The Solution
To Talk Of Many Things—Living In Interesting Times
Part 4 of 5
 

Socialist systems create the symptoms necessary to justify their own existence. Political intervention continues, in vain attempts to correct the disastrous consequences of past meddling, as freedom based on natural right is legislated out of existence, often replaced by license. Societies founded on universal servitude ultimately destroy themselves, unable either to tolerate or adequately suppress expressions of individual freedom.

Government through compromise fails to pacify those demanding true freedom. Mixing 5 gallons of sewage with 5 gallons of fine wine makes 10 gallons of sewage, not 10 gallons of new wine. Any individual partly enslaved is a slave.

A constitutional solution will not be found in compromise where minorities forfeit one or more tenets dearly held, replacing them with those of the opposition and becoming, in effect, that which they oppose. It may be found in accommodation.

Patriots want personal freedom for all but cannot logically object to voluntary servitude. If others see advantages in institutionalized slavery they should be free to make that choice for themselves. But, being in the majority, they went further, undermining a constitutional republic with democratic-socialism and establishing universal servitude.
 

Even with a steady stream of propaganda proclaiming America as the freest nation on earth, eventually someone was sure to notice the change and raise an alarm. Can you imagine a John Adams or a Thomas Jefferson asking a government bureaucrat, a public servant paid by them to run their government, for permission to start a business, plant crops on their own land, or to make an addition to their home? Preposterous! Millions of patriotic Americans would eventually come to that conclusion and respond by organizing hundreds of patriot groups and a few militias.

Citizen militias may intimidate tyrants but are no threat to lawful, limited republican governments. Smart political leaders ignore them as a passing fad, driven by anxieties that will disappear with implementation of rational solutions to society’s current crop of problems.

Volunteers in citizen militias receive no salary and must pay for their own equipment. They conduct arduous training in rough terrain where it is usually too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry. Bivouacs are notorious for terrible food and slow room service. More often than not they are located outside the range of pizza delivery.

In the interest of public safety, the military should donate some surplus artillery pieces and tanks to qualified militias. This equipment is expensive to operate, hard to transport, almost impossible to hide, and easily destroyed by superior firepower. A few people may object that it could be used to attack city hall. True, but improbable. Clearly, any militia could use UPS to deliver more destructive force with better precision at longer range and lower cost.

Public anxiety over militias is groundless unless they are forced to disarm and disband. That action breaks them into small two or three-man cells, some of which are sure to become malignant. And unlike previous examples of terrorists, a few of these men will have IQs larger than their shoe size and the best military training the world has to offer, paid for by the American taxpayer. Without weapons they can inflict millions of dollars of damage on a nation never designed as a fortress, only kill or injure by accident, and disappear without a trace.

Patriot groups pose no threat to an honest constitutional government. These people are not the problem and earnestly want to be part of the solution. Their goal of restoring the American dream is identical to that of the Democratic and Republican establishment. It was their choice of objectives and methods, civil disobedience and confrontation in the federal courts followed by armed resistance to perceived government restrictions on their natural rights, that generated the bad publicity. Most failed to realize that the only peaceful solution to social problems must come through political channels, not the judicial system.

The few patriots taking the political action path found many obstacles in their way, one of the largest being the personalities of their fellow crusaders. All patriots are fiercely independent, the very nature of the animal precluding a herd instinct. Cooperation is poor.

Communication is not much better. Everybody wants to talk; few listen. Of the many books and newsletters that circulate, most address the same tired old subjects: conspiracy theories centered on the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Organization, the Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve, income taxes and the Internal Revenue Service, the United Nations and a one-world government. Members of the patriot movement have read and circulated this material for almost a century. Most believe it. Longevity gives it added credibility. With so much smoke there must be flames out there somewhere.

As with any diverse group, serious differences of opinion exist. It would not be unusual to encounter anarchists, survivalists, militarists, libertarians, theocracists, and constitutionalists at a patriots meeting, all zealously arguing for their point of view. Many of these frustrated philosopher kings would happily substitute their set of arbitrary laws for the nation’s current set.

Most enlightened patriots see government as a means, an instrumentality for the protection of natural rights, not as the grantor of those rights to be blindly served. Better than most Americans, they understand the interlocking connections between economic, political and personal freedom.

Political fragmentation among citizens, whether they call themselves patriots, conservatives, moderates or liberals, stems from disagreements in defining the very nature and proper role of government. Beyond their semantic differences, these labels are useful for sorting profound ideological positions.

Conservatives occupy the philosophical right. They see government’s role as strictly limited: as the protector of individual natural rights, as the maintainer of law and order, and as the nation’s defender against foreign aggression. They believe in capitalism, that is, in a free market economy for the organization and distribution of production. Implicit in that belief is the assumption that every individual will choose rationally, consistently and better than other individuals or groups between alternate courses of action serving his self-interest and that maximizing his self-interest maximizes the general welfare. Growth and a rising standard of living are perceived as flowing automatically from free trade and commerce. Conservatives view a powerful state as a serious threat to individual rights and political freedom, reducing economic efficiency and being less responsive to change. They usually consider monetary policy as important as fiscal policy.

