Of the Constitution and the Ever-Fresh Idea of Freedom

It seems that the days of trial and testing of our Constitution are not over.  Perhaps they never will be until the Author of the Constitution returns to the earth.  The Obamacare statutes unfold as the time approaches when people will be required to buy government-designed health insurance whether they want it or not.  The Environmental Protection Agency continues to impose on industry rules that Congress refused to pass.  The new financial consumer czar, with no meaningful oversight or accountability, exercises his will to design financial services for all Americans, even though he was put in office by a recess appointment made when the Senate was not in recess (skipping the uncomfortable Senate confirmation process).  There is more, but these examples represent the challenge.

Under the inspiration of God, the Founders established the Constitution to protect, preserve, and indeed promote the rights of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That is the legitimate purpose of government, as the Founders inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, considering it self-evident,

That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed,

that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

In this effort the Founders twice abolished and instituted new basic forms of government.  The first was to throw off their allegiance to the Crown of England and control by his Parliament.  The second was to exchange the loose and ineffective Articles of Confederation with the new Constitution.

The Constitution was and remains a revolutionary document.  With footings based solidly on the indestructible rights and worth of the individual members of the society, it was unlike anything anywhere on the earth at the time.  At the core of the Constitution, and affecting all of its members, are the overriding and animating principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, constantly at war with and destructive of all forms of tyranny. 

Among the first fruits of the Constitution was the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments, all so wholly consistent with the Constitution that the only objection raised to them was that they were redundant to the basic text that they amended.  Maybe they were redundant, but time has proven the wisdom of spelling out these powerful and important rights of the individual.

They were soon challenged.  Once in government it is natural and expected that government leaders would become progressively intolerant of criticism and opposition.  Government “of the people” does not make government automatically friendly to the people and tolerant of their freedoms.  We see it today, every day.  In 1798 the Federalist Party leaders in government passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, inimical to the Constitution, in significant part to silence opposition voices from the new Democratic-Republican Party.  The Acts sought to declare criticism of public figures to be libelous, punishable by fines and imprisonment.  Under these unconstitutional statutes newspapermen were arrested and their newspapers stopped, among other outrages to liberty.    

Fortunately, the Constitution was not impotent to throw off this new effort to impose an old tyranny on the nation.  Thomas Jefferson led a popular revolt through the elections of 1800 to expel the Federalists from office, repeal these statutes, and launch a renewed spirit of governing focused on individual rights and liberties.

In succeeding years the inconsistency of human slavery with the principles of the Constitution grew increasingly acute, until in 1861 the leadership of most of the slave-holding states concluded that it would be impossible to maintain their “peculiar institution” if they remained governed by the Constitution.  They understood that they could maintain slavery or observe the Constitution, but not both.  Eventually, the spirit of freedom at the core of the Constitution would work to end slavery, by operation of the very constitutional system. 

Since the Union created by the Constitution would not allow the states to leave peacefully and take their slaves with them, the southern leadership invoked rebellion as the only way out.  Theirs, however, was a rebellion to invoke and support tyranny, and it failed.  The revolutionary American Constitution and the people on whom it rested won yet one more victory for freedom.  As Abraham Lincoln perceived, the war of the rebellion was a test of “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

That nation, conceived in constitutional liberty, did endure that test, but the tests never end.  There are ever those who believe that they have the privilege, the calling, the right, or even the duty, to impose their will and judgment on others in ways destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Not every assault on freedom and the Constitution fails. There have been too many that have succeeded.  So far the Constitution and the people who uphold it have withstood these assaults, even if at great cost.  The Supreme Court’s outrageous Dred Scott decision and the foolish Kansas-Nebraska Act were last gasp efforts to perpetuate the tyranny of slavery, but in the end they sparked the birth of the Republican Party and fed the Civil War that removed slavery and extended the reach of the principles of the Declaration and Constitution.

Today as a nation we face the sputtering final efforts of the Franklin Roosevelt legacy to enthrone government as the source of solution to people’s problems—and to buy popularity with government-laundered largesse confiscated from a dwindling pool of taxpayers.  That is a hoary practice of kings and Caesars that buys time but no lasting success.  The money always runs out before the promises do. 

The question that remains for us and for our Constitution is how well will we as a people, and our Constitution as a system of government, weather the demise of the New Deal system.  Acute test of freedom approaches again, if not already here, when we will determine whether our “nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”  I have confidence that it will, and—in the words of Lincoln—that the American people will decide “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,” as it has in all of its greatest tests so far.

Of the American Revolution and the Counterrevolution

One of the comments that I have heard following this year’s national election is that it did not settle much.  Barack Obama was president before the election and he will now be president for another term.  The Democrats held a small majority in the Senate before the election, and they will have a small majority in the Senate afterwards.  The Republicans controlled the House of Representatives before the election, and they will control the House in the next Congress.

