The View From 1776

A Wall Street Journal editorial describes a Mafia-style “protection” racket being implemented by those icons of liberal-progressive-socialism, the labor unions.  If there is much difference between Hitler’s Gestapo and labor unions, it’s hard to see.

Wisconsin Unions Get Ugly
Now they’re threatening businesses that stay neutral in the state’s budget battle.

Having lost their fight in the legislature, Wisconsin unions are now getting out the steel pipes for those who don’t step lively to their cause. A letter we’ve seen that was sent to businesses in southeastern Wisconsin shows that Big Labor’s latest strategy is to threaten small businesses with boycotts if they don’t publicly declare their support for government union monopoly power.

Dated March 28, 2011, the letter is addressed to “DEAR UNION GROVE AREA BUSINESS OWNER/MANAGER,” in Racine County. And it begins with this warm greeting: “It is unfortunate that you have chosen ‘not’ to support public workers rights in Wisconsin. In recent past weeks you have been offered a sign(s) by a public employee(s) who works in one of the state facilities in the Union Grove area. These signs simply said ‘This Business Supports Workers Rights,’ a simple, subtle and we feel non-controversial statement given the facts at this time.”

We doubt “subtle” is the word a business owner would use to describe this offer he is being told he can’t refuse.

The letter is signed by Jim Parrett, the “Field Rep.” for Council 24 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which is the most powerful union in the AFL-CIO. The letter presents a litany of objections to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s changes to benefits and public union collective bargaining power, describing them as “things that make life working in a 24-7 facility tolerable.”

The missive concludes by noting that, “With that we’d ask that you reconsider taking a sign and stance to support public employees in this community. Failure to do so will leave us no choice but do [sic] a public boycott of your business. And sorry, neutral means ‘no’ to those who work for the largest employer in the area and are union members.”

So even businesses that stay neutral in the political battle are considered the enemy and will be punished. Charming stuff, and especially coming from a union that claims (wrongly) to be losing its constitutional rights. Free speech for others apparently isn’t all that important.

On Wednesday we called the telephone number listed under Mr. Parrett’s name but his voicemail was full. We then spoke with union officials who said they’d ask Mr. Parrett to call us back, but he never called. He has since confirmed the accuracy of the letter to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which reports that the threat is an outgrowth of a boycott campaign by other unions that has targeted M&I Bank and Kwik Trip because those companies or their executives supported Mr. Walker’s budget proposals.

This kind of union thuggery is all too common and is in keeping with the larger political goal of preventing union members from exercising their own rights of free association. The Walker reform that union leaders hate the most would require unions to be recertified annually by a majority of their members and let those members opt out of paying union dues.

Union chiefs like Mr. Parrett know what that means for their political clout. After taking office in 2005, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels used an executive order to end collective bargaining for public workers—a power granted by former Governor Evan Bayh.

The number of state public employees has since fallen to 28,700 from 35,000. But more important, the vast majority of those employees stopped paying union dues. Today, 1,490 state employees pay union dues in Indiana, down from 16,408 in 2005. Similar declines have played out in Washington State and Utah, when those states gave members the freedom to choose.

This is the prospect that has Wisconsin labor leaders so furious these days—furious enough that they’ll even threaten the livelihoods of local business owners who won’t join them at the barricades. This is the nasty modern reality of government union power.

Monetary inflation’s effects under QE2 are becoming more evident; interest rates are up, not down; and bank lending continues to decline.

QE2’s principal effect has been a booming stock market that again fabulously enriches Wall Street traders and brokers.  As I wrote last November:

Note that it’s the securities brokerage community who now applaud the Fed’s QE2 program to raise the rate of inflation (i.e., devalue the dollar).  Corporations are reporting higher earnings, compared to last year’s depressed levels.  At the same time, they are cautioning that sales growth is anemic and cost-cutting opportunities have been exhausted, which means that the outlook for continued higher earnings is unclear.  The stock market rise is essentially floating on a rising tide of the Fed’s fiat money.

After the dust settles, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the Fed is more concerned about bolstering the stock market than helping the larger economy.  After stock market crashes in 1987 and the 1990s (the dot.com bubble), Alan Greenspan, then the Fed chairman, flooded the market with fiat money, just as Mr. Bernanke is continuing to do in response to the 2007-08 housing and financial market meltdown.

