Positive Liberty

I read all my favorite blogs through Bloglines, which means that all the articles have more or less the same format, font, color, and so forth. Sometimes it’s even difficult to tell who the author is, and that’s when my mind starts playing tricks on me.

In one entry I read of a horrific police raid, complete with property damage, a handcuffed grandmother, her handcuffed grandkids, and unapologetic cops who told them basically to get lost when it turned out that the whole thing had been one giant mistake. The blogger — a man after my own heart — commented as follows:

The problem is bigger than this one case, or even of the tendency for militarization of our police forces generally. The problem is in the changing dynamic of checks & balances in our government overall, and how that allows for abuse of power. In other words, the problem is with freedom. In order to fight a senseless ‘War’ on drugs, we’ve tolerated horrendous abuses of our civil liberties ranging from such home invasions cited above to limits on how much cash you can carry to even the seizure of cars and homes if so much as a trace of drug is found. In an equally senseless effort to curtail illegal gun use, legitimate gun owners have had to register weapons and seek permission from local police authorities to purchase, where their firearms haven’t been outlawed completely. Because of our fear of terrorism, we’ve allowed the encroachments of the Homeland Security Act, leading to abuses of the FBI using National Security Letters to investigate inappropriately, surveilance of mail, email, and phone conversations with minimal accountability, even ‘Extraordinary Renditions’ - not to mention the Iraq War. It all comes down to the simple truth that when you give people power, they will tend to misuse and abuse it without proper oversight and constraint. And when the populace is scared, they will tend to grant more power to government to assuage their fear.

Radley Balko? Nope. Jim Downey of Unscrewing the Inscrutable, a liberal skeptical/atheist site. He even crossposted it to Daily Kos, bless his heart. Cheers one Kossack: “…not to get all misty-eyed over the ‘Founders’, but they did have a pretty good grasp on human nature.” Indeed, the whole Daily Kos thread could well have been written at Hit & Run. There are cheers for people who defend their homes, jeers for Waco, complaints about rubber-stamped search warrants, and even a decent understanding of the whole public choice angle: When you give police departments subsidies for neat new military gear — guess what? They’re going shopping — whether or not they need the gear, and whether or not they know how to use it.

There’s hope for this liberaltarian stuff yet, I tell you. Downey closes as follows:

As a progressive, I know that government can aid in making this a better world - as a libertarian, I know that it should never be the government deciding for itself what that better world is “for our own good.”

So is he right?

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