[Peace-discuss] Midwest Liberty Fest - draft remarks

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following are preliminary notes for a talk I was invited to give at the 
Midwest Liberty Fest in Du Quoin IL, 9th-11th inst. The meeting included a wider 
variety of views than might have been predicted; I think it testifies to the 
failure of the Republicans and Democrats to constrain political debate within 
the tenets of neoliberalism (which was constructed a generation ago to suppress 
the challenging and creative political ideas of "the sixties"). For at least a 
decade, according to Harvard's Vanishing Voter Project, about 75 percent of 
Americans have felt that even presidential elections don't matter, that they're 
just some kind of game being played by rich contributors, party bosses, and the 
media.  That seems right to me, so it shouldn't surprise us that the politics 
grown outside that carefully fenced garden should contain some luxuriant 
varieties, along with some quite sensible critiques. They're perhaps the 
beginning of a more serious politics in America, which seems to need to be 
repristinated every generation or so. From May '68: "le vote ne change rien; la 
lutte continue."]

===

	SECURING LIBERTY: A BAILOUT FOR THE REST OF US

	“The basis of a democratic state is liberty;
	which, according to the common opinion of men,
	can only be enjoyed in such a state; this they
	affirm to be the great end of every democracy.”

	--Aristotle, POLITICS 1317a40f.



[1] HOW DID LIBERTY GET INTO THE RICH MEN’S CONSTITUTION?

We've heard the words so often that we don't seem to need to think too much 
about what they mean:  our government exists to "establish Justice, insure 
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the general 
Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" 
(Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, 1787).

We don't notice for example, that that's not just a list but a progression: if 
we establish a just society, we "insure ... tranquility" (peacefulness) inside 
the country (domestically), so that we can then defend ourselves in common 
against those outside; and peace inside and outside a just society can allow us 
to work to make everyone better off -- to "promote [that is] the general 
welfare" -- with the goal of securing what makes for liberty and what liberty 
brings us -- "the blessings of liberty" -- for us and our families.

We might be surprised that liberty comes at the end of the progression, not at 
the beginning, where we might expect it.  But the framers of the Constitution 
thought of the blessings of liberty as an achievement, not a given, for all that 
we had a right to them.  They were men of the Enlightenment, the great movement 
of liberatory thought of the 18th century, which drew on the intellectual riches 
of the past -- ancient, medieval and modern: the Hebrew Bible, the New 
Testament, the wisdom of Greece and Rome, and the thinkers of the thousand years 
that followed.

But they were hardly dealing in the abstract.  The people who wrote the 1787 
Constitution, now in force in the United States, were well-to-do men dealing 
with a practical challenge.  A Massachusetts farmer named Daniel Shays, a 
veteran of the Revolutionary War, had turned up at a county court house a year 
before to object to a rich man's foreclosure on Shays' farm.  And Shays brought 
some friends who were in the same predicament.  And they brought their guns.

Shays knew how to use his.  He had fought in the battles of Bunker Hill, 
Ticonderoga, Saratoga and Stony Point.  At the end of the war, he was awarded a 
ceremonial sword by the Marquis de Lafayette, for distinguished service.

When he and his friends arrived art he court, the Massachusetts authorities 
called out a private militia, and when the militia arrived, many joined Shays. 
Those who had wealth and power in the newly independent united states -- 
governed then by the Articles of Confederation -- concluded that they needed a 
stronger government to defend their property.

The result was the secret and technically treasonous assembly in Philadelphia in 
the hot summer of 1787 (the members of which had sworn allegiance to the 
Articles of Confederation and were licensed only to amend them).

Our best source for the deliberations over the Constitution (and its principal 
author), James Madison, notes in his diary that the primary purpose of the new 
government was "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority" -- 
i.e., to protect the rich against Daniel Shays and his friends.

Madison and his colleagues may have been self-interested but they were not 
stupid.  Unlike many modern intellectuals, they had not cast aside the 
accumulated wisdom of the human race, but had respect for it and tried to apply 
it to their own circumstances.  The government that they designed was based on 
the principles of the Enlightenment and two thousand years of thought about the 
best state of a commonwealth.

