A Generous Governor

Those who analyze economies often overlook the powerful factor of private sector charity. An example of this significant variable is Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan.

According to a Detroit Free Press report, he and his wife earned a bit more than $400,000 in the year 2015.

During that same year, they donated approximately $95,000 to charities. (This is the sum which went to true charities, i.e., not to professional organizations or political causes.)

By this reckoning, Snyder donated around 25% of his annual income.

For that same year, he paid approximately $31,189 in the form of income taxes. He paid many thousands more in sales tax, property tax, and other taxes.

By far, the greater impact was in the private sector, and this for three reasons: first, the actual dollar amount was greater; second, the private sector charities have lower overhead administrative costs than government programs; third, much government spending is counterproductive, i.e., it exacerbates the very problems it is designed to address.

Private sector charities have a greater, more efficient, and more effective impact than government spending.

The History of Taxation in the United States: An Unnecessary Evil

From the Han Dynasty in ancient China to the Roman Empire, people have demonstrated a strong antipathy toward taxation. Both government and taxes are necessary, but humanity is happiest when both are kept to an absolute minimum.

For several decades leading up to the 1770s, most of the grievances which caused the United States to declare itself independent of the British Empire were tax-related, from the quartering of soldiers to the Stamp Act to regulated imports.

After achieving independence, the U.S. government largely avoided taxing the citizens directly, as Steven Weisman, writing in the Washington Post, notes:

The American Revolution began as a protest against unfair taxation. In our early history, leaders avoided the question of income tax altogether, choosing instead to raise federal revenue with import tariffs.

One notable exception was a direct tax on distilled beverages, which led to the bloodless ‘Whiskey Rebellion’ of 1794. Although major violence was avoided, the rebellion demonstrated that U.S. citizens were strongly allergic to taxation.

The first income tax of note was imposed during the Civil War. Its top bracket levied as much as 10%, but approximately 90% of households were totally exempt, having incomes which fell below the lowest bracket. Weisman writes:

Since the federal income tax was introduced during the Civil War, U.S. citizens have complained about their taxes.

By 1872, the Civil War income tax was phased out. The people had tolerated the tax long enough to end the war, and pay war-related expenses in the first few years postbellum.

Public outcry against income taxes had grown by 1872, and in 1895, the Supreme Court ruled, in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company, that income taxes were unconstitutional.

Less than two decades later, Woodrow Wilson and his ‘Progressivist’ movement would avoid both the Supreme Court’s decision and the popular vote, enacting an income tax of a much larger proportion than the short-lived Civil War tax.

Steven Weisman reports:

The income tax disappeared when the war ended. But it returned on the eve of World War I, enabling President Woodrow Wilson to raise the marginal income tax rate to 70 percent. Wilson called paying taxes a “glorious privilege” and a way for the businesses profiting from military buildup to give back. Sen. Hiram Johnson of California even attacked “the skin-deep dollar patriotism” of those who favored war but opposed taxes.

The citizens got a brief respite from the shocking tax burden during the Harding and Coolidge administrations. With the help of Congress, Coolidge brought Wilson's draconian 70% rate down to 25%.

The federal government, held hostage to ‘Progressive’ ideology savaged the citizens with income tax rates as high as 91% in peacetime and an astounding 94% during WW2.

The 94% rates applied during 1944 and 1945, and might be excused because of wartime urgency.

But a 92% top rate, during 1952 and 1953, was not justified by the Korean War, inasmuch as that conflict consumed a smaller segment of the total defense budget.

The long reign of the 91% rate, from 1946 to 1963, cannot be excused. It was this era which gave birth to creative accounting, tax shelters, loopholes, and offshore accounts.

For almost two decades, confiscatory rates were used against citizens. No war or natural disaster created a justifying urgency. The government was simply savaging its people.

It was only logical, therefore, that financial systems were developed to help citizens avoid as much income tax as they legally could. From this we have inherited both a large tax accounting industry and bullying IRS with its thousands of pages of Byzantine tax codes.

Black Voting Rights in the South

The Civil War ended in 1865. For the next several decades, African-Americans not only enjoyed their right to vote in large numbers, they were also elected to major offices, including the Senate and the House of Representatives.

