From Alliance Defense Fund and The Witherspoon Institute:
Same-Sex Marriage and the Assault on Moral Reasoning
by Matthew J. Franck
August 6, 2010
Even same-sex marriage advocates should recognize the bad logic in the ruling overturning Proposition 8.
It is something of a consolation, albeit a small one, that the best arguments advocates for a constitutional “right” to same-sex marriage can muster are so transparently bad. Disconnected from nature, from history, from the canons of legal reasoning, and even from the standards of logic itself, their arguments betray themselves at every turn, as acts of the will and not of reasoned judgment. When the advocate advancing the arguments wears a black robe and sits on the federal bench, of course, even falsehood and fallacy have a decent chance of ultimate victory.
Such an advocate is Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. district court in San Francisco. After two and a half weeks of trial in January, and a day of closing arguments in June, he finally delivered his ruling and opinion in Perry v. Schwarzenegger on August 4, overturning California’s Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution adopted by the people in November 2008, declaring that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” The California Supreme Court, in May of that year, had overturned an earlier popular referendum protecting marriage (that had only statutory status) on grounds that it violated the state constitution. And so the people of the state, against the odds and facing elite opposition, amended that constitution just six months later. Judge Walker has shifted the ground of the controversy to the federal constitution, and has flung wide the door of the federal courts to embrace (he hopes) some of the worst sophistical knavery that has been seen in quite some time in the pages of American jurisprudence.
Perhaps the most surprising thing in the judge’s opinion is his declaration that “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage.” This line, quoted everywhere within hours with evident astonishment, appears to be the sheerest ipse dixit—a judicial “because I said so”—and the phrase “no longer” conveys that palpable sense that one is being mugged by a progressive. But Judge Walker’s remark here is actually the conclusion of a fairly complex argument. The problem is that the argument is not only complex but wholly fallacious.
Judges, especially those of the lower courts, know that their innovations in constitutional law are best armored by an appearance of continuity with history and precedent. And so Judge Walker begins by reminding us that the right to marry has long been considered “fundamental” in our jurisprudence. And so it has, for those—namely couples of men and women—considered capable of entering into the relationship of marriage. Are the same-sex plaintiffs in the Perry case asking then for a “new” right, or for admission without unjust barriers of discrimination to the enjoyment of an old one? At first glance it looks like the first of these is the case. But any road that leads to the second conclusion will be smoothest for the judge-advocate’s purposes, since it will provide that much-desired appearance of continuity with the law’s long history.
Yet how to pave that road? By distinguishing between the “core” attributes of the institution of marriage and those that are only incidental, those historical attributes that have been abandoned without harm to what is essential about marriage. Many American states, for instance, once considered race an important attribute, so that racial difference was a barrier to the formation of a marriage. But race is now universally understood not to matter, and the Supreme Court even said in 1967 that the Constitution did not tolerate such a legal rule.
By the same token, says Judge Walker, the doctrine of coverture, in the common law, in which a wife’s legal identity was subsumed by that of her husband as the superior partner in the marriage—that too has been abandoned by a more modern understanding of the sexes as equal partners. Thus, concludes the judge, there has been a “movement of marriage away from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from state-mandated gender roles.” And this has not been an essential change in the “core” of the marriage institution, but merely a shedding of an extraneous characteristic, thanks to “an evolution in the understanding of gender.”
And now watch carefully, for here the fallacious reasoning enters the equation. When “the genders” are no longer “seen as having distinct roles,” it is revealed that at marriage’s “core” there is ample space for same-sex couples too. Since “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage,” indeed since it never really did, “plaintiffs’ relationships are consistent with the core of the history, tradition and practice of marriage in the United States.” There, you see? There is something eminently conservative about the admission of same-sex couples to the marital bond. What could we have been thinking, denying them this right for all these centuries?
Judge Walker seems to have committed the fallacy of composition—taking something true of a part and concluding that it is also true of the whole of which it is a part. If it is true that “gender” no longer matters as it once did in the relation of husband and wife, he reasons, therefore it no longer matters whether the relation is one of husband and wife; it may as well be a relation of husband and husband or of wife and wife, since we now know that marriage is not, at its “core,” a “gendered institution.” But restated in this way, it is quite plain that the judge’s conclusion doesn’t follow from his premises. To say that the status of men and women in marriage is one of equal partners is not to say that men and women are the same, such that it does not matter what sex their partners are. The equalization of status is not the obliteration of difference, as much as Judge Walker would like to pretend it is.
Once having admitted same-sex couples to the ranks of those holding the “fundamental right” to marry, the judge has easier sport in his sights, manipulating the “levels of scrutiny” that so afflict modern constitutional law, and concluding withal that the voters who approved Proposition 8 acted without any “rational basis” for their decision to preserve marriage in the only form in which our law has ever known it. Now conservatism gets a hiding from Judge Walker: “Tradition alone . . . cannot form a rational basis for a law.”
Well, yes, to be sure. Tradition must give its reasons—though in the common-law legal tradition, it is novelty that usually bears a heavier burden in this respect. And is it really as easy as the judge thinks to dismiss a “tradition” so bound up with commonsense understandings of nature, of human flourishing, of the purposes of marriage and family? Confidently sweeping aside such understandings, Judge Walker declares that “moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples.”
This is a very telling conjunction. Once it would have been thought to strengthen the case for a law, that it rested on the moral views of the lawmakers, if no countervailing right against being governed by such views could be adduced. And it would have been a matter of no legal suspicion whatsoever that the moral views informing a law found confirmation in widely held religious views as well. For such moral principles are not articles of faith, in the sense of being specially revealed to the elect or the faithful. They are the conclusions of trains of reasoning about right and wrong, and about human ends and the fitness of the means to them. In language we might borrow from Plato’s Euthyphro, the moral norms that govern marriage are embraced by the pious not because they are mysterious commands of an inscrutable divine will, but because they are rationally knowable as good in themselves, and for this reason find support in the dictates of faith as well.
But for Judge Walker there is an odor of illegitimacy about merely “moral” views expressed in legislation, especially when morality finds support in religion. Thus he declares that Proposition 8 expresses only a “private moral choice,” not a considered public morality. And thus in his tendentious “findings of fact” (about the purpose of which, see this editorial in National Review), he makes the astonishing claim—purporting to be a fact found at trial, not a judgment of his own—that “religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful . . . harm gays and lesbians.”
Perhaps here, in this nadir of absurdity, we have found the real fundament of the judge’s thinking. Citizens who wish to defend the institution of marriage as they and their families have known it all their lives, and for countless generations, are irrational bigots. Worse still, if they are moved to act because of the union of their faith with their moral opinions, they are crazy religious folk, bent only on harming others whom they merely “dislike” on grounds that cannot possibly be defended before a tribunal of right-thinking people. And those others, the same-sex-couple plaintiffs? They must be rescued from the “harm” to their feelings that results from their exclusion from a historic civil and moral institution that has never hitherto been thought to have been built for them.
That Judge Vaughn Walker evidently cannot grasp what an effrontery his opinion is to the faith, the morals, and yes, the feelings of the vast majority of his fellow Americans is the final irony of his ruling in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. But perhaps he can be taught a lesson about the violence he has done to the rule of law, and to the United States Constitution. His fellow citizens, more accustomed than he to governing themselves by canons of reasoned judgment, may have to teach the lesson, if his superiors on the bench will not do so.
Matthew J. Franck is the director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.
Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Federal Court Declares Most Americans To Be Bigots
From Human Events and Alliance Defense Fund:
Federal Court Declares Most Americans A Bunch of Bigots
by Austin R. Nimocks
08/06/2010
There are two sides to our country’s ever-swirling debate regarding same-sex “marriage.” Both sides genuinely advocate their positions, and the debate has found its way into every corner of our society—churches, schools, media, legislatures, and ballot boxes, just to name a few places. And not unlike presidential elections and other contests, the feelings on both sides run deep.
