How did Big Brother come to the United States? By what mechanism was the free-spirited legacy of the founding fathers perverted to allow the heavy hand of bloated government to reach into every aspect of daily life? How was our foresighted Constitution circumvented?

Step by step, over decades, an otherwise independent electorate was tricked into accepting the substitution of government control for personal responsibility. Throughout this process, the same specific techniques of mental manipulation were used again and again to facilitate legislation in the public sector, namely:

• Use a real or manufactured crisis to induce public fear
• Enact draconian laws to remedy the crisis, preying on that fear to leverage increased government control and decreased personal freedom that the public would not normally accept.

Concurrently, the philosophy of governance held in the collective thought was transitioned by a concerted effort in public education and media discourse. The framers of the Constitution, and the early American people, believed that freedoms were an inalienable right derived from the Creator, and that our trust for preservation and guidance of the republic should rest in God. Today, the prevailing attitude of the Democrat-controlled Congress is that our freedoms are what they allow us to keep and the survival of our nation depends on human wisdom. That is a shift in moral compass that has huge implications.

But on the long curve that graphs our decline from being the beacon of enterprise and freedom for the world into moribund socialism, there is a specific inflection point. It is an event unknown to most citizens and not included in general United States high school history courses, but it changed everything. The egregious Supreme Court decision in the case Wickard v. Filburn (1942) effectively stripped individual citizens of any right that the federal government might choose to take from them.

First, some background. Congress justifies its power to meddle in every venue of citizen endeavor through the “commerce clause” in the US Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3):

The Congress shall have Power … To regulate Commerce … among the several States….

The founding fathers only intended that Congress should provide a “regular” or level playing field for interactions between and among the states. Activities totally contained within any given state were expressly left to the jurisdiction of the state government, or to local governments.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the fear engendered by the “great depression” to hoodwink Americans, and Congress, into accepting intrusive government regulation in ways that the early American patriots never intended. The Supreme Court of his day struck down many of his “New Deal” laws as unconstitutional, but he and his cronies overwhelmed the system with legislation faster than test cases could be brought to remedy his assault on the Constitution.

In particular, the Roosevelt government claimed the authority to tell an individual farmer how many acres of his own farm he could devote to wheat production. Now, as any reasonable thinking individual can conclude, that is an effort that is not only contained within one state, it is contained within one county, even within one township, and even within the boundaries of one citizen’s personal property. There is absolutely no way that what one farmer does within the boundaries of his own land is “interstate commerce.” And yet Roosevelt legislated, and the Supreme Court upheld, the government’s right to do this.

The test case that brought this wheat production issue before the Supreme Court is described by Wikipedia:

The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 limited the area that farmers could devote to wheat production…. Roscoe Filburn was a farmer who produced wheat in excess of the amount permitted. Filburn however, argued that because the excess wheat was produced for his private consumption on his own farm, it never entered commerce at all, much less interstate commerce, and therefore was not a proper subject of federal regulation under the Commerce Clause…. The Federal District Court ruled in favor of Filburn….

The intended rationale of the Agricultural Adjustment Act was to stabilize the price of wheat on the national market. The federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce through the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution. In Filburn the Court unanimously reasoned that the power to regulate the price at which commerce occurs was inherent in the power to regulate commerce.

Filburn argued that since the excess wheat he produced was intended solely for home consumption it could not be regulated through the interstate Commerce Clause. The Supreme Court rejected this argument, reasoning that if Filburn had not used home-grown wheat he would have had to buy wheat on the open market. This effect on interstate commerce, the Court reasoned, may not be substantial from the actions of Filburn alone but through the cumulative actions of thousands of other farmers just like Filburn its effect would certainly become substantial. Therefore Congress could regulate wholly intrastate, non-commercial activity if such activity, viewed in the aggregate, would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce, even if the individual effects are trivial. (emphasis mine)

Reflect on the two highlighted sentences for a moment. If everyone grew their own tomatoes in their garden, the cumulative effect would lower the commercial price of tomatoes across the United States. By this reasoning, Congress would have the authority to forbid families from growing tomatoes in their backyards. If everyone heated with a wood stove, and cut trees on their own property for fuel, the cumulative effect would lower the commercial price of energy across the United States. Then Congress would have the authority to forbid families from cutting wood to heat their own homes. Put more abstractly, in principle at least, Congress has the authority to forbid people from taking care of themselves, providing their own food and shelter, without being enmeshed in the public grid of commerce. In essence, Congress has the clout to mandate that we are all wards of the state, and what freedoms we do still have, we have at their pleasure.

And that, dear readers, is how Big Brother came into the United States. There is recourse, but it would take extraordinary coordination and resolve. And that would be — to throw all the bums out and elect a slate of libertarians to the presidency and to Congress, and then to roll back much of the offensive legislation. Now 200 years ago that might have seemed like a perfectly normal idea. But the liberal brainwashing by our public schools and our mainstream media has been going on so long, that what once might have seemed like a normal plan is now viewed as right-wing extremism.

Related:

The current effort by the federal government to control every drop of water in the United States relies on this same rationale.

Recently passed in Montana, the The Montana Firearms Freedom Act (Montana HB246) will likely generate a test case to be taken all the way to the Supreme Court, and come up against Wickard v. Filburn and its derivatives.