A WEEKLY COMMENTARY
Year Twenty-One ... Number Eighteen ... May 3, 1974
THE CONTRIVED EVOLUTION
OF REGIONAL GOVERNMENT
PART ONE
THE TREND IS TOWARD SOCIALISM
"The trend is toward socialism," declared George D. Aiken of Vermont, dean of United States of Senators, and ready to retire and bequeath his mantle of moderate conservatism to a younger and more optimistic Green Mountaineer. Upon deciding to leave the Washington scene, Senator Aiken called in reporters and gave them an interview and a written press release, hoping thus not to be misquoted, we presume. He said nothing startling, nothing new, nothing that will add importantly to anyone's fund of general knowledge. But he did state with both brevity and clarity what might be considered to be the consensus of that group once called "the silent majority," the conservatives who mean well but don't quite understand what's been happening to their Nation.
Because his words do seem to summarize such a consensus, his statement is a good starting point for this series of letters. The publication of this interview implies neither agreement nor disagreement with the Senator's opinions; rather, the interview serves as an excellent launching pad for our own flight into political orbit:
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Washington -- A steady and perhaps accelerating trend to the left in the United States and throughout the world is seen by Sen. George D. Aiken of Vermont, who is retiring this year after the longest service of any Republican in the Senate today. Only Sen. Allen J. Ellender (D-La.) served longer than Aiken, now 81, who took his seat Jan. 10, 1941.
"The trend is toward what we used to call socialism," Aiken said in an interview the other day. "Communities are more and more dependent on the states, and the states are more and more dependent on the federal government. Government support for education, hospitals and other social purposes has gone up tenfold, I suppose, in the last 10 years. The number of local, state and federal agencies has increased greatly. In Vermont, two-thirds of all the railroad trackage is publicly owned, either by the Canadian government or the state itself.
"The railroads are operated by a private concern which pays a percentage of income to the state. That is a combination of government ownership and private ownership, and it has worked pretty well so far.
"The cost of programs for feeding people, including the food stamp program, that are chargeable to the Department of Agriculture is about 10 times what it was five years ago.
"Paradoxically, under a supposedly conservative Republican Administration the leftward swing has been most rapid in the last five years. The people and the Congress seem to be for it. People are kicking about paying for these programs, but they are demanding to have them.
"Look what has happened in the case of revenue sharing, which Congress enacted in cooperation with the executive branch. The idea was that revenue sharing would make it possible to cut local taxes, but that is not what has happened. Instead, revenue sharing funds have been used for things that might not have been attainable otherwise, and in most places taxes have not been cut.
"My home town - Putney - got $15,000 in revenue sharing funds in the first quarter of last year. Out of that, $1,000 was voted for caring for indigent dogs -- and that brought in dogs from the surrounding towns. Some people went to use funds for indoor skating rinks and indoor swimming pools.
"People want more things now then they ever did before, and they want them without delay. Partly for that reason, the federal government is playing an ever greater part in our lives. In 1965 federal grants to state and local governments were a little over $10 billion. Just 10 years later these grants for 1975 are anticipated to be nearly $52 billion. Yet even with this 500% increase in federal contributions, state and local indebtedness, as well as local taxes, has continued to increase.
"In all the states, or in the overwhelming majority of them, there are land-use laws. Not many years ago that would have been regarded as a decided infringment on private rights. It would have been unbelievable that you couldn't toss waste in a river."
Aiken has been a slightly left-of-center Republican senator, something of a maverick, who is more famous for his practical wisdom than for the bills he has introduced. As the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he has helped carry on the tradition of bipartisanship in foreign policy that flourished under his famous predecessor in that role, the late Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg (R-Mich.).
In the clash between the hawks and doves during the Vietnam war, Aiken declared himself an owl. When the country was hopelessly mired in Vietnam, he made one of the greatest suggestions ever heard in Congress. He suggested that Congress pass a joint resolution declaring that the United States had won the war and that President Johnson bring the troops home in triumph. Unfortunately for Lyndon Johnson, he did not see the wisdom of it.
