Return Revolution
Frank Chodorov
[Reprinted from Ch.4, One Is A Crowd,
published in 1952 of Devin-Adair Co., New York]
IT All BEGAN, as you know, with the Declaration of Independence. The
Americans stated their case, both as to the disabilities put upon them
by the British Crown and as to the kind of government they considered
it fitting for men to live under. The indictment was rejected and the
issue was joined in baffle. The god of war decided in favor of the
Americans, insofar as removing the grievous rule was concerned; but in
the establishment of a government to their liking the victors were on
their own. Nobody could help them. Even history could not make a
suggestion; for never had there been a political establishment
constructed or operating on principles laid down in the Declaration.
These principles, moreover, were quite metaphysical, completely
outside the realm of experience. They were: one, that all men are
created equal, and, two, that all men are endowed with inalienable
rights. When you come down to it, the two metaphysical concepts are
really one. For the postulate of equality did not apply to human
capacities or attributes, which are quite unequal and far beyond the
scope of government, but to the enjoyment of rights or prerogatives.
In that respect, they maintained, all men must be considered on a par.
This was a brand-new base for government. In all political science
hitherto known it had been an axiom that rights were privileges handed
down to subjects by the sovereign power; hence there was nothing
positive about them. A new king or a new parliament could abrogate
existing rights or extend them to other groups or establish new
favorites. The Americans, however, insisted that in the nature of
things all rights inhere in the individual, by virtue of his
existence, and that he instituted government for the sole purpose of
preventing one citizen fr6m violating the rights of another. Sovereign
power, they said, resides in the individual; the government is only an
agency of his will. If it fails to carry out its duties properly, or
if it itself presumes to invade his rights, then the moral thing to do
is to kick it out.
But, government is not an abstraction; it consists of people, and the
inclination of all people is to improve upon their circumstances with
whatever skills or capacities they possess and by whatever
opportunities they meet up with. The power placed in the hands of this
agency -- to enforce the observance of an equality of rights -- is in
itself a temptation from which only the saintly are delivered. The
Founding Fathers were therefore confronted with a difficult
contradiction: men being what they are, a government is necessary; and
government being what it is, men must be safeguarded against it. Their
recipe was the Constitution. Whether or not the ensuing government
would materialize the metaphysics of the Declaration, the Constitution
was, at any rate, a definite pattern; and when it was ratified and put
into operation, it became the end-product of the Revolution.
To be sure, the Constitution cut corners around the doctrine of
natural rights. We must remember that it was, after all, a political
instrument, concocted by men. Only in its preamble can such an
instrument serve the moralities; its working parts must be geared to
the interests of the dominating groups in society, and hence it must
be a compromise; to effect the compromise the moralities must be
watered down. The Constitution was no exception. The assumed equality
of rights was distinctly out of line with the profitable slave-trade;
owners of large estates wondered how it might affect their business;
merchants and manufacturers deemed it dangerous to their preferred
position. The Constitution was therefore so framed that the doctrine
could not be employed to disrupt the status. There were many Americans
who contended that the profit of the Revolution was liquidated by the
Constitution and at their insistence a Bill of Rights was included.
The Basic Social Struggle
The Founding Fathers forged well. Putting aside what it might have
been, the Constitution did pay homage to the doctrine of natural
rights. It did so by the simple expedient of putting restraints and
limitations on the powers of government. We learn from their published
statements that the intent of the Founding Fathers was to prevent the
despised "democrats," should they come into power, from
using it for spoliation. They were quite forthright about it, and not
a little could be said in favor of their thesis. In recent years the "mob"
they feared has indeed come into power and the result seems to support
the contention of Madison, Adams and Hamilton. But regardless of their
argument and regardless of their intent, the Constitutional shackles
did in fact, though perhaps inadvertently, protect the people in the
enjoyment of their cherished rights.
From this we learn a little heeded lesson in social science, namely,
that the real struggle that disturbs the enjoyment of life is not
between economic classes but between Society as a whole and the
political power which imposes itself on Society. The class-struggle
theory is a blind alley. True, people of like economic interests will
gang up for the purpose of taking advantage of others. But within
these classes there is as much rivalry as there is between the
classes. When, however, you examine the advantage which one class
obtains over another you find that the basis of it is political power.
It is impossible for one person to exploit another, for one class to
exploit another, without the aid of law and the force to back up the
law. Examine any monopoly and you will find it resting on the State.
So that the economic and social injustices we complain of are not due
to economic inequalities, but to the political means that bring about
these inequalities. If peace is to be brought into the social order it
is not by accentuating a class-struggle, but by restraining the basic
cause of it; that is, the political power. To bring about a condition
of equal rights, which is a condition of justice, the hands of the
politician must be so tied that he cannot extend his activities beyond
the simple duty of protecting life and property, his only competence.
To the extent, then, that the Founding Fathers delimited the powers
of the new government -- by the system of checks-and-balances-to that
extent did they render inestimable social service. And to that extent
did they insure the victory of the Revolution.
The Three Immunities
For about a century and a half the American citizen enjoyed, in the
main, three immunities against the State: in respect to his property;
in respect to his person; in respect to his thought and expression.
Pressure upon them was constant, for in the pursuit of power the State
is relentless, but the dikes of the Constitution held firm and so did
the immunities. Only within our time did the State effect a vital
breach in the Constitution, and in short order the American, no matter
what his classification, was reduced to the status of subject, as he
was before 1776. His citizenship shrivelled up when the Sixteenth
Amendment replaced the Declaration of Independence.
The income tax completely destroys the immunity of property. It
flatly declares a prior right of the State to all things produced.
