A period of governmental corruption, monetary instability, gross expansion of political power, the solidification of public schooling, Anglo-Saxon racialist beliefs, manifest destiny, Indian Wars, and extreme violence, Reconstruction witnessed a giant leap toward a cohesive nation-state–far from the founding vision of a decentralized federal republic.

A mere two months before John Wilkes Booth assassinated him in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln met with his two top generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, on the steamship The River Queen, just outside of Hampton Roads, Virginia. Though Lincoln would call for “malice toward none” and “charity for all” in his second inaugural, delivered in early March of the same year, he offered his fullest plan and desires for what a reconstructed union might look like in a private conversation with Grant and Sherman. Lincoln assured them he wanted nothing more than

to get the deluded men of the rebel armies disarmed and back to their homes. . . . Let them once surrender and reach their homes, [and] they won’t take up arms again. . . . Let them all go, officers and all, I want submission and no more bloodshed. . . . I want no one punished; treat them liberally all around. We want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the laws.

While Lincoln had waged a terribly hard and total war, he also desired the softest peace possible. Indeed, if one takes Lincoln’s words on The River Queen at face value, the United States of 1865 would look very much like the United States of 1860, with one exception: Returning states would need to accept the emancipation of all slaves through the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. His architects of total war, Grant and Sherman, agreed completely with the President. Neither of Lincoln’s generals knew how much longer the war would last, they explained to him, but they believed the war was rapidly approaching an end with possibly only one or two major battles left. They had reached the endgame.

When Booth cut down Lincoln at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, two months later, he changed the entire course of American history. Had Lincoln presided over the peace, one has no reason to doubt, he would have reconciled constitutional relations with, among, and between the former Confederate states, officers, and citizens as quickly as politically possible. The war, after all, had been viewed by almost all sides as a noble tragedy for the common good of the republic and for the vision (no matter how varied) of the American founding fathers. Men, for the most part, had chosen to fight, and they had chosen to fight again and again. Though a draft existed in the North, for example, after the summer of 1863, 94 percent of all Union soldiers had volunteered. As General Joshua Chamberlain, the classicist from Maine’s Bowdoin College, had astutely observed of the surrender ceremonies in April 1865: “Honor answering honor. . . [as men] of near blood born, made nearer by blood shed. . . . On our part not a sound or a trumpet more, nor roll of drum; nor a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glory, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breathholding.”

Just outside of Appomattox Court House, Robert E. Lee’s former Confederate forces, what remained of the Army of Northern Virginia, walked through two lines of Union soldiers. The Union soldiers saluted the defeated for hours on end that day. “Reluctantly, with agony of expression,” Chamberlain recorded, the Confederate soldiers “tenderly fold their flags, battle-worn and torn, blood-stained, heart holding colors, and lay them down; some frenziedly rushing from the ranks, kneeling over them, clinging to them, pressing them to their lips with burning tears.”

Such a scene, of course, is a far cry from the militarization and politicization, the martial law and the intrusion of Leviathan that one normally associates with Reconstruction as it actually happened. Though President Jefferson Davis’s final executive order called for all Confederate States of America troops to divide into terrorist cells and launch attacks against civilians and urban areas, Lee countermanded the order through deed and word, telling the men to “be good citizens as they had been soldiers.”

With Lincoln’s death, though, the war became personal in a way that it had not been during the mass bloodshed of the previous four years. To many in the country, especially in the North, Lincoln’s death transformed him into a full-fledged American martyr, and his reputation exploded. The Radicals within the Republican party—Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, and Representative George Julian of Indiana, to name a few—manipulated this loss to their advantage more than any other group. These men  had despised and resented Lincoln as a spineless moderate, lacking a proper nationalist and vindictive streak.

The Radicals had attempted nothing less than a congressional coup against Lincoln in December 1862, openly desired a military dictatorship throughout much of the war, and proposed their own version of Reconstruction as early as 1863. Their vision of postwar America involved remaking the entirety of the South in their own image, with extensive punishment for all involved. Just as they had wanted Lincoln to wage an ever-increasingly hard war, they wanted a peace imposed by the sword. Lincoln’s death provided them with a symbol around which to rally northerners against their southern brethren. “Within eight hours of his murder Republican Congressmen in secret caucus agreed,” Lincoln biographer David Donald explained, “that ‘his death is a godsend to our cause.’” As the leader of the Radicals, Wade, stated, “[T]here will be no more trouble running the government.”

Wade and his fellow Radicals would have no small part in nationalizing the United States over the next dozen years. “The New England reformers thought they had struck down evil incarnate when they crushed the Sable Genius of the South; and their horror at the corruption and chaos of the Gilded Age was intensified proportionately as they discovered the extent of their own previous naiveté,” the cultural critic and historian Russell Kirk wrote in The Conservative Mind. “They had dreaded an era of Jefferson Davis; but now they were in an era” of the radicals and “of worse.” The true reformers “awoke to find their fellow-Republicans, the oligarchs of their party, intent upon concrete plunder.”

Not surprisingly, government grew dramatically during the four years of the Civil War. The Union printed greenbacks, founded the U.S. Secret Service to protect the fiat money (the second federal police force, the first having been set up after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850), taxed incomes, promoted university education, built war factories and railroads, raised tariffs, declared—in some places—martial law and suspended freedoms of speech and habeas corpus, used troops to break labor strikes, and encouraged mobs to do what it believed it could not do openly.

In the South, President Jefferson Davis nullified the Confederate constitution almost from day one. Davis often ignored Congress and his own vice president, and he used the full power of his office to harass any political opposition. Most notably, through fraud Davis shut down the one opposition to develop, the classical-liberal Conservative Party of North Carolina. The Confederate States of America (CSA) taxed incomes, excess profits, and licenses, and raised tariffs on imports as well as exports. Because currency flowed only intermittently throughout the South, the CSA printed an outrageous amount of paper currency and established—to the horror of average southerners—the Tax-In-Kind men, empowered by the government to take whatever livestock, produce, and materiel they deemed necessary for the war effort. Unlike the North, the South conscripted throughout much of the war, set prices, and enforced loyalty oaths. The CSA, contrary to popular memory, also rigorously enforced its own laws against the several states making up the Confederacy.

With the collapse of the Confederate government, no confederate laws continued, of course. With the end of the war the Union repealed many, if not most, of its war measures. The legacy and symbolism of such martial laws, however, remained into the Progressive period and beyond: If Lincoln could centralize the Union and defeat the Confederacy and slavery, could we not also use the federal government to wage war against poor standards, poverty, immigrants, or whatever any Progressive might resent? Perhaps no figure better represents this than John Wesley Powell, a Union officer who lost his arm in the 1862 Battle of Shiloh and is often regarded as the father of American Progressives. Tellingly, through the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Bureau of Ethnography, Powell crafted and promoted plans to remake the West (sometimes physically) through the powers of the federal government.

Believing the federal government under Lincoln had never gone far enough, the Radicals of Reconstruction expanded the scope and reach of the federal government as quickly as possible. Not only did the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution apply the Bill of Rights to the states, but it also repositioned virtually all federal law as superior to all state and local laws, thus attenuating even further the already difficult balance of federalism. Most Reconstruction laws began in the Radical-controlled congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction, dominated by Wade. Most important, through the impetus of the Joint Committee, Congress passed a series of haphazard laws establishing martial law over various districts of the South. The rule of law, such as it was, was enforced through military rather than civilian courts. Through a series of laws Congress provided extensive funding for public schooling and welfare (direct aid) for freed slaves, and it sometimes enforced the property rights of blacks.

None of this should suggest that somehow the Radicals were, as a whole, pro-black. As the Pulitzer prize-winning historian T. H. Williams once noted, the Radicals “loved the Negro less for himself than as an instrument with which they might fasten Republican political and economic control upon the South.” In reality the Radicals were little better in their promotion of rights, dignity, and liberties of blacks than had been the plantation owners of the previous generations.

Each group—white men of the North and South—desired to manipulate the black population for its own aggrandizement and profit.

As Robert Higgs has definitively shown in his path-breaking work, Competition and Coercion, American freedmen did exceedingly well in terms of culture, economics, and literacy in the 50 years after emancipation, but did so through their own efforts and despite significant government and societal obstacles: “Free from competitive counterpressures and strongly equipped to enforce compliance, public officials could discriminate pretty much as their pleasure or caprice might dictate. Under these circumstances it was a definite blessing for the blacks that the governments of the post-bellum South were still quite limited in the range of functions to which they attended. Such salvation as the black man found, he found in the private sector.”

Not surprisingly, given the abusive attitudes white Radicals held toward American blacks, corruption proved endemic to the entire Reconstruction effort. So much money flowed from Congress into the reconstructed South that manipulators and opportunists profited wherever and whenever possible, which was more often than not. The Reconstruction governments simply had no manpower or will to prevent the corruption. They often participated directly in the corruption, using it for political gain. The famous nineteenth-century Scottish observer of America, James Bryce, recorded his own thoughts on the period in The American Commonwealth: “Such a Saturnalia of robbery and jobbery has seldom been seen in any civilized country, and certainly never before under the forms of a free self-government.” He compared the American officials of Reconstruction to Roman provincial governors in the last days of the Republic:

Greed was unchecked and roguery unabashed. The methods of plunder were numerous. Every branch of administration became wasteful. Public contracts were jobbed, and the profits shared. Extravagant salaries were paid to legislators; extravagant charges allowed for all sorts of work done at the public cost. But perhaps the commonest form of robbery, and that conducted on the largest scale, was for the legislature to direct the issue of bonds in aid of a railroad or other public work, these bonds being then delivered to contractors who sold them, shared the proceeds with the governing ring, and omitted to execute the work. Much money was however taken in an even more direct fashion from the state treasury or from that of the local authority; and as not only the guardians of the public funds, but even, in many cases, the courts of law, were under the control of the thieves, discovery was difficult and redress unattainable. In this way the industrious and property-holding classes saw the burdens of the state increase, with no power of arresting the process.

While almost all white leftist historians have downplayed or ignored this corruption since the 1960s, they have done so at great peril to the dictates of honesty and truth.

As they had failed to do with Lincoln in the attempted congressional coup of December 1862, the Radicals tried to gain control of President Andrew Johnson’s cabinet with the Tenure of Office Act. When Johnson violated this law in February 1868, the House of Representatives impeached him on a strict party-line vote, 126-47. The failure of the Senate to support the House’s impeachment undercut the strength and confidence of the Radicals. Indeed, though Radical regimes remained in power until 1876, the Radicals never again wielded the same kind of power as they had in the second half of the 1860s.

In part the Radicals also failed because Ulysses S. Grant never accepted the fanatical premises on which Radicalism had developed. A moderate Republican at best, Grant resented the postwar bloodthirstiness of the Radicals, few of whom had ever seen battle. Despite this, Grant was a determined nationalist and, when he was not dealing with the corruption in his own administration, he was promoting “Americanness” wherever possible. This became most clear in his policy toward the American Indians.

U.S. government relations with the Indians had never been consistent. They had gravitated between vicious brutality (as had been the case under Andrew Jackson) and respect and protection of Indian property (such as under Franklin Pierce). After the Civil War, under the Johnson and Grant administrations, the U.S. government waged a fierce war against the Indians, confiscating their best property, relegating what remained of the tribes to the worst land. The greatest atrocity committed by the federal government against the Indians came just at the very end of Reconstruction. After a tragic misunderstanding, the military decided to round up, forcibly remove, and detain a sizable minority of the Nez Perce Indians, a tribe faithfully allied to America since 1805. When the Nez Perce understandably resisted, the government spared neither time nor expense to defeat them. As The Nation reported in 1877:

How far the Indian insurrection on the Pacific Slope is for the present suppressed is not decided, but it were well, while its lesson is fresh, to realize that the Nez-Perces are not to blame for the expensive and sanguinary campaign, unless being goaded into a brief madness by the direct and endless oppression of our Federal authorities be blameworthy. . . . [T]he neglect and bad faith of the general Government, continued for a quarter of a century, are apparent in the records of Congress. There was swindling, not in petty matters and by individuals, requiring detection and proof, but on a grand scale by the United States itself.

