Quotes from Myron Magnet

... the best way to help the poor is to promote economic growth and job creation

Even fervent abolitionists, viewing blacks as equal in rights but inferior socially and culturally, didn't relish having freedmen come north to live beside them but wanted them to stay down south.

So that's why he came to Memphis—"to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black. I come to state that I'm a man, free to think for myself and do as I please.… I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others.

Poet Walt Whitman, a Civil War hospital volunteer who later interviewed pardon-seeking Confederates, remarked that "in any other country on the globe, the whole batch of Confederate leaders would have had their heads cut off.

Thomas and his siblings constitute a natural experiment in the effects of such a caring, supervised, value-laden upbringing, compared with a more typical poor, fatherless childhood. It is the difference between freedom and victimhood.

Worst of all, the regulatory agencies may presume anyone they charge to be guilty unless he proves his innocence, and he has but limited standing and scope to appeal the agency's decision to a real court, effectively "making the commission's decisions on fact final and conclusive," the ABA objected.

This sets the wheels of government moving in reverse gear; the servant becomes the master, and the right to earn a living becomes subject to the servant's whim and caprice as he professes to apply some vague and variable statutory standard.

Little wonder that one congressman warned that "government by committees, boards, bureaus, and commissions will, if unchecked and uncontrolled, destroy the republican conception of government"—or that a senator deemed one of the agencies a "star chamber," the arbitrary, juryless court of Stuart despotism, where due process (as first laid out in Magna Carta over 800 years ago and reiterated in the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment) had no place.

But the ruined South—the war had cost it $13.6 billion—wanted its cotton, its only source of income and still the nation's major export commodity, amounting to nearly two-thirds of U.S. exports by 1889 and three-quarters of the world's supply.11

The serfdom was as much a cultural as an economic matter. "Slavery is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law," Frederick Douglass lamented. "Customs, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South.

Busing, affirmative action, and abortion are but the three most glaring areas in which the justices have made law from the bench, with no constitutional license to do so.

The constitutional machinery of limited and enumerated powers, separation of powers, and checks and balances all aimed to prevent such an "improper or wicked project," and America's vast size, even in 1787, ensured that a multitude of factions—special interests—would bar any single one from tyrannizing over the others.

But after a frustrated Franklin Roosevelt threatened to enlarge the high bench and pack it with his partisans, Justice Owen Roberts, in the infamous switch in time that saved nine, stopped finding New Deal legislation unconstitutional, so that 5–4 decisions against FDR became majority decisions allowing his schemes.

What would George Washington—whom the Senate declared didn't need its approval to dismiss Senate-confirmed executive-branch officers, since he alone was responsible to the voters for their actions—have to say about the civil service rules and union protections that make the whippersnappers so difficult, and often impossible, to fire? Even Franklin Roosevelt thought bureaucrat unions an absurdity.41

The Court has "overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure,

The end result may be trains that run on time (although I doubt it), but the cost is to our Constitution and the individual liberty it protects.

As the founders often cautioned, a self-governing republic doesn't have a governing class. Part of America's current predicament is that it now has a permanent, unelected one, unanswerable to the people. Absolutism—soft perhaps, but absolutism nonetheless—has replaced a democratic republic.

Typical was (later governor and U.S. senator) Pitchfork Ben Tillman's cold-blooded massacre in South Carolina of "a troop of black militiamen for no other reason than that they had dared to conduct a celebratory Fourth of July parade through their mostly black town," Thomas writes.

Our local communities, once vibrantly self-governing, have lost vital autonomy, as the Court has hemmed in their ability to police themselves and regulate their schools, all in the name of atoning for America's original sin of slavery but in fact harming black Americans more than helping them.

So too the race-conscious remedies that the Court has sanctioned or imposed have increased social tensions and distorted key civic institutions. Those liberties that the framers thought so absolute that they enshrined them in the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, especially political speech, and the protection of private property—became negotiable, with the connivance of a Court established above all to protect those constitutional liberties that it would be tyranny to abridge.

Imagine: they celebrated the Declaration of Independence! But for decades, groups like Tillman's "raped, murdered, lynched, and robbed as a means of intimidating, and instilling pervasive fear in, those whom they despised.… Between 1882 and 1968, there were at least 3,446 reported lynching of blacks in the South.

The practice of creating independent regulatory commissions, who perform administrative work in addition to judicial work," Roosevelt himself admitted, "threatens to develop a 'fourth branch' of Government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution."33

James Madison, always at the vortex of the fierce disputes over what measures these enumerated powers implied as necessary and proper, concluded—after serving for a quarter century as a congressman, secretary of state, and president—that the bedrock constitutional principle was simply to ensure that America does not "convert a limited into an unlimited Govt.

It's hard to count the ways in which the administrative or regulatory state overturns, abolishes, and usurps the Constitution.