…

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves—-the union between themselves and the State—-and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in same relation to the State that the State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union which have prevented them from resisting the State?

…

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

…

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

…

Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so a man.

…

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to—for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well—is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to lie aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which I have also imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

Henry David Thoreau
(Compiled by Gary Gibson)

December 31, 2008

Disobeying Civilly was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

This American government—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed upon, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievious persons who put obstructions on the railroads.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts—a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniment, though it may be,—

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero was buried.”

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few—as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men—serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,” but leave that office to his dust at least:—

“I am too high-born to be propertied,
To be a second at control,
Or useful serving-man and instrument
To any sovereign state throughout the world.”

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of ‘75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

December 30, 2008
Henry David Thoreau, 1849

Ideal Governance Is The Lack Thereof was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

But with a woman.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that women are antithetical to freedom (though that’s undeniably the case for some married men) — only that what really got me thinking about how Americans perceive freedom came from my brief association with a particular lady not long ago. Here’s how it happened…

After meeting up for some late drinks at a local pub, I spontaneously invited a woman I’d had numerous dates with back to my house. Now, this girl had read a lot of my Whiskey & Gunpowder essays, so she knew what I was all about — trucks, guns, motorcycles, hunting, bourbon whiskeys, the whole deal…

So as she followed me home, I really didn’t think anything of the fact that I had four or five hunting rifles leaning up against the back of the sofa in my living room (I’d gone to the gun range the evening before). Frankly, I was more concerned about whether I had anything she liked to drink, the condition of the bathroom, whether there were dishes in the sink — that kind of stuff.

However, the first thing she said when she came in the door and looked around wasn’t any kind of critique of my housekeeping, but rather, upon spying the rifles:

“Jim, how many guns do you NEED?”

It’s Not Freedom if You Need ‘Um

I’m mentioning my date-gone-sour because it’s emblematic of the fact that a lot of educated people who think they’re all about freedom really aren’t — at least not when the chips hit the table. This woman is a perfect example. She’s smart as a whip, degreed, professional, tuned-in and fancies herself a liberty-minded American…

Yet the first thing that jumps into her mind when she sees the trappings of liberty is the quasi-Marxist notion that its exercise should be tempered by the dictates of practical need.

What’s so tragicomic is that I find this kind of thinking to be typical of how a lot of Americans regard freedoms OTHER people find important — but not necessarily those they indulge in themselves. If I’d said to her “How many pairs of shoes do you need?” or “How many pets do you need?” she’d surely have balked…

I once got this same gun question from an uncle of mine, a man of great temperance, education and intelligence. In the ensuing exchange, he suggested in perfect seriousness that it should be determined, by earnest study and analysis, exactly how many guns and of what types an American could ever encounter a need for — and that the law should be modified to restrict our freedom to own guns beyond the dictates of these criteria!

If NEED were the litmus test of liberty, we would cease to be in any way free. And yet, a lot of Americans use this concept (necessity) as a looking glass when it comes to the freedoms their neighbors enjoy. This is disconcerting to me.

But it isn’t even the most insidious way in which a lot of us look at freedoms all wrong…

The “Balance Sheet” Mentality

Today, it’s the tendency of politicians, commentators, advocates on both sides of an issue — and increasingly, American citizens — to distill the debate about any personal liberties to one of numbers. Statistics, not principles, rule the day.

That’s because there’s an inherent credibility to an argument backed by numbers — they are assumed to be impartial. And they are. It’s only when numbers are contorted by people with an agenda (any time they come out of politicians’ mouths, basically) that they become treacherous, and anything but unbiased.

Think about this for a minute. Is there any liberty-based debate in the public discourse today that doesn’t center on an argument about numbers — that hasn’t become merely a contest of “dueling statistics?” The point of those statistics is always the same: To determine whether a freedom makes bottom-line sense in a twisted equation in which liberty is allowed to stand or fall based solely on its mercantile merits…

The smoking debate is a good example. Few are talking about smoking in terms of its intrinsic value as an exercise in personal freedom. Most only talk about it in terms of economics: Mainly, whether the increased costs of health insurance and medical treatment for both active and passive smokers is greater than the profits bars, restaurants, public sports venues and the like (tobacco-company profits are rarely mentioned) gain from smoking.