We today -- most of us -- have learned not to despise people on the basis of 
their race, religion, gender, or place of national origin, but we still seem to 
be willing to condescend to those who have the unfortunate characteristic of 
being dead.  We discount what they thought and said as if they were children, 
not as adult as we are.  I think that leads us to miss a lot, at the very least. 
  The framers, as men of the Enlightenment, were not that way.

In reaction against the despotic state structures of Renaissance Europe, the 
Enlightenment "asserts [liberty] as its major idea -- an opposition to all but 
the most restricted and minimal forms of state intervention in personal and 
social life. This conclusion is quite familiar, however the reasoning that leads 
to it is less familiar and, I think, a good deal more important than the 
conclusion itself.

"One of the earliest and most brilliant expositions of this position is in 
Wilhelm Von Humboldt's 'Limits of State Action', written in 1792 ... In his view 
the state tends to 'make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, 
overlooking his individual purposes.'  And, since humans are in their essence 
free, searching, self-perfecting being, it follows that the state is a 
profoundly anti-human institution. That is, its actions, its existence, are 
ultimately incompatible with the full harmonious development of human potential 
in its richest diversity -- hence incompatible with what Humboldt [and many 
others]  saw as the true end of man. (And for the record I think that this is an 
accurate description.)

"...For Humboldt [and the Enlightenment in general] humanity's central attribute 
is its freedom. 'To enquire and to create, these are the centers around which 
all human pursuits more or less directly revolve.' But he goes on to say that 
'all moral cultures spring solely and immediately from the inner life of the 
soul and can never be produced by external and artificial contrivances. The 
cultivation of the understanding, as of any man's other faculties, is generally 
achieved by his own activity, his own ingenuity, or his own methods of using the 
discoveries of others'...

"He says, 'Man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he 
does; and the laborer who tends the garden is perhaps in a truer sense its 
owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits.'

"And since truly human action is that which flows from inner impulse, 'it seems 
as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists; that is, men 
who love their labor for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius 
and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their 
character, and exult and refine their pleasures; and so humanity would be 
ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often 
go to degrade it'...

"'Freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the 
pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in 
producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man's free 
choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into 
his very being, but remains alien to his true nature. He does not perform it 
with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.'

"'And if someone acts in a mechanical way, reacting to external demands or 
instruction, rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies 
and power,' he says, 'we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.'

"For Humboldt then, man is born to enquire and create, and when a man or a child 
chooses to enquire or create out of its own free choice, then he becomes, in his 
own terms, 'an artist rather than a tool of production or a well-trained 
parrot.'  This is the essence of [the Enlightenment] concept of human nature."



[2] IF THE CONSTITUTION IS ABOUT LIBERTY, WHY DO WE HAVE SO LITTLE OF IT?

To come to the present -- Where, in our experience, is that concept most often 
violated?  I suggest our liberty is lost most notably in our work life, at our 
jobs.  Our work is in the first place what we freely create with the talents of 
our head and hands.  In this sense people want to work --- indeed it is work 
like that that distinguishes us from other animals, with whom what appears as 
work is instinct.  For us it is a matter of liberty.

In the modern world however we have to give over control of what makes us human, 
our work, to someone else's control. I can have a job -- I can be employed -- if 
and only if it makes some rich person richer than it makes me.  And in that job 
I have little if any democratic control.

"[In] the modern era, economic, political and ideological systems have 
increasingly been taken over by vast institutions of private tyranny that are 
about as close to the totalitarian ideal as any that humans have so far 
constructed. 'Within the corporation,' political economist Robert Brady wrote 
half a century ago, 'all policies emanate from the control above. In the 
[conjunction] of this power to determine policy with the execution thereof, all 
authority necessarily proceeds from the top to the bottom and all responsibility 
from the bottom to the top. This is, of course, the inverse of "democratic" 
control; it follows the structural conditions of dictatorial power.'"

This situation runs directly counter to the ideas that animated the framers. 
Another Enlightenment thinker, Simon Linguet, wrote twenty years before the 
Constitution,

"It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm 
laborers to till the soil, whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to 
construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to 
those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying 
them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in 
order to get from him permission to enrich him... What effective gain has the 
suppression of slavery brought to them? ... He is free, you say. Ah, that is his 
misfortune. These men, it is said, have no master. They have one, and the most 
terrible, the most imperious of masters: that is, need. It is this that that 
reduces them to the most cruel dependence."

