www.wbtv.com/story/36488337/are-345-diversity-and-social-justice-courses-at-uncc-too-much
THE WALL STREET JOURNALThe Tyranny of the Administrative State
Government by unelected experts isn’t all that different from the ‘royal prerogative’ of 17th-century England, argues constitutional scholar Philip Hamburger.
New York
What’s the greatest threat to liberty in America? Liberals rail at Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration and his hostility toward the press, while conservatives vow to reverse Barack Obama’s regulatory assault on religion, education and business. Philip Hamburger says both sides are thinking too small.
Like the blind men in the fable who try to describe an elephant by feeling different parts of its body, they’re not perceiving the whole problem: the enormous rogue beast known as the administrative state.
Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government, run by the president and the dozens of federal agencies that assume powers once claimed only by kings. In place of royal decrees, they issue rules and send out “guidance” letters like the one from an Education Department official in 2011 that stripped college students of due process when accused of sexual misconduct.
Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution, says Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar and winner of the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize last year for his scholarly 2014 book, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” (Spoiler alert: Yes.)
“Essentially, much of the Bill of Rights has been gutted,” he says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School. “The government can choose to proceed against you in a trial in court with constitutional processes, or it can use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law. Our fundamental procedural freedoms, which once were guarantees, have become mere options.”
In volume and complexity, the edicts from federal agencies exceed the laws passed by Congress by orders of magnitude. “The administrative state has become the government’s predominant mode of contact with citizens,” Mr. Hamburger says. “Ultimately this is not about the politics of left or right. Unlawful government power should worry everybody.”
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: This was a lesson the progressives had to learn the hard way during the New Deal. Today when people think of the New Deal, they are wont to recall Social Security or the minimum wage. But those were actually part of the second New Deal, which focused on granting new rights or powers to different groups. The first New Deal had more to do with controlling almost every aspect of American economic life, and it was an epic disaster that even the staunchest FDR cheerleaders are hard-pressed to defend.
Despite its clunky rollout, Obamacare continues to move forward. Many of the problems with the website have been fixed, at least on the “front end” that the consumer sees. The government, meanwhile, has reported nearly 2 million enrollments between the federal and state exchanges. This number is well below the 3.3 million expected—and it is almost surely an overestimation, considering the potentially high levels of nonpayment by enrollees and the remaining problems on the “back end,” where the insurance companies interact with the government. Still, it suggests that the program is here to stay for the time being.
Supporters of the law are breathing a huge sigh of relief, but their respite may be short-lived. Already there are hints of bigger problems with the law—bad ratios of healthy to sick enrollees, limited networks of doctors and hospitals, paltry drug formularies, and more. And there are more problems to come, symptoms of a deeper malady inherent in the law: It is ill-suited to our Madisonian system. Obamacare seeks to micromanage a vast sector of the American economy, when our government was designed purposely to prevent that sort of control. When central planners during the New Deal ignored the limitations placed on our pluralistic government, the results were disappointing and often perverse. The flaws already evident in the Obamacare system suggest that history may be repeating itself.
The progressives of the early 20th century were a diverse group of activists, but one thing they had in common was a taste for telling people what to do. Early progressive thinkers like Herbert Croly were enthusiastic about grand, government-directed endeavors to make America a better place. And that was the subtext of Theodore Roosevelt’s famed Osa-watomie speech: He wanted to co-opt Lincoln’s wartime coercion for peaceful social engineering.
The problem the progressives encountered is that our Madisonian system is incompatible with their grand ambitions. If the progressive left was bent on telling people what to do for their own good, just that sort of curb on individual freedom was one of the Framers’ biggest fears. For a decade, the Founding generation had been bossed around by a distant and unsympathetic British government, and then—after throwing off the shackles of colonialism—they found themselves, under the Articles of Confederation, at the mercy of ignorant, capricious, yet effectively omni-potent state legislatures. The subtext of Federalist 51 is a promise from Madison to the people: Nobody is going to tyrannize you under this new government. In Madison’s scheme, the government would empower a broad spectrum of interests to check one another, thus breaking and controlling what he called in Federalist 10 “the violence of faction.”
Of course, this has not stopped the government from finding novel ways to boss people around. Even so, the Madisonian system has often thwarted central planners who think the world would be a better place if only the country would follow their dictates.
