After forty years, AMC is remaking a six-hour version of The Prisoner, the late Patrick McGoohan’s clever, libertarian, metaphysical, TV mini-series. With the ominous rise of statism and collectivism now in the United States and elsewhere, this program could not be more timely in addressing such issues as privacy and government surveillance, propaganda and mind control, de-humanization and individual rights, modernism and objective truth, good and evil, justice, and much more. To be aired in November 2009, the program stars Ian McKellen as Number 2 and Jim Caviezel as Number 6.

With the enormous success of ABC-TV’s program, Lost, that draws upon such themes in the timeless work of such writers as C.S. Lewis (e.g., The Silver Chair, That Hideous Strength, The Great Divorce, etc.) (see here, here, here, here, and here), The Prisoner similarly explores profound metaphysical and ethical issues sure to capture a major audience. We can only hope that the new series remains true to the themes McGoohan embedded in the original. Here is the preview:

Number 2: “Be seeing you, Number 6.”

Number 6: “I am not a number, I am a free man.”

The Bush policy of spying on antiwar activists continues, now conducted by the military in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. See Amy Goodman. Yet another example of the bipartisan surveillance state.

California’s political leaders are in the midst of celebrating their temporary “solving” of the state’s Brobdingnagian budget mess by combining spending cuts and tax increases with heavy doses of accounting legerdemain. Once again, however, Sacramento has failed to take advantage of a golden opportunity to stanch the red ink without imposing a much heavier burden on the private sector: selling state-owned properties.

To be sure, and at the urging of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Department of General Services – the state’s landlord – recently has begun exploring opportunities for marketing some of California’s most valuable assets, including the Los Angeles Coliseum, San Francisco’s Cow Palace, San Quentin State Prison and fairgrounds in Del Mar, Orange and Ventura counties.

That renewed effort represents a major policy change since 2000, when California’s state auditor sharply criticized the DGS for failing to dispose of so-called surplus state property expeditiously, thus bypassing billions of dollars in potential revenue. Sequestering no longer publicly needed buildings and grounds in lockboxes, as did Caltrans, which finally sold a piece of property in the mid 1990s it had designated as surplus 38 years earlier, leaves tons of money on the table. The ultimate dispositions of LA’s unused Reception and Civic Centers have been pending for decades.

As far as can be told, the last surplus property transaction of any significance took place in fiscal year 2002, when the state sold 152 acres in Santa Clara County for $149 million. That parcel was part of a 292-acre property that had been declared surplus in 1996.

According to the statewide property inventory maintained by the Real Estate Services Division of the Department of General Services, as of January 2, 2008, the taxpayers of California owned 22,727 buildings and more than 6.7 million acres of land at 2,313 sites around the Golden State.

It turns out that state government policy erects barriers to exploiting that potential source of ready cash.

Other than ordinary bureaucratic inertia, delays created by filing environmental impact statements and complying with master facilities plans, the chief reason for foot-dragging is that state agencies have little incentive to identify and sell the properties they no longer need. If and when surplus property actually is disposed of, the DGS applies the proceeds (net of its own costs) to pay interest and principal on state bonds. Agencies incur the cost of identifying surplus property, but do not share in the gains from doing so.

Moreover, “surplus” properties can be disposed of only if the state legislature approves such actions. And political considerations mean that roughly ten to fifteen percent of the properties identified as no longer serving public purposes ever are offered to the market in the first place. Properties that eventually pass legislative muster may remain in limbo for up to 14 months until it reviews and approves their sale.

Moreover, other public agencies have the right of first refusal. If one governmental entity expresses an interest in acquiring another’s “surplus property” within 90 days, the property is transferred internally at something less than full market value, perhaps original cost, again providing no material benefit to the “selling” agency. It seems to be the case that, given its mandate to serve “the best interests of the State of California”, the DGS has full discretion over the “prices” at which such internal transfers take place.

A fiscal puzzle illustrates the dysfunctional incentives of the surplus property disposal regime now in place in California: Caltrans routinely overestimates the revenue it expects to generate from property sales. That makes no budgetary sense. Either Caltrans is not penalized for pie-in-the-sky projections or it (and Sacramento) can base spending plans for the coming fiscal year on overly rosy revenue scenarios. If so, that is a recipe for chronic budget deficit.

Two simple policy changes would transform the incentives now impeding the disposal of surplus state-owned properties: First, eliminate the right of first refusal, thereby forcing public agencies to compete with the private sector for the right to acquire “surplus” buildings and grounds, ensuring that property ownership is transferred at fair-market value to its highest and best user. Second, allow the selling agency to retain a predetermined percentage of that value, thus motivating it to identify and dispose of no longer needed property in a timely manner.

It is of course true that property now considered “surplus” is only the tip of the fiscal iceberg. If California’s taxpayers demanded that state government return to its core functions of protecting private property rights and safeguarding the rule of law, many more state-owned assets would fall under the auctioneer’s hammer.

