Who Can Really Say?

Last night I posted that Jane Galt got the better of Will Saletan and Twins Fan Dan on the point of what the word liberty means, at least in the context of Ronald Reagan's frequent use of the term. I left this comment to Twins Fan Dan's post on Will Carroll's Weblog:

What Saletan's talking about isn't liberty, and trickle down economics has nothing to do with the topic. Follow the link.

I was referring to both Saletan's comment on the meaning of the term and Twin Fan Dan's closing comments in his post:

Like it or not it was brilliant - - that government/as/the/only/tyranny issue. But let?s stop pretending that this was some historical sea-change philosophy.

What it was: Brilliant political strategy for Reagan?s political career, failed policy for the average American. (See ?Trickle Down Economics? for primer.)

Twins Fan Dan responded in the comments to his post:

Peter: I hate to bitch-slap people in comments but saying I don't read my linked articles qualifies as bordering on the lunatic.

The libertarian argument is so damn wrong. Go read "Scott" from the comments section of that blog.

And I never said "trickle down" economics had anything to do with liberty or Saletan's post. My point with that was that his political stratgey was terrible for the average American. He was the one who ushered in the mainstream meme (at least in contemporary politics) "cut taxes on the rich, and it'll trickle down to the average folk". well what a canard. it works to get you elected because people at +300k like to hear that. Hell I like to hear it for me; I make a lot of money. But unfortunately it's bad for the rest of the America. And I can think of what is good for me and what is good for America and sometimes know that my personal needs are subservient. Something a Libertarian wouldn't understand. Its all well and good in an Ayn Rand world, but unfortunately we live in the real world. Look at (your) Scorboard: Liberal Democracy/Republic = the best in the history of the world, Government built on Randian libertariansim = 0.

Well first, I didn't say he didn't read his linked articles -- all I said is that what Saletan was talking about isn't liberty, and I posted a link that I think explained quite well why that's so.

Liberty has a meaning in American political history. We fought and won a revolution against the British crown over the point, and the point was all about repressive governments telling us we can't do this, and taking our property, and putting us in jail for saying things, etc. etc. Liberty, in American political history, means the government doesn't get to run people's lives, and that's the sense in which Reagan used it.

Galt called Saletan on this point. Saletan said:

Do you buy Reagan's Law? That depends on two related questions. First, do you define liberty as the right to do things, or the ability to take advantage of that right?

Galt's response:

But it is Saletan who appears confused, not Reagan. What he is describing is not liberty; it is security. Security is also valuable and good, but it is not the same thing as liberty.

We fought and won a revolution to be free of overreaching government intereference, not to be "free" from, as Saletan says, the inability to pay bills, save money, or go to college. The latter is security, not liberty, which was Galt's point.

The argument is really over what are called positive and negative rights. Steven Bainbridge and Eugene Volokh have characteristically taken it to greater heights. Negative rights, generally those found in the Constitution, are couched in terms that say the government can't do this or that to you -- convict you of a crime without a jury, force you to testify against yourself, make it a crime to say things. The right is to not have the government do these things to you. Positve rights are those rights where the government must do something for you, as Saletan meant when he said:

But if liberty is the ability to make a decent living or attend a good school, then getting government out of the way isn't enough. In fact, government expansion, in the form of student loans or job training, may be necessary.

Saletan get's liberty all wrong here. Liberty isn't about the ability to make a living or the ability to attend a good school, it's about not having the government interfere with your ability to make that living or attend that school. By couching it that way, however, Saletan easily morphs into how meaningless liberty must then be because one might not be able to get that high wage or go to that school, and if they can't, they don't really have liberty, and if they don't have liberty, then the government should provide it, and since Reagan didn't he was wrong.

Galt, better than I can, skewered this rhetoric. She objects to defining security as liberty. While acknowledging that security is good, she also relates the historic meaning of those words in political dialogue, saying:

This promiscuous appropriating of words and redefining them is rather Orwellian. Saletan seems unwilling to admit he prefers one to the other; nor has he taken the many risk of fighting, as the libertarians and socialists are, to declare that one or the other has the sacred status of a right. Instead, he redefines them so as to obviate the need for argument: security and liberty are not two competing goods that we have to trade off against each other; security is liberty, doncha see. Indeed, this makes argument about the relative merits of security and liberty impossible; we are reduced to quibbling about dictionary definitions.

Galt has a another post on the topic today, in light of the Bainbridge/Volokh exchange, and she concludes:

I think, though, that it is possible to recognize that positive and negative rights are in some cases complementary, without claiming that they are therefore the same thing. I can't have night without day, but that doesn't mean the sun is shining at midnight.

I don't think you can say she meant otherwise from her first post, and I haven't argued otherwise here. All government policies that enhance the economic security of citizens do not necessarily detract from the liberty rights of those citizens. The point all along has been that the two are not the same. Saletan, by suggesting Reagan was short on delivering liberty because he didn't deliver something that was not liberty, was wrong.

Twins Fan Dan cited Scott's comment to Galt's first post in rebuttal. Scott's reference to the Brown decision is irrelevant. Nothing about Reagan's conception of liberty is contrary to Brown. And since the meaning of words is what this is all about, it's not surprising perhaps to see Scott do a nice job on the word security, twisting it from the sense in which it is used here (economic security) into security from terroism, which he thinks is John Ashcroft's excuse for infringing liberties. That's another discussion, but the point is, it doesn't relate to what we're talking about here.

As for Twins Fan Dan, if he hates to bitch slap people in his comments, maybe he shouldn't.