Brooks does identify some real problems: for instance, that competition between the two major parties has become “fratricidal” and theatrical, and that it is creating massive budget deficits that, left unchecked, will prove catastrophic. But his diagnosis of the problem and his proposed solutions are fraught with fallacies.

He thinks that a revived patriotism will “lift people out of their partisan cliques,” yet the current partisan tribalism seems not to be lacking in patriotism. As is often the case, much hangs on how one understands the terms.

What makes a country great? One way to answer this involves claiming that there is something special about the ethnic makeup of the people who comprise it. For Mussolini there was something great, something special, about being Italian; his allies in Germany and Japan had similar theories about their respective nationalities. But that approach won’t quite work for America since it comprises people of many ethnicities.

Another way to understand national greatness is in terms of institutions and operating principles. But institutions and principles can change. What would make a country great on this model would be to have great institutions grounded in great principles. The Declaration of Independence is an example of this approach: Begin with a set of principles (moral equality of all persons, the natural right to live and be free, power only justified by consent) and then appeal to it when creating institutions (limited government of enumerated powers, republican structure with a democratic franchise, church-state separation, citizen militia, free trade). On this model America is great inasmuch as its institutions reflect its principles. A nation that claims to be dedicated to the principles outlined in the Declaration fails to be great when it invades foreign lands, abuses its citizens’ liberties, or forbids the free movement of people and goods.

Brooks’s exhortations reveal a lack of clarity about different senses of greatness, which comes out most clearly in his repeated use of false dichotomies. He asks, for example, “Do you really love your tax deduction more than America’s future greatness?” This alternative presupposes that it is only through higher taxes that a nation can become great. This in turn assumes that national greatness is only measured by things done by the government. What might these be? Scholarly, artistic, and technological greatness might well be better fostered by individuals having more money and freedom.

“Are you really unwilling,” he asks, “to sacrifice your Social Security cost-of-living adjustment at a time when soldiers and Marines are sacrificing their lives for their country in Afghanistan?” It’s not clear that solving other countries’ problems is how we measure our own greatness. In any event, this question also reveals a confusion: equating national greatness with government spending. Instead of asking whether Social Security payouts should rise with inflation, we might ask whether we would be better off as a nation of financially independent and responsible people who didn’t look to the political system for retirement income. Instead of wondering how high taxes have to be to fund overseas military campaigns, we might ask whether those campaigns need to be undertaken by the government (as opposed to either being undertaken by privateers or not at all). One way to measure American greatness might be the extent to which we exemplify peace and prosperity. The best way to achieve those ends would be to limit (or even better, eliminate) coercive interference with other people’s lives.

Lost Preeminence

Brooks laments a lost preeminence, but it isn’t clear what he means by that. He might be referring to a late-1940s preeminence, when America, having helped destroy the Nazis and their Japanese allies, led the way in rebuilding those nations and helping them become prosperous liberal democracies. But today’s “nation-building” looks very different. Unlike World War II, which actually ended, the current wars of nation-building seem perpetual, which suggests that a different course of action might have better results.

Or perhaps Brooks is referring to a time when American preeminence was measured in contrast to the privations of the old Soviet Union. In that case, let’s review the lessons of that contrast: Our former adversaries in the communist world were impoverished because tyranny doesn’t work as well as freedom. Besides the soul-crushing dehumanization of a system that doesn’t recognize fundamental liberties, the centrally planned socialist economic system turned out to be incapable of generating an abundance of goods and services. So if Brooks wants to see American preeminence regained, he might do better to promote liberalization of the world’s economic systems, which, again, is best done by example.

Brooks’s general rhetorical approach is to frame the debate between “liberals” and “conservatives” as a stubbornness game in which both sides must yield in order to bring about “a governing philosophy that believes in targeted federal efforts to arouse growth, social mobility and responsibility.” As it happens, the free-enterprise system does precisely these things, but most politicians can’t understand that this requires not action on their part, but inaction. They must stop interfering with people’s lives, not look for new ways to do it; protect liberty not abridge it. Brooks fallaciously conflates subsidies with tax reductions, but this implies that people are not the owners of their property. If the government takes money from Peter and gives it to Paul, that’s a subsidy to Paul. But if the government takes less money from Peter, that’s not a subsidy to Peter, since it’s Peter’s property to begin with. Brooks’s calls to end subsidies are correct, but the word doesn’t mean what he thinks it does.

In a way, then, Brooks is right: America has lost some of its greatness and needs to take steps to regain it.

But the problem isn’t people who want to bring the troops home or keep more of their money. Indeed, bringing the troops home would make it easier for people to keep more of their money. So would ending drug prohibition. So would allowing free trade and free human migration. National greatness, American-style, does not consist of the storied pomp of ancient lands, but rather of the opportunities illuminated by the lamp of liberty.

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated. –Thomas Paine

So began the first of 16 pamphlets under the title “The American Crisis,” by patriot Thomas Paine. These very words were read aloud to General George Washington’s forlorn and bedraggled men on Christmas 1776, the night before the Battle of Trenton.

Consider the backdrop: For the six months since the Declaration of Independence, Americans had been in almost constant retreat. To a disinterested observer, the American cause must have seemed hopelessly quixotic. To many patriots as well, it appeared all but lost. But Paine’s stirring words helped give the troops the morale boost they needed. The next day they accomplished the impossible, capturing nearly the entire force arrayed against them. Desertions plummeted and reenlistments soared.

Lovers of liberty need a little Paine today in the face of all the pain around us. It seems at times that the world has gone mad. Companies that lose billions are being bailed out by a government that loses trillions. The same federal Leviathan that outlaws competition in first-class mail delivery but still can’t deliver letters at a profit now supposedly knows how to run auto companies, banks, and insurance firms. Debt, deficits, bureaucracy, regulation, government spending—the depressing stuff already in frightful superabundance pre-financial crisis—now threaten our diminishing liberties more than ever before. The cover of the March 15 issue of Newsweek proclaimed, “We Are All Socialists Now.”

No Sunshine Soldiers

Maybe we have good reason to feel like those dispirited troops on Christmas Day in 1776, but we should learn from what they did just a day later. We can either be summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, or we can let the very principles we profess be our rallying cry for the battles ahead.

Eternal optimist though I am, I admit that pessimism really tugs at me when I read the morning papers. At every speech I give these days, there’s a sizable portion of the crowd that seems ready to crawl under a rock and let the world go to a statist hell in a hand basket.

But then I ask myself, what good purpose could a defeatist attitude possibly promote? Will it make me work harder for the causes I know are right? Is there anything about liberty that an election or events in Congress disproves? If I exude a pessimistic demeanor, will it help attract newcomers to the ideas I believe in? Is this the first time in history that believers in liberty have lost some battles? If we simply throw in the towel, will that enhance the prospects for future victories? Is our cause so menial as to justify deserting it because of some bad news or some new challenges? Do we turn back just because the hill we have to climb got a little steeper?

Readers of this magazine should know the answers to those questions.

This is not the time to abandon time-honored principles. I can’t speak for you but someday I want to go to my reward and be able to look back and say, “I never gave up. I never became part of the problem I tried to solve. I never gave the other side the luxury of winning anything without a rigorous, intellectual contest. I never missed an opportunity to do my best for what I believed in, and it never mattered what the odds or the obstacles were.”

A Tradition of Courage

Remember that we stand on the shoulders of many people who came before us and who persevered through far darker times. The American patriots who shed their blood and suffered through unspeakable hardships as they took on the world’s most powerful nation in 1776 are certainly among them. But I am also thinking of the brave men and women behind the Iron Curtain who resisted the greatest tyranny of the modern age, and won. I think of those like Hayek and Mises who kept the flame of liberty flickering in the 1930s and ’40s. I think of the heroes like Wilberforce and Clarkson who fought to end slavery and literally changed the conscience and character of a nation in the face of the most daunting of disadvantages. And I think of the Scots who, 456 years before the Declaration of Independence, put their lives on the line to repel English invaders with these thrilling words: “It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.”