It would be difficult to find a more telling example of government corruption and abuse of power during this period than the directing of the military against a peaceful, allied people, farmers and ranchers who had been occupying the same land—the Palouse and Camas Prairies of the Pacific Northwest—for nearly 500 years.

Nation-building always and everywhere demands conformity and destruction of local and individual differences. To overcome such divisions, the builders must create a religious type of myth and fundamental symbols to rally the population and with which to defend the new nation with unrelenting force. The Reconstruction government did all of this without apology, and immigrants (especially Roman Catholics), blacks, and Indians suffered intensely. “Nationalism in the sense of national greed has supplanted Liberalism,” E. L. Godkin, one of the great classical liberals of the day and the founder of The Nation, noted in hindsight in 1900. “We hear no more of natural rights, but of inferior races, whose part it is to submit to the government of those whom God has made their superiors.” Americans, Godkin argued, had forsaken the Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitution. Further, he wrote, “The great party which boasted that it had secured for the negro the rights of humanity and of citizenship now listens in silence to proclamations of White Supremacy.”

Men who had fought valiantly on the battlefields of the Civil War must have asked themselves what, if anything, it had all meant.

Europe had not experienced a prolonged and massively destructive war since the defeat of Napoleon one hundred years earlier. To be sure, there had been some wars and civil wars, especially in central and eastern Europe during the nineteenth century. But they were relatively short and, compared to what were experienced in the twentieth century, rather limited in their destruction of life and property. “Rules of warfare” recognized the rights of neutrals and noncombatants in Europe, though not in the colonial areas of Asia and Africa.

But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, beneath the appearance of a classical-liberal utopia of freedom, peace, and prosperity, new ideological forces had been winning the hearts and minds of a growing number of people. These forces were socialism, nationalism, and imperialism—in a word, philosophical, political, and economic collectivism.

The air was filled with calls to arms in the name of national greatness and glory, talk of a higher social good more important than the “mere” interests of individuals, and the notion that peoples discovered their “destinies” not in peaceful industry, but on battlefields amid the thrust of bayonets.

Four years after the war began, by the autumn of 1918, more than 20 million Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians Italians, Russians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Serbs, Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, and many others were dead. European industry and agriculture were ruined, and a good part of the accumulated wealth of a century had been consumed.

Jim Powell, in his book Wilson’s War, tells the story of how this came about, what the consequences were, and the role Woodrow Wilson played in making this entire catastrophe worse than it might have been.

While not ignoring Imperial German militarism, aggressiveness, and bellicosity in the decades before World War I, Powell emphasizes the various nationalist ambitions and secret alliances among all the major belligerents that kept the war from being simply “Germany’s fault.” Battlefield incompetence by generals and political arrogance and stubbornness by national leaders on both sides dragged the war on and on in the face of mounting casualties and growing economic hardship unknown in living memory.

At first, Powell explains, Wilson—a vain and often vengeful man—claimed the role of impartial arbiter to bring the war to a negotiated conclusion. But soon both he and his circle of cabinet members and advisers decided that victory should belong to Great Britain and France. Finally, after winning reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson had Congress declare war on Germany in April 1917, although neither Germany nor any of its allies had attacked or threatened the United States. At the peace conference that followed the November 1918 armistice, Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric was drowned out by the imperial and territorial ambitions of the British and French that left Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires in a shambles.

Powell persuasively suggests that if America had stayed out of the war the belligerents, exhausted and with no hope of a clear battlefield victory, might have accepted the need to end the conflict without any winner. Had that happened, there might well have been no Bolshevik revolution in Russia and therefore no deadly 75-year “experiment” in Soviet communism under Lenin, Stalin, and those who followed them. If Germany had not been humiliated, stripped of 13 percent of its territory, burdened with “war guilt” and heavy reparations, and left in political and economic chaos, a demagogue like Hitler, with his Nazi ideology of racism and blood lust for revenge and conquest through a new war, might not have come to power.

Had America not taken the path of foreign intervention in 1917, it might not have set the precedent of assuming the mantle of global policeman throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and now into the 21st century. In the world Woodrow Wilson did so much to create, the United States suffered not only hundreds of thousands of casualties in two global wars, but also over a hundred thousand additional deaths in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Nor should it be forgotten that this U.S. role has cost Americans dearly in other ways: hundreds of billions of dollars in tax money; the growth and increased intrusiveness of the federal government; and their placement in harm’s way throughout the world. This has been a heavy price to pay for Woodrow Wilson’s war ambitions.

Introduced in 2005 to combat the waves of terrorists thronging our shores, REAL ID was supposed to thwart the bad guys by transforming our drivers’ licenses into a national ID card. We’d have submitted this card on demand to government’s agents—as do the victims in totalitarian regimes. Never mind that “almost no empirical research has been undertaken to clearly establish how identity tokens can be used as a means of preventing terrorism,” according to Privacy International, or that “terrorists have traditionally moved across borders using tourist visas,” unless they “are equipped with legitimate identification cards.” The 9/11 hijackers and the Madrid bombers, respectively, provide two recent examples.

Any Pretext Whatsoever

Governments itch to tag their subjects like so many cattle, on any pretext whatsoever. Ours thought it had a dandy excuse in the attacks of 9/11, and who can blame it? Many Americans would eagerly sell their few remaining liberties so long as a politician assured them that said sale secured the homeland. Ergo, the feds invented a bogus link between terrorism and America’s freedom from a national ID. They swore they’d prevent another 9/11 so long as we followed orders to carry “enhanced” drivers’ licenses.

Surprisingly, rebellion bloomed—and this among states that have supinely obeyed any number of anti-constitutional decrees since 1865. Fifteen passed legislation prohibiting their DMVs from turning licenses into a de facto national ID; another ten officially denounced REAL ID.

No matter: The feds slapped an alias on their failed legislation—PASS ID—and reintroduced it. But in case such cosmetics can’t con us, a couple of senators are aiming at the same goal via another American bugaboo: immigration.

Increased Workplace Patrols

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) propose to “reform” yet again the feds’ cruel and unconstitutional policies on immigration. Their national ID card piggybacks on Social Security cards rather than drivers’ licenses.

“The plan calls for a big increase in immigration agents patrolling workplaces,” the New York Times reported. The Bush administration already tried such raids; their inhumanity devastated whole towns, not just immigrants, and Obama’s government supposedly discontinued them. But senators seldom boast an enviable learning curve. Graham and Schumer would also “require all workers, including legal immigrants and American citizens, to present a tamper-proof”—that is, biometric—“Social Security card when they apply for jobs.”

In propaganda the Washington Post obligingly published, the senators wrote, “A tamper-proof ID system would dramatically decrease illegal immigration, experts have said, and would reduce the government revenue lost when employers and workers here illegally fail to pay taxes.” But, “there’s no such thing as a foolproof ID system,” as experts have also said. And “reducing lost government revenue” as a reason for national ID adds insult to injury. We should pack papers so the government can keep more of what it loots from us?

The senators also promise that though “we would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card,” we’re safe from bureaucratic prying because “no government database would house everyone’s information.” If you believe that, you no doubt believe as well that these politicians have only our best interests at heart, have studied rather than exploited this topic, and are competent to decide for us who our future neighbors, friends, and relatives will be.

Certainly, Graham and Schumer don’t have immigrants’ best interests at heart. Indeed, whether immigrants can live here is determined solely by whether we can use them to “ensur[e] America’s future economic prosperity.” Ergo, the senators’ “legislation would award green cards to immigrants who receive a Ph.D. or master’s degree in science, technology, engineering or math from a U.S. university. It makes no sense to educate the world’s future inventors and entrepreneurs and then force them to leave when they are able to contribute to our economy.”

Nationalist Agenda

Forget about those hungry, tired, and poor yearning to breathe free; the persecuted; and the tortured. If you can’t advance politicians’ nationalistic agendas, you won’t find a toe-hold here.

The senators aren’t content to menace only immigrants; they also threaten and penalize Americans who, unlike themselves, are productive: “Prospective employers would be responsible for swiping the [national ID] cards through a machine”—and who pays for the gizmo?—“to confirm a person’s identity and immigration status. Employers who refused to swipe the card or who otherwise knowingly hired unauthorized workers would face stiff fines and, for repeat offenses, prison sentences.”

Our rulers have spent the last 150 years ginning up fear of immigrants, pitting established Americans against newcomers, contriving a hobgoblin from which they squawk about rescuing us. They’ve succeeded so well that modern Americans happily don chains so long as it means immigrants wear them, too. National ID, raids on offices and factories, a wall on our southern border: Nothing is too dictatorial when it comes to controlling migration.

Schumer and Graham are betting Americans’ fear of immigrants outweighs their love of liberty. Tragically, that looks like a winning wager.

Enter “American Exceptionalism” (AE from here on) . Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru state it plainly in a recent National Review article:

What do we, as American conservatives, want to conserve? The answer is simple: the pillars of American exceptionalism.

It should worry conservatives that they need convoluted concepts like AE to bring clarity to their ideology.

The basic idea that there are historical facts that make the United States exceptional in the history of civilization is not what I’m concerned about. Every society has some exceptional quality, something that makes it unique. What concerns me is that a theory of American Exceptionalism must provide a coherent theory of “the exceptional” or else it becomes a mere placeholder for nationalistic fervor. Either America is exceptional because of something it does, or it is exceptional simply because it is American.

In this particular case, Lowry and Ponnuru fill their version of AE with mostly positive stuff:

Exact renderings of the creed differ, but the basic outlines are clear enough. The late Seymour Martin Lipset defined it as liberty, equality (of opportunity and respect), individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics.

Which begs the question? Why call it American Exceptionalism? Why not American Individualism or American Liberalism or just simply Libertarianism? Well because:

The creed combines with other aspects of the American character — especially our religiousness and our willingness to defend ourselves by force — to form the core of American exceptionalism.

But how is it exceptional for Americans to “defend themselves by force”? Are we supposed to believe that every other civilization has defended itself without force? or simply surrendered? Moreover, last I checked, religiosity was not particularly unique in the history of mankind.

So if we’re defining American exceptionalism using factors that aren’t particularly exceptional, what exactly are we talking about?  Ironically, American exceptionalism appears to mean liberty … with exceptions made for religion and national security. But then how does this differ from nationalism, the belief that the individual’s life only has meaning within the political and cultural boundaries set forth by the “nation”?

I’ll let you answer that. But don’t use the term “American exceptionalism” in your answer.

It was not always this way, and how we got here is the focus of Bill Kauffman’s Ain’t My America. The book is a pithy romp through American history, focusing on antiwar and antistate advocates from eighteenth century Antifederalists to the brave, post-9/11 minority who still dare to say no to an overweening federal government. The result is a remarkable effort that connects John Randolph to Freda Payne, George Washington to George McGovern, William Cullen Bryan to Bob Dylan, and a host of noble and colorful iconoclasts in between.

Kauffman identifies a long-running American strain of individualist thought crucial to a free society, one with two notable characteristics. The first is a recognition of the devastating effects of war on the natural order. Here Kauffman connects the popular dissent to the War of 1812, the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, the twentieth century’s world wars, the Cold War, and Vietnam. Common threads include the beliefs that war is unnecessary, that it serves vested interests over the general interest, that essential freedoms will be compromised in carrying it out, that the common man will pay with treasure and blood, and that it will lead to a permanently expanded state.

