.gif)
From The American Spectator:
Feature
A Splendid, Precarious Victory
By Dan Peterson from the September 2010 issue
There is now a class of people in this country who at every turn seek to increase the power of government at the expense of the people's freedom, who in practice have largely inverted the meaning of the Constitution, who hold in contempt the beliefs on which this country was founded and prospered, and who aim to break and retrain American civil society, with themselves in the saddle.
They have rampaged nearly unchecked since the 2008 elections.
It is a thing of beauty, then, when these forces are thrashed and an emphatic victory is won for constitutionalism and the rights of a free and independent people. The case of McDonald v. City of Chicago, decided by the Supreme Court at the end of June, is such a victory.
In McDonald, the Court held that the Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms not only against usurpations by the federal government, but also against infringement by states and localities. Disarming the American people is, of course, a central goal of the party of boundless government power. An armed people, determined to retain their guns in private hands, is a forbidding obstacle to oppressive government. Although this court decision will make it harder for them to disarm us, opponents of our constitutional freedoms will relentlessly continue their efforts to choke off, ban, and criminalize gun ownership.
Throughout most of the history of the republic, the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms was considered clear and uncontroversial. We were free American citizens; of course we had the right to own rifles, pistols, and shotguns; and the Constitution confirmed that right.
Then an odd thing happened. Principally in the latter third of the 20th century, Congress and many states and cities began imposing increasingly stringent regulation on firearms ownership and use. Confronted by such restrictions, and even by outright gun bans, the courts proved to be of surprisingly little use in protecting the right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.
There were two main devices by which the courts undermined the Second Amendment's straightforward command that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." First, the courts sometimes held that the right protected by the Second Amendment was not a right of individuals to own and use firearms. Instead, these courts held it to be an amorphous "collective" right relating to militia service -- which in practice meant no right at all. Second, some courts held that the Second Amendment applied only to bar infringements of gun rights by the federal government, and did not prevent similar infringements by states and cities. Thus, the Second Amendment was watered down by many courts to afford little or no protection for gun ownership.
The United States Supreme Court, however, had never squarely addressed either of these theories in recent times. The Supreme Court's decision in the McDonald case and its decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008, together have created a revolution in Second Amendment law. Heller involved a challenge to the nearly total ban on handguns imposed by the District of Columbia in the mid-1970s. The District argued that its ban could not be challenged by a private citizen who wanted to own a handgun, because the Second Amendment embraced only a collective right related to militia service. The Supreme Court disagreed, and held for the first time in its history that individuals have a Second Amendment right to own handguns in their homes for purposes of defense.
Because the District of Columbia is a federal enclave, Heller necessarily did not address whether this individual Second Amendment right protects against infringements by states, counties, and municipalities. That's where the McDonald case comes in.
A LITTLE LEGAL BACKGROUND is necessary to understand the arguments in that case. As originally ratified, the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, limited only the powers of the federal government. After the Civil War, however, the 14th Amendment was adopted. Among other things, that amendment prohibited the states from abridging the "privileges or immunities" of citizens of the United States. In a separate clause, it also denied to states the power to deprive any person of "life, liberty or property without due process of law."
But what rights, exactly, did these two clauses in the 14th Amendment protect against state invasion? In a series of cases called The Slaughter-House Cases, decided in 1873, the Supreme Court essentially turned the privileges or immunities clause into a dead letter. Beginning in the late 19th century, however, the Court began to examine whether certain provisions of the Bill of Rights should be considered to be "incorporated" into the 14th Amendment's due process clause, and thus become enforceable against states and localities. By the 1960s, the Court had held that nearly all of the provisions of the Bill of Rights were incorporated by the due process clause.
But there was one conspicuous exception: the Second Amendment's protection of the right to keep and bear arms.
McDonald challenged the almost complete ban on handgun ownership and possession that was imposed by the city of Chicago in 1982. Actually, three lawsuits were filed: one by plaintiff Otis McDonald, the Second Amendment Foundation, and several other plaintiffs against the City of Chicago; and two suits by the National Rifle Association and several private individuals against the City of Chicago and the Village of Oak Park. The trial court entered judgment against the plaintiffs in all cases on grounds that the Second Amendment was not incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment, and thus did not apply to the municipal defendants. The federal court of appeals consolidated the cases, and upheld the trial court's action on similar grounds.
The Supreme Court initially granted review only in the McDonald case, but the NRA parties also appeared and filed briefs on the merits as respondents in support of petitioners. Oral argument time for the pro-gun parties was divided between the two groups. The McDonald parties' main argument was certainly audacious: that the Slaughter-House Cases ought to be overruled, and that the Second Amendment should be applied to states and cities under the long-defunct privileges or immunities clause. The NRA parties, by contrast, concentrated on urging the Court to extend incorporation to the Second Amendment under its well-established due process jurisprudence.
During oral argument, counsel for the McDonald parties ran into immediate trouble. About a minute into his presentation, he was interrupted by Chief Justice Roberts, who noted that the privileges or immunities argument was "contrary to the Slaughter-House Cases, which have been the law for 140 years...." Three other justices chimed in right away, with Justice Scalia asking the attorney why he would rely on the privileges or immunities clause "unless you're bucking for [a] place on some law school faculty—."
In short, the privileges or immunities theory was a dead duck from the outset, and though the lawyer for the McDonald parties kept flapping its wings, he couldn't get it to fly. The attorney for the NRA parties had an easier time contending that the Court ought to follow its existing due process doctrines, and incorporate the Second Amendment on that basis.
In the end that's what the plurality of the Court did, in a 5-4 decision. Justice Thomas, in a separate concurrence, based his agreement with the Court's result on the privileges or immunities clause. The four dissenting justices argued that the Second Amendment should not be incorporated at all.
THE CASE DECIDED OR CONFIRMED two crucial points. First, it held that the right to keep and bear arms is incorporated through the 14th Amendment, and restrains the ability of state and local governments to infringe upon firearms rights. Second, the decision made it clear that the right to keep and bear arms is a "fundamental" constitutional right, which invokes the highest level of scrutiny by courts in determining whether restrictions on the right can stand.
McDonald did not directly strike down the Chicago ordinance, but it was obvious that Chicago's handgun ban could not survive under Heller and McDonald. So, four days after the Supreme Court's decision the Chicago city council passed a new ordinance that does not technically ban handguns, but instead piles on restrictions designed to limit the utility of guns for legitimate self-defense, while making firearms ownership extraordinarily difficult, expensive, and fraught with legal peril. Among other things, the new ordinance:
• Bans possession of a legally owned handgun anywhere outside the home, even in the yard or attached garage.
• Bans gun stores within the city.
• Prohibits citizens from having more than one assembled, workable firearm within the home.
• Bans any handguns that the police superintendent deems "unsafe."
• Prohibits possession of a rifle or a shotgun outside the home or fixed place of business.
• Prohibits anyone from registering more than one handgun per month.
• Requires gun owners to be fingerprinted and to complete a training course which cannot legally be offered in the city.
• Creates a burdensome and expensive permitting system to possess guns or ammunition, and requires registration of every firearm.
• Inflicts heavy fines and mandatory jail time for any violation of the ordinance, with each day of violation constituting a separate offense.
There are many more abusive restrictions in the 29-page, single-spaced ordinance. And these are in addition to the multiple requirements and disabilities already imposed by federal law and prohibitions on possession by felons) and by the existing, restrictive Illinois state law.
The 14th Amendment was passed in the aftermath of the Civil War primarily to ensure that state and local governments in the South could not deprive blacks of their constitutional and civil rights, including the right to own and use firearms for protection against unlawful violence. The Supreme Court has at long last given teeth to that right. It is surely an irony that Mayor Daley and the city council are now engaged in "massive resistance" to the Court's decision protecting the civil rights of Chicago's residents.
Chicago must be insisting on these draconian restrictions because the handgun ban had been so effective in reducing crime, right? Well, not exactly. Data presented to the Supreme Court compared Chicago's violent crime rate (murder, robbery, and assault) to the average of the other 24 of the 25 largest cities in America. None of the other cities had a handgun ban.
The data showed that when Chicago's handgun ban was enacted in 1982, its violent crime rate was about equal to that of the other 24 cities. After the ban, Chicago's violent crime rate spiked immediately and dramatically compared to the other cities. From 1982 to the present, Chicago's violent crime rate has averaged more than 50 percent higher than the other large cities. The percentage of murders committed with handguns in Chicago varied between roughly 40 percent and 55 percent each year during the pre-ban period of 1965-1981. In recent years, while the handgun ban was in place, the percentage committed with handguns has consistently been 70 percent or more.
So why do the proponents of government power bitterly cling to "no guns and no religion"?
Because their opposition to firearms ownership has nothing to do with reducing crime. The reason they want to ban guns is not that they all happen to be empirically mistaken about how to combat crime. Instead, disarming law-abiding citizens is part of a continuing power grab by an elite who want to subdue the private domain and control our lives.
THE DISSENTING OPINIONS in McDonald provide insights into this mindset. The four dissenting justices made it clear that they would gut the Second Amendment if they only had one more vote on their side.
Justice Stevens in his dissenting opinion posited that "it is a foundational premise of modern government that the State holds a monopoly on legitimate violence." (He sought to attribute that view to Chief Justice Roberts, which was a patent distortion.) But what Justice Stevens considers "a foundational premise of modern government" is diametrically opposed to the views of the Founding Fathers, who believed that every man should be armed, and that free men could legitimately use those arms to defend themselves and to resist tyranny.
According to Justice Breyer's dissent, there is no need for the American people to possess arms to resist tyranny, because the federal government would never tyrannize. Numerous laws, institutions, and the courts forestall "any serious threat of federal tyranny," he assures us. Since the four dissenting justices in Heller and McDonald wished to eviscerate a basic safeguard of the Bill of Rights, we may perhaps be excused in finding cold comfort in the protections offered by the courts against federal oppression.
Justice Stevens sneers at any test for incorporation that examines whether a right is "rooted in our history, tradition, and practice...." Instead, he avers, "liberty" under the 14th Amendment is a "dynamic concept" (citing a law review article written by himself). That "dynamic" liberty just doesn't happen to include the most fundamental right of all. Justice Breyer agrees: "[T]he Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense....Moreover, nothing in 18th-, 19th-, 20th-, or 21st-century history shows a consensus that the right to private armed self-defense, as described in Heller, is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation's history or tradition' or is otherwise ‘fundamental.'"
So there you have it. According to these dissenters, there's nothing fundamental about the right to protect yourself or your family from being killed, and throughout our history not many people have believed in such a right.
In fact, if you are lethally attacked, Justice Stevens is doubtful that you have much of a right to save your life at all. Whatever dubious right you might have is outside the purview of the Constitution and can certainly be taken away by government: "Just because there may be a natural or common-law right to some measure of self defense, it hardly follows that States may not place substantial restrictions on its exercise or that this Court should recognize a constitutional right to the same."
THE GOOD NEWS is that a lawsuit backed by the NRA was filed against the Chicago ordinance on the first business day after this oppressive legislation was enacted. The bad news is that some governmental entities will stop at nothing in their attempts to disarm ordinary citizens.
The Founders of this republic envisioned an independent, responsible, strong, informed, courageous, God-fearing, armed citizenry as the bedrock of freedom. In the Constitution, they delegated only limited, carefully enumerated powers to the federal government, and for good measure provided a list of rights of the people that could never be infringed.
But there are powerful people whose vision is exactly the opposite of the Founders. By their every action, they encourage dependence, irresponsibility, weakness, ignorance, political timidity, and irreligion. And they want to disarm us. The McDonald case is a magnificent victory, but the fight will be a long one, against determined, relentless opponents.
Letter to the Editor
Dan Peterson is an attorney who practices firearms law in Northern Virginia
Thursday, September 30, 2010
With The Internet On the Brink Of An FCC Take-Over, Waxman's Proposed Bill Deserves Consideration
From Big Government;
With the Internet on the Brink of an FCC Takeover, Waxman Proposal Deserves Considerationby Mike Wendy
Word has it that the Internet is on the brink of a takeover.
Egged on by radical interests, the FCC is poised to impose onerous regulations to guide the medium to a more “open” future. No matter that the Internet is perhaps one of the greatest success stories ever. And that a key to its success rests in the fact that government has stepped out of the way, letting developers and networks do what they do best – serve Americans with cutting-edge communications tools at affordable prices.
All of this is meaningless, of course, when the whip count and brute bureaucratic force are in your favor.
You see, Washington just learned that a bill, which could stop the FCC’s plans, is in deep jeopardy. The bill’s sponsor – Representative Henry Waxman – doesn’t have enough Republican support to credibly move the legislation through Congress. Lacking this, the proposal is basically dead in the water (even before formal introduction), having virtually no practical effect on the rogue FCC.
On any other day I wouldn’t shed a single crocodile tear hearing this news. Not today, however. Said Waxman, “If our efforts to find bipartisan consensus fail, the FCC should move forward.”
This will have significant repercussions.
I have long advocated that the Internet does not need regulating. Technology, marketplace dynamics, consumer education, reputation management, current competition law and industry best practices all work together to make sure that the Internet remains open. Though the naysayers cry otherwise, the still-unregulated Internet is anything but broken. With each day, new services come on line, serving more and more Americans with Internet services.
But since the present Administration came to town, radical interests have captured policymakers at the FCC. Over the past two years, they have enjoyed immense success in peddling the idea that the Internet is in danger of breaking unless Washington comes to the rescue.
How so?
Well, groups like MoveOn.org, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the New America Foundation (not to mention a far-too-willing mainstream media) fear “evil corporations” will “close” the Internet, “cable-izing” it so that free speech and the “little guy” get shut out. To prevent this, they have offered a simple plan – hogtie the very companies that bring the Internet to Americans through 19th Century-inspired Net Neutrality regulations. In their view, by regulating networks like plain old telephone companies, the laws of economics will be suspended, and all will be well for the little guy.
Sitting pretty to accomplish this task is the FCC. After all, instead of going to Congress and working 535 Members, all the radical lobbyists have to do is roll just three Commissioners. That’s right. Just three, unelected bureaucrats, who can decide the fate of nearly 20% of our economy.
For the better part of the past year, the FCC has developed quite a record to saddle the Internet with innovation-killing regulation. Thankfully, election year dynamics have slowed the FCC in developing final rules to reclassify Internet services as fully regulated telephone services. But, it’s just a matter of time if Congress doesn’t occupy that space quickly.
