Lies the government told you (31 page)

What the government hid was that it was protecting the people not from rising prices, but from reduced prices. This can be seen from the cases of
U.S. v. Standard Oil of New Jersey
and
U.S. v. American Can
. These are the seminal antitrust cases that influenced all those that were to follow. In the 1911 case of
U.S. v. Standard Oil of New Jersey
, among the charges laid was raised prices to consumers. Yet petroleum prices had decreased during the alleged monopolization, declining from thirty cents per gallon in 1869 to six cents per gallon at the beginning of the antitrust trial.
²⁶
The company was in the end broken apart by the United States Supreme Court because it had allegedly “
intended
to monopolize.”

The same result occurred with
U.S. v. American Can
, a 1949 case where a judge found that the company had “coerced its customers into signing long-term leases.”
²⁷
As pointed out by D. T. Armentano, this so-called coercion was effected largely by attractive terms and generous price discounts for large orders. It was freely offered and freely bargained for. The company had violated antitrust laws because it gave bulk-order discounts! What is most egregious is that the judge ordered the company to
raise
its prices, reasoning that this would help the more expensive and less efficient companies compete in the market.
²⁸

Ayn Rand once aptly stated that “
free
competition
enforced
by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms.” The result of this deceptive contradiction of enforced free competition is illustrated most effectively in the case of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), which was charged with 150 violations of antitrust law and which the federal government pursued for over thirteen years in court, even though at the end of this terrible odyssey, the trial judge in 1939 dismissed all the charges. Unfortunately for Alcoa, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit essentially faulted Alcoa for being too successful, deeming that it was anticompetitive not because it attempted to drive out competitors through immoral tactics, but rather because it was too efficient and charged prices that were “too low.”
²⁹

Yet, if these are the “monopolies” that the government is protecting us from, the lowest-price monopolies, is the government even performing anything remotely beneficial to the public? Why is the government spending massive amounts of its time and our money prosecuting corporations for charging low prices? If we agree that low prices are good for consumers, the only reasoning behind the government’s actions stems from the settlements that are often the result of these antitrust suits. Corporations are paying out millions of dollars in fines for their purportedly harmful activities. And while prices go up for the consumer, at least the government has been able to make a quick buck, all in the guise of the “public interest” myth.

When people argue that the laws protect competition and efficiency, they should be reminded of these decisions. In essence, the antitrust laws are like pulling over drivers driving at the speed limit and staying within their
lanes because careful conduct could be evidence that they are drunk drivers who are trying not to appear drunk, and when finding they are not guilty of being drunk, finding them too sober to drive.

Like traffic tickets for the state and local police, modern antitrust cases are just quick cash cows for the federal government. That is the modern law of antitrust: assuming guilt by status; fitting the circumstances to whatever crime may be needed; and using “crime” to fill government coffers.

The Presumption of Deception

We have merely touched upon the multitude of ways in which the government seizes our bodies, steals our property, and crushes our liberty with one side of its mouth, while proclaiming the presumption of innocence with the other. This presumption is the most fundamental jurisprudential value that “keeps the government off our backs,” to quote Justice Douglas. If the government can destroy this, however slowly, what will be next? What will remain of our freedom?

Lie #13
“The Constitution Applies in Good
Times and in Bad Times”

On April 16th 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a student at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, came to school and killed thirty-two of his classmates with a gun before taking his own life. By January 2008, President George W. Bush had signed into law a measure that aimed to keep firearms from people with mental illnesses.
¹
The law provided up to $1.3 billion in federal grants to states, so that they could improve their tracking of mentally ill people who should not be permitted to purchase guns.
²
A law like this was proposed in the mid-1990s, but the mental health lobbies argued that it stigmatized the mentally ill.
³
After the tragedy at Virginia Tech, however, fear smothered freedom. Not one member of Congress voted against the law.
⁴

When disastrous situations like the Virginia Tech shooting or 9/11 or Pearl Harbor occur, it is a tragedy for those affected. Yet, oftentimes the federal government utilizes the panic surrounding these situations to grab more power for itself. The government lies by telling us that it
must
infringe upon our rights in order to keep us safe. But if the steps taken by the government are truly necessary evils, why doesn’t the government tailor the scope of its power as narrowly as possible? Instead, the government enacts laws quickly amid the hysteria, thereby using people’s emotions and irrational fears to gag and blindfold them while their rights are swindled away. Many of these laws are then interpreted broadly as a mechanism for the government to seize more power, acquire more resources, and waste more taxpayer money.

Typically under these climates of hysteria an “anything goes” attitude prevails in Congress and, like patriotic lemmings, many politicians follow the leader and succumb to wishes of the political party to which they belong. Because they constrain their speech in an effort to be politically correct, justice is lost, and unconstitutional laws are passed.

Often the people don’t speak up either, because they, too, are afraid and tend to trust government to protect them in times of crisis. We are socialized not to rebel, not to question authority or to resist going along, because it is not polite to speak up, to state the obvious, to rein in government power. Those who object to government over-reaches are often put on the defensive and asked: What do you have to hide? Yet, we need to amend this thinking because in many of these hysteria-laden situations, we lose our rights and our identity as a free people. Thus, long after the crisis has settled, Americans still must endure the legacy of laws passed during the hysterical climate.

Guns

In recent history, liberal and even conservative politicians have developed an obsession with stricter gun control laws, a policy that they believe will decrease violent crime in America. Some of them honestly believe that fewer guns will lead to fewer crimes. Some are just afraid of guns. And some want a disarmed public. Sadly, they are all wrong. Every European despot in the past two hundred years has attempted to disarm the public so as to make and keep it docile. American politicians, most of whom have never been near a gun for self-defense, will not address this. In their effort to pass gun control laws, politicians have used national tragedies to exploit our fears.

