The Ninth Commandment of Capitalism provides that "No regulation affecting more than $100M in economic activity shall be adopted until enacted by the Congress of the United States and signed by the president." This is from something called the "REINS Act."
Phil Kerpen, one of the top proponents of the power of free markets to create prosperity in Washington, provided the backstory here: "The REINS Act started as an idea in the head of a remarkable 78-year-old tea party activist in Alexandria, Ky., named Lloyd Rogers. In 2009, Rogers went to meet with his then-congressman Geoff Davis at a town hall meeting. Both were outraged about an EPA storm water management consent decree that cost the three northern Kentucky counties in a consolidated sewer district about a billion dollars, doubling water fees. … Davis took the idea back to Washington and huddled with his key advisers to develop the simple idea into a robust, workable piece of legislation. That idea became the REINS Act…. The REINS Act cuts to the heart of abuse of regulatory power by requiring any major regulatory action to pass the House and Senate and be signed by the president … before it can take effect."
The philosophy behind this goes way back. Back to the Declaration of Independence, in fact, which predicated the legitimacy of declaring independence from Great Britain in part on a list of grievances. Among these were the King's having "erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance."
The political partner to true capitalism — the economic system that allows us to freely own and invest our savings legitimately earned — is representative democracy. Sometimes this is even more precisely called liberal republicanism. This was (and still is, if tarnished by progressives) the American Way!
There is a terrible internal contradiction on the hard left, those bold enough to admit to being socialists as such as well as those closeted as "progressives." The left routinely sings the praises of "democracy." At the same time it sneakily prefers to use the government institutions least responsive to the will of the people to advance its socialist agenda.
The left uses the courts — judges, generally appointed and for long terms, and, in the federal judiciary's case, life — and the career civil service (known less gloriously as "bureaucrats" or, in the words of the Declaration, "swarms of Officers") to cram its socialist policies down our throats. The left's phony praise for democracy is at best hypocritical and, really truly, dishonest. Relying so heavily on the courts and the bureaucrats, not our elected officials, tramples the Constitution.
What's the left's real game of which I have written at length elsewhere? The left is determined to destroy the classical liberal republican Judeo-Christian capitalist culture that makes America exceptional. The left is determined to replace the American Way with a totalitarian (meaning all power is vested in the government) nihilistic (meaning there is no meaning) undifferentiated radically egalitarian (which in the French Revolution led to wholesale guillotining in a "Reign of Terror.")
As I wrote: "The left believes that by dominating the culture, including civic groups, and using the courts and insulated government agencies, it will change the facts on the ground. Then it will win the political mandate. … The left has notched many victories and its morale is high. The left also believes that by putting its policies in place it will, in the end, win the political battles."
The left chronically takes liberties with the truth. That said, sometimes it is candid about its agenda and its commitment to ruthless means. The Communist Manifesto, the left's charter document, explicitly calls for using the "means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production."
"Despotic" is the antithesis of representative democracy.
"The rights of property" are the foundation of capitalism.
Read it and weep. The left is waging relentless war on the legitimacy of capitalism and liberal republicanism. Hence the importance of the Ninth Commandment of Capitalism to shift the power back from the bureaucrats and into the hands of our elected, and accountable, elected officials.
The Ninth Commandment would go a long way toward thwarting the left's despotic means and neutralizing its hostility to the "conditions of bourgeoise (meaning, middle class) production" by restoring to our elected officials both authority and accountability for regulations that have a big impact on our livelihoods.
Tell your elected officials to pass the REINS Act!
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $88T. He served as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House, has worked closely with the Congress and two cabinet agencies, and has published over a million words on politics and policy in the mainstream media, as a distinguished professional blogger, and as the author of the internationally award-winning cult classic book "The Websters' Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World." He has served as senior adviser, economics, to APIA as an advocate of the gold standard, senior counselor to the Chamber of Digital Commerce and serves as general counsel to Frax.finance, a stablecoin venture. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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