Thirty years have elapsed since our free-trade era began and 30 months since George W. Bush became president. It’s time to measure the promise of global free trade against the performance.

Undeniably, free trade has delivered for consumers. A trip to the mall, where the variety of suits, shoes, shirts, toys, gadgets, games, TVs, and appliances abounds, makes the case. But what has it cost our country?

Every month George Bush has been in office, America has lost manufacturing jobs. One in seven has vanished since his inauguration. In 1950, a third of our labor force was in manufacturing. Now, it is 12.5 percent. U.S. manufacturing is in a death spiral, and it is not a natural death. This is a homicide. Open-borders free trade is killing American manufacturing.

In 2002, we ran a trade deficit in goods of $484 billion. This May, it reached the level of $562 billion, nearly 6 percent of GDP. Evangelists of free trade tell us trade deficits do not matter. Michael Boskin, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Bush I, declared, “It does not make any difference whether a country makes computer chips or potato chips.”

History teaches otherwise. In 1860, Britain abandoned its ‘Britain First’ trade policy for the free-trade faith of David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Richard Cobden. By World War I, Britain, which produced twice what America did in 1860, produced less than half and had been surpassed by a Germany that did not even exist in 1860.

Free trade does to a nation what alcohol does to a man: saps him first of his vitality, then his energy, then his independence, then his life. (Emphasis added)

America today exhibits the symptoms of a nation passing into late middle age. We spend more than we earn. We consume more than we produce.

Why does it matter where our goods are produced?

Because, as I wrote in The Great Betrayal:

Manufacturing is the key to national power. Not only does it pay more than service industries (emphasis added), the rates of productivity growth are higher and the potential of new industries arising is far greater. From radio came television, VCRs, and flat-panel screens. From adding machines came calculators and computers. From the electric typewriter came the word processors. Research and development follow manufacturing.

Alexander Hamilton, the architect of the U.S. economy, knew this. He had served in the Revolution as aide to Washington and lived through the British blockades. He had led the bayonet charge at Yorktown. And he had resolved that never again would his country’s survival depend upon French muskets or French ships.

As first Treasury Secretary, he delivered in 1791 the “Report on Manufactures,” one of America’s great state papers. Reflecting on how close his country had come to losing its liberty, Hamilton wrote,

Not only the wealth, but the independence and security of a country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of a national supply. These comprise the means of subsistence, habitation, clothing and defense.

Under the Constitution he helped write, a national free-trade zone was created. Hamilton’s idea was to use tariffs to end our dependence on Europe and force British merchants to finance our government and the roads, harbors, and canals that would tie America together with commerce.

Tariffs would give our national government the revenue to operate, while providing our people both privileged access to the fastest growing market on earth and incentives to go into manufacturing. With American manufacturing thus encouraged, we would soon produce ourselves the guns and ships to defend the republic and the necessities of our national life so we could stand alone against the world.

For 12 decades, America followed Hamilton’s vision. On the eve of World War I, the 13 agricultural colonies on the eastern seaboard had become the richest nation on earth with the highest standard of living, a republic that produced 96 percent of all it consumed while exporting 8 percent of its GNP, an industrial colossus that manufactured more than Britain, France, and Germany combined.

The self-sufficiency and industrial power Hamiltonian policies created enabled us to rearm in security, crush the Axis in four years, rebuild Europe and Japan, and outlast the Soviet empire in a Cold War, while meeting all the needs of our people.

But in the Clinton-Bush free-trade era, Alexander Hamilton is derided as a “protectionist.” Woodrow Wilson’s free-trade dogma is gospel. Result: our trade surpluses have vanished, our deficits have exploded, our self-sufficiency has been lost, our sovereignty has been diminished, and an industrial base that was the envy of mankind has been gutted.

And for what? All that junk down at the mall? What do we have now that we did not have before we submitted to this cult of free trade?

The Loss of Independence

Consider the depths of our new dependency. Imports, 4 percent of GDP for the first 70 years of the 20th century, are near 15 percent now, and 30 percent of the manufactures we consume. Pat Choate, author of Agents of Influence, gives the following levels of U.S. dependency on foreign suppliers for critical goods:

Medicines and pharmaceuticals: 72 percent
Metalworking machinery: 51 percent
Engines and power equipment: 56 percent
Computer equipment: 70 percent
Communications equipment: 67 percent
Semiconductors and electronics: 64 percent

In July (2003), the U.S. Business and Industrial Council reported that the Pentagon officials responsible for procuring U.S. weapons had joined with defense industries to oppose legislation requiring 65 percent U.S. content. U.S. missile defense and the Joint Strike Fighter would be imperiled if 65 percent of the components had to be made in the USA.

As Choate writes, Dell Computers of Austin has 4,500 suppliers. Its just-in-time supply line, which stretches across the Atlantic and Pacific, has an inventory of four days. A dock strike on either coast, and Dell begins to close down after 96 hours.

The Loss of Sovereignty

In the lame-duck session of Congress after the GOP triumph of 1994, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich colluded with Clinton to bring us into a World Trade Organization where we are outvoted 15-1 by the European Union. In its most important ruling, the WTO has held that the foreign sales corporations of U.S. exporters like Microsoft and Boeing, set up to receive tax benefits voted by Congress, violate the rules of free trade.

Europe is now authorized to impose $4 billion in tariff penalties on U.S. exports if Congress fails to rewrite our tax laws to conform to WTO commands.

When America bailed out the world in the Asian crisis of 1997-98, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia, and Brazil devalued their currencies, slashing the dollar price of their exports. To enable them to earn the hard currency to pay back Western banks and the IMF, America agreed to keep her markets open. Soon, steel from Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and Brazil was being dumped in the United States, and American mills were reeling.

The recent steel decision is instructive. By 2002, 25 steel companies had gone bankrupt, and the International Trade Commission had identified dumping as the industry killer. Invoking U.S. trade law, President Bush imposed tariffs. The dumpers howled and ran to the WTO, which declared the U.S. tariffs unjustified. Either the Congress removes them or the EU is empowered to impose $2 billion in tariff penalties on U.S. exports.

Consider what submission to the WTO has meant. Our Congress is ordered by foreign bureaucrats to alter U.S. law or our companies face penalties. Presidential decisions to protect vital American industries are declared invalid by Eurocrats. The terms of access to the U.S. market are now to be decided in Geneva by Lilliputians of the New World Order.

Why are we letting this happen?

Libertarians teach that free trade provides a check on government power. By enabling citizens to buy outside their borders, free trade forces governments to reduce regulations and taxes to stay competitive.

A fine theory. Has it worked out? Hardly. History shows that the opposite is true.

Bismarck’s Zollverein, or customs union, went hand-in-hand with the rise of the Second Reich. The EU evolved from a free-trade common market into the socialist super-state of today that is the model for the world government under which all nations surrender sovereignty and how we live will be decided by Platonic guardians.

In the protectionist era from 1789 to 1933, U.S. taxes rarely took more than 3 percent of GNP, except in wartime. Government relied on tariffs. Before 1913, except for the Civil-War era and briefly under Cleveland, we had no income tax. But in the free-trade era, U.S. tax rates on incomes, currently 35 percent, have risen as high as 70 percent, and spending has exceeded 20 percent of GDP in peacetime. The free-trade era is the era of Big Government.

