“I had no hesitation to declare that I had but one Gentleman in my Mind for that important command, and that was a Gentleman from Virginia who was among Us and very well known to all of Us, a Gentleman whose Skill and Experience as an Officer, whose independent fortune, great Talents and excellent universal Character, would command the Approbation of all America, and unite the cordial Exertions of all the Colonies better than any other Person in the Union. Mr. Washington, who happened to sit near the Door, as soon as he heard me allude to him, from his Usual Modesty darted into the Library Room.”- John Adams, from his autobiography, on his June 15, 1775 speech at the Second Continental Congress nominating George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.
George Washington knew enough not to vote to enrich himself. Though he was a veteran and a taxpayer and had been elected as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, and legally entitled to a vote, he knew it was unseemly to vote himself into an office and thereby live at the expense of the state. That’s why he left the building as John Adams began nominating him. He didn’t even participate in the discussion, let alone the vote, on his nomination as commander-in-chief. Washington only accepted the office the next day as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army on the condition that he take no salary from the project of American independence.
My, how times have changed.
Modern democracy involves a years-long campaign to become commander-in-chief, and voting to put yourself into a lucrative government sinecure is now considered a sacred and holy duty. And as a result, we have Donald “Everyone agrees I’m the best ever and my opponent is a total disaster” Trump and Kamala “Nobody voted for me but Donald Trump is the threat to democracy” Harris as the two front-runners put forth by democracy.
My friend Tom Mullen said recently, “No matter what happens in November, one year from now no one will dispute that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is infinitely superior to any supposed mandate of the masses.”
I have to admit it is a strange year for the Democrats to claim in an annoyingly redundant chorus that “democracy is on the ballot.” I’m inclined to reply: “Oh? And where is this ballot question on democracy, so that I may vote against it?” Let’s face it, there’s no better case for vindicating Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s quip about democracy being the “god that failed” than the two major party presidential candidates offered by democracy this year. Is this really the best democracy can offer America?
And I write the above having never been particularly enamored with Hoppe’s observation that a benign monarchy is superior to a democracy. I don’t deny the truth of Hoppe’s claim in theory, but as an economist who is always asking “compared to what?” I don’t see the modern example of a benign monarchy to prefer in the real world.
Hoppe is right that Madisonian liberalism has become a failed experiment. Modern “democracy,” as practiced by the deep state hydra in every advanced economy, inexorably tends toward all the planks of fascism John T. Flynn outlined in his brilliant 1944 book As We Go Marching; admixing corporate with executive branch governance, an impotent legislative branch that rubber-stamps the executive branch agenda drafted by the unelected permanent bureaucracy, perpetual deficit spending that funds huge public works projects (today under the buzzword “infrastructure”) and endless foreign military aggression. All this has been followed by heavy government censorship of free speech, the evidence of which we now see in plain view with the Twitter files and demonetization of dissident voices like Max Blumenthal’s GrayZone on BigTech and financial platforms.
The America that began with a beautiful Declaration of Independence stipulating that the only legitimate purpose of government was to protect rights, and its Articles of Confederation designed for decentralization, have long gone by the wayside. Even the 1787 Constitution, with its gift of the power of the purse and the sword to the central government, was nominally written to restrain government, and it was subsequently buttressed by the adoption of the Bill of Rights.
Yet, none of these checks and balances are working today to control the size and scope of government. My anarchist friends will say that the Constitution was a centralist plot from the beginning, quickly replaced by unrestricted elective tyranny, and that only anarchy can solve this problem. But just as I don’t have faith in the workability of modern democracy, I don’t have faith in the sustainability of anarchy. If America failed because it fell apart at the New Deal, or the election of Lincoln, or the 1787 Constitution, or wherever your jumping off point is, it succeeded for a time. No government, or lack thereof (as preferred by anarchists), has succeeded for all time. Not yet. As an economist, I’m inclined to ask “compared to what?” on every choice. So when I’m told by anarchists that anarchy is preferable to a federal republic, I’m inclined to ask, “Then where, my anarchist friend, is this anarchist society which has successfully endured for centuries, that I may advocate copying it?”
