Hennessy's View

When the rules become so complicated and convoluted that well-meaning people unwittingly break the law, the legal system has lost its moral authority.

Students at Georgetown University are discovering the horrors of, what Tocqueville called “small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.”

An editorial in The Hoya, the official student newspaper, students advocate “eliminating bureaucracy.” Their grievance?  Indecipherable rules that student groups cannot understand.

In other words, student groups have no way of knowing the exact consequences for violations or even what kind of conduct merits punishment. For the university to legitimize its authority to sanction student groups for improper conduct, administrators must more clearly communicate their rules and expectations.

If they think Georgetown’s rules for student groups are confusing and unmanageable, wait until they fill out a tax return more advanced than the 1040-EZ.

I’m thrilled to see students at a Jesuit school awake to the horrors of bureaucratic tyranny.  I hope they carry their love of liberty and sound government into the political world by working hard this year for the overthrow of Barack Obama.

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Until the clock struck twelve on January 1, that is.

That’s when 40,000 – count ‘em, forty thousand—new laws took effect in the United States.

Some of the new laws are, no doubt, good and proper. Some restore liberties lost. But others bind. And some are silly.

Utah’s banning happy hours.  (Why not ban melancholy hours instead?) California now prohibits people 18 and under from using tanning beds.  Georgia requires golf carts to have turn signals and horns if driven on public roads. 

In a cruel joke, many states are raising the minimum wage, making millions of unemployed young people feel like they’re missing out on even more.

Logically, after more than 230 years of legislating, you’d think we’d be just about done making laws, wouldn’t you? Someone suggested that we stop calling people in legislatures “law makers,” hoping they’d stop assuming their job requires new laws. I’m starting to agree.

Some families have a rule about new things: for every new thing that comes into the home, something else must go out.  Get a new toy, pick an old one to donate. New suit? Old suit to Salvation Army.

The idea is to live within some parameters, to avoid the accumulation of crap. The practice is a bit tough for most of us to follow, until the producer of Hoarders knocks on the door and asks if you’d like to be a TV star.

Maybe it’s time we pass one more law in Jefferson City and Washington: for each new law, you must sunset another. 

See 40,000 Laws on Daily Mail

Photo: izismile.com

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Some St. Louis area conservatives cheered Roy Blunt’s (R-MO) elevation to the Number 5 leadership position in the Senate Republican caucus.

I didn’t. At least not politically. I like Senator Blunt personally, so I’m happy in that respect. But I’m not happy for the reasons some others are.

First, as I told Jo Mannies of the St. Louis Beacon, internal party stuff isn’t really a Tea Party matter. Leadership in the Senate’s GOP caucus is for Republican Senators to worry about.

More importantly, I’m a little disturbed about the expressed reason for the local happiness.

It seems some conservatives are eager for Senator Blunt to use his new power to channel more pork to the area. 

I don’t really understand how that’s conservative.  I thought we were trying to reduce the size and scope of government.  I thought our goal was to get Washington out of the business of picking winners and losers. 

When a Senator transfers money from one state to benefit another state, it’s socialism.

When a Senator writes regulations to help one business over another business, it’s corporatism, another word for fascism.

When a Senator bring home the bacon by borrowing from my future grandchildren, it’s generational theft.

Conservatives who protest wealth transfer though welfare payments to poor people can’t cheer wealth transfer to corporations.  Well, they can, but there’s a word for what that would make them.

The most difficult aspect of conservatism is eschewing short-term personal gain when it conflicts with the lawful role of government and good morals. On this point, I am far from perfect.  But I’m getting better at recognizing and correcting my own hypocrisy.

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Everyone knows and accepts that government does stupid things. Sometimes it feels like people institute governments and delegate them certain powers just to give us something to complain about.

Government stupidity, scandal, and corruption hits different people in different ways. Government hyperactivity keeps poor people poor by limiting opportunity and by building barriers to exiting poverty programs.  “If you take that job, you’ll lose your health insurance.” Compassion my non-qualifying asset.

Government induces moral complacency by telling otherwise decent people not to help their fellow humans.

Perhaps most insidiously, government steals opportunity from future generations for the benefit of generations that can and should take care of themselves.

Traditionally, business people, among others, watched and checked government.  They did this through local chambers of commerce, like the RCGA in St. Louis.

According to this article on Harvard Business Review:

Chambers of commerce are the oldest surviving business organizations. The earliest in the English-speaking world were set up in the 1760s in New York City and the Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. Charleston (SC), Manchester and Liverpool (UK), Quebec, and Jamaica followed in the 1770s, with the chamber model diffusing to all major towns and cities by the 1920s.

Chambers of commerce organized out of anger against government stupidity and growth.

Their earliest business leaders were angry protesters against the Stamp Act, taxation of the colonies, and military coercion on America. They were responding to a period of extreme contention between economic and political interests. A chamber of commerce provided a new model to shape anger and protests into more effective, reasoned, and sustained economic lobbies to the imperial government in London.

Somewhere between Stamp Act protests and Aerotropolis, though, chambers of commerce switched teams. They become lobbyists who curry favor with politicians in order to win unfair advantages for certain members of the chambers. According to economist Stephen Moore:

The Chamber of Commerce, long a supporter of limited government and low taxes, was part of the coalition backing the Reagan revolution in the 1980s. . . . [M]any chambers of commerce on the state and local level have been abandoning these goals. They’re becoming, in effect, lobbyists for big government.

That certainly seems to be the case in St. Louis. 

