Socialism’s Gilded Cage

The one great truth found at the convergence of economics and politics is that government costs money. The more government you have, the more money it costs. This has both its good and its bad sides. The bad side is obvious. We need only look at the national deficit to see that. The good side is that just as the number of sheep helps limit the number of wolves, so too the amount of available money helps limit the size of government.



Of course given power, governments will vastly overspend beyond the money available to them, but that cannot go on forever. If the population of wolves increases drastically beyond that of the sheep, no matter what the wolves do, there eventually will be a dieback and a lot of dead wolves. Because as wolves sustain themselves on sheep, governments sustain themselves on money gathered from their own subjects. A government that expands beyond the ability of its subjects to sustain it will collapse sooner or later. It can go deep into debt. It can turn the entire country into a slave labor camp, as the USSR did. It can invade other countries and rob them, as Nazi Germany did. But in the end, there will be a dieback, and it will fall.


Alternatively, the need of a government for money can actually lead to reforms and more freedom. It is doubtful that America would exist today, if King George III hadn’t needed more money. Much the same can be said of Protestantism in Europe. But it doesn’t always have to come about as a violent reaction against a central authority. The colonization of the New World is a more positive example. As was the rise of a European Middle Class and the survival of the Jews in a Europe and the Ottoman Empire. All are examples of governments being forced to grant rights or decentralize their power in order to fund the exercise of that power.


The visible paradox here is that governments actually lose money by increasing their power, and in order to increase their revenues, they have to give up some level of control over the people they rule. That is why authoritarian ideologies on both the left and the right constantly warn about the dangers of money as a disruption of their moral and social order. They are well aware that freedom is financially rewarding, and that open markets undermine central authority.


The left’s obsession with capitalism emerges from the fear of an ownership society, dominated by the wishes of a socially conservative middle class. It is not the poor and oppressed that they care about, but themselves. The far right meanwhile is still stewing in the brew of inherited lamentations over the fall of kings and the diminution of inherited nobility at the hands of a capitalist meritocracy. Authoritarian ideologies on the far left and the far right, are both marked by symptomatic obsessions with Rockefellers and Rothschilds, banking institutions and billionaires. They claim to do so because they are concerned about the centralization of power. More often they simply want to be the ones to centralize power, and recognize capitalism as a dangerous tool that puts social mobility outside the control of any individual ideology or political faction.


The intersections of power politics and economics can often produce a cycle, in which governments allow freedom in order to draw in more revenues, only to have those same freedoms lead to more government control. Immigration is one obvious example. As is urbanization. Complexity and diversity can lead to more profits, but they also invite a new degree of complexity in government. Which means the rise of a larger and more controlling government.


A growing middle class and urbanization was in the long run structurally incompatible with feudal monarchies, but both led to a demand for even more centralized government to serve as a provider of services and control over dense population centers. Monarchy gave way to socialism. And socialism proved to be even better at bad budgets and spending money than Louis the Sixteenth. The lesson is that the trap of tyranny is always waiting by the side of the road. Outsmarting it requires not only moving fast enough to escape what is behind you, but studying to see what waits ahead of you in the direction in which you are headed.


A citizenry with more money only makes for a more tempting target. Robbing the middle class is much more fun than robbing peasants, because they tend to have bigger bank accounts. And they have already been trained to meet life’s needs by exchanging money for services. Which is exactly the socialist pitch. Along with the fine print that says the government is not obligated to actually provide those services, or have them available, that the cost of those services may change any time it sees fit, and that it may change the terms of the arrangement at any time, and in any way it sees fit.


Tyranny dropped its iron collar and reinvented itself as a gilded cage. A Utopian system in which a wise and kind government would see to everyone’s needs and curb individual greed and power. But when the golden paint washed off, the gilded cage turned out to be the old fashioned black iron after all. The paint only existed to sucker its new occupants long enough for them to be on the wrong side of the bars.


Governments, like con artists, configure themselves to fit the people. Even tyrannies are an expression of that. The greatest danger of tyranny is therefore not that it will be imposed against your will, but that you may actually welcome its imposition. That you may not even be able to recognize it as tyranny, until it is much too late. The fundamental shift that happens is that of the locus of control passing from the power. In democratic republics, the people control the government. In tyrannies, the government controls the people. The power shift comes down to whom both the people and the government believe is best fit to control. Who should hold the rope.


This is a question that comes down to what people actually need from their government and what they think they need from their government. The two tend to overlap, but they are never quite the same. For government, the matter is rather simple indeed. What governments need from the people is power. Money is simply another expression of power. Its popular potency lies in its symbolic decentralization of authority. By drawing the money back, governments monopolize power and diminish the available options for citizens of that country.


By purchasing services from the government through taxation, rather than from corporations, the citizenry create a much more insidious monopoly. And they are engaging in a transaction of unequals that shifts their power balance much more dramatically than any corporation could do. And so the transition from capitalism to socialism begins. Socialism however is already a dead end. Economic centralization leads to a poverty of economic options. The sheep begin to die off, and eventually the wolves have to follow. Unless the wolves reluctantly let the sheep live to breed, and create many more sheep to prey upon, and then the cycle begins again.


Governments liberalize to allow for wealth creation that they end up restricting and consuming anyway. And the social changes that encourage wealth creation also create new temptations for tyranny. The cycle repeats itself again when governments are formed into traps for a new generation, and when that new generation, having lost the wisdom of the old, flies into the gilded cage, and does not even notice when the door slams shut. Socialism’s gilded cage is a new incarnation of the recurring trap by which governments deprive the people of their power. And though a cage may be gilded, it is still a cage.

Inside the Black Panther case

      On the day President Obama was elected, armed men wearing the black berets and jackboots of the New Black Panther Party were stationed at the entrance to a polling place in Philadelphia. They brandished a weapon and intimidated voters and poll watchers. After the election, the Justice Department brought a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and those armed thugs. Justice attorneys diligently pursued the case and obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the charges. Before a final judgment could be entered in May 2009, our superiors ordered the attorneys to dismiss the case.


      The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law in recent Justice Department history. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month several attorneys resigned their positions as  Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys.

      The federal voter-intimidation statutes used against the New Black Panthers were enacted because America never realized genuine racial inequality in elections. Threats of violence characterized elections from the end of the Civil War until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Before the Voting Rights Act, blacks seeking the right to vote, and those aiding them, were victims of violence and intimidation. But unlike the Southern legal system, Southern violence did not discriminate. Black voters were slain, as were the white champions of their cause. Some of the bodies were tossed into bogs and in one case in Philadelphia, Miss., they were buried together in an earthen dam.

     The dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Others still within the department share this assessment. The department abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens victimized by the New Black Panthers. The dismissal raises serious questions about the department's enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election.

     The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has opened an investigation into the dismissal and the DOJ's skewed enforcement priorities. Attorneys who brought the case are under subpoena to testify, but the department ordered them to ignore the subpoena, lawlessly placing those attorneys in an unacceptable legal limbo.

     The assistant attorney general for civil rights, Tom Perez, has testified repeatedly that the "facts and law" did not support this case. That claim is false. If the actions in Philadelphia do not constitute voter intimidation, it is hard to imagine what would, short of an actual outbreak of violence at the polls. Let's all hope this administration has not invited that outcome through the corrupt dismissal.

     Most corrupt of all, the lawyers who ordered the dismissal - Loretta King, the Obama-appointed acting head of the Civil Rights Division, and Steve Rosenbaum - did not even read the internal Justice Department memorandums supporting the case and investigation. Just as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. admitted that he did not read the Arizona immigration law before he condemned it, Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that he had not bothered to read the most important department documents detailing the investigative facts and applicable law in the New Black Panther case. Christopher Coates, the former Voting Section chief, was so outraged at this dereliction of responsibility that he actually threw the memos at Mr. Rosenbaum in the meeting where they were discussing the dismissal of the case. The department subsequently removed all of Mr. Coates' responsibilities and sent him to South Carolina.

     Mr. Perez also inaccurately testified to the House Judiciary Committee that federal "Rule 11" required the dismissal of the lawsuit. Lawyers know that Rule 11 is an ethical obligation to bring only meritorious claims, and such a charge by Mr. Perez effectively challenges the ethics and professionalism of the five attorneys who commenced the case. Yet the attorneys who brought the case were voting rights experts and would never pursue a frivolous matter. Their experience in election law far surpassed the experience of the officials who ordered the dismissal.

     Some have called the actions in Philadelphia an isolated incident, not worthy of federal attention. To the contrary, the Black Panthers in October 2008 announced a nationwide deployment for the election. There were indications that polling-place thugs were deployed elsewhere, not only in November 2008, but also during the Democratic primaries, where they targeted white Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters. In any event, the law clearly prohibits even isolated incidents of voter intimidation.

     Others have falsely claimed that no voters were affected. Not only did the evidence rebut this claim, but the law does not require a successful effort to intimidate; it punishes even the attempt.




     Most disturbing, the dismissal is part of a creeping lawlessness infusing our government institutions. Citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims. Equal enforcement of justice is not a priority of this administration. Open contempt is voiced for these types of cases.

     Some of the D.O.J attorneys argued that the law should not be used against black wrongdoers because of the long history of slavery and segregation. Less charitable individuals called it "payback time." Incredibly, after the case was dismissed, instructions were given that no more cases against racial minorities like the Black Panther case would be brought by the Voting Section.

     Refusing to enforce the law equally means some citizens are protected by the law while others are left to be victimized, depending on their race. Core American principles of equality before the law and freedom from racial discrimination are now at risk. Hopefully, equal enforcement of the law is still a point of bipartisan, if not universal, agreement. However, knowledge after the New Black Panther dismissal and the attitudes held by officials in the Civil Rights Division, we should all begin to fear the era of agreement over these core American principles has passed.