LDS scripture teaches that Latter-day Saints are to keep the laws of our land “for he that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land”(D&C 58:21).
A defining principle of American democracy in the founding of the nation was described best by Thomas Paine in his pamphlet Common Sense when he wrote that “in America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” (i) John Adams, just four years later, declared that we are to be a “government of laws and not of men.” (ii)
This principle is an underpinning of all others: we live by the rules because we believe that all others are going to live by the rules – including the government and what is generally called the “ruling class.”
Several years ago, I focused my company’s energy on a particular foreign country. I traveled there many times, visited a dozen handpicked businesses, and provided business counsel to the best of them. However, in each case, we were not able to complete the deal. The reason was simple: even though they were very profitable and well managed, they didn’t pay their taxes. Their excuse was that “the government cheats on us, why shouldn’t we cheat on the government?”
Last week I was on a call with a friend who is losing his home, caused by what the severe economic downturn has done to him personally. Like millions of other Americans . . . and families around the world for that matter . . . he can’t see any way out. His solution: just walk away. His reasoning: “my bank just got a multi-billion dollar bailout from the government. The taxpayers – including me – will be paying this off (along with all the other bailouts) for the rest of our lifetime, so why should I let the bank harass me about a mortgage that is peanuts to them? Let them pay for it with their bailout funds.”
At 3:00 am on a deserted street, drivers stop for a red light even though no one is awake for miles. Why? We voluntarily live by the rules. No military on every street corner to enforce. No “party apparatchiks” to spy and snitch on the rule breakers. We have an unwritten Social Contract as a people that we generally live by, because we expect others to live by it, too. Now, this is not always true, and not all abide by this, but by and large most people do, and the lawbreakers are the exception not the norm.
So, when my friend shared this decision with me, it caused me to wonder: is one of the ultimate casualties (of the trillions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money that the government has handed out to the multinational mega-businesses) the loss of faith by the American people that big government, big business and big labor are living by the rules; or, have they decided to live by a different set of rules than the rest of us? To many it seems like socialism for the rich, welfare for the poor, and free enterprise for the rest of us.
To begin with, only about half of families in America pay income taxes. Since 2000, the upper half of income earners have paid 94 percent of all income taxes, with the middle class paying about 26 percent of that total. The bottom half have paid about 4 percent. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this since these higher income tax payers also earn the majority of the income in the U.S. However, excluding the top 10 percent of income tax payers . . . the wealthy . . . what happens when the middle class decides that the game is rigged against them? When they decide that “the government cheats on us, so why shouldn’t we cheat on the government?”
This idea, whereby the people and the government enter into an agreement as to the “rules of the game”, is called a “Social Contract”; and, it has its deep roots in political philosophy. It is well described as:
The notion of the social contract implies that the people give up sovereignty to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order through the rule of law. It can also be thought of as an agreement (iii) by the governed on a set of rules by which they are governed.
Social contract theory formed a central pillar in the historically important notion that legitimate state authority must be derived from the consent of the governed. The starting point for most of these theories is a heuristic examination of the human condition absent from any structured social order, usually termed the “state of nature”. In this condition, an individual’s actions are bound only by his or her personal power, constrained by conscience, and outside resistance. From this common starting point, the various proponents of social contract theory attempt to explain, in different ways, why it is in an individual’s rational self-interest to voluntarily give up the freedom one has in the state of nature in order to obtain the benefits of political order. (iv)
The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution lists six sovereign rights that ‘We the People’ . . . the makers of this Social Contract . . . enumerate in ‘ordaining’ and ‘establishing’ the Constitution. The purposes of the implementation of this document are “in Order to”:
1. form a more perfect Union,
2. establish Justice,
3. insure domestic Tranquility,
4. provide for the common defence,
5. promote the general Welfare, and
6. secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. (v)
When ‘We the People’ begin to question whether our government is fulfilling any of these purposes for us personally, we are entering a very volatile period. The “Tea Party movement” seems to be an expression of this frustration, and is unprecedented in having arisen totally without leadership or organization whatsoever. And, putting aside how this plays out in a partisan way in 2010 election politics, the surprising rise of the Tea Party movement reinforces the belief by a large percentage of the American people, that someone is not living by the rules, and “we’re” getting stuck with the bill. More importantly, perhaps, is the belief that our children and grandchildren will be paying for it throughout their lifetime. Incidentally, it appears that people who identify with the movement are from both political parties and independents (polls differ about the percentages), are better educated than average, and more conservative. In other words: it is a middle class revolt against what they see as the unfairness by what they perceive to be a “ruling class” that is blind to their fears and concerns.
It is in this highly charged atmosphere that people like my friend are asking themselves whether the deck is stacked against them; and therefore, why they should live by the rules when no one else is. Former President Jimmy Carter, in an interview with Brian Williams of NBC News, recently lamented that
This country has become so polarized that its almost astonishing….
Not only with the red and blue states… President Obama suffers from the most polarized situation in Washington that we have ever seen – even maybe than the time of Abraham Lincoln and the initiation of the war between the states. (vi)
This may be an exaggeration made in the heat of a campaign. But, I don’t think that any of us (who have participated actively in the public process over the past four decades) would dispute that the polarization — that began in the middle 1960s as the post-World War II consensus began to break down in the country — has never been higher during our lifetime.
One would hope that once this election clarifies what ‘We the People’ are telling both political parties and the permanent political class that surrounds them, that the ship of state will move to restore the sense of fairness to all. This is essential to restoring our faith that we all are living by the rules of our Social Contract by conviction not coercion.
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i .Thomas Paine, Common Sense, January 10, 1776.
ii. John Adams ensured that this was placed in the Massachusetts Constitution, Part The First, art. XXX (1780).
iii. The word “not” is here in this explanation. I am assuming that this is an error.
iv. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract.
v. Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America.
vi. Interview of former President Jimmy Carter with Brian Williams, NBC News, as seen on MSNBC.com from September 20, 2010.
