Key ideas: Published in 1959. “To Francine: When you are old enough to read this book there will be a Society and there will be a State, and both will take their character from the reigning ideas of the times. I suspect that these ideas, planted in the American mind before you were born, will be so different from those expressed in this book that you may have some difficulty in understanding how your grandfather ‘got that way.’ That could provide you with some good, clean fun—try-ing to reconstruct a long-lost pattern of thought.” (F. Chodorov)
WHAT HISTORY will think of our times is something that only history will tell. But it is a good guess that it will select collectivism as the identifying characteristic of the twentieth century. For, even a quick survey of the developing pattern of thought during the past fifty years shows up the dominance of one central idea:
that Society is a transcendent entity, something apart from and greater than the sum of its parts, possessing a suprahuman character and endowed with like capacities. It operates in a field of its own, ethically and philosophically, and is guided by stars unknown to mortals.
Hence, the individual, the unit of Society, cannot judge it by his own limitations nor apply to it standards by which he measures his own thinking and behavior. He is necessary to it, of course, but only as a replaceable part of a machine. It follows, therefore, that Society, which may concern itself paternalistically with individuals, is in no way dependent on them.
In one way or another, this idea has insinuated itself into almost every branch of thought and, as ideas have a way of doing, has become institutionalized. Perhaps the most glaring example is the modern orientation of the philosophy of education. Many of the professionals in this field frankly assert that the primary purpose of education is not to develop the individual’s capacity for learning, as was held in the past, but to prepare him for a fruitful and “happy” place in Society; his inclinations must be turned away from himself, so that he can drop into the mores of his age group and beyond that into the social milieu in which he will live out his life. He is not an end in himself.
Jurisprudence has come around to the same idea, holding more and more that human behavior is not a matter of personal responsibility as much as it is a reflection of the social forces working on the individual; the tendency is to lay on Society the blame for crimes committed by its members. This, too, is a tenet of sociology, the increasing popularity of which, and its elevation to a science, attest to the hold that collectivism has on our times…
Collectivism is more than an idea. In itself, an idea is nothing but a toy of speculation, a mental idol. Since, as the myth holds, the suprapersonal Society is replete with possibilities, the profitable thing to do is to put the myth to work, to energize its virtue. The instrument at hand is the State, throbbing with political energy and quite willing to expend it on this glorious adventure. Thus comes Statism, or the worship of political power.
Statism is not a modern religion. Even before Plato, political philosophy concerned itself with the nature, origin, and justification of the State. But, while the thinkers speculated on it, the general public accepted political authority as a fact to be lived with and let it go at that.
It is only within recent times (except, perhaps, during periods when Church and State were one, thus endowing political coercion with divine sanction) that the mass of people have consciously or implicitly accepted the Hegelian dictum that “the State is the general substance, whereof individuals are but the accidents.”
It is this acceptance of the State as “substance,” as a suprapersonal reality, and its investment with a competence no individual can lay claim to, that is the special characteristic of the twentieth century.
In times past, the disposition was to look upon the State as something one had to reckon with, but as a complete outsider. One got along with the State as best one could, feared or admired it, hoped to be taken in by it and to enjoy its perquisites, or held it at arm’s length as an untouchable thing; one hardly thought of the State as the integral of Society. One had to support the State—there was no way of avoiding taxes—and one tolerated its interventions as interventions, not as the warp and woof of life. And the State itself was proud of its position apart from, and above, Society.
The present disposition is to liquidate any distinction between State and Society, conceptually or institutionally. The State is Society; the social order is indeed an appendage of the political establishment, depending on it for sustenance, health, education, communications, and all things coming under the head of “the pursuit of happiness.” In theory, taking college textbooks on economics and political science for authority, the integration is about as complete as words can make it.
In the operation of human affairs, despite the fact that lip service is rendered the concept of inherent personal rights, the tendency to call upon the State for the solution of all the problems of life shows how far we have abandoned the doctrine of rights, with its correlative of self-reliance, and have accepted the State as the reality of Society. It is this actual integration, rather than the theory, that marks off the twentieth century from its predecessors.
One indication of how far the integration has gone is the disappearance of any discussion of the State qua State—a discussion that engaged the best minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The inadequacies of a particular regime, or its personnel, are under constant attack, but there is no faultfinding with the institution itself. The State is all right, by common agreement, and it would work perfectly if the “right” people were at its helm.
It does not occur to most critics of the New Deal that all its deficiencies are inherent in any State, under anybody’s guidance, or that when the political establishment garners enough power a demagogue will sprout. The idea that this power apparatus is indeed the enemy of Society, that the interests of these institutions are in opposition, is simply unthinkable. If it is brought up, it is dismissed as “old-fashioned,” which it is; until the modern era, it was an axiom that the State bears constant watching, that pernicious proclivities are built into it…
Of a piece with this kind of thinking is a companion phrase, “We are the government.” Its use and acceptance is most illustrative of the hold collectivism has taken on the American mind in this century, to the exclusion of the basic American tradition.
When the Union was founded, the overriding fear of Americans was that the new government might become a threat to their freedom, and the framers of the Constitution were hard put to allay this fear.
Now it is held that freedom is a gift from government in return for sub-servience.
The reversal has been accomplished by a neat trick in semantics. The word “democracy” is the key to this trick. When one looks for a definition of this word, one finds that it is not a form of government but rather the rule by “social attitudes.” But what is a “social attitude”?
Putting aside the wordy explanations of this slippery concept, it turns out to be in practice good old majoritarianism; what 51 per cent of the people deem right is right, and the minority is perforce wrong. It is the General Will fiction under a new name.
There is no place in this concept for the doctrine of inherent rights; the only right left to the minority, particularly the minority of one, is conformity with the dominant “social attitude.”
This is the fulfillment of statism. It is a state of mind that does not recognize any ego but that of the collective.
For analogy, one must go to the pagan practice of human sacrifice: when the gods called for it, when the medicine man so insisted, as a condition for prospering the clan, it was incumbent on the individual to throw himself into the sacrificial fire.
In point of fact, statism is a form of paganism, for it is worship of an idol, something made by man. Its base is pure dogma. Like all dogmas this one is subject to interpretations and rationales, each with its coterie of devotees.
But, whether one calls oneself a Communist, Socialist, New Dealer, or just plain “democrat,” one begins with the premise that the individual is of consequence only as a servant of the mass idol. Its will be done.
Social and political pressures may compel the intellectually curious to put on an appearance of conformity—since one must live in one’s environment—but actual conformity is impossible for a mind of that kind. It must ask “why,” even of itself. And sometimes it is hardy enough to suggest an inadequacy in the prevailing pattern of thought and to speak out against it.
Even in this twentieth century there are those who hold, perhaps only in the privacy of their personality, that collectivism is erroneous and mischievous and will come to no good end…
They are in the minority, to be sure, as they have been throughout history; they are the “remnant” to whom Isaiah is instructed to carry the message. Perhaps these will find this inquiry inta the economics of Society, Government, and the State of some interest; it was written for them.
The presumably rational human animal has become so inured to political interventions that he cannot think of the making of a living without them; in all his economic calculations his first consideration is, what is the law in the matter? Or, more likely, how can I make use of the law to improve my lot in life?
This may be described as a conditioned reflex.
It hardly occurs to us that we might do better operating under our own steam, within the limits put upon us by nature, and without political restraints, controls, or subventions. It never enters our minds that these interventionary measures are placed in our path, like the trap, for purposes diametrically opposed to our search for a better living. We automatically accept them as necessary to that purpose.
Economics is not politics. One is a science, concerned with the immutable and constant laws of nature that determine the production and distribution of wealth; the other is the art of ruling. One is amoral, the other is moral.
Economic laws are self-operating and carry their own sanctions, as do all natural laws, while politics deals with man-made and man-manipulated conventions…
Economics, like chemistry, has nothing to do with politics
The intrusion of politics into the field of economics is simply an evidence of human ignorance or arrogance, and is as fatuous as an attempt to control the rise and fall of tides
The assumption that economics is subservient to politics stems from a logical fallacy. Since the State (the machinery of politics) can and does control human behavior, and since men are always engaged in the making of a living, in which the laws of economics operate, it seems to follow that in controlling men the State can also bend these laws to its will…
The evidence is that economics influences the character of politics, rather than the other way around.
A communist State (which undertakes to disregard the laws of economics, as if they did not exist) is characterized by its preoccupation with force; it is a fear State.
The aristocratic Greek city-State took its shape from the institution of slavery. In the nineteenth century, when the State, for purposes of its own, entered into partnership with the rising industrial class, we had the mercantilist or merchant State.
The Welfare State is in fact an oligarchy of bureaucrats who, in return for the perquisites and prestige of office, undertake to confiscate and redistribute production according to formulae of their own imagination, with utter disregard of the principle that production must fall in the amount of the confiscation.
It is interesting to note that all welfarism starts with a program of distribution—control of the market place with its price technique—and ends up with attempts to manage production; that is because, contrary to their expectations, the laws of economics are not suspended by their political interference, prices do not respond to their dicta, and in an effort to make their preconceived notions work they apply themselves to production, and there too they fail.
The imperviousness of economic law to political law is shown in this historic fact: in the long run every State collapses, frequently disappears altogether and becomes an archeological curio. Every collapse of which we have sufficient evidence was preceded by the same course of events.
The State, in its insatiable lust for power, increasingly intensified its encroachments on the economy of the nation, causing a consequent decline of interest in production, until at long last the subsistence level was reached and not enough above that was produced to maintain the State in the condition to which it had been accustomed. It was not economically able to meet the strain of some immediate circumstance, like war, and succumbed.
