But regardless of their argument and regardless of their intent, the Constitutional shackles did in fact, though perhaps inadvertently, protect the people in the enjoyment of their cherished rights.
From this we learn a little heeded lesson in social science, namely, that the real struggle that disturbs the enjoyment of life is not between economic classes but between Society as a whole and the political power which imposes itself on Society. The class-struggle theory is a blind alley. True, people of like economic interests will gang up for the purpose of taking advantage of others. But within these classes there is as much rivalry as there is between the classes.
When, however, you examine the advantage which one class obtains over another you find that the basis of it is political power. It is impossible for one person to exploit another, for one class to exploit another, without the aid of law and the force to back up the law. Examine any monopoly and you will find it resting on the State. So that the economic and social injustices we complain of are not due to economic inequalities, but to the political means that bring about these inequalities.
If peace is to be brought into the social order it is not by accentuating a class struggle, but by restraining the basic cause of it; that is, the political power. To bring about a condition of equal rights, which is a condition of justice, the hands of the politician must be so tied that he cannot extend his activities beyond the simple duty of protecting life and property, his only competence.
"His only competence." No form of redistribution works better than protecting life and property for creating a peaceful, happy society. The authorities don't do that perfectly either, but if they focused on it, they might improve.
And, if all that seems too tame, Chodorov goes on:
For about a century and a half the American citizen enjoyed, in the main, three immunities against the State: in respect to his property; in respect to his person; in respect to his thought and expression. Pressure upon them was constant, for in the pursuit of power the State is relentless, but the dikes of the Constitution held firm and so did the immunities. Only within our time did the State effect a vital breach in the Constitution, and in short order the American, no matter what his classification, was reduced to the status of subject, as he was before 1776. His citizenship shriveled up when the Sixteenth Amendment replaced the Declaration of Independence.
The income tax completely destroys the immunity of property. It flatly declares a prior right of the State to all things produced. What it permits the individual to retain is a concession to expediency, not by any means a right; for the State retains the liberty to set rates and to fix exemptions from year to year, as its convenience dictates. Thus, the sacred right of private property is violated, and the fact that it is done pro forma makes the violation no less real than when it is done arbitrarily by an autocrat. The blanks we so dutifully fill out simply accentuate our degradation to subject status.
Demagoguery loves to emphasize a distinction between human rights and property rights. The distinction is without validity and only serves to arouse envy. The right to own is the mark of a free man. The slave is a slave simply because he is denied that right. And because the free man is secure in the possession and enjoyment of what he produces, and the slave is not, the spur to production is in one and not in the other. Men produce to satisfy their desires and if their gratifications are curbed they cease to produce beyond the point of limitation; on the other hand the only limit to their aspirations is the freedom to enjoy the fruits of their labors.
BTW, I haven't had time to study this, but a guy named Bill Benson claims that the 16th Amendment hasn't really been ratified. The guys with the guns say otherwise, so use your own judgment about what to do about it.
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