Abolish the Constitution

Constitution? What Constitution?

Every person who signed the Constitution on this day in 1787 would urge the abolition of that document and the government it created.

Every person who was delegated to represent the states in the state ratifying conventions would agree: we need to abolish the Constitution and the government it created.

Politicians take an oath to support the Constitution, almost as if sleep-walking. The oath means nothing. The Constitution means nothing.

If we were to sum up the social ideals which the Constitution was intended to protect, we could do so in three words: "Liberty Under God." If you strip away our cars, computers, cell phones, TV's, and iPods, you would see that the government created by the Constitution does not protect "Liberty Under God." The U.S. is the exact opposite: an atheistic dictatorship. We are well-kept slaves.

"Under God"
The government created by the Constitution refuses to acknowledge that it is "under God." The current government has deified itself, and claims to be our Savior. George Washington, "the Father of His Country" (but not ours), proclaimed,

it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour

The current regime would say this constitutes an "establishment of religion." That is an outrageous lie. Not a single person who had a hand in demanding, formulating, or ratifying the First Amendment would say that the new nation does not have to obey God's will. But the current federal government makes it illegal for government schools here in southwest Missouri to even post a passive copy of the Ten Commandments on a classroom wall. It is illegal for Missouri students to be taught that the Declaration of Independence is really true. If Americans had known that the Constitution would give the federal government power to order local schools to remove copies of the Ten Commandments and deny the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution would not have been ratified. Period.

Liberty has also been abolished.
Not only are we not a nation under God, but we are not "the land of the free."

America demanded a Bill of Rights before the Constitution could go into effect. The Fourth of those Rights is:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Let's say you're an oriental grandmother. A government agent takes your suitcase, opens it up, unfolds your underwear, and confiscates your cell phone and shampoo. No probable cause, not even any improbable cause; no warrant, no testimony under oath by anyone who suspects you have, are, or will commit a crime, no description of what the government expects to find or how it could possibly benefit from this search. If this does not constitute an "unreasonable" search and seizure, nothing does. But the Fourth Amendment was intended to protect us against something. If not this, then what? But this happens every day in airports across America. It is "unreasonable" because no private business, accountable to the Free Market, would ever allow such conduct even once, much less make it a matter of routine corporate policy.

The denial of rights is routine government policy.

John Hancock and Samuel Adams tossed tea into the Boston Harbor rather than pay a tax of 3 pence per pound on the tea. A tax ten times greater is imposed on every gallon of gas we buy. Today's regime takes over half of everything we earn.

Years ago the Professor of Constitutional Law at the Harvard Law School boasted that he tells his con law students not to read the Constitution, holding that to do so would be apt to “confuse their minds.” Unquestionably, of the 6,000-odd words of the document, at least 39 out of every 40 are totally irrelevant to the vast majority, as well as to the most important, of the problems which the Supreme Court handles each term in the field of "constitutional interpretation." The Courts created by NAFTA and other trade agreements do not even pretend to be obligated to observe the Constitution. These foreign courts can overrule U.S. Supreme Court decisions and negate the laws of American legislatures.

Americans and people around the world give lip service to "the greatness of the Constitution," although no other nation operates in terms of a constitution
modeled after the U.S. Constitution. The conservative columnist Richard Grenier is correct:

It has never occurred to most Americans that their Republic – the first democratic state on a national scale – adopted a Constitution that has been taken seriously as an enduring model by nobody. I said, nobody.

Scholars in law and political science quietly admit that the U.S. is not really under the Constitution in any meaningful sense. The first step to restoring "Liberty Under God" is to admit that the U.S. is no longer a "Constitutional Republic," but an "Administrative State." The Constitution was abolished decades ago.

In the Washington Post article above, Chief Justice Roberts praises the Constitution, saying,

The Framers knew how bad it was to live under a powerful and unjust king, and so the Constitution split government power among the legislative, executive and judicial branches. That way no one of them could get too strong. That plan is more important than any one part.

In our day, the vast majority of government powers are exercised by administrative agencies with legislative, judicial, and executive powers all rolled into one bureaucracy. Tens of thousands of pages of laws are created by these agencies. Congress passes only a few hundred laws, including the renaming of post-offices and declaring the second week in October "National Pickle Week" (or some such thing). Meanwhile, James Madison declared the union of executive and legislative powers to be "the very essence of tyranny" (Quoted in A. Gulas, The American Administrative State: The New Leviathan, 28 DUQUESNE LAW REVIEW, 489, 490 [1990]). The total ignorance of the separation of powers is seen all around us, as Walter Williams points out:

Here's what the U.S. Constitution says: "All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." How many times have we heard politicians, pundits and guardians of our news media say that President Bush cut taxes, or Obama is going to raise taxes? The fact of the matter is that presidents have no power to raise or lower taxes. They can propose tax measures or veto them but it is Congress that has the ultimate power to raise or lower taxes since they can, with a two-thirds vote, override a presidential veto. The same principle applies to spending. Presidents cannot be held responsible for budget deficits or surpluses. A president cannot spend a dime that Congress does not first appropriate. Given these plain facts, are politicians, pundits and media people — who persist in talking about a president cutting or raising taxes, or creating a budget deficit — ignorant, stupid or deceptive?

