Here come higher gas and electric
prices.
Please be sure to thank the EPA, the Interior Department, and
don't forget to thank the White House.
David
ORourke54.htm
"There is
no virtue in compulsory government charity, and
there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who
portrays himself as
"caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the
government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's
willing to try to
do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a
voter who takes pride
in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good
with his own money
-- if a gun is held to his head."--P.
J.
O'Rourke
-------- Original Message --------
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![Morning Bell]() |
| 12/27/2010 |
|
Big
Government Strikes Back
The 111th Congress, the
most
unpopular Congress in the recorded history
if the United States, ended last week
with a flurry of legislative activity that
set a record for a
lame duck Congress. Some in the media are
eager to make the case that last week’s
events portend a new
era of bipartisan accomplishment, led by
the White House, that will
extend into the 112th Congress. They are
half right.
Last week’s events in Washington were a
preview of lawmaking in 2011, but Congress
was not where the real action was. While the
media was distracted
by the last breaths of a defeated leftist
majority in Congress, it was the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC), the
Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), and the Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS) that gave true
picture of how the Obama Administration will
advance their agenda
in 2011.
First on Tuesday, the HHS unveiled new
price controls for
the health insurance industry. Using new
powers granted by Obamacare, HHS Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius announced
that starting next year, health insurance
companies must
receive permission from the Obama
Administration before they can raise rates
by more than 10 percent. The experts at HHS
believe these price controls
will help decrease rising health care costs.
They are wrong. Price
controls
attack the symptoms of runaway costs, not
the cause. As any Econ 101 student can
tell you, they will cause only shortages,
not better
health care. This is only one of thousands
of new powers Obamacare granted the HHS.
Left unchecked, there are many new health
care regulations to
come.
Later on Tuesday, the FCC released its “net
neutrality†rules,
which will allow the federal government to
begin regulating the Internet. This despite
opposition from Congress and a contrary
federal court ruling. Dissenting FCC
commissioner Robert
McDowell described the unprecedented power
grab last week: “Nothing is broken that
needs fixing, however. The Internet has been
open and
freedom-enhancing since it was spun off from
a government research project in the early
1990s. Its nature as a diffuse and dynamic
global network of
networks defies top-down authority. Ample
laws to protect consumers already exist.â€
And just how competent is the Internet’s
new rulers? Just
before the FCC decision, visitors to the
commission’s Web site couldn’t even
access the 1,900
pages of documents pertaining to the
net neutrality ruling. The
very commission seeking to regulate the
Internet saw its Web site go down due to
“scheduled maintenance.â€
Then on Thursday the EPA announced that it
will begin regulating
power
plants and oil refineries in an
attempt to stop global warming. The new
regulations will seek to cut greenhouse gas
emissions by making it more
expensive to turn fossil fuels into energy.
But the Obama Administration did not stop
there. Later in the day, Interior Secretary
Ken Salazar announced
that the Bureau of Land Management was
issuing new rules that
would make it harder to develop natural
resources on government-owned land. Both of
these measures will not only drive up the
cost of electricity but
will also make us more dependent on foreign
sources of energy.
The ability of the Obama Administration to
step up their leftist agenda even after it
was thoroughly “shellacked†at the polls
is not an accident.
It is the purposeful design of the
Progressive movement, which has been working
to undermine the Founders’ vision of our
republic for over a century
now. Thomas G. West, contributor to The
Progressive Revolution in
Politics and Political Science, explains:
The Founders thought that laws
should be made by a body of elected
officials with roots in local communities.
They should not be
“experts,†but they should have
“most wisdom to discern, and most virtue
to pursue, the common good of the
society†(Madison). The wisdom in
question was the kind on display in The
Federalist, which relentlessly
dissected the political errors of the
previous decade in terms
accessible to any person of intelligence
and common sense.
The Progressives did not intend to abolish
democracy, to be sure. They wanted the
people’s will to be more efficiently
translated into government
policy. But what democracy meant for the
Progressives is that the people would take
power out of the hands of locally elected
officials and political
parties and place it instead into the
hands of the central government, which
would in turn establish administrative
agencies run by neutral experts,
scientifically trained, to translate the
people’s inchoate will into concrete
policies.
This will be the fight of 2011: the
unelected central planning “experts†of
the Obama Administration versus the newly
elected House of
Representatives and state and local
governments. The people are not powerless.
Congress still has the power of the purse
and can withhold funding for
implementing Obamacare or writing global
warming regulations. There is also the Congressional
Review Act, which allows Congress to
review and overrule
regulations issued by government agencies.
State and local governments can also thwart
the federal administrative
state by asserting their rights
whenever possible. We
can return power from Washington back to the
people. Saying good-bye to the 111th
Congress is a great first step.
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