On Glen Beck's Common Sense

June 23th '09

Over the last couple years Beck has been moving more and more towards the concepts and principals of Libertarianism, and over the last couple months Beck has rightly been railing against the out of control spending of the central government, and hailing Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense” as a masterpiece. I’ve heard him say, both on his radio program and his television show that he was going to edit or rewrite Paine’s pamphlet to make it applicable for our own times.

I was inspired and encouraged to hear this, And when I heard how successful Beck’s book has been in its first week out I was even more hopeful. Last friday I went to take a look at the book for myself, and that is when my hope turned into despair.

The first page of the book gave me pause,

“You might find yourself wondering what can be done to change our nation’s course. I lay out several options, but I want to be clear that none of them include violence. Thomas Paine and his fellow revolutionaries shed their blood so that future generations would have access to weapons immeasurably stronger than muskets or bayonets: the weapon of democracy. Those are the tools that we will use to usher in a second American revolution, a revolution that won’t be fought on battlefields, but in the hearts and minds of the three hundred million people lucky enough to call America home.”

Given all the problems with this first page, I put my federal reserve notes back in my pocket, and put the book back on the shelf.

The first problem of course is his language “our nation.” Did Thomas Paine look at the direction that parliament and the king were going in and hope to somehow change their course for the better? I think not. Thomas Paine along with the vast majority of the colonists were not primarily concerned with what the government was doing but that was an antecedent to their condition of weigning liberty and increasing taxes at the hands of the government. This is evident in the very first lines of Paine’s “Common Sense” , “Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them.” And Beck is instantly guilty of just that. Our Nation, the people are being turned into victims at the hands of the central government. But even here I think I betrayed Paine’s logic, allowing Beck and the modern idea of nation to influence my own words. Paine and the founders were not first Americans, but Virginians, Georgians, New Yorkers, and so on. Their concern was for the liberty and welfare of their individual colonies, and this is evident in the writing of the Articles of Confederation, and even in the practice of Constitutional government up to 1865.

Next, Beck takes the option of violence off of the table. Is this out of cowardice? Or should it be called prudence? I thought that maybe it might be out of prudence at first (until I later bought Beck’s book and found the same tired mantra about peaceful revolution repeated over and over.) But I will concede that Tonight is not the night to form up in regiments and march on D.C. In fact I do not propose that we fire the first shot at all, but it may come again to bloodshed, when we as free men attempt to regain our rights, the government may turn to violence, and then we must be ready to meet force with force, a prospect weighs heavily on my own heart, but it is better to die as free men fighting for liberty than to live as emasculated shells of men, subserviant to the central government. Robert E. Lee said once, “degradation is worse than death” But Again, this course of action is in our future and is not off of the table, though hopefully it can be avoided.

The 3rd error on this first page is to hail democracy as the key to winning back our independence. And this error is twofold; first for being impossible, for it is the nature of democracy, as Fredric Bastiat elaborately explained 159 years ago in his own Essay “The Law” when discussing universal legalized plunder he wrote, “we have been threatened with this system since the fanchise was made universal. The newly enfranchised majority has decided to formulate law on the same principle of legal plunder that was used by their predecessors when the vote was limited.” ( page 34) That is to say that democracy on a national level, is the aggressor of our rights.

And if it is worth mentioning the last error is that this would only be the 2nd American revolution. Which is to kick dirt in the faces of the men who fought for independence in 1861-1865.

With this much being wrong just on the first page of Beck’s “Common Sense” It is a wonder that I went back the next day and bought it, out of a perverse and sick curiosity I read and went from page to page, reading nearly every word and skipping over the parts that I could tell were nothing but rhetoric and filler.

The first section was an attack no on the government, like that of Thomas Paine’s first section, but a meak attack on what Beck might call ideologues who are in government, for whatever its worth he points out that there is little difference between the republicans, on the one hand, and the democrats on the other. This is where I wonder even more what it was that Glenn Beck read? did he get a different copy of Paine’s Common Sense than I did? Thomas Paine was indifferent to the whigs and the tories, those who wanted to regulate American commerce alot and tax it a little and those who wanted to regulate it alot and tax it a little. Paine and the other revolutionaries insisted that it wasn’t a matter of getting the right people into parliament, but breaking the chains from the king and from parliament.

