Political Discord and Anger Rule When Government is Too Big

With great frequency, we are told that the extent of the political discord in America today is too great and we must tone it down.  This is impossible because we have allowed government too much power. A government with the power of our federal government, and for that matter with the extensive powers of our state and local governments, just has too many ways to do harm to most of us and to rob and punish us for the benefit of those groups who control the power of those governments.  It is the excessive power and its inevitable use to harm most of us, and to allow profit to others at our expense, that calls forth great passions about politics.

Once government exceeds the limits of its legitimate function in protecting the rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, and the pursuit of happiness with broad freedoms of conscience and association, government will necessarily do harm to some even if it tries to do the greatest good for the greatest number.  That is not the proper function of government.  People should act for their own good in the private sector, taking full advantage of their protected individual rights to do so.  It is not for legitimate government to do harm to anyone.  Indeed, the wonderful thing about the private sector is that it in no way requires that harm be done to anyone.

Yes, some people will not fare as well as others in the private sector.  But, at least they have the opportunity to choose their own values in the private sector and to pursue those self-chosen values. When governments have grown beyond their individual rights protection functions, they chose the values that government will pursue and they drag us individuals along whether we would choose those values or not.  The government chooses values and imposes values on all of us by force.  This use of force to pursue its ends is the essence of government.  It is fundamentally why government must have very limited purposes and powers to pursue those purposes.  The Framers of the Constitution recognized this and the people who ratified the Constitution did too.

We have perverted that Constitution for highly limited and principled government with claims that it allows government to do anything in a law that includes taxes because it has the power to tax. Hogwash.  It has the power to tax only to support the very limited powers enumerated in the Constitution.  We have perverted the Constitution by claiming government has the power to regulate anything and everything that involves or could in any way affect interstate trade.  We have perverted the Constitution by ignoring the broad 9th Amendment that recognizes that individuals have rights not enumerated in the Constitution.  We have allowed the 10th Amendment to be weakened.  We have reduced the ability of the states to exert influence in Washington, DC by removing their power to appoint Senators to the Senate to represent the interests of the states.  We have reduced the representation of the People in the House of Representatives by allowing massive and ridiculous gerrymandering of Congressional Districts.

We have established government-dominated and controlled educational institutions with a serious conflict-of-interest problem.  These government-controlled institutions have seen to it that young Americans are unfamiliar with their individual rights and with the very limited role of legitimate governments.  They further the discord and distrust in order to further increase the powers of government.  The legislative law-creation function has also been substantially passed to regulatory agencies with little oversight by the People's representatives in Congress.  As a result about 80,000 pages of new regulations are produced each year.  No one knows how many federal laws and regulations there are.  In short, we have removed most of the limits on government power.

Consequently, it has become a matter of life and death whether one's personal interests are under attack by government.  Or, one might be in a particular band of robbers who stand to make out like bandits if only that band can control the levers of power.  The individual who stands up and defends his individual rights stands literally to be murdered as the governments exert their power.  Few people choose to suffer immolation at the hands of a brutal government eager to enforce its laws and regulations by using whatever force it may take.  But, though one may not present oneself for such immolation at the hands of overwhelming force, this does not mean that one is not suffering passionately one's subserviance.

Powerful governments with wily special interest groups working constantly to gain control over some function or other of said governments, understandably causes many citizens, who either do not have the time or who lack the mental power to understand what they are doing, to become very suspicious. Many begin to imagine that forces are arrayed against them that may not in fact be attempting to harm them.  The fact that many factions are taking advantage of the People in general, will cause many of the People to imagine the worst of motives for many who may only be trying to protect themselves from harmful government force.  Both rational and irrational fears will become common. This is a necessary result of governments that pursue the idea of doing the greatest good for the greatest number, which is made even worse by the fact that such governments only succeed in generating a general warfare among special interest groups for power at the cost of our general Welfare.

When the Framers of the Constitution and the People who ratified it, established a new government under that Constitution, they wisely opened it with:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The document that followed described a highly limited government and the main opposition to the adoption of the Constitution was by those who believed that that government was too powerful, not too weak.  It was a highly limited government that the People looked to to provide for Justice, domestic Tranquility, the promotion of the general Welfare, and the Blessings of Liberty.

We have failed their vision.  We have abandoned the principles of legitimate and good government which they perceived.  We are paying for that with governments that create injustices, stir up passions that lead to violence and discord, that harm many in the interests of factions too politically savvy, and deprive us of many of our Liberties.

It is no wonder that we have little domestic Tranquility under these conditions.  Who controls the levers of government has become a matter of life and death.  The only way to escape this sad state of affairs is to return to a highly principled and limited ideal of government.  Government should first do no harm to anyone.  It should promote our general Welfare and domestic Tranquility by simply protecting our individual rights and leaving us free to manage our own lives.

The Severe Limits of Social Justice

The idea that the government should force every individual of our society to provide Social Justice is a central belief of Progressive Elitists.  The implementation of their Social Justice agenda is a massive injustice.  Let us examine the reasons that make this the case.

