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Life, Liberty, Property #47: Federal Government Failure Could Save the Nation

S. T. Karnick

January 29, 2024

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Life, Liberty, Property #47: federal government failure could save the nation by devolving power to the states.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Federal Government Failure Could Save the Nation
Border War Amps Up Anti-Federal Resistance
The Public Is Wrong About the Economy, or So the Experts Say
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Federal Government Failure Could Save the Nation

The most important and consequential trend of the twenty-first century has been the rapid expansion of government power at all levels and the simultaneous, accelerating collapse of government competence. We are experiencing widespread government failure.

Consider a few examples.

Farmers have been conducting massive public protests in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other countries across all of Europe, in addition to the truckers’ convoy protest in Canada in 2022. These are the people who feed these nations and the world. Governments have responded by largely ignoring the farmers’ pleas and demonizing them in the media.

Building on trends established in the 2000s and 2010s, the Biden administration and state governments have continued their push for an end to the use of fossil fuels and their replacement with unreliable wind and solar power, playing havoc by undermining the electricity grid. That situation is only going to get worse, solely because of unfounded government restrictions, subsidies, and mandates directed fecklessly at changing the Earth’s temperature.

Nearly all the developed countries shut down their economies and bullied people into taking experimental genetic injections, only to begin admitting more than three years later that their premises were false and their policies were mistaken and grossly disastrous to the global economy and to people’s health and well-being.

The U.S. border with Mexico is now essentially undefended, with the federal government abdicating responsibility for maintaining sovereignty over the U.S. homeland. Meanwhile, Chinese and other overseas investors have bought up millions of acres of U.S. farmland.

Violent crime has spiked in cities across the United States, as local governments make it difficult or impossible for police to arrest lawbreakers and collect evidence of crimes, while city attorneys refuse to prosecute those the police do manage to apprehend. Meanwhile, state governments stand by and do nothing about it even though the cities are entirely under state authority and those governments have a duty to protect the life, liberty, and property of the residents of those benighted realms.

Homeless people have taken over large swaths of American cities, strewing the streets with human waste and narcotics paraphernalia. The governor of California temporarily cleaned up the streets of San Francisco only when Chinese government officials, led by the dictator Xi Jinping, visited last November. Pro-China groups assaulted anti-Xi protestors during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, while the city government and local police refrained from protecting them.

Violent mobs and individuals are attacking and killing innocent people in public places all across the country. The U.S. press, in the rare instances when they do cover these events, downplay the racial element unless the perpetrator is white.

Mobs of thieves are invading retail stores and stealing goods, with governments and even the stores’ corporate owners requiring employees and police to stand down and let the thefts happen without consequence for the invaders. Retailers are leaving these areas as a natural consequence.

Governments have abdicated control over parts of U.S. cities, especially in the Pacific Northwest. This trend is a logical outgrowth of the neglect of low-income neighborhoods by city governments throughout the previous two decades and the consequent rise of crime, public drug abuse, and other social ills that have made living there a nightmare.

Government-run schools increasingly indoctrinate children in ethnic and religious hatred and sexual idiosyncrasy; misbehavior and even crimes in classrooms and other school property have increased; and children’s scores on academic achievement tests are in decline. Antisemitism is on the rise in the United States, ominously growing fastest among young people.

Twelve percent of all websites have pornography, and approximately 69% of American men and 40% of American women view that material in any given year. Up to thirty-four percent of internet users report experiencing unwanted exposure to pornography through pop-up ads, misdirected links, emails, etc. Double-digit percentages of men self-report that they are addicted to pornography. Federal courts have stymied attempts to restrict this material, though states and the federal government have authority under the Constitution to ban obscenity.

Inflation has substantially reduced what people’s paychecks can buy, and prices of food and other important items remain much higher than two years ago despite a recent slowing of the rate of increase. The double-digit inflation was caused by a grotesque federal spending spree in 2021 and 2022. The spending is still rising, though a Republican-majority House of Representatives has slowed the rate of advance.

The one thing that is certainly not declining in the United States is federal government borrowing. The U.S. national government debt is now $34 trillion and still rising. The annual budget deficit is now $2 trillion. Federal tax collections decreased by $455 billion in 2023, because the truth is that you can only tax people so much before it becomes self-defeating.

Fleeing high taxes, crime, traffic congestion, filthy streets and other public areas, demented schools, and other annoyances and outright pathologies, people are moving out of “blue” cities by the thousands and settling in “red” states where the rule of law and bearable taxation are not yet entirely things of the past.

