Introduction by Rose Wilder Lane
This little book is important because it is revolutionary thinking. To appreciate its value correctly, we should remember the World Revolution’s career so far.
Not two centuries ago, refugees and castoffs on a wild coast between an empty ocean and an unknown wilderness, farther from the world’s affairs than Samoa is now, made an epochal discovery of man’s real nature. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," they said, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty – "
A declaration that liberty, as real as life, is the nature of "all men," challenged the basic belief and the practical arrangements of the whole world. And to defend it these low-class underlings rose, "a rabble in arms," and defied the world’s Great Powers.
They came from frontier cabins along the James, the Delaware, the Connecticut, the Mohawk, walking in moccasins and fringed deerskin up the trails of Virginia, the Carolinas, York State, the Hampshire Grants, to meet the solid fire of the British Regulars with musket shots and their revolutionary war cry, "Liberty and Property!" And a poor refugee printer spoke for them all: "These are the times that try men’s souls. . . . There hath not been such an opportunity since the time of Adam. We have it in our power to make a new world."
They fought and lost, fought and lost, fought again – and lost, for eight years, to a contemptuously broken treaty and a pause. The Great Powers stood around them, ignoring them, preparing to fight each other for the new continent: Spain south and southwest of them, France in the west, Great Britain northwest, north, and using their eastern ports. These enemies’ secret agents were among them, bribing, conspiring, plotting. The commander of their little army was in the pay of the king of Spain. The Republic of Vermont was a wavering ally. Many New Englanders were ready to return their States to Great Britain. In that precarious time their President, John Quincy Adams, discussing their policy, remarked in passing:
"When the day shall come for your representatives to determine whether the territories of Ceylon and Madagascar, of Corsica and Cuba, shall be governed by rules and regulations emanating from your Congress . . . and whether their people shall ultimately be constituted into States represented upon the floor of your national legislative assemblies . . . ."
The Discovery of Freed...
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For their discovery of the natural liberty of "all men" was world-revolutionary. The world of God-Kings, of Ruling Classes and wretched peasants, serfs, slaves enduring brutality, hunger, misery, could not survive that discovery.
They fought for it again – losing on land, their Capitol looted and burned, but winning on the Great Lakes, boldly winning in Britain’s own coastal waters – to the Treaty of Ghent, a real peace; and at last, after forty years, real recognition of the existence of their Republic – their revolutionary "republican" federation of thirteen little, poor, but "free and sovereign States."
Again and again, through the long past, leagues of nations had failed. This was a league of "all men," based on the nature of man; so in time, as its makers thought it must, it could be a federation of all mankind, a new world of free men. Including Eskimos.
The refugee printer wrote: "An army of principles will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer."
Now a strange thing occurred. In the source and center of this real World Revolution, the men who were making it – forgot it.
Three generations of free men, while overcoming the fierce resistance of a wild continent, actually created here a wholly new way of human life, never before imaginable. Men engaged in this stupendous task put their whole minds into it. And the minds of American intellectuals remained in the Old World, with the thinkers who were reacting against the Revolution.
In 1789, George Washington was President, and Jefferson and Lafayette were taking the Revolution to France. In 1792, the Jacobin socialists ousted the French republicans. The Jacobins decreed "unity," dictated and, wrecked the economy, tried to enforce unity and obedience by massacres and the Terror, collapsed, and made way for Napoleon, the first Hitler. Then appeared in American text books the European view: "The French Revolution began the spread of liberal ideas."
Islam and the Discover...
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In the 1830’s and 1840’s, active Americans were annexing the Republic of California. Americans in northern Mexico, at San Antonio and San Jacinto, were fighting and dying for freedom and their dream of the Lone-Star Republic of Texas. At Yale, an honored guest, the French socialist Fourier, was enthralling his learned audiences with his visions of a Socialist World, and New England’s intellectuals were fondly trusting that their Brook Farm commune was a beginning of the future Communist World Commonwealth. It wasn’t.
The Revolution was arousing reaction against it, everywhere in the Old World, from Mexico in 1820 through all South America, to Italy in the 1860’s, Germany in the 1880’s, China in 1911, Russia in 1917. The whole Old World was wrecked. That ancient world of rulers and ruled, tyranny and slavery, poverty, misery, famine, torture, human degradation, was smashed by its violent reaction against the discovery that "all men" are endowed by their Creator with liberty, as real, as inalienable from a living person as life itself.
