I can’t claim to be the most spiritual guy on the planet but as I am about to engage in an attempt to write an Instrument of Governance as I think the Founders would have written it had they been around today, I fear that my feeble efforts might well be regarded as blasphemy. It’s as if Franklin, Jefferson, Jay, Hamilton, Madison and Company are looking over my shoulder and saying “Kid, what in hell are you doing?” People reading along might think the same thing. Well, I owe you all, Founders and Inheritors, deceased, living and yet unborn, some explanation. I’ll address my remarks to the Founders as if they were here in the room with me. I do this not for narrative entertainment, but because in some unscientific corner of my mind I think maybe they are in the room. Please read on.
Good afternoon, Gentlemen. First, let me thank you. After much arguing, haggling, shouting and horse trading, you managed to hammer together a republic that has stood up to more than two centuries of attack from without and mismanagement from within. In a historically short period we have become the most influential country on the planet, not just militarily, but economically and culturally as well. It was inevitable that we should do this as growth in wealth and might are the natural rewards of a free and risk taking people.
Of course, the republic you built was not perfect, as no human created thing can be. The few omissions in the bulwark of your efforts have been used over time by people who wish, for their own reasons, to change America. They wish to change it from a free republic to something else which will certainly not serve the needs of the people at large but will serve the desires of the few at the expense of the many. The blame for this lands not on your shoulders, but on our own. As a people we have grown fat upon the success of our father’s endeavors while allowing compromise and expediency to erode the foundation on which those endeavors were built. Further, we have exchanged our critical faculties for flattery from the very parasites who tighten their grip around our throats. More on this factor I will address later, to the living. I speak of it here to you because more than anything else, it is the source of our woes.
I mention imperfections in your work, gentlemen, with the greatest of delicacy and hesitation. I certainly could not have created from whole cloth the edifice which your labors obtained. The only advantage I have by far is one of hindsight. The last two hundred and twenty years are illuminated by the twin lights of historical observation and experience which were unavailable even to the most prescient among you. It is these lights which allow my poor vision to apprehend what I dare, in my hubris, to call improvements.
You may wonder, rightly, why I would undertake these efforts alone as you all certainly did your work in concert, allowing for the review of your peers to temper or anneal as necessary the character of your constructions. A good and wise friend of mine did offer to help me in these, my own efforts. Two factors led me to decline his assistance. The first was the difficulty in consistently timing our mutual schedules to produce a completed work in timely fashion. The second was the name I had chosen for these writings, the Individualist Papers. I believe that individualism was the core of both Enlightenment thought and the republic you created, doing so specifically to preserve the essential elements of individualism while restraining it’s foreseeable excesses. I believe that any person claiming the natural sovereignty that his or her own individual being requires should be able to understand at least the fundamentals of individual right and responsibility and articulate for his peers that understanding. My friend understood and agreed, gracefully accepting my declination of his offer.
Now I hope you understand the tenor of my thoughts and can accept these my humble suggestions in the gentle spirit in which they are offered.
Slavery is seen by many as a hypocritical stain upon the Constitution. Indeed, it is a conundrum to me how many who were among the most impassioned and vocal in the defense of individual liberty could have owned slaves with a clear conscience. Perhaps a deeper and more lengthy study of your writings will provide an answer to me but, for the moment, I’ll have to accept this as a clear dichotomy.
In your defense, many of you spoke and wrote well in condemnation of that most peculiar institution and not all of you owned slaves. It is known that both the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in their original forms called for the end of slavery in America and, but for the intransigence of a few, the problem would have been solved then. If there is indeed a realm of spirit in which the deceased may forever remember their actions and the fruits thereof, may those of you who refused to sign either the Declaration or the Constitution till the anti-slavery clauses were removed know this, the horror that visited our country, from racial lynchings and civil unrest, to civil war, rests entirely upon your shoulders. Wear it well, wherever you are.
Those of you who labored mightily but in vain to remove the blot of slavery from an otherwise good intent of creating the republic, rest at ease for the sake of all that you did accomplish and remember that the omission was at length corrected, albeit at horrid cost.
