Writing on the matter of Obama’s 3,000 page health care bill, Charles Kesler notes that the founding fathers’ view on the law was similar to John Locke’s, who saw the law as a community’s “settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties.” To be legitimate, “a statute must be ‘received and allowed by common consent to be the standard of right and wrong, and the common measure to decide all controversies’ between citizens.”
Kesler:
This phonebook-sized law that would control a sixth of the U.S. economy cannot be a law by that definition. If you rummage through the text of, say, the House of Representatives’ version of the bill, you find scores of places where power is delegated to administrative agencies and special boards, which are charged to fill the gaps in the written legislation by promulgating thousands, if not tens of thousands, of new pages of regulations that will then be applied to individual cases.
(….)
The whole point is to empower government officials, usually unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, to bless or curse your petitions as they see fit, guided, of course, by their expertness in a law so vast, so intricate, and so capricious that it could justify a hundred different outcomes in the same case. Faster than one might think, a government of equal laws turns into a regime of arbitrary privileges.
(….)
It was against the threat of such a despotism that proper and not so proper Bostonians threw the original Tea Party….Today’s Tea Party movement sees a similar threat of despotism-of monopoly control of health care, corrupting bailouts, massive indebtedness, and the eclipse of constitutional rights-in the Obama Administration’s policies.
The whole thing here.
