Posted on 11/03/2022 5:13:54 PM PDT by Twotone
Next week, the Supreme Court will have a chance to save the free market economy from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Even as the court reins in the administrative state, the FTC is advancing new rules and novel theories that stretch the limits of its mandate. Under its progressive chair, Lina Khan, the FTC wants to cancel the gig economy, cripple the ad-supported internet, and address racial justice, rather than simply protect consumers.
In Axon Enterprise v. FTC, the court could take a big step toward cabining the FTC within its statutory and constitutional authority. Axon itself involves a narrow procedural question of whether someone can raise certain constitutional challenges to the FTC directly in federal court, without having to wade through years of administrative processes.
As explained in a new paper, however, the case’s import is much broader. If companies can bring the FTC into court anytime the agency exceeds its authority, the courts can prevent the FTC from imposing illegal rules at the outset — a critical tool given the scope of the FTC’s agenda. Even more importantly, the court could lay the groundwork to revisit the constitutionality of the FTC and much of the administrative state. Constitutionality Remains Open to Debate
In 1914, Congress created the FTC as a multimember body with features of all three branches of government. The FTC could prosecute, adjudicate, and even legislate rules of conduct. Although President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive, supported the new agency, even he wanted to avoid empowering a “smug lot of experts.” As Wilson explained, “God forbid that in a democratic country we should resign the task and give the government over to experts.”
In 1935, the Supreme Court upheld the agency’s structure because it believed, the agency had a limited mandate.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
Just the opposite of what Joe Biden said he'd do.
We’ve put our top men on it. Top men.
“Section. 8.
The Congress shall have Power
....
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes
....
Section. 9.
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.”
The positioning of the slave importation clause within the Constitution makes it clear the Commerce Clause did not empower Congress to require all workers (including slaves) be paid $15/hour (or otherwise regulate their employment).
Wilson was a liar. He did the opposite of what he said.
Btw, this case has tremendous ramifications. Whereas Dodd ruled on federal moral overreach, this case can reign in federal regulatory over reach.
“Growing evidence suggests that market power now looks to be an increasingly systemic problem across the economy, so we should generally focus our resources on the most significant actors, where our enforcement actions can have the greatest impact on the everyday lives of Americans.”
“The second area I’d like us to prioritize addressing is dominant intermediaries and extractive business
models. Research documents how gatekeepers and dominant middlemen across the economy have been
able to use their critical market position to hike fees, dictate terms, and protect and extend their market
power. Business models that centralize control and profits while outsourcing risk, liability, and costs also
warrant particular scrutiny, given that deeply asymmetric relationships between the controlling firm and
dependent entities can be ripe for abuse.”
Agreed. But it gets better than that. It is true that Wilson was a liar, but keep in mind, Wilson was trying to take the high ground in this speech by calling out technocrat statist Theodore Roosevelt. This was from his September 2nd Labor Day campaign speech.
The full text of this speech is not available online so I can only excerpt for copyright, but it's actually quite hilarious to read when you think about it.
And to think, to this day most conservatives think Roosevelt is also a conservative. Wilson said:
I don't mean as a lawyer, for while I was a lawyer, I have repented. But I mean in the courts of public opinion wherever I am allowed, as I am indulgently allowed today, to stand on a platform and talk to attentive audiences — for you are most graciously attentive — I want to constitute myself the spokesman so far as I have the proper table of contents for the people whom I wish to serve; for the whole strength of politics is not in the leader but in the followers. By leading I do not mean telling other people what they have got to do. I [mean] finding out what the interests of the community are agreed to be, and then trying my level best to find the methods of solution by common counsel. That is the only feasible program of social uplift that I can imagine, and, therefore, I am bound in conscience to fight everything that crystallizes things so at the center that you can't break in.It is amazing to me that public-spirited, devoted men in this country have not seen that the program of the third party proclaims purposes and in the same breath provides an organization of government which makes the carrying out of those purposes impossible. I would rather postpone my sympathy for social reform until I had got in a position to make things happen. And I am not in a position to make things happen until I am part of a free organization which can say to every interest in the United States: "You come into this conference room on an equality with every other interest in the United States, and you are going to speak here with open doors. There is to be no whispering behind the hand. There is to be no private communication. What you can't afford to let the country hear had better be left unsaid."
