The Trust Busters
Back in the day when people like John J. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan roamed the earth, the federal government set out to scale back these giants of finance and industry by breaking up monopolies.
Back in the day when people like John J. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan roamed the earth, the federal government set out to scale back these giants of finance and industry by breaking up monopolies.
They did manage to bust up the likes of Standard Oil and AT&T, only to replace them with something far worse.
Writing in The New American, Charles Scaliger titled his article “Why Isn’t the Largest Monopoly Broken Up?” I understood from his question that he was referring to none other than the federal government. The largest trust it’s busted is the one that is supposed to exist between the governed and those who govern.
The irony is that the oath that every person in government takes is to defend and protect the Constitution, and it’s the oath that each and every single one of them violates.
According to the 10th Amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Most people would be shocked to discover how few actual powers are granted to the federal government. Among the more notable are the right to collect taxes; to regulate commerce with foreign nations; to establish uniform rules of naturalization and bankruptcies; to coin money and fix the standard of weights and measures; to punish counterfeiters; to establish post offices and copyright protections; to constitute the Supreme Court and other federal tribunals; to punish pirates; to declare and wage war; and to raise and support an Army and a Navy.
Nothing in there about the power to redefine marriage; not a word about controlling schools; not a syllable devoted to abortions or energy; no mention of bribing foreign nations with our tax revenue; and nothing about picking up the tab for some monstrosity called either the League of Nations or the United Nations.
Even the naive notion that we have a free market economy is a fantasy concocted by people who still believe in the Easter bunny and the Tooth Fairy. If ours even faintly resembled a free market economy, you would not see subsidies for ethanol or paying farmers to grow or not grow soybeans.
You also wouldn’t see the feds bailing out huge banks or automobile companies, and not a single tax dollar would have ever gone to Solyndra or any other solar panel outfit.
What’s more, being “too large to fail” would only be used in reference to 7'6" basketball players and 300-pound defensive linemen.
Once FDR grasped that he could use our own money for the purpose of bribing people to vote for Democrats, he created the welfare state and shoved Social Security, which was a Ponzi scheme on steroids, down our throats. Of course, unlike the scam invented by Charles Ponzi, nobody had a choice when it came to Social Security. If you even considered resisting, men with guns would show up and force you to sign up and pay up. The only difference between the feds and the gangsters of that era who were forcing bar owners to buy their brand of beer was that Capone’s gunsels were breaking the law and the T-men were allegedly enforcing it.
Speaking of the Constitution, a cartoon that has recently gone viral shows Thomas Jefferson addressing his fellow Founders: “So we’re all in agreement. The 1st and 4th Amendments shall protect the digital technologies of the distant future, including cell phones, email and other private messages conveyed by electronic means …. but the 2nd Amendment shall only protect muskets.”
With a predictability that even the sparrows returning every year to Capistrano can only envy, we are once again being told to sympathize with the plight of college athletes not being treated like salaried employees.
Apparently, in certain quarters, it’s not enough that they get free tuition and free meals at colleges and universities while their more academically inclined classmates are piling up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
The student-scholars, as they’re jokingly referred to, aren’t even taxed on their athletic scholarships, although if you appear on a TV game show and win a car or a refrigerator, you will be taxed on its actual value.
The athletes are also being provided with free coaching and physical training.
My personal preference has always been to eliminate college sports programs. But if adults can’t bring themselves to eliminate something as blatantly corrupt as the NCAA and aren’t offended at the thought of college coaches being paid millions of dollars a year, how about if all the athletes who go on to have professional careers in baseball, football and basketball, sign over 20% of their future earnings to the schools that helped make their careers possible? That money could then be applied to a revolving fund to help turn future amateur athletes into semi-professional whores.
With midterm primaries only weeks away, I would suggest that the RNC not give a single dollar to any Republican candidate who refuses to sign a pledge to support whichever of his opponents makes it to the general election.
In some places, a true conservative has no chance to win the general election, but he or she is still preferable to someone whose allegiance will be to Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi.
I would like to see Trump pull our troops out of Syria. The problem, though, isn’t that Al-Assad is a brutal dictator, those being the only kind of leaders — outside of Israel — that exists in that part of the world. The problem is that it’s against our interests to hand the cesspool over to Russia and Iran, two of the four or five nations on the face of the earth who have it in for us.
On the other hand, I have no idea what we are still doing in Afghanistan. What possible difference is it to us which group of creeps are running the place? So far as I know, nobody has ever spelled out the difference between the central government and the opposition or come up with a single reason why America should spend a single dollar more or shed a single drop of blood to keep the Taliban at bay.
Mexico is quickly becoming one of my least favorite nations. It protects its own sovereignty against foreign intruders unless those trespassers swear they’re only passing through on their way to invade the United States. At the same time, it encourages its own citizens to cross our border illegally for two reasons; one, it works as a safety valve when it comes to its own millions of unemployed; and, two, the money they wire back to their relatives constitutes the difference between the nation’s solvency and Greek-style bankruptcy.
But making the country even more repulsive is the fact that its leaders, men like Mexico’s former president, Vicente Fox, feel entitled to demean Donald Trump as a racist. This coming from a spokesman for a country that has a history of racism, where those of Spanish heritage have always despised the dark-skinned natives — natives, by the way, who trace their own proud heritage to cultures that included human sacrifices to pagan gods at a time when other cultures were turning out the Sistine Chapel, “Hamlet,” Bach’s fugues and “Paradise Lost.”
It was President Fox who first earned my enduring hatred when he claimed that if we erected a permanent barrier at our southern border, it would be the equivalent of the Berlin Wall, pretending that there was no appreciable difference between a wall built to keep invaders out and one built to prevent citizens from escaping.
A problem closer to home is with the Democrats in Congress, who refuse to end chain migration, which liberals prefer calling “family unification,” pretending the families were separated by men with guns, when, in fact, it was some family member who decided it was time to leave the others behind.
Besides, Americans are constantly separating from relatives when they go to colleges in other states or take jobs on the other side of the country. What’s more, it’s a lot farther from, say, Albany to Phoenix than it is from San Francisco or Omaha to Tijuana. Where is it written except in the liberals’ election handbook that extended families have to live next door to each other?
The GOP should also get rid of the immigration lottery. It’s hard to believe that anyone in Congress takes national security seriously when they’re leaving such matters to chance. Frankly, I’m surprised they don’t turn the farce into a TV game show. They could have a pretty girl in a skimpy outfit pulling names out of a hamper while remote cameras show low-skilled illiterates and potential terrorists jumping for joy as their names are called.
Speaking of numbskulls, academia has apparently decided that the biggest problem isn’t with students behaving like fascists or professors coddling left-wing hooligans but with those uppity pronouns. That’s right, the real problem facing American colleges isn’t that conservative speakers can’t get a word in edgewise on our nation’s campuses but that the students continue to be brutalized on a daily basis by words like “he,” “she,” “him” and “her,” obscenities obviously intended to inflict pain and draw blood.
Bullied by lesbians, homosexuals, bi-sexuals and the transgendered — those whose every waking hour is apparently focused solely on their own or someone else’s genitalia — college administrators have decided to replace those archaic pronouns with “ze,” “yo” and “xie,” words that have been approved by the all-important LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ community.
