Subject:
ip: Money & Honor
Date:
Fri, 31 Aug 2001 20:45:24 -0400
From:
"R. A. Hettinga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To:
Digital Bearer Settlement List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Status: U
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 13:54:06 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (by way of [EMAIL PROTECTED])
Subject: ip: Money & Honor
Money & Honor
by Joseph Sobran
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sobran/sobran191.html
James Madison observed that liberty is lost more often through gradual
encroachments than through sudden revolutions. This is also known as the
boiling-frog principle: if the water heats slowly, they say, the frog
doesnâ*™t notice the fatal increase and fails to jump out in time.
I donâ*™t know about frogs, but I keep an eye on people, and Iâ*™ve
concluded
that theyâ*™ll put up with anything if they can get used to it by slow
degrees
until theyâ*™re convinced itâ*™s the way things have always been.
Weâ*™ve long
since passed the point our ancestors would have recognized as the
dividing
line between liberty and tyranny.
The first income tax imposed in this country, during the Civil War,
caused
outrage and was eventually declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme
Court. The rate was 3 per cent on all income between $600 and $10,000;
those
tycoons making more than $10,000 paid 5 per cent. The federal government
justified this crushing tax on grounds of a pressing national emergency,
but
it was hated anyway. Americans saw it as an act of tyranny, a dangerous
first step toward the loss of all their freedom.
Today, if a president could get tax rates down to the 3-to-5 per cent
range,
he would be a hero to taxpayers. They would probably honor him as the
Great
Emancipator.
Not that any modern president would harbor any such utopian goal as
restoring the tax rates of yore. Liberals attack President Bush as
irresponsible for seeking to limit the top tax rate to 33 per cent.
One reason Americans have such poor historical memories is that they are
systematically cut off from their past by their own money. The
government
has debased its own currency so badly that comparisons with the past are
difficult.
Today a $10,000 income makes you a poor man. A century ago it would have
meant that you were rich. Even when I was a young man, $10,000 was still
a
very good annual income. By the time I was making that kind of money, it
was
just enough to live on, but I still paid tax on it at rates that had
been
designed to soak the rich.
A state without justice, St. Augustine said, is nothing but a band of
robbers. In this country there is no longer a pretense of justice about
it.
The governmentâ*™s chief function is extorting money from us and giving
it to
others. It has the power to do with impunity what private persons would
go
to prison for doing. It is, literally, organized crime.
But the frog still doesnâ*™t notice the rising temperature. Our
ancestors
thought diluting the currency was one of the foulest things a government
could do. That was what counterfeiters did: robbery of the general
population through bogus increases in the money supply. The U.S.
Constitution not only charged the federal government with preserving the
value of money, but specifically authorized it to punish counterfeiting.
Today that selfsame government effectively counterfeits its own money.
And
it does so on a scale no private counterfeiter could ever match. But do
we
protest? No. We take inflation for granted, as a normal and inevitable
fact
of economic life, with no moral or criminal dimension.
Once upon a time, a dollar was a dollar: not a piece of paper, but a
fixed
amount of precious metal. It was hard to fake. The federal government
was
authorized to "coin" it, not "print" it. Paper money, or "bills of
credit,"
was suspect; it had to be strictly tied to metal, for the general safety
of
society. The governmentâ*™s honor was staked to the stable value of its
money.
A government that, over time, reduced the value of its own money to a
small
fraction of its original value, as ours has done, would be regarded as
criminal, tyrannical, and also incompetent. But weâ*™re not complaining.
We
donâ*™t even remember that things were ever any different. We canâ*™t
even
imagine a government behaving honorably. The very concept of honor is
equally unfamiliar to politicians and to government experts.
But Iâ*™d like to close on a positive note. So let me record my grateful
acknowledgment that this government has never quartered a single soldier
in
my home. Whatever can be said about the rest of the Constitution, the
Third
Amendment is alive and well.
Joe Sobran is a nationally syndicated columnist. He also writes
"Washington
Watch" for The Wanderer, a weekly Catholic newspaper, and edits
SOBRAN'S, a
monthly newsletter of his essays and columns.
Get a free copy of Joe Sobran's lecture, "How Tyranny Came to America"
by
subscribing to SOBRAN'S. See www.sobran.com for details. For a free
sample
of SOBRAN'S or for more information, call 800-513-5053.
Copyright (c) 2001 by Griffin Internet Syndicate. All rights reserved.
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