Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom

by Ron Paul

  To stop the excesses of a few, the many were required to give up their freedom of choice to enjoy a glass of wine or beer. It was rationalized that this sacrifice was legitimate and worthy of government enforcement to improve society as a whole as long as it was endorsed by the majority. Here let us offer some praise for Franklin D. Roosevelt: He ushered in the repeal of Prohibition, an action that won him vast affection from the American people, a true liberalization effort that made the country freer. It is a striking irony that this great day in American history bought him the political capital to bring about the unworkable New Deal, which fastened government control on the country in other ways.

  The only good thing about the process was that, in 1919, the American people and the U.S. Congress had enough respect and understanding of the Constitution to know that an amendment was required to authorize Prohibition. This realization prompted the passage of the ill-fated Eighteenth Amendment. Today, the federal government hands down a myriad of “prohibitions” and mandates without the slightest concern about their constitutionality. The entire drug war is an arbitrary prohibition that violates the Constitution, a process that has been going on for nearly seventy-five years. Great harm has occurred since the drug war was accelerated by the Nixon administration in the early 1970s.

  Alcohol prohibition was destined to wreak havoc on the American people. It bred lawlessness and underworld criminal syndicates, which made huge profits. Prohibiting any desired substance inevitably leads to a black market, as history has shown countless times, and never achieves its goal of eliminating the use. Since ingredients were no longer readily available, the quality of the alcohol produced by bootleggers led to blindness and death. That was in addition to the many who lost their lives in the violence that occurred in its delivery, just as is happening today in the war on drugs. The appetite for alcohol remained strong despite the effort of the government to enforce its prohibition.

  It is quite true that alcohol is a deadly drug when abused. Accidents and illnesses are definitely related to its misuse. Those responsible for the accidents must be held accountable. Those who abuse alcohol and suffer disease or addiction, not the government or the taxpayers, are responsible for their own actions. Furthermore, in the age of growing government medicine, the government (i.e., someone else) must pay the medical bills, so we can be assured that governments local and national will dictate our eating, smoking, drinking, and exercise habits to keep health-care costs down. Give up liberty, and the government will give us good health! Hardly! It never works out that way.

  The total failure of alcohol prohibition was an important lesson for many, but there are still too many who do not realize that the harm done by alcohol prohibition was not nearly as bad as what we suffer today with the ill-advised modern war on drugs.

  I know a lot of politicians who agree with this position but are convinced that the political risk involved prevents them from trying to change the laws regarding illegal drug use.

  My position on the drug war has been known for years, and in spite of my opponents using it against me, it has seemingly never hurt me in my reelection efforts. And my district is a Bible Belt conservative district. My assessment is that the people are a lot more sophisticated about the issue than the politicians give them credit for. Though they aren’t demanding a total repeal of drug prohibition, they are informed enough not to punish a politician willing to take a forthright position on changing the laws regarding illegal drugs.

  In Texas, it’s common knowledge that the current wars on the Mexico-Texas border are, to a large extent, about drugs. Ironically, the two strongest groups that want to maintain the status quo of prohibition are the drug dealers and many Christian conservatives—two groups with opposite motivations but who share a common interest in keeping the drug war going.

  At the federal level, the cost to pursue the drug war in the past forty years runs into hundreds of billions of dollars. The social cost, including the loss of civil liberties, is incalculable. Crime relating to the drug laws far surpasses the crime related to the fifteen years of alcohol prohibition. I expect that someday the country will wake up and suddenly decide, as we did in 1933, that prohibition to improve personal behavior is a lost cause, and the second repeal of prohibition will occur. This is more likely now than ever before because of the growing perception that the federal government is inept and that individual states must reassert themselves in order to provide more sensible government to their citizens. The Tenth Amendment is in the process of being reborn.

  But even with signs that more Americans are becoming aware of the senselessness of the war on drugs, we have local and national politicians demanding even more control, and over much more benign substances such as fatty foods, raw milk, and salt. The idea that in a free society each individual decides for himself what is good or bad and what is risky is completely foreign to the patronizing moralizers who are now in control. But because most of them are users of alcohol, they never bring up the subject of alcohol prohibition anymore. I was rather shocked, after working with a progressive on lightening penalties for marijuana use, that I was met with great resistance to my suggestion that we permit raw milk to be sold without government restrictions. He was convinced that the people would need government protection from this “danger.”

  That’s why the basic principle of freedom of choice with responsibility for one’s actions solves a lot of dilemmas when it comes to the proper role of government in our lives.

  Most Americans fail to recognize that throughout most of our history drug laws didn’t exist. There’s reliable evidence that the laws have done nothing to decrease drug usage while contributing significantly to street crime. Responsibility for teaching about the dangers of drugs falls principally on parents. Parents teach children about the dangers of highways, high places, stoves, household poisons, swimming pools, etc. It’s their responsibility to warn about all dangers, including alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and bad diets.

