If there are any dear brothers or sisters out there who are yet struggling with our pleas, to please regard government (beyond, but occasionally including, local) as but institutional extortion, here’s a bit more of what we’re on about.
This bill has been the darling dream of many a bureaucrat since Al Gore invented the internet, and now they’re pushing to realize their wildest fantasies. The next post will be cut/paste of some critical bits and a breakdown.Call for an impassioned explanation of anything not immediately grasped!
Official Summary
4/1/2009–Introduced.Cybersecurity Act of 2009 - Directs the President to establish or designate a Cybersecurity Advisory Panel to advise the President. Defines “cyber” as: (1) any process, program, or protocol relating to the use of the Internet or an intranet, automatic data processing or transmission, or telecommunication via the Internet or an intranet; and
(2) any matter relating to, or involving the use of, computers or computer networks.Directs the Secretary of Commerce to: (1) develop and implement a system to provide cybersecurity status and vulnerability information regarding all federal information systems and networks managed by the Department of Commerce; and (2) provide financial assistance for the creation and support of Regional Cybersecurity Centers for small and medium sized U.S. businesses. Requires the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to establish cybersecurity standards for all federal government, government contractor, or grantee critical infrastructure information systems and networks. Makes NIST responsible for U.S. representation in all international cybersecurity standards development. Directs the Secretary to develop or coordinate a national licensing, certification, and recertification program for cybersecurity professionals and makes it unlawful to provide certain cybersecurity services without being licensed and certified. Requires Advisory Panel approval for renewal or modification of a contract related to the operation of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Requires development of a strategy to implement a secure domain name addressing system. Requires the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support specified types of research and to establish a program of grants to higher education institutions to establish cybersecurity testbeds. Amends the Cybersecurity Research and Development Act to expand the purposes of an existing program of computer and network security research grants. Requires the NSF to establish a Federal Cyber Scholarship-for-Service program. Requires NIST to establish cybersecurity competitions and challenges to recruit talented individuals for the federal information technology workforce and stimulate innovation. Requires the Department of Commerce to serve as the clearinghouse of cybersecurity threat and vulnerability information. Grants the Secretary access to all relevant data concerning such networks notwithstanding any law or policy restricting access. Directs the President to: (1) develop and implement a comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy; (2) on a quadrennial basis, complete a review of the cyber posture of the United States; and (3) work with representatives of foreign governments to develop norms, organizations, and other cooperative activities for international engagement to improve cybersecurity. Requires the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Commerce to submit to Congress an annual report on cybersecurity threats to and vulnerabilities of critical national information, communication, and data network infrastructure. Establishes a Secure Products and Services Acquisitions Board to review and approve high value products and services acquisition and establish validation standards for software to be acquired by the federal government.
Many of you have, I take it, seen the recent reports of “secret” fund raising documents acquired from the RNC. They have raised allegations of “fear-mongering” against the Republican party, but I’m not sure the folks responsible for this idea have really considered how they define “fear-mongering.” As far as I can tell, the practical definition used by Democrats is: “Politics that is done by Republicans.”
Judging from the mass media reports, I am struck by the fact that the irony of putting forth effort to make me scaredof fear-mongering is entirely lost on so many supposedly intelligent people.
Well, my dear media mayhem artists, I regret to inform you that I am not afraid. Here are a few of the reasons why:
I would be willing to lay even money on the fact that “fear-mongering” is hardly as unfamiliar to the Democrats as they would like to make it seem. Remember, Bush is Hitler and he only wants to send your kids to Iraq because he wants to restore his family’s honor. Republicans as a whole want nothing more than to take all the money from all the poor people and give it to Donald Trump, at which point they will put blue-collar America into forced labor camps. The Homeland Security Act, only when Bush was president, of course, was built to turn our country into a police state. Oh, and if the Republicans win, American politics will be handed over to large corporations to do with as they see fit, which means crush the little guy and starve his family.
Did I miss anything?
