Key ideas: Published in 1943. Ayn Rand believed The God of the Machine was the greatest book written in the last three hundred years.
The God of the Machine is the greatest book written in the last three hundred years. It is the first complete statement of the philosophy of individualism as a political and economic system. It is the basic document of capitalism...
The God of the Machine is a document that could literally save the world—if enough people knew of it and read it. The God of the Machine does for capitalism what the Bible did for Christianity—and, forgive the comparison, what Das Kapital did for Communism or Mein Kampf for Nazism. It takes a book to save or destroy the world...
It is the book on capitalism and individualism, the book that will give readers ammunition in any argument with collectivists, the book that will answer their every question and tell them everything they want to know about Americanism—philosophically, historically, economically, morally.
Ayn Rand, 1943.
The military strength of Rome derived from the complete subordination of the army to civil authority but this does not occur merely by saying it shall be so. An army is a diversion of energy from the productive life of a nation.
Modern mass armies are supplied through a single power outlet but with a complicated and lengthy transmission arrangement for the pick-up and again for the spread, by which a great deal of energy is used in transit, and if there is a break or an overload or an inadequate current on the trunk line, nothing else will hold.
In the Roman republic, control of the army was ensured by the multiple direct hook-up, in local control of conscription. The soldiers' reward for winning a campaign was to go home. Their loyalty to the commander was restricted to military orders given under the Senate's commission. The commander on active service was subject to direct instructions from the Senate, which were enforceable because the army was likewise dependent on the Senate for supplies. If a commander was superseded, his soldiers would obey the Senate they were a citizen army. A commander had very little chance of sitting tight and establishing an independent regime in a foreign region....
As has been seen, the army of the Republic operated spatially as a lateral instrument of the civil authority, an extensor swung from a universal joint. The extensor weakened as it lengthened, while the load it clutched was much greater.
When the several armies occupied the provinces, the weights at the outer ends, which could neither be dropped nor managed, dragged them from the socket, and then impelled them against the center like gigantic battering rams. The "arm of the law" was unequal to the reach and retractive action demanded by such an unprecedented spread of its field.
Hence the sudden accession to world power literally tore Rome apart, in the civil wars of the Triumvirate. The state could not have survived if the cohesive principle had not continued to act upon the particles.
The republic did perish. What had happened was that the primary direction of the current of energy was reversed, and with it the incidence of physical powe. The republic was formed by a community that produced its own livelihood, including the personnel and maintenance of the army the energy originated within the stater. It could meet extraordinary demands in war because the normal expenses of the state were moderate and the agencies of direct authority were so arranged as to provide the most economical pick-up.
When a state relies upon a citizen army for defense, the intrinsic difficulty is to find a way to connect and disconnect the individual for intermittent military duty at minimum expense and with the least dislocation of the civil economy. hat problem was fairly well solved by the republic, Twith a centrifugal mechanism as the source of energy required. It could not operate in reverse.
With the world in fee, an incalculable flow of energy poured into Rome from external sources, a centripetal force, conveyed by the money from the provinces.
Money is indispensable to a long-circuit heavy load energy system. It must be used when a sufficient surplus is being produced to allow a margin for exchange, and cost of transport, over a considerable distance.
Money represents a storage battery when idle, and a generalized mode of the conversion of energy when it is in motion, with a function of equating time and space.
To adapt the disrupted mechanism of Rome to the new potential of energy from outside, the parts had to be interlocked or offset again by an indivisible nexus and semi-automatic distributor. The best that could be contrived by a desperate resort to expediency was a kind of jury rig.
One man was used as if he were a separate, and breakable, but replaceable object. His new position had no reference to his previous place in the social organism. He was something like a crude fuse plug, which may blow out but it should be borne in mind that the blowing-out of a fuse plug is a measure of safety in certain contingencies.
Practically any man who would do for the job would do; and if one failed, another must be thrown into the gap by the turn of events. He was the emperor, as long as he lasted. He had to take the incoming current and re-distribute it outward.
So he must not have any other social function in particular. The first man who made it stick did so mainly by that negative qualification, being neither a great soldier, an eloquent orator, nor a popular figure.
The isolation of a function is the only means by which its nature can be determined. Rome was the political power crystallized out of the social solution for the first time, and thus fixed as a historical exhibit of the nature of government. What it reveals is a peculiar negative during her regime, Rome contributed nothing to the actual productive processes.
