Government, Taxes & Spending – XIII

In the previous essay in this series, I began an examination of the havoc wrought upon our nation by the statists’ unscrupulous manipulation of the Constitution’s usage of the phrase “to promote the general welfare” (as it is worded in the Preamble) and “to provide for…the general welfare” (as it is worded in Article I, Section 8).  The question could be raised, “Just what havoc has been foisted upon us because of this phrase?”  True, in the previous essay I only outlined the warnings given by those opposed to the ratification of the Constitution regarding the potential abuse of this phrase.  Space does not permit me to include all that has been passed by legislators down through our history, the executive orders issued by various presidents, or even more so, the astronomical abundance of regulations vomited upon our freedom and liberties by the faceless horde of bureaucrats manning the insidious agencies established by different Congresses over the years.  However, I will give you a few examples and you can then readily name others that come to your mind.

We need go back only as far as FDR’s “New Deal” (or more appropriately his “Raw Deal”) to see examples of this destructive manipulation.  Take the Social Security Act ─ was that not put forth as being a program that would be for “the general welfare”?  (Of course there was LBJ’s expansion of this with the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, again for the same reason, our “general welfare”.)  Yet, of all the programs of our society today, which ones most threaten to topple our economy and with it, our society?   During that same time there was the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act which would guarantee a “decent minimum wage” for all workers and limit the hours an employer could require them to work.  Again, such lofty ideals were trumpeted to be for “the general welfare”.  However, as such economic giants as Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and authors such as Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan have written, such restrictions have had exactly the opposite effect.  A minimum wage mandated by governmental fiat will, in the long run, suppress wages and cause a higher rate of unemployment ─ something you could hardly categorize as being for “the general welfare”! 

Consider if you will some more recent forays by the general government against our freedom and liberties.  The Departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy and Environment ─ just to name a few ─ were all created to aid “the general welfare” of the nation; but instead, what they have done is squander billions upon billions of our earnings taken from us by the government through the intimidation of the Internal Revenue Service.  For example, President Carter established the Department of Energy in order to make the nation less dependent upon foreign oil.  Forty years and a bloated bureaucracy later, do you see where this goal has been achieved?  The Department of Education has done nothing to elevate the level of education among our populace as it was intended to do.  While academic scores have declined since its inception, this agency has provided the conduit though which local parental control over the education of their children has been usurped by the general government.  Do I even need to go into our most recent example of this, the passage of “Obamacare”?  No, I think not; this is enough to paint the picture of how devastating this phrase has been to our freedom, liberties, and our way of life.

Permit me in the remainder of this post to share with you the thoughts on this subject of that champion of liberty and the author of our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.  This stalwart defender of the principle of republicanism saw much danger in this phrase and with great clarity foresaw its abuse in enslaving us under a despotic “nanny” state.

In a letter dated September 9, 1792, replying to a request made by then President George Washington for his opinion on a matter being promoted by Jefferson’s arch rival Alexander Hamilton (the architect of our current all-invasive central government), Jefferson attacked this danger head-on, asserting that Hamilton’s proposed concentration and extension of the government’s power was both a sham and a perversion of the Constitution:

“…in a Report on the subject of manufactures (still to be acted on) it was expressly assumed that the general government has a right to exercise all powers which may be for the general welfare, that is to say, all the legitimate powers of government:  since no government has a legitimate right to do what is not for the welfare of the governed.  There was indeed a sham-limitation of the universality of this power to cases where money is to be employed.  But about what is it that money cannot be employed?  Thus the object of these plans taken together is to draw all the powers of government into the hands of the general legislature, to establish means for corrupting a sufficient corps in that legislature to divide the honest votes & preponderate, by their own, the scale which suited, & to have that corps under the command of the Secretary of the Treasury for the purpose of subverting step by step the principles of the constitution, which he has so often declared to be a thing of nothing which must be changed” [emphasis added].

As if that was not blunt enough, in his letter to Eldridge Gerry on January 26, 1799, he affirmed his opposition to what we see today ─ a bloated bureaucracy with legions of bureaucrats draining our financial resources and piling up mountains of debt, all in the name of “the public good” (or “general welfare”):

“I do then, with sincere zeal, wish an inviolable preservation  of our present federal constitution, according to the true sense in which it was adopted by the States,…I am for preserving to the States the powers not yielded by them to the Union,…and I am not for transferring all the powers of the States to the general government….I am for a government rigorously frugal & simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt; and not for a multiplication of officers & salaries merely to make partisans, & for increasing, by every device, the public debt, on the principle of its being a public blessing“ [emphasis added].

Yet this is exactly what happens when a welfare state with a mixed economy is created wherein fifty percent of the citizenry contributes nothing to the government treasury.  Instead, they  live on the public dole of sundry “general welfare” programs; as a result they continue to support those statists who maintain their positions of power by taking from the producers in society and giving to those who are not.  This is the result when the Constitutional rights and powers of the states are stripped away from them and absorbed by the central government.  This is why those of us who stand as the heirs to Jefferson’s republicanism and original intent in regards to the Constitution must stand and let our voices be heard in opposition to all that is done under the guise of “general welfare”.  If we do not, then we will sink beneath the waves of fascism, weighted down by these burdens which no free society can bear.

He further stated the wisdom of a federal system built upon the principle of republicanism in a letter to  Gideon Granger on August 13, 1800, as it relates to leaving things that are concerned with matters of general welfare to the governments closest to the people, and that the general government should be concerned with a very few explicit responsibilities:

“The true theory of our constitution is surely the wisest & best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, & united as to everything respecting foreign nations.  Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, & a very unexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants“ [emphasis added].

If the general welfare clause authorizes the broad expanse of power that so many statists claim it does, then why did the framers enumerate a list of powers following the opening section in Section I, Article 8 of the Constitution?  In response it is argued that those enumerations were listed as the “main powers” or as mere “examples” but were not meant to be all-inclusive.  Really?  Let us turn again to Jefferson’s thoughts on how he viewed this approach to interpreting the Constitution:

“When an instrument admits two constructions, the one safe, the other dangerous, the one precise, the other indefinite, I prefer that which is safe & precise.  I had rather ask an enlargement of power from the nation, where it is found necessary, than to assume it by a construction which would make our powers boundless.  Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution.  Let us not make it a blank paper by construction….If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives.  It specifies & delineates the operations permitted to the federal government, and gives all the powers necessary to carry these into execution” (Letter to Wilson Cary Nicholas, Sept. 7, 1803) [emphasis added].

As you look over the landscape of the current makeup of our central government with all its bureaucracies, established to carry out the copious “general welfare” programs that have been brought into existence over the years, does it appear to you to be a “simple organization” ─ one with limitations on its powers ─ or a behemoth whose powers have been enlarged to the point where the Constitution has been made into nothing more than “blank paper”?  Does the argument in favor of applying an expansive meaning to the phrase “general welfare” strike you as being “safe and precise” or “dangerous and indefinite”?  I believe the reality of our government today speaks for itself in answer to that question, and it is not the answer given by Jefferson.

He who wrote that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” also pointed out that if we as a people are to realize this right to happiness it cannot be attained if we have a government that wastes the fruit of our labors by assuming the responsibility of providing for each and every necessity under the guise of it being for our general welfare:

“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy” (Letter to Thomas Cooper, Nov. 29, 1802).

He went on to warn in a letter to Joseph Cabell on Feb. 2, 1816, that the threat to this happiness comes from the consolidation of power into the hands of the central government instead of it being dissipated down through more local channels.  From such division of authority, he asserts, comes the protection of our liberties by providing a strong network of checks and balances on the powers of these various levels of government against one another:

“…the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to….It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man’s farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.  What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which as ever existed under the sun?  The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body,…” [emphasis added].

Given this, then, and our current state of affairs, what would Jefferson have us do?  Did he foresee the possibility of his beloved Republic becoming what it is today?  To these questions he did give answer, just seven months before his death.  In a letter to William Branch Giles, dated December 26, 1825, he detailed what has become our fate and what steps we must attend if we are to regain the liberties which are being swallowed up by the tyranny that our central government has become:

“I see, as you do, and with the deepest affliction, the rapid strides with which the federal branch of our government is advancing towards the usurpation of all the rights reserved to the States, and the consolidation in itself of all powers, foreign and domestic, and that, too, by constructions which, if legitimate, leave no limits to their power.  Take together the decisions of the federal court, the doctrines of the President, and the misconstructions of the constitutional compact acted on by the legislature of the federal branch, and it is but too evident, that the three ruling branches of that department are in combination to strip their colleagues, the State authorities, of the powers reserved by them, and to exercise themselves all functions foreign and domestic.  Under the power to regulate commerce, they assume indefinitely that also over agriculture and manufactures, and call it regulation to take the earnings of one of these branches of industry, and that too the most depressed, and put them into the pockets of the other, the most flourishing of all.  Under the authority to establish post roads, they claim that of cutting down mountains for the construction of roads, of digging canals, and aided by a little sophistry on the words ‘general welfare,’ a right to do, not only the acts to effect that , which  are specifically enumerated and permitted, but whatsoever they shall think, or pretend will be for the general welfare.  And what is our resource for the preservation of the constitution?  Reason and argument?  You might as well reason and argue with the marble columns encircling them.  The representatives chosen by ourselves?  They are joined in the combination, some  from incorrect views of government, some from corrupt ones, sufficient voting together to out-number the sound parts; and with majorities only of one, two, or three, bold enough to go forward in defiance.  Are we then to stand to our arms,…?  No.  That must be the last resource, not to be thought of until much longer and greater sufferings….We must have patience and longer endurance then with our brethren while under delusion; give them time for reflection and experience of consequences; keep ourselves in a situation to profit by the chapter of accidents; and separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left, are the dissolution of our Union with them, or submission to a government without limitation of powers.  Between these two evils, when we must make a choice, there can be no hesitation” [emphasis added].