As I think about what some of those great men and women faced, the obstacles before us today seem rather puny. We just need to gird our loins. We have to get a lot smarter and better at reaching more fellow citizens with a compelling alternative to the dead hand of the corrupt and incompetent State. We need to put confident smiles on our faces and sally forth.

Time to Rally

We should not squander a second feeling bad for ourselves. This is a moment when our true character, the stuff we’re really made of, will show itself. If we retreat, that would tell me we were never really worthy of the battle in the first place. But if we resolve to let these tough times build character and rally our dispirited friends to new levels of dedication, we will look back on this occasion someday with pride at how we handled it. Have you called a friend yet today to explain to him or her why liberty should be a top priority?

Nobody ever promised that liberty would be easy to attain or easy to keep. The world has always been full of greedy thieves and thugs, narcissistic power seekers, snake-oil charlatans, unprincipled ne’er-do-wells, and arrogant busybodies. Sometimes they’re nattily dressed in custom-tailored, pin-stripe suits and give good speeches; sometimes they’re bedecked in jewel-studded robes and give lousy speeches; on yet other occasions they wear well-worn street clothes and don’t bother with a speech at all as they hold you up. It doesn’t matter how they’re dressed or what they say. No true friend of liberty should just roll over and play dead for any of them.

Wipe that frown off your face and get to work. Liberty’s future depends on you.

So it is with patriotism, especially on Memorial Day in May, Flag Day in June, and Independence Day in July. Walk down Main Street America and ask one citizen after another what patriotism means and with few exceptions, you’ll get a passel of the most self-righteous but superficial and often dead-wrong answers. America’s Founders, the men and women who gave us reason to be patriotic in the first place, would think we’ve lost our way if they could see us now.

Since the infamous attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans in near unanimity have been “feeling” patriotic. For most, that sadly suffices to make one a solid patriot. But if I’m right, it’s time for Americans to take a refresher course.

Patriotism is not love of country, if by “country” you mean scenery—amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesty, and the like. Almost every country has pretty collections of rocks, water, and stuff that people grow and eat. If that’s what patriotism is all about, then Americans have precious little for which we can claim any special or unique love. And surely, patriotism cannot mean giving one’s life for a river or a mountain range.

Patriotism is not blind trust in anything our leaders tell us or do. That just replaces some lofty concepts with mindless goose-stepping.

Patriotism is not simply showing up to vote. You need to know a lot more about what motivates a voter before you judge his patriotism. He might be casting a ballot because he just wants something at someone else’s expense. Maybe he doesn’t much care where the politician he’s hiring gets it. Remember Dr. Johnson’s wisdom: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Waving the flag can be an outward sign of patriotism, but let’s not cheapen the term by ever suggesting that it’s anything more than a sign. And while it’s always fitting to mourn those who lost their lives simply because they resided on American soil, that too does not define patriotism.

People in every country and in all times have expressed feelings of something we flippantly call “patriotism,” but that just begs the question. What is this thing, anyway? Can it be so cheap and meaningless that a few gestures and feelings make you patriotic?

Not in my book.

I subscribe to a patriotism rooted in ideas that in turn gave birth to a country, but it’s the ideas that I think of when I’m feeling patriotic. I’m a patriotic American because I revere the ideas that motivated the Founders and compelled them, in many instances, to put their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the line.

What ideas? Read the Declaration of Independence again. Or, if you’re like most Americans these days, read it for the very first time. It’s all there. All men are created equal. They are endowed not by government but by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Premier among those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government must be limited to protecting the peace and preserving our liberties, and doing so through the consent of the governed. It’s the right of a free people to rid themselves of a government that becomes destructive of those ends, as our Founders did in a supreme act of courage and defiance more than two hundred years ago.

Call it freedom. Call it liberty. Call it whatever you want, but it’s the bedrock on which this nation was founded and from which we stray at our peril. It’s what has defined us as Americans. It’s what almost everyone who has ever lived on this planet has yearned for. It makes life worth living, which means it’s worth fighting and dying for.

An American Spin

I know that this concept of patriotism puts an American spin on the term. But I don’t know how to be patriotic for Uganda or Paraguay. I hope the Ugandans and Paraguayans have lofty ideals they celebrate when they feel patriotic, but whether or not they do is a question you’ll have to ask them. I can only tell you what patriotism means to me as an American.

I understand that America has often fallen short of the superlative ideas expressed in the Declaration. That hasn’t diminished my reverence for them, nor has it dimmed my hope that future generations of Americans will be re-inspired by them.

This brand of patriotism, in fact, gets me through the roughest and most cynical of times. My patriotism is never affected by any politician’s failures, or any shortcoming of some government policy, or any slump in the economy or stock market. I never cease to get that “rush” that comes from watching Old Glory flapping in the breeze, no matter how far today’s generations have departed from the original meaning of those stars and stripes. No outcome of any election, no matter how adverse, makes me feel any less devoted to the ideals our Founders put to pen in 1776. Indeed, as life’s experiences mount, the wisdom of what giants like Jefferson and Madison bestowed on us becomes ever more apparent to me. I get more fired up than ever to help others come to appreciate the same things.

During a recent visit to the land of my ancestors, Scotland, I came across a few very old words that gave me pause. Though they preceded our Declaration of Independence by 456 years, and come from three thousand miles away, I can hardly think of anything ever written here that more powerfully stirs in me the patriotism I’ve defined above. In 1320, in an effort to explain why they had spent the previous 30 years in bloody battle to expel the invading English, Scottish leaders ended their Declaration of Arbroath with this line: “It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.”

Freedom—understanding it, living it, teaching it, and supporting those who are educating others about its principles. That, my fellow Americans, is what patriotism should mean to each of us today.

As shocking as it sounds, this is the kind of outrage to expect when people surrender responsibility for their lives to others. Self-styled experts, such as the duty-to-die group, which includes former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, promote their views as good for “society.” In their case, they believe if people have reached a certain age they’ve lived long enough, whether they’re healthy or not.¹ Since many of these experts draw government paychecks, should it be surprising when some of their pronouncements get enacted into law?

Let’s say the devil with them and take our lives back. It starts with an understanding of that weighty word, responsibility.

As psychologist Nathaniel Branden puts it, responsibility “requires that you consciously become the cause of the results that you want. [It is refusing] to behave like a victim or to wait for someone to save you from life’s problems.”²

If one result we want is political freedom, how do we consciously create it? By understanding what it is and promoting it in our personal and professional lives.

Our founders made exacting efforts to institute a government limited to our common defense, one that lacked the power to be nanny, bully, or thief. Unfortunately, they also said the state should promote the general welfare, which has sanctioned a meddlers free-for-all. But as The Federalist Papers attempted to make clear, this was not their intention. If we look at history we can see why: this country was created by spectacular acts of individual initiative. An obvious example is the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But it spread beyond a handful of elites in Independence Hall.

On July 9, 1776, the Declaration was read publicly in New York City, the first such reading outside Philadelphia. It was a document of outrageous treason to the ruling British government. Responsible citizens, no matter how just their grievances, did not take up arms against the king.

Some of the audience thought differently. After the public reading, they marched to nearby Bowling Green Park, where stood a lead statue of the king surrounded by a large iron fence. In a frenzy, they ripped down the fence, lassoed the statue, and tore it off its marble pedestal. Adding appropriate punctuation, they smashed the icon to bits and melted the lead into 42,000 musket balls they later used to fire upon the king’s soldiers.³

By engaging in political treason against the most feared nation on earth, the colonists were signing their own death warrants, literally, for the right to take full responsibility for their lives.

