Our Companies

I didn't watch the inauguration.  I had to work.  I only read some excerpts from the speech but one phrase jumped out at me:  "We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs."

What does he mean by "our companies."  Those companies don't belong to us.  They belong to those who put their money at risk and worked to produce goods and services that the public would be willing to pay for.  If Trump wants to prevent companies from pulling up stakes and decamping to other countries he should make this one more attractive for doing business.  That means less government, less taxation, less regulation, not more.

Our companies?  How is that any different from "you didn't build that?"

Congressional Intoxication

98 years ago today the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, outlawing alcoholic beverages throughout the United States.  Just under fifteen years later it was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment.  The story of prohibition is familiar and most frequently employed as a cautionary tale against governmental overreach banning activities that enjoy substantial popularity, like recreational drugs.

I think the more important lesson is to remember a time when the federal government recognized there were limits on its power.  After all, if Congress wanted to put the whole country on the wagon, why not just pass a law?

One hundred years ago Congress still respected the Constitution.  And the American people did too.  Congress was authorized to act in a few areas defined in the Constitution, mostly in Article I, Section 8.  And banning the "manufacture, sale, or transportation" of booze was not among them.  So prohibition required a Constitutional amendment.

About the time that prohibition was being repealed, Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats were pushing a new view of the Constitution.  They didn't look at it as a law conferring some powers and withholding others.  Rather, it was a malleable instrument that could be bent to justify any power the federal government wished to arrogate to itself.  The favored vehicle was the clause empowering Congress to regulate "commerce among the several states."  The New Dealers argued, and their allies in the Court agreed, that just about any activity could be said to have an impact on interstate commerce and thus came within Congress' jurisdiction.

There is no Constitutional distinction to be made between banning alcohol and banning marijuana.  Yet it goes almost without notice that Congress has done the latter by ordinary legislation, without availing itself of the amendment process to give it that authority.

In 1933 Congress gave the country permission to start drinking again.  Coincidentally, at the same time it began to imbibe the intoxicating brew of limitless authority.  We need to put Congress back on the wagon.

The Long Game

One sign of the declining maturity of the American voter is the extent to which he is impressed by the electoral successes of his chosen candidates or party with seemingly no thought of what use those candidates make of the trust that has been conferred upon them.  I should perhaps revise that statement because I may be jumping to an unjustified conclusion.

I spend considerable time, probably far more time than is good for my mental well-being, reading through the comments threads on internet opinion and news articles.  And I have no way of knowing to what extent the attitudes expressed in those comments reflect those of the voting public at large.  But the comments reveal a mean-spiritedness, a contempt for the public good and a total lack of respect for the responsibility we have as voters to be educated about the values that shaped the founding of this country and the issues that currently confront it.

This phenomenon manifests itself most prominently at the moment in the words of Donald Trump's most devoted followers.  Like rabid sports fans who derive some sense of self-worth from the performance of local teams even though they themselves play no part in that performance, Trump followers seem to be under the influence of some mind-altering drug ever since the election.  They seem to believe themselves members of some privileged class with the authority to silence all dissenters with childish epithets, profanity and over-the-top verdicts on their motives and fates.

The fact that Trump won the election means more to them than whether or not he actually follows through on the positions he appeared to champion during the campaign.  For example, before November 8, Trump couldn't pronounce Hillary Clinton's name without putting the word "Crooked" before it.  His rallies were punctuated with chants of "Lock her up!"  He once told Clinton to her face, during a debate, that if he were president, she would be behind bars.

What a difference a day makes.  In his first post-election interview he said that the Clintons are "good people" and that he doesn't want to see them hurt.  Those of us who had concluded, based on his history, that Trump has no fixed principles, felt vindicated.  He says what he thinks he needs to say to get what he wants at any given moment.  The Trump worshipers who praised his mastery of the Art of the Deal didn't realize that they were the ones being played.  Trump wanted their votes.  Now that he's gotten the votes, he doesn't need the voters anymore.

But the Trump supporters don't seem to care.  They possess a strange mental flexibility that allows them to celebrate his new positions even if they're 180 degrees from the positions they cheered 2 months ago.  Because Trump is a winner and they want to believe they are associated with him and his victories.  Meanwhile, the question of what is the best policy for preserving a free republic goes completely unaddressed.