Envision Spokane v. the Constitution

August 7, 2009Contrarian 1 Comment »
Brad Read

Brad Read

At its Aug. 3 meeting the Spokane City Council considered a resolution to place a pair of advisory questions before the voters in the November elections. The two questions were, (1) Should the City seek “new funding sources” (e.g., new or increased taxes) to pay the costs expected to result should Envision Spokane’s “Community Bill of Rights” be approved by voters?, and (2) Should the City reallocate funds from other City programs to pay those costs? (Link to the meeting is here, select Part 2 of the August 3 Council meeting).

Naturally a number of “Bill of Frights” supporters were on hand to oppose the resolutions, accusing the Council of attempting to subvert the “democratic process” by misleading and scaring voters. Supporters of the resolutions (i.e., opponents of the “Bill of Frights”) and some Council members accused Envision Spokane, in turn, of misleading voters by repeatedly telling them that the BoF would impose no costs on the City — a claim stubbornly repeated by several boosters at the hearing, which no Council member swallowed. Even some of the BoF supporters seemed to find that claim a bit implausible, but suggested that voters could decide for themselves whether there would be costs — an equally implausible claim. Very few voters have the information or expertise to estimate the cost even of something as specific and and concrete as paving a block of street, much less the costs of something as broad and ill-defined as Envision Spokane’s menu of free lunches.

But the most telling testimony of the evening (which should have been the focus of the S-R’s coverage but wasn’t) was that of Brad Read, former chair of Spokane’s Human Rights Commission and ES’s Board President. As did other BoF proponents, Read accused the Council of “acting out of fear . . . of being afraid of democratic decision-making,” and of improperly attempting to influence the vote on the BoF initiative.

But then Read went on to declare that the US government was designed from the beginning to serve the interests of the “wealthy minority,” or, quoting James Madison, to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” — a comment of Madison’s often cited by leftist scholar Noam Chomsky as evidence of the aristocratic intentions of the Founders. Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, and the other founders, wary of the “tyranny of the majority,” rejected participatory democracy in favor of a constitutional republic, said Read. Hence “the structure that we live under in this country by law prevents people, neighborhoods, and the natural world from having a say in their own future . . . it is a system and a structure which as a matter of course and a matter of law excludes ‘we the people’ from deciding the future of our community. Real decisions — the allocation of power, wealth and resources — has been in the hands of a powerful, wealthy few.”

The BoF initiative, announced Read, “is about reprogramming government.”

So let there be no mistake about the aims of Initiative 2009-2: it is to restructure government in the US, beginning with Spokane. (Read’s declared aim and his analysis of American history, BTW, is adopted virtually verbatim from the gospels of CELDF, the Philadelphia law firm which inspired and organized Envision Spokane. Thomas Linzey, CELDF co-founder and guru, also spoke at the Council hearing).

Read is perfectly correct that Madison and the other founders had no intention of erecting a “participatory democracy” in which majorities held the power to “allocate power, wealth, and resources.” And wisely so. That is because wealth and resources, and any “power” which may flow from them, are not produced by those majorities and are not their property. Hence decisions regarding the disposition and distribution of that wealth and those resources are not theirs to make.

Read and his fellow ES zealots have bought into the “organic fallacy” and hence assume that all wealth and resources are the products and property, not of their producers and discoverers, but of “society,” which is therefore entitled to decide their allocation by majority rule. It is the same fallacious conception of society assumed by collectivist ideologues throughout history, from Plato to Marx and Mussolini. But the premise of that view is empirically false, and the conclusion incoherent.

Every dollar’s worth of wealth is produced by particular people; not by “society.” Every resource is produced or discovered by particular people, not by “society.” Decisions regarding the allocation and distribution of each dollar’s worth of wealth and resources reside with the person or persons who produced that dollar and with no one else. Each person’s “share” of the wealth and resources which may be found within a society is the share he or she has produced; it includes no part of the wealth or resources produced or discovered by others. The “tyranny of the majority” that Madison et al feared is precisely the power that Read and his comrades seek — the power of political majorities to seize by force, via the power of the State, wealth and resources which are products of the time, talents, and efforts of particular creative and resourceful individuals.

Populists like Read misunderstand the scope and justification of democracy because they misunderstand the structure of society itself. They assume that modern, civilized societies are organisms, coherent structures of interdependent “cells” — individual persons — obliged to contribute to the functioning and well-being of the social “organism” as a whole, which they imagine to be a moral agent and actor in its own right. But of course it is not; “society” is merely a collective term for a number of autonomous individuals with diverse, distinct, and often incompatible interests and goals who happen, by accident of birth, to occupy a common territory and are thus in a position to interact. They are not all pursuing a common goal or engaged in a common enterprise; instead, each of them is pursuing his or her own idiosyncratic goals — happiness as each of them individually defines it. They erect governments to protect their individual rights (which are the only rights there are), to operate a few necessary or convenient public facilities and services, and to manage the “natural commons” upon which they all depend.

The scope of democracy is necessarily limited to the legitimate scope and functions of government itself. But government is merely the organized force of a community, and thus is itself limited to those functions and circumstances in which one person is justified in exerting force against another. If an individual, in the absence of government, would have no right to exercise force against another for a particular purpose or in a particular situation, then neither can government have such a right for the same purpose or in the same situation. For example, one person may be justified in exerting force against another to prevent or redress a violation of his own or another’s rights. But he would not be justified in exerting it to seize someone else’s property for his own benefit, or to compel his neighbor to contribute to his favorite charity.

Democracy is merely a decision procedure; it is a method for reaching a decision when there are multiple decision-makers, all of whom have an equal right to make the decision. It is not a method for making and enforcing decisions which none of the decision makers has any right to make in the first place, such as how wealth is to be “allocated” in a society. The only wealth any person is entitled to allocate is the wealth he or she has produced. Democracy does not and cannot create a license to steal.

The Council’s resolutions do not interfere with democracy, Mr. Read. They only interfere with your misguided notion of what democracy is, what it entails, and what it allows.

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