As Representative Ron Paul, economist Walter Williams, and others have pointed out, the colonists put up with a lot less from a despotic king than we do from our elected officials.

It’s tempting to believe we no longer fight for our freedom because the notion of “we’re all in this together” has snuffed out personal responsibility. It hasn’t, but its decline is being fostered by widespread semantic corruption, in which “freedom” has taken on the Orwellian features of slavery. The new freedom is “inclusive,” we’re told–as if the original freedom were not–and this requires strong state rule and unlimited funding to ensure everyone is equally free.

Fortunately, specious reasoning like this hasn’t infected everyone. Two months before the Event That Changed Everything, citizens in Nashville, Tennessee, became incensed when they found out politicians were trying to institute a state income tax in an 11th-hour session of the legislature. Known reverently as the Tennessee Tea Party, over 1,000 people stormed the capitol, pounding on doors and hurling rocks at windows, one of which landed in Governor Don Sundquist’s office. The protesters rallied outside for several hours until the senate backed down and passed a budget with no new taxes.⁴

Tragically, the sounds we heard after the 9-11 attacks were more pleading than protesting. “Save us,” Americans cried to the government that failed to protect them.

Tightening Government’s Grip

Politicians listened once again, but this time they passed “security” measures that in fact do little more than tighten government’s grip on our lives. For instance, we’re supposed to be relieved to know our intelligence services can now read terrorist e-mails legally–leaving “terrorist” to be defined as they see fit–when they already know that major terrorist organizations rely on steganography (hiding files within a file) to communicate messages. According to computer forensic experts, it’s virtually impossible to even detect steganographic files, let alone discern their contents. So whose e-mail will Big Brother be reading?⁵

Thankfully, in the post-cataclysmic rush to subdue freedom there have been significant acts of grassroots rebellion. One of the most brilliant came on September 15, 2001, the first day the government allowed airlines to resume service. As United Flight 564 pulled away from its gate in Denver en route to Washington, D.C., the pilot told his passengers their lives were in their own hands now–the government could not protect them.

“If someone or several people stand up and say they are hijacking this plane,” he told them, “I want you all to stand up together. Then take whatever you have available to you and throw it at them. Throw it at their faces and heads so they will have to raise their hands to protect themselves.

“We will not allow them to take over this plane. I find it interesting that the U.S. Constitution begins with the words ‘We, the people.’ That’s who we are, the people, and we will not be defeated.”⁶

Can you imagine the outcry to such an announcement before 9-11? The pilot would have likely been furloughed for stress, if not fired, and many of the passengers would have filed complaints.

On this day they broke into sustained applause, as did travelers on other flights who heard similar announcements. The passengers became instant patriots–in the sense of sharing with our founders their willingness to take responsibility for their fate.

People will eventually learn that in allowing the government to run their lives, it’s ruining them instead. It won’t happen overnight, but they will start demanding to have control back. They will insist that government rid itself of anything that interferes with its proper function of securing our right to live free.

They will see that their abnegation has become America’s worst enemy by making government an unaccountable brute that threatens their very existence. On that day, self-responsibility, which has manifest survival value, will no longer be an obsolete ideal to be legislated into extinction.

George Smith is a freelance writer.

Notes

1. See Stuart Anderson, “The World According to Dick Lamm,” August 22, 1996.
2. Nathaniel Branden, “It’s Your Life So Make the Most of It“.
3. See.
4. Leon Alligood, Rob Johnson, and Duren Cheek, “Crowd Hurls Rocks, Rhetoric to Protest Tax“, The Tennessean, July 13, 2001.
5. Robert Vamosi, “How the NSA Is Monitoring You-And Why It’s Wasting Its Time,” ZDNet, June 27, 2001.
6. David Remnick, “Many Voices,” The New Yorker, October 15, 2001.

What I’m referring to goes deeper and actually is insidious. Political leaders, pundits, television historians, and regular people longingly look back on the war as a grand time when, as a commercial for recordings of war-era songs put it, “we all pulled together.” Apparently, an era of peace, freedom, and privacy just can’t compare.

The commentators go further and lament that the baby-boom generation didn’t face something comparable: there was no great, unifying crisis. (Alas, Vietnam does not measure up.) Roosevelt-Johnson hagiographer Doris Kearns Goodwin recently whined that no leader has come along to “challenge” the boomer generation. These are the same people who swoon when they see the film of President Kennedy saying, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” (Now there’s a false alternative!)

What’s wrong with all this? Two things. First, there is the implication that a society’s commitment to a single cause is a good in itself. This is sheer collectivism. As a general principle, if a free society is attacked and its members must drop what they were doing to defend themselves, it is only so that they can resume their private lives as soon as possible. Solidarity at best is an emergency measure. Second, those nostalgic for what war produces on the home front ache to make it the normal condition minus the blood and destruction. Thus the unending search for “the moral equivalent of war” (William James’s phrase) in the form of destructive government crusades for this, that, and the other.

What it all comes down to is a thinly veiled collectivism, in which individuals are increasingly deprived of control over their own lives and resources—in the mantle of a sappy patriotism.

Rather than indulging in such nostalgia, friends of liberty should identify it for what it is.

* * *

When independent bookstores found themselves at a competitive disadvantage against Barnes & Noble and Borders, they—what else?—asked the government to do something. The economic theory they used to make their case was faulty, writes Gary Galles.

Social Security is palpably a bad deal, yet for many it’s the most wonderful thing the government has ever done. Hugh Macaulay resolves the paradox.

With the mapping of the human genome, the boon to health may be unfathomable. But some fear that genetic testing may permit insurance companies and others to know too much. Michael Rupert and E. Frank Stephenson counsel against the government’s interfering with the market for genetic information.

China doesn’t look the way it looks in old movies. The difference isn’t accounted for simply by the presence of Golden Arches and a finger-licking colonel, however, as Larry Tritten relates from personal experience.

Biodiversity appears to be valued more highly when someone else is forced to pay for it. The result, according to David Laband, is bad public policy.

When the Irish potato crop failed in 1845, laissez-faire capitalism suffered yet another black eye. But like the others, this one was undeserved. Stephen Davies sets the record straight.

With the re-election of the Blair government in Britain, another European nation remains in the hands of socialists in free marketeer’s clothing. Norman Barry strips away the disguise of the clever leftists. There was supposed to be a conference in Quebec City on making the Western hemisphere a free-trade zone. But beneath the trade rhetoric was the same old protectionist song. Pierre Lemieux scrutinizes the Third Summit of the Americas.

The news commentators talk about Alan Greenspan as though he were the helmsman steering the economy with pinpoint precision. But can you imagine what it would take to run an economy? Christopher Mayer gives it a try.

The federal government taxes producers in the 50 states and then sends some of the money back, giving rise to a list of states that apparently either win or lose in the transfer process. That’s the collectivist manner of looking at the issue. Methodological individualism brings Christopher Westley to another conclusion.

A prominent Catholic cleric has written that workers have a moral obligation to join unions. That brought him into conflict with a Catholic teacher who claimed that being required to join a union violated the church’s social teachings. Who has the better argument? Charles Baird sorts it all out.

Here is what our columnists have come up with. Donald Boudreaux urges Congress to enact energy price caps. Lawrence Reed looks at education tax credits. Doug Bandow defends the pharmaceutical companies. Thomas Szasz exposes pseudocritics of psychiatry. Dwight Lee rejects command-and-control environmentalism. Mark Skousen sees new appreciation of F. A. Hayek. Russell Roberts asks if trade harms the poor. And Roger Garrison, hearing claims that the economy is naturally cyclical, retorts, “It Just Ain’t So!”

