The More Things Change…

How can we explain the mess—the morass—in which we find ourselves today as a society? 

One commentator on the public scene offers this answer: “The demoralization of war. A spirit of gambling adventure, engendered by false systems of public finance. A grasping centralism, absorbing all functions from the local authorities, to control the industries of individuals by largesses to favored classes from the public treasuries of moneys wrung from the body of the people by taxation…”

So this commenter, one Sam Tilden, seems to blame our malaise on the demoralization following the Iraq War; the federal guarantees backing Fannie and Freddie leading to a “gambling adventure” with mortgage-backed securities, as Wall St. functionaries played a game of heads they win, tails the taxpayers picked up the losses; the progressive destruction of Federalism—“absorbing all functions from local authority”—during the Bush and Obama years; the bailouts (“largesses to favored classes from the public treasuries”); the crushing taxes (“wrung from the body of the people.”)

And this may all be true, in which case Sam Tilden was quite prophetic, because Samuel J. Tilden was the liberal Democratic candidate for President in 1876, 134 years ago. He was speaking not of our current predicaments but of the similar corruptions of the post-Civil War Republican Grant administration and their favored business interests.

It gets worse, for Tilden, in the quoted passage, was comparing his time with what he saw as similar growth and corruption towards the conclusion of the first Adams administration at the end of the 18^th century, not two decades into the American experiment with limited government, as Hamilton and his cronies moved away from the promise of the Declaration to centralize government power in Washington. 

In Tilden’s time the Federal government spent 3% of GDP, compared to about 20% under Bush II and 24% under Obama. But small as it seems now, that represented a 2-fold (100%) growth in government compared to the antebellum years of less than two decades before. Thomas Paine had noted a century earlier that fighting wars grows government.

At the time Tilden spoke, the Democratic Party was the party of laissez-faire, limited government, and free trade. The Republican Party was the party of high tariffs, government projects for favored businesses interests, and subsidies to the politically powerful; it was a pro-business rather than pro-market party. The Democrats were the party of individual freedom while the Republicans were the party of industrial policy, the mercantilists of their day. 

To paraphrase Nixon, we’re all mercantilists now. 

The French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” the more things change the more they remain the same. The Democrats are, to say the least, no longer the party of laissez-faire, but the Bush administration was filled with special business interests. Hank Paulson, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, easily—happily—confused an impending bankruptcy of Goldman-Sachs (and the loss of his personal fortune) with societal collapse, to be averted by a taxpayer-funded bailout of his industry, “wrung from the body of the people.”

This battle between Liberty and Power is not new. It is older than the Republic, and people whose idea of a Revolution is raising the federal budget less fast than Obama are not up to the task of reversing Power’s latest advance.

What is to be done? Edwin Lawrence Godkin, a contemporary of Tilden’s and himself a liberal in the 19^th century mold, the editor of New York’s Nation, offered this advice: “The remedy is simple. The government must get out of the ‘protective’ business, and the ‘subsidy’ business, and the ‘improvement’ and ‘development’ business. It must let trade, and commerce, and manufactures…alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.” The New York Nation was a respected venue and Godkin a leading voice in his time. But today calls to merely drop the federal budget to 2008 levels are condemned as “extreme” and the idea of the government letting trade, commerce, and manufactures alone is…simply unheard of.

 The Tea Party has a long road ahead of it. As Santayana said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Expanding government’s societal take from 3% to 24% of GDP in a century and a half is extreme. Fighting to reverse the tide is just, as Paine would say, common sense.

Experience

A strange claim made the rounds just over a year ago in the run-up to the 2010 elections. Made by incumbents, the argument asserted many candidates running for the first time were “not qualified” for office. Since this argument may well resurface with Tea party supported candidates later this year, I think it worth analyzing. The question is: what qualifies a person to be a Congressman?