When this debate began to percolate in California, the citizens of California did that most American of things—they voted. In America, we respect and uphold the right of free people to make policy choices through the democratic process—especially ones that do nothing more than uphold the definition of marriage that has existed since long before this country was founded. That’s why superficial comparisons of marriage amendments to discriminatory race-based laws don’t work. This vote had nothing to do with race, which does not involve behavior. Marriage between members of different races is still marriage between one man and one woman, and that’s all the people of California—together with 30 other states across the nation—want to protect.
Indeed, the vote over Proposition 8 was no different from other votes across this country. The matter found its way onto the ballot because millions of voters signed a petition so that the matter could be considered. Two distinct political “camps” developed, and the public debate lasted for months, with each side getting the full, free, and fair opportunity to make its case known to the voters. Then, on November 4, 2008, over 13 million voters voted their conscience.
Sounds like a government of, by, and for the people. So, you may ask, what gives a single federal judge the right to discard it all? Well, we’re asking the same thing.
Judge Vaughn Walker ruled, among other things, that not one single person who voted for Proposition 8 had any rational reason for so doing. Yes, if you voted in favor of marriage in any of the states that have taken up this question, you’ve now been officially labeled as an irrational bigot, your voice being “nothing more than a fear or unarticulated dislike of same-sex couples,” according to Judge Walker. He declared that your vote was “discrimination based on unfounded stereotypes and prejudices” and that to contend otherwise is to “mask” your true intentions. (By the way, that also goes also for the 84 percent of Congress who voted in favor of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. They also had no rational reason to vote for marriage and, according to Judge Walker, possess beliefs that are mere “artifact[s] of time.”)
Whatever your opinion on the subject, it is simply not credible to say that tens of millions of Americans from west to east, north to south, red states and blue states who have universally and unanimously affirmed the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman have beliefs that are simply, as Judge Walker wrote, “based only on antiquated and discredited notions of gender.”
And what about children, you ask? Good question. Judge Walker talked about them too, concluding that “the evidence shows beyond any doubt that parents’ genders are irrelevant to children’s developmental outcomes.” So, to every mother in our country—apparently you no longer matter for your kids, and you, as a woman, bring nothing unique to the “table” of child-rearing. According to Judge Walker, any average American man can adequately fill your shoes. Yet, we all instinctively know that all the love in the world doesn’t turn a man into a mother, and vice versa. To completely dismiss the idea that children need mothers and fathers is a slap in the face of, indeed, every mother and father around the world.
In his zeal to make his mark in judicial history, Judge Walker neglected to remember the historical purpose and form of America—a nation of, by, and for the people. The people made this decision, and though one judge in San Francisco may disagree with their decision, we know that this case is bigger than any one judge who ignores the law and puts himself above the people of California. In fact, this case has just begun, and ADF and the rest of the ProtectMarriage.com legal team plan to win it. We hope that all Americans who object to being maligned in this way will not be bullied either.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Austin R. Nimocks is senior legal counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund (www.telladf.org) and a member of the ProtectMarriage.com legal team defending the California marriage amendment in federal court. ADF is a legal alliance employing a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Federal Court Declares Most Americans A Bunch of Bigots
by Austin R. Nimocks
08/06/2010
There are two sides to our country’s ever-swirling debate regarding same-sex “marriage.” Both sides genuinely advocate their positions, and the debate has found its way into every corner of our society—churches, schools, media, legislatures, and ballot boxes, just to name a few places. And not unlike presidential elections and other contests, the feelings on both sides run deep.
When this debate began to percolate in California, the citizens of California did that most American of things—they voted. In America, we respect and uphold the right of free people to make policy choices through the democratic process—especially ones that do nothing more than uphold the definition of marriage that has existed since long before this country was founded. That’s why superficial comparisons of marriage amendments to discriminatory race-based laws don’t work. This vote had nothing to do with race, which does not involve behavior. Marriage between members of different races is still marriage between one man and one woman, and that’s all the people of California—together with 30 other states across the nation—want to protect.
Indeed, the vote over Proposition 8 was no different from other votes across this country. The matter found its way onto the ballot because millions of voters signed a petition so that the matter could be considered. Two distinct political “camps” developed, and the public debate lasted for months, with each side getting the full, free, and fair opportunity to make its case known to the voters. Then, on November 4, 2008, over 13 million voters voted their conscience.
Sounds like a government of, by, and for the people. So, you may ask, what gives a single federal judge the right to discard it all? Well, we’re asking the same thing.
Judge Vaughn Walker ruled, among other things, that not one single person who voted for Proposition 8 had any rational reason for so doing. Yes, if you voted in favor of marriage in any of the states that have taken up this question, you’ve now been officially labeled as an irrational bigot, your voice being “nothing more than a fear or unarticulated dislike of same-sex couples,” according to Judge Walker. He declared that your vote was “discrimination based on unfounded stereotypes and prejudices” and that to contend otherwise is to “mask” your true intentions. (By the way, that also goes also for the 84 percent of Congress who voted in favor of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. They also had no rational reason to vote for marriage and, according to Judge Walker, possess beliefs that are mere “artifact[s] of time.”)
Whatever your opinion on the subject, it is simply not credible to say that tens of millions of Americans from west to east, north to south, red states and blue states who have universally and unanimously affirmed the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman have beliefs that are simply, as Judge Walker wrote, “based only on antiquated and discredited notions of gender.”
And what about children, you ask? Good question. Judge Walker talked about them too, concluding that “the evidence shows beyond any doubt that parents’ genders are irrelevant to children’s developmental outcomes.” So, to every mother in our country—apparently you no longer matter for your kids, and you, as a woman, bring nothing unique to the “table” of child-rearing. According to Judge Walker, any average American man can adequately fill your shoes. Yet, we all instinctively know that all the love in the world doesn’t turn a man into a mother, and vice versa. To completely dismiss the idea that children need mothers and fathers is a slap in the face of, indeed, every mother and father around the world.
In his zeal to make his mark in judicial history, Judge Walker neglected to remember the historical purpose and form of America—a nation of, by, and for the people. The people made this decision, and though one judge in San Francisco may disagree with their decision, we know that this case is bigger than any one judge who ignores the law and puts himself above the people of California. In fact, this case has just begun, and ADF and the rest of the ProtectMarriage.com legal team plan to win it. We hope that all Americans who object to being maligned in this way will not be bullied either.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Austin R. Nimocks is senior legal counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund (www.telladf.org) and a member of the ProtectMarriage.com legal team defending the California marriage amendment in federal court. ADF is a legal alliance employing a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, August 5, 2010
The Age Of Self-Inflicted Stupidity
From The American Thinker:
August 06, 2010
The Age of Self-Inflicted Stupidity
James Lewis
I now have to flush my toilet twice to make it work properly, and then still spray the bowl with bleach to make the remnants go away. How about you?
This is of course because Americans don't know how to build proper toilets that actually work.
No, come to think of it, that's not right -- it's because we don't have enough water to do it the old way.
No, come to think of it, that's not right either --- all those drought scare headlines ten years ago were just sucker plays, because here in California they only counted the 10% of water that's allocated for cities, not the 90% allocated for agriculture and industry.
If the pols and mediots were forced to tell the truth, you and I could have figured out that moving 2% from aggies to the cities would have increased our urban water supply by 20%! No more drought! Saved by the wonders of arithmetic!
We were lied to with malice aforethought. The biggest liars won.
But we couldn't figure it out, because the media beat it to death -- and because most people were stampeded like donkeys. In spite of the fact that our average education today is three times what it was a hundred years ago.
By the 12th grade you've been "educated" twice as long as your great granny and grand daddy. Except that they were educated by life, of course.
In 1910 that"Drought Scare!!!" sucker play could never have worked. People would have figured it out, or some competing newspaper would have exposed the scam. Or the voters would have demanded more water sources. At that time people didn't fall for everything they were told.
But in 2010 the Big Lie works like greased lightning, because we have become self-inflicted idiots.
