Crisis This Constitution Day

This Constitution Day, the Democratic presidential candidate is committed to government price controls and to marching in on the patents of products developed from the findings of federally supported basic research.

She said so in 2019, and the Biden-Harris administration she is part of has set up a price controls regime for drug price-setting and proposed a technology-neutral price-based patent heist scheme.

Thus, this Constitution Day holds special import for our nation’s future, given these and other recent assaults on our form of government. Court-packing threats. Attacks on the Senate filibuster. Regulations designed to destroy established energy industries. An Administrative State that snubs the rule of law, due process, fairness and individual rights. Bureaucracies abrogating the separation of powers.

The Founding Fathers would be shocked to see how little regard Americans seem to have for the democratic republic they carefully crafted. The Founders expressed awareness of, and devoted attention to fashioning, a federal structure that would constrain the new government. States, branches of government and separated powers were intended to prevent any “long train of abuses” like that endured at the hands of the British Parliament and King George III.

To achieve success, Constitutional Convention delegates had to reach many compromises on issues, many of which were contentious or complicated. For instance, in balancing large-state and small-state equities, the solution provided states representation in the House based on population, while each state has equal representation in the Senate.

One of the noncontroversial matters considered was James Madison’s and Charles Pinckney’s proposal to include among Congress’s powers the authority to write federal patent and copyright laws. This power became Clause 8 of Article I, Section 8. The measure “secures” the private property rights of authors and inventors in their creative and inventive works.

The intellectual property clause specifies these IP rights as “exclusive” and “for limited times.” This combination of exclusivity and limited duration facilitates achieving the Founders’ stated purpose for the clause: “[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts.”

Madison’s and Pinckney’s IP proposal was adopted 12 days before the Constitution was approved. There was no debate and no opposition to it. Yet George Mason law professor Adam Mossoff notes how unique was the IP clause in Article I Section 8: “No country’s founding document had done this before.”

When the new Constitution went to the states for ratification, the “father of the Constitution” James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton explained its contents in a series of essays, the Federalist Papers. Madison briefly discussed the IP clause in Federalist 43.

“The utility of this power will scarcely be questioned,” Madison wrote. In other words, secure, exclusive property rights to the fruits of one’s intellectual labor would surely achieve the goal of incentivizing pursuits that advance knowledge and practical inventions.

Moreover, he pointed out, “The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals.” That is, the newly formed nation and its citizens benefit from the new knowledge and the inventions that expand America’s economy, improve the standard of living, and create wealth and new industries.

For a limited duration, creators and inventors enjoy exclusive ownership rights to the new property they have created. Meanwhile, the public derives benefits from these fruits of ingenuity.

The brilliance of this win-win model is lost on those who would distort core features of the U.S. Constitution.

Government price controls, such as those enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act, create imbalance in the IP clause’s promise of secure private property rights. Price controls and extortionary taxes undermine the constitutional IP framework, which over more than two centuries has proven extraordinarily fruitful.

Likewise, misuse of the Bayh-Dole Act’s “march-in” rights to “snatch” patents throws IP rights into uncertainty. The reckless Biden-Harris plan to misuse march-in rights based on product price—which is not one of the four narrow, specified grounds—throws licensing federally funded inventions into turmoil. Already this proposal is causing inventions tied to federally funded basic lab research to be regarded as toxic, tainted, too great a risk to assume.

On the promise of exclusivity and the free market, decisions are made about private investment, research and development, years before there’s a product, a price or a market.

In fact, most inventions never get to market or earn enough revenue to cover their costs. The most successful inventions and creative works are often the most valuable.

This Constitution Day, we should consider how the Constitution’s IP framework has served our nation extremely well. We must enter the fray against the live threats to the successful U.S. innovation model. If these threats take root, we have much at stake to lose. And the loss will take generations to recover from.

Kamala Harris’s Price Controls Fraud

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has pledged an economic policy of government price controls. Her anti-“price gouging” reaction may play great at the Democratic faithful’s convention in Chicago, but it’s not likely to play in Peoria—or Phoenix or Green Bay or Winston-Salem or anywhere in Georgia outside of liberal pockets of Atlanta.

Harris is talking about using price controls against groceries. But no one believes she’ll merely apply price controls so narrowly.

The Biden-Harris administration recently announced its first round of the U.S. government setting Medicare Part D drug prices. The “Inflation Reduction Act’s” drug price control measure starts with 10 medicines and escalates from there.

Above all else, know this: Harris and Biden own the highest inflation we’ve suffered in decades. They’re primarily responsible for inflation’s spike and its continued costly effects.