Since 1860 the Jacobin reaction has been organized. The first Communist International failed in France in 1870, and its disheartened members disbanded it in Philadelphia in 1876. The Second Communist International collapsed in 1914; its former members became Fascists in Italy, National Socialists in Germany. The Third Communist International is now an armed Power, and the issue at last is clear; in the ruins of the Old World, the Reaction faces the New World with bared teeth and claws, snarling, "We will bury you."
A century of heedless builders and reactionary thinkers has had reactionary effects even within this Republic. Too many Old World fallacies have been believed here, too many Old World measures imitated. Apparently only one lone newspaperman, Mr. Haskell, of the Kansas City Star recognized the "New" Deal as a stale imitation of ancient Rome in its decline. But the source and center of the World Revolution is still in this revolutionary Republic, this only successful league of States, the first ever made to defend every person’s human rights: life, liberty, property.
A real World Revolution is not to be won in two centuries. The reaction against it has wrecked the whole Old World. It wrecked France and retreated to Germany; wrecked Germany and retreated to darkest Russia and stagnant China. It can retreat no farther; now is the showdown. Now the struggle between the old, barbarous past and the new, possible future involves the whole human world and every one of us alive.
The basic question, on which the answers to all other questions depend, is: What is the nature of man? The only political question is: What is the nature of the institution named "Government"? It is a simple fact that all men’s future for centuries is being determined by the answers that Americans give to these fundamental questions. We have it in our power to make a new world. There has not been such a responsibility since the time of Adam.
So I would ask you to sharpen your own thinking on Mr. LeFevre’s genuine thought about these questions. The value of this little book is its contribution and its stimulus to true revolutionary thinking. I think you have not read its like before. If it jolts you, that’s good; these are the times when minds need waking up. Let nothing keep you from it any longer.
~ Rose Wilder Lane – (1886-1968)
Chapter 1: Man and His Government
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is Man.
Man is a conglomerate of many things. His distinctive characteristic, above all others, is his ability to create tools. In this department he is unique. No other animated entity of all creation, so far as we can tell, has this ability, at least to the extent that man has it.
Man has learned, because of his remarkable tool-making facility, to extend himself into all kinds of worlds and situations which would be beyond him except for his tools. It is the use of tools which gives man mastery over this planet. If man plunges beyond this planet, it will be his tools which take him there.
The Fundamentals of Li...
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One of the principal characteristics of the toolmaker is his ability not only to devise the original tool but to improve upon that tool which he has devised. It could be argued that a failure to improve a given tool, while other tools were being improved, might seriously handicap man’s progress. In other words, if man found himself addicted to the use of, let us say, the hand ax as the only tool for cutting wood, to such a degree that he would not consider a better method, the development of power saws would have been meaningless and impossible. If man wants to use an ax, and if his desires in this connection are buttressed by superstitious fear, by religious conviction, by stubborn willfulness or mental inertia, so that he believes the use of the ax is right whereas any tool other than the ax would be wrong, then man would never be able to go beyond the use of the ax. To convince him that the use of the ax in the midst of far more effective tools in other categories is no longer desirable, would require a virtual revolution of thought. Mankind would have to examine its habits, its thought patterns, its moral convictions, the very mores of the race itself before it would consider anything else.
Therefore, man’s use of a particular tool beyond the date of its obsolescence, though it admittedly had served a purpose at one time, might actually become a harmful usage. An insistence upon the use of an archaic instrument could hold back man’s progress, perhaps indefinitely. Further, if the tool were basic, a dedication to its employment could become actually destructive. For it might be that this one tool was of such a nature that it could and would interfere with the development or the improvement of virtually all other tools. Man could be bound and limited by the very device which once was, perhaps, one of his chief aids.
If we can begin to understand the tools men make, we may begin to understand more about man’s true nature. The nature of the creator is discernible in his works.
One of the most curious and one of the most useful tool-making facilities which man has is his ability to organize. Any organization made by man can be classed as a tool.
