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by Free Market Duck

Has Congress become an anachronism?
Sep 23, 2009

Did the Founding Fathers make a huge mistake in creating three branches of government instead of just two?  Think about it.  Since we already have the rules spelled out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights regarding our rights and freedoms, what’s really left for Congress to do except to create tons and tons of conflicting special interest legislation that infringes upon our freedoms?

Where did the Founding Fathers go wrong?  Or did they?

Washington, DC – Let’s discuss the basic structure of the government of the United States and – in light of our 2^nd Great Depression and increasing governmental intrusion into the life of the individual -- ask an important question:  namely, has the U.S. Congress morphed into an anachronism?  Has Congress outgrown its original purpose as one of the three “checks and balances” of government?  Specifically, has the U.S. Congress turned into exactly the type of authoritarian and corrupt entity against which we fought a Revolutionary War for Independence in the 1700s?

   Time for a brief History review.  Listen up, girl friends.

   233 years ago, the Founding Fathers of America broke away from a despotic form of government in Britain called a Monarchy and established their own form of government called a limited Republic.  Our Forefathers did not create a Democracy with 51% majority rule.  They created a limited Republic.  What’s the difference?  A Democracy with 51% Majority Rule is the exact antithesis of the concept of inherent individual rights and freedoms.  Inherent means we obtain our rights and freedoms from Nature, not from the government.  Limited means that our Republic is constrained, meaning, it:  (1) prohibits infringements upon individual rights, and (2) confers upon the U.S. Congress certain limited authority to pass legislation by democratic majority rule, as long as said legislation does not infringe upon (1) above.

   And that is the key:  as long as said legislation does not infringe upon our inherent precursor rights.

   These concepts (1) the source of our inherent rights, i.e. Nature not government, and (2) a limited Republic are important to understand:  Congress cannot infringe upon precursor rights of the people that brought about the creation and the very existence of Congress in the first place, and, in the second place, Congress cannot use the limited duties granted to it by the people to infringe upon the explicit or implied provisions of the U.S. Constitution.  In street talk, Congress can’t dump on those who brought it into existence – unless Congress has become Frankenstein but that’s another movie.

   In short, Congress was not created to be our master; Congress is supposed to be our servant, the protector of the rules, the laws, – not enforcer, that’s the job of the Executive and Judicial branches -- governing our inherent rights obtained at birth.  Today, however, Congress has morphed into what could minimally be described as an expensive snotty little brat throwing temper tantrums on the floor of Capitol Hill.  Somebody, I suggest WE the people, needs to collectively spank Congress’ collectivist little butts.

   I digress, but back to the scene of the crime.

   The explicit protections of individual rights are enumerated in, but not limited to, that portion of the U.S. Constitution we call the Bill of Rights.  Protected rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not to be mistaken as the only rights of the individual.  All other rights not specified belong to the individual, not the government.  In fact, Madison and Jefferson were loathe to even create an explicit Bill of Rights since it was clear in their minds that all mutually non-infringing individual rights and freedoms are automatically obtained at birth and do not need to be specified over and over in a Constitution since all rights spring forth from the same philosophical source:  inherent individual freedom.  As Madison said, this would be redundant.  And he was right.  However, many of the states in the 13 colonies had their own Bill of Rights and forced the inclusion of an explicit bill of individual rights in the new U.S. Constitution – fearing a future federal government would stomp on our major freedoms if they were not explicitly stated.  And it appears they were right, too.  Thus, the 13 colonies wouldn’t ratify the new U.S. Constitution and dump the old Articles of Confederation unless it included an explicit Bill of Rights.  Hesto presto, we got a Bill of Rights.

   In addition to protection of individual, not the collective’s, rights, the U.S. Constitution conferred certain limited authorities and duties to the Congress in Article I.  So we have two important areas, based upon two important fundamental concepts, to think about: inherent rights of the individual and specific duties of Congress.

   Fast forward to today, year 2009.

   We now have a U.S. Congress that appears to be totally corrupt, with out-of-control spending, and illegally ceding power to the Executive Branch of government – thus, subverting intra-governmental “checks and balances,” and, even worse, ceding power to a private corporation that controls and manipulates our U.S. Dollar, a private corporation called the Federal Reserve central bank.  As you will see below, Congress has misinterpreted their Constitutional duty to “regulate the value of our COIN, which must be gold or silver, by law” – as the authority to dump their job onto a private central bank.   Unfortunately, this is the root cause of our current Depression and was also the root cause of our first Depression in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

   As a result, the United States – because of Congress’ corruption and failure to do its Constitutional job -- is on the verge of morphing into some type of centrally-controlled collectivist government.  President Barack Obama, smelling the blood of a socialist opportunity and playing upon this default by Congress, is moving in for the kill with a zillion Executive Orders and independently-appointed Czars that bypass Congress’ Constitutional confirmation process.  Whether one calls the new state collectivism of 2009 socialism, fascism, guild socialism, communism, a totalitarian dictatorship, Obama’s Marxist Follies or your favorite term for Big Brother, it is clear that Americans do not now live in a limited Republic or even a strict Democratic Majority Rule.  We live in a collectivist Welfare State.  The type of state collectivism or the name we give to it is beside the point.  And it is growing rapidly, like a cancer infecting the U.S. Constitution and, therefore, the freedoms of all Americans.

