Beyond the Constitution


The principle behind the principal document
I've been thinking about this one for a while, sort of at the back of my skull. It's hard to know what brought it all together. Maybe it was this entry at Sunni Maravillosa's blog or the Butler Schaffer article she cites. Maybe it was my many attempts to finish Keen's The Cult of the Amateur that puts an almost perverse faith in experts simply because they are experts (I will be reviewing this one when I finish). And maybe it was watching the failures in Iraq all in the name of creating a stable government. Maybe it was seeing some of the constant abuses that our own government inflicts on the Constitution. And maybe it was watching the almost messianic hope that some liberals placed in a Democrat-controlled Congress.

I think it was Iraq that really crystalized things.

I still believe that "intervening" in Iraq was the moral choice given our involvement in the various Middle East messes for decades. But like many, I never had a clear idea of what the goal should be. Oh, I was making the right noises about a democratic government and the rule of law, but that wasn't a practical goal.

It wasn't until I was reading Salt: A History that I remembered. I am quoting myself here, so it's going to be green.

Trade and tolerance of other cultures are responsible for the ideals that led to America being founded. The pattern is almost always the same. Societies that have high levels of trade and tolerance (and later immigration and emigration) tend to grow incredibly fast, usually because of all those ideas percolating from group to group in the society. Culture spreads, economies boom, and the world changes. It happens again and again.

Greece. Rome. China. Britain. France. Spain. America. The more open a culture is to outside influences, the more it grows and spreads. The more a culture focuses only on itself, the more insular it becomes and the more it retreats.

Although I am an originalist when it comes to the U.S. Constitution, it has been subverted by the legalists. We need to get back to the "founding spirit." Fortunately that is not to hard to find. If I had to boil down every idea behind my American dream to one sentence, I know what I would say.

It's freedom of choice.

Everything else is the bells and whistles and fireworks and parades. Rule of law? It exists SOLELY to protect the individual and voluntary exchange. And that is what we keep overlooking. Good law follows the free market. You can't build a legal framework and then expect to have freedom. That is putting the warehouse before the horse, forgetting the wagon, the supplier, and the cashflow altogether.

If the individual has no choice, they have no freedom. It doesn't matter if it is religion or pancake mix or names on a ballot. Choice is freedom. And choice has to include rejecting. Freedom to walk away is a part of choice. Freedom to create your own is a part of choice.

But hey, if the Powers-That-Wanna-Be can stack the deck so your only apparent choices are one of their choices, they will.

So for now on, when someone limits my choices, I want to know why.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sun - July 22, 2007 at 03:02 PM  Tag


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