Voters in Madison, Wisconsin recently approved a measure asserting that corporations do not have constitutional rights.
The measure correctly asserts that only individuals have rights. But then it proceeds to state that corporations do not. This is collectivism at its finest. A corporation doesn’t act. People act. Although the “corporation” doesn’t have rights as an entity, each and every owner of the corporation does. The owners exercise those rights by having agents (the management) act on their behalf. When we speak of a corporation acting, this is merely an abstraction from the individuals involved. As Stephan Kinsella has explained, corporations are nothing more than a series of contracts enabling a large number of people to work together toward common goals.
This resolution, though purporting to support individual rights, is in reality opposed to such rights because it claims that these rights somehow disappear when the individuals who have them choose to use them in a coordinated manner.
[Keep reading…]
Radley Balko highlights the ridiculous case of a man arrested for interfering with police for filming them while they are on the job. Considering a passive observer, filming an arrest, to be “interfering” must be a special police corollary to the uncertainty principle that I missed in physics class. A friend asked the question, “how can one know what not to do?” This is a good question. If the laws on the books, and publicly clarified by the “authorities” are no shield, then what do we have?
As I mentioned before, police interactions with “civilians” are similar to the interactions between enslavers and slaves of the past. The rule on what can and cannot be done are set by the government official with whom you are interacting. Instead of rule by law, we have rule by overseer. Instead of viewing the police officer with whom you are speaking as a man as yourself, consider him a would-be slave master. He is has little reason to doubt his superiority to you. He has rights, and we have responsibilities.
How can it be otherwise? Whenever there is an asymmetry in recognized rights, there is great danger in interacting. During such interactions, the well-being of the oppressed is almost entirely dependent on the goodwill of the oppressor.
Consider the risks involved when an ordinary citizen has an interaction with the police. If a police officer is the violator, except in extremely egregious cases, nothing will happen to him. He will not be immediately fired after the accusation. A very bad outcome for a police officer will be him being fired, with no criminal record, and the ability to compete for a private sector job just like everyone else. Even in the case of him being prosecuted, he will likely be acquitted, and even if he is found guilty, he will be punished much less severely than an ordinary citizen.
On the other hand, consider the risk for a citizen. If a person with a regular job is arrested and held for several days, he may be fired from his job. An employer may not be able to afford to employ someone who is not at work, irrespective of the reason behind the absence. That means that even a misbehaving officer can ruin a person financially, even if that person is ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing. As I have mentioned before, this asymmetry is similar to that which existed between blacks and whites in the US (and especially the American South) prior to the middle of the 20th century. In such an environment, rather than being oppressive, segregation is actually desirable for the oppressed class. Unfortunately, the government does not permit mundanes, as the heroic William Norman Grigg calls ordinary citizens, to segregate themselves from the state.
The furor over the “Ground Zero Mosque” (which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero) doesn’t make me very optimistic about the prospects for liberty.
As a libertarian and just a live-and-let-live kind of guy, I can’t imagine caring much about, let alone vocally protesting, what someone is building two blocks away from me.
Yet apparently many of my fellow Americans are such busybodies that they’ll whine for weeks about something being built hundreds or thousands of miles away from them, in a city where they don’t live and probably won’t even visit. And many of the complainers are among the Tea Party set whom we are occasionally told are “libertarian,” even though they seem to hate Muslims and Mexicans and love war at least as much as they hate the federal government and love liberty.
Jonah Goldberg claims that the conservatives who object “mostly” recognize that the Muslims have a legal right to build their center. But what I hear on talk radio makes me doubt this. A common argument there seems to be that since “liberals” don’t care about the constitution or property rights in general, they aren’t entitled to invoke them now — as though liberals somehow have the power to waive Muslims’ rights.
In any event, even if Goldberg is correct, it’s hard to imagine that the spirit of liberty resides in the sort of people who get so worked up over this sort of thing. The ease with which they’ve been distracted by this issue suggests that reducing government isn’t going to be their top priority once their team is back in control in Washington.
(Cross-posted on my blog.)
