Yet I can think of someone who deserves very little privacy—a policeman making an arrest. Unfortunately it’s a crime in some states to make a video of a policeman doing just that. People recording police have been threatened, detained, or arrested. Some were jailed overnight.

That’s wrong. Police work for the public, they’re paid with tax money, and most importantly, they have tremendous power. They’ve got the legal right to pull guns, detain us, lock us up and, in some cases, shoot us. The potential for abuse is great. So it’s a good thing that modern video cameras are now so commonplace. Any abuse of police power in a public place is likely to be recorded. Why should that be a crime in some states?

I asked Radley Balko, an editor at Reason magazine who keeps an eye on issues like this: What’s happened to the people who were arrested for videotaping cops at work?

“In most of these cases, the people aren’t actually prosecuted,” Balko said. “The charges tend to get dropped before these cases get to trial—I think because the people prosecuting these cases and the people who make the laws don’t want the laws to actually get challenged. But it’s a night in jail.”

On what charge?

“In states that have these two-party consent laws, they rely on the old wiretapping laws. The claim is that police officers have a right to privacy while they’re on the job in public exercising some pretty powerful responsibilities that we give them. I think that claim is ridiculous.”

He says some authorities now claim that people who record the police while being arrested are “interfering with arrest or . . . refusing to obey a lawful order, if they tell you to turn the camera off and you don’t.”

How does it interfere with the arrest?

“It’s a ridiculous argument. But here’s the thing: You may not go to jail for these charges. But they’re going to take your camera, going to arrest you, you’re going to be handcuffed, put in the back of a squad car. And nothing is going to happen to the police officers who illegally arrest you—usually.”

Occasionally a cop caught abusing his power is arrested or fired. But that’s rare.

In Maryland, motorcyclist Tony Graber got in trouble for recording a cop who pulled him over for speeding. Graber didn’t know it was a cop. He was just a guy in plain clothes with a gun. The cop eventually identified himself.

“Graber didn’t get arrested until he posted that video on YouTube,” Balko explained. “Once he posted it . . . the state police raided his home—came into his home early in the morning, guns drawn—confiscated a bunch of computer equipment, held him and his parents at gunpoint, arrested him. He spent several nights in jail. He had felony charges hanging over his head until the case finally got to court.”

Fortunately, a state judge threw out the charges and wrote a strong opinion:

“Those of us who are public officials and are entrusted with the power of the state should not expect our actions to be shielded from public observation.”

He ended by asking, “Who watches the watchmen?”—a question Plato raised in The Republic. Good for the judge. But Balko points out that no one punished the authorities who abused their power.

“The prosecutor who charged him, the cops who raided him and arrested him—they were all wrong about the law and did real harm to him, and none of them are going to suffer any consequences.”

In 2004, three years after the Patriot Act was enacted, politicians started to worry about the rising number of Americans grumbling about government intrusions. The 9/11 Commission proposed creating “a board within the executive branch to oversee adherence to the guidelines we recommend and the commitment the government makes to defend our civil liberties.” Creating another office within the executive branch to report on executive branch activities was unlikely to produce anything more than extra jobs for Washington hangers-on. The White House edited the 9/11 commission’s report before it was publicly released, so the Bush team had no trouble with this toothless-tiger palliative.

In December 2004, acting on the commission’s recommendation, Congress mandated the creation of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The same law that created the oversight board also made it easier for the FBI to get eavesdropping warrants on Americans, created a new standard to make it easier to prosecute citizens who donate to foreign charities of which the U.S. government disapproves, and provided a new layer of secrecy for federal agencies.

Some congressmen hailed the board as the start of a brave new era. Things would be different since there was a new sheriff in Washington—or at least that was what people were supposed to think. The civil liberties developments in the years after the board was created offer profound lessons into how the government works.

It would have been difficult to design a better rubber stamp than the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. It had no subpoena power, so it was effectively obliged to accept unsubstantiated assertions from the agencies violating privacy and liberty. The president had the right to appoint board members and could fire them any time. Bush did not appoint any experts on civil liberties; instead, the board was stacked with Republicans who formerly held government positions as enforcement zealots. And the first appointments did not occur until seven months after the law passed. The American Bar Association noted that Bush’s nominations were timed “as part of the administration’s push to encourage Congress to reauthorize provisions of the USA Patriot Act that expire within the next few months.” The oversight board supposedly guaranteed that Patriot Act powers would not be abused.

Six months after Bush stacked the board, the biggest civil liberties expose of recent decades exploded on the front page of the New York Times. The prior year, when he was running for reelection, Bush assured Americans that no wiretaps were occurring without federal court authorization. But the Times revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had conducted warrantless wiretaps on thousands of Americans based on flimsy pretexts. The Times’ James Risen reported that Bush’s “secret presidential order has given the NSA the freedom to peruse . . . the email of millions of Americans.” The NSA’s program was quickly christened the “J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner.”

In the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights the Founding Fathers decreed that government searches must be based on probable cause and approved by a neutral magistrate. The Bush wiretapping program was based solely on the president’s edict. Shift supervisors at the National Security Agency decided which Americans got wiretapped. But a GS-13 civil servant is not constitutionally on par with a federal judge.

An Ineffective Rage

Did the existence of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board change how the wiretapping scandal played out? Not a whit. Bush seized on the Times exposé to portray himself as heroically rising above the statute book to protect the American people. A month later, Republican members of Congress gave Bush a standing ovation when he bragged about his “terrorist surveillance program” in his State of the Union address. There was more enthusiasm in Congress for prosecuting New York Times editors and reporters for treason than for prosecuting NSA officials for violating federal law.

Supporters of civil liberties rallied a few months later to try to slow the bandwagon to renew the Patriot Act. One major concern was the provision in the original Patriot Act that made it far easier for the FBI to use National Security Letters (NSLs) to compel private citizens, businesses, nonprofits, and other entities to surrender information on demand. NSLs empower the FBI to seize records that reveal “where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work,” the Washington Post noted. The FBI was issuing more than 50,000 NSLs per year.

While Bush pressured Congress to renew the Patriot Act in 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced, “The track record established over the past three years has demonstrated the effectiveness of the safeguards of civil liberties put in place when the act was passed. There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse.” In reality the feds had already discovered hundreds of criminal abuses of Patriot Act powers involving FBI agents and NSLs. But the abuses were kept under wraps until after Congress renewed the Patriot Act.

A bipartisan agreement to renew the Patriot Act was finally reached, giving the White House almost everything it wanted. As part of the deal Bush administration officials agreed to provide Congress far more details on how Patriot Act powers were being used. The Justice Department would be obliged to disclose to Congress how many Americans were having their privacy violated by NSLs.

However, Bush reneged in a “signing statement” quietly released after a heavily hyped White House bill-signing ceremony. He decreed that he was entitled to deny Congress any information that would “impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive’s constitutional duties.” Bush announced that he would interpret the law “in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information.”

In other words, any provision of the law that required disclosure would be presumptively null and void. The crux of the Bush administration’s “unitary executive” doctrine was that all power rests in the president and that “checks and balances” are archaic.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board had no complaint about this charade. Instead, the members belatedly and heartily endorsed the NSA’s warrantless wiretaps on Americans’ phone calls and emails.

In 2007, before the Board could issue its first annual report, White House staffers massively rewrote and censored a draft version. Lanny Davis, the sole Democratic member of the board, resigned, later protesting that “the board was logically viewed . . . as the functional equivalent of White House staff.”

Toothless Watchdog

But the mere existence of the board allowed members of Congress to pirouette as constitutional saviors. When the House passed legislation later in 2007 moving the board out of the White House and requiring Senate confirmation of its members, Rep. Carolyn Maloney proclaimed, “The American people must have trust in their government to support its tactics against terrorism, and a strong Civil Liberties Board is vital to upholding that public trust.” But the restructured board, like the original, was better designed to alleviate public fears than to restrain federal power. The “reformed” Board was given little or no power to acquire information that federal agencies chose not to give. And it is difficult to understand how requiring Senate confirmation of Board members was a silver bullet, since the Senate had given approval, retroactive or otherwise, to the Bush administration’s most controversial abuses.

The same season that Congress passed the civil liberties board reform proposal it also enacted a law requiring the Homeland Security Department’s chief privacy officer to “to report each year about Homeland Security activities that affect privacy,” the New York Times reported. The law required that “reports be submitted directly to Congress ‘without any prior comment or amendment’ by superiors at the department or the White House.” Congress passed this law because of an earlier controversy about White House censorship of the Homeland Security Department’s report on privacy violations.

Five months after the law passed, Bush covertly issued a legal opinion effectively declaring that provision null and void. Deputy assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury declared that “such interference [by Congress] is impermissible.” Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, denounced Bush’s action as “unconstitutional” and “a dictatorial, after-the-fact pronouncement by him in line with a lot of other cherry-picking he’s done on the signing statements.” But Bush’s action was largely ignored by the media. And his Civil Liberties Board certainly did not even whimper.

When Bush lagged in appointing members to the restructured board, Sen. Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, urged him in 2008 to move quickly “to preserve the public’s faith in our promise to protect their privacy and civil liberties as we work to protect the country against terrorism.” Lieberman wanted to preserve “the public’s faith” at the same time he championed “enhanced interrogation” methods and retroactive immunity for any company or person who violated Americans’ rights in the name of antiterrorism. (The Senate did not confirm any of Bush’s belated nominations.)

