Last month I blogged about a WSJ op-ed by Randy Barnett, in which he called for our states to convene a Constitutional Convention to reign in federal power :-)
Section 1. Congress shall make no law laying or collecting taxes upon incomes, gifts, or estates, or upon aggregate consumption or expenditures; but Congress shall have power to levy a uniform tax on the sale of goods or services.
Section 2. Any imposition of or increase in a tax, duty, impost or excise shall require the approval of three-fifths of the House of Representatives and three-fifths of the Senate, and shall separately be presented to the president of the United States.
Section 3. This article shall be effective five years from the date of its ratification, at which time the 16th Article of amendment is repealed.
Is that beautiful or what?
And that’s just the beginning! Other articles limit (or rather re-iterate existing limits on) the fed government power to regular intra-state commerce; forbid requiring states to implement programs unless the federal government also pays for them; forbid Congress from enlarging its powers by means of international treaty (BRILLIANT!); and extend the protection of political free speech.
I simply love this — not least of all because it renews my faith that there are intelligent, thoughtful people out there who are taking seriously the drift we’re experiencing from the America our Founding Fathers envisioned.
I mean, think about it. We have a federal government that began to redefine its role in the early 20th century, first by instituting an income tax and then by re-casting itself as a financial helpmate for people in trouble.
And we have a man in the White House who has suggested publicly that an even more radical re-shaping is warranted. (Scroll down at this link or listen to the audio here.
We can’t let this happen without a debate.
We need to look at three broad areas — technology; increased population and the pressures that brings on resources (including clean water, soil, and air); and the consequences of 70 years of a burgeoning federal beauracracy — and ask ourselves if we can apply Constitionally-founded principles to work out the issues arising within those areas.
If not, then we need to stand up and say: the Constitution is dated, it doesn’t work any more, toss it out, nice while it lasted but we need something different today.
But if we do that, it has to be out in the open. It has to be a debate led by people who are thinking past the next election — who are thinking past their own job security — because the decisions we make may well wipe this country off the face of the Earth, at least in terms of who we are and what we stand for. Or stood for . . .
How often do you read something that is so moving you want to cry, you want to shove it into the hands of everyone you know, hell, into the hands of strangers in the street?
Steyn’s got it all. First class intellect, international breadth of cultural & political perspective, wit, sharp eye.
Excepts. These are all quotes. “Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”:
Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic.
So-called fiscal conservatives often miss the point. The problem isn’t the cost. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They’re wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state.
There are stages to the enervation of free peoples. America, which held out against the trend, is now at Stage One: The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear.
Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. That’s the argument behind, for example, mandatory motorcycle helmets, or the creepy teams of government nutritionists currently going door to door in Britain and conducting a “health audit” of the contents of your refrigerator.
When the state “gives” you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it’s not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence . . .
Every Democrat running for election tells you they want to do this or that “for the children.” If America really wanted to do something “for the children,” it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a leviathan of bloated bureaucracy and unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. That’s the real “war on children” (to use another Democrat catchphrase)—and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they’ll win it.
The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back.
Everything he writes, I feel in my bones. Truly, I am so distressed by the direction our government is taking that I can only look at it peripherally — to look straight on would distress me to madness.
I love this country so much. I look at my life, at what I’ve accomplished — when else in history, where else on the planet, could a woman live the life I’m living? No other time in history. And as for “where,” the answer is this country, my country, America. A few other Western countries come close, possibly. But none of them with the space, the possibilities, & wealth of this country.
And we’re frittering it away, because we want our government to baby us. Because when we are faced with life’s sharp edges, we choose to be timid and fretful and whine for help instead of saying “we’ll get through it. We’ll figure out a way. We’re strong.” And meaning it. And taking pride in it. Pride!
Is this what the Dem party supporters wanted? A government that plays to our weakness? That grows, and grows, and taxes, and taxes, promises to solve our little problems, assumes more & more control in the name of solving them — tell me, you people who voted for Obama, are you getting what you wanted? Is this what you wanted? Is it?
Are you happy?
Do you really think we have a Caring Man in the White House now and that’s going to make everything better, give him time, it’s not his fault he inherited such a mess? I assume that’s what left-leaning intellectuals would claim, am I right? Do you really, honestly believe that? That the changes he’s making to our country are all benign, their consequences will be neutral at worst, that they are credible, that it’s all about patching and fixing? That the politicians running our government — those same politicians you would agree as individuals are idiots — are somehow, collectively, qualified to do the patching and fixing?
