Depressing burglary stats

Press columnist Peter Luke highlighted some depressing statistics on burglaries this week (not online).

Although the upper North Island continues to be New Zealand’s burglary capital, there were 7033 burglaries reported in Canterbury (population about 450, 000) last year with only 15.6 percent burglars being caught. In central Auckland the burglary rate is about 130 burglaries per 10, 000 residents.

Perhaps the most worrying statistic is the low number of burglars being apprehended, which although higher than in the late 90s, is stubbornly stuck at below 20 percent.

One of the reasons why New Zealand had a low property crime rate in the past was because it was a small, mono-cultural and well-organised country in which it was difficult for criminals to avoid being caught. Now that burglars are increasingly aware they have an excellent chance of getting away with burglaries, they may be more inclined to commit them.

The use of burglar alarms and private security firms seems to be helping check burglaries in affluent areas, but there is little (other than dangerous dogs) to deter burglars in low to mid-income areas, with students in particular, being frequent victims of break-ins.

New Zealand, like Britain, also has a relatively low rate of gun ownership. By constrast, burglary rates in the pro-gun United States are comparitively low, and significantly fewer burglars attempt to break in houses when they are occupied.

Political Correctness: A Vast Left Wing Conspiracy?

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, Hillary Clinton used the phrase “vast right wing conspiracy” to describe and label her husband’s political enemies on the right. While there may have indeed been a concerted effort on the right to bring Clinton down, in point of fact, if any conspiracy in American politics deserves to be called “vast” it would be the “vast left wing conspiracy,” which has at least since the Progressive era attempted to redefine American politics in a leftward direction. While the early Progressives had some success in that effort, the left in America really came into its own during Roosevelt’s New Deal. As I have stated elsewhere in “What’s in a Word?” , the very term “liberalism” was redefined by Progressives during that period to mean something entirely different. As James Burnham so aptly described this redefinition in Suicide of the West (1964), classical liberalism, with its belief in individual liberty, had been transformed into modern liberalism, with its primary principle of egalitarian social justice (based on the influence of Marxism and other socialist doctrines). I’ll risk quoting Burnham again because he so appropriately describes that redefinition of liberalism:

This difference in human character type corresponds to a theoretical conflict within the ideology of modern liberalism: the conflict between the principles of free speech and the other individual freedoms on the one hand, and the principle of egalitarian social justice on the other. Essentially, it is a conflict between individualism and regimentation: the individualism that the liberal ideology derives from its past and the regimentation it has absorbed in the present. This conflict is real, and can be hidden but not solved by discussion, negotiation and compromise. It is a fact that liberalism’s inherited principles correspond to individualism, and a highly atomistic individualism at that. It is equally a fact that the Welfare State and plebiscitary democracy mean a good deal and an increasing deal of regimentation. One or the other must give way; and, on the evidence of the past generation, there is little doubt which is the tottering horn of that particular dilemma. (p. 171)

Of course, why rely on the opinion of a conservative about the nature of that transformation when we have no lesser authority than that perennial candidate for the Socialist Party, Norman Thomas, who said in a speech in 1944:

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of “liberalism,” they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” He went on to say: “I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.”

But it was with the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left that the vast left wing conspiracy really came into its own. The anti-Vietnam War protests really pitted the New Left against the Old Left social democracy of LBJ, while conservatism did not really become a prominent political force in America until a reaction emerged to the excesses of the 1960s New Left and Countercultural revolts. The Political Correctness movement was both a cause and an effect of the New Left in that the origins of the New Left can be traced back to the cultural Marxism that was Political Correctness, and it was the triumph of the New Left that brought Political Correctness to the fore in American cultural and educational institutions such as schools, universities, and the media.