As a former Friedmanite free trader, let me say it: Free trade is a bright shining lie. Free trade is the Trojan Horse of world government. Free trade is the murderer of manufacturing and the primrose path to the loss of national sovereignty and the end of our independence. (Emphasis added)

NAFTA: The Big Sting

In 1993, the NAFTA debate gripped the country. Clinton had the backing of the political establishment, the Heritage Foundation, AEI, Brookings, National Review, New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable. Perot, Buchanan, Nader, and the AFL-CIO were opposed, as were the people. But that did not matter. Before the vote, the bazaar opened, and Congressmen began selling votes to Clinton for whatever they could get. NAFTA won.

Ten years later, returns are in. We were told our trade surplus with Mexico would grow, that NAFTA would create jobs here, that the rising wages in Mexico would end the invasion of illegal aliens.

But, the year after NAFTA passed, Mexico devalued the peso, and the United States began to run a string of trade deficits that has reached $40 billion a year. Drug cartels in South America shifted operations to Mexico. U.S. exports to Mexico are up, but it is not finished goods we send south, but parts to be assembled. Factories and jobs are gone as owners shutter plants north of the Rio Grande in search of wages that are 10 to 20 percent of what they have to pay in the United States.

By 2000, a million Mexicans were working in Maquiladora plants south of the border at jobs once held by Americans. But now, the creative destruction of globalization has come to Mexico. Factories there are being shut down and moved to America’s new enterprise zone, China.

And the Mexican people? Half of the 100 million are still mired in poverty. Tens of millions are unemployed or underemployed. Real wages are below what they were in 1993. And the migration north continues as 1.5 million are caught each year breaking into the United States. Of those who make it, one-third head for California where their claims on welfare, Medicaid, schools, and prisons have tipped the state toward bankruptcy as the taxpayers have begun a great exodus to Nevada, Idaho, and Colorado.

NAFTA has helped to convert California into Mexifornia and the Golden State into a Third-World country. Ten years after its passage, Mexico’s leading export continues to be Mexicans.

Factory Floor to the World

While Americans are sacrificing the future for the present, China is sacrificing the present for the future.

Beijing’s boom began after it devalued its currency in 1994. While a blow to Chinese consumers, devaluation gave Beijing a competitive edge over the other Asian tigers. Beijing then invited Western companies to locate new factories there to tap its pool of low-wage labor. As the price of access, Beijing demanded that Western companies transfer technology to Chinese partners. What the companies do not transfer, the Chinese extort or steal.

By offering excellent workers at $2 a day, guaranteeing no union trouble, allowing levels of pollution we would not tolerate, and ignoring health and safety standards, China has become the factory floor of the Global Economy and surpassed the United States as the world’s first choice for foreign investment.

What analyst Charles McMillion calls the world’s most unequal trading relationship, can be seen in the trade statistics. In 2002, the U.S. trade deficit with China was $103 billion. In May, it was running at $120 billion, the largest deficit between two trading nations in history.

It is thus a myth to say President Bush is presiding over a “jobless recovery.” The Bush tax cuts and Bush deficits are creating millions of manufacturing jobs in China. America buys 14 percent of China’s production and delivers Beijing a trade surplus of 12 percent of its entire GDP. American purchases probably account today for 100 percent of China’s economic growth.

The U.S.-China relationship cannot truly be described as trade. It is rather the looting of America by China and its corporate collaborators in the United States. Beijing understands what economic nationalist Friedrich List wrote long ago: “The power of producing wealth is infinitely more important than the wealth itself.”

China has now amassed $360 billion in reserves from her trade surpluses since 1990. Much of that is invested in U.S. bonds and T-bills, earning Beijing billions in interest from the U.S. Treasury. America may be the most advanced nation on earth, and China a developing country, but you could not tell that from studying the trade statistics.

In 2002, China ran up its largest trade surpluses with us in electrical machinery, computers, toys, games, footwear, furniture, clothing, plastics, articles of iron and steel, vehicles, optical and photographic equipment, and other manufactures. Among the 23 items where we had a surplus with China were soybeans, corn, wheat, animal feeds, meat, cotton, metal ores, scrap, hides and skins, pulp and waste paper, cigarettes, gold, coal, mineral fuels, rice, tobacco, fertilizers, glass. Beijing uses us as George III used his Jamestown colony.

One who has studied how China deals with craven capitalists who come courting is columnist Terry Jeffrey. On inspecting the Web site of Motorola, Jeffrey found this description of how it sees its future:

Motorola is moving toward taking China as its home and development base. Motorola Chinese Electronics has increased its investment several times in China without taking away a single dollar. The company reinvested all the profits in China. Since the very beginning Motorola has brought forward the idea of trying to be a good citizen of China, taking China as its home and thriving with the Chinese people. The development goal is to become a true Chinese company.

The hilarity of Motorola’s kowtow to the mandarins of the Middle Kingdom aside, this passage reveals a hidden cost of globalization. When U.S. companies go global, they shed their loyalty to America (just as do politicians – emphasis added).

Consider Boeing, last surviving U.S. manufacturer of commercial aircraft. Apparently, Boeing has gone beyond building plants in China to make horizontal stabilizers and vertical fins for its fleet. On Jan. 1, this story ran in the New York Times:

The State Department has accused two leading American companies of 123 violations of export laws in connection with the transfer of rocket and satellite data to China during the 1990s. The Boeing Company and Hughes Electronics Corporation, a unit of General Motors, were notified of the accusations last week.

Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and T.R. would recognize China’s policy for what it is and counter it. But this generation of free traders does not have a clue as to what is going on, or does not care. Either way, the consequences will be the same: de-industrialization of America, decline of the dollar, a deepening dependency on foreign countries for the necessities of our national life, diminished sovereignty, and eventual loss of our independence. If you disbelieve this, look at the once sovereign and independent nations of Europe.

Implosion of the Global Economy

One need not have a Nobel Prize in economics to understand that U.S. trade deficits cannot continue rising indefinitely. As Choate reports,

In the 1970s, [the United States] mounted a decades-long deficit of $75 billion. In the 1980s, the deficit soared to $843 billion as Japan began to take away our industries. In the 1990s, that trade deficit doubled to $1.7 trillion. At this pace, we’re probably going to have a $6 trillion cumulative deficit in this decade and that’s probably an understated number given the pace we are losing our manufacturing base.

But the world is not going to continue lending Americans $500 or $600 billion a year to indulge our appetite for foreign goods. The U.S. dollar has already lost 25 percent of its value against the Euro, and foreigners have begun to buy up America, purchasing our land, stocks, bonds, and T-bills. Foreigners now claim a lion’s share of the $300 billion we pay in annual interest on the U.S. debt and have liens against all future profits of our Fortune 500 companies.

Consider the altered situation we face today compared with five years ago. When the Asian crisis broke, our economy was booming. We could see budget surpluses out to the horizon. With the IMF, we poured over $200 billion in fresh loans into Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Russia, Argentina, and Brazil. To enable them to earn the cash to pay back the sums they owed private creditors and international banks, we pledged to keep America’s markets open to their exports.

These, then, are the three pillars of the Global Economy: first, the willingness of America to bail out nations about to default. Second, the willingness and capacity of America to run enormous trade deficits indefinitely. Third, continued wealth transfers to the Third World.

And this is why the Global Economy is in peril. When Argentina declared it could not service its debt, America and the IMF refused to lend new money. Argentina defaulted. A tottering Brazil was bailed out, but the message was clear. The days of automatic bailouts of bankrupt regimes are over.