Change You Can Forget About

During his presidential campaign Barack Obama vigorously criticized Bush’s civil liberties abuses. Many of his supporters expected that, if elected, Obama would radically change federal policies regarding American liberty.

As of this past October, Obama had made no appointments to the oversight board. Rep. Bennie Thompson, then chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Jane Harman, then chairman of that panel’s subcommittee on intelligence, wrote Obama early last year urging him to speedily make appointments because “we believe that the Board will give an anxious public confidence that appropriate rights are respected.” Harman is best known as the sponsor of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, which could have spurred massive crackdowns on libertarians, constitutionalists, and others with nonmainstream ideas.

Many newspaper editorials have also complained about Obama’s failure to stock the oversight board. But this is perhaps the most honest action the Obama administration has taken regarding civil liberties. In area after area Obama has rubber-stamped Bush-era abuses and signaled that there would be no investigation or prosecution of official wrongdoers from the previous administration. Obama is also embracing Bush-style State-secrecy doctrines that prohibit disclosure of the rationale for U.S. government-planned assassinations of Americans.

The oversight board is far more likely to induce complacency than to protect liberty. Since 9/11, trampling the Constitution is a no-fault offense. In Washington nowadays, only “extremists” believe that federal officials should be jailed for violating citizens’ privacy.

For every member of Congress such as Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), who vigorously and consistently opposes federal abuses, there are vanloads of congressmen cheering federal agents’ trampling the statute book in the name of public safety. The founders intended Congress to be a vigorous check on the abuses of the executive branch. However, few members of Congress have the gumption to pursue official lawbreakers or to fight to expose agencies’ crime sprees. In the 1970s, senators like Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) and Frank Church (D-Id.) spearheaded probes into executive-branch abuses, revolutionizing how Americans thought about the president, the CIA, and the FBI. Ervin and Church succeeded in part because of sheer willpower. But there is little or no such courage in Washington nowadays.

Washington vastly prefers the appearance of checks and balances to the reality of government under law. At a time when federal officials who violate Americans’ rights have nothing to fear from Uncle Sam, the existence of the oversight board is a cruel taunt to private citizens.

Perhaps the best epithet for the feds’ civil liberties record is the saying of Lily Tomlin: “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” “I’m from the government, and I’m here to safeguard your privacy” is the post-9/11 version of the old joke. But American liberty cannot afford any more sham protections. Abolishing the oversight board would be the most honest step Washington has taken on civil liberties in this century.

America at one time was a market economy, but as the country has aged, we have slid toward socialism in many respects. Among the signs of this slide is the loss of freedom to control one’s own land. That’s the case with farmers, for example, who must abide by government regulations on the crops they may grow. It’s the case with urban landowners, who must abide by zoning regulations. And it’s also the case when land is taken from owners under what is called eminent domain. This is the theme of Abuse of Power by journalist Steven Greenhut, who has followed this subject for years. What Greenhut gives us is a thorough investigation of the rampaging growth of this assault on private property, which frequently leaves the reader shaking his head in disbelief at the villainy of the process.

The original concept of eminent domain sanctioned in the Constitution is that government may take private property when it is necessary for a public use, and then only if just compensation is paid to the owner. Even that is a dangerous departure from libertarian principles; government should no more make anyone “an offer he can’t refuse” than should criminals. But so long as eminent domain was limited to property seizures only for true public uses—roads, for example—the damage was fairly small. The problem, Greenhut informs us, is that eminent domain is now routinely used to take land from people not for some public use, but instead to advance anything that might be called a public purpose. By going along with this, the courts (the U.S. Supreme Court is now the main culprit) have allowed an almost limitless expansion of eminent domain.

As Greenhut shows with many, many cases, eminent domain is now routinely used to transfer land from one party to another simply because politicians believe that it will be put to better use. “Better” here simply means “paying more in taxes.” An old house or a small business brings in a small tax take. Condemning the property and forcing its sale in order to hand it over to a big commercial enterprise that will generate far more tax revenue is regarded by many politicians as a public purpose. They have no qualms about slapping the label “blighted” on people’s homes or businesses so they can force them out.

Forced transfers to satisfy politicians and well-heeled developers are appalling enough, but the other side of the transaction is also terrible. The requirement of “just compensation,” Greenhut contends, is often ignored. “Almost always,” he writes, “the government tries to lowball the property owner, in many cases offering a fraction of the property’s value.” The unfortunate property owner usually loses. Even if he hires an attorney to contest the amount offered, the legal expenses involved generally mean a considerable net loss in wealth for him. (Of  course, “compensation” in a forced sale can never be just; justice requires consent.)

Where is the judiciary in all this? Won’t judges step in to stop these seizures? Unfortunately, no, as Greenhut demonstrates. Judges are often indifferent to the plight of individuals targeted for removal. Most seem to share the mindset of the politicians: that people who fight against eminent domain are greedy opponents of social progress.

Not even churches are safe from eminent domain. Actually, tax-exempt property is among the least desirable of all uses from the standpoint of tax-hungry politicians. Greenhut’s cases where churches have been eminent-domain victims will raise the reader’s ire further.

An instructive side lesson is that many of the politicians guilty of eminent-domain atrocities are “liberals” whose campaign rhetoric oozes with “compassion” for the supposedly downtrodden citizens.They don’t mind treading all over real people, however, if it will enable them to achieve the supreme objective of an expanded tax base, enabling them to spend more on their favorite projects and constituencies. Eminent domain is another piece of evidence for the Public Choice economists.

At the book’s end Greenhut offers helpful advice to people who find that they need to fight back. It can be done. Bravo to the author for showing how.

Still, if that’s what you think, you’re wrong.

The latest entry in the genre, Thomas Woods and Kevin Gutzman’s Who Killed the Constitution?, is something different. It’s well worth your while.

Unlike some other writers, Woods and Gutzman don’t just place the blame for our present situation on a handful of bad Supreme Court decisions. Instead, they show how, in the twentieth century, all three branches of the federal government have spun out of control, completely abandoning any pretense that the Constitution constrains them at all.

Woods and Gutzman demonstrate how the executive branch claims virtually unlimited power. President George W. Bush damaged the constitutional fabric significantly, and the authors demolish the dubious constitutional scholarship of Bush’s court intellectual, law professor John Yoo. They point out, too, that presidents never have trouble finding “scholars” like Yoo to rationalize their power grabs.

But the authors also show that Bush did not do much of anything new. All presidents since at least Harry Truman have assumed they could make war without a declaration from Congress. In fact, most presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have assumed, as he did, that they can do anything they want in the absence of a specific constitutional restriction on their power. (Gene Healy’s recent book, The Cult of the Presidency, reviewed in the March Freeman, offers much additional detail on this subject.)

A Litany of Abuses

One chapter in particular illustrates this by exposing one of the worst, but most overlooked, government crimes in U.S. history: Franklin Roosevelt’s confiscation of everyone’s gold. This discussion also gives the authors an opportunity to offer an important bit of economic education as they explain why gold was used as money in the first place.

You might expect the chapter titled “Roads to Nowhere” to offer a familiar list of pork-barrel projects funded by Congress. Instead, the authors show that the federal government shouldn’t be funding roads at all, no matter where those roads go. Early presidents assumed they would need a constitutional amendment to fund “infrastructure” projects. Unfortunately, today they just assume it’s within their power and that assumption goes unchallenged.

Other chapters explore topics such as the Commerce Clause, which the courts have used to justify almost anything Congress does; the military draft, which violates the Constitution’s prohibition of slavery; presidential “signing statements” (written pronouncements by a president on signing a bill, often with the intent to modify the statute and especially to nullify its application to the executive branch), and President Truman’s attempt to nationalize the steel industry.

Two of the boldest chapters deal with what the authors call the “third rail of American jurisprudence”—Brown v. Board of Education and its aftermath. The authors show how Brown had no basis in the Constitution—and that the Supreme Court justices behind the decision knew it. Yes, the book’s authors actually say it: the Fourteenth Amendment’s text does not actually prohibit school segregation.

Even if that’s so, why attack this sacred cow when most everyone today opposes segregation anyway? Because if the Supreme Court can so utterly disregard the Constitution and the very idea of law in this decision to reach its own policymaking goals, then there really is no Constitution to speak of anymore. And that’s the point. As they say in their introduction, “the Constitution is dead.”

Beyond Redemption

Refreshingly, they don’t argue that the Constitution might be revived by electing the right people or bringing the right lawsuits. Indeed, they even suggest that our sorry result might have been inevitable—not only with this particular Constitution, but with any written constitution. After all, what do you expect will happen when you let federal officials determine the limits of the federal government’s power? That’s true regardless of who’s in office, or what they might say before being elected. Woods and Gutzman write: “People in power exercise all the power they can get, even after they have howled in the wilderness against legislating judges, imperial presidents, and the death of states’ rights.”

The authors also quote Lysander Spooner, who put the problem best when he wrote in the nineteenth century that the Constitution “has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”

The MacDonald killing sparked an unusual amount of public outrage. This shooting, in particular, was hard to grasp. An empty park and a tiny teenager hardly make for a life-threatening situation for the officers. Couldn’t they just have backed away and used nonlethal alternatives such as pepper spray? The police admitted that they were readying a beanbag gun in the parking lot when the officers claimed that “time ran out.”