In 2004 the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank, published “Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology, Edited by William S. Lind. Lind, who wrote the Introduction to that work, stated the following:

While some Americans have believed in ideologies, America itself never had an official, state ideology – up until now. But what happens today to Americans who suggest that there are differences among ethnic groups, or that the traditional social roles of men and women reflect their different natures, or that homosexuality is morally wrong? If they are public figures, they must grovel in the dirt in endless, canting apologies. If they are university students, they face star chamber courts and possible expulsion. If they are employees of private corporations, they may face loss of their jobs. What was their crime? Contradicting America’s new state ideology of “Political Correctness.” (p. 2)

In Chapter II of the above mentioned work, “Historical Roots of ‘Political Correctness,’” Raymond V. Raehn has defined the problem of Political Correctness as follows:

America is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that we have come to know as “Political Correctness.” Political Correctness seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature. Its roots lie in a version of Marxism which seeks a radical inversion of the traditional culture in order to create a social revolution. (p.1)

How did this come about? Lind and Raehn trace the origins of Political Correctness to the cultural Marxism of the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, with his theory that to be successful and dominant in the West, Marxism needed to “march through [take over] the [cultural] institutions” of the West, and Georg Lukacs, a Hungarian Communist who in 1923 with other fellow Communist Party intellectuals founded the Frankfurt School in Germany. Lukacs, stated its purpose was to answer the question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilization?” (Lind, ‘What Is “Political Correctness”’? p. 5). Their goal was to undermine and destroy the foundations of Western civilization: Christianity, capitalism, and the so-called patriarchal-authoritarian family. The Frankfurt School became very influential in American universities after its leaders fled to the United States in the 1930s to escape Nazi Germany. Members of this group included Theodore Adorno (co-author of The Authoritarian Personality), Herbert Marcuse (author of Eros and Civilization and mentor of Angela Davis), Erich Fromm (author of Escape from Freedom), and Max Horkheimer. The Frankfurt School blended Marx and Freud and in the ferment of American universities in the 1960s, gave birth to “Critical Theory” and Political Correctness. The term Political Correctness has a long usage with the Communist Party and is synonymous with “the General Line of the Party” (Lind, Introduction, p. 2). I recall first hearing the term used in the 1970s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in disputes between various Marxist factions – Maoists, Trotskyites, and radical feminists – as to which group was most politically correct. What Political Correctness as cultural Marxism shares with classical, economic Marxism is the vision of a “classless society”: A vision which, since it “contradicts human nature,” must be forced. Thus, Lind concludes that both classical and cultural Marxism “are totalitarian ideologies”: “The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness can be seen on campuses where ‘PC’ has taken over the college: freedom of speech, of the press, and even of thought are all eliminated” (‘What Is “Political Correctness”’? pp. 5 - 6). In a similar vein, Raehn has concluded: “Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order and, ultimately, a totalitarian state” (p. 5). For those who express disagreement with the politically correct status quo, the left has been masterful at using name-calling – racist, sexist, homophobic – as a substitute for rational argument, especially when their Marxist agenda is exposed.

Another parallel between classical and cultural Marxism is that both “declare certain groups virtuous and others evil a priori, that is, without regard for the actual behavior of individuals” (Lind, p. 6). Thus, white males are automatically oppressors while members of acknowledged minority groups, such as blacks, Latinos, women, homosexuals, the Third World, are automatically deemed to be oppressed victims, and therefore, by race, gender, or ethnicity, granted the moral high ground. This is the morality of victimology: your moral status is assigned according to which oppressed or victim group you belong to and has nothing to do with your personal conduct. As Charles Sykes calls this “politics of victimization” a form of Orwellian doublethink, he poses the question: “How else can one describe the insistence that victims not be held responsible for their personal behavior conjoined with the belief that all members of so-called oppressor groups are responsible for crimes they themselves did not commit?” (A Nation of Victims, 1992, pp. 204 – 05). In other words, if you are a member of a victim group, as O.J. Simpson was, and you commit the crime of murder, you cannot be held responsible, but if you are a member of an oppressor group, you are held responsible for crimes you did not personally commit, such as the enslavement of African-Americans in the nineteenth century. For Political Correctness to succeed, belief in the Rule of Law, defined as equality before the law as principles universally applied to all citizens, must be undermined and eliminated. Both Affirmative Action and Hate Crimes are contrary to the rule of law and equality before the law, because they privilege certain favored (victim) groups.

