IDEOLOGY AND ETHICS SURVEY
Additional Commentary and References

30.	Should we treat the U.S. Constitution like a secular state religion?

	A strong centralization.viewpoint:				A strong decentralization.viewpoint:
*	We require religious patriotic feeling		*	Constitution originally a contract between
	for this document to bind the nation				states, never meant to be a religion
*	Since government officials take a holy		*		Since created, all the worst fears of the
	vow we can trust them to self-police.				anti-Federalists have been fulfilled
*	Supreme Court "high priests" required		*		The real sinew are Anglo-Saxon indigen-
	to interpret mysteries of government				ous roots. When they go, it is just paper

Sample argument (authoritarian) view: The Civil War proved to us that we can no longer trust white people to handle their own affairs like adults on a local level. After all, one third of the white population (white Southerners) decided to go their own way in 1861. They inevitably required a bloody "correction" for their unacceptable attitudes towards States rights, slavery, the Federal Government, and other issues. This proved that henceforward we require a special staff of learned wise men in Washington, backed by a powerful, interventionist Federal bureaucracy and military, to hold perpetual "Sunday School" for their unruly Southern white "children" and other Americans. Our leaders must now enlighten us with correct new interpretations of the Constitution that redefine our relationship to big government, Israel, corporatism, global interventionism, special privileges for minorities, and other issues. With a firm hand, they must be prepared to correct us with domestic military intervention if we threaten to break our required religious devotion to their new interpretations of our holy document. A soft light emanating from the National Archives Building radiates forth and fills our leader's minds with wisdom and their hearts with empathy for their subjects. We can trust them to provide adequate checks, balances, and restraints on power solely within the context of their own government. We can trust that Federal activism and interventionism can only mean Camelot rather than fascism. We can trust that globalism and multiracialism are an inevitable wave of the future, therefore we require our government high priests to help us adapt to this inevitability. We also understand that Southern whites were denied voting rights during the Reconstruction era because all men are literally equal before this new revealed state religion, and their legislatures had to be delivered into the hands of former black slaves to really make the point.

. . .

Sample argument (libertarian) view: Even George Washington, an authoritarian-leaning Federalist, claimed that the document was the result of "unawed" adoption based upon full investigation and deliberation. Anti-Federalist Patrick Henry opposed it before the Virginia legislature, claiming that it "squinted towards monarchy" compared to the Articles of Confederation. Most Americans at the time preferred the Articles of Confederation and believed the Federal government must be kept weaker than the state governments to prevent it from growing like a cancer. In the long run, it is much better to experience separatism than to risk fascism. All the worst fears of Patrick Henry have since become a reality. For example, Abraham Lincoln, who told us that the Constitution should become the supreme religion of the land, proceeded to run roughshod over the Tenth Amendment that reserves rights to the states by brutally invading the South. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly usurped Congress by making ridiculous interpretations of the Constitution's commerce and general welfare clauses in order to create new law and micro-manage the legal affairs of states with brazen Federal interventions. The Constitution has become an authoritarian magic totem, where a President can swear allegiance to it one moment, and then circumvent Congress by embroiling America in costly foreign wars the next. Many Americans believe that this country can absorb exotic peoples from all over the world, and if we can only get them swear allegiance to this document, they will make a contribution and become just as assimilable as WASPs who created America in the early 1800's. This ignores the fact that an important way to avoid authoritarian government is to insure that people have strong ethnic, racial, and cultural commonalities on a grass roots level in order to maintain common standards at a lower level without relying on central government interventionism.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY:

Even if one believes in treating the U.S. Constitution like a secular state religion, one must still ask hard questions about which particular denomination and priesthood of this religion one should adhere to. Should one embrace the "Constitution" as interpreted by the Supreme Court today, or adhere to a very different animal which was intended by its original creators?

I recommend The Politically Incorrect Guide to the U.S Constitution by Kevin R. C Gutzman, J.D., Ph.D. In his Introduction he claims that his book "shows how we went from the Constitution's republican federal government, with it very limited powers, to an unrepublican judgeocracy with limitless powers." He observes:

Dr. Gutzman explains the history regarding how the Constitution has been completely high jacked away from the intent and interpretations of its original creators. This is certainly a very important topic. In addition, if one shares the libertarian views of someone like Congressman Ron Paul, we could probably eliminate most of the evil incrustations of arrogant, overreaching Big Government simply by adhering to the Constitution as it was originally intended.

However, I would be remiss not to mention an even deeper level of social and political analysis. Here, we ask (as did the anti-Federalists in Thomas Jefferson's era) why America even needed the Constitution to begin with as a replacement for the Articles of Confederation. We can dig deeper yet by trying to analyze defects in the Articles of Confederation.

