Copyright 2011 by John T. Reed
When the Founding Fathers finished the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin stepped out of the room onto the street. “Well, doctor,” a woman asked, “what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A republic, madame, if you can keep it.”
A state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.
Many will say that the United States in 2011 is a republic then. If you believe that, you are suffering from boiling-frog syndrome—the inability to recognize great and dangerous change because it takes place gradually.
Do we elect the president? Yes. But after we elect him, he can do whatever he wants. The current president, Obama, has crammed numerous major spending laws down our throats in spite of their being clearly opposed by a majority of people in public opinion polls, namely, the stimulus and Obamacare.
About the only control you have over the president is during his first term if he wants to be reelected. But Obama has said he would rather be a great one-term president than a mediocre two-term one. (I’m not sure those are his only choices.) I don’t know if he was sincere when he said that, but if he was, then he would not be affected by an electorate that seemed displeased with him even in his first term.
And once a president either gets reelected to a second term or is convinced he would not get reelected, the voters have absolutely no power to influence him.
Similarly, the control voters have over Congress largely disappears when you consider retirement announcements or unannounced decisions to retire after the current term. That control also largely disappears when you look at the victory rate of incumbents.
According to Open Secrets, it was 88 percent in 1992 and 94 percent for 2006 and 2008 for the House. In the Senate it was 79 percent in 2006 and 83 percent in 2008.
In 2010, supposedly the big throw-the-bums-out election, 87% of House incumbents who sought reelection won as did 90% of Senators who sought reelection.
It must be admitted that there were lots of Congresspeople who decided to retire rather than run in 2010 because they saw the handwriting on the wall.
When the Soviet union still existed, it religiously held elections. But we Americans and others in the Western democracies laughed out loud at the success rate of Communist Party candidates—90% or more.
But when you look at our reelection rates, there is actually not much difference. For post-Cold War readers, the Soviet Union was a Communist dictatorship. The elections held there were generally unopposed and any opponents were phony ones approved by the government.
Furthermore, with our two-party system, you really do not have much choice at the polls. In a conservative district for example, both the Republican and the Democrat are typically rather conservative. Or in a liberal district, they are both rather liberal.
In a two-party system, each party appeals to its base plus independents. That means both parties are seeking the same independent voters. After focus groups and internal polling and all that, they both figure out what the independents want to hear and tell them that. The appeal to their base takes place in the party primaries. In the general election, they both go after the same group of voters generally with extremely similar messages and promises. Voters rarely have a real choice after the primaries. General elections are usually tweedledee versus tweedledum. It’s not your fault you voted for a scum bag. They were both scum bags.
Then there are the rules of the House and Senate. Generally, the Constitution makes no mention of House and Senate rules, but they sure are important. The leader of the majority part can generally stop anything from coming to a vote in the House. Committee chairs have enormous power. They use that power to get reelected. Few if any reader of this article ever voted for Sancy Pelosi or Harry Reid, yet those two people dramatically affected our lives in 2009 and 2010. They are unelected (by citizens to their rules-based positions of power) undefeatable and unaccountable, yet they are enormously powerful. That is not a democracy.
Then consider the definition of republic in light of the modern way of legislating. During the first two years of the Obama administration, he signed two laws that exceeded 2,000 pages into law: Obamacare and the financial reform package, plus another two laws of enormous length: the stimulus (647 pages) and the earmarks bill (9,000 earmarks). But it gets worse. These laws are not the law. Rather, they each authorize appointed, not elected, officials to issue thousands of pages of regulations that are the actual ultimate laws that citizens must comply with.
Nowadays, some regulations actually carry criminal penalties and do not require criminal intent as previously required by all criminal laws. That sounds unconstitutional, but don’t hold your breath.
Many have called the unelected officials a Fourth Branch of government—an unconstitutional branch. From the standpoint of the land of the free, it is the branch that most affects our lives.
Not only are they unelected, bureaucrats are unaccountable. You can’t fire them. When I was an Army officer, my roommate, another lieutenant, worked in an office that had civilian employees of the Army. One hardly ever came to work. When told to start showing up on time, the 250-pound woman said, “Go to hell. I’m black and I’m civil service and you can’t do nothing to me.” And they did nothing to her.