And with the dollar sinking, the U.S. budget deficit soaring, our merchandise trade deficit at $562 billion and rising, and manufacturing jobs vanishing at the rate of 80,000 a month, America’s willingness and ability to continue sacrificing for the Global Economy are coming to an end (should have come to an end – before it ever started) (Emphasis added).

Perhaps the most inexplicable free traders are the neoconservatives (true liberals who have discovered they can get themselves elected to public office by calling themselves conservatives) who champion unilateralism, talk of a Pax Americana, and cheer the coming American empire of pith helmets and jodhpurs. Do they not understand that trade is not an end in itself but a means to an end: national power? Can they not see that our growing dependence on foreign oil and nations like China for the necessities of national defense imperils our security? Can they not see that these mammoth trade deficits must sink the dollar and that no nation with a falling currency can maintain the troops and subsidies to sustain an empire?

In 1962, Prescott Bush stood with Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond to vote no on JFK’s Trade Expansion Act. President Bush rejects the economic patriotism of his grandfather and embraces the Wilsonian faith that free trade will lead to global democracy and world peace. Like his father, he also embraces Wilson’s faith in open borders and moral interventionism. Wilsonism may cost him his presidency. (It has already cost him his legacy).

By Patrick J. Buchanan
Published August 11, 2003
The American Conservative

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King George III reportedly denounced the American Revolution as “a Presbyterian rebellion.” 1 Horace Walpole, a distinguished man of letters, told his fellow members of Parliament, “There is no use crying about it. Cousin American has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.” 2 Many other British sympathizers in America blamed the Presbyterians for the war. 3

In 1775, the great statesman Edmund Burke tried to warn the British Parliament that the Americans could not be subjugated: “The people are Protestants, and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” While the Catholic and Anglican Churches were supported by the government, and were inclined to support the state, the American sects were based on “dissenting interests.” They had “sprung up in direct opposition to the ordinary powers of the world, and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim of natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim. All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement of the principle of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.” 4, 2

Historian John Patrick Diggins writes that American historians have concentrated on political ideas while underplaying “the religious convictions that often under gird them, especially the Calvinist convictions that Locke himself held: resistance to tyranny….” 5

The American Revolutionaries had many grievances which had little to do with religion - such as taxation without representation, searches and seizures without probable cause, the confiscation of firearms, and so on. Nevertheless, it was American religion, especially New England religion, which provided Americans with an intellectual framework for understanding their disputes with England. It was religion which told the colonists that the English government was not merely adopting unwise policy; rather, the King and Parliament were trampling the God-given rights of the Americans, and were in effect warring against God. It was religion which convinced the Americans that they had a sacred duty to start a revolution. The black-robed American clergymen were described as the “black regiment” for their crucial role in building popular support for war against England.

Ministers and the Militia

The first white settlers of New England were the Puritans who fled to North America to escape persecution in Britain. 6 The Puritans were quite confident that, no matter how severe their persecution, the kingdom of God was at hand. Although the initial migrants to New England had believed that they would return to England fairly soon, the defeat of Oliver Cromwell destroyed any hope of establishing a Puritan state in Britain.

Accordingly, the New England Puritans set out to build their “shining city on a hill” in the wilderness of North America. Their stern belief in their holy mission made them unafraid of whatever fighting was necessary to accomplish their goals. 7

Their laws about children and guns were strict: every family was ‘required’ to own a gun, to carry it in public places (especially when going to church), and to train children in firearms proficiency. 8

On the first Thanksgiving Day, in 1621, the colonists and the Indians joined together for target practice; the colonist Edward Winslow wrote back to England that “amongst other recreations we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us.” 9, 3

In New England, Congregationalist ministers were usually the preachers of special sermons on Election Day (when a sermon was preached to the legislature and governor) and Artillery Day (when new militia artillery officers were elected). On these days, the preachers departed from narrowly religious themes, and often spoke of the duty of Christian men to fight for liberty against tyranny. 10

Militia muster days were another occasion on which ministers exhorted men to fight in defense of their liberty, and to volunteer for expeditions beyond their state’s borders.11 At all special military occasions, ministers presented prayers. 12 A minister who wanted to address an important public issue could also announce a special weekday sermon.

Important sermons had a much broader audience than just the people who were in attendance when the minister spoke. Sermons were often reprinted, and distributed to other states. By 1776, the New England Congregationalist ministers were preaching at a record pace of over two thousand sermons per week. The number of Congregationalist pamphlets from New England exceeded the number of secular pamphlets from all the other colonies combined by more than four to one. 13

The meeting houses for church services were fortified buildings where the community could gather if attacked, and where arms and powder were often stored. (The community supplied militia arms to families which could not afford their own.) As historian Marie Ahearn writes, “Over the year the minister, the meeting house, and the militia forged an active and mutually supporting alliance.”14

Ezra Stiles, the Congregationalist President of Yale University, lauded “the wisdom of our ancestors in instituting a militia.” 15 Elisha Fish published the sermon The Art of War Lawful and Necessary for a Christian People, to encourage young men in their militia exercises. His introduction to the published version spoke of his intent to encourage other writers “to spread this martial Fire through our happy Land.”16 Free men bearing arms to defend their liberty were “the true strength and safety of every commonwealth.”17

Ministers taught that the militia bred good Christian character, whereas standing armies bred degradation and vice. When the Redcoats moved into Boston, the ministry contrasted the wicked, corrupt, degraded, and dependent character of the standing army with the Christian virtue of the free militiaman. 4

The former fought for pay and for worldly gain; the latter fought for Christian liberty. 18 Ebenezer Chaplin’s 1774 militia sermon argued that just as David’s band of volunteers had defeated King Saul’s army, so an American militia would defeat a British standing army. 19

Ministers cited the Roman historians Tacitus and Sallust to show that when Rome was defended by a militia, Rome was free. When the Roman character degenerated, and a standing army was substituted for the militia, Rome sank into despotism. 20

What was true for the military arm of society was true for the entire society: the loss of freedom created a condition of moral degradation, of servile dependence, and of temptation to vice. Christian virtue was nearly impossible to maintain if political liberty were destroyed. The fight for political liberty was a sacred cause because civil liberty was the garden for the proper cultivation of the Christian soul, according to God’s natural law. 21

Ministers quite often brought their own firearms to militia service, and fought in their town’s militia. 22 While all good citizens were obliged to become proficient in the use of arms, the obligation was especially great on wealthy citizens. After all, poor nations were rarely invaded, but wealth attracted foreign predators. So as for the wealthy:

It is therefore especially their duty, as well as interest, to do what they can to put the people into a capacity of defense. When they spend their time in idleness, effeminating pleasures, or even in accumulating riches, to the total neglect of the art of war, and every measure to promote it, they act unbecoming good members of society, and set an example highly prejudicial to the community. 23

Self-defense and the Gift of Life

All of the natural rights philosophers—such as Blackstone, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and Locke—who provided the intellectual foundation of the American Revolution saw self-defense as “the primary law of nature,” from which many other legal principles could be deduced.

John Locke argued that a man’s life belonged to God. Accordingly, the life was inalienable property; a man could not 5 destroy his life by suicide, or sell his life by voluntarily choosing to become a slave. To allow one’s life to be destroyed because one failed to engage in self-defense was a form of hubris. As a 1747 sermon in Philadelphia put it:

He that suffers his life to be taken from him by one that hath no authority for that purpose, when he might preserve it by defense, incurs the Guilt of self murder since God hath enjoined him to seek the continuance of his life, and Nature itself teaches every creature to defend itself.

