I want to be an American. What does that mean? To me, it means the most important thing in my life, a goal worth any sacrifice, any effort. But... It does not mean I want to submit to the bureaucratic hoops of the Federal Government of the United States of America. Why? Because the Federal Government and the modern American body politic is surely a complete anathema to anyone who would call themselves an American.
When did it all go wrong? After much personal study and research I am firmly of the mind that I was born not only on the wrong continent but in the wrong century. It all went wrong in 1787 when the National Socialists, to give them their modern appellation, created the Constitution, wrapped themselves in the false title of Federalists and sold a bill of goods to the Confederation of States.
The America declared as an independent entity from the rest of the world in 1776 was a unique creation of the pinnacle of western civilisation. The entity created was based on a proposition, a rational creation of intelligent people, which allowed the creation of a true social compact, a propositional nation.
To be an American was not based on consanguinity, it was based on the principle that you sacrified and got your sorry body to the North American Continent and affirmed belief in a concept, a proposition, "That We Hold These Truths to be self evident. That all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Thus began an experiment, commemorated in a speech which entirely captured the spirit of America, though written by an implacable enemy of the American Ideal, 76 years after it had already been strangled at birth, that of "government of the people, by the people, for the people."
Government, of what ever level, is at best a necessary evil, which must be limited and controlled as the servant of the people and never allowed to usurp its delegated powers to become their masters.
Today, generations of people born in America have been produced who mouth these platitudes and sincerely believe in them and yet are so thoroughly conditioned and indoctrinated that they don't see the disconnect between the reality of their condition and their description of it.
How does this state of affairs arise and what can be done about it?
The insight is simple and painful. You don't have to fight a nation to take it over. You just have to sit back and wait for the public to give it to you. Its not that most people are incapable of self-government, that is an elitist view of central planners, it is that most people are too lazy to want to do it. Its damned hard work.
Mises has a whole book on the principle of Human Action, the science of praxeology, which I don't want to get into in detail. My working summary model is two fold.
People inately recognise the principle of Division of Labor, that working together they can produce more for themselves than they can working alone despite the resultant sharing of the joint work product. This is Adam Smith's working of the invisible hand. Secondly, everyone wishes to become a rentseeker, you want to get off of the rodent wheel and rest alone, not work all day every day as a cog in the huge intricate web of activity.
There are four, and only four, roles which a person can play in life. Worker, Capitalist, Entrepeneur, Rentseeker.
A worker offers manual and/or intelligent labor performing a task. This is an early life role, played by the inexperienced.
A capitalist offers capital to entrepeneurs to enable them to organise workers into productive efforts which increase the amount of capital. The resultant captital is divided between the capitalist, the entrepeneur and the workers. Thus there is nothing, in principle, to stop a worker or entrepeneur becoming a capitalist or vice versa. The entrepeneur is simply a worker with experience who thinks he can add some secret sauce to a process of production, or a new product idea, etc. A capitalist is a worker and or entrepeneur who saved his captial along the way.
A capitalist is normally portrayed in the popular imagination of the media as a lazy, do-nothing, exploiter. As usual they've got it wrong. That's the description of a rentseeker. A capitalist, if they back the wrong entrepeneur who uses bad workers can lose the captial they have amassed and be forced back into work or entrepeneurship themselves in order to reamass it. A capitalist does have "skin in the game."
The rentseeker amasses captital but deploys it in ways for the others to use in such a way that it is not at risk. The capitalist puts capital at risk with entrepeneur and workers who rent a building to work in. If they are successful the building owner continues merely to collect the rent, he does not share in the captial increase. However, if the venture fails, he merely boots out the failures and rents the building to new tenants. He suffers no loss on his building. Note he also does nothing to help nor hinder the venture. He simply sits at home waiting for the rent check to come through the mail every month.
The question is, can we all be rentseekers? Clearly, not. (Second Law of Thermodynamics). Equally clearly, we'd all like to be.