In a matter dangerously akin to slavery, I bring on the subject of taxes. No wise person would hold that the State could long endure without the funding necessary to execute its constitutional mandate. I maintain that while certain kinds of taxation are moral and serve to fund the State in reasonable fashion, certain other tax methods and levels thereof are immoral and unendurable to a moral people. Further, when those immoral taxation methods become entrenched in the culture, it becomes all the more difficult for a just people to rise and remove them within the framework of the law. Devious and unscrupulous persons in the government would find such a tax structure useful to manipulate and control the behavior of the people and secure unwarranted power to themselves. This indeed has happened and is one of the many accumulated perils the republic now faces.
Had you foreseen the tax situation we the people now endure, I am confident you would have worked to prevent the abuses I have described. Nonetheless, such protection was lacking and our nation is becoming the worse for it. Indeed, our State has taken on a more than passing resemblance to the European States who’s structure you wished us to avoid. Our companies are taxed to the second highest level among the modern nations and our average citizen pays forty to forty-five percent of his annual income in a wide range of taxes. The spirits of your citizen militia must shake their heads in sad wonder at us, for they readily took up arms to throw off a far lighter burden.
Further, our culture has eschewed the citizen legislator concept for a veritable ruling class composed almost exclusively of attorneys. Ignoring your precedents, they remain in office as career politicians, courtesy of a benighted majority of their constituents, and compose legislation of ever increasing complexity, which alienates the ordinary citizen from his vital understanding of the law. The tax code alone is Byzantine beyond any rational deciphering. No single person can know it in its entirety, which invites the selective and capricious enforcement under which we now suffer.
I promised the living that I would exercise brevity in these writings, so I’ll offer you a list of constitutional items which your foresight might have given had the trials of your time permitted.
Some reasonable and specific limitations upon the power to lay and collect taxes would have been in order but I have railed on ad nauseum about taxes, so enough till I get to the Instrument.
I believe none of you gentlemen would allow a fox to design a henhouse, so why did you permit lawyers to write legislation? I know many of you were attorneys and fine ones at that but the power inherent in the Bar, and the abuses thereof, must have been known to you by observing His Majesty’s Parliament. To be certain, many of today’s attorneys in America are doing their level best to fight the impending tyranny but they seem outnumbered by those who have become seduced by the lure of power for power’s sake and who work to erode and diminish liberty by writing complicated laws and hidden laws within laws. With a flourish of ink, they destroy what was won in blood.
I believe that much of the damage done to our freedom could have been avoided if pieces of legislation were limited in scope to a single subject, written plainly, and describing the specific purpose of the bill and actively limiting the permissible interpretations thereof. Further, legislators who write, co-write, endorse or sign any bill must be held personally responsible for its content and their support thereof.
Still further, I think that freedom of speech and writing are for the ordinary citizen and the private press and media. It is not for the holders of high public office to make utterances and suggest legislation designed to separate the people from their liberty without great risk. This too, I will address in the Instrument. The status of Public Servant should be sufficiently hazardous to warn away those who would elevate themselves to Public Master.
Elements of our Foreign Policy are far too vulnerable to the personality of the Chief Executive. We can avoid the “foreign entanglements” you justly feared by having specific foreign policy standards which both protect the liberty of American citizens and reward the ethical behavior of foreign governments in the areas of commerce, finance and military activity and which are not subject to change by the naïve whim or calculating device of the President. Again, the Instrument will reflect these considerations.
The members of both houses have enjoyed a storied immunity from many of the laws they pass and which we must obey. It would seem common sense for this not to be so but common sense has never been common in Congress, even during your time. A correction is needed.
Many of my living countrymen cry out for term limits for all elected officials. With great reluctance have I been brought into agreement with this idea. It negates somewhat the choice the people should have of sending a good and properly motivated person to Washington who can serve the legitimate needs of his constituents. But far too often that person serves illegitimate needs, bringing “pork” to his district at the expense of everyone else. This has resulted not only in the corruption of many representatives but the corruption of the people represented.
In the early days of the republic, as you well know, voting was allowed only to white, male landowners. While this was understandable for the times, some corrections were due as years passed. Non-white citizens justly acquired the right, then women, justly as well. The restriction to land owners is understandable in that one should have a stake in the well being of the nation to preserve it. Today, however, two untoward situations abide. First, a great segment of the population receives financial assistance from the government and they most often vote for representatives who work to deliver more money to them, at the expense of the rest of us. Second, the young do not often vote but when they do, they bring to the franchise a profound lack of wisdom and ethics, electing candidates who reflect the same. These two matters must be corrected.
