Letter From An Ohio Farmer

                                                   Liberty or Soft Despotism



To My Fellow Citizens:
In an earlier letter, I remarked that Alexander Hamilton's view of a commercial republic has, for the most part, prevailed in the United States. Hamilton believed that such a commercial republic was the best means of protecting the natural rights of its citizens to their lives, liberty, and property, which constitute the very basis of prosperity.
Hamilton's view was largely adopted by the Whig Party in the 1830s and was the cornerstone of the economic program advocated by Henry Clay, whom Abraham Lincoln, an ardent Whig during his early political career, called his "beau ideal of a statesman" (on a forthcoming anniversary, we will reflect on the statesmanship of Clay in his many years as an American legislator). For Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln, the key to prosperity is freedom. In his eulogy on Clay, Lincoln observed that:

Mr. Clay's predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed everywhere, and an ardent wish for their elevation. With him, this was a primary and all controlling passion. Subsidiary to this was the conduct of his whole life. He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that free men could be prosperous.

The basis of the commercial republic that Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln envisioned was a just, generous, and prosperous system of free labor that "opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all." The genius of free labor, Lincoln held, was that "when one starts poor, as most do in the race of life ... he knows he can better his condition."
Lincoln conceded that not all individuals are able to improve their lot in a commercial republic. But "if any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune." The fact is that a system of free labor "allow[s] the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else" and "leave[s] each man free to acquire property as fast as he can."
Such a system has a place for government action but one that is limited in scope. "The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot, so well do, for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities," e.g., national defense and the maintenance of good domestic order (the military and police functions); the administration of justice, including protection of property rights and enforcement of contracts (the court system); and limited investment in and maintenance of "public goods." Such a government leaves to individuals "the sacred right to regulate their own family affairs" and to "communities ... [the right to] arrange their own internal matters to suit themselves" without undue government interference. "The proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own" was for Lincoln the very foundation of justice.
Lincoln saw free labor as the antidote to the great problem of the time: slavery. While a system of free labor was based on the assumption that industrious, honest, and sober men would freely pursue their own interests, slavery was based on the assumption that the vast majority of laborers were indolent and without ambition, "that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it, induces him to labor."
Contrast the view of republican independence advanced by Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln with the story of "Julia," a cartoon figure made famous in the country in recent weeks to demonstrate what a female citizen today—if we can call her that instead of "subject"—owes to the benevolent policies of the modern American government. "Julia" represents what Alexis de Tocqueville called "soft despotism." Tocqueville understood that democracy is susceptible to a certain form of tyranny: the rule of a "benevolent" government, catering to the public's needs and whims in exchange for their freedom, which creates a servile people dependent on the largesse of government, happily acquiescing in the loss of liberty as long as the government fulfills their material desires.
The United States stands at a crossroads. Will we choose the path to prosperity represented by the commercial republic based on a just, generous, and prosperous system of free labor? Or will we succumb to Tocqueville's "soft despotism" and the servility it entails?

Ohio Farmer

To Provide for the Common Defense

                                                  

                                                                  Letters from an Ohio Farmer

                                                            To Provide for the Common Defense

The Reason of the Public

                                              http://www.ohiofarmer.org/2012/05/the-reason-of-the-public.html

Letters from an Ohio Farmer - Equality and Race

 

Equality and Race

To My Fellow Citizens:
Recent controversy over the killing of a black teenager in Florida reminds us that America’s racial dilemmas did not end with the election of our first black president; they evolved. The episode is the latest intersection of equality, the general principle of democratic politics everywhere, and race, the particular issue that has been the greatest political challenge throughout America’s history.
Abraham Lincoln, who thought more profoundly than any figure in our history about the intertwined questions of equality and race, took the questions up in 1857 in a speech criticizing the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. The Court, and politicians like Lincoln’s great opponent Senator Stephen Douglas, who defended the Court’s decision, argued that when the American revolutionaries famously wrote that “all men are created equal,” they did not mean to include black men (this is a view still widely insisted on by many academics and intellectuals who write on these subjects). Lincoln denied this. As he said:

Chief Justice Taney … and [Senator] Douglas argue that the authors of [the Declaration] did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once, or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an equality with one or another.

It is worth quoting Lincoln at length explaining what the authors of the Declaration of Independence did mean:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".… They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.

