Having My Way

21

EVIL BEGUN, RARELY UNDONE

In all things bad or evil, getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of them.

—AUGUST HARE

A former aid to Franklin Roosevelt once told me how a Congressman had presented to the President the “social security” idea. After listening to the proposal, the President responded, “That is the silliest notion I have ever heard.” Ignoring the rebuff, the Congressman continued his plea. According to my friend, the busy President finally closed the interview: “Oh well, let’s try it and see what happens.” Whether or not this is an accurate account, it is quite probable that every step toward the planned economy and state welfarism was, in its beginning, no more pretentious or popularly demanded than this. A single politician initiates the scheme, gets it into Committee, works up a clamor, finds lobbyists to push it until, sooner or later, it becomes the law of the land.1

“Social security” is an outstanding example of fiscal evil. Never in all history has there been a greater fraud, measured in money terms, than this. Private perpetrators of such chicanery would be imprisoned, and rightly. But evil once begun is with difficulty undone. The initial push behind this program—reckoned by energy expended—was certainly a tiny fraction of the energy exercised in opposition today. Yet, try now to wipe it from the statute books!

My purpose here is not to list all of these schemes—impossible—but rather to cite a few more examples and then examine why such legislation, easily initiated, is so difficult to abolish.

Reflect on the beginning of the Sixteenth Amendment, adopted in 1913. President Wilson and Cordell Hull spearheaded this enactment of the progressive income tax, one of the ten planks in the Communist Manifesto. The question is, how do we get rid of it?

Take two of President Hoover’s programs: the Federal Farm Board and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. True, they are no more. However, their removal was not because of any rejection of socialism. To the contrary, these were simply displaced by other programs, under other labels: government farm management and Federal financing on the grand scale. Replacing one intervention with something worse is no victory for freedom.

The Volstead Act—prohibition—passed in 1919, was abolished in 1933. If we knew why and how, we might use similar techniques to get rid of “social security” and thousands of other socialistic laws now in force.

The NIRA—wage, price and other controls—was a scheme dreamed up by a New England utility executive and urged upon President Franklin Roosevelt. The rescinding of this legislation may offer some lessons for us.

Another intervention, later abolished, was initiated by dairymen: oleomargarine manufacturers were prohibited from adding coloring to their product, lest it be made to look like butter. But it took years to be rid of this silly law.

What, then, do these few examples have to teach us?

The dairymen were facing competition from oleomargarine, a butter substitute. Technological advance in the refinement of animal and vegetable fats made it possible for mass-produced oleomargarine to sell below the price of butter. What to do? Simple: keep oleo from looking tasty by disallowing the coloring customarily added to butter! In a word, oleo, competitively good, must be made to look comparatively bad. Substitute disparagement for competition!

The lesson? The prohibition of oleo coloring was abolished because the fallacy of this dictocratic scheme was apparent to even casual thinkers. All of the anti-free market schemes now on the statute books—countless thousands of them—are just as fallacious as this prohibition and would also be abolished were their errors as apparent. Not casual but deeper thinking is the urgent requirement.

Most businessmen, with a few notable exceptions, favor competition for others but not themselves. Thus, the NIRA—National Industrial Recovery Act—was greeted with open arms as a way to be rid of dreaded competition. However, after a year or two of the “Blue Eagle” and its strangling controls, approval from the business community sharply declined. Businessmen went about their opposition cautiously, for it was a commonly held view that these controls had to be removed gradually or the economy would be thrown into a tailspin. Then one day the Supreme Court rendered its famous “Chicken Case” decision. Suddenly, all NIRA controls were abolished. Tailspin? Check the record. With the restoration of the market, all business activity showed an upward trend. Freedom works!

The lesson? The Supreme Court measured the NIRA against the Constitution, and found it out of line. Whatever shows forth on the political horizon, be it the original drafting of the Constitution or the latter-day ruling of the Supreme Court, is but a reflection of the leadership thinking of its period. Jefferson contended that there is a natural aristocracy among men—marked by virtue and talent. For a restoration of freedom—lifting of restrictions—no more is required than a restoration of a natural aristocracy—good thinkers who stand ramrod straight.

The prohibition against drinking was abolished for the same reason as the prohibition against oleo coloring: the fallacy was so obvious. Our experience with the Volstead Act has two vital lessons to teach: (1) that the substitution of governmental intervention for free market processes results in both economic and moral deterioration among producers, distributors, and consumers, and (2) that law has no function—none whatsoever—in the correction of moral deficiencies.

