Other than possibly having to replace the word Russian with the word Muslim, Robert Welch's astute observations on the nature of government, as he presented them at the founding meeting of The John Birch Society in December of 1958, still ring true today — perhaps even more so...

And it seems to me, gentlemen, that the whole essence of our purpose, and the guiding principle for our action, covering not only our fight against collectivism but our fight for our constructive replacement, can be summarized in the objective expressed by just five words: Less government and more responsibility.

The principle is simple enough for all to understand. The direction signs leading to the goal expressed are clear enough for nobody to misjudge them. An honest adherence to that principle and those directions, against which to test either candidates or issues, will settle in the minds of our followers and ourselves almost all questions which may arise, concerning either candidates or issues, in the field of political effort. And yet it is broad enough, I believe, to be comprehensive with regard to all that we really desire to attain through political action.

Less government and more responsibility. I mean less government of every kind, federal, state, or municipal; and more true responsibility, not only on the part of individuals but on the part of such reduced governmental units as are necessarily permitted to exist. But of course I mean, primarily, less federal government, because that is where our greatest danger lies; and more individual responsibility, because that is our greatest need.

And now I want to give you some of the arguments and the reasoning by which we must try to inculcate this fundamental principle of less government and more responsibility into the minds of our contemporaries and successors. For we must try to make it a convincing political standard and an accepted goal on the part of not only our own dedicated followers, who go all the way with our principles and our ideals, of which this is only a segment. We must try to rally behind this concept thousands or possibly millions of anxious citizens who show a vital interest in their politically determined future, but are yet to be won to a dedication to ideals of more spiritual breadth.

So, again without your leave, I am going to utilize a few extracts from a talk I made a couple of years ago at a convocation of students and faculty of Dickinson College. I do so simply because, having put a lot of work into the preparation of that speech, I can cover the present ground more succinctly and quickly by quoting from it than in any other way. And this part is not long. What we must start asking our fellow citizens everywhere to consider, as of overwhelming importance to the future of themselves and their families, is this: 

On the basis of all known past human experience, are there any general conclusions, with regard to the organization of society, which can be set forth with confidence? It seems to me clear that there certainly are.

1. First, government is necessary -- some degree of government -- in any civilized society. There are believers in the possibility and desirability of a governmentless anarchy, as a practicable form of human association. But the number of these advocates is comparatively very small, there is no evidence within human historical experience to support their thesis, and there is considerable evidence indicating otherwise.

2. Second, while government is necessary, it is basically a non-productive expense, an overhead cost supported by the productive economy. And like all overhead items, it always has a tendency to expand faster than the productive base which supports it.

3. Third, government is frequently evil. And we do not mean by this that they (governments) are merely dishonest. For all governments, with very rare exceptions indeed, are thoroughly dishonest. We made the statement in print, about two years ago, that there has never in the history of the world been a government (and this generalization includes our present one) that maintained honesty in the handling of a "managed" irredeemable currency. A few weeks later one of America's ablest and best-known economists quoted that statement with full approval.

But what we are talking about here is something far worse than dishonesty. In December, 1956, Professor Sorokin of Harvard -- after quoting Lord Acton that great men, in the political arena, are almost always bad men -- went on to reveal the results of his own survey of the criminality of rulers. This survey of the monarchs of various countries and the heads of various republics and democracies, in a selection large enough to constitute a very fair sample, revealed that there was an average of one murderer to every four of these rulers. "In other words, " said Professor Sorokin, "the rulers of the states are the most criminal group in a respective population. 

With a limitation of their power their criminality tends to decrease; but it still remains exceptionally high in all nations. An obvious reason for this is the greater temptation to criminality on the part of those who control or influence the police power of a nation, of which they would otherwise stand in more fear. Another is that ambitious men with criminal tendencies naturally gravitate into government because of this very prospect of doing, or helping to do, the policing over themselves. 

A third reason is that so many apologists can always be found, for criminal acts of governments, on the grounds that such acts ultimately contribute to the public good and that therefore the criminal means are justified by the righteous ends. Kautilya wrote his Arthashastra in about 300 B. C. Machiavelli wrote his Il Principe in about 1500 A.D. And the arguments of both, that it is a virtue in a ruler to be unscrupulous for the good of his state, are heard in every age.

4. Fourth, government is always and inevitably an enemy of individual freedom. It seems rather strange that it was Woodrow Wilson, who more than any other one man started this nation on its present road towards totalitarianism, who also said that the history of human liberty is a history of the limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. But Wilson could have boasted, as did Charles II of England, that he said only wise things even though he did only foolish ones. It is self-evident that government, by its very nature, must be an enemy of freedom, edging always towards a restriction of the individual's rights and responsibilities.

5. Whatever must be done by government will always cost more than if it could be done by individuals or smaller groups. And the larger the government, the more disproportionate will be the cost. Letting a government do anything, therefore, which such individuals or smaller groups could properly do, is serious economic wastefulness. It is also contrary to the philosophy of the proper function of government that is derived from the whole body of past experiments.

