The Big Bad Wolf

The Land of the Free is Long Gone

(Years ago I had two addresses at “Geo Cities” 7006 & 7394 At one of these address I posted articles that I found that I felt needed to be read by folks. At the other address I posted cat pictures. Well not really, but sort of. LOL Yahoo bought out Geo Cities and for some reason just let it die. I suspect the reason was too many people were using it to disseminate truth out in the world and that just plain had to be stopped. While I was going through some of the pages I had saved I ran across this one and felt that it was a piece of history that we needed to be reminded of. Realize this….it was originally posted in April of 2001. If we can’t learn from history, we are condemned to repeat it. Is it worse today or better? Read it and weep for the truth is a bitter pill. ~C.L.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson prophesied that the boasts of nineteenth-century civilization would one day be cited as proof of its barbarity. That remark struck me when I first read it forty years ago, and I’ve often pondered it since.

Now and then I’ve cited the kindred story of the supposed Etruscan statue of a horse, which proved a forgery when a twentieth-century art expert noticed its nineteenth-century mannerisms – mannerisms which had passed unnoticed in the nineteenth century itself. As the critic Hugh Kenner puts it, "The style of your own time is always invisible." But eventually the style of the forger "rose to visibility." A keen twentieth-century eye finally discerned the telltale marks of a period that had receded into the past.

How many strange things we take for granted only because we are inured to them! When we read about slavery in the Old South, we can hardly believe that so many people, white and black, saw nothing wrong with it. For me it’s almost impossible to imagine "owning" another man, or treating him as if I did.

Yet there were even cases of free blacks, in the Old South, owning their own black slaves. America’s slaves had been purchased in Africa, where slavery was routine until recently (and still exists in a few places).

But why not? After all, slavery, in various forms, has existed throughout most of history. Though Washington and Jefferson are now blamed for having owned slaves, nobody gets indignant that Aristotle and Cicero owned them too. In the Classical world the abolition of slavery was almost unimaginable. What is unusual is a civilization where the evil of slavery is assumed.

And what features of our own civilization will the future recoil from, marveling that we saw nothing wrong with them? Nobody can say; but I hope that the chief evil of our time will be recognized in the state as we know it – a social system of "organized plunder," as Frederic Bastiat called it, also prepared for organized homicide, armed to the teeth with terrible weapons capable of killing millions within minutes.

Considering the scale of modern wars that have already occurred and the constant level of state plunder even in peacetime, I can only hope that men of the future will be astounded at our submissiveness. Instead of rebelling against the state for its enormous criminality, men in our time accept it as the most natural thing in the world – a good and indispensable thing, without which we might be at the mercy of "robber barons"! The state, we are told, has saved us from the depredations of laissez-faire capitalism; in return for which it has claimed only a couple of hundred million lives, untold trillions of dollars, and most of the freedoms our American ancestors considered their natural rights.

Modern man has drawn morals from his experience that are directly contrary to those he should have drawn. The worse the state treats him, the more convinced he becomes of its necessity and even beneficence. His faith in the state is far more profound (and irrational) than medieval man’s faith in the Church. And he accepts it as natural, if not exactly right, that the state should continue to grow and to increase its claims on him, his liberty, and his wealth.

Some libertarians reckon that the average American now works nearly half the year for the state. But when President George W. Bush proposed a modest reduction in tax rates, the statist opinion cartel reacted with scorn and outrage. It was "too much"; it would threaten "the economy"; the state (alias "we") "can’t afford it"; "lobbyists" and "special interests" were, as TIME magazine put it, going "Oink, oink." It was piggish of people to want a reduction of the state’s claims on them. The state, it goes without saying, is never greedy. There is no limit to what it may justly demand. The question of justice to the taxpayer is never raised.

In opposition to Bush, congressional Democrats staged a little show-and-tell scene, featuring a shiny new Lexus and a muffler. Under Bush’s plan, they said, "the rich" would get the Lexus, while "working families" would get only the lousy muffler.

The appeal to envy is a reliable feature of democratic (i.e., demagogic) politics. What it carefully avoids mentioning, of course, is that tax cuts don’t give; they give back. You can’t get the price of a Lexus back unless you are already paying the price of a Lexus in taxes. If you’ve only paid the price of a muffler, you can only get the price of a muffler back. And as long as income tax rates are graduated, tax cuts will inevitably most benefit those who have been the chief targets of democratic plunder. And any measure of justice to "the rich" will be portrayed as "unfair" to everyone else.

