IT BEARS EMPHASIZING—THE UTOPIAN mastermind seeks control over the individual. The individual is to be governed, not represented. His personal interests are of no interest. They are dismissed as selfish, unjust, and destructive. Societal deconstruction and transformation are not possible if tens of millions of individuals are free to live their lives and pursue their interests without constant torment, coercion, and if necessary, repression. In America, breaking from the past means breaking the individual’s spirit. He must be made to bend to the demands of the masterminds. He must be reshaped to serve the greater good.
There are those who are hypnotized by the utopian message, which sounds much like Karl Marx’s false historicism of the material dialectic—that is, of the two-class society, where the rich bourgeois capitalists victimize the hardworking proletariat laborers, with the latter eventually destroying the former, thereby setting the stage for the end of human struggle. This kind of class warfare, pitting straw men against straw men, is now a routine and regular part of the American political dialogue. Yet, in practice, for the utopian it is better that all be poor than some be wealthy; that all suffocate from laws and regulations than some breathe free. But equality of this sort—of behavioral conformity and equivalent economic outcomes—is not the natural state of man. It is not America’s history. From the first settlers to today’s immigrants, America has rightly been considered exceptional—the land of individual opportunity, not the land of haves and have-nots. In America, the wealthy can fall and do, and the poor can rise and do. There is no bourgeois-versus-proletariat standoff but, instead, an immense prosperity born of an open society and economic market system that know no class structure. However, the false utopianism of radical egalitarianism incites jealousy among some if not many, divides and distracts the people, and furthers the prospects of mastermind control by changing the society’s psychology and national character.
There are also those who delusively if not enthusiastically surrender their liberty for the mastermind’s false promises of human and societal perfectibility. He hooks them with financial bribes in the form of “entitlements.” And he makes incredible claims about indefectible health, safety, educational, and environmental policies, the success of which is to be measured not in the here and now but in the distant future.
For these reasons and more, some become fanatics for the cause. They take to the streets and, ironically, demand their own demise as they protest against their own self-determination and for ever more autocracy and authoritarianism. When they vote, they vote to enchain not only their fellow citizens but, unwittingly, themselves. Paradoxically, as the utopia metastasizes and the society ossifies, elections become less relevant. More and more decisions are made by masterminds and their experts, who substitute their self-serving and dogmatic judgments—which are proclaimed righteous and compassionate—for the individual’s self-interests and best interests.
These masterminds—the politicians, judges, and bureaucrats—have become America’s version of Plato’s philosopher-kings and guardians, with obvious exceptions. As Plato wrote in the Republic, “Philosophers because of the love of Forms [a perfect thing or being], become lovers of proper order in the sensible world as well. They wish to imitate the harmony of the Forms, and so in their relations with others they are loath to do anything that violates the proper order among people” (404). Moreover, only they are able to know “the Good” (the ultimate truth). They are wise and learned beyond the capabilities of the people they rule.
But from where do the masterminds acquire their superhuman qualities? Are they born with them? Do they materialize upon election or appointment to high office? The truth is that no individual or assemblies of individuals are up to the task of managing society. They never have been and they never will be. They do not know what they do not know. As Friedrich Hayek explained, “Economics has from its origins been concerned with how an extended order of human interaction comes into existence through a process of variation, winnowing and sifting far surpassing our capacity to design.… In our economic activities we do not know the needs which we satisfy nor the sources of things which we get. Almost all of us serve people whom we do not know, and even of whose existence we are ignorant; and we in turn constantly live on the services of other people of whom we know nothing. All this is possible because we stand in a great framework of institutions and traditions—economic, legal, and moral—into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we never made, and which we have never understood in the sense which we understand how the things that we manufacture function.”1 There is symbiosis to the civil society in which individuals participate in an intricate system of infinite voluntary economic, social, and cultural interactions that are motivated by their needs and desires within the community.
Thus central planning is not about rationality and reason. It is not about knowledge and experience. It is about illegitimately exercising power over others. It is about the deceit of moral relativism and situationalism. It is about the coercive imposition of a hopelessly impossible utopian ideal—an ideal that is complex and ambiguous; fixed and elusive; comprehensive and piecemeal; and abrupt and gradual. However, its direction is certain, steady, and one-way—tyranny, in one form or another. It requires nonstop social engineering and intervention, in matters big and small, for it concedes no failures, acknowledges no bounds, and tolerates no deviation from dogma, which is said to be futuristic, paradisiacal, and preordained.
Post-constitutional America bears the resemblance and qualities of a utopian enterprise. Its exact form and nature elude definitional precision, but its outlines are familiar enough. It shares ambitions, albeit inexactly, not only with the hierarchical caste system in Plato’s Republic, where the politicians and judges behave increasingly as philosopher-kings, federal bureaucrats serve as guardian enforcers, and “the masses” exist to serve the greater good of the state, but also with the artificial humanism of Thomas More’s Utopia, where labor is managed, conformity imposed, and no one goes without; the omnipresence of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, where the individual must obey the commands of the omnipotent sovereign; and the Marx-Engels class-based radical egalitarianism and its pursuit of the inevitable workers’ paradise. Over the course of the last hundred years or so, the counterrevolution has achieved significant success. There is no denying that America has become more utopian in character and less republican. In fact, it is more accurate to describe modern America not as a constitutional republic, although it retains certain constitutional and republican traits, but a utopia—an Ameritopia. To the extent this continues, and whether or where it ends, I cannot say, for I do not know.
