The Claremont Institute has a long and informative history of the central issue of in American politics: the size and scope of government. The dry recitation of facts is inexorable. Although it is fashionable to depict politics as a war between welfare state liberals and small government conservatives “the welfare state battle between liberals and conservatives has been as evenly matched as the one at Little Big Horn between Sitting Bull and Custer. Real, per capita federal spending on Human Resources was 15 times greater in 2007 than in 1940.” Human Resources spending is an OMB term for
- Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services
- Health (excluding Medicare)
- Medicare
- Income Security (excluding Social Security)
- Social Security
- Veterans’ Benefits and Services
Author William Voegeli’s tables should hammer the final nails into the coffin of the charge that ‘the War in Iraq bankrupted America’. Human Resources, not National Defense, has been top dog by a long chalk for decades. And it will get bigger still. Consider this chart.
The size of federal spending has been growing inexorably, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Often Human Resources spending has grown faster under Republicans than it has with Democrats. The difference is in the atmospherics. The Republicans have increased the size of government while moaning with regret in the manner of the walruses eating the oysters in Alice in Wonderland. Liberals on the other hand, have rubbed their hands with glee at each expansion. But attitudes aside, both have increased it just the same.
The long political advance of liberalism has coincided with the refusal of any prominent liberal politician or writer to specify or even suggest the welfare state’s ultimate and sufficient size. Instead, liberals have denounced our shockingly insufficient welfare state every year since the beginning of the Progressive era. When Max Sawicky did so in 2004, real, per capita expenditures on Human Resources were more than twice as large as they had been in 1975.
To all intents and purposes, the Big Government faction has won. The only problem is that neither faction — including the liberals — can afford their victory. “The baby boomers’ retirement will be the best documented, least surprising policy challenge in American history—and still we are not prepared for it. Herb Stein’s Law remains operative, however: if something can’t go on forever, it won’t. Entitlements can’t go on, indefinitely, laying claim to a bigger portion of the federal budget and the GDP. Once the furniture is engulfed in flames we will finally start shopping for fire extinguishers.”
William Voegeli doesn’t believe that any combination of tax cuts or alterations in government spending patterns will change things any time soon. America is imprisoned by self-created events. About the only thing it can do is make the prison cell a little more comfortable and efficient by curbing the fantasies on each side of the aisle and to concentrate on rejecting obvious imbecilities.
There is a framework, then, for liberals and conservatives to argue about Good Government rather than Big Government. Start by rejecting all magic beans theories of public finance, acknowledging that the welfare state’s expenditures and revenues cannot be massively, permanently out of balance. Both sides could accept the corresponding idea that the welfare state, like any utility-maximizing enterprise, has finite resources at its disposal. A well-designed and well-run welfare state will direct them to where they can do the most good and assist those people who need help most urgently. The corollary principle is that the welfare state should stop using its resources in ways that are not the best and highest, and reduce, reshape, or eliminate programs to help people who don’t need it.
Voegeli’s presentation is brilliant and suffers only from the defect of refusing to follow its own logic. “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.” Nothing in the prescription to focus on Good Government now that Big Government is a fait accompli addresses the issue of how to sustain it. If nothing works to slow it down it will simply expand like a bubble until reality knocks the pins out from under it. Spending on Human Resources must ultimately reach some limit imposed by demographics and the growth of the productive part of the economy. Once it passes that point, gravity takes over. As Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have just shown, there is no such thing as “too big to fail”.
It’s tempting to confuse the futility of political debate with the notion that nothing can be changed. Big government is only 60 years old. It had a beginning and it’s hard to hard to argue, even from its size, that it has no natural end. Within a given election cycle the debate about the size of government will revolve around the existence and coverage of particular programs. But over the longer period the shape of the outcome will be determined largely by technology, economics and demographics. My guess is that if it is useless to discuss how to reduce the size of government, it may be useful to speculate on what to do if it crashes.
Impossible? No. Unforseeable, maybe.
And if nothing works then there’s this special offer featured at Tigerhawk’s. But what happens if America collapses and Canada has to defend the Western Hemisphere?
Not Yours to Give
The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.
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.
We The People have been fatally gullible. We fell for their scams like rubes in 1861, 1913, 1933, and 1964. The scam of 2009 may be the final cut of the thousands that killed the Constitution.
Great post.
As a fan of biological analogies, I’d compare government to the beneficial flora that live in the human body, especially the gut. There’s a nice Wikipedia article on this topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flora
These bacteria perform some critical functions to maintenance of human health. In particular:
1. Defense. Flora create a hostile environment for invading pathogens.
2. Nutrition. Flora prepare nutrients for absorption by the intestines.
However, not all flora are good. When our immune system is compromised, the bacteria can become toxic. Also, bad strains of these bacteria – such as certain strains of E. coli – can enter our system and cause disease, and even kill us. Even worse, they can cause uncontrolled flatulence.
The system of flora is a dynamic one, and involve a competition between the human host and the bacteria. If the bacteria grow without limit, the host will die. If the bacteria are eliminated, the host becomes vulnerable to invasion from really bad bugs and becomes weaker due to poor nutrient uptake.
