Supreme Court Targets the Real Enemy（附中文）

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.（Public Domain）

English Epoch Times：The flurry of rulings from the Supreme Court has everyone’s head spinning. The most significant among them, even if it doesn’t capture all the headlines, is West Virginia v. EPA. The majority opinion is impressive, but the part I found truly wonderful is the concurring opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

This is where we see things headed, toward a major and much-welcome curbing of the power of the administrative state.

Just to review what this thing is, it’s an unelected bureaucracy that rules the country without oversight from voters or legislatures. For well over 100 years, most courts have given it a pass, just assuming that the “experts” in the bureaucracies are handling things just fine, faithfully interpreting legislation, and merely creating rules for easy compliance.

Generations have gone by as this fourth branch of government has grown in size, scope, and strength. For the most part, its baneful impositions have been felt by one business or one industry at a time. You have heard the stories. The car dealer complains about how the Department of Labor is making him crazy. The machine-parts manufacturer is going bonkers about letters from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The energy company can never satisfy the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

They are stories and we find them unfortunate, but we’ve generally avoided thinking of these as systematic, all-pervasive, and truly dangerous to the idea of freedom itself. However, there are some 432 of these agencies. The authors of the Declaration of Independence noted their existence back in the day when they accused the English king of having “erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance.”

They fought a revolution to end the tyranny but now we have a home-grown form, starting in 1883 with the Pendleton Act and continuing throughout the 20th century as each new administration creates its own bureaucracy.

The thing has taken on a power of its own. Strangely, the topic hardly comes up at all during elections, and that’s for a reason. Politicians running for office like to advertise their power to make change. They might even believe it. In reality, though, elected officials have very little influence over the conduct of public life relative to the administrative state.

As Trump found, not even the president is a match for the deep state.

Here’s what has happened since March 2020: The beast showed its face. Seemingly out of nowhere, these strange agencies and people for whom we never voted were ruling our lives. They restricted travel, forced us to cover our faces, closed our churches and schools, and forbid our businesses from operating unless they were big enough to afford a powerful lobbying arm in Washington. The whole scene was appalling. It caused many people—including some earnest judges—to take notice.

Once you see the problem, you can’t unsee it.

Consider the problem with inflation alone: it’s largely the responsibility of the Federal Reserve, which is among the most terrifying of the deep-state agencies. This thing was founded in 1913 with the promise that it would end “wildcat banking” and contain the expansion of money and credit so that we would have a more stable economic environment to encourage growth.

Even now, people believe that the Fed is going to somehow fix recessions and inflations, even though a deeper analysis reveals that the Fed itself is the cause of both. The Fed surely can’t be both the problem and the solution, which is becoming as obvious as the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can’t make a textbook pathogen go away with power and potions.

Let’s take a quick look at the supposed 2 percent inflation target of the Federal Reserve. It might seem to you that they have long ago blown past this, such that it is entirely cosmetic. But the Fed has a little trick up its sleeve. It says it doesn’t follow conventional inflation indexes such as the Consumer or Producer Price Index. It’s fancier than that. It follows instead the index of Personal Consumption Expenditures. And, sure enough, when we look at the PCE, we find that the Fed is pretty good at its job!

All that changed recently when the PCE itself blew up. Now, the Fed has been revealed to be utterly incompetent, in a way that is no different from the CDC, NIH, DOL, DOE, DOT, HHS, DHS, FTC, SEC, and all the rest of these glorified 3-letter agencies employing nearly 3 million people who can’t be fired or controlled. The unique feature of our times is that the expert class in government has been unmasked as fakes at best and unrelenting menaces at worst.

Here’s where the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation stands today:

So much for competence at the Fed! And yet, how exactly is this institution supposed to be controlled? We don’t vote for them. The Fed board is appointed by the president with Senate approval but this control is mostly mythical. The fancy economists run circles around the political actors with big words and fancy finance, so what can they do but approve?

The political class too often acts like absentee owners of a far-off land: they have little choice but to trust the hired landlords to do a good job. The administrative machinery has become the real power, not only implementing the policies but making and enforcing the rules too.

With COVID-19, this whole scam was revealed to absolutely everyone—not just to small businesses but to every single individual and family in the United States. The whole bureaucracy announced to us what they have always believed but rarely said: your life is not your own. Your job is to comply. And so, this raises the fascinating question of what precisely are we going for here and what kind of society and government do we want? Surely this should be up to the people!

