Two Problems with “General Welfare”

Let us assume for the sake of discussion that you are the parent of a three year old boy.

One day you, as a dutiful and attentive parent, sit your son down and tell him one of the most important rules he needs to follow is, “Don’t wizzle-wig the ruddy rods!” He smiles back at you because he’s a good kid and says, “Okay.”

So one day a couple of weeks later you come back to your home to find it surrounded by the fire department, burned to the ground. Fortunately your son and spouse made it out unharmed before it blew up. Yay!

Inquisitively you ask the fire chief what happened. More likely you ask him what the hell happened, or some other expletive, but this blog is meant for the young as well as the old, so I won’t fill it with my ability to talk like the salty old sailor that I am. You get the point. You ask what happened.

He looks at you as if he were a bit miffed and says, “Didn’t you explain to your son how important it is to not wizzle-wig the ruddy rods? What the (expletive) kind of parent are you?”

You look at your son and ask him, “Did you wizzle-wig the ruddy rods?”

“No,” he says slowly. After a bit of a pause he says, “what’s a ruddy rod? And what’s wizzle-wig?” After all, he’s a really bright kid and catches on to the problem before you did.

Let us say, for the sake of conversation, that “ruddy rod” means “gas valve on the stove” and “wizzle-wig” is a verb meaning “to play with.”

The problem isn’t that the house burned down. The problem isn’t that your son was playing with the gas valves. The problem isn’t that you are a bad parent. The problem is that you failed to define the terms of a rule and thus rendered it unfollowable. The house blowing up wouldn’t have happened if you’d defined the terms of the rules.

So we arrive at one of the most very basic principles of law, which I’m hoping you’ll forgive my paraphrase; all laws and rules, in order to be functional or enforceable, must have their terms defined and understood if they are to be followed.

If you ever find the need to read a law you will find that there is no lack of definitions. You may or may not understand them and have to look up long chains of words before the meaning is clear to you, but you can be assured any judge or lawyer—at least a good one—does understand the terms of the written laws as they apply to them. It could be some law as minor as a parking ticket or as major as first degree murder. You can be certain to find the legal definition of a parking space or first degree murder in the laws that are supposed to deal with them.

So here I am one day talking about the funding for National Public Radio (NPR) with one of my relatives and her friend. I make the point that nowhere in the Constitution is there federal authority to take money from taxpayers for the funding of such an organization. Yes, big surprise, National Public Radio is not in the Constitution.

The response I got was, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;”

It’s a good thing, I guess, that I managed to persuade a liberal to actually quote the Constitution. Who’d have seen that one coming? Right? I was so shocked this clause was known by this person that for a while I didn’t know how to respond.

So here’s the second problem. Apparently, at a cursory glance, the liberal got it right. But I’m not the kind of guy who just sits there and takes it for granted that just because someone answered a question it is the right answer. After all, teachers tell us all the time when we’ve got our answers wrong. Don’t they?

You wouldn't see the real nature of the problem here unless you've actually read and understood the Constitution—particularly Article One, Section Eight—that the statement was out of context. He only took a fragment of the sentence as important, and assigned his own meaning to it, which had nothing to do with the original meaning within the full Section from which it was taken. So here’s another basic principle; context matters to people who want accurate communication and truth. You may—or may not be—surprised as to how often this tactic is used in politics.

Now if you combine the absence of understanding of the above two principles, with the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution, you would immediately understand how the federal government and its spending is so far out of control.

Here’s problem number one. This statement is out of context; “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;”

It is a small fragment of a sentence. Its meaning is entirely different in the context of the whole sentence, which is this:

“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow money on the credit of the United States; To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States; To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States; To establish Post Offices and Post Roads; To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court; To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations; To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy; To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces; To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress; To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings; And To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

Yes! That is a single sentence. Notice the period at the end of it. Notice that there are no other periods throughout it. And I assure you, that is the way it is punctuated on the original document. Granted, today’s grammar school teachers would mark the student issuing such a sentence as a run on but in those days this kind of writing was typical. You will find each of these clauses is separated into stand alone lines to make this single sentence easier to break down and understand. That only gives the impression, falsely in my opinion, that each clause stands alone in meaning and application.

There are some clauses of this sentence that can stand alone without the meaning changing, this is true, but there are some that cannot be extracted without shifting the meaning or changing it entirely. Remember the first of my two principles above; all laws and rules, in order to be functional or enforceable, must have their terms defined and understood if they are to be followed.