Actually, smoking is a great example of a personal freedom that is ensured by bottom-line factors. Politicians may bang the regulatory drums in the name of public wellness and health-care cost savings, but they would never ban smoking outright. They’re all-too-aware of how corporate taxes on hugely profitable tobacco companies, federal excise taxes on cigarettes, and state tax revenues from cigarette sales dwarf any increased costs smoking may incur on society. Even if they didn’t, tobacco-related tax revenues are more immediately meaningful to politicians than any trickle-down economic boon that banning smoking might produce. But I digress…

Numbers also play a huge role in the dialogue about illegal aliens (if you think there’s no personal liberty angle to this issue, wait until we all get national I.D. cards or RFID chips under the auspices of distinguishing citizens from non-citizens). This debate — whether among politicians or pundits in the mainstream media — is appallingly one-dimensional in its focus not on the principle of whether non-citizens should be allowed to live, work, and suck at the public teat in the U.S., but rather on whether illegal aliens are a net boon or drain on our economy!

As though dollars and sense were the sole determining factors in the matter — security, fairness, equality, sovereignty, and the integrity of existing law be damned.

With few exceptions, today’s debate about personal liberties is overwhelmingly focused on need or economics — and driven by statistics. But as I’m about to show you, when numbers drive a discussion of freedom, we become vulnerable to deception on a much greater scale than if that debate focuses principally on principles…

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

There are two main justifications the various levels of government in America use to abrogate your freedom: Saving lives and saving money.

Perhaps the best example of this is the debate over a liberty that almost everyone has been brainwashed into believing it’s a good idea to restrict: Helmet-less motorcycling. As always, this debate has been dominated over the years by the discussion of numbers that SEEM to show that from both a bottom-line and human life standpoint, mandating motorcycle helmets is a no-brainer.

However, as is the case so many times when liberty is shackled, these statistics are an utter sham. Here’s the “Readers’ Digest” version of some hard numbers I included in my article on this topic in May 2006:

“At first glance, most statistics used to support the argument that helmets save lives and/or reduce injuries — or rather, that helmet laws accomplish these things — are compelling. Most of them look like this oft-cited data from California, the state with the most road-registered motorcyclists by far in America:

~~~~~

“Looks like the helmet law reduced brain injuries by more than 53%…

“Let’s put these numbers into perspective: …

• “According to data from the National Association of State Motorcycle Safety Administrators (NASMSA), California motorcycle registrations plummeted in the 4 years following passage of the mandatory helmet law by approximately 20%. This fact alone should result in 20% fewer accidents and brain injuries, all other factors being equal…
• “According to a 1994 UCLA study on the effects of the 1992 California helmet law mandate, in just the 2 years following the law’s passage, the total number of motorcycle accidents decreased by 34.98% (-25.46% in 1992 and -9.52% in 1993)! It stands to reason that brains injuries would also drop by at least this amount…

~~~~~

“These data can point to only one conclusion: When helmets are mandated, bikers ride less, which equals fewer accidents. Any statistics that fail to adjust for this — like most of the raw numbers being trumpeted by the pro-helmet lobby — are bogus…

