Degeneration of Democracy

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s,
leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to
activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.
Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they
were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less
basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.

"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to
describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the
Soviet Union.

Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to
thrive, or ultimately even survive. In our times, American democracy
is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the
current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be
concerned about it.

The president's poll numbers are going down because increasing numbers
of people disagree with particular policies of his, but the damage
being done to the fundamental structure of this nation goes far beyond
particular counterproductive policies.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a
president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a
private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he
deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to
be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in
the Gulf of Mexico.

Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is
simply whether BP's oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be
compensated. But our government is supposed to be "a government of
laws and not of men." If our laws and our institutions determine that
BP ought to pay $20 billion-- or $50 billion or $100 billion-- then so
be it.

But the Constitution says that private property is not to be
confiscated by the government without "due process of law."
Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is
a distinction without a difference.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion
of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations
can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never
granted to the government by the Constitution.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don't
believe in Constitutional government. And, without Constitutional
government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a "crisis"--
which, as the president's chief of staff has said, cannot be allowed
to "go to waste" as an opportunity to expand the government's power.

That power will of course not be confined to BP or to the particular
period of crisis that gave rise to the use of that power, much less to
the particular issues.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the
gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to
prevent trading with the country's wartime enemies. But there was no
war when FDR ended the gold standard's restrictions on the printing of
money.

At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the
German Reichstag passed a law "for the relief of the German people."
That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used for things
going far beyond the relief of the German people-- indeed, powers that
ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and
on others.

If the agreement with BP was an isolated event, perhaps we might hope
that it would not be a precedent. But there is nothing isolated about
it.

The man appointed by President Obama to dispense BP's money as the
administration sees fit, to whomever it sees fit, is only the latest
in a long line of presidentially appointed "czars" controlling
different parts of the economy, without even having to be confirmed by
the Senate, as Cabinet members are.

Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of
arbitrary power-- versus the rule of law and the preservation of
freedom-- are the "useful idiots" of our time. But useful to whom?

http://www.tsowell.com/
http://townhall.com/Columnists/ThomasSowell/
http://townhall.com/columnists/Thoma...racy?page=full
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnal...-Tyranny-.aspx