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© Copyright 2012, 2014 by Paul B. Skousen

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Ensign Publishing Company

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Contact the author at [email protected]

Softback ISBN: 978-1630720728

Hardback ISBN: 978-0910558730

eBook ISBN: 978-0910558723

Cover illustration and design by Arnold Friberg, restored by Benjamin C. Skousen, additions by J. Rich Skousen,

First edition, paperback, red cover: July 2012

First edition, hardback, red cover: September 2012

Second edition, paperback, black cover: May 1, 2014

by Paul B. Skousen

The Ensign Publishing Company, Riverton, Utah

Thomas Jefferson

November 29, 1802

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

Foreword

The Naked Socialist is the third in a series of books written to unmask the human combines of control and power that have labored for millennia to enslave others. The first two works, The Naked Communist (1958) and The Naked Capitalist (1970), by W. Cleon Skousen, dealt with the ugly aftermath of those forces in modern times. The Naked Socialist goes further, all the way back to the beginning, to explain in layman terms how elitist minorities have always managed to take charge over everybody else. It’s a modern phenomenon that began 6,000 years ago—and has failed to achieve its promised goals each and every time.

A wise man once said, “You will never hear the answer until you first ask the question.” The following information is intended to trigger a thousand questions so that the crucial answers will make sense, make a lasting impression, and make clear the way forward to restore freedom, prosperity, and lasting happiness. It is a wonderfully satisfying pursuit for freedom-lovers of all ages.

Preface

Ask anyone, what is socialism?

Ask an American what socialism is and the answer is usually an impatient shrug—“I think it’s a European idea where the government pays for a lot of regular things like utilities and health care.”

Ask a European what socialism is—“It’s a political party,” many will say. “They’re always promising to make the government pay for more things—it’s certainly better than your American way.”

Ask a former member of the USSR what socialism is and some will answer, “Do you mean that other word for communism? It was horrible—my grandparents were killed because of it, people starved, we were miserable, but today we’re more free and the government is paying for a lot of things. I’m not sure if that’s socialism, but it keeps us from starving.”

Ask someone in North Korea or Cuba or parts of China what socialism is, and they might be afraid to speak openly out of fear of being arrested or shot for criticizing the regime.

Socialism has so many meanings, people use it interchangeably with the ideas of compassion, fairness, and equality, or as the best alternative to “evil” capitalism. Or, as a system that provides affordable health care, utilities, mass transit, insurance, pollution control, etc.

Ask anybody, “what is socialism?” and the answers make it very clear that most people don’t know, probably don’t care, and seem content to live under its regimentation.

Missing in these hurried dismissals of socialism is this singular and critically important fact: socialism always destroys its host nation.

This study uncovers the ugly underside of socialism’s failure formula. It looks into socialism’s 6,000-year history to discover its common elements. As we’ll see, there are seven distinct and identifiable markers of socialism—seven shallow but affective ideas that consistently fail to serve the people or promote prosperity.

Once these seven bad ideas are identified and stripped of their deceit, propaganda, lies and false promises, then, quite suddenly, a way to climb out of today’s snarling maze of cultural and economic decline can easily be seen. It’s an amazing epiphany that pleasantly unfolds to students of freedom, to suddenly see the original U.S. Constitution in this new light and realize how elegantly and ingeniously it solved all the problems now facing America. And, how these same principles can guarantee freedom to all mankind.

Without using political or economic jargon, the reader is given the tools to correctly identify and explain why the best laid socialistic plans always go haywire. For example—

In 2010, President Barack Obama committed the American people to their first-ever national health-care program. He told them it was against the law to say no. If they did, they would have to pay a fine. At the same time, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and other parts of the European Union were in the middle of massive financial meltdowns brought on by their own health-care and entitlement packages.

As we’ll explain, entitlement programs is socialism at work.

In 1787, the Founding Fathers sat uneasy while Alexander Hamilton paced back and forth at the U.S. Continental Congress. He spoke for five hours in support of a strong, all-powerful president and State executives appointed for life. About that same time, the European crowned monarchs watched with worry as discontented masses in France agitated for a proper way to remove their own “head” of state.

As we’ll explain, all-powerful rulers is socialism at work.

In 1607, the emaciated survivors of Jamestown’s first terrible winter looked at their scant food supply and the buried remains of 66 of their company who starved to death or were killed, and wondered what had gone wrong with their “ideal” colony. At the same time, far to the south, Jesuit Priests in Paraguay were leading thousands of natives into a life of such regimentation that the men and women wouldn’t even sleep together unless they were ordered to by their masters.

As we’ll explain, government regulation is socialism at work.

In A.D. 500, a widespread Christian heresy in Persia, the Mazdakians, won followers by calling for all things in common, including wives and women. So confused were the biological connections that some of the members didn’t even know their own children. Meanwhile, far to the east, Shang Yang in China was teaching a doctrine of how to make millions of working peasants mentally weak so they could be ruled with greater ease.

As we’ll explain, that, too, was socialism at work.

For more than a century, America has been adopting socialism by changing or ignoring its founding documents. As a result, the current generation is reaping financial wreckage, cultural upheaval and widespread despair on a scale of cataclysmic proportions.

Conditions are now dangerously ripe for replacing the substance of the Constitution with an inferior form of government. For a dozen decades the American people have allowed these corrupting ideas of socialism to swell within their ranks to the point that today the nation is on the very verge of crumbling to pieces, and teeters on the brink of ruin. The executioner of liberty is socialism, a massive red iceberg now cutting a fatal swath through the hull of the United States.

Only one thing will spare America from going over the European and Soviet cliff of bankruptcy and cultural collapse. The answer is in the pages that follow. Here, the reader may learn what socialism is, learn a proper definition, learn how to apply this understanding as a test to root out dangerous ideas forming in government, learn how socialism’s 6,000-year track record renders its founding ideas anathema to human progress, and learn how to save this nation. The reader learns to reject socialism not because he hates it, but because he understands it. Stripping away all pretenses, false promises and lies, explains the title, The Naked Socialist.

Great hope and energy comes from the study of freedom. It breathes encouragement and optimism into all things. Keeping that freedom alive requires some work, some awareness, and some action on the part of every person who lives under liberty’s umbrella of prosperity and protection. Our goal here is to help readers detect in their own lives how they might be supporting the noxious ideas of socialism, or thinking like a socialist. Once discovered, the way forward becomes bright, clear, and filled with hope.

PAUL B. SKOUSEN

Salt Lake City, Utah, September 17, 2013

Reader’s Guide

The Naked Socialist may be divided into ten general sections for quick and organized study.

ONE: Indispensable Basics

For those in a hurry, the first 8 chapters tell what socialism is, what unalienable rights are, and why the two will always be in conflict. The seven pillars of socialism are introduced.

TWO: Socialism in History

There is nothing new to socialism. It has existed under different names since the dawn of human history. See examples in Chapters 9-34.

THREE: Religion

Are there any connections between socialism and Christianity or Islam? Was Jesus a socialist? Did the early Christians practice socialism? Find out in four short chapters, 35-38.

FOUR: The Miracle

Learn about the miracle that stopped socialism. Read how the Founders abolished all seven pillars of socialism with the Constitution. See Chapters 39-49.

FIVE: Revolution of the Socialists

Socialism-minded people seeking control over others have appeared in America’s history in the form of progressives, unions, religions, scholars, bad amendments, the Supreme Court, law schools, and more. See Chapters 50-66.

SIX: Welfare, 44 Pages

The last temptation of unrestrained government is to solidify power by offering welfare, national health care and other government services. See Chapters 67-74.

SEVEN: Money, 26 Pages

How does socialism finance itself? Read about national banks and the Federal Reserve and how these businesses took over Congress’s role as stewards over our money. See Chapters 75-79.

EIGHT: U.S. Presidents, 42 Pages

How did U.S. presidents inject socialism into America’s cultural heart and economy? See a brief sampling in Chapters 80-85.

NINE: World Socialism, 33 Pages

How are modern nations prospering or failing because of the influence of socialism in their midst? See a sampling in Chapters 86-90.

TEN: Restoring Freedom, 29 Pages

The hardest and most important question of all is “what can we do about the mess that socialism has created?” There is an answer, and it’s not as complicated as many might expect. See Chapters 91-92.

227 Quiz Questions

Several questions designed to help the reader learn how to recognize socialism are included at the end of each section.

The Seven Pillars of Socialism

Socialism stands atop seven pillars of control rooted in the power and authority of Ruler’s Law.

1. All-Powerful RULERS

2. Society Divided into CASTES or CLASSES

3. All Things in COMMON

4. All Things REGULATED

5. Compliance is FORCED

6. Control of INFORMATION

7. No Unalienable RIGHTS

Socialism: Government force to control and change society

Part I: WHAT IS SOCIALISM?

“Socialism is government force to control and change society.”

—Author—

“Socialism progresses like a snake eating its tail . . . .” —Author—

Chapter 1: Socialism at Work

Those who don’t understand socialism will always fall for it.

In 1985, this writer was a CIA intelligence officer on rotation to the White House Situation Room at the start of President Ronald Reagan’s second term. The Situation Room is in the West Wing, just down the stairs and around the corner from the Oval Office. It has undergone some changes over the years, but remains the most secure room in the White House, and for good reason.

Directly inside the door, past the small foyer and some offices, are the duty officers’ work stations—chairs, computers, phones, televisions and monitors. Toward the back is a little kitchen, the shredder, storage closets and a lot of communication gear. And immediately within those walls is another walled off section called the Conference Room, with seating for 10 around a highly-polished wooden table. This is where Reagan met with his top advisors—a sealed-off, private and secure location out of earshot from possible eavesdroppers.

The conference room has two entrances, and each is closed off with a sliding wooden door so that staffers cannot overhear the top- secret proceedings. In the event an urgent message must be delivered, or a late arrival doesn’t know which way to enter, the doors also have peepholes. Peering through the peepholes helped people navigate which door to open and enter, and which door to avoid.

The peepholes made it convenient for someone like me to stand outside and watch. I could see Reagan in action, always at the head of the table, facing my direction. Seated to either side was the vice president, the National Security Advisor, the head of the CIA, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, sometimes military leaders, and a few others as needed. They arrived with a clutch of papers and sat in thickly padded chairs. We put out a glass of ice water for each, a note pad, and made sure there was easy access to that roving jar of jelly-beans. Through the peephole I enjoyed watching the gesturing and emphatic declarations as they dealt with emergencies, sometimes arguing, other times laughing. It was exhilarating, it was exciting, it was history in the making.

At about this same time, the press started recycling an old harangue against Reagan that he was a detached president, too old for the job, sleepy, dozing through his meetings, not acting as a leader, and certainly a failure in a job that was, they said, way over his head.

Those rumors bothered me. I couldn’t imagine they were true, but they gave me reason to wonder. So, from that time forward, my visits to the peephole took on a new purpose: I decided to discover for myself if the man I was working for was the real Ronald Reagan.

For the first few weeks, I noticed that Reagan was indeed the silent observer. Most of the time he just sat there, hardly speaking, watching the proceedings like he was at a tennis match. He would look to those on the left side of the table, then to the right, then left, then right, rarely saying a word. I couldn’t help but wonder, were the rumors true? Why wasn’t he more actively engaged and giving orders, telling them what to do? Wasn’t he their boss, the president?

As it turned out, I simply didn’t know enough about the enemy that Reagan was battling to fully appreciate what was happening in that room. I didn’t know what I was watching through that peephole.

Today, however, these many years later, it has become exceptionally clear.

That was no detached president I watched, comfortably coasting or dozing or otherwise glad-handing his way through two terms. Reagan’s stone face of indifference was masking a master strategist at work. Behind that calm demeanor was a well-thought through and determined offense against an enemy intent on laying waste to all of the president’s best-laid plans.

The enemy in that room, and seated around that table, was woefully ill-defined, insidiously stealthy, and dangerously active. It manifested itself in subtle, almost imperceptible ways—as an attitude, an expectation, an assumption, a demand. I couldn’t see it, but Reagan did. It was something as old as history with a thousand names. And there it was, right before my very eyes, busily infesting the Reagan administration with its cheating lies.1 I didn’t know enough about it in 1985, but I later learned Reagan’s great enemy that stalked his closest advisors, infested his administration, and had seduced millions of other Americans and billions around the earth was that treacherously deceitful and artfully cunning materialization of mankind’s worst invention and most destructive power ever, a thing we call socialism.2

Chapter 2: The Eternal Conflict: Force Versus Choice

For most people the word “socialism” conjures up two very different images in their minds.

1. Beautiful Promise: The first image is an abstract idea or dream; a hope, a utopian promise of a fair and simpler world, a longing for some rapturous path toward a different way of living—it is socialism of wishful thinking, of make believe, it is the socialism of the future.

2. The Regime: The second image is very concrete—an actual structure or formation of socialistic ideas in society, in a government, in a nation—it is real socialism, the harsh and brutal socialism of today.

Examples of both are everywhere. John Lennon’s enormously popular song, Imagine, illustrates the first idea—the beautiful promise of life under a perfect and peaceful future socialistic society.

“Imagine there’s no heaven,” Lennon proposed, “it’s easy if you try. No hell below us—above us only sky—imagine all the people—living for today ...”3

Living for today is a tricky proposition. It implies a life with no planning for the future, shirking responsibility, consuming instead of producing—a suggestion to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. It is the grasshopper ignoring the ant’s warning about the coming winter. To the untold millions of fans, Lennon’s words created hope for a pathway to a wonderfully new and better way of living.

Lennon’s tune also advanced his beautiful utopian idea of no countries, nothing for people to fight over, ”and no religion, too.”

No religion, no countries, no possessions, and no worries—what a great life. This wasn’t the first time such a suggestion was made. Lennon’s song was actually a lyrical retelling of the ancient teachings of Plato, Marx, Engels, and Mao. Lennon himself said his song was “virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I am not particularly a communist and I do not belong to any movement.”4

The Second Idea of Socialism

Examples of the second idea—the actual concrete structure and formation of socialism—can be found in North Korea where malnutrition has stunted the growth of its children, where large ghost cities stand as empty mirages and facades to fool the world, where three million people starved to death in the mid-1990s because of their government’s stupefying policies, and where Dear Leader’s image flashes across television screens day and night, gushing the doctrine of Lenin while whistling the tune of Lennon.

Or, Cuba, where fifty years of socialism have produced a scourge of crime, corruption, prostitution, drugs, and white collar crime. Where the country has to rely on other socialist nations for such basics as food, medicine, and energy. Where the Castro regime and its successors use torture, arbitrary imprisonment, false trials, and executions to keep the population under control.

Or, Red China, where Mao’s great leap forward created a famine so intense that it killed at least 30 million people. On top of those dead, Mao heaped at least 40 million more in a purge to purify the formidable ranks of his loyal followers.

Or, the former USSR, where Stalin and his successors eventually killed more than 60 million people over seven miserable decades to establish a socialist state. Where the Soviets used international thuggery and bullying to threaten, steal, and fight their way to world prominence. Where its failure formula brought about the empire’s predictable collapse in the early 1990s, leaving its 15 republics buried in wreckage and still struggling for survival by 2014.

Or, the European Union, where the massive treasuries of the world’s mightiest trading partners, regulated under socialistic ideals, began imploding with uncontrollable spending, borrowing, and debt. By 2010, their circumstances were so desperate they made a last ditch attempt to rescue their excessive welfare entitlement programs with loans, bailouts, and austerity programs. Europe’s highly touted dream of “with socialism, we can do it better,” became painful proof that they couldn’t.

History has noted that after the socialists finally got control in their countries and took charge, their leaders had to kill at least 130 million people to establish their socialist forms of government. After America broke free from England, how many did its leaders kill to establish its form of government, its Constitutional Republic? None.

Such examples show that socialism in the “here and now” never achieves the beautiful promise, the dream, the pathway to a different life as suggested by Lennon’s Imagine. They also show that socialism is incapable of exerting innovation and creativity to solve any of society’s problems. Today’s socialists don’t know how to improve people’s lives. The only outcome that emerges from their abstract dream of “imagine all the people living for today” is the consolidation of power into the leaders, the creation of an upper class of elitists, the coronation of rulers who reap with force a rich harvest from the labors of the powerless masses, all in the name of fairness.

The Mechanics of Socialism

Socialists have just one main goal: putting themselves in charge.

There are two ways they achieve this. The first is to quickly wipe out an existing culture with a revolution or a civil war. And then? And then, Marx declared, “shall I stride through the wreckage a creator!”5 Marx truly believed he could recreate the world in his own image, but he died with nothing more than some bad ideas used later to justify killing people.

The second is by convincing the people to vote away protected rights, or at least refuse to challenge the loss of a right. From that process, those who claim to know best ultimately take final control.

Either way, the end goal of socialism remains the same: control.

The Seven Pillars of Socialism

There are seven goals or processes used to socialize a nation. Knowing what these are will forewarn wise people, and prepare them to recognize socialism as it develops so they may take preventative action. We call these characteristics the Seven Pillars of Socialism.

Pillar #1—ALL POWERFUL RULER. A ruler is quick to conquer the world but slow to conquer himself, and therein lies all the trouble. With a fistful of utopian plans, the new ruler feels empowered to change things his way. That is why the socialists’ first and most important goal is to enthrone their choice as the all-powerful ruler. This can be an individual or a group. The ruler operates according to Ruler’s Law (like a king) and will neither bow to the people’s will nor obey any written law. It is government by the ruler’s fancy and whim.

When the ruler begins ignoring existing law or a constitution to make his own laws, when he bypasses parliaments or any consortium of representatives and exerts powers he is not authorized to exert, and no one steps up to challenge or stop him, that is a dangerous sign that socialism has started and Pillar #1 is well underway.

Pillar #2—CASTES OR CLASSES. There are no rulers without slaves. Socialists claim they know best how to make society fair and equal, but as will be shown, just the opposite happens. Under socialism, society must be divided into classes. The upper class consists of party members who receive special privileges as a reward for their loyalty. The middle class is usually a massive bureaucracy of well-paid enforcers—an overlapping maze of rulers, guards and spies who are dispatched to all levels of society. At the bottom are the most abused and least privileged of all: the workers, the peasants, the serfs, the slaves.

When the government grants privileges to some classes and not to others (for example, giving financial advantages, legal benefits, bailouts, unequal tax breaks, or refusing to enforce laws equally), that is a sad sign that socialism has started and Pillar #2 is underway.

Pillar #3—THINGS IN COMMON. Basic socialist doctrine teaches that the ownership of property is the cause of all discord and envy. Therefore, they say, all things must be made equal. But that’s not all. Private ownership must eventually be eliminated altogether. Socialists are not consistent with how this part works. Some say a house and car may be privately owned, while others say they should be leased from the government for the duration of one’s job or life. In centuries past, this “commonality” has gone so far as having wives and children in common.

When the government imposes graduated taxes, nationalizes basic services, confiscates property for the common good, continually raises taxes, gives away entitlements, and invents other creative ways to take from the “haves” and give to the “have-nots,” this is a sign that socialism has started and Pillar #3 is underway.

Pillar #4—REGULATION. Total control requires total regulation. By issuing a regular stream of new laws and requirements, the Rulers control all economic activities and production. Too much broccoli? Reassign the acreage. Too many babies? Stop the pregnancies (see China’s one-child policy). Too many construction workers falling off ladders? Issue a ream of requirements on the proper manufacture and use of ladders. Too much wheat forcing prices down? Pay farmers to stop growing it so prices go up. People polluting the world at will and spoiling the view? Impose rules that drive polluters out of business and exercise eminent domain to confiscate real estate as protected sanctuaries. Bad unemployment numbers? Fire the statisticians and replace them with loyal messengers.

When government can impose laws without the legislature or the people involved, and sues States or other subordinated governments to get its way, that means socialism has started and Pillar #4 is heavily underway.

Pillar #5—FORCE. In socialism, all human activity is restrained or compelled to action with the use of force—penalties, fines, restrictions, “catch-22” laws, prison, and a multitude of fees and taxes. Under Ruler’s Law, supreme force must eventually centralize in the hands of the Rulers.

When government begins using force to violate basic rights of property, privacy, and the pursuit of happiness, and the people are powerless to stop it, then Pillar #5 is underway. When that force becomes deadly and the people are fearful of the government, they have landed on the expeditious path toward socialism through the fiery furnace of communism as advanced by Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

Pillar #6—INFORMATION CONTROL. Information is a powerful weapon for social control. It is used to win support from the masses, to teach them that the old way is bad and the new way is good, and to bolster claims that the regime is doing a good job. A regime will falsify economic data to sway decision-making in the regime’s favor. It perpetuates its hold on the culture by disseminating its messages through outlets it can control such as news sources, the media, entertainment outlets, textbooks and classroom discussions.

When a government separates the currency from precious metals to hide its true value, or dictates what news stories are broadcast, or mandates what textbooks are used in schools, or recasts numbers about job growth, unemployment, national output, international trade, etc., to its favor, then socialism has started and Pillar #6 is underway.

Pillar #7—VESTED RIGHTS. It is important for socialism’s success to eliminate any ideas about natural rights, to jeer and ridicule them out of existence. Only government-sanctioned rights may exist in a socialistic world. That way, the ruling body may withhold or redefine rights for the purpose of serving the needs of the selected classes at the expense of the others. Recent examples include the IRS targeting conservative groups to keep liberal factions in power; Argentina and Portugal confiscating billions in private pension funds to pay off government debts; the Islamic Brotherhood killing Christians in a genocide of religious purification; the Department of Justice refusing to prosecute certain criminals; the NSA committing unreasonable searches and seizures of electronic information and communications; and more.

When a government selectively protects some rights and ignores others, especially property rights, then socialism has started and Pillar #7 is underway.

Government Force to Control and Change Society

Socialists can’t agree on what they want. Most of them will defend one or several of the seven pillars as necessary evils to help humanity achieve its greatest capacities. They promise that the suffering and long wait for prosperity will all be worth it—someday.

Other socialists see it differently. They brag that the final outcome of socialism is an exciting unknown. They predict that when socialism is fully unleashed, mankind’s economic well-being will evolve naturally until society reaches a perfect harmony of balance, fairness and prosperity that is too fantastic to even imagine.

Whatever form or scheme the socialists choose to gain power and get their way, the best definition of socialism that emerges to describe its purposes, its mechanics, and its dreams, is this:

Socialism is government force to control and change society.

Chapter 3: How Much Force?

Governments need force, but the people need control.

One of the brilliant contributions by America’s Founding Fathers was a new way of looking at political power. Their idea can be illustrated with a yardstick serving as a scale, a sliding scale of political power. To the far left they put Ruler’s Law, or all political power—complete control. On the opposite end, to the far right, they put anarchy, or too little government power, no law, total anarchy, and mob rule—no control at all.

Where do the majority of governments fit on this sliding scale? Most are on the left side, the side of Ruler’s Law. That is because, for most of history, governments have used lethal force to violate human rights. These include communists, totalitarians, monarchists, fascists, socialists, dictators, emperors, chiefs, generals, Fabian-socialists, demagogs, tyrants, military juntas, social democrats, Christian socialists, parliamentary republicans, single-party governments, or any other form that denies the people their direct control over their government.

Governments that are too weak, or countries with no government at all, take a seat toward the right. This is mob rule. Examples include the shallow Articles of Confederation, the bloodthirsty mobs during the French revolution, the 20 years of no central government in Somalia, the anarchy and mob rule of a leaderless Egypt in 2013, etc. The Articles of Confederation came close to causing mob rule in America because its young government didn’t have enough force to maintain peace and order.

These weak regimes are examples of how too little power breeds chaos, lawlessness, loss of life, loss of property, destruction, and no means to stop people from warring with each other. The biggest mob always wins and the smaller mobs must acquiesce or be killed.

The perfect center or balancing point between all force and no force is difficult to achieve. The best solution ever invented is the U.S. Constitution. It gave Americans a carefully crafted system of bottom-to-top representation, checks and balances, and strict control over the government’s use of force.

The Constitution has not only protected the people’s unalienable rights, but it allowed for maximum expression of their freedoms inside a structure of brilliantly placed boundaries. These boundaries may be called liberty. You may have the freedom to swing your fist, but you’re not at liberty to hit my nose.

The Constitution provided the perfect balance between all force and no force. Its principles tapped into eternal laws that all other forms failed to embrace. It built the mightiest nation in history and spread its powerful ideas to help bring freedom to billions of others.

So, what is it about Ruler’s Law that creates so much discord and death and misery in the world? Why didn’t Ruler’s Law ever work?

Ruler’s Law

Ruler’s Law has been the default form of government for billions of people over thousands of years. The Founding Fathers identified ten major elements of Ruler’s Law that were being wielded like a bludgeon in the hands of King George and his monarchial administration:6

1. Bully Tactics: Authority under Ruler’s Law is nearly always put in place by force, violence, and conquest.

2. Might Makes Right: All sovereign power is considered to be in the hands of the conquerors or their descendants.

3. Classes: The people are not treated equally, but are divided into classes, and are looked upon as subjects of the king.

4. No Private Property: The entire country is considered to be the property of the ruler who speaks of it as his “realm.”

5. Powerless Masses: The thrust of government power is from the top down, not from the people upward.

6. No Rights: The people have no unalienable rights. The king giveth and the king taketh away.

7. Flip-Floppers: Government is by the whims of the king not by the fixed rule of law. Rulers know that fixed law governs even the king. Therefore, a ruler must prevent and destroy written laws, constitutions, charters, or corpus juris laws that would interfere with his complete power and control.

8. Bench Rulings: The ruler issues edicts that are called “The Law,” and interprets the law whichever way best suits the ruler’s ultimate goals.

9. Adding New Masters: Problems are always solved by issuing more edicts or laws, setting up more bureaus, creating more regulatory agencies, swamping the people with a flood of regulations, and charging the people for these services by continually adding new taxes.

10. Rejecting Freedom: Freedom is never discussed as a solution. The rulers are afraid of the people—they’re afraid the people will take away the power. The rulers do what they can to make the people weak and fully dependent on government for everything.

Could a King Ever Be Trusted?

Ruler’s Law always benefited the ruler and his supporters. The Founders declared that any ruler with kingly power had no place in human society, and no matter what controls were placed upon these leaders, that much power always corrupted them.

Didn’t the Bible promote kings? Deuteronomy tells of the Lord knowing that one day, Israel would demand a king. They would choose to abandon their open society of a theo-democracy, and willingly become subject to the arbitrary whims of a central and all-powerful authority figure.

The Lord knew that it was possible to have a righteous king provided he adhered to God’s law. A “good” king’s traits were outlined in Deuteronomy:7

1. Citizen—He must be a citizen of Israel and not a stranger.

2. Chosen—He should be a person whom “the Lord thy God shall choose.”

3. Circumspect—He should not “multiply horses” (build private armies) which was a common characteristic of heathen kings, especially the extravagant and war-making kings of Egypt.

4. Virtuous—The king was not to “multiply wives.”

5. Thrifty—The king was not to “multiply to himself silver and gold,” which would be at the expense of his people through taxes.

6. Wise—The task of the king was to be a great scholar, judge, general, and righteous policy maker. To do this, he was to have his own personal copy of the law, and he was to “read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them.” In other words, have a constitution, read it often, and rule accordingly.

Could a President Meet the Requirements?

The Founders labored long and hard to instill the Lord’s leadership requirements into the presidency so that America’s executive officer would meet this minimum expectation. As it turned out, very few presidents have measured up to the Lord’s requirements.

The Founders’ Intense Interest in People’s Law

The best alternative to Ruler’s Law and the hope of a Biblical king was a form of government called People’s Law. An early example of its success can be found in the leadership choices by Moses.

Exodus tells about Moses leading Israel—an estimated 600,000 families—from Egypt, sometime between 1490 B.C. and 1290 B.C. With the help of his father-in-law Jethro,8 Moses learned how to organize the Israelites under People’s Law.

Jethro advised Moses to organize the people into small manageable units where everyone had an elected representative, and a vote. He grouped them into families of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands, each with its own representative. At the very top Moses added a council of 70, similar to today’s U.S. Senate.9

This structure provided strong local self-government from the highest to the lowest levels of society. It allowed problems to be solved at the most logical level where personalities and local constraints were best known and understood.

If a local problem could not be solved among the ten families, their leader carried it to the leader of 50 families of which he was a part—and higher as needed. This process of appealing up the chain spared Moses from dealing with a million problems. Only the most severe issues ever reached his desk. “The hard cases they brought to Moses,” Exodus 18:26 says, “but every small matter they judged themselves.”

People’s Law and Natural Law

The Founders identified a number of principles from Moses’ experiences that led them to pinpoint the characteristics of good government under the natural principles of People’s Law—

1. Self-Government The people organized themselves to be self-governing, not servants of a king. They were jealous about their liberty. “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land,” Moses declared, “and unto all the inhabitants thereof.”10

2. Self-Policing: A strong code of virtue and morality was always taught and encouraged. This was a brilliant tactic for self-policing. If the people’s hearts were governed by themselves, they had no need for more masters to do it for them.

3. Free Elections: The adults were all organized into small units, with everyone having a voice in all matters, and a vote. All leadership was selected by consent of the people.11

4. Local Rule: Local government was strongly emphasized.

5. Gold Standard: Their money was reliable, based on gold and silver. They had a uniform system of weights and measures.12

6. Property: The land was the people’s, not the government’s.

7. Private Rights Are Sacred: Life and private property rights were protected for each lawful individual.

8. No Arbitrary Laws: All laws had to be approved by the people or their representatives before they were enacted.13

9. Fairness Under the Law: People were presumed innocent until proven guilty.14 Justice was based on giving reparations to the victim, not to the government.15

10. People in Control: The power of government originated with the will of the people upward. Only in times of crises, such as war, could the government exert power from the top down.

11. Written Law: The government had to comply with the written laws—a constitution. It could not make up laws or ignore certain laws of its choosing.

This carefully balanced system allowed the Israelites to transfer political power from one administration to the next without a massive uprising or bloodbath as was typical for other tyrannical cultures.

Anglo-Saxons Lived the Israelite System

A second example of a culture living under People’s Law is the Anglo-Saxons. When Thomas Jefferson first learned the Anglo-Saxons had practiced People’s Law, he was so excited that he decided to learn their language so he could read their original writings himself.

The Anglo-Saxons came from the Black Sea area in the first century B.C., and built settlements all across Northern Europe. They entered Britain around A.D. 450, at the behest of the king of Kent. Hengist and Horsa were the first, settling their families in the south to help guard the frontiers and borderlands. They multiplied, prospered, and eventually took over the island. They renamed the land Anglo-land, or Engle-land, or England.

The Anglo-Saxons embraced the Israelite’s form of government and practiced it for centuries with great success. Unfortunately, about A.D. 700-750, corruption crept in and eventually things fell apart.

Jefferson took these ancient ideas as a great breath of fresh air. He encouraged others to use these successful ideas in the new American government. “Are we not better for what we have hitherto abolished of the feudal system,” he wrote in 1776. “Has not every restitution of the ancient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the eighth century?”16

Human history is thick with Ruler’s Law and the seven pillars of socialism. One of the reasons this mayhem has continued is because succeeding generations have failed to pass along knowledge about People’s Law and the universal gift of unalienable rights.

Chapter 4: What Is A Right?

There are two kinds of rights—one is eternal, the other is temporary.

To understand socialism is to first understand human rights.

A “right” is a legal or ethical entitlement. The Founding Fathers identified two basic rights: (1) those vested by the government, and (2) those natural or unalienable rights that are gifts from the Creator. Many people confuse the two, thinking that some parts of life are simply theirs because, well, because it’s their right.

Vested rights are granted by the government. They can be revoked as easily as they are granted. That doesn’t automatically make vested rights bad. Quite the contrary, they serve many important purposes.

Vested rights include the right to operate a car, build a house, patent an idea, drive on a road, practice medicine, cross borders, participate in health insurance, buy a piece of ground, copyright music, sell paintings, start a business, go fishing, etc.

Vested rights are the rules that allow people to participate and interact together without killing each other in the process. If certain rules and regulations are not met, the people empower the government to revoke the vested rights and punish or imprison the violator in order to keep the peace.

To a socialist’s way of thinking, all rights are given by the government for precisely that purpose—to revoke them as the case may be. For example, when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia beginning in 1917, one of the first unalienable rights to be converted to a vested right, and then cancelled in one fell swoop, was the right to property. The Bolsheviks issued a land decree, one of 190 issued in the first six months, that ordered there could be no private ownership of land. Land could not be sold, leased or mortgaged, and eventually, all private land was confiscated by the government.

Natural Rights Have Three Parts

On the other hand, natural rights, or unalienable rights, are universal and established by the Creator. Every person is born with them, and they may not be revoked or legislated away. They frequently are revoked, but governments have no moral authority to do so. The struggle for freedom is the struggle to exercise unalienable rights.

An unalienable right has three parts.

1. It is universal. It applies equally to every living soul.

2. It imposes no obligation on another person. It doesn’t infringe on the rights of other people or impose on them.

3. It carries the duty to use that right respectfully. Rights must not be misused to harm others except in the defense of moral law.

Therefore, health care is not a natural right because it imposes on doctors, nurses, pharmaceutical manufacturers, etc. For that imposition, people compensate by paying a fee to get the services. If a person can’t pay, the provider is not obligated to provide a thing—at least, not in a free country. When health-care providers receive payment, they are motivated to continue providing the service.

If one person imposes on another, there must be compensation of some kind. It is a person’s unalienable right to be compensated, as described next.

The Eight Rights

There are eight basic unalienable rights or categories of rights. All eight are necessary for freedom. Remove any one of them, and the remainder quickly fall. Socialism cannot take control of a society where these personal rights are protected.

Right #1—Independent individuals.

The individual human being is the smallest minority, the single most important entity upon which all else is created, built, and focused. The individual is a sovereign, self-standing unit of creation with unalienable rights to his own life. Individuals are not born as commodities to be consumed by society—it is society that is built upon the independent individual. To protect society, first protect the individual.17

Socialism degrades the independent human to an anonymous, faceless insect dependent on the edicts of the community to survive. That is why communist leaders care so little about human life: What’s a million dead if it helps the 100 million stay alive?

Right #2—Choice.

By definition, an independent entity has free will—he or she is capable of making choices.18 Choosing wisely or foolishly is a measure of a person’s level of experience and ability to judge. There are always consequences for choices, and avoiding negative consequences is everyone’s constant challenge. Incentives play an important role in making choices, and the responsibility attached to this right is to never make choices that violate the same moral rights of others.

Under socialism, all choices are controlled so that they will benefit the rulers and keep the people’s will checked and under control.

Right #3—Property.

Property is the defining attribute of existence. A person’s body is his or her first piece of wholly owned and controlled property. A person must work to support his existence, and that labor produces private property. Deny people their property, and you deny them their lives.19

Without property, there can be no freedom. Private property is how individuals express their choices.20 People who are denied their property are called slaves—or ghosts.

Socialists believe property is the root of all human problems. They deny people the freedom to own property, and claim it for themselves, to distribute according to their wise and wonderful plan of equality and fairness.

Right #4—Association.

Freedom of association means that people may join together with others who share common interests to promote, defend, study, and express those interests without interference from the state or anyone else. The Founders believed this freedom was the strongest prevention of centralized power.21

Socialists won’t allow unauthorized meetings because discontent and rebellion can grow and overthrow the rulers. Groups must be tightly watched and controlled in a socialist society.

Right #5—Equality.

All humans are endowed with the same set of entitlements or rights.22 These are natural rights common to all and may not be arbitrarily violated except in consequence of criminal activity.

Equal rights must not be confused with equal opportunity, equal outcome, or equal things. Opportunities are not equal for everyone, and the outcome or fruits of labor are never guaranteed.

The socialists promise equal things for all, but this is impossible in every way, although it sounds alluring and many fall for it.

Right #6. Defense.

The right of self-defense is the unalienable right to defend your own life and property, or that of other people.

This includes the right to use deadly force, to use legal procedures such as a law suit, to express an opinion in a public forum, to use legal representation in the presence of a judge and jury, to use a gun or other weapon, or to use a militia or military power.23

Socialism must deny the right of defense because it allows a person to act in opposition to the rulers, to insist on private choice to protect his or her rights defensively, to raise a rebellion against a dictator—or, to question the declarations of the rulers and to disobey their unlawful writs and rules. Socialist strive to remove all means of self-defense from the people as a means to stay in control.

Right #7—Compassion.

Compassion is the cornerstone of human action. It separates humans from animals. It encourages cooperation and prosperity. Compassion serves to correct flaws in society and allow for progress in spite of human frailties and failings. Compassion is the gentle equalizer of human imperfections.24

Socialism destroys compassion by forcing people to pay welfare by taking more taxes, and people naturally avoid taxes at all costs. This is not compassion. People forced to pay for welfare eventually turn their backs on those in need, thinking that some agency or shelter will “handle it.” Forced compassion is slavery. It dulls people’s sense of caring for others. Without compassion people become as animals, willingly sacrificing the lives of others just to get ahead.

Right #8—FAILURE.

Real freedom means the freedom to fail. Failure is life’s greatest teacher—it exposes weaknesses for repair. Failure is unforgiving. It exacts a price that can be costly. Sometimes, a person pays with his life to learn that some things are dangerous, risky, or foolish.

Failure is a necessary part of innovation and creation. It teaches people tenacity and perseverance. It encourages invention and cooperation, patience and understanding. It can be discouraging, painful, frustrating, and costly—but it teaches, and therefore, advances society. It is an unalienable right to fall flat on our faces.25

Socialism seeks to eliminate failure by building safety nets at every level of society. It answers the call of pain and misery with massive tax-funded supports. These government-supplied safety nets always thwart the natural consequences of life. Nothing is permanently advanced by this—a class of dependency is created, and no economy in the world can sustain entitlements for very many decades before running out of money, creativity, and bailouts.

“The Individual Has Reigned Long Enough”

Protected individual rights prevent the rulers from abusing the ruled. For centuries the socialists have been calling for abolishing protected individual rights, calling them outmoded, ineffective, selfish, greedy, rudely self-centered, and harmful to everybody else. Such name calling is the socialists’ attempt to remove the last and strongest obstacle standing in their way of total control.

• G. Brock Chisholm (1896-1971): “To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas...”26
• Karl Marx (1818-1883): “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”27
• Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979): Marcuse said that Freud’s most important contribution to understanding humans was to undermine “one of the strongest ideological fortifications of modern culture—namely, the notion of the autonomous individual.”28
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980): “I believe that the thinking of the group is where the truth is. ... I always considered group thinking to be better than thinking alone. ...I don’t believe a separate individual to be capable of doing anything.”29
• Louis Baudin (1887-1964), writing about the Inca, “Life itself was torn out of that geometrical and sad empire, where everything occurred with the inevitability of fatum. ... The Indian lost his personality.”30 (fatum—fate, destiny, doom, lot, etc.)
• Dom Deschamps (1716-1774) envisioned how his perfect world with “identical morals would make, so to say, one man of all men and one woman of all women. I mean by this that ultimately they would resemble each other more than animals of the same species.”31 He further proposed banishing “all terms presently used to express our good and bad qualities, even all terms unnecessarily distinguishing us from other things.”32
• Lester F. Ward (1841-1913). In 1893, Ward called for a revolution against the individual. “The individual has reigned long enough. The day has come for society to take its affairs into its own hands and shape its own destinies. The individual has acted as best he could. He has acted in the only way he could. With a consciousness, will, and intellect of his own he could do nothing else than pursue his natural ends. ... Society should learn its great lesson from him, should follow the path he has so clearly laid out that leads to success.”33

  By eliminating the individual, a new society is created, a society of the anonymous human being. An important tool for destroying individual rights and promoting “group-think” is to deploy the clever abuse of one of mankind’s most basic generators of conflict: Envy.

Chapter 5: Force and Envy

Force is the lazy’s man’s shortcut, envy is his rationale.

Socialism is a blatant contradiction. It sets out to accuse the world of inequality, injustice, and lack of freedom. Yet history shows, once socialism is put in place, it imposes a far greater inequality, injustice, and lack of freedom than that which existed before—all in the name of fairness.

To achieve fairness, socialists must crush the human attributes that create inequality. One way they achieve this is by appealing to the most base and common human weaknesses of envy and force—an appeal to the primitive state that smothers the highest ideals, the most sophisticated and multifaceted human qualities of choice, compassion, and innovation. The philosopher John Locke said these positive qualities that envy sets out to destroy are actually a reflection of the very attributes of God.34

Sticks and Stones Will Break My Bones ...

Calling on envy to justify force is an easy sell for most people. Envy appeals to the brutish attributes of the “natural man.” Stirring up feelings of greed, envy, jealousy, and arrogance is the socialist’s main tool for proselytizing.

Stirring up Envy—Hillary Clinton: “The rich are not paying their fair share in any issue.”35

Stirring up Envy—Barack Obama: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”36

Stirring up Envy—Barack Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen.”37

Stirring up Envy—Barack Obama: “It’s not that I want to punish your success, I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success too.”38

Stirring up Envy—Hillary Clinton: “Too many people have made too much money off of eliminating opportunities for caring for people instead of expanding those.”39

Stirring up Envy—Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.”40

Stirring up Envy—Howard Dean: “We know that no one person can succeed unless everybody else succeeds.”41

Stirring up Envy—Michelle Obama: “The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”42

Forgotten and Left Out

These statements appeal to the envious side of the “have-nots.” It tells the “have-nots” that their place in life is not their fault, not their doing, and not their responsibility. To fix it, to make things fair, to satiate the demands of envy, the socialists use government force. Only government force lets them control society so they can take from the real producers, the “haves,” and give unearned riches and benefits to the “have-nots.” It’s all about government force.

Threatening Force—Maxine Waters: “And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be all about socializing—uh, uh-um—will be about ... basically ... taking over and the government, running all of your companies.”43

Threatening Force—Joe Biden: “You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.”44

Threatening Force—Jim Moran: “Because we have been guided by a Republican administration who believes in the simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it and they have an antipathy to our means of redistributing wealth.”45

Threatening Force—Bill Clinton: [Speaking about crime-ridden slum areas] “A lot of people say there’s too much personal freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.”46

Threatening Force—Bill Clinton: “If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government’s ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.”47

Threatening Force—Hillary Clinton: “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”48

Threatening Force—John Dingell: “The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re passing legislation [national health care] that will cover 300 million American people in different ways, it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”49

Threatening Force—Barack Obama: “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”50

Threatening Force—Jan Schakowsky: “You don’t deserve to keep all of it [private money] and it’s not a question of deserving because what government is, is those things that we decide to do together.”51

Threatening Force—Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy, on banning incandescent light bulbs: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”52

Threatening Force—Steven Chu on forcing Americans to buy fuel efficient cars and move closer to work: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”53

Threatening Force—Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, on forcing a ban on eating meat: “Somewhat more broadly, I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law.”54

Socialism is Force

According to the socialists, force is a necessary evil for the simple reason that people are more interested in their own pursuits than the needs of the whole. Therefore, people must be forced to care for the whole, they must be forced into socialism. Consider a few of the instances where the freedom to choose has been replaced by government force disguised as legitimate uses of the legislative process—

• Forcing people to give to the poor (taxes).
• Forcing people to save for retirement (social security).
• Forcing people to hire incompetent employees (EEO rules).
• Forcing people to stop smoking (taxes and regulations).
• Forcing people to be compassionate (taxes).
• Forcing people to use one kind of light bulb (regulations).
• Forcing the rich to pay more taxes; force the poor to pay none (graduated income taxes).
• Forcing people to pay for unrelated projects a thousand miles from home (redistribution of the wealth).
• Forcing children to attend school, or certain schools (forced busing and government mandates).
• Forcing people to bail out bad businesses (TARP and so-called stimulus bailouts).
• Forcing people to solve other nation’s problems (taxes, wars, and foreign aid).
• Forcing people to produce a particular type of car (EPA and OSHA regulations).
• Forcing people to cater to coercive monopolies (post office, utilities, railroads, cable television, water, etc.).
• Forcing people to support media control and regulation, and publicly supported outlets—and the list goes on and on.

  What’s Wrong With That?

  In the opinion of many millions, the above list makes good sense. Why not use government resources for these purposes? It’s worked so far, hasn’t it?

  The Founders understood that granting government the power to meddle in private life, to the extent listed above, is a two-edged sword. Government is a fearful master, George Washington warned, and when given too much power, it will turn quickly on its own supporters and force on them somebody’s idea of “good” whether the population approves of it or not. The Founders wanted the decisions about “good” left to the states, where the people could exert tighter control on the use of force, and adjust the laws according to their individual needs and populations.

  For example, suppose the regime in power is opposed to eating meat. They declare that cruelty to animals exists at all stages of the meat production process. They say every aspect of the meat industry contributes to greenhouse gases and global warming.55 They supply charts and statistics and a multitude of studies proving hundreds of negative impacts on personal health.

  The coup de gras comes when a host of government experts provide an estimate of meat’s impact on people’s arteries, and likewise, on the country’s insurance and health-care system. The only viable solution, they say, is to reduce consumption of meat by imposing crippling higher taxes at every level—from the rancher’s grazing fields, to the butcher, and finally to the restaurant.

  This fictitious scenario is not that far from reality. In 2013, Sweden’s Agricultural Board proposed a tax on meat because meat production uses a lot of resources.56 Australia imposed a carbon tax on meat producers in 2012, forcing businesses to pay $23 per ton of meat for their CO2 emissions. One plant alone was bracing for an additional $2 million a year in new costs.57 And, like all other movements to control people and force them to change, information control plays the key roll. In 2012, for example, a report in the U.K. declared that if everyone changed to a vegetarian or vegan diet, the U.K.’s greenhouse gas emissions could be cut in half.58 Excluded from these government mandates is any consideration for private innovation, free-market solutions, or freedom to deal with such issues outside of government intrusion.

  Other examples of government force are taxes or fines to reduce alcohol and tobacco use, to force people to wear helmets and seat belts, taxes to reduce use of tanning salons, and an attempt in New York to restrict sizes of drinks to 16 liquid ounce servings.

  Along the same lines of “government must fix all bad choices,” a few states have taken up the responsibility of controlling obesity among their numbers. As poorly crafted as those laws are, at least they are on the state level where the population has more direct control. But on the federal level, the original U.S. Constitution prohibited Congress from such activities, or from extracting taxes for such purposes (see Article 1.8). Yet, the federal government continually does things like this anyway, ignoring the Constitution.

Chapter 6: Using the “Eight Rights” As a Test

How may a person detect socialism without being an expert?

Every action by a government may be tested for principled behavior by asking this simple question: Does the new law violate an unalienable right? If it does, that law is bad for a nation, and will lead to difficulties as time passes. Such laws should be challenged immediately.

For example, the U.S. adopted national health care in 2010. Going down the list of eight rights and applying each to the new health-care law will help frame the act as being something wonderfully liberating, or something arduous and despotic—

Right #1—Independent individuals. Does national health care protect my right to be independent, and beholden to no one? No, it forces me into a class of dependency on the government.

Right #2—Choice. Does national health care protect my right to choose? No, it forces me to accept the government’s decisions about providers, levels of care, facilities, options, etc.

Right #3—Property. Does national health care protect my property rights? No, it forces me to surrender private property (taxes) to support what the government orders me to support—not what I choose.

Right #4—Association. Does national health care protect my right to associate? No, it violates my right to associate with my choice of doctor or health-care facility.

Right #5—Equality. Does national health care protect everyone equally? No, not everyone is covered, and some people may opt out for various reasons. Others with political connections, such as Congress, are granted waivers and exemptions. It forces the “haves” to pay more so that the “have-nots” can have health-care coverage. This is classical socialism at work, and it always destroys its host.

Right #6—Defense. Does national health care protect my right to defend myself against this imposition? No.

Right #7—Compassion. Does national health care protect my right to practice compassion? Not for some. Higher taxes will undermine philanthropic donations, and prevent doctors and nurses from volunteering their services because of regulations, constraints, allocation of resources, and use of personal time, among other impositions.