By this analogy, the government is a swarming colony of flora. Its functions are critical to the proper functioning of our polity, but if it grows out of control, it will kill the system it is designed to support.
If we are to use this as a rough guide for what to do about excessive government growth, the strategies we might employ include:
- Maintain a healthy immune system. As discussed in an earlier post, this involves protecting our cultural systems. Large government grows when local systems fail; the decaying cores of our large cities are places where our “immune system” has broken down, leaving its citizenry vulnerable to sociopaths and opportunistic commercial interests (this is part of the explanation for the subprime mess). Education is the key here, as is the rule of law.
- Practice good health habits. Simple things like trash and graffiti removal make a huge difference. Kinda like brushing your teeth to keep the bacteria from forming tartar that, left alone, will eventually destroy your teeth.
- When necessary, destroy all the flora and rebuild from scratch. When a beneficial bacterium turns pathogenic, it must be destroyed. Broad spectrum antibiotics kill all flora, good and bad. Usually, the good come back faster than the bad, and health is restored. Welfare reform was an attempt at such a strategy; welfare wasn’t destroyed, but came back in a more beneficial form. However, this is a very risky strategy for two reasons: a) while the flora are gone, our system is vulnerable – this is why antibiotics will occasionally cause a more problematic condition to occur; and b) resistant strains of the pathogen will evolve that are even more difficult to eradicate. This is sort of what happened in Iraq when the first strategy cleared out areas but then left them alone; the most resistant strains then re-appeared and were far worse than the original condition.
There is another biological analogy that is even more instructive – cancer. More on that in a future post.
L3
I think I get it, Farney Brank and company spent more in one day ($850 billion) than the cost of Iraq war, with the difference being that Iraq war brought positive results.
Of course, getting value for your money is no match for that biological analogy. That re-terrifies me all over again
God, where do I start in making a reply to this? We’ve already seen the Tytler quote at this site in another post.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville
“We will never take the Americans by conquest. It will take some time. They must be made to accept communism one small step at a time, until one day they wake up and realise they have all become communists.”
Nikita Krushev, 1961
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.”
-Gerald Ford
One day historians will look back and see statism as one of humankind’s great evils. Forget what Paul Kennedy predicts about Great Powers, this kind of spending will be our ruin.
Furthermore, I’m convinced that nothing will solve this problem of statism, short of something fantastic. When I was a child in the ’70s, science fiction shows depicted these times as one of space travel and colonization. Opening a new frontier on other worlds is the only peaceful way I can see for people to escape.
Continuing the biological analogy, it’s worth thinking about cancer.
Cancer, at its root, is a genetic disease. Every day, the cells that make up the human body are dividing. This function is critical to survival, as cells die on a regular basis, and must be replaced.
In the course of this division, a complete copy of the cell nucleus must be made, and this involves a replication process that makes a complete copy of the cell’s chromosomes. There are about 3 billion base pairs in the human genome – that’s a lot of copying. When this copying process makes a mistake, you get a mutation.
Most errors are caught and corrected in the replication process, and don’t cause a mutation. And most mutations don’t matter. Only about 1.5% of the genome is active, so a mutation in an inactive region (probably) doesn’t matter. And there are two copies of every gene sequence, since the genome is a double helix; a break on one side usually doesn’t cause problems.
But when certain mutations occur in the genome – especially in the parts that regulate growth – you can have problems. But one mutation rarely causes big problems, because there is a lot of redundancy built into the system (that’s why we’ve managed to survive for millennia – evolution has helped us to select systems that are highly resistant. But sometimes we have multiple mutations that, taken together, cause the mutated cell grow uncontrollably. This is when you get cancer.
The evolution of a Federal Government that is growing out of control has followed a similar path. There is not one event that has caused the condition we face today. But if you look back through history, you can spot the key mutations that, together, have caused the cancer we have today:
- The Income Tax: provided a mechanism for funding Federal expansion.
- The New Deal: expanded the scope of Federal Government into parts of the economy that had previously been run locally.
- WWI and WWII: dramatically increased the size of the Federal bureaucracy.
- The Great Society: further expanded the Federal Government scope and size.
There have also been many smaller mutations, each of which have weakened our ability to respond to the growth of Washington:
- Watergate
- Vietnam War
- Expansion of Federal Bureaucracy, especially the FDA, HHS, HUD, EPA, and GSEs.
- The rise of multiculturalism and political correctness.
- The subversion of our education institutions, both K-12 and Universities.
- Protection of incumbents.
- Most recently, the takeover of the financial system.
So, now we have a full-blown cancer, with the uncontrolled growth that is its mark. So, we might consider employing analogous strategies for reversing that growth:
- Surgery. This removes the tumor by cutting it out completely. The analogue would be eliminating a Federal function, like killing the Department of Education.
