The Danger of Emergency Powers: A History Lesson

Below is the second of three reposts in this election season on politics. (The third repost will be on November 1.) The present essay was posted on October 7, 2020, six months after the beginning of what I subsequently labelled covid totalitarianism. I used the terms in seven essays posted in 2021 and ’22.
 
 
Emergency powers, as we have learned in the past six months, are dangerous. Any little tyrant in our local mayoral or gubernatorial office can suspend individual rights at the drop of a hat—or virus—in the name of the emergency.
 
In 1933 Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany through “emergency powers.” Let’s briefly review how that happened.
 
In 1932 in a round of parliamentary voting, the Nazi Party lost to Paul von Hindenburg, World War I hero and president of the Weimar Republic since 1925. The Nazis, however, won a strong second place. After Hitler withdrew support for Hindenburg a third round of voting in November gave the Nazi Party the largest Reichstag share at 33%. Two prominent politicians and a “letter signed by 22 important representatives of industry” urged Hindenburg (1, 2) to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hitler immediately gave Hermann Göring a cabinet position in charge of the police, which soon became the State Secret Police, or Gestapo.
 
Emergency powers soon followed. In February 1933 the Reichstag (parliament) building burned, blamed by Göring on the communists, but some historians insist it was started by the Nazis. Hitler then persuaded Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree that eliminated many civil rights, including freedom of speech, press, and assembly, banned the communist party, and allowed detention without trial. (Hindenburg at the time was 85 and said by some to be senile.)
 
In one fell swoop, Hitler acquired dictatorial power. In March, with dissenters surrounded and intimidated by Nazi brownshirts (SA) and protection squad (SS), the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act to give Hitler “temporary” power to rule by emergency decree.
 
For the next sixteen or so months, which included book burnings, purges, and other forms of rioting and “cancel culture,” Hitler remained deferential in public to Hindenburg. After the latter died in August 1934, the chancellor eliminated the presidency, solidifying his dictatorship through the 1934 referendum, achieved similarly to the Reichstag vote with “widespread intimidation.”
 
It was in this manner that Adolf Hitler was elected dictator of Germany.
 
In our present cultural and political atmosphere, news commentator Bill O’Reilly recently wrote that the current Democratic presidential candidate [Joe Biden] “is Paul von Hindenburg in 1932 Germany. An old guy who is malleable.” In 1933 and ’34, Hindenburg’s shaper readily persuaded him to grant emergency powers, paving the way to full dictatorship.
 
Are we there yet? Are we heading down that path?
 
Emergency powers are dangerous and no one, least of all our political leaders, should have them. Individual rights are inviolate and absolute. They should never be suspended, whether the excuse is a pandemic or an insurrection or invasion. There is and can be no justification. This includes the suspension of habeas corpus, which unfortunately is allowed in the US Constitution.
 
In a free society no one has the right to force you to stay home during a pandemic or to force you to wear a hazmat suit (or mask) if you go out into public places. If you are so afraid of getting infected, you should stay home and avoid other people. If we had a society with a sound and stable legal system and you are infected knowingly and willfully by someone, you will likely have legal standing to sue or press charges—and with such a system you can expect most other people, lest they be sued or have charges pressed against them, to mind their manners when sick. A free society means you are free to choose and exercise in action your best judgment. We are all fully capable of doing just that. We ain’t stupid.
 
Emergency powers, even if, or especially when, they are declared to be “temporary,” lead inevitably to expansion of those powers. As in the case of Hitler, there seldom is a retraction or reduction of powers.*
 
Associated sometimes with emergency powers is the notion of martial law. Alan Dershowitz points out that the US Constitution says nothing about either, though, he writes, both were prevalent at the time of the country’s founding. Martial law, he says, is a contradiction in terms, because if the military is brought in, “then it is not law. It is power.” Other definitions have said martial law means the substitution of military for civil law.
 
No form of martial law, however, in a truly free society is ever appropriate. And I don’t believe it has been used in the United States. Whenever the national guard or military has been called out, their use has been to assist the police, to detain the violators of rights who are attacking person and property. In the process their purpose is to restore peace and order. Once the criminal violators are detained, the police can hold them for prosecution and incarceration.
 
Curfew? Aside from being a violation of rights, why? As a practical matter, you capture the law breakers, thereby making the streets safe again.
 
The use of emergency powers, martial law, and curfew are all confessions by politicians that they cannot maintain law and order with their own police.
 
Or, they are smokescreens for the expansion of power to establish a more authoritarian government. As did Hitler!
 
Can it happen here? Are the parallels sound? One-party rule, censorship, big business support and encouragement of dictatorial powers??
 
 
* See Jeffrey Tucker on “Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism.” Some true believers are already salivating over the pandemic lockdowns as dress rehearsal for total state control to enforce “climate change” decrees. Tucker, pointing out that the essence of “lockdownism” is puritanism, quotes none other than Anthony Fauci on the future of pandemic totalitarianism: “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior.” This simple statement is a double whammy: we in solidarity with the rabidly radical and toxic environmentalists apparently will be expected to sacrifice ourselves to trees and rocks and we must in addition transform ourselves into the utopian New Man (of Karl Marx, though the notion predates Marx).