Right #8—FAILURE. Does national health care protect my freedom to fail? No. Government health care installs a safety net. It creates the mind-set in people that “society owes me.” It ruins people’s motivation to change their lives, to work so they can afford private health-care services, or live so they don’t fall to illness, or to self-treat themselves before spending funds to see the doctor. Those are basic acts of personal responsibility that are destroyed by free or coerced national health care. In addition, medical practitioners lose motivation to be more efficient, to be more cost effective, and to be more innovative. The quality of care and the excitement to invent always suffer when a powerful profit motive is removed.

By asking the preceding eight questions, a person may gain a quick understanding about any government act, and learn which of the unalienable rights are being violated. This equips an individual to better consider, Is this good or bad? To the socialists, government control is always good. They never entertain freedom as a possible solution. They promise fairness, but national health care isn’t about equal rights or helping the needy or fairness. It is, and always has been, about control.

Chapter 7: The Appeal of Socialism

How could a great scientist or anyone with so much education fall for socialism?

The appeal of socialism is not just the many things that socialists are against (unfairness, inequality, etc.) but is also about those things for which they stand, the things they promise.

Throughout history there has been a class of certain educated individuals who believe that direct control over individuals and human nature is the sure path to peace and prosperity. Those who have not delved into the history of such control don’t realize it won’t work, it hasn’t worked, and by its very nature, it can never work. Nevertheless, socialism’s many promises are deliciously tempting—

Q. Can I stop worrying about my future?

A. Yes, socialism covers everything. “Under capitalism and the previous systems,” says the Socialist Party of Canada, “people have good reason to worry about tomorrow—they can lose their jobs, or be injured, or grow old, and need a cushion of wealth to fall back on. In a socialist society, everyone is entitled to have their needs met. They won’t be kicked out onto the street, or forced to give up the pleasures of life. There will be no poverty. The ‘cushion’ will be cooperatively provided by all.”59

Q. My bosses are rich, is that fair?

A. No, and socialism will make it fair. “The vast majority of workers are not paid according to the full value of what they produce,” The Marxist Encyclopedia declares. “If all workers in a workplace were paid this full value, then the boss would have nothing to survive on, since labour is the source of all value!”60

Q. What if I want a house but can’t afford one?

A. You get one anyway. “Houses and flats would be rent-free,” says The World Socialist Party, “with heating, lighting and water supplied free of charge. Transport, communications, health care, education, restaurants and laundries would be organized as free public services. There would be no admission charge to theatres, cinemas, museums, parks, libraries and other places of entertainment and recreation. The best term to describe this key social relationship of socialist society is free access, as it emphasizes the fact that in socialism it would be the individual who would decide what his or her individual needs were.”61

Q. I’m poor, I need food and a cell phone, can you help?

A. Don’t worry, it’s no longer about money. “In socialism,” the World Socialist Party says, “people would obtain the food, clothes and other articles they needed for their personal consumption by going into a distribution center and taking what they needed without having to hand over either money or consumption vouchers.”62

Q. May I still buy things?

A. Stop thinking in terms of “market”! The Socialist Party of Great Britain explains: “In a socialist society there will be no market, no buying and selling, and no money. Exchange can have no function where everything belongs to everyone. All people will have free access to the goods and services available.”63

Q. Can I just walk in and get a flat-screen TV and baby food?

A. Of course! It’s easy. “In a socialist society, there will be no money and no barter,” says WorldSocialism.org. “Goods will be voluntarily produced, and services voluntarily supplied to meet people’s needs. People will freely take the things they need.” 64

Q. Can I take all I want from the stores?

A. Well ... only according to your needs, or else we run out. The Socialist Party of Canada explains, “People are different and have different needs. Some needs will be more expensive (in terms of resources and labour needed to satisfy them) than others.”65

Q. What if people want too much?

A. Then it won’t work. WorldSocialism.org explains that “In a socialist society ‘too much’ can only mean ‘more than is sustainably produced.’ If people decide that they (individually and as a society) need to over-consume then socialism cannot possibly work.”66

Q. Am I forced to participate?

A. It’s voluntary. The World Socialist Party says, “Work in socialist society could only be voluntary since there would be no group or organization in a position to force people to work against their will.”67

Q. What if I don’t want to go to work?

A. You must work, but you don’t have to. “People will have to work, but it will be voluntary,” says WorldSocialism.org. “If people didn’t work society would obviously fall apart. To establish socialism the vast majority must consciously decide that they want socialism and that they are prepared to work in socialist society.”68

Q. Yes, but really, am I forced or not?

A. Well, on second thought... Super-socialist George Bernard Shaw takes exception to the World Socialist Party: “You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not,” Shaw wrote in 1928. “If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.”69 [Was Shaw joking? In the decades after his statement was made, the USSR and China killed an estimated 130 million people to force socialism and communism on all their citizens, especially on all those who resisted it.]

Q. Is it wrong to want things under socialism?

A. Only if it somehow hurts others. The World Socialist Movement says, “Socialism will be a society in which satisfying an individual’s self interest is the result of satisfying everyone’s needs. It is enlightened self-interest.”70

Q. What if I don’t want my neighbor’s cows?

A. They’re yours anyway. Paul Hubert Casselman says in the Labor Dictionary that “[Socialism is] an economic theory which holds that ownership of property should be in the group and not in the individuals who make up the group. Collectivism may be partial or complete.”71

Q. May I stake a claim and be on my own?

A. No, we’re in this together. “[Socialism] therefore aims at the reorganization of Society,” says Anne Fremantle, “by the emancipation of Land and Industrial Capital from individual ownership, and the vesting in them in the community for the general benefit ... for the transfer to the community ... of all such industries as can be conducted socially.”72

Q. Can I still save a little to get ahead?

A. No, it’s no longer about you. Norman Thomas said, “[Socialism is] control of economic processes for human use rather than for individual profit.”73

Q. Does socialism free me from religion?

A. Yes, a glorious freedom. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,” Karl Marx said, “the sentiment of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”74

Q. Doesn’t religion ensure a peaceful, calm society?

A. No, that is an illusion said Karl Marx: “The democratic concept of man is false, because it is Christian. The democratic concept holds that ... each man is a sovereign being. This is the illusion, dream, and postulate of Christianity.”75

Q. Will the government still persecute me?

A. No, there will be no government. “The state, then, is ... simply a product of society at a certain stage of evolution,” Friedrich Engels said. “It is the confession that this society has become hopelessly divided against itself, has entangled itself in irreconcilable contradictions which it is powerless to banish.”76

Q. Does socialism free me from the Bible?

A. Yes, it will free you at last. “With him (the communist) the end justifies the means,” said William Z. Foster, an avowed communist. “Whether his tactics be ‘legal’ or ‘moral’ or not, does not concern him, so long as they are effective. He knows that the laws as well as the current code of morals are made by his mortal enemies . . . Consequently, he ignores them insofar as he is able, and it suits his purposes. He proposed to develop, regardless of capitalist conceptions of ‘legality,’ ‘fairness,’ ‘right,’ etc., a greater power than his capitalist enemies have . . .”77

Vladimir Lenin summarized it: “We say that our morality is wholly subordinated to the interest of the class-struggle of the proletariat.”78

Friedrich Engels concluded that, “We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatever . . .”79

Q. What does Einstein think about socialism?

A. He likes it. “A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community,” Albert Einstein explained, “would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child.”80

Q. Could I be arrested for stealing?

A. There’s no such thing as ‘stealing.’ Engels wrote that the Ten Commandments, in particular, #8 “Thou Shalt Not Steal” and #10 “Thou Shalt Not Covet,” were examples of the exploiters forcing respect for private property onto the masses. “Thou shalt not steal,” Engels said. “Does this law thereby become an eternal moral law? By no means.”81

Q. Are unions part of socialism?

A. Yes, a union is democracy in the workplace—one worker, one vote, regardless of who owns the business. The Marxist Encyclopedia answers: “The vast majority of workers in the world are over-worked: required to put in more hours than is socially necessary in order to create profits. ... Unions can force the boss to hire more workers, instead of constantly increasing the burdens on existing employees. The union can also ensure that in emergency cases where someone must work over time, they are fairly compensated for (contrary to popular understanding—overtime compensation is compulsory only for unskilled workers in a handful of countries).”82

Q. Will there be any state, province, or national borders?

A. Not any more. “According to its basic principles,” socialist Eric Fromm said, “the aim of socialism is the abolition of national sovereignty, the abolition of any kind of armed forces, and the establishment of a commonwealth of nations.”83 “[Socialism] insists on a comradeship of the workers which transcends racial or nationalist lines,” said Norman Thomas. “It is therefore international in outlook.”84

Q. What if I change my mind about living in socialism?

A. Depends on whose socialism is used. The Socialist Party of Canada tries to have it both ways: “Those who disagree will be treated like anyone else. If a person or group decided to start promoting a return to capitalism, or some other class-divided social form, they would be free to do so. If however, a person or group was damaging society (beating people up, or blowing up buildings, etc.) then society will take appropriate action against them.”85

Q. Must there be violence to switch to socialism?

A. It depends on how submissive people are through the transition. Lenin called for a war for power among the masses to impose the dictatorship of the proletariat—“an organization for the systematic use of violence by ... one part of the population against another ... [and then] there will vanish all need for force, for the subjection of one man to another.”86

Q. How does socialism get started?

A. Three simple steps. Engels explained: “By limiting private property in such a way that it gradually prepares the way for its transformation into social property, e.g., by progressive taxation, limitation of the right of inheritance in favor of the state, etc. By employing workers in national workshops and factories and on national estates. By educating all children at the expense of the state.”87

Chapter 8: Sample Fruits of Socialism

The Founding Fathers repeatedly emphasized that national self-government required a high level of personal self-governance. As Benjamin Franklin said, people who become corrupt and vicious “have more need of masters.” Freedom, therefore, can’t exist without a minimum level of personal responsibility. This can’t be forced, it must be a voluntary contribution from the people who want maximum freedom. Here are some samples of issues dealt with by government edict that could be better handled with personal responsibility, freedom and free market innovation—

Socialist Idea: Can’t name your baby

Principle Violated: Freedom to choose

Story: In August 2013, an Israeli couple living in Brussels for three years, was forbidden by City Hall to name their first born, ‘Alma Jerusalem.’ The reason given was that ‘Jerusalem’ was not on the list of approved names. The clerk suggested as an alternative, ‘Bethlehem,’ an approved name, or to contact the Israeli embassy for a written document confirming that ‘Jerusalem’ was a valid name.88 Justification for the list is that it prevents such names as ‘Lucifer,’ ‘Mafia No Fear,’ ‘Queen Victoria,’ ‘Number 16 Bus Shelter,’ among other submissions.

Socialist Idea: No hoarding of food

Principle Violated: Freedom to acquire property

Story: In May 1918, Francis Smith Nash and his wife were charged with violating Section 6 of the U.S. government’s Food Control Act for storing a large supply of flour, sugar, and other foodstuffs in their home.

The Act prevented Americans from storing more than a 30-day supply, an amount that Food Administrator Herbert Hoover deemed a “reasonable one.” The purpose, Hoover said, was to keep the troops overseas supplied. The Nash’s food stash, legally purchased over time, was valued at $1,923.36 ($31,700 in 2012 dollars). For this crime, the judge set their bail at $3,000 ($50,000 in 2012 dollars) each.

To escape punishment Nash tried to distribute the food to charity. The Food Administration said they would prosecute all food hoarders to the fullest extent of the law regardless of a hoarder’s social standing or efforts to dispose of the evidence.89

Socialist Idea: Force recycling of trash

Principle Violated: Freedom to dispose of property

Story: In 2010, Cleveland residents were warned that their curb side trash would soon be monitored to make sure they were recycling. If they didn’t comply, they would be fined $100.90

Trash carts for recyclables were distributed with identification chips and bar codes. City workers started monitoring the activity of all such carts. If a cart was not wheeled to the curb for a few weeks in a row, this gave the Trash Czars automatic permission to dig through the companion trash cart’s contents. Whenever more than 10 percent recyclable waste was discovered, the owners were fined $100.

Chip-embedded carts are in use in other parts of the U.S. and England, and are catching on elsewhere.

Socialist Idea: Ban lemonade stands

Principle Violated: Freedom to try, buy, sell, and fail

Story: In 2010, Julie Murphy was only 7 years old when Multnomah County (Oregon) shut down her lemonade stand for failing to obtain a $120 temporary restaurant license.

A health inspector patrolling the monthly art fair in northeast Portland confronted the girl for failing to produce a proper license and threatened her with a $500 fine.

Nearby booth people told Julie to stand her ground, but two inspectors came back a short time later and forced her to shut down. A growing crowd protested, and Julie started crying while her mother gathered up Julie’s hand-made sign, her bottled water and Kool-Aid, and wheeled it away for home. Eric Pippert from the Oregon public health division vapidly responded with a bland, “Our role is to protect the public.”91 The summer of 2011 also saw half a dozen such cases across the U.S., and dozens more are reported each year.

Socialist Idea: Allow New Black Panthers to threaten voters

Principle Violated: Equal rights and responsibilities

Story: On Election Day 2008, three New Black Panther party members intimidated voters with threats and coercion. They were dressed in military clothing, brandished batons, and stood menacingly outside a Philadelphia polling place. They threatened and verbally harassed black Republicans and whites who came to cast their votes. Their message was clear: vote for Obama or else.

Evidence of the Panthers’ violation of the Voting Rights Act made it an open-and-shut case for President George Bush’s Department of Justice.92 But when President Barack Obama came to power, he appointed Eric Holder as attorney general. Holder dropped the charges after the thugs agreed to a plea deal not to do it again in that same city. The length of the probation? Only a couple of years, just in time to do it all over again for the 2012 elections. The three walked free.

Socialist Idea: National health care—Sweden

Principle Violated: Freedom to choose

Story: In 2010, a bleeding man named “Jonas” who was waiting in a Swedish emergency room took matters into his own hands by sewing up a deep cut in his leg.

“It [waiting] took such a long time,” Jonas told the Sundsvall Tidning Daily.

He said he first went to the regular health clinic, part of the socialized health-care program for which Sweden is so famous—it was closed. He called for help and was told the clinic wasn’t supposed to be closed. That’s when Jonas went to the emergency room of a hospital much farther away, but waited there more than an hour as his wound bled down his leg.

Deciding he had to take some kind of action, he sought out a sterile needle and thread and stitched the wound himself. Hospital staff caught him doing the procedure and reported him to the authorities. The charge was suspicion of arbitrary conduct for having used hospital equipment without authorization.93 Socialism failed Jonas and punished him for disobeying control.

Socialist Idea: National health care—Canada

Principle Violated: Freedom to choose

Story: In July 2010, Christine Handrahan was nine weeks pregnant when she started bleeding. Fearing for her unborn baby’s safety, her husband rushed her to Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s new emergency room.

She sat waiting unattended in a packed waiting room for three hours, with blood seeping out of her jeans and tears of panic rolling down her cheeks. Finally fed up with the wait, the husband pushed her wheelchair back to the parking lot where he helped her into their truck to make a 45-minute drive to Prince County Hospital, where Christine was given the sorry news that she had miscarried.

“Somebody should have cared enough to say, ‘Oh my goodness, you’re going through a miscarriage, do you need some quiet time?’” Christine said. “What bothered me the most was the fact that I had to sit in public going through a miscarriage.”94 Over-taxed national health care in Canada failed Christine.

Socialist Idea: National health care—Britain

Principle Violated: Freedom to choose

Story: Britain’s famed National Health Service (NHS) has been around since 1948, the oldest and most socialized health-care system in the world. Though it has had more than 60 years to sort out the bugs and become lean and efficient, just the opposite has unfolded. It is a bloated, redundant, government-run institution that employs 1.5 million people, is immune from change, and is losing money left and right. With few free-market forces to impose corrections, some real problems have erupted.

• Rushed—2007: A doctor at St. Ann’s Hospital, examining an 18-month-old baby, failed to notice that the child’s back was broken. The baby died two days later. An investigation was squashed by the hospital’s chief administrator. An independent report earlier warned that St. Ann’s Hospital was “clinically risky.”95
• Elder Care—2011: Some 100,000 terminally ill Englanders do not get proper care and run up costs by dying in the hospital instead of at home. New socialist measures are being deployed to grant each patient a pot of money based on circumstances to handle end-of-life expenses. Not mentioned is what happens when the pot of money runs dry.96
• Too Sad to Be Sad—2011: Rachael Dobson, 22, suffering from post-natal depression, was denied access to the U.K.’s NHS support group for post-natal depression sufferers because, they told her, she was too sad.97 Her health visitor referred her to a community practice nurse from the mental health team. That nurse told Rachael to “work through it on your own.”
• Selling Name Lists—2011: Legal firms offering to represent patients in law suits to win damages have been receiving private patient names and phone numbers after the patients leave the hospital. The hospitals denied that names were being sold for profit.98
• Hiding Incompetence—2011: European Union laws prevent Britain from verifying qualifications of foreign doctors. Many European countries refuse to reveal malpractice information, putting patients in England at risk from under-qualified doctors. A recent case involved a German-qualified cosmetic surgeon who accidently gave his 70-year-old patient a tenfold overdose of painkillers in 2008, killing the man. The doctor was found guilty. He moved back to Germany to continue practicing medicine.99
• Incentives to Work—2011: Doctors receiving more money for performing certain treatments tended to ignore other activities that did not lead to extra money, a survey discovered. Quality of care that was not incentivized went down, while rewarded care went up.100
• “The System” Trumps Sanity—2010: A five-year-old girl suffering from 3rd degree burns that required skin grafts was turned away from Coventry’s University Hospital. Her parents were forced to drive her 25 miles to a burn specialist.101
• Meat Market Medicine—2010: A man was left infertile when surgeons removed the wrong testicle. After the mistake was discovered, the doctors had to remove the other, the cancerous one. A hospital spokesman responded with, “The safety of our patients is our number one priority.” A consultant suggested the hospital give clearer instructions on how to mark and verify sites.102
• Star-Struck Sloppy—2010: A British movie star died of cervical cancer because NHS doctors failed to notice a tangerine-sized tumor.103

  The problem with lists such as the preceding is that mistakes happen everywhere, including in private health institutions. For the private sector, however, the impact of sloppy medicine can be devastating. A tainted reputation results in a decline in patronage, lower profits, a wounded ability to grow and modernize. Such pressure typically pushes private groups to bend over backwards to rebuild trust by taking strong action to correct the flaw.

  Government institutions, however, are insulated from those corrective pressures. Whether they are tainted or not, or whether patronage climbs or drops, the tax-funded incomes, supplies, staffing, etc., are never seriously threatened. They just keep going, too busy to improve, unmotivated to change. In nations where tax-funded health care is the only game in town, mistakes don’t draw market pressures for correction. Mediocrity becomes the standard.

  Socialist Idea: Prohibition (1919-1933)

  Principle Violated: Freedom to choose and control property

  Story: Prohibition in the U.S. was the constitutional outlawing of the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcohol to curb the abuse of drinking—“for our own good.” A majority of Americans believed that using force to prevent drinking was a good idea, a principled idea, a constitutional idea. The 18th Amendment barely passed

  The result? People demanded their freedom to choose, and some began a private revolution. Thousands of “speakeasies” or their equivalents sprang up overnight. Underground railroads and black market exchanges began moving illegal goods across the country. Violence, shooting, raids, mobs, fighting, killing, and destruction exploded in the major cities. The idea of forcing people into abstinence was the deployment of socialist ideas of compulsion against human nature in violation of unalienable rights. The whole thing flopped and was repealed.104

  Socialist Idea: Complete Submission to the Master Race

  Principle Violated: All natural rights and freedoms

  Story: Primo Levi was a survivor of Auschwitz, and described in his memoirs the utter brutality of an existence in the concentration camp where life and civilization had been stripped from everyone. He said each inmate was ultimately alone in his heart and mind, although surrounded by hundreds of others. The men could either fight to survive, mentally and emotionally, or give up—“drowning,” as he called it, the easy way out.

  Living was a daily battle, an unending hourly struggle. Those who surrendered their human will and relied on what was given to them became the “drowned.” They soon died from starvation, disease, back-breaking labor, or from the death of hope.

  “Precisely because the lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts we must not become beasts,” Levi wrote. “We must want to survive ... to bear witness.” Their hearts, their minds, and their very human nature remained the one place the Nazis couldn’t reach. The freedom to choose was the freedom to survive.105

  The Historical Record Says It All

  Socialism is structured so that it will never achieve its stated goals. The reason is self-evident: Socialism is a self-perpetuating consumption of other people’s labors, and when those labors run out, the whole system collapses. History shows that when reckless consumption grinds an economy down, the masters compel society forward using whips, chains, cruel force and coercion. And today? Today, the whips and chains are present in the form of fewer rights, less freedom, higher taxes, higher levels of borrowing, and unsustainable liabilities and debt.

  Whenever those who produce the most are not properly compensated, as the free market does, the producers eventually tire of the fruitless endeavors and stop producing—despite the appealing allure of the socialists’ promises. That is human nature at work, and such failings show up everywhere in history, even as far back as Caveman Dad.

  Learning to Recognize Socialism

  1. What are some of the “beautiful promises” that socialism puts forward? What are some of the reasons why people are so intrigued by these?
  2. In John Lennon’s song Imagine he suggests a perfect world with certain changes. Can any of these changes be made without the use of force? Explain.
  3. What appears to be the meaning behind Lennon’s lyrics, “Imagine there’s no heaven” and “no religion, too”? What is Lennon advocating regarding the worship and belief in God?
  4. After the Russians and Chinese fought their revolutionary wars and took over how many people died to establish socialist societies? After the Constitutional Convention, how many Americans died to establish their Constitutional Republic? Why the difference? Explain.
  5. Are the people in communist and socialist nations enjoying the “beautiful” future that the socialists promised them?
  6. Who holds all the political and military power in those socialist nations?
  7. What castes or classes exist in the U.S.? In which class would you consider yourself most closely associated?
  8. Name some services or things that are held “in common” (public monopolies) in the U.S. Can you name private businesses that are successfully competing with any of these?
  9. Name five activities or processes in America that are regulated by the federal government. Do you think the States could do the same job better? Why?
  10. How do you get your news every day? Do you trust those sources? Name some news outlets that you no longer trust because you found them to be biased, or with an ulterior agenda.
  11. Make a list of movies, songs and books that you have encountered that delivered messages opposite to your beliefs and standards. Do these promote freedom and choice, private control over property, freedom to associate? Give examples to support your answer.
  12. Is the media is an effective form of information control? Explain.
  13. Do you feel that any of today’s news outlets have an agenda to promote in one fashion or another, the establishment of Ruler’s Law? Name a few and explain.
  14. Name five elements of Ruler’s Law.
  15. Name five elements of People’s Law.
  16. What are the three parts of an unalienable right? What is a vested right? Which of the two may not be revoked by a morally sound government?
  17. Name your eight unalienable rights or categories of rights. Which of these are being threatened by the government today? Give examples. List a related responsibility for each right.
  18. Is health care an unalienable right? How about eating? Smoking? Employment? Housing? Explain why or why not.
  19. What do socialists stir inside of people to justify the use of force to control and change society?
  20. Do you catch yourself falling for these same tactics (see #19), and find yourself supporting coercive solutions that violate the rights of others, in the name of fairness? In other words, can you admit that sometimes you think like a socialist? Give examples.
  21. What is offered as a good working definition of socialism? Can you improve on that, or craft a more descriptive definition?

• Part II--SOCIALISM IN ANCIENT HISTORY

  “Socialism is a time-released poison pill with a 100 percent success rate.”

Chapter 9: First There Was Force

The earliest records are scant, but they show that socialism in its most raw form existed more than 6,000 years ago.

Some researchers believe that socialism is a natural state of ancient cooperation. They surmise that at the dawn of human history the earliest peoples voluntarily resorted to communal living as a necessary part of staying alive. The theory suggests that only by living in large, strong groups with things in common could the huddled masses procure food and provide mutual protection.

This theory further surmises that the invention of farming and irrigation made food more accessible, and introduced independent living. Researchers speculate this is the period when the concept of private property ownership entered the world, and all the world’s conflicts began—I planted this field, it’s all mine, now get out!

Difficult Questions—If this idea is true—that socialism is natural, and therefore, in harmony with the natural man and, therefore, good—then the “early communal” theory leaves unanswered a number of critical questions: Who assigned the workers to their various labors, or did they all just jump in like bees in a hive? Could people be lazy and not be punished and live off the labors of others? Who directed the distribution of food? What if the director showed favoritism? In times of scarcity, what about the needs of the very young, the sick, or the very old? What was to prevent gangs of bullies rising up at harvest time and taking all that they pleased?106

Caveman Dad—One solution might have been the family—parents directing children to participate in providing food and protection. But that doesn’t resolve the constant risk of other families raiding a village or campground. Hunger awakens the beast in all creation.

It’s a story that may never be known. However, history shows that communal or collectivist living in any setting required leadership directed by someone, and that dictatorship was fraught with the numerous built-in problems of rules, regulations, fairness, obedience, punishment—and the ever-present use of force. Here’s a sampling of the seven pillars of socialism in operation down through history—

Chapter 10: Ancient Sumer, the Earliest Socialists

It’s difficult to peg a start date for Sumer, but many scholars estimate this civilization took form before 4000 B.C.

STORY: Ancient Sumerians built their form of socialism around their temples in a dozen city-states at the south end of today’s Iraq. Eventually there were about 30 large and small cities, some with populations of 10,000 or more. The whole region was known as Sumer. Their prosperity came from intensive year-round cultivation and large-scale irrigation projects. With a reliable source of storable food the people could settle down in one place instead of migrating to greener pastures, as was their ancestors’ custom.

The temples were the center of everyone’s life. The priestly governor (ensi) or king (lugal) was both civic leader and spokesman for the gods. From him came the commands to keep the temple granaries full and the workers tightly organized and busy.

The societies of Sumer were highly stratified: a ruling class with all power; an aristocracy or nobility class that leeched off everyone; and the lowly workers.

Peasants Doing All the Work, As Usual

The common workers were owned by the temple, and their sole purpose in life was to work the lands that supported the temple. Everything necessary to raise food was given to them, including a place to live. They had no private property and couldn’t store or save anything as their own.

The earliest Sumerian cuneiform records don’t indicate many slaves in Sumerian society. The soldiers won plenty of wars, but rarely brought back prisoners—a strong indicator that the defeated foes were executed on the battle field or marched to death camps.

The Central Storehouse

The storehouse was central to everything in the Sumerian cities. The workers’ equipment, the animals, the seed grain, and a monthly sustenance all flowed from the storehouse. Quotas were important. The storehouse got stingy if workers failed to reach the quota. If a harvest came in leaner than what had been ordered, the workers were expected to make up the difference the following year—or suffer accordingly.

Igor Shafarevich provides several good examples of life in ancient civilizations in his book, The Socialist Phenomenon.107 Among those is the Sumerians’ Temple of Bau, built about 2500 B.C. in Lagash. Temple priests controlled the whole region, and were supplied by the “Shub-Iugal,” a workforce that received small land grants and government-issued plows, grain, cattle, yokes, collars, tools, etc. The Shub-Iugal were supervised by chief farmers who monitored all of their labors and free time.

Everything the Bau culture produced had to be given to the storehouse without compensation. Even the skin of a dead animal belonged to Bau. Craftsmen who were bonded to the temple used the skins and other materials to manufacture clothing, tools, artwork, and necessities—all of it surrendered back again to the central storehouse.

Other industries were obligated to do the same. The fishermen had to deliver their entire catch, the foresters their entire load, and the cattlemen every head to the storehouse coffers.

Miserable Mortality Rates

The cost for these operations was horrific. Copious baked-clay tablets meticulously included the word “deceased” next to names of those who died from the strenuous work. Researchers calculate that 35 percent of the field workers died each year. Many of these were women and children involved in unskilled labor and the physical taxing work to haul barges. The average mortality rate was calculated to be 20-25 percent. Over the centuries, the aristocracy grew fat and lazy while the peasants worked, toiled, and poured out their lives until death—all of this to benefit the storehouse.

State Control Creates State Collapse

At its peak the Sumerian’s main city of Ur was considered the largest in the world with 65,000 inhabitants. Here they built a temple to the moon god Nanna during the 21st century B.C. Today, its remains are known as the Great Ziggurat of Ur.

With the passage of many centuries of heavy-handed regulation, the huge bureaucratic Sumerian state was ripe for collapse. It had been repeatedly attacked over the years without success, but by 1940 B.C., conditions were right for the Elamites. That year they attacked and conquered the great city of Ur, and the rest of the cities fell soon thereafter.

Old Masters, New Masters

So great was their loss, the Sumerians wrote a lament for Ur, similar to the book of Lamentations in the Bible. In the aftermath of the destruction of their cities, they described complete wreckage—corpses decaying in the streets, the storehouses stripped down, the towns destroyed, women kidnapped to foreign lands, and other Sumerian cities falling to the sword. Their long and stifling experiment in socialism had ended with every life ultimately sacrificed for the strength and endurance of the all-important central storehouse.108

Human Nature at Work

There is a tendency among humans to accept the commands and demands of a ruling party. They generally don’t consider revolting until tyranny becomes unbearable, but the outcome is typically another radical ruler who installs new masters and new rules.

John Stuart Mill put it this way, “It is the common error of socialists to overlook the natural indolence of mankind; their tendency to be passive, to be the slaves of habit, to persist indefinitely in a course once chosen. Let them once attain any state of existence which they consider tolerable, and the danger to be apprehended is that they will thenceforth stagnate; will not exert themselves to improve, and by letting their faculties rust, will lose even the energy required to preserve them from deterioration. Competition may not be the best conceivable stimulus, but it is at present a necessary one, and no one can foresee the time when it will not be indispensable to progress.”109

The Seven Pillars

Sumerian society used all the classic forms of force and violation of unalienable rights throughout its history and genealogies—

Ruler. The presence of tyrannical top-down control around 4000 B.C. foreshadowed a common theme of human domination that would recreate itself thousands of times for thousands of years. Ruler’s Law apparently was easily imposed on the early Sumer people. The human tendency to relinquish responsibility to the initiatives of another person served well to sustain their leaders, a series of men who claimed to be a god or god’s representative for temple worship.

Caste. Sumer’s stratified society was protected, sustained and enforced with death. The rulers and nobility kept it this way to protect their own selfish lives and perpetuate power. As a result, untold thousands or millions were denied their contributions to a better society.

Things in Common. It’s easy to manipulate people who have been suckled on the fiction that all things belong to the mystical and mysterious god-like ruler. Even if they didn’t believe it, the point of the spear was the ruler’s backup plan. The ruler claimed ownership over all things and dispatched his properties to be used in common to support the temple and the city. With no private ownership, there prevailed a sense of detachment from responsibility—and with it, an acceptance of brutal force as the insurance that all the production be provided by the whole and for the whole.

Natural Rights. Central control meant very few natural rights, if any at all. The people were obligated to obey every command from the ruler. It was a harsh way of living.

Regimentation. All aspects of the Sumerian society were controlled by a crude form of modern Communism’s “scientific method.” This is where the community’s needs were anticipated, whether they materialized or not, and laborers were compelled to fulfill those needs. The free market system does a much better job of informing the innovators when a need exists.

Information. The people were controlled and probably pacified by a spirit of superstition and ignorance that was cultivated around them. By promoting a continuous fear of pending warfare, and preying upon the people’s mythical delusions to support temple worship, the rulers kept them focused and grateful for the Ruler’s benevolence and protection.

Force. Violent retribution for the least infraction made strong control feasible in Sumer. Complainers could have their tongues cut out, or worse. Finally, by around 1800 B.C., Hammurabi brought some order to these laws, but they remained severe. A doctor whose patient did not get better, especially if the person got worse, was liable—even unto death. If a house collapsed because of an architect’s bad design, he could be executed. On the other hand, if you were in an upper class, it made a big difference. A noble blinding another noble or breaking his bone could be punished by being blinded with a hot poker or having his own bone broken by a heavy club. However, if a noble blinded or broke the bone of someone in a lower class, he only had to pay a fine.

So went Sumer for many centuries, wasting the capacity of the whole populous to serve the selfish pursuits of the few.

The Beginning Place

Sumer is a good beginning place to see the framework and structure of the seven pillars of socialism at work in ancient times. After Sumer, what followed during the succeeding six millennia was not a variation of a theme, but the theme itself, hammered home in so many horrible ways. Unfortunately, each and every society that fell for the seven pillars of socialism didn’t actually see what was coming. The people apparently believed that violating natural laws and true principles might work this time if only we make a few changes.

But nothing did change. Those who didn’t understand socialism fell for it every time, and all the predictable consequences that came with it.

Next on the world scene was Egypt. Would they fare any better?

Chapter 11: Pharaoh, the Demigod Socialist

Egypt built a civilization on the flood plains of the Nile, extracting prosperity from the toils of thousands that grew into millions—starting sometime around 2700 B.C.

STORY: The pattern of temple worship and top-down control was not unique to Sumer. It was representative of other civilizations during the same period—Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Crete, Mesopotamia, with shades of the same in the Indus Valley civilizations. By the middle of the third millennium B.C., life in the ancient world underwent a big change. The friendlier conclaves of temple society and city-states were replaced by the all-encompassing power of the state—a new power of absolute force that changed the world forever.

Pharaoh and the Nile, Gifts From the Gods

Ancient Egypt is a good example of the new and expansive state. The land was ruled by Pharaoh, a god incarnate who united far-flung villages under his umbrella of control. He was advertised as being without parents, miraculously formed in the womb by the gods. They said he knew all, saw all, and as the gods’ chosen one, he therefore owned all, including the land, the people and the animals. He was revered as the high priest to Ra and favored of Horus, son of Osiris. He was Pharaoh—the deified king.

The No-ability Nobility

Helping Pharaoh, but later competing with him, was a class of nobility—the royal administrators. This rich upper class ruled in Pharaoh’s stead, checking every part of people’s lives—spiritual, social, and economic. They kept track of all things with a small army of scribes. These scribes were sent across the land every year or two to take inventory of the peoples’ possessions, and taxed them accordingly. Naturally, the scribes took along a few beefy-looking soldiers to enforce the peasant’s cooperation. It was leveling at the most intimate place in a person’s life.

The Quill Is Mightier Than the Rod

The scribes were well educated, themselves forming a class of intelligentsia who typically knew a lot more than their masters, the nobility. Knowing how to read and write led many scribes into positions of administration or pursuits of political agendas later in life.

This massive bureaucracy of administrators was everywhere in Egypt—village judge, village scribe, builder of palaces, overseer of grains and granaries, chief of canals, chief of the fleet, butlers of the palace, leaders of the land, the Sherden, cowherds, priests, warriors, swineherds, shopkeepers, interpreters, boatmen, husbandmen, noblemen, administrators, personal attendants, etc.

Obedience is Better Than Sacrifice

As for the general populous, peasants and farm workers made up the largest part of the population. The snooty upper classes looked down on them with disdain. Many worked the Pharaoh’s lands in exchange for a home and food. Others were their own masters and owned their own homes and land, and engaged in producing, buying, and selling as they pleased. However, they were still supervised by someone from a temple or private estate or some other bureaucrat.

Masters were reasonably kind to their workers. They kept them fed, clothed, housed, and protected from mobbing and bullying—they were, after all, the real producers and worth preserving. A maxim from the 19th dynasty proclaimed, “Give one loaf to your laborer, receive two from (the work of) his arms. Give one loaf to the one who labors, give two to the one who gives orders.”

The storehouse typically released food once a month. Some depictions on tombs show workers on the verge of starvation while the beasts of burden are fat and healthy—a telling display of priorities in the Egyptian culture.

We Keep You Alive to Serve This Pharaoh

Unlike Sumer, the Egyptians prided themselves in keeping their workers alive. Both they and their supervisors were subject to beatings for laziness, tardiness, or desertion. Pharaoh appreciated the value of the working class and did not work them to death as did the Sumerians.

While the upper classes enjoyed the richness of life, thanks to the workers, the peasants were on a bare subsistence level. The central planners determined that to stay alive for a year, a working-class family required 380 pounds of wheat (about a pound a day), 44 pounds of lentils, and 11 pounds of meat. Most peasants could earn 50-90 percent of those minimums, thus requiring the women and children to work as well, just to avoid starvation.110

And so grew Egypt through thick and thin, for dozens of centuries, to rise and fall and rise again—steeped in Ruler’s Law.

The Seven Pillars

The Egyptian culture made an enormous investment in supervisory management at every level of society. This multi-layered involvement created a mid-level of bureaucratic meddlers in a caste system that was strong, well-funded, well-organized, and was perpetuated down through the generations.

As with Sumer, there were layers of rights in ancient Egypt. The privileged had more rights than the common serfs, but all things remained under the control of Pharaoh—no private ownership of property except with his permission, and few natural rights were acknowledged.

Whatever Pharaoh proclaimed was declared as truth: let it be written, let it be done. Obedience to him or her (there were female Pharaohs111) was extracted by force because disobedience to Pharaoh’s law was deemed also an act of disobedience to the gods.

And then there arose a man who decided to blatantly disobey the God. Things didn’t go well for this frail human, either. The same dissolution that attends all individuals and societies that try socialism also became his ending. The Bible called him Nimrod, a hunter of men—

Chapter 12: Nimrod, the Anti-God Socialist

Nimrod’s story begins approximately 2200 B.C., a short time after the Great Flood.

STORY: According to Josephus112, an ancient Roman-Jewish historian from the first century A.D., Nimrod is the fellow who re-introduced centralized power and socialistic tyranny into the world after the deluge—the Great Flood.

Those who know their Bible take interest in Nimrod because he was a great-grandson of Noah. Genesis implies that Nimrod ordered the building of the tower of Babel so his people could survive another flood should God send one. The Bible describes Nimrod as a mighty hunter before the Lord who ruled over several major cities in Mesopotamia. Thanks to ancient historians and other scholars, here’s a summary of who Nimrod was and what he tried to do:

• Nimrod comes from the Hebrew verb “marad,” meaning “to rebel.” Adding “n” changes it to “the rebel” or “we will revolt.” The man’s name may not be Nimrod at all, but a derisive term. Some scholars believe he might be the king of Uruk, also known throughout history as Gilgamesh.113
• Genesis 10:9 says “He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.” Most scholars since A.D. 100 point out that the phrase “before the Lord” should be understood negatively, to mean in opposition to, or in defiance of the Lord.
• Genesis 10:10 continues with, “And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.” Scholars conclude that Nimrod’s great kingdom was built of men, explaining that the term “great hunter” really means he hunted men to build his empire in opposition to God.114

  Ancient writers said Nimrod turned the people from God, telling them that true joy came not from the Lord, but by their own hand. He instituted pagan worship, idolatry, and the worship of fire. He changed the government and put himself in charge, essentially declaring himself to be god. He forced the people to become dependent on him for everything they required—an ancient version of today’s food stamps, pensions, and general government welfare. Genesis says Nimrod’s reign of tyranny and force was ultimately conquered by the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel when all the people were scattered for lack of a common language or understanding.115

  After The Flood, Seven Soggy Pillars

  Nimrod was a devoted adherent to the seven pillars of socialism.

• He set himself up as the all-powerful ruler.
• He created classes of leaders and followers, a caste system with him at the top.
• He managed his power base with corruption, drawing support from his followers for the basest of reasons.
• He held all things in common for himself, doling out favors or necessities as he best saw fit. He regulated all things, certainly an exhausting undertaking at any level, but evidently not too exhausting for the power hungry.
• He controlled information and dismissed the belief in an intervening or judgmental God. He urged his followers to develop their own intellect and self-realization, along the lines he dictated, as the best guide for happiness and prosperity.
• He regulated society with ruthless force, passing laws according to his own whims.
• The people had no rights except what he granted them.

  The pattern Nimrod followed was not much different than other dictators and tyrants. For example, far to the east, many bad ideas incorporating Ruler’s Law were taking root among the ancient Chinese—

Chapter 13: China: Dynasties of Socialism

From about 1600 to 200 B.C., the elements of Ruler’s Law kept order down to the most personal levels of life in China.

STORY: Henri Maspero was a pioneering scholar of ancient China and researched the amazing history of rigid rule that existed in the earliest non-mythical period of region.116

Most of what is known about the Shang Dynasty (1750-1100 B.C.) comes from inscriptions on tortoise shells, cattle bones, and other oracle bones. Scribes used bronze pins to scratch ancient characters into the bones, telling of a society ruled by an all-powerful king, the leader of Chinese nobility, a ruler called Wang.117

Religious Tyrant

Wang was leader, military commander, and the high priest. He offered sacrifice to royal ancestors and communed with the divine to bring wind and rain. Should war erupt, Wang kept a personal force of 1,000 men for protection from uprisings, and also to personally lead into battle with other soldiers.

During Wang’s rule, the use of bronze was widespread. He ordered an enormous slave labor force to mine the copper, lead, and tin ores, haul them for processing, and deliver the metal to artisans and manufacturers. Bronze was used everywhere—for vessels, weapons, decorations, clothing items, and even chariot wheels.

3,000 Crimes and Growing

The Wang ruled the people with force. He called them his “cattle and people,” and on the disobedient he inflicted torture. One of the Wangs had a list of 3,000 crimes for which he imposed fear to extract obedience. For 1,000 of these offenses, the punishment was branding with a hot iron. For another 1,000, the punishment was cutting off the nose. There were 300 offenses punishable with castration, and 500 others for which they would cut off the heel. Two hundred were capital crimes for which the person was killed.

Wang Owns All

The Wang owned everything. One script declared, “Under the heavens there is no land that does not belong to the Wang, in the whole world from one end to the other there are no people who are not the Wang’s underlings.” Children were raised by the elders until age 10. The following year, they were forced to work. At age 20 they received a field whereby they made their subsistence. At age 60 they returned ownership of the field to Wang. When workers reached 70, they became wards of the state, and were cared for until death,

Wang granted authority to other officials to supervise agriculture, public works, and war. These leaders held tight rein on the fields, deciding when to plant, what to plant, and when to rotate crops. One of their songs declared, “Our ruler summons us all ... orders you to lead the plowmen to sow grain....quickly take your instruments and begin to plow. ...Let ten thousand pairs go out...this will be enough ... the Wang was not angry; he said, ‘You peasants have labored gloriously.’” Other songs told of their land and grounds being theirs in common.118

Marriage or Unions, Not Both

Marriage was regulated. As a religious bond, only the nobility could marry. The peasants were ordered into “unions”—men had to take a spouse by age 30, the girls by age 20. A day for marrying in the spring was declared and local officials enforced it.

Then Came Confucius

Winding down through the dynasties, from Shang (1600-1046 B.C.) through the Western Zhou (1046-771 B.C.), Confucius finally arrived around 500 B.C. He taught about man’s ethical and moral progression and the importance of his nobility and justice, his love of all things. Despite his proclamations on the dignity of man, the Chinese culture continued to strengthen its embrace of the seven pillars of socialism.

Shang Yang Weakens the People

By A.D. 350, a more rigid and centralized state took form. Shang Yang worked hard to strengthen the central government. He viewed the people as raw material that required softening and molding like clay by a potter. He wrote, “When the people are weak the state is strong; when the state is weak the people are strong. Hence the state that follows a true course strives to weaken the people.” Shang Yang advocated the seven pillars of socialism in his classic work, “The Book of Lord Shang,” with a chapter entirely devoted to political enslavement called, “Weakening the People,”119 such as—

• Make Them Dependent: Sever ties that bind people together and build trust in the government: “If the people are ruled as virtuous, they will love those closest to them; if they are ruled as depraved, they will become fond of this system.”
• Destroy the Culture: “If in a country there are the following ten evils: rites, music, odes, history, virtue, moral culture, filial piety, brotherly duty, integrity and sophistry, the ruler cannot make the people fight and dismemberment is inevitable.”
• Inject Mistrust: The ruler “should issue a law on mutual surveillance; he should issue a decree that the people ought to correct each other.”
• Reward “Whistle Blowers”: “Regardless of whether the informer is of the nobility or of low origin, he inherits fully the nobility, the fields and the salary of the senior official whose misconduct he reports to the ruler.”
• The Ends Justify the Means: “If by war, war can be abolished, then even war is permissible; if by murder, murder can be abolished, then even murder is permissible; if by punishment, punishment can be abolished, then even harsh punishment is permissible.”
• Staying Focused on the One Thing: Shang Yang considered the “One Thing” to be agriculture and war. Putting everyone’s attention to these prevented the peasants from considering other pursuits in life: “He who wants the flowering of the state should inspire in the people the knowledge that official posts and ranks of nobility can be obtained only by engaging in the One Thing.”
• Gimmick for Control: Part of the “One Thing” strategy was to control the peasants with farming: “When all thoughts are turned to agriculture, people are simple and easily governed.”
• Policing the Rulers: The other part of the “One Thing” was to control the nobility: “All privileges and salaries, official posts and ranks of nobility, must be given only for service in the army; there must be no other way. For only by this path is it possible to take a clever man and a fool, nobles and common folk, brave men and cowards, worthy men and those good for nothing, and extract all that is in their heads and their backs and force them to risk their lives for the sake of the ruler.”
• Information Control: There could be nothing outside of the “One Thing” because the people might start thinking on their own: “It is necessary to drive people into such a state that they should suffer if not engaged in agriculture, that they should live in fear if they are not engaged in war.”
• Ignorance Must Be Cultivated: “If knowledge is encouraged and not nipped in the bud, it will increase, and when it will have increased, it will become impossible to rule the land. ...The art of ruling well consists precisely in the ability of removing the clever and the gifted. ...If the people are stupid, they can be easily governed.”

  The State is Central in All Things

  Oppressive tyranny over the people of China was a way of life for centuries. In 221 B.C., Qin Shi Huangdi rose to power, calling himself the First Emperor. He unified the various warring states and brutally suppressed any teaching or philosophy different from his own. He destroyed the Hundred Schools of Thought that had been developing since 770 B.C. by burning all offending books and writings so he could unify the people’s thinking with his own. The next year he buried alive 460 scholars who continued to own such books. The executions and elaborately staged book burnings went far to prevent independent thought.120 And so it was that the seven pillars of socialism were forced upon the people of China.

Chapter 14: Assyrians: Ruthless, Blood-drenched Socialists

The Assyrians built their mighty power sometime around 750 B.C. Violence and bloodshed seemed to be the standard enforcement tool of Assyria and other ancient tyrannies of the Mesopotamia region during this period.

STORY: There’s a familiar pattern of reckless disregard for human life among many of the ancient kingdoms. These patterns of mass slaughter repeat themselves throughout history, as recently as with today’s modern socialistic and communistic countries.

It was rare when a tyrant in ancient times could anticipate a nice, quiet retirement after ruling his realm. Leadership often changed hands through assassination, outright murder, uprisings, rebellions, and palace intrigue. If a king’s son wanted power, killing good old Dad was the quickest way to get promoted. If the son was not liked by the people or the army, he was made a corpse before he could ascend his father’s throne. For example, of the first 47 Roman emperors, 24 were assassinated.

