Most Americans dearly hold to their rights articulated in and protected by the First Amendment. Put another way, few Americans would quietly abide the unwarranted government violation of the following:
- Not having a state-mandated religion
- Their right to freely worship or not worship God as they see fit without government intervention
- Speaking freely, with no state prevention or persecution thereof
- A free press, neither controlled nor manipulated by government
- The right to peacefully assemble
- The right to petition government for correction of government abuses
So why, then, don't we get all wrapped around the axle when government intrudes upon other very personal and private matters? If we've so jealously fenced off our religion, speech, and press from the meddling of the state on the one hand, why are we so indifferent to state interference of our private, peaceful interactions on the other hand?
Every time government intervenes in "the market" it interferes and adversely affects you in an intimate way. Why? Because you are the market! What else is "the market" but 300 million plus people making millions of decisions on a minute-by-minute basis and acting freely and cooperatively upon those decisions in pursuit of their respective self-interests? This amazing process occurs successfully when people are free enough to make it all happen; conversely, every time government takes it upon itself to plan, manipulate, order, and coerce the market into prosperity the opposite of prosperity occurs---I give you the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, and the United States during the Great Depression.
When government intervenes and places top-down decrees as to how goods are to be made, at what price transactions occur (like minimum wage laws), subsidies one producer and places other producers at a competitive disadvantage, bails out failing companies, and artificially affects the market forces and prices (which always go up--think of college tuition, health care services, and housing), the prices of goods and services have to match up to the actual costs involved and those costs go up.
And who pays for the increase in costs? You, the consumer who is always on the receiving end of unnecessarily high costs reflected in prices and you, the taxpayer who has to fund the regulatory regime that continues to expand with the ever-expanding size of the federal government.
If we were limited to the churches we could attend due to some government mandates would e sit by in quite acquiescence? If government limited what we could say and when we could say it would we not be openly outraged? If only we held all our liberties as dearly as we hold our right to free speech and freedom of religion.
The federal government has the constitutional authority and responsibility to regulate interstate commerce but no authority, neither constitutional nor moral, to directly interfere with the workings of that commerce, that is, our free assembling cooperatively and freely in pursuit of our respective self-interests and---gasp!---profits. Perhaps if such a restriction were included in the First Amendment and not Article 1 we'd jealously keep government out of our market affairs, too.
As they say in New Jersey, I'm not sayin,' I'm just sayin'...
