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America Needs an Intervention
John Adams
In his First Inaugural Address, Ronald Reagan said “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
However true that may have been in 1981, it’s not true in 2021. America’s once-proud middle class has lost its financial independence, while avenues of upward mobility have withered for those languishing below. The whole nation has fallen prey to political and financial patronage.
Sometimes government must intervene in the economy. Sometimes in ways the Founding Fathers hadn’t conceived when they established our Democratic Republic.
Sometimes, intervention is almost universally recognized as good. Sometimes, intervention isn’t desirable, but mitigates greater or more immediate evils. Sometimes, intervention has unintended consequences or is frequently abused.
But always, the Founding Fathers advocated intervention as required to preserve the United States as a democratic republic. On this point, the Founders would disown any of their self-proclaimed heirs who portray them as ardent, hardline anti-government fanatics.
In obedience to our founding principles, let us demolish all pretense there’s anything patriotic in reflexive opposition to government intervention.
The Constitution established the legal form of a democratic republic. But the Founders knew that the substance of a democratic republic depends upon widely diffused, modest, productive wealth. In 1787, John Adams noted this was inherent in the very definition of “republic”:
The original meaning of the word republic could be no other than a government in which the property of the people predominated and governed; and it had more relation to property than liberty.
Property Monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary – but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant riches.
In 1788, George Washington acknowledged the importance of moderate and productive wealth, and the means of procuring the same:
America … will be the most favorable Country of any in the world for persons of industry and frugality, possessed of a moderate capital, to inhabit. … It will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people because of the equal distribution of property the great plenty of unocupied lands, and the facility of procuring the means of subsistance.
In translating philosophy into constitutional provision, Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 draft Virginia Constitution channeled the Lex Sempronia Agraria, an ancient Roman republican law that reallocated public lands:
Every person of full age neither owning nor having owned [50] acres of land, shall be entitled to an appropriation of [50] acres.
Writing to Abigail Adams in 1776, John Adams approvingly described this legislation of Tiberius Gracchus as “a genuine republican measure”. That same year, he emphasized the connection between wealth and power, stating:
The Ballance of Power in a Society, accompanies the Ballance of Property in Land. The only possible Way then of preserving the Ballance of Power on the side of equal Liberty and public Virtue, theis to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society.
In 1785, Thomas Jefferson advocated government intervention to maintain a moderate diffusion of productive wealth:
An equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.
Ultimately, the Founders understood that wealth concentration leads to republic-destroying political faction. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote:
The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.
In 1829, 19 years before the Communist Manifesto, James Madison predicted the conditions which would fuel the revolutionary Marxist propaganda; conditions which are rapidly being reproduced in America today by expatriation of labor and a new wave of labor-saving technology:
It is a law of nature, now well understood, that the earth under a civilized cultivation is capable of yielding subsistence for a large surplus of consumers beyond those having an immediate interest in the soil; a surplus which must increase with the increasing improvements in agriculture, and the labour-saving arts applied to it. And it is a lot of humanity, that of this surplus a large proportion is necessarily reduced by a competition for employment to wages which afford them the bare necessaries of life. The proportion being without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights to be safe depositories of power over them.
But the solution does not lie anywhere in the Communist Manifesto. The answer is not Communism, Socialism, Democratic Socialism, Social Democracy, Basic Income, or any such other plan that cures the excesses of Capitalism with subsidies. Because while these plans may mitigate household precarity, they only serve to aggravate household dependency, and therefore financial patronage. And the Founders understood that financial patronage is the instrument of political faction. In Federalist No. 79, Alexander Hamilton said:
A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.
Authentic democracy and political dependency do not long coexist. That said, we must restore our middle class somehow.
America was born a middle-class republic amidst opulent aristocracies and monarchies (women and slaves excluded). But we’ve become the very plutocracy the Founders’ repudiated. Against America’s growing social stratification, household precariousness, household dependency, political faction, and financial patronage, the challenge – especially for conservatives and Republicans who continue to struggle with Reagan’s quote above – is not to obstruct all plans of government intervention. It’s to help progressives and Democrats develop good plans of government intervention. Plans that will restore an independent middle class and productive upward mobility. Plans that will solve for household precarity without aggravating household dependency.
Indeed, conservatives must join their progressive colleagues at the drafting table. For if only progressives write plans to save our middle class, the only plans written will be progressive, and the conservative voices and values will be heard only in dissent.
But worse, far worse, George Washington’s nightmare vision set forth in his 1796 Farewell Address – a vision that is taking ever sharper focus before our eyes – will come to pass in America, and our great experiment in the Democratic-Republican Model of Government will fail as it has for every prior democratic republic in the history of the world:
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, which in different ages & countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.