An excerpt from Tom Woods’s latest piece on the most divisive issue among right-wingers, and Laurence Vance’s book Christianity and War:
This is why the second edition of Laurence Vance’s Christianity and War, and Other Essays Against the Warfare State (which is nearly four times as long as the first edition) is at once both good news and bad news. The good news is the book itself, which eviscerates the self-justifying nonsense that passes for moral reflection among so many Christian supporters of war. The bad news is how rare such a book is these days: a theologically conservative Christian’s powerful, unrelenting case against war, militarism, and an eagerness to believe whatever propaganda will promote war and cast those politicians who support it in a favorable light. And it is to conservative Christians that Vance directs the bulk of his appeal, since it is they, he finds, who most readily adopt the war propaganda that emanates from Washington.
You can read the article here.
An excerpt from Schiff’s latest on the imaginative economic policies we’re all being screwed by:
Despite the pleas from bankers and politicians, mortgages are not plagued by a lack of liquidity but a lack of value. If sellers would be more negotiable, there would be plenty of liquidity. Who knows, at the right price I might even buy a few. The problem is that putting a market price on these assets would render most financial institutions insolvent, which is precisely why they do not want to let that happen.
Read the rest here.
In my relatively short life experience, I have never seen so many people so uneasy about the actions our government is taking in the name of peace and prosperity. As statists worldwide intervene even further into economies they have wrecked, pursuing Keynesian fantasies and creating public spectacles to incite the mobs who brought them to power, hints of the true nature of the ideological war we are engaged in seem to pop up in the most unlikely of places.
For anyone who missed Daniel Hannan’s smack down of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, I encourage you to watch it here, and share it with everyone you know as an example of the sort of character our former republic will require if we are ever to return to freedom and prosperity.
I also wish to share with you Peter Schiff’s latest piece, which touches on why the coming economic crash is made worse with each day of continued intervention by our enlightened rulers. You can read it here.
My partner in administering this website and I will be opening a YouTube channel in the near future, with videos meant to educate and inspire freedom loving Americans wherever they may be found. The goal of the videos that we aim to begin producing in short order is to appeal to even the most doltish of our fellow citizens with information easily observed and understood. “Stay tuned” for updates on the progress of this new endeavor.
I leave you with a quote from Ludwig Von Mises, perhaps more applicable today than at any time in history:
“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders, no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interest, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle.”
The humbuggery of overeducated imbeciles, especially when reflective of widely held societal views, can often present us with learning opportunities. Such is the case with a piece that recently appeared on History News Network, entitled We’re Not Heading to Socialism. In it, author and University of North Carolina, Wilmington professor Robert Brent Toplin argues that, “We need a better term that succinctly characterizes Washington’s efforts to rescue troubled American businesses.”
I have my suspicion as to the sincerity of the good professor’s motives. I suspect that the starvation, executions, torture, and other irritating achievements racked up by collectivists through the years may have led him to this “need” of a better term. Indeed, the scariness of socialism is rooted in its abysmal 100% failure rate, not in the nine letters used to spell the word. But that is neither here nor there. After all, questioning his motives would be almost like quibbling over semantics…
Toplin’s argument is malignantly stupid. He first cites two American socialists, Daniel De Leon and Eugene Debs, both of whom wanted to “…nationalize large businesses, because they judged capitalism exploitative.” Today’s economic wizards, on the other hand, “understand that the free enterprise system is vastly superior to one based on state-run industries.”
And judging the motivations of our enlightened rulers pure, Toplin concludes that, “Leaders in Washington certainly do not wish to keep AIG, Citicorp, and General Motors on the dole. They want these organizations to take full responsibility for their affairs…” So, after constraining the definition of a dynamic philosophy developed and implemented in various ways over the course of centuries to the anemic confines of government nationalizing major industry, Toplin implicitly scolds the imbecilic Americans who do not buy into Washington’s new and refined Bolshevism: “But Americans remain committed to the free enterprise system, and most of them understand that in an emergency government has an important role to play in saving capitalism from its excesses.”
