Ted Cruz and Mario Loyola are distinguished scholars who make the argument that constraints on federal power have all but vanished from out of the Constitution. Notwithstanding, the battle against unconstrained federal supremacy continues in the federal courts, and there have even been a few victories and precious groundwork lain for the resurgence of an “originalist” approach to the Constitution, as well as a restoration of the Republic in which the federal government has limited powers.
Perhaps the most important power granted to Congress (though the Framers did not intend this to be the case) has turned out to be the power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” As has been widely noted, the principal motivation for granting this power to the federal government was the concern that individual States might erect tariff barriers, and thereby discriminate against interstate commerce. During the 19th century, the Commerce Clause was invoked chiefly to overturn state laws that discriminated against interstate commerce. But as late as the early 20th century, the Supreme Court was unwilling to allow this power to reach commercial activity that was purely intrastate.
Starting around 1914, however, the Supreme Court began to embrace an ever-widening interpretation of the Commerce Clause. In the Shreveport Rate cases, the Court articulated a novel basis for intruding on purely intrastate commerce: Where interstate and intrastate commerce were so mingled that regulation of interstate commerce required incidental regulation of intrastate commerce, the activity fell within the commerce power, because of their “close and substantial relation.” As it happened, the victim of this first expansion of federal commerce power was Texas: the Court had ruled that the federal government could regulate the fees charged by a railway between Dallas and Marshall, Texas. The law protected those purely intrastate carriers who faced penalties for disobeying the regulations of the Texas Railroad Commission, in order to comply with federal mandates.
In the 1935 case of Schechter Poultry v. U.S., the Court once again asserted its role as a powerful guardian of constitutional constraints, striking down federal regulation of labor conditions in a purely intrastate business because the activity in question bore only an “indirect” relation to interstate commerce. The Court reasoned that otherwise “there would be virtually no limit to the federal power and for all practical purposes we should have a completely centralized government.”
The Court was no doubt correct about the looming danger of unlimited federal power and “a completely centralized government,” but the political winds were blowing against it. FDR won a landslide reelection in 1936 and in an address to Congress in early 1937 threatened to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices, implicitly warning that if the Court did not acquiesce in his New Deal legislation, he and the Congress would break its power. The Supreme Court reacted that very year, in the case of NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., by casting aside the categories of direct and indirect effects, and holding instead that Congress could regulate activities that “have such a close and substantial relation to interstate commerce that their control is essential or appropriate to protect that commerce from burdens and obstructions” in state law.
With that, the Court opened the door to all but eliminating the Constitution’s constraints on federal power exercised under the Commerce Clause. The stage was now set for the 1942 decision of Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court held that a farmer’s private cultivation of wheat for purely personal use on his own farm could nevertheless be regulated pursuant to the Commerce Clause, because any activity which, in the aggregate across the Nation, could have a substantial effect on interstate commerce, was properly within the power to regulate commerce “among the several States.” If this purely personal activity affected interstate commerce, then every activity falls within the power of the federal government. Wickard expanded the Commerce Clause to its outermost limits—so much so, indeed, that it arguably made the other enumerated powers of the Article I, Section 8 superfluous.
If the Framers had intended to grant the federal government a power to regulate commerce as expansive as that defined in Wickard, there was no need to enumerate so many other powers in addition to the Commerce Clause. Why specifically authorize Congress to create a Post Office (Art. I, Section 8, cl. 7); or regulate bankruptcies (Art. I, Section 8, cl. 4); or protect patents and copyrights (Art. I, Section 8, cl. 8)—if anything that in the national aggregate which might have an effect on commerce (as all those assuredly do) could be regulated already under the Commerce Clause?
Friday, February 25, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
Reflections on Ronald Reagan: What If? (Issue #488)
If you have memories tied to Reagan and his presidency, you may find it hard to believe that it has been 30 years since Ronald Reagan’s First Inauguration. On February 6th, 2011 we celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birthday, which means he was nearly 70 years old when he took office becoming our 40th president. He is still the oldest president Americans have ever elected. Maybe it was his optimism or sense of humor and easy laughter, but he seemed quite young at the time—more youthful frankly, than Nixon, Ford or Carter.
The Reagan Revolution was a great moment in history, and I am grateful to have been alive. Reagan said that gratitude opens a door to deeper wisdom. Reagan was a thinker, even though his detractors liked to pretend that he was unsophisticated and even simple. History has borne out that Reagan achieved a lot and certainly he changed the tenor of the time. I am mindful, however, that the Reagan Revolution was not and is not completed, not to its full extent as I understood it then.
I know there are disagreements within the conservative movement, in terms of just what the Reagan Revolution entailed. But I was a student of politics at the time and listened intently to what Reagan said. I am confident in the assertion that Reagan would not have supported the runaway spending in Washington, or the fearful concentration of power in the federal government that has occurred since he left office.
Let me suggest a few more things he may have done. He no doubt would have supported some version of the War on Terrorism, possibly even before 9/11. You know I remember being shocked and dismayed while at Ft. Bragg going through an Individual Terrorism Awareness Class in July 2000 (over a year before 9/11 when Bill Clinton was president)—and finding out, the administration actually knew who Osama bin Laden was. They knew he had declared war on the United States. For the life of me I can’t imagine why, but most of the Army did not know this, and the American people sure didn’t know until that fateful autumn day in 2001.
When the planes crashed into the twin towers I was in Kuwait, still helping contain Saddam Hussein in the Southern No-Fly Zone. Reagan was more strategic than either Clinton or George W., and he usually had his priorities straight. Reagan would have taken out the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11 the way George W. Bush did. My sense is the invasion of Iraq in 2003 would have been superfluous, because he would have taken care of Saddam Hussein the very first time he violated terms of the March 1991 truce—instead of putting up with more than a decade of risky expensive international containment paid for by the American taxpayer! In no wise would Reagan have supported the indefinite undeclared warfare we see today, or embarked on the same level of democratic nation-building. His foreign policy was of the realist school and tended to be bi-partisan.
On the domestic spending front, he would have used his veto many times over the last decade to be sure and probably would have taken on Republican and Democrat pork. We never would have doubted his intention to nominate strict constructionist judges for the Supreme Court—judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade.
I don’t believe he would have sanctioned the loss of freedom in a cynically named “Patriot Act” without sunset provision or oversight of the Executive Branch, or without reading it. I can’t imagine he would have continued to leave our borders unsecured either, in the wake of drug violence, kidnappings and murder—particularly since he tried a one-time amnesty program, which was expressly predicated on a national requirement to secure the southern border and to regulate immigration.
