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Quotes on Power

About the book Crisis and Leviathan

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Center on Peace & Liberty Civil Liberties

Contents:

Introduction:

Government power grows in soil seeded by crisis. Real, imagined, and conjured threats—domestic and foreign, economic, political, and military—are readily used to justify government responses “requiring” changes in established institutions and limits on traditional freedoms. Civil liberties have been the first casualties of responses to crises.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines civil liberties as “Fundamental individual rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, protected by law against unwarranted governmental or other interference.” Thus “civil liberties” is a moral and political category protecting the individual against the state. Civil liberties are what distinguish free and open societies from ones ruled by authoritarian or totalitarian governments. Theoretically, in a free society the individual is sovereign. Each person is recognized as having rights independent of and antecedent to government. The idea of civil liberties thus represents a radical break in the political history of the world.

Civil liberties are typically thought to include freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly; freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and certain other rights related to criminal law enforcement, such as the rights to habeas corpus, against self-incrimination, to a jury trial, and so on. This translates into prohibitions against violations of privacy, censorship, a state church, forced confessions, Star Chambers, and the like. Thus, the concept of civil liberties necessarily limits government power, which is why those who run governments regularly look for ways (“crises”) to ignore them.

In the United States, judges, politicians, and political philosophers have constricted the concept “civil liberties” largely to exclude property, or economic, rights. Thus property has been accorded far weaker protection than that given to speech, press, and religion. The prejudice against property was formalized during the Great Depression and the New Deal. Since then, economic regulation has been deemed acceptable. This bifurcation of liberty was arbitrary, ideologically driven, and wholly unsupported by the Constitution. Unsurprisingly, it has outlasted the economic crisis for which it was developed.

Virtually all civil liberties have been eroded by war, the preparation for it, and other kinds of crises, such as depressions. These have been particularly effective in de-sensitizing people to encroachments on their freedom. Responses to crises have brought censorship, conscription, new and higher taxes, and control of transportation, industry, and agriculture. When those crises ended, most new controls were removed and taxes were reduced—but government power never shrunk back to its pre-crisis level (the “rachet effect”). The people were left with new and permanent state impositions in their lives. What’s more, they were effectively trained to accept further “necessary’ assaults on their liberties when the next crisis arrived.

Also, click here for Bibliography for Crisis and Leviathan.

Crises and the Erosion of Liberty:

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War and Truth:

Calhoun, Laurie. “Just War? Moral Soldiers?”, The Independent Review, Vol. IV, No. 3 (Winter 2000), pp. 325-345.

Carlton, Jim. “Of Microbes and Mock Attacks: Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities,” Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2001.

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—. “Bush Deception on Iraq War II: Is the Public to Blame?” Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute, June 23, 2003.

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Higgs, Robert. “The Cold War Economy: Opportunity Costs, Ideology, and the Politics of Crisis,” Explorations in Economic History, July 1994.

—. “Collateral Damage: Two Venues, One Logic,” San Francisco Examiner, April 15, 2002.

—. “In the Name of Emergency,” Reason, July 1987.

—. “The Myth of ‘Failed’ Policies,” The Free Market, March 1995.

—. “Suppose You Wanted to Have a Permanent War.” Oakland, Calif: The Independent Institute, June 12, 2003.

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Jones, Carolyn C. “Class Tax to Max Tax: The Role of Propaganda in the Expansion of the Income Tax During World War II,” Buffalo Law Review, Vol. 37 (Fall 1988-89), pp. 685-737.

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MacArthur, John R. “Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War: How Government Can Mold Public Opinion,” Independent Policy Forum, The Independent Institute, October 7, 1993 [Forum Audio, Forum Transcript]

McElroy, Wendy. “War’s Other Casualty,” The Freeman, July 1999.

Roeder, Jr., George H. The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.

Sweeney, Michael S. Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World War II. Raleigh, N.C.: University of North Carolina, 2001.