MAN CANNOT CONTROL THE HEAVENS

By Ron Ewart

No, man certainly cannot control the Heavens and he can't alter the laws of the Universe. But you would think he would be able to control his own behavior and activities, given how smart he claims to be. It would appear that, throughout history, the opposite has been and continues to be true. An obvious character flaw in the species.
In our frequent articles we have made a concerted effort to bring simplicity to all of the issues we face as American citizens and landowners. There are root causes for everything and if we understand the root causes, we might just be able to fix "it", when things go wrong. The difficulty comes in first determining all of the outside influences (government controls, market forces, education, egos, money, power brokers, etc.) that we face on a daily basis and the priorities we set to fix those issues, one at a time. The other malady we face is our own apathy. After all, why should we get involved? However, for our own survival in the pursuit of happiness and the perpetuation of liberty, the arguments for getting involved are crystal clear. But before getting involved, understanding the root causes of what ails us, is paramount.
As countries grow and population increases, as diversion of interests propagate, as divisions in agendas spread wider apart, as governments, corporations, businesses, unions, special interest groups get larger and larger, a point is reached where the foundations of our culture and the ability to control our own individual lives under that foundation, begins to breakdown. We are well past that point now and we are truly out of control, where our "fixes" don't work, where rules are meant to be broken, where more rules become necessary and enforcement of all the rules becomes much more difficult.
Remember September 12, 2001, when we all came together with a common purpose, to strike back at the enemy that would perpetrate this violent and dastardly act against innocents in New York and Washington DC. We wrote songs and poems and built momuments to the dead. We gave speeches, we got angry and for a while, we were “one” with purpose. How long did it last before we settled back into our own little factions of self-interest? Not long. Now we have anti-war protestors, we have political parties at odds with each other, scurrilously and shamelessly pandering to one faction or another, using the public treasury as the lever and unconstitutional law as the fulcrum.
How did we get here? Bigness got us here. Big government, big business, big banks, big unions and big special interest groups. Although bigness gives us concentration of power and degrades individual rights and human dignity, bigness also gives us a condition of being out of control and the very real frustration of not being able to get in control. Large entities, by their very size, lose control of processes, personnel and finances, no matter how much they tell you that they are in control. Accounting errors and financial mismanagement emerge and management of personnel becomes diluted and ineffective.
Take a look around at big cities today. They are anything but in control and in fact are a huge drain on the entire financial structure of the nation because of that lack of control. One of the reasons they are out of control is due in large part to their bigness and to the intolerable density of humans in close proximity to each other, requiring more rules and regulations directly related to that density. Unfortunately, this unbalanced, out-of-control environment produces the votes necessary to keep the insane asylum that has been the past and the current inmates in Washington DC, in power.

So what do we do if we are big? We write rules and policies until there is a rule and policy for every single potential action or inaction. Pretty soon we write rules to strengthen the rules we have already written. We write rules to comply with other rules from other “big” entities. Then if we don’t get enough compliance for the rules, we write more rules and increase penalties and enforcement. Eventually, as time goes by and as the rules increase, we turn more and more law abiding citizens into law breakers with the potential of a breaking down in civil society.

So here we are. We have big government, big bureaucracies, big business, big banks, big unions and big special interest groups lobbying for, or writing, rule, after rule, after rule. Many of those rules become new legislation and then law. Bigness, concentration of power and out-of-control entities have buried WE THE PEOPLE in frustration, confusion and the feeling of utter helplessness, that is until WE THE PEOPLE have had enough and decide to draw a line in the sand.

Our Founding Fathers were very concerned about who had control and went to great lengths to see that control could not be concentrated in too few hands, or in only one branch of government. From the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the 'consent' of the governed,”

But as government got “bigger”, Jefferson’s “consent of the governed” became essentially meaningless, as our representatives and senators assumed more and more power, as government got ever bigger and bigger. In response to government bigness and power, business and labor had to get bigger and more powerful, in order to have influence with big government. Then big government started handing off some of their power and authority to bureaucracies, who then got bigger and assumed more power and authority than was ever dreamed of by the Founding Fathers. Since the “consent of the governed” was powerless, due mostly to their own fragmentation and division, special interest groups began getting bigger and more powerful in order to have more influence on big government, as well. As government, bureaucracies, banks, businesses, unions and special interest groups got larger and more powerful, they began to get out-of-control with their processes, personnel and finances. They are so out of control now that we have constant nightmares of ineptness, waste, fraud, abuse and corruption, in almost every one of our institutions, that no one person or group seems to be able to bring under control.
We have state and local governments getting more powerful and larger and more out of control. State legislatures write laws, regulations, restrictions and ordinances constantly. Bureaucracies of state governments write their own laws, regulations, rules, restrictions and ordinances without end and without legislative oversight. All this legislation filters down to local governments who then write laws, regulations, rules, restrictions and ordinances to comply with state and federal laws, regulations, rules, restrictions and ordinances, in a never-ending vicious circle. In the end, the PEOPLE become impotent and disenfranchised from the political process and lose control, as the so-called "consent of the governed".
One of our greatest strengths as a country and as individual jurisdictions within that country, was keeping political power in the hands of the people in local subdivisions of government; i.e. boroughs, hamlets, cities, parishes, counties and even states. At a meeting in Skagit County, Washington where we gave a speech on land use and eminent domain issues, a county commissioner in attendance, lamented that his county had been sued 162 times by special interest groups and a state bureaucracy for not being in compliance with a state land use law. The county commissioners, in desperation and going broke fast with legal fees supporting their position, threw their hands in the air and asked the special interest groups and the state how they wanted the law written and the county would write it that way. So much for local control.
The point that we would like to make here, is that no matter how big governments, businesses, banks, unions and special interest groups get, the ultimate power and control is still inherent in WE THE PEOPLE, if the PEOPLE are of one mind and that one mind is based on a solid foundation of the fundamental principles of freedom and liberty, as in our U. S. Constitution and the constitutions of the individual states. But we are so fragmented and so diverse, becoming of one mind is problematic. Until we are of one mind, bigness, concentration of power and out-of-control entities will be our undoing, if not our virtual enslavement.
One might say ..... well how does "bigness" affect freedom, liberty, property rights, gun rights, the bill of rights, states rights, illegal immigration, the fraud that is man-caused global warming, cap and trade legislation, gun control, nationalization of businesses, bank bailouts, stimulus packages, water boarding, Gitmo, the war on terror, national health care, socialism, the United Nations, the one-world-order, cunning presidents and arrogant congresses? In just about every way possible. Ron Ewart, President