Say Something

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Say Something
By Richard Girard

"Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods-moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former-but no opinion."

Hannah Arendt (1906 75), German-born U.S. political philosopher. On Revolution, chapter 6 (1963).

"One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed."

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 1900), German philosopher. Human, All Too Human, aphorism 303 (1878).

            I have mixed feelings about the recent decision of the OEN editorial staff to begin blocking the comments of certain individuals on the OEN Opted site. Like I.F. Stone, I like a good editorial tussle, and think that freedom's dialogue is enhanced by two individuals squaring off across the field of (electronic) newsprint, bashing one another with the facts until one or the other pleads mercy or the public loses interest. I think we exclude the opinions of individuals, however personally odious, however contrarian, at great risk to ourselves and our own freedom of speech.

            However, I can also understand the decision. Many times these comments seem to be entirely self-serving, and fully understood by only a small group of individuals. They are often times angry and filled with ad hominem attacks. Their primary purpose seems to be to ridicule the opinions of those they disagree with, and obscure any real discourse on the subject with an obscuring mud coat of obfuscations, slogans and platitudes. All of this occurs without exposing the commentators' actual opinions and beliefs to any sort of serious objective examination.

            The majority of commentators who I suspect were blocked, are those individuals who write nothing-or almost nothing-but comments. They tend to disagree with most traditional liberal philosophy: social safety net; regulation of business including enforcement of antitrust laws; promoting the rights of workers; progressive taxation weighted heavily towards the very richest Americans in order to prevent the creation of a hereditary aristocracy; equal protection under the law regardless of race, creed, color, sex, wealth, or birth; a real opportunity for our children to have a materially better life than we did.

            Many of these individuals I suspect are disciples of Ayn Rand and her objectivist philosophy, or right wing libertarians who follow von Mises, Hayek, and the teachings of the Austrian School of Economics. They seem to be far more interested in engaging in tautological (tail chasing in simple terms) arguments that support their own system of beliefs, rather than putting forth arguments that legitimately support their contentions against your own. When they do, these commentators have an unfortunate tendency to rely upon what in rhetoric is called "a converse accident fallacy." This is a fallacy that is created when an argument is dependent on a non-representative sample. The sample is often themselves, their friends, or "someone they heard about." A famous example was President Reagan with his welfare recipients driving Cadillacs.

            There is a tendency for these commentators to provide simplistic answers when they do offer arguments. "Get rid of the Federal Reserve and go back to the gold standard," is one example of these overly simplistic answers. They neglect to consider that the United States only has approximately 261 million troy ounces of gold, roughly 5/6 of a troy ounce per person. Worldwide, there are only 4.66 billion troy ounces of gold total, which is less than ¾ of a troy ounce for every man, woman and child on the planet.

            When I look back at the Roman Empire, its fall, and the onset of the Dark Ages; I believe that Rome's fall is directly attributable to the flow of precious metals eastward to buy off barbarian invaders and obtain the luxury items that the Empire's citizens wanted, including silk and spices.

            Here is my hypothesis: when the amount of gold per person dropped below a certain point-less than one or maybe two ounces of gold per person-was when the Western Roman Empire disintegrated in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries AD, because it no longer had enough of the medium of exchange-gold-to maintain internal trade. The Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire suffered a similar fate in the Twelfth through Fifteenth Centuries, finally succumbing to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The Crusades hastened the Byzantine Empire's end, and crusaders brought enough gold back to Western Europe to raise it above the one ounce (or so) of gold per person threshold, kicking the so-called "High Middle Ages" into full swing. The extinction of half of Europe's population during the "Black Death" doubled the available gold per person, permitting the Renaissance to spring into existence. Columbus' discovery of the Americas, and the Spanish treasure fleets sailing from them, brought enough gold into Europe to finance a flowering of culture and science unequaled since the rise of Greece.

            However, basing a nation's standard of wealth on a commodity such as gold has certain intrinsic problems. The biggest one of these is hoarding. When you see a hoarding of gold and silver coin-or even currency for that matter-you run the risk of deflation, or an uncontrolled lowering of prices. The problem with this is that the merchants and others who sell these products bought them at a higher original price and overhead, and cannot afford to stay in business at the new lower prices. This invariably leads to a recession, providing of course your economy was not already in the midst of a recession, which was the cause of your people hoarding their money in the first place. According to my economics textbook, deflation plus recession equals depression, a self perpetuating disaster that requires the infusion of large quantities of capital to cure.

