Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

500 in the Boot

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

August 29, 2014

A story is told of a fellow who was mugged in an alley by a band of thugs, and he put up a ferocious fight. After about fifteen minutes, they got him down on the ground, and found just two dollars in his wallet. “Two dollars?” one of them said. “You put up that fight for two dollars?”

“Well, no, actually. I thought you were after the $500 in my boot.”

One of the most precious possessions a government has is its moral legitimacy. When they have it, taxes are paid, for the most part, voluntarily. Any society requires force for the outliers, but is not held together at the center by force. When the ruling elites start to opt out of this societal bond — “laws are for the little people” — there is usually a time lag, but the “little people” do catch on. When they catch on, the whole thing spirals down into chaos.

One of the central techniques that is used by despots for divesting themselves of moral legitimacy is the technique of governing through arbitrary administrative law. A free people live under laws passed by legislatures in which they have freely chosen representatives. The prerogative of passing such laws may not be transferred. So if you chafe under rules and regs that spew forth from all the alphabet agencies, then you are not free. It doesn’t matter that you are currently not being harassed. No despot can torment all his slaves simultaneously.


Now when you find yourself in this situation — as we do — there are two aspects to it, represented in this situation by the two dollars in your wallet and the five hundred in your boot. When a government has lost its moral legitimacy, the fact that you actually do pay your taxes on the two dollars (which comes to three dollars) needs to be understood as principled acquiesence, and not as a statement on your part that what they are doing is legit. It is not.

At the same time, there are those who have studied these things in depth, and who have seventeen reasons for denying the legitimacy of the IRS, and nine of them are pretty good. They live in a cabin high in the mountains of western Montana, where they study Blackstone by candlelight, late into the evenings. These are the fellows who tell the thugs in single-spaced typewritten letters that they have no right to the five hundred in their boot.

Franklin was actually on to something when he said we had to hang together, or we would all hang separately.
There are more than just two options. The first option is to figure this all out by yourself, and take on the principalities and powers all by yourself. Good luck, and there is probably a legal society you can join there in Leavenworth. They might even make you chairman. The other option most often taken is simply to accept the way things are as “normal,” in which you pretend that our arbitrary administrative rulers actually care about our freedoms.

Madison described the problem this way:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many; and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elected – may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

And that, my friends, is what we have. We have it in spades.

But the solution is educate enough Christians to effect a coordinated response together that runs a chance of actually succeeding. Romans 13 does not say what many imagine it says.

In the next installment, I will talk about what Christians would have to learn together, and what they would have to do together.