The Liberty Equation

Today, I want to tell you a story about lost liberty. It begins not with heavy-handed cops, omni-present cameras, smoke-Nazis, meat-martyrs, or eco-fascists — nor Big Brother and the thought-police…

But with a woman.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that women are antithetical to freedom (though that’s undeniably the case for some married men) — only that what really got me thinking about how Americans perceive freedom came from my brief association with a particular lady not long ago. Here’s how it happened…

After meeting up for some late drinks at a local pub, I spontaneously invited a woman I’d had numerous dates with back to my house. Now, this girl had read a lot of my Whiskey & Gunpowder essays, so she knew what I was all about — trucks, guns, motorcycles, hunting, bourbon whiskeys, the whole deal…

So as she followed me home, I really didn’t think anything of the fact that I had four or five hunting rifles leaning up against the back of the sofa in my living room (I’d gone to the gun range the evening before). Frankly, I was more concerned about whether I had anything she liked to drink, the condition of the bathroom, whether there were dishes in the sink — that kind of stuff.

However, the first thing she said when she came in the door and looked around wasn’t any kind of critique of my housekeeping, but rather, upon spying the rifles:

“Jim, how many guns do you NEED?”

It’s Not Freedom if You Need ‘Um

I’m mentioning my date-gone-sour because it’s emblematic of the fact that a lot of educated people who think they’re all about freedom really aren’t — at least not when the chips hit the table. This woman is a perfect example. She’s smart as a whip, degreed, professional, tuned-in and fancies herself a liberty-minded American…

Yet the first thing that jumps into her mind when she sees the trappings of liberty is the quasi-Marxist notion that its exercise should be tempered by the dictates of practical need.

What’s so tragicomic is that I find this kind of thinking to be typical of how a lot of Americans regard freedoms OTHER people find important — but not necessarily those they indulge in themselves. If I’d said to her “How many pairs of shoes do you need?” or “How many pets do you need?” she’d surely have balked…

I once got this same gun question from an uncle of mine, a man of great temperance, education and intelligence. In the ensuing exchange, he suggested in perfect seriousness that it should be determined, by earnest study and analysis, exactly how many guns and of what types an American could ever encounter a need for — and that the law should be modified to restrict our freedom to own guns beyond the dictates of these criteria!

If NEED were the litmus test of liberty, we would cease to be in any way free. And yet, a lot of Americans use this concept (necessity) as a looking glass when it comes to the freedoms their neighbors enjoy. This is disconcerting to me.

But it isn’t even the most insidious way in which a lot of us look at freedoms all wrong…

The “Balance Sheet” Mentality

Today, it’s the tendency of politicians, commentators, advocates on both sides of an issue — and increasingly, American citizens — to distill the debate about any personal liberties to one of numbers. Statistics, not principles, rule the day.

That’s because there’s an inherent credibility to an argument backed by numbers — they are assumed to be impartial. And they are. It’s only when numbers are contorted by people with an agenda (any time they come out of politicians’ mouths, basically) that they become treacherous, and anything but unbiased.

Think about this for a minute. Is there any liberty-based debate in the public discourse today that doesn’t center on an argument about numbers — that hasn’t become merely a contest of “dueling statistics?” The point of those statistics is always the same: To determine whether a freedom makes bottom-line sense in a twisted equation in which liberty is allowed to stand or fall based solely on its mercantile merits…

The smoking debate is a good example. Few are talking about smoking in terms of its intrinsic value as an exercise in personal freedom. Most only talk about it in terms of economics: Mainly, whether the increased costs of health insurance and medical treatment for both active and passive smokers is greater than the profits bars, restaurants, public sports venues and the like (tobacco-company profits are rarely mentioned) gain from smoking.

Actually, smoking is a great example of a personal freedom that is ensured by bottom-line factors. Politicians may bang the regulatory drums in the name of public wellness and health-care cost savings, but they would never ban smoking outright. They’re all-too-aware of how corporate taxes on hugely profitable tobacco companies, federal excise taxes on cigarettes, and state tax revenues from cigarette sales dwarf any increased costs smoking may incur on society. Even if they didn’t, tobacco-related tax revenues are more immediately meaningful to politicians than any trickle-down economic boon that banning smoking might produce. But I digress…

Numbers also play a huge role in the dialogue about illegal aliens (if you think there’s no personal liberty angle to this issue, wait until we all get national I.D. cards or RFID chips under the auspices of distinguishing citizens from non-citizens). This debate — whether among politicians or pundits in the mainstream media — is appallingly one-dimensional in its focus not on the principle of whether non-citizens should be allowed to live, work, and suck at the public teat in the U.S., but rather on whether illegal aliens are a net boon or drain on our economy!

As though dollars and sense were the sole determining factors in the matter — security, fairness, equality, sovereignty, and the integrity of existing law be damned.

With few exceptions, today’s debate about personal liberties is overwhelmingly focused on need or economics — and driven by statistics. But as I’m about to show you, when numbers drive a discussion of freedom, we become vulnerable to deception on a much greater scale than if that debate focuses principally on principles…

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

There are two main justifications the various levels of government in America use to abrogate your freedom: Saving lives and saving money.

