Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
The times were dark ones. In some parts of the world communism was taking hold and viewed by some as the future that works. In other regions fascism was gaining in Germany and Italy. In the U.S. President Roosevelt and his administration tried idea after idea to end the Great Depression without success. Despite Roosevelt’s admonition that we only have to fear is fear itself, fear was always at people’s elbows.
The Tea Party has some major accomplishments to their credit that will be on display this week. The first is a reading of the Constitution in the House of Representatives to open the 112th Congress, the second is the change to rules that require any bill to state where in the Constitution Congress has the authority to enact that legislation.
To say today’s “Restoring Honor” event in Washington will be historic is an understatement. Gauging by the biased reporting on the news pages of the New York Times and the seething, sputtering outrage from Bob Herbert and Charles Blow on the Op-Ed pages should give you a pretty good indication of the focus this event will garner.
Kate Zernike opens her report, titled “Where Dr. King Stood, Tea Party Claims His Mantle”, saying it is the ultimate “thumb in the eye” to stand on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” in the place he stood and talk about restoring honor. How dare he? Isn’t that what racists said of Dr. King when he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial with these words?
“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”
Ms. Zernike reminds us of the case of Shirley Sherrod, who was fired by the Obama administration when a videotape of her redemptive speech about how she first discriminated against a white farmer but later helped him was shown across the Internet. She writes about video tape being heavily edited by failing to show how she mended her ways and helped that farmer. But Ms. Zernike doesn’t finish the story where later in her speech Ms. Sherrod says that those who opposed Obama’s health care plan had racist motives because President Obama is black. Ms. Sherrod’s redemption is far from complete.
She then says that the Tea Party’s talk of states’ rights raises the specter of Jim Crow and George Wallace. But it was the federal government that passed and enforced the Fugitive Slave laws and it was independent states of the north, exercising their states’ rights, who supported the Underground Railroad and refused to actively assist returning slaves to the South. So states’ rights cut both ways.
She concludes that, “Even if Tea Party members are right that any racist signs are those of mischief-makers, even if Glenn Beck had chosen any other Saturday to hold his rally, it would be hard to quiet the argument about the Tea Party and race.” It’s hard to quiet the argument because those on the left keep falsely making it. They cannot prove racism so they feel that by repeating often enough, they can make it stick.
I was at a street fair manning a booth for a Tea Party organization this spring. An African-American teacher approached us tentatively to ask what we were about. I asked her if she wanted the rumors or the truth and she opted for the truth. I told her that we were a policy based organization focusing on accountable government, fiscal responsibility, limited federal government and following the Constitution. She said she didn’t know any of that, she got e-mails from Moveon.org all the time and before leaving she signed our e-mail list. When the truth reaches the ears of people over the screeching of the New York Times and the main stream media, it is generally well received. The racial of mix of the Tea Party rallies will change over time when we can speak to the folks one on one without the lies of the left.
The Opionators
Bob Herbert begins his Op-Ed piece in a very open minded fashion, “America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure.” Thank you for sharing that, Bob, but there’s no need to pull punches here.
“There is a great deal of hatred and bigotry in this country, but it does not define the country. The daily experience of most Americans is not a bitter experience and for all of our problems we are in a much better place on these matters than we were a half century ago.”
So why to you and your fellow travelers throw down the race card every time someone disagrees with a policy, if they are not of the same race? Object to ObamaCare, that’s racism. Object to the stimulus, racism. Wanting Obama to fail to turn America into a socialist states, racism straight up. Yes there is hatred and bigotry in this country, but it is primarily coming from the left.
Not to be outdone in the outrage department, Charles Blow titled his Op-Ed piece, “I Had a Nightmare.” Mr. Blow said the following, “I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.” This would be an excellent point, if he could point to 3,000 blacks that Glenn Beck has murdered in the name of restoring honor. But Mr. Blow can make no such connection, so his analogy to the Ground Zero mosque falls flat. Curious indeed.
After venting his spleen, Mr. Blow suggests we re-read Dr. King’s speech “and to recommit ourselves to the nobility of righteous pursuits.” Let’s do that.
