Individual liberties increasingly limited

If the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution were heeded by our courts and legislatures, there wouldn’t be public controversies about whether a person has the right to commit suicide. This would be understood as one of the many unenumerated rights reserved to people, just as saying a prayer, worshiping Satan or playing bridge. We have the right to do all this, and no one has the just power or authority to interfere (beyond certain measure that make sure this is really what we want to do).

Unfortunately, the United States has become a country like the country from which it gained its independence in the late 1700s.

It is now managed by government, and nearly everything people want to do that doesn’t please some other people needs to gain public permission.

Thus we have the Supreme Court hearing arguments about whether Oregon’s law permitting doctors to dispense drugs that can be used to commit suicide is constitutional. Of course it is.

The big idea about the Constitution, as argued so astutely by professor Randy E. Barnett in his “Restoring the Lost Constitution, the Presumption of Liberty,” is that citizens are free to do everything apart from just a few matters that are the purview of their governments. Like fight wars with foreign nations or establishing the final court system. These are matters that governments were empowered to do, but everything else is — or should be — none of the government’s business.

Now they are.

So, the issue is not our liberty but who gets to control us — states, municipalities, counties or the feds. That is a disaster in the development of a country that the world still considers to be largely free. And our public officials still pretend that they represent a free people and are promoting freedom abroad. But heaven help Iraq if it gets the kind of legal system under which Americans live today.

The only reason the tyrannical implications of this system are not prominently displayed in the lives of Americans is that the earlier understanding — itself merely partial — of the meaning of the Constitution had been that individuals have rights that are indeed unalienable. The momentum that such an understanding created is still evident, from which we get our relatively free society — a mostly free market, due process of law, civil liberties, freedom or religion and the press, and some semblance of respect and protection of the right to property and drafting of contracts.

This momentum, however, is slowly petering out, and the courts and legislatures are doing nothing to abate that trend. No, instead they are hastening the demise of those aspects of the country that had earned it the designation of “a free society.”

(Of course, it never was fully free — consider, among other things, slavery and conscription as just two major contradictions to that ideal.)

Think about it for a moment: What business is it of the voters of Oregon, the federal government, the Supreme Court or anyone else if someone in the city of Eugene elects to obtain some help from a doctor in his or her efforts to end his or her life, especially a life that is unbearable to live for that person? Who are these meddlers anyway to burst in on such a person and order him or her to desist?

May I remind you that we are talking about adult citizens, not children, ones who have in the course of making their decision to seek such help passed a bunch of tests to show they are of sound mind when they made their decision? May I remind you that these adults have an unalienable right to their lives, which means they may not be intruded upon as they decide whether to live or to die?

(Having a right means one must be left free by all others, including the government, to decide about what one has a right to!)

But no. These free citizens of a supposedly free country are required first to ask permission of Oregon’s voters. Then they need to fend off the federal government, which wants to override the voters’ decision. And then they need to submit all of this to the Supreme Court, which should long ago have stated simply: “Leave these folks alone, it is their life, so let them decide about it!”

Instead, we have the ugly spectacle of free adult men and women going around in circles, begging for permission from all kinds of strangers, to do what is clearly their unalienable right to do.

And you wonder why the rest of the world may be a bit confused as to just what the government of the United States is promoting around the globe?

Tibor Machan advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this newspaper. E-mail him at [email protected]