Doomy's article is a subject that makes my heart thump.
I agree with every sentence. When people think of liberties they often think exclusively of political liberties like speech, association, religion, and so forth. These are very important. However, what are these worth without economic liberty? Wickard v Filburn made certain that the federal government could regulate- in others words ban- all economic activity. In addition to being a major suppression of liberty it's also an end run around the Takings Clause. Think back to Obama's pledge to destroy the coal industry and then following through on that threat. Billions of dollars of property were ruined when he shuttered power plants and coal mines. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost. Much of the big mining equipment lost the bulk of its value and was sold for parts or exported for pennies on the dollar. Such is the fruit of Wickard v Filburn and its allied cases.
But it's not just SCOTUS that got it wrong. After all, it was Congress who passed the law and the President who signed it. No future Congress repealed it. Our nation has been teaching its youth that this is a legitimate power of the federal government, that economic liberties are, like the 2nd amendment, second class liberties. Even if SCOTUS overturns Wickard we still have to contend with what's in the hearts of Americans with regard to economic liberty. Will they elect legislators who support passing such a law again?
So much work needs to be done to instruct the nation on our full heritage of liberty, including the right to work in any trade you wish without government destroying your career. You don't have to be in the coal industry to fear that possibility. During Covid the Constitution became an artifact for a time and many were told they were "non-essential" workers. Here's to hope that SCOTUS can strike a blow and that friends of economic liberty to persuade their fellow Americans that those liberties are as important as the ones in the Bill of Rights.
Studying Singapore, an authoritarian society with a happier population than ours, has made me realize that economic liberty affects one's lifestyle metrics and daily mental outlook more than civil liberties, if human flourishing can be quantified pragmatically.
Different cultural context, different resource endowment, different global role to play. Bless them for their remarkable achievements, may they contribute to inspire others, including growingly disfuncional western countries with too much compliance.
In general, governments - or rather the humans given power over others - once power is obtained, want to hang on to it. Spending my professional life in the “Washington Metro Area” the rule above all is, “You either want to own it, or kill it.” And one of my formative moments, was dealing with Norwegians back in the 1980s, and learning that after the Germans had been shown the door following WWII, the Norwegians accepted a war tax of 400% on automobiles. At least as of the 1980s, the “War Tax” was still in place. And good Lord, the gun owners of the US have been buffeted by the constant attempts by the ATF to control ever more of activities more or less related to the Second Amendment. The larger aggregate picture though, is most illuminating. Thank you.
Thanks for the reexamination of the Wickard v Fiburn case, but is this behavior any more egregious than the government paying farmers not to farm, or forcing oil companies to put ethanol or other oxygenates in their gasoline, or shutting down schools during Covid-19? The government dictates much of our behavior and the public seems to grow more and more accepting of centralized planning each decade. We can hope the current administration can reverse much of this mindset. Gavin Newsom isn't going to like it....
Well, as you may know I'm very hesitant to flow with your libertarian take on how to do the economy. I feel there is a fine line between government and the "free market" (which is never true)
To put it into context (which no one likes to do proving a point) the New Deal at the time was trying to keep prices and markets from TOTALLY collapsing. They didn't believe in juicing the economy with crazy crazy liquidity like we do today to save themselves and every time the "free market" implodes from its own greed and stupidity. Was this farmer screwed damn right he was. But again, all farmers were against the wall and if you look at the charts the commodities section of the market was one of the few bright spots during the Great Depression.
I'm not a socialist or a nihilist which are basically the same but I am not a libertarian. We have tried this approach too many times and it doesn't work unless your one of the top 10 % and own stuff.
We need to be balanced in how we run our economy which is difficult to do. Why investors read a lot to see the tea leaves and where we are in this balancing act to make profits.
The people wanting to make their own booze. Ok yes again this unbalancing we do. Prohibition was an overreaction to a problem. Too many men got off work and drank the family money away. It was a serious problem. But the law was an overreaction to the problem as we usually sway between too much government and too little.
From their mission, "NCLA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State. NCLA’s public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans’ fundamental rights."
Apologies if this organization has already been mentioned in earlier posts.
looking forward to watching or listening to the oral arguments on this one as well last the last stand protestations of the presenters in the print and broadcast media worth the cost of the popcorn . hope it gets there as all I have read about the decision is that it was poor jurisprudence on par with Roe the question is how dose the administrative state react, dose it go back to the states a la 10th amendment ?
