Letters from an Ohio Farmer

The Distributive Constitution

To My Fellow Citizens:

From my first letter, I have spoken of the need for attention to the Constitution if we are to continue to enjoy the blessings of limited government. Now the call for constitutionalism has been sounded on the left, in hopes that Americans will come to enjoy the blessings of government without limits.  Well, this is why we're having the national conversation we are having.

In a leading journal of leftist opinion, a widely published law professor at a major university recently criticized those who see the Constitution as a document that limits the power of government.  He argues instead for what he calls a "Distributive Constitution." In this view, the Constitution gives all three branches of the national government the right and duty to ensure that all Americans have a decent livelihood, and that no gross economic inequalities mar American democracy. 

To ensure these things would indeed require a government of unlimited powers. It would need to be able to control virtually all aspects of the economy—for example, to ensure employment for all.  It would also need to define "gross economic inequality" and take from everyone who had too much according to this definition, in order to give to those deemed to have too little.  This distribution of wealth is the core of the distributive constitution.

The Constitution, of course, gives none of the branches of the national government any such powers.  What is the argument that they should have these powers?

It is a version of the century-old progressive argument, and it goes like this:  Gross economic inequality leads to political inequality.  A democratic form of government is not possible if citizens do not have "economic independence and material security."   Americans had this when they were a nation of farmers, each living on and drawing his substance from his own land.  Each farmer was his own boss and in that way was independent and free.  Industrialization and urbanization destroyed this way of life and rendered working Americans "wage slaves, ciphers and servants, ill-equipped for democratic citizenship."

To rectify this situation, according to the progressive argument, the national government had to step in.  It did so principally by legalizing and supporting unions and by slowly establishing assistance programs such as social security and unemployment benefits.   The Second Bill of Rights, proposed by FDR in 1944, was an important expression of progress, including as it did the rights to a job, a house, and medical care, among others.

In sum, the Constitution of limited powers must become the distributive constitution of unlimited power because the ultimate purpose of the Constitution is to ensure democracy.  If "economic independence and material security" are necessary for democracy, and the distribution of wealth is necessary to ensure economic independence and material security, then the Constitution must become the distributive constitution to ensure such conditions. As paradoxical as it sounds, a national government of unlimited power is necessary for democracy.

This argument—which represents an influential segment of opinion in the country—is not merely paradoxical; it is wrong. Consider first how it understands the situation of Americans.  If we rely on the private sector, we are wage slaves.  The proposed alternative is dependence on the national government.  It will guarantee us education, jobs, a house, medical care, and pensions.   It will take care of us from cradle to grave, as the saying goes.  Why, we must ask, is dependence on government better than dependence on private wealth?  Do we know of a government with the powers proposed for the distributive constitution that has not abused those powers?  Does not the grant of Federal money always come with restrictions and requirements about what recipients can and cannot do?  In this light, the distributive constitution appears incompatible with both democracy and freedom.

Not only will this progressive solution produce the problem progressives hope to avoid (the destruction of democracy), it is also based on a misunderstanding of the foundation of democracy. It is not true that industrial workers, dependent on the labor market, were deprived of their rights.  On the contrary, protected by the secret ballot, they voted in large numbers and elected officials who voted for their views.  Our leftist law professor cites any number of federal laws favorable to the interests of industrial workers. How did these laws come to be if the workers, by that very status, were deprived of their rights and America was run by an oligarchy hostile to the interests of most Americans?

Democracy does not require, then, that workers and all Americans be dependent on the government rather than the free market.  On the contrary, in the market there is a wide variety of bosses and the freedom to change jobs or start one's own business.  If we were all dependent on the government, there would be only one boss and no freedom to escape his control.

Nor is it true that owning a family farm guaranteed material security.  Many homesteaders failed and lost their farms.  Drought and pests destroyed crops.  Farm life was hard and always precarious.  But the insecurity of this life did not destroy the rights farmers enjoyed as free citizens.  Material security is not necessary for democracy. Fortunately so, since material security is impossible for any power on earth to guarantee. 