During these decades, Republicans worked hard to protect the civil rights of the Blacks in the South. In Congress, the Republicans made the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Civil Rights Act of 1871, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 into law.

By the end of that century, however, the pro-slavery Democrats began to take power in the South.

As the Democratic Party asserted itself, it found ways to prevent African-Americans from voting. By the early 1900s, fewer Blacks were voting in the South than in the late 1800s.

With fewer African-Americans voting, the Democrats began to win elections in the South. Blacks had traditionally voted Republican.

The Democratic Party accumulated a string of victories by preventing African-Americans from voting in the South, as historian Patrick Buchanan notes:

In the two presidential campaigns of Wilson and the four of FDR, Democrats swept every Confederate state all six times. The Democratic candidate in 1924, John W. Davis, carried every Confederate state and, with the exception of Oklahoma, only Confederate states. Truman took seven Southern states to Strom Thurmond’s four. Dewey got none. In 1952 and 1956 most of the electoral votes Adlai Stevenson got came from the most segregated states of the South.

Some of the Democratic presidential candidates spoke in favor of segregation, like Woodrow Wilson. Some of the candidates were silent on the subject, like FDR, but allied themselves with segregationist vice-presidential candidates.

John Davis, the Democratic candidate for president in 1924, was an attorney who argued for segregation before the Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954.

The Republicans did not give up. They worked to help Black voters get back to the polls.

Against opposition from the Democrats, the Republicans in Washington passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, both of which were signed into law by Republican President Eisenhower.

The Republicans continued with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped millions of African-Americans get their right to vote.

The return of Blacks to the voting booth eventually began to break the stranglehold which the Democratic Party held on the South. Over the next few decades, the monopoly held by the Democrats in southern politics ended.

Mounting Evidence Yields Details of Soviet Spy Activity

Political parties are usually formed to represent a set of ideas. They work to spread those ideas by nominating candidates and campaigning for their election.

The American political system is based on the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press – allowing vigorous and unrestrained debate about public topics. To function properly, this system requires tolerance – people need to tolerate other viewpoints and other people who have those viewpoints.

A free and democratic society needs people to tolerate – but not to accept, support, welcome, or affirm – various political opinions. During an election, one voter must tolerate another voter’s views: but a voter is not required to accept, support, welcome, or affirm another voter’s beliefs.

In the case of the Communist Party (CPUSA), however, a terrorist organization presents itself as a political party. The CPUSA is not a party which exists simply to spread its ideas and nominate candidates. It is a terrorist organization.

The CPUSA seeks a “violent” revolution in the United States – it explicitly uses the word ‘violent’ in its documents – and is committed to sabotage and assassination. It is further a part of an intelligence network.

The larger international communist conspiracy of which the CPUSA is a part operates an espionage network with the goal of gathering confidential information from within the United States government and sending it on to hostile governments, and with the additional goal of planting operatives inside the U.S. government who can influence policymakers to make decisions which favor those hostile foreign governments.

The CPUSA, by calling itself a political party, seeks the protection of the first amendment, and seeks to garner the sympathy of a free and democratic society. But the CPUSA has no interest in a free exchange of ideas, and has no interest in free and fair elections.

This ruse has been successful. The CPUSA has fooled some Americans into believing that it is an organization interested in ideas, and has hidden its identity as a terrorist group and a spy network.

Historian John Earl Haynes, speaking of his work with Harvey Klehr, says,

Too-large of a segment of the academic world is inclined to a benign view of communism in general, and of the CPUSA in particular. They prefer to think of Communists as idealists interested only in social justice and peace. They resent historical accounts such as those Klehr and I produced that present archival documentation of the CPUSA’s totalitarian character and its devotion to promoting Soviet victory over the United States in the Cold War.

Those who’ve been fooled into believing that the CPUSA is peaceful and humane resist the preponderance of evidence which reveals the group’s true nature.

At the end of the Cold War, around 1990 or 1991, data became available as the Soviet Union crumbled. Information from Soviet intelligence agencies, and from agencies in various Warsaw Pact countries, showed a thriving communist spy network inside the United States.

