Rick Jones

At Sam Weller's bookstore, in the most low and deeply discounted area, I found a hard cover book for $1: "The Trouble With Money: A Prescription for America's Financial Fever," by William Greider. It was published in 1989 -- over 22 years ago. Yet these words on the back cover might make one think it was just published: "The conservative era has created a ... system that liberates banking and finance for new adventures in risk taking, yet assures the players that if something goes terribly wrong and they sustain great losses, the U.S. government will step in and pick up the tab. The process of picking up the tab is under way -- and on an awesome scale."

"Whenever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. ... The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore necessarily requires the establishment of civil government." Adam Smith, -- Book V, Wealth of Nations

Recently, President Obama has been accused of promoting class war. But the conservative free market fundamentalism, which entered the political stage in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is described by many as a one-sided class war, waged by those on top. Certainly, the data shows that even by the end of the 1980s, a large share of the income gains were going to the wealthiest. That trend has continued and intensified and has been much more pronounced in the U.S. than other nations. This redistribution of wealth has occurred because astronomical sums of money have pushed U.S. politics to the right. Both Rick Perry's verbal assaults on Social Security -- a centerpiece of the New Deal -- and Herman Cain's very regressive tax schemes can be seen as a continuation of the one-sided class warfare waged against the poorer classes.

For several decades, it has been fashionable and politically correct to bash labor unions. Whereas they comprise such a small part of the population and spend so much less than business on political campaigns, most people have a very unbalanced view. When I worked on the assembly lines of Chevrolet, and later Chrysler, I was a member of the United Auto Workers, yet had very little understanding of union contributions to American life.

To a large extent before the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency (1933 to 1945), our national government was strongly anti-union. The Pullman strike of 1894 illustrates this.

Large numbers of voters make very important political decisions on the basis of non-specific, vague and confusing labels.

Thus the side that is able to successfully label and define their opponents has a clear advantage.

There is a long history of the far right trying to brand moderates and even mild conservatives as "socialists." In 1950, conservative Republicans lead by the powerful Ohio Sen. Robert Taft wanted to adopt a campaign slogan for the congressional elections that would be "Liberty Against Socialism." They alleged that President Harry Truman's Fair Deal was "dictated by a small but powerful group of persons who have no concept of the true foundation of American progress, and whose proposals are wholly out of accord with the true interests of and real wishes of workers, farmers and businessmen."

From the inception of the U.S. Constitution, there has been a widespread ignorance of how little it originally protected individual rights from abuses by state governments.

The Declaration of Independence asserts that men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. But the Constitution was written in an environment when states were older, more established, and often more powerful than our national government. The newly created and weak national government was in no position to protect individual rights that states infringed upon.

Thus, an individual had only as many rights as his state decided to grant. The Constitution recognized that the source of rights could be state governments; if a state chose to deny a person's unalienable rights, that was the state's prerogative.

The fascinating book, "Candid Insights of a Mormon Apostle: The Diaries of Abraham H. Cannon 1889-1895," illustrates how individual liberty was limited by states rights. On Feb. 3, 1890 Cannon wrote: "The U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Idaho Test Oath, which disfranchises all Mormons is constitutional. According to this oath ... no man who is a member of our Church can vote or hold office. This decision will doubtless have the effect to eventually debar every Mormon in the whole United States of the rights of freemen ... the time is fast approaching when the Saints will be called to ... save the Constitution from being trampled underfoot."

Many republics are democracies such as the Republic of India or the French Republic. But some democracies are not republics, such as the Kingdom of Sweden.

The Utah House of Representatives believes that ideally people should live in a republic which is not a democracy. This was made clear with the passage of HB220 by a overwhelming vote of 57-17. According to the U.S. State Department there is only one republic in this hemisphere which is not a democracy: the Republic of Cuba. Interestingly, that republic shares a number of similarities with Utah:

Merchants played an important role in the creation of the U.S. Constitution. Several provisions of the Constitution served the interests of merchants by reducing states rights and concentrating power with the central government. Because states lost the right to issue paper money and control their commerce, the transaction costs for merchants was greatly reduced.