Like the Catholic canonists, the New Englanders connected the natural law right of self-defense to the duty to protect one’s national liberties:

There is a Principle of Self-Defense and Preservation, implanted in our very Natures, which is necessary to us almost as our Beings, which no positive Law of God ever yet contradicted….When our Liberty is invaded and struck at, ‘tis sufficient Reason for our making War on the Defense or Recovery of it. 24

Simeon Howard, preaching the Boston artillery company in 1773 likewise asserted the natural law right of self-defense:

Self-preservation is one of the strongest, and a universal principle of the human mind: And this principle allows of every thing necessary to self-defense, opposing force to force, and violence to violence. This is so universally allowed that I need not attempt to prove it. 25

According to Howard, failure to practice self-defense was a sin, one reason being that tame submission to tyranny created an environment conducive to sin: “Such submission tends to slavery; and complete slavery implies every evil that the malice of man and the devils can inflict.” Samuel Cooper likewise connected servility with moral degradation, for servility was 6 “commonly accompanied with the meanest vices, such as adulation, deceit, falsehood, treachery, cruelty, and the basest methods of supporting and procuring the favour of the power upon which it depends.” 26

The New Testament said that a man who neglects to provide for his family has implicitly denied the faith and is worse than an infidel. “But,” asked Howard, “In what way can a man be more justly chargeable with this neglect, than by suffering himself to be deprived of his life, liberty or property, when he might lawfully have preserved them?” 27

Preaching the Boston election sermon of 1776, Samuel West pointed to another implication of “the law of nature” and its “principle of self-defense.” Self-defense included a duty to one’s community. It was violation of common sense and of natural law for people to think that they “did God service when they unmercifully butchered and destroyed the lives of the servants of God; while others, upon the contrary extreme, believe that they please God while they sit still and quietly behold their friends and brethren killed by their unmerciful enemies without endeavoring to defend or rescue them. The one is a sin of omission, and the other is a sin of commission…” Both sins were “great violations of the law of God.” 28

Getting Ready for War

According to Harry S. Stout, a professor of religion at Yale University, “From the repeal of the Stamp Act on, New England’s Congregationalist ministers played a leading role in fomenting sentiments of resistance, and, after 1774, open rebellion.” 29

The Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770, radicalized much of the Massachusetts clergy. The following Sunday, Rev. John Lathrop, preaching at the Old North Church (from whose towers would shine on April 18, 1775, the “one if by land, two if by sea” lanterns for Paul Revere and Samuel Dawes), announced God’s condemnation of England. He proclaimed the legitimacy of forcible resistance to the British government, if reform were not speedy. 30

Eli Forbes’ 1771 Artillery Day sermon, The Dignity and Importance of the Military Character Illustrated, emphasized the importance of being prepared to fight to defend liberty.31 Christians were not required to wait until they were attacked by a 7 tyrant. Preemption was more prudent, explained Simeon Howard in his 1773 sermon the Boston militia’s artillery company:

An innocent people threatened with war are not always obliged to receive the first attack. This may frequently prove fatal, or occasion an irreparable danger. When others have sufficiently manifested an injurious or hostile intention, and persist in it, notwithstanding all the admonition and remonstrance we can make, we may, in order to avoid the blow they are meditating against us, begin the assault. 32

Nathaniel Whitaker elaborated on preemption. He pointed out that God had ordered Joshua to strike first at Jabin, king of Hazor (Joshua 11):

[W]hile all the peace in his kingdom, for aught we find, God commands Israel to raise an army, and invade the tyrant’s dominions.

The moral reason for this is obvious. For usurpation or oppression, is offensive war, already levied. Any state which usurps power over another state, or rulers, who by a wanton use of their power, oppress their subjects, do thereby break the peace and commence an offensive war. In such a case opposition is mere self-defense, and is no more criminal, yea, as really our duty to defend ourselves against murderer, or highway robber. Self-preservation is an instinct God implanted in our nature.

Therefore we sin against God and nature, when we tamely resign our rights to tyrants, or quietly submit to public oppressors, if it be in our power to defend ourselves. 33

After the British Army occupied Boston, the state legislature reassembled in Watertown. On May 31, 1775, a few weeks after the American victory at Lexington and Concord, Samuel Langdon preached a sermon to the legislature, telling the legislators not to worry about initiating military action: “He that 8 arms himself to commit a robbery, and demands the traveler’s purse by the terror of instant death, is the first aggressor, though the other should take the advantage of discharging his weapon first, and killing the robber.” 34

Victory Inevitable in the Sacred Cause of Liberty

Liberty was the “daughter of God, and excepting his Son, the first born of heaven.”35 Levi Hart declared that “the sacred cause of liberty” was why “the Son of God was manifest in the flesh, that he might destroy the tyranny of sin and Satan, assert and maintain the equal government of his Father, redeem the guilty slaves from their more and Egyptian bondage, and cause the oppressed to go free.” 36

To fight for liberty, therefore, was to fight for God. Biblical references to “liberty” were explained as referring primarily to spiritual liberty, yet also including civil liberty. 37 Indeed, the two were one, because tyranny would degrade religion. The favorite of all the liberty texts was “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” (Galatians 5:1). 38

About a month before the battles of Lexington and Concord, Rev. William Emerson preached to the Concord militia that their victory against the larger British army was guaranteed, just as God had protected little Judah from a larger army. He challenged the British: “It will be your unspeakable Damage to meddle with us, for we have an unconquered Leader that carries his people to Victory and Triumph.” The coming war would bring many tribulations, he acknowledged, but American victory had been ordained by God since the beginning of time. 39

Five weeks later, on April 19, 1775, the Redcoats, having marched out of Boston, quickly routed the Lexington militia, and then marched on to Concord, where the Americans were rumored to possess a cannon. The militia had been roused by Paul Revere and Samuel Dawes, and the first man to muster at the North Bridge in Concord was Reverend William Emerson.

The Concord militia stood its ground. The Redcoats fled after a few minutes fighting, and were harried by Americans all the way back to Boston, suffering 293 casualties. 40 On July 4, 1837, the Concord Monument was dedicated, and the crowd sang the Concord Hymn, written by William Emerson’s grandson Ralph Waldo Emerson: 9

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, here once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world. …

Spirit, that made those heroes dare to die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare the shaft we raise to them and thee.

The Revolution would involve much, much more than the interests of the people then inhabiting the thirteen colonies. William Gordon urged Americans “not to fear to bleed freely in the cause,” for their cause was “not of a particular people, but of mankind in general.” And although “the country should be wasted by the sword,” a war would preserve for future generations “the most essential part of the fair patrimony received from our brave and hardy progenitors—the right of possessing and disposing of, at our own option, the honest fruits of our industry.” 41 In March 1775, Oliver Noble preached that “the Cause of AMERICA…is the cause of GOD, never did man struggle in a greater, or more glorious CAUSE.” 42

Because America was the last refuge of liberty, America was necessarily essential to God’s plan of redeeming the whole world, and God could not let the cause of liberty fail in America. 43 In the fate of the American Revolution hung the fate of freedom not only in America, but around the world, for millions of people yet unborn. 44 “Whatever is most dear and valuable in this world, to millions now living, and will be so to all the millions of posterity after them, till this world shall be no more, is at stake. The prize contended for is the LIBERTY OF AMERICA,” declared Enoch Huntington. 45

During the tax crisis of 1767-68, the great Pennsylvania lawyer John Dickinson exhorted American resistance in a series of twelve public letters. The stakes were vastly greater than the immediate financial interests of the colonists: “you may surely, without presumption, believe that Almighty God Himself will look down upon your righteous contest with gracious approbation…You are assigned by Divine Providence in the appointed order of things, the protection of unborn ages, whose fate depends on your virtue.”46,10

Dickinson and the other Patriots were not just offering rhetoric for a tax dispute. Their language, which built on a century and a half of American history, was creating an American civil religion. It was an ecumenical religion, which ignored the issues on which a Baptist might disagree with a Congregationalist, or a Jew might disagree with a Presbyterian. The heart of religion was that liberty is a sacred gift from God; and that the United States of America has been chosen by God to guard the sacred lamp of liberty.