My late friend William Norman Grigg was fond of saying “shoot for anarchy and you’ll hit minarchy.” And that may be where to begin a process of perpetual decentralization that may end in anarchy. Human society may never decentralize all the way down to the individual level, but the practical questions is where do we begin? And how can any practical steps toward decentralization be accomplished at all in modern societies?
The principles of the U.S. Constitution, as one might expect of a written set of rules managed by fallible men, were violated almost immediately with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, along with many other early fitful usurpations. Whatever success the Articles of Confederation or the U.S. Constitution can claim when compared with the other governments of the world in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, it can no longer claim to restrain government in any meaningful way. At the very latest, by the time of the New Deal in the 1930s, the abuses increasingly began to be practiced en masse and most limits on government power ignored altogether.
Today, we have a federal government not operating under any of the principles of the American revolution. None of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, supposedly enshrined in law as the Bill of Rights, are respected by the ruling, unelected executive branch bureaucrats in Washington.
They suppress freedom of speech and press supposedly protected by the First Amendment, limits the kinds of guns citizens can own which the Second Amendment was written to prevent, armed police squat in homes in order to raid neighboring homes in the drug war in violation of the Third Amendment, and federal officials execute general search and seizure orders without warrants or probable cause, or even bothering to see a judge, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. And on and on down the list.
What went wrong? While I can point to many failings of the Madisonian liberal state (and there are many), perhaps the biggest structural problem is the perverse incentive of state funding, especially toward legislative reelection and perpetual support of the executive branch bureaucracy through the mechanism of public spending. In short, the money corruption in elections is that the state is buying votes in every election with taxpayer dollars, both directly and through politically-favored corporations who act as if government is their sugar daddy. The left likes to talk about how this presidential election will see several billion dollars being spent by the major two candidates and their billionaire donors, but the federal government alone will spend more than 1,000 times that figure this year alone.
Social media was all aflutter in recent weeks with accusations of voter bribery after Donald Trump handed a housewife a $100 bill to buy groceries. Meanwhile, nobody bats an eye at Kamala Harris’ promise to dole out $25,000 in other taxpayer dollars to thousands of first-time home-buyers to buy a house. Clearly, the lesson here is that the legal and socially acceptable way to bribe voters is to give them other people’s money. Give voters a Benjamin to buy groceries out of your own wallet, and they’ll call any political candidate out on bribery charges.
Today, there is a huge proportion of the voting class―not a majority, but inevitably a decisive minority who are tax-takers and not tax-payers. Mitt Romney wasn’t completely wrong when he described 47% of the population as tax-takers back in the 2012 presidential election, even if he was only guessing the 47% number.
It’s not just welfare recipients and government workers whose votes have been bought by money from the public trough, it’s also the votes of workers within the nominally private side of the military-industrial complex and Big Pharma, as well as countless other government contractors.
This is what has corrupted America’s elections, and has increasingly incentivized the government to grow beyond the Constitution’s paper boundaries. Their jobs and their paychecks depend upon the perpetual spending of money extracted by taxation, and as a rule the employers and employees vote with their own pocketbooks.
The state must be disenfranchised if decentralization is to ever have a chance, whether we are on the path to minarchy or eventual anarchy. I envision a constitutional amendment (which can be adopted independently by single states as well) that would remove the vote from those who received government funding in the previous election cycle:
Government employees: Section 1. No person shall be eligible to vote in the following two-year election cycle if they have received any tangible benefit, salary, emolument, or remuneration of any kind from the United States, or any of them, or any municipality thereof, excepting only a refund for taxes paid.
Employees of corporations under government contract: Section 2. No person who received any tangible benefit, salary, emolument, or remuneration of any kind from a corporation, non-profit or other institution of any kind that received government funding, whether federal, state or municipal, in the preceding two-years shall be eligible to vote in the ensuing two-year election cycle.
Limits on military draft: Section 3. Because mandatory military service could serve as a means of disenfranchising citizens of the vote, Congress shall not enact mandatory military service. Congress may by law enact an exemption for section 1 of this amendment for combat military personnel serving in a war declared by Congress, however, the exemption shall persist for a single two-year election cycle only. Congress may exercise the exemption not more than once every ten years.