Harris broke the tie in the 2022 Senate vote to push the IRA into law. The IRA along with the 2021 $2 trillion “American Rescue Plan” stimulated inflation. Just because the rate of inflation has now eased to about 3%, we’re still stuck with the inflated prices of many things that remain at or well above the 9% inflation high-water mark Biden-Harris caused.

As I warned in 2020, Biden and Harris would be—and have been—a disaster in health care. See my Washington Times op-ed from four years ago and be forewarned yet again.

On drug price controls, Harris’s new DNC platform calls for adding 50 medicines a year to the IRA price controls in order to reach 500 prescription drugs.

Thanks to Harris, Biden and their IRA, seniors are experiencing higher Medicare and Part D costs along with significant disruptions in their health coverage. This year, there are the fewest standalone Part D plans since the program’s creation.

Some 89% of health insurers expect to drop more medicines from their Part D plans. Medicare patients are highly likely to see more coverage restrictions, like step therapy. And Part D premiums will rise for many seniors.

The hype from Harris, Biden and Democrats has claimed that IRA drug price controls will save beneficiaries on prescription costs. However, most Part D patients won’t see any cost savings from price setting.

Rather, they’re likely to face higher out-of-pocket costs. Assessing different plan designs offered, Milliman determines that IRA drug price setting’s out-of-pocket impact in 2026 will see more than 3 million beneficiaries paying more to take government-priced medicines.

There's also the Harris drag on the economy. Andy Laperriere notes in the Wall Street Journal that economies expand only when greater output is achieved. Higher output “comes from higher productivity, technological innovation, and increased labor input.”

But Harris’s rein of price controls and regulatory terror will weigh like an anchor on productivity gains, innovation and work incentives. Laperriere warns that Harris’s “economic agenda is price controls, higher energy costs, record regulatory costs on the private sector, and an array of government handouts.”

The National Association of Manufacturers estimates the total cost U.S. regulations impose is $3.1 trillion annually. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s estimate of total yearly compliance costs and economic effects of federal regulations is $2.1 trillion. The Biden-Harris administration has wielded a much heavier regulatory hand than its immediate predecessor administrations, CEI says.

Ask anyone who’s lived under a government-run health system and they can tell you that price controls don’t work. Government price controls cause shortages, black markets, rationing and inflation—just like the real-world results that are beginning to appear in Medicare.

Columnist Catherine Rampell recently pointed to the lack of detail Harris has disclosed about her price control plans. Rampell’s best guess about its particulars leads her to write, “It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is . . . a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food.”

Rampell’s advice to Harris exposes what’s behind Harris’s “price gouging” fraud: “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘communist,’ maybe don’t start with an agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.”

Fetterman Out to End Single-Family Zoning

Senator John Fetterman and Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester have introduced in both Houses of Congress the “Reducing Regulatory Barriers to Housing Act.” This bill would make a federal law prohibiting state and local zoning protections for single-family neighborhoods, CPR member American Policy Center warns. Read APC's article below for more information.

The American Dream or Government Control?

Your Home Is In the Path to Destruction

By

Tom DeWeese

Does your family live in a home located in a single-family neighborhood of your choosing? A place where your kids are safe to play in the yard, you can enjoy the sun in your own lounge chair, the grill is ready to be fired up for dinner, and your neighbors wave hello? Best of all, are you counting on the equity value growing with each mortgage payment, preparing for your financial future?

This is your home, your investment, your quality of life!

Well, get ready to lose it all, because a growing movement believes your happiness and success is divisive, racist, and ignores the plight of others who just don’t have the same opportunities and privileges as you.

Over the past few years, in several states and communities there has been a drive to eliminate zoning protections for single family neighborhoods such as yours. Those zoning protections were designed to keep your neighborhood in the same shape as you found it. A street of matching home styles, and of equal value, free of apartment buildings and excess crowding of those designed for lower income living space.      

As Smart Growth programs began to take control of planning policy in many cities across the nation, single-family neighborhoods became a special target. Of course, Smart Growth is about control of development, not personal choice. Its main focus is to move people out of the rural areas and suburbs into the inner cities. 15 minute cities! In such a plan there is no room for traditional two-story homes and yards. The new housing plan is for high rise apartments squeezed together in a urban setting where few cars are necessary as you walk or ride your bike to the store; and take public transportation to work. It’s all to protect the environment!

But how do you get people to accept such a major change in life? Create a crisis, of course. So today, we have a housing shortage! Proponents of the scheme declare, “We can put 100 families in the space of your house and yard that today only holds four people!”

