The definition of who the people are has been blurred as a watery reflection is blurred when dirt is put upon it. What this dirt signifies I leave it up to the reader to decide. But, as one man put it, "[O]ur notion of a moral nation is one which cares for its young, its old and its poor and leaves the rich to fend for themselves."(1) Is this notion of a moral nation a wise standard, or a foolish one? That is an important question facing our society today, which this paper will try to answer.
As we saw before in today's society, the rich are held in scorn by the poor, and the powerful envied by the those without powerful. This conflict has crept onto our society, which, being based on freedom, struggles with this issue as all free nations do. For decades, proposals from ultra-progressive taxation to heavy regulation on business have been drifting about and sometimes resting in our society.
With this turmoil, the question must be asked: Who are the People? The poor? The rich? The big businesses? In summary, the people are any individual or group of individuals that live under the jurisdiction of the United States Constitution. Since the Constitution is and will always be the supreme law of the land, it would follow that any person or group of persons living in the United States of America is a part of the people.
The states of the our union have the Constitutional right to regulate citizens collectively as groups and as individuals within certain boundaries set forth the Constitution. As the Constitution states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." And thus most parts of American life is regulated by government; the poor and rich are regulated, the small business and the big business are also. So we see that all are under government.
Popular belief is that "big business is bad, because big-business is big.....wealthy people are bad because they are wealthy..." Yes; big-business is big, and yes, wealthy people are wealthy. But they are under the government, and they are regulated by it. Our human nature is one that naturally covets others more fortunate, thus those less-fortunate are attempting to "level the playing field," and make everything "fair."
True, these proposals running through our system of government seem to be the best and only way for our prosperity to flourish. Yet, as the saying goes, "Perception is not always reality." The perception here is fairness equals prosperity. Yet what is fairness? In the eyes of those who use the term in today, it means more taxes for the rich, and more regulations for business. Does more restrictions on them mean prosperity for all?
Not only logically does such a claim does not follow, but in practice it is also invalid. Looking at history, we see that when taxes and regulation are oppressive, our economy suffers, not only for the rich but also for the poor. For example, if regulation of businesses was held at its 1963 level, gross domestic product in 1993 would have been $7.3 trillion instead of $6.3 trillion(2). While the economy suffered, real median household income has declined 2.7 percent since 1989(3). And so, in an age where the members of the middle-class cry out for "fairness," not only the economy, but the middle-class are being restrained from doing their best to prosper in a free society.
So we are back to our original question: Who are the People? You, I, that branch of a national corporation downtown, and that guy living in the mansion in the upper-class part of your city; we are all people under the same constitution with the same rights that should not be abridged in the name of "fairness" or of a "level playing field."
What is a moral society? One answer to that question is "one which cares for its young, its old and its poor and leaves the rich to fend for themselves." I firmly believe this is not what a moral nation should be. A moral nation should treat all people equally and endow them with freedoms that cannot be taken away for any reason. A moral nation should be a nation of opportunity, in otherwords, a land of freedom.
(1) Remarks by John J. Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO Michigan State University Annual Labor Forum Series, November 19, 1996. (2) "The Cost of Rules," Investor's Business Daily, March 29, 1996. (3) US Census Bureau Data
John Rose is the Director of Regulatory Studies at the Center for American Freedom.
