The Solution
To Talk Of Many Things—Living In Interesting Times
Part 3 of 5
 

Government’s proper role is active, not dominant. By establishing reasonable standards in its regulation of commerce it promotes and enhances economic health. Try as it might, it cannot create general prosperity by political edict.

Simple systems built on the basic principle of individual freedom founded on natural rights outlast and outperform complex systems catering to philosophical fads. It was no accident that the Founding Fathers transformed a wilderness into the world’s wealthiest nation by establishing such a system.

Modern classes in economics teach that wealth is the product of land, labor and capital, the variables that economists can measure and manipulate in mathematical models. Various theories purport to explain America’s wealth in terms of each of these elements.

One theory holds that expropriation of native lands created America’s wealth. Another explains its wealth as the inevitable result of population growth and urbanization. Businesses, gaining access to cheap labor and mass markets, became more efficient using economies of scale. Yet, another declares the source to be the accumulation and investment of capital resources in production facilities efficiently using division of labor to make thousands of gadgets that satisfied human needs and desires.

Each theory contains a grain of truth; none tells the whole story. Obviously, material wealth originates in the physical world. But the New World was only a wilderness, a potential, not the Garden of Eden. Cheap labor and mass markets surely contributed to the generation of America’s wealth, yet China with more of both is relatively poor. Finally, far from creating new wealth, the malinvestment of capital resources depletes wealth already accumulated.

The production of wealth is a synergetic reaction requiring more than land, labor and capital. Which variables in the economists’ models account for the entrepreneurial genius of a Thomas Edison or a Henry Ford? What, exactly, is the role of government in the generation of wealth, or for that matter, of the courts?

Some argue that government should operate efficiently as a business. As justification they point to its many businesslike elements—income, expenses, massive capital investment, large labor force, products, customers that must be satisfied—and to its use of business techniques such as double-entry bookkeeping.

Opponents argue that the primary function of government is to establish and enforce standards in harmony with natural law, that government can never be a business. They see the attempt to operate government as a business, selling its products on the open market to the highest bidder, as the mechanism that plunged the nation into its current sorry predicament.
 

In attempting to protect everyone from insolvency, government itself became insolvent—first morally, then financially bankrupt. While chasing socialist goals through promotion and cultivation of commerce, it acted as both referee and participant in the game.

Initially the Supreme Court yelled foul, killing the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1935, an unpopular decision seen as anti-New Deal and contributing to the constitutional crisis of 1936–37.[3] The Court reversed itself in 1937, upholding the authority of the National Labor Relations Board, effectively conceding control of the American economy to the federal government through its conveniently newfound broad view of the Constitution’s commerce clause.[4] This decision worked to undermine Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Court with tame judges and signaled the end of its efforts to obstruct New Deal socialist programs.

During World War II the government exercised almost complete control over the national economy, an understandable necessity. However, after the war it somehow neglected to relinquish its authority, surely a simple oversight. By 1964 it was using this power to deal with social problems—voting, housing, employment—and now continues expanding its authority in line with a socialist agenda.[5]

Alvin Toffler, in his book The Third Wave, describes the actions of large centralized governments as they shift from heavy industrialization to an information-based economy. They “continue, by and large, to impose uniform, standardized policies designed for a mass society on increasingly divergent and segmented publics. Local and individual needs are forgotten or ignored, causing the flames of resentment to reach white heat.”[6]

Individuals may be morally compelled to support a general government through taxes, but not to support other private individuals. The latter amounts to involuntary servitude, irreconcilable with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This rampant socialism has but one end: most citizens turn to cannibalism, each trying to make a living by feeding on the body politic. Some refuse.

Serious dissenters carried their grievances into the courts. Using common law and the doctrine of natural rights, they challenged the constitutionality of the nation’s statutes, primarily those dealing with monetary and taxing policy and the conversion of rights into privileges through government-issued licenses. Time after time judges ruled against them, telling frustrated litigants, correctly, that the Constitution was not an issue in their case.

Legal protesters, unaware that they were playing in a game without knowing the rules or that the game had gone too far to start over, blamed the judges personally for these adverse decisions. They failed in understanding that no judge in his right mind will yank the supports from beneath the current social structure, declaring unconstitutional the nation’s monetary, fiscal or commercial policies, however faulty, without clear alternatives to take their place.

Most Americans remained contented slaves, dancing around the community hearth glowing with government handouts, soap operas, and ball games, the modern equivalent of Roman bread and circuses. A growing dissident minority, calling themselves patriots, declined the opportunity to participate in democratic-socialist cannibalism and vehemently objected to government encroachment into their lives. In ever increasing numbers they rejected government intrusion: rescinding Social Security numbers, refusing to pay taxes or file tax returns, placing their children in private schools or teaching them at home, refusing to obtain government-issued licenses and, in general, protesting control of their personal affairs by government officials. Without bothering to ask for government permission they stopped behaving as dutiful subjects and started acting like sovereigns.

Unable to ignore increasing challenges to its perceived authority, the government initiated legal action against outspoken dissidents such as Irwin Schiff, and against the leaders of various patriot groups.[7] Bad publicity for those under attack was still publicity. Sympathizers learned of and joined the movements, now popping up like weeds all over the nation.

