Panacea in the Parker

"No sir! Politics nowadays ain't what they were back in the eighteenth century--no initiative, no enterprise." This was the first remark we heard at Monday night's Tax Emancipation Dinner in the Ballroom of Boston's Parker House. Here a crowd of two hundred Boston businessmen, lawyers, and legislators gathered to hear a Congressman explain how to run the historical clock back forty years.

The Congressman was New York's Representative Ralph W. Gwinn; the dinner, sponsored by the Rental Housing Federation of Boston Real Estate Board, was excellent. By 8:30, cigar smoke filled the air and an injudicious mixture of highballs and beer stimulated a high level of noise from the table behind us. But Gwinn's voice, deep and sincere, quieted them down quickly. His subject was how to limit federal taxing power and stop government socialism and, although sponsored by one of the nations' more vociferous lobbies, he addressed himself to "the ordinary, unorganized, politically uninfluential citizen."

The Representative quickly explained that the original genius of our government lay in the limitations on its power rather than in its systems of popular representation or checks and balances. But these limitations, which centered on power of the purse, have disappeared. Congressmen are granting the government "illegitimate functions" like security benefits, school lunches, and public housing ("the NKVD American Plan") and voting increased taxes to pay for them. And, according to Gwinn, the root of this evil is the Sixteenth or income tax Amendment--passed in 1913. The solution, then, is to restore the limitation that prevailed from 1789 to 1913 by a Constitutional amendment to limit the federal tax take for non-military purposes to 5% of the national income. Such an amendment would forcibly restrict the government to its "legitimate" function (which remains undefined along with the amendment's necessary disastrous effects on our government's foreign and domestic commitments).

Furthermore, according to Gwynn, this amendment could not come from Congress which has sold out to the voters and where two parties are worse than one in a welfare state like ours. It must come from the small minority, pressuring their state legislatures to petition Congress to call a special Constitutional Convention.

Gwinn ended on this plea for minority action. While his historical throwback may amuse some, his plan is no joke. More than twenty states have petitioned Congress for just such a Convention, and only thirty-two such petitions are necessary.