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The Constitution for the
United States, Its Sources and Its Application
Senate Report 93-549 War and Emergency Powers Acts,
Executive Orders, and the New World Order
Who is Running America?
Senate Report 93-549 War and Emergency Powers Acts,
Executive Orders, and the New World Order
Who is Running America?
Our Enemy, The State
by Albert J. Nock - 1935
by Albert J. Nock - 1935
CHAPTER 4
I
AFTER conquest and confiscation have been effected, and the
State set up, its first concern is with the land. The State assumes the right
of eminent
domain over its territorial basis, whereby every
landholder becomes in theory a tenant of the State. In its capacity as ultimate
landlord, the State distributes the land among its beneficiaries on its own
terms. A point to be observed in passing is that by the State-system of
land-tenure each original transaction confers two distinct monopolies, entirely
different in their nature, inasmuch as one concerns the right to labour-made
property, and the other concerns the right to purely law-made property. The one
is a monopoly of the use-value of land; and the other, a monopoly of the
economic rent of land. The first gives the right to keep other persons from
using the land in question, or trespassing on it, and the right to exclusive
possession of values accruing from the application of labour to it; values,
that is, which are produced by exercise of the economic means upon the
particular property in question. Monopoly of economic rent, on the other hand,
gives the exclusive right to values accruing from the desire of other persons
to possess that property; values which take their rise irrespective of any
exercise of the economic means on the part of the holder.[1]
Economic rent arises when, for whatsoever reason, two or
more persons compete for the possession of a piece of land, and it increases
directly according to the number of persons competing. The whole of Manhattan
Island was bought originally by a handful of Hollanders from a handful of
Indians for twenty-four dollars' worth of trinkets. The subsequent "rise in land-values," as we
call it, was brought about by the steady influx of population and the
consequent high competition for portions of the island's surface; and these
ensuing values were monopolized by the holders. They grew to an enormous size,
and the holders profited accordingly; the Astor, Wendel, and Trinity Church
estates have always served as classical examples for study of the State-system
of land-tenure.
Bearing in mind that the State is the organization of the
political means - that its primary intention is to enable the economic
exploitation of one class by another - we see that it has always acted on the
principle already cited, that expropriation must precede exploitation. There is
no other way to make the political means effective. The first postulate of
fundamental economics is that man is a land-animal, deriving his subsistence
wholly from the land.[2] His entire
wealth is produced by the application of labour and capital to land; no form of
wealth known to man can be produced in any other way. Hence, if his free access
to land be shut off by legal predmption, he can apply his labour and capital
only with the land-holder's consent, and on the landholder's terms; in other
words, it is at this point, and this point only, that exploitation becomes
practicable.[3]
Therefore the first concern of the State must be invariably, as we find it
invariably is, with its policy of land-tenure.
I state these elementary matters as briefly as I can; the
reader may easily find a full exposition of them elsewhere.[4] I am here concerned
only to show why the State system of land-tenure came into being, and why its
maintenance is necessary to the State's existence. If this system were broken
up, obviously the reason for the State's existence would disappear, and the
State itself would disappear with it.[5] With this in
mind, it is interesting to observe that although all our public policies would
seem to be in process of exhaustive review, no publicist has anything to say
about the State system of land-tenure. This is no doubt the best evidence of
its importance.[6]
Under the feudal State there was no great amount of traffic
in land. When William, for example, set up the Norman State in England after
conquest and confiscation in 1066-76, his associate banditti, among whom he
parcelled out the confiscated territory, did nothing to speak of in the way of
developing their holdings, and did not contemplate gain from the increment of
rental-values. In fact, economic rent hardly existed; their
fellow-beneficiaries were not in the market to any great extent, and the
dispossessed population did not represent any economic demand. The feudal
rTgime was a rTgime of status, under which landed estates yielded hardly any
rental-value, and only a moderate use-value, but carried an enormous
insignia-value. Land was regarded more as a badge of nobility than as an active
asset; its possession marked a man as belonging to the exploiting class, and
the size of his holdings seems to have counted for more than the number of his
exploitable dependents.[7] The
encroachments of the merchant-State, however, brought about a change in these
circumstances. The importance of rental-values was recognized, and speculative
trading in land became general.
Hence in a study of the merchant-State as it appeared
full-blown in America, it is a point of utmost consequence to remember that
from the time of the first colonial settlement to the present day, America has
been regarded as a practically limitless field for speculation in
rental-values.[8]
One may say at a safe venture that every colonial enterpriser and proprietor
after Raleigh's time understood economic rent and the conditions necessary to
enhance it. The Swedish, Dutch and British trading-companies understood this;
Endicott and Winthrop, of the autonomous merchant-State on the Bay, understood
it; so did Penn and the Calverts; so did the Carolinian proprietors, to whom
Charles II granted a lordly belt of territory south of Virginia, reaching from
the Atlantic to the Pacific; and as we have seen, Roger Williams and Clarke
understood it perfectly. Indeed, land-speculation may be put down as the first
major industry established in colonial America. Professor Sakolski calls
attention to the fact that it was flourishing in the South before the
commercial importance of either negroes or tobacco was recognized. These two
staples came fully into their own about 1670 - tobacco perhaps a little
earlier, but not much - and before that, England and Europe had been well
covered by a lively propaganda of Southern landholders, advertising for
settlers.[9]
Mr. Sakolski makes it clear that very few original
enterprisers in American rental-values ever got much profit out of their
ventures. This is worth remarking here as enforcing the point that what gives
rise to economic rent is the presence of a population engaged in a settled
exercise of the economic means, or as we commonly put it, "working for a living" - or again, in technical terms,
applying labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth.
