John Taylor on the Ills of Government

I'd like to examine a portion of a book by John Taylor, an apostle, prophet, and third President of the Church. The book is called The Government of God (I wish I knew a web edition to link to), and it contrasts the governments of men with the way God governs. Elder Taylor wrote the book around 1850, when he was just over 40 years old.

In the book, and in this section, he seems to be advocating a single government for all mankind throughout the world. Now, such a situation would seem to be inimical to anarchism, since it doesn't solve the problem of government itself. But this excerpt, which is quite representative of Elder Taylor's assessment of the problems of human government in general, reveals not only some of the major problems with government that make anarchists oppose it, but also the extent to which leaders of the church have recognized the same problems, attributed those problems to the same source, and proposed roughly the same solution — the abolishment of human government. The divine government that Elder Taylor speaks of in the whole of the book, devoid as it is of all the problems inherent in human governments, so little resembles government as we understand it that it seems almost dishonest to call that divine government by the name of government.

The quotes that follow are all one continuous portion of the book. I have interspersed my own commentary in the text, but in Elder Taylor's book, they would occur as they are written here without interruption or alteration.

If men and nations, instead of being governed by their unruly passions, covetous desires, and ambitious motives, were governed by the pure principles of philanthropy, virtue, purity, justice, and honor, and were under the guidance of a fatherly and intelligent head, directed by that wisdom which governs the universe, and regulates the motions of the planetary systems, there would be no need of so many armies, navies, and police regulations, which are now necessary for the protection of those several nations from the aggressions of each other, and internal factions.

Notice here the explanation Elder Taylor gives for the need for armies and police, the armed forces of the state. They exist to protect the interest of the governments in question. The armies protect the interests of their government from other governments while the police protect the interests of their government from the governed. If the various governments were dismantled (with a true theocracy — rule by God rather than priests, which is hierocracy — to replace them, as described in Revelation 11:15), then there would be no need for armies or police, which exist only to protect the interests of governments competing, on the one hand with other governments and on the other with those they rule, for the "right" to rule the people within a defined area.

But since we have governments, we need armies and police — or at least, the governments do. But what are those armies and police doing? Elder Taylor tells us his view on it:

Let any one examine the position of Europe alone, and he will find this statement abundantly verified. Look at the armies and navies of France and England; and the confusion of Germany, also of Austria, Turkey, Russia and Spain, not to mention many of the smaller nations, and let their armies, their navies, and police be gathered together, and what an abundant host of persons there would be. They would be sufficient to make one of the largest nations in the world! And what are they doing? To use the mildest term, watching each other, as a person would watch a thief for fear of being imposed upon, and robbed, or killed; but generally strolling around as the world's banditti, robbing, plundering, and committing aggressions upon each other; and if they have peace, acquiring it by the sword; and if prevented from aggression and war, it is generally, not that they are governed by just, or virtuous principles, but because they are afraid that aggression might lead to combinations against them which would result in their overthrow and ruin.

There he states it pretty plainly. The armies and police of the world are the world's banditti. To achieve peace, they desolate opponents. The only way they bring justice is through their fear of not being able to get away with acting unjustly. And this is not really because of the individual natures of those men in the military and police forces of the various governments, but because of our system of governance, because of our whole approach to the concept of government. By thinking as we do about government, we convert a large body of men — large enough to constitute a great nation — into bandits and thieves to rob what they can, where they can, when they can.

But the plundering and robbing, the blood and the horror that these great bands of bandits bring us is only part of their cost. Elder Taylor goes on to detail some greater costs than even the violence and terror that we incur by establishing and supporting these robbers.

In the city of Paris alone, at the present time, and its immediate environs, there are one hundred thousand soldiers, besides police to a very great number, not to mention the vast number of custom-house officers and others. Suppose we add to these their families, where they have any, and where they have not, notice the vast amount of prostitution, misery, degradation, and infamy, that such an unnatural state of things produces. I give the above as an example of the whole, but here the navies are not included. I say again, What are these all doing? They do not raise corn to supply the wants of men, nor are they occupied in any useful avocation; but they must live, and their wants must be supplied by the products of the labour of others.

