A Nation Like No Other (19 page)

Of course, nearly every reform effort encounters the determined opposition of those vested in the current system. Consider Compton, California. By 2010, the city's perpetually failing schools had been repeatedly taken over by the state without any improvement, as state education bureaucrats proved no more effective than local education bureaucrats. Under pressure from parents' groups and school reform coalitions, California lawmakers passed a “trigger” law allowing charter school operators to take control of a failing school if a majority of the parents ask for it to do so. The first city where this occurred was Compton, where 61 percent of parents signed a petition calling on a charter school operator to run their dysfunctional local elementary school. Marion Orr, a Brown University public policy professor, commented on the historic
reform: “We've never seen anything like this before.… [It] could create real challenges for public officials who believe they know best how to run school districts.”
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Predictably, those public officials—teachers' union representatives and school board members—are vociferously opposing the attempt to force accountability on them. The school board has resorted to particularly desperate and underhanded measures to thwart the parents' will. It first announced that all parents who signed the petition had to appear before them with a photo ID to verify their signature—a clear attempt to intimidate parents who may be in violation of immigration laws. When a court rejected this requirement, the board looked through the petition's 275 signatures and ruled every single one invalid.
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At the time of this writing, the battle between parents and bureaucrats in Compton is still ongoing.

Aside from education, civil society is reasserting itself in other realms, and indeed has begun energetically reclaiming its traditional role from government. The most potent force here, of course, is the tea party movement. Dedicated to countering the growing and unaccountable power of government, the tea party is a diffuse network of tens of thousands of local organizations that is changing the way their fellow citizens and especially our elected leaders conceive of government power.

Consider just one example of tea party activism: in Ohio, tea party groups have united with other liberty-minded citizens to launch the Ohio project. This grassroots effort aims to gather support for a state constitutional amendment to preserve Ohioans' freedom to choose their health-care and health insurance. The effort has dozens of affiliates, thousands of volunteers, and has gathered more than 300,000 signatures to get this issue on the ballot.

The project's organizers and volunteers are driven to action because ObamaCare, according to the group, is an “unprecedented concept of federal power [that] would redefine the nation as we know it.”
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That is the same redefinition of government's role that Tocqueville predicted would create a culture of increasing dependency.

The tea party is demonstrating that the free institutions of civil society can reassert their rights and restore government to its limited role
through strong cooperative efforts. As shown by tea partiers' remarkable grassroots activism, by the noble fight of Compton's parents, and by many other community efforts that occur every day but don't make the newspaper headlines, despite the government's myriad intrusions, the civil society tradition in America lives on.

Bailey told Mike Wallace of
60 Minutes
, “If I had a ‘for sale' sign out there, it'd been a whole different deal. For them to come in and tell me how much my property was worth and for me to get out because
they're bringing in somebody else, when I own the land, is unfounded to me. It doesn't even sound like the United States.”

 

Americans have a long tradition of hostility to arbitrary, unlawful, or unconstitutional government actions. We fight these usurpations every day in courts of law and in the court of public opinion.

Americans know that arbitrary government replaces the rule of law with the rule of men. When government violates the rule of law, government officials are acting in their own interests in violation of the people's unalienable rights.

The ancient doctrine of the rule of law is described with clarity and power in James Madison's articles in the Federalist Papers. The rule of law means that government is vested with authority from the people to exercise power in predictable and even-handed ways according to the laws it enacts through constitutionally established means. In describing the House of Representatives in Federalist no. 57, Madison explains why the rule of law is such a powerful defense against tyranny:

The Founders knew from bitter experience about the rule of men.

King George III, who came to the throne in 1760 at age twenty-two, was constrained by the English Bill of Rights of 1689 from imposing taxes without the consent of Parliament. But he claimed this restriction did not limit his power to tax residents of Britain's colonies. After Britain's victory over France in the French and Indian War, King George looked for ways to find new tax revenue to repay Britain's enormous war debt. With Parliament unwilling to raise taxes in Britain itself, the young king moved to begin imposing taxes on his subjects in America. But the colonists steadfastly resisted these efforts, believing them unjust because the colonists had no direct representation in Parliament. Outraged by the colonists' defiance, King George and his majority in Parliament then committed myriad abuses against the colonials: holding them without trial, refusing to enact laws for their general welfare, undermining judicial independence in the colonies, and perpetrating other injustices that substituted the king's will for the rule of law.