Just after the ’08 elections, it looked like Net Neutrality would be the law of the land. President Obama ran on a plank that promoted Net Neutrality. $7 billion of stimulus money was in fact dedicated to Net Neutrality projects, ostensibly to boost our economy. And, when it came time to confirm a new Chairman of the FCC, a staunch advocate of the idea – Julius Genachowski – was chosen. With more important matters to consider, Congress receded from the picture, leaving the FCC at the helm.
Recent events have changed this. Throughout this spring and summer – prompted by a court decision that put in doubt the FCC’s specific authority to regulate the Internet – Congress has come back to the debate. Fearing it would lose valuable jurisdiction if it allowed the FCC to act in this vacuum, a majority of House members on both sides of the aisle signed a letter urging the FCC to refrain from regulating the Internet without an express congressional grant.
And, just this past week, a promising, yet imperfect alternative to the FCC’s takeover has emerged – the Waxman proposal.
Waxman’s bill would temporarily codify basic Net Neutrality principles (yes, similar to what the FCC has proposed) until the end of 2012. Surprising as that may be, what makes the proposal worthy of serious consideration is its stance on the FCC’s authority. Basically, it says to the agency, “Congress makes policy for the Internet, and we want you to get out of the way.” To this end, it prohibits the FCC from reclassifying Internet services as telephone services, which is a huge deal. This presents a nearly insurmountable obstacle to the Commission and its supportive radicals who want to regulate the Internet as if it were a public utility.
I understand many Republicans’ reluctance to get on board with this plan. I, too, worry that it gives far too much legitimacy to the idea of Internet regulation.
But I’m also a realist. The FCC could initiate its unilateral takeover tomorrow if it wanted.
The introduction of the bill alone sends an important signal. It puts Congress back on top where it should be. Moreover, it marginalizes those who espouse an endless maze of FCC regulation that will – unequivocally – harm the Internet and its bright promise.
This may be the last, best chance to stop the FCC before it goes over the brink and irreparably damages the Internet. House Republicans should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. They should strongly reconsider helping corral a rogue FCC through the Waxman bill.
With the Internet on the Brink of an FCC Takeover, Waxman Proposal Deserves Considerationby Mike Wendy
Word has it that the Internet is on the brink of a takeover.
Egged on by radical interests, the FCC is poised to impose onerous regulations to guide the medium to a more “open” future. No matter that the Internet is perhaps one of the greatest success stories ever. And that a key to its success rests in the fact that government has stepped out of the way, letting developers and networks do what they do best – serve Americans with cutting-edge communications tools at affordable prices.
All of this is meaningless, of course, when the whip count and brute bureaucratic force are in your favor.
You see, Washington just learned that a bill, which could stop the FCC’s plans, is in deep jeopardy. The bill’s sponsor – Representative Henry Waxman – doesn’t have enough Republican support to credibly move the legislation through Congress. Lacking this, the proposal is basically dead in the water (even before formal introduction), having virtually no practical effect on the rogue FCC.
On any other day I wouldn’t shed a single crocodile tear hearing this news. Not today, however. Said Waxman, “If our efforts to find bipartisan consensus fail, the FCC should move forward.”
This will have significant repercussions.
I have long advocated that the Internet does not need regulating. Technology, marketplace dynamics, consumer education, reputation management, current competition law and industry best practices all work together to make sure that the Internet remains open. Though the naysayers cry otherwise, the still-unregulated Internet is anything but broken. With each day, new services come on line, serving more and more Americans with Internet services.
But since the present Administration came to town, radical interests have captured policymakers at the FCC. Over the past two years, they have enjoyed immense success in peddling the idea that the Internet is in danger of breaking unless Washington comes to the rescue.
How so?
Well, groups like MoveOn.org, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the New America Foundation (not to mention a far-too-willing mainstream media) fear “evil corporations” will “close” the Internet, “cable-izing” it so that free speech and the “little guy” get shut out. To prevent this, they have offered a simple plan – hogtie the very companies that bring the Internet to Americans through 19th Century-inspired Net Neutrality regulations. In their view, by regulating networks like plain old telephone companies, the laws of economics will be suspended, and all will be well for the little guy.
Sitting pretty to accomplish this task is the FCC. After all, instead of going to Congress and working 535 Members, all the radical lobbyists have to do is roll just three Commissioners. That’s right. Just three, unelected bureaucrats, who can decide the fate of nearly 20% of our economy.
For the better part of the past year, the FCC has developed quite a record to saddle the Internet with innovation-killing regulation. Thankfully, election year dynamics have slowed the FCC in developing final rules to reclassify Internet services as fully regulated telephone services. But, it’s just a matter of time if Congress doesn’t occupy that space quickly.
Just after the ’08 elections, it looked like Net Neutrality would be the law of the land. President Obama ran on a plank that promoted Net Neutrality. $7 billion of stimulus money was in fact dedicated to Net Neutrality projects, ostensibly to boost our economy. And, when it came time to confirm a new Chairman of the FCC, a staunch advocate of the idea – Julius Genachowski – was chosen. With more important matters to consider, Congress receded from the picture, leaving the FCC at the helm.
Recent events have changed this. Throughout this spring and summer – prompted by a court decision that put in doubt the FCC’s specific authority to regulate the Internet – Congress has come back to the debate. Fearing it would lose valuable jurisdiction if it allowed the FCC to act in this vacuum, a majority of House members on both sides of the aisle signed a letter urging the FCC to refrain from regulating the Internet without an express congressional grant.
And, just this past week, a promising, yet imperfect alternative to the FCC’s takeover has emerged – the Waxman proposal.
Waxman’s bill would temporarily codify basic Net Neutrality principles (yes, similar to what the FCC has proposed) until the end of 2012. Surprising as that may be, what makes the proposal worthy of serious consideration is its stance on the FCC’s authority. Basically, it says to the agency, “Congress makes policy for the Internet, and we want you to get out of the way.” To this end, it prohibits the FCC from reclassifying Internet services as telephone services, which is a huge deal. This presents a nearly insurmountable obstacle to the Commission and its supportive radicals who want to regulate the Internet as if it were a public utility.
I understand many Republicans’ reluctance to get on board with this plan. I, too, worry that it gives far too much legitimacy to the idea of Internet regulation.
But I’m also a realist. The FCC could initiate its unilateral takeover tomorrow if it wanted.
The introduction of the bill alone sends an important signal. It puts Congress back on top where it should be. Moreover, it marginalizes those who espouse an endless maze of FCC regulation that will – unequivocally – harm the Internet and its bright promise.
This may be the last, best chance to stop the FCC before it goes over the brink and irreparably damages the Internet. House Republicans should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. They should strongly reconsider helping corral a rogue FCC through the Waxman bill.
High Schools, Civics And Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think And Do
From AEI:
High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do By Gary J. Schmitt, Frederick M. Hess, Steve Farkas, Ann M. Duffett, Cheryl Miller, Jenna M. Schuette
AEI Online
(September 30, 2010)
Download Foreword as a PDF
Download Executive Summary as a PDF
Download Full Report as a PDF
View Press Release
Executive Summary
"History is who we are and why we are the way we are," said David McCullough, perhaps America's most celebrated popular historian. From a nation's history, to its economic structure, politics, and constitutional order, a teacher can inspire appreciation or revulsion, mindless conformism or gratuitous agitation, boredom or wonder. Social studies teachers are uniquely positioned to frame and inform students' outlook about the nation, to tell the story of who we are.
This study revolves around an essential question: what are teachers trying to teach our youth about citizenship and what it means to be an American? The findings are based on a national, random sample survey of 866 public high school social studies teachers, an oversample survey of 245 Catholic and private high school social studies teachers, and three focus groups. Social studies teachers are excellent sources of information for this type of research. They are in the trenches, and they can report not only on their own attitudes, priorities, and behaviors, but also on what is actually happening in high schools and school districts.
Here is what we learned:
Teacher attitudes and values appear to be in step with those of ordinary Americans writ large.
•Fully 83 percent of teachers believe that the United States is a "unique country that stands for something special in the world"; 11 percent see it as just another country, no better and no worse than others. Likewise, in a 1998 survey of the general public, 84 percent of respondents said that "the U.S. is a unique country that stands for something special in the world."
•Eighty-two percent of teachers think it is most important for high school students to "respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings." Again, the general public agrees: in 2002, 90 percent said it was better to include the bad and the good--"warts and all"--when teaching American history.
•About 3 in 4 teachers (76 percent) say that high schools should impart respect for military service.
Teachers may be setting too low a bar for what they expect students to know about American history and government.
•Teaching facts is the lowest priority for social studies teachers when it comes to instruction in citizenship. Of the five priorities high schools may have around the teaching of citizenship, only 20 percent of teachers put teaching key facts, dates, and major events at the top of their list. Furthermore, it is the last of twelve items rated by teachers as absolutely essential to teach high school students: only 36 percent say it is absolutely essential to teach students "to know facts (e.g., location of the fifty states) and dates (e.g., Pearl Harbor)."
•Out of a list of twelve items, social studies teachers are most likely to say it is absolutely essential for high schools to teach students "to identify the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights" (83 percent).
•Other essential concepts of how the American political system functions garner less enthusiasm. Six in ten deem it absolutely essential for high schools to teach students "to understand such concepts as federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances" (64 percent) and "to be knowledgeable about such periods as the American Founding, the Civil War, and the Cold War" (63 percent).
•Are today's high school students actually reading the nation's keystone documents? When asked how close this statement comes to their view--"By graduation, virtually all students in my high school have carefully read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution"--56 percent of teachers say it comes close to their view, but 40 percent say it does not.
•Finally, teachers' reliance on textbooks appears to be on the decline. Two out of three (67 percent) say they rely on them "less and less" in their classrooms.
Teachers are not confident that students are learning.
•The news is either extremely dire or mildly reassuring, depending on how one reads the data. If the "somewhat confident" and "very confident" categories are combined, 50 percent or more of teachers are confident that most students graduate from their high school knowing eleven of the twelve items concerning citizenship (see table 1).
•But if only the "very confident" responses are considered--that is, using a higher threshold--the results are grim. Across all items, no more than 24 percent of teachers say they are "very confident" that most of the students from their high school have actually learned them before they graduate. For example:
◦"To identify the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights": 79 percent are confident when the "very" and "somewhat" categories are combined, but just 24 percent are "very confident."
◦"To have good work habits such as being timely, persistent, and hardworking": 50 percent are confident when the "very" and "somewhat" categories are combined, but just 6 percent are "very confident."
Social studies teachers believe their subject area is not viewed as a top priority--and testing is partly to blame.
•Forty-five percent say their school district treats social studies as "an absolutely essential subject area," while 43 percent say it is considered "important but not essential."
•More than four in ten (45 percent) say the social studies curriculum at their high school has been deemphasized as a result of NCLB, though 39 percent say it is "holding its own."
•Seven in ten (70 percent) say social studies classes are a lower priority because of pressure to show progress on statewide math and language arts tests.
•Yet social studies teachers want to hop on the testing bandwagon: 93 percent say "social studies should be part of every state's set of standards and testing."
Public and private school teachers share remarkably similar views when it comes to what it means to be an American and what students should learn about citizenship . . .
•Public and private school teachers give remarkably similar rankings to these five possible priorities that high schools may have around the teaching of citizenship:
◦"Internalizing core values like tolerance and equality" (49 percent public versus 54 percent private rank it first or second in priority)
◦"Promoting civic behaviors such as voting and community service" (49 percent versus 44 percent)
◦"Instilling good work habits" (46 percent versus 41 percent)
◦"Understanding the key principles of American government" (38 percent versus 43 percent)
◦"Teaching key facts, dates and major events" (20 percent versus 19 percent)
. . . but they differ enormously in their day-to-day experiences and their assessment of school atmosphere.
•While just under half (45 percent) of public school teachers say social studies is considered an absolutely essential subject area in their district, two out of three private school teachers (68 percent) say this is true for them.
•Private school teachers are almost twice as likely to report having a great deal of control over what topics they choose to cover and how quickly or slowly they move through the curriculum (86 percent versus 45 percent).
•Private school teachers report significantly higher levels of confidence that most students in their high schools learn what they are supposed to before they graduate. This confidence differential is especially stark on items pertaining to the implicit curriculum, such as teaching good work habits and respect for authority. For example:
◦"To have good work habits such as being timely, persistent, and hardworking" garners 31 percent "very confident" responses among private school teachers, compared with 6 percent among public.
◦"To be tolerant of people and groups who are different from themselves" garners 43 percent "very confident" among private, compared with 19 percent among public.
•Private school teachers are also more likely to report an overall more positive school atmosphere for conveying the importance of citizenship:
◦Their high school has a community-service requirement for graduation (82 percent versus 37 percent).
◦Their administration maintains a school atmosphere where adults are respected (88 percent versus 65 percent).
◦Their high school encourages involvement in student government and other issues-oriented clubs (91 percent versus 73 percent).
High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do By Gary J. Schmitt, Frederick M. Hess, Steve Farkas, Ann M. Duffett, Cheryl Miller, Jenna M. Schuette
AEI Online
(September 30, 2010)
Download Foreword as a PDF
Download Executive Summary as a PDF
Download Full Report as a PDF
View Press Release
Executive Summary
"History is who we are and why we are the way we are," said David McCullough, perhaps America's most celebrated popular historian. From a nation's history, to its economic structure, politics, and constitutional order, a teacher can inspire appreciation or revulsion, mindless conformism or gratuitous agitation, boredom or wonder. Social studies teachers are uniquely positioned to frame and inform students' outlook about the nation, to tell the story of who we are.
This study revolves around an essential question: what are teachers trying to teach our youth about citizenship and what it means to be an American? The findings are based on a national, random sample survey of 866 public high school social studies teachers, an oversample survey of 245 Catholic and private high school social studies teachers, and three focus groups. Social studies teachers are excellent sources of information for this type of research. They are in the trenches, and they can report not only on their own attitudes, priorities, and behaviors, but also on what is actually happening in high schools and school districts.
Here is what we learned:
Teacher attitudes and values appear to be in step with those of ordinary Americans writ large.
•Fully 83 percent of teachers believe that the United States is a "unique country that stands for something special in the world"; 11 percent see it as just another country, no better and no worse than others. Likewise, in a 1998 survey of the general public, 84 percent of respondents said that "the U.S. is a unique country that stands for something special in the world."
•Eighty-two percent of teachers think it is most important for high school students to "respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings." Again, the general public agrees: in 2002, 90 percent said it was better to include the bad and the good--"warts and all"--when teaching American history.
•About 3 in 4 teachers (76 percent) say that high schools should impart respect for military service.
Teachers may be setting too low a bar for what they expect students to know about American history and government.