What it perrmits the individual to retain is a concession to
expediency, not by any means a right; for the State retains the
liberty to set rates and to fix exemptions from year to year, as its
convenience dictates. 'Thus, the sacred right of private property is
violated, and the fact that it is done
pro forma makes the violation no less real than when it is
done arbitrarily by an autocrat. The blanks we so dutifully fill out
simply accentuate our degradation to subject-status.
Demagoguery loves to emphasize a distinction between human rights and
property rights. The distinction is without validity and only serves
to arouse envy. The right to own is the mark of a free man. The slave
is a slave simply because he is denied that right. And because the
free man is secure in the possession and enjoyment of what he
produces, and the slave is not, the spur to production is in one and
not in the other. Men produce to satisfy their desires and if their
gratifications are curbed they cease to produce beyond the point of
limitation; on the other hand the only limit to their aspirations is
the freedom to enjoy the fruits of their labors. That fact,
deep-rooted in the nature of man, accounts for the progress of
civilization when and where the right of property is recognized, and
for the retrogression that follows from its denial. Property rights
and human rights are more than complementary; they are identical.
The income tax did more than revoke the immunity of property. It gave
the State the means of effectively attacking the immunities of mind
and of person; it transferred to the State that sovereignty which,
according to the American theory, is lodged in the individual. In the
final analysis, sovereignty is a matter of dollars. The more dollars
the more sovereignty. The individual is no longer sovereign when his
living is dependent on a superior will, when that will becomes
dominant by the economic strength behind it. The edicts of the State
are not self-enforcing, since they lack the voluntary support of
public opinion, and are therefore only as effective as the size of the
police force; but the police force must be paid, and since the
payments must come out of the property of those upon whom the edicts
fall, there is no standing up to it. Without an F.B.I., military
conscription -- which violates the immunity of person -- would be
impossible; it failed during the Civil War simply because Lincoln did
not have the funds to support such an agency. The Espionage Act --
which violated the immunity of mind-would have been but a piece of
paper but for the thugs hired by the State to enforce it.
Bribing the Constitution
Further, the wealth acquired by the State at the expense of the
producers enabled it to buy its way into sovereignty. The Founding
Fathers put a check on the central power by clearly delimiting its
scope, specifying that all other prerogatives, named and unnamed,
shall reside in the component and autonomous commonwealths. They knew
from experience what a far-away and self-sufficient authority could do
to human liberty, and sought to avoid that danger by making local
government the residuary of all unspecified power; not that the local
politician is different in kind from the national politician, but that
his proximity to the people makes him more sensitive to their will.
However, with the advent of the income tax this safeguard lost all
meaning, for from then on the local politician was less and less under
obligation to his constituents; on the other hand, they fell under his
obligation by his ability to hand out gratuities derived from federal
grants, for which he gave up nothing but the dignity vested in him by
the Constitution. His political preferment is now largely a matter of
dispensing federal patronage. The American no longer regards his local
government as anything more than an agency of the State. Thus, the
original federation -- the Union-has been superseded in fact by a
single, centralized power, and the citizen of the commonwealth has
become a subject of that power. The income tax alone made this
possible, inevitable.
The transmutation of the Constitution by bribery has also been
effected through private channels. The income tax has made the State
the largest single buyer in the country and, since "the customer
is always right," it is unthinkable that the recipients of its
patronage would oppose the State on any issue important to its
purposes. Subvention of agriculture, education and the press has been
supplemented by gratuities to sundry pressure-groups, all easing the
shift of sovereignty from the individual to the State. To top it all
off, the capital absorbed by the State, via the income tax, has put it
into business in a big way, so that it is now the largest employer in
the nation; loyalty to a boss of that potential breeds a peculiar kind
of freedom of conscience.
Lost Will for Freedom
Our forefathers were not unaware of the inverse ratio of taxation to
liberty. Their experience with the British Crown was still fresh when
the Founding Fathers came up with the Constitution, and they
scrutinized its taxing provisions most carefully. About the only
fiscal power generally con-ceded to the federal authority was a levy
on imports. Hamilton knew this would hardly yield enough to support
the establishment contemplated and pleaded with great acumen for the
right to levy internal excise taxes. His argument prevailed, but only
because, as he pointed out, without this revenue the government would
be compelled to ask for the unthinkable: a land tax or an income tax.
And, until 1913, the federal establishment had to get along as best it
could with what it picked up from custom duties and a few excise
taxes. Its sovereignty was thus contained.
In 1913 the relationship between the State and Society was reversed.
Areas which had heretofore been considered within the private domain,
sacred ground so to speak, were now invaded by the arrogant and
enriched State, and within thirty years the individual was squeezed
into a corner so small that even his soul lacked elbow-room. His case
was far worse than it was in 1776; in exchange for an income tax King
George III would have conceded every point made against him by the
colonists, and might even have done penance for past sins. But, such
was the character of these Americans that they challenged him to
battle because he presumed to impose a miserable tax on tea. What they
won at Yorktown was lost by their offspring one hundred and thirty-two
years later.
Were the dispositi6n of the current crop of Americans comparable to
that of their forbears, a new revolution, to regain the profit of the
first one, would be in order. There is far more justification for it
now than there was in 1776. But, people do not do what reason
dictates; they do what their disposition impels them to do. And the
American disposition of the 1950s is flaccidly placid, obsequious and
completely without a sense of freedom; it has been molded into that
condition by the proceeds of the Sixteenth Amendment. We are Americans
geographically, not in the tradition. In the circumstances, a return
to the Constitutional immunities must wait for a miracle.
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