Books coming under review this month focus on the Clinton record, the Great Depression, the chairman of the Fed, George Soros’s views on capitalism, the failure of education reform, and Henry Wallace.

He proceeded to offer a history of the bathtub in the United States. President Millard Fillmore had installed the first one in the White House in 1851. This had been a brave act on Fillmore’s part, since the health risks of using a bathtub had been the subject of great controversy within the medical establishment. Indeed, Mencken observed, “Boston early in 1845 made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862, it was repealed.”

“A Neglected Anniversary” was the direct result of the anti-German propaganda that dominated the newspapers in the years before and during America’s involvement in World War I. Mencken was an established and respected newspaperman. He had started his career as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899, becoming city editor in 1904. In 1906 he began his long association with the Baltimore Sun. Yet during America’s anti-German period, he could not get material on World War I published because of his pro-German views, which sprang from a love of the culture rather than from its politics. Mencken was enraged by the popular portrayal of Germans as “barbarous Huns” who committed atrocities such as the widely reported bayoneting of Belgian babies. (Although this accusation had been absolutely accepted by the American people, it was later proven to be pure Allied propaganda.)

Mencken attempted to infuse some real-world perspective on the war into American newspapers. Near the end of 1916 he traveled as a reporter to the eastern front to cover the hostilities, but the breakdown of diplomatic relations between Germany and America forced him to return. At home he discovered to his horror that most of his dispatches had not been published. Edward A. Martin writes in H. L. Mencken and the Debunkers, “It was 1917; Mencken, passionately pro-German, felt muzzled by the excesses of patriotism that dominated the attitude of Americans. The ‘Free Lance’ column [Mencken's daily column in the Evening Sun] had been a casualty, in 1915, of his unpopular views of the war. The war and all of its ramifications were excluded from his writing until after 1919.”

Thus, Mencken—a political animal to the core—turned to nonpolitical writing in order to publish. A Book of Prefaces, a collection of literary criticism, appeared in 1917. His book on the position of women in society, In Defense of Women, was issued in 1918. And the first edition of Mencken’s magnum opus, The American Language, emerged in 1919. He also wrote for the literary magazine he co-edited with George Nathan, The Smart Set.

But Mencken was far from sanguine about having his political views suppressed. He complained to Ellery Sedgwick, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, whose pages were also closed to him: “It is, in fact, out of the question for a man of my training and sympathies to avoid the war. . . . How can I preach upon the dangerous hysterias of democracy without citing the super-obvious spy scare with its typical putting of public credulity to political and personal uses?”

Seeking an Outlet

His restless frustration found vent in “A Neglected Anniversary.” Like so much of Mencken’s writing, the article was not quite what it seemed to be on the surface. It had levels of meaning. “A Neglected Anniversary” was a satire destined to become a classic of this genre of literature in much the same manner as Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which satirized English policy in Ireland. In the article, Mencken spoke in an eloquent tone of mock reason, which was supported by bogus citations and manufactured statistics.

In short, his history of the bathtub was an utter hoax set within the framework of historical fact.

The modern bathtub had not been invented in Cincinnati. Fillmore had not introduced it into the White House. The anti-bathtub laws Mencken cited were, to use one of his favorite words, “buncombe.”

Calling the hoax “an amazing mixture of obvious fact and hard to refute fiction,” the author of An Un-Neglected History, P. J. Wingate, observed, “The story said that Millard Fillmore became President in 1850. True. It was easy to look that up. Also it said, obliquely, that Gen. Charles M. Conrad was Secretary of War under Fillmore. True again.” As for the “hard to refute fiction,” Wingate continued: “Mencken set a couple of very carefully hidden traps. He quoted from The Western Medical Repository of April 23, 1843, and the Christian Register of July 17, 1857. No editor or scholar in the land could find these imaginary journals but they had plausible names.” Moreover, Mencken’s citation of specific dates lent credibility to the quotations so that researchers might well assume that their own archives were incomplete.

The journalist’s purpose was not “good clean fun,” though it is certain Mencken enjoyed the hoax. “A Neglected Anniversary” was an act of merry contempt directed at journalists who blithely reported fiction as fact and at readers who were so gullible as to believe blatantly false reports without question. As he later wrote, “One recalls the gaudy days of 1914–1918. How much that was then devoured by the newspaper readers of the world was actually true? Probably not one per cent. Ever since the war ended learned and laborious men have been at work examining and exposing its fictions.”

Through his hoax, Mencken demonstrated to himself and to selected friends that the American public would believe any absurdity, as long as it appealed to their imagination or emotions. They would even believe a nonexistent inventor in Cincinnati, Adam Thompson, had hired blacks to haul water “from the Ohio river in buckets” to his bathtub because the city then lacked running water.

Keeping Quiet

Content with his private joke, Mencken remained silent about the hoax until a follow-up article, “Melancholy Reflections,” appeared in the Chicago Tribune on May 23, 1926, some eight years later. This was Mencken’s confession. It was also an appeal for reason to the American public.

His hoax was a joke gone bad. “A Neglected Anniversary” had been printed and reprinted hundreds of times in the intervening years. Mencken had been receiving letters of corroboration from some readers and requests for more details from others. His history of the bathtub had been cited repeatedly by other writers and was starting to find its way into reference works. As Mencken noted in “Melancholy Reflections,” his “facts” “began to be used by chiropractors and other such quacks as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. They began to be cited by medical men as proof of the progress of public hygiene.” And, because Fillmore’s presidency had been so uneventful, on the date of his birthday calendars often included the only interesting tidbit of information they could find: Fillmore had introduced the bathtub into the White House. (Even the later scholarly disclosure that Andrew Jackson had a bathtub installed there in 1834—years before Mencken claimed it was even invented—did not diminish America’s conviction that Fillmore was responsible.)

Mencken speculated on the probable response to his confession, “The Cincinnati boomers, who have made much of the boast that the bathtub industry, now running to $200,000,000 a year, was started in their town, will charge me with spreading lies against them. The chiropractors will damn me for blowing up their ammunition. The medical gents, having swallowed my quackery, will denounce me as a quack for exposing them.” He wondered whether disclosing the truth about the bathtub would lead to a renewed cry for his deportation to Russia as a Bolshevik.

One can only speculate on whether the actual response to “Melancholy Reflections” surprised Mencken, who was a practiced cynic by then. Many people believed that his confession, and not the original article, was the hoax. Mencken felt impelled to pen a second follow-up appeal, titled “Hymn to the Truth.” Writing in the Chicago Tribune of July 25, 1926, he commented, “The Herald printed my article [“Melancholy Reflections”] on page 7 of its editorial section . . . with a two column cartoon labeled satirically, ‘The American public will swallow anything.’ And then on June 13, three weeks later, in the same editorial section but promoted to page 1, this same Herald reprinted my 10 year old fake—soberly and as a piece of news!”

Mencken’s history of the American bathtub had been so graceful and charmingly constructed that people simply wished to believe it. Since then, curious researchers have thoroughly discredited Mencken’s bathtub “facts.” Biographies of Mencken feature the hoax he had played so well that even he could not debunk it. (All the bathtub pieces and more are compiled in The Bathtub Hoax and Other Blasts and Bravos, edited by Robert McHugh.) Yet references to Fillmore’s first bathtub still can be found. That piece of fiction has even made it into the Age of the Internet. The Internet Public Library’s page on Fillmore, part of its series on presidents, lists under “Points of Interest” the following: “The White House’s first library, bathtub and kitchen stove were installed by the Fillmores.” (See http://www.ipl.org/ref/POTUS/mfillmore.html.)

