THE LATEST IN THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA: OUR CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLE
Table of Contents
FROM BEHIND ENEMY LINES:A Conservative Libertarian Inside Academia
SOUTHERN HERITAGE: Dedicated to the truth about the War of Yankee Aggression
Constitutional Law
NEW WORLD ORDER, UNITED NATIONS, ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT AND AMERICAN SOVERIGNTY
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Compiled and Summarized by
Dr. Jimmy T. (Gunny) LaBaume
Our Enemy, The State: A Study of Social Power vs. State Power and of The State in Colonial America by Albert Jay Nock. Available from the Mises Institute at www.mises.org
Introduction – “Life, Liberty and…” (Pages 11-22)
Before the Revolution human rights were stated as “life, liberty, and property.” But, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Of course, the pursuit of happiness is an inclusive term in that it does cover property rights. (Happiness is certainly impacted by the molestation of a person's property.) However, it infers that there are many other human rights that are not specifically property rights. The effect of this small change in wording was to immensely broaden the scope of government's purpose.
After traveling in several countries, Nock observed that “hardly anybody…seemed happy.” Not that they were necessarily “gloomy” but just that they did not possess a high “general level of happiness.” This also seemed to have little to do with the level of “prosperity.” The well off did not seem to be any happier than the poor.
He goes on to attribute this “moral enervation” to State action and its “long series of positive interferences with the individual's right to pursue happiness.” He notes further that all of the countries he observed had some sort of “republican” form of government.
He opines that the people were “not nearly so happy as they would be if their governments had been…less paternalistic. It was not that the State set out to make its people unhappy. To the contrary, the interventions were meant to increase the level of happiness but it was obvious that they had not accomplished this.
According to Mr. Jefferson, the utmost the state can (and should) do is mind its own business. All state action should be negative. It should protect the individual from aggression and trespass and, beyond that, leave him alone. It should abstain from any positive regulation of individual conduct and make justice easy, costless and accessible. In other words, the State has only two legitimate concerns—freedom and justice.
The State should never involve itself in positive regulation. It's only involvement should be in the negative—e.g. ”forbidding the exercise of rights in any way that interferes with the free exercise of the rights of others.” Nock attributed the unhappiness that he observed to state action taken outside its proper sphere. A case of the State not “minding its own business but making encroachments on the individual's business…out of the realm of negative coercion into the realm of positive coercion.”
As evidence in support of his contention, he concludes the chapter with a lengthy list of specific, direct and indirect, State encroachments into every facet of the individual's life.
The state operating outside its proper sphere has two consequences. First, whatever it may have accomplished has been done poorly and expensively. Compared to private enterprise, bureaucratic administration is “slow, costly, inefficient, improvident, un-adaptive, unintelligent, and…tends…to become corrupt.“
The second consequence is that the state neglects its own (proper) business which is, first and foremost, the protection of freedom and maintenance of justice. These are in a very sad condition. The state has not only been indifferent to their breakdown, it seems to be doing everything possible to break them down further. Labor, capital and even speech and opinion have been progressively confiscated.
It comes down to the people living solely for the benefit of the state. The fiscal exactions, necessary to support the state's incursions into everybody's business but its own, represent confiscation of the individual's labor and capital. Positive regulations confiscate his time and attention. The state's interference with enterprise steal initiative and interest. Mencken was right when he said that the state is “the common enemy of all honest, industrious, and decent men.”
The individual essentially lives in servitude. The fact that he “furnished the means by which he suffered” does not make his condition any less one of servitude. Whether it is voluntary or involuntary, slavery is slavery. A man is in slavery when all his rights are “at the arbitrary discretion of some agency other than himself.”
This is the old doctrine of absolutism which is precisely the opposite from that set forth in the Declaration. The theory behind the Declaration is that the state exists for the good of the individual who has rights that are not derived from the state. These rights are "unalienable” and governments are instituted to secure them. All the state may do is protect them. That is its sole purpose.
By contrast, absolutist theory holds that the individual exists for the good of the state and the only rights an individual has are the ones that the state grants him. Americans have become well reconciled to this currently prevalent idea of an absolute state on “practical” grounds. This is illustrated by the words that are used. For example, unless one is so untactful as to name hated names (Socialism, Bolshevism, Communism, Fascism, Marxism, Hitlerism, etc.), he finds very little objection to the doctrine of the absolute state—which is the doctrine that underlies all of these political systems. As long as one avoids using the word “slavery,” he will find that most Americans do not dread (maybe even welcome) an actual slave status.
Absolutism assumes the state is an organism that exists apart from the individuals who make it up. If all those individuals somehow died off, the state would continue to exist.
The absolutist's rejection of natural rights leads him into a logical tangle. To writ: Individuals have no rights yet they can create a government which creates rights and confers them on the individuals who created it. How can that be?
Can humans be happy under absolutism? Obviously, some actually believe that state confiscation and coercion will “usher in a new Era of Plenty”—only if it can keep on enlarging its scope and encroachments upon the individual, it will ultimately result in an excellent social order. But, what will the individual be like when this is complete?
Suppose that the state suddenly changes its character—instead of being slow, inefficient and corrupt, it becomes good and efficient. Even then, if it close-herds the individual so as to prevent every possible consequence of his own bad judgment, what will that person become? Can he be happy if he is not his own man? Is happiness compatible with servitude?
Copyright ©2004, FlyoverPress.com
Jimmy T. LaBaume, PhD, ChFC is a full professor teaching economics and statistics in the School of Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, TX. He does not speak for Sul Ross State University. Sul Ross State University does not think for him.
Dr. LaBaume has lived in Mexico and spent extended periods of time in South and Central America as a researcher, consultant and educator.
“Gunny” LaBaume is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War and Desert Storm. His Marine Corps career spanned some 35 years intermittently from 1962 until 1997 when he refused to re-enlist with less than 2 years to go to a good retirement. In his own words, he “simply got tired of being guilty of treason.”
He is also currently the publisher and managing editor of FlyoverPress.com, a daily e-source of news not seen or heard anywhere on the mainstream media. He can be reached at jlabaume@sulross.edu.
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