Just yesterday I posted that the Obama cult demonstrates an increasing disconnect from and disregard of economics, but this example of disrespecting the American public takes the cake.

[Associated Press] Secretary Steven Chu came out swinging Friday against a House bill that would repeal a 2007 federal law effectively outlawing older forms of incandescent bulbs—an effort at energy conservation that has inflamed a wide swath of Americans who don’t care for the more expensive alternatives.

In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Chu said the more-efficient bulbs required would save consumers money over the life of the product, even if the up-front price is higher.

“We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money,” he said.

Talk about the nanny state run amok. Sec. Chu is going to have to point out to us which section of the U.S. Constitution empowers the government to judge what private spending is or is not “wasting” money, and what gives them the power to trump decisions by individual consumers.

Not to mention, I’ve owned my fair share of these mercury-laden “efficient” bulbs and found them lacking – many times the price of typical incandescents yet having lasted not much longer.

A common definition of hubris is when panels of unelected bureaucrats believe they can make better economic decisions than 300 million consumers in the marketplace. But worse, not only are our they not Constitutionally empowered, but their expertise is typically incorrect and filled with unintended consequences.

Finally, I think this retort by Mark Steyn on Team Obama’s hypocrisy is great.

More to the point, I wonder if Secretary Chu has any idea how stupid this argument sounds from an administration that has wasted more of other people’s money than anybody else on the planet. Secretary Chu and his colleagues took a trillion dollars of “stimulus” and, for all the stimulating it did, might as well have given it in large bills to Charlie Sheen to snort coke off his hookers’ bellies with. (In my weekend column, I touch on only the most lurid and outrageous of the government’s many smart investment decisions: its use of stimulus dollars to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry.)

Chu on that come election day.

Found this in the letters section of the WSJ this week. Great stuff. We often call this the law of unintended consequences.

F.A. Hayek in his “The Constitution of Liberty” cites the Harvard Business Review 1958: “Consider for a moment that any one person can only know a fraction of what is going on around him. Much of what that person believes will be false rather than true . . . At any given time, vastly more is not known than is known . . . It seems possible, then, in organizing into a hierarchy of authority for the purpose of increasing efficiency, we may really be institutionalizing ignorance.” Hayek seems clearer, with less gobbledygook on page 29, “the case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends. . . . Liberty is essential in order to leave room for the unforeseeable and unpredictable; we want it because we have learned to expect from it the opportunity of realizing many of our aims. It is because every individual knows so little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.”

[Ship Complaint Blog] Florida is currently open to direct shipments from wineries. The state’s previous direct shipping legislation was found to be unconstitutional under Granholm and was overturned in a 2005 court ruling under Bainbridge, et al. v. Turner. For the fifth time in six years, direct shipping legislation is being considered in Florida (no bills were considered last year). As introduced, HB 837 and counterpart SB 854 would allow wineries (not retailers) to ship directly to consumers. The bill contains severely onerous restrictions that would prevent most wineries from obtaining a permit or shipping into the state, including a 250,000 gallon production volume cap (capacity cap), bond, and a mandate to give wholesalers a year’s notice that the winery plans to direct ship.

HB 837 was voted on and determined “favorable” by the Business & Consumer Affairs Subcommittee on March 22, 2011, and is now in the Government Operations Appropriations Subcommittee.

If the idea that the government should be able to prevent you as a private consumer to purchase wine from a winery via the Internet or direct marketing is repugnant, please be sure to contact your representatives. This was in Florida, but your state may be doing the same.

You can visit www.freethegrapes.com to take advantage of their form letters so you can let your local rep know that you oppose these unfree market principles.

Here’s the Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon. But first, do you remember the old Star Trek (nerd alert: The Omega Glory) where Kirk, Spock, McCoy and a hapless red-shirted security guard beam down to a planet where the inhabitants, calling themselves “Yangs” and “Kohms,” short for Yankees and Communists, have been warring for centuries? A renegade Federation Capt. Ron Tracey, believing that he and his ship’s — the Exeter — remaining crew are marooned on the planet, had been helping the Kohms — right away cluing the audience that Tracey lacks Kirk’s wisdom in figuring out the puzzle of the two warring sides — against the Prime Directive. The Yangs end up capturing Kirk and crew, but Kirk saves the day by realizing that the Yangs are parallel to our culture in every way (nerd alert: Hodgkin’s Law of parallel planet development) including the flag, pledge, and constitution, and explaining at the episode’s end that the “sacred document” the Yangs claimed was only for the eyes of “chiefs, or sons of chiefs” are actually for everyone — and why the document starts “We The People.” The Yang leader, Cloud William, eventually promises Kirk that while he doesn’t fully understand, he swears to allow all his people, and even the Kohms, access to his people’s founding documents.