Extreme Violence a Way of Life

Assyria is a shocking example of violence and gore. Enough records were left behind to show that the Assyrians had no regard for their foes or citizens who didn’t obey. As historian Will Durant describes it, “The Assyrians seemed to find satisfaction—or a necessary tutelage for their sons—in torturing captives, blinding children before the eyes of their parents, flaying men alive, roasting them in kilns, chaining them in cages for the amusement of the populace, and then sending the survivors off to execution.”121

Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal (about 860 B.C.) describes putting down an uprising and how “all the chiefs who had revolted I flayed, with their skins I covered the pillar, some in the midst I walled up, others on stakes I impaled, still others I arranged around the pillar on stakes .... As for the chieftains and royal officers who had rebelled, I cut off their members.”122

No Wonder Jonah Skipped Out on the Lord

Assyria and Nineveh have an additional place of importance for students of the Bible. Knowing these added details about Assyria suddenly makes it clear why Jonah disobeyed God. Jonah had been ordered by God to visit the Assyrian capital city of Nineveh, “for their great wickedness is come up before me.”123

Rather than endure the extreme atrocities for which Assyria was famous, Jonah fled from his assignment and took a ship in exactly the opposite direction, toward Tarshish. It required a violent storm and a large fish swallowing Jonah and keeping him for three days and nights to convince Jonah that obedience is more important than the burning, flaying, cutting, dismemberment, blinding, tongue-lopping, beheading, roasting tortures of Nineveh.

And so, in fear and trembling, Jonah went to the great city and began calling them to repentance.

Much to Jonah’s surprise, the people of Nineveh hearkened to his message and actually started to repent. Jonah fully expected the Lord to destroy them for their great wickedness, but the Lord later explained that there were innocents in that city who needed saving.124

Elements of Socialism

Long before Jonah was born, the Assyrian kings told their subjects that they ruled with a heavenly mandate, that they were the incarnation of the god Shamash, the sun. The king’s lieutenants were anxious that everyone support this doctrine, and assured the masses that the king owned all things because of his divine connections. So, pay attention and do your job, they told the quivering masses.

The Assyrian government was an instrument of war, ever striving toward progress in the military arts. The king’s troops were organized and trained to be quickly adaptable—to remain as effective against the enemy as against the king’s own citizens.

The people were divided into five classes—the nobility, the craftsmen who were organized into guilds, the free workmen, the peasants, and the hordes of slaves captured in war.

There was no private ownership for the workers. They were bound to the land of the great estates and had all things provided for them in exchange for working the land and raising the animals.

The only science that flourished was that of war. An interesting side note is that the philosophers of the time showed no effort to explain life or the world around them. Instead, they filled their time listing objects—all objects—and attempted to catalogue them. From those lists, the modern world has adopted several words translated through the Greek such as camel, shekel, rose, ammonia, cane, cherry, sesame, and myrrh, among others.

How the Mighty Fall

Assyria relied on the wrong system to retain power and a place in history. Instead of strengthening its populace by living principles of prosperity, Assyria relied on iron-fisted force and the pillars of Ruler’s Law. Over the years, this approach weakened the entire culture and made them vulnerable to attack.

In 626 B.C., the Babylonians and several allies swept through the Assyrian strongholds and set the land to ruin. Palaces fell into mounds of burned-out rubble, Nineveh was smashed and set afire, and its population was slaughtered or hauled away as slaves.

And just that quickly, in an instant of horrible bloodshed, the mighty and seemingly unconquerable Assyrian dynasty of terror and ruthlessness was suddenly and simply ... no more.

Seven Pillars in Ancient Times

The predominant pillars of socialism in operation for the first three thousand years of recorded human history were the all-powerful rulers and the suppression and destruction of personal rights. In whatever form the leader maintained control, the ownership of all things rested in the priest, Pharaoh, Wang, and whatever classes of leadership and nobility that were allowed to wallow in the spoils.

Dispensing material necessities came at the whim of the rulers. All things went to a storehouse or treasure city, and were doled out to the masses according to levels of production. In times of war, the allegiance and loyalty of the soldiers was secured with additional allowances, but these bestowals of bribery were always tied to strict obedience to the hand that fed them.

Future tyrants would exact similar atrocities as the Assyrians had, to force the population to bow to the rulers. Examples include the Inca, the Maya, Soviet Russia, Communist China, and North Korea, who deployed the same strategies for the same ends.

With such terror exacted on enemies and conquered peoples, the Assyrians kept the fear of death among its people, promising torture by dismemberment, and other atrocities, as a reminder to the populous to support all edicts from the throne.

Socialism at Work

People in the ancient world had to be tricked with superstitions into following the regimented life. The idea of god in the form of their leader solved one of socialism’s greatest challenges: how do we conquer the human trait of self-interest so people will blindly obey?

A tool of socialism is compelling the people to believe a lie. With no other information available, lies can be well masked and the people’s ignorance can then be used against them very effectively.

Today, the lies come in many forms, and if this closing summary sounds repetitive, it’s for a reason: there is nothing new about socialism.

In ancient times as now, the value of a nation’s currency that was not based on the intrinsic value of precious metals was simply fabricated, made up, declared. Today, No one really knows how much a dollar is worth—or a yen or a shekel or a ruble or a euro. The worth is hidden by official government policy, manipulated as needed.

Another lie is that freedom, free enterprise, and capitalism cannot solve national problems. Painting these best solutions in the darkest light creates a false image and people willingly surrender the free market, those freedoms to try, buy, sell, and fail, and accept as a substitute complete regulation by the government.

The historical record of ancient times shows us that most people are content to be followers so long as their needs are met. But as the government strives to meet more needs, it must extract more taxes and sacrifices from the people, and with that comes more force plus all of the associated controls, lies, enticements, and masters. Top-down government must function in this fashion.

When the people have lost control of who rules them, a class of elites rises up, and true to human nature, they’ll resort to anything necessary to stay in power, no matter what rights they violate in others. “Might makes right” is the mantra of the despot.

Learning to Recognize Socialism

1. Sociologists assume that prehistoric peoples practiced socialism with all things in common as a necessity for survival. They see socialism as “natural.” What are some of the inherent problems that would have existed if these assertions are valid?
2. How long did the Sumerian civilization last? How old is the United States? Which culture put a man on the moon, tied the world together electronically, cured diseases, and tripled the ancient life-expectancy that had averaged 24 years? What made the difference?
3. How did Sumerian elites get food and services? Who did all the work in Sumer? Who owned the property?
4. What did John Stuart Mill say about the natural inclinations of mankind? What did he offer as the best motivating influence to nudge people toward positive attitudes and prosperity?
5. What are three ways that Egypt was different from Sumer?
6. How did the Egyptian rulers guarantee more work from a family besides the labors of the adult male? Was there a minimum wage?
7. When Nimrod eliminated the relevancy of God, whom did he put in God’s stead as the all powerful?
8. Why did Shang Yang want a weak people? What were his “ten evils”? What was his “One Thing”? How did he turn husband against wife, child against parent, friend against neighbor?
9. What role did religion play in holding power over the Assyrian people? Why was the Biblical Jonah afraid to enter the Assyrian capital of Nineveh and call them to repentance?
10. Which of the ancient civilizations had an all-powerful ruler? Which of them allowed private property ownership? Which of them pretended to be demigods who should be worshiped?
11. Are there any aspects of government rule or cultural norms that make you feel weak or vulnerable in society? What would you change to feel independent, self-sufficient, and strong again?
12. Do you think a few aspects of socialism are necessary to help freedom succeed? Is that question the same as asking, How many cockroaches do you want in your mashed potatoes?

Part III--SOCIALISM IN CLASSICAL HISTORY

“From Rome to ruins, the classical forms marched bravely toward the chasm, determined and assured that all was well.”

Chapter 15: Draco and His Draconian Ideas

Draco’s motto should have been: “In death we trust.” It was 621 B.C. when Draco rose to power, feverishly bent on forcing people to do good and be good.

STORY: Before 621 B.C., the Greeks didn’t do a very good job of writing things down, especially their laws. Many of their provincial customs and “whatever worked” rules were passed along orally from ruler to ruler and arbitrarily enforced—but not written. That created some problems.

And Then Came Draco

Historians don’t know a lot about Draco, and they guess that he came from the nobility class. He apparently rose to take power as Athens’ chief magistrate sometime around 621 B.C. According to Aristotle,125 Draco wrote down an elaborate code of laws—a constitution of sorts—that reached into every aspect of Athenian life. Ridding Athens of deeply rooted problems was Draco’s good and worthy goal. It’s how he went about doing it that won him a place in infamy.

Off With Their Heads

Draco’s strict and unforgiving laws put the death penalty on almost everything. Plutarch wrote that Draco’s death penalty “was appointed for almost all offenses, insomuch that those that were convicted of idleness were to die, and those that stole a cabbage or an apple to suffer even as villains that committed sacrilege or murder.”126

Plutarch also recorded a comment by Draco showing his callous attitude toward death. When asked why Draco had made so many offenses punishable with execution, he replied, “Small ones deserve that [death], and I have no higher [punishment] for the greater crimes.”127

Besides his fixation on the death penalty, Draco was a typical ruler. He bribed the privileged class so they would keep him in power, and granted them private property ownership and the right to vote. The masses of working peasants were generally denied these rights.

Instant Results

As was expected, the punishment of instant death for the least little infraction virtually paralyzed the Athenians in every regard. Crime was reduced, but at the horrible cost of perpetual fear among the people, and the loss of their personal freedoms. Nevertheless, Draco’s drastic impositions did rid the city of age-old problems. His ruthless actions led to a new word in the English vocabulary—”draconian,” meaning cruel and harsh.

Killing With Love

Draco’s overnight elimination of crime was so popular that the people believed he had actually performed a miracle. In gratitude and respect, he was surrounded with cheering, adoring crowds everywhere he went. Certainly much of the acclaim was to curry his favor lest they befoul themselves in something and be condemned to die (see any of the public displays of support and sorrow laughably staged for the national press in North Korea as a modern example of the same robotic and fear-driven behavior).

And then one day, Draco entered an Athenian theater and the enamored spectators rose to their feet in a raucous cheer of accolades for their great leader. He was at the height of his popularity and strode to a center place so that all might cherish him. As tokens of the people’s high esteem for him, or at least to further the theme of currying his favor, several hundred admirers rushed to honor him by casting to him their cloaks, robes, hats, and flowers. The outpouring was so sudden and massive that he was completely covered by their gifts and was literally smothered to death.

They buried him right where he died.

A man named Solon (638-539 B.C.),128 the so-called father of democracy in Greece, came along later and abolished nearly all of Draco’s laws except death for murder.

Chapter 16: Sparta: Warrior Socialists

Making war central to Sparta’s existence from 750 to about 371 B.C. is a good example of information control to retain power. Mussolini tried it in Italy some 2,500 years later under the name “fascism.”

STORY: Hanging off the southern end of Greece is a hand-shaped peninsula that was invaded around 1000 B.C. The invaders were a primitive and rude people called the Dorians. They settled in Sparta and quickly spread to enslave the local Greeks in Laconia. Although outnumbered by perhaps 20 to 1, the invaders inflicted such horrors that the Laconians acquiesced. And so began Sparta, the most powerful city-state in ancient Greece.

Over the centuries, Sparta became fanatical about producing the finest warriors in the world. Its entire social and economic structure was built around that goal. No greater honor existed than to die in glorious battle for the state.

Lycurgus and His Plan

Sparta’s military-oriented culture was first established by a man named Lycurgus. He appeared on the scene around 800 B.C. Ancient historians such as Herodotus, Plato and Polybius reported that Lycurgus had gone to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi for ideas about how to reform Sparta’s laws. He returned with some interesting innovations, for example, a class of rulers in the form of a council of 30 elders, each serving for life. These men controlled society. They could decide what laws were voted on and could veto any lower decision-making body. They also served as a supreme court.

Lycurgus also decided it was a good thing to confiscate the land from the rich. He divided it into 30,000 equal plots that were distributed to the general population so they could have all things in common. He confiscated all the people’s gold and silver, and issued an iron coin that was intrinsically useless. The idea was to keep money invested internally to prevent foreign influences and commerce from corrupting their ideal society.

The council of 30 included Sparta’s two demigod kings, a pair of men who traced their genealogy to Hercules, son of Zeus, a divine hero in Greek mythology. The two kings were equal in power and ruled at the same time. The rulers wanted a simple society, an agricultural collective, so they made any kind of industry forbidden.

Lycurgus’s institutions eventually led to a stable government and a foundation from which Sparta could rise. But, at what cost?

Raising Warriors

There were only two types of people who could have tombstones in Sparta—a warrior who died in battle, or a mother who died in child birth. Both were honorable sacrifices of giving one’s all for the benefit of state. Because the Spartans viewed children as products of the state, rearing them was not the job of the parents, not for the family, but rightly for the state. Serving the state was the first priority in all things. Therefore, if a newborn was deemed too weak to grow into a good warrior or sturdy mother, the state determined it should be left alone to die.

Rearing a warrior began early. At age seven the boys were taken from their mothers and enrolled in a rigorous education and military training system called the Agoge. It included reading, writing, music, and dancing. Military training included self-survival techniques, living in the wild, making do without any help, cutting reeds for a bed or shelter, hunting for food, creating weapons, etc. Often they were underfed to encourage creativity on how to steal food.

Sometimes they were flogged as a group to see which of them would be the first to cry out or pass out. Their families could watch the floggings at the wayside, and would shout to them not to pass out or cry or shed tears. The toughest was honored by everyone.

This whole structure of society was designed to strip people of their individual identity—to cement the idea that they were nothing more than tools of society.

All Control in the State

By age 12, the boys had to take an older male mentor who functioned as a substitute father and role model. Sexual relations between the two usually followed. At age 18, they were in the military reserve, and by age 20, they joined a group of 15 others to bond with and rely on for times of war.

Marriage was encouraged at age 20, but the men did not live with their families until age 30. For those reluctant to tie the knot, marriage was required by age 30, like it or not.

Young Spartans were granted land to work, and were forbidden from engaging in commerce or trade. Their houses had to be crude, built only with an axe to discourage time-wasting labors to beautify or sculpt the interiors. The women enjoyed more freedoms than others of that time, and were allowed to own properties as rewards for valiance, and were treated as equal with men in divorce. Despite Lycurgus’s efforts at things in common, some scholars estimate that women ended up owning 35 percent of all the land plots and other property in Sparta.

Other Classes in Sparta

The rest of the Spartan society included the free men—people who escaped the original Dorian invaders but still lived in Sparta.

At the bottom of society were the Greek slaves from Laconia. They were called Helots, and were wholly owned by the state. The Helots farmed the soil but were required to surrender the produce to the state—sometimes all of it, with nothing for themselves.

Young Spartan warriors just graduating from military school practiced their arts on Helots. Each autumn, the Spartans declared war on the Helots and sent their young soldiers-in-training to slay rebellious slaves. This annual “thinning” of the ranks kept the Helots submissive and deprived of their own leaders and warriors.

Socialist and Regimented

All land in Sparta was owned and assigned to others by the state. A citizen’s place in that society was determined at birth, and any commerce or trade with the “outside” was outlawed. Like all socialistic societies, most of the mandated restrictions could be conveniently set aside in favor of the class of elites as rewards for their birth, status, or loyalty.

Destroying Family to Keep Power

The Spartans prevented rebellion and uprising by breaking apart associations. They started with the family in its formative years, sending boys to the Agoge, forming men into “syssitia” or eating/bonding groups that met nightly, and uniting the women in groups while their husbands were away fighting. Slave families were left intact and sold or rented with the land—other times they were broken up according to the needs of the state.

The Seven Pillars of Socialism

Spartans were religious and turned to the Oracle at Delphi for guidance. This had been a Greek tradition since about 1400 B.C.,129and helped sustain the deification of its two rulers. This practice was not unique to Sparta, but was common around the world. The rulers loved it because it simplified the chore of winning complete obedience from the people. By making himself an object of worship, a ruler could control the beliefs and knowledge of the people, keep order, and stay in power.

The belief or at least the superstition that Sparta’s leaders were called by God continues down to this present day. Kings and queens make the same claim, confessing obedience to God for his holy ratification of their lofty place, bowing as if in a sacrament of holy communion, a tradition that their adoring crowds accept with reverence. Whatever edicts such kings and queens utter must then be accepted as divinely inspired, it is their divine right of kings. The Chinese made similar claims, calling theirs the Mandate from Heaven with similar responsibilities and authority.

Guns vs Butter ... or, Slavery vs Starvation

Perhaps in that hand-to-mouth bare subsistence level of existence, the routine politics of human organization didn’t matter as much as did the acquisition of food for an empty stomach. People who are starving generally don’t care who feeds them, not in the pain of the moment, perhaps. But the undying traits of human nature simmered from warm to hot in Spartan society. Their ancient records indicate that every effort was exhaustively pursued to coerce human behavior to support the state above their own personal interests.

And then, after a long time, came a new son of Greece, a thinker, a teacher, a student, a writer named Plato, revered by some as the scholarly father of western culture. But to others, the father of the bad idea—

Chapter 17: Plato and His Republic

Plato is among the impassioned few who received a lot of press for ideas that appealed more to meeting immediate lapses in society than promoting long-term solutions.

Plato (427-347 B.C.) was born in Athens, and is remembered for ideas he expressed in “The Republic” and “The Laws.” He was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of one of the first schools of higher learning in the Western world called the Academy in Athens. He had good company in those days with his mentor Socrates and his student Aristotle. Their combined works helped lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science.

Plato wrote his ten-volume work, “The Republic,” during his middle years in an attempt to depict the ideal state-controlled society. His only problem was how to get the people to cooperate with his plan. His suggestion was to allow nature to serve as the sifter of souls, choosing out natural leaders and natural followers. “The Laws” was written in his older years depicting his best estimation of how these ideals would be put into practice.130

Ruler—As for the leaders, Plato saw the rise of what he called philosopher kings, men who were smarter than everybody else. Because of their brilliance, they were naturally endowed with the wisdom to wield unlimited powers of control over everyone. Their duty to the state was to focus all their energies on leadership service, and then spend time studying mankind’s place in the universe.

Soldiers—Plato envisioned a class of guardians programmed to be helpful to friends but vicious to enemies. As true warriors they would never criticize the leaders, but simply take orders and fear no death. From childhood onward, guardians were to be taught myths that programmed them to be ever faithful to the state. To maintain the mirage, they couldn’t be taught anything about divinity, stories of the gods, or the injustice of fate. Plato said that any soldiers who became greedy and desired property would be bred out so those remaining would live exclusively for the state.

The artisans and peasants—This class did all the work, as nature dictated it. They were to be ruled by the other two groups, and were expected to die in defense of the city. If the peasants could be properly trained from their youth upward, they wouldn’t complain.

The beehive mentality—In short, Plato wanted human personality and egoism to be reduced to the robotic, instinctive placidity of ants in an ant hill or bees in a beehive—but not through force. The idea was to change human nature from within, with conditioning and education.

Plato on Submission: “In a word, [man] should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it.”131

Plato on Socialism: “Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.” 132

“The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.” 133

“Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.”134

“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.”135

Plato on Lying: “Then if anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good.”136

Plato on Predestination: “You are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power to command, and in these he has mingled gold ... others he has made of silver [to be soldiers] ... and others again he has composed of brass and iron [the common people] ... a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son.”137

Plato on Laws: “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.”138

Plato on Suppressing Initiative: “All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.”139

“For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.”140

Plato on Death: “No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”141

Plato on Cultivating Ignorance: “Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.”142

The Founders Dismissed Plato’s Ideas

The Founding Fathers were students of freedom. With the play of history laid out before them, they could plainly see the futility of Plato’s best laid plans to replace freedom with the seven bad ideas.

Thomas Jefferson: “While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of [Plato’s] work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this. ...His foggy mind is forever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen through a mist, can be defined neither in form nor dimensions.”143

John Adams: “My disappointment was very great, my astonishment was greater, my disgust shocking .... His Laws and his Republic, from which I expected most, disappointed me most.”144

Thomas Jefferson: “The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child, but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.”145

Thomas Jefferson: “It is fortunate for us that Platonic republicanism has not obtained the same favor as Platonic Christianity; or we should now have been all living, men, women and children, pell mell together, like beasts of the field or forest.”146

Plato’s Seven Pillars

The writings of Plato reveal his vision of how the seven pillars would best function in society. The ruling class answered to no one. With no lies allowed, except by the ruler to achieve some ultimate goal, the free-flow of information would remain suspect at all times. The caste was a permanent part of Plato’s society as a means to keep the feeble-minded in their places, and the overly aggressive people in theirs. All things in common was the ultimate goal, and having sufficient force to fully smother all other rights was to be upheld by the warriors.

As with all schemers envisioning their idea of the perfect society, Plato fell far short from reconciling irrepressible human nature with his utopian application of force to control and change the world.

Chapter 18: India and the Caste

Roll the dice, show up among a family of untouchables and suffer the consequences—or, live right and be reborn a king or queen, it’s the way things worked among the Indian Hindus.

Story: Beginning some time before 2500 B.C., the ancient empire of the Indus River Valley apparently was the largest on earth, looming larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia. Sometime around 1500 B.C., this empire came to an end—legend and myth point to Aryan troops raining down on the empire. However it happened, an attack was so severe, the record says, that tens of thousands of the dead were left strewn in the streets of several abandoned cities.

Surviving the assault were the populations in the southern regions. They escaped the attack, organized themselves, and built a society based on a caste system. By the 5th century B.C., the caste was deeply entrenched. For the arbitrary reasons of birth, they firmly believed a child was locked into permanent and limited choices of friends, food, jobs, marriage, housing, associations, and most other aspects of life. It worked because their belief system declared birth was not arbitrary—it was all cause and effect, the result of behavior during prior lives.

Four Castes

India had thousands of castes over the centuries. Today, four major groups survive. At the top are the spiritual leaders, the Brahman priests. The warrior and aristocracy follows second. The merchants follow third, with the Sundras or the laborers last. Excluded from these are the outcasts, a group set apart by themselves consisting of the poor, the diseased or those otherwise rejected from society.

Regimenting Life

A mosaic of religions called Hinduism, and India’s ancient caste system, were intimately involved in almost every aspect of a person’s life. The system strictly regulated the labor force at all levels. It set boundaries for marriage, ordered obeisance at the feet of those of the higher classes, itemized the foods that could be grown and consumed, predetermined jobs, housing, travel, communications, and more. Attempting to break loose from that regime could cost a man and his family their lives. The lower classes usually had no hope of ever changing jobs, improving their lives, or altering their future.147

Guilds and Unions

Most of India’s early population was concentrated in villages that generally were isolated, but quite self-sufficient. They took care of their own food and nutritional needs with routines of daily chores that kept the majority of people busy and employed.

This environment encouraged the rise of specialists—ivory sculptors, craftsmen, barbers, weavers, carpenters, goldsmiths, doctors, etc. To harness this financial power, guilds and unions were formed, called shrenis (singular “shreni”).148

No Women Allowed

The shrenis excluded women so the family secrets could be carefully guarded. Newly-wed daughters usually moved in with their in-laws, and father’s didn’t want their trade secrets moving with them, to be shared by accident or under pressure with the new in-laws. Not so with the sons. They usually stayed home with their new brides and therefore could be entrusted with the secrets of the family trade.

Mixing Private With Public

Some shrenis grew so large that entire villages developed around them with every villager focused on just one task or service. The caste system, the religion, and the shrenis subordinated individual rights at every level. With local governments enforcing the protectionist rules, any artisan seeking to become independent could be punished or banished for attempting to compete outside of the established shreni.

The caste system was so entrenched in early Indian society that those of a lower class felt intensely uncomfortable being around those of a higher class. It was an automatic suppression that was achieved without soldier or weapon. It perpetuated itself by way of cultural control of knowledge about freedom and rights. It was the seven pillars of socialism at work.

Chapter 19: Aristophanes: Socialist Ideas “In the Round”

People from all ages love entertainment, as demonstrated by the discovery of ancient coliseums and performance places. As early as 400 B.C., stage plays promoting socialism became popular.

WHEN: 400 B.C

WHERE: Greece

STORY: Not much is known about Aristophanes (446 B.C.-386 B.C.) except from the glimpses he gives of himself in his plays. He was a prolific prize-winning writer, and produced numerous extravagant and popular plays.

Aristophanes is best known for his great sense of comedy and a knack for ridiculing the famous and powerful—something that people in high positions actually worried about. Some scholars give Aristophanes credit for providing more accurate information and description of ancient Athenian culture than any other writer.

Socialism “Live On Stage”

Aristophanes enjoyed proselytizing his views on Plato’s socialism. In his play, The Ecclesiazusae, he has a woman named Praxagora joining several other women who dress in men’s clothing and beards to attend the “men only” political Assembly. Afterwards, in a discussion with her husband Blepyrus, she explains her views on the ideal society. Says Praxagora:

“I want all to have a share of everything, and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; no longer shall we see one man harvesting vast tracts of land, while another has not ground enough to be buried in ... I intend that there shall only be one and the same condition of life for all ... I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all.”

All Things in Common—Including Women

But alas and forsooth, that is not all that the characters in the play hoped to achieve. Aristophanes foreshadowed future socialistic experiments regarding marriage when he had his fictional Praxagora discuss men and women in common:

“I intend that women shall belong to all men in common, and each shall beget children by any man that wishes to have her.”

Then Blepyrus observes the obvious, “But all will go to the prettiest woman and try to lay her.”

To which Praxagora explains the socialist’s solution: “The ugliest and the most flat-nosed will be side by side with the most charming, and to win the latter’s favours, a man will first have to get to the former.”

Aristophanes’ theme of “all things in common” is found in several of his surviving plays.149

WHEN: 100 BC

WHERE: Mediterranean Lands—more socialist literature

STORY: About two centuries after Plato’s death, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus re-created Plato’s ideas in a story. In one dreamy place that Diodorus called the “sunny islands” (in the Indian Ocean), he manufactures a fictitious re-creation of Plato’s Republic. On these islands the 400 inhabitants labored for each other and freely shared in all things.

“Marriage is unknown to them; instead they enjoy communal wives; children are brought up in common as they belong to the whole of the community and are equally loved by all. Frequently, it so happens that nurses exchange babies that are suckling so that even mothers do not recognize their children.”

These fictional people lived to age 150, were unusually tall, and anyone with a physical defect was expected to commit suicide.150

Chapter 20: Rome’s Recipe: Bread & Circuses

In the Roman Senate, support for Ruler’s Law came as cheaply as a free loaf of bread or a small sack of grain.

STORY: Around 140 B.C., Roman politicians applied that old sure-fire formula to stay in power: buy votes with bread. Their easiest target were the poor people who happily exchanged their supporting votes for food and entertainment.

At the time, things were not well in Rome. Much of the populace had neglected their participation in the political affairs of the Republic. The average Roman was content to leave the drama and intrigue of national leadership in the able hands of professional politicians. National neglect left a dangerous void. But with free bread or small bags of wheat handed out, thanks to the benevolence of those in power, why worry?

The free lunch strategy wasn’t enough to settle the concerns of the politicians. The fact that the country was falling apart was hard to hide, and the politicians used the best anesthesia they had—Monday Night Football—or, in their day, The Circus. These huge parades of blood and action grew into grand spectacles and extravaganzas of the exotic. They drew thousands of spectators.

The distraction worked well for more than a century. While people were glued to the drama at the stadiums to watch chariot races or helpless slaves shredded by lions, or re-enactments of battles with real killings, an iron-willed emperor slipped into the Senate and transformed the weakened republic into an empire. His name was Julius Caesar, a savvy student of Ruler’s Law.

The Roman citizens could do little to stop the takeover—but the prevailing attitude appears to have been, why worry so long as we have bread and circuses?

The Roman promise of bread and circuses (panem et cirenses) has since been mimicked around the world as Spain’s “bread and bullfights” (pan y toros), Russia’s “bread and spectacle,” and America’s “tax, spend and bailout,” among others.

Chapter 21: Israel and the Elusive Essenes

Religious extremists were some of the first to discover “all things in common” is a really bad idea. The Essenes tried it between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100. Did it work?

STORY: Josephus, Philo and other early historians reported that the Essenes were the smaller of three Jewish sects (Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees), that flourished for a couple of centuries around the time of Christ. The Essenes became noticed around 100 B.C. They were found among several cities according to Philo, but Pliny the Elder (died A.D. 79) puts them off the shores of the Dead Sea at Ein Gedi and probably at Qumran, site of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.151

The Essenes lived a strict life of celibacy and no private property. All money and property was held in common. It was a self-imposed socialism where they practiced religious rites of communalism (all things in common) for the purposes of worshiping God. They ate no meat nor offered animal sacrifice.

The leader was supreme in all things and whatever orders he issued, everyone obeyed. There is evidence the leader might also have had traditional Jewish authority in his bloodline from his ancestral connection to the priesthood tribe of Levi.

The Essenes practiced daily baptisms, voluntary poverty, and would not swear oaths. They tried controlling their tempers, and vowed abstinence from all worldly pleasures, including marriage and sexual intimacy. Sometime around A.D. 100, the sect disappeared.

2,000 Year-Old Best Seller

Knowledge of their existence came alive with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran. Some scholars believe these scrolls belonged to the Essenes’ community library. Many of the scrolls have been translated and were found to include copies and versions of the Hebrew Bible dating back to 300 B.C.

Chapter 22: China: Wang Mang, a Failed Socialist

STORY: After a thousand years of all-powerful emperors in China controlling everyone and everything, a man came along who was the epitome of utopian scheming—Wang Mang. Was he a great visionary or a royal incompetent? It is still debated.

Wang Mang152 ruled from A.D. 9-23. He set out to start a dynasty of selfless social reform, and end the Han Dynasty with its wealthy class of land owners. He called his dynasty Xin, meaning “new.”

Once in power, he nationalized gold, imposed government monopolies, and went after the large-land owners to break up their power. He imposed communal farming and forced families to farm a plot shared by others. The food they raised went to the local rulers who then gave part to Wang Mang as tribute.

Wang Mang was not a good diplomat. His arrogance and frequent faux pas in the presence of foreign heads of state ruined international relations. Diplomacy as a tool to resolve differences with countries collapsed. This led to wars, death and misery.

If that wasn’t enough, one year the Yellow River suddenly changed course and started flowing south—not his fault, but his strident regimentation offered no solutions. The lack of water ruined the agriculture and caused panic, famine, and epidemics. Great masses of people started moving around for greener pastures.

The people finally gave up on Wang Mang and tossed him out. The wealthy and nobility banded together, with the military, and took their country back, reinstating the Han dynasty. Unfortunately, it was too little too late. Enemies watching from afar saw a vulnerable and fractured country, and launched an attack. They sacked the capital city of Chang’an. Wang Mang and his personal guard of 1,000 took their last stand but all of them were killed. Thus ended his short and confusing reign.

History remembers Wang Mang as a failure. China learned once again, as its people were limping about in chaos and ruins in A.D. 23, that the seven pillars of socialism can neither build nor prosper them.

Chapter 23: How Socialism Killed Rome

After a few centuries of strict government control, the slow death of Rome’s love affair with “the dole” finally took its toll.

Story: Rome’s experiment with the Seven Pillars of Socialism destroyed the empire from within, in just a few centuries.153

During the first century B.C., a great civil war sapped the strength of Rome.154 Mark Antony led rebellious troops to conquer Octavian for control, but Mark Antony was defeated. This was supposed to mean a return to economic freedom. However, the Roman empire was drained of its endurance. The army was sucking huge taxes from the people. Heavy inflation was underway and the means to rejuvenate the economy were blocked by closed trade routes. Over time the people concluded that only by putting all power into one individual could they get Rome’s financial house in order. They gave that power to Octavian who took the name Augustus, the first emperor of Rome in 27 B.C.

The Dole Drains

Since 140 B.C., Rome had informally adopted its expensive policy of bread and circuses. This steady drain on resources was tolerable at first. When the policy hit full stride under Tiberius Gracchus in 123 B.C., its popularity was drawing crowds by the thousands. Some 80 years later (40 B.C.) the empire was supporting more than 320,000 Romans. This number dropped to a steady 200,000 by A.D. 30. Bread was not the only handout in those days—sometimes free pork, oil, and wine were added.155

Welfare Pushes Taxes Higher

The free food forced taxes up. For two centuries the tax rate had hovered between the miniscule margins of .01 and .03 percent.156 By the early A.D. 100s, taxes rose to 1 percent. Roman coinage began to suffer. The denarius started to lose precious metal content—down to 90 percent during Nero’s time (circa A.D. 60). By A.D. 300, there was hardly 5 percent silver in the coins. With high taxes and military costs skyrocketing, Rome’s money was becoming worthless. The government was forced to take extreme measures. It began confiscating food and manufactured goods directly from the citizens. Soldiers went about taking people’s cows, pigs, harvests, and crafted goods, whenever the need arose.157

This mess locked everyone into their jobs—nobody could easily change. The state compelled them to work their jobs to support the army. This caused many to hide their wealth so the state couldn’t take it.

People Seek Escape

As the economy broke down, people fled to work their own plots, or took safety with a wealthy land owner. By A.D. 270, the denarius was down to .02 percent silver, causing food prices to explode. One estimate put inflation at 15,000 percent during the third century.

The crisis was so severe the rulers took extreme action to stabilize the economy. For example, the death penalty was imposed on those caught fixing prices. Hundreds were executed for the least little infractions.

A local historian, Lactantius, reported that so much blood was shed that products were no longer brought to market for fear some oversight or suspicion would result in instant death. Fortunately, the death law was finally repealed. But that didn’t stop the oppression—there were still wars to be fought.

The Cost of Defense

To distribute the burden of Rome’s expensive wars, the state calculated precisely what one soldier required in food and supplies. This, multiplied by all the soldiers, told the emperor how much each individual Roman citizen had to contribute.

Then, the emperor went forward with a monstrous inventory, counting every fruit tree and vine, every square foot of cultivatable land, every animal, and every living soul. Using this information, each citizen’s responsibility was spelled out so they could pay in advance and avoid surprise confiscations.

Forced Unionization

Another approach to calming the raging inflation was forcing workers to organize into guilds, and businesses into collegia, both controlled from above. This structure forced workers to remain chained to their jobs. People hated that and rebelled by abandoning their farms, hoarding, refusing to trade, and suddenly the number of people dependent on bread grew to exceed the capacity of those producing all the bread.

Collapsing Currency

Efforts to restore the currency failed to stem the tide of collapse. The wealthy had managed to bribe their way out of paying taxes, and the impoverished workers had been shouldering almost all the financial burdens. Taxes climbed to 4.5 percent in A.D. 444, but revenues continued to fall as the people started to withdraw from society. They could see their country coming apart—the government, the economy, and the security of the borderlands.

Rome’s Collapse Comes as a Relief

The final few years saw no income to finance Rome’s mighty army, its ships, and its forts, or, to fight the invading forces. When Rome finally collapsed in A.D. 476, the scattered citizens grouped around the churches and villas, and willingly offered themselves as servants, slaves or tenants—anything to just stay alive. By then, the collapse was seen more as a relief than anything else—a relief to be out from under the decay and tyranny and burdens of that society.

With the former empire’s defenses dissolved away into the countrysides, the invaders had free reign of the great production that once dominated the land. But unlike other conquering hoards, the barbarians were not bent on wiping out every last person—only the Roman government. With that disposed of, the invaders allowed the business people, the landowners, and their workers to remain because such concentrations of capability and wealth gave the invaders more resources to tax, tax, and tax. It was the late A.D. 400s, the start of western Europe’s so-called dark ages.

Socialism in the Ancient World

A sign of socialism is the control of information. For ages, the European continent was under various dictators who suppressed the growth of cultures and civilizations to maintain their power. Once those shackles began to fall by the A.D. 1200s, an enormous enlightenment unfolded.

The Greek influence had already been popular and widespread before Rome’s rise and had a large influence after Rome’s fall. Monuments, statues, ceremony with pomp and circumstance to institutionalize the coronation of the new ruler was very appealing to both friend and foe. Spiritual stability in the worship of Greek and Roman gods developed alongside economic prosperity. In short, the individual in the Mediterranean region enjoyed more freedom of action after Rome’s fall than did his predecessors living under Rome’s imperi-alism.

As populations spread across Europe during the middle ages, there was a shift from agricultural life to the rise of city-states and large concentrated populations. Power became consolidated in centralized groups, in local rulers and in businessmen, and the farmers became the paid or indentured laborers for the wealthy. International trade became important and the profitable benefits of peace and cooperation between regions, realms and budding countries were secured as best as the times would allow.

Another advancement that grew out of the middle ages was an improved value on life—people were not as easily disposed of as in centuries past. Individuals took a more active part in social life. They saw the world much differently. Instead of rule by the gods and the whims of the deities, people began to formulate advantages for personal gain outside of local feudal control.

Curiosity about the world and the mechanisms giving it energy and operation triggered the rise of philosophers and their schools of thought. Balance and harmony with the universe became the new spiritual pursuit. The study of astrology, languages, the arts, politics, literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and philosophy flourished. It was the dawning of a new age, the age of enlightenment.

Polybius Describes Socialism’s Deadly Pattern

Polybius was an ancient Greek historian who lived 200-118 B.C. He is known for his 40-volume work, The Histories, covering the period 220-146 B.C. He describes the growing power of the Roman Republic and how it eventually overshadowed Greece. His insights were extremely valuable in the writing of the U.S. Constitution.

In the passage below, Polybius provides an amazing insight into man’s eternal cycle that starts as a condition of savagery, then the fight for freedom, then succumbs to corruption, and back again to savagery. He explains why this cycle continually unfolds, suggesting the best way to stop it is proper education about freedom, passed along from generation to generation, parent to child, forever. There is nothing new to the bad ideas of socialism, they’ve been around forever. But so have the good ideas, when they’ve been preserved and practiced. During the dark ages, the bad ideas prevailed.

Speaking about the oppressed who eventually gang up and overthrow a tyrannical government, Polybius said—

“Then as long as some of those survive who experienced the evils of oligarchical dominion [all power in the rulers], they are well pleased with the present form of government, and set a high value on equality and freedom of speech. But when a new generation arises and the democracy falls into the hands of the grandchildren of its founders, they have become so accustomed to freedom and equality that they no longer value them, and begin to aim at pre-eminence; and it is chiefly those of ample fortune who fall into this error.

“So when they begin to lust for power and cannot attain it through themselves or their own good qualities, they ruin their estates, tempting and corrupting the people in every possible way. And hence when by their foolish thirst for reputation they have created among the masses an appetite for gifts and the habit of receiving them, democracy in its turn is abolished and changes into a rule of force and violence.

“For the people, having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of others and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of office by his penury [his poverty], institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master and monarch.”158

Learning to recognize socialism

In the ancient world the ideas of socialism sprang up spontaneously wherever bullies wanted to rule. In today’s modern world, that phenomenon is facilitated by instant communications, unprecedented access, and almost limitless resources to magnify ideas and theories everywhere, even down into the intimate and private world of the individual.

As in the days of Aristophanes, popular entertainment continues to be a strong vehicle to both promote socialism and warn against it. Books and movies that create prophetic fantasies of a world under socialism are widely enjoyed. They have raised the art of story-telling to new heights, and many of them give chilling portrayals of a future world enslaved in socialism by the Rulers. For example—

1984: Richard Burton’s last film. Cameras are everywhere in futuristic 1984. Big Brother is always listening and watching. Only crimes of the heart escape scrutiny—for a while, anyway.

Fahrenheit 451: The totalitarian government does not want books because they spark notions of freedom. So-called “Firemen” are given authority to check anyone anywhere for hidden books, and may burn them on the spot. It works until one of the Firemen meets a pretty school teacher named Clarisse. She likes books....

THX 1138: It’s a great socialist idea—drug everyone’s emotions and sex drive so they stop bothering others and obey the robot cops without question. It works until someone dodges the drug—and then human nature awakens, demanding a mate and freedom. In true socialist fashion, the tense final chase scene lasts only as long as the regime’s inflexible budget.

V for Vendetta: Remember, remember the 5th of November. A freedom loving terrorist awakens London from its stupor of obedience to the Chancellor’s oppressive socialism, using Truth against the regime’s Lies.

The Village: This gripping conspiracy of ignorance to control the villagers is riveting. All the socialistic tricks are there: deceit, control, no innovation allowed, terror to keep the populous subservient to the fathers, until desperation requires a messenger to procure medicine from the evil capitalists on the “outside.”

The Matrix: Here is the perfect socialist society with all humans in a coma, their brains running a program that grants them a fulfilling life while their bodies float in life-sustaining fluids with wires taking away electrical energy to support the vast communal intricacies of the Matrix.

A Bugs Life, Antz, Bee Movie, among other animated movies, portray the struggle of the individual protagonist doing battle against regimentation and the “colony mind set.” The totalitarian society allows for no innovation or deviation from the expectations of assigned duties and the mandate to just “go along to get along.” The hero tries to stand up against this regimentation and tell his friends about freedom and individual choice, at the risk of his life.

1. For the movies listed above, which of the seven pillars of socialism played a role? Which of those “evil government” fantasies are becoming accepted today in day-to-day life, even partially?
2. Draco used executions to manage his state problems. Which pillars of socialism are needed to ensure such power over life and death in a ruler? Name some recent leaders or countries where such power exists or recently existed.
3. Describe how the Spartan society destroyed its families.
4. List the pillars of socialism that Plato promoted. What did he say about private property? About lying? About self improvement? What did the Founders think about Plato’s ideas?
5. How did India’s caste system treat women? Can you name some nations where women remain in lower castes or classes?
6. How was “all in common” exercised among the Essenes? By Chang Wang? By Rome’s bread and circuses? Did it work?
7. What are some of the “bread and circus” strategies in operation today that keep the people temporarily satisfied but not improving their current predicaments? Has this tactic succeeded in keeping certain political parties in power? Give some examples.
8. What socialistic programs appear to have been primary reasons for Rome’s eventual collapse? What role did a declining currency play? Welfare and entitlement expenses? Malaise of the citizenry? Do you think personal virtue plays a role in lasting liberty? .
9. According to Polybius, who values freedom the most? Why? When freedom is no longer valued, what then becomes the most important goal? Is that happening in today’s world? Explain.

Part IV--SOCIALISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

“They advocated having all things in common—including wives. Early Church fathers stated, ‘They led lives of unrestrained indulgence’...”

Chapter 24: Socialism and the Rise of Christianity

True Christianity blessed the world. The frauds and misguided adherents used the Gospel of “Good News” to wreak havoc.

With the rise of Christianity the roots of socialism found rich soil in which to sink its perversions and corruption. On the surface, socialist doctrine aligned well with the basic Christian ideals of charitable giving, sharing, and a belief in a future “last days.” It was this latter idea of a coming millennium that attracted early Christian dissenters. They rejected the growing power of the Church, and longed for the prophesied thousand years of peace and joy when all things would be had in common.

The Catholic monasteries and convents provided good models for the socialist life style—no private property, all things in common, self-interests and initiative subordinated to abject obedience, and all forms of the nuclear family abandoned. However, that self-imposed Spartan existence wasn’t enough for the Christian heretics.

What is a Heretic?

A heretic is someone with a dissenting point of view to an orthodox religion; it is someone who makes a change to the official dogma, the tenets, or declared beliefs of a religion. Being accused of heresy results from expressing or acting out those dissenting views.

A heretic is not the same as an apostate who rejects completely a belief system. And, it is not the same as a blasphemer—someone who is rude or irreverent toward a religion.

As the religious heretics159 gained power and influence during the Middle Ages, they adopted several perversions of the Christian model and used force and death to impose those beliefs on others. This was poles apart from what Jesus taught. His was a gospel of compassionate choice—free and voluntary; no compulsion, no coercion, and no force.

Socialism in the Christian Era

The first 500 years of Christianity saw the rise of heretical movements, each built on the preachings of a strident leader who strove to rework Jesus’ true Gospel of peace.

The heretics’ misunderstanding was rooted in events described in Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32, where the idea of lumping all property together and living a life of pious poverty received Biblical authority (See Chapter 36, Did the Early Christians Practice Communism?). For the heretics, common property was a sign of humility and an overt signal to everyone that they were rejecting the imperfect material world. Rejecting material goods remained a common theme among the heretics for many centuries.

Christianity Offers Choice, Socialism Offers Force

The 1,500 years of Christian heresies are good examples of how the pillars of socialism found power under the guise of sincere association with Christianity. The drifting away from the simple concepts taught by Jesus led many tens of thousands into behavior completely contrary to his Gospel. Likewise, the heretical descent into debauched paganism violated the most basic truths of happy human existence that had been embraced even before Moses brought forward God’s commandments to ancient Israel.

As noted below, many of the heretical groups descended into a “jungle morality” of uninhibited sexual union, a theme common to all fallen societies. Scholar Igor Shafarevich located much of the Middle Ages information that follows. He describes these religious movements in greater detail in his book, The Socialist Phenomenon.160

WHEN: 1st Century A.D.

HERESY: Nicolaites—first Christian socialists161

STORY: As the original Apostles died away, various break-away Christian factions began to interpret scripture in strange ways, and injected their own ideas. They began forming various sects to create their form of a perfect society. The Nicolaites took their name from Nicholas, one of the seven deacons in Jerusalem. They are mentioned negatively in the Book of Revelations.162 They preached against private property, and encouraged having all things in common—including wives. Early Church fathers stated “they led lives of unrestrained indulgence,” and “ate things offered to idols.”163 Nicholas supposedly allowed other men to share his wife. Eusebius said this socialistic sect was short-lived.164

WHEN: 2nd Century A.D.

HERESY: Carpocratians—also had wives in common

STORY: Carpocrates165 taught a few principles of Christianity and then brayed off into the wilderness by falsely attributing to God a desire that his followers practice the socialist ideals of all things in common and no private property: “God’s justice consists in community and equality,” wrote Epiphanes, the son of Carpocrates. “He who takes a wife, let him possess her. But they can possess all in common as the animals do.”

Epiphanes continued: “It is therefore laughable to hear the giver of laws saying: ‘Do not covet’ and more laughable still the addition: ‘that which is your neighbor’s.’ For he himself invested us with desires, which moreover must be safeguarded as they are necessary for procreation. But even more laughable is the phrase ‘your neighbor’s wife,’ for in this way that which is common is forcibly turned into private property.”

This sect was reported to have spread from western Greece to Rome and points between. Having women in common was a distinguishing enticement that helped the sect grow so rapidly.

WHEN: 3rd Century A.D.

HERESY: Manicheism—also shared wives

STORY: Followers of Manicheism believed in the socialist ideals of all things in common and no private property. The group’s founder, Mani (A.D. 216-276), lived in Babylonia and became the founding prophet of his sect after he had a personal spiritual experience. Afterwards, he wrote six sacred books that he claimed corrected the corruption of Adam, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus.

Plato’s class socialism can be detected among Manicheism followers. They organized themselves into the upper “Elect” and the mainstream “Hearers.”166 The Elect fasted once a week, sometimes twice. The Catholic Encyclopedia reports Mani’s followers were rigidly regulated. “They were forbidden to have property, to eat meat or drink wine, to gratify any sexual desire, to engage in any servile occupation, commerce or trade, to possess house or home, to practice magic, or to practice any other religion.” They were opposed to marriage and viewed maternity as a calamity and sin because having children interfered in “the blissful consummation of all things.” 167

Mani’s religion endured about 400 years and was one of the most widespread religions in the world. At its peak, Manicheism stretched from the Roman Empire to China. Mani’s six holy books were translated into Persian, Chinese, Greek, Coptic, and Latin, among others, helping prosper the sect. St. Augustine was a member for 9 or 10 years before converting to Christianity—then he became its fierce opponent. The sect finally faded from sight in the A.D. 600s.

WHEN: 4th Century A.D.

HERESY: Mazdakism—early communists168

STORY: The Mazdakians tried to practice the socialistic ideals of no private property and having all in common. They used strange ideas and perverted conclusions to control and coerce followers into nefarious behaviors.

The namesake for Mazdakism is a fellow named Mazdak. Not a lot is known about him, and some wonder if it was an earlier Mazdak who actually named the religion. Most of the information about this heresy comes from his enemies scattered about in such diverse places as Syria, Persia, Greece and Arabian territories.

Mazdak taught there were two main forces in the universe—light and dark—that were meant to remain separated but accidently mixed together here on earth. He said the living were obligated to rid themselves of the dark so more light could be released into the world.

