MayerBlog: The Web Log of
David N. Mayer

 

Thoughts for Summer 2009

 

 

It’s time for another annual tradition:  once again, MayerBlog will be on a summer hiatus, for the next three and a half months (until Labor Day), while I continue writing the manuscript of my book on the U.S. Constitution and other summer writing projects. 

Before going on hiatus, however, I could not resist the temptation to comment on a number of important issues in public policy and popular culture – issues that are in the news today and are likely to remain in the news throughout the summer.  (Also included is my annual preview of summer movies.)

 

  

n    Gas-Price Hysteria, Yet Again? 

As summer begins, it’s time again for what, unfortunately, has become another annual summer tradition – the hysteria over high gasoline prices.  Usually, the annual angst is the natural result of the economic law of supply and demand:  with the supply of oil and refined petroleum products (including gasoline) holding steady at best, while worldwide demand for oil and petroleum products peaking during the summer travel months, it’s only natural that gasoline prices in the U.S.A. tend to skyrocket during the summer.  As I noted in last year’s comments on gas price hysteria, despite politicians’ attempts to scapegoat the oil industry (“Big Oil” and its allegedly “excessive profits”), the blame really falls on the politicians themselves – and especially on members of Congress, for the misguided federal energy policies they have enacted into law.   

With Democrats controlling both houses of Congress as well as the White House, we can expect those misguided policies to continue and even to get worse, as Democrats enact the radical environmentalists’ agenda, which is hostile to carbon-based energy such as oil.  With no additional drilling for oil in the United States’ plentiful reserves in Alaska and off the nation’s coasts – in other words, with no further development of U.S. natural resources – Americans will continue to depend on imported oil for their gasoline.  And with no new refining facilities being built in the country, supplies of gasoline and other refined petroleum products will continue to fluctuate, depending on a variety of factors, including the impact of hurricanes and other natural disasters.  Thus, supply will hold steady, at best, while demand grows – resulting inevitably in higher gasoline prices.  Gas may not soar above $4 a gallon as it did last summer, principally because the economic decline has reduced demand below its summer norms, but no one should be surprised if gasoline prices average closer to $3 a gallon instead of $2 for most of the summer.  Nor should we be surprised if politicians again try to evade their well-deserved blame for the problem and again try to demonize businessmen for simply trying to earn profits.

  

 

n    B.O.:  The Continually Rising Stench

                 Readers of this blog realize that since the November 2008 elections, I have referred to the man who is now President of the United States – the current occupant of the White House – by his initials, “B.O.”  Other modern presidents have been known by their initials – TR, FDR, JFK, LBJ – and using this president’s initials in lieu of his name seems appropriate, as I have argued.  It’s because B.O. as president, in a word, stinks.  He is the most unfit man ever to be president:  his limited executive experience – confined to his activities as a political activist on the local level, a so-called “community organizer” in the corrupt world of Chicago politics – plus his limited experience as a U.S. Senator (confined mostly to his campaigning, first for that job and then for the presidency) make him among the least qualified men in U.S. history to serve as chief executive of the government of the United States.  Moreover, his policies are, for the reasons mentioned in the next paragraph, truly bad for America. 

Not all forms of b.o. have an unpleasant smell, even in the summertime.  For example, the healthy smell of manly sweat after mowing the lawn, or making love on a sultry summer night, might be considered downright pleasant (at least to some people, in a raunchy sort of way).  But this particular B.O. has a decidedly unpleasant smell – a truly offensive stench, a noxious stink – that emanates from the current president’s policies.  His policies are undermining all that is great (and good) about America:  the constitutional system of limited, republican government that America’s Founders created, a system that gives more legal protection to individual freedom, in all its aspects (including economic freedom), than any other country’s on earth.  It is this system that has made free-market capitalism thrive, bringing prosperity not only to Americans but to the entire world.   Unfortunately, this limited-government, individualist, capitalist system is what B.O.’s policies seek to undermine, if not destroy:  If B.O. and his power-hungry cronies have their way, the United States will become more of a socialist nation, with the federal government controlling major segments of the nation’s economy – making the U.S., which was once the world’s “last, best hope” for freedom, more like the nations of Europe, ironically, just as Europe is finally moving away from its disastrous 20^th-century experiment with socialism and discovering the virtues of the American free-enterprise, capitalist system.    

Two things, fortunately, stand in the way of America’s fatal decline down the road to serfdom: first, our legal/constitutional system and the protections it provides (albeit incompletely and often inconsistently) for individual rights; and second, B.O.’s own shortcomings and limitations.  As I’ve also noted in my previous blog entries, B.O. is basing his presidential administration on the same strategy that worked so well for him in the 2008 presidential election:  in a word, on bullshit.  So far, B.O.’s bullshit has helped him pull the wool over the eyes of gullible Americans who are fooled by his personal charm or who are afraid to speak out in opposition to him or his policies for fear of being labeled “racist” or some other derogatory term (such as “mean-spirited,” “selfish,” or even “individualist,” which B.O. and his collectivist comrades are trying to turn into a negative).  But I remain optimistic enough to believe that, eventually, enough Americans are sufficiently rational and honest to realize that “the emperor” truly has “no clothes” – the naked truth, so to speak, about B.O.

  

 

n    Testing B.O.: When Will the News Media Notice the Stench? 

Vice President Joe Biden is an idiot, but there’s one thing he’s probably correct about:  foreign enemies of the United States – militant Islamic terrorists, or the rogue regimes that control Cuba, Iran, North Korea, or Venezuela – will try to “test” the current president of the United States, B.O.  They’re already begun doing so, with the leaders of Iran and North Korea – “Ah’m in a Jihad” and “Kim Jong (Mentally) Ill” – openly announcing their plans to continue developing nuclear weapons and the missile capability to launch them against their enemies (Israel, in the case of Iran, and the Pacific coast of the U.S., in the case of North Korea).  B.O. already has signaled the weakness of his administration’s foreign policy with regard to Russia (offering to unilaterally back off plans to install a missile-defense system in eastern Europe, which would have helped contain Russian expansionism under Vlad Putin’s dictatorship).  B.O.’s attempts to appease thugs all over the world – bowing to the Saudi king, shaking hands and smiling with Hugo Chavez, etc. – will only encourage them to be more aggressive in their anti-Americanism. 

Meanwhile, the left-liberal news media continues its naïve love-fest with B.O., acting more like propaganda arms of the White House or the DNC than like the independent, objective and indeed critical observers of power-wielders that the media ought to be.  When the media’s “slobbering” love affair (to borrow the apt term used by Bernie Goldberg in his latest book) will end is anyone’s guess, but my theory is that even B.O.’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders in the media will finally begin to realize “the emperor has no clothes” when his shortcomings in foreign policy and defense leadership finally are starkly revealed.  Sadly, that will happen when al-Qaeda or some other militant Islamic group (or one of the anti-American regimes noted above) commits another act of atrocity against America:  another 9-11, or somewhat less ominously, another event like the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80.  It took the latter event finally to make most Americans realize how unfit Jimmy Carter was to be president; and, unfortunately, it seems it will take a comparable crisis for most Americans to realize the truth about B.O. and to make him, like Carter, a one-term president.

  

 

n    A Presidency Based on Bullshit 

As I noted in this year’s “Prospects for Liberty” essay, the biggest pile of bullshit being peddled by B.O. is the conceit that his administration is bringing “change” to America, when in fact it’s doing nothing other than continuing – albeit on a radically expanded scale – the failed policies of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state.  As I noted there, the snake-oil that B.O.’s trying to sell is the “same old, tired semi-socialist, paternalist policies that the federal government has been tinkering with, under both Democrat and Republican administrations, for the past century or so, since the beginning of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state.  All B.O. really promises to do is to expand the welfare state – to increase government and its controls over Americans’ lives, making the U.S. even more of a socialist country – and that’s not any kind of real `change’ in public policy, at all.” 

B.O.’s record as president thus far – his first 100+ days, much touted in the left-wing news media – merely confirms my prediction.  Virtually every day of his presidency, he’s announced some new policy initiative – a policy “change” that’s really nothing new but just an expansion of government regulatory authority over more and more aspects of Americans’ lives, another grab for power by the federal government, typically rationalized by citing the nation’s economic downturn.  (The recession is typically described by B.O. administration officials and their allies in the news media as “the worst since the Great Depression,” but in fact it’s no worse – and by many important measures, actually no where near as bad – as the recessions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the economic mess caused largely by bad federal policies during the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter years.  That, by the way, was the mess that President Ronald Reagan referred to in his famous First Inaugural statement, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem” – a statement no less relevant today than when he made it over 28 years ago.) 

B.O.’s policies aren’t mere bullshit, however; they’re dangerous bullshit because, by perpetuating and even expanding the same old failed paternalistic policies of the past, they’re making the nation’s problems even worse.  Whatever signs of economic recovery that economists might see today are not the result of any of B.O.’s policies but rather result from the natural working-out of the market system, as the economy moves out of its recessionary phase and back into a growth phase, following the normal business cycle.  No doubt (being the master purveyor of bullshit that he is), B.O. will try to claim credit for the recovery – attributing it to the so-called “stimulus” legislation passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress earlier this year – but the economic effects of that massive increase in federal government spending have yet to be felt in the nation’s economy.  Whatever recovery is occurring, is doing so in spite of, rather than because of, the administration’s policies.  And when the effects of the massive increase in federal spending and the size of the national debt do finally play out, they will be disastrous – bringing back the problems of inflation and high interest rates, coupled with continuing sluggish economic growth and high unemployment; to put it simply, the infamous “stagflation” of the 1970s will return.  And that’s the best case scenario of what will result from the Democrats’ failed economic policies. 

Perhaps nothing better epitomizes B.O.’s “tyranny of bullshit,” as I call it, than his attempted sleight-of-hand with the federal budget.  After unveiling an unprecedented-high $3.6 trillion budget in early May, B.O. then announced – with much media-covered hoopla – that he was proposing $17 billion in cuts.  The 121 programs B.O. wants to kill or shrink account for less than one-half of 1 per cent of the budget (and less than 10% of the interest due next year on the $11.2 trillion federal debt).   Significantly, 56% of the proposed cuts are in military spending (one of the few legitimate concerns of the federal government), including major cuts in weapons systems and other Pentagon programs.  Meanwhile, the administration wants to increase spending on veterans’ medical care, environmental protection, low-income housing, early-childhood education, and global health initiatives (doubling U.S. spending on foreign aid by 2015).  Emphasizing how truly miniscule B.O.’s proposed spending cuts are, compared to these increases and the overall size of his proposed budget, Senator Judd Gregg (R.-N.H.), the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, likened it to “taking a teaspoon of water out of a bathtub while you keep the spigot on at full speed.”

 

  

n    Putting the “Bully” into the “Bully Pulpit” 

Another aspect of B.O.’s bullshit-based presidency that’s been noteworthy has been its hypocritical efforts to distinguish itself from the previous Bush administration, typically by focusing media attention on superficial policy differences while obscuring the ways in which B.O.’s presidency actually merely continues many Bush policies, usually the worst Bush policies (those that Democrats liked).  Consider, for example, B.O.’s announced intention of not only continuing but even expanding Bush’s infamous “faith-based initiative,” tying the federal welfare state to churches; or the previously-mentioned proposal to further expand U.S. spending on global heath programs (building on the Bush administration’s record-high U.S. spending in Africa to combat AIDS); or the B.O. administration’s plans to expand the war in Afghanistan.  One other way in which B.O.’s presidency thus far seems to offer more continuity than “change,” compared with his predecessors, is in the way it threatens not only limited, constitutional government but more generally the rule of law.  Clinton’s presidency greatly undermined the rule of law in America (see the excellent collection of essays, The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton, edited by Roger Pilon and published by Cato Institute in 2000) – a horrid legacy that, in the eyes of many libertarian critics, was matched and even exceeded in many respects by George W. Bush’s presidency.  B.O., though, may set new lows in the undermining of the rule of law. 

Instead of following the law (what he took an oath – albeit a flubbed oath – at his Inaugural to do), B.O. has not hesitated to use the coercive power of government, or threats of coercion, to force businesses to follow his dictates.  That dangerous pattern of intimidation has been evident not only in the administration’s partial nationalization, or “bailout,” of banks and other major financial institutions but also in its efforts to nationalize the automobile companies, Chrysler and GM.  As public-policy researcher John Lott notes in a recent op-ed, “Thugs in the White House” (May 8), the standard m.o. used by the administration to force its control over financial institutions that have accepted government bailouts has been to threaten to impose unnecessarily costly public audits and to replace disobedient CEOs with political cronies willing to do B.O.’s bidding.  Even those institutions that the government has failed to take over through bailouts have been threatened by the power-grabbing B.O. administration, which has not hesitated to use the White House press corps to destroy the reputations of opponents.   

Consider, for example, the way the administration brokered the Chrysler bankruptcy, a deal made possible by bullying tactics that used the power of government coercion as the ultimate threat to bring the owners of Chrysler’s debt to the table.  Clifford Asness, co-founder of the $20 billion hedge fund AQR Capital Management, posted an open letter detailing the dirty politics being employed by B.O., shortly after the president publicly scolded Chrysler bond-holders for not making enough “sacrifices”:  “The President is screaming that the hedge funds are looking for an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout is the big lie writ large.  Find me a hedge fund that has been bailed out.  Find me a hedge fund, even a failed one, that has asked for one.  In fact, it was only because hedge funds have not taken government funds that they could stand up to this bullying.”  As law professor Todd Zywicki observed in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed (“Chrysler and the Rule of Law,” May 13), the B.O. administration’s behavior in the Chrysler bankruptcy “is a profound challenge to the rule of law.  Secured creditors – entitled to first priority payment under the `absolute priority rule’ – have been browbeaten by an American president into accepting only 30 cents on the dollar of their claims.  Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers union, holding junior creditor claims, will get about 50 cents on the dollar.”  As Cliff Asness suggests, the administration brokered the company’s bankruptcy so that a favorite Democratic donor group, the UAW, can seize control of it.  Todd Zywicki notes that B.O. “may have helped save the jobs of thousands of union workers whose dues, in part, engineered his election.  But what about the untold number of job losses in the future caused by trampling the sanctity of contracts today?”

  

 

n    “A Time for Choosing” 

On May 7, I participated in a panel discussion sponsored by the Columbus Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society, on the topic “The Future of the Conservative Movement.”  Although I’m not a conservative – rather, I describe myself as economist Walter E. Williams describes himself, as a “radical for liberty,” a “liberal” in the true, classical sense of the word, a radical individualist and advocate for limited government and free-market capitalism – nevertheless, for several years now I’ve been urging my fellow libertarians to ally themselves with limited-government conservatives in order to promote their shared principles.  Noting how the Bush presidency nearly destroyed both the Republican Party and the conservative movement, with a president who compromised far too much with leftist Democrats (and who pursued the “big government” policies urged by his “neoconservative” and “compassionate conservative” advisors), I suggested that the proverbial “silver lining” in the current dark political cloud over Washington, D.C. (with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress and with B.O. in the White House) is that, in their opposition to B.O.’s policies, Republican politicians and conservative political activists might again return to those limited-government principles on which they may find common ground with libertarians and political independents who value individual freedom.  To do so, however, Republicans and conservatives must disregard the advice they’re getting from RINOs (those “moderate” Republicans and certain types of “big government” conservatives who’d like to turn the GOP into a pale imitation of the Democrats, kind of “socialists light”).  As I said in my talk, “the antidote for the poison being spewed by the collectivists of the left isn’t a collectivism of the right” – rather, it’s a principled defense of individualism. 

There is indeed a battle now raging, within both the GOP and the conservative movement, for the “soul” of both the Party and the movement.   In my May 7 talk, I suggested that the political situation today is rather similar to the situation 44 years ago, in the months following Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss in the 1964 presidential election, when Goldwater’s limited-government conservative principles seemed dead, politically.  Yet in a mere 16 years, in the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan won, by leading a coalition of limited-government conservatives, libertarians, and independents.  And in 1980 Reagan’s successful campaign used rhetoric astonishingly similar to that used by Goldwater, whom Reagan supported in 1964 in his famous speech, “A Time for Choosing.”  Among other things, Reagan observed: 

"It‘s time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers.  James Madison said, ‘We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government‘  This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man‘s relation to man.  This is the issue of this election:  Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them for ourselves."

 

Those words are just as relevant today as they were 45 years ago.  Today we – not just conservatives and the GOP, but all Americans – are again at a crossroads, at a “time for choosing.”  One road, the one advocated by Democrats and “moderate” Republicans, leads to total government takeover of the American economy and, with it, the end of “the American dream”; the other road, the one that Republicans and conservatives need to rediscover, leads us forward along the journey envisioned by America’s Founders, who dared to imagine a free society in which individuals governed themselves and order came not from the coercive power of government but from the free operations of the marketplace. 

The famous saying is true:  Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.  By the same token, however, those who remember the past – those who know history – are not likely to be surprised by anything, especially in the world of politics.

 

  

n    The Pernicious Babbling Brooks 

One of those RINOS whose advice ought to be ignored by Republican Party strategists is David Brooks, the New York Times’ favorite “conservative” columnist (which is to say he’s not really a conservative at all).  In a recent column, Brooks urged that the GOP should cease being “the party of individualism and freedom” and should become instead “the party of civil order.”  What exactly does he mean by civic order?  Apparently he means using the coercive power of government to deny individuals the freedom to choose how to live their own lives – in other words, the paternalistic regulatory/welfare state.  Brooks’ complaint is that Republicans are too different from the Democrats, the party of the welfare state:  he argues that Republicans need to be more “community-oriented” to get in touch with “the young,” to be less devoted to capitalism in order to have something to say to “the lower middle class,” and to be more devoted to radical environmentalism in order to have something to say to “the upper middle class.”  So, according to Brooks, young people aren’t interested in individual freedom, the “lower middle class” isn’t interested in bettering themselves through free-market capitalism but just want more government handouts, and the “upper middle class” would willingly forego their SUVs in order to save the world from “global warming.”  That sounds more like a Democrat political strategist’s view of the world than that of a so-called “conservative.”  If the GOP wants a political comeback, it needs to do precisely the opposite of what Mr. Brooks recommends:  it needs to become truly the party of individualism and freedom and leave paternalism to the Democrats.

   

 

n    A “Renaissance of the Free-Market Movement”? 

David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, offers some words of optimism in the May 2009 issue of Liberty magazine.  First, he describes the sad state of political affairs prior to the 2008 elections: 

            “Back in September and October, I think that libertarians, conservatives, and even Republican politicians were shell-shocked by one blow to free-market capitalism after another: the federal `takeover’ of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bailout of AIG, the all-power-to-Paulson plan, the collapse of Washington Mutual, congressional passage of the power-to-Paulson-plus-pork plan, the 22% drop in the Dow Jones average in one week, the Federal Reserve Board’s unprecedented decision to lend directly to nonfinancial companies, the government’s partial nationalization of major banks, Paulson’s announcement that he would use his bailout money for something other than what he asked Congress to authorize, the auto bailout in direct defiance of a congressional vote, and so on and so on.

 

            “There was no time to fight these measures.  Most of them were announced as done deals, others as measures to be taken by the Treasury or the Fed without any request for Congressional authorization.  With the incumbent president in charge, both [major-party] presidential candidates going along, and most of Congress afraid to challenge the dire warnings of catastrophe, it was impossible to create any real political debate.  Defenders of capitalism were reeling.”

 

But now, with B.O. in the White House and Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, things are quite different, Boaz notes.  “Smaller-government folks feel no compunction about vigorously taking on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid government,” especially when all it has to offer is “an old-fashioned, Keynesian, throw-money-at-the-problem spending bill described as `economic stimulus.’  Most free-market economists felt no ambivalence about opposing that bill.  Robert Barro of Harvard called it `probably the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s.’” 

Boaz sees in the reaction against against the so-called stimulus bill what he describes, hopefully, as “the beginning of the renaissance of the free-market movement”:   

“Freed from the burden of feeling some connection to a big-government Republican president, Republicans voted overwhelmingly against the bill in both houses of Congress.  Libertarians played leading roles in galvanizing the opposition.  The Cato Institute ran full-page ads in almost every major newspaper in the country, with the names of more than 200 economists who `do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.’  The ad was talked about on television, was waved by Republican senators at a press conference, and seemed to energize free-marketers who felt their voice hadn’t been heard in national debates over the past few months.”

 

“So,” he concludes, “the bad news is that the federal government has now committed at least $7.8 trillion in loans, investments, and guarantees since the beginning of last year.  But the good news is that the free-market movement is back in gear,” and in fact “in much better shape than it was in the FDR era.”

 

  

n    Real Progress 

There are at least two other fronts on which free-market, or libertarian, political activists may have room for optimism:  medical marijuana and same-sex marriage.   Both are examples of a trend toward real progress – not that kind advocated by today’s so-called “progressives,” who like their predecessors in the early 20^th-century Progressive movement are advocates for greater governmental control, or paternalism.  Rather, it’s the kind of real progress championed by true “liberals,” in the classic sense of the term: advocates of maximizing individual freedom and limiting governmental control over people’s lives, whether it’s their choice of a marriage partner or their choice of a substance to ingest into their bodies. 

There is a definite trend to liberalize laws criminalizing the possession and use of marijuana, particularly to allow for its medicinal use.  Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested that California policymakers begin debating whether to legalize marijuana, while over a dozen states (including California) already permit medical use of marijuana under state law.  (While the Bush administration insisted that the federal “war on drugs” trumped such liberal state laws – resulting in the unfortunate Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Raich (2005) – B.O.’s attorney general Eric Holder announced in mid-March that federal agents now will seek criminal charges only when both state and federal laws are violated, a rare instance of meaningful, pro-liberty “change” in policy by the B.O. administration.)  While neither Democrat nor Republican politicians seem willing to reconsider drug criminalization as a general policy (Gil Kerlikowske, B.O.’s “drug czar” recently stated that “legalization isn’t in the president’s vocabulary, and it certainly isn’t in mine”), a more lenient policy toward marijuana (or at least its medical use) finally might prompt policymakers to realize the failure of prohibition.  In November voters in both Massachusetts and Michigan adopted liberalized marijuana laws, and medical marijuana bills have been introduced in the legislatures of several states, including New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota. 

Meanwhile, in recent months, four states have joined Massachusetts in giving legal recognition to same-sex marriage.  In Connecticut, Vermont, and Iowa decisions by the state supreme courts changed the law limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples; in Maine, legislation allowing same-sex marriage was passed by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor.  Similar legislation has been passed by the New Hampshire legislature and is being considered by legislatures in New York and New Jersey.  Outside of New England (where, as USA Today suggested in a March 26 article, religious opposition to same-sex marriage is the weakest), prospects for expanding the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex couples may be bleak, at least for the near future:  in California, for example, the state supreme court is likely to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s ballot measure banning same-sex marriage.  But the momentum is starting to build in favor of same-sex marriage, as American popular culture seems to be shifting from homophobia (outright fear or hatred of homosexuality) to mere heterocentrism (bias in favor of heterosexuality).  As I noted in my May 2004 blog essay on “Marriage, American Style,” I’d like to think that legal recognition of same-sex marriage ultimately will be seen by most Americans as in keeping with our “traditional” values of individualism and equal treatment under law.

 

  

n    A Fucked-Up Decision and More Supreme Folly 

Near the end of April a divided Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on the one-time use of expletives, in a case arising from Cher’s outburst at an awards show televised in 2002.  (As she waved her lifetime achievement trophy, Cher said, “People have been telling me on the way out every year, right?  So, fuck `em.”)  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), applying a new policy banning even “fleeting expletives” (brief use of vulgarities association with sexual or excretory functions), had fined Fox Television Stations, which had broadcast the 2002 Billboard Awards ceremony featuring Cher.  A federal appeals court had agreed with Fox that the FCC policy was arbitrary, but the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, overturned the lower court’s decision.  Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion for the five-justice majority (comprised of the Court’s four conservatives, joined by moderately conservative Justice Kennedy), maintaining that “[e]ven isolated utterances can be . . . vulgar and shocking” and harm children, the FCC’s supposed rationale for the ban.  As he read the majority opinion on April 28, Justice Scalia referred to the forbidden utterances as the “f-word” (i.e., fuck) and the “s-word” (i.e., shit). 

Justice Clarence Thomas (the best of the Supreme Court’s nine justices) concurred with the majority but wrote a separate opinion criticizing the Court’s rationale for more FCC regulation of broadcast TV than cable because of the assumed scarcity of airwaves, an assumption that has been proved false by the development of new communications technologies.  Commentators speculate that if another case involving FCC regulation of broadcasts should come before the Court, Thomas might – as he has done in the past – join with the Court’s four “liberal” justices (who in this case dissented, maintaining that the FCC policy was not sufficiently justified and may violate First Amendment free-speech rights), in creating a majority to void the expletives ban under the First Amendment. 

As I’ve argued previously on MayerBlog (see my essay “Abolish the F*CCing FCC!,” Feb. 8, 2006), FCC regulation of speech is not only silly – words like fuck and shit are fine Anglo-Saxon words that ought to be freely expressed, along with all the other so-called “Dirty Words” that the late comedian George Carlin mentioned in his classic monologue from the late 1970s – but, more importantly, FCC regulation of broadcast content is blatantly unconstitutional, for it cannot be squared with the explicit language of the First Amendment, which provides that Congress shall pass “no law abridging freedom of speech.”  As I argued in my previous blog, the mere existence of the FCC is inconsistent with the absolute language of the First Amendment. 

Meanwhile, as the Supreme Court’s 2008 term draws to a close, news about other major Court decisions this year has been overshadowed in the media by speculation over whom B.O. will nominate as a new justice, to succeed Justice David Souter, who has announced his retirement at the end of the current term.   The president has said he wants to appoint someone who will have “empathy” for the problem of common people – which sounds like a qualification more appropriate for a social worker than for a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose chief responsibility is to apply the law impartially, and to uphold the limits the Constitution imposes on governmental power.  B.O. is also under political pressure from left-wing activist groups and others to appoint another woman to the Court; even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court’s lone female member (since Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement), has joined the chorus calling for a selection based primarily on sex.   Don’t be surprised if our “affirmative-action” president (who owes his election to deft manipulation of racism) makes a selection based on “affirmative-action” policies, under which superficial traits (like sex or race) trump individual qualifications – in other words, if he selects a new justice principally because she’s female and easily confirmable by the Democrat-controlled Senate.  The new justice, whomever she may be, no doubt also will be a left-liberal “activist,” in the worst sense of that term.  (See my essay, “Judicial Activism, Real and Imagined,” April 4, 2005.)

  

 

n    Tortured Rationalizations 

Many Democrats in Congress – egged on by leftists in their party and left-wing activist groups like the ACLU, and anxious to help the B.O. administration’s continuing efforts to distinguish itself from its predecessor – are pushing for a so-called “truth commission,” to investigate the CIA’s alleged use of “torture” in interrogating militant Islamic terrorist prisoners.  Whether so-called waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques constitute torture, as that term is defined and prohibited under U.S. and international law, or whether they are legitimate “enhanced interrogation” techniques justified when used against terrorists whose criminal conspiracies may pose imminent dangers to American lives – that is a question about which reasonable minds, equally committed to the rule of law, might differ.  The Bush administration approved such harsh interrogations; the current administration has repudiated them, just as it has bowed to the left-wing “political correctness” police in refusing to even use the term terrorist to describe militant Islamic criminals.   Yet certain Democrats seem eager to pursue a witch hunt (a modern variant of the McCarthyism of the late 1940s and early 1950s), targeting certain key officials in the Bush administration, including the authors of the Justice Department memos approving harsh interrogation methods (including John Yoo, now a law professor at UC-Berkley, and Jay Bybee, now a federal judge), and perhaps even higher-ranking officials, all the way up to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been vocal in his criticisms of B.O. administration policies.    

To its credit, thus far the B.O. administration has rejected the idea of an independent commission, recognizing it would “just become a political back-and-forth,” in the words of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.  An internal Justice Department study also has recommended that Bush administration lawyers who approved harsh interrogation methods should not be prosecuted for their misjudgments – which is about as close a recognition from the current administration that one could expect that the proposal is nothing but a political witch hunt, an effort to criminalize policy differences.    

Undeterred, certain Democrat leaders in Congress nevertheless continue to push for an investigation – an effort that may bounce back and bite them in their butts.  Nancy Pelosi – the moron who, as House Speaker, holds the No. 3 position in the U.S. government – may have jeopardized her own leadership position by continuing to insist, contrary to the evidence, that the CIA misled her in a long series of CIA briefings she received about the interrogation methods.  As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent editorial, “Now, when disclosure of the details of those briefings undermines the Democrats’ political game, Mrs. Pelosi tries to dump responsibility back onto the CIA. . . . Whatever one’s politics may be, there has to be some recognition that Washington – the U.S. government – simply can’t function if it is endlessly entangled in the exquisitely argued, one might say absurd, blame-games that she and some Democrats are running against former Bush officials, and that now threaten the political standing of the Speaker herself”  (“Pelosi’s Self-Torture,” May 15).

  

 

n    The Tyranny of “Green Bullshit”: An Update 

In the second part of my annual “Prospects for Liberty” essay for 2009 (posted January 26),  I maintained that “[p]erhaps the greatest threat to the freedom and prosperity of the industrialized Western world today is the threat posed by radical environmental activists and the politicians who follow their bullshit, pseudo-scientific theories.”  Chief among this “green bullshit,” as I call it, is the theory of “global warming” – or “climate change,” as it’s now euphemistically called – in other words, the theory that the average global temperatures are increasing, and that the Earth’s warming will lead to disastrous consequences, and most importantly, that this dangerous global warming is caused by human activity, namely, by man-made carbon dioxide (a so-called “greenhouse gas”) created by the burning of carbon-based “fossil fuels” such as coal, oil (and other petroleum products), and natural gas.  The best scientific evidence is that this theory is nothing but “junk science,” maintained and propagated by forces of “political correctness,” and that sound scientific evidence and theory refutes it in virtually all its major points:  there isn’t even a consensus about global warming (some scientists still fear global cooling instead), let alone that it’s caused by man-made carbon dioxide.  Indeed, the best evidence is that whatever climate changes occur on Earth do so as a result of naturally-occurring forces (such as sunspot activity) beyond human control.  Rather than debating how to try to change climate trends, we should be debating how best to adjust to them – what human beings have been doing since they first appeared on the planet. 