My Body, My Choice—Her Body, Her Choice. Same Principle

Principles are universal and provide causal explanations and guidance to human action.

Examples from an earlier post, with appropriate qualifications, included water boiling at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level, and never lying in human relationships. The former is a causal explanation with implicit guidance to adjust cooking temperatures at higher altitudes and the latter is moral guidance with a fundamental explanation of benevolent cooperation. Both principles are universal and apply to all instances of water boiling and cooperation.

Two disputed issues in today’s world are coerced vaccinations and coerced birthing of unwanted children. Both violate individual rights—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The premise underlying both types of coercion, which itself is presented as a universal principle, is the altruistic doctrine of self-sacrifice. As a universal, it justifies extending initiated coercion to other areas of our lives, such as coerced sterilization and coerced prevention of the use of birth control. The premise treats each of us as lambs to be sacrificed to the state. However, there is no right or duty to sacrifice ourselves to others, including the state, and certainly no right to sacrifice others to ourselves or the state.

Rights are freedoms of action, freedoms from any kind of initiated coercion, whether by another citizen or by the government, to choose the values we want to pursue and to take the actions necessary to acquire those values. Rights are moral guidance in a political context and causal explanation of peaceful social cooperation in a capitalist society.

Our only general obligation to others is to avoid initiating coercion against them.

Freedom of action in today’s world includes the freedom to refuse to get vaccinated or to have an unwanted baby. If anyone is afraid to get near the unvaccinated, it is that person’s prerogative to avoid them, not the responsibility of the government to punish or quarantine the unvaccinated. Private businesses can ask you to get vaccinated or stay home. The government cannot.

And the government is nearly everywhere in our lives in today’s mixed economy of freedom and dictatorship, which means “follow and find the government intervention” before drawing conclusions about what should and should not be done in specific cases. Solution: get the government out of our lives, personal and professional.

Freedom of action also presupposes an actual, not potential, independent living human being who does the acting. Cells in a woman’s body is not an independent life and the woman has the right to decide what to do with her body and those cells. If a fetus develops, though not yet into an independent entity, and the woman’s life becomes threatened, terminating the pregnancy is her decision, no one else’s.*

Freedom of action is the legal issue. You can talk about ethical issues of recklessly refusing to take care of one’s health or of recklessly getting pregnant. But the government in a free society has no right to interfere in such a person’s life.

If I sneeze on you and you can prove my awareness of illness and my negligence or intent to harm, you might have a legal case against me. But if a woman gets pregnant to increase her welfare payments—the only thing morally or legally guilty here is the government welfare system, which should be cancelled.

In April 2020, I cited John Goodman of the Goodman Institute who projected what a truly free market in medicine might be like in a pandemic—meaning absent licensing monopolies and health or medical czars telling us what we can and cannot do. Such as, inexpensive testing kits rapidly produced and made available. Doctors or nurses (an abundance of both because there would be no artificial restriction of supply caused by the licensing) would be available immediately to talk to you via telephone or, more likely, the internet, or actually to make a house call. And if you had serious symptoms, you would be welcomed to the hospital emergency rooms (many more than today because of their built-in excess capacity) and treated promptly.

Quarantining (including “lockdowns”) of asymptomatic people is preventive law and, as Ayn Rand has said, preventive law “is the legal hallmark of dictatorship . . . the concept that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent.”**

Emergency powers and martial law of any kind are violations of individual rights and should be banned in free societies.

Also in today’s mixed economy of freedom and dictatorship, both left and right, that is, the pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates have much to clean up before they can talk about the issue of abortion. The welfare state and poverty programs that have given us welfare recipients, including pregnant teenagers, who refuse to get a job or a husband to father their children need to be opposed and repealed. And the adoption system, hopelessly mired in bureaucratic rules that prolong and extend the process, should not have any government involvement at all.

Needless to say, the government and its money should also not be involved in birth control or the actual medical procedure of abortion. Let the market decide and operate. It will do a far better job than any federal, state, or local government.

My body, my choice—her body, her choice. Both follow from the US Bill of Rights.


* The right to life, in other words, begins at birth and the abortion issue is nearly entirely about the first trimester, though the woman’s life, health, or future must never be sacrificed, whether to a rapist or to a healthy fetus, or to a severely disabled one.

** Typhoid Mary? Mary Mallon was the only one of over 400 carriers of salmonella typhi forcibly confined by the health czars of New York City. For a total of twenty-six years! The common cold is asymptomatic for one to four days. If we develop a test and find someone positive after two days, do we put that person in jail (quarantine)? Protect the vulnerable is the advice of rational scientists today. See Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta’s 2013 monograph Pandemics (Kindle, location 380), where she suggests that our “current patterns of international travel” have exposed us to all kinds of pathogens and likely given us a “global wall of immunity.” Lockdowns and other forms of confinement prevent our acquisition of such an immunity. And, as Gupta also points out, older people during the 1918 Spanish Flu seem not to have been affected because they likely had developed immunity during previous influenza outbreaks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Pandemics, Kindle, location 20).

