Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto

by Matt Kibbe

  A monetary policy consistent with freedom rests firmly on the idea of sound money, free from manipulation by insiders, bureaucrats, and politicians. “Freedom of our currency is the fundamental issue,” wrote my college economics professor Hans Sennholz. “It is the keystone of a free society.”

  10. AVOID ENTANGLING ALLIANCES

  Congress, more closely accountable to the people, should approve acts of war. Wars cost precious American lives, and will always drain our economy of resources.

  Remember George Washington’s caution not to “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils” of other nations’ affairs. He was worried about the security of Americans first, and he knew that the budget implications of foreign entanglements mattered in a very real way. It is not isolationist, as some neo-conservatives accuse libertarians of being. It’s about opportunity costs, economic realities, and common sense. “As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit,” Washington counseled. “One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace.”

  In September 2013, President Obama seemed ready to go to war with Syria. The situation was a complex one, with rebel forces no more sympathetic to American interests than the incumbent regime. This echoed the situations in Egypt and Libya several years earlier, where American intervention clearly did not improve things either for our own interests, or that of those countries’ own citizens.

  Recognizing that both Congress and the American people were overwhelmingly against the idea of intervention in Syria, the president verbally toyed with the idea of acting without congressional approval, in violation of the War Powers Act.

  Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, but this was not an isolated incident. There has been a recent string of overseas military operations conducted without a formal declaration of war from Congress, ever since the War on Terror blurred the lines between enemy combatants and common criminals.

  This is a dangerous precedent. James Madison once wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war to the Legislature.” Madison rightly recognized that the power to send soldiers to their deaths and drop bombs on other nations should not be vested in one man alone.

  The American people knew better. Our national security depends on our economic strength and fiscal stability, and it would be reckless for Congress to bankrupt us in the process of becoming the world’s policeman in someone else’s civil war.

  Accountability and a new restraint on executive branch power came from the people. As National Review put it: “The Phone Lines Melt,” referring to an unprecedented grass roots onslaught of opposition to the president’s proposed war. “And inboxes are inundated, as people urge their congressmen to oppose military action in Syria.”21 Pretending that military measures won’t cost more than D.C. “experts” predict ignores everything conservatives already know about experts’ predictions. It doesn’t matter what government program we’re talking about—whether we’re debating Social Security, Medicaid, or therapeutic air strikes in the Levant. Costs always exceed illusory budget baselines.

  There is an opportunity cost to war. Resources directed toward building tanks and bombs cannot be used for more productive purposes. As every freshman economics textbook once held, if you want more guns you have to give up some butter.

  Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Obama, has argued that America’s debt is the single largest threat to our national security. The economic strength of our nation is the basis of our leadership in the world. Mullen says:

  [T]he most significant threat to our national security is our national debt. . . . That’s why it’s so important that the economy move in the right direction, because the strength and the support and the resources that our military uses are directly related to the health of our economy over time.22

  A foreign policy based on the ideals of freedom would address these problems. The use of military force is a serious thing not to be employed lightly. It is a mistake, therefore, to get involved in entangling alliances that force our troops to act when doing so is not in the national interest, when there is no clear objective or definition of victory, and when the lives of innocent civilians would be unnecessarily forfeit as a result.

  11. DON’T TAKE PEOPLE’S STUFF

  The right to be secure in your property is the cornerstone of a free society. The founders knew this, and for most Americans this is a commonsense proposition that keeps the government from arbitrarily taking their stuff. Yet today private property rights are being threatened by an expanding and unresponsive government. More and more citizens are finding their property under attack, either through a growing web of onerous regulation, or outright seizure through aggressive use of eminent domain and civil forfeiture laws.

  Property rights were a core issue for the thirteen colonies chafing under British rule. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton wrote extensively on the importance of private property, and asserted that you didn’t need the government to grant you rights in your property; property rights precede government and are inherent to the rights of all individuals. This view helped frame the U.S. Constitution and its constraints on government power. In fact, six of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights touch on the question of property.

  The most explicit protection of private property in the U.S. Constitution is the Fifth Amendment, including the famous “takings” clause, which states, “No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor shall property be taken for public use without just compensation.” The founders saw the government’s potential to expropriate property and drafted the Constitution to limit this possibility.

  Yet as government grew, the protections of private property enshrined in the Constitution were weakened by legal decisions and the growing scope of the regulatory state. Today, numerous government actions threaten the private property of individuals, whether through excessive regulation, expanding government control of our nation’s resources, or abuses of the legal system that take our property rights.

