Where Is Washington?

Kim du Toit
May 13, 2002
2:51 PM CDT

When asked how long the Republic would last, James Russell Lowe famously remarked, ”The Republic will endure as long as the ideals and principles of the Founders remain dominant in the hearts of the people.”

Someone else less-famously remarked that the framers of the United States Constitution had it easy when they were drawing up that wonderful document: they had the august and brooding presence of George Washington sitting in the room with them while they wrote it. And if at any time an ignoble urge might come upon them, they had only to think of Washington’s frown of approbation for that urge to be curbed --and they had the certain knowledge that whatever they produced would eventually have to be subjected to the stern scrutiny of Washington’s unbending honor.

Where is Washington now?

It is clear that people in government need some kind of moral compass, some kind of final arbiter, in order that their machinations be kept in check, and that the baser side of their natures be cowed at the thought of awful displeasure.

In the past, governments were set up so that there may be several checks, several such arbiters—in monarchies, the sovereign; in republics, a deliberative, disinterested body. In the Westminster model, there were two such checks: the upper body (such as the House of Lords in Britain and the Senate in the United States, as originally designed), and the sovereign or president, without whose final signature no legislation could be imposed on the populace. In this way, capricious or spiteful legislation could be tempered, amended or discarded before it caused long-lasting mischief --that the baser instincts of venal men, of demagogues, of faulty philosophies or of mob rule could not become the law of the land.

The Founding Fathers took this process one step further, and allowed for a final body of arbitration, the Supreme Court, an unelected body of unimpeachable integrity, not subject to the whims of the electoral process, who could, in the last resort, be relied upon to halt the process of ignoble sentiment into bad law and oppressive government.

All that has fallen apart.

The Senate, once an appointive body accountable to their respective states, became little less than a longer-term crowd of vote-grabbers and fund raisers, thanks to the ghastly 17th Amendment.  The “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” is about as deliberate as a leaf falling in the wind, and about as substantial.

The House of Lords has been systematically dismantled by a long process of cynical machination, ending with the death-blow delivered by the unspeakable Tony Blair: its centuries-long heritage of largely-impartial arbitration and deliberation has, finally, been reduced to an undistinguished and grubby institution of party political patronage.

The monarchy and presidency have both become rubber-stamp imprimaturs, their vetoes swayable by popular polls, an irresponsible Press and the threat of parliamentary quid pro quo. George W. Bush signed into law the awful and unconstitutional Campaign Finance Reform Act, no doubt hoping that the backstop of the Supreme Court will relieve him of his guilty conscience at having signed it.

They didn’t.

And this week, the Supreme Court itself relinquished forever its role of unimpeachable honor, when it held that the depiction of child pornography was okay, as long as no actual children were involved in its making.

These are the straws in the wind, the awful indicators that our Republic is on the brink of implosion.

Taxation in the United States has become so onerous that wealthy citizens have been compelled to renounce their U.S. citizenship in order to escape the greedy clutches of the IRS. What? People have, through hard work and sound judgment, become successful and wealthy--but instead of enjoying the fruits of their years of effort, they are forced to leave the greatest country on Earth? How dire must that tax penalty be, that people are prepared to leave the United States, and become instead citizens of another, lesser country?

And what did Congress do? Instead of recognizing the iniquity and amending the tax code, Congress passed a law stating that taxation of ex-citizens will continue for ten years(!) after their citizenship has been relinquished. The condemnation implicit in renunciation, and the shame Congress should have felt at its manifestation, were nowhere to be found—no doubt trampled to death in the rush to legislate the escaping money back into their thieving little hands.

But rich folks aren’t the only ones bitten by iniquitous taxation. For the same reasons, corporations have been forced to reincorporate in countries with less-onerous taxation rates. In some instances, such reincorporation has spelled the difference between staying in business and bankruptcy. Only this week, Stanley Tools, an old, established company known worldwide, decided to leave their Connecticut home and reincorporate in Bermuda, after realizing that they could pass on to their shareholders an annual savings of thirty million dollars, or else even increase employee salaries by the same amount.

What did Congress do? Firstly, the local government filed suit against Stanley to prevent them leaving. Next, Congress intimated that they were going to pass legislation that would continue to impose taxation on such companies, no doubt along the lines of the punitive conditions they had earlier applied to wealthy individuals who were forced to do the same. On a global scale, the horrible supranational OECD is trying to eliminate tax havens, imposing some ghastly universal tax rate on the entire world. Can you imagine what would happen if Congress tried to mandate state sales tax rates? Yet some socialist one-worlder Congressmen are backing the OECD, no doubt in the hope that this will save them from having to do the dirty work themselves.

Where is Washington?

Considering that this country was founded on the principle of hostility towards taxation, ask yourself this one question: if by some miracle you could bring George Washington back to life, what do you think he would say when you showed him the immense structure of the IRS building in the city that (ignobly) bears his name?

Moreover, what would Washington say about a tax code which takes by force nearly half of a person’s wages? About a tax code that taxes people after death? About a tax code that includes such envy-laden monstrosities as the alternative minimum tax? About a tax code that taxes both wages and profits?

I’ll tell you what Washington would say: “Never mind that tea nonsense: the situation is long past simple demonstrations. Grab that wondrous musket you call an ‘AK-47’, a couple of ropes, some barrels of tar and a sack of feathers, and let’s you and I go and have some fun. And after that, we can call out the militia.”