President Bill Clinton, who had been a staunch supporter of gun control throughout his presidency, used the tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, to bolster his argument for more stringent gun laws. On April 20th 1999, two deranged Columbine students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, shot and killed twelve students and a teacher. They injured twenty-one students, three of whom were trying to escape from the building. Immediately after the massacre, Harris and Klebold shot and killed themselves.

President Clinton, most Democrats, and many Republicans saw this tragedy as an opportunity to resume the gun control debate in America. In 1999, the United States Senate consisted of fifty-five Republicans and forty-five Democrats. The Columbine tragedy, however, caused the Republicans, a party that typically supports gun rights, to let their guard down,
⁵
or show their true colors. Less than a month after Columbine, with Vice President Al Gore serving as the tie-breaking vote, the Senate voted in favor of a bill requiring background checks for firearms purchasers at gun shows and pawnshops.
⁶
(Luckily, this bill never passed the House of Representatives, and thus was never enacted into law.) In light of Columbine, Clinton also launched a national campaign advocating less violence in music, movies, and video games.
⁷
In fact, Clinton signed an executive order mandating a study of how the entertainment industry markets music, movies, and video games.

It seems following each tragedy involving guns, the government attacks the guns and not the sick individuals who abuse them. The government paints guns as evil, and conjures up the notion that we will be safer only if criminals have less access to guns. This is completely false. Lance Kirklin, a student wounded in the Columbine shooting, put it best when he said, “You don’t see guns jumping off the table and shooting people.”
⁸
The problem is not easy access to weapons. The problem lies in the nature of the killers who commit these horrific crimes. No law restricting individual rights will stop them from carrying out their objectives.

The government, however, continues to succumb to hysteria over guns, as well as violence in movies, video games, and music. It ignores the real source of the problem because it cannot regulate what people think. On the other hand, it can throw money around restricting the use of everything under the sun, and pretend that it is solving problems that no law can prevent.

The government should not interfere with individuals’ rights to protect themselves against murderers like the Columbine and Virginia Tech students. Brave citizens used their right to bear arms to suppress a shooting at the University of Texas, Austin, on August 1st 1966. On that date, Charles Joseph Whitman, a twenty-five-year-old Florida native and former UT engineering student, opened fire from the twenty-eighth-floor observation deck of the school’s landmark 307-foot tower.
⁹
Whitman killed sixteen people and wounded thirty-one before he was killed by police.
¹⁰
Until the Virginia Tech massacre, the Texas shooting was the country’s deadliest.
¹¹

Whitman’s shooting could have been much worse, though. Brave Texans used their guns to fight back and prevent Whitman from doing even more damage. One English professor, who stored his deer rifle and boxes of ammunition in his office, shot at Whitman from his office window.
¹²
A man by the name of Bill Helmer, a witness to the shooting, stated that Whitman was leaning over the edge of the observation deck to shoot at people, but did not have this luxury once people started shooting
at him
.
¹³
According to Helmer, the Texans’ exercise of self-defense forced Whitman “to shoot through those drain spots, or he had to pop up real fast and then dive down again. That’s why he did most of his damage in the first 20 minutes.”
¹⁴
Unfortunately, the Virginia Tech campus was a gun-free zone.
¹⁵
Texas Representative Joe Driver, remembering the UT shooting, stated that “[i]f Virginia
Tech had not kept the campus a gun-free zone, people could have been saved.”

The government’s approach to gun control is clearly wrong and terribly misguided. We must not allow the hysteria of a post-tragedy environment to bolster the government’s ability to restrict our rights and prevent us from defending ourselves against killers. The right to defend yourself, your property, your freedom, or any known innocent is a natural right. Your right to use available technology to effectuate that defense is a natural right as well. The Supreme Court of the United States, as we have seen in previous pages, has characterized the right as fundamental. I’ll be blunt: A major reason we have these tragedies like the University of Texas, Columbine, and Virginia Tech is because there are too few of us who carry guns, not too many.

Our Rights Were Necessarily Infringed
After Pearl Harbor

In the past, attacks on our soil have also led to dangerous and unconstitutional government behavior. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal government hastily installed a system of rationing based on its claim that suddenly certain commodities were scarce and the fear that others would become scarce.
¹⁶
The first items to be rationed were automobile and truck tires, in January 1942.
¹⁷
During 1942 and 1943, the government also rationed cars, bicycles, typewriters, gasoline, fuel oil, kerosene, coal, stoves, rubber footwear, shoes, sugar, coffee, processed foods, meats, canned fish, and milk products.
¹⁸

Rationing severely restricted Americans’ freedom to purchase the type and amount of goods they desired, and also resulted in a black market for rationed goods.
¹⁹
It also reinforced the federal government’s power over individuals. It was utterly unnecessary. All the rationed goods could be bought for three or four times the government-set price on the black market. Without rationing, market forces would have established the prices at far less than what the black market did. Needless to say, rationing did not apply to the federal government. FDR and Congress had all the typewriters, sugar, coffee, milk, and vehicles they wanted. Americans accepted this like sheep.

The government also saw fit to strip ethnic Japanese of their liberty after the Pearl Harbor attacks. On February 19th 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast of the United States.
²⁰
Congress later passed a law imposing criminal penalties on people who violated the order or the regulations issued pursuant to it.
²¹
Through its new, self-created authority, the government systematically took away the freedom of Japanese-Americans, just as it did in the previous century to African-Americans.