•Teaching facts is the lowest priority for social studies teachers when it comes to instruction in citizenship. Of the five priorities high schools may have around the teaching of citizenship, only 20 percent of teachers put teaching key facts, dates, and major events at the top of their list. Furthermore, it is the last of twelve items rated by teachers as absolutely essential to teach high school students: only 36 percent say it is absolutely essential to teach students "to know facts (e.g., location of the fifty states) and dates (e.g., Pearl Harbor)."
•Out of a list of twelve items, social studies teachers are most likely to say it is absolutely essential for high schools to teach students "to identify the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights" (83 percent).
•Other essential concepts of how the American political system functions garner less enthusiasm. Six in ten deem it absolutely essential for high schools to teach students "to understand such concepts as federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances" (64 percent) and "to be knowledgeable about such periods as the American Founding, the Civil War, and the Cold War" (63 percent).
•Are today's high school students actually reading the nation's keystone documents? When asked how close this statement comes to their view--"By graduation, virtually all students in my high school have carefully read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution"--56 percent of teachers say it comes close to their view, but 40 percent say it does not.
•Finally, teachers' reliance on textbooks appears to be on the decline. Two out of three (67 percent) say they rely on them "less and less" in their classrooms.
Teachers are not confident that students are learning.
•The news is either extremely dire or mildly reassuring, depending on how one reads the data. If the "somewhat confident" and "very confident" categories are combined, 50 percent or more of teachers are confident that most students graduate from their high school knowing eleven of the twelve items concerning citizenship (see table 1).
•But if only the "very confident" responses are considered--that is, using a higher threshold--the results are grim. Across all items, no more than 24 percent of teachers say they are "very confident" that most of the students from their high school have actually learned them before they graduate. For example:
◦"To identify the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights": 79 percent are confident when the "very" and "somewhat" categories are combined, but just 24 percent are "very confident."
◦"To have good work habits such as being timely, persistent, and hardworking": 50 percent are confident when the "very" and "somewhat" categories are combined, but just 6 percent are "very confident."
Social studies teachers believe their subject area is not viewed as a top priority--and testing is partly to blame.
•Forty-five percent say their school district treats social studies as "an absolutely essential subject area," while 43 percent say it is considered "important but not essential."
•More than four in ten (45 percent) say the social studies curriculum at their high school has been deemphasized as a result of NCLB, though 39 percent say it is "holding its own."
•Seven in ten (70 percent) say social studies classes are a lower priority because of pressure to show progress on statewide math and language arts tests.
•Yet social studies teachers want to hop on the testing bandwagon: 93 percent say "social studies should be part of every state's set of standards and testing."
Public and private school teachers share remarkably similar views when it comes to what it means to be an American and what students should learn about citizenship . . .
•Public and private school teachers give remarkably similar rankings to these five possible priorities that high schools may have around the teaching of citizenship:
◦"Internalizing core values like tolerance and equality" (49 percent public versus 54 percent private rank it first or second in priority)
◦"Promoting civic behaviors such as voting and community service" (49 percent versus 44 percent)
◦"Instilling good work habits" (46 percent versus 41 percent)
◦"Understanding the key principles of American government" (38 percent versus 43 percent)
◦"Teaching key facts, dates and major events" (20 percent versus 19 percent)
. . . but they differ enormously in their day-to-day experiences and their assessment of school atmosphere.
•While just under half (45 percent) of public school teachers say social studies is considered an absolutely essential subject area in their district, two out of three private school teachers (68 percent) say this is true for them.
•Private school teachers are almost twice as likely to report having a great deal of control over what topics they choose to cover and how quickly or slowly they move through the curriculum (86 percent versus 45 percent).
•Private school teachers report significantly higher levels of confidence that most students in their high schools learn what they are supposed to before they graduate. This confidence differential is especially stark on items pertaining to the implicit curriculum, such as teaching good work habits and respect for authority. For example:
◦"To have good work habits such as being timely, persistent, and hardworking" garners 31 percent "very confident" responses among private school teachers, compared with 6 percent among public.
◦"To be tolerant of people and groups who are different from themselves" garners 43 percent "very confident" among private, compared with 19 percent among public.
•Private school teachers are also more likely to report an overall more positive school atmosphere for conveying the importance of citizenship:
◦Their high school has a community-service requirement for graduation (82 percent versus 37 percent).
◦Their administration maintains a school atmosphere where adults are respected (88 percent versus 65 percent).
◦Their high school encourages involvement in student government and other issues-oriented clubs (91 percent versus 73 percent).
New Study, Sad Results: Do America's High School Students Understand What It Means To Be A Citizen?
From AEI:
New AEI Report: Do American High Schoolers Know What It Means to Be a Citizen?
Download this press release as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.
A Survey of Over 1,000 Public and Private High School Civic Studies Teachers Says No
Civics, once the cornerstone of public education, has fallen off the radar in the era of standardized testing. Teachers feel increasing pressure to show progress on student math and reading skills to the detriment of civic education. This is one of the many striking findings in a new report by the AEI Program on American Citizenship, a new initiative dedicated to strengthening the foundations of freedom and self-government by renewing the understanding of American citizenship.
The report, High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do, explores the views and practices of those most responsible for educating and shaping America's new citizens--high school history and social studies teachers. It includes data gleaned from a survey of over 1,000 public and private high school teachers. Commissioned by AEI's Program on American Citizenship, the survey was conducted by the Farkas Duffett Research Group. To see the full report, please visit http://www.aei.org/paper/100145.
"For all our laudable attention to reading and math in the past decade, we seem to have turned a blind eye to the crucial role schools play as shapers of character and pillars of citizenship," says AEI director of education policy studies Frederick M. Hess. "In this national survey, Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett do a remarkable job of illuminating the consequence of neglecting what is being taught in American high schools. They provide a needed window into the attitudes and concerns of our high school social studies teachers."
Among the survey's key findings:
Despite concerns about anti-American sentiment in schools of education, teacher attitudes and values reflect what most would regard as a vision of responsible citizenship.
•Fully 83 percent of teachers believe that the United States is a unique country that stands for something special in the world; 11 percent see it as just another country, no better and no worse. Similarly, 82 percent say students should learn to "respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings."
•About three in four teachers (76 percent) say that high schools should impart respect for military service.
Teachers are largely uncertain as to what should be taught about civics. They set too low a bar for what they expect students to know about American history and government.
•Facts, such as key dates or the location of the 50 states, are the lowest priority for social studies teachers when it comes to teaching citizenship. Notions of tolerance and rights are emphasized instead of history, facts, and key constitutional concepts.
•Only six in ten teachers deem it absolutely essential for high schools to teach students "to understand such concepts as federalism, separation of powers and checks and balances" (64 percent) and "to be knowledgeable about such periods as the American Founding, the Civil War and the Cold War" (63 percent).
Public school teachers are not confident that students are learning.
•Regarding key concepts of citizenship, no more than 24 percent of public school teachers express great confidence that most of the students from their high school have actually learned these concepts before they graduate.
Social studies teachers believe their subject area is not viewed as a top priority--and that testing is partly to blame.
•Seven in ten (70 percent) say social studies classes are a lower priority because of pressure to show progress on math and language arts statewide tests.
•Nonetheless, social studies teachers want to hop on the testing bandwagon: 93 percent say "social studies should be part of every state's set of standards and testing."
Public and private school teachers share remarkably similar views when it comes to what students should learn about citizenship. Yet private school teachers express greater confidence that their subject is valued by their schools, and, most importantly, that their students are learning
•Private school teachers are almost twice as likely to report having a great deal of control over what topics they choose to cover, and how quickly they move through the curriculum (86 percent versus 45 percent).
•Private school teachers report significantly higher levels of confidence that most students in their high schools learn what they are supposed to know before they graduate.
•Private school teachers are also more likely to report an overall more positive school atmosphere for conveying the importance of citizenship.
Gary Schmitt, director of the AEI Program on American Citizenship, concludes that, "this survey shows that teachers take the subject of civics seriously, but they lack guidance and support from parents, principals, and policy-makers. Making matters worse, teachers seem to be at sea as to what the content of a civics curriculum should be--with key concepts and important facts 'failing' to make the grade."
Frederick Hess is available for interview and can be contacted through Jenna Schuette at jenna.schuette@aei.org, (202.862.5809). Gary Schmitt is available for interview and can be contacted through Cheryl Miller at cheryl.miller@aei.org, (202.419.5208). For additional media inquiries, please contact Sara Huneke at sara.huneke@aei.org, (202.862.4870).
###
New AEI Report: Do American High Schoolers Know What It Means to Be a Citizen?
Download this press release as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.
A Survey of Over 1,000 Public and Private High School Civic Studies Teachers Says No
Civics, once the cornerstone of public education, has fallen off the radar in the era of standardized testing. Teachers feel increasing pressure to show progress on student math and reading skills to the detriment of civic education. This is one of the many striking findings in a new report by the AEI Program on American Citizenship, a new initiative dedicated to strengthening the foundations of freedom and self-government by renewing the understanding of American citizenship.
The report, High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do, explores the views and practices of those most responsible for educating and shaping America's new citizens--high school history and social studies teachers. It includes data gleaned from a survey of over 1,000 public and private high school teachers. Commissioned by AEI's Program on American Citizenship, the survey was conducted by the Farkas Duffett Research Group. To see the full report, please visit http://www.aei.org/paper/100145.
"For all our laudable attention to reading and math in the past decade, we seem to have turned a blind eye to the crucial role schools play as shapers of character and pillars of citizenship," says AEI director of education policy studies Frederick M. Hess. "In this national survey, Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett do a remarkable job of illuminating the consequence of neglecting what is being taught in American high schools. They provide a needed window into the attitudes and concerns of our high school social studies teachers."
Among the survey's key findings:
Despite concerns about anti-American sentiment in schools of education, teacher attitudes and values reflect what most would regard as a vision of responsible citizenship.
•Fully 83 percent of teachers believe that the United States is a unique country that stands for something special in the world; 11 percent see it as just another country, no better and no worse. Similarly, 82 percent say students should learn to "respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings."
•About three in four teachers (76 percent) say that high schools should impart respect for military service.
Teachers are largely uncertain as to what should be taught about civics. They set too low a bar for what they expect students to know about American history and government.
•Facts, such as key dates or the location of the 50 states, are the lowest priority for social studies teachers when it comes to teaching citizenship. Notions of tolerance and rights are emphasized instead of history, facts, and key constitutional concepts.
•Only six in ten teachers deem it absolutely essential for high schools to teach students "to understand such concepts as federalism, separation of powers and checks and balances" (64 percent) and "to be knowledgeable about such periods as the American Founding, the Civil War and the Cold War" (63 percent).
Public school teachers are not confident that students are learning.
•Regarding key concepts of citizenship, no more than 24 percent of public school teachers express great confidence that most of the students from their high school have actually learned these concepts before they graduate.
Social studies teachers believe their subject area is not viewed as a top priority--and that testing is partly to blame.
•Seven in ten (70 percent) say social studies classes are a lower priority because of pressure to show progress on math and language arts statewide tests.
•Nonetheless, social studies teachers want to hop on the testing bandwagon: 93 percent say "social studies should be part of every state's set of standards and testing."
Public and private school teachers share remarkably similar views when it comes to what students should learn about citizenship. Yet private school teachers express greater confidence that their subject is valued by their schools, and, most importantly, that their students are learning
•Private school teachers are almost twice as likely to report having a great deal of control over what topics they choose to cover, and how quickly they move through the curriculum (86 percent versus 45 percent).
•Private school teachers report significantly higher levels of confidence that most students in their high schools learn what they are supposed to know before they graduate.
•Private school teachers are also more likely to report an overall more positive school atmosphere for conveying the importance of citizenship.
Gary Schmitt, director of the AEI Program on American Citizenship, concludes that, "this survey shows that teachers take the subject of civics seriously, but they lack guidance and support from parents, principals, and policy-makers. Making matters worse, teachers seem to be at sea as to what the content of a civics curriculum should be--with key concepts and important facts 'failing' to make the grade."
Frederick Hess is available for interview and can be contacted through Jenna Schuette at jenna.schuette@aei.org, (202.862.5809). Gary Schmitt is available for interview and can be contacted through Cheryl Miller at cheryl.miller@aei.org, (202.419.5208). For additional media inquiries, please contact Sara Huneke at sara.huneke@aei.org, (202.862.4870).
###
Will The Justice Department Be Authorized To Shut Down Internet Sites?
From Big Government:
Will the Justice Department Be Authorized to Shut Down Internet Sites?by Rich Muny
On September 20th, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced legislation — S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act — that seeks to give the Department of Justice the power to shut down websites anywhere in the world that are found to infringe on intellectual property rights. This would be accomplished by ordering U.S. domain registrars and registries to stop resolving infringing sites’ domain names. While this bill has the noble-sounding goal of preventing online piracy, handing the federal government authority over the Internet would set a troubling precedent that would imperil Internet freedom in America and across the world.
One disquieting issue is the lack of any requirement that these sites be found to violate the laws of the countries from where they operate. In fact, under this bill sites operating perfectly legally under the laws of their own nations could be shut down by the U.S. Justice Department.
The concept that domain names of Internet sites operating legally in their home nations could be shut down by other nations for violation of their laws is one that should concern everyone. For example, a few years ago a French court ordered Yahoo.com to block French citizens from accessing portions of the site deemed to contain content unlawful under French law. Yahoo.com resisted this demand, citing free speech issues. What if French courts had the capability to shut down the domain www.yahoo.com to force compliance with that decision? What if every nation had the right to shut down Internet domains to force the entire Internet to comply with their local laws? If the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act passes, a very dangerous precedent will be set.
Additionally, there is a threat that this power will be expanded well beyond piracy. In fact, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear (D) is already in court seeking seizure of the domain names of 141 Internet poker and gaming websites — none based in the Commonwealth of Kentucky — with claims that these sites compete with the state lottery and with the horse racing industry.
The likelihood of this effort expanding well beyond issues of online piracy is simply too great. The Department of Justice should use its already ample tools and not resort to censoring the Internet.
Will the Justice Department Be Authorized to Shut Down Internet Sites?by Rich Muny
On September 20th, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced legislation — S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act — that seeks to give the Department of Justice the power to shut down websites anywhere in the world that are found to infringe on intellectual property rights. This would be accomplished by ordering U.S. domain registrars and registries to stop resolving infringing sites’ domain names. While this bill has the noble-sounding goal of preventing online piracy, handing the federal government authority over the Internet would set a troubling precedent that would imperil Internet freedom in America and across the world.
One disquieting issue is the lack of any requirement that these sites be found to violate the laws of the countries from where they operate. In fact, under this bill sites operating perfectly legally under the laws of their own nations could be shut down by the U.S. Justice Department.
