• Tag Archives Constitution

  • What Are Rights? This Is What the American Founders Believed

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    In 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that everyone is endowed with “unalienable Rights.” Years later, the Bill of Rights elaborated on those rights.

    Subsequently, the rights of many (although not all, tragically and atrociously) Americans were secured to a greater degree than in any polity in human history. The results were spectacular and gave “rights” a luster that has endured to this day.

    But the word “rights” has long since been hijacked by enemies of the original idea of rights. To steal the prestige earned by that idea, they have hitched the word to their favorite government-granted entitlements. They champion “rights” to welfare, health care, education, internet access, etc.

    But, this is far removed from what the American founders meant by rights. They meant what their philosophical hero John Locke meant. So, let’s explore what Locke meant by rights.

    In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke wrote that, “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself.”

    In modern usage, “property” refers to external possessions. But in Locke’s time, the word encompassed anything that is “properly” owned by someone, including one’s own body. For every human being, the exclusive use of his own “person” or body is “properly his,” as Locke wrote. This later became known as the doctrine of “self-ownership.”

    Locke then posited that when an individual works on previously un-owned natural resources, he appropriates those resources: i.e., makes them his property. Locke referred to such property in external goods as an individual’s “possessions” or “estate.” An individual can transfer ownership of any of his possessions to anyone else, either in exchange or as a gift.

    All of the other rights that Locke posited in his Two Treatises (the right of self-defense, the right of revolution, etc.) are extrapolations of these two fundamental rights: the right of self-ownership and the right to own external possessions, either through original appropriation (or “homesteading”) or through being the recipient in a voluntary transfer of ownership.

    Thus, for Locke, and by extension for the American founders, “rights” are ultimately a matter of ownership or “property” in the original broader sense. Individuals have rights to their “lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property,” as Locke wrote.

    This means that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions…” To deprive someone of life by murder, health by assault, or liberty by coercion would violate that victim’s “property in his own person.” And to deprive someone of possessions by theft would violate the victim’s “estate,” i.e., property in those possessions.

    This is what the authors of the Declaration of Independence were referring to when they proclaimed the “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” And this is what the framers of the Bill of Rights were elaborating upon when they drafted the first ten amendments of the US Constitution.

    By “rights,” they did not mean government-granted entitlements. Indeed they would have rejected such entitlements as incompatible with true rights. Government can only enforce someone’s phony “right” to welfare, health care, education, or internet access by depriving someone else of their genuine rights: either by seizing their earnings or commandeering their labor.

    And such rights violations only serve to hamper much more effective—and rights-respecting—private efforts to abundantly provide goods and services like material security, health care, education, and internet access.

    It was respect for genuine rights, not the provision of government-granted entitlements, that made the American experiment the wonder of the world. And only a re-embrace of rights will make America exemplary again.

    This essay was originally published on Dan Sanchez’s Substack publication “Letters on Liberty.”


    Dan Sanchez

    Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in chief of FEE.org.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • The Palmer Raids: America’s Forgotten Reign of Terror

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


    Exactly a hundred years ago this morning—on January 3, 1920—Americans woke up to discover just how little their own government regarded the cherished Bill of Rights. During the night, some 4,000 of their fellow citizens were rounded up and jailed for what amounted, in most cases, to no good reason at all and no due process, either.

    Welcome to the story of the Palmer Raids, named for their instigator, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though largely forgotten today, they shouldn’t be. They constituted a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty since King George III quartered troops in private homes.

    The terror during the night of January 2-3, 1920, shocked and frightened many citizens. In her 1971 book, America’s Reign of Terror: World War I, the Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht wrote:

    [T]error is not just a body count. Terror exists when a person can be sentenced to years in prison for an idle remark; when people are pulled out of their beds and arrested; when 4,000 persons are seized in a single night; and when arrests and searches are made without warrants. Moreover, for each person sent to prison for his views, many others were silenced. The author amply documents the government’s insensitivity to civil liberties during this period, its frequent brutality and callousness, and the personal grief that ensued.

