United We Fall
Frank Chodorov
[Reprinted from analysis, Vol. VI, No.7, May
1950]
It is never too late to put up a fight for freedom. True, the
prospect for such a venture at this time seems bleak indeed, what with
the prevailing madness to push more power upon the political overseer
so that he might the better regulate our lives. Recruits would be
scarce. From the rank and file, those who under all circumstances are
determined to be harnessed, little can be expected; they are too
preoccupied with mere existence. And those who seem to have the
necessary ingredients that is, those who have by their own
initiative pushed themselves above the general level are
equally fervent for a regulated and subsidized existence under an
omnipotent State. Subvention has become everybody's business.
The despair of those who still put a value on freedom is
understandable. Perhaps, as they say, it is best to let the country
have its fill of socialism or fascism or communism or any other
pup from the litter of absolutism and be done with a quixotic
struggle. After a century or two of that kind of existence, when human
dignity shall have scraped bottom, a Moses will emerge from the
bulrushes and gain a respectable following. By that time, they point
out, the State shall have become emaciated from malnutrition, slaves
being poor providers, and a handful of resolute men can push it over.
It was ever thus. Every civilization we know of arose and flourished
in the sunshine of freedom; political institutions attached themselves
even at the beginning, but remained quiescent until an abundance of
economic goods stimulated cupidity; then followed a period of
increasing political predation until at long last the civilization
disintegrated and became an historical or archeological curio. After a
while, freedom germinates a new civilization. That is the inevitable
cycle, and we can do nothing, they say, to prevent or retard it.
Maybe so; maybe our civilization is also doomed by the ineluctable
forces of history; maybe it is in the decline right now. Nevertheless,
men do what they are impelled by an inner urge to do, not what history
dictates. The stars in the heavens tend to their eternal business
while we transitory mortals travel within our own specific orbits. It
was no historical imperative that directed the pens of those who
signed the Declaration of Independence; it was the integrity of the
signers. There were many at the time the Tories who
deemed the venture foolhardy and undesirable, and they could have
argued the historical uselessness of all revolutions. Nevertheless,
the rebels (none of whom were driven to it by economic necessity) put
their signatures to what at that time seemed to be their own death
warrant. Why? For lack of better answer, let us say they were made of
a particular kind of stuff and could not do otherwise.
Looking to history for causation, we find that man's constantly
recurring excursions in search of freedom are identified by their
leadership. The logical inference is that when men of that stripe
appear on the scene the cause of freedom is not neglected. If, for
instance, those who now prate about "free enterprise" were
willing to risk bankruptcy for it, as the men of the Declaration were
willing to risk their necks for independence, the present drive for
the collectivization of capital would not have such easy going.
Assuming that they are fully aware of the implications in the phrase
they espouse, and are sincere in their protestations, the fact that
they are unwilling to suffer mortification of the flesh disqualifies
them from leadership, and "free enterprise" remains merely a
mouthing.
The present low estate of freedom in this country must be laid to
lack of leadership. Whether or not leadership could have averted, or
can still stop, the socialistic trend, may be open to question; that a
glorious fight for freedom might yet enliven the American scene is
not. And, if we can trust the historic pattern, the odds are that
nature will give us, in her own good time and at her pleasure, the
kind of men that can and will make the good fight.
A Block to Power
The American terrain, so to speak, is fortuitously favorable for the
forces of freedom. Not only is there a strong supporting tradition,
but the Constitutional form of government which grew out of this
tradition is still in existence, though somewhat distorted, and could
provide the favorable battle line. It must be remembered that from the
very beginning of the country political power has been in bad repute;
even though it is well on its way to religious status, political power
in America still lacks the adulation that it receives from peoples
long inured to submissiveness.
In the beginning, the Founding Fathers recognized the need of
government in organized society, but were ever jealous of its powers.
