RadMod.com » Krauthammer blesses loss of liberty, says its necessary and temporary. Libertarians strongly disagree.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer disagrees with the famous Ben Franklin axiom that “Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither” in his article titled Situational Libertarianism over at Townhall.com.

In a nutshell, Krauthammer takes a few examples from history and draws a couple of sweeping conclusions unjustified by the quantity and quality of evidence he amassed:

1) He concluded that the wartime presidents who curtailed liberty were not so bad in the anti-freedom steps they took.

2) and he concluded that we “got our freedoms back” (to paraphrase) after wartime demanded we curtail freedoms.

In my view, it’s very bad for influential commentators to try to make us feel better about the steady steamroller of increasing governmental surveillance and control over our lives. Krauthammer, a so-called conservative, is in essence telling us to shut up and take it, because government means well and can be trusted.

Krauthammer sounds just like Limbaugh-Hannity-Coulter-O’Reilly and the gang. When did conservatives come to be so trusting of Big and Rapidly Expanding Government? - The answer is simple: When the GOP stepped into complete control of government.

To rail against government at this time is tantamount to admitting that the GOP is the party “doing it” to us, no matter how desperately the spinwits try to blame it all on the Democrats. And so, the conservatives are becoming pretty much OK with the Big Brother society fostered by the Republicans and by Bush’s policies.

Over at LewRockwell.com, the libertarians are kinda upset about Krauthammer’s willingness to give up the ideal of preserving liberty in today’s environment. Excerpts below. Now let’s see how big a piece of Krauthammer’s tail the angry libertarians can bite off:

Situational Totalitarianism by Anthony Gregory

Krauthammer goes on to say that if Americans look at our history, we see that “[t]here is no slippery slope, only a shifting line between liberty and security that responds to existential threats.” Specifically,

[quoting Krauthammer]
“During the Civil War, Lincoln went so far as to suspend habeas corpus. When the war ended, America returned to its previous openness. During World War II, Roosevelt interned an entire ethnic group. His policies were soon rescinded (later apologized for) and shortly afterward America embarked on a period of unprecedented expansion of civil rights. Similarly, the Vietnam-era abuses of presidential power were later exposed and undone by Congress.”

“Our history is clear. We have not slid inexorably toward police power. We have fluctuated between more and less openness depending on need and threat. . . .”
[End quote]

Where to begin with this? During the “Civil War,” Lincoln did a lot more than suspend habeas corpus. He jailed war protesters, sent the army to fire upon a civilians’ draft riot in New York, shut down hundreds of newspapers, deported an antiwar Congressman, implemented conscription for the first time in U.S. government history, established a barrage of corporate subsidies and new federal agencies, and forever abolished the true federalist system of the united States, turning it into an Old World–style militarist nation-state and violently undoing the principle of secession on which America was founded and which almost all political theorists considered sacrosanct before the war. The civil right of secession – as in, the right not to be attacked by the federal government for wanting to leave – stood as a vital check against unlimited federal power and was among the greatest of all the Founding Fathers’ contributions to the liberal tradition, and Lincoln permanently repealed it. The slippery slope, in this case, was short and steep right to the bottom.

A Libertarian Democrat is vigorously pro-personal liberty, and believes government can play a constructive role in regulating our economy and providing a social safety net.

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