Preceding that event, the economy of Society, on which State power rests, had deteriorated, and with that deterioration came a letdown in moral and cultural values; men “did not care.” That is, Society collapsed and drew the State down with it.
There is no way for the State to avoid this consequence—except, of course, to abandon its interventions in the economic life of the people it controls, which its inherent avarice for power will not let it do. There is no way for politics to protect itself from politics.
The story of the American State is instructive. Its birth was most auspicious, being midwifed by a coterie of men unusually wise in the history of political institutions and committed to the safeguarding of the infant from the mistakes of its predecessors. Apparently, none of the blemishes of tradition marked the new State…
It was fed on strong stuff: Rousseau’s doctrine that government derived its powers from the consent of the governed, Voltaire’s freedom of speech and thought, Locke’s justification of revolution, and, above all, the doctrine of inherent rights. There was no regime of status to stunt its growth. In fact, everything was de novo…
The people were to be left alone, to work out their individual destinies with whatever capacities nature had endowed them. Toward that end, the State was surrounded with a number of ingenious prohibitions and limitations…
Better yet, it was condemned to get along on a meager purse; its powers of taxation were neatly circumscribed. It did not seem possible, in 1789, for the American State to do much in the way of interfering with the economy of the nation; it was constitutionally weak and off balance.
The ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before its authors, now in position of authority, began to rewrite it by interpretation, to the end that its bonds would loosen. The yeast of power that is imbedded in the State was in fermentation.
The process of judicial interpretation, continued to the present day, was later supplemented by amendment; the effect of nearly all the amendments, since the first ten (which were written into the Constitution by social pressure), was to weaken the position of the several state governments and to extend the power of the central government.
Since State power can grow only at the expense of social power, the centralization which has been going on since 1789 has pushed American Society into that condition of subservience which the Constitution was intended to prevent.
In 1913 came the amendment that completely unshackled the American State, for with the revenues derived from unlimited income taxation it could henceforth make unlimited forays into the economy of the people.
The Sixteenth Amendment not only violated the right of the individual to the product of his efforts, the essential ingredient of freedom, but it also gave the American State the means to become the nation’s biggest consumer, employer, banker, manufacturer, and owner of capital...
The metamorphosis of the American State from an apparently harmless establishment to an interventionary machine as powerful as that of Rome at its height took place within a century and a half; the historians estimate that the gestation of the greatest State of antiquity covered four centuries; we travel faster these days.
When the grandeur of Rome was at if tts grandest, the principal preoccupation of the State was the confiscation of the wealth produced by its citizens and subjects; the confiscation was legally formalized, as it is today, and even though it was not sugar-coated with moralisms or ideologically rationalized, some features of modern welfarism were put into practice.
Rome had its make-work programs, its gratuities to the unemployed, and its subsidies to industry. These things are necessary to make confiscation palatable and possible.
To the Romans of the times, this order of things probably seemed as normal and proper as it does today… The Romans hardly knew or cared about the “decline” in which they were living and certainly did not worry about the “fall” to which their world was riding. It is only from the vantage point of history, when it is possible to sift the evidence and find a cause-and-effect relationship, that a meaningful estimate of what was happening can be made. We know now that despite the arrogance of the State the economic forces that bear upon social trends were on the job.
The production of wealth, the things men live by, declined in proportion to the State’s exactions and interferences; the general concern with mere existence submerged any latent interest in cultural and moral values, and the character of Society gradually changed to that of a herd.
The mills of the gods grind slow but sure; within a couple of centuries the deterioration of Roman Society was followed by the disintegration of the State, so that it had neither the means nor the will to withstand the winds of historic chance. It should be noted that Society, which flourishes only under a condition of freedom, collapsed first; there was no disposition to resist the invading hordes.
The analogy [see above] suggests a prophecy and a jeremiad. But that is not within the scope of this essay, the hypothesis of which is that Society, Government, and the State are basically economic phenomena, that a profitable understanding of these institutions will be found in economics, not in politics.
This is not to say that economics can explain all the facets of these institutions, any more than the study of his anatomy will reveal all the secrets of the human being; but, as there cannot be a human being without a skeleton, so any inquiry into the mechanism of social integrations cannot bypass economic law.
Is THE STATE ordered in the nature of things? The classical theorists in political science were so persuaded…They had a syllogism to support their assumption: God made man; man made the State; therefore, God made the State. The State acquired divinity vicariously.
The reasoning was bolstered by an analogy; it is a certainty that the family organization, with its head, is in the natural order of things, and it follows that a group of families, with the State acting as overall father, is likewise a natural phenomenon…
Accepting a priori the naturalness of the State, they sought for the taproot of the institution in the nature of man. Surely, the State appears only when men get together, and that fact would indicate that its origin is lodged in the complexity of the human being; animals have no State.
This line of inquiry led to contradictions and uncertainties, as it had to because the evidence as to man’s nature lies in his moral behavior and this is far from uniform. Two men will respond differently to the same exigency, and even one man will not follow a constant pattern of behavior under all circumstances.
The problem which the political scientists with the theological turn of mind set for themselves was to find out whether the State owed its origin to the fact that man is inherently “good’ or”bad,” and on this point there is no positive evidence. Hence the contradictions in their findings
The three thinkers along these lines with whom we are most familiar, although they had their forerunners, are Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau.
As a starting point for their speculations, the three of them made use of the same hypothesis, that there was a time when men were not politically organized and lived under conditions called a “state of nature.” It was pure assumption, of course, since if men ever roamed the face of the earth as thoroughgoing isolationists, having no contact with one another except at the end of a club, they never would have left any evidence of it. There must always have been at least a family organization or we would not be here to talk about a “state of nature.”
At any rate, Hobbes maintained that in this pre-political state man was “brutish” and “nasty,” ever poised at the property and person of his neighbor. His predatory inclination was motivated by an overweening passion for material plenty.
But, says Hobbes, man was from the beginning endowed with the gift of reason, and at some point in his “natural” state his reason told him that he could do better for himself by cooperating with his fellow “natural” man. At that point he entered into a “social contract” with him, by the terms of which each agreed to abide by an authority that would restrain him from doing what his “nature” inclined him to do. Thus came the State.
Locke, on the other hand, is rather neutral in his moral findings; to him the question of whether man is “good” or “bad” is secondary to the fact that he is a creature of reason and desire. In fact, says Locke, even when he lived in his “natural” state, man’s principal concern was his property, the fruit of his labor.
His reason told him that he would be more secure in the possession and enjoyment of it if he submitted himself to a protective agency. He therefore entered into a “social contract” and organized the State.
Locke makes the first business of the State the protection of property and asserts that when a particular State is derelict in that duty it is morally correct for the people to replace it, even by force, with another.
Looking into the “state of nature,” Rousseau finds it to be an idyllic Eden, in which man was perfectly free and therefore morally perfect. There was only one flaw in this otherwise good life: the making of a living was difficult.
It was to overcome the hardships of “natural” existence that he gave up some of his freedom and accepted the “social contract.” As to the character of the contract, it is a blending of the will of each individual with that of every other signatory into what Rousseau calls the General Will.
Thus, while the three speculators were in some disagreement as to the nature of man, where the seed of the State was to be found, they nevertheless agreed that the State flowered from it.
It should be pointed out that this attempt to find an origin of the State was not their prime purpose, that each of them was interested in a political system of his own, and that each deemed it necessary to establish an origin that would fit in with his system…
Their common prepossession was that the State is in the natural order of things, and Hobbes gives it divine sanction. In that respect they followed tradition; early Christian speculation on the State referred to its ideal as the “City of God/’ and Plato spoke of his State as something”of which a pattern is made in heaven.”
In recent times a few investigators have turned to history for evidence as to the origin of the State and have evolved what is sometimes called the theory of the sociological State.
The records show, they observe, that all primitive peoples made their living in one of two ways, agriculture or livestock raising; hunting and fishing seem to have been side lines in both economies. The requirements of these two occupations developed clearly defined and different habits and skills.
The business of roaming around in search of grazing land… called for a well-knit organization of venturesome men, while the fixed routine of farming needed no organization and little enterprise.
The phlegmatic docility of scattered land workers made them easy prey for the daring herdsmen of the hills. Covetousness suggested attack.
At first, the historians report, the object of pilferage was women… The stealing of women was followed by the stealing of portable goods, and both jobs were accompanied by the wholesale slaughter of males and unwanted females.
Somewhere along the line the marauders hit upon the economic fact that dead men produce nothing, and from that observation came the institution of slavery; the herdsmen improved their business by taking along captives and assigning menial chores to them.
This master-slave economy, the theory holds, is the earliest manifestation of the State. Thus, the premise of the State is the exploitation of producers by the use of power.
Eventually, hit-and-run pilferage was replaced by the idea of security—or the continuing exaction of tribute from people held in bondage. Sometimes the investing tribe would take charge of a trading center and place levies on transactions, sometimes they would take control of the highways and waterways leading to the villages and collect tolls from caravans and merchants.
At any rate, they soon learned that loot is part of production and that it is plentiful when production is plentiful; to encourage production, therefore, they undertook to patrol it and to maintain “law and order.”
They not only policed the conquered people but also protected them from other marauding tribes; in fact, it was not uncommon for a harassed community to invite a warlike tribe to come in and stand guard, for a price.
The investing people held themselves aloof from the conquered, enjoying what later became known as extraterritoriality. They maintained cultural and political ties with their homeland, they retained their own language, religion, and customs, and in most cases did not disturb the mores of their subjects as long as tribute was forthcoming.