“California lost nearly 350,000 residents in 2022, while New York lost about 300,000 and Illinois saw more than 140,000 go elsewhere, per Census numbers,” The Hill reports. “Other states, including New Jersey (-64,231), Massachusetts (-57,292) and Pennsylvania (-39,957), also saw large numbers of residents say goodbye.” Meanwhile, “other states, such as Florida and Texas, saw large gains in population, with Florida adding an eye-popping 444,484 residents and Texas adding 470,708,” The Hill notes. “Other population winners include North Carolina (99,796 residents added), South Carolina (+84,030), Tennessee (+81,646) and Georgia (+81,406).”

As the United States dissolves in this plague of pathologies, other nations are blithely declaring their contempt and openly threatening violence toward us. Rebel groups believed to be supported by Iran dared to open fire on an American warship and U.S.-owned commercial vessels flying the American flag. China’s tiny, impoverished client state in North Korea is threatening to nuke us, a notion that no longer seems absurd. The botched evacuation of Afghanistan informed the world that the United States is a failing state.

In all these cases and countless others, governments are promising heaven on Earth and delivering hell instead. In addition to the misery they directly cause, these delusional government edicts reduce tax revenues and congressional representation and cause jobs to leave town.

Those consequences, in turn, reduce the resources available to governments affected by the losses. To reverse that, the mismanaged city and state governments must become more efficient and less corrupt. Failure to do so creates the kind of long-term loss trends affecting neo-fascist states such as California, New York, and Illinois.

Unfortunately, when the national government is as inept as ours is at present, such within-nation migration is truly analogous to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If the U.S. government continues down the path it has taken in the past two decades, the United States will become progressively impoverished and the government unsupportable. The national government will ultimately collapse.

If that happens, power will revert to the states and ultimately the people, in a long-awaited and gravely needed realignment with our nation’s Constitution. The states are already pushing back against the federal government. States have allowed cities to establish “sanctuary” status to thwart enforcement of immigration laws. Numerous states have legalized marijuana use in defiance of federal law. What that has meant in practical terms is that the feds would have to enforce the national laws against marijuana trafficking. The federal government declined to do so.

The federal government has in fact adopted a policy of selective enforcement of the law and twisted reinterpretations of congressional legislation to create fake laws by executive fiat. President Joe Biden has metastasized this into outright lawlessness. Today, the government of Texas is attempting to enforce national border laws, while the Biden administration is actively thwarting those measures, cutting razor wire in the Rio Grande to prevent the state from doing so.

This raises the question of whether government failure in the United States is in fact intentional, a critical element of Barack Obama’s promised fundamental transformation of the nation into a banana republic mired in poverty and moral degradation (though he always declined to mention the last part). I believe that it is the case and that Biden is Obama’s willing co-conspirator in the effort. You may believe whatever you wish, but the chaos cited above seems dispositive.

Given the present size, cost, intrusiveness, and ineptitude of the U.S. government, its collapse would produce many great benefits. However, the social dysfunction caused by disruption of Social Security and other entitlements would be massive; shortages of food and other essentials would be devastating; and the temptation for other nations to attack us in a variety of ways would be irresistible.

The states, however, especially the red ones, would surely step in to restore order and cooperate with one another to support interstate commerce, protect the nation’s borders, and take care of the less fortunate in more-sensible and -affordable ways. Many have shown that they are eager to do just that.

In sum, a devolution of power from the federal government to the states and localities would be a boon, but it would involve an agonizing period of adjustment. Given the crisis of federal debt and entitlement obligations and other enormous government disruptions of American life, I cannot foresee a steady decline and orderly transfer of power from the nation to the states. It is likely that our government will go bust gradually and then suddenly, as a character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises described the decline into personal bankruptcy.

The great devolution would be like having to overcome an addiction. As in that case, it would be well worth the temporary suffering it would cause.

The red-state/blue-state contrast demonstrates that the solution to this enormous government failure is simple: require our government to do only what it is constitutionally allowed to do and keep within the limits of what the people can afford. Until governments stop promising the moon, conditions here on Earth will continue to deteriorate.

Border War Amps Up Anti-Federal Resistance

The situation at the Texas border with Mexico is one of the most consequential conflicts of recent years. It is emblematic of what appears to be a concerted effort by President Joe Biden and his puppet masters administration in a Cloward-Piven strategy to destabilize the United States and recruit Democrat voters from countries that know nothing about freedom, the latter being an important qualification for supporting Democrats.

The issue is whether the 50 states will resist Biden’s various programs of mass destruction and whether the states will be able to withstand what promises to be an ongoing escalation of federal use of force against the states and the people. (Note the allusion to the Tenth Amendment.)

The dispute between Texas and the Biden administration had been simmering for a while. It hit the boiling point this month when the Texas National Guard started to get in the way of federal Border Patrol agents who were doing nothing of value. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on January 12,

State officials here are blocking federal Border Patrol agents from accessing a busy section of the U.S.-Mexico border, a move that represents an escalation of a standoff between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and the Biden administration on authority over the U.S.-Mexico border.

The development comes after state law-enforcement officials in the border town of Eagle Pass took control of the city-owned Shelby Park against the wishes of the city, Mayor Rolando Salinas said on social media Wednesday night. The riverside park, near downtown, is a primary site for city gathering and recreation. It has also become a hot spot for migrants crossing the Rio Grande from neighboring Piedras Negras, Mexico.

It is important to note that cities are under the authority of state governments, not the other way around, rendering Salinas’s opinion irrelevant and positively fatuous. The park is a weak spot in border enforcement, ZeroHedge noted on January 12:

In its latest assertion of sovereignty and responsibility for securing its border with Mexico, the once and future Republic of Texas has seized control of a 47-acre park in the city of Eagle Pass, which has been a major avenue of illegal immigration. What’s more, the Texans are barring US Border Patrol agents and watercraft from the property, which they’ve used as a staging area for processing migrants. [Emphasis in original.]

The dispute ended up in court, as these things do. The Department of Homeland Security filed a request in federal court to tell the Texans to stand down, as the WSJ reports:

Texas has accused federal authorities of cutting through razor wire that the state has placed on miles-long stretches of the border. Border Patrol officials have said they occasionally need to cut through the wire to make arrests or rescue migrants drowning in the river. The administration is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn an injunction by an appeals court stopping agents from doing that. …

[Gov. Greg] Abbott last month signed a new law giving state officials the ability to arrest and deport migrants crossing into the state from Mexico outside of designated ports of entry. The Biden administration has sued the state, saying the law is an unconstitutional violation of the federal government’s sole authority over national borders and immigration. The law is scheduled to go into effect in March.

The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Border Control agents may destroy the physical barriers Texas has put up to protect the Border that the former are supposed to Control.

Characterizing Biden’s border policies as “lawless,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas promised to keep up the border control effort. “The Texas National Guard continues to hold the line in Eagle Pass. Texas will not back down from our efforts to secure the border in Biden’s absence,” Abbott posted on X.

Abbott released a statement saying the Biden administration has failed to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to protect the border and that Texas has the right and duty to step in. The Blaze reports:

“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States,” wrote Abbott. “The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now. President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them. The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration.”

He went on to outline the ways that Biden had undermined border enforcement and claimed that Texas had the right to defend itself when the federal government failed to provide and support that protection.

“That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary,” Abbott continued. “The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”

Other governors were quick to affirm Abbott’s point, The Blaze notes:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who suspended his presidential campaign on Sunday, released a statement in support of Abbott.

“If the Constitution really made states powerless to defend themselves against an invasion, it wouldn’t have been ratified in the first place and Texas would have never joined the union when it did,” wrote DeSantis on social media. “TX is upholding the law while Biden is flouting it. FL will keep assisting Texas with personnel and assets.”

Republican Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota said something similar.

“The Biden Administration has created a national security crisis and put Americans in danger,” she wrote. “Their failure is an unconstitutional dereliction of duty. South Dakota has been proud to help Gov. Abbott’s efforts to secure our border.”

Noem followed up with this gem at Fox News: “If Greg Abbott needs more razor wire, I’ll load it into a pickup myself.”

Noem “announced that she will be going to the war zone at the southern border to stand with Texas and the National Guard and tell them that the nation is with them,” Fox News reported. That will provide useful photos and video footage for this fall’s president campaign, should she land on the ticket with Donald Trump.

Governors of Democrat states predictably spoke out against Abbott’s interference in the effort to import more votes for them. Abbott, in turn, promised to install even more razor wire in the park, saying, “Texas will not back down.”

This dispute goes far beyond current politics, as I indicated at the beginning of this item. The nation is in an ongoing constitutional crisis brought on solely by massive federal government overreach initiated by the Obama administration and supersized by Biden. Blaze News Senior Editor Daniel Horowitz outlines the situation in an excellent article at his organization’s website:

We have a dispute between two independent units of government. The federal executive branch is flouting well-established laws to facilitate an invasion of Texas. The Texas executive branch (with support from its legislature) wants to repel that invasion with barriers. Under these circumstances, Texas has the right to defend its territory by force. As future Chief Justice John Marshall said during the debate on the Compact Clause on June 16, 1788, “This clearly proves that the states can use the militia when they find it necessary.”

