There is a simple way to get corporate money out of politics: Get the government out of our lives and economic affairs. If government has no favors to sell, no one will spend money trying to win them.

• Why South Carolina Doesn’t Want ‘Stimulus’
• The Financial Panic and the Only Proper Answer to It
• Save Us from Government Spending
• We Can’t Spend Our Way to Prosperity
• Why Government Spending Does Not Stimulate Economic Growth
• The Fierce Urgency of Pork
• Cut Taxes for the Right Reasons

When men claim independence, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes….”

So said certain Americans of 1776, reflecting such high regard for the dignity of individuals as to believe them both worthy and capable of freedom.

Contrast that appraisal of man as a self-respecting and responsible being with the very dim view taken by modern “liberals” who demand government aid and control in nearly every aspect of our daily lives.

If it’s true that millions of adult American citizens are incapable of caring for and supporting and educating their own children, incapable of providing their own housing and their own medical care, incapable of paying the full costs of their bus and train and plane fares or the costs of highways and parking spaces for their own cars, incapable of meeting the expenses for light and heat and water and recreational facilities, incapable of operating their own farms or businesses without price support or tariff protection or “urban renewal” or other subsidy, incapable of looking after their own interests in job negotiations without a special grant of monopoly power from government, incapable of providing for themselves in periods of temporary unemployment or in their years of retirement — if it is true that so many American citizens are improvident and irresponsible, incapable of earning their own living and unable to survive except as wards of society — is there any reason why they should be permitted a vote or have any part whatsoever in governing society?

Isn’t that the logical next step in the regression from citizenship to serfdom? Or, as one of the “liberal” professors has revealed, “Ours is not a government by the people, but government by government.”

So, there are two views of man, and each of us must choose which kind he’ll be:

• Man, as responsible and worthy of freedom, or
• Man, the weakling, whose life depends on the state’s permission or sufferance.

• “I do not choose to be a common man.”
• McBama vs. America
• The Moral Basis of Capitalism: Part 2
• Live Free or Die
• Bono the Capitalist Exploiter
• The Law
• Who Buried Capitalism?

All cash transactions in North Korea have been frozen after the Government’s shock decision to revalue the won currency in an effort to crack down on the country’s burgeoning free-market economy.

In the capital, Pyongyang, today only the few shops and restaurants permitted to trade in foreign currencies, patronised by the privileged elite and the city’s small foreign population, were open for business.

All other enterprises and services based on cash, including markets, long-distance bus services, barbers, saunas and bath houses, have been suspended until the revaluation is completed next week.

There was confusion after the announcement of the measure, which requires North Koreans to swap existing won notes with new ones at an exchange rate of one to 100, knocking two zeroes off their value. There is a cap of 100,000 won (£419) per family, which means that anyone with significant holdings of cash will have their savings wiped out.

“Loud sounds of weeping in every house have not ceased since the news was released,” one South Korean news website quoted an inhabitant of the city of Sinuiju, near the Chinese border, as saying. “Weeping and fighting between couples has not stopped anywhere. The atmosphere of the city is terrible now.”

The website, the Daily NK, citing similarly unnamed sources, said that one elderly couple had killed themselves in North Hamgyong, a province adjacent to the Chinese border across which much illegal trading is carried out. It also reported anxiety among local officials that the currency revaluation would provoke civil unrest.

But a western diplomat in Pyongyang said that, apart from the closed-up shops, the announcement had had no visible effect on the city. North Korea is one of the world’s most tightly controlled and brutal totalitarian states and public dissent is almost unknown.

The announcement was made on Monday via a closed cable broadcasting system which is piped into all North Korean homes, and reserved for public announcements and state propaganda.

It has not been reported in the state media, but it was confirmed the following day in briefings to foreign diplomats in Pyongyang who were summoned to the country’s foreign ministry at 20 minutes’ notice.

“It came as a great surprise to everyone,” one western diplomat in Pyongyang told The Times. “Everything literally closed – no notice given. When we made enquiries we discovered it was because the currency was no longer valid. It’s really quite dramatic.”

• Fed to pump another $1 trillion into U.S. economy
• The Free Market’s Not Dead
• Can the US economy afford a Keynesian stimulus?
• Dissatisfaction Guaranteed: The federal government should stop guaranteeing loans
• The Five Stages of Counterfeiting
• The Future of Money: DIY Currencies
• FDIC Criticizes Bank With No Bad Loans for Being Too Cautious

Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.

• Capitalism and the Moral High Ground
• “Republicans don’t know how to defend morally an individual’s right”
• “The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition…”
• War, Peace, and the State
• Bruce Schneier’s Security Matters: The Myth of the ‘Transparent Society’
• Socialism vs. Capitalism: Which is the Moral System?
• Green Comes Clean

Rep Roskam on why 5 years in jail and $250,000 in fines for not getting health insurance is in the bill passed by the house.

• Congressmen Told Martial Law Would Be Imposed if Bailout Bill Didn’t Pass
• Why America is NOT a democracy
• Milton Friedman: Morality and Capitalism
• Steve Forbes: Federal Reserve as cause of Financial Crisis
• Stopping Dr. Statism
• How Not to Help the Poor
• Kiddie-Capitalism Theme Park in Spain

Some years or decades ago I researched and reported on the Sullivan Act, one of America’s first gun control laws.

