It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong Read online

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  It is all too clear that either we are not really in grave danger, and hence the government’s actions, though sufficiently objectionable in many ways, are not lethally reprehensible, or we really are in grave danger and, given that condition, the government is acting in a completely irresponsible and utterly immoral manner. If semi-organized gangs of suicidal maniacs numbering in the thousands are out to kill us all, the government ought not to be fiddling with kindergarten subsidies and the preservation of the slightly spotted southeastern screech owl.12

  In none of these cases were McKinley’s, Wilson’s, Roosevelt’s, Johnson’s, or Bush’s actions morally, legally, or constitutionally justified. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states that the “President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” Nowhere does the Constitution state the “President may willfully and intentionally fool the people into war.”

  Land of the Free? Barely

  If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

  —JAMES MADISON

  Now that we have seen that throughout our history the state has used warfare merely as a means of expanding its power and control, we must next ask, In what way do wars encroach upon our own freedoms and thus violate the Natural Law? While war is being fought in the name of “freedom” abroad, war is bringing the opposite effect to Americans back home; we are less free because of war. While this statement may seem contradictory, the irony becomes clearer as we helplessly witness losses of liberty brought on by our power-hungry government in the form of higher taxes, greater government debt, increased government intrusion in markets, more pervasive government surveillance, manipulation, and control of the public.13 Every single one of these reactions to war restricts our freedoms and fundamental liberties as human beings. Our Founding Fathers would be appalled.

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  The most tried and true way of limiting Americans’ freedom during times of war is the draft. Whatever happened to the inalienable right “to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? President Wilson drafted almost 2.8 million men during World War I.14 This involuntary servitude (violating all natural rights) was found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court at the time, a prime example of how crisis allows people to pull off unconstitutional measures. Draft supporters will argue that conscription fundamentally “unifies the country,” “levels the classes,” and offers the opportunity to “share in our national fate.”15 This rationale, however, is empty and completely counters the individual freedom our Founding Fathers had in mind for their new, burgeoning, and free nation. The Founders’ thoughts are relevant in every age and at every encounter between the government and any individual: Does the government work for us, or do we work for the government?

  Repressive and freedom-limiting actions by the government continued during World War I in the form of jailed draft objectors. Resisting conscription led to the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of Americans throughout the Great War. Of the 450 conscientious objectors found guilty of evading the draft at military hearings, 17 were sentenced to death, 142 received life sentences, and 73 received twenty-year prison terms!16 Similarly in World War II, more than 10 million men were drafted to fight. Those who chose to stand up to the government and refuse to fight due to their religious affiliations were jailed just as they were in World War I (the government just does not seem to learn). The state locked up 6,000 of these conscientious objectors, most of whom were Jehovah’s Witnesses.17

  But the most shocking and dehumanizing restrictions during World War II took the form of concentration camps for Japanese Americans. In the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast of the United States.18 This executive order took away civil liberties on a whole new level. It singled out a group of people based upon their race, accused the group of sabotage and espionage without consideration of the presumption of innocence or due process of law, and then locked them all up as a “security measure.”

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  Born in California, Fred Korematsu was an American citizen of Japanese heritage. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, he was convicted of being in one of the areas restricted under the Civilian Exclusion Acts. In the appeal of his conviction, Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court held that the government could ship Japanese Americans off to internment camps in the name of national security, and that protections guaranteed under the Constitution could be curtailed based on race—or perceived collective guilt—when national security was at stake. Along with Korematsu, more than 112,000 men and women were kidnapped from their homes and forced to inhabit concentration camps without due process of law, in reaction to the attacks on Pearl Harbor. The Court believed that “pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions.” In other words, during war—a “special circumstance”—the government can use an end to justify the means.

  Justice Frank Murphy believed that no such vague showing of public necessity could ever justify government racism. In his dissent, he responded that “racial discrimination [by the government] in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States.” Those principles are the Natural Law, and Justice Murphy was absolutely correct.

  More “Covert” Freedom-limiting Rules and Regulations

  Civil and economic liberties always suffer when it comes to the lengthening list of laws, regulations, and agencies implemented during times of war. From Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act of 1917 to George Bush’s Patriot Act of 2001 to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security to governmental business controls, the government continuously finds ways to violate our freedom under the guise of “it’s for your own security.”

