As Republicans, many of whom presided over the devastating economic policies of the past two decades, celebrate their victory, let’s not forget that there were a few folks who were on the right side of this issue way back when. Let’s compare incoming House Speaker John Boehner as he pleads for the $700 Billion bankster bailout:
With Ron Paul who has spent thirty-odd years warning against these inevitabilities while our standard-issue Republicans ridiculed him as a lunatic. Funny how many of them sound just like him now:
The fact that Boehner is going to be House Speaker should be a warning to us all that the vast majority of the Republican leadership still doesn’t get it.
Texas is a land of mythic proportions. Across the nation people snicker that “Everything is bigger in Texas,” songs are written about the Lone Star State (where the government “leaves you alone”) and the defeat at the Alamo is regarded as just as glorious as any victory of the Revolution. Texas is more American than anywhere else in America. Texans are freer, and they don’t take kindly to being ordered about by anyone.
Growing up in a redneck region of Southern New Jersey, Texas was the Promised Land of the U.S. Texas was a place where you would just go buy a gun and no one would think twice. Texas was a place where the government wasn’t always peeking over your shoulder. For the teens of the Pine Barrens, listening to Country and Southern Rock while the rest of Jersey played the Beastie Boys, Texas was the kind of place we should have been born. We were country boys and girls at heart and we wanted to live our own lives without being micromanaged by some bureaucrat. We were radical individualists (though we couldn’t have defined it that way for all the money in the world) and in our eyes that was the way of the Lone Star State.
In 2004 I lived the dream, moving from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to the Pineywoods of East Texas, and everyone is exactly as I imagined they would be! The people here are radical individualists. They believe strongly in limited government and the freedom of the individual. They balk at the idea that a bureaucrat should be able to tell you how to run a business and they believe in helping one another without the compulsion of government force. They shake their heads at California’s budgetary crisis and proudly point to Texas’ successes as a hallmark of how well liberty works.
But all of this is an illusion. Much as the real estate market boomed under the false impression of increased demand, our Texas citizens glow with pride under a false impression of freedom and prosperity. One might say that Texans are the victims of a Liberty Bubble which is about to burst. It is important that this be made absolutely clear, because as our true economic conditions come to light, statists and liberals are already using our mythological freedom against us. On November 8th the leftist rag Daily Kos posted the following:
Wait, weren’t conservatives arguing that the Texas experience proves conservatives know how to manage governments better than the “coastal elites” in states like California? And now they’re looking at a bigger budget gap in percentage terms than California?
Naturally, I guess this means it’s a perfect time for Texas conservatives to start debating whether they can secede from Social Security and Medicare. Why stop now when they’ve already screwed up this much already?
If we leave unchallenged the lie that fiscal conservatism has held the day in Texas for the past decade, we have to confess the failure of fiscal conservatism. Rather than concede defeat in order to maintain the illusion that we have been free, we need to burst this bubble and look at the facts. Texas submits to every unfunded mandate of the Federal Government. Every time the Texas legislature convenes Texans are saddled with 1200 to 1400 new laws. Texans have one of the most expensive and massive prison systems in the nation, incarcerating, feeding, and clothing a population of non-violent offenders larger than any other total state prison population in the nation with the exception of California. Depending on what you include, our schools cost between $10,000 and $15,000 per student while private schools do better with tuitions as low as $3,000 a year. Small businesses have thousands of potential licenses, fees, regulatory boards, and flaming hoops to navigate before attempting to earn a living through the entrepreneurial spirit that made this nation great.
Yet Governor Perry will claim Texas is a prime example of the results of free markets and responsible government spending; and a thankfully shrinking number of legislators will claim Joe Straus is a conservative and should be Speaker again. These are lies we cannot afford to indulge.
Texans cannot entertain half-measures. We have a narrow window of opportunity here to institute real reform, turn Texas back to the principles of Liberty and Limited Government that made the American Experiment the envy of the world. Texas could be an example to her sister-states of just how restoration is done; but only if we take radical measures to restore freedom as a way of life and a by-product of governance in Texas, rather than the catchy slogan and crumbling facade it is today.