New York state senator Timothy Sullivan, a corrupt Tammany Hall politician, represented New York’s Red Hook district. Commercial travelers passing through the district would be relieved of their valuables by armed robbers. In order to protect themselves and their property, travelers armed themselves. This raised the risk of, and reduced the profit from, robbery. Sullivan’s outlaw constituents demanded that Sullivan introduce a law that would prohibit concealed carry of pistols, blackjacks, and daggers, thus reducing the risk to robbers from armed victims.

The criminals, of course, were already breaking the law and had no intention of being deterred by the Sullivan Act from their business activity of armed robbery. Thus, the effect of the Sullivan Act was precisely what the criminals intended. It made their life of crime easier.

As the first successful gun control advocates were criminals, I have often wondered what agenda lies behind the well-organized and propagandistic gun control organizations and their donors and sponsors in the US today. The propaganda issued by these organizations consists of transparent lies.

Consider the propagandistic term, “gun violence,” popularized by gun control advocates. This is a form of reification by which inanimate objects are imbued with the ability to act and to commit violence. Guns, of course, cannot be violent in themselves. Violence comes from people who use guns and a variety of other weapons, including fists, to commit violence.

Nevertheless, we hear incessantly the Orwellian Newspeak term, “gun violence.”

Very few children are killed by firearm accidents compared to other causes of child deaths. Yet, gun control advocates have created the false impression that there is a national epidemic in accidental firearm deaths of children. In fact, the National MCH Center for Child Death Review, an organization that monitors causes of child deaths, reports that seven times more children die from drowning and five times more from suffocation than from firearm accidents. Yet we don’t hear of “drowning violence,” “swimming pool violence,” “bathtub violence,” or “suffocation violence.”

The National MCH Center for Child Death Review reports that 174 children eighteen years old and under died from firearm accidents in 2000. The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control reports that 125 children eighteen years old and under died from firearm accidents in 2006. In 2006 there were 77,845,285 youths in that age bracket.

In 2006 violence-related firearm deaths of eighteen year olds and under totaled 2,191. A large percentage of these deaths appear to be teenagers fighting over drug turf.

According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, drugs are “one of the main factors leading to the total number of all homicides. . . . murders related to narcotics still rank as the fourth most documented murder circumstance out of 24 possible categories.”

According to the National Drug Control Policy, trafficking in illicit drugs is associated with the commission of violent crimes for the following reasons: “competition for drug markets and customers, disputes and rip-offs among individuals involved in the illegal drug market, [and] the tendency toward violence of individuals who participate in drug trafficking.” Another dimension of drug-related crime is “committing an offense to obtain money (or goods to sell to get money) to support drug use.”

Obviously, decriminalizing drugs would be the greatest single factor in reducing incarceration rates, the crime rate, and the homicide rate. Yet, gun control advocates do not support this obvious solution to “gun violence.”

Those who want to outlaw guns have not explained why it would be any more effective than outlawing drugs, alcohol, robbery, rape, and murder. All the crimes for which guns are used are already illegal, and they keep on occurring, just as they did before guns existed.

• End the War on Drugs
• The Lessons of Prohibition
• New safety rules for children’s clothes have stores in a fit
• Liberty in Britain is facing death by a thousand cuts
• War, Peace, and the State
• Socialism vs. Capitalism: Which is the Moral System?
• The Law

“There is a great, basic contradiction in the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was one of the first great teachers to proclaim the basic principle of individualism — the inviolate sanctity of man’s soul, and the salvation of one’s soul as one’s first concern and highest goal; this means — one’s ego and the integrity of one’s ego. But when it came to the next question, a code of ethics to observe for the salvation of one’s soul — (this means: what must one do in actual practice in order to save one’s soul?) — Jesus (or perhaps His interpreters) gave men a code of altruism, that is, a code which told them that in order to save one’s soul, one must love or help or live for others. This means, the subordination of one’s soul (or ego) to the wishes, desires or needs of others, which means the subordination of one’s soul to the souls of others.

This is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. This is why men have never succeeded in applying Christianity in practice, while they have preached it in theory for two thousand years. The reason of their failure was not men’s natural depravity or hypocrisy, which is the superficial (and vicious) explanation usually given. The reason is that a contradiction cannot be made to work. That is why the history of Christianity has been a continuous civil war — both literally (between sects and nations), and spiritually (within each man’s soul).”

from a letter to Sylvia Austin dated July 9, 1946, in Letters of Ayn Rand, p. 287

• The Law
• The Moral Basis of Capitalism: Part 3
• The Betrayal of Ayn Rand – An Open Letter to Objectivists
• A Moral Basis for Liberty
• The Moral Basis of Capitalism: Part 1
• Who Buried Capitalism?
• The Moral Basis of Capitalism: Part 2

Long after her death, it’s sad to see so many Objectivists losing sight of Ayn Rand’s personal mission. Talking like an Objectivist, referencing the characters in her books, and using the vocabulary of her movement—are all poor substitutes for acting in accordance with the ideas of an Objectivist and working to usher forth the moral revolution she so passionately advocated.

While there are notable and significant exceptions too many Objectivists that I come across on a regular basis seem to be using their intransigent atheism to justify abandoning the actual hard work of BEING real radicals for capitalism. I’m writing this criticism, not to be sensational or to attack, but to rattle a few rusty mental cages among a crowd I consider to be my friends—friends however, who seem to have succumbed to what Ms. Rand regularly described as the ‘sluggish inertia of unfocused minds.’