Despite its championing of minorities, the oppressed, and victim groups, Political Correctness did not originate with such groups. Rather, it originated with Frankfurt School émigrés to the United States, as stated above, and their protégés on American university campuses. Christopher Lasch in The Revolt of the Elites (1995) has argued that unlike the 1930s, when Ortega y Gasset wrote The Revolt of the Masses (1930), which inspired the title to Lasch’s work, the current revolt was a revolt of the elite classes from the norms of Western and American civilization. Lasch has argued that despite Affirmative Action and the pretence of a socially mobile meritocracy of the educated elite, the “New Class” of what Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, has called “symbolic analysts,” this new class of managers, professionals, and policy makers has become increasingly isolated from the rest of American society (Lasch, pp. 28 - 41):

The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational debate, as to create parallel or “alternative” institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all. (Ibid., pp. 20 – 21)

While the evidence, as I have been arguing thus far, contradicts the claim that the left wing elite “seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority,” the point is well taken that they do view the unenlightened with disdain and seek to isolate themselves from contact with this majority. The electoral victory of Obama has given this class new found hope that they can indeed remake America into their own image of what they think it should be. Of course Lasch is not entirely ignorant of the proselytizing tendencies of this new class of upper-middle class “liberals” who “have mounted a crusade to sanitize American society” of tobacco, pornography, “hate speech,” and various chemical additives and pollutants. Lasch continued: “When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, they betray the venomous hatred that lies not far below the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. Opposition makes humanitarians forget the liberal virtues they claim to uphold” (p. 28). As I’ve argued here and elsewhere, there’s nothing liberal about this new elite, at least to the extent that they subscribe to the tenants of Political Correctness and kowtow to the establishment of their peers. So the point being that the new elite, despite their professed belief in radical egalitarianism, do not themselves often rub shoulders with the great unwashed and unenlightened masses, but rather prefer to stay in their enclaves of privilege.

The current phase of Political Correctness is Multiculturalism, which advocates that our own Western and American cultures should not be privileged above any other world cultures, a form of cultural relativism. As undermining as that might be for our own culture, in point of fact, Multiculturalism privileges all non-Western cultures while it denigrates the Western and American cultures it intends to destroy. I will conclude with a statement from a previous article I wrote, “The Clash of Civilizations or the Suicide of the West?” :

Although Multiculturalism claims to promote diversity (of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender), what it does not promote is diversity in thought. Instead, it promotes a New Left, Marxian version of race, class, and gender warfare against America and the West; a new left wing monoculture that excludes, prohibits (when able to), and condemns all opposing viewpoints. As this ideology, through Political Correctness or the idea that one must conform to its tenants or be ostracized, has become dominant in American universities, schools, media, government, and even businesses, one could argue with some confidence that while America won the Cold War with the Soviet Union, she lost the war at home with Marxism.

I hope that I’m proven wrong in the near future.

Conservative opposition to the war in Afghanistan

A recent Telegraph post in support of Britain’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan drew a lot of intelligently-argued criticism from commentators.

Few people were buying the neo-conservative argument that the best way to protect Britain from terrorism was to try and remove the terrorist threat at its supposed source.

Most responders seemed to echo the US paleo-conservative argument that the West will never be able to establish a stable pro-western state in the country and should either pull out of the region altogether, or re-direct military assistance to neighboring Pakistan.

However, while it’s great to see a lot of well-argued commentators turning up on comment threads at British newspaper sites, it’s a bit disappointing there’s so few decent conservative blog sites coming out of the UK at present (Laban and and a few others excepted).

Compared with the US, which has generated a plethora of independent conservative sites and blogs, as well as several popular webzines like Taki’s Magazine and American Conservative, Britain appears to be a bit of independent conservative wasteland.

