Christianity and Liberty


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I also don't think the choice was between a flesh and blood king or the Constitution (or national state) as king. I do think the powermonger began in earnest much earlier, too. Not just with the Constitution itself -- though recall people like Alexander Hamilton were involved. Certainly, he was no stranger to powerlust. It started long before that and, in my view, gave impetus to having a Constitutional Convention in the first place. (That and the drive of many influential debt holders to get paid off -- hence the drive to have a national government with tax powers.)

Also, I wouldn't paint Washington as free of this taint either and I think ever his admirers should admit that he was far from flawless.

the true character of Washington and Hamilton was revealed in the way they executed the power of the U.S. against the Whiskey Rebels. That shameful action was a pretty good indication of what would likely happen in the future. Washington and this knob-shiner Hamilton lead a gang of 13,000 Federale goons to strip the good yeoman of Pennsylvania naked as jay birds. There is your Land of of the Brave and the Free.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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The loss of American freedom had little if anything to do with the supposed altruism that underlay the moral philosophy of some of America's Founders. The fact that earlier libertarian philosophers disagreed with Rand about which voluntary actions should qualify as virtuous had little bearing on their theories of justice and rights, which were frequently sound.

First, even if most of America's Founders had agreed 100 percent with Rand's ethical theory, this would not have made a dime's worth of difference for the future of America, so long as we had the same Constitution that we do now. Many Anti-Federalists accurately predicted the deleterious long-term consequences if Americans ratified the Constitution.

Second (and this is something I alluded to above), a fundamental conflict in American political thought pertained to the attempt to reconcile individual rights with political sovereignty. And this conflict had far more to do with the degeneration of freedom in America than any so-called altruistic premises. Again, Rand avoided this conflict by simply ignoring the problem. Or, more precisely, she dismissed it with a sneer.

In other words, America’s decline can be directly attributed to a Constitution which empowered a monopolistic government to engage in the systematic violation of individual rights, and the ethics of altruism are insignificant by comparison.

Yet, the fact is that we did have a century or more during which America enjoyed a level of individual freedom and progress which far surpassed anything the world had known for two thousand years, and that began to fall apart in a major way at the exact same point in history when our nation’s laws began to reflect the resurgence of altruism in the culture. It appeared to me—perhaps I’m mistaken—that we had reached some level of agreement about that historical pattern.

There is clearly no point in rehashing the anarchy vs. limited government debate here. The arguments on both sides have been repeated over and over so many times that the two sides no longer listen to each other. But it is unfortunate that you seem to want to elevate that issue to a position of such all-encompassing supremacy that nothing else counts. Say what you will, this thread on “Christianity and Liberty” has clearly shown that “so-called altruistic premises” had an undeniable impact on American history.

How are we supposed to get back to a point where liberal revolutionaries can evaluate what is or is not a “compromise on freedom,” if we downplay the crucial role of such underlying influences? Are you truly willing to take on the culture of today with ‘voluntarism’ as your ideological starting point? It almost seems as though you believe that minarchists (like me) are the real enemy, and that my defense of the role of pre-political philosophy is a smokescreen for political treachery.

“If you want to fight for a world where human life will once more be possible, you must now understand why that battle has to be fought on the field of philosophy…” Branden convinced me of that almost fifty years ago, and I have neither seen nor heard anything to change my mind.

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The loss of American freedom had little if anything to do with the supposed altruism that underlay the moral philosophy of some of America's Founders. The fact that earlier libertarian philosophers disagreed with Rand about which voluntary actions should qualify as virtuous had little bearing on their theories of justice and rights, which were frequently sound.

First, even if most of America's Founders had agreed 100 percent with Rand's ethical theory, this would not have made a dime's worth of difference for the future of America, so long as we had the same Constitution that we do now. Many Anti-Federalists accurately predicted the deleterious long-term consequences if Americans ratified the Constitution.

Second (and this is something I alluded to above), a fundamental conflict in American political thought pertained to the attempt to reconcile individual rights with political sovereignty. And this conflict had far more to do with the degeneration of freedom in America than any so-called altruistic premises. Again, Rand avoided this conflict by simply ignoring the problem. Or, more precisely, she dismissed it with a sneer.

In other words, America’s decline can be directly attributed to a Constitution which empowered a monopolistic government to engage in the systematic violation of individual rights, and the ethics of altruism are insignificant by comparison.

There was much more involved than our fatally flawed Constitution, but, yes, that was far more instrumental in the decline of American freedom than any so-called altruism of America's Founders. For one thing, the Founders (or at least the vast majority of them) were not altruists in the Randian sense, nor did they hold altruistic premises. To believe, as many of them did, that benevolence is a virtue -- something that needs to be practiced voluntarily to remain a virtue -- does not make them "altruists" in the Randian sense, or anything close.

If you truly believe that the belief in the virtue of voluntary benevolence somehow had a corrosive influence on individual freedom, then please explain how you think this happened. How did this supposed altruism manifest itself in political developments?

Yet, the fact is that we did have a century or more during which America enjoyed a level of individual freedom and progress which far surpassed anything the world had known for two thousand years, and that began to fall apart in a major way at the exact same point in history when our nation’s laws began to reflect the resurgence of altruism in the culture. It appeared to me—perhaps I’m mistaken—that we had reached some level of agreement about that historical pattern.

I could pose the same problem to you. If the quasi-altruistic premises of some of the America's Founders were so detrimental, then how do you explain your own seeming paradox?

When Thomas Paine advocated American Independence, defenders of Britain pointed to the considerable freedom enjoyed by Englishmen, and they attributed this freedom to the British "constitution." (This referred to the structure of the British government, various charters, and common law precedents, not to a single written document.) In response, Paine said that Englishmen owed their freedom to the "constitution" of their people, not to the constitution of their government.

I would reply in the same way to your question. Many early Americans -- very few of whom studied philosophy -- had a live-and-let-live attitude that was ingrained in the culture.

I freely acknowledge that the U.S. Constitution -- that "bundle of compromises," as Madison described it in the Federalist Papers -- has some good features, along with the bad. Unfortunately, like Gresham's Law, according to which bad money drives out good money, the bad aspects of the Constitution --those which left gaping holes for, and even sanctioned, the vast expansion of governmental power -- eventually overpowered the good aspects. Here I am reminded of what Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged: "In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."

There is clearly no point in rehashing the anarchy vs. limited government debate here. The arguments on both sides have been repeated over and over so many times that the two sides no longer listen to each other. But it is unfortunate that you seem to want to elevate that issue to a position of such all-encompassing supremacy that nothing else counts.

It wasn't my intention to bring up the current anarchism/minarchism controversy at all. The problems relating to political sovereignty were debated among Federalists (defenders of the Constitution) and Anti-Federalists (opponents of the Constitution), and there wasn't an anarchist to be found in either of these factions. Anarchism per se was never an issue in these early debates. The topic came up indirectly in arguments over "government by consent," because the critics of the Lockean theory of government maintained that it is implicitly anarchistic. As one English critic, Josiah Tucker, put it, Lockean consent theory is "the universal demolisher of all governments but not the builder of any."

It was in response to this kind of criticism that Americans fell back on the old doctrine of "tacit" or "implied" consent. Even a radical individualist like Thomas Paine (in Rights of Man) argued that a law which a people can repeal (via voting) but do not repeal is presumed to have the consent of that people, collectively considered.

This type of reasoning --according to which you and I and everyone else on OL have "consented" to high taxes, Obamacare, and every other provision of big government -- is common fare today. I trust I need not explain its horrendous consequences to you. Yet this was part and parcel of American political theory, and it had absolutely nothing to do with "altruism." This was the "fundamental conflict in American political thought" that I mentioned in my earlier post, a conflict that "pertained to the attempt to reconcile individual rights with political sovereignty."

Ghs

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As an addendum to my last post, I want to mention a few features of the U.S. Constitution that some readers may not be aware of.

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (then an ardent nationalist) worked for years to bring about the Constitutional Convention. But it was not known as the "Constitutional Convention" at the time -- it was usually called the Philadelphia Convention or, sometimes, the Grand Convention. Why? Because it was never authorized to draft a new constitution. Rather, it was only authorized (by the Confederation Congress and the several states) to correct and amend the Articles of Confederation.