Not that it makes me feel any better to contemplate the fact that each of our political parties is trying to make us terrified of the other one. I would just like to point out that the “They’re jerks because they’re trying to use your fear to get you to support their cause” line, if taken seriously, would invalidate every cause from religion to global warming. Fear-mongering is a time-honored human tradition, and the Dems calling attention to it like this is only one more nonsense political tactic, of exactly the same kind and of the very same order as fear-mongering itself. If you don’t think you agree, consider whether or not this is a valid restatement of the idea floating behind the “fear-mongering” accusations: “Fear the Republicans. Don’t vote for them. They are fear-mongers.”
Another fact to consider is that this was a Republican fundraiser. The people in the room were Republicans. Furthermore, as Republicans go, these were not the uncertain moderates. These were the kind who go, intentionally, to a Republican fundraiser. It’s not like they were using this propaganda to infect the general population. They were preaching entirely to the choir, to people who wouldn’t give them a dime if they didn’t at least acknowledge that Democrats’ policies are socialistic. These people didn’t come to be scared. They came, just like Democrats come to Democratic fundraisers, to hear someone saying out loud from an important podium the things they think are true in their own heads.
Now, I would like to premise my next point by saying that I hate socialism. It is a valid political system, so long as you don’t mind giving up freedom. I mind giving up freedom. I think that any question representing a choice between freedom and good government, as Obama gave us in his healthcare speech to Congress, requires us to ignore the choice, go back to the drawing board, and use all of our collective greatness to find a way to have both.
Just because I hate socialism, doesn’t mean I need to hate socialists. They’re just people who happen to be wrong about what’s best. That’s most of the population in one way or another, on one issue or another. There’s only one way to get things Right, and a veritable infinity of Wrong out there. Getting it right is like hitting a mustard grain bull’s-eye on a dart board the size of the whole world. It’s what humans are made for doing, but no one said it was going to be easy when we signed up. So the socialists got it wrong. Big deal. It doesn’t make them evil or even scary, just bad marksman in the hardest game of darts in the universe, so I cut them some slack.
That said, I know many of you were squirming at the “global warming” crack I made earlier. I get it. How can it count as “fear-mongering” if the danger is real? Good point. I’m not sure the media morons spreading this “fear-mongering” notion to the ends of the earth thought far enough ahead to consider what exactly the definition was of the term they decided to use. Just goes to show you how much smarter we can all be than our mass media.
Your objection, my friends, only holds if the Democrats’ policies do not, in fact, make our country more socialistic. Here’s why your Republican fellow citizens think they do:
A socialistic country is one in which the government controls the means of production. There are many ways to accomplish this. Communism, the extreme form of socialism, would give the people in Washington power over anything you use to make a product, from labor to tools to buildings, and even the natural resources like trees, water, etc., that go into making a product, would all be owned by the people in Washington.
Democrats do not advocate this extreme form of socialism, but they do advocate socialism in a lesser form.
Economics as a science has been dominated in recent years by two main figures, John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith. These men believe that government must exercise control over “large market” forces. Washington must have the power to alter financial markets, decide interest rates, control the flow of money in America. They believed that “small market” forces, like you and me and every reason we buy or sell or produce anything, fail to see the “big picture,” and that a wise government should guide our money so that we don’t hurt ourselves. Supposedly the wise government would guide us to good ends, but if you’ve been paying attention to all the ethics scandals in Washington recently, you’re as skeptical as I am.
Socialism, as I said, is government control of production. Keynesian economics advocates government control of capital markets, which means government controls how much money is available in the country, what is the interest rate, and how likely it is that you will get a loan. Most businesses take out loans to either start, improve, or maintain themselves. If government controls how much money that business can borrow, and that business buys resources with that money, then under a Keynesian economic system government controls resources. You don’t need to make a law giving control of all business buildings and lumber to the federal government, all you need to do is control the money with which a business buys these things. This is how Keynesian economy gives government control over resources, the means of production, and this is why Keynesian economics is socialistic.
Democrats advocate Keynesian economics because they think that we will be better off if government controls financial markets. They do not see this as a bad thing. They are not trying to destroy America with these ideas. They are doing what they think is best, they just happen to be very wrong.
