Jeffrey Paul is a research professor at West Virginia University and the author of Winning America’s Second Civil War: Progressivism’s Authoritarian Threat, Where It Came From, and How to Defeat It. He spoke with City Journal associate editor Daniel Kennelly.
What are the two sides in America’s Second Civil War, and what are the political philosophies animating them?
On one side are those who believe that government power is limited by individuals’ natural (prelegal) rights to life (i.e., self-ownership), liberty, and property. These people reside largely in the Republican Party. On the other side are people who believe that natural rights are a fiction. The government, rather, is the source of whatever rights individuals enjoy—and it may impose duties on citizens that violate individual rights and liberties as Americans have traditionally understood them. People who agree with this view reside primarily in the post-New Deal Democratic Party. The two views are obviously incompatible.
Where did the rejection of America’s founding natural rights philosophy come from?
The nation was founded on the natural rights principles first elaborated by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, championed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and written into the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights. But the unresolved contradiction between liberty and slavery led inevitably to the American Civil War.
With the Union victory, the principles of an individual’s natural rights and of limited government were triumphant. Yet scarcely four decades later, university professors repudiated this ideal. How this happened was an historical accident—essentially the result of a blunder.
In the post-Civil War years, presidents of leading universities wished to transform their undergraduate pedagogical institutions into research centers with doctoral programs and graduate students. Their model was German universities, which had awarded doctorates for centuries. Universities in this country began hiring Americans who had earned Ph.D.s in Germany, the only country that awarded them.
This proved an enormous success in the purely empirical natural sciences and medicine, but it was a disaster for the social sciences and humanities. The views of German philosophers, political scientists, historians, and economists were antithetical to America’s founding principles. German academics saw the nation as an organism made up of individuals as its cellular units. Individuals themselves had no rights, no entitlements to self-ownership, only duties to sustain the life and well-being of the organism—that is, the nation. These duties were to be assigned by the organism’s (the nation’s) brain, which included university faculty and their students in the bureaucracy.
German professors in the social sciences inculcated hundreds of American students with these autocratic ideas. This perspective became doctrinal after these students created America’s modern graduate programs and gained the power to hire future faculty (a power traditionally held by college presidents) and award doctorates to their students.
By 1903, the founder and chair of the University of Chicago’s political science department wrote that the academy had “discredited and repudiated” the individualistic idea of natural rights. The founder of Columbia University’s doctoral program added that “the state is the source of individual liberty.” American professors imbued with this German view called themselves Progressives; they came to dominate the social sciences and humanities from the 1890s onward. They flooded into journalism, law, and politics, and they have dominated the Democratic Party since the 1930s.
Why are income taxes incompatible with a natural rights republic?
In the nineteenth century, the protection of citizens’ persons and property was the duty of state governments, except in times of war. States levied “the general property tax,” which was to be assessed on each citizen in proportion to the benefit he received, i.e., the protection of his person and property.
But today’s federal income tax represents only a fraction of what is being protected and is inconsistent with the natural rights principle. It barely assesses what is being protected for some citizens while effectively plundering others who principally depend on earned income—that is, most Americans.
For that and other reasons, personal and business income and payroll taxes—as well as taxes on realized capital gains, estates, and gifts—should be replaced with a 1 percent Universal Sales Tax (not a VAT or retail sales tax). This would lift the burden borne by the middle class yet raise more revenue than the current system—as the lion’s share of revenue will come from sales of financial assets—for example, stocks, bonds, and derivatives. In 2019, for example, the federal government collected $3.5 trillion, while a Universal Sales Tax of 1 percent would have collected $1.1 trillion more and balanced the budget. The years 2011–2021 would have produced similar results.
How does one side “win” the Second Civil War?
Winning the Second Civil War will require, in the short run, the adoption of my tax proposal! The economic relief it would provide to the vast majority of working Americans will make Republicans the majority party for some time—ideally, time enough for Republicans to enact other reforms, like universal school choice and ideologically balancing the faculty of state-owned or state-supported “private” universities, none of which the Democrats would adopt. Additionally, the federal bureaucracy must be downsized dramatically and its powers severely limited.
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