From: fff@fff.org ("The Future of Freedom Foundation")
To: emailupd@fff.org
Subject: FFF Email Update -- November 15, 2002
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 12:41:33 -0500


FFF EMAIL UPDATE --  November 15, 2002
The Future of Freedom Foundation, Fairfax, Va.
http://www.fff.org
-- Advancing ideas on liberty for you --

CONTENTS

1. FFF Thoughts for the Week
2. Capsule Commentary by Sheldon Richman
3. FFF Commentary: "The Glass Houses of Dictators" by Jacob G. Hornberger
4. FFF Op-Ed: "A Rare Moment of Candor" by Sheldon Richman
5. Indiana's Concurrent Resolution: "There Is No Such Thing as Federal Aid"
6. Spreading the Word
7. Subscribe and Support

##### 1 #####

FFF THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

"The great thinker is seldom a disputant. He answers other men's arguments
by stating the truth as he sees it." -- Daniel March

"Expropriation of private property, without the owner's consent, falls
squarely within the definition of stealing -- certainly an immoral action.
Yet, that is the standard procedure in Federal urban renewal programs, and
the results are consistent with the immoral nature of the action,
notwithstanding the good intentions of civic leaders seeking to provide
better living conditions for residents of slum housing via government
aid." -- John C. Sparks

##### 2 #####

CAPSULE COMMENTARY

"President Bush dismissed the Iraqi parliament's deliberation on and
rejection of the UN arms-inspections resolution as 'political theater.'
That's funny coming from a man who declared that he has the power to launch
an unprovoked military attack on Iraq no matter what Congress says." --
Sheldon Richman

##### 3 #####

FFF COMMENTARY

The Glass Houses of Dictators
by Jacob G. Hornberger

President Bush's reaction to the Iraqi Parliament's decision to reject the
newly enacted U.N. resolution authorizing renewed inspections in Iraq
provides a fascinating insight into the direction in which our own nation is
headed. According to the New York Times, President Bush said, "The Iraqi
Parliament is nothing but a rubber stamp for Saddam Hussein. This guy's a
dictator, so we'll have to wait and see what he says."

But wait a minute! Hasn't it always been President Bush's position that
he -- and he alone -- decides whether the United States goes to war against
Iraq? Isn't it he who said that while he would like to have the support of
Congress, he would make the ultimate decision on whether to go to war
regardless of what Congress decided?

As Sheldon Richman put it, "President Bush dismissed the Iraqi parliament's
deliberation on and rejection of the UN arms-inspections resolution as
'political theater.' Thats funny coming from a man who declared that he has
the power to launch an unprovoked military attack on Iraq no matter what
Congress says."

If possessing the omnipotent power to decide whether his nation goes to war
is part of what makes Saddam Hussein a dictator, what does that say about
Bush, who claims the exact same power as the U.S. president? Is there really
much difference in principle whether a dictatorial power is exercised by a
self-appointed ruler or an elected one? Isn't the real point that the rulers
of both the United States and Iraq exercise the same omnipotent and
dictatorial power to send their respective nations into war?

It's important to note that our Founders rejected the Bush-Hussein view that
the power to declare war should vest in the executive. Instead, with our
Constitution our Founders placed the power to declare war in the legislative
branch of our government -- the Congress. Thus the supreme law of the
land -- the law that controls the actions of our public officials --
prohibits the president from waging war without an express declaration of
war from
Congress. And it also prohibits the Congress from delegating its power to
declare war to the president (which renders the recent pre-election
congressional resolution authorizing the president himself to declare war
against Iraq a nullity).