The Founders would be appalled at the nature of the federal government’s transmutation and the squandering of the American legacy. The federal government has become the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Its size and reach are vast. Its interventions are illimitable. As I am constrained by time, space, and the human condition, it is not possible to set out an all-inclusive examination of the state of things. However, certain examples, both general in nature and common to daily life, should help prove the point to those who remain open to reason and keen on liberty. If further evidence is desired, it abounds everywhere and permeates everyday existence. One need only make the effort to observe it.
FEDERAL TAXING, SPENDING, AND DEBT
Among the ten tenets in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels include “[a] heavy progressive or graduated income tax” (42). In America, the federal government imposes a staggering burden on a small fraction of taxpayers, as reflected in data released by the Internal Revenue Service for 2008. The top 1 percent of income earners paid 38 percent of personal income taxes while earning 20 percent of pretax income. The top 5 percent of income earners paid 58.7 percent of personal income taxes while earning 34.7 percent of pretax income. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of income earners paid only 2.7 percent of the total tax burden while earning 12.75 percent of the total pretax income. In other words, the top 5 percent of income earners paid the majority of the total tax burden and the bottom half of income earners paid almost nothing.2
Gross domestic product (GDP) represents the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States in a given year. In 1930, the federal government spent 3.4 percent of GDP. In 1937 and 1939, in the midst of the Great Depression, federal expenditures consumed 8.6 percent and 10.3 percent of the GDP, respectively. During 1943 and 1944, in the midst of World War II, expenditures were 43.5 percent and 43.6 percent, respectively. In 1948, after the war, the percentage dropped to 11.5 percent. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, federal expenditures as a percentage of GDP hovered between 15 percent and 17 percent. During the 1970s and 1980s, these numbers ranged between 17 percent and 19 percent. In the 1990s, the percentage varied between 15 percent and 19 percent. By 2000 and 2001, there was a small drop to 14.8 percent in both years. Starting in 2009, the percentage reached 21.1 percent—the highest percentage of federal spending since 1946.3 And in 2010, federal expenditures jumped to 24 percent of GDP.4
Moreover, at the end of 2008, the federal debt as a percentage of GDP was at 40 percent.5 In 2010, it jumped to over 60 percent.6 For 2011, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the federal debt will reach about 70 percent of GDP, the highest level since right after World War II, and it will exceed 100 percent of GDP by 2012. Shortly thereafter, “the growing imbalance between revenues and spending, combined with spiraling interest payments, would swiftly push debt to higher and higher levels.…”7
Furthermore, the most recent estimate of total unfunded obligations in dollar terms—for which no resources are currently available and will never be available—is $61.6 trillion, or $528,000 per household.8 This includes $25 trillion in unfunded obligations for Medicare, $21.4 trillion for Social Security, and $9.4 trillion for servicing the debt.9
REGULATIONS AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE
Congress has established a massive administrative state that serves as an unconstitutional fourth governmental branch and exercises legislative, executive, and judicial powers. It employs an army of more than two million bureaucrats who work for an untold number of departments, agencies, bureaus, divisions, boards, etc. They are highly compensated, with average salary and benefits more than double what employees in the private sector earn.10 Yet the administrative state operates mostly on autopilot, with minimal oversight by the constitutionally established branches of government. It monitors daily life and attempts to mechanically extinguish risk, dissimilarity, and choice, as well as that which has become routine and acceptable, in pursuit of societal perfection.