Before I go any further let me also offer two very distinct caveats at the outset. Number one, I am not an expert on Objectivism—though I do consider myself a diligent student. Number two; I do not mean to suggest that most Objectivists are not thinking. I mean instead to suggest that a large number of so-called Objectivists seem to be entertained and satisfied by their own thinking—in some queer sort of intellectual masturbation—rather than translating their ideas into marketable, articulated tools for ‘building a new culture on a new moral foundation.’

Somehow, almost three decades after her death, a large body of self-proclaimed followers seems to be attempting, and in large measure successfully, a tragic historical revision; namely, equating the title Objectivist (and the less used phrase ‘radical for capitalism’) with the much less diligent pursuits of being an isolated, libertarian leaning atheist. This intellectual abdication is no simple error in judgment. It is the hallmark of second-handers and amounts to nothing less than a betrayal of Ayn Rand and her philosophy. Even worse, this betrayal is being perpetrated by a significant portion of those very people who claim to be her advocates and defenders.

Alright. If I’ve gotten the attention of my desired audience, so far my remarks have been the equivalent of taking a stick and poking it violently into a previously docile beehive. Before I’m overcome with a multitude of now irritated bees intent on me as their new target—let me back up and create some context.

I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time perhaps five years ago. So, in the world of Ayn Rand fans and students, I’m certainly not an old timer. I did, however, find Atlas Shrugged to be, quite simply, earth shaking. I literally fell in love with the characters. It wasn’t because I was enjoying the fiction. I often found the reading long and arduous. Instead, I found in Atlas Shrugged, a systematic articulation of the main conflict facing the modern world, in a way that I had only been struggling to come to terms with previously.

Nevertheless, when I finished reading the book I found myself in a sort of depression. I had grown so accustomed to coming home from the office and sitting down to spend a few hours with Dagny, Reardon, Francisco and John Galt—eagerly plowing through pages to learn how they were dealing with the moochers and looters, that when the story ended, it was like saying goodbye to new friends. I actually experienced a real feeling of emptiness and withdrawal for the first few weeks after finishing the book.

It didn’t take long however, for me to realize that it was not her characters that I had actually fallen in love with, it was Ms. Rand herself–the mind behind the characters. This realization sent me on my own personal odyssey. Soon I was reading the Fountainhead and not long after I had ordered every book I could find online, authored by Ayn Rand. I read everything. I read Objectivist Epistemology, the Night of January 16th, the Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and on and on. I was like a starving man who had been invited to a banquet feast.

Oddly, while I was certain I had never read anything like Ayn Rand’s works, the material seemed somehow familiar. My own ideas were becoming more clear, and new related ideas were not hard to grasp at all. Ironically, I was so new to reading Ms. Rand that virtually no one around me knew enough to correct me when I would refer to her as “Ann Rand” rather than Ayn.

It didn’t take long before essentially every one of my seminars, every daily radio program, and every class that I was teaching had some reference to Ayn Rand or her books. For example, my recently completed four-hundred and forty-seven page student manual for my “13 Principles of Prosperity” course, contained forty-seven direct references and over one-hundred indirect references to Ms. Rand and her works. Some days I would talk about Compra-chicos on the radio, during others I’d simply be quoting John Galt to one of my students. The bottom line is—I became a very sincere and diligent student of Ms. Rand and Objectivism.

Being a Mormon, and therefore a member of the larger “Christian” community, one of the most obvious contradictions in my new intellectual landscape was that Ms. Rand was an unapologetic, unwavering atheist. As time passed two related problems emerged. My religious friends and associates began regularly expressing concern about my unflinching advocacy of Ms. Rand’s ideas and at the same time so-called Objectivists would summarily dismiss me, my arguments, my ideas, and the movement I was building, because, in their words, I was a “God-believer.”

Nevertheless, I continued studying Ms. Rand and have also worked diligently to cultivate relationships and opportunities with people from all walks of life, including Objectivists. For example, a few years ago I was extremely excited to travel with an associate to southern California to meet Yaron Brook and a few of his colleagues at the Ayn Rand Institute. They represent, generally speaking, some of the exceptions that I mentioned earlier on.

Over time I’ve learned that while there exists an unfortunate camp of so-called Christians who just can’t stomach the idea that Ayn Rand, an unapologetic atheist might have known something worth studying—even more oddly and surprisingly, there exists a camp of so-called Objectivists who can’t seem to think past the possibility that there might be some of us “God-believers” whose beliefs do not necessarily clash with reason.

• Ayn Rand: A Legacy of Reason and Freedom
• Is Rand Relevant?
• “Jesus was one of the first great teachers to proclaim the basic principle of individualism”
• Hostile-To-Reason Academics Fear Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
• Capitalism Shrugged: Should Ayn Rand Be Required Reading?
• On The Left-Wing Reaction to John Galt, Ayn Rand, and Tea Parties
• The Irrelevancy of Conservatism

In India, China and Russia, there were once 100,000 wild tigers. Today, only a few thousand survive.

They’ve disappeared because poachers kill them to sell crushed tiger bone, which is made into a paste that is supposed to kill pain.

The usual solution is to ban the sale of these products. Actor Harrison Ford says in a public-service announcement, “When the buying stops, the killing can, too. Case closed!”

But the case isn’t closed. The ban is 33 years old, yet the tigers still disappear.

