[Mb-civic] Notes from Harry Browne - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Notes from Harry Browne

By Jeff Jacoby  |  March 8, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IT CAME as a jolt to learn that Harry Browne -- scholar, gentleman, 
apostle of freedom, and two-time Libertarian Party candidate for 
president -- had died on March 1 of Lou Gehrig's disease. It came as an 
even greater jolt to discover that his last published words were 
apparently a criticism of . . . me.

The final post on ''Harry Browne's Journal," his online blog, was about 
a column of mine arguing that Supreme Court nominees should be compelled 
to give substantive answers to questions asked during their Senate 
confirmation hearings. Those hearings, I had written, should be used to 
remind the justices that they are not lords and masters but ''public 
servants who must answer, however indirectly, to the people."

Harry didn't quote that line. Instead he quoted my description of the 
Supreme Court's immense reach: ''From the power of presidents to hold 
terror suspects indefinitely to the power of Congress to override state 
law, from the execution of murderers to the recognition of same-sex 
marriage, from affirmative action to abortion, [John] Roberts and his 
fellow justices will shape national policy for years to come."

Then came Harry's scolding: ''Not one of the items mentioned is listed 
in the Constitution as a function of the federal government . . . 
Roberts's job is awesome, no question about it. The only problem is that 
the politicians and pundits have a different job description than that 
given in the Constitution."

I wish he had sent me an e-mail with that criticism. I would have 
reassured him that on this issue, we didn't differ in the least -- I was 
describing the judiciary as it has become, not as the Founders intended 
it to be. But by the time I saw Harry's objection, it was too late to reply.

Notes from Harry weren't uncommon, and they were unfailingly polite, 
even when he was distressed by a stand I had taken. He knew I was a fan 
of his, if not quite as dogmatically antigovernment or as willing to 
treat unfettered individual autonomy as the highest of all values.

Twice I had voted for him for president -- a distinction, I once told 
him, he shared with Ronald Reagan. The first time was in 1996, when I 
wouldn't vote to reelect Bill Clinton and couldn't bring myself to 
support either of his two leading opponents, the feckless Bob Dole or 
the bizarre Ross Perot. Instead, I pulled the lever for the 
distinguished-looking Libertarian who spoke with such refreshing 
bluntness about the maddening inability of the state to get things 
right. Of Dole's proposal that year to use the military for drug 
interdiction, Harry had said, ''Government can't keep drugs out of the 
country; it can't even keep drugs out of its own prisons." Social 
Security he defined as ''a fraudulent scheme in which the government 
collects money from you for your retirement -- and immediately spends 
the money on something else."

Four years later, unwilling to back the younger George Bush when the 
elder Bush had been such a disappointment, I voted Libertarian again.

But then came 9/11 and the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like many 
hard-and-fast Libertarians Harry was an antiwar isolationist, convinced 
that America would have few problems in the world if it stayed home and 
minded its own business. Al Qaeda's terror attacks, he insisted, were 
caused by US foreign policy, not Islamist extremism; he compared 
Republicans who supported Bush to Germans who supported Hitler.

I disagreed vehemently, as I generally disagree with Libertarians on 
foreign policy, and Harry's notes to me became more impassioned. ''God 
only knows what the results of Bush's idealism will be," he wrote last 
year, ''but it won't be a democratic Middle East, an end to terrorism, 
or peace in the world." When I said it was ''perverse" not to 
acknowledge the good that had been accomplished by Saddam's ouster -- 
''the mass graves are being exhumed, not added to; the prison rape rooms 
are shut down; Saddam and his thugs are going on trial" -- he replied by 
writing an article that questioned whether the atrocities of Saddam's 
regime had ever actually taken place. It saddened me that a man so 
attuned to the loss of liberty at home could be so cavalier about the 
horrors of dictatorship elsewhere.

Looking back at Harry Browne's record, though, what stands out are not 
the infelicities but the intensity of his American dream. Let Americans 
live freely, he insisted, and the results would be harmony, tolerance, 
responsibility, and success. ''That is the America we should have," he 
once wrote. ''The beacon of liberty, providing light and hope and 
inspiration for the entire world."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/08/notes_from_harry_browne/
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