In time, for such is the way of propinquity, the ideational barriers between conquered and conquerors melted away and a process of amalgamation set in.
Closer contact with the conquered resulted in a blending of languages, religions, and customs…
The blending of the two cultures gave rise to a new one, not the least important feature of which was a set of customs and laws regularizing the accommodation of the dues-paying class to their masters. Necessarily, these conventions were formulated by the latter, with the intent of freezing their economic advantage into a legacy for their offspring.
The dominated people, who at first had resisted the exactions, had long ago been worn out by the unequal struggle and had resigned themselves to a system of taxes, rents, tolls, and other forms of tribute… Also, the codifying of the exactions eventually obliterated from memory the arbitrariness with which they had been introduced and covered them with an aura of correctness.
The laws fixed limits on the exactions, made excesses irregular and punishable, and thus established “rights” for the exploited class.
The exploiters wisely guarded these “rights” against trespass by their own more avaricious members, while the exploited, having made a comfortable adjustment to the system of exactions, from which some of them often profited, achieved a sense of security and self-esteem in this doctrine of “rights.”
Thus, through psychological and legal processes that stratification of Society became fixed. The State is that class which enjoys economic preference through its control of the machinery of enforcement.
The sociological theory of the State rests not only on the evidence of history but also on the fact that there are two ways by which men can acquire economic goods: production and predation. The first involves the application of labor to raw materials, the other the use of force.
Pillaging, slavery, and conquest are the primitive forms of predation, but the economic effect is the same when political coercion is used to deprive the producer of his product, or even when he accedes to the transfer of ownership as the price for permission to live.
Nor is predation changed to something else when it is done in the name of charity—the Robin Hood formula. In any case, one enjoys what another has produced, and to the extent of the predation the producer’s desires must go unsatisfied, his labor unrequited.
It will be seen that in its moral aspect the sociological theory leans on the doctrine of private property, the inalienable right of the individual to the product of his effort, and holds that any kind of coercion, exercised for any purpose whatsoever, does not alienate that right.
Incidentally, at first glance this theory seems to bear a resemblance to the dictum of Karl Marx that the State is the managing committee for the capitalistic class. But the resemblance is in the words, not in the ideas. The Marxian theory maintains that the State in other hands—the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—could abolish exploitation.
But the sociological theory of the State (or the conquest theory) insists that the State itself, regardless of its composition, is an exploitative institution and cannot be anything else; whether it takes over the property of the owner of wages or the property of the owner of capital, the ethical principle is the same.
If the State takes from the capitalist to give to the worker, or from the mechanic to give to the farmer, or from all to better itself, force has been used to deprive someone of his rightful property, and in that respect it is carrying on in the spirit, if not the manner, of original conquest.
Therefore, if the chronology of any given State does not begin with conquest, it nevertheless follows the same pattern because its institutions and practices continue in the tradition of those States that have gone through the historic process.
The American State did not begin with conquest; the Indians had no property that could be lifted and, being hunters by profession, they were too intractable to be enslaved. But the colonists were themselves the product of an exploitative economy, had become inured to it in their respective homelands, had imported and incorporated it in their new organization.
Many of them came to their new land bearing the yoke of bondage. All had come from institutional environments that had emerged from conquest; they knew nothing else, and when they set up institutions of their own they simply transplanted these environments. They brought the predatory State with them.
BEGINNING WITH THE OBVIOUS—there must be men before there is a Society, and there must be a Society before there is a Government… Therefore, we are compelled to ask the individual, the unit of social life, to tell us why he socializes, why he becomes political…. Perhaps a surer light on the question will be thrown if we look at the human being externally, without reference to his spiritual composition.
What do we observe as a constant in his career? To that question there is but one answer: that he is always, and wherever we find him, concerned with making a living… His economic pursuit is ingrained in him as a matter of necessity…
Is it not likely that if we apply ourselves to the means and methods he employs in the gaining of a living we shall learn that Society and Government are outgrowths of that process? Perhaps, after all, these institutions have their roots in economics. It is a plausible hypothesis at any rate.
To man, unlike other living creatures, the “making of a living” only begins with providing the necessaries, for he is so constituted that once that problem is solved, or even before it is fully solved, his imagination gives rise to other desires which, when gratified, give rise to still other desires and so on ad infnitum. His job of ’living” has no fixed perimeter… The catalytic agent of all human aspirations is production.
What, then, is production? It is the application of labor to the raw materials that nature provides for the making of things that satisfy human desires. Nothing can be produced in any other way [incl. services]… But even the singer needs sustenance, and the naked preacher might find the cold a hindrance to thought…
When you think of it, you realize that all the tangibles that men desire, like food and raiment, are congealed services, like cooking and designing, and therefore any distinction between goods and services, in an economic sense, is academic.
The fact that man is invariably dependent on raw materials for his living, even in the widest sense of living, stamps him as a “land animal.”…
[Man] has the capacity of making use of nature to further his ends. This capacity we call reason, which is the faculty of extracting from a number of related phenomena a causative principle and of applying this principle in his business.
For instance, he observes that nature does not grow edible things just anywhere and at any time, but only when and where soil of a given texture enjoys a given amount of sunshine and a given amount of moisture. Learning these secrets of nature, he sets them down in formulae, which he calls natural laws.
Then, guiding himself by these laws, he goes about growing the food he wants; he becomes a maker of abundance. That, his animal friends cannot do.
We say man “conquers” nature, but the fact is his conquest consists of accommodating himself to the means employed by nature in achieving its ends; he cannot get the results he is after unless he learns and makes himself subservient to its laws.
Primitive people are primitive simply because they have not gotten around to fathoming these laws and making use of them.
And the failures of what we call the “civilized’ man, in whatever field he chooses to operate, are likewise due to his ignorance of nature’s laws or his arrogance in trying to make his way in disregard of them; they are, however, immutable and self-enforcing, and his failures indicate that they carry their own sanctions…
He is particularly at a disadvantage when he declares (as he sometimes does, especially in the fields of economics and social science) that there are no natural laws, that man is uninhibited by any such fictions; that’s when he gets himself into real trouble.
Given the natural resources and a knowledge of nature’s laws, the making of a living calls for an expenditure of labor. That is the inexorable price of production. But the expenditure of labor induces the unpleasant experience of weariness, something man does not want. (We are concerned only with labor expended for economic purposes… But he does not labor for the sake of laboring.)…
To avoid exertion, man might … curtail his appetites to the barest necessities, to the things that make existence possible and that can be had with the minimum of effort. (Nothing can be had with no effort.)
He invents labor-saving devices; he expends labor to save labor. He puts in “overtime”—or labor in excess of what is necessary to keep him alive—in the production of things that will save him labor in his future enterprises or will enable him to better his circumstances. We call those things capital
As far as we know, man has always been a capitalist, a storer up of labor, and we cannot conceive of a time when he was not making such tools. Thus, the stone axe which he made to subdue an edible beast became, after centuries of reflection and trial-and-error, a cleaving knife and the Chicago stockyards. Capital accumulation has always been man’s career. In any distinction between primitive man and civilized man we use as a yardstick their relative accumulations and use of capital.
A natural law is derived from observation of the ways of nature. Its first characteristic is invariability—it always happens that way; there are no exceptions.
And since, in everything he does, as far back as we have any knowledge of him, so that we cannot even conceive of a deviation, man seeks to satisfy his desires with the least expenditure of labor, we can put that down as a natural law of human behavior.
We invent and make household appliances because we know that every housewife is interested in saving labor; we offer bribes to officials because we are ever on the lookout for “something for nothing,” and if the officials accept the bribes it is because they prefer to get their satisfactions without an expenditure of labor. Our entire price structure is based on that “law of parsimony.” In fact, every economic theory must take it into account, and social doctrines that leave it out of consideration prove impracticable;
when, for instance, it is proposed that men sell their products for less than the cost of production, or for less than other men are willing to pay for them, we have what is called a “black market”.
Our immediate reaction to the socialistic notion that men will put out labor with abandon and with little regard for returns is that it is nonsensical; humans don’t act that way.
Now, Society, Government, and the State are institutions that men make, and it must be taken for granted that these too are expressions of this law of human behavior.
If in all his other undertakings he is invariably motivated by this aversion to labor, why should we assume that it plays no part in his social and political organization?
He does not undergo a mutation when he socializes and politicalizes; he is still the same man. Perhaps, after all, his institutions are, in one way or another, analogous to labor-saving devices.
It makes better sense to approach an inquiry into his institutions with such a hypothesis than to begin by positing the idea that his institutions arise from forces outside of him, forces that use him as an instrument, not as the creator, as the metaphysicians and the socialists do.
He does not shun labor merely for the sake of shunning it; he is not lazy. In fact, we find him investing every saving of labor in a new desire, one that he was hardly aware of before he had a surplus of energy to put into it… Mans desires are unlimited.…
Since the beginning of time, as far as we know, man has been a labor saver, a capitalist, not that he might hoard energy but that he might expend it in further accomplishment. It is for this reason, as we shall see, that Society becomes his natural habitat.
The “law of parsimony” does not maintain that men always satisfy their desires with the least exertion; it says that they seek to do so. Ignorance of the shortest cut, the easiest means, is the reason for his taking the longest way around,
Before he knew about the automobile, the oxcart had to take care of his transportation, but as his aversion to labor caused him to invent that primitive improvement over walking, so did it spur him to the invention of the automobile; speed is an economy of effort for the accomplishment of results…
Every crime in the calendar, every social evil, every piece of political skulduggery is traceable to the “law of parsimony.” So is every advance in the sciences and the arts.