To this end, Mazdak discarded the Church’s religious formalities and emphasized good personal conduct. This included sharing one’s wealth, no killing or shedding of blood, no eating flesh, never oppressing others or inflicting harm, always standing on best manners to be friendly, to be giving and kind—and, oh yes, sharing the women.

Mazdak believed God gave the earth’s resources to everyone as a gift so things could be divided up and shared equally among all men. He blamed the greedy and strong for hoarding the resources and dominating the weak, whereby the earth’s evil inequalities were created.169

Mazdak taught that inequality unleashed the evil demons of Envy, Wrath, Vengeance, Need, and Greed into the earth. He said the only way to get rid of these evils was by eliminating family and property, and making women and wealth common among all people. And that’s just what they tried to do: destroy family and live off of each other. The historian Abu Tabari (A.D. 838-923) wrote, “Frequently, a man did not know his son nor the son his own father, and no one possessed enough to be guaranteed life and livelihood.”170

Modern historians brand Mazdak as an early socialist, and his philosophy as early communism.

Mazdakism Was Appealing

Over the years, Mazdakism spread across Persia, even converting Persia’s King Kavadh. Local Zoroastrians (followers of an ancient Iranian religion) feared the Mazdakism’s growing popularity. In A.D. 524, they received permission from the king to rise up, attack the Mazdakians, and cleanse the land of that evil heresy. The band of attackers successfully slaughtered most of the Mazdakians, including Mazdak whom they hanged. A few small remnants fled for survival, and kept the movement going for centuries. By the 1700s, only a small handful of Mazdakians remained, continuing to practice their observances among their Muslim neighbors in secretive modesty.

A Christian Is as a Christian Does

These assorted heretics relied on distortions, perversions and complete destruction of the ideas Jesus originally taught in order to create their religious empires. The closest Jesus ever came to using force was to drive the money changers out of the Temple. However, he was well justified by both Jewish law and tradition to do so— no one dared complain. The lax Jews had allowed their Temple to become a place of mercantilism rather than a common gateway for people of all walks to bring their sacrifices and petitions to God.

When Jesus began his ministry, his message was consistent and powerful: freedom—freedom to choose, to act, to impart, to align and adhere; freedom to show love and caring compassion for others. The personal salvation of the human soul and a path to a fullness of joy was what Jesus offered. It was voluntary, never forced, and required nothing but a willingness to embrace the basic principles of freedom and personal accountability.

Jesus taught his followers to have problems in common, not things in common. This doctrine was misunderstood and lost in the centuries after Jesus’ crucifixion. During Western Europe’s mediaeval ages, much of the Mediterranean and European region fell into a darkness of masters and slaves. In the name of religion and Christianity the seven pillars of socialism were propagated to a frenzy through time and throughout the continent.

Historians of today typically hold Christianity guilty for the atrocities of the medieval period. In truth, it wasn’t the philosophy and teachings of true Christianity that were at fault. The fighting popes, the crusades and inquisitions, the selling of indulgences—all abuses of faith and uses of force—were opposite to Jesus’ message of freedom, charity, compassion, fidelity, hard work, friendly persuasion, and love. True Christianity is completely compatible with all the principles of freedom—it sustains every unalienable right. It might be said that Christianity is the embodiment of every principle required to acquire and perpetuate freedom because freedom and corrupted personal behavior are not in any way compatible.

Socialism at Work

The heretics provide a good example of how the control of information can lead normal people into abnormal behavior. The followers simply had to believe what they were doing was right, and the ancient pied pipers could lead their flocks to waste away their lives in the leadership’s service.

For several centuries the vast whole of the assorted heretics unitedly looked forward to a great “last days” when destruction would cleanse the earth of its polluted man-made societies and replace them with a thousand years of utopian bliss. To achieve this end, most heretics believed they were supposed to help bring about the conflagration and destruction of the current state of affairs. They believed they were duty-bound to take part in the divine cleansing. Many were happy to hurry the process forward with arson, killing, torture, raping, robbing, and ruin. The mass liquidations of millions by subsequent leaders and forces perpetuate these same dark ideas. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Islamic extremists, tribal tyrants, and all the others, justified and justify the genocide of millions of people for these same ends: to purify their great society.

Chapter 25: Feudalism and Ruler’s Law

Feudalism was no futile philosophy—it was socialism.

From the A.D. 700s to the 1400s, socialism was practiced by landholders in Europe. They gave desperate people a level of security and a place to stay in exchange for labor and loyalty. It was not any form of an established system of government, but it became an orderly way to preserve a degree of peace in the land.

Long before Rome fell in A.D. 476, the local seats of Roman power and landholdings were established with the construction of Roman villas. Originally, these were country dwellings for the nobility, and were scattered all over Europe. When Rome fell and Europe became decentralized, the local churches and villas became the new power centers. Those families who had land, and the means of protecting it, cordoned off their claims and dared anyone to take it away.

The peasants were left with nowhere to turn except to align with the churches or one of the landholders. And so evolved a crude replacement of Roman rule. The tenants willingly gave their sweat, labor and loyalty in exchange for a place to farm and raise a family.

• The Non-word Everyone Uses: “Feudalism” is used to describe this desperate “land for loyalty” arrangement. The origins and correct use of feudalism is regularly debated because the word didn’t exist back then. Italian Renaissance thinkers apparently invented it in the late A.D. 800s. The French Revolutionaries used it to describe the system they were overthrowing in the late 1700s, and the rest of us equate it with Europe during a difficult and dark time.171
• The Ruler: At the top of this caste was the feudal lord. This was a landowner who presumed superiority for the simple lucky happenstance that he inherited some land from his forefathers. That made him the boss. His rentable land was called a fief. Next in the caste came the lords, the knights, and at the bottom, as usual, the peasants.
• The Peasants: At the bottom of the feudal caste system were the vassals or peasants. In exchange for providing service to the lord or king, the peasants were allowed to use the land and benefit from the king’s protection inside the castle.

  Making a peasant a vassal was quite the formal and ceremonial event. It included a great feast and everyone showed up in their Sunday best. At the conclusion of the dinner, the vassal gave an oath to the lord—to obey and observe their contract of cooperation. This ceremony rendered the contract formally consummated.

  The Feudal Arrangement: These informal contracts gave the lord of the land a body of farmer-warriors whom he could call upon to defend his lands or to pursue other goals. It also gave the farmer a fairly reliable place to settle down and raise his family. He paid for this safety by giving away part or all of his agriculture work, or by taking up the sword, if so commanded.

  The vassals were not all farmers. They performed an assortment of other duties, but usually they could not own anything. Those who were particularly valiant were granted favors or were elevated to a class of nobility—knights, counselors, guards, etc. These promotion ceremonies were mixed with Christian sacraments to give the whole structure a degree of God-sanctioned authority. The religious anointing of kings (the previously mentioned divine right of kings) and sacred oaths of knights were viewed as binding before God and king.

  Fief: The word fief has a long history but was used to mean possessions or duties in a feudal relationship. A person’s fief could be any number of things: land, money, animals, an office, a task such as hunting or fishing. These could be passed down to the next generation but the original property right or authority always remained with the king—and what the king giveth he could also taketh away.

  Castles: Those beautiful buildings romanticized in legend and lore were the private fortified residences of the lords. They originated in the A.D. 800s, and many were actually the glorified expansions of the Roman villas. They were symbols of a king’s power and influence, and became centers for administration of the lands and fiefs under his control. The more powerful the king, the larger the castle. Finally, by the 1700s, cities and borders were well-established and most of that constructive bragging and building of the elaborate castles finally wound down so that attention and resources could be focused on other more pressing projects. 172

Chapter 26: Socialism in the Middle Ages

For parts of western Europe, the Middle Ages were dark and suffering years, highlighted with crazies running amok.

The first few centuries after the turn of the new millennium (A.D. 1000) saw an astonishing period of fanaticism and backwardness in Europe. People lost their heads—figuratively and literally. Where the existence of the Church was intended to bring civility to life and a deeper soul-searching pursuit of happiness, a few over-zealous fanatics managed to rise to the top of various religious movements. They drew thousands into acts of brazen paganism.

WHEN: 1100s-1200s

HERESY: Catharism—violent “Christian” socialists173

STORY: The Cathars used the socialistic ideas of information control to live with all things in common and complete regulation of every aspect of its followers’ lives. They degraded to the point of forcing people to kill themselves, or be murdered if they disagreed, to fulfill their bizarre doctrine that life was evil.

In Greek, cathar meant “the pure.” Over the centuries this heresy expanded into at least 40 different sects including numerous non-Cathars sharing the same doctrinal tenets. Its beginning was around A.D. 1000, and it swept across Europe in a matter of decades. A former Cathar bishop in Italy wrote in A.D. 1190, “Are not all townships, cities and castles overrun with these pseudo-prophets?”174

Evil Gods, Good Gods—Take Your Pick

The Cathars believed the physical world was the source of all evil, and that it was created by an evil God or perhaps by God’s fallen son, Satan—they weren’t sure. The spiritual world was the essence of good, and was created by a good God. There was to be no mingling between physical and spiritual. They supposed that Jesus, being good, had to be a spiritual being while on earth—although the circumstances of mortality obligated him to make himself appear as a physical man.

Cathars called themselves “New Adams,” and viewed the Church as a hostile enemy. It was a philosophy that centuries later would give rise to humanism and other movements of self-worship.

All Material Things Are Evil

Cathars considered their own bodies to be the creation of the evil God. Their bodies, and all other physical creation, were doomed to destruction. Their essence or matter wasn’t destroyed, they taught, but was recycled into new creations by the evil God. They believed the ultimate goal of mankind was, therefore, to throw off the physical—that is, commit universal species suicide—to free their spirits so they could join the good spiritual God.

Plato’s teachings about family and society gained practical support in the Cathar’s religious beliefs. They rejected property as a product of the evil God, and they forbade marriage. Sexual relations were okay so long as they didn’t propagate the species. Pregnancy was seen as the means whereby spirits became trapped in material bodies. Pregnant women were considered possessed by demons, and so were their children.

Say That Again—Sex Bad, Death Good?

Cathars didn’t eat anything that came from mating (meaning, no meat of any kind), or participate in anything considered physical or material that was a creation of the evil God. They opposed legal proceedings, giving oaths, owning a weapon, fighting in war, or even contacting non-Cathars unless it was to proselytize.

They firmly believed that becoming freed from the body was a good thing—and the sooner the better. If one among their numbers was terminally ill, he or she was given a deathbed “consolation.” However, if that “consoled” person suddenly recovered and didn’t die, it was expected that he would still honor the consolation by committing suicide. Suicide was viewed by Cathars as a lawful act—it was also encouraged and commendable. They called it “endura.”

Few people wanted endura, especially after recovering their health. In those instances, the happily restored person would receive involuntary endura—basically they were murdered.

According to some researchers, more Cathars in France died from endura than from the pope’s crusade in A.D. 1208, which was specifically dispatched from Rome to eradicate the Cathars.175

Cathars Hated the Catholic Church

Cathars viewed the Church as the whore of Babylon and the source of all error. Cathars denied Catholic sacraments such as communions, marriage, and baptism of children (declaring that children were too young to believe). They hated the cross as a symbol of the evil material God. Some sects felt justified in attacking churches—burning, looting, plundering, defiling, and killing.

War and Crusades

The pope launched several crusades against the Cathars, once trapping them in castles in the southwest corner of France where many hundreds of their leadership were finally killed, burned, or captured. In Béziers, between 15,000-20,000 men, women, and children were butchered. When the Crusaders asked how to identify their prisoners as Cathars or Catholics, the crusader monk, Armond Amaury, is reputed to have told his troops, “Kill them all, God will know his own.”176

By A.D. 1220, the Cathars were no longer a threat in Germany and England. Over the next century they were exterminated in France, Belgium, and Spain. By A.D. 1400, remaining believers in Italy were executed, and the Balkan States chased out the remainder a few years later. In A.D. 1416, some 40,000 Cathars left Bosnia for Herzegovina, where they finally disappeared after the Turks conquered those provinces and imposed Islam.

WHEN: 1200-1400s

HERESY: Brethren of the Free Spirit

STORY: The Brethren of the Free Spirit used the socialistic principles of information control, force, and all things in common to spread destruction in the lives of others in preparation for the coming cleansing of the world.

Joachim of Fiore (A.D. 1135-1202) and Amalric of Bena (died A.D. 1204) were the pioneering brains behind many of the Middle Ages heresies. They shared the belief that the corrupted world was about to end. It had already passed through two of its three epochs—Moses’ law, then Christ’s Law—and in A.D. 1260, according to their calculations, the world would finally enter the third epoch, a new age of freedom.

This era of perfection was supposed to be wonderful—a time when the words “mine” and “thine” would be unknown, and the renewed church would serve all mankind equally and fairly.

However, arriving at this blissful state required passage through a terrible period of war and bloodshed when the Antichrist would appear. Joachim taught that the Catholic Church was proof of the prophesied decay, and said the Antichrist would appear and rise up to become its pope. He told followers that if they would revert to apostolic poverty (no property or money), they would become strong enough to defeat the Antichrist. The result would be all of mankind uniting in Christianity.

Must Destroy at All Costs

Joachim promised that the destruction of the Church would open the door to a leaderless communal world run by the people. This teaching is said to have influenced—or at least, been a precursor to—Marx’s call to abolish the state and install rule and order through the dictatorship of the proletariat.177

Meanwhile, Amalric told everyone he was the embodiment of this budding third epoch—the man into whom all revelation was imbued, just as revelation was imbued into Christ.

Go Have Fun—There is No Longer Any Sin

Amalric taught that he and his faithful inner circle were above sin because they were received and accepted of God. And, God being the author of all things good and evil, whatever they did was, therefore, God’s will. This relationship made them surprisingly incapable of sin. To achieve that holy state, they had to surrender all property, their families, even their own will, and go about begging for survival. They called themselves the “The Brethren of the Free Spirit.”

With no moral restrictions, the Free Spirits believed they owned everything and they could do with it as they pleased. Anyone standing in their way could be killed. Nothing worldly could further exalt or diminish a Free Spirit. Once they achieved their state of “godliness” and understood that God works through everything, Free Spirits believed they could engage in sexual relations with any woman—stranger, sister, mother—and it could not stain him and would only improve her holiness.

By the early A.D. 1300s, the Free Spirits movement had spread far and wide. Those opposed to the Catholic Church were particularly drawn to it because the Free Spirits taught that this life is their actual resurrection—that there is no other life, and man’s greatest joys are in this life alone. So, get out there and live it up.

Force and More Force

The longed-for Third Epoch that Joachim and Amalric had promised wouldn’t come until first there was a cleansing of the Church. Once that was out of the way, the new and wonderful heavenly society would have room to finally establish itself. So, mobs of Free Spirits began attacking any establishment of the Church they could lay their torches to. They rained down upon villages and towns, slaughtering men, women, and children. Count Montefeltro (A.D. 1290-1364), boasted about plundering villages and churches, and raping nuns. According to records from the Inquisition, members of the sect openly embraced Satan as their supreme deity.178

Similar to the Cathars, the Free Spirits had a caste. At the top level was an “inner circle” of the most elevated. The group leadership declared that any act committed by them, regardless of its depravity, was not a sin. At the lower level—the “outer circle”—were the great masses of followers who evidently didn’t realize what atrocities the inner circle was perpetrating. Still, they all lived by the doctrine of no private property, no family, no church, and no state.

WHEN: 1200-1400s

HERESY: Dolcino and the Apostolic Brethren

STORY: Followers of Fra Dolcino submitted to the socialistic ideals of a supreme ruler on earth whose every utterance was truth. He deployed all the usual suspect ideas: things in common, stringent regimentation, control of all information, use of force, and no rights.

The Apostolic Brethren actually descended from the Free Spirit movement. They ran around telling everyone that the fulfillment of Joachim’s prophecy (see above) of the coming Antichrist was near, and the Catholic Church’s corruption had finally reduced it to the point of total collapse. Like many others, the Apostolic Brethren pointed to Emperor Constantine in A.D. 300 as the beginning time of the Catholic decay. They taught that the pope was possessed by the devil, and set themselves up as the new lighthouse of righteous leadership. At their head was a man named Dolcino.

Dolcino demanded strict obedience to his every command, and declared that violence against anyone was permitted because it helped to further cleanse the earth. He also ordered that members’ wives, property, and all things be held in common. As before, nobody recorded what the women thought about this religious tenet of wife-swapping, but the husbands seemed agreeable.

In 1304, Dolcino summoned 5,000 Apostolic Brethren to the mountains of northern Italy and began a guerilla warfare campaign, attacking villages and destroying churches. This war lasted for three years until his followers were finally beaten back. Dolcino and his “spiritual sister” Margareta were given the chance to recant their heretical beliefs, but they refused. They were burned at the stake on June 1, 1307.

Chapter 27: Socialism and the Reformation

Frustration leads to rebellion against the Church.

As populations in Europe grew in size, so did their frustration with the tyranny of renegade priests who oppressed the people. Wanting to gain freedom from oppression, large groups left the Catholic Church and joined reformers who wanted to impose changes on the Church. Even though many of the Church’s official teachings were aligned with the Christianity that Jesus introduced, the abuse that the renegade clergy exercised was a constant reality. The people’s complaints were very justified and their suffering quite real.

WHEN: 1300-1400s

HERESY: Taborites and the reformation

STORY: The Taborites adopted the socialist principles of severe top-down control. They built armies to force their belief systems on others, or at least break the grip that the Catholics had on alternative religious beliefs. However, the Taborites went about violating the very same rights they were rebelling against as they destroyed and fought and killed their way to dominance.

Our story begins with two forerunners of the Protestant Reformation—the English theologian John Wycliffe (1328-1384) and a Catholic priest named Jan Hus (1369-1415) from the Czech Republic.

They were among a growing number of people all across western Europe who were angry with the evolving role of the Church in civic affairs. Political power, material possessions, and privileged position became the chief focus of local Church leaders. Many bishops and abbots acted as if they were secular rulers instead of representatives of the Church. They labored more to increase power and income than to help the poor. Celibacy wasn’t uniformly practiced, and misgivings about Church doctrine and goals were festering in many locations.

Wycliffe Calls for Cleansing

John Wycliffe began publicly criticizing the Church for these lapses, saying it should renounce its massive land holdings and wealth, and become poor as in the days of Jesus. He revered the Bible as the sole source of Christian doctrine, not the pope, and believed the bread and wine of the Eucharist (the sacrament or Holy Communion) remained bread and wine once consumed and didn’t turn into the actual flesh and blood of Christ, as was being taught.

War

Meanwhile, over in the Czech Republic, Jan Hus read Wycliffe’s writings and embraced his ideas. He went so far as to translate them into Czech, and taught the same ideas in his own writings. He gained many supporters and followers, but at a serious cost: Hus fell into serious disfavor with Church leaders.

In 1415, Hus was lured to Constance, a city on the German-Swiss border, to an ecumenical council that had been called to settle the thorny issue of who exactly was the legal pope. The justification of Hus’s presence was to give him opportunity to air his grievances face-to-face with leading church authorities.

It was a trap. After a couple of weeks, the church guards suddenly confined Hus to quarters, and then one day, they brought him out for a contrived trial. The council members found him guilty of heresy, led him in chains to a meadow beyond town, and burned him at the stake.

Hus’s death triggered a revolt by his followers. Within five years, Hus’s original followers and others who aligned themselves started a series of wars against the Church. These lasted from 1420 to 1434, and became known as the Hussite Wars.

A leader of the Hussite army set up fortified headquarters just outside of Prague, a town they named Tabor. This became a gathering place for preachers who were opposed to the Church. Although they were united in their opposition to the Church, the groups eventually splintered into various sects.

First Priority: Destroy the Church

The Taborites sent their armies to fight the pope’s crusaders along various fronts. They were victorious and defeated the pope’s armies on numerous occasions.

“Pull down trees and destroy houses, churches and monasteries,” they ordered. “... All church property must be demolished, and the churches, altars and monasteries destroyed.”179

In the process, thousands of priests were pursued, burned and killed. The Taborite invaders destroyed libraries, works of art, sacramental candelabras, and gold and silver ornaments. The order was issued, “All human institutions and human laws must be abolished, for none of them were created by the Heavenly Father.”180

All Things in Common

Meanwhile, back in Tabor, the Taborites put all their money and wealth in barrels to be distributed evenly. There was to be nothing “which is mine or thine, but all possess everything in common and no one is to have anything apart, and whoever does is a sinner.”181 All things were to be communal, including wives: “There will be free sons and daughters of God and there will be no marriage as union of two—husband and wife.”182

Adamites Go Crazy

The Adamites carried the destruction of the Catholics even further. They attacked villages and towns at night, setting them ablaze, killing both young and old.

At their meetings, they wore no clothing as a sign of purity and separation from the ways of the world. They taught that marriage was wrong, and any man could take any woman by merely declaring “she inflames my spirit.”183 They practiced unlimited sexual liberty, mimicking the earlier established Free Spirit movement. This debased behavior couldn’t endure—it never has—and the Adamites eventually weakened, fell prey to attack, and were exterminated under the leadership of Hussite commander Ian Zizka in 1421.

Legacy

The Hussite wars did more than just ravage nearby countries and Church holdings. They also served to spread the utopian ideas of a necessary cleansing of the land as preparation for a coming millennium of peace with all things in common—no more oppressive overlords in the form of the Church, the monarchs, or any other tyrant. But first, they had to get rid of the corruption—

WHEN: 1525-1540

HERESY: The Anabaptists

STORY: The Anabaptists tried all the usual socialistic ideals to further their cause—things in common, no private property, and the destruction of the existing society. Their plan was still struggling to get off the ground when a new invention came to their rescue.

Gutenberg’s printing press did a lot to spread the influence of the heretical off-shoots during 16th century Europe. With the Peasant’s War in Germany, the Anabaptist movement was enabled to more quickly expand their rate of conversions through Germany to Switzerland, The Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Czechia, and decades later, over into England.

The name “Anabaptist” implied re-baptism, from the belief that infants were too young to make such religious decisions. Infant baptism was a tenet of the Catholics, and Anabaptists taught that it was meaningless—therefore, all people must be rebaptized.

Opposing the Church on All Fronts

The Anabaptists rejected the Catholic Church, saying it had been in apostasy since Constantine (A.D. 300). The Anabaptists claimed their own authority came directly through the bloodlines of the original Apostles. They rejected any sacrament or Church tenet that wasn’t in the Bible, and claimed for scripture only those words spoken by Jesus himself.

Their doctrine, however, was inconsistent. Some Anabaptists believed that baptism made them impervious to sin and they could do as they pleased. A 16th century German free thinker, Sebastian Franck, described these inconsistencies: “Some believe themselves to be holy and pure; they have everything in common. ... Others practice commonality only to the extent that they do not permit need to arise among themselves. ...Among them a sect appeared which wished to make wives, as well as belongings, communal.”184

Wealth, Wives, and Worship in Common

It went further: their clothing was dictated—the fabric, shape, style, length, and size. Then came the broad gray hat, mandatory for all to wear. They also had rules for eating, drinking, sleeping, free time, and when and how to stand or walk about. A group of enforcers checked on people’s upbringing of children, their marriages, their work, and wouldn’t allow private cooking or eating. The children were taken away at age 2 to be raised in common nurseries, and were not allowed contact with the community. Wives could be taken as desired by whomever—all in common.

Forcing Love and Humanity With the Sword

After the Peasant Wars in which the Anabaptists played a role against Germany, the authorities unleashed a wave of persecution against the movement. It weakened them for a while, but they rose again in 1530. Their new doctrine of self defense was proscribed: “The saints must be joyful and must take up double-edge swords,” said Apostle Hans Hut, “in order to wreak vengeance in the nations. ...slaughter of all overlords and powers that be.”185

Another Tyrant Meets His Maker

By 1535, the Anabaptists had angered enough Germans that a large coordinated attack was organized to neutralize the heretics once and for all. The “saints” gathered to Münster, Germany, where Jan Bokelson was made their ruler as well as king of the world. He had a huge court of luxury, and many wives. He wielded all justice, and personally beheaded evil-doers in the town square.

Surrounded by all his utopian dreams, all the riches and benefits that a poor mortal soul could want, Bokelson was captured and the city of Münster fell. He and his Anabaptist leadership were executed, and the rest of his followers were hunted and killed up until about 1660. To escape the persecution, thousands migrated to North America, taking upon themselves various names such as the Amish, the Hutterites, and the Mennonites.

WHEN: 1640s

HERESY: The Diggers—spreading atheism

STORY: The Diggers took hold of the socialistic idea of all things in common, and went about pushing it as far and wide as they could.

The mid-1600s was a time of upheaval in England. Corruption in the government gave rise to conflicting opinions about the best form of rule. Some wanted to return a king to the throne; others, led by Oliver Cromwell, wanted property owners to have more say in community and political affairs. And another movement wanted to build a parliamentary government that represented all male leaders of a household. Some wanted a theocracy, and then there were The Diggers.

The nickname of Gerrard Winstanley’s group, the Diggers, came about because they believed in digging the land as a common ownership and equally sharing in the harvest and fruits of labor. These Protestant socialists preached the gospel of knocking down enclosures, disposing of borders, and making everything free to everyone. They called themselves the True Levellers, a term associated with socialism to distinguish themselves from other levellers groups.

No Walls, No Fences

Winstanley’s pamphlets served as the Diggers’ guiding articles of faith. These condemned private property as the root of all evil. Of land, he said, “Not enclosing any part into any particular hand, but all as one man, working together, and feeding together as Sons of one Father, members of one Family; not one Lording over another, but all looking upon each other, as equals in the Creation.”186

In April 1649, food prices were at record highs. When The Diggers came into Weybridge (England), and offered communal land and harvest to freely share, local farmers blew their stacks. Landowners were irate that free food was undermining their efforts to get maximum pricing. This triggered a revolt against The Diggers.

Chased From Town to Town

After the local farmers exhausted their efforts to reclaim control over pricing, they grabbed their pitchforks and turned to violence. The locals began harassing, arresting, and burning until the Diggers pulled up stakes and moved to Cobham. The Diggers were not appreciated there either.

Another settlement was started in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. After similar clashes and troubles, some sect members were arrested without charges and held in prison indefinitely. By 1651, the farmers finally crushed the upstart, forcing its members to disband. Even though their numbers probably didn’t exceed 200 people, their impact was felt far and wide. Legacy

The Diggers’ tactics for proselytizing their cause introduced to the rest of Europe the effective use of pamphlets. This wonderful new media helped them to magnify their pursuit of political goals. They had friends in a newspaper called The Moderate in which defense of their actions was supported. Using these techniques to rouse public sympathy and support for their cause helped expand the Digger movement, but also proved the power of the written word.

WHEN: 1649-1660

HERESY: The Ranters—Leaderless fanatics

STORY: The Ranters’ socialistic ideas included having all things in common, including wives, and no private property.

There remain many questions about this strange group, but what is known is that they embraced many of the teachings of the Brethren of the Free Spirit of the 14th century. They rejected a personal God, and some of them denounced immortality or a life hereafter. They didn’t believe they had to obey anyone, including local governments and leaders.

Their most well-known member was Laurence Claxton, who declared in his 1650 pamphlet, A Single Eye, “[Ranters believe] that a believer is free from all traditional restraints, that sin is a product only of the imagination, and that private ownership of property is wrong.”

Popular Theme: Women in Common

From another of their pamphlets, The Ranters’ Last Sermon, came the teaching, “...for one man to be tied to one woman, or one woman to be tied to one man, is a fruit of the curse; but they say we are freed from the curse; therefore it is our liberty to make use of whom we please.”

Ranters went around nude as a means of social protest and as a demonstration of abandoning earthly and material things. They also engaged in unlimited sexual contact.

The Ranters as a distinct group were lost when most of the members joined the Quakers in the 1650s.

Socialism at Work

Destruction of the existing moral codes and institutions continued the basic theme of socialism under the guise of Christianity, or whichever religious leaning the assorted and varied heretics liked to claim.

Predominant among the heretics’ teachings was abolishing private property, including no possible claim to spouse and children. In the eyes of most other Europeans, the heretics’ direct assault on the family reduced their perch atop higher moral ground as they sought to institutionalize permissible orgies.

Friedrich Engels commented on the tendency of rebellions to frequently turn to sexual liberties: “It is a curious fact that in every large revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the foreground.”187

The heretics exerted strict regulations on their followers’ social and economic lives, but had difficulties in generating incomes to support themselves. They took what they wanted from others, and when sufficiently large in numbers, they attempted common farms and gardens.

Fortunately, as their stridency finally calmed, there arose a unity in the faith that put a rational work ethic back into the groups. True Christianity started to make its comeback—sort of. As countries established national religions, persecution took on a new form in the guise of local law—If you’re not one of us, you’re not welcome. For many, they had no viable option to exercise their free choice of religion except to leave and start fresh in the New World.

Chapter 28: Rise of the Guilds

Meanwhile, back in Europe: Before socialism infiltrated modern free trade under the guise of unions, there were first the ancient associations and guilds.

The butcher, the baker and candlestick maker conjure up pleasant images of a simpler time in faraway medieval European towns where everyone looked like roly-poly cartoon characters and there was no violent crime, disease or outhouses.

Well—Maybe Not

In earlier centuries, the cobblers, tinkerers and craft makers were members of a guild—an association of specialists organized in Middle Ages Europe to guard and protect trade secrets. The guild movement was a great engine of self interest at work, established to protect their businesses and exclude competition.

The word “guild” is from the Anglo-Saxon gildan, meaning “to pay” or “to contribute.” Guild members paid regular dues to the central fund to pool the risks of life and business. This helped secure against an emergency such as sickness, accidents, funerals, financial collapse, bad economic times, etc.

Early Milestone Dates

Organizing skilled people into groups was not a medieval invention. Associations of talented people appear to have existed in many eras and numerous places. They were not always so organized or retained the level of bargaining power as those of recent centuries, but pooling talent appeared to be popular.

800 B.C.—Homer mentions associations of builders, potters, carpenters, and specialists in metal and leather in ancient Greece.

700 B.C.—Numa, thought to be the second king of Rome, divided craftsmen into nine guilds or collegia.

400 B.C.—India’s caste system had guilds called shrenis.

200 B.C.—A Chinese guild system began to form at least during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 200), called the hanghui. Chinese guilds were well established by the Sui Dynasty (A.D. 589-618).

A.D. 600—Earliest guilds reported in England.

A.D. 900—Craftsmen started organizing in Iran.

Merchant Guilds—in Like a Lamb ...

The most powerful associations during the medieval period were the merchant guilds. These were associations of artisans, craftsmen, merchants and traders, and membership was voluntary.

The Christian church played a large role in setting the right spirit of philanthropy that was adopted by most guilds, but the Church as an institution was not connected. It opposed the binding oaths that guild members swore to keep the secrets of their crafts hidden among themselves.

The merchant guilds were initially organized to resist the arbitrary tax hikes imposed by the land-owning lords and kings. As a group, the guilds could tell the kings where to get off if the rulers wanted to benefit from their services. But individuals had no such power. Telling off the king meant a trip to the dungeon. An individual didn’t wield enough power in such matters—he was too insignificant.

The guilds often united with other guilds and formed a formidable group that could rise up and refuse services or products unless certain demands were met. For example, the guilds insisted tax rates had to be locked in and unchanged for at least one year. Those agreements were drawn up as charters or letter patents, which were the predecessors of today’s patent and trademark system.

Guilds built their own meeting places called the guildhall. The buildings gave the members a safe and distinguished place of privilege to conduct business and receive payment of guild taxes. The members wore special apparel to advertise their guild association at formal occasions and parades, and hung signs out in front of their businesses to let people know that only the best was available there.

... And Out Like a Lion

The merchant guilds grew so powerful, they melded in with the town structure. Politics and favoritism began to monopolize everything—including the craftsmen.

The craftsmen didn’t like being smothered by the merchants and wanted to form their own associations. It wasn’t always a scene of pitchforks and torches, with peasants shaking fists and shouting insults at the gates of guildhall. But, the craftsmen succeeded in starting their own silent revolution. Over time, these craft guilds eventually overpowered and replaced many of the merchant guilds.

Craftsmen Unite

The first to form a craft guild were the weavers and fullers in England in A.D. 1130. They successfully established their own authority over various trades, and other craftsmen soon followed suit.

The craft guilds were organized along similar lines as the merchants. They built guild halls, they corralled skills into a pool, and they controlled the sale and availability of their services in a way to strengthen their business profits and foot traffic. After a few years no one could practice a particular craft without being a member of the local craft guild.

The new guilds prevented outside competition, and they worked together to fix prices as well as to ensure high levels of quality. They conspired to keep their products in great demand by limiting the numbers of craftsmen working in any particular art or trade, or reduced the quantity of product available.

Tutoring the Apprentice

The son of a guild member typically joined the guild as an “apprentice” who worked under the professional tutorship of a “master.” This training lasted 5-9 years. The youth received no income during this period except free room and board. He couldn’t even marry until he graduated to the level of “journeyman.”

A journeyman could receive wages for his work. His goal was to make the next level of master. To qualify for the top job, a journeyman had to successfully create an acceptable “masterpiece.” This was a work of such precision and professionalism (he hoped) that it would convince the guild leadership and other masters that he was ready.

As a master he could set up his own shop and begin training (and exploiting) the next generation of apprentices.

101 Models of Crafts on the Wall ...

The craftsmen formed hundreds of guilds from apothecaries to armor makers, bakers, barbers, surgeons, dentists, embroiderers, butchers, carpenters, candle makers, cordwainers (leather workers), cutlers (knife makers), dyers, farriers, fishmongers, fletchers (arrow makers), girdle makers, goldsmiths, stirrup and harness makers, masons, needle makers, plasterers, plumbers, writers of legal documents, skinners, winders and packers of wool—and more.

Church and Emperors Not Happy

During the reign of the Carlovingians (also known as the Carolinians, the family dynasty that ruled Germany, France and Italy during A.D. 700-900) the guilds’ control threatened the emperors’ ruling power. In A.D. 779, one such emperor declared,

“Let no one dare to take the oath by which people are wont to form guilds. Whatever may be the conditions which have been agreed upon, let no one bind himself by oaths concerning the payment of contributions in case of fire or shipwreck.”188

Other emperors issued similar decrees.

There was little the emperors could do to stop these organizations. Their feudal co-dependencies complicated matters even more—exerting too much force could chase away the hired help.

Lost in all of these machinations was the individual. The best way up the ladder of success was guild membership, but what if a person wanted to go solo, do it alone, venture into entrepreneurship, innovate, and invent something that would compete with the guild? Those who tried were punished by the guilds or by the town fathers, who, in some places were one and the same.

Legal Authority to Oppress

By the start of the new millennium, guilds in England were asking for government protection (with charters)—and were getting them. They started organizing everywhere. By A.D. 1093, they had large groups in Bristol, Carlisle, Durham, Lincoln, Oxford, Salisbury, and Southhampton. Chartering gave the guilds power to make legal rules of conduct that often carried the legal authority of local law.

Participation records from the parliaments of Edward I (1272-1307) show that there were some 160 towns represented in his government. Of these, at least 92 were known to have strongly organized guilds—it’s easy to surmise from the business and trading activities of the time that all villages and towns had guilds of one kind or another.

Records show that organizations were forming elsewhere—Gilde and Confrerie (France and the low countries); Zunft, Bruderschaft, and Hansa (Germany); Komtoor (Bruges), and others in Novgorod (Russia), Prussia, Westphalia, Livonia, Sweden, and just about everywhere that a man could buy a good plow and horse collar, and a woman a good stove pot and sewing needles.

Equal Opportunity Guilds?

Widows were allowed to participate in guilds if their husbands had been members in good standing when they died. Women and children could resume the trade to bring in some income so long as the quality and production standards were met.

Government Force Turned Them Into Socialists

The story of guilds is important in the history of socialism because guilds corrupted the free market with elements of Ruler’s Law.

For the most part, guilds were capitalistic. They tried to control wealth for private benefit. Freedom to associate and form a guild did not violate the rights of others. Setting rules for participation, and out-producing with superior products didn’t hurt either.

But when the guilds’ rules carried the force of public law, when they created monopolies and prevented workers from exercising their unalienable rights of choice and association by switching jobs—such as preventing a shoemaker from being a shoe repairer, or more broad, such as preventing a carpenter from becoming a plumber—that’s when the guilds became little combines of socialism.

Violating the basic freedom to try, by using coercion and violence to keep competitors from honing in on the business, was the precursor to today’s modern trade unions. Thugs and mobs of guild members found a fresh way to kill the competition—literally.

Early Thuggery: In 1397, a case was brought before the Lord Chancellor in England complaining of local merchants who had attacked a competitor: “... Because he sold his merchandise at a less price than other merchants of the said town of Yaxley did theirs ... [angry merchants] and many other evil-doers of their coven, lay in wait with force and arms to kill the said William Lonesdale, and they assaulted him, beat him and ill-treated him, and left him there for dead, so that he despaired of his life.”189

• Dying Dyers: Another case in that same period dealt with snuffing out a competitor who offered to dye cloth at below the going rates. Official court records of the late 1300s report:

  “Dyers guild undertook to work only at certain rates; and when a number of dyers refused to be bound by these rates, the guild hired Welshmen and Irishmen to waylay and kill them.”190

• First Picket Line: What might be the first union-type picket line recorded in history was formed in 1538. A bishop reported to Oliver Cromwell that:

  “...Twenty-one journeymen shoemakers of Wisbech have assembled on a hill without the town, and sent three of their number to summon all the master shoemakers to meet them, in order to insist upon an advance in their wages, threatening that ‘there shall none come into the town to serve for that wages within a twelve month and a day, but we will have an arm or a leg of him, except they will take an oath as we have done.’”191

  With lethal force taking care of business on the outside, secret handshakes and ceremonial initiations among the associations were taking care of business on the inside.

  Super Secret Societies

  The compagnonnages192 were secretive societies of journeymen in medieval Europe. Unlike the local guilds, the compagnonnages were international, with groups organized over all of the western continent.

  Another secretive group was the Masons. There is little mention of these before the 1400s, but the Masons participated and developed their own initiations and recognitions to help one another advance in business, education and life. The Masons claimed their origins stretched clear back to the stonework performed on the temple of Solomon around 900 B.C. However, a more probable origin was during the heydays of cathedral building that started in the A.D. 700s in Germany, or A.D. 1040 in England. To join the Mason’s building construction fraternities, a person was initiated into the mysticism with secret handshakes, oaths, passwords, and ceremonies. Violating these oaths could mean death.

  Working the System

  Be they secretive, coercive or voluntary, when workers organized themselves to control the means of production and distribution, they were in violation of natural law because they prevented others from exercising the same rights. Organizing to increase quality and decrease price is the positive way of building wealth. Organizing to prevent competition and keep prices high is the negative way to build wealth. Socialism builds on the negative side, capitalism builds on the positive side.

  These are lessons in economics that even the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker understood until the guilds crept in and corrupted that path. The guilds laid the groundwork for future trade unions that would infiltrate the marketplace in similar ways—this time with the iron fist of federal regulation and supreme law to back them up.

  The Guilds Decline

  The strength of the guilds began to decline in the 1600-1700s.

  When France was teetering on the brink of complete conflagration in the 1790s, the king banished the guilds to restore peace. He allowed any craftsman to freely compete by paying a fee for a business license. Suddenly, that made things fair again—but it was short-lived, and then abandoned. At the time, the French people had much larger issues exploding in their faces.

Chapter 29: How the French “Revolutionized” Socialism

Centuries of socialistic management under a monarch changed when France’s citizens woke up to the possibilities of freedom. The potential to be free was theirs—but they missed it, and ended up swapping one dictatorship for another.

Before the great revolution in 1789, France had all the earmarks of a typical socialist society.

It was feudalism, it was a monarchy, it was regimented, it was regulated, and it was maddening.

Its name was Ancien Régime, the “old system.” Everyone—old, young, rich, poor, high, low—knew it was failing to meet the needs of the growing populous and had to be replaced.

Setting the Stage

Here’s where the country stood in 1774 when Louis XVI took the throne.193 Although the largest and wealthiest nation in Europe with about 25 million people, it was having problems—

• Scattered Villages: France was not an all-together nation. For centuries the various kings had patched it together by conquest and deal-making—even marrying heiresses for political purposes. The various kings broke down the old feudal dynasties and drew new lines. Some provinces came on board with their own laws, customs, and system of government. So long as they paid taxes, the kings didn’t see a need to impose a universal law on everyone. Some of these districts were very self-sufficient with their own assemblies and historical independence.
• Scattered Laws: In France’s west and north, there were at least 285 separate codes of law. If you moved from one village to another, you might get arrested for some crime you never knew existed.
• Gridlock: Attempting to trade goods between towns and regions was like trading to a foreign country. Merchants had to pay duties to cross “state” lines.
• The Salt Tax: The government had a monopoly on salt. This earned the king a great deal of money. Once a year every household was compelled to purchase from the state warehouse seven pounds of salt per person who was over age seven—the price was arbitrarily set at any given place or time. Some of the districts paid horrific prices, perhaps 30 times more than their neighbors. For example, if people in Dijon wanted to salt their potato fries, they paid seven francs. But go east a few miles in Franche-Comté and it was 25 francs. Up in Burgundy, it was 58 francs, but over in Gex, it was zero. (Gex must have made great fries). A man caught smuggling this precious commodity could be fined, flogged, sent to the gallows, or executed.
• Class Differences: Not all Frenchmen enjoyed the same rights. The French caste system had three classes called the Estates.

  The First Estate was the clergy—probably because God was supposed to be first in everything.

  The Second Estate was the nobility—no doubt because they wanted to be first.

  And, the Third Estate was the peasants—as usual, the workers who did everything important but were always being listed last. In 1789, this Third Estate of peasants numbered 25 million, while the other two Estates totaled 275,000.
  

  But change was coming. It was a time when the French believed they could climb out from the ancient ways, become more modern, and overhaul the government, the economy, and even human nature. The pieces were all falling into place.

  About the Church ...

  The Catholic Church had been a ruling influence in France for centuries. It played a key role in public life by handling education, providing relief for the sick and poor, and was a rallying point for the discouraged and the spiritually downtrodden.

  Records indicate that the Church owned as much as a fifth of all the land. The clergy said church property was sanctified for God’s work, and therefore it shouldn’t, and wasn’t, taxed (however, the clergy were smart enough to give the king a “free gift” every so often to maintain the status quo).

  Forced Tithes: The Church collected tithes from all the people. This was enforced by the government like a tax, and brought in 183 million francs in 1789 ($780 million in 2012 dollars194). But things were not friendly for the non-Catholic. A Protestant, for example, could not be legally married, make a legal will, or register the births of his children.

  Clergy Profits: Huge sums of Church funds went into the pockets of the bishops, archbishops, and abbots. These fellows were not selected by the pope—they were the king’s buddies and were simply and officially appointed to the Church jobs. They didn’t do much for the Church or the people, and spent their time living off the king’s handouts. When the French Revolution began, the lower clergy, those who carried the heavy load of actually serving the people as originally intended, didn’t side with their higher-up leaders—and joined the people.

  The Caste

  As kings before him had done, King Louis XVI told his subjects that his authority came from God and he wouldn’t let anybody forget it. “The sovereign authority resides exclusively in my person. To me solely belongs the power of making the laws, and without depend-ence or cooperation. ...I am its supreme protector ... by the grace of God.”195 He also insisted on continuing that terrible taille, that direct land tax on the French peasantry and non-nobles, whereby he raised a sixth of the country’s entire income. Nobody knew how much money was gathered every year, but the sums were estimated to be in the tens of millions.

  All Power

  The king had power to arrest anyone at any time and throw him into prison, lock the door, and forget him. Such arrest orders were called lettres de cachet (sealed letters). These arbitrary orders were hated by medieval Europeans and were specifically outlawed in the Magna Carta (1215 A.D.). Some people were being locked away for a pamphlet they published or a speech they gave that offended the king or one of his groupies—and they were never heard from again.

  Checks and Balances

  Next to the king were the higher courts of law called the parlements. Not to be confused with English parliaments, the French parlements helped check the king’s edicts. The people insisted that any law the king issued had to be looked at by parlement—read, reviewed, understood, and registered. If not, the people argued, how could the king expect them to enforce a new law that conflicted with others, or simply made no sense?

  Protest Letters: When the parlements didn’t like a new law, they sent the king a “protest” explaining their objections. But that wasn’t all—they had the protest printed and distributed so the masses would support their opposition to the king’s tyranny. This kept the debate public and conveyed the idea that the king wasn’t as “all powerful” as he tried to act—that there were fundamental laws even he couldn’t break.

  Nasty Feudalism Remained: By 1774, the nobility class no longer enjoyed the power it retained during the prior 500 years. Nevertheless, some remnants of serfdom let these lords extract some time-honored dues from those who lived nearby or from inside the boundaries of what used to be their villas and manors.

  The dues included part of a peasant’s crops or a toll on animals driven past a lord’s home. The lord usually obligated the peasants to use his mill, oven, or wine press, and charged heavily for the privilege. And, any of the lord’s animals and birds that wandered onto peasants’ lands could not be hunted because those were his property.

  Not Very Poor? The commoners of the 1780s were not as down-trodden and miserable as some said. Thomas Jefferson reported in 1787 that the peasants in France had plenty to eat and were comfortable.196 An English traveler named Arthur Young reported that the country people had prosperity and were contented.

  If Not Poverty, Why Then a Revolution? The reason the peasantry finally rose up in a revolution in 1789 wasn’t necessarily because of their impoverishment. They finally rose to a level of education, understanding, and freedom where they realized that they simply didn’t have to take it anymore.

  They rejected the old ways, those remnants of serfdom that still haunted their culture. They resisted the nobility’s continued attempts to act the part of common robbers, skulking around to extract a portion of the harvest, or hiding in the trees to take a toll at a river crossing, or refusing to compensate for damage from His Lordship’s animals that might have ruined a commoner’s crops during a hunt.

  Weary of the Slave Society: In short, the whole country was tired—tired of the absurd and abusive laws, rules, and customs of top-down regimentation, of thievery and control, of oppression and domination. Those relics of the old system that perpetuated the seven pillars of socialism would no longer be tolerated—the French wanted them gone. Helping to push things along were some great thinkers who came forward.

  Great Thinkers Set the Stage

• Voltaire (1694-1778) was a popular reformer whose writings unified the cause of freedom and rebellion in France.

  Understanding Voltaire is understanding France before their revolution. He had no patience or sympathy for the old traditions and wore out his quill exposing absurdity after absurdity in the existing norms. His prolific ways spanned the written word in published editorials, histories, plays, dramas, romances, letters, and more—reaching out to all levels of society where he put forth his persistent question, why not freedom?

  Voltaire was no atheist, but the Catholics and Protestants he attacked accused him of it, and of corruption and hypocrisy. He credited God for all things wholesome and good—as a good deist would—but his creative pen lobed fireballs at the worldly religions that showed themselves bent on greed, power, and gain.

  He somehow missed or at least he avoided acknowledging the centuries of good works by the Church, and instead focused on ridiculing them for their tragic lapses. The French commoners loved his writings.

• Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) did a great job stirring discontent. His famous little pamphlet, The Social Contract, boldly declared it is the people who should make the laws because it is the people who must obey them. France’s first constitution in 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizens, included Rousseau’s doctrine:

  “Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes.”197

• Montesquieu (1689-1755) pointed out how Englishmen kept control over their limited monarchy with a clever idea called separation of powers. The English, Montesquieu observed, had three powers in government—Parliament making the laws, the king executing them, and the independent courts enforcing them. France would be strong-er, Montesquieu reasoned, if these three functions were removed from the same individual’s hands, as the English had done, and spread out to check one another’s powers and choices.

  Taxes and the Science of Political Economy

  When Louis XVI took the throne in 1774 as a young 20-year-old, with his beautiful wife Marie Antoinette, he was anxious to turn around the financial mess in which the country was buried. The chicanery of prior monarchs had plunged the country deeply into a fiscal nightmare.

