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In their new
book, Nullifying Tyranny: Creating Moral
Communities in an Immoral Society, James and
Walter Kennedy address the case for nullifying unconstitutional federal
legislation to “fellow Christians who . . . understand that the
government . . . has been slowly taken over. . . by an anti-Christian secular
humanist element . . .” It is, in essence, an attempt to wake
Christians up to the fact that the “god” of democracy results in
a situation where immoral people can force everyone to comply with their
edicts. “Government, even when sanctified by a majority vote, cannot
turn an otherwise immoral act into a moral act.” Amen.
Government under
democracy is nothing more than legalized theft on a massive scale, the
Kennedy brothers say in their Rothbardian analysis of the state. Whether it
is monarchy or democracy, government steals private property (through
taxation, mostly) “in order to pay for the loyalty of . . . supporters
those close to the source of power who have a natural interest in maintaining
the status quo.” Moreover, “A loyal court, a loyal police
and military, and a loyal religious establishment” all “lead
parasitic lives. The cost is paid by the productive who must labor to earn
enough for the king” (or the state in general, under democracy).
Many Christians
misread Jesus’s command, “Render to Caesar the things that are
Caesar’s, and to God the things that are Gods,” they write. What
Jesus said was NOT to obey ALL of Caesar’s commands, but only to
“render unto Caesar things that belong to the realm of government, obey
[only] legitimate laws enacted by government . . .” For
“the larger the government the greater harm it will eventually do to
society’s morals . . . . the only way to maintain a moral community is
to keep the corrosive power of government at a minimum.”
The Kennedys
embrace the Rothbardian principle of self-ownership as “the first
principle of human liberty.” Liberty “is based on the principle
of self-ownership and personal accountability. Human liberty is indispensable
for the promotion, development, and maintenance of a prosperous, peaceful and
moral society.” The problem with democracy is that human liberty is
anathema to it, for “politicians, the ruling elite who control
government, do not want people to become self-reliant.” They want us
all to be reliant on them. They want us to be their tax slaves, cannon
fodder, and experimental laboratory rats. “[C]ommunities composed of
strong and self-reliant families pose a significant barrier to the envy and
greed of politicians and those closely connected to the political ruling
elite. Politicians know that people who rely upon themselves and their local
community have very little need for a powerful political leader, government
bureaucrats, and legions of regulators . . .”
Nullifying
Tyranny
lays out the classic case for limited constitutional government: “The
primary function of government indeed the only legitimate function for
government is to protect citizens’ property rights.” The authors
note that in the 1840s, John C. Calhoun identified the tipping point of
where, in a democracy, the “tax consumers” come to outnumber the
taxpayers. At that point, “government becomes the instrument for
legalized looting of the dwindling, law-abiding, moral, productive
element.” We become ACORN Nation, in other words. Moreover, government
is inherently a criminal enterprise, for “government agents have the
ability to do things to citizens that, were the agents not part of the
government, they would be seized by the local law enforcement service and
thrown into jail.”
Unlike almost all
conservatives and libertarians who make the case for limited constitutional
government, the Kennedy brothers are not so naïve as to believe that the
document could ever be self-enforcing. “Time has demonstrated the folly
of this argument,” they write. They are Jeffersonians, and believe as
Jefferson did that the only way such a document could ever conceivably be
enforced is through political communities organized at the state and local
level. Like past generations of Jeffersonians, they understand the absurdity
of believing that the federal government could ever be trusted, through its
“supreme” court, to faithfully enforce the constitutional
limitations on its own powers. Nullification and secession or the threat of
secession are the only possible means of enforcing a written constitution.
Addressing the
Lincoln Cult and other champions of centralized federal power, the authors
write that “Slavery and racial segregation are no longer enforceable by
law . . . . Anyone today who attempts to deride States’ Rights due
to its historical association with slavery or racial segregation should be
dismissed as one seeking Federal supremacy in order to force his will upon
‘we the people’ of the sovereign community . . .” (emphasis
added).
The Kennedy
brothers echo F.A. Hayek’s dictum from The Road to Serfdom that,
under socialism, “the worst rise to the top.” This is also true
in democracies in general, they say. In a democracy, “Successful
leaders . . . tend to be those who are not hindered by strong moral
principles.” That is because in a democracy, successful political
candidates must do three immoral things: “promise to take money away
from those who honestly earned it . . . and give it to those who have no
legal right to it”; “make promises that most likely will not be
kept”; and grant financial favors to individuals and groups who merely
provide the financing for the winning campaign. “Only an unprincipled
person can successfully piece together majority votes in a legislature made
up of numerous conflicting special interest groups.”
The final chapter
of Nullifying Tyranny makes a case for local citizen activism that can
resurrect states’ rights as a means of implementing nullification. Most
importantly, the chapter answers six major objections to their proposal to
amend the Constitution to resurrect state sovereignty. (In nutshell form,
these are: “We’ll never get three fourths of the states to
agree”; “Can’t we just rely on good, honest people to get
elected?”; “the special interests are too powerful”;
“Christians should not mix politics and religion”; “Can’t
we just elect ‘good conservatives’ to Congress?”; and
“Your proposal would weaken the federal government; who then would
protect us?”
The book ends
with four addendums, including a commentary on “Boom-Bust
Economics” that is based on Murray Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money? And Tom Woods’ Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the
Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make
Things Worse. Christians who
believe that all that needs to be done is to elect good, Bible-believing
Republicans are deluding themselves, say the Kennedy brothers, for “the
Republican Party is just as wedded to the status quo as the Democratic
Party” and “both parties can be counted on to do whatever it
takes to maintain the ruling elite’s control and parasitic use of
Federal power.”
Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas
J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about
Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His
latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed
the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.
Article
originally published on www.Mises.org. By
authorization of the author
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