Like kick out a corporation executive? One could say that if Washington, D.C., was bankrolling GM, it could sure tell GM what to do. Some might recall under the circumstances the famous photo of two National Guardsmen, in 1944, carrying out of his Chicago office the obstreperous chairman of Montgomery Ward, Sewell Avery, who had refused a Roosevelt administration edict to allow unionization.
Well, it was wartime, you know. Earlier, The New Deal had started telling farmers what they could plant -- and couldn't plant. It was an emergency, you know. A problem with emergencies, like the present one, is that the habits of command and obedience become institutionalized. Freedom retreats and only occasionally dares stick its nose back inside the door. Not so government. Government never retreats. The more we ask of it, the more it gives. The more it gives, the more latitude for action it demands -- the more oversight of our affairs.
Mr. Justice James W. Reynolds' dire and dour formulation from New Deal days -- "the Constitution is gone" -- could ring in our ears like a funeral bell. Supposing that anyone remembered McReynolds and the now-quaint intention that in a free society measures to limit government were of the essence.
Alas, Sewell Avery. Alas, Rick Wagoner. Alas, Mr. Madison, Mr. Adams, Mr. Jefferson -- the whole powdered-wig contingent that worked to pen government, that bumptious contrivance, behind a wall of carefully specified duties and powers, in the interest of keeping freedom free. I somehow don't imagine that at the end of the present emergency we are going to find freedom nearly as free as it was just weeks -- - count 'em, weeks -- ago.