You have to love this simple recollection by Mr. Pilon that the U.S. Constitution was never intended to be something that only lawyers, or sons of lawyers, or Congressmen, could interpret. Somewhere our law system ran amok, and like the Yangs in Star Trek, we’ve forgotten this basic truth.

Thus the first question the new Congress should ask of any proposed law is: Does the Constitution authorize us to pursue this end? If not, that ends the matter. If yes, the second question is: Are the means we employ “necessary and proper,” as constrained by the principles of federalism and the rights retained by the people that are implied by a government of enumerated powers? In essence, the Constitution is no more complicated than that. It was written to be understood by ordinary citizens.

How, then, did modern constitutional law get so complicated and federal power so expansive? One reason is that several provisions in the Constitution were written broadly to allow for contingencies. But those provisions were never meant to open the floodgates to boundless congressional power. The presumption was that any political redress of unexpected problems would be done with due deference to the larger structure, aims and principles of the document. This brings us to the main reason Congress leapt its constitutional bounds: a fundamental shift in the climate of ideas.

Early 20th-century Progressives, inspired by European social democracies, rejected the Constitution’s plan for limited government, advocating social engineering schemes instead. Rule by government experts was the order of the day. As people and politicians succumbed to those ideas, especially in the states, courts would often block the schemes in the name of constitutional liberty. When Progressives later took their agenda to the federal level, however, and the Supreme Court continued to block it, President Franklin D. Roosevelt unveiled his infamous plan to pack the court with six new members.

The threat cowed the court, which in a pair of 1937 decisions (Helvering v. Davis and NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp) essentially gave Congress the power to redistribute and regulate at will, eviscerating the very foundation of the Constitution: the doctrine of enumerated powers. A year later, in U.S. v. Carolene Products, the court reduced property rights and economic liberty to second-class status under the Constitution. And in National Broadcasting Co. v. U.S. (1943), it allowed Congress to delegate ever more of its vastly expanded legislative powers to administrative agencies in the quickly expanding executive branch.

Now that one-party rule has ended in Washington, we’ll see President Obama use these agencies to bypass Congress and promote his progressive agenda. On Dec. 23, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a schedule for setting greenhouse gas standards for power plants and oil refineries over the next two years, notwithstanding that Congress has rejected cap-and-trade legislation. The Obama administration has also quietly issued regulations providing for the end-of-life counseling that the Senate rejected when it passed ObamaCare. Expect far more of this in the next two years.

The 112th Congress will have its hands full simply monitoring what the more than 300 federal agencies are up to. But if the new members want to get to the root of the problem—if they want to start restoring limited constitutional government—they’ll have to do far more.

First, they’ll have to keep the debate focused on the Constitution, not simply on policy or practicality.

Second, they’ll have to reject without embarrassment the facile liberal objection that the courts have sanctioned what we have today, and thus all a member need do when introducing a bill is check the box that says “Commerce Clause,” “General Welfare Clause” or “Necessary and Proper Clause.”

If these clauses in the Constitution enable Congress to enact the individual health-insurance mandate, then they authorize Congress to do virtually anything. The Supreme Court was wrong in allowing Congress to exercise power not granted it by the Constitution, and courts today are wrong when they uphold those precedents—even if they’re not in a position today to reverse them until Congress takes greater responsibility.

Third, Congress has to start taking greater responsibility. Congress must acknowledge honestly that it has not kept faith with the limits the Constitution imposes. It should then stop delegating its legislative powers to executive agencies. Congress should either vote on the sea of regulations the executive branch is promulgating or, far better, rescind or defund those regulations, policies and programs that never should have been promulgated in the first place (rescission may not be possible during the next two years, but defunding is). And of course Congress should undertake no new policies not authorized by the Constitution.

This is all a tall order, and it will take years. But the alternative—our Leviathan state, which recognizes no limits on its power—is simply unconstitutional.

Here’s Kevin Williamson on the curious (0ver) reaction by liberal lamestream media in condemnation of gun ownership.