In today’s sermon at the Cohocton (NY) Assembly of God church, Pastor Dan Gardner’s text was Roman 13:8-10:

8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.  9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

This, as expressed by the Apostle Paul, is central to Jesus’s message, but it’s also a much older fundamental tenet of Judaism:

4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.  5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  Deuteronomy 6:4

18 “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.  Leviticus 19:18

28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:28-31

Pastor Gardner contrasted this love with the pure sentiment that predominates in today’s cultural milieu.  Loving one’s neighbor requires many things, notably moving from preoccupation with one’s self and moving beyond personality and opinion differences.  Love in this Biblical sense is a matter of willed action.

Whatever our feelings at the moment about the misfortunes of others, we are to will ourselves to empathize with them in their times of need and to do the right thing to help them.  Sometimes this requires true forgiveness for wrongs done to us, leaving vengeance if any to the Lord.

Pastor Gardner did not extend his message into political matters.  The following observations are my own.

First, one has to look with astonishment and abhorrence at a religion like Islam, which instructs its followers to pretend friendship to non-Muslims, to lie in wait to assault them, and to kill or enslave those who fail to submit to Islam.  If there is in the Koran any parallel to the Bible’s admonition to love one’s neighbor, it is cancelled by Muslims’ devotion to death in conquest.

Second, the commandment to love one’s neighbor, as well as to have no god other than the Lord God, is incompatible with the tenets of the secular religion of liberal-progressive-socialism.  Liberal-progressive-socialists are instructed to look to the political state for their salvation and for the satisfaction of all their material desires.  Spirituality is expressly dismissed as superstitious ignorance.

Imposing one-size-fits-all socialistic programs like Obamacare over strong objections of the majority is far removed from individuals doing the right thing to love and help their neighbors.  Liberal-progressive-socialist antipathy toward individualism and “caring” for the abstract masses was captured by anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who, opposing Marxian collectivism in 1872, described what life was to be under socialism:

The government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today.  It will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land…All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes.  There will be a new class, a new hierarchy…the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority.  And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!

The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding

Locke and the Declaration of Independence
By Robert Curry

• “… self-evident.”

“[T]he very first sentence of the actual Declaration roundly states that certain truths are—crucial words—self-evident.  This style—terse and pungent, yet fringed with elegance—allied the plain language of Thomas Paine to the loftier expositions of John Locke…”
Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson

Hitchens here observes the venerable tradition of finding Locke in the Declaration.  Although Hitchens is often cheerfully iconoclastic, in this instance he is very much in the mainstream of scholarly and popular comment.  It is after all the conventional wisdom that Jefferson applied the ideas of John Locke in writing the Declaration.

But did he?  If we question this assumption, we encounter big problems right away. 

First, there is Locke’s definition of “self-evident.” Locke’s definition would actually disallow Jefferson’s use of those “crucial words” in the Declaration.  For Locke, a self-evident truth is a proposition whose subject and predicate are identical, a proposition having the form “A is A.” Such propositions express a concrete identity.  Jefferson’s self-evident truths clearly do not conform to Locke’s very restricted definition:

“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…”

Jefferson simply cannot be using “self-evident” in the Lockean sense.  But if not in Locke’s sense, then in what sense?  Hitchens does not address this difficulty.  By moving directly to “style” and invoking an alliance with the language of Thomas Paine, he sweeps past the problem and moves on.

Moving on, Hitchens again finds Locke in his discussion of natural rights in the Declaration, although Hitchens does note that Jefferson deviated from the Lockean triad of “life, liberty, and property” by substituting “the pursuit of happiness.” Yet this is not simply a change of one term out of three.  It is a fundamental deviation by Jefferson from Locke’s thinking.  For Locke property is the foundation of all our natural rights.  By taking property out of the triad of natural rights, Jefferson removed the very foundation of natural rights according to Locke. 

Even this brief examination makes it clear that the conflict between Locke’s thinking and Jefferson’s thinking is actually profound.  How, then, can the traditional view that Jefferson relies on Locke in the Declaration endure?  It endures, I suggest, because the same mainstream of thought that finds Locke in the Declaration has lost sight of the role of the Scottish Enlightenment in America’s Founding.  Consequently, that mainstream account also leaves out an important part of Jefferson’s story. 

Jefferson in the Declaration and throughout his life is a kind of anti-Lockean, an anti-Lockean of a very specific sort.  Jefferson was schooled in the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Gertrude Himmelfarb has even pointed out that Jefferson wrote like a professor of philosophy at a Scottish university of his day.  Although Jefferson famously honored Locke as one of the Enlightenment trinity of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, to understand Jefferson’s use of “self-evident” we need to turn to the thought of a philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment—Thomas Reid. 

