Abraham Lincoln, one of the messiahs and saints of U.S. politics, purged the idea of secession as a noble and acceptable thing. Why celebrate Independence Day then, given that it is a holiday that commemorates (or is meant to commemorate) an act of secession? Moreover, and more importantly, why celebrate a holiday of independence if today there is no genuine independence from a massive federal government? A federal government that is many times over the size of King George III's. And one that is much more oppressive and intrusive in our lives-----not to mention the lives of men outside America. A government that is nothing but a caldron in its relationship to liberty and independence. A government-empire that is the world's largest in history. That's independence? . . . That's liberty?
In October I typed a Paleo Blog post asking: "Does Freedom Come From The State?" My answer was that it does not. Those that believe so, or believe that freedom is a positivistic thing, only invite tyranny and have no rational means to stop the development of tyranny. This is why the Declaration spoke of men having "unalienable Rights." Government does not create the idea or meaning of justice. Government, says the Declaration, gets its "foundation on such principles" and organizes "its powers in such form."
No doubt our view of government has come a very long way from how some of our ancestors viewed this institution.
Butler Shaffer, in a new essay, notes one irony about the Fourth of July in today's day and age:
Just how far we have contorted our thinking about "independence day" is reflected in most people's thinking about fireworks. Like private gun-ownership, our personal use of fireworks represents too much power in the hands of individuals. And so, we confine ourselves to the absurdity of having the state celebrate our liberty and independence for us!
In this 2001 essay, Thomas DiLorenzo requests that we put Independence Day in perspective; to take a look at the "train of abuses" from the King.
Frank Chodorov, one of the "Old Right" who enjoyed the fun of saying that no one was to the right of him, in One is a Crowd wrote that if "the disposition of the current crop of Americans [was] comparable to that of their forebears" a new revolution would be happening. Patricide, it could be argued, has occurred.
In the mind of Chodorov, the death of freedom resulted from the Sixteenth Amendment. Government then went from being the servant of man to being the master. The income tax brought about the centralization of power, opened the door to numerous abuses, and fed the growth of the government's increasing interventions into civil society. It denied the only real human right there is, i.e., private property:
The government says to the citizen: "Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim to them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide."
This is no exaggeration. Take a look at the income-tax report that you are required by law to make out, and you will see that the government arbitrarily sets down the amount of your income you may have for your living, for your business requirements, for the maintenance of your family, for medical expenses, and so on. After granting these exemptions, with a flourish of generosity, the government decides what percentage of the remainder it will appropriate. The rest you may have.
Although, this transformation from the more-or-less limited government to the Leviathan we have today was, I have come to believe, a natural and unavoidable event. This is because once man accepts the existence of a government, its incentive structure, which cannot be gotten rid of, will only lead to an expansionist trend. Not even "divided" government or a constitution can stop this.
"[I]t is the conservative laissez-fairist," as Murray Rothbard wrote in For a New Liberty, "the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, 'Limit yourself'; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian."
Furthermore, the very nature of government has nothing whatsoever to do with freedom or security. Bringing security and protection is a contradiction since it first violates the very thing it is claimed to do. In the name of "protection," the State first must resort to robbery (a.k.a. taxation). (And who is there to protect us from our "protectors"?)
Hans Hoppe in "On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution" (be sure to read his footnotes) sets forth an analysis that concludes that the death of freedom had its commencement before the Sixteenth Amendment. Creating the institution of government (local and federal), Hoppe says, was the mistake. The government, being an aggressive organization, can't bring freedom or "limit" itself in size. Consequently there needs to be a movement that promotes secession and the development of a free, voluntary market in the service of protection and adjudication.
America, Hoppe writes, has every right to be proud of itself as a country of pioneers. As well we should be proud of the American Revolution. The later adoption of the Constitution*, on the other hand, was a fatal blunder and something we should not be proud about.
*(Many times it is asserted that Fourth of July is a day that celebrates the birth of a nation-state. That the original day was a day that created a nation-state. Nothing of the sort happened, though. The Declaration does not speak of any nation-state. It only speaks of "Free and Independent States," which were individually sovereign. Nor was the Constitution any part of it.).
Think about the idea of limited government this way: Government "limiting" itself is as nonsensical as a business "limiting" itself in its desire to make profit. Both have a desire and incentive to expand. The way they expand, though, is fundamentally different.
You find competition in a free market among countless private businesses. Each business is in competition with all other businesses (if they are in the same industry or not) over consumers and resources (including labor). An individual private enterprise must be pioneering to please the demands of consumers; otherwise these consumers may voluntarily go to one of their competitors who they view as offering a superior good or service in terms of quality and/or price. They thus must thrive at improving quality, in terms of consumer demand, and at lowering costs.* Expansion is hence dependent on these things. This forces, via the "invisible hand," men to work together and to work in the production of things with other people in mind. (So much for capitalism, as some dullards claim, being selfish, nasty, egotistic, etc.! As will be seen below, these words more correctly describe statists.)
*(Compare this to socialized industries. Health care, despite what so many incessantly claim, is in the U.S. an example of fascism and socialism. It is no surprise that we see, because of this, high prices and inefficiency.)
The government is completely different. It is a monopolist and has no direct competition. It does not need to please its so-called "customers" because the relationship between men and the government is not based on voluntarism, like the free market, but the threat of violence. Everyone is uniformly forced into a relationship with the government and its activities. Whereas markets offer choices, states offer forced choices that are uniform. Government's growth is hence not dependent on voluntary individual consumers or their various and complex demands.
Remember, a businessman can only expand in the long-run if he is cost-efficient. He must economize his scarce resources to do this. Debt must be limited. And there is always the possibility of bankruptcy and being driven off the market. Conversely, government does not expand because it is necessarily cost-efficient with little to no debt. In fact it does not matter if government is ballooning with astronomical debt and is completely un-economic! It cannot (directly or immediately in a meaningful sense) go out of business. Growth is hence not dependent on lowering costs to its "customers" or acting in a cost-efficient way. Improving the quality of its goods or services (e.g., adjudication) is not a requisite, either.
When a businessman fails he then suffers a loss and perhaps disappears. He has the guide of profit-and-loss. This promotes correct allocations. However, when the government fails nothing directly happens. There is nothing that helps divert resources into productive uses. So allocations of the government, with no pricing signals, will always have to be arbitrary and wasteful.
This makes the growth of government, which is a restrictor and parasite of liberty, and the growth of a free market enterprise, which is an expression of free man and groups of men voluntarily working together for mutual ends, inversely related. They are antithetical to each other. The growth of a business is a "good," in terms of consumer demand and their interests, but government's growth can only be seen, given the above deductions, as a "bad." Because both have the incentive and interest to expand, starting up a government will set into motion the increasing parasitic allocation of resources, away from civil society and free market enterprises, into "bad" consumptions and (redistributive-parasitic) productions.
It is then no wonder that government is like what it is like today. Man must not see this as an anomaly but see the government itself as the anomaly in society. If there is to be freedom, then there must be a (peaceful) revolution against the state. While, as Dr. Hoppe argues in the above essay, this might not be conceivable on a national level, it is relatively more conceivable seeing local states, districts, cities, and towns peacefully seceding. Even if this act of secession did not lead to areas with no government, this still is a tremendous improvement over the current affairs and a movement that would be working towards (not away) the direction of an anarcho-capitalist society.
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