Dirigisme

It is a disease that is not covered by Obamacare because the cure would mean the death of the Unaffordable Care Act.

Is there anything in the US Constitution that authorizes the Federal government to dabble in the healthcare industry?  If it is there it is beyond an emanation of a penumbra.  This minor fact is not even a speed bump for the “progressives” who feel the compulsive need to help us live better lives.  Their arrogance is based on the illusion that a central authority populated by self-identified “intellectuals” can make better decisions than mere mortals trying to manage their lives in peace.  There is, sadly, a great appeal among the parasites for exactly this micro-management of day to day life experiences.  The snowflakes are totally risk averse and will happily turn their lives over to a despotic state run by Santa Sanders.

How did our Founding Fathers miss the opportunity to make this all very clear in the Constitution?

Simple…they were creating a governmental structure designed to minimize the likelihood that power would ever be concentrated in the hands of a few individuals.  It was self evident to the authors.  The US Constitution is the most incredible document in the history of government.  The Articles of Confederation that preceded the Constitution proved to be unworkable and a convention was called to address the shortcomings that had become manifest.  The men (sorry ladies) who met in Philadelphia in 1787 were originally charged with amending the Articles but this amazing group of statesmen (sorry again) scrapped the entire existing governmental structure and implemented a system of government that was based on the concept of Federalism and checks and balances.  The structure, as designed, was elegant but there was one caveat elucidated by Benjamin Franklin.  When asked what kind of government they had established he replied: “A republic, if you can keep it”.

The debate was a clinic on the strengths and weaknesses of government.  One faction, known as the Federalists, was led by Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton, the father of American capitalism, actually argued for a monarchy, the very form of government against which the colonists had rebelled.  The anti-Federalists were represented by a group of able Virginians, including James Madison and Patrick Henry.  After the closed door debate ended the final document had to be ratified by nine states and the process took two years.  It was finally ratified when an agreement was reached to include a series of amendments.  The two most important clauses in the Bill of Rights have been all but written out of the Constitution by an activist Supreme Court (originally believed to be the weakest of the three branches of government).

The Ninth Amendment provides:   The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The Tenth Amendment reads:  The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.  It is interesting to note that upon the election of Trump the left developed a sudden interest in the need to revitalize this Amendment.

So the Constitution included a clear separation of powers and a system designed to protect the sovereignty of the individual states protected by strong controls over the exercise of federal authority.  What they did not count on was a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, a dedicated Federalist.  Marshall engineered a series of opinions that favored the movement of power from the states to the central government and as we now know once that power has accreted to Washington the flow will never be reversed.

Nor did they count on Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson the first two progressive presidents.  These authoritarians believed that as they were the only federal officials elected directly by the people they should be the focal point of all federal authority.  Early in the first Wilson term the US made a fatal error by ratifying the 17th Amendment.  In the Constitution proper it provides for the appointment of US Senators by the various state legislatures rather than direct election by the people.  The state legislatures would provide instructions to their Senators and had the authority to recall Senators who did not follow those instructions.  This was a basic element of the federalist vision of the framers.  The 17th Amendment called for the popular election of US Senators and the result has been a cavalcade of incompetence: Teddy Kennedy, John McCain, Harry Reid and Elizabeth Warren to name a few.

Nor did they count on Franklin Ponzi Roosevelt a man whose sole source of energy and vision was his immense ego.  It had to be the case because he had no intellectual horsepower. FPR was a pure fascist who believed that we could have all sorts of private ownership as long as the private enterprises were essentially managed by the bureaucrats in Washington.  Bureaucrats who, in most cases, have no understanding of economics, capitalism or the free market.  As one of FPR’s advisors famously opined…”Tax, tax, spend, spend, elect, elect”.  And by 1944 when FPR’s ego passed away from exhaustion the dirigisme was complete.  If you wish to dissolve in tears read the opinion in the case of Wickard v. Filburn in which the Supreme Court concluded that wheat grown on a farm for the personal consumption by the owner and his family constituted “interstate commerce”.  From that moment on the federal leviathan became a black hole so strong that all economic activity became subject to its gravitational influence and there is no hope that the power to govern commerce will ever return to the states.

The formation of the European Union (EU) is the logical extension of this progressive vision.  Please read a wonderful book entitled: The Great Deception by Booker and North.  The entire structure of the EU is built on a fraud and now we have an entire continent that is run by a group of nameless unelected ribbon clerks who are incapable of succeeding in the real world.  The Brexit vote in the UK was a precursor to the Trump victory and the pre-vote polling was every bit as accurate as our election polling.  And now it appears that Brexit was merely the first domino to fall.  France may be next and then the whole system collapses and authority reverts to the people of each individual country where it belongs.  Brexit was a vote against dirigisme and the reaction of the EU autocrats was music to our ears.

Compare that to the massive bureaucracy that we have managed to empower in the US.  The EPA has regulations controlling the amount of water your toilet can consume each time it is flushed.  OSHA, allegedly to save lives, produces regulations that impose huge costs on business… costs that are paid by the American consumer in increased product and service prices.  If the federal government was serious about saving lives they would impose a national speed limit of 5 miles per hour but perhaps they are not all that serious.  When sanity prevails you get incessant wailing from the left every time Trump reverses a regulation relating to the use of coal or attacks some other piece of lunacy enacted by the mini-fascists that populate the various and sundry federal agencies.  Take the Department of Education…please!

This sop to the public teacher unions was imposed on us by the hapless Jimmy Carter…now replaced by Obama as the worst President in US history.  Many thought that it was not possible to be worse that Jimmy Carter but Obama breezed by him like he was parked.

The start of the decline in the performance of US education, as compared to other nations, roughly coincides with the time this departmental boondoggle was stillborn.  It is preposterous to think that decisions made by a group of theoreticians sitting in Washington DC can be beneficial to students sitting in classrooms in local schools.  All education decisions should be made by governmental authorities closest to the students, i.e. your local board of education.  Our students should not be lab rats subjected to silly experiments like common core math and nationalized textbooks that are mere propaganda.  Try teaching kids that man-made global climate change is a hoax…you will be the subject of an auto da fe or sentenced to be reeducated and synchronized with the zeitgeist according to al-Gore.

So why is this ongoing concentration of power in the Oval Office a problem…perhaps because we seem to end up with mediocrities occupying the Office with this uncontrollable power.  Acton was right when he observed that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.  No single human being should be allowed to exercise that much power.  It is time that political power devolved back to the lowest unit of government, closest to the people.  Washington does nothing effectively or economically.  End the Department of Education!

Please be sure to check the news today so you can stay current with the latest Susan Rice variation on the story of the unmasking of US citizens who were the subject of eavesdropping.  It is stunning to think that this nitwit is a graduate of Stanford and Oxford.  This suggests a level of grade inflation that makes the currency of Venezuela look stable!