They knew that political authority is constitutionally incapable of
moral inhibitions. It is force, and, like physical force, can be held
in check only by an equal and contrary force. For that reason, when
they came to organize a government to replace the one they had thrown
out, they put into its pattern provision for a series of
counterbalancing forces. Not only did they aim to keep the central
government weak by a division of authority, but also pitted against it
the governments of the component states. Freedom was to be preserved
by keeping political power decentralized and off balance. The scheme
worked well for a time, but no Constitution can of itself constrain
the inherent tendency of power to expand; only constant surveillance
and opposition can do that, and since the primary concern of man is
the business of living, political power makes its way unnoticed. The
present condition of freedom in this country is due entirely to the
breakdown of the strictures laid upon the government by the Founding
Fathers, most particularly the one providing for the dual form; the
powers of the central government have been enhanced at the expense of
the state governments. Hence, any campaign to restore freedom in this
country must begin with an effort to reverse that process.
The virtue in the juxtaposition of local and federal governments is
demonstrated in reverse by the careers of tyrannies. In no country
where a totalitarian regime established itself did it have to contend
with the dual system that obtains in this country. When Hitler came
along there was still some semblance of the local autonomy that
Bismarck had broken through, but it was too attenuated to stay the
path of the conqueror; he had to meet nothing like our sovereign state
governments, legally entrenched and supported by a tradition of
voluntary association. Mussolini's march on Rome was likewise
facilitated by the structural consolidation begun by Cavour, and the
Czars had long ago effected all the centralization that Lenin needed.
Again, for centuries the seat of ultimate authority had been London
when the socialists took over: home government in England is merely an
administrative agency.
When the trend toward centralization in this country took definite
shape under the New Deal, its leaders ran head on into the impediment
of divided authority. They set out to remove it. They went so far as
to draw up a blueprint for a new political setup, one that would
circumvent, if not obliterate, the troublesome state lines. In 1940
the National Resources Committee, in a report called
Regional Factors in National Planning, proposed to divide the
country into a dozen regional areas, as a basis for national planning
and the coordination of federal administrative services. It was a
proposal so violative of the spirit of the Constitution, if not the
letter, that the committee made haste to give assurance; the regional
organization, they said, "should not be considered as a new form
of sovereignty, even in embryo." It would have been foolhardy to
say anything else, especially since the consolidation of the states
into a national unit requires, under Constitutional procedure, the
joint action of Congress and the state legislatures. Nevertheless, the
committee insisted that the "division of Constitutional powers"
handicapped any program of national design; the report left no doubt
of the necessity of overcoming this division as a condition for the
federal solution of "otherwise insolvable problems." It was
clearly a bid for a nationalized system; and in the propaganda of the
day the prediction that the states are "finished" was
uninhibited.
Thus, the proponents of planning, with its correlative of
restrictions on individual initiative, are on record as to their
strategic campaign. The separate states must be either wiped out or
reduced to parish status. It is impossible to effect complete control
over the individual of divided allegiance; he must have only one god.
History is on their side; no political power ever achieved absolutism
where the subjects were permitted to indulge more than one loyalty;
the Caesars persecuted the Christians because, despite the homage they
rendered Rome, they worshipped God.
Pending the organic consolidation of the states, the planners adopted
a policy of conquest by purchase. Armed with the enormous revenues
from the unlimited income tax, they have to all intents and purposes
penetrated and almost obliterated state lines. All was done, is being
done, in the name of "public welfare," but the political
effect of flood control, public housing projects, farm subsidies,
federal control of banks, loans and subventions of all sorts, has been
to win public support for the central government and to discredit home
government. The loyalty as well as the integrity of the citizenry is
purchased by gratuities derived from its own substance, while bribery
and blackmail reduce the petty local politician to subservience. For a
brief tenure of office the sovereignty of the states is bartered away;
such areas of independent action as are left to them are those the
federal government has not yet chosen to absorb, like patrolling the
streets or real estate taxation. Washington has thus become the
American Mecca and, if not stopped by vigorous and uncompromising
opposition, will become its Moscow.
The Origin of States' Rights
The forces of centralization, then, have selected the "front,"
the line of battle, and there is nothing for the opposition to do but
to meet them at this line. The issue is again the matter of states'
rights, but this time vitalized with the issue of freedom.
Specifically, it is the original American issue, before it became
sullied with sectionalism and racialism; it is the problem that
confronted the Founding Fathers.