In his book Freedom at Risk, James L. Buckley (the late William F. Buckley’s brother) told of a six-employee business in Boulder, CO that was fined $1.16 by OSHA. The business said they was no rule against what they were fined for and demanded the citation.
First OSHA said no copy of the rule was available. Then they sent a 248-page list of the titles of OSHA regulations which was not helpful. Then they sent a 48-page supplement to the 248 page list of titles. That mentioned the situation of the Boulder employer, but did not say he violated a rule. The businessman appealed the fine. After four hours of hearings in front of seven unelected federal bureaucrats, a 19-page opinion was issued dismissing the charge.
Buckley does not say, but I’ll bet absolutely nothing happened to any of the OSHA officials who demanded the fine or who tried to stonewall the businessman when he asked for the citation of what he had done wrong.
Same thing happens every day and almost all the other citizens just pay. I have received an occasional IRS notice wanting more money. In a number of cases, the IRS was wrong. I balked and won. But the vast majority of people just pay because they are afraid to fight city hall or any other level of government—even when they are right. This the same way people behave in dictatorships.
A common civics class debate is whether an elected legislator should vote his conscience or his constituents’ wishes.
How about neither? How about they vote their own reelection which is a complex calculation about campaign contributions, alliances with special interests, what they can hide in the fine print, what the voters are too dumb to understand, their ambitions for higher office and other consideration that fall under neither the conscience nor the voter wishes categories.
What if the only people willing to run for elective office have no conscience?
Pure socialism is where the government spends 100% of the nation’s money.
Below is a partial list of countries by government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) for the listed countries, according to the 2011 Index of Economic Freedom by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. you can see the whole list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending.
| Country | Government spending as a percentage of GDP |
|---|---|
| United States | 38.9% |
| Belgium | 50.0% |
| France | 52.8% |
| Germany | 43.7% |
| Greece | 46.8% |
| Russia | 34.1% |
| Singapore | 17.0% |
| Sweden | 52.5% |
| United Kingdom | 47.3% |
Singapore is, I suspect, the most capitalist country on earth. Note they only spend 17% of GDP on government. We, on the other hand, are climbing rapidly toward France and Sweden and already above Russia.
You can see a graph of how the percentage of U.S. government spending has grown since 1903 to today at http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html. It has been climbing steadily since 1903 with peaks during World War I and II. But now we are above World War I levels and approaching World War II levels—WITH NO World War!The increase in the percentage of government spending during the Obama administration is the greatest ever in peacetime other than the early FDR administration. FDR did not have a war—yet—in the 1930s, but he was busy creating and deepening the Great Depression by too much interference with the private sector.
Every percent the government spending rises, means we have less freedom, less liberty, and that we are more socialist.
The same can be said about the size of the U.S. Code, the official name for the set of books containing all U.S. federal laws. The U.S. Code started out containing only the original Constitution (before the Bill of Rights). It takes up four pages in my World Almanac.
In 1935, two years into the Roosevelt Administration, the entire U.S. Code was 2,275 pages.
In 1970, the education section alone—Title 42—was 3,022 pages long
In 2010, the Code of Federal Regulations alone, not the U.S. Code, contained 35,637 pages.
Free men decide. Un-free men comply.
Every page of new laws or regulations means you decide less and comply with more. Ultimately, you decide nothing. It becomes impossible to comply with every law or regulation, and the government thus always has the power to incarcerate every single citizen for one thing or another.
Most regulations apply to businesses, so what do you care?
One reason you should is a famous statement from the 1930s in Germany.
You may think most of the laws and regulations don’t concern you because they apply to businesses. If businessmen have their freedom reduced, even massively, why should you care?
A famous quote came out of Nazi Germany:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
The other reason you should care when businesses lose freedom is that all burdens placed on businesses by the government are passed on to consumers. Basically, the one thing that businesses will never cut is their profit margin. It is their reason for being in business. If, for some reason, they cannot pass their additional regulatory costs onto the consumer, they will quit the business. Many of the industries that have moved offshore, like textiles, did so because regulations here made American manufacturers incapable of competing with foreign ones. People think it’s only because of cheap labor. That’s a factor, but environmental laws, minimum wage, lawsuits, etc. etc. are the total reason. See my article on “if” laws that explains that in more detail.