This is not to say there were no productive persons among the Romans.
In the republic, they had been capable craftsmen and good farmers, disposed to thrift, else they would never have developed their keen sense of property but from the beginning of empire, the ratio of production to population diminished in Rome, while unemployment increased and became chronic. And in the imperial set-up, Rome was strictly a consumer of material goods.
The whole energy which sustained the empire as a going concern came from outside the imperial city. Further, it arose from private effort and intelligence, from the enterprise and labor of individuals, who asked in return—simply to be let alone.
What Rome did for them, as compared to any other known form of government, was to do nothing; the margin of benefit consisted in the limitation of government. The political power being withheld from economic activity, production was thus left to private management. The government of Rome was better than that of its predecessors because Rome governed .
This was the first demonstrationtion the axiom that the country which is least governed is best governed.
Before Rome found her formula, no clear distinction had been made between the public and private domain.
Egypt was fossilized by government ownership of the land; the absolute power of government made the country a helpless prey of invaders.
Private property was the norm with the Athenians; but they tried to impose monopolies on commerce with their colonies.
Carthage was a corporative state.
When the enterprisers of any nation tapped a source of trade, forthwith they sought to use the political power to impound the resultant flow completely. It cannot be done; once energy has been released, it must obey its own laws.
Greece and Carthage were continually rocked and fissured by the energy which backed up and pressed for an outlet; they could never achieve equilibrium. The Phoenicians were dragged along the track of the energy from Tyre to Carthage. Precisely because Carthage did contrive to clamp a monopoly on the main channel of trade with Europe, Carthage was swept away.
But because the Romans were not primarily traders, having been engaged with their great problem of finding the political principle, they were predisposed to allow the stream to follow its natural course.
The structure of the republic was vertical and its source of energy internal. It collapsed from the horizontal drive of an overwhelming current of energy from without.
The mechanism of the empire operated horizontally, by a centripetal intake of energy. Given the existent factors, it was capable of wide extension; but its continuance called for positive resistance to the agencies of government from the peripheral parts. It was really maintained by the residual separatist tendency of the component nations. While the sentiment or aspiration toward independence remained in the provinces, the bureaucracy was restrained from taking a heavier toll than the traffic would bear.
As receiver of taxes, the provincial governor was in immediate danger if he took too much. Then if Rome made excessive requisitions generally, the next person endangered was the emperor. The mechanism was thus constructed to utilize the pressure of latent revolt in its action, to kick back, recoil. When finally the provincials regarded themselves as Romans, and could not imagine themselves reverting to a separate nationality, the empire was done for.
In effect, it blew the cylinder head.
The latent opposition became negligible. The exactions of the bureaucracy increased, and the number of officials multiplied. More and more of the flow was diverted from production into the political mechanism. Whatever elements in motion compose a stream of energy, enough must go through to complete the circuit and renew production.
Water running in an aqueduct to turn a millwheel is a stream of energy; or electricity going through insulated wires; or goods in process from raw materials to finished product and conveyed by a system of transport. If the water channel is pierced with many small openings en route; or electricity taken off by more and more outlets; or the goods expropriated piecemeal at each stage of the process, finally not enough will go through for maintenance of the system.
In the energy system comprised in an exchange of goods, the producers and processors have to get back enough to enable them to keep on producing and working up the raw materials and to provide transport.
In the later Roman empire, the bureaucrats took such a large cut, at length scarcely anything went through the complete circuit.
Meantime the producers, receiving less and less in exchange for their products, were impoverished and discouraged. Naturally they tended to produce less, since they would get no fair return; in fact, effort from which there is no net return automatically must cease. They consumed their own products instead of putting them into exchange. With that the taxes began to dry up. Taxes must come from surplus.
The bureaucrats inevitably came down on the producers, with the object of sequestrating the energy directly at the source, by a planned economy. Farmers were bound to the soil; craftsmen to their workbenches; tradesmen were ordered to continue in business although the taxes and regulations did not permit them to make a living.
No one could change his residence or occupation without permission. The currency was debased. Prices and wages were fixed until there was nothing to sell and no work to be had.
Men who had formerly been productive escaped to the woods and mountains as outlaws, because they must starve if they went on working. Sealed at the source, the level of energy sank until it was no longer sufficient to operate the mechanism.
The Roman Wall in Britain marked high tide. When the Legions were withdrawn from the Wall, they had not been defeated by the barbarians; they were pulled back by the ebb of energy, the impossibility of maintaining supplies and reinforcements.
