Torture and Liberty

Is torture compatible with liberty? Unfortunately, this is no longer a hypothetical question. Many Americans who claim to support individual freedom also favor permitting the government to torture suspected terrorists or other purported enemies of the United States. This controversy is reminiscent of a disagreement between the famous economists F. A. Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) brilliantly restated the classical warnings on Leviathan, showing the similarities in trends between Nazi Germany and Western democracies. Keynes claimed that Hayek had gone too far in his criticism because “dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.” Many Americans have embraced Keynes’s assumption in the post-9/11 era. They have accepted that a democratic government should be permitted to unleash itself if the rulers promise to do good things. They have ignored or shrugged off the specific methods used because of their confidence that politicians “think and feel rightly.”

read James Bovard’s latest at FEE

Udate: Martial Law Act of 2006

Jim Bovard posted an update to the AntiWar.com/blog that he was notified by a Boise State University professor that the changes to the Posse Comitatus and Insurrection Acts were repealed in Feb.’08. not that that wouldn’t necessarily stop them anyway, but it is pretty remarkable that the lame-duck congress did finally do something right.

read Jim’s post at the AntiWar.com/blog here.

(h/t to Scott)