While speaking to a typical crowd of his myrmidons in Illinois, President Obama had another Joe the Plumber moment when he dropped his guard and let his inner Marxist slip out again.  You can listen to the audio here, but the President’s words speak for themselves:

We’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned.  I mean, I do think that at a certain point you’ve made enough money.  But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on makin’ it if you are providing a good product or a good service.  We don’t want people to stop, uh, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow the economy.  — Barack Obama, 4/28/2010 in Illinois

As Levin suggests, when the President goes off-teleprompter you can often get a good glimpse of the Marxist True Believer that he tries to hide from Americans.

Levin’s take?

He hates capitalism, he hates capitalists, he despises the private sector generally and he is at war with it.

This President is the biggest threat to the survival of the American Experiment since the Civil War.  He simply does not believe in any of the principles that made America the greatest nation in the history of mankind and he seeks to knock America down to some feel-good parity with the rest of the world.

I thought that I hated Bill Clinton, but that was just disgust.  Now I know what it means to despise a politician with every fiber of my being.  Interestingly, the biggest winner in the Obama era is Bill Clinton, who now looks like a very reasonable, centrist, and dignified President compared to the empty suit radical who occupies the White House now.

As an aside, you can tell when Barry Obama is speaking to a group of people that he considers morons when he drops the G’s off of the end of his words in order to sound folksy, as he did above talking about how you can “keep on makin’ it”.

JUDGES

Limit the Supreme Court’s judicial-review power, which far exceeds the Framers’ intent, by establishing a legislative veto over Court decisions – perhaps a two-thirds supermajority of both houses of Congress, not dissimilar from the congressional override authority of a presidential veto.

It is an interesting thought.  Under our three branches of government there exist a number of mechanisms for the different branches to act as a check against the other two branches.  The legislative branch can thwart some actions of the executive branch, and the executive branch can obviously check the power of the legislative branch by exercising its veto power.  But there is absolutely no check on the judicial branch, and it shows.  The founding fathers never intended for the judiciary to be so all powerful.

Let’s take a look at how the three branches of government can act as a check on each other.  It is important to note that there are essentially two ways that one branch of government can provide a check on abuses of power by the other two branches, blocking actions and responsive actions.  Clearly the blocking actions provide a more immediate and effective check on power than the responsive actions.

Checks on the executive branch

The legislative branch can provide an immediate blocking check on the power of the executive branch in three ways.  They can override a Presidential veto if they muster a two-thirds majority, and the Senate can reject Presidential nominees to the cabinet and Supreme Court as well as reject treaties signed by the President.  Additionally, the legislative branch can respond to serious abuses of power by the President by impeaching (the House) and removing (the Senate) a President, though certainly without the same immediacy as the blocking checks previously described.

It is worth noting that congressional overrides of Presidential vetoes are fairly rare.  The Congressional Research Service reported that “Prior to 1969, Congress overrode approximately 1 of every 18 (5.7%) regular vetoes. Since 1969, Congress has been more successful, overriding about 1 out of every 5 (18.3%) regular vetoes”.

The judicial branch can act as a check on the executive branch by overturning laws, actions, and regulations signed or implemented by the President.  All of these are immediate blocking actions.

Checks on the legislative branch

There are essentially two methods that the executive branch can utilize to check the powers of the legislative branch, both of which are the more immediate blocking type of actions.  The President can veto legislation passed by Congress, though I would argue that Presidents do not exercise this power enough.  Additionally, although rare, the Vice-President can act as the tie-breaking vote in the Senate which was most recently exercised by Vice President Dick Cheney who did so 8 times.

The judicial branch can block actions of the legislative branch in much the same way that it can check the power of the executive branch by overturning laws passed by Congress.

Checks on the judicial branch

The legislative branch can check the power of the judicial branch, but only in a responsive fashion, in contrast to the more immediate blocking actions that act as checks on the power of the other legislative and executive branches.  Congress can impeach a Supreme Court justice, but the only case in history where this action has been taken was against Samuel Chase who was subsequently acquitted by the Senate and remained on the court.  Additionally, Congress can propose amendments that once passed cannot be overridden by the high court.  Both of these checks on the power of the judicial branch are responsive actions that cannot truly check the actions of the court in the same way that the actions of the other two branches can be thwarted.