Angry that anyone would question their “split-second decisions,” the law enforcement “community” said it was wrong to jump to conclusions before the details of the investigation were complete. The sheriff defended the police publicly before any investigation even started, so he apparently was jumping to conclusions, but never mind. The consensus: calm down and wait for the department to see what happened.

I called the Huntington Beach Police Department (HBPD) and asked for the completed reports for two other high-profile officer-involved deadly shootings from 2001 and 2004. In the one case a troubled man reportedly with a toy gun was shot 29 times and bullets riddled several houses behind him. In another case, officers followed a suspect, lost track of him, and then started following a different man, 18-year-old Antonio Saldivar. Police shot him to death after they claimed he pulled a toy gun on them. The officer who shot Saldivar, by the way, has a disturbing disciplinary history, including allegations of excessive force.

Plenty of time had passed, so the reports should have been completed in those two cases. Well, the HBPD said I could have neither report because both are exempt from the California Public Records Act. What a great Catch-22: the public has no right to comment on police shootings until the investigation is complete, but once it is complete the public has no right to see the report.

In the teenaged girl’s case district-attorney (DA) investigators ultimately prepared a report arguing that the officers had “no choice” but to shoot. The DA’s office did not conduct any of its own interviews with witnesses. Investigators simply took the reports produced by the sheriff’s department, which detailed a “perfect storm” scenario: the police were backed up against a fence with nowhere to go; the girl lunged toward them; officers gently implored her to back away but reluctantly shot her as she intruded on their 21-foot safety barrier.

Although a local newsweekly easily found witnesses who stridently disputed that account, the DA was content with what it found. No Orange County district attorney has ever filed charges against police officers for an on-duty shooting, which is typical of most DAs. And district attorneys, by the way, only look at whether officers committed a crime—whether they fired the shots with criminal intent. But no one thinks there was criminal intent. DAs do not look at police procedures, and the newspapers were quick to find police training officials who declared that the officers “did what they are trained to do.”

That’s what is so worrisome.

As the MacDonald case reveals, despite many official oversight channels and processes, there is no serious oversight of police behavior. Law enforcement writes the rules of engagement, investigates its own officers, and has a well-oiled public-relations machine that kicks in whenever something disturbing takes place. District attorneys and grand juries are part of the law-enforcement establishment, and politicians usually defend the “heroic” officers. No information gets out until the family files a civil lawsuit against the department. No one ever discusses police policy, which is an internal matter.

Typical Shooting

Yet the MacDonald shooting is sadly typical. Here’s an Orange County Register report about a 2004 incident: “Robert Velarde said his son Jason stood beside the bed and appeared to freeze out of fear when four police officers, their guns drawn, entered the room the night of May 10. ‘They told him to drop the scissors. I told him to drop the scissors. He didn’t look like he could let them go, so I wrestled to take them away,’ said Velarde, a quadriplegic with partial use of his arms. . . . ‘Then one officer yelled ‘knife’ and they all fired,’ Velarde, 62, said. His son, Jason Velarde, 22, was killed.”

In September 2007, a 15-year-old autistic teen went missing. The mother called the sheriff’s department, which, she said, did nothing to help find him. Ten hours later, someone reported that a man was wandering around a busy street. It was the missing teen. Deputies responded by tasering the teen and then handcuffing him. The teen’s father said his son was tasered when he already was on the ground and that the deputies treated him roughly as he tried to comply with their orders. The sheriff’s department alternately claimed that the deputies had no choice but to taser the boy because they feared he might have a weapon and that they tasered him to protect him from himself.

In one case I recall several years ago, Anaheim police went to arrest an elderly doctor for a nonviolent crime. They drove one of those mini-tanks into his wealthy suburban neighborhood, black-clad SWAT-team members hanging onto the sides clutching high-powered rifles. (SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics.)

Police often tell me, “Our only concern is getting home safely at the end of the day.” Such statements reveal two common traits in modern police forces. The first is an outsized sense of danger. In reality, police work isn’t in the top ten dangerous professions, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Indeed, no government job is in the top ten. The second attitude is the self-centered nature of police work. Concern for the public takes a backseat to concern for “officer safety.”

Police officials always depict their officers as reluctant warriors who rarely, if ever, use or even brandish their weapons. But this is a fiction from the past. Officers tell me the old-school guys are mostly gone and that the new breed of cop has a military mentality and often a military background. The SWAT-team members are the ones who do the training and get promoted to top positions in the departments.

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that police are far from reluctant to pull their weapons or feel much remorse when they do. After Riverside police gunned down a sleeping girl named Tyisha Miller in a car in 1998 (she had a gun in her lap, was unconscious, and after police smashed her window, she moved and they immediately opened fire), the officers involved in the shooting stood around, joked, and animatedly reenacted the shooting, according to Los Angeles Times reports. One of the officers commented, “This is going to ruin their Kwanzaa,” after upset family members showed up at the scene. One local man arrived at the scene of another officer-involved shooting and reported that the police were high-fiving each other.

In another recent local case, a Costa Mesa police officer admitted pulling a gun on a teenager after the officer noticed that the boy and his friends were riding their bikes without helmets. He chased the boy into the boy’s backyard and drew his gun. After the boy’s dog came to defend him, the officer shot the dog 15 times. The city paid the family a large sum of money, but the police department insists the officer’s behavior was correct police policy. That’s perhaps the scariest part of this whole disreputable incident.

Former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara, now a scholar at the Hoover Institution, captured the essence of the problem in a November 29, 2006, column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal. McNamara focused on an incident a few days earlier in New York, when several plainclothes police officers fired 50 shots at a car, wounding two men and killing a third, Sean Bell, who was to be married later that day.

How did this and other cases like it happen?

“Simply put,” wrote McNamara, “the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on ‘officer safety’ and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.”

According to McNamara, “Reasonable people accept that a cop’s job is difficult and dangerous, and most people understand that sometimes an officer will have to shoot someone. But the police are not and should never be allowed to think of themselves as soldiers or to believe they face the same level of danger.”

That’s exactly right. Even worse, there is virtually no public oversight or accountability, not only for police who follow these new policies and kill or hurt citizens, but for police who act outside proper authority and abuse their power. In Orange County, deputies spend about seven years patrolling the jail before being sent out onto the streets of our cities. Some critics wonder whether the experience dealing with prisoners leads at least some officers to treat members of the public with a high level of disdain. While police militarization is a problem on city streets, it is even worse for anyone under police custody.

Beaten by Inmates

In March of 2006, John Derek Chamberlain, who was stopped by an officer for public urination then arrested after he was found to possess child pornography, was savagely beaten to death for 20 minutes by fellow inmates. The Register reported that “[w]hile inmates beat John Derek Chamberlain to death, the senior deputy at the minimum-security barracks sat in the guard station, watching television. . . . The deputies’ failure to prevent the torture and killing of a man thought by jail inmates to be a child molester is at the center of an ongoing criminal inquiry.”

An inmate claims the deputy, who was several feet from the beating, actually instigated it after falsely outing Chamberlain as a child molester. Before any investigation was done, the county sheriff declared that his deputies did nothing wrong. Although other agencies typically investigate these killings, the sheriff’s department took charge of the investigation itself and even “cleaned up” the scene before the county supervisors’ staff arrived. The department refused to give the inmate a lie-detector test to corroborate his accusations. According to many solid sources, a group of deputies that calls itself “The Psycho Crew” routinely inflicts rough justice on inmates, picking particularly on minorities and drunks. The department denies this, but county taxpayers end up paying civil settlements to abused victims.

The Chamberlain case led to enough of a public outcry that the county board of supervisors voted to take the first steps toward creating an independent oversight panel. The sheriff, DA, and deputies’ union have tried to derail the proposal. It has been approved but the current plan, although useful, would create only a few advisory responsibilities. And, under current state law, almost all information regarding the disciplinary records of deputies and police are off-limits to civilian oversight panels, the public, and the media. As the American Civil Liberties Union explained, “On August 29, 2006, the California Supreme Court in Copley Press v. Superior Court held that records of an administrative appeal of sustained misconduct charges are confidential and may not be disclosed to the public. The decision prevents the public from learning the extent to which police officers have been disciplined as a result of misconduct.”

Police supporters claim the public already has plenty of oversight. But observers always find the same pattern: The internal investigations are not public, and the deputies stay on the force with no obvious punishment. The DA exonerates the deputies. The grand jury only gets involved in the most highly publicized cases, and such juries are controlled by the DA and represent a narrow, conservative demographic. (Around here, it’s mostly retired government workers who can afford to spend half their day working at the court for virtually no pay.) When a member of the public files a complaint with a police or sheriff’s department, it typically takes months to hear anything back. Then the only legal requirement is for the agency to say whether the complaint was “sustained” or “not sustained.” Such complaints are rarely sustained.

