Pawlenty Doesn't Get It

 ...or at least he acts like he doesn't get it. Specifically I'm referring to his statement that "it's a continuum between liberty and tyranny." Several centuries ago people wrestled with this idea, trying to figure out whether you could actually have any sort of government without walking down this path toward tyranny. And they came up with an answer: there's liberty, and there's liberty. Specifically, in the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, there's natural liberty and there's political liberty. In the absence of government, a state of perfect natural liberty, you get to do anything you want. In a state of perfect tyranny, you have literally no discretion over your life: everything not forbidden is compulsory. But the problem is that in a state of perfect natural liberty, your life ends up kind of sucking. But the choices are not, as people realized during the 1600s and 1700s, no government or bad government. We also have the option of good government, which moves toward the ideal of perfect political liberty. In a state of perfect political liberty, one is forbidden, by the government, from doing those things which make people's lives worse. Everyone is forbidden from doing those things, but only forbidden from doing those things. And the result is that people's lives are quite good, but they also have a whole lot of remaining discretion about how to live their lives. Conventionally, most people in the mainstream buy into the idea that some amount of trading natural liberty for political liberty is a good thing; that's why they are not anarchists.

So yes, maybe the Obama/center-left agenda does move us away from natural liberty. But that by itself does not mean he is moving us toward tyranny, not that his agenda is bad. You might believe that the natural liberty to not buy health insurance is more important than the political liberty to life in a world where your life is not ruined when you get sick, and we might believe the opposite, but none of that means that anyone is doing anything tyrannical.