Democracy, in fact any form of government, fails because the "system" promises everyone they can be a rentseeker. Clearly, such a system must cease to function. Everyone stops working when you can vote yourself someone elses captial. It becomes legalised theft as in Bastiat's The Law.
Self governing people are workers, entrepeneurs and capitalists, collectively I shall call these the toilers.
Government bureaucrats and rentseekers are symbiotic life forms which parasitise the toilers. They are symbiotes because long term stable rent seeking can only arise in artificially maintained, by government regulation, ie force of arms, shortages.
In an ideal world without parasites, toilers would buy buildings from failing older enterprises or buy land and build new facilites using their capital. When the latter is foiled by government land use, permits, etc., then someone who can buy up buildings from the former is now setup as a rentseeker.
Rentseekers aren't always easy to spot. A subspecies is the mercantilist. A mercantilist operation can look very much like a set of toilers except they invoke the parasites to "regulate" their industry thus allowing them to rentseek. They pretend to roil at the regulation, imposed by the parasites to "protect" the population from predatory action by the industry, but in fact it serves only to raise to cost of entry of competitors allowing the cartel to rent seek.
Modern society is rampant with these, American Medical Association, American Bar Association, FDA, EPA, NEA, steel industry, etc., etc.
To make rentseeking seem respectable, as opposed to the level of a pimp which it really is, modern government creates the expectation of retirement. That is, work for a few years and you can rentseek for the remainder of your life. Hmmm.
Not going to work is it. Go back through history and you've always had rentseekers but not the notion that for every strata and class of the population that "retirement" was a birthright. Naturally, to amass the capital to create the rent generating vehicle, someone would have to toil for awhile so rentseekers do tend to be the older more successful members but there was never anything automatic about it.
So what has all this got to do with being an American and whats so special and superior about America anyway?
Essentially, the revolution in the American colonies was unique in history and different in outcome from all the previous revolutions in that it was a revolt by a predominantly entrepeneurial population against a remote parasitic order. Compare this with the French revolution or other uprising in Europe. Here the upset can always be traced to one set of parasites overturning the rule of another set of parasites usually using the toilers as cannon fodder or chess pieces in the game. Elaborate rhetoric is used by the parasitic factions to raise the rabble and overcome the other faction after which the new faction quickly wants to return to the old pattern of the parasites living of the lumpen toilers, just with a new set of parasites.
Of course the American predominance of entrepeneurs was because of the mode of exploitation of a vast new empty continent. Empty? I know the Natives had to be eradicated, but they were a seen as a transient problem of divided and internecine pests not a monolithic entrenched system of parasites and toilers to be taken over. The parasites granted "warrants" and licences to anyone who could exploit the new "empty" (emptying it if necessary) land thus it was really only a going concern to entrepeneurs.
Again contrast previous empire expansions. To India and the Far East we sent our best mandarins, army, bureaucrats, etc., to parasitise an existing population of toilers having first replaced the existing parasites. To Australia, the other "empty" continent, we sent our dregs. To America flocked the best of Europe's entrepeneurs. Understand, no-one loved an entrepeneur worker in those days. Upwardly mobile over achievers were "upstarts" who didn't "know their place" and respect and obey their natural "elders and betters." But their energy and enthusiasm were well channeled to taming an otherwise "empty" and "worthless" wilderness. Who knows, if they actually succeed in making something of it we can send in the parasites to feed off them.
This is of course what sparked the revolution. A population of entrepeneur cast-offs who had at last succeeded in creating a place for themselves and a way of life they liked deeply resented the sudden influx of parasites who now wanted their cut.
Having fought off the parasites the last thing the Americans wanted to create was another government scheme like the old country. As entrepeneurs they of course came up with a system of rational governence based on self governing individuals.
Clearly, they recognised that there may be legitimate requirements for joint action and pooled government powers. They created these only as required and with strict enumerated powers. The first creation of such were the individual colonies or states Constituions or Compacts and finally after independence was the Articles of Confederation.