Reid made self-evident truths the foundation of his philosophy, the philosophy of common sense.  For Reid, self-evident truths are principles that are implicit in our conduct and imposed upon us by “the constitution of our nature”: 

“The same degree of understanding which makes a man capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life makes him capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident…”

Reid took self-evident truths far beyond the mere perception of a concrete identity, broadening their reach by rooting them in language and our communal experience. 

Hitchens’s rhetorical linking of Locke and Paine will not stand much scrutiny--Locke and Paine are just too dissimilar--but it is an inspired suggestion all the same.  If we simply substitute Reid for Locke, Hitchens’ formulation works wonders.  Paine, the author of Common Sense, and Reid, the philosopher of common sense, are natural allies.  Hitchhiking on Hitchens’ brilliant insight, we are positioned to notice that Jefferson allied the plain language of Thomas Paine with the loftier expositions of Thomas Reid—and we are well on our way to a better understanding of the Declaration.

• “…the pursuit of happiness.”

“[The Scots] had been pushed aside from the European mainstream yet not thrown free of it: permitted, rather, to witness closely its ruthless forward roar and to harbor… a criticism that became…America.”
                                                                                           John Updike, Macbech

Updike says that something happened in Scotland—a criticism—that made America.

What happened in Scotland was the Scottish Enlightenment. It flourished from around 1730 until about 1790.  Carried to America by a wave of enthusiastic Scots who came to teach, and brought back from Scotland by Americans who traveled to Scotland to study, the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment arrived just in time to have a decisive influence on the Founders, and to remain, in the words of Jeffry Morrison, “the dominant philosophical school in America for nearly a century and a half.”

Just as Updike suggests, there is, at the heart of Scottish Enlightenment philosophical and political thought, a brilliant and sustained criticism.  That criticism was aimed at the philosophy of John Locke.  Locke’s thinking provided the impetus for the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment.  In the words of Garry Wills:

“Man was seen, after Locke, as determined by the impact of pleasure and pain upon his senses.  [Thomas] Reid saw this as a challenge to the certainty of knowledge.  [Francis] Hutcheson saw it as a threat to the very possibility of virtue.”

Hutcheson founded the Scottish Enlightenment, and his thinking quickly came to play a dominant role in Scotland and in America. 

There are for our purposes here two essential points.  First, the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers defined themselves in opposition to Locke, and, second, these were the ideas and arguments that undergirded the American Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the American experiment.

It is a commonplace to observe that Jefferson followed Locke in the famous formulation “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Yet we have seen that he conspicuously did not.  The Lockean triad was “Life, Liberty and Property,” and for Locke property was the basis for all other rights.

In deviating in precisely this way from Locke, Jefferson was following Hutcheson.  Hutcheson did not agree with Locke that property was the basis for all other rights.  For Hutcheson, our rights to life and liberty are our principal rights.  They are natural and unalienable, but our right to our goods and labors arises out of the division of labor which depends on the right to exchange (alienate) them.  Hutcheson’s brilliant argument convinced Jefferson and also cleared the way for the enormous contributions of Adam Smith.

Hutcheson’s central concern was to make the case for the moral sense, and it is widely recognized that Jefferson held to moral-sense doctrine.

The consequences of that fact are far-reaching, though not often confronted; it means that Jefferson was not a Lockean. To hold to moral-sense doctrine was not to follow Locke.  Jefferson famously honored Locke as one of Enlightenment trinity of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, but early and late in his life Jefferson’s thinking was always closest to that of Francis Hutcheson.  In choosing “pursuit of happiness” Jefferson was making an informed choice to side with Hutcheson contra Locke. 

Why “happiness?” Again, Jefferson follows Hutcheson. Hutcheson puts happiness at the center of his system of moral philosophy.  According to Hutcheson, for the state, “the general happiness is the supreme end of all political union.” For the individual, “the surest way to promote his private happiness [is] to do publicly useful actions.”

What then of Locke and the Declaration?  No doubt Locke is the thinker who set in motion the thinking that is in the Declaration.  However, Hutcheson and Reid and the other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment believed that they had refuted Locke—and they, not Locke, were the thinkers Jefferson relied upon in writing the Declaration.

