And that’s important how, exactly?
Malkin thinks that some how the qualifiers in a Ben Franklin quote are relevant. I’m going to guess it’s probably because the protesters only had so much poster board and the whole quote wouldn’t fit. It’s not some nefarious plot to hijack Ben Franklin.
If essential is such a key modifier, exactly what liberties are essential? After all, free speech is not essential. Nor is my freedom from unreasonable searches, to not have troops quartered in my home, etc., etc. In short, with the exception of the right to live, not a single liberty I have is actually essential to my life. The qualifier that liberties must be essential in order to be protected basically makes all liberties meaningless. It’s not a bill of essential liberties nor is it a bill of needs.
Seems like a stretch to pick such a nit. And I say that as someone who picks a helluva lot of nits.
Update: And I got a kick out of this:
Take a close look at the protest banner held up by a petulant bunch of Georgetown University kids who disrupted a speech by Attorney General Al Gonzales defending the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program yesterday
Yes. How dare they exercise their non-essential liberty of protesting!
January 25th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
If this is “nitpicking,” then that’s one hell of a nit. The real quote (or, should I say, each of the competing versions, any one of which might be real) make it clear Franklin opposed unreasonable trade-offs that involved surrendering too much liberty for too little security. The dowdified version makes it sound as though Franklin categorically opposed any liberty-for-security exchanges whatsoever, no matter how little liberty we have to give up, and no matter how much securiity we may realistically expect in return. It’s the difference between chanting No blood for oil!” and asking “How much blood, for how much oil?”
January 25th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
I don’t think the quote makes it clear at all whether there is this magic scale with liberty on one hand and security on the other and says to balance it. Each version of the quote pretty much places priority on liberty.
I concur the protesters were quite sloppy in their presentation of the quote but I think they got the gist.
January 25th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
They got the gist all right, just not the gist of what he said or meant. If you want to argue an absolutist, never cede any liberty for any promise of security line, go right ahead. Just don’t attach Benjamin Franklin’s name to it.
January 25th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
BTW, your update to this post is equally silly. No one’s questioning the students’ essential liberty to protest and act like petulant jerks. At worst, Malkin is violating their somewhat less essential “right” not to be criticized for it.
January 25th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Sorry, dude, I think you’ve missed out on what he meant. As I said before, I see nothing in his quote to indicate the magical liberty/security scale that you and apparently Malkin think he’s referring to. That is unless you think Franklin assumed that no liberty is essential and I’d dare say he assumed quite a few were since he had some hand in it.
The rather ‘how dare you’ tone of that sentence is what I take issue with.
January 25th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
XRlq,
It’s the difference between chanting No blood for oil!” and asking “How much blood, for how much oil?”
I would suggest that it’s the difference between:
No blood for oil
And
No blood for protecting the free flow of oil at market prices and giving pricing power to the largest oil exporters.
The first one makes for a better t-shirt.
The only way that MM makes any sense is if she (and those who agree with her) see warrents as somehow unessential to liberity and their non-use y the administration as somehow advacing security. I reject both notions on their face.
January 25th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
You seem to be overlooking half the nit. Even if we were to assume ol’ Ben threw around the word “essential” just to hear himself talk for three more syllables, that still doesn’t change the fact that he only condemned those who traded such liberties for “a little (temporary)” safety, not any amount of safety whatsoever. If a terrorist’s God-given right to a private international phone conversation is your idea of an “essential” liberty, and preventing the next 9-11 attack is your idea of “a little temporary safety,” then I guess the protesters got the basic gist of the quote right, after all. Otherwise, they didn’t come close.
As to the “how dare you” tone, I fail to see what your beef is. That attitude neither originated nor ended with Malkin. It began with the students themselves who, rather than make their point in a civilized fashion, opted to act like dicks, instead. It continues as far as this post, which takes every bit as much of a “how dare you” tone against Malkin’s use of her First Amendment rights as she displayed toward the students over theirs. [Granted, my tone toward you in this thread probably isn’t much better, but then again, I’m not the one who made an issue of “how dare you tones,” which I don’t generally find objectionable.]
January 25th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
Well, to date, said wiretaps have not improved safety at all nor has taking my nail clippers. I know of no 9/11 type attack being prevented by this.
