Loading...
Loading...

Only power can check power by Ryan MacMacon.
A central problem of political theory
has long been the question of who watches the watchers.
This stems from the fact that it is generally assumed
that it is necessary to grant the civil government
a monopoly on coercive power in order
to protect the subject population from domestic crime
and from aggression by some other state.
Once the civil government obtains this monopoly,
it is transformed into what we call a state.
But once the state possesses this power,
how can the state be tamed if it then abuses that power?
This is a question that has long plagued theorists
who have attempted to create constitutions
and political systems that would somehow prevent
the states abuses of power or provide for some means
of raining in the state and its powers should abuses occur.
In the early years of American independence,
this was a common concern.
In 1787, when the American Federalists
were pushing for a new United States Constitution,
they promised, among other things,
that the Constitution would ensure the government
would not grow to the point that it could violate
the freedoms of Americans.
Many Americans, however, were skeptical
that the federal government needed the vast new powers
it was demanding.
After all, the new Constitution granted new taxation powers
to the central government and provided the central government
with a means of easily raising armies
and wielding federal power against the people
of the states themselves.
Don't worry, was the Federalist response to these fears?
The Federalists pointed to elections
and elected legislatures as guarantees
against abuses of federal power.
Hamilton, for example, claimed that no one in the federal government
would wield any powers that were not
specifically granted by the text of the new Constitution.
Clearly, the Federalists were wrong.
Federal power is today far, far larger
than any 18th century American would have imagined.
And the American states have been reduced largely
to administrative units of the federal government.
Today, it would be absurd to claim
that the federal government has never wielded
or abused powers that were not specifically granted to it
in the text of the Constitution.
The existence of the central bank, the spy powers
of the Patriot Act, and the so-called selective service
are only three examples.
Nor can we say that elections and congressional votes
have ever been a sufficient bulwark against federal power.
Indeed, Congress assembled in Washington
has done much to empower the federal government
beyond its promised limited powers.
After all, almost immediately following
the adoption of the new Constitution,
the federal government erected a vast new system
of federal courts, imposed new taxes,
and imposed new sedition laws.
By the end of the 19th century,
the federal government was raising increasingly
large standing armies for purposes of territorial conquest
and the military subjugation of American member states.
Today, the federal government grows with no limits
on its power except its own internal legal experts,
that is, the Federal Supreme Court,
which are members of the same Washington elite
as the rest of the federal central government.
Only power can check power.
So why has the U.S. Constitution failed
to restrain federal power in any meaningful way?
Beyond the fact that few Americans actually care
about limiting federal power, the primary reason
is there is no independent power that can check federal power.
Allowing the federal government to function this way
is like allowing a police department to investigate itself
to determine if it has abused its power.
This was understood by countless Americans
of the revolutionary generation thanks
to the real world experience of an eight-year war
and the well-known history of the English Civil War,
many Americans knew that no peace of parchment
and no legal framework ultimately is sufficient
to restrain the prerogatives of a powerful state.
In other words, these Americans understood
the timeless political truth that once a state is resolved
to address against its own people,
only power can check power.
Theoretical legal powers written down on a piece of paper
mean little in the state of emergency.
This did not trouble the pro-centralization
and federalists of the time who had convinced themselves
that internal checks and balances could limit federal power.
The federalist papers are filled with explanation
of the federal government.
The federalist papers are filled with explanation
of the federalist view on this,
although it is unclear how much the federalists themselves
actually believe the claims.
The federalist papers, after all,
were primarily propaganda designed to convince people
to support the new constitution.
The authors were willing to say whatever it took
to get their new constitution.
They used many thousands of words,
concocting theories of how various parts
of the federal government,
all parts of the same government and all controlled
by the same governing elite,
would somehow limit its own powers.
But in spite of all the talk about how Congress
would never let the president get away
with abusing federal power,
is almost laughable in the 21st century.
The end goal was a consolidated federal government
that would be able to independently exercise vast new military
and coercive powers.
Yet many did not buy the argument
that Americans assembled in Congress
would somehow prevent the federal government
from turning its power against Americans.