But I'm sure Williams would agree that the Executive does spend. We have just witnessed the Treasury Department spend billions of dollars to bailout an insurance company. To nationalize it, really. Actually, a private corporation has authorized itself to counterfeit the U.S. currency, putting the U.S. in debt, and taxpayers on the line. If anyone can, with a straight face, maintain that this is what the Constitution was intended to authorize, he is, as Williams put it, ignorant, stupid or so deceptive as to deserve an Oscar.^® People who take the ideal of "Liberty Under God" seriously warned about the recent bailouts years ago.

Then there's the Bush doctrine of "the Unitary Executive," making the President a far more absolute monarch than George III in 1776.

Government's departure from the Constitution is so widespread, so severe, and so destructive of the ideals for which America's Founders fought, that there can be no rational belief that the Constitution is still in effect in any meaningful way. Or if the Constitution is indeed in effect, it deserves to be abolished. As Lysander Spooner put it,

[W]hether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain --- that it has either authorized such a government as we [now] have ... or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist. HT

The Republocrat Reign is Nigh!

"Just keep convincing folks that voting for a third party is 'wasting your vote' and we can keep on doin' business as usual."

"We have made lies our refuge."

Creation and Destruction.

George Will, following Russell Roberts, following Leonard Read, links Pencils and Politics in the latest Newsweek Magazine. Together they demonstrate that no single human being on earth knows how to manufacture a pencil and sell it at a profit for a dime. And this past weekend the world learned that the most powerful government in the world cannot prevent the destruction of a 150-year old financial institution with nearly $700 billion in assets; its greatness has been swept into the dustbin of financial history. Nearly 50,000 jobs were lost in two days. AIG, the trillion-dollar insurance giant, may be next to collapse. Jeffrey Tucker writes:

Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars are on the move, sweeping all before them. And yet take note: it is not war accomplishing this. It is not violence. It is not the result of a planning committee. No election is necessary. No terrorist act took place. There was no government edict.

No one person is in charge. Layers upon layers of decisions by millions and billions of people are the essential mechanism that makes the process move forward. All these decisions and choices and guesses come to be aggregated in a single number called the price, and that price can then be used in that simple calculation that indicates success or failure. Every instant of time all around the world that calculation is made, and it results in shifts and movement and progress.

The Price.

It orders millions of human beings to cooperate in the process of creating a pencil, and it destroys "The Masters of the Universe."

Prices cannot be determined by the government's central planners. They are determined by billions of human beings, making their own plans, enforcing their own decisions, acting on their own values. The price is essentially a reflection of confidence.

It is not healthy for people to have confidence in something illusory. It is good for our economy when bubbles burst. The sooner they burst, the better.

Hopefully, the biggest bubble of them all will soon go "Pffssssssssst...."

Antony Sutton, formerly of the prestigious Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has called attention to the relationship between confidence and the price of our unconstitutional and debased currency:

Our money system, and almost all money systems in the modern world, are based on debt. One person's paper money or book-entry credit is another person's obligation to pay. The system is predicated on the heroic assumption that people will continue to accept another person's debts as an acceptable recompense.

Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has described the mythical, circular reasoning surrounding "fiat money":

. . . each accepts them [the pieces of paper] because he is confident others will. The pieces of green paper have value because everybody thinks they have value, and everybody thinks they have value because in his experience they have had value.

Sutton answers the obvious question:

What then keeps the Federal Reserve System, which is based on paper debt, in operation? In a word, confidence. The confidence that someone else will accept a worthless piece of paper, created out of nothing and backed by nothing, in exchange for their real tangible objects.

In the final analysis, emphasizes Friedman, acceptance of false weights "is a social convention which owes its very existence to the mutual acceptance of what from one point of view is a fiction."

Lehman Bros. had value as long as enough people had enough wishful thinking.

The "Dollar" (Federal Reserve Notes) has value as long as enough people have enough wishful thinking; as long as they listen to the government's unethical cheerleaders. When morality and reality sink in, the Fed will join Lehman Bros. and Fanny Mae. The sooner the better.

