Do you want to deprive others of free speech?
Do you want to live in a society where you can deprive others of free speech or freedom of the press? I wouldn’t.
I presume you value that your government protects your freedom of speech and the freedom of the press for that media you agree with. Can you imagine living under a government that didn’t? I’m in the middle of The Gulag Archipelago. It gives some of the picture and it doesn’t like desirable.
It’s tempting, is it not, to think sometimes, “As much as I value my freedom of speech, sometimes people say things I dislike so much that I’d like to be able to restrict theirs. Not always, of course, but sometimes.”
Or you learn what the other side’s media tells them: “Why they’re promoting fascism! They don’t care any more about being right or what’s good for the country or humanity. They just want raw power. They want to take over and they’ll do what it takes to achieve it,” then to conclude, “the good of our society demands that their freedom of the press be curtailed from such writing. Not always, of course, but sometimes.”
However tempting such thoughts, if you think about it enough, you conclude that however much you dislike their speech or press, to deprive them of those freedoms would eventually rebound to everyone. Everyone must enjoy all the freedoms necessary for liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security or we all lose them.
As much as we might think we would make all the right decisions if we get to pick and choose who gets them and when, even if in some abstract sense we made all the right decisions, we would eventually invade Poland or some equivalent, because we would be tyrants.
The Constitution and Declaration contain no extraneous protections
The freedoms of speech and the press are familiar ones. What about habeus corpus or the right to a speedy trial? To confront your accuser? Might these less familiar ones be less important? Could we relax them a bit sometimes?
As best I can tell, the Constitution and Declaration contain no extraneous protections. We have to protect all of them or we descend into tyranny, civil war, become invaded, or some other travesty, and by “we” here, I mean the government. I write, “as best I can tell,” but I’m not expressing my opinion. I’m expressing the result of plenty of deliberation by the people who wrote and ratified this nation’s Constitution, as well as those who wrote and ratified the constitutions of all nations derived from it and the protections they agreed on for theirs.
What about life, liberty, and property?
The US Constitution says that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. It says it twice—once for the federal government in the fifth amendment and again for the stats in the fourteenth.
You may have heard of a region called Cancer Alley or of many sicknesses and loss of years of life, liberty, or property resulting from pollution and depletion. You may have heard that the Colorado River doesn’t reach the ocean most years and that the Ogallala Aquifer is running dry.
You may also like flying, takeout, and driving. You may believe that without you enjoying such activities society would collapse. You’re not doing them to hurt people. You’re doing them to help people.
Okay, say you are. That intent doesn’t change that your polluting and depleting deprives others of life, liberty, and property without due process of law.
It’s tempting, is it not, to think sometimes, “As much as I value the protection of my life, liberty, and property, sometimes I like to do things so much that I’d like to be able to restrict other people of theirs. Not always, of course, but sometimes.”
However tempting such thoughts, if you think about it enough, you conclude that however much you like your activities that deprive them of their life, liberty, and property, to deprive them of those protections would eventually rebound to everyone. Everyone must enjoy all the protections necessary for liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security or we all lose them.
You may say, “But we need modern medicine, antibiotics, ambulances, and other things to live well. We need fighter jets and warships to defend our freedom. If we don’t do it, Russia and China will, and they’ll beat us.”
As much as we might think we would make all the right decisions if we get to pick and choose who gets them and when, even if in some abstract sense we made all the right decisions, we would eventually invade Poland or some equivalent, because we would be tyrants.
This nation allowed people to deprive others of life, liberty, and property without due process of law once before. The result was the Civil War, in which more Americans died than all other wars combined.
The alternative to your being prevented from depriving others of their life, liberty, and property isn’t reverting to the Stone Age or whatever you fear. It’s tyranny, civil war, or being invaded, preceded by society falling apart through isolation, polarization, degradation of civil discourse, and what we’re seeing today.
Beyond the fifth and and fourteenth amendments
I’ve focused on the fifth and fourteenth amendments, but polluting and depleting violate more requirements for liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security. Pollution and depletion violate two more requirements.
The Declaration of Independence requires the consent of the governed.
Property rights as understood by the people who drafted and ratified the Constitution as well as the public understanding included that you can’t take from nature unless you leave enough as good in common for others, in John Locke’s words, though Jefferson, Madison, and others wrote similar ideas. Humans since long before the US practiced “leave it better than you found it” and “don’t take the last one.”
But what about all our fears of what would happen without access to all that energy?
Our minds fill with fears and concerns about life without all the perks we help ourselves to that require violating those three requirements. Don’t we need them to live?
Stay tuned for a future post, but the answer is that we don’t. Our lifestyles require those perks, but our lives don’t, and you will prefer lives without those perks, even in the period before the tyranny, civil war, invasion, or other calamity that they cause.
That answer prompts the questions, “If we don’t need them and you say we will prefer living without them, on what basis? Why do I and everyone believe otherwise?”
Again, stay tuned.
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