  However, poor Louis XVI had to keep up appearances, too.198 And, deal with a host of corruptions. For example—

• Staff: The on-site military retinue of the king included 9,050 people. His civil household numbered around 4,000. The palace at Versailles also kept on the payroll 150 pages, 128 musicians, 48 physicians and assistants, 383 officers of the table, and 198 persons to wait personally upon the king.
• New Baby: When the queen delivered little Princess Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, the royal couple negotiated a compromise with the royal court that the one-month-old child could be adequately cared for by only 80 persons.199
• “Homes”: The king had a dozen residencies always kept in readiness. These had 1,857 horses, 217 vehicles, and 1,458 men in livery. Marie Antoinette’s stables in 1780 had 75 vehicles and 330 horses.
• Weekly Allowance: The cost of these extravagances was at least $120 million a year in adjusted 2010 dollars. Pensions to the king’s courtiers cost another $120 million a year.
• Favoritism: The upper class enjoyed benefits that others did not, such as being exempted from high taxes, and being spared the horrific and unequal methods of tax collection.
• Self-Defeating: The interior tariffs that villages charged each other had long paralyzed free trade among districts and cities.
• Greed: Kings of the past had bought support from the upper clergy, and their meddling in the market was slowing the economy. The opulence was very one sided—while the king lived the lavish lifestyle, his people were arrested for hoarding food, even during times of plenty. The fiscal mess brought various economists to Versailles, begging on bended knee for the king to please stay out of the people’s private market. They begged for laissez faire—(French: “leave it alone”).

  Louis XVI Listened. The king wasn’t totally detached from his country’s economic crises, and looked for smart people to help him get things righted again. He summoned the ablest economist in the land, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and made him controller general to clean up the mess. Turgot made a good stab at things and even induced the king to abolish the guilds (this lasted only a short time). But the privileged class won the day and undermined Turgot until he was fired in May, 1776. And then came—

• Next Minister: Jacques Necker took over as minister of finance in 1776. He sought to calm the troubled financial waters by making the taille more fair to all citizens, and arranged to borrow vast sums to help France support the Americans in the War for Independence against the British.

  Necker’s undoing was publishing for all to see the great secret of France’s financial condition that he delivered to the king in 1781. It wasn’t so much what the report said that caused the problems, but that he also had the information publicly printed and widely distributed. It told how much was raised from the hated taille and the salt tax, and how much the king lavished on himself, his court, and his friends. Necker was promptly fired. And then came—

• Next Minister: Charles Calonne in 1783. He is the man credited/accused of precipitating the great reforms that led to the French Revolution in 1789.

  Calonne was a lavish spender, also known as Monsieur Déficit for that obvious reason. After settling into his new job and looking at the books, he realized France was in deep trouble, mostly because of the help it gave the Americans. How was that to be handled? The country had no means to borrow more—everyone was taxed to the hilt—so just what was this powdered-wig dignitary to do?

  Calonne by-passed the parlements200 and went straight to the king with a proposal to fix things. He would reduce the taille, equalize the salt and tobacco taxes, create free trade, correct the abuses of the guilds, start a universal land tax, allow the sale of church property, and last but not least—force the nobility and privileged classes to give up their exemptions and start paying taxes like everyone else. That’s where the fight started.

  Calonne knew the parlements wouldn’t go along so he schemed with the king to bring important people in church and state together as a representative body to give their stamp of approval. This group was called the Notables.

  The Notables were all of the upper classes and seemed willing to help bail out the nation from looming bankruptcy. However, when they heard Calonne’s plan, they didn’t trust him and refused to go along. So, naturally, the king fired Calonne.

  The king tried to make the reforms himself and sent them to the parliaments to be registered as law. Those fellows refused to consider the king’s idea unless he would call an assembly of all three Estates, the Estates General, to take charge and really fix things with full representation from all the people.

  The King’s Ministers Light the Fuse

  The king agreed, but then the evil ministers of the king threw a monkey wrench into the whole mess: they started maneuvering for a way to remove the ability of the parlements to review all the king’s decisions. This would let the king make law by simple royal edict with no check or challenge to worry about.

  The parlement of Paris was the first to hear of this scheme, and they rose up in anger. Word quickly spread to the provinces. Fear and doubt spread—would the king and his ministers actually make laws for the entire realm, and ignore the special political privileges that were granted to some provinces, privileges that went back centuries as conditions for their joining with France? It was unthinkable!

  Estates General: With rumblings of alarm rolling through the kingdom, the king decided the only way out was to go ahead and call the Estates General and let them duke it out.

  The year was 1789. The last time the Estates General had been assembled was way back in 1614. No one knew exactly how the meeting should go. The group was made up of hundreds of delegates, but each was supposed to vote together as a bloc, as an Estate. Each bloc had one vote—a vote by the clergy, a vote by the nobility, and a vote by the commoners. Naturally, the commoners felt outnumbered. No matter what happened, the commoners could be outvoted 2 to 1 every time. To make it more unfair, there were clergy and nobility who sided with the commoners, but their votes didn’t matter so long as the majority of their blocs wanted it this way or that.

  One Man, One Vote: Realizing the “old way” was creeping back into this political process. The commoners demanded “one man, one vote” of all the delegates.

  After six weeks of haggling and being outvoted, the commoners grew impatient and refused to meet. They reconvened at an indoor tennis court building, took an oath to remain until a constitution was created, and declared themselves the “National Assembly.” It was an amazing and long overdue restoration of power to the people that made them the first modern representative assembly in continental Europe.

  The king was eventually forced to concede authority to the new national body and told the other two Estates to go join the whole. But Louis XVI wasn’t happy with the loss of control and power, and considered dissolving the Assembly and sending everyone home.

  The Ministers Throw Another Wrench: As if things weren’t tense enough, the king’s ministers advised the king to beef up his personal guard “just in case.” If he was going to dismiss the Assembly, chances of an uprising were pretty high, and he should be prepared with more troops. The king agreed and summoned more soldiers.

  When the people of Paris saw the king’s private troops receiving reinforcements, they panicked. What was he up to? Without arms, how could they protect themselves if shooting began? They knew where the arms were—the Hôtel des Invalides—and decided to take action and grab the guns. They mustered a large group and rushed the building, forced their way in, and gathered up 30,000 muskets—but they had no powder or shot.

  Storming the Bastille: The Paris mob was now more than 8,000, and believed there was a cache of 30,000 pounds of powder holed up in the Bastille. They pushed at the gates for admittance and a gun fight broke out. About a hundred persons were killed before the governor capitulated and opened the gates. The mob attacked the defenders, freed seven poor souls still imprisoned there, and killed the governor and the guard. With weapons and ammunition, the demolition of the hated Bastille was next on the list.

  And so began the first blow for freedom on July 14, 1789.

  Word of the revolution in Paris spread through France. In other cities, similar acts took place as the peasants took control of their futures by rising up against the tyranny of the nobility, the feudal lords, and the corrupted clergy.

  In hundreds of villages, people gathered at the commons or the parish churches and voted to stop paying feudal taxes. They turned on the old regime and burned their castles, thus destroying official records showing any obligation of money or servitude.

  As news of a general revolution reached Paris, the National Assembly was emboldened to action. They moved forward with confidence and passed their first important reforms:

• They abolished serfdom and feudalism.
• The lords, nobility, and independent provinces had to surrender their ancient privileges. Even the exclusive right of the nobility to hunt was abolished—now anyone could hunt.
• Mandatory church tithes were abolished.
• Taxes were made uniform and equal to all.
• It was decreed that anyone could run for any public office.
• All laws in all provinces were wiped out—all of France now had one law applicable to everyone, regardless of earlier promises or privileges.

  The passage of these historic reforms was another great day for France—August 5, 1789.

  Changes Came Rapidly

  The Assembly moved to secure more changes. They unified the whole country, erased the old province boundary lines, and divided the country into departments of appropriate size. They named them after nearby landmarks such as mountains and rivers, to further erase remnants of the old feudal distinctions.

  On August 26, 1789, the Assembly then approved an important document that assured freedom and prepared the foundation for a constitution. It was called the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It established that—

• Created Equal: “Men are born and remain equal in rights.”
• Law is Supreme: “Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate, personally or through his representative, in its formation. It must be the same for all.”
• Writ of Habeas Corpus: “No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law.”
• Freedom of Religion: “No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided that their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.”
• Freedom of Speech: “The free communications of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom as shall be defined by law.”
• Taxes: “All citizens have a right to decide either personally or by their representative, as to the necessity of the public contribution, to grant this freely to know to what uses it is put, and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection, and the duration of the taxes.”
• Public Accountability: “Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.”

  The King Didn’t Want to Surrender Power

  It took two years for the Assembly to clean feudalism off the map, and create a new constitution. The king didn’t like the rapid erosions of power, and thought fleeing was the best way to regroup with supporters and find a way back into power. On the night of June 20, 1791, he fled Paris with his family. He didn’t get very far before he was recognized and hauled back.

  Three months later, the new constitution was finished and presented to the king for his approval. This pointed the way to abolish the monarchy and make France a republic with a congress called the Legislative Assembly.

  Chaos and Misery. Swirling around the revolutionary changes were confusion, poverty and hunger. The Legislative Assembly had their hands full trying to purge the country of lingering threats, and trying to feed the starving at the same time. By the spring of 1792, matters worsened significantly when war broke out with Prussia and Austria.

  “Every Man for Himself!” The war panicked members of the Legislative Assembly. They had enemy troops at the border, mobs in the streets, all of Paris calling for the abdication of the king, and there the politicians sat paralyzed, wondering what to do. For half of that august body, the answer was simple—flee Paris and run for the hills.

  Rise of the National Convention. So, power changed hands again, this time to a group called the National Convention.

  Lenin liked this part of France’s revolutionary period. In 1917, Lenin stood atop the ruins of his own revolution and declared that the French events of August 10, 1792, had successfully revolutionized the revolution. It showed the world, he said, how the lower classes should rise up and claim what was theirs.

  Meanwhile, back in 1792, the National Convention held an iron grip on the affairs of the country and used terror to achieve its ends. They deported some priests, sold off property claimed by recent immigrants, took away all dues owed to landlords, and made everyone start calling each other “Citizen.”

  From Frenzy to Fear. By September 2, 1792, patriotic enthusiasm had switched to fearful paranoia. In just five days, ruthless mobs raged through Paris, freeing fellow citizens from the prisons, and hunting down the aristocracy. Members of the upper class who were accused of abusing the people received brief trials and were executed. By week’s end some 1,400 were killed.

  Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse. And thus came to be installed a fourth governmental power, Terror, that replaced Democracy which had already won out over the Monarch and the Aristocrat.

  Back to Business. On September 21, 1792, the National Convention finally and formally replaced the monarchy with a republic. It was a great day because good news came in from the war front—the troops had stopped the Prussians and liberated other lands in Savoy, Frankfurt, and Belgium.

  Meanwhile, What About the King? Louis XVI remained a formal figure head, but he had to be eliminated. That came about by way of accusations that he had cavorted with the enemy. He was arrested, put on trial for treason, found guilty, and guillotined on January 21, 1793.

  The king’s death didn’t calm or solve France’s problems.

  With food shortages, rampant crime, mobs, and fighting among those in power, the National Convention stepped in to control the economy. They set up a wide system of price controls on 50 necessities, including basic foodstuffs, fuel, clothing, and wages.

  The National Convention also formed the Committee of Public Safety to watch over France’s internal security. One of its leaders, a man named Robespierre, rose to total control by having others in the Committee of Safety condemned and executed. “To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency,” he said in 1794. “To forgive them is barbarity.” It was his philosophy that the revolutionary government adopted, his strange combination of both virtue and terror.

  Reign of Terror Spreads

  The Committee of Safety sent commissioners all over France to root out those suspected of contributing to the tensions of the time or challenging the committee’s authority. The purge began with the aristocrats, including Marie Antoinette. The sound of carts lumbering through the streets of Paris toward Madam Guillotine became far too familiar as the famous and the unknown were taken to their deaths.

  After the aristocrats were eliminated, the moderates went next, including those formerly on the National Assembly who opposed the power of the Committee of Safety. The feast for blood and power then turned on itself and executions were conducted everywhere—drownings, shootings, the guillotine—anyone suspected was put on trial with no legal representation.

  In the fever of the times, Robespierre lent his support to a new law that simplified the judicial process of convicting the accused. “Every citizen is empowered to seize conspirators and counterrevolutionaries, and to bring them before the magistrates. He is required to denounce them as soon as he knows of them.” It gave the Revolutionary Tribunal more power to kill.

  Tired of the Blood

  And then great news came in July 1794, that French troops had swept through Belgium, successfully extending the revolution and securing another border. This brought a national sigh of relief from one village to another. The crisis atmosphere that had hung heavy for so long finally seemed to lift. The fatigue of all that hate and suspicion turned on Robespierre and Saint-Just, the two leaders who fomented the Reign of Terror. They were accused of conspiring to wrest complete control for themselves.

  Getting a Head’s Up

  On July 28, 1794, Robespierre and 21 of his closest associates were meeting at the Hotel de Ville in Paris to consider their next move. It was 2 a.m. when suddenly, army troops surrounded the compound and ordered them to surrender. Fighting broke out. Several tried to escape, others tried to commit suicide.

  There are mixed reports about injuries Robespierre received that night. Either he shot himself in the face in a failed suicide attempt or he was shot by one of the troops. However it happened, the bullet shattered his jaw and he was bleeding profusely when they captured him. He used a handkerchief to secure his jaw, and remained bandaged all the way to his appointment with the guillotine. When the executioners laid him at the blade facing up, a man removed the bandage. Robespierre screamed in pain—until the falling blade silenced him forever.

  Before the Emperor

  After Robespierre died, the revolutionary fervor abated, but France’s financial and national security concerns did not go away. The people wanted more security in their lives and thought a stronger central government was needed. And that’s what they got in the form of an emperor named Napoleon Bonaparte, the hero general who had so recently waged such fine and victorious wars for France.

  The French Revolution and Socialism

  The ten-year revolution in France is an excellent study in socialism. A major theme for socialists is the destruction of the existing society. The French Revolution did just that—it got rid of Christianity, it got rid of the Church, it got rid of the aristocracy and the nobility, it got rid of the king, it was a major change. It brought bread to the poor and democracy to France, and established a grand new society. But it failed to finish the work to establish freedom and the protection of natural rights for all.

  Americans applauded the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy, but turned on France when the ghastly Reign of Terror began.201 The rampages through the countryside, the short and unfair trials, the hundreds of deaths with no legal support, gave ample proof to most Americans that the French were not ready for freedom. It was evidence that the uneducated and property-less masses were motivated mostly by greed and envy to despoil the propertied class. They were not ready for self-government.

  The French governments that rose and fell during that decade of 1789-1799 exhibited all seven pillars of socialism in action.

• An all-powerful ruler was present as first, the king, whom they failed to retire, and then the various all-powerful groups and committees that fought each other for power instead of serving the people.
• The government retained economic control. It set prices for at least 50 essential commodities and managed production and trade.
• It eventually allowed more freedom of information, but allowed suspicion, opinion, and simple finger-pointing to send a man or woman to the guillotine without any sense of order, goal or defense. It was too little law, the chaos of anarchy at work.
• It imposed behavior patterns such as the title of “Citizen” as a means for testing loyalty, or the new colors and styles of clothing that were forced on the people as proof of their patriotism.

  The use of force, terror, beheadings, destruction and executions to compel citizens to comply with the rulers’ demands could be no better illustrated than during the reign of terror. Unfortunately, it didn’t bring about the desired ending. After all the dust settled and the blood dried, France was left with having missed its chance for real freedom and prosperity. It failed to install a form of governance that kept power with the people, and allowed sufficient authority in a federal ruling body. Instead, it swapped one socialist power for another, in the form of an emperor. The country suffered for its mistake during the decades that followed.

  Learning to Recognize Socialism

  1. What was so enticing about Christianity that attracted socialism-minded people? What did they think they had in common?
  2. How soon after the death of Jesus and the Apostles did break-away groups begin to form? What was the first? What did Nicholas think about marriage? What did he do with his wife?
  3. Did the heretics practice Christianity as originally taught by Jesus? Name three of the activities or practices by the heretical movement that were shockingly unchristian.
  4. List three things the various heretics had in common. Why didn’t these movements last very long? Which of the seven pillars of socialism were present in these groups? Did these people violate the rights of others to practice their belief system?
  5. How is the “jungle morality” of uninhibited sexual union manifesting itself in the world today? In what ways is that damaging to the family as the key unit of society? Is it hurting American culture? What are some ways that it undermines freedom and liberty?
  6. After Rome fell in A.D. 476, what were the two most important challenges facing people in Western Europe? What two existing establishments came to their rescue?
  7. What is feudalism? How did it develop in Western Europe? What social classes eventually developed?
  8. Was the claim to ‘divine right of kings’ by Europeans significantly different from similar claims of demigod status by leaders of ancient Sumer, Egypt and China? Explain.
  9. Who owned everything in a feudal village—the land, the houses, the crops and cattle? What did the peasants receive in return for their labors? Where in the caste did peasants find themselves?
  10. When did guilds first appear in England? What advantages did a member have from being in a guild? What advantages did consumers get from the existence of guilds?
  11. Which pillars of socialism did the guilds acquire to control the market place and prevent competition?
  12. How long did the French Revolution last? What was the ancien regime?
  13. What do you think was missing from the French Revolution that might have ended with a constitutional form of government ensuring power in the people? Was France ready for self-government?
  14. How many rights in France’s Declaration of Rights are also included in America’s Bill of Rights?
  15. Looking back at the yardstick of political power, how is the French Revolution a good example of anarchy or “no law”? Which of the seven pillars of socialism were in force during the Revolution? Explain.

• Part V--SOCIALISM IN THE AMERICAS

  “The sober and godly men ... evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s ... as if they were wiser than God.”

Chapter 30: Meanwhile, Over in the Americas . . .

Socialism was not strictly a European invention.

Most of the pre-Columbian Indians of north America did not leave behind much in the way of record-keeping. This makes understanding their culture more difficult. Tradition, art, and legend is all that remain in some instances.

North American Natives

Many American Indians were usually on the move. Some of them put down roots, such as the Pacific Northwest people, but the majority were frequently relocating to follow the food or find a more suitable climate.

There were thousands of groups, small and independent. Their chiefs were often chosen for their superior material wealth, or in some instances, on account of their ancestry. For some tribes power was passed down along matriarchal lines. Many were bonded by tradition and blood to large decentralized nations.

Public and Private Property

On the level of the individual tribe, it was common to have basic village needs held in common—housing, the cook fire, sometimes canoes and teepees, or hunting and fishing grounds. There was, however, plenty of self-aggrandizement going on. Private ownership and building up of personal wealth was a sign of superior wisdom and capacity. Evidence of commercial trading of shells or copper or unique craft goods to enrich the treasure troves of personal wealth have been found far removed from their places of manufacture.

Making Do ...

Most of the tribes practiced slavery; a few were cannibals. It also appears their hand-to-mouth “on the go” bare subsistence level of living imposed a dependence that was more cooperative than in the larger civilizations. It is in the larger groups that the seven despotic pillars of socialism are found well established, entrenched, and floating in human blood.

Chapter 31: Incas: Model Socialists

Nobody practiced socialism better than the Incas from A.D. 1200 to 1573—for them, there were no problems a few thousand human sacrifices couldn’t solve.

STORY: When Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1532, he had Spain’s royal decree to conquer the land. It was a daunting challenge. They had to force some 12 million people scattered over Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and northern parts of Chile and Argentina to capitulate to Spain’s military authority. With hardly 200 men at his command, the prospects were ridiculously remote.202

Fortunately for Pizarro, he had two things going for him: a civil war between two brothers and their followers that was underway, and 200 years of regimentation that had sapped the entire culture of its ability to organize an adaptable means of defending itself.

Beautiful Cities Built Through Strict Regulation

The prize was worth the effort. Pizarro and his men were struck by the fantastic achievements of the Incas. Their capital city Cuzco was as advanced as any major city in Europe, and this without the advantages of iron or centuries of evolving European technologies.

The Incas had marshaled their people and resources to build magnificent fortresses, temples, palaces, paved roads, bridges and aqueducts. Giant blocks of stone weighing 10-12 tons each were fitted together for walls with such carved precision that even a knife blade could not fit between them. Cuzco was the center of everything, and was connected to the empire with excellent roads, cut as needed, through solid rock, or that spanned gorges with suspension bridges. Foot messengers ran the routes to keep Inca informed of the doings in his kingdom.

Central Storehouses

All the Inca storehouses were full of food and supplies. Llamas did the heavy labor and also provided meat and wool. Weapons, clothing, houses, utensils, and tools were finely developed and orderly—an amazing achievement considering the people had only wood and stone with which to work.

Caste System

The Inca society was organized into a three-level caste system. At the top were the Inca rulers, the direct descendants of the original tribe. This class provided leadership at all levels, but the levels were highly regimented. Each official could communicate only with his direct supervisor and those directly beneath him, thereby designating immediate accountability for all things good and bad.

The next level down were the peasants and workers. This vast majority did all the work to support the empire. They were the soldiers and defenders of the empire. When a village was conquered, these people were sent to set up the Inca way of life. They also sustained the kingdom with everything from farming, raising llamas, and producing clothing and other handcrafted items. And, they also provided their young daughters for human sacrifice. The Inca gods were hungry for such rituals, especially at the great festivals when a new Inca was installed as leader.

At the lowest level were the state slaves. The largest of this slave class apparently descended from an earlier group that once tried to rebel against Inca. They were condemned to die but legend says Inca’s wife pled for their preservation and the tribes were instead made slaves in perpetuity.

No Individual Rights

Inca owned everything, and allowed no private land ownership. He loaned out land as needed for farming, but the produce went to the ruling class. When a peasant married, he received a parcel of land that was large enough to sustain him and his wife. When children were born, the family received more. When the man died the land went back to Inca.

Low-level administrators supervised the peasants working the land. Work began each day with the sound of a conch, and everyone filed out to his or her assigned duties. Their labors included building the temples, repairing the palaces and roads, working the gold and silver mines, or any other state project assigned to them.

Tightly Organized

The people were grouped as families into 10s, 50s, 100s, up to 10,000. Each group had an assigned official watching them closely. Houses were all the same size and design—doors had to be open to anyone. They all ate at the same time, and they were forbidden to change anything from the standardized size, look, and feel, or they would be executed. If anyone wanted to leave a village for any purpose at all, permission was always required.

Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits

The Incas devised an excellent policing system for runaways. They forced everyone to have certain haircuts and uniform styles of clothing. The only variation in these appearances was from province to province. This smothered the temptation of vanity to use style, clothing, and looks to appear better. Also, if someone tried to run away, those in other districts could spot them immediately because of their different hair style, and the cut and color of their cloak.

“Bristle While You Work ...”

The laws exacted constant production from everyone. Men’s lives were divided into ten periods with appropriate duties and requirements for each period. Women had similar duties, and when en route from here to there, they were expected to take along some wool to spin along the way. The elderly or infirm had work assignments suited to their abilities. If slaves had no work to do, their masters would give them useless chores such as moving rocks from here to there or digging pits and filling them again. Work, work, work—no slackers allowed.

Intimate Family Life Regulated

Marriage was strictly programmed. Once each year in every village, a ruler would conduct marriages for all those who had reached a certain age. If they had not paired off, they would be forced to. A man might express a preference, but a woman could never say no. Objecting to the ruler’s choices was punishable by death.

There was no sharing of wives but a man could have concubines in addition to his first wife. Depending on the man’s place in the caste system dictated how many concubines he could have—10, 20, 40, or more.

When children were old enough for school, only those of the upper class were allowed to learn. Education among the lower classes was punishable by death. The privileged children learned their nation’s history, laws and culture, as well as hymns that conveyed similar messages that were recited around the campfires. A village scholar was assigned the duty to teach the children.

Food for the Gods

Females were treated like disposable property. Every year, representatives of Inca visited all the villages to choose out girls eight years old. They were taken from their families and raised in a commune. Also every year, those who turned 13 were taken to Cuzco and presented to Inca himself. He picked a third who would attend to matters of Inca worship. Another third was given away as wives or concubines to the nobility class. The last third was reserved for human sacrifice. If parents grieved over their daughter’s selection for the sacrifice they could be punished with death.

Obey or Else

Punishment for disobedience was extremely severe. Breaking the law was viewed as a direct affront to the Inca’s authority. Even the most minor infractions, such as picking berries or catching a fish on state-owned property, resulted in death. Other capital crimes included causing an abortion or seducing someone of a higher class. In some cases, the law allowed forced labor instead of execution, and punishment could extend beyond life to include punishing the criminal’s descendents. However, these laws did not apply equally to all. The elitist Incas often got off with just a scolding and a sour look, while the slaves were beheaded.

Executions by stoning, hanging by the hair, being thrown off a cliff, or dropped into a pit of snakes wasn’t necessarily the worst of it. The Incas had underground prisons that housed meat-eating animals or deadly scorpions. An accused conspirator’s guilt was tested by throwing him into just such a prison. If a person was guilty, the creatures would kill him—if innocent ... well, it was a miracle.

Ignorance and Fear

With all things identical, all things regulated, and all things standardized, the Incas were conditioned to be naturally suspicious of anything out of the ordinary—an eclipse, an earthquake, the birth of twins or triplets, strange anomalies in nature—these were feared and shunned as manifestations sent as warnings from the evil gods.

Crushing the Human Spirit

The Inca system of socialism weakened the people terribly. It took away their drive to achieve and initiate anything from their own creativity. They became indifferent, apathetic, and stopped thinking for themselves. They lost the connective tissue and emotional bonds in their family circles. They apparently didn’t care about elderly parents who were no longer able to care for themselves. They didn’t care about the suffering by those closest to them. They didn’t care about the Inca state. They had become accustomed to being told by someone what to do, when to do it, and when to do it over if things didn’t measure up.

It is small wonder, then, why a small group of 200 Spaniards could come among them and dispatch the Inca leadership and take over with relative ease. The Spaniards pitted faction against faction in battles and wars to gain complete control. And in the end, the final tally showed that the Inca’s thousands always lost against Pizarro’s hundreds.

Socialism Erupts on Its Own

The interesting message from the rise and fall of the Inca empire is that nearly every element of socialism that was promoted in Plato’s “perfect” Republic or More’s “ideal” Utopia were independently invented and implemented among the Incas—with devastating and miserable results. Also important is the fact the Incas didn’t have access to the writings of western philosophers—they came up with the horrible ideas of socialism all by themselves.

This leads to the conclusion that socialism as a set of tyrannical aspirations needs no precedent to come into existence. Lacking any better code of moral existence, tyranny will rise of its own accord. Not benevolently, but with blood and horror. The seven despotic pillars of socialism in Europe or the Americas cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence or accidental commonality. They are the magnification of mankind’s natural desires to survive at any cost, including the extermination of his fellow beings.

Chapter 32: Jesuit Priests Socialize Paraguay

In the name of Christianity, Jesuit missionaries socialized native converts with baptism, the whip, and Ruler’s Law.

In 1609, Jesuit priests rode into the jungles and valleys of central South America to search for converts.

The regional Spanish governor was in favor of these evangelical labors because there was a frontier border that needed protection. He granted the Jesuits permission to proselytize provided they would organize the people into hamlets at strategic points along the Paraná River. The Jesuits agreed and went about their missionary labors.

In a fascinating description provided by Yves Guyot in his book, Socialistic Fallacies (1910),203 this is how socialism worked among the natives of Paraguay—

It took only a few hundred Jesuits to conquer villages. They would invade the selected tribe, set the huts on fire, and take men, women and children as their prisoners. They divided the people among their missions to prevent them from combining again to form a rebellion. Some of the settlements (called a Jesuit Reduction) controlled as many as 3,500 with just 2-3 Jesuits as overseers.

A native was considered baptized when the Jesuit touched him or her with a damp cloth. A record of this baptism was sent to Rome. After the baptisms, things relaxed a little—each tribe was ruled by a spiritual leader and a temporal leader. There was no uniform or formal law put in place—the only laws were those set by the whim and wit of the Jesuits in charge.

All possessions were held in common—there was no private property. There was no inheritance to pass along or, for a while at least, no property boundaries to define or debate. The children were also communally raised by the village.

Even though the natives had to labor exactly as ordered, the Jesuits found things went smoother if they gave them a small piece of land the people could farm two days a week. They also allowed fishing and hunting, provided the people returned a gift of fish or game to the missionaries.

Regimented Life

Before sun-up, the entire village met at the church for hymns, prayers, and roll call. After lining up to kiss the hands of the missionaries, they were served a broth of barley meal without any fat or salt. Salt was scarce, so was meat, and very little of either was served except maybe on an occasional Sunday. Then, off to work.

The natives could never ride the horses, and had no money or commerce outside of the set boundaries. The men went to the fields or shops, the women worked over the fires, roasting a day’s worth of corn. Later, they went to work spinning at least an ounce of cotton. At lunch, the same broth was served but this time thickened up with peas, beans, some flour and maize. After lunch, they again kissed the missionaries’ hands and headed back to work.

When a native became a convert and “confessed,” he or she was forced to become an informer on others. Lashes with leather whips punished men in public and women in private for neglecting their duties or from committing other crimes.

The problem of “all things in common” ignited the passions of some missionaries who took advantage of the native women and girls. The Jesuits were confessor, legislator and judge, and supervised everything. The natives complained of many abuses, but were powerless to act.

Lifeless Automatons

Before the Jesuits were expelled in 1768, observers reported the populations had become spiritually dead. They theorized it was a leftover from the horror of the Inca, a so-called Inca Affect. Some 70 workers could hardly perform what eight or ten mediocre Europeans could perform in the same allotted time. The natives loathed their wretched lives. Even a nightly bell rung by the Jesuits to signal the start of sexual relations to repopulate their numbers failed to produce an increase. Disinterest in their spouses was the last and most horrible testimony of the smothering impact of the socialistic life. After 160 years of ruinous regimentation, the Jesuits left behind an entire people in misery, stagnation, and broken spirits.

Chapter 33: Jamestown: Socializing the New World

It was 1607 when the ancient ideas of ‘all things in common’ began to wreak havoc in North America.

STORY: The first English settlement in America landed the seven pillars of socialism into the “new world” with a painfully lethal thud.

After Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempts to establish a colony in Roanoke had failed, a group of investors obtained a charter to try again somewhere along the Virginia coastline. In 1607, a group of 104 entrepreneurs and explorers tied off at an island about 40 miles inland from Virginia’s Atlantic coast. They had discovered a natural deepwater port that was easily defendable.

Imposing Ruler’s Law

Once ashore, their first chore was to divide the colonists roughly into thirds—a group to build a fort, another to start a farm, and the remainder to look for gold. A central storehouse was established to receive all food supplies from which each could take as needed. Each man was required to put back all that he could. Marx would later codify the regimen as “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”204

Did it work? Not at all. The lack of incentive to work for each other, even to avoid starvation, left them severely hurting for food. By Christmas the death toll was high—66 had already died from starvation and disease. The remaining 38 suffered through the winter while they waited on England to deliver food, supplies, and a fresh crop of settlers.

Socialism Flops Again

Why did this first group of settlers fail to provide for themselves? A host of modern voices point to everything for the colony’s miserable failings except to the antagonistic assault on human nature that was used to coerce labor. Threats, deprivations, punishments, and even execution couldn’t stir the men to work. They hated working for others as if they were slaves or servants.

The following year a few hundred more settlers arrived. They faced the same problems. The promised free handouts from the central storehouse couldn’t supply the people’s needs. Only 40 of the men did any appreciable work while the others shirked their duties. That winter, death by starvation nearly wiped out all of them.

The Starving Time

In 1609, another 500 settlers arrived. Unfortunately, this didn’t solve anything because the principles of socialism continued to be in operation: no private ownership, top-down control, total and complete regulation.

That winter, their journals record a horrid time of suffering they named the “starving time.” The unfortunate entrepreneurs initially exhausted their stores of food and had to turn to eating their work animals. When those were gone, they ate any small rodents they could find. When that failed to satisfy, they finally resorted to boiling shoe leather. With the leather gone they ate the bodies of the dead. By the spring of 1610, only 60 were left alive.

Property Rights to the Rescue

This communal misery of “all in common” was finally abandoned with the arrival of Sir Thomas Dale. He brought whips and cruelty to the village, and a code he called “Articles, Lawes, and Orders—Divine, Politique, and Martial.”205 It was tyranny of the worst kind. He imposed capital punishment for trivial crimes. For example, one of his punishments for a man caught stealing food was to tie him to a tree to starve to death as a message to others about Dale’s new strict and strait ways.

However, Thomas Dale brought salvation to the colony in a most unexpected way: It was the miracle of private ownership. After two years of imposing force to make the settlers rebuild and become industrious about their plight, Dale was troubled that the men had no investment in the colony. So, he abandoned the communal farming plan in 1613, and handed out parcels of land—private ownership. For those longest settled, he granted three acres of land. Smaller plots were given to the newer arrivals. In return, he asked for 2-1/2 barrels of corn for the central storehouse.206

The settlers were delighted. They dropped their half-hearted communal labors and raced to improve their own property. With their own little farm to work, plow, and plant, the settlers came alive, putting in a new level of anxious enthusiasm they had lacked under the old system. That fall, private land ownership had unleashed an industry of labor that resulted in enough food production for the colony to survive on all through the winter, and the storehouse was stocked with plenty.

Property Ownership Saves the Colony

In 1614, Jamestown’s colony secretary, Ralph Harmor, affirmed that socialism resulted in laziness and a plague of disinterest:

“When our people were fed out of the common store, and labored jointly together, glad was he [who] could slip from his labor, or slumber over his tasks he cared not how, nay, the most honest among them would hardly take so much true pains in a week, as now for themselves they will do in a day, neither cared they for the increase, presuming that however the harvest prospered, the general store must maintain them, so that we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty as now three or four do provide for themselves.”207

According to this same eyewitness, giving the people an investment in the land saved the colony. Ralph Harmor continued:

“To prevent which, Sir Thomas Dale hath allotted every man three acres of clear ground, in the nature of farms ... for which doing, no other duty they pay yearly to the store, but two barrels and a half of corn. ...for the industrious, there is reward sufficient.”208

A short time later, John Rolf discovered that tobacco grew well in the Jamestown region, and an interest in smoking it back home in Europe encouraged the colony’s first cash crop. That’s when Jamestown began to take form and strength. The lessons learned from the 1607 disaster were not forgotten in the U.S. Constitution—180 years later the Founders made socialism illegal and unconstitutional. No one wanted another starving time.

Chapter 34: Plymouth: No Thanksgiving for Socialism

Like Jamestown, the Plymouth settlers were obligated to follow a certain business model that was, in fact, the same old tired notion of collectivism. The experiment ran from 1620 to 1624.

STORY: Beginning in 1620, William Bradford served as governor of the Plymouth colony, and fortunately for future generations, he also kept a good journal. His writings provide rich details about their failed experiment with the bad ideas of socialism.

After two months at sea, the 102 Pilgrim settlers stepped ashore to their new but cold and desolate wilderness home. They carried with them their freshly penned Mayflower Compact—a charter of laws that declared authority over believers and non-believers alike.

The voyage across the Atlantic had been stressful and exacted a terrible price from the Pilgrims. Upon arrival some of them were too ill to leave ship and just lingered onboard, attempting to recover. Those able to work went ashore for extended periods to construct housing. Their large “common house” of wattle and daub was finished first. Before winter ended, they had completed three more common houses plus seven residences.

Death the First Year

The colony suffered terribly that first winter—45 people died of disease and exposure. By fall of the following year more had died leaving just 53 alive by spring.

All Things in Common

Prosperity eluded them for reasons similar to those in Jamestown. The colony’s merchant-sponsors in London had ordered a very regimented system for living. Everything the colonists produced went into the central storehouse. All the land they cleared and houses they built were held in common—there would be no private ownership.

Guiding this arrangement was a seven-year contract. Point 3 said (all quotes from Gov. Bradford’s writings), “...All profits and benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means of any person or persons, remain still in the common stock until the division.”209 And stated again in point 10, “That all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock and goods of the said colony.”210

Land, homes and gardens were in common as well: “...That the houses, and lands improved, especially gardens and home lots should remain undivided wholly to the planters at the seven years end.”211

Socialism Flops Again

As with Jamestown, the rules and needs in Plymouth were abundantly clear, but getting the people to cooperate for their mutual survival just didn’t work. Those able to work complained about working for others. They complained about receiving the same compensation as those who didn’t work. As Bradford told it,

“For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children, without any recompense.”212

Industrious Become Angry With the Lazy

Those who were more industrious and fit for the rigors of hard physical labor were angry that they had to do all the work while others did less or none at all. Bradford reported:

“The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors, and victuals, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them.”213

The industrious women objected to being treated like maids or slaves for others, and their husbands objected as well. Bradford writes:

“And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brooke it.”214

The 1855 History of Massachusetts by John S. Barry, helps emphasize how socialism self-destructs because it runs so contrary to human nature. He observed the damage of false security in the free handout, and how this let the lazy avoid work or stop it altogether at Plymouth:

“The indolent, sure of a living, would labor only when compelled to; the willing were discouraged by the severity of their toils.”215

Starvation Forces Desperation

In Bradford’s narration, he explained how the whole system was corrupt and the crops yielded little because people kept sneaking around taking what they wished. Bradford wrote:

“Also much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable, and much more afterward. And though many were well whipped (when they were taken) for a few ears of corn, yet hunger made others (whom conscience did not restrain) to venture.”216

Bradford pointed out specifically the decay and corruption that spread among otherwise good and religious God-fearing people:

“For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. ...”217

A Thanksgiving at Death’s Door

As for the famous first Thanksgivings of 1621 and 1622, the grand feasts that are bragged about in legend and lore were hardly representative of a surplus of overflowing bounty.

The people feasted alright, but that didn’t mean they had much to live on afterwards. They didn’t know how to raise Indian corn, and it was the Indians who brought the venison. Bradford wrote,

“Now the welcome time of harvest approached, in which all had their hungry bellies filled. But it arose but to a little, in comparison of a full year’s supply; partly by reason they were not yet well acquainted with the manner of Indian corn, (and they had no other), also their many other employments, but chiefly their weakness for want of food, to tend it as they should have done.”218

A comment in Mourt’s Relation, a first-person account of the Thanksgiving event, repeats the same: “...Although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want ...”219

Socialism Abandoned

After two deadly years of starvation and suffering, the nightmare of collectivism was ejected in 1623. The more industrious among the settlers approached Gov. Bradford and asked that some land be given to them. Bradford wrote, “That they might therefore increase their tillage to better advantage, they made suit to the Govr to have some portion of land given them for continuance, and not by yearly lot. ...”220

Bradford recognized that private ownership was the answer to their problems. He said,

“And to every person was given only one acre of land, to them and theirs, as near the town as might be, and they had no more until the seven years were expired. The reason was, that they might be kept close together both for more safety and defense, and the better improvement of the general employments.”221

Those with an excuse not to work suddenly wanted to work. For example, Bradford said, “The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness, and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”222

Plato is Laughed Out of Plymouth

Bradford analyzed the change that came after private property ownership was implemented. He blamed Plato’s socialistic ideas for the earlier failures:

“The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients, applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property, and bringing in community into a common-wealth, would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser then God.”223

Condemnation of Communism

With private property finally rescuing the colonists from the multiple failures of all things in common, Gov. Bradford happily concludes, “This had very good success for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.”224

Of this amazing failure and salvation at Plymouth, modern economist E. A. J. Johnson observed (1961), “One would have to search long for such a damning criticism of communism, or such a penetrating analysis of the causes for its failure as a practical expedient. It restricts production by increasing the real costs involved; it breeds confusion and discontent; it creates a feeling of injustice in the minds of the young and old, the strong and weak, the married or unmarried.”225

Because of the success of Bradford’s changes and the industry of the early Pilgrims, the Plymouth colony became prosperous. It attracted additional settlers who made the risky overseas journey, and it ignited the Great Puritan Migration. This great movement was not just of individual men, but of whole families—educated and capable—who ventured to New England to be free. During the succeeding two decades some 20,000 migrated to the colony and nearby towns.

The Inca Affect

It is interesting to note that more than a century after the Inca empire fell, Jesuit Priests in Paraguay attempted to salvage the local culture from extinction under the spread of European settlements.

The priests tried to force large groups of people into highly regimented societies at remotely scattered missions. From the start, the missionaries were frustrated with the native’s doleful lack of initiative—a problem they tried to resolve with the whip. Unknown to the priests, the native workers had a long-nurtured proclivity to simply take orders, to do as they were told, or to do nothing if they were not told. This was not a change in biological human nature. It was the fallout of the Inca culture of a century earlier that had conditioned the natives to expect their needs to be met without investing personal responsibility.

The Jesuits attributed the Paraguayan’s despondency to the lingering impact of the Inca’s socialistic control, sometimes referred to as the “Inca affect.”

Different Forms of Human Sacrifice

Meanwhile, the first colonists in New England didn’t fare much better than the Inca or the Indians of Paraguay. The English were spared the formal rites of human sacrifices, but they were sacrificed just as well. Their deaths from starvation and harsh conditions came in exchange for a business venture. Instead of having their beating hearts cut out and their heads lopped off while strapped atop some pagan temple, the colonists had to endure death by starvation and related diseases brought about by the violation of the natural rights to own property. In all cases, the ultimate answer and salvation of the colonies came in the form of private, unhampered control over private property.

Learning to Recognize Socialism

1. The North American natives put great value on the acquisition of property and wealth. What does this say about theories of “all things in common”? What does it say about the importance they put on private ownership and making use of a free market?
2. How long did the Inca empire exist? What was Inca’s punishment for disobedience or rebellious behavior?
3. Which of the seven pillars of socialism were actively practiced among the Inca?
4. Did the Inca respect women? Girls? What happened to parents objecting to the kidnapping of their daughters for human sacrifice?
5. Did Inca respect individual rights? How were the people organized? Did they have any private property such as clothing, houses, tools, or animals? Why was their dress and personal appearance so tightly controlled?
6. What similarities can you list between the way Inca crushed the human spirit among his people, and how the ancient Chinese rulers made their people weak?
7. Why could the Jesuit priests manage so many thousands of Paraguayans with just one or two men? How did the Jesuits deploy the seven pillars of socialism on these native people?
8. What is the Inca Affect? Did the Jesuits report any issues of the Inca Affect among their flocks in Paraguay? What were some tell-tale signs?
9. What year was Jamestown started? List a few rules and assignments that show how socialism or communalism was imposed on the colony.
10. What was supposed to go into the storehouse? Why didn’t it? What resulted?
11. What year was the starving time? What happened? How many died?
12. Who is Sir Thomas Dale? When did he arrive in Jamestown? What did he change that turned every thing around for the colony?
13. Did socialism work for Jamestown? Explain.
14. When did the pilgrims land in Plymouth? What things did they try to share in common? Did they have a central storehouse?
15. Why did the most industrious workers eventually became angry about their lives in Plymouth. What happened to the crops and supplies as the people became more desperate?
16. The pilgrims had a thanksgiving feast in 1621 and 1622. Were these representative of prosperity or poverty? What happened?
17. What policy change saved Plymouth in 1623?
18. Did Governor Bradford understand the flawed system that nearly wiped out the Plymouth colony? What did he say about Plato?
19. What did E. A. J. Johnson say about socialism in Plymouth? What did it restrict? What did it breed? What did it create?
20. Did socialism work for Plymouth? Explain.

Part VI--SOCIALISM IN RELIGION

“All major world religions have gone through times when its members or leaders practiced Ruler’s Law in one form or another.”

Chapter 35: Socialism in Religion

For all the good that people try to do for God and individuals, some religions take it a step too far—they resort to tyranny on their own members, or nonmembers alike, to force obedience.

The eternal clash between religion and socialism is choice versus force. What is religion when force replaces choice? Is a person free to join and leave a religious order rather than obey its strict and strait rules? May a person voluntarily refuse a dominant religion’s teachings?

Personal and Voluntary

Religion is an intimately personal form of private conduct. An individual voluntarily follows the tenets and commandments of a belief system because of his or her conscience and free choice.

A religion that compels or restrains people against their will, whether they be adherents or not, is the embodiment of Ruler’s Law. The Bible provides an example of religious compulsion in the form of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego who refused to bow down to a golden image that Nebuchadnezzar ordered them to worship. As punishment, they were cast into a fiery furnace, but were delivered by the power of God.226

A common flaw in cultures that are strictly dominated by a religion is that they honor institutional rights above individual rights. They sustain the overall culture at the expense of the individual.

Imperfect People Doing an Imperfect Job

All major world religions have gone through times when its members or leaders practiced Ruler’s Law in one form or another. The actions of those imperfect and short-sighted humans should not automatically become an excuse for outsiders to re-define that religion’s core belief as evil or degrading.

But when a religion’s leaders or membership stand by doing nothing to rectify the excesses and anomalies of force and terror committed in their name, or even engage in propagating the abuse themselves, that leaves the rest of the world wondering if that religion is really everything that it says it is. It’s a murky and difficult subject to tackle. Here is one approach—

RELIGION: Catholic Church and Christianity

ADHERENTS: 2.1 billion worldwide227

STORY: The life of Jesus Christ is recorded as one of service, compassion, love, healing, and the ultimate sacrifice of his own life to benefit others. The message of obedience to God, loving others as yourself, and the promise of forgiveness and resurrection, are key foundation stones that helped his apostles spread “the good news.” Today, that message has been embraced by a third of the world.

Christian Socialism

As a political distinction, Christian socialism can be traced to a meeting of Christian Socialists in London in the mid-1800s. They rejected individual rights and the selfish aggression brought on by market-place competition. They thought Christian-type cooperation was the best replacement for competitiveness, and gave it a test drive by financing co-partnerships and profit sharing in industry. Henri de Saint-Simon was an early advocate, Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley and others followed suit.

Today, Christian Socialists have melted into the background of so many other political parties. They are not much different than any other groups attempting to secure governmental power for their own interests.

After the death of the apostles, Ruler’s Law was found infiltrating Christianity in a variety of ways. Some examples:

• Believe or Else: Killing people for their negative opinions about Christianity (the heretics) began as early as A.D. 385 when the Church had Priscillian, the bishop of Ávila in Spain, executed by Roman officials. The actual civil charge was practicing magic.228
• Heretics: The Cathars, starting about A.D. 1150, are an example of heretics targeted for slaughter by a formal Church-sanctioned Crusade. After killing and driving the Cathars away, the pope permitted the army to confiscate the Cathars’ lands.229
• Church Armies: The Crusades (1095-1798 A.D.) were nine major military campaigns (and dozens of lesser campaigns), launched by the pope to regain control over the Holy Land, and to fight Muslims, heretics, and pagans. The pope gave his blessing to the troops and indulgences to those killed in battle. The invaders were hardly Christian. Crusaders were guilty of massacring civilian men, women and children—and instances of assault, abuse and cannibalism.
• Executed for Thinking: Jan Hus (1369-1415) (see Chapter 27) was a Czech priest who berated the Church for its lofty arrogance. He was excommunicated. During this same time, a fight over who was the real pope had been raging since 1378. The Council of Constance was convened to resolve the matter in 1414. Hus was invited to attend the Council and express his concerns and reasons for his apparent apostasy. It was actually a dirty trick—after Hus’s arrival on the scene, the soldiers grabbed him, threw him in prison for heresy, held a quick trial, and burned him at the stake.230
• Torture: The inquisitions were extreme efforts to suppress heresy in the Church using torture and death. They didn’t start out ugly like that, but abusers twisted it so. They began around A.D. 1184, and continued in various forms, including torture and death, in different countries until about 1860.
• Forced Tithes: Many of the clergy in medieval countries, especially France, benefitted from royal decrees that let them force extraction of tithes from the peasantry. The clergy also avoided paying taxes on Church-owned land.