    The targets of the Palmer raids were radicals and leftists deemed by the Wilson administration to be hostile to “American values.” Ironically, none of those arrested had done anywhere near as much harm to those values as the man living in the White House—Woodrow Wilson, arguably the worst of the country’s 45 presidents. More on that and the Palmer Raids after some background.

    This wasn’t the first time the government in Washington had trampled the Bill of Rights. No less than the administration of John Adams, an American founding patriot, briefly shut down newspapers and dissenting opinion with its Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798. Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and arrested thousands of political opponents in Northern states.

    The most immediate precedents for the Palmer Raids were wartime measures of the same administration just a few years before. Wilson campaigned for re-election in 1916 on a boast that he had “kept us out of war” even as he authorized non-neutral aid for Britain and France. He then feigned surprise when Germany declared unrestricted warfare on ships carrying supplies to its enemies. It was the pretext for American entry into World War I in April 1917.

    “Wars are dirty but crusades are holy,” writes Feuerlicht, “so Wilson turned the war into a crusade.” The conflict became “the war to end all wars” and a war “to make the world safe for democracy” while the president made war on democracy at home.

    America was formally at war for only a week when Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Its job was to convince Americans the war was right and just. A national venture in thought control, it bludgeoned the people with Wilson’s view until it became their view, as well. It was government propaganda on a scale never before seen in the US, flooding the country with CPI-approved war news, speakers, school materials, posters, buttons, stickers—the works.

    Two months later, under intense pressure from the White House, Congress passed the Espionage Act. Any person who made “false reports or false statements with intent to interfere” with the official war effort could be punished with 20 years in jail or a fine of $10,000 (at least a quarter-million in today’s dollars), or both. It was amended in May 1918 by the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to write or speak anything “disloyal or abusive” about the government, the Constitution, the flag, or a US military uniform.

    Wilson pushed hard for Congress to give him extraordinary powers to muzzle the media, insisting to The New York Times that press censorship “was absolutely necessary to public safety.” According to Christopher M. Finan in his 2007 book, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America, a blizzard of hostile editorials killed that in Congress, fortunately.

    Wilson’s attorney general at the time, Thomas Watt Gregory, strongly encouraged Americans to spy on each other, to become “volunteer detectives” and report every suspicion to the Justice Department. In a matter of months, the department was receiving about 1,500 accusations of disloyalty every single day.

    Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson jumped into the cause with both feet, ordering that local postmasters send him any publications they discovered that might “embarrass” the government. The Post Office began destroying certain mail instead of delivering it, even banning certain magazines altogether. An issue of one periodical was outlawed for no more reason than it suggested the war be paid for by taxes instead of loans. Others were forbidden because they criticized our allies, the British and the French. “Throughout the war and long after it ended, [Burleson] was the sole judge of which mailed publications Americans could or could not read,” writes Feuerlicht.

    Individuals were hauled into court for expressing reservations about Wilson or his war. One of many examples involved one Reverend Clarence H. Waldron, who distributed a pamphlet claiming the war was un-Christian. For that, he was sentenced to 15 years. In another case, a filmmaker named Robert Goldstein earned a 10-year prison award for producing a movie about the American Revolution, The Spirit of ’76. His crime? Depicting the British in a negative light. They were allies now, so that sort of thing was a no-no.

    Of the roughly 2,000 people prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, not a single one of them was a German spy. They were all Americans whose thoughts or deeds (almost none of them violent) ran counter to those of the man in the big White House. Hundreds were deported after minimal due process even though they were neither illegal immigrants nor convicted criminals.

    The famous socialist, union activist, and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs found himself crosswise with Wilson for opposing both the draft and the war. In April 1919, five months after the war ended, he was convicted of “seditious” speech, sentenced to ten years in prison, and denied the right to vote for the rest of his life. Sometime later, when Debs heard that Wilson would refuse to pardon him, he poignantly responded, “It is he [Wilson], not I, who needs a pardon.”