Of course this is hypothetical conjecture. We can’t know for sure what President Reagan would or would not have done, in lieu of George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama. Like every other president, Reagan came into office with a set of goals and objectives; his actual record inevitably falls short and is mixed—he reduced overall government spending during his first term only to see it go up again in his second. Then there’s the debate over what constitutes his actual historic legacy, not to mention what unfinished legacy remains for those of us who count ourselves among his philosophic heirs.
To me the political environment today is reminiscent of the Reagan Revolution. Reagan’s agenda developed in the late 1970s and put into practice in the early 1980s received momentum during a period of financial crisis, and represents a similar critique to what is espoused by the Tea Party in the wake of today’s financial crisis. (And we thought Carter was bad!). For every action, government still has an equal and opposite government program. Government still subsidizes error, drags down the economy, burdens posterity with debt. Ronald Reagan’s speeches are full of references to the necessity of fiscal responsibility—of spending less and reducing the deficit; of returning to limited constitutional government; of free enterprise and free market solutions.
What this indicates to me is that the progressives joined in the battle again, after Reagan. They conducted a counterattack and have made headway. Capitalism may have won internationally, but socialists are rife in this country and continue to drive home their agenda. It is perhaps true that no political battle is ever won once and for all. That is why Reagan cautioned that our freedom cannot be handed down in the bloodstream—it can never be taken for granted. Every generation must perform its duty, add its weight, and help pull the wagon.
The Reagan Revolution was a great moment in history, and I am grateful to have been alive. Reagan said that gratitude opens a door to deeper wisdom. Reagan was a thinker, even though his detractors liked to pretend that he was unsophisticated and even simple. History has borne out that Reagan achieved a lot and certainly he changed the tenor of the time. I am mindful, however, that the Reagan Revolution was not and is not completed, not to its full extent as I understood it then.
I know there are disagreements within the conservative movement, in terms of just what the Reagan Revolution entailed. But I was a student of politics at the time and listened intently to what Reagan said. I am confident in the assertion that Reagan would not have supported the runaway spending in Washington, or the fearful concentration of power in the federal government that has occurred since he left office.
Let me suggest a few more things he may have done. He no doubt would have supported some version of the War on Terrorism, possibly even before 9/11. You know I remember being shocked and dismayed while at Ft. Bragg going through an Individual Terrorism Awareness Class in July 2000 (over a year before 9/11 when Bill Clinton was president)—and finding out, the administration actually knew who Osama bin Laden was. They knew he had declared war on the United States. For the life of me I can’t imagine why, but most of the Army did not know this, and the American people sure didn’t know until that fateful autumn day in 2001.
When the planes crashed into the twin towers I was in Kuwait, still helping contain Saddam Hussein in the Southern No-Fly Zone. Reagan was more strategic than either Clinton or George W., and he usually had his priorities straight. Reagan would have taken out the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11 the way George W. Bush did. My sense is the invasion of Iraq in 2003 would have been superfluous, because he would have taken care of Saddam Hussein the very first time he violated terms of the March 1991 truce—instead of putting up with more than a decade of risky expensive international containment paid for by the American taxpayer! In no wise would Reagan have supported the indefinite undeclared warfare we see today, or embarked on the same level of democratic nation-building. His foreign policy was of the realist school and tended to be bi-partisan.
On the domestic spending front, he would have used his veto many times over the last decade to be sure and probably would have taken on Republican and Democrat pork. We never would have doubted his intention to nominate strict constructionist judges for the Supreme Court—judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade.
I don’t believe he would have sanctioned the loss of freedom in a cynically named “Patriot Act” without sunset provision or oversight of the Executive Branch, or without reading it. I can’t imagine he would have continued to leave our borders unsecured either, in the wake of drug violence, kidnappings and murder—particularly since he tried a one-time amnesty program, which was expressly predicated on a national requirement to secure the southern border and to regulate immigration.
Of course this is hypothetical conjecture. We can’t know for sure what President Reagan would or would not have done, in lieu of George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama. Like every other president, Reagan came into office with a set of goals and objectives; his actual record inevitably falls short and is mixed—he reduced overall government spending during his first term only to see it go up again in his second. Then there’s the debate over what constitutes his actual historic legacy, not to mention what unfinished legacy remains for those of us who count ourselves among his philosophic heirs.
To me the political environment today is reminiscent of the Reagan Revolution. Reagan’s agenda developed in the late 1970s and put into practice in the early 1980s received momentum during a period of financial crisis, and represents a similar critique to what is espoused by the Tea Party in the wake of today’s financial crisis. (And we thought Carter was bad!). For every action, government still has an equal and opposite government program. Government still subsidizes error, drags down the economy, burdens posterity with debt. Ronald Reagan’s speeches are full of references to the necessity of fiscal responsibility—of spending less and reducing the deficit; of returning to limited constitutional government; of free enterprise and free market solutions.
What this indicates to me is that the progressives joined in the battle again, after Reagan. They conducted a counterattack and have made headway. Capitalism may have won internationally, but socialists are rife in this country and continue to drive home their agenda. It is perhaps true that no political battle is ever won once and for all. That is why Reagan cautioned that our freedom cannot be handed down in the bloodstream—it can never be taken for granted. Every generation must perform its duty, add its weight, and help pull the wagon.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Reclaiming the Constitution - Part 2 (Issue #487)
Ted Cruz and Mario Loyola are distinguished scholars, who make the argument that the Founders’ careful, intentional constraints on the power of the federal government have all but vanished from the Constitution. A reinterpretation of the Commerce Clause is a notable example, such that, the American people are vulnerable to the onset of tyranny owing to a willful neglect of the instrument of our governance. The original framework of federalism has grown fragile, and in some ways substantially collapsed.
After the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, the Framers returned to their homes to engage in debates centered on the state ratification conventions that would decide the fate of the proposed Constitution. Three prominent Federalists—John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and the proposed Constitution’s principal author, James Madison—published a series of essays in defense of the proposed Union, which came to be known as The Federalist Papers. Motivated by a deep concern for internal order and public safety, the Federalists argued that the proposed Constitution would pose no danger to individual liberty or to self-government in the States.
As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45, “the States will retain, under the proposed Constitution, a very extensive portion of active sovereignty,” chiefly through the specific enumeration of limited powers for the federal government. Furthermore, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” For this reason, and a host of others that Federalist No. 45 was meant to catalogue, “[t]he State government will have the advantage [over] the Federal government.”