The Danger of Emergency Powers: A History Lesson

Emergency powers, as we have learned in the past six months, are dangerous. Any little tyrant in our local mayoral or gubernatorial office can suspend individual rights at the drop of a hat—or virus—in the name of the emergency.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany through “emergency powers.” Let’s briefly review how that happened.

In 1932 in a round of parliamentary voting, the Nazi Party lost to Paul von Hindenburg, World War I hero and president of the Weimar Republic since 1925. The Nazis, however, won a strong second place. After Hitler withdrew support for Hindenburg a third round of voting in November gave the Nazi Party the largest Reichstag share at 33%. Two prominent politicians and a “letter signed by 22 important representatives of industry” urged Hindenburg (1, 2) to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hitler immediately gave Hermann Göring a cabinet position in charge of the police, which soon became the State Secret Police, or Gestapo.

Emergency powers soon followed. In February 1933 the Reichstag (parliament) building burned, blamed by Göring on the communists, but some historians insist it was started by the Nazis. Hitler then persuaded Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree that eliminated many civil rights, including freedom of speech, press, and assembly, banned the communist party, and allowed detention without trial. (Hindenburg at the time was 85 and said by some to be senile.)

In one fell swoop, Hitler acquired dictatorial power. In March, with dissenters surrounded and intimidated by Nazi brownshirts (SA) and protection squad (SS), the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act to give Hitler “temporary” power to rule by emergency decree.

For the next sixteen or so months, which included book burnings, purges, and other forms of rioting and "cancel culture," Hitler remained deferential in public to Hindenburg. After the latter died in August 1934, the chancellor eliminated the presidency, solidifying his dictatorship through the 1934 referendum, achieved similarly to the Reichstag vote with “widespread intimidation.”

It was in this manner that Adolf Hitler was elected dictator of Germany.

In our present cultural and political atmosphere, news commentator Bill O’Reilly recently wrote that the current Democratic presidential candidate “is Paul von Hindenburg in 1932 Germany. An old guy who is malleable.” In 1933 and ’34, Hindenburg’s shaper readily persuaded him to grant emergency powers, paving the way to full dictatorship.

Are we there yet? Are we heading down that path?

Emergency powers are dangerous and no one, least of all our political leaders, should have them. Individual rights are inviolate and absolute. They should never be suspended, whether the excuse is a pandemic or an insurrection or invasion. There is and can be no justification. This includes the suspension of habeas corpus, which unfortunately is allowed in the US Constitution.

In a free society no one has the right to force you to stay home during a pandemic or to force you to wear a hazmat suit (or mask) if you go out into public places. If you are so afraid of getting infected, you should stay home and avoid other people. If we had a society with a sound and stable legal system and you are infected knowingly and willfully by someone, you will likely have legal standing to sue or press charges—and with such a system you can expect most other people, lest they be sued or have charges pressed against them, to mind their manners when sick. A free society means you are free to choose and exercise in action your best judgment. We are all fully capable of doing just that. We ain’t stupid.

Emergency powers, even if, or especially when, they are declared to be “temporary,” lead inevitably to expansion of those powers. As in the case of Hitler, there seldom is a retraction or reduction of powers.*

Associated sometimes with emergency powers is the notion of martial law. Alan Dershowitz points out that the US Constitution says nothing about either, though, he writes, both were prevalent at the time of the country’s founding. Martial law, he says, is a contradiction in terms, because if the military is brought in, “then it is not law. It is power.” Other definitions have said martial law means the substitution of military for civil law.

No form of martial law, however, in a truly free society is ever appropriate. And I don’t believe it has been used in the United States. Whenever the national guard or military has been called out, their use has been to assist the police, to detain the violators of rights who are attacking person and property. In the process their purpose is to restore peace and order. Once the criminal violators are detained, the police can hold them for prosecution and incarceration.

Curfew? Aside from being a violation of rights, why? As a practical matter, you capture the law breakers, thereby making the streets safe again.

The use of emergency powers, martial law, and curfew are all confessions by politicians that they cannot maintain law and order with their own police.

Or, they are smokescreens for the expansion of power to establish a more authoritarian government. As did Hitler!

Can it happen here? Are the parallels sound? One-party rule, censorship, big business support and encouragement of dictatorial powers??


* See Jeffrey Tucker on “Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism.” Some true believers are already salivating over the pandemic lockdowns as dress rehearsal for total state control to enforce “climate change” decrees. Tucker, pointing out that the essence of “lockdownism” is puritanism, quotes none other than Anthony Fauci on the future of pandemic totalitarianism: “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior.” This simple statement is a double whammy: (1) we in solidarity with the rabidly radical and toxic environmentalists apparently will be expected to sacrifice ourselves to trees and rocks and (2) we must in addition transform ourselves into the utopian New Man (of Karl Marx, though the notion predates Marx).