Republicans, contrary to popular belief, also are not trying to destroy America. They think that Keynes is wrong, and that government is just as short-sighted economically, if not more so, than your average American businessman, and that government is just as likely to get the “big picture” wrong because they are only as human as the rest of us. Sure, government has brilliant analysts and economists working for them, but so do private businessmen. Government has no advantage when it comes to market knowledge.
Is it “fear-mongering” to call Obama a socialist? Only if you are afraid of the word “socialism.” Most people don’t even know the definition. Democrats have seemed to be very afraid of the word for a long time, which strikes me as strange because they imagine themselves to be so open-minded. Socialism is just another political system, and the Democrats do agree with it insofar as it is a part of Keynesian economics. Notice that no Democrat is denying their philosophical agreement with socialism, they are only saying, very loudly, that no one should be afraid of a socialist.
So my final point is that, just like many of you thought that global warming doesn’t qualify as fear-mongering because the danger is real, calling Obama a socialist, as the “secret” fundraising documents did, doesn’t qualify either. The danger that Democrats will implement policy that increases government control over financial markets (they’ve already done a lot), and therefore carry America closer to socialism, is very real.
I think people should be afraid of bad things. Only a moron isn’t. I want my friends, who are rightly afraid of bad things, to try to make me aware of how close bad things might be. It’s up to me to decide if the spider they see on my shoulder is really there, or if it’s really a threat, but even if it’s my pet tarantula of five years, I would still say, “Thanks for the concern, but this is my spider.”
Real fear-mongering should, in order to be considered dangerous, advocate an extreme, first-strike response to one’s fear. The only thing the RNC fundraisers advocated was voting against Democrats. I don’t think this qualifies as “extreme response” to fears of socialism. In my case, mass media has failed to make one more person afraid of his fellow American.
I couldn’t help but notice all of the new-fangled interest in “cracking down” in the Obama administration.
Many are of the opinion that this is positive news. I disagree. I think it is a sure indication that our government has failed us and proven beyond a doubt its gross inefficiency. Hear me out on this one…
Let us take as an example the “cracking down” to be done on healthcare fraud. This has been a serious issue for ages, but Democrats have always shouted efforts to curb such fraud down. Illegal aliens, whose relatives are a significant voting bloc, are among those committing such fraud, and the Dems can hardly be expected to cut their own throats by going after these offenders.
Why the change of heart? It’s simple money. Now that they have a shot at making healthcare federal, they know they must be more careful with how the taxpayers’ healthcare dollars are spent.
Do you see the problem here? Perhaps not. Let me put it another way.
The purpose of government, first and foremost, is to uphold the laws of the nation. Notice I did not write, “to uphold the laws of the nation only in those times when upholding the law saves tax dollars.” The purpose of government is to uphold the law, and to do so because that was its responsibility under the social contract.
This new fascination with upholding laws that were once distasteful to the Democratic Party demonstrates to me one thing; that our friends in Washington are more concerned with securing their European healthcare policies than with upholding the laws of our nation on principle alone.
If the enforcement of our laws is contingent upon how much those laws support partisan agendas, what practical basis is there for calling this a government in the first place?
If anything positive may be taken from President Obama’s healthcare summit, it is this; your elected officials are trying to change how America does healthcare. Why, then, does the President consider himself unsure as to the ability of our two parties to come to any genuine solutions?
Were I to speculate, I’d say that Mr. Obama is discovering something the alarmist/extremist media (yes, I mean every last one of them) never prepared him to expect. Listening to the President’s recent rhetoric, getting tough on Congress and asserting at every turn that only special interests and partisan “bickering” were at the heart of the disagreement on healthcare, one is hard pressed to imagine that he has not been affected by the closed-minded notions of those such as Bill Maher, who maintains that no genuine, reasonable disagreement can exist on the subject of healthcare, and all who oppose the Democrats’ reforms fit into the two simple categories of “bought” or “stupid.”
From this uncharitable perspective, Mr. Obama might have gone into the summit thinking that all he had to do was explain the position clearly enough and all of the disagreement would melt away. This is what comes from the assumption that all disagreements have to do with misunderstanding.