6. Government, by its size, its momentum, and its authority, will not only perpetuate errors of doctrine or of policy, longer than they would otherwise retain acceptance, but it will multiply their effect on a geometric scale, as against the arithmetically cumulative effect of those errors if confined to individuals or smaller groups. The errors of tens of thousands of individuals, all thinking and probing in different directions and moved by different impulses, tend to cancel themselves out or to be softened by the attrition of doubt and disagreement.

But let any one error become sanctified by government, and thus crystallized as truth, and little short of a revolution can discredit it or cause it to be discarded. An easy illustration of this principle is the witchcraft terror in the early days of the colonial government of Massachusetts. If there had been no governmental power to give phantasmagoria the semblance of reality by official decree, the common sense of a majority of the citizens would have kept this manifestation of fanaticism from ever having such widespread support and cruel results. But once government had authoritatively said "This is truth," then the hitherto doubting citizen was willing to join others like himself in accepting it as truth. And we have at least a dozen idiocies, equally repugnant to man's common sense and sound experience, being perpetuated by our government in Washington today.

7. As any society becomes reasonably settled, and shakes down into a semi-permanent pattern of economic and political life, and as some degree of leisure on the part of its citizens becomes both possible and visible, the drive always begins to have government become the management of the social enterprise rather than merely its agent for certain clear purposes. Government is then increasingly allowed, invited, and even urged to do planning for, and exercise control over, the total economy of the nation. Next, it is pushed, and pushes itself, more and more into planning and control of the separate activities of the citizens and groups of citizens that make up the economic life of the nation. And in doing such planning and exercising such controls the government must assume more and more of the responsibility for the success of the economy and the welfare of its citizens.

Of course no government, short of being omniscient, can ever plan the specialized division of labor and the beneficial interchange of the various products of human effort, or can ever appraise the impact of changing circumstances and changing desires on the infinite ramifications of interrelated human activity, one half as well as the planning, appraisal, and resulting corrections will be accomplished by a completely free market if given the opportunity. For the free market automatically weighs, measures, and integrates into its decisions increments of need, of difficulty, and of motivation, that are too small, too numerous, and too hidden for the planners ever to discover them. And the equations to be dealt with are too infinite to be resolved by any human brain or committee of human brains, even if all the variables and constants could be accurately set forth in such equations.

A government trying to step in and improve the workings of a free market is exactly like a man who takes a lighted lantern outdoors at noon of a bright June day to show you the sun. But a government's answer to any criticism as to the inadequacy of the lantern is always to bring more lanterns and then more lanterns -- until eventually the smoke and glare of the lanterns so seriously interfere with and shut off the light of the sun that everybody actually has to work mainly by lantern light. It is interesting to note, too, that in any society the government, and its allies who want to use the lanterns, always claim the justification that the society's economy is more complex than those which have preceded it. They insist that therefore the lanterns of planning and control are necessary and helpful now, no matter how futile and harmful they have been shown to be in the past.

Of course exactly the opposite is true. The more complex the economic life of a nation becomes; the more nearly infinite the shades and grades of impulse which determine the proper interchanges and relationships between its components become; then the more impossible and ridiculous is any undertaking to plan and control those relationships, and the more the automatic working of a completely free market is needed.

8. As a government increases in power, and as a means of increasing its power, it always has a tendency to squeeze out the middle class; to destroy or weaken the middle for the benefit of the top and the bottom. Even where there is no conscious alliance for this purpose, such as formed the basis for Bismarck's beginning of the socialization of Germany or Franklin Roosevelt's beginning of the socialization of America, the forces to that end are always at work -- as they have been in England for fifty years. In the nations that the gods would destroy they first make the middle class helpless, through insidious but irresistible government pressures.

9. The form of government is not nearly so important as its quality. Justice and a lack of arbitrariness, for instance, are two characteristics of a government that are most important to the welfare and happiness of a people. They are as likely to be found -- or more accurately, as little likely to be found -- under any one form of government as another. Rampant interference with personal lives is the most obnoxious characteristic of any government, and that is found just as readily under elected officials as under hereditary monarchs. In fact, as the Greeks pointed out, as has been well known to careful students of history ever since, and as the founding fathers of our own republic were well aware, when an elected government succeeds in attracting and maintaining an overwhelming majority behind it for any length of time, its mob instincts make it the most tyrannical of all forms of social organization.

Incidentally, a tragic result of the emphasis placed by historians and statesmen on the form of the American government has been the emulation by newly independent Asiatic nations of the wrong thing in our American system. Admiring the tremendous success of the United States, observing the unprecedented prosperity, freedom, and opportunities for happiness or the part of the people, looking up to the United States as the example to be followed, nation after nation in other parts of the world, but especially in Asia, has copied the American government for itself. Its budding political scientists have felt that this must be the key to national success and greatness -- as it clearly would have been if they had copied the right thing, the very thing that made America great.