Justice has meaning in the relationships of individuals and meaning as an aim of government.  In the relationships of individuals, justice exists when an individual correctly identifies the value of another individual based on his character and actions.  This evaluation is clearly dependent upon one's ethical code.  Consequently, an individual will not correctly identify the value of another individual when his moral code is not correct or when he holds himself to no moral principles.

Suppose an individual has a correct moral code and is highly capable in applying that code to the complex problem of evaluating the worth of another individual on the objective assessment of observations of his character as witnessed by his actions in life.  This highly competent judge of value in other individuals will nonetheless not be able to form a valid opinion of the worth of all the other people he encounters in his life simply because he will not know enough about many of them to form an objective opinion.  He will only be able to do justice to those he knows sufficiently well.

This objective moral evaluator will understand that when dealing with people who he does not know well enough, he should be careful not to do an injustice to them.  This is at least the case in the context of a society in which the initiated use of force by individuals is prohibited, as it is by legitimate governments.  A further requirement is that the government itself uses no more force than that needed to prevent the initiated use of force among individuals.  Once the use of force is minimized in a society, then an individual can afford to live by the principle that he should hold a benevolent assumption that others are not a threat to his life and he may assume that others are of significant value until they actually prove otherwise in actions he has had the opportunity to observe. Thus the rational individual in a free society acts on the principle that he should not do others the injustice of assuming them a threat to his life.  In voluntary associations with them, he can assume that they will trade values to their mutual benefit or they will be free not to have any association at all.

This benevolent assumption of value in others is conditional on a society in which our interactions with others are of a voluntary nature.  It assumes that when we trade values in our interactions, we are not being forced to do so.  A government which harms some individuals in order to provide favors to other individuals or groups, as our present government does on a major scale, is actively making some groups a threat to the lives of many individuals.  It undermines or even denies the basis under which one may make the benevolent assumption of value in others.  It can actually force individuals to do the injustice to others of having to assume that they are a threat to his life until and unless they prove that they are not a threat and actually are a value.  This is what has happened in many fascist and communistic societies.  Big Government or statist government is a basic threat to justice in this way.

Government can clearly be the means by which massive injustice comes to characterize a society. How can government be prevented from being the cause of injustice?  It is by forcing government to observe the rights of the individual.  The rights of the individual are determined by the nature of man and by a basic core morality.  As Ayn Rand said in her essay Man's Rights:

"Rights" are a moral concept -- the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others -- the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context -- the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics.  Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

A "right" is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context.  There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life.  Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action -- which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a "right" pertains only to action -- specifically, to freedom of action.  It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive -- of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice.  As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligation except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The freedom to act on your own judgment implies the need for freedom of conscience and the exercise of voluntary choices within a society requires the freedom of association.  Freedom of speech does not exist unless one is allowed to advocate wrong ideas from the perspective of others or even with respect to reality.  Similarly, freedom of conscience does not exist if one is not allowed to have ideas, including moral ideas, that are wrong.  Freedom of association does not exist unless one is allowed to unjustly err in assessing the value of others.

While rights are a means of securing morality in the actions of government, those moral principles that government must recognize are the most basic and most core moral beliefs.  The government must not dictate more than the most basic of moral requirements on the individuals of the society it serves.  Government protection of the exercise of individual rights requires it to allow individuals to choose their own values and to manage their own lives in accordance with their own values.  The bare minimum of morality that forms the foundation of rights is the recognition that the individual must take actions to secure his life and to maintain it in a healthy state.  He has the right to pursue his own happiness. To take such actions effective in their purpose, he must be free to think and to pursue the information and develop the knowledge necessary to that effective action. Both freedom of thought and action for such purposes are critical values and he must have property rights to values he produces by his thought and actions.  But, he does not have the right to initiate the use of force against others, as they do not have that right against him.  No one has the right to use the force of government to do harm to others either, unless those others have first initiated the use of force.

Rights reside in the individual.  The individual is the sovereign rights-holder.  Rights are not a grant or a privilege from government.  Rights arise from the nature of man, not from the nature of the state. The state either protects the rights of the individual or it does not.  It either performs its legitimate function or it does not.

Man, whether singly or in numbers, is not omniscient.  The development of knowledge and the understanding of nature are difficult.  In attempting to understand our reality we all make mistakes and no one achieves a complete knowledge.  This is a critical part of our understanding of man's nature and of the complexity of the reality in which man lives.  This being the case, it is not reasonable to expect that all men will agree on most moral issues and most value judgments.  So how can we live in a society together even when we are not in complete agreement, or maybe even in considerable agreement, about moral decisions?  The practical answer to this is to have a government that only enforces a minimum of moral requirements.  The answer is a government that simply prohibits the initiated use of force and protects our individual rights.  We are then left the freedom to make our own value choices and to associate with others of our choice voluntarily in the private sector to pursue our common values and to trade with one another to our mutual advantage.  In this private sector we can all aim to achieve every one of our values and to gain values we want in every association and cooperative endeavor we have with others.  This is not the case in the government sector, once government expands beyond its legitimate purpose as the protector of individual rights.