  The great Reformation was a rebellion by Christians who didn’t believe the leadership of the Catholic Church had the right to rule and reign in civic affairs, or had the right to oppress others. The Reformers called for a return to the original teachings of Jesus and to put the Bible at the head of the Church. The Reformers were not guiltless in their rebellions—they too were guilty of unchristian behavior such as driving out, killing, and burning devout Catholics.

  Over the centuries, Catholic clergy functioning closer to the people on the local level remained diligent and, for the most part, practiced true Christianity. They served their flocks with devotion and compassion, often in conditions of extreme poverty and stress.

  The primary problem in the Catholic Church during its first 1,500 years was the upper clergy’s penchant for entangling alliances with the powers of the monarchies to force religious obedience. In places where this grew into an all-powerful culture from which no one could escape, Catholic or not, that was Ruler’s Law replacing the Gospel of peace. The fruit of that shift away from free religious practice was misery, heavy burdens, taxation, punishment, war, and death.

  In recent centuries, many dozens of Christian churches have been formed with the declared intent to restore true Christianity and become more in line with the New Testament. These assorted churches encompass approximately one billion followers of Christ outside of the formal structure of the Catholic church.231

  Catholic Church Today: Despite some bad apples and abject foolishness among some that do great harm against the true teachings of Jesus Christ, for the vast numbers aligned with Christianity, a refining and refreshing spirit of love, service, and selfless labor dominates the Catholic Church, its leadership, and Christians everywhere.

  RELIGION: Buddhism

  ADHERENTS: 376 million232

  STORY: Buddhism is both a religion and a philosophy that dates back to about 600 B.C.233 Its founder, the young prince Buddha, desired to learn more about life, and left the sheltered care of his father’s palace to learn the normal earthly pain and suffering of others. Along the way he learned important lessons about his own mortal desires, stresses, and failings, and a pathway to control them, a pathway toward enlightenment.

  Hunting for Perfection: Seeking to conquer his mortality, Buddha experimented with forms of meditation. The end result was an earthly perfection of his body and soul through complete personal control. Buddha formed a monastic society whereby he shared his insights.

  Modern Leader: Buddhadasa (1906-1993) was a modern-day philosopher of Buddhism in his native Thailand. He taught that socialism is a natural state of being. “Look at the birds; we will see that they eat only as much food as their stomachs can hold. ... Therefore a system in which people cannot encroach on each other’s rights or plunder their possessions is in accordance with nature and occurs naturally ... The freedom to hoard was tightly controlled by nature in the form of natural socialism.”234

  Not Forced: Buddhism is voluntary, although some fringe groups have used force to regain members who convert to other religions, but these are infrequent. Buddhism’s modern view is to seek world harmony through natural socialism—to live within one’s own sphere, share what nature provides, and don’t be an exploitative capitalist.

  Surplus is Wasteful: While Buddhadasa called for mankind to become like the birds and eat only until they’re full, he implied at the same time that any surplus must therefore be evil. His problem that remains unanswered is that the surplus he objects to as wasteful is not an extravagance. It is the only means whereby people may serve one another. After they eat, are there no crumbs for the hungry? Surplus is how people are able to care for themselves and also help others less fortunate at the same time.235

  RELIGION: Islam

  ADHERENTS: 1.5 billion236

  STORY: Islam is the only major world religion that combines civic and religious law into one. Islam’s doctrine, tenets, and commandments mandate death and violence against apostates and non-believers. That orthodoxy, however, is generally practiced by only a minority of its followers.

  Islam had its beginnings with Muhammad (570-632 A.D.). He was a merchant who, at 40, started receiving revelations from the Angel Gabriel. These messages were written down as the Quran, and claimed to restore the fullness of God’s teachings, beginning with Adam to Moses, to Jesus, and to others.

  Muhammad’s religion was intended to put followers on a path away from worldly ways and toward obedience to God’s commandments. Today that path is manifested as both peace and terror. In countries where it has been allowed to rule society, it is imposing a way of life that must be obeyed or violators are faced with fines, jail time, dismemberment and death.

  Quran

  The Quran is the cornerstone of all Islamic belief. Muslims view the book as sacred scripture. It is organized in sections that are not chronological, but are ordered roughly according to size, approximately from the longest chapter to the shortest.

  The book is a mixture of war and peace. The verses written by Muhammad while in Mecca are mostly peaceful and encourage cooperation with people of other beliefs.

  That changed after Muhammad became a rich and powerful warlord in Medina. There he attracted his first followers and established his theocratic government. The verses he wrote in Medina took on a much more forceful and violent spirit. They express a very intolerant view toward other religions. For example, Surah 2:256, written in A.D. 614, the more peaceful years in Mecca, says, “There is no compulsion in religion ....” meaning no one should be forced into a religious belief system; they should be free to choose participation or not.

  Some 13 years later, Muhammad is in Medina. There he writes in Surah 9:5 that people should be threatened with death if they don’t join Islam, and actually be killed if they ultimately refuse: “Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them. ... But if they repent and accept Islam ... then leave their way free.”

  Sharia Law: Religion and state are not separated in Islam. It is a complete way of living. In Muslim nations, Islam governs all moral, spiritual, social, political, economical, and intellectual aspects of life. This makes breaking away, or expressing opinions critical of Islam, not only blasphemous but against civic law—and very punishable.237

  There is an extensive record of Islamic warfare all through the middle ages.238 The aim was not necessarily to win more converts to Islam but to protect the Islamic empire. There is debate over interpretation of the Quran’s role regarding jihads during this period, whether or not the wars and battles were for an offensive or defensive purpose. In either case, bloody conflict in connection to Islamic law and society has continued up until the present time.

  The Individual Muslim: The nuclear family and vast populations of the Islamic community look to make God the center of their lives. Many of them wish to stand apart from today’s political activists.

  When the extremists (or more precisely, the orthodox Muslims) dominate the world’s top news stories day after day, Muslim families truly ignoring the Ruler’s Law aspects of Islam can only hope others will understand that the monster parading in front of the media is brutal fanaticism—evil expressions of compulsion and slavish indulgence—and nothing like their peaceful version of Islam.

  The public appearance of Islamic tenets extracted to an extreme has been forming and molding western opinions about Islam for many decades. It’s a public relations nightmare for many Muslims, especially those enjoying freedom of religion in the West.

  Unalienable Rights Denied: In terms of natural and unalienable rights, the western view is that Islamic traditions of managing all human rights has cost untold millions of people the joy and prosperity that true religious freedom brings. It is Ruler’s Law of tyranny and force rather than choice and conscience.

  Dying in the Name of Allah

  News of another suicide bombing somewhere in the world has become an almost weekly event. Suicide bombers, however, are not really suicidal according to Islam. Suicide is contrary to the Quran. But dying while in the act of killing nonbelievers is acceptable.

  According to Surah 9:111, “Verily, Allah has purchased of the believers their lives and their properties for (the price) that theirs shall be the Paradise. They fight in Allah’s Cause, so they kill (others) and are killed. It is a promise in truth which is binding on Him in the Taurat (Torah) and the Injeel (Gospel) and the Quran. And who is truer to his covenant than Allah? Then rejoice in the bargain which you have concluded. That is the supreme success.”

  In modern times, Christians and Jews have sought peaceful coexistence with Muslims, and in lands where the freedom of religion exists, such peace often works. However, authorities point out that in the 49 or so nations where Muslims are the majority, and in the dozen of those that have installed Islamic or Sharia law, Christians and Jews face persecution or worse. “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘I have been ordered to fight with people till they say, None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.’”239

  No Central Authority: There is no top-level governing body in Islam to guide, restrain, instruct, and advise all the people. Various factions compete for leadership. The Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have long clashed—often with lethal violence—to argue points of doctrine or settle prejudices.

  For lack of the cultural virtue necessary to enjoy true freedom, various pockets of extremists froth their way to the world’s attention with terror, stonings and beheadings as if they hold some moral high ground over everyone else, which God’s law makes clear they don’t.

  Ruler’s Law and the Seven Pillars of Socialism

  The pillars of socialism most prevalent in Muslim-majority nations include the iron-clad use of force to impose religious obedience; an all-powerful ruling class that will punish the violation of laws; the destruction of personal freedoms of choice; strict control over all associations (especially between men and women); and the violation of property ownership rights for women. This slavery mentality is forced on millions who, for the most part, are trapped into obedience. In some Muslim countries these extremes are being challenged or eased, and support for more individual rights is growing.

  RELIGION: Judaism

  ADHERENTS: 14 million240

  STORY: The Jews descend from Abraham through his grandson, Jacob. Judah (1700 B.C.), was one of Jacob’s 12 sons. With the political breakup of the twelve tribes around 930 B.C., only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, with some remnants of Levi and Simeon, remained in the regions around today’s Jerusalem—they formed the southern kingdom of Judah. Later, they were joined by members of Ephraim and Manasseh.

  Scattered: For 3,000 years, the Jews have been scattered to all corners of the earth. At the same time, they developed a remarkable reputation for outstanding scholarship, science, business, and artistic talents that are exceptional from such a relatively small group.

  The modern development of the state of Israel initially embraced socialism. In the early 1900s many Jews were driven from Russia, most going to America but some settling in Palestine. Being too poor to buy land or start farms individually, they pooled their labors and funds to create a collective.

  The kibbutz (meaning “community”) began as “... a voluntary collective community, mainly agricultural, in which there is no private wealth and was responsible for all the needs of its members and their families.”241

  The earliest kibbutz pioneers cleared thousands of acres, first around Galilee. They planted orchards, crops, raised poultry, dairy and fish farming. They made the barren lands blossom. Membership ranged from 40-50 to more than 1,000, with most of them averaging today around 400-500 residents. The median age is 30.

  The political side of the kibbutz was a pure democracy, “one man, one vote, the majority rules.” Both men and women could vote. The structure they created allowed members to be assigned their work positions, and had routine duties such as kitchen and laundry rotated.

  For many years, children were raised in communal children’s houses. Modern times have changed that, and the assurance of an intact family unit has become important to new couples moving in.242

  With only 2.5 percent of the nation’s population, the kibuttzim produce about 33 percent of the agriculture and farm produce, and 6.3 percent of manufactured goods for all of Israel.

  Declining: The number of kibbutzim in operation has been declining but has stayed around 270 nationwide for the last couple of decades. There are about 117,000 people participating.

  The kibbutzim have struggled to keep up with changing times. Where large investments would upgrade and modernize their equipment and facilities, the collectives are generally too poor to handle large capital improvements. An association of kibbutzim has helped solve that problem, but the greatest improvements have come when the lands and facilities were privatized as profit-making operations.

  An important difference in the socialistic nature of the kibbutz and similar farming communities (called a moshav) is that these establishments are all voluntary—people may join or leave at their pleasure without being arrested, punished, or forced to remain.

  Free Religion: The tourist to Israel will find that Jewish beliefs and traditions are not imposed by law. Even so, many Jews observe tenets at their businesses. For example, most Jewish establishments in Israel will close for the Sabbath, elevators will go into automatic mode and stop on every floor of hotels (so a person doesn’t “work” by pressing a button for the desired floor), and only Arab-operated taxis and shops are open.

  But come Sunday morning, it’s business as usual for the Jews—and time for the Christians living in Israel to put on their Sunday best and attend church—freely, encouraged, and welcomed.

  RELIGION: Hinduism

  ADHERENTS: 1.1 billion

  STORY: Hinduism is the most predominant group of religious beliefs in South Asia. There is no record of a single founder, no single religious or traditional style, and no singular code of beliefs—it is the combination of several ancient religions with strains of beliefs reaching far back into antiquity. They call it the oldest living religion. In fact, Hinduism is not a religion in the traditional sense but more like a way of life. A person doesn’t really convert to Hinduism, he just melds in with the rest.

  Belief in Afterlife: The Hindus put a great deal of importance into breaking the cycle of birth and death, which is the main goal of their search for a loftier state of connection with the eternities.

  Some believe in gods who occasionally visit the earth to rectify imbalances and to guide humans toward the right way. One method Hindus employ to find the right way is yoga. Yoga is one of any number of rituals performed in temples or anywhere the person desires to seek peace. These rituals include chanting mantras, offering sacrifices, reciting scripture, and meditating.

  In several countries, Hindu society is a caste with four divisions. There is debate about this being sanctioned by their sacred tenets, or simply a leftover social custom, but it dates back thousands of years.

  The four classes of Varna (meaning order, type or color) are, 1) the Brahmins who are scholars and teachers, 2) the warriors and kings, 3) the agriculturists and merchants, and 4) the artisans and service providers. At the bottom are the untouchables. The untouchables do the dirty work—haul away corpses, execute criminals, dispose of night soil, basically your on-call disaster or stinky mess cleanup crew. In the past they were forbidden to learn from holy books and lived together in their own ghettos outside of the villages.

  The caste gave each individual a place in society, and if they behaved well, morally, they would be reborn after death into a higher caste as a reward—or lower caste if they were immoral.

  Your Are What You Were: Hindus consider their places in life as the consequence of their own earlier actions in a previous life. A person born rich is rich because of his karma. But if he was born poor and suffering, he has only himself to blame. Getting out of the mess is a chore viewed as his only. Enduring his plight is proof of his worthiness for a higher state of existence in his next life.

  The same view is taken toward electing leaders or being invaded by foreigners. Hindus put up with the resulting hardships of corrupt leaders, wars, or conquerors, believing that a bad leader or a conquering army is the result of their own lapses or fault. They believe they are personally responsible, and must endure the suffering for its cleansing effects.

  Socialism Won’t Work in Hinduism

  Hindu’s beliefs encourage such an independent and personal responsibility that any form of collective or socialist action among them is simply impossible. The individual pursuit for karma makes a group or socialistic society completely incompatible.

  These self-interested people wouldn’t want wealth sharing, or their freedom to suffer or improve, impeded by socialism—it is illogical and contradictory to personal perfection. Likewise, free enterprise is very much in harmony with Hinduism. It blends wonderfully well with independent action and personal responsibility.

  The Universal Religion

  With so many variations in belief and practice among the world’s religions, is there a singular universal religion to which all may adhere? Benjamin Franklin and other Founders thought there was. They identified five basic beliefs common to the major world religions:

  1. There is a Creator.

  2. We are his creations.

  3. He has revealed laws that govern our actions toward one another, and we are responsible to treat one another well.

  4. There is life after death.

  5. We will be judged for our treatment of others.243

  Samuel Adams said these basic beliefs constituted “the religion of America,” which he said was also “the religion of all mankind.”244 In other words, these beliefs belonged to all world faiths—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the others—and could be taught without being offensive.

  John Adams called them the “general principles” on which the American civilization had been founded.245

  Thomas Jefferson called them the principles “in which God has united us all.” 246

  Careful Not to Mention that “Force” Word

  Socialist-thinking planners are careful to avoid the necessity of Ruler’s Law to enforce their utopian schemes, and tend to skip over the negative consequences of force directed against those who will not obey the rulers.

  As with medieval Christianity and orthodox Islam, the use of force to impose a religion at any level always violates moral law and personal unalienable rights, and backfires. History shows the downward spiral of coercion ends at the same place: force, torture, burnings, beheadings and war.

  Religious Leaders Not Religious Government

  Religion changes the man on the inside so that he can change his world on the outside. Extremists try to change the outside world to force change on the man’s inside. It doesn’t work, and that explains the eternal conflict between force and choice. Separate religion from the force of government, and let the choice of religion become a tool of personal refinement, and the best of both worlds is created.

  Jesus clarified the importance of keeping religion and government carefully separated when he said “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”247

  Moses clarified the power of rational organization and God-centered government among the children of Israel without force.

  The Founding Fathers clarified the beneficial powers of religious influence in good government when they founded the United States.

  When individuals and their culture freely embrace the positives of religious belief, there is an automatic increase in cooperation, harmony, neighborliness, and prosperity. When any form of religious force is imposed on the people, by one person on another or a regime on its people, the whole society stagnates or explodes in anarchy.

  Was Jesus a Socialist?

  Some socialists justify forcing others to “be good” and “do good” by misinterpreting Jesus’ teachings. In their attempt to formulate the true heart and spirit of their benevolent socialism, they misinterpret Jesus’ actions in this fashion:

• Jesus supposedly wanted all things in common because he asked followers to share, to give to the poor, to sell worldly possessions, to help others, and to dispose of material wealth—no private property.
• Jesus said it was okay to tax the rich more than others because “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”248
• Jesus taught taking from the “haves” and giving to the “have-nots” was okay when he said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
• And, in the early Christian Church, there was to be no private property because new converts “had all things common, And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”249

  Force Versus Choice

  The above misapplications of Jesus’ teachings avoid the most important difference between the teachings of Jesus and the core doctrine of socialism. That difference is force. Jesus’ acts of compassion and his call for others to do likewise were never to be done by compulsion, but voluntarily, by free-will choice. Socialism doesn’t work that way. Socialism must compel others to obey, and therein boils and churns all of mankind’s eternal clashes, wars and destruction.

  Is force bad when it is used to compel people to help the poor and needy? Should people be forced to sell their goods and give to the poor? Should they be forced to have all things in common?

  Using Godly Force?

  Early in his ministry, Jesus showed that force is not the way to get things done, even if it’s to help the hungry. After he had fasted 40 days, Jesus was tempted by the devil:

  “And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread.”250

  If Jesus had used his Godly powers to force a solution, to bypass the normal way of obtaining bread and create it from stone for the positive purpose of feeding the hungry (in this case, himself), his mission would have been an immediate failure.

  A hungry man using a shortcut to turn stone to bread proves that he is a slave to the craving for instant self gratification, a slave to human appetites, a slave to the vice of wanting something for nothing. Jesus came to teach us the opposite, to control our appetites.

  Such power to turn stone to bread apparently was his to use, but Jesus would reserve those charities for another time—to teach his followers and bolster their faith, not to gratify selfish hunger pains.

  On this day, however, the devil tempted Jesus in the shroud and solitude of privacy, with no one else there to witness a little cheating to eat bread—to indulge just a little to the powerful temptations of mortality and the human flaws that Jesus had come to conquer.

  Jesus could not be swayed. Later in his ministry he would teach that only by resisting such urges would true peace and happiness ever be found. He would teach his followers to hold fast to the iron rod of true principles that runs along the pathway of provident living as established by his Father in Heaven—and to never let go.

  As for the bread, Jesus knew God’s commandment was to work for what you eat.

  “In the sweat of thy face,” God commanded in Genesis 3:19, “shalt thou eat bread.” Jesus was obedient to all of his father’s commandments. He refused to set himself above any law his Father gave to everyone else, and forthwith rejected Satan out of hand:

  “And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” (Luke 4:4)

  Jesus waited until he could procure food himself, a very real and tangible example to everyone else who suffers for want and is tempted to indulge against honesty or principle, and shrink.

  Forced Goodness?

  When charity for others is imposed by force, people are denied the benefits of carrying the entire responsibility of compassion on their own shoulders. In this they are robbed of one of life’s grandest and most gratifying experiences possible. Forced compassion always short-circuits the human heart and destroys the integrity of true and loving charity.

  Sincere and voluntary charity is kind, it doesn’t envy, it doesn’t boast, it endures, and never fails. People enjoy helping when they can, it is part of human nature. But when people are forced to pay heavy taxes to finance entitlement programs, food stamps, and welfare, they hate it. Some will go so far as to skip, cheat, or dodge paying such taxes by any means available. Paying taxes so somebody else can have food stamps and eat for free—or buy cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and lottery tickets from money they saved because of free food—doesn’t ignite feelings of compassion. It ignites feelings of anger and resentment, the antithesis of a helpful attitude. So—which process has the better outcome, the government’s policy of force, or Jesus’ way of voluntary charity? Why isn’t the compassion side of this being emphasized more than it is? Has something died in our culture?

  Force will always and inevitably frustrate the simplicity of pure compassion. The positive messages Jesus taught are in no way connected to the seven despotic pillars of socialism. Jesus’ message was precisely the opposite: be free to choose—and choose wisely.

Chapter 36: Did the Early Christians Practice Communism?

By W. Cleon Skousen251

A few students have secretly or even openly defended Communism because they considered it to be an important set of principles practiced by the early Christians. Such persons often say that they definitely do not condone the ruthlessness of Communism as presently practiced in Russia, but that they do consider it to be of Christian origin and morally sound when practiced on a “brotherhood basis.”

This was exactly the attitude of the Pilgrim Fathers when they undertook to practice Communism immediately after their arrival in the New World. Not only did the project fail miserably, but it was typical of hundreds of other attempts to make Communism work on a “brotherhood basis.” Without exception, all of them failed. One cannot help wondering why.

“Brotherhood Communism” is Unchristian

Certain scholars feel they have verified what Governor Bradford has said concerning “brotherhood Communism,” namely, that it is un-Christian and immoral because it strikes at the very roots of human liberty. Communism—even on a brotherhood basis—can only be set up under a dictatorship administered within the framework of force or fear. Governor Bradford found this to be true. Leaders in literally hundreds of similar experiments concur. Students are therefore returning to ancient texts with this question: “Did the early Christians really practice Communism?”

Two Bible Passages Create Confusion

The belief that the early Christians may have practiced Communism is based on two passages. Here is the first one:

“And all that believed were together, and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men as every man had need.” (Acts 2:44-45)

Two things might be noted here. First, the people formed a community effort by coming together; second, they sold their possessions and goods as they appeared to need cash proceeds for the assistance of their fellow members. It does not say that they sold all their possessions and goods although it is granted that at first reading this may be inferred. Neither does it say that they pooled their resources in a common fund although this has been assumed from the statement that they “had all things common.”

Problems in Common, Not Things in Common

What they actually did is more clearly stated in the second passage which is often quoted,

“And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.” (Acts 4:32)

Here we have a declaration indicating that the common effort was not a legal pooling of resources in a communal fund but rather a feeling of unity in dealing with common problems so that no man “said” his possessions were his own but developed and used them in such a way that they would fill the needs of the group as well as himself.

That this is a correct reading of this passage may be verified by events which are described in the next chapter of Acts.

Ananias and Sapphira Try to Cheat Peter

There we read of Ananias and Sapphira. They had a piece of property which they decided to sell. They intended to give the proceeds to the Apostle Peter. But the author of Acts says that when they had sold the property they decided to hold back some of the proceeds even though they represented to Peter that their contribution was the entire value of the property received at the sale. For this deceit, Peter severely criticized them, and then, in the process, he explained the legal relationship existing between these two people and their property. Said he, “While it (the property) remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it (the money) not in thine power?” (Acts 5:4)

In other words, this property had never been required for any communal fund. It belonged to Ananias and Sapphira. It was completely in their power. After the property was sold the money they received from the sale was also in their power. They could spend it or contribute it. If contributed, the money was a freewill, voluntary offering. It will be seen immediately that this is altogether different from a Communist’s relationship to property where there is a confiscation or expropriation of each member’s possessions, and the proceeds are distributed by a single person or a small committee. The member thereby loses his independence and becomes subservient to the whims and capriciousness of those who rule over him.

Christians Kept Legal Title to Property

It would appear, therefore, that the early Christians did keep legal title to their property but “said” it was for the benefit of the whole community.

This is precisely the conclusion reached in Dummelow’s Bible Commentary. It discusses the two passages we have just quoted and then says: “The Church of Jerusalem recognized the principle of private property. A disciple’s property really was his own, but he did not say it was his own; he treated it as if it were common property.”

Dr. Adam Clarke’s commentary also makes this significant observation concerning the Apostolic collections for the poor: “If there has been a community of goods in the Church, there could have been no ground for such (collections) ... as there could have been no such distinction as rich and poor, if everyone, on entering the Church, gave up his goods to a common stock.”

Jesus Taught Property is Individually Owned

This, then, brings us to our final comment on this subject, namely, that the Master Teacher made it very clear in one of His parables (Matthew 25:14-30) that property was not to be owned in common nor in equal quantities.

In this parable He said the members of the kingdom of God were servants who had been given various stewardships “every man according to his several ability.” One man was given a stewardship of five talents of silver and when he “traded with the same and made them other five talents,” his Lord said, “Well done!” However, another servant who had been given only one talent of silver feared he might somehow lose it, so he buried it in the earth. To this man his Lord said, “Thou wicked and slothful servant!” He then took this man’s one talent and gave it to the servant where it could be developed profitably.

Enjoy Property as a Stewardship

Two things appear very clear in this Parable of the Talents: first, that every man was to enjoy his own private property as a stewardship from God. Second, that he was responsible to the earth’s Creator for the profitable use of his property.

All of the evidence before us seems to clearly show that the early Christians did not practice Communism. They did not have their property in common. Instead, they had their problems in common. To solve their problems, each man was asked to voluntarily contribute according to his ability “as God had prospered him.” (1 Corinthians 16:2)

When carefully analyzed, this was simply free enterprise capitalism with a heart!

The student will also probably recognize that whenever modern capitalism is practiced “with a heart” it showers blessings of wealth, generosity, good will and happy living on every community it touches.

The ancient Christian order was a great idea.

Chapter 37: The Word That Can’t Be Defined

Socialism is often defined to promote a particular brand of the perfect dream. In truth, they’re all nightmares.

With the preceding historical summary to give context, what then can be the best definition for socialism? The traditional definitions include something about the government controlling parts of the economy that typically are controlled by private businesses. Outside of that, definitions of socialism are all over the map. This sampling includes both pro- and anti-socialism observations—

SOURCE: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13th Edition

DEFINITION: “Socialism is that policy or theory which aims at securing by the action of the central democratic authority a better distribution, and in due subordination thereunto a better production of wealth than now prevails.”252

COMMENT: A central democratic authority is the trap. When the people control their government through their representatives, then they will remain free. Centralized authority to impose “better” anything means the use of force in violation of rights.

SOURCE: Alexis de Tocqueville, defender of freedom

DEFINITION: “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”253

COMMENT: As precisely stated, socialism means force.

SOURCE: Paul Hubert Casselman, Labor Dictionary, 1949

DEFINITION: “An economic theory which holds that ownership of property should be in the group and not in the individuals who make up the group. Collectivism may be partial or complete. Partial collectivism is exemplified by public ownership of schools, hospitals, recreational centers, etc., in the capitalistic system. Complete collectivism exists under communism where all wealth is owned in common.”254

COMMENT: The error here is that collectivism is not exemplified by public ownership of schools, etc. Schools, hospitals, etc., are cooperative expenses managed by freely-elected officials. In a collective society, top-down force imposes those decisions outside of the control of the people.

SOURCE: Robert V. Daniels, U.S. author and educator

DEFINITION: “I take as my general working definition of socialism, ‘any theory or practice of social control over economic activity.’ This definition is purposely vague. It embraces any degree of social control in the economy, from the U.S. Post Office to the completely nationalized economy of the USSR. It covers both state socialism and non-state (cooperatives, syndicalism, etc.). It permits democratic as well as dictatorial forms of political control.”255

COMMENT: “Social control” means top-down government control without power by the people—the loss of freedom.

SOURCE: Ludwig von Mises, pro-liberty scholar and teacher

DEFINITION: “My own definition of socialism, as a policy which aims at constructing a society in which the means of production are socialized, is in agreement with all that scientists have written on the subject. I submit that one must be historically blind not to see that this and nothing else is what has stood for Socialism for the past hundred years, and that it is in this sense that the great socialist movement was and is socialistic.”256

COMMENT: Von Mises accurately points out that any name or label describing the regulation of society is still and will always remain socialism.

SOURCE: Benjamin Tucker, publisher, proponent of socialism

DEFINITION: “First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice.”257

COMMENT: Tucker cuts to the chase: Under socialism, there are no unalienable rights, no choice, and no property.

SOURCE: Roger Nash Baldwin, a founder of ACLU

DEFINITION: “I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself ... I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal.”258

COMMENT: Baldwin echoes the major goals of all socialists. Communism does it by abrupt force—socialism does it by gradual infiltration and change. Both aim for the same goal.

SOURCE: H. G. Wells, author and outspoken socialist

DEFINITION: “The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive ‘policies’ and ‘Plans’ of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk [shun] at the word ‘socialism,’ but what else can one call it?”259

COMMENT: H. G. Wells points out that the New Deal was the socializing of the United States—and an otherwise inattentive America embraced it with hopeful smiles.

SOURCE: Franklin Spencer Spalding, Episcopal Bishop

DEFINITION: “The Christian Church exists for the sole purpose of saving the human race. So far she has failed, but I think that Socialism shows her how she may succeed. It insists that men cannot be made right until the material conditions be made right. Although man cannot live by bread alone, he must have bread. Therefore the Church must destroy a system of society which inevitably creates and perpetuates unequal and unfair conditions of life. These unequal and unfair conditions have been created by competition. Therefore competition must cease and cooperation take its place.”260

COMMENT: Bishop Spalding sees force in everything—the church must destroy capitalism, it must destroy competition, it must save the human race. The bishop neglected to consider free choice as originally taught by Christianity, and the words of the strongest proponent of free choice among all religions, namely, Jesus Christ.

SOURCE: Frederic Bastiat, French economist and politician

DEFINITION: “Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by the government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”261

COMMENT: Bastiat brilliantly gives perspective and illustration of the fifth pillar of Socialism (force). While free people choose what they want in their society, socialism deems it necessary to impose on everyone “what is good for us” by government force. The problem is and will forever be, who decides for everyone else? As Bastiat observes, the best answer is “We the People” must remain free to decide our future. We do this by way of a free representative government, not through tyrants who will dictate what best benefits themselves, their opinion, and their power base.

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

In short, socialism is government force to control and change society. These examples illustrate the difficulty in parading tyranny in a positive light. It takes a lot of careful work to gloss over the details of Ruler’s Law and cast it as worthy of consideration, or as a viable solution to human problems. Socialists try to get around this by inventing a good name or category or leader around which others who want change may rally. There are hundreds of these groups, but only a few have achieved widespread recognition.

Chapter 38: Socialism Du Jour

There are more variations, brands, flavors and combinations of socialistic ideas and socialism than you can shake a stick at.

What are the major groups? This list is not all-inclusive, but presents a few of the more common forms of modern socialism. Each form embodies the same general theme: a promised utopia of peace and prosperity provided that control over social and economic choices are given to a central all-powerful authority.

BRAND: Utopian Socialism

UNIQUE FEATURE: Impossible, but delightfully hypothetical

STORY: First envisioned by Plato and then given a name by Sir Thomas More in his book, Utopia (1516 A.D.), this brand of socialism found roots in the early 1800s. It promised a perfect society brought about through the harmonious cooperation of like-minded people. Everyone shares everything happily—a garden of earthly delights with no fights, no poverty, and no crime.262

BRAND: Democratic Socialism

UNIQUE FEATURE: People vote for socialistic policies

STORY: This brand is hard to define. In general, it has deeper involvement of the masses who vote democratically for policy instead of relying on an elite class of leaders to impose it. Some see capitalism and basic property ownership (house, car) as engines of prosperity benevolently tolerated to prop up a democratic socialistic society. Others see it as a transitory mechanism, an in-between that leads from evil capitalism to righteous Marxist socialism without those nasty revolutionary wars and upheavals. Democratic socialism means voting to be impoverished and miserable rather than having it forced upon you.263

BRAND: Marxist socialism (communism)

UNIQUE FEATURE: Quickly imposed with violent uprising

STORY: It’s the culmination of an evolution. Marx envisioned capitalism reaching a breaking point at which time the working class would rise up and take over everything. These masses of laborers are managed by the State until order is restored, and then the State supposedly dissolves away so science can direct everything. Find yourself short on decaf? Plug your problem into the master planning computer. Workers are moved from one job to the other, more decaf is produced, and suddenly you have less to be fidgety about. The end goal is no property, no state, and no religion—just communism.264

BRAND: Scientific Socialism

UNIQUE FEATURE: Adjusts according to supply and demand

STORY: Similar to Marxism, this brand relies on evolution. By looking back in history at how the needs of a society expand and change, the scientific socialist strives to predict future needs. He adjusts his production and distribution to meet those needs—and then hopes he is right. If he’s wrong, millions starve to death, or barges of unused tofu go rotting on some distant loading dock, but that’s okay—the ends always justify the means, better luck next time.265

BRAND: Market Socialism

UNIQUE FEATURE: Price fixing by trial and error

STORY: This version has the state owning all resources and setting prices by trial and error. The idea is to lower prices on surpluses to get rid of the excess, and raise prices on scarce items to encourage more production to make more money and employ more workers (sounds very capitalistic). In this back and forth trial and error, a nation is eventually supposed to reach a point where everyone is producing what the country uses, everyone is employed, and their united labors happily grow the economy.266

BRAND: Fabian Socialism

UNIQUE FEATURE: Secretive, subtle, sneak up and infiltrate

STORY: Founded in London in 1884, its supporters advanced communism through gradual, easily swallowed means, not sudden revolutionary action. Socialism imposed slowly will last longer than a revolution, they said, provided it isn’t obviously anti-democracy or too bossy. The Fabians proposed minimum wage, national health care, “social justice,” and nationalization of the land, among other things. They promoted forced schooling and eugenics (selective breeding). Famous people embraced it wholeheartedly: George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells (for a while), Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell (for a while), Jawaharlal Nehru, Tony Blair, etc. It’s the same ol’ same ol’ socialism. When fully matured there would be no private property, no free choice, no liberty and personal rights.267

BRAND: Fascism

UNIQUE FEATURE: Turns family against family

STORY: “Fascism” has become a colloquialism for anything that is rash and brutal. For Italy’s Mussolini during WWII, fascism meant centering all power in him. His secret police spied on everyone to crush all opposition and dissent. Support for fascism was promoted as a patriotic duty and anyone opposed was viewed a traitor. To maintain popular support, Mussolini cultivated a state of ignorance about his activities by controlling all media, and restricting travel and association. It fomented a war-like state of crisis, convincing people of a threat they must be prepared for, and then employing many in the government to prepare and make armaments. The wealthy supported it because it protected their private properties. But once established, Italy’s fascist forces turned on the propertied classes to take from the “haves” and spread around the wealth to the “have-nots.”268

BRAND: Environmental Socialism

Unique Feature: Destroy rights to save the environment

Story: The so-named “green movement” has taken root in recent years to expand government power at the expense of individual liberties. Carbon taxes, global warming, capitalism’s supposed penchant for using too much energy, limited natural resources, cap and trade, the hole in the ozone layer, evil filament light bulbs, flatulence-prone cows—just about anything that puts humans below all things to regiment or eliminate them altogether, is today euphemistically called going green.

Ecosocialists say that Marxism already contains many pro-earth ideals, but today’s movement is designed to give teeth to the abstract—such as empowering Americans to sue companies that are not “green” enough, or shutting down coal-powered power plants (and driving up energy costs), or stopping oil drilling (and driving up energy costs), or stopping land development (make everything a no-touch national park), or imposing mandatory regulations to create ultra-expensive alternatives that are theoretically kinder to the earth.

In 2009 and 2011, suspicions about the political motivations of the global warming movement were validated when batches of 5,000 emails were posted on the Internet.269 Among the messages are cleanly stated the intentions of prominent scientists to conceal underlying data that went contrary to their political agenda, to promote political causes instead of making unbiased scientific inquiry, and admissions that the global warming science is dependent on manipulation of the facts.

Ecosocialism has developed into a filthy assault on liberty that many Americans are supporting at the expense of their own future freedoms to exercise innovation.270

Prickles Off the Same Weed

The growing number of forms of socialism are prickles off the same weed. Each destroys property rights with force. Each has its own elitist class of lordly I-know-better egotists leeching off the masses for sustenance and justification. The misery they create brings out the worst in people. Fighting, knockout games, lawlessness, protests, occupy movements, greed, corruption, and a general breakdown of society all create the excuses needed for an increase in police power. The rulers use police power to punish and crush opposition forces with brute force and multi-layered regulations. This continues until the population has had enough, and then regimes start falling—Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Somali, etc.

Socialism Has Been a Terrifying Failure

Socialism is the organized pursuit of something for nothing. It feeds on human nature with false assurances. It claims the power to satisfy all needs with minimal or no effort. In the end, only an elite class enjoys the advantages while everyone else must suffer.

The philosopher Ayn Rand spoke about the dark tide of socialism that swept across her homeland of Russia, and warned that no good will come of it for the rest of the world.

“Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake,” Rand wrote, “that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.”271

Rand was an eyewitness to the modern-day spread of socialism and the power it wields over individuals—

“Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.

“The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure—terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.

“Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse of every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.”272

Rand said the right to property was the single most important and consistent field of battle between freedom and socialism—

“When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature,” she wrote in the early 1960s. “Remember that there is no dichotomy as ‘human rights’ versus ‘property rights.’ No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the ‘right’ to ‘redistribute’ the wealth produced by others is claiming the ‘right’ to treat human beings as chattel.”273

The seven pillars of socialism are not applied equally through time, but are applied according to world circumstances and changing tolerances. In every instance, all seven methods to violate human rights become part of a painful test of endurance for the populous. When the ruling class, having finally exhausted their consumptions on the people, becomes weak, as they always do, a revolution erupts and new forms are installed to guide the people.

Are these ever any better than the originals?

It is the sad experience of generations past that replacement governments, once installed, eventually decay into abuse, like their predecessors—except for one grand exception: the government formed by the U.S. Constitution.

The assorted experiments in government practiced through the ages prove the brilliance of the Founding Fathers’ wisdom when they drafted the ideal framework for correct management of political power.

The Constitution was not a set of laws per se, but rather a structure to accommodate laws that would be as fair, as managed, and as carefully controlled as humanly possible. It was the great happy news for all of mankind, a change in human history when that miserable tide of blood and misery could, at last, come to a halt—perhaps not for everyone, but at least in one part of the world. And from there, freedom and liberty were positioned to spread to the rest of the nations if they wanted it. It was a time-altering and historical moment that forever changed everything.

Here, then, is the genesis, the unfolding, the brilliant beginning of that sparkling lunge for freedom, the amazing U.S. Constitution—

Learning to Recognize Socialism

1. Does voluntary religion promote an orderly society? Should organized religion be forced on others for the betterment of society? Has forced religion worked over the long run?
2. How many Christians are there in the world? Where is the Catholic’s worldwide headquarters? Give examples of the seven pillars of socialism that some Christians used in the past 2,000 years to get their way.
3. What most often gives organized religions a bad name: their doctrines or their members behaving badly? Do crimes committed by members of a religion always mean that the religion’s core doctrine is flawed? Give examples of bad people in good religions.
4. What did Buddhadasa say about hoarding? What did he say about consumption? Name three ways that a surplus is useful in society. What does socialist doctrine teach about surpluses?
5. How many Muslims are there in the world? Where is their worldwide headquarters? How is Islam significantly different from other world religions when it comes to civic affairs?
6. Explain why socialism won’t work among Hindus.
7. What did Benjamin Franklin list as the five beliefs common to all major religions? What other Founders supported the same conclusion?
8. What are some reasons why socialists believe Jesus was a socialist? What is the fundamental and telling difference between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of socialism?
9. Did the early Christians practice communism? What passages in the New Testament are misinterpreted to bring about this conclusion? Did Jesus teach that private property is good? Do socialists?
10. Name five of the major groups or schools of socialism. Which of these are prominent in the country today? In your community? In your life? How do these various groups propose to establish their way of socialistic life on everyone else?
11. How is “going green” retarding energy development? Transportation? Communications? Self-sufficiency? Personal choice?
12. Will socialism allow you to be more or less free? Explain.

Part VII--THE MIRACLE THAT STOPPED SOCIALISM

“The utopian schemes of leveling ... are arbitrary, despotic, and in our government, unconstitutional.”

Chapter 39: The Miracle That Stopped Socialism

It was 1787, and for the first time in history a nation rose to its feet firmly planted on the correct principles of freedom. They built a structure that banned forever the seven despotic pillars of socialism.

T he miracle that stopped socialism sprang directly from America’s Founding Generation—those pioneering souls who suffered through depravation, tyranny and death, beginning with Jamestown and slogging forward for 170 years. On the eve of their War for Independence in 1776, some 3 million colonists found themselves standing on the precipice of change—a change for freedom.

What was the “spirit of the times” in America on the eve of that war? What was the soil from which a miracle arose that altered the course of human history, that changed the world forever? Was it a confluence of enlightened ideas stirring the people to sever all ties to oppression, or was it the work of religion and Christianity? Or both?

What Makes a Nation Christian?

There are two ways to consider a nation Christian, Muslim, agnostic, or any other form. The first is when it declares itself as such, and formally endorses or enforces a state religion. For example—

In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established a theocratic system of government in Iran. Their new constitution left no doubt: “The form of government of Iran is that of an Islamic Republic, endorsed by the people of Iran...”274

In 1978, Spain’s constitution included: “...The public authorities shall take into account the religious beliefs of Spanish society and shall consequently maintain appropriate cooperation [sic] relations with the Catholic Church and other confessions.”275

In 1944, Iceland’s constitution said: “The Evangelical Lutheran Church shall be the State Church in Iceland and, as such, it shall be supported and protected by the State.”276

In 1787, the Founders put no such declaration directly into the Constitution. Nor was any added through the Bill of Rights in 1791. Does that mean the United States was not Christian?

“Look Unto the Rock Whence Ye Are Hewn ...”277

The second way to consider a nation as Christian or not, is to look at its social constructs, ethics and human values.278

John Eidsmoe offers a survey of America’s values and religious roots in his book Christianity and the Constitution.279 He points out—

At the time of the War for Independence, about 2/3rds of the American colonists came from countries steeped in Calvinism and similar versions of Christianity as taught by the Protestant reformers.

900,000 colonists were of Scotch or Scotch-Irish origin.

600,000 colonists were from Puritan England.

400,000 colonists were of German or Dutch-reformed origins.

And more thousands of additional European emigrants crossed the ocean with a cultural schooling of Christianity in their upbringing.

As the colonists formed their local governments, specific religious schools of thought were formally codified into their laws—

1. Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Haven, and New Hampshire incorporated the beliefs of Puritan Calvinist Protestants.

2. New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia incorporated the beliefs of the Church of England.

3. Maryland maintained formal neutrality although various uprisings over the decades attempted to install an official religion.

4. Colonies that had no state religion were Pennsylvania (founded by Quakers but neutral on religion), New Jersey (populated by many Quakers and Calvinists), and Delaware Colony although Catholics and Quakers periodically struggled for political control.

The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations officially granted religious freedom but the Catholics were sometimes persecuted or banned.

Additional insight into the religious culture of colonial America is gained from religious affiliation—all but three of the signers of the Constitution claimed allegiance to an organized religion. And, from actions such as the 1777 Continental Congress ordering 20,000 Bibles. And, by the assorted oaths of office that required public declarations such as Delaware’s, “I do profess faith in God the father, and in the Lord Jesus Christ...” And, by Congress setting aside 10,000 acres in 1787 for “civilizing the Indians and promoting Christianity.” And, by Congress’s 1787 Northwest Ordinance: “Sec. 14 Art. 3. ... Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”280

‘Religion is necessary for good government and happiness’? Where did these ideas come from?

John Calvin, Founding Father of the Reformation

The European nations from which these Americans emigrated were heavily schooled in Calvinism. John Calvin was a French pastor who greatly influenced the Protestant Reformation beginning around 1517. He taught three primary doctrines that helped form and steer the philosophical underpinnings of the Constitution:

• Men are by nature evil and sinful but they know right from wrong.
• All people are responsible for their own souls. Therefore, they must learn to read and understand the Bible to save themselves.
• Both moral and judicial laws as taught in the Bible are not a set of fixed rules to follow, but rather a body of principles that may be applied to all walks of life.

  Learning Becomes a Personal Religious Obligation

  The colonists believed that self rule would not succeed unless every citizen learned for himself to read the word of God in the Bible.

  In 1647, for example, Massachusetts passed the “Old Deluder Satan Law” to set up schools because “one chief project of the old deluder, Satan, [is] to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures.”281

  The religious fervor for education soon ingrained itself into American culture. In 1760, for example, John Jay’s entrance requirements to King’s College obligated him to translate the first 10 chapters of the Gospel of John from Greek into Latin.

  In 1730, a freshman at William and Mary College had to adhere to the Calvinistic Thirty-Nine Articles, and also be able to read, write, converse and debate in Greek.

  In 1763, John Adams studied Plato in French, English and the original Greek, as could most well-educated Americans in those days.282

  At the time of the Revolution, one in eight families received a newspaper that was passed along to others and usually read in public. There were nine large college libraries, and more than 60 subscription libraries. Hundreds of personal libraries of 500 or more books were scattered among the colonies, such as Thomas Jefferson’s collection. He donated 6,487 of his books to Congress to create the Library of Congress. Later on, he donated another 1,000 books.283

  Numerous studies conclude that a religious culture of literacy made Americans the most literate in the world. Among white New England men, 60 percent were literate between 1650 and 1670. By 1760, that figure rose to 85 percent, and between 1787 and 1795, it rose to 90 percent. In major cities such as Boston the literacy rate was close to 100 percent by 1800.284 At the turn of the century studies conclude that only Scotland surpassed America in literacy.285

  What Books Were in the Founding Father’s Library

  Although a Christian ethos permeated national morality, the Bible was silent on many aspects of self-rule. The Founders discovered what they needed in other sources—such as Cicero’s explanations on right reason and natural law, David Langhorne’s Plutarch’s Lives, the teachings of Virgil, of Thucydides, and of Tacitus and his Germania.

  They studied the enlightening Essays on Civil Government by John Locke, and Baron Charles de Montesquieu’s hopeful Spirit of the Laws. They pondered the enduring principles of Anglo-Saxon law as a restatement of Moses’ laws. They loved Paul’s letters on personal and national virtue. And, they pored over Sir William Blackstone’s legal commentaries and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

  They read Aristotle’s Essays on Politics and James Hampton’s translation of The General History of Polybius. They also scoured Plato’s Republic and Laws for principles important to freedom.

  They read the legal commentaries by Sir Edward Coke, the essays of Francis Bacon, and could borrow copies of Rapin’s five-volume History of England from many of Colonial America’s libraries.

  They researched the essays of Richard Hooker, and the challenges of social contracts between citizen and state in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. They studied Montagu’s Rise and Fall of Ancient Republics and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Roman History.

  They reviewed Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government that got the man beheaded by Charles II in 1683. They absorbed the insights from the Scottish economist David Hume—and more.

  Three Grand Conclusions

  It is evident from their reading and writings that the Founders knew their history—European, American, Roman, Greek and Biblical. From their combined accumulation of study, knowledge and experience they came to three important conclusions about self-government.

• First, they saw the absolute need for national virtue. People not practicing basic principles of decency such as that which Jesus taught were not able to govern themselves or their nations—and were always overthrown by outside forces after the decay was sufficiently severe.
• They realized the futility of a pure democracy—that it always degenerated into mob rule. They saw the clear need for a representative form of government as the key prerequisite to self-rule.
• Lastly, the protection of real property and individual rights was the best inoculation against the rise of tyranny. Property and unalienable rights are the magic ingredients of a life fully lived in freedom.

  Toppling the Seven Pillars of Socialism

  When the Founding Fathers affixed their signatures to the new Constitution, they put into play the greatest power for good the world had ever known. It was infused with the wisdom of the ages, steeped in the principles of Biblical law, and calculated to stand unremittingly for the good of all. With only 4,429 carefully ordered words, backed by an educated constituency with strong national virtue, the Founding Generation did what no other tyrant, monarch or dictator had ever before done: they established permanent freedom and prosperity, and chained down its enemies forever.

  It was the miracle that stopped socialism.

Chapter 40: Abolishing Pillar #1, “The Ruler”

Because the first pillar of socialism is the strongest, it required the most work to abolish. That’s why the Founders carefully wove layers of protections to strike an excellent balance between power and freedom.