            I do not believe that anyone who has seriously examined the Federal Reserve, and the way it does business, can doubt that both it, and the banks that control it, need to be brought under the actual control of the true Government of the United States, meaning We the People. To do this correctly may require a Constitutional Amendment. However, the simplistic solution of eliminating the Fed entirely and going back on the gold standard will not work. All the gold standard will do is guarantee poverty, misery, and recurrent depressions as people hoard the vastly insufficient quantity of available gold, just as it has throughout the history of Western Civilization.

            Another area where these commentators like to provide simplistic answers to complex questions is on one of my favorite subjects, the Social Contract.

            Many of these individuals say they object to being forced to "comply with a contract that they never signed, that compels them to pay taxes for services they never use, and supporting individuals who are too lazy to do the work to support themselves." Most of these individuals also object to the government enforcing standards for the working conditions provided and wages that they pay their employees, not to mention product quality and safety. These individuals' objections in many cases involves their rights to make and enforce contracts the way they desire, which always means making the most profit with the least expenditure. Their sole idea for the protection of workers and consumers seems to be "caveat emptor."

            Setting aside a whole milieu of references to characters in the books of Charles Dickens, I shall once again defend the idea of the Social Contract, and the fact that it exists, and the need for its existence, whether they care to admit it or not.

            My argument this time for both the existence of and need for an implicit, society wide Social Contract is one of necessity. Civilization throughout its history has seen a slow evolution to ever greater equality and mercy in the application of society's rules to its members. But even in the most primitive and despotic of times, the members of a society, from slave to sovereign, were aware-at least in a general sense-of the rules that they were expected to follow in order to maintain their position, and thereby some degree of order within that society.

            In the more barbaric (in my opinion) societies, violation of the rules carried a single penalty: death. A slave who broke the rules died almost instantly; a sovereign-like Caligula-took some time and planning. The result was the same: you became worm food.

            Although civilized societies have always ebbed and flowed, taking two small steps forward and one large one back; they have still shown signs of advancement over the centuries. As societies moved towards what I consider a more civilized frame of mind, they began to seek punishments other than death for those who violated the rules. At first it was exile for the rich and powerful (in Athens' democracy and Rome's republic, for example), and then enslavement or imprisonment for the other citizens. Over the course of centuries, as we have become more civilized, fewer and fewer crimes have merited the death penalty.

            At the same time, we have seen an increase in literacy (in the broadest sense of that term, which includes an interest in things literate) throughout these same societies. Even in Athens and Rome, the poor often attended the theater as well as the games. While the plebeians' tastes may have tended more toward comedy or farce than those of the senatorial class, it was not limited to those offerings. In Sixteenth Century England, Shakespeare's plays were attended by Englishmen from all walks of life, as were those of Marlowe and Spenser. The invention of the printing press, as well as increasing complexity of the world in which we live, has ushered in a steady climb in the literacy rate in the West.

            As literacy has increased, people have increasingly questioned both their role in society, as well as how tightly bound they are to that role. Ideas of class have increasingly fallen into disrepute, as have notions of hereditary privilege.

            The more courageous among us say "Let's try something different. Let's organize ourselves based upon those things which we hold in common reverence. The first of these is our nation's basic ideals, laws and traditions. We may not fully agree what these comprise, or even their meanings. Nonetheless, we can agree in principle on some of them as a more or less consistent framework for the political, economic and social interactions of individuals and groups within our society."

            Rarely is such an agreement between a nation's citizens given an explicit sanction by plebiscite. The more normal process follows one of two patterns. The first is a long standing, slowly evolving body of law and tradition-as is the case with the United Kingdom. The second is the creation of a written framework of legal principles set down and approved by the elected representatives of the nation's citizens, which then evolve through law and custom-as is the case in the United States with its Constitution.

            This body of laws and traditions are the framework of the Social Contract, just as the citizens' belief in the nation is the foundation. They are necessary as the working basis for a large society of diverse human beings, with a multitude of differing backgrounds and goals, in order to have any sort of consistent and equitable system for human interactions within a social, economic, and political context.