The Progressive Elitists say no to this concept of individual rights.  They claim that rights are really only privileges granted those favored by government.  Those privileges may be changed at the whim of government, at least if that government is controlled by a democratic vote, whether fraudulent or not.  They say the purpose of government is not to secure and protect the rights of the individual, but to ensure Social Justice.

An individual cannot form a just assessment of the character of everyone he encounters, so he cannot offer everyone justice.  But, he can adopt the principle that he will do no one an actual injustice and he will most certainly not initiate the use of force against others.  How can a government do more than this?  A government does not have a moral assessment of every one of the individuals within the country.  The government is still composed of a number of individuals and that number of individuals will never come close to having adequate objective knowledge of the character of most individuals in the country to form a valid assessment of their individual worth.  The government can no more provide justice to everyone than can an individual.

How does a government embarked on the endeavor of Social Justice respond to this inadequacy?  It must simplify the problem.  Its response to insufficient knowledge is a classification scheme that simplifies individual differences by assigning individuals to categories.  Individuals are complex, so a given individual will be thrown into many categories, with his particular combination of characteristics largely lost to the process.  The individual may be characterized by many pixels of information, but the whole of the individual is eradicated.  For instance, one individual may be a count in each of the following categories:

• Skin color or the area of the origin of his ancestors
• Male or female or transgender
• Age
• Married or unmarried
• Dependent children or not
• Child care users or not
• Home-owner or not
• Income level
• Wealth level
• Veteran or not
• Heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other flavors of sexuality
• Employer or employee
• Employed, seeking employment, or not seeking employment
• Labor union member or not
• Supporter of bigger government or not a supporter
• Contributor to favored charities and non-profits or not
• Healthy or unhealthy
• Paid health insurance or not
• Citizen, legal resident, or illegal alien
• Supporter of green energy and catastrophic man-made global warming or not
• Borrower or lender
• Farmer or not
• Exporter or not
• Bank accounts abroad or not

On and on the classification counting goes, but Abigail Adams and Patrick Henry cannot be reconstructed from the many bits they have been parsed into.  The individual himself is totally eradicated.  But with this simplification, the government can now pretend to pursue Social Justice.

Now having partitioned the population into numerous categories, the government can indulge in legislation aimed at helping certain categories and hurting other categories.  When helping a category, the usual justification is a claim that Social Justice is being served.  If preferences in hiring to certain ancestral groups or to one gender are legislated, Social Justice is served.  If income or property is transferred from someone who has worked hard to become educated and worked hard in business to subsidize someone else who has spent endless hours watching TV sitcoms and horror movies and who partied and played instead of studying, then Social Justice is served.  If a person unhealthy due to tobacco smoking and overeating of junk food has difficulty affording health insurance, then force healthy and young people to pay much more for their insurance in order to subsidize unhealthy behaviors in the name of Social Justice.  If it is impolitic to make employees file their own payroll tax forms and send their own tax payments to the government, then in the name of Social Justice make the employer spend his time providing this unpaid service.  If the taxpayer wants to contribute to a non-profit organization supporting individual rights, do not allow that organization to become a tax-exempt organization or if it already is and he contributes $250 a year to it, take down his name as an enemy of Social Justice.  If an individual or organization notes that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is a proven failure, prosecute him as a racketeer under RICO in the name of Social Justice.

Social Justice can be used to justify every act of special interest favoritism.  It is used to justify every instance in which the government hurts some individuals or groupings of individuals to supposedly help another grouping.  Endless numbers of groups are pitted against one another for the favors of government or to at least avoid being the victim of government.  The result is a general breakdown of the voluntary interactions that make it possible for one individual to assume that another has value to his life prior to his actually having such an evaluation of the character of that other individual.  It becomes easy to determine if that individual is a threat to one's life in many cases.  If you are an employer, then employees are a threat, especially if they are members of a government-favored labor union.  If you are a so-called white male, than anyone who is not a white male is a threat due to government favoritism.  If you have a high income or are wealthy, then those with significantly lower incomes or wealth are a threat by virtue of their ability to provide larger numbers of votes for a politician.

Because of government favors rendered in the name of Social Justice and the battle to be designated a special interest, society is broken into numerous, nearly innumerable, groups at war with one another to control the use of government force for their advantage.  The separation of interests of each individual into many categories is a great aid to minimizing the opposition of individuals to the government taking control of many aspects of their lives.  Each enabling act of legislation or each bureaucratic regulation commonly helps a group under one category at the expense of a group in another category.  The group hurt is hurt in one aspect of their lives, but that group still has many reasons to be busy attending to the many other aspects of their lives.  They cannot afford to spend a great deal of time opposing the new act that is imposing upon their individual rights and depriving them of their values and freedom.  The government pursuing Social Justice counts on this to perpetrate its accumulation of more and more power over the life of every individual. 