Perhaps the best example of this is the debate over a liberty that almost everyone has been brainwashed into believing it’s a good idea to restrict: Helmet-less motorcycling. As always, this debate has been dominated over the years by the discussion of numbers that SEEM to show that from both a bottom-line and human life standpoint, mandating motorcycle helmets is a no-brainer.

However, as is the case so many times when liberty is shackled, these statistics are an utter sham. Here’s the “Readers’ Digest” version of some hard numbers I included in my article on this topic in May 2006:

“At first glance, most statistics used to support the argument that helmets save lives and/or reduce injuries — or rather, that helmet laws accomplish these things — are compelling. Most of them look like this oft-cited data from California, the state with the most road-registered motorcyclists by far in America:

~~~~~

“Looks like the helmet law reduced brain injuries by more than 53%…

“Let’s put these numbers into perspective: …

• “According to data from the National Association of State Motorcycle Safety Administrators (NASMSA), California motorcycle registrations plummeted in the 4 years following passage of the mandatory helmet law by approximately 20%. This fact alone should result in 20% fewer accidents and brain injuries, all other factors being equal…
• “According to a 1994 UCLA study on the effects of the 1992 California helmet law mandate, in just the 2 years following the law’s passage, the total number of motorcycle accidents decreased by 34.98% (-25.46% in 1992 and -9.52% in 1993)! It stands to reason that brains injuries would also drop by at least this amount…

~~~~~

“These data can point to only one conclusion: When helmets are mandated, bikers ride less, which equals fewer accidents. Any statistics that fail to adjust for this — like most of the raw numbers being trumpeted by the pro-helmet lobby — are bogus…