    Allow me to digress for a moment on the Debs case because it brings to mind a current controversy. President Trump was impeached by the House last month because he allegedly tried to cripple a political opponent by pushing for an investigation into that opponent’s possible corruption. But there was hardly a peep from the media in 1919, even though Debs ran for president four times before and would run yet again, and Wilson himself was flirting with the idea of running for a third term in 1920.

    Wilson’s health eventually precluded another run, but Debs ran from his prison cell and garnered more than 900,000 votes. Wilson never pardoned Debs, but Republican President Warren G. Harding did.

    Hostilities in Europe ended in November 1918, but the Wilson administration’s assault on civil rights continued. With the Germans vanquished, the new pretext to bully Americans became known as the “Red Scare”—the notion that communists under the influence of the new Leninist regime in Moscow were the big threat in the country.

    Meantime, in March 1919, Wilson hired a new attorney general—A. Mitchell Palmer—who was determined to tackle it one way or another, especially after two attempted bombings of his home. Palmer was just what Wilson was looking for: “young, militant, progressive and fearless,” in the president’s own words.

    The first of the two biggest Palmer Raids occurred on November 7, 1919. With Palmer’s newly appointed deputy J. Edgar Hoover spearheading the operation, federal agents scooped up hundreds of alleged radicals, subversives, communists, anarchists, and “undesirable” but legal immigrants in 12 cities—some 650 in New York City alone. Beatings, even in police stations, were not uncommon.

    Palmer later said,

    If . . . some of my agents out in the field . . . were a little rough and unkind, or short and curt, with these alien agitators . . . I think it might well be overlooked.

    He pointed to a few bombings as evidence that the sedition problem was huge and required “decisive” action.

    January 2, 1920—when the largest and most aggressive batch of Palmer Raids was carried out—was a night of terror: about 4,000 arrests across 23 states, often without legitimate search warrants and with the arrestees frequently tossed into makeshift jails in substandard conditions.

    Leftists and leftist organizations were the targets, but even visitors to their meeting halls were caught up in the dragnet. No friend of liberty then or now, The Washington Post opined, “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties.” A few smaller raids were conducted, but nothing on the scale of January 2-3.

    Palmer thought he would ride the Red Scare into the White House, but he lost his bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination later that year. Meantime, the courts largely nullified his dirty work. By June 1920, the raids were history. In the fall, the Democrats lost big as Republican Warren Harding ushered in “an era of normalcy.”

    It’s hard to find any lingering trace of the “subversive” work the Palmer Raids were ostensibly intended to combat. Thousands were arrested when actual crimes were committed by a relative few. Certainly, none of the arrested Americans gave us a progressive income tax or a central bank or violations of free speech and due process. It was Woodrow Wilson and his friends who gave us all that, and much more mischief.

    Let us remember the Palmer Raids and the administration that carried them out as black marks against American liberty, hopefully never to be repeated.


    Lawrence W. Reed

    Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Ambassador for Global Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also author of Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • The Antifederalists Were Eerily Prophetic

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


    Most school kids are left with the impression that the US Constitution was the inevitable follow-up to the Declaration of Independence and the war with King George. What they miss out on is the exciting debate that took place after the war and before the Constitution, a debate that concerned the dangers of creating a federal government at all.

    Everyone knows about the Federalists who pushed the Constitution. But far less known are the Antifederalists who warned with good reason against the creation of a new centralized government, and just after so much blood had been spilled getting rid of one.

    The first of the Antifederalist Papers appeared in 1789. The Antifederalists were opponents of ratifying the US Constitution as it would create what would become an overbearing central government.

    As the losers in that debate, they are largely overlooked today. But that does not mean they were wrong or that we are not indebted to them.

    In many ways, the group has been misnamed. Federalism refers to the system of decentralized government. This group defended states’ rights—the very essence of federalism—against the Federalists, who would have been more accurately described as Nationalists. Nonetheless, what they predicted would be the results of the Constitution turned out to be true in most every respect.

    The Antifederalists warned us that the cost Americans would bear in both liberty and resources for the government that would evolve under the Constitution would rise sharply. That is why their objections led to the Bill of Rights, to limit that tendency.