Finally, we can also get down to the ultimate question about why the former thirteen colonies ever needed a perpetual Articles of Confederation or Constitution to begin with. After all, there have been a number of countries such as England and Iceland that have enjoyed prolonged periods of parliamentary government and protection of civil liberties without written constitutions.

Societies that have a homogeneous population with strong ethnic culture and folk legal tradition can often rule themselves without resorting to the legality of a "Constitution." The creation of a written Constitution can actually be a negative social indicator for at least three reasons:

a) It can imply that a society is drifting away from ethnic homogeneity and deeply shared racial, cultural, and historical roots and is increasingly relying on "legality" to try to hold an increasingly diverse society together. An extreme example would include a situation where business owners import alien peoples as low cost or slave labor. They typically rationalize that they can make these aliens "just as good" as their own people by indoctrinating them with legalistic documents like a Constitution. In this context, a constitution becomes a social crutch and cop out for greedy businessmen who are diluting the character of their own society for all future generations so that they can make some quick near term profits.

The dilution problem has already proven itself very serious in instances where whites have become outnumbered by Mexican "stealth immigrants," who proceed to vote whites out of power in their locality and install in their place oppressive, corrupt, anti-white Marxist-socialist governments. As another example, the Jewish invasion of New York City and other American power centers in the late 19th century has already repeatedly shown its extremely serious ramifications, such as through the creation of the corrupt, privately owned Federal Reserve central bank in 1913, the promulgation of the Balfour Declaration that sucked America into World War I, Jewish use of America as a springboard to help organize and finance the Bolshevik Revolution, and more recently the JFK assassination, the likely central involvement of the Mossad in the 9-11 attacks, and the highjacking America's military machine into continuous needless war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

No, my dear little Virginia, they do not necessarily learn how to act like real "Americans" simply by studying the Constitution in school.

b) It can imply that a formerly sovereign people is in the process of giving up important sovereignty rights as it amalgamates itself with other former sovereign peoples to form a quasi-empire, and they feel that they now need something more formal like a written constitution to help protect their rights. Maybe giving up full sovereignty rights is not such smart idea to begin with.

In the Constitution of 1787, the states gave up a number of former sovereignty rights that they had enjoyed on a de facto level as former colonies, such as the right to separately engage in military campaigns or to restrict commerce and the flow of people across their borders with each other. Dr Thomas E. Woods, Jr. explains this in more detail in his Mises Institute lectures on colonial America. As some examples, in the 1750's certain colonies refused to render military resistance to other colonies. On three separate occasions in colonial history, the colonies refused to form a centralized government in North America for fear of their losing local autonomy. Lastly, the colonies had instances where they restricted the flow of people from neighboring colonies. In one instance, Puritan-descended residents of Massachusetts prohibited Quakers from Pennsylvania from entering their colony on pain of death. This was mostly for religious reasons.

c) It can be motivated by war, imperial strategies, or the interest of certain ruling elites rather than what is in the long term best interest of the people. The Articles of Confederation were motivated by the need of the thirteen colonies to provide a united front during the War of Independence. According to Dr Murray Rothbard, an important motivation of the Federalists in holding the secretive Philadelphia convention of 1787 was to create a more powerful, central government to guarantee the repayment of all the Revolutionary War debt owed by different states to bankers. In addition, George Washington and other Federalists had extensive land holdings west of the Appalachians, and knew that a stronger Federal government might more rapidly open the west for expansion.

The online article "A Short History of The Constitution For The United States, The Federal Convention and The Creation of the U.S. Constitution, How It All Started . . . " contains important insights into the mercantile underpinnings of the Constitutional Convention.

Gary North covers other conflicts of interests behind the creation of the 1787 in his free online ebook Conspiracy in Philadelphia. Please recollect that the convention was originally called to simply make proposals to amend the Articles of Confederation. The people who held the conference proceeded to close the doors and conduct a secret meeting that in fact usurped the original scope of their meeting. Dr Rothbard claimed that the Federalists played dirty by using their control of the post office to hold up the mail of anti-Federalists, who reflected the majority American sentiment at the time, to help push through through their new proposed Constitution.

Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo argues in his Mises Institute lectures that the "Federalists" in actuality sought to install an American version of the British mercantilist system (ie. tending towards centralization, imperialism, and a central bank) in America, hence the creation of the U.S. Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation comprised as "Second American Revolution" that was not necessarily for the better.

In my centralization vs decentralization article, I describe the "right of exit" concept explained by Dr. Ralph Raico, and why Dr. Murray Rothbard felt that the thirteen former colonies may have been better off retaining full sovereignty rights and organized under a very loose compact or federation structure rather than falling in line under the stronger central government of the Constitution.

It is very important to note that the right of exit applies not only on an individual level regarding the state, but also in regard to individual states and the federal government.

