This morning I was impressed by what Cicero said in De Officiis (On Duties):
"For a man to take something from his neighbor and to profit by his neighbor's loss is more contrary to Nature than is death or poverty ... [for] injustice is fatal to social life and fellowship between man and man ...
But this principle is established not by Nature's laws alone (that is, by the common rules of equity), but also by the statutes of particular communities ...
In like manner it is more in accord with Nature to emulate the great Hercules and undergo the greatest toil and trouble for the sake of aiding or saving the world, if possible, than to live in seclusion, not only free from all care, but reveling in pleasures and abounding in wealth ...
It follows that man, if he is obedient to Nature, cannot do harm to his fellow-man ...
If the individual appropriates to selfish ends what should be devoted to the common good, all human fellowship will be destroyed." [de Officiis, translation by Walter Miller, book III, sections V and VI]
First, an apology to women, for surely while Cicero speaks only of men the same observations apply to women.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a product of his class, the Roman nobility, and of his times. He admits to mainly just putting into Latin what the wise men had written about in Greek. He writes this work after the fall of the Republic, which was a sort of very limited democracy, and which had given way to a dictatorship. He does not think the vast estates of his fellow Senators should have been seized, broken up, and given to ordinary Roman citizens. That is the particular theft he begins decrying. He does not worry about the thefts that led to those vast estates in the first place. He probably owned slaves.
Given that, I still think Cicero is speaking some core truths. You don't need the gods (whichever ones your culture believes in) to form basic ethical principles. You should work for your own good. You should not steal from, or defraud, other people.
People don't get rich from working. They can prosper (or not) from working, but to become wealthy one must either steal, defraud, or in the very least overcharge people.
Looking back through human history, the best way to cut down on the fraudulent acquisition of great wealth is through tax policy. When the U.S. was last truly prosperous, in the 1950s, we had a good tax policy. The maximum tax rate was near 90%, but that only applied to the richest Americans. CEO's of large corporation focused on running their companies for the benefit of everyone (shareholders, employees, and customers) because paying themselves millions or billions of dollars would have just meant a visit from the IRS. Despite that there was no shortage of rich people in 1961, when President Kennedy began his drive to lower tax rates on billionaires (coincidently, his father was a billionaire, and he would have become so by inheritance if he had lived longer).
Perhaps the 90% rate of the Eisenhower Era was a bit onerous, but would you rather make $30,000 a year and pay 15% in federal taxes, or $1 billion a year and pay 90% taxes? Unless you are real deficient in math skills, you'll take the 90% tax rate.
Hopefully, as a thoughtful person, you will support my Log Tax Plan. I hope to find some member of the House of Representatives who will introduce it after the fall elections.
Even our Founding Fathers, rich by colonial standards as some of them were, opposed the creation of a nobility in the U.S. They called it a titled nobility in the Constitution, but reasonable people realized that great wealth, even without a title like Baron or Duke, is a threat to a democratic republic like ours. The federal inheritance tax was implemented largely to prevent family fortunes of too great a size from spanning generations.
The corrupting influence of inherited wealth, and of rapidly accumulated wealth by robber barons like Jobs, Whitney, Gaits, Bezos, Page, Brin, and Zuckerberg, have overridden the safety features our economy and government formerly enjoyed. Taxes on vast inheritances can be as low as zero, taxes on capital gains are only 15%, and marginal rates on wages are lower than any time since the 1920's.
These low taxes on the rich have not resulted in job growth or economic prosperity.
Meanwhile the U.S. military and homeland security apparatus have run up vast debts that ordinary American workers, while struggling to keep a roof overhead and feed their dependents (often now including their senior parents), are expected to pay off.
The system is crazy. It is against Nature. If it is not fixed soon, expect it to crumble into Chaos.