"And if there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of bondage, as 
every spokesman for the Enlightenment would insist, then it would follow that a 
new emancipation must be awaited, what [another Enlightenment figure] referred 
to as the 'third and last emancipatory phase of history' -- the first having 
made serfs out of slaves, the second wage-earners out of serfs, and the third 
which will bring the commercial, industrial, and financial institutions under 
democratic control."

Von Humboldt, in 1792, sums up his Enlightenment vision as follows: he says "the 
whole tenor of the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay might fairly be 
reduced to this: that while they would break all fetters in human society, they 
would attempt to find as many new social bonds as possible. The isolated man is 
no more able to develop than the one who is fettered."

"And he in fact looks forwards to a community of free association, without 
coercion by the state or other authoritarian institutions, in which free people 
can create, inquire, and achieve the highest development of their powers."  That 
was the idea of liberty behind the 1787 Constitution.



[3] CUI BONO?

It is an essential vision; it is the vision that underlies our American 
institutions -- and where there is no vision the people perish.  But how today 
do we realize that vision of the blessings of liberty, given the social and 
political morass into which we have sunk at the end of the first decade of 21st 
century?

Well, some of our rulers seem to be finding a way to secure the blessings of 
liberty for themselves and their posterity.  A year ago this week the USG began 
an unprecedented bailout of the some of the richest people in the country and 
the institutions that had made them so rich, the banking institutions of the 
country.  And the size of the bailout was unprecedented.  Billions of dollars 
that shored up institutions with no semblance of democratic control, billions of 
dollars that found their way into the pockets of the richest people in the 
country and made them impossibly richer.

"The bailout of the banks was an exercise in corruption and favoritism. The 
Obama administration's deals with the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, and 
hospitals look the same."



[4] A FIVE-POINT BOFROU

How about, instead, A BAILOUT FOR THE REST OF US -- and particularly one that 
restores our liberty?

As it happens, I have one here -- and it consists of five points, like the 
preamble to the Constitution.

It recognizes that the blessings of liberty are of two kinds, of the mind and 
the body.  They cannot be separated any more that body and soul can be separated 
here below. The blessings that make for liberty free the body, the blessings 
that come from liberty free the mind and soul.


	{POINT ONE} is justice, specifically tax justice, justice regarding income. 
The Internal Revenue Code is said to be more than twice as long as the KJV of 
the Bible, and it is principal instrument for the vast concentration of wealth 
in very few hands that's occurred in the last few years.  (The Code,  not the 
Bible.)  So what do we do? "Get rid of the infamous thing," as Voltaire said, 
during the Enlightenment.  (He was in fact talking about something else.)

Abolish the internal revenue code and establish a low, flat tax on all income. 
In order to begin to redress the extreme imbalance in wealth in this country, we 
should perhaps abolish all income taxes.  If you tax something, you usually get 
less of it (that at least is the theory behind raising the taxes on cigarette 
smoking, and it seems to work].  But against the idea of abolition is the sense 
that in a democracy of one person one vote, we should all contribute at least a 
little to the functioning of that government.  So a low, flat tax -- and no 
Internal Revenue Code.

But we shouldn't stop there.  During the administration of President Richard 
Nixon, almost 40 years ago, a bill that would have established a negative income 
tax almost made it through Congress.  Such a proposal joined to a low flat tax 
could provide an income at the level of a living wage for all Americans.   The 
plan was set out in detail by the late economist Milton Friedman in 1962 in his 
book "Capitalism and Freedom."

"With an NIT, the need for minimum wage, food stamps, welfare, and even social 
security would be eliminated -- along with the vast and expensive bureaucracies 
that administer them.  The NIT would be in effect a guaranteed annual income 
(GAI) at the level of a living wage.

Perhaps even more importantly, some degree of liberty would be restored to our 
work.  The need to take any job that's offered in order to eat regularly and 
feed one's family would no longer exist.  On the other side, the disappearance 
of the minimum wage would restore employment to being a capitalist act between 
consenting adults.  Take the job at the wage offered if you want to -- but you 
don't have to.