In fact, the government has taken partial ownership of a number of companies, though the lack of transparency in the bailout and spending bills leaves much to be desired. Everyone has, by now, been made aware of the state’s 80% ownership of AIG. The last I checked, the fed owned 40% of Citigroup. These are, of course, purported as temporary measures necessarily taken in an emergency. Such assurances are comforting to me as I think back on all of the other expansions of government that were scaled back after their purposes were served…
Why Own It When I Can Just Run It?
Ownership is really a silly trick and a distraction anyway. The IRS does not own you, but a judge will certainly send you to prison if you choose to keep from it a portion of your earnings deemed unfair. Congress does not own the big three car companies either, but has crippled their operations with cafe standards, corrupt union ties to government, and exorbitant tax rates for decades. When the state tells oil companies not to drill, they do not drill. When the state tells businesses that a worker is worth $6.00 per hour (or whatever the latest fiat may be), the employee’s actual worth becomes irrelevant. Alas, if Barney Frank and enough other congressmen believe that more blacks should own homes, they will own them come hell or high water!
Freddie and Fannie were officially considered “Government Sponsored Entities,” which hardly describes the reality of the situation. Mr. Toplin is right in this instance, the relationship between these “GSE’s” and the G would more accurately be described as fascist. The behemoths were given billions in credit lines from the Treasury, lines always considered to really be limitless. They were instrumental in pushing loans that were doomed to default from the start, in the name of “affordable housing.” Barney Frank and his cronies repeatedly declared these companies solvent as they were swirling around in the white bowl, even as others tried to shine light on their obvious troubles. So the solution to government’s bad policies and their effects on the “entities” seemed obvious to the politicians. Subsidize the failures, buy up the bad loans, give judges the authority to nullify and modify contractual agreements, and take actual ownership of portions of failing companies. Sheer genius.
The Federal Reserve
Thomas Woods, in his recent release Meltdown, compares blaming the financial crisis on greed to blaming a plane crash on gravity. Deregulation is blamed as well, though every arm of the housing market functioned exactly as the government wished it to. What would they regulate? The most amusing culprit is “market failure.” The state disallows markets to function and then blames the pitfalls on the market. We’ll soon have alcoholics blaming their cirrhotic livers on all of the water they drank.
The prime enabler of government’s spending addiction, as well as the cause of the boom and bust cycles that have become characteristic of the American economy, is the Federal Reserve. The Austrian theory of the business cycle not only explains how the Fed’s tampering with the money supply and interest rates creates bubbles in the economy, but has successfully been used to predict such circumstances as we now find ourselves in.
The Federal Reserve is a private bank, but is completely unregulated. The bank has the ability not only to adjust the Federal Funds Rate (the interest rate at which banks lend to each other), but to adjust the supply of money as it sees fit. As the Fed creates artificially low interest rates, it encourages economic activity in sectors where it would not otherwise have been directed. Think housing. The government sold the line to Americans that home ownership was nearly a patriotic duty, high-risk loans were handed out like pamphlets about Jesus, money was made cheap by the Fed, and voila! Capital that would have been put into viable economic sectors was diverted to housing, a bubble was created, and the government is now scrambling to stick band-aids on the wounds it inflicted. One of those band-aids is another trick the Fed likes to pull, inflating the money supply. The bailouts and stimulus programs we’ve been watching are being financed with deficit spending. Either the money must be borrowed, or it must be printed. Though the Fed’s creation of money is a bit more murky than actually just printing it (it purchases bonds and writes imaginary checks that are backed by nothing), suffice it to say that the bank creates money out of thin air. Inflating the money supply as such amounts to a devious tax on most Americans. As the dollar loses its value, bankers and those in the know are able to liquidate their assets before the effects of inflation (namely the decreased value of the dollar) are felt.
The depth of the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of our money supply cannot be fully described here. The Fed’s unchecked power over our money and unholy alliance with government are just additional pieces in the sprawling puzzle of government intrusion into the free market. The prescient Thomas Jefferson warned, “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
The Fed is, above all else, a great liar. Our money is unbacked by any real capital. The rates at which the money is lent are made completely artificial by the powerful bank. The Fed actually determines the ratio of required bank holdings to what banks can legally lend. This ratio is, as all else the Fed dictates, a facade. The state is operating in and perpetuating a dream world in which nothing means anything, and at least half of the populace is buying the big lie.
