Privacy Rights: Beyond Abortion and Orgasm (Cornell Review)

When liberals speak about the right to privacy they are generally referring to the right of a 16-year-old girl to get an abortion without her parent's permission or the right of government employees to distribute condoms in sex education courses. Ann Coulter describes this phenomenon as the Democrats' obsession with a Constitutional right to orgasm. But aside from orgasms and ending the lives of unborn children, liberals are perfectly content to regulate every other private act under the guise of "interstate commerce." While Leftists are tilting at windmills -- presumably protecting sexual pleasures from imaginary assaults from the Right -- conservatives are actually supporting an agenda consistent with keeping the government out of our private lives. Some examples: (1) Solving social arguments by privatizing schools

Giving parents the right to choose their children's schools will solve the debates on school prayer, sex education, condom distribution, the Pledge of Allegiance, and multiculturalism. While public schools imply a tyranny of the majority of district voters (and, in the case of federal regulations, a tyranny of the Congress), private schools permit parents a lower cost method (relative to moving) of selecting among school characteristics that they care about.

Atheists who want their kids to have sex at age 12 can find a school to meet their needs. Orthodox Jews who want their children to be God-fearing can choose a school that is right for them. Under a private system, religious people and atheists never have to interact, argue, lobby school boards, or impose their will on one another. They can each choose what is best for their family's private lives.

Federal law -- and many state laws -- prohibit citizens from entering into private contracts to exchange labor for wages. The federal minimum wage is currently $5.15 per hour. Eight states have higher wage floors than the federal control, with Washington topping the list at $6.90 per hour. There should not be any wage control at all.

Why shouldn't a worker be able to approach an employer and offer to exchange his labor for, say, $3.00 per hour? Leftists argue that it is "inhumane" for a businessman to pay a wage that "low." But why is it inhumane? First, we should remember what a wage is -- it is simply the price of labor. In competitive markets, the price of labor is determined by two things -- (1) the marginal productivity of the worker and (2) the value (market price) of the product produced by the worker. The magnitude of the price of labor has no moral connotation. It simply reflects the supply and demand of labor.

Imagine that I own a business and I need to hire someone to do filing. I decide that the maximum I am willing to pay for a laborer to do my filing is $3.50 per hour. Now say that Pedro -- a teenager of upper-middle class parents -- is willing to accept $3.00 per hour to do my filing. In principle, Pedro and I could draw up a private contract in which he would agree to do my filing for a wage between $3.00 and $3.50 per hour. That private contract would make both of us better off. Unfortunately, the federal government would incarcerate us if we made this mutually beneficial exchange.

The feds want me to pay Pedro $5.15 per hour, but since I only value filing at $3.50, I will not hire anybody. Federal minimum wage law has prohibited Pedro from selling his labor and prohibited me from buying it. We are both worse off, and more importantly, we are less free.

Liberals want to prohibit wages that are "too low" simply because it offends their sensibilities. The cost of not offending their sensibilities is more unemployment, less freedom, and further government intrusion into our private lives.

In a recent speech to members of the Young America's Foundation, Walter Williams reminded his audience, "Countries do not trade with countries, people trade with people." Most Democrats -- and some Republicans -- wish to prohibit American citizens from selling and buying goods and services to and from other individuals in the world. They propose that we enact import quotas, tariffs, and embargoes on goods and services produced by individuals in other nations. They further wish to restrict American firms from producing goods and services to be sold to individuals in other nations.

The federal government should not have to give permission to its citizen to trade with individuals from other countries. Each American citizen ought to be free to choose whether to buy and sell goods and services from foreigners. For instance, if I want to buy a new lamp from a Chinese manufacturer, the government should not restrict my liberty by preventing such a voluntary exchange. Similarly, if I am producing sneakers and I want to sell them to people in Cuba, the federal government ought to get the heck out of my private life.

During the 1980s, Milton Friedman produced a television program called "Free to Choose" in which explained why free market capitalism was indispensable to liberty. The theme song to the program (found at http://www.freetochoose.com) should serve as a reminder to all liberty-loving Americans:

"Think twice before you let someone / Help you with your load / 'Cause the help you get might cost you something somewhere down the road / You never know / What you might have to owe / When you let somebody carry your load / You can give too much away / And the price you pay is the freedom / To choose the price you want to pay"

In America, conservatives are the true champions of the right to privacy. It might be nice if the Republican Party could abstain from massive corporate regulation to remember this from time to time.

There should not be any wage control at all.

The effect of a price floor on any good or service is not to increase the value of goods or services that are worth less than that price floor, but rather to make them worthless. By destroying the value of workers whose output would be worth less than $5.15/hour, the government reduces the supply of usable labor. This drives up wages for those who are fortune enough to be employed, while negating any wages for those who aren't. Even those who are employed, however, don't benefit much since increased wages lead to increased prices for goods and services, and the displacement of unskilled workers to the welfare office leads to higher taxes.

Free trade sounds nice and is sometimes necessary to break unions when they become to strong, but it is not without pitfalls. The fact is that people organize themselves into nations either to take advantage of other people or to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. If another nation manages to destroy your ability to get what you need, they can destroy your country and take what is yours.

The perfect example of this situation happened within our own country. The old South believed in free trade. They wanted to be able to buy British and French imports to their hearts' content without paying a tariff. The North wanted a tariff on British and French goods because that tariff helped manufacturers in the North who couldn't compete on either price or quality. Because the South believed that it could always get what it needed somewhere, it didn't develop a strong manufacturing base. In plotting a war to gain independence from the North, the South just assumed that the British and French would run the Northern blockades in order to have free trade with the South. What the South learned is that when the lead starts flying, the "principle" of free trade somehow loses its power to inspire people to action. Those who will yell the loudest to be able to trade without tariffs don't actually risk their lives for this idea. As a result, the North had more and better of every necessary supply throughout the war. While there are sometimes abuses in the name of "protectionism," a moderate amount is a good thing to ensure that we can always produce the things that we need in times of war or other troubles.

The other nice thing about tariffs is that they are the least intrusive form of taxation. Governments must raise money. An income tax is the most intrusive way to do so because it puts the tax man at the heart of our financial lives. A sales tax gives us a little distance, but the tax man is still watching every trade between fellow citizens. A tariff confines the tax man to the end of the dock. Maybe we can't raise all the money that we need through tariffs, but putting the tax man at the end of the dock as much as possible is a good thing.

WFTR
Bill

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