Hope is not a strategy

Those of you who know me well understand that I voted for neither Obama nor McCain. I gave my vote to Bob Barr as a protest vote. My current strategy is to support the growth of a third party in this country that actually celebrates individual liberty, free markets, rugged self-reliance and limited government. So, my views on Obama aren't positive from a policy perspective yet they aren't driven by partisan two-party politics either. I'm going to speculate as to what a President Obama means for our liberty and how his plans may impact that liberty. Btw, I'm intentionally leaving the issue of race aside for this post. While I think it's very notable, it isn't relevant to my analysis of his stated policies and their potential impact on our liberty.

First, the good news. While, strangely, the facts are hard to find, turnout was very high, hearkening back to the elections of the early 60's. This election has brought new people to the ballot, and with that hopefully comes a responsibility and thoughtfulness that will accrue to the benefit of our country. Democracy without a reasonably high participation rate by the citizenry is not really any kind of democracy at all. The growth in turnout is a continuing trend - 2004 saw increasing turnout too. We've also reached record voter registration rates. Turnout was not as high in some groups as it was hoped it would be - youth turnout only increased slightly and the modest, twenty percent increase in black voter turnout only brings their participation in the voting population up to par with their percentage of the electorate. We did make substantial progress though, which I find heartening.

Voting, however, in and of itself is not the only measure of an effective democracy. The German people voted Hitler in, after all. My measure is based on what people are voting for and on that count, we are are sadly at a deficit in my opinion. When you scrape away all the lofty rhetoric and get down to policies, it's clear that Obama stands for a significant expansion of the role, power and reach of government into the citizenry's lives. He sees government as a director of outcomes in society, hewing to a "social justice" agenda, although he wisely didn't call it out as such in the campaign. For those of you who are curious, click here to read up on one of the principal theorists of social justice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls . From a first principle perspective, he varies from the thinking of John Locke (developed the theory of matural rights, which in large part informed the American concept of freedom) mainly in the area of property rights and economic egalitarianism, injecting a new concept of the equality of circumstances into which one is exposed into the concept of liberty. Put simply, he doesn't see property rights as absolute, and he envisions the proper role of government to essentially level the playing field with respect to opportunity. A glimpse of this thinking came out in the infamous "spread the wealth around"comment by Obama. He makes this view much more plain in his writings and this fundamental concept drives much progressive thinking today.

So what's my beef with "social justice"? Very simply, I believe that property rights are fundamental to being free - and that this is enshrined in our constitution. Whatever the government lays claim to, it does so at gunpoint. Basic libertarian fare, but sadly our elections don't seem to ever contain this kind of dialogue so I'm hoping some of you find this illustrative. The libertarian position, simply put, is that the more property the government takes(taxes and regulation on your use of property) the less free you are - period. One could argue that we already do this, but my argument is about to what end and degree are we willing to give up our freedom for such beneficial outcomes? Who decides what the limits of the desired outcomes are and what equal opportunity is? We've had a small taste of this with affirmative action, but "social justice" takes things to a new level. The previous "deal" Americans have agreed to is that government was responsible for a "safety net" for those who couldn't care for themselves or were unfortunate, but left most economic outcomes to sort themselves out. Progressive taxation was seen as a fair way to apportion the responsibility for this safety net to those most able to support it - not primarily as a punitive redistribution scheme with the implicit assumption that those who have wealth were somehow more privileged. Welfare, social security, medicaid, medicare, these were all part of a societal agreement to not let folks fall into destitution, so we agreed to contribute taxes to support these programs. As a very important aside, note how wildly these programs have spiraled out of control with respect to cost. These initially modest programs now take big chunks of the GDP of our country. The "social justice" agenda asserts that equal opportunity is far more than equal treatment under the law. It opens up all of society for an examination of what causes equal outcomes, as though this was ever possible to truly understand in the first place and that it was desirable in any event. Let's look at a simple example. In education it's axiomatic that early childhood reading, being read to that is, is highly correlated with intelligence. A child who is read to daily, by the age of five has a huge advantage over a child who isn't in terms of future educational and economic performance. What's worse is that it's very hard for a child to catch up. Here is a perfect scenario where a progressive wants the government to intervene. Hence, early learning programs are needed to create equal opportunity for the innocent child. Sounds fair, right? Except in practice it's very hard to remedy. This part of childhood development is the province of parents and intervening in the family is a very tricky - oh yeah, and expensive - proposition (maybe that's why Marx called for the destruction of the family?). More to my point, advocates of "social justice" have many such examples of these kind of conditions that they would like to remedy. The question is where are the boundaries? Answer, there are none and this is where social justice conflates itself with Marxism and socialism. Essentially, the governments right to create desirous social outcomes overrides your individual rights, so unlimited intrusion into your life becomes warranted. In practice, wealth and the power to distribute it fairly is the responsibility of government, essentially giving goverment the ownnership of all wealth. Forget the notion of limiting government to it's enumerated powers, or the notion of individual responsibility. Let the smart people in government determine how to create "good citizens" and the right outcomes. That's how communist re-education camps were justified and how the eugenics movement - which was a brainchild of the original "progressives", btw, - led to the Nazi's Aryan aspirations.

It's not that I don't agree with the progressive movement's concerns about problems in society - and that's all Obama's positions are, btw. He proposes no "post ideological" or "pragmatic" new set of policies that differ substantially from the progressive agenda. I just think that the unintended consequences of this kind of social engineering are very dangerous. It's also clear that our constitution doesn't imbue the federal government with this kind of power - to the contrary, it explicitly forbids it. I do believe that Obama and his followers are truly well intentioned - and that's the scariest kind of fanatic, btw. I also think that this kind of government will (and already does) undermine the notion of individual responsibility in our society and I believe that the individualism enshrined in the constitution has been a core driver of the U.S.'s greatness. So I have to sadly give Obama a failing assessment with respect to the prospects for our liberty under his administration. I wish him well and hope for the best, but as my favorite book on sales is entitled, Hope is not a strategy.