“If we continue the current approach, … the tiger is doomed,” Terry Anderson of PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center (www.perc.org), told me for my ABC special “You Can’t Even Talk About It”.

Anderson points out that governments have repeatedly failed to save animals by banning their sale. They’ve failed with the Colobus monkey in West Africa, the alligator in China and now with the tiger in Asia.

How do we save them? Here’s an idea. Let’s sell them! And eat them!

A hundred years ago, American bison were almost extinct. Why? Because no one owned them and had the incentive to protect them. People just killed them.

Then ranchers began to fence in the bison and farm them. Today, America has half a million bison.

Does America have a shortage of chickens? No. Because we eat them. I realize this is counterintuitive. Expand animal populations by letting people consume them? The conventional thinking seems so much more sensible — and sensitive.

But it’s simpleminded. In Africa, rhinos were disappearing because poachers killed them for their horns, considered an aphrodisiac.

African governments banned the products, but this did little good. A black market, complete with official corruption, arose. The government’s game wardens took bribes or slept on the job.

“It was a complete failure,” says Dr. Brian Child, who spent 20 years in Africa working to save endangered species. “Wildlife was disappearing everywhere.”

What finally worked, he says, was letting landowners own rhinos so they could make money off them from tourism. Suddenly, each tribe had skin in the game, and an incentive to protect its own rhinos.

It’s human nature. No government protects resources as effectively as you protect your own property. In Africa, says Anderson, those indifferent security guards suddenly became fierce protectors of their tribal rhinos.

• Nationalization Is Theft
• The Absurdity of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
• Debunking Noam Chomsky’s “Private Tyrannies”
• Does “Depression Economics” Change the Rules?
• Bono the Capitalist Exploiter
• Keynesianism is Not Good for You
• Wage and Price Controls in the Ancient World

It must be an uncontrollable compulsion in conservatives that in almost any discussion of the role of government, they cannot help taking a swipe at novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, denying that she was much of a novelist or even a philosopher, and devoting at least a few derogatory words to her and her novels, if not launching into a nearly frenzied tirade characterized by ad hominem charges against her and sneers at her work. Three of her most notorious American detractors were Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Granville Hicks, the latter a Marxist-cum-“humanist” editor, novelist and book critic. Since their scurrilous reviews were published decades ago, Rand-bashing has become a kind of fraternity initiation ritual for Right and Left alike.

Speculation on the root causes of the compulsion can range from envy for the sales of her books, which far outstrip the sales of anything ever written by any conservative, to moral opposition to her philosophy of selfishness and individualism, which they abhor, to a fear that she is and has been right about everything she ever wrote and spoke about, a fear and hatred hidden behind a mask of occasional dispassionate criticism.

Of her novels, Atlas Shrugged has drawn the largest dose of their venom, and that dosage has grown larger ever since the outset of the financial debacle last fall. Newspapers and other periodicals have noted, with a degree of objectivity and respect never granted to the novel in the past by the Left or Right, the parallels between the events in the novel and events in reality, which have helped to spur sales of the novel. No novel ever written by a member of the Right or Left has proven to be so prophetic in its essentials and even in some of its concretes.

Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, however, cautioned in an interview that Atlas Shrugged should not be seen exclusively as a prophetic playbook of how to cause economic disasters:

“Many of these commentators seem to view Atlas Shrugged as a novel that’s primarily about politics and economics. The main issue…and which we feel is extremely important to address…is that the origins of the crisis in Atlas Shrugged and the origins of today’s crisis are much deeper than that. They result from the prevailing morality of the culture, of which political systems are an extension. In Atlas Shrugged the political system is crumbling because of the morality of altruism, and that is also the root source of our current crisis. So Rand is relevant, and she’s relevant on a level far more fundamental than politics and economics.”

Historically, on a moral and political level, the Left has objected to her philosophy because it claimed the individual owes his existence to society or the state and so should not be free to act against it, while the Right claimed that the individual owes his existence to God and society, so his mind should not be free to question either. Over the last few decades, Left and Right have been converging to the same points of agreement: that the individual owes his existence to the state or society (God’s role being optional) and should not be free at all.

Rand herself marked the malaise of conservatism in 1962 in her essay, “Conservatism: An Obituary.” Identifying why conservatism was finished as a distinct political ideology and political force, she wrote:

“If the ‘conservatives’ do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing; they have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone. Yet capitalism is what the ‘conservatives’ dare not advocate or defend. They are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: altruism.”

The compulsion can be explained. They must attack Rand because her philosophy contradicts and refutes their core premises and assumptions. Atlas Shrugged demonstrates and dramatizes the moral and practical consequences of those premises and assumptions. It is not merely a matter of details. As Rand once put it, it is a matter of philosophical nuclear warfare. Conservatives cannot hide their recognition that Rand’s is not merely a rival philosophy; it is their chief, mortal enemy. In the meantime, the “atheistic” Left is their principal ally, today aggressively applying the collectivist and altruist principles which it shares with the Right.

• Is Rand Relevant?
• Ayn Rand: A Legacy of Reason and Freedom
• What capitalists need to understand
• Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years
• Altruism: The Moral Root of the Financial Crisis
• Socialism vs. Capitalism: Which is the Moral System?
• The Political Chances of Genuine Liberalism

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the “military-industrial complex,” cautioning that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” He worried that “there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a “climate-industrial complex” is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers — the Copenhagen Climate Council — hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol’s replacement in December.

