Deregulation

“ Sir, it is bad enough that the government should presume to regulate the industry of man—it is sufficiently monstrous that they should attempt, by arbitrary legislation, artificially to adjust and balance the various pursuits of society, and to "organize the whole labor and capital of the country." ”

“ It will not surely be confessed, that the government has wanted authority to execute its own laws; that the legislature has been awed by the populace, by the dregs of the populace, the drunkards and the beggars! Yet when the provisions made for the execution of a law so salutary, so just, and so necessary, were found defective, why were not others substituted of greater efficacy? Why, when one informer was torn in pieces, were there not new securities proposed to protect those who should by the same offence displease the people afterwards? ”

“ Like the prince in the fable, you seem to have released from his prison the genie of competition, only to find that you are unable to control him. Your legislation for the past hundred years is a perpetual and fruitless effort to regulate the disorders of your economic system. Your poor, your drunk, your incompetent, your aged, ride you like a nightmare. ”

“ The chief business of government, from which, perforce, its essential nature must be derived, consists in the control and adjustment of conflicting economic interests. After enumerating the various forms of propertied interests which spring up inevitably in modern society, he adds: " The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the ordinary operations of the government." ”

“ Had the government been vested with complete power to procure a regular and adequate supply of revenue, those oppressive measures would have been unnecessary. But, sir, can it be supposed that a repetition of such measures would ever be acquiesced in? Can a government that stands in need of such measures secure the liberty, or promote the happiness or glory, of any country? If we do not change this system, consequences must ensue that gentlemen do not now apprehend. ”

“ If the principle were adopted, and the power which would arise from so doing were exercised, the result would be not only to destroy the state and Federal governments, but, by the implication of authority, from which the destruction would be brought about, there would be erected upon the ruins of both a government endowed with the arbitrary power to disregard the great guaranty of life, liberty, and property and every other safeguard upon which organized civil society depends. ”

“ Judges and executives simply have yielded to their own class impulses, and the pressure from organized interests, to suppress the legislation. When the public conscience finds itself and becomes organized and articulate, they will have no difficulty in finding grounds for declaring regulatory laws constitutional. ”

“ All acts of legislatures, and all decisions of courts, which deny to the citizen, or to any class of citizens, or to a particular trade, occupation, business, or profession, the same privileges and protection granted to others, or which grant to any class of citizens or to corporations privileges which infringe upon the rights of others, are abuses of power and assumptions of authority not delegated by the people to the government, or to any department of it. ”

“ That regulating agency, whatever its nature, must be paid for—must involve a deduction from the total proceeds of the labor regulated. The present system is one under which the share of the total proceeds that goes to pay for regulation is considerable; and, under better systems to be expected hereafter, there will doubtless be a decrease in the cost of regulation. But, for the present, our comparatively-costly system has the justification that it alone succeeds. Regulation is costly because the men to be regulated are defective. ”

“ The fifth, finally, is that the real remedies, in so far as it is possible to remedy the evil by legislation, would be found precisely in the regime which is accused of having produced it,—that is, in a more and more real regime of liberty and competition. ”

“ At the same time, it must be confessed that the complexity of our administrative and judicial system has been a stumbling block to many persons of large intelligence who have not been specially instructed in constitutional law. The interlocking state and federal jurisdictions, the curiously distributed powers of regulating commerce, of enforcing police regulations, of sanctioning and interpreting and enforcing contracts, etc., seem to the uninitiated to furnish easy means of nullifying the popular will as expressed in the laws. ”

“ For us, the government is the aggregate of the governors; and the governors--kings, presidents, ministers, members of parliament, and what not--are those who have the power to make laws, to regulate the relations between men, and to force obedience to these laws. They are those who decide upon and claim the taxes, enforce military service, judge and punish transgressions of the laws. They subject men to regulations, and supervise and sanction private contracts. They monopolize certain branches of production and public services, or, if they wish, all production and public service. ”

“ I then proceed to an examination of former principles, and from a confrontation of the politics of our ancestors with the modern system, I conclude, that the great political impediment to the progress of trade and industry, proceeds more from an arbitrary, irregular, and undetermined subordination between classes, and between individuals, than from differences in the regular and established form of their government, legislation, and execution or administration of the supreme authority. While laws only govern, it is of the less importance who makes them, or who puts them in execution. ”

“ But another gang, going to the other extreme, preach the theory that the government should be everything and do everything. They would blot out the individual, utterly. The government should own all property, conduct all business affairs, monopolize all industries. Everybody and everything should be reduced to a dull, dead level; every man, woman and child should be controlled, in all he does, by the State; should do nothing except in the service of the State, and have nothing except by permission of the State. ”

“ We have no apprehension that this power, under our American system of government, in which all official authority is derived from the people, and exercised under direct responsibility to the people, is more likely to be abused than the power to regulate commerce, or the power to borrow money. ”

“ The theory of dependence and protection will be more and more intolerable to them, and they will require that their conduct and condition shall be essentially self-governed. It is, at the same time, quite possible that they may demand, in many cases, the intervention of the legislature in their affairs, and the regulation by law of various things which concern them, often under very mistaken ideas of their interest. ”

