One of the many slick tricks of the Obama administration was to insert a provision in the massive Obamacare legislation regulating people who sell gold. .This had nothing to do with medical care but everything to do with sneaking in an extension of the government’s power over gold, in a bill too big for most people to read
Gold has long been a source of frustration for politicians who want to extend their power over the economy.
When the amount of money the government can print is limited by how much gold the government has, politicians cannot pay off a massive national debt by just printing more money and repaying the owners of government bonds with dollars that are cheaper than the dollars with which the bonds were bought. In other words, politicians cannot cheat people as easily.
But what is clear is that the Obama administration sees people’s freedom to buy and sell gold as something that can limit what the government can do.Freedom in general cramps the government’s style.
But, at every turn, they find the freedoms granted by the Constitution of the United States hampering the Left’s agenda of imposing their superior wisdom and virtue on the rest of us.
Sneaking a provision on gold purchases and sales into massive legislation that is supposedly about medical care is just one of the many cynical tricks used to circumvent the public’s right to know how they are being governed. ( More... )
It serves always to distract the public councils and feeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration to confine themselves with in their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.
If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."
…George Washington’s Farewell Address…
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