Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (14 page)

In 1856, the Republican Party replaced a Whig Party that had lost its philosophical bearings to the point of being an empty shell. It had once stood against tyranny and a too powerful executive branch. Today’s Republican Party in many ways is suffering from a political identity crisis of its own, and has failed too many times to deliver on its message of limited government and individual liberty. Democrats are more reliably authoritarian, now controlled by a progressive ideology, always wanting more government involvement in our lives.

Some Republicans, typically incumbents-for-life who have gotten way too cozy with the power and special relationships with the lobbying class that come with it, have lost credibility, often selling out their principles to special interests and the preservation of their own political skins. The Democrats have the very same problem, but have done even worse as the party in control, expanding military intervention in foreign lands, abandoning their promised commitment to civil liberties in favor of the cult of personality that is Barack Obama. And then there is the reverse Robin Hood scheme called ObamaCare.

The old way of doing business isn’t going to cut it anymore. Regardless of the brand name, it’s pretty clear that millennials are up for grabs, looking for something better than just a new, hipper boss in Washington.

CHAPTER 6

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HE
R
IGHT
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THE INTERNET CHANGES EVERYTHING.

In a free society, voluntary cooperation based on mutually beneficial choices and agreements helps individual people to get along and prosper, to not hurt other people or take their stuff. This is how it is possible for millions of people with very different goals and personal beliefs and private knowledge to come together to create things so much greater and more complex than any one person could have done alone.

Don Lavoie, my favorite professor at George Mason University, argued that this freedom-based model creates “a greater social intelligence” that cannot be replicated or reverse-engineered by the most sophisticated planning by the smartest among us. Lavoie got the basis of many of his ideas from Friedrich Hayek. Hayek’s work on economic coordination was a critique of various attempts by governments to plan our activities from the top down. Why did government planning typically fail? Because knowledge about what people want and need is not something that can simply be aggregated minus the process of free people figuring things out. This is the process that we all go through, sorting out the infinite pieces of information that bombard each of us in our daily lives. Through our choices, based on our personal knowledge, a pattern emerges that helps others who don’t know anything about us know what they need to know to meet our demands. Hayek, of course, got many of his ideas from Ludwig von Mises, who in turn drew from Carl Menger and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith and Andrew Ferguson.

Writing in the 1760s, Ferguson anticipates the wisdom of crowds:

The crowd of mankind, are directed in their establishments and measures, by the circumstances in which they are placed; and seldom are turned from their way, to follow the plan of any single projector.

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.
¹

Advances in our knowledge about how civil society works come from a type of intellectual cooperation not unlike the process of entrepreneurship—part creative thinking and part listening and learning from others who know more than you do. Sometimes you’re the leader, and sometimes you follow the lead. Just like John Coltrane studying his mentor Miles Davis and then breaking the “rules” of jazz, redefining them, making jazz better. Just like Rush ignoring their record label and giving their fans something different, something better.

This push and pull between the creative quest of individuals and the best-understood ways of doing things and institutions that we know work is what Hayekians call the “spontaneous order.” I call it beautiful chaos, the constant rearranging of preferences and needs in real time that celebrates the dignity of people and their potential to define, for themselves, a better path in life.

Of course, the Internet changes everything. Everything that worked before based on local knowledge, and freedom, and the ability of people to figure things out, learn from others, and build civil societies, is magnified by the Internet, because it reduces barriers to act, and know, and cooperate.

The Internet also changes the old rules of politics. Smart mobs and crowdsourcing and morphing communities built on social media have all democratized political action and broken down the top-down controls of political parties and the old equilibrium of interest groups that controlled them. Likewise, the old media cartels have been undermined—some might argue mortally wounded—by bloggers and Twitter queens and citizen journalists with smartphone video cameras. We citizens can connect, find out what Washington is up to in real time, and act, all in ways that are becoming easier and cheaper. Concerned moms with tens of thousands of Facebook friends can beat deep-pocketed interests in ways that would have been inconceivable just a few years ago.

Freedom is all about sorting information and distributing knowledge. Politics, the distribution of power, is all about controlling the free flow of information under a pretense of knowledge. The Internet changes this dismal calculus, and cuts out middlemen with hidden agendas. No longer are a few people with tremendous political power able to control the distribution of information about the decisions that are made about the things that really matter, things that impact your life and your stuff, like the taxes you pay, or the health care you are allowed to buy, or even the things you are allowed to say in the public square.

This is a very good thing.