Hence the Federalists—advocates of a strong national government—expected that the States would retain more than enough power and scope to enforce the constitutional limitations on the federal government. This conception lasted well into the 19th century. In 1824, the Supreme Court held in the famous case of Gibbons v. Ogden that navigation and commerce across state lines fall within the federal government’s power to regulate commerce “among the several States, with foreign nations, and with the Indian tribes.” Gibbons stands for the principle that “the sovereignty of Congress, though limited to specific objects, is plenary as to those objects.” But Chief Justice John Marshall shared James Madison’s vision of the federal system: their view of a federal government of plenary authority within its enumerated powers was predicated entirely on their foundational assumption that those powers would be few and limited, and that States would remain the major presumptive agents of regulation and self-government.
If Congress was supposed to be able to regulate all commerce, there was no reason for the Constitution’s drafters to qualify the word “commerce” with the phrase “among the several States” in the first instance. The Court observed: “The genius and character of the whole government seem to be that its action is to be applied to all the external concerns of the Nation and to those internal concerns which affect the States generally; but not to those which are completely within a particular state….” In Gibbons the Supreme Court observed that “inspection laws, quarantine laws, health laws of every description, as well as law for regulating the internal commerce of a State” were but a few examples “of that immense mass of legislation” not surrendered to the federal government. It was only because they were so sure of the stringent limitations on the scope of federal power, and the preeminence of States with respect to most areas of legislation, that Marshall, and the Federalists generally, felt so confident asserting the supremacy of federal law within its domain.
In Virginia’s ratification debates, Patrick Henry, a leader of the anti-Federalist movement, had railed against the proposed Constitution: “To all common purposes of Legislation it is a great consolidation of Government.” The Federalists agreed that a general consolidation of power would be dangerous and potentially tyrannical. But they saw little risk that would happen, given the power of the States and the “advantages” Madison thought they would have over the federal government. For most of the early history of the Republic, the Federalists proved right—the States were able to frustrate the concentration of power in federal hands. During the rest of the 19th century, the commerce power was relied on not to justify the exercise of federal power, but rather to strike down state laws that discriminated against interstate commerce. The idea was that States were “preempted” from regulating within areas of exclusive federal regulatory power, such as interstate commerce. Otherwise, states remained sovereign in their respective substantial orbits.
Indeed at the dawning of the 20th century, the Supreme Court was still a major obstacle to federal overreach. This changed with the ambitious legislative initiatives of the Progressive Era and the New Deal, which President Franklin Roosevelt then bolstered at the start of his second term in 1937 with a threat to increase the size of the court by adding pro-New Deal justices. Intimidated, the Supreme Court acquiesced to New Deal legislation and began to steadily demolish all meaningful limits on the federal government’s power to regulate commerce.
The doctrine that anything with a “direct effect” on interstate commerce could be regulated under the federal commerce power was replaced by a rule allowing regulation of anything with a “substantial effect” on commerce (even if indirect). After that came the doctrine that anything which, if “aggregated” across the Nation, had a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce, was properly within the federal commerce power. The post-New Deal Supreme Court all but erased the limits on the Commerce Clause. The fear of the Anti-Federalists now appears justified: If the power to regulate virtually all human activity is granted to the federal government in the simple phrase “commerce among the several States,” what was left for the States or for the people? Small wonder that the federal government has been expanding relentlessly, growing from a 19th century average of 4 percent of GDP to a peacetime peak of 27 percent in 2010.
After the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, the Framers returned to their homes to engage in debates centered on the state ratification conventions that would decide the fate of the proposed Constitution. Three prominent Federalists—John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and the proposed Constitution’s principal author, James Madison—published a series of essays in defense of the proposed Union, which came to be known as The Federalist Papers. Motivated by a deep concern for internal order and public safety, the Federalists argued that the proposed Constitution would pose no danger to individual liberty or to self-government in the States.
As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45, “the States will retain, under the proposed Constitution, a very extensive portion of active sovereignty,” chiefly through the specific enumeration of limited powers for the federal government. Furthermore, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” For this reason, and a host of others that Federalist No. 45 was meant to catalogue, “[t]he State government will have the advantage [over] the Federal government.”
Hence the Federalists—advocates of a strong national government—expected that the States would retain more than enough power and scope to enforce the constitutional limitations on the federal government. This conception lasted well into the 19th century. In 1824, the Supreme Court held in the famous case of Gibbons v. Ogden that navigation and commerce across state lines fall within the federal government’s power to regulate commerce “among the several States, with foreign nations, and with the Indian tribes.” Gibbons stands for the principle that “the sovereignty of Congress, though limited to specific objects, is plenary as to those objects.” But Chief Justice John Marshall shared James Madison’s vision of the federal system: their view of a federal government of plenary authority within its enumerated powers was predicated entirely on their foundational assumption that those powers would be few and limited, and that States would remain the major presumptive agents of regulation and self-government.
If Congress was supposed to be able to regulate all commerce, there was no reason for the Constitution’s drafters to qualify the word “commerce” with the phrase “among the several States” in the first instance. The Court observed: “The genius and character of the whole government seem to be that its action is to be applied to all the external concerns of the Nation and to those internal concerns which affect the States generally; but not to those which are completely within a particular state….” In Gibbons the Supreme Court observed that “inspection laws, quarantine laws, health laws of every description, as well as law for regulating the internal commerce of a State” were but a few examples “of that immense mass of legislation” not surrendered to the federal government. It was only because they were so sure of the stringent limitations on the scope of federal power, and the preeminence of States with respect to most areas of legislation, that Marshall, and the Federalists generally, felt so confident asserting the supremacy of federal law within its domain.
In Virginia’s ratification debates, Patrick Henry, a leader of the anti-Federalist movement, had railed against the proposed Constitution: “To all common purposes of Legislation it is a great consolidation of Government.” The Federalists agreed that a general consolidation of power would be dangerous and potentially tyrannical. But they saw little risk that would happen, given the power of the States and the “advantages” Madison thought they would have over the federal government. For most of the early history of the Republic, the Federalists proved right—the States were able to frustrate the concentration of power in federal hands. During the rest of the 19th century, the commerce power was relied on not to justify the exercise of federal power, but rather to strike down state laws that discriminated against interstate commerce. The idea was that States were “preempted” from regulating within areas of exclusive federal regulatory power, such as interstate commerce. Otherwise, states remained sovereign in their respective substantial orbits.