It was no doubt a very fine dignified thing for Carteret, Berkeley, and their
associate nobility to be the owners of a province as large as the Carolinas,
but if no population were settled there, producing wealth by exercise of the
economic means, obviously not a foot of it would bear a pennyworth of
rental-value, and the proprietors' chance of exercising the political means
would therefore be precisely nil. Proprietors who made the most profitable
exercise of the political means have been those - or rather, speaking strictly,
the heirs of those - like the Brevoorts, Wendels, Whitneys, Astors, and
Goelets, who owned land in an actual or prospective urban centre, and held it
as an investment rather than for speculation.
The lure of the political means in America, however, gave
rise to a state of mind which may profitably be examined. Under the feudal
State, living by the political means was enabled only by the accident of birth,
or in some special cases by the accident of personal favour. Persons outside
these categories of accident had no chance whatever to live otherwise than by
the economic means. No matter how much they may have wished to exercise the
political means, or how greatly they may have envied the privileged few who
could exercise it, they were unable to do so; the feudal rTgime was strictly
one of status. Under the merchant-State, on the contrary, the political means
was open to anyone, irrespective of birth or position, who had the sagacity and
determination necessary to get at it. In this respect, America appeared as a
field of unlimited opportunity. The effect of this was to produce a race of
people whose master-concern was to avail themselves of this opportunity. They
had but the one spring of action, which was the determination to abandon the
economic means as soon as they could, and at any sacrifice of conscience or
character, and live by the political means. From the beginning, this
determination has been universal, amounting to monomania.[10] We need not
concern ourselves here with the effect upon the general balance of advantage
produced by supplanting the feudal State by the merchant-State; we may observe
only that certain virtues and integrities were bred by the rTgime of status, to
which the rTgime of contract appears to be inimical, even destructive. Vestiges
of them persist among peoples who have had a long experience of the rTgime of
status, but in America, which has had no such experience, they do not appear.
What the compensations for their absence may be, or whether they may be
regarded as adequate, I repeat, need not concern us; we remark only the simple
fact that they have not struck root in the constitution of the American
character at large, and apparently can not do so.
II
It was said at the time, I believe, that the actual causes
of the colonial revolution of 1776 would never be known. The causes assigned by
our schoolbooks may be dismissed as trivial; the various partisan and
propagandist views of that struggle and its origins may be put down as
incompetent. Great evidential value may be attached to the long line of adverse
commercial legislation laid down by the British State from 1651 onward,
especially to that portion of it which was enacted after the merchant-State
established itself firmly in England in consequence of the events of 1688. This
legislation included the Navigation Acts, the Trade Acts, acts regulating the
colonial currency, the act of 1752 regulating the process of levy and distress,
and the procedures leading up to the establishment of the Board of Trade in
1696.[11]
These directly affected the industrial and commercial interests in the
colonies, though just how seriously is perhaps an open question - enough at any
rate, beyond doubt, to provoke deep resentment.
Over and above these, however, if the reader will put
himself back into the ruling passion of the time, he will at once appreciate
the import of two matters which have for some reason escaped the attention of
historians. The first of these is the attempt of the British State to limit the
exercise of the political means in respect of rental-values.[12] In 1763 it
forbade the colonists to take up lands lying westward of the source of any
river flowing through the Atlantic seaboard. The dead-line thus established ran
so as to cut off from predmption about half of Pennsylvania and half of
Virginia and everything to the west thereof. This was serious. With the mania
for speculation running as high as it did, with the consciousness of
opportunity, real or fancied, having become so acute and so general, this
ruling affected everybody. One can get some idea of its effect by imagining the
state of mind of our people at large if stock-gambling had suddenly been
outlawed at the beginning of the last great boom in Wall Street a few years
ago.
For by this time the colonists had begun to be faintly aware
of the illimitable resources of the country lying westward; they had learned
just enough about them to fire their imagination and their avarice to a white
heat. The seaboard had been pretty well taken up, the free-holding farmer had
been pushed back farther and farther, population was coming in steadily, the
maritime towns were growing. Under these conditions, "western lands" had become a centre of attraction. Rental-values
depended on population, the population was bound to expand, and the one general
direction in which it could expand was westward, where lay an immense and
incalculably rich domain waiting for predmption. What could be more natural
than that the colonists should itch to get their hands on this territory, and
exploit it for themselves alone, and on their own terms, without risk of
arbitrary interference by the British State? - and this of necessity meant
political independence. It takes no great stress of imagination to see that
anyone in those circumstances would have felt that way, and that colonial
resentment against the arbitrary limitation which the edict of 1763 put upon
the exercise of the political means must therefore have been great.
