Killing Free Speech and Free Enterprise With One Stone

In modern day America, if you criticize the government you are now fair game to be called upon to explain yourself in front of it. As Byron York reported in a recent Washington Examiner column, Rep. Henry Waxman sent letters to executives of major corporations such as Verizon and Caterpillar, requesting their testimony at hearings of the Subcomittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, chaired by none other than Rep. Bart Stupak, as each of the companies “announced that provisions in the [healthcare] law could adversely affect” their “ability to provide health insurance.” AT&T for instance had disclosed in an SEC form that changes in the tax treatment of a Medicare subsidy would lead to a $1 billion write-off in earnings from the first quarter of 2010, and said it was considering changes to the health care benefits it provides for its employees.

That the legislation would negatively affect the earnings of these corporations and potentially hamper their ability to provide healthcare is for Rep. Waxman “a matter of concern,” as the “new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs.”

But I wonder, for whom are the negative effects of this legislation really a concern? For Rep. Waxman and his fellow Democrats who already forced the egregious bill on the public? For the private enterprises pummeled seemingly on a daily basis by these same politicians? Perhaps for the American people faced with all kinds of economy-crippling unintended consequences as a result of the legislation, on top of the higher costs and worse healthcare they will ultimately receive?

Is it in response to the criticism of the bill or out of the selfless devotion to public service of Rep. Waxman (he who never read his own cap-and-tax bill) that he has the gall to call individuals critical of the healthcare albatross to personally testify in front of members of his House Committee? It sure seems like the former when he is challenging the executives simply because their prognoses happen to differ from those of the almighty independent CBO.

Even more shocking is the fact that companies are being asked to provide records such as proprietary analyses on projected health care costs and “any documents including email messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform,” for the hearing. As York asserts, “The executives will undoubtedly view such documents as confidential, but if they fail to give Waxman everything he wants, they run the risk of subpoenas and threats from the chairman. And all as punishment for making a business decision in light of a new tax situation.” That Waxman is requesting internal emails related to the financial decisions of these companies should send a chill down our collective spine.

The threat to free speech and private enterprise represented by this hearing fits in well with the increasingly authoritarian atmosphere emanating from Washington, replete with the abrogation of contracts, bailout of businesses, levy of arbitrary taxes on bonuses, takeover of large swaths of private industry and the populist attack on commerce in general. Rep. Max Baucus articulated clearly the mentality of this government when he argued that “the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy,” with the goal of healthcare reform to correct the so-called “mal-distribution of income in America.”

This philosophy and its political manifestation bring to mind that of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. Both Presidents accelerated our break from laissez-faire, the misguided ideologue Hoover (opposed by the “leave-it-alone liquidationist” to whom my pseudonym stands in tribute, Andrew Mellon), as a technocratic central planner who felt that the “cooperation” through cartelization of industry to keep men employed, maintain high wages and encourage consumption was the key to ending recession; and FDR in his tyrannical New Deal in which he outright attacked businesses on principle, saying of entrepreneurs that “A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, an organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help,” noting of Wall Street that “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men…The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit,” and taunting his “economic royalist” and “organized money” critics in gloating:

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

The Obama administration and much of our Congress combines the worst elements of these two leaders: the socialist ideology and elitism of Hoover and the ruthless lust for power and related hatred of private enterprise of Roosevelt.

Henry Waxman’s call for justifiably critical business leaders to take the stand in his show trial typifies this mindset. In threatening executives with Congressional Hearings, he is following in the footsteps of National Recovery Administration enforcer Hugh Johnson, who vowed that those who would not abide by Roosevelt’s policies would “get a sock in the nose.” After witnessing Waxman’s best Hugh Johnson impression, does anyone think that the ratings agencies would ever dare downgrade our national debt, or that indeed any business would do anything to challenge this set of leaders? Quelling dissent and putting business in its place was the goal during the original Depression as it is in today’s depression.

As we know, the capricious and heavy-handed policy and politics of the 1930s not only made the first Depression “Great” as a result of its immediate economic effects, but also its psychological ones, which themselves had a secondary economic impact. This second blow was that of the uncertainty created by Hoover and FDR with regard to the rights to liberty and property, an uncertainty that led to a capital strike. The loss of confidence in our markets and thus the fleeing of capital is illustrated in the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average did not again reach its 1929 high until 1954. Consider today’s parallel economic struggles (to which we can add that we are now the world’s largest debtor) along with the Nazism in the Islamic world, and history appears to be eerily repeating itself, but we shall leave this discussion for another day.

In closing, there are very real consequences to the threats to our First Amendment and our free enterprise system. What kind of country is my generation going to inherit, and in what kind of country are we going to raise our children? Where will man turn when the last best hope of man on Earth repudiates its fundamental tenets? How will the tragic tale of the tyranny of statism in America end?