We already have incumbents sitting on finance committees who have no background in accounting, economics, or finance. We already have Congressmen working on committees impacting the troops or American foreign policy who have not previously studied world history, military theory, diplomacy, or even been overseas. We have Congressmen who blithely claim their actions are constitutional without benefit of a law degree or deep knowledge of Constitutional theory or history. We have members who micromanage healthcare decisions for the American public who have neither medical degrees nor published papers in the healthcare economics literature.  So where is this necessity for experience when so many of the incumbents seems personally satisfied with on-the-job training?

How much experience does one need to vote on bills without reading them, as most sitting members do? 

In 2010, throughout the country, dozens of anti-incumbent ads talked about Democratic incumbents who “vote 99% of the time with Nancy Pelosi.” How much experience is required to simply do what one is told? The same 99% figure won’t be used with regard to current House Speaker, John Boehner, since the Tea Party GOP freshmen are, for the first time in a long time, standing up even to their own party structure. Many Americans think that is a good thing, but it is likely harmed by “experience,” and certainly experience is not a pre-requisite.

Might a principled commitment to less government substitute for experience? After all, one does not need to be an expert in the automotive industry to determine the Constitution affords no grounds for the government to run it.

It was argued last cycle in Delaware we just can’t vote for someone who claims she was once a witch. Yet for years we’ve voted for incumbents who seem to think they are wizards…

The Tea Party Movement and the Original Tea Party

Originally written Fall, 2010 [before the 2010 election]

More than any other movement in the last generation, the Tea Party movement seems motivated by ideology. It seems as if a mass of individuals has spontaneously rallied to the flag of less government, of Constitutional principles, of individual liberty and autonomy. If they can accomplish what they hope to accomplish, it will be a great public good.

That last sentence is a double entendre. It is true when “public good” is read as “public benefit,” but surprisingly it is also true when “public good” is used in its standard economic sense, where “good” is meant as in “goods for sale.”

Economists use “public good” to refer to goods, like national defense, said to exhibit the properties of non-excludability and non-rivalry. A good is non-excludable when, provided to one, it must be provided to all. A good is non-rivalrous when, provided to one, it is still available to be provided to others. Such goods, economists argue, tend to be underproduced in the market. Why spend time and effort producing a public good when consumers can obtain it without paying because they can’t be excluded?

Ironically, political activity to bring about less government is itself a public good—if successful, you benefit from less government even if you didn’t work to bring it about, and less government provided to one is provided to all. Therefore, economists expect underproduction of the good “less government.” Thus, per Jefferson, does government grow and liberty recede.

Yet there are episodes in American history—the Revolutionary period and the time of the original Tea Party, for example—where ideology trumped economic reasoning…where large numbers of people committed personal risk to bring about social benefits far beyond those they could internalize…where people offered their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. And in the modern Tea Party movement this may be happening again today.

Today’s Tea Party participants have been called “extremist” by current D. C. denizens, but is this true in a broad historical context? How does today’s movement compare to the actions of those responsible for the original Tea Party?

At that time, America was a collection of English colonies, and England was the most powerful empire on the planet. Like all empires, it thrived by fighting wars and collecting taxes. Thomas Paine, in his book Rights of Man, even argued that while it might seem that the government raised taxes to fight wars, it actually fought wars in order to raise taxes!

So it was not surprising that, in the mid-18^th century, toward the end of the French and Indian War (1754-63)—England’s 4^th war against France in 70 years—a gargantuan war debt led England to demand more revenue from the American colonists. Granted, such taxes were quite modest when compared to the taxes Americans pay today. But they were extensive. The Stamp Act of 1765 mandated the purchase and use of government stamps for various goods, services, and documents. Government stamps had to be attached to court actions, wills, contracts, leases, deeds, land grants, mortgages, insurance policies, ship clearings from port, pamphlets, newspapers, dice, playing cards, advertisements. Penalties for non-compliance were severe and imposed by an admiralty court without trial by jury.