On the first anniversary of the Battle of Lexington, Jonas Clark preached, “From this day will be dated the liberty of the world.” 47

Repentance, then Liberty

The Americans knew that liberty was God’s cause. But in order to defeat the tyrant, they had to purify themselves morally. Only if the Americans were repentant, sincere Christians would they have the moral right to resist their evil governors. If the Americans remained sinful, then the Americans would have to accept their evil governors as God’s just punishment. 48

By the time that fighting began at Lexington, the theme of repentance before victory had been well-established for a century. The first generations of settlers in New England had enjoyed mostly-peaceful relations with the Indians. But the swelling white population caused tensions with the Indians. In 1675, chief Metacom (a/k/a King Philip) led the Wampanoag, Nipmuks, and Narragansetts in a series of devastating attacks on towns from Connecticut to New Hampshire. The New Englanders and their Christian Indian allies were defeated again and again, until (according to the New England version of events), they sufficiently repented their sins, and from that point onward, God granted them favor, and they won King Philip’s War, one of the most terrible wars ever fought on American soil. 49

In a 1745 war, the New England militia captured the French fortress at Louisburg, Canada. In the French and Indian War of 1756-63, the Americans and the British won what they considered to be a holy war against papist tyranny. As in King Philip’s War, the Americans who fought the French were informed by their ministers that only if they sincerely repented 11 their sins would God grant them victory. And apparently, God did after they did.

So before the Americans warred for independence, they had to first fast, pray, and then repent. The American clergy and the American governments announced what Perry Miller called the “double injunction of humiliation and exertion.”50 For example, the Connecticut assembly simultaneously declared a statewide day of fasting and humiliation, and passed a resolution to stockpile ammunition. 51

Miller elaborated:

Circumstances and the nature of the dominant opinion in Europe made it necessary for the official statement [the Declaration of Independence] to be released in primarily “political” terms—the social compact, inalienable rights, the right of revolution. But those terms, in and by themselves, would never have supplied the drive for victory, however mightily they weighted with the literate minority. What carried the ranks of militia and citizens was the universal persuasion that they, by administering to themselves a spiritual purge, acquired the energies God has always, in the manner of the Old Testament, been ready to impart to His repentant children. Their first responsibility was not to shoot redcoats but to cleanse themselves, only thereafter to take aim. 52

Concludes Miller: “The basic fact is that the Revolution had been preached to the masses as a religious revival, and had the astonishing fortune to succeed.” 53 Summarizes Yale’s Harry Stout, “New England’s revolution would be nothing less than America’s sermon to the world.” 54

In commemoration of Independence Day, July 4th 2008

Conclusion

The New England ministers incited their congregations to overthrow King George because they believed, as did the Virginian Thomas Jefferson, that rebellion to tyrants was obedience to God. In the religious roots of the American 12 Revolution, we see the staunch belief that using arms to resist tyranny is an affirmative religious duty.

The belief about the sacred obligation to fight for freedom is not unique to the United States of America. Rather, the belief is at least as old as the Hebrew wars of independence (among Western religions) and the teachings of Confucius (among Eastern religions). However, it was in New England in the years leading to the American Revolution where the religious theory of the duty to defend the sacred gift of liberty was refined and elaborated in a more sophisticated form than ever before. The theory has never ceased to influence American attitudes about firearms and freedom, and is at the heart of American beliefs about the God-given right to keep and bear arms.

By David B. Kopel
http://www.davekopel.com/Religion/Religious-Roots-of-the-American-Revolution.pdf

Endnotes (see online text) at:
http://www.davekopel.com/Religion/Religious-Roots-of-the-American-Revolution.pdf

David B. Kopel is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on Firearms & Public Policy. He is also Research Director of the Independence Institute. This article is an excerpt from a book he is writing on religious attitudes towards self-defense.

Hat tip: Judge John Distworth, American patriot

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The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.

This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a non-falsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.

So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.

The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.

By Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal Online
July 1, 2008; Page A15

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121486841811817591.html?mod=todays_columnists

Hat tip: Len Salonsky

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Psychiatric Linkages to Global Warming:

As an illness, neurosis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurosis) represents a variety of psychiatric conditions in which emotional distress or unconscious conflict is expressed through various physical, physiological, and mental disturbances, which may include physical symptoms (e.g., hysteria). The definitive symptom is anxieties. Neurotic tendencies are common and may manifest themselves as depression, acute or chronic anxiety, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, phobias, and even personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder or obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. It has perhaps been most simply defined as a "poor ability to adapt to one's environment, an inability to change one's life patterns, and the inability to develop a richer, more complex, more satisfying personality." Neurosis should not be mistaken for psychosis.

A psychosis, on the other hand, is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality" and deterioration of normal social functioning. People experiencing psychosis are said to be psychotic and may report hallucinations (the end of the world) or delusional beliefs (carbon dioxide is a life-threatening pollutant in the earth’s atmosphere), and may exhibit personality changes and disorganized thinking. This may be accompanied by unusual or bizarre behavior (consuming scarce food supplies in combustion engines), as well as difficulty with social interaction and impairment in carrying out the activities of daily living.

Who said the inmates are not running the asylum?

Red State Patriot

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See if you can spot the neoconservative .....

Democrats want to implement windfall profit taxes, which ultimately will be passed on to the consumer at the gas pump and raise prices ever higher – significantly higher. The outcome is a foregone conclusion, i.e., politicians cynically win, having found a way to take even more of your money, and citizens lose. Republicans, i.e., neoconservatives, knowing that raising taxes would be a national economic disaster, want instead to punish the speculators who they choose to scapegoat for the rising prices. The similarity between the Democrats and Republicans (neither of whom are conservatives) is their propensity for shifting the blame for their own congressional malfeasance to anyone but themselves, refusing defiantly to take responsibility for the on-going energy debacle. ‘Shifting the blame’ is the single most common character trait of a liberal – every liberal. They, being the typical congressmen they are, would sacrifice their relatives before accepting accountability, even their grandmother.

The energy crisis we face as a nation due to lack of oil, nuclear, coal, refineries, and absence of exploration will never be their fault, just as the loss of jobs and outsourcing of entire industries is not their fault, just as the drunken overspending with earmarks and entitlements is not their fault, just as the abysmal failure of our nation’s public schools is not their fault, nor the open borders, nor the failing Social Security and Medicare systems.

Here is everything you need to know in two articles. The first appeared in the Wall Street Journal in February, 1989 and the second in Investor’s Business Daily on June 23, 2008

Red State Patriot
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The Speculator as Hero
Wall Street Journal
February 10, 1989

This is not a good time for speculators. Last month the FBI and the Chicago U.S. Attorney's office accused more than 100 traders on the Chicago commodities exchanges of systematically cheating investors and the government out of millions of dollars. Lawyers in Chicago have been besieged by floor traders wishing to plead guilty to the charges.

