Bush Speechwriter View on Freedom, 1999

I quoted the National Review’s review of Freedom in Chains (1999) in a blog comment earlier today.   Someone requested the full text of the review, so here it is.

Matthew Scully, the reviewer, was on Bush’s speechwriting team for most of George W.’s first term.

National Review  May 3, 1999

HEADLINE: Tyranny Lite-Matthew Scully; Review

Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen, by
James Bovard (St. Martin’s, 326 pp., $ 26.95)

The dust jacket to James Bovard’s Freedom in Chains lists a dozen high federal officials who have “publicly denounced” the author’s writings, from the FBI director to the secretary of agriculture. Bovard, a correspondent for The American Spectator and contributor to Playboy, earned these distinctions by a rare willingness to slog through government reports, budgets, hearing transcripts, and highway bills to expose fraud and waste in federal programs most of us have never even heard of. It takes diligence, and has left Bovard with a visceral distrust of government you don’t get from philosophy books.

He earned his rebuke from the FBI by investigating the federal raids at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and he sees in those events only the most dramatic proof that “the threat of government punishment increasingly permeates everyday life.” Picking up where his 1994 Lost Rights left off, Bovard tells us that the IRS wrongfully collects some $ 7 billion in penalties a year, “more than is stolen by all the burglars and robbers [in America] combined.” The average citizen pays almost 40 percent of his income to the government. Federal regulations, which multiplied even during the Reagan years, threaten livelihoods and the right to property, giving government “additional prerogatives . . . to trammel, shackle, and punish.”

Drug-enforcement laws have led to abuses of police power, spreading “like a computer virus through the statute books.” Federal attempts to regulate the Internet have “made it a felony for 17-year-old teenagers to exchange by e-mail the same type of zesty love letters that teenagers have sent each other since at least the time of Romeo and Juliet.”

Bovard reminds us over and over again that government always comes down to coercion-the gun-and the state can grow only at the expense of individual freedom. “The greater the state’s legal superiority over the citizen,” he writes, “the closer the citizen is to a slave. . . . Political slavery is revealed at those moments when the paths of the citizen and the state cross, and the citizen suddenly becomes aware of his complete insignificance.”

Waco had a big influence on Bovard, and often he writes as if law-enforcement officers were a greater menace to the average citizen than criminals. If his point were simply that the caliber of personnel even at the FBI isn’t what it used to be (though your average G-man or cop on the beat is still a pretty good character), one would have to agree. But he goes well beyond that, to the point of exaggeration.

I agree with him that laws against marijuana are a massive waste of time and money. But you can still avoid all the legal traps Bovard describes by steering clear of marijuana and other illegal drugs, just as the folks at Waco could have avoided their grief by steering clear of stupid cults or as most of us avoid no-knock ATF raids by not turning our homes into arsenals. In Bovard’s libertarian vision of the world, all the evildoers work for the
government-there are only innocent citizens trodden upon by malevolent government agents, never just foolish people who bring their troubles on themselves. Like the title itself, Freedom in Chains is a little overwrought, reading for stretches as if composed during a long wait at the local DMV: “When law itself is the means by which the citizen is stripped of the fruits of his labor, confined to ever narrower portions of his own existence, and subjugated to a thousand insect authorities-then ‘freedom under the law’ means simply freedom by submitting to your worst enemy.”

There is a point where the libertarian streak of the Right meets the libertine streak of the Left in a chorus of whining against government intrusion, as for example on the question of Internet regulation. “Zesty love letters,” his term for threatened speech on the Internet, is libertarian-ese for pornography circulated by the Romeos at NAMBLA [North American Man-Boy Love Association] and others who are not coerced nearly enough by government.

Supreme Court rulings on police procedure have been generally “salutary” in protecting individual freedom, Bovard argues. But it would be hard to think of a more coercive act by government than the exclusionary rule, a contrivance Bovard seems to approve of (though it is nowhere to be found in the Fourth Amendment) and that in the name of individual rights leaves people free to be attacked or murdered by criminals loosed upon society by the state. As evidence that we don’t need federally protected wilderness areas, he writes, “The proliferation of contracts for hunting on private land [shows] that, with a sound incentive system, access to private land can easily be negotiated.” In practice this free-market approach to conservation has made a giant industry of canned hunting, allowing every lout who pays his fees to shoot fenced-in and usually baited wildlife.

Bovard is right, of course, to warn against “the moral glorification of the state.” But the glorification of autonomous man has a few problems of its own. When he gets around to explaining his own credo the quotes start pouring forth from the likes of Emerson, Thoreau, and John Stuart Mill-not my idea of sound moral guides. “A free society,” writes Bovard, “gives people the chance to be their own disciplinarians. Liberty permits each person to build his own moral utopia or to wallow in his own moral squalor, to live according to his own moral values or lack thereof.” True enough, and doubtless his Playboy readers would agree, except that the squalor has a way of spreading into a tyranny all its own, and typically it’s the wallowers who call on the coercive powers of the state to hold their neighbors at bay.

Still, the book offers a principled and often eloquent vision of the minimalist state. There is an integrity to it, and it is always refreshing to find a man who takes his freedom straight. Only he ought to go easier on the talk about chains and shackles and slavery. Even with all the taxes, meddlesome regulations, and officious bureaucrats, the slaves still have it mighty good here, and a country where you can make a living writing books like Freedom in Chains can’t be all that bad.