Why I am not a Libertarian, Part 1
I’ve been reading Neal Boortz’s book Somebody’s Gotta Say It. The shortest chapter in the book is the one about Abortion. Neal says he’s opposed to abortion, especially when it’s used as a method of birth control. But he considers himself pro-choice because he believes the “government should [not] be powerful enough to put a gun to woman’s head to force her to have a child she doesn’t want to have.”
His underlying point, once you get past the hyperbole, is not something with which I disagree. I don’t want government mixed up in the private lives of people. The Federal Government especially has no business being involved there. Our country was made the most free of any nation on earth in part because of the system of Federalism we adopted which gives supremacy to the States when it come to the lives of citizens.
And yet, his application of the point is amiss. He believes the biggest threat to our way of life is the encroachments of government. But if our government is to work the way it was intended, there must be no reason for it to get involved. Our system is, as Franklin said as he exited the Hall, “a Republic, if you can keep it.” What did he mean by that, especially the “if you can keep it” part? John Adams wrote,
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
What was his point? Precisely that he understood that a system of self-government only works when there is a system ancillary to government that maintains and supports self-government, and that if that system should fail, and self-government begin to erode, then the Constitution could no longer function as intended.
And what would the result be? The Constitution allows for great leeway in the number and type of legislation that may be created, and since many of the checks on that power are upheld by personal virtue, once those checks are gone there is no limit to the kind of legislation that can be created. The Constitution allows for the creation of a tyranny as venal and brutal as any in all of human history, so long as the legislature can convince the people to support it and the President to sign it.
So, back to Boortz. If a woman is on her way to the abortion clinic, there are choices she has already made. The first is to engage in sexual behavior. If she doesn’t want a child, why is she acting sexually? Because she’s selfish? Because she’s got low self-esteem? Because she’s rebelling against the religious traditions of her parents? It really doesn’t matter to this discussion. What does matter is that she is failing to exercise self-government. Her actions affect the operation of our government in a destructive way.
Maybe not immediately, and maybe not directly, but her lack of self-government will force another government to act. How many of the laws of the 20th Century were designed with this in mind? Social Security laws, helmet laws, seat-belt laws, Income tax laws, anti-smoking laws; the list could go on and on. Why has this happened? Because, as we have learned from history, when a government fails a power vacuum is created and other powers will fill that void. In our case, self-government has failed and the vacuum has been filled by the next strongest power: the Federal Government.1
In the case of abortion, the government should be involved in preventing her from aborting the baby. This is not because the government should infringe upon her “reproductive rights.” It is because there is another life which is affected by her actions: that of the unborn child. Government has the duty to protect the lives of all it’s people, regardless of how inconvenient one of those lives might be to another.
Boortz’s position on abortion is wrong because abortion is not a true choice. It is an action intended to avoid the consequences of a choice. Our Rights are intertwined with our choices. Choices have consequences; Rights have duties. When we exercise our Rights and make a choice, we have a duty to accept the consequences. More and more there are people who go through their lives attempting to avoid the consequences of their choices, but still demanding their rights. In my opinion, they should be forced to face those consequences.
The Founding Fathers had the right idea. It was once a crime in this country to have an abortion. Why? I believe it was partly because of the religious character of the people, and partly because they understood a correct principle: that it is a crime to avoid the consequences of misbehavior. If this is not true, why have laws? Laws are intended to force people to face the consequences of their actions here and now. And we have laws against avoiding the enforcement of those laws. They deal with “obstruction of justice,” “perjury,” “witness tampering,” and “evading arrest.” A nation of laws is also a nation of duty.
I am a proponent of limited government. Government was instituted to protect society from those elements that are dangerous to its continued existence which cannot be practically addressed by the individual. But government should be “bound down by the chains of the Constitution,” as Jefferson stated. Those chains are kept bright with the oil of self-government, applied by a people anxious to attend to their duties.
Neal Boortz believes that the greatest threat to our Constitutional Republic is the “Imperial Federal Government.” He misses the real culprit. The real threat is We the People neglecting our duties regarding self-government. When that happens, some other power of government must step in to protect society from danger. And controlling that government is a task several orders of magnitude more difficult than self-control.
1If this power vacuum had been created in the early 19th Century, the void would have been filled by the individual State governments, being the next strongest power. But the Civil War initiated a change in the power structure in the United States that made the Federal Government the supreme power.
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September 14th, 2007
11:33 pm
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