The executive branch has no power to check the actions of the legislative branch.  Some would argue that the President’s role in appointing Supreme Court justices constitutes such power, but the dismal results of nominees like Souter and Kennedy completely undercut that position.  Once a justice is in place, it takes egregious conduct to warrant removal.  Oddly, history shows that simply ignoring the Constitution does not seem to justify that removal.

Speculation about the historical results of a Congressional override power

I must admit that I was initially opposed to Levin’s suggested constitutional change to implement a congressional override of Supreme Court decisions.  However, after taking a deeper look at the lopsided checks on power among the three branches, I immediately changed my mind.  This discussion would not be complete, however, without taking a cursory look at some controversial historic Supreme Court decisions and making some informed speculations as to how Congress would have voted if they had possessed this proposed override power.  In many cases it is very difficult to determine how Congress would vote in such an override vote, but one can draw some conclusions with respect to civil rights cases because the Democrat Party was clearly the party of racism up until the late 60s at which point it morphed into the party of race hustlers.

In 1856 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Dred Scott v Sanford that a slave who had lived in the northern free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin could not sue to secure his freedom from slavery in Missouri.  Because Democrats held the house and more than a third of the Senate at that time, this decision could not have been reversed by Congress using Levin’s suggested supermajority override power.

In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled 7-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was legal if the segregated facilities were equal.  Although the GOP did have a supermajority of the House, the almost evenly split Senate would have prevented the needed reversal of this horrendous decision.

In 1954 the Supreme Court finally came to its senses and ruled 9-0 in Brown v. Board of Education that separate-but-equal was not acceptable.  Though the racist Democrats would have supported an override, the GOP held both houses and would have prevented a Democrat attempt to maintain their preferred racist society.

Let’s move past genuine civil rights into a case that is falsely called a civil rights case, the hallmark decision in 1973 that forced legalized abortion on the states.  In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the states could not make their own laws with respect to the legality of abortion.  Given that the Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress, it is unthinkable that the required supermajority could have been assembled by the GOP.

Finally, let’s examine an egregious Supreme Court decision that would have been overturned by Congress.  In 2005 the liberal bloc plus the fickle Anthony Kennedy ruled 5-4 in Kelo v New London that New London, CT, could seize private property for the sole purpose of developing waterfront property in order to increase their tax revenues.  Though the GOP held only slight majorities in both houses, the outrage at the decision was universally criticized with even socialist Bernie Sanders (whose ideology requires the implicit acceptance that government owns its subjects) criticizing the decision.  In fact, the New York Times reported that “House members voted 365 to 33 late Thursday night in support of a resolution expressing ‘grave disapproval’ at the court decision.”

One other case near and dear to my heart is the 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller which ruled 5-4 that the Second Amendment indeed protects an individual right to keep and bear firearms.  Though the decision was anathema to Democrats, they could not have assembled the two-thirds supermajority that would be required to overturn the decision under Levin’s proposed change.

In summary, though Mark Levin’s proposed supermajority override power could be effective in some of the most obviously bad decisions of the modern era, it would likely not be successfully abused with any real regularity.

Eliminate lifetime tenure for federal judges, given the extra-constitutional power they have amassed and their routine intervention in the political and policy decisions – which the Constitution leaves to the representative branches.

The judicial branch has a disproportionate share of the power in America, and too many judges have proven that they are not up to exercising that power with restraint or responsibility.  Examples of judges like Kennedy or Souter, who pretend to be one thing and then swing to the “living document” side of things once they get offended because they are not part of the D.C. cocktail circuit, make a strong argument that judges’ tenure should be limited to one well-defined term.  The founding fathers never intended to have judges be kings.

Article 3, Section 8 of the Constitution fairly clearly allows for lifetime appointments of judges when it states that “The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior”, but it is not unreasonable to ask why we have imposed term limits on the Presidency but have not done so with congress or the judiciary.  Though Congress is not constrained by term limits, there are checks and balances provided by the other two branches as described above.  But with no check on their abuse of power, the one branch that really needs to be subjected to term limits is the judiciary.  Once appointed, they are veritable American royalty for life, unanswerable to anyone for anything that they do.  They simply have too much power over the lives of all Americans to let them stay in that position for life.  Mark Levin is right.

No judicial nominee should be confirmed who rejects the jurisprudence of originalism.

