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September 21, 2009
Exclusive: Ten Growing Threats to Our Liberty
I have been, until last month, the President of the Ethan Allen Institute. When several of us founded that independent think tank after I left the Senate 16 years ago, we named it after a great figure in our state’s history, the leader of the Green Mountain Boys, Col. Ethan Allen.
We did not lightly choose Ethan to be our namesake. We chose his name because the pole star that guided the life of that great, brawling, boozing adventurer was Liberty. He signed his letters to the Hartford Courant as “a lover of liberty and property”. He opened his famous Narrative of 1779 with the words, “Ever since I arrived at a state of manhood and acquainted myself with the general history of mankind, I have had a sincere passion for liberty.”
Suffused with that spirit of liberty, Ethan and his fellow Hampshire Grantsmen erected from this wilderness an independent republic. Its first constitution, adopted at Windsor in 1777 and still in effect today, began thus:
“All men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent and inalienable rights, amongst which are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Yet our liberties are threatened now as never before; so much so that you well might ask: Why only 10 threats? And why are there more threats now than, say, a decade or a century ago?
To that first question I would reply, there are surely more than 10 threats to our liberty today – I have just picked out 10 of which I particularly want you to be aware. And to the second question I would say, with real emphasis, that never before, going back to when I was a boy during World War II, have I seen so many growing threats to the liberty of the American people, emanating from the seat of our national government.
I believe that you are reading this because you love and cherish American liberty, because you feel a moral responsibility to protect that liberty and because you are willing to stand up to any emerging threat of tyranny to assure that our cherished liberties are transmitted undiminished to our grandchildren.
I firmly believe that today American liberty is under siege. Let me list just 10 ways that our current national government – President and Congress – are determined to shrink our liberties, even to the vanishing point.
Number One: federal spending. Six months ago President Obama presented a budget of seven trillion dollars spending over the next ten years. But wait – the Congressional Budget Office examined it and found that that number was $2.3 trillion too low.
For this fiscal year alone, the Obama deficit will be on the order of $1.7 trillion. Some of that he can claim to have inherited from President Bush, but three quarters of it will be created by Barack Obama and his Democrat Congress.
If all of Obama’s “transformational” policy objectives are met, the national debt will be one hundred percent of our Gross Domestic Product by 2018. That will put our United States in the same fiscal category as Argentina, Mexico and Bolivia. It will cause the government to demand massive tax increases to prevent national bankruptcy.
This astonishing burst of spending is bad enough, but since Congress authorized the $787 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program last November, to bail out failing banks, the Treasury, the Fed, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have hatched no less than 27 new programs or facilities to bail out the financial sector. Only around 12 percent of the $15 trillion in loans and guarantees was ever authorized by Congress. No elected official – except possibly Barack Obama – can be held accountable for these trillions of dollars in new obligations. This is not the system, accountable to the people, envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
Number Two: inflation. Obama approved the Federal Reserve System’s proposed purchase of hundreds of billions of dollars of long-term Treasury bonds. There’s a name for this: it’s called printing money.
Look at this chart. It was produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It shows the growth of the U.S. monetary base since 1960. Look what has happened over the last year. The growth line goes straight up. 
Now, I’m only an amateur at monetary policy, but you can’t tell me that a sudden trillion dollar increase in the monetary base won’t produce rampaging inflation a year from now.
This will surely happen unless the Federal Reserve Board of Governors acts decisively to shrink the monetary base by buying Treasury debt from commercial banks, and thus reducing the bank reserves on deposit with the regional Federal Reserve Banks.
That sounds straightforward enough, but there are important tradeoffs. Shrinking the monetary base means that money will be harder to get. Interest rates will rise. There is a real danger that a sudden rise in the cost of credit will choke off a hope-for economic recovery.
So the question is: what will the Obama administration do when it sees the Fed acting to combat inflation in a way that endangers an economic recovery – especially on the eve of the 2010 elections? I don’t know, but having watched the Obama White House for eight months, I do not believe it will show much respect for the tradition of an independent Fed.
Number Three: Financial Control. Since last October both the Bush and Obama administrations have showered billions of borrowed dollars on the country’s financial institutions. But some of them didn’t want to take the money. Bush said they had to take the money, to keep the others from looking bad. So they took it, under protest.
Several months later some of the banks that took the money, under pressure, tried to pay it back. At first the Obama administration told them they could not repay the billions they didn’t want to take in the first place. Why not? Because then the Obama administration would lose the ability to control those subsidized banks.
