A Three Paragraph Fix

In three paragraphs, I can resolve most of the issues that divide the two political parties in this country. Maybe these paragraphs will require some supporting application, and maybe I'm not the author, but we'll set that aside for a minute.

Here goes:

1.Everyone has the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three elements necessary to preserving life; each element requires the others, and cannot be understood without them.

2.If every man has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty, and his property, then a number of men have the right to combine together to form a group to defend their rights, property, and liberty.

3.If this is true, then the group's reason for existing, and its lawfulness, rest in individual right; and the group can't rationally have any other purpose than that of the isolated forces, the individual, for which it is substituted. So, if an individual cannot lawfully damage the person, the liberty, or the property of another individual, then for the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes.

That's it. If everyone followed the logic laid out in these three paragraphs by Frederic Bastiat, I modernized them to reflect the 150 years since they were written, politics would be ridiculously simple.

Apply this idea to two scenarios:

1.The Republicans author legislation to ban gay marriage.

2.Democrats raise taxes to pay for nationalized healthcare.

Take the first.

1.Republicans author legislation to ban gay marriage. If we apply the logic of Bastiat to this legislation we'd face this: As an individual, I have no authority, or right, to tell anyone they must or can't marry, no matter how reprehensible, distasteful, and downright gross I find the union. The government is just the combination of my authority with the authority, or rights, of a bunch of people just like me. None of us have the authority to prohibit the marriage, so together we don't have the authority or the right to prohibit it. It's wrong to do something you don't have a right to do, so it's wrong to pass this ban.

The second is just as easy.

Democrats want to raise taxes to pay for nationalized healthcare. I don't have the right to take money from my neighbor, no matter how much someone else needs it. The government is the combination of my authority, or rights, with the authority, or rights, of a bunch of people just like me. None of us have the right to take anything that's not freely given from anyone else, so together we don't have the authority, or the right, to take anything from anyone. It's wrong to do something that you don't have a right to do, so it's wrong to raise taxes to pay for nationalized healthcare.

These are two simple cases, and there are cases where it gets more complicated. Externalities exist (e.g. a factory producing dense fumes that ruin the air quality for you town.) In most cases this rule is easily enough applied, that it could go a long way towards clearing up the hypocrisy found in both parties of American politics.