A View from the USA: Bush, Palin, and the Attack of the Snarks

Isn’t it ironic that the far left, who promote laws against hate (Hate Speech) are so filled with hate? No President in recent memory has been the recipient of more anger, rage, and hatred than George Bush. While not a Bush supporter myself, as a conservative I always became strangely defensive when exposed to the anti-Bush vitriol of friends and co-workers on the left. The blogosphere was and is, of course, filled with angry diatribes from both sides. It’s so easy to attack your opponents anonymously with name calling and slurs when you don’t have to meet them in person. In a review of anthropologist Peter Wood’s "A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now," George Will wrote in 2007:

Many people who loathe George W. Bush have adopted what Peter Wood describes as "ecstatic anger as a mode of political action."

Wood . . . says the new anger "often has the look-at-me character of performance art." His book is a convincing, hence depressing, explanation of "anger chic" -- of why anger has become an all-purpose emotional stance. It has achieved prestige and become "a credential for group membership." As a result, "Americans have been flattening their emotional range into an angry monotone." (“Anger Is All the Rage,” realclearpoliltics.com, 3-25-07)

In another review of Wood’s book by Stanley Kurtz, Kurtz quotes Wood’s characterization of the New Anger, which he deems is applicable to the blogosphere:

[New Anger involves] deriding an opponent for the sheer pleasure of expressing contempt for other people....New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics come to an end....Whoever embraces [New Anger] is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression." (“Angry Talk,” eppc.org, January 2, 2007)

The left has long embraced anger: the self-righteous rage of angry feminists, angry demonstrators against war or the latest political cause, “primal scream” therapy. There’s a bumper sticker now that proclaims “If You’re Not Angry You’re Not Paying Attention.” The belief that anger is good probably has roots in Romanticism and the belief that “feeling is all,” expressed fully in the bloodbath of the French Revolution. And now we have the new Romanticism of the Countercultural left. “Rage Against the Machine.” Limp Bizkit and the violence at Woodstock 1999. Rage is good, violence is good. Kurtz maintained in the above article that the “formative political moment” for the New Anger was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and it took until the Clinton era “to bleed over to the Right.” The Right has tended to favor the old American ideal, “the modest heroism of Gary Cooper's Sargent York” rather than “something much closer to the Incredible Hulk.” But if the left has its Al Frankens, the Right can now boast its Ann Coulters.

It seems that once Bush was on his way out, the left needed someone else to transfer their hatred and anger to and who better to serve their purpose than Sarah Palin: She looks like the All-American girl, the former prom queen, the girl who wouldn’t date you in high school, as Douglas MacKinnon opined in a recent Huffington Post. A strong woman that could “do it all,” family and career, as a conservative woman she was a poke in the eye to radical feminists, who react like black radicals to a black conservative: any deviation from politically correct gender and racial politics is viewed as a heinous betrayal.

'It's not that they're ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so.'

New Yorker film critic David Denby recently wrote Snark, a book that takes a swipe at “snark,” which in my humble opinion (I confess I haven’t read the book although I have seen Denby promote it on Book-TV) typifies the kind of smirky ad hominem attacks perpetrated on Palin by such darlings of the left as Bill Maher or David Letterman. Amazon.com had the following definition of “snark” in a review of Denby’s book:

What is snark? You recognize it when you see it -- a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone's mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness.

I think people like Maher and Letterman prefer or are reduced to ad hominem attacks on conservative figures because that way they don’t have to address conservative arguments. I doubt that either one has ever read a conservative or libertarian author such as the Founding Fathers, Burke, Hayek, James Burnham, Robert Nisbett, or Thomas Sowell. In fact, I doubt that either one has read much of anything that isn’t contemporary book-of-the-month club type pabulum. Their half educated smirkiness doesn’t give one the impression that they’ve ever bothered to read the classics of history and literature. Brent Bozell, in an open letter to Oliver Stone, that well known leftist director of anti-American movies, wrote the following:

You were back on [Bill] Maher's show the other day talking about historical figures. Maher wanted to know why you haven't done a film about Ronald Reagan, since "that is the type of character you could do very well with." God only knows what he meant by that, but when you gave your answer, you were pretty blunt.

"Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch," you said, and the audience laughed, and you smiled and decided to take that statement further by agreeing with it. So you said, "You know, I think that he was," and the audience cheered and hooted and applauded.

See what I mean when I say you're a lousy historian? Don't take my word for it, Oliver.

I turned to Frank Donatelli, the White House Political Director under President Reagan from 1987 through 1989. I asked him what he thought of your observation. Here's what he has to say:

"Bill Maher and Oliver Stone have both made careers of ad hominem attacks on their political opponents. As Reagan would say, 'It's not that they're ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so.' The literature as written by conservative and liberal observers is overwhelming in concluding that Ronald Reagan was fully engaged in implementing policies during his presidency that resulted in the longest economic expansion in our history and the end of the Cold War and the defeat of communism. His presidential reputation is growing and history will remember Reagan as one of the great presidents in our nation's history."

I went to Richard Allen, Reagan's national security advisor and asked him what he thought. Apparently he didn't think much.

"Every respectable academic and popular analysis in the large and growing literature of the Reagan presidency and Reagan's presence on the national scene proves beyond any doubt the utter foolishness of the Oliver Stone remark. Stone has made an unsuccessful career of falsification, especially when it comes to Ronald Reagan. The actual dumbsumbitch is easy to identify." (“Oliver Stone, Lousy Historian,” Townhall.com, July 3, 2009)

If you fill your mind with half truths and falsehoods of a partisan political nature, there’s no room left for the real thing. One’s world view becomes one vast self-fulfilling delusion, but because it is shared by others, maybe by everyone you know, there’s no reason to question it. And with enough money to secure a plush lifestyle, reality can hardly intrude; there’s no cognitive dissonance to rear its ugly head. As Harry Stein has written in I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican, many upscale New Yorkers have never met anyone who thinks differently, and certainly not a Republican.

Immigration and housing shortages in Britain

Last week there was a lively exchange at the Guardian website, on a comment thread for a blog post by Simon Fletcher, about access to public housing in Britain.

In response to the author’s claim that the difficulties low-income native Britons are finding in obtaining affordable housing “have nothing to do with immigration,” a commentator under the name Zac Smith, weighted in with a public housing allocation list from Birmingham City Council, showing most housing in Birmingham was indeed going to recent immigrants. Then about half way through the thread a commentator named Monnie hit on the main reason why recent immigrants were more likely to receive council housing:

“…migrants jump the queue because they tend to have bigger families and that means they are deemed to have greater priority for housing.”

Family size is a key criteria for preferential treatment by local government authorities and native Britons, with smaller families on average than African or South Asian immigrants, are more likely to lose out.

Unlike skilled middle-class Britons who are able to deal with overcrowding by voting with their feet and moving overseas, the country’s disgruntled working-class natives can’t just up and leave if they can’t find a house.

Traditional blue-collar destinations like Australia only want a limited number of educated and skilled workers from the motherland, while economic stagnation, illegal immigration and language barriers mean Continental Europe is unlikely to appeal to most working-class Britons. Subsequently they have little to lose by supporting immigration restrictionist  parties like the much-maligned British National Party.

Criminality and voting

An issue that doesn’t seem to be discussed much in this part of the world, is whether convicted criminals should be allowed to vote.

In New Zealand convicted criminals serving a sentence of three years or more are unable to vote, but in the US, all prisoners, and ex-prisoners on parole, are barred from voting in most states.

It’s been estimated that preventing criminals serving sentences from voting may well have had a significant impact on the outcome of some state and national elections. For example, the Democrats may well have lost the 2004 presidential elections, because 400,000 Black males in the crucial state of Florida were unable to vote due to criminal convictions (in Florida both currently serving, and previously convicted, felons are barred from voting).

Although criminals are likely to have a high rate of apathy in regard to voting, their low socio-economic status means they are much more likely to vote for centre-left parties than those on the centre-right.

