Incidentally, that cinnamon doughnut the gasoline retailer sells in the snack food section of his store is supplied by a bakery that must comply with federal regulations requiring that all pulverizing of sugar or spice grinding be done in accordance with sugar dust limitation standards.29 Of course, there are all kinds of regulations that apply to virtually all other food items he stocks on his shelves.
Indeed, not just food, but food labeling and packaging are subject to extensive federal regulation. New mandates require food labels “to disclose net contents, identity of commodity, and name and place of business of the product’s manufacturer, packer, or distributor.” Labels must also include the presence of major food allergens. Certain terms like “low sodium,” “reduced fat,” and “high fiber” must meet strict government definitions. The federal government has defined other terms used for nutritional content including “low,” “reduced,” “high,” “free,” “lean,” “extra lean,” “good source,” “less,” and “lite.” If a food is described as “organic” it must meet the federal government’s definition.30 The food industry will also face new federal rules for “front-of-pack” calorie and nutrition labels and federally recommended nutritional criteria for foods making “dietary guidance” statements. For example, “Eat two cups of fruit a day for good health.” Federal regulations also involve “food contact materials,” including cutlery, dishes, glasses, cups, food processors, containers, etc.31
The administrative state is also foster-parenting the nation’s children. Aiming their regulatory power at such foods as Frosted Flakes, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United States Department of Agriculture, and Federal Trade Commission recently joined forces to propose “voluntary” nutrition principles for the food industry, including setting limits on sugar, fats, and sodium in food marketed to children. “By the year 2016, all food products within the categories most heavily marketed directly to children should meet two basic nutrition principles. Such foods should be formulated to … make a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet and minimize the content of nutrients that could have a negative impact on health and weight.”32 The Working Group’s proposals go beyond cereal and would affect snacks, candy, juice, soda, and even food served at restaurants. In addition to restricting the content of food, the Working Group is also entertaining proposals to regulate what can be included in product advertising.33 Tony the Tiger may be on the chopping block. Congress also passed legislation authorizing the administrative state to regulate nutrition in schools, including determining the amount of calories, fat, and sodium students should consume each day. The regulations may extend to food sold on school grounds during the day, such as pizza and bake sales at fund-raisers for school events, potentially ending those common practices.34
Restaurants have been hectored into accepting the “goals of smaller portions” to “include healthy offerings” in children’s meals.35 Federal requirements mandate that restaurant chains with at least twenty U.S. locations provide the calorie content of menu items. Chain restaurants are obligated to adhere to a host of requirements pertaining to the listing of food items on their menus, including “[a] statement on the menu or menu board that puts the calorie information in the context of a recommended total daily caloric intake.”36 Federal regulators are expanding the restaurant requirements to movie theater concessions, which will soon be compelled to disclose the calorie information for popcorn.37
So extensive is the federal government’s purview over food that the total federal budget for regulating nearly all aspects of food, from production to consumption, exceeds the entire country’s net farm income.38
The workplace is subject to a web of federal regulations. Where “public accommodation” is involved, such as a retail store or doctor’s office, there must be ramps, special bathrooms, widened doors, and curb cuts in the sidewalks. Even carpeting is scrutinized to make sure it is accessible.39 There are rules involving wages, taxes, health benefits, pension benefits, working conditions, environmental conditions, human resources, union elections, financial practices, and record keeping. The vending machine on the premises is regulated. It must have a “sign close to each article of food or selection button disclosing the amount of calories in a clear and conspicuous manner.”40
As I said earlier, the universe of federal regulations and their interpretations are too far-reaching and wide-ranging to catalogue and decipher here. Indeed, left unsaid are federal rules aimed at regulating so-called man-made global warming and carbon dioxide, which would engulf the private sector in one grand sweep; and the federal directives and mandates involving education at all levels, including instruction, funding, etc. Instead, these relatively few examples are intended to provide perspective and make tangible the extent to which the individual lives under increasingly burdensome controls imposed by a federal government that determines its own authority. Private interests, including property rights, are of little regard and nearly impossible to safeguard. Moreover, private citizens on whom the government imposes the duty to institute federal regulations are overwhelmed by the coercive powers of the administrative state, including audits, fines, penalties, confiscation of licenses and property, and prosecution. The hugely detrimental effects on human progress—including preventing, sabotaging, and discouraging the development of new lifesaving and life-improving technologies, processes, and products; wealth and job creation; and individual industriousness and self-sufficiency—are fatal to societal vitality.