The otherwise loyal citizens of Britain's North American colonies at first vociferously argued against the king's authority to undertake these measures, and eventually took up arms to settle their fundamental disagreement with him over their constitutional rights as Englishmen.

These circumstances are reflected in the Declaration of Independence. When we read the Declaration today, we're naturally drawn to the famous prologue with its universal description of the natural rights of man. We then tend to skip the large middle section—a chronicle of twenty-seven specific grievances against King George—and go right to the rousing closing lines in which the Founders pledge to each other “our lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.”

Yet it is those grievances that fired the fury of American patriots and justified the American Revolution. And the fact that the bulk of them—twenty-one out of twenty-seven—concerned violations of the rule of law
shows that the Founders believed the rule of law to be indispensible to a just society.

Property rights stand at the forefront of the securities provided by the rule of law. In America, an individual is entitled to the legal protection of his or her property and the fruits of such property. Unless a person breaks the law, no government bureaucrat or business competitor should have the power to infringe on that individual's property rights.

Although the government today exceeds its constitutional powers in many realms, protecting private property is a legitimate—and indeed vital—government responsibility. Throughout the world, property has historically “belonged” to whomever had the power to take it and defend it. In fact, in the state of nature described by John Locke, protecting property was the singular reason people agreed to institute governments in the first place.

The government must do three things to protect property: recognize private titles, provide a reliable system for registering those titles, and maintain a judiciary that protects those titles and enforces contracts. These protections provide a simple benefit: people can keep what they earn. It means no scheming competitor or conniving government official—like those who conspired against Randy Bailey and his brake shop—can arbitrarily take your land or belongings. And for the dreamers and innovators in our society, it means you are entitled to whatever benefits your risks, creations, and hard work may yield.

From Jamestown to Google, the American commitment to private property rights has provided the framework for American prosperity. Although we tend to take this commitment for granted, billions around the world are subject to the whims of an arbitrary government or a thuggish neighbor.

It was the absence of legally protected private property that sparked the revolutions now sweeping through the Middle East. It all began in Tunisia with a simple street vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, who operated a fruit cart in an outdoor market. Bouazizi's little business was unlicensed—a common situation throughout the region, where many would-be
entrepreneurs can't afford the galaxy of fees and bribes needed to secure work permits. Lacking basic legal protection for their property, vendors like Bouazizi were at the mercy of corrupt policemen, as Marc Fisher described in the
Washington Post
: “Arrogant police officers treated the market as their personal picnic grounds, taking bagfuls of fruit without so much as a nod toward payment. The cops took visible pleasure in subjecting the vendors to one indignity after another—fining them, confiscating their scales, even ordering them to carry their stolen fruit to the cops' cars.”
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On December 17, 2010, Bouazizi tried to stop a policewoman from stealing his fruit. The woman and some other officers then hit the vendor with a baton, pushed him to the ground, tried to steal his scale, and slapped him in the face. Fisher related Bouazizi's pained response: “‘Why are you doing this to me?' he cried.... ‘I'm a simple person, and I just want to work.'” After being told at city hall that he could not register a complaint about the incident, Bouazizi immolated himself in an anguished act of protest.
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Bouazizi's suicide sparked widespread protests in Tunisia that toppled the country's dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and then spread throughout the region. The next strongman to fall was Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, a country that, much like Tunisia, had failed to develop even rudimentary property law protections. In 2004, 92 percent of Egyptians held real estate without legal title, meaning virtually the entire economy lacked any common mechanism for selling, buying, or borrowing against landed property. According to Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, author of
The Mystery of Capital,
this lawlessness created a terrifying state of nature in Egypt, with businesses and property owners living in constant fear that government officials or someone else would seize their property.
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This problem is hardly confined to the Middle East. From southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa, deficient property rights protections have bred corruption and economic stagnation. And even democratic government is no guaranteed cure for these problems. Following the collapse of Latin American dictatorships in the 1980s and the fall of Eastern European Communist regimes shortly thereafter, many Western observers were surprised at how slowly free enterprise spread. As de Soto
explains, these states may have embraced capitalism, but they lacked its necessary legal underpinnings: