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Supreme Court Turns Ratchet of Compulsion

by Christopher Chantrill
April 09, 2007 at 11:52 am

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CONSERVATIVES are properly aghast at the United States Supreme Court’s April 2, 2007 decision. It ruled that the United States Environmental Protection Agency can, if it wants, regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, whatever the law may say.

But really, what is so surprising? All they have done, the liberal wing and the moderates, is give the ratchet of compulsion one more turn.

Last week’s decision amounts to this: On one more issue the bullying class will have the power to tax Americans and order them around to its heart’s content—assuming that it has a heart. What’s not to like if you are a liberal?

Let us rehearse the trail of tears in this cruel age of compulsion.

First they came for the children. In a nation that was 90 percent literate the bullying class decided in the mid-nineteenth century to force everyone to pay for “free” education. Then they decided to force parents to send their children to the free schools. Every year the government’s compulsory education system fails to improve and every year the bullying class adds more regulation and compulsion. Current cost: about $750 billion a year according to usgovernmentspending.com.

Then they came for the workers. In the richest nation in the world they decided to force workers to save for their retirement. But the bullying class didn’t save the money it had forced the workers to pay. It spent it all on buying votes. And now young workers are to be forced to pay for the pensions of retired workers whose contributions have been wasted on two generations of excess government spending. Current cost: about $875 billion a year.

Then they came for the sick. In the 1940s the bullying class began the ratchet of compulsion with the Hill-Burton Act that offered modernization grants to non-profit hospitals in exchange for provision of charity and reduced-cost care. The scale of this government encouragement steadily grew over the years till in 1986 the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act required hospitals that participated in Medicare and Medicaid to provide emergency room care regardless of ability to pay. Current compulsory cost of free government health care: about $850 billion a year.

Then they came for the blacks. In the 1960s liberals in their finest hour passed civil rights acts that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race. But blacks didn’t immediately step into the front rank of American society. So the bullying class proposed a solution: quotas and timetables. Pretty soon the administrators of government schools and universities and even big corporations discovered that they liked it. It gave them power. Cost: indefinite postponement of Martin Luther King’s dream of Americans judged by the content of their character.

Then they came for the family. In the feminist revolution it was decided that women were wasted at home raising children. The fall from transcendence into “stagnation” was a “degradation,” an “absolute evil,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir. So women were to be bullied out of their suburban nests and into the workplace. What with brilliant careers, abortion on demand, and no-fault divorce (all heavily advocated by the bullying class) many women found themselves at age 50 wondering why they hadn’t had children. So successful was the forced migration into the workplace that Europe has entered upon a demographic death spiral. Cost: End of Europe as we know it.

It is amazing that so much free stuff requires so much compulsion.

Now they have come for us all. Just about all of our friends in the kingdom of Animalia emit carbon dioxide. But we humans have gone an extra step; we have learned to emit carbon dioxide by proxy. It is a skill that has given us unimaginable wealth and freedom. But the bullying class has a plan to put the genie back in the bottle. If it controls carbon dioxide it controls everything that moves. Estimated cost: incalculable.

Years ago Tom Bethell divined the problem with the Supreme Court. It was the Strange New Respect article in The New York Times or The Washington Post. Supreme Court justices are people; they want to be liked. And the way to earn your Strange New Respect article in Washington DC is to advance the compulsion agenda of the bullying class.

There’s an opportunity here for conservatives. Change the culture. There will always be three to four liberal justices on the court. There will always be three or four conservative justices. The opportunity is the go-along-to-get-along justices in the middle.

Imagine an America in which elite newspapers published Strange New Respect articles about politicians who had mellowed out from narrow-minded advocates of compulsion into cultured moderates who couldn’t be bullied into ratcheting up yet another program of comprehensive and mandatory uniformity.

Then let us make it so.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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