The Future of Freedom Foundation is pleased to announce its new Civil Liberties Series entitled “The Critical Importance of Civil Liberties.” For the following six weeks, our weekly Libertarian Angle will be converted into a special format that will consist of a presentation on civil liberties by a guest speaker, followed by discussion with Libertarian Angle co-hosts Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling. Each show will be pre-recorded and posted on Thursdays. The shows will be approximately one hour in length.
Here is our schedule of presenters:
Thursday, October 9: James Bovard
Thursday, October 16: Radley Balko
Thursday, October 23: John Whitehead
Thursday, October 30: Michael Glennon
Thursday, November 6: Andrew Napolitano
Thursday, November 13: Ron Paul
Why are we emphasizing the critical importance of civil liberties? Two reasons: (1) civil liberties are absolutely essential to a free society, and (2) civil liberties are under the biggest attack by U.S. officials in our lifetime.
The Framers clearly understood the critical importance of civil liberties. Their pro-civil liberties mindsets, for example, were reflected in the Constitution by the preservation of the ancient right of habeas corpus. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1775-1769), the famous legal commentator William Blackstone referred to the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 as “a second Magna Charta, and stable xxxxxx of our liberties.”
Our American ancestors also had a deep appreciation and understanding of civil liberties. That was why they demanded the enactment of a Bill of Rights as a condition for accepting the Constitution.
The First, Second, and Third Amendments protect fundamental natural and God-given rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, and the rights of private property and privacy.
The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments require the federal government to go through all sorts of legal barbed-wire entanglements before federal officials can extinguish a person’s life or deprive him of his liberty or property. Particularly noteworthy is the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process of Law clause, whose language stretches all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215.
I discovered libertarianism through the principles of economic liberty and Austrian (i.e., free-market) economics. I’m willing to bet that the same holds true for most libertarians. I’d venture to say that most libertarian commentaries, books, and podcasts focus on the principles of economic liberty as well as the principles of monetary liberty.
But without civil liberties, economic liberty and monetary liberty become dead letters. If a government wields and exercises the power to suspend habeas corpus and due process of law, establish martial law with troops in cities and towns, designate and treat protestors as “terrorists,” incarcerate people indefinitely without trial, assassinate or execute people without charges and trial by jury, and ignore judicial rulings -- all during some so-called “national emergency” -- it is a virtual certainty that such government, at the same time, will be confiscating people’s income, savings, and property either directly through taxation or indirectly through monetary debasement and tightly regulating, controlling, and managing people's economic activity.
To lead America out of the statist morass into which our nation has been plunged, it is essential that we libertarians continue raising people’s vision to the importance of all aspects of freedom, including the critical importance of civil liberties. That’s what we are doing with our upcoming series on “The Critical Importance of Civil Liberties.” As former Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black stated in his essay “The Bill of Rights,” which we reprinted ([link removed]) in the July 1990 issue of our monthly journal Future of Freedom,
"Today most Americans seem to have forgotten the ancient evils which forced their ancestors to flee to this new country and to form a government stripped of old powers used to oppress them. But the Americans who supported the Revolution and the adoption of our Constitution knew firsthand the dangers of tyrannical governments… Misuse of government power, particularly in times of stress, has brought suffering to humanity in all ages about which we have authentic history. Some of the world’s noblest and finest men have suffered ignominy and death for no crime — unless unorthodoxy is a crime…. I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an 18th Century straitjacket, unsuited for this age. It is old but not all old things are bad. The evils it guards against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today…."
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