After America

items under “Miscellaneous.” For an accounting fraud of $567 million, Enron’s executives went to jail, and its head guy died there.⁸⁸ For an accounting fraud ten times that size, the two Democrat hacks who headed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, walked away with a combined taxpayer-funded payout of $116.4 million. Fannie and Freddie are two of the largest businesses in America, but they’re exempt from SEC disclosure rules and Sarbanes-Oxley “corporate governance” burdens, and so in 2008, unlike Enron, WorldCom, or any of the other reviled private-sector bogeymen, they came close to taking down the entire global economy. What then is the point of the SEC?

By 2005, the costs of federal regulatory compliance alone (that is, not including state or local red tape) were up to $1.13 trillion—or approaching 10 percent of GDP.⁸⁹ In much of America, it takes far more paperwork to start a business than to go on welfare. In the words of a headline in the organic free-range hippie- dippy magazine Acres, “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.”⁹⁰

The most vital element in a dynamic society is the space the citizen has to live life to his fullest potential. Big Government encroaches on this space unceasingly. Under the acronyms uncountable, we have devolved from republican self-government to a micro-regulated nursery. The book What’s the Matter with Kansas? gives the game away in its very title. What’s the matter with Kansas is that it declines to vote as the statists would like. It surely cannot be that there is something the matter with the statists, so there must be something the matter with their subjects: they’re too ill-educated, or manipulated by advertisers, or deceived by talk radio, or just plain lazy to understand their own best interests. Therefore, it is our duty, as enlightened progressives, to correct their misunderstanding of themselves and decide on their behalf. In a famous interaction at an early tea party, CNN’s Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here: “Because,” said the Tea Partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right…”⁹¹

But Miss Roesgen had heard enough: “What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?”

Had the Tea Party animal been as angry as Angry White Men are supposed to be, he’d have said, “Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don’t want a $400 ‘credit’ for agreeing to live my life in government-approved ways.” Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More’s line from A Man for All Seasons: “Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for a $400 tax credit?”

But Miss Roesgen wasn’t done with her “You may already have won!” commercial: “Did you know,” she sneered, “that the state of Lincoln gets $50 billion out of this stimulus? That’s $50 billion for this state, sir.”

Golly! Who knew it was that easy? $50 billion! Where did it come from?

Did one of those Somali pirate ships find it just off the coast in a half-submerged treasure chest, all in convertible pieces of eight or Zanzibari doubloons? Or is it perhaps the case that that $50 billion has to be raised from the same limited pool of 300 million Americans and their as yet unborn descendants? And, if so, is giving it to the (bankrupt) “state of Lincoln” likely to be of much benefit to the citizens? Government money is not about the money, it’s about the government. It’s about social engineering—a $400 tax credit for falling into line with Barack Obama, Susan Roesgen, and the “Head of Behavior Change.” That’s why these protests are called Tea Parties— because the heart of the matter is the same question posed two-and-a-third centuries ago: Are Americans subjects or citizens? If you’re a citizen, then a benign sovereign should not be determining “your interests” and then announcing that he’s giving you a “tax credit” as your pocket money.

In Political Economy (1816), Thomas Jefferson wrote that “to take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—‘the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.’” To do so on the scale modern western societies do leads to two obvious problems: First, you can’t erect a system of socioeconomic redistribution as extravagant as Susan Roesgen favors without losing a lot of the money en route. How much money do you have to take from Smith to give a $400 tax credit to Jones? Government isn’t an efficient delivery system; it’s a leach-field pipe with Smith at one end and Jones at the other and holes every couple of inches with thousands of bureaucrats sluicing all the way along. That’s why we’ve wound up with a situation worse than that foreseen by Jefferson. America is not a society comprising two groups—one that has “acquired too much” and one that has “not exercised equal industry and skill”—but a society dominated by a third group, a government bureaucracy that has “acquired too much” and, to add insult to financial injury, is not required to “exercise equal industry.”

And, when the state is that large, it takes not only the fruits but the fruit pies of your labors.

AS UNAMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

On the first Friday of Lent 2009, a state inspector from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture raided the fish fry at St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in Rochester. He had been there for his annual inspection of the church’s kitchen, but, while going about his work, he espied an elderly parishioner unwrapping some pies.

He swooped. Would these by any chance be homemade pies? Sergeant Joe Pieday wasn’t taking no for an answer. The perps fessed up:

Josie Reed had made her pumpkin pie.

Louise Humbert had made her raisin pie.

Mary Pratte had made her coconut cream pie.

And Marge Murtha had made her farm apple pie.

And, by selling their prohibited substances for a dollar a slice, these ladies and their accomplices were committing a criminal act. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it is illegal for 88-year-old Mary Pratte to bake a pie in her kitchen for sale at a church fundraiser. The inspector declared that the baked goods could not be sold.⁹²

St. Cecilia’s holds a fish fry every Friday during Lent, and regular church suppers during the rest of the year. That’s a lot of pie to forego. What solutions might there be? The inspector informed the ladies they could continue baking pies at home if each paid a $35 fee for him to come ’round to her home and certify her kitchen as state- compliant. “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” Louise Humbert, seventy-three, told the Wall Street Journal.

Alternatively, they could bake their pies in the state-inspected kitchen at the church. As anyone who bakes pies, as opposed to regulating them, could tell the inspector, if you attempt to replicate your family recipe in a strange oven, it doesn’t always turn out like it should.

A local bakery stepped in and donated some pies. But that’s not really the same, is it? Perhaps a more inventive solution is required. In simpler times, Sweeney Todd, purveyor of fine foodstuffs to Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop in Fleet Street, would have been proposing we drop the coconut cream and replace it with state-inspector pie, perhaps with a lattice crust, symbolizing the prison bars he ought to be behind. Problem solved. Easy as pie, as we used to say.

Instead, bye bye, Miss American Pie.

No matter how you slice it, this is tyranny. When I first came to my corner of New Hampshire, one of the small pleasures I took in my new state were the frequent bake sales—the Ladies’ Aid, the nursery school, the church rummage sale. Most of the muffins and cookies were good; some were exceptional; a few went down to sit in the stomach like overloaded barges at the bottom of the Suez Canal. But even then you admired if not the cooking then certainly the civic engagement. In a small but tangible way, a person who submits to a state pie regime is a subject, not a citizen—because participation is the essence of citizenship, and thus barriers to participation crowd out citizenship. A couple of kids with a lemonade stand are learning the rudiments not just of economic self-reliance but of civic identity. So naturally an ever multiplying number of jurisdictions have determined to put an end to such a quintessentially American institution. Seven-year-old Julie Murphy was selling lemonade in Portland, Oregon, when two officers demanded to see her “temporary restaurant license.” Which would have cost her $120. When she failed to produce it, they threatened her with a $500 fine, and also made her