Life, Liberty, and Shades of Gray

I took a political self-assessment the other day which was basically answering a handful of questions and returning to me where I stood on the political spectrum.  Turns out, I'm high on personal liberty, low on government intervention.  Any action that the government takes should further 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'  My underlying philosophy is that freedom is good.  And restrictions on freedom are bad.

I've actually read two very different columns today on two very different subjects but they both got me thinking about freedom.  What one person sees as freedom, someone else might see as a restriction of freedom.  Moreover, the idea that the government can do something to grant freedom to one person might often mean that someone else's freedom is compromised.  Ayn Rand puts it like this:

It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

The first article was written by Thomas Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University.  http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/is-poverty-a-kind-of-robbery/  My takeaway was this:  that the current election has pinned the Democrats into a corner where they can't talk about the real problems of the real poor.  Politically-minded liberals instead talk a lot about what they can do for the middle class.  In fact, they HAVE to talk about what they can do for the middle class, says Edsall, because to talk about poor people would be to alienate the middle class.  And Edsall goes on to talk about the issues; hunger, poor living conditions, exploitation, lack of health care, etc.

In other words, Edsall (and the stream of Ivy League profs he cites in the article) thinks the Democrats are abandoning the truly needy in favor of a workable political platform.  In this, he quotes Harvard sociologist, Matthew Desmond:

Structural accounts emphasize the inner city’s lack of jobs, social services, or organizations. Cultural accounts emphasize the inner city’s lack of role models, custodial fathers, and middle-class values. Although usually pitted against one another, structural and cultural approaches share a common outlook: that the inner city is a void, a needy thing, and, like supplies lowered into the leper colony, that its problems can be solved by filing the void with more stuff: e.g., more jobs, more education, more social services.

Predictably, Desmond points out, these solutions aren't solving any problems.  The real issue is exploitation.  There are investors getting rich off of low rent housing.  And the poor are at the mercy of the slum lords because they have to have a place to stay.

Wait a minute.  Are we suggesting that all really poor people can afford is low quality housing?  Isn't that a little like saying, 'only rich people can afford mansions'?  So if a friend comes up to me and says, 'man, my place is such a dump' and I say, 'why don't you move?' and he says, 'It's all I can afford'.  What am I missing here?  It seems these Super Liberals are blaming their favorite target, capitalism, even going so far as to suggest that this structure is a kind of 'robbery'.

I think of a baby who needs to learn how to walk on his own.  And people, the only way that baby ever learns to walk on his own, is when he puts forth the effort and decides to do it.

We've lost our minds when this passes the test of reason.  It is one thing to mandate a tax on the citizenry so that we can subsidize housing for the poor.  (By the way, that more closely approaches MY understanding of robbery)  What these guys are saying is we should exercise oversight into the slums and ensure that funds are being used toward the improvement of these properties.  In other words, force property owners to improve the living conditions in the poorest neighborhoods and don't allow them to increase rents.  Why is this crazy?  Because you would lose investors!  At the end of the day, here is what these really smart academic types are missing (probably because they don't live in a world of profit and loss).  People with capital don't like throwing money away.  And the market will decide price and quality, etc.

We could go much further into this but suffice to say, Edsall etal believe that the poorest of society don't have what they need in order to ... well ... be free.  And his solution is to take some freedom away from the business sector in order to 'balance the scales'.  It's the same thing with the Obamacare people.  This bumper sticker I've seen:  "Healthcare is a basic human right".  No it isn't!!!  Nothing that robs someone of their basic human rights can be a basic human right!

Are you following this?  Let's say that I assume that healthcare is a basic human right.  It sounds like a compassionate idea, a reasonable idea.  Until I ask you, what if the individual can't pay for the healthcare?  Um.  Ok, well, then force the doctors to do it for free.  Wait a minute!  Now you've taken away the doctor's freedom to work at his own choosing.  In fact, you've turned the doctor into a slave in order to fulfill another person's "basic rights".  OK then, we'll tax people and have them pay for it.  Now you're forcing people to pay someone else's bill.  That's not freedom.  That's trading one person's freedom for another's perceived freedom.  That's the redistribution of wealth.  That's government, playing God.

That's why I like ol' TJ's phrase.  Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  My translation?  The government should protect your life (not allow other individuals or other countries to kill you or steal your possessions), Let you do what you want to do (as long as it doesn't interfere with others' lives and liberties) and basically leave you to pursue your dreams.