The barbarians were not a rising force; they floated in on the ebb. They had no objective, and no ability to take over or set up any system; they came in as wild animals will graze across once-cultivated fields when the cultivator cannot muster sufficient strength to keep his fences in repair.
The tax-eaters had absorbed the energy. A map of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries traced with the routes of the barbarian migrations is a network of wandering lines showing where the East Goths and the West Goths, the Huns and the Vandals, simply followed the main trade routes. There was nothing to stop them. The producers were already beaten by bureaucracy.
The Dark Ages are puzzling, not in being obscure, since immense tracts of human history have receded from view, but because they occur between lighted intervals, as if they had passed while we were asleep. These gulfs of time cannot be measured by the square of the distance. They lie between two antithetic concepts of humanity, of the relation of the individual to the group, two methods of association. The distinction was drawn clearly by Sir Henry Maine, with the designation of the Society of Contract and the Society of Status.
The axiom of the Declaration of Independence that all men are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to life is now probably read by many Americans as a truism which never could have been denied. On the contrary, in that statement it was laid down for the first time as the political principle of a nation. It is the primary postulate of the Society of Contract. In the Society of Contract man is born free, and comes into his inheritance with maturity.
By this concept all rights belong to the individual. Society consists of individuals in voluntary association. The rights of any person are limited only by the equal rights of another person.
In the Society of Status nobody has any rights. The individual is not recognized; a man is defined by his relation to the group, and is presumed to exist only by permission.
The system of status is privilege and subjection. By the ultimate logic of the Society of Status, a member of the group who has not committed even a minor offense might be put to death for "the good of society."
The Society of Status is obliged to restrict production to the energy potential it can accommodate. It does so by collectivism.
Group ownership as the norm of property requires the denial of liberty to persons. Collective land tenure makes for inferior agriculture; and prevents the improvement of tools. Medieval farming gave a miserably low yield.
The resultant poor standard of living ensues famine and plague, thus reducing the vigor and numbers of the population and making it amenable to control. Only the most meager economy—coarse diet, manual labor, the minimum of comfort, convenience, and pleasure—can be adjusted to a planned economy; for a planned economy cannot even be imagined except under political subjection.
About 1560 or 1570, Etienne de la Boetie, the friend of Montaigne, filled with despair by the Wars of Religion, wrote:
What think you of the dire fate that has brought us to birth in these times? and what are you resolved to do? For my own part, I see no other course than to emigrate, forsake my home and go wherever fortune bears me. Long now the wrath of the gods has warned me to flee—showing me those vast and open lands beyond the ocean. When, on the thresh-old of our century, a new world rose from the waves, the gods—we may well believe—destined it as a refuge where men shall till free fields under a fairer sky, while the cruel sword and shameful plague doom the ruin of Europe. Over there are fertile plains awaiting the plough, a land without bourne or master—it is there I will go.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—what men found in America was the wish they had sent in anticipation. They brought with them the effective knowledge to make it come true.
Montaigne himself, whose subtle candor disestablished authority as the weather brings down a stone wall, commented:
If anything could have tempted my youth, it would have been the ambition to share the dangers of this new enterprise.
Yet Montaigne, like his friend, was no serf, but a seigneur, enjoying the privileges of rank and a good estate. It was his mind that was tempted to range abroad. He was the epitome of his age, furnishing his medieval tower as a study in which he pondered tranquilly the ideas which must undercut the whole structure.
Spain was electrocuted, burned out, by receiving a high voltage of energy into a political structure and mechanism without proper transmission lines, outlets, and insulation.
Making contact with America, Spain picked up a vast stored charge of energy in the form of the precious metals which were convertible into European currency. Thereafter the country presented an almost incredible spectacle, with treasure ships unloading bullion year by year in unprecedented quantities, and the people increasingly impoverished by inverse ratio until they were reduced to hunger and rags.
Every ordinance now recommended and applied in the name of a planned economy was tried out in Spain during that period on the same pretext of public necessity, with the inevitable consequences of stopping production.
Business could be done only by license; manufactures and trade were restricted; mines in Spain were shut down by order; real money was seized from private owners, who were forced to accept government paper in exchange, and imprisoned or executed if they attempted to refuse.
