{"id":10738,"date":"2017-11-02T09:43:10","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T13:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=10738"},"modified":"2017-11-02T16:59:21","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T20:59:21","slug":"government-as-slave-owner-2000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/02\/government-as-slave-owner-2000\/","title":{"rendered":"Government as Slave Owner (2000)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"\"<\/a><\/h3>\n

The\u00a0latest hubbub over whether slavery was the sole cause of the Civil War<\/a> reminded me of this article on how modern governments have connived to seize unlimited power over citizens.\u00a0\u00a0 The Declaration of Independence was clear that Americans rights pre-existed the creation of government.\u00a0 But today’s Statists see government as the fount of all rights.\u00a0\u00a0What the government gives, it has the right to revoke.\u00a0 And that can be a problem.<\/p>\n

Freeman, February 2000<\/h3>\n

Government as Slave Owner<\/a><\/h1>\n
Portraying All Rights as Dispensations of Government Is a Scam to Convey Absolute Power to Government Officials<\/em><\/div>\n
\n
\u00a0 by\u00a0 <\/a>James Bovard<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

James Bovard is the author of<\/em> Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State & the Demise of the Citizen <\/a>(St. Martin\u2019s Press, 1999).<\/em><\/p>\n

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that \u201call men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.\u201d This assertion captured the idealism and the principles of this nation\u2019s Founding Fathers.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the notion of the citizen\u2019s inviolable right to liberty is vanishing from the American political landscape. Attorney General Janet Reno, in a 1995 speech vindiacating federal actions at Waco, informed a group of federal law enforcement officers: \u201cYou are part of a government that has given its people more freedom . . . than any other government in the history of the world.\u201d Contemporary politicians and political scientists have greatly improved on Thomas Jefferson. Progressive thinking about government is exemplified in a new book titled The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxation<\/em> (Norton, 1999), by Princeton University professor Stephen Holmes and University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein.<\/p>\n

Holmes and Sunstein perform dazzling intellectual gymnastics that leave common sense in the dust. They begin by asserting that \u201cthe individual rights of Americans, including the right to private property, are generally funded by taxes, not by fees. This all-important funding formula signals that, under American law, individual rights are public not private goods.\u201d Thus, it is completely up to the current government what rights\u2014if any\u2014today\u2019s citizens will have.<\/p>\n

The American Revolution was fought in large part because colonists believed the British government was violating their pre-existing rights. However, Holmes and Sunstein reveal that \u201crights are rooted in the most shifting of all political soils, that of the annual budgetary process, a process thick with ad hoc political compromises.\u201d All rights are mysteriously created somewhere in the congressional appropriation process<\/strong>\u2014somewhere between the first draft of a legislative bill on an intern\u2019s laptop and the notes a lobbyist slips to a congressman while wheeling and dealing on the final version.<\/p>\n

Holmes and Sunstein spare no effort to stomp out any notion of inviolable rights. They say, \u201cIt is more realistic and more productive to define rights as . . . selective investments of scarce collective resources, made to achieve common aims and to resolve what are generally perceived to be urgent common problems.\u201d The authors also define rights as \u201cwelfare-enhancing investments, extracted by society for society\u2019s purposes\u201d and assert that \u201call legal rights are, or aspire to be, welfare rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus when the Founding Fathers proclaimed in the Bill of Rights that \u201cCongress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press\u201d it was no different from contemporary congressmen\u2019s voting for food stamps.<\/p>\n

Freedom through Intervention<\/h4>\n

Holmes and Sunstein work overtime to attribute every freedom to government intervention, asserting that \u201cReligious liberty is certainly no more costless than other legal rights. American citizens are more or less free to worship or not, as they wish, but their freedom in this respect makes a claim upon the public fisc, even when it is not subsidized out of public budgets (through, for example, police and fire protection of churches and other religious institutions).\u201d If a single drop of government money could conceivably be involved in some activity, the entire activity becomes the equivalent of a government handout. And regardless of how much in taxes a person pays, if he receives any benefit at all from any government activity, he becomes the moral equivalent of a public-housing resident who never worked a day in his life.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In perhaps the book\u2019s most creative passage, Holmes and Sunstein reveal that \u201cOur freedom from government interference is no less budget-dependent than our entitlement to public assistance. Both freedoms must be interpreted. Both are implemented by public officials who, drawing on the public purse, have a good deal of discretion in construing and protecting them.\u201d The fact that you can see the words on this page clearly is only because some police supervisor deterred a traffic cop from whacking you in the head with his billy club this morning. The Bill of Rights was created as a bulwark to defend citizens against government. Yet because government lawyers must occasionally interpret its clauses (usually to subvert plain meaning), any citizen not boarhogged by government officials miraculously becomes a government dependent.<\/p>\n

