Freedom and the Left

by Thomas Sowell

Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.

Freedom ultimately means the right of other people to do things that you do not approve of. Nazis were free to be Nazis under Hitler. It is only when you are able to do things that other people don't approve that you are free.

One of the most innocent-sounding examples of the left's many impositions of its vision on others is the widespread requirement by schools and by college admissions committees that students do "community service."

There are high schools across the country from which you cannot graduate, and colleges where your application for admission will not be accepted, unless you have engaged in activities arbitrarily defined as "community service."

The arrogance of commandeering young people's time, instead of leaving them and their parents free to decide for themselves how to use that time, is exceeded only by the arrogance of imposing your own notions as to what is or is not a service to the community.

Working in a homeless shelter is widely regarded as "community service"-- as if aiding and abetting vagrancy is necessarily a service, rather than a disservice, to the community.

Is a community better off with more people not working, hanging out on the streets, aggressively panhandling people on the sidewalks, urinating in the street, leaving narcotics needles in the parks where children play?

This is just one of the ways in which handing out various kinds of benefits to people who have not worked for them breaks the connection between productivity and reward, as far as they are concerned.

But that connection remains as unbreakable as ever for society as a whole. You can make anything an "entitlement" for individuals and groups but nothing is an entitlement for society as a whole, not even food or shelter, both of which have to be produced by somebody's work or they will not exist.

What "entitlements" for some people mean is forcing other people to work for their benefit. As a bumper sticker put it: "Work harder. Millions of people on welfare are depending on you."

The most fundamental problem, however, is not which particular activities students are required to engage in under the title of "community service."

The most fundamental question is: What in the world qualifies teachers and members of college admissions committees to define what is good for society as a whole, or even for the students on whom they impose their arbitrary notions?

What expertise do they have that justifies overriding other people's freedom? What do their arbitrary impositions show, except that fools rush in where angels fear to tread?

What lessons do students get from this, except submission to arbitrary power?

Supposedly students are to get a sense of compassion or noblesse oblige from serving others. But this all depends on who defines compassion. In practice, it means forcing students to undergo a propaganda experience to make them receptive to the left's vision of the world.

I am sure those who favor "community service" requirements would understand the principle behind the objections to this if high school military exercises were required.

Indeed, many of those who promote compulsory "community service" activities are bitterly opposed to even voluntary military training in high schools or colleges, though many other people regard military training as more of a contribution to society than feeding people who refuse to work.

In other words, people on the left want the right to impose their idea of what is good for society on others-- a right that they vehemently deny to those whose idea of what is good for society differs from their own.

The essence of bigotry is refusing to others the rights that you demand for yourself. Such bigotry is inherently incompatible with freedom, even though many on the left would be shocked to be considered opposed to freedom.

John Fund Comments on the Huckster

Andrew Roth

From John Fund in today's WSJ Political Diary ($):

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who won the Iowa presidential caucuses and became a mini-media sensation earlier this year, has a popular new book out (it's ranked No. 5 on next week's New York Times bestseller list) laying out his philosophy and settling some scores from the campaign.

As for philosophy, Mr. Huckabee was clearly stung by attacks on him as being insufficiently conservative during his ten years running the Arkansas state government from 1996 to 2006. He declares he was the genuine conservative in this year's presidential race and warns about coming economic hard times. He bitterly recalls "getting laughed at by the Wall Street Journal and pilloried by the National Review. They were just dicin' and slicin' me for not following the company line."

Mr. Huckabee thinks the "company line" is a combination of rigid fiscal conservatism and a refusal to use government to help people in times of distress. His book includes a chapter called "Faux-Cons: Worse than Liberalism" In it, he says the "real threat" to the Republican Party is a hidden "libertarianism masked as conservatism....[I]t threatens to not only split the Republican Party, but render it as irrelevant as the Whig Party."

Of course, Mr. Huckabee ignores exit polls from both the 2006 and 2008 elections that show many Republicans stayed home because the party had strayed from its fiscally conservative roots.

He also neglects to mention that the great hero of Republicans, Ronald Reagan, explicitly called for all wings of the Republican Party to stay united and raise "a banner of bold colors, rather than pale pastels." In a famous interview with Reason magazine, the Gipper noted: "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism....The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. . . . I think that libertarianism and conservatism are traveling the same path."

Mr. Huckabee takes other shots in his book, including one that dismisses a Mitt Romney proposal to encourage more investment in the stock market as a Marie Antoinette approach to the economy: "Let them eat stocks!"

In interviews promoting his book, Mr. Huckabee also admits to some puzzlement about the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running-mate, a job he thought himself in line for. "She's wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair," he told the New Yorker magazine. "It wasn't so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K....She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn't prepared."

Perhaps one reason why Mr. Huckabee's critics weren't enthusiastic about him joining the GOP ticket was his attitude. Rather than attack free-market groups like the Club for Growth as "the Club for Greed," Mrs. Palin assembled a broad coalition to win the Alaska governor's race in 2008 and maintained warm relations with both free-marketers and social conservatives. That's a page from the Reagan playbook that Mr. Huckabee seems not to have mastered, and indeed seems intent on ripping up.