The administrative state issues thousands of regulations and rulings every year, which have the force of law. The Competitive Enterprise Institute reported that the 2010 Federal Register, the official compendium of federal rules, totaled 81,405 pages, a record high. Since 2001, 38,700 final regulations have been promulgated. In 2010 alone, 3,573 rules were enacted by federal agencies.11 An evaluation by economists Nicole V. Crain and W. Mark Crain determined that private sector regulatory compliance costs amounted to $1.752 trillion in 2008, absorbing 11.9 percent of the total gross domestic product of the nation.12 Moreover, The Heritage Foundation found that the number of criminal offenses in the United States Code increased from 3,000 in the early 1980s to 4,000 by 2000, to over 4,450 by 2008. But the total number of criminal offenses is actually unknown even to the federal government, which establishes them. “Scores of federal departments and agencies have created so many criminal offenses that the Congressional Research Service (CRS) [the research arm of Congress] … admitted that it was unable to even count all of the offenses. The Service’s best estimate? ‘Tens of thousands.’ … Congress’s own experts do not have a clear understanding of the size and scope of federal criminalization.”13
However, even an abridged examination of the federal regulatory regime reveals the extent of its tentacles. For example, when constructing a home, federal rules set standards for insulation, gypsum board, treated lumber, windows, pipes, ventilation ducts, flooring, paint, etc. Homebuilders must comply with the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act.14 If water on the property meets the Clean Water Act definition of wetland, a permit must be secured by the property owner from the Army Corps of Engineers before the wet area can be filled with dirt. The definition of wetland is broad enough to include land that is not actually a wetland, such as “those areas that are inundated or saturated by surface or groundwater at a frequency and duration sufficient to support, and that under normal circumstances do support, a prevalence of vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil conditions.”15
Inside the home, the federal government regulates washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, dishwasher detergents, microwave ovens, toilets, showerheads, heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, freezers, furnace fans and boilers, ceiling fans, dehumidifiers, lightbulbs, certain renovations, fitness equipment, clothing, baby cribs, pacifiers, rattles and toys, marbles, latex balloons, matchbooks, bunk beds, mattresses, mattress pads, televisions, radios, cell phones, iPods and other digital media devices, computer components, video recording devices, speakers, batteries, battery chargers, power supplies, stereo equipment, garage door openers, lawn mowers, lawn darts, pool slides, etc. The federal government also regulates toothpaste, deodorant, dentures, and most things in and around the medicine cabinet.16
Like the home, so much of the automobile is regulated by the federal government. The Heartland Institute reported that federal mandates set standards for “automobiles’ engines, bumpers, headrests, seat belts, door latches, brakes, fuel systems, and windshields” as well as side-door guard beams and energy-absorbing steering columns.17 Add to this airbags, a centered/rear brake light, and electronic stability control system. Moreover, the Cato Institute reported that Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards require new car fleets to average 35.5 mpg by 2016. For an automobile manufacturer, it means for every 15-mpg model, five models will have to average 50 mpg.18 The federal government is requiring that by 2025, automobile car fleets average 54.5 mpg.19 Not only will the cost of these new standards be enormous,20 but CAFE standards have resulted in tens of thousands more deaths and injuries, since they require vehicles to be lighter.21
For years the federal government mandated that automobiles be sold only with labels on their windows that displayed their fuel efficiency levels. Beginning in 2013, all new passenger cars and trucks will be required to have more extensive window labels describing: emissions of smog-forming pollution and carbon dioxide, as well as a 1–10 rating showing how a model’s emission levels compared to other new vehicles; projected annual fuel costs for each vehicle; each vehicle’s fuel costs over a five-year period compared to other new vehicles; projected city, highway, and combined miles-per-gallon fuel efficiency performance; a separate estimate of how many gallons will be required to fuel a vehicle for one hundred miles of travel; and labels for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and electric vehicles, comparing pollution levels with gasoline-powered vehicles.22 The federal government requires that the labels be “useful” and “easy-to-read.”23
The federal government has instituted overlapping review processes and regulations, involving multiple agencies, discouraging the development of the fuel that powers the automobile.24 Once discovered and processed, the producers or importers of gasoline, diesel fuels, or fuel additives must register their products with the federal government before introducing them into the market.25 They must ensure that their gasoline is blended with the requisite percentages of specific types of biofuels. They are required to produce seasonal and regional variants. For renewable fuels, they must generate specific identification numbers to track their production and ensure compliance with mandated quotas.26
In addition to the scores of federal regulations respecting the transportation of fuel, the retail gasoline station that dispenses the fuel to the consumer is also regulated by the federal government. The “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants: Gasoline Dispensing Facilities” imposes requirements for seals and vapor locks and regulates underground storage tanks.27 The retailer must also post the automotive fuel rating of all automotive fuel sold to customers. One label must be placed on each face of each dispenser through which automotive fuel is sold. If the retailer does not blend the gasoline with other gasoline, he must post the octane rating of the gasoline consistent with the octane rating certified to him by the dealer. If the gasoline is blended with other gasoline, he must post the rating consistent with his determination of the average, weighted by volume, of the octane ratings certified to him for each gasoline in the blend, or consistent with the lowest octane rating certified to him for any gasoline in the blend. In cases involving gasoline, the octane rating must be shown as a whole or half number equal to or less than the number certified to the retailer or determined by him. If he does not blend alternative liquid automotive fuels, he must post consistent with the automotive fuel rating certified to him. If he blended alternative liquid automotive fuels, he must possess a reasonable basis, consisting of competent and reliable evidence, for the automotive fuel rating he posts for the blend.28
Incidentally, that cinnamon doughnut the gasoline retailer sells in the snack food section of his store is supplied by a bakery that must comply with federal regulations requiring that all pulverizing of sugar or spice grinding be done in accordance with sugar dust limitation standards.29 Of course, there are all kinds of regulations that apply to virtually all other food items he stocks on his shelves.