This was a lesson the progressives had to learn the hard way during the New Deal. Today when people think of the New Deal, they are wont to recall Social Security or the minimum wage. But those were actually part of the second New Deal, which focused on granting new rights or powers to different groups. The first New Deal had more to do with controlling almost every aspect of American economic life, and it was an epic disaster that even the staunchest FDR cheerleaders are hard-pressed to defend.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 was the first major program of the New Deal, and it was straightforward: The government would pay farmers not to farm in the hope that this would cut down the glut of agricultural products, raise farm prices and wages, and thus promote prosperity. Yet in practice it failed in surprising and far-reaching ways. It was in Dixie that the AAA wrought the most harm, decimating the economic standing of poor farmers, many of them black. Wealthy landowners manipulated the payment program so as to stiff tenants, purchase farm equipment, and send unskilled laborers crowding into the big cities looking for work. When reformers in the Agriculture Department tried to do something about this, they were unceremoniously sacked to keep congressional bigwigs like Senate majority leader Joseph Robinson of Arkansas happy.
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 sought a grand bargain among all the major industrial players including big and small businesses, organized labor, and consumer groups. It suspended the antitrust laws in exchange for cooperation from businesses in writing codes of “responsible” industrial conduct that protected unions and consumers. Yet big businesses mostly wrote the codes and took charge of their enforcement, using the NIRA as a vehicle for cartelization. Consumer prices went up, organized labor gained nothing at all, and small businesses took it on the chin. Jacob Maged, a dry cleaner from Jersey City, spent 30 days in jail for charging an extra nickel to press a suit, while General Motors was free to squash incipient unionism. (more…)
“Recognizing the Wrong People”
by Clare M. Lopez Clare M. Lopez is a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on Middle East, national defense, WMD, and counterterrorism issues
It is high time we stopped empowering those who wish us ill: not just to recognize a blood-soaked regime, but to keep on recognizing it.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt [FDR], reversing the policy of four presidents and six of their Secretaries of State not to recognize the Soviet government, in 1933 extended “normal diplomatic relations” to the Soviet Union, the totalitarian slaughterhouse of Josef Stalin. As meticulously researched by Diana West in her new book, “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character,” the reasoning behind Roosevelt’s decision was never made clear; what was clear, however, since the 1917-1919 Bolshevik seizure of the Russian government by force, was the Soviet reign of blood and terror. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, by the late 1930s, Stalin’s regime was shooting tens of thousands of people per month. Yet, for reasons that remain murky, FDR was influenced, inspired, or somehow persuaded to normalize U.S. relations with Stalin, in exchange for a page of Soviet concessions, not worth the paper they were written on, which pledged that the USSR “would not attempt to subvert or overthrow the U.S. system.”
What West documents is the subsequent process of infiltration, influence, and “occupation” by an army of communist agents and fellow travelers; here, however, the focus is on what that original 1933 decision has meant for future generations, most especially our own, when confronted with decisions about whether or not to recognize enemies who make no secret of their enmity and intention to destroy us.
Whatever FDR’s thinking, West points out that this decision — not just to recognize the blood-soaked communist regime, but to keep on recognizing it — fundamentally transformed what Robert Conquest, the great chronicler of Stalin’s purges, called “the conscience of the civilized world.” And perhaps not just our conscience: as West writes, “[b]ecause the Communist regime was so openly and ideologically dedicated to our destruction, the act of recognition defied reason and the demands of self-preservation.” In other words, quite aside from the abdication of objective morality represented by FDR’s decision, there was a surrender of “reality-based judgment,” the implications of which on the ability of U.S. national leadership to make sound decisions involving the fundamental defense of the Republic resonate to the current day.
Fast forward to late September 2010, when Mohammed Badi, the Egyptian Supreme Guide of the openly, avowedly jihadist Muslim Brotherhood [MB], literally declared war on the United States (and Israel and unfaithful Arab/Muslim rulers). Badi spoke plainly of “jihad,” “force,” and “a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.” There was no ambiguity in his message: it anticipated the “demise” of the U.S. in the face of Muslim “resistance.” Even as the Muslim Brotherhood, from the earliest years after its 1928 founding, has always been forthright about its Islamic supremacism and objectives of global conquest, a caliphate, and universal shariah [Islamic Law], Badi’s pronouncement was as clear and menacing as Usama bin Laden’s 1996 “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” or his 1998 declaration of “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders” – and garnered about as much understanding from the U.S. and Western political leadership of the time – which is to say, very little. (more…)
JUNE 18, 2013
Diana West, author of the newly released book, ‘American Betrayal, The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character’ was the guest speaker at the first ICON (Issues Confronting Our Nation) Lecture Series in Durham, North Carolina on June 18, 2013. Diana gave chilling details from her new book that reveals not just the familiar struggle between communism and the Free World, but the hidden war between those wishing to conceal the truth and those trying to expose the increasingly official web of lies. American Betrayal shatters the approved histories of the time period from the build up to WW II through the end of the Cold War. Diana argues that deception and self-deception by many of our government officials during that time sent us down the long road to ‘political correctness’ and other cultural ills that have left us unable to ask the hard questions: Does our silence on the crimes of Communism explain our silence on the totalitarianism of Islam? Is Uncle Sam once again betraying America?