How did the colonists respond? Did they hold rallies, peacefully petitioning their governing officials for relief, as the modern Tea Partiers do? No. Their response was implacable resistance. Violent mobs burned the homes of judges and tax collectors attempting to enforce the law. Government officials were hung in effigy. The Royal Governor of Massachusetts was forced to flee the colony. England had to repeal the unenforceable Stamp Act the same year it was passed. Five years later, in 1670, it gave up collecting the equally unenforceable Townsend Duties, save, ominously, the duty on tea…

The act and duties were unenforceable because the colonists refused to pay them. No one in the current Tea Party movement is calling for mass refusal to fill out income tax forms; no one is calling for businessmen to perform a “Vivian Kellems” and refuse to collect withholding taxes. So who is being extreme?

The duty on tea, a remnant of the Townsend efforts, when combined when England’s allowing the East Indian Company to ship directly to the colonies—bypassing the English middlemen—actually led to a lowering of the price Americans paid for tea. Yet there was widespread opposition, based on concerns that if they allowed this tax, there would be no stopping future taxes. That is to say, an ideological argument. Meanwhile, the taxes today’s Tea Party members oppose expanding are an order of magnitude more than those opposed by their ideological ancestors; but no one is calling to reduce the tax burden to what King George III wanted to impose on the colonists. Who is extreme?

The reason for the original Tea Party—the illegal dumping of tea from a ship in Boston Harbor before the government made good its threat to remove the tea from the ship and forcefully collect the tax—is because the English government pressed the issue. At that period in American history, the more common way of avoiding such taxes was simple: smuggling. The American colonists were widespread scofflaws, routinely flouting taxes by simply not paying them or collecting them. Today, many in the Tea Party movement oppose growing economic regulations and confiscatory taxation, but unlike those in Peter Zenger’s time or those Americans who refused to find guilty any who worked on the Underground Railroad, smuggling black slaves to freedom in defiance of the law, no one today is urging widespread jury nullification as the solution to stifling regulation and unjust laws. Again, who are the extremists?

Today’s Tea Party movement seeks less government, but typically makes an exception for “defense,” even as America’s global empire fights two overseas wars and has garrisoned permanent troops in South Korea for 60 years. Today, the U. S. military budget constitutes about 50% of military spending for the entire planet. But even while the US spends as much on war preparation as the rest of the world combined, many in the Tea Party movement, interested in cutting the federal budget overall, still see the military budget as sacrosanct. Meanwhile, it was a common concern at the time of the original Tea Party that England wanted to impose a “standing army” on the colonists. A major justification in England for taxing the colonists was that the revenue was needed to pay for the English Redcoats sent to defend them. But the Americans of the time not only didn’t want the taxes, they didn’t want the troops, which many saw as an effort to awe and subdue them. A major reason for the 2^nd amendment, recognized in 2008 by the Supreme Court’s Heller decision as a fundamental individual right, was to have militias composed of “the people” as a means of defense rather than impose a standing army. Yet the current Tea Party movement doesn’t even want to cut the military, let alone disband it. Extremism should be made of sterner stuff.

Today, our ruling class in Washington thinks even the mere suggestion that anything passed by Congress might be unconstitutional is evidence of extremism, even if the claim comes from a graduate of Yale Law School like Joe Miller of Alaska…even if, as is increasingly the case, it comes from judges on the federal appellate bench evaluating Obamacare. When former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was questioned during the 2010 campaign about the constitutionality of Obamacare, her response was “are you kidding?” This from a woman who as a precondition of her job has sworn to support the Constitution—one might think such a pledge would involve taking claims of unconstitutionality with at least some seriousness and decorum. Yet many Americans at the time of the original Tea Party—radicals like Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson—were loath to ratify the Constitution, a document today’s Tea Partiers view as sacred writing. Many Americans at the time of the original Tea Party saw it instead as an effort to centralize power, creating a more powerful national government than allowed by the Articles of Confederation.

So on issues as diverse as veneration of the Constitution, support of the military, civil disobedience, and willingness to use force to defend one’s rights, when compared to those colonists who dumped tea in Boston Harbor, who stood up to the most powerful empire in the world, it seems clear that today’s Tea Party movement is not too extreme. To bring about the change they desire, it may not yet be extreme enough.

A Nation of Slaves...