People have a visceral reaction to guns, which is why the reactions to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago have been so emotional. One extraordinarily telling reaction came from David Ignatius of the Washington Post, whose response was headlined: “The Supreme Court Gun Decision Moves Us Toward Anarchy.” Mr. Ignatius  wrote: “My biggest worry with Monday’s Supreme Court decision is that by ruling, in effect, that every American can apply for a gun license, the justices will make gun ownership much more pervasive in a society that already has too many guns. After all, if I know that my neighbor is armed and preparing for Armageddon situations where law and order break down (as so many are — just read the right-wing blogs) then I have to think about protecting my family, too. That’s the state-of-nature, everyone for himself logic that prevails in places such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Mr. Ignatius here is remarkably forthcoming: He is not worried about guns in the hands of criminals, but about guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, people who are willing to apply for a permit and jump through the bureaucratic hoops re­quired of gun buyers. His nightmare is not an America in which criminals run amok with Glocks, or even an America in which gun permits are handed out liberally, but an America in which “every American can apply for a gun license.” Never mind the approval of licenses, the mere application gives Mr. Ignatius the howling fantods. It is wonderfully apt that he references the “state of nature” in his criticism, imagining a Hobbesian version of life in these United States: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, permeated by the aroma of cordite. Mr. Ignatius, like Thomas Hobbes, is casting his lot with Leviathan and makes no apology for it.

That is the essence of 21st-century progressivism: In matters ranging from financial derivatives to education to gun control, the Left believes that we face a choice between a masterful state and a Hobbesian war of all against all. For all of the smart set’s vaunted and self-congratulatory nu­ance, it is this absolutist vision, this Manichean horror, that forms the foun­dation of progressivism.

The recess appointment of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) head Don Berwick is unlike previous and common recess appointments by past presidents, explains Avik Roy, for several reasons. First among them is that generally presidents use recess appointments because Congress drags its feet on hearings. But in Berwick’s case, Obama used the recess appointment precisely to avoid hearings which Republicans were eager to have to expose Berwick’s extreme views on health care. Once more the Obama administration displays that it has no intention of keeping its promise of an open, transparent and debate-healthy administration.

4. Berwick is an advocate of socialized, government-controlled health care. As we and others have documented, Berwick is “starry-eyed” about Britain’s National Health Service, in which government owns the insurers, the hospitals, and the doctors’ offices. He is a highly intelligent and articulate defender of that position. Liberals claim that Republicans are taking his views out of context. If that is true, why not give Berwick a public platform to explain himself? The answer is clear: Berwick would only generate more controversy if he aired his views in Congress. And we’re not talking “controversy” in the mountain-out-of-a-molehill sense: We’re talking about the basic philosophy of whether or not we should have a free or centrally-planned health care system. The American public and, more importantly, the American idea, are not on Berwick’s side.

Read the rest.

Another example: this way Obama doesn’t have to worry about Berwick answering a question such as: “According to the Boston Globe the ‘The number of people who appear to be gaming the state’s health insurance system by purchasing coverage only when they are sick quadrupled from 2006 to 2008, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday from the Massachusetts Division of Insurance.’ How will government-funded medical programs at the federal level not meet the same fate?”

If only George Will were in Congress he could ask Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan these questions:

– It would be naughty to ask you about litigation heading for the Supreme Court concerning this: Does Congress have the right, under its enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce, to punish the inactivity of not purchasing health insurance? So, instead answer this harmless hypothetical: If Congress decides that interstate commerce is substantially affected by the costs of obesity, may Congress require obese people to purchase participation in programs such as Weight Watchers? If not, why not?

– The government having decided that Chrysler’s survival is an urgent national necessity, could it decide that “Cash for Clunkers” is too indirect a subsidy and instead mandate that people buy Chrysler products?

– If Congress concludes that ignorance has a substantial impact on interstate commerce, can it constitutionally require students to do three hours of homework nightly? If not, why not?

– Can you name a human endeavor that Congress cannot regulate on the pretense that the endeavor affects interstate commerce? If courts reflexively defer to that congressional pretense, in what sense do we have limited government?

– In Federalist 45, James Madison said: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite.” What did the Father of the Constitution not understand about the Constitution? Are you a Madisonian? Does the doctrine of enumerated powers impose any limits on the federal government? Can you cite some things that, because of that doctrine, the federal government has no constitutional power to do?

– Is it constitutional for Arizona to devote state resources to enforcing federal immigration laws?

– Is there anything novel about the Arizona law empowering police officers to act on a “reasonable suspicion” that someone encountered in the performance of the officers’ duties might be in the country illegally?