Showing posts with label nobility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nobility. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Monday, December 5, 2011
Richard Grossman, Compost in Peace
Richard Grossman, a noted political activist in the United States of America, died this November 22, 2011. Richard was known for his criticism of for-profit corporate control of the American (and global) political system, economy, and culture. Richard had no issues with criticizing other dissidents who did not agree with him on strategy and tactics. To honor his memory, I will not refrain from criticism (as is typical in a requiem) while I share my personal experiences about Richard.
Richard tried to influence the discourse of American environmental and pro-democracy dissidents, with varying degrees of success. I had never heard of him until my wife, Jan Edwards, began working with Alliance for Democracy and made herself the first modern crusader against the legal doctrine of corporate personhood (c. 1999). I could not say exactly when Richard came into the mix, as I was never "wowed" by him or his organization, POCLAD (Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy).
But at some point, when Jan was determined to get the City of Point Arena to pass a law against corporate personhood, I became aware that she was talking on the telephone to one Richard Grossman, among others. Richard never really adapted to computers (he was born on August 10, 1943), but large packages of xeroxed copies of old articles about corporate power began arriving at our house.
Jan had a fixed idea that corporate personhood was the central evil of the modern era. Richard did not agree with that; he tried to expand her attention to other issues of corporate power. But he did provide us with a lot of material about corporate personhood, notably Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights by Carl J. Mayer [Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 4, March 1990] and a series of articles from the 1950's by Howard Jay Graham. These were fine, but too much, too fast to serve as introductory material.
No one at POCLAD had written anything substantial about corporate personhood. Jan, assigning duties to our small local team of activists, decided I should write the first modern introduction to the topic. This resulted in Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy.
With a million things going wrong in the world, do-gooders argue among themselves about priorities, strategies and tactics. Richard stated, strongly, that he thought the environmental and social justice movements were taking the wrong approaches. He believed that because of corporate power activists might win an occasional point (the Clean Air Act, or temporarily protecting an individual habitat) but were regularly losing ground on the whole.
Richard Grossman wanted to challenge fundamental legal doctrines that (with money) are the foundations of corporate power. These include, but are not limited to, corporate charters being treated as contracts, the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, limited liability, and the ability of corporate money to influence elections.
The question activists asked, in return, was how was that to be done? What was to be sacrificed (streams, mountaintops, oceans, human beings) in the meantime if activists stopped what they were doing and all ran to law libraries and spent a half-century arguing for legal reform?
Richard's point was not to train more environmental or social justice lawyers. They are plentiful enough, so much so that many can't earn a living, or even end up being employed by corporations. He did not want to fight corporations within the law. He wanted to change the law.
Changing the law really happens in only one of three ways. You can win Supreme Court cases. You can change the law with legislation. Or you can have a revolution and write the law anew.
The Revolution never came in Richard Grossman's lifetime. This is the sad fate of most revolutionaries. I cannot fault Richard for trying, and for thinking outside the usual boxes.
Knowing a little history, however, makes one wonder if Richard ever deserved to be the intellectual leader of American dissidents, as was clearly his wish. Richard moved from being the executive director of Greenpeace in the 1980's to a messenger of the nature of corporate power.
It was not a new message. You probably did not know old-time American Communist Party members, but they talked a lot about corporate power. It tied in well with their strategy of radicalizing labor unions so that the working class (or at least its authoritarian vanguard) could come to power in this bastion of capitalism. Anarchists, too, long pre-dated Grossman in their analysis of the System, but did not care to try to change obscure doctrines like corporate personhood. They wanted, and want, to go straight to building a new society out of the ashes of the old.
Without the legal framework of corporate power we would most likely just have private ownership of large businesses, much as is the case in the Soviet Union today.
How do you de-power the ruling class when they can buy politicians and courts and, yes, can even divert activist organizations simply by strategic donations of money? Richard could never answer that question. Perhaps simply raising taxes on the rich, in particular with estate taxes, would do the trick. Taxes could break up the growing "title of nobility" that the Constitution warns against in Article I, Section 9.