Coming on the heels of the October 1987 stock market crash, popularly thought to be the fault of program traders and portfolio insurers, and amid the popular furor over insider trading, the speculator's stock may be at an all-time low. Even fictional speculators are in trouble. In Tom Wolfe's best seller "Bonfire of the Vanities," bond trader Sherman McCoy is ridiculed by his wife, and is unable to explain what he does for a living to his young daughter. In real life, noted currency trader Andy Krieger, in a widely reported incident in 1987, quit his job after he found himself unable to supply a satisfactory answer to his eight-year-old son's question about what good his job did.

Like Sherman McCoy and Andy Krieger, I am a speculator. I own seats on the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But when my daughters ask me if my job is as important as the butcher's, the doctor's or the scientist's, I answer that the speculator is a hero, and has been throughout history.

Some speculators are discoverers like Christopher Columbus, creators like Henry Ford, or inventors like Thomas Edison. Their job is easy to place on a high plane. My role in the grander order is indirect, relatively invisible and unplanned. The only discoveries I make are the routes that prices will travel. Like hundreds of thousands of other traders, I try to predict the prices of common goods a day or two or a few months in the future. If I think the price of an item will go up, I buy today and sell later. If I think the price is going down, I'll sell at today's higher price. The miracle is that in taking care of ourselves, we speculators somehow ensure that producers all over the world will provide the right quantity and quality of goods at the proper time, without undue waste, and that this meshes with what people want and the money they have available.

Politicians eager to "do something" about high prices often make laws to punish the speculator. A representative incident occurred during the reign of Emperor Diocletian in Rome in A.D. 300. Speculators were withholding scarce provisions from the hordes, hoping to unload when the demand was even more intense. To remedy this, Diocletian set the highest price for beef, grains, clothing and several hundred other items. Anyone who sold at a higher price would be put to death.

The result? As reported by Lactantius in A.D. 314: "Much blood was shed upon slight and trifling accounts. The people brought no more provisions to the markets, since they could not get a reasonable price for them, and this increased the dearth so much that at last after many had died by it, the law itself was laid aside."

Another representative incident occurred during the siege of Antwerp by the Spanish in 1585. Antwerp was then the leading commercial town of Europe. The Spanish decided to blockade the port to force surrender when supplies gave out. Knowing this, Antwerp farmers and bakers produced large amounts of bread. Privateers ran the blockade at great peril to provide needed supplies. Prices began to rise. Speculators, guessing that bread was going to be scarce, contributed to further price rises through shrewd purchases.

But Antwerp politicians thought it wrong for greedy speculators to profit from war. The politicians fixed a very low maximum price to everything that could be eaten, and prescribed severe penalties for violators. The consequence was inevitable. Privateers stopped running the blockades and the supply of grain dried up. Consumers had no incentive to economize. The citizens ran out of all their provisions after six months of the siege and the Antwerpers starved. They surrendered and were quickly annexed.
Let's consider some of the principles that explain the causes of shortages and surpluses and the role of speculators.

When a harvest is too small to satisfy consumption at its normal rate, speculators come in, hoping to profit from the scarcity by buying. Their purchases raise the price, thereby checking consumption so that the smaller supply will last longer. Producers encouraged by the high price further lessen the shortage by growing or importing to reduce the shortage. On the other side, when the price is higher than the speculators think the facts warrant, they sell. This reduces prices, encouraging consumption and exports and helping to reduce the surplus.

Of course, speculators aren't always correct. When they are wrong, their actions contribute to shortages or gluts. Manias such as the Tulipmania, the South Sea Bubble, the Mississippi Bubble, gold panics, stock market crashes, and violent swings in the value of the dollar are frequently cited as examples of occasions when speculators contributed to instability and imbalance. But who could do the job better?

Bureaucrats have little incentive to improve, invest or innovate. When speculators are wrong, however, they are punished severely for their mistakes by losses of their own money. If left unchecked, the tendencies of our modern kings (read: government – emphasis added) to interfere with the natural working of the marketplace would lead to destruction. But speculators, searching for profit, send signals to producers and consumers as to the forces of destruction and good.

Traders sent such a signal on October 19, 1987, when they dropped the wealth of the non-Japanese-speaking world by 10% in one day when a modern-day king tried to interfere with the natural order by driving the dollar down one last 5% or so.

Perhaps the most positive impact of our current-day speculators is to check at inception governmental activities that would have an inflationary impact. Governments are prone to spend more money on their activities than they take in through taxes. The consequence often has been substantial inflation, followed by war, revolution and destruction of civilization. Nowadays, however, bond traders are so alert to the long-term consequences of such activities that they immediately send debt yields up significantly at the first sign of inflation.

The increased yields have such a negative and immediate impact on government revenue, business activity, and consumer spending that governments have all but given up trying to sneak increased spending past the market. As a result, the rate of inflation slowed markedly throughout the Western world during the 1980s. At the end of last year the long-term yield on a 30-year U.S. Treasury bond was 8.8% vs. 14.4% on the day after President Reagan was first elected. The great era of prosperity that has accompanied this reduced inflation adds a feather to the speculator's cap.

Granted, speculators are not angels; many are motivated by gambling and greed, and when given the chance will take advantage of the public as much as the next person.
What is the net effect of such evilness? Consider the purchase of one Treasury bond futures contract, the most actively traded futures contract. This is where the U.S. Attorney apparently focused his investigation after the undercover agents suffered huge losses for the government's account in stock market futures during the October 1987 crash.

To buy the equivalent of $100,000 in bonds, an average customer might pay $17.50 in commission (half of a typical $35 commission for one contract's purchase and sale) and $31.25 (one "tick"), the usual spread between the bid price and the ask price. This adds up to a $48.75 transaction cost for each $100,000 purchase.

Compare this with the "gentlemanly" New York Stock Exchange, where market-making speculators have a monopoly on trading in individual stocks. To purchase $100,000 of IBM stock (about 800 shares), the most actively traded Big Board issue, an average customer might pay 40 cents a share in commission costs and a 25-cent-a-share bid-ask spread. This $520 transaction cost is more than 10 times the cost to trade the same dollar amount of futures contracts.

Much of the suspected wrongdoing in Chicago apparently involved unscrupulous futures brokers who misreported customer transactions or gave customers unfavorable prices. But even if a bond-futures broker, for example, stole an additional $31.25 tick on every customer order, the liquidity of the market would still be far greater than that of the less-competitive Big Board. The customer would still be paying only one-sixth of the cost of the same trade in IBM stock.

This example serves not to exonerate crooked futures brokers, but to demonstrate the efficiency of a competitive market. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the speculator gets the job done, governments have attempted to bypass speculators in the name of a higher good.

The intellectual raises his eyebrows at the economic and historical analysis and contemptuously says, "Man cannot live by bread alone." To this I respond that without us, there would be no bread.

I am proud to be a speculator. I am proud that my humble attempts to predict Tuesday's prices on Monday are an indispensable component of our society. By buying low and selling high, I create harmony and freedom.

Mr. Niederhoffer is chairman of NCZ Commodities. This article appeared in the February 10, 1989, issue of The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones and Co., Inc., 1989.

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Just Speculating
Investor's Business Daily
June 23, 2008

Energy: Democrats, in their never-ending search for scapegoats, have had a go at oil company CEOs, industry profits and now oil "speculators." They've looked everywhere but where they should — in the mirror.