Code of Silence

Even when police engage in obvious misbehavior, fellow officers stand by the miscreants. There’s a well-known “code of silence.” Many people have watched the videotape of the savage beating of a barmaid by an off-duty Chicago police officer. The department had to be shamed into filing serious charges, and fellow officers showed up in force in solidarity when their compatriot had his court date. Juries in suburban communities are notoriously conservative, so when a case gets to trial, it’s difficult to convict an ill-behaving cop. In February former Irvine Police Officer David Alex Park went to court for pulling over a woman motorist, threatening to arrest her, but letting her off after she performed a sex act. Park argued that he pulled the victim over for her own safety and that the sex was consensual—as if sex could ever be consensual when an armed police officer has pulled a woman over and threatens to take her to jail.

The jury, however, bought the argument, and Park went free. He did lose his job, however, and the woman received a civil settlement from the city. Indeed, the only real oversight and justice in police-abuse cases comes from trial attorneys who sue police departments. It’s better than nothing, and such actions often dislodge police documents, but it’s a sad day when the only serious oversight of the most powerful government agents most people will encounter comes in the tort system. In many cases when police are caught abusing their power, their union defends them and keeps them on the force.

No wonder police officers behave as if they can do as they please. The Los Angeles Times reported last October 4 that Los Angeles County deputies play a game on the job called “Operation Any Booking,” in which the winner is the deputy who makes the most arrests or most car seizures in a 24-hour period. “It’s just a friendly competition to have a little fun out here,” said the department spokesman. Never mind that such “games” encourage officers to make unnecessary arrests and seizures.

Officers at times behave like they are part of an occupying army, and there are many stories of excessive force that don’t rise to the level of investigations and lawsuits, but are indicative of what’s going on out there. One of the Register’s independent contractors who services newspaper racks in the wee hours of the morning tells about the time recently when he was emptying money from a rack while wearing his newspaper apron and he saw an officer looking at him. Rather than approach and ask him what he was doing, several police cars surrounded him and officers came at him with weapons drawn; he was shoved to the ground, his arms painfully wrenched behind his back, and he was even taunted by an officer. He was let go after a short time, but is this really the way we want our communities policed?

Police officers in California in particular are well paid, so this is not a case of insufficient funds to hire quality candidates, as some people argue. In Orange County the average deputy earns a total salary and benefit package of $111,000 a year. They are eligible to retire at age 50 with 90 percent of their final pay after 30 years of service, guaranteed forever, courtesy of taxpayers. Police agencies in California complain about a hiring shortage. The reason for the shortage is simple: a) rapid increases in retirement benefits have encouraged a large portion of local forces to retire; and b) unions are always lobbying cities to provide more police positions, and politicians often comply for political reasons. Who can say no? Police and deputies, after all, have been afforded near-hero status following the 9/11 attacks. And the media often provide photo ops for their anti-terrorism training exercises, so the public knows about the importance of their work. In a recent political battle police organizations made direct references to 9/11 as a reason to oppose any rollback of benefits. Politicians who go against the blue tide pay a heavy political price.

There’s no apparent limit to the political gains that can be made by pandering to the “law and order” crowd. Last June the Assembly Public Safety Committee considered a bill that would have overturned the Copley decision and restored some public oversight to police misbehavior. The room was filled with police officers speaking out against it. The cops told emotional stories about police officers being killed in the line of duty—even though news reports later revealed that none of the examples had anything to do with the release of public records. The committee could not muster a single Democratic or Republican vote for the bill. In the state legislature Democrats mostly oppose such reforms because of their ties to the unions, and Republicans mostly oppose such bills because of their commitment to “law and order.” It’s the perfect scenario for law enforcement, and a troubling one for the public.

Yet something needs to be done. While I was writing this article, the Santa Ana police gunned down an apparently unarmed man in a stolen car, and then shut down the freeway for five hours. The department would say nothing, according to the Los Angeles Times: the police spokesman “referred questions to the district attorney’s office, which investigates officer-related shootings. A spokeswoman declined to discuss the probe, citing district attorney policy.” And so it goes.

Police use deadly force at their discretion. Police agencies then investigate themselves. They release only the information they choose to release. Few politicians are willing to discuss police procedures, and the courts and legislatures uphold the “right” of police agencies to hide information about misbehaving officers. In California, police have a special officer’s “bill of rights.” America may not be a police state—that is, a political system characterized “by an arbitrary exercise of power by police”—but it’s getting too close for comfort.

by Deepak Lal

Princeton University Press • 2006 • 320 pages • $29.95

Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

UCLA economics professor Deepak Lal is one of the most articulate defenders of the free market and an outspoken critic of interventionist and welfare-state polices around the world.

Over 20 years ago, when central planning was still considered a panacea for economic development in third-world countries, Lal published The Poverty of “Development Economics” (1983), a devastating critique of collectivist ideas and policies then dominant in underdeveloped countries. More recently, in Unintended Consequences (1998) he traced the unique institutional changes in Medieval Europe that led the West out of poverty.

In his latest book, Reviving the Invisible Hand, Lal explains why the world has only one hope for a free and prosperous future—the politics of classical liberalism and the economics of a radically free market. While well trained in mainstream neoclassical economics, he rejects many aspects of the textbook equilibrium models for a more realistic conception of man and markets derived from the classical economists and more modern theorists, such as the Austrian economists F. A. Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter.

Incorporating as well insights of the Public Choice theorists, Lal demonstrates why governments should not be viewed as manned by “Platonic Guardians” only concerned with some hypothetical common good. Rather, government should be viewed as full of predators using the coercive powers of the state to plunder others.

Lal then debunks many of the theoretical and factual myths of the day. He shows that both in the nineteenth-century heyday of classical liberalism and in the post-World War II period, the freer the trade among nations, the greater the benefit for all. Nineteenth-century laissez faire brought rising living standards and more market opportunities not only for the wealthy few, but also for the poor. The result was a growing middle class. Nor did free trade and enterprise harm the poor in underdeveloped countries. The more integrated they have become with Western economies, the greater and the more rapid their climb from economic desperation.

Accusations of the increasing “income gap” between rich and poor, both within developing countries and between them and Western nations in recent years, are shown to be based on either false or misused data. Indeed, Lal explains that more people than ever are now outside any reasonable measurement of poverty.

Precisely because it is possible to end poverty, Lal turns his analytical guns against the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization groups that have infiltrated nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as well as the United Nations, the World Bank, and many other international agencies. At the core of this opposition to a free market is the environmental movement. In a brilliant tour de force Lal demolishes each of their doomsday nightmares. For example, he draws on the relevant scientific evidence to argue that there is no catastrophic global warming and no significant climate change caused by industrialization. He shows that in general the earth is far cooler than it was in the Middle Ages, when a cooling trend set in for several centuries. The swing back to a warmer climate appears to be part of the planet’s natural cycles and may be highly beneficial to parts of the globe—if it actually materializes.

A central chapter turns to “morality and capitalism.” Lal reminds us that anthropologists and psychologists generally agree that human nature has not changed much since the Stone Age. Man is a chooser of ends, an applier of means, and an evaluator of tradeoffs to get the most out of what he has. In addition, men have within themselves the potential for risk-taking and creativity.

It is from this latter possibility that come society’s merchants, innovators, and entrepreneurs. In agrarian society, social order follows the seasons; relatively unchanging societal patterns are essential for survival and intergenerational continuity. Merchants and entrepreneurs, by their nature, are experimenters with the new—breakers of the existing order. Thus they have usually been shunned and disliked; in addition they seem to conjure up wealth out of nothing, unlike those who mix their labor with the soil or who fashion goods out of the materials of the earth.

In Europe during and after the Middle Ages, changes in economic institutions and the philosophical conceptions of man and society stimulated growth of the market economy and gave a degree of legitimacy to these men of the market and their bourgeois virtues. These changes were grounded, Lal explains, in Christian doctrines: a universal morality that focused on the individual, his autonomy, and his salvation. Other faiths, for example, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucian philosophy, emphasized communalism, societal hierarchy, and an exclusionary morality for the faithful. They also fostered subservience to a given order of things, with a suspicion of worldly pursuits.

The individualistic foundations of Western moral philosophy were undermined by the rise of positivism. The Victorian era attempted to balance scientific insight and faith-based values and moral conduct. But these values were eaten away in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries until, Lal argues, there was no shared foundation for moral conduct other than “anything goes” as long as it makes you feel good and doesn’t seem to be too harmful toward others.

Lal says that much of the resistance to globalization in other parts of the world has little to do with rejection of market-based institutions. Rather, people fear that with those institutions must come the perceived amoral and immoral “lifestyles” of the West. Lal responds that acceptance of market-based institutions does not require the adoption of Western “permissive” culture.

Thus we in the West should be more interested in seeing others adopt free markets and less concerned with whether they accept Western “values.” Attempting to impose such values may only have the perverse effect of causing other people to reject capitalism.

Richard M. Ebeling is the president of FEE.

Laws of Fear

by Cass Sunstein

Cambridge University Press • 2005 • 234 pages • $65.00 hardcover; $23.99 paperback

Reviewed by Donald J. Boudreaux

Cass Sunstein is much like his University of Chicago Law School colleague Richard Epstein. Both publish articles and books at a breathtaking pace. Both use economics lavishly. Each would be the smartest person in any group of 10,000 randomly chosen people. Both are academic superstars.

But while Epstein sees the world through the lens of a classical liberal, Sunstein wears the lens of modern American liberal—or a “progressive,” as such well-meaning champions of vigorous government regulation and heavy taxation are (misleadingly) called.

