by Caleb Nelson
The history of this amendment dates to the Civil War when direct taxes on incomes were first levied and upheld by the Supreme Court. Another income tax law in 1893 was found unconstitutional. In the early twentieth century the Progressive idea to “soak the rich” began to take deeper root among people. Democrats introduced bills to tax the rich—bills which were defeated by more conservative members of the Republican party. Democrats used this as evidence to make accusations that the Republicans were the “party of the rich” and should be removed from power. These accusations made President Taft, a Republican, concede in political speeches that the income tax might be all right “in principle,” but he opposed it!
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The conservatives lost ground not because they disagreed with the Progressives. They lost because they agreed! They had no principles of their own to guide their judgments. They were reduced to “me-tooing” the Progressive movement, only arguing about the degree of changes to be made. The conservatives ceded the moral high ground (if they ever had it in the first place) and had no argument to defend the empty vacuum that used to house principles of proper government and free markets. The amendment was approved by the Senate with a unanimous vote of 77 to 0! The House had a vote of 318 to 14.
The Sixteenth Amendment necessarily violates the rights provided in the Fourth Amendment—the privacy of home, business, personal papers, and affairs. The government cannot verify that everyone has paid the correct amount of taxes without inspecting the private papers, private business, and personal affairs of individual citizens.
T. Coleman Andrews, upon resigning as Commissioner of the IRS, said: “Under the Sixteenth Amendment Congress can take 100 percent of our income anytime it wants to . . . The income tax is fulfilling the Marxist prophecy that the surest way to destroy a capitalist society is by ‘steeply graduated’ taxes on income and heavy levies upon the estates of people when they die . . . I believe that a better way to raise revenue not only can be found but must be found because I am convinced that the present system is leading us right back to the very tyranny from which those, who established this land of freedom, risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to forever free themselves.”
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While some claim this is impossible, Dr. Skousen, in his book The Making of America, listed some interesting ideas to go about the process of repealing the Sixteenth Amendment and restoring America to a fiscally balanced government:
Pass the Balanced Budget Amendment, which would outlaw deficit spending in peacetime, and not allow an increase in taxes to cover deficit spending.
Pass a “Sunset Law,” which would eliminate every government agency or federal expenditure which exists outside the Constitution and cannot survive an amendment to justify its continuance.
Pass a Fiscal Reform Amendment which would raise required revenue indirectly by a temporary consumer tax (federal sales tax, or fair tax), and simultaneously repeal the Sixteenth Amendment.
[89] This would, in Skousen’s view, serve as a “nicotine patch” to a country in withdrawals from its spending addiction. It should also include a mandatory expiration date. There would be no exceptions or exemptions to such a simple tax. This would only be a temporary measure to help guide the country towards a completely voluntary method of government funding (see Chapter 22 for more on this subject).
Seventeenth Amendment: The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.
Ratified in 1913, this amendment delivered a crippling blow to the republican system of government set up by the Founders, stripping the states of an essential check and balance of power, all in the name of democracy. Senators are now elected by popular vote, rather than by their respective state legislatures.
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” you say. “I’d like to pick my Senator. That’s democracy! The rule of the majority!”
Unfortunately, your Senator wasn’t meant to represent you individually, or even your state’s citizens collectively. And as we discussed previously, this country wasn’t supposed to be democracy, it was supposed to be a republic.
At the Constitutional Convention there was great debate on the best form of representation. In a historic compromise it was decided to have the population represented in the House of Representatives, and the states equally represented in the Senate. Senators were appointed by their state legislators to represent the state and see that its rights and interests were protected.
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Senators now represent the people of the state “at large” and there is no one appointed in Washington D.C. to watch over states’ rights and sovereignty. Senators were not originally meant to represent the views of the people—that is the function of the congressmen. The Senators were originally meant to represent their state as a sovereign entity, holding a veto power over any legislation which violated the Tenth Amendment.
Why did the Founders want to do it that way at all? Let’s have them tell us in their own words:
William Davie: “The senators represent the sovereignty of the states.” “It was in the Senate that the several political interests of the states were to be preserved, and where all their powers were to be perfectly balanced.”
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John Dickinson: “The sense of the states would be better collected through their governments than immediately from the people at large.”