Indeed, not just food, but food labeling and packaging are subject to extensive federal regulation. New mandates require food labels “to disclose net contents, identity of commodity, and name and place of business of the product’s manufacturer, packer, or distributor.” Labels must also include the presence of major food allergens. Certain terms like “low sodium,” “reduced fat,” and “high fiber” must meet strict government definitions. The federal government has defined other terms used for nutritional content including “low,” “reduced,” “high,” “free,” “lean,” “extra lean,” “good source,” “less,” and “lite.” If a food is described as “organic” it must meet the federal government’s definition.30 The food industry will also face new federal rules for “front-of-pack” calorie and nutrition labels and federally recommended nutritional criteria for foods making “dietary guidance” statements. For example, “Eat two cups of fruit a day for good health.” Federal regulations also involve “food contact materials,” including cutlery, dishes, glasses, cups, food processors, containers, etc.31
The administrative state is also foster-parenting the nation’s children. Aiming their regulatory power at such foods as Frosted Flakes, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United States Department of Agriculture, and Federal Trade Commission recently joined forces to propose “voluntary” nutrition principles for the food industry, including setting limits on sugar, fats, and sodium in food marketed to children. “By the year 2016, all food products within the categories most heavily marketed directly to children should meet two basic nutrition principles. Such foods should be formulated to … make a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet and minimize the content of nutrients that could have a negative impact on health and weight.”32 The Working Group’s proposals go beyond cereal and would affect snacks, candy, juice, soda, and even food served at restaurants. In addition to restricting the content of food, the Working Group is also entertaining proposals to regulate what can be included in product advertising.33 Tony the Tiger may be on the chopping block. Congress also passed legislation authorizing the administrative state to regulate nutrition in schools, including determining the amount of calories, fat, and sodium students should consume each day. The regulations may extend to food sold on school grounds during the day, such as pizza and bake sales at fund-raisers for school events, potentially ending those common practices.34
Restaurants have been hectored into accepting the “goals of smaller portions” to “include healthy offerings” in children’s meals.35 Federal requirements mandate that restaurant chains with at least twenty U.S. locations provide the calorie content of menu items. Chain restaurants are obligated to adhere to a host of requirements pertaining to the listing of food items on their menus, including “[a] statement on the menu or menu board that puts the calorie information in the context of a recommended total daily caloric intake.”36 Federal regulators are expanding the restaurant requirements to movie theater concessions, which will soon be compelled to disclose the calorie information for popcorn.37
So extensive is the federal government’s purview over food that the total federal budget for regulating nearly all aspects of food, from production to consumption, exceeds the entire country’s net farm income.38
The workplace is subject to a web of federal regulations. Where “public accommodation” is involved, such as a retail store or doctor’s office, there must be ramps, special bathrooms, widened doors, and curb cuts in the sidewalks. Even carpeting is scrutinized to make sure it is accessible.39 There are rules involving wages, taxes, health benefits, pension benefits, working conditions, environmental conditions, human resources, union elections, financial practices, and record keeping. The vending machine on the premises is regulated. It must have a “sign close to each article of food or selection button disclosing the amount of calories in a clear and conspicuous manner.”40
As I said earlier, the universe of federal regulations and their interpretations are too far-reaching and wide-ranging to catalogue and decipher here. Indeed, left unsaid are federal rules aimed at regulating so-called man-made global warming and carbon dioxide, which would engulf the private sector in one grand sweep; and the federal directives and mandates involving education at all levels, including instruction, funding, etc. Instead, these relatively few examples are intended to provide perspective and make tangible the extent to which the individual lives under increasingly burdensome controls imposed by a federal government that determines its own authority. Private interests, including property rights, are of little regard and nearly impossible to safeguard. Moreover, private citizens on whom the government imposes the duty to institute federal regulations are overwhelmed by the coercive powers of the administrative state, including audits, fines, penalties, confiscation of licenses and property, and prosecution. The hugely detrimental effects on human progress—including preventing, sabotaging, and discouraging the development of new lifesaving and life-improving technologies, processes, and products; wealth and job creation; and individual industriousness and self-sufficiency—are fatal to societal vitality.
There are those who blindly accept if not demand federal intrusion whenever and wherever it is said to improve “health, safety, education, and the environment.” For them, it is enough for the masterminds and their experts to claim their intention to improve man’s condition. These individuals, it seems, are the type of citizens More had in mind in Utopia, where the Prince “will declare how the citizens use themselves one towards another; what familiar occupying and entertainment there is among the people; and what fashion they use in the distribution of every thing” (76). However, even in the smothering atmosphere of Leviathan, where the liberty of the subject (the citizen) is regulated by the all-powerful sovereign, Hobbes acknowledged its practical limits. “For seeing there is no commonwealth in the world wherein there be rules enough set down for the regulating of all kinds of actions and words of men (as being a thing impossible), it followeth necessarily that in all kinds of actions by the laws praetermitted, men have the liberty of doing what their own reasons shall suggest for the most profitable of themselves.…” (138) But do they? It is the endless pursuit of the utopian abstraction that tyrannizes the individual and society. As Charles de Montesquieu observed, “Countries which have been made inhabitable by the industry of men and which need that same industry in order to exist call for moderate government” (43, 18, 6).