For the last have I saved what I believe to be the most important or at least the most useful of my suggestions. Indeed, many of the items I have catalogued here might have already come about had this last item been in place. Where you had written the Constitution, therein empowering the House and the Senate to rescind laws which were ill-conceived or no longer useful, this task has been greatly neglected. Many representatives are slow to admit error in the writing or passage of legislation they might have worked hard to enact. Great harm to the republic has resulted often from this, perhaps most notably in the Prohibition of Alcohol which gave strength and position to organized crime.
A separate, third House, which I’ll call the Council of Reviewers could serve to fill this most desperate need. Councilors would examine legislation on a five, ten, or twenty year cycle, determining whether it has been helpful or damaging to the people and their liberty. They would have the power to vote it out by simple majority, sending their order of rescinding, or other such named item, to the Chief Executive for signing. That this would seem to have the government chasing its own tail might be true but that is preferable, I believe, to the government chasing ours. Good legislation would tend to remain in force while bad laws could be systematically corrected.
I promise to attend to all of these in detail within the Instrument. As I bring this chapter of For What It’s Worth to a close, I am reminded of how I felt when I first started it. I remember feeling that I should write a stern rebuke, saying why didn’t you people do this or that? But as I sat down to my computer and began to write (computers! You fellows would have loved these things, especially you, Dr. Franklin.), I realized it would be a rebuke you hardly deserved. What you gentlemen accomplished by sweat and toil, not to mention blood, was enough of a beginning. Instead, the rebuke should land on myself and my fellow countrymen from the beginning of the republic to today. It is we who let preoccupied indifference turn our heads from Dr. Franklin’s admonition “…If you can keep it”, while consigning those who did raise warning to the ranks of the deranged.
Can you forgive us our slumber if now we wake to a task that might have been easier had we begun much sooner? Might you, in your Spirits, petition the Devine on our behalf for His guidance, if such exists? I hope so, for I believe this to be not only America’s most desperate hour, but humanity’s as well. The course of the next millennium will be set by the things we do, or fail to do, in the next few years.
Thank you, Sirs, for your very kind attention and good evening.
John LaValley, May, 2009
Good afternoon, Gentlemen. First, let me thank you. After much arguing, haggling, shouting and horse trading, you managed to hammer together a republic that has stood up to more than two centuries of attack from without and mismanagement from within. In a historically short period we have become the most influential country on the planet, not just militarily, but economically and culturally as well. It was inevitable that we should do this as growth in wealth and might are the natural rewards of a free and risk taking people.
Of course, the republic you built was not perfect, as no human created thing can be. The few omissions in the bulwark of your efforts have been used over time by people who wish, for their own reasons, to change America. They wish to change it from a free republic to something else which will certainly not serve the needs of the people at large but will serve the desires of the few at the expense of the many. The blame for this lands not on your shoulders, but on our own. As a people we have grown fat upon the success of our father’s endeavors while allowing compromise and expediency to erode the foundation on which those endeavors were built. Further, we have exchanged our critical faculties for flattery from the very parasites who tighten their grip around our throats. More on this factor I will address later, to the living. I speak of it here to you because more than anything else, it is the source of our woes.
I mention imperfections in your work, gentlemen, with the greatest of delicacy and hesitation. I certainly could not have created from whole cloth the edifice which your labors obtained. The only advantage I have by far is one of hindsight. The last two hundred and twenty years are illuminated by the twin lights of historical observation and experience which were unavailable even to the most prescient among you. It is these lights which allow my poor vision to apprehend what I dare, in my hubris, to call improvements.
