Imagine having to vote every 4 years “as if your life depended on it.”

That the Presidency has evolved to this level of importance would appall many of the founders of our country. After all, these are men that listed, within the Declaration of Independence, 27 separate grievances against the decisions and actions of ONE MAN—King George III.

Most Americans at that time didn’t favor trading one British monarch for an American one, at least not initially.

There were deep concerns over what the Presidency should look like during the Constitutional Convention; and would the position of President simply be a king by another name? This pitted federalists, who favored a strong central government, against the anti-federalists, who were opposed to that idea.

One anonymous anti-federalist voiced his concerns about the Presidency by writing multiple letters to the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer under the pseudonym “An Old Whig.”

Below is an excerpt from one such letter:

Patrick Henry, never one to hold back from expressing himself, was also direct in his criticisms of the role of President:

Unfortunately their fears pertaining to a powerful presidency and strong federal government quickly manifested themselves.

First under George Washington, who was charged with putting down the Whiskey Rebellion, and later under John Adams, who signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law which, among other things, made it illegal to “write, print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the US Government. First Amendment be damned.

Subsequent Presidents have dipped their toes in despotic waters, while others like Franklin D. Roosevelt, jumped right into the authoritarian deep end by establishing Japanese-American internment camps through an executive order during World War II.

Focusing on more recent history, we all remember that President Obama “had a pen and a phone” and was considered a “socialist dictator” by some on the right. It didn’t help that his administration decided the government should temporarily take a 60% ownership in General Motors during the financial crisis of 2008.

And who can forget that George W. Bush claimed broad presidential powers after 9/11, invaded and occupied Iraq, and was “literally Hitler” while Donald Trump was still hosting The Apprentice.

Which brings us to present day Trumpism, a form of populism that pits “the people” against “the elites,” and can be found on both the right and left side of the political spectrum. Interestingly enough, Bernie Sanders ran a populist campaign parallel to Trump; both promised to reshape American politics as we know it.

After Trump’s surprising victory in 2016, massive protests took place before he took office, and his recent (projected) defeat elicited VE Day-like celebrations.

In a healthy republic, the election of ONE person to ONE branch of government would not elicit these types of emotional reactions, but sadly our republic is anything but healthy.

The increased focus on the executive branch has unsurprisingly coincided with Congress’ complete abdication of their primary law making responsibilities. While I welcome gridlock in Congress, the inability of Congress to seemingly do ANYTHING besides pass spending bills has led to frustrations among a large swath of the electorate who feel their voices are not being heard. This has led to Republican and Democratic presidents bypassing Congress altogether through the use of executive orders to get things done.

These non-legislative victories are fleeting however, because any executive order issued by a president can be reversed by the next one. We are already hearing this from Joe Biden, the presumed 46th President of the United States who plans a “flurry of executive orders” to reverse Trump policies.

Increased use of executive fiat makes each presidential election “The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime,” as candidates promise to right all the wrongs of the previous administration.

This cycle must be broken. It’s time to make presidents irrelevant again.

One way to accomplish this is through an increased emphasis on federalism. This allows states to function more autonomously and would be more in line with how states operated under the Articles of Confederation before the ratification of the US Constitution.

It is under this political environment that the “will of the people” can be more adequately addressed where it matters the most—closest to home.

Of course authoritarianism can be found at the state level too, as evidenced by the incredibly draconian lockdowns enacted by state governors. That said, you can at least air your grievances to a state governor and legislature that is positioned much closer to home, as opposed to petitioning some far away regime in Washington, DC.

Ultimately, if all grievances go unanswered, your last recourse could be to pack up and leave your state. While that is not an easy solution, leaving the country is a heck of a lot harder.

America has grown too large and too ideologically diverse to expect a central authority to address the needs of all its citizens. 76 million people voted for Joe Biden, 71 million people voted for Donald Trump. For everyone to feel as though they are being represented, we must begin to decentralize power away from Washington, DC and empower local and state governments to address the needs of its citizens.

Failing to do so will only give populism an even stronger foothold in America.

