Key ideas: Published in 1952. Back to: One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist - by Frank Chodorov
The wisdom in question is that of the capable and unselfish entrepreneur who, answering the call of duty, as he sees it, permits himself to be drawn into the Washington vortex, either as a stand-in bureaucrat or as an unwilling contractor…
Refusal to cooperate is possible, but what with the suggested taint of unpatriotism, or extinguishment through lack of supplies, or the danger of reprisal, only the most intrepid idealist would buck the suave bureaucratic bully…
But what of liberty? What of America’s future? The time has come when the American businessman, along with all other citizens, must face up to fundamentals, and without equivocation. Does one help one’s country by helping the bureaucrat out of a difficulty created by the bureaucrat, or is one a better patriot by refusing to cooperate?
The bureaucrat is completely incapable of making a useful thing. He talks about the virtues of a controlled economy, but when it comes to making any part of the economy work he is helpless. He has no equipment for it. All his training has been directed toward the acquisition and exercise of power.
He can fashion laws, make phrases, manipulate situations, lie convincingly, deal under the table of protocol. He cannot raise an onion or cobble a shoe. He is lost when his lust for power compels him to look into the practical prob- lems of production. It is then that he calls in a businessman.
To put it bluntly: Communism will not be imported from Moscow; it will come out of Wall Street and Main Street. It will show up as a disease internally induced by bad habits, not the least of which is the growing practice of capitalists to come to the aid of the political establishment, in peacetime as well as wartime.…
The basic principle, derived from all history, is that government is a necessary evil, not a means toward a good end, and that any course that tends to increase the power of government must deplete the power in the people governed. That is, there is an unending struggle between State and Society.
The Declaration of Independence—which is the definitive expression of Americanism—recognized that conflict by stipulating the limits of government. “For these purposes men institute government,” it says. And what are these purposes?
To safeguard the “unalienable rights”—the rights that inhere in the individual by virtue of his existence and are derived not from his government but from his Creator. That is all. When government goes beyond this limitation it is a transgressor; so says the Declaration.
So then, true patriotism, faithfulness to the American tradition, demands a skeptical attitude toward politics. It must be presumed, a priori, that the politician’s business is never to further the area of freedom, he has no interest in it, and that he is rather concerned with expanding his own area of activity. Hence, he must be kept constantly under surveillance. Cooperation with his schemes is dangerous to the interest of Society
The best the capitalist can do for his country, for his children, is to oppose intervention at every point, regardless of immediate consequences, and never to lend his prestige or capacities to the political establishment.