Originally written: March, 2011

Slavery is universally abhorred in 21^st century America. But it is poorly understood. The nature, or crux, of slavery is thought by many Americans to be the cruel treatment of blacks by whites in the antebellum South. But slavery need not be cruel to exist. And there need be no racial difference between owner and slave. Certainly there was not in the case of Roman slaves, often ethnically and racially identical to their owners, enslaved as a consequence of war. Let us now investigate the result of another war, an intellectual one that spanned the 20^th century, and the slavery that resulted.

IS DEMOCRACY SLAVERY?

Four decades ago, Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, in his National Book Award winning Anarchy, State, and Utopia, created a puzzle that highlights the nature of slavery, and compares it, ominously, with democracy. Most would consider these notions polar opposite. But let’s review Nozick’s Tale of the Slave [1], retold 7 times:

1. You are a slave, one of 10,000, beaten every day by your brutal master.

2. You are a slave, one of 10,000, treated well by your master. You all work for him 100 hours a week.

3. You are one of 10,000 slaves; your master gives you SOME choices as to where and how you work, allowing you to increase your skills and focus on those things you enjoy doing. He takes your earnings, and he limits your actions to the extent necessary to preserve your value to him, preventing you from bungee jumping, for example. [This is not a mere philosophical counterfactual. It was not uncommon for a slave-holder, in Rome and in America, to allow some talented slaves to choose their line of work.]

4. Your master allows you to work outside the plantation, taking whatever job pleases you. But you have to work unless you have a good reason not to. Your master takes a percentage of the income you make at your employment. You are allowed to spend the remainder on what you wish. Your master reserves the right to change the percentage taken—to raise or lower the amount—as he sees fit in future. [This, too, is similar to arrangements made with slaves both in Roman times and during America’s slave era, when slaves could make extra money on their own by working extra jobs.]  

5. Your master allows the other 9,999 slaves—but not you—to have some say in various aspects of their lives. They vote on certain things—whether one can marry; what one may eat—and the result of these votes, applying to all, impacts on you. In a sense, you now have 10,000 masters.

6. The 10,000 masters are willing to consult with you on the decisions they make that impact your life. After consulting with you, they vote. It is never clear, looking at the results of the vote, whether or not they took consideration of your concerns.

7. The 10,000 masters record your sealed vote. If there is a 5000/5000 tie, they promise to open your vote and abide by it. That has never happened before and is never expected to happen in future.

8. The 10,000 masters throw your vote in with theirs. If there is otherwise a 5000/5000 tie, your vote will carry the day. Otherwise, the results will be much like your not having voted or being allowed to vote.

The task—the puzzle—per Nozick is to determine just when, as this story is told and re-told, it ceased to become the tale of a slave…

SLAVERY AS DEPENDENCY

It is thought—indeed, it is a commandment of 21^st century political dogma to fervently believe—that no one wishes to be enslaved. Yet psychiatrists are well aware that many people like aspects of slavery. They like the relinquishing of responsibility. They like the renunciation of accountability. They very much like the ability to avoid blame. Slaves are property. Mere property is not responsible. The avoidance of responsibility explains slavery’s weird attraction, as well as the horrors seen in the Nuremberg trials [2] and the Milgram experiments [3], two little phenomena that came to attention in the century following slavery’s attenuation.

Issues involving slavery are more nuanced and complicated than many now appreciate [4]. In 1937, as part of the New Deal, FDR initiated a Federal Writers Project. Government employees manned with tape recorders interviewed, among others, over 2,300 ex-slaves, capturing their memories for the ages before they died. These people were no doubt quite old, and presumably were slaves only in their childhood and young adulthood. But the problem was not that memories had succumbed to the passage of time. The problem was that the memories were so disturbing to modern ears. Certainly they told tales of slavery’s pain and anguish, of families broken apart, of whips and lashes. But, to the surprise of many, they also told stories like this:

“I has worked harder since de war betwixt de North and de South than I ever worked under my marster and missus.”

“Dat marster would take good care of them; give them plenty of good vittles, warm clothes, warm houses.”

