Eternal Vigilance

Ralph L. Bayrer

Description

Your argument of how to protect the goose that laid the golden egg by defending freedom, civil society, and capitalism from the pernicious effects of Progressivism seems compelling to me. Moreover your account of the rise of progressivism in the U.S.is must reading for anyone who would take a stand on political issues. And no one who reads your accounts of the rise and fall of free-people-free market models of government in other societies can fail to agree with you about the value of government allowing the market to operate as freely as possible. It is a very informative summary of an enormous amount of data that I have not seen elsewhere, and a powerful empirical argument.
- Phillip Scribner, Associate Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, American University

Sujets

• Political Economy
• Political Science

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 19 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781796093230
• Langue: English

Extrait

ETERNAL VIGILANCE
 
GUARDING AGAINST THE PREDATORY STATE
 
 
 
 
 
RALPH L. BAYRER
 
COPYRIGHT © 2020 BY RALPH BAYRER.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER:
2020904693
ISBN:
HARDCOVER
978-1-7960-9325-4

SOFTCOVER
978-1-7960-9324-7

EBOOK
978-1-7960-9323-0
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Rev. date: 06/17/2020
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
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CONTENTS
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1      The Free Extended Order Of Human Cooperation (FEO)
The small government/high liberty model gets it right. That model is the optimal form of governance for maintaining individual liberty and producing wealth for all segments of society. It is predicated on: (1) the civil and property rights of free individuals and (2) a circumscribed government limited to ensuring security, enforcing contracts, preventing fraud, and preserving the federal rights of the states. These values represent the leading edge of societal evolution, in which tribal values and medieval thinking gave way to more individual autonomy, less communal meddling, and arm’s length (impersonal) financial and commercial transactions.
Chapter 2      Governmental Predation Is Ubiquitous
The inclination to predation is in our genes; it is ineradicable. We have millennia of experience with predation between and within societies. Examples of predation under tyranny and modern kleptocracies are commonplace and intuitively obvious. Predatory instincts hidden inside democratic governments also abound. They hide in the form of good intentions and high sentiment so as to extract wealth from society in favor of special interests and unachievable utopian goals.
Chapter 3      Controlling Political Predation
Societal evolution has produced political mechanisms to control predation. Even prehistoric man found ways (usually intuitive methods) to prevent one man from becoming despotic. These methods, however, grew less and less effective as societies grew larger and rulers more distant from those ruled. Nonetheless, using philosophy and institutional trial and error, societies have found ways to control the worst forms of predation and their effects on the free extended order. It was the U.S. Constitution that established the most evolved form of social organization at the date of its ratification.
Chapter 4      The Constitution Undermined
On the basis of good intentions and sentiment lacking scientific foundation, progressive forces found ways to undermine the bulwarks of liberty provided by the Constitution, leading to mis-governance and enormous costs.
Chapter 5      Costly Good Intentions
Escaping constitutional limits, progressive forces pursued good intentions on an increasingly unaffordable scale. This involved making impossibly expensive promises that surely will not be honored in the long run and will impair growth so as to lead to likely future fiscal crises.
Chapter 6      Cautionary Examples Of Representative Government
The forces of human nature that have led to our financial predicament are universal. There are some, like Greece, who have made a mess of things still un-remedied; others, like Brazil, have great potential but always cycle back to instability. More useful examples are those of New Zealand, Sweden, and Canada who, through utopian policies, hit financial barriers that left them no choice but to commit to deep reform, whose outcomes provide lessons for all.
Chapter 7      Countries Aligned With The Feo
Other democratic governments have escaped this dynamic through effective institutional control of predation; examples include Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Hong Kong (New Zealand and Sweden after their deep reforms). Of course, their methods differ from those outlined in the U.S. Constitution, suggesting for consideration alternative institutional methods of controlling political predation.
Chapter 8      Threats To The Free Extended Order : Sentamentality Versus Experience
Despite the superior performance of the FEO worldwide and a multitude of cautionary examples, progressive leftist forces are uncowed and remain in full attack mode. Lacking a historical perspective, they employ now-discredited medieval notions such as “fairness” that are as unworkable now as they were then. To do this, they have developed an impressive updated array of seductive arguments that are based on sentiment and good intentions but are oblivious to scientific evidence and historical precedent.
Chapter 9      Affirming The Free Extended Order
In the aid of reform and renewal, the first order of business is to point the way forward and meet the ideological threats head-on with an analytic framework and evidence.
Chapter 10     Strengthening The Free Extende d Order And Thwarting A Crisis
With clear empirical principles in hand, we can reform our political system by restoring the spirit and efficacy of the original Constitution; perhaps amending it to limit our free-spending ways and to secure our liberty and property.
Works Cited
DEDICATION
I dedicate this work to my life partner Kenneth Vincent George for his many years of loving support for this project.
INTRODUCTION
“Our civilization depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation.” 1
– Friedrich von Hayek
“Men are qualified for civil liberties, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites: in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity.”
– Edmund Burke 2
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”– Thomas Jefferson
This book is a renewed call for eternal vigilance in the defense of liberty, whether against simple tyranny or vis-à-vis the state as a predatory agent. Its central argument is that man’s discovery of ways to successfully cooperate with his fellow man on community, national, and global scales in the face of ubiquitous predatory instincts is his greatest achievement and the foundation for all advanced civilizations.
We are well into the beginning of the twenty-first century. We enjoy immense human accomplishments in the areas of material well-being and self-governance, yet we confront a bewildering array of forces attacking the very foundations of that success. More alarming is the prospect that these attacks have already so weakened our social structures that we will leave an unaffordable and debilitating inheritance to future generations. These circumstances may well be the single most important political challenge confronting our society – and, indeed, almost all modern societies. One key to successfully addressing this challenge is a better understanding of human nature itself – its predatory side as well as its creative/productive side.
Nobel Prize winner Friedrich von Hayek identifies human cooperation as the basis for meeting humans’ material needs when he characterizes civilization itself as an extended order of human cooperation. 3 The achievement of civilization was not so much learning to cooperate fruitfully since, as Hayek notes, this occurs spontaneously according to basic economic laws. Civilization’s great achievement was protecting this system of cooperation that spontaneously unfolds from the predatory forces that are as deeply rooted in human nature as ambition.
Accordingly, this book’s main theme shows how societies developed the essential values and institutions that optimize the functioning of that extended order. That order exists everywhere human communities exist; it can function well or clumsily. However, since its optimal form exists alongside liberty and freedom of all kinds, the book examines governance in terms of the predicates of what this author characterizes as a Free Extended Order of Human Cooperation (FEO).
In the face of predation, particularly within government, keeping the extended order free is no mean feat. If predation is not checked, vibrant wealth creation ebbs to a trickle. With effective control, however, wealth creation and all other human aspirations become more realizable – liberty, good health, a clean environment, and self-actualization by maximizing one’s talents. While societies have made great advances in these areas, predatory instincts continue to operate in various forms, becoming more ingenious with each generation. They cannot be controlled by paper constitutions or political institutions but require eternal, vigilant oversight by the people.
More specifically, to further clarify these concepts, this book: (1) defines the elements of the FEO, (2) characterizes the forces of predation that must be countered to realize its benefits, (3) outlines the institutions that have arisen to combat such predation – notably the U.S. Co