|
|
Unlike Romney and Obama, Ron Paul is neither a repeater of Republican Party platitudes about "America’s greatness"
nor a mumbler of silly socialist platitudes that sound like
they were paraphrased directly from The Communist
Manifesto ("From
each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"). Ron Paul is a seriously learned man when it comes to economics
and political philosophy.
He is very familiar with the writings of all the classical liberals, especially Austrian School economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, F.A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard. As such, he must know that Rothbard considered John C.
Calhoun, the nineteenth-century U.S. Senator, Secretary of War, and Vice President of the United States to have been one of America’s greatest political philosophers as well.
Because of his educational background, Ron Paul would
have articulated Romney’s
truthful comment about how the moochers
and parasites of American society ("the 47%") are on the verge of overwhelming the producers politically. He would not have gotten involved in the mindless media "debate"
over whether it is 47 percent or 49 percent of American adults who pay
no income taxes but receive
benefits from government. He likely would have quoted or paraphrased Rothbard’s
favorite American political philosopher, Calhoun, from his magisterial
1850 Disquisition
on Government instead.
"When
once formed," Calhoun wrote,
a political community
"will be divided into two great parties – a
major and minor – between
which there will be incessant struggles on the one side to retain, and on the other to obtain the majority . . . .
" Consequently, "some
portion of the community must pay
in taxes more than it receives back in disbursements;
while another receives in disbursements more than it pays in taxes."
The community
is thus divided into "two great classes – one consisting of those who . . . pay the taxes . . .
and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds." This will in turn lead to "one
class or portion of the community [being] elevated to wealth and power, and the other
depressed to abject poverty
and dependence, simply by
the fiscal action of the government."
This has certainly
come true. The real "One Percenters" that should have been the object
of the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters are not American capitalists
per se, but the politically-connected, subsidized and bailed out ones, combined with the political
class itself, including
all politicians, bureaucrats,
and their ideological
minions in the media and academe. Even the lowliest "city
manager" of a small California
town can retire on a
pension in the range of $800,000/year, the media sensationally reported a year or so ago.
Calhoun further
warned that the power to tax will inevitably
be used "for the purpose of aggrandizing and
building up one portion of the community at the expense of another," which will "give rise to . . . violent conflicts
and struggles between the
two competing
parties." Stay tuned,
Americans, and pay
attention to what has happened
in places like Greece.
Calhoun also
understood that the totalitarian-minded enemies of
a free society (i.e., most politicians
of all parties) would say
and do anything to destroy all roadblocks
to their totalitarian dreams. Thus, "it is a great
mistake," Calhoun wrote,
to suppose that a written
Constitution would be sufficient to protect individual liberty because the
party in power "will always
have no need of [constitutional]
restrictions." As Andrew Napolitano pointed out in his book, The
Constitution in Exile, the U.S. Supreme
Court failed to strike
down a single piece of federal
legislation as unconstitutional
from 1937 to 1995, and precious
little since then. The government’s
"Supreme Court" long ago
became what Alexander
Hamilton wanted it to become: a rubber
stamp operation for anything and everything the
state ever wants to do.
Such men as Hamilton and his political descendants would use "cunning, falsehood, deception, slander, fraud, and gross appeals to the appetites of the lowest and most worthless portions of the community," Calhoun predicted,
until "the restrictions [of the Constitution] would be ultimately
annulled, and the government
be converted into one of unlimited powers." Calhoun wrote this in 1850; the succeeding 162 years proved him to be prescient.
Representative government
and a written constitution were
good things in Calhoun’s
eyes, but would never be sufficient
to thwart tyranny and economic collapse unless some mechanisms could be adopted
that would allow the people themselves to
interpose their will directly on government. That’s why he proposed nullification, a
"concurrent majority" of citizens that could veto unconstitutional federal legislation, and secession, the principle idea of the American revolution.
|
|