“But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” –“I Have a Dream Speech”
How do the actions of the left, throwing down the race card at every turn, accusing everyone who disagrees with Barack Obama to have racism at the core of that disagreement comport with not “drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred”? It arrogantly assumes that it is impossible not to see the glorious benefit of the government running every last aspect of our lives, therefore the only reason to disagree has to be racism. With regard to violence, where do we see the violent demonstrations on the left or the right? Breaking windows, looting, SEIU members beating down street vendors for selling anti-Obama buttons, etc. are all on the left. When the police show up at rallies organized by the left they show up in riot gear, at Tea Party rallies the mounted police have to decide whether to let people pet their horses or not.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” –“I Have a Dream Speech”
Didn’t America elect an African American President of the United States with 53% of the vote? More than voted for Clinton either time, or Jimmy Carter? Barack Obama wasn’t elected by minority votes alone.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” –“I Have a Dream Speech”
Who more closely shares that dream, Glenn Beck, or those on the left who insist that forty years after Dr. Martin Luther King gave his speech that blacks can’t get into college or get a job without affirmative action; that black families have not been destroyed by government programs like welfare that drove fathers away; that government run schools that can’t graduate its students are far better for blacks than school vouchers that will let them escape those hellholes? Dr. King’s speech says nothing about racial preferences. Dr. King’s speech talks about color blindness. Dr. King’s speech says give us an equal chance. Glenn Beck believes that. Those on the left do not. It is those on the left who believe African Americans cannot compete without more government programs to help them. Glenn Beck believe they can succeed if government gets out of their way and if the left stops the lies of dependency that hold them back. It is the New York Times, Charles Blow, Bob Herbert who wrap themselves in racial division and then say, “Why can’t we come together?” If you want us to come together, stop standing in the way.
The Dodd-Frank Act that in a mere 2,000 pages sought to put the control back in financial regulation skipped right over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the Government Sponsored Enterprises that were at the heart of the fiscal crisis and are bleeding red ink. Focusing instead on those evil bankers on Wall Street the Dodd-Frank Act really put those guys in a box, until Goldman Sachs slipped its fetters faster than Houdini. So who’s buried under the pile of rubble that is the latest masterpiece of our massive government, Betsy Jensen. Who is Betsy Jensen?
Betsy Jensen is a farmer in southwest Minnesota. She and her family grow wheat and soy beans. She doesn’t have a mortgage, so she didn’t cause the housing bubble. But she does use derivatives to control the risk in farm prices which can be rather volatile. For example, a bushel of wheat went for $18.69 in February of 2008 whereas it was selling for $3.49 in July of 2010. A farmer has to buy their seed and fertilizer at the beginning of the growing season and they don’t sell their product until the harvest. If prices fluctuate wildly during that interval, it isn’t hard to imagine what that can do to your business, let alone your sleep patterns.
So where do derivatives come in? Farmers like Betsy can negotiate a guaranteed price for their grain with their customers. Betsy risks missing out on some profits if the prices go up as they have recently (45%) due to fires in the wheat producing region of Russia, but she also is protected against a price drop, for similar reasons beyond her control. She recently negotiated a price of $7.15 per bushel and with that knowledge, she can manage her farm business and sleep a little more peacefully. For her purchases she can also use derivatives to buy fuel and fertilizer, where the latter has seen price fluctuations of $435 to $685 per ton. Then along come Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, a couple of career politicians who never worked in the private sector.
The Dodd-Frank Act says it is unlawful to enter into swaps (derivatives) “in excess of such amount as shall be fixed from time to time” by the Commodities Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC). That doesn’t sound like a free market to me. What if, in Betsy’s example, the CFTC didn’t get around to raising the amount on wheat above $5 per bushel? Betsy couldn’t arrange to sell it for $7.15. What if the grain elevator couldn’t turn around and sell Betsy’s wheat for the 45% increase in price due to the Russian fires? Do you think with a cap on the upside they might not be willing to pay as much for Betsy’s wheat?
From Dodd-Frank to Bill O’Reilly we hear about the evils of speculators. O’Reilly used to rail against the speculators when gas prices were rising toward $5 per gallon. The evil, greedy speculators were driving up the price of gas! But little mention was made of speculators when the price of gasoline fell back down? Did the speculators retire? Go on vacation? The reality is that speculators don’t care if the price goes up or down, they only care it moves in the same direction on which they are betting. They can drive the price down just as fast as they can drive it up. But they are useful, not evil.
Speculators bring liquidity, that is, money to the market. Betsy Jensen estimates that about one-third of the purchasers of wheat contracts are traders who never take physical control of the product. But by adding their view and their money to the market they keep prices from fluctuating wildly. If these traders are banned then, as she put it, one-third of her customers would disappear. With one-third fewer customers the price swings will increase rather than decrease. Remember, a trader who does not take delivery of the wheat can make money on small swings in the price and is likely to get in or get out on smaller moves and thus change the market price accordingly. If only those who take physical possession of the product are in the market, then other factors such as transport, storage, spoilage, must be factored into each transaction and the price swings will be wider and wilder.
But Betsy said it best, “I may not be able to manage Mother Nature, but I can manage my risk with derivatives.” If only our government would get out of her way and let her do so.