With centre-right parties in many western countries struggling to come up with ways of taking the initiative away from the centre-left,  perhaps those with liberal voting laws (such as Canada, and a number of European states) should take a leaf from America, and consider restricting voting rights to law-abiding citizens only.

From common sense to PC nonsense

With Peter Dunne’s one-man United Future Party showing less than one percent support in current opinion polls, the so-called champion of common sense politics has ditched his pragmatic centrism for media-friendly PC waffle.

In a recent press release he’s proposed that New Zealand establish a “Multicultural Act” to give formal recognition to the country’s increasingly multicultural status. Exactly what would be achieved by such a vague sounding act is left unstated.

He also says New Zealand should establish more “family friendly” immigration laws and allow in more relatives of existing permanent residents.

Given that many of the elderly relatives of recent immigrants are unlikely to have pension plans provided by their host countries, especially those coming from third world countries, such a nice-sounding policy could prove very costly for New Zealand taxpayers.

Feminists ignore “man-cession”

US commentator Christina Hoff Sommers points out that US Feminist groups have been complaining that too much stimulus spending is going on male dominated areas of employment.

Subsequently, the stimulus spending has been reviewed and 42 percent will now be re-directed towards jobs held by women.

This is despite the fact that males have incurred 80 percent of jobs losses in the recession (hence the phrase man-cession) and that males are much more numerous in the run-down transport and communication sectors, which are arguably most in need of government investment.

(Hat Tip: Glen Sacks)

Thoughts on Liberty: The Rule of Law, Individual Responsibility, and the State

In a previous post about the Republican Party in America, I stated that “If the Republican Party is to represent true conservatism, then it must return to its core principles . . . . of liberty and freedom, including economic freedom, and [it] must be in favor of limited government and oppose statism in all its forms

I think that that is primarily true, and that when the left speaks of liberation, they generally mean liberation from the inequalities of capitalism. How do we do away with economic inequality? By doing away with economic freedom; by having an all-powerful state redistribute wealth so that all are equal, except the redistributors themselves. (As in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) Of course, this kills the goose that lays the golden egg, because the leftist assumes that the economic pie is finite and stagnant, and all we have to do is divide it up more equally. But in fact, a capitalist economy is almost (I know, we’re in a recession) always growing, so that the poor in America are generally better off than the average citizen in a communist state. The proof: The communists had to build a wall in Berlin to keep people in; we might have to build a wall to keep people out.

But our prosperity and opportunity is generally not enough for the leftist. What the leftist wants is freedom from the vicissitudes of life. As Mike Adams wrote, Franklin Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing a right to a job, to a decent living, to a home, to adequate medical care, to a good education, and so on. Adams concluded:

These are, of course, not rights in any sense of the word. This is a promise of Utopia from a Statist president seeking to justify unlimited intrusion upon the right to own property. It is a false promise from a president who fails to understand what separates man from the lower animals.” ("Liberty and Tyranny," Townhall.com 5/06/09)

But the American left also views freedom in another way that is essentially Romantic in its origins. In this rather anarchistic view, freedom is freedom from all restraint, from all laws, authority, and social institutions. The Constitution of the United States, by way of contrast, was conceived of not as a document to restrain individuals – state and local judiciaries could adequately handle such cases – but rather to restrain any excesses and abuses of power by the federal government. It was designed to limit the power of the state. So Constitutional Law in America is not so much a restraint upon individual freedom as it is protective and constitutive of our freedom. I was an undergraduate in the mid-eighties (a slow learner no doubt) when I first realized that law, in a Constitutional Republic like the United States, was actually constitutive of liberty, and not the enemy of freedom. Hayek quotes John Locke on the role of the law in the preservation of freedom:

The end of the law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others. . . . (Constitution of Liberty, p. 162)

