Libertarians for Monarchy!
Essay Posted April 8, 2008 by James E. Nelson
As all of you know who have been long time readers of this blog, I was Libertarian long before Ron Paul was cool. In historic American terms I’m a Jeffersonian Liberal who, on principle, distrusts government. In high school, after government and civics classes, I consciously began to lean Republican because they claimed to be the party of small and limited government while the Democrats unabashedly promoted bigger and more intrusive government programs.
But over time it became abundantly clear that Republicans wanted as big a government as the Democrats. Certainly the two were different. Democrats wanted to raise taxes in order to redistribute wealth while Republicans wanted ever-expansive government at the price of increasing deficits. The Republicans wanted a military state while the Democrats wanted a welfare state. Both parties, while defining morality in radically different ways, wanted to legislate it in ways that were way beyond their proper reach.
Eventually it dawned on me that both parties were trying to become the Kingdom of God, except their gods were pathetic little creatures that resulted in horrible injustices to various individuals and whole classes of people. It should have been obvious to any thinking Christian that what our government was up to was fundamentally idolatrous.
But my thinking was still circumscribed by American style politics that limited discussion to two basic realities—the individual and the group—while excluding God. The government is essentially “the group” in organized form. In a perfect Jeffersonian system, the group is limited. The Federal government is limited by the constitution, the balance of powers, (especially the review of a non-elected judiciary), the oversight of an independent media, and final say of educated voters.
Of course it doesn’t quite work out that way. In truth, the government was eventually untethered from all of those controls and became sovereign. This sovereignty of the state has resulted in undermining many of the basic principles of freedom. I will offer two examples. Through taxes there is ultimately no such thing as private ownership of property. (Property taxes are essentially a form of rent; don’t pay your taxes and your property returns to its ultimate owner—the government.) Through gerrymandering there is ultimately no such thing as a free and unbiased election. (Congressional districts are redrawn in utterly ridiculous ways so that a powerful congressman can keep his seat, even when the tide of public opinion has turned.)
In response to this unfettered power, the idea of the sovereign individual was born. Back in the 80s the sovereign individual was given a new title by “Bill Hill” (a pen name of an unknown advocate of personal sovereignty), a self-styled “perpetual traveler.” The term was carefully chosen, for the initials PT had multiples meanings: “perpetual traveler,” “permanent tourist,” and more to the point of the whole endeavor, “prior taxpayer.” The “sovereign individual” movement was a revolt against the loss of freedom in America as she increasingly exercised her sovereignty over her citizens.
Bill Hill gave the “sovereign individual” movement romance and purpose. Americans who refused to pay taxes because the taxes supposedly weren’t constitutional were (and are) a bit too radical for most folks. But Bill Hill was not scary-crazy like the tax rebels and certainly not threatening like other anti-government groups. On the one hand, his quest for absolute freedom was a bit quixotic. On the other, it was gloriously rebellious (like a pirate, or someone who traveled into the wild west to get away from it all). Both sensibilities are deeply attractive to Americans.
My own introduction to the sovereign individual concept came through Bill Bonner (one of my favorite social analysts), who has created a media empire based on the concept. It began with International Living, a company whose purpose is to help Americans and Canadians buy vacation and retirement property overseas. From that simple beginning came the concept of an overseas lifestyle (or in Bill Hill’s terminology, the PT lifestyle). That led to the Oxford Club, a group originally interested in all things offshore, from investing to citizenship. But as the Oxford Club membership grew, it’s lack focus became a detriment. Eventually the Oxford Club focused exclusively on overseas investment opportunities and the Club’s other interests were spun off into the Sovereign Society, which ultimately became a leading and outspoken expert on various legal and practical issues related to traveling, working, and living offshore.
The Sovereign Society is now more than a decade old and in 2007 a collection of essays written by John Pugsley, the Chairman of the Sovereign Society since its inception, was published in honor of its tenth anniversary. Being a subscriber to various Agora, Inc publications, I received a complimentary copy of Pugsley’s The Chairman’s Corner shortly after it was published. (Agora, Inc., by the way, is the above mentioned media empire. It is the umbrella corporation under which all of Bill Bonner’s projects operate.)