Ex-slaves told of regret when freedom came: “We was free but we didn’t know what to do.”

“I was better off when I was a slave dan I is now, ‘cause I had ever’thing furnished me den. Now I have got to do it all myself.”

According to Russell, of those interviewed for the Federal Writers’ Project, a majority of the ex-slaves held positive views of slavery. Many wished to return to their slave days. Some recalled hating, even attacking, Northern soldiers who came to free them.

After slavery ended with the passage of the 13^th-15^th amendments, only 9% of slaves left their plantations immediately. Over 22% stayed and worked on the plantations, working for their former masters, for more than 5 years. It would seem to follow they felt they would be more happy there than anywhere else they could be.

Why would slaves like slavery? Economists know one aspect of this puzzle. Slaves did not have to work for their living. Food, clothing, shelter, child-care, health-care, retirement comforts were all provided. And here is the point—they were all provided at the same level independent of how hard one worked “for de marster.” So slaves quickly learned how to game the slave system, working only as hard as needed to avoid beatings or other punishment. 

And the slave-holder’s responses were limited. Although beating was a legal option, it had the downside of harming valuable property, so it was not done all that often, and not for minor violations. Furthermore, a beaten slave was an angry slave. To beat a slave and then put him in control of your valuable crop, or your child, was a risky choice. Theft and destruction of property was a common complaint among slave-holders before the Civil War, and more than one child under the care of a slave mysteriously died. 

There was also the risk of slaves running off after a beating, or for other reasons. Often they returned after days, weeks, or even months away. Although fleeing to the north, or to Canada, was difficult, sometimes they found the Underground Railroad and escaped. Escape was a large financial loss to a slave-owner. Why, though, did the slave ever voluntarily return? This in itself implies the contemporary truth of what the old ex-slaves told FDR bureaucrats decades later: “I was better off when I was a slave…”

CITIZENSHIP AS DEPENDENCY

Historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel takes a passage from a famous Lincoln quote for the title of his Civil War text: “Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War.” [5] Hummel’s thesis is that even while the Civil War succeeded in ending slavery it also ended the secular trend toward less government and planted the seeds of government growth that extend to this day. Before the Civil War, federal government spending was 1.5% of GDP. After the Civil War, it was 3%. It has never since had a sustained downward trend, and is now, under Obama, at 24%. Even this doesn’t tell the entire story, as federal and state government regulations progressively restrict how we may choose to live even while government benefits place us in a state of dependency similar to that of the slaves freed 146 years ago.

Slavery places slaves in a state of dependency. Many don’t like dependency, but many more do. And all seem to grow used to it. We have allowed, since the Civil War, and progressively so in the last century, the government to make us all dependent on it for more and more aspects of our lives. Consider some common examples:

• The US government has been providing unemployment insurance for workers for many decades. With the 2008 recession, unemployment claims skyrocketed, and the unemployment rate more than doubled to almost 10%. Though in the past very few made claims for more than 6 months, Congress jumped to extend, extend, and extend again the duration during which people could collect money for remaining unemployed. It now extends beyond 2 years. “I has worked harder since [I was free] than I ever worked under my marster and missus.”

• In the past, free people saved for their own retirement years. For the last 70 years the government has forced people to depend on DC for a monthly check for the elderly. The system is now financially bankrupt. People worry that they will not be able to survive without the government providing for them. “Dat marster would take good care of them.”
• People now expect the federal government—not local governments, not friends and family, not churches or charities—to provide food stamps for the poor, housing for those who can’t otherwise qualify, education for all. “Dat marster would … give them plenty of good vittles, warm clothes, warm houses.”
• Medicare and Medicaid are two of the federal government’s largest expenditures. Most poor and most elderly Americans do not pay for their health care. It is a bounty provided by the government, just as it was provided by the overseer and slave-owner in the past.
• A front page article in February, 2011 in the Wall St. Journal noted that more and more occupations are licensed. 23% of Americans now have to get government permission to perform their jobs. Not just surgeons and lawyers…tree surgeons, yoga instructors, hair braiders. Not just teachers, but fortune tellers. Fewer and fewer jobs can just be done. More and more, permission is required to do them, just as good slaves could work off the plantation, as long as they were given permission. Though economists find the claim risible, the government asserts this is all required for consumer safety. “Dat marster would take good care of them.”

