Archive for category Individual Freedom
Shades of George Orwell
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy, Constitution, Federalism, Government Regulation, Individual Freedom, Law, Morality & Religion in the Public Square, National Character, Statism on December 28, 2010
Hopefully only a bad dream from which we shall awake!
Subsidiarity
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy, Government Regulation, Individual Freedom, Law, Morality & Religion in the Public Square on December 26, 2010
Club for Growth published a simple video which makes a profound point–government action necessarily implies force, force which we wound not wield as individuals, simply because we prefer our own freedom of action or inaction if that force were threatened against us. The corollary is that smaller units of society can accomplish the needs of society more effectively. The family, church, social group, or local government are always closer to the need. Moral obligations to help are stronger than legal obligations that force help. States over federal governments, local governments over state governments, social groups and churches over local governments, all work more effectively and more intelligently. Here’s the video:
Think of the myriad of ways the federal government spends your money to address so-called problems that could better be handled locally!
Justices Ignoring the Constitution
Posted by Tom in Constitution, Federalism, Individual Freedom, Judiciary, Justice, Law, Morality & Religion in the Public Square, Legal, National Character, Supreme Court on December 19, 2010
What to do about judicial legislation? About justices that ignore the constitution? Doug Bandow posted and excellent article in American Spectator, Does the Constitution Mean Anything? He recites the circumstances of the drafting and ratification of the establishment document, namely the restriction of the type of unlimited powers exercised by the king and parliament against the colonies and the people. It was natural then that the founders drafted a structure dividing government between branches, each with its own domain, and each having a check on the others so that power was in fact divided. Thus a balanced central government was created. But not one of general police powers. No, the federal government was one of limited powers, specifically enumerated limited powers. The general power governments were the states. Thus the states possessed the so-call “police power.” The constitution specifically reserves powers not delegated by it to the federal government, to the states or the people.
Realizing that changes may later be needed, the founding fathers provided for a couple of different processes for amending the constitution. There have been 27 amendments to the document none conferring additional power on the central government.
Bandow goes over the various theories by which judges and justices try to get around this basic governing document which they have foresworn to defend and uphold. Theories of “living constitution,” or “dynamic constitution” or “time is right” for changes that the founders would have drafted if they thought of them, are all part of the judicial tap dance used to deny the validity of the constitution.
He suggests that it is not judicial “activism” that is the sin: ”Originalists” of varying stripes have tended to criticize judicial “activism,” but activism is not the problem. Lack of fidelity to the Constitution is the problem.”
He correctly analyses the current constitutional issues on the Obamacare insurance mandate and then posits the real value of his post, a potential solution to recalcitrant judges short of impeachment, itself a non-remedy.
“GIVEN THE TENDENCY of judges to ignore law and constitution, one helpful fix would be to end life tenure for justices. Intended to protect judicial independence, this provision creates a dangerous and disconnected elite that will always be tempted to overstep its role. Better to appoint judges for a term, perhaps ten years. Rotation in office would still insulate jurists from political passions while limiting the concentration and abuse of power by the judiciary. Errant jurists would naturally leave the bench rather than forever wield unconstrained power — becoming liberal saints along the way.”
While this is perhaps not the only solution to the problem, it seems a sensible one. Perhaps others will be constructed, but this at least causes us to ponder the problem and think about potential solutions.
The issue is important for, “If constitutional protections are but formless inkblots, then no American is truly safe from his or her government.”
SHUT IT DOWN!
Posted by Tom in Congress, Entitlements, Federalism, Individual Freedom, Law, Morality & Religion in the Public Square, National Character, Statism, Subsidies, Welfare on December 15, 2010
It just burns money. It’s fraught with fraud and waste. It is not in touch with the will of the governed. It has little if any legitimacy. That’s our federal government which will shut down without the passage of an omnibus spending bill of 1,924 pages, pages that no legislator has read or fully understands.
Republicans want earmarks stripped from the bill before they will support it. That’s what the results of the last election would indicate the voters of America are demanding. This seems a reasonable interpretation of the November election results.
The existing stopgap measure that funds the current government operation is set to expire at midnight on Saturday. Absent legislation the government stops.
What a concept! The government stops! How would we function without a government? We would need to conduct our affairs with regard to others. We would need to help others in need. We would need to promote the general welfare of our immediate communities. We would need to come together to settle our private disputes, or, failing that, find a neutral arbitrator to settle them.
