Other socialists see it differently. They brag that the final outcome of socialism is an exciting unknown. They predict that when socialism is fully unleashed, mankind’s economic well-being will evolve naturally until society reaches a perfect harmony of balance, fairness and prosperity that is too fantastic to even imagine.
Whatever form or scheme the socialists choose to gain power and get their way, the best definition of socialism that emerges to describe its purposes, its mechanics, and its dreams, is this:
Socialism is government force to control and change society.
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3 Imagine, written by John Lennon, produced by John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Phil Spector, 1971, copyright by the John Lennon estate and Yoko Ono.
4 Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon in America, Cooper Square Press, 2000.
5 Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station, New York Review of Books, 2003, p. 115.
Chapter 3: How Much Force?
Governments need force, but the people need control.
One of the brilliant contributions by America’s Founding Fathers was a new way of looking at political power. Their idea can be illustrated with a yardstick serving as a scale, a sliding scale of political power. To the far left they put Ruler’s Law, or all political power—complete control. On the opposite end, to the far right, they put anarchy, or too little government power, no law, total anarchy, and mob rule—no control at all.
Where do the majority of governments fit on this sliding scale? Most are on the left side, the side of Ruler’s Law. That is because, for most of history, governments have used lethal force to violate human rights. These include communists, totalitarians, monarchists, fascists, socialists, dictators, emperors, chiefs, generals, Fabian-socialists, demagogs, tyrants, military juntas, social democrats, Christian socialists, parliamentary republicans, single-party governments, or any other form that denies the people their direct control over their government.
Governments that are too weak, or countries with no government at all, take a seat toward the right. This is mob rule. Examples include the shallow Articles of Confederation, the bloodthirsty mobs during the French revolution, the 20 years of no central government in Somalia, the anarchy and mob rule of a leaderless Egypt in 2013, etc. The Articles of Confederation came close to causing mob rule in America because its young government didn’t have enough force to maintain peace and order.
These weak regimes are examples of how too little power breeds chaos, lawlessness, loss of life, loss of property, destruction, and no means to stop people from warring with each other. The biggest mob always wins and the smaller mobs must acquiesce or be killed.
The perfect center or balancing point between all force and no force is difficult to achieve. The best solution ever invented is the U.S. Constitution. It gave Americans a carefully crafted system of bottom-to-top representation, checks and balances, and strict control over the government’s use of force.
The Constitution has not only protected the people’s unalienable rights, but it allowed for maximum expression of their freedoms inside a structure of brilliantly placed boundaries. These boundaries may be called liberty. You may have the freedom to swing your fist, but you’re not at liberty to hit my nose.
The Constitution provided the perfect balance between all force and no force. Its principles tapped into eternal laws that all other forms failed to embrace. It built the mightiest nation in history and spread its powerful ideas to help bring freedom to billions of others.
So, what is it about Ruler’s Law that creates so much discord and death and misery in the world? Why didn’t Ruler’s Law ever work?
Ruler’s Law
Ruler’s Law has been the default form of government for billions of people over thousands of years. The Founding Fathers identified ten major elements of Ruler’s Law that were being wielded like a bludgeon in the hands of King George and his monarchial administration:6
1.Bully Tactics: Authority under Ruler’s Law is nearly always put in place by force, violence, and conquest.
2.Might Makes Right: All sovereign power is considered to be in the hands of the conquerors or their descendants.
3.Classes: The people are not treated equally, but are divided into classes, and are looked upon as subjects of the king.
4.No Private Property: The entire country is considered to be the property of the ruler who speaks of it as his “realm.”
5.Powerless Masses: The thrust of government power is from the top down, not from the people upward.
6.No Rights: The people have no unalienable rights. The king giveth and the king taketh away.
7.Flip-Floppers: Government is by the whims of the king not by the fixed rule of law. Rulers know that fixed law governs even the king. Therefore, a ruler must prevent and destroy written laws, constitutions, charters, or corpus juris laws that would interfere with his complete power and control.
8.Bench Rulings: The ruler issues edicts that are called “The Law,” and interprets the law whichever way best suits the ruler’s ultimate goals.
9.Adding New Masters: Problems are always solved by issuing more edicts or laws, setting up more bureaus, creating more regulatory agencies, swamping the people with a flood of regulations, and charging the people for these services by continually adding new taxes.
10. Rejecting Freedom: Freedom is never discussed as a solution. The rulers are afraid of the people—they’re afraid the people will take away the power. The rulers do what they can to make the people weak and fully dependent on government for everything.
Could a King Ever Be Trusted?
