Centralized planning is a word our citizens need to be more familiar with. Most people know what a "one world government" is but this simple term is often overlooked and legitimacy is given to a government when it isn't due. Central planning has been in full force in our national government since 1933 and has grown in leaps and bounds every year since.
Simply put, centralized planning is using a government bureaucracy to decide how business will be conducted rather than letting those involved in it decide. We can see centralized planning in our day to day lives. All we have to look at is the multitude of farm programs, oil and energy controls, tax incentives, and a multitude of other programs designed to direct the economy to the likings of our elected elite.
This has not been beneficial to our economy at all. The right to do business has been replaced with a convoluted tax code, business licensing process, and rules for conducting business which stifles our economy. In some cases our infrastructure was even replaced with things that would live up to government expectations. In eastern Colorado the farmers used to grow beets. Under the Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 and again in 1938 these beets and the storage facilities were replaced with corn farms which could be regulated more fully under the usurped commodity markets. Farmers have to go through various conservation programs to be told what they can grow and how much of it they can plant. They have to report every detail of their farm to government agencies to receive a stipend that keeps prices artificially low. This has eroded away the right to farm and the right of people to eat a locally grown food. If you think the farmers wanted to grow corn we can look at a Governor's telegram in 1936 begging for FDR to return control of farms to the local population.
Centralized planning is most evident in lands which are owned by the national government. These lands are home to some of the most abundant resources in our country. The contain our precious metals, oil, coal, timber, headwaters to streams, and ores. The government has an obvious right to control access and production on any land it owns, as do all other land owners. This allows the government to create energy shortages, dead forests, water crisis and unrealistic gold prices all through fiat. National legislators and presidents have kept Colorado from mining coal, drilling for oil and cutting timber without ever having seen our state.
By creating these problems, our government can also convince us that we must look to countries such as China or Iraq to supply the things we need. By limiting resource production and forcing us into exports we are slowly bankrupted. Every dollar we spend abroad which isn't in turn spent back into our economy is gone forever, unless we produce more valuable products to replace it.
Our Supreme Court once upheld that conducting business was a right invested in private contracts. U.S. v Butler overturned the first AAA and set the government back on its true path. This was overturned through Wickard v Filburn in 1941, which decided that our government has so much central planning authority that it could prevent people from having a garden due to it keeping them from buying that product.
The only way to battle this problem is to regain ownership of these lands and to remove government agencies from private contract markets. The Constitution strictly limits government ownership of land to military related lands and post offices. It doesn't include land rich in resources and of course regulating commerce "among" the states doesn't include regulating the means of producing said commerce. We know this by looking at the failure of the Articles of Confederation to regulate foreign commerce when it wasn't given any power of interstate commerce. Our state needs to stand up and demand a return of these lands and demand the USDA divest itself from our commodity markets.
Only through an unregulated market will our prices ever stabilize, our exports increase, and our energy be produced locally. I know my family farm has barely weathered the storm of government interference. How has your life been affected by centralized planning?
Robert
No comments:
Post a Comment