The post The Presidency Has Become Too Powerful appeared first on Free the People.

On October 20, 2020 the DOJ filed a civil antitrust lawsuit to “stop Google from unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets and to remedy the competitive harms.”

Having a monopoly isn’t necessarily against the law in and of itself. The issue is that antitrust regulators say Google achieved monopoly status by illegal means.

Google SVP Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker countered the government’s accusations in a blog post, “People use Google because they choose to, not because they’re forced to, or because they can’t find alternatives.”

This lawsuit has also led to a broader question that goes far beyond Google: have tech companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon grown too large, and do their dominant positions ultimately harm consumers?

In theory, antitrust laws are designed to increase competition. An unregulated market would, in the mind of a central planner, ultimately lead to the establishment of illegal monopolies, shutting out competition and harming consumers.

What is often overlooked is how government creates monopolies by picking winners and losers through regulation and subsidies.

Antitrust laws can sometimes punish successful companies that have managed to offer superior goods and services at competitive prices. They also raise the barriers to entry for competition and protect less-efficient firms from the hard work of becoming or staying competitive, artificially keeping them in business. This maintains the status quo, solidifies larger firms’ position in the marketplace, and ensures that only a few firms dominate any given market.

Regulation doesn’t spur competition, it stifles it. There is usually an immense cost in adhering to new and ever changing government regulations. That cost can be easily absorbed by large companies (and passed on to the consumer), however smaller companies do not enjoy endless cash reserves and are usually priced out of the market, leaving only a few big firms (with political connections, of course) to serve the very market government was trying to “fix” on behalf of American consumers.

Ron Paul, ever the advocate for free markets, gave an example of how regulations stifle competition and actually lead to monopolies in a 2016 USA Today op-ed:

The DOJ’s targeting of Google has eerie similarities to the case they tried to make against Microsoft in 1998. The United States government accused Microsoft of trying to create a monopoly following the “browser wars” that put Netscape, one of it’s biggest rivals at the time, out of business partly because Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer within its Windows operating system.

Needless to say this was not a popular lawsuit with free market economists, as evidenced by this open letter to President Bill Clinton from 240 economists that argued:

Ultimately the presiding judge ruled that Microsoft violated parts of the Sherman Antitrust Act, (established in 1890 to outlaw monopolies and cartels) and found that Microsoft’s position in the marketplace constituted an illegal monopoly. Microsoft was ordered to divide the company and create two separate entities. The operating system would make up one half of the company and the software arm would make up the other.

Microsoft appealed the decision… and won. The Department of Justice instead settled with Microsoft, abandoning the requirement to break up the company. In return, Microsoft agreed to share more of the inner workings of its Windows operating system so competitors could make sure their software worked better on Windows. They also gave computer makers more leeway to offer/bundle non-Microsoft products (such as other browsers, ISPs, media players, etc.) with their computers.

Here’s the reality: the free market would have pushed Microsoft to arrive at the same exact place without the government having to spend $9.4 million. If Microsoft didn’t adjust to consumer demand for better software they’d put themselves in serious jeopardy from quality upstarts within their industry.

How do we know this? Because the free market had already kicked many of tech’s largest companies to the curb without any government interference. Remember BlackBerry, Yahoo!, and AOL? How many of you had a MySpace profile?

Notice that all of those tech companies are essentially irrelevant in today’s digital landscape. BlackBerry, for example, once controlled 50% of the smartphone market in the US, and 20% globally. Today? BlackBerry commands exactly 0% of the smartphone market. Let me say that again. BlackBerry went from 50% market share to ZERO PERCENT.

MySpace was the most visited social media site in the world garnering about 75 million unique visitors a month in 2008. Today it’s a music site of little to no relevance in anything related to “social” as we’ve come to know it today.

We didn’t need the government to come in and regulate BlackBerry and MySpace to foster more competition in their respective areas; the free market did that all on its own, helped in part by two companies named Apple and Facebook.