In order to remove the despotism of “all power in the ruler,” the Founders put two brilliant devices into the Constitution.

• Dilute: The first device controls the ruling body by spreading far and wide the political power among all the people.

• Define: The second device specifies exactly what that ruling body can do—and then it is chained down with laws, checks and balances.

How is Power Spread Out?

The idea of diluting power has ancient roots. Polybius (Greece, 204-122 B.C.) proposed a mixed constitution with political power shared among “the many.” He envisioned the ruler being assigned the executive duties of the government. The interests of the nobility or the “established order” would be represented in the Senate. The general population would be represented in the popular Assembly.

Polybius’ insight led to the idea of a single government made of three separate powers, each accountable and dependent on the other two. It was a great idea that unfortunately died when Polybius died.

About 1,900 years later, it was given new life by Baron Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755) as America’s now-famous Separation of Powers with self-protecting checks and balances. Thomas Jefferson explained why these ideas were so effective for retaining freedom:

“The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one,” Jefferson wrote, “but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions he is competent to [perform best]. Let the national government be entrusted with the defense of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward [township] direct the interests within itself.

“It is by dividing and subdividing these republics,” Jefferson continued, “from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man’s farm by himself; by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.”

Jefferson then asks, “What 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.”286

The results of Separation of Powers were ingenious. It was a three-headed American eagle—executive, legislative, judicial—each watching the others for bad behavior. Here’s how they laid it out:

A. EXECUTIVE: This is the president with strong but well-defined powers.

B. LEGISLATIVE: The law-making body was divided into two houses, each watched closely by the other.

The House: Today there are 435 congressmen equally divided according to population among the many states—the larger the state, the more representatives. Today, each congressman represents about 732,000 people.287

The Senate: This “upper house” has two representatives for each state. The Founders gave the state legislatures the responsibility for hiring and firing their two senators. This made the senator beholden to the legislature on a regular basis. This control was demolished in 1913 with the 17th Amendment (discussed later).

C. JUDICIARY: The Supreme Court is to test the validity of new laws in light of the principles of freedom as contained in the Constitution. They are not to interpret or twist the Constitution to meet “changing times,” although that happens all the time.

The lower courts are empowered to resolve all issues unless something is specifically identified for scrutiny at a higher level.

D. CHECKS AND BALANCES: The three branches of government stand together and support each other, but guard their responsibilities carefully. If one branch tries to step across the line, the other two branches have power to push it back.

E. THE STATE LEGISLATURES: Here’s where neighbors vote for neighbors. A state legislator is the first and most easily reached representative of the people. These people carry concerns in their districts to the state level where they can be discussed and solved. It it remains unsettled the concern can be elevated to the federal level through the two senators.

F. THE PEOPLE: The right to elect representatives begins with the individual voter who must be left alone and free to ponder, consider, and make a choice.

Tying Down the Power

The next problem the Founders faced was how to make sure the power remained under control of the people and not the other way around. Thomas Jefferson said Americans should view government power with jealousy and suspicion, not confidence. Americans may love their leaders, he observed, but that is no excuse to release them from careful control. The power is the people’s, not the government’s.

“Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence,” Jefferson wrote in 1798. “In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

What Are the Chains on the President?

The Founders wanted a leader with enough power to act with vigor but not escape accountability. If he acted foolishly, they wanted very real and legal punishments available.

The president’s job description is written up in Article 2. This section makes it clear the president was not given power to make laws like a king, or to issue edicts on a personal whim.

They gave him six responsibilities:

1—Chief of State

2—Commander in Chief

3—Executive over the whole executive branch of government

4—Chief diplomat in foreign affairs

5—Chief architect for needed legislation

6—Conscience of the nation in granting pardons and reprieves.

The Founders opposed political parties. They saw their corrupting influence in Europe and tried very hard to prevent it in America. The system they proposed did a much better job at vetting a presidential candidate. It shut the door on hype and hyperbole, and required candid, face-to-face contact by those who did the actual voting. From that came understanding, promises, commitments, and explanations. It was called the Electoral College. See Article 2.1.

The length of term was hotly debated. The Founders wanted the terms long enough so the president wouldn’t be wasting all his time fighting for re-election when there was so little time to get the work done. Seven years was deemed too long, three was too short, so they settled on four.

The Founders decided a president should be rewarded for good service with the chance to be reelected. The elections acted as referendums on the president’s capacity to govern well. (Article 2.1)

What Are the Chains on Congress?

The Founders opposed how Europe wasted the labors of the people with massive welfare projects. In Article 1, they gave the House and Senate power to take care of the nation’s general welfare, but drastically shortened the list of things they could do.

What is “Welfare”?

Noah Webster’s dictionary of 1828 defined welfare in the days of the Founders as “exemption from any unusual evil or calamity; the enjoyment of peace and prosperity, or the ordinary blessings of society and civil government.”288 This had nothing to do with food stamps, Social Security or Medicare, as claimed by tax-hungry bureaucrats in later years.

What is “General Welfare”?

The intent of “general welfare” was clearly a restriction, not a free-for-all blank check. Madison defended that specific list of do’s and don’ts as necessary to prevent runaway taxation and spending. In Federalist No. 41 he said the list in Article 1.8 was exactly that, a limitation on the kinds of projects for which the government could tax:

“For what purpose could the enumeration [a numbered list] of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power?”

Immediately, Congress tried to twist and turn the restrictions and definitions of welfare. They used the opening paragraph of Article 1.8 as the excuse—words, they said, that authorized them to care for the “general welfare.” In defense, Madison said that paragraph was an introduction only, and what followed was the actual authority:

“Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity, ...” (Federalist No. 41)

Madison called it an absurd misconstruction to believe that “general welfare” amounted to an “unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare....” (Federalist No. 41). Hamilton said the same thing:

“This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd, as well as useless, if a general authority was intended....” (Federalist No. 83)

Jefferson said that if “general welfare” truly meant any taxation for any purpose, “it would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”289

Unfortunately, those early controls were abolished by aggressive presidents, congresses, and a willing Supreme Court. In the beginning, however, the chains were brilliantly applied, well-crafted, and would have kept America out of the trouble it’s in today.

Rule by Law, Not “Whim”

The House puts forth reasons to raise money for various needs of the country. The Senate may agree or suggest changes. Extracting a tax had to be equal for everyone, and not graduated as it is today (Article 1.2.3). The use of those taxes is highly restricted—a laundry list of acceptable expenses is written right into Article 1.8.

“The Congress shall have power to ...”

1. BORROW: borrow money on the credit of the U.S., and ...
2. COMMERCE: regulate State and Foreign commerce
3. CITIZENSHIP: establish uniform rules of citizenship
4. FAILURES: establish laws regarding bankruptcies
5. COINAGE: coin money and establish its value
6. STANDARDS: fix standards of weights and measures
7. PUNISHMENTS: set the punishment for counterfeiters
8. MAIL: establish post offices and postal roads, but not, Madison said, “a power to construct roads and canals.” That job is the responsibility of the states.290
9. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: promote science and art by protecting copyrights
10. COURTS: organize a court system beneath the Supreme Court
11. FELONIES: set the punishment of certain felony crimes
12. WAR: declare war and set certain rules
13. DEFENSE: raise an army and a navy
14. RULES OF WAR: to set rules of military engagement
15. MILITIA: to call forth a militia for national security concerns
16. INTERNAL STRIFE: to organize, arm and set rules for militia in cooperation with the states
17. SEAT OF GOVERNMENT: to exercise legislative authority over Washington, D.C.

...and the power to make all laws necessary to carry out these responsibilities.

Extra Chains Just to Make Sure

After the list of 17 permissions, the Constitution lays out eight limits on Congress as outlined in Article I.9.

1. ANTI-SLAVERY: Congress may not interfere with importation of slaves for 20 years after the Constitution was ratified, but after that time (1808) it could terminate the slave trade. Congress could impose a $10 tax for each immigrant or slave. This was meant to make the importation of slaves more costly.
2. HABEAS CORPUS: Congress may not keep a person in jail without cause (writ of habeas corpus). And, that person must be considered innocent (not a criminal) without a trial and conviction.
3. EX POST FACTO: Congress may not pass laws after an act has occurred that makes that act illegal.
4. EQUAL TAXES: Congress may not extract taxes unequally. Congress may not extract direct taxes unequally. These are taxes the business can’t cover by raising prices on the goods it sells.
5. COMMERCE: Congress may not tax articles that the states export to foreign countries.
6. TAXES & FEES: Congress may not give one shipping port an advantage over others by taxing them unequally. Congress may not force ships and boats traveling from one port to another to pay fees or get permission—this was designed to ensure freedom of the coastal seas.
7. RAIDING THE TREASURY: Congress may not take any funds from the Treasury unless the expenditure has been approved by the people’s elected representatives. Congress must publish all receipts and expenditures.
8. SPOILS SYSTEM: Congress may not create an upper class, an aristocracy, nobility or privileged class. Members of Congress, and any other office holder in the U.S. government, may not accept gifts or titles of nobility, from foreign governments or agencies.

Keeping control of these enumerated powers and preventing them from expanding to become all-inclusive was the Founders’ goal.

“If Congress can apply money indefinitely to the general welfare,” Madison told Congress, “and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion ... education ... schools ... roads ... In short, everything from the highest object of State legislation, down to the most minute object of policy.”291 As most Americans painfully realize, that’s what happened.

What Are the Chains on the States?

The Founders learned by sad experience that the Articles of Confederation gave the states far too much power over the federal government, and this prevented the country from making progress. The challenge was to balance the power just right so both governments would function well within their own spheres of influence.

Article 1.10 puts the states under authority of the Constitution and explains what they may do. In addition, Amendments 9 and 10 gave yet one more restriction on the federal level, clarifying that powers not given to the federal government defaulted to the states or to the people themselves.

Rule By Law, Not By “Whim”

To make sure the states didn’t try to act as a separate country to the detriment of the other states, these restrictions were laid out:

• NO TREATIES: States may not enter into treaties and alliances.

• NO BULLYING: States may not instigate actions or authorize anyone to commit acts that could bring the nation into war (such as issuing letters of marque and reprisal).

• NO CURRENCY: States may not coin money or issue credit.

• DEBTS: States may not pay debts with anything but gold and silver.

• HABEAS CORPUS: States may not jail someone without a trial and conviction.

• NO EX POST-FACTO: States may not pass laws after an act has occurred that makes the act illegal.

• CONTRACTS: States may not pass laws that undo contracts or make their provisions illegal after such contracts have been agreed upon. For example, neither Congress nor state legislatures can suspend the payment of house mortgages during a depression—that is none of government’s authorized business.

• NO SNOBBERY: States may not grant titles of nobility.

• COMMERCE: States may not charge taxes (duties) on imports or exports of other states.

• FAIR FEES: States must allow Congress to control any import fees charged to offset the costs of inspecting things at the border.

• SHIPPING: States may not charge fees on ships according to their tonnage (which, of course, varies with each ship), but are required to all charge the same fees.

• MILITIAS: States may have state militias, but may not keep troops or build up a military—that is the job of Congress.

• NO WARS: States may not start a war except for self-defense. For any other purpose, Congress must give its consent.

• ALL OTHER RIGHTS ... States are responsible and obligated to handle everything else not specified in the Constitution—a privilege and right that has been foolishly abrogated and delegated to the whims of Congress.

What Are the Chains on the Judiciary?

During the Revolutionary War, the people had no top court to settle squabbles between the states. The Founders realized that some form of new judiciary had to be invented to handle national-level problems.

The Supreme Court was intended to be a third branch of the federal government, an independent branch at that. As will be discussed later, the Court quickly evolved into the last and final word on anything, including the actions of the other two “equal” branches. The judiciary became the new Ruler.

Jefferson was extremely disturbed with the Court’s role as an un-checkable ultimate authority. This, Jefferson warned, would result in the Court one day twisting and interpreting the Constitution as a means of amending it without due process, simply by reading the supreme law this way or that way. “Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution,” Jefferson warned. “Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.”292

Jefferson suggested an amendment giving power to Congress or the state legislatures to veto Supreme Court decisions, giving the people a remedy when the Court strayed from the Constitution. See Chapter 63 for more of Jefferson’s concerns and suggestions.

Rule By law, Not “Whim”

Job Description: Article 3 describes the duties of the Supreme Court and related courts in America.

• SUPREMACY: The judicial power of the U.S. is vested in one Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress shall establish.

• LIFE-LONG: Judges in the federal courts are appointed for life, provided they serve with “good behavior.”

• SALARIED: Judges will receive a salary that can’t be diminished during their terms.

• EQUALITY: The judiciary handles all cases of law and equality. Even though equality is not guaranteed under the Constitution, it becomes an issue when people are taken advantage of when forced into situations of hardship or misfortune. The federal court system is supposed to look at those cases, too.

• CONSTITUTIONAL: The federal courts shall deal with all questions concerning the Constitution.

• APPEALS: The federal courts must accept appeals from lower courts when the case involves enforcement or interpretation of U.S. law.

• TREATIES: Federal courts are responsible for problems arising from treaties or agreements made with foreign powers.

• AMBASSADORS: The delicate legal entanglements of foreign ambassadors and consuls shall be handled only by the federal courts.

• NON-STATES: Federal courts handle all cases involving maritime issues outside of a state’s jurisdiction (off its coastal waters, for example).

• SUING: The federal courts deal with any lawsuit or legal action involving the U.S. government.

• INTERSTATE: Problems between the states shall be handled by the federal courts.

• CITIZENS: Controversies between citizens of different states shall be handled by the federal courts.

• PROPERTIES: Controversies between citizens in the same state over lands or issues in other states may find a neutral hearing on the federal level.

• FOREIGNERS: Any individual or states having difficulties with a foreign state or group may have the case heard on the federal level.

• DIPLOMATS: Top diplomats may have access to the highest court in the land if they run into trouble in America.

• STATES: If a state is involved in a legal issue, it has the right to be heard by the highest court in the land.

• CASE LOAD: Congress may limit the number of cases appealed to the Supreme Court so the justices don’t get buried in a mountain of trivial issues that should be resolved at the lower levels.

Abolishing the Ruler

Forging all the links necessary to chain down federal power includes more than what is listed above. Additional controls can be found interlaced with other restrictions, responsibilities, and declarations throughout the Constitution. The all-powerful Ruler is prevented from tyranny and kingly dictatorship in the United States thanks to the chains put down with wisdom and foresight by America’s Founding Fathers.

Chapter 41: Abolishing Pillar #2, “The Caste”

The Founders disrupted the natural tendency toward divisions in society with the creation of a republic.

A republic is a state where power is held by the people, who express their desires and control through elected representatives. This means even the smallest class in society (the individual) has a voice and someone close by to hear it and convey those concerns into the limelight of public consideration.

It Takes a Family ... Then the Village

The beginning place for ‘power by the people’ is first, the family, and then the village. Jefferson called these clusters of people wards, meaning “watched over.”

“These wards, called townships in New England,” Jefferson wrote, “are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government.”293

Jefferson pointed to this strong local self-control as the means to protect freedom. “The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many ...”294

James Madison said that division of power is best made by putting the bulk of the power at the lowest possible levels. “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined,” Madison wrote. “Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” (The Federalist Papers #45)

The Republican Form Works Best

Madison explained, “In a democracy the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, must be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” (The Federalist Papers #15)

With the power so disbursed, the various classes cannot usurp political control to create advantages for themselves.

It’s the Law

Preventing castes was dealt with in Article 3.4: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government ....” So long as representation exists in every state and community in America, the caste system with an aristocracy at the top and a vast working class of peasants below cannot take root.

Historian Richard Frothingham pointed out how monarchs in England fought local autonomy, and destroyed it so a caste system could be created. Regarding England’s history of local control, he wrote:

“In the course of events the Crown deprived the body of the people of this power of local rule, and vested it in a small number of persons in each locality, who were called municipal councils, were clothed with the power of filling vacancies in their number, and were thus self-perpetuating bodies. In this way, the ancient freedom of the municipalities was undermined, and the power of the ruling classes was installed in its place. Such was the nature of the local self-government in England, not merely during the period of the planting of her American colonies (1607 to 1732), but for a century later.... It was a noble form robbed of its life-giving spirit.”295

Families of Tens: As mentioned earlier, republicanism or the process of elected representation, was used by Moses and then the Anglo-Saxons some 2,000 years later. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and others who were students of Anglo-Saxon culture carried those same concepts to the Constitutional Convention. To this day Americans continue to benefit from the wisdom of that inspired system of management. It helps keep power and responsibility where it belongs: with the people, and without a caste.

Chapter 42: Abolishing Pillar #3, “All In Common”

Of all the socialistic promises made to lure people into surrendering their rights, the promise to deliver something they didn’t earn has been the most difficult to eradicate.

The proper role of government is to ensure equal rights, not equal things.

At the foundation of all socialist thought is the stated goal of taking from the “haves” and giving to the “have-nots.” The Founders called this “leveling.” The fiction that equality in things is in some way possible is dismissed out of hand by the lessons learned at Jamestown, Plymouth, and all other times and venues where it has been tried. The Founders were determined to save America from falling for that one again. Samuel Adams said,

“The utopian schemes of leveling [redistribution of the wealth], and a community of goods, are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown. [These ideas] are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.”296

Ownership is Necessary for Life: John Locke (1632-1704) explained that there is a proper and necessary role for private property to achieve lasting prosperity and freedom. To begin with, he said, mankind’s greatest common gift is this earth and all that it contains.

“God, who hath given the world to men in common,” Locke wrote, “hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience.”

Locke said that the Creator’s command to have “dominion” over the earth and to “subdue” it required exclusiveness over property:

• All property lawfully acquired and developed is an extension of that person’s life, energy, and ingenuity.
• To destroy or confiscate another person’s property is an attack on the life of that very person.
• “Every man has a property in his own person,” Locke said.
• Whatever a person removes out of the common storehouse of nature, and mixes with it his own labor, thereby makes it his property:

  “It is allowed to be his goods who hath bestowed his labor upon it, though, before, it was the common right of everyone,” Locke said.

  For example, a man comes upon a tree in the wild. He turns it into lumber, makes a table and chair, and sells them. It is his labor that made the tree of value in the marketplace, and by natural law no other person has the moral right to deprive him of that property without his permission and without a fair compensation.297

  “The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent,” Locke said. “For the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society, it necessarily supposes and requires that the people should have property, without which they must be supposed to lose that [property] by entering into society, which was the end for which they entered into it.”298

  If property rights are destroyed, the lessons of history teach that there must follow a series of consequences that no one wants. Without property rights—

  1. The incentive to develop property is smothered. New ideas, improvements, labor-saving devices, cures for disease, multiplying the quality and production of food, etc., withers and dies. The people descend into a desperate hand-to-mouth existence.

  2. The industrious are deprived of the fruits of their labors and freedom of choice. Without an incentive to create a surplus, the industrious don’t, and the great motor that powers the world dies.

  3. Desperate mobs combine in various forms to go about confiscating by force whatever they please.

  4. People are compelled to live out their days on bare subsistence levels because accumulating anything invites attack.

  The Right to Property: Justice George Sutherland of the U.S. Supreme Court made an important distinction about property rights that reflect the Founding Fathers’ position:

  “It is not the right of property which is protected, but the right to property,” he said in New York in 1921. “Property, per se, has no rights; but the individual, the man, has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to his life, the right to his liberty, the right to his property... The three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.”

  Property Rights Necessary to Freedom

  John Adams made it clear that the right to property was the most important foundation stone for liberty.

  “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.”299

  James Madison said the same thing in his Essay on Property (1792) where he rejected all excessive spending and future raids on the U.S. people and treasury in the form of taxation:

  “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort.... This being the end of government, that alone is not a just government, ... nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.”

  And from these building blocks of freedom came these declarations inside the Constitution and Bill of Rights:

• Intellectual Property: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (Article 1.8)
• Equal Taxation (Property): “... Direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States ... according to their respective Numbers ....” (Article 1.2.3)
• Taking Taxes (Property): “No Capitation, or other direct Taxes shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” (Article 1.9)
• Property Rights: “...Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” (5th Amendment)
• Seizure: “The right of the people to be secure ... against unreasonable searches and seizures ...” (6th Amendment)

Chapter 43: Abolishing Pillar #4, “All Things Regulated”

The attempt to regulate the market to achieve prosperity has proved a consistent failure. Regulating freedoms simply doesn’t work, and each attempt to do so always backfires. The Founders clearly understood that when they gathered in 1787 to talk about how to balance power and freedom.

To abolish the abuse of regulatory powers, the Founders gave the new American government a very simple chore: protect the freedom to fail.

Allowing for equal failure meant certain rules of fairness had to be enforced—no monopolies, no fraud, no collusion, no restrictions of trade or access, no artificial limits or subsidies, no violation of free trade and competition, no violation of personal rights.

If the government ever found itself getting in the way of any enterprise falling flat on its face, that was proof positive the government had overstepped its bounds.

George Washington Said: “Let vigorous measures be adopted; not to limit the prices of articles, for this I believe is inconsistent with the very nature of things, and impracticable in itself, but to punish speculators, forestallers, and extortioners, and above all to sink the money by heavy taxes. To promote public and private economy; encourage manufacturers, etc.”300

To chain down the government from encroaching on regulating commercial activities, the Founders wrote this into the Constitution:

• Foreign Commerce: “The Congress shall have Power ... To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations...” (Article 1.8.2). This gave the Congress the right to represent the American people in regulating commerce with other nations.
• Interstate Commerce: “...and [to regulate commerce] among the several States...” (Article 1.8.2). This gave Congress the right to create a common market of free trade between all the states and regulate interstate commerce of all kinds.

  When these responsibilities were drafted, the emphasis was on the commerce—to prevent the states from trying to gain advantages over each other by interfering in the fair exchange of goods across state lines.

  The government is further restricted from regulating the private lives of Americans with:

• The Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10): These ten amendments spell out several aspects of personal and commercial life that may not be interfered with or regulated by the government.
• The Enumerated Powers (Article 1.8): The laundry list of activities for which Congress may tax the people and otherwise regulate their lives is limited to just those things enumerated and no others.
• Additional Chains: Article I, Sections 9 and 10, put additional restrictions on the government’s proclivity to regulate. Freedom from excessive government regulatory control was made a matter of constitutional mandate. There were put in place strong separations between federal responsibilities and State powers.

  So long as the American people could keep their national government chained down, there would be no fear of the government agency heads regulating aspects of American lives for which they had no constitutional power. Legislation was Congress’s job, not a czar’s.

  Lastly: If there was ever any doubt about the powers of regulation, the Founders included the tenth Amendment to the Constitution:

  “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” (Amendment 10)

  It was made very clear: Unless the federal government was granted specific powers of regulation, those powers remained with the states, for example, capital punishment, gay marriage, trade unions, guns, abortion, health care, immigration reform, speed limits, etc.

Chapter 44: Abolishing Pillar #5, “Force”


The weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation taught the Founders an important lesson about political power: authority without sufficient power of force is no authority at all.

For the Founders, the critical question of the day was, how much force should be granted so the ruling power doesn’t grow into another ruling monarchy?

The Key Was “We the People”

Putting reins on the power, having it emanate from the people themselves, was how the Founders intended to keep control of “force.” This wholly unique invention was designed to tolerate only definite and limited powers. As James Madison wrote301:

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

It was a common-sense choice. Generally speaking, Madison said the federal government was responsible for the whole and the outside, and the States were responsible for the individual issues on the inside.

“The former,” Madison continued, “will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce ... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”

A Nation of Laws, Not Men

It wasn’t enough to declare restraints and responsibilities. The Founders wanted a written law controlled by the people, under which all government power was required to perform and otherwise required to be restrained, according to the Constitution.

Doubts Remained

Even after their very best efforts to forge all the necessary chains around the government were finally talked out and described as cleanly as the Founders thought possible, there remained doubts about unseen loopholes.

As a double-safety net, they added these interesting and well-crafted words: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” (Amendment 9)

This passage expresses a distrust of government, and admits that a government’s very nature is to corrupt, usurp, and creep into realms where it doesn’t belong. Therefore, the Founders also added:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” (Amendment 10)

If ever there was conflict over power and rights, the Founders wanted the default resolution to point away from the centers of power and into the control of the individuals. Their systems of checks and balances were meant to encourage the flow of force to the lowest logical level. They wanted power diluted into the hands of many.

“This balance between the national and state governments,” Alexander Hamilton wrote, “ought to be dwelt on with peculiar attention, as it is of the utmost importance. It forms a double security to the people. If one encroaches on their rights, they will find a powerful protection in the other. Indeed, they will both be prevented from over-passing their constitutional limits, by certain rivalship which will ever subsist between them.”302

James Madison laid his axe at the root of the problem and foreshadowed America’s greatest threat: “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations.... This danger ought to be wisely guarded against.”303

As shall be seen a little later, the “gradual and silent encroachments of those in power” is precisely what happened. Today, that crafty invasion and violation of personal rights is burying Americans in a pit of destroyed culture, lost freedoms, and a mountain of obligations approaching $120 trillion.

Chapter 45: Abolishing Pillar #6, “Information Control”

Among the seven pillars of socialism, controlling information is the next most powerful tool after raw force. Information control is necessary to keep a dictator in power. Even if conditions are bad, the illusion of stability will keep the people under control because a natural human trait is to put up with bad things so long as hope and change are on the horizon.

Jefferson made that very point in the Declaration of Independence: “... all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.”

He continued, saying that when the abuses become intolerable, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Throwing off the old tyranny and installing new guards with the Constitution included unhampered information flow.

Abolishing Information Control

America’s founding documents include several statements enforcing freedom of information and government transparency.

• Freedom to Believe As You Wish: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; ...” (Amendment 1)
• Freedom to Express Opinions: “...or abridging the freedom of speech, ...” (Amendment I)
• Freedom to Print What You Want: “... or of the press, ...” (Amendment I)
• Freedom to Associate: “... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, ...” (Amendment I)
• Freedom to Complain: “...and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (Amendment I)

  The Founders also insisted the activities of the nation be scrutinized. Among their requirements for transparency and openness are:

• Responsibility to Report: “Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same...” (Article 1.5.3)
• State of the Union: The President “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union ...” (Article 2.3.1)

  Trending Toward Ignorance

  Cultivating a culture of ignorance helps the grip of socialism tighten. As long as the people don’t know what’s going on around them, so long as they are fed and housed and entertained, those in charge feel more free to do as they please. Preventing parents from teaching their children, abolishing Bible study, regulating what can be spoken and taught, controlling the media’s bias to one side or the other, these and all other inhibitors of the free flow of information keep people ignorant.

  Top Secret Code Word

  There are some exceptions to the free flow of information, such as the duties necessary for national security. Elected representatives have oversight responsibility on intelligence committees to keep an eye on U.S. government activities. Unfortunately, moles, spies and reckless comments by self-enamored politicians have compromised intelligence advantages that have cost this nation untold billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

  Manipulating Money

  Another tool of information control comes from changing a nation’s medium of currency from actual gold and silver to paper notes that cannot be cashed in for gold or silver. Once a baseless paper is admitted into circulation, it may be inflated and traded without the natural controls of the marketplace, and without the knowledge of the people—it is an insidious and powerful form of information control.

  George Washington advised, “We should avoid ... the depreciation of our currency; but I conceive this end would be answered, as far as might be necessary, by stipulating that all money payments should be made in gold and silver, being the common medium of commerce among nations.”304

  Thomas Jefferson saw oppressive power in the control of money that was not based on gold. The following quote is attributed to Jefferson, but some believe it is a combination of his statements. Either way, it is prophetic: “If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs.”305

  Restoration of control that Jefferson promoted meant keeping money tied to gold and silver reserves on hand.

  “We are overdone with banking institutions,” Jefferson wrote toward the end of his life, “which have banished the precious metals, and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium... These have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness... [These] are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.” (The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 12, p. 379.)

  A free market is best at conveying accurate economic information. Each dollar spent is a vote for products it is used to purchase. Such exchanges convey volumes of information about the worth of products: Is supply meeting demand? Are there more opportunities for profit-making investments? Unfortunately, once the government intervenes and removes the precious metal backing from the dollar, the people have nothing but faith in which to assume their dollar’s true value. All that glitters is not gold—sometimes that glitter is nothing more than the government’s deceptive smile.

Chapter 46: Abolishing Pillar #7, “No Natural Rights”

At the very heart of tyranny is the demand that only the ruler can declare rights and permissions. In the real world, nothing could be further from the truth.

By the time the Founding Fathers completed the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, they had sufficiently defined natural rights so they could be protected within the strong fortress of the Constitution. That sifting process was difficult. One of the teachers who guided them along the way was a man named Cicero.

Cicero (106-43 B.C.) was a Roman statesman, lawyer and constitutionalist. His excellent understanding of natural law laid the foundation for protecting natural rights, a breakthrough to which Thomas Jefferson was particular attracted.

Cicero lived in pagan Rome. It was unusual in that society to find a man speaking of a one true God, but so declared Cicero. He made his reliance upon and advocacy of God the center of his political philosophy. He taught:

• God Exists: God is the Creator, and man shares with him the divine gift of reason.
• Reason: Not just any reason will do, but right reason. Right reason is law, therefore man must have law in common with God.
• Law: True law is right reason in agreement with nature.
• Justice: Those who share reason and law must also share justice.
• Eternal: It is a sin to alter natural law or repeal any part of it—in fact, “it is impossible to abolish it entirely,” Cicero said.
• Self-Evident: Natural law is instinctive: “We need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it,” Cicero said.
• Natural Law is Consistent: “There will not be different laws at Rome and Athens, or different laws now and in the future,” Cicero said. “But one eternal and unchangeable law that will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is God....”

  How did the Founders protect natural law from abuses and usurpation? Here is a sampling:

  Declaration of Independence

• Equality: All people are born with “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them...”
• Created Equal: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
• Government Didn’t Invent Rights: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
• Natural Right to be Free: “...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish [destructive governments], and to institute new Government...”
• Natural Right to Form Governments: “...it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
• Natural Right to Control Destiny: “...and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

  Constitution of the United States of America

  The Constitution is a very thorough declaration of natural rights from its opening preamble to its conclusion. At least 286 rights are specified.306

  The people feared, however, that since England’s King George was so lax in his interpretation of natural rights, they should make a specific list of natural rights so there would be no question.

  The Problem of Listed Rights

  Alexander Hamilton didn’t like a list of specific ideas. In Federalist Papers No. 84, he pointed out that the federal government had only 20 specific enumerated powers—nothing more. “I go further and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions be imposed?”307

  At the end of the Constitutional Convention, several of the delegates refused to sign the Constitution without some kind of list of unalienable rights included. George Washington and others had to give personal assurances that if the states would accept the Constitution as presented to them, Congress would accept suggestions to improve it—including a Bill of Rights. Eventually, the states submitted 189 amendments. James Madison boiled them down to 17. Congress approved 12, and the states ratified 10—today’s Bill of Rights.

  The Bill of Rights

  The Bill of Rights comprises the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Their stated purpose is laid out in the preamble, “... the States ... expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added ...,” and thereby provided these 27 protections of individual rights:

  1. RELIGION: Congress may not interfere in the free exercise of religion.

  2. SPEECH & PRESS: Congress may not interfere in the free exercise of speech and the press.

  3. ASSEMBLY: Congress may not interfere in the right of the people to peaceably assemble.

  4. PETITION: Congress may not interfere in the right of the people to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

  5. ARMS: The people may possess arms without interference from the government.

  6. SOLDIERS: The people will not be forced to house the military except as the people’s representatives describe it according to law.

  7. PRIVACY: The people have the right to the privacy of their homes, their businesses, and all their private papers and effects.

  8. SEARCH AND SEIZURE: The people have the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

  9. WARRANTS: The people may not be arrested without a properly issued warrant.

  10. ACCUSED: People accused of a felony do not need to answer for it unless a formal charge is brought against them that has been heard by a grand jury and formal charges issued.

  11. MILITARY CRIME: Military personnel charged with crimes may be tried by a civilian court except during times of war.

  12. DOUBLE JEOPARDY: An individual passing through the criminal trial process is free of any additional prosecution for that same crime.

  13. SELF-INCRIMINATION: People may not be forced to testify against themselves in court unless they freely choose to do so.

  14. DUE PROCESS: People may not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.

  15. PROPERTY: Private property may not be taken without just compensation.

  16. TRIALS: The accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy, fair and public trial in the state and district where the crime was committed.

  17. ARBITRARY EXCUSES: The accused has the right to have explained the nature of the crime of which he is accused.

  18. WITNESSES: The accused has the right to confront witnesses brought against him.

  19. POVERTY: The accused will be provided the means to obtain witnesses in his favor using the compulsory powers of the court.

  20. DEFENSE: The accused has the right to a defense attorney whether he can afford it or not.

  21. CIVIL CASES: The accused in a civil case has the same right to trial by jury as does an accused in a criminal case, provided the suit involves $20 or more.

  22. APPEALS: The facts of a case may not be altered, added to, or adjusted during the appeal process.

  23. BAIL: The accused of a bailable crime will be released without providing a bail that would be considered excessive and unreasonable.

  24. FINES: The convicted has the right to penalties that are reasonable and not excessive.

  25. PUNISHMENT: The convicted will not suffer cruel or unusual punishment.

  26. ALL RIGHTS NOT MENTIONED ... Americans may claim any and all rights that belong to them whether or not they are listed in the Constitution.

  27. ALL POWERS NOT DELEGATED ... Americans and their sovereign states retain all powers not delegated to the federal government.

  It’s All About Rights

  The important distinction between the U.S. Constitution and other forms of government is that natural rights are not presumed to be invented by government, but instead are declared pre-existing and therefore receive protection by the government. The great modern clash between socialistic governments and freedom always points back to this fundamental part of human creation. Cicero said it best:

  “The animal which we call man, endowed with foresight and quick intelligence, complex, keen, possessing memory, full of reason and prudence, has been given a certain distinguished status by the Supreme God who created him; for his is the only one among so many different kinds and varieties of living beings who has a share in reason and thought, while all the rest are deprived of it. But what is more divine, I will not say in man only, but in all heaven and earth, than reason? And reason, when it is full grown and perfected, is rightly called wisdom. Therefore, since there is nothing better than reason, and since it exists both in man and God, the first common possession of man and God is reason.

  “But those who have reason in common must also have right reason in common. And since right reason is law we must believe that men have Law also in common with the gods. Further, those who share law must also share Justice; and those who share these are to be regarded as members of the same commonwealth. If indeed they obey the same authorities and powers, this is true in a far greater degree; but as a matter of fact they do obey this celestial system, the divine mind, and the God of transcendent power. Hence we must now conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.”308

  Cicero Also Wrote:

  “True law is right reason in agreement with nature. It is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting.”309

  “God ... is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. ...Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst punishment.”310

  Socialism Abolished

  The miracle that stopped socialism was brilliantly crafted—and it worked. All seven pillars of socialism were handily dealt with. The Founders knew this would continue only if the people wanted it, and only if the Constitution remained intact, understood, jealously protected, and supported. Here’s what it achieved—

  No Ruler: The executive was locked down so he couldn’t become a king and declare edicts on a whim. So long as Congress and the Court could reign him in, the president had little authority except to manage the government with the support of the other two branches.

  No Caste: Classes and castes could not develop among the populous because the Constitution gave individuals a raw chance at freedom, and the responsibility to bear the full weight of their own choices, their own industry, and their own ability to make opportunities where none existed.

  When a people knows their salvation rests in their own hands, history proves they are more apt to labor their way out of difficulties. The American system promoted that to everyone’s advantage.

  No Things in Common: ‘Things in common’ was outlawed by both the culture of self-sufficiency and independence, and the Constitution. Taking a handout was once considered humbling proof of a person falling on hard times, or worse, palpable proof of laziness. But failure also allowed other processes to unfold in positive ways: innovation, compassion, creativity, etc., that rose to the challenge.

  The Constitution wisely prevented government entitlements from developing—those misguided safety nets that eat up the labors of the people, encourage dependency, and ultimately destroy economies and cultures.

  Minimal Regulation: The sluggish drag on prosperity that over-regulation creates was carefully guarded against. Government was denied the power to shadow every human action and manipulate it toward some national goal.

  Small and well-managed government allows men and women to be responsible for themselves—it sets free that pioneering spirit that broke the land in Jamestown, Plymouth, Oregon, Utah, the prairie, the mountains, the continents, the moon, Mars and outer space. The best government is small government, and America’s resulting prosperity, ingenuity and capability proved that adage true.

  Balanced Force: Political force was held to the minimum necessary to meet national goals. The proper role of government was caged with chains and guards so it remained the servant of the people instead of vice-a-versa. As a result, prosperity exploded into fantastic realms of creative progress that went far beyond anyone’s expectation or imagination.

  Free Flowing Information: The free flow of information promotes prosperity; it is the key to wealth. With a free press, free association, and a money based on the sound value of precious metals, the flow of information lifted the American body and soul to heights of achievement and satisfaction unlike ever before in history.

  Natural Rights: The Founders built their model government on the simple premise that a national government should have no more rights than those of any individual. The individuals may delegate rights, but the government may not take them or grant unto itself any new rights.

  Upon that simple formula was the greatest nation in the history of the world scratched out of the prairie sod and coastal swamps to become a land littered with light, growth, and peace. It was indeed the miracle that stopped socialism.

Chapter 47: Founding Fathers Speak on Socialism

Socialism is unconstitutional.

The Founders did everything they could to preserve choice and make socialism, communism and any other scheme of leveling, clearly and unquestionably unconstitutional.

Socialism is Unconstitutional

Sam Adams: “The Utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those ideas which vest all property in the Crown ... [these ideas] are arbitrary, despotic, and in our government, unconstitutional.”311

Socialism is Theft

Thomas Jefferson: “To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”312

Socialism Erases Property Rights

John Adams: “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.”313

Socialism Destroys Profit

Thomas Jefferson: “A wise and frugal government… shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”314

Socialism Stops Progress

Thomas Jefferson: “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”315

Article 1.8 Prevents Socialism

Thomas Jefferson: “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”316

James Madison: “With respect to the words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”317

Socialism Benefits Only a Few

James Madison: In 1794, Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees coming to America. James Madison objected, saying, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that Article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”318

Socialism is Forced Welfare

James Madison: “The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”319

Socialism Begins With Easy Money

Benjamin Franklin: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”320

Socialism Centralizes Power

James Madison: “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.”321

Socialism Destroys “Power By the People”

James Madison: “Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.”322

Thomas Jefferson: “When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”323

Socialism Always Becomes Tyranny

James Madison: “If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions.” 324

Socialism Left Unchecked Creates Tyranny

James Madison: “There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” 325

Socialism Traps People Into Welfare

Benjamin Franklin: “I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”326

Freedom ends with Socialism

Thomas Jefferson: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.“327

Only War Will Dislodge Socialism

John Adams: “A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”328

Centralization of Power Leads to Socialism

Thomas Jefferson: “Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and over-look all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens, and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder and waste. And I do verily believe, that if the principle were to prevail, of a common law being in force in the United States ..., it would become the most corrupt government on earth....

“What an augmentation of the field of jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the State powers into the hands of the General Government. The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the General Government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our General Government may be reduced to a very simple organization and a very unexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants.”329

Chapter 48: “Old Fashioned”?

Critics dismiss the Constitution as a creation ideal for a culture of farmers, but no longer applicable to today’s modern problems.

America has made unprecedented progress since the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Some people clamor for reform, claiming that America has outgrown her founding Declaration and Constitution. They suggest these antiquated ideas be abandoned for something more modern. But can anything more modern be offered?

EQUALITY: The Declaration of Independence declares “all men are created equal”—Is equality old fashioned?

RIGHTS: The Declaration of Independence declares we “are endowed with unalienable rights”—Are rights old fashioned?

LIBERTY: The Declaration of Independence defines those rights as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—Which of those three is old fashioned or can be improved or replaced?

The Constitution of the United States lays out the mechanisms and restraints for those absolute truths to abide.

There is no improvement of liberty possible—no new plan or new approach that can advance human beings forward as have the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. To refuse those truths is to turn back to Ruler’s Law.

On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Calvin Coolidge said this about those absolute truths,

“No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”330

Said another way, those clamoring for reform are really clamoring for control.

Chapter 49: Does It Work?

Did the U.S. Constitution work? Here is one of countless millions of ideas that proves the workings of the phenomenon of free choice.

In 1945, one of the hottest-selling gadgets at Gimbels in New York City was the first-ever ball-point pen. It was bragged about as a “fantastic … miraculous fountain pen guaranteed to write for two years without refilling.” More than 5,000 people jammed the store that day and snatched up the entire supply of 10,000 pens, paying $12.50 apiece—that’s $145 in today’s dollars.331

The ingenious invention of a loose ball set in a socket that smeared ink on paper was not new. The idea had been around since 1888, but it was Laszlo Jozsef Biro, a Hungarian refugee, who first brought it to market.

The Milton Reynolds Company grabbed Biro’s idea, developed it, and struck gold. For the first time in history there was a viable solution to the maddening frustration of charcoal pencils or quill pens with all their problems of spilled ink, blotting, and smearing that these ancient tools had brought to the art of written communications.

And everybody wanted one. That’s when America’s amazing free market took over.

Competing companies saw the popularity of the ball-point pen and started working on their own designs.

By the 1950s, inventors discovered a better ink so people could hold the pen at an angle, upside down, or even in water, and it still worked.

Another company made it retractable. With just a click, the ball point disappeared inside so ink wouldn’t leak all over someone’s shirt. Others invented clips to hold it fast in a pocket.

One company boasted that their ink would not stain clothing, and sent salesmen into offices to write all over the shirt of the boss. If the ink didn’t wash out, they would provide a more expensive shirt. But the ink did wash out—each and every time. The company made a fortune.

What did all these new features do to the price of pens? Instead of making them more expensive, the competition forced the prices down—and the quality up. Companies all over the world began manufacturing their brand of a better pen in hopes of cornering the lucrative market. By 1952, a ball-point pen could be purchased in almost any store in America for only 19 cents.

By 1964, annual sales topped $80 million with nearly a billion pens sold worldwide.

In 2005, the Bic pen company sold its one-hundred-billionth pen (that’s 100,000,000,000). That’s enough pens to draw a line from Earth to Pluto and back, 33 times.

The story of the ballpoint pen is a wonderful example of how freedom in America works. No one forced Mr. Biro to invent his pen, and no one forced Milton Reynolds to market it. Nobody forced anybody to make it better. Every individual involved did it for one reason: to make millions.

They tried different ideas, they lowered the price, they advertised, they tried virtually anything to lure dollars away from competitors and into their own pockets.

For the consumer, all of that competition and fighting was delightful. Pens were invented and re-invented, improved, and made cheaper, and as prices fell their availability went up.

Along the way many inventors and marketers succeeded, and others failed. But everyone benefitted. At first, only the well-to-do could afford the ball-point pen, but over time, everyone could get one—rich and poor alike. Predictably, the tide of freedom lifted all boats. That’s how the free market works. It makes life better for the greatest number of people at the lowest possible cost.

Are there still $12.50 ballpoint pens out there? Indeed there are. In fact, there are some designer pens that sell for thousands of dollars. Many of those are just flamboyant gimmicks flaunted for attention, but inside, the ink, the roller ball, and the technology are essentially the same ideas at work.

The final fruit of that remarkable combine of energy is this: If you happen to know a good insurance salesman you can get a pocket-clipping, ink-safe, button-clicking, non-leaking, long-lasting gravity-defying amazing ball-point pen for absolutely free.

And that’s how freedom to choose works in America.

Learning to Recognize Socialism

1. Was America a Christian nation in 1776? Were the Founding Fathers? Discuss what might have been the outcome if the Founders had officially declared America be a Christian nation.
2. What two devices did the Founders use to remove power from the ruler and abolish socialism’s Pillar #1?
3. According to Polybius, how should federal power be divided? When Montesquieu revived this idea, what did he call it? What three divisions in government resulted from their ideas?
4. What did Jefferson say has destroyed liberty and human rights “in every government which has ever existed under the sun”?
5. What are the six duties of the president? How many terms may the president serve? What prevents the president from making any law he wants, just like a king?
6. What did the Founders mean by “general welfare”? How did Congress twist its meaning? What did Madison say?
7. What are the 17 duties given to Congress? Is national health care on this list? A national freeway system? Social Security or Food Stamps? The regulation of education? What are 8 more restrictions placed on Congress to chain them down?
8. May the judiciary branch make laws? Can you think of examples where it has, under the guise of “applying the Constitution”?
9. How does a republican form of government destroy a caste system?
10. How do protected property rights prevent “all things in common”?
11. How does the Bill of Rights prevent the abuse of information control? List three current abuses of information control. How is the “power to regulate” abusing Americans today?
12. What is the key to controlling a central government and its use and abuse of political power and force?
13. What did Madison predict would be the silent killer of freedom if a certain “danger was not wisely guarded against”?
14. Does the Constitution create rights or protect existing rights? Did the Founders see rights as invented or established by God?

Part VIII--REVOLUTION OF THE SOCIALlSTS, Part: 1

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

Chapter 50: Conspiracy to Socialize America

While the United States pushed forward with a new standard in human freedom and potential, its powerful engine of productivity was looked upon with greed and envy.

The Founding Fathers did such a good job of protecting the nation from the spread of socialism that the socialists had to invest an enormously difficult and costly amount of time and infiltration to upend the Founders’ best efforts.

In 1895, the Fabian Socialists complained, “England’s [unwritten] Constitution readily admits of constant though gradual modification. Our American Constitution does not readily admit of such change. England can thus move into Socialism almost imperceptibly. Our Constitution being largely individualistic must be changed to admit of Socialism, and each change necessitates a political crisis. This means the raising of great new issues ...”332

Ramsay MacDonald, a British Fabian socialist greatly vexed by the Constitution’s “roadblock to reform,” complained that “The great bar to progress is the written constitutions, Federal and State, which give ultimate power to a law court.”333

U.S. Constitution Blocks Socialism

Because of a written Constitution, the shift toward top-down socialistic control of the American economy and culture was thwarted. But that didn’t ensure that the American way would remain impervious to collapse. The carefully prepared structure of the Constitution was built to work only if the people managing it (that would be us) kept all of its necessary protections in place.

Those protections relied upon a voluntary and freely embraced national virtue, morality, religion, education, participation, and knowledge. As those guardrails on the road to freedom were refused, ignored, and taken down, so was freedom, a little at a time. For many ill-informed and misguided people this drift toward Ruler’s Law was a good change—they called it progressive.

Chapter 51: There’s Nothing Progressive about Progressives

The so-called Progressive Movement in the U.S. did not begin around 1900—it can be traced to more than a century earlier, back when the ink on the Constitution had not even dried.

An otherwise unknown woman remembered only as “Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia,” caught Benjamin Franklin after the Constitutional Convention and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”334

Franklin’s answer was both prophetic and factual. “If you can keep it” was a piercing expression of both hope and doubt: the hope of unrealized capacity because of freedom—and some degree of doubt that weak and gullible humans could sustain it as long as might be hoped.

Already by 1787, the seeds of erosion were planted at the top levels of the new government, and Franklin probably knew of it as he stood in front of Independence Hall to briefly converse with Mrs. Powel. He was more than likely well aware that forces lay in wait to undo the hard work of birthing freedom that the Founders had so recently completed.

Seeds of Corruption

Since America’s break with England, various efforts to replace the republic and impose unrestrained top-down control had been urgently promoted by self-proclaimed reformers seeking an overthrow of nearly every aspect of American life.

For more than a century, historians have called that drift toward reforming the Constitution the Progressive Movement—a generalization of the plethora of efforts to socialize America.

Terms of Enslavement

A progressive is someone who seeks to cut the chains of the Constitution that hold back the consuming powers of the federal government. With such chains cut, there is only one way the federal government can grow: bigger, fatter, more meddlesome, and more expensive. Recent history demonstrates this in a trillion-dollar way.