Other evidence emerged as Cold War era documents within the U.S. government were declassified, and as former operatives began to recount their activities.

Specific information is now available about the activities, from the 1930s to the 1950s, of known Soviet agents like Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, Julius Rosenberg, and others.

There is now no doubt that the CPUSA was funded and directed by the Soviet government in Moscow, and was a functional part of the Soviet intelligence apparatus. What seemed to be a political party was in fact a group bent on destroying the United States.

Robert Oppenheimer, Soviet Agent: a Physicist Goes Rogue

During WW2, development of an atomic bomb was a high priority. If the United States hadn’t achieved this capability, the Japanese would have killed millions of Americans.

So urgent was the need for this technology that military leaders, like General Leslie Groves, were willing to take security risks in order to accomplish this task. He hired a number of physicists and technological experts who had known Soviet sympathies.

By May 1942, when a physicist named Robert Oppenheimer was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project - originally named the ‘Manhattan District’ - the Soviet Union had switched sides in the middle of WW2, and was now ostensibly an ally of the United States.

Perhaps this made General Groves feel better about hiring Oppenheimer. While the war, and the alliance with the Soviets, lasted, it seemed like a reasonable risk.

But quickly after the war’s end, the USSR declared itself to be an enemy of the United States, and allowing the Soviets to gain nuclear technology would be dangerous indeed. Puzzlingly, Oppenheimer was allowed to remain in government projects related to nuclear weaponry.

More than merely having communist sympathies, Oppenheimer was a member of the communist party, dedicated to espionage. He was not the only atomic scientist working for Moscow. Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass were among his fellow Soviet agents.

Oppenheimer was one of the more dangerous Soviet spies, because he worked his way up into administrative decision-making, and became he held his post longer before being eventually discovered and removed, as historian Stan Evans writes:

Foremost among such cases was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the famous nuclear scientist who played a leading role in the atom project of World War II. This was by all odds the most significant security problem in Cold War records, having its genesis in the days of FDR, blossoming into a full-fledged scandal under Truman, then finally coming to public view in the Eisenhower era.

Oppenheimer’s communist links were strong. The American Communist Party (CPUSA) had declared that it sought the “violent” overthrow of the United States, its people, and its government. This was no mere political party. It was a terrorist organization.

Oppenheimer was part of an espionage network throughout the United States. His task was to see that the Soviets obtained military and scientific secrets about nuclear weapons.

The earliest known mention of Oppenheimer in the FBI reports is a memo from March 28, 1941, which says he had the previous year attended a meeting in the home of Haakon Chevalier, an identified (later self-admitted) Red, along with Communist leaders Isaac Folkoff and William Schneiderman. It was apparently this information, obtained at the era of the Hitler-Stalin pact, that prompted the FBI to put Oppenheimer on its “custodial detention” list of people to be picked up by the Bureau if a national emergency developed. A memo to this effect was issued May 21, 1941, describing his “national tendency” as “Communist.”

In the early 1950s, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was revoked, effectively ending his career. After his death, documents were discovered which indicated that Oppenheimer’s sympathies had clouded his judgment, and that he had been, in some instances, more of a ‘dupe’ than a spy. He had enabled others to relay information to Moscow, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes knowing that these individuals had connections to Soviet intelligence agencies.

Despite these possibly moderating factors, Oppenheimer had joined forces with an organization which envisioned the deaths of many Americans in violent revolution. He was clearly aware that in some instances, his actions led directly to the Soviet acquisition of American nuclear technology.

The fact that the USSR eventually obtained atomic weaponry emboldened the imperialistic ambitions of the international communist conspiracy, and led to wars in Korea and Vietnam.

It is possible that if the USSR had not obtained nuclear capabilities, then the wars in Korea and Vietnam would not have taken place. Oppenheimer bears some responsibility for the deaths of American soldiers in those two wars.