So the next time your toilet doesn't flush what has to be flushed, just remember why. It's not that American engineers can't figure it out. It's not all those droughts that never existed. It's simply the fact that we have been suckered by the 24/7 media, and turned into double-flushing morons.
Low-flush toilets were brought to you by the same folks who blocked nuclear energy and free oil exploration; the same people who voters in the Obama presidential campaign, and who gave us the global warming scam. The same scammers run ecological scare campaigns. It's the same mob who cover up every lie Obama tells the public.
We live in an age of lies and sucker plays, and few of us can stay centered enough not to get bullied by the lefties day after day.
We are a left-ridden nation, just like the Europeans. The evil bullies who prey upon us are trained (at tax expense) in the colleges and universities, where they are taught how to lie for the Democrats. Or maybe for the even more totalitarian left. Then they lie and lie, bully and bully, every single day, 24/7, through TV and radio, newspapers, and now, the through web. Look at any major web portal, and you can see leftie-prop.
The Independent Web is our only hope for sanity, and for a return to a government by the people, of the people, and for the people.
Right now we're losing Lincoln's ideal of government, and we have been losing ground for years.
It's high time to turn it around.
Posted at 01:03 AM
August 06, 2010
The Age of Self-Inflicted Stupidity
James Lewis
I now have to flush my toilet twice to make it work properly, and then still spray the bowl with bleach to make the remnants go away. How about you?
This is of course because Americans don't know how to build proper toilets that actually work.
No, come to think of it, that's not right -- it's because we don't have enough water to do it the old way.
No, come to think of it, that's not right either --- all those drought scare headlines ten years ago were just sucker plays, because here in California they only counted the 10% of water that's allocated for cities, not the 90% allocated for agriculture and industry.
If the pols and mediots were forced to tell the truth, you and I could have figured out that moving 2% from aggies to the cities would have increased our urban water supply by 20%! No more drought! Saved by the wonders of arithmetic!
We were lied to with malice aforethought. The biggest liars won.
But we couldn't figure it out, because the media beat it to death -- and because most people were stampeded like donkeys. In spite of the fact that our average education today is three times what it was a hundred years ago.
By the 12th grade you've been "educated" twice as long as your great granny and grand daddy. Except that they were educated by life, of course.
In 1910 that"Drought Scare!!!" sucker play could never have worked. People would have figured it out, or some competing newspaper would have exposed the scam. Or the voters would have demanded more water sources. At that time people didn't fall for everything they were told.
But in 2010 the Big Lie works like greased lightning, because we have become self-inflicted idiots.
So the next time your toilet doesn't flush what has to be flushed, just remember why. It's not that American engineers can't figure it out. It's not all those droughts that never existed. It's simply the fact that we have been suckered by the 24/7 media, and turned into double-flushing morons.
Low-flush toilets were brought to you by the same folks who blocked nuclear energy and free oil exploration; the same people who voters in the Obama presidential campaign, and who gave us the global warming scam. The same scammers run ecological scare campaigns. It's the same mob who cover up every lie Obama tells the public.
We live in an age of lies and sucker plays, and few of us can stay centered enough not to get bullied by the lefties day after day.
We are a left-ridden nation, just like the Europeans. The evil bullies who prey upon us are trained (at tax expense) in the colleges and universities, where they are taught how to lie for the Democrats. Or maybe for the even more totalitarian left. Then they lie and lie, bully and bully, every single day, 24/7, through TV and radio, newspapers, and now, the through web. Look at any major web portal, and you can see leftie-prop.
The Independent Web is our only hope for sanity, and for a return to a government by the people, of the people, and for the people.
Right now we're losing Lincoln's ideal of government, and we have been losing ground for years.
It's high time to turn it around.
Posted at 01:03 AM
The Winds Of Over-Regulation
From Western Journalism and The American Thinker:
August 04, 2010
The Winds of Over-Regulation
By Rosslyn Smith
The EPA is on the verge of declaring that naturally occurring dust is a pollutant. This means they will penalize farmers whose livestock and horticultural operations create what the Washington bureaucrats consider to be too much of it. Needless to say, the proposal has become a huge issue in farm states. Twenty-one senators recently signed a letter to the EPA. The senators state:
We respect efforts for a clean and healthy environment, but not at the expense of common sense. These identified levels will be extremely burdensome for farmers and livestock producers to attain. Whether it's livestock kicking up dust, soybeans being combined on a dry day in the fall, or driving a car down the gravel road, dust is a naturally occurring event.
Fertile soil is the most precious asset a farmer possesses. Modern agricultural practices are already designed to keep soil erosion to a minimum. One wonders what the EPA thinks farmers are supposed to do in a drought -- allow an already meager crop to go unharvested lest they raise any more dust? Is a rancher to allow his cattle to starve in place rather than move them to better grazing? That a bunch of desk-bound theorists would presume to second-guess those whose very livelihood depends on soil conservation is beyond mind-boggling.
KWTV in Oklahoma City asked some local farmers about the proposed EPA rules.
One farmer said the possible regulations are ridiculous.
"It's plain common sense, we don't want to do anything detrimental," said farmer Curtis Roberts. "If the dust is detrimental to us, it's going to be to everybody. We're not going to do anything to hurt ourselves or our farm."
Roberts, a fourth generation farmer and rancher in Arcadia, said regulating dust in rural areas will hurt farmers' harvest, cultivation and livelihood.
"Anytime you work ground, you're going to have dust. I don't know how they'll regulate it," Roberts said. "The regulations are going to put us down and keep us from doing things we need to be doing because of the EPA."
These regulations are particularly ironic because those beloved organic crops of the politically correct set often require extensive dust-producing cultivation in lieu of chemical herbicides if the weeds are to be kept from overwhelming the food crop. That's one reason my own vegetable garden, which is on a ten-degree slope, is not organic. If it were, much of my topsoil would be on its way down the French Broad River into Tennessee after every thunderstorm.
The comments to the above KWTV news story greatly expand on the sentiment in the last line of the senators' letter: "Common sense requires the EPA to acknowledge that the wind blows, and so does dust."
My question after reading this was can the EPA stop tornadoes? I ask because a whirlwind of voter outrage may be heading their way come November. Overreaching by the EPA and other federal regulators is one of those issues that tend to fall under the radar screen of the national political press, even as it can come to dominate discussions among insiders in a given industry. Name the industry, and it is a good bet the trade magazine and association websites report on each proposed rule change in the Federal Register, while the industry specific blogs have lively discussions on all the implications.
For example, how many of the political press, who write about members of Congress frequenting steakhouses and the Obamas patronizing a barbeque joint while on vacation, know that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has pending broad-ranging rules about meat subject to marketing agreements (e.g., Certified Angus or Sterling SilverTM)? The USDA is concerned that such arrangements may be "unfair." Beef cattle associations, the swine-producing industry, and meat-packers aren't talking about much else lately. A common concern is whether the USDA attention to the fairness of the prices asked of branded meat products means that class-action lawyers will have an open invitation to sue on behalf of anonymous consumers. This would mean the end of branded meat, because the lawyers for the meat-packers would deem the practice too risky to continue. That would be unfortunate, as consumers seem quite willing to pay a premium for the more uniform product in a branded beef marketing arrangement, whether it be a lean, certified organic, grass-fed cut for braising in the crock pot or a heavily marbled ribeye to be seared on the backyard grill. Again, the irony is that the longer time needed to bring an animal to market weight on grass and the smaller demand means that organic grass-fed beef could disappear from the market if the premium price for the product is deemed unfair.
One rancher commenting on these proposed regulations had this to say.
Twenty years ago, my dad made a trip to Russia as a paid consultant by the Eaton group. The purpose of his trip was to help devise a plan to supply quality beef to a tourist hotel being built in St. Petersburg. What he found there was a system that was extremely fair, but an absolute economic, production and quality disaster!