In this book of essays Pugsley continually contrasts the values of a sovereign state versus a sovereign individual. He correctly observes that the United States has abandoned its original core values for which the Revolutionary founders fought so hard. He also observes that by standards set forth in contemporary American law, the American Revolution was a terrorist act. In short, not only have our values changed as a country, they have mostly been turned upside down.
But his presentation of the sovereign individual as preferable to the sovereign state is fraught with pitfalls. Pugsley is a radical agnostic and biological evolutionist. (And by “radical,” I don’t mean wild-eyed, but rather these two principles are at the radix, or root, of his thinking. His ideas are internally consistent and all grow out of these two principles.) This philosophical bent allows him to recognize the full implication of the dividing wall between religion and state in the American context. Because many of the founding fathers were Christians and because there was a memory of Christian morality among the deists, it was assumed back then that Christian morality would both guide the politicians and bureaucrats and put limits on the individuals. In the original vision of the United States, there was an unspoken third party (that is, God) in any struggle between the individual and the state.
But because of the wall of separation between religion and state on the one hand, and the increasing secularization of America on the other (an inevitable result of Protestantism’s acquiescence to the Enlightenment), religion—any old religion—while acceptable in private, became marginalized in the public square. In other words, the “wall of separation” resulted in an environment where it was and is generally not acceptable to talk about religion, and religious based morality, in public. This led to the current state of affairs where the question of what we ought to do is only governed by highly amoral scientific and sociological values.
The effect is that both the individual and the state are completely loosed from the tether of morality and both inevitably come to think of themselves as sovereign. Just as governments need built in limits so do individuals. Just as governments who are loosed from their limits begin to think of themselves as sovereign, and thus in competition with the sovereign God, so individuals who are loosed from constraint begin to think of themselves as sovereign, and become a god unto themselves.
This environment of competing individual and state sovereignties (both either ignoring or marginalizing the sovereign God) seems to be the inevitable result of a democratic republic that espouses separation of church and state. In this environment it is nearly impossible to be a Christian and either a Republican or Democrat, because both parties have a messianic view of themselves. To endorse their policies is to slap God in the face. But it is as nearly impossible to be a Christian and a Libertarian, because doing so in this context implies a belief in the sovereignty of the individual, which is also a slap in the face of God.
Old school Orthodox and Catholic thinkers often long for the days prior to the French Revolution when the world was still run by monarchies. The sensibilities of contemporary monarchists seem so quaint to us modern folk. We all know that representative government is good and monarchies are bad. It is obvious to us that monarchists are mere political luddites who would rather pine for the old days than engage with contemporary problems.
But after plowing through John Pugsley’s Libertarian essays, the inherent weakness (as well as the incredible hubris) of “freedom and liberty for all” without an equal helping of being a bond-slave to the only and all-sovereign God becomes so obvious that it makes the secular French and American political experiments seem silly at best and dangerous at worst.
Is a malevolent despot any worse than a democratically elected government gone bad? (Don’t forget, Robert Mugabe was elected president of Zimbabwe.) On the other hand, could a virtuous president turn the American bureaucracy around and make it a righteous tool of God? That’s very doubtful, given the current state of affairs inside the Beltway. But in a bad monarchy, a benevolent despot could turn things around almost immediately. The story of Robin Hood could only have a happy ending in a land where the bureaucrats don’t run the country. If he were an American, his best hope would be to eventually get elected to congress—it doesn’t quite have the same romance.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating the immediate return to power of the royal families in Romania, France, Russia, Denmark, et. al. (Although I think the crown prince of Liechtenstein is doing a fine job at the moment in the face of the crimes against Liechtenstein at the hands of the democratically elected German government. Hang in their Prince Alois!) What I am calling for is that those of us who espouse American-style representative government step back and consider our own biases that blind us. Given the right context, Democracy can be a good thing. Given a slightly wrong context, it can be overwhelmingly evil and an affront to God.
Similarly, I am not giving up on my Libertarianism. As those unwashed and smelly terrorists from the thirteen colonies observed, no government owns its citizens, and any government that seeks to control their lives (or as Orwell observed, their thoughts) deserves to be overthrown. But this does not make the sovereign individual any better than a sovereign government. Both ultimately need to be in service to God because sovereignty belongs only to God. A benevolent despot often understands that. I know of no contemporary democracy that does.
Copyright © 2008 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
You are free to distribute as long as attribution and web address is included.
Site support by C T E K