- Radiation and Chemotherapy. These kill the tumors by killing everything that grows fast (chemo), or cells that are undifferentiated (radiation), and then allow the body to regenerate without the cancer. The analogue would be an across-the-board spending cut, as well as electoral changes like term limits and elimination of the gerrymander. Once the “bad” cells are killed, the hope is that the “good” cells would grow back in their place. But you have to get rid of all the cells first, both good and bad.
- Targeted Therapy. This kills the cancer by targeting specific types of cells that we know to be cancerous. The analogue would be some form of a line item veto and the elimination of earmarks. This therapy is generally most effective in combination with chemotherapy.
- Anti-angiogenesis. Tumors need blood to grow. Anti-angiogenesis therapy cuts off the blood supply to a tumor, causing it to die. The analogue would be strict limits on Federal revenue, or elimination of income taxes. Money is the lifeblood of the Federal Government; limit the money, and the tumor eventually dies.
- Immunotherapy. This approach boosts the body’s own defense mechanisms and focuses them on attacking and killing the cancer cells. The most well-known of these therapies is the bone marrow transplant. The analogue would be actions that boost our “social immune system” such as education reform, weakening PC, subsidiarity (problems are most effectively tackled locally), and encouraging faith-based solutions to social problems. Ultimately, cancer relies on fooling the immune system to avoid destruction by our own body’s defenses. The weaker the immune system, the more likely we are to get cancer (cf. AIDS patient vulnerability to various sarcomas).
Anyway, you get the drift. Nature points the way for us to fix this problem. Now, we just need to act before the cancer metastasizes and reaches a stage at which no treatment will help. We’re not there yet, but time is running short.
Enough for now. Gotta run to my son’s soccer game.
L3
Remember the big red switch? In the early IBM PCs at the back of the box next to the chromed fan guard was the big red switch. It turned the box on and off. This was in the era of the “C:_” interface and the infamous dot prompt.
Whenever you were working and the bits and bytes rolling through the motherboard got more and more complicated and more and more confused there came a point where it all stopped. System freeze. On one level cntrl-alt-delete worked to correct this, but on a higher level of hosedness there was a complete system halt. At that point, you’d sigh, rise up in the chair and reach behind the box and hit the big flat red switch which flipped down with a ghastly click.
At that point you’d learn the truth that “Those who do not save keystrokes are doomed to repeat them.”
Right now we’re kind of fooling about with cntrl-alt-delete, but the sigh and the rise and the hitting of the big red switch looms.
As Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have just shown, there is no such thing as “too big to fail”.
Minor quibble: That phrase, as it was coined and most commonly used, actually means “too big to be allowed to fail”.
Leo Linbeck III: When necessary, destroy all the flora and rebuild from scratch. [...] However, this is a very risky strategy for two reasons: a) while the flora are gone, our system is vulnerable – this is why antibiotics will occasionally cause a more problematic condition to occur [...]
Fear of this side effect is probably the #1 reason why reining in Big Government has historically been a political loser – and in a more general sense, why “quick fixes” are politically preferable to major overhauls in any government program. We may desperately need to overhaul, say, Medicare, but that will almost certainly involve a lengthy transitional period while the overhaul is in progress, during which benefits may become unreliable or worse. How do you explain this to millions of people who are already dependent upon these benefits and can’t afford any disruption in them, not even for a good reason?
Leo Linbeck III:
Don’t overlook the 17th Amendment as one of the critical mutations. Originally, the House of Representatives was popularly elected and represented the people, while the Senate was created to represent the states’ interests in Washington. Senators were usually chosen by state legislatures, which were also popularly elected.
With the popular election of Senators, the function of the Senate was permanently changed, and the states lost their representation in the Federal government. Coupled with the 16th Amendment, ratified at about the same time, the way was cleared for the explosive growth in the size and scope of the Federal government.
It seems very likely this is the cure, not the problem. The problem was, this accumulation of bad ideas in a democratic equality was considered politicaly inevitable. And perhaps it was.
Paraphrazing Tocqueville–
Only a very small number of men will ever be blessed with the attainment of deliberate and self-confidant convicion born of knowledge and arising from the very heart of agitation and doubt.
A good test of their actions will be that they appear obvious in retrospect, because
those very evils which we suffered patiently as inevitable suddenly seem insupportable once we conceive the idea of escape from them.
What a great discussion! What I don’t see, though, is any examination of the “why” government grows along with the “how” it grows. Why did GW Bush expand government when his party purports to oppose that? Why did Barney Frank defend Freddie and Fannie? Until we can address the eagerness of political actors to expand government, we can’t really slow the process.
And I have to say, I worked for one of the very few government agencies that was ever abolished (the U.S. Information Agency) and I don’t think that was an example of how to save money: the function of that agency was taken up by the State Department, and I would guess any budgetary savings associated with the closure of USIA were promptly negated by an increase in State’s budget.
Growth of government will not be an easy matter to slow, much less reverse. No one who has run on the platform of limited government has delivered — even Reagan.
Damn fine discussion, nonetheless. F
Joshua,
Fear of this side effect is probably the #1 reason why reining in Big Government has historically been a political loser.