It is beyond the mark to moralize about this aversion to labor qua labor. It is as amoral as the hair on a man’s head. But if one looks into human psychology one can find there the germ of an ethical principle in this law of behavior.
There it will be found that the value the individual puts on himself is measured in terms of the labor he must put out to satisfy his desires . His ego expands or contracts in proportion to the labor cost of his living.
Thus, a slave, who reaps a bare existence from his exertions, makes mental adjustment to that rate of pay and acquires what we call a slave psychology; that is, he thinks of himself as not worth more than what he gets.
On the other hand, the “big shot” gangster looms large in his estimation of himself because with no apparent expenditure of labor he is able to live in luxury.
Whatever other attributes the human being brings to bear on the social order of which he is the integral, his will to live comes first in the hierarchy; the will to live is not mere clinging to existence but is also an urge to improve one’s circumstances and to widen one’s horizon. This is innate; Nirvana, or the negation of desire, is an acquired characteristic, requiring much exercise of the will.
The urge to live is accompanied by means and methods that are also built in—the inclination to avoid labor….
However else we try to explain Society, Government, and the State, we cannot ignore the “economic man.”
SOCIETY IS A COLLECTIVE CONCEPT and nothing else; it is a convenience for designating a number of people. So, too, is family or crowd or gang, or any other name we give to an agglomeration of persons…
But Society is still a word, not an entity. It is not an extra “person”…
The concept of Society as a metaphysical person falls flat when we observe that Society disappears when the component parts disperse; as in the case of a “ghost town” or of a civilization we learn about by the artifacts they left behind. When the individuals disappear so does the whole. The whole has no separate existence.
Using the collective noun with a singular verb leads us into a trap of the imagination; we are prone to personalize the collectivity and to think of it as having a body and a psyche of its own.
We transfer to this mental fabrication some habits or characteristics of the individuals who are the reality; rather, we pick out of the heterogeneity some traits that seem to be common to all the parts and ascribe them to the image in our minds.
And so we speak of a Mormon Society, an agricultural Society, an advanced Society; in point of fact, Society cannot be religious, has no occupation, is incapable of advancement; these are attributes of individual persons.
It is a legerdemain of language [an artful trick]. We invent a word to create an impression rather than a measurable fact, and then we use the word as if indeed it does represent a measurable fact.
From describing Society as if it were a person, we slide into the habit of judging each member of the group by our impression of the whole, and of acting upon that judgment.
By this mental trick the well-advertised pathology of the Nazi hierarchy was transferred to all Germans and, as its enemy, we decided that the only good German was a dead one.
The mass mania of war is a product of this habit of personification; it then becomes a matter of honor, not a murder, to destroy the uniform of this personification.
This negation of the individual, by use of words, is the premise of every socialistic rationale; socialism hasn’t a leg to stand on until the individual, like a lump of sugar, is verbally dissolved in the personification of a class. Every political scheme to “improve” Society rests on this trick of words.
For that reason it is necessary to point out that Society is nothing but a handy word, a symbol, and that we are talking about persons, each driven by the primordial urgency to live, according to his lights and by the limitations of his inherent capacities.
Society is an institution invented by man to further his purposes and his aspirations. It is, like a labor-saving device, something that helps him improve his circumstances with a saving of effort…
The specialist does not appear until there is population enough to need him, and until that population has acquired an abundance. him, and until that population has acquired an abundance. It is the stored-up labor in the barns, the capital, that suggests the possibility of hiring a [specialist]… Capital accumulation is the necessary antecedent of specialization…
In a century or two, capital accumulations reach a point where the cobbler is replaced by a shoe factory, the pedlar by a department store, and the little red schoolhouse by a college
We are speaking of the rise and development of American Society. Other social integrations, like those of Tibet or Abyssinia, never emerged from the primitive stage, and still others, like those of Europe, took a much longer time in arriving at a comparative level…
No doubt, climatic conditions and the availability of natural resources influenced the course of American Society, for man is, after all, a “land animal.” But other peoples similarly blessed did not “go places,” or as fast, and for cause we must look to some special advantage the American enjoyed. By the process of elimination we come to this special advantage: freedom.…
The early American did not have an expensive government to support, little in the way of taxation to deprive him of his savings, no traditional caste system to depress his sense of self-importance… He was free to work out his destiny according to his capacities.
There is a current conceit that Society can be fabricated, like a chair or a shoe, by imposing the achievements of one group of people on another. Seeing that the special characteristic of what we call an advanced culture is its fund of capital, the conceit holds that the showering of this fund on a “backward” people will speed their advancement
The idea is as silly as that of forcing a child to keep pace with an adult. A factory does not make Society, but a Society makes a factory.…
… gratification gives rise to another desire, and if the second calls for techniques hitherto unknown,man will take thought and invent them. But he must have freedom to do so. That is what a “backward” people lack most; either expropriation of their goods discourages production and makes accumulation impossible, or habits of mind induced by political or cultural institutions inhibit the impulse to dream. The necessary ingredient of progress is freedom.
The output of the conveyor belt is in exact proportion to the number of workers who man it.
You come to the same conclusion when you answer the question, why do men work? To satisfy their desires—and for no other reason….
Every worker works for himself. Every worker is impelled to labor by the will to live, and there is no way of transferring that will to another person or a collectivity of persons.
Therefore, the hypnotic phrase “social production”—as meaning more than the sum total of the production of individuals—is only a mischievous abstraction that bears watching. It is a phrase that looms large in the jargon of socialism.
… the cost of every “good” is that undesirable thing called effort…
Labor, in juxtaposition to desire, is the ultimate determinant of value. Let us keep in mind, however, that it is not the labor invested in producing the “good” which fixes its value—not the “cost of production”—but the labor one must give up as the price of possession.
Confronted with this problem of variability in desires, the “economic planner” must resort to constriction, to limitation of choice, to the strangulation of imagination. The planner undertakes to prescribe what the individual should want, and the basis for his prescription is a conviction that he knows best what is “good” for the individual.
Because it is in the market place that variability of choice expresses itself, through price, the planner’s conceit leads him to attempt to control consumption by controlling price.
But price is not controllable, simply because desires are not controllable. The barrier to free choice which the planner sets up acts like the dam in the river; the water does not stop flowing but either overflows the dam or spreads out in a lake. Price control does not stop wanting or bidding; it simply creates what propaganda calls a “black market,” which is in fact the true market, somewhat distorted but nevertheless true.
It may be illegal but it is highly moral, for it arises from the individual’s right to himself, to the product of his labors, and to the pursuit of happiness which is the essence of living.
All “economic planning” ultimately rests on purging. Purging of what? Of the impulses on which Society is built. The “economic planner” does not control prices or production; he polices men.
Value is a deeply human experience, and it is individual. There is no way for the individual to transfer his value concepts to another; there is no way of collectivizing value. It is a ratio between intensity of desire and aversion to labor and can be compared to a measuring stick on which is recorded the esteem that man puts on the energy stored up in him. It is the economic phrasing of his self-worth.
When a great supply of the things he lives by reduces the amount of labor he must give up to get them, his worth to himself is enhanced; for the energy thus saved becomes investable in a further improvement of his circumstances. His horizon expands. He thinks of Beethoven and baseball because of the ease with which his primary desires can be satisfied.
A general abundance, therefore, is synonymous with both low prices and a wider scope for life. Contrariwise, the high prices brought about by a scarcity of goods signify that more energy has to be expended to satisfy one’s needs, that the worth of human effort has declined. The cheaper things are, the richer man is
Among the labor-saving devices that facilitate the exchange of abundances arising from specialization is money.
Money is a token that something of a given value has been produced and, by custom and common consent, is accepted as a claim on production of comparable value.
It is a commodity that, in the area in which its value is generally recognized, is exchangeable for all other commodities, thus obviating burdensome barter. But it is itself of no value, except as metal or paper, and is esteemed only because it is accepted in the market place as an evidence that goods or services have been made available, that the general abundance has been increased by labor.
In the final analysis, money is a receipt for services performed; for that reason it achieves importance as a measurement of value. However, the yardstick is not and cannot be made a substitute for the goods measured, and money is not production.
The wide acceptance of the measurement of value suggests to the “economic planner’ that he can control consumption and regulate production by tinkering with this accepted yardstick
By surreptitiously changing the standard from thirty-six to thirty-three inches, he induces the buyer into believing that he has acquired more goods. But no more goods has been produced by this trick, and the buyer finds that the cloth he purchased is not enough for the suit of clothes he expected to get out of the yardage.
As a result of this experience, his esteem of money drops; he demands more of it in exchange for his labor. And that is all that the “economic planner” has accomplished; he neither controls consumption nor regulates production by his counterfeit operation.
Until his trickery is discovered, Society has been robbed of some of its output; but the robbery, when discovered, undermines confidence in the market place, discourages production (and therefore consumption), until Society insists on the correction of the wrong done it. The net effect of inflation, of cheapening the value of money, is to retard man’s pursuit of happiness.
The importance of the market place to the enjoyment of life is illustrated by a custom recorded by Franz Oppenheimer in The State.
In ancient times, on days designated as holy, the market place and its approaches were held inviolable even by professional robbers; in fact, stepping out of character, these robbers acted as policemen for the trade routes, seeing to it that merchants and caravans were not molested. Why? Because they had accumulated a superfluity of loot of one kind, more than they could consume, and the easiest way of transmuting it into other satisfactions was through trade. Too much of anything is too much….
So, the tendency of trade is to break down the narrowness of provincialism, to liquidate the mistrust of ignorance… The market place unifies Society.