True federalism, as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and other individuals known to be "anti-Federalists" in early America (they actually called themselves "republicans"), meant a system where the federal government had to be kept weaker than the state governments in order to preserve liberty. In his Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, penned in opposition to the Alien and Sedition and Act promulgated by President by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson stated that the right of a state to exit the union was one of the most important rights required to keep the federal government in check and preserve individual liberty.

Dr. Murray Rothbard observed that the concept of "checks and balances" that entails competition between the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of the government is inadequate. While each branch might serve to check the power of each towards the other, there is still the possibility that all three federal branches might grow themselves together relative to the country and the states. After all, government and its bureaucracy have a tendency to grow on their own accord without being held in check. Therefore, according to Dr. Rothbard, Thomas Jefferson was correct that the only really effective deterrent against unlimited federal growth was the right once held by states to secede

All of this is based on a very contractual view of government. If the government fails to perform its end of the bargain, the both the individual citizen and each of the states has the right to punish the government by exiting the system or exercising the right of revolution.

At the other extreme of the Federalist vs. anti-Federalist spectrum, we see many historical instances of American leaders who have promoted a very duty-based interpretation of the Constitution. They want American citizens to treat the Constitution as if it were some kind of religious scripture beyond criticism. Americans must bow and worship it regardless of how badly they are treated by the Federal government. Needless to say, this is a highly authoritarian view of the Constitution.

One example involves Abraham Lincoln's address before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, in Jan 27, 1837. Please note how he described the Constitution as the "political religion of the land." Laws should become dogma. His talk reads more like an exhorting Church sermon rather than a political analysis:

I would invite the reader to consider the King Lincoln archive at lewrockwell.com and the works of Dr Thomas DiLorenzo, who explains how Lincoln was one of the greatest centralizers in American history. Not surprisingly, the same individual who called for the Constitution to become the "political religion of the nation" that justifies unceasing sacrifice upon its alters would later brutally unite an empire by conducting the armed invasion of the South. This ultimately ended the last effective check against unlimited federal growth, and the federal government has grown in size and power like a cancer ever since.

Critics of the anti-Federalist perspective claim that America in the 1780's under the Articles of Confederation was a mess. A good online example is the article "A Short History of The Constitution For The United States: The Federal Convention and The Creation of the U.S. Constitution, How It All Started . . . " This article talks about how New York City levied tariffs on New Jersey and Connecticut farmers. It describes Shay's rebellion by disgruntled Revolutionary soldiers in Massachusetts. There was also an episode in June 1788 where eighty soldiers mutinied at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, marched on Philadelphia to appear in front of the State House where Congress was in session, and caused Congress to flee to Princeton, New Jersey. The article also observes that:

In his Mises Institute lectures (available online as MP3 files), Dr Murray Rothbard responded to many of these kinds of allegations. First, massive spending for war tends to distort the economy under any kind of regime. The U.S. Government especially distorted the economy during the Revolution by inflating its fiat currency, called the "Continental," into oblivion (hence the phrase "not worth a Continental"). Usually after massive inflationary episodes, economies under any kind of government (be they centralized or decentralized) tend to undergo painful readjustments as they clear out bad debt and major mal investment. According to Rothbard, Federalist newspapers unfairly blamed the recession of the mid-1780's on the Articles of Confederation as propaganda to promote the more centralized Constitution, when the underlying economic causes of the problems had very little to do with the degree of centralization of the Federal government. In fact, Americans had defeated one of the two most powerful empires on earth (with help from the other powerful empire --France) under while the Articles of Confederation, so it was very misleading to suggest that under this compact Americans were ineffective.

Secondly, if Revolutionary soldiers were rebelling because they felt they were cheated out of their pay, this was ultimately a moral issue involving the way the state handles existing obligations, and not necessarily a centralization vs decentralization issue involving the federal government. Making a government more centralized does not necessarily make it more moral. In fact, over the long run, steadily increasing centralization tends to make make government even more immoral, to the extent that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (in the words of the famous British classical liberal historian Lord Acton). Furthermore, many Revolutionary soldiers were so underpaid and impoverished as a result of their military service that they lost their farms to creditors. Far from being irresponsible hooligans and brigands promoting some kind of social anarchy, they had perfectly legitimate reasons to be angry and engage in public demonstrations. Creating a more centralized government to better be able to forcefully suppress their expression of grievances was in fact more dangerous than their public protest and militancy in itself.