How did we Americans cope before the advent of such a massive and intrusive administrative state? How did we feed, clothe, transport, and house ourselves? How did we make decisions about our health, safety, and well-being, and consumer items large and small? How did we raise our children and educate them, and manage our finances and retirement?
During his travels in America, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled that “[t]he secondary affairs of society have never been regulated by [the central government’s] authority; and nothing has hitherto betrayed its desire of even interfering in them.…” (I, 271) He observed that if such decrees were ordered, the federal government “must entrust the execution of its will to agents over whom it frequently has no control and who it cannot perpetually direct. The townships, municipal bodies, and counties form so many concealed breakwaters.…” (I, 272) Yet he foretold democracy’s vulnerability to administrative despotism, although he had hoped America would avoid its infliction because of its unique history and circumstances. “Above this race of men stands an intense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood … it every day renders the exercise of free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all his uses of himself.… It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.…” “Such a power … compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people” who are “reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd” (I, 318–19).
America has become a society in which the people are wise enough to select their own leaders, but too incompetent to choose the right lightbulb.
“ENTITLEMENTS” AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE
Another aspect of the administrative state involves so-called entitlements. In the United States, the concept of “social insurance” can be traced back to the work of Columbia University professor Henry Rogers Seager. In his 1910 work, Social Insurance: A Program of Social Reform,41 Seager provided a framework for Social Security, among other government social programs. In turn, Seager was heavily influenced by European models of socialism.42
Seager constantly attacked the American “absorption” with individualism as he promoted Europe’s “cooperative movement.”43 “As though it were not enough that heredity and environment combined to make us individualists, our forefathers wrote their individualistic creed into our federal and state constitutions. All these instruments give special sanctity to the rights to liberty and property.… Thus it is not too much to say that Americans are born individualists in a country peculiarly favorable to the realization of individual ambitions and under a legal system which discourages and opposes resort to any but individualistic remedies for social evils.”44 He added that in those areas of the nation involved in manufacturing and trade “we need not freedom from government interference, but clear appreciation of the conditions that make for the common welfare, as contrasted with individual success, and an aggressive program of governmental control and regulation to maintain these conditions.”45
Seager proceeded to lay out the general terms of what would become the Social Security program. He argued, “The proper method of safeguarding old age is clearly through some plan of insurance.… The intelligent course is for [the wage earner] to combine with other wage earners to accumulate a common fund out of which old-age annuities may be paid to those who live long enough to need them.”46 Seager praised the insurance programs of certain large corporations and foreign countries, particularly in the United Kingdom and Germany. He believed that the best aspects of these systems should be adopted by the federal government and turned into compulsory old-age insurance. This would require “vigorous government action.”47 But given the resistance to this and other social programs in the United States at the time, because of the history of individualism and its federal form of government, there must be “political reform” and “industrial education”48 to develop a “deepening of the sense of social solidarity and quickening of appreciation of our common interests,” both of which are “indispensable to the realization of any program of social reform.”49 “Only by a change of attitude and change of heart on the part of the whole people can we hope to curb our rampant individualism and achieve those common ends which we all admit to be desirable but which are only attainable through our united efforts. As soon as we begin to think of government as something more than an agency for maintaining order,—as organized machinery for advancing our common interests,—we appreciate how far we still are from being a truly civilized society.”50 Hence there must be a counterrevolution in which the psychology of the American people and the nature of their government are radically transformed.
Again and again, Seager targeted what he considered the greatest obstacle to “social reform”—individualism. “The gospel of love has as yet influenced very little our views on public questions. In business and in politics we are still individualists. We habitually put our individual before our common interests, and even when we are conscious of common needs we hesitate to intrust them to our common government. To correct these national characteristics is … the most important next step in social advance. And as we correct them, as our sense of social solidarity is deepened, and our appreciation of our common interests quickened, measures of reform will seem obvious and easy that now seem visionary and impracticable.”51 “Let us not be frightened by phrases, by the bugaboo of ‘destroying local self-government,’ … of ‘undermining individual thrift,’ or of ‘socialism.’ This is the truly scientific attitude toward a field of phenomena where all is change and development.”52 Seager makes no effort to conceal his attack on the nature and spirit of the individual. Importantly, Seager’s views were influential on President Franklin Roosevelt and his brain trust.