Is it not evident that Jefferson saw so clearly the beginnings in his own day on a small scale what we see today played out before us “from sea to shining sea” on a much broader and expansive plain?  And what does he give us as our alternative as an answer to this assault upon our freedom and liberties?  Not reason and argument ─ this is something which we know will not work with the fascists who dominate the Democrat Party in Congress and the Obama Administration.  Armed rebellion ─ the reason we have the right to bear arms guaranteed to us by the second amendment?  Possibly, but only as a last resort.  Secession of States from the Union?  When the only choice left is liberty or tyranny, yes; however, such a likelihood was squashed by Lincoln when he launched the unconstitutional invasion of the southern states who tried to do just that. 

That leaves us with relying upon our elected representatives to do the right thing by us and the Constitution.  But I must ask, how has this option worked out ─ especially as of late?  Not very well, as we have too many men and women ensconced in their positions in Congress who are more in love with their status and power than they are with the principles of freedom, liberty, and the obligation of their oath to uphold the Constitution, and who have sold out our freedom and liberties for a bowl of pottage.  Jefferson stated we must have patience with them until they come to realize their mistaken judgments, but the time for patience has run out.  It is time that we resort to the only peaceful remedy left us, namely, the voting out of office all those who have made a career of using, in Jefferson’s words, “sophistry”.  These sophists who distort the intent of the Constitution so as to aid and abet their grasp on power, must be replaced with men and women who have a love for the principles upon which this nation was founded ─ men and women who will put principle above personal gain and prestige.  Only then can we begin the dismantling of this monolithic monster which has been erected upon the perverted foundation of “the general welfare”.

-Epaminondas

Government, Taxes & Spending – XII (or “How the Confederacy ‘Got It Right'”)

Perhaps no greater damage has been done to our Republic through a twisting of the Constitution by unscrupulous politicians than the claim that the so-called “general welfare” clause authorizes the central government to spend money on anything and everything they deem to be within the description of these two words.  The phrase occurs twice in the Constitution ─ in the Preamble, and in Article I, Section 8 ─ and perhaps the fact of its repetition is what the advocates of a large centralized government rely upon as the strength of their argument in expanding the control of the government into our lives by its profligate spending.

The Preamble to the Constitution reads:

“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” [emphasis added].

As a preamble’s purpose is to set forth the purpose of a document, its general framework, it is argued that the purpose of establishing the central government was to do whatever deemed necessary to “promote the general Welfare.”  This “truth” is furthermore argued to be buttressed by the empowerment statement in the opening sentence of Article I, Section 8:

“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;” [emphasis added].

What is most telling about how dangerous this phrase was viewed by those states who seceded and formed the Confederate States of America, is amplified in the wording of its Constitution, which was in most parts a mirror image of the US Constitution.  That these states had a constitutional right to secede from the Union will have to wait for another discussion, but note the glaring omission in the preamble of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America:

“WE, the People of the [United States] Confederated States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a [more perfect Union] permanent Federal government, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility [provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare], and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the [United] Confederate States of America. ”

The phrases in italics are what they added to the preamble of the US Constitution, and those enclosed in brackets were the words or phrases they omitted.  Most notably absent was the phrase under consideration in this essay, namely, “to promote the General Welfare.”  Compare again the wording of Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution with Section 8 of the CS Constitution:

“The Congress shall have Power

To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, for revenue necessary to pay the Debts [and], provide for the common Defence [and general Welfare of the United States; but], and carry on the government of the Confederate States;”

What was it that these states saw in this phrase that would prompt them to omit it from theirs?  The answer is quite simple ─ they saw the havoc it was causing to the system of republicanism upon which the country had originally been founded.  I need not delve into how even greater havoc has been unleashed upon us in the century and a half since their attempted secession.  During the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, those who opposed its usage warned of the danger posed by the twisting of this phrase in eroding our freedom and liberties.  Most notable among those who issued this warning, though he did support the Constitution’s ratification, was that great champion of republicanism, freedom and liberties, namely, Thomas Jefferson.  In the remainder of this essay, I will share with you quite a number of quotes from these patriot founders so that you may see what they foresaw as the angst we groan under today.

In-as-much as I began this current series of essays on the topic of taxation, allow me to begin these quotes with one from the Antifederalist writing under the pseudonym “Centinel”.  In an essay published on October 5, 1787, he points out that this phrase will give the central government the power to levy any and all kinds of taxes, to dictate the taxes that states may levy, and use force of arms (which Alexander Hamilton did use in 1791, but today is done through the intimidation of the IRS) to collect taxes, just so they can spend it on whatever program suits its fancy:

“The celebrated Montesquieu established it as a maxim, that legislation necessarily follows the power of taxation….and all external objects of revenue, such as unlimited imposts upon imports, etc. ─ they are to be vested with every species of internal taxation;─ whatever taxes, duties and excises that they may deem requisite for the general welfare, may be imposed on the citizens of these states, levied by the officers of Congress, distributed through every district in America; and the collection would be enforced by the standing army, however grievous or improper they may be.  The Congress may construe every purpose for which the state legislatures now lay taxes, to be for the general welfare, and thereby seize upon every object of revenue.”

In this same essay, Centinel continued to argue the merits of federalism which would mitigate against the general government from using this argument of “general welfare” to expands its power because those things most needed for the general welfare of the citizens would be best served by the state and local governments:

“If one general government could be instituted and maintained on principles of freedom, it would not be so competent to attend to the various local concerns and wants, of every particular district, as well as the peculiar governments, who are nearer the scene, and possessed of superior means of information;”

Contrast Centinel’s comments above with the impossibility of what those who twist the meaning of this phrase in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution ─ that this was to be for “the general welfare of the United States.”  The word “general” implies a broad, all-encompassing concept, applicable to a majority, which in this case includes the entire United States!  Yet, the task involved in providing the multitude of items by our central government for which this phrase has been used as justification is utterly impossible due to its sheer magnitude.  In November 1963, Nathaniel Branden wrote in a short essay on “Capitalism’s Practicality”:

“…the more complex an economy, the greater the number of choices and decisions that have to be made ─ and, therefore, the more blatantly impracticable it becomes for this process to be taken over by a central government authority.”

This echoes the principle repeatedly argued by F.A. Hayek in a number of his works.  Given the expansiveness of a society (such as that of the United States), it is impossible for any one individual or group of individuals to adequately effect the central planning in behalf of that entire society because it is impossible for them to know all of the facts necessary to make the proper decisions and plans.

Foreshadowing this principle argued by Branden and Hayek was another Anti-Federalist who wrote under the pseudonym “The Federal Farmer.”  In arguing against the states being swallowed up into one centralized government under the proposed Constitution, he stated:

“…that one government and general legislature alone, never can extend equal benefits to all parts of the United States: Different laws, customs, and opinions exist in the different states, which by a uniform system of laws would be unreasonably invaded.”

In other words, what might be construed as a matter of “general welfare” in one part of the country (or by some states) would not of necessity be so considered by another part (or other states).  Consider some of the more hotly debated issues of our time ─ gun control, socialized health care, illegal immigration ─ the difference in viewpoints varies considerably both in viewpoint and intensity from one region or state to another.

When the Pennsylvania Convention ratified the Constitution on December 12, 1787, by a vote of 46 to 23, those who had opposed the ratification issued a “Minority Report” in which they warned that the central government being created by the Constitution would eventually use these broad clauses such as “general welfare” to pass just about any law it pleased:

“The Congress might gloss over this conduct by construing every purpose for which the state legislatures now lay taxes, to be for the ‘general welfare,’ and therefore as of their jurisdiction.”

I ask, has this dire prediction not come to pass in our day and time?  Have not the states become the mere vassals of the central government obliged to do its bidding in order to continue to receive the financial crumbs thrown to them ─ crumbs that came from the bread produced by and taken from the mouths of the very citizens of the states?   Later in their report this minority went on to decry how this would ultimately destroy individual responsibility, industry, and self-reliance:

“Miserable is the lot of that people whose every concern depends on the WILL AND PLEASURE of their rulers.”

