The rise of politically motivated violence in the United States in recent years, highlighted in the recent murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, goes right to the heart of the American experiment and indicates a fundamental problem with our current, highly centralized system of governance.
The United States was founded on the belief that the widest possible distribution of human agency and power is morally right and practically effective. The move from a centralized, hierarchical system under a king to a distributed, highly parallel form of organization in a democratic republic brought forth vastly more power to the average person. The freest nation in the world transformed an underpopulated wilderness bursting with natural resources into the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world.
As regards personal safety, the United States was designed to distribute self-protection widely, notably through the Second Amendment, the limiting of police powers to the states, and the preference for state militias instead of a standing national army.
Unfortunately, the steady accumulation of power by the federal and state governments has undermined people’s sense of responsibility for the protection of their own safety and that of family members, neighbors, the community, and ultimately the state. This dependency on the state evokes ever-more government intervention toward the prevention of crime, as opposed to the government’s proper sphere of identifying and punishing for crimes that have already been committed. This creates a system of pervasive moral hazard and perpetual government expansion.
In the recent killings in New Orleans, as with most of the mass murders committed on American soil over the years, a widely distributed system of self-protection would probably have prevented the attack, and it certainly would have reduced the carnage greatly. A swift and sure demise is a great deterrent to ambitious schemes of mayhem, as it thwarts the person’s ability to kill multiple people in a bid for antihero status.
The goal of public policy in this regard is therefore to reduce to a minimum the chance of success of the murder element of such a murder-suicide plan. Widely distributed self-protection is a sound foundation for that. Self-reliance as the first order of protection from violence is thus the most effective and unobtrusive approach.
There are cases, of course, such as the 2017 mass shooting by Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas, which took the lives of 60 people and injured more than 400, in which self-protection is not a practical option and the perverse determination of the killer makes post-crime punishment no appreciable threat.
Hard cases make bad law and extremely bad government policy, yet the public rightly expects governments to do whatever is reasonable to avert such atrocities. This is where government action is called for, and there are a variety of ways for law enforcement agencies and the public to harden potential targets and create obstacles to killers’ plans, without devolving into a police state.
The hotel from which Paddock fired on the crowd in Las Vegas, for example, allowed him to bring all those weapons in and prepare a mass murder. Liability laws should not allow the managers and stockholders of corporations to escape responsibility for actions and inaction that cause death, injury, and destruction. Similar reforms of other laws could help enhance a culture of first-order protection of self and others for whom one has responsibility.
These efforts will not be perfect. Risk will remain. That is the natural state of life within a sphere of freedom. Freedom distributes power widely. In that truth, one can see the thought behind John Adams’s statement that such power requires a strong sense of moral responsibility and self-control on the part of those who hold it, which in a democratic republic is nearly everyone: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
A nation with so much crime, so many people on the public dole, so much addiction to damaging substances and activities, declining marriage and birth rates, and deteriorating church attendance, to name only a few indicators among many, can hardly be said to comprise a moral and religious people.
This is not a side note. It is important to recognize that the welfare state is a powerful force in undermining the connection between actions and consequences. The imposition of work requirements in the 1990s was a good start toward a partial solution for the problem, but states have unfortunately scrapped them over the years, with the collusion of the federal government. The moral hazard of the welfare state remains pervasive through American society.
A similar process has gone on in the nation’s schools, accelerating in the past decade, with a steady removal of rewards for achievement and undesirable consequences for failure, plus the teaching of moral relativism and denigration of the nation’s laudable history of pioneering support for the expansion of liberty and the rewarding of personal initiative. The schools have thus been steadily increasing the perceived distance between actions and consequences.
Ordered liberty requires a people who respect others’ life, liberty, and property and who expect misdeeds, negligence, idleness, and other wrongs to result in undesired consequences for those who commit them, including themselves. We do not have that kind of public in the United States today, though there is much more support for this mindset than the press and other elites generally acknowledge. We can start to encourage the spread of such simple decency by dismantling the welfare state, reforming education, and punishing crime, so that most people will more naturally tend to connect actions with consequences.
That would be a fundamental change, of course. Until we undertake such a social and political effort with full seriousness and determination, however, we will be doomed to accept either havoc or servitude – or, more likely, both.
This article was originally published at www.thecentersquare.com
