Freedom?

What we obtain to cheaply, we esteem too lightly… it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. – Thomas Paine

In large part I think Thomas Paine was right, in that we little value the freedom that has literally been handed to us on a silver platter! After all, how many of today’s Americans have ever been required to defend that freedom by serving a few years in the military, or even been involved in a hard fought political campaign to preserve our rights!? For that matter, how many of today’s American citizens even know what freedom and liberty are? Freedom seems to be one of those “magic words” that has many meanings to different people, and that fits hand in glove with several other terms. According to my dictionary, the definition of “freedom” is the “absence of interference with the sovereignty of an individual by the use of coercion or aggression. Individual freedom is the moral stance, political philosophy, or social outlook that stresses independence and self-reliance.” Along with “Freedom”, we commonly find the word “Liberty”, which is defined as the condition in which an individual has the ability to act according to his or her own will. From this, it would seem that freedom and liberty have much the same meaning. Thus, by these definitions, if I were truly free, I would be independent and self-reliant, responsible only to myself for my actions, and no other individual would be in a position to force me to do anything that I didn’t want to do. Of course I would also be the only one at fault if, due to ignorance, mistakes, or sheer stupidity, I managed to get myself injured or killed. It doesn’t take any real flash of genius to conclude that about the only way I’d ever have complete freedom or liberty is if I were the only person on the planet. (Which I suspect would get rather lonely, in a hurry.) Finally, the word “Law” is defined as a system of rules that shapes society and serves as the primary mediator in relations between people. So then, law is a modifier of freedom and liberty that tends to regulate the social interactions of people.

I’ll go a step further and ask “what is society”? Again from the dictionary: “A society is a body of humans generally seen as a community or group that is delineated by the bounds of cultural identity, social solidarity, or functional interdependence. A society allows its individual members to achieve individual needs or wishes that they could not fulfill by themselves, without the existence of the social group.” From that definition I’ll assume that society developed from the days when two or more cave dwellers decided to cooperate, share the cave, and the job of keeping the fire going. From that stage, a rudimentary society would logicially have evolved into hunter-gatherers remaining in the vicinity of a seasonal food source and thus becoming an agricultural – tribal community, and later into an early age town – city and possibly even a “nation” based culture. In political science, ‘society’ is often used to mean the state, the rule of government within a given territory, and over it’s inhabitants. The earliest states developed when it became possible to centralize power in a sustained manner. The development of agriculture allowed the production and storing of a food surplus, and immediately thereafter the emergence of a specific group of people who controlled the agricultural surplus and thus did not have to spend most of their time providing their own food. Essentially, “government” began with societies unproductive parasites assuming control the fat of the land, and things don’t seem to have changed much in the essuing centuries.

The history of the ‘state’ usually begins with classic antiquity when government took on a variety of forms. There were monarchies where power was based on the religious function of the king, and his control of a centralized army. There were also bureaucratic empires like the Romans, which depended on effective military and legal organizations along with the cohesion of the aristocracy. The dissolution of the Roman Empire led to the feudal European system which was a conglomeration of suzerains and anointed kings. There, a monarch was not an absolute power who could rule at will, instead, relations between kings and lords were controlled by varying degrees of interdependence, which was ensured by the absence of a centralized system of taxation. The local Lord collected the taxes in his fiefdom, and generally handed the King his share of the take. Thus the ruler needed to obtain the 'consent' of each estate in the realm before undertaking any major project. The struggles over taxation between the monarch and the nobility gave rise to what is now called the “Standstaat”, or the state of Estates, characterized by specific groups which negotiated with the king about legal and economic matters. These estates sometimes developed into full fledged parliaments, and sometimes they lost their struggle with the monarch, leading to greater centralization of lawmaking and coercive (military and police) power in his hands. Beginning in the 15th century, this centralizing process gave rise to the modern nation-state. Only recently has the military power been used primarily to defend the state from foreign threats.

Taxes are the tool by which government acquires value from the populace, and, as government cannot create value by itself, can only be acquired by extorting it from the citizenry. A Tax may be defined as a "pecuniary burden laid upon individuals or property to support the government." It "is not a voluntary payment or donation, but an enforced contribution, exacted pursuant to legislative authority" and is "any contribution imposed by government … whether under the name of toll, tribute, impost, duty, custom, excise, subsidy, aid, supply, or other name." When taxes are not fully paid, civil penalties (such as fines or forfeiture) or criminal penalties (such as incarceration) may be imposed on the non-paying entity or individual, hence the usage of the word “extortion”.

Interestingly enough, the founders of the United States of America took a step backwards, away from centralized government, when they produced our Constitution. Rather than placing the authority to levy taxes in the hands of the federal government, they gave it to the ‘several states’, in a manner reminiscent of feudal lords, with the understanding that those states would provide any vitally needed federal funding. The only taxing authority allowed the central government was collecting import revenues, and a tax on the production of whiskey. (Now we know why there has always been a severe dislike of “revenoor’s” in this country!) Although somewhat cumbersome, this system worked quite well, until Congress, probably claiming temporary insanity, passed the Internal Revenue Act, which effectively took taxation authority away from the states and gave it to the suddenly expanding central government.

The question is of course, when are we finally going to get fed up with a self-proclaimed omnipotent federal government, take the taxing authority away from “them”, and thus force them to do what “we the people” want done for a change?