What is becoming clearer as the summit continues is that real philosophical issues concerning the role of government in a free society, the extent of responsible governmental power, and the most correct response of a free market to the less fortunate, issues which have been debated for millennia, are rightfully at the heart of disagreements between Republicans and Democrats on healthcare. These issues will not be conclusively solved by a handful of politicians this year. Problems this ancient are not dispelled by the eloquence of a communicator who gets others to see it “his way,” no matter what the Beatles sang. I might understand every last subtle nuance of the Democrats’ or Republicans’ approaches to healthcare and still legitimately, intelligently, and rightly disagree with them all.
Some contend that “compromise” is what’s missing from this debate. Let us be clear from the beginning that most of the people calling for this fabled political panacea do not mean by “compromise” the same thing that you’ll find in Webster’s dictionary. What they mean is: “Their side will give in to enough of our demands so that we feel like we’ve made a difference.” Neither side intends to give any ground unless they get some in return, which will always leave us at a situation equal to the one we had before. Things will get different. We might have change, but this system is not set up to give us improvement.
This state of affairs exists because each side thinks it has the right of things, and having the right of things means that you should not back down. This is not like having more Halloween candy than your friend and sharing some. You are not the “bigger person” for letting a bad political system hurt your country. For this reason, I am delighted to see in my public officials no desire to be “bipartisan,” a word whose meaning, I think, should be more closely related to “schizophrenic” in some cases, “opportunistic” in most. The issues at stake here are morality vs. immorality, morality vs. justice, and freedom vs. slavery. These are not issues upon which anyone should say proudly that he has “compromised.”
If our politicians did not hold their ground on such important issues, I would be worried that they really were just puppets of the system, caring more for their jobs than for making our country a better place. Therefore, I am afraid I must disagree with the media and our President. I am, in fact, pleased by all of the gridlock.
I have also heard all of the conspiracy theorists and their notions of payoffs streaming into Washington from insurance companies, etc. Obviously, these stories are true, but they are unsatisfying tales, written by novice writers and inexperienced chess players. These people want a clear foe and a clear hero so badly that they write the scenario for themselves, but because they lack imagination as well as ability, they write in an easy way to win for the “good” guys.
Had these sorts of people grown up with a chessboard in front of them, they may have stumbled upon some impressive games by some brilliant masters. They may have found themselves backed into a situation where any move at all only tightens the opponent’s grip. Large companies, oh Quixote’s of the world, are not run by inexperienced players. You do not win by throwing all of your resources at a single, doubtful outcome. The insurance companies have played both sides, given millions to both parties, and will make millions no matter which side “wins.” Did you notice, for example, how their stocks surged even when it looked like the Democrats had the momentum to pass whatever bill they wanted?
I do not begrudge them this effort, however. Many of us have advocated the use of government’s wheels to make life harder for insurance companies and their employees. It is only fair that they use the same mechanisms to keep this from happening. On the one side, the insurance companies use their money to bribe politicians to steer healthcare reform. On the other side, politicians used economic stimulus money, which wasn’t even theirs, to bribe other politicians to get the votes for healthcare reform. Tit for tat; more status quo; the same corrupt politics on both sides of the aisle.
If the problem, then, is not that the two sides do not understand each other, if it is not that they should stop “bickering” and compromise on issues far too important for compromise, and we acknowledge that our chess-playing insurance companies only get paid back for all their invested lobbying dollars if a bill gets passed, so they want this gridlock to end as much as we do (they’re already making more money on the mere promise of reform than they did during the healthcare “status quo,” so how much more will they make once reform passes?), why is the process still stalled?
Now comes the part where I propose something radical. Indeed, there are whole political parties who will call me a radical for even calling attention to such a thing, political parties whose very foundations are built upon the bedrock assumption that what I am about to write cannot possibly be the truth. Nevertheless, I must conclude from the lack of any other possible reason for stalled healthcare reform that what remains, however improbable to some, must be the truth.