Truly, as a nation of debtors, "we have made lies our refuge" (Isaiah 28:15).

The View from Down Unduh

Will Grigg links to an Aussie news show which gives us good insight into the nature of America's Economic woes:



Next question: "What is the Solution?"
Peter Schiff gives the correct answer.
Not one I've ever heard at any "Candidate Forum."

Income Inequality: What's the Problem?

I certainly invite answers to this question in the "comments" section:

What's wrong with the rich getting richer?

Imagine that you and a few hundred others have fallen through a tear in the space-time continuum into the future: the 23rd century. You now work in a museum, doing what only you can do: keeping records and recreating the work you did when you lived in the 21st century, for the benefit and delight of historians and anthropologists who really appreciate the insights you bring from the past. (This scenario assumes that you loved the work you are doing now, and you're perfectly content doing that same work in the future.)

In fact, you're getting paid twice as much as you earned in 2008. And you're able to use the extra income to buy an extraordinary range of goods and services that were completely unavailable to you in the 21st century.
• You travel from place to place in a transporter beam like on Star Trek.
• The labor-saving devices in your kitchen boggle your imagination.
• 23rd century health-care will keep you alive an estimated 112 more years, in youthful vigor.

Here's the catch:

You and the others from the 21st century who slipped through the wrinkle in time are in something of a separate caste. Because human beings in the 23rd century are so much more highly educated, morally developed, and psychologically balanced than people of the 21st century, you are not allowed to vote.

Further, everyone else earns at least 100 times as much as you and others from the 21st century do. It's like earning $100,000 per year in a world where everyone else earns $10,000,000 per year.

Because everyone in the 23rd century has their act together, you are treated with respect, kindness, and genuine affection by everyone else. Every conversation you have with 23rd century human beings is rewarding and edifying. You are becoming wiser with each conversation, and you're building many good habits and admirable character traits the more you interact with people of the future. As a result, your very generous employers give you almost weekly raises. You still haven't figured out what 23rd-century inventions you want to buy with all the extra income you already receive.

But the "income gap" between the 21st century people like you and the 23rd century people is huge, and growing every day.

"The rich get richer, and the poor get relatively poorer."

Is this really a problem?

Is thus "fundamentally unfair?"

Many left-leaning economists say it is.

This blogger quotes the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, who say:

During the two decades before the early 2000's, the average income of this country's poorest families rose by 18.9%. During that same time the average income of our richest families rose . . . nay, exploded by 58.5%.

"Paul Krugman is very upset," writes George Reisman.

In his Monday New York Times Op-Ed column this week, he complains that while the real incomes of the great majority of Americans have essentially stagnated or declined over the last thirty-five years, "income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent."

Krugman calls it "a rising oligarchy." He also speaks of "a new Gilded Age," and says, "if the rich get more, that leaves less for everyone else."

But that just isn't true. Krugman admits that the rich of today are richer than the rich of the Gilded Age:

We are now living in a new Gilded Age, as extravagant as the original. Mansions have made a comeback. Back in 1999 this magazine profiled Thierry Despont, the ''eminence of excess,'' an architect who specializes in designing houses for the superrich. His creations typically range from 20,000 to 60,000 square feet; houses at the upper end of his range are not much smaller than the White House. Needless to say, the armies of servants are back, too. So are the yachts. Still, even J.P. Morgan didn't have a Gulfstream.

Yes, the rich are richer, but so are the middle class. And most dramatically, so are the poor. Only an intensely envious person would contend that the poor of 200 years ago were better off than the poor of today.

What is Wealth Inequality? - Art Carden - Mises Institute

The poor are not getting poorer, they are only getting relatively poorer.

And the reason why the poor are living better lives today than 200 years ago is precisely because the rich are getting richer.

For Society To Thrive, The Rich Must Be Left Alone - George Reisman - Mises Institute

There are several reasons why the "income gap" is such a boogeyman among socialists:

Envy

Democracy

Krugman claims that when the heads of corporations (that are creating all the wealth that is being enjoyed by the poor and middle classes) become richer, the political landscape becomes more conservative; there is "a general shift to the right" he says.

This may explain why the socialist revolution always kills off the rich, leaving only democrats to be herded by The Party. (I assume that Krugman assumes that he'll still be around after the revolution as a "Party advisor.")

Liberalism is Aristocracy

The remedy is:

Libertarian Democracy

Laissez-faire capitalism is true democracy. Not the majority voting for the rulers who will initiate force against the minority, but the masses of consumers making their own voluntary choices in every area of life.

A truly laissez-faire capitalist society is one devoid of the initiation of force.