Following passage of this Act, what happened to the production of beer, wine, and liquor? Brought to an end? To the contrary, millions of people made “home brew,” an inferior product, and homemade wine that was even worse; and, to top it off, “bathtub” gin! In addition, outlaws became manufacturers of this and that kind of “juice” which, in many instances, bordered on the poisonous.

What about distribution? Throughout the nation “speakeasies”—off-beat saloons—popped into existence. Bellhops, taxidrivers, and others became undercover merchants. Interestingly, one of today’s best restaurants had its beginning as a “private club” for the elite, a dispenser of illegal beverages. From lawbreakers to free market makers!

What happened to the consumption of this inferior stuff? It is my guess that more alcohol was consumed than ever before. Illicit drinking becomes sportive, that is, people think it fun to play an out-guessing game, to defy and circumvent stupid laws; they appear to have no sense of wrongdoing when they break laws they believe to be doing wrong.

In any event, producers, distributors, and consumers became schemers, breakers of the law. As a consequence, they lost a great deal of respect for all law, even that which is appropriate.

Leave to the free market the production, distribution, and consumption of beverages—alcoholic or not—and all other peaceful trade in goods and services, without exception. This is lesson number one.

As to the second lesson, the law should be confined to codifying the taboos and intervening to prohibit any person’s injury to others. It is none of government’s business how or to what extent an individual injures himself. Injury to others is the societal problem, and this is the business of society’s governmental agency. Injury to self, be it drug addiction or suicide, is strictly a personal problem and its remedy is to be achieved solely by self-correction.

If drunken drivers are killing others, the remedy is not to be found in outlawing alcohol. Penalize any driver for a crime he commits; this should discourage reckless driving, whatever the excuse. The fear of penalty and the widespread habit of obeying the law suggests the limit of the influence government can bring to bear against man’s inhumanity to man. To “outlaw” drunkenness or drug addiction is as fruitless as the legal prohibition of maniacal tendencies or sex craze or the evil thoughts people entertain or any other psychosis.

The obvious impossibility of correcting moral deficiencies by force should be evidence enough to end such attempts. Point to a single success! Those who sponsor and pass such laws believe their job then is done when, indeed, it has not begun; they have only put more laws on the statute books which must, eventually and with enormous difficulty, be abandoned—as was the Volstead Act, for instance.

There have, of course, been more repeals than the three mentioned above. Another that comes to mind was President Franklin Roosevelt’s $25,000 annual salary limitation edict, at the beginning of World War II. The reaction against it had the force of a tidal wave. Why? It was so patently ridiculous!

Nonetheless, there are numerous equally ridiculous, socialistic laws now on the statute books. Why, then, are they not repealed? Why the difficulty?

A major part of the difficulty, it seems, is the fact that a bad scheme, once enacted into the law of the land, spawns and develops a vested interest in its preservation.

The most effective opposition to the repeal of Prohibition came from the bootleggers and their tribe.

Why is not the government’s unemployment insurance program abandoned? By now, millions have a vested interest in its continuance: those who prefer getting paid for not working rather than competing for a job.

Who stood out most tenaciously against NIRA’s demise? As in ever so many other cases, the enormous bureaucracy which had a vested interest in NIRA forever: snappy jobs at good pay!

The vested interest in “social security” and countless other laws is now beyond comprehension.

But in the final analysis, vested interests, however powerful, cannot withstand the light of understanding. When the fallacies of laws are apparent even to casual observers, such laws are abandoned. But the fallacies of most socialistic measures are not easily detected; casual onlookers are taken in by them. When enough of us can see that antitrust laws are denying competition in the name of protecting competition, the antitrust laws will as readily fall by the wayside as did the inept Volstead Act.

My barber was complaining about high prices. I explained inflation and its cause: excessive costs of government brought on by state welfarism and interventionism. I argued that there would be no halt to rising prices until these causes were removed.

“How and when can we stop these?”

“When you start!”

“Start what?”

“Start thinking for yourself!”

Here is the point: That barber has more common sense than the dictocrats who are denying his freedom. Except that he does not realize this! There are countless millions just like him, whose liberation is simply a matter of waking up, coming to themselves—unmasking.

This is the way and, in my view, the only way to change from evil coercive collectivism to the virtuous and voluntary practice of freedom.

• 1See “The New Science and The New Faith” by Dr. Donald Hatch Andrews, The Freeman, April 1961.