Mr. Spitsbergen, keen student of constitutional theory and practice, is the author of “Liberals” and the Constitution.
Disaster always overtakes government engaged in business adventures or in taxation plans to eradicate economic hardships.
That is so because of the relationship of the government official to the tax money. He represents sovereignty and therefore is not financially responsible for his mistakes. The King can do no wrong. He obtains the tax money by compulsion. He is in a strategic position to spend such money for his own political, financial, and social advantage.
By abuse of majority rule he can dissipate the funds of the efficient, thrifty, and honest. He can block investigation under cover of “public necessity” and “military secrecy.” He cannot be sued without his consent and, when sued, may avoid judgment by declaring that the court is without jurisdiction, on grounds of public policy. There is no way to make him financially responsible.
Obviously, to grant wide authority to spend tax money to a person who is covered with so many privileges, advantages, and immunities violates all the important moral and legal rules on which society depends. Society cannot survive when such rules are disregarded.
The government official is well aware of the rules. He enforces them most vigorously against bankers, insurance companies, trust companies, corporations, brokers, and guardians. In his “war” to prevent fraud by private concerns he often imposes restrictions on them which make it impossible to use the funds to the owner’s advantage.
In tax disputes he is most unfair. He seizes the tax money before he comes to the court — a court presided over by a judge paid and appointed by the government and, therefore, in an awkward position to resist its policies. A taxpayer’s chance for recovery is therefore at the minimum.
The money in the hands of a government official constitutes a most sacred trust. Nevertheless, without the consent of the taxpayer, it is invested in dubious undertakings without regard to the usual rules of what is moral or legal. Such a concept of a trust relationship is not one of integrity, nor is it sound business.
Undue Influence
The government official is in a strategic position. Undue influence, difficult to uncover, arises from his authority to grant and deny. He does not have to ask, promise, or even suggest favors. Favors will be pressed upon him over his protest. Moreover, his self-interest will make him astute in representing undue influence as heroic action to save the nation, or even the world.
He can readily reap benefits from wasteful programs. Office, security, and prestige may be gained by giving friends financial help. They, in turn, will make themselves believe that what they demand is absolutely necessary to promote public welfare. Human beings do not withstand such temptation. It breaks the strongest character, even in the area of religion.
Not Unfair Criticism
What has been said is not unfair criticism of integrity or intelligence. It recognizes the weakness of human beings, implied in every lock, ring, contract, charter, and constitution, as well as in the practice of honest men binding themselves with contracts, and of judges refusing to sit on cases in which they have a personal interest.
Unforeseeable consequences make it impracticable to hold a government official financially responsible. He could not pay for the damage caused by a court decision uprooting long-established customs, or for ill-advised legislation, or a misdirected war. Moreover, he would be afraid to act under such circumstances. Generally, therefore, even though the action be the high-water mark of blunder, false pride, or deceit, financial liability does not arise in his case. His immunity from liability is, of course, the basis for restricting his authority to the limited areas specified in the Constitution.
Power and responsibility must not be separated, and the one financially responsible must dictate policy. That is the basis for the Constitution’s mandate to limit the taxing power, in order that tax money could be utilized only for the usual functions of government. The disregarded mandate proves that the forefathers underestimated the craftiness of the human mind in search of power.
Ballot Not a Check on Corruption
Under the universal ballot the voting majority is often made up of the frustrated, the desperate, the disappointed, the hungry, the ignorant, the misinformed, the greedy, the lazy, and the unscrupulous, plus that great number of voters who depend on government for jobs, contracts, pensions, education, food, and shelter. Such voters, in connection with spending tax money for welfare purposes, should not be expected to exercise sound judgment.
Constitutional provisions restricted voting to the selection of representatives who were supposed to make decisions. Even the judgment of the representative was not trusted. The Constitution gives him a short term of office and, in addition, binds him by an oath to abide by and defend a plan of government which greatly curtails his taxing authority.
But all these curbs have been bypassed by misuse of the universal ballot. An office seeker depends on votes. He, therefore, grants what a majority demands. He does more. He skillfully encourages the voter to make demands which will enhance his power. The record shows that he follows such a course to collapse and revolution.
Limitations on Majority Rule
The government bases the tax policy for its welfare-state laws on the implied consent of the governed — majority rule. But a majority has no moral right to authorize the government to tax (compel) a minority, or an individual, to support others. Such procedure binds the taxpayer to the obligation that everyone shall have what is needed — an impossible task. That idea is the philosophy of communism and totalitarianism. It ushers in permanent destitution for those promised help.
War, a temporary status, presumably gives government authority to compel the citizen to surrender his property and life. But when such authority is used to dissolve economic hardships, the prerogative becomes a permanent one. Then everything the citizen has is constantly at the government’s command. There will be neither time nor area in which he could be considered a free man. That abrogates the inalienable rights proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence and protected by the Constitution. To exchange such rights for a government’s promise of security is to bargain for slavery. The government has no way to keep its promise.
Doctrine of Inalienable Rights
The doctrine of inalienable rights stressed property ownership. Such ownership, in its various phases, is the only way to avoid dependence on government for food and shelter. To be so beholden is the most degrading form of slavery. It brings the individual into subjection to unlimited power administered by a human being.
The citizen, therefore, is assumed to have rights which he cannot surrender and which the government cannot seize. They are the basis of his independence.
Nevertheless, in the name of majority rule, the government seized these rights. To redeem the world from poverty, it pledged the taxpayer to support the destitute. Under that government-imposed pledge, the inalienable right of security through property ownership is practically set aside. It denies the citizen the inalienable right to be independent of government for his food and shelter — to be secure through property ownership.
If such is an inalienable right, the government cannot by majority rule, or in any other manner, even in the name of “public welfare,” modify it — compel citizens to be dependent on government for their bread and butter, or compel them to guarantee that to another.
When the Constitution was ratified, the citizens did not contemplate a tax program which could force them to become philanthropists or give government officials authority to invest or spend tax money as they now do.
The Most Disturbing Aspect
What is most disturbing is the great number of businessmen, clergymen, educators, judges, statesmen, and economists who, in their zeal for a Welfare State, follow the totalitarian or communist concept of implicit faith in government — government based on the judgment of one man, or a group of men. But no such faith in others!
Today men worship the Golden Calf of government by man. The original commandments of good government have been discarded.
A Pure Democracy
Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
James Madison, The Federalist, No. 10