"They used to say," the senator recalled in an interview, "that when 35% of the income went into taxes of all kinds, you were a socialist country. Well, I guess we have reached that. It used to be every man for himself, with no restrictions -- and no benefits. Devil take the hindmost. That served a purpose in the early days, I suppose. But things have changed. It's a world trend. The things we are doing today would have been called socialism when I first came down here. But there is this paradox -- the whole universe is a paradox -- that the movement toward socialism has not reduced individual freedom. The individual is almost freer now than he ever was before. Thirty years ago people would not have dared to get together and knock hell out of the government, as they do now. Some people get away with things today that they probably would have been hanged for a generation or two ago. I am thinking of this fellow Daniel Ellsberg. In practically no other country could he have gotten away with what he did here.
"And people are living better now than they ever did before. They never had the educational opportunities, the health benefits, the standard of living, the clothes to wear. If my mother got one new dress a year, she was lucky, and they were gingham dresses, at that. I went barefoot beginning the first of May until it got too cold.
"We should pay more attention to local government," Aiken admonished. "That is where real democracy starts. It don't start from Washington."
(end of interview)
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Senator Aiken confuses freedom with license and fails to realize that people "get away with more day" not because there is more liberty now, but rather because there is less respect for the law and a reluctance on the part of officials to enforce the law and on the part of judges (and even juries) to judge righteous judgment. Senator Aiken should know, too, that true happiness can never be counted in terms of material possessions, educational opportunities or health benefits. And, while real democracy may start with local government, an octogenarian citizen of the Green Mountain State should be among the first to realize that true democracy should never go beyond the local government, because when it gets bigger than the town meeting stage, democracy is the worst form of government ever attempted.
Tom Anderson, in his capacity as columnist for The American Way Features, was asked if he thought we should help promote democracy in other countries. His published answer should be forced reading for all politicians in this country. He wrote:
"As someone has said, 'Democracy is the worst of all possible forms of government.' Democracy is mob rule. Perhaps the best form of government is the government a people understand and like. If a people want tribal government, they should have it. People who want to be ruled should be ruled. The great Thomas Jefferson said: 'The best government is the least government.' And some people say: 'The best government is a dictatorship tempered by assassination.'
"The word 'democracy' is derived from the Greek word demos (the people) and kratos (rule). Aristotle defined democracy as "... a state where the freemen and the poor, being in the majority, are invested with the power of the state ... every department of government being alike open to all ... the people are the majority, and what they vote is law ..."
"So, obviously, pure democracy is mob rule. Our forefathers did not bequeath to us a democracy, thank Heaven. Benjamin Franklin said: 'We have given you a Republic, if you can keep it'." (end of quotation)
We noted, at the beginning of this discourse, that Senator Aiken's statement might serve as a consensus of pseudo-conservative thinking about today's society and today's American government. If this be true, then the composite American citizenry has strayed so far from the original concepts of American government, that we all need a refresher course, before it is too late to reconstruct, and even too late to remember what was lost.
"Revolution by scientific technic is above morality. It makes no distinction between means that are legal and means that are illegal." So commented the ex-New Dealer Garet Garrett in a monograph entitled "The Revolution Was." His reference was to the second stage of this Quiet Revolution (the first stage occurred during the Woodrow Wilson Administration) and the total disregard of the Constitution and the Laws of the Land when they stood in the way of the revolutionists. Garrett cited the case where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted a new "Authority" established and wrote in a letter to a member of the House Ways and Means Committee: "I hope your committee will not permit doubt as to Constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation."
Ours is the third stage of the Revolution. The first -- under Wilson -- accomplished the task of securing unlimited finances for a Central Government. The second -- under FDR -- accomplished the task of securing unlimited political power for that Central Government. The third stage of the Revolution aims to achieve the centralization of all power -- economic, political, social, monetary -- within the Executive Branch of that Central Government.
Over a century ago Abraham Lincoln, who deduced from objective evidence the blueprint of a political plot that was to culminate in a War Between the States; gave the following classic analogy:
"When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen . . . and when we see those timbers joined together, and see that they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tendons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few . . . in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that . . . all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck."
In applying this analogy to our present plot, it is necessary that we look back, at least briefly, to that time before the very first blow could have been struck.
