Response to "The Price of Liberty"
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
washingtonpost.com
Message 18847876
If you think government is useless, evil and unnecessary, ponder those pictures of looters in Iraq ransacking homes, hotels, even hospitals. Feel for that sobbing official of the National Museum of Antiquities, aghast at the destruction of irreplaceable historical artifacts by an angry mob.
The lesson the looters teach is basic, and it is usually ignored: The alternative to tyranny is not the abolition of government. Absent a government committed to the protection of rights, there are no rights. Without government, individuals have no way to vindicate their rights to property, to basic personal liberty, to life itself.
All of this gets almost univeral agreement. Who is supposedly claiming that government is of no use whatsoever? They are so few that adressing them with this argument could be considered knocking down a straw man.
On and about April 15, anti-government and anti-tax groups annually devote much energy to trying to convince Americans that we live under a rapacious, money-grabbing, rights-destroying regime. The anti-taxers always throw numbers about how many days and months you'll be "working for the government." It's their way of describing how much of your income is taken in taxes.
These groups want to make you mad. And especially if you've ever discovered that you owe government more than you thought, you can see how they might succeed.
What these groups never talk about, because it would wreck their story line, is the extent to which our personal and collective prosperity as a property-owning, enterprising people depends on strong and effective government.
Sure, anarchies have no government protection of your rights. But you could get rid of 90% of our federal government without having an anarchy. Without being that extreme if you got rid of corporate welfare and most form of subsidies and reigned in redistributive spending, and as much of the pure pork as possible, you could keep government spending under control and reduce taxes while reducing or eliminating the deficit. Disliking huge and evergrowing government isn't the same as liking anarchy.
Yes "freedom isn't free" but that doesn't mean that any amount of spending is justified in the name of freedom esp. since a lot of the spending does little to support freedom or even reduces it.
Tim |