Nevertheless, a coalition of radical environmentalists and other special interests (including the burgeoning “alternative energy” industry that has come into being thanks to government subsidies) generally has been remarkably successful in lobbying the Democrats who control Congress and the White House to enact laws and to implement federal government regulations and other policies, all premised on the global warming myth, or hoax, and designed to replace carbon-based fuels with other energy sources.  This so-called “green” movement indeed does pose the greatest current threat to Americans’ freedom and prosperity.   

The policies being pushed by advocates of “green” bullshit are not only unnecessary, based on fatally flawed “junk science” theories, but also dangerously threatening to our economic freedom and to our lifestyles.  As for the threats to our freedom, what’s at stake are both the freedom of businesses and consumers:  for businesses, such as electric utility companies, it’s the freedom to use the most readily-available, efficient and reliable fuels (which are carbon-based fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas) to generate power; or for vehicle manufacturers, the freedom to manufacture and sell vehicles (cars, trucks, and SUVs) which are popular with consumers despite the fact that they are relative “guzzlers” of gasoline.  For consumers, of course, what’s at stake includes the freedom to buy electricity from companies that generate it at lowest cost, as well as the freedom to drive whatever sort of vehicle one prefers (as well as other freedoms already limited by the “green” police, such as the freedom to purchase certain kinds of clothes washing machines, or toilets, or even electric light bulbs).  Yet, so long as Americans are gullible enough to be taken in by all the “green” bullshit, they will continue to see both their freedoms and their living standards erode, as the “green police” push for more government policies designed to force carbon-based energy out of the marketplace.   

            A number of good books shattering the “global warming” myth have been published in recent years, several of which I’ve already recommended here:  among them, Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007), Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Jr.’s Climate of Extremes (2009), Iaian Murray’s The Really Inconvenient Truths (2008), Roy Spencer’s Climate Confusion (2008), and Christopher Horner’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (2007) and Red Hot Lies 2008).  A new book, which I highly recommend, is Steve Milloy’s Green Hell, which I discuss below.  Finally, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the premiere libertarian think tanks in the U.S., has an excellent site, Cooler Heads Digest, which links to new material on the Internet that presents the truth about so-called “climate change” and other radical environmentalist myths.

 

 

n    The Coming Energy Crisis 

The most imminent “green bullshit” threat to Americans’ freedoms – one that merits close attention to Washington politics, before Congress adjourns for its summer recess – is the legislation proposed by U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D.-Calif.) and Rep. Edward Markey (D.-Mass.), co-chairmen of the panel’s energy and environment subcommittee.  The Waxman-Markey bill would mandate a reduction in U.S. emissions of so-called “greenhouse gases” (i.e., carbon dioxide) to 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent below by 2050.  In April, former vice president Al Gore called the bill “one of the most important pieces of legislation ever introduced in Congress” – which alone should cause alarm to all rational persons (as Gore is the most extreme alarmist and fear-monger on this issue).  What the legislation will do is to make it much more difficult and expensive for utility companies to generate electricity, by forcing them to shift from readily-available, economical and dependable carbon-based fuels to the new “alternative” energy sources (wind, solar, etc.) which are expensive (so expensive they exist only by virtue of heavy government subsidies) and very unreliable.  As a result, electricity will become not only significantly more expensive throughout the United States – having devastating ripple effects on the nation’s economy, fueling inflation, among other problems – but also unreliable, raising the specter of more black outs and “brown outs,” the kind of problem the state of California had several years ago, except throughout the United States.   

The Waxman-Markey “energy” bill is more aptly called an energy-rationing bill, because it will inevitably lead to more expensive and less available energy.  Republicans in both houses of Congress should oppose the bill, as should many common-sense Democrats, such as freshman Democratic Congressman Zack Space, from Ohio, who is now being subjected to a barrage of TV and radio ads (sponsored by radical environmentalists, organized labor, and the alternative-energy special interests groups), designed to pressure him into supporting this horrid piece of legislation.  (Ohio moderate Democrats are being targeted because much of the state’s electricity is generated from coal, an industry that is critically important to Rep. Space’s district in southeast Ohio.) 

  

 

n    CAFÉ Lunacy 

Yet another example of bad public policy being pushed by the tyranny of “green” bullshit – as well as an example of the power-grabbing tendencies of the president – is the administration’s  sweeping revision of auto-emission and fuel-economy standards.  In mid-May B.O. proposed the most dramatic change in federal regulations over autos since the Clean Air Act of 1970, which set auto-pollution standards for the first time and banned lead from gasolines.  But the new regulations do not target pollutants, in the true sense of the word; rather, they follow the radical environmentalist “green” agenda, based on the global-warming myth, by targeting carbon dioxide (a naturally-occurring gas that poses no health harms to humans other than in the fantasies of global-warming alarmists).   The new regulations would, for the first time, limit the amount of carbon dioxide vehicles could emit, by mandating that vehicles burn less fuel.  In the name of reducing gasoline consumption, the federal government for years has mandated fuel economy standards, through so-called “corporate average fuel economy,” or CAFÉ, standards.  But now, those standards are becoming not only far more draconian but also are being revised deliberately to pander to the radical environmentalist, or “green,” anti-carbon agenda.   According to an administration official, the new regulations are designed to mandate a 30 percent reduction in so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions of cars and trucks by 2016; cars would have to average 39 miles per gallon and trucks, 30 mpg.  And, in an effort to push implementation of the new regulations, the administration also has proposed a streamlined rulemaking process, including unprecedented coordination by the two agencies mostly responsible – the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation – working jointly to ramrod the new rules through. 

These new regulations will not only limit the freedom of Americans to purchase the kind of motor vehicles they prefer – they will effectively outlaw SUVs and other “gas-guzzling” vehicles – but will also endanger Americans’ safety on the nation’s highways.  Current CAFÉ standards already have had that result, for the most economical way for auto makers to improve fuel economy is to reduce the size and weight of vehicles, making them less safe in crashes – as recently-released studies have verified.  

The new CAFÉ standards proposed by B.O. would make “a very bad situation even worse,” as recently noted by Sam Kazman, general counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  Noting that existing fuel-economy standards already have had a negative impact on consumers by “raising car prices and reducing the availability of models,” he added that they tend to make cars less crash-worthy.  “You make these standards more stringent, you’re going to make them even more lethal,” Kazman warned.  “The research and development burden that these new standards are imposing on the industry are incredibly expensive with very little payoff, and so you’ve got this ironic standard that you have regulations that are killing both people and car companies.”  (“Killing both people and car companies,” WorldNet Daily, May 19).   

The “help” the B.O. administration has given American auto manufacturers – the bankruptcy it has forced on Chrysler and is about to force on General Motors – so far has been avoided by Ford Motor Company, which has managed to stay in business without federal handouts.  But now, thanks to the new CAFÉ standards, it seems that B.O. is determined to put Ford out of business, too.

 

  

n    More Presti-digital-delaytion 

Congress, in its far-from-infinite wisdom, has delayed until June 12 the deadline to force U.S. TV broadcast stations to convert from analog to digital signals.  As I noted in one of my March 19 “Spring Briefs” entries (scroll down to “Presti-digital-delaytion”), the Congressionally-mandated national switch represents in microcosm many of the failures of government paternalism, of the federal “Nanny State.”  It’s not just the principal folly – the erroneous belief that a free market in broadcasting would not better adapt to new technologies, and hence, the rationalization for government control over broadcasting through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – but also the various ways that Congress allegedly has “helped” American consumers weather the transition that it forced upon the market.  Core to the government’s plan to turn the USA into an all-digital TV market was its coupon program -- $40 coupons, two per household – which mainly has resulted in inflating the cost of digital converter boxes (by, shall we say, about $40, the cost of the indirect government subsidy).  Not surprisingly, the $1.34 billion program ran out of money by the end of 2008 (the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA), the agency established to administer the program, exhausted its budget in just ten months):  the government grossly miscalculated the demand for the “free” coupons, resulting in a first-come, first-served system.  Conscientious, prudent consumers applied for their coupons, while imprudent ones – not coincidentally, many of them also the “neediest,” the poor, elderly or disabled Americans that Congress claimed to be “helping” in the first place – failed to request them in time (despite the government-mandated broadcaster warnings about the February deadline for the switch).   

Not surprisingly, the current Democrat-controlled Congress not only extended the deadline to June but also, as part of the massive spending legislation passed earlier this year, also appropriated $650 million in funding for new coupons.  At the request of Congressional Democrats, the NTIA is now sending out coupons via first-class mail, in hopes that households that have yet to purchase digital converters will get them before June 12.  (Only Americans who receive “free TV” via antennas will be affected by the switch to digital broadcasting; subscribers to cable and satellite TV services aren’t affected and will continue to receive channels via those services.)  Wanna bet that, because some pathologically imprudent consumers will still not buy converters by June 12, some members of Congress will sponsor a bill to delay implementation of the transition yet again?   (The FCC is spending millions of dollars in its DTV budget to buy the help of dozens of organizations – including AARP, AmeriCorps’ federally-paid “volunteers,” and the national association of volunteer firefighter – for “DTV outreach,” to help consumers install their converter boxes.  Apparently, the federal government knows no bounds in its assumption that Americans are a bunch of idiots who cannot do even the simplest task without government assistance.)

 

  

n    Casting Perils Before Swine (Flu, That Is) 

The media-hyped scare over the so-called “swine flu” (the new variant of the H1N1 influenza virus) has proved to be mostly a bust.  Although the disease has spread from Mexico (apparently its country of origin) throughout most of the U.S. states and many nations around the world, the epidemic is not increasingly as much as many experts feared and this particular strain of flu seems to be relatively mild (no more deadly than the typical winter-season flu which annually results in the deaths of tens of thousands of people from flu-related complications).  Some observers have likened the hysteria over this year’s H1N1 flu to the “swine flu” scare of 1976, which resulted in fatal overreaction by the U.S. government.  (Fearing a replay of the 1918 flu pandemic, the most deadly in modern history, the government urged all Americans to be vaccinated.  Over 40 million Americans – almost 25 percent of the population – received the swine flu vaccine before the program was halted in December 1976.  But the pandemic, which some experts at the time had estimated could infect 50 to 60 million Americans, never materialized; only about 200 cases of swine flu and one death were ultimately reported in the U.S.  The vaccine proved to be deadlier than the flu:  more than 500 people are thought to have developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition, after receiving the vaccine; and 25 people died.  The episode triggered an enduring public backlash against flu vaccination, embarrassed the federal government, and cost the director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control his job.)  

This year’s hype over the H1N1 flu is even more reminiscent of the exaggerated scare over the so-called “bird flu,” the avian H5N1 influenza virus, about three years ago, in 2006.  Once again, epidemiologists and other supposed public-health experts expressed fears that the virus could mutate, begin spreading from human to human and cause a global pandemic; but those fears never materialized, either.  The bird flu remained confined largely to those areas in southeast Asia, and even in the hardest-hit countries it had weakened by May 2006.  (Vietnam, which had almost half of the human cases of H5N1 flu in the world, as of mid-May 2006 had not had a single case in humans or a single outbreak in poultry reported that year.  Thailand, the second-hardest hit nation until Indonesia overtook it, had not had a human case reported in nearly a year or one in poultry in six months.)  With warm weather approaching, the number of new countries with bird flu cases in either birds or humans had declined drastically by May 2006.  Good hygiene and common sense (travelers getting vaccinated before visiting hard-hit countries, properly cooking poultry meat or eggs, and washing hands often with soap and water or sanitizing with alcohol-based hand gels) successfully combated the bird flu.  Apparently, similar common-sense techniques (particularly hand washing) are now successfully combating this year’s “swine flu” outbreak, as well.  Once again, it seems the supposed “cure” (government “protection” of public health) is worse than the disease.

 

  

n    The Summer of Atlas Shrugged 

Something is very wrong.  The “American Dream” seems a relic of bygone days, and the United States seems no longer the world’s “best, last hope” for freedom, as the nation suffers from a crippled economy caused by more and more federal government regulation of business, as the U.S. seems to be emulating the socialist “people’s states” around the world.   Once successful businesses are closing, as the men and women who run them – the productive people who keep the “motors of the world,” the nation’s key business enterprises, working – quit, realizing that instead of protecting their rights, the government is instead helping facilitate the “looters” who would live off the wealth they’ve earned.  Instead of standing up for the rights of productive persons, the nation’s leading intellectuals are leading the charge calling for even more government-coerced looting, claiming that everyone has a duty to “sacrifice” for the sake of others (especially those “less fortunate,” or more needy, than oneself).  Even more ominously, whenever anyone speaks out in defense of individual rights, the intellectuals not only denounce them for being “selfish” but also maintain (however logically inconsistent their arguments may be) that there are no longer any moral absolutes, that everything’s relative, and therefore that everyone ought to blithely accept the nation’s economic and cultural collapse. 

Sound familiar?  That scenario, which nicely describes the most pressing problems currently facing Americans, also describes the plot of Atlas Shrugged, the magnificent novel written by Ayn Rand.  First published nearly 52 years ago, in October 1957, the novel continues to be a best-seller: indeed, it’s selling better now than at any time during the half-century it’s been published.  Stephen Moore, in an op-ed published earlier this year, theorized that the novel has special relevance today because of the recent massive growth in the federal regulatory/welfare state:  “Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that "Atlas Shrugged" parodied in 1957,” he wrote  (“Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 9, 2009).  And Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, in a mid-March op-ed in the Journal’s weekend edition, explained the novel’s “relevance” to today’s problems in terms of Rand’s philosophical message: 

"The book's eerily prophetic nature is no coincidence.  . . . Economic crises and runaway government power grabs don't just happen by themselves; they are the product of the philosophical ideas prevalent in a society – particularly its dominant moral ideas.

 

"Why do we accept the budget-busting costs of a welfare state?  Because it implements the moral ideal of self-sacrifice to the needy.  Why do so few people test the endless regulatory burdens placed on businessmen?  Because businessmen are pursuing their self-interest, which we have been taught is dangerous and immoral.  Why did the government go on a crusade to promote `affordable housing,' which meant forcing banks to make loans to unqualified home buyers?  Because we believe people need to be homeowners, whether or not they can afford to pay for houses.

 

"The message is always the same: `Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good.'  But Rand said this message is wrong -- selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue.  . . . Selfishness -- that is, concern with one's genuine, long-range interest -- she wrote, required a man to think, to produce, and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily for mutual benefit.

 

"Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism -- and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imagineable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster.  Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention -- and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.

 

"Rand offered us a way out -- to fight for a morality of rational self-interest, and for capitalism, the system which is its expression.  And that is the source of her relevance today."

 

("Is Rand Relevant?" (Mar. 14)). 

Ever since I first read Atlas Shrugged, 35 years ago (when I was only 19 years old), I’ve regarded the book as the most important I ever read.  Indeed, I regard it as the most important book written in the 20^th century and one of the most important books ever written – a book that has more profound insights into human nature than does the Bible (and a book that’s far more relevant to life in modern society than is that book written by various anonymous authors in a primitive dessert culture thousands of years ago).  For more on my take on why Atlas Shrugged is so important, see my three essays in celebration of the book’s 50^th anniversary, especially Part I, “Courage To Face a Lifetime” (Sept. 27, 2007).  (Part II, “Ayn Rand’s Magnum Opus,” discusses my favorite passages of the book and is recommended for people who have already read the novel; otherwise, it might contain some “spoilers.”  Part III, my report on the 50^th anniversary conference in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the Atlas Society in October 2007, also contains the text of my talk, on the significance of Atlas Shrugged in terms of “Completing the American Revolution.”) 

Anyone who hasn’t yet read Ayn Rand’s magnificent novel should do so; and everyone who has read it, should read it again.  It’s the single most important book to read this summer.

 

  

n    Green Hell, Murder Mysteries, and Other Recommended Summer Reading 

Another book that I highly recommend for reading this summer, because of its relevance to current issues in politics and public policy (the above-discussed “tyranny of green bullshit”), is Steven Milloy’s Green Hell (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2009).  The subtitle of the book describes its thesis:  “How Environmentalist Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.”  Milloy is the founder and publisher of JunkScience.com and is an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  Milloy reveals the dark agenda behind the movement to make America “Green”:  an authoritarian crusade to dictate the very parameters of our daily lives – where we can live, what transportation we can use, what we can eat, how we heat and power our homes, and even how many children we can have.  He shows how the Green movement has gained so much power:  “Steamrolling nearly all opposition with its apocalyptic predictions of environmental doom,” it has gained influence throughout American society, from schools and local planning boards to the biggest corporations in the country.”  Indeed, one of the strengths of the book is Milloy’s expose of how big businesses have knuckled under to the Greens, even aggressively promoting the green agenda to the detriment of their own stockholders – as well as how Green elites (hypocrites like Al Gore) stand to profit enormously from the restrictions and regulations they seek to impose on the rest of us.  As the publisher’s summary describes it, the book is a “comprehensive takedown of the entire environmental movement,” a book that (I hope) will indeed help open Americans’ eyes to “a looming threat to our economy, our civil liberties, and the entire American way of life.” 

Summer is also the perfect season for reading my favorite genre of fiction:  historical murder mysteries.  Some recently- or newly-published books that are on my “To Read” list this summer include:  Lindsey Davis’s Alexandria, her latest Marcus Didius Falco novel (in which her protagonist, a private “informer” in ancient Rome during the time of the emperor Vespasian, travels to Alexandria, Egypt with his family, on a working vacation); Anne Perry’s Execution Dock, her latest William Monk novel (in which Monk, a former policeman and private detective and now an officer in the Thames River police, investigates a sex-slavery ring involving children and aristocratic pedophiles); and C. J. Samsom’s Revelation (his latest novel in the Matthew Shardlake series, set during the reign of Henry VIII, this one at the time of his sixth and last marriage to Catherine Parr).   For more on these books and other historical mysteries that I recommend, see my revised “Guide to Historical Mysteries.” 

Finally, summer’s also a good season for reading more contemporary mystery novels.  And I plan, for my pleasure reading, also to continue reading several books in two “classic” series that are also favorites of mine, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.

 

  

n    Summer Movies: A Preview 

In the classic early-1980s comedy skit TV show, SCTV (with Toronto’s talented Second City comedy troupe), one of the most memorable skits was “The Great White North,” a mock talk show hosted by two beer-drinking Canadian “average Joes” (or should that be, “average Joes, eh?”), the McKenzie brothers, Bob (Rick Moranis) and Doug (Dave Thomas).  Bob and Doug frequently did film reviews, judging movies mostly by how explosive they were (literally).  Their favorite movies not only “blew `em up,” but really “blew `em up good.” 

Bob and Doug would be really happy at the movies in the summer of 2009:  As USA Today noted in its annual preview, LOUD explosions will be the main theme in this summer’s movies:  “Among the titles packed with fire and falling debris over the next few months [are] J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek, with whole planets consumed by cosmic weaponry; Quentin Tarantino’s World War II campfest Inglorious Basterds, blowing up the placid French countryside; the fantasy soldier saga G.I. Joe; and sequels to Transformers, Terminator and X-Men, which threaten to wipe out life on earth” (“Yay, it’s the end of the world! Upcoming movies promise to blow the lid off summer,” April 24).  (Another theme, identified in a more recent USA Today article, is that of the “origin” story – which also characterizes both the X-Men and Star Trek films – and the hidden sequels.  “Nervous that moviegoers are weary of sequels, studios are downplaying the continuing stories entirely.  For this summer’s franchise pictures, numerals have been retired . . . . There’s this week’s Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (the second installment), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (also Part 2, June 24), and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (the third chapter, July 1).” (“Film franchises successfully turning back time,” May 21).  

Some of the new action movies are worth seeing.  These include the first two big box-office successes of the season, X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which debuted May 1) and Star Trek (which debuted May 8).  Wolverine is a worthy addition to the X-Men movie series, featuring the personable (and incredibly versatile actor) Hugh Jackman as the most intriguing of the “mutants.”  And director J.J. Abrams’ “reimagining” (to use Hollywood lingo) of the origins of Star Trek: The Original Series, the maiden voyage of NCC 1701, the starship Enterprise, is an interesting film that should appeal to both fans and neophytes alike.  (Although some Trekker purists may object – or, at the very least, raise both eyebrows, a la Spock – to the way the story plays fast and loose with the Gene Roddenberry canon, the liberties can be rationalized by the movie’s time travel/alternate universe main plot line, a staple of the Star Trek genre of films.  And the actors who portray the young original crew of the Enterprise are inspired choices, led by Chris Pine as the young James T. Kirk and Zachary Pinto as the young Spock.  My favorite was the 20-year-old Anton Yelchin as the young Chekhov, who nearly steals the movie with his over-the-top Russian accent – even though he’s a genuine Russian-American.) 

Most of this summer’s blockbuster action films, however, aren’t worth seeing (except perhaps at a bargain matinee if one has nothing better to do); they’re merely big-budget exercises in gratuitous violence and special effects.  Movies on my “not-worth-seeing” list include: Terminator Salvation (May 21) (a prequel to the Terminator series, which despite no-doubt solid performances by Christian Bale as Connor and Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese, unfortunately will showcase much too much violence); Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (June 26) (in the original, the huge special effects almost overwhelmed lead actor Shia LaBeouf’s charm, and in the sequel the even-huger effects and violence are almost sure to do so); G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (August 7) (I wasn’t a fan of the toy, so I have no interest in the movie).  And, of course, the film that surely will epitomize gratuitous violence this summer:  Quentin Tarantino’s WWII flick, Inglorious Basterds (August 21) (a more appropriate misspelling in the title would use a “u” instead of an “e”).  

Movies that I do look forward to seeing include, at the top of the list, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (July 15), the sixth installment in the Harry Potter film series which promises to be, like its five predecessors, a remarkably faithful adaptation of J.K. Rowlings’ magical book.  Some comedies that promise to be amusing, in a light-hearted summer kind of way, include Land of the Lost (June 5), a big-budget update of the campy `70s show for kids, starring the amusing Will Ferrell; The Proposal (June 19), a romantic comedy starring the likeable Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock (and featuring Betty White as – surprise! surprise! – a dirty old lady); Bruno (July 10), a quirky comedy starring the versatile Sacha Baron Cohen (star and co-creator of Borat) as a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion expert; and Funny People (July 31), Judd Apatow’s latest combination of bawdy humor tempered with sentiment, starring Adam Sandler as a famous stand-up comedian dying of a blood disorder, with Seth Rogan as the man’s protégé and friend.  Finally, one film that no doubt will have much violence but which will probably be worth seeing nevertheless is the real-crime drama Public Enemies (July 1), with Johnny Depp as the notorious criminal John Dillinger and Christian Bale as his nemesis, G-man Melvin Purvis.   

 

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Monday,  May 25, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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Those Damn Taxes!

 

 

April 15 is popularly known as “Tax Day,” for it is the day that personal income tax forms (and payments) are due at the Internal Revenue Service (or “Infernal Revenue Service,” as I often call it).  The truly significant day, however, is so-called “Tax Freedom Day” – the day marking the lifting of the burden of taxation on the average American’s income.  In 2000, Tax Freedom Day was celebrated May 3, the latest date ever.  That meant that in that year, the average American had to work from January 1 to May 3 – a full five months of the year – in order to pay all his taxes (federal, state, and local), leaving to himself just the last seven months of his yearly earnings.  A series of tax cuts between 2001 and 2003 – the “Bush tax cuts,” recommended by former President George W. Bush to Congress, which Democrats love to decry – pushed Tax Freedom Day up by more than two weeks, so it fell on April 16 in 2003 and April 17 in 2004.  For the next three years, incomes and tax collections soared, pushing Tax Freedom Day back to April 26 in 2007. 

This year, according to the Tax Foundation (in its Special Report No. 165), Tax Freedom Day fell on April 13 – eight days earlier than in 2008, and a full two weeks earlier than 2007 – because of recently-enacted tax cuts and the reduction in income resulting from the recession.  Nevertheless, Americans this year still will pay more in taxes than they will spend on food, clothing and housing combined.  Moreover, an earlier Tax Freedom Day isn’t a trend that’s likely to continue.  When federal budget deficit figures are calculated into the determination of Tax Freedom Day (in other words, if the projected deficit were counted as a tax), in 2009 it falls on May 29 – the latest date ever, under this alternative calculation, thanks to this year’s unprecedented $1.5 trillion deficit.  (The only previous years when taxes and deficit spending comprised a similarly large share of national income were 1944 and 1945, at the peak of World War II.  In the postwar era, this date has never fallen later than May 9 (in 1992).) 

With Democrats controlling both the White House and Congress (and with a president who has publicly stated his goal to use the federal government’s taxing and spending powers to “spread the wealth”), the future trend is indeed alarming.   The $787 billion so-called “stimulus” legislation passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress and signed into law by B.O. – a.k.a. H.R. 1, the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” – will result in a massive increase in federal government spending this year and in future years.  More ominously, B.O.’s proposed $3.6 trillion budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will produce record-breaking deficits of $9.3 trillion over ten years. 

This massive increase in federal government spending and, concomitantly, the national debt, raises the specter of burdensome taxation on future generations of Americans.  Never in U.S. history has the future looked so bleak as it does now, as national policy-makers finally seem to be realizing the nightmare scenario that Thomas Jefferson warned about in 1816.  To preserve Americans’ independence, he cautioned, “we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt”: 

“We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.  If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

. . .  This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance.  And this is the tendency of all human governments.  A departure form principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.”

 

The “fore horse of this frightful team,” Jefferson warned, is “public debt.  Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”  (Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816.) 

Thankfully, a large number of Americans who do not want to be enslaved by their ever-growing government – Americans who refuse to be reduced to “mere automatons of misery,” with nothing left but “sinning and suffering,” as Jefferson put it – are participating in a nationwide tax protest on April 15 this year.  Billed as a modern-day Boston “Tea Party” revolt by its organizers, the nationwide protest is scheduled to take place in 500 cities and towns all over the country.  According to a recent article in USA Today (“Tax revolt a recipe for tea parties,” April 13), “What started out as a handful of people blogging about their anger over federal spending – the bailouts, the $787 billion stimulus package, and Obama’s budget – has grown into scores of so-called tea parties across the country.”  The biggest demonstration so far drew 6,000 people in Cincinnati.  The goal, as stated in the article and in a Heritage Foundation website focused on the “tea-party” movement (“Stop Spending Our Future”), is to pressure Congress and the states to reject government spending as a supposed way out of the recession and to build a national anti-spending grassroots coalition of taxpayers. 

It’s indeed time for Americans to stand up in opposition to the mushrooming growth of government – and to demand urgently-needed reform in the massive, bloated, unjust (and illegitimate) taxation system that threatens to tyrannize not just the people today but also future generations of Americans, in the years to come.

 

 

Taxation, Consent, and Legitimacy (and Illegitimacy)

 

The historic Boston “Tea Party” of December 1773 involved a group of Bostonian Patriots dumping chests of tea from East India Company ships into Boston Harbor, as a protest against the monopoly granted by the British government to the Company as well as against the British Parliament’s levying of a tax on tea imported into the American colonies.  The American Revolutionaries’ argument, “no taxation without representation,” is justifiably famous, as a slogan of the Revolution – and one of the founding principles of the United States – but is often misunderstood or taken out of context.   

“No taxation without representation” is a corollary of the foundational principle of American government, stated in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their just powers from “the consent of the governed.”  Government is not a natural entity; it is created by human beings, for a specific purpose – to safeguard, or “secure” their rights.  Their rights, in turn, do not derive from government but from their nature as human beings; they exist independently of government, which is founded to “secure” (as the Declaration puts it) these natural rights of individuals.  Yet even when exercising its legitimate function of securing rights, government cannot do whatever those in power want to do:  it must exercise its power – the power to use force, or coercion, to compel people to do certain things or to refrain from doing certain things – according to law.  Even before Revolutionary-era Americans created the device of a written constitution to limit government’s power, the rule of law (a bundle of associated principles constraining how government acts, how it wields its power) limited the exercise of political power.  Written constitutions, like the Constitution of the United States with respect to both the national and state governments, and the various state constitutions with respect to state and local governments, provided simply an additional device for ensuring that government operated according to the rule of law.  And for ensuring that government exercised only those powers that were legitimate – powers relating necessarily to government’s legitimate function of protecting individuals’ rights, and powers to which the people have consented to have government exercise, through the power-granting clauses of the constitutions.

In the centuries-old Anglo-American constitutional tradition, the power to tax has always been regarded as a special governmental power, one that required not only “consent” by the people generally but also required the specific consent of those people paying the tax.  Indeed, one of the complaints against King John in Magna Carta (1215) was that he had attempted to levy taxes beyond the bounds of his legitimate authority as feudal overlord of England, without the “common counsel” of the realm.  Under his successors, especially under King Edward I, Parliament itself was created as an institution in order to provide a mechanism for the king to obtain the tax revenues he needed to fight his wars in Wales and Scotland, from the people who had “liquid capital” (as we would say today) in the early 14^th century, the middle class, or the “commons” of England.  In the parliaments held during Edward I’s reign, aristocrats were represented personally in the King’s Great Council, the institution that evolved into the House of Lords, while representatives of the middle class – the knights in the counties, the merchants in towns – joined the lords in an extraordinary assembly, a “parliament.”  These representatives of the middle class eventually became known as the House of Commons.  Together with the House of Lords, their consent to taxes or to a change in the laws (legislation through Parliamentary statutes) gave the king authority backed up by the “common counsel of the realm” – the aristocrats, represented personally in the Lords, and the middle class, represented by their chosen representatives in the Commons.  That gave rise to the principle, by the 16^th century, that whatever the King and Parliament jointly did, was done by the consent of “every Englishman,” actually (in the case of the personal assent of the King and the Lords) or “virtually,” by representatives in the House of Commons, who in theory were to represent the interests of the middle class throughout England.  When the early Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, attempted to levy taxes without the consent of Parliament, Parliament objected – and eventually, during the English Civil War of the 1640s, levied war against the King himself, defeating Charles I and putting him on trial, and executing him, for treason against the people of England, for violating their rights (among them, their right not to be taxed except by their own consent, given in Parliament).