In her book Dependent on D.C., Professor Charlotte A. Twight explained how Social Security was decisive in promoting the psychological and political transformation of the nation. She wrote, “Contrary to conventional wisdom, the public did not desire the compulsory old-age ‘insurance’ program that we call Social Security.… It was passed [in 1935] and later expanded despite initial public opposition and strongly prevailing ideologies of self-reliance. Social Security’s history unfolded as a montage of political transaction-cost manipulation that included governmental use of insurance imagery, incrementalism, cost concealment, information control and censorship, suppression of rival programs, and a myth of actuarial balance. Its primary targets were the program’s congressional opponents and, especially, the voting public. In the end, these strategies moved Social Security from being regarded as a dangerous socialistic invasion of American life to an almost sacrosanct institution.”53 In fact, “as late as 1934, five years into the Depression, ‘a bill had not yet been introduced into Congress for compulsory old-age insurance’ because ‘there were simply no significant demands for such a program.’ Even after the administration’s proposal was introduced, ‘no groundswell developed in support of social insurance programs because they did not affect the major problems of relieving the victims of the depression.’ Depression conditions did stimulate public sentiment favoring needs-based (that is, means-tested) public assistance for the aged poor, but President Roosevelt instead sought a broader ‘contributory’ program of compulsory old-age insurance. When a widely supported bill to provide needs-based public assistance for the elderly neared passage in 1934, Roosevelt strategically urged its deferral.…”54
It serves the purposes of the utopian masterminds to enlist or ensnare as many people as possible in their cause. The objective is to cut generational ties with the past—society’s traditions, customs, and beliefs—in order to transform and restructure society. The common psychology that brought individuals together in the first place, making them “the American people,” must be suppressed and reoriented. The people must be reeducated and indoctrinated to accept utopian dictates, or as the utopians call them, “social reforms.”
Programs such as Social Security and Medicare serve the utopian purpose, for they create a widespread dependency on a post-constitutional government and its masterminds. These schemes are built on the illusion that the individual has a vested ownership interest in, for example, a pension or insurance program. Through forced taxation, misleadingly referred to as “contributions,” the individual is encouraged to believe that he has, in effect, purchased a pension annuity or health insurance policy, which becomes his personal property. But his tax dollars are actually subsidizing others, and later others will subsidize his retirement and medical care in what is an elaborate and unsustainable undertaking. As such, it falls on future generations, including children and grandchildren yet born, to sort out the financial ruin and societal havoc let loose by the masterminds.
Roosevelt understood, and intended, that individuals would rely on these misrepresentations and false promises and plan their retirements around them. After all, the hoax goes so far as to require that pay stubs show the funds deducted from every paycheck, which are then tracked by the federal government to presumably fund the individual’s personal retirement and medical benefits. Individuals logically conclude that they have a “right” or “entitlement” to the benefits for which they paid over a lifetime of work. Any attempt to alter the conditions and benefits in this arrangement is seen by the individual as a violation of his property rights and an injustice. For the mastermind, it is an exploitable opportunity to ingratiate himself with the “masses” as he positions himself as the defender of those rights. That said, the mastermind frequently alters the arrangement, including in small ways that are difficult for the individual to discern, or in bigger ways that are masked with self-serving declarations and cloaked in deceit. But the basic structure must never change, for the utopian must never relinquish control.
As Roosevelt himself explained when criticized that the Social Security payroll tax was regressive, “Those [Social Security payroll] taxes were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll taxes there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”55 By this Roosevelt meant that the utopian pursuit is an undying pursuit.
In 1966, Social Security Administration official John Carroll put it this way: “It can scarcely be contested that earmarking of payroll taxes … reduced resistance to the imposition of taxes on low-income earners, made feasible tax increases at a time when they might not otherwise have been made, and has given trust fund programs a privileged position semi-detached from the remainder of government. Institutionalists foresaw these advantages as means to graft the new programs into the social fabric.”56
Social Security is the single biggest program in the federal government. In 2010, it paid benefits to almost 54 million individuals.57
So successful was the Social Security deception that in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson used it as the basis for establishing Medicare and Medicaid. As Twight noted, it is not widely remembered that in 1960, Congress had already passed the Kerr-Mills bill—a needs-based medical program to assist the aged poor.58 But a welfare program instituted exclusively to subsidize medical care for poor patients cannot be convincingly presented as an insurance program. Nor can it engulf enough individuals in the utopian cause.
Johnson insisted on a new entitlement that would cover nearly all individuals age sixty-five and older. The opportunity arose in 1964 with the Democratic Party’s landslide victory. When he signed the Medicare bill, Johnson said, “In 1935, when … Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, he said it was, and I quote him, ‘a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but it is by no means complete.’ … And those who share this day will also be remembered for making the most important addition to that structure.…”59 Johnson added, “Through this new law … every citizen will be able, in his productive years when he is earning, to insure himself against the ravages of illness in his old age.…”60 Like Roosevelt, Johnson understood the import of misleading the American people by packaging Medicare’s taxes and costs as insurance and dissembling about its economic viability. As Wilbur Mills, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told Johnson when informing him that his committee had passed the Medicare bill, “I think we’ve got you something that we won’t only run on in ’66 but we’ll run on from here after.”61 In 2010, Medicare covered 38.7 million people over age sixty-five and 7.6 million people with disabilities.62
Again, in 2010, the CBO estimated that unfunded obligations for Medicare and Social Security are $25 trillion and $21.4 trillion, respectively.63 Both programs are economically unviable.
