Linguistic Corruption

Some sixty years ago, George Orwell already had detected the corruption of the English language stemming from the steady politicization of society. Anyone who possesses the ability to think clearly on his own represents an obstacle to the arbitrary impulses of the mob, which technology brought to ascendancy during the twentieth century and which continues to destroy any objective measure of truth or justice standing in its path (as Ortega y Gasset explained in similarly prophetic fashion). As truth succumbs to expediency, it follows that the very ability to perceive and communicate truth withers as well.

One of the symptoms of this linguistic leprosy manifests itself in the unending debates over taxes, many of which occur at the federal level, and one of which is unfolding in Florida right now. After experiencing a windfall in property-tax revenues over the past six years – a windfall far surpassing the rate of inflation – it turns out that every level of government in Florida has spent the surplus money and now balks at lowering the property tax in any meaningful way. Politicians and their sycophants in the media fret whether the engorged governmental apparatus can “afford” better tax cuts, and whether it is prudent to “give” Floridians too much tax relief. Such corrupted language has obtained frequent currency in American discourse, signaling the abject defeat of a fundamental truth: tax money does not belong to the government. A clear conception of this truth would banish the notion that the government can “give” anything to anybody, since the government possesses nothing of its own in the first place.

At best, government acts a trustee of money that belongs to the private citizenry, and as a trustee, the government is charged with collecting and spending the money only to discharge its narrowly-prescribed functions. But of course, with the advent of government as soup kitchen, librarian, babysitter, school marm, curator, and property baron – rather than mere policeman or mediator – is it any wonder that Americans have lost their liberty as well as their language?

UPDATE:

While driving home from the gym just now, I caught a snippet of an interview on NPR with a professor of African Studies at Syracuse University. Our good professor excoriates the government of Mozambique for applying “neoliberal” policies over the last decade, which he paused to explain as the terrible notion that the citizens of Mozambique should pay for their own basic needs rather than have the government provide them. This man is a professor at a major university, yet he fails to grasp that citizens pay for everything the government does. The question is not whether citizens or the government will pay; the question is whether citizens decide how to spend their own money, or whether the government takes their money and their discretion away from them. It’s times like these that I realize I would never qualify for a professorship in latter-day America, incapable as I am of engaging in doublethink.

“War On Terror” Is Nothing New

A lot of hand-wringing is happening these days over whether America and the Constitution can survive the reign of Jefe Máximo Bush. I have to admit that this makes me laugh, revealing as it does the monumental misperception that America was hunky-dory and law-abiding before those eeeevil neoconservatives descended on the White House. Sorry to inform you, but all of the maladies currently confronting us – warrantless searches, undeclared wars, repression of civil liberties, and the depletion of the Treasury – are nothing new. Instead, this “War On Terror” is simply the latest in a parade of narratives meant to prop up the unlawful governmental activity that has plagued American life for at least three generations. And to tell you the truth, a bogeyman that is faceless and timeless (“terrorists”) is a stroke of narrative genius when compared to the old Soviet Union, which suffered from the dreadful disadvantage of being a tangible foe that could expire and thereby rob Uncle Sam of its fearmongering grist.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Congress has not declared war since the 1940s, so Bush’s illegal exercise of the war power does not distinguish him from any other president going back to Democrat Harry Truman (who unilaterally launched a “police action” into Korea that has never technically ended). In times of war, governmental outrages do become more overt, such as during World War I when American citizens were imprisoned at the behest of Democrat Woodrow Wilson for expressing unpopular views (e.g., Eugene V. Debs) or during World War II at the behest of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt when Americans were “interned” for having suspicious ancestry (e.g., Japanese-Americans). During the Cold War, before the FISA court even existed, the Executive Branch was conducting warrantless searches and surveillance of people within the United States, and on the assertion that the President has inherent constitutional authority to do so. Conscious as I am of American history, the plaintive cries about how Republican Bush is warmongering, spying on citizens, or disregarding the FISA process do not faze me.

Even times of peace in modern America – such the supposed halcyon days of Bill Clinton – are typified by rampant federal lawlessness that, while less overt, is equally outrageous. What does it say about Americans when they consider “good times” to consist of the following things:

• forcibly re-distributing our wealth and slowly bankrupting us in the process (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.)

• charging thousands of people with federal “crimes” that lack any constitutional foundation (e.g., the “war on drugs”)

• usurping our property without paying us any compensation (e.g., freezing development in the name of snail darters and stagnant ponds)

• compelling us to subsidize illegal-alien invaders (e.g., the death of California’s Proposition 187)

• taxing and regulating us into serfdom (but then again, even serfs kept two-thirds of their income)

That is not an America I am eager to return to, and therefore I am not champing at the bit to expel Bush and company from power so that we can rush headlong back to “normalcy.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the dam has already broken, so let’s focus on salvage rather than on plugging a demolished dike. For me, salvage equates to secession, which remains viable only so long as something resembling a localized community continues to exist. If the Tumor successfully pumps enough illegal aliens into our midst, then Anytown U.S.A. will lose its identity and slide into irretrievable Third Worldism.

Moving Pains

My sparse posts have grown even sparser lately because of a watershed event in a man's life: moving into my own home. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears have gone into this, but not so many as to crowd out yet another lesson on the evils of modern governmental excess. When purchasing a washing machine for the homestead, I discovered that federal regulations have destroyed the efficiency of most models, obligating me to shell out extra cash for a model that avoids the need to wash the same load multiple times.

Readers of my blog should be able to pinpoint automatically a constitutional transgression here. In case you're new and don't follow me, the regulation dictates a private activity occurring entirely within the confines of a single State, which means that the State (Florida, in this instance) has sole presumptive authority to act here. In the absence of an express grant of power to Congress to legislate on this type of activity, the regulation therefore is unconstitutional vis-à-vis the Tenth Amendment.

In typical fashion, the official excuse for the regulation is surely the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause, which the New Deal and Warren-era Supreme Court perverted to include activity that is neither interstate nor commerce. But even if we imitated America's law students by accepting that nonsense at face value, there is another problem here: a bureaucracy rather than Congress created the regulation. Since Article I of the Constitution dedicates the legislative power only to Congress, this rulemaking represents an unconstitutional delegation of power outside the legislative branch.

We've seen this brand of misconduct before, such as whenever Congress illegally transfers its unique war-declaring power to the president (a consistent practice since the end of World War II). Although washing machines are hardly as weighty as war and peace, there are tens of thousands of similar illegal regulations pumped out of Washington on a daily basis, regulations that micromanage every last detail of your daily existence. In effect, Congress has decided that it cannot possibly consider and pass laws fast enough to keep our freedom in check, so it has "outsourced" that power to legions of feckless bureaucrats. What goes completely forgotten is that maybe, just maybe, the Founders intentionally handicapped Congress so that we could pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness however we see fit.