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James Madison: “The state legislatures also ought to have some means of defending themselves against the encroachments of the national government.”
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James Iredell: “The Senate is placed there for a very valuable purpose—as a guard against any attempt of consolidation . . . in order to preserve completely the sovereignty of the states.”
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The repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment would go far in wresting power from Washington, D.C. and returning local sovereignty to the states as originally designed. (Repeal would not have to come from Congress. The Constitution allows for amendments to be made by three-fourths of the states, without Congress’s approval.)
Eighteenth Amendment: This prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” This is a statute of law, rather than a principle of government as the rest of the Constitution had been. Prohibition was a foolish move, delivered by the Progressive movement, which denied a basic right of liberty to drink whatever you want and however much you want until your liver fails and you die. What it actually ended up doing was creating a black market protected by violence.
A little-known story from this era was how the government, to prevent bootleggers from using industrial ethyl alcohol to produce illegal beverages, ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols. In return, the bootleggers then “hired chemists who successfully renatured the alcohol to make it drinkable. As a response, the Treasury Department required manufacturers to add more deadly poisons, including the particularly deadly methyl alcohol . . . . As many as ten thousand people died from drinking denatured alcohol before Prohibition ended.”
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Heavy profits from illicit liquor also led to the corruption of judges and police. This amendment was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment, though its lessons have yet to be applied to the War on Drugs or immigration.
The Nineteenth Amendment finally recognized women as full citizens with a personal vote in their governance, not merely “represented” by the vote of the men in their family. While this doubled the number of people entitled to a vote, it did little at the time to alter the morality in politics or shift political thinking drastically one way or the other.
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The Twenty-sixth Amendment extended voting rights to all citizens eighteen years and older. The government presumed to draft young men into military service at the age of eighteen and the point had been raised that if these men were old enough to fight and die for their country, they were old e
nough to vote about it.
There’s our Constitution in a nutshell. It laid the groundwork for the freest nation that had ever existed in modern history; and although it’s not perfect, it’s the best that’s been done so far.
The proper role of a government is to protect the individual rights of those within its given geographical area. We have detailed the principles of good government set up in the founding of the United States of America. We next turn our attention to economic and social theories.
Review
Q1: What is the philosophical foundation of America?
Q2: Why is the typical left-right dichotomy of government inaccurate?
Q3: What is a more accurate spectrum of government?
Q4: What form of government was America founded as?
Q5: What were the three types of freedom central to the founding of America?
Q6: When the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal, to what is it referring?
Q7: What did the Bill of Rights fail to do?
Q8: What are two ways a constitutional amendment can be passed?
Q9: Should any parts of the Constitution be repealed or replaced in your opinion? Which ones and why?
Q10: Are there any new amendments you would like to see passed? What effects would this have?
Chapter 7: The Proper Environment for Mankind
“A man was either free or not free. And where it had formerly been assumed that men were not fit for freedom, it was now thinkable that nothing but freedom was fit for men.”
[97] - Isabel Paterson
We’ve discussed the nature of man and what he requires to sustain and maintain his life. We’ve discussed two crucial concepts most commonly avoided in any modern discussion of politics—rights and the proper role of government. But what sort of environment is optimal for mankind’s prosperity and happiness? Is there a particular social system that would best guarantee man’s life and pursuit of happiness? Or is any system good as long as it is “democratically” chosen?
The former Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, described an essential question of life. In speaking about how the republican system established by the Founders cannot endure long without its fundamental principles, he said, “Momentum is gathering for another conflict . . . This collision of ideas is worldwide . . . The issue is . . . will men be free to determine their own course of action or must they be coerced?”
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The question: Is man free?
John Locke identified freedom as man’s natural state, “To understand political power right . . . we must consider what state men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they see fit, within the bounds of the law of nature; without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”
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Freedom begins with what some Founders referred to as “liberty of conscience.” It is the unalienable right to a free mind. Men can choose what they value and prefer, and cannot force their value judgments on others.
Why is liberty the optimal state for man’s prosperity and happiness? Because we must rely on our minds to sustain our lives. To rely on our mind requires that we be free from coercion that would keep us from acting in our rational self-interest.