  Eminent domain abuse has been on the rise, with many individuals losing their property as local governments seize it in the name of economic development. The developers win, but homeowners often get the short end of the stick. As of late 2013, the Institute for Justice was suing seven U.S. cities over their attempts to seize private property, but the issue first came to popular attention when the Supreme Court upheld the Kelo v. City of New London decision in 2005, which allowed city officials in New London, Connecticut, to seize homes and businesses on the pure assertion that new development would provide jobs and new revenue for the city.

  The decision stacked the deck in favor of business interests at the expense of small property owners. As noted in Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s dissent to the court’s opinion, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result.”23

  The release of the Kelo decision created a surge of public outcry against governments taking private property. Unfortunately, the outrage has dissipated with time, and eminent domain abuse continues to cause problems. While some states have attempted to address the issue, strong federal legislation would help us all sleep more soundly. Passing the Private Property Rights Protection Act would be an important step forward.

  Perhaps more disconcerting is the rise in civil forfeitures, where law enfo
rcement and other agencies seize property from criminal enterprises. More and more innocent people are being caught in an ill-defined dragnet that has stripped them of their property. Consider the recent case of a grocer in Michigan. Despite receiving a clean bill of health from the IRS less than a year before, the local family business had its bank account wiped out in January 2013 after a secret warrant was issued over deposit transactions that allegedly violated banking laws. In fact, there were no violations, and the activity in question was due to the need to comply with the store’s insurance policy. Yet that grocer in Michigan is still waiting for a day in court to plead his case.24

  The vast increase in data collection by the federal government and the rise of the government’s Big Data policies are putting more and more people under a spotlight. Unfortunately, they may never know, because many of these decisions are made by faceless bureaucrats with warrants granted by secret courts. Civil forfeiture laws should be wiped from the books; without being convicted of a crime, no individual should have to hand over his private property to the government.

  Besides outright takings of property, the growing regulatory state that we live in also threatens our property and livelihoods. The federal government has stopped people from building homes in the name of environmental protection; local governments are passing new laws to keep food trucks from competing against local restaurants, alternatives to taxis, such as Uber, are being threatened with regulation prompted by taxicabs, and the IRS is now deciding to issue new regulations about who can be a tax preparer. At every turn the growth of regulation is a threat to our property and our liberty. And more often than not, it is wielded by those with political clout against those without. The regulatory state offers political insiders more levers to press and more avenues of access in order to protect their interests from new businesses trying to enter the market. Paring back the regulatory state—which costs the nation $1.2 trillion a year—is a sure way to enhance the freedoms we enjoy.

  12. DEFEND YOUR RIGHT TO KNOW

  The Internet has changed everything. Creating a digital community that spans the globe has led to unprecedented disintermediation as individuals gained the freedom to interconnect on their own, no filters, no hierarchy, no middleman required. EBay, the online auction house, has made every individual a potential retailer, while allowing customers an unprecedented scope of access to retailers across the world. Access to information and the ability to communicate across all the corners of the world have empowered individuals in ways that were inconceivable even a few years ago.

  Why do you think it is that tyrants of all stripes now go after control of the Internet and readily available social networking platforms first? They want more control, and political disintermediation online shifts control and freedom—and a real voice—to the end user. “Most of the world’s dictators share a common fear,” argues Joel Brinkley, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist now at Stanford University. It’s social media. “Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the rest have spread around the world and are now being used as cudgels against authoritarian leaders in places like Vietnam, Russia, Belarus and Bahrain. In those states and so many others, the leaders are attacking tweeters and bloggers as if they were armed revolutionaries.” In Iran, “bloggers are given long prison terms or sentenced to death, charged with ‘enmity against God’ and subverting national security.”25

  The implications are profound, particularly in terms of participatory politics. In the fight for freedom, the Internet is everything, and we should fight to protect it from government encroachment and censorship.

  As more and more of our lives are carried out online, the data cloud is growing, and so is the potential for abuse. The government can now readily access private information, as when the IRS illegally seized 60 million personal medical records.26 At the same time, the rules governing federal access to online information are murky as to whether a search warrant is required. As Declan McCullagh noted, “An IRS 2009 Search Warrant Handbook obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union argues that ‘emails and other transmissions generally lose their reasonable expectation of privacy and thus their Fourth Amendment protection once they have been sent from an individual’s computer.’ ”27

  It is important, then, to ensure that the liberties enshrined in the Constitution extend to every sphere of activity—the Constitution does not stop where technology begins.

