The Naked Socialist

by Paul B Skousen

  322 James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788.

  323 Thomas Jefferson to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821.

  324 James Madison to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792.

  325 James Madison, speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788.

  326 Benjamin Franklin in On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, Nov. 29, 1766.

  327 Thomas Jefferson in An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, passed in the Assembly of Virginia in the beginning of the year 1786.

  328 John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 17, 1775.

  329 Thomas Jefferson to Gideon Granger, 1800.

  Chapter 48: “Old Fashioned”?

  Critics dismiss the Constitution as a creation ideal for a culture of farmers, but no longer applicable to today’s modern problems.

  America has made unprecedented progress since the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Some people clamor for reform, claiming that America has outgrown her founding Declaration and Constitution. They suggest these antiquated ideas be abandoned for something more modern. But can anything more modern be offered?

  EQUALITY: The Declaration of Independence declares “all men are created equal”—Is equality old fashioned?

  RIGHTS: The Declaration of Independence declares we “are endowed with unalienable rights”—Are rights old fashioned?

  LIBERTY: The Declaration of Independence defines those rights as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—Which of those three is old fashioned or can be improved or replaced?

  The Constitution of the United States lays out the mechanisms and restraints for those absolute truths to abide.

  There is no improvement of liberty possible—no new plan or new approach that can advance human beings forward as have the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. To refuse those truths is to turn back to Ruler’s Law.

  On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Calvin Coolidge said this about those absolute truths,

  “No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”330

  Said another way, those clamoring for reform are really clamoring for control.

  * * *

  330 Calvin Coolidge, July 5, 1926, Philadelphia Pennsylvania.

  Chapter 49: Does It Work?

  Did the U.S. Constitution work? Here is one of countless millions of ideas that proves the workings of the phenomenon of free choice.

  In 1945, one of the hottest-selling gadgets at Gimbels in New York City was the first-ever ball-point pen. It was bragged about as a “fantastic … miraculous fountain pen guaranteed to write for two years without refilling.” More than 5,000 people jammed the store that day and snatched up the entire supply of 10,000 pens, paying $12.50 apiece—that’s $145 in today’s dollars.331

  The ingenious invention of a loose ball set in a socket that smeared ink on paper was not new. The idea had been around since 1888, but it was Laszlo Jozsef Biro, a Hungarian refugee, who first brought it to market.

  The Milton Reynolds Company grabbed Biro’s idea, developed it, and struck gold. For the first time in history there was a viable solution to the maddening frustration of charcoal pencils or quill pens with all their problems of spilled ink, blotting, and smearing that these ancient tools had brought to the art of written communications.

  And everybody wanted one. That’s when America’s amazing free market took over.

  Competing companies saw the popularity of the ball-point pen and started working on their own designs.

  By the 1950s, inventors discovered a better ink so people could hold the pen at an angle, upside down, or even in water, and it still worked.

  Another company made it retractable. With just a click, the ball point disappeared inside so ink wouldn’t leak all over someone’s shirt. Others invented clips to hold it fast in a pocket.

  One company boasted that their ink would not stain clothing, and sent salesmen into offices to write all over the shirt of the boss. If the ink didn’t wash out, they would provide a more expensive shirt. But the ink did wash out—each and every time. The company made a fortune.

  What did all these new features do to the price of pens? Instead of making them more expensive, the competition forced the prices down—and the quality up. Companies all over the world began manufacturing their brand of a better pen in hopes of cornering the lucrative market. By 1952, a ball-point pen could be purchased in almost any store in America for only 19 cents.

  By 1964, annual sales topped $80 million with nearly a billion pens sold worldwide.

  In 2005, the Bic pen company sold its one-hundred-billionth pen (that’s 100,000,000,000). That’s enough pens to draw a line from Earth to Pluto and back, 33 times.

  The story of the ballpoint pen is a wonderful example of how freedom in America works. No one forced Mr. Biro to invent his pen, and no one forced Milton Reynolds to market it. Nobody forced anybody to make it better. Every individual involved did it for one reason: to make millions.

  They tried different ideas, they lowered the price, they advertised, they tried virtually anything to lure dollars away from competitors and into their own pockets.

  For the consumer, all of that competition and fighting was delightful. Pens were invented and re-invented, improved, and made cheaper, and as prices fell their availability went up.

  Along the way many inventors and marketers succeeded, and others failed. But everyone benefitted. At first, only the well-to-do could afford the ball-point pen, but over time, everyone could get one—rich and poor alike. Predictably, the tide of freedom lifted all boats. That’s how the free market works. It makes life better for the greatest number of people at the lowest possible cost.