Economists have long known—a recent Nobel Prize in economics went to economists who published on just this—that unemployment insurance tends to make people work less. Extend unemployment insurance and you ipso facto extend the duration of unemployment. People guaranteed 40 weeks pay if unemployed tend to find work around the 42^nd week. But I speak not merely of economic incentives. I speak of a growing culture that, like the slaves on Southern plantations, has learned to live with one set of rules and cannot bear to see them change, cannot believe in a better life with less dependency, cannot imagine a better future if guarantees are not attached, cannot fathom how to feed, clothe, and care for itself without the government. 

To paraphrase Nixon’s comment about Keynes, we are all slaves now…

This is today the relationship of the citizen to the State: we are told that we can’t cut entitlements, that people must have their health care and monthly government FICA checks, that unemployment insurance must be continued for multiple years, that childcare must start earlier and be made universal, that food stamps are vital, and that government-guaranteed loans are a necessity in obtaining mortgages for all who desire one. This is the dream of the slave. This is the slave’s solution to the following problem: “We was free but we didn’t know what to do.”

IMPRISONMENT AS DEPENDENCY

The United States—land of the free, home of the brave—incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than any other country on earth. More than Russia. More than Red China. More than Iran. More than North Korea. More than Saudi Arabia. Over 2 million Americans are held in a form of involuntary servitude, properly processed of course. It’s all done legally, just as slavery was once done legally. Many are there for good and justifiable reasons—murder, rape, assault. Many more are there for victimless crimes of one sort or another, as many in the former Soviet Union were imprisoned for acts against the State, for what Nozick called “capitalist acts among consenting adults.” The point of mentioning these millions of Americans is not to address the issue of the fairness or justice of their imprisonment. It is to address another way to look at the issue of slavery.

As prisoners in the United States, these men and women have their room and board provided. It is not great room and board. But it likely compares well to that provided in the antebellum South. For many prisoners, it likely also compares well to what they can get outside, on the streets.      “I was better off when I was a slave…, ‘cause I had ever’thing furnished me den.

Clothing is also provided [6]. So is health care. Again, it is not great healthcare. People often die in prison of ailments that hold much lower morbidity and mortality “on the street.” Nonetheless, prison doctors routinely treat chronic illnesses like diabetes and congestive heart failure; malignant diseases like cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma; post-traumatic problems like amputations and prosthetics. Dental care is available, as are prescription eyeglasses. As government healthcare goes, it is likely better than that found in Cuba, where antibiotics are not routinely available, or North Korea, where anesthesia often cannot be had and surgeries are done without. 

In prisons, medications are handed out daily. Anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety drugs flow like milk and honey. “Dat marster would take good care of them.”

In many US prisons, prisoners are “forced” to work. Of course, no one is beaten for not working, but privileges are lost, including “good time” reductions on their sentences. Prison Industries throughout the country make furniture—benches, desks, conference tables, chairs, name plates—for state and federal officials. The prisoners are even paid for their work, though the salaries are quite low, much like the earnings of chattel slaves were low [7]. And like the slaves of two centuries earlier, inmates quickly learn what constitutes the minimal amount of work required to get paid and not fired. Doing more leads to no more pay. So many do minimal work, inefficient work, poor quality work…just enough to pass inspection by government supervisors/overseers not overly concerned (having, as they do, a government monopoly) about issues of quality control. That is, in short, inmates act like slaves. They are slaves. And like slaves on the plantation, they learn dependency in prison. And on release they often find they preferred the good ol’ days: “We was free but we didn’t know what to do.” So they violate parole or commit another crime and end up adding to the recidivism rate. 

Some who end up in the prison system have skills allowing them to earn a good living, though if those skills are for the 23% of all jobs requiring licenses, the life-long felon status will likely make such work impossible in future. And so these people also become dependent. 