A recent article in the New York Times, “Once Stigmatized, Food Stamps Find Acceptance,” talks about how Food Stamps are now, thankfully, accepted and people can get the help they deserve.
I remember the first time I encountered food stamps. I was in line at the grocery store behind a woman with a cart piled high and among its contents were soda, potato chips, and other tasty luxuries. When the bill was tallied, she took out her book of food stamps and handed them to the cashier. I related this story to a friend who told me that you can’t use food stamps on junk food so it must have been applied against the other items in the cart. Even so, I thought back to when I grew up. We weren’t poor but we were no where near rich. Things like soda and potato chips were a rarity reserved only for those times when relatives were coming from a distance for a visit. Otherwise it was home brewed ice tea and supermarket generic cookies. But even those treats weren’t purchased through a subsidy of our food staples.
New York is now actively recruiting new food stamp recipients in all languages imaginable. It seems that it is not enough to provide the service but you have to make sure that everyone who can get food stamps is taking advantage of them. Let’s see, government employees paid by taxpayers going all out to make sure that a taxpayer funded program is using as much taxpayer money as possible including a program on Rikers Island (the city jail) to enroll inmates as they leave. The article describes one woman who was actively recruited to join the program:
A big woman with a broad smile, Ms. Bostick-Thomas swept into the group’s office a few days later, talking up her daughters’ college degrees and bemoaning the cost of oxtail meat.
“I’m not saying I go hungry,” Ms. Bostick-Thomas said. “But I can’t always eat what I want.”
Okay, I’m going to go out on a limb here. By a “big woman” can we take that observation to mean she is not lacking in caloric intake? She says she doesn’t go hungry. She talks about her daughter’s college degrees. So why are taxpayers tasked with helping her eat what she wants? And what is that anyway? Steak? Lobster? Twinkies? Ice cream? Why aren’t the daughters with their college degrees helping their mother? Maybe they could invite her over once a week and feed her the foods she favors? And if they are not local, why not ship her a box of Omaha Steaks? Why does some other taxpayer have to pick up the tab for her after they worked hard to feed their own family?
The Other Side of the Coin
On the other side of the coin, from the budget of the same Department of Agriculture, we pay farmers not to grow food in the form of farm subsidies. Why? Well, if we didn’t, the prices of farm products, aka food, would become too cheap for the farmers to make a decent living. In my simple economic model of supply and demand that would seem to indicate that maybe we have more farmers than we need. But you see farming is a way of life as much as it is an occupation, and taxpayers must be sensitive to preserving that way of life whether or not it is economically justified. I am sure there are several million unemployed people in this country who would like to have their jobs subsidized. Unemployment compensation is when the government gives you a check (actually its funded by your employer) when you lose your job. Farm subsidies are when the government (no employer funding here) pays farmers to keep working at their job.
Add to that another government program to pay farmers to produce corn to make ethanol, another uneconomic subsidy. Ethanol is pitched as a substitute for gasoline, but it takes a lot of energy to make it, it cannot be transported via pipeline like petroleum products, and when the corn is diverted to produce ethanol, the cost of almost all food goes up. Corn is used for feed for cattle, as seed to produce corn, for corn syrup as a sweeter. So on top of regular farm subsidies, we have ethanol subsidies to further drive up food prices. In the case of corn syrup, sugar could be a substitute, but our government places a very high tariff on imported sugar, to protect our domestic sugar producers.
Coming Full Circle
So, on the one hand we have several government programs, funded by taxpayers, that drive up the price of food. Then we have another program, taxpayer funded, to help people buy food because food is too expensive. And then we have government workers and programs, taxpayer funded, that are actively marketing the food stamp program to overweight people, who never go hungry, have college educated children who could help them but don’t seem to, so that the recipient can eat the things she wants to. But if you see a problem with this, don’t worry. Michele Obama is about to use more taxpayer dollars to launch a program to fight childhood obesity. Can we get off this Merry-Go-Round?
How about we shut down the Department of Agriculture? It’s function is not in the Constitution and so it should not exist at the federal level. End farm subsidies. If that means we have a few less farmers, so be it. The American people do not owe anyone other than themselves a way of life. To the farmer who can make it, you have my complete admiration. End ethanol subsidies. If ethanol is a viable fuel, it should be able succeed on its own, not because Archer Daniels Midland spends millions on agricultural lobbyists. Negotiate free trade agreements so that our successful farmers, instead of being paid not to produce, produce and sell their goods around the world. Likewise end high tariffs that protect our farm products. These steps should lower the cost of food.