Unlike many “progressives,” however, Sunstein brings genuine intellectual firepower to the debate. His arguments, in this book and elsewhere, are serious and challenging. And while I often disagree with him, I must say that 90 percent or more of this book is spot-on correct.

He opens Laws of Fear with a devastating attack on the so-called “precautionary principle.” This “principle” advises that we steer clear of actions that might generate substantial harm even if we don’t know what this harm might be and its chances of occurring. If it’s possible that action X will cause some great harm, the precautionary principle demands that the action be avoided.

Environmentalists love that principle because it rationalizes almost any piece of restrictive regulation—or so they think. Because, for example, drilling on the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve might unleash a series of events that doom all of the flora and fauna of the northern wilderness, that’s sufficient reason to prevent drilling even if the chances of this outcome are tiny.

Sunstein points out, however, that “the Precautionary Principle is literally incoherent, and for one reason: There are risks on all sides of social situations. It is therefore paralyzing; it forbids the very steps that it requires.”

Indeed so. A proponent of ANWR drilling can turn the precautionary principle’s logic around by pointing out that there’s a chance, however small, that failure to drill on ANWR might lead to catastrophe.

No matter how loudly it’s done, no such illogical posturing for (and against) regulation can substitute for sound cost-benefit analysis. A regulation cannot be justified on the possibility that some extreme scenario may materialize. Instead, sound estimates of the probabilities of various outcomes, along with estimates of the costs and benefits of those outcomes, are the intelligent way to determine what actions are appropriate.

Sunstein is correct about this, and he makes a strong case that “assignment of monetary values to risks is far more plausible and intuitive than it might seem.” I agree completely—if government is going to regulate, it should do so on cost-benefit grounds.

But how wide are those grounds? In my opinion, nowhere near as wide as Sunstein believes them to be. First, as Elinor Ostrom’s research shows, people are surprisingly creative at arranging their affairs voluntarily to solve many problems of a kind that too many of us simply assume can be solved only by government. When the robustness of private arrangements is overlooked (as Sunstein tends to do), the benefits of government regulation are overestimated.

Second, people tend to abuse power. Although Sunstein sometimes seems aware of Public Choice concerns, too often he writes as if they are either nonexistent or exaggerated. When the dangers of government-power abuse are overlooked, the costs of government regulation are underestimated.

So in my view, the soundest cost-benefit analysis counsels against almost all government regulations and in favor of reliance on the law of property, contract, and tort. Put another way, cost-benefit analysis counsels in favor of laissez faire.

Sunstein would disagree, for two reasons. First, he overestimates the benefits and underestimates the costs of regulation. Second, and more interesting, Sunstein is a legal positivist—he believes that all law is created by government. From this belief it’s a short step (which Sunstein seems to take) to the conclusion that all law is consciously chosen.

This isn’t the place to challenge legal positivism. I mention it only because it is the largest flaw in all of Sunstein’s work.

Still, Laws of Fear is a solid work, informed by sound economic understanding—including many useful applications of behavioral economics. I recommend it to readers of The Freeman with more enthusiasm than I expected I would have.

Donald Boudreaux (dboudrea@gmu.edu) is chairman of the economics department at George Mason University.

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves

by Adam Hochschild

Houghton Mifflin Company/Mariner Books • 2005/2006 • 468 pages • $26.95 hardcover; $16.00 paperback

Reviewed by Becky Akers

Does anyone today think slavery a good thing? Probably only politicians and bureaucrats would defend some men’s lording it over others, living off their labor, and ordering them about; everyone else grasps the inherent immorality. This renders modern screeds against slavery not only needless but sanctimonious. Perhaps that’s why Bury the Chains, an otherwise fascinating account of the anti-slavery movement in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, ultimately annoys: the author’s piety seeps from its pages.

Adam Hochschild is a journalist who writes for the New York Times Magazine and Mother Jones, which he co-founded. That explains his piety. It may even explain his inability to place himself in the age he surveys, which he resolutely judges by modern standards and finds wanting. For starters, he sees democracy as Leviathan’s worthiest guise; that eighteenth-century Britons (and Americans) disdained democracy as mob-rule earns his censure, however excellent their reasons against it. Not that Hochschild considers or even seems aware of those reasons. Instead, he assumes that a universal British franchise would have demolished the slave trade years before Parliament did and that the lack of said franchise is almost as tragic as slavery itself.

Likewise his attitude toward Christianity. However it may disconcert modern agnostics, Quakers and devout, Bible-believing Christians led the fight against slavery. Hochschild seldom tries to understand their convictions or ideas and how those inspired their actions. Rather, he condemns them for “hypocrisy” and for not going far enough in their endeavors; that is, for not behaving as modern socialists would. The famous hymn writer John Newton is Hochschild’s most egregious victim. Newton briefly captained slave ships after his conversion to Christianity, and while God may have forgiven him, Hochschild certainly hasn’t. He repeatedly ridicules Newton for obsessing over his relationship with the Almighty instead of the abolition of slavery.

Those flaws aside, Bury the Chains is a riveting read. It will resonate with anyone who hates the state because of the parallels between slavery and statism, anti-slavers and anti-statists. Like us, the anti-slavers confronted a pervasive, unquestioned, and even beloved system. Hochschild emphasizes that slavery reigned everywhere when the activists began their campaign, with most of the world’s contemporary and historical peoples held in bondage of one kind or another. And like statism today, slavery was dismissed as inevitable and natural.

Those anti-slavery crackpots who bothered themselves about the justification for such an obviously wicked scheme found that they bore a staggering burden of proof, as do we who oppose Leviathan. Most people then were as willing to excuse slavery’s horrors as people today excuse the state’s. Perhaps this was because slavery, like the state, offered a road to riches; those directly involved in the slave trade could reap enormous wealth, as can modern politicians and their cronies. A host of others, indirectly connected, found their fortunes tied to slavery’s success, even as corporations that manufacture war materiel, prison and school supplies, and the rest, depend on the state for their profits.

The similarities end, however, when we come to the anti-slavers’ rate of progress and eventual victory. It took them only 20 years to proscribe the African slave trade and another 30 years to outlaw nongovernment ownership of one human by another.

Hochschild’s subject is dramatic by its nature, and his novelistic style enhances it. He often departs from his story to introduce us to such characters as William Wilberforce, the emaciated member of Parliament whose zeal against slavery almost literally consumed him, and Granville Sharp, remarkable alike for his music and his hatred of slavery. Sharp lived with his seven musical siblings aboard a barge that was towed along the Thames and other waterways while they performed; Handel’s Water Music comes by its name honestly.

Equally intriguing are Hochschild’s explanations of the customs and technology of a vanished world. We learn that the slops bucket in a printer’s shop was used to clean the type because the ammonia in urine dissolves ink, and that female slaves performed the back-breaking field work of cultivating sugar cane since more valuable males were saved for skilled labor. We read about Toussaint L’Overture, a national hero in Haiti because he led a rebellion among the slaves. Tragically, Toussaint became as big a tyrant as the masters and overseers he deposed. No man, black or white, slave or free, seems able to withstand the toxin of political power.

Because Bury the Chains narrates an obscure chapter in the struggle for freedom, it ought to cheer all who love liberty. It’s too bad, then, that its sanctimony and politically correct subtleties overshadow the joy. Bury the Chains greatly exasperates while it educates.

Becky Akers is a writer and historian specializing in early American history.

Why Men Earn More

by Warren Farrell

AMACOM • 2005 • 233 pages • $23.00

Reviewed by George C. Leef

Warren Farrell’s Why Men Earn More is a businessman’s explanation for an economic phenomenon that gets many people up in arms. The book won’t be popular among the purveyors of the notion that the so-called gender earnings gap is due to a defect in the economy because Farrell gives no credence to that idea, so popular among feminist scholars. Farrell provides the reader a dispassionate—and often amusing—look at the differences between men and women in the market and shows that there are perfectly rational explanations for the fact that men who are fulltime labor-force participants on the average have higher earnings than women. In sum, the book is a crushing refutation to the contention that capitalism is inherently unfair to women and that government must promote “gender justice.”

This is not unexplored terrain, of course. There have been academic studies on the differences between men and women in the labor market for decades. What Farrell does so well is to package that information, mixed generously with his own observations and experiences, to create a highly readable, nontechnical analysis that should persuade all but the most die-hard exploitation theorist that the attacks on capitalism are unwarranted.

Farrell’s big point is that men tend to make decisions about employment—including such key factors as hours per week, risk, and the possibility of mandatory relocation—that lead to higher pay, but entail offsetting difficulties. Women, conversely, tend to make choices that lead to lower compensation, but with offsetting advantages. Accordingly, there are ways for individual women to increase their earnings, but they require individual action, not government intervention.

Speaking of government intervention, Farrell easily disposes of the feminists’ pet solution to the earnings gap, namely “comparable worth” legislation. Here is his discussion: “The problem with comparable worth is that it creates higher pay for higher fulfillment positions that everyone wants and lower pay for lower fulfillment positions that are hard to fill unless we pay more. Thus, it leaves us with few people to build highways, bridges, or homes; pick up garbage, clean sewers, mine coal; or do most any job that employs almost all men. Why? Test this out yourself. Imagine that for a month you have neither had your garbage picked up nor an opportunity to read about new anthropological discoveries. Which would you pay more money to remedy?”