There are those who blindly accept if not demand federal intrusion whenever and wherever it is said to improve “health, safety, education, and the environment.” For them, it is enough for the masterminds and their experts to claim their intention to improve man’s condition. These individuals, it seems, are the type of citizens More had in mind in Utopia, where the Prince “will declare how the citizens use themselves one towards another; what familiar occupying and entertainment there is among the people; and what fashion they use in the distribution of every thing” (76). However, even in the smothering atmosphere of Leviathan, where the liberty of the subject (the citizen) is regulated by the all-powerful sovereign, Hobbes acknowledged its practical limits. “For seeing there is no commonwealth in the world wherein there be rules enough set down for the regulating of all kinds of actions and words of men (as being a thing impossible), it followeth necessarily that in all kinds of actions by the laws praetermitted, men have the liberty of doing what their own reasons shall suggest for the most profitable of themselves.…” (138) But do they? It is the endless pursuit of the utopian abstraction that tyrannizes the individual and society. As Charles de Montesquieu observed, “Countries which have been made inhabitable by the industry of men and which need that same industry in order to exist call for moderate government” (43, 18, 6).
How did we Americans cope before the advent of such a massive and intrusive administrative state? How did we feed, clothe, transport, and house ourselves? How did we make decisions about our health, safety, and well-being, and consumer items large and small? How did we raise our children and educate them, and manage our finances and retirement?
During his travels in America, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled that “[t]he secondary affairs of society have never been regulated by [the central government’s] authority; and nothing has hitherto betrayed its desire of even interfering in them.…” (I, 271) He observed that if such decrees were ordered, the federal government “must entrust the execution of its will to agents over whom it frequently has no control and who it cannot perpetually direct. The townships, municipal bodies, and counties form so many concealed breakwaters.…” (I, 272) Yet he foretold democracy’s vulnerability to administrative despotism, although he had hoped America would avoid its infliction because of its unique history and circumstances. “Above this race of men stands an intense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regu
lar, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood … it every day renders the exercise of free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all his uses of himself.… It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.…” “Such a power … compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people” who are “reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd” (I, 318–19).
America has become a society in which the people are wise enough to select their own leaders, but too incompetent to choose the right lightbulb.
“ENTITLEMENTS” AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE
Another aspect of the administrative state involves so-called entitlements. In the United States, the concept of “social insurance” can be traced back to the work of Columbia University professor Henry Rogers Seager. In his 1910 work, Social Insurance: A Program of Social Reform,41 Seager provided a framework for Social Security, among other government social programs. In turn, Seager was heavily influenced by European models of socialism.42
Seager constantly attacked the American “absorption” with individualism as he promoted Europe’s “cooperative movement.”43 “As though it were not enough that heredity and environment combined to make us individualists, our forefathers wrote their individualistic creed into our federal and state constitutions. All these instruments give special sanctity to the rights to liberty and property.… Thus it is not too much to say that Americans are born individualists in a country peculiarly favorable to the realization of individual ambitions and under a legal system which discourages and opposes resort to any but individualistic remedies for social evils.”44 He added that in those areas of the nation involved in manufacturing and trade “we need not freedom from government interference, but clear appreciation of the conditions that make for the common welfare, as contrasted with individual success, and an aggressive program of governmental control and regulation to maintain these conditions.”45
Seager proceeded to lay out the general terms of what would become the Social Security program. He argued, “The proper method of safeguarding old age is clearly through some plan of insurance.… The intelligent course is for [the wage earner] to combine with other wage earners to accumulate a common fund out of which old-age annuities may be paid to those who live long enough to need them.”46 Seager praised the insurance programs of certain large corporations and foreign countries, particularly in the United Kingdom and Germany. He believed that the best aspects of these systems should be adopted by the federal government and turned into compulsory old-age insurance. This would require “vigorous government action.”47 But given the resistance to this and other social programs in the United States at the time, because of the history of individualism and its federal form of government, there must be “political reform” and “industrial education”48 to develop a “deepening of the sense of social solidarity and quickening of appreciation of our common interests,” both of which are “indispensable to the realization of any program of social reform.”49 “Only by a change of attitude and change of heart on the part of the whole people can we hope to curb our rampant individualism and achieve those common ends which we all admit to be desirable but which are only attainable through our united efforts. As soon as we begin to think of government as something more than an agency for maintaining order,—as organized machinery for advancing our common interests,—we appreciate how far we still are from being a truly civilized society.”50 Hence there must be a counterrevolution in which the psychology of the American people and the nature of their government are radically transformed.