If you are a Texan and have not already done so, please sign the “No Compromise in Texas” petition.
The cold, hard reality is that liberalism suffered a defeat but not a crushing one, and the war is far from won. In the past, victories in these minor skirmishes have resulted in people becoming complacent. The battles that are not making the headlines in the war on freedom continue to rage despite the victory.
Learn exactly how the Federal Reserve and their cronies at Goldman Sachs are ripping you off and how the Fed caused the current crisis. (Language warning.)
For too long the People of this nation have accepted the lie that the Federal Government is empowered to restrict their liberty by limiting their choices in the marketplace. The justification for this malfeasance is inevitably the Commerce Clause which states that Congress shall have the power to “[R]egulate commerce…among the several States.”
The Ninth Amendment states “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This means that the list of rights we have been given is not exhaustive. Just because a right is not in the Constitution does not mean it doesn’t exist.
The Tenth Amendment states “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.” This means that if the Constitution does not specifically give the Federal Government the power to do something or specifically deny that power to the States, the power remains in the hands of the States or the People.
So, do we have the right to a free market, and if so does the Federal Government have the rightful power to limit it through regulation?
It may seem strange to allege there is a right to a free market until you consider what a free market really is at its core. It is, quite simply, the unhampered transactions of free people with one another in the pursuit of wealth. It is one citizen deciding they want what another has more than he wants the money it will cost him. It is one citizen deciding he wants that money more than the item he will sell it for. It is these simple transactions multiplied a million-fold throughout the nation every day. The question really is “Do A and B have the right to trade with one another if they personally believe that trade will be beneficial?”
Asked another way, “Does Government have the right to stop A and B from trading with one another if Government decides they shouldn’t?”
Proponents of the Nanny-State interpretation of the Commerce Clause say that this power in the Constitution grants the Federal Government just that right. When defending such an interpretation though, they will need to ignore everything stated about that clause by the men who wrote it along with 150 years of Supreme Court precedent. They also must ignore the contemporary justifications for the Revolutionary War, which relied on the Enlightenment Era philosophy of property rights and liberty.
In short, our Founders adhered to the philosophy most famously put forth by John Locke, that mankind was born free and equal as opposed to some people being ‘destined’ to rule over others which was the Tory belief. If man was born free and equal, then government (which consists only of fellow men, not demi-gods) is formed by those men to guard the freedom they inherently possess. Locke argued that as mankind requires the freedom to take resources from nature to sustain his life, he must have at least four “Natural Rights:” Life, Liberty (of action to sustain life), Property (ownership of those things he creates through his labor), and the right to defend all of those things.
It was on the bases of the rights to property and defense of it that the entire War of Independence rested. Great Britain had in place for decades, a series of laws known as “The Navigation Acts” which taxed and regulated Colonial markets. All throughout the French-Indian War, these laws were merrily ignored as the Colonists smuggled goods across the Atlantic, refusing to allow the Crown to interfere with their right to trade freely. Busy with war, Britain was unable to enforce the Acts.
Following the conclusion of this war, Great Britain began patrolling the ports of New York and Boston, confiscating the goods of Colonial Merchants who were not in compliance with the law. More laws were added such as The Stamp Act, a law requiring Colonists to use special, stamped paper purchased from Great Britain, the Tea Tax which spawned the Boston Tea Party; efforts of the Crown to milk the Colonists for money through regulation of their markets.
Our Founders revolted (literally) boycotting British merchants, breaking ‘smugglers’ out of jail, imprisoning the Captains who confiscated smuggled goods, and burning in effigy those leaders foolish enough to side with their oppressors.
It is very important to note two things: First, that everything Great Britain did was ‘legal’ and had the Colonists simply paid their taxes and submitted to the regulation of their market, we would still speak the King’s English. Second, that their objections rested on the premise that they should be free to conduct commerce as they saw fit; they appealed to a higher law than the King.
As is too often the case, what’s good for the goose later does not look good for the gander. The greatest hypocrisy of the time of course, was the treatment of slaves as sub-human and not entitled to the same ‘born free and equal’ philosophy that the Founders used for themselves. In second place might be the States, who had so recently thrown off the Crown for its oppression, yet almost immediately began imposing the same protectionist trade barriers against one another.