– The Fifth Amendment mandates “just compensation” when government uses its eminent domain power to take private property for “public use.” In its 2005 Kelo decision, the court said government can seize property for the “public use” of transferring it to wealthier private interests who will pay more taxes to the government. Do you agree?

– Should proper respect for precedent prevent the court from reversing Kelo? If so, was the court wrong to undo the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregating the races with “separate but equal” facilities is constitutional?

– In 1963, President John Kennedy said Congress should “make a commitment . . . to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.” Was he right?

– In 1964, Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a principal sponsor of that year’s Civil Rights Act, denounced the “nightmarish propaganda” that the law would permit preferential treatment of an individual or group because of race or racial “imbalance” in employment. What happened?

– William Voegeli, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, writes: “The astonishingly quick and complete transformation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, from a law requiring all citizens be treated equally to a policy requiring that they be treated unequally, is one of the most audacious bait-and-switch operations in American political history.” Discuss.

– In a 2003 case affirming the constitutionality of racial preferences in law school admissions, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” If you are a sitting justice in 2028, do you expect to conclude that such preferences can no longer survive constitutional scrutiny because they no longer serve a compelling public interest?

– The president is morose about the court’s Citizens United decision holding that the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make “no law” abridging freedom of speech, means no laws abridging a corporation’s freedom to speak, including nonprofit advocacy corporations such as the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club. The court called it “censorship” for government “to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear.” Do you agree?

– You have noted that the court often considers legislative motives when deciding First Amendment cases. Should the court consider legislators’ motives if, in response to Citizens United, they impose new burdens on corporate speech?

– When incumbent legislators write laws restricting the quantity, content and timing of speech about legislative campaigns, are not their motives presumptively suspect?

– Regarding campaign finance “reforms”: If allowing the political class to write laws regulating the quantity, content and timing of speech about the political class is the solution, what is the problem?

– If the problem is corruption, do we not already have abundant laws proscribing that?

– If the problem is the “appearance” of corruption, how do you square the First Amendment with Congress restricting speech to regulate how things “appear” to unspecified people?

– Incumbent legislators are constantly tinkering with the rules regulating campaigns that could cost them their jobs. Does this present an appearance of corruption?

– Some persons argue that our nation has a “living” Constitution; the court has spoken of “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” But Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking against “changeability” and stressing “the whole antievolutionary purpose of a constitution,” says “its whole purpose is to prevent change — to embed certain rights in such a manner that future generations cannot readily take them away. A society that adopts a bill of rights is skeptical that ‘evolving standards of decency’ always ‘mark progress,’ and that societies always ‘mature,’ as opposed to rot.” Is he wrong?

– The Ninth Amendment says: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The 14th Amendment says no state may abridge “the privileges or immunities” of U.S. citizens. How should the court determine what are the “retained” rights and the “privileges or immunities”?

– The 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people”) is, as former Delaware governor Pete du Pont has said, “to the Constitution what the Chicago Cubs are to the World Series: of only occasional appearance and little consequence.” Were the authors of the Bill of Rights silly to include this amendment?

– Should decisions of foreign courts, or laws enacted by foreign legislatures, have any bearing on U.S. courts’ interpretations of the Constitution or federal laws (other than directly binding treaties)?

– The Fifth Amendment says private property shall not be taken by government for public use without just compensation. But what about “regulatory takings”? To confer a supposed benefit on the public, government often restricts how persons can use their property, sometimes substantially reducing the property’s value. But government offers no compensation because the property is not “taken.” But when much of a property’s value is taken away by government action, should owners be compensated?

– In Bush v. Gore, which settled the 2000 election, seven justices ruled that Florida vote recounts that were being conducted in different jurisdictions under subjective and contradictory standards were incompatible with the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” Were they right?

– In Bush v. Gore, five justices held that Article II of the Constitution gives state legislatures plenary power to set the rules for presidential elections. The Florida legislature fashioned election rules to produce presidential electors immune from challenge by Congress. But the legislature said that immunity depended on electors being chosen by a certain date, which could not be met if further recounts were to ensue. The court held that allowing more recounts would have contravened the intent of Florida’s legislature. So the recounts were halted. Was the court’s majority correct?

– Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom you clerked, said: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” Can you defend this approach to judging?

– You have said: “There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.” But that depends on what the meaning of “is” is. There was no constitutional right to abortion until the court discovered one 185 years after the Constitution was ratified, when the right was spotted lurking in emanations of penumbras of other rights. What is to prevent the court from similarly discovering a right to same-sex marriage?