Indeed at the dawning of the 20th century, the Supreme Court was still a major obstacle to federal overreach. This changed with the ambitious legislative initiatives of the Progressive Era and the New Deal, which President Franklin Roosevelt then bolstered at the start of his second term in 1937 with a threat to increase the size of the court by adding pro-New Deal justices. Intimidated, the Supreme Court acquiesced to New Deal legislation and began to steadily demolish all meaningful limits on the federal government’s power to regulate commerce.
The doctrine that anything with a “direct effect” on interstate commerce could be regulated under the federal commerce power was replaced by a rule allowing regulation of anything with a “substantial effect” on commerce (even if indirect). After that came the doctrine that anything which, if “aggregated” across the Nation, had a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce, was properly within the federal commerce power. The post-New Deal Supreme Court all but erased the limits on the Commerce Clause. The fear of the Anti-Federalists now appears justified: If the power to regulate virtually all human activity is granted to the federal government in the simple phrase “commerce among the several States,” what was left for the States or for the people? Small wonder that the federal government has been expanding relentlessly, growing from a 19th century average of 4 percent of GDP to a peacetime peak of 27 percent in 2010.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Redistricting and a Look Back at the Last Time it happened in Texas, 2003-2004 (Issue #486)
Recently there was a survey of incoming elected officials involving trivia, and it was compared to the same survey taken of the public at large. In this case the public did better than the crop of elected officials these days—and fully 20% of elected officials in the survey thought the Electoral College was a school that teaches those who aspire to higher office! While that is awful, the public and elected officials might be forgiven if they didn’t understand redistricting. I’m an historian. I’ve got a Masters degree from Oxford in American History and specializing in political history, and I can tell you there’s precious little in “majors” programs or in graduate education about redistricting. Not many elections or candidacies in the past hinged on the process like they do today.
The Founders probably did not anticipate a modern gerrymander (it was considered a scandal the first time it happened in Massachusetts in 1812). They would also not have predicted the overwhelming monopoly of political power by two national parties; or the post-modern national polarization and growth of government services and dependent constituents, which has caused election races to go on forever and redistricting to become a cutthroat business, rather than a process that aims to arrive at the fairest possible representation. No, formal education did not prepare me for the experience of redistricting, when I ran for U.S. Congress in the 2004 Republican Primary—starting out in District 11, which had a Democrat incumbent, and ending up two months before the Primary Election inside a brand new District 31 with a freshman Republican incumbent! The arrangement was decided by state legislators in committee behind closed doors. The impetus in the middle of the decade (not tied to any census) came from a new Republican majority in Austin—in coordination with the National Republican Congressional Caucus and then-U.S. House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay (Sugarland, TX).
Here are two observations with some associated points that I gleaned from my experience in 2003-2004. First, redistricting frustrates campaign planning and execution during the cycle in which it happens. Campaigns for office and particularly for U.S. Congress typically begin the summer before the primary, i.e., in my case the summer of 2003 for a March 9, 2004 election. The new district lines then, however, were not announced in the summer because the legislature did not get it done. The Governor called special sessions but these likewise dragged on (in part because Democrats kept running away to prevent a quorum). Preliminary lines were announced in October 2003, and these were highly contested so the matter went to the courts. In the meantime, candidates grappled with whether to suspend campaigns in large areas, bet on the new lines, or run in preexisting lines and hope they didn’t change too much. In a political sense the district lines were not actually finalized until a district court upheld the plan in January 2004, just two months before the Primary Election.
Therefore for seven months of the nine month primary campaign, I campaigned almost exclusively in District 11 (not 31). That’s not too bad if the districts had been close, but they were not. The old District 11 had 9 ½ counties in it; the new District 31 has 7 ½ counties in it—but only 4 ½ counties actually overlapped. That meant that I was spending time and scarce campaign funds working in 5 counties that were not in the District! I was spending inordinate time in Waco too (part of District 11) and almost no time in Round Rock (brought in by the redistricting).
Secondly, redistricting potentially pits the proverbial “Establishment” or party organization against newcomers or challengers. I happen to like Congressman John Carter very much and consider him and his wife Erika to be friends. He turned out to be a great conservative bulldog too for the people of Central Texas. After the last redistricting, however, one should recall that there was only ½ a county similarity between the new District 31 and the old District 31—and that was southern Williamson County (mostly Round Rock). The old District 31 stretched from southern Williamson County all the way to Houston. Congressman Carter had been elected to that district two years earlier, before inheriting the current District 31. Today’s District 31 stretches from Williamson County northward to Erath County nearly at the outskirts of Ft. Worth!
In terms of becoming a new “incumbent” at the time, well people in 7 of 7 ½ counties had actually never voted for “the Judge”—only one county (Williamson) was familiar with its long-term County Judge who served there 20 years before running for Congress. Carter tells the wonderful story of his being prompted by a sense of patriotism to run for Congress after the 9-11 attacks in 2001. Notwithstanding, other primary challengers who invest sizeable amounts of time, money and heart in their campaigns (and especially if they stand for tangible ideas and policy positions) are not necessarily dissuaded from completing the primary race, just because political elites redraw a line. Not only is it a free country (more or less), but no one should ever assume that they can deliver the people’s choice on a silver platter without a vote. In fact the redistricting was every bit as much a frustration for Carter, perhaps more so than it was for me. It certainly cost his campaign more to run in a new district than it would have to simply run for reelection in an old one. When there is no redistricting to affect the cycle, there typically is no primary challenger unless a party incumbent creates a scandal or performs very poorly. No one, for instance, thought seriously to challenge “the Judge” in a primary race in 2006, 2008 or 2010, i.e., after the people in the district had in fact voted for him and he performed admirably.
The Party, however, invests the title of “incumbent” on a Congressman who owns a district “number.” The District in an almost virtual sense is determined by a number and based on influence more than anything on a process that is not conducted in public. The outcome is not based on specific constituents or counties or land area, on claims of representation or plausible relationship with any favorite son. The number of a district resides with those who draw the lines in the state legislature and place it on a map or into a computer program regardless of town hall meetings. Redistricting is a partisan tool and also an insider/”Establishment” tool. Candidates and potential candidates are not consulted unless they happen to be incumbents, and even then their influence is limited. Redistricting is perhaps the least democratic aspect of our entire elective political system.
