Congress and the Bush administration are looking for ways to reverse President Clinton’s barrage of executive orders from his final months of office.
The former president, for example, arbitrarily designated millions of acres of private lands as public property, utilizing vaguely worded environmentalist legislation as his rationalization. He also, in effect, declared private businesses to be public property through issuing “ergonomic guidelines” for offices to follow.
Clinton, more than most presidents, failed to appreciate any kind of distinction between issuing an order to, say, The State Department or The Department of Health and Human Services versus an order to a private business. Perhaps this is because he has been a public official, quite literally, for his entire life and has no remote idea of what the private sector is, nor what the concept to make money — as opposed to merely redistributing it — is all about.
I support Congress and the Bush Administration for any efforts in reversing these regulations, but they still don’t get to the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is this: private lands and private businesses are not public property. They are private property. An individual should be free to do whatever he or she pleases on his or her private property. The only exceptions to this should be initiating force (i.e. murder, assault and battery, rape, etc.) or fraud (i.e. violating mutually agreed upon contracts, embezzlement, etc.) It’s that simple.
Many decades ago, the government started to slowly cross over the line. Particularly from the FDR-era onward, the government began to consider some of private property to be its own. For example, taxes were raised to initiate government retirement pensions and other social programs, like it or not. In the psychology field, we call these “boundary issues.” This led to the ever-growing alphabet soup of regulatory agencies we still have with us today. The presence of some regulations leads to more regulations; the presence of more regulations leads to the “need” for still more agencies and ever more tax money to fund and support them.
It’s a vicious cycle which began with the very first step over the line, way back when. There should not have been so much surprise that a President Clinton, sooner or later, would come along and gleefully impose his arbitrary will on whomever he feels like. President Clinton was not the first to act in this way; he was just an uglier, cruder, and more consistent version than usual. (His wife, if ever given the chance, will be much worse: she wants to go all the way in her quest for control). The Clintons won’t be the last, either — at least not so long as the government considers private property its own to seize, regulate, or reshape as it sees fit.
The issue is not “too much” regulation, or “too many” executive orders. The issue is the existence of such powers in the halls of government in the first place. Until or unless individual citizens learn where and how to draw the boundary, you better believe the problem will never be solved. President Clinton gave us a whiff of true-blue dictatorship for the first time in our nation’s history. Consider him a warning of even worse to come, if we allow it. Will we heed the warning?
Visit Dr. Michael Hurd’s website at: http://www.drhurd.com/