Attorney Harvey Silverglate is unfortunately not a reliable source to defend the natural rights of the citizenry from the abuse of government agents. Like most “liberal” attorneys, Silverglate’s views are a mixed bag, even when his intent may be to defend habeas corpus. Incredibly enough, given his critique of the Cambridge, Mass., police in arresting Henry Louis Gates, even as recently as this past April, Silverglate was opposing the prosecution of CIA and other government officials for torture.

[I]t would make very “bad law,” and would create a legal precedent that would haunt our criminal justice system for generations, if we cede to the demands of those calling for torture prosecutions.

Why? Silverglate believes that:

[H]owever disturbing the DOJ torture memos are, they are far from anything seen in the Nazi and Soviet eras. They approve the infliction of terror and pain, but not disfigurement and death.

What is the importance of this distinction? A CIA agent, operating in good faith, could readily consider such DOJ advice to be a binding legal opinion that he could safely follow. And in our legal system, based on an ancient Anglo-Saxon moral and legal tenet incorporated into our own criminal codes, a wrongdoer may be punished only if he knowingly and intentionally committed an act that he believed to be illegal. Given the facts and circumstances—the nation had just withstood the worst terrorist attack in its history and was being led by a president who suddenly declared a full-scale “war on terror”—it is inconceivable that any criminal jury in any American jurisdiction could, would, or even should agree unanimously (which is what it takes to convict) that an agent, acting in accord with DOJ legal advice, is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt (another prerequisite for conviction). These are legal realities often missed by those outside the practice of trial law.

Unless we are prepared to allow the war on terror to inflict further damage on our legal system, we need to step back and ask if perhaps better sense, and cooler heads, should prevail in the face of righteous outrage at our government’s conduct.

In other words, so long as government officials are doing what Silverglate wants done, the rule of law and individual rights are strictly secondary because for Silverglate civil liberties are situational (“the end justifies the means”)—for him, the “war on terror” is apparently just too controversial to be bothered with culpability. For government torturers, he instead advises mere “disbarment as well as judicial impeachment.” Confusing positive law with the natural law tenets of habeas corpus, he even attempts to square his legal positivism with Sir Thomas More’s choice to uphold the natural law against the utilitarianism and moral relativism of Henry VIII.

Hence in the Gates affair, Silverglate’s weighing in now on the matter rings rather hollow in stating that unlike for the victims of CIA renditioning and torture, “the citizen was merely—even if neither kindly nor wisely—exercising his constitutional right when faced with official power. Even if Professor Gates were wearing a ‘F*** You, Cambridge Police’ jacket, the officer would have been obligated to leave the house without its occupant in handcuffs.” Apparently for Silverglate however, when it comes to government torturers, a different standard applies.

Harvey A. Silverglate has a wonderful piece on the neglected issue in the Gates arrest—the constitutional right to be rude to a cop, and the trouble with “disorderly conduct” as a class of criminality. A choice excerpt:

It is not yet entirely clear whether there was a racial element to the initial decision by a woman on the street—working for Harvard Magazine, no less!—to call the police, although that is looking unlikely. It remains disputed whether Sergeant Crowley treated Professor Gates any differently than he would treat a white citizen in the same position. (In fact, if one accepts Crowley’s claim that he dished out to Gates equal treatment under the law, this case stands as a dire warning to all citizens as to the dangers inherent in exercising one’s constitutional right to free speech when in an exchange with a police officer—but more on that below.)

Means cracking down on citizens too. Hector Veloz was detained for 13 months, including 5 months after he was determined to be a U.S. citizen but the decision was appealed by the immigration authorities.

Some argue that the government is not taking the task of keeping out illegals seriously enough. Because of the nature of the state, there is no way to expect it to do a good job, but I fear what a “serious” approach to cracking down on illegal immigrants would mean, given what its lackadaisical approach has meant for the liberty of Americans.

A whopping $242 million in cuts. “These ‘cuts’ will save less than $1 per household this year,” says a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, or enough to pay for five hours of interest on the federal debt. The savings represent 0.006% of the nation’s $3.99 trillion budget.

Obama promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut government in some places to pay for its growth in others. He particularly vowed to withdraw from Iraq, but even if he comes through on his current promises there, he is merely following the Status of Forces Agreement acceded to by Bush in late 2008. In other words, even on foreign spending, Obama is at best a continuation of the Bush regime.

Writes Jonah Goldberg:

[L]et us consider how President Obama’s health-care bill would work. An official body—staffed with government doctors, actuaries, economists and other experts—will determine which treatments, procedures and remedies are cost-effective and which are not. Then it will decide which ones will get paid for, and which won’t. Democrats call this “cost-controls.” But for the patient and the doctor, it’s plain old rationing.

Now, imagine if the government had a body of experts charged with figuring out what your free-speech rights are, or right to assemble, or worship. Mr. Jones, you can say X and Y but not Z. Ms. Smith, you can freely assemble with Aleutians, Freemasons and carpenters, but you may not meet in public with anyone from Cleveland or of Albanian descent. Mrs. Wilson, you may pray to Vishnu and Crom, but never to Allah or Buddha, and when you do pray, you cannot do so for longer than 20 minutes, unless it is one of several designated holidays. See Extended Prayer Form 10-22B.

