RALEIGH – Have we learned the important lessons from 9/11?
The question was asked so often during the news coverage of the anniversary of the attacks this past weekend that it became hackneyed. It’s also become a sort of political Rorschach test. The lesson of 9/11 is, of course, not to trust a new and disengaged Republican administration to accept smoothly the baton from a seasoned, wise, outgoing Democratic one – if you are a Clinton partisan. If you’re a Bushie, the event confirmed the dangers of Clintonian complacency, as the failure to stand up resolutely to would-be tyrants merely eggs them on to the next, dastardlier deed.
Partisanship is not entirely irrelevant to the issue. But while the two major parties have more coherent, distinct philosophies today than they did during past rivalries, you can see from the response to Hurricane Katrina that neither holds a monopoly on competence – or, in this case, on incompetence.
The question of learning 9/11’s lessons does have a deeper political significance, but it is philosophical, not partisan. Simply put, do America’s national leaders really understand what we have a national government to do?
I’ll go ahead and provide a little cheat sheet for those still stumped by the query. The following are wrong answers: cutting bike paths, building industrial parks, subsidizing nursing-home care, putting obscene art in government-funded museums, commenting on whether evolution or creationism should prevail in biology classes, running choo-choo trains, paying farmers to grow crops, paying farmers not to grow crops, reporting the news via tax-funded stations, protecting workmen from rogue stepladders, researching how to turn chicken poop into an energy source, confiscating 15 percent of workers’ paychecks and dribbling it back to them in cash and services after their retire, helping millionaires’ kids borrow money for a sixth year of campus partying, classifying citizens according to their skin pigmentation and apportioning goodies or punishments accordingly, taxing drivers in New York to build ferries in Alaska, programming the radio dial, and deciding whether and how makers of bran cereal can advertise the potential health benefits of eating fiber.
These and many other current federal functions lie outside the proper constitutional scope of the national government. They intrude on the prerogatives of state governments, local governments, and most important of private individuals and institutions themselves. The federal government exists to perform a specific set of enumerated tasks – here’s a handy list – the common denominator of which is to secure individual rights through collective action that can be performed effectively no other way.
In large part, this involves preparing for wars, waging wars, and winning wars to protect American lives and property, combat piracy and other intrusions on the right to travel and conduct trade, and take on gathering threats before they become dire dangers. We have a federal government to collect and analyze intelligence, to ensure a safe and orderly process for entering and exiting the country, to prepare for horrifying events and difficult contingencies, to supplement local resources when criminality or tyranny threatens, and to invest in the manpower and materiel necessary to accomplish these ends.
Every federal dollar spent outside this proper scope is a dollar not invested in protecting us from foreign or domestic enemies, or else a dollar we should have been allowed to keep in our own pockets to spend as we wished.
That’s the lesson. Washington, do your job – and stop trying to do everyone else’s.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.