Ray Harvey

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This year rather than celebrating Earth Day by advocating still more government bureaus, which will then determine for the rest of us what we can do with our property, let us instead celebrate the only real way to clean up and beautify the planet: private property rights and private stewardship.

From Chapter 2 of Leave Us Alone:

The right to property is, as James Madison said, “the guardian” of every other right. Freedom and private property are inseparable. Property is freedom: you cannot be free if you are not free to produce, use, and dispose of those things necessary to your life.

“Control the property, control the person,” said Lenin, correctly.

Property, like every other right, is first and foremost the right to act: specifically, it is the right to produce, exchange, and use.

“Property is not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth…. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner” (Electric Law Library).

Money is property.

The only alternative to private property is government or communal ownership of property, both of which amount to the same thing in the end: a bureau of centralized planners controlling the property.

If you desire to know precisely what someone’s political viewpoint is, all you need do is find out his or her stance on property; for it is through the stance on property that the entire political philosophy is disclosed. You needn’t listen to anything anyone says about “freedom” or “liberty” or any of these other easy platitudes: no one in her or his right mind will go against those things. Instead, simply check the stance on property. If someone doesn’t believe in full private property rights, that person is, to the exact extent he or she denies private property rights, a statist.

Property is the sine-qua-non of human freedom.

To defend freedom, therefore, you must start by defending the unalienable right to property.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government (James Madison, Federal Papers 10).

Government is instituted no less for protection of the PROPERTY, than of the persons (James Madison, Federalist Paper #54, emphasis in the original).

The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management (Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval).

A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings (Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours).

The political institutions of America, its various soils and climates, opened a certain resource to the unfortunate and to the enterprising of every country and insured to them the acquisition and free possession of property (Thomas Jefferson: Declaration on Taking Up Arms).

The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence (John Adams).

The following is from Chapter 30 of Leave Us Alone — A Capitalist Credo:

The Russian writer Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in what is now the Ukrainian town of Berdichev. At that time, Berdichev was still part of the Russian Empire. Vasily Grossman attended high school in Kiev and then the University of Moscow. He graduated from University in 1929 with a degree in chemical engineering. He worked as an engineer for five years, after which he devoted himself to writing full-time.

He published his first news article in 1928, his first fictional story in 1934.

During the middle and latter 1930’s Vasily Grossman was exceptionally prolific, and even more so after the start of World War II. At that point he became a correspondent for Red Star (Krasnaya Zvezda). He spent the entire war on the treacherous front, covering the blood-soaked siege of Stalingrad in minute detail. In popularity his war reportage was second to none (well, maybe one: the famous Ehrenburg), and Grossman is loosely portrayed by actor Joseph Fiennes in the inaccurate movie Enemy at the Gates.

In his youth and well into his thirties, Vasily Grossman was devoted to the communist philosophy. But during and immediately after the war, he became increasingly disillusioned with the socialist system, so that, starting in 1943, he began explicitly challenging the whole Soviet ideal — both for its repression of freedom and for its anti-Semitism.

His war fiction at this time also began to generate criticism from high Soviet officials. In a matter of months, thus, his writings were suppressed. Over the course of his latter years, Vasily Grossman became an outright opponent of socialism. His writings are, at times, not consistently, among the most eloquent expression of freedom of any person in any era.

Stomach cancer killed him in 1964.

What follows is a short passage from his last novel Forever Flowing. It is one side of a brief dialogue spoken, in part, by the novel’s protagonist Ivan Grigoryevich, who has just been released from the Russian Gulag, after thirty years of imprisonment. I quote it as a tribute to freedom, to be sure, but also as a tribute to the man who came to understand the philosophical roots of freedom — and that in a country where freedom was not allowed; in a country where philosophies and freedom were replaced by blind obedience and dogma. It’s important that people like Vasily Grossman are not forgotten.
Please think of the following passage the next time you hear an environmentalist talk about more centralized government and more government ownership of land for the sake of “our endangered environment.”

Please think of it next time you see someone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt (or necklace) in glorification of Che Guevara’s communistic ideals, or romanticizing communist Cuba and Castro for their healthcare system, or Chairman Mao with the blood of billions on his hands:

I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.

Forever Flowing

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964)

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey! You are a true friend to the workingman, such as me. Your book Leave Us Alone should be required reading in our schools.

Don’t you get sick and tired of capitalism being everyone’s escape goat, like I do? The halls of congress are crowded with representatives of the “X” industry, saying The “X” industry is sick and dying. The “X” industry must be saved!! Only tariffs and subsidies can save the X industry, and if the X industry dies, workers will be thrown out onto the streets. But if congress acts promply (LOL!!) the X industry can be saved, and then it will buy equiptment from other industries, and more men will be employed. But congress once tried to “save silver” in just such a way to “help the East” when one of its results was to force China into deflation and force China off that basis? The United States Treasury was forced to acquire hoards of unnecessary silver to store in its vaults, at ridiculous prices, the essential aims of the “silver senators” achievable at a fraction of the harm by the payment of the frank subsidy to the mine owners or to there workers. But congress would never have approved a naked steal of this sort unaccompanied by ideological flimflam regarding “silver’s essential role in the currency” as with the Guffey Act under which the coal mines (in which I work) were not permitted but compelled to conspire together to NOT sell below fixed minimum prices fixed by the government. Though congress had started out to fix “the” price of coal, the government soon found itself (because of different sizes, 1000s of mines, and 1000s of different destinations by rail, truck, and barge) fixing 350,000 separate prices for coal! One affect this had of trying to keep coal prices above the competitive market prices was to accelerate the tendency by consumers toward the substitution of other energy sources such as natural gas and oil. If people didn’t expect to be feed off the government “teet” all the time this wouldn’t happen, I feel. Don’t you?