Taxes and tariffs multiplied. Everything went into government; and the government was always bankrupt.... The condition of Spain while still in possession of her New World empire (circa 1700) was thus described:
A country without an army, justice or police, and absolutely without liberty.... The grandees are contemptuous and contemptible. They have nothing except pride, poverty, laziness and the pox. They have no education and no sort of knowledge.
Commerce and industry were at a standstill, agriculture in decay; and though there was still a considerable revenue from America, there was no money in circulation
Though much of the energy which Spain drew from the new world served only to fuse Spain into agonized rigidity, some had to go on through, and was thus returned to productive channels else- where in Europe. The money circulated, and stimulated rival nations and rebellious provinces to break the Spanish monopoly by trading on their own account...
The balance of power fell to England because England allowed the energy to flow most freely, which is to say that England conceded the most liberty to the individual by respecting private property and abandoning by degrees the practice of political trade monopolies.
The crucial test of private property is the attitude of government toward money. Devaluation of currency is outright expropriation.
The British empire was founded when the debased coinage was restored to standard during the opening years of the reign of Elizabeth, on the advice of Gresham.
At the time, English trade was in distress, the national treasury was empty, the national credit was gone and mercantile credit shaky, war was threatening and rebellion a possibility. In such circumstances, governments usually resort to repudiation, confiscation, and fiat currency. Instead, England took the opposite course. The world came under her sway.
The British empire ended three hundred and fifty years later, when England again debased her coinage, defaulted on her debts, confiscated private property, and abrogated personal liberty.
These are not sentimental considerations; they constitute the mechanism of production and therefore of power. Personal liberty is the pre-condition of the release of energy. Private property is the inductor which initiates the flow. Real money is the transmission line; and the payment of debts comprises half the circuit.
An empire is merely a long circuit energy-system. The possibility of a short circuit, ensuing leakage and breakdown or explosion, occurs in the hook-up of political organization to the productive processes. This is not a figure of speech or analogy, but a specific physical description of what happens.
The first abstract generalization made by Europeans in regard to the American aborigines was that the less civilized tribes had no government. Europe was far enough from that condition to be struck with astonishment. The fact gave rise to the myth of the Noble Savage, which now seems like a gratuitous fabrication because it was translated into poetic and pictorial form
The Noble Savage was a syllogism, a logical construction from the premises of the European theory of government... It was assumed that without government every man's hand must be against his neighbor, and every kind of crime would be committed by everyone... And since plenty of crimes certainly were committed, it was arguable that more would be if individuals were allowed leeway.
Thus it was a profound shock to discover that crime was rather less prevalent among savages with no government than in a society with authoritarian government minutely applied. The savages practiced most of the lay virtues: courage, hospitality, truthfulness, loyalty, perhaps even chastity. True that they made war and were sometimes cruel, but Europeans made war and legalized torture.
Still, men do not readily abandon an opinion by which they have justified their institutions therefore it could only be supposed that savages were peculiarly noble by nature or anyhow, American savages were so.
During centuries past, in Europe, various "liberties" had been wrested or bought from authority, but such concessions had always been phrased as grants from above, not right but privilege.
When the sum became considerable, the Society of Contract could at least be imagined. It had been imagined, and projected to the New World. In the New World it had become a fact. At length the time was ripe to affirm it as a political concept, without reservations.
The terms were found: all men are endowed by their Creator with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Freedom was indivisible, a pre-condition. To talk of several "freedoms" is to use the language of Europe, not of America; it is an abandonment of the basic principle on which the United States was founded....
The change from the European basis of government was made by positing that men are born free, that since they begin with no government, they must therefore institute government by voluntary agreement, and thus government must be their agent, not their superior. Since volition is a function of the individual, the individual has the precedent right.
First, energy is a natural phenomenon, calling for no abstract definition at that stage of human association in which energy operates only through the units and modes of conversion found in nature.
Second, in mechanical engineering, dealing with inanimate objects, the prime consideration is so obvious that it does not need to be postulated or given a separate value in conscious calculation. This is the factor of the underlying base. The physical earth is the base of all mechanism. The engineer need only choose a spot and level or solidify it to permit the engine to rest upon it, and of course he must balance, weight, or clamp down his machine so that it will not turn turtle. But he knows the earth is there; all his calculations have that factor included as a distributed component; mass, weight, extension, stresses, volume, are measures established from the base.
Third, in mechanical engineering, which is confined to material terms, the source of energy is designated; a unit can be determined, and the transmission and load proportioned to the flow. Every factor is capable of measurement.