I never said terrorists had a God-given right to private phone calls. However, there were controls in place (FISA warrants) to mitigate abuse of such authority (which I think we can agree that there is a great benefit to wiretapping alleged terrorists) that were bypassed. The question is whether bypassing that check is warranted or not. Your example is oversimplified.
And again I see no indication in Franklin’s quote endorsing the ‘trade liberty for security’ meme.
January 25th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Agree with XRLQ. The “essential” and “little” qualifiers are necessary for the quote to even make sense. Every bit of security is purchased at the expense of liberty. Every single bit of it. When you get one, you lose some of the other, and it’s a matter of deciding which tradeoffs are worth it. There aren’t any free lunches.
January 25th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
When President Nixon was overwhelmingly re-elected in 1972, Pauline Kael didn’t know a single person who voted for him, either. That doesn’t mean those people weren’t out there. Personally, I doubt that taking people’s nail clippers has done a f’n thing to stop any terrorist attacks, but to argue that wiretaps haven’t, just because you don’t know if they have (and the information is classified, if they have), is beyond silly.
I certainly believe that, but given your eagerness to assume that such taps have never stopped any attacks, and given your flip comparison to nail clippers, I’m not sure why you do.
For the real Ben Franklin, sure. For the apocryphal “never trade any amount of liberty for any amount of security, ever” version, it’s not. Passing FISA at all, and allowing for warrants under any circumstances, involved the very trade-off you and the petulant students insist Franklin never would have allowed. Now we’re just haggling over the price.
As to whether or not it was warranted for the President to bypass FISA procedures, to the extent they even applied, let’s just say that Congress consists of too many members to keep secrets, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
January 25th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
NOt to mention that those idiots are probably only protesting the “Bush Administrations” efforts to restric our liberties. I doubt they’d stand up for encroachment on 2A liberties or economic liberties. Typical lefty nitwits. I could be wrong, but I bet I’m not.
January 25th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
ben,
One need look only to their complete and total silence in the 1990s and the “Echelon” project to confirm your hypothesis…
January 25th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
And, for the record, I concur there is a reasonable level at which liberties can be sacrificed a bit to provide for greater safety (i don’t think i should be allowed to own a nuke, even though there is a second amendment). But to say that Franklin’s quote endorses the view that it’s OK to let liberties slide as opposed to endorsing the view to be mindful of liberties is inaccurate. Otherwise, he’d have said: it’s ok to sacrifice liberty every once in a while.
January 25th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
The thing I’ve always found more interesting is that people treat the statement like a causal statement: sacrificing freedom for security eventually leads to the loss of both.
If you actually read it though, it’s a moral judgement: you shouldn’t bother worrying about the security of such people, because they don’t DESERVE to be secure.
That’s actually a significantly harsher statement. It’s not a warning, it’s a threat.
January 25th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
“i don’t think i should be allowed to own a nuke, even though there is a second amendment”
Damn. I was hoping to someday buy a bullpup nuke with an polymer pistol grip stock and flash suppressor.
January 25th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
He did say that, by selectively condeming only those who would trade an essential liberty in exchange for a little temporary safety. The negative implication of that statement is that he had no problem at all with those who would (1) trade a non-essential liberty for any amount of safety, (2) trade any kind of liberty for a significant amount of temporary safety, or (3) trade any kind of liberty for any amount of long-term safety. And to top it all off, the issue these moron students were protesting wasn’t even about liberty, but privacy, a topic the quote in question didn’t address at all.
Other than that, your analysis is spot on.
January 25th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
First off, Ben is correct: These paper hangers would most likely be the first ones to let the Brady’s toss out the 2nd Amendment and ask for more police. So their point is moot, because their hypocrisy automatically loses the ‘security/liberty’ argument for them.
Secondly, Unc, you said this:
“Well, to date, said wiretaps have not improved safety at all nor has taking my nail clippers. I know of no 9/11 type attack being prevented by this.”
You’re in TN so maybe it didn’t help you, but it sure as hell helped me. The NSA contends that if it weren’t for the NSA wiretaps, the cell they busted in Portland, OR would not have happened.
I’m less that 150mi from Portland and am between that city and the Canadian border. The NSA didn’t tap these people randomly, they called and took calls from what turned out to be a terrorist in Afghanistan, so screw their ‘liberty’ to talk to whom they want.