The nationalists claimed that the Articles of Confederation were woefully deficient, primarily because they did not vest taxing power in the federal government. This was the major "defect" that the Convention was supposed to remedy.

It was clear from the beginning that Madison and other nationalists had plans far more ambitious than amending the Articles of Confederation; they intended, as they made clear in the initial "Virginia Plan," to scrap the Articles and to draft an altogether new constitution.

This was technically illegal, which is why two of the three delegates from New York -- Francis Yates and John Lansing -- left the Convention in protest (leaving only Hamilton) long before it was over. Moreover, suspicions of the nationalists' real purpose were widespread even before the Convention convened, which is why Rhode Island refused to send delegates, and why Patrick Henry refused to serve as a delegate, explaining that he "smelt a rat."

This illegal scheme also had a lot to do with why strict secrecy was maintained during the Convention (a policy that Jefferson, then in France, strongly condemned) and why, shortly before the Convention adjourned, the delegates voted to keep the proceedings secret for 50 -- count 'em -- 50 years. Delegates feared that folks back home would not be happy with the measures they advocated, and it was assumed that most delegates would be dead in 50 years and so would be spared any undesirable political consequences.

As for the Constitution itself, the Virginia Plan specifically stated that it was meant to establish a "national government." But this was a very unpopular idea among most Americans, so all references to "national" were deleted and the term "federal" replaced them.

This tactic enabled champions of the Constitution to call themselves "Federalists" and to smear their critics as "Anti-Federalists." Before this linguistic coup, "federalism" signified a confederation of sovereign states, as had been established by the Articles of Confederation, so it was a popular notion. But the nationalists, by co-opting the term for themselves, reversed the conventional meaning of this word, and in so doing they incurred the wrath of the real federalists, i.e., opponents of the Constitution. (To be called an "Anti-Federalist" then was like being called "anti-democracy" today.) As one of these opponents put it, instead of the words Federalist and Anti-Federalist, we should use the words rat and anti-rat.

Two more points:

1)That the national government established by the Constitution was to be a very powerful government by 18th century standards was made unmistakably clear by James Madison during the Convention. He stated on June 29, 1787:

"According to the views of every member, the General Government will have powers far beyond those exercised by the British Parliament, when the States were part of the British Empire."

To fully appreciate the implications of this remark, we need only recall that Americans had recently concluded a protracted and bloody war against the selfsame parliamentary powers to which Madison referred. Yet the Constitution was intended to establish a government with "powers far beyond" even those powers.

2) Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution authorizes Congress to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises." There is no mention of a limit to this taxing power. Was this an innocent oversight? No, far from it. When opponents of the Constitution vigorously protested against the absence of any limit on the power of Congress to tax, both Hamilton and Madison (in the Federalist Papers) expressly argued that no such limit should be imposed. As Hamilton put it in #31, "the Federal Government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes." (My italics.) Madison agreed completely.

Thus, we are not merely dealing with a "limited government" that somehow turned bad over time. The Constitution established a government with powerful statist elements from the very beginning.

Ghs

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This type of reasoning --according to which you and I and everyone else on OL have "consented" to high taxes, Obamacare, and every other provision of big government -- is common fare today. I trust I need not explain its horrendous consequences to you. Yet this was part and parcel of American political theory, and it had absolutely nothing to do with "altruism." This was the "fundamental conflict in American political thought" that I mentioned in my earlier post, a conflict that "pertained to the attempt to reconcile individual rights with political sovereignty."

Ghs

Also so-called "states' rights." That is why Senators were sent to Washington by the states. This was destroyed by direct popular election of US Senators. I'd say the problem is more how to protect the Republic from democracy. Only so much can be done with the actual structure of government. The Constitution could have been better, but eventually its various provisions would have gotten plowed under anyway by those who claim it's a "living document" and original intent doesn't count. Individual rights are always reconciled with political sovereignty, but at the expense of those rights, because that is serving, and is reflective of, the basic corrupting nature of political power. The need to fight for freedom cannot be entirely vitiated no matter how successful that endeavor at any point in time.

--Brant

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2) Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution authorizes Congress to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises." There is no mention of a limit to this taxing power. Was this an innocent oversight? No, far from it. When opponents of the Constitution vigorously protested against the absence of any limit on the power of Congress to tax, both Hamilton and Madison (in the Federalist Papers) expressly argued that no such limit should be imposed. As Hamilton put it in #31, "the Federal Government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes." (My italics.) Madison agreed completely.

Lest there be any doubt about how villainous (by libertarian standards) early nationalists could be, consider what Alexander Hamilton said in a lengthy letter to fellow nationalist James Duane in 1780, seven years before the Constitutional Convention. While outlining his vision of a strong central government with the power to tax, Hamilton conceded that this would not go over well with most Americans, and he even admitted that such taxes would have a "tendency to discourage industry and the like." But he called this taxing power a "necessity" and went on to say, approvingly:

"It has been a constant remark that free countries have ever paid the heaviest taxes."

In the same letter, which is more like a lengthy essay, Hamilton also discusses his vision of a national bank -- one based "on the joint credit of the public and of individuals." This bank, modeled after the Bank of England, would issue "paper credit" and bind the interests of private businesses to the interests of the national government.

Gag me with a spoon. :angry:

As the historian Merrill D. Peterson discusses in his brilliant book, The Jeffersonian Image in the American Mind, the Hamiltonian vision dominated American thinking about government (and what is sometimes called "state capitalism") in post-Civil War America, after Jeffersonian individualism was discredited, owing to its emphasis on states' rights.

Alexander Hamilton was the great evil genius of early American history. And he was no altruist.

Unfortunately, my middle name is "Hamilton," but I trust no one will hold that against me. ;)

Ghs

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This type of reasoning --according to which you and I and everyone else on OL have "consented" to high taxes, Obamacare, and every other provision of big government -- is common fare today. I trust I need not explain its horrendous consequences to you. Yet this was part and parcel of American political theory, and it had absolutely nothing to do with "altruism." This was the "fundamental conflict in American political thought" that I mentioned in my earlier post, a conflict that "pertained to the attempt to reconcile individual rights with political sovereignty."

Ghs

Also so-called "states' rights." That is why Senators were sent to Washington by the states. This was destroyed by direct popular election of US Senators. I'd say the problem is more how to protect the Republic from democracy. Only so much can be done with the actual structure of government. The Constitution could have been better, but eventually its various provisions would have gotten plowed under anyway by those who claim it's a "living document" and original intent doesn't count. Individual rights are always reconciled with political sovereignty, but at the expense of those rights, because that is serving, and is reflective of, the basic corrupting nature of political power. The need to fight for freedom cannot be entirely vitiated no matter how successful that endeavor at any point in time.

--Brant

I agree.

Jeffersonians generally regarded states' rights as the best check on the growth and abuse of federal power -- one that is far more effective than the system of "checks and balances" between the three branches of the federal government.

Even James Madison, after he abandoned his early nationalism and joined the Jeffersonian camp, came to regard the system of checks and balances within the federal government as a mere "parchment barrier" (his words) to the growth of power. He argued that the three branches (legislative, executive, and judicial) will not expand their power primarily by encroaching on the domains of the other branches. Instead, each branch will expand outward into the social sphere at the expense of individual freedom.

A common theory among America's Founders -- one with roots in ancient political theory -- was that republics will eventually degenerate into despotism. They thought long and hard about how to avoid this political degeneration, but some remained pessimistic in the long run. Jefferson, for example, predicted that America would probably lose her freedom in around 200 years. This would happen, Jefferson believed, largely because people would take their freedom for granted and not pay sufficient attention to the gradual encroachments of state power.

There was considerable discussion by early American theorists about the importance of precedents. Many of the taxes, such as the tax on tea that precipitated the Boston Tea Party, were very small, but the radicals insisted that all such taxes should be opposed and resisted at the outset so that precedents would not be established.

The old story about a camel getting his nose under a tent is very much how American revolutionaries viewed the dangerous growth of governmental power. They understood that state power usually increases incrementally, in small steps, and that if action is not taken immediately to resist such power, it will eventually reach a point where little can be done about it, short of revolution. They did not think that a revolution need be violent, however.