            Any attempt to rely purely upon a system of specific contracts, negotiated by individual members of a society between one another, is improbably cumbersome and impossible to enforce without an already existing system of legal jurisprudence. Thus, a nation's citizens give their implied consent to their nation's Social Contract, in the belief that it is the best way to ensure the furtherance of the "common good."

            The greatest fear of these followers of Rand and von Mises is the "tyranny of the majority," as James Madison named it; named when Jefferson was ambassador to France and unable to calm Madison's fears. I hear from these commentators ridiculous refrains of "if three men are on an island, and two of them vote for the third to be their slave, he is their slave under majority rule," or "if the people voted to take away my wealth for 'no good reason,' and distribute it among the poor, and this plebiscite passed by a single vote or an overwhelming majority, it is still theft of my property, by those too lazy or stupid to legitimately acquire it themselves."

            This mindset demonstrates both an ignorance of the principles that underlie majority rule; as well as a profound disrespect for the principles that underlie the very essence of the republican system of government that so many of them claim to believe in.

            Let us start with Thomas Jefferson, whose wisdom in such matters is almost always paramount:

            "The first principle of republicanism is that the lex majoris partis is the fundamental law of every society of individuals of equal rights; to consider the will of the society enounced by the majority of a single vote as sacred as if unanimous is the first of all lessons in importance, yet the last which is thoroughly learnt. This law once disregarded, no other remains but that of force, which ends necessarily in military despotism."-Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 1817.  (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 15: page 127, 1904).

            The first clause of the first sentence of the above statement gives the lie to the argument for two men voting for a third's slavery as an example of "majority rule." Jefferson states quite clearly that majority rule (lex majoris partis) is the fundamental law "of every society of individuals of equal rights." (I would add that in my opinion, that with those rights there must be an equal share of responsibility.) If two men are considering making a third their slave, somehow their microcosmic society has already lost its prerequisite for rule by the majority: individuals of equal rights.

            The answer to the second complaint is related to the first. In a society of individuals with equal rights, the single most difficult problem is the maintenance of some roughly equal parity of rights.

            Throughout history, republican forms of government have invariably been the most commercially successful. Athenian dominance of Greece was based as much on its commercial acumen as it was on its fleets. The wars between Rome and Carthage were primarily about control of trade. The Dutch Republic rose to a level of prominence in the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries that was completely out of proportion with its size or population; because of its commercial dominance.

            Unfortunately, all of these republics eventually declined because their immense wealth was hoarded by their wealthiest classes, to the detriment of not only the poor, but their nation's working and middle classes. Finally, their "society of individuals with equal rights" became a society with two tiers of rights: those of the rich, and those of the rest of the population. These republics quickly declined into oligarchies or despotism. With this decline came an eventual decline in prominence and power, even for Rome; whose republic had existed for more than four centuries.

            Something must be done to prevent the acquisition and aggregation of vast intergenerational wealth, which invariably leads to an oligarchy with a two tiered system of rights. It is the very nature of the republic that makes such an amassing of wealth possible, and it is this uncontrolled amassing of wealth-like some cancer of capital-that eventually kills the republic.

            One of the most important lessons that I have learned in my life is that we condemn most strongly in others that which we despise in ourselves. I have noted that those who condemn welfare and other forms of public assistance for the poor and disabled, are the same ones who benefit most either from direct corporate welfare in the form of government contracts, subsidies, and other programs, or indirect corporate welfare by legally or illegally avoiding their fair share of taxes, or often both.

            The Social Contract is a necessity. It provides a guide for our relations with each other on a national scale, and a test for what might or might not be fair with regard to our relations with our government. Those who claim that it does not exist, and condemn it-and those of us who believe in the Contract-despise it because it forces them to be responsible for something, and to someone, other than themselves. They are selfish, lazy individuals, and they will try and tell you that I am some sort of altruistic fool.

            Nothing could be further from the truth.

            First of all, the opposite of selfishness is not altruism. As I laid out in my OEN article in December 2008, "An Illuminating Dichotomy," altruism is simply selfishness turned inside out, not its opposite. Selfishness is being unfair to everyone but yourself. Altruism is being fair to everyone else, and unfair to yourself. The real opposite of selfishness is fairness.

