Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate their liberty. Liberty typically is conceived as freedom from domination from foreigners. We kicked out the British in order to be free of them. We defeated the Japanese and the Nazis and the communists in order to preserve that liberty. But virtually every day, Americans are deprived of liberty in nicks and slices, dribs and drabs, nickels and dimes. Foreigners aren't to blame. We do it to ourselves.
Liberty consists of being able to possess and wield resources free of government control. This is why private property -- your real estate, your car, your bank account and the other tangible assets -- is essential for liberty. Without property, liberty remains theoretical. Article 50 of the Soviet Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press. But Soviet citizens were not allowed to own a press. It's hard to exercise a right if you are denied the material resources needed to do so.
To the extent that the government helps itself to our resources, or limits the ways we may use them, our liberty is reduced. Taxation and government regulation reduce liberty. You may approve of the taxes and the regulations, but that doesn't change the fact that they make you and everybody else less free.
And it should be understood that democracy is not liberty. If a majority of neighbors want to, they can vote to have the government take or regulate your resources just as surely as a dictator could. New school levy, anyone? The fact that you had a chance to vote no may be some consolation, but it is not the same as being free to use your resources as you choose. Voting is not liberty.
The U.S. Constitution was conceived as a limit on government, to preserve large areas in which individuals can act autonomously. But over the past 70 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has changed the constitution into Silly Putty, allowing the government to do virtually anything it wants, often through expansive readings of the Commerce Clause: If it affects the economy, even in farfetched ways, the government can regulate it.
Right now, Congress is laying plans to make major inroads on the liberty that remains, with the health-care overhaul and the cap-and-trade bill.
The latter, which aims to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, would drive up the cost of energy and dictate how we can use the energy that we still can afford. It would dictate what appliances we can have and the sort of houses we can build, among many other things. The health-care overhaul most likely will require each of us to buy health insurance whether or not we want or need it. (This should be unconstitutional, but we'll see.) It will penalize us if we refuse. Either way, more of our resources will be appropriated (the overhaul would drive up costs, by the way) and our freedom to do what we want reduced.
Of course, we've been trading away our liberty step by step for a long time as government has gotten bigger and more intrusive. So why single out these two pieces of legislation? Because they would be giant steps. More than a sixth of the productive activity in our economy is tied up in health care. The cost of energy affects the entire economy and every aspect of life. If the cost of energy increases, we all have to make do with less. How we work, live, travel and play would be regulated by our energy overlords.
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