Establishing a true understanding of equal human rights in the public mind was—and is—a mountainous challenge in itself. Giving the best possible effect to that truth in the “circumstances” in which the country finds itself at any given time can be an even greater challenge. Lincoln wrote that the Founders intended the enforcement of Americans’ equal natural rights to “follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” As he said repeatedly throughout the 1850s, this meant, among other things, that the Founders intended to put slavery in the “course of ultimate extinction.”
In Lincoln’s time, he and Stephen Douglas were politicians competing at the highest levels of American politics for the same mid-19th century voters, who were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly opposed to sharing their political and social rights with blacks. To gain advantage with such an electorate, Douglas—in Lincoln’s words— sought to exploit the “natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.” He did this by saying of those who, like Lincoln, affirmed that the declaration’s “all men are created equal” meant all men, that they “do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes!”
Appealing to the same voters, Lincoln protested “against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.” The only “preventive”—if there was any preventive—for amalgamation of the white and black races, he said, was the “separation of the races.” The only way—if there was any way—to effect the separation of the races was “colonization,” transporting “the African to his native clime” or to some other foreign parts that he would consent to go to.
With such appeals, Lincoln got himself elected president. Secession and Civil War followed. The circumstances of the war made it possible for Lincoln to promote the immediate abolition of slavery; this led, quickly, to the constitutional guarantee of black citizenship and voting rights and, slowly, to the federal enforcement of those guarantees. After a century of the uncertain and painful unfolding of circumstances, in1964 Congress outlawed the local ordinances and private practices that required blacks to eat in separate sections of restaurants and sleep in separate sections of hotels. Three years later the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that legal restrictions on marriage, if based on race, were unconstitutional.
Nothing changes circumstances like war. By the time the Civil War ended it became clear that all the options Americans had been exploring were dead ends. We were not going (though the rebelling states tried) to split into two countries, one free and one slave. We were not going to exist in perpetuity as one country in which we agreed to disagree about slavery. A house divided against itself, half-slave and half-free, could not stand, as Lincoln had predicted. And we were not going to end slavery only to send the descendants of Africans who had been brought here against their will throughout the 17th and 18th centuries back to Africa or on to some other part of the world. The only option left was the one that most white Americans before the Civil War considered morally intolerable and practically impossible: find a way to make American democracy work in a nation where different ethnic and racial groups formed one people. Some thoughts on the course of that endeavor will be the subject of a future letter.
Ohio Farmer

Posted at 12:58 PM in Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Civil War, Declaration of Independence, Equality | Permalink

We the People

 

                                                                   We the People

To My Fellow Citizens:

Our Constitution begins with the phrase "We the people." The people precede the Constitution. They, through their representatives, wrote it and then voted to adopt it. Following generations amended it. Since we can amend the Constitution, ultimately we cannot depend on it unless we ourselves are dependable. The people are the foundation upon which the legal edifice of the Constitution rests. No matter what the Constitution says, no matter how clever its provisions, it will never be sound and constitutional government secure, if the people are not sound.

We often hear another account of the relationship between the people and the Constitution. This account presents the Constitution as a necessary constraint on the people. The people are a collection of self-interested individuals, perhaps even self-indulgent. If not for the rule of law, the authority and the procedures of the Constitution, who knows what they would do? This was a view held by some at the time of our Founding. It is a view still held today.

This must disturb those who love liberty. For if the people are weak, and divided by self-interest, then the government must be strong. For what else could control such people and direct them to useful ends? It is also a paradoxical view of the Constitution, since some of those who complain of the self-interestedness of the people also praise limited government. But, again, if the people are weak and divided, does this not encourage their government to be strong and to take over responsibilities for which the people are supposedly unfit?

How we, the people, view ourselves, therefore, is critical to the kind of government we have. How should we view ourselves? One test we might apply is a now ancient one, offered by those who sought to revive republican self-government after centuries of rule by emperors and kings. The test was simply this. What are the people like when a crisis comes? What do they discover in themselves?

We might think this a test we will fail. Have we not heard stories of the horrors in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, for example? Once government disappeared—the narrative goes—savagery returned. The first reports did convey that sense, but the first reports were wrong or at least exaggerated. Further research has revealed that violence was rare; people helped one another. The people of New Orleans and surrounding areas, in the absence of government, organized on their own an evacuation that saved thousands from the flood waters.

Something similar but on a larger scale happened in New York City on September 11. When the twin towers fell, thousands were trapped in lower Manhattan. They moved to the tip of the island. There they stood, growing numbers pressed against the water's edge. Some of those who worked the waters around Manhattan started to take people aboard. Other boats joined them, starting an evacuation that lasted almost nine hours and brought more than 300,000, perhaps nearly 500,000, to safety. The evacuation took place without panic. No one was injured or killed during it.

This evacuation was the spontaneous response of people to a crisis. As such, it reveals something about the people. One observer saw businessmen, no doubt from the financial district in lower Manhattan, those we might think of as the very paragons of conniving self-interest, carrying the old and disabled to boats, setting them down and then returning into the dust and crowds looking for others they could help. Such actions occur not just in great crises like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. They occur when a tornado rips apart a town and people from surrounding communities come to help or when an ice storm takes out the electricity and neighbors share firewood or check on an elderly couple.