Perhaps with a third party. Perhaps with the tactics being practiced by CELDF or MoveToAmend (both groups spawned by Grossman). Perhaps by anarchists, or communists, or social democrats, or revolutionary environmentalists. Why, it is not absolutely impossible that reforms could come from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
No one knows. Richard Grossman's greatest trait was his willingness to revise his views. He kept revising them until the day he died. Maybe if more people did more thinking outside their usual boxes, we might collectively find a solution that can transition us to an environmentally sound, ecologically sustainable, and culturally rich world.
Richard tried to influence the discourse of American environmental and pro-democracy dissidents, with varying degrees of success. I had never heard of him until my wife, Jan Edwards, began working with Alliance for Democracy and made herself the first modern crusader against the legal doctrine of corporate personhood (c. 1999). I could not say exactly when Richard came into the mix, as I was never "wowed" by him or his organization, POCLAD (Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy).
But at some point, when Jan was determined to get the City of Point Arena to pass a law against corporate personhood, I became aware that she was talking on the telephone to one Richard Grossman, among others. Richard never really adapted to computers (he was born on August 10, 1943), but large packages of xeroxed copies of old articles about corporate power began arriving at our house.
Jan had a fixed idea that corporate personhood was the central evil of the modern era. Richard did not agree with that; he tried to expand her attention to other issues of corporate power. But he did provide us with a lot of material about corporate personhood, notably Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights by Carl J. Mayer [Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 4, March 1990] and a series of articles from the 1950's by Howard Jay Graham. These were fine, but too much, too fast to serve as introductory material.
No one at POCLAD had written anything substantial about corporate personhood. Jan, assigning duties to our small local team of activists, decided I should write the first modern introduction to the topic. This resulted in Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy.
With a million things going wrong in the world, do-gooders argue among themselves about priorities, strategies and tactics. Richard stated, strongly, that he thought the environmental and social justice movements were taking the wrong approaches. He believed that because of corporate power activists might win an occasional point (the Clean Air Act, or temporarily protecting an individual habitat) but were regularly losing ground on the whole.
Richard Grossman wanted to challenge fundamental legal doctrines that (with money) are the foundations of corporate power. These include, but are not limited to, corporate charters being treated as contracts, the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, limited liability, and the ability of corporate money to influence elections.
The question activists asked, in return, was how was that to be done? What was to be sacrificed (streams, mountaintops, oceans, human beings) in the meantime if activists stopped what they were doing and all ran to law libraries and spent a half-century arguing for legal reform?
Richard's point was not to train more environmental or social justice lawyers. They are plentiful enough, so much so that many can't earn a living, or even end up being employed by corporations. He did not want to fight corporations within the law. He wanted to change the law.
Changing the law really happens in only one of three ways. You can win Supreme Court cases. You can change the law with legislation. Or you can have a revolution and write the law anew.
The Revolution never came in Richard Grossman's lifetime. This is the sad fate of most revolutionaries. I cannot fault Richard for trying, and for thinking outside the usual boxes.
Knowing a little history, however, makes one wonder if Richard ever deserved to be the intellectual leader of American dissidents, as was clearly his wish. Richard moved from being the executive director of Greenpeace in the 1980's to a messenger of the nature of corporate power.
It was not a new message. You probably did not know old-time American Communist Party members, but they talked a lot about corporate power. It tied in well with their strategy of radicalizing labor unions so that the working class (or at least its authoritarian vanguard) could come to power in this bastion of capitalism. Anarchists, too, long pre-dated Grossman in their analysis of the System, but did not care to try to change obscure doctrines like corporate personhood. They wanted, and want, to go straight to building a new society out of the ashes of the old.
Without the legal framework of corporate power we would most likely just have private ownership of large businesses, much as is the case in the Soviet Union today.