Producers were all paid the exact same. The exact same! There was no difference paid for pounds, quality, yield, type, breed etc. This was done in the name of fairness and equality. But nobody won. The price paid for every head was the minimum. Quality was nonexistent. Availability was minimal. A consumer after standing hours in line would get whatever was passed through a window and had no choice of cut or price. As a result, Russia couldn't supply a single hotel in St. Petersburg with any product that would satisfy a foreign tourist.
Dad's recommendation was that they import Certified Angus Beef from the United States because there was nothing to work with in Russia and would take billions of dollars and years to build any system that would deliver quality. That is what they were reluctantly resigned to do. Today Russia is still trying to recover from this central planning economic disaster and are now importing into Russia some of the very best of American genetics that they can find. So that they may jump start the building of an economically viable system. This was also my father's recommendation 20 years ago.
Currently, I have a Russian order for 1,000 bred registered Angus heifers that I am trying to fill. What I am afraid of with these GIPSA rules is that 20 years from now we may need to go back to Russia and buy back our own genetics to recover from our own central planning mistakes.
All of this has political implications. There are a large number of Democrat congressmen and senators from areas in which the EPA, the USDA, and other government agencies in the Obama administration are busy making a lot of enemies. The entire state of West Virginia comes to mind, with its traditional ties to coal mining. There comes a time when even constituents who think the incumbent is a really nice guy start to wonder if he has a clue about what his political affiliation is doing to their pocketbook. Democrat Congressman Rick Boucher of rural SW Virginia is under a triple curse these days, as he has both coal and beef interests in his district, which is in the middle of an abnormally dry spell, so farmers working their fields are raising more dust than normal.
The cumulative effect of dissatisfaction with rising government regulation has been a potent political force before this election. Most political pundits attribute George H.W. Bush's defeat in 1992 to a poorly timed recession and his broken pledge on taxes, but there was another factor. After being partially reined in under Reagan, federal regulation was again on a noticeable rise by the time of the 1992 election. In 1990, both the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)and the Clean Air Act were passed, and with them came a burst of new federal regulation. Many business owners were particularly unhappy with the ADA, as it increased costs for both their own businesses and for local governments as countless facilities were refitted to accommodate the disabled.
Perhaps of even greater importance was the amount of uncertainty it created. The ADA greatly increased the possibility of a business being sued by activists, who sometimes took the good intentions behind the act to the extreme. This led to some totally ridiculous situations. I recall a local cable channel during this period that hired a news reader whose speech impediment made her all but incomprehensible to viewers. The cumulative effect of these burdens further enhanced the ability of Ross Perot to inject himself into the race as a fiscal conservative who understood the concerns of the small business that line Main Street America.
Word also moves fast in industry circles about overzealous enforcement of existing rules. One consultant who helps smaller businesses come into compliance with government regulators recently made these observations.
I have seen a marked and large spike in administrative enforcement action from agencies on all levels of government, even after a company has rapidly and completely achieved compliance. Not only are there more such cases -- many more -- but the fines sought have risen dramatically. Prior to the last six months, when such enforcement action was taken -- if the company had been cooperative and achieved compliance - fines sought would be of the nuisance variety. That is to say a few thousand dollars. But since the beginning of 2010 I have seen the fines sought rise, in more than one case, to levels of 20-25% of the gross annual sales of the company in question.
The methods by which such exorbitant fines are extracted are certainly unpleasant, to say the least. What are supposed to be negotiations are generally exercises in intimidation by the agency in question -- often accompanied by the prosecutorial department of their particular branch of government. People that have clearly acted in good faith are treated to accusations and characterizations that I have seen bring grown men to tears, or worse physical manifestations.
Obviously there has been a policy change within the governmental agencies. They no longer seek to bring the regulated community into compliance, rather they seek to punish the community for being out of compliance. What is very sad is that they can do so with virtually unchecked power. All they need do is decide to interpret a specific regulation differently, and instantly, even the majority of the community that was in compliance no longer is, and is subject to fine.
Main street businesses hate both over-regulation and the overhead costs necessary to bring about compliance. They don't have a personnel director -- excuse me, human resource professionals -- to enforce politically correct hiring standards. They don't have government relations departments that pore over the Federal Register and send memos to line managers about upcoming changes. Nor do they measure performance on what an accountant says their book income was for the year under International Financial Reporting Standards. They want results, measured in simple terms of do I have more cash and net hard assets this year than I had last year? To get that cash, they will often take a great many risks, but only when they feel the odds of a successful outcome aren't stacked against them. Being docked a quarter of the annual revenue for an inadvertent mistake that was soon corrected amounts to playing against a dealer with a crooked deck.
As the compliance consultant pointed out, when faced with such a hostile regulatory environment, some businesses decide to shut down operations. Those who labor on are deprived of the cash needed to grow and hire new employees. The owners know this and vote accordingly. So do many in their work force. Indeed, the idea of regulating the wind is an excellent metaphor for what has gone wrong with our economy. Once reason blue-collar whites have been hostile to this administration has to do with the fact that if they are not self-employed contractors in the construction trades, they are increasingly employed by small businesses. Unionized blue-collar American industry, such as the giant auto, steel and textiles operations, has been in a forty-year decline and is but a shadow of its historic self as an aggregate of employers of working-class Americans. For example, UAW Local 599 in Flint, Michigan has seen its membership more than decimated, in the literal meaning of that word, to a mere 2,500 members today from a peak of 28,000. My neighbors, who are skilled electricians, have been mowing lawns of late. Their long-term employment prospects are gone in a wind of market-distorting over-regulation that began with lending laws that mandated mortgage loans be made to non-creditworthy home buyers and which continue unabated today across almost every industry.
Small businessmen and women often have dirt under their fingernails or grease stains on their work clothes and may lack the social polish the political class too often mistakes for actual intelligence. Our current administration is dominated by government-sector lawyers and academics who have seldom, if ever, worked in the private sector. The people in the private sector they do associate with are almost universally the well-groomed senior executives of the largest international conglomerates. These businessmen and women are socially smooth while being both risk-adverse and creatively hampered by an over-reliance on conventional wisdom. The conglomerates they run can factor in increased regulatory costs and are often doing very well in the current political environment. Indeed, regulation can be the friend of a public business, as it often acts as a barrier that keeps those pesky new competitors at bay. What these conglomerates increasingly do not do is hire large numbers of American workers.
Someone as obtuse about Main Street America as David Brooks understands that it is American small business that controls the growth of jobs in our economy.
Over the past decade, professionals - lawyers, regulators and legislators - have inserted themselves into more and more economic realms. The princes are perfectly at home amid these tax breaks, low-interest loans and public-private partnerships. They went to the same schools as the professionals and speak the same language. The grinds try to stay far away and regard the interlocking network of corporate-government schmoozing with undisguised contempt.
The upshot is that we have an economy that is inching toward recovery but that is not creating much in the way of new innovations and new jobs. It's not that the overall labor markets are shrinking. It's just that very few grinds are bringing new ideas to scale and hiring workers to enact their us-against-the-world schemes.
For jobs to recover, the grinds have to recover, but it's hard to see how that will happen so long as households are still so leveraged, government debt is still so unnerving and the business climate is still so terrible for entrepreneurs.
We've been mired in debates over macroeconomic models recently. But maybe the real issue is how we are going to light a fire under the country's loners, its contrarians and its narrow, ambitious outsiders.
One sure way not to light that fire of growth is to tell these innovators that they'll be fined if their F-150 kicks up dust on a country road on a typical summer day.
August 04, 2010
The Winds of Over-Regulation
By Rosslyn Smith
The EPA is on the verge of declaring that naturally occurring dust is a pollutant. This means they will penalize farmers whose livestock and horticultural operations create what the Washington bureaucrats consider to be too much of it. Needless to say, the proposal has become a huge issue in farm states. Twenty-one senators recently signed a letter to the EPA. The senators state:
We respect efforts for a clean and healthy environment, but not at the expense of common sense. These identified levels will be extremely burdensome for farmers and livestock producers to attain. Whether it's livestock kicking up dust, soybeans being combined on a dry day in the fall, or driving a car down the gravel road, dust is a naturally occurring event.