Such an insightful, excellent article! Thanks! I particularly appreciated the calculation of the fine in today’s gold USD equivalent. I calculated the fine in simple USD … about $2,330 which simply hammers another issue … the eroding value of our currency.
Note that an impediment to overturning the Endangerment Finding under the major questions principle was recently left in place by the big beautiful bill, a major error in Republican strategy, in my view. Biden’s similarly partisan IRA added language to the Clean Air Act defining CO2 as a “pollutant”, one of the hurdles the EPA has to surmount to get to the EF. By failing to reverse that language the argument can be made that this major question was resolved by Congress and not by bureaucrats. The fact that a substantive matter like that should not have been allowed into reconciliation legislation under the Senate’s germaneness rules may well be disregarded by the court as it may not want to get into the weeds of legislative sausage making.
Unfortunately I agree with depletedUranium that the “The Roberts court will not confront Wickard v Filburn directly. Just slowly chip away.” The barn needs to be cleaned out and I hope the Supreme Court does take it head on for We the People.
Holy Cow …make that Holy Holy Cow…anther great essay helping to bring balance to all of us readers….balance because you help us see that the push of the super unbalanced stuff that has built to 150,000 pages in 245 volumes of crap the “feds “ have shoved down our throats, didn’ t just start yesterday , and that there are “heroes” in the Farmer in in 1940’s and this wannabe booze brewing couple in today’s world want to take on these “feds”!! Thanks again
My bet would be the Moonshine couple's case gets narrowly decided in their favor if SCOTUS gets involved.
The Roberts court will not confront Wickard v Filburn directly. Just slowly chip away.
That said, where's the support from silicon valley tech bros who need electric generation for their AI data centers??? Confronting Wickard v. Filburn with off-grid gas generation (like xAI did in Memphis) seems like a no-brainer.
Or is confronting a sacrosanct New Deal legal pillar too big a step?? I'm getting a whiff of silicon valley's latent progressive Stockholm Syndrome from a decade ago. Elon should get behind this.
Several of these tech bros run companies that (imho) are most probably operations either supported , welcomed or even given birth by so called deep state actors.
Another excellent piece. Somehow, the size of congressional bureaucracy must be reduced. What is surprising (well, actually not) is that the size of the Code of Federal Regulations never makes the news.
Federal government’s regulatory overreach to shove green energy down our throats, and the resulting expensive, inefficient, ineffective, unreliable energy adversely effecting 90% of our population livelihood is where this effort stemmed from.
In order to rollback & defang the abuse of the commerce clause by Wickard v. Filburn (1942), Gonzales v. Raich (2005) must be overturned.
Though the Court in U.S. v. Lopez (1995) overturned the Gun-Free School Zones Act on the grounds that it was not related to interstate commerce, just ten years later in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), they reverted back to the precedent they had set in Wickard.
The Ream case will overturn the 2005 Gonzales v. Raich which as you correctly stated in your article curtail the abuse of federal agencies like EPA:
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been used ad nauseam by the EPA to usurp state-level oversight of plainly intrastate activities and those not directly considered commerce. Further showcasing the risks of congressional outsourcing, the agency’s reinterpretation of the Clean Air Act to conclude that carbon dioxide is a pollutant violates all fair readings of the original bill and the debate surrounding its passage, neither of which can plausibly support such a conclusion.
There are two court cases working their way through the 5th and 6th circuits on their way to the Supreme Court 🤞. The Ream case being the 6th, god willing it will prevail in achieving its goal of “make federal government small again.”
Affordable Reliable Clean Energy Security Act of USA that codifies America’s energy independence into a federal law is in the works.
Americans energy affordability and America’s national security through energy independence are in the works with the two powerful one-two punch described above … god willing 🙏 & for the future of America & the free world they will prevail 🗽🇺🇸🗽
Doomy's article is a subject that makes my heart thump.
I agree with every sentence. When people think of liberties they often think exclusively of political liberties like speech, association, religion, and so forth. These are very important. However, what are these worth without economic liberty? Wickard v Filburn made certain that the federal government could regulate- in others words ban- all economic activity. In addition to being a major suppression of liberty it's also an end run around the Takings Clause. Think back to Obama's pledge to destroy the coal industry and then following through on that threat. Billions of dollars of property were ruined when he shuttered power plants and coal mines. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost. Much of the big mining equipment lost the bulk of its value and was sold for parts or exported for pennies on the dollar. Such is the fruit of Wickard v Filburn and its allied cases.