Under true laissez-faire capitalism, corporate CEO's do not use the government to extort multi-million dollar severence pay packages from taxpayers by force when their corporations go belly-up.

People are free to begin a business, hire the employees they want at the wages they want, sell the products they want at the prices they want, and consumers are free to reject the price or benefit from the product. If consumers choose to buy the product, it will be voluntarily, and it will signify an increase in their standard of living. The poor will get richer, and those who serve the poor by creating jobs for them and selling the goods and services that enrich their lives, will get even richer. _

Usury

Gary North has written an article entitled, "Usury, Interest, and Loans: A Brief Summary of Biblical Teaching, With Bibliography."

Here is my response: Gary North on Usury, Interest, and Loans.

Libertarian Dime Interview, Pt. 2

Part 2 of my interview on the Libertarian Dime podcast is now ready for online listening or downloading. [mp3]

Follow along or take detours through the links posted here:

http://LD.KevinCraig.us

No Taxation Without Representation

"Following its knee-jerk, free-market, Milton Friedman-obsessed ideology, the Bush Administration has seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

That's Russell Roberts, lampooning the impending liberal response to yesterday's federal seizure of trillions of dollars of home loans, and taxpayer-subsidized payouts to investors.

Actually, liberals aren't going to be all that critical of the Bush Administration, because liberals are part of the problem, and need to maintain the fiction that the federal government is our Messiah. Democrats hope to take control of the dictatorial reins now held by Republicans, not to eliminate those powers.

"Speaking of the imperial presidency–all these huge new powers and expenditures are being conducted without any sanction from Congress and with little public debate."

So writes David Boaz at the CATO Institute.

Were your elected representatives part of the Treasury Department's seizure? Did they represent you?

The Constitution, as a roadmap for government taxation and appropriation, was completely bypassed.

That's no news to readers of this blog.

The Constitution is a meaningless historical relic.

A CNBC report quotes Jim Rogers, a well-renowned investor and an expert on China, saying that the United States is now more communist than China. Only Cuba and North Korea have a larger percentage of the economy under centralized regulation than the United States. Sunday's action controls about half of the U.S. mortgage market, $5 Trillion. That's half of the entire GDP of China.

Remember that this "crisis" is government-induced. The government has been using mortgage bankers as instruments of social change to put trillions of dollars of home loans into the hands of "the disenfranchised" and preferred minorities who otherwise would have been too risky to lend to. This is more than just buying votes (but it is that). It is enslaving - nationalizing - homes and "homeowners." "The rich rules over the poor, And the borrower is the slave of the lender." (Proverbs 22:7)

The following British parody is truly illuminating, but it doesn't hit you across the face with the fact that this whole situation is immoral. It is the complete opposite of "Vine & Fig Tree," the original "American dream." It amounts to a huge national structure of larceny and covetousness. It truly reflects on the basic character of America, her people and her institutions, that character being nearly sociopathic: a complete disregard for the well-being of others. This exchange is truly witty, but think about the moral dimensions of what's being described, and it is sobering, to put it mildly. Remember, the Declaration of Independence says we will answer to "the Supreme Judge of the world" for the ethics of our behavior, and that only if our behavior conforms to "The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" can we have "a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence." Don't you feel safe and protected, knowing that McCain, Obama, support final Sovietization of Fannie, Freddie, assisted by the wise experienced leadership of Sarah Palin and Joe Biden? We're in good hands.

The End of the American Empire

Facing threats of a "catastrophe," the government has moved to socialize the mortgage industry. Network talking heads are saying this could cost taxpayers "millions of dollars." This is like the initial cost estimates of Medicare or the War in Iraq. In fact, the cost could exceed a trillion. Count on hundreds of billions. Losses could be trillions. The New York Times asked a couple of weeks ago, "What Will Mac ’n’ Mae Cost You and Me?" Go ahead; read the article; you won't find the answer. The reason will be found at the end of this post.

Leading economist Nouriel Roubini had warned that This is the beginning of the decline of the American empire. On his blog he made the following predictions:

• At the end of the day this financial crisis will engender credit losses of at least $1 trillion and more likely $2 trillion. The financial and banking crisis will be severe and last several years, leading to a severe and persistent liquidity and credit crunch.

• This is not just a subprime mortgage crisis; this is the crisis of an entire subprime financial system. The losses are spreading from subprime to near-prime and prime mortgages, including hundreds of billions of dollars of home equity loans that are now worth little; to commercial real estate; to unsecured consumer credit (credit cards, student loans, auto loans); to leveraged loans that financed reckless debt-laden LBOs; to muni bonds that will go bust as hundred of municipalities go bust; to industrial and commercial loans; to corporate bonds whose default rate will jump from close to 0% to over 10%; to CDSs, where $62 trillion of nominal protection sits on top an outstanding stock of only $6 trillion of bonds and where counterparty risk – and the collapse of many counterparties – will lead to a systemic collapse of this market.