Finally, and most important in that it obscures the nature of government, fhysics has no name for the exact function which is delegated to government. It is something which does not exist in any manifestation of energy through inanimate material. It is peculiar to living creatures. Energy is pre-existent in the universe, and cannot be created out of nothing; but in a specific energy circuit, it is possible to designate an approximate point at which a moiety of the universal energy is introduced to the circuit; this is the dynamo, generator, converter, or motor.
In the social organization, man is the dynamo, in his productive capacity. Government is an end-appliance, and a dead end in respect of the energy it uses.
Now in principle a mechanism composed of inanimate material, utilizing energy, is wholly calculable. A motor of a certain power will propel a certain load on a certain gradient; if the power is cut off, mass and momentum will determine its stopping point on the level, or an obstacle of a certain resistance will stop it.
No similar prediction can be made of the actions of a human being functioning as such. True, his muscular strength can be measured; but while he is moving about under his own power it is not possible to measure and predict what will cause him to start, stop, turn, or accelerate. That depends on what he thinks, a non-measurable factor.
He has a faculty for which no equivalent is found in the processes of inanimate nature. He is self-starting, and he can inhibit himself.
As the word indicates, the inhibitory faculty is a function of the individual; strictly speaking, it cannot be delegated. No faculty can be delegated. One man may bestow the product of his labor and talent upon another voluntarily one man may deprive another of his product by force or fraud; or men may trade their labor or product.
But a man cannot transfer his strength or intelligence to another man's physical frame. What can be done, in case an individual fails to inhibit himself as he has agreed to do, or if he infringes the liberty or takes the property of another, is to exact a forfeit or impose external restraints; and officials can be empowered by delegated authority to execute the seizure. By the same means, such officials can take a cut from production, in taxes, to support themselves and pay the expenses of their organization.
That is what government does, and all it can do. It is a prohibitory and expropriative agency. ts type of mechanism necessarily corresponds to its function.
There is no collective good. Strictly speaking, there is not even any common good. There are in the natural order conditions and materials through which the individual, by virtue of his receptive and creative faculties and volition, is capable of experiencing good.
Let it be asked, is not sunlight a common good? No; persons do not enjoy the benefit by community, but singly. A blind man cannot see by community. The same degree of sunshine may induce sunstroke in one person while another derives benefit from it; although incidentally, it will not even be the same ray of sunlight which falls on both.
Alexander the Great, with the power of empire at his command, asked Diogenes: "Is there anything I can do for you?" Diogenes replied: "You can stand aside from between me and the sunlight."
"The greatest good of the greatest number" is a vicious phrase; for there is no unit of good which by addition or multiplication can make up a sum of good to be divided by the number of persons.
Jeremy Bentham, having adopted the phrase, spent the rest of his life trying to extract some meaning from his own words. He meandered into almost incredible imbecilities, without ever perceiving why they couldn't mean anything.
If ten men enjoy playing checkers and only one enjoys a symphony, which is the greatest good in sum? and if a choice must be made which shall be provided, and the symphony could be proved to be eleven times as "good" as the checkers, what then? the allotment must be either the greatest good to the lesser number or the lesser good to the greatest number.
In any case, it is impossible to disguise the fact that good accrues only to individuals (the "number" gives that away, for it must be the number of persons); but if the good of one person is supposed to equate with the suffering of another, it is monstrous. It would justify abominable tortures of a minority if the majority claimed to benefit thereby for if "good" is quantitative and makes up a sum by majority, there can be no judge of what is good except the majority
This rule is, in fact, the justification alleged by the Nazis for the extermination of the Jews, as of the Russian Communists for the beastly murder of the most productive members of the population. Both have acted on the same theory.
History within nations consists of the struggle of the individual against government; and between nations, of the free economy against the closed economy. These are two aspects of the same process.
The primitive life of humanity is a unique phase of natural history, being occupied with the effort of man to master his environment instead of merely adapting himself to it. The use of fire, of hunting weapons, and the taming of animals, come under this head.
When he has succeeded in such direct contacts, the next step is to begin changing his environment, by cultivation of the soil, by building permanent shelter and storage, and finally by contriving mechanism for the conversion of energy; these call for time-space organization by delegating authority.
But since such authority can only be prohibitive, the problem is to keep this repressive agency subordinate to the creative faculty. The difficulty is enormous; an advanced understanding of engineering principles is required for its solution.
