Webster's Warning

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority.” – Daniel Webster, 1782-1852

Every assumption of authority by the government implies a relinquishment, or the outright theft, of that same authority from the people. Consider the following intrusion of government into the private sector: On December 2, 2010, President Obama signed the CALM Act into law. What is CALM? Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation, which “requires the Federal Communications Commission to prescribe a regulation limiting the volume of audio on commercials transmitted by television broadcast stations, cable operators, and other multichannel video programming distributors.” Ironically, on the FCC’s own webpage, the following advice is provided: “Manually controlling volume levels with the remote control remains the simplest approach to reducing excessive volume levels." Yet, we need another law…

“There are [those] in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” – Daniel Webster

Politicians don’t spend millions of their own dollars to get a $175,000 a year job. They don’t run to get elected and re-elected for the benefit of you and me, although they sell it that way. Their only true aim is POWER. From Arlen Specter’s famously smug (and thankfully wrong) “my change in party will enable me to be re-elected” to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s ardent defense of the power of “Congressionally-mandated spending”, i.e., earmarks, they show their true colors again and again. Politics is more about power than anything else, and once they have it, it will take the hounds of hell to pry it from them.

“It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.” – Daniel Webster

The Probe from STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME had no idea that it’s transmissions were devastating to the planet below, it was just seeking to reestablish lost contact with an extinct species of whale.

Quite similarly, our government for decades has provided short-term solutions to long-term problems with no regard given to, or any responsibility accepted for, the unintended consequences of its actions. It has taken our hard-earned cash and traded it for decades of votes to retain and grow its power. When it ran out of our money to give away, it started borrowing it, and now is simply printing more of it. History has shown us time and again where governments that don’t recognize their boundaries of their power end up…on the ash heap of history.