Is it Socialism?
Back to Toplin’s point, are we headed for socialism? The professor calls our system “welfare capitalism.” The fact is, we could call it “enlightened geniusism” without altering its nature at all. The battle underway in America is not a new one. It is as old as man himself. We are engaged in a battle between liberty and various forms of collectivism that all serve to usurp liberty. Socialism, communism, fascism, and all systems in between rob individuals of liberty at the hands of a coercive state bureaucracy.
Toplin argues that “government has an important role in saving capitalism from its excesses.” Are we to believe that a government operating on an $11 trillion deficit, with $52 trillion in unfunded entitlements is fit to save anything from excess?? Are we so naive as to believe that our economy had been a free market exemplar, and that free markets have failed? It is no coincidence that the United States has historically dwarfed every other country in the world economically. America came closer to free market capitalism than any other country has, though our markets have never been free. As politicians pretend that A is B and something can come from nothing, citizens will ultimately feel the ill-effects of their battle against reality.
I’ve completely revamped the links here at IsMeansIs, getting rid of many of the old ones and adding quite a few. Links have been placed in more specific categories in order to make targeted research easier. Lots of links are gone and lots of new ones are now available. A few notes on the new archive:
1) The category, “Economics and Liberty,” contains both libertarian and free-market capitalist resources. The two subjects are so intertwined and overlap so often that it is difficult to divide them into separate categories.
2) The category “Conservatism” contains links that could be neoconservative, paleoconservative, or independent conservative in nature. Links in this category are placed there (rather than in “Liberty and Economics”) because they cannot be classified as libertarian either for some economic, foreign policy, or other reason.
3) The “Essentials” category is now strictly limited to the founding documents, legislative information, and judicial information pertinent to the United States.
Hopefully these links will be useful to the intellectual pursuits of all who choose to take advantage of them. The aim here is to offer as concise a selection as possible, and one that can be used as a springboard into other areas of interest.
Happy browsing,
-Bill
Thousands of hung over bureaucrats will awake this morning with a new president, a new congress, and starry-eyed fantasies of further entrenching themselves in their positions of power. Change will most certainly come quickly as the new administration begins its reign, and it won’t be pretty. The change that most are yearning for is a master of economics and infrastructure, healer of the sick, benefactor of the poor, and punisher of the rich. It appears at least half the country hopes that our new leader can eliminate all of the unpleasantries and misfortunes of life, regardless of the freedoms they must sacrifice or the chains they surreptitiously place on their fellow men. Of the other half, a worrisome number don’t mind the schemes of legal plunder or coercive measures, they simply “hope Obama will be a great president,” as if history is without lessons and man is without unalienable rights. Like an addict with no fix, nothing is sacred.
Here’s to the people getting what they’ve asked for!
The democrat party is loathsome to be sure, but the G.O.P. has been reduced to the level of a man who watches with a blank and apathetic stare as his family is butchered. The only meaningful opposition to the leviathan in D.C. lies in whatever segment of the population has retained self-respect after over half a century of being told that the state is the only hope.
A moderate, gutless, compromising republican party with a weak handshake lost big in 2006. The establishment decided that more moderation was the ticket in 2008. As if a platform centering around more government growth coupled with insignificant spending cuts wasn’t enough, the republicans redefined “civility” as never saying anything that may be construed as too negative about the opponent’s plans to drive the country over a cliff. Short of a full blown revolution of thought among republican politicians, the party is finished as a useful apparatus for derailing the leviathan.
It is now up to us to either bring about that revolution of thought, or throw out the thoughtless in massive numbers. If the debate remains over how to grow government and expand its coercive powers, the best days of our little experiment have surely passed. It will be an interesting two years, and even more interesting to see if the G.O.P. shows any signs of life afterwards.
January 20th, 2009 in
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These are interesting times as we approach a presidential inauguration. The president elect refuses to comment on Israel’s latest skirmish (we only have one president at a time), but has used his national pulpit daily to push congress to get an economic stimulus bill to his desk as quickly as possible. His comments in past days are consistent with the big brother statist many have predicted he will govern as. Debt and deficits be damned, only government can get the country out of this economic mess. We’re going to tax and spend ourselves back into prosperity!
