The New American – by William F. Jasper
Here’s a thought most of us don’t want to entertain: Could you or I, or a close family member or neighbor, be thrown into jail, publicly branded a criminal, and fined thousands, or even millions of dollars for allegedly violating an obscure federal regulation we didn’t even know about?
Yes, it could happen. It has happened to many unfortunate Americans. And it is almost certain to happen with greater frequency, as the Obama administration’s regulatory police begin enforcing the avalanche of new federal regulations.
Earlier this year, we reported at The New American on the latest installment of “Ten Thousand Commandments,” the annual report of the Competitive Enterprise Institute on the size and scope of federal regulations.
The main focus of that report is the incredible monetary costs that the tens of thousands of pages of regulations cost our economy: a mindboggling $1.863 Trillion per year — almost $2 trillion annually!
However, there is another hidden cost that should be equally, if not more disturbing, to every American; that is the very real cost to our freedoms posed by the federal regulatory state. The federal regulatory bureaucracy is rapidly destroying the constitutional limitations and protections that made America the shining beacon it once was.
America’s Founding Fathers gave us a constitutional system that includes many checks and balances, all aimed at dividing up power and preventing the concentration and centralization of power that would inevitably lead to tyranny. First of all, they divided power between the national, or federal, government and the individual states. In this principal/agent compact, the States are the principal and the federal government is the agent. The States delegated to the federal government limited, enumerated powers, and reserved the vast remainder of powers “to the States and to the people.”
At the federal level, our Founders divided the legislative, executive, and judicial powers between three branches of government.
The very first sentence of Article I, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” It is difficult to get more plain and definitive than that: “All legislative powers.” Congress is the legislative branch, and it possesses “all legislative powers.”
Nevertheless, Congress has allowed the executive branch to stealthily, steadily build an enormous fourth branch of government — the federal regulatory leviathan — that has usurped legislative, executive, and judicial powers.
Consider that the EPA, FDA, OSHA, SEC, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and numerous other agencies issue thousands of pages of regulations, which they claim have the force of law. Then they send out their agents to enforce those “laws.” And when they fine you or take your property, you must appeal through their own agency courts.
According to our Founders, this is “the very definition of tyranny.” James Madison, frequently referred to as the “Father of the Constitution,” addressed this issue in essay No. 47 of The Federalist, noting: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Ocie Mills and his son Carey, hardworking middleclass Americans, were sent to jail for 21 months for the “crime” of filling in a small area of their property with clean fill dirt. The EPA and the United States Army Corps of Engineers wrongfully claimed that the Mills property, which had previously been designated “upland,” was now “wetland.”
This was back in 1989. It is a story of incredible injustice that we covered repeatedly in The New American. Unfortunately, Ocie and Carey Mills’ story is but one of many similar stories. More recently, we have reported on the case of the Sackett family in Idaho, whom the EPA threatened with fines of $75,000 per day for attempting to build a home on their own property — after already complying with all state and local permits. Again, the EPA made ridiculous claims that the property is a protected wetland. If not for the help of attorneys from the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Sacketts would have already lost their property — and might be in jail. However, the U.S. Supreme Court slapped down what it termed the EPA’s “high-handedness” in violating the rights of Mike and Chantelle Sackett.
And the same plight threatens thousands of other law-abiding Americans. But Congress created these agencies and Congress can and must rein them in and/or abolish them. However, Congress will not do that unless we, the American people monitor their votes and force them to uphold their constitutional oaths. You can do that by finding out how your Congressman is voting on The New American’s “Freedom Index,” which rates Congress based on the U.S. Constitution.
There are more “laws” than there are stars in the sky. There is not one person walking around that knows all the laws they could be prosecuted for. That’s why lawyers have huge libraries in their offices. Ignorance of the law is no excuse they say, yet not even the ones accusing you know every law.
Exactly!
To top that all off with some WHIP cream the enforcers don’t even follow said laws.
WHAT property ‘rights’?
Unless you have an allodial title to a piece of land, you own NOTHING. Your home, your car… NOTHING!
This does not apply to your weapons, however.
‘The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
Ayn Rand
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” — Tacitus
Protocol 12
2. “Freedom is the right to do what which the law allows. This interpretation of the word will at the proper time be of service to us, because all freedom will thus be in our hands, since the laws will abolish or create only that which is desirable for us according to the aforesaid program.”
Protocol 20
3. ‘ Our rule, in which the king will enjoy the legal fiction that everything in his State belongs to him (which may easily be translated into fact), will be enabled to resort to the lawful confiscation of all sums of every kind for the regulation of their circulation in the State. From this follows that taxation will best be covered by a progressive tax on property. In this manner the dues will be paid without straitening or ruining anybody in the form of a percentage of the amount of property. The rich must be aware that it is their duty to place a part of their superfluities at the disposal of the State since the State guarantees them security of possession of the rest of their property and the right of honest gains, I say honest, for the control over property will do away with robbery on a legal basis. ‘
(Address of the Jew Laventria Beria, The Communist Textbook on Psychopolitics, page 8)
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“Use the courts, use the judges, use the constitution of the country, use its medical societies and its laws to further our ends. Do not stint in your labor in this direction. And when you have succeeded you will discover that you can now effect your own legislation at will and you can, by careful organization, by constant campaigns about the terrors of society, by pretense as to your effectiveness, make the capitalist himself, by his own appropriation, finance a large portion of the quiet Communist conquest of that nation.”