This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Jon Sanders (twitter.com/jonpsanders), Associate Director of Research at the John Locke Foundation.
RALEIGH — When the Founders compiled the Bill of Rights, they had no inkling that people were endowed with a Creator-given right to purchase whatever light bulbs suited their fancy. After all, the light bulb was nearly a century away from being invented.
They certainly weren’t about to codify a right to select a properly flushing toilet. But they knew they didn’t have to.
In one of the Founders’ greatest sparks of ingenuity, they completed the Bill of Rights with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution with a flourish that made it clear that the rights explicated so far in the Constitution and first eight amendments were not at all a comprehensive list.
They understood the importance of unseen freedoms, the manifold individual choices and actions people take throughout their daily lives, too many even to imagine but all just as vital to the fabric of American liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And they wanted to ensure that the government they were establishing recognized that rights at all times are retained by the people. Rights are God-given, not government-granted.
The words of the Ninth: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Tenth adds protection for the individual states from overreach by their creation, the federal government: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
(Notice how few words it takes to protect freedom. Contrast it with the thousands of pages of a single bill designed to usurp it.)
While the Founders worked to protect freedoms they would be hard-pressed to name individually, they did so with an understanding of what happens when a government takes such freedoms at whim. For proof, read their many charges against King George in their Declaration of Independence.
One of them includes the charge that the king “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” Government agencies with executive power pestering people and effectively destroying their wealth — it has a disturbingly 21st-century sound to it.
Being pro-choice on energy efficiency standards
What does all that have to do with light bulbs and toilets? Consider this encounter between U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and an officer of the Department of Energy, Kathleen Hogan, who holds the title of deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency. It happened during a hearing of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, discussing energy efficiency standards for certain appliances.
Paul exploded the hypocrisy of those standards as being, in actuality, restrictions on consumer choices (standards are impositions by the federal government bearing the force of law):
… light bulbs, refrigerators, toilets — you name it, you can’t go around your house without being told what to buy. You restrict my choices; you don’t care about my choices. You don’t care about the consumer, frankly. You raise the cost of all the items with your rules, all your notions that you know what’s best for me.
Restricting choices raises costs. A side effect of arbitrarily raising the costs of innumerable household objects is that families can afford fewer things for their houses. They are forced to make do with less. In essence, their substance has been eaten because of the actions of government officials.
If there are compelling reasons for people not to buy certain lights, toilets, fridges, etc., government officials aren’t in the habit of making them. They don’t have to. They have access to government’s awesome power to force people instead.
“I wish you would come here to extol me, to cajole me, to encourage, to try to convince me to conserve energy,” Paul said, after noting he favors energy efficiency. “But you come instead with fines, threats of jail, you put people out of business who want to make products you don’t like. This is what your energy efficiency standards are.”
So consumers aren’t the only ones who are affected. They harass producers and eat their substance, too.
Toward the end, Hogan objected, telling Paul, “I really do not believe the appliance standards end up restricting personal choice.”
Paul tried to help her see the light. “I can’t buy the old light bulbs. That restricts my choice on buying.”
The response: “My view is what you want is lighting, right?”
And there you have it. The government agent sees only the desire for a light bulb. She misses that buying a light bulb is better when there is choice among light bulbs, because with choice is competition, with competition are competitive prices, and with competitive prices are innumerable ways for individual families to stretch their dollars further and purchase more for their families. That way enlarges their substances — which is to say, it enlarges their wealth. By extension, it also enlarges wealth within the entire society. The wealth growth is unseen, but its effects are evident.
A family wants lighting, yes. But they would be happier with a more competitive environment for lighting, in which case they could take the same amount they used to spend just for lighting and be able to have lighting and money left over for milk, bread, socks, or their choice of whatever else they also need.
On the other hand, government restrictions destroy wealth — often in ways just as unseen as the freedoms that are sacrificed alongside it. Just to get lighting, the family must pay beyond the amount they were used to spending on light bulbs and eat into money that would have met other needs.
It’s unseen, but the destruction is all too real. Our Founders understood it. It’s time our leaders understood it, too.