The solution among the opponents
of new centralized government,
now known as anti-federalists,
was to ensure that the states themselves
would have the means of resisting federal power
by force of arms.
One of the most concise and animated summaries
of this position comes from Patrick Henry
at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788.
After being told that assemblies of delegates
could address the problem of federal power,
Henry responded.
The honorable gentleman who presides told us that
to prevent abuses in our government,
we will assemble in convention,
recall our delegated powers,
and punish our servants for abusing
the trust reposed in them.
Oh, sir, we should have fine times indeed.
If to punish tyrants,
it were only sufficient to assemble the people.
Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves,
are gone.
Did you ever read of any revolution in the nation?
Brought about by the punishment of those in power,
inflicted by those who had no power at all.
You read of a riot act in a country
which is called one of the freest in the world,
where a few neighbors cannot assemble
without the risk of being shot
by a hired soldiery,
the engines of despotism.
We may see such an act in America.
A standing army we shall have also
to execute the executable commands of tyranny
and how are you to punish them?
Will you order them to be punished?
Who shall obey these orders?
Will your mace bearer be a match
for a disciplined regiment?
In what situation are we to be?
The clause before you gives a power
of direct taxation,
unbounded and unlimited,
exclusive power of legislation,
in all cases whatsoever,
for 10 miles square,
and overall places purchased
for the erection of forts,
magazines, arsenals,
dockyards, et cetera.
What resistance could be made?
The attempt would be madness.
You will find all the strength
of this country in the hands of your enemies.
Their garrisons will naturally be
the strongest places in the country.
Your militia is given up to Congress also
in another part of this plan.
They will therefore act as they think proper.
All power will be in their own possession.
You cannot force them to receive their punishment.
Of what service would militia be to you
when, most probably,
you will not have a single musket in the state,
for as arms are to be provided by Congress,
they may or may not furnish them.
The answer for the early American
was to oppose any federal standing army
and to ensure that the states themselves
had the means of defending themselves
from federal incursion.
These early Americans understood the phrase
only power can check power.
The French liberals in the wake of the revolution,
similar concerns were voiced
within the French classical liberal school
following the French revolution.
After the terror and the wreckage
of Napoleon's reign and 25 years of warfare,
the French liberals observed that
the problem of the revolution
did not lie only with its disastrous ideology.
An additional problem was the centralization
of political power under the revolutionaries.
Although opponents of the state
are often rather naive about the necessity
of maintaining the independence of powers
to defy the central power,
the advocates of greater state power
have always understood this.
Thus, those who want stronger states
always without fail
also want more political centralization.
So the French revolutionaries advocated
centralization of political power in France
on an unprecedented scale,
yet the revolutionaries also benefited
from centuries of centralization
that had already taken place under the ASEON regime.
As Rothbard notes in his history
of political thought,
the absolutist French state
had worked to centralize power
for the same reasons
the French revolutionaries had done so.
To facilitate a strong state
and to enable the central state
to more easily put down any who resisted.
By the time of the revolution,
this process was already well underway
as noted by Sprite.
The French king explicitly sought
to reduce political fragmentation
of the French realm.
He strove to make French politics
ultimately subject to royal control
and to act as the sole representative
of the French kingdom in international affairs.
The many privileges that the aristocracy maintained
until the French Revolution
were hardly the same
as the large political autonomy
of the lords before the success
of the Capitian kings.
Before the Capitian consolidation,
some great lords could call their territories Regna.
Kingdoms in their own right
after the consolidation
they merely had privileges.
Note the importance of asserting
the French states control
over all international affairs.
Without political consolidation,
many of the nobility maintained
their own means of military defense.
And it is primarily due to this
that we can call the realms
of the nobility Regna.
This, of course, presented a very inconvenient reality
to the central state.
Local institutions could resist
by force, if necessary,
the incursions of the central state,
similarly Alexis de Tocqueville noted.
During the aristocratic ages
which preceded the present time,
the sovereigns of Europe had been deprived of
or had relinquished many
of the rights inherent in their power.