In default, the class system developed, an order which places the whole community under arrest*, estops energy at the source, and restricts it to a local circuit. Original thought therefore becomes a crime, because it would release energy. Even in a high culture with a class system, the repressive principle exhibits its character by imposing the death penalty for unauthorized opinion, as heresy or treason.
* As lately as the reign of Louis XIV in France it was advisable for a noble about the court to ask leave even to go to his own estate, because he could be imprisoned at the king's pleasure indeterminately without charge or trial by lettre de cachet. Or he might instead be forbidden to quit his estate, or to return to Paris
We see this system returning now, first by degrees and then by blanket orders preventing movement or herding people into concentration camps.
Before the world war of 1914, this medieval condition of general arrest had been largely thrown off and half forgotten almost everywhere except in Czarist Russia... The more civilized nations did not require passports, but issued them on request of their citizens merely because they might be called for in such backward regions.
The reactionary drift toward status government is also signalized by the persistent discrediting of reason, and the deliberate corruption of language, to prevent communication.
[T]he Marxist terminology reduces verbal expression to literal nonsense on the basis of fact and usage; this is not obvious gibberish, nor the humorous nonsense which will sometimes elucidate an intrinsic difficulty of expression or indicate a gap in knowledge, but arrangements of words according to the rules of grammar, in which each word taken separately has a customary meaning, but which in the given sequence, the sentence, mean nothing at all.
For example, let it be said that: "An isosceles triangle is green." The several words are in common use, and as parts of speech they are placed in proper order' but the whole statement is absurd. That is bad enough, but it would be rather worse if one spoke of the "roundness of a triangle."
The phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" is like the "roundness of a triangle," a contradiction in terms. It has no meaning.
The theory of "dialectical materialism" is a misuse of terms of the same type as the statement that an isosceles triangle is green...
Fools might argue solemnly that an isosceles triangle is not green but blue, or that a green isosceles triangle will produce a blue circle and the two will then synthesize into a purple cow or rhomboid; still these statements are empty. This is specifically the language of fools; for the deficiency which is indicated by the word fool is the incapacity to understand categories and the relation of things and qualities.
Contract law is the same type of mechanism in the political organization. The legal restriction does not occur until after individuals have made a voluntary contract and one of the parties fails to carry out its terms. Contract law has no primary authority, no jurisdiction unless invoked by the individual; and then it can take cognizance only of the point at issue, which is determined by the previous agreement of individuals. It is indisputably nothing but an agency, initiative being vested in the individual.
It is the only method of organization which leaves the creative faculty and corollary productive processes their inherent and necessary freedom. The political instrument must be of a secondary character.
The American revolutionaries had declared the axiom of the rights of the individual, the Society of Contract, as the reason and justification for their independence. An indigenous aristocracy would nullify their intention. Such vestige as remained, in the form of entail, which is the root of the society of status, was accordingly abolished.
The separate states already existed, and had not ceded their several sovereignties to the original loose federation. Their natural resistance as political entities in being was strong enough to defeat proposals that their autonomy should be extinguished, and tended to obscure the future danger in that direction.
The question immediately presented was how to bring them together in "a more perfect union"—without lapsing into democracy. What was wanted was a Republic.
The objection to democracy was clear and cogent; but for quite opposite reasons from those of the Old World. It was obvious that democracy must dissolve the European order of Society, which was hierarchical, framed to hereditary rank. The premise of democracy is supposed to be natural equality*.
* Equality in itself signifies nothing, implies no values; two zeros are equal. Liberty attaches value to it. The argument that conscription is right because it is applied equally would justify torture if applied equally. This argument has been carried further by a pseudo-liberal: "The voluntary system sounds well. In practise it is a moral horror . . . since no one can tell by looking at a young man whether he is doing essential war work, or is married or has children, or is perhaps not in good health. The voluntary system is not voluntary. It is in practise the worst form of compulsion . . . excellently designed to make young men unhappy." Then slavery is not slavery, because the world is peopled with moral imbeciles, all equally terrified of the casual glance of a stranger.
But the American axiom asserted political equality as a corollary of the inalienable right of every man to liberty. Democracy was inadmissible because it must deny that right and lapse into despotism, as it has always done. It does so abstractly, by its own logical contradiction; and in practice because logic is a statement of sequence. It is not liberty and equality that are incompatible, but liberty and democracy.
