The Ides of the American Republic

Roman Republicans understood that Caesar was the problem, but the mob in the
end brought down the Republic and gave themselves an Emperor anyway.

A lot of conservatives, especially the stubborn constitutionalists in the group keep reminding us all that we are a republic and not a democracy. Trouble is they do it on conservative websites where we already know that. I think everyone on the conservative side gets it that we are a Republic. We've talked about it enough. There's not a need to harp on that and nitpick at words of commentators who casually use the term democracy in commentaries. The real need just now is not to convince ourselves, but to convince the mob of the value of a Republic at a time, when the mob is clamoring for an emperor to rule them.

We are, in fact, a democratic republic (not the socialist kind, but the real kind). Such a structure protects us from mob rule as the founders of our nation intended. That said, we are also a democracy in the sense of one man/one vote. We are the opposite of an aristocracy, even though aristocracies may allow folk to vote.  That distinction should be made very clear so long as we are nit-picking. You can have a Republic of aristocrats as well as the democratic sort. In an aristocratic Republic, some men are worth more than others. It was one of the great flaws of the Roman Republic and it is one of the great flaws we have seen in the Republican Party of late.

Unfortunately, for the founding fathers to make this country work, they had to accept a more egalitarian to be sure, yet still a kind of class-based republicanism, in which slaves and women were not allowed to vote or were only counted as 3/5ths of a person. We were, at first, very much a nation of white males.The founders were, however, wise enough to build into the Constitution what Confederate VP Alexander Stephens called "the seeds of the destruction of our peculiar institution". He was referring, of course, to slavery, but I would argue that the founders also built into the Constitution an innate antagonism to any form of inequality. In doing so, the founders inevitably triggered societal changes that led to the emancipation of women and slaves, civil rights for all, fair treatment of native Americans and free market capitalism.

The elitist faction of our country have never been entirely comfortable with a government of the people, by the people and for the people. They've always seen themselves as a kind of American nobility and have always fought the tsunami of freedom initiated by the Constitution and Bill of Rights in one manner or another in an attempt to secure their positions at the head of society.  Along the way they clung to slavery, glommed onto Darwinism, eugenics and socialism, passed Jim Crow laws and used media as a social engineering tool to secure the place of our betters (themselves). The saw their rightful place in the world as at the top and have used wealth, influence and education to secure that position. It's not accidental that the first feature film, Birth of a Nation, glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. Propaganda got an early start as an art form in all media.

And always the Constitution and the people (whom the government is of and by) have pushed back. In large part this has been due to the teaching of the Constitution's values to children in school. Inculcating the idea that all men are created equal has had a powerful effect and is the secret to America's success and longevity. It's not surprising, then, that there has been such a powerful effort to rewrite history as taught in school and to downplay the importance of the very document that made this nation the first bastion of true freedom in the world.

Of course, the elitist new nobility had to stop that sort of nonsense. The lower classes might be taught to believe they were as good as the upper classes in America and they could not have that. So now we teach our kids to admire wealth and celebrity instead of courage and good behavior. We've taught our kids to laugh at the Horatio Alger stories, to deride moral courage and altruism and to sneer at the founders of our nation, criticizing them for the very sins their work helped our nation to eventually overcome and reject. Then they taught our children that there is no such thing as sin. And mind you that the organizations and individuals who now undeservedly claim the moral high ground are the very ones who throughout our nation's history who have defended the sins they now claim to abhor.

I do believe the battle has come to a head in this election where we have a choice between an outright socialist and an outright crony capitalist (which is itself little more than a corporate welfare state). Now, in this election we find out whether the more "democratic" American Republic has more backbone than the old class-based Roman Republic. Will we choose an emperor or will we, as the wife of the last great president of the United States once advised, "Just say NO!". 

Sadly, even if the Republican leadership does manage somehow to assassinate the disaster that is the Trump candidacy, we've already seen how this works out before. For every Julius there is an Augustus elevated by the mob, followed by a Tiberius, then a Caligula, a Claudius and then a Nero, followed by flames as the last of the Old Republic goes up in smoke. People say God's will will inevitably be worked out. Best hope His will doesn't include America going up in flames.

There is an ancient Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times."  Well this next few yours should certainly be interesting.

© 2016 by Tom King

The Bill of Rights: Does It Really Grant Only "Negative Liberties"

(c) 2012 by Tom King



"That government is best which governs least"
- Henry David Thoreau

 It's wonderful how my liberal buddies descend to name-calling after only a few exchanges when they discover that you don't buy their ideas. I got into an argument yesterday with a guy who follows my blog (though why I don't know since I irritate him so much).

He objected to two things.  The first was my contention that people with money are the primary job creators (the investor-centric view).  He contends it's consumer demand that creates jobs (the worker-centric view).