The people who settled in the English colonies in America derived from English common law the fundamental right – a “constitutional right,” we would call it – not to be taxed, by the king or the king’s government, except by their own consent.  Revolutionary-era Americans, however, went further than the traditional English concept of “no taxation without consent” by insisting on “no taxation without representation,” that is, consent given by their own representatives, personally chosen by them.  The American understanding of representation differed from the “mainstream” 18^th-century English view, which relied on the theory of “virtual” representation (the theory that all members of the middle class, no matter where they were situated in England, or indeed in the British empire, were “virtually” represented by the members of the House of Commons, even if they had no right to elect them).  For nearly 150 years prior to the Revolution, colonial Americans had become used to the practice of “actual” representation – of directly electing their own representatives, in their own colonial assemblies or legislatures, and even of instructing their chosen representatives how to vote.  Thus, when the Parliament of Great Britain in the years following the French and Indian War (that is, in the mid-1760s), attempted to levy taxes directly on people in the American colonies, Americans – through their delegates at the First Continental Congress in 1774 – objected that Parliament was violating their right, under the English constitution, not to be taxed except by their own consent.  Because they elected no member of Parliament to represent them (and because they understood the British House of Commons to represent only the interests of the middle class in Britain itself and not in the colonies), they maintained that they could give their consent to taxes only through their actual representatives, in the various colonial assemblies (men who were their neighbors, whom they chose to represent them in the legislature because they trusted them to look out for their interests).

Thus, by the time of the adoption of the earliest state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution, the principle had been established in American constitutional law that government may not tax the people without obtaining their consent, given either directly (by popular vote) or indirectly (by vote of the people’s representatives in the legislature).  The framers of the U.S. Constitution, for example, assigned to the U.S. House of Representatives the exclusive power to originate revenue bills (that is, proposed tax laws) because the British House of Commons had – in recognition of this centuries-old principle of “no taxation without consent” – similarly the exclusive power to originate tax bills.  The members of the U.S. House were meant to represent “the people” – that is, the people of the several states.

Given this historical background, it is easy to see why consent of the people – and, specifically, the consent of those (or at least of a majority of those) on whom a given tax is to be levied – is a prerequisite for the government’s exercise of its taxation power, if it is to do so legitimately.  Through the written constitutions, “the people” generally may authorize the government to levy taxes, to pay for the costs of government’s legitimate functions.  But in addition to this general authority to levy taxes, government needs the specific authority of the people – that is, of the majority of the people (or of their representatives in the legislature) – to legitimize any particular tax levy.

The necessity of consent to legitimize taxes does not fall entirely on this historical argument, however.  It is also based on the fundamental principle that government is created in order to “secure” the people’s rights.  One of the most important rights – certainly, one of the most fundamental, and arguably, the most fundamental right – is the right of private property, a right that is violated by the very act of taxation itself (because when governments collect taxes, they forcibly deprive individuals of their property), unless those on whom the tax is levied give their consent.  That’s why – and here the historical practice in Anglo-American society meets the theoretical argument of the Declaration of Independence – government can legitimately tax the people only when they have authorized it to do so, by their own actual consent.  As John Locke recognized in his classic Second Treatise on Government (1690) – a book that America’s Founders regarded as a textbook of fundamental principles of government –

“The Reason why Men enter into Society, is the preservation of their Property; and the End why they chuse and authorize a Legislative, is, that there may be Laws made, and Rules set, as Guards and Fences to the Properties of all the Members of the Society, to limit the Power, and moderate the Dominion of every part and member of the Society.  For since it can never be supposed to be the will of the Society, that the Legislative should have a Power to destroy that, which every one designs to secure, by entering into Society, for which the People submitted themselves of Legislators of their own making, whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any further Obedience. . . .” (emphasis in original)

Locke concluded that in such a situation, where the legislature levies taxes in an arbitrary way that in effect enslaves the people to the government, the legislature “by this breach of trust . . . forfeit[s] the Power the People had put into their Hands,” and the ultimate political power – the sovereign power – then “devolves” back to the people.

Of course, by adopting written constitutions embodying the people’s sovereign power, America’s Founders sought to make unnecessary a resort to violent revolt, or revolution, in order for the people to take back the power they had entrusted to government.  Through the process of constitutional change, or amendments, the people could peaceably alter, or even abolish and re-institute government, as we (the people of the United States) did in adopting the U.S. Constitution in 1787-88, or in the various amendments added to the Constitution in the two centuries since.  Moreover, by allowing American judges to enforce the limits the Constitution (or the various state constitutions) placed on the government, through exercise of their power of “judicial review” (the power to void unconstitutional laws), America’s Founders sought to give the people an additional check against tyrannical laws, including arbitrary or tyrannical taxes.

 

 

The Pernicious, Invidious Personal Income Tax

 

The current occupant of the White House, B.O., said in his first address to Congress that the tax cuts enacted under his predecessor, “W.,” amounted to a massive “transfer [of] wealth to the wealthy.”  This comment, the opening salvo in the president’s campaign to impose higher taxes on the wealthiest – that is, the most productive – Americans, is wrong (it is in fact a grossly misleading statement, a blatant lie), on at least two important counts.

First, a cut in tax rates is not a “transfer” of wealth to taxpayers, for the simple and obvious reason that it’s not the government’s money, it’s the taxpayers’ own money, income they created by their own productive work.  (It’s perhaps not surprising that B.O. fails to understand this simple fact, because he – like most professional politicians – hasn’t the faintest idea how wealth actually is created by the nation’s business-owners.  His political constituency obviously aren’t productive Americans, the producers of wealth, but rather the “looters,” unproductive Americans who live off the wealth produced by others and redistributed to them by the forceful hand of government.) 

Second, “the wealthy” – that is, the most productive, upper-income Americans – already pay a disproportionately heavy burden of federal personal income tax revenues, under the so-called “progressive” rate structure of the income tax law.  For years now, opponents of tax-relief proposals have continued to voice the tired objection that an across-the-board cut in income-tax rates would "favor the rich." Of course it would: it’s their money.  The wealthiest 5% of taxpayers earn 36% of the nation’s income but pay a majority (60%) of federal income taxes, and the top 25% pay more than 80% of income taxes, according to the Internal Revenue Service. In contrast, those in the bottom 50% pay a mere 4% of all federal income taxes. So naturally the wealthy would get the most relief from a rate cut – and they should, because they pay a vastly disproportionate share.

If the tax cuts enacted during former President Bush’s administration can be faulted for anything, it would be for not doing enough to redress this great imbalance.  The Bush tax cuts in fact exacerbated the imbalance.  As the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial written after the Congressional Budget Office and IRS released tax numbers for 2005 (“Taxes and Income,” Dec. 17, 2007), the tax reductions of 2001 and 2003 actually resulted in “the rich” paying an even greater share of the nation’s tax burden:  their share of taxes paid rose “at a faster rate than their share of income.”  The richest 1% of Americans in 1990 earned 14% of the nation’s income but paid 25% of federal income taxes; by 2005, the richest 1% earned a greater share of the nation’s income (21%) but paid a disproportionately even greater share of federal income taxes (39%).  For the richest 5%, who earned 27% of the nation’s income in 1990 and 36% of the nation’s income in 2005, the tax burden increased from 44% of federal income taxes in 1990 to 60% of federal income taxes in 2005. 

Yes, as the political left and the news media like to observe, this means “the rich are getting richer” – but they’re also paying an even more disproportionately heavy share of federal income taxes.  How could this be?  The Journal editors give two plausible explanations.  First, the Bush tax cuts reduced the income tax liability of middle and lower income households by more proportionately than wealthier households.  “The average family of four with an income of $40,000 saw its income tax liability fall by almost $2.052 a year from the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.”  Second, as the IRS statistics verify, America continues to be a society of upward mobility.  “Over the past decade, millions of Americans have joined the once highly exclusive club of six- and seven-figure earners.  Some 304,000 Americans earned $1 million or more in annual income in 2005, compared to 110,000 in 1996 and 176,000 in 2000.  Because there is no cap on the top income share, this increase in millionaires pushes the top income (and taxes paid) share higher.”  Left-liberals might decry this as proof of a new “gilded age,” the Journal editors note, but what it really means is that Americans are free to earn their way into the ranks of the affluent.  “This is the kind of upward mobility that a dynamic society should want because it means that incomes aren’t stagnant and opportunity continues to exist.”

The tax-cut debate has focused attention on the issue of fairness, and all Americans should seriously question whether the federal income tax is really "fair" at all.  Under its so-called "progressive" rate structure, a minority of taxpayers in the upper income brackets are forced to pay the lion’s share of federal income taxes.  Moreover, there is no correlation between the amount of taxes an American pays and whatever benefits, if any, he receives; indeed, a wealthy person may get fewer government services than a poorer person.  As H. L. Mencken noted in 1925, "The intelligent man, when he pays taxes, certainly does not believe that he is making a prudent and productive investment of his money; on the contrary, he feels he is being mulcted in an excessive amount for services that, in the main, are useless to him, and that, in substantial part, are downright inimical to him."

The history of federal income tax rates shows a constant temptation to raise tax rates on productive citizens to pay for new government programs.  At the limit, persons with the highest incomes may face a marginal tax rate of 100%, while those with low incomes pay nothing.  During the 1950s, indeed, top marginal tax rates exceeded 90% in the United States.  The confiscatory nature of the federal income tax was lessened somewhat by the tax reforms of the 1980s, but it is still true that wealthy Americans pay a highly disproportionate share.

Federal income taxes today are at an all-time high.  The tax receipts of the federal government in 1998 were 26.4% of national income (and nearly 22% of gross domestic product), the highest level in American history.  At their peak in 1945, the final year of World War II, federal tax receipts amounted to 23.4% of the national income—13% less than in 1998.  And federal tax receipts rose sharply during the Clinton administration, thanks not only to the legislated tax increase in 1995 but also to the "unlegislated tax increase" which economist Milton Friedman attributed to "bracket creep" and to inflation.  Wealthier Americans thus not only shoulder the vast bulk of the tax burden, but that burden increases disproportionately as the economy grows.

A "progressive" income tax is not only unfair; it’s also contrary to America’s founding principles.  Those principles include consent of the governed and equality under the law.

As noted above, when the Patriots uttered their famous cry—"No taxation without representation!"— they were following the principles of John Locke, who recognized that consent was a necessary condition to legitimate government.  Because the end of government is to protect individual rights, government must be formed by a procedure that does not itself violate those rights.  "Men being ... by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent," Locke wrote in the Second Treatise of Government.  Moreover, he argued that consent was especially necessary to "take from any man any part of his property," given that the purpose of government is to preserve property.  Taxes, to be legitimate, must be imposed with the consent of the people on whom they will be levied.

Progressive income taxes, by their very nature, violate this fundamental principle of legitimacy.  They represent the very worst sort of "tyranny of the majority," for they subject a small portion of citizens—those with the highest incomes—to taxes imposed by the "consent" of other citizens, the majority of voters, who do not pay taxes.  Indeed, that was the story of the origin of the Sixteenth Amendment, which empowered Congress to levy taxes on income.  When the Amendment was ratified in 1913, it was sold to voters in the western states as a way to soak "the luxurious incomes" of industrialists in the East.  And very few people paid the first income tax, which was only 1% on the first $20,000 of taxable income, with the rate raised to only 7% on income above $500,000.  As late as 1939, only 5% of the population filed returns.  As journalist David Brinkley noted, the income tax "was voted into law by people who were confident it would punish the rich they despised while they themselves would never have to pay it.  Envy and resentment [of wealth] carried the day."  (Brinkley, “The Long Road to Tax Reform,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 18, 1995.)  It’s not surprising, then, that public opinion polls usually show little support among voters generally for easing the federal tax burden:  a large portion of Americans continue to pay little or no income taxes at all!

Because it discriminates against individuals simply because they have higher incomes, a progressive income tax also violates another fundamental principle of our constitutional government:  that individuals are equal under the law.  The minority of Americans who shoulder the federal income tax burden are denied the equal protection of laws.  Moreover, when we consider the full impact of the federal budget, it is clear that the federal income tax is an integral part of a massive redistribution of Americans’ wealth.  Thus, it constitutes "class legislation"—the type of law that "takes property from A. and gives it to B."—which, as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase noted in 1798, violates "the great first principles of the social compact."

If we really care about fairness, legitimacy, and equality under the law, we need to abolish progressive taxation and institute a flat-rate tax, preferably applied to consumption rather than income.  Proponents of the so-called “Fair Tax” – a flat-rate national sales tax, to replace the income tax – have strong arguments in support of their proposal.  It would not only be fairer but also would be far less intrusive on the personal lives of Americans.  Even the left-leaning USA Today, in a remarkable recent editorial (“Tax code: Too complicated, too costly, too unfair,” April 10, 2009), decried the complexity of the income tax – noting that the number of pages in the U.S. tax code has ballooned, from 400 in 1913 to 70,320 in 2000, and that the percentage of tax returns signed by paid preparers has increased from 46% in 1985 to 60% in 2006 – suggesting that the complexity has resulted from the lobbying efforts of “special interests” who have put various deductions into the law, or from politicians’ attempts to manipulate Americans’ behavior with various deductions or credits.  It’s certainly an abuse of the tax laws to use them to try to manipulate people’s behavior, but elimination of all the special credits or deductions would still go only part way toward true tax simplification.  Much of the complexity of the income tax code results from the difficulty in defining “income” itself and thus is inherent in the code, as is the government’s intrusiveness into the nature and sources of that income.  A national sales tax, implemented through “piggybacking” on the mechanisms already existing in most of the states for the collection of state and local sales taxes, would make possible the elimination of both the incredibly complex income tax laws and the meddlesome I.R.S. that enforces them.

True tax reform, by implementation of a national sales tax to replace the income tax, must also include the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, which grants Congress the power to levy a tax on income.  Otherwise, members of Congress are likely to enact a national sales tax as just an additional source of revenue, on top of the existing income tax – an even more burdensome national tax regime than we have now.  Again, H. L. Mencken has some important words of wisdom we must bear in mind as we consider major reform of the U.S. tax laws.  He warned, “Where a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned.  It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.”  (Mencken, in the [Baltimore] Evening Sun, Nov. 13, 1925.) 

 

 

The Worst Ponzi Scheme of All

 

A “Ponzi scheme” is defined in Wikipedia as “a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned.”   It “usually offers returns that other investments cannot guarantee in order to entice new investors, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going,” until its eventual – and inevitable – collapse.  Named after Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant who notoriously practiced the scheme in the early years of the 20^th century, the Ponzi scheme has been in the news often over the past several months, as modern counterparts of Mr. Ponzi have bilked many gullible Americans of their hard-earned wealth – most notably, Bernard Madoff, who has been convicted of defrauding investors of tens of billions of dollars.

Although some commentators have called Bernie Madoff’s operation not only the largest investment fraud ever committed by a single person but also the largest Ponzi scheme ever perpetrated, there’s one that’s even bigger.  And it has been perpetrated by the U.S. Government for over 70 years, ever since Congress created it in 1935:  Social Security.

            The Social Security program came into being in the late 1930s as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s so-called “New Deal” – the huge con game that FDR and his advisers put over on the American people.  For the past three-quarters of a century, leftists have perpetuated the myth that New Deal policies and programs helped alleviate the economic woes of the Great Depression.  Today, fortunately, the myth has been shattered:  historians and other social scientists are beginning to acknowledge what conservative and libertarian critics of FDR have been arguing all these years – that the New Deal, rather than alleviating the Depression, actually prolonged and exacerbated it.  (See, for example, Jim Powell’s FDR’s Folly (2003).)

            Social Security epitomizes the New Deal con game, at its worst.  To disguise its true nature, the Roosevelt administration sold it to the American people by calling it an “insurance” program, masking the fact that it’s really a wealth-redistribution scheme.  True insurance programs involve people voluntarily contracting for benefits based on the premiums they paid.  As Jim Powell notes,  

With true insurance, premiums varied according to the policyholder’s age and how much retirement income they wanted.  Insurance companies invested the premiums long term in productive assets, principally stocks, bonds, and real estate, so that individuals could cover the costs of their own retirement.  In contrast, every “social insurance” scheme [like Social Security] had some people subsidizing others.  Often such schemes started out or became pay-as-you go, meaning that current taxpayers covered the costs of people currently receiving pensions.  Individuals, as taxpayers, didn’t contribute anything for their own retirement.  The cost of their retirement became a burden for future generations.  The assumption was that there would be enough taxpayers in the future to take care of all the retirees and that future generations would be willing to bear burdens.  Nobody seems to have considered that such burdens might become heavier over time if the number of retired people grew faster than the number of taxpayers. 

 

Indeed, as Powell also notes, FDR repeatedly misrepresented Social Security as an insurance program.  The Roosevelt administration proposed paying for Social Security benefits with a payroll tax, even though such a tax is regressive, taking a higher portion of the earnings of lower-income people than higher-income people.  “FDR apparently wanted a payroll tax because it made Social Security seem more like a self-financing insurance plan and politically more difficult to later repeal.”  As FDR himself said, candidly, “`With those taxes in place, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.’” (FDR’s Folly, pp. 174, 179-80.)

In my previous essay “Socialist Insecurity” (Feb. 15, 2005), I maintained that instead of being called “Social Security,” the program ought instead to be called “socialist, insecure, shitty” because it is each of those things.

First, Social Security is socialist both in its origins and in its character.  “Social insurance” programs like Social Security originated in one of Europe’s most autocratic regimes, Germany in the 1870s.  As Jim Powell notes, “German socialists demanded that their government gain more power in the name of social justice, and German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw that expanded government power would suit his very different purposes.  In 1881, Bismarck said, `Whoever has a pension for his old age is far more content and far easier to handle than one who has no such prospect.’  Bismarck’s biographer A. J. P. Taylor added that `Social Security has certainly made the masses less independent everywhere.’”  Germany’s government-run retirement system began in 1889; by the early 20^th century, socialist governments in other European countries followed suit.  In the United States, many European immigrants agitated for the same kind of government-run pension systems they had known in their “old country”; Russian immigrant Isaac Rubinow was the most prolific and influential author promoting “social insurance” as a scheme for redistributing income in the name of “social justice.”  (FDR’s Folly, pp. 173-75.)

            Not only were the movers behind Social Security themselves socialist, but the program established by Congress in 1935 epitomizes socialism.  Rather than being a true insurance program, where individual Americans own their own pension funds, Social Security is a government-run monopoly that is funded on a pay-as-you-go basis, taking the money paid in taxes by working Americans and redistributing it to retirees.   No one “owns” their Social Security “account”; the “lock-box” that some demagogues imagine doesn’t exist, and the so-called “trust fund” also is a misrepresentation.  In reality, the so-called “trust fund” is completely controlled by the government, which uses the fund to redistribute wealth, to make an increasingly large number of Americans dependent on the government for their basic needs in their retirement years.  The system uses force (the coercive power of government) to take money earned by some Americans (younger workers paying FICA taxes) and redistribute it to other Americans (retirees and other “beneficiaries”).  It is the epitome of a government program that takes property from A (one group of citizens) and redistributes it to B (another group of citizens).  Architects of the system deliberately used the terminology of private pension plans – terms like contributions, benefits, trust fund, etc. – to mask the true nature of Social Security, to create the myth that it is an insurance program rather than being what it really is, a socialist wealth-redistribution scheme. 

Second, Social Security is insecure because it is a government-run scheme in which no American owns his or her own retirement fund.  Rather, the entire scheme is at the mercy of politicians.  As Alex Epstein wrote in a 2005 op-ed: 

Under Social Security, every aspect of the government’s “promise” to provide financial security is at the mercy of political whim.  The government can change how much of an individual’s money it takes – it has increased the payroll tax 17 times since 1935.  The government can spend his money on anything he wants – observe the long-time practice of spending any annual Social Security surplus on other entitlement programs.  The government can change when (and therefore if) it chooses to pay him benefits and how much they consist of – witness the current proposals to raise the age cutoff or lower future benefits.  Under Social Security, whether an individual gets twice as much from others as was taken from him, or half as much, or nothing at all, is entirely at the discretion of politicians.  He cannot count on Social Security for anything – except a massive drain on his income.

 (Alex Epstein, “End Social Security,” The Ayn Rand Institute, January 18, 2005.)   

What could be more insecure than this Ponzi scheme that can be changed, by law, whenever Congress wishes!  (In two landmark cases, Flemming v. Nestor and Helvering v. Davis,  the U.S. Supreme Court ruled – correctly – that workers have no right to receive Social Security benefits.  Note also that most of the proposals to “fix,” or “reform,” Social Security offered by politicians take the form of either an increase in payroll taxes or a cut in benefits, by raising the retirement age, for example, or some combination of these.)  Income that derives from government largesse – in other words, income that derives from politicians using the coercive force of the law to transfer wealth from taxpayers to the “beneficiaries” of government programs – is based on nothing but the politicians’ promises.

Third, Social Security is, to put it bluntly, shitty – that is, the return on workers’ “investments” – the payroll taxes they pay into the scheme – is indeed shitty.  It offers a pathetically poor rate of return, compared to the other options individuals would have for investment if they controlled their own accounts.  If a younger worker today would invest a small portion of his Social Security payroll taxes (say $1000) into a private retirement account, the results would be staggering.  $1000 annually invested in the stock market, with its historical 10%-a-year average return compounded, would grow to more than $440,000 in 40 years.  In 50 years it would balloon to more than $1.15 million.  Those figures do not come from either a libertarian or conservative pundit; rather, they were cited by left-liberal Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, in a January 7, 2005 editorial in his paper denouncing ad campaign then being run by AARP (against President Bush’s proposal to partially privatize Social Security) as “an abuse of power by AARP leaders” who were engaged in scaremongering. 

            As Milton Friedman noted in his 1998 “Social Security Socialism” op-ed, a truly privatized system of individual retirement accounts would not only benefit participants in the system but the whole nation’s economy:  “If the corresponding sums had been accumulated by private individuals and not used to finance government spending, they would have been a real addition to the nation’s capital and not just a bookkeeping entry.  Those sums would have been invested in ways citizens or their advisers chose.  The end result would have been more productive investment, a larger stream of income and a freer, more responsible, more productive society.” 

            Instead, we have a socialist, insecure, and shitty program that is not only a drag on the nation’s economy but also is tantamount to grand larceny on an epic scale:  a system that uses force to deprive productive Americans of a significant portion of their income, and of the full future earning capacity of that income, in order to fund a retirement system with a pathetically dismal rate of return. 

Social Security is not only socialist, insecure, and shitty.  It is also unjust and unconstitutional.

            As a program that takes wealth earned by taxpayers and redistributes it to beneficiaries on the basis of their presumed “need,” Social Security also epitomizes the moral code of the 20^th-century welfare state – a moral code based on the Marxist slogan, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”  In practice, implementation of that policy inevitably has lead to misery and destitution.  (Witness the history of communist societies, whether based on Christian, Marxist-Leninist, or Maoist dogmas, from the 17^th century to the present day.  Or consider the parable of the “Twentieth Century Motor Company” in Ayn Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged.)   

            The moral code of the welfare state is at odds with human nature – with individuals’ inherent desires to be free and to better their own lives – as well as with our society’s private morality, based on individual responsibility.  As David Kelley notes in his insightful book A Life of One’s Own, one of the tragic consequences of the welfare state is its basic assumption that the needs of recipients take precedence over the rights of producers – which means that “those with the ability to produce are obliged to serve, while those with needs are entitled to make demands” – resulting in “a public morality at odds with our private standards.”  (Kelley, A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State (1998), p. 2.) 

Although the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal law creating Social Security, in its 5-4 decision in Stewart Machine Company v. Davis (1937), that decision was wrong, based upon an incorrect interpretation of the Constitution that ignored its essential context as a document creating a federal government of limited powers, enumerated in the Constitution.   The majority of the Court held, essentially, that Congress had an unlimited power to levy taxes and to spend tax revenues on whatever purpose it wished, notwithstanding the explicit enumeration of federal powers in the text of the Constitution.   A retirement system – whether a true insurance program or the kind of Ponzi scheme that Social Security really is – is not among the enumerated powers of the federal government. 

Social Security is doubly unconstitutional, when we consider that it not only exceeds the legitimate powers of the U.S. government as enumerated in the Constitution, but also deprives individuals of their rights (both their rights to property and to economic liberty), in violation of the Fifth Amendment due process clause of the Constitution.  The Social Security scheme, as noted above, is the epitome of a government program that takes property from A (one class of citizens) and gives it to B (another class of citizens).  In early American constitutional law, it was universally understood that such a law violates the essential rights that all individuals have in a free society.  Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, in the landmark early Court case, Calder v. Bull (1798), observed that a law contrary to the principles of natural justice – “an ACT of the Legislature (for I cannot call it a law) contrary to the great first principles of the social compact” – cannot be valid; it “cannot be considered a rightful exercise of legislative authority.”  Among the examples of such blatantly unconstitutional laws that he gave were:  “a law that punished a citizen for an innocent action, or in other words, for an act, which, when done, was in violation of no existing law” [an “ex post facto” law]; “a law that destroys, or impairs, the lawful private contracts of citizens”; “a law that makes a man a judge in his own cause”; and – of course – “a law that takes property from A. and gives it to B.”  Chase added, “It is against all reason and justice, for a people to entrust a Legislature with SUCH powers; and therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it.” 

Real reform of Security Security – meaning privatization and eventual abolition of this horrid Congressionally-created Ponzi scheme – is inevitable, if the United States is to avoid total economic collapse.  Anyone who denies that Social Security faces fiscal crisis is in denial of reality, for the program is inevitably in conflict with demographic reality.  When the program was first enacted by Congress in 1935, the average life expectancy for 65-year-olds was only about 13 years.  The architects of Social Security assumed the program would remain solvent because they set the retirement age – the age at which benefits would begin to be paid – at 65, just a few years over the average life expectancy.  Over the past seventy years, although the retirement age has remained largely constant (Congress increased it to 67 in 1983), the average life expectancy has steadily increased.  In 1950, there were sixteen people working and paying Social Security taxes for every person receiving benefits.  By 1997, the ratio had declined to 3.3 people for every beneficiary; by the year 2020, the ratio will be less than two to one.  It’s plainly obvious that the system is a fiscal disaster; the only dispute is over exactly when the system will go bankrupt. 

As of May 2008 – that is, about a year ago, well before the explosive growth of the federal debt in recent months – an analysis by USA Today researchers estimated that the combined costs of federal liabilities to cover the lifetime benefits of everyone eligible for Social Security, Medicare, and other government programs totaled an unprecedented $57.3 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t,” in other words, $57,300,000,000,000) – the equivalent of a $500,000 credit card debt for every American household.  When obligations of state and local governments are added, the total rises to $61.7 trillion, or $531,472 per household – more than four times what Americans owe in personal debt such as mortgages.  The $61.7 trillion liability is, as an earlier article explained, “the amount that government needs now, stashed away and earning interest, to generate enough cash to pay future obligations.  The obligations are valued in today’s dollars and come due as early as in a few days, when Treasury bills mature, to as long as 75 years for Social Security and Medicare.”  (“Bill for taxpayers swells by trillions,” USA Today, May 19, 2008, and “Retiree benefits grow into `monster,’” May 25, 2006.)  The costs of Social Security and Medicare will skyrocket in the near future, as “baby boomers” – the 79 million people born between 1946 and 1964 – have already begun collecting Social Security, last year in 2008, and will begin collecting Medicare in 2011.

That’s pretty pricey (to horribly understate the problem) for a scheme that has no legitimate foundation in the Constitution – for a program created under an unconstitutional law, sanctioned by an erroneous Supreme Court decision, and sustained by a propaganda campaign run by demagogic politicians in league with special interest groups like the AARP.

It is a measure of how far the 20^th-century welfare state has corrupted American constitutional principles – how far it has undermined our commitment to individual freedom and responsibility, the responsibility each of us has over our own individual lives – that Social Security today is seen by many people as a “sacred cow,” rather than as the horribly unjust, immoral, and unconstitutional program it really is.  As Alex Epstein concluded in his recent op-ed, “Social Security in any form is morally irredeemable.  We should be debating, not how to save Social Security, but how to end it – how to phase it out so as to best protect both the rights of those who have paid into it, and those who are forced to pay for it today.  This will be a painful task.  But it will make possible a world in which Americans enjoy far greater freedom to secure their own futures.”

  

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday,  April 15, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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Spring Briefs 2009

 

 It’s that time of year again – time for another series of “Spring Briefs” on MayerBlog.  As the spring weather heats up, so too do controversies in the world of politics and popular culture.  Here are my comments on some current developments:

 

 

n                 The Busybody-in-Chief 

            The new president, B.O., is commonly caricatured by cartoonists as having big ears.  Although his ears may be the most prominent feature of his head, physically, if he were to be portrayed metaphorically, in terms of his character, his most prominent feature would be his nose.  He just can’t stop sticking it into places it doesn’t belong.  The nation’s Demagogue-in-Chief is also the nation’s chief busybody, using the “bully pulpit” of his office – or perhaps I should say, his “bullshit pulpit” – to state his opinion on all sorts of matters that do not fall within the constitutional purview of the U.S. government.  Even before his inaugural, he criticized the BCS college football system, calling for national playoffs.  Since his inaugural, he has opined about a seemingly limitless variety of topics:  D.C. schools’ snow days (coming from Chicago, he thinks folks in D.C. are wimps when faced with winter weather); the Superbowl (he’s a Bears fan, but he picked the Steelers to win); Wall Street salaries (he – who signed into law the nearly-$1 trillion “stimulus” legislation – thinks corporate CEOs’ bonuses are “shameful”); and even the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (as part of ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge, he picked North Carolina to win).  It’s only a matter of time before he declares the winner on American Idol. 

            What else can we expect from a president whose reactionary policies are hopelessly mired in the failed paternalistic approaches of the past?  From a politician who deceitfully promises “change” and yet who offers absolutely no new ideas, other than a radical expansion of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state? 