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is “rent-seeking.”

The world’s largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN’s “Climate in Peril” segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas’s earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore’s green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.

Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.

American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.

• Bailout Free-For-All: Companies Line Up For Cash
• Nationalization won’t save General Motors
• Tax Cuts and the “Trickle Down” Economics Straw Man
• Green Comes Clean
• Don’t endanger free markets, Czech president warns
• Bionomics: Economy As Ecosystem
• Folly of Incentives

Where do individual rights come from? You’d think that if anyone knows the answer, it would be America’s top judges.

But you would be wrong.

On this basic question conservative and liberal judges alike are locked into a crucial error about America’s bedrock constitutional principle: individual rights.

The error consists in regarding rights as gifts from society that can be revoked at will, through the political process.

In truth, rights are not social gifts but political principles based on facts of reality. These facts don’t bend to the so-called will of society. That’s why the most fundamental question a Supreme Court justice must answer is what in fact do the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and happiness include? Only then can he determine if a certain law or government action is securing or violating those rights.

But judges don’t ask this question anymore, because they don’t think it’s objectively answerable.

Instead, and broadly speaking, judicial conservatives only ask what privileges American society granted the individual at the time of constitutional ratification. To conservatives, it’s meaningless to ask whether the right to liberty in fact includes, say, the right to use contraception (a question 18th-century Americans may have answered incorrectly). Their only concern is whether society at that time meant to permit this action. So when modern legislators make criminal offenses out of abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and other acts said to be frowned upon centuries ago, conservative judges feel duty-bound to stand aside and do nothing, in obedience to the “social will.”

Judicial liberals reject this conservative view of social values frozen in time, like a sepia-toned snapshot of bygone days. Instead, liberals see constitutional values evolving like a motion picture, constantly updating to reflect current social mores. To liberals, it’s meaningless to ask whether the right to liberty in fact includes freedom of trade and contract (a question that a majority of Americans may be answering incorrectly today). Their only concern is whether the “will” of today’s society favors permitting such actions. So when Congress declares federal dominion over every nut, bolt, and button of American industry, liberal judges feel duty-bound to stand aside and do nothing–not because earlier Americans intended to allow such controls, but because modern Americans want them.

But conservatives and liberals are both wrong about rights.

It is not true that rights are grants from society. The very concept of a right identifies the actions you can take without anyone’s permission. Rights are not social privileges but objective facts, identifying the freedoms we need to live our lives–whether a majority in society agree or not. This is why the Founding Fathers dedicated their new government to the protection of each individual’s already-existing rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

• “A man’s happiness cannot be prescribed to him by another man or by any number of other men”
• Capitalism and the Moral High Ground
• The Separation of Marriage and State
• The Moral Basis of Capitalism: Part 1
• McBama vs. America
• Health Care Is Not a Right
• The Moral Basis of Capitalism: Part 2

President Obama’s articulated criteria for his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court is: “We need somebody who’s got the heart to recognize — the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

What is the role of a U.S. Supreme Court justice? A reasonable start for an answer is the recognition that our Constitution represents the rules of the game. A Supreme Court justice has one job and one job only namely; he is a referee. There is nothing complicated about this. A referee’s job, whether he is a football referee or a Supreme Court justice, is to know the rules of the game and make sure that they are evenly applied without bias. Do we want referees to allow empathy to influence their decisions? Let’s look at it using this year’s Super Bowl as an example.

The Pittsburgh Steelers have won six Super Bowl titles, seven AFC championships and hosted 10 conference games. No other AFC or NFC team can match this record. By contrast, the Arizona Cardinals’ last championship victory was in 1947 when they were based in Chicago. In anyone’s book, this is a gross disparity. Should the referees have the empathy to understand what it’s like to be a perennial loser and what would you think of a referee whose decisions were guided by his empathy? Suppose a referee, in the name of compensatory justice, stringently applied pass interference or roughing the passer violations against the Steelers and less stringently against the Cardinals. Or, would you support a referee who refused to make offensive pass interference calls because he thought it was a silly rule? You’d probably remind him that the league makes the rules, not referees.

I’m betting that most people would agree that football justice requires that referees apply the rules blindly and independent of the records or any other characteristic of the two teams. Moreover, I believe that most people would agree that referees should evenly apply the rules of the games even if they personally disagreed with some of the rules.

• The Law
• Supreme Disappointments: Conservatives and Liberals are Both Wrong About Rights
• The Moral Basis of Capitalism: Part 2
• The Moral Basis of Capitalism: Part 1
• The Dictatorial, Anti-Democratic and Socialist Character of Interventionism
• It’s Priceless
• The Separation of Marriage and State

California, like the other 49 states and most countries in the world, holds a monopoly over marriage. Who can get married and un-married is at its sole discretion, through the granting and revocation of the marriage license – that fiat currency, if you will, whose only value derives from the powers and privileges that accompany it at the behest of the State, but which nonetheless is required to consummate human relationships.

The state’s involvement with marriage is rarely questioned. Advocates and enemies of same sex marriage alike all seek the endorsement of the state, never stopping to ask why the states approval is needed at all. The reason behind this submission appears simple enough – the philosophy ascribed by our society today which has led to the displacement of the private sector with the substitution of the state in nearly all facets concerning the rights of life, liberty, and property has taken root in the marriage issue.

