Contributor

Ray Haynes

Mr. Haynes is an Assembly member representing Riverside and Temecula. He serves on the Appropriations and Budget Committees. [go to Assembly Member Haynes website at California Assembly][go to Haynes index]

An Agenda For Liberty
Individual liberty should guide the Governor's vision...
[Ray Haynes] 1/13/04

Last Tuesday, Governor Schwarzenegger laid out his agenda for California in his state of the state address. Like so many of the newspaper reporters, I want to recommend an agenda for him to follow: an agenda that promotes individual liberty.

Why liberty? It’s simple. There are two ways we make decisions in our life—either we make them ourselves or someone makes them for us. Sometimes, we allow someone else to make a decision for us, like when we allow our employers to tell us when we have to show up for work, or when we hand over how we spend our money to our spouse. We usually voluntarily hand over decisions in exchange for something else (like money, or other benefits). Other decisions are made for us whether we like it or not, like how much in taxes we have to pay. Government usually makes those decisions. We don’t get anything for giving up that kind of decision-making power. In fact, it usually costs us, because if government makes the decision for us, they usually hire a very expensive bureaucrat (and raise our taxes) to make that decision.

An agenda that promotes individual liberty increases the number of voluntary decisions we get to make, and decreases the number of decisions that government forces us to accept. It also makes government smaller, cheaper, more efficient, and more effective. More important, liberty unleashes the creative energy of those who enjoy its benefit.

Here is an agenda for liberty:

(1) Government should promote free enterprise in California—There are two aspects to protecting and promoting free enterprise—freedom of contract and protection of private property rights.

(a) Government should promote Freedom of contract—California interferes with more private contracts that any other government in the nation. We do it for the best of reasons, we want to protect people, but the regulations, the laws, the rules, and the court decisions that limit choices limit how we feed our families (by preventing us from making our own deals with our employers), how we spend the money we earn (by limiting what we can buy with that money), and sometimes tells us how much we have to pay for something. Freedom of contract allows us to make our own decisions about what we do for a living, what we buy, and how we live.

(b) Government should protect private property rights—Private property is how we keep what we earn, either through savings, real estate, or other investments. If government can take it away, we have little or no incentive to earn it.

(2) Government should protect and promote Private Institutions—We choose many ways to order our lives. We raise and educate our children in families, we go to private social clubs, we use churches and local charities to take care for the poor and disabled. More things get done by people working on their own, with their families, and with their neighbors, through private institutions, than whatever occurs in the hours between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., when the government offices are open

The Legislative ideas that would implement this agenda for individual liberty are (1) cutting government regulation on business; (2) getting government out of land-use planning and regulations; (3) parental choice in education and child rearing; (4) free market based health care reforms; and (5) Faith based and community based social welfare programs. A free people may succeed or fail, but at least success or failure is the result of their own decisions and not the decision of some bureaucrat or politician.

Governor Schwarzenegger, if you truly want real radical ides to unleash the creative energies of Californians, read Thomas Jefferson and follow his blueprint. Liberty has worked everywhere it has been tried. It may actually work even here in California.

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