But most in the system are poor, with limited skills. This is true almost by definition; those with money and skills can usually hire lawyers good enough to keep them out of jail. For those who have limited skills and limited prospects, the prison is a second home. They know most of the guards and many of the prisoners. They are in and out, much like slaves who leave the plantation for a time but then return, often to great fanfare.

This is a bad system. But worse is modeling our society after it. Worse is setting up matters so that virtually all citizens are forced to trade restrictions on what they can do and how they can live for dependence to one degree or another on government largesse, on government favors, on government benefits. Worse is setting up matters so that virtually all citizens become to a degree enslaved.

And this is the dirty little secret of slavery that Nozick focused on but that most Americans fail to notice: it is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Like freedom, it is a matter of degree. Since it’s a matter of degree, one can become a slave without even knowing it. One can become a slave even while thinking one is still free.

SLAVERY AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

Today America is in a financial crisis. The federal debt approaches $15 trillion. Deficits are over $1 trillion per year. A WSJ op-ed by industrialist/philanthropist Charles Koch on March 1^st paints an even bleaker picture. Koch notes, correctly, that the unfunded liabilities of our entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—total over $106 trillion, an unfathomable amount. Entitlement payments make up approximately 40% of the federal budget. Tea Partiers are demanding something be done. Yet a March 3^rd WSJ poll indicates that even now the American public objects 2 to 1 to any effort to rein in entitlement spending. Even a majority of Tea Party members object to balancing the budget by modifying entitlements. The idea that it is not the role of the federal government to pay for people’s retirements or health care expenses is not even considered, let alone debated. That would be like demanding that slaves, after hoeing the field and planting the crop, take the responsibility to feed themselves as well. Clearly that is the owner’s responsibility.

Conservative pundits have noted for a generation that blacks vote as a block—more than 90%—for the Democratic Party. They refer to it, somewhat derisively, as blacks condemning themselves to the “Democratic plantation.” And there is a great degree of truth in this. But they seldom refer to corporate CEOs as trapped on the Republican plantation. Looked at through the lens of slavery, however, both parties stand condemned: both hold in thrall segments of the population who have become dependent on their largesse, be it racial preferences or government-guaranteed contracts; be it welfare increases or protection from competitors. Both parties gain the allegiance of those they hold down by offering them a pittance and convincing them that it is more than they could ever get on their own. “Dat marster would take good care of them.” 

And just as some slaves attacked Northern soldiers who came to free them, many today attack any suggestion that cutting the size and scope of government would lead to a rebirth of entrepreneurial freedom, would lead to greater opportunities, now unimagined. For the slave mentality, if it is not guaranteed, it is of no value.

The relationship of citizen to State today is similar to that of slave to owner in the 19^th century. Just as the slave was expected to work for the slaveholder, the citizen is supposed to work for the State. This is seen not merely in the fact that Tax Freedom Day—the day one finishes paying one’s taxes and begins to work for oneself—falls further in the calendar each year [8], but also in the ready acceptance, even reverence, of political slogans like President Kennedy’s inaugural statement, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” [9]

In return for his labor, the State provides the citizen with food, housing, healthcare, retirement benefits. Those who are capable can earn more than the State-provided minimum on their own, just as talented slaves could earn their own money and enjoy some luxuries. But minimums were guaranteed to the slave, as they are guaranteed to the citizen. And the slaves were grateful for what they were given, as are the citizens. 

None of this was free, of course. It was a cost to the slaveholder. In the professional economic literature, there has been a long, detailed debate as to whether the slave system, as a whole, was or was not profitable, did or did not benefit the slaveholder. [10] But the weird logic of slavery is that, whether it benefited the slaveholder or not, there was, clearly if surprisingly, at least a class of slaves who benefited. We know this, because they didn’t want to leave. Just as today many citizens don’t want to leave the guarantees provided by the State. 

