The time has come to break the chains of the welfare-warfare state
By Murray Sabrin
Murray's Newsletter
November 2, 2026
Introduction-The New Abolition Movement
"The citizen is sovereign only when he can retain and enjoy the fruits of his labor." Frank Chodorov
"The darkest hour in any man's life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it." Horace Greeley
"A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government..." Thomas Jefferson
"No institution is more necessary for State control and manipulation of a modern economy than the Central Bank" Murray N. Rothbard
"Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force him to yield to a dictator...Liberty is always freedom from the government." Ludwig von Mises
"My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth." George Washington
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On July 4, 2026, the American people celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But what, exactly, were we celebrating?
Was this past Fourth of July merely another national holiday-a day off from work, a time for family and friends, a backyard barbecue, fireworks, and community festivities ? Or did Americans pause to reflect upon the extraordinary act of political defiance that took place 250 years ago, when thirteen colonies declared that they were no longer willing to live under a government they believed had violated their fundamental rights?
The answer matters.
If Americans truly understand the meaning of the Declaration, then the 250th anniversary should have inspired more than ceremonies and patriotic speeches. It should cause us to ask whether the principles proclaimed in 1776 still govern the nation today. And if they do not, Americans should be prepared to do what the colonists did: demand their independence from institutions of government that have exceeded their legitimate constitutional authority.
The Declaration was a ringing indictment of political power that had become arbitrary and oppressive. The colonists accused King George III of violating their rights, interfering with their self-government, imposing burdensome taxes, maintaining a standing military presence, obstructing commerce, and exercising powers that they believed had no legitimate foundation. They did not begin with a desire for war. They petitioned, protested, negotiated, and appealed to the British Crown and Parliament. Only after repeated attempts at peaceful resolution failed did they declare their independence.
The Revolutionary War followed. After years of sacrifice and bloodshed, the colonies emerged as thirteen free and independent states. They then faced another enormous challenge: how to establish a political system that would preserve the liberty for which they had fought.
Yet from the beginning, the new nation contained a profound contradiction.
A people who had proclaimed that "all men are created equal" continued to permit human beings to be held as property. Slavery, the antithesis of freedom and independence, survived the Revolution and became embedded in the political and economic institutions of the new republic.
This contradiction cannot be ignored.
The Declaration articulated universal principles of human liberty, but many of the men who signed it participated in, benefited from, or were economically connected to slavery. A study by the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study found that 48 of the 56 signers of the Declaration, nearly 86 percent, had profited directly or indirectly from slavery.
The paradox is one of the great tragedies of the American founding: the nation proclaimed liberty while hundreds of thousands of Black Americans remained enslaved.
Yet the story of abolition did not end there.
Over the following decades, increasing numbers of Americans challenged the institution of slavery on moral, religious, political, and constitutional grounds. The abolitionist movement transformed American politics and ultimately forced the nation to confront the contradiction at the heart of the republic.
Although historians continue to debate the causes of the Civil War, including slavery, sectional conflict, tariffs, and competing constitutional visions, the conflict ultimately resulted in the abolition of chattel slavery. The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 abolished slavery throughout the United States, with the constitutional exception for punishment of a crime.
The first American abolition movement therefore confronted a system in which one human being could legally own another.
But America faces another question today:
What institutions of government have become incompatible with the principles of liberty proclaimed in 1776?
That question is the starting point of this book.
The Abolition Manifesto argues that the United States needs a New Abolition Movement, an abolition of government powers, institutions, and expenditures that have no legitimate constitutional foundation and that have transformed a limited republic into a vast welfare-warfare state.
The modern federal government reaches into virtually every dimension of American life. It taxes income, regulates and interferes with peaceful domestic and international economic activity, redistributes wealth, finances an enormous welfare state, maintains a worldwide military presence, conducts undeclared wars, creates fiat money through the Federal Reserve, accumulates unprecedented debt, and increasingly assumes powers never granted to it by the Constitution.
The central question is not whether these programs are popular. It is whether they are constitutional and consistent with the principles of 1776.
The Founders understood that liberty could not survive merely because politicians promised to exercise power benevolently. They understood that government itself had to be restrained. The Constitution established a federal government of limited and enumerated powers, not a government with authority to do whatever a temporary majority, a president, Congress, or a federal bureaucracy might consider desirable or politically popular.
The history of America since the adoption of the Constitution also reveals the difficulty of maintaining those limits. The Constitution replaced the decentralized Articles of Confederation with a stronger federal structure, and over time the meaning of federal power was expanded through constitutional interpretation, legislation, executive action, administrative agencies, taxation, and monetary policy.
The New Abolition Movement begins with that premise.
The Abolition Manifesto is also an antidote to the ideas of democratic socialism. Democratic socialism generally seeks a larger role for government in directing economic activity, redistributing income and wealth, and providing an expanding range of goods and services through taxation and government programs.
Ludwig von Mises summed up the issue of capitalism versus socialism in Human Action.
"A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings."