The Social Justice pursuing government cannot allow anyone to disagree with its moral proclamations.  Disagreement implies a violation of justice within this framework.  It becomes policy for the government to become intolerant of different views of ethics and of different value judgments. If you disagree with affirmative action for the hiring of Black Americans, you are a racist and because you are wrong, you do not have the right to say that affirmative action is wrong.  But, note that if you do not have the right to be wrong, then you have no right to freedom of speech.  If you believe you have religious reasons for thinking gay marriage is wrong and will not produce a wedding cake for a gay marriage, you must be fined heavily enough to destroy your small bakery. You cannot be wrong about this moral issue, so you are not allowed freedom of conscience, freedom of association, or the freedom of free trade.  If government claims that some scientific theory implies that harm is being done to someone and you claim the science of that theory is wrong, you are proclaimed guilty of Social Injustice to those the theory claims will be harmed.  You do not then have the right of free inquiry, free speech, freedom of the press, and you do not have the right to develop scientific understanding because you are not serving Social Justice as determined by the government.

Governmental pursuit of Social Justice imposes much more highly elaborated moral theory on the people of a nation than does the legitimate government whose only purpose is to protect individual rights.  That theory will neither be consistent nor highly rational since the government is chosen by those who vote and they are notably not experts in ethical theory.  What is worse, because there is an enforced intolerance of differing moral beliefs, the People are denied the benefit of a free discussion of morality.  Moral ideas are never tested and improved in the free market for the development of knowledge.  

Even if the People were thoughtful about ethics, they might be wrong and the politicians they vote for might trade ethics for geld or power in their dealings with the myriad special interests vying for the great powers exerted by Social Justice-pursing government.  Such government must violate individual rights.  It must act largely in ignorance of the interests of many of the People.  It must act to hurt many people in the name of helping others.  It must use force much more often than will the individual rights protecting government.  It must minimize the voluntary and co-operative relationships found in the private sector and replace them with involuntary mandates and transfers of income and wealth, jobs, medical care, education, housing, and innumerable other values.  The harmony of the private sector must be replaced with the strife of the Big Government sector.  All of this is a necessary consequence of a government pursuing Social Justice as envisioned by the Progressive Elitists.  In reality, this is the ultimate Social Injustice.

The closest a society can come to maximizing Social Justice is to be a society that honors individuality and protects the rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  The best a society can do is to protect these individual rights equally and to provide an environment in which the use of force is minimized by not allowing either individuals or the government to initiate the use of force.  The rational individual will understand his own life and his freedom to manage and secure his own life is his greatest value.  He understands that to do that he must be free to think and to act upon his thoughts, with only such limits as set by the requirement that he not deprive others of an equal right to think and to act upon their thoughts in the interest of their lives as well.

It is the private sector, not the force-wielding government sector, that provides us the opportunities of a good and healthy society for beneficial relationships with others to achieve our individual values in a manner consistent with a respect for individual lives and the individual minds that direct those lives. The role of a legitimate government is only to protect our individual rights. When government takes on the additional role of delivering goods and services to some at the expense of others, it is hurting some under the threat of force in a brutal manner that has no analog in the private sector.  It forces individuals into an unnecessary conflict of interest, whereas the private sector provides a wealth of individual choices for relationships, cooperation, trade of values, or the freedom to not pursue a relationship, cooperative endeavor, or a trade.  In comparison, the Big Government model, proclaiming itself to be pursuing Social Justice, is a shotgun wedding offering no possibility of divorce and a staid existence with ever-reduced choices.  Nothing more offends my sense of justice than this evermore totalitarian state.

A Comment on the Constitution and its Role

I just left this comment on the Constitution and its legitimate role in a discussion in another blog:

Obama said he did not like the Constitution in a Chicago radio interview when he was a state Senator in Springfield, IL.  The reason: It did not allow the redistribution of income that he favored.  So of course, he and the other Democrat Socialists such as Justice Ginsburg, simply ignore the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence clearly states that the legitimate purpose of government is the protection of individual rights, broadly defined as to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The Preamble to the Constitution sets the terms of the contract the People have mandated that the government will observe, namely that the government will insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the General Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity.  It then enumerates a very few powers of government designed to make its sphere of influence small and that of the individual in the private sector much, much larger.

This is consistent with a government just big enough to defend us, but not big enough to use a great deal of force, as is the essential nature of government, to control our lives and deprive us of our liberties.  Government was small so the use of force and the fight over the power that represents would not divide the People and cause the destruction of the domestic tranquility.  The General Welfare then was understood to mean that government was to function so that everyone's welfare was promoted, not just that of a majority, or that of the poor, or that of the middle class.  Everyone's interest, which was mostly in their liberties, was to be promoted.  That understanding of the General Welfare has been horribly corrupted.