Man begins his organizational efforts by classifying things in groupings according to his understanding of those things. He learns to make associations on the basis of identity and similarity. He then learns to make disassociations on the basis of differences and, finally, opposites. Man organizes his thoughts, his time, his physical possessions. Finally, he organizes his neighbors and politics is born.
Men have made hundreds of thousands of organizations. Each one has a purpose. Men have learned to combine their energies around a specific objective; harness the energies of diverse and sometimes even conflicting personalities; and concentrate upon a program, project, or product, to the exclusion of all other things. If you look at this process objectively, you cannot help but be amazed.
During the long and bloody history of human progress, the most prolific and fertile efforts have been put forth by men to create an organization which is called "government." Government has been deemed by primitive and semi-civilized men as the single most important tool ever to be devised.
Government is important because it is a tool designed to multiply the strength and power of individuals. If one man is strong, two men would be stronger. From earliest times man has desired strength. If government, the invention of man, could be so formed that it multiplied man’s strength, then man would have an important device of power to use against his enemies. This is the reason for government. It was the answer to the search made by primitive men for collective strength in place of individual lack of strength.
For us to understand the nature of man, a good beginning could be made by attempting to understand the nature of this tremendous tool of man’s devising.
What is government?
Clearly, all governments are simply groups of men or women which are put together for the purpose of finding strength, of providing protection. Every possible combination of rules, codes, laws, charters, constitutions, regencies, protectorates, treaties, contracts, specifications, and customs has gone into the tens of thousands of governments which have been devised during history’s meteoric course. But however the framework is made, however the structure is built, the fact remains that government is a tool of man’s devising, neither better nor worse than the men who devise and use it, and calculated to make man stronger and better able to protect himself in his weaknesses, by the use of force, exerted by some over others. That is all.
The understanding of what government is, and what government is not, is of paramount importance. The importance of understanding government lies not in the importance of government itself, but in the importance men place upon their beliefs respecting government. The importance of understanding government lies in the importance of the security and protection which governments have been devised to provide. Thus, while men may believe that a government is important in itself, beneath this belief is the fact that government is a means to an end, not an end in itself. So we must not only examine this means, this tool of protection, but we must also explore protection, and the necessity for it if it exists.
Chapter 2: A Reasonable Viewpoint
Men have many viewpoints respecting the functions and the purposes of government. Let us explore some of them in turn.
It has been noted that men are weak and that government is a device aimed at helping men to overcome their weakness.
Physically, mentally, and even morally, men appear to be weak. As we look at man’s physical nature, we recognize immediately that he is no match for many other living things. Lacking tools, modern man would survive with difficulty if at all. Tools multiply his energies, making him more than a match for other living things. In a hand-to-claw combat man could be bested by almost any other living creature relatively near his own size.
Man cannot outrun the four-footed animals, but his tools can. Man cannot outfight the wild beasts, but his tools can. Man cannot tame the domesticable animals, but his tools of fences, ropes, cages, special foods, and knowledge can.
Looking at man’s mental stature, again we are prone to discover his weakness. Men have lived in error. What progress man has made has been made haltingly, as he rubbed superstition and fear from his eyes, studied the true nature of matter and learned to rise, by means of the tools of books, research, test tube and model, into a better world.
Compared to what man does not know, even all modern mental achievement is but a single candle flame flickering in darkness. Yet by means of his tools, man is overcoming this darkness. Where would man be without, let us say, the alphabet; the numerals 1 to 10; the printing press; paper, ink, and glue? Eliminate the tools and within a few generations man would be engulfed once more by superstition, fear, and ignorance.
And what of morality? Here is, perhaps, the greatest frontier yet to be crossed by humankind. What does man know and understand about morals? Very little. In centuries, he has learned that the Golden Rule is good, and has less than a dozen basic rules of conduct embodied in the Decalogue.
Here, the church and religion itself have been man’s most useful tools. But today, even as man’s technology improves, as his mechanical genius unfolds and his knowledge of matter increases by leaps and bounds, his ability to govern himself and to master the precepts of morality approaches a yawning chasm. It could be said that the area of man’s basic goodness has been too little shored up by effective tools. While man’s material tools improve, man’s moral tools are neglected and remain largely static. It would not be too harsh to say that man’s morality has gone into a decline.
