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Michael S. Rozeff Let us abandon Congress, which means let us abandon the U.S. Constitution that establishes Congress. When a business project is losing money, any rational owner either fixes it up, sells it, or abandons it. I know of no evidence that Congress or the Constitution can be fixed up. The opposite evidence, a continuously malfunctioning organization, is reported daily in every Act of Congress. To fix up Congress properly for 300 million diverse Americans would require an impossibility: a political consensus concerning the acceptable law of the land. This law would be a minimalist affair that is not even remotely held as a fervent desire in the hearts and minds of most Americans. I conclude that Congress and the Constitution are broken and can’t be fixed. We should abandon them. The country is not broken. The people with all their many skills, their knowledge, their economy, their drives, their associations, and so on remain intact. We merely need to rid ourselves of an unnecessary and counter-productive encumbrance. The country will function better without Congress and the Constitution than with it. The abandonment might proceed by various Declarations of Independence made by various groups. There is no telling what sorts of political entities might emerge from such a process. Yet there are several sure results of such a fracturing of the U.S. It would result in a much higher degree of political competition and choice than at present. In a situation in which there is no unifying political monopoly, as represented by Congress and the Constitution, no individual group could enforce counter-productive laws for long. People could move away from jurisdictions that thwarted them to jurisdictions that favored the realization of their goals. The processes of migration to favorable environments have a long history of fostering human progress. They have occurred often in U.S. and world history. They are occurring now. They involve people and capital. They involve new agreements and laws. They involve the implementation of new technologies. They involve new economies building up. All these processes are frustrated when Congress imposes laws and mandates across all sorts of people and jurisdictions, across technologies, and across capital flows. Congress is strangling the competition, migration, movements, and capital flows that are essential to full-fledged progress. It is replacing them with restriction, prevention, constriction, and retardation. The Congressional process is producing a society ruled by an elite whose only interest is in itself, in its own power, privilege, wealth, and rule. Congress is ruining the country. Congress has just passed a bill, signed by President Bush, that bans the incandescent light bulb. I hope that this bill proves to be a fatal error on the part of Congress. I hope it sparks the overdue revolution in the American political system that I hope for. Since the light bulb is an item that reaches every person in America, as pervasive an item as tea once was to another set of revolutionaries, perhaps Americans will awake to the stranglehold that Congress has on all of us. My hopes are not high because every person also uses paper money, and the political processes that took Americans away from gold and into an ever-depreciating legal tender have not occasioned a revolution. Nevertheless, I hope, if only to make crystal clear that nothing less than such a revolution, which will of course require a revolution in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, can unlock the submerged and suppressed energies that are the consequences of that true and unique American ideal of freedom that once propelled this country into the forefront of all the world’s countries and made it an attractor for millions upon millions of immigrants anxious to better themselves and escape the strangleholds of their native lands. Has not our nation now become one of those lands now exercising a dominion and stranglehold upon its own people that suffocates and suppresses? When a Congress forces every American to use an expensive "compact fluorescent light" (CFL) that contains high levels of mercury and that imposes significant health hazards and outrageous cleanup costs when a bulb is merely broken or shattered, is not the time long past for every single person to realize that the American political system is beyond saving? Nothing less will do but to abandon Congress and the U.S. Constitution. The forces of progress will overtake Americans in one way or another and show up Congress for the throwback that it is. While Congress worries about saving energy by regulating the light bulb, the Toshiba Corporation is marketing a new micro nuclear reactor. It can provide electric power at substantial savings to ordinary grid costs. Many more such innovations await us. This is an example of the migration of technology and capital we welcome in a free economy. It is the very opposite of the mastodon that Congress is. Congress is an outmoded, useless, and dysfunctional organization, trampling everything it steps upon, geared only to the emoluments, favors, and privileges of those parasites who traverse its widening circle of money and influence peddling. Congress is simply a ring of tax money, lobbyists, influence-peddlers, favor-seekers, and corrupt politicians who feed their own appetites with the money stolen from income-producing Americans. We the People absolutely do not need such a beast that crushes us and frustrates our every move. As this beast grows more powerful, it increasingly surrounds and confines all potential political competition. Thwarting the forces of migration and progress, Congress distorts the economy it rules by a wave of its laws. Congress doubles corn prices and boosts food prices while subsidizing the inefficient production of ethanol fuel, a fuel that promises to harm automobile engines in devious and hidden ways. Congress passes the "America Competes Act," which continues the government’s attack on freedom and free markets. How can a clumsy politically-driven law make any claim whatsoever to boosting competition? How can such a process driven by coerced taxpayer funding and politically-driven favoritism do anything but retard competition? Here is a law that continues to nationalize science and divert it to politically-favored ends. There could not be a more dangerous, wasteful, and anti-competitive law than one that throws more money at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, NASA, and NOAA. All the government propaganda about freedom is belied by this law’s "Establishing a President’s Council on Innovation and Competitiveness to develop a comprehensive agenda to promote innovation and competitiveness in the public and private sectors." Even a minimal understanding of free markets tells us that such a council is totally absurd. It will do nothing but seed a center for economic control. Years after socialism and communism have been discredited, our government via its Congress is engaged in an open, yet stealthy, advancement of the controlled and planned economy! How many thousand cuts does it take before we realize that Congress is advancing an agenda in the U.S. that is against progress and for its own centralized and monopolistic power?
Abandon Congress, I say. Abandon this beastly organization of crafty deviousness and greed that disguises itself as America’s savior. Abandon Congress! Away with it. Be done with it. It has no saving grace. December 24, 2007 Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com |
Congress
has signed its own death warrant by such mad and outrageous tyrannies.
They have been going on for decades. They only become more and more
bold and repugnant.