Remember, Governor Greg Abbott in 2020 set up checkpoints on the roads leading into Texas from Louisiana to screen people and enforce the mandatory quarantine, as if Louisiana were an international border. The federal government and the courts had no problem with it. Suddenly, when it comes to invaders, foreigners have more rights than Americans do.

Federal supremacy does not apply to unconstitutional actions, Horowitz notes:

It’s true that states are bound by the Supremacy Clause to follow “the Laws of the United States.” But that’s only when the laws are “made in pursuance” of the Constitution. In this case, not only are the administration’s border policies, buttressed by the high court’s ruling, not in pursuance of the Constitution, they stand in contravention to the laws of the United States established in the Immigration and Nationality Act.

In such cases, states have a duty to enforce valid laws and resist unconstitutional actions of the federal government, and they are authorized to tell the Supreme Court, president, and anybody else to pound sand, Horowitz argues:

Texas is right on the merits and the morals. Abbott swore the same oath to the Constitution as Joe Biden and Supreme Court justices. The Supreme Court is not supreme over the other branches (only over the inferior courts). The Constitution is supreme. And when it’s clear that Texas is abiding by the proper reading of the Constitution, its leaders must block the feds from destroying the barrier.

The Founders did not give the Supreme Court a police force for a reason. The court issues opinions, which are supposed to persuade the other branches based on the quality of its facts and analysis. This is why Hamilton in Federalist 78 said that the judiciary is the “least dangerous” branch because it has “neither force nor will.” …

Although Texas is not a separate branch of the federal government, it is an independent state and must also follow the Constitution when it runs into conflict with the Supreme Court or other branches of government.

Horowitz delves into other important issues in the case, such as the Compact Clause and the limits on the Supreme Court’s authority. The full article is well worth reading.

In a post on X on Friday, podcaster Tucker Carlson reported, “Gov. Greg Abbott says ten other states have sent national guard to the Texas border, and others will follow. Abbott says he is ‘prepared’ for a conflict with federal authorities.” In a video attached to that post, Abbott told Carlson, “We do have armed state employees on the border as we speak, right this minute, … as well as National Guard from other states, and you can be assured” that more of both will be deployed at the border. Abbott said he will “declare an invasion” of the state and “this is a fight for the future of America.”

This is a conflict of historic proportions.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal; ZeroHedge; The Blaze; The Blaze

The Public Is Wrong About the Economy, or So the Experts Say

The U.S. economy has recovered from the pandemic lockdowns and post-pandemic inflation, The Wall Street Journal reports, yet the American people stubbornly refuse to give President Joe Biden due credit for his economic genius, the Big Guy’s political supporters complain. Writing at Utah Policy, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Beth Akers affirms that observation:

A straightforward examination of macroeconomic data tells a clear story: Americans overall are better off today than they were when Biden took office. Unemployment is low and has been that way for a good stretch. … The heightened inflation that plagued most of Biden’s presidency has now waned, and many experts are predicting that the Federal Reserve efforts to rein in inflation will succeed without necessarily causing the nation to dip into recession. …

But many Americans aren’t buying it. According to surveys of consumer sentiment, which have historically tracked pretty closely with trends in macroeconomic data, Americans are seemingly distraught over current economic conditions. Data from the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers suggests that consumer sentiment today is at a similar level with consumer sentiment during the Great Recession (in 2008 and 2009), and before that, during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Analysts widely profess to be puzzled by this. I reckon they will settle on the argument that it is simply taking time for people to get used to prices pushed up by Bidenflation, a process impeded by misinformation spread by MAGA scoundrels.

Consumer confidence has in fact risen in the past two months, providing some evidence for the claim that it takes a while for people to forget about what things used to cost only a year or two previously.

Consumer sentiment still, however, is much lower than it was during the pre-pandemic Trump years and even the part of the Obama administration when Republicans had control of Congress and slowed the growth of federal spending:

Source: Yahoo! Finance

Right now, consumer sentiment is about where it was at the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP) has a different explanation for the disparity between the apparent state of the economy and the public’s perception of it:

CTUP senior fellow E.J. Antoni has been crunching the latest numbers from the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] and he finds that workers in the bottom half of incomes still haven’t caught up to inflation. There are a record number of Americans working multiple jobs and 60% of them are still living paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford what they could buy just 3 years ago.

Here’s what that looks like in graph form, from the CTUP piece:

As the CTUP item summarizes it: “[T]he media, the Biden economics team, and the Washington talking heads still can’t understand why everyone is so negative about Bidenomics. Here’s why: real median earnings are still in the red.”