History

Nothing rings so true as the quote Milton Friedman is known for above. Temporary government programs have a tendency to stick around for a long time- in many cases forever. It is notoriously hard to remove a government program, becuase the government employees people to keep the program running. Unlike the private sector, the profit motive has almost no effect on operation of a government program. The modus operandi is merely having jobs for the public. Hence why most government programs are always in debt- from the Mighty State Department to the mere senate barbershop.

Any and all programs from entitlements, to public works projects end up being permanent programs that are next to impossible to remove. One could argue big expenditures like the Income Tax or Welfare programs federally are temporary, given their origins (Lincoln’s Greenbacks and LBJ’s War on Poverty.) However the current use of each seems to haze the original intentions into a permanent apparatus to fund government & help the poor, respectively.

What about the programs that were clearly intended for temporary use? Here is a list of several programs that still exist today:

Tennessee Valley – “a federally owned corporation in the United States created by congressional charter in May 1933 to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development in the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected by the Great Depression….TVA was envisioned not only as a provider, but also as a regional economic development agency that would use federal experts and electricity to rapidly modernize the region’s economy and society.”

The intention was creation of economic activity back in the great depression…so why does it still exist today?

Federal Crop Insurance Corporation: is a wholly owned government corporation managed by the Risk Management Agency of the United States Department of Agriculture. FCIC manages the federal crop insurance program, which provides U.S. farmers and agricultural entities with crop insurance protection…. The legislation was created in response to the economic difficulties brought to the U.S. farming industry by the Great Depression and the weather-related catastrophe of the Dust Bowl…Initially, participation in FCIC was voluntary. However, insurance premiums were subsidized by the U.S. government as a means of encouraging participation in the FCIC program. This changed with the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act of 1994, which required farmers to participate in the program in order to be eligible for deficiency payments related to certain FCIC programs. Mandatory participation was repealed in 1996.

In Short- temporary relief to farmers in the great depression became a federal insuracne program on crops. What the definition neglects to mention is the crop-buying programs which has government forcibly by farmer’s crops each year in order to maintin higher costs. During the depression, these drops were intentionally destroyed to perserve the high cost. Now, they are sent to needy third-world countries. Why are we funding a program decades old to keep prices artifically high? Didn’t the depression end?

Just about any notable program from the great depression has stuck around to today. Here are some more famously known government programs that are now “corporations”, just like the TVA:

Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac- remember these folks? Federally-founded & still funded companies to help americans get into houses. Also intended to be a tmeporary program, the housing markets many fluctations seemed to have blurred the lines to keep these ‘companies’ as permanent figures in government. Yet, they were behind the very issue of the 2008 housing crisis due to those very genrerous federally-backed loans that undercut the true-market rate for a decade. Well, now it seems the federal government may in fact remove them…and instead control the entire housing market with legislation approving them to underwrite 100% of all mortgages. Not good folks…

A recent target of Republican politicans Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, & Justin Amash has been a “government corproation” that is glaring evidence of corporate welfare.

Export-Import Bank– the official export credit agency of the United States federal government… It was established in 1934 by an executive order, and made an independent agency in the Executive branch by Congress in 1945, for the purposes of financing and insuring foreign purchases of United States goods for customers unable or unwilling to accept credit risk….Its Charter spells out the Bank’s authorities and limitations. Among them is the principle that Ex-Im Bank does not compete with private sector lenders, but rather provides financing for transactions that would otherwise not take place because commercial lenders are either unable or unwilling to accept the political or commercial risks inherent in the deal.

If you want a glaring opposition to the fundementals of the Free Market, the Ex-IM bank is it. They are the epitimany of governmt meddling in the economy. No compeititon – undercut market credit rates- unattainable private risk? All are reasons a free-market thinker would NOT invest in a program in the first place. Yet the government is some form of dogmatic entity that defies human nature in order to better mankind. In the Ex-Im bank’s case, it is mostly just Boeing (and even the failed energy titan Enron, which was loaned 1+ billion dollars pre-collapse). I am 100% for the closure of the Export-Import bank with every fiber of my Libertarian Principles.