Ghs

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George, I would think that the emphasis on individual relationship with God and autonomy of individual choice that is typical of Protestant sects has been more conducive to individual liberty in legal systems than has been Catholicism.

I’d expect that whichever branch/flavor of christianity is in the minority in a given area to be the one on the side of liberty. Nevertheless, I’m scratching my head trying to think of a historical case where Catholicism was on the side of liberty. Ireland post-Reformation? No clear cut examples come to mind.

Great thread BTW.

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There was much more involved than our fatally flawed Constitution, but, yes, that was far more instrumental in the decline of American freedom than any so-called altruism of America's Founders. For one thing, the Founders (or at least the vast majority of them) were not altruists in the Randian sense, nor did they hold altruistic premises. To believe, as many of them did, that benevolence is a virtue -- something that needs to be practiced voluntarily to remain a virtue -- does not make them "altruists" in the Randian sense, or anything close.

If you truly believe that the belief in the virtue of voluntary benevolence somehow had a corrosive influence on individual freedom, then please explain how you think this happened. How did this supposed altruism manifest itself in political developments?

Ghs

George,

Due to the irksome demands of my corporeal self for that biological phenomenon known as sleep, I will have to limit the current response to your first question:

How did this supposed altruism manifest itself in political developments?

I guess I thought I had addressed this in a prior post, which I will repeat here:

Here is more evidence of the impact of altruism in American history. In view of your prior comments about what does or does not constitute altruism, I am interested in your reaction.

Prominent intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th Century who called for major government intervention in the name of social justice and social welfare included: Henry Demarest Lloyd (Wealth Against Commonwealth), an early advocate for nationalization; Henry George (Progress and Poverty), who advocated for public ownership of all land; Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class), another prominent socialist who wrote of the inherent conflict between profit and the general welfare; novelist Edward Bellamy (Looking Backwards), who envisioned a transformed America as a socialist utopia. The Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Antitrust Act were early attempts by the government to instigate the social reforms these thinkers advocated in the name of the “common good."

The Progressive Movement in the early 20th Century was to some extent Christian and explicitly altruistic. The “Social Gospel” wing of Progressivism broke away from the earlier Protestant emphasis on individualism to adopt an aggressively altruistic agenda of social justice and social reform and the creation of an interventionist welfare state in the name of Christian morality. A number of Christian spokesmen had a part in that movement, including Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch.

Herbert Croly spelled out the Progressive ideology in The Promise of American Life in 1909. The “traditional American confidence in individual freedom,” Croly argued, “has resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth,” something that should be corrected by sacrificing and subordinating “the individual to the demand of a dominant and constructive national purpose.” Progressives managed to push through a number of interventions and regulations, including the Federal Trade Commission Act, the creation of the Federal Reserve and the Sixteenth Amendment, which helped free the federal government from fiscal restraints. Then came President Wilson’s selfless effort to make the world “safe for democracy” in the First World War. ” “We have no selfish ends to serve,” he proclaimed. “We seek no . . . compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.” Croly, editor of the New Republic, justified the war on the grounds that the nation needed “the tonic of a serious moral adventure.”

Herbert Hoover’s interventionist policies helped transform some relatively minor economic setbacks into the Great Depression. “Sacrifice by all groups,” said Hoover, “is essential to the salvation of the nation.” Then came the massive interventionist policies of FDR’s New Deal: “ ‘Not for ourselves but for others.’ That motto can well be the inspiration of all of us,” said FDR, “not alone for the fine purposes of charity, but also for our guidance in our public and private service. Selfishness is without doubt the greatest danger that confronts our beloved country today.”

World War II was an excuse for even more extensive socialist measures. More altruistic BS from FDR: “If ever there was a time to subordinate individual . . . selfishness for the national good, that time is now.” Taxes, government spending, the national debt, and inflation reached levels this country had never seen before. FDR frequently invoked the “Christian ideal” to justify America’s involvement in the war. In a radio address, FDR described the Nazi plan to "abolish all existing religions" and to replace "the cross of Christ" with the swastika and the sword. "We stand ready in defense of our nation and the faith of our fathers to do what God has given us the power to see as our full duty."

After the New Deal, there came the social welfare programs of LBJ’s ‘Great Society”: ”Government must always be compassionate,” said LBJ. It is by the “great dedication of selfless men” that we help the “ill clad and ill fed and ill housed.” And then came Nixon and his wage and price controls: “A strong and healthy spirit,” said Tricky Dick, “means a willingness to sacrifice . . . when a short-term personal sacrifice is needed in the long-term public interest.”

And, needless to say, we got more of the same from Nixon forward. Altruism has served as the primary ethical justification for most all of the statist interventions during the last century.

Your fascinating commentary on the Constitution and “government by consent” will demand a level of scrutiny than I cannot muster at 3: 05 am. But I'll be back. (No doubt you will be waiting with bated breath.) To be continued…

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There was much more involved than our fatally flawed Constitution, but, yes, that was far more instrumental in the decline of American freedom than any so-called altruism of America's Founders. For one thing, the Founders (or at least the vast majority of them) were not altruists in the Randian sense, nor did they hold altruistic premises. To believe, as many of them did, that benevolence is a virtue -- something that needs to be practiced voluntarily to remain a virtue -- does not make them "altruists" in the Randian sense, or anything close.

If you truly believe that the belief in the virtue of voluntary benevolence somehow had a corrosive influence on individual freedom, then please explain how you think this happened. How did this supposed altruism manifest itself in political developments?

Ghs

George,

Due to the irksome demands of my corporeal self for that biological phenomenon known as sleep, I will have to limit the current response to your first question:

How did this supposed altruism manifest itself in political developments?

I guess I thought I had addressed this in a prior post, which I will repeat here:

Here is more evidence of the impact of altruism in American history. In view of your prior comments about what does or does not constitute altruism, I am interested in your reaction.

Prominent intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th Century who called for major government intervention in the name of social justice and social welfare included: Henry Demarest Lloyd (Wealth Against Commonwealth), an early advocate for nationalization; Henry George (Progress and Poverty), who advocated for public ownership of all land; Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class), another prominent socialist who wrote of the inherent conflict between profit and the general welfare; novelist Edward Bellamy (Looking Backwards), who envisioned a transformed America as a socialist utopia. The Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Antitrust Act were early attempts by the government to instigate the social reforms these thinkers advocated in the name of the “common good."

The Progressive Movement in the early 20th Century was to some extent Christian and explicitly altruistic. The “Social Gospel” wing of Progressivism broke away from the earlier Protestant emphasis on individualism to adopt an aggressively altruistic agenda of social justice and social reform and the creation of an interventionist welfare state in the name of Christian morality. A number of Christian spokesmen had a part in that movement, including Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch.

Herbert Croly spelled out the Progressive ideology in The Promise of American Life in 1909. The “traditional American confidence in individual freedom,” Croly argued, “has resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth,” something that should be corrected by sacrificing and subordinating “the individual to the demand of a dominant and constructive national purpose.” Progressives managed to push through a number of interventions and regulations, including the Federal Trade Commission Act, the creation of the Federal Reserve and the Sixteenth Amendment, which helped free the federal government from fiscal restraints. Then came President Wilson’s selfless effort to make the world “safe for democracy” in the First World War. ” “We have no selfish ends to serve,” he proclaimed. “We seek no . . . compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.” Croly, editor of the New Republic, justified the war on the grounds that the nation needed “the tonic of a serious moral adventure.”

Herbert Hoover’s interventionist policies helped transform some relatively minor economic setbacks into the Great Depression. “Sacrifice by all groups,” said Hoover, “is essential to the salvation of the nation.” Then came the massive interventionist policies of FDR’s New Deal: “ ‘Not for ourselves but for others.’ That motto can well be the inspiration of all of us,” said FDR, “not alone for the fine purposes of charity, but also for our guidance in our public and private service. Selfishness is without doubt the greatest danger that confronts our beloved country today.”