   The fact is that the U.S. Constitution is now on its death bed and we are caught in a philosophical war between The Individual vs. The Collective.  We do not live in a free market economy, capitalism is all but dead, and the U.S. Congress has ceded so much of its obligations and Constitutional authority to other branches of government, to other bureaucracies, and even to a private central bank, the Federal Reserve monetary manipulators, that the question must now be asked:

Has Congress outlived its usefulness as one of our government’s three "checks and balances?"

   In other words, has the U.S. Congress become an anachronism, out of step and out of time with the provisions of the U.S. Constitution?

   Now that we have seen what the U.S. Congress has evolved into -- a corrupt body of special interest peddlers selling power and doling out money to the highest bidders at a federal pig trough of Deficit Spending for their Giant Welfare State -- it begs the philosophical question:  did we really need a legislative branch of government in the first place?

   Let’s face it, once the Rules of the Game are enacted, i.e., the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, why did we need a legislative branch of government that has the capacity to continually change the rules?  Especially in the middle of the game?  Was this a naïve oversight by our Founding Fathers, i.e. creating three branches of government after already spelling out the Rules in a Rule Book called the Constitution?  What was the intended function of a body of Representatives and Senators?  To make minor changes and keep track of the nation’s limited budget and expenditures, or to continually change The Basic Rules of the Game to implement thousands of new laws, taxes, and power plays to run roughshod over the individual rights and freedoms of the American people?

   In short, did our Forefathers make a fatal mistake when they created a federal Congress?  Did they not know what Congress would morph into, given the nature of mankind, and given the knowledge of inflated, Revolutionary War paper indebtedness that was created by bankers for our Continental Congress?

   At first glance, one might come to the conclusion that, yes indeed, our Forefathers did commit a huge mistake by creating three branches of government instead of just two:  (1) an Executive Branch to enforce the Rules, (2) a Judicial Branch to objectively interpret the Rules, and, unfortunately, (3) a Legislative Branch to change the basic Rules in the middle of The Game.

   I mean, why have a third branch of government whose function is to continually CHANGE the Rules, especially in the middle of The Game?  Isn’t this like changing the rules in the middle of a chess match or allowing the refs at the Super Bowl to participate in the game itself and, like Congress in the free market, play quarterback in the 4^th quarter?  (What do you think a protectionist tariff against free trade is, if not Congress breaking the Rules and participating in the free market?  What do you think a state-granted monopoly on selling health insurance within each of 39 states is -- thus driving up profits for individual health insurance companies and providing a future excuse for President Barack Obama to exclaim, with no hint of pretentiousness, “Wow, ain’t private health insurance expensive, dudes,” so he can then push a nationalized health care agenda down all Americans’ throats by pretending that the government needs to step in and compete with subsidies against the very insurance monopolies created by previous intervention into the market by Congress?  One governmental intervention usually leads to a thousand other interventions and a million unintended consequences.)

   However, upon closer scrutiny of the U.S. Constitution and Federalist Papers – the Federalist Papers being the writings of the authors of the Constitution explaining their reasons for including specific sections in the Constitution -- we discover that our Founding Fathers were perhaps not that naïve or as careless as we, at first, might think.  They just never comprehended how future technology and state collectivist ideology would allow greedy bankers to take us off the one thing that the Founding Fathers counted on not changing:  namely, removal of the gold standard and enacting fractional reserve banking.  (Fractional Reserve banking is simply a hundred dollar term for “counterfeiting.”)

   There is one very important provision in the U.S. Constitution that our Founders expected us to carry out, a provision that would automatically prevent the U.S. Congress from (1) spending beyond its means by deficit financing and inflating our money, and (2) creating special interest legislation that grants power and money to all sorts of special interest groups. 

   What was that provision that our Forefathers put in Article I of the U.S. Constitution to prevent Congress from becoming corrupt and spending us into bankruptcy?

   That provision was the establishment of sound money, gold and silver coin, not paper but hard specie commodity money, so that nobody, not politicians, not private bankers, not anybody could use paper currency – especially inflated paper currency -- to take over the new Republic.

   Within the three pages of Article I of the U.S. Constitution that lays out the legislative powers vested in Congress is Section (8) POWERS OF CONGRESS, paragraphs (5) and (6), which state, “Congress shall have the power to (5) coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures [especially of coin], and (6) provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States.

   Guess what?  Congress has violated both of these paragraphs vested in them and our lawmakers have given the power to manipulate our U.S. Dollar to a private corporation of central bankers called the Federal Reserve.

   And what has the Federal Reserve done?

   The Federal Reserve has taken America off the gold standard, a violation of the above legislative duties granted to Congress to retain coinage as a standard, i.e. a hard specie commodity as our monetary standard.  Congress and the Fed Reserve have debased our coins from gold and silver to copper-nickel.  In addition, the Federal Reserve has removed the contractual words of gold and silver backing and convertibility of our paper certificates, thus obliterating the difference between the concepts of (1) gold and silver coin as money and (2) the paper dollar as a receipt, which is a contract, for the storage and redeemability of that coinage.  In fact, today’s Federal Reserve Notes are not real money, in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution and in direct violation of the limited Powers granted to Congress.

   Our current paper dollars are simply counterfeited fractional reserve notes not backed by anything.  Worse still, by transferring power over our money supply to a private central bank, Congress has thus made itself an anachronism.  By this one action alone, Congress has made itself totally irrelevant as a third branch of government, especially regarding “checks and balances.”  In fact, Congress in 2009 has now morphed into the equivalent of the British Parliament of Whores, the special interest group of Royals, of the 1700’s against whom we fought for our Independence. We are essentially back to Square One.  And that’s why many Americans are now calling for a 2^nd American Revolution by peaceably marching on Washington, DC, and demanding an audit of the Federal Reserve and a return to the original monetary provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

   Within the same Article I of the U.S. Constitution, Section (9) POWERS DENIED CONGRESS, paragraph (7) states that “No money shall be drawn from the treasury [remember this was intended to be gold and silver coins or gold and silver certificates], but in consequence of appropriations made by law [not secret appropriations by a private central bank]; and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.”

   Guess what again?  The Federal Reserve has NEVER, EVER, since its illegal inception in 1913, been audited.  At least not for anything more than how many paper clips did Suzy the receptionist purchase last month.

   Even today, Fed Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke has stated that it is not the business of Congress or the people to know where trillions and trillions of inflated paper dollars were expended, who got them, what they were used for, how much interest was charged, or any details whatsoever.  Why?  Bernanke says that accountability to the public would create a, “systemic risk” to the economy.

   Really?  A “systemic risk” to our economy?  That’s funny, the Constitution doesn’t say our public debt should be kept secret from the people.  In fact, if it’s OUR debt, and we have to pay interest on it, then we have a right to know.  Can you imagine your neighbor assuming your identity, spending the crap out of your plastic credit cards, running it into millions of dollars of secret expenditures, and then telling you that you don’t have a right to know why, how and what he’s doing with YOUR money that you have not even authorized him to spend?  What arrogance by the Federal Reserve!

   So, we are told by a secret central bank inflating our National Debt and secretly shoveling the money out all over the place without our knowledge that we don’t have a need to know and that by revealing their secret expenditures the economy might collapse all around our ears?  Errrt, screech.  Whose money is this anyway, the Federal Reserve’s or the people of America?

   Once again, our Founding Fathers expected Congress to keep us on a gold standard with no fractional reserve banking and thus “no money would be drawn from the Treasury without lawful appropriations” and “regular statements shall be published.”

   Thirdly, in Section 10 of Article I, POWERS DENIED THE STATES, it says that (1) “No state shall … coin money; emit bills of credit; or make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; … or pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts,” the latter of which means neither Congress or the illegal Federal Reserve can pass a law or statute -- or just plain go out and do it – that changes the contractual wording on lawful U.S. paper money, such that it is now not redeemable in gold or silver coin to the bearer upon demand at any U.S. Treasury.  The real meaning of this clause is not just that the states cannot create money, it also means that the Feds can’t crank up money for the states, fork it over as earmarks or whatever other Great Train Robbery you want to call it, and thus get around the provisions of Article I, Section (10), paragraph (1).

   In reality, the Federal Reserve Note is not lawful money because it is not gold or silver or a convertible gold or silver certificate as required by the U.S. Constitution in Article I, Sections (8), (9), and (10), and the U.S. Congress has illegally authorized a private corporation, the Federal Reserve, to impair an obligation of U.S. monetary contracts, the U.S. Dollar, i.e. by removing the contractual redeemability wording on U.S. gold and silver certificates.  Removing these words constitutes an “impairment of contracts,” or in current legalese, a “fraudulent contract.”  In street talk it’s called “a freakin robbery.”

   Therefore, we come back to the original question:  has the U.S. Congress morphed into an anachronism?  Were the Founding Fathers mistaken to have created three branches of government, specifically a legislative branch of government, since Congress has no other function today than to continually crank out tons and tons of new special interest legislation, the function of which is to continually change the Rules of the Game and allow a runaway central bank to fund its creation of a Deficit Welfare State?

   In short, did our Forefathers screw up by creating a U.S. Congress?

   The answer is:  Yes and No.

   Yes, in that our Forefathers naively trusted that a future group of legislators – today’s Gang of 535 -- would never give away their monetary powers to a private central banking corporation that most free market economists will admit had a huge hand in creating today’s Greater Depression – as well as the first Great Depression in the 1930s -- by going off the gold standard, inflating the U.S. Dollar, and granting itself powers never intended by our Founding Fathers.  We’re talking about powers that stretch into setting wage rates for CEOs of private companies, controlling market interest rates, nationalizing car, insurance, banking, and health care companies, injecting inflated non-backed U.S. Bonds and Dollars into member banks who then create fanciful and clever toxic derivatives to sell as fake “securitized” hedge funds on Wall Street.

   And the other answer, No, in that our Founding Fathers never thought Congress would go crazy and go off the gold standard.  Our Forefathers put the cautions and stops into Article I, Sections (8), (9), and (10) of the U.S. Constitution to prevent the atrocities of a group of Banksters from essentially taking over the United States by controlling and manipulating our monetary system but Congress over the years has long since defaulted on their duties and obligations to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.  Especially in the area of money, which virtually none of our legislators understand.

   While everybody is kept busy choosing up sides, Republicans and Democrats, in this War of Congress and the Fed Reserve against the people, Americans are rapidly losing all of their rights and freedoms to a Big Brother government who continually claims it must save us all from some unknown “systemic risk” and a mysterious Depression that flew in from Mars or just appeared out of nowhere for incomprehensible reasons -- when, in fact, the real reasons are already known:  Congress has dumped its Constitutional monetary authority into the hands of a private central bank and thus turned America into a giant Welfare State with everybody only arguing about who gets how much inflated paper money from the federal government as fake “stimulus” money to finance their favorite socialist program.  Nobody discusses the fact that these actions constitute a usurpation of everybody’s private property rights to their own minds, bodies, and the fruits of their own production.  Redistributionist consumption of other people’s private property through Congressional and Executive Let’s Spread the Wealth programs is now the name of The Game.

   Government redistributionists such as President Barack Obama claim their Progressive socialist programs are “compassionate.”  But being “compassionate” with other people’s money is not compassion; it is out and out robbery.  It is enslavement of the very people who are the inventors, the discoverers, the producers of wealth, and not just quantitatively but, more importantly, qualitative wealth.  On the other side of consumers are the producers.  It is the producers that the Progressives, the redistributionists, hate.

   And this is the dirty little secret that governmental redistributionists such as President Barack Obama and his socialist cronies do not want you to know:  the surest way to fundamentally change America from a free market economy to Marxist socialism is to control the U.S. monetary system with inflated fiat currency.  Marx knew this.  Stalin knew this.  Hitler knew this.  FDR knew this.  And Barack Obama knows this.  All state collectivists know this and that is why the first thing that Progressives and Totalitarian Dictators all know they must do is:  dump the gold standard and grant monetary manipulation powers to a secretly-run government central bank. 

   So, the real answer to our initial question:

Has the U.S. Congress become an anachronism?

is that as long as our U.S. Congress is allowed to illegally delegate its monetary authority to a group of private central bankers, the Federal Reserve, then Congress has become the very Monstrosity of Government Corruption for which we fought an American Revolution to prevent.  By dumping its limited and specific duty to regulate America’s money as gold and silver coin, not allowing anything else to become lawful money, to provide an accounting of expenditures and appropriations to the public, and to provide for punishment for counterfeiting U.S. coin and currency and punishment for “impairment of contracts” of our paper monetary receipts, our U.S. paper dollars, today’s U.S. Congress is no different than King George’s Parliament of Special Interest Royals in 1700 Britain.

   Until one of Congress’ most important checks and balances – its proper monetary authority as stated in Article I of the U.S. Constitution – is reigned back in and our central bank, the Federal Reserve, is divested of its insane money manipulation powers – and, in fact, abolished -- we will have continual boom-bust cycles, inflation of our pulp fiction money supply, inflation of the price of all goods and services with alternating deflation of the same, and eventually the complete loss of control of our own government by the people of the United Sates.

   Until Congress returns to a sound monetary system, it is nothing but an anachronistic cancer of corruption. -- FM Duck

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