The actual state of land-speculation during the colonial
period will give a fair idea of the probabilities in the case. Most of it was
done on the company-system; a number of adventurers would unite, secure a grant
of land, survey it, and then sell it off as speedily as they could. Their aim
was a quick turnover; they did not, as a rule, contemplate holding the land,
much less settling it - in short, their ventures were a pure gamble in
rental-values.[13]
Among these pre-revolutionary enterprises was the Ohio Company, formed in 1748
with a grant of half a million acres; the Loyal Company, which like the Ohio
Company, was composed of Virginians; the Transylvania, the Vandalia, Scioto,
Indiana, Wabash, Illinois, Susquehannah, and others whose holdings were
smaller.[14]
It is interesting to observe the names of persons concerned in these
undertakings; one can not escape the significance of this connexion in view of
their attitude towards the revolution, and their subsequent career as statesmen
and patriots. For example, aside from his individual ventures, General
Washington was a member of the Ohio Company, and a prime mover in organizing
the Mississippi Company. He also conceived the scheme of the Potomac Company,
which was designed to raise the rental-value of western holdings by affording
an outlet for their produce by canal and portage to the Potomac River, and
thence to the seaboard. This enterprise determined the establishment of the
national capital in its present most ineligible situation, for the proposed
terminus of the canal was at that point. Washington picked up some lots in the
city that bears his name, but in common with other early speculators, he did
not make much money out of them; they were appraised at about $20,000 when he
died.
Patrick Henry was an inveterate and voracious engrosser of
land lying beyond the deadline set by the British State; later he was heavily
involved in the affairs of one of the notorious Yazoo companies, operating in
Georgia. He seems to have been most unscrupulous. His company's holdings in
Georgia, amounting to more than ten million acres, were to be paid for in
Georgia scrip, which was much depreciated. Henry bought up all these
certificates that he could get his hands on, at ten cents on the dollar, and
made a great profit on them by their rise in value when Hamilton put through
his measure for having the central government assume the debts they
represented. Undoubtedly it was this trait of unrestrained avarice which earned
him the dislike of Mr. Jefferson, who said, rather contemptuously, that he was "insatiable in money."[15]
Benjamin Franklin's thrifty mind turned cordially to the
project of the Vandalia Company, and he acted successfully as promoter for it
in England in 1766. Timothy Pickering, who was Secretary of State under
Washington and John Adams, went on record in 1796 that "all I am now worth was gained by speculations in land."
Silas Deane, emissary of the Continental Congress to France, was interested in
the Illinois and Wabash Companies, as was Robert Morris, who managed the
revolution's finances; as was also James Wilson, who became a justice of the
Supreme Court and a mighty man in post-revolutionary land-grabbing. Wolcott of
Connecticut, and Stiles, president of Yale College, held stock in the
Susquehannah Company; so did Peletiah Webster, Ethan Allen, and Jonathan
Trumbull, the "Brother
Jonathan," whose name was long a sobriquet for the typical American,
and is still sometimes so used. James Duane, the first mayor of New York City,
carried on some quite considerable speculative undertakings; and however
indisposed one may feel towards entertaining the fact, so did the "Father of the Revolution"
himself - Samuel Adams.
A mere common-sense view of the situation would indicate
that the British State's interference with a free exercise of the political
means was at least as great an incitement to revolution as its interference,
through the Navigation Acts, and the Trade Acts, with a free exercise of the
economic means. In the nature of things it would be a greater incitement, both
because it affected a more numerous class of persons, and because speculation
in land-values represented much easier money. Allied with this is the second
matter which seems to me deserving of notice, and which has never been properly
reckoned with, as far as I know, in studies of the period.
It would seem the most natural thing in the world for the
colonists to perceive that independence would not only give freer access to
this one mode of the political means, but that it would also open access to
other modes which the colonial status made unavailable. The merchant-State
existed in the royal provinces complete in structure, but not in function; it
did not give access to all the modes of economic exploitation. The advantages
of a State which should be wholly autonomous in this respect must have been
clear to the colonists, and must have moved them strongly towards the project
of establishing one.
Again it is purely a common-sense view of the circumstances
that leads to this conclusion. The merchant-State in England had emerged triumphant
from conflict, and the colonists had plenty of chance to see what it could do
in the way of distributing the various means of economic exploitation, and its
methods of doing it. For instance, certain English concerns were in the
carrying trade between England and America, for which other English concerns
built ships. Americans could compete in both these lines of business. If they
did so, the carrying-charges would be regulated by the terms of this
competition; if not, they would be regulated by monopoly, or, in our historic
phrase, they could be set as high as the traffic would bear. English carriers
and shipbuilders made common cause, approached the State and asked it to
intervene, which it did by forbidding the colonists to ship goods on any but
English-built and English-operated ships. Since freight-charges are a factor in
prices, the effect of this intervention was to enable British shipowners to
pocket the difference between monopoly-rates and competitive rates; to enable
them, that is, to exploit the consumer by employing the political means.[16] Similar
interventions were made at the instance of cutlers, nailmakers, hatters,
steelmakers, etc.
These interventions took the form of simple prohibition.