The truth we have failed to consider, the truth our President fails to acknowledge when he runs to what we have seen above to be the useless allegations of “special interests” and unfounded “partisan bickering,” is that our elected officials in Washington are plainly not smart enough to come up with a solution that is really and truly new. They cannot innovate. They can accuse, or they can copy.
Now, as I am never the sort to identify a problem without also finding a solution, let us ask ourselves what a new solution would look like.
First, it seems clear that it will not look like the simple-minded “single-payer” system so popular in Europe. “Have government take care of it” is old thinking.
Second, it seems as though a truly new solution will not correspond to the definition of “compromise” currently in vogue in Washington’s culture. As I mentioned before, this definition portrays “compromise” as “give-and-take,” but if Republicans are somehow convinced to allow a law inconsistent with their ideas, and then the Democrats, in turn, pay for it by allowing the Republicans a law that is inconsistent with the ideas of Democrats, we end up right back where we started. Status quo.
Now, if we are truly non-partisan, we admit that both sides want a good thing. As our President made clear in his famous healthcare speech to Congress, the Republicans are focused on maintaining freedom, while the Democrats are focused on forcing the insurance market to cater well to everyone.
Somehow, as the President’s speech also makes clear, they all came under the impression that these two situations, freedom and better healthcare, are mutually exclusive. We have to give up some of one to get some of the other.
This yawning practical gap, while it makes for an interesting speech, full of political importance, suffers from an equally important philosophical deficiency; it does not exist. There is no reason why better healthcare and freedom cannot exist at the same time, and this is because their natures do not contradict each other.
Our politicians have fallen prey to this hallucination because they have been doing their status quo compromises for so long they have actually begun to see “give-and-take” everywhere they look. It has stopped being just a way they decided to do business. They have convinced themselves that everything in the world must work in the same way.
The defining environment of the new solutions will be the complete rejection of this stagnating notion of compromise. The result will be progress.
I must make it clear that I am fundamentally against a healthcare system. I want a healthcare market. The problem with our current healthcare situation is that it was systematized early in its history. Many of the healthcare giants grew up in the shelter of tax-exempt status, freeing them from fully fair competition. The others began gigantic because they were divisions of large private companies looking for a way to cope with the introduction of a federal minimum wage. So you see, government has only itself to blame for the giants it now wants to cut down to size, and absurdly blames the “free market” for these monstrosities.
I have already outlined my own proposal, but it seems as though nothing can get passed in this pop U.S.A. unless some portion of the population, rich or poor, is allowed by law to infringe upon the rights of some other portion. Therefore, I have come up with something else that might prove more palatable to our current politics of civilized civil war.
Since private insurance never got a chance to exist in a free market, I can imagine a compelling case for creating a time machine/incubator to see if it can be reborn as it was supposed to exist.
This little thought experiment brings me to my ultimate solution.
If the best of intentions make public healthcare impossible to get rid of in the minds of Democrats, if the ideal of it as the great Cornucopia, the only source of better healthcare, is simply too much for them to let go, and the Republicans are correct in the ideal that freedom is the best job of government, why not use public healthcare to set the stage for the first free insurance market in the history of this country? That would be truly new.
This proposal, however, would ask an almost impossible task of government, a task which it has never performed of its own volition. It would require Washington to set a term limit on a major government program.
As the Democrats would have it, the intention behind the public option is to provide competition of a very particular sort in the current insurance market. This competition, as our President tacitly admitted in his speech to Congress, is a sacrifice of freedom. It would force insurance companies to fund their own competition, to knowingly and without a choice perform the abominable act of using their own resources to hurt themselves.
This idea is naturally hateful to any lover of freedom. However, if you would have it no other way, Mr. President, and you want a shot at getting it past the Republicans in a way that really might be “bipartisan,” I propose that you limit the public option in two ways, to the end of potentially creating a truly free market rather than one you feel you have to excuse with language like “It is sometimes necessary to sacrifice freedom for protection.”
First, let the public option be exclusively for individual insurance. This creates only one kind of new market question for the private insurance companies; how to make individual insurance competitive with the public option?
