Edward M. House, an influential advisor during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, wrote Philip Dru: Administrator (1912) during the beginning of the Progressive Era. Rapidly, U.S. politics became dominated by Progressive idealism and the hope for a brighter future. All of the country’s past classical liberal ideals regarding federalism, constitutionalism, limited government, free trade, non-interventionism, etc., were abandoned as the U.S. moved towards imperialism abroad and the welfare state domestically. The era of Calvin Coolidge and Grover Cleveland was over, and the three presidential candidates in 1912—Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt—were all Progressives. With Wilson winning the presidency, Edward House was thrown into the upper echelons of political power, receiving autonomous authority to select all of Wilson’s cabinet members except the Secretary of State. And his book, Philip Dru, is more or less a manifesto of the Progressive Era.
By the 20th chapter, House summarizes the entire Progressive movement into one sentence: “The strong will help the weak, the rich will share with the poor, and it will not be called charity, but it will be known as justice.”1 In a way, he was correct. Under the Wilson administration, the United States would in fact move towards compulsory charity and make the United States government, not just a protector, but a provider for the entire nation. Congress attempted to implement a federal income tax, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co (1894). To bypass that decision, Congress moved to pass the 16th Amendment, which constitutionally gave the federal government the right to levy an income tax. By 1913, it was ratified under the Wilson administration.
Congress should have opposed this measure on various grounds. First, it was historically unprecedented. For a brief period, there was a federal income tax between the Civil War and Grant’s presidency in the 1870s. In other words, there was only an income tax for 10 of the nation’s 140 years of existence. Secondly, modern-day Progressives do spread mottos like “Tax the rich!” and “Make them pay their fair share!” And to be sure, loopholes in the arduous tax system enjoyed by the lobbying class should be repealed and streamlined. But there is a stark difference between wanting a fair tax code of equality of oppression and wanting Progressive inequality. As the Bible says regarding the poll tax, “The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less” (Ex. 30:15). Although the “rich” should pay their “fair share,” they should not bear a disproportionate burden, and removing tax loopholes is not the same thing as increasing the tax rate. From a logical perspective, progressive and regressive income taxes make no sense as the “rich” and the “poor” alike receive the same level of military defense and the same access to the court systems.2 If taxes are the means of paying for government services and everyone, irrespective of class, receives the same services, why should one man pay more than another? Even so, as much as wanting the “rich” to disproportionately bear the tax burden is the opposite of equality, expecting Progressives to drop that slogan is probably unrealistic; envy is part of human nature. Thirdly, the people of the United States have never wanted to pay more taxes. Those who increase the tax burdens of the people are renegade representatives ignoring the will of the people. While some may argue in favor of taxing another person’s money, everyone in the history of Western civilization has opposed taxing their money. Yet the 16th Amendment was plain and clear—everyone’s tax burden was increasing. Again, the people of America have never dreamed of paying more in taxes—they fought a revolution against unlawful ones—and that makes the 16th Amendment a repugnant betrayal of the will of the people and the American character.
Edward M. House and his rhetoric in Philip Dru should have been completely ignored. It is not state-enforceable “justice” for the strong to help the weak; it is charity. To be sure, God will judge those who ignore the cry of the downtrodden and the oppressed, but that is not the responsibility of the U.S. government. Moreover, the federal income tax should have been opposed on three grounds: There was virtually no historical precedent for it, the rich and the poor alike should pay the same taxes since they receive the same services from the government, and raising taxes was a flagrant rebellion against the American people.
- Edward M. House, Philip Dru: Administrator (1912), pdf. https://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/members/PhilipDru.pdf, p. 19. ↩︎
- Or at least, they should. ↩︎
Asher Sisneros 