I Told You So

In a prior post I likened myself to Cassandra and Noah, those prophets of old whose foretellings went largely ignored. A recent cluster of occurrences has convinced me even more of the accuracy of my comparison.

First, the Supreme Court is poised to issue a ruling on the Second Amendment concerning the scope of an individual's right to keep and bear arms. I addressed this issue in my book and explained that the history and wording of the Constitution make it clear that the federal government may do nothing to curtail arms ownership, whereas the States retain their "police-power" authority to do so if they wish. I also predicted that if given the chance, the Supreme Court would muck up this crystal-clear distinction between State power (which is presumptive) and federal power (which is enumerated):

Most likely the Second Amendment will come to the same ruin as the First Amendment -- treated as a "grant" to individuals that neither the States nor the federal government may eliminate, but which both may mutilate.

As I predicted, the buzz surrounding the recent oral arguments is that the Justices feel uncomfortable with a "total ban" by the D.C. government, but are likely to conclude that both the State and the federal authorities (of which D.C. is one) will retain the power to enact "reasonable" restraints. So just like the First Amendment -- which the Court has transformed into a weapon to decrease the power of the States while increasing the power of the Tumor -- the Second Amendment will fall victim to the same fate.

Second, when discussing in my book the obscene amounts of unconstitutional "entitlement" spending and other excesses that the Tumor indulges in, I made the following prediction:

As French King Louis XV remarked during the generation preceding his own country's revolution, "it will last my time, and after me, the deluge." Our "entitlement" gluttony will also bring about a deluge, and perhaps sooner than anyone would like to contemplate.

I think current events have borne out this prediction quite well.

Third, I predicted here that the blame for this economic turmoil would not fall on the Tumor, but rather on a patsy such as the "free market" so as to rationalize "even greater controls over our lives," since "[o]ne transgression begets another, ad infinitum." Once again, I am proven correct with this New York Times op/ed by economist Paul Krugman, who blames both the Great Depression and today's troubles on an "unregulated" marketplace in need of governmental control. But maybe I shouldn't feel too proud about this last prediction, since foreseeing that Paul Krugman will get something completely backwards is about as difficult as foreseeing that a bear will . . . relieve itself . . . in the woods.

UPDATE -- I TOLD YOU SO, WITH A VENGEANCE!

Well, well, well . . . the Tumor proposes sweeping new powers in response to the economic crisis that the Tumor itself caused. These criminals are nothing if not predictable. I said it before, and I'll say it again: One trangression begets another, ad infinitum.

The Mentality We Face

The Federal Reserve has acted true to form by bailing out an investment bank, Bear Stearns, in a spasm of officious intermeddling that has typified this creature since it was spawned a century ago. Apart from the inherent injustice of the public sector's rescuing only certain private actors because they are "too important," it appears that the Federal Reserve has violated one of its own regulations in doing so -- by offering a lower interest rate than permitted for such loans.

A comment by one of the Fed's former lawyers (who else?) encapsulates perfectly the lawless mindset of America's owners:

They used what authorities they thought they had and went ahead,'' says Oliver Ireland, a former longtime Fed counsel who is a Morrison & Foerster partner in Washington, D.C. "From a public-policy standpoint, if this is important to do, you wouldn't want to be tripped up by your own regulatory structure.''

Well, there you have it. Public policy will not be bound by laws or rules whenever the policymakers find it necessary. Bid farewell to the rule of law, my friends, as we live under the arbitrary rule of men.

More White Guilt

I mentioned once before that I'm sick and tired of the white guilt bedeviling America, and based on what Barack Obama recently proclaimed, it appears that white guilt isn't going away anytime soon. Barack Obama's attempt at apologia the other day quickly degenerated into just another indictment of America's founders and the suspected, heretical attitudes of private citizens regarding the subject of race. From all appearances, this harangue has greatly endeared Obama to the chattering classes, but it remains to be seen whether the vast majority of voters hate themselves and their ancestors enough to buy into it as well.

According to this unoriginal and official version of history, America was born in a state of dreadful sin and has therefore required the blood of political martyrs such as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., to redeem itself. By stealing the language of Christianity in this manner, Obama and the rest of the political class labor to fashion a mythology of the mundane that banishes all thoughts of transcendence and affixes man's gaze squarely on the drab things of this world -- where the political class reigns supreme and is the only supposed agent of salvation.

America was indeed born imperfect, but it has become more rather than less so -- at least at the beginning only some Americans were slaves, whereas today the fruit of everyone's toil is taken away for our own supposed good, since our masters supposedly know how to dispose of it better than we do. Choosing these masters via the modern sacrament of "free and fair elections" does not make us any less the slaves we have become.

And as long as everyone's speaking openly about race here, where does any government come off telling citizens what racial attitudes to have? If private citizens choose to make decisions based on unenlightened criteria such as race, it is their right to do so, and any attempt by the political sector to coerce change in these attitudes is a moral affront. An ostensibly free society changes and improves by way of voluntary interaction among people and communities, not by political diktat. The only "civil rights revolution" this country ever needed was for the government to refrain from singling people out for disfavorable treatment, and to the extent the government conducts ideological pogroms against disapproved viewpoints, it is destroying rather than advancing that revolution.

In short, Obama is not offering hope, he is offering more of the same: government at war with its own people to re-make them into government's chosen image, a "new man" free of all countervailing conceptions or devotions. Didn't some very unsavory regimes try this during the twentieth century?

Mortgage Bailout Just Another Unlawful Governmental Program

In the wake of the mortgage meltdown, and having discarded the maturity to accept the consequences of poor choices, many homeowning Americans are clamoring for government at all levels to "do something" to bail them out. That "something" looks to be a foreclosure freeze of some sort, whereby States and the Tumor would prohibit lenders from exercising their right to raise interest rates or sell mortgaged homes as security for delinquent loans. Sounds nifty, except for the fact that it blatantly violates the Constitution.

Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution reads as follows:

No State shall . . . pass any . . . Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts . . . .

Note that this is one of the few restrictions that the Constitution places on the States, who normally enjoy the open-ended "police power" to do anything they wish. In other words, the Founders thought this was pretty important. A mortgage loan springs from a contract between a borrower and a lender. Because this is a voluntary agreement between private parties, States have no power to step in after the fact and re-write it for the benefit of one party and to the detriment of another -- which is precisely what these States are proposing.

As usual, though, the New Deal Supreme Court neutered this clear language by inventing a case-by-case balancing test that allows States to destroy the obligations of contracts all the live-long day. (In the meantime, the Court was inventing legions of unwritten restrictions on States under the guise of "interpreting" the Fourteenth Amendment . . . a subject addressed more fully in my book).

What about federal action? Article I, Section 10 applies only to the States, so isn't federal action okay? If you're asking that question, you need to go back and read my earlier post on enumerated powers -- the Tumor cannot do anything unless the Constitution specifically authorizes it, and nothing authorizes the Tumor to re-write a private loan agreement. If that doesn't persuade you, then the Fifth Amendment should suffice, which reads in pertinent part:

No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.

The Tumor cannot destroy any lender's contractual right -- which is a form of property -- to foreclose on a house or raise the interest when the contract authorizes it, unless the Tumor observes due process of law with a full-fledged hearing on the individual matter and, after that, pays adequate compensation. Truth be told, since this taking is not even occurring for a public use (e.g., to build a road or a military base), it should not be allowed even if all procedural niceties are observed.

None of this will receive any earnest discussion or consideration, I'm sure. Just another day in post-constitutional America.