• Hundreds of small banks with massive exposure to real estate (the average small bank has 67 percent of its assets in real estate) will go bust.

• This will be the most severe U.S. recession in decades. This U.S. consumer is shopped out, saving less, debt burdened and being hammered by falling home prices, falling equity prices, falling jobs and incomes, rising inflation and rising oil and energy prices.

• This financial crisis signals the beginning of the decline of the American Empire; over time the relative economic, financial, military, geostrategic power of the US and reserve role of the US dollar will significantly decline.

• This crisis also represents a Crisis of the Suburbian (“McMansions and Gas-Guzzling SUVs”) American Way of Life. The sharp rise in gasoline and energy prices and transportation costs, together with the sharp fall in home prices, will radically change the pattern of living of the typical American household.

What Roubini doesn't point out is that the coming depression was government-induced, just as "the Great Depression" of the 1920-30's was government-induced. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted this in a Federal Reserve Board speech on Milton Friedman's ninetieth birthday. But no policy changes have been made. This is because political considerations take precedence over economic theory. By "political considerations" I mean, keeping up the myth that the government is our Messiah. This is why you will never find out what the exact cost to taxpayers of the Fannie/Freddie bailout will be, or what the losses will be to holders and insurers of mortgage debt. A concrete answer would be like admitting there is no Santa Claus. So we quickly change the subject.

The Founders' Vision for Government

I recently received a fund-raising letter from the CATO Institute. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the first of 10 pages:

I'd like to ask you to take a few minutes to read this letter and consider getting involved with what [George] Will calls the organization that is the nation's "foremost upholder of the idea of liberty." Because to us liberty is — or should be — what America is all about. The essence of America is a respect for the dignity of the individual. It should be axiomatic that such dignity is enhanced to the extent one has control over one's own life. All of Cato's projects are developed with that thought in mind.

You know, we treat it almost as a cliché, the phrase from the Declaration of Independence in which the Founders cite certain "unalienable Rights" among which are the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." But it's a crucially important idea. Furthermore, the whole purpose of government in the Founders' vision was to secure those rights. What a powerful, radical phrase that is.

I previously blogged on the first paragraph, and concluded that America's Founders believed that the dignity of the individual is preserved only when the individual (and government) is subordinated to the "Supreme Judge of the World." To the extent that CATO is a secular (atheistic) or "pluralistic" organization, it is not a defender of the dignity of the individual. In an impersonal meaningless evolving universe, the individual has no meaning or dignity; the concept of "dignity" itself is an arbitrary social convention, not a timeless moral absolute.

Did America's Founders believe that the purpose of government was to secure the rights of an impersonal and meaningless individual? No, they believed that God commanded them to form a civil government which would protect the rights with which God Himself had endowed mankind.

And in this they were mistaken.

The Declaration of Independence says

that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The Founders believed that instituting government was a divine command. Creating a civil government was for them an act of religious duty.

There is no other legitimate basis for having a government than to have a Theocracy, that is, having a God-commanded civil magistrate that protects God-endowed rights.

Tragically, America's Founders were wrong about this. The institution (or formation) of what we call "the government" was never commanded by God, and it inevitably undermines true Theocracy, that is, the protection of God-endowed rights.

As I have pointed out, the word "theocracy" simply means "God rules." In a theocracy, the government is subordinate to God. There is "a Law above the law." In a theocracy, the government is "under God" because God is over the government. America was obviously founded as a Christian Theocracy.

But God nowhere commands the creation of an institution called "the State" or "civil government" to be a necessary component of a true Theocracy. "The State" is in fact formed out of rebellion against God's Commandments, such as the commandment "Thou shalt not steal," and "Thou shalt not kill." There was no king in Israel's Theocracy prior to 1 Samuel 8. Before this great sin, Israel's Theocracy might have been called "anarcho-familist."

In 1776 every civil government in Western Civilization was a Christian Theocracy, or claimed to be. There were two things that made America different: (1) no king (2) no state-church. America was different not because there was no government at all (though there was a trend in this direction), and not because the government was no longer "under God" (a preposterous idea). America's government was "non-Sectarian," but still Religious.

To repeat the CATO fund-raising letter,

the whole purpose of government in the Founders' vision was to secure those rights. What a powerful, radical phrase that is.

But that wasn't really such a "radical" idea -- in the modern sense of "something really new and different." It was "radical" in the sense of something very old.