Here is a statement about the cost of regulation on small business from the Small Business Administration:
In the face of higher costs of federal regulations, the research shows that small businesses continue to bear a disproportionate share of the federal regulatory bur- den. The findings are consistent with those in Hopkins (1995) and Crain and Hopkins (2001).
The research finds that the cost of federal regulations totals $1.1 trillion; the cost per employee for firms with fewer than 20 employees is $7,647.
Here’s another from the Wall Street Journal:
The annual cost of federal regulations in the United States increased to more than $1.75 trillion in 2008, a 3% real increase over five years, to about 14% of U.S. national income. This cost is in addition to the federal tax burden of 21%, for a combined cost of 35% of national income. One out of every three dollars earned in the U.S. goes to pay for or comply with federal laws and regulations, and new policies enacted in 2010 for health care and financial services will increase this burden.
In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, they say every time you hear a bell ring it means an angel got his wings.
Every time a clause of a new law is passed or a clause of a new regulation is issued, Americans lose more of their freedom and have to turn more of their hard-earned money over to government to live in the United States.
The standard answer to the question, “Who is protecting Americans’ freedoms and liberty?” is “our brave men and women in uniform.”
That’s what they told us when I was in Vietnam.
It’s not true. North Vietnam won the Vietnam war. Did they take away any of our freedoms as a result? Nope. I have never been forced to comply with a North Vietnamese law or regulation. The Vietnamese Communists did not make an amphibious landing in Hawaii or California. Twenty of my West Point classmates died in the Vietnam War—for nothing. Our freedom was in danger, but not from the Vietnamese. We “freedom fighters” had been sent literally as far away as possible (Vietnam is 12 time zones from Washington, DC, in other words, precisely on the other side of the earth) from the actual danger to our freedoms: the president, Congress, and bureaucracy in DC.
Now we are told al Qaeda wants to take away our freedom. Or the Taliban. Actually, they would like to do some more terrorist publicity stunts like 9/11, but they don’t give a rat’s rump about our Bill of Rights.
The “war on terror” is a distraction. The real war for American freedom is being fought in Washington, DC—and lost. If the men and women on active duty in the military really want to protect our freedom, they need to get out of the military and go work for the Cato Institute or some similar, anti-big government advocacy group.
“Big government” is a euphemism for socialism and socialism requires dictatorship because it is all about central planning which must be mandatory, like the Obamacare everyone-has-to-buy-health-insurance mandate. Republicans are generally afraid to call it socialism because it sounds too extreme. It is what it is. Refusing to call it what it is is aiding and abetting the socialists in their thus far quite successful efforts to take away our freedom.
My Uncle Jack died of cancer ant age 51. I visited him shortly before he died. There were tubes going into and out of him. He could see that the ones going out were carrying more black liquid by volume than the one coming into him with clear liquid. He pointed to the drain tube and said,
That‘s my life draining away.
And so it was. If you want to watch your freedoms drain away, subscribe to the Federal Register. John Stossel does just so he can wave it or point to the growing stack of thick booklets from time to time on his Fox Business TV program. I have not heard him say, “This is the record of your freedoms draining away,” but he makes the same point in his own words.
Oh, well. I and a bunch of others tried to tell them. The 5/30/11 Hearst Newspapers had an interview with David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He said essentially the same thing that I and others have been saying for the last several year—what Ross Perot said back in 1992.
Franklin’s “if you can keep it” warning was prescient. We did not keep it. We still have the superficial appearance of it, but the fact is the national government pretty much ignores us and has been for decades. They enact laws and regulations we do not want, they spend higher and higher percentages of our money by taxing and by borrowing on the taxpayers’ “credit card,” and they hire more and more unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who issue and enforce “laws” no legislator ever explicitly voted for. How would a dictatorship be different other than the superficial appearance?
But the American people we never recognize it until we make government officials wear Nazi arm bands.
I favor constitutional amendments that would have national referenda to decide issues in which politicans cannot behave responsibly, like the national debt ceiling, immigration policy, and so on. I also favor a constitutional amendment that would choose and operate Congress the way grand juries operate.
Actually, that would not be a republic, but it would be government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It would be true democracy. The republic theory turned out not to be viable. It puts dishonest politicians (pardon my redundancy) in charge of taxpayers’ money and credit and immigration policy and they are incapable of responsible behavior in those areas.
John T. Reed