Totally agree. Also, in the past, we have used “broad-spectrum antibiotics” to destroy a “bug,” while ignoring both the longer-term effects and the toxic environment that allowed the “bug” to enter the system. The best example of this is Proposition 13. Conservatives, angered by the California Supreme Court’s attempt at fixing the California public school system by directing funds from rich to poor districts.
Angered by this, conservatives pushed for a limit to property taxes. This was a huge systemic change, but it failed to get at the root causes of the problem: a monopoly public school system and an out-of-control state government. Having cut off the blood supply from one source, the tumor created alternate arterial pathways. The tumor was not destroyed, that the consequent distortion of economic decision-making actually created the environment which later contributed to the home price bubble.
People now sense that these “big” solutions are inherently dangerous because the “pathogen” will evolve resistance and become even harder to kill. But kill them we must.
How do you explain this to millions of people who are already dependent upon these benefits and can’t afford any disruption in them, not even for a good reason?
Great question; in fact, it is the political question of the future for conservatives. I believe the solution is subsidiarity: push these benefits as low in the political/economic chain as we can. Remove the ability of the Federal Government to control them, and leave it to local and State government to tackle them. Government can then make decisions that are more relevant to the purported beneficiaries. I know that poverty in big cities like Houston looks much different than poverty in small towns like Carmine. Therefore, the solutions have to look different. Can’t do that from Washington.
But the messaging of this is key. I know it can be done, and we need to pay more attention to messaging. My admiration for Ronald Reagan is primarily driven by the fact that he was able to take complex issues, and communicate a very clear message to the people in a way that they understood. We need to find a way to do the same today, even though many of the issues have changed.
The forces for collectivism like to use anecdote. It is powerful, and touches emotions, but ignores the fact that the problem arises from the system-wide application of “solutions” to anecdotes. The forces for freedom must fight back with analogy. It, too, is powerful, and it exploits our day-to-day experience with complex system, like running a home, business, or family. But our solutions also have to be comprehensive enough to kill the cancer, and not let it mutate and metastasize.
Anecdote vs. analogy. The “Game of the Century.” Play ball!
L3
Oops! Forgot to unbold after “the.” Oh well. So much for being good at a managing a message.
Sigh.
The Claremont’s study of “Human Resources” spending is interesting. It shows that spending on social programs went up.
But who controlled government during that period?
By control I mean having a majority in two of the three branches of government (the House, the Senate and the Executive Office).
I ran the numbers from the time frame of 1920 to 2008 (mainly because I could not find data on senate majority leaders before 1920).
I found that about 60% of the time the democrats held at lest 2 of the 3 branches of power – and for long stretches of time. Some of those stretches the democrats held all three branches of power.
Out of the 89 time periods I looked at (because of congressional mid-term elections which don’t match the Presidential election cycle – it’s more like 88.5 years) I found 52 years of democratic control with 31 years of control over all three branches of government.
I saw 37 years of Republican control of at least two branches of government and about 14 years of control over all three branches of government.
Statistically, speaking the dems where in control for a majority of the time and they are the ones to blame.
F,
What I don’t see, though, is any examination of the “why” government grows along with the “how” it grows.
My view of this is simple: government grows because all organisms, organizations, and applications grow until they either hit an internal design limit or an external countervailing force – usually a competitor for resources. It is the nature of a living thing to grow. We are growing, or we are dying.
Why did Bush grow the government? Heck, why did Reagan? The reality is that the government is a complex system that has its own programming code, and code is tangled up too badly, and so many lines, that it is beyond the capability of any single coder to fix.
Back when I used to write code for a living, I found that every so often, some application I had developed had grown to the point where it was too big to maintain. I essentially had to throw it out, and start over.
The funny thing was that I was able to replicate the same functionality at that point with about 1/4 the effort, mainly because I had a good understanding of where the design flaws were. I knew how to re-architect the design (this usually involved breaking some of the huge and unwieldy procedures into nice, discrete, clean little modules or objects), and I was always able to reuse more than 1/2 of the code (or replace big chunks of the 1/2 with someone else’s library code).
Still, no matter how much I tested, I could never tell, before release, where the problems were going to crop up. But, dagnabbit, those pesky users sure were able to find them, often within an hour or two of release.
I truly believe we could “start over” but reuse the “kernel” of our operating system: the US Constitution. We’d have to make a few important changes, but it’s not like we don’t know what the problems are, or that most of it doesn’t work. But the key to any changes is that they truly address the flaws that exist in the system, flaws that have led to an inexorable accumulation of power in Washington.
return 0
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L3
Well the government sure isn’t going to start contracting under The Big O (except for the military, natch). What’s much more frightening than the growth of run-of-the-mill Liberal spending are the new Orwellian aspects government is going to take on. Feast your eyes on HR 808, The “Department of Peace and Nonviolence Act.”
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.808:
No, it’s not a joke. And it will feature, among other new departments:
Office Of Peace Education And Training
Office Of Domestic Peace Activities
Office Of International Peace Activities
Office Of Technology For Peace
Office Of Arms Control And Disarmament
Office Of Peaceful Coexistence And Nonviolent Conflict Resolution
Or translated into everyday English, the Department of National Suicide. I wonder what tiny corner of life won’t, somehow, fall under the rubric of “peace.”