Here, then, is man – a moral, mental, and physical entity having life. And here, also, are man’s weaknesses, embodied in his very nature.
But as we have shown, man has, from his earliest beginnings, turned to government to bolster his weaknesses. Government is man’s chief organizational tool to be employed against his weaknesses.
Thus, when men turn to government in an effort to overcome weakness and to obtain protection, the strength desired is found in compulsive unity. Government, inherently, places individualism at a low point on any scale of values. Individuals are the enemies of government. Government is inescapably concerned with unity. Individuals are the necessary victims.
It is true that some governments have proclaimed a contrary doctrine. Some have said that the individual is important and the government is merely the servant of the individual. But let the evidence be presented and we discover that this assertion is only a pleasant fiction. The servant has the power and the strength. The individual bows before the might of the servant, who is, despite the platitudes, a master, not a slave to men. Governments rule. Individuals are ruled.
Any individual must give way to the violent cohesion of government.
If the individual is physically, mentally, or morally in error, that is to say, if the individual is physically a criminal, mentally unbalanced, or morally degenerated, the combined and powerful action of a government may provide an amelioration. And it is in this area where actions taken by government are deemed to be not only proper in a moral sense, but highly practical and desirable. Since it is true that an individual who refuses to practice self-discipline and practices theft, for example, can be opposed, apprehended, and even punished by government, the employment of this tool by human beings has long been upheld as a prime necessity.
This would seem to be, then, a reasonable function for the government to have. What we must explore are some of the other functions which government has assumed. Also, we must look into this same function – that of apprehending and punishing criminals – to determine the actual necessity of the function and also to discover whether the function could be performed more practically, more morally, more economically and more certainly by some tool other than government.
Man’s progress has come largely of his ability not only to discover tools, but to improve tools. Can the thief-taking ability of government be improved upon by providing a better tool?
Chapter 3: Aggressive Power
As we look at government we find that men have organized for the purpose of protecting themselves and their property. Government is the tool of this protection.
Also, since government is always an agency which plans to use and, indeed, must use force, we have noted that government derives its power from a compulsory unification. All persons under the jurisdiction of a particular government are compelled to agree with whatever that government does. The agreement can be enthusiastic, tacit, or reluctant. But the agreement must be there. Government’s power to protect is based upon that agreement, however secured. Power, to be effective, cannot permit exceptions.
Thus, the government is inevitably opposed to individuals. The individual is the natural prey of the organizational tool. And we have shown that when the individual is immoral, mentally retarded, or physically aggressive against others, the government can employ its cohesive power in a manner which is pleasing to people in general.
In short, it can act defensively, taking a position against the one on behalf of the many.
So long as the matter is simple, the case clear-cut, the individual obviously out of order, and the protection of the people generally the paramount issue, government is fulfilling what people generally expect of it.
But matters are rarely simple and cases have a way of being complicated and fogged over with a combination of motives, behavior patterns, backgrounds, and prejudice. Thus, more times than not, an individual will object to some particular government action only to find himself, by reason of his objection, the object and the victim of governmentalism.
A peaceful and law-abiding citizen, for example, may have perfectly sound and moral reasons why he does not wish to share his money with the government or the politicians of Yugoslavia. His conviction can be logically derived, morally certain, and sincerely maintained. In holding to his conviction, the individual is harming no one. His belief is not inimical to the welfare of other people. Actions which might spring from his belief are not aggressive. In other words, physically, mentally, and morally, such a citizen can be above reproach.
Yet, when the government adopts a policy which prescribes the sharing of his earnings with a foreign government, the man who objects to this can be treated in precisely the same manner as a bank robber could be treated and for the same reason. The government cannot brook a deviationist.
If the government decrees against bank robbing, it can permit of no exception. It will use its full force of unified power to prevent bank robbing, or, at worst, to apprehend and punish the robber should one appear. And if the government decrees a universal sharing of its citizens’ wealth with the politicians of another country, it can permit of no exception here. It can and it will use its full force of unified power to collect whatever sums it deems advisable and will punish any person refusing to provide those sums, with arrest, fine, or imprisonment, and in the event of resistance, with death.
