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Civil Liberties |
Contents:
Government power grows in soil seeded by crisis. Real, imagined, and conjured threats—domestic and foreign, economic, political, and military—are readily used to justify government responses “requiring” changes in established institutions and limits on traditional freedoms. Civil liberties have been the first casualties of responses to crises.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines civil liberties as “Fundamental individual rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, protected by law against unwarranted governmental or other interference.” Thus “civil liberties” is a moral and political category protecting the individual against the state. Civil liberties are what distinguish free and open societies from ones ruled by authoritarian or totalitarian governments. Theoretically, in a free society the individual is sovereign. Each person is recognized as having rights independent of and antecedent to government. The idea of civil liberties thus represents a radical break in the political history of the world.
Civil liberties are typically thought to include freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly; freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and certain other rights related to criminal law enforcement, such as the rights to habeas corpus, against self-incrimination, to a jury trial, and so on. This translates into prohibitions against violations of privacy, censorship, a state church, forced confessions, Star Chambers, and the like. Thus, the concept of civil liberties necessarily limits government power, which is why those who run governments regularly look for ways (“crises”) to ignore them.
In the United States, judges, politicians, and political philosophers have constricted the concept “civil liberties” largely to exclude property, or economic, rights. Thus property has been accorded far weaker protection than that given to speech, press, and religion. The prejudice against property was formalized during the Great Depression and the New Deal. Since then, economic regulation has been deemed acceptable. This bifurcation of liberty was arbitrary, ideologically driven, and wholly unsupported by the Constitution. Unsurprisingly, it has outlasted the economic crisis for which it was developed.
Virtually all civil liberties have been eroded by war, the preparation for it, and other kinds of crises, such as depressions. These have been particularly effective in de-sensitizing people to encroachments on their freedom. Responses to crises have brought censorship, conscription, new and higher taxes, and control of transportation, industry, and agriculture. When those crises ended, most new controls were removed and taxes were reduced—but government power never shrunk back to its pre-crisis level (the “rachet effect”). The people were left with new and permanent state impositions in their lives. What’s more, they were effectively trained to accept further “necessary’ assaults on their liberties when the next crisis arrived.
Also, click here for Bibliography for Crisis and Leviathan.
Crises and the Erosion of Liberty:
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Bovard, James. Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Cole, David D. Enemy Aliens. New York: New Press, 2003.
—. Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security. New York: New Press, 2002.
Davis, James Kirkpatrick. Spying on America: The F.B.I.'s Domestic Counterintelligence Program. New York: Praeger, 1992.
de Jasay, Anthony. “Is National Rational?”, The Independent Review, Vol. III, No. 1 (Summer 1998), pp. 77-89.
Ebeling, Richard M. and Jacob Hornberger, eds. Liberty, Security and the War on Terrorism. Fairfax, VA: Future of Freedom Foundation, 2003.
Eland, Ivan. “Frying the French.” Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute, March 12, 2003.
—. “No One Noticed, but President Did the Right Thing,” Houston Chronicle, November 14, 2000.
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—. “Recommendations from Terrorism Commission Belong in the Circular File,” Manchester Union-Leader, June 26, 2000.
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—. “Smallpox: U.S. Government Is Endangering Americans to Run Risky Foreign Policy,” News-Herald (Hartford City, IN), November 12, 2002.
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Halpern, Morton H. The Lawless State: The Crimes of U.S. Intelligence Agencies. New York: Penguin, 1976.
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—. Living the Bill of Rights: How to Be an Authentic American. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1999.
—. The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.
Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
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—. “Crisis, Bigger Government, and Ideological Change: Two Hypotheses on the Ratchet Phenomenon,” Explorations in Economic History, Vol;. 22 (1985).
—. “Crisis-Induced Losses of Liberties,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2002.
—. “Defending the Homeland,” The Free Market, May 2002.
—. “How War Amplified Federal Power in the Twentieth Century,” The Freeman, July 1999.
—. “In the Name of Emergency,” Reason, July 1987.
—. “Some Other Costs of War,” The Free Market, March 1991.
—. “War and Leviathan in Twentieth-Century America: Conscription as the Keystone,” from The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, edited by John V. Denson. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999.
—. “World War II and the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex,” Freedom Daily, May 1995.
Higgs, Robert and Charlotte Twight. “Economic Warfare and Private Property Rights: Recent Episodes and Their Constitutionality,” Journal of Private Enterprise, Fall 1987.
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McElroy, Wendy. “The Abolitionist Adventure,” Future of Freedom Foundation, July 2003.
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Twight, Charlotte. “Conning Congress: Privacy and the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act,” The Independent Review, Vol. VI, No. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 185-216.
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—. “Watching You: Systematic Federal Surveillance of Ordinary Americans,” The Independent Review, Vol. IV, No. 2 (Fall 1999), pp. 165-200.
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Eland, Ivan. “The Bush Administration’s Weapons of Mass Deception.” Oakland, Calif: The Independent Institute, June 5, 2003.
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Gregory, Anthony. “Unbelievable Reasons for War.” Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute, February 28, 2003.
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Higgs, Robert. “The Cold War Economy: Opportunity Costs, Ideology, and the Politics of Crisis,” Explorations in Economic History, July 1994.
—. “Collateral Damage: Two Venues, One Logic,” San Francisco Examiner, April 15, 2002.
—. “In the Name of Emergency,” Reason, July 1987.
—. “The Myth of ‘Failed’ Policies,” The Free Market, March 1995.
—. “Suppose You Wanted to Have a Permanent War.” Oakland, Calif: The Independent Institute, June 12, 2003.
Holmes, Robert L. On War and Morality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Jones, Carolyn C. “Class Tax to Max Tax: The Role of Propaganda in the Expansion of the Income Tax During World War II,” Buffalo Law Review, Vol. 37 (Fall 1988-89), pp. 685-737.
Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent As Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Kofsky, Frank. Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Kwitny, Jonathan. “Review of the book The Captive Press: Foreign Policy Crises and the First Amendment, by Ted Galen Carpenter,” The Independent Review, Vol. II, No. 2, Fall 1997, pp. 321-323.
MacArthur, John R. “Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War: How Government Can Mold Public Opinion,” Independent Policy Forum, The Independent Institute, October 7, 1993 [Forum Audio, Forum Transcript]
McElroy, Wendy. “War’s Other Casualty,” The Freeman, July 1999.
Roeder, Jr., George H. The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.
Sweeney, Michael S. Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World War II. Raleigh, N.C.: University of North Carolina, 2001.