The Founders probably did not anticipate a modern gerrymander (it was considered a scandal the first time it happened in Massachusetts in 1812). They would also not have predicted the overwhelming monopoly of political power by two national parties; or the post-modern national polarization and growth of government services and dependent constituents, which has caused election races to go on forever and redistricting to become a cutthroat business, rather than a process that aims to arrive at the fairest possible representation. No, formal education did not prepare me for the experience of redistricting, when I ran for U.S. Congress in the 2004 Republican Primary—starting out in District 11, which had a Democrat incumbent, and ending up two months before the Primary Election inside a brand new District 31 with a freshman Republican incumbent! The arrangement was decided by state legislators in committee behind closed doors. The impetus in the middle of the decade (not tied to any census) came from a new Republican majority in Austin—in coordination with the National Republican Congressional Caucus and then-U.S. House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay (Sugarland, TX).
Here are two observations with some associated points that I gleaned from my experience in 2003-2004. First, redistricting frustrates campaign planning and execution during the cycle in which it happens. Campaigns for office and particularly for U.S. Congress typically begin the summer before the primary, i.e., in my case the summer of 2003 for a March 9, 2004 election. The new district lines then, however, were not announced in the summer because the legislature did not get it done. The Governor called special sessions but these likewise dragged on (in part because Democrats kept running away to prevent a quorum). Preliminary lines were announced in October 2003, and these were highly contested so the matter went to the courts. In the meantime, candidates grappled with whether to suspend campaigns in large areas, bet on the new lines, or run in preexisting lines and hope they didn’t change too much. In a political sense the district lines were not actually finalized until a district court upheld the plan in January 2004, just two months before the Primary Election.
Therefore for seven months of the nine month primary campaign, I campaigned almost exclusively in District 11 (not 31). That’s not too bad if the districts had been close, but they were not. The old District 11 had 9 ½ counties in it; the new District 31 has 7 ½ counties in it—but only 4 ½ counties actually overlapped. That meant that I was spending time and scarce campaign funds working in 5 counties that were not in the District! I was spending inordinate time in Waco too (part of District 11) and almost no time in Round Rock (brought in by the redistricting).
Secondly, redistricting potentially pits the proverbial “Establishment” or party organization against newcomers or challengers. I happen to like Congressman John Carter very much and consider him and his wife Erika to be friends. He turned out to be a great conservative bulldog too for the people of Central Texas. After the last redistricting, however, one should recall that there was only ½ a county similarity between the new District 31 and the old District 31—and that was southern Williamson County (mostly Round Rock). The old District 31 stretched from southern Williamson County all the way to Houston. Congressman Carter had been elected to that district two years earlier, before inheriting the current District 31. Today’s District 31 stretches from Williamson County northward to Erath County nearly at the outskirts of Ft. Worth!
In terms of becoming a new “incumbent” at the time, well people in 7 of 7 ½ counties had actually never voted for “the Judge”—only one county (Williamson) was familiar with its long-term County Judge who served there 20 years before running for Congress. Carter tells the wonderful story of his being prompted by a sense of patriotism to run for Congress after the 9-11 attacks in 2001. Notwithstanding, other primary challengers who invest sizeable amounts of time, money and heart in their campaigns (and especially if they stand for tangible ideas and policy positions) are not necessarily dissuaded from completing the primary race, just because political elites redraw a line. Not only is it a free country (more or less), but no one should ever assume that they can deliver the people’s choice on a silver platter without a vote. In fact the redistricting was every bit as much a frustration for Carter, perhaps more so than it was for me. It certainly cost his campaign more to run in a new district than it would have to simply run for reelection in an old one. When there is no redistricting to affect the cycle, there typically is no primary challenger unless a party incumbent creates a scandal or performs very poorly. No one, for instance, thought seriously to challenge “the Judge” in a primary race in 2006, 2008 or 2010, i.e., after the people in the district had in fact voted for him and he performed admirably.
The Party, however, invests the title of “incumbent” on a Congressman who owns a district “number.” The District in an almost virtual sense is determined by a number and based on influence more than anything on a process that is not conducted in public. The outcome is not based on specific constituents or counties or land area, on claims of representation or plausible relationship with any favorite son. The number of a district resides with those who draw the lines in the state legislature and place it on a map or into a computer program regardless of town hall meetings. Redistricting is a partisan tool and also an insider/”Establishment” tool. Candidates and potential candidates are not consulted unless they happen to be incumbents, and even then their influence is limited. Redistricting is perhaps the least democratic aspect of our entire elective political system.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Reclaiming the Constitution - Part 1 (Issue #485)
Two distinguished scholars have written an essay that should alarm Americans, but also spur them to action. Ted Cruz served as Solicitor General for the State of Texas—the chief appellate lawyer for the State— from 2003 to 2008. He was the first Hispanic Solicitor General in Texas, and when appointed, was the youngest Solicitor General in the United States. He was named by Texas Lawyer magazine as one of the “25 Greatest Texas Lawyers of the Past Quarter Century,” by American Lawyer magazine as one of the “50 Best Litigators under 45 in America,” and by National Law Journal as one of the “50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America.” A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, he previously served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist on the U.S. Supreme Court; as Domestic Policy Advisor to President George W. Bush on the 2000 Bush-Cheney Campaign; and as Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Mario Loyola began his career in corporate finance law. Since 2003, he has focused on public policy, dividing his time between government service and research and writing at prominent policy institutes. He served in the Pentagon as a special assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and on Capitol Hill as counsel for foreign and defense affairs to the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee. He has also worked as a state policy advisor for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and written extensively for national and international publications, including features for National Review and The Weekly Standard, and op-eds in The Wall Street Journal.
The two scholars combined research and writing talent in an essay they entitle, “Reclaiming the Constitution: Towards an Agenda for State Action” produced for the Center for Tenth Amendment Studies, part of the Texas Public Policy Foundation—the state’s most influential free-market think tank. Given their previous employ with some notable and long-serving Republicans, their assessment is even more striking because it implicates both political parties. To the extent that both political parties have overseen and been complicit in the massive growth and rise in power of the federal government at the expense of States and individual rights, then both parties are responsible for undermining the Constitution and laying down hard pavement on the road to serfdom.
Indeed, the steady expansion of the federal government since the early 20th century has arrived at a crisis point today. The federal government is pushing further and further into areas of traditional state governance—and intruding deeper into our lives. This threat to liberty—one that James Madison thought the several States would be strong enough to resist—is now apparent to millions of Americans, many of whom are participating in the Tea Party movement. Assaults on the constitutional constraints meant to limit federal power, combined with the relentless expansion of the federal bureaucracy, has led to a steady erosion of the constitutional constraints on federal power—raising the very dangers to self-government and individual liberty that the Framers feared might lead to tyranny. Though the Federalists—advocates of a strong national government—expected that the States would retain more than enough power and scope to enforce the constitutional limitations on the federal government, the dawn of the industrial age, and America’s rise to Great Power status abroad by the start of the 20th century opened the door to an era of steadily expanding federal power.