Thus, in practice, the tool of protection, which men have devised out of their weaknesses, can be employed and is employed with equal vigor and ferocity against both the criminal and the good and harmless citizen. Here the bank robber and the patriot who loves his country are equated.
Government has but a single standard, obedience. Its decrees, good, bad, or indifferent, are enforceable. And the men in government cannot recognize a law which need not be enforced. If the government has adopted a policy, the policy must be carried out, even though one policy may be aimed at social stability and the other at social injustice.
This is one of the characteristics of weakness contained in man’s nearly universal tool of strength. The device of protection can be employed as a weapon both defensively and aggressively.
Chapter 4: The Law Factory
Having granted that a government can perform a defensive function by apprehending and punishing the criminal, we must look at government on a broader scale.
It is immediately apparent that there is no government in all the world, saving only extremely small and local constabularies, which reserves for itself solely this simple and at least partially constructive function. The prevention of crime and the punishment of the criminal have become, in most instances, subsidiary departments of government. In the main, governments have gone far beyond this field of activity.
Today governments concern themselves in general not with criminals, but with law-abiding citizens. Every citizen is a victim of the aggressive tactics of government. Government begins by seizing the arbitrary and total power of deciding how much money it wants. Then it collects the money without a care or concern for the plight of the individual who must pay or be punished like a criminal.
Next, the government establishes hundreds and thousands of regulations which prescribe particular practices and proscribe others. Almost every action of every citizen has its legal "do" and "don’t."
The list of prohibitions and compulsions is too lengthy for cataloguing here. But it pertains to business operations, licenses, building regulations, zoning, hours of employment, prices, trade, quotas, embargoes, subsidies, grants-in-aid, traffic, assembly, slander, libel, trespass, health, cleanliness, quality, quantity, method, education, indoctrination, propaganda, news, pictures, morals, food, drink, clothing, housing, sanitation, roads, farm products, transportation, search, seizure, mental outlook, exchange of parcels by post, and so on.
It can truthfully be said that there is almost no activity in which human beings engage which is free of legality. Think what you will, do what you will, there is a law somewhere which either compels, limits, or prohibits.
Try to think of something that people do. With the possible exception of breathing, laws bristle from the activity like quills from a porcupine. And the result of all these laws is to make any individual who does not conform in every respect, a lawbreaker.
Thus, the average person today, buttressed in by government, surrounded and overshadowed by government, finds himself a lawbreaker several times during an average day. And this fact turns him from being a law-abiding citizen into a lawbreaking citizen and equates him with any criminal who, in fact, breaks a law with aggressive intent.
But the government, as has been shown, cannot concern itself with anything but the universal obedience it must enforce. Thus, any violation of law becomes in essence a punishable offense. And whereas the government does maintain certain classifications – civil, criminal, and the like – the fact remains that even in civil matters government can and will punish and apprehend with vigor. This is not the fault of government. This is the nature of government.
This is the major point which must be understood eventually. Government which passes and enforces endless rules and codes is not out of character when it does so. It is in character. That is the way any government operates. And the longer a given government endures, the more numerous will be the laws it enacts. It is the business of government to pass laws and to enforce them. These laws are the productive sum of all governmental effort. Therefore it is not to be wondered at when thousands and thousands of new laws come into existence every year. It would rather be a marvel if this did not happen.
Government is a law factory. It passes laws in the same manner that another type of factory extrudes metal molding. Government is a lawmaking tool.
But, whereas a factory which extrudes metal molding is providing a product which is useful to the citizens generally, and which certain citizens will purchase voluntarily; the government factory extrudes compulsion which is useful principally to the government, itself, but is purchased in advance by the people, who are never in a position to refuse to buy.
Chapter 5: Government as Competitor
We have now shown that government has a single, possibly legitimate, function, that of apprehending and punishing the criminal. We have also shown that government has, in its manifold legal actions, gone far beyond its possible legitimacy by passing thousands upon thousands of laws and rules which tend to equate the average individual, who is peaceful and orderly, with the criminal who commits acts of aggression with willful intent.
Now, we must continue to look at government as it goes even beyond this limit. For within our own lifetimes, our own governments – national, state, and local – have gone beyond even the excessiveness of multiple legal prohibitions and compulsions.