These bandits do not produce the materials that all men need to sustain life, but their lives must be sustained. That means they must live by the fruit of other men's labor. For that to happen, the people must not be able to enjoy the full fruit of their own labor, but the state must send some of their bandits to the producers of the world and take their produce from them at gunpoint so that it can provide for the needs of the whole band. This reduces the producers — the farmers, the clothiers, the builders, and so forth — to slavery and reduces the men in the military and police forces to slave-driving, both degrading occupations for mankind.

Now, notice that Elder Taylor does not fault the individual men in those military and police forces, nor even does he fault the men who direct them. The fault lies in the whole "unnatural state of things," as Elder Taylor puts it. The whole system is unnatural, and that is what brings about all these problems. Men are not naturally meant to be in bondage one to another, but this whole artificial system of states, created by the puny wisdom of man, forces such a complex interweaving of relationships of bondage that the system cannot leave any man in it free from its stain.

And Elder Taylor continues:

There has to be an immense amount of legislation for the accomplishment of this thing, and instead of having one government of righteousness and the world obeying, we have scores of governments, all having to be sustained in regal pomp, to be equal to their neighbouring nations; and all this magnificence and national pride having to be supported by the labour of the people. Again, all these legislatures have to provide immense hosts of men, in the shape of custom-house, excise, and police officers, to carry out their designs, all of whom, and their families, help to increase the burden, till it becomes insupportable.

This wicked system has to expand indefinitely in order to maintain itself. Every action of its hired bandits requires more legislation to extort goods for their support. Every increase in legislation requires more officers to enforce the legislation, who in their turn must be fed by the labor of those who must therefore enjoy even less of the their own produce. The whole system, like any artificial and unnatural system, inevitably becomes unsustainable over time.

Now, notice that if all governments were dissolved in one great government, but that government were based on the same principles as our current governments, the problems would not go away. There might be no need for armies, but the need for police would only increase unless something were done to strike at the root of government as we know it. You have to read the whole book to see it, but when Elder Taylor speaks of "one government of righteousness," he's talking about something very different from everything we think of when we think of government. So don't think Elder Taylor is advocating something like a highly empowered UN. Rather, he is attacking the very foundation of everything we, in our mortal understanding, think of as government.

And the problems of government as we know it simply multiply:

That, together with the unnatural state of society, before referred to, in regard to the situation of the inhabitants of cities and the nations, plunges millions of the human family into a state of hopeless destitution, misery, and ruin, for they are groaning under all these hopeless burdens without having sufficient land to till to meet their demands, and as natural means fail they are obliged to have recourse to those that are unnatural.

This whole unnatural state of things, then makes our ultimate source of productivity, the earth itself, insufficient for our needs. The earth's insufficiency has nothing to do with overpopulation (see D&C 104:17); it is instead caused by this whole approach to government that we all support and encourage. That is what makes the land give less than we seem to need. If instead every man had to live by the fruit of his own labor and every man were free to enjoy the full fruit of his own labor, then earth would be abundant, with enough and to spare. But that kind of abundance depends on our being agents unto ourselves (really, see D&C 104:17). If we are agents unto another man instead of agents unto ourselves, the natural order of things is subverted and the earth's abundance is not properly brought forth.

Elder Taylor discusses one of the more chilling ironies this system brings about:

Hence, in England a great majority of the inhabitants are made slaves of, virtually to supply the wants of the greatest part of the world, and are forced to be their labourers. Thousands of them are immured in immense factories, little less than prisons, groaning under a wearisome, sickening, unhealthy labour; deprived of free, wholesome air; weak and emaciated, not having a sufficiency of the necessaries of life. Thousands more from morning till night are immured in pits, shut out from the light of day, the carol of the birds, and the beauty of nature, sickly and weak, in many instances for want of food; and yet, in the midst of their wretchedness, gloom, and misery, you will sometimes hear them trying to sing in their dungeons and prison-houses, in broken, dying accents,

"Britons never shall be slaves."

For those of who unfamiliar with the song Elder Taylor is referencing here, it is "Rule, Britannia!", a stirring patriotic song of Britain expressing the resolve of the British to be remain free from the rule of other states.