It is easy to laugh and lose sight of the motive behind “A Neglected Anniversary.” Mencken wished to demonstrate the dramatic inaccuracies of many newspaper accounts, which are too often swallowed whole by uncritical readers. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in periods of war, when great efforts are made to stir the public’s emotions so that it unquestioningly supports the government’s policies. When reading accounts of war, it is valuable to consider Mencken’s estimate that “probably not one per cent” of it is true.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World. He formerly served as a special assistant to President Reagan.

Advocates of limited government have long known that war and preparation for war are enemies of liberty. War obviously destroys lives and consumes wealth—new technologies have made genocide a simple matter of pushing a button. But war has another, long-lasting consequence: it centralizes power. “War is the health of the state,” observed Randolph Bourne.

Many conservatives were willing to pay this high price during the Cold War because of the threat of hegemonic communism. But now America reigns supreme internationally. Those who believe in individual liberty must work to limit government power internationally as well as domestically.

John V. Denson’s The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories provides a desperately needed call to arms. As he explains: “[B]ecause liberty is so fragile, its true defender recognizes that war is its greatest enemy, and therefore the true patriot is often the courageous individual who opposes a particular war because he recognizes that it is unjust—that it would be fought for the wrong purposes or that the risk for the loss of liberty is greater than any benefit to be gained by the war.”

The Costs of War emphasizes the fragility of liberty and chronicles the devastating impact of past conflicts. This comprehensive volume covers everything from the War of Northern Aggression (sometimes called the Civil War) to the role of conscription and the record of Winston Churchill.

Denson leads off with a sweeping essay on U.S. history. The nation’s founders feared the costs of war, which is why they worked to prevent intervention in foreign conflicts. Their fears were well founded: the Civil War and Spanish-American War both spurred the growth of federal power. World War I, however, was a truly epochal event. Not only did the national government institute mass conscription and seize control of the economy, but, as Denson relates, “President Wilson followed Lincoln’s example and ruthlessly crushed the civil liberties of those Americans who opposed his war.” Although government power receded some after the conflict, World War II and the Cold War fueled state growth anew.

The lack of serious opposition to warlike policies today conflicts with America’s long anti-interventionist tradition, of which Justin Raimondo, of the Center for Libertarian Studies, writes: “It wasn’t just the founders who opposed fighting other people’s wars. There was strong opposition to the Spanish-American War and World War I—which is why Wilson resorted to jackboot tactics against his critics.”

What makes The Costs of War particularly valuable is its willingness to slaughter sacred cows. Such as Abraham Lincoln and his war for the Union—which ended up killing more than 600,000 people, distorting the constitutional order, and violating civil and political liberties. History professor Richard Gamble explores Lincoln’s ugly legacy of the “destruction of the old Republic, a more modest federation with a regard for localism and states’ rights, a sense of limits, and a relative freedom from foreign entanglement.”

Equally subversive, but also persuasive, is the analysis of Winston Churchill’s record by historian Ralph Raico. There is perhaps no more venerated figure from World War II, but Raico’s view is rather less positive. He contends that “Churchill was from first to last a Man of the State, of the welfare state and of the warfare state.” Indeed, argues Raico, war “was his lifelong passion.” This is the record that virtually no one knows.

Some of the impacts of war are unintended and even unimagined. Allan Carlson of the Rockford Institute explains how war swells the state; in turn, “as the state grows, the family declines.” He warns that the military today is “being used to re-engineer our society to serve the total state.” He therefore calls on conservatives to “cast off lingering delusions about the ‘conservative traditions’ of the military.”

Real patriotism means risking the lives and wealth of Americans when their future as a free people is at stake. The Costs of War illustrates why there may be no more important duty today for advocates of limited government than to steadfastly oppose war.

A constitutional amendment that would forbid the desecration of American flags is again percolating in the nation’s capital. As of this writing, the immediate prospects for passage look bleak. But this amendment has a way of never fully going away. Many opponents of the measure trot out free speech arguments. And although concerns about free expression are important, these traditional arguments miss a more central political principle that the amendment and resulting laws against flag burning would jeopardize: property rights. The amendment would undermine key liberties for which the flag stands.

Arguments for Flag Desecration Laws

Those who uphold laws against flag desecration typically speak of the important values that the flag symbolizes. They claim that legally allowing flag burning is tantamount to rejecting the freedoms that the flag represents. They say it is vital that we express our respect for human freedom by institutionalizing penalties against those who would defile the national symbol.

Permitting flag burning, the amendment’s proponents continue, sends the wrong message to America’s youth, America’s voters, and observers abroad. When the young see protesters publicly burning a flag with impunity, they may believe that American freedoms are cheap. They may then think that the nation’s commitment to uphold those freedoms is fleeting. Permitting flag burning may also undermine a key basis for community among America’s voters. With protesters burning flags, voters may lose a vision of shared citizenship and be less committed to the American ideal. Flag burning is also supposedly a slap in the face to all Americans who suffered in wartime to secure freedoms for everyone. Lastly, foreign observers who see Americans burning their own flag may be less inclined to support America’s international policies aimed at securing freedom. Advocates fear that foreigners will think: if Americans cannot take their own freedoms seriously, then we need not take seriously the moral reasoning they present to the world.

The Free Speech Argument Against Flag Desecration Laws

People who burn flags intend to send a message by doing so. This is what makes flag burning a form of expression. Some flag burners take offense at various American foreign policy measures. (Recall the nightly news broadcasts last summer showing Sudanese burning American flags in Khartoum after the United States bombed what it deemed a suspicious pharmaceutical factory.) Some individuals may burn flags as a way of saying America is not true to its own values. Others simply despise American ideals and set the flag aflame. In any case, people who burn flags do so deliberately in order to send a public message of protest.

The First Amendment to the Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Constitutional scholars and legal theorists have long argued over the meaning of this amendment. There is, however, a rough consensus on two ideas: (1) the amendment protects peaceful expression, popular or unpopular, but (2) the Framers clearly did not intend for it to license any and all forms of expression. Consequently, room has been made for laws against libel, slander, and obscenity. Contrary to hyperbolic op-eds railing against flaming protests, burning a flag is not “obscene.” At worst, it is despicable. At best, it is a valuable form of political speech.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, which in turn protects the liberty to say wrong-headed, bigoted, stupid, vicious things. Such protection is crucial; otherwise freedom of speech would reduce to the empty freedom to say only the right, the true, and the good. That would present a disturbing practical difficulty: some bureaucrat would have to decide what is permissible speech, because in today’s pluralistic society, there is little consensus on many aspects of the right, the true, and the good. Freedom of speech, however, is the freedom to say what one wishes without having to solicit the permission of anyone first.

Freedom of speech guarantees a healthy, open marketplace of ideas. More fundamentally, it includes the freedom to say things that others might not like. Those who are offended should respond with reasoned arguments of their own and not by passing a law. If individuals were only free to say things that others liked, public and private discussions would be banal, stilted, and oppressed. A law against flag burning forbids a form of expression simply because others do not like the message. Government exists, however, to protect individual rights. It should not protect citizens from being offended. We can stipulate that many acts of flag burning are offensive. Simply being offensive, however, does not violate individual rights.

The Property Rights Argument Against Flag Burning

The free speech argument against the proposed amendment is powerful; people must be free to offend if free speech is to count for anything. There is, however, one time when flag burning should be against the law: when it’s someone else’s flag.

Suppose you own a flag. Suppose that Chris takes your flag without your consent and sets it on fire in the public square. What Chris has done ought to be forbidden (and punished) not because he burned a flag, but because he burned your flag. Chris ought to be held accountable just as if he had taken a sledgehammer to your concrete garden gnomes without your permission. He destroyed your property.