            President B.O., who took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” – even though he fumbled the oath, stumbling over its words at his splashy inaugural – ought to actually read the document.  If he did, he’d find that the legitimate powers of the U.S. government, including the powers of the president, are limited to just a few matters of concern to the national government, just a fraction of the business of America.  (In the famous words of that greatest 20^th-century president, Calvin Coolidge, “the business of America is business” – and it’s none of the damn business of the U.S. government.) 

  

n                 Daschle-ing through the Snow Job 

            In early February B.O.’s original nominee for the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), former Senate Democrat leader Tom Daschle, withdrew himself from consideration (despite pundits’ assurances that his former colleagues in the Senate indeed would confirm him) because of continuing controversy over his failure to pay taxes.  As Charles Krauthammer noted in a Feb. 6 column, Daschle “had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.”  What Krauthammer was alluding to, of course, was the fact that news of Daschle’s tax problem surfaced after news of similar problems by other “tax-challenged” B.O. nominees, chiefly Tim Geithner, the new treasury secretary.  (In retrospect, given Geithner’s failure as Treasury secretary, perhaps B.O. jettisoned the wrong nominee, a veteran crook over an incompetent tyro.) 

            The real scandal in Tom Daschle’s case, as Krauthammer adds (citing former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley), “isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal”:   

“Not paying taxes is one thing.  But what makes this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.  He’d been getting $1 million per year from a law firm.  But he’s not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist.  You don’t get paid this kind of money to instruct partners or the Senate markup process.  You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence. . . . [Moreover, Daschle] made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal’s private equity firm . . . .”

 

(“Well, that didn’t last long,” February 6.) 

            Krauthammer’s point is that Daschle’s tax problem – which really was an ethics problem – exposes the hypocrisy in B.O.’s campaign claim to dispense with Washington “politics as usual.”  Daschle’s influence-peddling “represented everything Obama said he’d come to Washington to upend,” Krauthammer notes.  That’s not surprising to those of us who saw through B.O.’s phony claims and promises to bring “change” to Washington for precisely what they were:  bullshit.

 

 n                 Fear-Monger-in-Chief 

            Yet another example of B.O.’s hypocritical bullshit has been his pledge (as stated repeatedly during his presidential campaign and then again in his inaugural address) to bring “hope” to Americans.  (“We have chosen hope over fear,” he pompously declaimed at his inaugural.)  Yet, in talking about the economy, he has used the most outrageous alarmist rhetoric:  he began on January 20 by describing the economy as “badly weakened,” then on January 23 said we’re experiencing “an unprecedented, perhaps, crisis,” which by January 30 had become a “continuing disaster for America’s working families.”  On the last day of January he said, :Rarely in history has our country faced economic problems as devastating as this crisis”; and a few days later, in early February, was saying the economy was “in desperate straits” and  that that “a failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.” 

B.O. and his administration clearly were using this alarmist rhetoric to help build political support for his massive, nearly $1-trillion economic “stimulus” plan and for his ambitious plan to take advantage of the “crisis” to push through the greatest expansion of federal government power in U.S. history.  White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, just after the election in November, brazenly spoke of the new administration’s “Rule one,” as he put it, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.”  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking in Europe a few weeks ago, urged her audience of leftist European activists to “never waste a good crisis,” suggesting that exploiting the current worldwide economic downturn could “have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security” – in other words, on advancing radical environmentalists’ anti-energy “green” agenda.  B.O. himself, in a radio address in early March, talked openly of exploiting the country’s hard times to “discover great opportunity in the midst of great crisis.” 

Throughout history tyrants have used “crisis” rhetoric to expand their power:  Lenin and Stalin did it in the Russian communist revolution; Hitler did it to bring his National Socialist party to power in post-World War I Germany, while Mussolini similarly exploited national insecurity to bring his Fascist party to power in Italy.  The similar technique that B.O. utilized in his recent “State of the Union” address to Congress was astutely identified by Charles Krauthammer, in another one of his insightful columns, “Obama’s `Big Bang’ Agenda” (March 6).   Krauthammer writes of the “brazen deception at the heart of Obama’s radically transformative economic plan”:  the president’s “rhetoric sleight of hand” in trying to claim that the current economic problems somehow were caused by the absence of his three ambitious legislative plans:  a program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as a goal.  “Amazing,” he writes:  “As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy.  As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest nonsequitur ever foisted upon the American people.”  The economic mess has nothing to do with the absence of universal health care, or the absence of “an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon tax, or the lack of college graduates; yet, “with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and in his budget that the essence of his presidency will be a transformation of health care, education and energy.”  Meanwhile, he has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the real problem, the banking crisis (or the housing and credit bubble whose bursting precipitated it). 

Notwithstanding the exaggerated rhetoric of B.O., his administration and their accomplices in the news media – who continually chant the mantra that we’re experiencing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression – it can be argued that, in real terms, the present situation is actually no worse than the recession of 1982.  As my colleague Brad Smith noted in a recent Columbus Dispatch op-ed (“Washington should halt its unhelpful financial `aid,’” Feb. 27), 

“The economy is bad, but unemployment (7.6 percent) remains substantially below its 1982 high of 10.8 percent, and economic forecasters predict it will peak well below 10 percent.  In fact, unemployment is still below the 1992 peak (7.8 percent) and the 1975 peak (9 percent). . . . Despite the president’s alarmist rhetoric, we are not even in the ballpark of the Great Depression, when unemployment reached 25 percent, exceeded 20 percent for 35 consecutive months, and did not fall below 14 percent until World War II and conscription of millions of people into the armed forces.”

 

The current short-term crisis is not unprecedented, but the president’s proposed response is:  not just billions but trillions in new government spending, coupled with talk of yet another major “stimulus” and of spending hundreds of billions more to nationalize health care.  As Smith concludes, “Each day the government seems to announce some new plan for interfering in our private affairs, including our finances and retirement planning.”  We have, under the current administration, “a frenetic, unsettling government that cannot stop doing something when the best thing it could do is to let what has been done already have a chance to work.”   

What B.O. is counting on is the same assumption that every socialist throughout history has made:  that capitalism is so resilient that, no matter what burdens government may place on the working of free economic markets, capitalists will still find a way, somehow, to make profits and thus bring the economy out of the current recession.  And that B.O. and the Democrat leaders in Congress can then claim credit for the recovery, by utilizing the post hoc, propter hoc logical fallacy – that simply because the recovery occurred after passage of their “stimulus” program, they can claim that it happened because of the stimulus (rather than, as is really the case, in spite of it).  The problem with this game plan is that B.O. and his administration may have gone too far with their alarmist rhetoric, turning their negative assessment of the economic crisis into a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.  

The real problem, though, isn’t with the alarmist rhetoric but with the misguided actions the president is taking.  It’s not mere coincidence that stock prices have continued to fall steadily since the election and since B.O. inauguration:  Wall Street is simply reacting rationally to the probable outcome of his policies – his actions, not his rhetoric – which logically, and inevitably, will not only fail to solve the financial crisis but will make our economic problems worse.  (It truly should be called “the B.O. Bear Market.”)  As Charles Krauthammer also noted in his March 6 column,  

“The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of

any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions – the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic – for enacting his `Big Bang’ agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.”

 

As Krauthammer concludes, B.O.’s agenda is “intellectually dishonest to the core”:  the “fraudulent claim” that health, education, and energy are both the cause of our financial collapse and its cure “is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.”

 

 n                 Fawn-tasy Island 

            Although Charles Krauthammer has argued (in the above-mentioned Feb. 6 op-ed) that the new president’s “honeymoon” with Congress has ended – maintaining that the “legislative abomination,” the so-called “stimulus” bill, which was B.O.’s first signature program, has exposed the hypocrisy in the new administration’s “fairy tale” that it represented a different kind of politics – Krauthammer’s thesis doesn’t seem to apply to the national news media.  For them, the honeymoon’s not (yet) over:  members of the media are continuing their love affair with B.O., fawning over him – or (to use the apt word in the title of Bernard Goldberg’s new book) “slobbering” over him.  (See Goldberg’s A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.  Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris, in a Feb. 8 column, “Why Bernie Goldberg Has It Right,” notes that the book, “despite its long title,” is important to read, to understand how partisan the American media have become.)  

As one example of the national media’s B.O.-mania and bias in favor of the administration, consider NBC’s Today show the morning of Wednesday, February 25, the day after B.O.’s “State of the Union” address to Congress.  Matt Lauer’s teaser at the opening of the program repeated the Democrats’ mantra that the present economic situation is “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” presented a clip showing B.O.’s speech at its rhetorical height, and then asked, “But are the President’s proposals specific enough?  We’ll ask Vice President Joe Biden.”  Imagine the Today show anytime over the past eight years choosing former V.P. Dick Cheney as the principal commentator, giving his reactions to one of George W. Bush’s major speeches, and you’ll quickly realize the double standard of the news media and the favoritism they’re showing to the administration now that their guy’s in the White House. 

That same day, February 25, another segment on Today featured an interview with Mrs. B.O., Michelle, talking about life in the White House – a puff piece that epitomizes the way the network news (and especially NBC and MSNBC) have become virtual public-relations arms for the Democratic Party and the B.O. administration.  In so doing, the news media are abdicating their vitally important role to act as watchdogs over those wielding governmental power – a role that, at a minimum, requires them to act objectively, if not skeptically, rather than as fawning cheerleaders for the administration. 

The media has yet to realize that B.O., one of the least-qualified men ever elected president, is in way over his head (his admittedly large head), and that his presidency is based on nothing but bullshit (what I call “B.O.b.s.”).  In other words, the media have yet to make the obvious call that “The Emperor Is Naked!,” as I did in my Oct. 16  blog essay. 

  

n                 Hope for the GOP? 

            The national Republican Party – which arguably was the segment of the U.S. population that suffered most from the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, and which then suffered from another near-fatal self-inflicted wound by nominating John McCainiac as its presidential candidate in 2008 – might finally be seeing the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel,” the key to its political comeback in the 2010 and 2012 elections.  That key may be found in, of all places, the GOP’s delegation in Congress, where every single Republican member of the House and all but three RINOs (Republicans in Name Only – Specter of Pennyslvania, Collins and Snowe of Maine) in the Senate voted “No” on B.O.’s first major signature legislation, the massive $787 billion “stimulus” bill (aptly called “porkulus” by conservative pundits).  The legislation has massive new government spending on health care, education, energy, and the environment – a “hodgepodge of government spending,” said Rep. Eric Cantor (R.-Va.).  Dan Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute called the package a “Trojan horse” that houses “a combination of payoffs to different Democratic constituencies.” 

What the near-unanimous rejection of the $787 billion abomination means is that Republicans finally have found their long-lost limited-government principles and have begun to develop the political backbone they’ll need to stick to those principles.  Ironically, B.O. has united us – the opposition, that is – and has given us common cause in fighting against his misguided policies.

  

n                 Rush (Man of the) Hour 

Rush Limbaugh has been getting lots of free publicity lately, courtesy of the Democrats and their friends in the news media, who’ve been trying to demonize him in order to split Republicans and to stir up popular support for B.O.’s policies.  The FOBOs (friends of B.O., as I call them) have feigned outrage at Limbaugh’s supposed remarks about “wanting the president to fail,” but they took his words out of context.  As Rush explained in his inspiring talk at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington in late February,  “What is so strange about being honest and saying, `I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation?  Why would I want that to succeed?”  Bravo, Rush, bravo!  

The Democrats are right about one thing:  there is a struggle now going on in the Republican party.  But it’s not the personality conflict between Limbaugh or RNC chairman Michael Steele, over leadership; it’s a far more profound struggle between two camps that are competing, not just for control of the party, but for its very “soul” – for the principles that will guide the party into the 21^st century.  On one side are so-called “centrists” or “moderates” in the party who would concede the legitimacy of the welfare state and would make the GOP merely a watered-down, somewhat less socialistic version of the Democratic party.  On the other side are a coalition of traditional conservatives, libertarians, and free-market advocates who still value capitalism and the American free market system and who oppose on principle all efforts to move America further down the road to socialism.  What Rush Limbaugh has done, so eloquently in recent weeks, is to show Republicans which side offers victory – and hope for keeping alive the American dream.      

  

n                 It’s a Hit! – But Just a Bong Hit 

            One of the hot news stories (especially on newspapers’ sports pages, or in late-night comedians’ monologues) in early February focused on a photo of 23-year-old champion Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps smoking from a marijuana pipe – aka a bong – at a private party in South Carolina.  Since the story broke, Phelps has been facing what arguably has been the greatest crisis of his career:  he was suspended from competing for three months by USA Swimming; he was dropped by one of his major sponsors, Kellogg Co.; he was threatened with criminal prosecution by a sheriff in South Carolina (who subsequently decided not to press charges); and, most recently, he’s endured a series of embarrassing interviews in which he’s been asked to apologize for his “mistake.” 

            It’s all much ado over nothing.  The only reason it’s a controversy is “reefer madness,” the continuing paranoia, or phobia, about marijuana – a naturally-existing drug that has many beneficial medicinal uses and which, when used recreationally, is no more harmful to users’ health than many legal drugs (alcohol and tobacco immediately come to mind), a drug that would be legal if the USA had sane drug laws, laws based on reason rather than irrational phobia.  USA Swimming, or any other sports authorities, arguably might have valid concerns if Phelps were using some sort of performance-enhancing drug – but that’s certainly not the case with marijuana, which has quite the opposite effect.  To put it bluntly, it’s none of USA Swimming’s damn business what Phelps does in his private life – whether he made one “mistake” by succumbing to peer pressure and taking a bong hit while partying with some other college-aged guys (as seems to be the case here) or whether he regularly smokes marijuana (as many other 23-year-olds do).   If it’s the latter, and he somehow manages to compete successfully – then all power to him, he really would be the greatest athlete of all! 

            Neither did Phelps’ singular “mistake” give Kellogg Co. a justifiable reason to terminate its sponsorship deal, apparently under some sort of “morals clause” in the contract, on the assumption that his scandalous behavior made him somehow less fit to be a “role model” for the kids who eat Kellogg’s cereals.  But what about all those dope users who also eat Kellogg’s cereals when they get the munchies?  The company seems to be thumbing its nose in their faces.  To their credit, almost all of Phelps’ other sponsors have decided to stand by their man, including Swiss watchmaker Omega (which issued a statement affirming it was “strongly committed” to its relationship with Phelps and calling the controversy a “nonissue” that concerned only Phelps’ “private life”), swimwear manufacturer Speedo (which called Phelps “a valued member of the Speedo team”), and Hilton Hotels Corp. 

            For those of us who’d like to see an end to reefer-phobia and to have both the government and sports authorities adopt rational drug policies, the lesson is clear:  Boycott Kellogg’s – and wear Omega watches and Speedos when staying in Hilton hotels.

 

 n                 Presti-digital-delaytion 

            Perhaps nothing better epitomizes the failure of the federal “Nanny State” than the U.S. government’s botched mandate to convert television broadcasts from analog to digital signals.  For most of the past year, U.S. TV watchers have been inundated with warnings about the “big switch” to take place on February 17, 2009 – but now it won’t take place until June 12, because members of Congress worried that millions of Americans weren’t ready for the switch.  So, in early February – barely two weeks before the original deadline – Congress voted to delay by four months the transition to digital. 

Like so many other problems in American society today, the problem was caused by Congress in the first place.  Rather than allowing the broadcast industry to modernize on its own – which would mean allowing the free-market system to work as it should, matching consumers’ demand with producers’ supply – Congress mandated the much-touted “new era in TV viewing” by forcing most of the nation’s broadcasters (all but a few low-power stations) to cease broadcasting analog signals and instead broadcast TV signals only in digital.  Despite the program’s self-serving propaganda (emphasizing the superiority of digital picture quality), Congress was motivated by more than a paternalistic regard for consumers’ welfare:  it also aimed at regaining control of the segment of the broadcast spectrum occupied by analog signals and redistributing that segment to other uses, including mobile broadband and public safety – which the U.S. government already had auctioned off, netting more than $20 billion for the U.S. Treasury.  ($20 billion used to be a great deal of money, but it’s now a drop in the bucket, compared to the nearly $1 trillion of U.S. taxpayer money the Democrat-controlled Congress recently spent in the “porkulus” legislation.) 

When Congress originally had decreed February 17 as the deadline date for the big switch, it also appropriated $1.3 billion for a program offering $40 coupons for American consumers to buy digital converter boxes.  (By an amazing coincidence, the average cost of the boxes ranges from $40 to $70.  Had the government not offered free coupons – up to two per U.S. household – to help “subsidize” the cost of the converter boxes, no doubt they’d be cheaper, by about $40, the cost by which the “free” coupons inflated the market price of the boxes.)  Now, as part of the recently-enacted “porkulus” legislation, more money will be spent to further inflate the cost of converter boxes, just so no American will be denied the opportunity to see B.O. give another televised address to the nation – or appear on Jay Leno’s “Tonight” show to promote his dishonest agenda.  

 

 n                 Octo-Womb 

            The bio-medical ethics cottage industry has been stirred up over the past several weeks with the national debate over Nadya Suleman, the 33-year-old single California woman who gave birth to octuplets the last week of January.  The saga of Ms. Suleman has been slowly unwinding in the news, and each new revelation helps complete the picture of possibly the most irresponsible mother in the world today.  She is the biological mother of 14 children, all created through in-vitro fertilization:  the octuplets, whose birth resulted from the simultaneous implanting of six fertilized embryos in her womb, have six older brothers and sisters, ranging in age from 2 to 7.  Ms. Suleman is unemployed, and she depends on government welfare payments to support both herself and her huge family. 

            Ms. Suleman, or “Octowomb” as I call her (an apt name alluding to her single most famous accomplishment), epitomizes all that is wrong with the modern “welfare state” and the way in which it fosters, and even rewards, personal irresponsibility.  By all accounts, she is unfit to be a mother:  she lacks the wherewithal to provide minimally adequate care for her children, either financially or psychologically; indeed, she appears to be “mentally challenged,” to put it euphemistically, or to be a “nut,” to put it more bluntly, as testified by her own mother (who said in an interview that Nadja has been “obsessed” with having children since she was a teenager), the public-relations persons who have quit working on her behalf, and by her own well-publicized 911 phone call (the day she mislaid one of her children and called frantically, saying she’s “going to kill myself”).   

            As a libertarian, I’m uncomfortable with the state second-guessing parents’ child-rearing decisions, but I also believe government has a legitimate role in protecting the rights of children who are suffering from parental abuse or neglect (when objectively defined and proved by credible evidence).  And while I generally take a broad view of reproductive liberty (the freedom to procreate, or not to procreate), I consider that liberty – like all other aspects of liberty, rightly considered – to be limited by actions that are harmful to others.  Personal freedom goes hand-in-hand with personal responsibility.  Just because Ms. Suleman desperately wants to be a mother – and, apparently, has some sort of sick psychological “need” to be a mother (whether of one, two, six, or fourteen children) – should not entitle her, in the law, to be free to be so, relieved of the awesome responsibility that bringing any child into this world ought to entail.  Again, by all accounts, “Octowomb” is an unfit mother who doesn’t deserve to have custody of any of her manufactured children.  California child-welfare agencies should place these innocent victims of Ms. Suleman’s insanity in appropriate foster homes, giving them the chance to live healthy lives in the homes of fit adoptive parents.  And the fertility doctor who helped her realize her sick fantasy – the doctor who violated the professional guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) that limit the number of embryos to be implanted – ought to lose his state license to practice medicine.  Maybe he should be forced to take care of two or three of the pups from the litter he helped to create.

  

n                 Damn Socialist Tinkering 

            Once again, earlier this month, Americans were forced to undergo the inconvenience of setting all their clocks one hour ahead, to Daylight Saving Time (DST), as mandated by an act of Congress.   I’ve previously written about this misguided law, yet another one epitomizing the folly of government tinkering with virtually all aspects of our daily lives.  I’m pleased to see Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today and usually a left-wing supporter of government tinkering in the economic sphere, in a recent column calling for the abolition of DST.  Noting how a reader has written him to complain how DST has interfered with her chickens laying eggs – in other words, as Neuharth puts it, “what this foul extra hour of early morning darkness means to her fowl” – he observes that now “chickens join parents of school-age children, farmers, city-folks with early morning jobs,” and others in opposition to the law, created by lobbyists for “the late-night crowd,” who pushed Congress to extend DST.  “Getting rid of DST would give most people – and chickens – something to crow about” (“Even chickens hate daylight saving time,” March 6).

  

n                 Twitter-dum and Dumber 

            There’s a new phenomenon sweeping the nation:  Twitter.  One uses Twitter to send “tweets,” or electronic notes (limited to no more than 140 characters), to one’s online friends, family, and other subscribers.  What’s really remarkable about the Twitter phenom is that its fans aren’t just young people who might find text-messaging too intellectually challenging.  Politicians and journalists have gone Twitter mad, too.  As Leonard Pitts, Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald, recently noted, several members of Congress were seen, during the president’s “State of the Union” speech, “hunched over their handheld devices madly tweeting, like fifth graders passing notes in the back of the class.”  One Republican Congressman from Virginia reported, “I am sitting behind Sens. Graham and McCain.” CNN’s Roland Martin, stuck at an airport in Chicago while trying to get back to snowed-in New York City, tweets, “No flights allowed in.  I was on plane in Chicago, we pulled out, got word, now back at gate.”  And NBC’s Ann Curry, in the snow-bound city, reported: “All Stars are not the proper shoes for NYC today.  But seeing this dark city frosted in white is worth my cold toes.”  That’s, I suppose, what passes for eloquence in the world of “tweets.” 

But Pitts’ criticism of this phenomenon truly is eloquent.  As he writes, “In the 90s, you often heard people complain of how memoir writers and afternoon talk shows had turned our public spaces into a communal confessional, intimate secrets once necessary for whispering now shouted into the other like an order at a fast-food joint.  Ten years later, we are not just sharing secrets; we are sharing lives.  And not the good parts, either, but the banal, the mundane, the everyday. . . . Now here is Twitter, which encourages you to narrate your life in real time as opposed to, well . . . living it.  I’m sorry, but include me out.  I will never Twitter you.  In the first place, you have better things to do.  In the second, I am not that interesting.  No one is.”

  

n                 Idol Speculations 

            Another new season – the 8^th, believe it or not – of American Idol has been airing on Fox TV, to continued high ratings.  As in past seasons, the news media has tried to stir up controversies, even where there really aren’t any.  First were the stories about the new, fourth judge, Kara DioGuardi, whose main purpose seems to be functioning (somehow) as a calming influence on Paula Abdul.  Then came stories about the new “twists,” or “tweaks,” in the rules this year:  resurrection of the old rule allowing the judges to pick “wild card” slots (only 9 of the top 13 finalists were picked by the viewing public), coupled with a new rule allowing the four judges to “save” one finalist from being eliminated prematurely (a rule that in practice, thus far, seems downright tacky, as it means that each finalist not “saved” by the judges gets to be rejected twice, first by the viewers and then by the judges).  Then came the Internet rumors that one of the finalists (guess which one) is – gasp! – gay.  Finally, just this week, came the even juicier Internet chatter (a rumor spread, perhaps deliberately, by an “A.I.” staffer) that the show’s producers have already picked the final four contestants – allegedly Danny Gokey, Alexis Grace, Adam Lambert, and Lil Rounds – and have somehow “fixed” the show so that one of these four will win.  (It’s a rumor already proven at least partially false when Alexis Grace was eliminated this week.) 

            The finalists this year are generally a talented group, but once again (like last year) the men seem more talented than the women.  Lil Rounds impresses me as the strongest of the female singers, but any one of three guys – either Danny Gokey, Adam Lambert, or Matt Giraud – could emerge as the best.  I like Adam Lambert, who is both a superb singer and a smooth (yet flamboyant) performer, thanks to his background in musical theater (wink, wink).  But, despite his devoted fan base (they have to be devoted in order to still vote for him after his outrageous performance of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire this week), I don’t see him as the winner.  I also like Danny Gokey, mainly because he wears glasses; he’ll go far in the competition – perhaps all the way to the final two – because his singing talent is coupled with a moving “back story” (his sorrowful loss of his wife, who died during heart surgery just a month before his audition).  But I’ll stick my neck out and predict, as my pick for the final winner, Matt Giraud.  Matt is a fellow Michigander (originally from Ypsilanti, he’s now a piano player and has “a gal” – a girlfriend, that is – in Kalamazoo).  Nicknamed “White Chocolate” when he was a kid performing soulfully in gospel choir, he seems like a cross between Michael Bublé and Billy Joel (especially when he’s playing at the piano).   Best of all, he’s a true dark horse contestant, one of the four “wild card” finalists, whom none of the pundits picked as a stand out at the beginning of the season – just the sort of guy who’ll really shake up expectations as the show continues to surprise viewers. 

  

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday,  March 19, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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Rating the U.S. Presidents – 2009

 

 

Another annual tradition on MayerBlog is my mid-February “Presidents Day” essay discussing my rating of the U.S. presidents.  As I explained in my original post (“Rating the U.S. Presidents,” February 13, 2004), my rating system differs from others in deemphasizing “leadership” per se and instead emphasizing fidelity to the Constitution.  I do use the same six categories as other rating systems – “Great,” “Near-Great,” “Above-Average,” “Average,” “Below-Average,” and “Failures” – and then (with some exceptions) arrange the presidents chronologically within each category.  I revised the ratings slightly in 2005 and 2006, as follows:

• “Great” presidents:  Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln

• “Near-Great” presidents:  Madison, Monroe, Cleveland

• “Above-Average” presidents:  Jackson, Van Buren, Polk, Coolidge, Reagan

• “Average” presidents:  Adams (both), Harrison (both), Garfield, Arthur, Fillmore, Hayes, Pierce, Taylor, Tyler, Taft, Harding, Kennedy, Ford

• “Below-Average” presidents:  Buchanan, A. Johnson, Grant, Eisenhower, McKinley, Hoover, Truman, Carter, Bush (both)

• “Failures”:  Roosevelt (both), Wilson, L. Johnson, Nixon, Clinton

(For an explanation of each category, see “Rating the U.S. Presidents III” (Feb. 15, 2006), and for easier access to my individual summaries of each president, see “Rating the U.S. Presidents (Reprise) (Feb. 7, 2007).) 

As I’ve previously noted, my “Rating the U.S. Presidents” essays are also perhaps the most controversial pieces I post on this site.  Everyone seems to have an opinion about the best – and the worst – presidents in American history, and many people (including some libertarian friends who generally see eye-to-eye with me on most political matters) are not shy about e-mailing me to express their disagreement with my ratings.  In my 2006 essay, I defended my rating of Lincoln as “great,” in answer to some modern libertarian critics of Lincoln (see “Rating the U.S. Presidents III” (Feb. 15, 2006), discussing “Abraham Lincoln: Why He’s Great”), a topic on which I elaborated somewhat in my last entry, in honor of this year’s bicentennial of Lincoln’s birthday.  And last year, although I left my ratings still unchanged, I focused on the U.S. president whom I’ve put at the bottom of the list of “Failures,” the one I consider the worst U.S. president ever, Bill Clinton.  So many people of various political stripes (left-liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc.), both defenders and detractors of Clinton, disagreed with my rating that I felt it necessary to explain the reasons why I regard “Slick Willie” as the worst president – reasons I continue to give in justifying my conclusion that he’ll remain the worst president, ever.  See “The Worst U.S. President” (Feb. 15, 2008). 

This year, I’m making one important change to the ratings.  Although in past years I defended my rating of the former president, George W. Bush (or “Bush the Younger,” as I refer to the 43^rd President) as merely “below average” – again see “Rating the U.S. Presidents III” (Feb. 15, 2006), discussing “George W. Bush: A Great Disappointment, But Not a Failure” – I’ve decided, now that his two terms in office have passed, to downgrade his rating, to “failure,” for the reasons discussed below. 

            I also include a review of the recently-published book, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, by Ivan Eland (Oakland, California: The Independent Institute, 2009).   

You’ll notice that I have not included the new president, B.O., who was just inaugurated as few weeks ago, for the obvious reason that it’s too soon to fairly assess his presidency.  (This is the one and only time I’ll show generosity toward B.O., whom I regard as the worst sort of bullshit artist, a slick politician who has the audacity to call his reactionary policies – essentially, nothing but a massive increase in the federal regulatory/welfare state – “change.”  As a popular witticism says, the only “change” the new president will bring will be the few cents left in the value of the dollar when his policies are implemented.)  Perhaps next year I will include him.  I will note, however, how I anticipate rating him.  As arguably the least-qualified man ever elected president, I expect he will rate no better than “below average.”  And if the dire consequences that I fear from his presidency do come to pass (see my previous essays on “the tyranny of bullshit,” in “2009: Prospects for Liberty,” Part I (January 15) and Part II (January 26)), then I think he will join his two predecessors in being rated yet another “failure.”

 

  

George W. “Bailout” Bush:  Yup, He’s a Failure

 

             Just three years after I defended my earlier rating of “Bush the Younger” as merely “below average” (insisting, as I did then, that calling him a “failure” gave him too much credit), why am I now downgrading him to the “failure” class (ranking him as even more of a failure than Nixon but not quite as bad as Clinton)?   I could say that, now that all eight years of his two terms are over, it’s possible to evaluate the full record of his presidency.  But that answer raises another question:  What, if anything, did Bush do wrong during his last three years in office, that would justify classifying him as a “failure”?  There’s a simple, one-word answer to that question – one that some commentators have now fastened onto Bush as a kind of nickname:  Bailout.  As I observe in my summary of Bush’s presidency below, 

What ultimately made his presidency not merely “below average” but a true failure was his administration’s massive, $700 billion “bailout” of Wall Street, following the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 – a crisis precipitated by Bush’s own Treasury secretary’s dire Apocalyptic rhetoric.  In doing so, he not only practically destroyed limited-government conservatism in the modern Republican party but also set in motion a series of events that threatens to undermine American capitalism by converting our semi-socialist “mixed economy” into full-blown socialism, under Bush’s successor, the current occupant of the White House.  Finally, to “Bailout” Bush’s lasting infamy, he left a record of dangerous expansion of executive power and undermining the rule of law – a record that actually built upon the disastrous legacy of his predecessor, Clinton.

