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Plunder by Proxy

By

Leonard E. Read

Saturday, September 01, 1956

“They who employ force by proxy, are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it themselves.” Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, 1865

The popularity of Robin Hood derives from the fact that he robbed the rich to aid the poor. Let it be acknowledged that he was popular not with the few he robbed but with the poor he aided, they being the more numerous.

Robin would not have been popular even with the poor had he robbed the rich to aid himself. Nor would the poor have been popular had they robbed the rich to aid themselves.

However, the rich were no less robbed by reason of Robin’s doing the robbing. Nor were the recipients of stolen goods any the less thieves because someone else did their stealing.

The issue in this fiction is not robbery, for that has been established. The issue is: Why, when someone else does one’s stealing, is there an absence of a guilty conscience, a sense of absolution? Can anything be done about it?

The analogue to this Robin Hood fiction is the taking-from-some-giving-to-others reality of our own political establishments. The recipients of subsidies, for instance, have no more sense of guilt than did Robin’s “beneficiaries.” Absolution is assumed, and for the same reason: Someone else—in this case, the government—does the plundering and the bestowing.

As long as this blind spot prevails, it will induce a feeling of absolution; and as long as this false feeling persists, political plunder will be increasingly embraced as proper national policy.

What can be done to replace this blind spot with understanding?

A bit of imagination may suffice. Take the recipient of a farm subsidy as an example. Let the government policy of subsidization remain exactly as it is. It is decreed that Farmer Jones (he may be rich or he may be poor) is to receive $1,000 as payment for taking some of his acreage out of production. But instead of the government forcibly collecting this amount in taxes, Farmer Jones is assigned a policeman and authorized by the government to call personally on all American families, rich and poor alike, and forcibly collect from each a specified amount. Disregard, please, the inefficiency of this type of plunder. Think only of Jones personally doing the collecting, with his policeman in tow, of course.

One can readily see what would happen the moment such personal plunder replaces impersonal government plunder. The blind spot would cease to exist. Guilt would stand where absolution had stood. Farmer Jones would no more use force to collect one penny from Widow Doakes or 50 cents from Mr. Gotrocks than he would steal his neighbor’s cow.

It isn’t necessary to adopt this collection plan to be rid of spoliation. It is only necessary to understand that morally there is not an iota of distinction between the collecting and disbursing method now in practice and the one here depicted.

The difference between the impersonal and personal methods is not moral but psychological, an unwholesome gap in thinking. The impersonal evokes a false absolution; the personal, if merely imagined, compels us to see that we would act solely on our own integrity and moral scruples. []

The Field of Personal Responsibility

It must be remembered that 95 per cent of the peace, order, and welfare existing in human society is always produced by the conscientious practice of man-to-man justice and person-to-person charity. When any part of this important domain of personal virtue is transferred to government, that part is automatically released from the restraints of morality and put into the area of conscienceless coercion. The field of personal responsibility is thus reduced at the same time and to the same extent that the boundaries of irresponsibility are enlarged.

Government cannot manage these fields of human welfare with the justice, economy, and effectiveness that are possible when these same fields are the direct responsibility of morally sensitive human beings. This loss of justice, economy, and effectiveness is increased in the proportion that such governmental management is centralized.

Clarence Manion, The Key to Peace

Source: https://fee.org/articles/plunder-by-proxy/

the political problem here

By

You have to be a registered Republican to get elected to public office in Elbert County. You don’t have to uphold any ideals normally associated with the party, and an activist minority here loudly prefers that you don’t. Party affiliation in Elbert County tells you about as much as hair color. It’s a non-dispositive attribute.

This greatly complicates matters around election time because the signals that people normally use to read the political landscape aren’t reliable. Candidates have constituencies, but the constituencies don’t know each other and aren’t identified unless they out themselves.

Politics used to be a social affair where people could air their views and engage each other with some expectation of understanding. Political parties aren’t really necessary for that to happen. But if they exist it would be nice if they meant something because the two political parties in America now speak different languages, and they don’t generally understand each other very well.

In Elbert County, however, politics are bifurcated. They are de facto non-party, under a de jure party system. On the one hand, a common party affiliation leads to an expectation of not-wildly-divergent political views, while on the other hand, wildly-divergent political views pop up under the Elbert County Republican rubric all the time.

Moreover, the minority use this confounded landscape as a tactic to ratchet the majority into the minority’s way of doing things. Under the flags of  transparency, regulation, and accountability, they use subterfuge, coercion, and harassment. Like rust, the militancy never rests.

Every now and then an activist will carelessly or proudly name-drop a dash of Marx, an Alynsky rule, or a big government maxim. But they rarely get called on it because, after all, who would expect to meet a communist principle in a Republican framework?

When someone has the temerity to challenge their leftism, the shock and dismay that anyone could even think something so dastardly about the little angels comes pouring out in teachable moments of politically correct speech proscriptions. The collectivist problem (in the Republican framework) isn’t relevant, but talking about it is a high crime.

A reasonable person would think communism to be a dead philosophy. Didn’t the Berlin wall come down? Wasn’t the Russian parliament attacked by tanks? But as the Sanders campaign and the Left’s current violence on American streets are showing, communism is alive here. It’s only dead or dying in countries that have actually been governed by it.

Elbert County’s Left never got the memo. And many of them became Republicans.

Will the coming generations cure this political mess in Elbert County? With so much institutionalized denial in local politics, with an activist minority who prefer to operate without criticism under artifice and pretense, and with the young conditioned in school to look first to government for solutions, I expect not.

A return to a functioning two-party system in Elbert County wouldn’t, by itself, fix the negative consequences of subterfuge. We have an ethical deficiency, and that’s a little more difficult to remedy.

James Madison, Property

By

James Madison, Property

29 Mar. 1792
Papers 14:266–68

This term in its particular application means “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.”

In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.

In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property.

In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.

He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.

He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.

He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.

In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho’ from an opposite cause.

Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.

According to this standard of merit, the praise of affording a just securing to property, should be sparingly bestowed on a government which, however scrupulously guarding the possessions of individuals, does not protect them in the enjoyment and communication of their opinions, in which they have an equal, and in the estimation of some, a more valuable property.

More sparingly should this praise be allowed to a government, where a man’s religious rights are violated by penalties, or fettered by tests, or taxed by a hierarchy. Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man’s house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man’s conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest. A magistrate issuing his warrants to a press gang, would be in his proper functions in Turkey or Indostan, under appellations proverbial of the most compleat despotism.

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called. What must be the spirit of legislation where a manufacturer of linen cloth is forbidden to bury his own child in a linen shroud, in order to favour his neighbour who manufactures woolen cloth; where the manufacturer and wearer of woolen cloth are again forbidden the economical use of buttons of that material, in favor of the manufacturer of buttons of other materials!

A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species: where arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied, by an unfeeling policy, as another spur; in violation of that sacred property, which Heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him, in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities.

If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property; which provides that none shall be taken directly even for public use without indemnification to the owner, and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties; nay more, which indirectly violates their property, in their actual possessions, in the labor that acquires their daily subsistence, and in the hallowed remnant of time which ought to relieve their fatigues and soothe their cares, the influence [inference?] will have been anticipated, that such a government is not a pattern for the United States.

If the United States mean to obtain or deserve the full praise due to wise and just governments, they will equally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights: they will rival the government that most sacredly guards the former; and by repelling its example in violating the latter, will make themselves a pattern to that and all other governments.


The Papers of James Madison. Edited by William T. Hutchinson et al. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962–77 (vols. 1–10); Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977–(vols. 11–).

Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Aristotle

"Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved."

Karl Popper

“A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.”