Evidently, it’s not just me. A growing number of Americans aren’t happy with the federal government’s approach to fixing our economic woes. Obama’s numbers are dropping and ever-increasing numbers of Americans have grave doubts about the government’s ability to solve these problems.
I’d like to think these concerns are for the right reasons. But I’m not sure they are. People probably just want to get back to the lives they’ve been living for the past several years. The Dot.com crash interrupted their lives…9/11 interrupted their lives…and now the big easy-money mortgage crash has interrupted their movies, soccer games, vacations, early retirement plans, and everything else we seem to truly cherish.
I’d like to think that Americans really believed Ronald Reagan when he said, “government is the problem, not the solution.” But something tells me that we haven’t learned anything.
What we all seem to forget is that freedom and prosperity created our government – our government didn’t create them.
There’s a great piece of history that reminds us of this relationship. As fate would have it, Utah’s own George Sutherland was sitting on the United States Supreme Court throughout the Great Depression years. He was one of five conservative justices who opposed Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.
For anyone who needs reminding, the New Deal was at least as aggressive, in terms of government intervention, as anything Obama is trying to do these days. It created the National Recovery Administration to establish a byzantine patchwork of centralized controls, it called “codes,” to fix wages, prices, and regulate work environments.
The NRA Codes were drastic. No economic activity was immune. Tailors were arrested because their prices for pressing a pair of pants were below the set price control. Farmers were fined for planting crops that they, themselves, ate on their own farm. Barbers who charged less than the code rate for a shave and a haircut were subject to fines up to $500 (that’s in 1935 dollars!). Even union workers, who thought that the New Deal was saving their jobs, had their pay cut deeply and began to rebel. The NRA became known as the National Run Around.
One famous case to reach the Supreme Court and George Sutherland, that shows how intrusive the good intentions of government can become, had to do with the selling of chickens. To create the highest efficiency, the NRA code required chickens to be sold without prejudice – meaning that a wholesale consumer was not free to pick out the chickens she wanted, and that the poultry seller was told to simply give a buyer the first chicken that was near to his hands at the time of the sale. (And, no, I’m not kidding.)
During oral arguments, Sutherland and his conservative colleagues entertained the following dialogue:
Justice McReynolds said, I want to see if I understand correctly. The chickens are brought into New York by the carload, and they’re taken out and put in coops? And when they’re sold, they must be sold by straight-killing (that’s what the arbitrary process was known as).
The defendant’s attorney replied, that’s correct. The customer is not permitted to select the ones he wants. The seller must put his hands in the coop and take the first chicken that comes to hand.
The Justices then asked about the sale of larger quantities of a coop…a full coop or a half-coop. The attorney responded that the sale of half-coops is allowed under NRA code as long the half is divided arbitrarily. To which Justice Sutherland asked facetiously, “well suppose that all the chickens have gone over to one end of the coop?” The courtroom erupted in laughter. After which, the majority voted to kill the NRA code.
That’s what government intervention looks like. Ridiculous enough to invoke laughter. For Obama, just as any other notable utopian throughout history, it seems that crisis is opportunity, and that his government is simply acting as the good entrepreneur. The only problem with that sort of thinking is that government isn’t a business; government is only force.
In the chicken selling decision, the Sutherland Court pronounced wisdom that applies today: “Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power.”
I’m Paul Mero. Thanks for listening.
