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The Lawless State
Karl Hess
Lew
Rockwell.com
Monday, Nov 2nd, 2009
This article was first published as The Lawless
State: A Libertarian View of the Status of Liberty. Volume IV,
No. 4 in the National Issues Series of Politics, (Constitutional
Alliance, 1969).
The Nature of Government
Government has gone wild.
Today, in the land we like to think of as the most free on
earth, government reaches into every level of our lives. It
controls and it coerces, it bullies and it brags, it browbeats
and it blusters. It grows and it grows, feeding without restraint
on the energy, the talents, the hopes, the fears, and the futures
of the people.
Endless arguing about, or even rigorous voting for "better"
government has not altered and can not alter the fact that it
is the nature of government, the state itself, that has shown
itself in such a dark light. For it is in the nature of the
state and of government as it has developed to do all of the
things that it now is doing – regardless of which partisans,
which technicians, operate it at any given point.
After each American election there are the weeks and months
of elation in which partisans euphorically tell one another
that "problems are going to be solved" by the "good"
and "strong" and "wise" men about to take
office. The losers, meantime, say just as flatly that the world
is going to hell in a breadbasket.
And very little changes.
In terms of actual change, as a matter of fact, there hasn't
been an election in the United States since its inception that
has driven the country solidly onto a course toward less government
and more liberty. Each, rather, has driven the country toward
more government and less liberty.
Parties and promises notwithstanding, this is the way it is.
To not recognize that one overpowering fact is to let the meaning
of the entire political history of our time utterly escape you.
The nature of the state, the growth of government has been
unchanged by politicians. Only the politicians themselves have
changed.
Too many Americans for too long have been diverted by the changes
of faces and factions. They have permitted their attention to
be diverted from the unchanging problem of government itself.
To the extent that they continue to be so diverted, government
has a free hand to continue its development toward despotism.
Particularly now, with one more election and with one more
chorus of paeans and plaints, one more magic-lantern display
of changing images in an unchanging show, those who profess
an interest in liberty need to turn away from illusions and
shadows and look at the actual and concrete facts of government
here and around the world.
They need to ask not whether it is possible simply to tame
government, or to make it more economical, or to make it more
favorable to this or that ideology, class, or interest; they
need to ask the most fundamental questions about government.
What is its purpose? What is its limit? What is its legitimacy?
What is its relation to liberty? To the individual?
Those who weigh the cost of government only in dollars will
vote for the most economical government, the most efficient
– perhaps not bothering to ask if that efficiency is in
the service of or to the detriment of liberty.
Those who assess the value of government only in terms of its
output of "good" programs will vote for the most active
government – perhaps not bothering to ask if the action
serves the need or greed of some men, or the liberty of all.
Others may measure government only by its arms and martial
spirit, praising the way in which it guards the borders or the
outposts but remaining curiously uninterested in the garrisons
it may be building at home.
Some will ask only that government benefit them, protect them,
comfort them, preserve their status quo and suppress any who
would disturb it. And they too will have forgotten to ask any
question at all about liberty.
Questions about liberty have, of course, long been most notably
neglected by those who have called themselves liberals in America.
One result has been that the entire liberal position now stands
discredited and, even more humiliating to its leadership, hopelessly
outdated and irrelevant.
But the same is more and more true of those who call themselves
conservative. They too, more and more, ask simply who controls
the government ("our" guys or "their" guys)
rather than what we should do about government itself.
It has become, as a result, a political truism of our time
that the differences between the two major political parties
are marginal at best. One editor recently pointed out that in
terms of sheer differences of political approach there now is
more difference between factions behind the Iron Curtain than
between the major political factions in the United States. It
is not altogether fanciful to say that the United States has,
finally, become a one-party state.
And it is merely common sense to observe that, beyond it all,
government rolls along – widely accepted, widely supported,
largely unquestioned as the father of us all, the focus of life,
lever of all power.
Riots in the streets may concern some. Riots on the campus
may concern others. But it is the riotous, growing power of
government gone wild that should preoccupy the serious and concerned
friend of liberty in this land once so hopefully dedicated to
freedom.