Yes, indeed!  How miserable we have become, have we not?!  Today, to whom does the majority of our populace turn to for help and assistance with almost every one of life’s necessities?  Is it not our central government in Washington, D.C.?  Not surprisingly the rulers and bureaucrats of our central government happily oblige these requests in return for the support of these slaves in keeping them in power.

This point was eloquently expounded by one of the most articulate of the Anti-Federalists, Robert Yates, writing under the pseudonym “Brutus”.  In his essay published on October 18, 1787, he wrote:

“The powers of the general legislature extend to every case that is of the least importance ─ there is nothing valuable to human nature, nothing dear to free men, but what is within its power.  It has authority to make laws which will affect the lives, the liberty, and property of every man in the United States; nor can the constitution of laws of any state, in any way prevent or impede the full and complete execution of every power given….there is no limitation to this power unless it be said that the clause which directs the use to which those taxes, and duties shall be applied, may be said to be a limitation; but this is no restriction of the power at all, for by this clause they are to be applied to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States,…and they only are to determine what is for the general welfare; this power therefore is neither more nor less, than a power to lay and collect taxes, imposts, and excises, at their pleasure; not only is the power to lay taxes unlimited, as to the amount they may require, but it is perfect and absolute to raise them in any mode they please“ [emphasis added].

He went on a little later in his essay to state that (in regards to the phrases in the 8^th section of the 1^st article of the Constitution):

“The powers given by this article are very general and comprehensive, and it may receive a construction to justify the passing of almost any law”  [emphasis added].

Re-read the parts of these quotes I have emphasized and ask yourself if what we see today by the “progressives” in Congress and the Obama Administration are not in fact doing exactly what Yates said they would do all the while claiming Constitutional authority for their actions!

Such a claim to power is an absurd abstraction that will be arbitrarily applied by whichever group holds the reins of power at any given time.  Once more, I give you the erudite commentary of Brutus, written on December 27, 1787:

“…in the very clause which gives the power of levying duties and taxes, the purposes to which the money shall be appropriated, are specified, viz., to pay the debts, and provide for the common defence and general welfare.  ‘I would ask those, who reason thus, to define what ideas are included under the terms, to provide for the common defence and general welfare?  Are these terms definite, and will they be understood in the same manner, and to apply to the same cases by every one?  No one will pretend they will.  It will then be matter of opinion, what tends to the general welfare; and the Congress will be the only judges in the matter.  To provide for the general welfare, is an abstract proposition, which mankind differ in the explanation of, as much as they do on any political or moral proposition that can be proposed; the most opposite measures may be pursued by different parties, and both may profess, that they have in view the general welfare; and both sides may be honest in their professions, or both may have sinister views….

It is certainly right and fit, that the governors of every people should provide for the common defence and general welfare; every government, therefore, in the world, even the greatest despot, is limited in the exercise of this power.  But however just this reasoning may be, it would be found, in practice, a most pitiful restriction.  The government would always say, their measures were designed and calculated to promote the public good; and there being no judge between them and the people, the rulers themselves must, and would always, judge for themselves” [emphasis added].

So I ask you ─ when you survey the intrusiveness into our lives by this monolithic Minotaur called our “Federal Government”, accompanied by its minions of bureaucracies and their unaccountable agents spewing forth repressive regulation upon repressive regulation, all of which is purportedly for our “general welfare” ─ which Constitution “Got it right? The US Constitution or the Constitution of the Confederacy?”  I would submit to you, in viewing the damage done to our freedom and liberties under the cover of the phrase “provide for the…general welfare”, on at least this one point, the Confederates “got it right.”

– Epaminondas

Government, Taxes & Spending – XI

In the first ten essays of this series I examined the constitutional basis for taxation, the various kinds of taxes employed or proposed to be employed by our general government, and how destructive our current income tax system is to both our freedom and liberties, and our economic strength and prosperity.  I have also set forth what I and many others believe to be the best solution to our economic ills as far as taxation is concerned ─ the passage of H.R. 25, The Fair Tax Act, into law ─ a system of taxation which would eliminate all income-related taxes.  However, as I closed the previous essay, how to best provide revenue to the general government is only part of the problem we face today ─ the other part is the kind and amount of spending of this revenue by the government.

As I have stated before, the right of the general government to levy and collect taxes is totally proper and within its constitutional powers.  That Congress has the power to enact oppressive taxation can hardly be disputed.  In order to better understand how we arrived at our present condition, perhaps it would be best to return to our roots and see how this journey began. 

The Constitution authorizes all revenue (tax) bills to originate within the House of Representatives.  Article I, Section 7, Clause 1 states

“All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.”

The reason for this was simple ─ the House of Representatives was composed of elected individuals who were to be closest to the people ─ those who would ultimately bear the burden of any and all taxes enacted by the Congress.  Therefore, it was believed that those representatives would be the fieriest guardians of the interests of their fellow constituents in protecting them from unreasonable and onerous taxation ─ a prime instigation for the War of Independence.  During the Constitutional Convention of 1787 much heated debate raged over this clause.  Elbridge Gerry, a delegate from Massachusetts who had proposed this clause, originally worded it where all such tax bills were to originate within the House with no right of amendment given to the Senate.  The reason was to protect the people from the Senate which Gerry (and many others who were fearful of an overly-powerful general government) feared would become an aristocratic body not as empathetic to the people.  Such a Senate would weaken the power of the House (representing the people) to protect the citizen taxpayers.

On the other side of this issue were those who favored a strong central government and who had little love for states’ rights or individual liberties which the concept of federalism afforded individual citizens.  Alexander Hamilton, for instance, was one of the staunchest promoters of this view of what should be the nation’s new government.  Aided in the opposition on this issue was James Wilson of Pennsylvania who proposed the addition of the latter part of this clause giving the Senate amendment rights.  In the compromise that resulted in the clause being adopted into the Constitution, history has shown the power to control tax legislation has been greatly diluted.  In effect, we have seen over the years how this so-called “Origination Clause” has been routinely subverted by not only the Senate but by the Treasury Department and its sub-department, the IRS, inasmuch as the seed for many revenue bills have their germination in these agencies.  Indeed, just in the closing days of 2010 we have seen a massive “Continuing Resolution Bill”, laden with all kinds of “pork projects”, originate in the Senate instead of with the “Peoples’ Representatives” in the House ─ the people ─ you, me and our descendants ─ who would have been burdened with more debt and the threat of higher taxation to repay it.

Consider if you will the following requirement placed upon Congress regarding the spending of the money collected by the general government, as found in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution:

“No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”

Notice the severe restrictions of the words used in this clause:  “No money”, “but…by Law”, “regular Statement and Account…of all…Money shall be published….”  Does this sound like how our tax monies are being accounted for?  When was the last time we saw a published accounting of just where all these trillions of our tax dollars was spent ─ and if it were to be published, what would the likelihood be of it being “transparent”, forthright, and understandable?

Article I, Section 8 contains the so-called “enumerated powers” that the sovereign nation-states granted to the general government, all the while retaining all other powers to themselves (Amendments 9 and 10).

“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings; And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

As you read through this list, notice just how few powers granted to Congress and the general government actually require money and therefore are the only explicitly authorized expenditures by the Constitution Congress is authorized to make.  Summed up, these limited authorized expenditures are as follows:

• To pay the debts (resulting from the enumerated authorization to “borrow money on the credit of the United States”);
• Provide for the common Defence (and hence further down in the list, the authority to pay for wars which may be declared, which then requires the “raising and support of an army”, “the provision and maintenance of a navy”, “to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia”, and the “erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards”);
• To coin Money (which obviously requires funds to produce such coinage);
• To establish Post Offices and Post Roads (Note that this is one of the few “centrally-controlled”  businesses that the Constitution authorizes and which has been proven now to be grossly inefficient and costly.  Furthermore, take note also that it authorizes the building of “post roads” ─ not any and all roads in general such as the interstate highway system started under President Eisenhower, which was a massively mismanaged project.  The early history of the nation is replete with examples of how local and private endeavors to construct roads and canals were much more efficient and successful than those attempted by the general and even state governments).
• To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court would obviously entail the rent or construction of court houses and the salaries of judges appointed to serve in those tribunals.
• and other needful Buildings ─ a general authorization, but most certainly not one that authorizes buildings on an indiscriminate scale ─ only those justified as being “needful”.

 Through all of these we can see some common threads woven together.  Much of what is delineated has to deal with the defense of the union from outside forces or internal insurrections ─ situations in which the combined might of all of the states would be required under a unified command.  The other items have to deal with assisting the union of the states in their connectivity with each other through communication (post offices & post roads), and the provision for the judiciary so that citizens in the various regions of the country would have access to the dispensing of justice should it be required.  Tying all of these together is the obvious necessity of establishing the means of producing a common currency to pay for all this and to aid in the exchange of commerce between the states. 

Clearly, the vast majority of what the central government spends our money on today is far and away outside the scope of these items.  However, those who argue for the extensive governmental interference in our lives and the justification for taxing us to that end point out that the opening clause of this section details three general areas which the Constitution authorizes revenue expenditures:  to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.  With the second of these three, there is no disagreement, as I have pointed out in my preceding comments.  That debts honorably incurred ought to be paid will also not garner any objections (although the reasons for the incurring of the debt certainly are open for dispute).  It is with the final phrase that has become the “catchall” authority for all of our massive government spending that we see today.

