Commercial Power Research Paper

1646 Words7 Pages
Syracuse University Federal Commercial Power: A Case of Regulating Liberty, Circumstance and Time David Yitzhari PSC 324, Fall Semester, Section M100 Professor John Hanley October 28, 2013 The propriety of granting the American federal government the right to regulate a high degree of economic activity within its national borders is to be assessed with respect to circumstance and timing. Inevitable calamities such as war and economic failures may threaten the very continuity and existence of an entire nation if not successfully and swiftly addressed. Thus, the national government, must fully utilize its unmatched capacity to effectively organize respective states through all economic means to minimize the prospect of an…show more content…
The duty of Congress to promote for the general welfare of the United States immediately precedes the enumerated power to regulate commerce among the states in Article One of the Constitution. Thus, the limitations of commercial power may be associated with the task of promoting for the general welfare. To take the argument a step further, it can then be conceived that the General Welfare Clause endows the national government a power, commercial or not, that is implicitly separate from the enumerated powers when circumstances raise a truly national problem with a resolution that transcends individual states’ abilities. Indeed, during the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt justified unprecedented commercial legislation with the same interpretive logic as he informed Congress in 1934, “If, as our Constitution tells us, our Federal Government was established among other things ‘to promote the general welfare,’ it is our plain duty to provide for that security upon which welfare depends” (Gillman 458). It should have come as no surprise then that the Wagner and Social Security Acts soon became major parts of the political…show more content…
As Gillman explains, two fundamental principles were at the core of the New Deal constitutional vision. The first, which has substantially been justified thus far, is that “the national government was responsible for solving all national economic and, increasingly, all social problems” while the second principle was that “the national government was responsible for guaranteeing to all American citizens a broad array of both positive and negative freedom” (Gillman 417). Put simply, negative freedom generally refers to protections from government while positive freedom can be understood as duties on government. Remarking the rhetoric Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech will shed light on the great extent to which this latter principle was prevalent. In 1941, Roosevelt exclaimed in this speech that he gave as the State of the Union address that: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear are to be regarded not only as “essential human freedom,” but also “as much elements of man's needs 
as air and sunlight, bread and salt.” It is critical to notice that the latter two stand out as peculiar. Freedom of speech and worship are original American liberties that appearing in the Bill of Rights. Freedom from want and fear are not – they are positive notions of freedom and
Open Document