The Declaration of Independence, the state constituitions, and the Articles of Confederation are the form of Government which I wish to live under and what I mean by being an American.
Very quickly the mercantilists within the new population (we all try and become rentseekers remember, its the basic Original Sin, the Fall from the Garden) sought to create a more powerful centralised government. Parasites need this symbiosis to survive without working. They thus hijacked the second continental convention, a carefully restricted set of representatives sent to make some minor changes and tinkering of the Articles of Confederation, who instead worked in secret to create from whole cloth a new form of government. They then went back and with a fourth estate elitist spin machine which modern politicans can only dream about, The Federalist Papers, they circumvented the consititutionally restricted states and federation, and appealed to mass democracy to create a new central, national government.
They threw in what scraps they needed to window dress and disguise the new form as a constitutional republic with many of the old bromides, finally adding a Bill of Rights, but they knew long term that they would get what we have today. A mercantilist managed democracy.
Within a few years we had central banks, fiat money, national armies, etc.
The Civil War, taught to us by the victors as a war about slavery, ie a fight to uphold the Constitution against the evil doers of the South, was in fact a last reactionary effort of the entrepeneurial class to get back to their original ideal, they could see where this was going. Lincoln finally destroyed the American Ideal and cemented the centrally planned nation state we have today and the parasites have never looked back.
So, how do we either get back to where we wanted to be or start again somewhere else? An in either case how do we prevent the same mistakes happening?
The first requirement is to realise that we have seen the enemy and it is us. There are not four classes of people, every person is an amalgam and the composition varies over time with the successes and failures of our lives. Given the temptation we would all try to become rentseekers. We have to recognise that a good life is a journey, a process, not a destination or state to achieve. We live a good life by constantly cycling through the toiling, starting off flipping burgers as an inexperienced young worker, then becoming entrepeneurial, then capitalist, the doing it all over again but bigger and better. Sitting on the beach, doing nothing while the rent checks roll in is not an honourable pursuit for a person and is a waste of life.
You can't create laws, who would enforce them, against rentseeking. It has to be a social norm, a moral value, that you don't do it and will be shunned if you attempt it.
I believe that in fact no government is required in a population of toilers devoid of parasites. The American Founders, by whom I mean the Declarers of Independence not the ratifiers and authors of the Constitution, the longest suicide note in history, were close in recognising self government of the people, by the people, for the people but couldn't quite make the break to no government being required. Even then you would be ridiculed for supporting anarchy and chaos.
Anarchy and chaos are viewed as bad things if you live and die by cornering markets and rentseeking. In a world of constant change where no one is in charge establishing a stable, long term, rentseeking vehicle is next to impossible. However, to toilers I don't believe such a world would appear much worse than it is now in terms of ability to prosper and work and live. In fact it would be a better world because it would be more efficient, vibrant and lively, a toilers playground.
I believe we could get there by making a simple change. Make people choose between two worlds. You can live and work in a parasite controlled economy or a toilers only. If you haven't paid the taxes you can't claim the benefits. If you don't claim the benefits you can't be made to pay the taxes. There are two clubs in town, you choose the one you want to join. By default you are in one already. How do you transfer? Simple, pay the costs of the benefits you have taken and away you go. So if you've received a public school education but you don't want to work in the parasite economy, simply pay back the cost of your education and leave.
Notice the costs of transfer are all one way. You would have to pay to leave the parasites and you would pay a steep entry cost to join them. In a Ponzi scheme you can't have people leave permanently with some of the pie and anyone joining must contribute some pie. A capitalist leaving the toilers to join the parasites would be too tempting a target for the parasite taxes. A successful capitalist in the parasites would be stripped of all capital before being allowed to leave.
The toilers wouldn't care either way. Anyone is free to join in any way they can and no one is envious of anything you leave with because you earnt it.
