Recently, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. This is a national disgrace because it suggests that Mr. Obama has rejected republicanism. In turn, this would suggest that he is a traitor.
The American Center for Law and Justice, located here (h/t Nancy Razik), has a petition protesting Obama's rejection of American sovereignty, a necessary component to republicanism. It reads:
President Obama:
Don’t Surrender our National Sovereignty!
President Obama is embarking on a new and troubling direction for our nation. Some are calling it the “Selling of America” — surrendering our national sovereignty in the interest of international cooperation. This is contrary to our very founding. We must hold America’s leaders accountable! Stand with the ACLJ and send a powerful message to President Obama — America is NOT for sale. The U.S. is a sovereign, independent world leader — and must not surrender its autonomy. Please read the form below carefully and declare your membership with the ACLJ by adding your name to our Letter of Protest.
LETTER OF PROTEST
TO:
President of the United States, Barack Obama
As a concerned member of the American Center for Law and Justice and a proud citizen of the United States of America, I join with Chief Counsel Jay Alan Sekulow in protesting your Administration’s push for “transnationalism.” America’s sovereignty is not for sale. It should be protected at all costs, esteemed as our Founding Fathers envisioned, and governed under the authority given by our United States Constitution.
Ceding America’s independence in the interest of international cooperation is unacceptable. It is subservient to our national interests and stands as a threat to American democracy and the future protection of our citizens.
The United States is a powerful, sovereign, independent world leader and must not surrender its autonomy. I respectfully raise my voice in protest: America is not for sale.
Please consider signing it here.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Unity Philosophy Failed Because Laissez Faire Succeeded
In the US, the notion that there needs to be a strong central state began with the Federalist Papers. The Federalists left a considerable degree of decentralized authority with the states, but from the beginning there was ambiguity as to how decentralized decision making ought to be. Centalization was re enforced with the Civil War, which further strengthened the federal government and opened the door to Progressivism. The Progressives were not necessarily centralizers. However, the key federal legislation that came from Progressivism, the Hepburn Act, the Federal Trade Commission, the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve Bank as well as imperialist ventures like the Spanish American War were all centralizing. On the other hand, much of the Progressive legislation, such as Workers' Compensation, housing codes and wage and hours laws respecting women and children proceeded at the state level. The New Deal served as a centralizing force on Progressivism, and may be viewed as the culmination of 160 years of Hamiltonian federalism.
The centralizing trend came about because of conflicts about morals and economic opportunism. As Charles Beard and other Progressives argued, much of the motive for the federal Constitution was economic gain to domestic manufacturers, which Hamilton wholeheartedly supported as did Madison and Jefferson to a lesser degree. But abolitionism and then concern about trusts led to moralizing about the economy. Until the post-bellum era Protestantism had been associated with local community as in John Winthrop's City on a Hill. The states were separate religious communities and did not aim to impose their religious-based moralities on other states. But slavery posed a national moral problem, as did the central bank. Thus Calvinist morality took on a national scope. The notion that the nation was a moral community took hold. Among the advocates of this notion were the late nineteenth century Mugwumps, who were among the first media-based national moral movements. The Mugwumps were mostly Protestant, although there were a few Catholics and Jews among their ranks as well (there were few Jews in America in the 1870s but there was a handful of notable Jewish Mugwumps, such as Simon Sterne). The Mugwumps were not necessarily religious, but they had been religiously trained and applied the morality of their education to the economic problems facing America, for instance, the corruption associated with the railroads, the Greenback inflation and most of all the need for a civil service to counteract the urban corruption of the political boss system. Although the Mugwumps were laissez faire in ideology they were very much the precursor to the Progressives in that they focused on national issues and saw national solutions in terms of the need to rationalize government.
The trend toward centralization thus came out of the Civil War and was re enforced by one outcome of Progressivism: the intensification of Jim Crow laws, especially in the South. As the results of Jim Crow became evident in the early twentieth century, the need to counteract it took hold in a reincarnation of the Civil War in terms of the Civil Rights movement. As well, the Roosevelt administration saw economic problems as resolvable at the federal level. Thus, Social Security, labor law, wage and hour laws, securities regulation, agricultural regulation and public works took hold in the public mind.
This was occurring precisely as it became evident to managers in America's large industrial firms that centralization does not work. This was noted by Alfred Chandler in his book "Strategy and Structure", especially with respect to Alfred Sloan. Sloan modeled General Motors after the federal government, downloading responsibility to the automotive and other manufacturing divisions just before Roosevelt saw fit to centralize decision making in Washington.