The congressional hearings that kicked off Monday to look into speculative behavior in the markets produced all the usual finger-pointing about the doubling in oil prices over the past year to nearly $137 a barrel.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, seeking to catch a political wave he can ride all the way to the presidency, has announced he'll "crack down" on oil speculation by imposing new limits and regulations on oil traders in the futures markets.

But as emotionally satisfying as going after speculators sounds, this will only make our current oil problem much worse.

Its true there's speculation in the oil market. But then again, there's speculation in virtually every exchange-traded good — from oil and gold to corn and pork bellies. This isn't just acceptable, it's healthy.

Speculators aren't evil. They ensure a liquid market for the commodities we need most. They make money by buying low, when the product is in low demand, and selling high, when demand has grown.

It has been pretty easy for them to make money recently, because speculation in oil has become a one-way bet.

Global oil demand has been growing by about a million barrels a day each year — thanks to surging use in fast-growing China, India, the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe. Supply hasn't kept pace. In fact, it's falling at key suppliers including Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria and Russia. So the price rises.

The logical answer to any question about speculation in a market is: What are you doing to boost supply? In the case of Congress and the solution offered by Obama, the answer is nothing.

They would punish people who do economically useful work, but wouldn't add a drop to our oil supply. If they really wanted to break the back of speculation, they should signal that they intend to use every means at their disposal to bring energy markets back in line.

High prices already have curbed demand here in the U.S., the latest data show. What's left is to drill for the literally hundreds of billions of barrels of oil we have here in this country locked up offshore, in Alaska and in vast shale-oil reserves.

Instead, the Democrat-led Congress has pursued foolish energy policies that lead inevitably to higher prices, less supply and declining standards of living for all Americans.

As for speculation, one tell-tale sign of market manipulation is a buildup of inventories kept off the market to keep prices high. That is, as the price runs up, the speculators pull supply off the market.

Is that happening? No. Oil inventories, in the most recent data, are down year over year. No one's hoarding oil.

Claims of surging speculation likewise fall apart on closer examination. It's true that speculative positions in oil have jumped from 37% of all oil traded in 2000 to 70% now. But much of that trading involves commercial hedging and risk-management — not speculation by people out to make a killing.

As the Commodity Futures Trading Commission notes: "There are almost as many short speculative positions as there are long positions." In other words, speculators are betting as much that prices will drop as they will rise.

In short, there's no real evidence that speculators are driving energy prices up. But there's plenty of evidence that Congress' refusal to permit drilling is a big factor keeping supplies down.

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
June 23, 2008

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While the national corporate media has covered the outcome of this case, their analysis has been (and will be) long on the sensationalism of the arguments between these two sides, and very short on what the opinion actually says. For those who are interested in the actual language and analysis of the Heller decision, as well as some educated guesses as to the likely directions this decision will take us in the future, this analysis will deal with the issues of importance that stand out to both practicing criminal defense attorney and political science professor.

The most important things about Heller, other than the mere fact that it squarely addresses the Second Amendment, are that it is far more comprehensive than the national media are explaining. This is no mere overturning of the District of Columbia's pervasive gun ban, it absolutely establishes that the Second Amendment does indeed protect an individuals right to own and use firearms, as separate and distinct from any government controlled military organization. Justice Scalia, writing for the 5-4 majority, carefully analyzes each and every word of the Amendment, and does so from both a linguistic, legal, and historical perspective. He defines "arms", "bear", "people", "right", "keep", "militia", "state", and fully deconstructs how they are put together. There is nothing left to define here, no words about which the meaning can be speculated, and no syntax structure left to be manipulated. Short of outright overturn of the decision (which every Supreme Court abhors to do), the individual nature of this right is now set in stone. Further, Justice Scalia (rightly) heaps scorn on some of the more obtuse and insultingly disingenuous arguments that have been made to eviscerate the meaning of the Second Amendment over the last few decades. We begin our examination of Heller with its disposal of those "chestnuts".

For at least a couple of decades, we've been forced to endure the catchphrase that the Second Amendment only would allow private ownership of muskets and muzzleloaders, since that was what the founders were calling firearms. This was what would be called a "compromise position" uttered by the self congratulatory, semi-educated, through a haze of clove cigarette smoke. Justice Scalia harshly brought them to reality with the following:

Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 19th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, the Second Amendment extends, prima faciae, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.

The second venerable "chestnut" that has long been a lamppost for gun opponents to slouch against during any debate, has been to claim that the Second Amendment is only a "collective" right, indicating that it has to do with "militia service" or some existent group organized by the government, such as police forces, National Guard Units, or the proverbial "posse". While Justice Scalia spends considerable time on the exploration of the "militia" idea, before disposing of the gun opponents agenda for that phrase, he deals a swift death blow to the idea that the Second Amendment is some kind of "collective" right. He notes that the Second Amendment specifically says the "right of the people", and goes on to add that;

The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase "right of the people" two other times, in the First Amendment's Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment's Search-and Seizure Clause. The Ninth Amendment uses very similar terminology.[direct quote removed] All three of these instances unambiguously refer to individual rights, not "collective" rights, or rights that may be exercised only through participation in some corporate body.

In footnote here he says that Justice Stevens contention that the right is conditioned on membership in a militia, and is "primarily collective in nature", Justice Scalia calls "deadwrong", citing McDonald v. Smith, 472 U.S. 479(1985) which defined the historical origins of another individual right set forth in the Bill of Rights. Writing for the majority Justice Scalia notes that, "Nowhere else in the Constitution does a 'right' attributed to 'the people' refer to anything other than an individual right." In fact, he says, "We start therefore with the presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.

The opinion spends much of its length dealing with just how, precisely; the "militia" concept is entwined with the right to bear arms. In short, he says that the Second Amendment is divided into two distinct parts. The part that talks about "militia" is what he calls a "prefatory clause", a phrase used only to clarify or justify the important part of the statement, the "operative clause". The operative clause here is, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".

He clearly states that the operative clause is based on the long standing conflicts in England, where the government sought to disarm groups that opposed it, to better establish tyranny, and is the codification of a pre-existing right. Hence, the word "infringed", making it clear that the people already have a right to keep and bear arms. Had the amendment been designed to give a heretofore unknown right to the people, it would have read something like, "…does hereby grant to the people a right to keep and bear arms". (The founders were followers of the philosophy of the 18th century liberals philosophers, like John Locke, and believed that humans had inalienable rights, not that humans were only to be "given" rights by a sovereign.)

He says that the prefatory clause does not serve as a limit on the operative clause, and that "…operative provisions should be given effect as operative provisions, and prologues as prologues….[if]the prologue itself should be one of the factors that go into the determination of whether the operative provision is ambiguous [that] would cause the prologue to be used to produce ambiguity rather than resolve it."

He notes that the Constitution itself empowers congress to make a Navy and to raise Armies, but that the militias are something different. He argues that the plain language and history indicate the militias were pre-existing to the government, and were composed of all able bodied men, armed with their personal weapons. He conveys that there were many reasons the founders felt that a militia would be "necessary to the security of a free state", among them repelling invasion. Though he does not mention it specifically, it is worth noting that Admiral Yamamoto advised the Japanese military ruling council against a land invasion of California, primarily because the large number of armed citizens would make it an ungovernable quagmire. This shows that the founders belief that the security of the nation would be bolstered by having an armed populace was borne out, at least through the 20th century. Scalia also draws attention to the writings of Hamilton describing that a nation of armed, able bodied men, are better able to resist tyranny, and also spends some time discussing the history of the struggles between Catholics and Protestants for control of the monarchy, as the origins of this knowledge of armed resistance to tyranny. Thus he illuminates that the prefatory phrase about the militia is merely explanatory as to the operative phrase of just why it is so important that the "right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".