Our Founders also provided a process by which the Constitution could be
changed, whenever the people concluded that a constitutional provision
needed to be changed. That process involves the approval of amendments to
our Constitution that require the approval of 3/4 of the states. In fact,
there have been 27 Amendments to our Constitution since its inception.
Compare that process of constitutional change to the one in Pakistan, which
is ruled by another dictator, an army general who ousted the democratically
elected president and appointed himself ruler. He claims the power to
unilaterally amend the Pakistani constitution whenever he wants in order to
provide himself with more power. President Bush, for his part, doesn't go
that far but he does effectively hold that he has the power to ignore
constitutional restraints that he feels are either out-of-date or regularly
violated, such as the declaration-of-war provision in the Constitution,
thereby enabling him to circumvent the amendment process provided in the
Constitution itself.

President Bush should exercise caution before hastily criticizing the
omnipotent powers of foreign dictators. After all, people might just start
asking some uncomfortable questions about the powers that he's exercising
and the method by which he is usurping them.

Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
(www.fff.org) in Fairfax, Va.


##### 4 #####

FFF OP-ED

A Rare Moment of Candor
by Sheldon Richman

President Bush says he's got the economy under control. That's supposed to
comfort us.

I'd feel better if he said he had the federal government under control. It's
spending wildly -- and it can't blame the "war on terrorism" for it all.
That's just the latest spending. We are in for a federal soaking for as far
as the eye can see. Social Security, Medicare: those two programs alone have
created a $25 trillion unfunded liability. The people hoping for those
benefits have to pray the taxpayers will continue to be chumps.  That's how
all chain letters work.

It shrinks Enron and WorldCom back into perspective, doesn't it? The
government wrote the book on cooking the books. The politicians talk the
talk, but they never seem to walk the perp walk. That's because unlike
businessmen, politicians first legalize their crimes. To appropriate Mel
Brooks's great movie line, "It's good to be the president or congressman."

Incidentally, the businessmen forced to take the perp walk on national
television are only accused, not convicted, and they are pleading not
guilty. We know the politicians are guilty.

Mr. Bush can make his outrageous statement because we Americans have been
indoctrinated into believing that the president is supposed to control the
economy. That's free enterprise! I'm waiting for the Chamber of Commerce and
National Association of Manufacturers to politely object, but I will not be
holding my breath. We're all socialists now.

Okay, not socialists in the sense of nationalizing all the means of
production. That's where Marx and his ilk blew it. Those dolts thought they
had to run the entire economy. As a result, the governments they favored
spread themselves too thin, and it was only a matter of time before they
collapsed.

Savvier socialists understand that, as with so many things in life, less is
more. To engineer a society, you don't need to run everything -- just hold a
few key command posts. The top three posts are the money supply, people's
incomes, and education. Hence, we have the Federal Reserve System, the
income tax, and the so-called public schools. There may be others worth
seizing, but these get you a good distance toward running virtually every
aspect of society.

Here's the Fed's legacy: what you could buy for a dollar in 1913, when the
Fed was created, would cost about 18 dollars today. By inflating the money
supply, the government can manipulate the economy for political gain and
secretly tax us in the process. In theory, of course, the Fed is
independent. But in fact presidents have often been able to lean on the Fed
chairman to get their way. An infusion of freshly created money can bring an
economic boom in time for a reelection campaign. Unfortunately, busts follow
booms. The economic business cycle is really a political business cycle.
Presidents get the Fed chairman to cooperate by telling him that failure to
do so might jeopardize his independence. Orwell lives.

If you're wondering why the stock market has been so bad in recent years
("greed" is presumably a constant), take a look at the Fed's money-growth
figures. Alan Greenspan and his colleagues created money like mad in the
late 1990s. All binges end.

The income tax gives the government unlimited access to our wealth. It's
doubtful so much money could be raised with a sales tax. There were only two
reasons for passing the income tax in 1913: envy and the politicians' lust
for money. In recent years some politicians have learned that tax rates
above a certain level are counterproductive and revenues fall. So we've had
modest tax-rate cuts. Nevertheless, the government sucks up a record
percentage of our wealth, not counting the levels reached during the world
wars.

