UPS versus FEDEX

[Dr.Who]

Here is an interesting little article with a big message:

http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/10/ups-vs-fedex-whiteboard

It seems that somehow along the way the government rules that UPS must obey have been written to be different than the government rules that FEDEX must obey. I have no doubt that both companies lobbied congress many times to get a huge hodgepodge of rules enacted with the final result being unpredictably chaotic if not blind.

But the result is that presently UPS is trying to get congress to change the rules that govern FEDEX. I don't know if the rules UPS wants changed are ridiculous (I am pretty sure I could guess correctly that they are) and need to be changed anyway. But I think we all know why UPS wants the change - to beat FEDEX. Does FEDEX presently have an unfair advantage? I don't care, there is a bigger lesson here.

The government is big enough to screw any business. Overnight. And of course that is true. Tomorrow they could rewrite the rules so that FEDEX got ALL of the business and UPS went out of business. Or they could rewrite the rules so that UPS got all of the business and FEDEX went out of business.

WE could write a thousand threads like this one each time substituting the names of two different companies and the only consistent message would be that the government is big enough to cream the diary industry in favor of the orange juice industry. They can sock it to Nike in favor of Adidas. They can make KFC kick the bucket. They could pelt a leathermaker. They could bulldoze a construction company. They could shoot down Boing. Etc.

 

[Little-Acorn]

There's a reason the original Framers wrote the Constitution to LIMIT the Fed govt's powers to only those explicitly listed. And you have identified that reason clearly.

Unfortunately, the Framers had to leave a LITTLE leeway in the powers they described... especially since the Constitution was written to replace the Articles of Confederation, and cure some of the ills the Articles had.

One of those ills was commercial infighting between the states, tariffs being charged by states on goods that crossed state borders, etc. So the Framers wrote that the Fed could regulate interstate commerce... mostly to get that power out of the hands of states and make it more uniform.

The big-govt advocates immediately decided that this meant the Fed could regulate any item that was passing from one state to another... or had passed, or would pass sometime in the future. And not only could the Fed regulate the actual passage, but it could also regulate the item's manufacture, pricing, usage, the materials it was made from, and a whole host of other things the did NOT have anything to do directly with its passage across a state border.

The Constitution gave them an inch, and the big-govt advocates promptly took a mile. And then another mile. And another, ad infinitum. You have described some of those miles, Dr.Who.

In 1995, lawyers for the big-govt advocates tried to describe their justification for banning firearms at schools based on the Commerce Clause. They went through the most far-reaching, tortured "logic" you could imagine, spelling out every connection for the Supreme Court. And the justices literally laughed them out of the courtroom. (US v. Lopez).

Some people thought this had finally put a reasonable damper on the abuse of the Commerce Clause. But in fact, it merely lopped off one of the many extra miles the big-govt advocates had taken, leaving them many more to play with and abuse, as you noted above.

We won't be back to sensible application of the Commerce Clause, until it is once again restricted to regulating actual passage across state lines, and NOT to any other characteristics of the items not DIRECTLY related to that passage.

And that return to sensibility, will cut the Federal Register just about in half.

And then we'll need to start working on the big-govt advocates' similar abuse of the "Commerce Clause", abuse of the 10th amendment, abuse of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th, and many other fields where miles have been taken.