For more than a hundred years, the federal government has been expanding its power and reach. The steady concentration of power in Washington has been accompanied by a steady intrusion into areas of state authority that the Framers assumed the federal government would never be involved in. In the Framers’ conception of democracy, state based self-government and individual liberty went hand in hand. It was for this reason that they insisted on a federal government of strictly limited powers. They enshrined this ideal in the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution: “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.”
Today the expansion of the federal government proceeds at an unprecedented pace. The last decade has witnessed an expansion of federal power virtually on a par with the trillions of dollars in federal debt added over the same period. The current administration has launched what many Americans see as an inevitable federal takeover of health care. It has undertaken environmental regulatory actions of historic sweep, seeking to regulate manifold areas of traditional state jurisdiction, and smothering less-favored industries in regulatory uncertainty. It has unleashed the greatest explosion in federal spending and borrowing in our history. These policies not only endanger our economic future—they erode the constitutional constraints that were meant to shield local self-government and individual liberty from the dangerous accumulation of power in Washington. That is why the balance between state and federal powers matters. That is why the Tenth Amendment matters.
The Tenth Amendment, however, is much more than a legal construct. It is an expression of the American tradition of self-governance. The propensity to self-organize spontaneously at the local level to solve problems that had been observed by Alexis de Tocqueville—and felt so painfully by the British Army—was essential to American democracy. The Constitution had been designed to protect it, not supplant it. And while a respect and deference to state authority both predated and was implied in the Constitution itself, in the end the Tenth Amendment was deemed necessary to assure that self-governance would never give way to tyranny. In this sense, the Tenth Amendment, coming at the end of the Bill of Rights, was something of a summation of the Framers’ whole notion of American democratic republicanism—and a salutary warning that those powers granted to the federal government needed to be kept strictly limited within the Constitution’s constraints, or else the States and individuals who formed the Union, and the Union itself, would be imperiled. Today it is imperative that States begin to take action, in order to stop federal overreach and to restore the Constitution’s limits on government power. We must, in short, start reclaiming the Constitution quickly, if we would remain a free people.
Mario Loyola began his career in corporate finance law. Since 2003, he has focused on public policy, dividing his time between government service and research and writing at prominent policy institutes. He served in the Pentagon as a special assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and on Capitol Hill as counsel for foreign and defense affairs to the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee. He has also worked as a state policy advisor for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and written extensively for national and international publications, including features for National Review and The Weekly Standard, and op-eds in The Wall Street Journal.
The two scholars combined research and writing talent in an essay they entitle, “Reclaiming the Constitution: Towards an Agenda for State Action” produced for the Center for Tenth Amendment Studies, part of the Texas Public Policy Foundation—the state’s most influential free-market think tank. Given their previous employ with some notable and long-serving Republicans, their assessment is even more striking because it implicates both political parties. To the extent that both political parties have overseen and been complicit in the massive growth and rise in power of the federal government at the expense of States and individual rights, then both parties are responsible for undermining the Constitution and laying down hard pavement on the road to serfdom.
Indeed, the steady expansion of the federal government since the early 20th century has arrived at a crisis point today. The federal government is pushing further and further into areas of traditional state governance—and intruding deeper into our lives. This threat to liberty—one that James Madison thought the several States would be strong enough to resist—is now apparent to millions of Americans, many of whom are participating in the Tea Party movement. Assaults on the constitutional constraints meant to limit federal power, combined with the relentless expansion of the federal bureaucracy, has led to a steady erosion of the constitutional constraints on federal power—raising the very dangers to self-government and individual liberty that the Framers feared might lead to tyranny. Though the Federalists—advocates of a strong national government—expected that the States would retain more than enough power and scope to enforce the constitutional limitations on the federal government, the dawn of the industrial age, and America’s rise to Great Power status abroad by the start of the 20th century opened the door to an era of steadily expanding federal power.
For more than a hundred years, the federal government has been expanding its power and reach. The steady concentration of power in Washington has been accompanied by a steady intrusion into areas of state authority that the Framers assumed the federal government would never be involved in. In the Framers’ conception of democracy, state based self-government and individual liberty went hand in hand. It was for this reason that they insisted on a federal government of strictly limited powers. They enshrined this ideal in the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution: “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.”
Today the expansion of the federal government proceeds at an unprecedented pace. The last decade has witnessed an expansion of federal power virtually on a par with the trillions of dollars in federal debt added over the same period. The current administration has launched what many Americans see as an inevitable federal takeover of health care. It has undertaken environmental regulatory actions of historic sweep, seeking to regulate manifold areas of traditional state jurisdiction, and smothering less-favored industries in regulatory uncertainty. It has unleashed the greatest explosion in federal spending and borrowing in our history. These policies not only endanger our economic future—they erode the constitutional constraints that were meant to shield local self-government and individual liberty from the dangerous accumulation of power in Washington. That is why the balance between state and federal powers matters. That is why the Tenth Amendment matters.
The Tenth Amendment, however, is much more than a legal construct. It is an expression of the American tradition of self-governance. The propensity to self-organize spontaneously at the local level to solve problems that had been observed by Alexis de Tocqueville—and felt so painfully by the British Army—was essential to American democracy. The Constitution had been designed to protect it, not supplant it. And while a respect and deference to state authority both predated and was implied in the Constitution itself, in the end the Tenth Amendment was deemed necessary to assure that self-governance would never give way to tyranny. In this sense, the Tenth Amendment, coming at the end of the Bill of Rights, was something of a summation of the Framers’ whole notion of American democratic republicanism—and a salutary warning that those powers granted to the federal government needed to be kept strictly limited within the Constitution’s constraints, or else the States and individuals who formed the Union, and the Union itself, would be imperiled. Today it is imperative that States begin to take action, in order to stop federal overreach and to restore the Constitution’s limits on government power. We must, in short, start reclaiming the Constitution quickly, if we would remain a free people.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Question Socrates: Part II. Getting it Right this Time! (Issue #484)
From a Socrates all-intelligence-source view of worldwide competition, the nature of generating, maintaining and measuring economic health becomes apparent. Information is in fact highly usable and can be scientifically rendered to make close to optimum decisions, and to direct the necessary course changes in a logical, systematic and strangely intuitive fashion. The economic health of a country, state, region, private or public organization, is dictated by its competitive advantage in the world marketplace, that is to say, its ability to sell goods and services.