An analysis by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation of the 2011 Social Security Trustees’ financial report found that Social Security is in a weakened financial position in the short run and in an unsustainable condition in the long run. “Social Security is now operating with a permanent, annual cash flow deficit. Within seven years, the Trustees estimate that Social Security will not be able to pay full disability benefits scheduled under current law. The Disability Insurance program will begin running permanent cash deficits. Its trust fund will be exhausted in 2018. Absent reform, Social Security will only be able to pay approximately 77 percent of scheduled benefits under current law after 2036. After this date, the program will only have the legal authority to pay benefits equal to the amount of revenue generated by the payroll tax and the taxation of some benefits.”64
The chief actuary for Medicare, Richard S. Foster, stated that the shortfalls facing Medicare are even worse than reported by the Medicare trustees. He wrote that “the financial projections shown in [the 2011 trustees’ report] do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations.”65 The trustees had reported that Medicare will be unable to meet its obligations starting in 2024.66
The economic impossibility of these programs was never a utopian concern. Although cost-cutting, price controls, and benefit denials are instituted haphazardly, there can be no retreat from the overall mission and the centralized control and planning of the masterminds. Instead, further consolidation is nearly always the answer. Centralized control over health-care decisions in particular has been a utopian priority from the earliest for it maximizes government authority over the individual. In the Republic, only those who were otherwise healthy, but suffered either an injury or seasonal malady, were entitled to medical care. Those who were chronically ill, old, or infirm were of no benefit to the Ideal City and denied treatment (407d, 406b–c). In Utopia, magnificent hospitals were located near each city. “These hospitals be so well appointed, and with all things necessary to health so furnished … there is no sick person in all the city that had not rather lie there than at home in his house” (79). However, those who suffered from incurable diseases or fatal conditions were urged to kill themselves to alleviate their pain and their burden on society (107).
In America, for more than one hundred years, the utopians have insisted on the institution of government-run universal health care, promoting it in egalitarian terms. It was among the “rights” listed in Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights. Every person, he argued, has “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.”67 In his 1948 State of the Union speech, President Harry Truman asserted, “The greatest gap in our social security structure is the lack of adequate provision for the Nation’s health.… I have often and strongly urged that this condition demands a national health program. The heart of the program must be a national system of payment for medical care based on well-tried insurance principles.… Our ultimate aim must be a comprehensive insurance system to protect all our people equally against insecurity and ill health.”68 Proclamations and proposals of this kind have littered the political landscape, and successful legislative efforts have moved America piecemeal in this direction.
However, in 2009, with Barack Obama as president and a supermajority Democratic Congress, the utopian counterrevolution reached a new pinnacle, for there were no legislative obstacles and few remaining constitutional impediments to stop or even slow its advance. The utopians seized the opportunity they had long craved to centralize and consolidate control over the entire health-care system. Late on March 22, 2010, despite much arm-twisting, deal-making, and secret negotiating, the Democratic-controlled House barely passed the nearly three-thousand-page-long “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (PPACA) by a margin of 219 to 212. As with the initial adoption of Social Security and Medicare, there was no great clamor for the PPACA when it was adopted. Indeed, it was opposed by the public. A few days before its passage, Gallup found that “more Americans believe the new legislation will make things worse rather than better for the U.S. as a whole, as well as for them personally,” and its latest poll was “consistent with previous Gallup polls showing a slight negative tilt when Americans are asked if they support the new plan.”69
Most in Congress who voted for the bill had not read it, not only because of its length and complexity, but because the final version had not been made available to them, or the public, until shortly before it was voted on in the House. As intended, its concealment prevented critical scrutiny of its particulars. As then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, just a few weeks prior to the vote, told the Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.…”70
In a letter to his close friend James Madison after the Constitutional Convention adopted the Constitution and sent it to the states for ratification, Thomas Jefferson warned of the diabolical nature of this kind of legislating, which has as its purpose to keep both the diligent representative and the citizen in the dark. He told Madison, “The instability of our laws is really an immense evil. I think it would be well to provide in our constitutions that there shall always be a twelvemonth between the ingrossing a bill and passing it: that it should then be offered to its passage without changing a word; and that if circumstances should be thought to require a speedier passage, it should take two thirds of both houses instead of a bare majority.”71
But the particulars were less important to the utopian lawmakers and the president than the universality of the law. Its size and reach, in all its iterations, were known to be enormous. As former president Bill Clinton insisted, “It’s not important to be perfect here. It’s important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling. There will be amendments to this effort, whatever they pass, next year and the year after and the year after, and there should be. It’s a big, complicated, organic thing. But the worst thing to do is nothing.”72 In other words, it was important to exploit the recent election to diminish the outcome of the next one, should it be lost to the opposition, and install a universal health-care scheme as quickly as possible. It was left to favored “experts” and special-interest third parties to work out most of the details. The routine is a familiar one: temporary politicians establishing permanent societal changes by using the law to seize the individual’s sovereignty and transfer control over it to the administrative state.