Now, the congregate victim class would have no ready bankroll and would need to deal with others on a reasonable basis. There would be no automatic handouts to the entitlement class, but those in need would be required to demonstrate that need.
Commerce would be conducted on a market basis. There would be no subsidies to favor one product or solution over another. Competition would prevail in quality, price, availability, etc. Markets would be allowed to work.
People who wanted services like education, medical treatment, transportation, etc. would pay for them, unless they could claim a real hardship, in which case others would help them. In other words, everyone would pay for what he gets.
If our nation were attacked we would need to take up arms to defend our hearth and home. If hooligans ran roughshod in our streets, we would need to band together to collar them and bring them to local justice.
On balance, all this might not be too bad. A teachable moment as our president is wont to say! Think what burdens would be lifted and what responsibilities would be replaced!
The Fox article today reports the brouhaha as well as any. McCain’s take is enlightening:
“Sen. John McCain tweeted the top 10 earmarks in the spending bill, including $247,000 for virus free wine grapes in Washington State, $413,000 for peanut research in Alabama, $235,000 for noxious weed management in Nevada and $400,000 for solar parking canopies and plug-in electric stations in Kansas.”
“McCain expressed disbelief about the projects.”
“Are we tone deaf? Are we stricken with amnesia?” he said, adding that voters made it clear in last month’s midterm elections that they’re tired of business as usual in Washington.”
When left a choice between stealing from other taxpayers with earmarks and continuing to steal from our grandchildren with every thing else or alternatively shutting down a government that doesn’t work, I say, SHUT IT DOWN!
Stalin’s Ghost is Alive and Well in the FCC’s Michael Copps
Posted by Tom in Constitution, Government Regulation, Individual Freedom, Press, Statism on December 8, 2010
Democrat Michael Copps of the FCC wants to impose a “public welfare test” on broadcasters forcing upon them “a renewed commitment to serious news and journalism,” according to today’s IBD editorial, A Tyrant’s Thinking!
Recall that the Communists to complete the takeover of a country needed to control the media and the universities. Copps, a good student, has learned the Communist lesson. Here’s a guy that has sucked at the public teat all his life, never known a real job, and in a brief foray into private life worked in government relations.
He is the perfect leftist liberal, a member of the governing elite that fits in the Obama, Reid, Pelosi cabal. Besides wanting to control news content, he is a strong advocate of “net-neutrality.” That is the concept where content providers can expropriate bandwidth from carriers who have invested heavily in it.
This guy’s positions are right in line with this leftist administration. He opposes the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and the Fifth/Fourteenth Amendments’ freedom from unjust takings.
We need to fear for our nation when unelected bureaucrats like this have the power they have.
Government of Laws or Men?
Posted by Tom in Bankruptcy, Constitution, Federalism, Government Regulation, Individual Freedom, National Character on December 7, 2010
Lincoln Caplan in the December 1st New York Times attempts to explore the …Meaning of ‘Constitutional Conservatism.’ He points out that the phrase is used mainly in opposition to Obamacare, the GM takeover and Obama’s policies. That incoming speaker John Boehner like 80% of Republicans wants to “return to the constitution,” and Boehner wants every bill in Congress to identify the specific part of the Constitution it rests on. Caplan then points to the “radical vision” of Utah senator-elect Mike Lee who “views much of what the federal government does as unconstitutional.” In short, Lincoln Caplan doesn’t like constitutional conservatism, whatever it is, nor does he understand the Constitution.
Well James Antle of the American Spectator does understand the Constitution and proceeds to educate Caplan in yesterday’s post, Caplan’s Constitution. But before getting down to basics, he explains why the voters may be upset at what Caplan calls the “solutions.” Solutions like expropriating GM to favor the UAW and penalize the bondholders or forcing people to buy Obamacare approved insurance policies that they don’t want or need. He speculates that indeed these solutions may indeed be unconstitutional. In fact the voters may have perceived that the solutions are a cause of our dire economic problems.
But it is the basics that are important. The Article I of the Constitution forms a federal government of limited powers, limited and specifically enumerated. To avoid any doubt as to the meaning of that limitation, the Tenth Amendment, specifically reserves all powere not delegated to the federal government, to the states or the people.
Antle shows that our great-grandparents generations understood the Constitution and the limited government it created. They considered it necessary to amend it to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages (Prohibition–18th Amendment) and amend it again to repeal the prohibition (21st Amendment).