The second philosophical characteristic of a free society important to Kauffman is that of localism. Here the idea of maintaining roots and revering the local over the international—the anchored over the unanchored—is important for constraining the nation-state. Indeed, for a nation-state to grow, it needs dependents willing to abandon the ties of hearth, home, and family, if only because this helps when sending soldiers off to one of the 100-plus countries where the U.S. government has military bases. Kauffman emphasizes the important contributions of Allan Carlson of the Howard Center on the full costs of nationalism and militarization on families and communities. Kauffman concludes: “Divorce, dispersal, disruption of courtship patterns; ye shall know the warfare state by its rotten fruits.”

Kauffman introduces his readers to people like John Randolph, who opposed the War of 1812 by asking, “Who would suffer [by war]? The people. It is their blood, their taxes, that must flow to support it.” Noting the loss in freedoms war brings, Randolph added, “The Government of the United States was not calculated to wage offensive foreign war—it was instituted for the common defence and general welfare; and whosoever should embark it on a war of offence, would put it to a test which it was by no means calculated to endure.”

Another outspoken critic Kauffman introduces is George S. Boutwell, who had been Grant’s treasury secretary and later broke with President McKinley in opposition to the war with Spain and the (virtually unknown today) slaughter of Filipinos following their “liberation.” Asked Boutwell: “Is it wise and just for us, as a nation, to make war for the seizure and government of distant lands, occupied by millions of inhabitants, who are alien to us in every aspect of life, except that we are together members of the same human family?”

Such anti-imperialists of the nineteenth century would pass the baton to the Veterans of Future Wars and America Firsters of the twentieth, a time when criticizing the government’s wars could land you in jail. Kauffman describes a South Dakota farmer who served a year and a day in prison for saying, “If I were of conscription age and had no dependents and were drafted, I would refuse to serve. They could shoot me, but they could not make me fight.” Kauffman also describes the efforts to pass the Ludlow Amendment in the late 1930s to counter the New Dealers’ well-known penchant for warfare. This amendment would have required all declarations of war to be approved by national referendum, but it failed in a close House procedural vote.

Lastly, Kauffman chronicles the rise of the New Right following World War II, led by a cadre of ex-communists to promote the militarization of society in order to defeat “the god that failed them, the Soviet Union and world communism.” The great individualists who bemoaned the costs of that campaign included Howard Buffet, Harold R. Gross, Murray Rothbard, Robert Taft, Felix Morley, and others, many of whom wrote for The Freeman.

Ain’t My America is not your high school civics text. In our era of centralized education with No Child Left Behind, that may be its strongest attribute.

—John Taylor of Caroline, 1814

John Taylor of Caroline has a secure place in the history of American political thought. Charles Beard’s historical writing did much to revive Taylor’s reputation in the early twentieth century. Eugene T. Mudge saw Taylor as a “prophet” of sectional struggle, while English historian M. J. C. Vile saw him as “in some ways the most impressive political theorist that America has produced.” New Left historian William Appleman Williams thought Taylor “made the best case against empire as a way of life.”

Other historians are dismissive. Louis Hartz chided Taylor for failing to become the American Disraeli, and Richard Hofstadter called him “a provincial windbag.” For Hof-stadter, Taylor’s Jeffersonian ideas were “negative” and “laissez faire,” ending as mere conservatism in the hands of “men like William Graham Sumner.” Manning Dauer saw Taylor as—paradoxically—the father of both Southern Agrarians and “states’ rights industrialists.”

Despite the attention given Taylor over the years, he remains (in my view) somewhat neglected, relative to his actual merits.

Raised in the home of his uncle Edmund Pendleton, John Taylor (1753–1824) attended The College of William and Mary, studied law, served as a major in the Continental Army, and became a successful lawyer and planter, owning several plantations and 150 slaves. He preferred his rural life, but entered politics to defend republican values, serving in the Virginia legislature (1779–81, 1783–85, 1796–1800) and filling out unexpired terms in the U.S. Senate (1793–1794, 1803, 1822–24). Taylor was clearly no archaic-radical republican like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He did not find freedom in political participation as such, but he would step forward in a crisis, as his sponsorship of the Virginia Resolutions, damning the Alien and Sedition Acts, shows.

Taylor began as an “Anti-federalist.” Once the Constitution won ratification, he meant to hold the victors to the assurances they gave while promoting it. Generally, Taylor’s books (1814, 1818, 1822, 1823) arose from immediate political questions; they included attacks on federal economic policies and reasoned polemics against the centralizing decisions of John Marshall’s Supreme Court. A book by Taylor levels much learning and colorful language against pressing issues, in the manner of Jeremiah.

There are some awkward moments in Taylor’s literary style, as Adams, Jefferson, and John Randolph all noted, but there are also interesting compression and apt expression. Taylor was a secular preacher. Like William Faulkner, he is sometimes better understood when read aloud. He is also a stepfather of semantics and semiotics, as his running critique of “artificial phraseology,” or counterfeit language, shows. He was not an especially successful politician. Taylor served the public better as a critic.

Here I must at least mention the Forty-Years War between historians of the Republican School and the Liberal-Lockean School over early American ideology. For J. G. A. Pocock, classical republican themes—court versus country, the mixed constitution, balanced social orders, “virtuous” agrarian landowners—dominated revolutionary thinking. The Lockeans have Americans abandoning those in favor of abstract individualism and natural rights. But the two political “languages” co-existed throughout the Revolutionary era. What matters is their exact “mix.” Taylor, for one, employs republican language within a liberal framework.

Beginnings of Centralization

Not long after independence, centralizing Federalists replaced the Articles of Confederation with a constitution (1788) aimed at creating a mercantilist political economy. Their opponents coalesced as “Republicans,” broadly continuing the Anti-federalist cause. Federalist-Republican debates over the National Bank, excises, public debt, standing army, and tariffs echoed English debates after 1688.

Perhaps the worst tragedy that can befall an ideology is to have a political party professing allegiance to it come to power. (Think of “conservatism” today.) So it partly was after 1800, with Jeffersonian republicanism in power. Taylor defended Jefferson’s measures into 1804, but gradually drifted into the “Quid” opposition movement within Republican ranks. He railed against the administration’s half-Federalist policies. Along with John Randolph of Roanoke and a few other Republicans, he opposed the War of 1812—his own party’s war—as a “metaphysical war.” He rightly feared its potential for state-building.

For Taylor, the laws of nature suggested political equality instead of the fixed social orders found in John Adams’ archaic republicanism. Popular sovereignty “flows out of each man’s right to govern himself.” Similarly, Taylor traces the right of free speech directly to the right of self-government, which presupposes open discussion.

On solidly liberal ground, Taylor sees human nature as “compounded of good and evil qualities.” Men should frame governments “with a view to the preservation of the good and the control of the evil.” Self-interest was the only real constant in human affairs, and bad structural incentives might make governments “vicious.” Suitable structures would “secure the fidelity of nations to themselves,” even if the people were individually “vicious.” Here Taylor broke decisively with archaic-republican “virtue,” mixed constitutions, and social balance. Americans had chosen to divide rather than “balance” power, and in so many ways—vertically (federally) and horizontally (departmentally)—as to prevent serious abuse.

Protecting men’s lives, liberty, and rightful property was the purpose of government.

The goal of “political law” (the Constitution) was control over all representatives and agents. Taylor hails election, divisions of power, and an armed people (militia) as among the means to republican liberty. “Oaths of agents,” he observes, “are prescribed to enforce, not to destroy, the duties of agency.” Taylor’s overall conception thus far surpasses any tame notions of “checks and balances” or “separation of powers.”

Taylor frowned on notions of absolute sovereignty. Where he does use the word, he is normally referring to self-government, which results from men’s living together in a community. He does not explain community as arising by conventional social contract; indeed, he tends to reject his contemporaries’ half-digested Lockeanism, thereby postponing any final surrender of natural rights. (Here he comes close to Thomas Paine.)

There was, however, an actual contract—the Constitution—creating a limited union with a common agent subjected to structural, procedural, and substantive restraints on its power. This contract was between the peoples of the several states, not between the members of a single, aggregate American people as individuals. The constitutional agreement “derives its force, not from the consent of a majority of the states, but from the separate consent of each” (italics supplied).

Taylor denied the common assertion that the people, “having thought and spoken once, had lost the right of thinking and speaking forever.” If so, “its first will, must be its last will”—something Taylor found absurd. If, for example, the states should call a convention and approve a constitutional amendment previously blocked in the Senate, “any one state may refuse to concur in [it], because each state will resume its original right to refuse or consent, as being independent of each other in negociating the terms of a new union” (italics supplied). Implicit here is renegotiation of the agreement—and even secession in an extreme case. Any other conclusion conflicted with outstanding historical facts, as Taylor saw them.

Taylor observes that no governments—federal or state—could, in their status as subordinate agents, dissolve the union on their own. (The constituent peoples could.) And Taylor was so far from being a positive “disunionist” that, in describing the geographical advantages of the United States, he attributed Americans’ safety to their maintaining a union of some kind. But he was not an unconditional unionist.

Taylor always tried to bracket sovereignty. He supposed the states to possess full concurrent jurisdiction with the federal government, except where one or the other clearly had an exclusive delegation of power. He denied that the Supreme Court’s reasoning necessarily bound the state courts; decisions applied at most between the parties to a case. Taylor thought an occasional inconsistency of outcome preferable to letting the Supreme Court remodel all of American law. To concede final interpretive power to the Court would transfer sovereignty to the general government, as the Court imported consolidation into the Constitution. Finally, the Court would assert “an immoveable power of construction” over the Constitution, over the other branches, and over the people.

Republicanism and Nationalism

Taylor’s states-rights republicanism necessarily collided with the intermittently nationalist views of James Madison. Taylor was trying to unravel the knots Madison tied while confusing different audiences and, finally, himself. Taylor questioned Madison’s claim in Federalist 10 that a republic must be geographically extensive—and even expand farther—to prevent “factious” instability. Taylor viewed expansion as unwise, where it might undermine liberty through war, armies, debt, and taxes. And he had little awe of the Federalist Papers: “The English writers . . . contain whatever is to be found in the Federalist; but all their theories sunk, as soon as they were promulgated; in a vortex of corruption. . . .”

Republican adoptions of Federalist policies were many and galling. Even worse, Federalists remained entrenched as federal judges and appointments by Republican presidents had not changed this. Taylor’s Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (1820) targeted John Marshall’s decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) with its mighty assertions of federal power. “The unknown powers of sovereignty and supremacy may be relished,” Taylor writes, “because they tickle the mind with hopes and fears.” Further, “the term ‘sovereignty,’ was sacrilegiously stolen from the attributes of God, and impiously assumed by Kings.” Later, “aristocracies and republicks. . . claimed the spoil.”

Sovereignty being “neither fiduciary nor capable of limitation,” Taylor wished to neutralize the concept. Americans had tried “to eradicate it by establishing governments invested with specified and limited powers,” so that “ungranted rights remain also with the grantors . . . the people.” (Alas, the principle that rights or powers “not granted” are not granted failed to impress either Marshall or Harvard Law School.)

Marshall’s decision turned allegedly “necessary and proper” means into actual unenumerated powers. Taylor recalled the 1760s, when Parliament asserted “it would be absurd to allow powers, and with-hold any means necessary or proper.” The colonies found it “more absurd to limit powers, and yet concede unlimited means for their execution.” The principle made the Constitution’s list of powers superfluous. Following Marshall, “[E]nds may be made to beget means” and “means . . . made to beget ends, until the co-habitation shall rear a progeny of unconstitutional bastards, which were not begotten by the people.” Roads being “necessary in war,” Congress could “legislate locally concerning roads.” Congressional power over horses—and everything else—would soon follow.