The concept that domain names of Internet sites operating legally in their home nations could be shut down by other nations for violation of their laws is one that should concern everyone. For example, a few years ago a French court ordered Yahoo.com to block French citizens from accessing portions of the site deemed to contain content unlawful under French law. Yahoo.com resisted this demand, citing free speech issues. What if French courts had the capability to shut down the domain www.yahoo.com to force compliance with that decision? What if every nation had the right to shut down Internet domains to force the entire Internet to comply with their local laws? If the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act passes, a very dangerous precedent will be set.
Additionally, there is a threat that this power will be expanded well beyond piracy. In fact, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear (D) is already in court seeking seizure of the domain names of 141 Internet poker and gaming websites — none based in the Commonwealth of Kentucky — with claims that these sites compete with the state lottery and with the horse racing industry.
The likelihood of this effort expanding well beyond issues of online piracy is simply too great. The Department of Justice should use its already ample tools and not resort to censoring the Internet.
On The Necessity For Ending The Department Of Agriculture
From The Patriot Word:
Thursday, September 30, 2010Patriot Paper #2 Necessity For Ending the Department of Agriculture
Patriot Paper #2
Department of Agriculture: Unconstitutional, Arbitrary, and Expensive
By
Walter L Brown Jr
To People of the United States,
This is the second in a series of letters calling for significant changes in the United State's Federal Government to end Unconstitutional Activities and Restore the American Dream.
In the private sector, the USDA would be the sixth largest company in the United States with over:
•100,000 employees
•14,000 offices and field locations
•$128 billion in assets
•$77 billion in annual spending
The Department of Agriculture provides $100 billion of loans as well as significant guarantees and insurance in support of America's farmers and ranchers.
USDA’s total outlays for 2011 are estimated at $146 billion.
Roughly 80 percent of outlays, about $117 billion in 2011, are associated with mandatory programs that provide services as required by law. These include the majority of the nutrition assistance programs, farm commodity programs, export promotion programs and a number of conservation programs. The increase in mandatory outlays in 2011 is primarily due to nutrition assistance and crop insurance.
The remaining 20 percent of outlays, estimated at $29 billion in 2011, are associated with discretionary programs such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC); rural development loans and grants; research and education; soil and water conservation technical assistance; animal and plant health; management of National Forests, wildland fire, and other Forest Service activities; and domestic and international marketing assistance.
While size and cost are not postive attributes,they are not illegal. The problem with the USDA is that its activities are not within the scope of powers enumerated to Congress and as such, they are all illegal, benevolence and good intentions notwithstanding. The only potentially constitutional activities of the USDA are obligations associated with treaties ratified by congress pursuant to the Constitution, which could easily be handled by the Department of State.
James Madison, regarding benevolence and good intentions, said, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article in the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”
No specific authority exists in Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution for establishing a United States Department of Agriculture. Considering the Ninth and Tenth Amendments it is clear that the power to regulate Agriculture has been reserved by the people and the states. A Department of Agriculture is not necessary to carry out any of the specifically enumerated powers of Congress delimited in Article I, Section 8 and is therefore forbidden short of a Constitutional Amendment to authorize it.
By and large the USDA transfers the fruits of the labors of one group to other groups, this is nothing more than pandering. Wealth redistribution systems like the USDA deprive people of their property without the benefit of a trial by jury (due process) and are specifically prohibited under the fifth and fourteenth amendment, being legal for neither federal, state nor any other government.
In addition to the unconstitutional character of the USDA it is an enormous duplication of effort as every state has a Department of Agriculture. There is even an organization "National Association of State Departments of Agriculture" through which state governments lobby the federal government.
Proponents of the USDA will point to its charitable benevolence on behalf of Women Infants and Children, Healthy Foods, Hunger and a host of other heartstring pullers as justifications for maintaining the USDA, ignore them they are offering socialism and slavery in place of capitalism, charity, and economic freedom. They are demanding our government participate in theft, without having any way of evaluating the damage they are doing. Even if a moral balance with perfect accuracy could be established depriving persons of their property against their will is theft plain and simple. Government structures that rely on an immoral activity to accomplish questionably moral net-outcomes has chosen luxury over rights and no longer serve the principle function of protecting the rights of the people. When a government no longer serves the purposes for which it was instituted, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it…
Posted by Walter L. Brown Jr. at 7:41 PM
Thursday, September 30, 2010Patriot Paper #2 Necessity For Ending the Department of Agriculture
Patriot Paper #2
Department of Agriculture: Unconstitutional, Arbitrary, and Expensive
By
Walter L Brown Jr
To People of the United States,
This is the second in a series of letters calling for significant changes in the United State's Federal Government to end Unconstitutional Activities and Restore the American Dream.
In the private sector, the USDA would be the sixth largest company in the United States with over:
•100,000 employees
•14,000 offices and field locations
•$128 billion in assets
•$77 billion in annual spending
The Department of Agriculture provides $100 billion of loans as well as significant guarantees and insurance in support of America's farmers and ranchers.
USDA’s total outlays for 2011 are estimated at $146 billion.
Roughly 80 percent of outlays, about $117 billion in 2011, are associated with mandatory programs that provide services as required by law. These include the majority of the nutrition assistance programs, farm commodity programs, export promotion programs and a number of conservation programs. The increase in mandatory outlays in 2011 is primarily due to nutrition assistance and crop insurance.
The remaining 20 percent of outlays, estimated at $29 billion in 2011, are associated with discretionary programs such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC); rural development loans and grants; research and education; soil and water conservation technical assistance; animal and plant health; management of National Forests, wildland fire, and other Forest Service activities; and domestic and international marketing assistance.
While size and cost are not postive attributes,they are not illegal. The problem with the USDA is that its activities are not within the scope of powers enumerated to Congress and as such, they are all illegal, benevolence and good intentions notwithstanding. The only potentially constitutional activities of the USDA are obligations associated with treaties ratified by congress pursuant to the Constitution, which could easily be handled by the Department of State.
James Madison, regarding benevolence and good intentions, said, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article in the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”
No specific authority exists in Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution for establishing a United States Department of Agriculture. Considering the Ninth and Tenth Amendments it is clear that the power to regulate Agriculture has been reserved by the people and the states. A Department of Agriculture is not necessary to carry out any of the specifically enumerated powers of Congress delimited in Article I, Section 8 and is therefore forbidden short of a Constitutional Amendment to authorize it.
By and large the USDA transfers the fruits of the labors of one group to other groups, this is nothing more than pandering. Wealth redistribution systems like the USDA deprive people of their property without the benefit of a trial by jury (due process) and are specifically prohibited under the fifth and fourteenth amendment, being legal for neither federal, state nor any other government.
In addition to the unconstitutional character of the USDA it is an enormous duplication of effort as every state has a Department of Agriculture. There is even an organization "National Association of State Departments of Agriculture" through which state governments lobby the federal government.
Proponents of the USDA will point to its charitable benevolence on behalf of Women Infants and Children, Healthy Foods, Hunger and a host of other heartstring pullers as justifications for maintaining the USDA, ignore them they are offering socialism and slavery in place of capitalism, charity, and economic freedom. They are demanding our government participate in theft, without having any way of evaluating the damage they are doing. Even if a moral balance with perfect accuracy could be established depriving persons of their property against their will is theft plain and simple. Government structures that rely on an immoral activity to accomplish questionably moral net-outcomes has chosen luxury over rights and no longer serve the principle function of protecting the rights of the people. When a government no longer serves the purposes for which it was instituted, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it…
Posted by Walter L. Brown Jr. at 7:41 PM
On The Necessity For Ending The Federal Reserve
From The Patriot Word:
Thursday, September 30, 2010Patriot Paper #1: Necessity for Ending the Federal Reserve
Patriot Paper #1: Necessity for Ending the Federal Reserve
To People of the United States,
Today, slightly more than 234 years after the several states elected to band together to throw off oppressive tyrannical government we find our situation again wanting for substantial changes. The American Dream has been gradually smothered and we must look deep into the ashes in order to find the embers of freedom from which to re-ignite the flames of freedom.
Protection of the creator-endowed, self-evident Rights to Life, Liberty, and Property are the reason for which our government exists, according to the Declaration of Independence. This idea while compromised has never been abandoned and appears in both the fifth and fourteenth amendments. As such, the current supreme law of the land forbids depriving any person of their property save by due process of law. This is a reflection of a fundamental moral law recognizing the immorality of theft, in other words, “thou shall not steal.” A government cannot change an immoral action into a moral action by legislation.
The Federal Reserve has been depriving Americans of their property since it was established in 1913, without due process of law meaning a jury trial and is in direct violation of the United States Constitution. Recognizing that the Federal Reserve does not create money they only dilute it, is fundamental to this discussion. Since leaving the gold standard in 1913, the US dollar has lost 98% of its value; this is the direct result of the Federal Reserve’s “money creation” scheme.
Since 1913, our entire financial system has been based on a fraudulent scheme wherein money is loaned by entities that don’t have any money to loan. This fraudulent process dilutes the equity of our money to facilitate loans and in the process deprives the holders of money of their property without due process of law, a violation of the 5th and 14th amendments not to mention the so-called self-evident truths of natural laws.
To make matters worse, there is no Constitutional Justification for the existence of the Federal Reserve. No specific authority can be found in Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution for establishing a Federal Reserve Bank as such the imagined power to do so can only be justified via the “necessary and proper clause” Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 18 which states, “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
In spite of the illogical position taken by our Supreme Court, the word "necessary" means something without which it is impossible to succeed at the proposed task. With this in mind we look at the Article 1 Section 8 powers of Congress that could not be accomplished without the existence of a Federal Reserve bank and none can be found.
A national treasury department is more than sufficient for coining money and regulating the value thereof. Authority to regulate the value of currency this is not authority to dilute of the value of currency without compensating the holders in due course for equity lost via dilution. The reason that no such authority exists is because it violates the most fundamental principles of property rights. Neither the complexity nor the scale of the scheme changes its fundamental nature, theft is theft plain and simple.
While the Federal Reserve will tell you that their system has been the driving force behind American and even worldwide economic development the facts are quite different. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 and the United States had already grown from scratch to the world’s largest economy without its existence.
An engine is a good analogy for an economy, the more fuel you give it the faster it turns and the more power it produces. The fuel of economic engines must be purchased and the Federal Reserve every time the Federal Reserve “invents money” they dilute the purchasing power of the money that all others hold increasing the cost of the fuel. Monetary devaluation forces a permanent state of impoverishment onto the American people and has caused countless businesses to failures by forcing higher than necessary capital to be maintained in order to compensate for devaluation. No justice is done on behalf of the defrauded dollar holders when interest rates are raised to control inflation or lowered to stimulate economic activity; the original equity theft is never corrected and contributes nothing to the economic situaiton.
Using the Federal Reserve (monetary policy) to fix the economy is like using Quaaludes and Speed to fix your health. You don't fix a tax-suffocated economy by giving it hallucinogens or pain-killers for that matter.
Theft of Equity and manipulation of interest rates distorts both the cost of borrowing money and the value of money itself. The Federal Reserve is the cause of and not the solution for monetary devaluation (price inflation in banker talk). The reason for this is simple; the primary function of the Federal Reserve has been to accommodate government overspending. Our government spends roughly 75% more than it collects in taxes, the federal reserve in combination with the United States Treasury Department accommodate this spending by devaluing our assets and putting us in-hock to buyers of treasury notes, the interest of which consumes 90% of our current tax receipts.
Holding the US Dollar would be an excellent investment if it weren't for the continuous devaluation of the dollar by the Federal Reserve. With a fixed money supply, or a stock-split holder in due course compensation program the increased equity created by American ingenuity and productivity would be reflected in an increasing scarcity of dollars which would raise their value naturally.
The reason that Americans do not save is not that they have an uncontrolled urge to spend; it is because the purchasing power of the dollar gets smaller over time as a result of theft! Like any investment with a negative return, common sense dictates that you not hold assets of this type.
In addition to being an unconstitutional institution with the immoral mission of wealth redistribution and equity theft, the Fed does more damage than good when applied to the economy.
Shut it down now and charge its board members and commissioners with Conspiracy to Defraud the American People, Fiscal Malfeasance, and Treason…
Humbly and Sincerely,
A Patriot
by Walter L. Brown Jr.
Posted by Walter L. Brown Jr. at 2:58 PM
Thursday, September 30, 2010Patriot Paper #1: Necessity for Ending the Federal Reserve
Patriot Paper #1: Necessity for Ending the Federal Reserve
To People of the United States,
Today, slightly more than 234 years after the several states elected to band together to throw off oppressive tyrannical government we find our situation again wanting for substantial changes. The American Dream has been gradually smothered and we must look deep into the ashes in order to find the embers of freedom from which to re-ignite the flames of freedom.
Protection of the creator-endowed, self-evident Rights to Life, Liberty, and Property are the reason for which our government exists, according to the Declaration of Independence. This idea while compromised has never been abandoned and appears in both the fifth and fourteenth amendments. As such, the current supreme law of the land forbids depriving any person of their property save by due process of law. This is a reflection of a fundamental moral law recognizing the immorality of theft, in other words, “thou shall not steal.” A government cannot change an immoral action into a moral action by legislation.
The Federal Reserve has been depriving Americans of their property since it was established in 1913, without due process of law meaning a jury trial and is in direct violation of the United States Constitution. Recognizing that the Federal Reserve does not create money they only dilute it, is fundamental to this discussion. Since leaving the gold standard in 1913, the US dollar has lost 98% of its value; this is the direct result of the Federal Reserve’s “money creation” scheme.
Since 1913, our entire financial system has been based on a fraudulent scheme wherein money is loaned by entities that don’t have any money to loan. This fraudulent process dilutes the equity of our money to facilitate loans and in the process deprives the holders of money of their property without due process of law, a violation of the 5th and 14th amendments not to mention the so-called self-evident truths of natural laws.
To make matters worse, there is no Constitutional Justification for the existence of the Federal Reserve. No specific authority can be found in Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution for establishing a Federal Reserve Bank as such the imagined power to do so can only be justified via the “necessary and proper clause” Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 18 which states, “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
In spite of the illogical position taken by our Supreme Court, the word "necessary" means something without which it is impossible to succeed at the proposed task. With this in mind we look at the Article 1 Section 8 powers of Congress that could not be accomplished without the existence of a Federal Reserve bank and none can be found.
A national treasury department is more than sufficient for coining money and regulating the value thereof. Authority to regulate the value of currency this is not authority to dilute of the value of currency without compensating the holders in due course for equity lost via dilution. The reason that no such authority exists is because it violates the most fundamental principles of property rights. Neither the complexity nor the scale of the scheme changes its fundamental nature, theft is theft plain and simple.