  Many of the current laws governing online privacy were written for a world that no longer exists. For example, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)—which sets the rules for law enforcement agencies accessing private data online—was written before anyone heard of Facebook or Dropbox. Online storage was expensive, and no one envisioned a world of cloud computing; data was only protected from warrantless searches for 180 days, because no one could possibly store information any longer than that. Consequently, under ECPA, any data older than 180 days are fair game for law enforcement. No warrants are necessary.

  As is often the case, technology evolved in ways that the lawmakers in Washington could not envision. Today, virtually all Internet users engage in some form of cloud computing, whether it’s Facebook, an online music collection, or simply archiving emails. As a result, much of our lives is accessible to law enforcement agencies without ever needing a warrant. The laws must change with the times. Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Pat Leahy (D-VT) have offered an amendment to ECPA to make it clear that government must obtain a warrant prior to accessing private online information.

  In addition to arbitrary incursions into individual privacy, a growing government presence on the Internet poses significant threats to free speech and online activism.

  Both government policy and businesses seeking refuge from the intense competition of the Internet may introduce barriers that ultimately limit consumer choice or access to information.

  In 2011, this drama played out in Washington, as Big Hollywood and other content providers sought tough new laws to stop Internet infringements on their material. In the Senate, the debate focused on PIPA—the Protect Intellectual Property Act. In the House the debate targeted SOPA—the Stop Online Piracy Act.

  Intellectual property has long been the topic of heated debates because the definitions are not clear and the exceptions ambiguous. The founders understood the need to balance innovation with intellectual property. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution—often called the copyright clause—states that Congress has the authority “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

  A period of exclusive ownership or copyright provides an incentive to produce works that might otherwise not be undertaken. At the same time, this unique clause suggests that the founders viewed intellectual property differently from other forms of property, so much so that it is addressed separately.

  Since first establishing a copyright of fourteen years in 1790, the span of protection has increased dramatically, thanks to pressure from interested parties. Today, it stands at the life of the author plus another seventy years, or in the case of corporate authorship, 125 years from the creation or ninety-five years from the year of publication, whichever comes first.28 These politically defined “rights” seem like a subversion of the founders’ intent.

  How much more inspiration to innovate does a 125-year copyright provide?

  This largesse to powerful business interests has always been balanced by the doctrine of fair use, which, under certain circumstances, allows limited use of copyrighted materials without first seeking permission from the owner of the copyright.

  The Internet poses a new threat to intellectual property owners, allowing individuals to copy and transmit content, often at almost zero cost. SOPA and PIPA were pushed by Hollywood interests in response, to clamp down on piracy. But these ill-conceived measures effectively set up the infrastructure for the federal government to censor the Internet, granting unprecedented authori
ty to shut down millions of websites that failed to meet the new standards. In effect, these bills would have made the government the official online enforcer, mandating search engines and third parties to remove links to websites deemed unacceptable.

  While these efforts to censor the Internet were defeated by a broad coalition of grassroots and civil liberties organizations, new threats loom. A new, more sweeping proposal is CISPA, which stands for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. This legislation would provide broad new powers to the government. It would allow “companies to identify and obtain ‘threat information’ by looking at your private information,” according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It is written so broadly that it allows companies to hand over large swaths of personal information to the government with no judicial oversight—effectively creating a ‘cybersecurity’ loophole in all existing privacy laws.”29

  Restrictions on the flow of information have important political implications. Regulation and other formal constraints on the Internet have the potential to shape the information available to individuals and therefore the political debate. We can’t go back to the world of three nightly news channels and have the same level of political discourse that we do today. The Internet has to remain free from government control and unnecessary regulation, free to provide activists a platform to educate and mobilize, and free to anyone wishing to exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech.

  ALL THESE ISSUES COULD be acted upon by Congress this year, if the political will were there.

  If the will were there. How many times have you heard that before, all the while watching our “representation” in Washington drive headlong over the cliff? The lemmings seem utterly unaware, or at least wholly unconcerned, that a dire end quickly approaches. And that’s the point. They won’t do the right thing when left alone; they will run our country right off the edge, pointing the finger of blame at one another even as they plummet to their own undoing.