In fact it is in the amendment mechanism, Article V, that the framers recognized that they could not anticipate all future circumstances. Granted the amendment process is difficult, but it should be so with a basic governing document. It is not like there are no other governments, the states and the people have the reserved powers to govern themselves. This fits beautifully with the principle of subsidiarity, that the lowest cognizant part of society should be responsible to handle the problems it is capable of handling.
I would be remiss if I did not try to explain my call for a constitutional amendment precluding the federal bailout of bankrupt states. Bailing out states is not an enumerated power, so an amendment is not legally necessary. But in this age of leftists elites dictating laws and governmental actions, we need a bootstrap amendment emphasizing that this in fact is not a legitimate power of government. Belts and suspenders do work well together.
So, to the title question, government of laws or men? We have allowed ourselves to become a government of men, and have forgotten our basic law. We need to return to that basic law.
Today’s Nonclassical Liberalism….against the American grain!
Posted by Tom in Democrats, Individual Freedom, Liberalism, National Character, Statism on December 4, 2010
Emmett Tyrrell pens an interesting analysis of today’s left in the weekend WSJ, Liberalism: An Autopsy. American voters who identify themselves as liberals are down to 20% of the electorate while those identifying themselves as conservatives are 42% and the powerful independents who swung right in the last election are 29%. What happened to the so-called liberals?
Tyrrell traces their decline from JFK forward. He put us on the path to big government and his successor LBJ dramatically expanded that path. So while JFKs by executive order legitimized public employee unions, Johnson gave us the Great Society with legislation in education, voter rights, poverty, medicare and medicaid. Kennedy threw open the floodgates of public unionism and its incestuous alliance with politicians. Johnson showed us how big and bankrupting government can be with its bankrupting parasitical Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Granted the expansion of the leftist progressive thinking started much earlier, reached a plateau with FDR. But Truman’s and Ike’s return to normalcy provided only a brief respite. The size, the power, the intrusiveness of big government was shown with Johnson’s Great Society. As implied from the moniker the Great Society demanded a Small Individual with less freedom and consequently less potential.
Tyrrell makes an excellent point that “conservatives have had Edmund Burke and the Founding Fathers as their cynosures.” Sadly the liberals search in vain for their cynosures, denied them, save perhaps the British Fabian Socialists or Karl Marx, they lack intellectual mentors.
The vile overreach of big government was shown in the person of Obama who with Reid and Pelosi engaged in the stimulus-Obamacare, generation choking spending orgy. They steal from our grandchildren:
“Over the past two years the Democrats showed their true colors. Faced with an entitlement crisis, they rang up trillion dollar deficits. We now face an entitlement crisis and a budget crisis—and liberals have no answer for it beyond tax and spend. They still have support in the media, but even here they are faced with opposition from Fox News, talk radio and the Internet.”
“As a political movement liberalism is dead. They do not have the numbers. They do not have the policies. They have 23 seats in the Senate to defend in 2012 (against the Republicans’ 10) and Republican control of state houses and legislatures will give them even more seats in the future.”
Tyrrell generously concludes with, “Liberalism R.I.P.” I only hope he is not premature in his assessment!
Let’s Return to Federalism
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy, Constitution, Federalism, Individual Freedom, National Character, National Debt, Statism on November 10, 2010
Too much power resides in Washington and too little with the States. The farther away power gets from the people, the more dangerous it is to the common good, the more intrusive it is to our freedom and independence, and the more costly it is, now to our great grandchildren!
The Constitution as originally established understandably reflected the founders fear of highly centralized national power. It created a federal republic. Recall Benjamin Franklin’s famous response, “We’ve given you a Republic, if you can keep it.” That republic was a marvelous structure of checks and balances on power, on centralized power.
Who was beholden to whom for the office held was wonderfully allocated to various constituencies. The executive was elected by an electoral college and had a four year term. The legislature of the people, the House, was elected directly by the people and based upon population. The analogy here was the House of Commons. And the people would express their control and sentiments most frequently, every two years. The Senators, only two from each state, were elected by the state legislatures and had terms of six years. The analogy here was the House of Lords. Finally the judiciary, then the Supreme Court, was appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate and served for life.
This worked as structured, as a federal government, with local and state responsibility and control for years. The principle of “subsidiarity,” that needs would be best served at the lowest level of society, was in full force and flourished. Under this principle, the family, the social organization, the church, the local authority, etc. could all do things more effectively than the federal government miles away. States, counties, municipalities all had real responsibility and provided for the local needs much better than could be done by some distant government.