How do you de-power the ruling class when they can buy politicians and courts and, yes, can even divert activist organizations simply by strategic donations of money? Richard could never answer that question. Perhaps simply raising taxes on the rich, in particular with estate taxes, would do the trick. Taxes could break up the growing "title of nobility" that the Constitution warns against in Article I, Section 9.
Perhaps with a third party. Perhaps with the tactics being practiced by CELDF or MoveToAmend (both groups spawned by Grossman). Perhaps by anarchists, or communists, or social democrats, or revolutionary environmentalists. Why, it is not absolutely impossible that reforms could come from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
No one knows. Richard Grossman's greatest trait was his willingness to revise his views. He kept revising them until the day he died. Maybe if more people did more thinking outside their usual boxes, we might collectively find a solution that can transition us to an environmentally sound, ecologically sustainable, and culturally rich world.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Fred Koch, Stalin, and Social Security
The Koch brothers, or the two of them that own Koch Industries, Charles and David, are now well known financiers of the Tea Party and, more generally, the movement to dismantle all social welfare programs at the international, federal, state and local levels. They are the main backers of Herman Cain [See Ready for a Caining?] and for that matter directly or indirectly fund a number of current candidates for the Republican nomination for President of the United States.
Charles and David Koch run a lot of industries. They are smart, competent guys. How did they end up with their current political ideology? Can the rest of us, who are inclined to like Social Security and Medicare, learn anything from the brothers Koch? I think we can learn a lot from examining the history of their father, Fred C. Koch, and his relationship with Joseph Stalin, who was the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) from the late 1920's until his death in 1953.
Fred Koch's father had immigrated to the United States after learning the printing trade in Europe. He owned a small town newspaper, the Tribune-Chief in Quanah, Texas. That means he was one of the chief citizens of Quanah, but in the American scheme of things was a hard-working member of the middle class. Fred's older brother, Anton, stayed with the family business, and thus remained in the middle class. Fred Koch was sent to college, graduating from MIT in 1922 as a chemical engineer. At some point he aspired to being more than middle-class. He became an petrochemical engineer and in 1927 invented a process that improved the efficiency of turning raw oil into gasoline. I count that as a good thing: if you are going to make gasoline, you might as well make it efficiently.
Koch then saw the mean side of monopoly capitalism. He licensed his methods to a number of (relatively) small, independent oil companies. The larger oil companies buried him in litigation, forcing him out of business in the United States. He had more success overseas, where the new Soviet Union became one of his large clients. Joseph Stalin had been Communist Party boss there since 1922 and was effectively dictator by 1928. Stalin decided to collectivize agriculture and at the same time push to industrialize the Soviet Union. While this forced industrialization was no more brutal in total than the capitalist industrialization process had been in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, it certainly was no less brutal, and served anti-communists with many propaganda points. More significant was Stalin's penchant for imprisoning and executing people (probably 800,000 in total, many of them Communist Party members, not counting those who died of hunger and disease), which was done on a scale that made rough forms of capitalist politics seem minimally violent.
Therein lies a contradiction: the Koch family fortunes are largely based on Communist money. Fred Koch, however, did not like Stalin's methods any more than he liked the monopoly tactics of the Rockefeller family. He became one of the founding members of the John Birch Society in 1958.
It has been a while since I studied John Birch Society doctrine, but my understanding is that, much like George Orwell (who was an anti-Stalin socialist), Birchers believed there was a conspiracy by some of the richest members of the ruling class to use the working class and impoverished non-workers as a weapon to take wealth and political power from the middle class, in particular from small private business owners. Thus to the Birchers communists like Stalin and monopolists like the Rockefellers were at least playing the same game against the middle class, and probably actually cooperating with each other. Recall that by the time the Birch society was founded in 1958 the Rockefeller family had turned liberal, at least by Republican standards. Liberal Republicans of that era favored civil rights, a progressive income tax, and social security. In that era too the conservative wing of the Democratic Party (mostly, but not exclusively, southern Democrats) was against civil rights for African Americans, but had come to accept social security and the income tax.
