THE HIGH COST OF GOVERNMENT

Back in the depression era, FDR claimed that he could get the nation's economy moving again if only he had extended powers over farming, business and industry, like his buddy Stalin had. To that end, the Roosevelt administration designed a complete regulatory bureaucracy, with each agency to be controlled by little politburos and the politburos, in turn, overseen by a dictator in the White House.

The problem was, the whole scheme was totally and completely unconstitutional and the U.S. Supreme Court told the administration exactly that. So, FDR attacked the U.S. Supreme Court, threatening court packing and other unheard of arrangements to mitigate the Court's checks and balances.

Ultimately, Roosevelt won. Our Constitution suffered and the federal government has never been a Constitutional government since.

Today, there are at least 113 federal regulatory agencies passing laws they call -- with a wink and a nod -- rules and regulations. These rules and regulations affect everything the American people do and their hidden costs (hidden tax) are more expensive to most taxpayers than all other federal taxes combined.

For instance, according to the Cato Institute in a report by Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr. titled, "Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State," federal regulations cost the American people about $854-billion annually.(1) That amounts to a hidden tax of 8.4% of the U.S. gross national product annually. Put another way, the cost amounts to an average hidden tax bill of, on average, $7,490 per American taxpayer annually.

Congress is being a little more careful about staying out of the tax and spend mode lately, so the task is performed stealthily. Instead of funding a program on the budget, Congress simply requires state and local governments, or industry, to do it. Nevertheless, we get the bill, just as if it were a direct tax.

Regulatory agencies, of course, are totally unaccountable to voters. It shows, too. In the fiscal 2001 year, congress passed 108 bills that were signed into law.

The regulatory agencies, however, wrote 4,132 rules (laws)that were inflicted on the American people. This is, of course, taxation without representation. Worse yet, it is also government without representation.

Think about that last remark: "government without representation." Not one of us, or even our representatives in government, voted for even one of the many thousands of rule-making bureaucrats. Not even one.

The very first sentence of the body of our Constitution implies that Congress shall make all law. Yet, there is a lawmaking ratio between the regulatory agencies and Congress of nearly forty to one!

So, when we ask where the inflation is coming from, we should look directly to government. The federal regulatory bureaucracy has written many controlling regulations for every product sold. Which means, every product sold in the United States costs the consumer more money because of these busy-body regulation rangers in the unconstitutional regulatory agencies. Congress knows this.

As Cato reports: In 1998, the median two-earner family's after-tax income of $41,846 contained $7,410 in hidden regulatory costs -- thus eating up about 18 percent of the after-tax family budget.

That equates to a lot more every year than most people pay out in house payments and food combined.

Here in the United States, the regulatory costs alone are more than the entire Gross Domestic Product of Mexico or Canada. Just the annual budgets for these regulatory agencies cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

So, when we look for the reason for the cost of living increase (inflation) every year, look to Washington.

Congress is the direct cause of most of it because Congress allows the regulatory agencies to exist and function autonomously. It is time that unconstitutional scam ended.

I don't need to tell you this, but

As claims [on the use of private property] proliferate, the legislatures and courts are overwhelmed with cases that are technical and difficult to prove. They rely upon opinions from supposedly disinterested experts regarding the impacts of transformation products. Neither legislators or courts have the power to enforce a judgement; that power lies exclusively with the executive branch of government. The demand for expediency seduces legislatures and the courts to default upon their Constitutional responsibility, to the only civic agency with relevant expertise and police power. Control of use and, thus ownership of that use, is effectively transferred to the executive branch of government.
When taking land out of production profits the financial sponsors of a claim, it is cheaper to control the target use than to compensate the owner or buy the property. All it takes to manipulate a resource market by democratic means is to buy out the competition by manipulating majority perceptions about the risk of ecological harm associated with that target use. The few who can profit by taking competing resources out of production then have reason to sponsor the investment in political or legal action. They focus the first case against a weak target or obvious problem (which is why most such takings appear as local actions).
Established precedent then extends the applicability of cited legislation and lowers the cost successive claims. Property owners gradually lose their ability to finance the cost of compliance or legal resistance. Absent a profitable use, the market value of the target use approaches zero. After repeated exercise of external controls, purchase of the residual asset value concludes any remaining claim by an owner.
When a rival owner produces a competing or substitute good, the financial advantages of such tacit property acquisitions can be enormous. For example, if a developer funded public concerns about the negatively valued transformation products of farming to render the use of farmland non-economic and ripe for development, the land becomes less expensive to purchase.
This politically-sponsored dissolution of the Separation of Powers Principle, combines all three branches of government into one, that can derive power and funding by manufacturing claims on the use of property. The more externalities are regulated, the more power accrues to the agency to control the use of the producing asset to turn its use to corrupt purpose. When agency control is sufficient to alienate the interest of the agent from the democratic majority, the asset has then degenerated into a socialized commons.
The claims by which a commons is socialized are ironically often the same precedents as were used to extend the original democratic claim; i.e., by extending claims against the transformation products of the democratic use of the resource. With the legal precedents in place that were used to take control of the factors of production on individual property, the civic agent now has the legal tools to take control of ALL related private property. Control of the use of land is now in the hands of an agency that is alienated from accoun-tability to the public claim for healthy ecosystem function. The agency instead serves the limited interests of the politically dominant, who use the power of government to gain de facto control of ALL factors of production.
History teaches that this is not a good thing.

Source

We need more justices who share Justice Clarence Thomas' outlook on Federal power under the Commerce Clause.

Put simply, much if not all of Art. I, 8 (including portions of the Commerce Clause itself) would be surplusage if Congress had been given authority over matters that substantially affect interstate commerce. An interpretation of cl. 3 that makes the rest of 8 superfluous simply cannot be correct. Yet this Court's Commerce Clause jurisprudence has endorsed just such an interpretation: the power we have accorded Congress has swallowed Art. I, 8.

Indeed, if a substantial effects test can be appended to the Commerce Clause, why not to every other power of the Federal Government. There is no reason for singling out the Commerce Clause for special treatment. Accordingly, Congress could regulate all matters that substantially affect the Army and Navy, bankruptcies, tax collection, expenditures, and so on. In that case, the clauses of 8 all mutually overlap, something we can assume the Founding Fathers never intended.

Our construction of the scope of congressional authority has the additional problem of coming close to turning the Tenth Amendment on its head. Our case law could be read to reserve to the United States all powers not expressly prohibited by the Constitution. Taken together, these fundamental textual problems should, at the very least, convince us that the substantial effects test should be reexamined.

-- www.constitution.org/ussc/514-549c.htm

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