FrankChodorov – ILANA MERCER

GOP Sticks With Karl (Marx)

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

To get a Democrat to admit to practicing socialism is a lot like frisking a wet seal.

To get Republicans to confess to their role in socializing America is an equally slippery affair.

The latter have been grandstanding about the plan of the wily pitch-man Obama to plunder taxpayers (the minority) so as to pay tax consumers (the majority). For the edification of GOP grandstanders, America has a tax system that energetically distributes income.

The progressive income tax is a good example of Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It is socialism by any other name.

Obama is an adherent of this socialism; as is McCain. And so is George Bush, who, as a campaign ploy, had promised to reform America’s steep tax system, but decided to stick with Karl.

Indeed, America, the cradle of capitalism, clings to Karl. Russia, the cradle of communism, has abandoned him in favor of a flat—and very low—tax on income.

Strictly speaking, socialism implies state ownership of the means of economic production. But as McClatchy’s David Lightman and William Douglas point out, “state-directed sharing of the wealth” is also part of the socialist scheme. A scheme both Republicans and Democrats have overseen energetically and with matching commitment.

The American economic system is a mixture of free-market capitalism and socialism, with dollops of fascism added for good measure. “Fascism,” wrote the Tannehills in “The Market for Liberty,” “is a system in which the government leaves nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals but exercises control by means of regulatory legislation and reaps most of the profit by means of heavy taxation.”

The gargantuan, government give-away to the financial sector combined elements of fascism and socialism. However you define the Bush bailout—it was bad. Bad and bipartisan.

A great deal of this boils down to deceptive semantics—and a society that has accepted the attendant, underlying, socialistic precepts.

“Progressive” has a forward-looking ring. Yet there is nothing “progressive” about inequality under the law, which is what “progressive taxation” amounts to. In as much as it advocates taking from some Americans more than from others, a progressive tax translate into inequality under the law.

Just because politicians call this political piracy “fairness,” or “social justice,” does not make it so. Progressive taxation is not remotely fair. Nor does such social leveling approach, even tangentially, the original idea of America, which is that all be accorded equal justice under the law.

It’s not for the state to act as socialist leveler.

Consider: In a free enterprise system, people don’t pay for goods and services in proportion to their income (or else Bill Gates would be paying a million dollars for a loaf of bread). Rather, they all pay the same. By logical extension, the fairest method of taxation would be a poll or head tax, where we’re all taxed equally. Let the poor set the amount. More than the McCain-Palin promises, this would limit government spending like nothing else.

This is not to say that coercive taxes on income are fair, flat or graded. To borrow from a great American, Frank Chodorov, McCain and Obama’s glib talk about property not their own amounts to the following declaration:

“Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on 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 both socialism and serfdom—the blight of which GOPers could have lessened during their interminable tenure, but didn’t. If anything, America has slouched toward socialism under Republicans. Perhaps not as far as direct taxation goes, but certainly in as much as borrowing and printing money is concerned. For this is how wastrel “W” has funded his orgiastic spending.

Borrowing and counterfeiting cash is taxation by stealth and subterfuge. These, arguably, are more destructive than direct taxation because more clandestine. Americans don’t seem to comprehend that there is no free lunch—that unlimited spending comes at a price. Be it creditors that must be paid or a money supply that is inflated—the net effect is every bit as bad as increasing taxes on income, if not worse.

Taxation hits the pocketbook directly; government’s borrowing and counterfeiting does so indirectly—it devalues Joe the Plumber’s labor, assets, purchasing power, and savings. Unaware of how he’s being ground down, Generic Joe keeps on consuming until he crashes.

Speaking of whom, the trashing of Joe the Plumber by the Left has been contemptible. Republicans, however, have countered incoherently. In the absence of first principles, not one Republican has been able to defend a man’s absolute right to his property—all of it.

None was able to explain why it is not up to some central planner—McCain or Hussein—to determine how much of Joe’s life is his; and how much of it is theirs.

