William Graham Sumner

In 1883, William Graham Sumner wrote a series of essays for Harper’s Weekly, which paid him $50 apiece. The excerpted essay below on “The Forgotten Man” is as relevant today as in 1883—even more so. Politicians continue to pile more burdens on ordinary people in the name of this or that professed well-intentioned cause, but it’s the ordinary working man and woman who pays the taxes, suffers under government regulatory and redistribution schemes, and would do much better if government simply secured “true liberty” and otherwise left them alone. Bernie, Hillary, and Donald would be wise to follow Mr. Sumner’s advice:

I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator, and philanthropist, and I hope to show you before I get through that he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid upon him....

In the definition the word “people” was used for a class or section of the population. It is now asserted that if that section rules, there can be no paternal, that is, undue, government. That doctrine, however, is the very opposite of liberty and contains the most vicious error possible in politics. The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature. They are not confined to classes or to nations or particular ages of the world. They present themselves in the palace, in the parliament, in the academy, in the church, in the workshop, and in the hovel. They appear in autocracies, theocracies, aristocracies, democracies, and ochlocracies all alike. They change their masks somewhat from age to age and from one form of society to another. All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others. It is true that, until this time, the proletariat, the mass of mankind, have rarely had the power and they have not made such a record as kings and nobles and priests have made of the abuses they would perpetrate against their fellow-men when they could and dared. But what folly it is to think that vice and passion are limited by classes, that liberty consists only in taking power away from nobles and priests and giving it to artisans and peasants and that these latter will never abuse it! They will abuse it just as all others have done unless they are put under checks and guarantees, and there can be no civil liberty anywhere unless rights are guaranteed against all abuses, as well from proletarians as from generals, aristocrats, and ecclesiastics....

It is plain enough that the Forgotten Man and the Forgotten Woman are the very life and substance of society. They are the ones who ought to be first and always remembered. They are always forgotten by sentimentalists, philanthropists, reformers, enthusiasts, and every description of speculator in sociology, political economy, or political science. If a student of any of these sciences ever comes to understand the position of the Forgotten Man and to appreciate his true value, you will find such student an uncompromising advocate of the strictest scientific thinking on all social topics, and a cold and hard-hearted skeptic towards all artificial schemes of social amelioration. If it is desired to bring about social improvements, bring us a scheme for relieving the Forgotten Man of some of his burdens. He is our productive force which we are wasting. Let us stop wasting his force. Then we shall have a clean and simple gain for the whole society. The Forgotten Man is weighted down with the cost and burden of the schemes for making everybody happy, with the cost of public beneficence, with the support of all the loafers, with the loss of all the economic quackery, with the cost of all the jobs. Let us remember him a little while. Let us take some of the burdens off him. Let us turn our pity on him instead of on the good-for-nothing. It will be only justice to him, and society will greatly gain by it. Why should we not also have the satisfaction of thinking and caring for a little while about the clean, honest, industrious, independent, self-supporting men and women who have not inherited much to make life luxurious for them, but who are doing what they can to get on in the world without begging from anybody, especially since all they want is to be let alone, with good friendship and honest respect. Certainly the philanthropists and sentimentalists have kept our attention for a long time on the nasty, shiftless, criminal, whining, crawling, and good-for-nothing people, as if they alone deserved our attention....

What the Forgotten Man really wants is true liberty. Most of his wrongs and woes come from the fact that there are yet mixed together in our institutions the old mediaeval theories of protection and personal dependence and the modern theories of independence and individual liberty. The consequence is that the people who are clever enough to get into positions of control, measure their own rights by the paternal theory and their own duties by the theory of independent liberty. It follows that the Forgotten Man, who is hard at work at home, has to pay both ways. His rights are measured by the theory of liberty, that is, he has only such as he can conquer. His duties are measured by the paternal theory, that is, he must discharge all which are laid upon him, as is always the fortune of parents. People talk about the paternal theory of government as if it were a very simple thing. Analyze it, however, and you see that in every paternal relation there must be two parties, a parent and a child, and when you speak metaphorically, it makes all the difference in the world who is parent and who is child. Now, since we, the people, are the state, whenever there is any work to be done or expense to be paid, and since the petted classes and the criminals and the jobbers cost and do not pay, it is they who are in the position of the child, and it is the Forgotten Man who is the parent. What the Forgotten Man needs, therefore, is that we come to a clearer understanding of liberty and to a more complete realization of it. Every step which we win in liberty will set the Forgotten Man free from some of his burdens and allow him to use his powers for himself and for the commonwealth.

The post An 1883 Memo to Bernie, Hillary, and Donald on How to Help Ordinary People: Leave Them Alone! appeared first on The Beacon.

This “Read the Bills” movement has finally cut through political pretensions to reveal that there is no “deliberative democracy” in the USA. Apparently, members of Congress are simply asked to “react” or express “feelings” or channel interest-group concerns about broad notions like global warming, the economy, energy, and so on.

Not that democracy is an unalloyed good, but words ought to mean what they say. Otherwise, William Graham Sumner was right about “public servants” throwing the Constitution overboard:

If you take away the Constitution, what is American liberty and all the rest? Nothing but a lot of phrases. . . .

