“The Forgotten Man” Is Now Every American Hoping To Change His Government

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “We have people on hold that want to ask the question, [mocking] “Mike, what can we do about it?”  Here’s the issue: there’s nothing you can do about it.  Understand this.  The United States Congress, the executive branch and the judicial branch of this government will not take no and do not take no for an answer.  They only pretend to alter course when there’s an election.  It’s the same whether you’re run and ruled and taxed and warred to death by a Republican or a Democrat.  It doesn’t matter.  That was his other point, it doesn’t matter what you call the class.”  Check out today’s transcript AND Clip of The Day for the rest….

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Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  William Graham Sumner, “The Forgotten Man,” was published, I believe, in 1883.  Let’s go to Page 8 quickly.  He’s writing about what he called the forgotten man.  What did William Graham Sumner mean when he wrote about the forgotten man?

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He was writing about and talking about the little guy, the Whiskey Rebellion farmer from 1794 that thought that when the government of the colonies or the newly free and independent states, that when it was centralized it was for their benefit, only to find out that it was not for their benefit; it was for the benefit of the railroad barons and all of Lincoln’s other buddies.  It was for the benefit of an ever-growing and encroaching centralized government, that they had been forgotten and all they were now were numbers to be taxed and regulated into the current state that we are.  This is in 1883.  That means it’s 132 years ago.  I wonder what William Graham Sumner would think of the forgotten man today, which all of us most certainly are.

[reading]

I suppose that the first chemists seemed to be very hard-hearted and unpoetical persons when they scouted the glorious dream of the alchemists that there must be some process for turning base metals into gold. I suppose that the men who first said, in plain, cold assertion, there is no fountain [private |FP-Monthly|FP-Yearly|FP-Yearly-WLK|FP-Yearly-So76|Founding Brother|Founding Father|FP-Lifetime] of eternal youth, seemed to be the most cruel and cold-hearted adversaries of human happiness. I know that the economists who say that if we could transmute lead into gold, it would certainly do us no good and might do great harm, are still regarded as unworthy of belief. Do not the money articles of the newspapers yet ring with the doctrine that we are getting rich when we give cotton and wheat for gold rather than when we give cotton and wheat for iron?

Let us put down now the cold, hard fact and look at it just as it is. There is no device whatever to be invented for securing happiness without industry, economy, and virtue. We are yet in the empirical stage as regards all our social devices. We have done something in science and art in the domain of production, transportation and exchange. But when you come to the laws of the social order, we know very little about them. Our laws and institutions by which we attempt to regulate our lives under the laws of nature which control society are merely a series of haphazard experiments. We come into collision with the laws and are not intelligent enough to understand wherein we are mistaken and how to correct our errors. We persist in our experiments instead of patiently setting about the study of the laws and facts in order to see where we are wrong. Traditions and formulae have a dominion over us in legislation and social customs which we seem unable to break or even to modify.

For my present purpose I ask your attention for a few moments to the notion of liberty, because the Forgotten Man would no longer be forgotten where there was true liberty. You will say that you know what liberty is. There is no term of more common or prouder use. None is more current, as if it were quite beyond the need of definition. Even as I write, however, I find in a leading review a new definition of civil liberty. Civil liberty the writer declares to be “the result of the restraint exercised by the sovereign people on the more powerful individuals and classes of the community, preventing them from availing themselves of the excess of their power to the detriment of the other classes.” You notice here the use of the words “sovereign people” to designate a class of the population, not the nation as a political and civil whole. Wherever “people” is used in such a sense, there is always fallacy. Furthermore, you will recognize in this definition a very superficial and fallacious construction of English constitutional history. The writer goes on to elaborate that construction and he comes out at last with the conclusion that “a government by the people can, in no case, become a paternal government, since its law-makers are its mandataries and servants carrying out its will, and not its fathers or its masters.” This, then, is the point at which he desires to arrive, and he has followed a familiar device in setting up a definition to start with which would produce the desired deduction at the end.

In the definition the word “people” was used for a class or section of the population. It is now asserted that if that section rules, there can be no paternal, that is, undue, government. That doctrine, however, is the very opposite of liberty and contains the most vicious error possible in politics. The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature. They are not confined to classes or to nations or particular ages of the world. They present themselves in the palace, in the parliament, in the academy, in the church, in the workshop, and in the hovel. They appear in autocracies, theocracies, aristocracies, democracies, and ochlocracies all alike. They change their masks somewhat from age to age and from one form of society to another. All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others.

[end reading]

Mike:  That’s William Graham Sumner’s “The Forgotten Man.”  It’s about a 60-page essay.  If you’re a Founders Pass member, click on the Download tab on any of the pages at MikeChurch.com and go to the Download PDF page.  Read that essay.  What he’s basically saying back in 1883, he’s seen the writing on the wall that the classes are beginning to divide and that the political class and the elite class that supports them are beginning to assert themselves.  They’re beginning to say things that are troubling.  As they say these things that are troubling, what he’s basically identifying here is what English writers at the early part of the next century would call the end of truth.  This is what Chesterton and company, this is what drove Chesterton and company to write the things they wrote.  You could see that liberty and democracies and republics that had been created in its name, you could see what was happening was the situation we have today, although they had it then.

We have people on hold that want to ask the question, [mocking] “Mike, what can we do about it?”  Here’s the issue: there’s nothing you can do about it.  Understand this.  The United States Congress, the executive branch and the judicial branch of this government will not take no and do not take no for an answer.  They only pretend to alter course when there’s an election.  It’s the same whether you’re run and ruled and taxed and warred to death by a Republican or a Democrat.  It doesn’t matter.  That was his other point, it doesn’t matter what you call the class.  What does the class do?  Well, the fact of the matter is that the Nobel Peace Prize winner is a war president.  He’s presided over war.  He’s the first president that we know that has an actually published, with typewritten names, kill list of individuals, an assassination list. [/private]

For some, though, this is not enough.  This is what is equally troubling.  It’s not just that Obama is going to get us into a ground war, another land war in Asia, which even the Sicilian in The Princess Bride knew was a dumb idea.  Those that are on the “other side of the aisle” are convinced that Obama is not waging a violent and large enough war.  The foreign policy of the United States hasn’t changed one iota.  It’s the same as it was.  As a matter of fact, you might say we’ve gotten more interventionist and more aggressive.  What is the conservative answer to this?  We’re not aggressive enough.  Listen to them.  Listen to Ted Cruz.  Listen to Marco Rubio.

Listen to the star candidates that are going to run for the GOP nomination.  They all want more and bigger wars.  They want more of your money.  They want more of your liberty.  They want more of your children.  They need more bodies.  This is the end of our government.  As Patrick Henry said, we are now one empire of America.  What is to be done?  What is to be done? is the cry from the people.  There is no easy answer to that.

End Mike Church Show Transcript