Liberals sit on the philosophical left. As socialists, they see inherent contradictions in laissez-faire capitalism. They would argue that a profit-driven market system based on private property leads inevitably to a privileged few using economic power, and ultimately the power of the state, to further their own selfish ends. Human needs thus become subordinate to the instrumentalities of production and the profit motive. Because these alleged abuses are inherent in capitalism, clashes between owners and workers, and among workers themselves, must continue until it is eliminated. This results in a more democratic and humanistic society, one in which the individual is free to develop in an atmosphere of cooperation and fellowship. In short, liberals claim that socialism maximizes individual freedom by replacing natural rights, primarily the right to private property, with a host of government-granted civil rights. Fiscal and monetary policy are regarded as social tools, inflation as a problem only if it becomes excessive.

Moderates float around in the center. Being pragmatists, their viewpoint is almost non-ideological. They believe in whatever works in a mixed economy, that is, in public regulation or control if not public ownership of the means of production. In their view, government in an expanded role will act to achieve full employment, economic growth, an equal distribution of income and a variety of social welfare programs promoting equity, equality and social justice. They support the Keynesian idea that skillful use of monetary and fiscal policies will control the business cycle.

Despite differences in their political orientation, most Americans agree on one thing—they are dissatisfied with current government programs and performance. Surely such mass alienation on so many different fronts has a root cause.

Who holds responsibility for America’s social problems, for the deterioration of the middle class, and for the persistence of poverty in a rich society? The individual? The community? The national government?

Liberals blame poverty on wage exploitation under capitalism. But capitalism is only one element of a complex system. It is by no means clearly the villain. In fact, economists generally agree that the great mass of workers benefited from increasing wages as productivity grew with capital investment. Still, the left does win a point in observing that a disproportionate amount of income from the community at large finds its way into the channels of dividends, interest and rents, into the hands of a moneyed elite with awesome political power. They see most of the huge interest payments we “owe to ourselves” going to the wealthy and shrewdly observe that most people do not belong to that particular group of “ourselves.”

Conservatives proudly point out that capitalism created a rich nation with a tremendous military power and that it bankrupted a less efficient Soviet economy frantically trying to keep up. They complain about too much money spent on social programs, too little for capital investment likely to produce a return in higher productivity and increased national wealth. In their view it was the pursuit of socialist objectives that caused America’s problems, that reduced America’s industrial base and exported many highly paid jobs, not any inherent ills of capitalism.
 

Attacks rain upon the political-military-industrial establishment from every side. Liberals are justifiably disillusioned with the failure of socialist policies and programs, despite trillions of dollars in expenditures, to substantially curb, much less eliminate, poverty and social problems. Conservatives grumble about the failure of orthodox neoclassical economic theory to explain our troubles or to provide workable solutions. Almost everyone, upset with living standards and opportunities below their expectations, demands that the government do something.

America’s shortcomings are primarily due to a bad choice of objectives in response to philosophical error and to poorly designed fiscal and monetary systems. They are not due to our political leaders, the best educated in our history, nor to lack of communications or close public scrutiny.

At the core of the nation’s monetary policy, the Federal Reserve System suffers from bad design with poor choices for its goal and regulation tools. It is subject, at least in part, to political manipulation and influence without corresponding accountability. Its diverse and complex management structure is manned by bankers, or by private citizens selected by bankers, whose interests are not necessarily congruent with those of the public. Banks operating within this system are driven by precarious policies and equations prone to failure in the presence of adverse economic conditions.

The nation’s fiscal policies are even worse. Its progressive income tax system, founded in the redistribution scheme of socialist theory, penalizes productivity, savings and investment. It isolates effects from their causes, conceals double taxation within its recursive, self-referential nature, limits private consumption and the national standard of living, and obscures the true cost of government from the public. It reverses the most basic principle of American justice, holding citizens guilty on mere bureaucratic accusation, often unfounded, until they can prove themselves innocent. In a bumper-sticker-mentality society where political leaders, acting in their own best interest, follow their pollsters, the huge amounts of money it collects encourage the widest variety of ill-advised pork-barrel projects conceivable, few of which do anything to increase national wealth.

Combined, these ingredients make a sure recipe for disaster.

Civil government’s structure and functions, particularly in a free community, are heavily influenced by the prominent philosophies of its citizens. In turn, a society’s instrumentalities, many of which are created or molded by government, constitute powerful forces in shaping these philosophies. Societies quickly become trapped within this self-reinforcing loop. A bad choice of objectives, whether or not achieved, inevitably leads to destruction.

The free world did not defeat socialist Russia; socialism did. The harder the Soviets worked at it, the more they failed—an unavoidable consequence of pursuing bad objectives. Conversely, selecting the right objectives, and their supporting instrumentalities, will just as surely eliminate most of the problems.

An honest government’s proper function is not to pander to human weakness but to promote individual strength of character through the establishment and enforcement of rational standards. It must stay within the boundaries of natural law, refusing to enact wishful thinking as legal statutes. The advantages of replacing an aristocracy built upon land tenure with a society based on contract quickly disappear as government and its instrumentalities become the prime contractors.

Individuals are deprived of personal freedom in hundreds of ways: forced to obtain government’s permission for the simplest of functions in their daily lives, coerced to participate in a social security program, forbidden to purchase goods by a quota, or denied the opportunity to visit a foreign country because of political views. Absent freedom of choice, people avoid personal responsibility. As government assumes more control over the lives of its citizens, public demands surpass its capabilities. The resulting decay of both government and society should not be surprising.

Without fundamental changes in public policy, specifically in fiscal and monetary policy, the aspirations of the masses far exceed any realistically conceivable harvest.