Key ideas: Published in 1952. Back to: One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist - by Frank Chodorov
When the Union was founded, political scientists were agreed on the axiom that the source of sovereignty is the individual. It is from him that government derives its powers.
This involves another assumption, the one about “natural rights” inhering in the individual by virtue of his existence or by divine gift. The two ideas, necessarily related, emerged from the revolt against absolutism, resting its case on the doctrine of the “divine right of kings.”
Neither doctrine as to the source of sovereignty is provable. The nature of sovereignty, however, is beyond doubt; it is the degree of coercion that the government exerts on the people; and this degree of coercion is in turn dependent on the amount of the nation’s wealth the government has at its disposal. For the coercion must be exerted by men, and men must live while they carry out the orders of the government. The police must be paid.
In short, sovereignty is a matter of taxation; the more taxation the more sovereignty
Conversely, the immunity of the people is in proportion to the amount of their wealth they can keep out of the government’s hands.
It follows, then, that the Sixteenth Amendment, which gives the government a prior claim on all the production of the country, puts the government in the way of acquiring as much power as it is possible for a government to exercise; that is, under our revised Constitution it is possible for the government to attain absolutism.
The introduction of income taxation destroyed the original concept of the Union—as consisting of autonomous states, in which political power was a concession from sovereign citizens—just as effectively as if it had been done by a foreign invader.
The indisputable fact of the Sixteenth Amendment is its socialism; it denies the right of private property
Other taxes, particularly the indirect kind, are apologized for on the ground of necessity: the cost of maintaining the political establishment must be met:w
by the citizenry, but the levies are made as painless as possible by hiding them in the price of goods.
The income tax, on the other hand, unashamedly proclaims the doctrine of collectivized wealth. The State may take whatever it needs, as a matter of right; that which it does not take is a concession. It has first claim on all the earnings of all the people.…
There is nothing in the Sixteenth Amendment, there is nothing in the spirit of income taxation, that puts a limit on what the State may confiscate. Legally, all that is produced by the citizenry may be demanded, and the relationship between the State and its subjects, as far as property is concerned, approximates the relationship between master and slave.
What makes the slave a slave is that he is legally denied the right of property, and the master is so only because the law permits him to ap- propriate all the slave produces.
The substitution of the State for the individual master does not deny the economic substance of slavery, even though the State cloak its appropriations with eleemosynary intent; the individual master also takes care of “his people.’*
The primary right of the individual to life is denied when his right to the possession and enjoyment of the fruits of his labor is denied; he who may not own may not be. And it is foolish to talk of a sovereign people without the right of property.
In the beginning, income taxation was eased into our mores by its promise to “soak the rich.” It flattered what the people were pleased to call their sense of justice, which was only envy. Their concern was with tearing down, not with moral principles.
.The opponents of the Sixteenth Amendment were equally devoid of principle, for they were quick to make compromise, since the first levies were low and the exemptions high. As was inevitable, the exemptions were regularly lowered and the levies increased, so that income taxation now falls most heavily on those least able to bear the burden.
This consequence was unavoidable simply because political power is incapable of self-restraint and stops short only when confronted with vigorous social opposition. Since its power is in direct ratio to its income, the State could not overlook the pockets of the poor; the poor are the largest segment of the population and their aggregate income is the most attractive target of spoliation.
“The Congress shall have the power,” says the amendment, “to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived . . .”
and in that italicized phrase rests the unlimited power of appropriation; nothing and nobody are exempt, neither the incomes of the poorest nor the incomes of gamblers, thieves and prostitutes. It is the unequivocal assertion of the State’s lien on all the wealth of the nation.
The passion for levelling that insinuated the Sixteenth Amendment in the Constitution obscured the fact that this all-inclusive power of appropriation must in time reduce the people to the condition of wardship.
Every strengthening of the State is accomplished by a weakening of the moral fibre of the people. That is axiomatic. Just as a bonded servant is dependent on the will of the master, so do people deprived of their incomes acquire the habit of charity; they learn to lean on the only propertied “person,” the State.
Dependence on the State, by way of socialized education, “free” medicine, unemployment insurance, public housing, gratuities and subsidies of all kinds, becomes the normal way of living and the pride of personality is lost. When selfreliance falls into disuse, it atrophies.