While the Federal Reserve will tell you that their system has been the driving force behind American and even worldwide economic development the facts are quite different. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 and the United States had already grown from scratch to the world’s largest economy without its existence.
An engine is a good analogy for an economy, the more fuel you give it the faster it turns and the more power it produces. The fuel of economic engines must be purchased and the Federal Reserve every time the Federal Reserve “invents money” they dilute the purchasing power of the money that all others hold increasing the cost of the fuel. Monetary devaluation forces a permanent state of impoverishment onto the American people and has caused countless businesses to failures by forcing higher than necessary capital to be maintained in order to compensate for devaluation. No justice is done on behalf of the defrauded dollar holders when interest rates are raised to control inflation or lowered to stimulate economic activity; the original equity theft is never corrected and contributes nothing to the economic situaiton.
Using the Federal Reserve (monetary policy) to fix the economy is like using Quaaludes and Speed to fix your health. You don't fix a tax-suffocated economy by giving it hallucinogens or pain-killers for that matter.
Theft of Equity and manipulation of interest rates distorts both the cost of borrowing money and the value of money itself. The Federal Reserve is the cause of and not the solution for monetary devaluation (price inflation in banker talk). The reason for this is simple; the primary function of the Federal Reserve has been to accommodate government overspending. Our government spends roughly 75% more than it collects in taxes, the federal reserve in combination with the United States Treasury Department accommodate this spending by devaluing our assets and putting us in-hock to buyers of treasury notes, the interest of which consumes 90% of our current tax receipts.
Holding the US Dollar would be an excellent investment if it weren't for the continuous devaluation of the dollar by the Federal Reserve. With a fixed money supply, or a stock-split holder in due course compensation program the increased equity created by American ingenuity and productivity would be reflected in an increasing scarcity of dollars which would raise their value naturally.
The reason that Americans do not save is not that they have an uncontrolled urge to spend; it is because the purchasing power of the dollar gets smaller over time as a result of theft! Like any investment with a negative return, common sense dictates that you not hold assets of this type.
In addition to being an unconstitutional institution with the immoral mission of wealth redistribution and equity theft, the Fed does more damage than good when applied to the economy.
Shut it down now and charge its board members and commissioners with Conspiracy to Defraud the American People, Fiscal Malfeasance, and Treason…
Humbly and Sincerely,
A Patriot
by Walter L. Brown Jr.
Posted by Walter L. Brown Jr. at 2:58 PM
Former Iowa Justice, Attorney Warn Against Politicizing Judicial Retention
From The Iowa City Press-Citizen and Alliance Defense Fund:
Former justice, attorney warn against politicizing judge retention
Lee Hermiston • Iowa City Press-Citizen • September 30, 2010
Comments (3) Recommend Print this page E-mail this article Share
Del.icio.us Facebook Digg Reddit Newsvine Buzz up!
Twitter FarkIt Type Size A A A A former Iowa Supreme Court Justice and a University of Iowa College of Law professor warned potential voters against the potential dangers of bringing politics into judge retentions.
Linda Neuman, an Iowa Supreme Court Justice from 1986-2003, and law professor John Whiston spoke for an hour on the subject Thursday at League of Women Voters forum that was organized with help from Iowans for Fair and Impartial Courts.
At issue is a political movement to unseat Iowa Supreme Court justices by way of the retention election in November. Making judge retention a political issue could undermine the state’s court system, Whiston warned, speaking only for himself and not as a representative of the university.
“We want judges to enforce the rule of law,” he said. “If we always have judges looking over their shoulders at what the lawyers think or the voters think, they’re not enforcing the rule of law…It’d be a terrible thing to happen to Iowa.”
Some have also called for a change in how judges in Iowa are selected. Since 1962, Iowa has used a merit system to select judges and prevent politics from entering the process. Nominees are selected through a nominating commission made up of lawyers and non-lawyers appointed by the governor.
Neuman said candidates are thoroughly vetted by the committee, who look for qualities such as competence, intellectual ability, a reputation for fairness and integrity and a dedication to a life of public service.
“Which is really what being a judge is all about,” she said.
The governor the ultimately selects one of the candidates. Neuman said at that point, its impossible for the governor to screw up the decision since all of the candidates have gone through the rigorous nomination process.
Whiston said the driving force behind the movement to unseat the judges and change the selection process comes from those opposed to the April 2009 Varnum v. Brien Supreme Court Opinion which stated denying rights to homosexual couples violated the state’s constitution. While opponents to the decision say it’s radical, Whiston said the decision is consistent with the state’s enforcement of judicial review and ensuring equal rights to all Iowans.
So, how should voters choose whether to retain a judge? Neuman said on Friday the Iowa State Bar Association will release the results of a survey of thousands of lawyers in Iowa which rates the judges at each level of Iowa’s court system. The results, which include rankings on knowledge and application of the law, attentiveness, temperament and clarity of written opinions, can be found at www.iowabar.org.
Former justice, attorney warn against politicizing judge retention
Lee Hermiston • Iowa City Press-Citizen • September 30, 2010
Comments (3) Recommend Print this page E-mail this article Share
Del.icio.us Facebook Digg Reddit Newsvine Buzz up!
Twitter FarkIt Type Size A A A A former Iowa Supreme Court Justice and a University of Iowa College of Law professor warned potential voters against the potential dangers of bringing politics into judge retentions.
Linda Neuman, an Iowa Supreme Court Justice from 1986-2003, and law professor John Whiston spoke for an hour on the subject Thursday at League of Women Voters forum that was organized with help from Iowans for Fair and Impartial Courts.
At issue is a political movement to unseat Iowa Supreme Court justices by way of the retention election in November. Making judge retention a political issue could undermine the state’s court system, Whiston warned, speaking only for himself and not as a representative of the university.
“We want judges to enforce the rule of law,” he said. “If we always have judges looking over their shoulders at what the lawyers think or the voters think, they’re not enforcing the rule of law…It’d be a terrible thing to happen to Iowa.”
Some have also called for a change in how judges in Iowa are selected. Since 1962, Iowa has used a merit system to select judges and prevent politics from entering the process. Nominees are selected through a nominating commission made up of lawyers and non-lawyers appointed by the governor.
Neuman said candidates are thoroughly vetted by the committee, who look for qualities such as competence, intellectual ability, a reputation for fairness and integrity and a dedication to a life of public service.
“Which is really what being a judge is all about,” she said.
The governor the ultimately selects one of the candidates. Neuman said at that point, its impossible for the governor to screw up the decision since all of the candidates have gone through the rigorous nomination process.
Whiston said the driving force behind the movement to unseat the judges and change the selection process comes from those opposed to the April 2009 Varnum v. Brien Supreme Court Opinion which stated denying rights to homosexual couples violated the state’s constitution. While opponents to the decision say it’s radical, Whiston said the decision is consistent with the state’s enforcement of judicial review and ensuring equal rights to all Iowans.
So, how should voters choose whether to retain a judge? Neuman said on Friday the Iowa State Bar Association will release the results of a survey of thousands of lawyers in Iowa which rates the judges at each level of Iowa’s court system. The results, which include rankings on knowledge and application of the law, attentiveness, temperament and clarity of written opinions, can be found at www.iowabar.org.
"Separation Of Church And State" Group Now Wants State-Controlled Churches
From Speak Up and Alliance Defense Fund:
56
Share “Separation of Church and State” Group Wants State-Controlled Churches
Posted onSeptember 30th, 2010 Churches and Politics, Religious Freedom
0 Comments and 0 Reactions
Americans United for Separation of Church and State recently sent a letter to the IRS to encourage the IRS to monitor, censor, and control Pastor Paul Blair’s sermon. Pastor Blair is pastor of Fairview Baptist Church in Edmond, Oklahoma. Pastor Blair, along with almost 100 other churches, participated in Pulpit Freedom Sunday. What did Pastor Blair do that was so egregious that AU would want to turn him in to the IRS? Well, Pastor Blair preached a sermon that compared the positions of the candidates for office in light of Scripture and then made a recommendation as to how his congregation should vote based on that biblical evaluation. Pastor Blair preached a sermon very similar to that preached by Timothy Dwight, a minister and President of Yale, who in 1798 urged his congregation not to vote for Thomas Jefferson for President. And Timothy Dwight is just one historical example of pastors who preached similar sermons opposing or favoring candidates for office.
It’s ironic that a group that has “separation of church and state” in its name would argue and agitate for government-controlled churches. AU wants pervasive and ongoing monitoring and surveillance of churches by the IRS. That’s not separation of church and state no matter how you look at it.
If the IRS does audit Pastor Paul Blair, ADF will stand with him and other churches to defend his right to speak biblical truth from the pulpit.
56
Share “Separation of Church and State” Group Wants State-Controlled Churches
Posted onSeptember 30th, 2010 Churches and Politics, Religious Freedom
0 Comments and 0 Reactions
Americans United for Separation of Church and State recently sent a letter to the IRS to encourage the IRS to monitor, censor, and control Pastor Paul Blair’s sermon. Pastor Blair is pastor of Fairview Baptist Church in Edmond, Oklahoma. Pastor Blair, along with almost 100 other churches, participated in Pulpit Freedom Sunday. What did Pastor Blair do that was so egregious that AU would want to turn him in to the IRS? Well, Pastor Blair preached a sermon that compared the positions of the candidates for office in light of Scripture and then made a recommendation as to how his congregation should vote based on that biblical evaluation. Pastor Blair preached a sermon very similar to that preached by Timothy Dwight, a minister and President of Yale, who in 1798 urged his congregation not to vote for Thomas Jefferson for President. And Timothy Dwight is just one historical example of pastors who preached similar sermons opposing or favoring candidates for office.
It’s ironic that a group that has “separation of church and state” in its name would argue and agitate for government-controlled churches. AU wants pervasive and ongoing monitoring and surveillance of churches by the IRS. That’s not separation of church and state no matter how you look at it.
If the IRS does audit Pastor Paul Blair, ADF will stand with him and other churches to defend his right to speak biblical truth from the pulpit.
The Vast Majority Of Americans Like The Internet Just The Way It Is
From Big Government:
The Vast Majority of Americans Like the Internet Just the Way It Isby Seton Motley
Even Obama voters think Net Neutrality is a solution looking for a problem
Free Press, Public Knowledge and the rest of the ever-dwindling Media Marxist “Save the Internet” contingent incessantly assert that they are pushing their government regulatory Web agenda in the “public interest” – to protect consumers from the Big, Bad Telecom companies.
Well it turns out – yet again – that the public isn’t interested in what Free Press & Co. are offering – perhaps because they rightly realize that the “reformers” are looking to burn down the Internet in order to “save” it.
There is a new poll out that shows an overwhelming majority of the consumers Free Press and Co. are claiming to be helping – don’t want their help. 75% of Americans like the Internet just the way it is – no “saving” necessary. And 57% think the federal government should not regulate the Internet at all.
And of the 31% who think the government should regulate the Internet, more than two-thirds of them said that the regulation should be focused on privacy, online safety and protecting.
Doing the math, that means less than 10% of Americans think the government should be regulating the Internet to the tune of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reclassification and Network Neutrality.
Full disclosure: the poll was conducted by Broadband for America, a coalition of more than 200 free market-favoring companies and public interest groups. Some of these members are the Big, Bad Telecoms from whom Free Press & Co. are allegedly trying to protect us. So the Media Marxists will soon be denouncing the results (if they have the guts to respond at all) as mere propaganda from the “Media Capitalists.”
Let us again remind everyone what Robert McChesney – the co-founder of Free Press and the Godfather of the media “reform” movement – has to say about what they want to use Net Neutrality to do to those dreaded “Media Capitalists”:
“At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”
Media Capitalism, the State and 21st Century Media Democracy Struggles: An Interview with Robert McChesney – The Bullet Socialist Project
August 9, 2009
That’s certainly a bit drastic, is it not? I’m fairly sure most of even the pro-Net Neutrality less-than-10% did not have this particular outcome in mind.
So the Big, Bad Telecoms and their many, many fellow free marketeers can be forgiven for checking in with the American people to see if they like what they as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are providing.
Given that Free Press & Co. are working to “get rid of” them and “divest them from control” of the Internet structural framework that they’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars building and maintaining – and that the American people love using.
And here’s the really amusing part – the part that makes it inordinately difficult to dismiss out of hand the poll and its results given the pollsters.
Of those polled, only 36% said they voted for Republican Presidential nominee John McCain in the 2008 presidential election, versus 44% who voted for then Democrat nominee and now President Barack Obama.
Meaning those polled here had a wider pro-Obama margin than did the nation in 2008 (53%-46%). So this was not the partisan hack-poll as which they will try to dismiss it.
So here you have less than 10% of an Obama-majority polling sample supporting the Media Marxist agenda of Free Press & Co.
Which begs a few questions. Why on Earth are we still talking about Net Neutrality and Internet reclassification? Why hasn’t this ridiculous concept yet been summarily dismissed?
And why do Free Press, Public Knowledge and what remains of the Save the Internet gaggle – now clearly defined as the quintessential extremist fringe group – still hold any sway at the FCC?
The Vast Majority of Americans Like the Internet Just the Way It Isby Seton Motley
Even Obama voters think Net Neutrality is a solution looking for a problem
Free Press, Public Knowledge and the rest of the ever-dwindling Media Marxist “Save the Internet” contingent incessantly assert that they are pushing their government regulatory Web agenda in the “public interest” – to protect consumers from the Big, Bad Telecom companies.
Well it turns out – yet again – that the public isn’t interested in what Free Press & Co. are offering – perhaps because they rightly realize that the “reformers” are looking to burn down the Internet in order to “save” it.
There is a new poll out that shows an overwhelming majority of the consumers Free Press and Co. are claiming to be helping – don’t want their help. 75% of Americans like the Internet just the way it is – no “saving” necessary. And 57% think the federal government should not regulate the Internet at all.
And of the 31% who think the government should regulate the Internet, more than two-thirds of them said that the regulation should be focused on privacy, online safety and protecting.
Doing the math, that means less than 10% of Americans think the government should be regulating the Internet to the tune of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reclassification and Network Neutrality.
Full disclosure: the poll was conducted by Broadband for America, a coalition of more than 200 free market-favoring companies and public interest groups. Some of these members are the Big, Bad Telecoms from whom Free Press & Co. are allegedly trying to protect us. So the Media Marxists will soon be denouncing the results (if they have the guts to respond at all) as mere propaganda from the “Media Capitalists.”