 

            Bush’s disastrous economic policy has been aptly described as “disaster socialism,” by the editors of Reason magazine, in the lead article in the January 2009 issue (“Exit, Stage Left: Bush’s disaster socialism”).  Like the apologists for FDR who claim that his New Deal programs “saved capitalism,” at the price of undermining the constitutional system of limited government upon which capitalism depends, George W. Bush himself – in a December interview on CNN – by his own admission “abandoned free-market principles” in order (he alleged) to “save the free-market system.”  That admission speaks volumes about Bush’s failings – his shameful lack of understanding about capitalism (perhaps not surprising, given Bush’s M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School), as well as the American system of limited government.  He didn’t merely abandon free-market principles; he failed to have them in the first place, because he had no idea what these principles are.   

            Bush’s comment also highlights the trait that marked both the strongest and weakest features of his presidency:  Bush’s supreme sense of self-confidence, bordering on cockiness.  To his credit, he was not at all swayed by public opinion – in this sense, he was almost the opposite of his predecessor, Clinton, whose constant craving to be popular meant that the policies of his administration were practically determined by opinion polls.  Bush never let poor popularity ratings dissuade him from policies he thought were right – which is fine, when he was right (in cutting taxes, for example), but was most unfortunate, when he was wrong (as he was in deciding to “bail out” Wall Street) and stubbornly continued to pursue failed policies.

  

 

Reviewing Recarving Rushmore:

Why I Disagree with Many of Ivan Eland’s Ratings

  

Like my ratings (fully set out, in revised form, below), the system of ratings used by Ivan Eland in his recently-published book, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty (Oakland, California: The Independent Institute, 2009), challenges the conventional view of the U.S. presidents.  He too rejects the conventional view that equates presidential activism with greatness and instead emphasizes fidelity to constitutional limits on presidential power.  He emphasizes three values – peace, prosperity, and liberty – and rates the presidents according to how well they did in promoting those values.  The emphasis on prosperity (that is, on free markets) and liberty yield generally predictable results, but Eland’s ratings yield some surprising results overall because of his emphasis on the third factor, peace – a peculiarity of Eland’s analysis, explained by the facts that his think tank, the Independent Institute, is generally aligned with the pacifist, non-interventionist wing of the modern libertarian movement and that Eland himself is director of the Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty. 

Eland ranks the presidents into five categories: “excellent,” “good,” “average,” “poor,” and “bad.”  Given his emphasis on peace, he rates highest those presidents who not only limited the powers of the federal government and the executive branch, staying within the limits the Framers intended (as viewed by Eland), but also those who kept the United States out of war and who pursued a foreign policy of isolationism.  Thus, his four highest-rated presidents – the only four he rates as “excellent” – were all 19^th-century presidents:  Tyler, Cleveland, Van Buren, and Hayes, in that order.  (Yes, that means that Eland’s No.1-ranked president was the relatively obscure John Tyler, the Whig who resided in the White House for one term, 1841-45.  Tyler also was the first vice president to succeed to the presidency, after the Whig elected president in 1840, the war hero William Henry Harrison, died only 31 days after his inaugural.)  These four men – Tyler, Cleveland, Van Buren, and Hayes – are the ones Eland would prefer to see honored at Mount Rushmore (hence the book’s title, Recarving Rushmore), precisely because they were so “bland.”  As Eland summarizes their achievements,  

“[T]hey largely respected the Constitution’s intention of limiting government and restraining executive power, especially in regard to making war.  They realized that America is great not because of its government’s activism at home and abroad, but because of the hard work and great ideas of private American citizens living in freedom.  In other words, they realized that peace, prosperity, and liberty are best achieved by the framer’s notion of restricting government power.”

 

And, he adds, most of them – three of the top four (with Cleveland being the exception) – served only one term. 

What about the four presidents actually honored by the monument at Mount Rushmore?  Only one – George Washington – rates as “good,” according to Eland’s analysis.  Washington “grabbed more presidential power and made the federal government more active than most of the framers of the Constitution had envisioned,” and he set some bad precedents, including “unconstitutionally crushing the Whiskey Rebellion in 1793.”  Eland nevertheless ranks Washington “a respectable seventh” place because “he had republican intentions, shunning being a king or dictator, and set a most valuable precedent by leaving office after two terms.”  As for the other three on Mount Rushmore, Eland rates Teddy Roosevelt as “poor” (at No. 21 in his rankings), and both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln as “bad” (at Nos. 26 and 29, respectively).   

Some other surprises found in Eland’s ratings:  Jimmy Carter ranks as “good,” among the top ten (at No. 8), whom Eland sees as “the best modern president.”  Rounding out Eland’s top ten, the other presidents in the “good” category, are Arthur, Harding, Eisenhower, and Coolidge.  He sees Bill Clinton as “average” (at No. 11), joining John Quincy Adams, Taylor, and Fillmore in that category.  Of the early presidents, John Adams ranks highest, rating as “poor” (and ranked at No. 22); both Madison and Monroe join their fellow Virginians, Washington and Jefferson, as falling into Eland’s lowest category, of “bad” presidents.  Dead last in his rankings – the worst U.S. president according to his analysis – is Woodrow Wilson.  Except for Carter, Clinton, Coolidge, and Eisenhower, all the 20^th-century presidents (along with George W. Bush) rank as either “poor” or “bad.”  “W” comes in at No. 36, with only four presidents – Polk, McKinley, Truman, and Wilson – ranked lower. 

            Eland’s analysis is at its best when discussing domestic policy – especially when he critiques those 20^th-century presidents who abused presidential powers and expanded the scope of federal powers, to create the modern regulatory/welfare state.  He ranks Woodrow Wilson as last – the worst of the “bad” presidents – because Wilson was “the most interventionist president in U.S. history,” not just in foreign policy (bringing the U.S. into World War I) but also in domestic policy, with his “New Freedom” legislative agenda of government intervention in the economy that “laid the groundwork” for FDR’s New Deal.  Eland goes relatively easy on Teddy Roosevelt, whom he calls “charismatic” but “overrated,” “a less consequential president than his dull predecessor, William McKinley”; nevertheless, he criticizes T.R. not only for his “excessively belligerent” foreign policy but also for championing “progressive” policies – such as his “trust-busting” campaign – that unconstitutionally expanded government and harmed the country.   

            Perhaps the best chapter in the book is the one on Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Eland justly criticizes for his “Mussolini-style corporatism” that expanded the welfare state and abused executive power.  Eland excoriates FDR for bringing the U.S. into World War II – arguing that FDR “lied the United States into a massive war that he intentionally helped to provoke and allied himself with a dictator, Joseph Stalin, who killed more people than Adolph Hitler” – but his most solid criticisms of FDR concern his domestic program.  Eland concludes, “FDR’s New Deal had no coherent philosophy, wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, and cemented the expectation of permanent big government in the minds of the American public.  He actually deepened and prolonged the Great Depression by pursuing such activist government policies rather than letting natural market forces correct the economic slowdown.”  All this is a valuable history lesson, especially for today’s policy-makers (President B.O. and the Democrat-controlled Congress) who seem hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of the 1930s.   

            Eland is also good in criticizing late-20^th-century presidents who further expanded the federal regulatory/welfare state:  especially Lyndon B. Johnson, whose “Great Society” and “War on Poverty” not only irresponsibly wasted trillions of dollars but also “created a permanent underclass, dependent on the government for its livelihood”; and Richard M. Nixon, whose bad domestic policies – including wage and price controls, inflationary monetary policy, Keynesian spending programs, the federal “war on drugs,” and the creation of new regulatory agencies like the EPA, OSHA, and CPSC – not only ruined the economy but also expanded government as much, or more, than his predecessor’s.  

            Eland’s analysis suffers from serious flaws, however, when he discusses 19^th-century presidents.  He is most unfair in discussing Thomas Jefferson, whom he rates as a “bad” president because of the precedents he set with the Louisiana Purchase, his Indian policy, and the Embargo, calling Jefferson “a hypocrite on limited government.”  Here Eland repeats the false charge of hypocrisy that has been made by Jefferson’s critics, from his time to the present day: that the Louisiana Purchase contradicted Jefferson’s “strict constructionist” principles (that is, his strict reading of the power-granting clauses of the U.S. Constitution).  As I have shown in my book The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (1994), Jefferson’s actions regarding the Louisiana Purchase confirm, rather than contradict, his constitutional scruples.  (It was Jefferson himself who urged a constitutional amendment to sanction the Purchase, to “set an example” against broad construction of federal powers, even though under Jefferson’s own theory of constitutional interpretation the power to acquire new territory clearly fell under the federal government’s treaty-making power.)  Eland’s real objection to the Purchase seems to be his absurd argument that Jefferson “violated” Indians’ rights by purchasing lands they (rather than France) “owned” and then pushing them westward as Americans settled the territories – an attempt to scapegoat Jefferson by indicting him for the U.S. government’s Indian policy over the entire 19^th century (including the actions taken by Andrew Jackson and other successors).  The Embargo on foreign trade in Jefferson’s second term did drastically curtail Americans’ economic freedom, but the draconian enforcement powers Jefferson exercised as president were authorized by Congress pursuant to its constitutional authority to regulate foreign commerce.  The Embargo was a failed experiment in economic coercion to help avert war – it failed because war eventually came, the War of 1812 during the administration of Jefferson’s successor, Madison – but it was not inconsistent with Jefferson’s constitutional principles, which included the exercise of federal power in “its whole constitutional vigor.”       

            Eland is similarly unfair in his criticisms of Jefferson’s two successors – his fellow Virginia Republicans, James Madison and James Monroe – whom he also rates as “bad” presidents chiefly because of their foreign policy.  He blames Madison for the War of 1812, which he calls “an unnecessary and avoidable war,” although it was authorized by a Congressional declaration.  And he excoriates Monroe for his foreign policy (his famed “Monroe Doctrine,” which advocated European non-interference with the Americas) as well as for his support of U.S. westward expansion (including his continuation of Jefferson’s policy of what Eland calls “ethnically cleansing” Indian lands).  Just as he holds Jefferson responsible for 19^th-century Indian policy, he holds Monroe’s Doctrine responsible for U.S. interventionist foreign policy in the 20^th century. 

            Eland’s criticisms of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe illustrate the fundamental flaw in his analysis:  his misunderstanding of the proper scope of presidential powers in the realm of foreign policy.  Eland is a pacifist who allows his preference for peace to bias his view of presidential war powers; he confuses pacifism with constitutionalism, ignoring the fact that war is a legitimate exercise of federal government powers (at least when properly initiated by Congressional action).  He also would deny to U.S. presidents their full constitutional authority over diplomacy with foreign governments, which is a legitimate part of the “executive power” granted to the president under Article II of the Constitution.  As a result, he’s unjustifiably harsh in his critique of presidents who lead the country into war, even when they followed the proper constitutional procedure of asking Congress for a declaration of war.  He does this not only with regard to “Mr. Madison’s War” (as his Federalist political enemies called the War of 1812) but also with regard to the Mexican-American War, for which he excoriates James K. Polk and his “aggressive land-grabbing policies.”  Given his pacifism, it’s not surprising that Eland views “Manifest Destiny” with nothing but contempt and thus negatively grades any U.S. president who contributed to American westward expansion. 

As I discussed in my previous entry (“A Bicentennial Defense of Abraham Lincoln,” Feb. 5), Eland also shares with some other libertarian scholars an unfortunate agenda to demonize Abraham Lincoln – failing to understand the extraordinary nature of the secession crisis (a crisis that threatened not only the American Union but also the future of the republican form of government) and exaggerating the effects of Lincoln’s assertion of executive powers in putting down the Southern Rebellion.  Eland concludes his chapter on Lincoln with this extraordinary assertion:  “Instead of choosing war, Lincoln should have let the South go in peace, as the abolitionists advocated, or prior to the conflict, offered southerners compensated emancipation of slaves.  Under the first option, industrialization and rising moral objections likely would have peaceably eliminated slavery in the South – as they did in most other places in the world – helped out by a slave haven in the free North.”  That huge bit of speculative “alternative history” is totally unsupported by historical facts:  As the Confederate Constitution shows, Southern slave-owning secessionists didn’t simply want to be let alone; they demanded their “right” to expand their ownership of slaves into the western territories and even into free states they visited.  If the Civil War had not been fought, war between the United States and the Confederate States probably would have been inevitable – and Eland probably would have criticized Lincoln (or his successors) just as severely for getting the U.S. involved in that hypothetical war, too. 

Overall, Eland’s book is a provocative reassessment of the American presidency.  Like other ratings of the U.S. presidents (including my own, I admit), unfortunately it suffers from the author’s bias – in Eland’s case, his bias toward pacifism, which is (as I’ve noted above) so strong that he confuses constitutionalism with presidential weakness on matters of foreign policy and national security.  As Justice Robert Jackson once famously wrote, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact”:  it does not oblige U.S. presidents to refrain from exercising their legitimate powers (including presidential diplomatic and war powers) to safeguard the nation.

 

  

Rating the U.S. Presidents IV (3^rd Revised Version)

  

And so, with no further ado, here are my revised ratings of the U.S. Presidents. 

  

  

The “Great” Presidents

 

• George Washington:  He carefully exercised his powers as president, aware that he was setting precedents, the most important of which was the precedent of stepping down after two terms.

 

• Thomas Jefferson:  As I have argued in my book The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson and in various articles (see especially my essay on Jefferson in The Presidency: Then and Now, edited by Phillip Henderson), more than any other president since Washington, Jefferson took seriously constitutional limits, particularly the separation of powers.  Thus, as president, he respected Congress’s war power (in waging the Barbary War, the first U.S. foreign war).  He replaced the State-of-the-Union address to Congress with a written annual message (a tradition that lasted until Wilson’s presidency in the early 20^th century); he also refused to issue presidential proclamations declaring days of prayer or thanksgiving, because he viewed the First Amendment religion clause as (in his famous words) “a wall of separation between church and state” (a constitutional scruple which, unfortunately, few of his successors have shared).  And he even came close to jeopardizing his greatest success as president – the addition of the Louisiana Purchase territory to the U.S. – because he proposed a constitutional amendment (although an amendment was not necessary, even under Jefferson’s strict theory) “to set an example” against broad interpretation of federal powers under the Constitution.  (I know of no other president who so valued constitutional fidelity.) 

 

• Abraham Lincoln:  He not only saved the Union – the peculiar status of the United States as a nation comprised of states – but also republican government, by enforcing the rule that the minority must acquiesce in the legitimate decisions made by the majority, a rule necessary for republican government to survive.  Although he did so at horrible costs – the bloodiest war in American history, accompanied by expanded governmental powers and curtailed civil liberties – Lincoln did not violate the Constitution lightly.  (Indeed, given the extraordinary crisis faced by the nation during his presidency, what was remarkable was the degree to which he generally adhered to the limits imposed by the Constitution on his office and national powers generally.)

 

 

The “Near-Great” Presidents

 

• James Madison and James Monroe (tie):   Jefferson’s successors – and fellow Virginia Republicans – they each earned kudos for using the veto power to kill unconstitutional legislation, particularly “internal improvements” bills (bills to build roads or canals, the paradigm “porkbarrel” projects of the time).  Madison’s additional claim to greatness as president was his leadership during the War of 1812, arguably the American war that did least damage to the Constitution; but detracting from his greatness was his decision to sign into law the bill chartering the Second Bank of the United States – a position contradicting his opposition to the First Bank in the 1790s – because (he rationalized) the American people had tacitly consented to the broadening of Congressional powers.  Monroe shared with Jefferson a stricter interpretation of federal powers, requiring explicit amendment (not mere tacit consent) to go beyond those enumerated in the Constitution – the correct interpretation.

 

• Grover Cleveland:  The last Jeffersonian president (and the last good Democrat to hold the office), he aggressively used the veto power against private bills and other unconstitutional legislation.  In vetoing a bill in 1887 that would have appropriated $10,000 to aid drought-stricken farmers in Texas, he uttered the memorable words, “though the people support the Government; the Government should not support the people.”  He cut taxes as well as spending, he supported the gold standard, and he opposed protective tariffs.

 

 

“Above Average” Presidents

 

• Andrew Jackson:  Although he pushed the envelope in his exercise of presidential powers (earning the nickname “King Andrew” to his Whig opponents), he deserves great credit for vetoing the bill rechartering the Bank of the United States on constitutional grounds, thereby not permitting Chief Justice John Marshall’s over-broad interpretation of federal powers (in McCulloch v. Maryland) to constrain the president’s exercise of his duties under the Constitution.

 

• Martin Van Buren:  Notwithstanding the fact he was the first professional politician to serve as president, he was remarkably consistent in his adherence to limited-government Jeffersonian principles.

 

• James Polk:  He realized the United States’ “Manifest Destiny” by waging war against Mexico, after Congress officially declared it; and believing a two-term presidency promoted corruption, he served only one, as he had pledged he would.

 

• Calvin Coolidge:  The greatest president of the 20^th century because he did the least damage to the Constitution. “Silent Cal” earns bonus points for being a man of few words (although they include another one of the most profound truths uttered by an American president: “The business of America is business”), and for his lack of political ambition in declining to seek an additional term.

 

• Ronald Reagan:  Although his rhetoric was splendid (“Government is not the solution; government is the problem,” he declared in his first Inaugural Address on January 20, 1981) and promised a conservative revolution, Reagan’s administration disappointed those of us who hoped for real reforms actually cutting the size of the federal government.  Rather, he succeeded only in reducing the rate of growth in domestic spending.  But he did get Congress to significantly cut income tax rates, resulting in greater freedom for productive Americans (the freedom to keep the wealth we earn) and the economic boom of the 1990s.  And (his greatest legacy) by rebuilding U.S. military strength and by standing up to the Soviet Union, he won the Cold War – bringing about the collapse of Soviet communism and ending the greatest threat to national security (and world peace) of the 20^th century.

 

 

“Average” Presidents

 

• John Adams and John Quincy Adams:  The first father-son team to serve (in single terms, 25 years apart) in the White House, each had a mixed record as president.  The elder Adams, on the negative side, signed into law the blatantly unconstitutional Sedition Act of 1798; but on the positive side, he eventually stood up to the Hamiltonian Federalists and avoided war with France, leaving eight years of peace and prosperity to his successor, Jefferson.  The younger Adams began his presidency under a cloud which never fully dissipated: the 1824 election was decided by the House of Representatives, under circumstances that led to the charge of a “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay, which helped contribute to Andrew Jackson’s success in 1828.  On the positive side, his administration coincided with one of the greatest “feel-good” moments in American history:  the 50^th anniversary of American independence (and, significantly, the day both his father and Jefferson died).

 

• William Harrison and James Garfield:  One died of pneumonia a few weeks after his inaugural, the other murdered by an assassin, both had very brief terms – and thus did very little damage to the Constitution.

 

• Chester Arthur, Millard Fillmore, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford Hayes, Franklin Pierce, Zachary Taylor, and John Tyler (tie, in alphabetical order):  These unremarkable, unmemorable mediocrities typify the “average” American president.

 

• William Taft:  The heftiest president, his chief contribution to the presidency (presiding over a comparatively conservative interlude between the two “Progressive” presidencies of TR and Wilson) was overshadowed by his post-presidency service as Chief Justice of the United States.

 

• Warren Harding:  As my friend Brad Smith pointed out in a August 2, 1993 article in the Columbus Dispatch, Harding does not deserve the bum rap he’s been given by historians who associate him only with corruption and scandals (Teapot Dome pales in comparison to Watergate or “Clintongate”).  His administration returned the U.S. to “normalcy” – among other things, greater economic freedom and prosperity, civil rights protections, and lower taxes – after the draconian wartime presidency of Wilson.

 

• John Kennedy:  On the plus side, he got Congress to cut income tax rates (thereby reducing somewhat the injustice of steeply progressive taxation) and he led the U.S. through the Cuban missile crisis without starting World War III.  But on the negative side, he committed thousands of American military advisers to South Vietnam – and thus got us sucked into that conflict.  Were it not for the premature end of his presidency due to his assassination, he would be remembered as an unremarkable one-term president, the last president before the “Goldwater Revolution.”  (OK, OK – can’t I indulge in some wishful thinking?)

 

• Gerald Ford:  Although he restored honor to the presidential office in the wake of Nixon’s resignation, as well as acted wisely in refusing to bail New York City out of bankruptcy (“Ford to N.Y.: Drop Dead,” as the New York Post headline sourly announced), his administration continued the disastrous fiscal policies of his predecessor – resulting in a significant inflation problem, which Ford thought he could solve by having Americans wear buttons reading “W.I.N.” (“Whip Inflation Now”).  On the positive side, his administration coincided with another landmark “feel-good” event:  the American Revolution Bicentennial celebrations of 1976.  (And disco!)

 

 

“Below Average” Presidents

 

• James Buchanan:  His acquiescence to the secession of Southern states left his successor, Lincoln, with the greatest crisis ever faced by an American President – a crisis that Buchanan helped precipitate by his inappropriate reference, in his inaugural address, to the Supreme Court’s upcoming Dred Scott decision.  His presidency was marked by his utter failure to take responsibility for his actions, or inactions – and his too-ready tendency to pass the buck to others.

 

• Andrew Johnson:  Politically inept and dominated by his biases (including racial prejudice and class-envy), he openly defied Congressional Reconstruction policies through unprecedented use of the “bully pulpit” and aggressive use of the presidential veto power – prompting Congress to impeach him and almost remove him from office.

 

• Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower (tie):  Great generals in wartime, mediocre presidents in peacetime.  Grant presided over an administration in which corruption was rampant; Eisenhower’s main claim to fame was the Interstate Highway System, which continues to be one of the biggest pieces of “pork” in American history.

 

• William McKinley:  By getting the U.S. involved in the Spanish-American War, he transformed American foreign policy – ending American exceptionalism and turning the U.S. into yet another imperial power.

 

• Herbert Hoover:  Conventional wisdom blames him for the Great Depression because of inaction; but in reality he did contribute to the Depression, for the opposite reason – as Murray Rothbard has shown in his book America’s Great Depression, the disastrous government policies of the New Deal actually begun under Hoover, a so-called “Progressive” Republican who believed in government/business “partnership,” not laissez-faire.  The principal differences between Hoover’s New Deal and FDR’s was that Hoover’s relied on cooperation rather than coercion of business, and Hoover did not blatantly disregard the Constitution – which saves him from being a failure, like FDR.

 

• Harry Truman:  Although he successfully ended World War II (and saved thousands of American lives through his courageous decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan), he acted unilaterally in getting the U.S. involved in the Korean war, the first of a series of U.N.-sanctioned “police actions” to which presidents have committed U.S. troops without prior authorization by Congress, thus eviscerating Congress’s war power.  And by attempting to seize steel mills to forestall a national strike during the war, he blatantly acted outside the law – an action that the Supreme Court thankfully declared unconstitutional.

 

• Jimmy Carter:  His disastrous regulatory policies resulted in the energy crisis of the late 1970s; his disastrous foreign policies resulted in the resurrection of draft registration and the Iranian hostage crisis.  One of the most incompetent presidents in U.S. history, his principal achievement was making possible Reagan’s election in 1980.

 

• George H.W. Bush:  George Bush “the Elder” (as I like to call him) was the elder member of the second father-and-son team to serve in the White House.  His was at best a mixed record.  The elder Bush doomed his own presidency by reneging on his “No new taxes” pledge and by repudiating his predecessor, Reagan, with his promise of a “kinder, gentler” nation (which fed Democrat propaganda about cold, cruel “Reaganism”).  Sadly, his most popular action as president was also his most unconstitutional, committing U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf region, and warring upon Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, without prior Congressional authorization.  He also signed into law the unconstitutional Americans with Disabilities Act, which pushed federal government regulation of the workplace to ridiculous lengths.  Not surprisingly, Bush the Elder’s transitional presidency led the way from the “above average” presidency of Ronald Reagan to the failed presidencies of his two successors, Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton and the younger Bush, George W. “Bailout” Bush.

  

 

“Failures” as President

  

• Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (tie):  These so-called “Progressive” politicians, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, were political rivals whose policies (in terms of their disastrous impacts on the Constitution) were virtually indistinguishable.  They supported significant expansion of federal regulatory powers through the creation of such agencies as the FDA, FTC, and Federal Reserve System; and they demagogued against “big business” by abusing antitrust laws.   TR espoused a theory of unbridled presidential power as “steward of the people” that turned on its head the Constitution.  Wilson led the U.S. into a European war that did not concern the U.S. and during wartime exercised virtually dictatorial powers.

 

• Franklin Roosevelt:  His unbridled political ambition led him to seek reelection not once, nor even twice, but an unprecedented three times, thus destroying Washington’s two-term tradition until it was restored by constitutional amendment after FDR’s death.  His blatant disregard for the Constitution led him to expand government even further than TR and Wilson, with his so-called “New Deal” programs which destroyed American capitalism in the name of saving it (and which, as shown by Jim Powell’s splendid book, FDR’s Folly, actually worsened the Great Depression).  And when the Supreme Court stood in his way by declaring his programs unconstitutional, he proposed a “court-packing” scheme that shocked even his fellow New Dealers.  

 

• Lyndon Johnson:  His misnamed “Great Society” program (which should have been called “Huge Government”) resulted in the greatest expansion of the welfare/regulatory state since FDR’s New Deal.  He signed into law the unconstitutional Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the legislation creating the Medicare program.  And he turned the American military presence in South Vietnam into a full-fledged war that eventually resulted in the useless deaths of tens of thousands of young American men.

 

• Richard Nixon:  He escalated the Vietnam war, imposed wage and price controls without any constitutional authority to do so, and expanded the welfare/regulatory state as much as LBJ – and all this before Watergate.  With Watergate, he abused the powers of his office to cover up a third-rate burglary, which was done by his subordinates as political dirty tricks to further his reelection.  Two bright spots prevent his presidency from being a complete failure:  he did end the military draft (as the Vietnam war wound down); and by resigning before impeachment, he demonstrated not only a sense of shame (unlike Slick Willy) but also duty to the office he held (again, unlike Clinton). 

 

• Bill Clinton:  Hands down (or perhaps I should say, “Pants down”), the worst president – and the worst man to hold the office of president.  Before his first term ended, he already was presiding over the most corrupt and scandal-ridden presidency in American history (see my 1996 essay, “Clinton Presidency: The Most Corrupt”).  With “Monica-gate,” the scandal that led to his impeachment and trial during his second term, he abused the powers of his office to cover up his use of the presidency for sexual gratification; and he personally committed the felonies of perjury and obstruction of justice to cover up that affair in order to avoid liability in a sexual-harassment suit brought against him because of his prior abuse of the office of Arkansas governor, also for sexual gratification.   His legacy has been not only the growth and abuse of government power but also the virtual destruction of the rule of law in America.  (See James Bovard’s “Feeling Your Pain”: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years and The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton, edited by Roger Pilon.)

 

• George W. Bush (Bush the Younger):  Like his father, the younger Bush had, at best, a mixed record as president.  To his credit, he showed courageous leadership in the wake of the September 11, 2001 Islamic terrorist attacks, by abandoning the policies of his predecessors, who either ignored or appeased the threat of militant Islamic terrorism.  Unfortunately, with bipartisan support in Congress, Bush overreacted to the threat:  in foreign policy, he committed the U.S. military not only to overthrow the lawless regimes of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq but also to help rebuild Iraq; and in domestic policy, he supported policies that needlessly curtailed Americans’ civil liberties, expanded the federal bureaucracy, and practically ruined air travel.  His other positive accomplishments – tax reduction and a proposal to reform Social Security through partial privatization – were undercut by his negatives:  failure to follow through on either tax reform or Social Security reform, expansion of the federal welfare state by adding prescription-drug coverage to Medicare, and expansion of the federal government’s unconstitutional role in education.  And, like his father, he signed into law a major piece of legislation that he knew to be unconstitutional:  the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulatory law, which abridges First Amendment freedom of political speech.  What ultimately made his presidency not merely “below average” but a true failure was his administration’s massive, $700 billion “bailout” of Wall Street, following the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 – a crisis precipitated by Bush’s own Treasury secretary’s dire Apocalyptic rhetoric.  In doing so, he not only practically destroyed limited-government conservatism in the modern Republican party but also set in motion a series of events that threatens to undermine American capitalism by converting our semi-socialist “mixed economy” into full-blown socialism, under Bush’s successor, the current occupant of the White House.  Finally, to “Bailout” Bush’s lasting infamy, he left a record of dangerous expansion of executive power and undermining the rule of law – a record that actually built upon the disastrous legacy of his predecessor, Clinton.

  

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Monday,  February 16, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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A Bicentennial Defense of Abraham Lincoln

  

 

            When it comes to observing holidays (particularly those that are anniversaries of great events in history), I’m a traditionalist.  In the month of February, I observe – on their actual days – the anniversaries of the births of two of America’s greatest presidents, George Washington (on February 22) and Abraham Lincoln (on February 12).  And except for the excuse it gives me to post my annual essay “Rating the U.S. Presidents,” I have no use for the Congressionally-mandated, pseudo-holiday of “Presidents Day” (also because the only other truly great U.S. president whom I care to celebrate is Thomas Jefferson, on his birthday, April 13).   

            This year, Lincoln’s birthday on February 12 is particularly special, for it marks the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, on February 12, 1809.  As an admirer of Lincoln, I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of those celebrating his life and achievements on this very special day.  I do so especially because many of my libertarian friends – whom I otherwise generally agree with, on fundamental principles of political philosophy – have been so harsh, and in my view, grossly unfair, to Lincoln.  

            So, to observe Lincoln’s bicentennial this year, I’d like to write a short defense of Lincoln, and particularly of his record as U.S. president.   What follows is a slightly revised version of the essay I posted on February 15, 2006, as part of my “Rating the U.S. Presidents III,” discussing “Abraham Lincoln: Why He’s Great.”  To that I’ve appended the first essay I wrote about Abraham Lincoln, “The Lesson of Lincoln,” which I wrote when I was a high school student.