One of the most serious incursions performed by the governments against their citizenry has occurred in those instances where the government has abandoned its position as arbiter and compulsionist, and has embarked in the role of entrepreneur. Today, not content with compelling and preventing citizens as they go about their daily routines, government has developed for itself an independent status as a business or industrial entity.
Our federal government has taken on this chore in more than nine hundred separate fields, ranging from corset making, rope manufacture, and candy-bar purveying to the distilling of low-grade rum. It has become a provider of electric power, gas, and water; it runs golf courses, zoos, and tourist attractions; it manages bus and railroad lines, radio and television stations, newspapers and periodicals. It manufactures nuts and bolts and copper wire, and engineers immense building projects. It builds roads and ships, runs hospitals and, even in the end, handles graveyards.
Yet all of these things also are done by private persons, managing their own affairs under government supervision and by permission – after taxes; whereas the government cannot supervise itself, pays no taxes, and consistently competes with the very persons who are compelled to provide the wherewithal for government enterprise. Nor have state or local governments been free of the general federal trespass. In point of fact, in many areas local governments are the principal offenders.
This is a very far cry, indeed, from the simple expedient of catching and punishing thieves and murderers. Nor is this the end of government’s straying from its prescribed course.
In our own case, anew departure in governmentalism has arisen to plague every American. For in this country chiefly, although the offense also exists in other countries to a minor degree, our own taxpayers are compelled to pay taxes for the support of foreign governments. And this is tyranny of the worst order.
Yet it is not unknown in history. Weaker states have, from time immemorial, been compelled to pay tribute to stronger and more vigorous neighbors. The innovation, circa the 1930’s, was that the United States of America, the then strongest and most vigorous nation in the world, began to pay tribute from a position of strength. And this was the great advance towards barbarism, made exclusively by American politicians.
Stripped of its humanitarian language and reduced to fundamentals, the payment of American tax money to foreign powers constituted international bribery of an order a degree worse than the payment of ransom money to the Barbary pirates. Fear was obviously at the bottom of the move.
With America the greatest and most productive nation on earth, her politicians became fearful of both the envy of others and the war making potentials of others. It was as though we lived in a glass house in a neighborhood of stone throwers. And to prevent the stones from being thrown, our government adopted a policy of rewarding our neighbors for the negative passivity of not throwing stones.
The claim was made that this would win us friends. The most simple and least informed psychologist could have revealed that this practice would only win us the contempt and hostility of others. For America was no glass house. It was a rich and productive reservoir of a high percentage of all the production on earth, including the production of the means to defend ourselves. And this our neighbors knew.
Chapter 6: National Defense
We come at once to government’s classic usage, that of making war upon government’s enemies. Whether we begin our examination of government as a warmaker in clan, tribe, city, state, or nation, or even as a body of nations joined together, we find this the single most costly and terrible function that government can ever attempt.
Aggressive warfare is always the exclusive prerogative of government. Mobs, groups, families, or individuals may fight. They may riot, destroy, pillage, and perform in any wanton way. But it takes a government to conduct a war. Only government has the capacity, extended through both time and space, to organize sufficient force and violence to sustain a war. And only government, in our age, can effectively amass sufficient wealth for such a nonproductive and destructive purpose.
Aggressive warfare can never be justified on any moral ground. The use of initiated violence is abhorrent to all persons. But what does fall under our gaze is the apparent occasional necessity for a government to perform in war as a defendant. It is true, governments being what they are, that certain governments will plot and plan an aggressive campaign of combat, however immoral or foolish such a campaign might be. And it must follow that if any government undertakes so violent a course, other governments, lying in the pathway of the deliberate predator, may with some justification inform their citizens of the danger.
What should be the nature of this information? Since government is merely a tool, and since it is always the citizens who face the hazards occasioned by a physical clash in battle, the alert should always be couched in terms acceptable to volunteers. Further, the call to arms should come from the people and not from their government.
If there is a real danger, the danger is one which the citizens will recognize. Having recognized it, they will do what they can to defend themselves. They are the actors of the drama.