I should have gotten a degree in “Peace Studies.” No doubt it will be one of the few areas of job growth in the next few years.
Every time that I travel in the Former Soviet Union the thing that breaks my heart is the army of little old ladies begging in the streets. The Soviet Union promised an adequate pension to all of its citizens. The successor regimes inherited this promise, and is paying it – about $5 a month.
This is what inevitably happens when promises exceed capabilities.
F: What I don’t see, though, is any examination of the “why” government grows along with the “how” it grows.
The short answer is that America’s political system, if not democracy by its very nature, favors political action over inaction – even if it’s the wrong action, and even if inaction would in fact be the optimal choice. That’s because few politicians care to risk being blamed by their constituents, the media, the history books or anyone else for permitting some perceived moral outrage to continue, or allowing some perceived problem to grow into a catastrophe, by sitting on their hands and not Doing Something(TM) about it.
Yes, such intervention may be futile, and it may even exacerbate the situation it purports to remedy, but not necessarily for reasons that are readily apparent to voters. If politicians Do Something(TM) about a looming crisis and the crisis still happens anyway, they can at least go back to their constituents and say they tried, and most voters will forgive them as long as they’ve acted in good faith. If they’re lucky they may even have a convenient scapegoat to blame for their failure. If, on the other hand, the crisis is indeed averted, they get hailed as heroes, and can use it as a stepping-stone to an even higher office if they are so ambitious. But in order to get any of these benefits from a crisis, pols first have to be seen to be Doing Something(TM) – anything – to address the crisis.
That, as I said, is the short answer to your question. The long answer would require a blog of its own to even begin to flesh out.
Re: Department of Peace
Check out the following humorous little ditty. It’s sung by Eric Idle of Monty Python fame.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofKX9HZwakc
It seems a great many of the “peace at all costs” crowd dwell at about this level of intellectual discourse these days.
PS- The alien peacemaker stabs everyone in the back and invades Earth after it has been disarmed.
rickl,
Great point about losing the state appointment of Senators, turning them into uber-representatives. This has eroded the notion of state’s rights, and also helped people lose sight of the purpose of the Electoral College formula that combines a popular vote with a state-by-state vote, to cover both groups that ceded power to form the Constitution. Which is why we had both a House for the people and a Senate for the states.
Anyone advocating a national popular vote for President should be told they are then in favor of eliminating the Senate. I think it ironic whenever I hear a Senator calling for ditching the Electoral College (i.e., Hillary)!
rickl,
Good thought. I’d certainly agree on the 16th Amendment. The 17th, less so. If we repealed the 17th, we might just end up exchanging one group of out-of-touch blowhards for another group of out-of-touch blowhards.
But it’s certainly deserving of consideration. Clearly, there were mutations along the way that caused the cancer. But whether attempting to undo the original cause (repeal the 17th) is better than applying new approaches (term limits), is a great question worth pondering.
L3
“That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.” Thomas Jefferson
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” Thomas Jefferson
“The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management.” Thomas Jefferson
“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.” Thomas Jefferson
“The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.” Thomas Jefferson
“A nation ceases to be republican…when the will of the majority ceases to be the law.” Thomas Jefferson
“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” Thomas Jefferson
“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” Thomas Jefferson
“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.” Thomas Jefferson
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.” Abraham Lincoln
“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Abraham Lincoln
“There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them….. In the welfare state the government undertakes to see to it that the individual shall be housed and clothed and fed according to a statistical social standard, and that he shall be properly employed and entertained, and in consideration for this security the individual accepts in place of entire freedom a status and a number and submits his life to be minded and directed by an all-responsible government.” Garet Garett
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/garrett1.html
Our Second Republic ended in 1913. In that year U.S. Senators ceased being embassadors from their States to the Federation and became vote-seeking politicians. Where Senators had been dependent on Governors and Legislatures for their office, they were now political power-seekers in their own right. It had been the Senator’s job to beg money from their State’s budgets to pay for any Federal expeditures over what the Federal Treasury took in in Tariffs, customs and excise taxes. The Central Government was severely restrained in what it could take in and spend. After the ratification of the 16th Amendment Washington City was freed from any need to go hat in hand to State Legislatures for funding. Also in 1913 Congress divested itself of its responsibilities to borrow money on the credit of the United States and to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, creating the Federal Reserve System to do their job and deflect blame away from themselves.
Government grows because politicians want to retain power and they will send back a long list of pork..money the federal government doesn’t really have. If they can borrow the money from China, et al and buy their constituents’ votes, they will do it. It is happening as we speak and there is no better example than Robert Byrd seen hobbling around the capitol, probably wearing diapers. But let’s not forget that it is “we” who run the country. If you aren’t talking to your reps in Washington you are part of the problem.