Fred Koch made his money honestly and made so much that later in life he was, by wealth if not by ideology, a certifiable member of the ruling class. His sons are made of different stuff, inherited money. Thus while Fred's political beliefs were pragmatic (if, as I will show, somewhat mistaken), Charles and David's are ideological, free of any meaningful real-world testing. This does not mean they are stupid or mean-spirited, but they were not able to get a clear view of political, economic and social realities because they were wrapped in a fog of great wealth since birth. They have become, in effect, the very type of capitalists who tried to destroy their father's early engineering business.
I have actually met a number of people who thought highly of Stalinism. Mostly they were either aging CPUSA (communist party U.S.A.) members who refused to believe in reports of Stalin's purges, or young organizers who were angry enough to rationalize killing (in a non-war, non-civil war situation) as a legitimate political tool. In the 1980's in the U.S. you could still find a few thousand such people in the U.S. Today, as best I can tell, they number in the hundreds at best.
It is not right to equate Stalinism with socialism. Before the Russian Revolution most socialists, including most Marxists, were Democrat Socialists. They believed the preferred method for reaching a socialist society was through organizing the working class to vote for socialist parties in free elections. The Bolshevik Revolution was actually a catastrophe for the global socialist movement. The Bolsheviks attacked and eventually destroyed the larger socialist groups (anarchists, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and others) when they consolidated power. According to anarchist thinking the Bolsheviks did not represent the working class achieving power, but the establishment of a new capitalist class that in effect made the state into one big oppressive industrial monopoly.
Outside the Soviet Union, communists worked as hard to destroy other socialist groups as they worked to actually overthrow capitalism.
Socialism does not require a dictatorship. Socialist parties have come to power many times in democracies, and when the voters tired of the government, left power peacefully to become the opposition party. Judging all socialism to lead to Stalinism is like saying all capitalist rulers are just steps in the path to the type of regime General Franco ran in Spain. I may not like Bill Clinton, but I'll take him any day over General Franco.
Socialism can mean government ownership of industry, but how much government ownership of industry is there in the U.S. today? Very little. The Post Office and the TVA are the only significant examples [See Our Socialist Constitution Framers]. Social security is not an industry, it is a national pension system, and there are good reasons the government runs it. Only an ideologist would want to move America back to the days before social security. If you want to get rid of social security, why not get rid of the internal combustion engine, the printing press, and that newfangled Christian religion that vilifies the old fashioned religions of our ancestors?
The Constitution gives Congress the power to promote the general welfare. The most common abuse of that power is when a member of Congress uses that power as a cover to promote the interests of political donors, who are typically already very wealthy.
The idea that social security is a step on the road to socialism is disputed by the Marxists themselves. Most Marxists see the socialist revolution as most likely when the working class, and those unable to find work, are most miserable. Thus food stamps, welfare, Social Security and Medicare are seen as attempts to shore up capitalism. They are the modern equivalent of bread and circuses (we now let private industry take care of the entertainment fix), designed to keep the Democratic Party and its basically capitalistic, imperialistic, corrupt political machine in power.
I think most Americans should agree that freedom has many dimensions. Before the Civil War the slavery of many was the freedom of the few. We reject individual freedom when it is the freedom to take away the freedoms of the rest of us. We don't want the government running Wal Mart or the local bar, but we don't want private industry tearing pieces of flesh out of us like it would if it ran social security. Bad enough the banks are private. We are mostly tired of the medical insurance industry, and medical capitalists and even doctors, tearing more out of us than their services are fairly worth.
My basic conclusion is that it is a very bad idea to let people who are born rich run the government. It is as stupid as having whatever idiot a king has for a son become the next king. Not everyone who is born rich gets as out of touch with reality as the Koch brothers, but there are plenty of smart, hard working thinkers from the middle class who will take better care of our governance. That is as close to the Birch society as I am willing to get.
