On July 4, 2012, Jeffrey Tucker writes on LaissezFaireBooks about the day that overthrew a government, July 4, 1776, which now celebrates the power of a government that is far more vast, predatory and imperialist than the one overthrown.
Not only is the real meaning of Independence Day forgotten; it has been turned on its head. The ethos of the real July Fourth celebrated sedition as essential to life and liberty. The ethos of the July Fourth that people celebrate today bolsters a government and standing army that punishes sedition with a ferocity and cruelty that would have startled even the British.
If you return to the writings of the original Revolutionary generation, you find that seditious and revolutionary spirit, one completely unlike the fatuous pro-American “patriotism” on display today with pledges, flags and songs about national greatness.
As we learn from Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty, the 1776 generation consisted of a people who rallied around a principle, and that principle was liberty (which stands against government control) and its extension in the right of private property.
Since the writings of John Locke and before, the notion had been advanced that all people have the fundamental right to life, liberty and property. But there is a gigantic distance to travel from theory to practice. What made the link is absolutely indisputable: taxation. It was this above all else that caused the revolting generation to make reality accord with an idea that they had already seen working for 150 years.
Binary economics and democratic or universal capitalism, or what could be termed economic personalism, is founded on the principal that economic power has to be universally distributed amongst individual citizens and never allowed to concentrate. It is a value system based on the importance and dignity of every human person. The “pursuit of happiness” phrase in the Declaration of Independence was interchangeable in those times with the word “property.” The original phrasing was “the right to life, liberty and property.” “The pursuit of happiness” phrase was a substitute for the “property” phrase. In the forerunner of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights declared that securing “Life, Liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing Property” is the highest purpose for which any just government is formed. Democratizing economic power will return us to the pristine innocence and economic power diffusion we had in a pre-industrial society where labor was the principal factor in the creation of wealth.
Non-human productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. If both labor and productive capital are interdependent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all.
The power of government can provide the regulatory legislation to empower ordinary Americans to participate in future income-producing productive capital economic growth and gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being, thus dramatically reducing their increasing dependency on government support in the form of make-work, military-industrial contracts, and welfare, open and concealed financed through taxation redistribution and exponential growth of national debt as a result of necessary borrowing to prop up the economy.