Look very closely at this; “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;"

What does the term “general Welfare” mean in this clause? You can look at it and think you know what it means because of your tendency, a natural human tendency, to fill in the gaps of things you don’t know with the things you do know. We all do it unconsciously and automatically, sometimes never realizing when we do it. It’s an assumption based on your considerations of what you think would be good for society, but it is not written law.

Now here’s the issue here. What exactly is meant by “general Welfare” is not in this fragment of the sentence.

“General Welfare,” taking only this sentence fragment, could mean anything. You might think it means “Single Payer Public Heathcare.” You might think it means “Social Security.” You might think it means “treadmills for shrimp.” You might think it means “feeding the poor.” You might think it means “National Endowment for the Arts.” You might think it means any number of a million-billion things you can think of that would be good for society. And you might be right that most of them are good for society if they were to be done outside of the authority and force of the federal government and its big guns.

It’s good to take care of people’s health. It’s good to take care of the old and disabled. It’s good to do scientific research. It’s good to feed the poor. It’s good to support artists—and I say this because I am one, please send me your money!

You are a good person for caring about such things and thinking they are good. And to that extent I agree with you.

But for President Andrew Jackson the “general Welfare of the United States” meant the Trail of Tears leading to the deaths of thousands of Indians for the sake of land and gold. For President Grant the “general Welfare of the United States” meant the initiation of a war, that some might call genocide, against the Indian tribes who were in the way of the Transcontinental Railroad. For President Franklin D. Roosevelt the “general Welfare of the United States” meant the rounding up 120,000 Japanese American citizens, confiscation of their property, and placing them in “internment camps,” which were little better than the mass prison camps in the horror stories of other countries.

For the sake of the undefined “general Welfare of the United States” President Lincoln waged a very clearly unconstitutional war, which was the bloodiest in American history, and suspended the right of habeas corpus by the wrongful imprisonment of tens of thousands of Americans who spoke out against him, supposedly for the purpose of eradicating slavery. Never mind the fact that if that’s what he wanted to do he should have found a peaceful way to do it without killing more people than we could count! So for the “general Welfare of the United States” the most recent guess on the “Civil War” is 750,000 dead Americans, whether you agree with the cause and actions or not. And that number is only the military related deaths. It does not count the deaths of the people, slaves or not, civilians, who died from disease, exposure and starvation as a result of actions like Sherman’s March and Sheridan’s total destruction of the Shenandoah Valley. For the “general Welfare of the United States” Abraham Lincoln gained a record for the destruction of life that exceeds the deaths caused by Idi Amin!

Anything, anything, anything, ANYTHING!!! can be justified under the terms of undefined “general Welfare.” If you can imagine it, it can be done. I’ve only given four examples from American history above, but there are more. Included in the above four examples are a complete denial of human rights and liberties of people who are both American citizens as well as those who aren’t. The Bill of Rights is meaningless when confronted by the undefined concept of “general Welfare.” You, your life, your rights, the rights of your family, all demonstrably mean nothing to the self-righteous causes of the masses of people under the specious reasoning of “general Welfare” when it has no definition other than what you imagine it to be.

The “general Welfare” of any country throughout the world, throughout history, has always been the openly stated cause of brutal tyrants. Even Hitler thought he was doing what was right for the “general Welfare” of the German people and the race of humanity throughout the world. He said so, frequently and in his own words.

A lot of people talk to me about this or that “interpretation” of the Constitution. I find it better to simply read what’s there without putting my own thinking or bent of nature into it. There are things it says I wish weren’t there. There are things I wish it did say that it doesn’t. The fact is it says what it says. It doesn’t need “interpretation.” You just have to read what’s there and understand it.

 “Interpretation” to me, as person who would rather know the truth of a subject, seems an awful lot like the simple method of liars. If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance baffle them with bull. Never have I found a person who cries about constitutional interpretation taking in the full context with accurate definitions. Always what I do find is that they’ve inserted some program, benefit, or entitlement; they themselves have a vested interest in, which isn’t there.

It’s just too bad the General Welfare clause doesn’t have something that defines exactly what the founders meant by it, so we don’t have to interpret it. You know, something that acts as a guideline for what general welfare means and keeps the federal government acting within its clearly defined authority. Isn’t it?

Here’s a hint for you then. I’ll make it subtle so you’ll be forced to think about it with all possible erudition.

READ THE REST OF THE SENTENCE!!!

Particularly the part of it that says, "And To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

Maybe read the Tenth Amendment while you're at it.

It may or may not represent the government you would wish and hope for in the wildest of your dreams. But it does represent the government that we are supposed to but don't have.

And by all means tell your son not to play with the gas valves on the stove!