To the extent I believe in Americanism and the original Constitution, I oppose the existence of a titled nobility. We don't have a system of Sirs and Lords, but we have allowed the economic equivalent to take root. I would like to give the modern interpretation to this phrase of the Constitution [Article I, Section 10]: "No state shall ... grant any title of nobility." A reasonable interpretation of that is that, since great wealth is effectively nobility, no person should be able to accumulate great wealth in their lifetime, and no person should be allowed to inherit great wealth. As to how much wealth constitutes great wealth, I am willing to leave that open to debate for now.
Charles and David Koch run a lot of industries. They are smart, competent guys. How did they end up with their current political ideology? Can the rest of us, who are inclined to like Social Security and Medicare, learn anything from the brothers Koch? I think we can learn a lot from examining the history of their father, Fred C. Koch, and his relationship with Joseph Stalin, who was the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) from the late 1920's until his death in 1953.
Fred Koch's father had immigrated to the United States after learning the printing trade in Europe. He owned a small town newspaper, the Tribune-Chief in Quanah, Texas. That means he was one of the chief citizens of Quanah, but in the American scheme of things was a hard-working member of the middle class. Fred's older brother, Anton, stayed with the family business, and thus remained in the middle class. Fred Koch was sent to college, graduating from MIT in 1922 as a chemical engineer. At some point he aspired to being more than middle-class. He became an petrochemical engineer and in 1927 invented a process that improved the efficiency of turning raw oil into gasoline. I count that as a good thing: if you are going to make gasoline, you might as well make it efficiently.
Koch then saw the mean side of monopoly capitalism. He licensed his methods to a number of (relatively) small, independent oil companies. The larger oil companies buried him in litigation, forcing him out of business in the United States. He had more success overseas, where the new Soviet Union became one of his large clients. Joseph Stalin had been Communist Party boss there since 1922 and was effectively dictator by 1928. Stalin decided to collectivize agriculture and at the same time push to industrialize the Soviet Union. While this forced industrialization was no more brutal in total than the capitalist industrialization process had been in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, it certainly was no less brutal, and served anti-communists with many propaganda points. More significant was Stalin's penchant for imprisoning and executing people (probably 800,000 in total, many of them Communist Party members, not counting those who died of hunger and disease), which was done on a scale that made rough forms of capitalist politics seem minimally violent.
Therein lies a contradiction: the Koch family fortunes are largely based on Communist money. Fred Koch, however, did not like Stalin's methods any more than he liked the monopoly tactics of the Rockefeller family. He became one of the founding members of the John Birch Society in 1958.
It has been a while since I studied John Birch Society doctrine, but my understanding is that, much like George Orwell (who was an anti-Stalin socialist), Birchers believed there was a conspiracy by some of the richest members of the ruling class to use the working class and impoverished non-workers as a weapon to take wealth and political power from the middle class, in particular from small private business owners. Thus to the Birchers communists like Stalin and monopolists like the Rockefellers were at least playing the same game against the middle class, and probably actually cooperating with each other. Recall that by the time the Birch society was founded in 1958 the Rockefeller family had turned liberal, at least by Republican standards. Liberal Republicans of that era favored civil rights, a progressive income tax, and social security. In that era too the conservative wing of the Democratic Party (mostly, but not exclusively, southern Democrats) was against civil rights for African Americans, but had come to accept social security and the income tax.
Fred Koch made his money honestly and made so much that later in life he was, by wealth if not by ideology, a certifiable member of the ruling class. His sons are made of different stuff, inherited money. Thus while Fred's political beliefs were pragmatic (if, as I will show, somewhat mistaken), Charles and David's are ideological, free of any meaningful real-world testing. This does not mean they are stupid or mean-spirited, but they were not able to get a clear view of political, economic and social realities because they were wrapped in a fog of great wealth since birth. They have become, in effect, the very type of capitalists who tried to destroy their father's early engineering business.
