Unrestrained Government

History books most often say the war was fought to free the slaves. But that idea is brought into serious question by Abraham Lincoln’s repeated disclaimer: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” The real causes had more to do with problems similar to those the nation faces today—a federal government that has escaped the limits of the Constitution.

John C. Calhoun expressed that concern in his famous Fort Hill Address of July 26, 1831, when he was Andrew Jackson’s vice president. Calhoun, who later became a senator from South Carolina, said, “Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail.”

Calhoun, like Jefferson, feared Washington, D.C.‘s usurpation of powers constitutionally held by the people and the states (“consolidation”). For example, of the tariffs enacted to protect Northern manufacturers, Calhoun said that “an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North.”

Import duties extracted far more from the South than from the North, and Southerners complained of having to pay either high prices for northern-made goods or high tariffs on foreign-made goods. They also complained about federal laws not dissimilar to the Navigation Acts that helped bring on the War for Independence.

Source: Walter E. Williams
The Freeman, January 1999, pp. 63-64

Topics: Civil War; Government, Loss of Freedom; Slavery; Taxes

Man combines conscious curiosity with the lessons of experience and, when permitted to do so, makes the combination pay continuous dividends. In contrast to the lower animals, he includes himself and his social affairs within the scope of his curiosity.

Source: Henry Grady Weaver
The Mainspring of Human Progress, p. 28

Topics: Praxeology

The Purpose of Society

And what is the one constant element in all these relationships? Why does one person want to meet another person? What is the human purpose in society?

It is to exchange one good for another good more desired. Putting it on a personal basis, it is a matter of benefiting yourself by getting something you desire from another person who, at the same time, benefits himself by getting something that he desires from you. The object of such contacts is the peaceful exchange of benefits, mutual aid, cooperationfor each persons gain. The incalculable sum of all these meetings is human society, which is simply all the individual human actions that express the brotherhood of man.

To discuss the welfare and responsibilities of society as an abstract whole, as if it were like a bee swarm, is an oversimplification and a fantasy. The real human world is made by persons, not by societies. The only human development is the self-development of the individual person. There is no short cut!

But even today, many civilized persons—nice people, cultured, gentle, and kind, our friends and our neighbors, almost all of us at some time or another—have harbored the pagan belief that the sacrifice of the individual person serves a higher good. The superstition lingers in the false ideal of selflessness—which emphasizes conformity to the will-of-the-massas against the Christian virtues of self-reliance, self-improvement, self-faith, self-respect, self-discipline, and a recognition of ones duties as well as ones rights.

Source: Henry Grady Weaver
The Mainspring of Human Progress, p. 28-29

Topics: Society

Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

Source: Thomas Jefferson

Topics: Government

If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.

Source: Attributed to George Washington during the Constitutional Convention

Topics: America, Heritage

Capital levies, inheritance and estate taxes, and income taxes are . . . self-defeating if carried to extremes.

It is one of the characteristic features of the market economy that the government does not interfere with the market phenomena and that its technical apparatus is so small that its maintenance absorbs only a modest fraction of the total sum of the individual citizens’ income. Then taxes are an appropriate vehicle for providing the funds needed by the government. They are appropriate because they are low and do not perceptibly disarrange production and consumption. If taxes grow beyond a moderate limit, they cease to be taxes and turn into devices for the destruction of the market economy....

[T]he true crux of the taxation issue is to be seen in the paradox that the more taxes increase, the more they undermine the market economy and concomitantly the system of taxation itself. Thus, the fact becomes manifest that ultimately the preservation of private property and confiscatory measures are incompatible: Every specific tax, as well as a nation’s whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.

Source: Ludwig von Mises
Human Action, pp. 740-741

Topics: Government, Limited; Taxes

I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

Source: Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:278

Topics: Citizenship; Responsibility

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.

Source: Thomas Jefferson
Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782. ME 2:207

Topics: Government, Loss of Freedom

Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.”

Source: Thomas Jefferson to Littleton Waller Tazewell, 1805.

Topics: Government, Loss of Freedom; Responsibility

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