  Government should not compel or prohibit any personal activity when that activity poses danger to that individual alone. Drinking and smoking marijuana is one thing, but driving recklessly under the influence is quite another. When an individual threatens the lives of others, there is a role for government to restrain that violence.

  The government today is involved in compulsion or prohibition of just about everything in our daily activities. Many times these efforts are well intentioned. Other times they result from a philosophic belief that average people need smart humanitarian politicians and bureaucrats to take care of them. The people, they claim, are not smart enough to make their own decisions. And unfortunately, many citizens go along, believing the government will provide perfect safety for them in everything they do. Since governments can’t deliver, this assumption provides a grand moral hazard of complacency and will only be reversed with either a dictatorship or a national bankruptcy that awakens the people and forces positive changes.

  Thornton, Mark. 1991. The Economics of Prohibition. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

  PUBLIC LAND

  In a free society, the land is owned by the people, not the government. We started out rather well in our early history, and a reasonable precedent was set for the land east of the Mississippi. Even today, federal ownership of the land in the eastern third of the United States is minimal, but there’s a steady effort by the authoritarians in Congress to continually increase federal ownership of land across the entire country.

  The development of the West was quite different. After annexation, federal government policy was always to retain ownership of most of the land even after statehood was granted. Government management of land is atrocious. Management of the commons, whether it’s grazing or mining, proves to be bureaucratic, inefficient, and serving the special interests. Usually the choice is between picking beneficiaries of government policy or prohibiting any development. Rarely is it considered to turn the land over to the states for the purpose of its being sold. Since we didn
’t need the federal government to manage or own the lands east of the Mississippi for worthwhile development, why should it be necessary for the government to own the land west of the Mississippi and stifle progress?

  Total federal ownership is more than one third of the land mass of the fifty states. But that’s not the only problem for those who believe in private ownership of land. Taxation and regulations are so cumbersome that landowners are essentially renters with no rights to the land. If taxes are not paid, the land is quickly taken by the state. School taxes are especially onerous throughout the country—with little to show for them. Regulations governing land use, from local to federal governments, makes developing land horribly difficult. Cities and their surrounding jurisdictions, counties, and states, all must give their approval before an owner can proceed to make use of his land. This is so even if there is no threat to a neighbor’s property. Each jurisdiction has many overlapping regulations.

  The federal government uses an iron fist to show that it is the real “owner” by overriding all state and local laws. Many times these rules and regulations are driven by radical environmentalists. The Environmental Protection Agency, Fish and Wildlife, the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Corps of Engineers, all must be satisfied. There are strong hints that the United Nations will be involved in land management in the United States as well.

  Many people believe that the federal government is needed for national parks and therefore they never ask questions about how much land the federal government owns outside of the park system. The truth is that most federally owned land is not part of a national park. The states in the east certainly have adequate parks without the federal ownership. Who knows, private entities such as Ducks Unlimited or The Nature Conservancy may be the types of organizations that would provide “national” parks in a free society. Fees from the people who use the parks would be a fairer way to finance parks than by taxing the 90 or so percent of citizens who never get to enjoy them.

  Over the years I have heard numerous stories about how the wealthy, and yes, even politicians, will purchase their hideaway in a remote area and then subsequently see to it that thousands of acres around them are purchased by the federal government to guarantee their privacy at the expense of the taxpayers. Many private estates are adjacent to government-owned lands and that’s not just a coincidence.

  Some argue that in the West, the land has to be managed by the federal government due to the natural resources available. They argue that these resources belong to the people and shouldn’t fall into the hands of a few rich individuals. They, of course, prefer the benevolence of a few wise politicians. Never would they admit that special interests will benefit from bureaucratic and political schemes.

  Texas is a good example of how private ownership of land facilitated the development and use of its natural resources—especially oil, gas, and coal. In the beginning, the Spanish land grants allowed large blocks of land to fall into the hands of a few. But over time, for economic reasons, this land was broken up into smaller and smaller pieces. Ownership of the oil was divided according to private property rights, which allowed many less wealthy people to benefit. The risks were taken by the entrepreneurs and the benefits were spread generously to small landowners with mineral rights and to the workers who labored in the industry. Before joining the union—probably a mistake—the Republic of Texas owned very little land. Texas never needed the federal government to manage its progress, whether it concerned natural resources, agriculture, or ranching.

  The rest of the West could be developed the same way as Texas by turning the federal land over to the state to be sold. The natural monuments issue would present the greatest resistance. By making this an exception, a lot could still be accomplished by turning millions of acres over to the states. As the land is sold, a portion of the funds could be used to lower the national debt.