It is important, of course, not to flatter ourselves. A small number of the people do take advantage of a crisis for their own ends. The people did get some assistance from the government on 9/11. Seeing the evacuation starting, the Coast Guard issued a call for all available boats and announced that the normal safety rules about how many passengers a boat might carry would not be enforced. Above all, we should not take our bearings solely by what people do in a time of crisis. We live mostly in more normal times, when complacency has a more marked effect and where the law as constraint and guide is helpful.

Still, we should not accept the idea that the people are above all self-interested, especially if it suggests that the government, therefore, needs a heavy hand. Or, perhaps, we should take from the example of how the people act in a crisis a better understanding of self-interest. What we see in a crisis, we might say, is people who think enough of themselves, and what they can do, to think of others as well. We see that self-interest in this sense derives from self-respect. If you think well of yourself, you will take an interest in yourself. Taking an interest in yourself, you will take an interest in and help those who are important to you, your family, friends, neighbors, and fellow-citizens. The circle of regard spreads, in due proportion, outward from the self-regarding individual. That is the true foundation upon which the Constitution and our hopes for limited government rest.


Ohio Farmer

Unlimited Government

Taxation and Unlimited Government

To My Fellow Citizens:
Throughout history, most political regimes have been what professional categorizers of such things call "extractive." We have no objection to the term. It is accurate enough and even vivid. Extractive regimes—that is, most regimes in most places in most times—protect the political and economic power of the ruling class by taking wealth from others. In the realm of international affairs, states and empires conquered others and extracted wealth from the defeated populations. Domestically, rulers imposed taxes on their subjects in order to fund the rulers' enterprises, especially foreign wars.
On the surface, the extraction of wealth from the subjects by taxing them would seem to be limited only by the will of the ruler. But in practice, the imposition of high taxes on the population destroyed the incentives of those being taxed to produce, ultimately drying up the rulers' source of revenue, often leading to the fall of the overreaching extractive political regime.
The American Founders, building on the liberal political theories of the 17th and 18th centuries, envisioned a different polity, a limited government the purpose of which was to protect the natural rights of its citizens. Such a government would of course require revenues, but taxes would be limited because the ends of government were limited.
The Constitution's "spending clause" (Art. I, Sec. 8, Clause 1) permits the levying of taxes for only two purposes: to pay the debts of the United States and to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. Some Founders, especially Alexander Hamilton, supported an expansive spending and taxing power for the national government, but even this most ardent advocate of a strong national government understood the limited purposes of government. For Hamilton, the taxing and spending power of the national government was best focused on stimulating economic growth.
Hamilton and the other Founders understood, as Adam Smith taught, that freedom and economic growth could occur only if the government's power to interfere with the natural rights of individuals, especially the right to property, was constrained. They understood that sacrificing the natural rights of individual citizens to a government of unlimited powers would lead to slavery, not freedom. As James Madison argued in Federalist 10, the protection of the diverse faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, "is the first object of government."
As we have argued repeatedly in these letters, the Founders' understanding of the Constitution as a charter for limited government has over the course of a century largely been overturned by a progressivism the central idea of which is that the job of government is to provide for the material well-being of all. The government envisioned by the progressives is necessarily unlimited in scope. And if the ends of government are unlimited, the revenues necessary to achieve those ends are likewise unlimited. Progressive government is a return to an extractive political regime.
In practice, taxation under the progressives' extractive regime amounts to adjudicating the distribution of resources among competing claimants. For today's progressives, the United States is not a community of individuals, but an array of groups whose demands must be met. But since government produces nothing on its own, certain favored groups prosper at the expense of others. Wealth must be transferred from more productive citizens to less productive ones. Modern progressives may invoke the language of rights, but what they really mean by the term, as we have seen, are privileges or claims to resources that are granted by government. All of this is done in the name of "equity" and "fairness."
The problem with the progressive version of the extractive polity is the same one that the old-fashioned extractive polity faced: raising taxes to pay for an unlimited government destroys the incentives of productive citizens to create the wealth that underpins economic growth. Without economic growth, taxes and wealth transfers create a zero-sum or negative-sum outcome. This situation is what economists call "rent-seeking": the distribution of a fixed stock of goods. Politics in such a regime is reduced to the maneuvering of politicians seeking advantage by redistributing wealth to favored groups in the expectation that those favored groups will re-elect them.
As the old saying goes, all that is certain in life is death and taxes. The problem today is that progressivism has distorted the end of government, eliminating the constraints the Founders recognized as necessary in a republic dedicated to the protection of natural rights. But unlimited government requires unlimited revenues. The result is a system of taxation that kills economic growth by interfering with the release of productive capital into the economy. Those who want a preview of the future of a progressive America need only look to Europe, where governments seeking to redistribute wealth have run out of other people's money.
Ohio Farmer