As it turned out, Sloan was right, although subsequent generations of General Motors executives dropped the ball. As General Motors re-centralized it failed to be able to compete with innovations of the much smaller Toyota Automotive in the 1950s. These innovations were known as lean manufacturing. As well, Toyota was able to adopt the ideas of Edward I. Deming.
As American industry found that decentralization was necessary to competent management, the federal government became more insistent on centralization. Part of this was due to intensification of the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960s, but part was due to the egos and greed of politicians and academics who oversaw federal policy. Thus, plans like Medicaid and Medicare which could have been experimentally adopted at the state levels, with the best results revealed, were thrown into existence in a slipshod manner at the federal level without the pragmatic advantage of state-based experimentation. Policies concerning health care, social security, pension regulation, health and safety regulation, auto safety, pollution and most of all monetary policy were adopted at the federal level, typically with poor to mediocre results.
The failure of the Great Society Programs; the mismanagement of social security; the crippling effects on inner city blacks of urban renewal and labor laws; the instability due to monetary policy under Richard M. Nixon and the early years of the Carter administration might have given the centralizers pause. But it did not.
Unwilling or unable to grasp the reasons why centralization does not work, they continue to push for dramatic, centralized solutions to America's problems. The result: the sub-prime crisis; the series of bubbles that occurred in the 1990s and 2000's; declining real hourly wages; a failing social security system (or a social security that fails to provide an adequate retirement benefit despite 14% annual contributions by workers and their employers); and declining career opportunities for young people.
Despite these and other failures, the "progressives" continue to agitate for the same failed, centralized approach. This should be called the "pathology of centralization".
The centralizing trend came about because of conflicts about morals and economic opportunism. As Charles Beard and other Progressives argued, much of the motive for the federal Constitution was economic gain to domestic manufacturers, which Hamilton wholeheartedly supported as did Madison and Jefferson to a lesser degree. But abolitionism and then concern about trusts led to moralizing about the economy. Until the post-bellum era Protestantism had been associated with local community as in John Winthrop's City on a Hill. The states were separate religious communities and did not aim to impose their religious-based moralities on other states. But slavery posed a national moral problem, as did the central bank. Thus Calvinist morality took on a national scope. The notion that the nation was a moral community took hold. Among the advocates of this notion were the late nineteenth century Mugwumps, who were among the first media-based national moral movements. The Mugwumps were mostly Protestant, although there were a few Catholics and Jews among their ranks as well (there were few Jews in America in the 1870s but there was a handful of notable Jewish Mugwumps, such as Simon Sterne). The Mugwumps were not necessarily religious, but they had been religiously trained and applied the morality of their education to the economic problems facing America, for instance, the corruption associated with the railroads, the Greenback inflation and most of all the need for a civil service to counteract the urban corruption of the political boss system. Although the Mugwumps were laissez faire in ideology they were very much the precursor to the Progressives in that they focused on national issues and saw national solutions in terms of the need to rationalize government.
The trend toward centralization thus came out of the Civil War and was re enforced by one outcome of Progressivism: the intensification of Jim Crow laws, especially in the South. As the results of Jim Crow became evident in the early twentieth century, the need to counteract it took hold in a reincarnation of the Civil War in terms of the Civil Rights movement. As well, the Roosevelt administration saw economic problems as resolvable at the federal level. Thus, Social Security, labor law, wage and hour laws, securities regulation, agricultural regulation and public works took hold in the public mind.
This was occurring precisely as it became evident to managers in America's large industrial firms that centralization does not work. This was noted by Alfred Chandler in his book "Strategy and Structure", especially with respect to Alfred Sloan. Sloan modeled General Motors after the federal government, downloading responsibility to the automotive and other manufacturing divisions just before Roosevelt saw fit to centralize decision making in Washington.
As it turned out, Sloan was right, although subsequent generations of General Motors executives dropped the ball. As General Motors re-centralized it failed to be able to compete with innovations of the much smaller Toyota Automotive in the 1950s. These innovations were known as lean manufacturing. As well, Toyota was able to adopt the ideas of Edward I. Deming.
As American industry found that decentralization was necessary to competent management, the federal government became more insistent on centralization. Part of this was due to intensification of the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960s, but part was due to the egos and greed of politicians and academics who oversaw federal policy. Thus, plans like Medicaid and Medicare which could have been experimentally adopted at the state levels, with the best results revealed, were thrown into existence in a slipshod manner at the federal level without the pragmatic advantage of state-based experimentation. Policies concerning health care, social security, pension regulation, health and safety regulation, auto safety, pollution and most of all monetary policy were adopted at the federal level, typically with poor to mediocre results.
