July 18, 2011

Opposite Forms of Freedom on the Fourth [original article]
by Jacob G. Hornberger

Jacob is a well-known libertarian writer and commentator, and I always learn from his articles. But sometimes, he starts off well and then runs off on a tangent, damaging his arguments and not addressing the root problems. In other cases, his words strike a spark in me and others, and helps us see things more clearly. This reflection on the Fourth of July is a mix of those: my comments on his thoughts are in italics.

I’d like to share two points about the Fourth of July that I believe are important:

First, the people who signed the Declaration of Independence were not American citizens, as is commonly believed. The people who took up arms against the British government were not fighting a foreign power. The revolutionaries were British citizens. They took up arms against their own government. They were shooting the troops rather than supporting them.

I’ve heard this debated many times: technically, they were NOT “citizens” but rather “subjects” of the King; in those days, those who were from or the children of immigrants from the United Kingdom were considered as Englishmen who had given up some of their rights (not that many British subjects of the era actually had voting rights) in return for the increased liberty of living in the Colonies. Jacob is right that the UK was NOT a foreign power, although today colonial powers (sadly, even the US in Puerto Rico) is considered such. Times change.

Why did they do that? Because they believed that their government was engaged in terrible wrongdoing. That wrongdoing is specified within the Declaration. They believed that when people’s own government is engaged in wrongdoing and persists in that wrongdoing, it is up the citizenry to take a stand against it.

Amen! It is a moral duty, and if you are a believer in government, it is a civic duty. It is also a duty that (like preaching the Gospel and rebuking sin for christians) is more commonly shirked than not.

There are undoubtedly those who consider the rebels to have been traitors — people who refuse to support their own government, especially in time of crisis and war. British government officials certainly considered George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others who joined the Revolution to be criminals and traitors.

Not me. I consider the signers of the Declaration to have been the real patriots. It’s not easy to take a public stand against the wrongdoing of one’s own government.

For one thing, the dissidents must put up with all the nasty things that the good, little citizens hurl at them — the citizens who have the mindset of “my government, never wrong, especially in crisis and war.”

For another, there is the threat of retaliation from the government itself. We often forget that if Washington, Jefferson, and the others had lost, they would have been hanged as common criminals and traitors by British government officials, to the applause of all the good, little citizens who sided with their government in the conflict.

In fact, the easiest thing in the world — the thing that takes no courage at all — is to take the side of the government in times of crisis and war. What takes courage is to stand against it during such times. My favorite example of such courage is the story of the White Rose, where German young people had the courage to stand against their own government in the middle of World War II — and paid for it with their lives at the hands of their own government — for “treason.”

Jacob is making excellent points – though preaching to the choir: there are few Americans today who consider the signers to be anything but patriots. But I recall those famous words “None dare call it treason,” and for an alternative view by another libertarian, see Gary North’s column: Tricked on the Fourth of July.

Second, the “freedom” that Americans today celebrate is opposite to the freedom that our American ancestors celebrated when they celebrated Independence Day every year. The reason I put the word in quotations is because I personally don’t consider it to be genuine freedom, but the fact is that most Americans today do.

Actually, only some Americans (anti-federalists, later Democratic-Republicans) celebrated the Fourth; Federalists celebrated Washington’s Birthday. By the time the celebration of Independence Day was a standard feature of the year as an official federal holiday (in 1870) most of those freedoms proclaimed in 1776 were long gone.

Today, Americans define freedom as the extent to which the government is taking care of them, providing for them, and keeping them safe and secure from the likes of drug lords, terrorists, illegal aliens, and communists.

Some, maybe, and probably way too many, but it is not close to unanimous, Jacob.

Consider the welfare state: Government provides people with retirement (Social Security), health care (Medicare and Medicaid), education (public schooling and education grants), farm subsidies, community grants, and many other programs that entail the government’s use of force to take money from whom it belongs in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong.

Consider the warfare state: 700-1000 military bases in some 130 countries, invasions, wars of aggression, undeclared wars, bombings, occupations, sanctions, embargoes, kidnapping, rendition, assassination, kangaroo tribunals, and the like. In a word, empire.

Consider the drug war, whereby the government wields the power to incarcerate people for ingesting non-approved substances, a 4-decade war that continues to wreak death, destruction, and corruption.

Is the drug war anything but the intersection of the welfare state and the warfare state? It has (in other forms) been going on for far longer than four decades, when we look at the Prohibition Era (and the events leading up to that) and the Opium Act and other actions. And indeed, the “war on some drugs” is metamorphing into a war on even MORE substances; tobacco in any form, sugar, and numerous other substances are sucked into this evil conflict.