  Are there still $12.50 ballpoint pens out there? Indeed there are. In fact, there are some designer pens that sell for thousands of dollars. Many of those are just flamboyant gimmicks flaunted for attention, but inside, the ink, the roller ball, and the technology are essentially the same ideas at work.

  The final fruit of that remarkable combine of energy is this: If you happen to know a good insurance salesman you can get a pocket-clipping, ink-safe, button-clicking, non-leaking, long-lasting gravity-defying amazing ball-point pen for absolutely free.

  And that’s how freedom to choose works in America.

  Learning to Recognize Socialism

  Was America a Christian nation in 1776? Were the Founding Fathers? Discuss what might have been the outcome if the Founders had officially declared America be a Christian nation.

  What two devices did the Founders use to remove power from the ruler and abolish socialism’s Pillar #1?

  According to Polybius, how should federal power be divided? When Montesquieu revived this idea, what did he call it? What three divisions in government resulted from their ideas?

  What did Jefferson say has destroyed liberty and human rights “in every government which has ever existed under the sun”?

  What are the six duties of the president? How many terms may the president serve? What prevents the president from making any law he wants, just like a king?

  What did the Founders mean by “general welfare”? How did Congress twist its meaning? What did Madison say?

  What are the 17 duties given to Congress? Is national health care on this list? A national freeway system? Social Security or Food Stamps? The regulation of education? What are 8 more restrictions placed on Congre
ss to chain them down?

  May the judiciary branch make laws? Can you think of examples where it has, under the guise of “applying the Constitution”?

  How does a republican form of government destroy a caste system?

  How do protected property rights prevent “all things in common”?

  How does the Bill of Rights prevent the abuse of information control? List three current abuses of information control. How is the “power to regulate” abusing Americans today?

  What is the key to controlling a central government and its use and abuse of political power and force?

  What did Madison predict would be the silent killer of freedom if a certain “danger was not wisely guarded against”?

  Does the Constitution create rights or protect existing rights? Did the Founders see rights as invented or established by God?

  Part VIII--REVOLUTION OF THE SOCIALlSTS, Part: 1

  “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

  * * *

  331 See, among others, Robert Sobel, When Giants Stumble: Classic Business Blunders and How to Avoid Them, Prentice-Hall Press, 1999, pp. viii-xi.

  Chapter 50: Conspiracy to Socialize America

  While the United States pushed forward with a new standard in human freedom and potential, its powerful engine of productivity was looked upon with greed and envy.

  The Founding Fathers did such a good job of protecting the nation from the spread of socialism that the socialists had to invest an enormously difficult and costly amount of time and infiltration to upend the Founders’ best efforts.

  In 1895, the Fabian Socialists complained, “England’s [unwritten] Constitution readily admits of constant though gradual modification. Our American Constitution does not readily admit of such change. England can thus move into Socialism almost imperceptibly. Our Constitution being largely individualistic must be changed to admit of Socialism, and each change necessitates a political crisis. This means the raising of great new issues ...”332

  Ramsay MacDonald, a British Fabian socialist greatly vexed by the Constitution’s “roadblock to reform,” complained that “The great bar to progress is the written constitutions, Federal and State, which give ultimate power to a law court.”333

  U.S. Constitution Blocks Socialism

  Because of a written Constitution, the shift toward top-down socialistic control of the American economy and culture was thwarted. But that didn’t ensure that the American way would remain impervious to collapse. The carefully prepared structure of the Constitution was built to work only if the people managing it (that would be us) kept all of its necessary protections in place.

  Those protections relied upon a voluntary and freely embraced national virtue, morality, religion, education, participation, and knowledge. As those guardrails on the road to freedom were refused, ignored, and taken down, so was freedom, a little at a time. For many ill-informed and misguided people this drift toward Ruler’s Law was a good change—they called it progressive.

  * * *

  332 Introduction to The American Fabian, 1895.

  333 Fabian News, February 1898.

  Chapter 51: There’s Nothing Progressive about Progressives

  The so-called Progressive Movement in the U.S. did not begin around 1900—it can be traced to more than a century earlier, back when the ink on the Constitution had not even dried.

  An otherwise unknown woman remembered only as “Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia,” caught Benjamin Franklin after the Constitutional Convention and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

  Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”334

  Franklin’s answer was both prophetic and factual. “If you can keep it” was a piercing expression of both hope and doubt: the hope of unrealized capacity because of freedom—and some degree of doubt that weak and gullible humans could sustain it as long as might be hoped.