In Human Motivation I argued that Keynesian macroeconomics fails to attain its objectives, because people are not the automatons implicitly assumed by macroeconomists and other varieties of social-engineering state planners.  In the short run of an economic recession - say two to four years - people remain individualistic to the extent that they respond or fail to respond to government stimulus programs, based on their widely disparate aims and fears at that time.

It is true, however, that inculcating society over a couple of generations with liberal-progressive-socialist ideology alters average expectations and behavior, and not for the better.  See How the Welfare State Corrupted Sweden, by Per Bylund.

Franklin Roosevelt’s New-Deal welfare state damaged social mores in the United States.  Fortunately the necessity to fight against Japanese and German aggression in World War II kept enough spine in the average citizen to preserve the self-reliant individualism that had built the nation.

The 1960s’ Vietnam War, because it did not require the total mobilization of World War II, was a different matter.  Many self-centered, self-indulgent Baby Boomers, who never had experienced their parents’ hardships, became anarchic activists, determined to destroy the societal values of their parents.  The creed of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) under Tom Hayden and the Weather Underground under Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn was, “Hell no; we won’t go [to fight in Vietnam]” and “Bring the war home; kill your parents; ice the pigs [police].” Every effort was made to stigmatize individualism and to stress communalism.  As had been true of socialism and anarchism since the 19th century, “free love,” i.e., sexual promiscuity, became the norm; monogamous marriage and marital fidelity were denigrated as anti-social selfishness.

Over the ensuing fifty years those student activists and their progeny have come to dominate education, the judiciary, and governmental bureaucracy, as well as state and Federal legislative bodies.  Young people today have been warped by activist ideology, having been instructed that free education, free housing, readily available jobs, and free medical care are their constitutionally guaranteed “rights.”

Immediate gratification of sexual, social, and economic desires has been the general expectation since the 1960s.  Hence the almost non-existent personal savings level and massive accumulation of credit card and mortgage debt that presaged the 2007-08 housing and banking meltdown. 

This website in its statement of purpose stands in opposition to such degradation:

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

Keynesian macroeconomics reintroduced and popularized in the 1930s the presumption of the 19th century’s socialist philosophers who had expected to emulate in the social sciences the methodology of Newton’s physics and mathematics. 

In their ideological vision, intellectuals were to derive laws of social action analogous to Newton’s laws of motion.  Those sociological laws would then be applied by social engineers and economic planners to implement an entirely new social and economic structure that was to resurrect the primordial Garden of Eden, a society of socialized equality, with an abundance of goods and services equally available to all citizens.

Today’s liberal-progressivism is the heir to that egalitarian, socialistic ideology.

Implicit in it is the belief that human individuals and humans in the mass react to external stimulae, and that their reactions can be conditioned and manipulated by state planners. 

That, of course, was the significance of Russian scientist Pavlov’s 1890s experiment with conditioned response in dogs.  By training dogs to expect to receive a meal shortly after hearing a bell ring, Pavlov was able to induce salivation in the dogs whenever the bell rang.  His later work involved human responses and initiated the field of behavioral psychology.

Today’s propagandists like Paul Krugman are blindly confident that humans, like Pavlov’s dogs, can be channeled by government regulation and deficit spending into the egalitarian socialism championed by Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.  If the Federal Reserve System creates enough fiat money and the Federal government engages in enough deficit spending, according to Keynesian macroeconomic theory, the economic boom of the housing bubble will automatically resume and be made perpetual.  If wealth is transferred by punitive taxation from “the rich” to everybody else, unemployment will disappear and social harmony will reign.

In contradistinction, today’s school of Austrian economics, along with earlier economic studies by Classical economists such as J. B. Say and Nassau W. Senior, assert the opposite: human behavior is characterized by purposeful action.  Judging from the abject failure of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and Obamanomics today, most people are fearful of a future clouded by the Democrat/Socialist Party’s continual threats to their way of life.  People obviously don’t rush out the door and immediately recommence spending and piling on credit card debt in automatic response to a melange of government stimulus programs.

Individuals have private desires and aims, which they endeavor to attain through their actions.  Those actions often may involve temporary inaction, deferring immediate gratification to achieve greater future benefit. And those aims and actions focused by them are massively varied, lying to a considerable extent outside the parameters prescribed by Democrat/Socialist Party economic planners.

Thus, a fundamental reason for repeated, and inevitable, failures of Keynesian macroeconomics is simply that individuals and humans in the mass do not uniformly, or even generally, react like automatons to the regulations and monetary inflation prescribed by Keynesian state planners.