Another mode of intervention appeared in the customs-duties laid by the British
State on foreign sugar and molasses.[17] We all now
know pretty well, probably, that the primary reason for a tariff is that it
enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.[18] All the
reasons regularly assigned are debatable; this one is not, hence propagandists
and lobbyists never mention it. The colonists were well aware of this reason,
and the best evidence that they were aware of it is that long before the Union
was established, the merchant-enterprisers and industrialists were ready and
waiting to set upon the new-formed administration with an organized demand for
a tariff.
It is clear that while in the nature of things the British
State's interventions upon the economic means would stir up great resentment
among the interests directly concerned, they would have another effect fully as
significant, if not more so, in causing those interests to look favourably on
the idea of political independence. They could hardly have helped seeing the
positive as well as the negative advantage that would accrue from setting up a
State of their own, which they might bend to their own purposes. It takes no
great amount of imagination to reconstruct the vision that appeared before them
of a merchant-State clothed with full powers of intervention and
discrimination, a State which should first and last "help business," and which should be administered either
by mere agents or by persons easily manageable, if not by persons of actual
interests like to their own. It is hardly presumable that the colonists
generally were not intelligent enough to see this vision, or that they were not
resolute enough to risk the chance of realizing it when the time could be made
ripe; as it was, the time was ripened almost before it was ready.[19] We can
discern a distinct line of common purpose uniting the interests of the
merchant-enterpriser with those of the actual or potential speculator in
rental-values - uniting the Hancocks, Gores, Otises, with the Henrys, Lees,
Wolcotts, Trumbulls - and leading directly towards the goal of political
independence.
The main conclusion, however, towards which these
observations tend, is that one general frame of mind existed among the
colonists with reference to the nature and primary function of the State. This
frame of mind was not peculiar to them; they shared it with the beneficiaries
of the merchant-State in England, and with those of the feudal State as far
back as the State's history can be traced. Voltaire, surveying the dTbris of
the feudal State, said that in essence the State is "a device for taking money out of one set of pockets and putting
it into another." The beneficiaries of the feudal State had precisely
this view, and they bequeathed it unchanged and unmodified to the actual and
potential beneficiaries of the merchant-State. The colonists regarded the State
as primarily an instrument whereby one might help oneself and hurt others; that
is to say, first and foremost they regarded it as the organization of the
political means. No other view of the
State was ever held in colonial America. Romance and poetry were brought to
bear on the subject in the customary way; glamorous myths about it were
propagated with the customary intent; but when all came to all, nowhere in
colonial America were actual practical relations with the State ever determined
by any other view than this.[20]
III
The charter of the American revolution was the Declaration of Independence,
which took its stand on the double thesis of "unalienable" natural rights and popular sovereignty. We
have seen that these doctrines were theoretically, or as politicians say, "in principle," congenial to
the spirit of the English merchant-enterpriser, and we may see that in the
nature of things they would be even more agreeable to the spirit of all classes
in American society. A thin and scattered population with a whole wide world
before it, with a vast territory full of rich resources which anyone might take
a hand at predmpting and exploiting, would be strongly on the side of natural
rights, as the colonists were from the beginning; and political independence
would confirm it in that position. These circumstances would stiffen the
American merchant-enterpriser, agrarian, forestaller and industrialist alike in
a jealous, uncompromising, and assertive economic individualism.
So also with the sister doctrine of popular sovereignty. The
colonists had been through a long and vexatious experience of State
interventions which limited their use of both the political and economic means.
They had also been given plenty of opportunity to see how these interventions
had been managed, and how the interested English economic groups which did the
managing had profited at their expense. Hence there was no place in their minds
for any political theory that disallowed the right of individual self-expression
in politics. As their situation tended to make them natural-born economic
individualists, so also it tended to make them natural-born republicans.
Thus the preamble of the Declaration hit the mark of a
cordial unanimity. Its two leading doctrines could easily be interpreted as
justifying an unlimited economic pseudo-individualism on the part of the
State's beneficiaries, and a judiciously managed exercise of political
self-expression by the electorate. Whether or not this were a more
free-and-easy interpretation than a strict construction of the doctrines will
bear, no doubt it was in effect the interpretation quite commonly put upon
them. American history abounds in instances where great principles have, in
their common understanding and practical application, been narrowed down to the
service of very paltry ends. The preamble, nevertheless, did reflect a general
state of mind. However incompetent the understanding of its doctrines may have
been, and however interested the motives which prompted that understanding, the
general spirit of the people was in their favour.
There was complete unanimity also regarding the nature of
the new and independent political institution which the Declaration
contemplated as within "the right
of the people" to set up. There was a great and memorable dissension
about its form, but none about its nature. It should be in essence the mere
continuator of the merchant-State already existing. There was no idea of
setting up government, the purely
social institution which should have no other object than, as the Declaration
put it, to secure the natural rights of the individual; or as Paine put it,
which should contemplate nothing beyond the maintenance of freedom and security
- the institution which should make no positive interventions of any kind upon
the individual, but should confine itself exclusively to such negative
interventions as the maintenance of freedom and security might indicate. The
idea was to perpetuate an institution of another character entirely, the State, the organization of the political
means; and this was accordingly done.
There is no disparagement implied in this observation; for,
all questions of motive aside, nothing else was to be expected. No one knew any
other kind of political organization. The causes of American complaint were
conceived of as due only to interested and culpable mal-administration, not to
the essentially anti-social nature of the institution administered.