Consider the regulated society, in which governments at all levels regulate the most minute aspects of people’s lives, especially within the context of the so-called war on terrorism. 

It is not just the “war on terrorism” –indeed, that is just one of the more recent excuses for the micromanagement of government. The war on drugs, including its currency controls, no-knock raids, random drug tests, and more, already had warped our society and liberties into unrecognized forms, and given more excuse for conflict. The “real wars” of WW1 and WW2, followed immediately by the Cold War, gave government some excuse and opportunity for micro-management but it was the environment that did and now does give the most opportunity, even more than the war on drugs, since there are many people that do not get involved in drugs but we ALL live in the environment.

Consider the Federal Reserve and paper money, which involve a never-ending inflationary debasement of the value of people’s money in order to finance ever-burgeoning welfare-warfare state spending and debt.

Actually, the debasement of the money is a separate but complementary matter to the welfare-warfare state, because it has always been a key avenue and tool of control for the rulers. It is just a great advantage that it can also fuel the expanding spending and debt. Like taxes, regulations, spending, threats to security, and the environment, it is another color on tyranny’s palette.

Consider the income tax and the IRS, which suck money out of the pockets of those who have earned it in order to give it to those who haven’t earned it.

There are some, but very few people, who consider the income tax or the IRS either one to be”freedom” because what both of these induce is people is fear: fear of being broke, and fear of being both broke and in danger of imprisonment and at the mercy of the taxman.

All this is considered “freedom” by modern-day Americans. 

Again, Jacob, some, but NOT ALL of us. Please do not forget that!

Not so with our American ancestors. Consider that for more than 100 years, they chose to live without income taxation, an IRS, a Federal Reserve, paper money, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, public (i.e., government) schooling, and other such socialistic programs. 

Actually, no. Here is where I really disagree with you. The War between the States brought the Income Tax into existence in North America, not even “four score and seven years” after the birth of the Union in 1776. While the Federal Reserve did not exist until 1913, experiments with both the First and Second Banks of the United States in the early 1800s gave us (well, our ancestors) a taste of the evil. Paper money has been a bane on society since well before the Constitution. Indeed, that was one of the arguments of the Federalists FOR the 1787 document.

We didn’t have Social Security for more than 150 years, but we DID have pensions for veterans (and their widows and children) and we did have annuities for Indians and retirement for Congressmen, well before 1876. Just as the beginnings of Medicare and Medicaid could be found in the 1800s in the form of medical services for Indians, seaman’s hospitals (later to become the Public Health Service), and especially the incredible corruption of the political machines like Tammany Hall in New York, and the Pendergast Machine in Kansas City, which provided health and other care as part of their reward to their clients and street shoulders.

Farm subsidies? What was the Homestead Act and virtually free land to sodbusters but that? Land stolen from the tribes or land-grant holders and given to farmers directly or by way of the railroads.

As for public schools, well, give me a break. The first public school in the “United States” is more than 140 years OLDER than the US, having been established in 1635 in Boston. Proponents of government-run-tax-funded schools today crow that Jefferson himself advocated government control of education, and that despite the existence of many private schools, government-run schools became the norm in the 1840s, bringing ideas from Prussia and other massive states to the US.

As for socialism, well, starting with the kind of “public charity” that Rep. David Crockett first supported and then opposed, the grants of money and land to build canals and then railroads, the herding of the tribes into reservations, the monopoly of the Post Office, demonstrates that the evils of socialism existed in the US well before the word itself was coined by Karl Marx.

No drug war for our ancestors. They believed that genuine freedom encompassed the right to ingest whatever one wants. < /p>

Unless you were an Indian (firewater – alcohol – sales were prohibited to Indians both on and off reservations for many years) or a Chinee immigrant who wanted to smoke some opium, or of course, a visitor or a citizen to a dry state like Kansas of Carrie Nation’s heritage, or… you get the point. As with public schools, prohibition predates the US, starting in Massachusetts in May of 1657, and the first temperance association (dedicated to making alcoholic consumption illegal) was started in Connecticut in 1789! Too many of our ancestors tried to keep the rest of them from doing certain things, even if the only harm was to the person doing it. They used the excuse of harm to others caused by a few individuals to punish everyone.

Also, for most of the first century of our nation’s existence our ancestors lived without militarism, a huge standing army, wars of aggression (the Mexican War being a notable exception), occupations, foreign military bases, a military industrial complex, kidnappings, torture, and assassination. In a word, they chose a republic, as compared to an empire. 