Let us again remind everyone what Robert McChesney – the co-founder of Free Press and the Godfather of the media “reform” movement – has to say about what they want to use Net Neutrality to do to those dreaded “Media Capitalists”:
“At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”
Media Capitalism, the State and 21st Century Media Democracy Struggles: An Interview with Robert McChesney – The Bullet Socialist Project
August 9, 2009
That’s certainly a bit drastic, is it not? I’m fairly sure most of even the pro-Net Neutrality less-than-10% did not have this particular outcome in mind.
So the Big, Bad Telecoms and their many, many fellow free marketeers can be forgiven for checking in with the American people to see if they like what they as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are providing.
Given that Free Press & Co. are working to “get rid of” them and “divest them from control” of the Internet structural framework that they’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars building and maintaining – and that the American people love using.
And here’s the really amusing part – the part that makes it inordinately difficult to dismiss out of hand the poll and its results given the pollsters.
Of those polled, only 36% said they voted for Republican Presidential nominee John McCain in the 2008 presidential election, versus 44% who voted for then Democrat nominee and now President Barack Obama.
Meaning those polled here had a wider pro-Obama margin than did the nation in 2008 (53%-46%). So this was not the partisan hack-poll as which they will try to dismiss it.
So here you have less than 10% of an Obama-majority polling sample supporting the Media Marxist agenda of Free Press & Co.
Which begs a few questions. Why on Earth are we still talking about Net Neutrality and Internet reclassification? Why hasn’t this ridiculous concept yet been summarily dismissed?
And why do Free Press, Public Knowledge and what remains of the Save the Internet gaggle – now clearly defined as the quintessential extremist fringe group – still hold any sway at the FCC?
Obama To Support Internet Wiretapping; More Silence From The Left
From Big Government:
Obama to Support Internet Wiretapping; More Silence from the Leftby SusanAnne Hiller
A few months back, I reported that President Obama reauthorized the Patriot Act–you know, the one signed by Bush that enraged the left and right and the one Obama wanted to change:
Apparently without Bush, the Patriot Act is no longer Orwellian as Michael Moore would have it and the ACLU is now quietly voicing its differences. Even Obama criticized the Act’s compromise in 2006, but had no issue, as President, signing the identical Act he wanted reforms on. In 2006, Obama stated on the Senate floor:
So, I will be supporting the Patriot Act compromise. But I urge my colleagues to continue working on ways to improve the civil liberties protections in the Patriot Act after it is reauthorized.
But those improvements were never made and the NYT reports that the US Obama administration now supports Internet tapping:
Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.
Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.
Where is the public outcry? The silence of the left is deafening. Interestingly, we are not the only ones who noticed the silence, the NYT did as well:
An Obama administration plan to make wire tapping the Internet easier for law enforcement and national security agencies was met with silence by online companies Monday.Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Research in Motion – never shy about issuing press releases – all declined to talk about what would be a major shift in privacy law.
[snip]
Privacy advocates criticize the plan as a threat to free speech and open to abuse. However, major technology companies, which vociferously defend their privacy records, today declined to weigh in on the proposal – never mind that it could affect their users and require some technical gymnastics to implement.
Only Facebook would comment, if only generally, saying in a statement: “We will examine any proposal when and if it materializes but we can’t comment on something we haven’t seen. Generally, it’s our policy to only comply with valid, legal requests for data.”
[snip]
Under the proposal, the Internet companies will have to have systems in place that would allow law enforcement to intercept messages if asked to do so by law enforcement. Some companies already have such technology in place, but some do not and have to build such systems after being served.
Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group, said that there are “obvious civil liberty and privacy issues” with the Obama administration plan. Existing law already allows law enforcement to get user information from Internet companies, although it may not get it as quickly as they want.
You know what they say, you’ve come a long way, baby!
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
States' Rights Means Freedom
From Lew Rockwell.com:
More Fantasies From Claremont
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The Claremont Institute has joined with Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the far left of American politics in demonizing Senator Trent Lott for the "sin" of trying to say something nice about a hundred-year-old man, Senator Strom Thurmond, upon his retirement from the Senate. (It’s too bad he wasn’t elected president in 1948, Senator Lott said to his aged and ailing, wheelchair-bound colleague).
In a snotty article in the Institute’s December 12 weekly newsletter one Ken Masugi describes Senator Lott as "vacant," "rapacious," "twisted," "failed," "stupid," "mean spirited," "silly," and "lost," and joins the "Reverend" Sharpton and other enemies of the Republican Party in calling for Senator Lott to resign.
Sometimes it seems that everything to come out of the Claremont Institute is a fabrication or a fantasy. For example, the very first sentence of Masugi’s tirade (his specialty) is: "The Founders’ purpose in establishing the United States Senate was to elevate the characters of its members so that, following deliberation, it could act on behalf of the whole nation. This is the real, constitutional issue in the furor concerning would-be Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott." And this statement is a pure fabrication.
Masugi has his American history exactly backwards. When the founding fathers created the U.S. Senate in the Constitution they provided that senators were to be elected by state legislatures, not by popular vote. It wasn’t until the Seventeenth Amendment was passed in 1913 that U.S. senators were popularly elected.
The reason for this was that the election of senators by their own state legislatures was seen to be one of the bedrocks of states’ rights. Senators were expected to defend and promote the rights of the citizens of their own states and protect them from encroachments by the federal government – just the opposite of Masugi’s theory. This was seen as an important roadblock to the growth of any welfare/redistributionist state. By answering only to their own state legislature, senators were placed above national special-interest groups, the media, and even political parties. Since each piece of legislation, all judicial appointees, and all top executive appointments had to be approved by the senate, senators were effectively given the power to veto all three branches of the federal government. Each senator had a hand in federal affairs, and was held accountable by the people of his own state. This was all lost with the Seventeenth Amendment, though, so that today senators are pressured primarily by big campaign donors, the (liberal) media, special-interest groups, and opinion polls. The adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment was another nail in the coffin of states’ rights that led to the explosion of governmental power that has occurred ever since.
Masugi invokes the name of James Madison to support his a-historical theory, but Madison’s own words clearly repudiate the Masugi/Claremont position. In Federalist #39 the Father of the Constitution wrote that the establishment of the constitutional order was to come from the assent of the people "not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong." The "whole nation" theory of constitutionalism is a myth that has been perpetrated by many decades in order to rationalize the centralization of governmental power. The Claremont Institute is a shameless promoter of this myth, and of the bloated federal leviathan that the myth serves to prop up.
It was the election of U.S. senators by the state legislatures that benefited the "whole nation" by placing an important restraint on the powers of the central government. The whole purpose of the Constitution, Madison wrote in Federalist #10, was to restrain "the violence of faction," and this was best achieved by limiting the powers of the central state in this and numerous other ways.
Masugi seems to have a naïve, child’s view of government as he drones on about how politicians are expected to act in a "public-spirited" manner and enact policies that are "good for the nation as a whole" as they serve the "public interest." As I said, nearly everything to come out of the Claremont Institute seems to be a fantasy or fabrication.
Several hundred years ago state tyranny was rationalized by court historians who waxed eloquently about the "divine right of kings." With the advent of democracy "the public interest" replaced the "divine right of kings" as the supposed justification for state tyranny. Claremont’s court historians tirelessly promote this childish but dangerous view of government.
December 13, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House, 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
More Fantasies From Claremont
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The Claremont Institute has joined with Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the far left of American politics in demonizing Senator Trent Lott for the "sin" of trying to say something nice about a hundred-year-old man, Senator Strom Thurmond, upon his retirement from the Senate. (It’s too bad he wasn’t elected president in 1948, Senator Lott said to his aged and ailing, wheelchair-bound colleague).
In a snotty article in the Institute’s December 12 weekly newsletter one Ken Masugi describes Senator Lott as "vacant," "rapacious," "twisted," "failed," "stupid," "mean spirited," "silly," and "lost," and joins the "Reverend" Sharpton and other enemies of the Republican Party in calling for Senator Lott to resign.
Sometimes it seems that everything to come out of the Claremont Institute is a fabrication or a fantasy. For example, the very first sentence of Masugi’s tirade (his specialty) is: "The Founders’ purpose in establishing the United States Senate was to elevate the characters of its members so that, following deliberation, it could act on behalf of the whole nation. This is the real, constitutional issue in the furor concerning would-be Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott." And this statement is a pure fabrication.
Masugi has his American history exactly backwards. When the founding fathers created the U.S. Senate in the Constitution they provided that senators were to be elected by state legislatures, not by popular vote. It wasn’t until the Seventeenth Amendment was passed in 1913 that U.S. senators were popularly elected.
The reason for this was that the election of senators by their own state legislatures was seen to be one of the bedrocks of states’ rights. Senators were expected to defend and promote the rights of the citizens of their own states and protect them from encroachments by the federal government – just the opposite of Masugi’s theory. This was seen as an important roadblock to the growth of any welfare/redistributionist state. By answering only to their own state legislature, senators were placed above national special-interest groups, the media, and even political parties. Since each piece of legislation, all judicial appointees, and all top executive appointments had to be approved by the senate, senators were effectively given the power to veto all three branches of the federal government. Each senator had a hand in federal affairs, and was held accountable by the people of his own state. This was all lost with the Seventeenth Amendment, though, so that today senators are pressured primarily by big campaign donors, the (liberal) media, special-interest groups, and opinion polls. The adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment was another nail in the coffin of states’ rights that led to the explosion of governmental power that has occurred ever since.
Masugi invokes the name of James Madison to support his a-historical theory, but Madison’s own words clearly repudiate the Masugi/Claremont position. In Federalist #39 the Father of the Constitution wrote that the establishment of the constitutional order was to come from the assent of the people "not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong." The "whole nation" theory of constitutionalism is a myth that has been perpetrated by many decades in order to rationalize the centralization of governmental power. The Claremont Institute is a shameless promoter of this myth, and of the bloated federal leviathan that the myth serves to prop up.
It was the election of U.S. senators by the state legislatures that benefited the "whole nation" by placing an important restraint on the powers of the central government. The whole purpose of the Constitution, Madison wrote in Federalist #10, was to restrain "the violence of faction," and this was best achieved by limiting the powers of the central state in this and numerous other ways.
Masugi seems to have a naïve, child’s view of government as he drones on about how politicians are expected to act in a "public-spirited" manner and enact policies that are "good for the nation as a whole" as they serve the "public interest." As I said, nearly everything to come out of the Claremont Institute seems to be a fantasy or fabrication.
Several hundred years ago state tyranny was rationalized by court historians who waxed eloquently about the "divine right of kings." With the advent of democracy "the public interest" replaced the "divine right of kings" as the supposed justification for state tyranny. Claremont’s court historians tirelessly promote this childish but dangerous view of government.
December 13, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House, 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
States' Rights Vs. Monetary Monopoly
From Lew Rockwell.com:
States' Rights vs. Monetary Monopoly
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The federal government today can wage wars without the consent of our congressional representatives, overthrow foreign governments, tax nearly half of national income, abolish civil liberty in the name of "homeland security" and "the war on drugs," legalize and endorse infanticide ("partial-birth abortion"), regulate nearly every aspect of our existence, and there’s little or nothing we can do about it. "Write your congressman" is the refrain of the slave to the state who doesn’t even realize he’s a slave (thanks to decades of government school brainwashing).
But Americans were not always slaves to federal tyranny. Perhaps the best illustration of this is how Americans once utilized the Jeffersonian, states’ rights traditions of nullification and interposition to assist President Andrew Jackson in his campaign to veto the re-chartering of the Second Bank of the United States (BUS) in 1832. Jackson essentially ended central banking in America until it was revived thirty years later by the Lincoln administration. The story is told in James J. Kilpatrick’s wonderful 1957 book, The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia.
The Bank was notorious for fraud, mismanagement, corruption, and attempts to engineer a "political business cycle." Prior to 1861, the American people were still sovereign over their government. They exercised that sovereignty in the way the founders intended: through state political conventions or legislatures. The federal government was their agent.
Consequently, as early as 1816, Indiana and Illinois amended their state constitutions to prohibit the BUS from establishing branches within their jurisdictions. North Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland imposed heavy taxes on BUS branches within their states in attempts to tax them out of existence (A tax that even libertarians could love!). Knowing that such taxes could destroy the central bank, the federal government brought suit in Maryland (McCulloch vs. Maryland), confident that John Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Court and a proponent of the BUS, would rule in its favor. He did, coining the famous phrase that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy" in his decision. He wasn’t expressing a fear that taxation could destroy private initiative and private enterprise, but that it could limit the federal government’s monetary monopoly.
Despite Marshall’s opinion that state taxes on the BUS were unconstitutional, numerous states continued to harass the bank. Until 1865, the Supreme Court’s opinion was just the Supreme Court’s opinion. The citizens of the states reserved the right to offer their own opinions on constitutionality, which they often considered to be every bit as valid as the Court’s. The same was true of certain presidents: Andrew Jackson essentially said "thank you for your opinion" and then thumbed his nose at the Court when it ruled that the BUS was constitutional.
After Marshall’s 1819 opinion, Ohio enacted a $50,000 per year tax on the BUS. The Bank refused to pay, so the Ohio state auditor ordered a deputy, one John L. Harper, to collect the tax. As Kilpatrick (p. 151) explains it:
[O]n the morning of September 17, Harper made one last request for voluntary payment. When this was denied, he leaped over the counter, strode into the bank vaults, and helped himself to $100,000 in paper and specie. He then turned this over to a deputy . . . stuffing this considerable hoard into a small trunk, with which the party thoughtfully had come equipped . . .
This would be the equivalent of today’s governor of Ohio ordering state troopers to enter the Cleveland Fed and strip its vaults of over a million dollars. The BUS sued Ohio, relying on Marshall’s opinion. The Ohio legislature considered such a lawsuit to be a threat to citizen sovereignty and a dangerous precedent to all Americans, not just Ohioans. It issued a statement saying, "To acquiesce in such an encroachment upon the privileges and authority of the States, without an effort to defend them, would be an act of treachery to the State itself, and to all the States that compose the American Union (emphasis added)."
The legislature stated that it was aware of the theory that the Supreme Court is to be the interpreter of the Constitution, but declared that "to this doctrine . . . they can never give their assent" (Kilpatrick, p. 152). The legislature quoted Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolve of 1798, which said that "as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge," each party "has an equal right to interpret the Constitution for themselves, where their sovereign rights are involved . . ."
Marshall was wrong, the Ohioans said, because his opinion unconstitutionally encroached upon the sovereignty of the states. Therefore, they were under no obligation to acquiesce in his ruling.