The main question that must be asked is do we really have a housing shortage? If so, why? Aren’t home building companies able to keep up with demand for housing? And why aren’t homes affordable to the average American?

The answer is, we don’t have a housing shortage, we have a government interference problem. For the past several decades, the government has been working to limit home building. Urban Sprawl, they call it. To protect the environment, we can’t have housing developments spreading all over the place. So, many communities have put up Urban Growth Boundaries around the city and allow no growth outside that line. The poster child for this practice is Portland, Oregon. Over twenty years ago the city installed such a boundary and the restrictions have barely changed. But the population has grown by almost 80%. Now Portland has a housing crisis!

Meanwhile millions of illegal aliens are flooding our inner cities, and suddenly we have a national housing shortage. And why are homes no longer affordable? Massive inflation caused by government destruction of the value of the dollar is the real culprit. It’s a crisis caused by bad government – not zoning protections for homeowners. In fact, such home ownership used to be called the American Dream. Now it’s a crisis.        

 To make the stakes even higher in our new world of social equity, the mayor of Minneapolis declared that people living in zoning-protected single-family neighborhoods are actually self-segregating themselves from those they don’t want to live next to. He summed up the charge saying single-family neighborhoods are racist!

  Biden’s so-called infrastructure program calls for the end of zoning protections for single-family neighborhoods, to be replaced by the installation of Section 8 public housing projects. And Congress voted big money for such a plan. To implement such a plan, city councils would need to apply for the federal grants supplied through the legislation. Many have done so, but such a process would take time and there is no guarantee that every city would do it. Another approach was needed.

That plan came in June, through the bold efforts of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and Delaware Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester. Together they introduced in both Houses of Congress the “Reducing Regulatory Barriers to Housing Act.” Now, instead of waiting for local communities to make the decision to move forward with the assault on community organization, Congress can now make it a law!

In a joint statement, Fetterman and Blunt Rochester explained their motivation for introducing the bill, “Historically, zoning practices have been used to divide communities and concentrate poverty in under-resourced areas. By transforming our zoning regulations, more people would have access to affordable and diverse types of housing, high-paying jobs, and healthy and safe communities”.      

Do you catch what they are saying? Single family neighborhoods are the root of creating ghettos (under-resourced areas), but, if you move that public housing to upscale neighborhoods, then the inhabitants will have “affordable” housing. Well, yes, that can happen because the values of the homes there will certainly plummet as property values are destroyed. But how “diverse” can the housing be when government will have to do all of the building in these newly created ghettos? Oh, and don’t forget, the new inhabitants will now get “high-paying jobs” by living in these newly constructed communities. I never knew that salaries on the job depended on the type of housing one lived in! And finally, everyone is going to have “healthy and safe communities” simply because of the location.

Let’s get something straight. Ghettos are created by government controlling the living space because it’s run by bureaucrats who care little about the quality of living there. If the air conditioning stops working, a window is broken, or the land around the building is overgrown with weeds, he still gets paid. Land owned by a private owner is nearly always better taken care of because it affects the value of the property. To believe that simply moving such a nightmare to a nice neighborhood will fix the problem of poverty is just ignorance of economics.

In addition, the Fetterman bill reads, “It is the policy of the United States to provide for fair housing throughout the country, and it is in the regional and national interest to have a supply of housing that is fair, affordable, adequate, and near opportunity”. And it goes on to say that any zoning ordinance that restricts housing opportunities based on economic status or income without good reason is “contrary to the regional and national interest.”     

Now, under the Fetterman bill, they are not planning to just take your home by eminent t domain and just rebuild the neighborhood. No, that would cause controversy and possibly pushback. They can’t have that opposition blocking their high ideas. That would be too messy. Instead, they will begin a steady movement forward. First, they will begin to promote new building in the neighborhood, perhaps to allow tiny homes to be built in the backyards, or apartments over the garage. Next will come the promotion of turning some existing housing into rental apartments. Slowly the atmosphere in the neighborhood will begin to change.

Over time, the original residents will begin to sell and leave. Their property will be bought by developers who are involved in the reorganization project, such as Blackrock. And the home will be torn down, and apartment buildings placed on the land. One at a time, the original homes will disappear. Finally, you too, will have had enough, and you’ll have no choice but to leave. Mission accomplished. Your personal choice, your investment, your ability to live as you chose for your family will disappear.    

Do you want to stop this monster? Then the time has come for every homeowner in America to stand up and say NO! For perhaps the first time in your life, pick up the telephone or send a letter to your Congressman and U.S. Senators and tell them that this Fetterman bill must be thrown in the trash where it belongs. Your way of life depends on it.