It follows that any interference with the operation of the market place, however done, is analogous to an act of war. A tariff is such an act. When we are “protected” against Argentine beef, the effect (as intended) is to make beef harder to get, and that is exactly what an invading army would do.
Since the duty does not diminish our desire for beef, we are compelled by the diminished supply to put out more labor to satisfy that desire… The absence of a plenitude of meat from the market place lowers the purchasing power of our labor. We are poorer, even as is a nation whose ports have been blockaded…
The effect of a tariff is to drive a potential buyer out of the market place. The argument that “protection” provides jobs is patently fallacious. It is the consumer who gives the worker a job, and the consumer who is prevented from consuming might as well be dead, as far as providing productive employment is concerned….
Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers; indeed, can there be a viable political union while these barriers exist? And, if freedom of trade were the universal practice, would a political union be necessary?
If a people prosper by the amount of foreign goods they are not permitted to have, then a complete embargo, rather than a restriction, would do them the most good.
Continuing that line of reasoning, would it not be better all around if each community were hermetically sealed off from its neighbor, like Philadelphia from New York? Better still, would not every household have more on its table if it were compelled to live on its own production?
Silly as this reductio ad absurdum is, it is no sillier than the “protection- ist” argument that a nation is enriched by the amount of foreign goods it keeps out of its market, or the “balance of trade” argument that a nation prospers by the excess of its exports over imports….
The myth of “protectionism” rests on the notion that the be-all and end-all of human life is laboring, not consumption —and certainly not leisure.
If that were so, then the slaves who built pyramids were most ideally situated; they worked much and received little. Likewise, the Russians chained to “five-year plans” have achieved heaven on earth, and so did the workers who, during the depression, were put to moving dirt from one side of the road to the other…
Yet, if we base our thinking on the natural urge of the individual to better his circumstances and widen his horizon, operating always under the natural law of parsimony (the most gain for the least effort), we are compelled to the conclusion that effort which does not add to the abundance of the market place is useless effort.
Society thrives on trade simply because trade makes specialization possible, specialization increases output, and increased output reduces the cost in toil for the satisfactions men live by. That being so, the market place is a most humane institution.
For the present, we need only observe that organized Government does not make its appearance until property becomes a factor in social integrations, and its authority is called upon more and more as property becomes more important in the pursuit of happiness; hence the concept of Government and the concept of property are interrelated. Would there be any need for Government if the individual had no sense of property, no concern with ownership?
The primary concern of the pioneer is with production; the need for disengaging himself from production to pursue some protective enterprise is a nuisance; there is no profit in it. The time and effort put into policing the competence piled up in his barn and pantry could be better employed, and the thought occurs to him that it would be more profitable for him to turn over his gun, his instrument of authority, to a specialist in its use…
Thus comes the posse and the vigilante committee, the instrument of collective security. The essential feature of this instrument is the use of force to prevent behavior inimical to their business of making a living.
That is Government.
It is a social service established by the members of the community to do that which each would do for himself if he could, and which he is compelled to do for himself before there are a sufficient number of producers in the community to hire a specialist…. Government is a protector, not a producer.
In the interest of that tranquillity without which production becomes difficult, to the discouragement of accumulations, the community sets up an impartial third party to adjudicate these and all other disputes. The tribunal is Government. Thus, the institution that grew out of the need for a protector of property takes on the related duty of judge…
To repeat, Society consists of a number of producers, each contributing to the general fund of wealth, and each depending for acceptance of his goods or services on the free vote of the market place; he has no power of compulsion.
Government too is a specialized service, differing from all the others in that it contributes nothing tangible to the market place and is endowed with the monopoly of coercion by the members of the community.
For that we must look to the behavior of the individual: why does he put such weight on ownership, and what does his claim rest upon? More specifically, on what grounds does he expect Government to guarantee his claim to property?
And the individual replies with an axiom: he has a right to live. Whether he has or not is neither provable nor disputable: all reasoning on the subject leads to the dead-end of all causality, “the nature of things.” By this hypothesis, the individual has a right to life simply because he craves it. Who can dispute that point without throwing doubt on his own right to existence?
The right to life, or the right to oneself, must mean the exclusive title to all the faculties which are identifiable with that thing called “me”: body, mind, appetites, aspirations, all the factors of personality….
Title to things, or the right of property, enjoys moral validity, therefore, only when it rests on labor. Any other theory of property rights must begin by rejecting the right of the individual to himself and must assume that the successful use of force to separate the producer from his product is title enough….
But, on principle alone, regardless of consequences, any method, legal or illegal, by which title to property is shifted from producer to nonproducer, is essentially akin to the burglarizing of a house.
Under letters of marque issued by the monarch, piracy became privateering, but in either case it was stealing; and when I am compelled against my will to support a school or a bureaucracy, under any pretext, I am being deprived of my property…
When we put this theory—that the right of property rests on labor—to the test of experience, we find that it is supported by what might be called a natural law; that is, an invariable cause-and-effect relationship that operates automatically, undeterred by human will and enabling us to make predictions.
The law may be stated thus: the worker’s possession and enjoyment, including disposition, of his past production determine the amount of his future production; or, the level of consumption (wages) determines the level of production.
DIONYSIUS, the storied tyrant of Syracuse… called in all the coin of his realm, known as drachmae, restamped them so that each drachma became two, and, after paying off his debts with the revalued money, returned to the owners many more drachmae than they had been obliged to turn in. No doubt, the Syracusans were delighted by the operation; their advances to the tyrant were paid up in full and their nonmonetary assets had suddenly doubled in price. He deserved praise for this financial feat.
Like Dionysius, latter-day politicians sometimes find themselves without the wherewithal needed to defray the costs of glorious State adventures and, having stretched taxation to the breaking point, resort to borrowing. They convince the citizens not only that their savings will be spent in ways that will redound to their benefit, but that they will be rewarded for their faith with an annual increment; the imposingly printed receipt issued to the lender solemnly pledges the honor of the State to that effect.
Now, in one way or another, these receipts become monetized, and Society is deluged with new coin of the realm, even as were the Syracusans when their drachmae were restamped. Everybody is “enriched.”…
For, among its other advantages, this modern receipt bears a maturity date, usually falling in the next generation, to the relief of the immediate borrowers; furthermore, through refinancing and funding methods this date ac- quires the unique capacity of extending itself into eternity, so that the loan need never be repaid.
We have no doubt that Dionysius’ ministers fortified him with a learned dissertation on the virtues of his restamping scheme. His modern counterpart not only has ministers to advise him but also professors of economics to explain to the public how the abundance in their pantries is improved by inflation.
Since the matter of succession was not constitutionally regularized, the praetorian guard undertook to provide Rome with a steady supply of emperors. (Sometimes the legions set up a claimant of their own, and then the selection was decided by a test of arms.) Admitting that the soldiery considered the course of empire in making their choice, they were nevertheless not uninfluenced by the aspirant’s promise to improve their economic welfare.
We might call that venal voting, but in what essential does it differ from the promises to veterans that now embellish campaign oratory?…
The point of the analogy is not that ancient and modern men of arms are alike in their pursuit of something for nothing—in that respect they are no different from the rest of the citizenry—but that in every age political power has lent itself to purposes that are uneconomic and antisocial, that it has never hesitated to purchase support with confiscated property. For the ancients it may be said that they conducted the business in a forthright manner, unadorned with moralisms; the Caesars did not invoke an ideology to cover up the real objective of “bread and circuses.’
Today, political preferment and the augmentation of political power are accomplished in the same way—with subsidies of all sorts, paid for by tax- payers—but the business is conducted under a panoply of rectitude. Our politicians do not purchase votes, they advocate “social” programs. It comes to the same thing.
To prove the point, it is only necessary to point up the fact that political establishments stick to their negative role when Society produces little, and that they become active and grow in stature only when an accumulation of wealth appears.
Among the North American Indian tribes, where production equaled subsistence, the chiefs, who were part-time and volunteer politicians, exercised little authority and that only within the appointed bounds of maintaining order. In contrast, when the conquistadores got to Peru they found a considerable accumulation of wealth and a corresponding accumulation of political power.
A comparison between the early American political establishment and the present one brings out the point; when in 1789 the economy of the country was largely agricultural and its total wealth was measured in millions, the scope of political authority was sharply delimited; its interventions in- creased in number and in extent as the productive energy of the people expanded, and now that the wealth of the nation is measured in many billions the hand of authority is felt in every private endeavor. Its interventionary powers are in proportion to its expropriation of one third of all that is produced.
When the nature of political power is put under the microscope of analysis, its incorrigible penchant for predation becomes understandable. For then one sees that political power is not “in the nature of things” but in the nature of man.
It is not, like the force of gravity, self-operating and inexorable, but is an expedient devised by man to facilitate his urge for acquiring satisfactions with the least expenditure of labor. In essence, political power is the physical power, or the threat of it, that one man or a group of men may bring to bear on other men to affect behavior.…
It is this need of a broad base that accounts for the predatory practices of political institutions. The crown rests uneasily on the royal brow until it is held firmly in position by the loyalty of subjects who partake or hope to partake of the substantial privileges at his disposal; and an elected official likewise needs the votes or campaign contributions of constituents who expect to profit by his elevation to power. What manner of fare can he possibly spread before them? Only what he can extract from the larder of production. He has nothing else.
The advent of popular suffrage did not change the nature of political power nor affect its practices. The doctrine on which suffrage rests is that sovereignty—which is protocol for power—resides in the voters, as a permanent possession, and that they merely loan it for a time to their selected rulers.
Upon analysis the doctrine boils down to the idea that each voter holds in his hands on election day a small piece of the power that once centered in a king. But, even as the king thought of power in terms of his prerogatives and perquisites, so the voter, in casting his ballot, is influenced by his material condition or expectation of improvement.