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EEPING
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Unfortunately, the Internet’s same liberating forces—the ones that are freeing people—are being leveraged by the government to violate your personal privacy and your liberties. John Perry Barlow, the lyricist for my beloved Grateful Dead and a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, puts this dilemma succinctly: “I have known, ever since I encountered the Internet, that it was both the most liberating tool I had ever seen for humanity, and the best system for extremely granular surveillance that had ever been devised, and that it would always be that way. And that there was always going to be, throughout my lifetime, a battle between the forces of openness and connection, and freedom from repression, and the forces of secrecy and repression. . . .”
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The Obama administration, beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, has led the charge in this Brave New World of government cyber-surveillance. Their aspiring reach seems to know no bounds. It’s a game of hide-and-seek, where yesterday’s denials are revised and extended to cover up the latest exposed executive branch tyranny with the false promise of future security. “The national security operations, generally, have one purpose and that is to make sure the American people are safe and that I’m making good decisions,” Barack Obama explained to the American people on October 28, 2013. “I’m the final user of all the intelligence that they gather,” says the commander in chief. “We give them policy direction, but what we’ve seen over the last several years is their capacities continue to develop and expand, and that’s why I’m initiating now a review to make sure that what they’re able to do, doesn’t necessarily mean what they should be doing.”
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In part because of the president’s tendency to say “I didn’t know” in response to any executive branch abuse-of-power scandal, more people are wondering if he is in charge of the executive branch at all. He “generally” knows what the National Security Agency and other intelligence-gathering functions of the federal government are up to, he says. But he didn’t seem to know that the NSA was listening to German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone calls.

What if the power is now with faceless bureaucrats, not the president? If the president knows the “general” purposes of federal snooping, do you wonder what the extraordinary ones are? Wouldn’t you like to know? Given the extraordinary power of the federal government in the era of Big Data, should we trust faceless, unelected bureaucrats with the extraordinary discretionary power to choose you as their next target?

Think about the abuses of power big and small, from J. Edgar Hoover, to Richard Nixon, to Lois Lerner. Think about the qualified, and ever-evolving, promises made by Barack Obama. Does the federal government of the United States have the right to snoop on you, tracking your phone calls and reading your emails? Does Washington, D.C., have the power to limit your speech, spy on the press, or suppress the opinions of bloggers? Does the president of the United States have the discretionary authority to assassinate American citizens on American soil without due process, before guilt is determined in a court of law? Don’t you have a right to know?

The president has continuously claimed, responding to a seemingly endless series of revelations that disprove the previous assurances from the White House and various federal agencies, that lines were not crossed, that our constitutional rights were not breached, that your civil liberties were not violated. I don’t know about you, but I am not reassured. In fact, I’m certain that things are out of control, and that the balance between our essential liberties and the national security apparatus is fundamentally off, in favor of faceless bureaucrats that we hope are doing the right thing with all that power.

As Americans, our freedoms are broad and our rights are protected under the Constitution. The government’s powers, on the other hand, are supposed to be well defined and strictly limited. But you have to know your rights and vigilantly defend them from the natural tendency of governments to grab power and grow capabilities. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer of us are taught in public school about our guaranteed individual rights. Fewer still take the time to find out and understand the rules for themselves.

This is a very bad trend, and it’s our bad if we don’t know, or care to know. “Thomas Jefferson often insisted that the ultimate guardians of our rights and liberties are We The People,” says the great civil liberties activist Nat Hentoff. “But when many Americans are largely ignorant of the Constitution, an imperial president—like George W. Bush or Barack Obama—can increasingly invade our privacy; and now, with ObamaCare, ration our health care and—for some—our very lives.”
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ACKASSWARDS

Think he’s exaggerating? Consider some of the more extreme views recently expressed by Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “If I thought censoring the mail was necessary,” he told stunned reporters on June 11, 2013, “I would suggest it, but I don’t think it is.”
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Graham sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, with its jurisdiction overseeing “civil liberties.” In other words, you could argue, he has a unique responsibility to protect your constitutional rights.

But he doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job. In an interview on
Fox and Friends,
Graham defended the NSA’s warrantless surveillance of American civilians, telling the show’s hosts, “I don’t think you’re talking to the terrorists. I know you’re not. I know I’m not. So we don’t have anything to worry about.”
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He went on to tell the astonished hosts that he was “glad” the warrantless surveillance activity was happening in the NSA.

Guilty until proven innocent? You don’t need to be a constitutional lawyer to know that this is backasswards. Graham’s view, though not all that unique, is a fundamental inversion of the American concept of justice.

On June 5, 2013, the British newspaper the
Guardian
broke a story about the NSA collecting phone records from millions of Americans who use Verizon.
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The source of the information was Edward Snowden, a young computer analyst consulting for the NSA. A day later, the
Washington Post
⁸
and another
Guardian
story
⁹
revealed that the surveillance extended to Internet companies as well, enabling the NSA to access emails, photos, videos, and pretty much anything else stored on supposedly secure servers.

Senators Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) revealed during a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee that this type of surveillance had been going on unnoticed for seven years.
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Feinstein actually defended the program by claiming that the NSA needed access to people’s phone records “in case they became terrorist suspects in the future.”

The Obama administration jumped right out of the gate with a defense of the NSA, claiming that no personal information or conversational content was being collected,
¹¹
but this was in direct contradiction to a statement made several months earlier at a congressional hearing by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Clapper went on record with the following exchange:

SENATOR RON WYDEN
: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

CLAPPER
: “No, sir . . . Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps, collect, but not, not wittingly.”
¹²

President Obama continued to deny the accusations of domestic spying with a number of public statements as the story made national headlines. “Nobody is listening to your phone calls,” he assured us during a June 10, 2013, press conference.
¹³
This was followed by an appearance on the
Tonight Show,
where he assured host Jay Leno, “There is no spying on Americans.”
¹⁴