While I agree that consumer demand does play a role in creating jobs, I'd qualify that by saying consumers only demand things when they can afford to buy them.  And they can't afford to buy things unless they have a job. It's kind of the chicken or the egg argument and there are two basic philosophies as to how to address the creation of jobs:

• One says the government should take away money from the rich (and upper middle class), give (after taking its cut) the money to the poor and middle class (the poor mostly) and then the poor and middle class will spontaneously create demand for goods and services which will be a good thing for everybody.

• The other philosophy says, investors watch trends in markets and invest money in meeting consumer demands as they happen, thus creating industry and jobs on the chance of being rewarded for that investment with obscene profits which will be a good thing for everybody.

The gaping hole in the first system is that it treats wealth as a magical bottomless pit that it can draw from without consequences.  Without the profit incentive (say if we go back to taxing 75-90% of income from the "wealthy" as we did during the failed war on poverty of the 60s) investors do not make risky investments - the kind that result in the creation of companies and jobs and new industry. And you get the malaise of the 70s where people just give up because no matter how hard they work, the tax man is going to take it away. I lived in the 70s. I was a school teacher and nearly everybody felt that way - so much so that the president made a speech telling us to stop feeling malaiseful and everything would be fine. It wasn't until Reagan lowered taxes and gave business an incentive to get off its duff and make some money that the malaise went away.

I did better under Reagan and I was working in the nonprofit sector. Yes wages didn't skyrocket during the Reagan recovery. That's true. But then neither did our cost of living. When you got a raise, it wasn't eaten up at the grocery store.  Wages didn't skyrocket under Carter either, but we also had double digit inflation that pretty much robbed us of what little we were making. I vividly remember the shortages under Nixon's price controls and Carter's gas lines. The Great Society didn't look so great anymore.

But my progressive buddies like to pretend those things never happened because they don't fit their ideology. In the 60s we were going after those richy rich dollars and had all kinds of government programs. Everything must have been just great!  We were giving away sooooo many food stamps after all.

Ever applied for food stamps? I did back then - a miserable, humiliating process. I'd rather get up and go to work every day and I did. At 5 am every weekday I road a bike five miles each way in the dark on rural roads dodging dogs and rattlesnakes to catch a converted school bus and ride 45 miles one way to work at miserable grinding work building a nuclear power plant (riding past liberal protesters at the gate every day who wanted to shut the project down). I clawed my way out of poverty, but I had to get off all those helpful government programs in order to do it. I couldn't keep up with the paperwork and work full time too. And as soon as I went to work I lost wll those helpful benefits anyway. I was fortunate to find a nonunion job working for Haliburton's Brown and Root. My wife was pregnant. B&R paid for my wife's childbirth even though I'd only been working for them for a month.

I believe in the private sector because I've seen the kind of charity delivered by both it and government. The welfare system seems designed to keep the poor in their place. When I escaped it, I was able to pull myself out of poverty. It was hard. I drove a cab 18 hours a day, worked 50 to 60 hours a week during the early 80s till my wife and I finally started our own business out of our home. We ran it till it failed (free government preschool forced us out of our niche market).  We worked 25 more years in the nonprofit sector, started 5 nonprofit organizations and worked our butts off just to stay afloat. We have no retirement, no pension, no savings. I plan to work till I drop over dead and hope in the years I have left to still get ahead by my own efforts.

And if I do finally take a risk that pays off, I don't want to see the president standing there on TV telling me somebody else made my success for me and demanding 75% of my income because I have "more than my share."

Government is historically the most greedy, oppressive, cruel and heartless organization man has ever come up with.  And don't tell me the church is worse, because the church at its worst was only ever a government in priestly robes and no true church at all.  Even the US government, arguably the most benign in history, has a stark record of committing a whole host of outrages. It has only been kept in check from even worse brutalities by the limitations imposed on it by the US Constitution. And my liberal friends want to remove those limitations and thrust more power into the hands of the government.  That's just insane to me!

My friend argued that Obama didn't make up the idea that the Bill of Rights was a charter of negative liberties - as though that made it a better idea somehow.  Of course Obama didn't make up the idea of "negative liberties". The man hasn't an original thought in his head. He's serving as a tool to other masters, a figurehead to be used in a massive power grab by progressives, his way paved by others. In Obama's case his success is truly not his own. Others did that for him. And I do not think I trust those people with my liberties and my liberties are positive.

I can see how the bill of rights could be considered negative liberties. They are negative liberties for the government.

1. The government doesn't have the liberty to prevent me from speaking.
2. The government doesn't have the liberty to prevent me from worshiping as I please.
3. The government doesn't have the liberty to take away my means to defend myself and my home.
4. The government doesn't have the liberty to keep me from meetin where I please and with whom I wish.
5. The government doesn't have the liberty to prevent me from writing and publishing what I wish. 
6. The government doesn't have the liberty to take away my life or liberty without due process.

In that respect I agree, they are "negative" liberties.  So what's Obama's point?  Is he looking for a bill of rights outlining the government's rights. What a horror that would be!
 
CS Lewis memorably said this and it's worth resaying, "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."


Tom