Daily Archives: October 26, 2009

Ques­tion 2:  What do we do with the cadre of folks who are con­vinced that they were born to direct our every move (if we don’t want them to do it)?

Today Kather­ine Jean Lopez, writ­ing in National Review Online, reminds us … in which he sup­ported Barry Gold­wa­ter as the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in the 1964 race. Rea­gan said, “This is the issue of this elec­tion: Whether we believe in our capac­ity for self-government or whether we aban­don the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and con­fess that a lit­tle intel­lec­tual élite in a far-distant cap­i­tal can plan our lives for us bet­ter than we can plan them ourselves.

Uh, let’s have that again:

This is the issue of this elec­tion:  whether we aban­don the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and con­fess that a lit­tle intel­lec­tual élite in a far-distant cap­i­tal can plan our lives for us bet­ter than we can plan them ourselves.

These lead­er­ship things seem to be get­ting a lit­tle bol­lixed up.  In New Orleans when a young man of good fam­ily is unfit for seri­ous endeav­ors they used to make him a branch man­ager of one of the estab­lish­ment banks because there peo­ple took care of him and kept him from doing too much damage.

I applaud the prin­ci­ple, but I think Con­gress and the White House are prob­a­bly bad places to park snobby elit­ists.  They can do some dam­age.  And they can be supremely annoy­ing on their way to doing it.

I use the “snobby elit­ists” thing advis­edly.  Lately there have been galax­ies of words expended in defense of  “elites” and against the clue­less Yahoos who would take their name in vain.

The snobby peo­ple I’m talk­ing about need no defense.  They are in con­trol. They achieved this posi­tion by going to an élite uni­ver­sity, where they learned how naughty the US was, and that peo­ple they have never met, read, or heard should be taken out and shot for offend­ing them with their poi­so­nous views about pol­i­tics and society.

So, there­fore, they are dis­tin­guish­able with a lit­tle effort.

mean­while, back at the ranch,

dare we insist that we be con­sulted about laws gov­ern­ing us before they become laws?

Pro­fes­sor William Jacob­son has a post about what he calls a fed­eral power grab in his blog Legal Insur­rec­tion.

It’s a good piece, and lists the many ways (How do I own thee? Let me count enu­mer­ate the ways…) that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment could use this lat­est affront to fed­er­al­ism and lim­ited gov­ern­ment in a camel’s-nose-in-the-tent sort of way.

Like this:

But to base gov­ern­ment con­trol of salaries on mere reg­u­la­tory juris­dic­tion would give the gov­ern­ment con­trol over much of the econ­omy, essen­tially any busi­ness involved in inter­state com­merce. This is the harm which many of us feared from the Tro­jan horse of the bailouts.

As I said, a very good piece.

Yet as I thought about it I started think­ing, “What nose? What tent?” It’s not a nose any more.   It’s more like a piece of super-sticky fly-paper that Daffy Duck puts out for an annoy­ing fly and one lit­tle bit of it touches his feather.    Then every­thing in the house is stuck to him.  Except the fly.

It all started with wheat. The pièce de résis­tance of fed­eral over­reach, WICKARD v. FILBURN, 317 U.S. 111 (1942).

Con­gress passed a law telling each farmer how much wheat he could grow. Their author­ity for this was the clause in the Con­sti­tu­tion allow­ing the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to reg­u­late inter­state com­merce. A farmer grew more wheat than allowed. He said he could do this because none of the wheat left the area and went across a state line.  There­fore it couldn’t be reg­u­lated by the fed­eral government.

This makes sense to me. How about you? The stuff never crosses a state line? Then it’s not inter­state com­merce. Right? Well, you know the answer to that one, don’t you?

It’s wrong because, as Jus­tice Jack­son said, writ­ing for the court, “the extent as well to which one may fore­stall resort to the mar­ket by pro­duc­ing to meet his own needs.”

Got that? It was within Congress’s power to tell a man how much wheat he could grow even if it never left his farm, because.… wait for it, wait for it… it WAS part of inter­state com­merce because if he hadn’t grown the wheat he might have bought some and some of that might have arrived via inter­state commerce.

With that kind of think­ing the fed­eral gov­ern­ment can reg­u­late every­thing. And they have.

Joe gets up in the morn­ing when his alarm clock goes off. Sev­eral fed­eral agen­cies have had a say in the design and mar­ket­ing of his alarm clock.

Joe takes off his paja­mas. A cou­ple of fed­eral agen­cies have put in their two-cents’ worth about the pajamas.

He brushes his teeth. Ditto tooth­brush and toothpaste.

Under­wear? Yup. Socks? Check. Shoes? You bet. He looks in the mir­ror. Now what do you sup­pose?  The mir­ror? Uh-huh.

Time for cof­fee. Cof­fee?  Oh, yeah.

Milk? Um-hmm.

Ditto cereal.

Watch — check.

Then he puts a comb in his pocket. As near as I can tell there is not one fed­eral agency, law, or reg­u­la­tion that con­cerns his comb but I’ll bet there is one.

He leaves his house. If he owns it the fed­eral gov­ern­ment reg­u­lates the bank that wrote the mort­gage, the inter­est they can charge, prob­a­bly bought and repack­aged the mort­gage, reg­u­lated the build­ing mate­ri­als that went into it, the race, eth­nic group, and pos­si­bly sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion of the peo­ple build­ing and sell­ing it, and the sell­ing or rent­ing of the house.

Then he gets into his car.