The Ohio legislature promised to return the $100,000 if the BUS left the state. If not, it proposed a law forbidding "the keepers of our jails" from imprisoning any person "committed at the suit of the Bank of the United States"; prohibiting Ohio courts from "taking acknowledgements of conveyance where the Bank is a party"; and forbidding "our courts, justices of peace, judges and grand juries from taking any cognizance of any wrong alleged to have been committed upon any species of property owned by the Bank." Invoking Jefferson’s "Doctrine of ’98," the Ohioans concluded by "denouncing the Federal courts for violation of the Constitution" (p. 154).
The BUS persisted in its lawsuit, and eventually had the state treasurer arrested and imprisoned. While in prison, the keys to the state vaults were physically taken from him and the feds took back the $100,000, apparently still in the same trunk.
This act infuriated the Ohioans even more, and they continued to harass the Bank, as did many other states. Kentucky and Connecticut adopted Ohio’s states’ rights stand toward the Bank in 1825. In 1829, South Carolina imposed a tax on stockholders of the Bank within the state. New York and New Hampshire enacted resolutions urging that the Bank not be re-chartered. As Kilpatrick concludes:
In the face of this unrelenting warfare, the bank could not survive. Withdrawal of the public deposits began in August of 1833, under Jackson’s order; and when Pennsylvania governor Wolf, who had been one of the bank’s staunchest supporters, denounced the institution in . . . March of 1834, public opinion was fatally influenced against the bank. The Pennsylvania Senate adopted fresh resolutions urging that the bank ought not to be re-chartered. The following month, the United States House of Representatives adopted the same view, and the bank’s days came to an end (p. 157).
Andrew Jackson is usually given credit for (temporarily) ending central banking in America in the nineteenth century. But he had help. It was this expression of citizen sovereignty, in the spirit of the Jeffersonian states’ rights tradition, that made Jackson’s veto of the bank politically possible.
States’ rights as a check on the tyrannical proclivities of the central government ended in 1865, of course. As Forrest McDonald noted in States' Rights and the Union (p. 224), after Lincoln’s war the Supreme Court "became the sole and final arbiter of constitutional controversies. No longer could a Jefferson arise to insist that the other branches of the federal government had coequal authority to determine constitutionality. No more could a Calhoun arise to defend a doctrine of interposition or nullification."
The imperious Woodrow Wilson would celebrate this fact in his 1908 book, Constitutional Government in the United States, where he wrote (p. 178) that "the War between the States established . . . this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers."
In A View of the Constitution, published a century earlier, the Jeffersonian legal scholar St. George Tucker cited this phenomenon as the very definition of tyranny. If the federal government ever became the final judge of the limits of its own powers, Tucker warned, then constitutional liberty would become an empty phrase. The federal government would inevitably conclude that there are, in fact, no limits to its power.
May 9, 2003
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House, 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at LRC
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org
States' Rights vs. Monetary Monopoly
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The federal government today can wage wars without the consent of our congressional representatives, overthrow foreign governments, tax nearly half of national income, abolish civil liberty in the name of "homeland security" and "the war on drugs," legalize and endorse infanticide ("partial-birth abortion"), regulate nearly every aspect of our existence, and there’s little or nothing we can do about it. "Write your congressman" is the refrain of the slave to the state who doesn’t even realize he’s a slave (thanks to decades of government school brainwashing).
But Americans were not always slaves to federal tyranny. Perhaps the best illustration of this is how Americans once utilized the Jeffersonian, states’ rights traditions of nullification and interposition to assist President Andrew Jackson in his campaign to veto the re-chartering of the Second Bank of the United States (BUS) in 1832. Jackson essentially ended central banking in America until it was revived thirty years later by the Lincoln administration. The story is told in James J. Kilpatrick’s wonderful 1957 book, The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia.
The Bank was notorious for fraud, mismanagement, corruption, and attempts to engineer a "political business cycle." Prior to 1861, the American people were still sovereign over their government. They exercised that sovereignty in the way the founders intended: through state political conventions or legislatures. The federal government was their agent.
Consequently, as early as 1816, Indiana and Illinois amended their state constitutions to prohibit the BUS from establishing branches within their jurisdictions. North Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland imposed heavy taxes on BUS branches within their states in attempts to tax them out of existence (A tax that even libertarians could love!). Knowing that such taxes could destroy the central bank, the federal government brought suit in Maryland (McCulloch vs. Maryland), confident that John Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Court and a proponent of the BUS, would rule in its favor. He did, coining the famous phrase that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy" in his decision. He wasn’t expressing a fear that taxation could destroy private initiative and private enterprise, but that it could limit the federal government’s monetary monopoly.
Despite Marshall’s opinion that state taxes on the BUS were unconstitutional, numerous states continued to harass the bank. Until 1865, the Supreme Court’s opinion was just the Supreme Court’s opinion. The citizens of the states reserved the right to offer their own opinions on constitutionality, which they often considered to be every bit as valid as the Court’s. The same was true of certain presidents: Andrew Jackson essentially said "thank you for your opinion" and then thumbed his nose at the Court when it ruled that the BUS was constitutional.
After Marshall’s 1819 opinion, Ohio enacted a $50,000 per year tax on the BUS. The Bank refused to pay, so the Ohio state auditor ordered a deputy, one John L. Harper, to collect the tax. As Kilpatrick (p. 151) explains it:
[O]n the morning of September 17, Harper made one last request for voluntary payment. When this was denied, he leaped over the counter, strode into the bank vaults, and helped himself to $100,000 in paper and specie. He then turned this over to a deputy . . . stuffing this considerable hoard into a small trunk, with which the party thoughtfully had come equipped . . .
This would be the equivalent of today’s governor of Ohio ordering state troopers to enter the Cleveland Fed and strip its vaults of over a million dollars. The BUS sued Ohio, relying on Marshall’s opinion. The Ohio legislature considered such a lawsuit to be a threat to citizen sovereignty and a dangerous precedent to all Americans, not just Ohioans. It issued a statement saying, "To acquiesce in such an encroachment upon the privileges and authority of the States, without an effort to defend them, would be an act of treachery to the State itself, and to all the States that compose the American Union (emphasis added)."
The legislature stated that it was aware of the theory that the Supreme Court is to be the interpreter of the Constitution, but declared that "to this doctrine . . . they can never give their assent" (Kilpatrick, p. 152). The legislature quoted Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolve of 1798, which said that "as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge," each party "has an equal right to interpret the Constitution for themselves, where their sovereign rights are involved . . ."
Marshall was wrong, the Ohioans said, because his opinion unconstitutionally encroached upon the sovereignty of the states. Therefore, they were under no obligation to acquiesce in his ruling.
The Ohio legislature promised to return the $100,000 if the BUS left the state. If not, it proposed a law forbidding "the keepers of our jails" from imprisoning any person "committed at the suit of the Bank of the United States"; prohibiting Ohio courts from "taking acknowledgements of conveyance where the Bank is a party"; and forbidding "our courts, justices of peace, judges and grand juries from taking any cognizance of any wrong alleged to have been committed upon any species of property owned by the Bank." Invoking Jefferson’s "Doctrine of ’98," the Ohioans concluded by "denouncing the Federal courts for violation of the Constitution" (p. 154).
The BUS persisted in its lawsuit, and eventually had the state treasurer arrested and imprisoned. While in prison, the keys to the state vaults were physically taken from him and the feds took back the $100,000, apparently still in the same trunk.
This act infuriated the Ohioans even more, and they continued to harass the Bank, as did many other states. Kentucky and Connecticut adopted Ohio’s states’ rights stand toward the Bank in 1825. In 1829, South Carolina imposed a tax on stockholders of the Bank within the state. New York and New Hampshire enacted resolutions urging that the Bank not be re-chartered. As Kilpatrick concludes:
In the face of this unrelenting warfare, the bank could not survive. Withdrawal of the public deposits began in August of 1833, under Jackson’s order; and when Pennsylvania governor Wolf, who had been one of the bank’s staunchest supporters, denounced the institution in . . . March of 1834, public opinion was fatally influenced against the bank. The Pennsylvania Senate adopted fresh resolutions urging that the bank ought not to be re-chartered. The following month, the United States House of Representatives adopted the same view, and the bank’s days came to an end (p. 157).
Andrew Jackson is usually given credit for (temporarily) ending central banking in America in the nineteenth century. But he had help. It was this expression of citizen sovereignty, in the spirit of the Jeffersonian states’ rights tradition, that made Jackson’s veto of the bank politically possible.
States’ rights as a check on the tyrannical proclivities of the central government ended in 1865, of course. As Forrest McDonald noted in States' Rights and the Union (p. 224), after Lincoln’s war the Supreme Court "became the sole and final arbiter of constitutional controversies. No longer could a Jefferson arise to insist that the other branches of the federal government had coequal authority to determine constitutionality. No more could a Calhoun arise to defend a doctrine of interposition or nullification."
The imperious Woodrow Wilson would celebrate this fact in his 1908 book, Constitutional Government in the United States, where he wrote (p. 178) that "the War between the States established . . . this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers."
In A View of the Constitution, published a century earlier, the Jeffersonian legal scholar St. George Tucker cited this phenomenon as the very definition of tyranny. If the federal government ever became the final judge of the limits of its own powers, Tucker warned, then constitutional liberty would become an empty phrase. The federal government would inevitably conclude that there are, in fact, no limits to its power.
May 9, 2003
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House, 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at LRC
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org
Independence Day In Perspective
From Lew Rockwell.com:
Independence Day in Perspective
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
To many Americans the Fourth of July is just another day off, a picnic, and some fireworks. It is my favorite holiday because, unlike so many Americans, I haven’t forgotten what we’re celebrating: independence from tyrannical government. The July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence, one of the defining documents of our nation’s existence, is better thought of as a Declaration of Secession, since the Revolutionary War that it started was a war of secession from the government of England. America was born with an act of secession which, until 1865, was considered to be one our most cherished freedoms.
Perhaps the most famous section of the Declaration, authored by Thomas Jefferson, is the list of the "train of abuses" perpetrated by King George III on the colonists. This very same train of abuse was heaped upon the citizens of the Southern states from 1861 until the end of "Reconstruction" in 1877, and applies to some degree more or less universally today. Consider the words of the Declaration:
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected.
Lincoln imposed military rule on those parts of the South that were conquered territory during the war, and the Southern states were governed by Republican party-appointed military dictatorships for twelve years after the war.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone.
By suspending the writ of habeas corpus, ignoring U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s ruling that only Congress could constitutionally suspend habeas corpus, and threatening to prosecute state judges who permitted criminal prosecutions of federal government officials to go forward, Lincoln effectively trumped the judiciary.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
Myriad new bureaucracies were created to run the militarily-occupied states during and after the War for Southern Independence. General Benjamin Butler famously harassed the people of New Orleans by hanging a man for merely taking down a U.S. flag and declaring that any woman who did not display proper respect for federal soldiers would be considered a prostitute. Other military officers were just as harassing. Federal armies pillaged, plundered, and sacked their way through the southern states for four years, and Lincoln supported several "confiscation" bills that allowed them to plunder private property (but not slaves).
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.
The federal army occupied Maryland in 1861 so that the legislature (most of which was thrown into military prison) could not meet to discuss secession. The other border states were under military occupation for the duration of the war, as was the entire South for twelve years after the war.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
By suspending habeas corpus, Lincoln ordered the military to arrest and imprison virtually all opposition newspaper editors, supported an "indemnity act" that prohibited state judges from allowing the prosecution of military officers for criminal acts, and effectively nationalized the judiciary at gunpoint.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended legislation.
Lincoln suspended constitutional liberty in the North for the duration of his presidency. He launched a military invasion without congressional consent; declared martial law; blockaded the Southern ports; suspended habeas corpus; imprisoned without trial thousands of Northern citizens for favoring peace over war; imprisoned newspaper publishers and editors who criticized him; censored all telegraph communication; nationalized the railroads; created several new states without the consent of the citizens of those states; ordered federal troops to interfere in elections by intimidating Democratic voters; deported an opposition member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio; confiscated private property, including firearms; and essentially gutted the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. This was all indeed "foreign" to Thomas Jefferson’s constitution.
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.
Federal troops were quartered in the border states and in various parts of the South during the war and the twelve years of "Reconstruction."
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.
The Constitution prohibits blockades except for in wartime and against a foreign power. But Lincoln never conceded that the Southern states were a "foreign power" or the war as anything but a "rebellion."
For imposing taxes on us without consent.
Southern protests over protectionist tariffs helped precipitate the war. The historically-high tariffs imposed during the war and lasting for decades thereafter were certainly imposed without the South’s consent. Occupied parts of the South during the war had no voting rights but were nevertheless heavily taxed, with taxes collected at gunpoint by federal soldiers. The "Reconstruction" governments raised taxes relentlessly even though most white male southerners were disenfranchised for years.
For depriving us in many cases, of the right of Trial by jury.
Habeas corpus was abandoned in the Northern states for the duration of the Lincoln administration. Any Northern citizen could be arbitrarily arrested without a civil warrant and imprisoned without trial on the mere suspicion or rumor that he was an advocate of peace.
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
This is a perfect description of the "Reconstruction" South, where virtually every white adult male was disenfranchised, and all the adult male ex slaves were immediately given the right to vote and instructed to vote Republican. The state and local governments were puppet governments run by notoriously corrupt Republican political hacks.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coast, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies, of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny.
Lincoln declared not only secessionists, but anyone in the North who sympathized with peaceful secession, a traitor and undeserving of the protection of constitutional liberties. In the occupied South summary arrests were made, civilians were arbitrarily rounded up and shot in retaliation for guerrilla warfare, newspapers were suppressed, land was confiscated, railroads were taken over, entire towns were burned to the ground, many churches were closed and ministers and priests imprisoned, and some citizens who refused to take a loyalty oath were imprisoned or executed.
Thousands of new immigrants from Europe, many of whom did not even speak English, were recruited into the federal army, ostensibly to teach the grandsons of Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry what it meant to be an American (Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Garland Jefferson, was killed in the Battle of New Market).
So when you’re celebrating on the Fourth of July go ahead and fly the flag of the Thirteen Colonies, the First National Flag of the Confederacy, or the Confederate Battle Flag, for these are the appropriate flags for celebrating American independence from tyrannical government. The U.S. flag, on the other hand, stands for exactly the opposite.
July 4, 2001
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
Independence Day in Perspective
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
To many Americans the Fourth of July is just another day off, a picnic, and some fireworks. It is my favorite holiday because, unlike so many Americans, I haven’t forgotten what we’re celebrating: independence from tyrannical government. The July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence, one of the defining documents of our nation’s existence, is better thought of as a Declaration of Secession, since the Revolutionary War that it started was a war of secession from the government of England. America was born with an act of secession which, until 1865, was considered to be one our most cherished freedoms.