These trade wars were the driving force behind the Philadelphia Convention, when our Constitutional Republic was born.
When viewed in the context of a nation that had just fought a war to end regulation, taxation and intervention by their rightful government and was now attempting to stop similar measures between States, it is ridiculous to claim these men intended to empower a bigger, stronger government to impose the same hated system on a larger scale.
In arguing for ratification of the Constitution, in The Federalist #22, Alexander Hamilton argues that addressing commerce is the most important goal of the instrument. As evidence he notes that there is a difficulty in establishing trade treaties with other nations because of the non-uniform nature of the laws throughout the States regarding trade. He states:
…the want of concert, arising from the want of a general authority and from clashing and dissimilar views in the State, has hitherto frustrated every experiment of the kind, and will continue to do so as long as the same obstacles to a uniformity of measures continue to exist.
The interfering and unneighborly regulations of some States, contrary to the true spirit of the Union, have, in different instances, given just cause of umbrage and complaint to others, and it is to be feared that examples of this nature, if not restrained by a national control, would be multiplied and extended till they became not less serious sources of animosity and discord than injurious impediments to the intercourse between the different parts of the Confederacy. “The commerce of the German empire is in continual trammels from the multiplicity of the duties which the several princes and states exact upon the merchandises passing through their territories, by means of which the fine streams and navigable rivers with which Germany is so happily watered are rendered almost useless.”
He never alludes to regulation as we think of it today, only to making the States adhere to uniform standards when dealing with one another. This is a distinctly free market notion. Indeed he uses the phrase “restrained by national control” indicating that the is idea to stop States from erecting trade barriers enabling free passage of goods across State lines.
In The Federalist #42, James Madison who is known as “The Father of the Constitution” says:
A very material object of this power [to regulate commerce] was the relief of the States which import and export through other States, from the improper contributions levied on them by the latter. Were these at liberty to regulate the trade between State and State…ways would be found out to load the articles of import and export, during the passage through their jurisdiction, with duties which would fall on the makers of the latter and the consumers of the former
Again, we see no justification except uniformity. In fact Madison warns of the problem of loading down commerce with taxes and regulations sort of like the Federal Government does today. Could this man, who wrote nearly the entire document have so badly misunderstood the power he was crafting?
And he further gives the example of other nations as justification for the power to regulate commerce:
The necessity of a superintending authority over the reciprocal trade of confederated States, has been illustrated by other examples as well as our own. In Switzerland, where the Union is so very slight, each canton is obliged to allow to merchandises a passage through its jurisdiction into other cantons, without an augmentation of the tolls. In Germany it is a law of the empire, that the princes and states shall not lay tolls or customs on bridges, rivers, or passages, without the consent of the emperor and the diet; though it appears from a quotation in an antecedent paper, that the practice in this, as in many other instances in that confederacy, has not followed the law, and has produced there the mischiefs which have been foreseen here. Among the restraints imposed by the Union of the Netherlands on its members, one is, that they shall not establish imposts disadvantageous to their neighbors, without the general permission.
Every example is in the vein of preventing States from erecting trade barriers. Let me say again: A distinctly free market notion.
The Supreme Court also held for a hundred and fifty years that Congress could not legislate with regards to production, employment or trade within a State. Surely the earliest Court decisions are those that most accurately reflect the sentiment and intent of the Constitution at the time in which was written.
The first case to interpret the Commerce Clause dealt with exactly the sort of instance the Founders predicted. Conflicts of commerce between States. In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) Gibbons claimed that New York had given Ogden an improperly exclusive right to operate a steamship on the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York. The Court properly held that this was a violation of a federal law regulating coastal trade, but unfortunately used the term “intermingled” when describing what sort of commerce the Federal Government could regulate. They also opined that the right to regulate commerce could go into the States. It would take over 100 years for this poor choice of words to wreak havoc with our rights.