Obama plans to spend $700 billion on top of a $1.2 trillion deficit to stimulate the economy. Why? The answer is clear, isn’t it? The 2008 stimulus package consisted of $150 billion “pumped back into the economy.” A “shot in the arm,” as Bush put it. Apparently the shot wasn’t quite strong enough, as future months would show. There was Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Bros., Bear Stearns, AIG, Washington Mutual, and eventually the entire U.S. automotive industry. Hank Paulson’s original bailout plan was $700 billion and had to be done!. As weeks went by we were told that the world would end tomorrow if the bailout bill was not passed. The world never ended, we must have squeaked by just in time.
Clearly government spending did not fix the economy, whether in the form of “tax rebates” or cash infused into companies “too big to fail.” Obama’s logical deduction is that the state has not spent enough of the money it does not have. After all, the president elect has told us that only government can correct the economic troubles we are now faced with. The foolishness of such reasoning should be obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense. Indeed, common sense is often a better and more useful tool than any other in making the wisest decisions. Yet in this case, sound economic principles available to anyone and everyone to analyze not only predicted the debacle we find ourselves in, they also provide us with the information necessary to minimize the pain inflicted as a result of past mistakes.
The idea that government spending stimulates economies is commonly attributed to J.M. Keynes, but was popular in elite intellectual circles far before Keynes further advanced the notion. One can understand why the political class would readily accept such a theory. But where does the state get this money that it spends in order to stimulate the economy? There are but three possible answers to that question.
The most obvious way that government obtains capital is through taxation. In this case, money is removed from the private sector and reallocated as bureaucrats see fit. This could only result in a net stimulus to the economy if the government uses the capital more efficiently than the private sector would have, had the money not been taken away. To believe that such a centralized power as that in Washington could confiscate the nation’s capital and distribute it throughout such a huge and complex economy as ours in a more efficient and wise manner than consumers and entrepreneurs could if left alone is asinine. The politicians are not that smart. Furthermore, the U.S. government has no money. Our leaders are gambling with taxpayer money in a game of pin the tail on the donkey while running an annual deficit approaching $2 trillion, and with a national debt approaching $11 trillion.
Considering those numbers, we arrive at two other ways the state can “obtain” the capital to stimulate the economy. It can print it or it can borrow it.
When the federal reserve (a private bank) prints (this would be called counter-fitting if you or I did it) the money for the stimulus, the fiat currency our economy operates with becomes further inflated. Those in the top economic circles are often able to diversify and pad themselves from loss. The rest of us are not so lucky, and suffer the equivalent of a hidden tax as the currency we hold loses some of its real value. As the prime rate in America approaches zero and the fed continues to pump out money out of thin air, we also risk hyperinflation and the complete collapse of the dollar.
Borrowing money for the stimulus is a terrible option as well. $412 billion was paid out to holders of U.S. debt in fiscal year 2008 on interest alone. Consider the aforementioned (and old fashioned) method of responsibly collecting money from the taxpayers and increase the inefficiency of government spending exponentially.
Government’s inability to stimulate the economy through spending is only the beginning. It is also essential to consider the effects of government intervention that contributed to the economic troubles we face, and deal with them accordingly.
Consider the effects of artificially low interest rates and “affordable housing” policies pushed through by Washington. Easy money, easily attainable loans, and artificially high prices culminated in the crashes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as a myriad of other financial institutions. The effects of this government created calamity could have been minimized by allowing market corrections occur. Interest rates would go up, home prices would go down, and the homes of those people unable to make their house payments would have been foreclosed on and resold at newly adjusted (lower) prices. Yet government insists on preventing this correction and in turn guarantees a more painful shock into reality in the future.
Austrian economists have preached these principles for a century. They predicted the Great Depression, discussed in hypothetical terms the exact scenario that recently occurred in the U.S. housing market, and predicted the current recession.
Consider the following excerpt from Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and see if anything seems familiar (this book was written over half a century ago):
The advocates of government-guaranteed mortgages also forget that what is being lent is ultimately real capital, which is limited in supply, and that they are helping identified B at the expense of some unidentified A. Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise. They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to “buy” houses that they cannot really afford. They tend eventually to bring about an oversupply of houses as compared with other things. They temporarily overstimulate building, raise the cost of building for everybody (including the buyers of the homes with the guaranteed mortgages), and may mislead the building industry into an eventually costly overexpansion. In brief in the long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment.