People who debate the flag issue often lose sight of this important fact: you cannot burn “the American flag” because there is no such thing as “the American flag.” There are only flags. The “American flag” is an idea that cannot be burned. A particular flag, however, can be burned. Whether it is permissible to do so turns on whose flag it is.

Being a material object, a flag usually comes into the world attached to someone as property. A law against flag burning would forbid you from disposing of your property as you see fit. Let us assume that burning your flag does not pose a threat to public safety (that is, you don’t ignite and toss it into an unsuspecting crowd). In that case, when you burn your flag, your actions are not importantly different from taking your paper and your ink to print up pamphlets that say anything (or even nothing) at all. The pamphlets are your property, and so too is your flag. Passers-by can take your message or leave it.

To forbid flag burning is to forbid you from disposing of your property in ways that offend others. But property rights protect freedom of action for which one need not solicit the permission of others. A right to your flag guarantees a right to burn it, stomp on it, spit on it, or turn it into underwear if you so choose. Your flag is your property. If someone does not like what you do with your property, he should not lock you up; he should persuade you to change your ways or he should have nothing to do with you. Consider the absurdity of having rights to use your property only in ways others find acceptable.

Permissible Flag Burning and Some Problems

When a flag becomes old and tattered, there is a prescribed way to dispose of it. Part of the process involves burning it. If flag burning were forbidden, presumably it would not be just any flag burning that would be illegal. It would only be flag-burning-while-thinking-nasty-thoughts-about-the-flag. If persons are to be punished not for what they do, but for what they think, we will have marched a long way from the freedoms on which this nation was founded, and headed dangerously closer to tyranny.

There are further difficulties with laws against flag burning. We all know what an American flag is supposed to look like. It has 50 stars and 13 stripes, all arranged in a certain pattern. Suppose, however, you were to sew a piece of fabric that looked just like a current American flag, except that it had 49 stars or 50 six-sided stars (instead of five-sided stars), or white stripes on the very top and very bottom (instead of red), or a blue field that was only six stripes high (instead of seven). Strictly speaking, those pieces of fabric would not be American flags. They would be imperfect approximations of American flags. Would a law against flag burning forbid the desecration of any piece of fabric that even looked like an American flag? What if one takes a big piece of white paper and writes in big boldface letters, “This is an American Flag,” and sets it on fire? Perhaps the courts would rule that any act intended to make onlookers believe that one was burning an American flag would be covered by the amendment. Once again, however, the government would be getting into the business of punishing people for having bad thoughts. This is not the mark of a government in a free society.

What the Flag Means

The flag is a symbol of American values such as self-determination and freedom from oppression. Throughout our history, members of the armed services suffered on behalf of freedom, not on behalf of a piece of fabric. They did not put their lives on the line so that busybodies and bureaucrats could tell us what we can or cannot say and what we can or cannot do with our property.

No doubt, flag burners are often quite vicious, detestable persons whose contempt for American values deserves our contempt. But the law should not forbid all vicious conduct. We can privately refuse to have anything to do with such persons. We can hold them up to public scorn. We might display our patriotism to counter the flag-burning demonstration. Such acts would help solidify the shared citizenship that flag-burning amendment advocates so often invoke. Those informal responses would also help send the message that some matters are best left to private individuals and the free choices they make. Those who take freedom seriously are civilized enough to put flag burners in their place without beating them up or locking them up.

Supporters of laws to punish people who destroy a flag betray their belief that the values the flag symbolizes cannot prevail on their own merits. They seem to think that freedom demands government-mandated respect. But American ideals are sturdy enough to await voluntary respect. Let us repudiate flag burners and persuade (not force) individuals to respect the flag. We must not, however, cheapen the freedoms the flag represents with an amendment that would restrict individual rights.

During the last year the public has been familiarized with descriptions of Spain and of Spanish methods of doing things until the name of Spain has become a symbol for a certain well-defined set of notions and policies. On the other hand, the name of the United States has always been, for all of us, a symbol for a state of things, a set of ideas and traditions, a group of views about social and political affairs. Spain was the first, and for a long time the greatest, of the modern imperialistic states. The United States, by its historical origin, its traditions, and its principles, is the chief representative of the revolt and reaction against that kind of a state. I intend to show that, by the line of action now proposed to us, which we call expansion and imperialism, we are throwing away some of the most important elements of the American symbol and are adopting some of the most important elements of the Spanish symbol. We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies. Expansionism and imperialism are nothing but the old philosophies of national prosperity which have brought Spain to where she now is. Those philosophies appeal to national vanity and national cupidity. They are seductive, especially upon the first view and the most superficial judgment, and therefore it cannot be denied that they are very strong for popular effect. They are delusions, and they will lead us to ruin unless we are hard-headed enough to resist them.

The original and prime cause of the war was that it was a move of partisan tactics in the strife of parties at Washington. As soon as it seemed resolved upon, a number of interests began to see their advantage in it and hastened to further it. It was necessary to make appeals to the public which would bring quite other motives to the support of the enterprise and win the consent of classes who would never consent to either financial or political jobbery. Such appeals were found in sensational assertions which we had no means to verify, in phrases of alleged patriotism, in statements about Cuba and the Cubans which we now know to have been entirely untrue.

There is another observation, however, about the war which is of far greater importance: that is, that it was a gross violation of self-government. We boast that we are a self-governing people, and in this respect, particularly, we compare ourselves with pride with older nations. . . . The war with Spain was precipitated upon us headlong, without reflection or deliberation, and without any due formulation of public opinion. Whenever a voice was raised in behalf of deliberation and the recognized maxims of statesmanship, it was howled down in a storm of vituperation and cant. Everything was done to make us throw away sobriety of thought and calmness of judgment and to inflate all expressions with sensational epithets and turgid phrases. It cannot be denied that everything in regard to the war has been treated in an exalted strain of sentiment and rhetoric very unfavorable to the truth. . . . Patriotism is being prostituted into a nervous intoxication which is fatal to an apprehension of truth. It builds around us a fool’s paradise, and it will lead us into errors about our position and relations just like those which we have been ridiculing in the case of Spain.

It has become almost a doctrine with us that patriotism requires that we should hold our tongues while our interests, our institutions, our most sacred traditions, and our best established maxims have been trampled underfoot. There is no doubt that moral courage is the virtue which is more needed than any other in the modern democratic state, and that truckling to popularity is the worst political vice. The press, the platform, and the pulpit have all fallen under this vice, and there is evidence that the university also, which ought to be the last citadel of truth, is succumbing to it likewise. I have no doubt that the conservative classes of this country will yet look back with great regret to their acquiescence in the events of 1898 and the doctrines and precedents which have been silently established. Let us be well assured that self-government is not a matter of flags and Fourth of July orations, nor yet of strife to get offices. Eternal vigilance is the price of that as of every other political good. The perpetuity of self-government depends on the sound political sense of the people, and sound political sense is a matter of habit and practice. We can give it up and we can take instead pomp and glory. That is what Spain did. She had as much self-government as any country in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The union of the smaller states into one big one gave an impulse to her national feeling and national development. The discovery of America put into her hands the control of immense territories. National pride and ambition were stimulated. Then came the struggle with France for world-dominion, which resulted in absolute monarchy and bankruptcy for Spain. She lost self-government and saw her resources spent on interests which were foreign to her, but she could talk about an empire on which the sun never set and boast of her colonies, her gold mines, her fleets and armies and debts. She had glory and pride, mixed, of course, with defeat and disaster, such as must be experienced by any nation on that course of policy; and she grew weaker in her industry and commerce and poorer in the status of the population all the time. She has never been able to recover real self-government yet. If we Americans believe in self-government, why do we let it slip away from us? Why do we barter it away for military glory as Spain did?