A standing army? True. Indeed, that was the case except during wartime for more than 150 years – depending on your definition of “standing army.” But militarism is as American as apple pie: starting with attempts in Congress to “liberate” Quebec and what became Ontario and the Maritime Provinces from the British in 1777. Indeed, you can trace that militarism and wars of aggression back to – guess what – Massachusetts Bay in the 1600s, as the “puritans” and their ilk began to take land from the tribes.

Following the American War of Independence, tens of thousands of troop-days were spent to extinguish the independence, or at least the land-ownership, of dozens of AmerInd tribes and hundreds of thousands of people; the suppression of Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, and dozens of slave uprisings were all examples of wars of aggression: the Mexican War was just the biggest of these. Even the War of 1812 became a war of aggression with the invasion of Canada, and the occupation of Spanish Florida. That is, the biggest except for the War of Northern Aggression, which killed hundreds of thousands and lasted four bloody years and ended with the occupation of a totally vanquished independent nation.

As for foreign military bases, well, those started in the 1850s with the deployment of steam ships, when the US (and other nations) started laying claim to distant islands for coaling stations, to say nothing of the large number of filibustering expeditions to various parts of Latin America which led to occupations time and time again. Kidnappings, torture, and assassination? Again, the tribes suffered the bulk of such crimes committed by government agents and private citizens, but were far from the only victims. Visit a site with the history of Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania some time, or look at what happened to Jefferson Davis in 1865, or what American settlers did to the Californios and Californian Indians in the 1850s.

No, the American republic HAS been an empire, as well, for virtually its entire history, as can be traced back to the way Vermont was treated by New York and New Hampshire, and Kentucky was treated by Virginia, for years, and continuing with the way the Atlantic Seaboard states treated the Midwest, and then the Midwest with its steel and oil and railroad barons treated the Plains and Mountain States.

That does not mean that I am NOT very much aware of the many good things and the benefits of America’s unique mixed-brand of liberty and imperialism brought to North America and the world. My own ancestry is proof of that: I would neither want to be a citizen of Mexico as some of my Texian ancestors were prior to 1836 or a tribesman the way others were prior to the 1790s (the mixing of the Cherokee and other southeastern tribes into the expanding American civilization) or the 1860s (the shattering of the Comanche domination of the Southern Plains), or for that matter a slaveholder as some of my ancestors in Arkansas and Mississippi were prior to 1863. But valuing American society and civilization and liberty and the contributions Americans have made to liberty throughout the world should not blind us to our errors and weaknesses and stupid actions, then or now!

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that our Americans ancestors also lived without immigration controls and gun control. 

Unless, of course, you were Japanese or Chinese (immigration restrictions dating back to the 1850s) – or either a black (slave or freeman or after 1865, freedman) in too many states – NORTH as well as South, not allowed to own guns. Or disarmed Indians or enrolled members of tribes who could live off their reservation only by sneaking and even passing. AND let us not forget the rules imposed by states fearing the Irish in the 1830-1860 period.

Why did they reject the things that present-day Americans celebrate as “freedom”? Because they believed that all the things that present-day Americans have brought into existence with their welfare state and warfare state were opposite to freedom. Since they wanted to be free, they chose not to adopt such programs when they founded the country. 

The problem is, there have always been SOME “Americans” (legally if not spiritually) who HAVE wanted these things and tried to impose them on others. Yes, many – indeed eventually the MAJORITY of Americans (at least in most states) DID believe that these things were the opposite of freedom, and most of these things I’m rubbing in Jacob’s face were done away with – most but not all. And worse, too many of these ideas about freedom and liberty were twisted and co-opted into serving the dark side: the even more blatant imperialism of the White Man’s Burden of the post-Spanish American War, that was not new but simply the intensification outSIDE North America of the practices of the War of Northern Aggression and the various wars of conquest from Georgia to Eastern Washington and the Arizona Deserts to the High Plains of the North. Now, as we did in WW1 and WW2 and Korea and Vietnam and Kuwait and Afghanistan and the rest of Mesopotamia, we were “bringing freedom” to others. Of course, now, we have so corrupted ourselves that we are bringing them the imitation of a substitute of a copy of a fake.

Does the welfare-warfare state way of life constitute genuine freedom? Permit me to answer that question with the words of the great German thinker Johann von Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Jacob (and Johann) is right, but when we are blind not just to our current state but to our past state, we are even more to be pitied. But painting the past a utopia is NOT the way to restore and preserve freedom and liberty; indeed, if we went back to what we had in 1787, we’d slide into our present horror in a fraction of the time. We must learn and act on the proven truth that government is as evil as slavery or murder or rape or hate – all of which it practices.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.