When Government Slippery Slope Goes Vertical

Let the government run the schools, and it may end up teaching your children values that offend you. Let the government have new powers to fight terrorism, and it may use those extraordinary powers in the pursuit of ordinary crimes. Let the federal government give the states money for highways, and it may eventually use its money to impose its own rules on the states.

In the Obama era, the slippery slope has gone vertical. Instead of "eventually," the feared extensions of government power come immediately.

When President Obama decided to convert George W. Bush's bailout of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler L.L.C. into effective government ownership, critics warned that this could lead to political intrusion into the management of automobile companies, with decisions being made for political instead of economic reasons. The companies would get less efficient. The government might try to preserve jobs or engage in political grandstanding rather than build sound companies that serve consumers - eventually.

But there was no "eventually" about it. Before he had even secured government control, Obama fired the chief executive officer of General Motors. He decided what the ownership structure of the companies should be. He insisted that the companies build "clean cars" rather than cars that consumers want to buy. And as soon as a deal was concluded, members of Congress started trying to block the closing of inefficient dealerships and to require the companies to buy their palladium in Montana, use unionized trucking companies, remove mercury from scrapped cars, and so on. Politics reared its ugly head in the first moments of government control.

Now we have the federal government's unprecedented intrusions into executive-pay decisions at seven bailed-out banks and automobile companies. The Obama administration's "pay czar," unlike most of the so-called White House czars, has an appalling amount of real power. He "has sole discretion to set compensation for the top 25 employees of each of those companies," and his decisions "won't be subject to appeal," according to recent articles in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, respectively. I was appalled when he used that autocratic power to make such sweeping cuts in executive pay.

True, these executives were running their companies with taxpayers' money. Live by the bailout, die by the bailout. If you don't want to make a government salary, don't take government money. It's a bad idea for government to attach strings to its funding, to use its money to impose an agenda, but the reality is that it does. Maybe it's a good lesson for other executives: Don't take government money.

But what about the slippery slope? Well, it went totally vertical. On the very day that the government czar announced that he would cut the pay of companies that received taxpayer bailouts, the Federal Reserve announced that it would start regulating compensation at the thousands of banks that it regulates, as well as American subsidiaries of non-U.S. financial companies. Some state regulators said they planned to issue similar requirements for state-regulated banks not covered by the Fed plan.

All of this is being done without any legitimate power under the Constitution, and much of it without even the authorization of Congress. Congress refused to bail out the auto companies, so Bush did it on his own authority. Congress never authorized the Federal Reserve to regulate the pay of bank employees.

This is not a slippery slope. This is falling off a cliff. As one news story pointed out: "The restrictions were the latest in more than a year's worth of government intervention in matters once considered inviolable aspects of the country's free-market economy and represent a signal moment in the history of the American economic experiment."

Sometimes it's hard to make a case for slippery slopes, because you're trying to oppose an immediate benefit by warning of a future cost. Not this time.

If you put a frog in lukewarm water, and then gradually turn up the temperature to boiling, the frog won't sense the danger, and will eventually be cooked to death, or so the metaphor goes. Throw a frog into boiling water, and it will jump out immediately, rather than be scalded.

People tend to react the same way to new demands by the government. If new powers and restrictions are introduced gradually, they'll get used to each one so that the next one seems no big deal.

In this case, we're being tossed into boiling water. It's time for Americans of left, right, and center to say that this is not the economic system we want. If you still have warm feelings toward Obama and his good intentions, ask yourself this: Will you feel comfortable one day when the appointees of President Romney or President Palin are exercising unconstitutional, unauthorized, unreviewable authority to restructure the economy the way they see fit?

What would Mr. Jefferson say?

I recall Free Republic suffering a spasm of populism when the issue of restricting executive pay of subsidized companies first emerged. Many FReepers were outraged at the bonuses taken by these executives both before and after the government infused money into them. I remember posting at the time that any amount of executive pay rolled back would be the most expensive money we ever saved.

Now the author of this article recounts a series of usurpations by the federal government which would have appalled any patriot of colonial America. If one reads the intrusions committed by George III outlined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and adjusts the words for the context of time and place, one can find many parallel usurpations committed or threatened to be committed by this administration.

Consider, for example, Jefferson's indictments of British administration respecting the executives control of the colonial legislatures:

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

Has Obama or the Democratic party committed these specific offenses? No, but we no longer live in the 18th century and the context has changed. In these indictments, Jefferson is describing the undermining of the democratic process by the executive as he perverts the legislative process. What we have today in the modern context is a perversion of the legislative process with earmarks, closed-door hearings limited to party henchmen, secrets bills not even released to the Democrat party as a whole, much less to the opposition party, or the people, midnight votes on bills which run literally into the thousands of pages which no one can read even if he wanted to do his duty as a legislator. We have seen the modern equivalent of bribing of senators with constituents money, bribes which go not directly into the senators' own pockets but disguised as schemes to reward interest groups or even constituencies as a whole. George III was brazen and used the geography of the 18th century world to render colonial legislatures impotent. Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi are less ham-handed but, because their legislation is so pervasive and so controlling, they are no less tyrannical in the effect of their machinations.