The New Abolition Movement begins from a fundamentally different premise: free people should be able to retain the fruits of their labor, make their own economic choices, and rely upon voluntary exchange and voluntary association rather than political redistribution. Government cannot create prosperity simply by taking resources from some citizens and transferring them to others, nor can an expanding welfare state preserve individual independence. As government assumes responsibility for more areas of economic and social life, it necessarily requires greater taxation, regulation, borrowing, and monetary intervention. The alternative presented in this manifesto is therefore not another form of government-managed economics, but a return to constitutional limits, private property, free markets, sound money, individual responsibility, and the voluntary institutions of civil society.
This is the economic and constitutional foundation of the New Abolition Movement.
Just as the abolitionists eventually forced Americans to confront the incompatibility of slavery with the principles of liberty, we must confront the incompatibility of an unlimited federal state with the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution.
Article I, Section 8 outlines the enumerated powers of the federal government, while the Tenth Amendment declares:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Together, these constitutional principles establish a presumption of limited-very limited- federal power. Yet those limits have been progressively weakened as the federal government has assumed responsibility for activities far removed from the powers enumerated in the Constitution.
The result is the modern welfare-warfare state-a government that taxes and regulates its citizens at home while maintaining an extensive military and foreign-policy presence abroad.
The New Abolition Movement challenges both dimensions of that state.
It challenges the assumption that Washington should manage the economic lives of Americans through taxation, subsidies, regulation, entitlement programs, and monetary manipulation. And it challenges the assumption that the federal government should maintain a worldwide military presence and engage in wars and military interventions without the constitutional declarations and limitations contemplated by the Founders.
The solution is not to elect different managers of an ever-expanding government.
The solution is to abolish the powers and institutions that government was never legitimately granted in the first place.
That means confronting the income tax and the payroll tax, unconstitutional federal spending, corporate subsidies and other forms of political favoritism, the creation of the welfare state, fiat money and the Federal Reserve's manipulation of interest rates and the money supply, excessive federal borrowing, the administrative state, and foreign interventions and wars that exceed the constitutional authority of the federal government.
It also means recognizing that government is not the only institution capable of addressing human needs.
Families, churches, charities, mutual-aid societies, businesses, entrepreneurs, community organizations, and voluntary associations have historically aided and expanded opportunities without requiring political coercion. A free society does not mean a society without compassion. It means a society in which compassion is expressed through voluntary action rather than government compulsion.
The goal, therefore, is not simply to reduce the size of government.
It is to restore the relationship between the citizen and the state envisioned by the principles of the American founding: government as the servant of the people, not their master.
The first abolition movement demonstrated that institutions once considered permanent can ultimately disappear when Americans recognize that they are incompatible with human liberty.
The same principle applies today.
The welfare-warfare state is not inevitable. The Federal Reserve is not necessary. An income tax need not be permanent. A system of corporate welfare is not a requirement of a free economy. Perpetual federal deficits and an ever-expanding national debt are not laws of nature. A permanent global military presence is incompatible with peaceful foreign relations. And dependence upon government programs need not define the relationship between citizens and their government.
Abolition begins with recognizing that what exists is not necessarily what must exist.
The New Abolition Movement therefore calls upon Americans to rediscover the principles of independence-not independence from one another, but independence from unnecessary political control. Economic independence means keeping the fruits of one's labor. Monetary independence means sound money that does not systematically erode purchasing power. Political independence means government constrained by a written Constitution. And personal independence means accepting the responsibilities that accompany liberty.
The task before us is nothing less than the restoration of the American republic.
The first abolition freed Americans from the institution of slavery. The new abolition must free Americans from the institutions of unconstitutional and anti-liberty government.
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The Abolition Manifesto is divided into four parts. Part I covers The Rise of the American State. Part II focuses on The Great Expansion: The Welfare-Warfare State is Imposed on America. Part III explains The Crisis of the Welfare-Warfare State. Part IV outlines The Road to a Free America.
All told, the eight chapters of the manifesto is a journey of why the principles of 1776 have been discarded and replaced by virtually the same policies that ignited the American revolution.
The expansion of the welfare-warfare state is not inevitable. Witness the collapse of the "evil empire," the Soviet Union, nearly four decades ago. Restoring the lost liberties of the American people is a battle worth fighting for to prevent America descending into a collectivist nightmare that deprives the American people of all their constitutionally guaranteed rights, their dignity, and creates widespread economic ruin.
This article was originally published at Murray's Newsletter.
Murray Sabrin is a Mises Institute Associated Scholar and Emeritus Professor of Finance at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He has a B.A. in history, geography and social studies education from Hunter College, an M.A. in social studies education from Lehman College and a Ph.D. in economic geography from Rutgers University. Sabrin is one of only two individuals who had the honor of having the late Austrian School economist, historian, and philosopher Murray N. Rothbard serve as a member of his dissertation committee. His dissertation, "The Spatial Incidence of Inflation in the United States 1967-1971: An Economic-Geographic Perspective," was completed in 1981.