Hazlitt’s hypothetical prediction based on sound principle is eerily applicable to the recent goings on in the U.S. Hazlitt also suggested in this work that there are two primary economic fallacies in which all others are rooted. I will quote these in closing as food for thought.
Nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today are the result of ignoring this lesson. Those fallacies all stem from one of two central fallacies, or both: that of looking only at the immediate consequences of an act or proposal, and that of looking at the consequences only for a particular group to the neglect of other groups.
It is most unfortunate that the Republican Party, assumed to be laissez-faire by far too many, has stooped to such depths that their leader (W) declares the market to “not be functioning correctly.” The lines between the parties are being blurred as ambitious political figures seek to convince you that life should be free of discomfort and risk, and that in the case of either the solution is government intervention. Free market capitalism is the reality of traders trading. As with any other reality, its truths will come back to bite you regardless of how hard you fight against them.
For lack of a transcript I must paraphrase, but Bill O’Reilly started a recent radio show by stating that 34% of the country’s populace is conservative, thus a candidate running on conservative ideology can’t possibly win an election and therefore should not run as such. Ousted congressman Chris Shays was interviewed days later by one of the A-B-C networks. The congressman who had just lost was brought in to give his insight into what the Republican Party needs to do to win. Shays’s answer was, of course, that Republicans should resist pressure to move to the right. According to Shays, the only way for the G.O.P. candidates to win elections is to moderate their positions and increase the size of the proverbial tent. Maybe we’ll see the Detroit Lions head coach interviewed after the Lions are decimated this week on how to win games!
These are two of a growing horde of pundits, politicians, and members of the intelligentsia who are either ignorantly or maliciously advocating the destruction of the very backbone of America. The myriad of impediments to third party viability in our political process makes the battle for the Republican Party paramount in the fate of the United States.
Wherever O’Reilly may have gotten his 34% statistic, a couple of points regarding that number are important.
First, the 34% would be a number of people who understand conservatism and readily identify with it as a political ideology. That is to say it would not count those who don’t have any particular interest in politics but if asked specific policy questions would find that they are conservative. Beyond this common sense observation, the election gave us some more objective statistics to work with. In Florida and Arizona, bans on gay marriage were passed in landslides by voters. Even in California, voters rejected “judicial legislation,” voting 52 to 48 for a Constitutional ban on gay marriage. 48% of voters there also voted for parental notification of abortion. 45% of South Dakotans voted to outlaw abortion in all but the most extreme cases. Nebraska voters overwhelmingly chose to ban affirmative action; the decision on the same issue was split down the middle in Colorado. Where ballot initiatives are made available, conservative values garner significant support.
Second, suppose it is true that only 34% of the country is conservative. The defections of millions of democrats who voted for Ronald Reagan is proof of the power of solid leadership and the ability to inspire and educate people. Leaders inspire. Leaders change minds. This battle is not a new one, just consider a portion of Reagan’s 1975 speech to C-PAC:
I don ‘t know about you, but I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, “We must broaden the base of our party”—when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents.
It was a feeling that there was not a sufficient difference now between the parties that kept a majority of the voters away from the polls. When have we ever advocated a closed-door policy? Who has ever been barred from participating?
Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?
Let us show that we stand for fiscal integrity and sound money and above all for an end to deficit spending, with ultimate retirement of the national debt.
Let us also include a permanent limit on the percentage of the people’s earnings government can take without their consent.
Let our banner proclaim a genuine tax reform that will begin by simplifying the income tax so that workers can compute their obligation without having to employ legal help.
And let it provide indexing—adjusting the brackets to the cost of living—so that an increase in salary merely to keep pace with inflation does not move the taxpayer into a surtax bracket. Failure to provide this means an increase in government’s share and would make the worker worse off than he was before he got the raise.
Let our banner proclaim our belief in a free market as the greatest provider for the people.
Let us also call for an end to the nit-picking, the harassment and over-regulation of business and industry which restricts expansion and our ability to compete in world markets.