So the question is, “Does the clause, ‘provide for the…general welfare of the United States’ justify the bloated budget of our modern-day central government?”  Just what did the founders intend when they inserted this phrase?  The answer is, “It depends upon which founder you have in mind.”  In the next essay we’ll take up this issue and examine this phrase which has come to wreck so much havoc on our society today and lies at the root of the loss of much of our freedom and liberties.

-Epaminondas

Government, Taxes & Spending – II

‘Forward, the Tax Payers!’

Was there a man dismay’d ?

Not tho’ the payer knew

Congress had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to pay & die,

Into the valley of Oppression

Rode the American Citizen.

If you are an aficionado of English literature, specifically poetry, you will recognize my adaptation above of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous ode to the charge of the Light Brigade.   If you are not familiar with the history behind this famous poem, it was written to commemorate a suicidal charge of light cavalry of the British army in the battle of Balaclava (Ukraine) in the Crimean War (1854-56). Of the 637 men who began the charge, 247 of them were killed or wounded and the attack failed miserably.  Today, as I write this, our congress and president are poised to order the taxpayers of this nation to commit a similar economic suicide charge that will cripple our ability to recover from the oppressive recession that they, though their reckless and irresponsible fiscal decisions, have brought upon us. 

On January 1, 2011 the tax rates that all Americans pay on their income from all sources will increase dramatically.  Every income tax bracket will increase and one more will be added.  Those on the lowest end of the economic spectrum will see their rates jump by fifty percent (from ten percent to fifteen percent) ─  this despite almost universal warnings from economists from one shore to the other that raising taxes during a recession will put the economy into a crash dive that we may not be able to pull out of.

In my introductory essay on this topic I established the case that government does have a legitimate right to levy taxes in order to carry out the responsibilities that its citizens have assigned to it.  I also covered some of the basic kinds of taxes that are used by all levels of government in our nation, including one insidious tax that the Obama Administration is considering adding to our tax burden, the Value Added Tax (or VAT).  We are today awash in taxes (hence my adaptation and modification of Tennyson’s poem).  Various tax watchdog organizations have compiled lists of the various taxes to which we are subjected and the longest list I found had over fifty different taxes listed (and I doubt it was exhaustive)!   None of the lists I encountered included the VAT currently under consideration, nor any of all of the other taxes hidden within the recently enacted Health Care “Reform” Law, nor any of those proposed by the so-called “Cap and Trade” legislation that has been proposed in congress and advocated for by the Obama Administration. 

So just what is the most effective kind of tax that should be employed by our government in order to carry out its obligations?  I shall leave for the moment to a future post this second question of the five I raised in the opening of the previous essay of this series.  Instead I would like to proceed to the third question which was, “Upon whom should the taxes be levied?”  If an individual receives gifts constantly for which he or she has to put forth no effort or sacrifice, those gifts or benefits quickly lose their value in the eyes of the recipients – they are neither appreciated nor well taken care of.  As I intimated in the previous post, governments exist to protect civil society and our government has been charged with the responsibility of providing a secure society in which all men (and women) are free to pursue life, liberty and happiness, and to make of their lives whatever talents and ambition which they have, drives them to achieve.  Everyone in this nation receives the benefits accorded by the government; hence a failure to contribute something, even if only a small portion, will cause them to adopt an entitlement mentality towards the freedom and liberties accorded to them by our constitution and government and to fail to appreciate just how precious these liberties and freedom are.  Just considering the income tax (a topic  I shall deal with in either the next post or the one following it), according to the latest figures available for the tax year 2007, the top one percent of tax payers, those earning an Adjusted Gross Income of $410,096 or greater, paid 40.42% of the entire income tax burden collected by the Internal Revenue Service.  The top five percent, those earning an AGI of $160,041 or more, paid 60.63%, and the top twenty-five percent, those who earned an AGI of only $66,532 or more, paid 86.59% of the income tax burden.  A full forty percent of income tax filers paid no income tax at all!  Is it any wonder then that the fascists in the democrat party are so ably adept at playing the class warfare card in order to garner votes and keep themselves in power?!  The following quote has often been misattributed to Benjamin Franklin but was most likely penned by an earlier historian in Europe (although the exact authorship is debated); nevertheless, its words ring as true as though struck from a bell cast of the purest gold regarding our situation today:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been about 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage”  [emphasis added].

President Obama supposedly feels that everyone should have a stake in this nation by supporting it, but his tax policies and class warfare rhetoric belie this exchange he had with reporter George Stephanopoulos in early January 2009:

OBAMA:   “What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government, what are we getting for it, and how do we make the system more efficient?”

STEPHANOPOULOS:   “And eventually sacrifice from everyone.”

OBAMA:   “Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game. “

Though Obama pays lip service to this principle, his actions speak to the opposite position.  In the Biblical story of God’s punishment of King David for his arrogance in taking a census of the people of his kingdom, the pestilence sent by God as punishment was halted at the threshing floor of a man named Araunah.  David wished to purchase the property from Araunah in order to offer a sacrifice to God, but Araunah declined, instead offering to give the king his property.  To this offer David gave an answer that bespeaks the principle of personal responsibility and appreciation:  “No, I insist on paying you for it.  I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing” [emphasis added].  Neither should anyone enjoy the fruits of freedom and liberty when it costs them nothing.  I will offer what I feel has been set forth as the fair remedy to this in a later post; but suffice it at this time to have established the point that everyone who benefits from being a citizen in this nation should have a part, even a small one, in the maintenance of it.  Is it no wonder then that Obama was elected and his minions keep getting re-elected because those groups that make up the core constituency of their party have learned that by voting for them they are voting “themselves largesse from the public treasury.”

The fourth question that I posed in that initial essay was “In what proportion should taxes fall upon those who pay them?”  This has been the central question about taxation for centuries.  The celebrated Montesquieu, in his monumental work The Spirit of the Laws, contradicted our current tax system ─ a system that is the backbone of every Marxist, Socialist and Fascist government ever erected:

“Public revenues must not be measured by what the people can give but by what they should give, and if they are measured by what the people can give, it must at least be by what they can always give” (Part II, Book 13, Chapter 1) [emphasis added].

Contrast this with Karl Marx’s statement in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  This has been part of the party platform of every tyrannical government that has ever existed, whether you call it Communist, Fascist or Socialist.  This is what is behind the oft-repeated phase uttered by Obama and his fascist democrat cronies, that there must be a “spreading of the wealth around” ─ i.e., a forceful taking of wealth from those who created it by their efforts and distributing it to those who did nothing for it, according to what the central government sees as “fair and equitable.” 

This ploy is as old as the fable of Robin Hood ─ the demonizing of those who are wealthy (which is anyone who has at least one dollar more than you do) and his justifiable robbery of them in order to give the plunder to the poorer inhabitants of the land.  But what else would you expect from one whose experience has not been in creating jobs, opportunities or wealth, but instead was a rabble rouser who cut his teeth on the teaching of the Marxist Saul Alinsky?  Alinsky’s thirteenth rule in his section on tactics in his book, Rules for Radicals, on stirring up animosity within a community, society or nation, is to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”  Such is exactly the tactic used in the class warfare waged by Obama in his speeches regarding taxing the wealthy so that they “pay their fair share.”  Furthermore, consider the thrust of what Alinksy held were the purposes of tactics (Alinsky’s son described Obama as the most expert student of his father’s principles of anyone who had been a follower of him):  “Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.”  Combine this with his fifth rule of tactics and you can readily see how in the area of taxation and “wealth-spreading”, Obama is applying these Marxist principles of community upheaval on a national scale:  “…the fifth rule:  Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.  It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.”  Listen carefully to the words Obama uses the next time you hear him speak on this subject and see if you don’t recognize these tactical principles in his attack upon our society.

Having said this, however, still does not answer the question, which is, just how much should each individual pay in taxes?  What is “fair” to everyone concerned?  What “should” each individual pay, to go back to Montesquieu’s statement.  Clearly, someone who earns $500,000 is able to pay more taxes than someone who only earns $50,000, but is it fair that just because he can he should?  We are right back then to where we started with the quote from Montesquieu.  Or in the words of President Obama, just how much “skin” should each individual “have in the game”?  This whole notion of Marx and the “spreading of the wealth around” harkens back to the concept that everyone should be equal ─ that no one should have more than anyone else.  To this belief the Nobel prize-winning economist and political philosopher, F.A. Hayek, argued in his book, Individualism and Economic Order:

“I can see no reason for trying to make people equal as distinct from treating them equally. While individualism is profoundly opposed to all prescriptive privilege, to all protection, by law or force, of any rights not based on rules equally applicable to all persons, it also denies government the right to limit what the able or fortunate may achieve. It is equally opposed to any rigid limitation of the position individuals may achieve, whether this power is used to perpetuate inequality or to create equality. Its main principle is that no man or group of men should have power to decide what another man’s status ought to be, and it regards this as a condition of freedom so essential that it must not be sacrificed to the gratification of our sense of justice or of our envy.

