We come up against the whole question of the ability of a free government to continue functioning in spite of pressures from groups inside the body politic, where these pressures are created by immediate self-interest. Numbers of our writers today believe, indeed strongly urge, that free government can continue to exist only as the central authority - in our case, the federal government - assumes a stronger and stronger role in directing the economic processes of the country. By exercising a stronger authority over the economy, these writers mean bureaucratic rather than purely legislative control. In this way they would hope to get away from the group influence, to which an elected official is so sensitive, while at the same time they would preserve the general forms of free government and individual liberty through the dependence of the bureaucrats upon the Congress for appropriations.
Thinking of this kind leads to a greater and greater dependence upon the so-called regulation commissions, most of them having a combination of legislative, executive, and judicial functions.
The Congress has at times referred to some of these commissions as an extension of Congress. This would be an accurate description if their functions were limited to legislative action and their decisions always subject to approval by the executive. This is not the case, and I would not be surprised that a very strong argument could be made against the functioning of some of them, on constitutional grounds. In any event, to the degree that we depend more and more upon the regulatory commission, we are departing from the system laid down in our Constitution, a system that groups all functions into three categories and keeps these mutually independent of each other. Since America has always believed that this functional dispersion of power is equally important with the geographical dispersion accomplished by the reservation of all powers to the states and to the people, except where such power is especially granted to the central authority by the Constitution, it follows that to the degree that we depend upon the regulatory commission, we are threatening the individual liberties and the entire system of free government that they established.
Of course, we well understand that whereas in the early days of our republic the "liberal" was any individual who pled for less government in our daily lives, we have come to the point in the past thirty or forty years where the present-day liberal is the man who demands more and more government in our lives, claiming that only in this way can the mass of individuals be protected against the greed and lust of the predatory few. Individuals of this school shout their undying hatred of the "practitioners of special privilege," but the fact is that the only special privilege that could possibly exist under the systems that they advocate would be high-ranking bureaucrats of Washington.
Admittedly, masses of people have suffered under the injustices inflicted by people controlling means of production, not only in our civilization but in past ones. However, individual fortunes come and go; shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves in three generations is almost an accepted characteristic of modern civilization. But once an all-powerful and self-perpetuating government has fastened itself onto the people, then exploitation of the masses will revert again to the kind practiced by the Hitlers and Napoleons of the past - and indeed, as it is practiced by Stalin today.
MYR CONVENTION!