Holmes and Sunstein reveal that \u201crights depend in practice on the going rate of taxation.\u201d Thus the higher the tax rates, the more rights people have. Unless citizens live under the heel of the tax collector, they cannot hope to have any freedom. The Internal Revenue Service is never mentioned in the book. Instead, taxation is portrayed practically as an abstraction, as something that just happens and automatically fills up government coffers with rights fodder.<\/p>\n

\u201cA tax deduction is a form of public subsidy,\u201d write Holmes and Sunstein. But to believe this is to assume that politicians are entitled to 100 percent of everyone\u2019s income. If politicians set the tax rate at 99 percent, and allow people a tax deduction for food and clothing, then everyone\u2019s budget supposedly becomes a government handout.<\/p>\n

The so-called tax burden is an illusion because whatever title anyone has to own something came originally from government. In an earlier book, Sunstein stressed that \u201ca system of private property is a construct of the state\u201d and \u201cgovernmental rules are implicated in, indeed constitute, the distribution of wealth and entitlement in the first instance.\u201d Thus government can presumably revoke the rights to any property without violating the rights of the purported owner. This presumes that government is the equivalent of some pagan Earth Mother from whom all things come\u2014and who thus has a right to take all things back.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The only way to justify treating tax burdens as morally irrelevant is to assume that government owns all the labor of all the citizens in society. Taxes are not an imposition but merely government reclaiming its rightful property. But did the government bequeath the sweat of the brow of the carpenter who built a house that he sold, or the muscle by which a laborer dug a ditch, or the idea that the software writer used to revolutionize computer use around the world, or the courage of a businessman who staked his life savings on a new product that made life easier for millions? A citadel of freedom cannot be built on a foundation of slave ethics.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Holmes and Sunstein argue in effect that because politicians help set the rules for economic markets, they somehow become entitled to what anyone produces. This makes as much sense as saying that federal patent clerks deserve all the rewards for new inventions, since they approve and register new patents, or that a bank security guard is entitled to carry home armfuls of money from the vaults he guards.<\/p>\n

Citizens at Fault<\/h4>\n

Every failure of government is somehow the citizens\u2019 fault. Sunstein notes that \u201cThe Fourth Amendment right [against unreasonable government searches and seizures] cannot be absolute unless the public is willing to invest the enormous amounts necessary to ensure that it is seldom violated in practice. The fact that the Fourth Amendment is violated so regularly shows that the public is not willing to make that investment.\u201d Thus the only reason that police routinely carry out unconstitutional searches is that taxes are not high enough.<\/p>\n

The one part of the Bill of Rights that Holmes and Sunstein strictly avoid mentioning is the Second Amendment, which guarantees citizens the right to keep and bear arms. The Founding Fathers saw widespread private gun ownership as a necessary check against the threat of tyranny. Even Harvard law professor and \u201cprogressive\u201d icon Laurence Tribe recently admitted that \u201cIt becomes impossible to deny that some right to bear arms is among the rights of American citizens.\u201d Presumably the authors believe that people must pay taxes so that government can confiscate everyone\u2019s guns.<\/p>\n

Holmes and Sunstein see government as the alpha and omega of all rights, all liberties, all existence: they cannot conceive of anything happening that was not first ordained by politicians and inflicted by bureaucrats. They declare that \u201cTo take the cost of rights into account is therefore to think something like a government procurement officer, asking how to allocate limited resources intelligently while keeping a wide array of public goods in mind.\u201d Neither Sunstein nor Holmes has spent time around the General Services Administration headquarters, where real procurement officers waste billions every month.<\/p>\n