If all men were completely equal in their gifts and inclinations, we should have to treat them differently in order to achieve any sort of social organization. Fortunately, they are not equal; and it is only owing to this that the differentiation of functions need not be determined by the arbitrary decision of some organizing will but that, after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level … There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal” [emphasis added].

We can see how this concept of political correctness and equality is invading more and more areas of our lives, such as the absurdity of everyone being a winner in any kind of contest – that there are no such things as “winners and losers”.  Thus those who possess superior skills in athletics, the arts, or any other area must not be recognized for the superiority of the gifts they possess, just as those who use their talents and ambition to succeed financially must be punished for their efforts by having the fruit of their labor taken from them and distributed to others.  Many can see this absurdity in these other areas, but are blind to it when it comes to the subject of taxation.  To this Ayn Rand aptly said, “ Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel!”  Remember this, then, that the next time Obama talks about redistributing wealth he is viewing you and me as nothing more than chattel, to be manipulated by the government in the way it (he) sees fit!  What is fair is you having the control over how much you pay in taxes, not the government ─ you deciding how much and when to pay taxes, and for everyone to have that same decision-making power and responsibility is the only fair way to levy taxes.  This is exactly the solution proposed by the “Fair Tax”, which I will delve into in more detail when this series of essays concludes. 

Perhaps, though, the over-arching question is the fifth question I initially raised, which is, “Just what are the legitimate purposes for the collection of taxes?  For America, that answer lies in our Constitution, which for years has been abused in this subject of taxes and which abuse has created the burdensome and onerous tax system that afflicts us today.  In my next post I will take a look at just what the Constitution authorizes, how Congress has over the years twisted it to justify the taxes taken from us, and look at just a few of the abuses this has led to.

– Epaminondas

The Death of Our Beloved American Republic (1788 – 2010) – XVI Pivotal Events in Its Demise

“I watched as he opened the sixth seal.  There was a great earthquake” ─ so goes the graphic description in the Biblical Book of Revelation of the judgments of God against the Roman Empire in bringing about its ultimate collapse.  So too, the sixth “seal” in my seven “seals” that have “sealed” the fate of our republic, along with our freedom and liberties, was a great earthquake, better known as “The Great Society”, created by president Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s’.

With the ascension of LBJ to the presidency, the fascist tentacles of the central government, first extended into the lives of free Americans by Woodrow Wilson and then extended further by FDR, expanded and multiplied in all directions, attaching its suckers to the very core of what being American stood for, until today its stranglehold threatens to choke the very last drop of our founding principles from our nation.  As with all progressive (or fascist) programs the professed aim is for the “good of society.”  Thus LBJ, like all good fascists who use the war imagery (see my previous essay on Woodrow Wilson, The Death of Our Beloved American Republic (1788 – 2010) – XIII Pivotal Events in Its Demise), declared his “war on poverty” program that would usher in a utopia in which all poverty would be eliminated, and in the words of the prophets of old Israel in their depiction of paradise, every man would “sit under his vine and fig tree.”    That this was LBJ’s aim was clearly set forth in the commencement address which he delivered on May 22, 1964 at the University of Michigan:

“The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all.  It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time.  But that is just the beginning…The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.  It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness.  It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”

He couched this panorama of paradise against the backdrop of “liberty”, but it is not the liberty of the founders, the liberty of the individual to pursue happiness as spoken of in the Declaration of Independence, but rather of the liberty from fear, wants, and all needs ─ everything that a citizen should need provided for by the community, i.e., the state.  That, my friends, is pure socialism, which can only be realized when the state becomes supreme in the lives of the individual, which, according to Benito Mussolini, the father of Fascism, is at the very heart of a Fascist government.  To create this utopian paradise by the central government, it would obviously require agencies, legislation, and regulations to carry the “battle” to these societal enemies.  And so came into existence the Department of Health and Urban Development (HUD) whose mission was to eradicate homelessness and poor housing conditions among the citizenry; Medicare and Medicaid, to eliminate the danger of the elderly not having adequate medical care; food stamps so that everyone would be fed; welfare payments so that other needs could be met; and on and on it went ─ the great cornucopia of the central government providing to everyone according to his needs.  What should have raised an alarm greater than it did, especially during the height of the “cold war” and the war being fought in the jungles of Vietnam (purportedly to stop the advance of Communism), is that such a principle was a brick in the very foundation of Communism, as expressed by none other than Karl Marx himself:  “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs.”  It is not my intent to cover all the faults of the welfare state in this essay, as there have been books upon books written by eminent men in the field of economics on this topic, but rather to touch just briefly on the matter of how this system has served to destroy our Republic.

To begin with, the very title of LBJ’s grand and ambitious drive to remake American society has its roots in radical socialism.  The phrase actually came from a book written in 1914 by the co-founder of Fabian Socialism (which has become the Labour Party in Great Britain), Graham Wallas, titled The Great Society.  Hence, it should not come as any great shock that the programs that grew out of Johnson’s Great Society would be aimed at transforming America into a truly socialist state though the fascist centralization of power in the hands of the “federal” government.  The justification for this assault on our system of constitutional, federal, representative republicanism was the assertion that these needs to be supplied by the government though its various new agencies were “rights” and not “privileges”.  Indeed, as Jonah Goldberg points out in his book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of The American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Change,

“Michael Harrington, whose ‘The Other America’ laid the moral groundwork for the War on Poverty, led a group of thirty-five left-wing intellectuals, grandiosely dubbed the ‘Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution,’ which proclaimed that the state should provide ‘every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right‘” [emphasis added].

Compare these asserted “rights” of these “Progressives” with those in the Declaration of Independence and see if you think they reach that high bar set forth by Thomas Jefferson.  Are these “rights” “certain and unalienable”, “endowed upon us by our Creator”?  The answer is clearly that they do not (see my essay The Concepts of “Freedom”, “Liberty” and “Rights”).

If you will permit another Biblical reference, the phrase that bests applies to all of these programs is “by their fruits you shall know them.”  And just what are the fruits of LBJ’s “Great Society”?  Allow me to share with you some observations cataloged by a couple of Nobel Prize-winning Economists – Milton Freidman and F. A. Hayek.

To begin with, since LBJ styled his remodeling of America on a war-facade footing, what say you – are we winning the war ─ have we won it yet?  After trillions of dollars spent, has poverty decreased, housing improved, homelessness decreased, etc?  Hardly!  In fact, things have actually worsened and made the future of all Americans more bleak.  During the 1960s protestors ranged across the streets and campuses of this nation in protest of the Vietnam War because we were waist-deep in a quagmire with no foreseeable way out.  Today, we see the same thing from these same-minded leaders of the democrat party towards the war against terrorism, yet they keep throwing more and more money at their societal war with even less progress to show for it than these actual “wars”!  The reason we don’t see the protests against these programs like we do the military conflicts just mentioned is that there are protests against not enlarging these insatiable pits of freedom-eating Minotaurs even more than they have already been enlarged!  Through these programs their power over greater areas of our lives can be continuously expanded, making the continuation of this never-ending “war” acceptable to the Fascists.  The abject failure of public assistance was set forth by Friedman in his book, Free to Choose, in the chapter titled “Cradle to Grave”:

“Once people get on relief, it is hard to get off.  The country is increasingly divided into two classes of citizens, one receiving relief and the other paying for it.  Those on relief have little incentive to earn income.”

Thus, instead of uniting the country, the citizens are divided, one group against the other, with one continuing to support the Fascists and their agenda (since they benefit from it) while the others, who are the producers in society, come to resent the other group and those in power who cater to them.  The sad part is, those who live off of the public dole will eventually learn, as the gingerbread man who accepted a ride across the stream on the back of the fox, that eventually their freedom and liberties will be swallowed in whole by their Fascist benefactors!

An obvious by-product of these programs has been the proliferation of agencies which produce their regulations without answerability to the people as they are guided by unelected bureaucrats.  This can mean but one thing, and that is a loss of freedom and liberties.  I will, however, leave the discussion of the insidious growth in this area and its subsequent failure to deliver on the promises made by the architects of “the Great Society” for a later series of essays.  Let us instead return to the matter of the assault of the welfare state upon the foundational principles of our Republic.

Returning once more to Dr. Friedman’s work, he summed up the danger with these words:

“…spending tends also to corrupt the people involved.  All such programs put some people in a position to decide what is good for other people.  The effect is to instill in the one group a feeling of almost God-like power; in the other, a feeling of childlike dependence.  The capacity of the beneficiaries for independence, for making their own decisions, atrophies through disuse.  In addition to the waste of money, in addition to the failure to achieve the intended objectives, the end result is to rot the moral fabric that holds a decent society together….Voluntary gifts aside, you can spend someone else’s money only by taking it away as the government does.  The use of force is therefore at the very heart of the welfare state ─ a bad means that tends to corrupt the good ends.  That is also the reason why the welfare state threatens our freedom so seriously” [emphasis added].