But it's not just SCOTUS that got it wrong. After all, it was Congress who passed the law and the President who signed it. No future Congress repealed it. Our nation has been teaching its youth that this is a legitimate power of the federal government, that economic liberties are, like the 2nd amendment, second class liberties. Even if SCOTUS overturns Wickard we still have to contend with what's in the hearts of Americans with regard to economic liberty. Will they elect legislators who support passing such a law again?
So much work needs to be done to instruct the nation on our full heritage of liberty, including the right to work in any trade you wish without government destroying your career. You don't have to be in the coal industry to fear that possibility. During Covid the Constitution became an artifact for a time and many were told they were "non-essential" workers. Here's to hope that SCOTUS can strike a blow and that friends of economic liberty to persuade their fellow Americans that those liberties are as important as the ones in the Bill of Rights.
Amen
Studying Singapore, an authoritarian society with a happier population than ours, has made me realize that economic liberty affects one's lifestyle metrics and daily mental outlook more than civil liberties, if human flourishing can be quantified pragmatically.
Different cultural context, different resource endowment, different global role to play. Bless them for their remarkable achievements, may they contribute to inspire others, including growingly disfuncional western countries with too much compliance.
In general, governments - or rather the humans given power over others - once power is obtained, want to hang on to it. Spending my professional life in the “Washington Metro Area” the rule above all is, “You either want to own it, or kill it.” And one of my formative moments, was dealing with Norwegians back in the 1980s, and learning that after the Germans had been shown the door following WWII, the Norwegians accepted a war tax of 400% on automobiles. At least as of the 1980s, the “War Tax” was still in place. And good Lord, the gun owners of the US have been buffeted by the constant attempts by the ATF to control ever more of activities more or less related to the Second Amendment. The larger aggregate picture though, is most illuminating. Thank you.
Thanks for the reexamination of the Wickard v Fiburn case, but is this behavior any more egregious than the government paying farmers not to farm, or forcing oil companies to put ethanol or other oxygenates in their gasoline, or shutting down schools during Covid-19? The government dictates much of our behavior and the public seems to grow more and more accepting of centralized planning each decade. We can hope the current administration can reverse much of this mindset. Gavin Newsom isn't going to like it....
Well, as you may know I'm very hesitant to flow with your libertarian take on how to do the economy. I feel there is a fine line between government and the "free market" (which is never true)
To put it into context (which no one likes to do proving a point) the New Deal at the time was trying to keep prices and markets from TOTALLY collapsing. They didn't believe in juicing the economy with crazy crazy liquidity like we do today to save themselves and every time the "free market" implodes from its own greed and stupidity. Was this farmer screwed damn right he was. But again, all farmers were against the wall and if you look at the charts the commodities section of the market was one of the few bright spots during the Great Depression.
I'm not a socialist or a nihilist which are basically the same but I am not a libertarian. We have tried this approach too many times and it doesn't work unless your one of the top 10 % and own stuff.
We need to be balanced in how we run our economy which is difficult to do. Why investors read a lot to see the tea leaves and where we are in this balancing act to make profits.
The people wanting to make their own booze. Ok yes again this unbalancing we do. Prohibition was an overreaction to a problem. Too many men got off work and drank the family money away. It was a serious problem. But the law was an overreaction to the problem as we usually sway between too much government and too little.
Great article, thanks Doom.
A wonderful summary. Thanks, Doomberg.
If one is interested in getting back to the Constitution and away from administrative tyranny, the New Civil Liberties Alliance is the place to go.
Their website - https://nclalegal.org/
A sample of their work is described in their podcast series Unwritten Law - https://nclalegal.org/media/unwritten-law/
From their mission, "NCLA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State. NCLA’s public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans’ fundamental rights."
Apologies if this organization has already been mentioned in earlier posts.
looking forward to watching or listening to the oral arguments on this one as well last the last stand protestations of the presenters in the print and broadcast media worth the cost of the popcorn . hope it gets there as all I have read about the decision is that it was poor jurisprudence on par with Roe the question is how dose the administrative state react, dose it go back to the states a la 10th amendment ?
this is a perfect time to shut down the EPA. PLEASE.
