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Written by Tibor Machan
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Friday, 29 December 2006 |
In a
mildly interesting exchange in The New Republic, between one of the magazine's
senior editors, Jonathan Chait and Cato Institute scholar Brink Lindsay, the
idea of a possible alliance between liberals (like Chait) and libertarians
(like Lindsay) was recently debated.
No one, I
think, really believed in a serious prospect for this alliance but my own
attention was piqued when Chait responded to Lindsay's suggestion that Social
Security ought to be (somewhat) privatized as this could appeal to "younger
liberals."
(I must
admit it always irritates me to call these folks "liberals" when they
have no interest in human liberty whatsoever any longer!)
Chait
asks, "And why would we force retirees into the individual medical
insurance market?"
Focus on
his use of the word "force."
The Social
Security system has been notorious for perpetrating the extortion of millions
and millions for decades: "You are only going to work lawfully if you pay
the government what it has decided you must pay it. When you retire, the government will decide how much of it you
will get back." Talking about doing some forcing!
So-called
liberals have for ages gotten away with this, claiming that if you do not
submit to being coerced into providing the funds they want, you are forcing
others to do something. So if I don't want to be taxed - to help the war on
drugs or the Social Security system or whatever else government decides the
funds extorted via taxation should go to -
then I am "forcing" someone to do things like supporting drug
abuse or going without insurance.
Notice
immediately how insane this idea is: If
I didn't exist at all, and the funds I might have produced but didn't are not
there for these various programs, somehow some nonexistent I would have forced
the recipients to go without.
Now, of
course, if I do exist and have the legal right to keep my very own resources, I
would not be forcing anyone to do or be anything at all. I certainly wouldn't
be forcing retirees to go without insurance since I would not have stolen a
thing from them, only refused to allow government to steal money from me.
For
centuries enemies of human liberty have played this nasty game, stealing
concepts that support freedom and putting them to use opposing it.
Like the concept
of individual rights, which used to concern securing our liberties but now,
after years of sophistic conceptual gerrymandering, is used to refer to alleged
entitlements.
When
people are "entitled" by the government to get things they haven't paid for, it
means others' lives and works must pay for them. Thus the modern liberal achieves the exact reversal of the idea
of individual rights as John Locke and the American founders understood them.
Liberals
like Chait are adept at rolling out this kind of sophistry. Instead of
admitting, plainly and honestly, that what he wants is to steal from those who
work and take care of their own retirement and hand over this loot to those who
haven't (or haven't enough), he pretends that not stealing for this purpose
amounts to forcing people into doing without old age insurance.
Friends of
freedom should never accept this kind of verbal trickery. See it for what it
is, trying to win political arguments by subterfuge.
Tibor Machan holds the R.C. Hoiles Professorship in
business ethics and free enterprise at Chapman University in Orange,
California.
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