In American Betrayal, Diana West shakes the historical record to bring down a new understanding of our past, our present, and how we have become a nation unable to know truth from lies.
PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT
Diana West, author of the newly released ‘American Betrayal’ speaking at the ICON Lecture Series in Durham, North Carolina
lunch with Diana West – from the left, Katharine Carek, Dana Postiglioni, Janie Wagstaff, Dr. Laura Gutman, Margaret Gresham, Lee Green, seated in front – Diana West, Lauren Panchal and Nancy Clark
from the left, Janie Wagstaff and Diana West arriving for lecture
book signing
from the left – Carol Johnson, Linda Zoffer, Linda Arnold and Dana Postiglioni
from the left, Ruth Bishop, Sandy Bazley and Karen Kolias
from the left, Katharine Carek and Cathy Wright
from the left, Dennis Dickerson, Dana Postiglioni and Harry Dawley
Zan Bunn and Louis Stannard
from the left, Terry Wiegers, Linda and Matt Arnold
from the left, Joanne Beckman, Nancy Clark and Laura Cox
from the left, Mary Lou Drake and Val Williams
from the left, Carol King and Dr. Laura Gutman
from the left, Joan Ritz, Beverly Inchalik, Jean O’Connor and Betsy Ninninger
Don Hunter, Lee Green and Dr. Brenda Hunter
from the left, Margaret Gresham, Lee Green, Dana Postiglioni and Lauren Panchal
VIDEO – DIANA WEST DISCUSSES HER NEW BOOK, ‘AMERICAN BETRAYAL’ WHICH EXPOSES HOW SOVIET AGENTS SUBVERTED THE U.S. IN THE 1930’S. DIANA WEST IS INTERVIEWED BY GINNI THOMAS, WIFE OF U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS.
DIANA WEST WILL BE THE GUEST SPEAKER AT THE FIRST ICON LECTURE SERIES ON TUESDAY, JUNE 18 AT 7 P.M. AT THE LEVIN JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER, 1937 WEST CORNWALLIS ROAD, DURHAM. TO RESERVE YOUR TICKET FOR THIS LECTURE, PLEASE GO TO WWW.ICONLECTURESERIES.COM
Levin Jewish Community Center1937 West Cornwallis RoadDurham, North Carolina
Guns and Pensions
By Thomas Sowell – February 19, 2013
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:American warplanes were not updated to match the latest warplanes of Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. After World War II broke out, American soldiers stationed in the Philippines were fighting for their lives using rifles left over from the Spanish-American war, decades earlier. The hand grenades they threw at the Japanese invaders were so old that they often failed to explode. At the battle of Midway, of 82 Americans who flew into combat in obsolete torpedo planes, only 12 returned alive. In Europe, our best tanks were never as good as the Germans’ best tanks, which destroyed several times as many American tanks as the Germans lost in tank battles.
A nation’s choice between spending on military defense and spending on civilian goods has often been posed as “guns versus butter.” But understanding the choices of many nations’ political leaders might be helped by examining the contrast between their runaway spending on pensions while skimping on military defense.
Huge pensions for retired government workers can be found from small municipalities to national governments on both sides of the Atlantic. There is a reason. For elected officials, pensions are virtually the ideal thing to spend money on, politically speaking. Many kinds of spending of the taxpayers’ money win votes from the recipients. But raising taxes to pay for this spending loses votes from the taxpayers. Pensions offer a way out of this dilemma for politicians.
