily to bring new controls over the citizenry, in the form of national ID cards and the reauthorization of the Patriot act. The judiciary, the supposed defenders of the law and liberty, are ignoring the boundaries of federal power set out in the Constitution, as evidenced in their decision to allow prosecutions of medical marijuana patients who grow their medicine for personal use, never crossing state lines. Of course, the executive branch is the most eager to oppress the populace with regulations, prosecutions, and war being its bread-and-butter.
And the average citizen seems to accept this, or is even in favor of the government having these powers. Where is the opposition? Where are the defenders of liberty? Where are the liberals?

It is my belief that the “Good Citizen” will be in ascendance as long as there is no coherent movement to work against this mindset of compliance and submission.

Is Liberalism Dead?

In a journalism law class I took last fall, a fellow student bellowed out one day, “Liberalism is not dead.” However, the failure of liberals to hold back the encroachment of the police state suggests otherwise. In February, Martin Peretz in The New Republic said of the movement, “It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying.”

Jonah Goldberg, writing in National Review, extended the diagnosis, postulating that there is an absence of intellectual strength on the left, “Like many spiritual movements, liberalism emphasizes deeds and ideals over ideas.” Goldberg blames this lack of rigor on the left’s religious infatuation with big government, “Liberalism puts government in God’s throne to the extent that it believes that no challenge is beyond the reach of Leviathan.”

So the problem is not that there are no liberals, but that so many liberals have forgotten what being “liberal” is all about. Caught in crusades against smoking, wailing about a lack of government sponsored health care, or decrying the Republicans’ funding cuts to National Public Radio, liberals have dropped the flag of liberty. How can a liberal complain that Big Brother wants her to carry a national ID card while at the same time demanding that Big Brother give out a bunch of goodies? Liberalism is dying because liberals are conflicted in their values.

Liberty for Liberals

In the April issue of The Washington Monthly, William Galston wrote on the subject of “Taking Liberty.” He calls upon liberals to reclaim the language of liberty and to understand the costs and benefits of various public policy proposals in terms of their impact upon freedom. While saying explicitly that liberals should not try to redefine liberty, that “we cannot make it mean whatever we like,” he proceeds to do just that.

“It follows that libertarian freedom, the “right to choose,” is but a part of freedom in the fuller sense. As a motorist, I am rightly free to choose my own route and destination. But government correctly infers that I also wish to be protected from smashing into other cars, and so restricts which side of the road others and I may drive on. My desire to avoid an accident is no less real than my desire to drive where I please. Similarly, the desire to avoid want and fear is no less real than the desire to speak and worship without interference.”

With this, Galston provides a conceptual framework for weighing one freedom against another. Although Galston’s call for universal health care seem to be a bit of old-think, his suggestion for greater intellectual scrutiny of liberal arguments is definitely in order.

Liberals would do well to study public choice theory -- the economics of collective decision-making. From James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent, we are provided a way to analyze what government should do and what private individuals should do. Where the negative externalities(costs) to a community are higher from private action than from collective action, government may be called in. But, collective decision-making and government action have their own externalities which must be accounted for in any cost-benefit analysis. Using Galston’s rubric, we might count freedoms gained by government action against freedoms lost by that same action.

Direct Action Vs. Waiting for Government

Moreover, liberals should reconsider the expectation that solutions will come from the government. Many people use the term “direct action” to mean directly protesting government policies through marches, sit-ins, rallies, and occasional outright rebellion. I would use direct action to mean something different -- directly acting to implement your values, without asking permission, without consulting an authority, but also without imposing upon anyone else or “volunteering” their time, money, or lives. Such direct action is entirely non-violent and non-coercive. These include any positive activities that benefit yourself and your community. This is a tremendously hopeful idea -- it gives the individual the license to do good now.

On the other side there is political action: everything we do to change the law, to secure funds for worthy charitable efforts, or to prevent nasty things that other political or private actors are planning. There are certainly some things that are changeable only through political action, but in a substantially free society, the benefit of engaging in politics diminishes. The cost of putting politics first is to impose upon ourselves the burden of watching and waiting while others choose wrongly. We also give up resources (time and money) that could have been put to use improving society through individual action.

More important than any political action is what each individual chooses to do. By committing yourself to live as a free person, and requiring yourself to directly act on your conscience and to improve your community, to innovate, to create wealth, you become the very moral fiber needed to sustain a free society.

A “Good Citizen” doesn’t wait for orders. A “Good Citizen” fights for liberty.

Kevin D. Rollins is the editor of the Free Liberal and president of the Center for Liberty and Community. He was formerly the publisher of a short-lived publication known as the Beltway Free-Marketeer. He has served in a number of positions in the Libertarian Party including as chairman of the Libertarian Party of Buncombe County, and as ballot access coordinator for the Libertarian Party of North Carolina.