The foundation of all competitive advantage is a matter of satisfying customer needs better than the competition. Satisfying customer needs is accomplished with technology (defined as any application of science to accomplish a function). To satisfy customer needs better than the competition, an organization or region must exploit technology more effectively than its competition does. Technology exploitation is both the acquisition and utilization of technology (and note that research and development is just one of the many mechanisms for exploitation). To be most effective, exploitation will have aspects that are both offensive and defensive, relative to competitors. Various competitors will attempt to outmaneuver each other in the acquisition and utilization of technology, like chess players moving pieces on a game board all trying to excel at satisfying their customers’ needs better than the other guy. In so doing, competitors constantly seek to acquire and maintain a competitive advantage through technology-based planning.
Technology-based planning, not economic-based planning, is by far the most effective foundation for the full range of decision-making needed desperately in this country. Counter-intuitively, almost all current plans to tackle our economic crisis address science and technology as it were nothing more than a global research and development and education race with each country attempting to “out-R&D” and “out-educate” all the other countries to get to the finish line first. To those who propose such plans, winning the race requires little more than America increasing its R&D and education spending—again, back to manipulating the economics rather than manipulating the technology.
Fortunately recent legislation introduced by Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) begins to address U.S. competitiveness through sophisticated acquisition and utilization of technology, and the continued strategic use of technology-based planning. Wolf is one of the first congressional leaders to make the shift in thinking so essential to re-entering the path towards real and sustainable prosperity. With the recent mid-term elections over, socialism and shared scarcity schemes seem less likely than before, but the GOP and its new class of Tea Party freshmen have yet to find a consensus over specific policies to pursue. It is time to reexamine a smarter path than throwing good money after bad at the fiscal problems—indeed a path that Reagan first charted nearly thirty years ago but then was unable to pursue to completion when the big spenders in both political parties took over and led us to the terrible brink of economic ruin. Says Michael Sekora, now the president of Quadrigy, a technology-based strategy consulting firm based in Austin, “[We] are where we were back in 1983,” but he adds this time there really is no room for error.
The prospects for our economy do not look good, even if political fortunes have improved. Hard-nosed documentaries based on economic numbers and keen historical analysis, such as “Generation Zero” predict a double-dip recession or depression, or hyperinflation to begin in 2011. Of course, as Reagan was fond of saying, it is within our power to mold our destiny. Clearly it depends much on what the new Congress actually does. Good decisions, much less the attendant actions required based on those decisions, may not come easily. In the current climate there is not a lot of positive excitement for anything that smacks of an earmark for research or proof of principle or prototype, etc., much less something grandiose and “strategic” that sounds more than a little like industrial policy. Lawmakers are going to have to use their better judgment in the national interest. Worst case they certainly won’t be committing the first million dollars of wasted taxpayer money, with our without requisite good intentions. Best case we could avert disaster and regain economic preeminence. If that be the case, then it is critically important when it comes to a methodology for implementation, that this include decentralization of information and power, such that, the new “Socrates” is not an exclusive centralized planning tool for the federal government. Make it the province of States from the beginning. Start with Texas and Virginia.
The foundation of all competitive advantage is a matter of satisfying customer needs better than the competition. Satisfying customer needs is accomplished with technology (defined as any application of science to accomplish a function). To satisfy customer needs better than the competition, an organization or region must exploit technology more effectively than its competition does. Technology exploitation is both the acquisition and utilization of technology (and note that research and development is just one of the many mechanisms for exploitation). To be most effective, exploitation will have aspects that are both offensive and defensive, relative to competitors. Various competitors will attempt to outmaneuver each other in the acquisition and utilization of technology, like chess players moving pieces on a game board all trying to excel at satisfying their customers’ needs better than the other guy. In so doing, competitors constantly seek to acquire and maintain a competitive advantage through technology-based planning.
Technology-based planning, not economic-based planning, is by far the most effective foundation for the full range of decision-making needed desperately in this country. Counter-intuitively, almost all current plans to tackle our economic crisis address science and technology as it were nothing more than a global research and development and education race with each country attempting to “out-R&D” and “out-educate” all the other countries to get to the finish line first. To those who propose such plans, winning the race requires little more than America increasing its R&D and education spending—again, back to manipulating the economics rather than manipulating the technology.
Fortunately recent legislation introduced by Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) begins to address U.S. competitiveness through sophisticated acquisition and utilization of technology, and the continued strategic use of technology-based planning. Wolf is one of the first congressional leaders to make the shift in thinking so essential to re-entering the path towards real and sustainable prosperity. With the recent mid-term elections over, socialism and shared scarcity schemes seem less likely than before, but the GOP and its new class of Tea Party freshmen have yet to find a consensus over specific policies to pursue. It is time to reexamine a smarter path than throwing good money after bad at the fiscal problems—indeed a path that Reagan first charted nearly thirty years ago but then was unable to pursue to completion when the big spenders in both political parties took over and led us to the terrible brink of economic ruin. Says Michael Sekora, now the president of Quadrigy, a technology-based strategy consulting firm based in Austin, “[We] are where we were back in 1983,” but he adds this time there really is no room for error.
The prospects for our economy do not look good, even if political fortunes have improved. Hard-nosed documentaries based on economic numbers and keen historical analysis, such as “Generation Zero” predict a double-dip recession or depression, or hyperinflation to begin in 2011. Of course, as Reagan was fond of saying, it is within our power to mold our destiny. Clearly it depends much on what the new Congress actually does. Good decisions, much less the attendant actions required based on those decisions, may not come easily. In the current climate there is not a lot of positive excitement for anything that smacks of an earmark for research or proof of principle or prototype, etc., much less something grandiose and “strategic” that sounds more than a little like industrial policy. Lawmakers are going to have to use their better judgment in the national interest. Worst case they certainly won’t be committing the first million dollars of wasted taxpayer money, with our without requisite good intentions. Best case we could avert disaster and regain economic preeminence. If that be the case, then it is critically important when it comes to a methodology for implementation, that this include decentralization of information and power, such that, the new “Socrates” is not an exclusive centralized planning tool for the federal government. Make it the province of States from the beginning. Start with Texas and Virginia.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Question Socrates: Part I. Back to the Future (Issue #483)
As the country searches for a solution to our economic meltdown, it becomes more apparent that we have to examine some deep-rooted causes and not just events of the past few years. Indeed, America’s declining competitiveness has been at least partially visible for decades, albeit the last time the country seriously addressed the issue from a strategic standpoint was during the Reagan years in the 1980s.