Dissatisfaction was directed against administrators, not against the institution
itself. Violent dislike of the form
of the institution - the monarchical form - was engendered, but no distrust or
suspicion of its nature. The character of the State had never been subjected to
scrutiny; the coöperation of the Zeitgeist
was needed for that, and it was not yet to be had.[21] One may see
here a parallel with the revolutionary movements against the Church in the
sixteenth century - and indeed with revolutionary movements in general. They
are incited by abuses and misfeasances, more or less specific and always
secondary, and are carried on with no idea beyond getting them rectified or
avenged, usually by the sacrifice of conspicuous scapegoats. The philosophy of
the institution that gives play to these misfeasances is never examined, and
hence they recur promptly under another form or other auspices,[22] or else
their place is taken by others which are in character precisely like them. Thus
the notorious failure of reforming and revolutionary movements in the long-run
may as a rule be found due to their incorrigible superficiality.
One mind, indeed, came within reaching distance of the
fundamentals of the matter, not by employing the historical method, but by a
homespun kind of reasoning, aided by a sound and sensitive instinct. The common
view of Mr. Jefferson as a doctrinaire believer in the stark principle of "states rights" is most
incompetent and misleading. He believed in states' rights, assuredly, but he
went much farther; states' rights were only an incident in his general system
of political organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit, the
repository and source of political authority and initiative, should be the
smallest unit; not the federal unit, state unit or county unit, but the
township, or, as he called it, the "ward."
The township, and the township only, should determine the delegation of power
upwards to the county, the state, and the federal units. His system of extreme
decentralization is interesting and perhaps worth a moment's examination,
because if the idea of the State
is ever displaced by the idea of government,
it seems probable that the practical expression of this idea would come out
very nearly in that form.[23] There is
probably no need to say that the consideration of such a displacement involves
a long look ahead, and over a field of view that is cluttered with the dTbris
of a most discouraging number, not of nations alone, but of whole
civilizations. Nevertheless it is interesting to remind ourselves that more
than a hundred and fifty years ago, one American succeeded in getting below the
surface of things, and that he probably to some degree anticipated the judgment
of an immeasurably distant future.
In February, 1816, Mr. Jefferson wrote a letter to Joseph C.
Cabell, in which he expounded the philosophy behind his system of political
organization. What is it, he asks, that has "destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which
has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares
and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or
France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate." The secret of
freedom will be found in the individual "making
himself the depository of the powers respecting himself, so far as he is
competent to them, and delegating only what is beyond his competence, by a
synthetical process, to higher and higher orders of functionaries, so as to
trust fewer and fewer powers in proportion as the trustees become more and more
oligarchical." This idea rests on accurate observation, for we are all
aware that not only the wisdom of the ordinary man, but also his interest and
sentiment, have a very short radius of operation; they can not be stretched
over an area of much more than township-size; and it is the acme of absurdity
to suppose that any man or any body of men can arbitrarily exercise their
wisdom, interest and sentiment over a state-wide or nation-wide area with any
kind of success. Therefore the principle must hold that the larger the area of
exercise, the fewer and more clearly defined should be the functions exercised.
Moreover, "by placing under
everyone what his own eye may superintend," there is erected the
surest safeguard against usurpation of function. "Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his
ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a
participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in
the year, but every day; . . . he will let the heart be torn out of his body
sooner than his power wrested from him by a Cæsar or a Bonaparte."
No such idea of popular sovereignty, however, appeared in
the political organization that was set up in 1789 - far from it. In devising
their structure, the American architects followed certain specifications laid
down by Harington, Locke and Adam Smith, which might be regarded as a sort of
official digest of politics under the merchant-State; indeed, if one wished to
be perhaps a little inurbane in describing them - though not actually unjust -
one might say that they are the merchant-State's defence-mechanism.[24] Harington
laid down the all-important principle that the basis of politics is economic -
that power follows property. Since he was arguing against the feudal concept,
he laid stress specifically upon landed property. He was of course too early to
perceive the bearings of the State-system of land-tenure upon industrial
exploitation, and neither he nor Locke perceived any natural distinction to be
drawn between law-made property and labour-made property; nor yet did Smith
perceive this clearly, though he seems to have had occasional indistinct
glimpses of it. According to Harington's theory of economic determinism, the
realization of popular sovereignty is a simple matter. Since political power
proceeds from land-ownership, a simple diffusion of land-ownership is all that
is needed to insure a satisfactory distribution of power.[25] If everybody
owns, then everybody rules. "If the
people hold three parts in four of the territory," Harington says, "it is plain there can neither be any
single person nor nobility able to dispute the government with them. In this
case therefore, except force be interposed, they govern themselves."
