|
|
Time magazine’s
Joe Klein recently appeared on a Sunday news show where he accused Glenn Beck
and Sarah Palin of "sedition" because of their criticisms of the
Obama administration’s expenditure of trillions of dollars of corporate
welfare in the form of bailouts; its Soviet-style nationalization of
automobile, banking, student loan, and mortgage industries; its historically
wild spending and borrowing binge; its forcing of socialized medicine down
our throats in the face of overwhelming public opposition; and its plans to
tax American capitalism into bankruptcy. Anyone who criticizes such things
should be thrown into the Gulag, says Klein. Another talking head on the same
television show as Klein screeched that Rush Limbaugh should also be indicted
for "sedition" for the crime of criticizing King Obama.
Sedition, Joe Klein informed us (reading off of a
napkin), is a threat to "the authority of the state." But the key question
is: authority to do what? Does the American state have unlimited
"authority" to do everything and anything the Marxist in the White
House, the former senator from ACORN, can dream up? If they can nationalize
automobile companies, banks, and the healthcare industry, do they also have the "authority" to nationalize
the grocery industry, home building, steel manufacturing, and everything
else? Joe Klein obviously believes so. In so doing, he supports the
"authority" of a totalitarian state. Opposing totalitarian
government is "sedition" according to Joe Klein and his fellow
network "news" show talking heads.
The original design of the American government was
that the only "authority" the central government was to have was powers delegated to it by the free, independent, and
sovereign states in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. All others are
the responsibility of the people, respectively, and the states, according to
the Tenth Amendment, which Thomas Jefferson considered to be the cornerstone of
the document. These powers were delegated to the central government for the
benefit of the sovereign states, who appointed the central government as
their agent – mostly for issues regarding war and foreign policy
– by adopting the Constitution. That’s why treason is defined by
the U.S. Constitution in Article 3, Section 3, as follows: "Treason
against the United States, shall consist only in waging War against them,
or adhering to their Enemies, and giving them Aid and Comfort . . ." As
in all the founding documents, "United States" is in the plural,
signifying that the free and independent states were united in delegating
certain enumerated powers for their own mutual benefit. Thus, "waging
War against them" means the states. Waging war against the free and
independent states is what constitutes treason under the U.S. Constitution.
That’s why Lincoln’s
invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of Treason.
As I wrote in The Real Lincoln, the one unequivocal good that came of Lincoln’s war was
the abolition of slavery. But the worst thing that came of it – the
thing that was the real purpose of the war – was the centralization of
virtually all political power in Washington,
D.C., and the essential death
of the Jeffersonian system of states’ rights
or federalism that was the essence of the pre-war Constitution. After 1865,
the federal government became the sole decision maker with regard to the
limits of its own powers. It exercised this decision-making power through the
federal judiciary and, as the Jeffersonians had
always warned, it eventually declared that there were, in fact, no
limits to its powers.
It didn’t take long for the federal government
to declare the idea of natural rights, the bedrock of the Jeffersonian
philosophy of government, to be null and void. It did this by adopting the
income tax in 1913, along with the creation of the vast legalized counterfeiting
scheme known as the Federal Reserve. The income tax effectively declares that
all earned income is the property of the state, and that the state will
inform us from time to time how much of our own income we may keep to live on by setting the income tax rates. The Fed and
the income tax made it possible for the government to finance a limitless
explosion of statism just four years later with
American entry into the wordwide disaster of World
War I, which led to the most destructively bloody century in all of human
history.
The income tax and the Fed finally centralized all
political power in Washington, as it became trivially easy for the central
state to conscript millions of men for its wars, spend mind-boggling sums on
things like a welfare state and the nationalization of education that have no
constitutional authority whatsoever, and to easily bribe any state government
that voices the least bit of dissent by threatening to withdraw federal
grants to the state. More than half of the American population is bribed and
manipulated in a similar manner today as recipients of myriad federal
subsidies.