Jack Rakove: Revolutionaries - A New History of the Invention of America

One of my greatest concerns is that few Americans know very much about American history.  Most are especially ignorant of American history covering the period of the 1700s, when Americans generally came to believe in the American Principle of highly limited government devoted only to the protection of the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and to the pursuit of happiness.  Few Americans today seem to understand that my explanation of individual rights is especially redundant, because at that time most Americans would have expressed the same idea as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or as life, liberty, and property.

I am finding considerable pleasure in reading Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America by Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and a professor of political science at Stanford University.  This will not be a general effort to review the book, since I am still in the process of reading it.  Instead, I am going to offer an interesting quote from the book.

Professor Rakove discusses the role of the moderates in the period leading up to the Declaration of Independence.  The men he focuses on in this group are from the Middle Atlantic colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland who were especially interested in the constructive economic development of America as entrepreneurs.  He names the business partners Robert Morris and Thomas Willing of Pennsylvania and the lawyer they sometimes hired, James Wilson; John Jay, James Duane, Robert Livingston, and Gouverneur Morris of New York; William Livingston of New Jersey; and Thomas Johnson and Charles Carroll of Carrollton of Maryland as belonging to this group.  He points out that moderate did not mean that they were just relatively undecided between the more radical patriots such as Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Richard Henry Lee and the Loyalists, but that they had their own very definite viewpoint.  They were men of property, from that part of America with the most diverse population which might be torn apart in war, they understood that the colonies had much to benefit from the use of British capital, and they were appalled by Britain's rejection of their efforts to promote accommodation with an "obstinate commitment to repression and force."

This strong commitment to the productive development and improvement of property helped distinguish the moderate political leaders of the middle colonies from their counterparts from other regions.  Yet there was a deeper sense in which their attachment to the rights of property identified a value that all Americans shared.  For property was one of the strongest words of the Anglo-American political vocabulary.  Its security from unlawful taxation had been a dominant value of their common constitutional culture since the previous century.  John Locke had grounded an entire theory of government -- and the right to resist tyranny -- on the concept of property in his Second Treatise of Government.  But Locke only gave philosophical rigor to a belief that already permeated Anglo-American law and politics.

For Locke, as for his American readers, the concept of property encompassed not only the objects a person owned but also the ability, indeed the right, to acquire them.  Just as men had a right to their property, so they held a property in their rights.  Men did not merely claim their rights, but also owned them, and their title to their liberty was as sound as their title to the land or to the tools with which they earned their livelihood.  Furthermore, Americans believed that they truly owned these rights because their ancestors had fairly purchased them through the arduous work of colonization.  Just as Locke had grounded his theory of property on the labor through which men expropriate the fruits of nature for their personal use, making the earth more productive and thus fulfilling the divine injunction to preserve mankind, so the colonists looked back to their ancestor's pioneering and saw that it was good -- and legal too.  Property was a birthright, a legal entitlement and material legacy that one industrious generation transmitted to another. ... Property, defined in this way, was the vital right that Parliament would infringe upon, even destroy, if it made good its claim to legislate for Americans "in all cases whatsoever."

I have quoted this because modern Americans do not understand that our most fundamental property is in the ownership of our rights, our bodies, our minds, and our labor and the fruits of that labor.  The concept of such property was and is central to the understanding of the American Principle.  If we do not understand this, then we will surely be ruled by tyrannical government and be reduced to serfs.

We must understand that the General Welfare of our Constitution was not a fulfillment of the wishes of some fraction, possibly occasionally a majority, of Americans to take the property of others for their benefit, but an assertion that government was to secure the property each of us has in our individual rights and all that implies.  The General Welfare therefore does not imply and require that the People go to war with some among them, but implies quite the opposite.  We the People and our government must respect the property right that each and every American has in his individual rights.  Only then is the General Welfare secured.

Oklahoma and Arizona Will Follow Missouri Lead Against ObamaCare

The people of Missouri recently voted on Proposition C, which would make it state law that Missouri residents could not be forced to buy individual health insurance as required by ObamaCare.  71% of the people voted for Proposition C, despite its opponents spending about five times as much to block it as was spent to promote it.  The state Medical Association actually opposed Proposition C.

Oklahomans will vote on a similar proposition since the Oklahoma legislature passed Senate Joint Resolution 59, despite the adamant opposition of the Democrat Gov. Brad Henry, an Obama ally in a state that voted 66% for Senator John McCain for President.  The state house voted 88 to 9 in favor of putting the proposition on the November ballot, with strong bipartisan support.  I have family in Oklahoma and I fully expect that Sooners will vote in an even higher percentage for a state law to make it illegal to force state residents to buy health insurance than did Missourians.

In Arizona, the Healthcare Freedom Act will be on the ballot in November.  The Taxpayer Freedom Alliance was the principal force getting this put on the ballot.  The Healthcare Freedom Act makes it illegal to force citizens to purchase health insurance using taxes or penalties.  The Mayo Clinic facilities in Arizona have stopped taking Medicare payments already.  Enthusiasm for this proposition is running high and the recent attacks on Arizona over the enforcement of immigration laws have probably made Arizonians even more inclined to thwart the federal government again.