World War II was an excuse for even more extensive socialist measures. More altruistic BS from FDR: “If ever there was a time to subordinate individual . . . selfishness for the national good, that time is now.” Taxes, government spending, the national debt, and inflation reached levels this country had never seen before. FDR frequently invoked the “Christian ideal” to justify America’s involvement in the war. In a radio address, FDR described the Nazi plan to "abolish all existing religions" and to replace "the cross of Christ" with the swastika and the sword. "We stand ready in defense of our nation and the faith of our fathers to do what God has given us the power to see as our full duty."

After the New Deal, there came the social welfare programs of LBJ’s ‘Great Society”: ”Government must always be compassionate,” said LBJ. It is by the “great dedication of selfless men” that we help the “ill clad and ill fed and ill housed.” And then came Nixon and his wage and price controls: “A strong and healthy spirit,” said Tricky Dick, “means a willingness to sacrifice . . . when a short-term personal sacrifice is needed in the long-term public interest.”

And, needless to say, we got more of the same from Nixon forward. Altruism has served as the primary ethical justification for most all of the statist interventions during the last century.

Your fascinating commentary on the Constitution and “government by consent” will demand a level of scrutiny than I cannot muster at 3: 05 am. But I'll be back. (No doubt you will be waiting with bated breath.) To be continued…

We appear to be talking about two different things here. As quoted above, I was asking about the harmful effects of the "so-called altruism of America's Founders." You mentioned thinkers from a much later period, all of whom (with one exception, Henry George, discussed below) rejected virtually all of the fundamental ideas of America's Founders, including their theories of property, rights, and the proper role of government.

These thinkers were not somehow corrupted by some supposed proto-altruism in early American thought. They were influenced mainly by currents of socialism in Europe and the "New Liberalism" in England that were quite powerful at the time.

Did progressive ideas influence the course of freedom in America? Of course. I have never denied the causal significance of ideas in history; far from it. My point was simply this:

If, following Rand, we look for mixed premises among America's Founders -- i.e., harmful ideas that eventually worked themselves out to the detriment of freedom -- then, contrary to Rand, we won't find those ideas in the largely nonexistent "altruism" of the Founders. Rather, we will find them in the Constitution itself and in specifically political ideas that had nothing to do with altruism. I have discussed both aspects in some earlier posts.

About Henry George: He doesn't belong on your list. He did not call "for major government intervention in the name of social justice and social welfare."

George, in large measure, was a disciple of Herbert Spencer. In Social Statics , Spencer opposed the private ownership of land and called for its nationalization. In this respect, Spencer's views were similar to those of Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice.

There is an interesting history behind the seeming paradox of thinkers who opposed the the private ownership of land but who held very libertarian positions in other areas. For now, I will only note that this position was far more popular among English libertarians than it ever was among American libertarians. Why? Well, other than purely philosophical arguments, such as those that Spencer presents, one reason is because the "Norman Yoke" theory -- i.e., the unjust land distribution in England that occurred as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066 -- had a huge influence on how English libertarians thought about land.

Anyway, even though Henry George was heavily influenced by Spencer and agreed with almost all of his libertarian views, he didn't go as far as Spencer did on the issue of land. George did not oppose private ownership of land, nor did he call for its nationalization. Instead, he advocated a "single tax" on land. This was called a single tax because it was the only kind of tax that George endorsed. He believed that all other forms of taxation should be abolished and that the minimal functions of government could be financed solely from a single tax on land.

It would take a while to explain George's reasons, but his economic views were influenced by the free market economist David Ricardo, who worked from a labor theory of value, which in turn contributed to his ideas about the "unearned" portion of land rent. George embraced this idea of "unearned" rent and used it as the economic and moral justification for his single tax.

Henry George was no statist or progressive. There are a lot of Georgist "single-tax" libertarian types around even today. I've had online debates with a number of them.

Ghs

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Anyway, even though Henry George was heavily influenced by Spencer and agreed with almost all of his libertarian views, he didn't go as far as Spencer did on the issue of land. George did not oppose private ownership of land, nor did he call for its nationalization. Instead, he advocated a "single tax" on land. This was called a single tax because it was the only kind of tax that George endorsed. He believed that all other forms of taxation should be abolished and that the minimal functions of government could be financed solely from a single tax on land.

It would take a while to explain George's reasons, but his economic views were influenced by the free market economist David Ricardo, who worked from a labor theory of value, which in turn contributed to his ideas about the "unearned" portion of land rent. George embraced this idea of "unearned" rent and used it as the economic and moral justification for his single tax.

Henry George was no statist or progressive. There are a lot of Georgist "single-tax" libertarian types around even today. I've had online debates with a number of them.

Ghs

Regarding Henry George, the problem is, for me, his idea leads to or is statist -- even if he and his modern followers don't believe it does. (This is, in some ways, no different than how some libertarian minarchists truly believe minimal government will work -- that they can tame the beast, e.g., with a well written constitution -- when I believe it's painfully obviously that won't work in practice -- save by the greatest of luck.)

Aside from this, I think the economics of and other justifications for his idea are flawed.

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Two more points:

1)That the national government established by the Constitution was to be a very powerful government by 18th century standards was made unmistakably clear by James Madison during the Convention. He stated on June 29, 1787:

"According to the views of every member, the General Government will have powers far beyond those exercised by the British Parliament, when the States were part of the British Empire."

To fully appreciate the implications of this remark, we need only recall that Americans had recently concluded a protracted and bloody war against the selfsame parliamentary powers to which Madison referred. Yet the Constitution was intended to establish a government with "powers far beyond" even those powers.

2) Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution authorizes Congress to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises." There is no mention of a limit to this taxing power. Was this an innocent oversight? No, far from it. When opponents of the Constitution vigorously protested against the absence of any limit on the power of Congress to tax, both Hamilton and Madison (in the Federalist Papers) expressly argued that no such limit should be imposed. As Hamilton put it in #31, "the Federal Government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes." (My italics.) Madison agreed completely.

Thus, we are not merely dealing with a "limited government" that somehow turned bad over time. The Constitution established a government with powerful statist elements from the very beginning.

Ghs

You make a convincing case for indictment of the Founders as much more statist than is typically believed, but how do you reconcile this with the history behind the Bill of Rights, or more specifically the Ninth Amendment? The Federalists argued against a Bill of Rights because specifying certain individual rights could, by implication, significantly enhance the powers enumerated in the Constitution. In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton asked, "Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?" And Madison told Jefferson: "I conceive that in a certain degree ... the rights in question are reserved by the manner in which the federal powers are granted.”

The result of all this debate was, of course, the Ninth Amendment, which Madison characterized as follows: “It has been objected also against a Bill of Rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure.”

The history of how the Courts have interpreted the amendment has clearly been problematic, but the framers’ intent was respected in Griswold v. Connecticut and later in Roe v Wade. Bernard Bailyn certainly seems to think it represented a bona fide effort to preserve individual liberty. Doesn’t the Ninth Amendment provide some evidence that the founders’ intentions were not quite as pernicious as you charge?

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Two more points:

1)That the national government established by the Constitution was to be a very powerful government by 18th century standards was made unmistakably clear by James Madison during the Convention. He stated on June 29, 1787:

"According to the views of every member, the General Government will have powers far beyond those exercised by the British Parliament, when the States were part of the British Empire."

To fully appreciate the implications of this remark, we need only recall that Americans had recently concluded a protracted and bloody war against the selfsame parliamentary powers to which Madison referred. Yet the Constitution was intended to establish a government with "powers far beyond" even those powers.

2) Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution authorizes Congress to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises." There is no mention of a limit to this taxing power. Was this an innocent oversight? No, far from it. When opponents of the Constitution vigorously protested against the absence of any limit on the power of Congress to tax, both Hamilton and Madison (in the Federalist Papers) expressly argued that no such limit should be imposed. As Hamilton put it in #31, "the Federal Government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes." (My italics.) Madison agreed completely.

Thus, we are not merely dealing with a "limited government" that somehow turned bad over time. The Constitution established a government with powerful statist elements from the very beginning.