I acknowledge the point and the extent of its validity, but I am careful not to overvalue it.  This time was different, if not yet different enough. 

The reigning governing system is nearing its end.  Barack Obama and his companions embody in the 21^st Century the old wizening counterrevolution in America begun by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, now well into its senility.  The FDR counterrevolution has been the prevailing doctrine of governing in the United States since the (aptly named) Depression.  Even Republican presidents—with the exception to some degree of President Reagan—have governed within the terms and context of the FDR counter-American revolution, rarely taking issue with its basic theme of government as the ultimate source of solution to people's problems.

I like the analogy that Senator Phil Gramm used to offer in illustration of how Republicans get co-opted into the FDR approach.  Imagine, he would say, a great big piece of paper blown by the wind getting caught on the top of the dome of the U.S. Capitol, blocking out all sunlight below.  The typical solution from the Democrats would be to create an artificial sun inside of the dome to illuminate the room.  The typical Republican response has been to argue for a smaller artificial sun, one involving the private sector.  The real solution—seldom mentioned—is to remove the big piece of paper.

Today, the great piece of paper to be removed is the fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of the FDR welfare state:  robbing Peter to pay for Paul’s votes.  For over 70 years Democrats and Republicans alike have been bidding against each other to gain Paul’s support, until the day is at last in sight when there will not be enough left to take from Peter to honor the promises to Paul.  The looming national fiscal crisis in over-promised Social Security, Medicare, and a host of government give-away programs is at last acknowledged by the public, even if its full import remains for most hard to grasp as real.  Still, more and more people suspect that all this has about played out.

Against much public vilification by the media propagandists, some are challenging the FDR counterrevolution, getting outside of the context of the tired debate that for decades characterized the contest between Democrats and Republicans.  They are explaining that government cannot create wealth, and redistributing wealth destroys it.  Defeating Barack Obama and his FDR policies this year would have been an important milestone, because more than any other recent president Obama fully embodied the FDR approach to governing, and more than any other presidency its abuses have been apparent.  At the same time, more than any time in the past 70 years political leaders and would-be political leaders have been challenging the FDR counterrevolution.  Mitt Romney chose one of those leaders, Paul Ryan, to be the Republican candidate for vice president.

In the event, we fell short, but we made progress.  As I said, this time was different.  To begin with, President Obama’s margin of victory was materially smaller than four years ago, 50%-48% of the vote in 2012, while in 2008 it was 53%-46%.  Similar narrowed margins were the pattern in the various states.  Moreover, notably few other Democrats were able to sail to electoral victory in Obama’s wake.  In 2008 along with President Obama 7 more Democrat Senators were elected and 20 more members of the House of Representatives.  Four years later it looks like Democrats will pick up only 2 Senate seats and 4 seats in the House.  In all respects, a very narrow victory.  Mitt Romney came close to being elected president, a point that media propagandists have been busily trying to bury in their efforts to make it feel like Obama won in a landslide with a mandate to continue on with his policies of impoverishment.

What the election has not changed are those policies.  President Obama’s economic program is just as much a failure today as it was before the election.  The vote on November 6 did not make it any better.  Neither have the problems changed, except that they continue to grow.  With each day, the federal deficit and federal debt deepen and America’s ability to manage that debt declines.  Each day brings us nearer to the day when we as a nation will be unable to pay that debt.  Economic performance as a nation remains weak and wobbly, while Administration apologists preach that weak is the new normal for the United States of America.

Governing will prove even more difficult for President Obama.  At least now he can truthfully blame the previous administration, the Obama first term administration.  He spent those years avoiding the most significant problems, pushing them off until after November 6, 2012, while creating new ones with his healthcare, regulatory, energy, and environmental policies.  The problems are a gathering storm.  There is not enough money left to run the welfare state, and the willingness of investors—foreign and domestic—to lend Uncle Sam money to pay for it is four years closer to an end. 

Foreign policy does not look very good either.  National weakness, economic or military, is provocative.  It encourages those who mean us harm.  Iran is heading toward crisis, without a comprehensible U.S. policy to deal with an unstable violent regime approaching the production stage of a nuclear arsenal.  The unanswered, mishandled, and covered up failures against the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, will invite others.  With dread we await the realization of what President Obama meant when he told the Russians that he would have more “flexibility” after the election.

I acknowledge and applaud those who worked so hard to bring an end to a misrule that now will continue to inflict hardship on the nation and the people.  We came close to turning back the FDR counter-American Revolution in its naked manifestation.  We all need to keep on working for something a lot better, to restore the American revolution of 1776.  We are gaining ground.

Of Struggling Economies and Finishing the Job

The Obama Administration is having trouble keeping the economy down.  In spite of all the battering that the economy has taken from Obama policies, it keeps showing signs of life—weak, hesitant, surely not robust, but they are there, like the weak patient who wants to get out of bed and shuffle downstairs to sip some chicken soup.  Instead, the Administration, like some 18^th century doctor, wants to try some more blood letting to get the bad humours out of the system. 

