I have one job on this lousy ship, it's *stupid*, but I'm gonna do it! Okay? - Gwen Demarco in Galaxy Quest.
I've argued that our Federal Constitutional order is unsuitable for a centralized social democracy where a bureaucracy manages the society via detailed regulations and administrative rules. The US Constitution was built by 13 sovereign, agrarian states to link them together sufficiently to see off enemies from without and to overawe those within, not to regulate citizen alcohol intake or the safety features of mule harnesses.
That notwithstanding, both the left and the right have confronted these limitations and instead of honoring the law, they've simply ignored it. From the right we've had sweeping abuses of privacy by the NSA, FBI and others as well as absolutely brutal oppression of people who grow the wrong plants in their gardens. Activities utterly inconceivable to the men who wrote our Constitution. On the left we've had legislation by judge, including the inexcusable and socially destructive Roe v. Wade, judicially enforced racism (initially anti black, now pro black, soon to be anti-white) as well as an explosion of insanely detailed administrative regulations and controls amounting to millions of pages of rules that Americans are supposedly subject to upon pain of criminal prosecution.
On top of that we've had a remarkable erosion in the basic rights that our forefathers held as Englishmen and that they considered to be so lacking that they started a war over them. Rights like mens rea: the quaint notion that you can't be charged with a felony if you didn't reasonably know it was a crime; the right to a trial by your peers: most experts agree that in the current sentencing environment this is simply a faux right; and the right to due process - the administrative state has substituted quasi-judicial procedures for real due process - procedures where the agency is the police force, the prosecutor, the judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one. And they get to keep any fines or forfeitures, making them the equivalent of the 'stationary bandits' of the Middle Ages.
So it's not surprising that the system's broken down with the President and his lapdog press touting 5-6% of GDP deficits at a time of 3 to 4% nominal GDP growth as 'prosperity' and 'fiscal responsibility' while Congress rages and howls and the courts issue edict after conflicting edict on thousands of different bits of the millions of pages of rules all spun by the partisan press, 80% left-ways, 20% right-ways and all of it dumbed down to the point of ignorance.
So we hear the traditional moans that the country is 'ungovernable' (funny, they never say that when Republicans have the keys) and that "something" needs to be "done". So it's understandable that a resolutely statist and authoritarian chief executive, looking at this roaring cacophony would be tempted to cut the Gordian knot by simply ruling by decree. Which would be tragic because like Gwen Demarco, the President really has only one job: to hold the country together enough so that the natural creativity and productivity of the people can transcend whatever difficulties we face now. Sometimes holding the country together means ruling autocratically: to hold the Union together Abraham Lincoln did a lot of things that were of questionable constitutionality. Or doing something, anything to signal that help was on the way as FDR did for a time.
But to think that we live in a Lincolnian or Rooseveltian moment is to mistake the situation. The threat to the Republic is not from without - notwithstanding the screeching rhetoric, the nation is not threatened by the Tea Party or Occupy movements much less the nouns "Terror", "Drugs" or even "Inequality". Indeed the public in surveys overwhelmingly indicate that they believe the Federal State is the problem, not the solution. The threat to the Republic is from within: the rulers, plutocrats, union bosses, and elites in general have backed themselves into a corner from which they don't see any profitable (for them) way out. Constitutional way out, that is.
They've ridden the Federal horse so hard and so far, put it to uses so beyond it's natural ken that the poor nag is dying on its feet and the country that counts on it to sustain order and trust and legality is threatened. Not by bandits from without but from the greedy, arrogant teamsters driving the wagon. We need a new constitutional order - either change this one into a unitary parliamentary state where the executive and legislative are one and dominate the bureaucracy and courts, sweeping away our traditional liberty and state autonomy for centralized 'efficiency' a la Europe* or break up the Federal behemoth and return it to the traditional limited role it was designed for.