Again and again, Seager targeted what he considered the greatest obstacle to “social reform”—individualism. “The gospel of love has as yet influenced very little our views on public questions. In business and in politics we are still individualists. We habitually put our individual before our common interests, and even when we are conscious of common needs we hesitate to intrust them to our common government. To correct these national characteristics is … the most important next step in social advance. And as we correct them, as our sense of social solidarity is deepened, and our appreciation of our common interests quickened, measures of reform will seem obvious and easy that now seem visionary and impracticable.”51 “Let us not be frightened by phrases, by the bugaboo of ‘destroying local self-government,’ … of ‘undermining individual thrift,’ or of ‘socialism.’ This is the truly scientific attitude toward a field of phenomena where all is change and development.”52 Seager makes no effort to conceal his attack on the nature and spirit of the individual. Importantly, Seager’s views were influential on President Franklin Roosevelt and his brain trust.
In her book Dependent on D.C., Professor Charlotte A. Twight explained how Social Security was decisive in promoting the psychological and political transformation of the nation. She wrote, “Contrary to conventional wisdom, the public did not desire the compulsory old-age ‘insurance’ program that we call Social Security.… It was passed [in 1935] and later expanded despite initial public opposition and strongly prevailing ideologies of self-reliance. Social Security’s history unfolded as a montage of political transaction-cost manipulation that included governmental use of insurance imagery, incrementalism, cost concealment, information control and censorship, suppression of rival programs, and a myth of actuarial balance. Its primary targets were the program’s congressional opponents and, especially, the voting public. In the end, these strategies moved Social Security from being regarded as a dangerous socialistic invasion of American life to an almost sacrosanct institution.”53 In fact, “as late as 1934, five years into the Depression, ‘a bill had not yet been introduced into Congress for compulsory old-age insurance’ because ‘there were simply no significant demands for such a program.’ Even after the administration’s proposal was introduced, ‘no groundswell developed in support of social insurance programs because they did not affect the major problems of relieving the victims of the depression.’ Depression conditions did stimulate public sentiment favoring needs-based (that is, means-tested) public assistance for the aged poor, but President Roosevelt instead sought a broader ‘contributory’ program of compulsory old-age insurance. When a widely supported bill to provide needs-based public assistance for the elderly neared passage in 1934, Roosevelt strategically urged its deferral.…”54
It serves the purposes of the utopian masterminds to enlist or ensnare as many people as possible in their cause. The objective is to cut generational ties with the past—society’s traditions, customs, and beliefs—in order to transform and restructure society. The common psychology that brought individuals together in the first place, making them “the American people,” must be suppressed and reoriented. The people must be reeducated and indoctrinated to accept utopian dictates, or as the utopians call them, “social reforms.”
Programs such as Social Security and Medicare serve the utopian purpose, for they create a widespread dependency on a post-constitutional government and its masterminds. These schemes are built on the illusion that the individual has a vested ownership interest in, for example, a pension or insurance program. Through forced taxation, misleadingly referred to as “contributions,” the individual is encouraged to believe that he has, in effect, purchased a pension annuity or health insurance policy, which becomes his personal property. But his tax dollars are actually subsidizing others, and later others will subsidize his retirement and medical care in what is an elaborate and unsustainable undertaking. As such, it falls on future generations, including children and grandchildren yet born, to sort out the financial ruin and societal havoc let loose by the masterminds.
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br /> Roosevelt understood, and intended, that individuals would rely on these misrepresentations and false promises and plan their retirements around them. After all, the hoax goes so far as to require that pay stubs show the funds deducted from every paycheck, which are then tracked by the federal government to presumably fund the individual’s personal retirement and medical benefits. Individuals logically conclude that they have a “right” or “entitlement” to the benefits for which they paid over a lifetime of work. Any attempt to alter the conditions and benefits in this arrangement is seen by the individual as a violation of his property rights and an injustice. For the mastermind, it is an exploitable opportunity to ingratiate himself with the “masses” as he positions himself as the defender of those rights. That said, the mastermind frequently alters the arrangement, including in small ways that are difficult for the individual to discern, or in bigger ways that are masked with self-serving declarations and cloaked in deceit. But the basic structure must never change, for the utopian must never relinquish control.
As Roosevelt himself explained when criticized that the Social Security payroll tax was regressive, “Those [Social Security payroll] taxes were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll taxes there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”55 By this Roosevelt meant that the utopian pursuit is an undying pursuit.
In 1966, Social Security Administration official John Carroll put it this way: “It can scarcely be contested that earmarking of payroll taxes … reduced resistance to the imposition of taxes on low-income earners, made feasible tax increases at a time when they might not otherwise have been made, and has given trust fund programs a privileged position semi-detached from the remainder of government. Institutionalists foresaw these advantages as means to graft the new programs into the social fabric.”56