  

 

Abraham Lincoln:  Why He Was a Great President

 

Abraham Lincoln, who traditionally has been revered as not only one of America’s greatest presidents but also as a kind of second “father” of the country – the man who, as president during the crisis of the Civil War, presided over the rebirth of the United States – in recent years has been attacked by some writers, including some libertarian scholars, for being a “dictator” or a “tyrant.”  For example, Jeffrey Hummel, in his provocative libertarian history of the Civil War, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996), has argued that the war destroyed two of the principles of the American Revolution, the “revolutionary right of self-determination” and “decentralized government,” and thus that Lincoln, in effect, help originate the modern American nation-state (what some call “Big Government”).  And economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo, in his ironically titled book The Real Lincoln (2002), has presented an extreme (and ahistorical) iconoclastic view of Lincoln as both a “dictator” and father of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state. 

In the recently-published book, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty (2009), Ivan Eland (senior fellow at the libertarian think tank, the Independent Institute) echoes DiLorenzo – whose book he frequently cites in his chapter on Lincoln – categorizing the 16^th president as “bad” and calling Lincoln “one of the worst chief executives.”  Remarkably, although Eland concedes that the South “probably didn’t have the right to secede from the union” and that Lincoln “probably did have the right to put down the violent insurrection,” he maintains that Lincoln “managed the Civil Ware in an incompetent, brutal, and dictatorial way” and joins other libertarian scholars in calling Lincoln “the father of big government in the United States.”

These criticisms are not justified.  They are based on shoddy history – what some historians call “lawyers’ history,” which picks and chooses from the historical evidence only those pieces that support the author’s thesis – and they overlook the essential truth about Lincoln’s presidency:  that he faced a crisis unlike any other faced by any president in U.S. history, a formidable internal rebellion or insurrection that not only threatened the legitimate authority of the U.S. government but also threatened the very existence of the republican system of government. 

To understand why Lincoln had to fully utilize the powers of the presidency and of the federal government generally – and, yes, to bend some of the rules of the Constitution even to the point of almost breaking them – one must begin with the premise that underlay all of Lincoln’s actions.  This is the premise ignored by Professor Hummel’s book but which nevertheless is one of the foundational principles of American government:  that in a republican government, the reasonable will of the majority must prevail and, thus, the minority must acquiesce in the legitimate decisions of the majority.  Thomas Jefferson, in his First Inaugural Address, called this a “sacred principle,” because he recognized it was essential to the preservation of republican government (and indeed a corollary of the foundational principle he stated explicitly in the Declaration of Independence, that government derives its legitimate powers from the consent of the governed).  Lincoln, who frequently stated that his political principles flowed from those of Jefferson (which is why Lincoln’s political party used the same name, “Republican,” that Jefferson had used for his party in the 1790s), also understood this principle well and explained, in both his First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861) and his special July 4, 1861 address to Congress, why the secession of Southern states jeopardized this principle and, with it, all republican government. 

The Southern states that claimed to secede from the Union in 1860-61, following Lincoln’s election as president, had no “right” to do so.  The notion that any state might secede from the Union whenever it was sufficiently unhappy with the policies of the national government – a notion advanced first by Northerners (by the Federalist delegates from New England states at the Hartford Convention in 1815) and then threatened by South Carolinians in the 1832-33 Tariff Crisis, a famous prelude to the Civil War – was a controversial view in early American political and constitutional thought.  Always a minority view, it was amply rebutted by evidence from early American political and constitutional history showing that the United States of America was founded as a “perpetual” and “indivisible” union of the people of the several states – the view Lincoln expounded in his 1861 addresses and subsequently confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its decision in Texas v. White (1869).  As Lincoln explained in 1861, secession leads inevitably to either anarchy or despotism:  “If a minority . . . will secede rather than acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government must cease. . . . If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority.”  (That indeed was how the state of West Virginia came into being:  the pro-Union majority of the western counties of Virginia seceded from the secessionists who controlled state politics.) 

Nor could the Southern secessionists justify their action as an exercise of the legitimate right of revolution, under the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Among the key principles of the Declaration is the important corollary to the right of revolution:  that it is justified only when “a long train of abuses and usurpations” show a clear design to impose tyranny upon a people.  Southerners had no legitimate grievances about the policies of the U.S. government, either its past policies (which were perceived by most people in the Northern states as largely favorable to the interests of Southerners and particularly Southern slaveholders) or the policies expected under Lincoln’s administration or the new Republican majorities in Congress.  Nor did Southerners have any valid complaints about the legitimacy of Lincoln’s election.  (Indeed, as scholar Harry Jaffa has noted, if there were any serious improprieties in the 1860 elections, they were more likely to be in the South, where Southern Democratic candidates ran effectively unopposed.)   Those Southern states that attempted to secede from the Union in 1860-61 did so because they believed Lincoln’s election (and the election of Republican members of Congress) threatened to thwart their scheme to use the power of the national government to impose slavery on all parts of the U.S., including not only the western territories but even those states that had abolished it – exactly what Lincoln had warned about in his famous “House-Divided Speech” of 1858.  Southern secessionists not only sought to preserve slavery, but to expand it.  They were upset with the results of the 1860 elections because they thwarted their nefarious designs.  

The real motive behind Southern secessionism can be seen if one carefully studies the Confederate Constitution, adopted in Montgomery, Alabama in March 1861.  The Confederate Constitution explicitly protected slavery, prohibited Congress from passing any law denying or impairing slaveholders’ “property” rights (and required Congress to protect slavery in the territories), and effectively precluded any state from abolishing slavery by requiring each state to recognize slaveholders’ rights of “transit and sojourn” with their slaves.  To be sure, the Confederate Constitution also had some laudable features, including a single six-year term for the president, a presidential line-item veto, prohibitions on the use of tariff laws for protectionism, and limits on porkbarrel spending (particularly, for “internal improvements,” or roads and canals subsidies, so popular in the North).  But most of these laudable features were reforms suggested by four decades’ experience with government under the Constitution (many, like the line-item veto, are reforms still thought good ideas today) and not reflective of any peculiarly Southern constitutional views; moreover, with regard to those that were peculiarly Southern (such as opposition to protective tariffs or internal improvements), the hypocrisy of the Confederates was evident, for example, in the provision allowing internal improvements for river and harbor projects (which were popular in the South, given the extensive river system that marks the geography of that region of the country). 

Lincoln, who as president took the oath to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States, was duty-bound to regard Southern secession as an unlawful rebellion or insurrection – a vast criminal conspiracy against the Constitution and the laws, seeking to overthrow them – that must be suppressed with all the powers the U.S. government had at its disposal.  What was at stake was not only the Constitution and the laws of the United States, but also that great experiment in the republican form of government that the U.S. represented to the world in the 19^th century.  As Lincoln so eloquently put it in his July 4, 1861 address (anticipating what he would later say at Gettysburg),  

“Our popular government has often been called an experiment.  Two points in it our people have already settled – the successful establishing and the successful administration of it.  One still remains – its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it.  It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections.  Such will be a great lesson of peace:  teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.”

 

 (Emphasis added).  Southern secessionists, by firing on Fort Sumter and by declaring war on the United States in the Confederate Congress, were indeed the beginners of the Civil War. 

In waging the war – in putting down the insurrection – Lincoln indeed aggressively used the powers of his office, often pushing the envelope through unprecedented uses of presidential power that did, unfortunately, abridge Americans’ civil rights in many ways, as Mark E. Neely, Jr. documents in his book The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (1991).  Some of these actions – such as his order suspending the writ of habeas corpus, or his support of the draft law passed by Congress in 1863 – Lincoln based on plausible, albeit broad, interpretations of presidential or Congressional power under the Constitution.  (Congress, which explicitly has the power to suspend habeas corpus during insurrections, retroactively sanctioned Lincoln’s orders through its Habeas Corpus Act of 1863.  And military conscription was based on a broad reading of Congress’s power to “raise and support armies”—the same rationale used by the Confederate Congress, when it imposed conscription on the South a year before the U.S. Congress did.  (Of course, the post-war Thirteenth Amendment, by abolishing “involuntary servitude” as well as slavery, arguably made military conscription no longer constitutional.)  Other actions – such as Lincoln’s order of a naval blockade of Southern ports (upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Prize Cases (1863)), as well as Lincoln’s most famous action as president, the Emancipation Proclamation – were based on Lincoln’s broad interpretation of his powers as commander-in-chief.  They, too, were arguably within legitimate constitutional bounds.  Less justifiable were the restrictions the Lincoln administration imposed on freedom of speech and the press (abridging the First Amendment rights of Confederate sympathizers in the North) and the trial of civilians in military courts (found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, in its post-war decision Ex parte Milligan (1866)), which Lincoln justified as militarily necessary.  “Are all laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?”  Lincoln asked (in reference to habeas corpus) – practically an admission that some of his policies did violate the letter of the Constitution. 

If Lincoln did indeed bend the law, even to the pointing of breaking, he did so under a theory of extraordinary executive powers in times of emergency, in order to defend the very existence of the nation and its system of laws – a theory, sometimes called “executive prerogative,” that even Thomas Jefferson (despite his generally remarkable constitutional scruples) had believed in.  (Jefferson, after his retirement from the presidency, discussed the theory as a justification for the Louisiana Purchase, about which he remained uneasy long after his retirement – even though, as I have argued, the Purchase did not really compromise his constitutional principles.)  Unlike other chief executives who claimed to use extraordinary powers in response to various crises (other wartime presidents, chiefly Wilson, FDR, and President Bush the Younger come to mind), Lincoln faced a genuine crisis that has not been equaled in American history.  His greatness, as president, in large measure comes from the fact that he rose to that crisis and defended the Constitution while remaining as faithful to it – to its spirit, if not its letter – as much as possible.  His record during the extraordinary crisis of the Civil War stands in marked contrast to the record of most other presidents who, with far less at stake, have been all-too-willing to disregard their oath to support and defend the Constitution.

            Like other great figures in history, Lincoln should be understood as a human being, not as a kind of demigod, as depicted in the temple-like Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. or in the carving of his head as part of the monument at Mount Rushmore.  Like all other human beings, Lincoln should be understood within the context of his times and the full record of his life, including his flaws and limitations as well as his virtues and achievements.  With regard to his views on slavery, Lincoln cannot fairly be expected to “color-blind,” as an enlightened 21^st-century American may be; he shared the racist prejudices against persons of color that virtually all 19^th-century white Americans had, except for the most radical abolitionists.  Although he despised the institution of slavery and shared, with other members of the Republican Party, a sincere conviction to prevent its spread into the West, Lincoln understandably made the preservation of the Union his highest priority.  As he announced in a famous 1862 letter to newspaper editor Horace Greeley, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery.  If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.  What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

            In a sense, therefore, the argument that it’s a myth that Lincoln “freed the slaves” through his Emancipation Proclamation – an argument made by Lincoln’s critics and admirers alike, from his time to the present day – is correct.  Lincoln’s executive order declaring enslaved persons to be free applied only to those portions of the seceded Southern states still in rebellion at the time he issued his Proclamation.  It did not apply to slave-holding states that had not seceded (such as Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland), nor did it apply to areas of the rebellious South that were under the control of Union military forces (including New Orleans, Louisiana, and several counties in Virginia).  That was necessarily so because of constitutional considerations:  Lincoln’s order was based on his powers as Commander-in-Chief, “in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and Government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.”  It was a military measure designed to demoralize and destabilize the rebellious South, in order to help save the Union – in accordance with Lincoln’s primary objective, as stated in his letter to Greeley.  Nevertheless, the argument that it’s a “myth” that Lincoln freed the slaves – and the correlative argument that the Emancipation Proclamation legally “did not free a single slave” – is more smart-ass than smart.  In fact, Lincoln’s Proclamation did free many slaves:  in the short run, its actual effect was to give those enslaved persons in the South who were close to Union lines to escape behind those lines to secure their freedom; and in the long run, it was part of a chain of events that led not only to the military defeat of the Confederate South but also the permanent abolition of slavery not only in the South but throughout the United States.

            As a good lawyer, Lincoln understood that as president, he could do nothing constitutionally to abolish slavery in those states where positive law allowed it to exist.  But, also because he was a good lawyer, he also understood that this “peculiar institution” of the Southern states was legally and constitutionally (as well as morally) incompatible with the free-labor, capitalist system of the Northern states, and that (as he said in his famous 1858 speech in Springfield, Illinois), “`A house divided against itself cannot stand,’” and that “this government cannot endure permanently half slave and have free.”   Lincoln did not set about, as president, to abolish slavery in the United States, but the Civil War made possible the Thirteenth Amendment, which constitutionally did so.  Perhaps Lincoln’s most revealing remarks about slavery can be found in a less-famous speech he gave in Peoria, Illinois on October 16, 1854, when he debated Senator Stephen A. Douglas on the merits of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  Lincoln explained why he could not be indifferent to the spread of slavery into the western territories:  “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.  I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world – enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites – causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty” as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

            One of the measures of a truly great man is his ability to transcend the particular circumstances of his time – his own prejudices, based on his own limited experiences and knowledge of the world – and to grasp some essential, universal truth about the human experience.  Thomas Jefferson did this when he transcended his own experience as a slave-owner in 18^th-century Virginia and wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and from that equal creation are entitled to equal rights – an achievement that Lincoln lauded.  (In Lincoln’s famous words, “All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”  [Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce and others, April 6, 1859])  Lincoln demonstrated his own true greatness not only in his dedication to preserve republican government in the United States, as an example to the world, but also in his realization that the institution of slavery was a moral blight on America and the American example. 

 

 

The Lesson of Lincoln

 

What follows is the first essay I ever wrote about Abraham Lincoln – the text of a speech I gave many years ago.  It was my award-winning entry in the Lincoln Oratory Contest at the American Legion Wolverine Boys State in 1972, which I attended during the summer between my junior and senior years of high school.  (I represented my high school at Boys State, which was a week-long conference sponsored by the Legion and designed to teach boys about American government and civics.  At the Wolverine Boys State (WBS), held on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, June 14-21, 1972, I was elected and served as a state senator, was a member of the Glee Club and a staff reporter for the Whirligig, the WBS newspaper, and entered – and won – the Lincoln Oratory Contest with this extemporaneous speech.  Please keep in mind that I composed it at a time when I was young (age 16), naïve and inexperienced in the “ways of the world,” and (most importantly) when I knew very little about the history of the United States, especially during the Civil War era – mostly, just what I had gleaned from textbooks and from a few Lincoln biographies I had read (including Dale Carnegie’s hagiographic biography, Lincoln the Unknown (1932)).  Perhaps the essay reveals more about me than it does about Lincoln.  Nevertheless, thirty-seven years later, I stand by my admittedly over-simplistic view of Lincoln and of the important lessons we can derive from his life and career.

 

            “Honest Abe,” “The Great Emancipator,” “The Rail Splitter.”  All of these well-known nicknames refer to one man – Abraham Lincoln.  As a President – and as a man – Lincoln has been one of the most respected in all of history.  What is it that made Lincoln great?  The answer isn’t easy.

            Looking at the phrase “Honest Abe,” we might say that it was his honesty.  There are numerous examples, but one striking one is that of Lincoln’s experience in owning a grocery store in Illinois.  His partner died, leaving Lincoln with a $1100 debt.  Instead of using his partner’s death as a legal loophole of divided responsibility, Lincoln chose to pay off the debt himself.  It took 14 years, but the debt was repaid.

            If we look at the second phrase, “The Great Emancipator,” we might say it was Lincoln’s compassion for the suffering that made him great.  Lincoln knew the meaning of word poor in his early years when, as a boy, he himself lived in extreme hardship on the prairie frontier.  Lincoln learned the meaning of oppression as a young man with a job on the Mississippi River.  At a New Orleans slave auction, Lincoln beheld the true horrors of human slavery.  He told his comrades, “By God, boys, let’s get away from this.  If I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard.”  Around 1863 he did hit slavery, with the Emancipation Proclamation.  This proclamation was important, not in itself, but in the precedent it set – continuing even into today’s civil rights acts.

            Finally we can look at the third nickname, “The Rail-Splitter.”  The meaning is that Lincoln was hard-working, and no better example can be found than that of his self-education.  Filling out a biography in Congress in 1847 which asked “What has been your education?,” Lincoln simplyu answered: “Defective.”  His formal education totaled no more than twelve months.  Yet Lincoln developed one of the most valuable assets any man can have:  a love of knowledge, a thirst for learning.  Lincoln learned public speaking from a book borrowed from a neighbor.  He became interested in law when he ran across a volume of Blackstone’s Commentaries in the bottom of a barrel he cleaned out while working at a general store.  Lincoln’s education was best summed up by Mentor Graham, a Springfield schoolmaster who said that he had taught more than 5000 students, but that Lincoln was the “most studious, diligent, straightforward young man in the pursuit of knowledge and literature” he had ever met.

            Honest.  Compassionate. Hard-working.  Lincoln was all of these, but he was much more.  We all tend to generalize when we talk about Lincoln – to put him into categories.  But we cannot use one of these commonly-used nicknames to represent Lincoln.  His complex character – a unique blend of several qualities – can best be described as “Lincoln the Moralist.”

            Lincoln expressed no less than any other man a sense of moral obligation and foresight.  He realized long before the Civil War that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” and that “this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.”  When his rival for the Illinois Senate seat, Stephen A. Douglas, argued that the states [territories] themselves should decide by way of popular sovereignty the question of slavery, Lincoln replied that the moral question cannot be ignored.  Lincoln felt that the United States, if it truly stands for freedom and equality, must not be indifferent to the unjust treatment of any person.  In Lincoln’s words:  “To ignore moral values deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.  It enables the enemies of free institutions to taunt us as hypocrites.”

            “Lincoln the Moralist” can also be seen in his philosophy toward the struggle to save the Union.  At a time when Abe Lincoln was a young man of 20 traveling across the prairies of Illinois, Daniel Webster delivered a speech in the U.S. Senate.  Known as “Webster’s Reply to Hayne,” this speech was considered by Abraham Lincoln to be “the greatest specimen of American oratory.”  The memorable words which ended this speech were “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”  This became Lincoln’s political religion, and it was this idea – the close connection between unity and liberty – that Lincoln profoundly believed in during the Civil War.  His determination to save the Union – and the fate of world democracy – never altered, even at a time when tens of thousands of lives were lost and Lincoln paced the floor, asking “My God, what will the country say?”

            And even after the war, Lincoln the Moralist pleaded for the people of the United States to bind up the nation’s wounds with “malice toward none, charity toward all.”

            The outstanding quality of Abraham Lincoln was not solely his honesty, his charity, nor his ambition.  His greatest asset was moral realization – convincing himself of the rightness and wrongness of actions and then following these beliefs.  It was best summed up by Lincoln: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.”  It was this faith that made Lincoln great – and which is the greatest lesson any American can learn.

 

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday,  February 4, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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2009: Prospects for Liberty

Part II

  

Continuing my annual January blog essay on “The Prospects for Liberty” in the coming year, I’m emphasizing this year what I call “the tyranny of bullshit.”  As discussed in Part I, the single greatest threat to individual freedom today is paternalism – the expanding 20^th-century regulatory/ welfare state, which deprives individuals of the freedom (and the responsibility) to govern their own lives.  Here in the United States, given the results of the 2008 elections (with the party of the welfare state, the Democrats, increasing their control over the U.S. Congress and regaining control over the presidency), further expansion of the welfare state – and with it, the loss of more and more individual freedoms (not only economic freedom but other aspects of “personal” freedom as well) – will be a real threat for the next several years.  

The policies that will result in the expansion of the “Nanny State” are based on nothing more than bullshit:  bullshit rationalizations offered by paternalistic politicians, bullshit believed by a majority of the gullible public, the fools who voted for the politicians “whose sole qualification to rule [us] was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalizations that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun," to quote Ayn Rand’s apt definition of politicians.  Unlike other forms of tyranny in the past, the tyranny of bullshit is not based on the use of force against an unwilling people:  it’s based instead on fraud, fraud committed by the politicians who spout the bullshit theories that persuade a gullible majority of the people to put the collars around their own necks.  

Part I focused on the bullshit espoused by the new President of the United States, B.O., our new “demagogue-in-chief.”  Contrary to his claim – the mantra of “Change” chanted by the handlers of his presidential election campaign and espoused by his slobbering friends in the news media – B.O.’s administration will not bring any meaningful change to Washington.  On the contrary, it will bring just more of the same – more of the same tired, old, failed welfare-state policies of the past – nothing but an expansion of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state model, albeit on an even bigger scale.  The only questions remaining to be answered, as I argued in Part I, are:  How soon will it take for Americans to realize that B.O. is a fraud?, and how bad will things get in the United States? – how much will the economy be destroyed, how much will the Constitution and its limits on governmental power and its protections for individual rights be eviscerated – before the American people begin to demand real change – that is, a reversal of paternalism and a reinvigoration of the free, capitalist system that America’s founders sought to create? 

One brief, post-inaugural update to note:  In Part I, I made the following prediction about the new president: 

Given his politics, he lacks the requisite understanding of, and respect for, constitutional limits on the powers of government – which means that on January 20 when he takes the oath of office to `preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,’ he will be lying.  Virtually everything he’ll do as president will undermine the Constitution, the limits it places on the powers of the executive branch and the federal government generally as well as its protections for the rights of individuals. 

 

Anyone who watched B.O.’s swearing-in ceremony (either live or on tape) will see how he dramatically illustrated the truth of my prediction by flubbing the oath, stumbling over its words.  As Randy Barnett has observed on the “Volokh Conspiracy” blog, B.O. followed Chief Justice John Roberts in misstating the presidential oath – saying he “will execute the office of president of the United States faithfully,” rather than saying, as prescribed in the Constitution, that he “will faithfully execute the office.”  True, Chief Justice Roberts deserves some blame for getting the words wrong, but the new president – who, more than any other person, ought to know the proper word order in the oath, notwithstanding Roberts’ error – ought to be held responsible for getting it wrong himself.  (Law professor Orin Kerr, also posting to the “Volokh Conspiracy,” joked that the flubbed oath “teaches one important lesson: The answer to the question, `How many former editors of the Harvard Law Review does it take to administer the Presidential oath properly?` is `More than two.’”)   

All joking aside, however, the Constitution stipulates that “[b]efore he enter[s] on the Execution of his Office,” a new president “shall” take the prescribed oath.  As some perceptive commentators noted following the inaugural ceremonies, B.O. should have a “do-over,” taking the oath correctly, lest the constitutionality of his executive acts be called into question.  The fact that he did have the chief justice re-administer the oath in the White House on January 21 shows that the new president’s advisers took such concerns seriously.  Why is it so important that a new president properly take the oath?  It’s not just because the Constitution so stipulates:  it’s also because, in the history of Anglo-American common law, oaths are quite serious.  Under the old English law, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, if a litigant failed to correctly state his oath – if he got a single word wrong, or even merely stumbled over the words – the law regarded it as a divine sign that he was not telling the truth.  So, the real significance of the flubbed oath is that it proves my original point about B.O.’s contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law.  How appropriate a beginning for this presidency based on bullshit, to not even get the constitutional oath of office right!  (I believe B.O. is the first president in U.S. history to so mangle the presidential oath at his inauguration – which is an act far more telling about the prospects of his presidency than all the Lincolnesque symbolism and other pomp and circumstance that occurred on January 20.) 

Part II focuses on three other ways in which “the tyranny of bullshit” will manifest itself over the coming year, and beyond:  first, “green” bullshit; that is, the bullshit theories espoused by radical environmentalists – principally, the theory of “climate change,” or of “global warming,” allegedly caused by human consumption of carbon-based, or “fossil,” fuels – and the havoc that “green” public policies will wreak on American society; second, “bailout” bullshit, the policies followed by the Bush administration and likely to be expanded upon by the B.O. administration, of federal government “bailouts” of Wall Street, banks, the Detroit auto companies, and other industries, coupled with B.O.’s plans for a massive spending, or “stimulus,” program, that will exacerbate, rather than relieve, the current economic crisis; and third, and finally, the bullshit espoused by “Big Government conservatives,” paternalists within the Republican party and the conservative political movement who threaten to destroy any effective opposition to left-wing paternalism by offering paternalistic bullshit rationalizations of their own. 

  

 

“Green” Bullshit:

Threats to Liberty from Radical Environmentalism

  

Perhaps the greatest threat to the freedom and prosperity of the industrialized Western world today is the threat posed by radical environmental activists and the politicians who follow their bullshit, pseudo-scientific theories.  And no theory better epitomizes this “green bullshit,” as I call it, than the theory of “global warming” – or “climate change,” as it’s now euphemistically called – in other words, the theory that the average global temperatures are increasing, and that the Earth’s warming will lead to cataclysmic disasters such as massive flooding of coastal areas as the polar ice cap melts and the world’s oceans rise to dangerously high levels, etc., etc., and that this dangerous global warming is caused by human activity, namely, by man-made carbon dioxide (a so-called “greenhouse gas”) created by the burning of carbon-based “fossil fuels” such as coal, oil (and other petroleum products), and natural gas. 

The global-warming thesis is a theory that, despite the propaganda of global-warming alarmists, is far from being scientifically proven.  Indeed, it is a flawed theory that fails to fit the facts.  Even though a large number of scientists believe it, the theory is not proven; it remains merely a theory, a theory based on faulty “junk” science.  Even a supposed “consensus” of scientific opinion does not prove its truth, because science is not based on majority vote. And thankfully so.  The best scientists, in my opinion – those who care about objective standards of scientific proof and who know that good science is based on these standards, rather than on majority opinion – constitute a minority of “skeptics” who bravely resist the political pressures to join in the hysteria.  In recent years it has become politically correct for many scientists to jump aboard the global-warming bandwagon – in large part, because environmental activists have created such a climate of fear that anyone who dares speak out against the thesis becomes, in effect, black-listed (targets of media smear campaigns, denounced as “deniers” and equated with “flat-Earthers” or even with Holocaust deniers, unable to obtain government grants, etc., etc.).  All this is well-documented in an excellent book written by Christopher Horner (senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute), Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2008).   (See especially Chapter 6 of Red Hot Lies, entitled “Big Government: How Government, Politicians, and Alarmists Abuse Power in the Pursuit of Power.”) 

Perhaps the most “inconvenient truth” to the global-warming alarmists – to borrow a phrase from fear-monger-in-chief AlGore – is the fact that the Earth seems to be cooling rather than warming.  As Deroy Murdock reports in a December 18 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (“Global cooling is here”), there is abundant evidence that average global temperatures are lowering rather than increasing.  According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2008 was America’s coldest year since 1997.  In mid-December, for example, a half-inch of snow fell on the hills of Malibu, California, and three inches of snow closed the Las Vegas airport.  Last summer was Anchorage’s third coldest on record, and Alaska’s glaciers are actually getting thicker.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the equator, Brazil had an especially cold September, with snow in its southern provinces.  The same day the British House of Commons debated “global-warming” legislation in October, snow fell in London for the first time that early in the season since 1922.  Globally, surface temperatures are holding steady – a far cry from the 0.54 degree Fahrenheit average global temperature rise predicted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – while the average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere near its surface actually decreased some 0.25 degrees C (0.45 degrees F) between 1998 and January 2007; from January 2007 until the spring of 2008, it fell a whopping 0.75 degrees C (1.35 degrees F).  

The growing body of evidence of global cooling, rather than warming, despite increases in carbon dioxide levels, calls into serious question the thesis that manmade CO2 causes global warming.  Rather, recent data all seem to support the argument made by many scientists (including Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas) that natural forces, especially solar variability, much more than CO2, influences global temperatures.  (This year’s sunspots and solar radiation approach the minimum in the Sun’s cycle.  This solar quietude seems to underlie the global cooling in 2008.)  And viewed from the standpoint of history, climate change truly does seem to follow cycles related more to natural phenomena (like solar activity) and wholly unrelated to human activities.   Indeed, the historic evidence is that the Earth warmed since the end of the so-called Little Ice Age, about 150 years ago, but that we are presently experiencing a cooling trend, even as emissions of so-called “greenhouse gases” from carbon-based fuels are on the rise. 

Undeterred by such inconvenient truths, radical environmentalist alarmists are now avoiding the term global warming the way leftists generally have been avoiding the label “liberal”; instead, the P.C. term they now prefer to use is climate change, which supposedly covers either possibility.  But if all the hysteria they’ve generated is based on models of global warming, how could evidence that the Earth is in fact cooling mean anything else than their whole theory is fundamentally flawed? 

As I reported last year, the global warming thesis has been aptly called “a scam,” indeed “the greatest scam in history.” In a hard-hitting op-ed published on the Internet (on the Web site of Icecap, an organization dedicated to exploding myths about climate change) in Fall 2007, John Coleman – meteorologist and the founder of The Weather Channel – separated facts from fiction quite succinctly.  “There is no run away climate change.  The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic.  Our planet is not in peril.”  And yet, led by Al Gore, “the high priest of Global Warming,” perpetrators of this great scam have been remarkably successful.  Coleman bluntly explains how and why the scam has worked: 

“Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming.  Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the `research’ to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims.  Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going.  Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

 

“Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild `scientific’ scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda.  Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmentally conscientious citizens.”

 

Mr. Coleman concluded his op-ed on an optimistic note, predicting that in time – in a decade or two – the outrageousness of this scam “will be obvious”:  the horrible scenarios postulated by the scammers – polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding, super storm patterns, and so on – will fail to occur.  “The sky is not falling.  And natural cycles and drifts in climate are as much if not more responsible for any climate changes underway.”  Indeed, Coleman predicts, “the next twenty years are equally as likely to see a cooling trend as they are to see a warming trend.” 

Coleman’s statement drew attention, not only from conservative talk-radio hosts like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but also from the Weather Channel, which rushed to deflect his statement by distancing itself from him – and, in the process, conceded its own activist agenda, as Christopher Horner reports in Red Hot Lies.   

