Iโm with Mark. In this pre-election article, I took my best shot at explaining why Obamaโs โeconomic justice,โ which sometimes travels under the heading โSecond Bill of Rightsโ was so flawed โฆ and monstrous. Here, fwiw, are the relevant passages:
As Obama sees it, the Warren Court failed to โbreak free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.โ The judges instead clung to the hoary construction of the Constitution as โa charter of negative libertiesโ โ one that says only what government โcanโt do to you.โ For Obama, economic justice demands the positive case: what government โmust do on your behalfโ (emphasis added).
True to form, Obama has twisted the most elementary points. First, the Framers viewed government as a necessary evil: required for a free peopleโs collective security but, if insufficiently checked, guaranteed to devour liberty. The purpose of the Constitution was not to make the positive case for government but for freedom. Freedom cannot exist without order, and thus implies some measure of government. But it is a limited government, vested with only the powers expressly enumerated. As the framers knew, a government that strays beyond those powers is necessarily treading on freedomโs territory. It is certain to erode the very โBlessings of Libertyโ the Constitution was designed to secure.
Relatedly, the Constitution does state the positive case for government in its opening lines. Government is required to safeguard the rule of law and the national security. These injunctions are vital: there is no liberty without them. Why, then, do Obama and other Leftists ignore them? Because they donโt involve picking winners and losers; they eschew social engineering. These guarantees, instead, are for everyone, uniformly: Government must โprovide for the common defenseโ and โpromote the general welfareโ (emphasis added). The Blessings of Liberty are to be secured โto ourselves and to our posterityโโnot to yourself at the expense of my posterity.
The question isnโt what government โmust do on your behalf.โ It is what government must do on our behalf. In general, the positive power of government is for the body politic, not the individual. Of course individuals have rights. But those rights comprise a sphere of personal liberty against government. In that sphere, each individual Joe the Plumber is free to work hard, or not; to make of his life what he will, bearing personally the consequences of his choices. Freedom, after all, includes the freedom to fail. Pace Obama, failure is a part of life โ there is no right against it.
The framers understood that there is no societal good in a government that โmust doโ for individuals and factions. โDoingโ is a zero-sum game. Government does not inherently have anything to give. What it awards you it must seize from me. What it gives one faction it must deny to others. Such an arrangement is inimical to the Constitutionโs purpose โto form a more perfect union.โ It is, in fact, a prescription for disunion, for a house divided.
Freedom accepts that we are different. The endless variety of life assures that. I had every opportunity to become just as good a basketball player as Michael Jordan, but he has natural gifts and worked harder. If we played a hundred times, he would whip me a hundred times by about 500 points. No Change, no matter how rapturously framed, could alter that result without chaining him to the bench and rendering the game no longer recognizable as basketball. That would be perversion, not justice.
Yet, this is just what Obamaโs โeconomic justiceโ envisions: that the government can hamstring Michael Jordan and give me enough freebies that, despite his talent and industry, he can only play me to a tie, destroying his incentive to excel while the Bulls go out of business, no longer able to afford even my mediocrity. Naturally, such an absurd system requires change. Redistribution smothers the freedom our Constitution is designed to foster. It is therefore antithetical to our law.






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