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  The government implemented the Espionage Act of June 1917 to silence critics of the draft. Penalizing willful obstruction of enlistment services with fines of ten thousand dollars and imprisonment as long as twenty years, the federal government stripped away civil liberties at the most fundamental level: Both freedom of speech and religion. The feds censored all printed materials, deported aliens, and encouraged warrantless searches and seizures. People were even arrested for reading the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in public.19

  How far have we come since World War I? Not very far. Almost a century later, the Patriot Act creates some of the same consequences as the Espionage Act. It lets the government snoop around your private communications and personal records. It expands the size and power of federal agencies and allows searches and seizures of your property without a warrant or probable cause. It permits the president to detain you without counsel for indefinite periods. And all of this conduct can be accomplished without the scrutiny of a judge. Whatever happened to the freedoms the Constitution was written to guarantee?

  Controls on business during both World War I and World War II also severely restricted Americans’ economic freedoms. The feds “nationalized the railroad, telephone, domestic telegraph, and international telegraphic cable industries,” asserting control over prices, people, and corporations.20 Regulations in the forms of manipulation of “labor-management regulations, securities sales, agricultural production and marketing, the distribution of coal and oil, international commerce, and markets for raw materials and manufactured products” highly constricted private enterprise and free market practices.21 These economic controls must not be disregarded as simply unimportant economic liberties (as opposed to civil liberties).22 The penalties for violation of economic controls were severe, ranging from fines to prison.

  Moreover, unnecessary agencies are created d
uring wars. Typically, they grow in size and lengthen the list of regulations under which we live. After war, some disappear, while others magically morph into the “solution” of other government problems. The War Finance Corporation, for example, was founded during World War I “to provide funds for various munitions enterprises.”23 After the war, the War Finance Corporation turned into an agricultural cooperative financing tool, which exported agricultural products to Europe. It died in 1925. In 1932 it was brought back to life again to bail out railroads and other bankrupt companies during the Great Depression. It was laid to rest in the 1950s due to scandals, but was yet again revived and combined with the Small Business Administration. Do you see how the government uses war to grow in size and scope surreptitiously?

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  And lastly, we come to the ultimate theft and restriction of property: The government’s withholding of income taxes. The withholding practice was not implemented until World War II: A seemingly new custom wholly unsupported by our Founding Fathers whatsoever. In an effort to raise funds for the war effort, Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1942 which imposed a “Victory Tax” on income, which was to be withheld by the employer and paid directly to the government. Gradually, this practice increased in scope to constitute the present system of income taxation in America.

  There are several evils inherent in this practice. First, by allowing the government to seize property directly and send the taxpayer back any surplus, it portrays the government as a beneficent caretaker. Second, it deprives the taxpayer of the use of his money for a period of time; that is money that could have flowed into investments and generated a return while the government was holding on to it. Finally, it enables the government to increase in size, as it would be infinitely more difficult to wrest tax dollars from the taxpayers themselves than secreting them away from their employer. And it was all made possible because of war.

  Constitutionally and philosophically, withholding taxes presumes that we exist to serve the government. In an historic irony, the idea of withholding income taxes was proposed as a short-term war-financing measure by a young Treasury Department clerk named Milton Friedman. That would be the future Nobel Laureate who championed the free market and who would one day condemn the extension to peacetime of his wartime-only proposal with his sharp and witty tongue: “There is nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.” Too late, professor.

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  “The Purse Is Now Open”

  When the government does not comply with its own laws, it is rewarded with more power. When it overspends its budget, it is rewarded with a bigger budget. Furthermore, “most of the defense budget increase has little to do with winning the war on terrorism,” observed an Independent Institute defense analyst, Ivan Eland. In war, the government’s bank account (filled with your tax dollars) flies open to the joy of an interconnected web of governmental and quasi-governmental actors: The president, the Defense Department, defense contractors, and elected officials.

  Consider the size of the Defense Department’s budget, and more importantly, the government’s justification for the size of that budget. When President Bush signed the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2004, everybody knew the price tag was big, but nobody understood how big. At $401.3 billion, President Bush attempted to legitimize the 42 percent rise in budget by claiming it was for the security of the American people. He vowed the government “will do whatever it takes to keep our nation strong, to keep the peace, and to keep the American people secure.” Perhaps, but in any event, unborn taxpayers are picking up the bill. How about keeping us free—free to make our own choices, free from debt, free from Big Government?