Jefferson complained that George III, a figure for the British government, committed the following outrages:

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

Again, Obama does the same thing in a modern context. He attempts to corrupt the census process and he threatens to alter the entire demographic makeup of the electorate with open immigration and general amnesty. In effect, these are the reverse of what George III was doing but both despots seek the same antidemocratic ends. Interestingly, Jefferson complains that George III did not release lands to the public while Barack Obama places lands wholesale away from the use by the public and we have much limited oil exploration, for example.

Jefferson complains:

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

Obama has appointed Sonia Sotomayor, arguably a racist, and his other appointments to inferior courts have been purely ideological. Because there is no check or balance in the Senate, there is no check on his tyrannical tendencies in exercising this office of judicial appointment. Obama, after all, has tacitly stated that the Constitution should be reinterpreted to authorize him as the government to expropriate and redistribute wealth. The tyranny comes by appointing judges he knows will undermine the Constitution.

Jefferson says:

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

Simply citing ACORN, SEIU, the census takeover, and a plentitude of unapproved and un-consented to "CZARS" should be examples enough to illustrate the application in the modern context.

Jefferson again:

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

It remains to be seen what will transpire respecting because military style civilian reeducation camps he seeks to set up around the country. In judging this, one must be mindful of Obama's assertion on video that as much money should be budgeted for this endeavor as for our legitimate military.

Jefferson anticipates global warming treaties, the full empowerment of Interpol free of congressional oversight, the potential submission of American operatives and servicemen to trial for war crimes, etc. etc. here:

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation

Mr. Jefferson:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states.... [I regard this to be one of the most potentially dangerous of all of the usurpations of this administration.]

Modern context and the facts are inverted but the results, again, are eerily similar to those complained of by Jefferson. For example, Jefferson speaks to the imposition of taxes without representation:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

Need we cite the EPA and a stream of regulations some of which impose taxes directly and some of which impose them indirectly through regulation or other requirements, but so many of them are done without congressional participation authorized only by blanket delegation of power.

How expensive was the money saved by the rollback of executive bonuses? We as FReepers must never succumb to the temptation to lash out in envy or to support any demagogue who would seduce the people by pretending to defend their money or by buying senatorial votes with their money.

The depredations of Barack Obama are not fully outlined here, indeed, his worst offenses are not catalogued because the literary device of paralleling the Declaration of Independence limits the scope of the indictment. We conservatives, like my ancestor who took his flintlock down off the mantle to go out and shoot a red coat, can recognize a tyrant when we see one. We do not have the same option my great great grandfather had to make war on George III or my grandfather had to make war on Yankees, but we do have the right (with apologies to Ted Sorensen) to mobilize Free Republic and hurl it into battle.

I think the problem is that the elites have learned that they can prosper by catering to the cravings of the majority of the electorate and they have learned from the bitter experiences of their elected colleagues that they will be swept away by an angry electorate if they deny them the entitlements of dependency.

I accept second place to the one on these threads in bashing George Bush early on for his spending and creation of entitlements. But I recognize that Karl Rove is neither ignorant nor stupid, rather he made his bets on an extremely fine calculation of just how far he could go in denying the beast it's feed. I think George Bush decided to duck fiscal responsibility and he rationalized the easy way out saying that frugality might interfere with his God appointed role to defend the country after 9/11. We, of course, we'll never know if the Rove calculation was the only way to get George Bush in office and keep him there. Similarly, we can not know how Bush would have fared in maintaining support for the Iraq war and the overall war on terror had he wielded even once the veto pen.

If Karl Rove was correct then the answer to the conundrum which you express is to stop blaming the elites for what the electorate clearly has wanted for decades. And they vote in people who give it to them. Consider the times when George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan were pilloried in the press for cutting food to the poor by calling catchup a "food" and when "cuts" were decried when the reality was the budget was only reduced in the rate of increase of entitlements spending.

If the Democrats have is succeeded in establishing an entitlement mentality throughout the culture, the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves and we will have to simply re-educate, Ronald Reagan style, the body politic to our way of thinking. We have precious few tools to do that. In fact, all the levers of persuasion from kindergarten through media to Hollywood to most of our churches actually preach the contrary vision, nevertheless, it must be done and it must be done now because there is simply no more blood to wring out of the stone.

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