On the other hand, it is entirely possible, and in many instances a proven fact, that the announced danger is fancied rather than real. Governments tend to make trouble, in a great hubbub of concern for their own prerogatives. The citizens are capable of discerning the difference between a scare drummed up by power-hungry politicians and a real threat to their safety and security. In truth, the citizens are always in a better position to make this discernment than is their government. Governments, as instruments of force and power, are far too prone to operate in an atmosphere of fear. They tend to engender fear. They end by believing their own engenderings.
One of the most serious mistakes the citizens can ever make is to grant to their government the power of a draft. Governments which can forcefully enlist the citizens under them, can shoulder their way truculently among all foreign powers, confident that they can compel a final showdown to their liking. Lacking this power, a government is constantly in review before its citizens. The citizens may, in such a case, refuse to accept their government’s foreign policies and the errors perpetrated thereby. This would leave such a government in an untenable position. It must move warily and peacefully or risk an ultimate exposure before a hostile force.
From a practical point of view the volunteer in any war is a better soldier than the conscript. The nature of man being what it is, men will always seek to be in the place they wish to be, and they will attempt to get away from the place they do not wish to be. If a man chooses to oppose an actual enemy in the field, it is because he would rather be in such a position than in any other. But if a man is compelled to take the field, and is uncertain as to the actual hostility in the breast 0f his supposed enemy, he must be driven and forced at every turn of the road. Such a man will only stay to fight because he fears his own government more than he fears the guns of his opponents. Under such compulsions he does not do his best. Nor is his love of country encouraged by such outrage.
Our problem is not to find a way to compel men to defend themselves. This they will always do. Our problem is to prevent the evils of conscription which hamper true defense, create armed forces which contain aggressive potential, and create a drain of economic wealth beyond all other actions. We must be vigilant that we are not lured into hostile poses by a fearful or belligerent government.
But here we run into a whole series of dilemmas. The dilemmas are occasioned by the fact that historically the citizens have turned over to their government all power of decision respecting the preparing for and the waging of war.
How can a government, armed and capable of conducting an effective defensive campaign, be successfully prevented from the slightest act of aggressive war? To this question, history gives us a discouraging answer. Any government fully armed and ready for defense is all too prone to prove the point upon the field.
Alas, the human record proves another point. Who is the aggressor in any war? With absolute unanimity the answer is, the other fellow. The bristling engines of war build up along each national boundary. The pressures mount behind the barricades. A rising tide, like a great wave, towers menacingly until sometime, somewhere, the laws of gravity take hold and the great wave topples, spilling out across the barriers like an onrushing flood. This is aggression. Who caused the spilling? The science of tactics and of strategy gives us the official ruling. "Each act of war is retaliatory." Even the first act of any conflict is in reprisal for some prior condition.
The prior condition in itself need not be hostile. Differences between nations and people abound. Wars have been waged for the flimsiest of reasons. Yet, when a government decides that warfare is "the only course," the slightest pretext, relating to color of skin, religious differences, tariffs, immigration laws, language differences, differences in philosophies, or even hostile words, has established at one time or another a cause for war.
Thus, even when one government hurls its legions across a boundary in an obvious attempt to amass land and plunder, the excuse is always given that the aggression occurred because the government on the other side of the boundary drove the government on the near side to this final deadly act of politics.
How can the ultimate in human foolishness be prevented? Clearly, it is preposterous to assume that the tool capable of such a holocaust can also be relied upon to prevent the very thing it is uniquely designed to do. This would be like supposing that fire will not burn, or that a fire once started can be extinguished by a larger fuel supply. One does not call upon one’s government to prevent war. One calls upon one’s government to wage it. And it is here that the necessity for understanding man’s own nature as well as the nature of his tool de main, becomes, in modern times, acute.
If we are to believe the tacticians, war is always a reaction against some prior act. But this is only saying what has been said all along, that war is the natural extension of politics. War is organized force employed by government against some other government which is under no constraint to give obedience to alien politicians. Governments wage wars against their individual citizens and it is called policing. But when a government wages war against another government, it is called by its right name.
But let us ask, in what way is a war against an opposing government different from government’s eternal war against the individual? The answer is that in principle it is the same; only the battle- fields and the size and scope of the arena provide a distinction. But it is a distinction without a difference in principle. Governments back up their decrees by force of arms. In the event the decree is leveled against a citizen, the force of arms required is moderate. In the event the decree is aimed at a foreign power, an army must be employed to compel obedience.