Finally, the government runs the schools mainly to assure we don't object to
the other two interventions and to make us believe it's protecting us --
rather than itself -- when it goes to war. Public schools began local, but
note how federal "influence" has accelerated for decades. This lets
Washington set the agenda.

The upshot is that when Mr. Bush says he has the economy under control, he's
given us a rare moment of candor. But we shouldn't be calmed.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation
(www.fff.org) in Fairfax, Va., author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal
the Welfare State, and editor of Ideas on Liberty magazine.

##### 5 #####

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION:
There Is No Such Thing as Federal Aid

85th General Assembly
STATE OF INDIANA

House Concurrent Resolution No. 2

INDIANA needs no guardian and intends to have none. We Hoosiers -- like the
people of our sister states -- were fooled for quite a spell with the
magician's trick that a dollar taxed out of our pockets and sent to
Washington, will be bigger when it comes back to us. We have taken a good
look at said dollar. We find that it lost weight in its journey to
Washington and back. The political brokerage of the bureaucrats has been
deducted. We have decided that there is no such this as "federal" aid. We
know that there is no wealth to tax that is not already within the
boundaries of the 48 states.

SO WE PROPOSE  henceforeward to tax ourselves and take care of ourselves. We
are fed up with subsidies, doles, and paternalism. We are no one's
stepchild. We have grown up. We serve notice that we will resist Washington,
D.C., adopting us.

BE IT RESOLVED by The House of Representatives of The General Assembly of
the State of Indiana, The Senate concurring: That we respectfully petition
and urge Indiana's Congressman and Senators to vote to fetch our county
court house and city halls back from Pennsylvania Avenue. We want government
to come home. Resolved, further, that we call upon the legislatures of our
sister states and on good citizens everywhere who believe in the basic
principles of Lincoln and Jefferson to join with us, and we with them to
restore the American Republic and our 48 states to the foundations built by
our fathers.

Adopted by House, January 13, 1947
Adopted by Senate, January 22, 1947
Introduced by Mr. George Henley of Bloomington and Mr. Lothair Tector of
Hagerstown

##### 6 #####

SPREADING THE WORD

The following is a list of newspapers that have recently published FFF
opeds. The number at the end of the entry is the paper's daily circulation.

Observer (New Smyrna Beach, Fla.) 5,000
Herald (Truth or Consequence, N.M.) 45,000
Philadelphia Tribune (Philadelphia, Penn.) 126,000
Independent Bulletin (Chicago, Ill.) 61,000
Roanoke Times (Roanoke, Va.) 113,054
Post Dispatch (Post, Texas) 1,800
Columbia Star (Columbia, S.C.) 10,000
Northern Virginia Journal (Alexandria, Va.) 89,101
Communcator (Columbus, Ohio) 90,000
Tri-County Tribune (Deer Park, Wash.) 102,000
Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.) 98,416

##### 7 #####

SUBSCRIBE AND SUPPORT

FREEDOM DAILY. This is our monthly journal of libertarian essays on current
events. For a one-year print subscription (12 monthly issues),  send $18
(or $10 for the e-mail version). Check, VISA, or MasterCard accepted. Or
order directly from the Subscribe and Support section of our website:
http://www.fff.org .

SUPPORT: Our work is funded through (tax-deductible) donations
from our supporters, subscriptions to Freedom Daily, and sales of our books.

If you would like to support our efforts to advance liberty, please send
your donation (check, VISA, or MasterCard) to the address below or through
the Subscribe and Support section of our website: http://www.fff.org .You
will receive a written acknowledgement and appreciation for your support.

FFF E-MAIL UPDATE is provided free of charge by The Future of Freedom
Foundation. Please feel free to forward it to others. To subscribe, please
go to FFF's home page: www.fff.org.
To unsubscribe, please reply with "remove" or "unsubscribe."

The Future of Freedom Foundation
11350 Random Hills Road
Suite 800
Fairfax VA 22030
Tel. (703) 934-6101
Fax (703) 352-8678
E-mail: fff@fff.org
www.fff.org