One underlying principle explains almost all policy quarrels between Republicans and Democrats (part one of two)
by Richard Schulman
The recent banking crisis has provided an unexpected value: it tells us much about the underlying principles that differentiate progressive Democrats from traditional Republicans.
The banking crisis was triggered by the unusually rapid raising of interest rates by the Federal Reserve to bring down a runaway inflation that it had itself caused by acquiescing to fiscal dominance – that is, by financing the Biden administration’s profligate spending, just as former Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns did for President Richard Nixon. (This seems to be a blunder the Fed can’t help repeating.)
But why did the Biden administration indulge in excess spending in the first place? Our government, except for the House since January, is dominated by progressive Democrats. Their overriding principle is to addict voters to government-provided entitlements. Their presumption is that addicted voters will convince themselves that entitlements are a free lunch and will revere progressives for providing the soup kitchen. But meanwhile, economic growth and after-tax incomes, the basis for rising standards of living, are hobbled by over-taxation and over-regulation.
But what exactly are entitlements?
They are demands by individuals or groups for government to “positively” (actively) intervene to satisfy their wants. They are now so costly that they have starved national defense of needed funding as war dangers threaten from at least four hostile powers.
“Spending on entitlements is the highest in American history,” US News writes. “In 2010, entitlement spending had grown to be almost 100 times higher than it was in 1960; it has increased by an explosive 9.5 percent per year for 50 straight years. Entitlement transfer payments to individuals (such as for income, healthcare, age, and unemployment) have been growing twice as fast as per capita income for 20 years, totaling $2.2 trillion in 2010 alone—which was greater than the entire gross domestic product of Italy and roughly the same as the GDP of Great Britain.” Entitlement expenditures were an astonishing 75% of US government spending in 2022, according to the government’s own figures.
No meddling, please
When the Founders drew up the original Constitution, the last thing they wanted was for government to meddle in citizens’ lives as the British had done to American colonists before the American Revolution. The rights the Founders approved were negative rights. They protected the individual from government — by guarantees of a free press, freedom of speech and religion, the right to bear arms, etc.
The addition of positive rights by progressives in the 20th century constituted a legal revolution. Rather than protecting individuals from government, they created costly obligations of government to individuals. The excessive spending of the Biden administration far exceeds the derelictions of the previous three administrations (Trump, Obama, and Bush 2).
But how did rights develop in the first place?
The Greeks and Romans had only natural law, which defined individuals’ obligations to the polis or kingdom. According to historian Brian Tierney, writing in his study The Idea of Natural Rights, the Greeks certainly had no doctrine of individual natural rights. Thus, Sophocles’ Antigone did not assert a God-given right; she found herself bound by an inexorable law. The Stoics “conceived of natural law as an expression of divine reason pervading and ordering the whole cosmos.” Cicero believed in an innate force in humans through which they could discern the law of nature. “But all of this,” Tierney continues, “is far from a doctrine of individual natural rights,” which protects individuals from compulsion by government and others. Similarly, in the early Christian era, “Paul wrote of a law written on the hearts of men; but he did not assert that ‘all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.’”
All this changed in the Middle Ages. This is when natural rights had their origin — during the 12th Century Renaissance in the legal writings of commentators on Gratian’s Decretum and later by 13th and 14th century commentators on papal decretals. This is an important change from still dominant beliefs that natural rights first took form in the 17th-18th century Enlightenment, or the 14th century Franciscan scholar, William of Ockham.
The decline of classical liberalism (the Founders’ outlook)
From then to the 18th and early 19th century, natural rights were regarded as an outgrowth of natural law, in opposition to the legal positivism of Jeremy Bentham that only government could create rights and that there was no pre-existing higher law or rights to which legislators had to submit. The US Founders followed the earlier understanding: the rights in the Constitution are negative rights, the things that authority cannot do to you. Natural law defines a public sphere; natural rights a private domain.
But in the 19th century, republics took an increasingly democratic turn. As the franchise expanded. competition for votes by the political parties led to the decline of classical liberalism – the Founders’ outlook – and the rise of partisan competition for the votes of the newly franchised lower classes. This led, by the end of the 19th century, to the expansion of positive rights in Europe – benefits accorded by government to individuals. These quickly evolved into the welfare states of contemporary Europe and later the US. Its promoters in the US were and are the progressives, beginning with the FDR administration; in the UK, by the Labour Party and Fabian Society; in Germany, by Chancellor Otto Bismarck and the Social Democratic Party.
Isaiah Berlin’s essay
The philosophical difference between negative rights (as in the US Constitution) and positive rights (the entitlements passed by legislatures or affirmed by courts) was characterized by the late public intellectual Isaiah Berlin in a famous essay, “Two concepts of liberty.”
As we go to press, Republicans, in budget negotiations with President Biden, have sought to restrain the out-of-control spending. The president, so far, has refused to cooperate, ignoring the budget negotiating norms of past years and present economic necessity.
Clearly, it’s time for progressives to return to the original understanding of the Constitution, with its focus on negative rights, not positive ones, for reasons of national defense and economic prosperity. But if they did that, they wouldn’t be progressives anymore, would they?
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