Ameritopia

by Mark R. Levin

  Locke explains the necessity of an executive to carry out the laws adopted by the legislature “because those laws which are constantly to be executed, and whose force is always to continue, may be made in a little time, therefore there is no need that the legislative should be always in being, not having always business to do. And because it may be too great temptation to human frailty, apt to grasp at power, for the same persons who have the power of making laws to have also in their hands the power to execute them.…” (12, 143) Hence, Locke makes clear the distinction between the executive enforcing legislative acts and the usurpation of the legislature and the people by the delegation of lawmaking authority to other entities.

  Locke also argues for the impartial adjudication of disputes as a compelling reason for the acceptance of consensual government. He wrote, “Firstly, there wants an established, settled, known law, received and allowed by common consent to be the standard of right and wrong, and the common measure to decide all controversies between them.…” (9, 124) “Secondly, in the state of Nature there wants a known and indifferent judge, with authority to determine all differences according to the established law.…” “And so whoever has the legislative or supreme power of any common-wealth, is bound to govern by established standing laws, promulgated and known to the people, and not by extemporary decrees; by indifferent and upright judges, who are to decide controversies by those laws” (9, 131).

  Consequently, Locke argues that the only legitimate form of government is that which is established by the consent of the members of society; that the only kind of government that can preserve the individual’s God-given natural rights, including his liberty and labor/property, is a representative commonwealth in which there are three branches or at least three distinct responsibilities; that it must operate through just and impartial laws, which are applied equally to everyone in the society, including those in government; and that the extraordinary power of making laws must not be delegated to those who are beyond the reach of the governed.

  However, if the government loses its legitimate purpose, its form is irrelevant. “As usurpation is the exercise of power which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to; and this is making use of the power anyone has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private, separate advantage. When the governor, however entitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion” (18, 199).

  Locke emphasized that even representative governments, of the kind he described, can take on a tyrannical character. “It is a mistake to think that fault is proper only to monarchies. Other forms of government are liable to it as well as that; for wherever the power that is put in any hands for the government of the people and the preservation of their properties is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the arbitrary and irregular commands of those that have it, there it presently becomes tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many” (18, 201).

  Should government turn tyrannical, discarding its original purpose, it ceases to be legitimate. Locke declares, “The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property; and the end while they choose and authorize a legislative is that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the society, to limit the power and moderate the dominion of every part and member of the society. For since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which everyone designs to secure by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making; whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence.” In such circumstances “the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and by the establishment of a new legislative (such as they shall think fit), provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.… What I have said here concerning the legislative in general holds true also concerning the [executive].…” (19, 222)

  Locke also insisted that the right to revolt is not to be exercised imprudently. “[S]uch revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was first erected, and without which, ancient names and specious forms are so far from being better, that they are much worse than the state of Nature or pure anarchy; the inconveniences being all as great and as near, but the remedy farther off and more difficult” (19, 225). “But if they have set limits to the duration of their legislative, and made this supreme power in any person or assembly only temporary; or else when by the miscarriages of those in authority, it is forfeited; upon the forfeiture of their rulers, or the determination of the time set, it reverts to the society, and the people have a right to act as supreme, and continue the legislative in themselves or place it in a new form, or new hands, as they think good” (19, 243).

  Locke would undoubtedly consider the modern-day political declarations about “spreading the wealth” or “redistributing the wealth” or “leveling the playing field,” and the government’s application of its statutory, regulatory, and taxing powers to pursue them, as a miscomprehension of man’s nature and an assault on the individual’s inalienable rights and the civil society. Underlying Locke’s view of man, society, and government is the individual’s right to the value he creates with his own labor and in his own property (which may be physical and/or intellectual) now and in the future, for it is central to his nature and existence. The right of all individuals to try to acquire property, and once acquired to secure it, is a right that no man or government can legitimately deny him, and which just governments are instituted to preserve and protect. Although some will become wealthy and some will not—that is, the result will be unequal when comparing individual to individual—the poorest man can become rich and the richest man can become poor depending on how each applies his labor. Furthermore, the protection of private property applies not only to that which exists today, but to that which is earned in the future, thereby encouraging industriousness and the expansion of wealth in successive generations, to the good of the individual and society.

  Moreover, whereas Marx and Engels later argued for the destruction of what they called the bourgeois, or the feudal lords and later capitalists, insisting there can otherwise be no justice for the laborer, Locke explained that the coercive redistribution of wealth through government’s abuse of law and misapplication of rights destroys individual liberty; ambition, productivity, and wealth; and the purpose of the commonwealth. Instead, society and government should ensure that all individuals, regardless of their circumstances of birth, are unmolested in their inalienable rights. If all are free and secure in this regard, there can be no predestined or official class structure or caste system. In this sense, property rights are the great equalizer—not of outcomes but opportunity. This is the surest way to expand economic opportunity for the greatest number. Communism, and its socialist progeny, is tyranny. And it is tyranny without end since equality of economic outcomes is an illusion, requiring constant repression and plundering.

