The Left’s recent frothing anger over the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision has been great fun for those of us who bothered to figure out its actual contents, given how ignorant so many of the protests and protestors have been. Apart from the humor, the protests have served a useful purpose for those advancing libertarian principles, in that they’ve opened the eyes of many to the difference between the right to do something and the expectation that someone else pay for it, and that’s a good strong libertarian message that people are ready to embrace.
Consider some of the signs that protestors held aloft (sampled from a Google image search):
- “Bosses don’t belong in the bedroom.”
- “You are not a doctor, you are not a church, you are a craft store.”
- “Keep your politics off my body.”
- “Mind your own business.”
- “Keep your theology off my biology.”
- “Reproductive justice.”
- “Hobby Lobby denying women’s rights.”
and finally,
- “My body, my decision.”
This one should raise eyebrows. Apart from its irrelevance to the Hobby Lobby ruling (nothing in that ruling prohibits anyone from availing herself of any form of birth control), it’s an assertion that wouldn’t hold up in any court in the land if considered broadly. What you do with or to your body may be your decision, but that decision is subject to the whims of the government. These prohibitions include illegal drugs, prostitution, selling of bone marrow or a kidney while you’re alive or your corpse after you expire, suicide… heck, you can’t even take a prescription drug for an off-label use legally. No, you don’t really own your body, no matter what you may have been led to believe or what some placard-carrying protestor avers.
Nor do you really own your property. Sure, that bag of apples you bought from the grocery store is yours, but the residence you bring it home to isn’t, even if you are a mortgage-free homeowner. To own something includes having the right to do with it as you please (of course, if you do harm to others with that property, you are liable), and that’s certainly not the case with land or a house sitting on land. Zoning laws, building codes, environmental and hunting restrictions are just the beginning. Property taxes are a declaration that you must pay the government in perpetuity for the right to own your property. Then there are easements, where the government gives itself the right to do as it will with part of your property, and eminent domain, where the government takes your property for a use it deems better or more important than whatever you were doing or not doing with it.
What of that which you create, the fruit of your labor? Or your labor itself? No, it’s not a trick question. Not only can you not sell that which you create without the government taking some of your compensation in taxes, you are not allowed to sell things the government doesn’t approve. Various health departments, the USDA, OSHA, CPSC, and on and on and on all have jurisdiction over what you can sell. Nor can you work for compensation you deem sufficient, unless the government approves. Want to volunteer to work at a company in exchange for the experience you’d receive? Nope, not unless you work as an intern under a specific set of circumstances. Want to take a below-minimum-wage job because it either provides useful training or it’s all you can find? Sorry, the government would rather you remain unemployed. Want to actually pay someone to teach you a skill? Same thing – there are rules. What if you want to do something that’s within the rules and that earns you enough? Oops, you don’t have a license to arrange those flowers or design that interior.
During his campaign against Romney, Obama famously made a speech that included the line You didn’t build that. His point was one regarding the foundations upon which we all grow – teachers, infrastructure, knowledge developed by others – and how the act of creating establishes an obligation to all those foundations. The Right made major political hay of that sound bite, something the Left angrily denounced as out of context. I don’t like sound-bite politics as a rule, because sound bites almost invariably paint an incomplete or misleading or flat-out-wrong picture, and in that regard the Right’s interpretation was no exception. However, the sentiment underlying the full statement, that the social contract supersedes the individual’s rights and achievements, was represented fairly by the short quote.
So it goes with ownership. Statism doesn’t put much priority on individuals’ ownership, and none at all when you get deep into forms like communism and socialism. With just about any form of government there are compromises made regarding property rights, and even nations that prioritize individual liberty (as this one once did) make those compromises. While utopians at the fringe of some political ideologies (anarchists, minarchists, some libertarians) don’t accept any compromise, they fall into the same category as the purist communists i.e. outside any practical reality. What matters in a real, functioning society is what is prioritized, individual rights or the state’s interests.
The mindset of statists/leftists/progressives doesn’t consider abridgments of ownership as compromises, but instead establishes them as the framework within which rights are granted. Under a statist philosophy, you own only the fruits of your labor that the government permits you to create, and only as much of them as the government permits you to keep. You own your body only to the degree that the government allows, and you can do with it only what the government assents. This is what makes the protests regarding Hobby Lobby so funny. The protestors are asserting ownership over themselves while simultaneously aligning with a political philosophy that doesn’t believe in that ownership.
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