“ Charters and banks will become the chief objects of state legislation, and if twenty legislatures can outstrip one in this manufacture, the general government may lose its power, and the calamities of a dissolved union will, follow. These will ravage the states,until they ripen the publick mind for the introduction of a steady tyranny by some military adventurer; and the catastrophe of the drama will be the effect of exchanging our system of genuine representation, cautious division, and effectual responsibility, for the monopoly and corruption of a system of backing, charters and paper. ”

“ Those who are in favor of consolidation; who are constantly stealing power from the states, and adding strength to the federal government; who, assuming an unwarrantable jurisdiction over the states and the people, undertake to regulate the whole industry and capital of the country. ”

“ It is not to be expected that those men filling official places in the legislative and judicial departments of the government, who, from interest and custom, have become addicted to the habit of giving new meanings and interpretations to the constitution, will reform the abuses that have been rapidly accumulating, or that they will manifest any zeal or alacrity in stripping the railroad corporations and other monopolies of the great powers conferred upon them, or that any real reformation can be effected without a thorough change of public servants. ”

“ Such indus- tries, too, operating under special franchises from councils and legislatures, are a peculiarly fertile source of corruption, and, in defense of its own autonomy, the state may be compelled to monopolize them in its own hands, even at the loss of the inven- tiveness and enterprise which private operation would introduce. Here the state is compelled to go beyond its duty as the coercive institution of society, wherein it acts only as the framework of the institutions, and to take up also the technical and business problems of industry. ”

“ If I should admit what the noble lord has asserted, that the lives and morals of the people are affected by this bill, I cannot yet see that his inference is just, or that our compliance with the motion is, therefore, necessary.
That under the present regulation, the miseries of the nation are every day increased; that corruption spreads every day wider, and debauchery makes greater havock, is confessed on all sides ”

“ The service which government renders to Production by its laws, courts, and officers, by the force which it is at all times ready to exert in behalf of any citizen or the whole society when threatened with evil in person or property, is rendered somewhat on the principle of division of labor, one set of agents devoting [543] themselves to that work; and, notwithstanding some crying abuses of authority which no constitution or public virtue has yet been found adequate wholly to avert, is rendered on the whole economically and satisfactorily. ”

“ But may we not blame law-makers, or, rather, our own social order, for measures more fatal in their results than either of these—for instance, the law which concentrates all property into the hands of a few owners? ”

“ As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the other from employing whom they think proper." Government regulation, therefore, in as far as it restricted men's freedom of action in working, employing, buying, selling, etc., was an interference with their natural liberty. ”

“ The warning that, by giving up the régime of private properly, we should not only be rid of its evils, but also lose its advantages, should be pondered by agitators against the existing economic system. ”

“ It is indeed a singular phenomenon in the story of human conduct, that when all legal institutions were abolished, and long established governments at once annihilated in so many distinct states that the recommendations of committees and conventions, not enforced by penal sanctions, should be equally influential and binding with the severest code of law, backed by royal authority, and strengthened by the murdering sword of despotism. ”

“ It takes the position that abuse of power, in relation to private rights or to commerce, is excess of power and hence demands to be shown the substantial effect of legislation, not its mere formal justification. ”

“ Inasmuch as the primary object of a government, beyond the mere repression of physical violence, is the making of the rules which determine the property relations of members of society, the dominant classes whose rights are thus to be determined must perforce obtain from the government such rules as are consonant with the larger interests necessary to the continuance of their economic processes, or they must themselves control the organs of government. ”

“ Public regulation is not obliged and we cannot lightly assume it is intended to restore values, even if promised by charter terms, if they have already been lost through the operation of economic forces. ”

“ A federal government, which can neither regulate your industry, secure your property, nor protect your person! Surely there can be no just reason for stealing, by liberal constructions and implications, from these beneficent State governments, any portion of their power, in order to confer it on another government, which, from its very organization, cannot possibly exert it for equally useful purposes. ”

“ They will consider every institution calculated to restrain the excess of law-making, and to keep things in the same state in which they happen to be at any given period, as more likely to do good than harm. ”

“ They remind us too, that while these and all other corporations need regulation by law, this regulation should never hamper, or interfere with, their legitimate activities and expansion, however strict and severe it may be in prohibiting and punishing wilful violations of law and other abuses of power. ”

“ One of the reprobated powers is exercised by charters, and another is advocated by the doctrine, that government ought to patronise all metaphysical idols. But neither the perpetrated nor intended violation is chargeable to our constitutional policy; that labours to leave wealth to be distributed by industry, and salvation by God; and abstains throughout from the idea of a power in government to regulate either by law. ”

“ Every party of interest, whether a noble, a religious, or a military order; or created by a corrupting degree of legislative or executive patronage; or by usurping a power of regulating property by means of paper credit, charters or fraudulent wars; is the instrument and ally of the power by which its interest can be fed or starved. It must acquire an influence over legislation, both to do its own work, and the work of the power it serves. ”