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JUDGE MOORE AND THE GODLESS 14TH AMENDMENT

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore paid for and placed a granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments in the Alabama judicial building, where he presides. This was two years ago. Predictably, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) could not tolerate the sight of a moral code displayed on taxpayer-funded property. Together with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ACLU alleged the justice had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

A district judge by the name of Myron Thompson then ordered the removal of the Decalogue. Moore appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency stay. When this was denied, a nine-member state tribunal suspended him with pay. If the monument is not removed, the plaintiffs want Moore held in contempt and fines levied against the state.

First Amendment jurisprudence has tended to see the injunction against the establishment of a state religion as an injunction against the expression of faith—especially discriminating against the founding Judeo-Christian faith—in taxpayer-supported spheres. The end result has been the expulsion of religion from the public square and the suppression therein of freedom of religion.

Thomas Jefferson was prolific on the topic of religious freedom—the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was a crowning achievement for which he wished to be remembered, along with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia.

With “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof,” Jefferson intended, according to David N. Meyer, author of Jefferson’s Constitutional Thought, to guarantee both “an absolute free exercise of religion and an absolute prohibition of an establishment of religion.”

It’s difficult to see how the display of the Decalogue constitutes an establishment of a state religion or why Moore should be forbidden to so express his faith. The Ten Commandments are a civilizing moral code. Fine, the first few Commandments, among which are Commandments that exhort against idolatry and pantheism, do pertain to ethical monotheism. But other than those, why would anyone (bar the ACLU) object to “thou shall not kill,” or to “thou shall not commit adultery, steal, or covet?” The Ten Commandments can hardly be perceived as an instrument for state proselytization.

However obvious, this is not the soul of the subject in the case of Justice Moore.

Back to Jefferson: “I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercise,” Jefferson expatiated. He then gets to the essence of the issue: “This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise of religion but also from the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states [or to the people] the powers not delegated to the U.S.”

That was true until the ratification of the 14th Amendment!

Prior to that, the federal government had no authority to enforce the Bill of Rights in the states, religious freedoms included. The Bill of Rights, very plainly, did not grant the federal government any powers, but was intended to place limits on the federal government’s actions. Ratified illegally after the War Between the States, the 14th Amendment overrode, to all intents and purposes, the doctrine of states’ rights, to which Jefferson looked for the preservation of freedoms.

The particular portion of the miscellany that is the 14th states: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The gargantuan grant of power to the federal government is thus sealed: “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

In American federalism, the rights of the individual are secured through the strict limits imposed on the power of the central government by a Bill of Rights and the division of authority between autonomous states and a federal government. As Frank Chodorov wrote, states’ rights are “an essential Americanism. The Founding Fathers and the opponents of the Constitution agreed on the principle of divided authority as a safeguard to the rights of the individual.”

If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect the individual from government, the 14th, in effect, defeated that purpose. What it did was to put the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.

Naturally, states can just as well violate individual rights. But, as Chodorov highlighted, there is no monopoly power behind a state’s action. If a state wants to outlaw alcohol, then one can move to a state that doesn’t. (That’s one way for state legislators to ensure that their states will be as densely populated as the moon.) If a state wants to establish a religion, and its own constitution doesn’t prohibit this, one can move to a state with a different constitution. Competition in government puts the brakes on folly and abuse and preserves freedom.

The 14th Amendment violated this balance, or as Felix Morley observed in Freedom and Federalism, it nullified “the original purpose of the Bill of Rights, by vesting its enforcement in the national rather than in the state governments.” This just about renders asunder the Ninth and 10th amendments—what powers do the states retain if the federal government has gobbled them all up?

When the federal government became the arbiter of individual rights—freedom of religion included—the doctrine of limitation of powers was badly damaged, if not destroyed. In the real world, as opposed to the wasteland of pure theory, government—especially centralized government—is the natural enemy of natural rights. Putting the central government in exclusive charge of protecting natural rights is the height of folly.

Judge Moore rightly proclaimed his innocence in the Wall Street Journal. “The First Amendment says that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ It does not take a constitutional scholar to recognize that I am not Congress, and no law has been passed,” he protests.

However, when the Justice proclaims, “The Ninth Amendment secured our right as a people. The 10th guaranteed our right as a sovereign state,” he is neglecting that along came the 14th and did away with all that.