>   Locke summed up the purpose of government this way: “Absolute arbitrary power, can neither of them consist with the ends of society and government, which men would not quit the freedom of the state of nature for, and tie themselves up under, were it not to preserve their lives, liberties and fortunes, and by stated rules of right and property to secure their peace and quiet.… For all the power the government has, being only for the good of the society, as it ought not to be arbitrary and at pleasure, so it ought to be exercised by established and promulgated laws, and the rulers too, kept within their bounds.…” (11, 137)

  Locke’s extraordinary insight into the nature of man, the sovereignty of the individual, and the ideological threats that have and will menace the civil society by those who exercise governmental authority is much more than an academic undertaking. Few before Locke or since have had such a thorough grasp of the human condition and enormous influence on Western civilization.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE INFLUENCE OF LOCKE ON THE FOUNDERS

  IN 1776, THE CONTINENTAL Congress established the Committee of Five to draft a declaration to the world setting forth the American colonies’ justification for seeking independence from Great Britain. It appointed John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Robert R. Livingston of New York,1 and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. The committee assigned Jefferson the task of drafting the original version. Jefferson’s draft was modified by Franklin and Adams and submitted to Congress. Congress made further modifications. But the basic document remained largely unchanged from Jefferson’s version.

  For the purposes of this discussion, it is important to recognize the profound influence Locke’s Second Treatise had on the Founders, especially Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence represents the most prominent, official, consensus position of the Founders’ rationale for declaring independence and, importantly, the philosophical origin of the new country. Jefferson and the delegates borrowed heavily from Locke’s thinking and words.

  EXAMPLE 1

  In the Second Treatise2 Locke writes, “The constitution of the legislative is the first and fundamental act of society, whereby provision is made for the continuation of their union under the direction of persons and bonds of laws, made by persons authorized thereunto, but the consent and appointment of the people, without which no one man, or number of men, amongst them can have authority of making laws that shall be binding to the rest. When anyone, or more, shall take upon them to make laws, whom the people have not appointed so to do, they make laws without authority, which the people are not therefore bound to obey; by which means they come again to be out of subjection, and may constitute to themselves a new legislative, as they think best, being in full liberty to resist the force of those, who without authority would impose any thing upon them” (19, 212).

  Locke’s asserting that laws made by men or governments without the consent of the governed are illegitimate and no man is bound to them. Under these circumstances, men are not only free to resist such a force, but they are free to form a new government.

  Locke also writes, “[W]henever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence.… What I have said … concerning the legislative in general holds true concerning the supreme executor, who having a double trust put in him, both to have a part in the legislative and the supreme execution of the law, acts against both, when he goes about to set up his own arbitrary will as the law of the society” (19, 222).

  Locke is not only underscoring his earlier point about man’s right to resist the illegitimate, arbitrary power of government, particularly relating to his property rights; he is going further—that is, no government, including one established by the consent of the governed, has authority to violate man’s inalienable rights.

  Locke explains that the law of nature exists above all else, and all men are required to obey it, including those who hold public office. “Thus the law of Nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men’s actions, must, as well as their own and other men’s actions, be conformable to the law of Nature, i.e., to the will of God, of which that is a declaration, and the fundamental law of nature being the preservation of mankind, no human sanction can be good, or valid against it” (11, 135).

  The first sentence of the Declaration encapsulates Locke’s view of the preeminence of natural law and the right to disobey and, indeed, throw off a government that abuses its power. It states, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

  EXAMPLE 2

  Locke writes, “The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions, for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business.… And, being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours. Everyone as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he as much as he can to preserve the rest of mankind, and not unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another” (2, 6).

  The Founders embraced Locke’s vision that all men are blessed by God with inalienable rights—“the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another”—which they described this way: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It is the job of government to preserve those rights.

  EXAMPLE 3

  Again, Locke explains that any government not established by the consent of the governed is illegitimate and, therefore, its laws are illegitimate. “Nor can any edict of anybody else, in what form soever conceived, or by what power soever backed, have the force and obligation of a law which has not its sanction from that legislative which the public has chosen and appointed; for without this the law could not have that which is absolutely necessary to its being a law, the consent of the society, over whom nobody can have a power to make laws but by their own consent and by authority received from them.…” (11, 134)

  Nor can a government established by the consent of the people exercise absolute power or surrender its legitimate power to another. In either case, the people are free to replace the officials with others or disband the government altogether and form a new one. “Whensoever, therefore, the legislative shall … endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people, by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and by the establishment of a new legislative (such as they think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society” (19, 222). “In these, and the like cases, when the g
overnment is dissolved, the people are at liberty to provide for themselves by erecting a new legislative differing from the other by the change of persons, or form, or both as they shall find it most for their safety and good” (19, 220).

  The Founders agreed. They proclaimed in the Declaration, “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

  EXAMPLE 4

  There should be no mistaking Locke’s position with that of an anarchist. “[S]uch revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur” (19, 225). Besides, he observes that “the people, who are more disposed to suffer than right themselves by resistance, are not apt to stir. People are not so easily got out of their old forms, as some are apt to suggest. They are hardly to be prevailed with to amend the acknowledged faults in the frame they have been accustomed to” (19, 223).

  However, if the people are pushed too far by a tyrannical government, revolution is not only legitimate but possible. “But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.…” (19, 225)