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The Genius of Self-Government

by Christopher Chantrill
August 29, 2004 at 3:00 am

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ISN’T it convenient that Speaker Hastert’s book came out the week before the Republican Convention with a juicy quote about Senator Clinton? She thinks that the federal government spends money more wisely than people spending their own money.  Oh really. There are some of us, Senator, who think that the opposite is true.

You could call it the difference between the German model of politics and the All-American model.  Over the last two centuries, the Germans have come up with one brilliant idea after another: Kant’s philosophy, modern psychology, the research university, socialism, relativity, and quantum mechanics—even the modern army.  But one thing they really screwed up:  Self-government.  Again and again they blew it until the world’s foremost experts in self-government thoughtfully conquered them and gave them, finally, the Rechtstaat they had been philosophizing about since the early nineteenth century.  You could think of it as a thank-you gift from Uncle Sam for the brain drain of brilliant Germans sent to the United States in the 1930s.

Self-government has always been the great American achievement.  We all know this, of course, but we don’t really know it.  Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto didn’t really know it either.  Then he tried to find out why the United States has a functioning property system and Peru had a profound disconnect between the formal government sector and the informal, extralegal sector. He found, in The Mystery of Capital, that back in the nineteenth century the U.S had the same kind of property mess that Peru had in the mid twentieth century.   

Starting from the early years of European settlement in North America there had been a conflict between the formal law of property that generally benefited the landed elite and the informal rules, the living law, developed by migrants and squatters.  By the 1820s, legal experts were close to despair.  It seemed impossible to reconcile the warring interests.  To the Peruvian de Soto, this sounded familiar.  It was just like Peru where the informal living property law in the villages was at war with the written law of the land.  How then had the United States solved its land tenure problems?  The answer was that the suits had capitulated to the squatters.  The landmark Homestead Act of 1862, he realized, essentially encoded the living law of the squatters.  If you worked the land, the law now said, you got to own it.

Then there were the miners.  In 1848 gold was discovered in the state of California, the spoils of the Mexican-American War of 1848.  The 49ers discovered when they got to the goldfields that the suits back in Washington DC had omitted to provide the United States with a comprehensive and mandatory National Mineral Rights Act.  Rather than throw their hands up in disgust, they set to work forming mineral districts and developing a living law of mineral rights as they went along.  In 1866 and 1872 when the suits finally got around to drafting a national mineral law, Congress essentially encoded the living law that the miners had put together in their individual mining districts in the high Sierras in the intervening years.

When there is a disconnect between the living law of the people and the formal law of the suits, de Soto realized, the fault usually lies with the suits.  At the very least, the suits should think long and hard before imposing their lofty ideas upon the common people.

But Senator Clinton doesn’t care. Back in June she told a meeting of rich Democrats: “we’re probably going to cut that [tax cut] short and not give it to you.  We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”  Or the First Lady Clinton who told Denny Hastert ten years ago that, in Hastert’s words: “she felt if money goes to individuals and they have control over it, then that is money that the government doesn’t have.  People wouldn’t spend their money as wisely as the federal government would.”

The Clinton Way is the German way, the vanguard elitism of Karl Marx, the paternalistic social insurance of Bismarck, the one-size-fits-all way of Prussian state schools, the cradle-to-grave mothering of the “social market.”  It is based on the German cult of genius in the elite and the presumption of helplessness in everyone else.

But there’s another way.  It’s called the American Way, and it works.  It’s based on an assumption of competence, that ordinary people can govern themselves—without the constant interference of self-nominated geniuses.  Again and again, Americans have demonstrated their competence at self-government, but some people just don’t get it.   This Fall, let’s all send a message to our overweening elites.  We believe in the American Way, not the German way.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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