Before the election an interview Obama gave on Chicago public radio in 2001 surfaced. I never linked to it, but I’ll embed it below; here also is a transcription I made of the relevant bits. Our future president speaking, folks. Read it closely, please, pay attention, please.
You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k.
But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and, sort of, of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in the society.
And to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted — and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way — that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you. But it doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And, um, in some ways we still suffer from that.
We elected this man. We elected him to uphold our Constitution — without ever ONCE looking at what he plans for our Constitution.
The entire pre-election debate was about namby pamby crap. Petty sh!t. Not once did we discuss what is really important.
But as Steyn’s essay asserts, there are consequences when people expect governments to do things “on their behalf,” as opposed to operating in terms of those negative liberties, in terms of what its limits are relative to its citizens.
The left looked at the future under Republican rule and saw a militaristic America alienating other nations and promulgating racism.
Bad stuff. I agree we don’t want to go there.
But are we really on a better path?
No, we are not. We’re on a path to ruin. Maybe on a different route than the GOP would take us, but the destination is the same.
Steyn, again:
Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea — of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest — or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it’s subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay “humanist” (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”
But not to worry. In fact: sleep in. Spend your life in bed, it’s so comfortable! reading, watching T.V., surfing the net.
Genteel decline can be very agreeable—initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure’s off it’s nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by.
You don’t even have to roust yourself to attend those anti-war rallies any more! Now that Chimpy’s out of office! Niiiice!
So go ahead, have a glass of wine, a glass of beer, go back to bed, such a nice man in charge now, and those fools called him a Socialist! Go back to bed.
He calls for states to take action against the Federal government’s out-of-control encroachment on our Constitutional liberties.
Best of all, he suggests actual concrete action: a Constitutional convention to repeal the 16th Amendment. That’s the one that established the income tax, btw.
“This single change,” Barnett writes, “would strike at the heart of unlimited federal power and end the costly and intrusive tax code.”
Congress could then replace the income tax with a “uniform” national sales or “excise” tax (as stated in Article I, section 8) that would be paid by everyone residing in the country as they consumed, and would automatically render savings and capital appreciation free of tax.
Dollar amounts on state financial disclosure forms, which are not published on the Internet, exist as only broad ranges of value — and even those vague range values are withheld from the public. Descriptions of income or gift sources are allowed to be similarly opaque.
Public officials in New York are not required to disclose conflicts of interest. Such conflicts, when they are discovered, are actionable only if ethics officials, who operate in secrecy, deem them to be “significant.” And state prosecutors cannot bring criminal charges under the state’s ethics laws without a referral from an ethics panel, which consists of members appointed by the very politicians they regulate.
Even if prosecutors clear those hurdles and bring charges, a violation of the ethics law is only a misdemeanor, not a felony.
We pay the highest taxes in the country. Our revenue per capita ratio is one of the highest in the country. Yet Albany is out of money, and is preparing to tax us even more.
How can this happen? Because the Empire State has been hijacked by thugs.
“There is no watchdog,” said Blair Horner, legislative director for the New York Pubic Research Interest Group. “You’ve had an astonishingly long list of lawmakers getting into trouble. We haven’t reached the tipping point yet.”
Horner said it isn’t surprising Bruno didn’t take ethics oversight seriously: The ethics panel, chosen by him and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, has never charged any lawmakers with wrongdoing.
Maybe there is still a bit of Jefferson’s influence hanging around.
From a new Washington Post-ABC News Poll. When asked, “Generally speaking, would you say you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with more services?” 53 percent of respondents picked smaller government, to 43 percent who picked larger.
People once fled New York State for California. And bragged about it.
Now they’re moving away. (Granted, not to New York, where all our leaves are brown, still. Also covered with a couple feet of snow. And chilled down to a cozy 4 degrees this morning.)
The number of people leaving California for another state outstripped the number moving in from another state during the year ending on July 1, 2008. California lost a net total of 144,000 people during that period — more than any other state, according to census estimates. That is about equal to the population of Syracuse, N.Y.
The state with the next-highest net loss through migration between states was New York, which lost just over 126,000 residents.