Locke, writing a half-century later, when the revolution of
1688 was over, concerned himself more particularly with the State's positive
confiscatory interventions upon other modes of property-ownership. These had
long been frequent and vexatious, and under the Stuarts they had amounted to
unconscionable highwaymanry. Locke's idea therefore was to copper-rivet such a
doctrine of the sacredness of property as would forever put a stop to this sort
of thing. Hence he laid it down that the first business of the State is to
maintain the absolute inviolability of general property-rights; the State
itself might not violate them, because in so doing it would act against its own
primary function. Thus in Locke's view, the rights of property took precedence
even over those of life and liberty; and if ever it came to the pinch, the
State must make its choice accordingly.[26]
Thus while the American architects assented "in principle" to the
philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty, and found it in a general
way highly congenial as a sort of voucher for their self-esteem, their
practical interpretation of it left it pretty well hamstrung. They were not
especially concerned with consistency; their practical interest in this
philosophy stopped short at the point which we have already noted, of its
presumptive justification of a ruthless economic pseudo-individualism, and an
exercise of political self-expression by the general electorate which should be
so managed as to be, in all essential respects, futile. In this they took
precise pattern by the English Whig exponents and practitioners of this
philosophy. Locke himself, whom we have seen putting the natural rights of
property so high above those of life and liberty, was equally discriminating in
his view of popular sovereignty. He was no believer in what he called "a numerous democracy," and
did not contemplate a political organization that should countenance anything
of the kind.[27]
The sort of organization he had in mind is reflected in the extraordinary
constitution he devised for the royal province of Carolina, which established a
basic order of politically inarticulate serfdom. Such an organization as this
represented about the best, in a practical way, that the British merchant-State
was ever able to do for the doctrine of popular sovereignty.
It was also about the best that the American counterpart of
the British merchant-State could do. The sum of the matter is that while the
philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty afforded a set of
principles upon which all interests could unite, and practically all did unite,
with the aim of securing political independence, it did not afford a
satisfactory set of principles on which to found the new American State. When
political independence was secured, the stark doctrine of the Declaration went
into abeyance, with only a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving.
The rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional
formality left open to eviscerating interpretations, or, where these were for
any reason deemed superfluous, to simple executive disregard; and all
consideration of the rights attending "the
pursuit of happiness" was narrowed down to a plenary acceptance of
Locke's doctrine of the predminent rights of property, with law-made property
on an equal footing with labour-made property. As for popular sovereignty, the
new State had to be republican in form, for no other would suit the general
temper of the people; and hence its peculiar task was to preserve the
appearance of actual republicanism without the reality. To do this, it took
over the apparatus which we have seen the English merchant-State adopting when
confronted with a like task - the apparatus of a representative or
parliamentary system. Moreover, it improved upon the British model of this
apparatus by adding three auxiliary devices which time has proved most effective.
These were, first, the device of the fixed term, which regulates the
administration of our system by astronomical rather than political
considerations - by the motion of the earth around the sun rather than by
political exigency; second, the device of judicial review and interpretation,
which, as we have already observed, is a process whereby anything may be made
to mean anything; third, the device of requiring legislators to reside in the
district they represent, which puts the highest conceivable premium upon
pliancy and venality, and is therefore the best mechanism for rapidly building
up an immense body of patronage. It may be perceived at once that all these
devices tend of themselves to work smoothly and harmoniously towards a great
centralization of State power, and that their working in this direction may be
indefinitely accelerated with the utmost economy of effort.
As well as one can put a date to such an event, the
surrender at Yorktown marks the sudden and complete disappearance of the
Declaration's doctrine from the political consciousness of America. Mr.
Jefferson resided in Paris as minister to France from 1784 to 1789. As the time
for his return to America drew near, he wrote Colonel Humphreys that he hoped
soon "to possess myself anew, by
conversation with my countrymen, of their spirit and ideas. I know only the
Americans of the year 1784. They tell me this is to be much a stranger to those
of 1789." So indeed he found it. On arriving in New York and resuming
his place in the social life of the country, he was greatly depressed by the
discovery that the principles of the Declaration had gone wholly by the board.
No one spoke of natural rights and popular sovereignty; it would seem actually
that no one had ever heard of them. On the contrary, everyone was talking about
the pressing need of a strong central coercive authority, able to check the
incursions which "the democratic
spirit" was likely to incite upon "the
men of principle and property."[28] Mr.
Jefferson wrote despondently of the contrast of all this with the sort of thing
he had been hearing in the France which he had just left "in the first year of her revolution, in the fervour of natural
rights and zeal for reformation." In the process of possessing himself
anew of the spirit and ideas of his countrymen, he said, "I can not describe the wonder and mortification with which the
table-conversations filled me." Clearly, though the Declaration might
have been the charter of American independence, it was in no sense the charter of
the new American State.