And there's the irony. These wage laborers, spending the bulk of their waking hours in unnatural conditions for a pittance of the value of the produce of their labor (else how would their employers make a profit?), bound by the scarcity-induced poverty just described to their labor, in every way matching or surpassing the sadness of condition known by slaves who truly bear the name (of which there were many in the United States of John Taylor's day), imagine themselves free because of the power of their government. It is their very government that creates the whole situation forcing them into this slavery. A slave is not free simply because his master is free. A slave is a slave. But slaves under modern governments largely support and even cherish the system that enslaves them, supposing that the power of their government makes them somehow more powerful, when in reality it is the power of their government that makes them less powerful. If their government were weaker, they would have far more power.

Elder Taylor gives a further example of this kind of capitalistic exploitation that is brought about by the whole governmental system as we know it:

I will here give, as one example, an iron works that I visited lately in Wales. One of the proprietors informed me that they employed fifteen thousand persons, and paid them £5,000 per week. Most of these people laboured under ground, in the pits, digging for iron ore and coal; the remainder were employed principally about the furnaces, in rolling the iron, &c., at heavy, laborious, fatiguing work. And who were they toiling for? Principally for the Americans and Russians, at that time, to furnish them with railroad iron. And what did they get for their labour? The riches of those countries? No. £5,000 a week among about fifteen thousand persons. I suppose, however, a number of these were boys and girls. The average wages of men was from ten to twelve shillings per week. And this is their pay for that labour; and yet the masters are not to be blamed, that I can learn, for they are forced by competition to this state of things, and by the unnatural, artificial state of society. If they did not do this their workmen must be out of employ, and ten times worse off, if that were possible, than they are now. In the State of Pennsylvania, in America, where the railroads run through coal and iron mines both, they leave them untouched, and come to England for iron to make the rails of, that they cannot afford to make at home, because of higher wages, and an outlet to society, which prevents them from being coerced into bondage. If the world was right, the labour would be done there, and not here, and the labour of carriage saved.

The workers in the Welsh iron works described here are each of them making a third of a pound a week. That would be worth about £25 a week today, or $50 in America — probably close to a dollar an hour. This situation was brought about because British labor was cheaper than labor in Russia and America. There was plenty of iron in those countries, but it was cheaper to hire Britons to extract and process their own iron and then ship it than to hire Americans or Russians to extract and process it right where it was needed.

In school, we were told that this kind of exploitation was because of the laissez-fair economy of the 19th century and that governments helped the workers by establishing minimum wages and worker safety regulations. The government protected the worker from the harsh employers. But what did protection that really cause? Did it end exploitation? For the British, the exploitation became far less extreme, but a visit to India or China today will quickly cure a person of believing that the exploitation has stopped. In 1850, Americans got cheap goods from Britain because labor was so much cheaper there. Today we get cheap goods from Asia, where people are working for less than a dollar a day to supply our wants. The exploitation and slavery of John Taylor's pre-Civil-War times is still going on — it's just hidden by outsourcing.

And it's not the fault of the employers. They have to exploit people if the system is to remain intact. The whole process of exploitation is necessary in order to support the ever-burgeoning growth of states, who are the source of this whole complicated inter-network of bondage. As long as the states remain, they will have to operate by extortion that is always increasing, forcing fewer and fewer people to work harder and harder to support the state's officers, both armed and bureaucratic, thus reducing the productivity of the whole earth. The only thing that has let us continue this exploitative system so long is the technological progress that has dramatically increased our productivity per man-hour.

The solution is simple. Let us not continue to maintain governments as we know them, whose well-being requires this kind of parasitic exploitation that reaches through every level of our society. Let each man labor for his own support and enjoy the full fruit of his own labor. When every man is free to act fully as an agent unto himself, then we will see that the earth is full and there is enough and to spare. We will see an end to war and oppression as we know them. We will see an end to slavery of all kinds. The solution to the problem Elder Taylor outlined so clearly over 150 years ago, a problem that has only worsened since then, is simple.

It is simply anarchy.