California’s loss is extremely small in a state of 38 million. And, in fact, the state’s population continues to increase overall because of births and immigration, legal and illegal. But it is the fourth consecutive year that more residents decamped from California for other states than arrived here from within the U.S.
When the article moves on to answer the burning question of “why,” it falls back on the usual dreamy litany. Unemployment. High foreclosure rate. Personal income flat.
California has followed the grim path of the Great Lakes states.
[T]hose states where [sic] once the industrial dynamo for the entire Earth, yet they destroyed that enormous economic dominance by political policies hostile to economic creativity . . .
It seems that in post-New Deal America, economic and civil success sow their own seeds of destruction. When things are going good, socialist experimentation seems harmless. A booming economy can pay for increased government spending and an ever-increasing scope of government power. Eventually, however, socialism strangles the economic engine and destroys civil society.
Does running California really cost $1800 more per person than running New Hampshire?
Of course not. At least, it shouldn’t.
America is wasting its assets by funneling our money through political machines that add ZERO value.
California is our canary in the gold mine . . .
(P.S. California’s population is still growing, incidentally, thanks to the birthrate etc. It’s the people who can voluntarily move who are leaving. The babies are staying put for now.)
For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.
In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as “the looters and their laws.” Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the “Anti-Greed Act” to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel’s promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn’t Hank Paulson think of that?
These acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008.
For the life of me, I can’t understand why people can’t grasp how badly our politicians are running the government right now.
It’s just COMMON SENSE.
I know that there are good, thoughtful people out there who hope the Democrats can rescue this country from the mess we’re in. But government isn’t the answer. You can’t force people, through legislation, to not be stupid and greedy. They’re going to be stupid and greedy no matter what, and when you pass a law to restrict one behavior, they’ll just express their greed & stupidity some other way.
This is an existential issue, folks. You can’t legislate what goes on in peoples’ souls.
Meanwhile, that growing pile of increasingly byzantine laws encumbers EVERYONE. You end up with lunacy. You end up with things like a tax code that’s so complicated people can’t fill out their income tax forms without professional help. As one example of many.
That’s why the minimalist approach of our Constitution is such a beautiful thing.
Probably the best article I’ve read so far on what was going on, in the last few years, on Wall Street is this one: a piece in Conde Nast Portfolio by Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker.) The article does a great job of describing just what greed & stupidity looked like among the guys who engineered our current fiscal disaster.
But we don’t make it better by putting our politicians in charge — because they are every bit as greedy, and if anything more stupid, than the Wall Streeters.
They don’t have our best interest at heart — and we don’t have the resources to keep them honest. We just don’t. We’re looking after our homes, and our families, and our jobs.
There’s only one way out. We have to take our medicine and put our economy back on sound fiscal footing again. Even if it means we go through a period of economic upheaval, and uncertainty, and even hardship for a few years. We can handle it. We can come together at a community level and take care of each other.
Anybody who knows me also knows: I’m the first to applaud efforts to get rid of toxins, particularly in our food and — most certainly — in anything our kids might put into their mouths.
But we now have another textbook example of why we can’t entrust Congress with this responsibility.
They’ve passed a law mandating that all products sold to kids 12 and other be tested for lead and phthalates.
“We will have to lock our doors and file for bankruptcy,” said Shauna Sloan, founder of Salt Lake City-based franchise Kid to Kid, which sells used children’s clothing in 75 stores across the country and had planned to open a store in Santa Clara, Calif., this year.
I know my posts of late have been dripping with disgust for our politicians, but I’m sorry, it’s warranted.
Really, is it too much to ask for them to read their stupid laws before they vote on them?
And while I’m at it, activists who push for legislation on these things — I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but you need to learn a lesson here, too. Even if this law is softened in some way, it will still have two consequences that I bet you will hate to see.
1. More stuff — including perfectly safe stuff–will be sent to landfills instead of being reused/recycled and
2. Toxic stuff that’s of any value, but that can no longer be sold second hand here, will be shipped overseas where laws are more lax.
Because–as I posted last summer–that’s what we spend annually to fluoridate our water in this county.
I’ve been fuming about that figure again lately, and not only because we’re facing the prospect of unprecedented tax hikes, thanks to the poor fiscal management of our pols.
Much of this research was originally published in China, but the FAN is translating it.
