America's Founding Fathers wisely and boldly rejected the political doctrine known as "the Divine Right of Kings."
The idea of a king is called "monarchy," derived from the Greek words μόνος (mónos, "one, single")
and ἄρχω (árkhō, "to rule").
The U.S. Constitution divided up the powers of the monarch into separate "branches." It was thought that a "separation of powers"
could prevent tyranny.
America's Founders had abolished their monarchical government because they said it had become a tyranny.
The Declaration of Independence (1776) says we have a duty -- not just a "right," but a duty -- to abolish any government that becomes a
tyranny.
If they could travel through time from their day in 1776 to our day in 2022, the Signers of the Declaration would abolish our government, because it is clearly
more of a tyranny than the monarchical government they abolished.
So what went wrong?
Why is it that their Constitution did not prevent tyranny? In fact, why did the Constitution create a government even more tyrannical than the one
they abolished?
By separating the powers of the monarch into separate branches, the Constitution transformed "mon-archy" into what we should call "poly-archy,"
or "multi-archy."
Lord Acton famously said, "Power Corrupts." But corrupt people aren't satisfied with the power they possess. They want more. So Lord Acton could
have said, "Corrupt Power Expands."
Each one of the branches of the U.S. Government today has expanded beyond the worst nightmares of the Founding Fathers.
Each department within each branch of the U.S. Government has more power than the monarch did in 1776. Examples:
What is the answer to poly-archy?
After 200 years under the Constitution, it should be obvious.
But it's controversial.
Let's look at the last two hundred years under the Constitution.
The First 100 Years
During the 1800's, the first 100 years under the Constitution, the powers of the archies in Washington D.C. were limited. People sometimes speak of the 1800's as
a time of "laissez-faire capitalism." ("Laissez-faire" is French for "let us work," "let us do business," or, more
colloquially, "leave us alone.")
Jacob Hornberger describes the libertarian/laissez-faire society that
America's Founders created:
Was the society that existed under the federal government a perfectly libertarian society? We all know it wasn’t. There was slavery. There were tariffs.
There were land grants to the railroads. There were various economic regulations at the state and local levels. There was corporatism.
Once again, however, that’s looking at the glass as half empty. Consider the other side of things: Our ancestors brought into existence a society in which
there was no income tax or IRS, one where people could keep everything they earned and decide for themselves what to do with it. There was no Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, education grants, food stamps, public housing, or FDIC. Indeed, there was no welfare state or mandatory, coercive charity.
There were no drug laws. There were very few economic regulations, especially at the federal level. No minimum-wage laws. No occupational-licensure laws. No
Federal Reserve. No fiat money: the official U.S. money consisted of coins made out of precious metals. No immigration controls. No public (i.e., government)
schooling. No national-security state. America had a relatively small army that was nothing like the enormous military establishment and military-industrial
complex that exist today. No foreign military bases. No regime-change operations, coups, foreign interventions, foreign aid, or alliances with foreign regimes. No
CIA. No NSA. No official programs for mass surveillance, torture, and assassination.
That is the most remarkable political and economic achievement in history. Never in history has there existed such a society. It was the closest that people
have ever come to what libertarians envision as a genuinely free society. Notwithstanding the exceptions (e.g., slavery and tariffs), the result was the freest
and most prosperous nation in history and certainly among the most peaceful and harmonious for most of the time (the Civil War, the Mexican War, slavery, and the
war against American Indians being notable exceptions).
Today, we obviously live in a very different type of society, one that has all those government programs that our ancestors didn’t have. For most of the 20th
century and continuing through today, we live under what has become known as a welfare state and a warfare state, where the federal government
wields omnipotent power over the lives and economic activities of the citizenry.
This "laissez-faire" society made America the most prosperous and admired nation in history. America can be summed up in three words:
Liberty Under God
The Second 100 Years
During the 20th century, the powers of Washington D.C. archies expanded greatly. The growth of archies began in "the
Progressive Era."
As a result of this growth in archism, America's prosperity was transformed into bankruptcy, and her admiration
into loathing and ridicule.