That is just the tip of the iceburg for temporary government programs. Not all are from the FDR regime, but his New Deal policies ushered in a larger government than any president in our history….almost all programs temporary.

Here is a continued running list of our current existing temporary programs:

Commodity Credit Corporation (1933)
Corporation for National and Community Service (Americorps) (1933)
Corporation for Public Broadcasting aka PBS (1967)
Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation (1987)
Farm Credit Banks (1916)
Federal Financing Bank (1973)
Federal Home Loan Banks (1932)
Federal Prison Industries (1934)
The Financing Corporation aka FICO (1989)
Legal Services Corporation (1974)
National Consumer Cooperative Bank (1978)
Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (1978)
Millennium Challenge Corporation (2004)
National Credit Union Administration Central Liquidity Facility (1998)
National Endowment for Democracy (1983)
National Park Foundation (1967)
National Railroad Passenger Corporation aka Amtrak (1971)
Overseas Private Investment Corporation (1971)
Panama Canal Commission (1903) – (still used as a military base, despite losing its established program name in
Securities Investor Protection Corporation (1970)

So when people say we have nothing to cut in our national budget…..here are plenty of temporary programs that well past their due time.

One of the powers invested in the government by our founders is called Eminent Domain. Essentially, this is the power of government to seize private property for betterment of public use…assuming just compensation is met.

The original use people cite for eminent domain was to seize open land that is privately owned, and turn it into a major road, or government building. I threw in open land because no real concept of a congested city was around for the Untied States at the time. The evolution of the human landscape occurred, and so did eminent domain.

The issue is this: eminent domain’s evolution evolved in such a way that government retained more power over land seizure, not less. Instead of reigning in a loosely defined rule of land seizure, the government & the american people left that power unchecked. Eminent Domain has now become a tool of malicious use by governments to threaten private land owners, a state’s tool to bring in bigger tax-payers than the folks who own the land, and federal tool to re-engineer cities and towns at the hands of bureaus…not the American voting public.

A recent history of Eminent Domain dating back to the end of ww2 up to today will show just how far eminent domain went from just compensation for public use to malicious power over the right to property.

One of the powers invested in the government by our founders is called Eminent Domain. Essentially, the power of government to seize private property for betterment of public use…assuming just compensation is met.

The original use people cite for eminent domain was to seize open land that is privately owned, and turn it into a major road, or government building. I threw in open land because no real concept of a congested city was around for the Untied States at the time. The evolution of the human landscape occurred, and so did eminent domain.

The issue is this: eminent domain’s evolution evolved in such a way that government retained more power over land seizure than less. Instead of reigning in a loosely defined rule of land seizure, the government & the american people left that power unchecked. Eminent Domain has now become a tool of malicious use by governments to threaten private land owners, a state’s tool to bring in bigger tax-payers than the folks who own the land, and federal tool to re-engineer cities and towns at the hands of bureaus…not the American voting public.

Boston’s West End

The West End of Boston has personal ties for me: I was a resident in Boston for 5 years, and I leanred from fomrer West End residents first-hand just how malicious the government was. The West End was victim to a Federal urban redevelopment project, which led to the neighborhood’s ultimate destruction.

Before

After

All over the nation, the federal government handed checks to major cities for urban redevelopment called the Housing Act, under President Truman’s Fair Deal. The idea was to destroy delapitated areas and create better neighborhoods. Some areas may have been successful with this projects, but others were not. What most people overlook is the process by which government claims & destorys the property. With Boston’s West End, I heard first-hand accounts of just how malicious the city of Boston & the State of Massachusetts was to remove whole neighboorhoods.

Under the guise of the housing act, which would become the Department of Housing & Urban Development, the urban renewal projects gave federal money to state & local governemnts to destory neighboorhoods. How this occurs is about as ugly as politics gets: it is a non-democratic process which the city & the state take out zoning maps of the city, and made deals in the dark to single out areas to be redeveloped.

Sounds simple, but it gets far uglier. People have lived in neighboorhods like the West End for generations; how do they get them out? That is where the maliciousness really takes place- the West End was singled out, as was part of Roxbury, and the North End (which was saved). The city considered the West End “blighted” or “slum”, and thus the city services lets the neighboorhod rot. What was once a functional community turned into a true slum because of the government by not responding to 911 calls, refuse to collect garbage…all of it.