Unfortunately, as I also noted last year, by the time people realize that global warming is a scam, it may be too late:  politicians will have enacted legislation, purported to help “solve” this phony global warming “crisis,” which will in fact have devastating consequences on our economy and our lifestyles.  As Horner notes, “in the global warming agenda we are dealing with a premise that, once adopted, leads to no other conclusion than to accept government control of nearly every aspect of our lives.”  Quoting the economist Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic – who noted that global warming “has become a new religion or new ideology” – Horner notes how the warmists’ agenda “threatens to undermine freedom and the world’s economic and social order.”  Global warming, he notes, “is merely the latest, best excuse for energy controls and economic interventions – for the enemies of capitalism on the Left to undermine the market system and the freedom and prosperity it brings to people around the world. 

Already in the United States we have seen how the past Congress, working together with the Bush administration, passed legislation – the energy bill of late 2007 – enacting the radical environmentalist agenda, limiting the freedom (and decreasing the quality of life) of all Americans.  Among the consequences of that misguided legislation have been a loss of freedom of choice in the way people light their homes and offices (through the ban on incandescent light bulbs and the mandate for replacing them with compact fluorescent bulbs), a steep rise in the price of foods (through the mandate for increased use of corn-based ethanol and other biofuels), and less-safe motor vehicles (through an increase in the CAFÉ, or fuel-economy, standards) – all in the name of reducing consumption of carbon-based fuels in the generation of energy.  B.O. and the Democrats in Congress (allied with many Republicans, such as Senator John McCain, who also have jumped on the “green” bandwagon) plan to enact additional laws that will implement such things as “cap and trade” mandates to force utility companies to switch from carbon-based fuels such as coal to far more expensive – and far less reliable – “alternative” energy sources as wind and solar power.  Loss of freedom of choice for consumers and higher prices for electricity are just part of the consequences of such legislation; loss of reliable sources of energy and concomitant disruption in the nation’s electric grid – with brownouts and blackouts becoming common occurrences rather than extraordinary phenomena – are likely to be the long-term consequences of such misguided policies. 

The radical environmentalist, global-warming alarmists’ real agenda – and the real result of the legislation being pushed by their politician allies – is to so increase the price of carbon-based fuels that this plentiful (and safe and relatively inexpensive source of energy) will no longer be economically feasible.  This will have a devastating impact on everyone’s quality of life.  Chris Horner cites, for example, the agenda of one activist group – Carbon Sense Coalition in Australia – as evidence of the sort of proposals we can expect here in the United States, in the near future, to change our laws to modify people’s behavior in the name of preventing global warming.  Frighteningly, many of the schemes being pushed by the Australian radical environmentalists already have been enacted by the U.S. Congress, such as the ban on incandescent light bulbs and increased fuel economy standards (as noted above) and limits on choice in appliances.  The other schemes include: 

• Ban open fires and pot-bellied stoves

• Ban bottled water  (an initiative already begun in many localities)

• Ban private cars from some areas

• Ban plasma TVs

• Ban new airports and extensions to existing airports

• Ban “standby mode” on appliances

• Ban coal-fired power generation

• Ban electric hot water systems

• Ban vacationing by car

• Tax babies, big cars, supermarket parking areas, and holiday plane flights

Horner quotes B.O.’s policy advisor Jason Grumer in admitting, “This is going to require a kind of social commitment the likes of which we haven’t seen in this country since World War II.”  Given B.O.’s choices for key administration positions – for example, his pick for energy secretary, physicist Steven Chu, who is a global-warming fanatic who wants the U.S. to lead the way in cutting use of carbon-based fuels – we’re likely to see efforts to force these and other misguided policies on Americans over the next several years.

 

  

The Government’s “Bailout” Binge:

More Nanny State Bullshit

  

As I noted in my previous essay “The Myth of Market Failure” (Oct. 2), both Democratic and Republican politicians in Washington – not only the members of Congress and both the past and the current presidential administrations, but also the regulators at the Federal Reserve and other agencies – have reacted to the current economic crisis with misguided legislation that will only worsen the economy.  Both the $700 billion Wall Street “bailout” legislation enacted by Congress last fall (in response to the hysteria generated by Mr. Bush’s secretary of the treasury) and the over $800 billion “stimulus” legislation now being being pushed by the B.O. administration (with the new president utilizing similarly hysterical rhetoric) are based on the same bullshit theory – the myth that some sort of “market failure” (that is, a failure in the capitalist, free-market system) requires government intervention to “save” the economy.  The bullshit behind both the Bush “bailout” and the B.O. “stimulus” is the notion – originally propounded by socialist British economist John Maynard Keynes – that governments can, by spending vast amounts of their taxpayers’ money, somehow legislate prosperity.  That was the fallacious notion behind FDR’s “New Deal” programs of the 1930s – which scholars now know did not help the economy at all but rather simply prolonged and worsened the Great Depression.  (See the books I cited in my “Market Failure” essay:  Gene Smiley’s Rethinking the Great Depression (2002), Jim Powell’s FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (2003), and Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2007).)   

The economic history of both the United States and the world in the decades since the end of World War II have proven that Keynesian economics is untenable – nothing more than bullshit, to put it bluntly – and yet the policy-makers in Washington seem determined to repeat these failed public policies of the past.  It proves the truth behind the saying that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it:  similarly, those who are ignorant of the real history of the New Deal (not the propaganda of “progressive” activists and scholars, but the story of what FDR’s programs really did to the nation’s legal and economic system) seem doomed to repeat it – and to create a second Great Depression, as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. 

As I noted in “The Myth of Market Failure,” it was not capitalism, or the free-market system, that caused the current recession:  rather, it was misguided public policy, laws passed by the Congress and enforced by government regulators, that so distorted the private credit market that it created, first, a “bubble” in the housing market, which (when the bubble burst) has negatively affected credit markets generally.  One of the best essays explaining the causes of the financial crisis that I’ve read is a briefing paper published by the Cato Institute and written by Lawrence H. White, called “How Did We Get into This Financial Mess?” (Nov. 18, 2008).  As White explains, the root cause of the mess was the expansion in risky mortgages to underqualified borrowers, a policy that was encouraged (and even mandated) by the federal government.  The growth of “creative” nonprime lending followed Congress’s revision of the Community Reinvestment Act, the FHA’s loosening of down-payment standards, and HUD’s pressuring lenders to extend mortgages to borrowers who previously would not have qualified.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those Frankenstein monsters created by Congress, grew to own or guarantee about half of the United States’ $12 trillion mortgage market, yet Congressional leaders refused to rein in these institutions’ expansion, instead pushing them to promote “affordable housing” through expanded purchases of nonprime loans to low-income applicants.  And the credit that fueled these risky mortgages was provided by the cheap money policy of the Federal Reserve.  (Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, following the 2001 recession, slashed the federal funds rate from 6.25 to 1.75 percent, and then it was cut further in 2002 and 2003, reaching a record low of 1 percent in mid-2003, where it stayed for a year.  Subsequent actions by the Fed have slashed interest rates even further.)  Thus, as White summarizes it, “[t]he actual causes of our financial troubles were unusual monetary policy moves and novel federal regulatory interventions.  These poorly chosen policies distorted interest rates and asset prices, diverted loanable funds into the wrong investments, and twisted normally robust financial institutions into unsustainable positions.” 

Just as the “New Dealers” did in the 1930s, Congress under both the past and now the current administrations failed to address the root causes of economic downturn – the misguided governmental policies that distorted financial markets – and instead has continued, and even expanded, those misguided policies.  Rather than reforming Freddie and Fannie, Congress has not only allowed them to continue making bad mortgage loans but now is even considering using the second half of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout program to, in effect, further subsidize risky loans by providing more guarantees against mortgage foreclosures.  Overall, rather than allowing the housing “bubble” to burst and markets to reach a fair equilibrium – that is, to allow the market system to work, correcting itself, to reduce housing values from their overpriced levels of a few years ago to a level more justly reflecting their true market value – policymakers seem determined to perpetuate the “bubble,” prolonging if not compounding the distortions and making true recovery even more difficult at any time in the near future. 

What Congress has done in perpetuating and even worsening the problems it caused, in the housing market, it’s done to an even more dangerous degree in its efforts to “bail out” particular industries such as banking and the “Big 3” Detroit auto companies.   Consider the case of General Motors.  GM’s problems are not based, as many commentators have asserted, on inferior products, or “cars no one wants to buy.”  There’s nothing wrong with GM cars or trucks; they remain popular with consumers, both in the United States and around the world, especially consumers who appreciate larger, safer, more comfortable vehicles.  (Full confession here:  as a longtime owner and driver of a Buick car – one that actually gets fairly good mileage for a “gas guzzler” – as well as an owner of some shares of GM stock, which I inherited from my father, who was a longtime GM employee, I have a bias in favor of GM.  I also know more about the company than many of the commentators who’ve been spouting their opinions about it.)  GM’s fundamental problem is its high labor costs – not only the unjustifiably high wages the UAW union has negotiated for hourly workers, but also (and especially) the “legacy” costs (particularly the generous health-care benefits) that the UAW has extorted from GM and the other Detroit auto companies.  That’s why it would be in the best interest of GM for the company to go into bankruptcy, so it could renegotiate its labor contract (forcing the UAW to make some much-needed real concessions, not just the symbolic concessions it seemed to make as the bailout legislation was being considered in Congress); it’s the only way that GM, Ford, and Crysler can effectively compete with other foreign-owned auto companies (Honda, Toyota, etc.), which (because their factories are located in right-to-work states, where  even workers’ freedoms are protected from union monopolies) are not saddled with the high labor costs brought about by UAW extortion.   

The “bailout” legislation passed by Congress will not help alleviate this fundamental problem; the Democrats in Congress helped cover the UAW’s ass, just as they also evaded Congress’s own responsibility in aggravating Detroit’s problems, with CAFÉ (government fuel-economy standards) and other mandates that interfere with the carmakers’ ability to manufacture the kind of vehicles consumers really want (roomy gas-guzzlers).   Indeed, Congress has used its “bailout” of the Detroit auto companies as a vehicle (if you pardon the pun) for forcing its radical-environmentalist agenda on the companies.  With the members of Congress second-guessing the business decisions made by auto company executives, the industry seems doomed to fail, no matter how many additional taxpayer-backed loans and other “guarantees” the demagogues on Capitol Hill promise. 

What’s most disturbing about these “bailouts” are the precedents they set – precedents that will result not only in demands by other industries and institutions for more U.S. government “relief,” but also in the further erosion of constitutional limited-government and even of morality in the United States.  Already, we can see how the federal efforts to assist Wall Street, major banks and insurance companies, and the Detroit auto companies has spurred a variety of industries – including even the southern California porn industry! – to call for federal aid, too; and politicians in state and local government – such as the Democrat governor of Ohio, as well as the Democrat mayor of Columbus (both of whom claim to be friends of the new president) – have joined in clamoring for their piece of the incredibly expensive “pie” – the $800-billion “stimulus” program – currently being considered by Congress.  (Isn’t it interesting how many “friends” B.O. has, given his plans to redistribute some $825 billion of the wealth produced by American taxpayers!)   

Like pigs at the trough (or, perhaps a more apt metaphor) piglets suckling at a sow’s teats, all the looters are competing with one another for their “share” of the loot, U.S. taxpayers’ money – the wealth produced by others.  Such unsightly and, frankly, sickening competition over whose “needs” are greatest is, sadly, the inevitable consequence of public policies based on the Marxist principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  Thanks to the “bailout” philosophy, American society as a whole is being destroyed by the same vicious principle that destroyed the Twentieth Century Motor Company, as dramatized in Ayn Rand’s amazingly prescient novel, Atlas Shrugged, over fifty years ago. 

Federal government bailouts violate the U.S. Constitution, undermine morality (and the personal responsibility upon which morality depends), and worsen a bad economy.  

Bailouts are unconstitutional.  Subsidies of business, regardless what form they take, are not among the powers of the national government enumerated in the Constitution; by falling outside the enumerated powers, they are unconstitutional abuses of power.  Moreover, whenever government exercises its powers to “bail out” one particular company or industry, it unjustly enriches that company or industry and simultaneously unjustly penalizes competing companies or industries, thereby violating the fundamental constitutional principle of equal protection of the laws.  A government that has the power to “save” a particular company or industry – the power to make “winners” in the competitive marketplace – also has the power to destroy, to make other companies or industries “losers.”  Given what government is (an entity that uses force), it cannot do one without also doing the other. 

Bailouts undermine morality.  They do this not only by directly committing acts of injustice – rewarding the unworthy and punishing the worthy – but also by destroying the personal responsibility upon which all moral codes depend.  When a bank is “saved” from failure, or a homeowner’s house is “saved” from mortgage foreclosure, by some governmental action, the beneficiary of government largesse is relieved of his responsibility for the bad choices he made that caused his failure.  Simultaneously, businesses or homeowners who acted responsibly – those who made wise decisions, investing capital or spending money, and who did not live beyond their means, making purchases or investments they really couldn’t afford – are in effect being punished for their responsible actions:  not only do they fail to benefit from government largesse, but they ultimately pay the bill for it (directly through higher taxes, indirectly through the distortions that government deficit spending causes in credit markets and in the money supply).  We’re living under a welfare state that follows the perverse morality that punishes responsible people because of their virtue and rewards irresponsible people because of their vices.  As Walter Williams noted in a perceptive column late last fall, “We’ve become a nation of thieves.”  And we’ve also become a nation of moochers, increasingly dependent on government. 

Finally, bailouts worsen a bad economy.  They do nothing to address the underlying causes of business failure, as I’ve noted above in my comments about GM and the Detroit auto industry.  The “New Deal” programs of the 1930s – both the early programs of government aid to shaky businesses under Herbert Hoover’s New Deal (his Reconstruction Finance Corporation, for example) and the more extensive, and more coercive, programs of FDR’s New Deal (including the National Recovery Administration) – interfered with the natural workings of the marketplace, allowing poorly-managed companies to stay in business (by subsidizing them for their inefficiencies) instead of allowing the competitive system to work as it should, allowing the better-run, more profitable companies, to remain in the marketplace and to succeed.  Similarly, long-term unemployment insurance benefits might provide “relief” for the out-of-work employee, but from an economic perspective, they create perverse incentives for workers to remain unemployed – and dependent on government.  Thus, bailouts both for failed businesses and for unemployed workers simply exacerbate the problems of business failure and unemployment – because they interfere with the ability of the market system to recover on its own – and therefore prolong and exacerbate recessions and depressions, just as the programs of the 1930s did.   

The over-$800 billion “stimulus” legislation being pushed by the B.O. administration and the Democrat leaders of Congress will only worsen these destructive effects on the Constitution, moral responsibility, and the American economy.   Moreover, that massive increase in federal spending – and in the size of both the federal budget deficit and the U.S. national debt – will have an additional, truly frightening, devastating effect on the economy:  it will cause a major problem with inflation.  The combined policies of the Bush Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve already have expanded the nation’s money supply by dangerously high levels:  it’s not just the $700-billion Wall Street “bailout,” but actually a total of over $8.3 trillion in federal government spending to “rescue” U.S. financial markets.  (As summarized in a USA Today sidebar article, “Where is bailout money going?,” Nov. 28, the rundown of the total amount of known U.S. public funds that have been put at risk – either spent, allocated, or pledged – in Fed liquidity, loan and purchase actions, Treasury Department financial rescue efforts, housing support legislation and actions by other federal agencies, include:  up to $1.8 trillion in Federal Reserve purchases of top-rated U.S. dollar commercial paper, under a program launched in October; up to $800 billion in Fed support for mortgage and consumer credit markets, including purchases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt; up to $600 billion in Fed purchases of U.S. dollar commercial paper and certificates of deposit under a program announced Oct. 21; up to $1.9 trillion in new Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. guarantees for banks; up to $900 billion in Fed Term Auction Facility loans offered to meet financial institutions’ cash needs over the 2008 year-end period; the $700 billion for the Treasury to buy equity stakes in financial institutions (the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP); over $400 billion in aid to Citigroup and AIG; $200 billion to backstop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, plus an additional $144 billion in purchases of mortgage-backed securities by Fannie and Freddie; $300 billion for the Federal Housing Administration to refinance failing mortgages; and $29 billion in financing for JPMorgan Chase’s government-brokered buyout of Bear Stearns.) 

When an additional $800-plus-billion in new spending currently being pushed by the B.O. administration is added to this veritable orgy of federal spending, the nation’s money supply will rise drastically to unprecedented levels.  As any student of basic economics knows, when the supply of money – the number of dollars in circulation – increases, while the supply of goods decreases or at best remains stable, the inevitable result is inflation:  the value of the dollar declines.  Inflation is truly the most horrendous form of taxation:  thanks to government efforts expanding the money supply, the value of everyone’s wealth – as measured in the value of the dollar – declines.  As Robert Samuelson notes in his book The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath (2008) (excerpted in a fascinating article in the January 2009 issue of Reason magazine, “Lessons from the Great Inflation”), one of the most overlooked (and yet crucially important) landmarks in late-20^th-century American history was the rise and fall of double-digit inflation in the U.S.  From 1960 to 1979, annual U.S. inflation increased from a negligible 1.4 percent to 13.3 percent, as a result of huge blunders the U.S. government (and the Federal Reserve) made in the nation’s monetary policy in the 1960s and 1970s.  Thanks to the reform policies of President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) and the Fed under the leadership of Paul Volcker (chairman from 1979 to 1987), the inflation monster was subdued; by 2001 it had fallen to 1.6 percent, almost exactly what it had been in 1960.  But given the steep rise in oil and food prices last summer (thanks in large part to the federal government’s misguided energy policies, including the ethanol mandate), inflation had risen by late 2008 to the uncomfortably high level of about 5 percent.  Given the recent massive increases in federal spending – and continued deficit spending amounting to about $1 trillion more each year, as B.O. recently predicted – it seems that a best-case scenario would be a return to the double-digit Great Inflation of the late 1970s.  A worst-case scenario would be triple-digit inflation, the likes of which helped the Nazis rise to power in Weimer Germany. 

The fallacy underlying massive government spending programs – the Keynesian myth that governments can legislate prosperity by spending money – was exposed long ago by the great early-19^th-century French philosopher Frederick Bastiat, who wrote about “what is not seen” whenever government spends money.  This was his famous parable of the “broken window,” a hypothetical story involving a boy who breaks a shop window.  A group of onlookers try to console the shopkeeper by pointing out how repair of the window will help the local economy: “What would become of the glaziers if no one ever broke a window?” they rhetorically ask.  The six francs that the shopkeeper pays to the glazier to replace the glass in the window is “what is seen,” Bastiat observes. “What is not seen,” however, is what the shopkeeper would have done with his six francs if the window had not been broken – for example, replacing his worn-out shoes or buying a book for his library.  Generalizing from this simple story, Bastiat argued that the advocates for government action – those who propose a taxpayer-funded public works project, for example – commit the fallacy of considering only “what is seen” (the jobs created by government spending) and failing to take into account “what is not seen” (the other jobs, or other forgone activities, that would have been created by private investment had money not been taxed away). 

            By exposing the fallacy of the broken window, Bastiat called attention to a fundamental fact about government – a fact that frequently ignored by modern policy-makers: that government cannot legislate prosperity.  Government itself creates no wealth; it can only forcibly seize (through its taxation powers) wealth that individuals have created or forcibly compel (through its other powers) individuals to act differently from the ways they freely would have chosen to act.  Every time and every way government acts, through the coercive power of law, it interferes with the spontaneous order that would have resulted from the free market; that is, from the free choices of individuals in society.  Those who believe government can legislate prosperity are like those naïve townspeople in Bastiat’s story:  by considering only “what is seen” – employment for a glazier – they fail to consider “what is not seen,” the true costs of governmental action.   

Every dollar spent by the government is one less dollar that could have been used for truly productive purposes – by private businesses, to invest more capital in their enterprises.  Every make-work “job” supposedly created by government takes the place of the only source of real, productive jobs in our economy – those created by private enterprise.  Governments do not “make jobs”; they only destroy them.  Governments do nothing truly productive; they only forcibly take the wealth created by productive persons in society and reallocate it to other, non-productive persons, or looters.   

The one and only way that government truly can stimulate the economy is to get out of the way – to repeal the taxes, spending programs, and regulations that distort the market – and thus to set the market system free to function as it should.  Economists who understand and appreciate the free-market system – those of the so-called “Austrian” and “Chicago” school of economics – also understand that it’s natural for there to be a business cycle, with periods of “boom” and “bust,” and that recessions – even deep recessions, as the present situation seems to be – do not constitute a “crisis” requiring government intervention to “solve.”  Indeed, they also understand that government efforts to “solve” the so-called “crisis” are apt to cause a real crisis – just like that which the politicians in Washington are about to create, if and when they enact more misguided federal government “stimulus” programs.

  

 

“Conservative” Paternalism: 

Bullshit from the Right

 

Finally, another major threat to individual freedom from “the tyranny of bullshit” comes from the “right” side of the political spectrum.  It’s the resurgence of a paternalistic wing within the conservative political movement and the Republican party.   

These so-called “conservative” paternalists – a motley crew of intellectuals including social conservatives, “Big Government” (or “national greatness”) conservatives, “neoconservatives,” and “reform” conservatives – during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency pushed to the sidelines of both the conservative movement and the Republican party the Goldwater-Reagan coalition of traditional limited-government conservatives, “free-market” conservatives, and libertarians.  With one of their own (John McCain, one of the so-called “reformer” conservatives) as the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, the paternalists seem to have taken over the Republican Party, just as they had in effect taken over the Bush administration. Today the GOP is at a crossroads, with a struggle for the soul – and the future – of the party underway.  Will it recover its limited-government principles and thus offer a real alternative to the welfare-state policies of the Democrats?  Or will it continue to be the party of “socialism light,” differing from the Democrats only in the degree of its embrace of the paternalistic “nanny state” model? 

Among the purveyors of this “conservative” brand of paternalism is political commentator David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times (and the Times’ favorite “conservative”).  Brooks is the author of a number of asinine columns, but I’ll briefly focus on two of them, written over the past year, which I happened to see and to find particularly disgusting.  

In a July 18 column, “An Activist Age,” Brooks announced, “We’re entering into an era of epic legislation,” identifying five “large problems” that will “compel the federal government to act in gigantic ways over the next few years”:  health care (the “erosion of the social compact,” i..e., employer-provided health insurance), “the energy shortage,” “the stagnation in human capital” (by which he means the nation’s failed education system), financial market reform, and infrastructure reform (the U.S. transportation system is “in shambles,” he asserts).  To deal with these five problems, Brooks alleges, the next few years necessarily will be “an age of government activism,” similar to comparable periods of great governmental change, or “reform,” when “conservatives” ruled.  The two examples from history that he cites?  First is British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and his “One Nation Conservatism,” or Tory conservatism, that helped usher in the late-Victorian welfare state in Britain.  Second is FDR’s “New Deal.” 

Apart from Brooks’ ludicrous identification of either Disraeli or FDR as “conservative” leaders, note what’s missing from Brooks’ column – the unstated premises of his column, in fact.  First, the assumption that “activist” government can indeed solve these problems (which, as history has shown, is an erroneous assumption).  Second, and more fundamentally, what Brooks fails to grasp is that governmental policies have been responsible for each of the five problems he identifies:  first, the health care “crisis” (if there is indeed one) is the rising cost of health insurance and health care, a problem caused by government policies that created the employer-based system and then inflated prices by adding on socialized medicine in the forms of Medicare and Medicaid; second, energy shortages (that is, shortages in oil and gas) have been caused by misguided federal regulation of the energy industry, including the war currently being waged against carbon-based fuels in the name of combating “climate change”; third, the failed U.S. education system, which is almost entirely a problem of failed public, or government, schools (private educational institutions seem to be doing quite well, thank you); fourth, the problem with financial markets, which as noted above, was caused by misguided government policies and programs; and fifth, the problems with the nation’s “infrastructure,” roads and bridges, etc., which again have been mismanaged by government.  The obvious answer to these problems which were caused by bad laws and regulations, by bad governmental policies, is to repeal those laws and regulations and to change those policies.  That would be real “reform,” not an even-more activist government, which would simply compound the problems that government control caused in the first place.  That’s also the true “conservative” solution, Brooks’ skewed vision of conservatism notwithstanding. 

Even more disgusting is Brooks’ September 15 column, “Republicans must recognize worth of society as a whole,” in which Brooks advises the Republican Party to abandon Barry Goldwater’s limited-government philosophy and instead embrace – you guessed it – a “new conservatism” that “emphasizes society as well individuals, security as well as freedom.”  That sounds suspiciously like left-liberal Democrats’ collectivist philosophy, and in fact that’s exactly what paternalistic “conservatives” like Brooks would like Republicans to embrace.  Rather than seeking true solutions to the problems caused by failed government policies – for example, individual choice in health care, or vouchers in lieu of government-controlled schools in education, both sound ideas that Brooks ridicules – such paternalist conservatives would offer more failed government programs that differ from the programs offered by Democrats only in their details.   

With such collectivist and paternalistic bullshit emanating from the pens of self-described “conservatives” like Brooks, is it any wonder that individualism, responsibility, and free markets are now on the defensive in American politics? 

 

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Monday,  January 26, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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2009: Prospects for Liberty

Part I

  

Continuing the tradition that I’ve followed since MayerBlog began five years ago, I’m beginning the New Year with an essay on “The Prospects for Liberty” in the coming year.  This year the prospects are, to put it simply, not very good – and they’re likely to remain so for the next several years.  The success of Democrats in the November 2008 national elections in the United States, along with the resurgence of socialism in Europe and in other regions of the world, demonstrates the single greatest threat to individual freedom and responsibility in the world today.   

            What is that threat?  It’s the persistence of paternalism; that is, the use of the coercive power of government to “protect” individuals from themselves – that is, to prevent individuals from governing themselves, from exercising both the freedom to live their lives as they please (as long as they do not harm others by interfering with their rights) and from taking responsibility for their lives (which means, taking responsibility for the choices they make).  And what is the greatest force for paternalism in the Western world today?  It is the persistence, now into the 21^st century, of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state – a system of political economy which originated in Europe in the late 19^th century (in Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, under the leadership of his fascist prime minister, Otto von Bismarck), spread to Britain and other countries in Western Europe in the early decades of the 20^th century (during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras in British history) and eventually spread to the United States by the middle of the 20^th century (as a result of the so-called “Progressive” movement of the early 1900s and Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs of the 1930s).  The 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state, sometimes called the “nanny state” (for obvious, appropriate reasons) has also been called the “mixed economy” of the United States and other Western countries – the part-capitalist (or semi-free market), part-socialist (that is, government-controlled) economic system that has prevailed since the late 1930s in the U.S.   And it has been expanded, by Congress (whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans) and by FDR’s successors as U.S. presidents, again, both Democrat and Republican.  Although its proponents call themselves “liberals” or “progressives,” the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state is neither “liberal” nor “progressive,” in the true sense of those words.  Rather, it’s reactionary – harkening back to the paternalistic policies that the governments of Britain and other European nations followed for centuries, from the Dark Ages to the dawn of the Enlightenment.  (For more on this, see my essay on “Reactionary Progressives,” Mar. 16, 2006.) 

            In identifying paternalism as the greatest threat to individual freedom today, I emphasize that the threat is not, as many people in the Western world naively believe, the “culture war” with radical, militant Islam, which is about as likely to conquer modern Western civilization as an alien invasion from outside our solar system would be likely to conquer the Earth.  No, the greatest enemy of individualism in the world today is not the anti-individualist, anti-capitalist, collectivist ideology of radical Islam (or, for that matter, any other non-Western ideological movement).  Rather, the greatest enemy of individualism in the Western world today can be found in the Western world itself, in those aspects of Western thought that contradict the   individualism and capitalism on which the modern West has been based.  It’s the persistence of a social, economic, and political system that preceded the rise of individualism and capitalism:  an older system based on collectivism – a class-based, feudal, paternalistic, monarchical and aristocratical system that eventually was replaced by "liberalism” (in the classic sense), a system based on individualism, equality of rights, free markets, and limited government (or constitutional republicanism).   

            The only really “liberal” or “progressive” policy – to use the true sense of both those terms – is the policy of radical individualism, which in terms of political economy means free-market capitalism.  It was the rise of capitalism that made Western societies – especially Great Britain and the United States – so prosperous, and so free, in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries.    Contemporaneously, two great, revolutionary philosophical and political/economical movements – the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution – brought about the transition to individualism and capitalism, on which the distinctiveness of modern Western culture has been based.  Those revolutionary movements, unfortunately, were not complete.  (The American Revolution, one of the most important manifestations of the Enlightenment – the one that defined the United States of America as a nation uniquely founded on the principles of individualism and capitalism – was itself incomplete, as I have discussed in my essay “Completing the American Revolution,” written for my presentation at The Atlas Society’s conference in October 2007 celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.   (For more on this theme, including a reprinting of my essay as well as additional essays further exploring this “unfinished revolution” theme, see the forthcoming Winter 2009 issue of The New Individualist, the magazine published (now quarterly) by The Atlas Society.)    

            Legal paternalism, as championed by the self-proclaimed “liberals” or “progressives” in American politics today, is actually a reactionary policy.  It threatens to undermine the truly liberal, progressive policies of individualism and capitalism – as well as the “principles of 1776,” the radical individualist, limited-government principles on which the American Revolution was based.  It threatens to turn the clock back, not only to 18^th-century British paternalistic system against which America’s Founders rebelled during the Revolution but even further back to the monarchical, feudal pre-capitalist system on which the British system was based.  Paternalism, in the form of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state, again, is the single greatest threat to liberty in the United States and the world today.

  

 

This Year’s Theme: “The Tyranny of Bullshit” 

 

Last year’s New Year’s essay (“2008: Prospects for Liberty”) focused on what I called the “four fascisms,” four aspects of statist collectivism (or “fascism,” in the literal sense of the term) that posed what I regarded as the greatest challenges to individual liberty in 2008:  (1) “Eco-Fascism,” the tyranny of radical environmentalists, including the global-warming hoax and other myths propagated by “green” activists as a rationale for imposing their agenda on us by force; (2) “Nanny-State Fascism,” the tyranny of the health police, who seek to turn everyone into wards of the state, including the movement pushing for “universal” health care – that is, government monopolization of the health care industry (what used to be called, and still is, socialized medicine); (3) “Demopublican/ Replicrat Fascism,” the tyranny of the two-party political system in the United States, particularly dangerous in 2008 as an election year; and last, (4) “Islamo-Fascism,” the danger of militant, fundamentalist Islam to the United States and the rest of the civilized world.   