Failure to subdue a growing protest movement triggered additional demented government action: the death of a mother and child at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, over two shotguns claimed to be ½ inch shorter than the government’s allowed standard length and the wholesale deaths of Branch Davidian men, women and children in Waco, Texas, over allegations that some members living at the settlement possessed illegal firearms.

Some citizens, feeling powerless in their personal lives, join patriot groups holding meetings to air their grievances. A few enlist in militias and play weekend warrior out in the wilds. Because their weapons give them a sense of security, of being back in control, there is absolutely nothing that will fuel their anger more than restrictions on gun ownership, a clear violation of the Second Amendment.

America became a pressure cooker with its safety relief valves, the courts, tied down. Congress responded to cracks in the social structure—increasing levels of threats and attacks directed at government officials, including an aircraft almost crashing into the White House and random shots at the building—with tougher laws: more categories of federal crimes and harsher penalties. Their actions failed to prevent catastrophe in Oklahoma City.

Predictably, the first coverage of this tragedy by mass media generated more heat than light. Rational people with logical grievances against the government suddenly found themselves depicted as neo-Nazi, gun-toting, anti-Semitic, anti-New World Order, racist, anti-gay, hard money-supporting, tax-protesting, anarchists. The only missing elements in the reporting were Bigfoot and an alien invasion from outer space with the mother ship buried beneath the Lincoln Memorial, presumably because reporters were on a tight schedule.

Cooler heads responded with constitutional concerns, hoping to prevent or offset the most likely outcome of these confrontations—more unaccountable government power provoking additional paranoia among radical dissidents and leading inevitably to an escalation of the conflict.

“Twenty-seven percent of Americans believe citizens have the right to arm themselves and organize to oppose the powers of the federal government.”[8] These numbers may give a measure of the distribution of public sentiment on the subject but do not necessarily reveal its intensity. A Patrick Henry, choosing death over servitude, gets one vote, the same as everyone else.

Toffler makes the point concisely: “In a mass society these well-known weaknesses of majority rule were tolerated because, among other things, most minorities lacked strategic power to disrupt the system. In today’s finely wired society, in which all of us are members of minority groups, that is no longer true.”[9]

So far, skirmishes along the ideological battle lines—loosely labeled liberal, left-wing, statism versus conservative, right-wing, libertarian—are largely symbolic: government attacking dissident public figures and leaders of the various patriot groups, radical dissidents counterattacking federal officers and facilities. Direct costs measured in terms of lives and property lost, although tragic, are small on a national scale. One must expect that during this moment of national crisis that fact will, for better or worse, change.
 

Dissidents know that the government holds an inferior position. It cannot stifle criticism without using draconian measures, sure to produce more condemnation. It cannot arrest, prosecute and jail 10 million non-filers as tax protesters. Costs for that action would exceed the defense budget. Even if it could maintain electronic and computer surveillance of every potential troublemaker, it will never have enough personnel to analyze that massive amount of data in time to respond, the same problem faced by the KGB before the collapse of the Soviet Union. And contrary to the paranoid fears of a few radicals in the patriot movement, the government’s seemingly overwhelming police and military power is virtually useless. What is it to do—bomb Boise, Idaho; send troops and tanks into Phoenix, Arizona? Absurd!

Without fundamental changes in government policies, and soon, this situation will get further out of hand, potentially escalating to disasters of monstrous proportions, as devastating to the American psyche as the Civil War.

Defining a problem does not necessarily point the way to an acceptable solution. In an overpopulated world, shoot half of the people. This may be an appropriate engineering answer but lacks something in the social graces. Solving the nation’s problems goes beyond achieving desired public goals despite methods or costs. To work, any proposed solution must be constitutional, economical, and politically doable.

Some suggest austere policies within the current governmental framework. Others advise rudimentary changes to the structure of government, starting with a new constitution. Toffler believes that the existing document is “increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and dangerous to our welfare. It must be radically changed and a new system of government invented—a democracy for the twenty-first century.”[10]

But his description of its replacement sounds more like a republic than a democracy. Patriots would argue that the logical choice is not a reinvention of government but a return to the republican principles established by the Founding Fathers, to a limited government whose single function is to protect the natural, unalienable rights of the individual. Under such a system one little grandmother in tennis shoes can put a tyrannical overreaching government on its knees simply by invoking her rights. It would be difficult to envision a form of government more fair or versatile.

Toffler attributes much of the national social character to society’s institutions and changed material conditions, explaining their strong influence on the community. But granting the truth and importance of that observation does not cancel thousands of years of human development. One suspects that more underlying similarities exist between ancient and modern mankind than differences traceable to changes in the instrumentalities of civilization. Without discounting the power and influence of the various elements that comprise modern society, the fact remains that the individual is always the quantum unit.

In building a government for sovereign individuals, our agrarian Founding Fathers were ahead of both an emerging industrialized society and the coming information age. America’s troubles stem directly from prostitution of that plan; their solution, from a return to moral government.
 

3 Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935)
4 N.L.R.B. v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937)
5 Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 379 U.S. 241 (1964); Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294 (1964)
6 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (1990, Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036), p. 317
7 Partial list of books by Irwin Schiff:

The Great Income Tax Hoax  
How An Economy Grows and Why It Doesn’t  
The Social Security Swindle—How Anyone Can Drop Out  
How Anyone Can Stop Paying Income Taxes  
The Kingdom of Moltz  
The Biggest Con: How The Government Is Fleecing You