The years went by, the money came from the federal money came along, and the state government, via the BRA (Boston Redevelopment Authority), began the eminent domain process. Residents were forced out of the city with “just compensation” to live in the neighboring towns of Medford, Somerville, Everett, etc. The promise from government was “affordable high-rise buildings of better quality”. Nevermind the fact that the neighborhood was forced into blight/slum status by government greed; what could the government do to create that would be superior to the West End’s own creation of their newighboorhood identity? They didn’t.

The immediate result was the leveling of the neighborhood in the after photo above. But here is the current result of the West End “Redevelopment”:

Notice everything to the left is empty space: that was once brownstone apartments & busienss. Now its an empty lot & an ugly City Hall.

high rises in the west end, that’s what was built. Currently going for 3 grand a month minimum. Not quite affordable

Here’s the point: giving government the power to make decisions on neighboorhod development is inviting malicious action. It costs too much money to the taxpayers, it ruins families & communities, and results in exactly the opposite of what the govenrment promises. The city of Boston & state of Massachusetts screwed the West End. They made it more expensive to live, and provided far less business oppertunity than was once there. Aisde from the “protected” businesses of Massachusetts General Hospital, and the following government buildings: Boston City Hall, JFK Federal Building, Tip O’Neil Federal Building, former Charles Street Jail, Massachusetts State Police Headquarters……the list goes on.

So the excuse for Boston was blighting a questionable neighborhood, which resulted in more government buildings than affordable residental housing. Nowhere in Boston’s redevelopment pitch was the pitch to bring in private business. What happens when the government uses a private business invitation as an eminent domain justification?

Enter New London v Kilo

Did you know that government can seize your land if it thinks they can find a better person to utilize it? It’s true: according to the New London v. Kilo decision, the government allowed the city of New London to take a condo complex by eminent domain in order to court a bid for Phifzer. The asumption of the case is that private ownership can be taken by eminent domain if another private entity if they are willing & able to pay more in taxes. Perhaps a bit rigid, but the excuse that it would be “better for the community” is a ruse: how can such a subjective meaning be reason to take land? What was once questionable in the building of roads & bridges….now is allowed to be given to private companies within the world after New London v Kilo.

At the end of the day, no other reason but tax revenue ends up being the decision behind taking the condo complex for Phifzer. All decisions lead to some form of money, or economic decision making as a whole. The best explanation of this asinine ruling was by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor:

“For who among us can say [condo owners] already makes the most productive or attractive possible use of her property? The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory…”

Since the ruling, many states have passed legislation preventing such eminent domain seizures, but that hardly gurantees it from happening again. Any grey-area eminent domain seizure by a city town or state for buildings of “mixed use” development are a merger of public-private interest that has no voted consent by the citizens of the area. Oh do not forget: Phifzer withdrew its bid anyways! Welcome to Amerika!

We’ve covered urban redevelopment of entire cities for (un)affordable housing & government buildings, into private companies backing an eniment domain land seizure. What happens when a Federal Bureau- not a state or city or town- taking land via Eminent Domain?

EPA vs Riverton, Wyoming

The small town in Wyoming was recently seized by the EPA for the “Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes to declare the newly expanded tribal region henceforth be treated “as a state.” No Democracy involved, no meetings- just a federaly funded bureau acting as an agent of a party (the tribe) against the will of the current land owners, private citizens.

What justifies this seizure? In fact what justifies all three private property seizures?

Answer: A lack of private property rights. If we do not represent them, we do not have them. Having ogvernment take land via eminent domain is ever-growing proof the government feels private property is granted by them, and not from our humanity.

It has been a slippery slope for over 100 years of bad eminent domain seizures. Keep these in mind when your town or city attempts to do something in the name of “public good”. Question them. Press them for every single detail. You should never trust someone else to make claims of property you can do yourself.

Fight for your right to have private property! Afterall, private proeprty begins and ends with you- you belong to yourself and yourself alone.