The people of the recently liberated British colonies had had their
fill of government from afar, of impersonal government, of government
by decree. If they were going to have any government at all they
wanted one they could keep their eyes on and, if need be, put their
hands on. They were for Union, to be sure, for by such cooperation
they had rid themselves of a foreign tyrant, but they recognized that
under the Articles of Confederation the Union was imperfect; it was to
correct these imperfections that they sent delegates to the
Philadelphia Convention, not to draw up a new Constitution. They
accepted the Constitution rather grudgingly, even though it left to
the several states almost as much autonomy as they had had; in
internal matters the only material limitations on their authority was
in imposing interstate tariffs and in the matter of issuing currency;
in the important fiscal powers, with the exception of import tariffs,
the states gave up nothing, merely allowing the federal government to
share with them the right to levy excise taxes. Direct taxation, on
land and on incomes, remained the exclusive prerogative of the states.
And, while the Constitution did not touch on the subject, the opinion
prevailed that withdrawal from the Union was permissible, an opinion
that found expression first in the 1815 Hartford convention called for
the purpose of exploring the possibility of secession of the New
England states. The first loyalty of the early American was to his
local government, and for good reason.
There is no vice in the government of a large nation that cannot be
duplicated in the government of a small nation or of any political
sub-division. Even the Greek city-states had their tyrants. Our state
and city establishments have proven themselves susceptible to the
ubiquitous malady of corruption, and the rights of citizens have not
been immune to the power-complex of county sheriffs. If we were
divided into forty-eight nations, each independent of the other, the
case for freedom would hardly be better; it could be worse. But, where
power is diffused, as was contemplated in the original Union, and the
citizen can play one authority against another, his inherent rights
are less likely to be infringed upon. That political fact was taken
for granted, or rather sensed, by those who drafted, ratified or
opposed the Constitution; the arguments in the Convention, the
pleading for ratification in the
Federalist and the warnings of anti-ratificationist
pamphleteers all bear evidence to a general distrust of centralized
power. Except for a handful who urged the monarchial form of
government, everybody was for local authority at least equal in scope
to that of the new national authority.
Freedom Is a Fight
Freedom is a personal experience; a free society is an association of
free individuals, nothing else. Freedom consists simply in the absence
of external restraints on thought and behavior. Yet, because the
individual, in his efforts to improve upon his circumstances, not
infrequently transgresses the equal freedom of his fellow man,
restraint becomes a necessary condition of social living; it is the
means of maintaining an equilibrium, or justice. But, the
administrators of justice are themselves men, possessed of the frail
ties common to all men, and in the exercise of the powers of restraint
vested in them are not immune from temptation. Power over men is
itself a satisfaction, besides providing opportunity to better one's
circumstances with a minimum of exertion. Hence, the lust for power
increases with its enjoyment and restraint is added to restraint. The
government instituted to prevent men from transgressing one another's
equal rights thus tends to become a transgressor of the rights of all.
The injustice is far more oppressive than any one man can do unto
another, and the interests of freedom can be served only by restraint
of government.
The fight is unending. Man being what he is, government is necessary;
but government being subject to its own perversions, must be kept in
line by constant surveillance and opposition. At times, as during the
present, political power gets the upper hand and seems well on the way
to reduce the individual to animal status; but because of man's innate
urge for self-expression, which is the essence of freedom, the
struggle flares up again and again. Between man and political power
there is never peace, only a temporary truce.
On this basic premise a states' rights movement can build an
appealing program. If it promises freedom, with decentralization as a
means only, it will speak to the hearts of men. The romantic appeal of
government by neighbors, of non-interference from outsiders, of the
preservation of cherished local customs, of the pride of belonging to
one's home environment all this will have its contributory
effect; but far more fetching will be the expectation of greater
freedom, economic as well as political. That is the goal men have
always striven for.
