THE FIRM LEAGUE OF FRIENDSHIP:

A RESTORATION OF THE CLASSICAL STUDIES

 

CAN all men live together in concord?  Today, even intellectuals assert that we cannot agree about the “real” world of minerals and men – that our knowledge is only conjectural, liable to be falsified tomorrow.

            However, this skepticism, widespread though it is, cannot be supported.  There are, and have long been known, self-evident truths – theories that govern the world of experience, but can be proved a priori – and these laws stand despite quantum mechanics.

            True it is that every individual must live his life by trial and error;  but collective questions, political questions, can be settled by taking counsel together.  We can demonstrate that the theory of ethics is not altruism, nor is it egoism: it is righteousness, fraternité, collective security.  And when we understand that there is an obligation to defend one’s equals against wrong-doing, we know who are equal – they are those who behave accordingly.  So then we see what a government is: it is not the mind of the collective, it is only the creature the collective uses to oppose wrong-doing.

            Once it is known that an attack on one will be resisted by all, then every individual enjoys liberty – in the words of the common law, no prior restraint.  And there prevails capitalism – the social system described, and prescribed, by the classical liberals:  the subjective values of the many are transformed into objective prices by the market.

            Is this only the ideal of the philosophers, the jurists, the Jews and the Christians?  No indeed!  It is the system established by these United States when they rejected the Articles of Confederation, in which the Congress was accepted as an equal, and adopted the Constitution, under which the States can abolish the Congress, the President, the courts.  No longer has the Congress “sole and exclusive right and power . . .”; instead we read “Congress shall have power . . . ,” and every power named is a power to act for the welfare of all – or, where a privilege (such as bankruptcy or copyright) is allowed, for the benefit of a minority. De jure, these United States have always been politically correct.

 Philosophers have, for two and a half centuries, been parroting the dogma of Hume, that we can have no certain knowledge of the material world: “there are no absolutes.”   Firth – standing on the shoulders of twentieth-century philosophers such as Ayn Rand in New York and Sir Karl Popper in London – has shown that there indeed exists self-evident truth, Objective Knowledge.  Moreover, he has demonstrated that the American revolutionaries were acting upon an unassailable understanding of the rights of men, and the powers of government, when they framed the Constitution.

if democracy means the system of majority domination which shattered the great British Empire in a mere generation; yes, the judges of the Continental Congress were allowed to decide by majority, but the Constitution gives no such power to the courts of the United States.

It Is Indeed a Democracy

in the sense that the many discuss and agree, the few only concur – or veto: always State officers have the first word, if not the last word also.  “[B]y and with the advice and consent . . .” cannot possibly mean “subject to the approbation or rejection” of the Senate, because that is what Hamilton, a notorious aristocrat, proposed – and the States in convention rejected.