Any member of Congress who refuses, then “guffaws,” at the notion of “reading bills” is a candidate for expulsion from Congress. “Aye, there’s the rub”: who will read the bill of particulars against the scoundrel who presumes to speak in the name of “the people?” Who but his fellow scoundrels, who have continually mocked thoughtful, active, ongoing deliberation?

The Waxman-Markey bill (mentioned in above article) is a perfect example of the oligarchy in D.C.: fancy preambles with flights of prose followed by blank pages to be filled in later by a few “leaders” of Congress.

My worst students cannot read, write, or put together an extended argument for a position. In place of reason or analysis, they offer “feeling” or what they are told third-hand. To wit: They are perfect future congressmen (women) of America.

The best history students grapple with the primary stuff of history, its original intent, changing meaning, and significance. In the future, what can they “read” in between the pages of congressional acts? They cannot assume anything when few people had anything to do with the bill, and obscure bureaucrats file enabling regulations that carry enormous significance for future generations, all hidden from public view.

I’m sure we will be told that “Read the Bill” is not “on the up-and-up.” Right wingers must be behind it because they want to slow down the work of Congress. Leave aside the bare fact that Congress is not working and we still have ample exhibits of “right-wing” laws (e.g., USA PATRIOT Act) that sprang surprises on the Left because “we don’t read those things.”

I have researched the papers of men and women in nine presidential libraries, along with the records of many congressional committees. What impresses me is how little the White House and Congress know about the functioning of government. Some say that government has become too big to be safe (the Left) or efficient (the Right). I say government has become too big for democracy. If that is true, why bother voting? Heresy, but there is an argument for “those who refuse to vote.” (See Carl Watner and Wendy McElroy’s The Dissenting Electorate).

In short, our long march into oligarchy reminds me of the Old Whig slogan (I am working from memory):

“Man is free on election day, and everywhere in chains between elections.”

Further reading:

The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States (1969), by Theodore J. Lowi, offers a stinging and cogent critique of congressional abdication of its constitutional responsibilities, both by refusing to properly deliberate and by simply handing the task of governing over to staff and unelected bureaucrats.

Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism (1955, rpt. 2008)

Robert Higgs, Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society (2004)

The post Democracy Is Dead: What’s So Funny about “Read the Bill”? appeared first on The Beacon.

Currently, I am teaching a course listed as “The Conservative View in U.S. History.” In fact, it deals with classical liberal thought and conservatism. This week, we are up to the late 19th century and William Graham Sumner’s “Forgotten Man” essay is assigned reading. When war breaks out, and people oppose it, I often refer them to Sumner’s “Conquest of the United States by Spain” (also assigned this week). But a section of “The Forgotten Man” reminds me so much of today’s entitlement-“no risk”-bailout culture. See below.

Thanks go to the Liberty Fund for posting this essay:

“. . . I have shown how, in time past, the history of states has been a history of selfishness, cupidity, and robbery, and I have affirmed that now and always the problems of government are how to deal with these same vices of human nature. People are always prone to believe that there is something metaphysical and sentimental about civil affairs, but there is not. Civil institutions are constructed to protect, either directly or indirectly, the property of men and the honor of women against the vices and passions of human nature. In our day and country, the problem presents new phases, but it is there just the same as it ever was, and the problem is only the more difficult for us because of its new phase which prevents us from recognizing it. In fact, our people are raving and struggling against it in a kind of blind way, not yet having come to recognize it. More than half of their blows, at present, are misdirected and fail of their object, but they will be aimed better by and by. There is a great deal of clamor about watering stocks and the power of combined capital, which is not very intelligent or well-directed. The evil and abuse which people are groping after in all these denunciations is jobbery.”

“By jobbery I mean the constantly apparent effort to win wealth, not by honest and independent production, but by some sort of a scheme for extorting other people’s product from them. A large part of our legislation consists in making a job for somebody. Public buildings are jobs, not always, but in most cases. The buildings are not needed at all or are costly far beyond what is useful or even decently luxurious. Internal improvements are jobs. They are carried out, not because they are needed in themselves, but because they will serve the turn of some private interest, often incidentally that of the very legislators who pass the appropriations for them. A man who wants a farm, instead of going out where there is plenty of land available for it, goes down under the Mississippi River to make a farm, and then wants his fellow-citizens to be taxed to dyke the river so as to keep it off his farm. The Californian hydraulic miners have washed the gold out of the hillsides and have washed the dirt down into the valleys to the ruin of the rivers and the farms. They want the federal government to remove this dirt at the national expense. The silver miners, finding that their product is losing value in the market, get the government to go into the market as a great buyer in the hope of sustaining the price. The national government is called upon to buy or hire unsalable ships; to dig canals which will not pay; to educate illiterates in the states which have not done their duty at the expense of the states which have done their duty as to education; to buy up telegraphs which no longer pay; and to provide the capital for enterprises of which private individuals are to win the profits. We are called upon to squander twenty millions on swamps and creeks; from twenty to sixty-six millions on the Mississippi River; one hundred millions in pensions – and there is now a demand for another hundred million beyond that. This is the great plan of all living on each other. The pensions in England used to be given to aristocrats who had political power, in order to corrupt them. Here the pensions are given to the great democratic mass who have the political power, in order to corrupt them. . . .”

Dateline: 1883. Here we are one hundred and twenty-six years later, and none the wiser.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”—Alphonse Karr

The post The Politics of “Jobbery”: 1883-2009 appeared first on The Beacon.