The authors never attempt to explain where or how government got all the rights. Supposedly, government officials have them because government spends the money to protect them. But the money government spends was first earned by private citizens. How can citizens acquire rights only by government\u2019s taking away much of their paychecks in order to protect the remainder of their income and their other rights? If rights are the result of the government budget, then the rights must originate with the person who produced the money, not with the government agents who seized it. The adulation of government turns into a tautology: in the final realm, government is the source of all rights merely because it has the power to fleece and subjugate its citizens.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Portraying all rights as dispensations of government is a scam to convey absolute power to government officials. Since rights are solely the creation of government, any limitation on government power supposedly becomes a threat to rights.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Americans endorsed the creation of the federal government over 200 years ago so that it could fulfill a handful of narrowly prescribed functions. Government was intended to be a hired clerk, not a divine master.<\/strong> Each person has a natural right not to be made a government pawn, a right to sovereignty over his own body, his own life, and his own peaceful actions. As Etienne de la Bo\u00e9ttie, a sixteenth-century French thinker, observed, \u201cIt is fruitless to argue whether or not liberty is natural, since none can be held in slavery without being wronged.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans must choose between \u201cgovernment-issue liberty\u201d and \u201cself-reliant liberty.\u201d<\/strong> The choice is between a concept of freedom based on government handouts and a concept of freedom based on restraint of government, between a liberty in which people are perpetually treated as children needing to be restrained and a liberty in which they are allowed to experiment, take chances, and pay for their own bloody noses. It is a choice between a freedom in which each person can make his own mistakes or a freedom in which each person becomes another statistic in the government\u2019s mistakes. The choice between the two freedoms comes down to a question of whether people will benefit more from being left alone to build their own lives or from somebody\u2019s confiscating much of their building material and imposing the structure he thinks best. A good definition of liberty must provide a barricade that 10,000\u00a0federal\u00a0agents can\u2019t breach.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

\"James<\/p>\n

James Bovard <\/a><\/h5>\n

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy<\/em>, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty<\/em>. Find him on Twitter @JimBovard.<\/p>\n

+++++<\/p>\n

I also wrote about The Cost of Rights in a 1999 Playboy article<\/a>. Co-author Stephen Holmes sent\u00a0a testy response which was published in January 2000:\u00a0\u00a0James Bovard\u2019s outburst at a book written by me and University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein (\u201dThe Cost of Rights,\u201d The Playboy Forum, October) leaves me feeling like a mosquito in a nudist colony: I don\u2019t know where to begin. The theme of our book, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, is the budgetary cost of nonwelfare rights. Property rights, freedom of contract, the right to vote, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and so forth all make important claims on the public fisc. Bovard may not have noticed that the money to light, heat and repair courthouses comes from taxpayers…. <\/em>The purpose of our book is not to decide which government programs should be expanded or cut, but to puncture some pervasive illusions that continue to cloud the thinking of those who enjoy posing as embattled heroes of private liberty. The notion that any right is deeply un-American if it makes the individual dependent on government is one of those all- too-common fallacies. If Bovard feels perfectly \u201cfree\u201d when he rides in an elevator that has never been inspected by a taxpayer-salaried government official, then he has an odd conception of freedom. <\/em><\/p>\n

Stephen Holmes, <\/em>New York, New York<\/em><\/p>\n

Bovard responds<\/strong>: Because the government spends a minuscule percentage of tax revenues on the administration of court systems, citizens are supposed to pretend that government is their liberator. And regardless of how heavy taxes become, they are still a badge of freedom, because not all the revenue is pissed away or used to buy new shackles for citizens. This is the Sunstein-Holmes philosophy of government in a nutshell.<\/p>\n

Holmes and Sunstein work overtime to attribute every freedom to government intervention, asserting: \u201cReligious liberty is certainly no more costless than other legal rights. American citizens are more or less free to worship or not, as they wish, but their freedom in this respect makes a claim upon the public fisc, even when it is not subsidized out of public budgets (through, for example, police and fire protection of churches and other religious institutions).\u201d By that reasoning, people have sexual freedom only because government-funded rescue squads might retrieve the wounded after a couple injure themselves attempting a Flying Philadelphia Fuck. If a single cent of government money could conceivably be involved in some activity, the entire activity becomes the equivalent of a government handout.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0latest hubbub over whether slavery was the sole cause of the Civil War reminded me of this article on how modern governments have connived to seize unlimited power over citizens.\u00a0\u00a0 The Declaration of Independence was clear that Americans rights pre-existed the creation of government.\u00a0 But today’s Statists see government as the fount of all rights.\u00a0\u00a0What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10760,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[382,1180,45,565,164,484,811,1179,50,252],"class_list":["post-10738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cass-sunstein","tag-flying-philadelphia","tag-freedom","tag-janet-reno","tag-leviathan","tag-playboy","tag-slavery","tag-stephen-holmes","tag-taxation","tag-tyranny"],"yoast_head":"\nGovernment as Slave Owner (2000) - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"If government is the source of people's rights, then politicians can justifiably revoke those rights & seize unlimited power over the citizenry\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/02\/government-as-slave-owner-2000\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Government as Slave Owner (2000) - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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