That’s the way the whole book is: sharp, clear, relentlessly logical.

The willingness to accept risk is one of the main reasons men on average earn more. To get people to take jobs where there is a danger of injury, employers have to offer higher pay. Biology seems to have hard-wired men to be more willing to want to make that tradeoff than women. Jobs in mining, fishing, forestry, and more are overwhelmingly male despite governmental antidiscrimination rules. Farrell cites the chilling work on an Alaskan floating cannery to help make his point. Very few people will work under those conditions, hardly any of them female.

My favorite pages occur near the end of the book when Farrell turns to policy questions. He argues against the affirmative-action crusade for greater equality in the numbers of men and women in occupations where men have historically been dominant. His reason is that it’s anticompetitive: “Affirmative action effectively adds a tax to domestic labor that makes it more difficult to compete with foreign labor. . . . Whenever the government requires companies to pay workers more than the market would bear, to pay for long vacations and extraordinary health benefits, the unemployment rate soars and the country risks the political rebellion, now happening in countries like France, Germany, and Sweden.”

Quite right, and the reader may notice that Farrell has given a sound argument for abolishing all labor-market interference.

While Farrell does an excellent job of showing that women can do better in today’s labor market without statist interventions, the book would have been stronger if he had paid some attention to the ways in which the status quo is biased against workers in general. Specifically, our economy is constricted at many points with laws and regulations that make it difficult for newcomers to enter the market and compete. Women entrepreneurs could find many new opportunities for profitable businesses if we had a truly free market that didn’t protect existing businesses (mostly owned by men) against competition.

Why Men Earn More is a potent antidote to the victimhood of the women’s movement. Women (and men) who read it will learn much about the way business decisions are made and will come away with a strong sense that the spontaneous order of the free market works in the best interests of all.

George Leef (georgeleef@aol.com) is the book review editor of The Freeman.

Yet not withstanding Roosevelt critic John T. Flynn’s remark—“There was no real objection to social security—everybody was for it.”—not all were duped. There did exist a group of conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, members of what we now call the “Old Right,” who fiercely opposed President Roosevelt’s plan for Social Security. They saw the program for what it was and understood its long-term consequences even if Roosevelt didn’t. In short, they smelled a political scam. Behind the rhetoric of “safety” and “security” they knew it was an unconstitutional usurpation of the traditional powers delegated to the states and an infringement on individual liberty.

Historians today like to emphasize the opposition to Social Security by business groups and leaders. Blinded by the pursuit of power and mammon, they were the only Americans shortsighted enough to oppose aiding the poor and elderly. To a large extent it was business leaders who understood the consequences of imposing a tax on labor during a massive economic contraction. Taxes are almost always an economic drag, especially during a recession. Former head of General Motors and FEE board member Alfred P. Sloan declared, “Industry has every reason to be alarmed at the social, economic and financial implications [of Social Security].” Looking to profit and longevity and not votes, the business community was in a better position to evaluate the effects of the employer’s and employee’s “contribution” to Social Security.

In early 1935 James A. Emery, chief counsel for the National Association of Manufacturers, appealed to the House Ways and Means Committee to rethink its push for national Social Security legislation. He argued that the Social Security bill before Congress would “discourage employment rather than encourage it.” Why would the federal government raise taxes on business in the midst of a recession? According to Emery, “General recovery depends on our ability to enlarge our production, to employ more people, and to cut down and not raise up the price of goods. Every time we increase the price of goods in a diminishing market, we are diminishing the possibility of employing other men, because we are making it more difficult, not less, to sell goods. Until we can market goods, we cannot employ men.”

Emery’s attack on FDR and the New Deal lasted through much of 1935. Later that year he declared, “We are steadily confronted with an almost continuing attempt to evade the plain limitations placed upon the exercise of political power.” He continued, “We face, in our opinion, evident determination to evade by indirection what centuries of experience have written into constitutional prohibitions against doing directly.”

Delegates to the Chamber of Commerce’s 1935 annual national convention roundly denounced FDR’s New Deal, including Social Security. Regarding the Social Security bill being debated in Congress, the Chamber warned that “if the provisions in the bill pending should be adopted, the country will realize that within a decade there will be a tax burden amounting probably to as much as $1,000,000,000 a year.” In July 1935, 200 business executives met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and concluded that most of the New Deal would be thrown out as unconstitutional.

Unlike today, when both parties seem enamored with the basic tenets of “social insurance,” congressional opposition to the 1935 bill was fierce. Once again, however, modern interpretation of this principled dissent is saturated with disdain for those who couldn’t understand the “progressive” nature of FDR’s plan. In his book The Coming of the New Deal, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., detailed the congressional opposition to the Social Security bill. Most of the objections, Schlesinger notes, were toward the old-age provision, not the unemployment coverage. Through clenched teeth Schlesinger quotes congressman after congressman who (rightly) decried Social Security as a financial monster. Rep. Thomas A. Jenkins of Ohio thought the legislation “nefarious” and that it placed “a financial lash upon the backs of the people whose backs are breaking under a load of debts and taxes.” Rep. Allen T. Treadway of Massachusetts predicted the program would “destroy old-age retirement systems set up by private industries, which in most instances provide more liberal benefits.” And Rep. John Taber of New York said, “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought in here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers, and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people.”

Immediately after the bill’s passage, stories of popular revolt began to appear in newspapers. In Brooklyn 26,000 business owners refused to file for employer-identification numbers. Julian Olney of County Presentations, Inc., simply wrote across his application, “You don’t need to bother me any more. I don’t believe in this.” As the New York Times reported at the time, Olney “held that the Securities Act [sic] is unconstitutional, inasmuch as it provides no contract and no assurance of any return upon money paid by either employers or employees.”

Popular revolt against Social Security continued for over a decade after the bill’s passage. In 1951, 18 “housewives” emptied their bank accounts after they learned that the Internal Revenue Bureau (later the IRS) was authorized to seize money owed in back Social Security taxes. The women thought it unconstitutional that they were required by law to act as tax collectors for the federal government by withholding Social Security taxes from those who worked at their homes.

The Times also reported the case of 72-year-old Frederick C. Perkins, who in 1942 was sentenced to jail for not paying $51.16 in Social Security taxes. (He had served 18 days in 1934 for failure to comply with the National Recovery Act.) According to the Times, “Mr. Perkins asserts that Social Security tax is ‘confiscatory, discriminatory and unconstitutional’ and says he will go ‘all the way to the Supreme Court, provided I have some help from friends.’ ”

The Court Approves

Although the Supreme Court found many of FDR’s New Deal programs unconstitutional, Social Security was not among them. On May 24, 1937, the Supreme Court upheld the program in three cases: Helvering v. Davis, Steward Machine Company v. Davis, and Carmichael v. Southern Coal & Coke Co. and Gulf States Paper. In his dissenting opinion in Steward Machine, Justice James Clark McReynolds held “That the portion of the Social Security legislation here under consideration, I think, exceeds the power granted to Congress. It unduly interferes with the orderly government of the State by her own people and otherwise offends the Federal Constitution.” The passage of the Social Security bill, McReynolds said, “opens the way for practical annihilation of [federalist] theory; and no cloud of words or ostentatious parade of irrelevant statistics should be permitted to obscure that fact.”

Also in 1937 came a stinging rebuke by the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. In a two-to-one decision the court found Social Security unconstitutional. Judge Scott Wilson’s majority opinion, surely forgotten today, is perhaps the most eloquent attack on the program:

“It is not a question of what powers Congress ought to have to meet certain conditions, but what powers are vested in Congress under the Constitution. In determining what they are, we must return to first principles.

The care of the unfortunate and the dependent and the relief of those unable to labor is the burden imposed on the State and until recently has always been so considered. Congress has no power either directly or indirectly to invade this province of the States.”

Wilson continued:

“We think that the power to provide for old age benefits was among those powers reserved to the States under the Tenth Amendment, and that a tax imposed to benefit slightly over half of the people over 65 years of age, and who are the care or burden on the State, cannot be said to be imposed for the general welfare of the United States. . . .”

Another critic of Social Security was Henry Hazlitt, then lead economic editorialist for the New York Times. Hazlitt and many of the program’s fiercest opponents soon began to see the new influx of Social Security taxes squandered. As Hazlitt wrote in a 1937 editorial, “What is now happening to the proceeds of the social security taxes substantiates the predications of the harshest critics of the reserve fund provisions of the Social Security Act.” Foreshadowing the criticisms of today, Hazlitt concluded, “All this is an elaborate hocus-pocus by which the Government issues IOU’s payable to itself.” John T. Flynn similarly noted that the reserve was “a swindle and a solemn and cruel farce.”

With Social Security today routinely called the New Deal’s “crown jewel” and the most successful government program in history, we would do well to reread the prescient criticisms offered by these dissidents. In most cases, they were right. Now, 70 years later, we are living with FDR’s legacy. Liberty and self-reliance in retirement are now unthinkable.

Hold that thought. . .

It is true that I did set out with a plan to build houses on some land in my hometown. But in the process of doing so, I removed a mosquito-infested dump from my neighborhood, created a peaceful pond my neighbors could enjoy, and drafted rock-solid plans that would alleviate many of my neighbors’ chronic flooding problems that have plagued their property for decades.