Consciously or instinctively, the proponents of home government (or States’ Rights) proceed from a philosophical axiom, that the individual is the only reality. He alone exists. Without him there cannot be a society, and without society there is no need of government. Society, in fact, is nothing but a convenient abstraction, a word describing an agglomeration of individuals cooperating for their mutual advantage. The character of society is but a composite of the characters of its components; it has no other. In short, society is nothing of itself.
For the purposes of society—that is, the improvement in the circumstances of its membership—experience has shown the need of an umpire. Since all the members are assumed to be possessed of the right to do whatever they please, provided they do not transgress the equal rights of others, it is necessary for society to provide a means of preventing transgression or of effecting restitution when it occurs. We give government a monopoly of coercion so that it can prevent coercion.
On the record, however, the government, which must consist of fallible human beings, is too often inclined to use the power vested in it for purposes not consistent with its appointed duty; it frequently goes in for a bit of predatory activity in the interests of its own members or of favored citizens. The only preventative is constant surveillance…
This problem of surveillance presents a physical difficulty. The business of the members of society is the production of goods and services; this is demanding enough and leaves little time or energy for the supervision of government. It is necessary, therefore, that government be kept within reach, small, and completely dependent for its keep on the will of the body it serves.
If it engages in activities too complicated for the citizens to follow, if it assumes to be an active agency as well as an impartial umpire, or if it achieves economic independence at the expense of the citizens, it will surely get out of hand; in that case it must become a burden and a hindrance.
The evidence of history supports the conclusion that simple, small and dependent government is the only kind that can be watched and held to its social aim.
That, in a nutshell, is the reasoning behind the home government idea—or the American doctrine of States’ Rights.
The income tax proceeds from, or finds justification in, quite the opposite premise, namely, that society is not only an entity distinct from the individuals composing it, but is endowed with capacities and qualities superior to anything the individuals can lay claim to. The collectivity may be a merger of individuals; still, the merger is a thing in itself, with a character of its own. This artifact of man is greater than its maker.
Once the fiction of a separate and superseding society is accepted as fact, logic has no difficulty in marching directly to the income tax and to the interventions that follow in its wake.
In the first place, the fictional premise liquidates the doctrine of “natural rights”—of immunities inhering in the individual.
That doctrine, say the collectivists, is an unprovable assumption; actually, they point out, the individual exists only within the framework of society. He is like part of a machine, necessary to its operation, but replaceable and therefore of consequence only as an accessory. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
As a matter of experience, they say, what we call rights are merely the liberties that society (acting through its managing committee, the goveminent) deems it advisable, in its own interests, to permit the individual to enjoy; when society finds the exercise of these liberties inconsistent with its purposes, it is entirely justified in withdrawing them. There are no immutable immunities.
Particularly is this so in the case of property. The individual may not lay claim to what he produces simply because he produces nothing by himself. Society produces everything; the more integrated the society, the greater the subdivision of labor, the greater the total production and the greater the dependence of the individuals on the collectivity.
It follows from this line of reasoning that society alone has a vested interest in all production, and what the individual obtains through the system of wages and profits may be appropriated at will; he holds it in trusteeship only. The judgment of the governing committee as to what part he may keep for his own consumption cannot be questioned.
Thus we have the rationale of the income tax, if one is needed; in point of fact, the political establishment does not go in for rationalization, but exercises its power of confiscation on the basis of law and custom.
That the income tax was bound to transfer sovereignty from the people to a ruling class is seen when we look into the economic nature of the levies. It is not, as the title infers, a tax on earnings; it is a tax on that part of the earnings that might have become capital. Obviously, the State does not take what the earner consumes, it takes what he might have saved.
Savings become capital, things used in the production of consumable wealth, like machines, railroads, buildings. The more savings thus invested the larger the capital structure of the community, and the larger the capital structure the greater the abundance of things men live by.
What the State takes thus lowers the total productive capacity and, consequently, the standard of living. Dependence on the State follows as a matter of course.….
The repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment is the one thing we can do to save America from the dust-pile fate of other civilizations. That alone will decentralize and weaken the American State— and set up government again.