The oldest corruption has the newest face

Reason reports that the Trump administration has pushed to pause a ban on hemp-derived products — not, the magazine argues, out of any principled objection to prohibition, but out of favoritism toward interests that stand to profit from the pause. I was not present for this maneuver, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the shape of the civic question is as old as republics themselves: when the executive arm of government inserts itself into a marketplace to spare one industry and crush another, it is no longer governing — it is dealing.

I spent considerable effort in my own time arguing against the power of a national bank precisely because such an institution, once chartered, would inevitably serve those close enough to its directors to benefit from its decisions. The small farmer, the independent tradesman, the first-time grower trying to build a livelihood — these citizens would stand at the back of the line while the well-connected stood at the front. I see no reason to believe that tendency has been reformed out of human nature in the two centuries since.

Hemp itself is a crop I knew well — a practical plant of wide utility, the kind of thing an agrarian republic ought to cultivate without the permission of distant officials. Whether a ban on its derivatives is wise policy, I leave to those with command of the modern chemistry involved. But the question Reason raises is not botanical; it is republican. When a policy is shaped by the preferences of favored private interests rather than by the public interest, it does not matter whether the underlying question is hemp, cotton, or coal. The corruption is in the method, not the commodity.

The small grower is the citizen I have always been most anxious to protect. He has no lobbyist. He has no anteroom in the White House. He has only the law — and when the law is bent by executive discretion in the direction of those who can afford access, the small grower finds himself governed not by the republic but by his better-placed competitor. That is, in miniature, the very tyranny the Declaration was written to name.

I would urge readers to hold this principle regardless of which administration is in office or which industry is under discussion: the executive power has no legitimate mandate to tilt a marketplace toward private friends. If the hemp ban is unjust, repeal it openly, by legislation, through the deliberate process the Constitution prescribes. If it is just, enforce it equally. What the public interest cannot abide — what no honest republican of any era should abide — is a government that suspends the rules selectively, on a schedule set by those with the most to gain. That is not policy. It is patronage with a federal seal.