To Dr. Friedman’s words on the threat of the “Great Society” on our freedom and liberties Dr. Hayek added his concurrence in his voluminous work, The Constitution of Liberty.  So that you may feel the full impact of his words, I offer to you the following quotes without any interruptive commentary on my part.

“…we must realize that, as a service agency, it” [i.e., the state] “may assist without harm in the achievement of desirable aims which perhaps could not be achieved otherwise.  The reason why many of the new welfare activities of government are a threat to freedom, then, is that though they are presented as mere service activities, they really constitute an exercise of the coercive powers of government and rest on its claiming exclusive rights in certain fields….

What goes under that name” [i.e., the welfare state] “is a conglomerate of so many diverse and even contradictory elements that, while some of them may make a free society more attractive, others are incompatible with it or may at least constitute potential threat to its existence….

The distinction, then, is that between the security of an equal minimum income for all and the security of a particular income that a person is thought to deserve.  The latter is closely related to the third main ambition that inspires the welfare state: the desire to use the powers of government to insure a more even or more just distribution of goods.  Insofar as this means that the coercive powers of government are to be used to insure that particular people get particular things, it requires a kind of discrimination between, and an unequal treatment of, different people which is irreconcilable with a free society.  This is the kind of welfare state that aims at ‘social justice’ and becomes ‘primarily a redistributor of income.’  It is bound to lead back to socialism and its coercive and essentially arbitrary methods….

The chief danger today is that, once an aim of government is accepted as legitimate, it is then assumed that even means contrary to the principles of freedom may be legitimately employed….

If government wants not merely to facilitate the attainment of certain standards by the individuals but to make certain that everybody attains them it can do so only by depriving individuals of any choice in the matter.  Thus the welfare state becomes a household state in which a paternalistic power controls most of the income of the community and allocates it to individuals in the forms and quantities which it thinks they need or deserve….

It is sheer illusion to think that when certain needs of the citizen have become the exclusive concern of a single bureaucratic machine, democratic control of that machine can then effectively guard the liberty of the citizen.  So far as the preservation of personal liberty is concerned, the division of labor between a legislature which merely says that this or that should be done and an administrative apparatus which is given exclusive power to carry out these instructions is the most dangerous arrangement possible.  All experience confirms what is ‘clear enough from American as well as from English experience, that the zeal of the administrative agencies to achieve the immediate ends they see before them leads them to see their function out of focus and to assume that constitutional limitations and guaranteed individual rights must give way before their zealous efforts to achieve what they see as paramount purpose of government.’

It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good….It is inevitable that this sort of administration of the welfare of the people would become a self-willed and uncontrollable apparatus before which the individual is helpless, and which becomes increasingly invested with all the mystique of sovereign authority…” [emphasis added].

As you have read through these gems of wisdom enunciated by Hayek, I think it clear that there is certainly no need for me to even attempt to add to them.  The “Great Society” thus is anything but “Great”; instead it is the “Great Enslavement” of our individualism which was the heart and soul of our forefathers view of what made Americans “exceptional.” 

In the final installment of this series we will wrap up with the final seal that has sealed the fate of our once free republic, the elections of the Fascists on the radical left of the democrat party in 2006 and the follow up election of the most leftist driven anti-American ideologue to the office of president in 2008.  Until then, I leave you with one final quote from Dr. Hayek’s previously referenced work:

“Many of the policies intended to combat particular evils have actually made them worse.  And some of the more recent developments have created greater potentialities for a direct control by authority of the private life of the individual than may be seen in any other field of policy” [emphasis added].

-Epaminondas

The Death of Our Beloved American Republic (1788 – 2010) – XV Pivotal Events in Its Demise

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”; “…a day that will live in infamy….” ─ two of perhaps the most famous statements people remember uttered by our thirty-second president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  The first statement was a line from his first inaugural address in January 1933, and the second was a phrase contained in his speech before Congress asking for a declaration of war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  Although the two statements were given many years apart and were part of speeches that were vastly different from one another in subject matter and purpose, I would contend that for the future health of our Republic, together they take on an entirely different and ominous meaning.

FDR was an admirer of his cousin, Teddy Roosevelt, and had also served in the administration of Woodrow Wilson.  As both of his presidential predecessors were “Progressives” (or more accurately, “Fascists” – see my earlier essay on Woodrow Wilson in this series – The Death of Our Beloved American Republic (1788 – 2010) – XIII Pivotal Events in Its Demise), it should come as no surprise that he built upon the foundation that these men, especially Wilson, had laid.  It is true that Wilson brought the principles of Fascism into the mainstream of American life, but it was FDR that opened the floodgates so that it overflowed the boundaries of the Constitution until we find ourselves today stripped of most of our liberties, our freedom, our privacy, our property and our individualism.  It is for this reason that I would propose a totally new “spin” on his two most famous utterances:  We have everything to fear, for the election of FDR was a day that continues to live in infamy in every day of our present lives.

FDR is revered as the patron saint of the modern democrat party, the rescuer of the nation from the Great Depression, and the stalwart leader during the dark days of World War II.  If his history were more accurately depicted instead of the white washed version propagated by the liberal establishment that has a death grip over our elementary, secondary, and higher education institutions, this would not be the case.  I cannot detail in this essay all of the aspects of his movement of this country into a fascist state, but I shall endeavor to at least present enough evidence to support my contention that FDR’s ascension to the office of president and his subsequent policies in the New Deal represent my fifth “seal” of the “seven fatal seals” which were the pivotal turning points in our nation’s history that have “sealed” the fate of the death of our Constitutional Federalist Representative Republic.  Should you have a deeper thirst on this topic, I commend to your reading the chapter on FDR in Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change.  There are also numerous other works as well that provide documentation to the fascist leanings of the “sainted” Franklin D. Roosevelt, but Goldberg’s book gives you the entire history of Fascism’s rise within our beloved Republic.

That FDR was in fact a fascist can be substantiated by examining his view and those of his advisors of the concurrent fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, observations made by those of that time who observed his administrations, and programs he initiated that resonate down and continue with us to this very day.

I begin with an incident that Goldberg references, which was the shooting of ten union strikers in Chicago on Memorial Day in 1937.  A young reporter (with whom you will be familiar), Eric Sevareid, reported the incident with these words:  “I understood deep in my bones and blood what fascism was.”  Young Mr. Sevareid was not alone in this observation.  The British ambassador to the United States cabled London shortly after FDR’s election to his first term with this observation:

“The starved loyalties and repressed hero-worship of the country have found in him an outlet and a symbol….Every house I visited ─ mill worker or unemployed ─ had a picture of the President…He is at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems.  And though everything else fails, he is there, and will not let them down.”

I ask you ─ if you had not been told that this was an observation about FDR and the cable referred to the person being described as “President”, would you have thought this a report on 1933 America or 1933 Nazi Germany?  Allow me to go further and ask, is this not the same mindset that is evident in the minds of many today towards the current occupant of the White House?  I fear that too many of our citizens fail to exercise a sufficient objective reflection upon the policies of our leaders and instead place far too much faith and idolization upon the individual.  It has evidently happened in the past (as in this case with FDR that continues to this day) and in our current times.

In an article published on May 7, 1933 in the New York Times by reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick, she opined that Washington D.C. appeared to be “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan.…America today literally asks for orders.” She went on to say that FDR “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.”

That Ms. McCormick’s observations and intimations were on the mark is supported by comments made by both FDR about Mussolini and Mussolini’s comments made in return.  Would you not agree that the father of Fascism would be a reliable judge in recognizing Fascism at work within a country?  Then, with acknowledgement to the research of Goldberg, I give you these observations made by that father of Fascism, Benito Mussolini:

“The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people….Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism”  (Mussolini’s review of FDR’s book, Looking Forward) [emphasis added].

Regarding democratic principles that had long existed in America, Mussolini later observed that

“America itself is abandoning them.  Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress.  There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation.  There is no longer a parliament but an ‘etat majeur.’  There are no longer parties, but a single party.  A sole will silences dissenting voices.  This has nothing to be with any demo-liberal conception of things” [emphasis added].

In a similar vein, the Völkischer Beobachter, the newspaper of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (i.e., the Nazi Party of Hitler’s Third Reich) had this to say about Roosevelt’s book:

“…many passages in his book ‘Looking Forward’ could have been written by a National Socialist.  In any case, one can assume that he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist philosophy” [emphasis added].

This mutual admiration society demonstrated itself with FDR’s reply in a letter he addressed to the administration’s ambassador to Italy in 1933.  Speaking of Mussolini FDR said:

“…that admirable Italian gentleman is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished” [emphasis added].

I trust that these quotations are sufficient to leave no room for doubt that the political philosophy which FDR brought with him into the White House was Fascist, and our ancestral citizens applauded it!  However, I must ask, are we any different today than they when you consider the fawning over Barak Obama by the masses, intelligentsia and main stream media?   