President Harry Truman Was Tough on Communism - Except When He Wasn't

President Harry Truman spoke forcefully about his intentions to stop the USSR’s global imperial ambitions. He famously proclaimed the ‘Truman Doctrine’ in a speech, as he sought Congressional approval to aid the nation of Greece against an attempted Soviet takeover:

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

Truman also indicated that he would resist Soviet attempts to infiltrate the United States government with ‘moles,’ and that he would root out those communist agents who had already lodged themselves inside federal bureaucracy. Historian Stan Evans writes:

In many standard histories and bios, Truman is depicted as a tough cold warrior who bravely faced down Moscow, being teamed in this respect with his foreign policy vicar Acheson at State. Even more to the present point, we’re told, Truman cleaned up security problems on the home front.

The Soviet Union was about the business of taking over nations who did not want to become the victims of communist dictatorships. Truman successfully put forth the image of someone who would fight Soviet socialist aggression, as he did, e.g., in the case of Korea.

It was logical, therefore, if the public were to assume that Truman was also dedicated to eradicating the agents of the various Soviet intelligence agencies who had worked their way into positions inside the U.S. government.

The cleanup was supposedly effected through the Truman loyalty program, announced in March of 1947. Thanks to this draconian effort, it’s said, whatever Communists or security risks had got on official payrolls were ousted.

Puzzlingly, Truman’s actions on the domestic front did not always match his words. His efforts against the well-developed Soviet espionage network in North America were lackluster and halfhearted.

Some of the most notorious communist spies held position inside Truman’s administration. Robert Oppenheimer, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and William Remington were a few of the many Soviet operatives who had access to sensitive information which they sent to Moscow, and also had access to the ears of policymakers, who could be influenced to unwittingly make pro-Soviet decisions.

This well developed intelligence network connect these individuals, and others, back to the USSR and eventually back to Stalin.

Truman, however, did not act on information given to him by the FBI which indicated that these men were major security risks, as Stan Evans writes:

Sad to say, this portrayal of Truman’s policy on the home front is almost entirely fiction. That he was a visceral anti-Communist is not in doubt. However, he seemed to know little about the way the Soviets and their U.S. agents functioned, or their presence in the government he headed, and didn’t show much interest in learning. This ennui persisted despite the myriad FBI reports supplied to the White House and Truman cabinet about the vast extent and serious nature of the penetration. Accordingly, not only was the security problem not cleaned up by 1950, some of the most flagrant suspects imaginable were flourishing in the federal workforce.

Why did Truman, who seemed dedicated to freeing the world of the communist threat, turn an inattentive eye to Soviet spies inside his own offices? Why did he not act when others attempted to alert him to this danger?

There are several possible answers.

Perhaps Truman was concerned about the image of a U.S. president having to publicly admit the presence of communist operatives inside the federal government. The political damage to his administration and to his party would be grave.

Or perhaps Truman, like many presidents, had to answer to higher powers - the leaders of his party, and the shadowy figures who operate internationalist conferences - who told him not to root out the dangers.

It’s possible that we’ll never know the cause of Truman’s mystifying inaction on this topic.

New Concepts of Warfare: Deterrence Both Large and Small

While students are often familiar with the word ‘deterrence’ in the context of doctrines like “massive retaliation” during the Cold War, they are less likely to know the word’s use in terms of smaller, regional conflicts. Deterrence is primarily taught in the context of the large arsenal of atomic weapons held by the United States: arsenals which made “massive response” or “massive deterrence” a reality.

Thus readers tend to think of deterrence on a macro scale: the extensive collections of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems in the face of Soviet aggression.

The goal of deterrence is always to prevent an armed conflict before it begins, by convincing a potential attacker that any aggression will meet with an overwhelming response.

By 1952, voters in the United States were tired of the Korean War. Eisenhower’s strategy was to prevent the United State from being dragged into similar regional conflicts by using deterrence on a regional scale. This was deterrence on a micro scale.

Structuring national defense systems for deterrence instead of for engagement requires a different type of planning. Prior to the Eisenhower presidency, the focus of military planning was for a large-scale confrontation with the Soviets, perhaps a land war, a re-play of WW2.

A WW2-style mobilization made no sense militarily because nuclear weapons had significantly changed strategy, and made no sense politically because the citizens were tired of protracted warfare. There was not much room, in Eisenhower’s deterrence strategies, for “tactical atomic” weapons.