Another reason why government tends to grow and not shrink, which relates to the one I posted back at #18:
In Western societies at least, there is a deep streak of conservatism. Not conservatism in the political sense, but in the more literal sense of inertia: the desire to maintain as much of the status quo as possible, for as long as possible. This becomes a problem as time goes by and various elements of society – the economy, technology and the underlying culture to name just a few – evolve in directions that make the status quo increasingly untenable. Once this becomes apparent, those who value the status quo, and/or have a vested interest in its survival, can be counted on to start clamoring for government to intervene to protect the status quo, if not roll back evolution that has already occurred. Witness, for one example, the Left’s interest in reviving and expanding the Fairness Doctrine, which can be interpreted as simply an attempt to re-establish the dominance of the legacy news media, at the expense of newer media which now threaten their continued viability.
Wretchard with all due respect you are trapped by recent history and along with many here share built-in assumptions.
If we assume that Big Government exists and grows because people WANT it, and more particularly want help with things that benefit them …
And if we assume that at some point there will be not enough money to pay for it all …
Then the question is raw politics. Who? Whom? Or more specifically, how will Big Government simply exclude various categories of people that it helps?
I would suggest to all, that FDR’s actions provide a window into the future. FDR had financial constraints — a depression meant there was only so much money he could spend. He spent to maximize political gain. Mexican nationals were deported, citizenship required for participation in the New Deal. Blacks were also excluded as much as possible. Ugly? Yes but it worked.
I would suggest that the collapse of revenues in Europe will cause the Welfare State to be restricted to either Muslim or European groups, depending on which is stronger electorally, and that either choice will cause brutal fighting and eventually revolutions of some sort.
And in this country? Past is prologue, and FDR will return at some point. The real one of choices for political maximization, not the folksy myth.
All measures of modern society are based on government spending.
Military might = military expenditures.
Environmental stewardship = regulation of industry.
Quality of production = inspection agencies.
Healthy citizenry = public health systems.
Global non military influence = participation in UN, distribution of foreign aid.
Modern transportation infrastructure = government constructed/own/maintained airports, roads and ports.
Stable energy production/distribution = nationalized or regulated monopolies.
Environmental stewardship = mass transit, owned by government.
The problem with these things isn’t that they exist, or that government owns and runs them. The problem is a political system that is designed to advantage those who purposely misuse the levers of power.
Who can really know, as a voter, if the transportation system is properly maintained?
And of course, as a politician, I can get votes by promising something new.
We get the government that we deserve.
Derek
The only limit on government is it’s inability to collect more revenues.
Canada hit the wall more than a decade ago. They raised taxes and brought even less revenue in. They ran out of credit.
The federal government cut spending to what it could collect. As a result, much of the infrastructure has come to the point of collapse. It is shocking to drive through Montreal for example, to see the infrastructure that was constructed in the 70′s at the point of collapse.
This whole economic mess is based on a simple premise; too many people are living beyond their means. Driving the spiral up created revenues for government that allowed them to live beyond their means.
Every government right now is talking of borrowing money to tide them through the coming recession.
Derek
Leo Linbeck # 15 and earlier postings
Your analogies in this and earlier postings are very persuasive. However, I have concerns about the idea of starting over, using our present Constitution as a kernel. You have mentioned earlier using Article V of the Constitution as a way of proceeding. Are you thinking of a series of amendments or a Constitutional Convention? Your analogy of using the present Constitution as a kernel seems to imply a total rewriting and, therefore, a convention.
The framers of our present Constitution were widely read and had a number of kernels for the Constitution before they met. We could use those plus what they created plus our experience since then. But what could our representatives at a convention produce today? That first convention had Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Franklin with help and support from Europe by Adams and Jefferson. And they pledged themselves to secrecy as they debated and wrote. Do we have such persons today? And could a new Constitution be written if the convention’s deliberations are open to the media?
Our Constitution today has a number of problems, maybe especially because of unintended (or intended?) consequences of some of the amendments. But, to paraphrase Nixon’s comment about the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, maybe ‘it is not this Constitution or something better; it is this Constitution or something worse’.
If we cannot repeal some of the problem amendments and laws arising from them using the amendment option in Article V, how could we prevent them and even worse ones in a new Constitution growing out of the kernel of this one?
Thank you for your many contributions to BC.
Jim
When you have a shrinking revenue base its probably not a bad idea to focus attention and resources on stuff that makes the economy grow.
It is after all what the best governors in the US do. They grow their tax base.
The top governors see themselves as top farmers rather than top predators.
Jim Nicholas,
Thx for the post, and the kind words.
If my postings seemed to imply starting over, my bad. That’s not at all what I would intend, or promote. In fact, just the opposite.
I definitely would keep the Constitution, as amended. That is the kernel. It is a remarkable and generally successful document, and to me a big part of conservatism is keeping what is tried and true.
But I am very interested in the Article V process, and using it to address the deficiencies that we have identified. The Framers clearly envisioned this process as a final check on the system. It may well be time to try it.