This would create a new marketplace geared, as it would have been had insurance not begun as giants dealing with consumer pools, to the buying power of the individual. Insurance would now be scaled to the pockets of the single consumer, just like any other free market commodity.
I have no idea how long this will take. To speculate on the speed of innovation is folly. However, if you can bring yourselves to agree on market indicators that would let you know when this single-consumer shift had occurred, you would no longer need the public insurance plan.
Now, Mr. Obama, comes the hard part. Public insurance would have done its job, and you could either dissolve it, finding new posts for government insurance company employees in any of the score or so other government programs I trust you and your Capitol kind will dream up in the meantime, or else you can simply privatize it and see if it can run itself. I realize that this is asking a lot, something completely foreign to the habits of government anywhere and any time in history (excepting, perhaps, the wise and brief rule of Solon), but you must, if you would make no more excuses, write into law the eventual dissolution of the public option. Give it a specific job and retire it when that job is done.
Once we’ve gotten all of this civilized civil war out of our system, let us finally get back to Patrick Henry’s notion of preferring freedom to protection.
Is the State ordered in the nature of things? The classical theorists in political science were so persuaded. Observing that every agglomeration of humans known to history was attended with a political institution of some kind, and convinced that in all human affairs the hand of God played a part, they concluded that the political organization of men enjoyed divine sanction. They had a syllogism to support their assumption: God made man; man made the State; therefore, God made the State. The State acquired divinity vicariously. The reasoning was bolstered by an analogy; it is a certainty that the family organization, with its head, is in the natural order of things, and it follows that a group of families, with the State acting as over-all father, is likewise a natural phenomenon. If deficiencies in the family occur, it is because of the ignorance or wickedness of the father; and if the social order suffers distress or disharmony it is because the State has lost sight of the ways of God. In either case, the pater familias needs instruction in moral principles. That is, the State, which is inevitable and necessary, might be improved upon but cannot be abolished.
Accepting a priori the naturalness of the State, they sought for the taproot of the institution in the nature of man. Surely, the State appears only when men get together, and that fact would indicate that its origin is lodged in the complexity of the human being; animals have no State. This line of inquiry led to contradictions and uncertainties, as it had to because the evidence as to man’s nature lies in his moral behavior and this is far from uniform. Two men will respond differently to the same exigency, and even one man will not follow a constant pattern of behavior under all circumstances. The problem which the political scientists with the theological turn of mind set for themselves was to find out whether the State owed its origin to the fact that man is inherently “good” or “bad,” and on this point there is no positive evidence. Hence the contradictions in their findings.
The three thinkers along these lines with whom we are most familiar, although they had their forerunners, are Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. As a starting point for their speculations, the three of them made use of the same hypothesis, that there was a time when men were not politically organized and lived under conditions called a “state of nature.” It was pure assumption, of course, since if men ever roamed the face of the earth as thoroughgoing isolationists, having no contact with one another except at the end of a club, they never would have left any evidence of it. There must always have been at least a family organization or we would not be here to talk about a “state of nature.”
At any rate, Hobbes maintained that in this pre-political state man was “brutish” and “nasty,” ever poised at the property and person of his neighbor. His predatory inclination was motivated by an overweening passion for material plenty. But, says Hobbes, man was from the beginning endowed with the gift of reason, and at some point in his “natural” state his reason told him that he could do better for himself by cooperating with his fellow “natural” man. At that point he entered into a “social contract” with him, by the terms of which each agreed to abide by an authority that would restrain him from doing what his “nature” inclined him to do. Thus came the State.
Locke, on the other hand, is rather neutral in his moral findings; to him the question of whether man is “good” or “bad” is secondary to the fact that he is a creature of reason and desire. In fact, says Locke, even when he lived in his “natural” state, man’s principal concern was his property, the fruit of his labor. His reason told him that he would be more secure in the possession and enjoyment of it if he submitted himself to a protective agency. He therefore entered into a “social contract” and organized the State. Locke makes the first business of the State the protection of property and asserts that when a particular State is derelict in that duty it is morally correct for the people to replace it, even by force, with another.