Ghs

You make a convincing case for indictment of the Founders as much more statist than is typically believed, but how do you reconcile this with the history behind the Bill of Rights, or more specifically the Ninth Amendment? The Federalists argued against a Bill of Rights because specifying certain individual rights could, by implication, significantly enhance the powers enumerated in the Constitution. In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton asked, "Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?" And Madison told Jefferson: "I conceive that in a certain degree ... the rights in question are reserved by the manner in which the federal powers are granted.”

The result of all this debate was, of course, the Ninth Amendment, which Madison characterized as follows: “It has been objected also against a Bill of Rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure.”

The history of how the Courts have interpreted the amendment has clearly been problematic, but the framers’ intent was respected in Griswold v. Connecticut and later in Roe v Wade. Bernard Bailyn certainly seems to think it represented a bona fide effort to preserve individual liberty. Doesn’t the Ninth Amendment provide some evidence that the founders’ intentions were not quite as pernicious as you charge?

The absence of a Bill of Rights in the original Constitution was the major objection of many Antifederalists. Some lukewarm defenders of the Constitution, especially Thomas Jefferson, also called for one. (One of Jefferson's proposals that didn't make it into the Bill of Rights was prohibition of a standing army, i.e., a professional army maintained in peacetime.)

Opposition to the Constitution was very strong in some key states, such as Virginia, so it would not have been ratified if Federalists had not promised Antifederalists and fence-sitters that a Bill of Rights would be included after ratification. Most Federalists subsequently ignored this promise, hoping the issue would go away, but James Madison, to his eternal credit, did not. As a member of the House of Representatives, he drafted a Bill of Rights and pushed a modified version through an indifferent Congress in 1791.

According to the standard Federalist argument, a Bill of Rights was unnecessary. Indeed, as indicated in your post, a Bill of Rights could prove counterproductive, since not every right withheld from the federal government could possibly be specified, and the failure to mention certain rights might later be used as an argument that such rights fall within the legitimate jurisdiction of the federal government. (The Ninth and Tenth Amendments were intended to remedy this problem.)

When James Madison used this argument in the Federalist Papers, before he was won over to Jefferson's view, there can be no doubt that he was sincere. But not so with Alexander Hamilton, who could be a real sleazebag in these matters. Throughout the Federalist Papers, Hamilton defends positions that he had explicitly opposed during the Convention and for many years before that.

Hamilton was the intellectual father of the "implied powers" doctrine of the Constitution, according to which the Constitution grants implied powers that go far beyond the enumerated powers. He articulated this theory, which became the basis for the broad construction of constitutional powers, in considerable detail against Jefferson and Madison during the controversy over a national bank (the Constitution nowhere authorized Congress to establish this bank), but this was not the first time Hamilton had appealed to this theory. Years before the Convention, he used the same reasoning in regard to the Articles of Confederation.

Thus, in my opinion, Hamilton really opposed a Bill of Rights because he didn't want to hamstring the powers of the federal government. This was probably true of some other nationalists as well.

Murray Rothbard used to argue that we owe the statism of the Constitution itself to the Federalists, whereas we owe the libertarianism of the Bill of Rights to the Antifederalists. Although this is a bit of an exaggeration, it is essentially accurate, as historical generalizations go.

I therefore agree with you that the Bill of Rights "represented a bona fide effort to preserve individual liberty." But the major impetus for a Bill of Rights came from opponents of the Constitution, not its defenders.

Ghs

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Anyway, even though Henry George was heavily influenced by Spencer and agreed with almost all of his libertarian views, he didn't go as far as Spencer did on the issue of land. George did not oppose private ownership of land, nor did he call for its nationalization. Instead, he advocated a "single tax" on land. This was called a single tax because it was the only kind of tax that George endorsed. He believed that all other forms of taxation should be abolished and that the minimal functions of government could be financed solely from a single tax on land.

It would take a while to explain George's reasons, but his economic views were influenced by the free market economist David Ricardo, who worked from a labor theory of value, which in turn contributed to his ideas about the "unearned" portion of land rent. George embraced this idea of "unearned" rent and used it as the economic and moral justification for his single tax.

Henry George was no statist or progressive. There are a lot of Georgist "single-tax" libertarian types around even today. I've had online debates with a number of them.

Ghs

Regarding Henry George, the problem is, for me, his idea leads to or is statist -- even if he and his modern followers don't believe it does. (This is, in some ways, no different than how some libertarian minarchists truly believe minimal government will work -- that they can tame the beast, e.g., with a well written constitution -- when I believe it's painfully obviously that won't work in practice -- save by the greatest of luck.)

Aside from this, I think the economics of and other justifications for his idea are flawed.

I used to own a set of Henry George's collected works. I think it was in ten volumes, and I went through all of them during the late 1970s. I recall thinking that his arguments for free trade were very good, even if not very original, but I also recall that I wasn't impressed with some of his other arguments, even when I agreed with his conclusions. George, however, was an excellent writer who could explain complex arguments to a general audience, and this talent may account for some of his popularity.

As a sidebar, it is worth mentioning that Henry George attacked Herbert Spencer for supposedly retreating in his later years from his opposition to the private ownership of land. Spencer (like Rand) almost never replied personally to his critics -- he left that chore to his followers -- but he replied to George.

Spencer argued that he never abandoned his original moral position, as defended in Social Statics; he still opposed the private ownership of land in principle. But Spencer had come to regard land nationalization as not only an impractical scheme (e.g., compensation would have to be paid to current owners for improvements, which would be impossible to calculate) but as a potentially hazardous scheme as well, given his deep distrust of government and its typical inefficiency.

Spencer concluded that the only credible solution to eradicating the unjust holdovers from the feudal land system -- a consequence, he believed, of the Norman Conquest -- was to abolish all barriers to free trade in land, such as primogeniture and entail, and allow the market to take its course.

I never quite knew what to make of Spencer's reply to George, given its obvious inconsistencies.

Ghs

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This is an addendum to my earlier post about Antifederalists and a Bill of Rights.

The following excerpt is from a letter (5 Oct. 1787) written by the Antifederalist Richard Henry Lee (who made the original resolution for American Independence in the Second Continental Congress) to another opponent of the Constitution, Sam Adams (who I trust needs no introduction).

I suppose my dear Sir, that the good people of the U. States in their late generous contest, contended for free government in the fullest, clearest, and strongest sense. That they had no idea of being brought under despotic rule under the notion of "Strong government," or in form of elective despotism: Chains being still Chains, whether made of gold or iron.

The corrupting nature of power, and its insatiable appetite for increase, hath proved the necessity, and procured the adoption of the strongest and most express declarations of that Residuum of natural rights, which is not intended to be given up to Society; and which indeed is not necessary to be given for any good social purpose. In a government therefore, when the power of judging what shall be for the general welfare, which goes to every object of human legislation; and where the laws of such Judges shall be the supreme Law of the Land: it seems to be of the last consequence to declare in most explicit terms the reservations above alluded to. So much for the propriety of a Bill of Rights as a necessary bottom to this new system--It is in vain to say that the defects in this new Constitution may be remedied by the Legislature created by it. The remedy, as it may, so it may not be applied--And if it should a subsequent Assembly may repeal the Acts of its predecessor for the parliamentary doctrine is "quod leges posteriores priores contrarias abrogant" 4 Inst. 43. Surely this is not a ground upon which a wise and good man would choose to rest the dearest rights of human nature.

Ghs

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We appear to be talking about two different things here. As quoted above, I was asking about the harmful effects of the "so-called altruism of America's Founders." You mentioned thinkers from a much later period, all of whom (with one exception, Henry George, discussed below) rejected virtually all of the fundamental ideas of America's Founders, including their theories of property, rights, and the proper role of government.

These thinkers were not somehow corrupted by some supposed proto-altruism in early American thought. They were influenced mainly by currents of socialism in Europe and the "New Liberalism" in England that were quite powerful at the time.

Did progressive ideas influence the course of freedom in America? Of course. I have never denied the causal significance of ideas in history; far from it. My point was simply this:

If, following Rand, we look for mixed premises among America's Founders -- i.e., harmful ideas that eventually worked themselves out to the detriment of freedom -- then, contrary to Rand, we won't find those ideas in the largely nonexistent "altruism" of the Founders. Rather, we will find them in the Constitution itself and in specifically political ideas that had nothing to do with altruism. I have discussed both aspects in some earlier posts.