Chapter 4
Footnotes https://www.blogger.com/null
[1] The economic rent of the Trinity Church estate in New York
City, for instance, would be as high as it is now, even if the holders had
never done a stroke of work on the property. Landowners who are holding a
property "for a rise"
usually leave it idle, or improve it only to the extent necessary to clear its
taxes; the type of building commonly called a "taxpayer" is a familiar sight everywhere. Twenty-five
years ago a member of the New York City Tax Commission told me that by careful
estimate there was almost enough vacant land within the city limits to feed the
population, assuming that all of it were arable and put under intensive
cultivation! https://www.blogger.com/null
[2] As a technical term in economics, land includes all natural
resources, earth, air, water, sunshine, timber and minerals in
situ, etc. Failure to understand this use of the term has seriously
misled some writers, notably Count Tolstoy. https://www.blogger.com/null
[3] Hence there is actually no such thing as a "labour-problem," for no
encroachment on the rights of either labour or capital can possibly take place
until all natural resources within reach have been predmpted. What we call the "problem of the unemployed"
is in no sense a problem, but a direct consequence of State-created monopoly. https://www.blogger.com/null
[4] For fairly obvious reasons they have no place in the
conventional courses that are followed in our schools and colleges. https://www.blogger.com/null
[5] The French school of physiocrats, led by Quesnay, du
Pont de Nemours, Turg(t, Gournay and le Trosne - usually regarded as the
founders of the science of political economy - broached the idea of destroying
this system by the confiscation of economic rent; and this idea was worked out
in detail some years ago in America by Henry George. None of these writers,
however, seemed to be aware of the effect that their plan would produce upon
the State itself. Collectivism, on the other hand, proposes immeasurably to
strengthen and entrench the State by confiscation of the use-value as well as
the rental-value of land, doing away with private proprietorship in either. https://www.blogger.com/null
[6] If one were not aware of the highly explosive character
of this subject, it would be almost incredible that until three years ago, no
one has ever presumed to write a history of land-speculation in America. In 1932,
the firm of Harpers published an excellent work by Professor Sakolski, under
the frivolous catch-penny title of The Great American Land Bubble. I do
not believe that anyone can have a competent understanding of our history or of
the character of our people, without hard study of this book. It does not
pretend to be more than a preliminary approach to the subject, a sort of
path-breaker for the exhaustive treatise which someone, preferably Professor
Sakolski himself, should be undertaking; but for what it is, nothing could be
better. I am making liberal use of it throughout this section. https://www.blogger.com/null
[7] Regard for this insignia-value or token-value of land
has shown an interesting persistence. The rise of the merchant-State,
supplanting the rTgime of status by the rTgime of contract, opened the way for
men of all sorts and conditions to climb into the exploiting class; and the new
recruits have usually shown a hankering for the old distinguishing sign of
their having done so, even though the rise in rental-values has made the
gratification of this desire progressively costly. https://www.blogger.com/null
[8] If our geographical development had been determined in a
natural way, by the demands of use instead of the demands of speculation, our
western frontier would not yet be anywhere near the Mississippi River. Rhode
Island is the most thickly-populated member of the Union, yet one may drive
from one end of it to the other on one of its "through" highways, and see hardly a sign of human
occupancy. All discussions of "over-population"
from Malthus down, are based on the premise of legal occupancy instead of
actual occupancy, and are therefore utterly incompetent and worthless.
Oppenheimer's calculation made in 1912, to which I have already referred, shows
that if legal occupation were abolished, every family of five persons could
possess nearly twenty acres of land, and still leave about two-thirds of the
planet unoccupied. Henry George's examination of Malthus's theory of population
is well known, or at least, easily available. It is perhaps worth mention in
passing that exaggerated rental-values are responsible for the perennial
troubles of the American single-crop farmer. Curiously, one finds this fact set
forth in the report of a farm-survey, published by the Department of
Agriculture about fifty years ago. https://www.blogger.com/null
[9] Mr. Chinard, professor in the Faculty of Literature at
Johns Hopkins, has lately published a translation of a little book, hardly more
than a pamphlet, written in 1686 by the Huguenot refugee Durand, giving a
description of Virginia for the information of his fellow-exiles. It strikes a
modern reader as being very favourable to Virginia, and one is amused to read
that the landholders who had entertained Durand with an eye to business,
thought he had not laid it on half thick enough, and were much disgusted. The
book is delightfully interesting, and well worth owning. https://www.blogger.com/null
[10] It was the ground of Chevalier's observation that
Americans had "the morale of an
army on the march," and of his equally notable observations on the
supreme rule of expediency in America. https://www.blogger.com/null
[11] For a most admirable discussion of these measures and
their consequences, cf. Beard, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 191-220. https://www.blogger.com/null
[12] In principle, this had been done before; for example,
some of the early royal land-grants reserved mineral-rights and timber-rights
to the Crown. The Dutch State reserved the right to furs and pelts. Actually,
however, these restrictions did not amount to much, and were not felt as a
general grievance, for these resources had been but little explored. https://www.blogger.com/null
[13] There were a few exceptions, but not many; notably in
the case of the Wadsworth properties in Western New York, which were held as an
investment and leased out on a rental-basis. In one, at least, of General
Washington's operations, it appears that he also had this method in view. In
1773 he published an advertisement in a Baltimore newspaper, stating that he
had secured a grant of about twenty thousand acres on the Ohio and Kanawha
rivers, which he proposed to open to settlers on a rental-basis. https://www.blogger.com/null
[14] Sakolski, op. cit., ch. 1. https://www.blogger.com/null
[15] It is an odd fact that among the most eminent names of
the period, almost the only ones unconnected with land-grabbing or
land-jobbing, are those of the two great antagonists, Thomas Jefferson and
Alexander Hamilton. Mr. Jefferson had a gentleman's distaste for profiting by
any form of the political means; he never even went so far as to patent one of