Voting rights of taxpayers: Section 4. No citizen attaining the age of 18, except upon the provisions of sections one through three of this amendment, shall be denied the right to vote.
Information for enforcement by the states: Section 5. Congress shall provide names and information on persons and corporations receiving federal funds to the state legislatures in order for the states to enforce this amendment.
I’ll be accused by supporters of our modern “democracy” of being a radical proposing impossibly impractical measures. I fully expect my illiberal friends to hoist up the banner that I’m “hateful” because I want the franchise taken from poor welfare recipients, our “hero” military servicemen and police and first responders, and senior citizens on Social Security and Medicare. And my anarcho-libertarian friends will accuse me of not being radical enough for trying to repair liberalism. Of these criticisms, I’m far more sympathetic to the latter critique.
The vote is not a natural right, but instead a procedural (one might say “civil”) right. The American Revolution was fought on the principle that taxation and representation go together. The idea was that people dragooned into paying for a government ought to have some sort of say in how those tax dollars they fund are spent. Only those who pay taxes (no matter how little)―not those who receive them―can claim to have some sort of say in how those tax dollars they contribute are spent.
This is why George Washington, even as he was about to engage in military service that extended for seven years, voluntarily gave up his vote.
But the purpose of a popular vote, under classical liberalism, is to secure sufficient public support for liberty while at the same time using other means to thwart the worst excesses of democracy aimed at eroding individual rights. Thus, under the U.S. Constitution the people are denied the right to vote for federal judges, and at one time for senators (until the Seventeenth Amendment), and―as Hillary Clinton found out in 2016―for president. The Constitution’s framers gave the people the vote for only one-half of one of the three branches of government.
The modern reality is that people receiving government funds are not the governed, but the governors. They enrich themselves, by definition at everyone else’s expense, through the mechanisms of taxation, debt, and inflation. The governors may enrich themselves directly in the form of drawing salary from the government treasury, or indirectly by working for nominally private companies funded through government grants and contracts.
The governed are the owners of and workers for genuinely private companies, who are milked by the governors in perpetuity. Therein lies the source of support for this reform: they also vote their own pocketbooks, which are being constantly picked by government to support a welfare-warfare-censorship state.
The failure of Madisonian liberalism will continue to accelerate until the state is disenfranchised, until “taxation and representation go together” is restored in a completely different way as a founding principle of (classical) liberal government. To my anarchist friends who think this proposal means I’m supporting taxation, I counter that few of the governed like paying taxes through force. I suspect that disenfranchising the state will be the most practical means toward the eventual end of taxation through force.
There is a way out of this morass, but it won’t be easy. A reform can come by cultivating the classes of people naturally inclined to rebel against the deep state hydra because it is in their direct interest. In an economic sense, we’re talking about those two groups not funded directly or indirectly by that hydra; the entrepreneurial class, and especially the working class.
Working people are the main and essential lever that can reform and restore classical liberalism in any meaningful way. A liberty movement that’s not laser-focused upon picking up the support of the laboring classes (if I may use such a hated term in libertarian circles) is one doomed to failure. Let’s face it, official libertarianism as represented by the Cato Institute and Reason magazine has always focused upon entrepreneurs and ignored laborers (whether they labor with their hands or brains) like a date stood up on a Saturday night. But the latter is the far more numerous class among the libertarian movement’s natural allies, and its power is felt to far greater effect at the voting booth.
If any change is ever to be accomplished, it will be by uniting the entrepreneurial and working classes in opposition to the self-licking ice cream cone of government funding.
George Washington expressed the sentiment at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, according to Gouverneur Morris then in attendance, that he would “raise a standard that the wise and the honest can repair.” But that standard has devolved into a “democracy” based more upon the bureaucratic and corporatist practices of Mussolini’s fascist state than the limited government envisioned by the delegates in Philadelphia in 1787. The wise have not repaired the Constitution because Americans have not elected anyone honest in at least a century. The only way to repair it is to disenfranchise the state!
