A West Wing-related thought

[avevale_intelligencer]

I've moved on to the West Wing now, and am watching episodes and reading such scripts as have been published (not enough I say) and I came in my reading to the bit where Ainsley Hayes is justifying her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment by saying that as a Republican, she believes that every time the government passes a new law, it leaves people with a little bit less freedom. I take that to be an accurate statement of one of the planks of Republicanism, and address it as such after this wise:

Laws are passed to deal with specific things, and should be dealt with specifically. "Freedom" is a fuzzy generality and doesn't exist in that form. The law against murder means that one is not free to kill someone else, at least not and get away with it. A law against paying a woman less than a man means that one is not free to pay a man one dollar and a woman seventy-nine cents for doing the same work. A law against abortion (to cover all extremes) means that one is not free safely and legally to have a foetus removed from one's body. If that freedom is important to you--if you want, or need, for people to be able to shortchange a human being for their efforts in your behalf, or if you want, or need, for people to be able to murder someone with impunity, or if you want, or need, for women to be able to terminate an unintended pregnancy and live through it--then you fight that law. You don't fight it because you looked at the gauge and there's less freedom in the tank than there was when you set out. Looked at in that way, all laws should be fought, even the ones that you might think make sense, and no new laws should ever be passed, even ones that we find later on we sorely need.

There are laws that should be fought. There are laws that should never have been passed. But "because they take away our freedom" is a stupid reason for fighting them. Of course they do. That's what they're for, mostly. The question is, is that particular freedom that is affected by that particular law...a freedom you want people to be able to exercise? And are you willing to stand up and say so in public?

EDIT: to sort out phraseology in the middle there. You should fight what you believe to be bad laws and fight for what you believe to be good laws whether they affect you directly or not.

Comments

[billroper]

Actually, that statement is from the viewpoint of the libertarian wing of the Republican party (which is probably the closest to my ideological home), just to be clear. It travels along with statements such as "He who governs best, governs least."

The problem isn't so much laws or even the number of laws that might restrict someone's freedom in a "good cause". The problem is partly that one person's definition of a "good cause" may not be someone else's and partly that the more laws you get, the greater the temptation to enact one for the next -- perhaps not universally popular -- good cause.

There's also the problem that laws are enforced unevenly. That speed trap (or speed camera in your case) is there for the public good, right? Of course, should the speed trap pick up the son of the mayor, well, he might be let go with a warning.

Me, not so much. :)

Now, I am not one of the around-the-bend libertarians. There are clearly things that government can and should do. I'm not a fan of, for example, private police forces. Or courts, for that matter.

But the temptation to pass the stupid law just gets worse the more that our elected leaders think that they should have control of everything and correct every possible injustice. At the risk of offending someone, I'll mention Chicago's recently repealed ban on pate de foie gras, which was originally enacted because the force feeding of the ducks was deemed cruel.

It may well be -- I am no expert on the subject, nor do I particularly care to be (so we can skip the links :) ). But I'm far from convinced that this was a matter that the Chicago City Council needed to be involved in.

The most common reaction here: Doesn't that bunch of wardheelers have something better to do with their time?

[howeird]

There's an old adage which Mark Twain was fond of quoting, "No man's freedom or property are safe while the legislature is in session."