Since then some of the more influential banks have been allowed to repay their TARP loans that they didn’t need in the first place. But the Obama push for ever-tighter control over financial institutions continues unabated. I might add, there is every reason to believe that the Obama financial regulation policy is not to establish clear operating rules for banks, and transparency of operations in the markets. It is to keep financial institutions on a tight leash held by their political masters in the White House. Woe unto the bank whose chief executive starts raising money for Obama’s opponent in 2012.
Number Four: Health Care Takeover. This spring Obama offered a $634 billion dollar budget item for creating universal health care. Every responsible analyst believed that the price tag will be far more than that. A month ago Obama’s allies in Congress were working on measures that, even when favorably scored, promised to cost almost twice that much.
It’s not just the enormous new spending. It’s not just the new taxes levied to force businesses and individuals into buying government-approved insurance. The Obama administration’s goal is to force Americans into one large government run health care system. That system will be financed in large part by underpaying doctors, dentists, hospitals and nursing homes. Its global budget will require government bureaucrats to decide who gets health care and who does not.
Obama and his Congress are well along in imposing a mandate on every American to use his or her resources to purchase a health insurance product containing “essential benefits” defined by Washington bureaucrats. What are those benefits? They are benefits that will be lobbied into the mandate by every sort of health care provider who wants in on the action. You may not see the need to pay more for pregnancy or substance abuse treatment coverage or in vitro fertilization, but I can assure you they will turn out to be “essential benefits” as prescribed by this administration.
Now, Congress has the power under the Constitution to draft young men and even women to maintain our armed forces. But where in the Constitution does Congress find the power to compel a free American to buy an insurance product mandated by the government? Nowhere. The fact that the majority party in Congress has paid no attention to this important constitutional question ought to be very distressing to anyone who believes in constitutional government.
The leaders of Congress are well along with their proposal to create a government-run “public option” insurance company, designed to undersell and eventually extinguish its private competitors, leaving only the government as single payer. That of course is what Barack Obama has always wanted, although he is trying to duck out on his previous statements of support.
Every bureaucratic health care system has to balance demands and costs. There’s a name for that: rationing. The House bill even authorizes a federally issued card that identifies you and specifies just what medical treatment the government will allow you to receive. A House amendment affirming your right to choose your doctor was beaten down by the Democrats on orders of Speaker Pelosi.
In short: if Obama and Congress have their way, your health, your doctor, and your life will be at the mercy of unseen government functionaries. What will not be unseen – by you – will be the shrinkage of your paycheck, your savings, and your choices. Get ready for Third World medical care.
Number Five: “Global Warming.” Obama has been promoting his response to fictitious human-caused global warming. That’s budgeted for $646 billion in new revenues, and Congress plans to extract it from all Americans who use carbon-based energy. Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, a Democrat, says it will actually cost twice that amount.
The House has - narrowly – passed the Waxman Markey energy tax bill. It will require every sizable emitter of carbon dioxide to buy emission permits from the government. To scrounge up enough votes for passage, the bill’s managers had to give away 85 percent of the expected proceeds from the sale of this government funny money, but that’s only the opening round. Over time, Waxman Markey will tax all carbon energy users to subsidize corporate welfare for a renewable energy industry that cannot possibly hope to sustain America’s energy-dependent economy with arrays of 400-foot wind towers and hundreds of square miles of solar collectors.
As of now it is beginning to look like the Waxman Markey bill will run out of steam, due to the opposition from Midwestern Senate Democrats. That’s good – but if this bill dies, its contents will turn up again. And while Congress is wrestling with legislation, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency has issued an endangerment finding that gives it the power to inventory and regulate all carbon dioxide emissions over 250 tons a year. For reference, that’s a dairy farm with about 80 cows.
Number Six: Immigration. Obama and the liberal Democrats are eager to legalize 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country, and let in millions more from abroad, especially from disintegrating Mexico. They’ll cheerfully provide millions of these illegals with welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid – and come around to collect their votes every two years.
They’re even tampering with the 2010 Census to try to cash in politically on illegal immigrants. They were forced to restore control of the census from the White House back to the Census Bureau, but they’ll still try to have it do the same dirty work. That work is to contrive a way to estimate the existence of people that nobody can actually count, because they are illegals living in the shadows who don’t want any contact with officialdom.