Creating pensions that offer generous retirement benefits wins votes in the present by promising spending in the future. Promises cost nothing in the short run — and elections are held in the short run, long before the pensions are due. (more…)
- January 11, 2013
Just When You Thought Soviet
Propaganda Was Dead
By RONALD RADOSH
For many years, the American left has combed the past for history lessons that will aid their effort to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, if not a full-fledged socialist utopia. The most successful leftist intellectual in that enterprise was the late Howard Zinn, whose books—such as “A People’s History of the United States,” first published in 1980—have sold millions of copies and are still used by high schools and colleges nationwide. Zinn believed that by emphasizing the struggles of working people, women and people of color against their supposed oppressors, his work could mobilize a new generation to carry on the fight of yesterday’s radical heroes.
That search for a usable past has been taken up in a new form by filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick in both their Showtime television series, “Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States,” and in the accompanying book of the same name. Mr. Kuznick, who wrote the volume and whose outlook frames the series, is frank about his mission.
He once wrote in a book of essays that he sees his role as a professor to be that of “creating a bridge between leftist and more moderate students,” so that he can “try to radicalize some of the more moderate and liberal students” who accept our political system instead of working for real radical change. Those who support “liberal capitalism,” he wrote, are “blind to the lessons of history.”
In discussing the TV series, Mr. Stone says in the first episode that he wants to counter the view that “we were the good guys” by telling the story of America “in a way that it has never been told before.” The series’ treatment of the Vietnam War, for instance, is intended, according to Mr. Kuznick, to show that the U.S. had moved so far “to the dark side” that “we were the wrong side.” (more…)
For all the fury and fistfights outside the Lansing Capitol, what happened in Michigan this week was a simple accommodation to reality. The most famously unionized state, birthplace of the United Auto Workers, royalty of the American working class, became right-to-work.
It’s shocking, except that it was inevitable. Indiana went that way earlier this year. The entire Rust Belt will eventually follow because the heyday of the sovereign private-sector union is gone. Globalization has made splendid isolation impossible.
The nostalgics look back to the immediate postwar years when the UAW was all-powerful, the auto companies were highly profitable and the world was flooded with American cars. In that Golden Age, the UAW won wages, benefits and protections that were the envy of the world.
Today’s angry protesters demand a return to that norm. Except that it was not a norm but a historical anomaly. America, alone among the great industrial powers, emerged unscathed from World War II. Japan was a cinder, Germany rubble and the allies — beginning with Britain and France — an exhausted shell of their former imperial selves.
For a generation, America had the run of the world. Then the others recovered. Soon global competition — from Volkswagen to Samsung — began to overtake American industry that was saddled with protected, inflated, relatively uncompetitive wages, benefits and work rules.
There’s a reason Detroit went bankrupt while the southern auto transplants did not. This is not to exonerate incompetent overpaid management that contributed to the fall. But clearly the wage, benefit and work-rule gap between the unionized North and the right-to-work South was a major factor.
President Obama railed against the Michigan legislation, calling right-to-work “giving you the right to work for less money.” Well, there is a principle at stake here: A free country should allow its workers to choose whether to join a union. Moreover, it is more than slightly ironic that Democrats, the fiercely pro-choice party, reserve free choice for aborting a fetus while denying it for such matters as choosing your child’s school or joining a union. (more…)
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Roosevelt’s successors continued to pay off existing clients while bringing new ones into the mix. By the 1970s the party added the environmentalist left, the feminist movement, government unions, trial lawyers and others to its coalition. By the 1990s, big business, long considered to be a client of the GOP, also purchased a major stake. All of these groups joined the Democratic Party because of special privileges they received from it, and in exchange they provided cash for campaign ads, volunteers for get-out-the-vote efforts, and support to members of Congress through lobbying networks.
For a long while, Democrats managed to balance the needs of their clients with the public interest, much like FDR had done during the New Deal. Eventually there were just too many special interests to do both. The party was like a juggler who added one too many balls to the routine, only to see them all come crashing down.
In the wake of Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall election, Democrats are blaming their loss on Republican-friendly super PACs and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United. The thinking goes that moneyed interests far outspent the Democrats, bought the election, and undermined democracy.
This analysis is misguided. Liberal Democrats who fancy themselves reformers should take a long, hard look at their own party before pointing fingers at the Supreme Court. When they do, they might see it has fallen far from its lofty claims to be the “party of the people.”
The first progressive Democrats hated the role of narrow interests in their own party. At the turn of the last century, early liberal leaders such as William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson were embarrassed by Tammany Hall, the amoral political machine that ran New York City. Both tried unsuccessfully to break the back of the “Tiger,” as Tammany was known. (more…)