The RCGA, which once helped revitalize areas of town like Laclede’s Landing, Soulard, and Dog Town, now focuses on transferring tax dollars from future generations or from tax payers in distant Missouri counties into the pockets of the RCGA’s favorites players.

In the process, St. Louis has fallen in almost every category.  Population is declining in both St. Louis City and St. Louis County.  City schools are a discredited shambles.  St. Louis County is shedding tax payers to adjacent counties thanks to its insatiable appetite for fees and taxes. The St. Louis region has fallen dramatically in job creation.

Instead of working to get government off the backs of businesses and improving the region, the RCGA is focused on growing government and shifting business risk to the tax payers.  That’s not only bad for business and bad for the region, it’s bad for the soul.

Stephen Moore says St. Louis’s RCGA is not unique:

In as many as half the states, state taxpayer organizations, free-market think tanks, and small business leaders now complain bitterly that, on a wide range of issues, chambers of commerce deploy their financial resources and lobbying clout to expand the taxing, spending, and regulatory authorities of government.

The reason I and many other Tea Partiers oppose the Republican Establishment is because we’ve seen how that Establishment has gutted American cities like St. Louis. The Republican Establishment is almost indiscernible from various chambers of commerce.  Neither advances limited government, free markets, and fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives like me have a knee-jerk tendency to defend all private businesses against all accusations.  But that’s a knee-jerk reaction, not a wise consideration of facts and consequences.

Big businesses are famously myopic.  We’ve all heard the woes of companies that look only to the fiscal quarter or year, not to the long-term value of the business.  Many conservatives have oversold themselves on certain aspects of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations without ever trying to square those ideas with his other work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 

As a result, we on the right have become de facto enablers of big government, defending big business in their efforts to gain advantages through activist governments.

Stephen Moore found a small business owner in Maryland who’s had enough with his local chamber and the big businesses using it to destroy everyone else:

“I used to think that public employee unions like the NEA were the main enemy in the struggle for limited government, competition, and private sector solutions,” says Mr. Caldara of the Independence Institute. “I was wrong. Our biggest adversary is the special-interest business cartel that labels itself ‘the business community’ and its political machine run by chambers and other industry associations. [emphasis mine]“

Luckily, that Harvard Business School piece offers some solutions.  I’d like to responsible and serious St. Louis businesses start a rival chamber to advance these 7 principles of business-friendly government:

1. Set an ambitious new vision for engagement with the deepest irritations among chamber members; involve non-members to aid recruitment.
2. Build capacity among staff and volunteers to manage protest.
3. Recognize that government “bads” and threats are usually a far more influential force on businesses than government “goods”: avoid the US “pork barrel” and do not be trapped by the UK or EU incentives to “chase the funding”. This just gets non-profits to follow politicians’ agendas.
4. Focus on where threats, risks, and anger are highest; most businesses are not interested in the minor or trivial.
5. Use new technology to expose contention and open new avenues to welcome protest. Take on the tough problems and avoid easy solutions. Use business networks, social media, and crowdsourcing to re-engage business communities at low cost.
6. Prepare for long term and sustained campaigns; policy victories are rarely won quickly.
7. Expose policy incompetence, look for public programs that do not work and press for termination; but celebrate policy successes, especially where businesses and chambers have contributed. Use blogs and networks to keep up to date and monitor feelings. [emphasis mine]

If you’re interested in starting such a chamber, please enter comments below.

Update:  Perhaps Joe Reagan will changes things.  I forgot that the RCGA recently replaced long-time CEO, Dick Fleming.

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A friend of mine told me this story.

He sat that there bragging about getting a tax cut for friends of his.

I said, ‘you do realize, don’t you, that you’re just like the Democrats, except you’re giving taxpayers money to a different special interest.’

He looked at me and said, ‘but our special interests do good with the money.’

My friend was talking about the second highest-ranking Republican in the Missouri House at the time.

That’s Establishment thinking. The idea that legislators can spend . . . I’m sorry, “invest” . . . your money better than you can.

Okay, so maybe I have a fixation with the Establishment.  Just maybe, though, my fixation is justified.

The Establishment does some good.  It has access to lots of money and media.  It has database and training programs to help candidates win.  It throws great parties in really cool hotels, allowing ordinary people to watch drunk Republicans skinny dipping with Dumbo-ear water wings. 

Most importantly, the worst, most corruptible, most cynical, most self-serving of the Republican Establishment is still better for America than the best of the Democrat Establishment.  (Don’t forget when when you’re vilifying a candidate between now and the primary.)

There’s still something wrong with the Establishment.  It’s purpose is to advance and perpetuate the Establishment. 

Our purpose is to advance and perpetuate a uniquely American freedom.

In 2010, our purposes happened to blend very well with the GOP’s. That led to harmony on the right and a big win for Republicans.

After the swearings-in, the Establishment did what the Establishment does: like any organism from a simple protozoan to an advanced primate the GOP started working on self-perpetuation. 

Like Obama, the Republican Establishment believes that people cannot run their own lives.  Instead, other super-people (called politicians and bureaucrats) must run our lives for us.

The GOP Establishment supports subsidies for corporations that should be able to stand on their own. It supports bailouts for company that should be allowed to die their own. It maintains regulations for matters that the market regulates better. It chooses winners and losers, from Government Motors to the failed Aerotropolis here in Missouri.

The Establishment demonstrates its mistrust of people and markets every day.

We utterly reject that notion.

The reason the Tea Party exists is not to end the Establishment.  As I wrote last week, that can’t really happen. 

Instead, we hope to mold the Establishment into a vessel of liberty and good government, not a tool for social engineering.

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