In the end we will see that only governments make war. The people in all nations do the fighting and the dying. But our quarrel is never truly with them. Our quarrel is always with their government, which sets them upon us.
We are not suggesting a dismantling of the tool of our possible protection.
But we are suggesting that we examine this tool, recognizing that while it is capable of defensive action, it is a1so capable of so conducting itself at home or abroad that defensive action, in the end, becomes the only course open to us.
Here, as in every other case, that which was formed for our protection becomes, finally, the very reason we need to be protected. This tool of defensive potential inevitably contains the seeds of aggressive force and violence. The larger and more powerful it becomes defensively, the more it is apt to use its vast ability in some aggressive manner.
Chapter 7: A Government’s Government
If we would understand why our government has so invaded private rights; if we would learn why our government has expanded so greatly during the past two and a half decades; if we would comprehend the thinking which has caused our government to resort to bribery in an effort to maintain friendly relations, and is even now considering the advisability of launching a war to prevent a war from breaking out – we must look to the nature of man, and not to the nature of government.
Government, as we have attempted to show, is merely a tool. Man, the maker of government, is, in the final analysis, the master of government. Yet man has made government to perform the opposite function and to master man. And while all governments begin with the premise that they will protect the many peaceful from the few who are belligerent, it is in the nature of governments that the rules will be extended and expanded until the state itself becomes man’s mortal permanently damages a priceless relic.
The tool is blameless. And thus, the government, within itself, is blameless. It is simply a ravening monster, naturally, and will continue to grow, to expand, to pounce upon its victims and devour them in foe.
We cannot blame a lever if, in our exercise of it across a fulcrum, it slips from our grasp and smashes a toe. We cannot blame a shovel if, in the hands of the wielder, it plunges into an ancient tomb and the normal course of its activity. That is the kind of tool it is. Man made the tool to perform in that fashion.
It is an instrument of force and coercion. And there can never be an instrument of force and coercion which will consciously restrain itself. It must be restrained. Yet there is no tool capable of such restraint. For any type of tool, whatever its nature, which is allegedly formed to restrain and contain government, would, by its own nature, simply become a government’s government.
In other words, the restraining tool for a compulsive instrument would have to contain a greater accumulation of power than the compulsive instrument or it would be ineffective. But this, in essence, would also be a government. It would simply be a larger, more compulsive, more dangerous and more mischievous tool and less subject to restraint than the original instrument of coercion.
The United Nations falls into this category, as – does every other prior political organization aimed at universal peace. The United Nations is simply a government’s government. The members of the United Nations are, by definition, not the peoples of the world, but the nations of the world, at present eighty-two in number.
Individual people cannot belong to the United Nations. Only governments can belong. The delegates to the United Nations are simply politicians who have been appointed by the member governments. And it is in the nature of the United Nations that it will look after the governmental interests of its members. Hence, the things that the member governments desire to do will become the policies of the United Nations.
But the thing all member governments desire to do is to rule their own people and to collect money from them. This is inherent in their natures. So the United Nations, perforce, will aid and abet the member governments in their universal desire to maintain a coercive hold over their individual subjects.
Thus, the United Nations is a government of the governments, by the governments, and for the governments. And it cannot and will not restrain these governments, for the members support the giant, looking to it for backing, even as the individual citizen supports his own government and looks to it for backing.
So much for the nature of government, and even for the nature of a government’s government.
But at the root of all government stand the people. What is it in the nature of human beings which causes them to look to a government?
There is only one thing which causes man to look for and to organize a tool which is an instrument of compulsion and prohibition. That thing is fear. Men look to government to protect them because they fear. And virtually without exception, everything that human beings fear becomes a project for government.
Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) was a businessman and radio personality, and the founder of the Freedom School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, whose purpose was to educate people from all walks of life in the libertarian intellectual tradition. Before it closed in 1968, it had featured among its rotating faculty Rose Wilder Lane, Milton Friedman, F.A. Harper, Frank Chodorov, Leonard Read, Gordon Tullock, G. Warren Nutter, Bruno Leoni, James J. Martin, and even Ludwig von Mises. His library and papers are housed at the Mises Institute.