What is originalism?  There is a lot of propaganda associated with different views of what the term means, but the clearest definition would be that adherents to the philosophy of originalism believe that the words of the Constitution mean something and that those words should be what guides the decisions that they make.  The other side of the coin would be the so called Living Document crowd who believe that the Constitution means whatever they want it to mean.  It is important to point out that while the Constitution is not unchanging or unmalleable, the only proper (and constitutional) method of changing its meaning is the legal amendment process which has been used seventeen times since the passage of the Bill of Rights.  However, given that the amendment process is intentionally slow and difficult to those who seek to engineer every aspect of our lives, the egregiously dishonest and sinister living document concept has been foisted upon a public that is largely ignorant of the U.S. Constitution.

It is quite illuminating that the section titled “Arguments opposing originalism” in the Wikipedia entry on originalism has as its first point “Originalism leads to unacceptable results.”  That hits the nail right on the head and is the key problem with the judiciary in America.  Contrary to the wishes of the social engineers who seek to control every aspect of our lives, the constitution is not meant to right all wrongs or always produce the desired results.  Instead, it is intended to severely limit the powers of the federal government, a concept completely rejected by the Left in America.  In fact, the mark of a great and honest judge is in making decisions that are personally unpalatable if that is what is constitutionally correct.  A judge’s opinion on a particular subject should be irrelevant because they should only compare the case to the text of the Constitution.

The fact is that the federal courts do not acknowledge any limits to their power, refusing to accept their proper role as one branch of government.  We recently had a national discussion centered around an unqualified Supreme Court nominee’s statement that a “wise latina” would make better decisions than a white man, when in fact they should both be reading the same text and making decisions based upon that and only that, leaving their own ideologies at the door.  Some Supreme Court justices, most notably the mercurial and intellectually dishonest Anthony Kennedy, have even suggested that judges should look to foreign laws when deciding a case.  Someone who thinks like that should never be considered qualified to sit on an appellate court, much less the highest court in the land.

A classic example of judicial tyranny is the case of Roe v. Wade.  In that case the majority not only substituted their own ideologies for what is constitutionally correct, they also completely stepped over the line separating them from the legislative branch.  In that historic case they should have simply either upheld the Texas law or overturned it, but they in fact took on the powers of the legislative branch when they wrote new law in that egregiously dishonest and unconstitutional decision.  Writing law, as they did in that decision, not only goes beyond their legitimate powers but in fact usurps the proper role of the legislative branch.  If they decided to overturn the Texas law they should have simply struck it down and let them go back to the drawing board.  Instead, Justice Blackmun assumed the role of a dictatorial member of congress writing new laws to be forced on Americans.  Most people are stunned to find that the “law of the land” when it comes to abortion was written by one judge on the Supreme Court.

The changes proposed by by Mark Levin in the third plank of his Conservative Manifesto would obviously require a constitutional amendment and should be approached very thoughtfully.  However, the uncontrolled power of the judiciary and their demonstrable lack of restraint are a danger to the critical American constitutional balance of powers.  These suggested modifications would be a net positive for states’ rights and for individual freedoms though judges and statists will likely disagree.  This is yet another great idea from Mark Levin.

ENVIRONMENT

Eliminate the special tax-exempt status granted to environmental groups, since they are not nonpartisan charitable foundations.

I had to do some non-trivial research here in order to understand the underlying issues and legal constraints on such organizations.  Like a lot of governmental nonsense this is really boring stuff, but put simply the IRS allows tax-exempt status for some non-profit groups if they meet certain requirements related to their activities and what they do with the money that they raise. The IRS 557 publication states:

The organization will not, as a substantial part of its activities, attempt to influence legislation (unless it elects to come under the provisions allowing certain lobbying expenditures) or participate to any extent in a political campaign for or against any candidate for public office.

Then the section on Lobbying Expenditures states:

In general, if a substantial part of the activities of your organization consists of carrying on propaganda or otherwise attempting to influence legislation, your organization’s exemption from federal income tax will be denied.

