The Mackinac Center reports:
Who was George Sutherland? Some remember him as a Michigan-trained justice of the United States Supreme Court, but he was more than that.You might say George Sutherland had different views on the U.S. Constitution than Professor Obama and Cass Sunstein:
In 1922, President Harding appointed Sutherland to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Sutherland became a jealous protector of individual liberty. One of his first cases, for example, was Adkins v. Lyons in which Sutherland supported a woman’s right to negotiate a wage contract for herself — without state regulation. In a later case, New Ice Company v. Liebmann, Sutherland wrote the majority opinion that struck down an Oklahoma law that virtually prohibited anyone from entering the ice business to compete with the monopolistic New State Ice Company.If you are a federal judge, and you are reading this, you have a moral obligation to uphold the views of George Sutherland and declare ObamaCare unconstitutional.
As Sutherland was to discover, the New Ice case was the tip of an emerging iceberg in government regulation. The NRA, which was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program, far surpassed the New State Ice Company in its threat to free enterprise. All major industries in the nation were invited to form cartels. They were urged to develop industry-wide codes that would regulate the prices charged for the products they made, wages paid, number of hours worked, and even the quality of products sold. These NRA rules would, in practice, be binding on all corporations in their industry, even those who opposed such interference.
Over 500 NRA codes emerged, which stifled American production through higher prices for goods and lack of innovation in industry. As monetary expert Benjamin Anderson observed, “NRA was not a revival measure. It was an anti-revival measure.” Indeed, it was a major reason the Great Depression worsened in 1933.
Finally, the Schechter brothers challenged the constitutionality of this law which forced so much of American business into a straitjacket. Their lawyers observed that the NRA was trying “to regulate human activities literally from the cradle to the grave and beyond.” For example, the tailors of America decided in their code to establish 40 cents as the minimum price that could be charged to press a pair of pants. When Jack Magid in New Jersey charged a customer only 35 cents, he was sent to jail for breaking the law.
In the Schechter Poultry Corporation v. U.S. case, Sutherland ruled against the NRA and for the rights of the Schechter brothers to sell chickens freely in the Jewish community of New York City. Justices Sutherland and James McReynolds were effective in their questioning — so effective that the audience frequently erupted in laughter as the government tried to explain why customers should not have been allowed to select the particular chickens they wished to purchase from the Schecters, but should have had them selected randomly instead.
So persuasive was Sutherland, and so bad was the NRA, that the Supreme Court voted unanimously that the law was unconstitutional. Three years later Sutherland retired from the court, leaving future generations to defend the Constitution. Seventy years after his landmark rebuke of the NRA we should remember him for his commitment to individual liberty and for temporarily halting the rise of big government.