The second chapter in Beck’s book is titled “Money.” I hoped that after reading a limited amount of Austrian Economics, notably Thomas E. Woods Jr., that Beck might attack paper money and the federal reserve in much the same way Thomas Paine did here http://mises.org/story/2942 . But to my chagrin, it was not to be. Beck instead only attacks the nation debt, an issue well worth taking up, but entirely missing the point if the issue of fiat currency is not addressed. Another point of disappointment is that in attacking all of the wasteful spending Beck writes things such as, “ Our children will question our sanity for spending money we did not have on “bridges to nowhere”, skateboard parks...” and so on, not once addressing the government’s greatest bill, the military, how much more will our children question the frugality and sanity of spending 145 billion dollars a year to fight a war in Iraq, spending 130 billion dollars a year to maintain a large standing army, 136 billion to have the world’s largest and best air force, or 140 billion a year to have the worlds largest navy and marine force. In total the military expense that we will pass on to our children will be 717 billion dollars a year. Remember, as of right now our budget hasn’t yet passed 4 trillion dollars, and is closer to 3 trillion. If anyone is really serious about reducing debt, they ought to support a Thomas Jefferson solution. Thomas Jefferson reduced the size of the standing army by almost 50% and reduced the national debt from 83 million in 1800 to 57 million at the end of 1808. (Studenski and Krooss, Financial History, pp. 69-71; Balinky, Gallatin, pp.90, 107). Lots of people will say things to the effect that that was a different time, and a different world, and throw out the tired old federalist myth that the best way to remain at peace is to prepare for war, but I would point out that Jefferson’s policy worked. Prior to his presidency, we were in a quasi war with france, and after his presidency, we shortly entered into the war of 1812 with Britain. Whatever spending waste there is in the federal government, the bridge to no where and the grants to the international hopscotch league are but trifling pennies compared to the staggering amount spent to threaten, intimidate, and otherwise impose our will on other nations. As alluded to this is also a matter of contention not just as a fiscal issue, but also a point that jeopardizes our safety. If one might recall, Japan didn’t bomb pearl harbor until after FDR ordered our pacific fleet moved from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. And that Hitler’s election was a result of his railing against the unfair Versailles treaty that Woodrow Wilson imposed on Germany after getting us involved in another unnecessary war.

In Chapter 3. Glenn Beck wastes no time attacking Obama’s nominees to various positions as “crooks who sought to defraud the government.” Much unlike Thomas Paine’s take, who would have called the government crooks for stealing the bread won by others by the use of threats and intimidation and outright violence. In fact no where in Beck’s book does he address the central issue of the American Revolution, that the right to levy and raise taxes rests solely with the people, and not with the central government. To express this in our own times is to say that the people of Oklahoma, New York, Oregon, and Mississippi have the rights to impose taxes on themselves, but London, excuse me, Washington D.C. does not have the power to raise taxes. This is what was meant by “No taxation without representation” It means that outside of the representation of the people in the various colonies, or in this case states, there is no right to impose taxes. It is not a matter of having representation in the central government as Benjamin Franklin proposed in 1765 with “a cute way to make a mockery of the principle of colonial self-taxation: to provide some colonial representation in parliament.” ( Rothbard, Murray. Conceived in Liberty vol III,pp. 92, Mises Institute) As history tells us, this idea was rejected by all 13 colonies. Beck along with many of the well intentioned “tea partiers” have their heart in the right place, but I fear their heads have not been in a book of significance for many years.

Chapter four was titled “The Perks and Privileges of the Political Class” which gave me hope, but again, instead of going for the gut and talking about the legal plundering of the political class, taking a play from Bastiat, Beck only talks about the insane amount of money it takes to win an election, and gerrymandering. He Talks about “reform” using the same system that has brought about this system. Oh and term limits, yippee. I’m sure Thomas Paine was entirely up in arms about the career politicians in the house of lords!

The last chapter of any substance, though slight it might be, dealt with progressivism. It was probably the best chapter of the book. And was simply over progressivism. Perhaps, it is sign of the times, and a sign about just how far away we are from a real revolution that its necessary to decry socialism and progressivism. Thomas Paine Had no need of arguing against the evils of mercantilism and violations against property. He really did write what everyone else was thinking. That the government was illegitimate “neither can any power, which needs checking, be from God” ( Common Sense and The Rights of Man, pp 9 Phoenix press) and that the government had subjected its citizens to worse situations than they might face without any government at all.

The final chapter of the book is largely filler, expressing optimism that this 2nd revolution might be a successful one, and again calling on us to “leave our muskets at home.

In total, Beck never recognizes Paine’s actual call for secession by the colonies. He never acknowledges the danger, expense, and subjection that the central government exposes us to. And he never asserts the rights of the people through their respective states to do something about it.