Such observations were not made without foundation, however – there was ample evidence in the steps taken by the Roosevelt administration from the very beginning that substantiated these comments.  The “New Deal” of FDR was nothing short of “Raw Fascism”, and therefore should more appropriately be termed as such – the “Raw Deal”!  As with its cousin Fascist regimes in Europe, FDR styled his attack upon the economic depression that griped the country with a war-styled rallying cry.  His fascists descendents (and even conservatives) have followed this manta – the “war on poverty”, the “war on illiteracy”, the “war on drugs”, the “war on corporate greed” and so on.  The reason for this is very simple ─ in the advent of a war crisis citizens willingly give up liberties and freedom and the suspension of their Constitutional rights which they would not otherwise do under non-warring conditions.  The only problem is that with a social “war”, it is never over, and hence citizens never regain the liberties and freedom that they willingly given up to fight it. 

Do these words that FDR uttered in his first inaugural address strike you as being more the words of a dictatorial tyrant intent on imposing his will on a nation regardless of the wishes and concurrence of their elected representatives, or the words of a freedom-loving, democratically-inclined adherent to a constitutional republican form of government:

“We must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline….I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people….In the event that the Congress shall fail to [act] and in the event that the national emergency is still critical…I shall ask the Congress for…broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

Many, if not most or even all, of the programs of the New Deal had parallels in the Fascist regimes of Italy and Germany.  It should not come as a surprise, then, that the Supreme Court repeatedly struck down as unconstitutional FDR’s attempts to put these programs into place.  Out of frustration, FDR threatened, with the backing of a compliant Congress, to “pack the court” with additional appointees of his philosophical bent who would weaken the power of the Court into a mere “rubber stamp” which he would wield with impunity.  Faced with this unprecedented and unconstitutional bullying, the Supreme Count acquiesced to FDR’s will and declared all of his programs to indeed be “constitutional”.  And so it is that much of what threatens our fiscal stability today was achieved not by integrity and an honorable respect for the Constitution, but rather out of one man’s Fascist thirst for consolidating power into the hands of the central government!

But what of these programs ─ just what was so “Fascist” about them?  Robert Shaw, a Progressive writer described the New Deal in an article for the North American Review in 1934 as the “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.”As I mentioned earlier, there are numerous parallels between the programs of FDR and Nazi Germany, many based upon a “war” footing.  For example,  Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps was very similar to programs of like purpose in Nazi Germany.  John A. Garraty of Columbia University, an admirer of FDR, wrote in 1973 that both programs in the two countries

“were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth ‘off the city street corners,’ Hitler as a way of keeping them from ‘rotting helplessly in the streets.’ In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. Furthermore, both were organized on semi-military lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency.”

Indeed, in 1942 FDR threatened Congress that if it did not repeal a provision of a bill that it had lawfully passed, he would personally repeal it (do you find that power granted to the President anywhere in the Constitution?)!

Perhaps, however, the most Fascist of all his programs was the NRA, the National Recovery Administration, created in 1933 by the  National Industrial Recovery Act.  Waldo Frank, the social historian, wrote in 1934 that

“The NRA is the beginning of American Fascism….Fascism may be so gradual in the United States that most voters will not be aware of its existence.  The true Fascist leaders will not be present imitators of German Führer and Italian condottieri, prancing in silver shirts.  They will be judicious, black-frocked gentlemen; graduates of the best universities;….”

Under the power of this new agency virtually all industries, large and small, were forced into cartels.  Wage and price controls were put in place (the minimum wage was part of the Socialist Party’s Platform as well as one of the tenets of the Communist Manifesto).  That no one, regardless of their status, was exempt from the reach of this Fascist agency, is exemplified by the arrest and jailing for three months in 1934 of a forty-nine year-old immigrant dry cleaner, Jacob Maged,  who dared to charge thirty-five cents to press a suit ─ a price that was five cents under the NRA mandated price that all “loyal” American dry cleaners were to charge!  You see, dear reader, when individuals cheer on the central government’s insidious takeover of larger corporations it is only laying the groundwork for turning their attention and reach to the “little guy”, the small business owners who make this country’s economic engine the envy of the world.  It wasn’t just major industries and corporations that were to be nationalized, but individual farms were also to be folded into larger ones, organized and run by the government for the “general welfare” of the nation! In their view it was the government’s responsibility to see to it that there was adequate food production, production of products and jobs for everyone.  In short, the aim was the principle known as “corporatism”, a principle that is the very heart and soul of Fascism.

So the question is now, just how did all this turn out?  In our history classes and in political speeches delivered by democrat politicians we are constantly reminded how Franklin D. Roosevelt rescued American from the depths of the Great Depression and preserved our Republic.  Such could not be further from the truth.  Many economists and historians now will admit that the New Deal both worsened and prolonged the Depression.  Employment had reached 11.6 million in 1932 when FDR was elected.  After seven years of his New Deal, there were still 11.3 million unemployed (obviously, major works projects ─ think “shovel ready” ─ such as the TVA do not lead to lasting employment).  In 1932 there were 13.6 million Americans on the relief rolls, but after seven years of FDR’s Raw Deal there were 19.6 million in the relief lines (more on this in next week’s post when we’ll take a look at LBJ and his “great society” legislation).  As Mark Levin recounts in his book, Liberty and Tyranny,

“…Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., wrote in his private diary that ‘we have tried spending money.  We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work….We have never made good on our promises….I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started…and an enormous debt to boot!'”

During his campaign in 1932, Roosevelt had championed the notion of reducing taxes, cutting government spending, reducing the nation’s debt and freeing the economy to return the nation to prosperity, yet once ensconced in office he broke every one of his promises by going in the exact opposite direction! 

There is so much more that could be added, but I fear that I have tried your patience enough with the length of this piece.  There is yet one more quote that I would like to leave with you, courtesy once again of Jonah Goldberg’s research.  J.T. Flynn, who had at one time been a pundit for the New Republic in the 1930s, gave this characterization of the New Deal:

“It is born in crisis, lives on crises, and cannot survive the era of crisis.  By the very law of its nature it must create for itself, if it is to continue, fresh crises from year to year.  Mussolini came to power in the postwar crisis and became himself a crisis in Italian life…Hitler’s story is the same.  And our future is charted out upon the same turbulent road of a permanent crisis.”

Does the phrase “never let a good crisis go to waste” spring to your mind?  Do you not see the parallels of FDR’s actions with those of BHO?  Yes indeed, we are reaping that future charted out by FDR’s New Deal, as described by Flynn.  We are on that “Road to Serfdom” as set forth by F.A. Hayek ─ a road that leads to the dead-end of tyranny and desolation; an end to which we are fast approaching at breakneck speed.  We must spread this warning from history to as many of our fellow citizens while we can or else there will be no stopping the train wreck looming up in front of us.

– Epaminondas

The Death of Our Beloved American Republic (1788 – 2010) – X

Our founding fathers realized that the republic they set in motion with the most noble intentions of providing the ultimate framework for man’s realization of freedom and liberty would constantly have to struggle to survive.  Such was the opinion of Benjamin Franklin, who, upon exiting where the Constitutional Convention in that summer of 1787 had just adjourned after adopting the Constitution and recommending it to the states for ratification, was asked by an elderly woman as to the form of government the delegates had created.  His reply was erudite and clarion: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”  I have labored over the past nine essays in this series to establish that we have not “kept it”, but instead are not in danger of losing it but have indeed already “lost it” – that we have ceased to be a representative republic guided by a constitution according to federalist principles.

All great republics of times past have dissolved into dust and been blown by various winds into oblivion.  Thus far I have presented to you ten “winds” that have scattered the once strong pillars of our republic into the dust bin of history along with all the other great republics, and the one that I present to you in this installment is one of recent development, scarcely seventy-five years in the making.  Consider the time line laid out in the following quote – a quote whose authorship is uncertain and has been widely attributed to several great men of the eighteenth century (including, incorrectly, Benjamin Franklin):

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been about 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage”  [emphasis added].

Consider the timeline spelled out in the latter half of this quote, apply it to our nation’s history, and you can determine where along this timeline we find ourselves today.

• “From bondage to spiritual faith” — from 1776 when the colonies declared their independence from Great Britain to the “Second Great Awakening” of religious revival from 1800 – 1840.
• “From spiritual faith to great courage” — from the Great Awakening mentioned above to the courage of a nation to fight its bloodiest war in order to preserve its union.
• “From courage to liberty” — from the bloody Civil War of 1860-1865 to the often bloody confrontations of the Civil Rights movement a century later in which the principles of liberty were broadened to all regardless of who or what they are.
• “From liberty to abundance” — during the latter half of the previous century citizens came to enjoy the highest standard  of living of any nation yet to grace the world’s stage.
• “From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy” — many have titled the last two decades of the twentieth century as the decades of greed, and as I have pointed out in the fourth post of this series, a fog of apathy towards our government settled in over the land due to our being consumed with our materialism.
• “From apathy to dependence” — beginning with FDR’s “New Deal” to LBJ’s “Great Society” to Obama’s expansion of our government’s socialist programs we have become more and more reliant upon the “nanny state” than at any other time in our history.
• “From dependence back into bondage” — we are not yet at this stage, but as you can see, it is not a matter of “if”, but merely a matter of “when” unless we turn our country back down this timeline.