We are indebted to Nelson A. Pryor, Representative of Berlin, New Hampshire, for recalling to our mind the historical fact that Americans have traditionally viewed government in one of three ways, which are based upon three different theories:
1. The Compact Theory;
2. The Continental Theory; and
3. The International, or World Theory
The Compact Theory originated with the landing of the Pilgrims at an unexpected placed in the New World, and therefore with no patent to honor or obey. The circumstance was most unusual, truly an Act of God:
When the English Pilgrims set sail, their historian and leader William Bradford wrote: "They knew they were pilgrims, and looked not on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits."
The Mayflower's destination was Virginia, but when her master hove to on the ninth of November in the year of our Lord 1620, he knew he was hundreds of miles to the north of the intended place of landing.
Before leaving the Old World, the Pilgrim's had obtained a patent that gave them power to establish a government in Virginia. But that patent had no standing outside the limits of Virginia. This left them with no form of government of any kind whatsoever, and some of the Londoners on the ship may have felt as did the Israelites in their new promised land when "there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes" (Judges 17:6). Or, as Governor Bradford put it, some felt that "they would use their own liberties, for none had power to command them." Feeling that only chaos and disaster could result from the lack of rules for the common good, the Pilgrim leaders determined that no one should leave the ship until some basis of government had been decided upon.
One can imagine the scene as they gathered in the cabin of the Mayflower: William Brewster, spiritual leader of the Plymouth brethern; John Carver, soon to become the first governor of the colony; William Bradford, the chronicler; Miles Standish, the soldier; John Alden, the cooper; all wise and God-fearing men who knew the covenants by which their independent congregations had been governed in England and in their years of exile in Holland. And these covenants they took as their model as they drew up what came to be known as the Mayflower Compact; this likewise becoming the basis of the "Compact Theory" of government which was much in the minds and the hearts of the Founding Fathers when they assembled a century-and-a-half later to establish a more detailed Compact.
There are three basic tenets compromisng the Compact Theory as originally enunciated in the Mayflower Compact:
1. The Absolute Sovereignty of God. There is no recognition of innate sovereignty
in any man-created institution such as the State, Nation, United Nations, or
any other man-made organization.
2. The delegation of that sovereignty to the individual man, who is created
in the image of God and made to have dominion over all the earth; so that sovereignty
rests in man, not in his institutions.
3. The transfer of a necessity portion of that sovereignty to a body politic
for purposes of mutual protection and "a better ordering and preservation and
furtherance" of desired objectives.
Note how these three basic tenets are included as we quote portions (in modern English) of the original Mayflower Compact:
"In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten . . . having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these patents, solemnly and mutually in the prescence of God, and of one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."
First God, then the individual made in God's image, then the Compact made to further the ends of man and his God. This is the Compact Theory, as opposed to and contrasted with the Continental Theory and the International Theory, which we shall discuss in later letters.
As more and more people came to settle in the New World, and as Colonies expanded and became Thirteen in all, this Compact Theory formed the basis from which various and independent constitutions were written and governments formed. Then, when the Internationalist Theory, as proclaimed by George III and his Parliament, began to conflict with the Compact Theory held by the Colonists and revolution became inevitable, the Compact Theory was restated and expounded finally in the Declaration of Independence, especially in the last section of that document which contained the Resolution attributed to Richard Henry Lee and quoted by Thomas Jefferson:
" . . . these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free and Independent States; . . . and . . . as Free and Independent States they have full power to levy war, conclude treaties, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour."
Note the same formula that was established with the Mayflower Compact: With reliance on God, these individuals as representatives of their free and independent Colonies, met to sign a Declaration which was a compact between the Thirteen Free and Independent States to which sovereignty had been transferred by the individuals, who in turn had received that sovereignty as a delegation, or endowment, from their Creator.
Thus, each of the Thirteen States was a Sovereign Nation unto itself; and because of the war emergency, an alliance was struck. That alliance is known as the Articles of Confederation, and Article II of that document sustains the Compact Theory:
"Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, Jurisdiction and Right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress Assembled."
Within a few years it became apparent that more of that precious sovereignty must be transferred to a Central Government if the States were to maintain their freedom and independence. So, a Constitutional Convention was convened.
And here was staged a great debate: The Compact Theory versus the Continental Theory. Out of that debate came the Constitution of the United States of America, a Document now being ignored because of the third, The International Theory, a tenet of which is called Regional Government.
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For information concerning this letter, write: DON BELL REPORTS, P.O. Box 2223, Palm Beach, Florida 33480