            The only non-violent method I know of to slow the aggregation of vast quantities of individual wealth is taxation. I think that a return to the pre-Reagan marginal tax rates (for the top one-tenth of one percent of all wage earners) topping out at seventy percent (70%) would fix many of our government's problems, especially those concerning solvency. This would mean (for those of you who do not understand the term "marginal tax rate"), that those individuals who make more than $3,000,000.00 per year, would have to pay seventy cents of every dollar they make over $3,000,000.00 per year to the Federal government. I also believe that corporations should be taxed once again at the rate they were during President Eisenhower's administration, where their taxes provided approximately 35% of the Federal government's tax income, rather than the current 9%.

            Despite the propaganda of the right for the last thirty years, taxes-if progressively assessed and enforced-are not a burden. They are, as Justice Holmes said, the price we pay for civilization. Progressive taxation is based upon the idea that it is most fair that those who are most capable of handling the heaviest tax burden without suffering, should pay the highest taxes. It is assumed that, generally, those who have benefited most from the infrastructure provided in whole or in part by the Social Contract, have also directly or indirectly made the most use of that infrastructure, and should bear the greatest burden.

            Here is some of what the Social Contract does, and what I believe it can and should do. The Social Contract provides:

1. Consistency of the interpretation and enforcement of civil and criminal law in a society where there is not an established hierarchy, but a fluid and continually changing leadership.
2. Protection of the rights of all of the members of a society, without regard to race, creed, color, sex, wealth, or birth. In theory, a person's wealth should count for nothing in the legal system; only the justness of their cause. In a practical sense, the playing field needs to be leveled, to the best of our human capabilities to do so. This is in keeping with civilization's evolving tradition of a search for justice, not retribution.
3. A means for conservatives (including followers of Rand and von Mises) to acknowledge that the era of hierarchical dominance is ending, and that a new era of constantly changing leaders is emerging. It is a frightening idea, that in the future, it is the lex majoris partis that will dominate, and leaders will be those who catch the wave of ideas and make them their own.
4. A recognition that great wealth can no longer be permitted to pass untouched from generation to generation in a given family. I am not alone in this opinion. Media mogul Ted Turner has stated that he will leave enough money for his children to "do whatever they want to, but not enough to do nothing." A century ago, Andrew Carnegie stated, "The day is not far distant when the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was free for him to administer during life, will pass away 'unwept, unhonored, and unsung,' no matter to what uses he leave the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these the public verdict will then be: 'The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.' Such, in my opinion, is the true gospel concerning wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the rich and the poor." "The Gospel of Wealth," in North American Review, (Cedar Falls, Iowa, June 1889).
5. An end to any possibility of an established, wealth based, aristocracy.  Some sort of brake needs to be placed on the acquisition and retention of wealth.  Too much wealth-especially if one becomes wealthy not by creation of a tangible product, but rather by creating more money on paper-is dehumanizing. It makes people-employees, customers, associates, and even friends and family-into things to be used, not people to be cherished and nurtured.  At some point, it even quits being about money, and begins being about power and control, seeking to become a "Master of the Universe," as Tom Wolfe put it.  We can no longer permit individual wealth to grow so great that it makes people believe that the rules no longer apply to them.

            I am certain that I shall be excoriated for this article: branded a socialist, a Marxist, even a Communist. But in reality, I am only following the lead of the Founders of the United States: men such as James Madison, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. Here are two quotes from Jefferson, nearly thirty years apart, which demonstrates my point:

            "There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents... There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendency."-Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 13: page 396.

            "A heavy aristocracy and corruption are two bridles in the mouths of [a people] which will prevent them from making any effectual efforts against their masters." -Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785. Ford Edition 4:38, Papers 8:40.

            And I'll add Thomas Paine to the mix, "All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny," (The Rights of Man, Part II; Chapter 3).

            I would expand Mr. Paine's observation by saying every  form of hereditary power-political, social, or economic-is in its nature tyranny.

            Historically, the only way to draw the fangs from the nest of vipers that is  Jefferson's artificial aristocracy is to break up their fortunes, their syndicates, and their "good old boy" networks, by placing effective checks and balances on their activities using government power: antitrust actions, financial and manufacturing oversight, limiting corporate actions, and strong unions to oppose their worst financial self-indulgences. Ours is the government of We the People, of the people of the nation of the whole, not some self-serving pampered elite.