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Monday, July 18, 2005
Originalism
Jay Tea at Wizbang has posted an important bit of thinking about Constitutional assumptions:
[T]he United States Constitution was written by adults for adults. More specifically, at the time it was written for white, property-owning males -- those who, at the time, were considered to be mature and responsible members of society. That has expanded since, to all adult citizens who have not forfeited their franchise by conviction of a crime, but the essential concept remains the same: the Constitution was written for mature, responsible people.The underlying presumption behind that is that rights and responsibilities are inseparably intertwined. Paul Harvey phrases it as "self-government without self-discipline is self-defeating," and I kind of like that.
[...snip...]
David Gerrold nailed it when he defined "freedom" as "the right to be responsible for one's actions." If we're going to have the government step in and protect us from our "bad" choices, how long will it be before it also starts intervening in our "good" choices? And who exactly will decide which choices are good or bad?
Thanks, but no thanks. I know some of my choices are pretty rotten, but they're MINE, and I neither want nor need anyone to "protect" me.
Some of this is "right on!" material, but some requires more explicit thought than conservatives and libertarians are accustomed to giving it. The Framers did not give any attention to the rights and prerogatives of "wards:" women, children, the crippled, the mentally diseased. In their view, such rights didn't exist. If one could not assume full and effective responsibility for oneself, one could not claim rights.
We've moved away from that assumption these past two centuries. In some ways, it was necessary. Women have every right to be treated as men's legal equals. Some explicit protections of the rights of children to their lives, and to adequate care from their guardians, had to be entered into our legal code. But it would be inappropriate to dismiss the Framers' core assumption -- that rights are married to a matching set of responsibilities, and that one must accept the latter if one is to claim the former -- as sweepingly as our contemporary advocates for the Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnibenevolent State would have us do.
No less a mind than Milton Friedman has written: "Freedom is a tenable objective for responsible individuals only. We do not believe in freedom for children or madmen." But freedom is only the short-form expression of the bundle of individual rights whose legal and social recognition characterizes a free society. Rudolph Giuliani understood this, which is why New York City is no longer a web of squalor where one must run broken-field like a star halfback to evade the "squeegee men," the panhandlers, and the variously drug-addicted and mentally diseased "homeless."
This idea must be resuscitated and discussed openly.
Comments
This is absolutely beneath contempt.
Posted by John Sabotta on 07/19/2005 at 02:31 PM(chuckle)
Are you really saying that freedom and responsibility are nessesarily disconnected from each other, John?
Posted by Bithead on 07/19/2005 at 10:38 PM
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