“An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation.” – John Marshall

Folks with extensive training in strategic analysis tend to have a very different viewpoint of the macro-political machinations from that of folks in the trenches who have a more tactical perspective. As such, strategic viewpoints are many times received with great skepticism.

At ground level, for example, one might have a problem with the following strategic analysis: It would appear that Barack Hussein Obama’s macro agenda for the U.S. economy is to break the back of capitalism and, in the ensuing crisis, use government intervention to replace it with a more refined socialist economic framework than the one currently in place.

If that analysis makes you uncomfortable, prepare to become far more so if his agenda succeeds.

As one with excessive formal training in the art of strategic analysis, I can assure you that Obama’s plan, as outlined above, is progressing on schedule.

In regard to the failing economy, Obama recently said, “Make no mistake, we are headed in the right direction, but … we’re not headed there fast enough for a lot of Americans.”

Many people hear those words and interpret them to mean that we’re progressing toward economic recovery. However, the strategic analyst hears that the Left’s objective of a socialized economy is just upon the horizon, that Obama and company would like to bring it to dock at a much faster pace and with such forceful momentum to ensure that the “fundamental transformation of America” can’t be undone.

House Minority Leader John Boehner gets it. In regard to House Democrats’ passage of Obama’s so called “economic reform plan,” Boehner responded, “The writing is on the wall for President Obama’s ‘stimulus’ policies and everyone — taxpayers, economists, and the rest of the world — sees it but him. How much longer are we going to continue with this disastrous spending spree that is scaring the hell out of the American people and piling debt on our kids and grandkids?”

Answer: As long as it takes to fulfill their Leftist agenda.

“We had to take some tough steps to pull the country out of the free fall we faced when I took office,” says the blame-shifting Obama.

For the record, the current economic debacle began with a crisis of confidence in the U.S. housing and security markets — a crisis largely driven by Democrat policies and their refusal to rein in the government-sponsored mortgage enterprises known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The ensuing financial market collapse in the weeks ahead of the 2008 presidential election resulted in the selection of a charismatic radical Leftist community organizer as president of the United States.

Commenting on the agenda of his newly elected boss, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said infamously, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.” And they haven’t.

It is no small irony that on the very day Obama asserted the economy is “headed in the right direction,” the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported, based on the implementation of Obama’s “economic recovery” agenda thus far, that the current accumulation of debt will exceed 100 percent of gross domestic production by 2025, and will total almost twice GDP by 2035.

But not to worry, I suspect our economy will collapse long before our national debt reaches that level. The burden of debt accumulation at current levels makes the current economic problems of socialist European states seem like gnats on an elephant’s … uh, rear.

The CBO report concludes, “Large budget deficits would reduce national saving, leading to higher interest rates, more borrowing from abroad, and less domestic investment — which in turn would lower income growth in the United States. Growing debt would also reduce lawmakers’ ability to respond to economic downturns and other challenges. Over time, higher debt would increase the probability of a fiscal crisis in which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget, and the government would be forced to pay much more to borrow money.”

In other words, unless Obama’s agenda is overturned, the U.S. will one day be a subsidiary of Red China.

On the principles of free enterprise, Obama proclaims, “We already tried the other side’s ideas. We already know where their theories led us. And now we have a choice as a nation. We can return to the failed economic policies of the past, or we can keep building a stronger future. We can go backward, or we can keep moving forward. I don’t know about you, but I want to move forward.”

Obama apparently hopes a majority of Americans have no idea where the Left’s theories led in places like the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, he’s probably right, given that many of his constituents are little more than sycophantic lemmings, having been sufficiently dumbed down in our government-run education institutions.

Obama’s primary co-conspirator in this extra-constitutional folly to undermine the economy is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, she of the following ridiculous claim: “When I became Speaker of the House, the very first day we passed legislation that made Paygo the rule of the House. The federal government will pay as it goes.”

In other words, she promised that Congress would not pass unfunded spending bills. But that would mean either radically reining in spending, or implementing vast new tax initiatives on virtually all income earners, which she and Obama promised they would not do. Thus, Pelosi’s Congress has added more than $1 trillion to the national debt, taking the U.S. Debt Clock beyond the $13 trillion mark.

To put their plan into perspective, national debt was about 40 percent of GDP when Obama took office, but with the economic recession resulting in greatly reduced tax revenues, the national debt will be 62 percent of GDP by the end of this year. That would be an increase of more than 50 percent in just two years. (I recommend you read this paragraph at least twice!)

For a complete analysis of federal waste, see the Heritage Foundation’s study, “30,543 Reasons Spending Is Out of Control.”

To make matters worse, Obama continues to inflate the bloated central government beyond any recognition of its constitutional authority even as American families and businesses must cut back to make ends meet. Adding insult to injury, non-military federal employee salaries are now 40 percent higher than private sector salaries on average, and while private sector benefit packages average $9,882, government employee benefits average $32,115.

This week, Obama laughingly launched his annual “SAVE” Award dog and pony show, ostensibly encouraging federal employees to recommend how to save taxpayer dollars. I have more than a few ideas, but Obama did not ask taxpayers how to save taxpayer dollars.