Hayek argued that it is the law that makes us free, but this is true only of the law of abstract general rules, which can be applied equally to all citizens. This is what is known as “the Rule of Law,” which differs from laws as specific commands, emanating from a legislative authority (Constitution of Liberty, pp. 155 – 6). When Obama states that he wants Supreme Court Judges who specifically have “empathy” for minorities, he is arguing for applying the law unequally, and privileging certain members of society to the detriment of others. As Hayek wrote: “The true contrast to a reign of status is the reign of general and equal laws, of the rules which are the same for all, or, we might say, of the rule of leges in the original meaning of the Latin word for laws – leges that is, as opposed to the privi-leges” (Ibid., p. 154). Both Affirmative Action and Hate Crimes are contrary to the rule of law and equality before the law, because they privilege certain favored (victim) groups. One might ask, why should it be anymore heinous to brutally murder a gay or lesbian or a member of some other privileged minority than anyone else?

There is also another sense in which the Romantic leftist view of freedom as “freedom from all restraint” proves to be inadequate. In the Burkean sense, it confuses liberty with license, which is freedom without responsibility. Again, if we turn to Hayek, he states, “Liberty and responsibility are inseparable” (p. 71). If we are free to act as we please then we must also be responsible for our actions. Hayek justifies “assigning responsibility” because it also benefits us by teaching us what we “ought to consider in comparable future situations” (p. 76). Taking responsibility for our actions is how we learn from our experiences; otherwise, we’re condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

In the modern “therapeutic state” (see Philip Rieff’s critique of the same in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 1966), which subscribes to the Romantic view of human nature, individual responsibility is discounted in favor of social responsibility. With origins in Rousseau’s thought, the belief is that we are born good and that it is society that corrupts us. A personal standard of behavior, or what we might call morality, ceases to matter; what counts in the new morality are what politically correct causes one espouses. What I call “bumper sticker morality” is proudly displayed on the rear automobile bumper of most card carrying leftists. When one deviates from the new morality, it is usually pathologized, as witnessed by the Soviet gulags or books by leftists such as Theodore Adorno et al, who published The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. The latter was a rather bogus study that argued that conservatives exhibited an authoritarian personality type. Funny coming from a group that rarely meets a totalitarian dictator they don’t admire: Stalin, Mao, Castro, all wonderful examples of humanity! This tendency to pathologize deviance and crime also extends to what I would call a “misplaced compassion” for career criminals and thugs. Such admiration is also amply displayed on bumper stickers: Free [input the latest celebrity criminal of the left].

But the bottom-line, so to speak, is that the new morality (some call it moral relativism) destroys individual responsibility. And while some determinists might contend that free will is a fiction, and if so, we cannot be held responsible for our actions, as William James has famously argued (The Will to Believe, 1896), the belief in free will and responsibility has great pragmatic value: How can one possibly be effective and successful in life if one does not believe that one has the freedom to act? To expand the point, just compare how successful and free societies are that believe in free will versus societies that ascribe to some form of determinism or fatalism. Also, to absolve the individual of freedom and responsibility devalues, de-humanizes, and infantilizes the individual. Without free and responsible individuals, how can we expect our democracy, which depends upon such individuals, to survive? Hayek quoted F.D. Wormuth as follows:

It is doubtful that democracy could survive in a society organized on the principle of therapy rather than judgment, error rather than sin. If men are free and equal, they must be judged rather than hospitalized. (Ibid., p.71)

The German thinker, Goethe, was rather prescient, when he wrote in a letter to Frau von Stein (June 8, 1787): “I think it is true that humanity will triumph eventually, only I fear that at the same time the world will become a large hospital and each will become the other’s humane nurse” (Quoted in W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 369).

A society of invalids and victims does not a free democratic republic make.

Government opposes amnesty

Amnesties for illegal overstayers have a poor record of success in most countries where they have been tried (see here, here and here).

Now the New Zealand Department of Immigration admits that they’ve haven’t been very successful in New Zealand either.

Immigration Minister Jonathan Coleman told a government select committee last week the government is not considering another amnesty for overstayers as the previous amnesty in 2000 had proved to be a failure.

New Zealand currently has about 16,000 overstayers, with about a third coming from Samoa and Tonga.