Ruler’s Law always benefited the ruler and his supporters. The Founders declared that any ruler with kingly power had no place in human society, and no matter what controls were placed upon these leaders, that much power always corrupted them.
Didn’t the Bible promote kings? Deuteronomy tells of the Lord knowing that one day, Israel would demand a king. They would choose to abandon their open society of a theo-democracy, and willingly become subject to the arbitrary whims of a central and all-powerful authority figure.
The Lord knew that it was possible to have a righteous king provided he adhered to God’s law. A “good” king’s traits were outlined in Deuteronomy:7
1.Citizen—He must be a citizen of Israel and not a stranger.
2.Chosen—He should be a person whom “the Lord thy God shall choose.”
3.Circumspect—He should not “multiply horses” (build private armies) which was a common characteristic of heathen kings, especially the extravagant and war-making kings of Egypt.
4.Virtuous—The king was not to “multiply wives.”
5.Thrifty—The king was not to “multiply to himself silver and gold,” which would be at the expense of his people through taxes.
6.Wise—The task of the king was to be a great scholar, judge, general, and righteous policy maker. To do this, he was to have his own personal copy of the law, and he was to “read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them.” In other words, have a constitution, read it often, and rule accordingly.
Could a President Meet the Requirements?
The Founders labored long and hard to instill the Lord’s leadership requirements into the presidency so that America’s executive officer would meet this minimum expectation. As it turned out, very few presidents have measured up to the Lord’s requirements.
The Founders’ Intense Interest in People’s Law
The best alternative to Ruler’s Law and the hope of a Biblical king was a form of government called People’s Law. An early example of its success can be found in the leadership choices by Moses.
Exodus tells about Moses leading Israel—an estimated 600,000 families—from Egypt, sometime between 1490 B.C. and 1290 B.
C. With the help of his father-in-law Jethro,8 Moses learned how to organize the Israelites under People’s Law.
Jethro advised Moses to organize the people into small manageable units where everyone had an elected representative, and a vote. He grouped them into families of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands, each with its own representative. At the very top Moses added a council of 70, similar to today’s U.S. Senate.9
This structure provided strong local self-government from the highest to the lowest levels of society. It allowed problems to be solved at the most logical level where personalities and local constraints were best known and understood.
If a local problem could not be solved among the ten families, their leader carried it to the leader of 50 families of which he was a part—and higher as needed. This process of appealing up the chain spared Moses from dealing with a million problems. Only the most severe issues ever reached his desk. “The hard cases they brought to Moses,” Exodus 18:26 says, “but every small matter they judged themselves.”
People’s Law and Natural Law
The Founders identified a number of principles from Moses’ experiences that led them to pinpoint the characteristics of good government under the natural principles of People’s Law—
1.Self-Government The people organized themselves to be self-governing, not servants of a king. They were jealous about their liberty. “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land,” Moses declared, “and unto all the inhabitants thereof.”10
2.Self-Policing: A strong code of virtue and morality was always taught and encouraged. This was a brilliant tactic for self-policing. If the people’s hearts were governed by themselves, they had no need for more masters to do it for them.
3.Free Elections: The adults were all organized into small units, with everyone having a voice in all matters, and a vote. All leadership was selected by consent of the people.11
4.Local Rule: Local government was strongly emphasized.
5.Gold Standard: Their money was reliable, based on gold and silver. They had a uniform system of weights and measures.12
6.Property: The land was the people’s, not the government’s.
7.Private Rights Are Sacred: Life and private property rights were protected for each lawful individual.
8.No Arbitrary Laws: All laws had to be approved by the people or their representatives before they were enacted.13
9.Fairness Under the Law: People were presumed innocent until proven guilty.14 Justice was based on giving reparations to the victim, not to the government.15
10. People in Control: The power of government originated with the will of the people upward. Only in times of crises, such as war, could the government exert power from the top down.
11.Written Law: The government had to comply with the written laws—a constitution. It could not make up laws or ignore certain laws of its choosing.
This carefully balanced system allowed the Israelites to transfer political power from one administration to the next without a massive uprising or bloodbath as was typical for other tyrannical cultures.
Anglo-Saxons Lived the Israelite System
A second example of a culture living under People’s Law is the Anglo-Saxons. When Thomas Jefferson first learned the Anglo-Saxons had practiced People’s Law, he was so excited that he decided to learn their language so he could read their original writings himself.
The Anglo-Saxons came from the Black Sea area in the first century B.C., and built settlements all across Northern Europe. They entered Britain around A.D. 450, at the behest of the king of Kent. Hengist and Horsa were the first, settling their families in the south to help guard the frontiers and borderlands. They multiplied, prospered, and eventually took over the island. They renamed the land Anglo-land, or Engle-land, or England.