As mind-numbing as this stuff is, it is vital to understanding the subsequent discussion with respect to abuses and interrelated groups so let us briefly define the three main types of IRS-allowed groups that we will be examining: 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), and 527.  501(c)(3) organizations can accept tax-deductible donations if the organization refrains from anything political, but if they cross the line into politics they lose their highly-desired ability to accept those deductible donations.  A 501(c)(4) organization is like a 501(c)(3) group but is permitted to be politically active as long as it is true to the organization’s purpose, however that political activity cannot be its primary focus.  The price that a 501(c)(4) group pays for the permitted political activity is a loss of the deductible donations.  The third group, a 527 organization, can support “issue advocacy” but cannot support or oppose a specific candidate without falling under some additional regulations.  Like the 501(c)(4) groups, donations to a 527 group are not tax deductible.  As you may already suspect, part of the game involves multiple related groups.

In 2004, the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee published a report on the actions of several environmental groups who manage to maintain their tax-exempt status even though they are breaking the rules.  The groups singled out included The League of Conservation Voters, The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace.  One problem pointed out in this report is the interconnected web of 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), and 527 groups, with the latter two groups receiving money funneled from the 501(c)(3) organization (which is permitted to receive deductible donations).  None other than the very liberal Washington Post featured the Sierra Club as a good example of this potentially illegal web:

Perhaps no one better illustrates the host of interlocking roles than Carl Pope, one of the most influential operatives on the Democratic side in the 2004 election.  As executive director of the Sierra Club, a major 501c (4) environmental lobby, Pope also controls the Sierra Club Voter Education Fund, a 527. The Voter Education Fund 527 has raised $3.4 million this election cycle, with $2.4 million of that amount coming from the Sierra Club. A third group, the Sierra Club PAC, has since 1980 given $3.9 million to Democratic candidates and $173,602 to GOP candidates.

 These activities just touch the surface of Pope’s political involvement. In 2002-03, Pope helped found two major 527 groups: America Votes, which has raised $1.9 million to coordinate the election activities of 32 liberal groups, and America Coming Together (ACT), which has a goal of raising more than $100 million to mobilize voters to cast ballots against Bush. Finally, Pope is treasurer of a new 501c (3) foundation, America’s Families United, which reportedly has $15 million to distribute to voter mobilization groups.

 ‘I am in this as deeply as I am,’ Pope said, ‘because I think this country is in real peril.’

The US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report, titled POLITICAL ACTIVITY OF ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS AND THEIR SUPPORTING FOUNDATIONS concludes:

This report does not represent the totality of environmental groups engaged in political activity in this election year or prior election years. It does not even represent all the actions taken by the environmental groups that are highlighted in this report each election year. However, this report provides examples of some of the actions taken by these groups and clearly questions any claims these groups make concerning being “non-partisan.”

…

Moreover, these groups’ activities demonstrate the concern expressed in the Washington Post article regarding political money this election year – money “slithering through on other routes as organizations maintain various accounts, tripping over each other, shifting money between 501(c)(3)’s, (c)(4)’s, and 527′s.” 

Today’s environmental groups are simply political machines reporting millions in contributions and expenditures each year for the purpose of raising more money to pursue their agenda. Especially in this election year, the American voter should see these groups and their many affiliate organizations as they are – the newest insidious conspiracy of political action committees and perhaps the newest multi-million dollar manipulation of federal election laws.

Since the game involves collecting that easy-to-get deductible money through a 501(c)(3), then funneling it through to more political groups, there must be serious transparent and auditable firewalls placed between the groups.  More to Levin’s point, the regulations clearly state that a group “may qualify for exemption from federal income taxes if it is organized and operation exclusively for one or more of the following purposes”:

• Religious
• Charitable
• Scientific
• Testing for public safety
• Literary
• Educational
• Fostering amateur sports competition

Since a group like Greenpeace is obviously not one of those organization types it seems fairly clear that it should not qualify for tax-exempt status.

Eliminate special statutory authority granting environmental groups standing to bring lawsuits on behalf of the public, since their main purpose is to pursue the Statist’s agenda through litigation.

The definition of “legal standing” seems fairly cut and dry at first and as is typical it only got complicated once judges started redefining the term to better suit their own particular ideologies.  The idea of legal standing is simply that in order for you to sue you have to be someone who is being harmed or will be harmed by the law and that a favorable court decision must be likely to redress the injury.  For example, I would not have the legal standing to simply step up and sue to overturn the D.C. laws that severely restrict firearms, but Dick Anthony Heller, being subject to those laws, had standing to bring that landmark case (Heller v D.C.) which ultimately overturned many of the D.C. laws as being in violation of the second amendment.