Let us explore ways to ward off socialism, not by increasing government’s coercive power, but by increasing participation by the people in the ownership of our industrial machine.
Our banner must recognize the responsibility of government to protect the law-abiding, holding those who commit misdeeds personally accountable.
And we must make it plain to international adventurers that our love of peace stops short of “peace at any price.”
We will maintain whatever level of strength is necessary to preserve our free way of life.
A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers.
I do not believe I have proposed anything that is contrary to what has been considered Republican principle. It is at the same time the very basis of conservatism. It is time to reassert that principle and raise it to full view. And if there are those who cannot subscribe to these principles, then let them go their way.
Even more important than the fact that conservatism works is the fact that true conservatism is moral and just. Either the lives, liberties, and properties of every individual will be fought for and protected or they will not. Either the rule of law as dictated by the Constitution will be observed or it will not. While this is not the place to digress into a discussion of liberty, it is liberty that is at stake here and it is a revitalized Republican party that has the greatest chance of defending it.
From the so called Republican Revolution of 1994 to the Democrat takeover of the Presidency and Congress in 2008, what have been the concurrent trends within the Republican party? Immediately following the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, neoconservatives like Bill Kristol began cautioning against moving forward too quickly with a conservative agenda. Since that time the Republicans have failed so miserably to promote the values of their base that they have now been rendered impotent by voters. Principle aside for the moment, it is a tough argument to swallow that a 12 year leftward shift, a “broadening of the tent,” a “modernization” of the Republican party just wasn’t enough to keep winning. It is undeniable that this shift occurred, so if moderation is the key to winning elections then why have Republicans been backhanded out of office nationwide?
However this battle is to be defined, the most difficult obstacle to be overcome is that of convincing people to think. Conservatism, libertarianism and the like are ideologies that are products of a constant, active mental pursuit. Platitudes uttered by the left are easy on the emotions and require little thought. Who doesn’t want life to be fair? Who doesn’t want affordable housing and health insurance? Who doesn’t want a pristine environment? To advocate such ends is painless, to analyze the means required to realize them is not. It is perhaps easier to achieve political victory by relieving the voting public of its responsibility to think and catering to the polls. Nonetheless, it is certainly more beneficial to the country in the long term to exhibit leadership and explain to voters why freedom works.
There is much to be said of partisanship and ideology, to be sure I think many among us develop their ideologies using those magnetic poetry sets, sticking random words in random order on a refrigerator. An ideology or philosophy is a set of values and rules that one should subscribe to based on an active pursuit of truth, proper identification of the nature of existence, and acknowledgement and acceptance of one’s proper role in that existence. It is an understatement to say that far too often man’s philosophy, political or otherwise, is baseless and primarily a product of emotion rather than thought. In an address to the graduating class at West Point in 1974, Ayn Rand described the emotional approach this way:
But the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation- or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.
Every individual in America has been granted the obviously natural freedom of developing an ideology by way of one of the two aforementioned means, and then voting based on his or her conclusions. Some choose the refrigerator magnet model, others choose to think. Let us, for a moment, disregard all ideological debate and focus on a more tangible and direct proposition.
This proposition is that we subject our government to the rule of law. For far too long our country has been governed by a bureaucracy ostensibly subject to a Constitution, yet that bureaucracy has never submitted itself to that document. Judge Andrew Napolitano recently addressed the Constitutional crisis our nation faces in a Wall Street Journal column.
This is a must read piece, in which Napolitano covers the 17 powers delegated to Congress, the gross violations of Congress in regards to these delegated powers, and a fed history of completely ignoring Constitutional Law.
If we are to be a nation governed by the rule of law, we must take the Constitution seriously. If we drift away from our written law and become guided by the whims of the political elite, we will soon find ourselves in a mess even murkier than that which we are currently dealing with. Our government has been breaking the law it was empowered to enforce for at least a century. Regardless of party, regardless of ideology, there are legal means to return our government to sanity. We can make our government both sane and legal by demanding that Congress, the Executive, and the Judiciary stick to their assigned roles and delegated powers. Regardless of ideology, the rule of law is the basis of our government and must be adhered to. To the extent our Constitution is disregarded, so will our liberties fall by the wayside.
