An entire article about a famous quote. An article and a quote, I fear, we need:
Giving Up Liberty for Safety
by Tibor R. Machan
In my circle of friends and pals this quote from Benjamin Franklin has been making the rounds during the last several days. Franklin did say that “They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” (Look it up, and a lot more, at ushistory.org
It is a pregnant remark, to say the least, and comes easy to mind as one hears and reads commentators these days, such as Attorney General Ashcroft and many others, calling for greater and greater powers for government to invade our private lives so as to avoid terrorist attacks throughout the country. The TV host Chris Matthews boldly agreed with this, as apparently do many Americans, if the polls are to be believed.
What is rarely noted, however, is that when one gives up liberty — i.e., authorizes the government to abandon its task of protecting, first and foremost, our unalienable and sometimes constitutionally acknowledged individual rights — one isn’t doing this for oneself alone.
If the majority of the people believe that the FBI and other government agencies no longer need to follow due process, this isn’t something that will only impact them, members of the majority. It will impact everyone, including those of us who would not think of abandoning the principles on which the country was founded and join others where, in the name of safety and security — and whatever else demagogues tend to promise when they want more power — entire peoples are held in servitude, watched, regimented, and treated as invalids or children instead of the sovereign adults who they are.
And here is the kicker — anyone who wants to give up his right to liberty need not even do so but has the option simply to volunteer to be fully cooperative with the authorities. You can report on all your feelings, if you wish, and all your activities and all of your possessions and even your dangerous thoughts, no one has the right to stop you.
If someone believes that insisting that one’s rights be secured by the government does not suffice to fight terrorism, there is nothing to stop the person from confining all activities to the home or even the basement, from refusing to fly or go to work or to play. Sure, this may mean having to live a very different life from how most of us want to live, a much more deprived life than they might live if they didn’t worry about safety so much. But that, not other people’s liberty, should be the price they pay for their so called safety.
In short, give away your own liberty, not that of others who haven’t made that choice. Don’t vote others into the servitude you believe is needed to escape terrorism but go ahead and hide, withdraw, and remain confined. There is nothing that prevents anyone from doing this.
That it comes at a cost is true enough but then that should be the cost born by those who choose to live like that from now on. But if they vote more power to the government to bother everyone, even those who are willing to face down the terrorists rather than enter a state of marshal law or something close to it, that means they want others to be dragged into their own way of responding to terrorism.
One of my daughters this morning got on a plane to fly to Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. Yes, she made it fine this time. I am flying tomorrow and two weeks from now and most of those I respect are carrying on with most of their tasks, passionately clinging to what freedom they have to do them, while admitting to being a bit hesitant, even afraid. But then human beings throughout the ages have lived with these kinds of fears, indeed, most of the time in the grip of them.
Yet they have also testified, at least a lot of them did, to prizing liberty far more than simply trading it in for the temporary safety that is, after all, just an illusion, in fact, when obtained at the price of liberty. For that kind of safety introduces the constancy of being supervised, watched, recorded, listened to and even harassed by the authorities who aren’t likely to give up their power once the danger has abated somewhat. So what was to be a trade turns out to be a give away, really, without any gain in safety but a loss of liberty for us all.
Terrorism, even at its worst, is people being evil, rotten, intolerably so, but there is really not that much novelty to this. It is a condition of social life to face this problem and it is done much better in freedom than in servitude.
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Machan, who teaches at Chapman University in Orange, California, advises Freedom Communications, Inc., on public policy matters. His most recent book is Initiative — Human Agency and Society (Hoover Institution Press, 2000). His email address is Tibor_R._Machan@link.freedom.com.
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