Chapter IX

SOCIALISM AND THE CONSTITUTION

This brings us to the central point of this study. It must be obvious to any honest mind that a socialist society cannot be organized and conducted by the federal government under our Constitution. The powers of the central government are all derived from the Constitution and these are set out with the greatest particularity. The extent and meaning of these several powers had been defined over and over by the Supreme Court. There is no one sentence in the Constitution that would authorize the federal government to socialize our medical facilities, to regulate or finance our schools, to engage in industrial and mercantile enterprises, or to carry on any of that multitude of activities which have, as a matter of record, brought the federal government into almost every kind of business in one degree or another. There is no way in which this can be done save by a bold political iconoclast who despises law, constitutions, restraints of every sort—the only limitation being such as might arise from an angry population. This did not appear, of course, first because the whole structure of our government was hidden behind the masquerade of war and the orgy of spending fantastic billions borrowed to fight wars to save “democracy” in Europe and Asia, while it was trampled on here in America.

I have said that the great limitations on the federal government were specifically set down in the Constitution. The Constitution gave it no broad grant of powers. Its functions were set out specifically in Article I, Section 8. There is a general grant to lay and collect taxes, duties and excises. Then there is a careful enumeration of the purposes for which taxes and duties may be levied. These are to:

Borrow money on federal credit.

Regulate commerce with foreign nations and between the several states and the Indian tribes.

Establish uniform rules for naturalization and bankruptcies.

Coin money, regulate its value and the value of foreign coins, and fix the standards of weights and measures.

Punish counterfeiters of coin and the securities of the United States.

Establish post offices and post roads.

Establish a system of copyrights and patents.

Provide for courts inferior to the Supreme Court.

Define and punish piracies and felonies on the high seas and make rules governing captures on land and sea.

Raise and support armies, but appropriations for such purposes can last for but two years.

Maintain a navy.

Make rules governing land and naval forces.

Provide for calling the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrection or repel invasion.

Exercise exclusive jurisdiction over the Nation’s capital and places purchased in states for federal purposes.

Make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into effect the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by the Constitution in the government of the United States or any department or officer thereof.

There is nothing in the Constitution which authorizes the Congress to engage in anything save those functions which are enumerated in the Constitution. The whole purpose of the framers of the Constitution, as well as of the men who ruled our government for nearly a century and a half was to bring into existence a government that possessed all the powers necessary to defend the nation from foreign enemies and to guarantee to all the citizens certain great fundamental rights of freemen, and to leave to the states—the several small republics—the powers essential to the government of a free people.

Thus, for the first time the great powers of government were no longer committed to the same set of hands or to the management of a single administration. All the powers needed to govern a free people were present, but so arranged that these powers could not be used on any broad scale to oppress them. Here was government—not one huge and formidable government machine in the hands of a single administration, but a great central authority which would protect the people against external enemies and regulate a few and highly limited number of social arrangements on a national scale, while far the greater powers of government were left with the states—13 smaller separate republics. Here was the perfection of government for free men. And it remained on this model for 144 years—the admiration of the world and a beacon light to men everywhere who yearned for freedom.

It will not do to say that times have changed, that the social and economic life of the people in a machine age calls for a government equipped with more formidable powers than those enumerated in the Constitution. If this be so, then the means of increasing the powers of the federal government are specifically stated in the Constitution. This can be done only by constitutional amendment—by going back to the states with a plea for more power. This was done on several occasions. On one such occasion an almost fatal blunder was made when the Constitution was amended to permit the imposition by Congress of a federal income tax, without limit. The federal government never had the power to raise excessive taxes under the Constitution as it stood for 123 years. Indeed, it was severely handicapped. To correct this situation the Income Tax Amendment was adopted. The great blunder in this incident was the failure to put a drastic limitation on the amount of the tax permitted. Some argument could be made for a severely limited income tax, but none whatever for such a tax without limit. However, many men at the time felt that there was already a sharp limitation in the Constitution that would automatically limit the tax—that is, the very limited number of subjects over which the federal government had authority. But the granting of unlimited taxing power was a crime against our system of government of tragic dimensions, as we shall see.

The second crime which completed the war on our Republic was to come much later—and we shall consider it shortly—through the infamy of a collection of judges packed onto the Supreme Court for the specific purpose of performing an operation on the Constitution by judicial decree. Unable, as they knew, to change the Constitution by lawful amendment, the radical elements then in possession of the mind of President Roosevelt hit upon a plan to pack the Supreme Court with a group of radical judges who could be depended on to perform the necessary surgery on the Constitution—which they did and continued to do with shameless abandon.

The socialist society which these elements envisaged required a powerful central government that could assert its authority over every sector—indeed every county or neighborhood—in the land, with total power over the economic life of the people. It could own the railroads, all electric power, all the great instruments of communication. It would assert ownership over all the great natural resources of the nation—coal, iron, copper, oil. It would own banks, all the agencies of saving and insurance. It would own or regulate all our farms and mines, operating what it believed suited its purposes and subjecting the others to its regulations. It would assert the right to tax and tax, demanding the bulk of the profits from our industries and a heavy cut on whatever income a private citizen might have. It would be a government endowed with such vast and compulsive powers that once any political or economic group got possession of its dread machinery, no man would dare lift his hand—save the darling of some opposition party pledged to operate the socialist monstrosity better.

To bring on the socialist society in the United States the first blow was struck—43 years ago—by a nation that had no suspicion of the gravity of the breach it had made in our Constitution by the Income Tax Amendment. It would be years later that the second great assault would be made. It must be clear to the reader who has followed these pages that the federal government under our Constitution did not possess any powers required to organize a socialist society. This had never been questioned in 145 years. And the socialists of the United States up to 1937 realized this fact. No one has defined our system more clearly, as we have seen, than one of the darling philosophers of our modern socialist revolutionaries, the late Charles Beard.20

Beard clearly recognized the all-important fact—and he did so with approval—that “no faction or political party could get control of the whole government.” Yet a very small group—which would become dangerously powerful—insisted that it could get into its hands at one time not only all the instruments and weapons of government but all the vast installations of the economic system, thus creating on these shores a monster of political and economic power. Once this monster came into the hands of any ruling group the last feeble spark of freedom would be extinguished.

It was the considered judgment of our people and their leaders that government itself—however essential to orderly and free life—could be, if not curbed and controlled, the instrument of tyranny. Now a new school had arisen which proposed not merely to dismantle the Constitution and bring at last all the powers of government to the center, but to add to their political power the control of all the engines of economic life.

An honest man, bent on making this into a socialist society, might well offer an amendment to the Constitution running about as follows:

The authority of the federal government shall extend to every form of economic action in the nation, including the right to acquire by purchase or condemnation any or all types of industrial or agricultural or mercantile enterprises, including all forms of transportation, electric-power generating and distributing systems and any other type of economic enterprise; provided the government compensate the owners justly; and that all such forms of economic enterprise not so conscripted by the federal government may be operated by private persons but under such plans and methods as may be determined and promulgated by the Congress.

Preposterous as this proposal may seem, this is precisely what the Planned Society—the Collectivist State—or the Socialist State, if you please, calls for.

20 See quotation from Beard at pp. 37-38.