It is in that dedication, as a matter of fact, that may be
found that inspiration to return to concern about government
itself and not simply to its current cost or management. For
in that dedication we can clearly see a time when men, serious
men, were concerned very candidly not with who should run the
government but with how to restrain, repress, and even eliminate
government. They were concerned with purpose, not merely with
program.
The deepest concern then, as it should be now, was not the
sort of law to impose upon citizens, not the sort of order to
impose upon citizens, not the sort of privileges and prerogatives
to bestow upon government, not the tasks to assign it or the
titles to enhance it. No. The concern was to impose law upon
government.
It was to curb government; to cut it back and cut it down.
The concern was liberty.
The Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence says it all and says it well.
… that all men are created equal, that they 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.
To the men who founded the United States, that Declaration
was the essence of the law insofar as the state was concerned.
There were among those men some, perhaps many, who had little
sympathy for the state at all. They accepted it as a necessary
evil. Others conceived it only as an evil and not actually necessary
at all.
All finally agreed, however, that they could live under or
at least coexist with an agreement of government, an agreement
of lawful government that established the sole function of government
as in "securing" the "rights" of the people:
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government would,
in effect, be merely an instrument, voluntarily subscribed to,
that would prevent anyone (including governments) from taking
or abridging life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. That
is all.
It has been the constant breach of that law that has marked
the development of the state ever since then.
It is the gathering momentum of more and more breakage of that
law that marks the only crucially important political question
facing Americans, or, indeed, people anywhere. This is no longer
a problem of any one state. It is a threatening reality in all
states, around the world.
The Omnipotent State
Government, gone wild in growth and its powers, has gone also
above and beyond the law. Today it is widely accepted, as a
matter of fact, that Government Is The Law. Just as a "divine"
king once could say, "I am the state," governments
today everywhere say they are the law, even that they are the
people.
Each citizen can ask himself the most grave questions in this
regard. Frank self-answers should be revealing.
Do you feel that the state is more important than you are?
Do you feel that the state should enjoy freedoms that you do
not?
Do you feel that the state should be able to rise above the
law?
Do you feel that you could not live unless the state protected
you?
Do you feel that you could not thrive unless the state nourished
or subsidized you?
Do you feel that service to the state is more desirable or
more noble than service to your self, your family, your neighbors,
or your own ideals?
Do you feel that it actually is a privilege to pay taxes?
Do you feel that since the government, the state, is more important
than any one man, that every single man should be prepared to
give his all, even his life, to or for his government?
Do you feel that the state is something with a life and identity
of its own, beyond the men who might hold office in it?
Do you feel that "the government" and "the country"
are the same?
Do you feel that, when all is said and done, your life belongs
to your government?
Do you feel that your "rights" are given to you by
government?
Do you feel that, when all is said and done, if big problems
are to be solved in this world that government will have to
do it?
The crucial separation between men today is not anything more
or anything less than the separation between those who answer
yes to those questions and those who answer no. The only important
gradations in the thinking that separates men today will be
found along a scale of how many yes and how many no answers
are given.
My own position is a resounding NO to every single one of these
questions.
The demonstrated purpose of both major political parties, and
including the new, conservative administration is yes to at
least a majority of the questions.
And it probably would be fair to say that the response of most
Americans, sincerely and in heartfelt patriotism, also would
be yes.
That the so-called liberal response has been yes all along
does not require exposition at this point. Readers of average
care know this is true from a generation of reform-liberal,
New Deal-type programs in which every action of government has
been condoned and expanded. "Liberal" programs have,
without exception, strengthened government, and have rejected
by their very actions one particular approach to problem-solving.
That approach is liberation; the liberation of people from political
control rather than simply trying to advantage them by political
favoritism.
Conservative Contradictions
Conservatives, it now turns out, have little to crow about
either. They have howled at the expenditure of tax-taken money
for welfare programs but have jumped to support vast outpourings
of the same sort of money for the entire panoply of the military-industrial
complex and the garrison state; many supported racial laws at
the state level but wept when reverse-racial laws became Federal;
many gleefully seek government subsidy and protection of business
even when they rail against government protection of unions;
many ask tariffs to protect their particular interest; few object
to farm boondoggling when it gives millions to a man with vast
acreage, but many decry the support of another man with a small
and unproductive plot.
The examples abound; examples of inconsistency, of outrage
at government when it benefits someone else, and of red-white-and-blue
support for government when it's "on our side."