Perhaps the most famous section of the Declaration, authored by Thomas Jefferson, is the list of the "train of abuses" perpetrated by King George III on the colonists. This very same train of abuse was heaped upon the citizens of the Southern states from 1861 until the end of "Reconstruction" in 1877, and applies to some degree more or less universally today. Consider the words of the Declaration:
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected.
Lincoln imposed military rule on those parts of the South that were conquered territory during the war, and the Southern states were governed by Republican party-appointed military dictatorships for twelve years after the war.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone.
By suspending the writ of habeas corpus, ignoring U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s ruling that only Congress could constitutionally suspend habeas corpus, and threatening to prosecute state judges who permitted criminal prosecutions of federal government officials to go forward, Lincoln effectively trumped the judiciary.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
Myriad new bureaucracies were created to run the militarily-occupied states during and after the War for Southern Independence. General Benjamin Butler famously harassed the people of New Orleans by hanging a man for merely taking down a U.S. flag and declaring that any woman who did not display proper respect for federal soldiers would be considered a prostitute. Other military officers were just as harassing. Federal armies pillaged, plundered, and sacked their way through the southern states for four years, and Lincoln supported several "confiscation" bills that allowed them to plunder private property (but not slaves).
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.
The federal army occupied Maryland in 1861 so that the legislature (most of which was thrown into military prison) could not meet to discuss secession. The other border states were under military occupation for the duration of the war, as was the entire South for twelve years after the war.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
By suspending habeas corpus, Lincoln ordered the military to arrest and imprison virtually all opposition newspaper editors, supported an "indemnity act" that prohibited state judges from allowing the prosecution of military officers for criminal acts, and effectively nationalized the judiciary at gunpoint.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended legislation.
Lincoln suspended constitutional liberty in the North for the duration of his presidency. He launched a military invasion without congressional consent; declared martial law; blockaded the Southern ports; suspended habeas corpus; imprisoned without trial thousands of Northern citizens for favoring peace over war; imprisoned newspaper publishers and editors who criticized him; censored all telegraph communication; nationalized the railroads; created several new states without the consent of the citizens of those states; ordered federal troops to interfere in elections by intimidating Democratic voters; deported an opposition member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio; confiscated private property, including firearms; and essentially gutted the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. This was all indeed "foreign" to Thomas Jefferson’s constitution.
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.
Federal troops were quartered in the border states and in various parts of the South during the war and the twelve years of "Reconstruction."
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.
The Constitution prohibits blockades except for in wartime and against a foreign power. But Lincoln never conceded that the Southern states were a "foreign power" or the war as anything but a "rebellion."
For imposing taxes on us without consent.
Southern protests over protectionist tariffs helped precipitate the war. The historically-high tariffs imposed during the war and lasting for decades thereafter were certainly imposed without the South’s consent. Occupied parts of the South during the war had no voting rights but were nevertheless heavily taxed, with taxes collected at gunpoint by federal soldiers. The "Reconstruction" governments raised taxes relentlessly even though most white male southerners were disenfranchised for years.
For depriving us in many cases, of the right of Trial by jury.
Habeas corpus was abandoned in the Northern states for the duration of the Lincoln administration. Any Northern citizen could be arbitrarily arrested without a civil warrant and imprisoned without trial on the mere suspicion or rumor that he was an advocate of peace.
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
This is a perfect description of the "Reconstruction" South, where virtually every white adult male was disenfranchised, and all the adult male ex slaves were immediately given the right to vote and instructed to vote Republican. The state and local governments were puppet governments run by notoriously corrupt Republican political hacks.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coast, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies, of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny.
Lincoln declared not only secessionists, but anyone in the North who sympathized with peaceful secession, a traitor and undeserving of the protection of constitutional liberties. In the occupied South summary arrests were made, civilians were arbitrarily rounded up and shot in retaliation for guerrilla warfare, newspapers were suppressed, land was confiscated, railroads were taken over, entire towns were burned to the ground, many churches were closed and ministers and priests imprisoned, and some citizens who refused to take a loyalty oath were imprisoned or executed.
Thousands of new immigrants from Europe, many of whom did not even speak English, were recruited into the federal army, ostensibly to teach the grandsons of Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry what it meant to be an American (Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Garland Jefferson, was killed in the Battle of New Market).
So when you’re celebrating on the Fourth of July go ahead and fly the flag of the Thirteen Colonies, the First National Flag of the Confederacy, or the Confederate Battle Flag, for these are the appropriate flags for celebrating American independence from tyrannical government. The U.S. flag, on the other hand, stands for exactly the opposite.
July 4, 2001
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
Celebrating America's Capitalist Revolution
From Lew Rockwell.com:
Celebrating America’s Capitalist Revolution
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The Revolution of 1776 was America’s first War of Secession. Secession was "the" principle of the Revolution, said Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering, who also served as President George Washington’s secretary of war and secretary of state. The colonists seceded from the British Empire because, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." (Note that the tyranny was over the free, independent, and sovereign States, plural, not "the United States" in the singular).
Economic issues were a major concern for the colonists. Jefferson also condemned the King’s tax collectors: "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance." The Declaration also criticized the King’s protectionist trade policy: "For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world." And of course for "imposing taxes on us without our Consent."
Even more fundamentally, one of the reasons the colonists believed they were being tyrannized by the King of England was that the King increasingly viewed the colonies as an economic resource to be exploited by his mercantilist policies, especially trade restrictions in the form of tariffs. Mercantilism was the policy of the British government in the eighteenth century, and one of the first mercantilist laws imposed on the American colonists was the Molasses Act of 1773, which placed a high tariff on imports of molasses from the French West Indies. The Act was not very effective, however, because of good old American ingenuity in the smuggling business. Indeed, the most famous signatory of the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, was a renowned smuggler.
To protect British ship builders from competition – another patently mercantilist policy – England passed the Navigation Acts which prohibited any ships built outside the British Empire from engaging in trade with the colonies; ships involved in colonial trade were also required to employ a crew consisting of at least three-fourths British subjects, an early form of labor union "featherbedding."
The Navigation Acts also entailed a long and constantly-changing list of "enumerated goods" produced in the colonies (sugar, tobacco, indigo, furs, etc.) that could be shipped only to England. Even if the goods were eventually sold elsewhere in Europe, they had to go to England first and then be reshipped. This made shipping more costly to the colonists, and less profitable as well. On the other hand, it was an indirect subsidy to the British shipbuilding, shipping, and port industries.
The Navigation Acts also included a Byzantine bureaucratic system of regulations and subsidies. For example, the colonies were prohibited from exporting such things as textiles and fur hats from one colony to another. Constant bureaucratic meddling to enforce all these tax collection laws caused resentment among the colonists to build and build.
At the end of the Seven Year’s War in 1763, England was left with a huge war debt and so it began enforcing the Navigation Acts and other mercantilist trade restrictions with renewed vigor while imposing onerous new taxes on the colonists. There was the 1764 Sugar Act, which increased taxes on sugar imports. The Stamp Act of 1765 required a government stamp to be placed on every paper transaction – marriage licenses, property titles, etc. The tax was not very onerous, but it spawned the first American tax revolt: If the King of England could impose such a tax, where will it all end?
The first continental congress was formed to protest the Stamp Act and coined the phrase "no taxation without representation." These tax protesters were so successful that King George repealed the Stamp Tax in 1766. But at about the same time came the Townshend Acts of 1767 which imposed myriad new tariffs on imported goods.
Americans responded by boycotting British goods; the boycott was so successful that, like the Stamp Tax, King George was forced to repeal the Townshend Acts. But the King was not about to give up his attempts to plunder the colonists for all they were worth. In 1773 came the Tea Act, which increased the tariffs on tea, some750,000 pounds of which was imported per year at the time. American tea merchants understood that this could ruin them, so they organized the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, where merchants dressed like Indians and dumped tons of tea into Boston Harbor. They were eventually joined by Virginia planters, Pennsylvania farmers, Connecticut woodsmen, and New England seafarers, writes historian Larry Schweikart in The Entrepreneurial Adventure: A History of Business in the United States.
Thus it was that in 1776, the year that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, so many of the acts of tyranny that King George III was accused of had as their objective the implementation of British mercantilism in the colonies. The American Revolution was at least partly a capitalist, or anti-mercantilist revolution. In the same year that the Declaration of Independence was written Adam Smith published his famous treatise, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The "Wealth of Nations" is a prolonged attack on the policy of British mercantilism and a defense of its opposite: free trade and the institutions of capitalism (even though the term "capitalism" had not yet been coined).
After the Revolution the Hamiltonian faction of American politics would battle mightily to bring British mercantilism to America by advocating protectionism, corporate welfare, and central banking. Like the British government, they understood that, as harmful to the country as this mercantilism is, it is nevertheless a powerful tool for the accumulation of political power. They believed that doling out special benefits to the wealthy, privileged, and politically connected through protectionism and government subsidies financed through money creation was the key to perpetual political success.
They sought, in other words, to repudiate America’s capitalist revolution. With the demise of Hamilton’s Federalist Party the Whigs picked up the mercantilist mantle, and then the Republicans in the 1850s, after the demise of the Whig Party. America’s mercantilist cabal achieved very little success in the political arena until their entire agenda was put into place – literally at gunpoint – during the first year of the Lincoln administration. Thus, the Lincoln administration’s adoption of mercantilism, with its tripling of the average tariff rate, its massive subsidies for railroad-building corporations, and its National Currency Acts, was an embrace of the very kind of policies against which the American revolutionaries of 1776 fought.
July 3, 2004
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold Story of Our Country’s History, from the Pilgrims to the Present (Crown Forum/Random House, August 2004).
Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at LRC
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org
Celebrating America’s Capitalist Revolution
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The Revolution of 1776 was America’s first War of Secession. Secession was "the" principle of the Revolution, said Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering, who also served as President George Washington’s secretary of war and secretary of state. The colonists seceded from the British Empire because, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." (Note that the tyranny was over the free, independent, and sovereign States, plural, not "the United States" in the singular).
Economic issues were a major concern for the colonists. Jefferson also condemned the King’s tax collectors: "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance." The Declaration also criticized the King’s protectionist trade policy: "For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world." And of course for "imposing taxes on us without our Consent."
Even more fundamentally, one of the reasons the colonists believed they were being tyrannized by the King of England was that the King increasingly viewed the colonies as an economic resource to be exploited by his mercantilist policies, especially trade restrictions in the form of tariffs. Mercantilism was the policy of the British government in the eighteenth century, and one of the first mercantilist laws imposed on the American colonists was the Molasses Act of 1773, which placed a high tariff on imports of molasses from the French West Indies. The Act was not very effective, however, because of good old American ingenuity in the smuggling business. Indeed, the most famous signatory of the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, was a renowned smuggler.
To protect British ship builders from competition – another patently mercantilist policy – England passed the Navigation Acts which prohibited any ships built outside the British Empire from engaging in trade with the colonies; ships involved in colonial trade were also required to employ a crew consisting of at least three-fourths British subjects, an early form of labor union "featherbedding."
The Navigation Acts also entailed a long and constantly-changing list of "enumerated goods" produced in the colonies (sugar, tobacco, indigo, furs, etc.) that could be shipped only to England. Even if the goods were eventually sold elsewhere in Europe, they had to go to England first and then be reshipped. This made shipping more costly to the colonists, and less profitable as well. On the other hand, it was an indirect subsidy to the British shipbuilding, shipping, and port industries.
The Navigation Acts also included a Byzantine bureaucratic system of regulations and subsidies. For example, the colonies were prohibited from exporting such things as textiles and fur hats from one colony to another. Constant bureaucratic meddling to enforce all these tax collection laws caused resentment among the colonists to build and build.
At the end of the Seven Year’s War in 1763, England was left with a huge war debt and so it began enforcing the Navigation Acts and other mercantilist trade restrictions with renewed vigor while imposing onerous new taxes on the colonists. There was the 1764 Sugar Act, which increased taxes on sugar imports. The Stamp Act of 1765 required a government stamp to be placed on every paper transaction – marriage licenses, property titles, etc. The tax was not very onerous, but it spawned the first American tax revolt: If the King of England could impose such a tax, where will it all end?
The first continental congress was formed to protest the Stamp Act and coined the phrase "no taxation without representation." These tax protesters were so successful that King George repealed the Stamp Tax in 1766. But at about the same time came the Townshend Acts of 1767 which imposed myriad new tariffs on imported goods.
Americans responded by boycotting British goods; the boycott was so successful that, like the Stamp Tax, King George was forced to repeal the Townshend Acts. But the King was not about to give up his attempts to plunder the colonists for all they were worth. In 1773 came the Tea Act, which increased the tariffs on tea, some750,000 pounds of which was imported per year at the time. American tea merchants understood that this could ruin them, so they organized the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, where merchants dressed like Indians and dumped tons of tea into Boston Harbor. They were eventually joined by Virginia planters, Pennsylvania farmers, Connecticut woodsmen, and New England seafarers, writes historian Larry Schweikart in The Entrepreneurial Adventure: A History of Business in the United States.
Thus it was that in 1776, the year that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, so many of the acts of tyranny that King George III was accused of had as their objective the implementation of British mercantilism in the colonies. The American Revolution was at least partly a capitalist, or anti-mercantilist revolution. In the same year that the Declaration of Independence was written Adam Smith published his famous treatise, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The "Wealth of Nations" is a prolonged attack on the policy of British mercantilism and a defense of its opposite: free trade and the institutions of capitalism (even though the term "capitalism" had not yet been coined).
After the Revolution the Hamiltonian faction of American politics would battle mightily to bring British mercantilism to America by advocating protectionism, corporate welfare, and central banking. Like the British government, they understood that, as harmful to the country as this mercantilism is, it is nevertheless a powerful tool for the accumulation of political power. They believed that doling out special benefits to the wealthy, privileged, and politically connected through protectionism and government subsidies financed through money creation was the key to perpetual political success.
They sought, in other words, to repudiate America’s capitalist revolution. With the demise of Hamilton’s Federalist Party the Whigs picked up the mercantilist mantle, and then the Republicans in the 1850s, after the demise of the Whig Party. America’s mercantilist cabal achieved very little success in the political arena until their entire agenda was put into place – literally at gunpoint – during the first year of the Lincoln administration. Thus, the Lincoln administration’s adoption of mercantilism, with its tripling of the average tariff rate, its massive subsidies for railroad-building corporations, and its National Currency Acts, was an embrace of the very kind of policies against which the American revolutionaries of 1776 fought.
July 3, 2004
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold Story of Our Country’s History, from the Pilgrims to the Present (Crown Forum/Random House, August 2004).
Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at LRC
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