Of course, all of this would be ludicrous.

Which is the whole point. Health care cannot be a right, because rights cannot come from government.

Indeed, this is true. Rights do not come from the government. People do not have a natural right to have the government do anything on their behalf, even protect their rights, for that too would involve rationing. This entire line of reasoning can and should be applied to the whole state apparatus, and certainly to the welfare state.

People can have a right to free speech, because in theory, they can say whatever they want so long as they don’t trespass against the property rights of others. This is true in any time and place. The notion of health care being a right is incoherent. For if you have a right to a check up, does that mean a doctor somewhere has the enforceable duty to perform it? Does a right to surgery imply a right to force surgeons to work? As Herbert Spencer said, all socialism involves slavery. Indeed, taken to its logical conclusion, a positive right to health care is not just a right to compel others to finance it, but to compel others to provide it.

Under natural law, true rights, natural rights, do not conflict with one another. But positive rights must be rationed. I wrote about this back in 2006, in a piece reprinted below.

Those on the left who believe in positive rights but not negative liberties have always confounded me when they claim universalism. Now, I believe in universal human rights, locally (and, ideally, civilly) enforced. But if you believe everyone has a right to health care or education, then your conception of rights is limited to the amount of wealth, the practical possibility of distributing benefits equally, etc., which is why socialist states treat people so unequally—or, at best, everyone is equally miserable.

One interesting area where the contradiction occurs is immigration. Lefties think there’s only so much social justice to go around, and yet everyone has a right to it. But even they often don’t believe the US should let everyone from the world into America and give them all a free lunch. It would simply be impossible, they realize. Yet, if everyone is entitled to freedom from hunger and sickness by some ethical axiom, some moral irreducible, wouldn’t it follow that everyone in the world, regardless of national origin, would have the same claim? The only alternative, within positivist socialism, to international socialism, is nationalist socialism. And, in practice, most lefties are nativists when pressed, believing that Americans deserve a grab bag of welfarist goodies that should be doled out not on the basis of humanity alone, but with national considerations in mind.

Thus do we see a gay activist complaining that the illegal immigrants are having their Civil Rights given to them before homosexual American citizens. Ponder these interesting lines of argument, all based on the unspoken premise that postivist Civil Rights must be rationed out, which hints at the implied admission that they cannot be universalist, human rights, but are rather ones created wholly by the state:

“With several versions of various bills being debated in Washington and hundreds of staged protests around the country both supporting and against extending citizenship and other rights to millions of illegal immigrants, America has forgotten that there are legal, taxpaying, and voting citizens in America who don’t yet have all of their rights. . . .

“It’s a slap in the face to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to take up the debate on whether to give people who are in this country illegally additional rights when we haven’t even given the people who are here legally all of their rights.

“If we’re going to hold 24-hour Senate sessions using taxpayers’ dollars, let those sessions be used to come up with a comprehensive plan that allows America’s same-gender-loving stakeholders to have the opportunity to have the right to make decisions on a partner’s behalf in a medical emergency or the right to receive family-related Social Security benefits.

“While I agree that immigration reform is an important issue—and perhaps it could become the next leading civil rights movement—we haven’t even finished with our current civil rights movement. . . .

“Immigration reform needs to get in line behind the LGBT civil rights movement, which has not yet realized all of its goals.

“Which is not to say that I don’t recognize the plight of illegal immigrants. I do. But I didn’t break the law to come into this country. This country broke the law by not recognizing and bestowing upon me my full rights as a citizen. . . .

“With all due respect, Mr. President, there can be no guest worker program until we resolve the issue of making sure that all lesbian and gay legal workers have the right to take up to 12 weeks of leave from work to care for a seriously ill partner or parent of a partner and the right to purchase continued health coverage for a domestic partner after the loss of a job.”

As a libertarian, I find it most interesting to see the lefties struggle among themselves when they realize that, given their conception of Civil Rights, there really is only so much justice, as they define it, to go around, and so some minorities and official victims have to be viewed as more equal than others. Only property rights can be universally recognized, and not be contigent on central provision and rationing. Only negative rights guarantee true legal equality. Only libertarianism treats people as people, rather than deepening class problems by entrenching them with state power.

This originally appeared on the Stress Blog and LewRockwell.com. Copyright © Anthony Gregory 2006. Creative Commons License 2.0.

This post might sound parochial (no pun intended). However, my take on the latest papal statement on capitalism is that we need to understand how parochial schools are no longer fulfilling their purpose of offering an alternative to public education. Ignatius Insight published my op-ed arguing that point.

On a related point, I blogged about school choice and parochial schools here.

Religion—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—plays an important role in my new book Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader (University Press of Kentucky, in association with The Independent Institute, 2009). Although Catholics did not dominate the classical liberal tradition of race in this country, they were not entirely absent either.

That is the topic of my next post on “when ‘inferior races’ were ‘white.'”