And I agree that the process used by the Framers would probably not work today. That is why, in earlier posts (#54 in Operation Grand Slam and #88 in Just So) I suggested the Article V process, with a fixed agenda. I envision a sort of “base closings” process, where the Congress has to give an up-or-down vote to the entire package of Amendments sent to it by the States. How to do that legally, well, I haven’t thought that through completely, and I’m not a lawyer, so there could be a fatal flaw. But my gut is that there is a way to do it.
Any ideas?
L3
1. Amend our Constitution with term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court, and provide Congress with 2/3 override power for all Supreme Court decisions impacting or relating to the Constitution its self. This amendment should also identify the Supremacy of the laws in our Declaration of Independence over Constitutional law.
2. Enforce the tenth amendment by breaking up all entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security into fifty state programs. Also, make the Department of Education an advisory agency only – ban all educational matching grants from the federal government to the states – let the states and the people educate their children without the socialist federal state.
3. Cease federal funding of the ACLU and similar organizations.
American Declarational Law:
1. Our human equality self-evidently derives from all men being created by God – the Great Equalizer of men. American equality refers to equality of all citizens under the law, not government enforced economic equality, i.e.: French Revolution/Marxist equality.
2. Our essential human rights, i.e.: life, liberty and creative pursuit of happiness, are sacred and irreversible – our human rights are endowed by God, and not by an all-powerful state which would make our human rights reversible. Liberty = freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to defend life, freedom of assembly, freedom to have privacy at home, freedom to own the property one has labored creatively to obtain, freedom to petition government for redress of grievances, freedom to speedy and public trial by jury, freedom from large government by reserving the rights of the states and the people, etc.
3. Just government power must only derive from the consent of the governed. This means majority rule while protecting minorities through equal application of our laws. All of the worst totalitarian systems of the past were, at their core, systems of elite minority rule over the majority – over the ordinary man and women, i.e.: government of the elite, by the elite and for the elite.
Leo Linbeck #33
I too am not a lawyer. Maybe some of our lawyer colleagues at BC can help.
As I understand it, even though two-thirds of the states can require that Congress call a Constitutional Convention, the states cannot impose an agenda (base-closing model) or any limits on the product of that Convention. The only limit on such a Convention is that three-fourths of the states fail to ratify the changes. And we are agreed that, as conservatives, we want to preserve the greater part of the Constitution, which is the best ever written.
The only other method is to compel the federal government, through the Congress, to do something that those with power rarely agree to do–give up some of that power. As King George III recognized, there are few George Washingtons.
Certainly some powers have moved from the states to the federal government because a complex world requires it. But many powers have moved because those in power want more power. Greed for power may be harder to satisfy than greed for money. So how to get Congress to implement the second possibility in Article V?
Members of Congress have become less and less beholden to their state’s political parties or legislatures. They may often want to keep the power the states would like to have back. I do not know of a way in which the states can compel Congress to propose for ratification by the states any amendments or a package of amendments.
Perhaps a solution is for the states’ legislatures to become politically effective enough to persuade their citizens to elect a different kind of Representative or Senator, one who would look to the welfare of the states, not by providing pork and earmarks but by returning certain powers to the states.
Jim
I have said it here before. Allow me to say it again: As long as the pols and the bureaucrats are insulated from the market by their use of the violence of taxation, there can be no change. What most people do not understand is that whatever goes on, it is never about anything else.
I had a political philosophy/American government professor there on the West bank of the Charles who used to say, “The first rule of bureaucracy is to take care of the bureaucracy.” I’d like to see a charting of the pay and benefits of Federal employees over the same period with the military separated from the civil and senior executive service.
The current European model is the European Commission of Placing the Collective Wedding Tackle on the Cutting Board and Whacking it with a Meat Cleaver.
Panday – One day historians will look back and see statism as one of humankind’s great evils. Forget what Paul Kennedy predicts about Great Powers, this kind of spending will be our ruin.
As for the present economic catastrophy, we screwed up. We screwed up as a People because once again we trusted a cabal of greed-driven private individuals to regulate themselves and run banking and finance.
Remember, in “Animal House” Flounder f**cked up just once. Since Reaganomics started, Americans have been screwed time and time again and had to pay for 7 major banking scandals and two utility dereg scandals that only enriched a small well-positioned, Ruling Elite. Our trust, like Flounders, is now shot. The “freedom-lovers” of the “free-market” are now on double secret probation….or worse as the landslide for Democrats the rapacious capitalists caused may have many that wish to veer from proper punishment and good statist solutions. Into overarching socialist solutions beyond what the present level of anger and disgust at sleazy WASP bluebloods, unethical Jewish financiers, and amoral Irish and Italian “get rich quick” Wall Street soldiers – actually demand.
It was those “freedom-lovers!!!” of banking and finance that once again, as they have since the dawn of America – ripped off the average American. We can blame the contributions of Reagan, Phil Gramm, Bush II, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd all we want – but bottom line is that from the Federalist banking crises to the Rise of Jacksonian Democracy, Free Grange Movement, TDR busting up the Banking Trusts and Robber Barons, to FDR having to clean up Wall Street to the 7 massive banking/investment scandals tied to Voodoo Economics – it has always been so.