But what these new nations have taken for themselves are carbon copies of the American government at the time their own governments were being established. In far too many cases this has been since the New Deal had completely stultified the original virtues of the American Government. The Philippines, for instance, in 1948, took over every form of welfarism and every stifling regulation and suppression of private enterprise, and substitute therefor, which Roosevelt's newdealers had been able to impose on us even with a war to help them. The results were and still are pathetic, simply because they had been led to believe that it was the form of the American government which counted. But actually it had been the small amount of government in America throughout its centuries of mushrooming productivity, not the form of that government, which had been the vital factor of success. The Filipinos and others like them took over, instead, the excesses of government which were already in a fair way to start the decline of America itself.

10. Which brings us to the last, the most overlooked, and in my opinion the most important, of these basic generalizations concerning government. Thomas Jefferson expressed part of it in his famous dictum that that government is best which governs least. But Jefferson was thinking of the extent of a government's power more than of the extensiveness of the government itself. And our tenth point is that neither the form of government nor its quality is as important as its quantity. A thoroughly foul government, like that of Nero, which still did not reach its tentacles too far into the daily lives and doings of its subjects, was far better for the Roman Empire in the long run than the intentionally benevolent government of Diocletian or of Constantine, whose bureaucratic agents were everywhere.

Let's dramatize this fact -- or opinion -- by bringing it closer home. And your speaker would like to have it understood that he does not condone dishonesty in the slightest degree. Yet I had rather have for America, and I am convinced America would be better off with, a government of three hundred thousand officials and agents, every single one of them a thief, than a government of three million agents with every single one of them an honest, honorable, public servant. For the first group would only steal from the American economic and political system; the second group would be bound in time to destroy it. 

The increasing quantity of government, in all nations, has constituted the greatest tragedy of the Twentieth Century. Let's spotlight just one particular result of this tragic development, which has occurred in connection with man's age-old worry — war. That result is the frequency, the length, the extensiveness, the horrible destructiveness, and the totality of impact on the population, of the wars of the Twentieth Century. In the physical sciences we are accustomed to using combined measurements, such as foot-pounds, kilowatt-hours or man-days. Let's invent such a phrase for the measurement of war, and call it the day-number-horror unit. In the use of that three way calculation we multiply the days of suffering by the number of people who suffer, by the depth of the suffering, to arrive at an appraisal. Then I believe you will find that pretty generally throughout history -- despite other factors causing occasional exceptions -- and very definitely throughout recent centuries, the day-number-horrors measure of any war has been proportional to the contemporary extensiveness of government. In fact and specifically, it has been directly proportional to the product of the quantities of government in the nations involved at the time a war was fought. 

Also, you will find that it is the huge quantity of government which, more than anything else, makes these tremendously destructive wars not only possible, but unavoidable. One illustration should make this statement too clear for argument. Do you want to fight the Russian people? Do you think the Russian people have the least desire to fight us? Do you think there would be the slightest chance of the American people and the Russian people fighting each other, with millions to be killed on both sides and great parts of both countries probably to be utterly destroyed, if there were only one-tenth as much government in each country as now exists? Stop and think about it for a minute.

It is not only that governments carry their peoples into horrible and utterly unnecessary wars, but it takes a very huge quantity of government to carry its people into the totalitarian struggle which war has now been made by this same quantity of government. Reduce all the governments of all the nations of the world to one-third of their present size -- not one-third of their power, note, nor are we referring to their quality, but just to one-third of their bureaucratic numbers, their extensiveness, their meddling in the lives of their subjects -- and you would immediately accomplish two things. You would reduce the likelihood of war between hostile nations to at most one-ninth of its present probability, and the destructiveness of any wars that did take place in the same proportion.

The greatest enemy of man is, and always has been, government. And the larger, the more extensive that government, the greater the enemy.

The above excerpt from Robert Welch's presentation at the founding meeting of The John Birch Society can be found starting at page 80 in the Adobe .pdf file download for the Blue Book of The John Birch Society.  For additional insights of Robert Welch concerning the battle for freedom before us, please enjoy and share the video prepared for the 50th Anniversary of The John Birch Society in 2008.

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Lee Gonzales said:

	Robert Welch Thank you for reminding us of the words of Robert Welch. The Blue book explains what we John Birchers stand for.
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June 22, 2009
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Peter Steele said:

I loved Dad because he was right and not given an obit in the Socialist New York Times Dad was JBS since 1964 as he knew he was right for our Great Country and Robert Welch was right of course as family friend Barry M. Goldwater, Sr. The liberals can have William F. Buckley as he endorsed the treasonous Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who did not deserve his Nobel Peace Prize with LeDucTho a communist. The New York Time whose "Treason Fit To Print" byline loves communistas and socialistas but never capitalism. Best Peter F. Steele

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June 23, 2009
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