Fertile soil is the most precious asset a farmer possesses. Modern agricultural practices are already designed to keep soil erosion to a minimum. One wonders what the EPA thinks farmers are supposed to do in a drought -- allow an already meager crop to go unharvested lest they raise any more dust? Is a rancher to allow his cattle to starve in place rather than move them to better grazing? That a bunch of desk-bound theorists would presume to second-guess those whose very livelihood depends on soil conservation is beyond mind-boggling.
KWTV in Oklahoma City asked some local farmers about the proposed EPA rules.
One farmer said the possible regulations are ridiculous.
"It's plain common sense, we don't want to do anything detrimental," said farmer Curtis Roberts. "If the dust is detrimental to us, it's going to be to everybody. We're not going to do anything to hurt ourselves or our farm."
Roberts, a fourth generation farmer and rancher in Arcadia, said regulating dust in rural areas will hurt farmers' harvest, cultivation and livelihood.
"Anytime you work ground, you're going to have dust. I don't know how they'll regulate it," Roberts said. "The regulations are going to put us down and keep us from doing things we need to be doing because of the EPA."
These regulations are particularly ironic because those beloved organic crops of the politically correct set often require extensive dust-producing cultivation in lieu of chemical herbicides if the weeds are to be kept from overwhelming the food crop. That's one reason my own vegetable garden, which is on a ten-degree slope, is not organic. If it were, much of my topsoil would be on its way down the French Broad River into Tennessee after every thunderstorm.
The comments to the above KWTV news story greatly expand on the sentiment in the last line of the senators' letter: "Common sense requires the EPA to acknowledge that the wind blows, and so does dust."
My question after reading this was can the EPA stop tornadoes? I ask because a whirlwind of voter outrage may be heading their way come November. Overreaching by the EPA and other federal regulators is one of those issues that tend to fall under the radar screen of the national political press, even as it can come to dominate discussions among insiders in a given industry. Name the industry, and it is a good bet the trade magazine and association websites report on each proposed rule change in the Federal Register, while the industry specific blogs have lively discussions on all the implications.
For example, how many of the political press, who write about members of Congress frequenting steakhouses and the Obamas patronizing a barbeque joint while on vacation, know that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has pending broad-ranging rules about meat subject to marketing agreements (e.g., Certified Angus or Sterling SilverTM)? The USDA is concerned that such arrangements may be "unfair." Beef cattle associations, the swine-producing industry, and meat-packers aren't talking about much else lately. A common concern is whether the USDA attention to the fairness of the prices asked of branded meat products means that class-action lawyers will have an open invitation to sue on behalf of anonymous consumers. This would mean the end of branded meat, because the lawyers for the meat-packers would deem the practice too risky to continue. That would be unfortunate, as consumers seem quite willing to pay a premium for the more uniform product in a branded beef marketing arrangement, whether it be a lean, certified organic, grass-fed cut for braising in the crock pot or a heavily marbled ribeye to be seared on the backyard grill. Again, the irony is that the longer time needed to bring an animal to market weight on grass and the smaller demand means that organic grass-fed beef could disappear from the market if the premium price for the product is deemed unfair.
One rancher commenting on these proposed regulations had this to say.
Twenty years ago, my dad made a trip to Russia as a paid consultant by the Eaton group. The purpose of his trip was to help devise a plan to supply quality beef to a tourist hotel being built in St. Petersburg. What he found there was a system that was extremely fair, but an absolute economic, production and quality disaster!
Producers were all paid the exact same. The exact same! There was no difference paid for pounds, quality, yield, type, breed etc. This was done in the name of fairness and equality. But nobody won. The price paid for every head was the minimum. Quality was nonexistent. Availability was minimal. A consumer after standing hours in line would get whatever was passed through a window and had no choice of cut or price. As a result, Russia couldn't supply a single hotel in St. Petersburg with any product that would satisfy a foreign tourist.
Dad's recommendation was that they import Certified Angus Beef from the United States because there was nothing to work with in Russia and would take billions of dollars and years to build any system that would deliver quality. That is what they were reluctantly resigned to do. Today Russia is still trying to recover from this central planning economic disaster and are now importing into Russia some of the very best of American genetics that they can find. So that they may jump start the building of an economically viable system. This was also my father's recommendation 20 years ago.
Currently, I have a Russian order for 1,000 bred registered Angus heifers that I am trying to fill. What I am afraid of with these GIPSA rules is that 20 years from now we may need to go back to Russia and buy back our own genetics to recover from our own central planning mistakes.
All of this has political implications. There are a large number of Democrat congressmen and senators from areas in which the EPA, the USDA, and other government agencies in the Obama administration are busy making a lot of enemies. The entire state of West Virginia comes to mind, with its traditional ties to coal mining. There comes a time when even constituents who think the incumbent is a really nice guy start to wonder if he has a clue about what his political affiliation is doing to their pocketbook. Democrat Congressman Rick Boucher of rural SW Virginia is under a triple curse these days, as he has both coal and beef interests in his district, which is in the middle of an abnormally dry spell, so farmers working their fields are raising more dust than normal.
The cumulative effect of dissatisfaction with rising government regulation has been a potent political force before this election. Most political pundits attribute George H.W. Bush's defeat in 1992 to a poorly timed recession and his broken pledge on taxes, but there was another factor. After being partially reined in under Reagan, federal regulation was again on a noticeable rise by the time of the 1992 election. In 1990, both the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)and the Clean Air Act were passed, and with them came a burst of new federal regulation. Many business owners were particularly unhappy with the ADA, as it increased costs for both their own businesses and for local governments as countless facilities were refitted to accommodate the disabled.
Perhaps of even greater importance was the amount of uncertainty it created. The ADA greatly increased the possibility of a business being sued by activists, who sometimes took the good intentions behind the act to the extreme. This led to some totally ridiculous situations. I recall a local cable channel during this period that hired a news reader whose speech impediment made her all but incomprehensible to viewers. The cumulative effect of these burdens further enhanced the ability of Ross Perot to inject himself into the race as a fiscal conservative who understood the concerns of the small business that line Main Street America.
Word also moves fast in industry circles about overzealous enforcement of existing rules. One consultant who helps smaller businesses come into compliance with government regulators recently made these observations.
I have seen a marked and large spike in administrative enforcement action from agencies on all levels of government, even after a company has rapidly and completely achieved compliance. Not only are there more such cases -- many more -- but the fines sought have risen dramatically. Prior to the last six months, when such enforcement action was taken -- if the company had been cooperative and achieved compliance - fines sought would be of the nuisance variety. That is to say a few thousand dollars. But since the beginning of 2010 I have seen the fines sought rise, in more than one case, to levels of 20-25% of the gross annual sales of the company in question.
The methods by which such exorbitant fines are extracted are certainly unpleasant, to say the least. What are supposed to be negotiations are generally exercises in intimidation by the agency in question -- often accompanied by the prosecutorial department of their particular branch of government. People that have clearly acted in good faith are treated to accusations and characterizations that I have seen bring grown men to tears, or worse physical manifestations.
Obviously there has been a policy change within the governmental agencies. They no longer seek to bring the regulated community into compliance, rather they seek to punish the community for being out of compliance. What is very sad is that they can do so with virtually unchecked power. All they need do is decide to interpret a specific regulation differently, and instantly, even the majority of the community that was in compliance no longer is, and is subject to fine.
Main street businesses hate both over-regulation and the overhead costs necessary to bring about compliance. They don't have a personnel director -- excuse me, human resource professionals -- to enforce politically correct hiring standards. They don't have government relations departments that pore over the Federal Register and send memos to line managers about upcoming changes. Nor do they measure performance on what an accountant says their book income was for the year under International Financial Reporting Standards. They want results, measured in simple terms of do I have more cash and net hard assets this year than I had last year? To get that cash, they will often take a great many risks, but only when they feel the odds of a successful outcome aren't stacked against them. Being docked a quarter of the annual revenue for an inadvertent mistake that was soon corrected amounts to playing against a dealer with a crooked deck.