While the Supreme Court denied standing for environmental groups in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), saying that among other things it was a violation of the Separation of Powers, they did allow standing in Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw (2000).  In his dissent, joined by Justice Thomas, Justice Scalia wrote:

We have certainly held that a demonstration of harm to the environment is not enough to satisfy the injury-in-fact requirement unless the plaintiff can demonstrate how he personally was harmed. E.g., Lujan, supra, at 563. In the normal course, however, a lack of demonstrable harm to the environment will translate, as it plainly does here, into a lack of demonstrable harm to citizen plaintiffs. While it is perhaps possible that a plaintiff could be harmed even though the environment was not, such a plaintiff would have the burden of articulating and demonstrating the nature of that injury. Ongoing “concerns” about the environment are not enough, for “[i]t is the reality of the threat of repeated injury that is relevant to the standing inquiry, not the plaintiff ’s subjective apprehensions,”

Article III’s mention of “cases” and “controversies” has been defined by the courts since the very beginning (i.e. President Washington and Chief Justice Jay) as being a requirement that the plaintiff suffer injury or a legitimate threat of injury.  In this case the plaintiffs did not make that case effectively, though the majority did not see it that way.

In another case, Massachusetts v. EPA (2006), Justice Roberts issued a scathing dissent based upon a lack of standing associated with the Court granting special status to Massachusetts:

Before determining whether petitioners can meet this familiar test, however, the Court changes the rules. It asserts that “States are not normal litigants for the purposes of invoking federal jurisdiction,” and that given “Massachusetts’ stake in protecting its quasi-sovereign interests, the Commonwealth is entitled to special solicitude in our standing analysis.” Ante, at 15, 17 (emphasis added).

The nuances of legal standing are complex and I cannot even begin to scratch the surface of this, but the fact is the environmental movement has succeeded in having the courts redefine the definition of standing in order to bring many of their suits.

Fight all efforts to use environmental regulations to set governmental industrial policies and diminish the nation’s standard of living, such as “cap-and-trade” to regulate “man-made climate change.”

This one is hard to argue against. 

The environmental movement is as much about left wing politics as it is about the earth.  You may have heard many environmentalists described as “watermelons”, meaning that they may be green on the outside but are red (politically) on the inside.  There is a lot of truth to that.

What I have observed is that if you have a group of people, all of whom are informed about the science (or lack thereof) of anthropogenic climate change, the dividing line between the believers and the skeptics is which side of the ideological spectrum that they are on.  Many leftists realized years ago that a sure path to the soft-tyranny that they seek is to hide their real motives in an environmental agenda.

Cap and trade is about politics, not the environment.

TAXATION

Eliminate the progressive income tax – replace it with a flat income tax or national sales tax – for its purpose is redistribute wealth, not fund the constitutionally legitimate functions of the federal government.

In other words, a flat tax or a national sales tax will clearly result in a more equitable sharing of the load in terms of the cost of common needs.  I must admit here that I do not believe that the wealthy get more out of government than the poor, and I could actually make the case that the opposite is true, so bearing that in mind I would define fair taxation as a situation where most taxpayers pay roughly similar dollar amounts into the system regardless of their income.  I submit that people should not get a free ride simply because they are unsuccessful, however I will not suggest that Levin agrees with that arguably extreme position.

A progressive income tax, however, completely parts ways with the fairy tale concept that we are simply all paying our fair share of the cost of common infrastructure and services provided by the government.  A progressive tax, meaning a tax where they decide how high a percentage to apply to you based upon how successful you are, is nothing more than an instrument for plunder.  Not surprisingly, Karl Marx called for the progressive income tax in his Communist Manifesto, the playbook of the Left.

As an aside, I always have to point out that whenever anyone uses the self-congratulatory label of “progressive” you can bet that they wish to progress towards more socialism and more control over your life.

All residents of the country must be required to pay the tax so they have a stake in limiting its abuse.

An oversimplified analogy: if you are not paying the bill at the restaurant you will not hesitate to order the lobster.  People who do not pay taxes have no interest whatsoever in controlling spending or growth of government and in fact often support the opposite, feeling that it will give them more opportunities to use the government to obtain the property of other, more successful people.

Eliminate the automatic withholding of taxes, for it conceals the extent to which the federal government is confiscating income from its citizens.