“Pillaging, slavery, and conquest are the primitive forms of predation, but the economic effect is the same when political coercion is used to deprive the producer of his product…”
Looking into the “state of nature,” Rousseau finds it to be an idyllic Eden, in which man was perfectly free and therefore morally perfect. There was only one flaw in this otherwise good life: the making of a living was difficult. It was to overcome the hardships of “natural” existence that he gave up some of his freedom and accepted the “social contract.” As to the character of the contract, it is a blending of the will of each individual with that of every other signatory into what Rousseau calls the General Will.
Thus, while the three speculators were in some disagreement as to the nature of man, where the seed of the State was to be found, they nevertheless agreed that the State flowered from it. It should be pointed out that this attempt to find an origin of the State was not their prime purpose, that each of them was interested in a political system of his own, and that each deemed it necessary to establish an origin that would fit in with his system. It would not serve our present purpose to discuss their political philosophies, but it is interesting to note that each was fashioned to fit the exigencies of the times, giving rise to the suspicion that their theories as to origin were similarly influenced. Their common prepossession was that the State is in the natural order of things, and Hobbes gives it divine sanction. In that respect they followed tradition; early Christian speculation on the State referred to its ideal as the “City of God,” and Plato spoke of his State as something “of which a pattern is made in heaven.”
Modern political science passes up the question of origin, accepts the State as a going concern, makes recommendations for its operational improvement. The metaphysicians of old laid the deficiencies of a particular State to ignorance or disobedience of the laws of God. The moderns also have their ideal, or each political scientist has his own, and each has his prescription for achieving it; the ingredients of the prescription are a series of laws plus an enforcement machinery. The function of the State, it is generally assumed, is to bring about the Good Society — there being no question as to its ability to do so — and the Good Society is whatever the political scientist has in mind.
In recent times a few investigators have turned to history for evidence as to the origin of the State and have evolved what is sometimes called the theory of the sociological State.
The records show, they observe, that all primitive peoples made their living in one of two ways, agriculture or livestock raising; hunting and fishing seem to have been side lines in both economies. The requirements of these two occupations developed clearly defined and different habits and skills. The business of roaming around in search of grazing land and water called for a well-knit organization of venturesome men, while the fixed routine of farming needed no organization and little enterprise. The phlegmatic docility of scattered land workers made them easy prey for the daring herdsmen of the hills. Covetousness suggested attack.
“The Marxian theory maintains that the State in other hands — the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ — could abolish exploitation.”
At first, the historians report, the object of pilferage was women, since incest was tabu long before the scientists found reason to condemn the practice. The stealing of women was followed by the stealing of portable goods, and both jobs were accompanied by the wholesale slaughter of males and unwanted females. Somewhere along the line the marauders hit upon the economic fact that dead men produce nothing, and from that observation came the institution of slavery; the herdsmen improved their business by taking along captives and assigning menial chores to them. This master-slave economy, the theory holds, is the earliest manifestation of the State. Thus, the premise of the State is the exploitation of producers by the use of power.
Eventually, hit-and-run pilferage was replaced by the idea of security — or the continuing exaction of tribute from people held in bondage. Sometimes the investing tribe would take charge of a trading center and place levies on transactions, sometimes they would take control of the highways and waterways leading to the villages and collect tolls from caravans and merchants. At any rate, they soon learned that loot is part of production and that it is plentiful when production is plentiful; to encourage production, therefore, they undertook to patrol it and to maintain “law and order.” They not only policed the conquered people but also protected them from other marauding tribes; in fact, it was not uncommon for a harassed community to invite a warlike tribe to come in and stand guard, for a price. Conquerors came not only from the hills, for there were also “herdsmen of the sea,” tribes whose hazardous occupation made them particularly daring on the attack.