He [the voter] assumes that his personal economy is tied in with the political power of distribution, not with his own productive capacity, and the assumption seems valid enough when he observes that some of his fellow voters do well at the public trough.
Yet, his minuscule piece of power is by itself unable to push him into a favorable position, especially as it is in competition with millions of others of like value. It is necessary for him to add his vote to many others so that the total will bulk large in the sovereign fifty-one percent.
Thus comes the pressure-group system of utilizing political power for acquiring pecuniary advantages.
What does the wielder of political power—also a human—hope to gain from the bargain he makes with those who put the scepter in his hands? That depends on the values of the individual politician, but taking into consideration the breed as a whole, the desires that drive them to seek office are exactly those that motivated Charlemagne: the perquisites and prerogatives attendant thereto.
What else can one derive from political labors?
Putting aside the perquisites, including the crude bribe and the more sophisticated and legal methods of participating directly or indirectly in the economic advantages the politician grants his favorites, he measures his gain in the satisfaction of a desire that is often stronger than the yearning for creature comforts…
It is an ego profit that one derives from the making and administration of rules that others must obey, and with many of us this is of inestimable value.
But there must be some means of restraining Cain from going after Abel’s hide and property, lest human life go the way of the dinosaur. There cannot be a Society until there is a market place, and there cannot be a market place until security of possession is assured. Without that assurance the individual will not strive to improve his circumstances and production will drop to the level of mere subsistence; man will be little better than an animal, a status against which his primordial compulsions revolt.
It is for that reason that he sets up a machinery for the protection of life and property, even against himself, a machinery to which he gives the name of Government.
“To secure these [inalienable] rights [to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness]’ says the best phrasing of the subject,”governments are instituted among men.”
It follows that if there were some way of securing these rights without Government, men would not institute it. And it also follows that when Government employs its monopoly of coercion for purposes which violate these rights it ceases to be Government.
It is some other kind of concern, even as a merchantman that turns to piracy cannot be classified as a merchantman. So that, when the committee in charge of the power of compulsion use it to confiscate property they cannot lay claim to the name of Government. It is a corruption, and its name is the State.
“IN THOSE DAYS,” we are told in Judges 17:6, “there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
To be able to do that which is right in one’s own eyes is to be free, and freedom was the way of life among the Israelites before the coming of the kings…. Yet, they were not without Government, they were not lacking in those social controls that are the essence of Government….
Tradition supplemented necessity in the orderly arrangement of life, for the tradition grew out of experience by the trial-and-error method and had proved itself beneficial. The laws of custom were sanctified because violation of them carried its own penalties, not only to the individual but also to the group…
That which was “right” in the tribesman’s eyes was “right” by custom, tradition, and the laws of Yahweh, to the enumeration of which the Old Testament, before the Book of Joshua, devotes much space. Freedom is not license….
… someone had to adjudicate disputes so as to prevent the chaos of internecine struggles. So came the Judges, men esteemed for their wisdom and integrity, the “sports” provided by nature for the instruction of the rank and file. The evidence leads to the conclusion that these Judges ruled by natural selection and common consent, much like the chiefs of American Indian tribes.
The significant feature of the rule of the Judges is that it lacked the power of coercion. “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes” meant that no man was compelled to do otherwise; and since “in those days there was no king in Israel” it must be presumed that there was no constabulary to enforce rules of behavior. The sole enforcement agency upon which the authority of the Judges rested was public opinion.
According to one computation this kind of Government lasted about four centuries—a period, incidentally, comparable to the duration of the Roman republic. The manner of its termination is recorded in the Book of Samuel, where it is told that the elders of the tribes came to the last of the Judges and demanded that he set a king over them.
The background of this agitation for a basic constitutional reform is worth noting. The nomads had by this time settled down in the hills surrounding Canaan; sheepherding was giving way to agriculture; land tenure had achieved an importance it did not have during the migrations; trading, capital accumulations, and financial transactions had entered their way of life. Their economy had changed.…
The immediate occasion for the revolutionary demand was what we would today call an emergency. In fact, there were two emergencies. In foreign affairs things were going badly for Israel; the Philistines had not only beaten them roundly in battle but had also made off with the sacred ark of the covenant. On the domestic front, they had lost faith in their leadership; the two sons of Samuel, whom he had appointed as assistants, did not live up to the high standards of their office; they had “turned aside after lucre, and took bribes and perverted judgment.”
So that, when the elders said “make us a king to judge us like all the nations,” he [Samuel] was displeased. The story says that he took the matter up with Yahweh, who assured him that nothing could be done about saving the Israelites from themselves, since they had given up on first principles.
It was because they had foresaken the rigorous tradition of their forefathers, with its insistence on self-reliance and personal integrity, that they had lost the victorious touch which carried them from Egypt to the outskirts of the Promised Land; the breakdown of the Judge system could be traced to the same lack of self-discipline.
Therefore, said Yahweh, give them what they ask for, but as a parting shot you might “shew them the manner of the king that shall rule over them”; and tell them also that when they realize their mistake it will be too late to regain freedom: “The Lord will not hear you in that day.”
This is an interesting comment, seeming to stress the point that when a people put their faith in a State, rather than themselves, there is no way for them to remove the noose from their necks.
First, there will be conscription, replacing the system of voluntarism
Then, “he will appoint him captains over thousands and captains over fifties.” The term “captain” is ambiguous, referring sometimes to men of war, sometimes to what we would call a nobility, sometimes (by the kind of work assigned to them) to bureaucrats;
And, continued Samuel, the king will take from you the best of your lands “and give them to his officers and to his servants,” thus establishing a landed aristocracy, which the laws of Moses clearly forbade
What’s more, for the upkeep of his establishment “he will take a tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards”; apparently, compulsory taxation was new among the Israelites.
To top it all off, “ye shall be his servants.”
But the elders were obdurate in their demand for political authority… More likely, fear had entered their hearts, as is usually the case when a people accustomed to success are faced with adversity, and they were quite willing to swap freedom for the promise of subservient security.
In any event, Samuel anointed Saul. From the very beginning of the royal establishment the troubles of Israel multiplied… Some followed Saul, others revolted against his rule; more exactly, they resisted the establishment of those institutions which Samuel had warned them would come with a king. But, as Samuel said, there was no way of regaining freedom once the State had made its appearance…
Though the people of Israel had asked for a king, the spirit of freedom did not depart from them immediately upon the granting of their wish, and Saul never really set the kingship on a solid basis. It takes time for the myth of authority to gain general acceptance.
David, the second king, did better, for he had forty years in which to get the tribesmen in line with the new institution; a second generation had come to maturity during his reign, and to them the exploits of royalty were “modern,” real and vibrant, while the freedom of their forefathers sank into the limbo of a fairy tale.
Even so, something of the past hung on, and David had to contend with frequent insurrections and, at the end, with a war of succession. He did succeed, as we learn from the Second Book of Samuel, in setting up the necessary framework for the functioning of a successful State, that is, in surrounding the kingship with a supporting caste of “mighty men,” analogous to what we would today call a privileged class, and with a group of efficient “servants” whose functions corresponded with those of latter-day bureaucrats. In that way he facilitated the consolidation of power under Solomon.
At first, an aspiring chieftain fights his way to ascendancy as a lone wolf, knocking off rivals, and concentrates in himself all the power he can lay his hands on. This method has merit only insofar as the area of his sovereignty is limited to personal supervision. But it proves to be quite inefficacious, and moreover quite precarious.
As his quest for power reaches beyond his purview, as it always does, he finds it necessary to delegate some of his power to and share his prerogatives with a supporting oligarchy— military, ecclesiastical (or intellectual) and, in time, commercial or industrial groups which lend themselves to his purpose in return for the special privileges he grants them. They serve as a moat to his castle.
In addition to these favored blocs he must surround his citadel with a class of wellpaid “servants” skilled in taking care of the details of sovereignty so that it can function with the least amount of friction.
The State is not, as many political scientists would make it, an inanimate thing; it consists of people, human beings, each of whom operates under an inner compulsion to get the most out of life with the least expenditure of labor. They differ from other human beings only in the fact that they have chosen (because they believe it to be easier) the political or predatory means of satisfying their desires rather than the economic or productive means.
The fiction that the State is an impersonal institution, something Society constructs for its own benefit, serves to hide, even from its members, the nature of its composition. Yet, if it were not for the economic advantages it grants to favored blocs, and if it were not for the emoluments and honorifìcs of political position, there would be no State. The State are people.
But, as to taxation, we learn nothing until we come to 2 Chronicles (Chapter 10), which deals with the installation of his son Rehoboam. There it is told that “all Israel” pleaded with the new king thus:
Thy father made our yoke grievous; now therefore ease thou the grievous servitude of thy father, and the heavy yoke that he put on us, and we will serve thee.
Whatever deprives the members of Society of the fruits of their labors is a deterrent of the human purpose that brought them together; it is a desocializing force. And among the devices that men have invented to defeat the ends of Society none is more devastating than compulsory taxation, because it is a constant drain on their property, tending to increase as they show more and more enterprise.
The State, on the other hand, thrives on what it can exact of Society; its temples are built with taxes, its bureaucracy or enforcement agency grows in size and arrogance by the same means, and it is with taxes that the State buys the support of those who might otherwise turn against it.