The People of Florida would also have such an anti-ObamaCare individual health insurance mandate proposition on the November ballot, except that a Circuit Court judge appointed by Gov. Charlie Crist cut down the proposition while claiming it was "manifestly misleading."  The People will now have no way to say they object to being forced to buy health insurance acceptable to the federal government, except to vote those Representatives and Senators out of office who voted for ObamaCare.  Many, many of them will do that.

Supporters of ObamaCare justify the constitutionality of the individual insurance purchase mandate based upon these false claims:

• The Commerce Clause allows the federal government to require health insurance purchases because if someone has no insurance they will have to be treated at the expense of others anyway, which will somehow affect interstate commerce even though such insurance is purchased within one state and regulated by each state.
• The Necessary and Proper Clause of the Power to Tax allows any tax, which this is, contrary to all claims when the House and Senate passed it that the penalty for not buying individual health insurance was not a tax.
• The mandate requiring the purchase of individual health insurance approved by the government is required by the General Welfare and the federal government can do anything as long as it claims it is doing it for the sake of the General Welfare.

Each of these claims is nonsense at multiple levels.  Here is why:

• The Commerce Clause was provided in order to keep the states from interfering with free trade between the people of different states, not to give the federal government the power to interfere with the free trade of the people. Besides, this actually forces someone to buy insurance and by that act, it puts them into a commerce they would not otherwise be in.  Even then, the commerce need not even be interstate commerce.  The courts have allowed ridiculously broad interpretations of the Commerce Clause, but have agreed that some powers it has been stretched to cover were not covered.  Surely this is one of them.
• The Necessary and Proper Clause of the Tax Power only allows taxation for enumerated powers of the government in the Constitution.  This restriction has been widely abused by the federal courts already.  This power of taxation is also supposed to be restricted to actions for the General Welfare.  There are further restrictions on the type of allowed taxes in the Constitution and none of those taxes cover this penalty tax for not buying a product.
• The People have made it clear that they do not think that this ObamaCare tax and mandate to buy a product is consistent with their General Welfare.  Besides, the requirement to act consistent with the General Welfare is actually a further restriction upon the powers of government, not an enlargement.  The government is allowed only to exercise the powers enumerated for it and then only in such a manner as is consistent with the General Welfare.

Some of the People are beginning to understand these constitutional limitations of the power of the federal government.  This increased understanding is being pushed in good part by the sense of outrage against ObamaCare.  Many of the People are finally realizing that the federal government has been greatly exaggerating its powers with the help of the federal courts.  Many of them are also realizing that they need the help of the states to defend themselves against the voracious power of the federal government.  Others believe they have a right surely to managing their own healthcare and that government does not own their bodies.  Some realize that it is a farce to say an American has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but he cannot control his health to control whether he will live, he cannot control his time and effort devoted to his healthcare and body, and he is not allowed to pursue the happiness of pain and disability avoidance in his own way.

Enough understand that they do not need and do not want ObamaCare, that propositions similar to those of Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arizona have or will pass overwhelmingly.  We are sure to see more such state propositions in the future, with the result of more state nullification of federal government overreach beyond its constitutional powers.

You can keep your health care plan -- It's a lie

Documents from a project of the Labor Dept., Health and Human Services Dept., and the IRS to examine the effects of ObamaCare on existing employer-based health care plans claim that 51% of employers will have to give up their current health care plans by 2013.  That constant refrain that "If you like your present plan, I guarantee you can keep it." was the usual Obama tactic of saying anything to get more control over our lives and to diminish the private sector.  There is no pain in lying when lying is the path to socialism.

Current employer-based coverage will not be grandfathered and will be subject to ObamaCare if compared to 23 March 2010:

• Any benefit related to treatment or diagnosis is lost or reduced.
• Any increase in cost-sharing, such as co-insurance occurs.
• Deductibles or out-of-pocket limits rise by more than medical inflation plus 15%.
• An increase in co-payments greater than medical inflation plus 15% or medical inflation plus $5 occurs.
• The employer's share of the premium decreases more than 5%.
• Any new policy, certificate, or contract of insurance issued ends grandfather coverage.

Small employers with 3 to 99 employees are expected to be no longer able to offer their present plans in 66% of the companies.  Only 45% of large employers are likely to lose their present plans.  The study says that 69% of all companies will lose their plans in their worst-case scenario.  I am puzzled about why they were addressing companies with fewer than 50 employees, unless this means that while they will not be penalized with a tax, at least initially, they will also not be allowed to continue their present plans unless they meet the new ObamaCare mandate.

There is one exception to the above conditions.  The last bulleted item does not apply to collective bargaining contract provisions relating to health care insurance.  Such plans can change insurance companies.  Labor unions are once again an Obama favorite and unions members have special, unequal rights compared to the rest of us.  The General Welfare be damned, if you are among the anointed by the socialists now ruling us all.  It is all about Special Interest or Factions now and their taking advantage of most of the People.