Liberty is a truly natural condition; for life itself is possible to a human being only by virtue of his capacity for independent action. If any living creature is subjected to absolute restraint, it dies. Human life is of an order transcending the deterministic necessity of physics; man exists by rational volition, free will. Hence the rational and natural terms of human association are those of voluntary agreement, not command.
Therefore the proper organization of society must be that of free individuals. And their equality is posited on the plain fact that the qualities and attributes of a human being are ultimately not subject to measure at all; a man equals a spiritual entity.
But democracy is a collective term; it describes the aggregate as a whole, and assumes that the right and authority reside in the whole, though derived from the adult condition of the individuals comprised.
Then it must be supposed that at an unknown moment by an unknown sanction and for no reason whatever such right and authority was irrevocably transferred from the individuals to a group which is nothing but a numerical sum, or particles merged into mass. The authority then is not in any part, nor is any part of it in any part of the mass.
Thus democracy resolves into pure process, and even the process is fictitious, for individuals cannot actually merge, though a group can exercise the function of mass for a given purpose at a given time, by inaction, a negative.
The fictitious process imagined as operating in democracy is of a physical and mathematical and non-moral order, beginning with an arbitrary number delimited by accident of residence or descent.
But if the authority resides in the collective whole, it is evident that with the disagreement of even one person, the whole is no longer existent or operative; in which case no general action whatever could be legitimately undertaken.
The prime presumption has vanished. In practice then democracy must abandon its own pretended entity of the collective whole, and rely upon majority. But majority is only a part; thus majority rule implies inconceivably that the part is greater than the whole.
Furthermore, even majority is not always obtainable; only a plurality may favor a given course of action in which case one minority must command several other minorities which if added together are greater in number or weight. Such is the inherent contradiction in the theory of democracy.
In any event, personal liberty is wiped out at the very beginning, with the theoretic transition from particles to mass or from the unit to the sum. Slavery of a minority, or of "foreigners," is quite consistent with majority rule*.
* The modern cliche, "This is a democracy, I am the government," is nonsensical. Even as an agency, the government is a formal organization with an authorized personnel, of which the private citizen is not a member. When several persons employ an umpire, they are distinctively not the umpire, although he holds that office by their agreement.
But in reason, if one man has no right to command all other men—the expedient of despotism—neither has he any right to command even one other man; nor yet have ten men, or a million, the right to command even one other man, for ten times nothing is nothing, and a million times nothing is nothing.
The material objection to democracy is that it has no structure, the practical defect corresponding to the moral defect. Gravity determines the movements of an aggregation of separate particles over a given surface; with every disturbance each particle is subject to the discontinuous hazard of chance; if a number of them move together under the same impulsion, it is as dislocated mass. Active difference of opinion in democracy is either the detachment of a particle or dislocated mass. As Madison said, "it affords no remedy for the evils of faction." Faction is fragmentary mass, the several fragments being thrown into collision by whatever force occasioned the cleavage.
To understand why bases cannot be established on popular suffrage, with no property qualification, it is only necessary to try an equivalent with any other physical materials. Let the substance on which the structure must be supported be composed of separate particles of equal size and weight, and each susceptible of movement—obviously nothing can possibly stand on it.
A pillar or cornerstone cannot be fixed on a heap of buckshot, or a mound of sand. There must be something solid, self-contained, and immovable. A regional area answers that description, and will sustain a permanent base of political representation. The area must be definitely circumscribed, and the representation must pertain to it, not to the mobile inhabitants, who may wander about and cross the boundaries at will.
Failure to discern that a political organization consists of both structure and mechanism, that is, a fixed base to which agencies of action are attached, has caused untold disaster throughout the ages.
Sir Isaac Newton was asked by the British Treasury officials and financiers of his day why the monetary pound had to be a fixed quantity of precious metal. Why, indeed, must it consist of precious metal, or have any objective reality? Since paper currency was already accepted, why could not notes be issued without ever being redeemed?
The reason they put the question supplies the answer the government was heavily in debt, and they hoped to find a safe way of being dishonest. But Newton was asked as a mathematician, not as a moralist. He replied: "Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit."
Paper currency cannot be described mathematically as money. A dollar is a certain weight of gold; that is a mathematical description, by measure (weight). Is a piece of paper of certain dimensions (length, breadth, and thickness, or else weight) a dollar? Certainly not. Is a given-sized piece of paper a dollar even if numerals and words of a certain size are stamped on it with a given quantity of ink? No.
