A favorite trick of the ruling class is to sneak laws that benefit them at the expense of the public into legislation that has nothing to do with the sneaky new law. One such law regulates how citizens can buy and sell gold. It removes restrictions on government power while restricting the freedom of the people. Unknown to most people, the law was sneaked into the totally irrelevant Obamacare legislation.
Dr. Thomas Sowell, political commentator and Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, addresses the issue in his Sept. 28 column, “Politics Versus Gold.” Excerpts from that column:
One of the many slick tricks of the Obama administration was to insert a provision in the massive Obamacare legislation regulating people who sell gold. This had nothing to do with medical care but everything to do with sneaking in an extension of the government’s power over gold, in a bill too big for most people to read.
Gold has long been a source of frustration for politicians who want to extend their power over the economy. First of all, the gold standard cramped their style because there is only so much money you can print when every dollar bill can be turned in to the government, to be exchanged for the equivalent amount of gold.
When the amount of money the government can print is limited by how much gold the government has, politicians cannot pay off a massive national debt by just printing more money and repaying the owners of government bonds with dollars that are cheaper than the dollars with which the bonds were bought. In other words, politicians cannot cheat people as easily….
(T)he Obama administration sees people’s freedom to buy and sell gold as something that can limit what the government can do….
Indeed, freedom in general cramps the government’s style. Those on the left may not be against freedom in general. But, at every turn, they find the freedoms granted by the Constitution of the United States hampering the left’s agenda of imposing their superior wisdom and virtue on the rest of us….
Sneaking a provision on gold purchases and sales into massive legislation that is supposedly about medical care is just one of the many cynical tricks used to circumvent the public’s right to know how they are being governed. The Constitution begins, “We the people” but, to the left, both the people and the Constitution are just things to circumvent in order to carry out their agenda.