In U.S. v E.C. Knight (1895) the Supreme Court revisited Gibbons and expressly differentiated between commerce (as the movement of goods from one place to another) and manufacture (as the production of goods) and interpreted the Commerce Clause as to deal exclusively with the movement of goods between States. In this case the majority opinion refers to precedent in Kidd v. Pearson (1888) which states:
It was said by Chief Justice MARSHALL that it is a matter of public history that the object of vesting in congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states was to insure uniformity for regulation against conflicting and discriminating state legislation.
Again we see the justification for the power as ‘Uniformity’ not micromanagement. Citing the intention of the clause to establish uniformity Justice Lamar continues explaining why the regulation of the manufacture of items is outside of the scope of the clause in question:
The demands of such a supervision would require, not uniform legislation generally applicable throughout the United States, but a swarm of statutes only locally applicable, and utterly inconsistent. Any movement towards the establishment of rules of production in this vast country, with its many different climates and opportunities, could only be at the sacrifice of the peculiar advantages of a large part of the localities in it, if not of every one of them. On the other hand, any movement towards the local, detailed, and incongruous legislation required by such an interpretation would be about the widest possible departure from the declared object of the clause in question.
Even more damning to the interventionist excuses of our time, this case explicitly refutes the argument that a business can be regulated if it provides a service or good that will cross State lines:
Over this commerce and trade [ the internal commerce and domestic trade of the states] congress has no power of regulation, nor any direct control. This power belongs exclusively to the states. No interference by congress with the business of citizens transacted within a state is warranted by the constitution, except such as is strictly incidental to the exercise of powers clearly granted to the legislature. The power to authorize a business within a state is plainly repugnant to the exclusive power of the state over the same subject.’ The manufacture of intoxicating liquors in a state is none the less business within that state because the manufacturer intends, at his convenience, to export such liquors to foreign countries or to other states. This court has already decided that the fact that an article was manufactured for export to another state does not of itself make it an article of interstate commerce within the meaning of section 8, art. 1, of the constitution, and that the intent of the manufacturer does not determine the time when the article or product passes from the control of the state and belongs to commerce.
Continuing, the Court ruled minimum wage laws unconstitutional in Lochner v. New York (1905) and Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1919).
Enter the New Deal. How was Roosevelt going to pass all of those price controls and wage limitations and manufacturing regulations and union laws with the Supreme Court striking down every interference of Congress into private business? He couldn’t, so he proposed to appoint six new Justices by pushing the Congress to enlarge the Court (this is legal and the Court has grown and shrunk through the years). The frightened Justices fell into line and began issuing decisions contrary to all precedent (even their own) and expanding forever the power of Congress to regulate private individuals engaged in business.
In the landmark case Wicker v. Filburn (1942) a farmer, Roscoe Filburn was growing wheat. He did not sell the wheat, he only used it to feed his family and chickens. Roosevelt had imposed limits per acre for growth of wheat in order to keep prices artificially high. Filburn was ordered to destroy his excess harvest and pay a fine. The justification for this was that as he grew wheat he would not buy wheat from elsewhere, potentially across State lines, therefore he could be regulated by Congress under the Commerce Clause.
Ever since, this incredible and frankly insane ruling which overturned 150 years of precedent restricting federal power over business, Congress has increased its role in everything we do. The Commerce Clause has been used to justify the EPA which is threatening to impose Cap and Trade without even bothering with legislation. It has subjugated the rights of landowners to supposedly endangered animals. It was even used to try and justify making rape a federal law by saying that a woman who is raped misses work and therefore rape affects interstate commerce. By such a rationale what can Congress not legislate?
You can’t buy a toilet with more than a certain amount of water. You can’t buy a showerhead that sprays too much. You can’t buy carpet padding thicker than whatever. You can’t purchase individual cable channels, you must buy a package. Soon you will be forced to buy health insurance that Congress approves of or you will pay a fine. Nancy Pelosi’s press office released this statement justifying such an act with the Commerce Clause, saying:
Congress has used this authority to regulate many aspects of American life, from labor relations to education to health care to agricultural production
And right there is the problem. They aren’t making uniform standards for trade among the States. They are “using” this clause to run our lives. The Federal Government must stop robbing us of our decisions and treating us alternately as host animals and helpless children. Let Congress do their job, the one defined in the Constitution, and leave us alone in ours.