Meanwhile, like Roosevelt and Johnson, Obama used deception and manipulation in hopes of rallying popular support from the very individuals whose sovereignty he sought to control. During the health-care debate, Obama claimed that “no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”73 However, McKinsey and Company’s “early-2011 survey of more than 1,300 employers across industries, geographies, and employer sizes, as well as other proprietary research, found that … 30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering [health care] in the years after 2014,” once the PPACA has been fully implemented.74
Obama insisted that “the underlying argument … has to be addressed, and that is people’s concern that if we are reforming the health care system to make it more efficient, which I think we have to do, the concern is that somehow that will mean rationing of care, right? That somehow some government bureaucrat out there saying, well, you can’t have this test or you can’t have this procedure because some bean-counter decides that is not a good way to use health care dollars.…”75 He went on, “So, I just want to be very clear about this.… You will have not only the care you need, but also the care that right now is being denied to you [by insurance companies]—only if we get health care reform.”76 But Professor Martin Feldstein pointed out at the time that “[a]lthough administration officials are eager to deny it, rationing health care is central … to Obama’s health plan. The Obama strategy is to reduce health costs by rationing the services that we and future generations of patients will receive. The White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in June explaining the Obama administration’s goal of reducing projected health spending by 30% over the next two decades. That reduction would be achieved by eliminating ‘high cost, low-value treatments,’ by ‘implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt,’ and by ‘directly targeting individual providers … (and other) high-end outliers.’”77
Obama argued that health-care reform “will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.” He declared, “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficit, now or in the future, period.” However, Hewitt Associates and Mercer both reported that the PPACA was contributing to premium hikes;78 the Congressional Budget Office disclosed that it will cost 800,000 jobs;79 it reported further that the program will likely cost $115 billion more than originally estimated;80 and the secretary of Health and Human Services admitted that $500 billion in supposed savings resulted from double-counting funds cut from the Medicare program.81
Plato, in the Republic, would have approved of Obama’s mendacity, as he would have approved of Roosevelt’s and Johnson’s earlier. “The noble lie,” as Plato called it, conditioned citizens to surrender their personal desires and happiness to the needs of the City and the common good. He wrote that it also promotes patriotism and eliminates political factionalism (415d). Of course, there is nothing noble about it. Obama knew full well that his pronouncements were distortions. Former Harvard University professor Donald Berwick explained in 2008 that “[a]ny health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributionist.”82 Obama demonstrated his agreement with Berwick’s sentiment when, in 2010, he appointed Berwick to oversee the federal government’s massive Medicare and Medicaid programs. As Obama said in 2008, “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”83
However, more than a year after its passage, and before 2014, when its most onerous provisions kick in, the PPACA remains unpopular with the American people.84 But rather than be deterred, the utopian masterminds are moving fast to institutionalize the law in the administrative state, making it much more difficult to disentangle should they lose control of the elected branches in subsequent election cycles. More than $100 billion was secreted into the bill to fund its start-up, bypassing the usual congressional appropriations process.85
An analysis by Peter Ferrara of the Heartland Institute revealed that the PPACA establishes more than “150 new bureaucracies, agencies, boards, commissions and programs” that “are empowered to tell doctors and hospitals what is quality health care and what is not, what are best practices in medicine, how their medical practices should be structured, and what they will be paid and when.”86 The Congressional Research Service reported, “The precise number of new entities that will ultimately be created pursuant to PPACA is currently unknowable.”87 Consequently, oversight will be practically impossible and the health-care system, and particularly the individual patient, will be overwhelmed by an administrative monstrosity. What is certain is that the individual will lose control over his own health-care decisions—his physical well-being and survival—since the purpose of the PPACA is to centralize health-care decision-making over all of society.
Yet the most pernicious aspect of the PPACA has nothing to do with health care per se. Specifically, the statute dictates that an individual who does not have health insurance but who can afford it must purchase a private health insurance policy, whether he wants to or not, or face federal fines and penalties.88 In response to litigation challenging the constitutionality of this “individual mandate,” the Obama administration argues that the mandate is nothing more than Congress exercising its authority under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. However, the Commerce Clause provides, “The Congress shall have Power … To regulate Commerce with Foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”89 The plain meaning of this language provides no support for the authority the federal government demands. Congress can tax interstate commerce, regulate interstate commerce, and even prohibit certain types of interstate commerce. But there is nothing in the history of the nation, let alone the history of the Constitution and the Commerce Clause, empowering Congress or any part of the federal government to regulate inactivity and compel an individual to enter into commerce—that is, to enter into a legally binding private contract against the individual’s will and interests simply because the individual is living and breathing.
Should such a specious and brazen contortion of fact and history prevail in the courts as a constitutionally recognized and legally enforceable imperative, the contours of utopian society and the mastermind’s authority would seem unconfined. Thereafter, the individual’s free will ceases to be free or his will. The mastermind’s duping becomes an unnecessary artifice, for the federal government can now flatly dictate the individual’s behavior, and the individual is without lawful recourse. Tyranny, then, will reveal itself, unvarnished and unequivocal, with future governmental trespasses on individual sovereignty both certain and more onerous.