We must conclude, then, that material security and independence from the market are not necessary for democracy.  It follows also that the distribution of wealth and the distributive constitution are not necessary for democracy, either.  Indeed, on the contrary, in turning our government from one of limited powers into one of unlimited power, the distributive constitution poses a great danger to democracy.

Ohio Farmer

Progressives and Regressives

To My French Friend:

You raise lots of good questions, Jean-Luc, about my previous letter on the speeches of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama at Osawatomie.  For the moment, let me comment on just one.  

I think you are right to say that Mr. Obama drew a false parallel in his speech, when he compared himself to Roosevelt as he did.  Just as Roosevelt argued that the government had to have more power to counter the centralization in corporations of the wealth and power created by the industrial revolution, so did Obama argue that the government required yet more power to counter the centralization in corporations of the wealth and power created by the information revolution, the more recent transformation the President acknowledged our economy has gone through.  

The problem with this parallel is that the two revolutions are very different—in fact, they are opposed—in their effects.   Corporations centralized power during the industrial revolution because it was the most efficient way to get their work done.  All decisions, all actions require information.  Manufacturing a product requires thousands of decisions, for example, about raw materials, design, marketing, and many other things.  Getting the information to make those decisions is costly.  Bringing all those decisions and the processes they make possible under central control in a corporation reduces those costs.  Furthermore, when dealing with a mass of less skilled workers a hundred years ago, it made sense to give them simple tasks and to centralize control over them by giving them rules and regulations that they had to follow in carrying out those tasks.  The information revolution is changing all this. 

Consider your own situation.  You design and can manage industrial control systems for corporations around the world from France because the internet connects you to thousands of sensors that automatically feed you information.  The cost of gathering the information you need to decide and act on a problem in a California plant is a fraction of what it would have been even a few decades ago for the plant itself to do that work.  And you can do it more cheaply than they can because you can do it for many others at the same time.  Furthermore, you and your colleagues are skilled.  The company in California does not need to give you detailed rules on how to do your work.  In fact, such rules would make you less useful and productive.  They merely tell you what they want and they leave it to you to figure out how to do it.  The information revolution means that corporations can and need to decentralize, to disperse their power and authority. 

The administrative state of rules and regulations that Theodore Roosevelt championed was a response to industrialization.  The industrial age is ending, as the President himself acknowledged.  Shouldn’t the administrative state be ending as well then?  Instead, the President proposes more rules and regulations.  

Everywhere we look, whether the streets of Cairo or New York City, offices in France or family rooms in America, the information revolution is putting more information and thus more power into the hands of individuals.  Everywhere that is but in the minds of people like the President who acknowledge that our case is new, but who cannot think or act anew.  It is striking how backward looking, how trapped in the past so-called progressives are.   I agree with you that they should be called regressives. 

It is true, of course, that the transfer of power to individuals that I just spoke of will never be complete.  Neither you nor I are arguing for some kind of absolute individualism.  As I noted in my previous letter, we acknowledge, for example, that governmental action is necessary to ensure that none have unfair advantage.  But this does not mean that government action and power must always be the same or must always grow.  Given the information revolution, the transformation that the President acknowledged, our real task is not to keep building up the centralized industrial age bureaucracy but to figure out what aspects of that bureaucracy we can do without and what might need to be preserved but changed. 

The transformation we are going through has the potential to enhance human freedom, but while the President acknowledges the transformation, he does not acknowledge its potential.  At Osawatomie, he presented it not as an opportunity but as a problem that only government could fix.  If Jefferson were alive today, I think he would see this potential for freedom as he once saw such potential in America’s abundant land.  Living on one's own land, Jefferson thought, was the best way to ensure that citizens would live free and be safe in the enjoyment of what they labored to achieve.  Our circumstances have changed.  The age of the family farm has passed for most of us.  But the age-old longing for freedom and justice that Jefferson sought to satisfy can find fulfillment still, I believe, in the new forms made possible by the latest transformation of our lives.  Indeed, that transformation can give fresh life to individual liberty.  We should not let it be smothered in rules, regulations, and thinking suited to a by-gone era. 

There is more to say about all this, Jean-Luc, as you know, and I look forward to our future correspondence.

Ohio Farmer