“But back to the UC San Francisco School of Medicine chart for a moment: Isn’t it odd that the chart only catalogs brain injury hospitalizations, not fatalities? Could this be because the fatalities numbers paint a less-than-flattering picture of helmet usage?

~~~~~

“You’ve already learned that in California, the total number of motorcycle accidents decreased by 35% in the 2 years (1992-1993) following the mandatory helmet law. So, if helmets improved accident survivability, then the ratio of deaths to accidents should have fallen at a greater rate than this during those two years…

“But it didn’t. Based on NASMSA’s records of fatalities per motorcycle registered in the Golden State, the fatality rate in the last year of voluntary helmet use (1991) was approximately 7.55 deaths per 10,000 motorcycle registrations. At the end of 1993, this ratio was approximately 5.30 per ten thousand bikes…

“A difference of only 29.8%.

“This means that the California mandatory helmet law made it MORE likely that a motorcycle crash would result in death to the rider — nearly 15% more likely, in fact.

“California is not alone, either. In similar comparisons of public accident and fatality data across all 50 states in 1993 (the year in which mandatory helmet laws most recently peaked in the U.S.), the numbers look like this:

“As you can see, the rate of accidents per participant nationwide is 14.5% higher (222.21 vs. 194.02) in mandatory helmet states, and the rate of fatalities per accident is also higher, by nearly 3% (2.98 vs. 2.9)…”

Stay with me here. Now I’m going to relate all of this helmet talk back to the “balance sheet” idea…

Power Politics of the “Golden” Rule

My home state, Maryland, passed its helmet law at the same time as California (1992) on the grounds that it would save both lives AND money — since it would eliminate the state’s long-term care costs of those uninsured riders who were hospitalized with head injuries helmets would have prevented. Assuming that the California data would hold roughly true in the Old Line State, this would indeed likely have been the case, even adjusting for a similar decline in registrations and rider-ship…

However, nary a peep was made during the pre-mandate discourse about the negative economic impact Maryland’s bars, restaurants, motels, gas stations, bike dealerships and cycle parts and service centers would have sustained from a drastic decrease in rider participation in response to a helmet law. This number would surely have far exceeded the fiscal liabilities involved with treating brain injuries of the uninsured.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: If bottom-line concerns really are the “Golden Rule” of legislation, why’d Maryland and California politicians pass helmet laws that seemingly subtracted from their real-world bottom lines in the early 1990s?

Because the Federal government bribed them to.

At the tail end of 1991, the sweeping Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) was signed into law by Congress. Among other liberty-quashing, government-expanding, commerce-shackling and public-payroll-increasing provisions, that law revived millions of dollars in dormant-since-the-‘70s incentives to states that had passed both car seat-belt and motorcycle helmet laws. Some of this money was earmarked for specific transportation-related programs, and some of it was discretionary for states to spend as they pleased.

Basically, since the Feds couldn’t pass a national helmet mandate without looking iron-fisted, they simply dangled a few million bucks in tax-pork bride money in front of state legislatures, and some of the more greedy ones (Maryland and California) took the bait. It’s hardly a coincidence that both these states enacted helmet laws in 1992.

What this proves to me — and what it should prove to any thinking American — is that raw, liquid money in their hands is more important to politicians than likely far greater sums infused into the economies of their home states…

That state road-maintenance and other low-wage jobs paid for by federally subsidized pork are more important to them than private-sector jobs lost in their own districts by needlessly limiting freedom…

And that it’s more important for them to be able to say, even falsely, that they “saved lives” and “created jobs” than it is for them to say they preserved liberty and allowed the free market to find its own unfettered economic equilibrium…

My point is that limiting personal liberties — smoking, drinking, helmet-wearing, gun-carrying, kite-flying, you name it — is almost always hostile to the real-world, entrepreneurial bottom line. But such restrictions are often favorable to the bottom lines politicians care about: Image, pork money, tax revenue, votes and government jobs.

And so they become the law.

Rhetorical Red Herrings

To me, there’s something even scarier than the fact that our government, from Capitol Hill on down to the town hall in Podunk, Georgia, is doing everything it can — through its own perverse bureaucratic alchemy of laws, lies, rhetoric, taxation and regulation — to convert various chunks of our liberty into money in their pockets…

That’s the fact that we’re all thinking in their terms about it.

