Not Left, Not Right . . . Try Up (Part III)

What government activities have to go

What are the proper limits on government power?

That question is no longer asked. Political theorists have concluded that the question is unanswerable. There is no "bright line," they tell us, that separates proper from improper acts of government. But that line exists. Individual rights are precisely those lines, the radiantly bright boundaries of your protected domain.

Rights are morality's "Keep Out, No Trespassing" signs.

And the signs are addressed above all to government. On an individual-to-individual level, a worked-out theory of rights isn't necessary. "Don't use force" would do. But with the establishment of a huge armed institution to enforce rules, we need "bright lines" to protect us from our protector, government.

Again, government is not a social club or voluntary charity. Government issues commands--laws, directives, edicts, regulations--which it enforces with the armed might of the police and military.

"The difference . . . between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force" (Rand).

The symbol of government is a gun.

Using that gun against criminals and invading armies is necessary and proper. The government is then acting as the agent of the citizen's right of self-defense. But when the government's gun is aimed at innocent, rights-respecting people, initiating force against them, the government is itself acting as a criminal.

Here’s the proper scope of government in four words: Retaliation good, initiation bad.

You want it with no Latinate words? Starting force--bad, stopping force--good.

In a properly limited government, each branch of government does only that which is necessary to retaliate in defense of individual rights.

The legislative branch enacts the laws that state more concretely what violates rights and will be met with retaliatory force. (E.g., battery is a crime, and the criteria for an act being battery are X, Y, and Z.)

The judiciary interprets the law in order to settle disputes, thus avoiding feuds, vigilantes, and lynch mobs. The appeals courts, in reviewing the decisions of lower courts, help keep them objective. The higher courts, by their power to declare laws unconstitutional, offer a crucial means of protecting rights.

The executive branch enforces the law and court rulings with its police force and similar law-enforcement agencies. The executive branch also runs the military, which defends the citizenry against any foreign armies.

What, then, does a properly limited government not do? What does today's government do that initiates force and has to be repealed?

Brace yourself. I warned at the outset: we have long been on the wrong road; moderation or reform won't do. What America needs is a radical alternative to both Left and Right. And that means big changes. That alternative, the "Up" that rejects the statism of both Right and Left, is capitalism--pure, unregulated, unshackled laissez-faire capitalism.

"Laissez-faire capitalism" means a social system in which all human interactions are voluntarily consented to, and the government is limited to protecting that condition--i.e., to protecting individual rights.

What has to go are all the anti-capitalist measures, the myriad ways in which we have departed from the system envisioned in the Declaration of Independence.

Such as what, concretely? Here's an unordered list to get us started.

Under laissez-faire, there are no regulations, no regulatory agencies, no handouts ("transfer payments")--including no Social Security and no Medicare--no government schools, no government licensing of doctors, lawyers, architects, psychologists, or any other profession, no earthquake or hurricane relief, no government-owned land, no Federal Reserve, no conscription, no immigration controls, no antitrust laws.

Sounds shocking, doesn't it? Impossible. A prescription for anarchy and monopolies and depressions and . . .

Yet, before World War I, the only things from that list that were operative federally were land holdings, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and for 7 years after the Civil War, the Freedman’s Bureau. Hard to believe, but America flourished without a Federal Reserve, conscription, Social Security, Medicare, the FDA, FTC, FCC, FDIC, OSHA, ICE, ICC, SEC, HHS, DOE,TVA, FHA, Fannie Mae, NLRB, EPA, CFTC, and so on through the 100 federal regulatory agencies now in place. There was only one immigration control (the Chinese Exclusion Act). And there was no income tax.

Federal spending in 1913, as a percent of GDP, was only 9% of what it is now. Inversely, the government's "take" from the private sector has grown 11-fold since 1913.

Inflation? Before the Federal Reserve (1913), the currency was private bank notes(!). They were redeemable in gold or silver. After the Civil War until 1913, the value of the dollar slowly rose(!) at an average of 1% a year. Under the Fed, the value of the dollar has dropped 32-fold. And the rationale for the Fed was to stabilize the value of the dollar.

Monetary costs are not the only factor the growth of statism has brought. The regulatory state strangles innovation and creates incredible injustice. It has been said that if we had had today's regulatory state in 1900, the automobile would not have been allowed. The same is true of many inventions made before, say, 1960.

We were told in the 1950s that the near future meant flying cars in every garage and colonies on Mars. That seemed inevitable, given the rate of progress before then. We are still waiting.

The injustice of all government regulation is that it represents preventive law: you are forbidden to act unless you can prove to a government board that it is okay for you to do so. You are considered dangerous until proven safe.

More on this in a forthcoming Substack.

America began with a system that was quite close to laissez faire. (Southern blacks were execrably excluded, until the North fought a bloody war for their freedom.)

But over the past century, the ideals of the Declaration and the mechanism of the Constitution have been progressively abandoned. American government has encroached more and more on individual rights.

Using approximate numbers, America has declined from 98% laissez faire to maybe 50% today.

This slow but steady growth of government is why my list of programs to repeal sounds shocking. We tend to think that the way things have been for the last 20 years is the way they have always been and have to be.

Aiding this, for two generations our schools and universities have been twisting and falsifying our history to blacken our past. It is now not uncommon to hear from young people that America's past put it among the world's most evil nations.

The truth is that "The United States of America is the greatest, noblest, and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world." (Rand)

Right makes might. The more capitalist the U.S. was, the faster was its economic progress. And that's true around the globe. It's why adopting free-market policies in India raised its population from squalid poverty to a decent standard of living in a single generation. It's why moving from communism to a semi-capitalist economy did the same for China (though under Xi, communism is making a comeback). Conversely, it's why every socialist state has been poor, stagnant, and miserable and why there's literal starvation in the more extreme of these anti-capitalist regimes, such as Stalin's Russia and today's North Korea.

Going to laissez-faire capitalism means rejecting almost every expansion of government since the Constitution was ratified (1788).

Plus a little more.

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Despite the hatred Left and Right have for each other, there is little difference between them: both seek to expand state power, and both have lost the very concept of individual rights. The real difference is between those two tribes and the system of full liberty: laissez-faire capitalism.

Here it is in visual form.

My next Substack rebuts common objections to laissez-faire capitalism.