“But back to the UC San Francisco School of Medicine chart for a moment: Isn’t it odd that the chart only catalogs brain injury hospitalizations, not fatalities? Could this be because the fatalities numbers paint a less-than-flattering picture of helmet usage?

~~~~~

“You’ve already learned that in California, the total number of motorcycle accidents decreased by 35% in the 2 years (1992-1993) following the mandatory helmet law. So, if helmets improved accident survivability, then the ratio of deaths to accidents should have fallen at a greater rate than this during those two years…

“But it didn’t. Based on NASMSA’s records of fatalities per motorcycle registered in the Golden State, the fatality rate in the last year of voluntary helmet use (1991) was approximately 7.55 deaths per 10,000 motorcycle registrations. At the end of 1993, this ratio was approximately 5.30 per ten thousand bikes…

“A difference of only 29.8%.

“This means that the California mandatory helmet law made it MORE likely that a motorcycle crash would result in death to the rider — nearly 15% more likely, in fact.

“California is not alone, either. In similar comparisons of public accident and fatality data across all 50 states in 1993 (the year in which mandatory helmet laws most recently peaked in the U.S.), the numbers look like this:

“As you can see, the rate of accidents per participant nationwide is 14.5% higher (222.21 vs. 194.02) in mandatory helmet states, and the rate of fatalities per accident is also higher, by nearly 3% (2.98 vs. 2.9)…”

Stay with me here. Now I’m going to relate all of this helmet talk back to the “balance sheet” idea…

Power Politics of the “Golden” Rule

My home state, Maryland, passed its helmet law at the same time as California (1992) on the grounds that it would save both lives AND money — since it would eliminate the state’s long-term care costs of those uninsured riders who were hospitalized with head injuries helmets would have prevented. Assuming that the California data would hold roughly true in the Old Line State, this would indeed likely have been the case, even adjusting for a similar decline in registrations and rider-ship…

However, nary a peep was made during the pre-mandate discourse about the negative economic impact Maryland’s bars, restaurants, motels, gas stations, bike dealerships and cycle parts and service centers would have sustained from a drastic decrease in rider participation in response to a helmet law. This number would surely have far exceeded the fiscal liabilities involved with treating brain injuries of the uninsured.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: If bottom-line concerns really are the “Golden Rule” of legislation, why’d Maryland and California politicians pass helmet laws that seemingly subtracted from their real-world bottom lines in the early 1990s?

Because the Federal government bribed them to.

At the tail end of 1991, the sweeping Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) was signed into law by Congress. Among other liberty-quashing, government-expanding, commerce-shackling and public-payroll-increasing provisions, that law revived millions of dollars in dormant-since-the-‘70s incentives to states that had passed both car seat-belt and motorcycle helmet laws. Some of this money was earmarked for specific transportation-related programs, and some of it was discretionary for states to spend as they pleased.

Basically, since the Feds couldn’t pass a national helmet mandate without looking iron-fisted, they simply dangled a few million bucks in tax-pork bride money in front of state legislatures, and some of the more greedy ones (Maryland and California) took the bait. It’s hardly a coincidence that both these states enacted helmet laws in 1992.

What this proves to me — and what it should prove to any thinking American — is that raw, liquid money in their hands is more important to politicians than likely far greater sums infused into the economies of their home states…

That state road-maintenance and other low-wage jobs paid for by federally subsidized pork are more important to them than private-sector jobs lost in their own districts by needlessly limiting freedom…

And that it’s more important for them to be able to say, even falsely, that they “saved lives” and “created jobs” than it is for them to say they preserved liberty and allowed the free market to find its own unfettered economic equilibrium…

My point is that limiting personal liberties — smoking, drinking, helmet-wearing, gun-carrying, kite-flying, you name it — is almost always hostile to the real-world, entrepreneurial bottom line. But such restrictions are often favorable to the bottom lines politicians care about: Image, pork money, tax revenue, votes and government jobs.

And so they become the law.

Rhetorical Red Herrings

To me, there’s something even scarier than the fact that our government, from Capitol Hill on down to the town hall in Podunk, Georgia, is doing everything it can — through its own perverse bureaucratic alchemy of laws, lies, rhetoric, taxation and regulation — to convert various chunks of our liberty into money in their pockets…

That’s the fact that we’re all thinking in their terms about it.

Like quick-draw artists in Old West movies, pundits in the media, on the Boards of special interest groups and even around the dinner table go into arguments and debates armed NOT with simple reason and the fundamental righteousness of liberty, but with numbers they can sling at the drop of a stat.

And like I’ve shown with the helmet law example, in many cases, those numbers are colored, skewed, pared down and stacked to prove one point and not the other…

This is the end result of a calculated move by government, perpetuated by the dim bulbs running the lap-dog media. On the one hand, they’re programmed us to see things only in terms of dollars and cents — and on the other, they’ve obfuscated, dumbed-down, and co-opted the debate to the point where fundamental American principles get buried under stacks of irrelevant statistics, never to see the light of day.

It’s a three-part formula that campaign managers, hired-gun pollsters, and PR slicks know all too well:

1)First, make people greedy by threatening their bottom lines, or fearful by threatening their safety. (“Drinking is costly to society — if we don’t pass this law lowering the DWI standard to .000000000000008, we’ll have to raise taxes,” or “A gun in the home is more likely to harm the family than an intruder — if we don’t outlaw them, kids will die!”)

2) Second, show them numbers — real or not, it makes no difference — that outrage them and support abrogating freedom. (“Just look at how much money these invalided motorcyclists and seat-belt-less drivers are costing the rest of us decent, hard-working people!”)

3) Finally, pit freedoms against each other to make folks think they’re patriotic for restricting OTHER Americans’ liberties. (“These smoking libertines are threatening your freedom to go where you want without risking emphysema yourself!”)

It’s a total racket, too. Politicians know that by definition, practitioners of any single liberty are in the MINORITY. Far more people don’t smoke than do. Loads more people don’t ride motorcycles than do. There are a lot more non-skiers than there are skiers. There are fewer gun owners than those without any firearms (though not by as much as you might think)…

Therefore, it’s relatively easy to limit any single liberty by majority vote. All our leaders have to do is give us a red herring to look at — like a bunch of statistics — and we’ll forget all about the fact that liberty is its own reward…

And it’s worth paying for even if the numbers really don’t validate it.

Bottom Lines on Liberty: Theirs and Ours

Though I often use the terms liberty and freedom interchangeably, to my way of thinking, liberty most accurately refers not to those fundamental freedoms that are guaranteed to us by law (e.g. see Bill of Rights, the)…

But rather to all those things that aren’t explicitly protected by law.

In other words, everything Americans are supposed to be able to do without fretting about Big Brother busting them for no good reason. Ideally, this should mean (and it used to) that you can do just about anything you want to — especially on your own property — as long as it’s not directly harming anyone else. That’s the TRUE American model, handed down from Locke, Rousseau and others the Constitution’s framers thought were onto something…

Now think about this for a minute: If the “balance sheet” mentality that has driven the changes in just one liberty — like motorcycle helmet legislation — were to become the boilerplate model for laws concerning all kinds of other liberties, what kinds of things would still be allowed in America at the end of the day?

Only those liberties that can pass a societal bottom-line bean-counter test?

Or would it be only those that contribute to government’s bottom-line?

Here’s OUR bottom line, as American citizens: Liberty isn’t always safe, sensible or good for us. It isn’t always noble, and it isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always tasteful or moral or high-minded. It isn’t always profitable and it doesn’t always add up in the “plus” column on paper…

But it shouldn’t have to, because liberty is always important. It has value on its own, and is almost always worth whatever it costs us. And if we’re going to limit it, there should have to be a damn good reason for it.

It’s my great fear that if “we” — I mean people like me in the fringe media and you at the dinner table and in the town hall — don’t start re-directing the liberty debate back toward principles and away from mere principal, none of us may end up being able to do so many of the things that makes our lives worth living with passion.

I also think that as we’re about to vote on a measure or candidate who supports limiting the exercise of some liberty we find personally offensive, we should all stop and ask ourselves this question…

When some money-grubbing, headline-grabbing politician puts MY favorite freedom in the crosshairs, will those whose right to liberty I’m betraying right now stand up for ME?

Always lobbying for liberty,

Jim Amrhein
Freedoms Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

July 16, 2007