I have supported this for many years, going back to my most hard-core purist Libertarian days.  I have always been convinced that if April 15^th came along and everyone had to write a check for the astounding amount of money that the government was stealing from us we would have a revolution on April 16^th.  Withholding is just another way for the government to hide the amount of taxes that they are taking from you and you can see the ignorance it encourages when you hear someone who simply had too much withheld state “I did not have to pay this year, I got money back.”  Statist politicians just love morons like that.

Eliminate the corporate income tax, for it is nothing more than double taxation on shareholders and consumers, and penalizes wealth and job creation.

I agree wholeheartedly with Levin here; it is clearly double taxation.  Moreover, and this is what really irritates me, corporate income taxes are simply another way for them to hide the insatiable tax appetite of our out of control behemoth government.  If the government raises taxes on a corporation the company will simply (and intelligently) respond by adding the higher taxes into the price of their product or service, the result being that every single tax in America is paid by individuals.  Corporate income taxes succeed wonderfully at obfuscating that fact, often stoking some anti-corporate class warfare in the process.

Eliminate the death tax, for it denies citizens the right to confer the material value they have created during their lives to whomever they wish, including their family.

Let’s examine this.  A person works for their entire life, perhaps making wise investments and saving money, and at the time of their death they have some valuable assets.  Then in steps the government to take some more.  Lost in the debate is the cold hard fact that everything that they managed to invest or save is taken from the money that is left after the government has already taxed them.  There is no tax more immoral than the death tax.  It is an inherently evil wealth confiscation and redistribution program.

I had a very heated discussion with an acquaintance on this very subject.  He (pathetically) argued that the money belonged to the dead person, not the heirs, and that the government had every right to take all of it to redistribute to “the people”.  People who support the death tax are Marxists.  They simply do not believe in private property rights.  Most people who think like this are ambition-deficient losers, so it’s no surprise why they feel the way that they do.  They want your stuff.

All federal income tax increases will require a supermajority vote of three-fifths of congress.

I was very involved in the political debates of the 90s, when a previous seemingly hard-left President came into office, though in retrospect President Clinton was refreshingly reasonable and centrist compared to the statist juggernaut of the Obama administration.  But I digress.  One thing that I supported wholeheartedly during that time was the Republican attempt to pass a constitutional amendment to require a 60% supermajority vote in Congress to raise taxes.  It failed to pass (meaning that it failed to successfully be proposed to the states as an amendment) by one vote, with RINO Sen. Mark Hatfield (OR) voting against it after it passed overwhelmingly in the House.

The cynic in me knows that even had it passed they would just stick it to us with “fees” or some other intentionally misleading term, avoiding the “tax” label in order to avoid the supermajority requirement.

Limit federal spending each year to less than 20 percent of the gross domestic product.

I agree.  I would further argue that the amount of debt that the country holds should be limited to a hard percentage of the GDP.

We have a lot of work to do, my friends.  Get up every morning asking yourself if you want your kids to grow up in the America of Obama’s statist vision, then light a fire under your posterior to do something about it.

Nobody saw this more clearly than the great political thinker de Toqueville that democracy stands in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism:  “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom,” he said.  “Democracy attaches all possible value to each man,” he said in 1848, “while socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number.  Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality.  But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives – the craving for freedom – socialists began to increasingly make use of the promise of a “new freedom.”  Socialism was to bring “economic freedom,” without which political freedom was “not worth having.”

To make this argument sound plausible, the word “freedom” was subjected to a subtle change in meaning.  The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men.  Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us.  Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth.  The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth.

Excellent.

I once had a long argument with my one liberal brother and his (pretty much marxist) significant other where I tried to make this very point.  I tried to explain that if we gathered up all of the things that people like to call “rights” there would be a clear line down the center that divides these so-called rights very unambiguously.  On one side of that line are legitimate rights; exercising these rights only requires that people stay out of your way (avoiding the “arbitrary power of men”, as Hayek put it).  On the other side of that dividing line are rights that require that someone do something for you.  I argued strenuously that any right that requires that someone take action or fund your “right” is not a right at all.  For example, you have a right to free speech but no one is required to provide you with a soapbox on which to stand.  You have a right to keep and bear arms but we do not have to buy your gun for you.  On the other side of that line, you do not have any “right” to expect anyone to subsidize your lifestyle by, for example, paying for your health care.  Calling something like that a “right” is simply dressing up the act of using government to take another person’s property.