Third, if Rhode Island was a creditor's nightmare, that was the problem of creditors who lent to people in Rhode Island, and not other Americans. These creditors knew when they loaned money to people in Rhode Island during the Revolutionary War that there was a risk that the colonies could lose the war, or that if they did in fact win, that certain state governments might be run by rogues. There was never any moral obligation by people in other states to step in and create a more centralized government under the Constitution to guarantee Rhode Island's debt. In fact, by stepping in and creating a more centralized government that assumed the debt of all the states, one might argue that Americans inadvertently set the grounds for the massive moral hazard we see today. For example, when bankers created S & L crisis of the late 1980's, the bankers were typically able to walk away with their generous salaries and golden parachute options. It was the taxpayer who lost hundreds of billions of dollars making the bailout. As another example, through its continuing inflationary policies, the privately owned banking cartel call the Federal Reserve continuous engages in taxation without representation (inflation is a hidden form of taxation, and closed door meetings to set inflation rates are a form of taxation without representation). The reason why we continue to experience major inflation and bank fiascos is because there is very little downside risk for bankers when they screw up, since it is always the taxpayer who is forced to make a last ditch bailout. This is indeed a very serious moral hazard that could only exist under our centralized federal government.

Witnessing rebellion by Revolutionary soldiers was embarrassing, to be sure, and having Connecticut and New Jersey farmers pay tariffs at the New York State border may have seemed inconvenient, but let us look by comparison at the "blessings" we receive today after nearly a century and a half of supposedly ever wiser, ever more munificent centralized government following the Abraham Lincoln dictatorship during the War Against Southern Independence.

Back in the 1780's, American's paid less than 5-10% of their income in taxes. In fact, up until the War Against Southern Independence, this remained the norm. The Federal Government itself consumed less than 5% of GDP. Today, total taxes (federal, state, excise, etc) comprise about 50% of the average American's income, and total government expenditures as a percent of GDP are somewhere close to 40-50% as well.

In addition, let us consider the "protective services" rendered by our imperial neo-Jacobin global welfare-warfare super state. Roughly 116,000 Americans were needlessly expended in World War I, followed by over 300,000 who got killed in the World War II. (I believe that if America had stayed out of WWI, the exhausted Allied and Central powers would have sued for peace by 1917, avoided the onerous Treaty of Versailles, and also would have avoided the social conditions that led to WWII). It is likely that hundreds of thousands of veterans of the unnecessary Gulf Wars I and II will die premature deaths from depleted uranium exposure. Last, but not least, our imperial federal government refuses to protect our border with Mexico, causing tens of millions of whites to be displaced by endless hordes of illegal immigrants. To put it bluntly, our imperial federal government does a magnificent job of serving the Jewish Lobby, Israel, and other special interests, and does a perfectly lousy job of protecting the direct interests of the America's dwindling white middle class within each state of the union.

Americans had prospered for over 160 years in the colonial period when each colony frequently acted like an independent country, to include issuing their own money, levying their own tariffs at their own borders, and dispatching their own military expeditions. They were happy enough with their situation that they resisted on three separate occasions in the colonial era efforts to create a consolidated government in North America. Why did the independence of the states suddenly have to become such a big problem in the 1780's?

Let us remember Dr. Ralph Raico's concept of the right of exit. One reason why taxes remained low during the colonial period, and also the period of western expansion of the early 19th century, is that if a colony or state started to raise its taxes too high, its most productive people could easily go somewhere else. However, following the Lincoln dictatorship, big bankers, media moguls, pork politicians, and bureaucratic parasites began to feel their monopoly power. As a consequence, they have stuck it to American taxpayers ever since.

If America were to decentralize, and Dr. Raico's theory proves correct, we might see a dramatic reduction in taxes as well as a major decrease in wasteful foreign imperial wars.

So perhaps we might the phrase the question this way: If your taxes could be reduced from 50% down to 5-10% would you be willing to pay a little bit more for farmer's goods imported from another state? Would you be willing to brake at your state border and spend a little time at a customs station, knowing that this might correlate not only with lower overall taxes, but also better efforts to stem the inflow of illegal immigrants, and the outflow of skilled jobs and industry to Third World countries?

Lastly, which is worse, reading about how certain disgruntled veterans brandished weapons by state buildings in the 1780's, or seeing tens of thousands of people in our "modern era" get needlessly expended in foreign wars fought for Israel, New York-based bankers, and other alien special interests?

Speaking personally, if this is what the real political deal in America ultimately entails, then I would prefer decentralization. Driving across state borders anywhere in North America, such as from Washington state to Oregon, or from North Carolina to Virginia, I would gladly brake for Oregon and Virginia if we can drop the taxes of fellow Americans by 80-90%. The mess brought to us by our highly centralized, imperial government envisioned by Tom Chittum in Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America totally dwarfs whatever crises Americans suffered under the Articles of Confederation. I might add that as embarrassing as Rhode Island's situation was in the 1780's, it was child's play compared to ugliness of the extreme corruption of America's centralized power structure we see today described by Michael Collins Piper in Final Judgment or by Col Donn de Grand Pre in Viper's Venom.

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