Afghanistan Withdrawal: President Obama gets it right

President Obama announced on May 27^th a scaled back plan to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.  The proposal will reduce the present 32,000 troops to 9,800 by the end of 2014 with final withdrawal by the end of 2016.  The proposal is subject to the approval of a bilateral security agreement (BSA).  The current Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has refused to sign a BSA, but his probable successors indicate they will sign such an agreement.  

The President’s announcement represents a sharp pull back from the previous plan to retain 10 to 15 thousand U.S. personnel in Afghanistan for ten years.

Sgt. Bergdahl Prisoner Exchange

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was released by the Taliban to the control of U.S. Special Forces on June 1, 2014 after nearly five years of captivity. In exchange the U.S. released five senior Taliban leaders held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  The circumstances of Bergdahl’s capture, the context of a broader U.S. policy to negotiate with the Taliban, and the potential long term repercussions of the exchange are controversial.

Threats to Liberty - Expanding Government

Liberty is the indispensable principle that underpins the uniqueness of the American founding and experience.  Yet, Americans have ceded a great deal of their liberty to government.    The relinquishing of liberty did not come as some feared – surrendering a way of life to the point of a foreign sword.  Rather, it was a gradual abdication of responsibility for one’s own destiny by an increasingly self-indulgent and distracted citizenry to an ever expanding, and increasingly centralized government.

Threats to Liberty – Federalism Diminished Through Aid

Federalism is the concept of shared sovereignty whereby constituent parts (states) join with a central governing authority (U.S.) in a union. There was great debate among the Founders about how much power the federal government should have.  They knew it needed to be more than it was under the Articles of Confederation, but they also did not want a unitary state where all power is held centrally and distributed to lesser administrative units as the central authority sees fit.

The federal government, though intended as limited and specific in its powers, has grown exponentially since the founding of the United States, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries.  There are differing opinions about the value of a dominant federal government, but it is clear that the structural check on the growth of federal power – Federalism - is substantially diminished and the United States is de facto becoming a unitary state.

The federal government was envisioned by the founders and framed within the Constitution as limited in its powers.   The federal system itself, whereby power was divided between the national government and the states was a mechanism to check the power of the national government.  The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution affirms specifically this principle, stating, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Over the course of the last 100 years relative power has tilted to the federal government. State governments are growing in size, but they are weakened relative to the federal government in large part by dependence on federal aid and submission to the coercion of the strings attached to it.  The states have largely become an extension of the federal government.

For example, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts adopted the federal Common Core educational curriculum in 2010 despite the clear success of a curriculum and assessment system implemented in the 1990s that has led to Massachusetts ranking at the top of educational performance for decades. Why -  because access to federal education funds were contingent on adopting the Common Core.

The diminution of the states began in earnest in 1913 with the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution that established the income tax.   Unprecedented growth spawned by the inflow of revenues and creation of aid programs for states expanded further in the New Deal of the 1930s, the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

According to the non-partisan State Budget Solutions, “states received $5.27 trillion from the federal government since the start of the 21st century. Since 2001, 34 states saw over 30 percent of all their collected general revenue come from the federal government” and the trend is of increasing dependence.   The federal system is at risk when states are dependent on the federal government and must accept the strings that accompany those funds.

The Foundations of Liberty

The blessings of Liberty have been experienced throughout history by a relatively small percentage of human beings. 

Until the 17th century, when the age of reason took hold, human beings were no more than the chattel of pharaohs, emperors, kings, czars and caliphs, supported often by popes, bishops, and imams. It took millennia to establish the basic foundations of our innate human rights and centuries more to define them fully and create mechanisms to protect them in constitutions and law.

 
 Pharaohs enslaved whole populations to die at the whip building pyramids in their honor.   The Roman Emperor Crassus lined the Appian Way from Rome to Capua with over 6000 crucified men to make the point that he would not abide any rebels.   Throughout the many empires and invasions from West to East and East to West there was horror, torture, and death to accompany the imposition of a new ruler.  Those who survived the killing were often enslaved.

The Population Reference Bureau estimates that 108 billion people have inhabited the earth across the history of human existence.   Only about one percent of all human beings who have ever lived have experienced liberty as experienced by citizens of the United States.   It is only very recently that the value of the individual human being, constituted with rights, has emerged.

The philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment, such as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, led a redirection of human history.  Bacon introduced the scientific method of inquiry into the natural world.   Newton, an English physicist and mathematician, led the scientific revolution and is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time.  John Locke was an English philosopher who later in the 17th century built upon the ideas of Bacon and other period philosophers to introduce the concepts of “natural rights” and consent of the governed as the basis of “political legitimacy”.

In particular, the ideas of John Locke were of great interest to the founders of the United States and many appear in the Declaration of Independence as it conveys our foundational principles.  The natural rights concept appears in the Declaration as “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”   These unalienable rights are innate.  They are not granted as a legal right through the benevolence of a king or the decree of a president or prime minister. Rather, they are a birth right.

The Declaration also fully conveys the concept of political legitimacy within its text, stating that governments can only derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”   This was a complete rejection of the monarchy.  No longer would political power convey through inheritance of title, but only through the consent of the governed.

Nearly 240 years later, these same aspirations expressed by a young and newly declared nation are the desire of many and the reality for few.   According to the Economist Group Democracy Index approximately 15 percent of the world’s 167 countries can be considered full democracies where the electoral process is legitimate and civil rights are assured.   Less than 12% of the world’s population today can claim fully the rights and protections envisioned in the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration lays forth our aspirations and foundational principles.  The United States Constitution makes those aspirations and principles whole in form and substance to “secure the Blessings of Liberty.”

The Constitution was completed in 1787 and consisted of seven articles.  The first three described the formation and powers of the Congress, Presidency, and Judiciary respectively, while the remainder were procedural, such as the process for amending the Constitution.  The Constitution laid out the mechanisms by which the “consent of the governed” would be obtained and executed.

Eighteen months after the original signing of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution) was signed and forwarded to the states for ratification. It was subsequently approved and became an integral part of the Constitution in 1791.  The Bill of Rights was the culmination of John Locke’s “natural rights” concept and secured in detail the fundamental rights necessary to liberty.

Of course, liberty was not the right of all U.S. citizens until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fifteenth Amendment enshrined the right to vote regardless of race or color, and finally the Nineteenth Amendment provided for women’s suffrage in 1920.    Hence, it is little more than 100 years ago that all citizens of the United States fully participated as individuals in giving their consent to be governed and fully received their birthright to liberty. 

Liberty and its blessings are rare in the human experience and fragile.  Those blessed by it should protect it.        

Why "Liberty Takes Effort"?

Liberty Takes Effort was selected as the title of this blog because liberty is the indispensable principle that underpins the uniqueness of the American founding and experience.  Effort must be put forth in a vigilant manner to protect it.

The blog’s perspective and topics will flow from the thesis that liberty remains the key to happiness and prosperity, and the concern that liberty is eroding. It will hopefully serve as a clarion call to United States citizens to recognize the essential value of liberty and to protect it from further government incursion.

The images of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin, the architects of the Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution, were selected as the background image of this blog because the blog author holds them in high esteem.  Their intellect, courage, and faith formed what was to be the most powerful nation on Earth, its citizens were guaranteed liberties and rights such as the Earth had never known, and its economic dominance unquestioned for over a century.  Their ideas and opinions in large part remain valid and relevant today.

Abraham Lincoln’s picture is also included in the background images because he ended the blight of slavery and opened the door to the blessings of liberty for all.

The Liberty Takes Effort blog is intended as a place for respectful conversation.  The author encourages comments.  It is his hope that through respectful conversation, where all stipulate the good intentions of others, that common opinions might emerge.  Disagreement is inevitable, but it is far better to disagree with others while knowing why and to what degree the disagreement exists than to simply reject the opinion of another out of hand.

All comments will be reviewed by the blog author to prevent comments that in his view are irrelevant, in error, or disrespectful of others.  Any modern day reader of online comments knows how quickly they devolve into partisan name calling.   The role of the mediator is to improve the conversation, not to censor.

Finally, let me say that the blog title and background images were selected with considerable care.  The author was warned that the use of the word LIBERTY and the images of the notable figures in the background may diminish participation because the word and images have been co-opted by extremists of the right.  I understand the basis for this concern, but reject the notion that a word so central to our experience must be abandoned or the images of such great men cast aside for fear that they invoke extremism. They belong to extremists only as long as we allow it.