Protection and Dependency

ProtectionandDependency This haven of free and independent men, as decades passed into history, began to develop protected and de pendent men. The exigencies of free immigration, free trade, free competition in services as well as in com modities, and responsibility for individual welfare, came to be thought of as credos for a hardier race of men, only for such men as had made our country what it was. It isn't easy to identify the growing items of violence which the accepted, limited violence initiated. Who can appraise the significance of immigration laws in a country begun only by immigrants? Who can assess the meaning of the protective tariff imposed by a people who got their start by overthrowing trade tyrannies imposed on them? What will be written in the final judgment book of a nation whose citizens were "educated" by force? whose "prosperity" depended on violence? The answers to these questions are dependent on each individual's value judgments. For my part, I have no faith, whatever, in any "good" that can come from these meas ures based on violence.

15 A Vital Measure Certainly an important, if not vital, break away from the original principles of the Constitution and the limi tation of violence against liberty and property occurred in 1913 with the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, the progressive income tax. Here, again, appeared com munism in its purest form, no different in principle from that applied by the Pilgrim Fathers after their arrival. Here was the forced acceptance of "... from each accord ing to ability; to each according to need." Here was the socialization, in part, of the fruits of the labor of all, with nothing - absolutely nothing beyond fickle, political ex pediency - standing as a limitation against complete socialization. We have money which goes by force into the communal storehouse and which is withdrawn accord ing to "need"; with the Pilgrims it was corn. This communistic wedge, pounded by violence, opened an ever-widening crack in the wall of limitation on gov ernment. Here was formal acknowledgment of government as an agent of plunder. The only remaining limitation on the extent of the plunder against private property is every body's total property. Beyond that the plunderer cannot plunder. * *Numerous European countries provide a case in point. Fabianism in Britain, for example, is at a dead end. The plunder at home, for all practical purposes, is over. But the parasitical idea of "... from each according to ability; to each according to need" will not down. This is why the eyes of socialists are turned toward America. It is the last remaining pool from which to siphon.