Did you do your required federal reading today?

The annual report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) on the state of federal regulations called Ten Thousand Commandments for 2010, written by Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. notes that:

• The Code of Federal Regulations is now over 157,000 pages long
• 3,503 new rules went into effect in 2009
• That is a new regulation every 2.5 hours every day, all 365 days of the year

For the last decade, the number of pages in the Federal Registry, where new regulations are published, has averaged 73,018 per year.  This would suggest the Code of Federal Regulations should have grown by 730,177 pages in the last decade, but apparently many of the older regulations are replaced by the newer ones.  Fortunately!  The following plot comes from the CEI report:

Most of these regulations provide for fines, penalties, and even jail sentences should they be violated.  Ignorance of the law is no defense in our courts of law.  That may have made sense when the laws were simple enough that an ordinary American could be expected to know the law and the regulations, but I am betting that, like me, none of my readers have read all of these regulations.  Therefore, you and I are under constant threat of fines, penalties, and jail time for breaking regulations we know nothing about.  The situation is even worse, since our state and local governments are also busy writing laws and regulations.

Since we have not read these regulations, I suppose we are supposed to consult with a lawyer before we undertake any action at all.  In fact, we have to consult with a lawyer in many cases before we do not take any action at all!  But this volume of regulations is so large that no lawyer knows the entire width and breadth of these regulations either.  So, they specialize in portions of the regulations, such as bank regulations, or import regulations, or export regulations, or farming regulations, hiring and firing regulations, or gaseous emissions regulations.  So, before we undertake any action, we need to figure out how many lawyers with how many specialties we need to consult.

There are a lot of Americans who have not read 157,000 pages in their entire lives.  I surely have, but very, very little of my reading has been federal regulations, despite having worked for the Dept. of the Navy for 10 years and the Dept. of the Army for 19 months.  I certainly did not read my 9.6 regulations today that I should have read.  Now, some of you will say that surely we do not have to read all of these regulations.  We can just skim through their titles and judge whether they will apply to us.  After all, many of us are not farmers.  But, a regulation on the use of fertilizers aimed mostly at farmers, might in some cases affect those of us who fertilize our lawns and gardens.  Or, we might buy an item from an importer who is not allowed to import that item.  Are we then guilty of purchasing contraband and subject to penalties ourselves?  In many such cases we are at least likely to lose our investment in the item, since it can be seized by law enforcement authorities.  We are not talking about cocaine here, which we all know to be illegal.  But, you had better be careful which flowers you buy that have been imported.  A man has been in prison for two years for not filing the necessary paperwork to import some unusual flowers.  He claims he did not know he needed to do this and there is plenty of reason to believe his import effort was small enough that this was likely true.

Now behind the huge flood of regulations is the Congress that no longer listens to the American People.  It passes bills, many of which are 1,000 or even 2,700 some pages long.  Those Congressmen voting for these bills do not read them, even though their oath of office makes reading them their duty because they are supposed to only pass laws that are constitutional and also meet the requirement of promoting the general welfare.  Apparently, one of the reasons that most Congressmen do not care whether their laws are constitutional or not is because if they did care and if they did their duty to the Constitution, then they would have to actually read all of the laws they vote for!  Ugh..... how boring.  It is so much more rewarding to be wined and dinned by constituents and special interests who are imploring you not to hurt them or who are trying to bribe you into giving them a special benefit.  Yes, at those dinners the money just flows in for your next re-election campaign.  Who cares whether you have actually read the bills you vote for?  How many Congressmen have lost their re-election campaigns to-date for that reason?

Then these thousand page plus bills call on the various executive branch agencies to create the new regulations to deal with hundreds of issues.  The recent Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 was more than 2,700 pages long and called upon the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services alone to create rules and regulations 137 times.  Many other federal agencies were given new responsibilities and many more new agencies were created.  This will call for many, many more new regulations.  Many of these regulations will presumably apply to the many Americans who will be forced to buy the mandated health insurance and who will receive the more rigidly regulated health care also mandated in the bill.  It appears inevitable that we will be held responsible for knowing all or many of these new regulations.  Since the health care industry is one-sixth of the economy, everyone in that industry will have to know a lot more about these upcoming regulations than the average patient will have to know.

Of course we are all pretty busy as it is.  So how on earth are we going to have the time to read all of these federal, state, and local regulations?  For one thing, there ought to be a law that no vehicle can have a radio or play any CD which is not encoded by the government as an official government law and regulation CD.  When driving, we shall be required to listen to audio readings of the laws and regulations of that area of the country we are in.  If we are pulled over for any reason, law enforcement should immediately check that we have the required CD in our government-mandated CD players.  Those too poor to have a CD will be required to apply for a federal subsidy for the purchase of the mandated CD player.  Before graduating from high school, every student must have read every law and regulation applicable to his area prior to two weeks before his graduation date and pass tests on those laws and regulations.  Once a year, every resident of the United States will go to the Department of the Laws and Regulations and pass a test on the body of the current laws and regulations including all new regulations and laws issued up to two weeks prior to that annual renewal date.