By the 1930s the central state was sick and tired of
what it considered to be contemptible constitutional arguments that limited
the size and scope of government. FDR condemned the Constitution as the
irrelevant scribblings of a lost generation, and
advocated massive socialistic government intervention whereby the government
would magically "guarantee" everyone a high-paying job, high food
prices for farmers, a "decent home," all the medical care you could
want, freedom from fear of old age, sickness, and accidents, and of course,
state-funded education. This was the essence of FDR’s childish wish
list of an "economic bill of rights." Of course, government cannot
promise anyone anything without also confiscating the income of someone else
to pay for it. Nor can it "guarantee" any of FDR’s
pie-in-the-sky wish list unless the laws of economics are repealed, which of
course they can never be.
Since states’ rights had been obliterated by Lincoln’s war,
there was no longer any effective opposition to totalitarian-minded political
hacks like FDR. He appointed enough Supreme Court judges to create a
situation that, by 1937, the Court was prepared to reverse generations of
prior decisions that attempted to enforce the Constitutional constraints on
government. And they succeeded: According to Andrew Napolitano, author of The Constitution in Exile, not a single
federal law was ruled unconstitutional between 1937 and 1995. The legal
scholar Bernard Siegan made the same point in Economic Liberties and the
Constitution. For more than
seventy years, Americans have lived under a judicial dictatorship that
rubber-stamps all expansions of federal power, no matter how at odds they may
be with the Constitution itself. The body of "constitutional law"
that has developed during this time is nothing more than a bundle of
tongue-twisting legalese designed to subvert and destroy any lasting vestiges
of constitutional limitations on the powers of the central state.
In short, the government in Washington, D.C.
has not been a government by consent since 1865. In response to the
declaration by American citizens residing in the Southern states in
1860–61 that they no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C., the U.S.
government waged war on the entire civilian population of the South, killing
some 350,000 fellow American citizens, which is more
Americans than died in all other wars combined. This number includes at least
50,000 civilians. On top of that, Southern cities and towns were burned to
the ground, bombed, and plundered. The plundering continued for a decade
after the war during the laughingly named "reconstruction" period.
Americans – especially conservatives –
delude themselves when they express the view that it might be possible to
restore constitutional government. How would this happen? Who would enforce
the Constitution? Why would the federal government ever give up its monopoly
of constitutional interpretation and return to the pre-1865 world where all
three branches of government were often given equal weight in constitutional
interpretation, as well as the citizens of the free, independent and
sovereign states? The central state murdered hundreds of thousands of its own
citizens in order to achieve this monopoly status, and it will never just
give it up.
It is the Washington
establishment, which includes its media lapdogs like Joe Klein,
that is guilty of sedition. The legitimate "authority" of
the state is spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. It is the Washington
establishment that has abandoned that legitimate authority and granted to
itself essentially unlimited powers. Therefore, there can be nothing more
patriotic and "American" than opposing everything the central
state proposes doing that would expand its scope and powers in any way.
Without any kind of constitutional constraints or meaningful citizen control,
the federal government is nothing more than another criminal gang, as Murray Rothbard often said. The fact that it is a very large
gang does not make it any more legitimate. The TEA Party protesters and all
others who oppose the oppression of the central state should ignore the
puerile rantings of the Joe Kleins
of the world and remind themselves of what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the
Declaration of Independence when he said that men
are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted
among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
– That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of
these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to
institute new Government . . . (emphasis added).
"TEA Party" activists claim that they are Taxed
Enough Already. That’s not good enough. If they took
their own rhetoric about constitutional government seriously, they would
recognize that what is needed is at least a 90 percent reduction in
federal taxes, not merely being satisfied with being taxed "enough
already."
Since such a tax reduction is not likely to be
achieved with the cooperation of the Washington
establishment, no matter who is elected president, the only real prospect for
success is to take seriously the words of Thomas Jefferson, author of America’s
Declaration of Secession from the British Empire, and organize
numerous peaceful secession movements. Let them have their ACORN/Democratic
Socialists of America-inspired, socialist utopia on the Potomac.
The rest of us can watch with great amusement as they ruin their small
society, impoverish themselves, and turn it into a
Third-World swamp, which is what Washington,
D.C. started out as several
hundred years ago.
Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in
Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What
You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How
Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What
It Means for America Today.
Article originally published on www.Mises.org. By authorization of the author
|
|