John Adams said that the ideas of the American Revolution had an ancient pedigree in English history, dating back to the Protestant Reformation: to such works as A Short Treatise on Political Power, and of the true obedience which subjects our to kings and other civil governors, with an Exhortation to all true and natural English men (1556), and Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (c. 1580). These works (and others) set forth the key points of the Declaration of Independence:

• God-ordained rights
• Governments instituted by God to secure these rights
• Governments abolished if they destroy these rights

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

These are not new, "radical" truths. These were well-accepted political axioms. It was the British government that was becoming "liberal" in the modern sense of that word, following a new path, abandoning the old, "change you better believe in," and America's revolution was in fact a "conservative counter-revolution."

After the fall of Rome, the truly radical ideas in political science were put in place by medieval kings like Justinian, Ethelbert, and Alfred. They made the Ten Commandments the basis for law and government. They put government under God. The Christian trend was for these ancient pagan political systems to become smaller, smaller, smaller, diminishing entirely until only the government of Christ remained.

Benjamin Rush signed the Declaration of Independence and served in the Presidential administrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison -- each of whom came from a different political party. And of what party was Rush?

I have been alternately called an aristocrat and a democrat. I am now neither. I am a Christocrat. I believe all power . . . will always fail of producing order and happiness in the hands of man. He alone Who created and redeemed man is qualified to govern him.

America's Founding Fathers were part of this trend and made progress in it when they abolished the British government over the colonies, but they regressed backwards toward pagan Rome when they "ordain[ed] and establish[ed] this Constitution for the United States of America." Men like Samuel Adams ignored their initial reservations against the Constitution. Men like Patrick Henry did not; they opposed the new government created by the Constitution and never signed on.

In 1776 Adam Smith was speaking of "the Invisible Hand." Rather than relying on a civil government with a Roman-style Senate, America's Founding Fathers should have dispensed entirely with efforts to "institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness," and should have been content "with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence."

Individualism

I recently received a fund-raising letter from the CATO Institute. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the first of 10 pages:

I'd like to ask you to take a few minutes to read this letter and consider getting involved with what [George] Will calls the organization that is the nation's "foremost upholder of the idea of liberty." Because to us liberty is — or should be — what America is all about. The essence of America is a respect for the dignity of the individual. It should be axiomatic that such dignity is enhanced to the extent one has control over one's own life. All of Cato's projects are developed with that thought in mind.

You know, we treat it almost as a cliché, the phrase from the Declaration of Independence in which the Founders cite certain "unalienable Rights" among which are the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." But it's a crucially important idea. Furthermore, the whole purpose of government in the Founders' vision was to secure those rights. What a powerful, radical phrase that is.

I have hundreds of links to CATO publications on my website. In fact, the entire structure of my website was originally taken from the CATO Handbook for Congress.

But CATO is an atheistic or "cosmopolitan" libertarian think-tank, as opposed to a more Christian "paleo"-libertarian think-tank like the Mises Institute, or a website like LewRockwell.com.

This being the case, I wonder if George Will is correct when he says that CATO is the "foremost upholder of the idea of liberty." Can liberty be upheld when Christianity is not? Or as Jefferson asked:

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever....

If liberty is the measure of "political prosperity," then what secures political prosperity? George Washington answered in his famous Farewell Address:

Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion, and Morality are indispensable supports.—In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. —The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.—A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity.—Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.—Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure—reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.—

"Rights" exist only in a religious society, because "rights" exist only in a moral society. If nobody believes in the morality of "Thou shalt not steal," you have no "right" to property. If nobody believes in the morality of "Thou shalt not kill," you have no "right" to life. As John Adams put it:

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If "Thou shalt not covet" and "Thou shalt not steal" were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.
J.Adams: A Defense of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America (Phila: Wm Young, 1797) III:217, from "The Right Constitution of a Commonwealth Examined," Letter VI.

But these commandments cannot be made inviolable if they are perceived as mere social conventions, evolved in a meaningless universe, or arbitrarily imposed on the weak by a privileged class.

The CATO fundraising letter says, "The essence of America is a respect for the dignity of the individual."

Is this really "the essence of America?" If we asked Americans from the Mayflower to the Declaration of Independence, "What is the essence of America?" how would they answer?

Moreover, if those Americans could see America today, would they say that Americans have any dignity in 2008? What if they saw Americans as potrayed on the average TV commercial?

How can Americans have dignity if they believe they are simply impersonal animals crawling up the evolutionary chain? Nobody wants to be a "fanatic," but they all agree with the "animal rights" activists: "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." Does this give us dignity? No defense of the dignity of the individual (human) is possible without defending the idea that Man is created in the Image of a dignified God.