Keep up the great work, Ray Harvey!

John

The following is Chapter 21 of Leave Us Alone:

Before the Great Depression of the 1930’s and 1940’s, there were a number of depressions and recessions in this country, two of the most notable being the Panic of 1819 and the depression of 1837. In every instance prior to the Great Depression, the government policy was essentially a policy of hands-off.

Which was exactly as it should have been, since depressions are not caused by the private sector but by government interference in the marketplace, and only that.

What were the results of these hands-off policies prior to the Great Depression?

Answer: a drastic reduction in the amount of time the depression lasted.

Let us reiterate and emphasize that the only way to create wealth and jobs is through production.

That is why capitalism, true laissez-faire capitalism, is the only possible way to end an economic depression or recession.

Government spending will always compound problems. Why? Because government can only obtain money by taxing or borrowing or printing.

Always remember: government by definition is not an agency of production: it is a mechanism of force. That is its defining characteristic.

Thus the money that government takes away from the private sector depletes money that would otherwise have by choice (as opposed to by coercion) been saved or spent upon other things.

Private money, in other words, is diverted from the capital sector into the hands of bureaucrats. Which is exactly the thing that exacerbates and prolongs the preexisting economic problem.

It is so very easy to spend money that is not yours, money that you’re not fully accountable for, money that you obtain through force or the threat of force. Whereas, on the other hand, cutting governmental borrowing and spending and taxation and printing, it frees private money and private resources, which in the end is the one and only thing that can produce genuine wealth.

Printing more and more money to cover the cost of government spending will only ever bring inflation. It can happen in no other way.

Economic law cannot be abolished, just as mathematical law cannot be abolished, and for the exact same reasons. It doesn’t even matter how many politicians wish to abolish these economic laws, or how charismatic the masses find these bureaucrats: economic laws will not be subverted. One might just as well try turning back the tide with one’s own two hands.

Here, then, is how to end a recession or depression as swiftly as possible:

Slash government spending.

Slash taxes.

Stop the inflationary process that fiat money (i.e. money printing) inevitably brings.

Deregulate private enterprises so that the private sector can function – which is to say, free the market so that businesspeople can start up businesses, produce products, and create more and more jobs.

That’s all there is to it. And yet it’s a pill that bureaucrats simply cannot swallow.

The depression of 1837 was the biggest depression this country had seen prior to the Great Depression. The good President Martin Van Buren and his administration did exactly the right thing: they stepped back and let the market correct itself, which indeed it did, so that the depression lasted less than a year.

Martin Van Buren stated in his inaugural address that he advocated a policy of laissez faire.

Two months later, the United States experienced a banking crisis. President Van Buren stuck to his guns.

“All but six of the nation’s eight hundred or so banks had ceased redeeming their bank notes in gold or silver, but in his first message to Congress the President proclaimed that his policy would be one of governmental retrenchment” (Dr. Thomas Dilorenzo, How Capitalism Saved America, p. 158).

In President Van Buren’s own words:

“All communities are apt to look to government for too much, especially at periods of sudden embarrassment and distress…. All former attempts on the part of Government to assume management of domestic or foreign exchange have proved injurious.”

President Van Buren added that the solution is “a system founded on private interest, enterprise and competition, without the aid of legislative grants or regulations by law” (James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1922).

It should be noted that Van Buren had to fight every step of the way against governmental intervention by such notable statists as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and the young Abraham Lincoln, all of whom remained statists until the day they died.

President Van Buren waged a tireless war for deregulation of finance, and he thereby created the Independent Treasury System in which all bank notes were redeemable in gold and silver.
In so doing, he brought this country the strongest and most stable monetary system it’s perhaps ever had.

President Van Buren also, in the words of historian Jeffrey Hummel, “thwarted all attempts to use economic depression as an excuse for expanding governments role.”

Conversely, interventionists like Henry Clay and his young protégé Abe Lincoln saw this economic downturn as a political opportunity to create pork-barrels for so-called internal improvements. Sound familiar?

These same statists also attempted to get the federal government to bail out the states, but President Van Buren fought them tooth-and-nail and eventually won; so that government spending actually fell during his term, and the debt remained steady, the free-market price system allowed to operate without intervention.

That is why the depression of 1837 lasted only one year.

That is why it never spun out of control, as today’s crisis has.

By refusing to pile up debt, President Van Buren thereby refused to drag out the economic downturn, which by necessity steals money from the private sector.

Compare that to, in the next chapter, the brief but by-no-means exhaustive list of extraordinarily destructive policies followed first by Herbert Hoover, who was an admirer of Soviet Russia and “believed that human manipulation could triumph over any alleged ‘laws’ of economics,” and then the even more brutal Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a discussion of whom will come in the chapter after the next.