Meanwhile, the National Research Council, which has reviewed a handful of these studies, says “the consistency of the collective results warrant additional research on the effects of fluoride on intelligence.”
Yeah, well how about discontinuing mass fluoridation of our water until we know for sure, folks?
It’s almost enough to make you believe the conspiracy theorists who think the government is deliberately trying to make people stupid.
At the least, it’s a clear window into how these agencies view their responsibilities toward the American people. They’re not going to err on the side of protecting us from brain damage. What do they care if our kids’ IQ loses 5 or 10 points? They’re collecting their salaries, and seeing their names published in prestigious medical journals, and being invited to speak at all the right conferences.
Came across this article from 2003. It’s a reprint of a piece by Kevin Hasset that was originally published in the October/November 2003 issue of The American Enterprise magazine.
Hassett compares the fiscal health of states that voted for Bush to that of states whose voters when for Gore.
Ha ha ha.
Though the total population of Bush and Gore states are almost identical, the states that voted Democratic account for fully 70% of today’s state deficits; Republican states ring up only 30% of the total. And of 10 ten states with the largest per capita budget deficits (see nearby table), every single one voted Democratic in the last presidential election.
But wait, there’s more!
. . . in the top 10 deficit states (again: all Democratic) tax revenues increased at the dramatic rate of about 5% a year over the last decade.
And more!
. . . the average tax revenue per person in today’s sickest ten states was $2,445 in the last data available–compared to only $1,923 per person in the 10 healthiest states. This blasts out of the water the idea that states get sick because they have been starved of revenue; indeed it shows the opposite.
Hassett doesn’t pick on Democrats alone, mind you. He reserves some sharp words for President Bush, who, he notes
increased spending on just about everything. Three of the five biggest increases in federal spending in U.S. history occurred during Mr. Bush’s first three years in office (the other two took place during World War II).
Something that makes me positively sick to my stomach, btw.
Because those of us who understand that government spending is a hugely, hugely inefficient way to take care of people have no party that even approximates our views. We’re forced to hold our noses and consort with fringey groups that attract only marginal political talent. Ugh.
My only hope is that people will finally wake up and look at the data. It’s right there, if you just look. Increasing taxes should NEVER be the first line solution. We have to tighten our belts. We have to stop running deficits. We have to truly cut the size of government.
Until we can show the maturity and discipline to do those things, our situation is only going to get worse. It might take a generation or two, but we will impoverish ourselves.
No, that isn’t a joke. That’s a New York Times article. Click it and read for yourself.
THE received wisdom about economic life in the Nordic countries is easily summed up: people here are incomparably affluent, with all their needs met by an efficient welfare state. They believe it themselves. Yet the reality - as this Oslo-dwelling American can attest, and as some recent studies confirm - is not quite what it appears.
Even as the Scandinavian establishment peddles this dubious line, it serves up a picture of the United States as a nation divided, inequitably, among robber barons and wage slaves, not to mention armies of the homeless and unemployed. It does this to keep people believing that their social welfare system, financed by lofty income taxes, provides far more in the way of economic protections and amenities than the American system. Protections, yes -but some Norwegians might question the part about amenities.
In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list.
More:
After I moved here six years ago, I quickly noticed that Norwegians live more frugally than Americans do. They hang on to old appliances and furniture that we would throw out. And they drive around in wrecks . . .
One image in particular sticks in my mind. In a Norwegian language class, my teacher illustrated the meaning of the word matpakke - “packed lunch” - by reaching into her backpack and pulling out a hero sandwich wrapped in wax paper. It was her lunch. She held it up for all to see.
Yes, teachers are underpaid everywhere. But in Norway the matpakke is ubiquitous, from classroom to boardroom. In New York, an office worker might pop out at lunchtime to a deli; in Paris, she might enjoy quiche and a glass of wine at a brasserie. In Norway, she will sit at her desk with a sandwich from home.
So those of you who want our country to abandon our Constitution and go socialist, there’s your template.
Celebrate politicians who call for tax increases.
Call at the top of your lungs for more government “services.”
Beg for more government intervention into businesses and our private lives.
And, if things go really really well, we might one day be as well-off as Norway.
Randy Barnett, Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown, 
How I wish this were required reading for everybody in this country: Stephen Moore, in the Wall Street Journal, 