The Republicans are too timid to point out that the greediest men in America today are the Democrats, who assume a boundless right to seize other people’s wealth. Income taxes, even more than other taxes, are money taken by force and collected by a police-state apparatus. There is no way to impose them "fairly" because they are evil in principle. They amount to slavery. And the slaves are piggish when they want their freedom.

Like the slaveowners of old, the Democrats are not aware of the least effrontery or presumption in themselves when they claim others’ money. They really feel they own us. And the whole debate over tax cuts accepts the premise that the state is entitled to decide how much we may keep. We are all statists now. The state doesn’t have to establish its right, let alone its need, to claim the lion’s share of what we earn and own. Whatever it currently takes is the baseline for further debate.

The most successful tax-cutting argument of recent years has been the "supply-side" approach of the early Reagan years: that tax cuts were justified because lower rates would give the state more revenue! Yet even when that turned out to be true, the liberal Hive rejected the lesson. The revenues increased dramatically, but federal spending outstripped the revenues and the resulting deficits were said to prove the failure of supply-side economics. The Hive instinctively disliked any decrease in the taxing power, even if the state gained by it, because the Hive – the socialist oversoul, so to speak – favors maximum state power over the individual, just as a matter of principle. It felt it had been tricked into relaxing its grip, though at some point high taxes become, even from the state’s point of view, self-defeating. Which is why socialist economies always fail, in economic terms, though they succeed in their real goal – monopolizing power.

How much should we really be paying in taxes? If we assume that the U.S. Government should be bound by the U.S. Constitution, that the Constitution itself is valid, and that a government may justly impose taxes to pay for its proper functions, we are paying at least ten times as much as we should.

A little rough arithmetic may help. The federal government is now spending about $2 trillion per year (it was about $2 billion when Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933). With a population of about a quarter of a billion people, that comes to $8,000 per year. Is that "fair"? Not in terms of what any honest man receives in government services. (Some men, it is true, get many times that amount in government money.)

By far the greatest part of the federal budget goes for three purposes: redistributive programs, the armed forces, and interest on the federal debt. The "social" programs should not exist at all; they are both unconstitutional and immoral burdens on productive people. Most "defense" spending is unrelated to "the common defense of the United States," which does not require this country to maintain military bases around the world and most of its advanced weaponry; any truly defensive needs could be met for a small fraction of the expense of the U.S. empire. The federal debt, around $6 trillion, is simply the scandalous cumulative result of wildly excessive spending over many years. It has been calculated that every American child born today will be taxed $100,000 to pay interest on the current debt, which he had no say in running up – a telling reflection on "self-government."

The "budget" problem is really a constitutional problem. Thanks to the quasi-constitutional federal power to impose limitless taxes on personal incomes, and to the ability of the federal government to change the meaning of the Constitution to expand its powers as it pleases, there are no controls on that government’s spending, least of all self-control. The numbers speak for themselves. In the 1830s the federal government actually ran a surplus, of about $35 million. Today that figure seems comically trifling. Of course we now have to judge such things in "constant" dollars, a fact which is itself a comment on the government’s debasement of money. That debasement is nearly as astounding as the increases in spending.

If, then, the Constitution is our yardstick, the average American should be paying less than a $1,000 (in today’s money) in annual taxes. If the dollar had retained its former value, that amount would be less than $100.

It is not enough to say that we are not now getting our money’s worth for our taxes; we are paying the government for tyrannizing. The hostages are forced to subsidize their captors. How does a hostage get his money’s worth? The "services" and "defense" we allegedly receive are themselves evils we – or at least the honest men among us – would be better off without. Today government is the wolf at the door.

The Land of the Free is long gone. Of all our patriotic myths, one of the most irksome is that we owe our freedom to this country’s government and the wars it has fought. Those wars have in fact been ruinous to freedom. With each one since at least the Civil War, the government’s powers have expanded. When was the last time a country won a war and emerged with a more limited government than it had had before the war?

Some traces of the Constitution do survive, but no thanks to our rulers. And our most basic freedoms are relics of Anglo-Saxon law: the right to a jury trial, the privilege of habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence. If these things had not existed already, it is a certainty that the modern state would never have established them. Would Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt or, for that matter, George W. Bush have introduced the concept of habeas corpus? The question answers itself. Yet we are constantly assured that we somehow owe our freedom to our rulers and to the wars they have plunged us into. After all it has done to us, the state still expects our gratitude. ~ Joe Sobran

I am sad to report that the mind of Joe came to a halt in 2010 when he passed away. He would have been a great addition to Substack ~C.L.