  Unfortunately, we’re not moving in that direction. But it’s more likely to happen as a result of the breakdown of the federal government with the states picking up the pieces than by Congress and the President doing it in a deliberate, intelligent fashion.

  Our biggest current battle is to restrain the eminent domain enthusiasts at all levels of government. The Fifth Amendment was written more to assure that land taken by the government was adequately paid for than it was to give the right to government to confiscate property at will. This assumption was based on the fact that it was known that governments traditionally do take land at will from private owners. But too often governments didn’t pay fair value for it. It’s actually impossible to precisely define “just compensation” as the Constitution requires.

  Values are established subjectively, not by some estimate made by a government agent based on recent sales in the area or some other scheme. Land or a home may have a special value to its owner. It might have been in the family for a long time. The owners may be emotionally attached to the homes or property for sentimental reasons, and to them it has value far above what the government decides. Pure and simple, eminent domain is government force used to empower the state or help communities as a whole at the expense of individuals. Motivations are generally well intentioned to provide road easements, utility easements, or parks. Requests for government to pay fair value for land taken date back to early Roman law and were recognized in the Magna Carta in 1215.

  Recently, though, this device has become an instrument not to serve the “public” but to serve the special interests. The Fifth Amendment was written assuming the government would take property only for “public use”—never for someone else’s private benefit.

  Today’s corporations and private businesses ask local governments to condemn land in order to resell it to them. The promise is that the land value will go up, the business will pay more taxes, the municipality will benefit, and the new business will earn more money with its new, preferable location. Sounds like a good deal, except for the individual who was forced to sell the land and lose his or her right of property ownership.

  This is a modern distortion and abuse of the principle of eminent domain. If anything, we should be moving in the opposite direction which makes it more difficult to impose eminent domain for the purpose of “public” use. We should not be allowing it for the benefit of some special interest.

  A clear understanding of the right to own private property is crucial in maintaining a free society. Without this, a free society cannot exist.

  Epstein, Richard. 1985. Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain. Boston: Harvard University Press.

  RACISM

  The term “racism” is thrown around loosely these days. Sometimes it applies, and sometimes it does not. I define the term as (1) the defining and disparaging of a whole people due primarily to its racial, ethnic, or religious makeup, which leads to (2) the desire to deny an individual or group full rights in the civic community, and (3) the related impulse to see some harm come to an individual or group through private or public means. The terms “racism” or “racist” could apply to one or all of the above.

  With this definition in mind, it should be clear that racism is a problem that begins with a denial of individualism. A racist believes that some group trait always trumps all individual traits. This is the first error, and it stems from a desire to simplify the reality of group heterogeneity (people really are different) for the sake of convenience or quick thinking.

  I’m not talking about the universal tendency to generalize based on particular circumstances of time and place. This is part of the expectations that we develop based on observed behavior of group solidarity. And of course people act with group solidarity. If you doubt it, watch any sports match and see the way many thousands can simultaneously cheer for a team. It is not racism, of course, to expect the fans of one team to cheer if their team makes a point. But if you believe that this shared interest of a group obliterates individual differences, or that individual differences do not matter at all by
comparison to the group trait, we see the beginnings of a racist cast of mind.

  When people cannot let go of generalizations to face the reality of counterexamples, there is a problem. A white person who sees no good in any action or words of a black person provides the most obvious example of racism. Another example of such thinking comes from dismissing the views of, for example, a black economist who disagrees with the socialist bias of the NAACP. The assumption is made that the economist is not somehow “thinking like a black.” The same dismissals can be made by or toward any group. Black leaders can caricature whites and whites can caricature blacks based on group prejudice. This is different from regular prejudices, which one might say are a normal part of life and constantly being formed and corrected based on real-world experience.

  The problem of personal attitudes is, however, not the crucial issue. The problem is how these attitudes come to have a political expression. During the great wave of European immigration to the United States in the late nineteenth century, the anti-Italian and anti-Irish feelings on the part of the majority might have been understandable from historical context, but they led to real effects in the form of political disabilities being imposed on these groups. It was the same with the Jim Crow laws that followed Reconstruction in the South. Such laws not only violated human rights; they led to long-simmering resentments that had terrible human and political consequences.

  Wartime is an environment that breeds wicked forms of racism. This is because governments love to turn existing prejudices into hate in order to mobilize the masses. In the First World War, the anti-German hysteria led to suppression of German cultural forms and widespread suspicion toward German Americans. In the Second World War, Germans suffered again, but Japanese even more so. It is incredible to imagine the horrible truth that all Americans of Japanese descent were rounded up and put into concentration (“internment”) camps. During the Cold War, Russians in the United States were suspected of being communists until they openly and aggressively proclaimed their hatred for the rules of their homeland.