That old sage Will Rogers once quipped, “Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.” If he only knew…

Demonstrating the extent to which government has exceeded its constitutional mandate, my colleague Walter Williams wrote, “In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees, James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, stood on the floor of the House to object, saying, ‘I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.’ He later added, ‘[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.’”

Professor Williams concludes, “Two hundred years later, at least two-thirds of a multi-trillion-dollar federal budget is spent on charity or ‘objects of benevolence.’”

Is there still time to restore the primacy of Free Enterprise over Socialism and turn back Obama and his Leftist ilk?

Reversing Course and Restoring Liberty

“The people of the U.S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings.” – James Madison

So once again, I ask, “Is there still time to restore the primacy of free enterprise over Socialism and turn back Obama and his Leftist ilk?”

The short answer is yes. I believe there is still time to implement political solutions to reverse course and restore Essential Liberty, constitutional Rule of Law and its economic expression, free enterprise. But that window is closing.

There is an economic catastrophe on our horizon, (the Obama Plan), one whose full force will likely be felt in the next few years. It will bring with it massive increases in taxation and income redistribution accompanied by inflation of the cost of goods and services and, ultimately, centralization of the economy through complete regulation of every economic sector. This scenario will be modeled after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, but it will be so massive as to fully institutionalize Socialism on a national scale.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is there exists a solution, short of civil disobedience and revolution, to dispense with the Obama Plan. That solution is a revitalized national movement to restore constitutional integrity. That effort is now well underway bearing the Tea Party label — not a political party, per se, but the advocacy of a set of principles to restore Rule of Law.

Our success will require a groundswell of action in the next few election cycles, and the seating of a majority of legislators who have both a firm understanding of the principles of Essential Liberty and a willingness to enact the bold and difficult legislation necessary to restore constitutional Rule of Law.

The most important of these legislative measures are outlined in the Patriot Declaration. These include the enumeration of specific constitutional authority for any and every act of the legislature, its compliance with our Constitution’s standard for Federalism, the Tenth Amendment, and a complete overhaul of our system of taxation.

In other words, the only way to undermine the Obama Plan is to reduce the size and scope of central government such that it comports once again with the plain language of our Constitution. In fact, this conversion to a government whose powers are, as our Constitution’s principal author James Madison declared, “few and defined,” will necessarily collapse its size.

However, our Constitution’s prescription for central government authority and its proscription against exceeding that authority have been eroded for generations. It will thus take time to restore the Rule of Law, but restoration is the only option if our legacy of liberty is to be extended to future generations.

The alternative is, most certainly, tyranny.

The “Cycle of Democracy,” attributed to 18th-century Scottish historian Alexander Tytler, follows this sequence: “From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty [Rule of Law]; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage [rule of men].”

The consequences of complacency and apathy are, indeed, dependency and bondage.

The choice that all Americans face today was aptly described by Ronald Reagan in his timeless challenge to conservatives, “A Time for Choosing”: “You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right, There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”

Now, as then, Leftists decry the Reagan model for restoration, cutting taxes to grow the economy, as “trickle-down economics.” But the Reagan Plan resulted in the largest peacetime economic surge in American history.

To be sure, the Democrat-controlled legislature refused to enact the spending cuts Reagan called for, and this led to what were then record deficits. Those deficits, however, pale in comparison to the debt of the Obama Plan, which can only result in “trickle-up poverty.”

Alexis de Tocqueville once observed, “Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

Today, the once noble Democrat Party seeks only to forcibly reduce the people they pretend to serve to restraint and servitude.

In 1916, a minister and outspoken advocate for liberty, William J. H. Boetcker, published a pamphlet entitled The Ten Cannots, which fittingly contrasts the competing political and economic factions today: You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they will not do for themselves.

It is a hard, undeniable truth that the federal government cannot give to anybody what it does not first take from somebody else, and the power to do so is ruinous. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, we must “prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them.”

Further, the debt and taxation crisis we face today was a prospect of great concern to our Founders at the dawn of our Republic. In Jefferson’s words, “Taxes should be continued by annual or biennial reenactments, because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse is a salutary restraint from which an honest government ought not wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free. … Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands. … The fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its turn wretchedness and oppression. … We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. … I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.”

In 1824, Jefferson concluded, “I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” What would he say today?

Our Constitution, and Rule of Law it was meant to ensure, has suffered great injury as a result of national complacency and apathy.

So we must once again choose.

Which will it be, freedom or totalitarianism, the Reagan Plan or the Obama Plan?

If we expect to bequeath liberty to our posterity, then we must dedicate our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to uphold the primacy of free enterprise over socialism, to defend Essential Liberty and to restore constitutional Rule of Law.

Will enough conservatives be seated in Congress this election cycle to stop, or even reverse, the Obama agenda? Stopping, at the very least, is mandatory. Reversing, while a daunting challenge, is achievable and must be the sole focus of every Patriot in the coming election cycle.

Be assured, should we fail to rise to the current challenge, the terminus of the Obama Plan is tyranny.

So, fellow Patriots, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.”

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!

Mark Alexander
Publisher, PatriotPost.US

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