In part one, we revealed there are only two kinds of government when you strip away all the smoke and mirrors. Big Government (BG) or Limited Government (LG). Or as we will see in this chapter, “top down” or “bottom up.” The choice you make determines if you support freedom or slavery. Today we’re going to talk about why in more detail.
To start, I need to say that this chapter explores the role of religion as a tool of statecraft. It’s going to discuss how rulers use religion to get what they want. It is not a comment on the merits of any religion, just on how it’s been used.
The earliest form of government is the tribe. The tribe had a chief of some kind who made all the big decisions. The tribe went out and gathered resources and the chief got the pick of the spoils. This system was expanded as civilization grew into villages, towns and cities. There was one person at the top, a ruler. Below them was his support group, a court. And they were the major beneficiaries of whatever wealth the society created. Everyone below them got diminishing returns. This system is still in use today in varying forms. It’s called a top down system. BG systems are all top down no matter how they try to spin it.
The first cities were ruled by priest-kings who claimed to have a direct line of communication with the gods. Using religion as a tool, rulers were able to get their citizens in line and get them to do whatever they wanted. The system worked fairly well for thousands of years. Religion worked because it served a dual purpose. It created the first set of laws which governed behavior. And it gave people people a reason to follow orders besides the threat of the sword. Most people wanted to go along with the program because they believed in their faith.
But the problem with this system is the same reason Big Government systems always fail over time. Human nature. Human beings are flawed. Many of them are corrupt. In most top-down societies, you are stuck with whatever position you were born into. But religion offered a single path to power an ordinary citizen could aspire to. Those who craved power entered the temple for that purpose and corrupted it from within. The temple became a force unto itself and the rulers eventually had struggles with it.
Another problem with early religion is they had a god for every thing under the sun. This is because these religions were invented to explain things that people needed an answer for. Why where there storms? What caused illness? Why were there crop failures? If people didn’t like the explanation their religion gave them, they would move to another faith or invent their own. This made it harder for the temple and the state to keep people in line.
Then Christianity came along. It had one god, one unifying powerful message. It had a strong moral code. Roman Emperor Constantine saw the value in it. At that time Rome had an untold number of gods and religions. New ones were being created almost every day. It was out of control. So Constantine converted the Romans over to Christianity by law. The Eastern Roman Empire lasted for nearly 1000 years until the Muslims invaded it.
When the industrial age came around, the old Agrarian model began to crumble. Since the dawn of civilization most people worked on farms with the rest living in cities. Now, people started moving to cities for factory jobs and the dynamic changed. Factory jobs gave people marginally more freedom than farm life. A more secure income.
Society was changing and two men named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, perhaps thinking of the Platonic Utopia, saw a way for humanity to get out of the trap they’ve been in for thousands of years. Up till then, humans all worked for the benefit of a few elite. Marx and Engels developed Communism and refined Socialism (as a step toward communism) so that everyone could “benefit” from the wealth a society produced. It envisioned some kind of perfect society where kings and popes no longer ruled the masses. The people did. And everyone would get a “fair share” when the “wealth was spread around.”
To this end, Communist governments rejected religion and tried to replace it with their political ideology. But the problem with Marxism is it fails to understand that human nature would undermine any such society. It sounds good on paper, which is why it seduces so many academics and alleged intellectuals. But it lacks the moral core that religion provides. It tries to supplant them with laws. As a result, where Socialism and Communism have been attempted, more people died due to the vagrancies of its leaders and their policies than all the wars of the 20th century combined. The end result for the Soviet Union was economic collapse. For China, it had to move toward Capitalism to survive.
Despite the failings of these systems and the others, Marxism was seductive to many elites. Socialism provided a way for the state to control all the resources and production while appearing benign. By providing “benefits” to the people, they were tricked into thinking they were “sharing the wealth.” In truth, the leaders lived in wealth and excess while the rest were forced into a narrow kind of poverty of which there was no escape unless you “joined the party” and became part of the corrupt political class.
While communism has been largely discredited, the lovers of socialism keep trying to sell it under different guises, claiming it’s never worked because “it hasn’t been done right yet.” But they refuse to deal with the reality that it can’t work because it depends on bureaucracy which is ruled by an elite group, which creates a top down society. And bureaucracies are always corrupted by human nature.
Almost 100 years before Marx, another political revolution happened in America resulting in the formation of the Constitution and the United States. The people who formed this country wanted to escape the tyranny and oppression of the British monarchy. They also wanted free speech, religious freedom and the right to bear arms. This is why these three issues form the first two amendments to the Constitution’s “bill of rights”. Other rights were given as an answer to legal abuses the British had used against the people.
America based its government in part on the Roman Republic. But it was unique in the history of the world. The founders understood the problems of previous governments throughout human history. They knew that human nature, being what it is, leads people to try to corrupt the state to suit their own personal gain. The Roman Republic suffered that fate. So they created one of the greatest documents in human history: The U.S. Constitution. It creates the government and assigns power equally to three branches, Administration, Legislative and Judicial. It created the federal government and only have it a ten square mile plot of swamp land in Maryland to rule over. The rest was given to the states to rule themselves, as long as they guaranteed the rights and laws the U.S Constitution provides. Their own constitutions are subservient in that respect, but the states were semi-autonomous. This was an LG, bottom up form of government. So named because the people decided who their leaders would be and those leaders only had a limited run in office to prevent them from establishing a dynasty.
The United States operated under this LG model for 100 years, with no income tax and a limited Federal government. But when Marxism came along many elites found some appeal in the ideas. They did not want to make the mistakes the Soviets made by forcing it on the people through civil war and severe hardship. So they decided to apply some of the principles slowly through a “progressive” system that the people would gradually succumb to. One of the first Progressive presidents was Woodrow Wilson who gave us income tax, the Federal Reserve and the early form of the United Nations.
In Part three we’ll discuss how the Progressives undermined our Limited Government, how they were friends of the Fascists in Europe until they weren’t and how, in many respects, they are the New Fascists.
Big Government
