Liberty Maven

Bob Barr sat down for a rather lengthy grilling from GQ magazine’s Wil S. Hilton. Hilton approached the interview with an obvious sarcastic bias and attacked Barr with some of his questions. They even argued a bit, but Barr held his own, as usual. Here is a particularly argumentative excerpt:

Why shouldn’t the government interfere in the market and rein in corporations?
Is that the job of the federal government? I would say absolutely not. The government is not there to guarantee that the market is going to operate in a certain way.

Isn’t the government there to do whatever the people want? Isn’t that the whole idea of a democracy?
In a pure democracy, yes. But we don’t have a pure democracy. We have certain principles on which the nation is founded. The basic philosophy—the reason the government was set up the way it is—is to keep the government out of those areas. In our system, it’s not the job of the federal government to do those things. It is the job of the government to ensure free commerce.

Do you actually believe free commerce will cap pollution and keep the water pure and the air clean?
It may or may not.

Don’t you think the public has a right to keep its water clean?
I wouldn’t equate public concern with the appropriate role of government. The public, by and large, would like government to do all sorts of things.

And this is a democracy, and the government should do what they want.
It’s not a democracy. We have certain principles. The government exists to provide very limited functions—for example, free commerce.

The government exists to do whatever people want it to do.
Part of the problem is that we no longer have a truly educated public. The Founding Fathers lived in a very different world. They lived in a world where people understood and cared about the written word. They had a much more educated citizenry.

The reason the “citizenry” was more educated was because the “citizenry” excluded everybody who wasn’t a white male landowner.
Abigail Adams was one of the brightest people around back then.

But she couldn’t vote, and neither could slaves, or anybody who didn’t own land.
But Abigail Adams still influenced public policy through her interchanges with her husband. Part of the problem today is that we don’t have an educated citizenry like that. The citizenry may clamor for the government to do all sorts of things. That does not provide an appropriate basis for the government to do it.

Who else is going to decide what the government should do, if not the citizenry?
We don’t live in a democracy! This was not intended to be a country where the citizenry decides what they want government to do! We have a structure of government that is based on principles, independent of the vagaries of public opinion.

I’m not sure that’s true at all. The citizens can elect representatives to do whatever they want. If the citizens want to take away their own right to free speech, they can do it.
They could.

They can make government come to their doors every morning with a newspaper and donuts if they want.
Well, we’re almost at that point.

And so it goes. One wonders if they would treat Obama and McCain to the same line of opinionated questions, sarcasm, and assumptions. Read the full interview here at GQ.