Thanks to the state, marriage is no longer a covenant between two people or between two people and God. No, marriage is a state classification, which connotes state-provided benefits or detriments. Marriage is married to the state imposed tax structure and the state created probate system, and in many instances marriage defines the powers of the state over the married individuals.

This unholy union between the state and marriage has transformed marriage from an inalienable or natural right in which government’s only place was as protector of that right, to a civil right in which the state became the creator of the right.

Some, including California’s attorney general Jerry Brown, have even reclassified marriage into a newly created type of right – the offspring of a marriage between a civil right and a natural right. A naturvil or civatural right perhaps?

Jerry Brown, representing California’s (and his own political) interests in the Prop 8 battle argued in his legal brief and at oral argument that since the California Supreme Court (that is, the State) has determined that “the right of same sex couples to marry” is “part of fundamental human liberty,” and an “‘inalienable’ right,’” California voters cannot amend the California Constitution to intentionally withdraw that right “from a class of persons by an initiative amendment.”

Mr. Brown correctly pointed out that inalienable rights are “beyond the power of the Legislature or the Executive to abrogate” and “‘antedate’ the constitution as inherent in human nature… ,” but the attorney general’s understanding of natural rights stops there, because he then paradoxically asserted that “the scope of liberty interests evolves over time as determined by the Supreme Court.” In other words, inalienable rights exist, but at the whim of the state.

With this tortured logic the California AG, like any good representative of the state, moved to the next logical step and suggested that the real question which the Court should address is whether Proposition 8 “sufficiently furthers the public health, safety, or welfare” of the state of California. Thus, Mr. Brown opined that the interest at issue is not that of an individual natural right, but the interest of the state.

One wonders why Mr. Brown bothered to discuss inalienable rights at all.

The state attorney general’s argument is indicative of the tainted philosophy that has enveloped modern society, infected our state and federal legislatures, and permeated our judicial system. First, the State declares what are and are not rights. Second, even if the State recognizes that something is a right, the State can abrogate that right so long as the State has a sufficient interest. Gone is the day when government’s role was to protect the individual’s natural rights.

By transitioning away from a protector of rights to a provider of rights, the state has laid the groundwork for the problems that are so evident in the same sex marriage issue. If the government were to take its proper place as a protector of rights then a private union between a same sex couple which the couple calls “marriage” would be inconsequential to same sex marriage opponents, even though it may be morally repugnant to some and nonsensical to others. Likewise, refusal to recognize a private same sex union as “marriage” would be inconsequential to gays and lesbians, even though such refusal may personally offend the practitioners of same sex unions. In a free society any individual could “marry” whomever he wants by whatever procedure he desires, and the government’s only role would be to make sure that in doing so he does not violate the natural rights of others.

Such a scenario, of course, assumes that the state would be acting in its proper role as protector of rights in all regards, which would mean that private contractual relationships would replace the state created systems of benefits. Marriage, in that situation, would be relevant only where the contracting parties made it so; and, the state’s only role with regards to such contracts would be to ensure that the contract is enforced or to protect the parties against the other’s fraud.

A free society based on private contractual or covenantal relationships, however, is not what either side of Proposition 8 advocates. Proposition 8’s supporters have used the state to solidify what they consider to be the appropriate private relationship. Proposition 8’s opponents, on the other hand, want all of the state-provided benefits that come with being “married” and with that end in mind have used the state to force everyone to accept their relationships as equal.

Until we divorce marriage from the state, the right to marry will never be protected and the problems associated with Proposition 8 will be repeated throughout the world. Both sides of the Proposition, therefore, should agree to truly protect their natural rights by removing the state from the equation. In the meantime the world will wait to see how California protects its interests in the Proposition 8 lawsuits.

• The Law
• Supreme Disappointments: Conservatives and Liberals are Both Wrong About Rights
• Why America Rejected the “Third Generation” Rights
• McBama vs. America
• Walter Williams: Democracy or Liberty?
• War, Peace, and the State
• Liberty in Britain is facing death by a thousand cuts

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 9, 2009.

My remarks are titled tonight after the words of General Stark, New Hampshire’s great hero of the Revolutionary War: “Live free or die!” When I first moved to New Hampshire, where this appears on our license plates, I assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other—a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the charge; a touch of the old Henry V-at-Agincourt routine. But I soon discovered that the general had made his famous statement decades after the war, in a letter regretting that he would be unable to attend a dinner. And in a curious way I found that even more impressive. In extreme circumstances, many people can rouse themselves to rediscover the primal impulses: The brave men on Flight 93 did. They took off on what they thought was a routine business trip, and, when they realized it wasn’t, they went into General Stark mode and cried “Let’s roll!” But it’s harder to maintain the “Live free or die!” spirit when you’re facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, remorseless, incremental, unceasing ratchet effect. “Live free or die!” sounds like a battle cry: We’ll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it’s something far less dramatic: It’s a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.

My book America Alone is often assumed to be about radical Islam, fire-breathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old “Death to the Great Satan” dance. It’s not. It’s about us. It’s about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic. When I ran into trouble with the so-called “human rights” commissions up in Canada, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Even as the cheap bus ‘n’ truck road-tour version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they have in common overrides their superficially more obvious incompatibilities: Both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential.