About Henry George: He doesn't belong on your list. He did not call "for major government intervention in the name of social justice and social welfare."

George, in large measure, was a disciple of Herbert Spencer. In Social Statics , Spencer opposed the private ownership of land and called for its nationalization. In this respect, Spencer's views were similar to those of Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice.

There is an interesting history behind the seeming paradox of thinkers who opposed the the private ownership of land but who held very libertarian positions in other areas. For now, I will only note that this position was far more popular among English libertarians than it ever was among American libertarians. Why? Well, other than purely philosophical arguments, such as those that Spencer presents, one reason is because the "Norman Yoke" theory -- i.e., the unjust land distribution in England that occurred as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066 -- had a huge influence on how English libertarians thought about land.

Anyway, even though Henry George was heavily influenced by Spencer and agreed with almost all of his libertarian views, he didn't go as far as Spencer did on the issue of land. George did not oppose private ownership of land, nor did he call for its nationalization. Instead, he advocated a "single tax" on land. This was called a single tax because it was the only kind of tax that George endorsed. He believed that all other forms of taxation should be abolished and that the minimal functions of government could be financed solely from a single tax on land.

It would take a while to explain George's reasons, but his economic views were influenced by the free market economist David Ricardo, who worked from a labor theory of value, which in turn contributed to his ideas about the "unearned" portion of land rent. George embraced this idea of "unearned" rent and used it as the economic and moral justification for his single tax.

Henry George was no statist or progressive. There are a lot of Georgist "single-tax" libertarian types around even today. I've had online debates with a number of them.

Thank you very much for your exposition on Henry George and the historical basis for his views. Clearly I was mistaken to include him. I also had no idea that there were “Georgist ‘single-tax’ libertarians around even today.” A cliché about horse races would probably be appropriate here.

I did not understand that your question specifically addressed the altruism of America’s founders. I thought you were talking about altruism in general. In regard to the founders, I would argue that their sin was one of omission; i.e., they did not offer an adequate moral defense of individual rights. You have clearly explained that Jefferson did at least make some strides in that direction, but, as I think I said before, he did not do nearly enough to distance himself from traditional views of Christ, Christianity and the Bible, which most people then and now continue to associate with self-sacrifice. The founders contributed to the eventual decline of freedom in America by leaving the conventional altruist ethic largely unchallenged.

As evidence of that, I would cite the prevalence of Christianity in the culture at the time. In varying degrees, Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton all had significant misgivings about religion and Christianity. However, almost without exception, they all gave lip service to Christian beliefs at one time or another. Washington, for instance, felt that religion was an important element in motivating his troops. Hamilton was probably the Founding Father who was most open about the need for “public expressions of piety” to retain control over “the masses.” Of the key founders, John Adams may have been the most religious, although he seems to have gradually moved away from religion in his later years. Because they were outwardly ambivalent about religion, regardless of their personal beliefs, they did not, for the most part, openly attack it or the Bible. So religion (and specifically Christianity) remained very influential throughout the colonies.

Brooke Allen, in Moral Minority, writes: “Of the thirteen states represented at the Constitutional Convention, all had established religions written into their state constitutions except for Virginia and New York.” She also writes: “The Second Great Awakening, which began at the close of the eighteenth century…would change the climate of the country for at least the next century. A new religiosity swept the nation, bringing the American Enlightenment to an abrupt end…”

Christianity and the Christian Bible are imbued with the moral principle of self-sacrifice, Jefferson’s unique perspective notwithstanding. It is the failure of founders and other intellectuals at the time to adequately address the conflict between Christian ideals and a country founded on the right to “the pursuit of happiness” that eventually led to America’s decline.

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The absence of a Bill of Rights in the original Constitution was the major objection of many Antifederalists. Some lukewarm defenders of the Constitution, especially Thomas Jefferson, also called for one. (One of Jefferson's proposals that didn't make it into the Bill of Rights was prohibition of a standing army, i.e., a professional army maintained in peacetime.)

Opposition to the Constitution was very strong in some key states, such as Virginia, so it would not have been ratified if Federalists had not promised Antifederalists and fence-sitters that a Bill of Rights would be included after ratification. Most Federalists subsequently ignored this promise, hoping the issue would go away, but James Madison, to his eternal credit, did not. As a member of the House of Representatives, he drafted a Bill of Rights and pushed a modified version through an indifferent Congress in 1791.

According to the standard Federalist argument, a Bill of Rights was unnecessary. Indeed, as indicated in your post, a Bill of Rights could prove counterproductive, since not every right withheld from the federal government could possibly be specified, and the failure to mention certain rights might later be used as an argument that such rights fall within the legitimate jurisdiction of the federal government. (The Ninth and Tenth Amendments were intended to remedy this problem.)

When James Madison used this argument in the Federalist Papers, before he was won over to Jefferson's view, there can be no doubt that he was sincere. But not so with Alexander Hamilton, who could be a real sleazebag in these matters. Throughout the Federalist Papers, Hamilton defends positions that he had explicitly opposed during the Convention and for many years before that.

Hamilton was the intellectual father of the "implied powers" doctrine of the Constitution, according to which the Constitution grants implied powers that go far beyond the enumerated powers. He articulated this theory, which became the basis for the broad construction of constitutional powers, in considerable detail against Jefferson and Madison during the controversy over a national bank (the Constitution nowhere authorized Congress to establish this bank), but this was not the first time Hamilton had appealed to this theory. Years before the Convention, he used the same reasoning in regard to the Articles of Confederation.

Thus, in my opinion, Hamilton really opposed a Bill of Rights because he didn't want to hamstring the powers of the federal government. This was probably true of some other nationalists as well.

Murray Rothbard used to argue that we owe the statism of the Constitution itself to the Federalists, whereas we owe the libertarianism of the Bill of Rights to the Antifederalists. Although this is a bit of an exaggeration, it is essentially accurate, as historical generalizations go.

I therefore agree with you that the Bill of Rights "represented a bona fide effort to preserve individual liberty." But the major impetus for a Bill of Rights came from opponents of the Constitution, not its defenders.

Ghs

We appear to be in complete agreement here, both about the crucial historical significance of the Bill of Rights and the anti-libertarian influence of the monarchist sympathizer Hamilton. Thanks for explaining it so much more clearly than I ever could. It's too bad Hamilton couldn't have insulted Aaron Burr's honor twenty years earlier. We would all be that much better off.

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We appear to be in complete agreement here, both about the crucial historical significance of the Bill of Rights and the anti-libertarian influence of the monarchist sympathizer Hamilton. Thanks for explaining it so much more clearly than I ever could. It's too bad Hamilton couldn't have insulted Aaron Burr's honor twenty years earlier. We would all be that much better off.

Yes, earlier would have been better. But when a sitting Vice-President kills a former Secretary of the Treasury in a duel -- well, that's my idea of the Good Old Days. :rolleyes:

Ghs

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In regard to the founders, I would argue that their sin was one of omission; i.e., they did not offer an adequate moral defense of individual rights. You have clearly explained that Jefferson did at least make some strides in that direction, but, as I think I said before, he did not do nearly enough to distance himself from traditional views of Christ, Christianity and the Bible, which most people then and now continue to associate with self-sacrifice. The founders contributed to the eventual decline of freedom in America by leaving the conventional altruist ethic largely unchallenged.

As I have said before, to defend the voluntary virtue of benevolence does not make one an "altruist" in Rand's sense. I'm afraid you will need to be more specific about what you mean by "altruism."

Take another look at Rand's article "Man's Rights." She there describes the "altruistic-collectivist doctrine" as follows:

Under all such systems, morality was a code applicable to the individual, but not to society. Society was placed outside the moral law, as its embodiment or source or exclusive interpreter—and the inculcation of self-sacrificial devotion to social duty was regarded as the main purpose of ethics in man's earthly existence.

This doesn't come close to describing the moral theories that were used to justify individual rights during the 18th century. It is light years away.