The requirements of a sound currency are simple. If five apples are exchanged for a pound of cheese, and the cheese for two yards of cotton, and the cotton for a peck of potatoes, and the potatoes for two hours of labor, by what common measure can these various items be reckoned? Each is worth any one of the others, and all of them are worth five times what any one of them is worth; but it signifies nothing to say that any one of them is worth one, or that five of them are worth five. One what? Five what?
Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. As the several items can be exchanged, they must be equal but in what terms? Not in pounds, yards, or hours; they are equal in value.
Then what is wanted is a unit of value to reckon by. Any of the items could be designated as the unit of value if the sequence of transactions were considered closed on the spot. But these are perishable goods, and have been considered as fixed quantities. General exchange must go on in an endless sequence through time and distance, to include variable quantities of raw ma- terials existent in nature, labor applied to them, and end-use, consumption or inactive possession.
Then what is wanted is a medium of exchange, something for which everything else can be exchanged, so that it enters into every transaction as the unit of value, and serves for an indefinite number of transactions, an endless use...
Gold was not and is not given value by fiat, any more than cheese or cotton or leather were given value by fiat. It has value because it serves a vital need. Nothing can be given value by fiat.
If a gold coin of the Roman Republic were dug up now, it would have its original value, though the Roman Republic perished two thousand years ago. So would a Russian gold rouble minted under the czars, or a gold coin of Germanyvor France dated before 1914, though the last czar was shot inva cellar, the last German emperor fled the country and died in exile, and France has suffered invasion and conquest. But paper currency of Russia, Germany, or France before 1914 is now waste paper.
Primitive savages know how to start a fire by friction. They must have discovered the process tens of thousands of years ago. Yet as lately as the middle of the eighteenth century scientists were still debating whether or not heat was a material element (an "indestructible substance"), though they were already experimenting with the steam engine. So a principle may be put in practice long before it is understood or defined.
Therefore it is not strange if the obvious fact that a high production system works on a long circuit of energy has not been perceived and the general laws governing its creation and maintenance have not been formulated...
When energy is routed on the long circuit, it is done by actions in which the force expended is not merely incommensurable to the result, but does not enter into the specific physical sequence of transmission at all...
This is what happens by the use of money, or by credit or other contractual agreements. There is a real, material, unbroken sequence of physical energy carried through in the long circuit of production, which is visible and easily traced.
A farmer grows food; he sells most of his product and buys what else he needs, perhaps a tractor. The food has supplied energy to other men who dig ore, make steel, manufacture motors, build and run railways; innumerable other products enter into the sequence; but it is a physical succession of material objects in motion and in process of the conversion of energy, completing a circuit which brings back the tractor to the farmer, or maybe coffee from Brazil or tea from China or gasoline from Texas oil wells.
There is no break in the line. But the continuity of the flow is not absolutely and precisely like that of a stream of water running downhill. Left to itself, the water would never run uphill; it must flow down. Yet man may intervene, with engineering devices, by which the full force of the stream is utilized to send a moiety of the water upward again.
Likewise in the production circuit a train of cars is hauled uphill, against gravity, by energy which man has brought under control for that purpose. The train stops at stations, because man cuts the flow temporarily. It would never have run in that particular channel "of itself," nor would it start again or continue in the production line without man in the circuit.
When the farmer sells his produce or buys a tractor, using real money, the imponderable is represented separately. The weight of the gold does not correspond to the weight of the tractor, nor does the energy exerted in handing over the gold correspond to the energy of the tractor in motion. If a check is given, so that the real existence of the gold may be overlooked, the nature of the transaction is still further obscured. But what occurs is that the energy in the continuous physical sequence is routed in a direction specified by a representative parallel action.
Perhaps the easiest way to perceive the process is by assuming a production circuit much shorter and simpler than it could ever be in fact.
Imagine the farmer, the miner, the steel maker, the tractor manufacturer, etc., standing in a circle, each passing his own product forward on his right, in one direction while money is passed back on the left in the opposite direction, making payment at each transfer.
The physical energy which constitutes the circuit is never in the money; it is in the goods and transport facilities. Further, the intervention of man in the circuit introduces a factor by which more energy is produced (or picked up) en route than is consumed (lost or dissipated). This cannot occur in any specific flow of energy which is not under human control; inanimate nature contains nothing equivalent to the action of man's mind, or to the parallel actions by which man routes such a flow. Nor can these functions be built into a piece of machinery. Forever they must require human intelligence and volition.