Indeed, we have certainly arrived at this juncture of our history.  Consider the fact that according to The Tax Policy Center, in 2009, 47% of the households in this nation paid no income tax!  According to the 2009 Index of Dependence On Government as reported by the Heritage Foundation, “…60.8 million Americans remain dependent on the government for their daily housing, food, and health care. The number of taxpayers is shrinking–and the country may be rapidly approaching the point where more than one-third of Americans do not pay taxes for benefits they receive…. Add in spiraling academic grants, flat-out farm socialism, and the swelling ranks of Americans who believe themselves entitled to public-sector benefits for which they pay few or no taxes–and Americans must ask themselves whether they are near a tipping point in the nature of their government.”  I leave the question for you to answer – for which kind of candidate do you think the people in these two groups will cast their votes?  Those that promise more and more benefit programs, or those who propose to scale back government control and re-establish a free-market system?

We have come a long way from the days of our early history as observed by Tocqueville, as he wrote in his monumental work, Democracy in America:

“In the United States, as soon as a citizen has some measure of education and some financial resources, he seeks to grow rich in commerce or industry, or he buys a stretch of forest and turns into a pioneer.  All he asks of the state is not to trouble him while he is working and to guarantee the fruit of his labor….while classes are moving toward equality” (i.e., the socialist idea of “re-distributing wealth” so that all are equal) “men’s education stays incomplete, or their minds diffident, or commerce and industry are hampered in their upward growth so that they offer only a slow and difficult path to wealth,” (as is caused by excessive government regulations, taxation and interference) “citizens, in despair at improving their lot by themselves, rush to the head of state clamoring for his help….To increase their comfort at the expense of public funds” (which are amassed via the taxation of those who are productive) “seems to them…the easiest and most open for all of them to escape from a situation which they find unsatisfactory” (Volume II, Part 3, Chapter 20).

In this chapter Tocqueville compares the United States of his day with European countries whose people clamored for appointments within the government.  Today we see in the employment reports that the only sector of our economy that is producing new jobs is the central government, as it grows its bureaucracies like an out of control cancer within our body politic (currently at a 14% annual rate).  Tocqueville continues in this chapter to give this dire warning for a government that allows itself to be forced down this path, or chooses it as the preferred course of governing:

“But I do want to note that the government which supports such a tendency risks its own peace and puts its very existence in great jeopardy….So when administration is the only outlet for public ambition, the government ends up, inevitability, facing a permanent opposition for its task is to satisfy ever limitless desires with limited means.  One must be quite certain that the most difficult of all nations to control and govern is one full of supplicants.”

Though his words were directed at the prospect of people seeking government employment as the way to supply their security, the same principle can be applied to a welfare state.  Indeed, when government continues to expand benefits and programs to more and more people while drawing the funds to provide them from fewer and fewer sources, it places not just its continued existence in jeopardy, but that of society and the nation as well.  Ultimately the entire house of cards built by those promoting such schemes will come crashing down and the resulting chaos which will produce a flood of supplicants like this nation has never seen will create such extreme difficulties in governance that it will give those in power the excuse to finally bury our notion of representative government and declare dictatorial rule.  Such is the goal of those in the leadership of the democrat fascist party in Congress and the one who most would like to see this nation destroyed to such a degree that he can assume such power, the “anointed one”, Barak Hussein Obama!  Everything this president has done since his inauguration has been to either capitalize on existing crises and exacerbate them to a degree that they assume epic proportions that people flee to the central government as their savior or to turn situations that, although in need of being addressed are not at a critical stage, into a crisis (such as health care reform).  Such is the Saul Alinsky methodology of fomenting community unrest until you are able to destroy the current structure of society in order to rebuild it in the manner you desire. 

Again, from the 2009 Index of Dependence On Government as reported by the Heritage Foundation,

“From virtually the first day, the Obama Administration rapidly advanced programs and initiatives that deepened and expanded American citizens’ dependency on government. From new and expanded federal programs designed to boost economic activity to health care reform that placed the U.S. government at the center of the nation’s health care system, the central thrust of policy since January 2009 has been to increase Americans’ daily dependency on Washington.”

The report does point out that not all of the blame can be laid at the feet of President Obama, that he has simply accelerated the pace of this growth, albeit at warp speed, which has been in progress through preceding administrations.

Contrast what Tocqueville reported in America, circa 1831 with what our politicians in Washington hath wrought as of today, according to the same dependency index I’ve previously quoted:

“Today’s welfare system is a convoluted machinery of 70 programs, six federal departments, and a voluminous collection of state agencies and programs. A typical welfare recipient family could receive assistance from six or seven programs…administered by four different departments…. Welfare spending was the third largest category of government expenditures, after combined costs of Social Security and Medicare, and public education.

Too many of these welfare programs operate on means-tested eligibility and without any real mechanism to break dependence. Twelve years after the reform, the welfare system still rewards non-work….

Alarmingly, in February 2009, the Democrat-controlled Congress and the new Obama Administration enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which essentially overturned the fiscal foundation of welfare reform…. The new legislation clearly undercuts the incentives wrought by welfare reform to move individuals into work and self-sufficiency. The act also significantly increases other cash, food, housing, medical care, and welfare expenditures, thereby laying the foundation for a permanent expansion of the welfare system.” (Should you have an interest in reading this full, eye-opening report, you can access it at this link:  http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/03/The-2009-Index-of-Dependence-on-Government).

That a welfare state controlled by the central government results in a loss of freedom and sovereignty of local entities and their citizens is illustrated by Milton and Rose Friedman in the chapter “Cradle to Grave” of their classic work Free to Choose, published in 1979.  On pages 101 they give the example of how the city of New York and its residents lost their local independence because of the growth of the city’s welfare programs:

“New York is the most welfare-oriented community in the United States.  Spending by the city government is larger relative to its population than in any other city in the United States….But more money, more programs, more taxes didn’t work.  They led to financial catastrophe without meeting ‘the essential needs of the people’ even on a narrow interpretation…Bankruptcy was prevented only by assistance from the federal government and the State of New York, in return for which New York City surrendered control over its affairs, becoming a closely supervised ward of state and federal governments.”

They go on to quote from Ken Auletta on this matter that ” ‘Goaded by liberalism’s compassion and ideological commitment to the redistribution of wealth, New York officials helped redistribute much of the tax base and thousands of jobs out of New York.’ “

Notice how New York City provides us with the perfect microcosm of what is happening to our nation on a national level, yet when our national catastrophe comes crashing down upon us there will be no state, no federal government to bail us out.  Consider also what was said of the city once they accepted federal aid – they ceased to be sovereign.  That means, my fellow Americans, they ceased to be free citizens of New York City, all brought about by that all too common phrase we hear coming out of the mouth of the fascists in Congress and the White House today – “redistribution of wealth.”  Just this past week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chastised other governments in our hemisphere as not taxing their wealthy citizens enough – that all nations need to work harder at “redistributing the wealth” so that everyone can be on an equal footing!  Do you still believe you live in a free, democratically-elected representative republic restrained by a written constitution and founded upon the principles of federalism?

If you still believe this, then, I will leave you with one more quote from Tocqueville, and I apologize for its length, but once you read it you will see the importance of my including the entirety of it:

“…I think that the type of oppression threatening democracies will not be like anything there has been in the world before…I wish to imagine under what new features despotism might appear in the world:  I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls….

Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny.  It is absolute, meticulous, ordered, provident, and kindly disposed.  It would be like a fatherly authority, if, fatherlike, its aim were to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks only to keep them in perpetual childhood; it prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind.  It works readily for their happiness but it wishes to be the only provider and judge of it.  It provides their security, anticipates and guarantees their needs, supplies their pleasures, directs their principal concerns, manages their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritance.  Why can it not remove from them entirely the bother of thinking and the troubles of life?

Thus, it reduces daily the value and frequency of the exercise of free choice; it restricts the activity of free will within a narrower range and gradually removes autonomy itself from each citizen….

Thus, the ruling power, having taken each citizen one by one into its powerful grasp and having molded him to its own liking, spreads its arms over the whole of society, covering the surface of social life with a network of petty, complicated, detained, and uniform rules though which even the most original minds and the most energetic of spirits cannot reach the light in order to rise above the crowd….We forget that it is, above all, in the details that we run the risk of enslaving men….” [emphasis added] (Volume II, Part 4, Chapter 6).

Tocqueville concludes this chapter with this sobering assessment:  “It is, indeed, difficult to imagine how men who have completely given up the habit of self-government could successfully choose those who should do it for them, and no one will be convinced that a liberal, energetic, and prudent government can ever emerge from the voting of a nation of servants.”

Yes, indeed, how difficult it is, is it not?  Monsieur Tocqueville was, unquestionably, a prophet.

-Epaminondas