The designation of taxation as a yoke is a nice piece of biblical directness. A yoke is worn by an ox, a beast of burden, which by nature is incapable of claiming a property right in the products of its labors. It follows that when a human being is deprived of that right his status approximates that of an ox, and if taxation takes all he produces beyond that needed to sustain life (the wages of an ox), it can rightly be called a yoke The Israelites who pleaded with Rehoboam to lower the tax load which Solomon (the State) had put on them were quite literal.
THE STATE consists of a number of people who, having somehow got hold of it, make use of the machinery of coercion to the end that they might pursue their version of happiness without respect to the discipline of the market place. They batten on Society.
Taking into consideration the paraphernalia of coercion—laws, propaganda, and the police — the State might be called an institution; but at bottom it is a gang of people.
Obscurantism sets in and disguises the character of the State when the personnel of rulership is subject to periodic change, and particularly when the oligarchy convinces both itself and Society that it serves a noble purpose.
There are services which are indeed social, for without them there could not be a Society. The cobbler is a social servicer because he shoes people. So is the manufacturer of toothpicks or the doctor or the entertainer, or any person who devotes himself to satisfying human desires. Whether anyone is a social servicer is determined by Society, by those who willingly give up to him their possessions to avail themselves of his offerings…
But the “social services” with which the State occupies itself are quite different in character from those that Society designates as services in the market place. They are enterprises which have nothing at all to do with the market place, are not subject to competitive conditions, do not exist be- cause Society has chosen them to exist, and would not exist but for the power of political management to impose them on Society… Since the State is possessed of a monopoly of coercion, and has no other competence, the “services” it presumes to render cannot be subjected to any other judgment.
But, though coercion is its own justification, the acceptance of it by Society calls for moral support; and so it is said that there are some services which can best be performed collectively and these are called “social.”
What can be done collectively that cannot be done without the use of force? What are “social services”? The category varies with the incidence of power…
Insurance was once a service rendered by specialists to those who availed them- selves of it; now the field is being invaded and promises to be preempted by the State…Even in the same State the definition of “social services” undergoes change by force of law, as when the United States outlawed the delivery of mail by anybody but itself.
The reason for this is plain: each activity that the State takes unto itself reduces the scope of social activity, adds to its personnel, and improves its position vis-àvis Society. That is, its power increases in proportion to the number of “social services’ it engages in…
Whenever the State appropriates or engages in a field of economic activity it either monopolizes it outright or surrounds it with conditions that are peculiar and advantageous unto itself, so that private operators in that field are put to flight.
In the first place, the State does not tax itself and thus is relieved of a cost its competitors must bear. It is under no necessity so to manage its business that its income shall meet its expenses, for it can make up for losses by taxation.
In the second place, the bookkeeping of the State is a meaningless invention of its own. Competition with the State, even when it is permitted, becomes impossible
Indeed, the State knows that it is unable to meet the performance of private business and therefore refuses to face the test of the market place. Its interest is not in rendering service but in expanding its power over Society. What are called “social services” are merely means for such expansion.…
In short, there is no service required by Society that is in any way improved by its politicalization, and that could not be better done if it were subjected to competitive conditions. The only reason for the political operation of these services is to give the State (and there is a State in every city) the semblance of a competence it does not have, so that its accumulation of power may appear to be socially beneficial.
THERE IS THIS to be said in behalf of avowed and doctrinaire socialists, that their faith in the State is sublime. To them, the institution of political power is the unerring shepherd of the flock, the guide to the Good Society; it is also the antidote for all evil, the maker of abundance, the embodiment of justice, the sublimation of human aspirations. That they believe..
To be sure, they affect an elaborate rationalism, something they call dialectical materialism, which in turn rests on a verbal agglomeration known as Marxian economics. Logic and fact without end have been applied to these notions to prove that they are only notions. But all this cerebration has turned out to be sheer waste of effort as far as influencing the true worshipers is concerned. They still believe. One cannot help but marvel at, and admire, their devotional integrity.
When we reduce the abstraction “political power” to its operational reality, to the way it actually works, we see how it feeds on reform.
Every proposal to improve man’s lot by political measures calls for the enactment of a law or an official edict. The law presupposes that some people are not doing what they ought to do or are doing something that ought not to be done. Hence, the purpose of the law is to regulate human behavior.
The very premise of the law is that violation or evasion will ensue from its enactment, that it will not be self-enforcing; therefore, the heart of the law is a punishment clause. No law is worth the paper it is printed on without such a clause, and no law has any effect unless it is implemented with a corps of enforcers. Therein lies the secret of the accumulation and perpetuation of political power.
The bureaucrat likes his job… his job depends on law, not on production, and therefore his primary concern is in law, its enactment, its perpetuation, its enlargement. The more law the better; which is another way of saying that his mind is keenly attuned to the possibilities of reform.
Strictly speaking, laws are made by monarchs and legislators. It was Pharaoh who proclaimed the law, not Joseph. But it was on the advice of Joseph that Pharaoh acted. In our “democratic” era, when parliaments make laws, it is the bureaucrat who phrases them, who prepares the supporting arguments (which legislators mouth), who estimates (or underestimates) the costs of operation, who sets up the machinery (jobs) to implement the laws. And when a law in operation does not effect the solution of the problem it was supposed to solve, but produces problems of its own, it is the bureaucracy that comes up with correctives.
Ideologically, the bureaucracy is always “leftist” (if by that term is meant the enlargement of State power), not so much by persuasion but because of personal interest and the psychology of the trade. A bureaucrat is a socialist, or communist, because his business requires him to think like a socialist or a communist.
An income tax was imposed during the Civil War and was continued for half a dozen years to clean up the costs of that affair. Its abolition was vigorously opposed by those who had gotten a taste of blood, and their overpowering passion for more of it finally culminated in the Sixteenth Amendment.
It was admittedly a leveling tax, the presumption being that what was taken from the pockets of the rich would somehow trickle into the pockets of the poor. But the State, as history tells us, is not concerned with the fate of the poor or the rich, its protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, but only with its own advancement.
This opportunity to pick pockets could not for long be limited to a few that obviously bulged large. It was soon learned that all these pockets collectively contained less loot than the national pay envelope, and when that fact was ascertained the itching fingers of the State could not be restrained.
So that the “soak the rich” tax has become a “soak the poor” tax. Most of the income of the American State is now derived from the earnings of those least able to bear the burden.
The net profit of reform is the accumulation of State power; the net loss is borne by Society. Out of the reforms advocated by the Gracchus brothers came the Caesars and “bread and circuses.” Pericles set up a number of make-work projects and ruled for thirty years, subtly but with an iron hand. Bismarck was a reformer. Mazzini was the unwitting forerunner of Mussolini. Lenin was the archreformer of all times, in that his reforms culminated in the largest, the most arbitrary, and the most ruthless bureaucracy the world has ever known.
The first item on the agenda of the State is taxation, simply because the State could not exist without it. A tax is a compulsory exaction; it is not a voluntary payment for goods received or services rendered. In ancient times, before a regularized system obfuscated it, the nature of a tax was better understood, for it frequently consisted of the lifting from the producer’s premises of goods he had labored for in the expectation of enjoyment: his corn, cattle, or other accumulations.
That was palpable evidence of the scarcity-producing nature of taxation. No mutation occurs when the tax is collected in the form of money; it is still part of what the producer has labored for in the hope of satisfying his desires. It is shoes, bread, entertainment.
Taxation not only robs the market place of consumable goods, which is the true measure of a nation’s economy, but it also reduces the productive capacity of Society by its absorption of savings, or capital. It is obvious that the individual cannot save what he does not have. And since savings become investments in productive machinery, the lack of savings means a shortage of those instruments that make abundance possible.
Thus, taxation deprives the consumer of immediate satisfactions and lessens the possibility of plenty in the future. In both effects, taxation is a shortage-creating institution, and that is not what men have in mind when they merge themselves into Society.
Idolators of the State are wont to counter this fact with the observation that productive effort seems to increase with an increase in taxation, inferring that the activities of the State are economically beneficial. This is equivalent to saying that men work to pay taxes and that the bigger the tax load the greater their productivity.
If this were so, then the wealthiest and healthiest economy would be achieved by the State’s confiscation of everything produced—which is the claim of communism… And historians tell us that the continuing and mounting exactions of the Roman emperors caused a lack of interest in productive enterprise, so that the net income from taxes decreased and the emperors resorted to conquest and loot to replenish their coffers; when conquest proved unprofitable and production did not yield enough to pay expenses, the State collapsed.
THE SMALL STATE can do to Society everything the large State can do, but not so much of it. The tyranny and terrorism of modern communistic overlords is of a kind with the practices of ancient Sparta, and twenty-five centuries before Mr. Roosevelt launched the New Deal, Pericles had something closely resembling it.
Sparta and Athens were small aggregations, compared to their modern counterparts, and so there were fewer people to ride herd on; also, because they were less productive, there was less for the bureaucrats to lay their hands on. But the pattern of intervention and confiscation was the same.
A State is a State, now as in the past, regardless of the size of its victim, and regardless of ideology affected by its management. It is always at war with Society.
As an illustrative instance, on a rather grandiose scale, there is the case of the New York City subway system. Originally this railroad was built by entrepreneurs under a franchise granted by the “city fathers.” As a condition of the grant, the fare was fixed at five cents. For a while all went well; the company rendered adequate service and paid its bills, including interest on its bonded indebtedness.
As the city pulled into its orbit more and more surrounding communities, the company extended its mileage, as required, and in due time the nickel fare did not meet operational costs. The company asked for permission to increase its fare. The people-loving politicians refused the request and the “nickel fare” became a potent campaign issue
From the very beginning there were those who clamored for public ownership and operation, terming the franchise a “giveaway,” but they were shouted down as socialists, the bondholders and management being most vociferous in this denunciation. But, when the company defaulted on its interest payments, and the bonds consequently shrank in value, it was the bondholders who asked the city to buy them out; they had no objection to socialism if a profit were involved.