You may wonder, rightly, why I would undertake these efforts alone as you all certainly did your work in concert, allowing for the review of your peers to temper or anneal as necessary the character of your constructions. A good and wise friend of mine did offer to help me in these, my own efforts. Two factors led me to decline his assistance. The first was the difficulty in consistently timing our mutual schedules to produce a completed work in timely fashion. The second was the name I had chosen for these writings, the Individualist Papers. I believe that individualism was the core of both Enlightenment thought and the republic you created, doing so specifically to preserve the essential elements of individualism while restraining it’s foreseeable excesses. I believe that any person claiming the natural sovereignty that his or her own individual being requires should be able to understand at least the fundamentals of individual right and responsibility and articulate for his peers that understanding. My friend understood and agreed, gracefully accepting my declination of his offer.
Now I hope you understand the tenor of my thoughts and can accept these my humble suggestions in the gentle spirit in which they are offered.
Slavery is seen by many as a hypocritical stain upon the Constitution. Indeed, it is a conundrum to me how many who were among the most impassioned and vocal in the defense of individual liberty could have owned slaves with a clear conscience. Perhaps a deeper and more lengthy study of your writings will provide an answer to me but, for the moment, I’ll have to accept this as a clear dichotomy.
In your defense, many of you spoke and wrote well in condemnation of that most peculiar institution and not all of you owned slaves. It is known that both the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in their original forms called for the end of slavery in America and, but for the intransigence of a few, the problem would have been solved then. If there is indeed a realm of spirit in which the deceased may forever remember their actions and the fruits thereof, may those of you who refused to sign either the Declaration or the Constitution till the anti-slavery clauses were removed know this, the horror that visited our country, from racial lynchings and civil unrest, to civil war, rests entirely upon your shoulders. Wear it well, wherever you are.
Those of you who labored mightily but in vain to remove the blot of slavery from an otherwise good intent of creating the republic, rest at ease for the sake of all that you did accomplish and remember that the omission was at length corrected, albeit at horrid cost.
In a matter dangerously akin to slavery, I bring on the subject of taxes. No wise person would hold that the State could long endure without the funding necessary to execute its constitutional mandate. I maintain that while certain kinds of taxation are moral and serve to fund the State in reasonable fashion, certain other tax methods and levels thereof are immoral and unendurable to a moral people. Further, when those immoral taxation methods become entrenched in the culture, it becomes all the more difficult for a just people to rise and remove them within the framework of the law. Devious and unscrupulous persons in the government would find such a tax structure useful to manipulate and control the behavior of the people and secure unwarranted power to themselves. This indeed has happened and is one of the many accumulated perils the republic now faces.
Had you foreseen the tax situation we the people now endure, I am confident you would have worked to prevent the abuses I have described. Nonetheless, such protection was lacking and our nation is becoming the worse for it. Indeed, our State has taken on a more than passing resemblance to the European States who’s structure you wished us to avoid. Our companies are taxed to the second highest level among the modern nations and our average citizen pays forty to forty-five percent of his annual income in a wide range of taxes. The spirits of your citizen militia must shake their heads in sad wonder at us, for they readily took up arms to throw off a far lighter burden.
Further, our culture has eschewed the citizen legislator concept for a veritable ruling class composed almost exclusively of attorneys. Ignoring your precedents, they remain in office as career politicians, courtesy of a benighted majority of their constituents, and compose legislation of ever increasing complexity, which alienates the ordinary citizen from his vital understanding of the law. The tax code alone is Byzantine beyond any rational deciphering. No single person can know it in its entirety, which invites the selective and capricious enforcement under which we now suffer.
I promised the living that I would exercise brevity in these writings, so I’ll offer you a list of constitutional items which your foresight might have given had the trials of your time permitted.
Some reasonable and specific limitations upon the power to lay and collect taxes would have been in order but I have railed on ad nauseum about taxes, so enough till I get to the Instrument.
I believe none of you gentlemen would allow a fox to design a henhouse, so why did you permit lawyers to write legislation? I know many of you were attorneys and fine ones at that but the power inherent in the Bar, and the abuses thereof, must have been known to you by observing His Majesty’s Parliament. To be certain, many of today’s attorneys in America are doing their level best to fight the impending tyranny but they seem outnumbered by those who have become seduced by the lure of power for power’s sake and who work to erode and diminish liberty by writing complicated laws and hidden laws within laws. With a flourish of ink, they destroy what was won in blood.