Taylor believed that Americans had never knowingly adopted that European conception of absolute, unitary sovereignty, which licensed Marshall’s centralizing deductions. Americans supposed their governments to be their agents, not their rulers. Lately, however, American legislatures—state and federal—were aspiring to be “British parliaments,” and if the trend held, one must conclude that in American government, “no experiment at all has been made.”

Marshall made much of the supremacy, superiority, and so on of Congress in its proper sphere of action. Taylor answers, “If the sovereignty of the spheres means any sovereignty at all, it supersedes the sovereignty of the people.” The problem was not spheres, but sovereignty in them. Powers might exist, certainly, but granted by principals to agents. No one had “inherent” powers.

Sphere-Sovereignty Dogma

Taylor preferred the “occasional collisions” arising from concurrent jurisdictions. Instead of creating various institutions, each supreme in a sphere, our system featured “co-ordinate political departments . . . as checks upon each other, only invested with defined and limited powers, and subjected to the . . . controul of the people.” The Court’s sphere-sovereignty dogma overthrew this distribution of powers, because a “power able to abolish collisions, is also able to abolish checks, and there can be no checks without collisions.” In America we “have preferred checks and collisions, to a dictatorship of one department.” Congress and the states might pass laws, each one constitutional, which “impede each other. . . . For this clashing the constitution makes no provision.” (Taylor’s view thus differs greatly from the highly artificial “separation of powers” espoused by “conservative” unitary-executive theorists working for the Bush administration.)

Having asserted Congress’s right to “remove all obstacles to its action,” the Court pretended to “hook every implied [power], to some delegated power” as a means. (Even today, a massive regulatory state subsists under the Commerce Clause, while global military enterprises masquerade as simple “defense.”) Taylor did not buy the argument.

Deductions from the international lawyers’ sovereignty-construct intruded into war and peace. Our system, Taylor writes, provided the necessary “powers of making war and peace . . . not as emanations from . . . sovereignty . . . but as delegated powers conferred by the social sovereignty, or natural right of self-government.” Otherwise, “the federal government, as having no sovereignty,” could not have declared war. That international law and lawyers “contemplate the powers of declaring war and making peace, as residing”—inherently—“in an executive department” meant nothing to us; the American system divided the powers and “does not intrust the president with either.”

So the question was “whether these laws of nations or our constitutions have delegated powers to our political departments.” If the former, the game was up, Marshall could go on deducing, and power would not—and could not—be limited. Interestingly, Taylor’s line of attack on these questions supplied materials for refuting United States v. Curtiss-Wright (1936) 114 years before the Supreme Court issued those latter-day deductions about “inherent” executive powers over foreign affairs and war.

Even with all these new, constructively discovered means and powers about, Americans remained complacent, safe in the knowledge that their officials were elective and responsible. For Taylor, representation and elections did not, by themselves, provide security against abuses of power. If elected officials managed to escape their bounds, then we would once again see that “no experiment . . . has been made.” As a mere slogan, “popular sovereignty” meant nothing to Taylor, and he foresaw the probable failure of republicanism if Americans adopted European sovereignty as its legal basis. Indeed, “a sovereign power over labour or property is less oppressive in the hands of an absolute monarch, than in those of a representative legislature” and “the error of trusting republican governments with this tyrannical power, has probably caused their premature deaths, because they are most likely to push it to excess.”

A government outfitted with “the complete panoply of fleets, armies, banks, funding systems, pensions, bounties, corporations, exclusive privileges; and in short, possessing the absolute power to distribute property,” was effectively “unrestrained” and tyrannical—and therefore not a republic in Taylor’s meaning. (Taylor has much to say about power distributing property, but I intend to treat that topic in another place.)

As party leader, aggregator, aider and abettor of factions, would-be war hero, and more, the president of the United States, whoever he might be, spearheaded the political evolution deplored by Taylor. As Taylor writes, the American executive was so constructed as “to excite evil moral qualities . . . propelling us toward force and fraud.” His exclusive control of military patronage, and its extension during war, inclined the president to initiate war. And now we understand Taylor’s commitment to a genuine, revitalized militia system; he wanted it for practical, political—even liberal—reasons, and not out of an attachment to Greek, Roman, or Renaissance Italian republicanism.

Taylor can find no “reason why war, peace, appointments to office, or the dispensation of publick money, should have been counted in the catalogue of the [executive], except for the efficacy of these powers in one man for begetting tyranny.” (He has elsewhere denied real textual, constitutional authority for exclusive presidential power over war and peace.)

More Power to the President

The treaty and appointment powers add to the president’s political weaponry; and to his already excessive military power “is subjoined a mass of civil power,” as well as patronage. Election “procures a confidence which has no foundation.”

The treaty power has long been prized and feared as a source of new, unknowable federal powers. As late as the mid-1950s, the Old Right movement sought to define and curtail that power through the Bricker Amendment. It took all the Eisenhower administration’s leverage to defeat the proposal in Congress. Under the Constitution, properly understood, Taylor finds no magic in the words making treaties part of the supreme law of the land. “On the contrary,” he notes, “the laws were to be made in pursuance of the constitution, and the treaties, under the authority of the United States.” And now he springs his trap: “The United States have no authority, except that which is given by the constitution” (italics supplied).

It followed that treaties could not alter or overthrow the Constitution. He gives an example: “Suppose the treaty-making power should stipulate with England to declare war against France; would that deprive congress of the right of preserving peace, with which it is invested by the constitution?” Presumably not, unless we must once more endure theories of inherency and sovereignty under international juridical deductivism.

James Madison, “father of the Constitution,” thought an extensive and expanding union would “dilute faction” and preserve liberty under an American mercantilism. Tying liberty to territorial expansion, Madison imposed an imperial logic on the Constitution he helped create. Taylor, spying the state-building possibilities of that program, came to oppose it. “A protector is unexceptionally a master,” he noted. Almost two centuries later, under another “Republican” regime betraying principles it never had, we may wonder who was the better prophet over all—Madison or Taylor?

If originalism entails the problem Davies raises, it also has at least one more. Original intent, meaning, or understanding is inevitably multiple. John L. O’Sullivan, former editor of the Democratic Review, noticed this in 1862. The Constitution, he wrote, was America’s “ark of the covenant,” but “no man could ever exactly say what the Constitution was.” Its “elastic generalities of phrase” hid the deep divide “between the ‘Consolidation’ and the ‘State Rights’ parties in the Convention.. . .” Constitutional interpretation had been “twofold from the outset . . . Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, or indeed Northern and Southern.” There was “not one . . . universally recognised Constitution, but two, widely different, and indeed conflicting” (my italics).

But what of our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation? For a time, they suited most of the people and the states. On the other hand, a vocal group in Congress was violently unhappy over the Articles’ failure to establish effective federal (national) power. Joseph Jones of Virginia, newly arrived in mid-1780, complained, “This Body never had or at least in few instances have exercised powers adequate to the purposes of war. . . .” Charles Thomson lamented in 1784, “A government without a visible head must appear a strange phenomenon to European politicians. . . .”

With new members, a dangerous optical malady often set in—“Continental Vision.” Writing to James Madison on February 20, 1784, Thomas Jefferson described the process: “[Young statesmen learn to] see the affairs of the Confederacy from a high ground; they learn the importance of the Union & befriend federal measures when they return.” Continental vision and “insufficient” power: Here was a dilemma, one that American nationalists—James Wilson, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, and many others—determined to resolve. In their view, the country needed a mercantilist political economy, a standing army, public debt, and effective central taxation—things structurally and systematically interrelated. Nationalists wanted central power, as much of it as possible. Under the Confederation they made some interesting attempts to get it. We may begin with war powers.

Invoking vague war powers, early American nationalists urged that Congress ought to have certain powers and, therefore, did or “must” have them, neatly getting an “is” from an “ought.” Big on assertion, Congress spent the war complaining of its lack of real power, including power to tax. Yet mysteriously, Americans defeated Britain without anyone’s giving Congress many powers it craved or claimed. What actually happened?

Acting Without Authority

In practice, Congress coordinated revolutionary activity in the 13 incipient states and conducted diplomatic activity in their (plural) name. In so doing, Congress constantly recommended specific actions to the states, relying on them to carry the measures out. Before ratification of the Articles (1781), Congress often undertook measures for which it could show no obvious authority whatsoever, including the debt it created, its adoption of a European-style code of military “justice” for the Continental Army, and its creation of that army itself. Congress could only appeal to the wartime emergency, iron necessity, “public safety,” and the like. Under the Articles, nationalists complained endlessly of the powers Congress had “lost” with ratification. They referred of course to earlier congressional claims of inherent power—those being “proven” by the fact that Americans in their states had been good enough to cooperate. The price of following Congress’s advice and recommendations was to be told later that one had followed orders and obeyed commands.

American historians largely agree with the original claimants. Legal historian Edward S. Corwin was a case in point. Congress had, he admits, “no real governing power.” The states, on Congress’s recommendations, seized property, repressed Tories, suspended habeas corpus, and undertook “measure after measure that entrenched upon the normal life of the community drastically.” Regrouping, he concludes: “The fact, however, that this legislation came from the state legislatures whereas the war power was attributed to the United States in the Continental Congress served to obscure the fact that the former was really an outgrowth of the latter.”

This calls to mind the paradox, which I have noted previously (“On Misplaced Concreteness in Social Theory,” The Freeman, May 2006), whereby actual successful social action tends to be denounced as a dreadful evil or social problem. In the case at hand, cooperation serves to allocate authority away from those who acted. Whether that authority really entailed a spectral “war power” need not detain us. Whatever that last abstraction did for Congress from 1776 to 1781, and even under the Articles, 1781–1783, it did very little for it after 1783 without the war. Nationalists saw this problem coming. Late in the war, Gouverneur Morris hoped for “a Continuance of the War, which will convince people of the necessity of Obedience to common Counsels. . . .”

In the hunt for added congressional powers, nationalists employed deductions from International Law and pleaded Machiavellian necessities and moments. According to Merrill Jensen, they sought “to establish precedents [from which] they could argue the sovereignty of Congress.” Jensen stresses the interest of certain land companies in having their titles confirmed by the higher “government,” as well as the public creditors’ desire to have depreciated paper claims redeemed at somewhere near face value.

Hamilton hoped Congress would simply assert “undefined Powers” and see what they got away with. They should “assume Congress had once had such powers.” Boldness was needed to build a governing coalition of army, public creditors, and other nationalists. Madison was more indirect. In a Report to Congress in March 1781, he, James Duane, and James Varnum asserted a “general and implied power. . . to carry into effect all the Articles of the said Confederation against any of the States” but could find “no determinate and particular provision.” They therefore urged amendment of the Articles so that Congress could “employ the force of the United States” against states failing to meet funding requisitions.

After Rhode Island rejected an amendment to create a federal impost, Hamilton, Madison, and Thomas FitzSimons drew up a lengthy Congressional Reply in December 1782, calling the impost “a measure of necessity.” Congress, they urged, had “an indefinite power of prescribing the quantity of money to be raised.” This brought the impost “within the spirit of the Confederation.” Further, Congress, “empowered to borrow money,” had power “by implication, to concert the means necessary to accomplish that end.” Arguing against Rhode Island’s position, Robert Morris—federal financial czar—wrote on October 24, 1782, “[I]f a thing be neither wrong nor forbidden it must be admissible [and] if complied with, will by that very compliance become constitutional.” Now, mere acquiescence was “consent,” and consent bred legality. Meanwhile, having thought the thing over, other states had “rescinded” their earlier approval of the impost amendment.

