An Even Trade?

by Joseph S. Bommarito

(A version of this essay was published as “ ‘Forever War’ Trades Rights for False Promise of Security” in the October 16 print edition of Connect Savannah, a news/entertainment weekly.)

It’s trading season and we are being asked to trade something that we have in abundance for something scarce and more precious. Rights for safety.

All transactions are economic. For example, a shopper in a grocery store trades something less valued—dollars—for something more valued—food. The store values food less than dollars. If the shopper valued money as much as food, the shopper wouldn’t go shopping. If the store valued food as much as money, the store wouldn’t entice shoppers. Each party is trading up. Is it the same when trading rights for safety?

Economist Walter Williams says, “In the standard historical usage of the term, a right is something that exists simultaneously among people. A right confers no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech is something we all possess. My right to free speech imposes no obligation upon another except that of non-interference.”

We have historically believed that rights were endowed by a Creator, or by nature, or were inherent in human beings. Lately, Government has taken over for God, Congress for the Creator, McCain and Leiberman for Mother Nature, and our rights are to be modified, reshaped, and restricted at the whim of legislators.

Since September 11, newspapers have been chockfull of articles informing us that trading rights for safety is necessary because we are “in a war.” Surprisingly, a majority of Americans agrees, mostly through fear of terrorism and ignorance of the nature of rights. Not to mention the arrogance of Washington bureau-rats and the incompetence, or outright dishonesty, of Congressweasels willing to violate their Constitutional oaths.

Those who favor trading rights for safety speak as though a certain measurement of safety can be acquired through denying a certain measurement of rights. Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer says that the administration has "generally struck the right balance" in its approach to the war on terrorism. "We have to err on the side of security." He tends to forget that “security” is the watchword of the police state.

Rights are not baseball trading cards. I cannot trade a Right to Privacy, a Bear Arms, and a Freedom of Travel for one Airline Safety. This is, as Benjamin Franklin said, giving up “essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety.” Without straining I can think of a half-dozen ways in which an airline flight can be compromised, beginning with the fact that airline screeners fail to stop over 40 percent of prohibited items—guns, knives, explosives—from getting onto flights. But, the politicos and their media sycophants whine, “we are in a war.”

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded,” said James Madison. Rights are most likely to be infringed during war. Abraham Lincoln, sometimes referred to as The Great Dictator in his own time, jailed newspaper editors without bail or without charging them by ignoring their constitutionally protected rights. Their crime? They disagreed with Presidential policy. When Supreme Court justices criticized Lincoln’s actions as unconstitutional, he threatened to jail them too. The excuse was war.

Thousands of native-born and naturalized citizens of Japanese descent were tossed into concentration camps . . . I mean “relocated to internment camps” during World War II in a frenzy of fear and ignorance. Again, the excuse was war. 

In the current war on terror, or terrorism, or terrorists . . . whatever . . . the government is infringing rights to speech, freedom of travel, privacy, association, and legal representation, among others. The badly misnamed USA PATRIOT Act has been a primary vehicle for rights infringements. We now know that Congress didn’t have copies of the bill before the vote and couldn’t have possibly known what they were voting on, but they really liked the title. It sounded so . . . patriotic. Several Congressweasels, to their credit, later declared portions unconstitutional; to their discredit, they voted for it anyway. (Why do you think they’re weasels?) 

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the infringement of guaranteed rights, Attorney General and Obergruppenfuhrer John Ashcroft accused "those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty" with aiding terrorists. He was one step from calling some Congresscritters enemy combatants. Even a citizen labeled an enemy combatant can now be imprisoned indefinitely without right to counsel. (Not that I would object to imprisoning most of Congress. The USA PATRIOT Act is a declaration of war on individual rights and on the American population.) As Thomas Jefferson noted, “The law is often the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” 

Newspaper pundits tell us that we should feel fortunate because past wartime restrictions on rights were generally lifted at the end of whatever war was being waged at the time. As soon as the current war is over, then we should get our rights back. 

But when will the war be over? Anthony Romero, national president of the ACLU, said that Americans are faced with a crisis that will never reach a "publicly decisive end. This war not only will be long lasting, but it could change the notion of what it means to be a free American." And the government agrees with him. 

Vice President Cheney called the war a new normalcy. Homeland Security Director Ridge says that the end of al-Qaida won’t be the end of the war; he compares it to the wars on drugs and crime. President Bush has expanded the war on whatever to war on Iraq. Where next?  

No president in his right mind will ever declare the war on whatever over, even if Osama bin Laden is caught and all known terrorist groups in the world are wiped out. The smallest act of terrorism, foreign grown or native born—remember McVeigh—that occurred after such a declaration would cost the president and his party the next election.

We are engaged in a new type of war, a forever war, and we are expected to suffer it gladly with ever-decreasing rights, bartered away for an undeliverable promise of safety. What God, or nature, giveth, Government taketh away.