Not a hundred years ago,
amongst the greater part of European nations,
numerous private persons and corporations
were sufficiently independent
to administer justice,
to raise and maintain troops,
to levy taxes,
and frequently even to make or interpret the law.
Again, we see one of the most important characteristics
of this independence was the fact
that the local sovereigns,
whom Tocqueville here
tellingly refers to as private persons,
were capable of military resistance,
should the central state truly overstep its powers.
This acted as a sizable check
on the national monarchy's attempts
to centralize power.
Yet, by the time of the revolution,
this had largely been swept aside,
and all that was left was a prize
that had been prepared and nicely packaged
for the revolutionaries to seize.
A centralized state that had already made
the regional powers largely impotent.
Thus, in the wake of the revolution,
Tocqueville could see the mistake of centralization
as did the influential French liberal Benjamin Constantin,
who, according to historian Henri Michel,
in the term decentralization in French decentralization,
which Michel notes,
it is under this name
that it has entered the program
of the French liberal school,
where it constitutes an essential article.
In the wake of the centralizing revolution,
Constant sought to preserve
what was left of those local sentiments
that provided some resistance to the central state.
Constant, for example,
lamented that the revolution had done much
to break up the old regional allegiances,
going so far as to break up the traditional French regions,
to conform to a scheme of new provinces developed
by the central state.
And he notes, to build the edifice of the new French state,
they began by crushing and reducing
to powder the materials they were to use.
They almost designated cities and provinces with numbers,
just as they designated legions and army cores.
So great was their fear that sentiment might disturb
the metaphysics of what they were establishing.
Today, admiration for absolute unity,
a genuine admiration in a few narrow minds,
feigned by many servile ones,
is accepted as religious dogma by a multitude
of asidious echoes of every favored opinion.
As Ralph Raco shows,
Constant's response was to point to the essential importance
of both regional and religious allegiance,
hoping this would provide a foundation
for resistance against the central power.
Patriotism, for Constant,
was necessarily local.
While patriotism exists only through a keen attachment
to local interests,
blind patriots have declared war on these interests.
They have dried up this natural source of patriotism
and sought to replace it with a contrived passion
for an abstract entity.
A general idea stripped of everything
that strikes the imagination
and everything that betrays reality.
Constant wasn't saying all this
only because he liked the diversity of local culture,
embodies in French regionalism,
but because he saw local interests
contain a seed of resistance
that authority tolerates only reluctantly
and hastens to eradicate.
Without this, there is no hope
of fostering any true power
that can counter the central power.
Bastiat, ever the radical,
took Constant's view further,
advocating the abolition
of the French standing army altogether
and replacing it with armed private citizens.
This version of setting power against the central power
is the natural progression
of the Bastiat constant view of the state
in which, as Michelle writes,
to rival even hostile,
principles appear and stand in opposition
to one another,
the state and the individual.
Every triumph of one is a setback for the other.
In this view,
the individual in the state are never complimentary
and naturally necessitate
the preservation of non-state powers,
religion, local institutions,
and individuals against the state.
It is essentially a zero-sum game
in which the coercive power of the state
must be countered by constant effort to resist
by arms if necessary.
Thus, by the end of the 19th century,
Bastiat's disciple Gustave de Molinari
ultimately concludes we must question
the very idea of the state's monopoly on coercion
and Molinari advocates
for a widespread secession
as a counter to this monopoly.
Ultimately, we can contrast
the late French liberal school,
skeptical and realist
and not fooled by promises of legal bulwarks
against state power
with the more naïve Anglo
American view of checks and balances
within the state apparatus itself.
It was not always so.
The American anti-federalists
had the federal government's number.
They understood the ultimate end of federal consolidation
and the unification of the state's coercive power
under a single federal government.
The anti-federalists lost, of course.
The advocates of a United America won
and as in France, after the revolution,
Constan's words are relevant
when he says admiration for absolute unity,
a genuine admiration in a few narrow minds,
famed by many servile ones,
is accepted as religious dogma.
For more content like this, visit Mises.org.
Audio Mises Wire
