When the Federal Government Goes Insane
I have this theory that every so often governments go
insane. Usually they have someone who is already demented heading up the
government, but it takes a majority of the elected body to enact crazy laws and
it takes the government apparatchiks to engineer the systemic failures, the
wars, and the crazed rush off the cliff.
The election of 2008 is a splendid example of this. The
majority of voters elected a man with the thinnest possible resume for the job
of President. Indeed, the man has refused to release his birth records to
reassure voters he met the minimum, Constitutional standards for the job. The
man, however, was a skilled orator, able to give voice to the TelePrompter
speeches written for him by master manipulators.
Promising “change”, promising a government free of
“lobbyists”, promising “transparency”, and generally promising a new dawn of
enlightened government, Barack Obama and his majority in Congress arrived on
January 20, 2009 and promptly began to bankrupt the nation, deprive Americans
of access to its vast energy resources, and seek to impose an insane law
predicated on the belief that carbon dioxide, vital to all life on Earth, was a
“pollutant” that had to be reduced and, of course, heavily taxed.
Capping all this madness was a naïve effort to establish
improved relations with the spawning ground for terrorism around the world, the
Middle East. He is determined to change the
fanaticism that have spawned Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the Taliban, and
decades of Islamofascist terrorism from Bali
to London, Manhattan and Madrid, to Mumbai.
And it has taken barely four months to get to this point.
In the President’s own words during a C-Span interview,
“We’re out of money.”
A recent Cato Institute Tax & Budget Bulletin by Chris
Edwards, its director of tax policy studies, spells it out.
“Federal spending is growing by leaps and bounds,” wrote
Edwards. “The budget hit $3.9 trillion this year, double the level of spending
just eight years ago.”
“The government is also increasing the scope of its
activities, intervening in many areas that used to be left to state and local
governments, businesses, charities, and individuals.”
To clarify what is occurring, it is necessary to know that
the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids the government from bailing out
individuals or private industry. Such bailouts violate the Equal Protection
doctrine that forbids the government from selecting who shall receive the
bailout and who shall not.
Moreover, it violates the General Welfare clause because
such bailouts benefit a small group and not the general public. Finally, it
violates that Due Process Clause because it interferes with contracts that have
already been entered into and, lastly, they turn the public treasury into a
public trough.
This new administration, however, has given the union
virtual ownership of Chrysler and is likely to do the same with General Motors
if the courts do not intervene. The losers are those who lent money to them
under contractual terms that put them first in line to be compensated, but who
have been left out in the cold along with their fiduciary responsibilities to
their investors.
“In recent years,” wrote Edwards, “the range of federal
control over society has widened as politicians of both parties have supported
nationalizing many formerly state, local, and private activities.” This has led
States in particular to spend well beyond the taxes they collected because they
counted on the federal redistribution of funds to make up the difference. In
the process, they gave up control over their education, healthcare, and
transportation systems to name a few.
Edwards cited the Catalog
of Federal Domestic Assistance, a 2,205-page official compilation of all
federal aid or subsidy programs, including grants, loans, insurance,
scholarships, and other types of benefits.
“There has been a large increase in the number of
agricultural programs due to bloated farm bills passed in 2002 and 2008. There
have also been large increases in the number of homeland security and justice
programs, which subsidize local activities such as firefighting and policing.
While those are important activities,” said Edwards, “it would be more
efficient if they were funded locally because Congress often steers such funds
to projects of dubious quality and little national security relevance.”
The Founding Fathers fashioned a central, federal government
with specific limitations on what it could or could not do. Most of these have
been violated since the last century’s increasing governmental intrusion and
acquisition of centralized power.
“It is very sad that a nation founded on individualism and
limited government,” wrote Edwards, “has more people than ever suckling at the
federal subsidy teat.”
“President Barack Obama has proposed a wide range of new
subsidies in energy, health care, and other areas. If enacted, they would take America further
away from the individual reliance, voluntary charity, and entrepreneurialism
that made it so prosperous in the first place.”
We should not be living in an America where the unions own
the corporations, where the banks are not free to determine their own prudent
loan principles, where local schools are governed from Washington, D.C., where
the kind and size of automobile you drive is decided upon by politicians and
bureaucrats, and where we are denied the energy we need based on false
accusations about “dirty” fuels that are, in fact, the lifeblood of the
economy.
Much of what the federal government is doing and proposing
to do is patently insane. It is most surely unconstitutional.
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