The failure of the Great Society Programs; the mismanagement of social security; the crippling effects on inner city blacks of urban renewal and labor laws; the instability due to monetary policy under Richard M. Nixon and the early years of the Carter administration might have given the centralizers pause. But it did not.
Unwilling or unable to grasp the reasons why centralization does not work, they continue to push for dramatic, centralized solutions to America's problems. The result: the sub-prime crisis; the series of bubbles that occurred in the 1990s and 2000's; declining real hourly wages; a failing social security system (or a social security that fails to provide an adequate retirement benefit despite 14% annual contributions by workers and their employers); and declining career opportunities for young people.
Despite these and other failures, the "progressives" continue to agitate for the same failed, centralized approach. This should be called the "pathology of centralization".
"Obama Reaches Out to Moderate Pirate Community"
H/t Larwyn. The Exurban League blog carries the following:
"After maintaining his silence for two days, President Obama will soon make his first public statement about the pirate attack upon an U.S.-flagged vessel off the Horn of Africa. After several inquiries and a few well-placed bribes, Exurban League has received an early transcript of the President's remarks:
"...Since the pirates are still holding the captain, I have sent FBI negotiators to facilitate his safe and speedy release. I assure his friends and family that I will not stop until this man-made disaster is resolved in a peaceful, tolerant and ecologically-sound manner."
Read the whole thing here.
"After maintaining his silence for two days, President Obama will soon make his first public statement about the pirate attack upon an U.S.-flagged vessel off the Horn of Africa. After several inquiries and a few well-placed bribes, Exurban League has received an early transcript of the President's remarks:
"...Since the pirates are still holding the captain, I have sent FBI negotiators to facilitate his safe and speedy release. I assure his friends and family that I will not stop until this man-made disaster is resolved in a peaceful, tolerant and ecologically-sound manner."
Read the whole thing here.
Christianity and the Coming Dissolution of the United States
Conservative Chloe's Eagle Eye blog takes activist judicial interpretation of the Constitution to court.
Chloe argues that Jefferson and other of the Founding Fathers believed in a literalist interpretation of the Constitution. Quoting Jefferson:
"On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
As well, Chloe points out that the Founding Fathers saw this as a Christian nation. Quoting the Northwest Ordinance, signed by President George Washington:
"Religion, morality, and knowledge, necessary to good government and happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."
Chloe argues that America is a Christian nation. Supreme Court and other rulings that have overturned the Founders' original intent are illegitimate.
Recently, I received an e-mail from Baruch College, a campus of the City University of New York, as is my employer, Brooklyn College. The e-mail said that Baruch College was holding a colloquium on whether the Constitution should be abolished. The academics involved were indifferent to republicanism, limited government or restrictions on government to steal, murder, loot, mismanage and oppress. These academics are ignorant of history. In short, they are quacks.
Conservative Chloe makes a good point. However, the resolution of these differences is hard. I do not believe that the Supreme Court of today functions as a legitimate institution. It is not authorized by the Constitution to write law, but it has repeatedly done that. It has done so in the name of changing social values. Yet, the Supreme Court does not represent Americans' values and has no mechanism to be aware of them.
The justices on the Supreme Court are taken from the ranks of elite universities. Elite universities are overtly antagonistic to traditional American values. I would add that quack social theories; medieval belief systems concerning socialism and how economies ought to work; and primitive attitudes toward the legitimacy of state violence and murder, especially as concerns left-wing or communist dictatorships and murderers are common. A murderer like Che Guevara is eulogized in these circles, as are failed, stupidly conceived medieval economic systems such as those of the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Trained in the primitive ignorance characteristic of American universities, the Supreme Court of the United States reflects neither prevalent social attitudes and mores nor any kind of evolution. They are a medievalist, reactionary body whose aim is to assist the far left in imposing aristocratic and monarchical systems on the American people through a total state similar to what existed in Russia in the 14th century.
The question is how to resolve this dilemma. On the one hand, the quackademics agitate ceaselessly for medieval government through what they pathetically call "progressivism". At the same time, real Americans favor progress through economic evolution, free markets, innovation and the free circulation of ideas, free of the unlimited authoritarian state that left-wing academics and their pupils on the Supreme Court advocate.