While the Supreme Court in its most recent decision was dealing with a technical aspect of how regulations applied to a coal plant, the implications of the decision are much larger. The EPA was determining policy, even making it, riffing wildly on legislation with the presumption that courts will always and everywhere defer to the agency over industry and even over the words of the legislation. The court said no: it was the EPA that had been operating illegally all along.

This decision is so startling because it shows a Supreme Court doing what it is supposed to do, serving as a legal check on the power ambitions of government itself. That’s what the framers intended. We’ve just begun, however. The court needs to attack the whole machinery of the deep state at its very root, going after “Chevron deference” (1984), the Public Health Services Act (1944), the Federal Reserve Act (1913), and stretching all the way back to the Pendleton Act (1883).

A nation ruled by a faceless deep state isn’t a representative democracy and it isn’t consistent with the U.S. Constitution.

When you consider the implications of this one decision, they are awesome. It doesn’t just apply to the EPA and its elaborate plans for changing the global climate through command and control. It also applies to every other agency, including the CDC and even the Fed itself.

They all should be accountable to the people through their elected representatives. If we can’t get back to that system, we will lose everything.

Jeffrey A. Tucker：Jeffrey Tucker is founder and president of the Brownstone Institute. He is the author of five books, including “Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty.”

中文大紀元【名家專欄】美國最高法院瞄準真正的敵人-英文大紀元專欄作家Jeffrey Tucker撰文／原泉編譯

美國最高法院的一連串裁決讓每個人都頭暈目眩。其中最重要的，即使沒有占據所有的頭條，是西弗吉尼亞州訴美國環境保護署（Environmental Protection Agency，簡稱EPA）案。大多數大法官的意見令人印象深刻，但我發現真正精彩的是大法官尼爾‧戈薩奇（Neil Gorsuch）的贊同意見。

這就是我們看到的發展方向，對國家行政權力的重大而深受歡迎的遏制。

回顧一下這起訴訟，針對的是一個未經選舉產生的官僚機構，在沒有選民或立法機構監督的情況下，治理著這個國家。一百多年來，最高法院大都對這種行為放行，僅僅是基於這樣一個假設，即這些官僚機構中的“專家們”能處理得很好，忠實地解釋立法，並只是制定規則以方便遵守。

幾代人過去了，（未經選舉產生的官僚機構）這個（立法、行政、司法之外的）政府第四部門在規模、範圍和實力上都有所增長。在大多數情況下，每次都是一個企業或一個行業感受到它的惡劣影響，人們已經聽說了這類故事。汽車經銷商抱怨勞工部是如何把他逼瘋的，機器零件制造商被職業安全與健康管理局的來信搞得暈頭轉向，能源公司永遠無法滿足環保署（EPA）的要求。

這些都是故事，我們覺得很遺憾，但我們通常避免把這些當作是系統性的、無處不在的、對自由的理念本身構成危險。但是，這樣的聯邦機構約有432個。《獨立宣言》的起草者們早就註意到了官僚機構的存在，他們指責英國國王“濫設新官署，委派大批官員到這裏來騷擾我們的人民，侵吞他們的財產”。

他們為結束暴政進行了一場革命，但是現在，我們有了本土的官僚機構，從1883年的《彭德爾頓法案》（Pendleton Act）開始，一直持續到整個20世紀，每一屆新政府都會創建自己的官僚機構。

這些機構有自己的權力，奇怪的是，這個話題在選舉期間幾乎沒有被提及，這是有原因的。競選公職的政客們喜歡宣傳他們做出改變的權力，他們甚至相信這一點。事實上，相對於行政國家（The Administrative State）而言，民選官員對公共生活事務幾乎沒有影響力。

註：行政國家是這個國家的政府在行政職能上大幅擴張，使得人民逐漸依賴政府，甚至受政府行政部門不當壓迫的現象。在此情況下，行政部門占有極重要的地位。雖然立法、司法權尚能發揮其職能，但行政組織與運作變得特別重要，可說是一權獨大。

正如川普（特朗普）發現的那樣，即使是總統也不是深層政府（deep state）的對手。

以下是自2020年3月以來發生的事情：野獸露出了真面目，不知從哪裏冒出來的，這些未經我們投票選舉的陌生的機構和人員，在統治著我們的生活。他們限制旅行、強制人們戴口罩、關閉教堂和學校、禁止企業經營，它們的規模大到能夠負擔得起華盛頓強大的遊說機構。整個場面令人震驚，引起了許多人，包括一些誠實的法官的註意。