Our gimcrack system of  minimum wage, food stamps, welfare, and social security 
doesn't even work.  Today a family of four living on minimum wage cannot afford 
the average two-bedroom apartment in any community in the United States.

And this aspect of the BOFROU would do far more to end the recession than the 
Bailout of the Bankers.  All admit that consumer spending is the crucial support 
for the real economy.  At the dawn of the automobile industry, Henry Ford paid 
high wages so that his workers could afford the cars that they were building. 
Now we can't even employ 10% -- some say 20% -- of those who want to work.

A populace with a guaranteed annual income at the level of a living wage would 
have to spend it, providing the demand immediately that the administration's 
stimulus program is supposed to provide a good way down the road.

But, I hear you cry, this would be expensive!  How would we pay for it?  It's 
interesting that that question wasn't asked a year ago when vast sums were 
required to bail out the banks.  Nor was it heard during the last administration 
or this one when billions of dollars were said to be needed to kill people in 
the Middle East.

But we'll do better, and answer the question with


	{POINT TWO}: tax wealth (as opposed to income).  Tax something and you get less 
of it, as we said, and we don't want less wealth but rather less difference in 
wealth.  Although real wages in this country haven't risen in more than a 
generation, the rich have gotten richer at a rapidly increasing rate while 
almost all of us have at best stayed level.  The concentration of wealth has 
grown enormously. There has been a vast redistribution of wealth upwards, into 
the top 1% of the population.  We want to reverse that.

Income disparities don't capture the real nature of economic inequality in 
America, because the rich don't take their money in income but, say, capital 
gains.  The distribution of wealth is much more unequal than the distribution of 
income.  The bottom 60% of households possess only 4% of the nation's wealth. 
The top 20% has 50% of the income but 85% of the wealth.

Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of families. The 
wealthiest 1 percent of families owns more than a third of the nation's net 
worth, the top 10% of families owns over 70%, and the bottom 40% of the 
population owns far less than 1%.

A steeply graduated tax on wealth would exempt 95% of all Americans.  Only the 
top 1% would pay noticeable amounts -- and toward the top of that 1%, they 
should be quite noticeable.

It should be clear here that we are talking about liberty, not envy -- about 
bodily freedom, not about the equalization of wealth.  "I cannot see the 
slightest objection to other people being richer than I am; I have no urge to be 
as rich as everybody else, and no Christian (and indeed no grown up person) 
could possibly devote his life to trying to be as rich or richer than others."

But there's another source of money to pay for the GAI at the level of a living 
wage that will restore consumer demand.  That leads us to


	{POINT THREE}  Bring the troops home and stop paying vast amounts for imperial 
wars.  Bring the troops home, not just from the Middle East, where the 
administration is killing people to secure control over world oil supplies and 
is lying about what it doing;  it's not stopping terrorism but creating it. 
Bring the troops home also from the more than 700 (sic!) military bases that he 
US has around the world.

The US spends more on the military each year than the entire rest of the world. 
  A generation ago, we were told that would stop after the fall of Communism. 
The peace divided could be returned to the people. It didn't happen.

That military and those bases are supposed to be defending us against terrorism, 
but the dirty little secret -- in fact it's a filthy big secret  -- is that the 
US needs the threat of terrorism to justify its military incursion into the 
Middle East.

And terrorism is a real threat, as a result of the US invasion and occupation of 
foreign lands, notably the Middle East.  And why?  If the primary product of 
Iraq were asparagus, do you think that we would have half the American army there?

If the USG really wanted to defend us against terrorism, it would do things it 
has avoided doing, like securing our ports.  (I have a friend who says it would 
be easy to get a nuclear bomb into NY harbor: "Just wrap it in a bale of 
marijuana," he says.)

Of course, it's no joking matter.  The prospects are serious indeed, but instead 
of dealing with them, our government says it's stopping terrorism by killing 
people in Pakistani villages with drone rockets.

And there is one more great cost of our government's military adventurism, 
discussed in one of the best political books I've read recently, Bill Kauffman's 
"Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and 
Middle-American Anti-Imperialism."  In it Kauffman makes the point that the 
victims of American militarism include notably the men and women in the US 
military and their families.


