by Robert Russo
Anyone who takes up the fight for liberty discovers our enemy has no name, face or brand. It is not any one institution that is empowered to stifle civil liberties but their collaboration in which corruption exists. When we target government, power is switched over to private industry and vice versa, a relationship in which morals, laws and accountability slip namelessly and facelessly through the cracks. Examples of this union are Halliburton and other government contracting overseas, charter schools, and private companies used in enforcing the law. The threat to liberty is an enigma that passes from private ambition to board room to public policy, and these relationships require monitoring with far more scrutiny than the backing of any one party or practice. Our simple process of choosing leadership and laws is not equipped to call these shady deals into question.
Now apply this imbalance to a larger scale. The other day a young person asked me to explain socialism, to which he replied "So stores can't choose what price to sell their merchandise, it's all just one big company. Those bastards!" Similarly an adult commented to me how the Baby Boomers, and Pres. Bush among them, view the world through a Cold War attitude that we are a righteous nation and should enlighten the world to our standard. That may be true for countries that do not yet have civil rights and consentual government, but many bright ideas come from socialism such as government responsibility to the citizen. No one who loves capitalism thinks every single entity should be a competitor and markets completely unregulated. The key to making it work is knowing its faults.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say these ideas don't "come" from capitalism, socialism etc., but such general terms are a brand name placed upon a set of life choices which are infinite (and infinitely ambiguous). This branding has a purpose, for example I often hear people speak inconsistently about institutions like academics and the health industry, mixing their compliments and complaints, and it's clear to me why no one is able to stop this corruption because they cancel out their own views, refusing to make a choice. It's easy to get lost in the ambiguity of leaving no stone unturned, which anyone can see in the endless legislative runaround of the General Assembly, and the UN which never seems to make up its mind when there is a crisis.
So it is difficult to admit this business of choosing sides, slating a practice as right or wrong, is how we got into the current war and numerous other predicaments. Sen. Obama seems equipped to break these preconceptions by his willingness to meet with leaders that have long been slated as dead ends.* On our home turf however, the relationship between public and private entities is almost always decided without consent from the citizen, but at the expense of the citizen. Police using private enterprise to enforce the law (such as the private towing company and body shop that doubles as Richmond's police impound yard) allows officers to make summary judgments at the expense of both the taxpayer and their private partner, leaving it a civil matter between those two, when this role should be reversed. It should be law enforcement's responsibility to ensure the ways and means of their decisions or not to make them, decisions which are rightly up to the citizen and private businesses with the law moderating only.
As a writer of speculative fiction I've often thought if there were two Earths, the ruling class of both would meet in secret until there was a world of privilege and a slave world. This union and displacement has happened in every power struggle in history, leading H.G. Wells to write of a future in which the human race is split in two, finally resulting in a race of giant crabs hunting tiny butterflies on a preternatural beach.** Both the desire to hold fast to our principles and the flexibility to hunt down corruption in any arena, even our own and within ourselves, must be put to use to advance the cause of liberty.
*http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-campaign24-2008may24,0,6735347.story
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine
Question of the Week: In your personal life what collaboration have you noticed between public and private entities that disadvantage the citizen and how would you change it? Send your thoughts to russo@richmondliberty.org.
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