Nationalist aspirations for revenue did not lessen with time. In a speech on January 28, 1783, Madison found “general revenue” to be “within the spirit of the Confederation.” Hamilton agreed, but un-bagged the cat by saying, “[I]t was expedient to introduce the influence of officers deriving their emolument from . . . Congress.” Madison often suggested naval blockades of offending states. He seems also to have spotted an implied power to coerce the states, even without an amendment. (Thirty years later, as president, Madison tried to coerce Britain and France with an embargo, but got the War of 1812 instead.) Even Governor George Clinton of New York spied an implied “Power of compelling the several States to their Duty and thereby enabling the Confederacy to expel the common Enemy.”

But Congress could not make the states ratify an amendment for a modest impost, much less one for their own coercion or blockade. For now, big notions drawn from Machiavelli, Vattel, and Pufendorf were of no avail. They did serve, however, in building both nationalist ideology and a theory of the union, and they yet serve historians who want philosophical foundations for the practical—even cynical—system the nationalists put over a few years later.

Another possible way out was the treaty power duly inscribed in the ninth Article of Confederation. In a centralizing mood, Jefferson himself, writing to James Monroe from Paris on June 17, 1785, advocated using the treaty power “to take the commerce of the states out of the hands of the states” and give it to Congress, which under the Articles had “no original and inherent power” over the subject. But Jefferson did not try to find implied powers in the Articles, nor did he deduce powers from some congressional sovereignty that “necessarily” arose under international law.

The treaty-power dodge reappeared much later, fueling the Old Right’s Bricker Amendment movement of the early 1950s. Senator John Bricker (R-Ohio) and his supporters wanted to keep Congress and the president from aggrandizing themselves under the vaguely worded treaty clause of the present constitution. They meant for their amendment, which failed in the Senate by one vote in February 1954, to meet the problem.

Utilizing Public Debt

Nationalists focused more and more on the public debt. Congress quit issuing credit money in late 1779. Thereafter, as Madison wrote to Jefferson on May 6, 1780, Congress became “as dependent on the States as the King of England is on the Parliament.” Nationalists saw this situation as completely improper. And so, Lance Banning observes, they “proposed to use the national debt to create a single nation—or at least an integrated national elite—where none existed in 1783.”

E. James Ferguson writes, “The Union was a league of states rather than a national system because Congress lacked the power of taxation. This was not an oversight.” Further, the federal debt itself was “inconsistent” with such a union. Jack N. Rakove adds, “Congress lacked the effective power or, once the Articles were ratified, the constitutional right either to levy taxes on its own authority, or to compel the states to obey its recommendations. It is certainly true that the states would never have ratified the Articles had they contained such provisions. . . .”

Nationalists feared the states would pay off the debt. Like the English Whigs in 1649, they needed the debt as the “cement” of union, as Hamilton called it. The debt was needed, in Rakove’s words, “to justify endowing Congress with independent revenues.” If revenue were found, public creditors and the underpaid officer class would rally to the cause of national power. All these advocates well understood the inflationary potential of consolidated public debt in the hands of fractional-reserve bankers. The economy would boom under their own profitable management.

Nationalists conducted an unrestrained campaign against the Confederation’s limits on power. “Water would not boil” due to the Articles. More important, nationalists discovered The People. Within doors, Federalists habitually denounced the people as a great rabble, the source of danger, wild enthusiasms, paper money, and attacks on property. Now they hastened to embrace John Locke’s empty marker of popular sovereignty to justify a takeover in the name of the people. Then they hustled the people off stage so the new machine “could go of itself.”

Social-Contract Theory

Anyone who reads Madison’s enormous journal of the Constitutional Convention will find the delegates arguing a mass of undigested social-contract theory big enough to sicken a hog. Here is an economical explanation: ambitious men with political, economic, and ideological motives wanted a central government with vague (therefore large) powers. They had, doubtlessly, a certain kind of public spirit. The system they created unfolded its inherent defects over time. To provide cover for their more specific goals—power, profit, prosperity, fisheries, security for slavery, land grabbing, glory, fame, good government—the framers issued great clouds of political “science” and theory that have confused Americans ever since. Madison was the outstanding mystifier, but there were others. Nationalists artfully decried the governments of the states while championing the Sovereign People, neatly dodging the question of who the people were and whether there were 13 peoples or one.

The constitutional deed and its defending rationales do not seem much grander than the origins of many other states. But as Jesse Lienesch has written, the founders succeeded in presenting themselves as demigods who saved the nation. It is a point of American orthodoxy to believe them. Charles Beard and J. Allen Smith, seconded by Albert Jay Nock, got much flak for recognizing that the Federalists had mixed motives and self-serving goals.

To win ratification, American nationalists, rechristened as “Federalists,” sold the new Constitution as a document involving “limited” and “enumerated” powers. On this reading, any power not obviously granted was not granted and the new outfit would not have it. Having cornered themselves verbally, Federalists showed their original understanding in the first Congress by enacting all manner of laws directly in conflict with their assurances to the ratifying conventions. Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania especially noted the Judiciary Act, Hamilton’s funding system, economic coercion to force Rhode Island to ratify the Constitution, the War Department, a standing army—and federal consolidation generally. (See Maclay’s Journal at http://tinyurl.com/3ch2nm.) Seeing this, the Federalists’ opponents, with a different original understanding, argued for theirs as “Republicans” led by Jefferson, John Taylor, and others. They meant to hold the former promising parties to their pledges. Historian Garry Wills affirms that the ratifiers were somewhat swindled, but holds this to be a universal blessing that makes modern American governance possible.

And for all their high-minded talk about The People, popular consent, and so on, nationalists did not rule out violence. Benjamin Rush wrote Richard Price on June 2, 1787, that, if needed, “force will not be wanting,” since the wealthy and military classes wanted a new government. As Jensen writes, “It was power, not powers, that they wanted.”

Could the nationalizers have gotten their way by ingeniously stretching the Articles? One possible way would have been to filch the states’ powers and reassemble them into a collective power. Nationalists might have contended that a majority of congressional delegations—each delegation embodying, fully and immediately, its state’s separate sovereign powers—could, in concert, do any old thing, outside the Articles, that came to mind. Similar ideas had yielded results before the Articles came into force in 1781.

The nationalists were not the sort to be denied power. They might have made interesting inroads by discovering “indefinite” or “implied” powers, or by invoking the Articles’ “spirit.” Patiently accumulating “precedents,” they could cash them in, down the road, as grounded on powers that had always “been there.” But nationalists were not as patient as, say, the Supreme Court.

And certain structural advantages still remained to the states and the people(s). Their key advantage involved taxation. Congress had to ask the states for its money. It still seems a good arrangement.

Here our sub-theme—originalism—returns. It appears that original contestants contested many constitutional “meanings” at the very beginning. On this view, any simple originalism means clinging to original mistakes. The framers’ opinions were certainly original; how or whether they dictate to us today through the ether is another matter.

Works Used

1. Lance Banning, “James Madison and the Nationalists, 1780–1783,” William & Mary Quarterly, April 1983.
2. Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, New York, 1957.
3. Thomas Y. Davies, “Correcting Search and Seizure History,” Mississippi Law Journal, vol. 77, 2007.
4. Jonathan Elliot, Debates in the State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, I, 1973 [1830]).
5. E. James Ferguson, “The Nationalists of 1781–1783 and the Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” Journal of American History, September 1969.
6. E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961.
7. Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, IV, New York, 1904.
8. Merrill Jensen, “The Idea of a National Government during the American Revolution,” Political Science Quarterly, September 1943.
9. Jesse Lienesch, “The Constitutional Tradition: History, Political Action, and Progress in American Political Thought, 1787–1793,” Journal of Politics, February 1980.
10. William Maclay, The Journal of William Maclay, United States Senator from Pennsylvania, 1789–1791, New York, 1965.
11. Roger McBride, Treaties versus the Constitution, New York, 1955.
12. John L. O’Sullivan, Union, Disunion, and Reunion: A Letter to General Franklin Pierce, London, 1862.
13. Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, New York, 1979.
14. Murray Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, IV, New Rochelle, N.Y., 1979.

This faith in government is deeply puzzling. Governments have started absurd and terrible wars. Governments have slaughtered scores of millions of their own peoples. In domestic affairs—regulation of the savings-and-loan industry, mortgage lending, hurricane disaster relief, agriculture, college loans, public housing, medical care, to name a few—government has stumbled into embarrassing mega-scandals. One would think that this record of catastrophe and bungling should have made people hesitant to look to government for solutions.

Another thing that should make people skeptical about government is its unseemly modus operandi. Government is not a high-minded institution that approaches the world in a spirit of gentle persuasion and self-sacrifice. Its officials don’t lead by setting an inspiring example. Government relies on laws and on taxation, tools that are based on force, on threats to throw you in jail, or seize your property, or kill you. One would have supposed that idealists, who look askance at the use of force in other contexts, should have turned their backs on this crude approach.

Yet, for the most part, they haven’t. Generation after weary generation, well-meaning social reformers have taken their petitions to government, convinced, as the world in general is convinced, that government is the agency we must use to make the world a better place. When, one wonders, will this fixation fade?

Well, perhaps it is today starting to fade—in the quiet, unnoticed way a great cultural change begins. The straw in the wind is the warm reception given by book clubs and college campuses to an unusual book, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace. . . One School at a Time. It recounts how mountain climber Greg Mortenson became a social reformer. Returning from a failed effort to scale the peak K2, Mortenson lost his way and was taken in by Pakistani villagers, who nursed him back to health. One day he saw the children of the village trying to learn school lessons, sitting on a patch of open ground, with no teacher, no books, and writing by scratching with sticks in the dirt. It tore his heart. Mortenson promised the villagers to come back and build a school for them. To make coauthor David Relin’s gracefully written long story short, Mortenson eventually did return, built the school, and founded a charity that has gone on to build some 60 more.

This bestseller is recommended reading at schools across the country, including Montana State, South Dakota State, the University of North Carolina, Carroll College, San Diego State, and Vanderbilt. “It’s just an inspiring story,” said Greg Young, Montana State’s vice provost for undergraduate education. “The implied message is our students could serve the world, change the world, using this as an example.”

The Voluntary Way

What Young didn’t add, because provosts aren’t permitted to contradict the Zeitgeist so directly, is that Mortenson’s example squarely contradicts the assumption that government is the way to change the world. Mortenson built his schools through his own dedication, and by inspiring others to donate funds voluntarily. That he succeeded with a ridiculously tiny budget (his first school cost $12,000) throws into relief the failings of governments with their jillions of tax dollars. In Pakistan, the villages had no schools because the government had failed to live up to its promise to provide them. In Afghanistan, where Mortenson also built schools, the U.S. government makes promises, but the money vanishes into bureaucratic rat holes.

Mortenson’s experience goes beyond demonstrating that voluntarism is more efficient than government. He shows that it is the humane and sensitive method as well. Because he can’t force people to do anything, Mortenson relies on persuasion and his own example of sacrifice and commitment. He meets with locals, listens to their opinions and advice, and tries to learn from them, a personal approach vital in these days of global misunderstanding and tension. The U.S. government, operating in the sweeping, arrogant way governments act, has provoked suspicion and hostility in Muslim communities around the world. Mortenson, following the sensitive, voluntary approach, builds bridges of genuine understanding between cultures.

