His refusal to get dragged into the existing political wars frustrated some critics. On the left, he has been denounced as carrying water for QAnon, whatever that could mean. On the right, the worldview he’s preaching has been decried as corn-fed Marxism that seeks to fuel hatred of the rich and class resentment, pitting the working classes against the privileged owners of capital.
This debate displays gross ignorance of the history of ideas. To speak about class and draw attention to the conflicts therein isn’t inherently Marxist. Karl Marx himself refused credit for the paradigm.
Raico cites Adolphe Blanqui, who was the protégé of Jean-Baptiste Say and succeeded him in the chair of political economy at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.
In what’s probably the first history of economic thought, published in 1837, Blanqui wrote: “In all the revolutions, there have always been but two parties opposing each other; that of the people who wish to live by their own labor, and that of those who would live by the labor of others. ... Patricians and plebeians, slaves and freemen, guelphs and ghibellines, red roses and white roses, cavaliers and roundheads, liberals and serviles, are only varieties of the same species.
“So, in one country, it is through taxes that the fruit of the laborer’s toil is wrested from him, under pretense of the good of the state; in another, it is by privileges, declaring labor a royal concession, and making one pay dearly for the right to devote himself to it. The same abuse is reproduced under more indirect, but no less oppressive, forms, when, by means of custom-duties, the state shares with the privileged industries the benefits of the taxes imposed on all those who are not privileged.”
This sounds like Mr. Anthony’s song!
“Liberal class conflict theory emerged in a polished form in France, in the period of the Bourbon Restoration, following the final defeat and exile of Napoleon,” Raico wrote. “From 1817 to 1819, two young liberal intellectuals, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, edited the journal, Le Censeur Européen; beginning with the second volume (issue), Augustin Thierry collaborated closely with them. The Censeur Européen developed and disseminated a radical version of liberalism, one that continued to influence liberal thought up to the time of Herbert Spencer and beyond. It can be viewed as a core-constituent—and thus one of the historically defining elements—of authentic liberalism. In this sense, a consideration of the worldview of the Censeur Européen is of great importance in helping to give shape and content to the protean concept, ‘liberalism.’ Moreover, through Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers and through other channels, it had an impact on socialist thought as well. Comte and Dunoyer called their doctrine Industrialisme, Industrialism.”
Another case in point comes from one of my favorite economists, Jean-Baptiste Say, who wrote: “If one individual, or one class, can call in the aid of authority to ward off the effects of competition, it acquires a privilege and at the cost of the whole community; it can then make sure of profits not altogether due to the productive services rendered, but composed in part of an actual tax upon consumers for its private profit; which tax it commonly shares with the authority that thus unjustly lends its support. The legislative body has great difficulty in resisting the importunate demands for this kind of privileges; the applicants are the producers that are to benefit thereby, who can represent, with much plausibility, that their own gains are a gain to the industrious classes, and to the nation at large, their workmen and themselves being members of the industrious classes, and of the nation.”
Early 19th-century theorist Charles Comte wrote, “What must never be lost sight of is that a public functionary, in his capacity as functionary, produces absolutely nothing; that, on the contrary, he exists only on the products of the industrious class; and that he can consume nothing that has not been taken from the producers.”
Which is to say that Mr. Anthony’s song is correct: The wealth of the state comes at the expense of the rest of the population.
“The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!”
The clarity of Bastiat’s prose is for the ages.
“But how is this legal plunder to be identified?“ he wrote. ”Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
“Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law—which may be an isolated case—is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.”
Thus we can see that Mr. Anthony isn’t merely whining about his plight while neglecting the blessings all around him, much less pushing for some Marxian-style social revolution. He is drawing on a deep lineage of thought, which we can find even in the Declaration of Independence.
He’s saying that some shouldn’t live off the labor of others but rather that every person should be entitled to equal liberty and equal protection against exploitation by the powerful. The rich in the capitals of the world must change their ways else risk the destruction of the middle and working classes and the poor.
This insight about social and political structures—the powerful few versus the downtrodden many—is at the core of the development of the post-feudal idea of freedom itself. That his song would come as a shock to anyone in this generation reveals widespread ignorance of the ideas that gave birth to all modern notions of freedom. Proper predecessors to Mr. Anthony aren’t the Marxists but Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.