Particularly today, the conservative contradiction is glaring.
Of a sudden, as though smitten by righteous lightning, conservatives
are discovering that government is good and big government is
even gooder. Where is the conservative voice being raised to
ask, of the new administration, that it use its every power
not to "improve" government but to, quite literally,
get it off the backs of the people altogether.
Instead, the talk most popularly is of such things as "tax
incentives," as though letting a man keep some of the money
he has earned is an act of supreme wisdom and charity on the
part of the government. Only those who, deep down, believe that
the government actually does have first claim on everything
legitimately, can find inspiration in a system that merely uses
taxes to "pay off" this or that class or faction.
Where, instead, is the conservative voice that says do not
simply reform the tax system; replace it!
There are few such voices to be heard. Ironically, only on
the libertarian right and in some portions of the New Left or
among true anarchists are there voices crying against not programs
and not against personalities but against government itself.
It is in this very context and against this very background,
of the widespread acceptance of government as good, that liberty
must beg, must implore all with some concern for her to pause,
to reflect – ultimately, to resist.
The Nature of Man
Philosophically, the resistance to government has roots running
to the very nature of man himself. There are questions to be
asked, in care and conscience, on that score just as on the
political score.
Do you feel that your life is unimportant when compared to
the lives of others?
Do you feel that the noblest thing you could do would be to
give your life for someone else?
Do you feel that the value of each man is simply what "society"
says it is?
Do you feel that man actually is incapable, as an individual,
of knowing what is right or wrong: and that only the wisdom
of "society" can establish such values?
Do you feel that the life of each individual person belongs
in large part to society?
Do you feel that individual men are nothing, but that "mankind"
is everything?
Do you feel that man's reasoning mind is just a veneer and
that under it he is only another animal, very much like all
others?
Do you feel that man is basically bad?
Do you feel that if man didn't have restraints he always would
run amuck?
Do you feel that man's mind is so limited, in the long run,
that it just isn't safe to think you know anything for sure?
Do you feel that your life is swept along, determined by invisible
forces over which you have no control?
The person who answered no to the liberty-degrading questions
listed earlier should answer no also to these life-degrading
questions. But the sad truth is that, to a greater or lesser
degree, the most acceptable answer has become yes, yes, yes.
Just as liberty has become a low order of priority for concern
politically, so has the individual become a low order of priority
for concern philosophically. And, of course, it follows. The
collectivist view of society, which dominates politics of both
parties and most people today, also dominates the view of man
himself. In both instances the word of the day is that men must
be ruled, that they are unworthy of liberty, and that progress
is only possible through the programs of a special elite, the
politicians.
To the abiding discredit of most of us, the fundamental question
of liberty and man, of man versus the state, has been neglected,
rarely even asked as the right and left, liberal and conservative,
Democrat and Republican have preoccupied themselves with the
lesser questions of political spoils.
The challenge to liberals today is whether they will mutter
in their tents about the amounts of welfare programs or the
progress of some particular war or whether they will become
concerned by the principles of liberty that underlie the programs
and the conflict. Liberals cannot have it both ways.
The problems of poverty and prejudice are not solvable by piling
official restrictions, more control, and more coercion on top
of old, informal repressions. It is to the liberation of people,
not their regimentation that liberals should have addressed
themselves had they not been swept up in the current concern
for political control as an end in itself.
Nor can liberals have it both ways about war. Wars are waged,
solely, by governments. The bigger and stronger the government,
the bigger and more likely the wars it will wage. Liberals who
worship the state, and forsake liberty, who oppose one war but
whoop it up for others (against "bad" guys), are no
friends of liberty or of peace.
Conservatives are similarly challenged and they have similarly
failed.
After decades of platform ranting about the perils of big government,
they have been in the forefront of those who advocate all-encompassing
government to protect industry, wage war (against their enemies,
of course) and, above all, to establish and enforce norms of
conduct and morality as they have conceived those norms.
Both liberals and conservatives, to sum it up, become preoccupied
with the ways in which to use government, each for their own
ideological or class benefit.
Neither have offered a body of libertarian doctrine. Neither
have, so far, returned to the concern over liberty which marked
the founding of the nation.
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BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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