Misguided
Enthusiasm
While not a jubilee year, last week marked the 230th anniversary
of the US Constitution. Naturally, most of its devotees enthusiastically
praised the document which by now is seen on a par with Holy Writ itself.
The constitutional convention in Philadelphia, anno 1787.
Things have gone downhill ever since. Many – though not all – of those taking
part in the convention were members of the moneyed elite, the land speculators
who had instigated the war of independence when King George foolishly tried to
keep them from expanding their speculative activities to the West with his
ill-conceived edict of 1763. Having won the war, they were no longer
constrained by the edict, but they couldn’t leave well enough alone… sitting on
their laurels apparently just wasn’t their style. The constitution was the next
logical step – a successful attempt to install a centralized Merchant State
after the British model, only sans King
George. As Albert Jay Nock points out in Our Enemy, the State: “The great majority of them, possibly as
many as four-fifths, were public creditors; one-third were land-speculators;
some were moneylenders; one-fifth were industrialists, traders, shippers; and
many of them were lawyers.” Not exactly the first thing they
tell pupils in public schools about, we would guess. Nock also reminds
us, ibid: “Wherever economic exploitation
has been for any reason either impracticable or unprofitable, the State has
never come into existence; government has existed, but the State, never”.
[PT]
An editorial from Investor’s Business Daily provides an example
of such hagiography:
The
Constitution’s beauty is that it not only delineates our rights as Americans,
but expressly limits and defines government’s ability to interfere in our
private lives. This equipoise between citizens’ duties, responsibilities and
rights makes it the defining document or our nation’s glorious freedom.But
America is wonderful largely because of the Constitution and those who
framed it… What we have is too precious to squander…*
Most of the piece laments the widespread ignorance of its sacred
contents among the denizens which it rules over and admonishes the unlearned “to bone up a bit on your
constitutional heritage…”.
The editorial fails, as do most others on the Right, to
understand that it is not a lack of knowledge of the Constitution’s contents
among the populace which lies at the heart of America’s social, economic, and
political problems, but
the very document itself.
A Coup d’État
One of the main reasons why the Constitution continues to be so
widely venerated is the deliberate distortion of history that its “founders”
promoted and that generations of its sycophants have continued to perpetuate to
this very day.
The official narrative runs that the Constitution was enacted
because of widespread popular support for a change to the supposed inadequacies
and deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation.
10 years earlier, in 187, the Articles of Confederation were
signed. When Hamilton called for a constitutional convention, it was done on
the understanding that the articles would be amended here and there, which
wasn’t considered a big deal. Instead they ended in the waste basket, with a
new constitution drawn up de novo – and
that was it for state sovereignty. The centralization of the
political means was the goal, and who can look at the US today and
not admit it has become glaringly obvious? [PT]
This is a myth. Instead, the Constitution was a coup, a
deliberate scheme by the leading political and mercantile classes to set up a
powerful central government where ultimate authority rested in the national
state.
The use of the term “federal” to describe what was created in
Philadelphia in those fateful days was a ruse much like the banksters and
politicos used “Federal Reserve” to describe the central bank created in 1913.
It was neither “federal” – a decentralized monetary order – nor
a “reserve” of gold, but a monetary institution which could create money out of
thin air and eventually eliminate the gold standard.
Centralized Power
It was a similar political maneuver 230 years ago as a new
American national state was established and touted as a decentralized form of
government where power was evenly divided between state and national levels and
between the different branches of the government itself – “separation of
powers.”
In actuality, however, the “federal system” was the elevation of
central power at the expense of local authority which had previously existed.
Section VI of the Constitution says it all:
The
Constitution and the laws of the United States… shall be the supreme law of the
land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the
Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.
Elementary political science has shown and plain common sense
knows that any person or institution given “supreme authority” will misuse and
abuse such power. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely
is an undeniable dictum of human nature.
A truly decentralized system of governance would not contain a
plank as “supreme law of the land” as part of its foundation. Instead, real
federalism would be dispersed, as it existed in the past in such political
arrangements as confederacies, leagues, and, certainly, under the much maligned
feudal social order.
In his seminal and bracing work “The State” (available for free download here, pdf), German historian and
sociologist Franz Oppenheimer coined the terms “the economic means and the political means” to describe the ways in which wealth
is essentially obtained – namely either by one’s own efforts, combined with
voluntary exchange, i.e., by economic means or
by theft, the “legalized” form of which is perpetrated by the State, i.e.,
by political means. As Oppenheimer remarks: “What, then, is the State as a sociological concept? The State,
completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first
stages of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a victorious group
of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of
the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt
from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had
no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the
victors.” [PT]
No Escape from Leviathan
Even the Constitution’s celebrated Bill of Rights is flawed and
has proven to be ineffective in protecting basic human freedoms. It is the
federal government which enumerates and interprets what freedom individuals
should possess.
Thus, the meaning and extent of individual liberties will be in
the hands of federal jurists and courts who will invariably rule on cases in
favor of the state. The ensnaring of individual rights within the central
government’s authority did away with the venerable common law which was a far
greater defender of liberty than federal courts.
Just as important, the enactment of the Constitution, which
brought all the individual states under it suzerainty, did away with one of the
most significant checks on state power – “voting with one’s feet.”
When there are multiple governing authorities, if one
jurisdiction becomes too oppressive, its subjects can move to freer domains.
This still happens on a local level as high tax and regulatory states such as
California and New York have lost demographically to freer places like Nevada
and Texas. Yet, from the Federal Leviathan there is no escape, except
expatriation.
Thomas Hobbes, whom we have to thank for using the term
“Leviathan” to describe the State. In his famous book he inter alia established “social contract theory”, a
today a widely used propaganda tool in the defense of statism (we would note
that no-one has ever signed such a contract). Hobbes asserted that anarchy (a
stateless society) would be characterized by a “war of all against all”, i.e.,
total chaos. Although this assertion remains utterly bereft of evidence to this
day, a stateless society is nevertheless widely considered “impractical”,
“unworkable”, etc., so we will just have to live with the allegedly “lesser
evil” of the State (just as people in large European cities are nowadays
supposed to just “live with” the occasional terror attack by Islamist
fundamentalists and continue on as though this were perfectly normal. What can
you do, it’s all just part of life…). Not surprisingly, those obtaining their
income by political means are in complete agreement with this Hobbesian
insight… [PT]
Unless and until Americans and all the other peoples of the Western
world who live under constitutional rule recognize that it is the type of
government which is the cause of most of the political turmoil, social unrest,
and economic malaise which they face, there is no hope of turning things
around.
References:
* “Sturdy Constitution” – Investor’s
Business Daily, Week of September 18, 2017, A20.
Reprinted with permission from Acting Man.