The fundamental right established, the remaining three elements of this decision, upon which so many people waited so anxiously, were how the court was to deal with "crime", "regulation", and the types of "arms" protected.

Justice Scalia repeatedly referred to the right to use firearms to protect oneself in the home or on ones property. Over and over again, this entered into his analysis at all levels. This established two things never before addressed by the Court. First, that the 2nd Amendment is now related to an individual's right of self defense, not merely as a mechanism for defense of the nation against foreign aggression or domestic tyranny. Secondly it clearly establishes the right of a person to use a firearm in self defense. This second point, while it has escaped comment in the popular media, was hammered home, by repetition, throughout the opinion. By choosing this language, Judge Scalia laid a bulwark against any future efforts to undermine this right of self defense, such as is currently happening in England. There, many recent cases have found persons convicted for using deadly force to defend themselves from violent attack. It seems likely Judge Scalia took this opportunity to prevent such a perversion of justice from finding roots here in America. He goes so far as to call it the "core lawful purpose of self defense".

The court acknowledges the difficulties posed to communities by "handgun violence" but says that the Constitution leaves communities with a variety of tools for combating the problem, "But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table". To wit, governments and communities can't absolutely prohibit handguns, "held and used for self defense in the home".

As to the right of the government(s) to regulate ownership of firearms, the court clearly states that some regulations are permissible.. The court notes that like most rights, this right is not unlimited. Just as there are permissible limits on the freedom of speech, and the freedom to practice ones religions, so too there are reasonable limits that can be placed on ones right to keep and bear armaments. Scalia and the court note that the longstanding prohibitions which prevent convicted felons, or the mentally ill from owning firearms is permissible, as are restrictions preventing the carrying of firearms into sensitive locations. Specifically named are schools, and government buildings. Likewise the opinion specifically permits laws which impose conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Scalia says these are merely examples, and are not to be seen as the complete list, so we can presume that many more specific restrictions will not be undone by this opinion. It seems the BATF officers who conduct checks on gun stores and licensed dealers will not need to be updating their resume's, nor will the wand wielding inspectors at our courts, schools, and airports. However, the strong wording on the right to use a firearm to defend oneself in the home makes it likely any "school zone" bans which overlap anyone individuals private residence are likely defunct.

Lastly, the court did give some guidance in the area of the types of firearms protected by the 2nd Amendment, the area of great interest to both the enemies of gun ownership and firearms enthusiasts alike. Over the last couple of decades, this has been the central arena in the battle over guns in the US. Though this decision in no way creates a definitive list of what specific guns can be regulated or to degree, there is some pretty strong language limiting the governments reach in this regard.. On several occasion in the opinion, the court specifically upholds the ban on sawed off shotguns, as an example of the type of permissible regulation of weapons that are "unsafe" and not typical of the weapons used by the average soldier. The opinion cites the colonial regulations on the storage of gunpowder to minimize fire damage, and a singular colonial era regulation on keeping a loaded firearm for its danger to firefighters. This analysis would indicate that the government may prohibit ownership of particularly unusual or dangerous armaments. Do not expect regulations prohibiting flame throwers, rocket launchers, explosives or heavy weapons to be invalidated. However, this does not seem to extend to any weapons commonly used by the average soldier, or citizen. The popularity and utility of handguns, for use in personal self defense is given a great deal of discussion, and it seems that any "handgun" ban is going to be absolutely unconstitutional. Justice Scalia notes that many people prefer handguns for defense within the home because of their ease of handling in close quarters, and the fact that they free a second hand to do such necessary tasks as dialing the police, and though he doesn't mention it, hold a flashlight.

Of great interest in light of the recent battles fought over "assault style weapons", was a singular paragraph of great depth and analysis, that this author has yet to see addressed in the popular media. It is almost a summation of the entire analysis of the 2nd Amendment;

It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service-M-16 rifles and the like- may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendments ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias of the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large….But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.

This seems to say that like the analysis of the right of speech to be extended to our fax machines and cell phones, the right to militarily useful weapons should be protected. Light machine guns, and squad automatic weapons are probably not protected and may be "infringed", but the average infantryman's rifle, "M-16 rifles and the like", appear to be protected specifically by the Second Amendment. At least, for as long as the Supreme Court stands as it does today.

That said, the opinion does expose some weaknesses in the protection if affords. The exceptions made for regulation and licensing of firearms would be deeply disturbing if adopted on a wider scale than by the small political areas that will now be losing their comprehensive bans. The weakness in the decision, specifically, is that there is great deference shown to "licensing", which is treated as an acceptable accommodation to the right, for the District of Columbia. If licensing is a permissible way to regulate handguns, then by analogy, it would be permissible for the Federal government to potentially require licensing of all firearms. To allow this to occur would build a fatal weakness into our basic freedom, since registration makes later confiscation, by tyrant or invader, not only possible but likely. Historical examples of registration based confiscation are common, and not limited to the activities of the Nazi's, both in Germany and immediately upon conquest of a neighboring state which "enjoyed" a gun registration scheme.

Also, there is the phraseology that places it within governmental power to regulate the commercial sale and interstate commercial transport of arms. This may be the single greatest threat to our continued enjoyment of the benefits of the Second Amendment. There have been and continue to be ongoing attempts to prohibit or limit the person to person sale of firearms, without involving a "licensed" intermediary. These efforts to "close the gun show loophole" are largely unopposed by the firearms manufacture and retail industries, because they see the used gun market as competition to their revenue flow. However, this simple custom in the law is the razor thin edge between our current system and de facto national registration. This is not merely speculation, for this author personally seen basic, simple, felony criminal cases in Arizona, which directly demonstrated the existence of national gun registration as early as the year 2003.

In the several months before these cases went to trial, the prosecution was able to send the serial number of a pistol to the BATF, who contacted a licensed gun dealer in an outlying city in Arizona. That dealer FAXed the firearm purchase form, which had been filled out nearly 10 years prior, at the purchase of the pistol by an individual now accused of the crime. During trial, the local deputy county prosecutor was able to produce a copy of the actual form filled out by the defendant, with his handwriting, and signature, from a lawful purchase nearly a decade old. Bear in mind, this was not a federal crime, or even a high profile crime (the accused had no criminal record, and there were no injuries). If a low level, local, prosecutor, chasing down a simple local crime, can easily acquire the purchase forms from a lawful firearms purchase, nearly a decade old, from merely a manufacturers serial number, how is that not a national registration scheme already in place? The only current limitation on this registration scheme is that if a "gun confiscator" came to the addresses on each of those forms, the persons named could now answer, "I sold it to some guy 5 years ago". If the Heller decision permits laws to be passed which require all purchases to be either from licensed dealers, or that the transaction be done through a licensed dealer, the we automatically have national gun registration. The first and most important step for confiscation by either invader or tyrant.

While Justice Scalia concludes the majority opinion by writing "it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct", it will unfortunately require ongoing activism and vigilance to make sure another government body does not make it moot.

By David Roth

David Roth is a Generation X, former political science professor, now practicing law in Phoenix.

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