The zero-sum game of…

…liberty vs. government

zero-sum game (noun): a situation in which one person or group can win something only by causing another person or group to lose it.

All too often today we hear cries that the (federal) government should “do something.” We hear it in response to shootings. We hear it in response to the economy. We hear it in response to homelessness, healthcare, and myriad other concerns. The prevailing pattern of thought is that government should be looking after many areas of our lives.

This mentality exhibits a failure to recognize the zero-sum game that is the balance between government power and our liberty. Most appear unaware that, whenever the federal government is given power to “do something,” that means we give up our liberty to do something else. It is truly a zero-sum game.

For instance, if we say that government cannot infringe on our right to freedom of speech, we have liberty. If we say government can pass laws that in some way limit that speech, for instance, in order to combat alleged disinformation, our liberty is being given up because the government now has the ability to say what is or isn’t disinformation and can work to prevent you saying something they consider “untrue” (let’s not go off into the rabbit hole that is government untruth).

If we say government cannot infringe on our right to “keep and bear” (own and carry) arms, we have liberty. If we allow government to pass laws restricting the types of arms we can purchase, the hoops one needs to jump through in order to purchase any particular arms, and/or where one can be in possession of those arms, we have sacrificed our liberty to government control.

If we say our healthcare is our business and government has no place interceding (it doesn’t - check the Constitution), we have liberty. If we decide government should have power over healthcare, whether it be to provide insurance for those who can’t afford it, or to protect us from a virus, there are powers the government must exercise to make such provision, and that means losing the ability to choose your doctor, or losing the liberty to decide whether to partake of a medication.

Giving the government responsibility for aspects of life in which it has no business interfering always means ceding liberty to make decisions for ourselves. It can be expressed as a simple equation:

Power = Liberty + Government Control

where Power is a fixed value. You can see that, in such an equation, if Liberty is increased, Government Control, of necessity, must decrease in order for Power to remain constant. The same is true in the other direction; in order for Government Control to increase, Liberty must decrease. The most amazing piece of the puzzle, which most people are missing, is that we are the ones who control the equation - not the government.

As John Taylor of Caroline wrote in Tyranny Unmasked:

By our political theory, the people are supposed to be the patrons of the government, and not the government the patron of the people. A theoretical reversal of this principle, is a theoretical advance towards tyranny; and a practical reversal of it, either by an assumption of power by a government, to prescribe constitutional regulations to the people, or to use their property in donations to individuals or combinations, is in my view, both theoretical and actual tyranny.

Tyranny Unmasked, p. 145 

As he recognized, power belongs to the people. The more power we are willing to grant the government, the more liberty we must relinquish. This too is why measures were taken to limit the government’s power. Contrary to what many may believe, the Bill of Rights does not grant or merely enumerate some of our rights - it specifically limits the government’s power to infringe our rights (and those rights are absolute, but that is a topic for another piece). This also is why the Ninth Amendment makes clear that the Bill of Rights is not an exhaustive list of our rights, and the Tenth Amendment makes clear that the government is limited specifically to the powers explicitly granted it by the Constitution, and that all other rights are reserved “to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Unfortunately, through politics, propaganda, and poor public pedagogy, the populace has a paltry percipience of the Constitution and the very limited powers the government was intended to wield. We the people have over time, little by little, abnegated our power and our liberty to an ever growing government that has become a bureaucratic behemoth.

The founding fathers believed liberty to be of the utmost importance. It is listed in the Declaration of Independence as the second of only three rights listed, and its preservation and protection is also stated in the preamble to the Constitution to be one of the main purposes for the Union of the States.

Yes, in order to have government secure our liberty, we must first surrender some of our liberty to government, and therein lies the conundrum. How do you sacrifice your liberty to government in order to have government secure your liberty? By giving government only that power which it needs in order to perform its purpose.

James Madison rightly recognize that, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” The fact is, men are not angels, which is why we need to closely guard our liberty in the zero-sum game of liberty vs. government.