With lower food costs we shouldn’t need a food stamp program. End it at the federal level along with the Department of Agriculture. If there continues to be a need it will probably be a much smaller one and let each state decide if it wants to start its own program. Also, with everyone saving on food there is a greater likelihood for people to contribute to food banks to help the truly needy. But to have one government program create a problem and another government program to try to solve it is lunacy.
With our economy hurtling toward a cliff with out of control spending, we don’t need to be on both sides of a problem.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. – Tenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America
The Tenth Amendment
The Tenth Amendment of the Constitution is an interesting piece of work. The way the Constitution is written is to explicitly state what the national government could do, and thereby exclude it from doing everything else. When some of the Founding Fathers advocated a Bill of Rights the federalists strongly objected. Why? First, they thought it was redundant. If, for example, the Constitution did not say the national government could regulate speech then having a First Amendment guaranteeing the Freedom of Speech made no sense. The national government was only permitted to do precisely what the Constitution said it could do.
The second objection concerned having the opposite intent of the original writing of the Constitution. You see, if the constitution has a provision that says what the national government cannot do (First Amendment barring free speech for example) it implies that the national government can do anything else that is not prohibited, which is exactly what the federalists did not want the Constitution to say. It wanted to specifically enumerate the powers granted to the national government and no more. So they compromised by adding the Tenth Amendment, which spelled out that distinction. To quote Hamilton in Federalist 84:
“Why, for instance should it be said that the liberty of the press should not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?”
The Federal Government’s Runaway Growth
The federal government has expanded enormously particularly with FDR and the New Deal. The Supreme Court has paid scant attention to the Tenth Amendment in curbing that expansion. Perhaps it is time they gave it a closer look and more weight in their decisions.
Below is what the Constitution says Congress has the Power to do.
Article I. Section 8. The Congress shall have Power To:
Does anybody see anything there about minimum wages? miles per gallon? housing subsidies? urban development? education? energy? James Madison summed it up thus in Federalist 45:
“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace negotiations, and foreign commerce;….The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state.”
To see how far we have come from Madison’s and the other Founding Fathers views can be seen in the New Deal era court case Wickard v. Filburn(1942). Roscoe Filburn was a farmer during the Great Depression who was growing wheat to feed his chickens. The Federal Government had imposed limits on how much wheat a farmer could grow based on acreage in order to prop up wheat prices. The amount of wheat that Filburn was growing exceeded this number, however, Filburn intended to use the wheat entirely on his own farm. Not only was the wheat not going to leave his home state, it was not going to leave his farm! But the Supreme Court ruled that by growing more wheat than allowed, Filburn would not have to buy additional feed in the open market and by not doing so the lack of his consumption of wheat on the market would adversely affect the price of wheat, therefore he was violating the Federally imposed limits. Now if that doesn’t set off Tenth Amendment alarm bells, I don’t know what could.
Federal Government Sprawl
Here are the cabinet level departments of the Federal Government. Those in bold seem, in my opinion, to be consistent with the enumerated powers above. Those in italics seem, again in my opinion, to be a national government overstepping its Constitutional bounds. It is not that each and any of these things should not be done at all, but according to the Tenth Amendment should be at the discretion of the states or local government.
Federalism
One of the brilliant ideas of federalism is the ability to vote in two ways. One, is at the ballot box and the other is with your feet. If my state puts forth a bad idea and the majority of the citizens of my state agree with the bad idea, I have the freedom to move to another state. However, if we keep moving all these bad ideas up to the national level, my right to vote with my feet is taken away. If states like California and New York choose to follow polices that lead to their bankruptcy, so be it, but let’s not force those policies on Texas and Florida or force the citizens of those states to pay for the mistakes of Californians and New Yorkers.
Since George Washington, who had four cabinet positions, we have added thirteen new cabinet departments and eliminated two and the ones eliminated did not go away, they simply became part of other government entities (e.g., Navy into Defense; Post Office into Postal Service). In other words our government is telling us that they have not solved a single problem for which one of these agencies were created since 1789, otherwise why wouldn’t that cabinet department be shut down, after ceremoniously giving all the key players well deserved gold watches? But Government encroachment marches on with the Obama Administration poised to devour one-sixth of the U.S. Economy into the Department of Health and Human Services. They tell us they know how to solve that problem. With their track record do you believe them? Perhaps it’s time to dust off the Tenth Amendment, and start putting a scalpel to the federal government rather than tying a bib around its bloated neck.
Let’s look to 2010 as the year we start taking back our government. Polls show how far out of touch our elected leaders are from the views of their constituents. It’s time to retire them from office. Let’s keep up the hard work and countdown to November 2010.