For example, a local cleric issued a fatwa against Mortenson, arguing that it was un-Islamic to educate girls, as Mortenson was proposing to do. To counter him, Mortenson didn’t get on his high horse and rant. He asked for guidance from his local mentors. They advised him to let friendly clerics submit the issue to the Supreme Council of Ayatollahs in Qom, Iran. Agents of the Council visited the schools and interviewed locals about Mortenson’s morals and character. Eventually, the Council issued its judgment: “Our Holy Koran tells us all children should receive education, including our daughters and sisters. Your [Mortenson's] noble work follows the highest principles of Islam, to tend to the poor and the sick. . . . We direct all clerics in Pakistan not to interfere with your noble intentions. You have our permission, blessings, and prayers.”

Remember, this high praise came from fundamentalist Iranian clerics, a group not disposed to view Americans kindly. Can one imagine a U.S. government agency working so delicately and thus inspiring genuine trust and cross-cultural good will? Episodes like this go far in persuading the reader that Mortenson’s sincere voluntary action is promoting tolerance in a way government never could.

More than a century ago, the bestseller sweeping campuses and book clubs was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a utopian novella that had the federal government in charge of every aspect of economic production and distribution. This management would be so flawless, said Bellamy, that “No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.” Don’t laugh: this book postulating a wise, selfless, unbiased, efficient, prompt, and honest federal government sold millions of copies, and “Bellamy Clubs” were formed all across the country to bring this vision, called “nationalism,” into reality.

Perhaps Mortenson’s book will today inspire youngsters to consider a different “ism,” voluntarism, as the way to make the world a better place. On one level, Mortenson is far ahead of Bellamy. Bellamy’s book was fiction, and his image of government as a wonderful problem-solver was not based on the actual performance of any government. Mortenson’s picture of voluntarism’s glowing success comes from a step-by-step demonstration in the real world.

by Ludwig von Mises

Liberty Fund • 2006 • 220 pages • $20.00 hardcover; $12.00 paperback

Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

Without a doubt, World War I was one of the most momentous events of the last hundred years. Indeed, it could be argued that it was the most important event during this time. It marked the break between the generally classical-liberal epoch that had prevailed during the nineteenth century and the collectivist era that has dominated world civilization ever since.

Of course, collectivism had been growing in intellectual and political influence for several decades before the war began in 1914. But it was that war that released the demons on the entire world: socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism, interventionism, and the welfare state.

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the war as an artillery officer, seeing action on the eastern front against the Russians. After the war ended in November 1918 Mises returned to his prewar employment as an economic analyst for the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. In that role he was deeply involved in the postwar politics and economics of the new, small Austrian Republic. In the middle of all these events he found time to write Nation, State, and Economy, which appeared in the early autumn of 1919. In its pages he attempted to explain the causes and consequences of the war. After being out of print for many years, the English translation of this important volume is available once again, published by Liberty Fund.

The book is really two long essays on related themes. The first part is an insightful analysis of the origins and implications of modern nationalism and the concept of nationality in general. The second part is devoted to a detailed study of the relationships between socialism, imperialism, and war.

A sense of nationality has often been said to be linked to a common racial or cultural heritage. Mises argues, however, that in modern times feelings and attitudes of a shared national belonging, especially in Europe, have had their origin in a common language. Language, he says, is the means through which we reason, communicate, and have a shared basis with others for understanding and interpreting the world. The linguistic stamp is impressed on us in childhood from those immediately around us as we absorb a language. “Community of language binds and difference of language separates persons and peoples,” Mises states.

Mises is careful to explain that neither a language nor a language group is static; both are constantly in flux. But at any moment a shared language works as a strong element of self-identity and a common bond with others. Mises goes to great lengths to challenge the racial conception of nationality, especially as it had been developing in Germany in the decades before the war. “Germans” could be shown to have many ethnic backgrounds; what they all possessed was the German language.

Over the last 200 years, Mises explains, political nationalism took two forms: “liberal nationalism” and “militant or imperialistic nationalism.” Liberal nationalism was grounded in the idea of individual freedom, which included the right of individuals to decide the state to which they wished to belong. This meant kings and princes no longer should have the right to trade among themselves territories and their inhabitants. The notion of national self-determination was a natural outgrowth of this. In Western Europe, where there were compact and relatively homogeneous linguistic groups, the boundaries of states could frequently reflect the borders between these groups.

That was more difficult in Central andEastern Europe, a patchwork of overlapping and adjacent linguistic groups within the same states. Political boundaries could not easily be drawn along linguistic lines, so linguistic majorities held political power over linguistic minorities.

If classical liberalism had prevailed and governments had been limited to securing life, liberty, and property, Mises suggests, the frictions between linguistic groups living in these nation-states might have been minimized. But with the growth of interventionist ideologies and policies in the second half of the nineteenth century, government power was inevitably used to benefit one linguistic group at the expense of another. This became the basis for the nationalistic conflicts and wars in Europe over the last 150 years.

In the decades before World War I German nationalism was grounded in two ideas: that all Germans had to be unified within the same political state (even if this meant incorporating and oppressing minority linguistic groups), and that Germany had to have a territory large enough to be self-sufficient in land and resources to match the economic potential of any political rival for domination on the European continent. Those goals generated a spirit of German militarism and imperialism, Mises laments, that set the stage for the events that then unfolded beginning in 1914.

Classical liberalism, Mises argues, focuses on the rights and the welfare of the individual. Nationalism and imperialism see only the collective to which the individual must be made subservient for the sake of the nation-state, even if subservience includes paying what he calls the “blood tax”—that is, being sacrificed on the battlefield for the glory of national greatness.

In the second part of the book one sees already many of the ideas for which Mises would become famous in the twentieth century. He demonstrates why central economic planning and regulation during war are the exact opposite of what should be done if a country is to use its full potential against its enemies. It is precisely during a national emergency, when resources and productive ability must be quickly shifted from peacetime to wartime uses, that the market must be left free. Market-based profit incentives and entrepreneurial ingenuity will get the job done far better than any bureaucracy.

Mises also challenges the popular delusions about supposed wartime “booms.” Regardless how a war is financed—increased taxation, more borrowing, or printing-press money—society ends up poorer. Consumers see fewer goods made for them because scarce resources must be shifted to making the tools of war. Often capital is not fully maintained and replaced due to the pressures of war production, resulting in a loss of productive capability. And of course, part of the labor force is killed or permanently maimed in battle, while part of the society’s physical capital is destroyed in the conflict.

What creates the illusion of wartime prosperity is the apparent good times generated by inflation. Here Mises hammers away that inflation creates the illusion of prosperity only because of the “non-neutral” manner in which increases in the money supply ripple through the economy. Thus it appears that profits are improving and incomes are rising when in fact beneath the monetary surface massive distortions and imbalances are being produced by the inflationary process. Mises was one of the first economists to demonstrate how inflation can distort accounting methods, resulting in actual capital consumption.

One also sees in this book the germ of his critique of socialist central planning—which he would publish a year later—when in his analysis of inflation he emphasizes the crucial role of economic calculation and a stable monetary system if resources are to be used efficiently and capital is to be properly maintained and allocated to the most highly valued uses.

In the concluding chapter Mises bemoans the fact that all the great industrial achievements made possible by the classical-liberal epoch of the nineteenth century had been placed in the service of collectivism and imperialism. The push of a button can send tens of thousands to their deaths because the technologies of peaceful capitalism had been perversely adapted to violent statist ends.

And the shadow of the next world war was already seen by Mises. He warned his fellow Germans and Austrians that if in defeat they vengefully planned a future war, they could well face “the complete annihilation of the German people.” All who have seen the photographs of the wasteland that Germany became in World War II can appreciate how clearly in 1919 Mises had foreseen the disaster that faced Germany 25 years later thanks to its failure to turn its back on collectivism and its Nazi permutation in the 1930s.

Richard Ebeling (rebeling@fee.org) is the president of FEE.

1776

by David McCullough

Simon & Schuster • 2005 • 294 pages • $32.00 hardcover; $18.00 paperback

Reviewed by George C. Leef

1776 is Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough’s chronicling of the momentous year in which Britain ‘s American colonies declared their independence from the ruling monarchy, came exceedingly close to military defeat on several occasions, and finally won a morale-boosting victory that sufficed to keep the fire of rebellion from dying out the following winter. This, of course, is history that has been told many times before, but McCullough not only recounts the tumultuous events in a gripping manner, but also weaves into his account enough of the philosophy of the contending sides to make the book considerably more than just another military history. The details of troop movements, attack and defense, weaponry, and so on are all here. So, too, is a look into the minds of the men who fought to shape the destiny of North America in that amazing year.

We learn, for example, a great deal about King George III, who was dismissive and contemptuous of the patriot forces and regarded it as his “duty” to restore order in his empire by compelling his rebellious subjects to obey. How dearly he, but mostly the people of England, would pay for his haughty attitude. As with so many rulers throughout history, King George’s imperious cast of mind would lead to great suffering among his friends and foes alike.

Some readers will be surprised to learn that there was a considerable antiwar faction in England. One newspaper, the Evening Post, denounced the war to force the naughty colonists to respect their royal masters as “unnatural, unnecessary, unjust, dangerous, hazardous, and unprofitable.” Letters home from soldiers serving in the colonies also attacked the King’s war policy. One, from an officer stationed in Boston, expressed the wish that all the “violent people” who advocated war should come across the Atlantic to experience it themselves. “God send us peace and a good fireside in Old England,” the man wrote plaintively.

Nor, we learn, was the war uniformly popular with the aristocracy. In the House of Lords the Duke of Grafton, saying the King’s ministers had deceived him as to the true state of affairs in America , proposed that every act that Parliament had passed regarding the colonies since the disastrous Stamp Act of 1765 should be immediately repealed. He argued that “nothing less will accomplish any effectual purpose, without scenes of ruin and destruction, which I cannot think on without the utmost grief and horror.” And in the House of Commons, John Wilkes, Lord Mayor of London , maintained that the war with “our brethren” in North America was “unjust, fatal, and ruinous to our country.” Whether McCullough had current U.S. policy in mind when he included these pages on dissent from British policy in 1776, they have an unmistakable connection across the centuries.

Why did the patriots fight? McCullough answers: “Asked what they were fighting for, most of the army—officers and men in the ranks—would until now have said it was in defense of their country and their rightful liberties as freeborn Englishmen.” Driving away the hated redcoats was the motive for most of the soldiers. The idea that political independence should be the objective had not gained many adherents in 1776. That abstraction wasn’t nearly as potent a motivator as the presence of British regulars, widely regarded as an invading force.

On the battlefield it’s often better to be lucky than good, and much of 1776 is proof of that adage. A diligent British commander would have had little difficulty in defeating Washington ‘s army in 1776, especially in view of the repeated military blunders Washington committed during the New York campaign that summer. Fortunately, the British general commanding the land forces, William Howe, was, McCullough writes, “slow-moving, procrastinating, negligent in preparing for action, interested more in his own creature comforts and pleasures.” Howe made no effort to understand his adversary or to fathom his intentions. His indolence was a constant source of irritation for his more aggressive subordinates.

On several occasions, Washington ‘s attempts to defend New York —which was quite impossible given the British control of the seas—nearly led to the destruction of the Continental Army. The unsung hero of the year was really Colonel John Glover, whose regiment of expert boatmen from Massachusetts saved the army from capture on Long Island by rowing it off to temporary safety, saved it again by plugging a defensive gap at White Plains, and finally made possible the surprise attack on the Hessians at Trenton by rowing the army across the icy Delaware River. Readers will revel in the detailed account McCullough provides of the famous surprise attack on Trenton.

Beautifully written and printed, 1776 is a book that belongs in the library of everyone who has a desire to understand how the United States came to be.

George Leef (georgeleef@aol.com) is book review editor of The Freeman.

Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution

by Stephen Breyer

Alfred A. Knopf • 2005 • 161 pages • $21.00 hardcover; $12.95 paperback

Reviewed by Michael DeBow

Active Liberty deserves to be widely read and discussed. In it Justice Stephen Breyer explains his approach to the Constitution and his view of the proper role of the federal courts. Based on a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 2004, the book is not likely to win over many readers of The Freeman to Breyer’s point of view. But I can think of no better book to read if one is interested in how talented left-of-center judges and lawyers think.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to look at the Constitution—one focuses on the text, the other doesn’t. Justice Breyer is firmly in the latter camp. Specifically, he argues for a form of interpretation known as “purposivism,” which he explains by quoting a 1941 Supreme Court opinion: “The judge should read constitutional language ‘as the revelation of the great purposes which were intended to be achieved by the Constitution’ itself, a ‘framework for’ and a ‘continuing instrument of government.’” Note well the word “continuing.” Breyer’s Constitution is of the living-breathing variety, and he is comfortable with the massive regulatory-welfare state we now have. Property rights are mentioned once in his book, and the concept that the federal government has only enumerated (limited) powers is ignored, as is the Founders’ assumption that most government business would be settled at the state or local level. At one point, Breyer dismisses “textualism”—the more text-bound approach to the Constitution—by characterizing it as “placing weight upon eighteenth-century details to the point at which it becomes difficult for a twenty-first century court to apply the document’s underlying values.”

Chief among the Constitution’s “underlying values” that Breyer is keen to advance is “active liberty,” which he also refers to as “ancient liberty.” He cites Benjamin Constant, a nineteenth-century political philosopher, for the distinction between “ancient” and “modern” liberty. Modern liberty is what most people likely have in mind when using the word: “freedom from government, . . . the individual’s freedom to pursue his own interests and desires free of improper government interference.” Breyer contrasts this everyday meaning with “the active liberty of the ancients, what Constant called the people’s right to ‘an active and constant participation in collective power.’”

Elsewhere, Breyer defines active liberty as “the scope of the [citizen's] right to participate in government,” and the “principle” of active liberty as “the need to make room for democratic decision-making.” Active liberty is the great “democratic theme” that, Breyer assures us, “resonates throughout the Constitution.”

Breyer cannot, of course, point to the term “active liberty” in the text of the Constitution because it does not appear there. The unmodified word “liberty” does appear twice outside the Preamble—in the due-process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments—but Breyer makes no attempt to tie his purposivism to these textual anchors. Rather, his claim for the legitimacy of his interpretive theory depends on his reading of the broad outlines of American political history.

The problem with purposivism is that it is an open invitation to judges to legislate from the bench. The Supreme Court decisions Breyer discusses do not reassure the reader on this point, despite his repeated references to the need for judicial restraint.

Remarkably, Breyer does not discuss Roe v. Wade, almost certainly the most widely debated modern decision in which the Supreme Court gave an expansive reading to the term “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment. Since Roe is the elephant in the middle of the room of American constitutionalism, the omission is indefensible.

Breyer does attempt a purposive defense of the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision upholding the affirmative action practices of the University of Michigan Law School. He declares that “equality . . . is the underlying objective of the Equal Protection Clause” and that affirmative action promotes equality. Q.E.D. He engages in no textual analysis beyond that, and does not try to make any argument based on the history of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Breyer’s defense of the Court’s 2003 decision upholding the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance statute likewise depends on his judgment that the underlying objective of the free-speech clause of the First Amendment is to protect “participatory self-government” and that this objective is best served by restrictions on campaign contributions. His explanation of his vote against allowing parents to use federal education vouchers to pay parochial-school tuition depends on his judgment that the underlying objective of the First Amendment’s establishment clause is the avoidance of “religious strife.”

Most of the rest of Breyer’s examples sound this same theme. It’s underlying objectives all the way down, to borrow the punch line from an old joke.

Although Active Liberty failed to convert me to the cause of purposivism, I applaud Justice Breyer for writing such an honest book. Active Liberty invites interested citizens to discuss the nature of the Constitution and of judging.

Michael DeBow (medebow@samford.edu) teaches law at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.

Making Great Decisions in Business and Life

by David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper

Chicago Park Press • 2006 • 287 pages • $28.50

Reviewed by Philip R. Murray

David Henderson and Charles Hooper have given us a “how to” book employing economic principles to solve common problems.

The problems range from everyday situations to far deeper problems calling for sophisticated analysis. Hooper explains how he figured out why his gas grill quit working. Henderson tells how he salvaged his vacation by buying pillows from a department store instead of upgrading his hotel. Or consider the choice between looking for a postcard stamp and using a letter stamp. The authors recommend using a regular stamp because the value of your time is greater than the few cents you’d save. Under their assumptions that you earn $200 an hour and the probability of finding a postcard stamp is 75 percent, they calculate that you should spend no more than 1.89 seconds looking.

Thinking about buying a compact car? Henderson and Hooper introduce the concept of a “micromort” to shed light on the tradeoff between the lower price of the compact and the greater risk of death due to an accident. “A micromort” they explain, “is a unit of cost that you bear for engaging in risky activities.” Given a few assumptions about small and large cars, they calculate that the greater risk of death from driving the former amounts to $10,900 compared to $5,300 for the latter. “The larger car undoubtedly costs more to purchase and operate,” they conclude, “but given everything else equal . . . it is worth $5,600 more purely due to its safety.”

The most complicated technique is the “risk-averse expected net present value approach,” which the authors apply to buying home insurance. Intuition suggests we buy insurance because “we are happy spending a little money to protect ourselves from big losses.” The mathematics of the “risk-averse expected net present value approach” shows the logic of that intuition. Readers should not be deterred by this and a few other technical sections in the book; there are plenty of basic rules of thumb to help them with the difficult patches.

The authors also take on some controversial policy topics and provide a warning label for one discussion: “Before you read on, let us warn you that we are about to challenge a commonly accepted belief.” That belief is the immorality of sweatshop labor. Henderson and Hooper explain that refusing to buy products made in sweatshops may actually harm some workers who lose their jobs or take lower paying jobs elsewhere. Thus comprehension of economics may help “socially conscious” consumers avoid a decision—boycotting sweatshop products—that would be counterproductive.

Henderson and Hooper return to the question of decisions affecting auto safety with a look at the famous Ford Pinto. Ford could have spent a small amount per car to prevent the gas tank from exploding. “Based on Ford’s estimated value of a human life and its estimated probability of fires,” however, “it concluded that the $11 part was too expensive.”

What might be shocking is that we live in a world where automakers sell cars that aren’t as safe as possible. To explain why not, Henderson and Hooper cleverly pose two alternative scenarios. In the first, “Ignorant Cars International” suppresses any thought of making its cars safer for fear of being caught putting a car on the market knowing it could have been safer still. In the second, “Infinite Motors” encourages its employees to think of ways to make cars safer and implements each measure before cars go on the market. Ignorant’s cars won’t get any safer, but Infinite’s cars will either never reach the market or they’ll be so expensive few will buy one. In the real world, companies make cars incrementally safer over time and people risk buying cars that are affordable but not the safest possible.

Reading Making Great Decisions is apt to change your behavior to some degree. Anyone who has been spending more than a few seconds searching for postcard stamps will probably reconsider. Some may replace their old refrigerators for a double-digit return on their investment. A few might construct a decision tree to analyze buying insurance. Thanks to Henderson and Hooper, everyone will find that the mental toolbox of economic thinking is useful.

Philip Murray (prmurray4@hotmail.com) teaches economics at Webber International University.

In Socialism (1922), Liberalism (1927), and Critique of Interventionism (1929), the task Ludwig von Mises set for himself was to offer a radically different vision of man in society from that presented by the socialists, nationalists, and interventionists. In place of their starting premise of inescapable conflicts among men in terms of “social class,” nationality, and race, or narrow group interest, Mises insisted that reason and experience demonstrated that all men could associate in peace for their mutual material and cultural betterment. The key to this was an understanding and appreciation of the benefits of a division of labor. Through specialization and trade the human race has the capacity to lift itself up from both poverty and war.

Men become associates in a common process of social cooperation, instead of antagonists with each attempting to rule over and plunder the others. Indeed, all that we mean by modern civilization, and the material and cultural comforts and opportunities that it offers man, is due to the highly productive benefits and advantages made possible by a division of labor. Men collaborated in the arena of competitive market exchange.

The confusion, Mises pointed out, is the failure to view this cooperative social process from a longer-run perspective than the changing circumstances of everyday life. In the rivalries of the market, there are always some who earn profits and others who suffer losses in the interactive and competitive processes of supply and demand. But what needs to be understood is that these changes in the short-run fortunes of various participants in the division of labor are the method through which each participant is informed and nudged into either doing more of some things or less of others. This process brings about the necessary adjustment of society’s productive activities in order to assure that they tend to match and reflect the market pattern of consumer demand.¹

Of course, political force can be substituted for the “reward” of profits and the “punishment” of losses. However, the costs of this substitution are extremely high, Mises argued. First, men are less motivated to apply themselves with intelligence and industry when forced to work under the lash of servitude and compulsion, and thus society loses what their free efforts and invention might have produced.² Second, men are forced to conform to the values and goals of those in command, and thus they lose the liberty of pursuing their own purposes, with no certainty that those who rule them know better what may give them happiness and meaning in life.

And, third, socialist central planning and political intervention in the market, respectively, abolish or distort the functioning of social cooperation. A sustained and extended system of specialization for mutual improvement is only possible under a unique set of social and economic institutions. Without private ownership in the means of production, the coordination of multitudes of individual activities in the division of labor is impossible. Indeed, Mises’s analysis of the “impossibility” of a socialist order being able to match the efficiency and productivity of a free-market economy was the basis for his international stature and reputation as one of the most original economists of his time, and was the centerpiece of his book Socialism.³

Private ownership and competitive market exchange enable the formation of prices for both consumer goods and the factors of production, expressed in the common denominator of a medium of exchange—money. On the basis of these money prices, entrepreneurs can engage in economic calculation to determine the relative costs and profitability of alternative lines of production. Without these market-generated prices, there would be no rational way to allocate resources among their competing uses to assure that those goods most highly valued by the buying public were produced in the least costly and therefore most economical manner. Economic calculation, Mises demonstrated, guarantees that the scarce means available best serve the members of society.

Such rationality in the use of means to satisfy ends is impossible in a comprehensive system of socialist central planning. How, Mises asked, will the socialist planners know the best uses for which the factors of production under their central control should be applied without such market-generated prices? Without private ownership of the means of production there would be nothing (legally) to buy and sell. Without the ability to buy and sell, there will be no bids and offers, and therefore no haggling over terms of trade among competing buyers and sellers. Without the haggling of market competition there would, of course, be no agreed-on terms of exchange. Without agreed-on terms of exchange, there are no market prices. And without market prices, how will the central planners know the opportunity costs and therefore the most highly valued uses for which those resources could or should be applied? With the abolition of private property, and therefore market exchange and prices, the central planners would lack the necessary institutional and informational tools to determine what to produce and how, in order to minimize waste and inefficiency.

Mises Challenged

Socialists and many nonsocialist economists claimed over the decades that Mises was wrong when he said that socialism was “impossible.” They pointed to the Soviet Union and said it existed and operated. However, in numerous places in his various writings, beginning from the early 1920s, Mises insisted that he was not saying that a socialist system could not exist. Of course, the factors of production could be nationalized and a central planning agency could be delegated the responsibility to direct all the production activities of the society.