    Antifederalists opposed the Constitution on the grounds that its checks on federal power would be undermined by expansive interpretations of promoting the “general welfare” (which would be claimed for every law) and the “all laws necessary and proper” clause (which would be used to override limits on delegated federal powers) creating a federal government with unwarranted and undelegated powers that were bound to be abused.

    One could quibble with the mechanisms the Antifederalists predicted would lead to constitutional tyranny. For instance, they did not see that the Commerce Clause would come to be called “the everything clause” in law schools, justifying almost any conceivable federal intervention—because the necessary distortion of its meaning was so great even Antifederalists couldn’t imagine the government could get away with it.

    And they could not have foreseen how the 14th Amendment and its interpretation would extend federal domination over the states after the Civil War. But despite that, it is very difficult to argue with their conclusions in light of the current reach of our government, which doesn’t just intrude upon, but often overwhelms Americans today.

    Therefore, it merits remembering the Antifederalists’ prescient arguments and how unfortunate is the virtual absence of modern Americans who share their concerns.

    One of the most insightful of the Antifederalists was Robert Yates, a New York judge who, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, withdrew because the convention was exceeding its instructions. Yates wrote as Brutus in the debates over the Constitution. Given his experience as a judge, his claim that the Supreme Court would become a source of almost unlimited federal overreaching was particularly insightful.

    Brutus asserted that the Supreme Court envisioned under the Constitution would become a source of massive abuse because they were beyond the control “both of the people and the legislature,” and not subject to being “corrected by any power above them.” As a result, he objected to the fact that its provisions justifying the removal of judges didn’t extend to rulings that went beyond their constitutional authority, leading to judicial tyranny.

    Brutus argued that when constitutional grounds for making rulings were absent, the Court would create grounds “by their own decisions.” He thought that the power it would command would be so irresistible that the judiciary would use it to make law, manipulating the meanings of arguably vague clauses to justify it.

    The Supreme Court would interpret the Constitution according to its alleged “spirit” rather than being restricted to just the “letter” of its written words (as the doctrine of enumerated rights, spelled out in the 10th Amendment, would require).

    Further, rulings derived from whatever the court decided its spirit was would effectively “have the force of law,” due to the absence of constitutional means to “control their adjudications” and “correct their errors.” This constitutional failing would compound over time in a “silent and imperceptible manner,” through precedents that build on one another.

    Expanded judicial power would empower justices to shape the federal government however they desired because the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretations would control the effective power vested in government and its different branches. That would hand the Supreme Court ever-increasing power, in direct contradiction to Alexander Hamilton’s argument in Federalist 78 that the Supreme Court would be “the least dangerous branch.”

    Brutus predicted that the Supreme Court would adopt “very liberal” principles of interpreting the Constitution. He argued that there had never in history been a court with such power and with so few checks upon it, giving the Supreme Court “immense powers” that were not only unprecedented, but perilous for a nation founded on the principle of consent of the governed. Given the extent to which citizens’ power to effectively withhold their consent from federal actions has been eviscerated, it is hard to argue with Brutus’s conclusion.

    Brutus accurately described both the cause (the absence of sufficient enforceable restraints on the size and scope of the federal government) and the consequences (expanding burdens and increasing invasions of liberty) of what would become the expansive federal powers we now see all around us.

    But today, Brutus would conclude that he had been far too optimistic. The federal government has grown exponentially larger than he could ever have imagined (in part because he was writing when only direct, e.g., excise taxes and the small federal government they could finance were possible before the 16th Amendment opened the way for a federal income tax in 1913), far exceeding its constitutionally enumerated powers, despite the Bill of Rights’ constraints against it. The result burdens citizens beyond his worst nightmare.

    The judicial tyranny that was accurately and unambiguously predicted by Brutus and other Antifederalists shows that in essential ways, they were right and that modern Americans still have a lot to learn from them.

    We need to understand their arguments and take them seriously now, if there is to be any hope of restraining the federal government to the limited powers it was actually granted in the Constitution, given its current tendency to accelerate its growth beyond Constitutional limits.

    This article is republished with permission from the Mises Institute. 


    Gary M. Galles

    Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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