And the whole NSA wiretap issue is a load of crap anyway. If you don’t suspect your gov’t of listening to your phone calls, reading your emails, etc., you are not doing your job as a citicen.
January 26th, 2006 at 12:02 am
I’m so confused by this I don’t even know what to say.
Are we supposed to presume that our government is violating our 4th ammendment rights and be happy about it when they admit to it, or be outraged?
January 26th, 2006 at 12:14 am
I’m one of the folk that takes the same line as Say Uncle on this issue, however I can’t see Ben Franklin not being OK with Executive Branch intercepting mail to or from the Brits during the Revolutionary War.
That doesn’t mean I support the NSA wiretap actions. I’m against it — there should be judicial oversight, not congressional. I can elaborate on why if you want, but you’ll have to email me.
What I really wonder about is what their take on a ‘war’ that’s never ending, undeclared by Congress, and against a rather loosely defined entity. This seems to be a new development in world politics, unheard of “back in the day.”
January 26th, 2006 at 1:33 am
Personally I always thought “essential” was a descriptor of liberty and not a qualifier. As Uncle noted, the only essential liberty is the right to breath. Beyond that, few liberties are all that essential.
January 26th, 2006 at 3:27 am
That’s possible, but even under that reading, surely the phrase “a little temporary security” means something different than “any amount of security, long- or short-term.”
January 26th, 2006 at 11:25 am
Damn I love these discussions.
I believe the NSA taps were legal because the Pres has the responsibility to defend the nation. I think Congress gave him _more_ authority when it passed the first Patriot Act.
btw, It’s interesting how different places on the ‘net discuss similar topics at the same time, yet they aren’t connected. Over at The Moderate Voice, the host wrote an essay regarding “Ideals” and “Ideas” of freedom which argues some of the same points as this topic and comments.
I’ve seen two other blogs on this topic recently and I wrote an essay (but haven’t finished it yet) on the subject about a week ago. Must be something in the water, as they say.
The question I posed was; “Have we really lost any freedoms recently?”
I realize that surrendering your clippers in exchange for travelling on a shared transportation system is an inconvenience, but it doesn’t seem like a loss of freedom.
Even if the wiretaps were illegal, does having the FedGov keep track of international calls lessen your freedom to use the phone?
I still do the things I want to, same as before 9/11/01.
I realize the argument also applies to freedoms we may lose in the future if government power is unchecked. But are we at risk of losing them due to some laws recently passed?
I don’t see it. Mebbe I’m dense, mebbe I’m too easy going on the matter.
But I do love these discussions. 🙂
January 26th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Like Manish, I also always saw “essential” as a descriptor of liberty and not a qualifier.
As to what Ben Franklin might have considered a reasonable trade, note that he also said that it was better to go to bed hungry rather than borrow money for a loaf of bread and wake up in debt the next morning; I think he had pretty high standards about such tradeoffs.
January 26th, 2006 at 7:38 pm
Well Justin, apparently you did know what to say because you said something right after your silly statement.
Let me make this easier for you: If you do not think that the government is spying on you, then you have no idea about the nature of government and how it works to increase its power by any means necessary.
If the government is shown to be spying on you, you have every right to feel whatever you want, from outrage to happiness to feeling relieved.
That is what is called ‘freedom’. You are ‘free’ to feel however you want about the government spying on you. Anyone who tells you to feel a certain way about anything is also trying to increase their own power by influencing you.
However, if you are among the outraged people, you also, in the US anyway, have the ‘freedom’ to talk to your government representatives and demand an investigation which could lead to prosecution of the guilty parties. A show of hands of those here who have made the phone call, please?
Gee, thanks.
Now, as to the Oregon Terror Cell that somehow escaped Uncle’s knowledge, they were calling a nation where we have forces on the ground facing hostile fire on a daily basis, but they weren’t calling anyone stationed there. So screw them and their ability to make private phone calls. Same goes for Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
You couldn’t receive a letter from Germany during the years of 1914 to 1918 or from 1939 to 1945 without a visit from the feds, and same thing goes for every other nation we’ve been at daggers with in the 20th Century. Why should we let people in Afghanistan call whomever they want in the US with no surveillance? The hostility there is, in and of itself, probable cause.
Don’t like that, call your Congressman.