As for "an adequate moral defense of individual rights," 17th and 18th century philosophers defended rights in far greater detail than Rand ever did, and their arguments were very similar to hers. Indeed, significant sections of Rand's article on "Man's Rights" read like mere summaries of earlier treatments. (I can be much more specific, if you like.)

I mentioned the Scottish moral sense philosopher Francis Hutcheson in earlier posts. Books by Hutcheson were commonly used as college texts in 18th century America, and Jefferson became familiar with Hutcheson's writing while a student at William and Mary. One of the teachers there, the Scotsman William Small, became like a second father to Jefferson and introduced him to Enlightenment literature, especially the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. It was via this influence that Jefferson became a moral sense theorist.

Hutcheson distinguished between the "natural goods" of self-regarding actions and the "moral goods" of other-regarding actions, and this technical distinction is probably where Jefferson got the idea that ethics, strictly construed, is concerned only with other-regarding actions. But Hutcheson, like others in his tradition, insisted that the virtue of benevolence is an "imperfect obligation," i.e., an obligation that cannot and should not be coerced. It is a virtue that must be practiced by purely voluntary means. As Adam Smith later put it, "Beneficence is always free, it cannot be extorted by force...."

So did this doctrine make Hutcheson an "altruist"? Well, I suppose we could call him that in one sense, but certainly not in Rand's sense. On the contrary, Hutcheson toed the Lockean line in rights theory. In his first book, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson wrote, "Unalienable Rights are essential Limitations in all Governments." And "whenever an Invasion is made upon unalienable Rights, there must arise...a perfect [i.e., enforceable]...Right of Resistance."

Hutcheson goes on to say:

[E]xcept when Men, for their own Interest, or out of publick Love, have by Consent subjected their Actions, or their Goods within certain Limits to the Disposal of others; no Mortal can have a Right from his superior Wisdom, or Goodness, or any other Quality, to give Laws to others without their Consent, express or tacit; or to dispose of the Fruits of the Labours, or any other Right whatsover. (Liberty Fund ed., p. 194).

This Lockean approach was standard fare among 17th and 18th century libertarian types, and, in essentials, it is virtually identical to Rand's approach. So where is the pernicious "altruism" here? (As I pointed out in a previous post, there is a serious problem here, one that pertains to the doctrine of "tacit" consent. This escape hatch from the bogey of anarchism eventually opened the theoretical floodgates to democratic despotism -- but this had absolutely nothing to do with altruism.)

An adequate defense of individual rights does not require pure egoism of the Randian variety. The relevant point is where one draws the bright line between the voluntary and the coercive, and how one justifies that line. As John Milton put it in the 17th century, "Here the great art lies, to determine in what things the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work."

I will respond to the rest of your post later.

Ghs

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The founders contributed to the eventual decline of freedom in America by leaving the conventional altruist ethic largely unchallenged.

Again, I don't know what you mean by the "conventional altruistic ethic."

The Founders believed that man is naturally a social animal and that we can live happy, fulfilling lives only by interacting with others. They also believed that the voluntary virtue of benevolence greatly enhances the quality of our social interactions, making them more pleasant and enjoyable. They often cited some version of the Golden Rule to indicate that we should treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves.

The Golden Rule served as a maxim of social reciprocity, one that even non-Christians, such as Thomas Paine, frequently cited. It took two forms. In its negative form ("Do not unto others...), the Golden Rule conveyed the principle of justice, i.e., the "perfect" (enforceable) obligation to leave others alone to pursue their own happiness in their own ways, so long as they respect the equal rights of others.

In its positive form ("Do unto others..."), the Golden Rule conveyed the "imperfect" (voluntary) obligation of benevolence. It was commonly argued that if you are benevolent to others, you will find that others are more likely to treat you benevolently. Hence the standard argument that there is no conflict between benevolence and self-interest; each reinforces the other.

Is this what you mean by "the conventional altruistic ethic"? If so, I'm glad that the Founders didn't challenge it.

The remainder of your post delves into a number of different issues, most of which have nothing to do with altruism. I'm still trying to figure out how to break them down to a manageable level.

Ghs

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The founders contributed to the eventual decline of freedom in America by leaving the conventional altruist ethic largely unchallenged.

Again, I don't know what you mean by the "conventional altruistic ethic."

The Founders believed that man is naturally a social animal and that we can live happy, fulfilling lives only by interacting with others. They also believed that the voluntary virtue of benevolence greatly enhances the quality of our social interactions, making them more pleasant and enjoyable. They often cited some version of the Golden Rule to indicate that we should treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves.

The Golden Rule served as a maxim of social reciprocity, one that even non-Christians, such as Thomas Paine, frequently cited. It took two forms. In its negative form ("Do not unto others...), the Golden Rule conveyed the principle of justice, i.e., the "perfect" (enforceable) obligation to leave others alone to pursue their own happiness in their own ways, so long as they respect the equal rights of others.

In its positive form ("Do unto others..."), the Golden Rule conveyed the "imperfect" (voluntary) obligation of benevolence. It was commonly argued that if you are benevolent to others, you will find that others are more likely to treat you benevolently. Hence the standard argument that there is no conflict between benevolence and self-interest; each reinforces the other.

Is this what you mean by "the conventional altruistic ethic"? If so, I'm glad that the Founders didn't challenge it.

The remainder of your post delves into a number of different issues, most of which have nothing to do with altruism. I'm still trying to figure out how to break them down to a manageable level.

Ghs

George,

Since you say that you don’t understand what I mean when I describe the ‘conventional altruist ethic,’ I will elaborate.

Your prior two posts provide interesting insights into some of the more sophisticated ethical teachings in Jefferson’s day, but you don’t seem to be addressing the more obvious point—that Christianity then and now remains the strongest influence on what most people regard as ethical. As you know, the Bible is rife with proclamations about the glory of laying down your life for others. But beyond that, since many Christians never read the Bible, let’s consider what someone might typically say if you asked them how to be a good Christian.

I found the following guidelines on a Christian website:

Love God completely and everybody even if they treat you badly.

Try to look at the world through the eyes of others.

Love your enemies. Say farewell to selective loving. Love everyone just like God does.

Volunteer to help people.

Remain modest as pride suggests you are judging others.

Remember that the heart of your faith should be love.

Christianity does not always openly say that you must sacrifice—but it does say that you must be guided by your heart and not your mind, which has the same effect. In this way, the ethical teachings of Christianity are insidious but also extremely powerful. In fact and in practice, Christians are moral to the extent that they abandon their brains and indulge their feelings of love for others. Self-sacrifice really amounts to mind-sacrifice: follow your heart and not your brain. And in practice that translates to altruism. This was as true in Jefferson’s time as it is today.

The only way for the founders to have made any substantial headway with challenging the prevailing influence of Christianity was to have challenged it head on—and they did not. As I indicated, the founders often gave lip service to Christianity, even as they might have personally been drawn to Enlightenment sources on the best way to live morally. Their failure to use their secular moral ideas to openly challenge Christianity was their great failing. But it was also completely understandable.

Despite their secular advances in ethical thinking, Jefferson and other thinkers of his day did not know how to develop a foundation for ethics without religion and God.

Here are some remarks by Jefferson in a letter to Thomas Law in June,1814:

"If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such being exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and their reasonings in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God."

But Jefferson and other ethical thinkers of his day never discovered such a foundation—at least not one that was truly derived from reason. In addition, they explicitly discounted egoism as a reliable guide. Without a rational foundation, the benevolent “moral sense” reasoning of Jefferson and others was unlikely to have a strong cultural impact. Jefferson credited reason as the final arbiter of truth, but could not find a way to extend reason into the ethical sphere.

As far as I can tell, emotion played a similar role in much of the secular ethical thinking of the day, comparable to the role it plays in religious teachings, making it impossible for such ideas to mount a serious challenge to religion. Such a rational foundation for validating ethics was essential to the task of discarding thousands of years of the kind of religious, feeling-based ethics described above. An emotion-based ethics almost always ends up embracing some form of altruism. The upshot of all this is that the Lockean-Jefferson (and quintessentially American) idea that men own their own lives was left without an ethical foundation in reason.