America's Founders spoke of the dangers of "standing armies." They would be appalled at the
number and lethality of the standing armies in Washington D.C. John
W. Whitehead warns:
We’re
being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers—a standing army. While
Americans are being made to jump through an increasing number of hoops in order to exercise their Second Amendment right to own a gun, the government
is arming its own civilian employees to the hilt
with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment, authorizing them to make arrests, and training them in military tactics. Among the agencies being supplied
with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and
Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department,
Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government
civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the government’s arsenal, the transformation of local
police into extensions of the military, and the speed with which the nation could be locked down under martial law depending on the circumstances. Clearly, the
government is preparing for war—and a civil war, at that—but who is the enemy?
"We the People" are the enemy of the government created by the Constitution which begins with those words.
"Power corrupts."
When you don't have to compete in a free market, when you can steal ("tax") to get all the money you want (or just print it up), and when you can use
that stolen money to buy weapons to impose your will on others by force or threats of violence, you are corrupt. You become less accountable. You become more
corrupt. More tyrannical.
There is no way to "regulate" or "limit" corruption. Corruption is evil. Corruption must be eliminated entirely.
We need to repudiate poly-archy.
You may have already figured out that the opposite of "monarchy" and "poly-archy" is "AN-archy" (the Greek letter alpha means
"not" or "none").
But when victims of educational malpractice in schools run by archists hear the word "anarchy," they don't think "freedom from archists,"
"liberty," "prosperity," "peace," "virtue," and "absence of tyranny."
They think "bomb-throwing assassins," "chaos," "disorder," and "lawlessness."
So we've come up with a new word: "UN-archy." The absence of political powers. The absence of systematic corruption and aggression.
We need Unarchy.today
It was not enough to abolish "mon-archy" in 1776.
We need to abolish the entire idea of "the public sector."
| “Private Sector” |
“Public Sector” |
| Competitive Sector |
Monopoly Sector |
| Persuasive Sector |
Coercive Sector |
| Peaceful Sector |
Violent Sector |
| Productive Sector |
Parasite Sector |
The idea of "Liberty Under God" will be slandered. Complete liberty -- the complete abolition of archies, politicians, and bureaucrats -- will be
denounced as "anarchy," implying chaos, disorder, and lawlessness. It will be politicians and bureaucrats, of course, who will scream and shout the
loudest that the loss of their jobs will bring "chaos and crime."
But the fear of "lawlessness" is averted by our commitment to be a nation "Under God,"
and observant of "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." From the Greek word for God, theos,
and the Greek word for law, nomos, comes the term "Theonomy." This causes the archists to scream
and shout that we are trying to "impose a theocracy" on America -- even though the repudiation of archism is the repudiation of
"imposing" anything at all.
The word "Theocracy" is a boogeyman. The word comes from the Greek word for God and the Greek word for govern. We are "governed by
God" when we obey His commandments.
At the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin proposed that each session of deliberations begin with prayer to God, because, he said,
"God governs." A nation "under God" is a nation that allows God to govern by obeying His
commandments. America has always been a "Theocracy." America has never been a Muslim theocracy. At
first, America was a Christian Theocracy, which is libertarian, because it is characterized by piety
and virtue. Then in the 1900's, America became a secular theocracy, where every man is his own god, and then The State becomes god, the apotheosis of
human power. Theocracy is an inescapable concept. All law is the legislation of someone's morality, and morality is the social outworking of religion (or as
Harvard Professor Paul Tillich described it, "ultimate concern"), and the ultimate concern is the god of that society. There is always some theos to
be obeyed. There is always some theo-cracy.
If liberty-minded people simply refuse to show up at the polls and vote for candidates committed to "un-archy," all the archists in Washington are
going to continue to expand their monopoly of violence. They're not just going to leave their
paychecks and sinecures in Washington D.C. and go home and look for an honest job. They need to be replaced with unarchists who will abolish the machinery of poly-archy.
The only other way to eradicate the ruling class is the way America's Founding Fathers abolished their government: by violent revolution. This is an evil and
destructive route.
For further reading:
What is an ARCHIST?
Unarchy and Theonomy
This website is sponsored by Kevin Craig, an un-archist who is the Libertarian Party candidate for U.S. Congress in Missouri's
7th Congressional District.