Which brings me to the immigration problem. America doesn't have an immigration policy problem. It has a welfare state problem. All the racist posturing, which tries to cover itself with academic cost benefit analysis of immigration (Brimelow is the worst) is basically a measure of tax and welfare balancing, i.e., the two pillars of the parasites. Tax and welfare is the poison of both the new immigrants (actually their children) and the native born. To Brimelow an immigrant is "bad" because over a couple of generations they are a net drain on the parasites Ponzi scheme. No one does the same analysis of a "native" family over a couple of generations. Apparently, single mother welfare queens are not "bad" because they are born here. So now in modern America even consanguinity is back in fashion.
If Brimelow did the same analysis of the natives it would quickly point out that the whole scheme is a collapsing Ponzi. Instead he uses a starting pie with the assumption it was built and is expanding by the natives and then does a zero sum game with the effect on it of the immigrants assuming that they are parasites. In fact it is a shrinking pie regardless of immigration and the zero sum game will look worse if you add more mouths either by immigration or by native births.
Here is my view as an English immigrant. All immigrants are attracted to America by its ideals as a propositional state not by its parasites. They know "Send me your huddled masses yearning to be free," not Senator Kennedy's latest re-election pork-spending scheme. Such immigrants are toilers and will remain toilers. Their children are captured by the parasites in the government indoctrination camps aka schools and become parasites from day one. The children and their parents are lost to each other, strangers in the new land. This problem is worse for non-English speaking immigrants. The parents never realise until its too late that the ideals they think the new land shares with them, the toilers ethic, have in fact been lost. Only when their bilingual children are full fledged parasites do they realise the error of their ways.
Understand, this is not some theory of some huge conspiracy by the parasites. We have seen the enemy and it is us. None of the catagories are self aware of their roles. Their interactions lead naturally without the need for a grand plan to the outcome described. As individuals they may be well intentioned fine people. As a group their unintended consequences are predicatable and unavoidable. In the same way, a capitalist does not need to be philanthropic to improve the common good. As stated by Adam Smith, by the magic of the invisible hand, the myriad strivings of the the individual merchants tending only to their own requirements gives betterment to all.
Self awareness, self analysis, and a moral strength to resist temptation is a necessary prerequisite for a self governing people. No one likes to wake up and realise they are a parasite. What we lack in style we make up for in denial.
So why can the toilers be selfish and yet lead to a common good, yet the parasites, even with good intentions, can lead only to a common bad? Because of the second law of thermodynamics. By definition entropy increases. Locally entropy can be decreased by expanding entropy elsewhere. Overall this still leads to an increase in total entropy. The question is how efficiently can you localise this effect? This a toiler does. To decrease local entropy by a half I may need to double it elsewhere (probably more because we can't achieve perfect efficiency - Maxwell's Daemon.) A parasite means the toiler may have to quadruple entropy elsewhere to achieve the same halving of local entropy. A parasite never contributes decreased local entropy. It always increases entropy. It thus leads to inefficient use of entropy which is a irretrievable loss to the community. The parasite is a tax, a drag, on any and all transactions, thus we are all worse off. The parasite is no better off (remember he doesn't get to share in the increased capital, he just gets his rent which is enough to allow him to stand still, if he's only standing still, not getting better off then by definition he has no increased capital to contribute to the toilers.)
Since coming to the states I have toiled and paid the parasites taxes and taken none of their benefits nor will I ever. My children have attended private schools paid for out of my after tax dollars. I will not take vouchers nor do I expect to retire on social security or use medicare or medicaid. I expect to work until I drop. If my children support me it will be as a low paid baby sitter in my dotage not as a drain on their resources in a nursing home. If the parasites get them and they won't support me I'll die rather than get in bed with the parasites.
What about charity, compassion, support of the lame, the halt, the elderly, the infirm? Why can't families and friends and neighbours and local community organisations take care of all of this? Absent the parasites I believe they can - and do it better.
To be free we need only stand up and start living free. Its a state of mind. Don't take the parasites "free gifts."
And for me one of those free gifts is "American Citizenship."
My God, how I wish I could simply say "I'm an American" and have it clearly understood what that means, whatever country I live in and whatever language I say it in!