– Bonus question: In Roe v. Wade, the court held that the abortion right is different in each of the three trimesters of pregnancy. Is it odd that the meaning of the Constitution’s text would be different if the number of months in the gestation of a human infant were a prime number?

Here’s John Stossel:

In The Washington Times Richard W. Rahn points out that the U.S. government’s “regulatory budget” is growing faster than the overall federal budget. According to a 2011 regulatory budget report ,

“the growth in dollar terms over the last ten years is more than double that of any previous decade.”

Rahn worries that the U.S. will become

“one vast regulatory state and, eventually, the economy will become strangled by its own regulations…”

Maybe it’s already happened.  The budget of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC):

“grew tenfold (to more than $1 billion) in the past 25 years, but there is no evidence it has made us any safer from financial fraud. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. The Madoff Ponzi scheme was the biggest financial fraud ever. Yet when knowledgeable people presented evidence of the Madoff scheme to the SEC, they were just blown off. Now the SEC wants a bigger budget as a reward for its failure, and the agency and members of Congress are demanding more power for the SEC. The United States has many laws against financial fraud, so that is not the problem. The problem may be – in addition to SEC incompetence – that the public assumes the SEC is looking out for it and consequently fails to do proper due diligence. In other words, the existence of the SEC may be increasing rather than diminishing risk.”

Private enterprise has an incentive to keep lawyers from strangling the enterprise.

The Obama administration is feeling a lot of heat regarding their reaction to the continued oil leak in the Gulf. Rather than be the executives who, you know, execute action to solve a problem (hence, The Executive Branch) the Obama administration is instead focusing on “whose ass to kick” (i.e., lawsuits — and what else would one expect from lawyers) and shifting blame. This week the blame goes to the Tea Parties and fiscally responsible conservatives. Watch how deftly Obama misrepresents the arguments of those who advocate limited government (including thus by definition James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, et. al.).

Here’s Obama to The Politico’s Roger Simon:

In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: “I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.”

The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue.

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

The president makes two fundamental errors in his argument, and we’ll look at them in reverse order to which he made them.

First, it’s ridiculous to compare a Federal response to the worst petroleum accident in the history of the country to daily Federal intrusions into our lives. Indeed, the very argument of those who advocate limited government is that national disasters are precisely when one should expect an overwhelming Federal response. No fiscal conservative or tea party I know is saying that government has no role (that would be the anarchists, the people who riot at world trade meetings, and hardly conservatives).

Conversely, the tea parties legitimately question, for example, daily government intrusions on your wallet and liberty vis-a-vis the type of light bulb you may place in your home, or how many gallons per flush your toilet may use, or how much money you must pay your after-school high-school employee to check out your customers at a register, not to mention Michelle Obama’s toe-dipping into the pool of the government determining what foods are or are not good for your family.

This is why Thomas Paine (of Common Sense) wrote that government “in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one”; and why Thomas Jefferson similarly argued never to misread the “General Welfare” clause: “They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare…. [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”

The second fundamental error President Obama makes is his implied assumption that a lack of regulation enabled the BP oil leak. I have a hard time believing that when we’ve got a Federal agency called the Minerals Management Service (MMS) — an agency that the vast majority of Americans had probably never heard of six months ago — we really don’t have a plethora of federal, state and local regulations guiding the energy company. On top of that we’ve got the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and slew of other bureaucracies — again, federal, state, local — that must on a daily basis wade through no doubt pages of regulations that when stacked are higher than an oil rig. And that’s just the complexity that our government must interpret — imagine how much it costs BP, Chevron-Texaco, Exxon-Shell, etc., and thus how much that costs you and me at the pump. Remember, it was this same MMS that gave the Deepwater Horizon oil rig a safety award last year. So how would have giving the MMS, or another agency, more power prevented this accident? There’s not one shred of proof it would have.

Now, this isn’t an argument against regulation carte blanche. Rather, it’s an argument that the facts show that that oil leak was not a systemic problem — such as Obama argues — or caused from a lack of regulation, but rather caused by a series of human errors — the humans at BP and in the government did not follow the regulations, and indeed not even follow BP’s internal regulations or oil and gas industry common practices!

This understanding — that the problem was human, not systemic — is best explained, by the way, by a small Colorado oil and gas company president this weekend in the WSJ. In short, summarizes Terry Barr, the employees at BP and at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig chose to press forward despite a minimum of three “red flags” which any other company in the energy industry, argues Barr, would have halted operations.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal”.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow, this ground — The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

– President Abraham Lincoln.