The issue is not about helping the poor, any more than slavery was about helping the African. The issue is about how people are helped. Free people help one another through charity and other voluntary efforts. But the incentives of a charity are to end dependency quickly, saving charitable funds. The incentives of the welfare state are to maintain dependency indefinitely, growing one’s clientele and budget. In fostering such chronic dependency, the State acts as the slaveholder of yore. The State acts as the slaveholder of you…

The budget battle is heating up in Washington. Democrats claim it would be extreme to cut the budget back merely to what it was 3 years ago. Republicans appear bold when they ask for $100 billion in cuts in a $1.7 trillion budget, a less than 6% cut. No one calls for ending Cabinet departments, even recent ones like Homeland Security or Education or Energy, though Ronald Reagan ran on a platform of eliminating the Education and Energy departments. No one calls for cutting the budget to what it was in Reagan’s day, though some remember Reagan thought at the time that budget was too large. Certainly no one would be so outré as to call for cutting the budget to what it was prior to, say, World War I, less than a century ago, within living memory of some, a time when there were no federal income taxes, a time when our land attracted immigrants from around the world.

No one calls for such things because cutting the budget is hard in the context of our modern world. The point of this essay is to make clear just what that context is: It would be much easier to cut the budget if we were a free people…a people who took the responsibility of freedom seriously. It would be much easier to cut the budget if we weren’t slaves.

It would be easier to cut the budget if people said:

“End entitlements. You have taken money from us in order to give money back to us for far too long. Let us keep our money and we’ll take care of our elderly. Let us keep our money, and we’ll save for our retirements ourselves. 

End entitlements. Stop hamstringing doctors and patients and hospitals. Let them compete for our health-care dollars. Healthcare is too important for the government to be involved. Return our money and we’ll pay for our healthcare ourselves. Stop taxing us to death and we’ll contribute to charities for those who can’t manage these things on their own. Stop making us dependent on you. 

“We yearn for freedom, even knowing that means we may fail. The government’s job is to maintain order, not to prevent our failures. It’s not that we want to fail, but dependency costs too much. We’d rather be free. Leave us alone. 

“Free us. We’ll figure out what to do.”

For such a people, cutting the budget would be easy. But we are not such a people. Many of our ancestors were. But we are not. And we may never be. Perhaps our descendants might…

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[1] Nozick, R: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974: Basic Books), p. 290-2. The version in this paper paraphrases Nozick.

[2] Held in Nuremberg, Germany after World War II, these trials condemned Nazi leaders for following orders they knew to be wrong.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials

[3] Stanley Milgram, psychologist, found people eager and willing to be exceedingly cruel to other human beings who had done nothing to harm them if only told to do so by an authority figure. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_Experiment

[4] See Thaddeus Russell’s recent work, The Renegade History of the United States, (Free Press, 2010), esp. Chapter 2, “The Freedom of Slavery,” from which the following FWP quotes are taken. I take it as obvious that the evil of chattel slavery is in no way mitigated by the statements of some slaves that they accommodated to the institution. The reader should also appreciate that, as historians recognize, comments blacks made to white interviewers in the 1930s did not always correspond to contemporaneous understandings they had among themselves. Nonetheless, the frequency and similarity of these statements must give pause…

[5] Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, Open Court: 1996. The Lincoln quote appeared in a January 27, 1838 Lyceum address Lincoln gave in Springfield, IL. “Towering genius…thirsts and burns for distinction, and if possible it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.” It has been suggested that Lincoln’s reference to towering genius was self-referential; if so, he succeeded at the expense of both, beyond his wildest imagining.

[6] Russell notes [chapter 2] that slaves often wore fancy and distinctive garb. That they stood out. While not fancy, prison garb is also distinctive, and stands out.

[7] $0.40 to $0.90/hour is typical, with 20% taken out to cover prison costs

[8] In 2010, the date fell, depending on the state in which one lives, between June 30 and August 1

[9] At the time, not all were swayed by this oratory. Economist Milton Friedman said in response that both aspects of the statement were objectionable in a free society, while, based in part on this speech, writer Ayn Rand labeled Kennedy’s administration the “Fascist New Frontier,” but today few object to Kennedy’s rhetoric.

[10] See Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989)