The conflict is one of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. The end result will be dissolution of the United States.
There is no reason why Conservative Chloe should be forced to share this nation with the thuggish, left wing knuckleheads who dominate Congress. Nor should people schooled in American history like Conservative Chloe be forced to share this country with ignoramuses who do not know that the Founders saw a militia and the ownership of guns as necessary to protect against the tyrannical state--the very kind of state academics and the US Supreme Court advocate.
The country ought to be broke up into several regions. The regions ought to reflect widespread values of large groups of Americans. Each region ought to be free to form its own constitution as far as economic and social values. The Supreme Court ought to be decentralized into the several regions. The chief remaining duty of the federal government ought to be national defense. The federal government ought to be elected by the state governments and by the people. The regions should be free to decide on their own monetary, economic, social and religious policies.
America is simply too large to manage. The attitudes of the left, namely, the activist state, are incompatible with the ideals of the Founders. The failure of the activist state has, unbelievably, been met in left-wing and Democratic Party circles for calls for an ever more activist state.
The current federal government lacks legitimacy. It exists by force of violence. It is a tyranny.
Chloe argues that Jefferson and other of the Founding Fathers believed in a literalist interpretation of the Constitution. Quoting Jefferson:
"On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
As well, Chloe points out that the Founding Fathers saw this as a Christian nation. Quoting the Northwest Ordinance, signed by President George Washington:
"Religion, morality, and knowledge, necessary to good government and happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."
Chloe argues that America is a Christian nation. Supreme Court and other rulings that have overturned the Founders' original intent are illegitimate.
Recently, I received an e-mail from Baruch College, a campus of the City University of New York, as is my employer, Brooklyn College. The e-mail said that Baruch College was holding a colloquium on whether the Constitution should be abolished. The academics involved were indifferent to republicanism, limited government or restrictions on government to steal, murder, loot, mismanage and oppress. These academics are ignorant of history. In short, they are quacks.
Conservative Chloe makes a good point. However, the resolution of these differences is hard. I do not believe that the Supreme Court of today functions as a legitimate institution. It is not authorized by the Constitution to write law, but it has repeatedly done that. It has done so in the name of changing social values. Yet, the Supreme Court does not represent Americans' values and has no mechanism to be aware of them.
The justices on the Supreme Court are taken from the ranks of elite universities. Elite universities are overtly antagonistic to traditional American values. I would add that quack social theories; medieval belief systems concerning socialism and how economies ought to work; and primitive attitudes toward the legitimacy of state violence and murder, especially as concerns left-wing or communist dictatorships and murderers are common. A murderer like Che Guevara is eulogized in these circles, as are failed, stupidly conceived medieval economic systems such as those of the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Trained in the primitive ignorance characteristic of American universities, the Supreme Court of the United States reflects neither prevalent social attitudes and mores nor any kind of evolution. They are a medievalist, reactionary body whose aim is to assist the far left in imposing aristocratic and monarchical systems on the American people through a total state similar to what existed in Russia in the 14th century.
The question is how to resolve this dilemma. On the one hand, the quackademics agitate ceaselessly for medieval government through what they pathetically call "progressivism". At the same time, real Americans favor progress through economic evolution, free markets, innovation and the free circulation of ideas, free of the unlimited authoritarian state that left-wing academics and their pupils on the Supreme Court advocate.
The conflict is one of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. The end result will be dissolution of the United States.
There is no reason why Conservative Chloe should be forced to share this nation with the thuggish, left wing knuckleheads who dominate Congress. Nor should people schooled in American history like Conservative Chloe be forced to share this country with ignoramuses who do not know that the Founders saw a militia and the ownership of guns as necessary to protect against the tyrannical state--the very kind of state academics and the US Supreme Court advocate.
The country ought to be broke up into several regions. The regions ought to reflect widespread values of large groups of Americans. Each region ought to be free to form its own constitution as far as economic and social values. The Supreme Court ought to be decentralized into the several regions. The chief remaining duty of the federal government ought to be national defense. The federal government ought to be elected by the state governments and by the people. The regions should be free to decide on their own monetary, economic, social and religious policies.
America is simply too large to manage. The attitudes of the left, namely, the activist state, are incompatible with the ideals of the Founders. The failure of the activist state has, unbelievably, been met in left-wing and Democratic Party circles for calls for an ever more activist state.
The current federal government lacks legitimacy. It exists by force of violence. It is a tyranny.
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