The investing people held themselves aloof from the conquered, enjoying what later became known as extraterritoriality. They maintained cultural and political ties with their homeland, they retained their own language, religion, and customs, and in most cases did not disturb the mores of their subjects as long as tribute was forthcoming. In time, for such is the way of propinquity, the ideational barriers between conquered and conquerors melted away and a process of amalgamation set in. The process was sometimes hastened by a severing of the ties with the homeland, as when the local chieftain felt strong enough in his new environment to challenge his overlord and to cease dividing the loot with him, or when successful insurrection at home cut him off from it. Closer contact with the conquered resulted in a blending of languages, religions, and customs. Even though intermarriage was frowned upon, for economic and social reasons, sexual attraction could not be put off by dictum, and a new generation, often smeared with the bar sinister, bridged the chasm with blood ties. Military ventures, as in defense of the now common homeland, helped the amalgam.
The blending of the two cultures gave rise to a new one, not the least important feature of which was a set of customs and laws regularizing the accommodation of the dues-paying class to their masters. Necessarily, these conventions were formulated by the latter, with the intent of freezing their economic advantage into a legacy for their offspring. The dominated people, who at first had resisted the exactions, had long ago been worn out by the unequal struggle and had resigned themselves to a system of taxes, rents, tolls, and other forms of tribute. This adjustment was facilitated by the inclusion of some of the “lower classes” into the scheme, as foremen, bailiffs, and menial servitors, and military service under the masters made for mutual admiration if not respect. Also, the codifying of the exactions eventually obliterated from memory the arbitrariness with which they had been introduced and covered them with an aura of correctness. The laws fixed limits on the exactions, made excesses irregular and punishable, and thus established “rights” for the exploited class.
“But the sociological theory of the State (or the conquest theory) insists that the State itself, regardless of its composition, is an exploitative institution…”
The exploiters wisely guarded these “rights” against trespass by their own more avaricious members, while the exploited, having made a comfortable adjustment to the system of exactions, from which some of them often profited, achieved a sense of security and self-esteem in this doctrine of “rights.” Thus, through psychological and legal processes that stratification of Society became fixed. The State is that class which enjoys economic preference through its control of the machinery of enforcement.[1]
The sociological theory of the State rests not only on the evidence of history but also on the fact that there are two ways by which men can acquire economic goods: production and predation. The first involves the application of labor to raw materials, the other the use of force. Pillaging, slavery, and conquest are the primitive forms of predation, but the economic effect is the same when political coercion is used to deprive the producer of his product, or even when he accedes to the transfer of ownership as the price for permission to live. Nor is predation changed to something else when it is done in the name of charity — the Robin Hood formula. In any case, one enjoys what another has produced, and to the extent of the predation the producer’s desires must go unsatisfied, his labor unrequited. It will be seen that in its moral aspect the sociological theory leans on the doctrine of private property, the inalienable right of the individual to the product of his effort, and holds that any kind of coercion, exercised for any purpose whatsoever, does not alienate that right. We shall take up that point later.
Incidentally, at first glance this theory seems to bear a resemblance to the dictum of Karl Marx that the State is the managing committee for the capitalistic class. But the resemblance is in the words, not in the ideas. The Marxian theory maintains that the State in other hands — the “dictatorship of the proletariat” — could abolish exploitation. But the sociological theory of the State (or the conquest theory) insists that the State itself, regardless of its composition, is an exploitative institution and cannot be anything else; whether it takes over the property of the owner of wages or the property of the owner of capital, the ethical principle is the same. If the State takes from the capitalist to give to the worker, or from the mechanic to give to the farmer, or from all to better itself, force has been used to deprive someone of his rightful property, and in that respect it is carrying on in the spirit, if not the manner, of original conquest.
Therefore, if the chronology of any given State does not begin with conquest, it nevertheless follows the same pattern because its institutions and practices continue in the tradition of those States that have gone through the historic process. The American State did not begin with conquest; the Indians had no property that could be lifted and, being hunters by profession, they were too intractable to be enslaved. But the colonists were themselves the product of an exploitative economy, had become inured to it in their respective homelands, had imported and incorporated it in their new organization. Many of them came to their new land bearing the yoke of bondage. All had come from institutional environments that had emerged from conquest; they knew nothing else, and when they set up institutions of their own they simply transplanted these environments. They brought the predatory State with them.
Any profitable inquiry into the character of the American State must therefore take into account the distinction between making a living by production and gaining a living by predation; that is, between economics and politics.
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