The Anglo-Saxons embraced the Israelite’s form of government and practiced it for centuries with great success. Unfortunately, about A.D. 700-750, corruption crept in and eventually things fell apart.
Jefferson took these ancient ideas as a great breath of fresh air. He encouraged others to use these successful ideas in the new American government. “Are we not better for what we have hitherto abolished of the feudal system,” he wrote in 1776. “Has not every restitution of the ancient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the eighth century?”16
Human history is thick with Ruler’s Law and the seven pillars of socialism. One of the reasons this mayhem has continued is because succeeding generations have failed to pass along knowledge about People’s Law and the universal gift of unalienable rights.
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6 Excerpted from W. Cleon Skousen, The Five Thousand Year Leap, 2009, pp. 12-13.
7 See Deuteronomy 17:15-19.
8 See Exodus 18:13-26.
9 Number 11:16.
10 Leviticus 25:10, .
11 See 2 Samuel 2:4; 1 Chronicles 29:22; for the rejection of a leader, see 2 Chronicles 10:16.
12 See Deuteronomy 25:13-15.
13 Exodus 19:8.
14 For example, see the law of witnesses, Deuteronomy 19:15, and 24:3.
15 See references to this process in Exodus 21 and 22. There could be no “satisfaction” for first-degree murder. The killer had to be executed. Numbers 35:31.
16 Julian P. Boyd, editor, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:492.
Chapter 4: What Is A Right?
There are two kinds of rights—one is eternal, the other is temporary.
To understand socialism is to first understand human rights.
A “right” is a legal or ethical entitlement. The Founding Fathers identified two basic rights: (1) those vested by the government, and (2) those natural or unalienable rights that are gifts from the Creator. Many people confuse the two, thinking that some parts of life are simply theirs because, well, because it’s their right.
Vested rights are granted by the government. They can be revoked as easily as they are granted. That doesn’t automatically make vested rights bad. Quite the contrary, they serve many important purposes.
Vested rights include the right to operate a car, build a house, patent an idea, drive on a road, practice medicine, cross borders, participate in health insurance, buy a piece of ground, copyright music, sell paintings, start a business, go fishing, etc.
Vested rights are the rules that allow people to participate and interact together without killing each other in the process. If certain rules and regulations are not met, the people empower the government to revoke the vested rights and punish or imprison the violator in order to keep the peace.
To a socialist’s way of thinking, all rights are given by the government for precisely that purpose—to revoke them as the case may be. For example, when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia beginning in 1917, one of the first unalienable rights to be converted to a vested right, and then cancelled in one fell swoop, was the right to property. The Bolsheviks issued a land decree, one of 190 issued in the first six months, that ordered there could be no private ownership of land. Land could not be sold, leased or mortgaged, and eventually, all private land was confiscated by the government.
Natural Rights Have Three Parts
On the other hand, natural rights, or unalienable rights, are universal and established by the Creator. Every person is born with them, and they may not be revoked or legislated away. They frequently are revoked, but governments have no moral authority to do so. The struggle for freedom is the struggle to exercise unalienable rights.
An unalienable right has three parts.
1.It is universal. It applies equally to every living soul.
2.It imposes no obligation on another person. It doesn’
t infringe on the rights of other people or impose on them.
3.It carries the duty to use that right respectfully. Rights must not be misused to harm others except in the defense of moral law.
Therefore, health care is not a natural right because it imposes on doctors, nurses, pharmaceutical manufacturers, etc. For that imposition, people compensate by paying a fee to get the services. If a person can’t pay, the provider is not obligated to provide a thing—at least, not in a free country. When health-care providers receive payment, they are motivated to continue providing the service.
If one person imposes on another, there must be compensation of some kind. It is a person’s unalienable right to be compensated, as described next.
The Eight Rights
There are eight basic unalienable rights or categories of rights. All eight are necessary for freedom. Remove any one of them, and the remainder quickly fall. Socialism cannot take control of a society where these personal rights are protected.
Right #1—Independent individuals.
The individual human being is the smallest minority, the single most important entity upon which all else is created, built, and focused. The individual is a sovereign, self-standing unit of creation with unalienable rights to his own life. Individuals are not born as commodities to be consumed by society—it is society that is built upon the independent individual. To protect society, first protect the individual.17
Socialism degrades the independent human to an anonymous, faceless insect dependent on the edicts of the community to survive. That is why communist leaders care so little about human life: What’s a million dead if it helps the 100 million stay alive?
The Naked Socialist Page 3