One unhappy byproduct of the Industrial Age was the growing discontent of its industrial workers, who constantly agitated for better pay and more humane working conditions.  In America, for example, a strike for an eight-hour work day took place on May 1, 1886, drew 350,000 workers nationwide, including some 40,000 strikers in Chicago.   While the Chicago strike ultimately ended peacefully, two days later Chicago police fired on picketers outside of a McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. plant, killing two and wounding several.

Another byproduct of the Industrial Age were radical political movements, including Socialists and Anarchists who denounced Capitalism as human exploitation, and on May 4, at Chicago’s Haymarket Square, numerous Socialists and Anarchists held a rally to protest the violence at the McCormick plant.

This rally also was peaceful until the 300 Chicago police observing it were ordered to break it up, but just at that moment a huge bomb exploded, rocking Haymarket Square, killing police officer Mathias Degan and wounding several others.

In a panic, the police began firing indiscriminately, killing several protestors and, it was determined later, mistakenly killing fellow officers.  It was dubbed “The Haymarket Square Massacre” and in its wake eight of the protest organizers were arrested and tried for Officer Degan’s murder.  Unsurprisingly, all eight were identified as Socialists and Anarchists, and six of the eight were immigrants.

Indeed, a third byproduct of the Industrial Age was pervasive animosity toward foreign-born “agitators” and “radicals,” as evidenced by the sham trial the eight defendants underwent.  The presiding judge said at the outset he considered the defendants guilty.  The jury comprised business owners and professionals — hardly “peers” of the defendants — and many jurists openly admitted they too were prejudiced against the defendants.  One jury member was related to one of the slain policemen.

Continue reading →

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” is now before the Supreme Court, which must decide whether it passes constitutional muster.  At the heart of this constitutional controversy is Obamacare’s “individual mandate,” which requires all individuals and organizations to purchase health insurance, or pay a stiff fine.  That mandate rests on the Constitution’s “Commerce Clause,” which gives Congress the power to regulate economic activity.  But does it also give Congress the power to compel economic activity?  Can Congress force citizens to purchase a product they otherwise would not want to purchase?  “If Congress has that power,” say those who think Obamacare is unconstitutional, “then Congress has unlimited power,” which is antithetical to the Constitution, which only gives the federal government a finite number of limited powers.

And so the battle rages, including the battle over what will and will not be covered under Obamacare, what it will cost, and so on.

But I have another question?  The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is 2,700 pages long.  How can a piece of legislation that is 2,700 pages long qualify as a law?  Yes, Congress passed it (without one single vote by Republican members of the House of Representatives), and President Obama signed it into law.   But, by definition, any legislation of that length cannot possibly pass the first test of a law as understood by our Founders when they created the Constitution in 1787, and as understood by the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment when it was ratified in 1868.   A law must treat all citizens equally.   The 14^th Amendment is very clear:  no law can deny any U.S. citizen “equal protection.”

It does not take 2,700 pages to describe the equal treatment of all citizens.  It takes 2,700 pages to describe the law’s myriad clauses, subsets, codicils, exceptions, addendums and regulations, plus the various bureaucracies that will determine and administer them.   To give one example, Obamacare includes what are called “Ethics Panels,” which will determine, depending on a patient’s age, whether that patient can receive certain medical treatments, including surgery.  That is clearly age discrimination and unequal treatment.  (And begs the question:  If, under Obamacare, a 75-year-old person suffers a heart attack, can doctors respond immediately, or do they first need approval from the Ethics Panel?)

To that end, on Mark Levin’s radio show recently a neurosurgeon called in to report that he had just read Obamacare’s provisions on coverage of brain surgery, only to discover that such surgeries for patients over 70 are also subject to the whims of an Ethics Panel (consisting of bureaucrats, not doctors).   Actually the language in that section of this 2,700-page “law” does not call them “patients” at all.  It calls them “units.”

John McLean, who died this week (April 4) in 1861, was—by his early 40s—one of the most important people in America.  In fact, he oversaw what was, in the 1820s, the federal government’s largest, most extensive and arguably most important responsibility.

McLean was postmaster general.  He was in charge of establishing post offices across America to deliver the mail to citizens increasingly hungry for news and information, but—unlike today—with very limited choices in how they received it.  Indeed, the post office was America’s only national communications system and the postal department had more employees than the other federal bureaucracies combined.   By 1830 there were 8,000 post offices in America, most established in response to the thousands of petitions to Congress from towns and villages wanting their own post office.  That made McLean, who was postmaster general under presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, a very powerful person.  So powerful, in fact, that he seriously thought of running for president himself.

This postal growth reflected the fact that America in the mid-18th Century was undergoing a communications revolution.  More people were literate and more and more newspapers were springing up to serve them, meaning the general public was becoming better educated and better informed, two national goals the federal government was only too happy to encourage.  As a result, McLean’s postal department charged lower postal rates to deliver printed material, such as newspapers, than it charged for hand-written letters, and technological advances in printing also fostered this print communications boom.  By the late 1820s New York City alone had 160 newspapers, including the nation’s only newspaper for African-Americans.

In addition, as the nation’s only national communications system, the postal department was a major incentive toward improving the nation’s transportation system.  McLean badgered both Congress and local authorities to improve the nation’s roads because the stage coaches that carried passengers also carried the mail.  Steam boat lines depended on contracts to carry the mail, as did the railroads when they became prevalent, and the competition to earn postal contracts among both steam boats and railroads spurred even further technological improvements.

Continue reading →