In spite of all the side benefits of my work, I am still having the book thrown at me by government bureaucrats.

The red tape and regulatory intransigence have shut down my effort to build affordable homes. It has me, my wife, Ruth, and our two daughters teetering on the brink of financial ruin. And, with government officials seemingly blocking my every avenue, I wonder in this post-9/11 world what it really means to be an American.

My story started more than a decade ago. In 1990 I bought the dump at the end of my street. Since the 1950s the dump has been filled by a 500-foot-long pile of concrete road slabs, bricks, concrete from demolished buildings, old sewer manholes, and other refuse. In addition to all the rubble, the dump had been overtaken by weeds, mosquitoes, snakes, and rats. Most of my neighbors considered it a peril to their children, and little more than a hangout for thieves and vandals.

The dump also was a chief cause of a 40- year flooding problem in my neighborhood. In the process of developing home sites, I saw an opportunity to clean the dump and create a lake to serve as a storm reservoir.

My plan was to build new homes around the lake in this bedroom community just nine miles from St. Louis’s Gateway Arch. Along with turning the neighborhood dump into a lake, my plans included the creation of wildlife habitat. Numerous trees were to be left in place, and inside the lake would be an island for endangered waterfowl.

I was sure I had stumbled across my American dream—until U.S. government officials turned it into my American nightmare.

I cleaned up most of the dump and was eagerly embarking on my plan to spruce up the neighborhood when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stepped in. Based on observations of cattails growing through the concrete and rubble at the dump, the Corps ordered me to halt activity or face fines of up to $25,000 per day. The unsightly mountain of concrete slabs, bricks, and refuse was a wetland.

But even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) labeled the dump a “nonfunctioning” wetland. This raised a question: How can it be a “wetland” if it is nonfunctioning? In my opinion, it was the bureaucrats who were “non-functioning.”

The Army Corps knew all about the dump and how my plan would help alleviate the town’s storm-water flooding problems. Because of the wetlands vegetation growing in the concrete slabs, however, Corps officials told me they had no choice. They not only ordered me to stop work, but they also ordered me to fill in the reservoir I created and restore the dump to its original state.

Knowing I risked going to prison for 21 months as a “wetland violator,” I refused to comply with the Corps’ directives. In return, the federal regulators wouldn’t allow me to fill in a dangerous temporary construction ditch or smooth the dirt so I could cut the weeds on my property. During the hot, humid summers in the St. Louis area, the weeds grew out of control and several times caught fire, endangering my home and those of my neighbors.

Prison and Financial Ruin

Still with the threat of prison hanging over my head and the specter of financial ruin knocking on our door, for the next four years my family and I stood our ground. I decided to take a proactive path by submitting several freedom-of-information requests to the Army Corps to find out what was in the file regarding my project.

You’ll never guess what I found. When the Army Corps stomped on my project in 1990, they were also taking a new look at three studies they conducted on my neighborhood during the 1980s. According to documents that I hold dear, these Army Corps studies reported average home damages in my neighborhood of more than $315,000 annually due to floods.

Digging a little deeper, I also found a $90,000 study from 1972 that recommended a storm reservoir or lake to alleviate the flooding problem. The government’s solution—very similar to the one I already put into action—was projected to cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Flood-wise, the results would have been identical to my plan.

There were at least two government-studied solutions to the flooding problem, both costing more than $4 million. The topper—I would have built the flood-control structures for free. My family’s most terrifying run-in with our government came in May 1994, when we were served with a “voluntary settlement agreement.” That document proposed that I leave the reservoir, never mow within 35 feet of it, and excavate all or part of the adjacent nine lots into a swamp.

I immediately called the Army Corps’ chief of enforcement. My question cut to the chase. If Corps officials knew something should have been done about the flooding, why did they not support my project? I also informed the Corps of my intention to build a home for my family on the flood-control lake I planned.

The reply I received will forever burn in my mind. The Corps official coldly told me: “You can think about building on your property and you can think about putting food on your family’s table—but, you know, ‘Daddy’s in jail’ makes for a bad show-and-tell [presentation for your little daughter].”

Ruth and I were terrified, but we stood our ground.

Corps Threat

One week later, I received a certified letter from an Army Corps colonel stating that if I refused to sign the “voluntary settlement agreement” within ten days, I would be referred to the EPA for the imposition of fines of up to $25,000 per day—without a court hearing or trial.

The Army Corps also communicated with one of my state’s U.S. senators at the time, contending that the agency was “not debating the application of engineering principles” nor my “efforts to clean up the property.” However, the Corps’ letter did question my intent of building homes and making a profit even if my neighbors benefited. To this day, I wonder why the Corps was opposed to my development proposal, when it knew all about the longstanding flood problem I was resolving.

In summary, I was threatened with jail and fines for turning a dump into a lake and resolving a 40-year flooding problem. In the process of building houses, I was doing, at no cost to the taxpayer, what two expensive government studies had recommended—digging a lake or reservoir to control flooding.

After my tussle with the Army Corps and having been referred to the EPA for legal action, it turned out the EPA was too embarrassed to prosecute me. Its wetlands regulatory chief told me the lake I had already dug should have been sufficient mitigation, or tradeoff, for the brick, rubble, and concrete-filled dump I cleaned up. He also told me I would have to find a way for the Army Corps of Engineers to “save face.”

So I came up with what I believed was a perfect new proposal to clear my name, let the Army Corps save face, and put the entire controversy to rest. I showed the EPA chief my plan for a second housing development that was designed around a second, 17-acre man-made reservoir on the farm adjacent to my original lake. My proposal was to connect both reservoirs by a large pipe to permanently resolve my neighborhood’s flooding problem. The EPA chief agreed this plan would satisfy the Army Corps by creating a new lake that would, as he said, make up for my “original sin” of cleaning up the dump.

Thus I now had my course set, and I wasted little time in gathering capital. After a couple of years of hard work and saving, I had enough money to finance an offer for the farm adjacent to my property and to pay for the necessary preliminary work.

Things looked bright. Then, again, in stepped the Army Corps.

In October 1999, Corps regulators had told me my plan looked acceptable, but that I would need a wetlands permit since my new reservoir would “fill in” six acres of “actively farmed wetland.” I submitted my wetland permit application in February 2000 and was told it would be completed by April of that year.

At the same time, a new Army Corps study on my neighborhood’s flooding was submitted, and it suggested—believe it or not—a flood-control reservoir on the same farmland included in my proposals. It was eerily identical to my plan—same farm, same “farmed wetland,” same connecting pipe to my original lake. The main difference—the Army Corps’ plan would cost taxpayers more than $1.1 million in excavation costs alone. This figure did not include money for land purchase, engineering, landscaping, or other costs.

The Army Corps kept promising, but never issued my permit. I was slowly approaching financial ruin. I begged the regulators to let me do for free what their expensive studies recommended.

On July 25, 2000, I met with Army Corps regulators to discuss the permit and request a release of my property. That was when the Army Corps regulatory chief made an astonishing revelation. After ten years of stopping my work and threatening me with prison, fines, and financial ruin, the Corps complaint with my original dump-to-reservoir cleanup project was that I had not made my original lake big enough. Amazingly, the bureaucrats’ decision took so long that they forgot they were the ones who stopped me from making my original lake big enough in the first place.

After that revelation, the Army Corps assured me the permit for my new lake project would be completed by October 1, 2000. In reality, however, by that date my permit had not even seen bureaucratic ink. In November 2000, the full scope of the Army Corps’ misrepresentations came into focus. That was when I learned what I now believe the regulators knew all along: I did not need a wetlands permit to complete my proposal because the six acres of “farmed wetlands” included in my plan had been farmed for decades and were therefore exempt from wetland regulations and permits.

In fact, of the 80 acres I was trying to develop, the Army Corps had jurisdiction over only a one-acre stand of trees, which I was leaving next to my new lake, and the half-acre farm pond, which I left in two back yards. I found out that if I did not disturb the trees or the farm pond, no permit was needed.

By the time this information came to light, after years of bureaucratic harassment and misrepresentation, it was too late. Even though no permit was needed, my family was financially ruined, my credit destroyed by the delays. To date, more than 20 banks and financial institutions have refused to finance my project, even though I have hundreds of thousands of dollars in pre-sales contracts.

To make matters worse, last summer West Nile virus came to my neighborhood, and the Corps of Engineers still would not allow me to smooth out a number of bulldozer ruts and potholes that are now full of stagnant water, weeds, and mosquitoes.

My family and I have decided to hang tough and take the last possible step we can take. We are telling our story to the public to show how our own government has treated us.

I suspect vindictiveness was the reason the government regulators withheld vital information from me. I stood up to them and embarrassed them, and now my family and I are paying the price. I gave them an opportunity to back down, but they took my good will and shoved it back into my face.

For more than a decade the regulatory division of the Army Crops of Engineers has shackled me inside a financial prison. I wonder how many other people have faced this kind of bureaucratic arrogance and intimidation. How many Americans have simply rolled over and let the federal bureaucracy have its way with their lives, their life savings, and their livelihoods?