But any supposed rationality and seeming degree of efficiency observed in the workings of the Soviet and similar socialist economies was due to the fact that such socialist planning systems existed in a world in which there were still functioning market societies. The existing market economies provided various “shadow prices” that the socialist planners could try to use as proxies and benchmarks for evaluating their own allocation and production decisions. However, since the actual economic circumstances in such a socialist economy would never be an exact duplicate of the conditions in the neighboring market societies—resource availabilities, labor skills, the quantity and qualities of capital equipment, the fertility and variety of land, the patterns of consumer demand—such proxy prices could never completely “solve” the economic calculation problem for the socialist planners in places like the Soviet Union.⁴

Therefore, Mises declared in 1931, “From the standpoint of both politics and history, this proof [of the ‘impossibility' of socialist planning] is certainly the most important discovery by economic theory. . . . It alone will enable future historians to understand how it came about that the victory of the socialist movement did not lead to the creation of the socialist order of society.”⁵

At the same time, Mises demonstrated the inherent inconsistencies in any system of piecemeal political intervention in the market economy. Price controls and production restrictions on entrepreneurial decision-making bring about distortions and imbalances in the relationships of supply and demand, as well as constraints on the most efficient use of resources in the service of consumers. The political intervener is left with the choice of either introducing new controls and regulations in an attempt to compensate for the distortions and imbalances the prior interventions have caused, or repealing the interventionist controls and regulations already in place and allowing the market once again to be free and competitive. The path of one set of piecemeal interventions followed by another entails a logic of the growth of government that eventually would result in the entire economy coming under state management. Hence, interventionism consistently applied could lead to socialism on an incremental basis.⁶

The most pernicious form of government intervention, in Mises’s view, was political control and manipulation of the monetary system. Contrary to both the Marxists and the Keynesians, Mises did not consider the fluctuations experienced over the business cycle to be an inherent and inescapable part of the free-market economy. Waves of inflations and depressions were the product of political intervention in money and banking. And this included the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mises argued.

Monetary Manipulation

Under various political and ideological pressures, governments had monopolized control over the monetary system. They used the ability to create money out of thin air through the printing press or on the ledger books of the banks to finance government deficits and to artificially lower interest rates to stimulate unsustainable investment booms. Such monetary expansions always tended to distort market prices resulting in misdirection of resources, including labor, and malinvestment of capital. The inflationary upswing caused by an artificial expansion of money and bank credit sets the stage for an eventual economic downturn. By distorting the rate of interest, the market price for borrowing and lending, the monetary authority throws savings and investment out of balance, with the need for an inevitable correction. The “depression” or “recession” phase of the business cycle occurs when the monetary authority either slows downs or stops any further increases in the money supply. The imbalances and distortions become visible, with some investment projects having to be written down or written off as losses, with reallocations of labor and other resources to alternative, more profitable employments, and sometimes significant adjustments and declines in wages and prices to bring supply and demand back into proper order.⁷

The Keynesian revolution of the 1930s, and which then dominated economic policy discussions for decades following World War II, was based on a fundamental misconception of how the market economy worked, in Mises’s view. What Keynes called “aggregate demand failures” to explain the reason for high and prolonged unemployment distracted attention away from the real source of less-than-full employment: the failure of producers and workers on the “supply side” of the market to price their products and labor services at levels that potential demanders would be willing to pay. Unemployment and idle resources constitute a pricing problem, not a demand-management problem. Mises considered Keynesian economics basically to be nothing more than a rationale for special-interest groups, such as trade unions, that didn’t want to adapt to the reality of supply and demand and of what the market viewed as their real worth.⁸

Thus Mises’s conclusion from his analysis of socialism and interventionism, including monetary manipulation, was that there is no alternative to a thoroughgoing unhampered free-market economy, including a market-based monetary system such as the gold standard.⁹ Both socialism and interventionism are, respectively, unworkable and unstable substitutes for capitalism. The classical liberal defends private property and the free-market economy, he insisted, precisely because it is the only system of social cooperation that provides wide latitude for freedom and personal choice to all members of society, while generating the institutional means for coordinating the actions of billions of people in the most economically rational manner.

Classical Liberalism, Freedom, and Democracy

Mises’s defense of classical liberalism against these various forms of collectivism, however, was not limited “merely” to the economic benefits from private property. Property also provides man with that most valuable and cherished object—freedom. Property gives the individual an arena of autonomy in which he may cultivate and live out his own conception of the good and meaningful life. It also protects him from dependency on the state for his existence; through his own efforts and voluntary exchange with other free men, he is not beholden to any absolute political authority that would dictate the conditions of his life. Freedom and property, if they are to be secure, require peace. Violence and fraud must be outlawed if each man is to take full advantage of what his interests and talents suggest would be the most profitable avenues to achieve his goals in consensual association with others.

The classical-liberal ideal also emphasizes the importance of equality before the law, Mises explained. Only when political privilege and favoritism are eliminated can each man have the latitude to use his own knowledge and talents in ways that benefit himself and also rebound, through the voluntary transactions of the market, to the betterment of society as a whole. This means, at the same time, that a liberal society is one that accepts that inequality of income and wealth is inseparable from individual freedom. Given the diversity of men’s natural and acquired abilities and volitional inclinations, the rewards earned by people in the marketplace will inevitably be uneven. Nor can it be otherwise if we are not to diminish or even suffocate the incentives that move men to apply themselves in creative and productive ways.

The role of government, therefore, in the classical-liberal society is to respect and protect each individual’s right to his life, liberty, and property. The significance of democracy, in Mises’s view, is not that majorities are always right or should be unrestrained in what they may do to minorities through the use of political power. Elected and representative government is a means of changing who holds political office without resort to revolution or civil war. It is an institutional device for maintaining social peace. It was clear to Mises from the experience of communism and fascism, as well as from the many tyrannies of the past, that without democracy the questions of who shall rule, for how long, and for what purpose would be reduced to brute force and dictatorial power. Reason and persuasion should be the methods that men use in their dealings with one another—both in the marketplace and the social and political arenas—and not the bullet and the bayonet.¹⁰

In his book on classical liberalism Mises bemoaned the fact that people are all too willing to resort to state power to impose their views of personal conduct and morality whenever their fellow human beings veer from their own conception of the “good,” the “virtuous” and the “right.” He despaired, “The propensity of our contemporaries to demand authoritarian prohibition as soon as something does not please them . . . shows how deeply ingrained the spirit of servility still remains in them. . . . A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.”¹¹

What, then, should guide social policy in determining the limits of government action? Mises was a utilitarian who argued that laws and institutions should be judged by the standard of whether and to what extent they further the goal of peaceful social cooperation. Society is the most important means through which men are able to pursue the ends that give meaning to their lives. But Mises was not what has become known in philosophical discussion as an act-utilitarian; that is, one who believes that a course of action or a policy is to be determined on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis. Rather, he was a rule-utilitarian, one who believes that any particular course of action or policy must be evaluated in terms of its consistency with general rules of personal and social conduct that reason and experience have accumulated as guides to conduct. Any action’s long-run consequences must be taken into consideration in terms of its consistency with and relationship to the preservation of the institutions essential for successful social interaction.¹² This is the meaning of the phrase Mises often used: the “rightly understood long-run interests” of the members of society.¹³

Thus his defense of democracy and constitutional limits on the powers of government was based on the reasoned judgment that history has demonstrated far too many times that the resort to nondemocratic and “extra-constitutional” means has led to violence, repression, abrogation of civil and economic liberties, and a breakdown of respect for law and the legal order, which destroys the long-run stability of society. The apparent gains and benefits from “strong men” and “emergency measures” in times of seeming crisis have always tended to generate costs and losses of liberty and prosperity in the longer run that more than exceed the supposed “short-run” stability, order, and security promised by such methods.

Classical Liberalism and International Peace

The benefits from social cooperation through a market-based division of labor, Mises argued, are not limited to a country’s borders. The gains from trade through specialization extend to all corners of the globe. Hence, the classical-liberal ideal is inherently cosmopolitan. Aggressive nationalism, in Mises’s view, not only threatens to bring death and destruction through war and conquest, but it also denies all men the opportunity to benefit from productive intercourse by imposing trade barriers and various other restrictions on the free movement of goods, capital, and people from one country to another. Prosperity and progress are artificially constrained within national boundaries. This perversely can create the conditions for war and conquest as some nations conclude that the only way to obtain the goods and resources available in another country is through invasion and violence. Eliminate all trade barriers and restrictions on the free movement of goods, capital, and men, and limit governments to the securing of each individual’s life, liberty, and property, and most of the motives and tensions that can lead to war will have been removed.

Mises also suggested that many of the bases for civil wars and ethnic violence would be removed if the right of self-determination were recognized in determining the borders between countries. Mises took great care to explain that by “self-determination” he did not mean that all those belonging to a particular racial, ethnic, linguistic, or religious group are to be forced into the same nation-state. He clearly stated that he meant the right of individual self-determination through plebiscite. That is, if the individuals in a town or region or district vote to join another nation, or wish to form their own independent country, they should have the freedom to do so.

There still may be minorities within these towns, regions, or districts, of course, that would have preferred to remain part of the country to which they belonged, or would have preferred to join a different country. But however imperfect self-determination may be, it would at least potentially reduce a good amount of the ethnic, religious, or linguistic tensions. The only lasting solution, Mises said, is the reduction of government involvement to those limited classical-liberal functions, so the state may not be used to impose harm or disadvantage on any individual or group in society for the benefit of others.¹⁴

Liberalism and the Social Good

Finally, Mises also discussed the question: for whose benefit does the classical liberal speak in society? Unlike virtually all other political and ideological movements, liberalism is a social philosophy of the common good. Both at the time when Mises wrote many of his works and now, political movements and parties often resort to the rhetoric of the common good and the general welfare, but in fact their goals are to use the power of government to benefit some groups at the expense of others.

Government regulations, redistributive welfare programs, trade restrictions and subsidies, tax policies, and monetary manipulation are employed to grant profit and employment privileges to special-interest groups that desire positions in society they are unable to attain on the open, competitive market. Corruption, hypocrisy, and disrespect for the law, as well as abridgments on the freedom of others, naturally follow.

What liberalism offers as an ideal and as a goal of public policy, Mises declared, is an equality of individual rights for all under the rule of law, with privileges and favors for none. It speaks for and defends the freedom of each individual and therefore is the voice of liberty for all. It wants every person to be free to apply himself in the pursuit of his own goals and purposes, so he and others can benefit from his talents and abilities through peaceful market transactions. Classical liberalism wants elimination of government intervention in human affairs so political power is not abusively applied at the expense of anyone in society.¹⁵

Mises was not unaware of the power of special-interest-group politics and the difficulty of opposing the concentrated influence of such groups in the halls of political power.¹⁶ But he insisted that the ultimate power in society resides in the power of ideas. It is ideas that move men to action, that make them bare their chests at barricades, or that embolden them to oppose wrongheaded policies and resist even the strongest of vested interests. It is ideas that have achieved all the victories that have been won by freedom over the centuries.

Neither political deception nor ideological compromise can win liberty in the twenty-first century. Only the power of ideas, clearly stated and forthrightly presented, can do so. And that is what stands out in Mises’s books and makes them one of the enduring sources of the case for freedom.

When Mises wrote many of his books in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, communism and fascism seemed irresistible forces in the world. Since then, their ideological fire has been extinguished in the reality of what they created and the unwillingness of tens of millions to live under their yoke. Nonetheless, many of their criticisms of the free market continue to serve as the rationales for the intrusions of the interventionist welfare state in every corner of society.¹⁷ And many of the contemporary arguments against “globalization” often resemble the criticisms leveled against free markets and free trade by European nationalists and socialists a hundred years ago.¹⁸

Mises’s arguments for individual freedom and the market economy in the pages of Socialism, Liberalism, Critique of Interventionism, Omnipotent Government, Bureaucracy, Planned Chaos, Human Action, and many others continue to ring true and remain relevant to our own times. It is what makes his works as important now as when he wrote them across the decades of the twentieth century.