The modern-day battle for independence

In my research for the past three columns, I have accrued quite a wealth of information on the American battle for independence. No, not the battle against England at the end of the 18th century, but the battle against Washington, D.C., at the end of the 20th.

Time after time in my research from the late 1960s, I found evidence that plenty of people tried to sound the warning against the “big brotherism” if not outright socialism that they saw threatening our fundamental freedoms in America.

But then as now, these warnings largely fell on deaf ears. As long as people had enough for themselves and their families, it didn’t seem as though they cared whether it came in the name of socialism or hard work.

Newsweek magazine famously ran a cover last year that proclaimed, “We Are All Socialists Now.” The magazine argued that the conversion of the United States to a European-style socialist state was virtually a done deal, and that “The sooner we understand where we truly stand, the sooner we can think more clearly about how to use government in today’s world.”

Scarier words have never been spoken, except perhaps these — from a famed newspaper columnist of yesteryear, Sidney J. Harris, who wrote in 1967:

“If social security is called ‘socialism,’ as it was 30 years ago, and if Medicare is called ‘socialism,’ as it was last year, then the public will say, ‘If this is socialism, then we are for it’ — and if thorough-going socialism is ever proposed by the government, it will find a ready audience.”

What is most scary about these words is not their deadly accuracy — because it has all come to pass just as he said — but that Harris was a liberal columnist who was urging conservatives to keep quiet about the socialist intrusion, the same way that liberals want to silence conservative critics like myself today.

Apparently, the idea is just take the money from the federal government and shut up about it.

But some people in the 1960s, just as the Tea Party now, were smart enough to realize that taking money from the federal government is really taking money from your neighbors — or yourself.

Many of you have no doubt heard this dictum attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, the 18th century Scottish historian:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.”

 I found it reprinted in a 1968 column by Don Oakley of the Newspaper Enterprise Association in which he held up the British welfare state as the latest example of the inevitable truth of Tytler’s words. It seems the people of Britain had just learned that they would have to pay for their free health care after all.

“Britons are learning that the good life for all is not something that can be decreed by government,” Oakley wrote. “Government can only dispense that which it first takes from the people.”

This is a hard lesson to learn, and perhaps Sydney Harris was right that Americans, like Britons, cannot resist the lure of “something for nothing,” however much they know in their hearts that it is just a Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff got rich by following the formula perfected long ago by Uncle Sam: Take from the many, give to the few — and hope like hell that no one wakes up and smells the poverty.

But it would appear that from time to time, some people do get a glimmering of the con game being waged against them by the federal government. Thus in 1967 and 1968, there is plenty of evidence in American newspapers of a growing awareness that something was wrong. Remember, this was the time when LBJ was imposing the Great Society on the United States, just a few years after Mao Zedong had decimated the Chinese economy with his Great Leap Forward.

In the Olwein (Iowa) Daily Register, an editorial from May 19, 1967, lamented “A Diminishing Freedom.” This piece, in about 400 words, managed to sum up the fallacy of Social Security and to warn Americans that when they first begin to surrender their “freedom of choice” to the government, they have opened the door to a nightmare scenario. Even then, before the Social Security trust fund had been raided, it was obvious to some people that the scheme presented a huge risk, and that it was a risk that was being forced upon the American people, without any opportunity to “just say no.”

“It should be apparent to everyone that social security provides no such choice. Therefore it becomes a form of socialized insurance, perhaps the fore-runner of socialized medicine, socialized plumbers, socialized printers and what have you.”

Hmmm. Socialized medicine. Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, national mandatory health insurance (also known as Obamacare). And as for socialized printers, you might as well start writing the obituary for democracy when that happens. As soon as the government gains control of the press, we have all had it.

But don’t think it can only happen in China! The Federal Trade Commission earlier this year presented a series of proposals for how the national government could boost newspapers and TV stations through tax breaks and subsidies and even government-paid journalists to just kind of, you know, help out. Oh yeah, and for a nice Orwellian touch, the non-profit group promoting a government takeover — er, bailout — of newspapers is called “Free Press.”

To complete the trifecta of “socialized medicine, socialized plumbers [and]  socialized printers,” we would just need to find out that “Joe the plumber” has gone over to the dark side. You remember him, right? The working stiff who got candidate Barack Obama to admit that he believes in the fundamental communist idea that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Joe didn’t buy it, but many someone else will if the government tells them they can have free plumbing service whenever they need it.

Anyway, back to that editorial in Iowa in 1967, it starts with concerns about Social Security but ends with a general appraisal of American liberty:

“Freedom is a funny thing,” the editorialist wrote. “ It is granted to only a few in this vast world, and to be among those who enjoy it is really a rare privilege. History has proven, however, that freedom for any length of time is enjoyed only by those who guard it carefully, wisely and diligently.”

Regarding America, he noted that “social security, like so many other government programs today, [has] eliminated any freedom of choice...” and he concludes, “We cannot make ourselves believe that our fore-fathers would have strived nearly so hard to set up the ‘ideal’ government if they could have realized that the individual would eventually lose even a minute portion of his freedom to choose for his own benefit.”

Freedom of choice. It isn’t in the Constitution, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. The Constitution didn’t give us our rights, you know; it merely protects some of them. And freedom of choice is one of those rights that the Ninth Amendment acknowledges and which the government too often doesn’t — the rights given to us by, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, our Creator.

As the amendment’s authors wrote: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Or, in simpler language that even Congress and the president can understand: “Don’t Tread on Me.”

But don’t be complacent. Don’t think slogans will keep you free. And don’t — please don’t — think the government will.

The rights of the people are only “retained” as long as the people keep up their guard. And as the Iowa editorial writer reminds us, “Once the guard has been let down even the strongest have crumbled.”