Like quick-draw artists in Old West movies, pundits in the media, on the Boards of special interest groups and even around the dinner table go into arguments and debates armed NOT with simple reason and the fundamental righteousness of liberty, but with numbers they can sling at the drop of a stat.

And like I’ve shown with the helmet law example, in many cases, those numbers are colored, skewed, pared down and stacked to prove one point and not the other…

This is the end result of a calculated move by government, perpetuated by the dim bulbs running the lap-dog media. On the one hand, they’re programmed us to see things only in terms of dollars and cents — and on the other, they’ve obfuscated, dumbed-down, and co-opted the debate to the point where fundamental American principles get buried under stacks of irrelevant statistics, never to see the light of day.

It’s a three-part formula that campaign managers, hired-gun pollsters, and PR slicks know all too well:

1) First, make people greedy by threatening their bottom lines, or fearful by threatening their safety. (“Drinking is costly to society — if we don’t pass this law lowering the DWI standard to .000000000000008, we’ll have to raise taxes,” or “A gun in the home is more likely to harm the family than an intruder — if we don’t outlaw them, kids will die!”)

2) Second, show them numbers — real or not, it makes no difference — that outrage them and support abrogating freedom. (“Just look at how much money these invalided motorcyclists and seat-belt-less drivers are costing the rest of us decent, hard-working people!”)

3) Finally, pit freedoms against each other to make folks think they’re patriotic for restricting OTHER Americans’ liberties. (“These smoking libertines are threatening your freedom to go where you want without risking emphysema yourself!”)

It’s a total racket, too. Politicians know that by definition, practitioners of any single liberty are in the MINORITY. Far more people don’t smoke than do. Loads more people don’t ride motorcycles than do. There are a lot more non-skiers than there are skiers. There are fewer gun owners than those without any firearms (though not by as much as you might think)…

Therefore, it’s relatively easy to limit any single liberty by majority vote. All our leaders have to do is give us a red herring to look at — like a bunch of statistics — and we’ll forget all about the fact that liberty is its own reward…

And it’s worth paying for even if the numbers really don’t validate it.

Bottom Lines on Liberty: Theirs and Ours

Though I often use the terms liberty and freedom interchangeably, to my way of thinking, liberty most accurately refers not to those fundamental freedoms that are guaranteed to us by law (e.g. see Bill of Rights, the)…

But rather to all those things that aren’t explicitly protected by law.

In other words, everything Americans are supposed to be able to do without fretting about Big Brother busting them for no good reason. Ideally, this should mean (and it used to) that you can do just about anything you want to — especially on your own property — as long as it’s not directly harming anyone else. That’s the TRUE American model, handed down from Locke, Rousseau and others the Constitution’s framers thought were onto something…

Now think about this for a minute: If the “balance sheet” mentality that has driven the changes in just one liberty — like motorcycle helmet legislation — were to become the boilerplate model for laws concerning all kinds of other liberties, what kinds of things would still be allowed in America at the end of the day?

Only those liberties that can pass a societal bottom-line bean-counter test?

Or would it be only those that contribute to government’s bottom-line?

Here’s OUR bottom line, as American citizens: Liberty isn’t always safe, sensible or good for us. It isn’t always noble, and it isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always tasteful or moral or high-minded. It isn’t always profitable and it doesn’t always add up in the “plus” column on paper…

But it shouldn’t have to, because liberty is always important. It has value on its own, and is almost always worth whatever it costs us. And if we’re going to limit it, there should have to be a damn good reason for it.

It’s my great fear that if “we” — I mean people like me in the fringe media and you at the dinner table and in the town hall — don’t start re-directing the liberty debate back toward principles and away from mere principal, none of us may end up being able to do so many of the things that makes our lives worth living with passion.

I also think that as we’re about to vote on a measure or candidate who supports limiting the exercise of some liberty we find personally offensive, we should all stop and ask ourselves this question…

When some money-grubbing, headline-grabbing politician puts MY favorite freedom in the crosshairs, will those whose right to liberty I’m betraying right now stand up for ME?

Always lobbying for liberty,

Jim Amrhein
Freedoms Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

July 16, 2007

The Liberty Equation was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder