What Welfare May the Congress Provide?
By RJ Harris, U.S. Congressional Candidate Oklahoma 4th District
…the general Welfare of the United States...
Article I Sec. 8 allows the Congress to "…provide for the general Welfare of the United States." Taking notice of the "of the United States" qualification is critical to understanding the limits of Congressional authority to raise revenue to spend on general Welfare. This qualification refers to the United States as an entity and not to its individual citizens. The ability to levy taxes to pay for the individual Welfare (personal, state or corporate) does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. Therefore, Welfare for the individual is not allowed to be provided for by the Congress and any levy raised to pay for individual Welfare is unconstitutional. Furthermore, since the Constitution embodies our consent to taxation to pay for those things contained therein, taxing us to pay for individual Welfare, or things not contained therein, is an illegitimate and absolute abuse of federal government power; also known as a tyranny. Some current examples of individual Welfare either already being provided or under consideration are:
Education: Congresses ability to legislate in this area does not exist at all. This power it simply asserted under the commerce clause vaguely tying the education level of our citizens to their aggregate affect on national commerce. This sort of inductive reasoning has led to the regulation of things that could not be tied to the commerce clause without chains-of-inference of near ridiculous length. Constitutional arguments aside, consider the ethical's ramifications of taxing the citizens of Florida to pay for the education of children in Oklahoma. We have treaties with the British and the French…are we now to levy taxes on them to pay for education here? Of course not; why then do we think it is ok to allow our federal government, through the perversion of our treaty with that entity, to tax Oklahomans to pay for another state's welfare?
Health Care: Congresses ability to legislate in this area is limited to preventing states from interfering with the free trade of health insurance across states lines. Currently, this is indeed the impediment preventing market based solutions from delivering affordable health care to all those who need/want it.
Bailouts: Bailouts are little more than theft, carried out by the government against the taxpayers, to insure the losses of companies that should have been liquidated through the bankruptcy process. Bankruptcy redistributes, through the market, those resources which were previously mismanaged to stronger firms or new firms that will put them to better use
Stimulus Packages: This form of individual welfare would be completely eliminated if the Congress stopped taxing us for unconstitutional expenditures and was only allowed enough of our money to accomplish its enumerated functions. The ability to hand out money from the treasury, back to the citizens, presupposes that 1. We were taxed beyond what the federal government needed in the first place and 2. that the fruits of our labor belong to the government to redistributed when and how it sees fit.
Subsidies: This form of welfare pays people to not produce what they could otherwise out of fear that over-production could destroy the present and future production of the overproduced good/service. However, fears of overproduction presuppose that access to surplus goods will not encourage wider distribution and/or facilitate entry into larger markets. Moreover, overproduction will cause surpluses and price decreases which will naturally move some producers to shift to replacement goods/services should new markets not materialize.
Some will counter that such a strict constitutional interpretation is cold and indifferent to the needs of those unable to provide for themselves. However, that argument presupposes that the states are powerless to act without the aid of the federal government. According to the 10th Amendment, powers not given to the federal government are reserved to the States and to the People. Therefore, any of these aforementioned individual, social, governmental or corporate Welfares may be provided by states should their citizens demand it of them. Some states, through the consent of their citizens, will allow the free market to supply these things, some will rely on corporate/government partnerships and other states may lean more directly on their own bureaucracies. We the People can then determine in which states to live based upon the level of taxation and regulation we are willing to accept to pay for these individual Welfares. In a system of checks and balances, the ultimate check on governmental power then has been left to the individual choices of the people deciding where to live. This is the liberty our founders fought and died to pass on to us and we should not so easily trade it away for one-state-solutions which remove all choice and deprive us of that Liberty.
About RJ Harris:
RJ Harris is a currently serving nineteen-year Oklahoma Army National Guard Officer, two-time Iraq War Veteran and U.S. Congressional Candidate for Oklahoma's 4th Congressional District. He is a University of Oklahoma graduate in Philosophy and a second year law student at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. RJ is a Constitutional Conservative Republican and the first 912 Liberty Candidate in the nation. He has appeared on Fox News' Freedom Watch twice with Judge Andrew Napolitano and been the featured guest on conservative/libertarian talk-radio programs across the country.
www.rjharris2010.com
