Our Founding Fathers Must Have Been Paranoid Too, Like Tom Perkins

Liberals are in a feeding frenzy over Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Tom Perkins’s, irate letter to the liberal San Francisco Chronicle, reprinted in the Wall Street Journal (Is a Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?). In his complaint, Perkins calls “attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’” Perkins warns of “a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent…. This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

The Left has pounced on Perkins’ Kritstallnacht analogy as the “clownish” mutterings of an “aging, coddled jerk,” who has the gall to compare American “progressives” to Hitler’s Nazis! They dismiss Perkins’ fear of dangerous demonization of the one percent as the paranoid ravings of an ultra-rich guy, who like most of his kind, is “alarmingly detached from reality” (Paul Krugman Paranoia of the Plutocrats).

The faux empathetic conclusion of the Left: Pay no attention to the ramblings of this poor (but rich) fool. He cannot help himself. Imagine a rich guy, isolated in his Francisco estate and private clubs, worrying that “they are coming to get me.”

I say: Not so fast. Perkins’ fears are actually those that motivated our founding fathers to establish a limited government, secured by checks and balances and by the Bill of Rights. Our founders worried, like Perkins, that a majority can pass laws that discriminate against minorities—in particular against owners of property for the purpose of “more fairly” distributing wealth. 

go to forbes.com

A Community Organizer Among Hunter-Gatherers: Do We Have Socialist or Individualistic Genes?

 "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." Barack Obama October 13, 2008

A young community organizer is struck by lightning and is transported back to 20,000 BC, sitting around a fire as twenty five cold fur-clad men recount their day of hunting and gathering.

The community organizer feels an immediate kinship.  His Ivy League course on “Liberation Writings from Marx-Engels to Cornell West” taught him that these noble “first communists” constitute “our loving, peaceful, lyrically fair human core.”  Shared belief in collective production and equal distribution make us spiritual brothers. He is fortunate to be able to observe the “blissful conditions of a fabulous golden age of the remote past,” as one writer phrased it. This should be fun.

The glorious savages name him their leader.  Anyone who could make fire with the “flick of a Bic lighter” must be a god. Well, if our intrepid time traveler can organize tough Chicago neighborhoods, he can help this clan live up to its principles of  collectivism and redistribution.

The next day, the community organizer dispatches the hunters and gatherers. He divides them into groups of five and observes with dismay as they depart in ones and twos. He waits near the fire as they return – some with food, others empty handed. The rugged Thor returns with an antelope, and the clan gives him the place closest to the fire’s warmth.  The community organizer has to move.

Our community organizer writes observations in his notebook. Indeed, the successful hunters and gatherers share, except with two they call Hapless and Helpless. Our community organizer waits in vain for his share. Apparently hunter and gatherers think a god should know how to provide for himself. He goes to bed hungry.

The next day Gor bags a deer. He shares with all except Hapless, who got lost, and Helpless, who sprained his toe. Now Gor gets the place closest to the fire. The Community Organizer gets nothing.

Outraged, the community organizer rebukes Thor and Gor. They should pay their fair share!  Down-on-their-luck Hapless and Helpless need a helping hand. Also community organizers don’t work for nothing. In a dramatic gesture, he waves his magic cigarette lighter: “If you do not provide for me and the less fortunate, I will bring the wrath of the gods down upon you.”

The next morning Hapless, Helpless, and the community organizer awake to find the others gone. The community organizer snaps his fingers to return to the 21^st century, but he is stuck in time. He, Hapless and Helpless become weaker and weaker and die.

My story is based on Thomas Mayor’s Hunter-Gatherers: The Original Libertarians. He demonstrates that we are genetically programmed to respect  individual rights to the fruits of our own efforts. Our prehistoric forbearers did not engage in voluntary redistribution. They shared perishable food, not out of altruism, but as insurance and reciprocal gift giving. Consistent shirkers were expelled from the band. If anyone tried to force them to redistribute, they simply picked up and moved on to another hunting ground.

go to forbes.com

Back to Constitutional Basics: Madison On Class Warfare

James Madison was the Father of the U.S. Constitution. Madison, more than any other of the Constitutional framers, insisted on limited government. Madison argued that the Constitution’s task was to limit the powers of government:  “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Few today know that Madison’s greatest fear was of an “overbearing majority” that would act against minorities. Madison and the other founding fathers used the separation of powers and the protection of private property (the Fifth Amendment) to rein in out-of-control majorities. In Madison’s words: “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

What minorities might fear the majority? In a burst of what today might be regarded as political incorrectness, Madison wrote: “The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.”

In other words, people have different skills, education and talents. Hence income and wealth will be unevenly distributed. The majority will have less income and wealth than the fortunate minority and it “must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression.”

Government must protect minorities against unfair laws: “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”

If we translate the Father of the Constitution into modern English, we can say that Madison warned about class-warfare appeals to an overbearing and jealous majority.  This was Madison’s fear.

We are about to enter Madison’s nightmare. Although class-warfare appeals are as old as the hills, we now have an income tax system in which soon a majority of the population will pay no income taxes. Those we do not pay income taxes, but receive benefits from the state will be “overbearing” in their support of higher taxes on the “rich.” They will be unable to view the problem of this type of approach from Madison’s eagle-nest view.

They do not understand that such policies can kill the golden goose.