It’s also important to note that tech companies like Microsoft and Google have actually advocated for increased regulation at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of this year. The linked article touches upon the adverse consequences of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation which has caused exactly the kind of issues with competition those 240 economists warned Bill Clinton about:

Of course privacy is an important issue, but consumers have been advocating for privacy protection long before government decided to step in. Companies that don’t value and protect consumers’ privacy will suffer the consequences of bad publicity, decreased sales, and loss of market share. Social reputation is a valuable commodity nowadays and actually helps to self-regulate markets. No government needed.

Innovation happens at breakneck speed, and success today doesn’t mean success tomorrow. A market, free of government interference, provides the best environment to spur innovation, which naturally leads to increased competition, quality goods and services, and lower prices. Rather than the government advocating for increased regulation, consumers should be advocating for less government.

The post Government Doesn’t Need to Regulate Big Tech, Free Markets Will appeared first on Free the People.

“Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” —Present Day Mob

Before we further shred the Constitution, let’s take a step back and examine why the United States is a republic and not a democracy. This is by no means an exhaustive analysis, but rather a simple philosophical examination using Plato and Socrates who, among others, greatly influenced our founding fathers.

So let’s get this out of the way now—democracy sucks. Sorry to break it to you.

The whole, “one person = one vote” battle cry we are hearing across the United States lately? Yeah, no thanks. Pure democracy is a mobocracy, and as someone who values protecting the smallest minority on earth, the individual, I will continue to fight this trend.

But enough about me, what did Plato think of “one person = one vote”?

He wasn’t a fan for a number of reasons, one of which was that a majority of his fellow Athenians voted to execute his mentor, Socrates, because he asked too many political and philosophic questions. (This seemingly happened a lot back in Greece.)

During the trial of Socrates, out of the 500 Athenian jurors summoned, 280 jurors voted to find Socrates guilty and 220 jurors voted for acquittal. In our legal system, criminal cases like this would require a unanimous jury, but in Athens, a simple majority was able to find Socrates guilty.

During the penalty phase, 360 jurors voted for death and 140 voted for a fine. So Socrates was democratically sentenced to die. Under Athenian law, execution was accomplished by drinking a cup of poisoned hemlock. He subsequently died of gradual paralysis of the central nervous system.

Plato believed in five regimes, starting with the one he advocated for in Republic, which was an aristocracy (rule by philosopher kings) and ending with tyranny. The last step before tyranny? You guessed it: democracy. In Plato’s mind, the idea that anyone has the capacity to rule would mean you’d have unqualified corruptible people who seek power as opposed to qualified virtuous leaders who are essentially groomed for the position, a ruling class rather than a democracy.

While there is great wisdom in this view on the drawbacks of democracy, I of course disagree with his conclusion that there needs to be a ruling class.

Now let’s fast forward to the founding of our republic and the Electoral College.

The Electoral College was intended to create harmony between smaller and larger states. Is it perfect? No, but neither is pure democracy, as the founders (who studied Plato among other philosophers) knew.

James Madison spoke of the fear of factions in Federalist 10. “The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”

And how did they try to reduce the effects of growing factionalism within such a large landmass that is the United States?

The framers believed in republicanism (little r, not big R political party) as a way to keep a large country together, as opposed to disintegrating into factions which always causes balkanization and eventually factionalism. They also knew that population centers, such as cities, could grow to the degree that would marginalize anyone living outside cities in more rural areas.

The Electoral College was essentially a protection against the tyranny of cities.

The framers envisioned a country that was much more state-focused in terms of sovereignty, as opposed to the centralized Leviathan that is the Federal government today. They addressed population representation concerns in the House, and state representation concerns in the Senate, making sure not to marginalize smaller states and less populated areas.

All of this was to guard against the tyranny that ultimately would arise out of a pure democracy.

Some founding fathers, such as Patrick Henry, had grave concerns about “one great consolidated national government.” In his opening speech during the Virginia ratifying convention for the proposed United States Constitution he said the following:

We should heed the words of Patrick Henry and work towards shifting power away from the Federal Government and back to the individual states.

The future of our republic depends on it.

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