  And the $401.3 billion price tag was not even the whole of it. Hidden elsewhere in the nation’s budget were allocations to other departments that constituted defense spending. The Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the State Department were just some of the places where further defense items were concealed. Professor Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute perused the federal budget to estimate the actual total. Higgs’s suggestion: Take the Pentagon’s budget total and nearly double it. His estimate came to a whopping $596.1 billion.24 In the same vein, if the Defense Department was not defending the security of the “homeland” prior to the Homeland Security Department’s creation after September 11th, what precisely was it defending?

  To make the government’s theft and deceit even more glaring, the Defense Department’s accounting practices are a disaster. The Department of Defense has never been able to fulfill the government’s auditing requirements because its records are in such disarray. To date, no major part of the Department of Defense has been able to pass the test of an independent audit.25 In other words, the government consistently breaks its own laws! (As Mark Twain once remarked, Congress truly is “America’s only native criminal class.”)26 Instead of focusing on the flaws of its own system, the federal government chooses to go on a witch hunt against corporate America, demonizing the likes of Enron, WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen for their accounting practices in the full view of the public. While these companies grossly misbehaved with billions of dollars, the federal government has grossly misbehaved with trillions of dollars.27 Only the government can prosecute, with a straight face, entities for engaging in the same behavior as it does.

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  Equally important as the amount of waste is the identity of its intended recipients. With war, the government forms a criminal organization with large business to transfer money away from taxpayers fraudulently and place the lives of innocent soldiers at stake. General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the most lauded marines in U.S. history, wrote and spoke extensively on the nature of this criminal organization in War Is a Racket:

  In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. . . . And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Backbreaking taxation for generations and generations.

  The military-industrial complex (a term coined by President Eisenhower, another decorated war hero, no less) is the biggest, bloodiest, and most culpable criminal organization in American history. It grows fat off of the blood and gold of everyday Americans, and continually evading justice, has no incentive to cease its piracy during our lifetimes or our children’s.

  Despite the fiscal irresponsibility and waste which necessarily accompany war, progressive historians and Keynesian economists have argued that war actually creates prosperity (as opposed to simply transferring it to the fortunate few). This argument, however, is flawed. As economist Ludwig von Mises noted, “War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or plague brings.”

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  This argument’s strongest case for war prosperity is based on the drop of unemployment rates and rise of gross domestic product during World War II. To be fair, unemployment numbers did in fact plunge, falling from 14.6 percent to 1.2 percent between 1940 and 1944.28 However, there is a simple answer to this analysis. The unemployed were drafted by the feds to serve in the armed forces; unemployment rates only fell because the government was conscripting its very own unemployed population. Of the sixteen million who served in the armed forces at some time during the war, ten million were drafted. Many of these men volunteered so as to avoid the draft and the likelihood of assignment to the Army infantry.29 With this line of reasoning, shall we reinstate the draft to alleviate our high unemployment rate today?

  The war prosperity argument will also contend the gross domestic product (GDP) soared during World War II. However, upon closer inspection, this calculation consisted entirely of military goods and services; there were planes to build, guns to manufacture, and foo
d items to ship.30 Real civilian consumption and private investment actually dropped after 1941 and did not recover until 1946.31 Professor Robert Higgs asserts “it is high time that we come to appreciate the distinction between the government spending, especially the war spending, that bulks up official GDP figures and the kinds of production that create genuine economic prosperity.”

  More fundamental is the fact that, although resources may be redistributed toward those Americans who are manufacturing military supplies, there is no actual wealth being created. When the farmer grows his corn crop, he exerts labor toward creating something that will literally nourish society, thus making us all better off. It is for this wealth creation that he receives money in exchange, and it is for this value that we are willing to give money. Transactions for defense supplies do not, however, share this attribute. War creates no more prosperity than hiring one hundred individuals to dig a hole and fill it back up again. After the defense contractor has received his pay for building nuclear submarines, precisely who is it that is “nourished” by their standing idly at the bottom of the ocean? Unlike a Web site that connects consumers with sellers, neither a submarine in the sea nor bullet in a soldier’s gun produces wealth. What benefit is it that we as taxpayers are receiving from this exchange? There is none; it is wealth redistribution by another name.

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  Wartime prosperity: We are anything but prosperous during times of war. War is a time of death, grief, and tragedy. The only entity that prospers in war is the state and its close friends. And as General Butler asks, “How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?” No, my readers, war creates no prosperity; it only bankrupts our savings accounts, our cradles, and our sense of human decency.