"The essence of America" was in fact a defense of this idea. America was "a City upon a Hill," that from this hill the world would learn "the ways of God." James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," said legislators should vote against any bill which is

adverse to the diffusion of the light of Christianity. The first wish of those who enjoy this precious gift, ought to be that it may be imparted to the whole race of mankind...[to] the nations who continue in darkness."

Individuals who live in "darkness" don't have dignity, just as individuals who live in immoral societies do not enjoy rights.

Attacking or denying religion and morality is an attack -- not a defense -- of the liberties and rights of the individual. Those who say that an individual's rights and freedoms are crushed when subjected to the sovereignty of God, and seek to preserve human autonomy by attacking "theocracy," end up losing the rights and dignity of man in a world where the State is god.

Jesus said, "Whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it."

The freedom of the creature comes in subordination to the Creator and in surrendering "control over one's own life"; the dignity of the individual is the product of being created in the Image of God.

Next: "the whole purpose of government in the Founders' vision was to secure those rights. What a powerful, radical phrase that is."

Organized Anarchists

I'm no big fan of Obama or Christian lefty Jim Wallis. I'm more a fan of Karl Hess. Hess is remembered as Barry Goldwater's speechwriter, who turned that nifty phrase, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Hess and Obama were both "community organizers." Funny how words can have nearly opposite meanings when applied to two different people. Obama's brand of "Community Organizing" seems to make the community more ungrateful ("agitated") and more dependent on the State. Hess' organizing had the exact opposite effect, as Hess had a completely different view of "community" (and America).

In her famous RNC speech, Sarah Palin said that her experience as "a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities." Jim Wallis comments:

The convention crowd in St. Paul thought that was very funny. But it wasn't. It was actually quite insulting to the army of community organizers who work in the most challenging places across the country and have such a tremendous impact on the everyday lives of millions of people.

Indeed, it's like FEMA turning away the WalMart trucks voluntarily filled with bottles of desperately needed water, ready to be passed out by an organized community of volunteers, because only the State can be given credit for bringing order and organization to communities.

Alexis de Tocqueville noted that one of the strengths of America in the early 1800's was an army of community organizers who had organized voluntary associations that met human needs. Libertarians prefer such order and organization over that imposed by distant bureaucrats.

HT: The Point

P.S. After the Storm: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Public Policy. Excellent report by Reason Magazine on spontaneous voluntary organization during major crises. Excerpts:

• "More than a half-century of investigation has established a fairly firm pattern: After the cataclysm, volunteerism will explode . . . ."
• "Although volunteerism isn't nearly as widespread in Japan as it is in the United States, [after the Kobe quake of 1995] "most search and rescue was undertaken by community residents; officially-designated rescue agencies such as fire departments and the Self Defense Forces were responsible for recovering at most one quarter of those trapped in collapsed structures. Spontaneous volunteering and emergent group activity were very widespread throughout the emergency period; community residents provided a wide range of goods and services to their fellow earthquake victims, and large numbers of people traveled from other parts of the country to offer aid."
• After the San Francisco quake of 1989, Stewart Brand wrote in Whole Earth Review that "volunteer rescuers in San Francisco's Marina District...outnumbered professionals three-to-one during the critical first few hours." "These volunteers, coming from residences and businesses in the neighborhood or passing by on the street and freeway, performed some of the first rescues of trapped motorists," the Oakland Fire Department acknowledged in its earthquake report.
• Looting is exacerbated when "the police department was 'ineffective, corrupt, and full of nepotism,' and many officers joined in the larceny themselves."
• In St. Croix [in the U.S. Virgin Islands following Hurricane Hugo in 1989], residents rescued their neighbors, gave shelter to the homeless, and shared their supplies; even the looting itself was often a matter of desperate but nonviolent citizens taking survival necessities, not gangs seizing luxury goods. (It's not even clear that it's properly theft to take, say, food that's bound to spoil before its owner can return to reclaim it.) Rumors of murders, armed robbery, and the like generally turned out to be unverified, exaggerated, or simply inaccurate. In New Orleans there were some genuine firsthand accounts of violent assaults, but the rumor mill worked overtime as well.
• Meanwhile, we also heard stories of spontaneous cooperation on the ground--notably the heroic tales of Deamonte Love, the 6-year-old boy who led five toddlers and a baby out of the flood zone, and Jabbar Gibson, the young man who commandeered an abandoned school bus, drove it to Houston with around 70 people aboard, and arrived there well in advance of the official convoy. The Baltimore Sun described a group of about 40 people who turned the Samuel J. Green Charter School into a well-supplied, well-fed, well-protected little republic. The New Orleans Times-Picayune recounted how a neighborhood association in Algiers Point formed a "makeshift militia" to protect the area. Rolling Stone talked to civilians in motorboats who spent days ferrying flood victims to dry land, rescuing far more people than the authorities did during the first week that followed the storm. Neighbors saved neighbors from the rising waters, volunteers patrolled their communities, and evacuees who owned vehicles gave lifts to people who didn't. Quarantelli is almost certain we'll learn that such cooperation and initiative greatly outnumbered the widely reported crimes.