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it’s effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. Hillary Rodham Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. It’s supposedly an African proverb—there is no record of anyone in Africa ever using this proverb, but let that pass. P.J. O’Rourke summed up that book superbly: It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village, and you’re the child. Oh, and by the way, even if it did take a village to raise a child, I wouldn’t want it to be an African village. If you fly over West Africa at night, the lights form one giant coastal megalopolis: Not even Africans regard the African village as a useful societal model. But nor is the European village. Europe’s addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.

And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it’s another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ’s Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that’s underway. The 44th president’s multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can’t make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it’s about 40%. In four years’ time, that number will be trending very Swede-like.

But forget the money, the deficit, the debt, the big numbers with the 12 zeroes on the end of them. So-called fiscal conservatives often miss the point. The problem isn’t the cost. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They’re wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. That’s the stage where Europe is.

America is just beginning this process. I looked at the rankings in Freedom in the 50 States published by George Mason University last month. New Hampshire came in Number One, the Freest State in the Nation, which all but certainly makes it the freest jurisdiction in the Western world. Which kind of depressed me. Because the Granite State feels less free to me than it did when I moved there, and you always hope there’s somewhere else out there just in case things go belly up and you have to hit the road. And way down at the bottom in the last five places were Maryland, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and the least free state in the Union by some distance, New York.

New York! How does the song go? “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere!” If you can make it there, you’re some kind of genius. “This is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression,” announced Governor Paterson a few weeks ago. So what’s he doing? He’s bringing in the biggest tax hike in New York history. If you can make it there, he can take it there—via state tax, sales tax, municipal tax, a doubled beer tax, a tax on clothing, a tax on cab rides, an “iTunes tax,” a tax on haircuts, 137 new tax hikes in all. Call 1-800-I-HEART-NEW-YORK today and order your new package of state tax forms, for just $199.99, plus the 12% tax on tax forms and the 4% tax form application fee partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5% tax filing tax. If you can make it there, you’ll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.

New York, California… These are the great iconic American states, the ones we foreigners have heard of. To a penniless immigrant called Arnold Schwarzenegger, California was a land of plenty. Now Arnold is an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land: That’s not an improvement. One of his predecessors as governor of California, Ronald Reagan, famously said, “We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” In California, it’s now the other way around: California is increasingly a government that has a state. And it is still in the early stages of the process. California has thirty-something million people. The Province of Quebec has seven million people. Yet California and Quebec have roughly the same number of government workers. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” said Adam Smith, and America still has a long way to go. But it’s better to jump off the train as you’re leaving the station and it’s still picking up speed than when it’s roaring down the track and you realize you’ve got a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express.

“Indolence,” in Machiavelli’s word: There are stages to the enervation of free peoples. America, which held out against the trend, is now at Stage One: The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear. Every night of the week, you can switch on the TV and see one of these ersatz “town meetings” in which freeborn citizens of the republic (I use the term loosely) petition the Sovereign to make all the bad stuff go away. “I have an urgent need,” a lady in Fort Myers beseeched the President. “We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.” He took her name and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he didn’t insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant associate secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the big-time tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be.

As all of you know, Hillsdale College takes no federal or state monies. That used to make it an anomaly in American education. It’s in danger of becoming an anomaly in America, period. Maybe it’s time for Hillsdale College to launch the Hillsdale Insurance Agency, the Hillsdale Motor Company and the First National Bank of Hillsdale. The executive supremo at Bank of America is now saying, oh, if only he’d known what he knows now, he wouldn’t have taken the government money. Apparently it comes with strings attached. Who knew? Sure, Hillsdale College did, but nobody else.

If you’re a business, when government gives you 2% of your income, it has a veto on 100% of what you do. If you’re an individual, the impact is even starker. Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. That’s the argument behind, for example, mandatory motorcycle helmets, or the creepy teams of government nutritionists currently going door to door in Britain and conducting a “health audit” of the contents of your refrigerator. They’re not yet confiscating your Twinkies; they just want to take a census of how many you have. So you do all this for the “free” health care—and in the end you may not get the “free” health care anyway. Under Britain’s National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, says that it’s appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of “lifestyle choices.” Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his “lifestyle choices” get a pass while theirs don’t. But that’s the point: Tyranny is always whimsical.

And if they can’t get you on grounds of your personal health, they’ll do it on grounds of planetary health. Not so long ago in Britain it was proposed that each citizen should have a government-approved travel allowance. If you take one flight a year, you’ll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you’ll be subject to additional levies—in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bear documentaries and that carbon-offset palace he lives in in Tennessee.

Isn’t this the very definition of totalitarianism-lite? The Soviets restricted the movement of people through the bureaucratic apparatus of “exit visas.” The British are proposing to do it through the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes—indeed, the bluntest form of regressive taxation. As with the Communists, the nomenklatura—the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Madonna—will still be able to jet about hither and yon. What’s a 20% surcharge to them? Especially as those for whom vast amounts of air travel are deemed essential—government officials, heads of NGOs, environmental activists—will no doubt be exempted from having to pay the extra amount. But the ghastly masses will have to stay home.

“Freedom of movement” used to be regarded as a bedrock freedom. The movement is still free, but there’s now a government processing fee of $389.95. And the interesting thing about this proposal was that it came not from the Labour Party but the Conservative Party.

That’s Stage Two of societal enervation—when the state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior. Free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very quickly to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life. When President Bush talked about promoting democracy in the Middle East, there was a phrase he liked to use: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Really? It’s unclear whether that’s really the case in Gaza and the Pakistani tribal lands. But it’s absolutely certain that it’s not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, New Orleans and Buffalo. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. It’s ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world’s wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.

