John Edwards is Accidentally Right
According to Tim Dickinson over at National Affairs Daily (Rolling Stone’s politics blog), John Edwards accused Rudy Giuliani of being “Bush on steroids.”
Of course, Edwards is right—but not in the way he intended. He was referring to the level of ‘crony capitalism’ under Bush and the increased level he would expect to see under Rudy. I’ll give him the ‘crony capitalism’ hit on Bush—our current president wouldn’t know true free market capitalism if it put him in a headlock and gave him a noogie. But neither would John Edwards. Both Bush and Edwards have shown themselves to be fans of various degrees of a coercive, violence-based system of socialism. I actually think Giuliani is probably oriented much more toward free market policies than Bush (but that’s not saying much).
Where Edwards accidentally spoke truth is with respect to Giuliani’s predisposition toward the use of the police power of the state. Giuliani does not extend his pro-freedom philosophy from the marketplace to the realm of civil liberties. Although many credit him with cleaning up New York City through his ‘get tough’ policing tactics, the cause-and-effect relationship is far from clear. Not only that, but in the interests of maintaining the most just society possible, American criminal justice philosophy has always been structured around the absolute necessity of avoiding what’s known as the ‘alpha error’–the accidental punishment of the innocent. Our system knowingly fails to punish every last offender because it’s considered far worse to punish the innocent by mistake (a principle most of us would agree with). Who knows how many innocents were punished under Rudy’s policing policies.
The fact of the matter is that Giuliani would institute a police state in America that would make George Bush slap himself on the forehead every few days and say, “Dang! Why didn’t I think of that?!”
Giuliani’s support for things like a national ID card, lack of strong support for the 2nd Amendment, and “every community in America is prepared for terrorist attacks and natural disasters” (I can just imagine what that would translate into under a Giuliani administration) are just a sample of his lack of respect for true freedom and civil liberties.
I guarantee you Rudy is no fan of Ben Franklin, who famously articulated a key libertarian principle: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
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