The 'leaders' in Washington want to go in the authoritarian, statist, fascist direction. I think the people had they the option would choose liberty. But so many of our elites are so full of themselves so convinced of their righteousness and genius that I fear we will get the autocracy by fiat rather than decision with the brain dead establishment press cheering it as a new 'blooming' of their ridiculous 'positive' liberties. Here's the President's latest inept stab at rule by decree:
But to think that we live in a Lincolnian or Rooseveltian moment is to mistake the situation. The threat to the Republic is not from without - notwithstanding the screeching rhetoric, the nation is not threatened by the Tea Party or Occupy movements much less the nouns "Terror", "Drugs" or even "Inequality". Indeed the public in surveys overwhelmingly indicate that they believe the Federal State is the problem, not the solution. The threat to the Republic is from within: the rulers, plutocrats, union bosses, and elites in general have backed themselves into a corner from which they don't see any profitable (for them) way out. Constitutional way out, that is.
They've ridden the Federal horse so hard and so far, put it to uses so beyond it's natural ken that the poor nag is dying on its feet and the country that counts on it to sustain order and trust and legality is threatened. Not by bandits from without but from the greedy, arrogant teamsters driving the wagon. We need a new constitutional order - either change this one into a unitary parliamentary state where the executive and legislative are one and dominate the bureaucracy and courts, sweeping away our traditional liberty and state autonomy for centralized 'efficiency' a la Europe* or break up the Federal behemoth and return it to the traditional limited role it was designed for.
The 'leaders' in Washington want to go in the authoritarian, statist, fascist direction. I think the people had they the option would choose liberty. But so many of our elites are so full of themselves so convinced of their righteousness and genius that I fear we will get the autocracy by fiat rather than decision with the brain dead establishment press cheering it as a new 'blooming' of their ridiculous 'positive' liberties. Here's the President's latest inept stab at rule by decree:
I am not just talking about the president’s (latest) illegal waiver of the employer mandate, which yet again delays (this time, to 2016) the requirement that businesses with 50 to 99 employees must provide Obama-certified coverage or pay crushing fines – a desperate political calculation to accommodate Democrats who face angry voters this November. I am talking about the other bomb administration officials dropped in announcing this unconstitutional edict.
Obama’s central-command policies are inevitably crashing into each other. The waiver may provide some relief to endangered Democrats, but it also gives employers an incentive to lay off employees in order to get under 100 and qualify for the illegal waiver. So Obama has unilaterally legislated illegal conditions on the illegal waiver. To wit, employers will be required to certify to the IRS, under penalty of perjury, that the waiver was not a motivating factor in the company’s hiring and firing decisions. As Fox News’s Chris Stirewalt quips, “To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs.”
So now Obama, like a standard-issue leftist dictator, is complementing lawlessness with socialist irrationality.
Think about how lunatic this is. There is nothing even faintly illegal about businesses’ – indeed, all economic actors’ – making financial decisions based on tax consequences. (And remember, notwithstanding Obama’s misrepresentations to the contrary, Obamacare mandates are taxes, as Obama’s Justice Department argued and as Chief Justice Roberts & Co. concluded.) The tax consequences of Obamacare are profound; that is precisely the reason that Obama is “waiving” them. No responsible officers in a corporation of relevant size would fail to take them into account in making the decision to staff at over or under 100 employees; in determining whether some full-time employees should be terminated or shifted to part-time; or in making any number of the decisions Obamacare’s mind-numbing complexity requires.
The officers’ responsibility is to the owners of the company, the shareholders. The business exists to create value, not to provide employment – employing workers is a function of the value added to the enterprise, not the need to create a more favorable election environment for the statist political party. Corporate officers who overlooked material tax consequences would be unfit to be corporate officers.
What is illegal and irrational is not a company’s commonsense deliberation over its costs, it is Obama’s edict. And look what attends this one: criminal prosecution if Obama’s Justice Department decides the business has falsely certified that its staffing decision was not motivated by Obamacare.
Think about that for a second. The waiver is illegal. It flouts the language of theObamacare statute, under which the employer mandate is required already to have been implemented by now. There is nothing in the law that empowers Obama to waive the mandate, much less to attach lawless conditions to such a lawless waiver. A business that seeks the waiver and fails to pay the mandated tax (in lieu of providing the required coverage) is in violation of federal statutory law, regardless of its compliance with Obama’s outlaw edict. The payments required by the statute, after all, are owed to the public, not to Obama – he’s got no authority to deprive the government of these funds just because it would harm Democrats to collect them.