Justice Roy Moore has more on his hands than he bargained for, although his passions are well suited to begin the necessary groundswell that’ll see the repeal of the 14th Amendment.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
August 27, 2003

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SIXTEEEN, THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 20 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
—The 16th Amendment

What are we to make of the idea Washington is floating of replacing tax on income with a national sales tax? The libertarian Cato Institute has described it as “simpler, more efficient, pro-growth and fairer to taxpayers.” I must be missing something because I thought we already paid taxes on products and services. In addition to states where a sales tax already exists, sizeable portions of the prices we pay are taxes. The quandary as to whether an indirect consumption tax is better than taxes on income masks what’s probably in the offing.

Once a tax is pushed through it seldom disappears. Last I looked, government at all levels was consuming over 40 percent of the national income and growing. A reversal of the trend is almost unheard of among developed nations. To keep the state in style, consumption taxes will have to go through the roof. On the plus side, the consumer can opt out, something he can’t do with a tax on income. On the downside, should he “choose” not to purchase, the consumer may be destined to a rather austere existence.

In all likelihood, “tax reform” will leave us with the income tax in addition to more consumption taxes. Hopes realistically must be more modest. Let the idea of a tax reform, for once, engender a discussion about First Principles, the kind Americans of the 19th century were capable of having.

However contemptible taxes on consumption are, libertarian writer Frank Chodorov insisted that taxes on income and inheritance were “different in principle from all other taxes.” In the seminal work, The Income Tax: Root of all Evil, he elaborates:

The government says to the citizen: “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on 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.

Fundamentally, taxes on income imply a complete denial of private property, which is what socialism is in all its permutations; it rejects man’s absolute and natural right to his property and vests property rights in the political establishment. The 16th Amendment does just that. When they incorporated the Amendment into the Constitution, Americans said a resounding “yes” to socialism.

Make no mistake: What’s staving off communism is not the Constitution. If it so chooses, Congress has constitutional imprimatur to raise taxes to 100 percent of income, an odd thing considering the Declaration of Independence vests the source of man’s rights in the Creator, not in government.

Philosopher Ayn Rand, on the other hand, anchored man’s rights in his nature. “Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his survival,” she wrote in Atlas Shrugged. In order to survive, man must—and it is in his nature to—transform the resources around him by mixing his labor with them and making them his own. Man’s labor and property are extensions of himself. The right of ownership is thus an extension of the right to life. If ownership is not an absolute right but is instead subject to the vagaries of majority vote, then so is the right to life.

Be it in the nature of man or in divine law, man’s rights do not originate in “congressional law”—Congress is merely entrusted with protecting the rights with which man is imbued.

This arrangement, the 16th Amendment corrupted.

Statists will always counter by claiming that if not for the state, man would be unable to produce. Rubbish! That’s like saying that the tick created the dog! Production predates government predation. Government doesn’t produce wealth—it only consumes it. What, pray tell, would government have fed off if people were not hard at work well before the advent of the bureaucracy? As usual, the statists have it topsy-turvy. First came the individual—he is the basic unit of society, without which there can be no society. And without man’s labor there is no wealth for government to siphon.

However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an “organized society” that does the same. In a just society, the moral rules that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft.

The founders intended for government to safeguard the natural rights of Americans. The 16th Amendment gave government a limitless lien on their property and, by extension, on their lives. The Amendment turned government into the almighty source—rather than the protector—of rights and Americans into indentured slaves.

* Iron Maiden cover art

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DEMOCRACY IS FOR THE DOGS

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 06 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

A succinct distinction between a republic and a democracy shows that the American republic rests in peace and that voting in the Unites States is undeniably democratic, not republican. In Does Democracy Promote Peace, legal scholar James Ostrowski does just that:

Democracy is nothing more than the numerous and their manipulators bullying the less numerous. It is an elaborate and deceptive rationalization for the strong in numbers to impose their will on the electorally weak by means of centralized state coercion …
Both forms of government feature voting by the people to select officials. The primary difference between them is that while republican voting is done for the purpose of choosing officials to administer the government in the pursuit of its narrowly defined functions, democratic voting is done, not only to select officials but also to determine the functions and goals and powers of the government.
The guiding principle of republics is that they exercise narrow powers delegated to them by the people, who themselves, as individuals, possess such powers.

The allusion to “narrow powers” is far removed from the realities of the American social democracy, particularly in light of the welter of new powers Washington has grabbed since September 11. With the governed in the U.S. exerting so few controls over those doing the governing, the original notion of the people having the same powers as their elected officials strikes one as positively quaint.

The powers available to power wielders in a democracy are, by definition, exceedingly broad and broaden with almost every bit of legislation passed. That we were once a republic and are now a social democracy makes clear that the Constitution has not halted this progression. The Constitution has, for all intents and purposes, been destroyed.

“The process of mutilation” Frank Chodorov dated to the Jackson Administration, but put the Constitution’s final expiration down to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. “The income tax,” wrote Chodorov in Imperium in Imperio, “insinuated a theory of government quite unknown to the Founding Fathers, holding that the function of government is to act as pater familias to society as a whole. To perform that role, the government must have access to all that is produced, as a matter of right, just as a feudal baron might lay claim to the fruits of his vassals’ labor.”

Successive Supreme Courts have contributed to the “mutilation” by interpreting the Constitution so that it no longer reflects the eternal verities the Founders spoke to, but the prevailing egalitarian redistributionist credo.

With natural rights being held hostage to the “greater good,” the vote in a democracy is not to select people who would protect the inviolability of the rights the Founders wanted to instantiate—the right to life, liberty and property. At best, the vote in a democracy is a toss-up between a candidate who would loot for welfare and the candidate whose preference is to pillage for warfare.

The one fellow will ransack the taxpayer in order to secure prescription medication for those who think their health is the collective’s responsibility; the other ‘virtuous’ chap thinks nothing of a shakedown in the cause of imposing democracy on far-flung nations, never with their democratic consent.

The vote in a democracy is about the coerced distribution James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, eschewed in his 1792 disquisition on Property: “What a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but cannot be taken from him without his consent.”

In a democracy, “even the individuals who voted and who managed to pick a winner are not actually ruling themselves in any sense of the word,” say Linda and Morris Tannehill. They voted for a man, not for the specific laws that govern them.” And the laws that man and his faceless bureaucracy usher in have their own momentum.

Who among the traditional support base of George Bush would have foreseen his plumping for protectionist policies for the steel, softwood lumber and agriculture industries? Or for legislation like the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulation bill? Who would have predicted his newfound dedication to rights infringing anti-discrimination laws, not least the support for gender-based quotas in college athletics? All of these reflect presidential pandering in a democracy to the real constituency: the special interest group.

This voracious voter forms the largest and most powerful constituency. He is the backbone of the system, and possesses the greatest political pull, because the tax burden in a democracy rests on a minority. The majority of taxpayers in the modern-day social democracy pay very little tax but receive myriad government benefits anyway.

Oddly enough, conservatives continue to stubbornly associate Republican candidates with the no-longer extant republican principles, believing that systemic ills can be remedied at the ballot box: Get the right—Republican—guy in and all will be swell.

Their confusion is understandable. Republicans are the drag queens of politics. While the Democrat is open about his devilishness—he finds the idea of a constitutional government with narrowly delimited powers as repellent as Dracula finds garlic—modern-day conservatives are subtle about their aversion to a Jeffersonian republic.

Peel away the pules for family, faith and fetuses and one discovers either, what economist and political philosopher Hans-Hermann-Hoppe calls “neoconservative welfare-warfare statists and global social democrats”—Or, conversely, national socialists of sorts, who fuse economic protectionism, populism and support for the very welfare infrastructure which is at the root of the social rot they decry.

In a word, the social democratic bona fides of the Republican are beyond reproach. “Contrary to popular myth,” demurs Ostrowski, “every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government’s size, scope or power—and usually all three. Include regulations and foreign policy, as well as budgets approved by a Republican Congress, and a picture begins to emerge of the Republican Party as a reliable engine of government growth.”

Mr. Bush has certainly earned his Great Society Democrat credentials.

Ultimately, the vote in a democracy is for the social democrat who thinks nothing of mob rule as a moral philosophy. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn almost got it right when he said, “Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.” Correction: All that can be achieved with only 51 percent of the vote, making the slogan “freedom begins at the ballot box” a very cruel hoax indeed.

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