A progressive seeks to install top-down government power to eliminate control from the bottom up. He does this in the name of fairness or equality or social justice or economic justice or civic responsibility or equal opportunity, or some other appeal to the free- lunch mentality. A progressive strives to take advantage of the ever-changing whims and frustrations wrought by the natural inclinations of human nature to trod the path of least resistance.

The very term “progressive movement” is an oxymoron. There is nothing progressive or positive or beneficial about the work to destroy freedom. Progressives would not see it that way, of course, but why call going backwards going forwards except to deceive and mask their true intentions? A more suitable name for progressivism is just what it is—socialism.

Each and every progressive effort, regulation, plan, law, court decision, and legislation has worked to remove freedom from individuals or the nation as a whole. Many of these changes came to America with a great amount of pomp and circumstance, of pontificating and proclamations promising some utopian dream.

The passage of time eventually wears away those empty promises and facades, and exposes progressivism for what it really is—the systematic and carefully crafted violations of true principles. There is nothing new here. Progressivism is simply another flavor, another version, another strategy, another deception to take a great forward-moving people backward—under control of a ruling body of the elitists.

Progressivism has unleashed multiple chain reactions that give us today’s national meltdown in which Americans are now trapped. When did it actually start?

Chapter 52: America’s First Progressive

America’s first big-league progressive was also a respected and brilliant Founding Father. What went wrong?

We pause in our world-wide view of socialism to focus on America for this important reason: the dominant power in the earth tends to draw all other nations to it through trade, alliances and example. With America standing as the sole practitioner of actual liberty, its resulting prosperity has blessed the entire world. All other peoples who have sought to emulate its patterns of success have also succeeded to varying degrees.

But then, as America’s integrity was weakened, so began the shrinking of freedoms everywhere. Liberty and prosperity in the Earth today do not rise any higher than the level established by the United States. It will remain that way unless America’s demise becomes so severe that it becomes unseated as the major influential power over all nations.

Discovering when and where that weakening actually began helps formulate a cure and a solution. As it turns out, surprisingly, that starting place was a dismal doubt in the heart of an original Founding Father.

Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)

For all of Alexander Hamilton’s brilliant and inspiring insights into principles of freedom, he had a dangerous blind side: he liked some aspects of Ruler’s Law, of the “British system.”

Hamilton was one of America’s Founding Fathers and the first Secretary of the Treasury. He was born and raised in the Caribbean and attended Columbia University in New York. He was elected to Congress from New York and later founded the Bank of New York. He represented New York at the Constitution Convention in 1787, and wrote 52 of the 87 essays in The Federalist Papers to explain and define the new Constitution, and get it ratified.

Hamilton’s admiration for the British system was his downfall. While his role in setting up the new government is highly admired, quoted, and celebrated, his corruption of its authorities in favor of a stronger central government spoiled an otherwise honored place among the defenders of freedom. His policies as Treasury Secretary reverberate to this day in the form of bottomless national debt and incurable federal intrusion.

Promoted British System

Hamilton wanted a strong ruler in the nation’s capital, an all-powerful leader similar to the monarchy of England. He wrote:

“I have no scruple in declaring ... that the British government is the best in the world; and that I doubt much whether anything short of it will do in America. ...It is the only government in the world which unites public strength with individual security.”335

Hamilton gave a 5-hour speech at the very beginning of the Constitutional Convention celebrating the British system as the model of government that America should follow. The speech didn’t sparkle with his usual flourish, but listeners knew he was trying to stir up the comforting memories of old loyalties to crown and country.

The speech probably wore everyone out. It received polite applause but that was about it. William Samuel Johnson from Connecticut panned it saying Hamilton was “praised by everybody” but “supported by none.”336

Hamilton was so disappointed in the lack of appreciation (no discussion or votes were called), that he left the convention discouraged and angry. Except for a few times when he dropped in to see what was happening, he didn’t return until it was about time to sign the finished document. As a result, Hamilton missed all the debates on the important issues.

The ideas that Hamilton proposed in his speech read like the “to-do list” of a modern-day progressive.

Hamilton’s Plan

Hamilton said it was too dangerous to tread the untried waters of a truly representative type of government. The British system, he said, was the best way to go.337 His plan called for:

• Lifetime Ruler: A single executive chosen for life by electors from the States. Hamilton wanted the President to have an absolute veto over any legislation, similar to the veto power of the king of England. In the notes for his speech, Hamilton referred to the executive as the “Monarch,” and said the office “ought to be hereditary.” 338

  That’s Bad Because—The people can’t easily get rid of a bad president who is appointed to office for life. He’ll give favors, bribes and freebies to keep himself in power. Bribes are corrupting and create a class of privilege and power. U.S. federal employees enjoy higher salaries (averaged $126,000 in 2010) and retirement packages 2.7 times more generous than large private sector companies. In 2011, Washington, D.C. became richer than Silicon Valley.339

• All-Powerful, Except ... Hamilton insisted the office of president have all power to do anything except what was forbidden by the Constitution. “The general doctrine of our Constitution, then, is that the executive power of the nation is vested in the President; subject only to the exceptions and qualifications which are expressed in the instrument.”340

  That’s Bad Because—A president with all-power, except for a few listed restrictions, is essentially a king. Jefferson and Madison were totally opposed to Hamilton’s theory because it removed the chains on the executive office that would keep it from growing beyond the people’s control, which today it has.

• Lifetime Senators: Senators were also to be appointed for life similar to the English House of Lords.341

  That’s Bad Because—Life-time senators will always vote to keep the president in power and his policies in force. They would tend to never bite the hand that feeds them for fear of falling out of favor.

• Three Years: The House of Representatives, like the British House of Commons, would be chosen for a limited term. Hamilton recommended three years.

  That’s Bad Because—Two years is more than enough time for those with control over the money to prove their worth of office. If they do poorly it shows quickly—they can be kicked out with the next election before too much damage can be done. Their incentive to keep their job, therefore, is to be wise.

• Federal Agents in States: Governors of the States would be appointed by the federal government, just as the king of England had appointed governors for each of the colonies before the War for Independence.342

  That’s Bad Because—Appointed executives instead of elected executives puts the States under the thumb of the federal government’s arbitrary control to pick and choose friends and supporters. It’s the model of the old USSR where a Communist Party member was required to be present at all local government events to ensure that Party policies were being obeyed.

• Total Veto Power: Hamilton proposed a president who could veto any and all laws passed by the States.

  That’s Bad Because—Consolidating all power in one leader who could tell States what they could or couldn’t do violates the separation of powers, destroys State sovereignty, and would be a return to government by monarchy, the very power and enslavement the colonists had rebelled against at the cost of so much American blood.

  Hamilton Tries to Install a King

  In 1786, Hamilton and some friends tried to convince 50-year-old Prince Henry of Prussia to be king of the new United States.343 The plot came dangerously close to success. Prince Henry hesitated just long enough to allow an investigation to expose him as one of Europe’s most debauched and notorious philanderers—with both sexes.344

  New Government Includes Hamilton

  On April 30, 1789, George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the new United States of America.

  On September 11, President Washington chose Alexander Hamilton as his Secretary of the Treasury. Two weeks later the federal court system was set up with a Supreme Court presiding over federal district courts in each State. John Jay was appointed the Chief Justice. A week later President Washington created the United States Army.

  Hamilton Wanted to Be Prime Minister

  Hamilton was a star-struck student of England’s history and was intrigued by the ruling power of its Prime Minister.

  In 1727, King George II inherited his father’s throne. He reigned for about 33 years, and was the last British monarch to be born outside of Great Britain. Like his father, he was a German elector and spent nearly all his time away in Germany with his mistress. For England’s Prime Minister, the king’s absence opened the door for him to keep things running practically any way he saw fit. That Prime Minister was named Sir Robert Walpole.

  Hamilton liked the way Walpole was able to run things as an almost all-powerful monarch.

  In addition, Walpole also served as the secretary of the treasury, or more formally, “chancellor of the exchequer.”

  As Hamilton began his new duties as the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, that chance to wear many hats was playing in his mind. As one biographer writes:

  “Hamilton contemplated an American adaptation of the British scheme of things—with Washington as George II and himself as Sir Robert Walpole.” It fit nicely his idea of a strong executive authority as practiced in Great Britain. Jefferson and Madison were disgusted by this attitude, as noted in their journals.345

  An Interesting Dialogue

  Hamilton took many opportunities to emphasize the superiority of the British political system over that of the Constitution.

  One day while John Adams was serving as Vice President under Washington, Adams apparently tried to humor Hamilton and poke fun at Hamilton’s pet project, the British system. Said Adams,

  “Purge that [British] constitution of its corruption, and give to its popular branch [House of Commons] equality of representation, and it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.”

  Hamilton shot right back:

  “Purge it of its corruption and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would become an impracticable government; as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed.” 346

  Thomas Jefferson, who recorded this conversation, wrote, “Hamilton . . . [was] so bewitched and perverted by the British example, as to be under thorough conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.”347

  What is “Corruption”?

  The “corruption” Jefferson loathed was Hamilton’s introduction of the same kinds of “buddy networking” that England’s King enjoyed: appointing all leaders of influence, rewarding loyalty, paying for obedience, ensuring perpetuity of private wealth and income, wrapping his arms around the aristocracy with money and privilege, viewing all the rest of society as peasant masses requiring the seasoned guidance of aristocratic leadership.

  Said Jefferson, “Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.”348

  Hamilton’s Ideas to Ignite the Economy

  As Secretary of Treasury, Hamilton wanted to fire up the economy of the new nation and attract leaders of industry, shipping, and commercial enterprises, He proposed doing this by using several techniques:

• Special Favors: Hamilton liked the king’s ability to grant generous favors to key people in Parliament, to the landed gentry, to certain investors, and others who held political power so the king could get things done.

  That’s Bad Because—Instead of outright bribes, these special royal favors usually came in another form—inside investment tips, lucrative contracts, prestigious appointments or nominations to high offices in the government. In other words, politics as usual, rewarding supporters with advantages the others don’t get—dishonesty that the other Founders thought they had outlawed in the Constitution.

• Tax Favoritism: Use tax revenue to subsidize risky investments by private people, or give them tax breaks or even cash bonuses for just trying. That was the kind of political corruption Hamilton believed was necessary to turn America into a great industrial nation “after the manner of England.”

  That’s Bad Because—In the Founders’ wisdom, the Constitution forbade the government from taking money from some and giving it to others, as either a handout or a tax break. It is wiser to let the free market dictate what works and what fails, and leave the people’s hard-earned taxes out of it.

• Sell the National Debt: Hamilton wanted to invite the affluent to pay off the country’s debts in exchange for repayment with interest. Hamilton knew this would entice investors into supporting his schemes for bigger taxes and bigger government, all in violation of the Constitution. Did it create bigger taxes and government? Yes.

  That’s Bad Because—Every working man or woman knows you’re never free to do what you please with your money until you are debt free. Jefferson argued to Washington that paying off the national debt is the responsible, smart, and morally mandated direction to take, but Hamilton’s position prevailed. As a result, the affluent were always first in line for bailouts and handouts—then and now.

• A Private Central Bank: Hamilton’s idea for a central bank was to have it handle all financial affairs of the government and the country, lend money, borrow, control the money supply, and tell other banks what they could and couldn’t do, similar to the Bank of England.

  That’s Bad Because—The Constitution gave those fiscal responsibilities to Congress where the people could keep an eye on how coins and the value thereof were managed.

  Hamilton won congressional support for a central bank by corrupting their personal principles—he offered Congressmen generous stock in the new private bank. Many of them happily accepted, hoping to secure a nice fat portfolio.

  The awful fallout from the bank’s attempt to regulate the money supply was a horrific 72 percent inflation in its first five years of operation.

  A central bank prevents private banks from flourishing—it sets all rules and forces compliance without any power by the people to manage the efficiency, elect new directors, etc.

  A central bank can inflate or devalue the currency to control the market. It has power to instantly reduce the buying power of the dollar. Such power created America’s first boom and bust cycle, and the banking panic of 1819.

  Today’s incarnation of Hamilton’s central bank is the Federal Reserve—to be discussed later.

• Continental Buyback: Washington was very concerned about the money owed after the war. Many people who financed the war were suffering financially for lack of payback. Hamilton proposed that the worthless Continental Dollars used in those days be exchanged for good currency at face value.

  That’s Bad Because—Hamilton’s suggestion was that Continentals be exchanged for their face value, not what they were actually worth. Hamilton bragged about the plan to a friend and when word got out, schemers scattered far and wide offering to buy up worthless Continentals for pennies on the dollar. This dishonest scheme was underway long before the holders of the old Continentals even knew they could get more. The crooks then presented the Continentals to Congress for full exchange value.349

  Jefferson never forgave Hamilton for his loose talk that resulted in the organized cheating and betrayal of the veterans, farmers, and business houses who had sacrificed so much to support the war effort.

• Buying Votes: Hamilton promised special favors to those politicians who voted for his programs.

  That’s Bad Because—This was the very corruption that Jefferson and the other Founders worried about, as Hamilton sought a more progressive way to run things.

  Hamilton told the States the federal government would assume all their war debts, even an estimate if they couldn’t provide documentation proving what debts they owed.

  Jefferson Tries to Convince Washington

  Jefferson hated Hamilton’s plans. At his first opportunity, Jefferson sat down with Washington and carefully explained what the monetizing of the debt meant to future generations. Instead of paying off this debt, Jefferson explained that Hamilton and his moneyed friends were buying the right to receive interest checks taken from the taxpayers for generations to come.

  Washington told Jefferson that high finance was something he didn’t entirely understand. He was impressed, however, that Hamilton’s plan had made the country’s credit first rate.

  Jefferson sadly returned to his journal and recorded:

  “Unversed in financial projects . . . his [Washington’s] approbation of them was bottomed in his confidence in the man [Alexander Hamilton].” 350

  How shocked Washington would have been if Jefferson could have shown him our own day—two hundred years after the fact—when the national debt Hamilton so gleefully promoted would exceed $17 trillion and the interest payments would amount to more than $400 billion per year, with many of those payments taken from working Americans in the form of taxes going to foreign investors.

  Hamilton Pays Bribes to Cover Adultery

  It was during the same period that Hamilton was extremely worried over threats of exposure by the husband of Maria Reynolds with whom he had established extra-marital relations. The liaisons began soon after the federal government moved from New York to Philadelphia in 1790.

  Mrs. Reynolds had gained Hamilton’s sympathies by claiming her husband had deserted her. However, after their affair had continued for some time, the husband suddenly returned and threatened Hamilton with exposure if he did not provide immediate satisfaction. At first Hamilton paid $600, then $400, and apparently other payments from time to time. By 1797 the scandal broke in the press and Hamilton eventually issued a public confession setting forth a complete recitation of the whole sordid affair.351

  By this time, however, Hamilton had long since resigned as Secretary of the Treasury and was practicing law. He had also gone through a bitter and long-standing dispute with Thomas Jefferson who considered Hamilton one of the foremost enemies of the Constitution as it was originally designed.

  Death and Legacy

  Hamilton’s death resulted from a pistol duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Hamilton was mortally wounded and died the next day, July 12, 1804.

  Many biographers attribute to Hamilton a keen insight into changes necessary to stabilize the early American economy. There is no doubt that he was a leading advocate for the principles of freedom, and that he did a great deal to help to get the Constitution ratified, and contributions in other areas. However, this brief review is meant to highlight Hamilton’s damaging socialistic policies, not present other achievements in his life which are well remembered and honored.

  Hamilton fell victim of the socialist lie—that the people cannot be trusted to govern themselves, that intellectual superiors should be put in charge. It was this attitude and his actions as Secretary of the Treasury to centralize control in the Executive that opened the doors to dismantling the chains and protections put forth in the Constitution. These were the early blows of progressivism that would evolve into stronger influences as the decades wore on.

Chapter 53: The Revolution of the Socialists

Industry wasn’t the only thing being revolutionized in the 1800s.

After America’s break from England, a spirit of individual freedom spread throughout Europe. People saw an opening to finally unshackle themselves from the lingering remains of the dying feudal system. They demanded a say in political affairs. They looked to throw off the tyranny of kings and lords. They sought ways to apply their own ideas to politics and economics, to create, invent, invest, and expand the freedom to exercise and protect their individual rights. It was a renaissance of liberty, of self-rule, of creativity, of inventiveness. It was the dawning of the Age of the Machine.

Industrial Revolution Changes the World

The so-called Industrial Revolution was really an industrial evolution that spanned more than 100 years. It was a time of opportunity, invention, investment and creativity.

This revolution had roots back to the age of the guilds when governments were sponsoring and protecting certain industries. By the 1700s, major advancements appeared in England, most of them in the textile industry. Assorted innovations in weaving and thread-making gave birth to new jobs, new machines and new industries.

Steam engines contributed to every aspect of society where traditional manufacturing processes suffered for want of some kind of power to run large machines.

New construction materials, iron and cement, were invented for better performance and cheaper production. This led to improvements in building construction, mining, machinery, mills, housing, and all of the related employment.

Like a giant vortex pulling in ideas from all directions and combining them into things never before thought of, this new creativity began churning and splitting and fusing and overlapping to advance engineering, metallurgy, chemistry, and medicine, to build inventions, discoveries and ideas, one atop another, until the tide toward a whole new age had swelled beyond imagination: automated looms, spinning wheels, flyer-and-bobbins, steam engines, steam power, spinning mills, rotary machinery, power tools, glass making, paper manufacturing, food productions, pharmaceuticals, ploughs, harvesting equipment, steamboats, steam locomotives, steel manufacturing, weaponry, and so much more.

Genius on Parade: As these discoveries, inventions and breakthroughs were put to market, many of them were proudly shared with the world, and sent on tour to be displayed and paraded around at symposiums and fairs and international expositions. Details and descriptions of the achievements were printed in books, encyclopedias, and periodicals. The means to spread this amazing knowledge was improved by the very act of spreading such knowledge.

It was a wonderful time of enlightenment and progress for the world, and Europe in particular.

Making Do on the Continent: For the European nations, the joys of actual freedom remained largely just headlines boasting the fantastic prosperity taking off in America. Could Europe follow suit, or would socialism get in the way?

Unfortunately for Europe, the march toward liberty became side-tracked by individuals and ideas that fell short of the necessary principles of freedom. It was an unsettled time, a vulnerable time, it was the rise of the revolutionaries.

Chapter 54: Revolutionary: Ned Ludd

He attacked a machine with a hammer and became a legend.

Not a lot is known about Ned Ludd but his legacy lives on as the lad who fought the machine and launched a revolution.

The Industrial Revolution had a worrisome impact on craftsmen who believed their handmade skills were put to flight by the machines. It was a love-hate relationship. Craftsmen boasted of their high quality handmade goods and their ability to manufacture products with careful attention to detail and patient processes. But the machines! They magnified everything. Those amazing technologies could do it faster and better than humans, thus increasing profits for manufacturers, and putting the craftsmen out of work.

Ned Ludd was born in England, and hailed from the little village of Anstey on the outskirts of Leicester. He was a weaver who, in 1799, exploded “in a fit of insane rage,” and took a hammer and broke two stocking frames (knitting machines). Such machines had been putting knitters out of work for 200 years before the Industrial Revolution, so Ned’s outburst doesn’t seem motivated by resentment of the newness of the machines per se’. He remains a puzzle. Some records called him a half-wit, dull, etc.

Nevertheless, Ned’s vigorous and single-handed attack on the machine was admired by others of similar concern, and gave birth to the 1812 movement of machine busters in England called the Luddites.

The Luddites were anonymous, masked, and well organized men. They went about destroying machinery, mostly in the textile industry, to keep the demand for handmade goods high. The conspirators’ loyalty was to no one but the now mythical “King Ludd,” and the preservation of jobs. As with the guildsmen of old, and the trade unions of the future, the Luddites learned that they could destroy the property of other people as a means of propping up their own sources of income. It was by force that they prevented the competition from getting a leg up on them in the hosiery business.352

Chapter 55: Revolutionary: Unions and the King

Circa 1795-1825

The king giveth and the king taketh away—anything more or less than that meant death.

The problem of the Luddites was not new. Other groups were forming, in particular the trade unions that were striking for more pay, fewer hours, and other demands.

As a step to stop this breakout of free assembly and action, England’s king declared in 1795 that 50 was the maximum number of people allowed to gather for any purpose outside of his official decrees—especially if they met for political reform. If the number exceeded 50, the local sheriff could force the crowd to disburse. After an hour, if 12 or more remained, they could be arrested. If any were found guilty of seditious talk, they could be hanged.

These draconian measures against the freedom to associate were lumped together in the Seditious Assembling Act of 1795.

By 1799, a similar proclamation against seditious assembling, the Combination Act of 1799 and 1800, prevented workers from forming trade unions and collective bargaining. They were not allowed to strike “for obtaining an advance on wages ... or altering their usual hours of working ... or decreasing the quantity of work.”353

The anti-union laws remained in force until 1824. Sympathy for the problems that workers faced, and the necessity of resolving them outside the view of the king’s guards, brought about a repeal in 1824 of the Combination Act. Almost immediately a series of strikes broke out by workers wanting to settle old and festering grievances. A short time later, the Combination Act of 1825 was passed, making labor unions legal.354

And so began the complex era of unions that would slowly erode the property rights of business owners. It was a power given teeth by the iron fist of law and government. This brand of socialism had already spread to America by the early 1800s.

Chapter 56: Revolutionary: Napoleon Bonaparte

Circa 1799-1815

In a strange contradiction of goals, Napoleon used force and Ruler’s Law to impose onto his conquered European subordinates many of the freedoms gained from the French Revolution.

The failure of France to figure out permanent freedom with its first revolution in 1789 continued to haunt the country for sixty more years. The first decade was a topsy-turvy confusion of competing forces that sought to de-throne the king, or at least sharply curtail his powers. Several versions of constitutions and declarations rose and fell until France found herself embroiled in despotism, war, runaway inflation, tyranny, and confusion.

By 1799 the country was tired of the revolutions and turmoil, and submitted almost with relief to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. The brilliant strategist, who already had led France’s armed forces through several decisive victories, participated in a coup d’Etat on November 9-10, 1799 and overthrew the government.

For 15 Years, Napoleon expanded French dominion into Italy and most of Europe. He created a vast empire of states, threatening to dominate them militarily if they refused to accept the monarchs he gave them.

Most of Europe was already under the rule of kings with their confusing patchwork of feudal laws. As Napoleon’s troops swept across the landscape, he gave the sitting monarchs the option to capitulate or die. Many stepped down, others fled. In this way, Napoleon was able to put loyal friends on the various thrones and extend France’s new-found freedoms across the continent—these new-found freedoms became known as the Napoleonic Code.

Napoleon’s Code abolished the old feudal ways of ancient monarchs, serfs, and lords, and replaced them with a code of relatively broad-based freedoms such as—

• No special privileges based on birth.
• Freedom of religion but not of the press. Emperor Napoleon insisted he be spoken of in kindly and positive terms.
• Freedom to vote and run for office.
• Freedom to own and control private property, and unrestricted access to the marketplace.
• No more secret laws—all laws had to be properly examined, well defined, clearly described, and published for the public to review before they could be put in force. No ex post facto laws (laws created after a crime was committed just so a court could convict a person).
• Judges could not be activists and make up laws to suit their own personal desires or pursuits for power.
• The criminally accused were innocent until proven guilty, and were promised a defense attorney.
• Trial by jury.
• Husbands were made legal heads of family, although divorce was allowed.
• In Spain, Napoleon abolished the Inquisition, feudal dues, internal customs fees, and closed 2/3rds of the Catholic cloisters. The cloisters were walled-off living places that separated monks from serfs and workmen who performed their labors outside the high walls. These church-owned compounds encompassed thousands of acres throughout Europe.
• Freedoms to try, buy, sell, and fail were guaranteed.
• Peasants who were once locked to the land as serfs were freed to buy those lands, or to work or sell them—even move away if they pleased.

  Other Nations Copy Napoleon

  As that spirit of newly-found freedom spread, the Napoleonic Code was adopted by many other European countries including Poland, Holland, Portugal, Spain, England, Russia, Prussia, the lands of Germany, and Italy. Leaders saw how well such freedoms were working and decided that the best way to retain strength and national harmony was to adopt those same principles. Even to this day the Napoleonic Code remains the foundation for many European nations’ jurisprudence.

  As resistance to Napoleon’s march through Europe grew, his power began to fade. He was finally deposed in 1814. He managed to escape his prison island and rebuild an army, but he was re-conquered in 1815—this time permanently.

  Cleaning up the Mess

  Napoleon’s demise left Europe in a mess. It took the Congress of Vienna, with delegates from the largest countries, to sort things out. They labored for more than a year (1814-15) to carefully re-draw European borders so that no single nation could grow strong enough to rise up and dominate the others, as had Napoleon’s France.

  Backward is Their Idea of Going Forward

  When the dust settled, many of European borders were returned to their pre-Napoleon boundaries and rulers.

  France returned to its 1789 borders, and its old line of Bourbon kings was put back in power. Most nations took back their own kings and re-instituted the old ways, dissolving natural rights as if they were some form of contagious plague. And, in just a matter of a few years, Europe was back in the grip of the seven pillars of socialism.

  The taste of freedom, however, was hard to erase—it lingered in the memories of millions for a long time afterward.

Chapter 57: Revolutionary: Robert Owen

They call him the father of modern socialism. His capitalistic experiments helped him build a fortune, and then his socialistic experiments took it all away in just a few years.

SOCIALIST: Robert Owen (1771-1858

STORY: Born in Wales, sixth of seven children, became famous for buying textile mills in Scotland and giving his paid workers and their families good educational and living opportunities. He encouraged self sufficiency within the whole.

When Owen tried his utopian schemes in New Harmony, Indiana in 1824, he abandoned what he called “private property, irrational religion, and marriage” for the hollow ideals of socialism. His experiment was an expensive failure, costing him 4/5ths of the fortune he had built with capitalism back in Scotland.

Impact: Considered the “father” of modern-day socialism, Owen pioneered the “cooperative movement” in Great Britain where villagers jointly owned and operated the town’s businesses.

Famous Words: “Man is the creature of circumstances.”355

It’s the old nature vs. nurture argument. Owen taught that no one was “responsible for his will and his own actions” because “his whole character is formed independently of himself” by his nurturing.356 The better the environment, the better the person becomes in all aspects. Owen said no one was “responsible for his will and his own actions” because “his whole character—physical, mental and moral—is formed independently of himself.”357

History teaches otherwise. Throughout all ages in all places, men and women resist slavery and stagnation. They bristle against tyranny. Whether they ultimately escape or not, nurture can only go so far. Built-in human nature always demands the freedom to choose.

Famous Words: “[Religions] have made man the most inconsistent, and the most miserable being in existence. By the errors of these systems he has been made a weak, imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic or a miserable hypocrite...”358

Believing that to be true, Owen tried to make the ideal workplace at his textile mills. He invested heavily to provide nice homes for workers and a school for the children. He insisted there be no child labor, created shorter work days, and, instead of punishing poor performers, he rewarded excellence. Like all good capitalists, Owen believed proper incentive would encourage better performance. He was right, of course, and he made millions.

Inspired Marx and Engels: Owen’s ideas helped lay the philosophical groundwork for Marx and Engels that human nature has no pre-disposed or built-in tendencies. He believed that human nature was the product of interaction with others, and that such nature is under constant revision and change.

Owen was convinced that people are not born with certain attributes and proclivities, but they develop these according to the world in which they are born. And that’s just what Marx and Engels concluded just a few decades later.359

Changing Into a Socialist: Then a strange thing happened. Owen turned from a capitalist into a socialist. He believed that planning and regulation could create the same prosperity without the capitalistic principles of incentive and ownership that had worked so well for him before. Owen thought the incentive of working together for the common good would be sufficient motivation for people to work hard.

Infecting America: In 1824, Owen sailed to America to launch his idea. He was welcomed everywhere as a great reforming hero—he spoke to Congress, the president, and justices of the Supreme Court. His socialist ideas spread about into many rural areas where people seeking a better way in “the land of the free” decided to give it a try.

Seeking Harmony in Indiana: Owen’s own choice for his blissful experiment in socialism was New Harmony, Indiana in 1825. Here he invested his treasure to create the perfect utopian society with everyone happily working for the benefit of everyone else. All things were tightly regulated and there was no private ownership—all was in common.

About 900 families joined Owen in his enterprise. They sold their properties, invested with the commune, and took their place in Owen’s new socialist village. It took only two years for the commune to fall apart.

According to Josiah Warren, an original participant at New Harmony, Owen lured them all with the same old false promises:

“[Owen] showed us that in Communism, instead of working against each other as in competition, we should all work for each other while working for ourselves.360 ...It appeared that it was nature’s own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us ...our ‘united interests’ were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation...”361

Warren elegantly summarized the failure of socialism everywhere and anywhere, from New Harmony to Jamestown, Plymouth, Sumer, China, Greece, Sparta, the USSR, today’s European Union and the United States, when he said, simply, “Nature’s law conquered us.”362

Learning to Recognize Socialism

1. According the Fabian Socialists in 1895, what monumental obstacle stood between freedom and socialism in the United States? What did they say had to be done with “our Constitution”?
2. What do you think the Fabians meant when they said they would change the Constitution by “the raising of great new issues”? Can you name a few “new issues” that have threatened or abolished a few freedoms and liberties in recent decades?
3. What did Franklin tell Mrs. Powel about the new government? Did he express some concern or doubt? Explain.
4. What is a “progressive”?
5. Who was the first progressive in the U.S.? Name three changes he called for in the new Constitution. Why were these bad ideas?
6. Whom did Alexander Hamilton want as king of the U.S.? What office did Hamilton want under that king?
7. What was the “corruption” that Jefferson loathed?
8. Name three projects Hamilton started as Secretary of the Treasury that backfired. Why did these ideas fail? Explain.
9. Who is Ned Ludd and why is he remembered?
10. What did England’s Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 achieve? What changed in 1825?
11. What is the Napoleonic Code? Name five freedoms that the Code protected that also align with freedoms enjoyed in America today. Did the Napoleonic Code make a lasting change in Europe? What aspects of the Code are still present in Europe today?
12. Who is Robert Owen and why is he remembered? How did he make his first fortune?
13. According to Owen, what is responsible for how a man or woman develops and takes on traits, virtues and work ethics? What did Owen think about the influence of religion on people?
14. What village did Owen set up in 1825? Where? How many families joined?
15. Which of the seven pillars of socialism did Owen set up to run the village? What three things did he specifically abandon to establish his utopian society?
16. What did Josiah Warren, a member of Owen’s utopian village, say that Owen taught them about Communism? How long did the experiment last? According to Warren, what eventually conquered the village?

Part IX--REVOLUTION OF THE SOCIALISTS, Part: 2

“When virtue suffers neglect and death, the historian knows an end to the whole is not far behind.”

Chapter 58: Revolutionary: Union Organizers

Circa 1740-2010

After a thousand years of looking for an easier way to make a buck, the guilds finally found traction in the form of trade unions in the 1800s.

One of the intriguing legacies left by the guilds (Chapter 28) is their ingenious strategy of organizing themselves with government control in such a way that other people were not given the fair opportunity to participate or compete. In the free market, competition pushes prices lower and ignites the creation of better quality or new inventions—that’s how a civilization grows. But the guilds had complete control over pricing, availability, value, and quality. They held a firm grip on the market of try, buy, sell, and fail.

The guild system seemed to work pretty well for a while. They became powerful small-business associations, or cartels. Small towns benefitted enormously from their local guilds and zealously protected all the sources of revenue the guilds helped generate. Town leaders passed laws favoring the guilds, and helped them preserve the secrets of their trade—an early form of patent and copyright protection.

Decline of the Guilds

With the passage of time and the growth of populations, the tables turned against the guilds. People started blaming guilds for having too much control, for stifling innovation and business development, for preventing technology from advancing, and practicing a form of nepotism by benefitting only their friends and relatives in other communities. The guilds also ignited fights over sales territory. The fighting and control turned towns against villages and cousins against relatives. It was bad public relations for the guilds, and helped lead to the guild system’s eventual collapse.

Were Guilds Forerunners of the Labor Unions?

Modern scholars debate whether or not there exists a direct connection between guilds and modern trade unions. Whatever the technical definitions are that create such debates, to an outsider it seems fairly clear that guilds led to unions.

Like unions of today, the guilds united craftsmen into what amounted to an exclusive members-only club. For example, with all the skilled shoemakers in a particular region strongly united to create only so many shoes in a week, and demanding a sales price of so much money per shoe, and setting standards of skill so that only so many shoemakers were servicing a population, they could control the shoe market and get rich.

Pro-labor Politicians Not New

That exclusive control across hundreds of crafts and services was further entrenched when pro-guild candidates ran for election. Those who won office carried forward the guilds’ agenda into town hall to pass pro-guild laws: lace sold in this town must be made with locally produced thread; shoes sold in this town must be made of local leather; candles sold in this town must be made with locally produced wax and wicks, etc.

To the guild members this was fantastic progress. To everyone else, it made life more restricted. And to competitors, it was the loss of the liberty to compete.

Minority Becomes the Ruler

The labor movement in the 1800-1900s had similar goals and tactics as did the ancient guilds. Most histories of trade unions list a time-line of strikes and violence, and show how the courts and society gradually accepted the unions as if they were necessary components of progress.

In the beginning, only a minority typically joined a union. The unions were led by a small group of leaders. The select groups, with the strong backing of the government, demanded that the rest of the industry, the country, and the world obey their commands.

Unions are ‘Socialism in the Workplace’

From the perspective of the spread of socialism, union “milestones” in history do not represent progress—they represent battles won in the war to take away property rights of business owners. As unions gained more power, so did the laws that protected their actions on all fronts. Unions constituted the socialization of a nation—as unions grew, so did socialism.

Like the Guilds: Trade unions organized themselves to restrict or prevent competition. They gained the legal power of the strike or the walk-out to force their demands. They created exclusive markets and centers of production. They illegally confiscated advantages with the backing of legal entities. It was, in short, the imposition of Ruler’s Law in the marketplace.

Colonial Unions

By the mid-1700s, there was already a good working relationship among employers and employees throughout the colonies. Walk-outs and strikes in this early setting were viewed more as greedy conspiracies that fostered antagonisms than as the means to bargain over wages or working hours.

• In 1740, bakers in New York City went on strike. They refused to bake until they received a pay raise. The constables arrested the strikers and charged them with conspiracy to ruin the otherwise honestly-run bakeries.
• In 1776, New York City was occupied by British troops and the young country was in the very throes of declaring independence. With newspapers owning the Goliath portion of communications in those days, printers had a lot of clout and influence in all the major cities. The New York printers decided they deserved a wage increase, and demanded it. The employers refused, so the printers went on strike to get their raise.
• In 1794, an association of printers in New York went on strike for shorter work hours and higher pay. The same demands were made by cabinet makers in 1796, carpenters in 1797, and cordwainers (shoemakers specializing in soft leather) in 1799.
• By the 1800s, the idea that workers could gang up on their employers was widespread and popular. It became the most effective means whereby workers could garner some degree of leverage against employers whom they believed were abusive, or to otherwise extract treatment they considered more fair or more safe.
• In 1803, the Sailors’ Strike enticed sailors from all over New York to march through the city to encourage sailors from other ships to join them as they demanded higher wages. Although the crowds swelled, the leader was arrested and the strike failed.
• In 1805, the Shoemakers’ Strike in New York and Philadelphia was the first time the factory owners turned to the courts for relief. The Journeyman Shoemakers’ Association launched a strike to raise prices from 25 cents to 75 cents per shoe. The strike dragged on for six weeks. The leaders were finally arrested and prosecuted for criminal conspiracy. The jury declared the union members to be guilty of “a combination to raise their wages.”363
• In 1809, New York cordwainers went on strike for better pay. During the strike, the bosses slipped away with the shoe-making materials to other shops where non-strikers would finish the work, thereby defeating the strikers’ strategy. When the strikers discovered what the bosses had done, almost 200 men joined in a new strike in an attempt to shut down all the shoe-making shops.
• In 1827, workers in several diverse occupations were invited to join together in the Mechanic’s Union Trade Association. The goal was to give a unified setting and airing of all mutual concerns, regardless of trade or specialty. Supporting and backing strikes together carried more support and additional pressure tactics. Other associations and unions were encouraged by the unified effort.

  Strikes Increase: The number of strikes in the first 35 years of the 19th century grew so rampant and widespread in America, the strikers starting behaving as if this was standard procedure to get pay raises. Union leaders advertised their newly-found ‘easy pickings’ by advertising the possibilities in the newspapers. In 1835, The New York Daily Advertiser boasted that strikes “are all the fashion,” and encouraged others to get in on the action, saying it was “an excellent time for the journeymen to come from the country to the city.”364

  Crossing the Line and Changing the World

  In 1842, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court broke the last chain preventing socialism from entering American labor when it declared that labor unions were not criminal conspiracies.

  At issue was the Boston Journeymen Bootmakers’ Society that tried to force boot factories to hire union members only. In modern terms, they tried to create a closed shop.

  In 1839 the bootmakers went on strike for a closed shop, and the strike leaders were arrested on charges of conspiracy to restrain trade. The lower court found them guilty, but the union appealed to the State supreme court. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw identified their constitutional right to assemble, but only if they never used force to get their way.365

  The shaky ground on which Shaw made his ruling was this: unions have but one purpose—to use the force of the strike to get their way. Shaw’s ruling was contradictory. Can an institution founded on the use of force and created to violate the rights of owners be made legal so long as it doesn’t use force, or violate the rights of others?

  Shaw declared that the union could exist regardless of its purpose (seeking a closed shop) or the means whereby it would seek those ends (the power to strike).

  The ruling gave unions a legal foundation to exist. That’s all they needed to launch strikes and make other demands for control across multiple issues and multiple decades.

  Unions More Important Than Property Owners

  Since the 1842 Bootmakers case, the courts have given legal teeth to widespread union organizing, even when business owners don’t want that on their property.

• Strikes Made Legal: In 1914, the Clayton Antitrust Act366 gave unions the legal permission to conduct peaceful strikes, to picket, and to boycott.
• Can’t Prevent Unions: In 1932, the Norris-La Guardia Act prevented business owners from going to the courts to stop union organizing in their companies. If workers wanted to join a union, owners could do nothing to stop it. Union organizers were given legal permission to trespass on private property, and to peacefully pass out pro-union literature.367
• Loss of Freedom to Negotiate: In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act forced workers to let unions set their wages and benefits. Workers and employers could not make their own contracts at union-controlled businesses without the blessing of the union.368
• Interstate Commerce Clause Violated: In 1937, the Supreme Court broke a major chain binding down Congress. There was a steel plant that manufactured goods in Pennsylvania. When the unions tried to organize its workers, the company fired them. The workers sued, saying the National Labor Relations Board had jurisdiction, but they lost in the lower courts. When the case reached the Supreme Court, that’s when the damage was done.

  The problem was that Congress and its NLRB only had constitutional authority over trade between the States. The steel plant issue was inside Pennsylvania, and it did not extend to other States.

  Justice Hughes said even though the company didn’t engage in trade outside the State, its close relationship to those that did meant Congress and the NLRB could indeed control them. The court ordered the company to rehire the ten employees and give back their lost wages.

  The justices who disagreed said Congress shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with a company that was just in-state.369 The dissenters were outvoted 5-4.

  This decision warped the restrictions in Article 1.8, the so-called Commerce Clause that restricted congressional powers. Without amending the Constitution, the Court gave Congress the power to control intrastate businesses if unions wanted to organize there.

• Violence and Damage is Legal: In 1972, power company union workers who were striking for higher pay shot bullets into three electric transformers, drained the oil out of another, and dynamited an electric company substation.

  The Supreme Court said this was okay because the union had a legitimate claim to higher wages, and destroying property was acceptable in pursuit of that claim.370 Violent acts against a business, including assaults, destruction of property, and even murder, are not punishable under federal law, but they can be punishable under State law. In the 25 years after that 1973 ruling, there were 8,799 incidents of violence recorded, but there were only 258 convictions.371

• Union Force Ruins Prosperity: In 2007, just as another U.S. recession was beginning, the American auto industry was screaming for help. Instead of cutting back and going through a self-imposed austerity program, the unions held firm, threatening to bankrupt the major U.S. auto makers if they didn’t comply with union demands. And that’s just what happened.
• Unions Bankrupt Their Hosts: As unions use the strike to compel wages and benefits to go up, a company or city’s surpluses that might otherwise be used to invest, modernize, and expand are instead diminished. This makes them less competitive. Businesses saddled with aggressive unions often respond to union victories by reducing the work force, outsourcing, or closing plants for good. This is not a beneficial deal for workers who otherwise might work for less. Given enough time and power, unions, like socialists, will destroy their hosts.

  Hostess (Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, etc.): About 80 percent of its 19,000 workers belonged to a dozen different unions. When Hostess fell on hard times, it tried to amend its contracts with the unions to reduce pensions, medical benefits and restrictive work rules that cut into profits. Some unions wanted to help, but others did not, and the company had to close its doors in 2012.

  “Big 3” Automakers: When Detroit’s automakers controlled a monopoly over car production, they could afford to acquiesce to costly union demands. And then came foreign competition—better cars at lower prices. This required change. However, the tight marriage between unions and the Democrats in government prevented the automakers from trimming back union demands. Cost per car stayed high. The companies responded by dropping quality to keep prices low. People stopped buying those unreliable products. Foreign car makers took bigger chunks of the market, and today, the once vibrant motor city in Michigan sits rusting with its hood up and the engine gone.

  American Airlines was losing almost a billion dollars a year for the decade of 2001-2011. During this period labor unions were pulling out $800 million a year more than other airlines’ unions. They had demanded better pay, work rules, pensions and benefits. Strikes loomed everywhere each time the company tried to trim costs—flight attendants, check-in clerks, baggage handlers, cabin crews, pilots, mechanics, and suppliers said ‘don’t touch our contracts.’ The result? The company filed for bankruptcy in 2011. And what about the unions? They sued.

  Detroit: This city is a wreck. For decades, union demands chipped away at Detroit’s prosperity. With wages and benefits higher than market levels, thanks to the prosperity of the auto industry, the unions drove up costs on just about everything. City services were unionized, and taxes had to rise to meet those costs. It was unsustainable and discouraging. People started moving out, reducing Detroit’s population from 1.8 million in 1950 to about 700,000 in 2013. By then, total unemployment was over 50 percent. Detroit’s bloated and inefficient government stood blamed for shattered morale, 47 percent of the population being illiterate, 40 percent of the street lights not working, police taking an average of 58 minutes to respond, only 1/3 of the ambulances running, and 2/3rds of the parks closed since 2008. In all of this, the unions insisted that a city horseshoer making $56,000 was critical to the city, even though there were no horses in Detroit.372 That’s socialism at work.

  Unions successfully advance their socialist causes until they run out of other people’s money, and then they loudly complain.

• Unions May Misuse Funds: In 2010, the Supreme Court decided that unions, among others, may spend unlimited amounts of union dues to dispense information supporting or opposing federal candidates of the unions’ choosing. They said such action was a First Amendment right. There are stipulations, but the fact remains, union bosses can inundate union members with literature supporting their favorite candidates, and any minority of dues-paying members have no say in it.373

  Union members pay into pension plans so they have money to retire. The pension funds have been in trouble for years. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a U.S. government agency, is always seeking billions in tax dollars to fill pension fund vaults because those funds are being drained for other purposes. This ongoing pursuit will not let up until the socialism train wreck either explodes in bankruptcy, or a firm resolve is made to return to the principles of freedom.374

  Decline of the Unions?

  With the passage of time and the growth of populations, the tables are turning against the unions. People have been blaming unions for having too much control, for stifling innovation and business development, for preventing technology from advancing or benefitting other industries and workers as did the old guilds.

  Unions have a history of igniting fights over sales territory. The fighting and control has turned cities against towns, and friends against competitors. There is a lot of bad PR for the unions, and the right-to-work States are prospering from an influx of businesses fleeing the union-heavy States. This shift away from unions is nearly identical with the shift away from the guild system centuries earlier.

  In 1944, union membership accounted for almost 36 percent of the U.S. work force. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics375 reported that in 1983, union membership stood at 20.1 percent of the labor force, or about 17.7 million union workers. By 2011, membership had dropped to 11.9 percent, or 14.7 million of the current number of employed Americans. That decline was spread across 33 States where union membership has been dropping since 2010.

  About half of the American workers in unions live in only six States: California (2.4 million), New York (2 million), Illinois (800,000), Pennsylvania (800,000), Ohio (700,000), and New Jersey (600,000).

  As government grew, so did the benefits extracted from taxpayers to support government employee unions. In 2010, union membership for people working for the government stood at 36.2 percent, while the rate for private-sector union membership dropped to 6.9 percent. The pay difference? Average pay per week for union members in 2010 was $917, and for non-union members, $717.

  Slow Erosion of Liberty

  The golden era of unions rose and fell at the expense of human rights. The right to compete on a fair playing ground, and to exercise unalienable rights, had fallen prey to the ever-increasing bully tactics of unions.

  There is no question that labor disputes are a complex issue. On the one hand there are the needs of the desperately unemployed, those who are willing to do anything for a paycheck. On the other hand are those employers needing workers, and who take unfair advantages such as hiring illegal immigrants to work at below-market wages.

  The strike, with all its connected coercion, intimidation, and violence, was the lever to steal from a property owner his right to develop his idea in the fashion that freedom allows.

  To their credit, the unions did launch strikes to correct lapses in the workplace. They correctly identified abuses, safety issues, and other risks.

  But such discovery didn’t require a union. Men and women are capable of noticing, all by themselves, that rats in the kitchen, lopped-off fingers in the ground beef, and more pay for men than women doing the same work, are all bad. Was union-instigated force the only alternative to correcting such problems?

  Was Union Force the Only Answer?

  Pro-union people stand aghast with shocked annoyance that anyone would dare question the contributions of unions to change the working environment.

  What they ignore, squash, squander, and kick under the rug are all of the positives that the free market might have brought.

  The free market has a way of improving everything it touches with a unique durability that expands into other corners of civilization. The question of how life might be different were unions not the driving force for such corrections in the workplace must remain unanswered for the 1700-1800s.

  However, letting freedom back into the workplace portends a more satisfying solution to employment issues in the future. A 2011 study376 showed that during the period 1977 to 2008,

• The unemployment rate in right-to-work States was 7.9 percent while the national average was 9.1 percent;
• Right-to-work States enjoyed a 100 percent growth in employment while union-friendly States grew only 56.5 percent. The national average was 71 percent;
• Real per capita income grew 62.3 percent in right-to-work States, while union-friendly States averaged 52.8 percent. The national average was 54.7 percent.
• The top 14 States with the slowest income growth from 1999 to 2009 were all union-friendly States.
• In 2011, a survey by CNBC found that measuring for quality of work force, 22 of America’s right-to-work States ranked in the top 25.377 A 2013 survey by CNBC showed 18 of the top 25 best States for business were right-to-work States.378

  Freedom in the Workplace

  How different might today’s world be if companies had to actually compete for good employees. Come work here, we don’t have rats. Come work here, our machines are finger safe. Come work here, we offer a shorter work week, fewer hours, better pay, equal pay, and fantastic benefits such as insurance.

  Obviously, everyone would rush to the employment office of companies offering so many positives, and ignore those that didn’t. Competing to compete is a novel idea that freedom allows.

  Unions hijack that market-driven process by forcing business owners to acquiesce to their union demands. There is a lot of discussion on this subject, but our purpose here is not to resolve all of it, but simply show that unionization is what Karl Marx called for, a means to violate the rights of business owners, property owners, and tax payers. It is not the free market at work when coercion is supported by government force to violate other people’s unalienable rights to make contracts, to control property, and to exercise free choice.