            With the exception of Islamo-Fascism (the danger of which is greatly exaggerated, as noted above), these “fascist” threats still remain as major threats to individual liberty.  But the success of Democrats in the November 2008 federal elections in the United States – retaining, and even increasing, their control over both houses of Congress as well as recapturing the White House – was possible because of yet another phenomenon, one that today makes possible the resurgence of welfare-state paternalistic policies. 

            That phenomenon – the theme of this year’s essay – is what I call “the tyranny of bullshit.”  Welfare-state paternalistic policies are popular, among the American public and large segments of the electorate of other Western democratic societies, because they’re based on various myths that are believed in by the gullible masses.  (Contrary to the old adage, “forty million Frenchmen” – or seventy million Americans – indeed can “be wrong.”  And, it turns out, you can fool most of the people most of the time.  Look how many Americans, for example, let Oprah Winfrey’s producers pick the books they read!)  I could discuss some of the most important myths (about history, economics, and human nature) on which the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state has been founded.  But I think it’s more interesting to talk not about those myths in an academic sense, but rather to talk about them in a less formal way.  What scholars call myths or legends, ordinary people call, more bluntly, “bullshit.”  And so, it’s the bullshit on which welfare-state paternalism rests – and, even more importantly, on which the arguments for expanding the welfare state (as spouted mostly by Democrat politicians) rest – that will be the topic of this year’s essay. 

            I call it “the tyranny of bullshit” because it’s a peculiar form of tyranny, one based on the gullibility of people who vote for the politicians who are taking away their liberties based upon the bullshit rationalizations they espouse.  I’m reminded here of Ayn Rand’s definition of politician: “men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalizations that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun."  The “fraudulent generalizations” that support expansion of the welfare state today are nothing more than bullshit: theories based not on well-established facts about objective reality, but rather on phony “junk science,” or on misuse of statistics and other empirical data, or erroneous (and often unstated) premises, or on nothing but irrational “faith,” or superstition.  

            Again this year I’ll identify four kinds of threats – four forms of bullshit – that seem most threatening to individual liberty in 2009.  Part I focuses on the most visible bullshit in the news today, the new presidential administration and its talk about “change”:  Nothing better illustrates the gullibility of the people, the gullibility that makes the tyranny of bullshit possible, than their naïve belief that the new president and his administration somehow will bring real change to Washington, D.C.

 

 

“Change” Bullshit:

Threats to Liberty from the New Demagogue-in-Chief’s Administration

  

            The President-elect, B.O., is a master purveyor of bullshit – truly a bullshit artist – as I’ve previously discussed here.  (See my essay “The Emperor Is Naked!” (Oct. 16).  As to why I refer to the President-elect by its initials rather than by name, see the first entry in my “Fall-deral 2008” essay (Nov. 6).) 

            B.O. is unfit to be president of the United States.  He’s one of the least qualified persons ever to hold the office:  he has no executive government experience and limited experience holding office at the national level (as a first-term U.S. Senator, he accomplished nothing other than running for the presidency).  I’ve called him an “affirmative action president” because his election epitomizes the injustice of so-called “affirmative action,” or racial preference, programs, which select persons not because of their abilities or qualifications as an individual but solely because of their race.  His campaign deftly played the “race card,” cashing in on the dregs of America’s past problems with racism:  black group-identity politics and white liberal guilt.  If he had not racially identified himself as a black man and cashed in on racism, he would not have been nominated by the Democrats’ party, let alone elected president.  

            He also has far-left political views, well outside the “mainstream” views of most Americans.  He may not be an out-and-out socialist (like, for example, Bernie Sanders, the former Democratic and now independent U.S. Senator from Vermont), but his political views have been shaped by the influence of Marxist mentors his entire life.  More than any other man who has occupied the White House – including those early-20^th-century harbingers of the welfare state, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt – B.O. is friendly to socialism and is ignorant of, if not hostile to, free-market capitalism.  Given his politics, he lacks the requisite understanding of, and respect for, constitutional limits on the powers of government – which means that on January 20 when he takes the oath of office to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he will be lying.  Virtually everything he’ll do as president will undermine the Constitution, the limits it places on the powers of the executive branch and the federal government generally as well as its protections for the rights of individuals.  The only real uncertainty about B.O.’s presidency is how much damage he will do – and how soon. 

            B.O. got his party’s nomination and was elected president because of his campaign – which I have likened to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (again, see my Oct. 6 essay, “The Emperor Is Naked!”).  It was a campaign based almost entirely on bullshit:  the image portrayed of B.O. as a “uniter” (when in fact he employs the standard Democrat demagoguery based on race and class divisiveness), his image as a “centrist” (when in fact, as previously noted, he’s one of the most left-wing politicians ever elected president) – all this is bullshit. 

            The biggest load of bullshit associated with B.O. and his campaign for the presidency, however, is the notion that he’ll bring “change” to Washington.  The constant references to “Change,” or “Change You Can Trust,” etcetera, are nothing but pure bullshit because all B.O.’s administration will bring to Washington is more of the same – more of the same old, tired semi-socialist, paternalist policies that the federal government has been tinkering with, under both Democrat and Republican administrations, for the past century or so, since the beginning of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state.  All B.O. really promises to do is to expand the welfare state – to increase government and its controls over Americans’ lives, making the U.S. even more of a socialist country – and that’s not any kind of real “change” in public policy, at all.   

            Consider the contrast between B.O. and the greatest president since World War II, Ronald Reagan.  In his first inaugural address, Reagan spoke the memorable line, “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”  Those words are more true today than when spoken by Reagan 28 years ago.  Yet B.O. is so out of touch with reality that he believes precisely the opposite:  as he stated in a recent press conference, he believes not only that government can solve America’s problems but that only government can solve our problems.  He seeks to expand, not restrict, government – to make the federal government even more intrusive in controlling virtually all aspects of Americans’ lives, and to substitute for the spontaneous order that emerges from a free marketplace the coerced order that emerges from government planning and controls.  B.O. suffers from what F.A. Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of socialism:  the false belief that government planning not only works but that it works better than free markets.  Or, to put it another way, that government bureaucrats’ decisions ought to substitute for the choices spontaneously made by millions of individuals in a free marketplace. 

            All this, of course, does not bode well for liberty in 2009 and in the coming years.  Those of us who care about limited government and individual freedom and responsibility can only hope that B.O.’s incompetence will minimize the damage he’ll do in exercising the awesomely dangerous powers of his office.  And that his incompetence will become obvious – even to a leftist partisan, blindly adoring news media (a news media still embarrassingly engaged in a “slobbering” love affair with B.O., to borrow the title of Bernard Goldberg’s new book) – soon enough that the “honeymoon” period new U.S. presidents traditionally enjoy will be blessedly brief.  And, we hope, he’ll be just a one-term president, like Jimmy Carter. 

            Given the serious problems with the U.S. (and world) economy today, and the misguided policies that the new administration and Congress will pursue in dealing with the economic crisis, it’s fairly certain that instead of “making history,” we’ll be repeating history.  As I tell my students, the old saying – that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it – is true, especially in the United States, where it seems the politicians and policymakers are always ignorant of history and therefore always continue to repeat the mistakes of the past.  In the case of B.O.’s administration, the only question is which mistakes – the mistakes of which prior Democratic administration – will it repeat.  The best-case scenario, it seems, would be that of Jimmy Carter’s presidency (1977-1981), which expanded upon the perverse economic policies of the LBJ-Nixon-Ford administrations (high taxes, increased government regulations including price controls, etc.), resulting in the “malaise” of the late 1970s, a time of economic “stagflation” (with high rates of inflation, coupled with high unemployment and high interest rates) as well as a serious energy crisis that included shortages in oil and gas supplies and all the hardships those shortages created.   

            A replay of the Jimmy Carter years, I emphasize, would be the best case scenario for America with B.O. in the White House.  Given the seriousness of the present economic crisis, and the misguided policies the new president and the Congress are planning to pursue, a more likely scenario will be, frighteningly, a replay of FDR’s presidency (1933-45), that is to say, a second Great Depression, as many scare-mongering political and economic commentators have been warning.  We’ve already begun going down that road, with the outgoing Bush administration’s push for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout legislation, which looks like a replay of Herbert Hoover’s “New Deal” program of government subsidies for shaky banks and other business enterprises – a program that was expanded massively by FDR’s “New Deal,” which most knowledgeable experts now recognize did nothing to help our recovery from the Depression but, in fact, exacerbated and prolonged the Depression.  B.O., whom many admirers are comparing to FDR, has promised a massive, nearly $1-trillion “stimulus” program – a massive increase in federal spending, with trillion-dollar budget deficits every year for the foreseeable future (by B.O.’s own admission).  His plans include the largest public-works program since the creation of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, spending federal money on what B.O. has called “shovel-ready” projects to “rebuild roads, make buildings energy efficient, modernize schools and upgrade hospital technology,” as a recent USA Today article described them (“Obama eyes `shovel-ready’ fixes in a long recovery,” December 8).  “Shovel-ready” certainly seems an apt way to describe B.O.’s program (and the plenty of shovels its will need to toss around the piles of bullshit it entails), a bullshit program which like FDR’s make-work programs in the 1930s (PWA and WPA, CCC, etc.) created temporary jobs at the price of sucking out of the economy much-needed capital for private enterprise to recover from the market maladjustments that originated the crisis.  And like FDR’s programs, B.O.’s “shovel-ready” programs will worsen our economic problems.  

            A second New Deal, and the worsened economic depression it created, still is not the worst-case scenario for the next few years.  Given the huge increase in the money supply that the Bush administration’s Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve already have created – and which will increase exponentially as B.O.’s administration expands the misguided “bailout” programs (B.O. already has threatened to veto any legislation from the Democrat-controlled Congress that will inhibit his ability to spend the remaining $350 billion of the Wall Street bailout) and add another $1 trillion in government spending – it’s dangerously likely that inflation will become a major problem during the coming years.  Not just the high inflation of the Carter years, but hyper-inflation (with annual rates exceeding 100% or more), reminiscent of Germany in the early 20^th century (the German Weimer Republic, whose failures in the 1920s led to the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party) or of the “banana republics” of Latin America in recent decades.  (For more on this, see my discussion of the “bailout bullshit” in Part II, next week.) 

            In terms of domestic policy, then, the B.O. administration offers nothing really new, other than its meaningless (and fraudulent) rhetoric.  In fact, it will merely replay the mistakes that other administrations have made in the past, albeit on an even more ambitious scale – meaning, on a scale that will be even more dangerous to individual freedom and to our constitutional system of limited governmental powers.  The severity of the current economic recession may have forced B.O. to shelve (at least for the time being) his plans to increase taxes on higher-income Americans – the “share the wealth” policies he so brazenly espoused during his campaign – but otherwise, the list of horribles that I predicted in my “Emperor Is Naked” essay are likely to come to pass.  These include government-managed, “socialized” medicine (including the loss of individual privacy rights entailed in B.O.’s plans to “modernize,” under government control, medical record-keeping), coupled with further hemorrhaging of the massive federal “entitlement” programs, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; more draconian use of the antitrust laws and more government regulation of industries, including a practical government takeover of the banking and domestic auto industries; an energy policy that will make the U.S. even more dependent on other nations for reliable supplies of oil and gas and which, by pushing a misguided scheme to foster “alternative” energy sources, will make electricity not only very expensive but also often scarce (with blackouts and brownouts common across the nation’s energy grid); increased power for Big Labor, not only in industries like the domestic auto industry but also in government employees’ and teachers’ unions – and with it, further deterioration of “public education,” that is, of government schools, in America; and some sort of compulsory, national service requirement (in blatant violation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude). 

            In terms of national security and foreign policy, B.O.’s administration also will have more continuity than change, compared to the preceding Bush administration.  People who voted for B.O. because they disliked Bush’s policies in the Middle East and who expected B.O. to immediately pull our troops out of Iraq are in for a massive disappointment, for B.O.’s actual policies will not be anything like the “anti-war” rhetoric of his campaign.  Like other Democrats in the White House, B.O. shows no propensity to limit U.S. military involvement in foreign nations to only legitimate wars or to imminent threats to the United States; rather, like other Democratic presidents, B.O. is likely to use our military forces to intervene for “humanitarian” or “policing” purposes around the globe – converting them into a kind of “Peace Corps with guns” – as the Clinton administration did by intervening in such places as Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.  B.O. will, in fact, escalate the war in Afghanistan (which is likely to become not just a quagmire but a real mess, if as many pundits predict, the Pakistani government collapses); and he will continue the U.S. military occupation of Iraq for at least another year and a half. 

            If B.O. does change U.S. foreign policy, it’s likely to be change for the worse – a retreat from some of the misguided policies of his immediate predecessor, Bush (and his administration’s so-called “War on Terror”), but a reversion back to similarly misguided (albeit for different reasons) policies of Bush’s predecessors, including Clinton.  B.O. already has promised to end the use of “torture” (that is, vigorous interrogation techniques) in dealing with militant Islamic terrorists; and he plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, thereby releasing back into the world various dangerous Islamic terrorists captured as enemy combatants.  The so-called “smart power” policy espoused by Mrs. Clinton, B.O.’s nominee for secretary of state, during her recent confirmation hearings amounts to nothing more than a return back to the pre-Bush policies of appeasement, with regard to militant Islamic terrorist states (like Iran) and groups (like Hezbollah and Hamas).  During B.O.’s “watch” as chief executive and commander-in-chief, we can expect Islamic militants to become emboldened by U.S. weakness and hence more aggressive – with Iran acquiring the dangerous capability of using nuclear weapons, with pro-Palestinian terrorists escalating their attacks on Israel (and “diplomatic efforts” on the part of the United States, under the most anti-Israel administration ever, designed to thwart Israel’s ability to defend itself against its homicidal neighbors), and, most ominous of all, real danger of another devastating, 9-11 type attack on the United States (with an administration that lacks the competence necessary to protect Americans from another attack on American soil).  The bottom line is that, as misguided as the Bush administration’s policies against militant Islamic terrorists were, they at least averted another 9-11 for the past seven and a half years; the even more misguided policies likely to be followed by the B.O. administration will give Americans less security against foreign attacks. 

            In short, not only will there be much continuity, rather than change, compared to the preceding Bush administration, but there’ll also be continuity with the previous Democratic administration, under “Slick Willy” Clinton.  The B.O. administration will be staffed by many Clinton administration retreads, including Hillary, the “great bitch” (and Slick Willy’s partner-in-crime) herself, as secretary of state; Eric Holder, Janet Reno’s deputy as attorney general; and Leon “Panacea” Pinetta, Clinton’s former chief of staff, as the new nominee to be director of the CIA (despite the fact he’s a political hack with no experience in intelligence, quite literally).  Is this what B.O.’s supporters consider “real change” – a reversion back to the late 1990s, when the Clintonistas wielded power? 

            Of course, as many libertarians argue, there are a handful of issues on which the Democrats in Congress and in the B.O. administration actually will be better – that is, better from a libertarian standpoint, i.e., more pro-liberty – than Republicans and the previous administration under George W. Bush.  Among these issues may be “gays and the military”:  critics of our current homophobic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding homosexuals in military service are hopeful that B.O. might change that policy, initiated by Clinton, and allow gay men and women to open serve.  Another possible positive change could be a softening of “the war on drugs”:  critics of our failed policy of criminalizing drugs are hopeful, based on some early statements by B.O., that he might be willing to propose decriminalizing marijuana, at least for medical uses.  B.O.’s administration, moreover, is not likely to follow his predecessor’s “pro-life” policies, limiting women’s rights to obtain abortions or terminally-ill persons’ right to commit suicide (Bush policies, such as the Bush administration’s encouragement in the Florida case of Terri Schiavo, as I’ve argued previously – see my essay “A Life That One Owns,” Feb. 28, 2005 – actually amounted to a policy against the “right to life,” properly understood, as the right of individuals to own their own lives).  Yet another issue on which a B.O. administration could be more pro-liberty than his predecessor’s administration is the Federal Communication Commission’s war on “indecent” speech (see my previous essay “Abolish the F*CCing FCC!” Feb. 8, 2006).  B.O.’s likely nominee for new FCC chairman comes from a high-tech business background and seems less willing than his predecessor, Bush appointee Kevin Martin, to cave under pressure from conservatives to “crack down” on indecent speech over the broadcast spectrum.  

            But, as I warn my libertarian friends, whatever might be gained, as “pluses” on behalf of individual freedom, on these and other issues, will be more offset by “minuses,” through the loss of individual freedom, not only on economic matters but many other areas of “personal” freedom as well.  Democrats and left-liberals generally are no more friendly to “personal freedom,” in all its aspects, than are Republicans and social conservatives.  (Consider, for example, their hostility to Second Amendment rights – something that’s especially well-documented for B.O., who has been accurately described by the NRA as the most “anti-gun” president ever to occupy the White House, as well as his nominee for Attorney General, Eric Holder, who had a horrendous record with regard to gun rights during his tenure as Janet Reno’s deputy in the Clinton Injustice Department.)  So, true, B.O. may scrap the misguided “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and allow homosexual persons to openly serve in the military; but he’s unlikely to support any other initiatives to expand the personal freedoms of homosexual persons.  He’s opposed to same-sex marriage, and his inclusion of social-conservative pastor Rick Warren (an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage) in the inaugural program shows that B.O. (like many other Democrats) tends to take homosexuals’ political support for granted and is unwilling even symbolically to push for any real “change” in the laws that might alienate the majority of homophobic Americans.  Similarly, even if B.O.’s administration were to soften the “war on drugs” by modifying the federal rules criminalizing marijuana use, it’s unlikely to bring about the kind of real reform that we desperately need in our drug laws and other laws criminalizing “moral” offenses and other “victimless” crimes:  a total decriminalization of such activities as drug use, gambling, prostitution, and so, which harm no one but the adult individuals who freely engage in them.  Democrats generally are just as unwilling as Republicans to allow individuals to govern themselves, even when they’re acting in ways that other people think are self-destructive.  (Anyone who naively believes that Democrats are “better” on personal freedom than Republicans ought to consider not only the federal War on Drugs, which has persisted under both Democrat and Republican administrations, but also the “war on tobacco,” which politicians from both parties – egged on by “public health” activists – have been waging in recent years against Americans who choose to smoke.)   And perhaps an FCC staffed by B.O.’s appointees may cease the silly (and decidedly un-libertarian) crack-down on “indecent” speech, but it may pose even greater dangers to free speech through such initiatives as a revival (in some form) of the so-called (and misnamed) “Fairness Doctrine” (regulating the content of broadcast speech in order to silence conservative talk radio), as well as other “consumer protection” initiatives (following up on the paternalistic policies followed by Chairman Martin) that, in the name of “protecting” consumers, will limit the economic freedom of broadcasters.  

            One final observation about the new president:  B.O.’s inaugural planners are trying to wrap him in the mantle of Abraham Lincoln, whose bicentennial will be celebrated next month:  there’ll be a pre-inaugural celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, B.O. will try to reenact Lincoln’s arrival in Washington by a “whistle-stop” train trip, and he’ll even take the oath of office January 20 on the same Bible that Lincoln used for his inaugural in 1861 – all symbolic acts designed to link B.O. with the blessed memory of Abraham Lincoln in the American public mind.  But that effort, too, is sheer bullshit.  There are only two things that B.O. has in common with Lincoln:  they’re both lawyers, and they were both residents of Illinois when elected as president.   

 

In Part II, to be posted next week, I’ll discuss three other ways in which “the tyranny of bullshit” will threaten individual freedom in the coming year, and beyond:  “green” bullshit (the theory of “climate change,” or “global warming,” espoused by radical environmentalists and their dangerous agenda), “bailout” bullshit (persistence of the fallacy that government spending and subsidization of failed business enterprises will “save” free-market capitalism), and finally, the bullshit espoused by paternalistic “conservatives,” who offer no real alternative to the paternalism of the left.   

 

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday,  January 15, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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Happy Holidays!  (Reprise)

 

 

With Thanksgiving and the month-long “holiday season” of December fast approaching, it’s time to revisit some past essays on the significance of the holidays.

 

 

 Thanksgiving:  Celebrating the Producers

 

            As I noted two years ago (“Celebrating Thanksgiving,” Nov. 21, 2006), Thanksgiving is in many ways the most American of holidays.  Persons of religious faith may consider it a time to thank God for their “blessings,” but it’s not some hypothetical supernatural being that’s responsible for the material abundance that most Americans celebrate.  It’s the American capitalist system – the free-market system that not only has made our society prosperous but also has made each of us free (and self-responsible), at least as far as it goes in the modern “mixed economy” of part-capitalism, part-socialistic governmental controls.   

            That’s why, properly speaking, Thanksgiving ought to be considered a time to thank the productive people in our society – the people whose achievements have made life in modern civilized society possible – for the blessings they have given us, by their hard work, their superlative skills, and their ability to freely trade their achievements with other productive persons.  Other special-interest groups have U.S. holidays – labor unions have Labor Day, military veterans have Veterans Day and Memorial Day, politicians have “Presidents Day” – but Thanksgiving truly ought to belong to America’s producers, the men and women of achievement, who are typically the “forgotten” individuals in American politics (although they’re the ones who pay the vast majority of taxes that fund the operations of government). 

            As I also previously noted, philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand summed it up quite nicely in an essay she wrote in The Ayn Rand Letter in the early 1970s: 

“Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday.  In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production.  It is a producers’ holiday.  The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.  Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride – just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation.”

 

(emphasis in original). 

            My previous essay also told the story of the myth of the “First Thanksgiving,” presumably celebrated by the Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth.  As I noted, the lesson to be learned from the real historical experience of the Plymouth settlers during their disastrous first year in 1620-21– how their utopian communist system of landholding nearly killed them all by starvation, but they recovered and found they had something really to celebrate when they discovered the importance of private property – reminds us that capitalism is not only the best (economically speaking) but also the only moral system for organizing society.

 

  

Christmas:  It’s Not Just for Christians 

 

As I noted in a previous year’s “Happy Holidays!” essay (Dec. 4, 2006), among the traditions that have become established in recent years, unfortunately, has been the tradition of some Christians, with obvious chips on their shoulders, complaining about the way others celebrate the holiday season.  I wrote:  “Two complaints in particular have been voiced with increased shrillness in recent years.  The first bemoans what some perceive as the increased `commercialization’ of Christmas; this is a complaint that goes back several years, at least as far as the original broadcast of the classic `Peanuts’ Christmas special on TV.  (This year it’s the theme of a new book, The Purpose of Christmas (2008), written by Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life and pastor of the Saddleback Church in California.  Pastor Rick’s book may be new, but it repeats the same old complaint about consumerism, arguing that “the true meaning” of Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Jesus.)  The second complaint is based on the notion that `politically-correct secularists’ are waging a sort of `war on Christmas’ itself, by intentionally downplaying the Christmas holiday (particularly its religious significance to Christians) and instead emphasizing a generic, or multicultural, `holiday’ season.” 

As I concluded in that essay, “Neither of these criticisms has any real merit.  Rather, both are just a load of `bah, humbug’ – in other words, bullshit.  Both the so-called `commercialization’ of Christmas and the effort to make the holiday season more inclusive are social phenomena that, rather than being criticized, ought to be praised and celebrated.”

Why should commercialization be praised?  Simply put, it’s because commerce is a good thing:  it’s commerce that provides order in a good, civilized society – a society of free individuals who respect each other’s rights, treating each other as individuals, trading with one another for their mutual advantage.  That’s the kind of society that people who deplore commerce and “commercialization” are, in effect, criticizing – which raises the question, What alternative kind of society would they prefer?  One in which the equal rights and freedoms of individuals are not respected?  One in which society itself – the collective mass of persons who constitute society – is superior to each of its members?  A society like czarist Russia or the Soviet Union, or Hitler’s Germany, or communist China (or Castro’s Cuba or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela), perhaps?  

Commerce and commercialization have long been a part of the Christmas holiday celebrations in the United States – and thankfully so.  Philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand observed that it is the very aspect of Christmas that so many people today lament – its so-called “commercialization” – that makes it most worthy of celebration: 

            “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has become commercialized.  The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure.  And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions – the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors – provide the city with a spectacular display, which only `commercial greed’ could afford to give us.  One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.” 

 

Ayn Rand also nicely summed up the secular meaning of Christmas: 

            “The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way.  One says: `Merry Christmas’ – not `Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form – by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance.

 

           “The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion; it is good will toward men – a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.” 

 

(Ayn Rand, in The Objectivist Calendar, December 1976) 

This secular meaning of Christmas has a longer, better-established history in Western (or at least in Anglo-American) culture than does the religious celebration.   Those who allege that the “true meaning” of Christmas is “Christ” – in other words, Christians’ celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ – ignore a number of key historical facts.  The “Yuletide” observance has its roots in pagan Germanic, and pre-Christian, Britain; like similar observances in other pagan societies (such as the Saturnalia celebration in ancient Rome), it coincided with the Winter Solstice – the shortest day of the year, celebrated because its passing represents the beginning of the lengthening of daylight hours and the eventual coming of spring – and many of the holiday-season traditions (including the exchanging of gifts, the “Yule log,” kissing underneath mistletoe, etc.) also have their origin in these pagan observances.  There is no historical evidence for Jesus’ birth in December – indeed, the historical evidence suggests that he was born in springtime, not in winter – and early Christians simply expropriated the existing Winter Solstice celebrations for their mythical observation of Jesus’ birthday.   (Indeed, recognizing the pagan origins of Christmas celebrations, English Puritans discouraged observation of the holiday, viewing it as a form of heresy.)  Other aspects of what many people see as “traditional” Christmas celebrations had their origins in secular culture:  for example, Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, brought the German custom of decorating a Christmas tree (which in turn was based on ancient, pre-Christian Germanic customs) to England, from where it spread to the United States, in the mid-19^th-century, about the time that the custom of exchanging Christmas cards also originated. 

As for the complaint – mostly voiced by conservative demagogues and blow-hards like Bill O’Reilly – that there’s a “war on Christmas” being waged by “politically-correct secularists,” I’ll simply say that in light of the historical context discussed above, it’s the secularists who have truth on their side.  Notwithstanding the arguments of would-be theocrats who maintain that America is a “Christian nation,” the better view – the one sustained both by the history of our nation’s founding as well as its fundamental founding principles articulated by men such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison – is that the United States of America is, rather, a nation founded on the recognition of each individual’s freedom of conscience.   It is recognition of that noble principle that lies at the heart of the idea of constitutionally separating “church” and “state” – that is, keeping government out of religion and religion out of government.  Efforts to maintain that principle by stressing the inclusiveness of the December “holiday season,” rather than the exclusiveness of Christmas as a religious holiday, ought to be praised, not criticized.  

Christmas isn’t just a holiday for true believers in Christian theology; its secular celebration is just as valid, just as important, as Christians’ observance of it as a religious holiday.  Similarly, the December holiday season has other holiday celebrations of equal merit to non-Christians:  for example, Jews who celebrate Hanukkah, Muslims who celebrate Ramadan, atheists or “secularists” of various stripes (including neo-pagans) who celebrate the Winter Solstice, college football fans who celebrate the bowl-game season, and virtually everyone who celebrates the New Year on January 1^st. 

As I concluded my previous essay “Three Cheers for Commercialization!” (Dec. 19, 2005):  “Christians may `own,’ as their special religious holiday, Christmas as a celebration of the myth of Jesus’ birth.  But they don’t own other celebrations of the Yule holiday – especially in the United States, a nation founded on the principle of an individual’s freedom of conscience.  Let us all celebrate the `holiday’ season in our own way – and let’s allow our wonderful, free-market capitalist system give us as much “commercialism” (and all the resulting freedom of choices) as possible!”  

 

 

Ebenezer Scrooge:  A Good Man 

 

As I also noted in my 2006 “Happy Holidays!” essay, it was largely due to the influence of 19^th-century English novelist Charles Dickens that Christmas, both in England and America, became popularly associated with Christianity – and not only with a religious significance (the myth of Jesus Christ’s birth) but also with the Christian morality of altruism.  (By altruism, I mean the moral code that preaches that it’s morally wrong for people to be “selfish” and that instead they should be “selfless,” that is, they have a moral duty to sacrifice their self-interest to the interests of others.)  Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol helped establish the new Christian paradigm for the celebration of the December 25 holiday. 

As I observed in my entry of December 27, 2004, "In Defense of Ebenezer Scrooge,"

“What is often overlooked about Dickens’ story – often because the popular film or stage adaptations soften its hard edges – is that it is propaganda for a social philosophy, one that is essentially anti-capitalist and anti-individualist.  Dickens shared with many of the literary men of his time a trait common among so-called intellectuals today:  a disdain for business and for the virtues on which capitalism rests.  The `moral’ of Dickens’ story is that it is `evil’ for humans to be productive and motivated by their self-interest.  Rather than urging individuals to be responsible for themselves and to deal with others as equals, trading value for value for their mutual interests, Dickens exhorts individuals to act as their `brothers’ keepers,’ to sacrifice their own interests to those of the `needy,’ to put others’ interests (or desires) above their own.” 

            I added, “Dickens preaches his altruistic morality through the story of Scrooge’s personal redemption,” and then I showed how that code of morality, as told through Dickens’ story, really is perverse.   I confess that I like the “old sinner” in the first part of the story – the unredeemed Scrooge – whom I see as the most real character in the story, the one character in the book who acts responsibly and who treats his fellow-men justly.  (He's certainly more moral than his gold-digging nephew, Fred, or those irresponsible breeders, the Cratchits.)  “After his transformation – that is, after he becomes a “born-again” believer in Dickens’ altruistic morality – he loses his humanity and becomes just another boring character in just another boring Dickens book.  (Indeed, as Douglas Kern puts it in his hilarious take on the book on the Tech Central Station website – “A TCS Christmas Carol” – Dickens’ story can be aptly described as a “melancholy tale of a productive businessman who gets worked over by three meddling supernatural social workers one Christmas Eve, transforming him into a simpering socialist.”)  

 

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Monday,  November 24, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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