We assume that what we like and practice, and what we think better, must come as a welcome blessing to Spanish-Americans and Filipinos. This is grossly and obviously untrue. They hate our ways. They are hostile to our ideas. Our religion, language, institutions, and manners offend them. They like their own ways, and if we appear amongst them as rulers, there will be social discord in all the great departments of social interest. The most important thing which we shall inherit from the Spaniards will be the task of suppressing rebellions. If the United States takes out of the hands of Spain her mission, on the ground that Spain is not executing it well, and if this nation in its turn attempts to be school-mistress to others, it will shrivel up into the same vanity and self-conceit of which Spain now presents an example. To read our current literature one would think that we were already well on the way to it. Now, the great reason why all these enterprises which begin by saying to somebody else, We know what is good for you better than you know yourself and we are going to make you do it, are false and wrong is that they violate liberty; or, to turn the same statement into other words, the reason why liberty, of which we Americans talk so much, is a good thing is that it means leaving people to live out their own lives in their own way, while we do the same. If we believe in liberty, as an American principle, why do we not stand by it? Why are we going to throw it away to enter upon a Spanish policy of dominion and regulation?

We are told by all the imperialists that these people [of the former Spanish possessions] are not fit for liberty and self-government; that it is rebellion for them to resist our beneficence; that we must send fleets and armies to kill them if they do it; that we must devise a government for them and administer it ourselves; that we may buy them or sell them as we please, and dispose of their “trade” for our own advantage. What is that but the policy of Spain to her dependencies? What can we expect as a consequence of it? Nothing but that it will bring us where Spain is now.

The doctrine that we are to take away from other nations any possessions of theirs which we think that we could manage better than they are managing them, or that we are to take in hand any countries which we do not think capable of self-government, is one which will lead us very far. With that doctrine in the background, our politicians will have no trouble to find a war ready for us the next time that they come around to the point where they think that it is time for us to have another. We are told that we must have a big army hereafter. What for; unless we propose to do again by and by what we have just done? In that case our neighbors have reason to ask themselves whom we will attack next. They must begin to arm, too, and by our act the whole western world is plunged into the distress under which the eastern world is groaning. Here is another point in regard to which the conservative elements in the country are making a great mistake to allow all this militarism and imperialism to go on without protest. It will be established as a rule that, whenever political ascendency is threatened, it can be established again by a little war, filling the minds of the people with glory and diverting their attention from their own interests. Hardheaded old Benjamin Franklin hit the point when, referring back to the days of Marlborough, he talked about the “pest of glory.” The thirst for glory is an epidemic which robs a people of their judgment, seduces their vanity, cheats them of their interests, and corrupts their consciences.

Of the interpretation of clauses in the Constitution I am not competent to speak, but the Constitution is the organic law of this confederated state in which we live, and therefore it is the description of it as it was planned and as it is. The question at stake is nothing less than the integrity of this state in its most essential elements. The expansionists have recognized this fact by already casting the Constitution aside. The military men, of course, have been the first to do this. It is of the essence of militarism that under it military men learn to despise constitutions, to sneer at parliaments, and to look with contempt on civilians. Some of the imperialists are not ready to go quite so fast as yet. They have remonstrated against the military doctrine, but that only proves that the military men see the point at issue better than the others do. Others say that if the legs of the Constitution are too short to straddle the gulf between the old policy and the new, they can be stretched a little, a view of the matter which is as flippant as it is in bad taste.

The question of imperialism, then, is the question whether we are going to give the lie to the origin of our own national existence by establishing a colonial system of the old Spanish type, even if we have to sacrifice our existing civil and political system to do it. I submit that it is a strange incongruity to utter grand platitudes about the blessings of liberty, etc., which we are going to impart to these people, and to begin by refusing to extend the Constitution over them, and still more, by throwing the Constitution into the gutter here at home. If you take away the Constitution, what is American liberty and all the rest? Nothing but a lot of phrases.

It seems as if this new policy was destined to thrust a sword into every joint in our historical and philosophical system. Our ancestors revolted against the colonial and navigation system, but as soon as they got their independence, they fastened a navigation system on themselves. The consequence is that our industry and commerce are today organized under a restrictive system which is the direct offspring of the old Spanish restrictive system, and is based on the same ideas of economic policy; viz., that statesmen can devise a prosperity policy for a country which will do more for it than a spontaneous development of the energy of the people and the resources of the territory would do.

Everywhere you go on the continent of Europe at this hour you see the conflict between militarism and industrialism. You see the expansion of industrial power pushed forward by the energy, hope, and thrift of men, and you see the development arrested, diverted, crippled, and defeated by measures which are dictated by military considerations. At the same time the press is loaded down with discussions about political economy, political philosophy, and social policy. They are discussing poverty, labor, socialism, charity, reform, and social ideals, and are boasting of enlightenment and progress, at the same time that the things which are done are dictated by none of these considerations, but only by military interests. It is militarism which is eating up all the products of science and art, defeating the energy of the population and wasting its savings. It is militarism which forbids the people to give their attention to the problems of their own welfare and to give their strength to the education and comfort of their children. It is militarism which is combating the grand efforts of science and art to ameliorate the struggle for existence.

Now what will hasten the day when our present advantages will wear out and when we shall come down to the conditions of the older and densely populated nations? The answer is: war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, political jobbery—in a word, imperialism.

The point which I have tried to make in this lecture is that expansion and imperialism are at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people, and that they will plunge us into a network of difficult problems and political perils, which we might have avoided, while they offer us no corresponding advantage in return.

Of course “principles,” phrases, and catch-words are always invented to bolster up any policy which anybody wants to recommend. So in this case. The people who have led us on to shut ourselves in, and who now want us to break out, warn us against the terrors of “isolation.” Our ancestors all came here to isolate themselves from the social burdens and inherited errors of the old world. When the others are all over ears in trouble, who would not be isolated in freedom from care? When the others are crushed under the burden of militarism, who would not be isolated in peace and industry? When the others are all struggling under debt and taxes, who would not be isolated in the enjoyment of his own earnings for the benefit of his own family? When the rest are all in a quiver of anxiety, lest at a day’s notice they may be involved in a social cataclysm, who would not be isolated out of reach of the disaster? What we are doing is that we are abandoning this blessed isolation to run after a share in the trouble.

There is a consistency of character for a nation as well as for a man. A man who changes his principles from week to week is destitute of character and deserves no confidence. The great men of this nation were such because they embodied and expressed the opinion and sentiments of the nation in their time. Their names are something more than clubs with which to knock an opponent down when it suits one’s purpose, but to be thrown away with contempt when they happen to be on the other side. So of the great principles; whether some of us are skeptical about their entire validity and want to define and limit them somewhat is of little importance. If the nation has accepted them, sworn by them, founded its legislation on them, imbedded them in the decisions of its courts, and then if it throws them away at six months’ warning, you may depend upon it that that nation will suffer in its moral and political rectitude a shock of the severest kind.

Upon a little serious examination the off-hand disposal of an important question of policy by the declaration that Americans can do anything proves to be only a silly piece of bombast, and upon a little reflection we find that our hands are quite full at home of problems by the solution of which the peace and happiness of the American people could be greatly increased. The laws of nature and of human nature are just as valid for Americans as for anybody else, and if we commit acts we shall have to take consequences, just like other people. Therefore prudence demands that we look ahead to see what we are about to do, and that we gauge the means at our disposal, if we do not want to bring calamity on ourselves and our children. We see that the peculiarities of our system of government set limitations on us. We cannot do things which a great centralized monarchy could do. The very blessings and special advantages which we enjoy, as compared with others, bring disabilities with them. That is the great fundamental cause of what I have tried to show throughout this lecture, that we cannot govern dependencies consistently with our political system, and that, if we try it, the State which our fathers founded will suffer a reaction which will transform it into another empire just after the fashion of all the old ones. . . .

And yet this scheme of a republic which our fathers formed was a glorious dream which demands more than a word of respect and affection before it passes away. Indeed, it is not fair to call it a dream or even an ideal; it was a possibility which was within our reach if we had been wise enough to grasp and hold it. It was favored by our comparative isolation, or, at least, by our distance from other strong states. The men who came here were able to throw off all the trammels of tradition and established doctrine. They went out into a wilderness, it is true, but they took with them all the art, science, and literature which, up to that time, civilization had produced. They could not, it is true, strip their minds of the ideas which they had inherited, but in time, as they lived on in the new world, they sifted and selected these ideas, retaining what they chose. Of the old-world institutions also they selected and adopted what they chose and threw aside the rest. It was a grand opportunity to be thus able to strip off all the follies and errors which they had inherited, so far as they chose to do so. They had unlimited land with no feudal restrictions to hinder them in the use of it. Their idea was that they would never allow any of the social and political abuses of the old world to grow up here. There should be no manors, no barons, no ranks, no prelates, no idle classes, no paupers, no disinherited ones except the vicious. There were to be no armies except a militia, which would have no functions but those of police. They would have no court and no pomp; no orders, or ribbons, or decorations, or titles. They would have no public debt. They repudiated with scorn the notion that a public debt is a public blessing; if debt was incurred in war it was to be paid in peace and not entailed on posterity. There was to be no grand diplomacy, because they intended to mind their own business and not be involved in any of the intrigues to which European statesmen were accustomed. There was to be no balance of power and no “reason of state” to cost the life and happiness of citizens. . . . Our fathers would have an economical government, even if grand people called it a parsimonious one, and taxes should be no greater than were absolutely necessary to pay for such a government. The citizen was to keep all the rest of his earnings and use them as he thought best for the happiness of himself and his family; he was, above all, to be insured peace and quiet while he pursued his honest industry and obeyed the laws. No adventurous policies of conquest or ambition, such as, in the belief of our fathers, kings and nobles had forced, for their own advantage, on European states, would ever be undertaken by a free democratic republic. Therefore the citizen here would never be forced to leave his family or to give his sons to shed blood for glory and to leave widows and orphans in misery for nothing. Justice and law were to reign in the midst of simplicity, and a government which had little to do was to offer little field for ambition. In a society where industry, frugality, and prudence were honored, it was believed that the vices of wealth would never flourish.

. . . It is by virtue of these ideals that we have been “isolated,” isolated in a position which the other nations of the earth have observed in silent envy; and yet there are people who are boasting of their patriotism, because they say that we have taken our place now amongst the nations of the earth by virtue of this war. My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months’ campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a representative.

For presidents and generals, the Cold War made military policy easy. The U.S. armed forces had to contain the Soviet Union; everything else was secondary.

But no more. The world may be dangerous, but it isn’t particularly dangerous for America. With the Pentagon still at Cold War levels—adjusted for inflation, U.S. defense spending is as high as in 1980—what should the armed services do? That was the question posed at a recent West Point conference on the relationship between civilian and military service.

As if further evidence of the accuracy of public choice economics was needed, the proceedings showcased proposals for cooperation, coordination, and perhaps much more between the Pentagon and civilian “national service” programs, particularly AmeriCorps. Why not deploy the armed services to deal with all manner of other “national security” problems, such as education?

This debate is possible only because we are living in a post-Cold War world where the Pentagon doesn’t have much important work to do. The United States and its allies account for 80 percent of the globe’s military spending; Washington’s enemies are few and pathetic; America’s prosperous allies can defend themselves; the failed foreign societies around the globe pose no threat to our own.

The search for new tasks is bureaucratically awe-inspiring. NATO is viewed as a means of integrating former Warsaw Pact members into the West. U.S. troops in Okinawa are said to help stabilize South Asia. The U.S.-South Korean alliance is now touted as a check on China.

Then there’s the Selective Service System. Created to conduct a speedy mass mobilization, Selective Service has been left without a purpose by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Even the Pentagon has said that it could do without registration.

But Selective Service is nothing if not creative in coming up with new reasons to survive. The administration says registration provides insurance—against what is not clear. Advocates declare that it deters despots from using nuclear weapons—apparently 7,000 nuclear warheads are not enough. And the program supposedly promotes civilian-military relations—as if signing a card at the Post Office generates patriotism.

Still, Selective Service realizes its vulnerable position. Last year it admitted that “with the downsizing of the Federal government, the Selective Service System can no longer dwell on its proud past or bet on the threats of tomorrow. The System must be of proven value to America today and every day.”

Thus, the agency proposed a half-million-dollar “Serve America” initiative to publicize AmeriCorps. Argued Selective Service Director Gil Coronado, the “traditional role of Selective Service offers a natural opportunity to promote voluntary service to America in AmeriCorps, as well as in our military.” Apparently we now need military registration to encourage civilian “service.” Congress refused to appropriate the money, but Selective Service still hands out the AmeriCorps phone number to young men forced to register.

Mixing military and civilian service is far more likely to promote a bureaucratic empire than meet citizen needs. The problems with the AmeriCorps approach go beyond the usual government waste. Federal funding is likely to warp even the best groups, causing them to lobby for additional assistance and to shape their programs to win government support.

Moreover, AmeriCorps further shifts decision-making from average people across the country to the political process. As Marvin Olasky has pointed out, the definition of “compassion” was once to “suffer with” by becoming actively involved in the lives of those one was attempting to assist.

In this century the definition changed, first to mean writing a check, which absolved people of the painful requirement of human interaction, then to making other people write checks. While AmeriCorps may be a better means of assisting the poor than the panoply of past welfare programs—what wouldn’t be?—it further distances people from those they are supposed to be serving. Instead, people should directly fund and oversee private organizations.

These are all good enough reasons to oppose government “national service,” no matter how well intentioned. But another reason for caution is the likely impact on the military from expanded civilian service and “cooperation” between the two.

Military service differs from civilian service in several key ways. First, it is service to the national community. It is seen as almost the definition of patriotism. Civilian service, in contrast, is service to a particular person, although there may be social benefits from, say, teaching literacy. Second, soldiers have what is essentially unlimited liability anywhere around the world. They can be sent into dangerous, even life-threatening, conditions anywhere. Third, they voluntarily accept restrictions—such as the prohibition on quitting—that apply to no other job. Finally, defense is one of government’s few mandatory functions; paying people to work in charities is not. Even if the latter seems cost-effective (and funneling funds through government certainly is not), it should not be allowed to interfere with the government’s performance of its defense function.

Joining the military has always been viewed as an act of citizenship, and not just service. Establishing an alternative form of government service dilutes the unique quality of military service. Obviously the civilian marketplace already creates significant competition for the military. AmeriCorps and its siblings would go further, offering an official alternative to young people who want the challenge of “service,” while reducing the likelihood they will enlist in the armed forces. This is especially true when military service means constant deployments away from their families in order to implement a foreign policy of social work. It is one thing to accept the cost and risk of military service to help defend America from a foreign threat. It is quite another to join, say, to maintain a unified Bosnian state against the wishes of most of its inhabitants. Even the patriotic-minded are less likely to join in those circumstances. True, the military is too big today, but even a smaller force would suffer the loss of a few thousand high-quality recruits.

Civilian service is important, but it needn’t be organized and funded by government. At the same time, military service should continue to be recognized for its unique role. The armed services should be downsized to reflect the diminishing threats to America and the Pentagon should focus on defense.

Separating civilian service from government is likely to give us more service, the kind that more effectively meets critical individual and national needs. And it will provide service in a manner that best reflects our heritage of liberty.