By default, the task of embedding ethics in an elaborate tapestry of pseudo-rationality was left to the founders’ German contemporaries Kant and Hegel, whose ideas corrupted Western philosophy and eventually infiltrated American thinking, paving the way for the Progressive movement a century later. Kant rescued religion (and altruism) from the Enlightenment challenge, and Hegel cleverly secularized God into the almighty state. The rest, unfortunately, is history.

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I found the following guidelines on a Christian website:

Love God completely and everybody even if they treat you badly.

Try to look at the world through the eyes of others.

Love your enemies. Say farewell to selective loving. Love everyone just like God does.

Volunteer to help people.

Remain modest as pride suggests you are judging others.

Remember that the heart of your faith should be love.

How do any of these precepts conflict with a theory of individual rights?

A free society is a pluralistic society; it is a society where people can pursue their own values and act on their own beliefs, so long as they respect the equal rights of others.

Will you say that the moral defense of a free society should be based on self-interest? Fine, but surely you don't believe that only the interests of atheistic egoists will be maximized in a free society. Many Christians have argued that Christianity will fare best in a free society, and that coercion destroys the moral value of faith. As the Church father Tertullian (c. 145-225) put it:

It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions: one man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion -- to which free will and not force should lead us....

Similar pro-freedom comments were common during the early Christian era. For example, Lactantius (c. 240-320) wrote:

There is no occasion for violence and injury, for religion cannot be imposed by force; the matter must be carried on by words rather than by blows....If you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, and by tortures, and by guilt, it will no longer be defended, but will be polluted and profaned. For nothing is so much a matter of free-will as religion; in which, if the mind of the worshiper is disinclined to it, religion is at once taken away, and ceases to exist.

These appeals to freedom of conscience were virtually unheard of in Greek and Roman philosophy. In both cultures, religion was public rather than personal -- a matter of state.

When Jefferson and other Deists appealed to the ethics of early Christianity, it was largely this voluntaryism that they had in mind. They believed that this stress of freedom of conscience reflected the authentic teachings of Jesus, and so did the early Church Fathers.

Maybe you think they were wrong. Maybe you think your reading of the Gospels is more accurate than that of most Christians during the first three centuries of Christianity. But that isn't really the point. It won't do to claim that Christianity teaches self-sacrifice and then draw all kinds of conclusions from this that are not supported by historical facts.

More later....

Ghs

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The arguments by Tertullian and Lactantius that I quoted in my last post, to the effect that the value of faith is destroyed by force, bear a striking resemblance to this passage by Ayn Rand in "What is Capitalism?"

Force invalidates and paralyzes a man's judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one's mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.

Needless to say, I am not defending faith. My point, again, is that one needn't be an atheistic egoist to understand and appreciate the value of individual freedom, or to offer sound arguments in its defense.

The fact that people with different belief systems have offered different justifications for freedom does not necessarily mean that those defenses are incompatible. Rand's argument, quoted above, applies to all values, not merely to secular egoistic values. It applies as much to Christian values as it does to atheistic values. And it applies as much to the values of benevolence as it does to strictly self-interested values.

Ghs

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The only way for the founders to have made any substantial headway with challenging the prevailing influence of Christianity was to have challenged it head on—and they did not. As I indicated, the founders often gave lip service to Christianity, even as they might have personally been drawn to Enlightenment sources on the best way to live morally. Their failure to use their secular moral ideas to openly challenge Christianity was their great failing. But it was also completely understandable.

Many Enlightenment thinkers challenged Christianity in no uncertain terms. For one thing, they rejected the Bible as a source of divine revelation, and that's about as "head-on" as it gets. I discuss a number of these figures in "Deism and the Assault on Revealed Religion," in Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies.

Despite their secular advances in ethical thinking, Jefferson and other thinkers of his day did not know how to develop a foundation for ethics without religion and God.

This is just flat wrong. In The Law of War and Peace (1625), a massive work on moral and political theory that exerted an incalculable influence on subsequent thinkers, Hugo Grotius wrote that the moral precepts of natural law, which are knowable through reason, would be valid "even if we should concede...that there is no God." And this wasn't even a novel view. Some earlier Catholic philosophers, especially Thomists, had said virtually the same thing.

In the latter part of the 17th century, John Locke stated that the Bible is not a proper foundation for political theory, and by the time the 18th century Enlightenment got underway, the influence of the Bible on the mainstream of political thought was virtually nil. Virtually every major philosopher appealed only to reason and natural law.

There were admittedly some technical complications, as we see in debates over the ultimate foundation of moral obligation, but those had relatively little effect on the outcome. Moreover, some philosophers, such as Burlamaqui and Vattel -- both of whom were widely read in 18th century America -- argued that self-interest is the ultimate basis of moral obligation.

To be continued...

Ghs

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Ghs--

(And, given your monniker, I would love if you pulled some strings<--blatant dumb joke and got me a few comp sets of Ghs' "Nickel Rockers" guitar strings; I like .009-042--something problematic in their normally-offered gauges, but just give it a try if you would not mind so much: I am burning up strings playing shows--doing Negro Spirituals at church is definitely reducing tensile qualities.)

I, too, lie in eager anticipation of your book; that you approve and modify so that it is what you wish it to be, fully.

As that I have now for many years been a tried-and-true Universalist Unitarian, reports from the ground level are in order. Bear in mind that my, er, "faith decision" was not taken quickly, nor lightly. As you likely know, the UU church (within the greater body of the UUC) is one under what is commonly referred to as the "Free Church."

The UU church is covenant, rather than creed-based. This is an important distinction. Further, it is reason-based, intellectually based, for sure. I preface slightly, but allow, if you will.

One of the things that we get often is the "you believe in everything" deal. Well, no--easy example is that there is no toleration for hateful thinkers like, say, skinheads and such. Disrupters are handled discretely, humanely, but there is a line there. That needs known, I believe.

Our troubles do involve certain strains of Christianity, in a big, bad way. If we were all black, our churches would have been bombed heavily, years ago.

There is a certain meanness within Fundamentalism, for one thing, and that is for sure. It causes all manner of troubles. I know this for many reasons, both direct and indirect. I know it because we have atheists that attend UU services. I know it because we are a welcoming church, including those of alternate sexualities, down to trans-gender. The ones who have taken beatings.

Essentially, at least for me, and many I have spoken to within the UU faith tradition, it comes down to hateful thinking, intolerance, and so on. One can only deal with this as an educational issue for so long (though it remains a constant) if push comes to shove. What is the nature of Evil, one may ask? Hateful thinking? Where does hateful thinking originate? From others, before, perhaps. Where did it start in the fucking first place? Does that matter, where it came from?

However, ground experience tells me ("us") that there remains, always, some few that can be un-bedazzled. That is where the work comes in, I suppose, and that is work most of us can ill-afford, what with being balanced humans constituting a nearly full-time job.

The misbehavior of certain and so many Christian faiths troubles us for obvious reasons alone (violence, physical type or mental), but even more so because our traditions are, at least in N. America, deeply rooted in certain types of Christian thought, down to Puritans, and even Quakers. We know what is wrong is because it smells bad.

It involves, like most things in life, many trials, and a great deal of patience. Often, action is required.

In the end, the fight to deprogram the spread of Fundamentalist thought, in any form (Islam, Xstian, whatever) becomes the main challenge. And sometimes it is just better to walk away from a fight. There are many ways to deal with engagements.

I will also state that, by speaking of my UU affiliation, I have no desire nor need to, by so doing, "convert" anyone to anything. If there is a problem with me speaking about my affiliation, and how Objectivist thought is congruent with it, the real problem (if there is to be one) lies not within me, but within those who protest my open speaking. It is 100% certain that an Objectivist-based thinker (all the way, where atheism is if not mandatory, nearly so) would not suffer any attacks or other forms of scolding when talking to a UU. Just to be clear on this one, I will live in both worlds, because they do not clash, they compliment. And, that it is only my orientation. To each, his own, fairly so.

Best on this book, Ghs.

DSC_0036.jpg

From our wedding day, Ft. Myers, Fl. Outdoor Chalice. For more on the significance of the UU Chalice,

click here:

http://www.uupuertor...eng/Chalice.htm

Regards,

rde

Edited by Rich Engle
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