Tactical nuclear weapons are intended for use within the context of conventional land war. They are often small missiles, with ranges of two or three miles.

By contrast, strategic nuclear weapons are large, powerful, and often delivered from thousands of miles away. They are intended either to be a part of strategic, not conventional, combat, or to deter combat altogether.

Although ‘tac nukes’ were produced in quantity throughout the Eisenhower administration, they were not a significant part of strategic planning.

Eisenhower’s goals were to get the United States out of the Korean conflict, to prevent U.S. entanglement in similar regional conflicts, and to accomplish this by developing deterrence on both a macro and a micro scale, as historian Russell Weigley writes:

The new Eisenhower administration embraced deterrence still more enthusiastically, with fewer backward glances toward plans for mobilization on the pattern of the World Wars. Apart from the asset of Dwight Eisenhower’s winning personality and prestige, the Republicans captured the Presidency in the election of 1952 largely because of voter discontent with the prolonged and puzzling Korean War. The new administration intended both to extricate the country from the Korean entanglement and to ensure against further involvements of the Korean type. It was able to succeed in the former aim, to end the fighting and the weary truce talks, for various reasons, including its political ability to be more flexible in negotiation than the Truman administration - few Americans could believe that Republicans were soft on Communism - and perhaps primarily, because Stalin soon died. Many in the new administration also believed that a threat to use atomic weapons in Korea, the message being conveyed to the Chinese through India, was decisive; this conviction was important in conditioning subsequent policy. For the second goal, guarding against a repetition of Korea, the new administration turned to an explicit strategy of deterrence, aimed at deterring local and limited as well as general wars.

Conventional war plans, on a strategic or macro level, were reactive, or at best responsive, and amounted to simply waiting for WW3 to break out. Deterrence was a more proactive approach.

Rather than make plans for a possible armed conflict with the Soviets, deterrence was designed to reduce the probability of that conflict, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski explain:

After the Korean War, the United States turned from a crisis-oriented military policy toward concepts and programs designed to last as long as the rivalry with the Soviet Union. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson adopted policies suited for “the long haul.” With Soviet-American competition accepted as the central fact in international relations, American policy makers regarded defense policy as a principal instrument for containing the parallel spread of Communism and Soviet imperialism. To check the extension of Soviet influence, the United States sought to reduce the chance that the Russians would threaten or use military force as a tool of international influence. For all the debate about the means and costs of defense, American policy rested upon consensual assumptions about the nature of the military challenge and the appropriate response. Supported by an activist coalition in Congress, the three Cold War presidents further refined containment, strategic deterrence, and forward, collective defense.

But on the political side, strategies of containment, deterrence, and defense are only as good as the realism needed to face the global situation, and are only as good as the will to implement such strategies.

On the American political scene, there were significant numbers of both leaders and voters who either did not understand, or willfully chose not to believe, that the crystalized goal of the USSR and the international communist conspiracy was the destruction of western societies leading to the Soviet Socialist domination of the world.

The Soviets were clearly focused on this goal, and willing to use, even intending to use, the deaths of thousands and millions of innocent civilians to reach this objective. In 1960, Senator Goldwater wrote:

The temptation is strong to blame the deterioration of America’s fortunes on the Soviet Union’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. But this is self-delusion. The rot had set in, the crumbling of our position was already observable, long before the Communists detonated their first Atom Bomb. Even in the early 1950s, when America still held unquestioned nuclear superiority, it was clear that we were losing the Cold War. Time and again in my campaign speeches of 1952 I warned my fellow Arizonians that “American Foreign Policy has brought us from a position of undisputed power, in seven short years, to the brink of possible disaster.” And in the succeeding seven years, that trend, because its cause remains, has continued.

There were enough voters and leaders, however, who accurately understood the Soviet threat. Although imperfectly, the United States was able to maintain enough deterrence that the USSR chose not to mount direct frontal attacks on either North America or western Europe.

The communists certainly continued their efforts at expansion, via proxy wars, via the acquisition of smaller defenseless countries, and via the espionage network they had established inside the United States. But America managed to deter a large-scale, massive Soviet military aggression.