Thanks so much for educating me on the Wickard decision. I can’t believe it hasn’t been seriously challenged until now. I’ll be following Ream closely
Such an insightful, excellent article! Thanks! I particularly appreciated the calculation of the fine in today’s gold USD equivalent. I calculated the fine in simple USD … about $2,330 which simply hammers another issue … the eroding value of our currency.
Note that an impediment to overturning the Endangerment Finding under the major questions principle was recently left in place by the big beautiful bill, a major error in Republican strategy, in my view. Biden’s similarly partisan IRA added language to the Clean Air Act defining CO2 as a “pollutant”, one of the hurdles the EPA has to surmount to get to the EF. By failing to reverse that language the argument can be made that this major question was resolved by Congress and not by bureaucrats. The fact that a substantive matter like that should not have been allowed into reconciliation legislation under the Senate’s germaneness rules may well be disregarded by the court as it may not want to get into the weeds of legislative sausage making.
Thanks for the additional color
This and Administrative Law Courts and Judges must either be abolished or transferred to the Judicial branch.
Yup
Unfortunately I agree with depletedUranium that the “The Roberts court will not confront Wickard v Filburn directly. Just slowly chip away.” The barn needs to be cleaned out and I hope the Supreme Court does take it head on for We the People.
Yes
Holy Cow …make that Holy Holy Cow…anther great essay helping to bring balance to all of us readers….balance because you help us see that the push of the super unbalanced stuff that has built to 150,000 pages in 245 volumes of crap the “feds “ have shoved down our throats, didn’ t just start yesterday , and that there are “heroes” in the Farmer in in 1940’s and this wannabe booze brewing couple in today’s world want to take on these “feds”!! Thanks again
You’re welcome!
My bet would be the Moonshine couple's case gets narrowly decided in their favor if SCOTUS gets involved.
The Roberts court will not confront Wickard v Filburn directly. Just slowly chip away.
That said, where's the support from silicon valley tech bros who need electric generation for their AI data centers??? Confronting Wickard v. Filburn with off-grid gas generation (like xAI did in Memphis) seems like a no-brainer.
Or is confronting a sacrosanct New Deal legal pillar too big a step?? I'm getting a whiff of silicon valley's latent progressive Stockholm Syndrome from a decade ago. Elon should get behind this.
Several of these tech bros run companies that (imho) are most probably operations either supported , welcomed or even given birth by so called deep state actors.
Another excellent piece. Somehow, the size of congressional bureaucracy must be reduced. What is surprising (well, actually not) is that the size of the Code of Federal Regulations never makes the news.
Yup
Here is the article that describes the project nicknamed “make federal government small again.”
https://americanmind.org/salvo/recovering-the-commerce-clause/
Federal government’s regulatory overreach to shove green energy down our throats, and the resulting expensive, inefficient, ineffective, unreliable energy adversely effecting 90% of our population livelihood is where this effort stemmed from.
In order to rollback & defang the abuse of the commerce clause by Wickard v. Filburn (1942), Gonzales v. Raich (2005) must be overturned.
Though the Court in U.S. v. Lopez (1995) overturned the Gun-Free School Zones Act on the grounds that it was not related to interstate commerce, just ten years later in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), they reverted back to the precedent they had set in Wickard.
The Ream case will overturn the 2005 Gonzales v. Raich which as you correctly stated in your article curtail the abuse of federal agencies like EPA:
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been used ad nauseam by the EPA to usurp state-level oversight of plainly intrastate activities and those not directly considered commerce. Further showcasing the risks of congressional outsourcing, the agency’s reinterpretation of the Clean Air Act to conclude that carbon dioxide is a pollutant violates all fair readings of the original bill and the debate surrounding its passage, neither of which can plausibly support such a conclusion.
There are two court cases working their way through the 5th and 6th circuits on their way to the Supreme Court 🤞. The Ream case being the 6th, god willing it will prevail in achieving its goal of “make federal government small again.”
Affordable Reliable Clean Energy Security Act of USA that codifies America’s energy independence into a federal law is in the works.
Americans energy affordability and America’s national security through energy independence are in the works with the two powerful one-two punch described above … god willing 🙏 & for the future of America & the free world they will prevail 🗽🇺🇸🗽
Thanks for the link!