his many useful inventions. Hamilton seems to have cared nothing for money. His
measures made many rich, but he never sought anything from them for himself. In
general, he appears to have had few scruples, yet amidst the riot of greed and
rascality which he did most to promote, he walked worthily. Even his
professional fees as a lawyer were absurdly small, and he remained quite poor
all his life. https://www.blogger.com/null
[16] Raw colonial exports were processed in England, and
re-dxported to the colonies at prices enhanced in this way, thus making the
political means effective on the colonists both going and coming. https://www.blogger.com/null
[17] Beard, op. cit., vol. I, p. 195, cites the
observation current in England at the time, that seventy-three members of the
Parliament that imposed this tariff were interested in West Indian
sugar-plantations. https://www.blogger.com/null
[18] It must be observed, however, that free trade is
impracticable so long as land is kept out of free competition with industry in
the labour-market. Discussions of the rival policies of free trade and
protection invariably leave this limitation out of account, and are therefore
nugatory. Holland and England, commonly spoken of as free-trade countries, were
never really such; they had only so much freedom of trade as was consistent
with their special economic requirements. American free-traders of the last
century, such as Sumner and Godkin, were not really free-traders; they were
never able - or willing - to entertain the crucial question why, if free trade
is a good thing, the conditions of labour were no better in free-trade England
than, for instance, in protectionist Germany, but were in fact worse. The
answer is, of course, that England had no unpredmpted land to absorb displaced
labour, or to stand in continuous competition with industry for labour. https://www.blogger.com/null
[19] The immense amount of labour involved in getting the
revolution going, and keeping it going, is not as yet exactly a commonplace of
American history, but it has begun to be pretty well understood, and the
various myths about it have been exploded by the researches of disinterested
historians. https://www.blogger.com/null
[20] The influence of this view upon the rise of nationalism
and the maintenance of the national spirit in the modern world, now that the
merchant-State has so generally superseded the feudal State, may be perceived
at once. I do not think it has ever been thoroughly discussed, or that the
sentiment of patriotism has ever been thoroughly examined for traces of this
view, though one might suppose that such a work would be extremely useful. https://www.blogger.com/null
[21] Even now its coöperation seems not to have got very far
in English and American professional circles. The latest English exponent of
the State, Professor Laski, draws the same set of elaborate distinctions
between the State and officialdom that one would look for if he had been
writing a hundred and fifty years ago. He appears to regard the State as
essentially a social institution, though his observations on this point are by
no means clear. Since his conclusions tend towards collectivism, however, the
inference seems admissible. https://www.blogger.com/null
[22] As, for example, when one political party is turned out
of office, and another put in. https://www.blogger.com/null
[23] In fact, the only modification of it that one can
foresee as necessary is that the smallest unit should reserve the taxing-power
strictly to itself. The larger units should have no power whatever of direct or
indirect taxation, but should present their requirements to the townships, to
be met by quota. This would tend to reduce the organizations of the larger
units to skeleton form, and would operate strongly against their assuming any
functions but those assigned them, which under a strictly governmental rTgime
would be very few - for the federal unit, indeed, extremely few. It is
interesting to imagine the suppression of every bureaucratic activity in
Washington today that has to do with the maintenance and administration of the
political means, and see how little would be left. If the State were superseded by government, probably
every federal activity could be housed in the Senate Office Building - quite
possibly with room to spare. https://www.blogger.com/null
[24] Harington published the Oceana in 1656. Locke's
political treatises were published in 1690. Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776. https://www.blogger.com/null
[25] This theory, with its corollary that democracy is
primarily an economic rather than a political status, is extremely modern. The
Physiocrats in France, and Henry George in America, modified Harington's
practical proposals by showing that the same results could be obtained by the
more convenient method of a local confiscation of economic rent. https://www.blogger.com/null
[26] Locke held that in time of war it was competent for the
State to conscript the lives and liberties of its subjects, but not their property.
It is interesting to remark the persistence of this view in the practice of the
merchant-State at the present time. In the last great collision of competing
interests among merchant-States, twenty years ago, the State everywhere
intervened at wholesale upon the rights of life and liberty, but was very
circumspect towards the rights of property. Since the principle of absolutism
was introduced into our constitution by the income-tax amendment, several
attempts have been made to reduce the rights of property, in time of war, to an
approximately equal footing with those of life and liberty; but so far, without
success. https://www.blogger.com/null
[27] It is worth going through the literature of the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century to see how the words "democracy" and "democrat" appear exclusively
as terms of contumely and reprehension. They served this purpose for a long
time both in England and America, much as the terms "bolshevism" and "bolshevist"
serve us now. They were subsequently taken over to become what Bentham called "impostor-terms," in behalf
of the existing economic and political order, as synonymous with a purely
nominal republicanism. They are now used regularly in this way to describe the
political system of the United States, even by persons who should know better -
even, curiously, by persons like Bertrand Russell and Mr. Laski, who have
little sympathy with the existing order. One sometimes wonders how our
revolutionary forefathers would take it if they could hear some flatulent political thimblerigger
charge them with having founded "the
great and glorious democracy of the West." https://www.blogger.com/null
[28] This curious collocation of attributes belongs to
General Henry Knox, Washington's secretary of war, and a busy speculator in
land-values. He used it in a letter to Washington, on the occasion of Shays's
Rebellion in 1786, in which he made an agonized plea for a strong federal army.
In the literature of the period, it is interesting to observe how regularly a moral superiority is associated with
the possession of property.
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