Finally, this:

• There was one additional factor in Katrina that wasn't present in the other cases: what Quarantelli calls "the worst mishandled disaster I've ever seen in my life, and I've been studying disasters since 1949." The full story of what went wrong has yet to be fully uncovered, but it seems more and more clear that, far from working closely with volunteers and rival authorities, the Department of Homeland Security--the giant new bureaucracy that absorbed the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2003--adopted a command-and-control approach that at times worked actively against the other responses. Anecdotes abound not just of well-qualified civilians being turned away from the disaster zone but of public employees being poorly deployed, such as the 1,400 firefighters who were assigned to do community relations work. Worst of all were the squalid holding camps at the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center, where authority was omnipresent but order was absent.

The problem with Katrina was not a failure of the federal government, but too much federal government. Too many "archists," and not enough "anarchy." Government is always more concerned with protecting its own authority and control than in maintaining order and organization. Often, genuine efforts to assist community organization is only a means to the end of buttressing government authority.

Cafe Hayek: Who You Gonna Call?

Life Under Sharia Law

I previously mentioned an article called Lights Out on Liberty by Mark Steyn. I'd like to balance that out with an article in Asian News called "In the name of the law" by Dan Bell, from Asian News's sister paper, The Guardian. "Asian News is strictly non-sectarian" coverage of news of interest to those of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian origin in the U.K.

If you've never met a Muslim, you may see them in the way the Pentagon wants you to see them: terrifying, inhumane, violent terrorists. I haven't met a lot of Muslims, but they have all been ordinary, reasonable human beings, and decent Americans.

Similarly, the popular perception of sharia law is one of brutal punishments carried out by hardline states. Bell's article shows a more human side.

It also shows that "pluralism" is an impossibility. "Pluralism" is always a path of transition from one theocracy to another. "Theocracy" is an inescapable concept. The question is not "whether Theocracy," but "whose theocracy."

If Sharia law takes over in Britain, as Steyn suggests, then the British transition will have been from (1) a Christian Theocracy to (2) a Secular Humanist theocracy to (3) an Islamic theocracy. Those who advocate pluralism are saying that the new theocracy and the old theocracy should "live in peace, side by side" -- until the new theocracy completely supplants the old one.

The U.S. is not struggling against Islamic theocracy like Britain is. Here, "pluralism" has meant a struggle between an atheist theocracy (where "man" is god) and Christian Theocracy, such as existed under the Puritans, the Declaration of Independence, and the first 150 years under the Constitution -- a land of "Liberty Under God." Atheists want a world where Christianity is purged from public, and the State grudgingly allows Christians to think Christian thoughts only in their heads, and practice the Christian religion only in private, so that atheists do not have to be confronted with ideas that "offend" them.

Liberty depends on shared morality. My "right" to property depends on your obedience to God's command, "Thou shalt not steal."

What Good Are "Rights?"

I protest the protests.

As Peter Maurin put it, "Strikes don't strike me."

Glenn Greenwald is blogging about federal arrests and searches of protesters at the Republican National Convention. Hurricane Gustav may take a lot of wind out of the RNC sails, and a low-key Republican convention may dampen the enthusiasm of an army of protesters set to besiege Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Good. I believe our number-one priority should be to convert the "men in blue," persuading them to repudiate archism, not to "protest" them.

But then, I oppose the American "War for Independence."

I do oppose tyranny, and I suppose that sets me apart from most Americans, who talk about "rights," but actually believe in subservience. Not just believe in it, but count on it. Greenwald writes:

We love to proclaim how much we cherish our "freedoms" in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic -- but we've decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it's therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

After all, if you don't want the FBI spying on you, or the Police surrounding and then invading your home with rifles and seizing your computers, there's a very simple solution: don't protest the Government. Just sit quietly in your house and mind your own business. That way, the Government will have no reason to monitor what you say and feel the need to intimidate you by invading your home.

Federal government involved in raids on protesters - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

The Myth of "Rights"

Thomas Jefferson, Instructions in the Virginia Convention to the Delegates to Congress