Peter Robinson On ‘The Loss Of Individual Liberty’
Peter Robinson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Forbes columnist, writes that the challenge for our generation in politics is to “keep our liberty” by building upon the intellectual defense of freedom offered by Milton Friedman, Bill Buckley and other 20th century luminaries.
Forbes – The Loss of Individual Liberty – 11/14/08 – Over dinner with Milton Friedman several years before he died, I offered the great man a compliment. He refused it.
I had just re-read God and Man at Yale, the 1951 book in which William F. Buckley Jr., denounced the leftist attitudes he had encountered among the Yale faculty and administration as an undergraduate. Buckley singled out the department of economics as the most collectivist department on the campus. “Today,” I said, “nobody would call the economics department at a major university ‘collectivist.’”
Academia as a whole may have continued its long, sorry wobble to the left, I continued, but the economics profession had proved an exception, moving the other way. Departments of economics across the country now grasped the importance of free markets. “Mises, Hayek, Stigler and you,” I told Friedman. “You’ve transformed the intellectual climate. You’ve won.”
Friedman shook his head. “We may have won the intellectual battle,” he replied, “but in practical politics, it’s difficult to see that we’ve had any effect at all.”
Government spending had continued to grow, he explained. After a pause during the Reagan years, regulations had once again proliferated. For a moment, Friedman grew silent. Then he looked at me.
“The challenge for my generation,” he said, “was to provide an intellectual defense of liberty. The challenge for your generation is to keep it.”
As we face unceasing encroachment by the federal government in our daily lives, we would do well to accept that the ursurpation of fundamental freedoms is as likely to occur from the left as it is the right. Those who seek power — whether for good or ill — too often become enamored with it.
President Bush has left us with an entrenched federal bureaucracy in public education, expanded government involvement in medicare and medicaid, an unreformed social security/entitlement system and new wiretapping powers.
President-elect Obama is likely to strip union workers of their right to a secret ballot, increase taxpayer funding for abortion and other methods of infanticide and fundamentally change the relationship between government and healthcare.
If there’s one thing Americans of all political stripes could rally behind, it would be a movement to reject federal intervention and government controls, and limit wherever possible federal interference in the daily lives of the average citizen.
Our individual liberty hinges upon it.
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