Freedom means freedom from the force of others. Freedom is the ideal environment for mankind to thrive, be happy, and prosper. Freedom in a social environment does not mean, and has never meant, anarchy. An environment of freedom must also include a viable method for the protection and maintenance of rights. Unfortunately, most social systems in history have had a much different basic premise at their foundation.
A major argument in favor of freedom is that the number one killer of humans in the twentieth century was oppressive governments. An estimated 262 million people were victims of political mass murder between 1900 and 2000. That is six times the number that was killed in wars! Professor Rudolph Rummel concludes that, “The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom. Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.”
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Then which social system, if any, is best?
A social system is a “set of moral-political-economic principles embodied in a society’s laws, institutions, and government, among men living in a given geographical area.”
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Two primary questions to determine the nature of any given social system are:
Does it recognize individual rights?
Does it ban physical force from human relationships?
Is man a sovereign individual who owns his own life, person, mind, work, and its products, or is he the property of the state, society, or collective?
Does man have a right to live for his own sake, or is he born a slave to be disposed of as or used as others see fit?
Remember that if force is not banned, rights are not protected. The answer to question number two is also the answer to number one. A society that does not ban force, including legal plunder, but claims to stand for rights is deceived.
This is the basic question of life: Is man free?
In all of mankind’s history, capitalism is the only social system that answers, “Yes!”
Let us see why.
Review
Q1: What is a social system?
Q2: What are the necessary requirements for a moral social system?
Q3: Why do humans require freedom?
Q4: What was the number one killer of humans in the twentieth century?
Chapter 8: Capitalism
“[Here] a man is allowed to thrive and flourish without having a penny taken out of his pocket by the government; no visits from tax collectors, constables, or soldiers.”
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- John Doyle, Irish immigrant to America, 1818
If you had to name the single, foundational idea that has made the United States different from every other nation on earth, what would it be? What idea lies at the heart of the American Dream, its entrepreneurs, and unparalleled prosperity? Is it faith, hard work, or liberty? Is it self-reliance or respect for the rule of law? What idea is the cause of these things? What was it that made America so unique?
We can find the answer in the Declaration of Independence. America was founded on the idea that all men are created equal and have certain unalienable rights.
The bright, shining light at the source of all that is good in America is the principle of individual rights. America is the dream; it is the place where dreams may exist. It is the place that, unlike so many others at the time of its founding, allowed people to have dreams in the first place. The place where citizens may dare to hope and work for a life better than their fathers had. America is the place where they had the freedom to consider such a thing. The American Dream is not, as some politicians would have you believe, merely owning a home or having more stuff than your parents or neighbors. It is to have the freedom to pursue whatever dream you have without coercive interference from others.
This answer leads us to the social system set up by the Founding Fathers implicitly, but never explicitly explained by them—capitalism. This is the only social system that recognizes the principle of individual rights.
What is capitalism? Is it greed? Exploitation? Worship of profits? Government influenced by Big Business? Monopolies? Imperialism? Institutionalized Racism? Slavery and oppression? Class warfare?
If you answered “yes” to any of the above, you have been the target and are now the end result of a long, strategic, and widespread campaign to both distort and hide the moral foundation of capitalism, to rewrite its history, and in fact completely reverse its essential meaning. So what is it then?
Many sources define capitalism primarily as an economic system, not a philosophical system or even a social system. For example, a dictionary definition might read: “Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are
privately owned; wage labor is predominant; supply, demand, and price are at least partially determined by markets; and profit is distributed to owners who invested in the business.”
This definition is true, but not complete. For a more complete understanding of what this definition means, what its essentials are, and what it looks like in practice, we must ask some additional questions. Let’s take what we know from definitions like this one and identify the implications through the following questions. Take some time to answer these as specifically as possible:
· What kind of society is one where property and the means of production are privately owned? (Completely—all property and all business is private.) What principles of governmental and private action does this imply must exist?
· What kind of society is implied in that definition? What conditions must exist for prices, including wages, to be freely decided by those involved, and for profits to be given to those who invested time, talents, creative thought, human life value, and capital to produce them?
· What kind of society recognizes that man must be left free to live according to his own conscience and exercise his own agency for choice and responsibility? Think about this in areas of education, health care, business, home ownership, retirement, etc.