Those are some of the horror stories told in this powerful book by Senator William Roth of Delaware, co-author of the 1981 Kemp-Roth tax cut, and his executive assistant, William Nixon. They wrote The Power to Destroy in the belief that “real change will take place within the IRS only when Americans are fully aware of how the agency works and possess the knowledge necessary to protect themselves.” The best protection against the IRS would be its non-existence. Although Roth and Nixon are not aiming for that ultimate objective, their book, by showing the IRS’s fangs in all their viciousness, may help to catalyze a true tax rebellion.

As the most powerful agency in America the IRS cuts a huge swath through our lives. Property seizures have increased 400 percent since 1980 and every day 300,000 households receive IRS demands for more information or notifications of audits. As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Roth is one of the two members of Congress empowered to conduct a full-scale investigation of the IRS. (The other is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.) In 1996, as evidence of abuses mounted, Roth decided to undertake the first thorough investigation of the IRS inhistory. The book mostly reports on the findings of his committee.

The authors do not say that the IRS is staffed exclusively with abusive people who thrive on power—although there are some—but rather that the culture of the IRS drives its employees to treat taxpayers as exploitable resources. Within the IRS, incentives push agents to try to wring all they can out of taxpayers. As Roth and Nixon write, “despite laws against the practice, goals and quotas still drive the performance of auditors, groups, divisions and even districts.” Career advancement hinges on how much revenue one can bring in, how many cases one can close, and so on. Therefore agents can and do take advantage of the indecipherability of the tax code and the natural fear most people have of the IRS. Moreover, IRS training encourages employees to “see taxpayers as liars and cheaters” who are guilty until proven innocent.

That mindset produces several consequences, including padded tax liabilities and penalties and use of Bureau of Labor Statistics data to impute income through agency-generated “substitute returns” (when an agent believes that a nonfiler should have filed) or to inflate income to the level the agent thinks is “right.” And of course some agents are quick to resort to brutal property seizures, liens, and levies to collect money, and plain threats and harassment.

Small businesses are favorite targets. Like any predator, the IRS likes to go after those who are least able to fight back. Large companies can afford high-priced legal counsel that can argue relentlessly over the interpretation of the tax code; small ones usually can’t, and tend to cave in under an IRS onslaught. Many small businesses have been driven to bankruptcy by the IRS.

Roth and Nixon point out that Congress is partly to blame for this terrible state of affairs. Frequent changes in the tax laws have spawned a nightmarishly complicated tax code, creating difficulties for taxpayers. Thus the authors argue, modestly, for a far simpler tax code.

The Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, enacted following Senator Roth’s hearings, was designed to curb the abuse of taxpayers, such as shifting the burden of proof from the taxpayer to the IRS in some circumstances and restricting the use of liens and property seizures. Nevertheless Congress, with its spending addiction, likes the extra revenues that IRS zeal produces.

Get this revealing book, read it, and pass it on. The tax nightmare you prevent may be your own.

John Attarian is a freelance writer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has recently completed a book on Social Security.

John Locke’s work Two Treatises of Government was written in the 1680s, when Englishmen were chafing under the growing tyranny of the Stuart kings. Locke wrote, “That subjects, or foreigners attempting by force on the properties of any people, may be resisted with force, is agreed on all hands. But that magistrates doing the same thing, may be resisted, hath of late been denied: as if those who had the greatest privileges and advantages by the law, had thereby a power to break those laws, by which alone they were set in a better place than their brethren.”

Locke showed how the power of a ruler must not be placed on a higher moral plateau than that of any other potential criminal: “Should a Robber break into my House, and with a Dagger at my Throat, make me seal Deeds to convey my Estate to him, would this give him any title? Just such a title by his Sword, has an unjust Conqueror, who force some into Submission. The injury and the Crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a Crown, or some petty villain. The title of the offender, and the number of his Followers make no difference in the Offence, unless it be to aggravate it.”

No concept of sovereignty can justify extending government power beyond the bounds of political right. It is absurd to expect governments to descend into barbarism gradually, step by step—as if there were a train schedule to political hell and people could get off at any stop along the way. People forget how quickly the forms of political power can turn civilized behavior into unrestrained pillage and mass violence. Most people strolling the streets of German towns in the late 1920s would never have suspected that, within a few years, the government would launch a policy of genocide. Similarly, someone visiting Moscow in 1913 or Phnom Penh in 1969 would likely not have seen the barbarity just around the bend. Politicians rarely give formal warnings of how they intend to abuse the power they acquire.

Once ideas and principles consecrating unlimited power are accepted, it is only a matter of time until that power is used in ways that shock those who acquiesced to its expansion. As Senator John Taylor observed in 1821, “Tyranny in form is the first step towards tyranny in substance.”

Mere Parlor Talk

Discussions of political right are mere parlor talk unless citizens have a right to resist tyranny. The New Hampshire Bill of Rights, written in 1784, declared: “The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” Yet much of the political and academic establishment shudders at even considering the right to resist.^*

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* See James Bovard, “Paranoia about Paranoia in American Politics,” The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, August 1999, pp. 27-30.

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Any discussion about the right of resistance must begin by recognizing the extent to which government is already the aggressor. As Locke wrote, “There is only one thing which gathers people for sedition, and that is oppression.”

History is replete with tyrannical governments that deserved to be destroyed by their victims. At what point can we say that a government has placed itself in a state of war with the citizenry? By what standard or measure can people know when they have a right to forcibly resist illegitimate power? In Bosnia, in Rwanda, or in other areas where mass murders have recently occurred, the citizen obviously may use as much deadly force as necessary to prevent himself and his family from being slaughtered by rampaging government forces or by murderous private mobs acting with government sanction. And in the United States, blacks clearly had a right to peacefully resist segregationist laws in the 1950s and 1960s and had a right to violently resist attacks on them by sheriffs and private citizens.

Unfortunately, there is no lucid standard by which a citizen can know precisely when he must cease obeying. And, regrettably, much of the political establishment, like the Anglican Church in the 1680s, will preach the duty of passive resistance all the way to the entrance of the political slaughterhouse.

Effective Nonviolent Action

Nonviolent action is, in most cases, a far more effective means to curb power than is violent resistance. Killing an oppressive politician usually only generates more sympathy and sanctity for the engine of coercion that he commanded. Many attempted or successful assassinations became pretexts to redouble oppression. The first necessity for peaceful reform is for people to realize how much power they have to bring government to its knees. At the height of the Vietnam War protests, fewer than 5 percent of the American public were actively protesting the war, yet those protests psychologically paralyzed the Johnson administration and played a role in the Nixon administration’s paranoia of dissent that led to Watergate.

Intelligent, targeted, decisive protests can puncture the sense of legitimacy that cossets both Leviathan’s commanders and employees. And once the government’s aura of legitimacy is shattered, the “transaction costs” of tyranny skyrocket. Each person who understands his rights and liberties is another barrier against the wrongful expansion of government power. As sixteenth-century French philosopher Etienne de la Boétie observed, “It is the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude.”

In the final analysis, the government’s sovereignty is limited by the character strength of its subjects. If the citizens have self-respect and courage—and the means to defend their rights—government abuses will be curbed. Historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, writing in 1832, asserted that the English in the 1500s were “beyond all doubt, a free people. They had not, indeed, the outward show of freedom; but they had the reality. They had not a good constitution—but they had that . . . which, without any constitution, keeps rulers in awe—force, and the spirit to use it.”

There may come a time when peaceful resistance becomes futile. As Locke wrote, “Men can never be secure from tyranny, if there be no means to escape it, till they are perfectly under it.” In the same way that any citizen has a right to defend himself against a mugger or a murderer, so citizens in general have a right to defend themselves against violent political predators.

As Joyce Lee Malcolm showed in her 1994 book, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, the Second Amendment was based on recognition that people had the right to possess the means to resist government tyranny. Discussions on federal gun control measures often focus on whether specific guns serve “sporting purposes.” However, if the Founding Fathers had added a clause to the Second Amendment specifying that people will be “permitted to own guns for hunting rabbits,” the Constitution would have been overwhelmingly rejected because Americans would have been alerted to how far politicians intended to stretch their power.

The citizen’s right to resist government is directly proportionate to the amount of force government uses against the citizen. If the government generally respects the rights of the citizen, then the citizen should give the government the benefit of the doubt when it occasionally errs or exceeds its legitimate power. When abuses do occur, citizens are obliged to seek every peaceful remedy before forcibly resisting.

Respecting the Innocent

Regardless of whether Americans consider the federal government illegitimate, attacks that kill innocent people are never justified. The 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building was inexcusable, and the people who carried out the bombing deserve death sentences. Citizens have as little right to kill innocent government agents as government agents have to kill peaceful private citizens.

If statists fear popular resistance, perhaps government should violate fewer rights. The militia movement in this country became highly active only after the federal killings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. The fact that no federal officials have been held legally responsible for the deaths made many people presume, not surprisingly, that the government is out of control and a dire threat to their rights and safety.

Government does not have rights in itself, but only possesses such powers as are necessary to safeguard and uphold the rights of the citizens. The more power that sovereignty supposedly confers on government, the more the doctrine of sovereignty defeats the entire purpose for which government was created. When politicians stretch their power beyond reasonable bounds, it is they, not the citizens resisting political oppression, who destroy the legitimacy of the state.