I believe that much of the damage done to our freedom could have been avoided if pieces of legislation were limited in scope to a single subject, written plainly, and describing the specific purpose of the bill and actively limiting the permissible interpretations thereof. Further, legislators who write, co-write, endorse or sign any bill must be held personally responsible for its content and their support thereof.
Still further, I think that freedom of speech and writing are for the ordinary citizen and the private press and media. It is not for the holders of high public office to make utterances and suggest legislation designed to separate the people from their liberty without great risk. This too, I will address in the Instrument. The status of Public Servant should be sufficiently hazardous to warn away those who would elevate themselves to Public Master.
Elements of our Foreign Policy are far too vulnerable to the personality of the Chief Executive. We can avoid the “foreign entanglements” you justly feared by having specific foreign policy standards which both protect the liberty of American citizens and reward the ethical behavior of foreign governments in the areas of commerce, finance and military activity and which are not subject to change by the naïve whim or calculating device of the President. Again, the Instrument will reflect these considerations.
The members of both houses have enjoyed a storied immunity from many of the laws they pass and which we must obey. It would seem common sense for this not to be so but common sense has never been common in Congress, even during your time. A correction is needed.
Many of my living countrymen cry out for term limits for all elected officials. With great reluctance have I been brought into agreement with this idea. It negates somewhat the choice the people should have of sending a good and properly motivated person to Washington who can serve the legitimate needs of his constituents. But far too often that person serves illegitimate needs, bringing “pork” to his district at the expense of everyone else. This has resulted not only in the corruption of many representatives but the corruption of the people represented.
In the early days of the republic, as you well know, voting was allowed only to white, male landowners. While this was understandable for the times, some corrections were due as years passed. Non-white citizens justly acquired the right, then women, justly as well. The restriction to land owners is understandable in that one should have a stake in the well being of the nation to preserve it. Today, however, two untoward situations abide. First, a great segment of the population receives financial assistance from the government and they most often vote for representatives who work to deliver more money to them, at the expense of the rest of us. Second, the young do not often vote but when they do, they bring to the franchise a profound lack of wisdom and ethics, electing candidates who reflect the same. These two matters must be corrected.
For the last have I saved what I believe to be the most important or at least the most useful of my suggestions. Indeed, many of the items I have catalogued here might have already come about had this last item been in place. Where you had written the Constitution, therein empowering the House and the Senate to rescind laws which were ill-conceived or no longer useful, this task has been greatly neglected. Many representatives are slow to admit error in the writing or passage of legislation they might have worked hard to enact. Great harm to the republic has resulted often from this, perhaps most notably in the Prohibition of Alcohol which gave strength and position to organized crime.
A separate, third House, which I’ll call the Council of Reviewers could serve to fill this most desperate need. Councilors would examine legislation on a five, ten, or twenty year cycle, determining whether it has been helpful or damaging to the people and their liberty. They would have the power to vote it out by simple majority, sending their order of rescinding, or other such named item, to the Chief Executive for signing. That this would seem to have the government chasing its own tail might be true but that is preferable, I believe, to the government chasing ours. Good legislation would tend to remain in force while bad laws could be systematically corrected.
I promise to attend to all of these in detail within the Instrument. As I bring this chapter of For What It’s Worth to a close, I am reminded of how I felt when I first started it. I remember feeling that I should write a stern rebuke, saying why didn’t you people do this or that? But as I sat down to my computer and began to write (computers! You fellows would have loved these things, especially you, Dr. Franklin.), I realized it would be a rebuke you hardly deserved. What you gentlemen accomplished by sweat and toil, not to mention blood, was enough of a beginning. Instead, the rebuke should land on myself and my fellow countrymen from the beginning of the republic to today. It is we who let preoccupied indifference turn our heads from Dr. Franklin’s admonition “…If you can keep it”, while consigning those who did raise warning to the ranks of the deranged.
Can you forgive us our slumber if now we wake to a task that might have been easier had we begun much sooner? Might you, in your Spirits, petition the Devine on our behalf for His guidance, if such exists? I hope so, for I believe this to be not only America’s most desperate hour, but humanity’s as well. The course of the next millennium will be set by the things we do, or fail to do, in the next few years.
Thank you, Sirs, for your very kind attention and good evening.
John LaValley, May, 2009
