Two articles (each dated by a year or five) caught my eye this week about small governments serving their people where happiness thrives. The first is Donald Livingston’s Abbeville blog post from JAN2019 that states:
Switzerland is regularly ranked by the UN’s World Happiness Report in the top ten happiest countries in the world. The top ten are usually always small states. The U.S. has yet to make the top ten.
The second one is a five year old Abbeville blog post (recently re-shared) that states:
In his time [Nathaniel] Macon was widely admired by Americans as the perfect model of a republican statesman. By republican I mean republican with a small “r.” I definitely do NOT mean the Republican Party, which, from its very beginning, when it stole the name from better people, right up to this minute, has stood for the exact opposite of what Nathaniel Macon meant by republican government.
It should be noted that the thirteen British colonies that seceded from the British Empire chose to fashion their guiding document, the Articles of Confederation from the Switzerland’s confederation documents. So when on Nov. 15, 1777, the Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, he articles vested the conduct of war and foreign policy in a Federal government, but left everything else to the States.
The Swiss Confederation was chosen in part due to it having been established more than four centuries earlier and was still intact and the federation in 1777 was still thriving. Historically, in 1315, the Swiss defeated the powerful Austrian empire in the Battle of Morgarten, when the men of Schwyz (one of the Swiss cantons / sovereign states) lured the Austrians into the mountains and ambushed them in a pass. The men of Schwyz killed 1,500 Austrian troops, drove hundreds more into Lake Lucerne and put the rest to flight. The country’s inhabitants were so grateful they changed the name of their nation from Helvetia to Switzerland. The country has remained free, independent and faithful to its own Articles of Confederation for nearly 700 years.
What this means is that the small republics, cantons, allow the people in a federation to tolerate differences across these unique cultures and lands. Smaller is better, but bigger can allow for protection from external forces, the problem is when there are internal forces that attempt to use the larger body for their own agenda.
The republics themselves have the following guiding principles modeled by the Greeks:
There are four principles to this republican tradition: First, republican government is one in which the people make the laws they live under. But, second, they cannot make just any law. The laws they make must be in accord with a more fundamental law which they do not make but is known by tradition. Third, the task of the republic is to preserve and perfect the character of that inherited tradition. And finally, the republic must be small. It must be small because self-government and rule of law is not possible unless citizens know the character of their rulers directly or through those they trust.
The Greeks created a brilliant civilization that was entirely decentralized. It was composed of 1,500 tiny independent republics strung out from Naples to the Black Sea. Most were under 10,000. One of the largest was Athens with around 200 thousand people. For over two thousand years, up to the French Revolution, republics seldom went beyond 200-300 thousand people, and the great majority were considerably smaller.
Having only 300,000 people to a republic, is small enough to personally kick the *ss of a politician who has done the people wrong. Large states have whole groups of people that live above the law and not under the laws they themselves get to create. Large states are also known for killing large amounts of their own people as in the case of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. It was not that long ago that the USSR disintegrated into 15 republics proving that they too found the downside of the large centralized state.
So we have the options of small republics and large nations, but it was a German Calvinist Johannes Althusius (1563-1638) that proposed a federation of small polities in a state larger than the classical republic, but smaller than a European monarchy. He called it a federation! In this structure, to prevent the central government from consolidating the smaller polities into a unitary modern state, Althusius introduces a constitutional right of secession from the federation. If a federation grew too large, it could always be brought back to a republican scale by secession.
This was why the founders, BEFORE the full force of the British Empire was on their shores, thought that this arrangement like the Swiss had (see below) would work across the cultures from New England to the Southern colonies:
Switzerland is so decentralized that its central government has no original taxing power. Its power to tax requires a constitutional amendment approved by a majority of the cantons, each of which has one vote, and a majority of individuals.
After the revolutionary war, many founders abandoned the Swiss model as being too week and opted again towards the large-state model which is why we are in the mess we are in today!
It was at this point as the Revolutionary War ended that a reluctant Nathaniel Macon appeared on the scene:
Macon was born in 1758 on a plantation in Warren County, where he lived his entire life. He was a student at what is now Princeton when the War of Independence broke out in 1775. He left school and joined the New Jersey militia on active service, and then went home and joined the North Carolina troops. He was offered but refused a commission and he refused also the bounty that was paid for enlisting. He served in the Southern campaigns until he was elected to the General Assembly near the end of the war while he was still in his 20s. In the next few years he was offered a place in the North Carolina delegation to the Continental Congress which he declined.
You can see Macon’s character here, refused a commission (G. Washington would never do that), declined a place on the North Carolina delegation to the Continental Congress, but when the wheels started coming off the liberty and freedom wagon, he showed up!
As soon as the U.S. government went into operation, Hamilton and his Yankee friends, claiming that they were acting in behalf of “good government,” began to turn the government into a centralised power and a money-making machine for themselves by banks, tariffs, government bonds, and other paper swindles that would be paid for out of the pockets of the farmers, who produced the tangible wealth of the country. To oppose this Macon accepted election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the Second Congress. He served in the House 24 years and the Senate 13 years—representing North Carolina in congress from 1791 to 1828, from the age of 33 to the age of 70 when he retired voluntarily.
He was in this fight to the end as his own philosophy did not change at all from his farm in Warren County, North Carolina to the swamp (which it literally was in those days) called District of Columbia.
During all this time Macon was admired because he never changed from the principles with which he began. What were these principles? The federal government should be tightly bound by the Constitution. It should not tax the people and spend money any more than was absolutely necessary for the things it was entitled to do, nor go into debt, which was just a way to make the taxpayers pay interest to the rich. Eternal vigilance was the price of liberty. Power was always stealing from the many to the few. Office-holders were to be watched closely and kept as directly responsible to the citizens as possible.
His priority at all times was the people, not himself, not his agenda. He was a learned man who know the history of other peoples in different times and learned from their mistakes:
It might be nice to pay for everybody to go to college, or to build a fancy temple for the Supreme Court, or to issue bonds for rich people to invest in, or overturn a dictator 5,000 miles away. But the politicians had no right to take away the citizens’ earnings for whatever they thought was good. ..
History showed that the stronger and more centralised a government became the less free were the people. And the richer the government and its politicians and beneficiaries became, the poorer were the people. That was what had always happened, but America, with governments created by the people, had a chance to avoid the bad tendencies of government of the past.
It had a chance but even Nathaniel know the momentum was against those who saw the eternal vigilance against state powers was needed but was found wanting toward the end of his life:
By the end of his life Macon had realised that the cause of republicanism was lost at the federal level, and also that the North was determined to exploit and rule the South. South Carolina tried in 1832 to use “nullification,” state interposition, to force the federal government back within the limits of the Constitution. After he read Andrew Jackson’s proclamation against South Carolina, Macon told friends that it was too late for nullification. The Constitution was dead. The only recourse was secession—there was nothing left but for the South to get out from under the “Union” and govern itself.
Patrick Henry saw the American Republic die with the 1787 US Constitution when he said “I smell a rat”. Nathaniel Macon tried fighting the good fight until 1832 before he admitted that the Constitution was dead. Lysander Spooner saw this all real clear by 1867 when he said:
It was over before any of us were even born. The American Empire is what is rolling on now to its eventual grave, which those in command trying to take as many tax slaves with us to potential early graves.
-SF1