Pundits and policy-makers alike throughout 2010 continued with their myopic fascinations, focusing on manipulation of funds to the detriment of every other approach—i.e., calling for stimulus packages, more tax revenues, sundry cost-cutting measures, etc. What they miss or do not know is that our country’s former economic greatness came about through techniques involving technology, not selfish or stupid shell games with money. Understanding the difference between economic-based planning and technology-based planning is perhaps the key to identifying what we have been doing wrong. More importantly, shifting our thinking away from the accepted economic-based solutions enables us to find real and more complete answers to our financial crisis.
Under the Reagan administration, Michael C. Sekora initiated and directed a program called the Socrates Project within the U.S. Intelligence community, in order to address America’s declining competitiveness. The first part of the Socrates mission was to determine the true source of America’s declining competitiveness. To accomplish this, the Socrates team utilized all-source intelligence to assemble for the first time in history a bird’s-eye holistic view to understand competition worldwide.
In terms of scope and completeness, this bird’s-eye view went far beyond the narrow slices of data that were (and still are) available and sadly thought to be sufficient to the professors, professional economists, and consultants who traditionally address the questions of competitiveness. Conclusions that the Socrates team derived about competitiveness in general, and about the U.S. situation in particular, turned out to be in direct opposition to the preponderance of what most of the professors, economists and consultants had been saying for years and which decision makers in the U.S. had accepted as irrefutable and as underlying, presumptive truths. Had the Socrates Project team been adequately supported and empowered and had their observations informed national policy in terms of economic strategy and investment, the current crisis may have been averted. At this juncture, moreover, it is only a technology based strategy and associated data mapping from the modern equivalent of Socrates that will save the United States of America, enabling it to win in global competition against China and any other country.
What the Socrates team determined was at the source of the nation’s economic decline was that at the end of WWII decision-makers throughout the U.S. shifted away from technology-based planning, which had been used to build the U.S. into an unequalled superpower. The U.S. began adopting more economic-based planning and, in just a few years after World War II, the same had become the standard and unchallenged foundation for decision-making throughout US industry, government and academe. At the same time, the rest of the world continued using and refining a technology-based approach—including especially China and India, which aggressively used it to start building themselves into the next economic superpowers.
In economic-based planning the foundation of every decision is a matter of how to most effectively acquire and utilize funds, either to generate maximum profit as in the case of a company, or in the case of government and non-profit organizations to accomplish certain objectives. For a country this can mean changing tax rates and interest rates; tax incentives for home ownership or research and development; portfolio management of federal R&D funds; or seed capital for start-up companies. The measure of the effectiveness of said manipulation of the funds is also fund-based, i.e., a country’s trade balance, its GDP, standard of living, budget deficits or surplus, etc. As a result, the person viewed as the one most capable of making decisions for the nation’s economic health is the economist. The economist determines how to correctly manipulate funds on the front end of something (for example, to decrease interest rates) in order to generate a particular measure of success on the back end (such as, to decrease unemployment payments).
The empirical reality, however, is that there is rarely agreement among economists about what kind of manipulation of funds on the front end is required to generate any particular measure of success on the back end. Even when a general consensus is reached on a particular course of action, the chosen course of action produces results that, more often than not, only roughly match what the economist predicted.
Pundits and policy-makers alike throughout 2010 continued with their myopic fascinations, focusing on manipulation of funds to the detriment of every other approach—i.e., calling for stimulus packages, more tax revenues, sundry cost-cutting measures, etc. What they miss or do not know is that our country’s former economic greatness came about through techniques involving technology, not selfish or stupid shell games with money. Understanding the difference between economic-based planning and technology-based planning is perhaps the key to identifying what we have been doing wrong. More importantly, shifting our thinking away from the accepted economic-based solutions enables us to find real and more complete answers to our financial crisis.
Under the Reagan administration, Michael C. Sekora initiated and directed a program called the Socrates Project within the U.S. Intelligence community, in order to address America’s declining competitiveness. The first part of the Socrates mission was to determine the true source of America’s declining competitiveness. To accomplish this, the Socrates team utilized all-source intelligence to assemble for the first time in history a bird’s-eye holistic view to understand competition worldwide.
In terms of scope and completeness, this bird’s-eye view went far beyond the narrow slices of data that were (and still are) available and sadly thought to be sufficient to the professors, professional economists, and consultants who traditionally address the questions of competitiveness. Conclusions that the Socrates team derived about competitiveness in general, and about the U.S. situation in particular, turned out to be in direct opposition to the preponderance of what most of the professors, economists and consultants had been saying for years and which decision makers in the U.S. had accepted as irrefutable and as underlying, presumptive truths. Had the Socrates Project team been adequately supported and empowered and had their observations informed national policy in terms of economic strategy and investment, the current crisis may have been averted. At this juncture, moreover, it is only a technology based strategy and associated data mapping from the modern equivalent of Socrates that will save the United States of America, enabling it to win in global competition against China and any other country.
What the Socrates team determined was at the source of the nation’s economic decline was that at the end of WWII decision-makers throughout the U.S. shifted away from technology-based planning, which had been used to build the U.S. into an unequalled superpower. The U.S. began adopting more economic-based planning and, in just a few years after World War II, the same had become the standard and unchallenged foundation for decision-making throughout US industry, government and academe. At the same time, the rest of the world continued using and refining a technology-based approach—including especially China and India, which aggressively used it to start building themselves into the next economic superpowers.
In economic-based planning the foundation of every decision is a matter of how to most effectively acquire and utilize funds, either to generate maximum profit as in the case of a company, or in the case of government and non-profit organizations to accomplish certain objectives. For a country this can mean changing tax rates and interest rates; tax incentives for home ownership or research and development; portfolio management of federal R&D funds; or seed capital for start-up companies. The measure of the effectiveness of said manipulation of the funds is also fund-based, i.e., a country’s trade balance, its GDP, standard of living, budget deficits or surplus, etc. As a result, the person viewed as the one most capable of making decisions for the nation’s economic health is the economist. The economist determines how to correctly manipulate funds on the front end of something (for example, to decrease interest rates) in order to generate a particular measure of success on the back end (such as, to decrease unemployment payments).
The empirical reality, however, is that there is rarely agreement among economists about what kind of manipulation of funds on the front end is required to generate any particular measure of success on the back end. Even when a general consensus is reached on a particular course of action, the chosen course of action produces results that, more often than not, only roughly match what the economist predicted.
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