That, of course, is the socialist response to this problem.  My response is this:  It is perfectly clear that we have far, far too many laws and regulations.  The logical consequence of having laws and regulations is that we must read them and understand them.  If the burden of reading them and understanding them is so great that it cannot be consistent with our general welfare and it is an unreasonable infringement of our individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then all laws and regulations in excess of such a reasonable limited number, must be unconstitutional for that reason even if some small fraction fall within the powers actually granted the federal government by the Constitution.  This is because any law passed by Congress must meet both of the following requirements:

• It must be the exercise of one of the few powers given to Congress in the Constitution.
• It must also be consistent with promoting the General Welfare.

The Constitution does not even provide for regulations issued by the executive branch.

Of course, the interpretation of the Progressive Retrogressives differs with mine.  They say it may either be an explicitly enumerated power or it may be anything they choose to claim is for the General Welfare.  This is nonsense for many reasons, but one of them is the reason we are examining in this post.  If the power of government is to do anything it says is in the General Welfare, then the rules, laws, and regulations will quickly become unknowable, unintelligible, and overwhelming in their demands for reading time!  This is clearly inconsistent with the General Welfare being claimed.

Clunker Morals and Government

The Democrat Congress cash for clunkers program has quickly spent its first billion dollars. The program is widely touted as an effective stimulant of the economy and as popular with the people. Presumably, the environmentalists and those who worry incessantly about running out of fossil fuels or about the Middle East enjoying oil income, are all very happy to get the clunkers off the road.

I, however, have a few problems with this program. They are:

• It encourages the destruction of wealth, without the wise inputs of the free market system, which is replaced by the foolishness of politics.
• It transfers large sums of money from the taxpayer to the relatively few individuals who decide they want a new vehicle and who have a qualifying "clunker."
• It transfers large sums of money from the taxpayer to the auto industry.
• The pollution emissions of even 12 year-old cars are already very low, so there is little to be gained on that issue, unless you believe the craziness that CO2 is a pollutant or a global climate changer of catastrophic import.
• If oil were in critical short supply such that cars that would mostly have been junked in one or two more years saved enough to be significant, then oil prices would be high and we would not hesitate to drill in ANWR, the eastern Gulf, and off the southeast Atlantic coast.

No, this is immoral politics as usual. It is a simple transfer of wealth to buy votes. The beneficiaries are more grateful to the politicians than those who are hurt are angry.

Before the late 1930s when Roosevelt's threat to pack the Supreme Court turned some of the Justice's knees to jelly, such a program would have been found unconstitutional on two grounds. First, Congress has no enumerated power to play the stimulating the economy game. Second, such a transfer of wealth from so many to so few could not be said to be consistent with the limitation on the federal government that all of its actions be taken for the General Welfare. This is clearly a program for the welfare of a few and the harm of the many.

The concept of the General Welfare these days is apparently this: The government will undertake thousands of programs most of which harm more people than are helped. But, somewhere among these many programs there are likely to be a few which will help a given individual. If most people are helped by some program, then the General Welfare has been satisfied.

There are severe problems with this concept of the General Welfare. They are:

• People are aware of how they have been helped by the few helpful programs.
• The vast majority of people cannot add up all the harm they have suffered from the many programs that hurt them, partly because they are unaware of all the little hurts and even if they remembered them, they cannot calculate up the sum of the pains.
• This concept gives the government unlimited powers, which the politicians are certain to abuse.
• These programs act to reduce the role of choice in each individual's effort to manage his own life.
• The government is given the power to pick winners and losers.
• The politicians use this power to collect campaign contributions to win re-election so they can continue to sell their votes in Congress.
• The entire process pits every segment and group within our society at the throats of all other such groups, because the prize to win the power to guide the government monopoly use of force is so critical. The losers are hurt badly and the winners are rewarded grandly.
• As a result, every segment of society has reason to distrust every other segment of society.
• This distrust causes universal anxiety and uncertainty.
• Anxiety and uncertainty make life miserable and people in despair turn to government to bail them out, which creates a visicous circle.

One would think this would be reason enough for rational people to reject this loose and immoral idea of the General Welfare. Apparently, the observational skills, the rational linkages of the observed events, and the importance of the principles of a harmonious and force-forebearing society are too much for the modern man to figure out. Yet, the framers of the Constitution were able to figure this out in a more primitive world than that we live in now. We should be most appreciative of their intellectual effort, even as we bemoan the weakness of the modern American's thinking skills. To a substantial degree, we can thank the dumbing down of Americans in a public school system for that. These government schools are very happy to confuse the people about the ennumerated powers of the federal government and about the Constitution's further restriction that actions be for the General Welfare.