A REAGAN PEARL FOR OUR TIMES

"As government expands, liberty contracts."
That pearl of wisdom was spoken by Ronald Reagan as he bid the nation farewell in 1989.
Those words, so simply stated, so profoundly rational, so invoking of the underpinning of our nation's constitution, were spoken as a gentle warning by Reagan to his fellow citizens to guard against the encroachment of government. It is a warning we have failed to heed.
Five members of the National Labor Relations Board are dictating to airline manufacturer Boeing it cannot hire non-union employees at its new plant in South Carolina, a plant already built at a cost of nearly two-billion dollars in a state where workers have a choice to join or not join a union.
Sadly, thousands of unemployed South Carolinians will remain unemployed because of the NLRB action.
Five NLRB appointees should not have the power to dictate where a business is built in this country or who can be hired by the employer to man its assembly lines.
NLRB vs. Boeing is one of many such intrusions by the Obama administration into the economic freedoms Americans won on the battlefields of the Revolutionary War and in the ensuing decade it took to found our republic. It is simply the most egregious intrusion.
That five unelected federal government officials can wield such power over the economic freedom of so many is a travesty. In time the matter will be arbitrated and settled by federal courts, but not before a high cost is paid by both Boeing and those who could be put to work earning a paycheck in these hard times.
And as the black robbed arbitrators of fairness and freedom weigh the arguments that come before them in the coming months, it would behove those judges to consider the simple wisdom of Reagan's words: "As government expands, liberty contracts."