This worked in fact until the so-called progressives said that it didn’t work. The 17th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1913. It provided for the direct election of Senators, rather than the election by state legislatures as set out in Article 1, Section 3.
Since that time we have witnessed ever increasing federal power and ever declining local power. We have seen control of local responsibility for important programs like education eroded. We have seen unfunded mandates levied upon the states and localities, like Medicaid. We have seen concentrated national unions influence the election of Senators. And we have now seen an out of control federal budget with unsustainable levels of debt that will subject our grandchildren to servitude.
There is an embryonic movement afoot to repeal the 17th Amendment. It is very much worth serious consideration. Todd Zywicki has an excellent post on NRO today, Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment. It’s well reasoned and persuasive.
From my perspective, we need to promote more individual and local responsibility and power and less in Washington DC. A repeal of the 17th Amendment would go a long way to doing so. It would likewise go a long way to starving the beast.
Rent-seeking Appropriators Lost Big
Posted by Tom in Government Regulation, Individual Freedom, National Character on November 8, 2010
These elections results are encouraging in a very critical respect: those candidates who signed a pledge to support “net neutrality,” all 95 of them, were soundly trounced last Tuesday.
“Net neutrality” is the attempt of content providers to expropriate bandwidth of the cable companies. The cable companies have invested big dollars in infrastructure, the lines in the ground or on the poles and the maintenance attendant thereto. They are entitled to charge users of that infrastructure. Some users, content providers with no infrastructure investment, take up so much space, so much bandwidth, that other users are slowed down or stopped. Now the cable companies should be able to charge more to those users and be able to provide bandwidth to others. The pricing mechanism works to police the traffic.
Well the socialist politicians listen to the rent-seeking content providers and take contributions from them as well. Together they have hit upon the euphemism, “net neutrality.” This would be the regulation of the internet to “level the playing field,” or provide bandwidth choking trafic to the rent-seekers at the same rates as other users. In other words the rent-seekers want a government mandate that gives them a traffic use advantage over others.
It’s good to see the electorate has an innate sense of what’s right. “Ya pay for what ya use,” as my dad used to say. They also have a very real sense of freedom of speech and intuitively abhor FCC regulation of the internet. The internet is our freest medium of expression. It’s the equivalent of the pamphlet in 1776! Allowing the government to regulate it, is extremely dangerous to our most basic democratic right.
Gordon Corvitz set it out well in his WSJ piece today, ‘Net Neutrality’ Goes 0 for 95. “The broader lesson may be that people fear government regulation of what has been a free and open Internet more than they fear what any other institution might do to the Web. This is a good time to reset the argument about how to ensure that the Internet remains a lively place for users and innovators.”
How to explain the extreme, 95 to 0, loss? Perhaps it’s an intuition against rent-seekers and a sense that those who invest to provide a service should profit from it. Or perhaps, it’s a natural resistance to government regulation of free speech. Maybe a combination. But whatever the motivation, the results were heartening!
Never Never Land…Compliments of the Leftists
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy, Democrats, Free Speech, Individual Freedom, Law, Morality & Religion in the Public Square, National Character, Statism on October 22, 2010
It was hard for me to restrain myself in reading a Fox News item detailing a Civil Rights violation against a Michigan woman for posting an ad at her church seeking a Christian roommate.
“The ad “expresses an illegal preference for a Christian roommate, thus excluding people of other faiths,” according to the complaint filed by the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan. ”It’s a violation to make, print or publish a discriminatory statement,” Executive Director Nancy Haynes told Fox News. “There are no exemptions to that.”
Harold Core, director of public affairs with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, told the Grand Rapids Press that the Fair Housing Act prevents people from publishing an advertisement stating their preference of religion, race or handicap with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling.
Apparently these leftists do not believe in the Frist Amendment applicable to the states via the Fourteenth. It would do them well to remember it:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
This Hanyes woman is admittedly not the brightest bulb on the tree, as she states the obvious: “If you read it (the ad) and you were not Christian, would you not feel welcome to rent there?” YEAH! HOW ABOUT THAT!
Under these Democratic leftists we have come to the point in our history where Civil Rights are more often than not CIVIL WRONGS. As this case illustrates, we have not only abandoned our founding principles but we have abandoned common snese.