	{POINT FOUR}  We can also afford to provide healthcare, and without the 
administration's "Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act," as 
it has rightly been called.

Much ridicule has been heaped upon the charge that the administration's Rube 
Goldberg plan would mandate end of life decision, the dreaded "death panels."

But "Since the major preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right 
to kill embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward those 
gasping in the thin air of senility? [I take his matter rather personally.] 
There is a strong eugenic thread to American progressivism, most horribly 
expressed in its very successful campaign across much of the twentieth century 
to sterilize “imbeciles.” [A distant cousin of mine was a major figure in that 
campaign.] Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic device. Women 
in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the inconvenient twins, triplets 
or quadruplets when they show up on the scan.

“'The progress of eugenic abortion into the heart of our society is a classic 
example of 'mission creep,' In the 1960s, we were told that legal abortion would 
be a rare tragic act in cases of exceptional hardship. In the ’70s abortion 
began to be both decried and accepted as birth control. In the ’80s respected 
geneticists pointed out that it was cheaper to hunt for and abort Down’s babies 
than to raise them. By the ’90s that observation had been widely put into 
action. Now we are refining and extending our eugenic vision, with new tests and 
abortion as our central tools.

"So if we have mission creep  in the opening round, what’s to persuade people 
that there won’t be mission creep at the other -- and the kindly official 
discussing living wills won’t tiptoe out of the ward and tell the hospital that 
the old fellow he’s just conferred with is ripe to meet his maker?"

Instead, we already have a system, established more than 40 years ago, that 
provides for medical care -- if you're old enough: in principle, you go to the 
doctor or hospital of your choice, and the government pays the bill.  But 
Medicare is available only to those over 65.  We solve the healthcare crisis by 
making it available to all.  But the administration is in fact instead proposing 
to invade that system to pay for its plan, which has been rightly called "an 
absolute gift to the [insurance] industry."


	{POINT FIVE}  Liberty must be physical as well as mental.  The CEO of the 
yuppie grocery Whole Foods, Inc., writes in the WSJ that there is no "intrinsic 
right to health care, food or shelter ... This "right" has never existed in 
America."  Americans in his view have only the right to starve, or die of 
exposure, unless they rent themselves to people like him.  But that is hardly 
the blessings of liberty that the government is established to secure.

But humankind "must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before 
it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc."  Two years after the 
writing of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The earth belongs to the 
living," and he meant specifically the things needed for human flourishing.

The blessings of liberty come in two sorts; (1) the things that give us liberty, 
the free use of our bodies, and (2) the things that liberty gives us, the free 
use of our minds.  And these things belong to us not as handouts form a Lady 
Bountiful government, but as rights that it is the responsibility of government 
to secure.

If we do not attend to both, we are in the situation described in the second 
chapter of the Letter of James in the New Testament:

"If one of the brothers or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not 
enough food to live on, and one of you says to them, 'I wish you well; keep 
yourself warm and eat plenty,' without giving them these bare necessities of 
life, then what good is that?"

***

IN SUMMARY, THEN, if we think of ways of pursuing the goals for government set 
out 222 years ago, we find some suggestions for a bailout for the rest of us:

[1] ESTABLISH JUSTICE by a tax system -- flat and negative -- that  would 
produce a guaranteed annual income at the level of a living wage;

[2] INSURE DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY, disturbed since Daniel Shays' time by the 
conflict of rich and poor, by taxing vast wealth directly (and undue 
financialization via a Tobin tax, etc.);

[3] PROVIDE FOR THE COMMON DEFENSE by bringing the troops home and actually 
defending against terrorism, rather than using it as an excuse for the invasion 
and occupation of foreign countries;

[4] PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE by providing healthcare via Medicare for all, 
and education for interest, not for employment; and

[5] SECURE THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY TO OURSELVES AND OUR POSTERITY -- the 
blessings that make for liberty, those of the body, and the blessings that flow 
from liberty, those of the mind -- to promote the situation of the person who is 
living without hindrance the life that is becoming to a human being, the 
"satisfactory" life -- which means literally the life that is "sufficiently 
made" -- and, for that, liberty is essential, as we've known at least since the 
Enlightenment.

	###