Eventually, a “reform” administration, headed by a mayor of pronounced socialistic persuasion, arranged for the purchase of the bonds at a price far beyond the open market quotation. The taxpayers, as usual, paid the bill. Shortly thereafter the subway was “taken out of politics,” meaning that the fare was raised to ten and then to fifteen cents, and deficits are now the regular order. The subway system is now a city-owned monopoly, run by bureaucrats, whose prime interest is the perpetuation of their jobs, not railroading…
Indeed, the City of New York has set a pattern for the nationalizing of the railroads of the country: a regulatory body, with power to ñx rates and compel unprofitable operation, squeezes the business into bankruptcy, so that the owners are quite willing to sell their property to the taxpayers, and bureaucracy improves its position.
Centralization is the setting up of a protective distance between State and Society, of the insulation of the State from social sanctions…
Realization of the dangers of centralization, of the divorcement of political power from social control, gave rise to the idea of constitutionalism. A constitution undertakes to define the scope of political power, to delimit the functions the State may assume, as a condition for public support. It is a contractual agreement.
It is a contractual agreement. But it is a matter of record that no State has long abided by the terms of the agreement; its inherent compulsion toward the acquisition of power cannot be inhibited by law. The best example of this is the life story of the American Constitution.
It originated in the convention that a State is inherently incapable of containing its urge for power, and the writers not only defined and limited the scope of the new State but also provided for a system of “checks and balances” that presumably would prevent its getting out of bounds.
It specifically provided that all powers not enumerated would remain with the state establishments—a clear recognition of the historic fact that political power is less virulent the nearer its wielders are to the ruled. This novel idea of states’ rights, of the division of authority, was intended as a block to centralization… Besides these “checks and balances” and the doctrine of imperium in imperio, there was the further formidable barrier to centralization in the carefully circumscribed authority to levy taxes,
Despite all this, the American State has been able to circumvent the terms of the bargain of 1789; by legal interpretation and amendment it has achieved centralization as effectively as other establishments have done by force. When we compare the intent of the “founding fathers”—and taking into consideration the social pressures that bore upon this intent—with the present state of political affairs, we can say that the original constitution has been in fact replaced by something quite different.
Basically, the intent was to provide a form of political institution that would hold inviolate the immunities of person, property, and mind.
The immunity of property was abolished by the Sixteenth Amendment [income tax], which, by asserting the prior lien of the State on the earnings of citizens, virtually denies them the right of private ownership; with this right gone, the right to life becomes academic.
The immunity of mind has been violated by more subtle but no less effective means, which the proceeds of income taxation made available: by the establishment of a vast propaganda machine for the channeling of thought in favor of State ventures, including the distortion of facts as to its operations; by the subvention, with favors, of news-vending and opinion-influencing publications; by the subsidization of educational institutions and educators.
If the carefully constructed constitution of 1789 has not been able to contain the power-grabbing proclivities of the federal establishment, it is reasonable to conclude that no body of laws can accomplish that purpose.
The key to centralization, to the consolidation of conquest, is taxation. All things considered, the Sixteenth Amendment made a shambles of the constitution of which it is ostensibly only a part.
It gave the Executive branch the means of undermining the independence of Congress (which was supposed to hold it in check), for with the vast funds at its disposal it is able to purchase compliance from the legislative branch and to suppress opposition.
It made possible the virtual liquidation of the autonomy of the states, first by sapping their sources of revenue and then by bringing them into line with subventions; the doctrine of states’ rights has thus lost all meaning.
It provided political authority with capital enough to venture into the market place as manufacturer, distributor, financier, publisher, farmer, physician, employer, to the disadvantage of private entrepreneurs.
It set the State up as the largest eleemosynary institution in the history of the world. And along with all these interventionary measures came the vast bureaucracy dedicated to the perpetuation and extension of these interventions.
Thus, one change in the constitution did away with its original character.….
It follows that political authority is not containable by contract. No constitutional constriction ever invented has succeeded in keeping the political person within his appointed sphere, that of maintaining the peace within Society, of effecting equity between producers, of assuring each member that his rights shall not be invaded by another. Some other instrument of control is necessary if Society is not to be periodically swallowed up by the State.
To be sure, man is a reasoning animal, and if he were to refer the matter to his reason he would conclude that something-for-nothing is an impossibility; what one acquires “for free” must be provided by another. He would admit that a Society consisting entirely of consumers, say pirates, could not exist. He would concede without argument that production must precede consumption, that the purpose of production is consumption, that nothing would be produced if there were no prospect of enjoyment. He need not be an economist to arrive at such conclusions. All that, he would say, is common sense.
Yet, how easily does common sense take flight before the prospect of a gratuity or an unearned profit! Reason is not lacking in sufficient logic to circumvent reason when a handout is involved. The beneficiary finds nothing incongruous in a regimen of “bread and circuses”; here is visible evidence that something-for-nothing is not a mirage…
Yes, man is endowed with the gift of reason, but he is also possessed of appetites and an aversion to labor, and too often his reason bends to his other characteristics. The failure of Utopians to accept this fact, or to accept man as he is, not as he ought to be, gives their schemes a dreamlike quality.
Generally speaking, utopianism falls into two main categories: the anarchistic and the communistic. The one posits as its primary premise the essential reasonableness and goodness of man, which are perverted by the introduction of force.…
Significantly, all Utopian programs pay considerable attention to the political organization of man.
The philosophic anarchist (relying on the perfectibility of man through education) is convinced that when the individual comes to his senses he will not need or tolerate the State.
The communist believes that an all-powerful State is necessary not only for the wiping out of private property but also of the inclination of the individual to own, and expects that instrument to “wither away” when it has accomplished that purpose.
Then there are the Utopians who dwell somewhere between these schools; accepting the State as a desirable or unavoidable fact of life (or even enjoying divine sanction), they propose to rid it of its admitted imperfections by legalistic tinkering; The Republic of Plato is the best known of this type
All Utopias are characterized by an avoidance of the fact that the State is made by man and in his own image, that if he were not constantly on the prowl for something-for-nothing he would never build such an institution.
The means by which the political person—“divine right” king or elected official—achieves independent stature is the power to appropriate property. Without appropriation there cannot be a State, and the power of the State is in direct proportion to the amount of property it appropriates.
Contrariwise, social power is measurable by the amount of property the individual producer is able to retain and dispose of as he sees fit. The State thrives on taxation, Society suffers from it. The difference between a free Society and a dominated one is in the percentage of property the State lays its hands on.
Thus, the more money the individual producer can retain and dispose as he sees fit, the freer Society is. Up till recently there had been no money that the State couldn’t appropriate. That changed with the invention of private crypto-currency, likeоднако Monero, for example.
It is possible that private crypto-currency is what, in the end, will allow Society to regain its freedom. As more people start using private crypto-currency (that the State cannot trace and appropriate), the percentage of property that Society can retain will increase and the power of the State will start shrinking. And eventually, the positive State might starve to the size of the negative Government.All taxes are compulsory exactions—“voluntary taxation” is a contradiction in terms—and the problem that Society must face, if it would retain its freedom, is whether it will keep the compulsory power in its own hands, under strict surveillance, or transfer it to its political agents. Transference carries with it the relinquishment of social power and the enlargement of political power, or the deterioration of the negative Government into the positive State.
Hence, the safeguard of the “good society,” or the means by which it can be achieved, is the constant, rigorous, and jealous examination of every tax request, and the careful supervision of the disbursement of the levies. Above all, the politician must never be given blanket authority to impose taxes; each tax proposal must be considered on its own merits, as a temporary levy intended for a specific purpose, even as the individual manages his own economy.
The ideal of the “good society” is the abolition of all taxes, but that presupposes the existence of the “perfect” man and a general understanding of how public expense can be met without levying on production; until that time comes, if ever, the best that Society can do to protect itself is to keep a suspicious eye on all taxation.
We might never have the “perfect” man, but we might have the “perfect” money that is unconfiscatable and outside of the State’s control (i.e. private crypto-currency). If the State cannot confiscate money (as it does today), to survive it will be forced to confiscate other physical property (as it did in the past). But confiscating physical property is something that people will notice and will not tolerate for long. (Money confiscation is much easier to obfuscate by methods that most people don’t undertand and don’t notice)
The key is that private crypto-currency make compulsary taxation impossible. This makes private crypto-currency is the best and the most powerful defence instrument free Society has ever had against the State.The drive toward centralization began long before the American State acquired the power to tax incomes, but this instrument provided the means for reducing the states to mere administrative subdivisions; for it gave the central au- thority the wherewithal to buy the subservience of local authorities. Hence, nothing can be done about restoring the balance between the two unless the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution is repealed.
But, while this political purpose demands repeal of the amendment, a far more fundamental reason calls for it. It is that the power to tax incomes violates the right of property, which underlies the sacred rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
It is silly to talk of freedom as long as the State can and does lay its hands on the earnings of the producer; unless the individual has the prerogative of possession, enjoyment, and disposition of all his produce, without let or hindrance, his status is less than that of a freeman; the more of it that is taken from him the nearer he approaches the status of a slave. It is interesting to note that the amendment puts no limit on the amount the State may confiscate.
Therefore, if the progress of the American State toward the subjugation of American Society is to be stopped, its power to levy on incomes must be abolished. But that can be done only if absence-of-restraint takes precedence over something-for-nothing in the scale of human values. The will for freedom comes before freedom.