一旦發現了問題，就不能視而不見。

僅考慮通貨膨脹問題：這在很大程度上是美聯儲的責任，美聯儲是最可怕的深層政府機構之一。該機構成立於1913年，當時的承諾是終結“野貓銀行”（wildcat banking），遏制貨幣和信貸擴張，以便我們有一個更穩定的經濟環境促進增長。

註：“野貓銀行”是美國銀行法實施前胡亂發行紙幣的銀行，這些銀行拿不可靠的擔保發行幾乎一文不值的貨幣，且都設在人跡罕至的地方，以阻止人們拿銀行券去兌現。

即使是現在，人們仍相信美聯儲將以某種方式解決衰退和通脹問題，盡管更深入的分析表明，美聯儲本身就是這兩個問題的根源。當然，美聯儲不可能既是問題，也是解決方案。就像疾控中心無法通過權力和藥劑，讓教科書上的病原體消失一樣，這一點越來越明顯。

讓我們快速了解一下美聯儲設定的2%的通脹目標。在人們看來，似乎他們早已超越了這個目標，以至於它完全是表面文章。但美聯儲有個小伎倆，稱其不遵循傳統的通脹指數，如消費者或生產者價格指數，它采納的衡量指標更花哨，是個人消費支出物價指數（PCE）。毫無疑問，當看PCE時，我們發現美聯儲的工作相當出色！

最近，當PCE本身激增時，這一切都改變了。現在，美聯儲被揭露出完全不稱職，在某種程度上，與疾控中心（CDC）、國立衛生研究院（NIH）、勞工部（DOL）、能源部（DOE）、交通部（DOT）、衛生與公眾服務部（HHS）、國土安全部（DHS）、聯邦貿易委員會（FTC）、證券交易委員會（SEC），以及其它所有這些光鮮亮麗的3個字母的機構沒有區別，這些機構雇用了近300萬人，這些人無法被解雇或控制。我們這個時代的獨特之處在於，政府裏的專家階層，往好了說是騙子，往壞了說是不折不扣的威脅。

以下是美聯儲目前首選的通脹衡量指標今天的情況：

美聯儲的能力也就如此！然而，究竟該如何控制該機構呢？他們不是我們投票選的，美聯儲董事會由總統任命，並經參議院批準，但這種控制大多形同虛設。那些自以為是的經濟學家們用空話和花哨的金融學，圍著政治行為者們轉，那麼他們除了批準之外還能做什麼呢？

政治階層往往表現得像一塊遙遠的土地的在外領主：他們別無選擇，只能相信雇用的人會做好工作。行政機構成為真正的權力機構，不僅執行政策，而且還制定和執行規則。

隨著新冠病毒的出現，這整個騙局被揭露給每一個人——不僅僅是小企業，而是美國的每一個個人和家庭。整個官僚機構向我們宣布了他們一直相信，但很少說的話：你的生活不是你自己的，你的工作就是服從。這就引出了一個有趣的問題，我們到底要什麼，我們想要什麼樣的社會和政府？當然這應該由人民來決定！

最高法院最近的裁決涉及的是如何將法規應用於燃煤電廠的技術層面，但該裁決的影響遠非如此。環保署正在決定政策，甚至是制定政策，在立法上肆意妄為，總是假定法院始終並且處處都會站在這些機構一邊，而不是站在行業這邊，甚至也不聽從立法的文字。這次最高法院說不：一直以來，是環保署在非法運作。

這一判決令人震驚，因為它顯示了最高法院正在做它該做的事情，對政府自身權力野心進行法律制約，這就是制憲者的意圖，然而，我們才剛剛開始。最高法院需要從根本上打擊深層政府的整個機制，從《雪佛龍（美國公司）訴自然資源保護委員會案》（Chevron deference ）（1984年）、《公共衛生服務法案》（Public Health Services Act）（1944年）、《聯邦儲備法案》（Federal Reserve Act）（ 1913年），一直延申到《彭德爾頓法案》（Pendleton Act ）（1883年）。一個由不見真面目的深層政府統治的國家，不是代議制民主，也不符合美國憲法。

這一決定影響深遠，不僅適用於環保署及其通過命令、控制來改變全球氣候的精心計劃，也適用於所有其它機構，包括疾控中心，甚至美聯儲本身。

他們都應該通過他們選出的代表對人民負責。如果我們不能回到那個體制，我們就會失去一切。

作者簡介：

傑弗裏‧塔克（Jeffrey Tucker）是布朗斯通研究所（Brownstone Institute）的創始人、主席。他著有五本書，包括《右翼集體主義：對自由的另一個威脅》（Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty）。

原文：Supreme Court Targets the Real Enemy刊登於英文《大紀元時報》。