Jeffrey Paul He is a research professor at West Virginia University. Winning America’s Second Civil War: The Progressive Authoritarian Threat, Its Origins, and How to Defeat ItHe spoke City Journal Collaborators Daniel Kennelly.
What were the two sides in America’s Second Civil War and what were the political philosophies that drove them?
On the one hand, there are those who believe that government power is limited by individuals’ natural (pre-legal) rights to life (i.e., self-ownership), liberty, and property. These people are primarily found in the Republican Party. On the other hand, there are those who believe that natural rights are a fiction; rather, the government is the source of all rights enjoyed by individuals, and can impose obligations on citizens that infringe on individual rights and liberties as Americans have traditionally understood them. Those who hold this view are primarily found in the post-New Deal Democratic Party. These two views are clearly incompatible.
Where did the rejection of America’s founding natural rights philosophy come from?
The nation was founded on the principles of natural rights first proposed by John Locke. Civil Government Theory IIThe contradiction between freedom and slavery, advocated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, inevitably led to the American Civil War.
The victory of the Union marked a triumph for the principles of individual natural rights and limited government. Yet just 40 years later, college professors rejected these ideals. That this happened was a historical accident and, essentially, the result of a policy mistake.
In the years after the Civil War, presidents of major universities wanted to transform their undergraduate institutions into research centers with doctoral programs and graduate students. Their model was Germany, where doctorates had been awarded for centuries. These countries began hiring Americans who had earned their doctorates in Germany, the only country that granted doctorates.
This was a great success in the purely empirical natural sciences and medicine, but a huge failure in the social sciences and humanities. The views of German philosophers, political scientists, historians, and economists were the antithesis of the principles on which the American nation was founded. German scholars saw the state as an organism made up of individual cells. Individuals themselves had no rights or entitlements to self-ownership, only duties to maintain the life and well-being of the organism, the state. These duties were to be assigned by the brains of the organism (the state), including the university professors and students in the bureaucracy.
German professors of the social sciences indoctrinated hundreds of American students with these dictatorial ideas, which became dogma after these students founded America’s modern graduate programs and acquired the power to hire future professors (a power traditionally held by university presidents) and to award doctoral degrees to students.
By 1903, the founder and dean of the University of Chicago’s political science department wrote that academia had “discredited and rejected the individualistic idea of natural rights.” The founder of Columbia University’s doctoral program added that “the state is the source of individual liberty.” American professors imbued with this German way of thinking called themselves Progressives, and came to dominate the social sciences and humanities from the 1890s onwards. They flooded journalism, law and politics, and have dominated the Democratic Party since the 1930s.
Why is an income tax incompatible with a natural rights republic?
In the 19th century, it was the state’s duty to protect the person and property of its citizens, except in times of war. The state levied a “general property tax,” which was levied on each citizen according to the benefits he received, namely, protection of person and property.
But the current federal income tax only covers a small portion of what is protected and violates natural rights principles, doing little to appreciate what is protected for some citizens while effectively plundering others who depend primarily on labor income — the vast majority of Americans.
For these and other reasons, personal income taxes, business income taxes, payroll taxes, and realized capital gains, inheritance taxes, and gift taxes should be replaced with a 1% universal sales tax (not a VAT or retail sales tax). This would reduce the burden on the middle class while raising more revenue than the current system, because the majority of revenue comes from the sale of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, and derivatives. For example, in 2019, the federal government collected $3.5 trillion, but a 1% universal sales tax could have collected an additional $1.1 trillion to balance the budget. This would have been the case from 2011 to 2021.
Why would one side “win” a second civil war?
Winning a second Civil War requires, in the short term, the adoption of my tax proposals, which would provide economic relief to the majority of working Americans and make the Republican Party the majority party for a time. Ideally, long enough for the Republicans to enact other reforms, such as universal school choice and ideological balancing of the faculty at state-owned or state-supported “private” colleges and universities, neither of which the Democrats will embrace. In addition, we must significantly shrink the federal bureaucracy and severely limit its power.
Photo: drbueller/E+ via Getty Images
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