As the compliance consultant pointed out, when faced with such a hostile regulatory environment, some businesses decide to shut down operations. Those who labor on are deprived of the cash needed to grow and hire new employees. The owners know this and vote accordingly. So do many in their work force. Indeed, the idea of regulating the wind is an excellent metaphor for what has gone wrong with our economy. Once reason blue-collar whites have been hostile to this administration has to do with the fact that if they are not self-employed contractors in the construction trades, they are increasingly employed by small businesses. Unionized blue-collar American industry, such as the giant auto, steel and textiles operations, has been in a forty-year decline and is but a shadow of its historic self as an aggregate of employers of working-class Americans. For example, UAW Local 599 in Flint, Michigan has seen its membership more than decimated, in the literal meaning of that word, to a mere 2,500 members today from a peak of 28,000. My neighbors, who are skilled electricians, have been mowing lawns of late. Their long-term employment prospects are gone in a wind of market-distorting over-regulation that began with lending laws that mandated mortgage loans be made to non-creditworthy home buyers and which continue unabated today across almost every industry.
Small businessmen and women often have dirt under their fingernails or grease stains on their work clothes and may lack the social polish the political class too often mistakes for actual intelligence. Our current administration is dominated by government-sector lawyers and academics who have seldom, if ever, worked in the private sector. The people in the private sector they do associate with are almost universally the well-groomed senior executives of the largest international conglomerates. These businessmen and women are socially smooth while being both risk-adverse and creatively hampered by an over-reliance on conventional wisdom. The conglomerates they run can factor in increased regulatory costs and are often doing very well in the current political environment. Indeed, regulation can be the friend of a public business, as it often acts as a barrier that keeps those pesky new competitors at bay. What these conglomerates increasingly do not do is hire large numbers of American workers.
Someone as obtuse about Main Street America as David Brooks understands that it is American small business that controls the growth of jobs in our economy.
Over the past decade, professionals - lawyers, regulators and legislators - have inserted themselves into more and more economic realms. The princes are perfectly at home amid these tax breaks, low-interest loans and public-private partnerships. They went to the same schools as the professionals and speak the same language. The grinds try to stay far away and regard the interlocking network of corporate-government schmoozing with undisguised contempt.
The upshot is that we have an economy that is inching toward recovery but that is not creating much in the way of new innovations and new jobs. It's not that the overall labor markets are shrinking. It's just that very few grinds are bringing new ideas to scale and hiring workers to enact their us-against-the-world schemes.
For jobs to recover, the grinds have to recover, but it's hard to see how that will happen so long as households are still so leveraged, government debt is still so unnerving and the business climate is still so terrible for entrepreneurs.
We've been mired in debates over macroeconomic models recently. But maybe the real issue is how we are going to light a fire under the country's loners, its contrarians and its narrow, ambitious outsiders.
One sure way not to light that fire of growth is to tell these innovators that they'll be fined if their F-150 kicks up dust on a country road on a typical summer day.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Lunacy From The Department Of Justice
From The Washington Examiner and Personal Liberty Digest:
Lunacy From The Department Of Nobody Gets Ahead
August 4, 2010 by Bob Livingston
There are few clearer examples of a fascist system’s views of exceptionalism and innovation than one pointed out by The Washington Examiner’s Byron York in a column yesterday.
It seems that last year Princeton, Arizona State and Case Western Reserve universities undertook an experiment to see if e-book readers would be more convenient and less costly than traditional textbooks. The idea also made sense from an environmental standpoint as the green-leaning educators felt it would reduce the huge amount of paper students use to print files from their laptops, not to mention the need to kill trees to make paper for textbooks.
So the universities set aside a couple of courses under a pilot program with a limited number of students and gave them the OPTION of using the Amazon Kindle. Amazon supplied the Kindle DX for the student’s use. But if the students chose to they could opt out and use a standard textbook.
That idea didn’t sit well with President Barack Obama’s radical Department of Justice Civil Rights Division head Thomas Perez, who sued the universities for violating the Americans With Disabilities Act. Why? Although the Kindle has a text-to-speech feature that can read a book aloud, it requires sight to operate the menu functions. So Perez assumed the courses were discriminatory to the visually impaired.
“We acted swiftly to respond to complaints we received about the use of the Amazon Kindle,” Perez recently told a House committee. “We must remain vigilant to ensure that as new devices are introduced, people with disabilities are not left behind.”
The Civil Rights Division ordered the universities stop distributing the Kindle because if blind students couldn’t use the device, then nobody could.
Never mind that no visually impaired students had registered for the classes. Never mind that the idea makes economic and environmental sense. Never mind that the technology was evolving quickly and the text-to-speech capabilities were improving. All Perez could see was that someone might be left behind.
The problem with that school of thought is, when you are so intent on making sure no one is left behind you also ensure that no one gets ahead. But isn’t that the goal of totalitarian regimes?
Lunacy From The Department Of Nobody Gets Ahead
August 4, 2010 by Bob Livingston
There are few clearer examples of a fascist system’s views of exceptionalism and innovation than one pointed out by The Washington Examiner’s Byron York in a column yesterday.
It seems that last year Princeton, Arizona State and Case Western Reserve universities undertook an experiment to see if e-book readers would be more convenient and less costly than traditional textbooks. The idea also made sense from an environmental standpoint as the green-leaning educators felt it would reduce the huge amount of paper students use to print files from their laptops, not to mention the need to kill trees to make paper for textbooks.
So the universities set aside a couple of courses under a pilot program with a limited number of students and gave them the OPTION of using the Amazon Kindle. Amazon supplied the Kindle DX for the student’s use. But if the students chose to they could opt out and use a standard textbook.
That idea didn’t sit well with President Barack Obama’s radical Department of Justice Civil Rights Division head Thomas Perez, who sued the universities for violating the Americans With Disabilities Act. Why? Although the Kindle has a text-to-speech feature that can read a book aloud, it requires sight to operate the menu functions. So Perez assumed the courses were discriminatory to the visually impaired.
“We acted swiftly to respond to complaints we received about the use of the Amazon Kindle,” Perez recently told a House committee. “We must remain vigilant to ensure that as new devices are introduced, people with disabilities are not left behind.”
The Civil Rights Division ordered the universities stop distributing the Kindle because if blind students couldn’t use the device, then nobody could.
Never mind that no visually impaired students had registered for the classes. Never mind that the idea makes economic and environmental sense. Never mind that the technology was evolving quickly and the text-to-speech capabilities were improving. All Perez could see was that someone might be left behind.
The problem with that school of thought is, when you are so intent on making sure no one is left behind you also ensure that no one gets ahead. But isn’t that the goal of totalitarian regimes?
Monday, August 2, 2010
The Government Has Run Amok Since 9/11
From Campaign For Liberty and The Future of Freedom Foundation:
The Government Has Run Amok Since 9/11
By Sheldon Richman
View all 51 articles by Sheldon Richman
Published 08/02/10
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Those who understand the exploitative nature of big government suspected that the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks had little to do with the security of the American people and much to do with power and money. Still, the magnitude of the scam, as revealed by the Washington Post last week, is astonishing.
Naturally, the politicians justify the growth in intelligence operations on national security grounds. To make sure such attacks never happen again, they said, new powers, agencies, personnel, and facilities were imperative.
Now the truth is out: the post—9/11 activity has been an obscene feeding frenzy at the public trough. Any resemblance to efforts at keeping Americans safe is strictly coincidental.
"The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work" the Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin write. "After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine."
It would be a mistake to chalk up the government’s conduct to bureaucratic bumbling. This is not bumbling. It is highway robbery. Everyone who was well connected, either in government or the "private" sector, wanted a piece of the action, and chances are that he -- and many others -- got it. It doesn’t matter that multiple agencies do the same work and keep their findings secret from one another. It doesn’t matter that the volume of paperwork is beyond anyone’s capacity to absorb it. What matters is money, power, and prestige. This is the mother of all boondoggles.