I have actually met a number of people who thought highly of Stalinism. Mostly they were either aging CPUSA (communist party U.S.A.) members who refused to believe in reports of Stalin's purges, or young organizers who were angry enough to rationalize killing (in a non-war, non-civil war situation) as a legitimate political tool. In the 1980's in the U.S. you could still find a few thousand such people in the U.S. Today, as best I can tell, they number in the hundreds at best.
It is not right to equate Stalinism with socialism. Before the Russian Revolution most socialists, including most Marxists, were Democrat Socialists. They believed the preferred method for reaching a socialist society was through organizing the working class to vote for socialist parties in free elections. The Bolshevik Revolution was actually a catastrophe for the global socialist movement. The Bolsheviks attacked and eventually destroyed the larger socialist groups (anarchists, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and others) when they consolidated power. According to anarchist thinking the Bolsheviks did not represent the working class achieving power, but the establishment of a new capitalist class that in effect made the state into one big oppressive industrial monopoly.
Outside the Soviet Union, communists worked as hard to destroy other socialist groups as they worked to actually overthrow capitalism.
Socialism does not require a dictatorship. Socialist parties have come to power many times in democracies, and when the voters tired of the government, left power peacefully to become the opposition party. Judging all socialism to lead to Stalinism is like saying all capitalist rulers are just steps in the path to the type of regime General Franco ran in Spain. I may not like Bill Clinton, but I'll take him any day over General Franco.
Socialism can mean government ownership of industry, but how much government ownership of industry is there in the U.S. today? Very little. The Post Office and the TVA are the only significant examples [See Our Socialist Constitution Framers]. Social security is not an industry, it is a national pension system, and there are good reasons the government runs it. Only an ideologist would want to move America back to the days before social security. If you want to get rid of social security, why not get rid of the internal combustion engine, the printing press, and that newfangled Christian religion that vilifies the old fashioned religions of our ancestors?
The Constitution gives Congress the power to promote the general welfare. The most common abuse of that power is when a member of Congress uses that power as a cover to promote the interests of political donors, who are typically already very wealthy.
The idea that social security is a step on the road to socialism is disputed by the Marxists themselves. Most Marxists see the socialist revolution as most likely when the working class, and those unable to find work, are most miserable. Thus food stamps, welfare, Social Security and Medicare are seen as attempts to shore up capitalism. They are the modern equivalent of bread and circuses (we now let private industry take care of the entertainment fix), designed to keep the Democratic Party and its basically capitalistic, imperialistic, corrupt political machine in power.
I think most Americans should agree that freedom has many dimensions. Before the Civil War the slavery of many was the freedom of the few. We reject individual freedom when it is the freedom to take away the freedoms of the rest of us. We don't want the government running Wal Mart or the local bar, but we don't want private industry tearing pieces of flesh out of us like it would if it ran social security. Bad enough the banks are private. We are mostly tired of the medical insurance industry, and medical capitalists and even doctors, tearing more out of us than their services are fairly worth.
My basic conclusion is that it is a very bad idea to let people who are born rich run the government. It is as stupid as having whatever idiot a king has for a son become the next king. Not everyone who is born rich gets as out of touch with reality as the Koch brothers, but there are plenty of smart, hard working thinkers from the middle class who will take better care of our governance. That is as close to the Birch society as I am willing to get.
To the extent I believe in Americanism and the original Constitution, I oppose the existence of a titled nobility. We don't have a system of Sirs and Lords, but we have allowed the economic equivalent to take root. I would like to give the modern interpretation to this phrase of the Constitution [Article I, Section 10]: "No state shall ... grant any title of nobility." A reasonable interpretation of that is that, since great wealth is effectively nobility, no person should be able to accumulate great wealth in their lifetime, and no person should be allowed to inherit great wealth. As to how much wealth constitutes great wealth, I am willing to leave that open to debate for now.
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