And don’t be too sure you’ll get to choose your record collection in the end. That’s Stage Three: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it’s a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts. When my anglophone friends in the Province of Quebec used to complain about the lack of English signs in Quebec hospitals, my response was that, if you allow the government to be the sole provider of health care, why be surprised that they’re allowed to decide the language they’ll give it in? But, as I’ve learned during my year in the hellhole of Canadian “human rights” law, that’s true in a broader sense. In the interests of “cultural protection,” the Canadian state keeps foreign newspaper owners, foreign TV operators, and foreign bookstore owners out of Canada. Why shouldn’t it, in return, assume the right to police the ideas disseminated through those newspapers, bookstores and TV networks it graciously agrees to permit?

When Maclean’s magazine and I were hauled up in 2007 for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia,” it quickly became very clear that, for members of a profession that brags about its “courage” incessantly (far more than, say, firemen do), an awful lot of journalists are quite content to be the eunuchs in the politically correct harem. A distressing number of Western journalists see no conflict between attending lunches for World Press Freedom Day every month and agreeing to be micro-regulated by the state. The big problem for those of us arguing for classical liberalism is that in modern Canada there’s hardly anything left that isn’t on the state dripfeed to one degree or another: Too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it. Up north, “intellectual freedom” means the relevant film-funding agency—Cinedole Canada or whatever it’s called—gives you a check to enable you to continue making so-called “bold, brave, transgressive” films that discombobulate state power not a whit.

And then comes Stage Four, in which dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as “hatred.” In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control. Despite the smiley-face banalities, the tyranny becomes more naked: In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard’s Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator is invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but is banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported.

America, Britain, and even Canada are not peripheral nations: They’re the three anglophone members of the G7. They’re three of a handful of countries that were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century. But individual liberty flickers dimmer in each of them. The massive expansion of government under the laughable euphemism of “stimulus” (Stage One) comes with a quid pro quo down the line (Stage Two): Once you accept you’re a child in the government nursery, why shouldn’t Nanny tell you what to do? And then—Stage Three—what to think? And—Stage Four—what you’re forbidden to think . . . .

Which brings us to the final stage: As I said at the beginning, Big Government isn’t about the money. It’s more profound than that. A couple of years back Paul Krugman wrote a column in The New York Times asserting that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about “family values,” the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more “family friendly.” On the Continent, claims the professor, “government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff-to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family.”

As befits a distinguished economist, Professor Krugman failed to notice that for a continent of “family friendly” policies, Europe is remarkably short of families. While America’s fertility rate is more or less at replacement level—2.1—seventeen European nations are at what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility—1.3 or less—a rate from which no society in human history has ever recovered. Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Greeks have upside-down family trees: four grandparents have two children and one grandchild. How can an economist analyze “family friendly” policies without noticing that the upshot of these policies is that nobody has any families?

As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don’t have to pay for their own health care, they’re post-Christian so they don’t go to church, they don’t marry and they don’t have kids to take to school and basketball and the 4-H stand at the county fair. So what do they do with all the time?

Forget for the moment Europe’s lack of world-beating companies: They regard capitalism as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it. But what about the things Europeans supposedly value? With so much free time, where is the great European art? Where are Europe’s men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus A380, capable of carrying 500, 800, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the darn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it.

“Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor,” wrote Charles Murray in In Our Hands. “When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.”

The key word here is “give.” When the state “gives” you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it’s not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence—literally so for those Germans who’ve mastered the knack of staying in education till they’re 34 and taking early retirement at 42. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912. He understood that the long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

Genteel decline can be very agreeable—initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure’s off it’s nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference in February, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, “Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?” To pose the question is to answer it. Alas, it only works for a generation or two. And it’s hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latter-day Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

As Gerald Ford liked to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And that’s true. But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which in the end will put those countries out of business. Just to get the Social Security debate in perspective, projected public pension liabilities are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8% of GDP in the U.S. In Greece, the figure is 25%—i.e., total societal collapse. So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I want my benefits. The crisis isn’t the lack of money, but the lack of citizens—in the meaningful sense of that word.

Every Democrat running for election tells you they want to do this or that “for the children.” If America really wanted to do something “for the children,” it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a leviathan of bloated bureaucracy and unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. That’s the real “war on children” (to use another Democrat catchphrase)—and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they’ll win it.

Conservatives often talk about “small government,” which, in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms: they’re for big government. But small government gives you big freedoms—and big government leaves you with very little freedom. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back. Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it’s subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay “humanist” (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.” In the famous Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, Mr. van den Boogard is past denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and has arrived at a kind of acceptance.

“I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.” Sorry, doesn’t work—not for long. Back in New Hampshire, General Stark knew that. Mr. van den Boogard’s words are an epitaph for Europe. Whereas New Hampshire’s motto—”Live free or die!”—is still the greatest rallying cry for this state or any other. About a year ago, there was a picture in the papers of Iranian students demonstrating in Tehran and waving placards. And what they’d written on those placards was: “Live free or die!” They understand the power of those words; so should we.

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College

• Stopping Dr. Statism
• Hawaii’s Hard Healthcare Lesson
• The Law
• Single-Payer Health Care: Immoral and Hazardous to Patients’ Health
• Ayn Rand: A Legacy of Reason and Freedom
• Atlas Shrugged
• McBama vs. America