It’s worth noting two additional things: a major cause of California’s $15 billion deficit – that may bring down the state – is the education, health and welfare demands of illegal immigrants. When Republicans in the House offered amendments to require verification of citizenship before applicants could claim health care subsidies, Democrats, at Speaker Pelosi’s bidding, voted them down.
Number Seven: Gun Control. Barack Obama supported every gun control bill he ever voted on in the Illinois legislature. He is on record for restoring the so-called assault rifle ban, and his Democratic friends in Congress are vowing to require national gun registration. Tyranny thrives on a disarmed citizenry, and that’s what these people want to bring about.
Right now, the Obama administration and its gun control friends in Congress are lying low on this issue, for obvious reasons. But they’re on record, and nowhere did any of them say they were giving up their cause. Their threat to your Second Amendment rights is not going away.
Number 8: Union Power. Obama and the Democrats are working hard to find the votes to do away with the secret ballot in union representation elections. If they succeed with their card check bill, that will sharply increase union dues collections, and the unions will use those millions of dollars to reelect Obama and his liberal friends.
This effort seems to have stalled in the Senate, but as with gun control, the union lobbyists are not going to lie low forever.
Number 9: Compulsory Universal Service. Americans have tolerated a military draft – just barely - when the security of the nation was in the balance. But Obama supports universal service, where every young man and woman is required – required! – to give a year or two of their lives to doing what the government decides is good for them.
And what if our young people decline this opportunity? It’s perfectly clear: they’ll go to the Obama Gulag. This is involuntary servitude. This is – tyranny.
Like union card check and gun control, compulsory service appears to be on the back burner for now. But we know what the President wants. He wants an ObamaCorps of young people indoctrinated with the wonders of their federal government and eager to do its bidding. This sort of thing is not unknown to 20th century European history.
Number Ten: Capitulating to Radical Islam. In his recent tour of Europe, Obama began by actually bowing before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. This is the king of the heartland of Islam, 16 of whose young men took down the World Trade Center in the name of jihad against us infidels.
Then Obama went around Europe and Egypt making a fool of himself by applauding his own unconditional respect for “peace loving” Islam. Osama bin Laden hasn’t had much to laugh about in recent years, but this performance must have put a grim smile on his face.
Western civilization is in mortal peril from the rise and spread of radical Islam, but Obama seems to think that if he’s nice to Islam’s leaders, Islam will be nice to us. Fourteen hundred years of bloodshed belie that foolish assumption.
Petroleum-funded radical Islam is on the march – if not to fly more planes into our buildings right now, then to wage cultural jihad against America’s Judeo-Christian civilization.
Our tradition of religious tolerance gives them lots of leeway to act. They demand to apply Islam’s Shariah law to Muslims who want to convert to Christianity – in other words, the death penalty. They will try to stifle critics with so called human rights lawsuits, as they have effectively done in Canada. They will demand special dispensations for their practices – girls coming to school inside of black bags, Muslim cab drivers refusing Jewish passengers or even Seeing Eye dogs, special facilities for bathing before prayers, honor killings of rape victims.
There can be only one response to this pressure. This is the United States of America. You are free to worship whatever God you choose, or none at all. But if you insist on all those preferences, exemptions and dispensations, find yourself a benighted country where Sharia law is practiced, because you aren’t getting away with it here, in the land of the free.
Unfortunately, there is nothing emanating from the administration of Barack Obama that shows that anyone there takes this crucial matter seriously.
*****
These are 10 examples of what President Obama and his power-hungry, authoritarian big-government liberal allies have openly declared as their plan for the future of America. These are 10 compelling reasons for us to fear for the future of American Liberty.
Let me return to the words of Ethan Allen, in his address in 1780 to the lawyers and politicians of New York and New Hampshire:
“Whereas [the people of] this state hold their charter of Liberty from heaven, and not of man, or of the will of man, [they] have upon a full and candid examination and consideration [determined] not to submit heaven-born freedom for the arbitrament of any tribunal below the stars, which through infirmity might deprive them of it – but as they have closely embraced it in the most critical and hazardous times, [they] are determined to hold it fast, except it be torn from them by the hand of power - which resolution we trust will be justified by the court of heaven, and commended by all true friends to the liberty and happiness of mankind.”
So I say to you, as Ethan would say were he with us: Behold the hand of power – and resolve to hold fast to protect our heaven-sent Liberty.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John McClaughry, a former senior policy advisor in the Reagan White House, is founder and now Vice President of the free-market Ethan Allen Institute. He has served in the Vermont House and Senate, and as Kirby Town Moderator for the past 43 years.
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