People want to do things.  Businessmen have new ideas that they want to have a go at.  Men and women like to build, grow, and develop their lives.  No one needs to tell them to do it.  You just need to get out of the way.  The most productive, the most energetic, the most inspired, the hardest workers will do it best.  We can still remember when the economy was like that, when the news was full of new products, new ventures, new growth, and new jobs.  That is the light America shines to the world and what despots throughout the world hate about the American experiment.

President Obama came to power with a different vision for America, what he thought was a mandate to spread the wealth around, to take from those who succeeded the most in economic activity and growth and find ways in which he and his administration could give it to those who were less productive—or not even productive at all.  In other words, his plan was to tax success and reward failure.  So far, it has worked as designed, even if he has not yet finished with his efforts.  We are getting less of the success and more of the failure.

The trillion dollar “stimulus” plan was a good example.  President Obama and friends hit the economy with a special trillion dollars of new Washington spending that went to support cronies and fund new projects that soon added to the landscape littered with failed businesses.  The “stimulus” plan added to the deficit and became a seemingly permanent part of federal largesse, but it failed to add to the economy.  In fact, it made legitimate businesses compete for funds and customers against those who enjoyed government subsidies.  Hard to do.

The housing market makes up about a quarter of the economy, when you include people who build houses, furnish houses, maintain houses, and so forth.  That market was in full decline as the housing bubble burst in 2007 and kept deflating.  But eventually all the extra air comes out of economic bubbles (if you do not keep pumping new air into them), the crashing market reaches bottom and starts to recover.  The Obama Administration has made sure that it stayed on the bottom a long time.  Normal economic crashes and recoveries look like a “V” on a graph charting their progress.  The housing market under the Obama Administration looks like an “L”.  Note the tiny turn up at the end of the letter.  That is what the Administration’s friends would try to convince us is the recovery.  And they would like to divert our attention from the several thousand pages of new mortgage regulations that will go into effect in the next several months to whack the housing markets again.

Sure, mortgage rates are incredibly low, but that is not a healthy sign.  Have you tried getting a mortgage lately?  The paperwork, already a mountain, has become overwhelming.  And do you think that those rates would be so low if there were a real recovery in demand for houses and mortgages?  There is more (or less):  many people who qualify for mortgages today will have trouble qualifying in the future under the new rules.  The Obama Administration’s new consumer Bureau has been putting off those rules until after the election, but they are promising to issue them by the end of the month.

The summers of 2009, 2010, 2011, and even 2012 were each supposed to be the “Summer of Recovery” with the “green shoots” of new economic activity showing life each spring.  Yet each year those summers saw instead new economic setbacks as the green shoots wilted.  Sometimes the damage came from threats of new tax policies that would raise rates but give “tax breaks” to people who spent their income in ways approved by the Obama Administration and the tax code.

Businesses were threatened with new carbon taxes and other innovative and contorted ways to penalize any use of carbon dioxide, part of the air that we as humans produce with every breath.  Even a Congress with heavy majorities of legislators from President Obama’s own party choked on that idea.  Not to be deterred, the Obama Administration just imposed restrictions by fiat through the Environmental Protection Agency—all part of the war on carbon, which includes the energy industry as its victims.

The business climate remains in turmoil, as waves of new regulation and Obama campaign promises to bail out new favorites in the economy continue changing the rules and make business planning impossible.  Who would take a risk at trying something new when Obamacare and other employee regulations make it hard to know what the expense will be for new hires?  American businesses are sitting on somewhere between one and two trillion dollars in funds, waiting to know when it would be safe to invest them.  Employers are trying to put some of that cash to work, but they are being very cautious in doing so, not what the words “free enterprise” bring to mind.

The Obama Administration and its apologists call the recent unemployment report “good.”  The unemployment rate went up, above the level when President Obama came to office; 5 million people are long-term unemployed, up by 200,000 from the month before; and the economy has 4.4 million fewer jobs than at the peak of its last growing period before Obama took office.  The excitement apparently comes from the net increase of 171,000 jobs in the past month, above the experts’ predictions of 125,000.  Watchers have learned to lower their expectations for this administration, so that they greet with cheers any signs of life above their reduced standards.  Maybe for President Obama that continued anemic performance is good, but America can do better.  America has done better, much better.  We cannot afford to lower our vision. 

Our future and the future of our children and grandchildren must not be crippled by looking at 2% economic growth as being “good” or even acceptable.  If we want a better future for our children and grandchildren, in fact if people my age want a secure retirement, we need to get back to an America where 4% annual growth or better is the norm.  The social welfare state is expensive, not the least of which being the cost it exacts from the future to pay for the promises of today.

Fortunately, the economy still refuses to die, in spite of all the beating that it has received at the hands of the Obama Administration, but the economy is not well.  Let’s not give the Obama team another four years to try to finish it off.