What I fear, therefore, is a government of experts. God forbid that in a democratic country we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be [scientifically] taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job? Because if we don't understand the job, then we are not a free people. We ought to resign our free institutions and go to school to somebody and find out what it is we are about. I want to say I have never heard more penetrating debate of public questions than I have sometimes been privileged to hear in clubs of workingmen; because the man who is down against the daily problem of fife doesn't talk about it in rhetoric; he talks about it in facts. And the only thing I am interested in is facts. I don't know anything else that is as solid to stand on.
We don't really know TR this way today. I suppose someone is going to come in and say "Oh you trust Wilson now?"
No. It is an objective truth without the words of Woodrow Wilson - We can study Roosevelt and see it for ourselves. Theodore Roosevelt is the reason we have the deep state. Wilson mainly came in, and expanded what TR already gave us. And we'll never get rid of the deep state until we get sober and stop gawking at human interest bits of TR's strenuous life and come to terms with the full ramification Teddy's progressive record. TR was simply a technocrat and loved the bureaucracies that he created. That's just how the facts align. Ignore it or learn from it.
Getting rid of a tree means getting at the roots and the trunk. Just chopping branches isn't working.
However, to be fair to Wilson, whom I rate in the bottom 10 of presidents, he did NOT “create” either the income tax or the Federal Reserve. Both were done when he came in. He signed the Fed act, but it was 20 years in the making by small-town “country” bankers, not by five guys on Jekyll Island; and the Income Tax, let’s all remember, was a Constitutional Amendment, so regardless of what anyone thinks of it, it was hugely popular at the time or it could never have gotten passed as an Amendment.
Good post.
I always characterize TR’s “commissions” as “politics by other means.”
Agreed. This is perhaps the most important contribution of TR to the deep state of all of them.
Progressive taxation was a dead and done deal after Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. was decided. Using the power of his presidency, Roosevelt revived the income tax issue in 1906 and kept raising it, and railed on it intensely during the 1912 campaign to keep it alive. In 1909, Roosevelt’s hand picked successor Taft was the one who pushed for a constitutional amendment.
By the time Wilson comes to office, the whole thing is already done except for one or two states, I think. Wilson of course favored it so criticism of Wison in the area is fair. But this is all because of Theodore Roosevelt, we have the IRS and are stuck with it because of deep state Teddy.
TR had an influence, no doubt. But you cannot ignore the fact that the tariff-—in Congress’s eyes-—was simply too much work.
In 1908-1912, Congress did almost nothing BUT the Tariff. The schedules were getting massive. Don’t ignore the fact that whatever else it was, the income tax was (at the time) a VERY simple substitute. One page, more or less. Congress didn’t have to do a thing-—the IRS did it all.
This is true but there’s the progressive ideology limitation.
What I mean by that is the progressives were so desperate to make government bigger, and progressives then are no different than progressives today - they will use any excuse and produce whatever propaganda necessary in order to achieve their purpose.
To whatever extent the rules of Tariff were onerous, they could have simplified it. They simply chose not to. They wanted an IRS. They needed it to satiate their love affair with government.
They’re pretty much doing this exact same thing with healthcare, today. They’ve so convoluted healthcare and they promise, - they PROMISE that a single payer public option will be oh so much cheaper and oh so much more simple to handle. They promise it.
It’s the arsonist also being the fireman.
Progressives in the 1900s knew: they weren’t going to get big government unless they had a big way to fund it. That’s why they needed the income tax.
And back to TR - yeah, I know it wasn’t solely him. The GOP in those days was the progressive party moreso than the democrats as it pertains to bureaucratic despotism. When TR split off the Bull Moose party, the vast majority of the people that went with him were republicans. They were progressive republicans. Which is why when the Bull Moose progressive party collapsed, the majority of those people (And TR himself) reluctantly retreated like losers back into the GOP. They had already been progressive republicans before so it wasn’t a big deal to become a progressive republican once more.
The point is, I’m probably repeating myself here - a system that the progressives want to destroy and replace with government, or bigger government, more government, they will purposefully sabotage it over time so as to make their hand picked chosen replacement or successor look better.
I guarantee you that’s what they did. If we had a large body of conservative historians, I have no doubt that a little research in this would expose that that’s exactly what they did. They’re progressives, they can’t help but be statists and micromanage everything.
It’s like Rush used to say on his show. A tiger is a tiger. A progressive is going to micromanage, they’re going to build bureaucracies, and they’re going to destroy everybody’s life. And for that reason, the tariff had to go. What better way than to sabotage it.
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