Yet, Obama proclaims his illegal waiver with impunity – Congress apparently unwilling to stop him. You, on the other hand, will be prosecuted for breaking the “law” if you do not comply to Obama’s satisfaction with the illegal and irrational condition he has unilaterally placed on his illegal waiver.
Got that?
To put it in blunt terms: it is very likely than men and women will be prosecuted and imprisoned for criticizing a lawless decree from our President. And if he's popular enough with the press, he'll get away with it. Mr. President, don't do it. You only have one job and you may think it's stupid when compared to implementing social democracy but you've already spent five years driving us apart when you should have been pulling us together. If you pursue rule by decree you will make the conflicts in our society infinitely worse and severely damage the rule of law. So take a page from Galaxy Quest and even though you may find it stupid, bring us together Mr. President - our unity is more important than your policy.
*An 'efficiency' that oddly enough delivers far less wealth and prosperity. Funny, that.
Obama’s central-command policies are inevitably crashing into each other. The waiver may provide some relief to endangered Democrats, but it also gives employers an incentive to lay off employees in order to get under 100 and qualify for the illegal waiver. So Obama has unilaterally legislated illegal conditions on the illegal waiver. To wit, employers will be required to certify to the IRS, under penalty of perjury, that the waiver was not a motivating factor in the company’s hiring and firing decisions. As Fox News’s Chris Stirewalt quips, “To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs.”
So now Obama, like a standard-issue leftist dictator, is complementing lawlessness with socialist irrationality.
Think about how lunatic this is. There is nothing even faintly illegal about businesses’ – indeed, all economic actors’ – making financial decisions based on tax consequences. (And remember, notwithstanding Obama’s misrepresentations to the contrary, Obamacare mandates are taxes, as Obama’s Justice Department argued and as Chief Justice Roberts & Co. concluded.) The tax consequences of Obamacare are profound; that is precisely the reason that Obama is “waiving” them. No responsible officers in a corporation of relevant size would fail to take them into account in making the decision to staff at over or under 100 employees; in determining whether some full-time employees should be terminated or shifted to part-time; or in making any number of the decisions Obamacare’s mind-numbing complexity requires.
The officers’ responsibility is to the owners of the company, the shareholders. The business exists to create value, not to provide employment – employing workers is a function of the value added to the enterprise, not the need to create a more favorable election environment for the statist political party. Corporate officers who overlooked material tax consequences would be unfit to be corporate officers.
What is illegal and irrational is not a company’s commonsense deliberation over its costs, it is Obama’s edict. And look what attends this one: criminal prosecution if Obama’s Justice Department decides the business has falsely certified that its staffing decision was not motivated by Obamacare.
Think about that for a second. The waiver is illegal. It flouts the language of theObamacare statute, under which the employer mandate is required already to have been implemented by now. There is nothing in the law that empowers Obama to waive the mandate, much less to attach lawless conditions to such a lawless waiver. A business that seeks the waiver and fails to pay the mandated tax (in lieu of providing the required coverage) is in violation of federal statutory law, regardless of its compliance with Obama’s outlaw edict. The payments required by the statute, after all, are owed to the public, not to Obama – he’s got no authority to deprive the government of these funds just because it would harm Democrats to collect them.
Yet, Obama proclaims his illegal waiver with impunity – Congress apparently unwilling to stop him. You, on the other hand, will be prosecuted for breaking the “law” if you do not comply to Obama’s satisfaction with the illegal and irrational condition he has unilaterally placed on his illegal waiver.
Got that?
To put it in blunt terms: it is very likely than men and women will be prosecuted and imprisoned for criticizing a lawless decree from our President. And if he's popular enough with the press, he'll get away with it. Mr. President, don't do it. You only have one job and you may think it's stupid when compared to implementing social democracy but you've already spent five years driving us apart when you should have been pulling us together. If you pursue rule by decree you will make the conflicts in our society infinitely worse and severely damage the rule of law. So take a page from Galaxy Quest and even though you may find it stupid, bring us together Mr. President - our unity is more important than your policy.
God help us every one.
*An 'efficiency' that oddly enough delivers far less wealth and prosperity. Funny, that.
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