  Already by 1787, the seeds of erosion were planted at the top levels of the new government, and Franklin probably knew of it as he stood in front of Independence Hall to briefly converse with Mrs. Powel. He was more than likely well aware that forces lay in wait to undo the hard work of birthing freedom that the Founders had so recently completed.

  Seeds of Corruption

  Since America’s break with England, various efforts to replace the republic and impose unrestrained top-down control had been urgently promoted by self-proclaimed reformers seeking an overthrow of nearly every aspect of American life.

  For more than a century, historians have called that drift toward reforming the Constitution the Progressive Movement—a generalization of the plethora of efforts to socialize America.

  Terms of Enslavement

  A progressive is someone who seeks to cut the chains of the Constitution that hold back the consuming powers of the federal government. With such chains cut, there is only one way the federal government can grow: bigger, fatter, more meddlesome, and more expensive. Recent history demonstrates this in a trillion-dollar way.

  A progressive seeks to install top-down government power to eliminate control from the bottom up. He does this in the name of fairness or equality or social justice or economic justice or civic responsibility or equal opportunity, or some other appeal to the free- lunch mentality. A progressive strives to take advantage of the ever-changing whims and frustrations wrought by the natural inclinations of human nature to trod the path of least resistance.

  The very term “progressive movement” is an oxymoron. There is nothing progressive or positive or beneficial about the work to destroy freedom. Progressives would not see it that way, of course, but why call going backwards going forwards except to deceive and mask their true intentions? A more suitable name for progressivism is just what it is—socialism.

  Each and every progressive effort, regulation, plan, law, court decision, and legislation has worked to remove freedom from individuals or the nation as a whole. Many of these changes came to America with a great amount of pomp and circumstance, of pontificating and proclamations promising some utopian dream.

  The passage of time eventually wears away those empty promises and facades, and exposes progressivism for what it really is—the systematic and carefully crafted violations of true principles. There is nothing new here. Progressivism is simply another flavor, another version, another strategy, another deception to take a great forward-moving people backward—under control of a ruling body of the elitists.

  Progressivism has unleashed multiple chain reactions that give us today’s national meltdown in which Americans are now trapped. When did it actually start?

  * * *

  334 See James McHenry’s diary, reproduced in the 1906 American Historical Review, see New American, November 6, 2000.

  Chapter 52: America’s First Progressive

  America’s first big-league progressive was also a respected and brilliant Founding Father. What went wrong?

  We pause in our world-wide view of socialism to focus on America for this important reason: the dominant power in the earth tends to draw all other nations to it through trade, alliances and example. With America standing as the sole practitioner of actual liberty, its resulting prosperity has blessed the entire world. All other peoples who have sought to emulate its patterns of success have also succeeded to varying degrees.

  But then, as America’s integrity was weakened, so began the shrinking of freedoms everywhere. Liberty and prosperity in the Earth today do not rise any higher than the level established by the United States. It will remain that way unless America’s demise becomes so severe that it becomes unseated as the major influential power over all nations.

  Discovering when and where that weakening actually began helps formulate a cure and a solution. As it turns out, surprisingly, t
hat starting place was a dismal doubt in the heart of an original Founding Father.

  Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)

  For all of Alexander Hamilton’s brilliant and inspiring insights into principles of freedom, he had a dangerous blind side: he liked some aspects of Ruler’s Law, of the “British system.”

  Hamilton was one of America’s Founding Fathers and the first Secretary of the Treasury. He was born and raised in the Caribbean and attended Columbia University in New York. He was elected to Congress from New York and later founded the Bank of New York. He represented New York at the Constitution Convention in 1787, and wrote 52 of the 87 essays in The Federalist Papers to explain and define the new Constitution, and get it ratified.

  Hamilton’s admiration for the British system was his downfall. While his role in setting up the new government is highly admired, quoted, and celebrated, his corruption of its authorities in favor of a stronger central government spoiled an otherwise honored place among the defenders of freedom. His policies as Treasury Secretary reverberate to this day in the form of bottomless national debt and incurable federal intrusion.

  Promoted British System

  Hamilton wanted a strong ruler in the nation’s capital, an all-powerful leader similar to the monarchy of England. He wrote:

  “I have no scruple in declaring ... that the British government is the best in the world; and that I doubt much whether anything short of it will do in America. ...It is the only government in the world which unites public strength with individual security.”335

  Hamilton gave a 5-hour speech at the very beginning of the Constitutional Convention celebrating the British system as the model of government that America should follow. The speech didn’t sparkle with his usual flourish, but listeners knew he was trying to stir up the comforting memories of old loyalties to crown and country.