Goodwin Liu Mangles the Constitution

Gov. Jerry Brown’s Tuesday appointment of Goodwin Liu to the California Supreme Court will continue the state’s lurch to the Left. Liu clearly believes in a highly activist judiciary for which the U.S. Constitution and the California Constitution are as malleable as Silly Putty. He think our traditional rights, especially property rights and the right to be left alone, are expendable on the road to  Utopia.

Yesterday, my colleague Steven Greenhut quoted a passage from Liu’s free online book, “Keeping Faith With the Constitution.” It’s worth analyzing the passage at length to see precisely why Liu, and his judicial philosophy, will so damage Californians’ life, liberty and property. Here’s the passage:

“Today, Americans do not think twice about the authority of government to respond to economic needs. Social Security, Medicare, collective bargaining and minimum wage laws, disaster assistance, regulation of the financial markets, and robust initiatives to stabilize the economy comprise large parts of the work we expect our federal and state governments to do. Reasonable people may disagree about the specific policies needed to deal with various economic conditions, with regulation of the marketplace, and with the economy as a whole. But there is no question that developing, enacting, and implementing such policies are an important and legitimate part of what government does.”

Parsing Liu

Let’s look at the clauses:

* “Today, Americans do not think twice about the authority of government to respond to economic needs.” Yes they do. That’s why the Tea Party racked up such large victories last November, expelling Liu’s fellow Left-Democrats from scores of seats in Congress and state legislatures, and likely will continue to do so next year.

Certainly, the Republicans caused much of the economic damage when they ran the show in the early 2000s under President Bush and the Republican-run Congress, as well as under Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. But Democrats, under President Obama and when they controlled both houses of Congress, made matters even worse. And Democrats in California are continuing Schwarzenegger’s policies of destruction.

* “Social Security.” It’s going broke. Starting in 2010, reported the New York Times, the system began paying out more than it takes in. Due to the ongoing Greatest Recession, that happened seven years before previously expected. Things will get worse as 70 million Baby Boomers continue retiring. Sharp cuts in benefits are inevitable.

* “Medicare.” It’ll be broke in 2024, just 13 years from now, its Trustees reported in May. That’s also five years earlier than expected due to the sinking economy.

* “collective bargaining.” Private-sector union membership has declined sharply from around 35 percent in World War II, 66 years ago, to just 6.9 percent today. According to economist Robert Samuelson, “By and large, union concessions were too little, too late. Corporate managers, their business models besieged, were also slow. Both executives and union leaders underestimated the vulnerability of once impregnable market positions. The downfall of the ‘Big Three’ automakers epitomized this disastrous cycle. Nonunion firms gained market share; union membership fell. Unions also had a harder time organizing other companies, because both managers and workers feared job loss.”

The decline of private-sector unions has been accompanied by the rise of pubilic-sector unions. But these unions are different. As one union boss said during last November’s election, “This is our opportunity to elect our own bosses.” For government unions, Liu’s beloved “collective bargaining” means electing compliant politicians, so the unions sit on both sides of the bargaining table. Citizens also have a role: paying the massive taxes that are needed to fund lavish government-worker pay, perks and pensions.

But even that is falling apart. As Ed Ring just wrote in City Journal California (party quoting Greenhut), even now, “Public-employee unions underestimate the magnitude of California’s unfunded retirement liability.” You can only squeeze so much juice from an orange — or money from a taxpayer.

* “minimum wage laws.” In the 1970s, economist Walter Williams’ path-breaking research documented how minimum wage laws were enacted mainly to keep lower-cost black workers from taking jobs from whites.

Here’s a two-minute YouTube by Williams explaining how the minimum wage is a “racist tool”:

* “disaster assistance.” Remember President Bush’s comment to FEMA boss Michael Brown during the Hurricane Katrina disaster? “Heck of a job, Brownie,” Bush said — even as the federal government was interfering with private and local efforts to help people and recovery from the disaster. The bigger disaster was the Federal Emergency Management Agency itself. Even President Obama mocked President Bush’s incompetence during Katrina.

The Feds also interfered with last year’s Gulf Oil spill cleanup, making matters worse.

* “regulation of the financial markets.” The ongoing Greatest Recession is proof that government itself is the major cause of our financial problems. The Feds not only were too incompetent to catch Ponzi-meister Bernie Madoff. The federal government was the major cause of the financial instability, as I noted in an article on Tuesday on how the Greatest Recession began, not just four years ago, but 10 years ago. That’s when President Bush and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan panicked after the 9/11 attacks. They debased the dollar, kept interest rates artificially low and went on wild spending binges — policies continued by their successors, Obama and Ben Bernanke.

* “and robust initiatives to stabilize the economy.” Beginning with the two Bush bailouts of 2008, especially the TARP, and continuing with Obama’s bailouts and Bernake’s inflationary Quantitative Easing schemes, the government’s actions have further destabilized the economy. Now, the economy is declining again. And the only real solution is to do the opposite of what Liu wants. That is, government must be cut back sharply, at all levels, including the “robust” — and gargantuan, grotesque, Brobdignagian — government of California that Liu now will judge from the bench.

Recall Brown and Liu?

Things are so bad in America now, and especially in California, that people finally are realizing that the Brown-Liu philosophy of über-big government is the cause of our problems. That the Brown-Liu philosophy means rule by a tiny elite of the wealthy and powerful, headed Brown and Lui, with everyone else their groveling peons, and the middle-class virtually eliminated.

It wouldn’t surprise me if recall efforts began against both Brown and Liu.