Chew on some of the numbers from the Post investigation and see if it sounds as though protection of American society was a national-intelligence priority:
* "Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States."
* "An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances."
* "In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -- about 17 million square feet of space."
Moreover, the Post writes, "51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks," and "Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year -- a volume so large that many are routinely ignored" (emphasis added).
Since 9/11 no fewer than 263 intelligence and counterterrorism organizations have been "created or reorganized."
And what about cost?
"The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs." In other words, no one knows how much the whole thieving operation costs.
According to Priest and Arkin, "[Many] officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] is in charge of."
It comes as no surprise that the mega-bureaucracy isn’t even much help fighting wars: "When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the [National Counterterrorism Center]. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. ‘I told him that after 4 1/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!’ he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview" (emphasis added).
These revelations should have any professed opponent of big government screaming bloody murder. So far the silence from conservatives has been deafening.
Copyright © 2010 Future of Freedom Foundation
The Government Has Run Amok Since 9/11
By Sheldon Richman
View all 51 articles by Sheldon Richman
Published 08/02/10
Printer-friendly version
Those who understand the exploitative nature of big government suspected that the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks had little to do with the security of the American people and much to do with power and money. Still, the magnitude of the scam, as revealed by the Washington Post last week, is astonishing.
Naturally, the politicians justify the growth in intelligence operations on national security grounds. To make sure such attacks never happen again, they said, new powers, agencies, personnel, and facilities were imperative.
Now the truth is out: the post—9/11 activity has been an obscene feeding frenzy at the public trough. Any resemblance to efforts at keeping Americans safe is strictly coincidental.
"The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work" the Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin write. "After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine."
It would be a mistake to chalk up the government’s conduct to bureaucratic bumbling. This is not bumbling. It is highway robbery. Everyone who was well connected, either in government or the "private" sector, wanted a piece of the action, and chances are that he -- and many others -- got it. It doesn’t matter that multiple agencies do the same work and keep their findings secret from one another. It doesn’t matter that the volume of paperwork is beyond anyone’s capacity to absorb it. What matters is money, power, and prestige. This is the mother of all boondoggles.
Chew on some of the numbers from the Post investigation and see if it sounds as though protection of American society was a national-intelligence priority:
* "Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States."
* "An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances."
* "In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -- about 17 million square feet of space."
Moreover, the Post writes, "51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks," and "Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year -- a volume so large that many are routinely ignored" (emphasis added).
Since 9/11 no fewer than 263 intelligence and counterterrorism organizations have been "created or reorganized."
And what about cost?
"The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs." In other words, no one knows how much the whole thieving operation costs.
According to Priest and Arkin, "[Many] officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] is in charge of."
It comes as no surprise that the mega-bureaucracy isn’t even much help fighting wars: "When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the [National Counterterrorism Center]. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. ‘I told him that after 4 1/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!’ he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview" (emphasis added).
These revelations should have any professed opponent of big government screaming bloody murder. So far the silence from conservatives has been deafening.
Copyright © 2010 Future of Freedom Foundation
Our Totalitarian Regulatory Bureaucracy
From Capaign For Liberty and Mises.org:
Our Totalitarian Regulatory Bureaucracy
By Thomas DiLorenzo
Also by Thomas DiLorenzo :
Hayek's Road to Serfdom: Despotism Then and Now 06/26/10
Published 08/02/10
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In Chapter 5 of The Road to Serfdom ("Planning and Democracy"), F.A. Hayek warned that the state need not directly control all or even most of the means of production to exert totalitarian control over the economic life of the nation. He cited the example of Germany where, as of 1928, "the central and local authorities directly control the use of more than half the national income -- 53 percent." (As the first director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, Hayek was familiar with such statistics.)
In addition to this, Hayek wrote, private industry in Germany was so heavily regulated that the state controlled, indirectly, "almost the whole economic life of the nation." It was through such totalitarian economic controls that Germany travelled down the road to serfdom. As Hayek further stated,
There is, then scarcely an individual end which is not dependent for its achievement on the action of the state, and the "social scale of values" which guides the state's action must embrace practically all individual ends.
In other words, government regulation was so pervasive that the pursuit of profit, driven by consumer preferences and demands, was mostly replaced by the whims of regulatory bureaucrats. Ludwig von Mises recognized this as one of the great evils of regulation in his book Bureaucracy. The more time any business person spends catering to the demands and dictates of government bureaucrats, the less time is spent serving consumers in order to earn profits and survive economically.
It may sound shocking to some, but modern-day America compares "favorably" to fascist Germany of the 1930s with regard to the degree to which the state interferes with and controls economic activity. First of all, government expenditures at all levels of government account for about 40 percent of national income. It differs by a few percentage points, year by year, but it has been in the 40 percent range in the past few years. This doesn't count all of the off-budget government agencies that exist at the federal, state, and local levels of government as James Bennett and I documented in our book, Underground Government: The Off-Budget Public Sector. If this is included, government expenditures as a percentage of national income would be at least 45 percent, which is not so far from the 53 percent in Nazi Germany that Hayek alluded to.
In addition, as George Reisman pointed out in "The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Present Crisis," there are nine executive-branch cabinet departments in the federal government that exist for the purpose of regulating, controlling, and regimenting housing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy, mining, agriculture, labor, and commerce. That pretty much covers the entire economy.
According to the White House website, there are also hundreds of federal regulatory agencies and commissions, among the better known of which are the Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Commodity Credit Corporation, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Department of Veterans Affairs, Drug Enforcement Administration, Employment and Training Administration, Employment Standards Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Farm Credit Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Election Commission, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Commission, Federal Highway Administration, Federal Trade Commission, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and others. New "commissions" are being formed all the time, and their budgets and responsibilities expanded. This is a short list. In addition, there are now more than 73,000 pages of regulations in tiny print in The Federal Register instructing all Americans how their lives are to be regulated by these bureaucratic monstrosities.
On top of all of this, state and local governments have literally thousands of regulatory agencies and commissions that regulate everything from allergies to zoos. As just one example, taken from the statelocalgov.net, the state of Alabama has regulatory agencies and commissions that regulate retirement systems, geological surveys, public health, education, conservation and natural resources, industrial relations, agriculture, seniors, tourism and travel, veterans affairs, environmental management, forensic science, business development, rehabilitation, banking, insurance, labor, transportation, youth services, children's affairs, film making, ports, disabilities, arts, real estate, oil and gas, forests, ethics, surface mining, alcoholic beverages, auctioneers, and "faith-based initiatives." And Alabama is a relatively conservative state with a modest-sized government compared to, say, New York, California, or Washington DC. Local governments are also active in regulating most of the things that are on the list for the state of Alabama.
Then there's the Fed. In addition to attempting to fix prices (interest rates) and causing perpetual boom-and-bust cycles with its monetary manipulation, the Fed performs dozens of regulatory functions. According to a Fed publication entitled "The Federal Reserve System: Purposes and Functions," the Fed regulates bank holding companies, state-chartered banks, foreign branches of member banks, edge and agreement corporations, state-licensed branches, agencies, and representative offices of foreign banks, nonbanking activities of foreign banks, national banks, savings banks, nonbank subsidiaries of bank holding companies, financial reporting procedures, accounting policies of banks, business "continuity" in case of economic emergencies, consumer protection laws, securities dealings of banks, information technology used by banks, foreign investment by banks, foreign lending by banks, branch banking, bank mergers and acquisitions, who may own a bank, capital "adequacy standards," extensions of credit for the purchase of securities, equal opportunity lending, mortgage disclosure information, reserve requirements, electronic funds transfers, interbank liabilities, Community Reinvestment Act subprime lending demands, all international banking operations, consumer leasing, privacy of consumer financial information, payments on demand deposits, "fair credit" reporting, transactions between member banks and their affiliates, truth in lending, and truth in savings.