And the promise must be implemented with specific objectives; ideals
alone will not do. Its platform must offer relief from all the
interventions in human affairs that the federal government, under the
guise of humanitarianism, has possessed itself of and without
compromise. Going to the tap-root of its present overweaning power,
repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment should be the keystone of a states'
rights program. The power to tax the earnings of men is a denial of
private property, the one right without which man is reduced to
subject-status. Our entire Bill of Rights became a dead letter when
the right to keep and enjoy the product of ones labor was taken
from us; for human dignity cannot be divorced from the sense of
ownership. Once the political establishment acquired a proper lien on
everything produced, it had the means to undertake ventures for which
it has no competence in theory or practice, ventures which are
properly in the domain of individual initiative. It acquired the means
of becoming the Monopoly State Capitalist. Nor is there any power left
to prevent its achievement of that goal. For its enormous economic
resources enable it to maintain the machinery for the repression of
opposition.
A states' rights movement that did not encompass repeal of the
Sixteenth Amendment would be meaningless. For the autonomy of the
state government was inevitably doomed when the incomes of the people
became the incidence of federal taxation. In the first place, loyalty
of the citizen, who before that had been primarily a citizen of his
state, and only secondarily of the nation, was transferred to the
authority that takes his wealth; he became a subject of the government
controlling his economy. And then, with these funds at its disposal,
the federal government was in position to bring the local governments
to heel, mainly through the process of bribery. It is now clear that
when the states ratified this amendment they signed the death warrant
of their own sovereignty.
Secession and Nullification
With that plank as a beginning, the platform should tear into every
device of centralization, always exposing it as a threat to freedom,
regardless of the promise with which it is eased into our lives. Let
us take the Federal Reserve System as an example. This was in the
beginning a quasi-public organization, or a private organization under
the aegis of the government; its function was to move money from banks
with an excess of it to banks that had a need of it for sound
purposes. However, through its monopoly privilege of making money and
issuing bonds, the government has reduced this organization to
subservience; it is now an arm of the government, willy-nilly. As a
consequence, the local bank, which once served the commercial life of
its community, is an obedient secretary of the U. S. Treasury. Since
sixty percent of its assets are in the hands of the government, the
bank's interest in the local merchant and industrialist is only forty
percent. The banker is hardly the servicer of the society of which he
was a part, but has been fitted into the "foreign"
bureaucracy. Not only is his freedom being whittled away, but the
freedom of the citizen he once served is being limited by the rules
and regulations of the super-banker, the government. A states' rights
movement must not only point out how the liquidation of private
banking came about, to the discouragement of private initiative, but
should advocate a system of state-chartered banks as free as possible
from federal entanglement.
But, whether it is against the banking system, or flood control
boards with authority superseding that of the states, or the
multitudinous lending and spending agencies that everywhere demote
civic management to secondary importance, the attacks should be made
with the purpose of laying upon the federal government the odium of a
"foreign" government. One could make a strong case for the
proposition that the disabilities put upon the colonials by George III
compare favorably with the disabilities we suffer under the Washington
bureaucracy; the indictment of that monarch in the Declaration of
Independence needs little change to fit it to the Trojan horse named "Welfare
State." It must be the business of a states' rights movement to
point out that freedom can be bartered away as well as taken away. The
result is the same.
Important as is this ideological program, the movement must attach to
itself an economic interest. This is essential. In 1815, the movement
got up a head of steam only because "Mr. Madison's War" was
playing havoc with the merchants and individualists of New England,
and it was the economic difficulties of the South that germinated
interest in nullification and secession. No political movement travels
on ideals alone; it must be fueled by economics. Through the
intelligent use of the fiscal powers of the states, it is possible to
induce capital to engage in intra-state ventures; the current attacks
of big government on "big business" should favor such
decentralization, and the graduated income tax will in time make the
per-dollar return from a small investment more attractive than
possible earnings from a large undertaking. Farming freed from local
taxation should prove more profitable, and infinitely more dignified,
than subsidized and regulated farming. The exemption of buildings from
local levies would long ago have overcome the housing shortage, upon
which the bureaucracy has waxed fat, and would have started a wage
boom of proportions. In numerous ways, the states individually or
through voluntary agreements could go in for encouraging local
industry, to the disparagement of federal methods.
In short, a states' rights movement should take the form of the
secession from Washington, not from the Union, and nullification of
the directives issuing from bureaucracies. It would be revolutionary
in character but legal in form, because the autonomy of the state
governments is inherent in the Constitution. Besides, there is no way
for the federal government to indict the state governments, and
revolution is always legal when it is successful.
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