Because of the inevitable failures of all government planning in a democracy, Hayek wrote that "the conviction [will grow] that if efficient planning is to be done, the direction must be 'taken out of politics' and placed in the hands of experts -- permanent officials or independent autonomous bodies." Moreover, "the cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward [central] planning." This indeed describes many of the above-mentioned agencies and commissions, but is especially descriptive of all the central planning "czars" who now hold office in the federal government. These include the following, as of July 2010: Afghanistan czar, AIDS czar, auto-recovery czar, border czar, California-water czar, car czar, central-region czar (Middle East, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and South Asia), climate czar, domestic-violence czar, drug czar, economic czar (Paul Volcker), energy and environment czar, faith-based czar, government-performance czar, Great Lakes czar, green-jobs czar, Guantanamo-closure czar, health czar, information czar, intelligence czar, science czar, stimulus-accountability czar, pay czar, regulatory czar, Sudan czar, TARP czar, Technology czar, terrorism czar, urban-affairs czar, weapons czar, WMD-policy czar, war czar, oil czar, manufacturing czar, cybersecurity czar, safe-school czar, Iran czar, Mideast-peace czar.
In sum, it would be very difficult to argue against the proposition that the US economy today is even more heavily controlled, regulated, and regimented by the state than Germany was at the time Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom. Americans have travelled many miles down the road to serfdom by deluding themselves that the god of democracy will somehow save them from statist slavery. But as Hayek warned 56 years ago, "There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary. . . ."
The exercise of arbitrary or dictatorial power is, of course, the whole purpose and function of all those agencies, commissions, and czars.
Reprinted from Mises.org
Our Totalitarian Regulatory Bureaucracy
By Thomas DiLorenzo
Also by Thomas DiLorenzo :
Hayek's Road to Serfdom: Despotism Then and Now 06/26/10
Published 08/02/10
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In Chapter 5 of The Road to Serfdom ("Planning and Democracy"), F.A. Hayek warned that the state need not directly control all or even most of the means of production to exert totalitarian control over the economic life of the nation. He cited the example of Germany where, as of 1928, "the central and local authorities directly control the use of more than half the national income -- 53 percent." (As the first director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, Hayek was familiar with such statistics.)
In addition to this, Hayek wrote, private industry in Germany was so heavily regulated that the state controlled, indirectly, "almost the whole economic life of the nation." It was through such totalitarian economic controls that Germany travelled down the road to serfdom. As Hayek further stated,
There is, then scarcely an individual end which is not dependent for its achievement on the action of the state, and the "social scale of values" which guides the state's action must embrace practically all individual ends.
In other words, government regulation was so pervasive that the pursuit of profit, driven by consumer preferences and demands, was mostly replaced by the whims of regulatory bureaucrats. Ludwig von Mises recognized this as one of the great evils of regulation in his book Bureaucracy. The more time any business person spends catering to the demands and dictates of government bureaucrats, the less time is spent serving consumers in order to earn profits and survive economically.
It may sound shocking to some, but modern-day America compares "favorably" to fascist Germany of the 1930s with regard to the degree to which the state interferes with and controls economic activity. First of all, government expenditures at all levels of government account for about 40 percent of national income. It differs by a few percentage points, year by year, but it has been in the 40 percent range in the past few years. This doesn't count all of the off-budget government agencies that exist at the federal, state, and local levels of government as James Bennett and I documented in our book, Underground Government: The Off-Budget Public Sector. If this is included, government expenditures as a percentage of national income would be at least 45 percent, which is not so far from the 53 percent in Nazi Germany that Hayek alluded to.
In addition, as George Reisman pointed out in "The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Present Crisis," there are nine executive-branch cabinet departments in the federal government that exist for the purpose of regulating, controlling, and regimenting housing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy, mining, agriculture, labor, and commerce. That pretty much covers the entire economy.
According to the White House website, there are also hundreds of federal regulatory agencies and commissions, among the better known of which are the Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Commodity Credit Corporation, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Department of Veterans Affairs, Drug Enforcement Administration, Employment and Training Administration, Employment Standards Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Farm Credit Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Election Commission, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Commission, Federal Highway Administration, Federal Trade Commission, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and others. New "commissions" are being formed all the time, and their budgets and responsibilities expanded. This is a short list. In addition, there are now more than 73,000 pages of regulations in tiny print in The Federal Register instructing all Americans how their lives are to be regulated by these bureaucratic monstrosities.
On top of all of this, state and local governments have literally thousands of regulatory agencies and commissions that regulate everything from allergies to zoos. As just one example, taken from the statelocalgov.net, the state of Alabama has regulatory agencies and commissions that regulate retirement systems, geological surveys, public health, education, conservation and natural resources, industrial relations, agriculture, seniors, tourism and travel, veterans affairs, environmental management, forensic science, business development, rehabilitation, banking, insurance, labor, transportation, youth services, children's affairs, film making, ports, disabilities, arts, real estate, oil and gas, forests, ethics, surface mining, alcoholic beverages, auctioneers, and "faith-based initiatives." And Alabama is a relatively conservative state with a modest-sized government compared to, say, New York, California, or Washington DC. Local governments are also active in regulating most of the things that are on the list for the state of Alabama.
Then there's the Fed. In addition to attempting to fix prices (interest rates) and causing perpetual boom-and-bust cycles with its monetary manipulation, the Fed performs dozens of regulatory functions. According to a Fed publication entitled "The Federal Reserve System: Purposes and Functions," the Fed regulates bank holding companies, state-chartered banks, foreign branches of member banks, edge and agreement corporations, state-licensed branches, agencies, and representative offices of foreign banks, nonbanking activities of foreign banks, national banks, savings banks, nonbank subsidiaries of bank holding companies, financial reporting procedures, accounting policies of banks, business "continuity" in case of economic emergencies, consumer protection laws, securities dealings of banks, information technology used by banks, foreign investment by banks, foreign lending by banks, branch banking, bank mergers and acquisitions, who may own a bank, capital "adequacy standards," extensions of credit for the purchase of securities, equal opportunity lending, mortgage disclosure information, reserve requirements, electronic funds transfers, interbank liabilities, Community Reinvestment Act subprime lending demands, all international banking operations, consumer leasing, privacy of consumer financial information, payments on demand deposits, "fair credit" reporting, transactions between member banks and their affiliates, truth in lending, and truth in savings.
Because of the inevitable failures of all government planning in a democracy, Hayek wrote that "the conviction [will grow] that if efficient planning is to be done, the direction must be 'taken out of politics' and placed in the hands of experts -- permanent officials or independent autonomous bodies." Moreover, "the cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward [central] planning." This indeed describes many of the above-mentioned agencies and commissions, but is especially descriptive of all the central planning "czars" who now hold office in the federal government. These include the following, as of July 2010: Afghanistan czar, AIDS czar, auto-recovery czar, border czar, California-water czar, car czar, central-region czar (Middle East, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and South Asia), climate czar, domestic-violence czar, drug czar, economic czar (Paul Volcker), energy and environment czar, faith-based czar, government-performance czar, Great Lakes czar, green-jobs czar, Guantanamo-closure czar, health czar, information czar, intelligence czar, science czar, stimulus-accountability czar, pay czar, regulatory czar, Sudan czar, TARP czar, Technology czar, terrorism czar, urban-affairs czar, weapons czar, WMD-policy czar, war czar, oil czar, manufacturing czar, cybersecurity czar, safe-school czar, Iran czar, Mideast-peace czar.
In sum, it would be very difficult to argue against the proposition that the US economy today is even more heavily controlled, regulated, and regimented by the state than Germany was at the time Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom. Americans have travelled many miles down the road to serfdom by deluding themselves that the god of democracy will somehow save them from statist slavery. But as Hayek warned 56 years ago, "There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary. . . ."
The exercise of arbitrary or dictatorial power is, of course, the whole purpose and function of all those agencies, commissions, and czars.
Reprinted from Mises.org
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