When rich people have little incentive to be honest, and every opportunity and incentive to lie and deceive to get richer – they will take the latter course.
That is why statist control, regulation, oversight of banking parameters is as important as control over the military or
insustries subject to catastrophic impact malfunctions – like nuclear power plants, oil tankers.
The people of the USA must demand an end to special privilege of the Ruling Elites who operated the American financial system and it’s 200 million investor’s entrusted assets like it was their own personal piggy bank. That goes for greedy bastards in London and Tel Aviv and Zurich who also played the global game with equal complicity with American banker scum. That goes for Barney Frank & his cabal which tried forcing excess risk into the mortgage industry so barely employable blacks and runaway male prostitutes could get their own home.
The economic impact of the poison paper America pushed and other nations followed is a greater economic impact than not just one Chernobyl spewing it’s poisons, but a dozen or more. That is why the conservative darling, Sarkozy, has declared that banking and finance are too critical to the public good to be left as free market, in the hands of a small cabal that constantly betrays their public trust.
The head of the largest global source of capital – the China Sovereign Wealth Fund – has said that financial confidence and going forward – requires an end to “cowboy ways”. And for America to undertake major reforms in it’s financial markets and penalties on the “deceivers” if it is to again be a trusted international player in global markets.
It is all well and good to blame this or that politician. I’m all in favor of firing squads for Dick Lugar, Barney Frank, Ted Stevens, Phil Gramm, Chris Dodd, Chistopher Cox, Alan Greenspan,…as well as the worst of the unethical bastards on Wall Street.. And renaming Reagan Airport back to National in recognition of his great Dereg failure. And for limiting that clueless, reckless bastard Dubya to a double-wide trailer for his Presidential Library Monument to Himself.
And it is worth pulling as many FBI agents as necessary off other beats (even the “terrahist evildoer” bunch) to see who broke laws, and how much of the lost trillions is tucked away in the Caymans, Panama, Swiss bank accounts, Tel Aviv, and under their spouses name – and how much can be recovered for the taxpayer.
CF,
You’ve missed the kind of statism which Wretchard mentioned and which I had in mind when I wrote my comments: social statism.
Sure, corporate welfare has its own evils, but if one adds up all of the money spent on:
-public education (while we lag behind the rest of the developed world)
-Social Security (which grows incessently and upon which people have become dependent)
-Medicare & Medicaid (ditto from SS)
-Welfare (and the cost of the dependency culture which even the liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about)
the amount is staggering. Just staggering. It’s far more than any war we’ve ever fought or bank we’ve bailed out.
Soon we can add socialized medicine to the list. And then we’re like Europe, except, unlike them, we also have a military to pay for, too. For now.
-public education (while we lag behind the rest of the developed world)
……………
US students are behind much of the rest of the developed world on “Average” however, US spending per capita is among the highest. For example, the last debate mentioned how much District of Columbia spends on public education and how poor their results are.
I really like the idea of a convention, even with the potential for a totally screwed outcome, with the states having to approve then the potential for even stupid stuff to get approved is limited.
Two possibilities, where states still have a functioning petition (referendum) process, instructing the legislature to initiate the article V process is reasonable.
For those whose legislators in their wisdom, long ago denied their citizens the right of petition, then city or county measures to prod legislative action are bound to be more fruitful than relying on the two party system to initiate such a convention.
Seder ford, I believe every one of the “crisis” you mentioned had to do with folks taking advantage of regulatory over reaching, and not de-regulation. Having once put such a system of accounting in place it will be hell to get rid of it, especially if in the effort more regulation is enacted to game.
I believe it is every citizens patriotic duty to keep every penny legally possible out of the hands of fat and flatulent government.
Jim Nicholas,
I think the keys to any approach working are a) relying on the fact that the States have the penultimate say, and the voters the ultimate; and b) exploiting the fact that State legislators are often anxious to get the opportunity to run for national office.
A couple of suggested approaches, both of which use Article V (thinking out loud):
Approach 1
Have a single package of Amendments that must be passed as a whole. Write the State resolutions in such a way that the States agree to ratify only the Amendments in the submitted package, and any other Amendments will be rejected and the original package resubmitted. If there are multiple attempts that fail, it will become obvious that Congress is obstructing the will of the people, and we will be entering the 2010 election cycle in a year and the pressure will build from voters. Some kind of election pledge could then be extracted from all candidates, and the package resubmitted to the subsequent Congress.
Approach 2
A two-phase commit. The first phase is an Amendment specifying the process for a Constitutional Convention, using a “base closing” methodology. The second phase is Approach 1, but without the need for the State resolution language enforcing the outcome.
In either approach, and possibly in any approach, there must be a grass-roots, Prop 13-style uprising that has electoral clout. If the people want to reassert their sovereignty, they have to mobilize. Otherwise, it’s a big waste of time.
But what I think is unusual is that we may be entering a period in our history when there is a solid majority that believes that the system is broken. If McCain wins, the core of that majority will be the Obamaites, who will believe that they will never regain power under the existing system. If Obama wins, the core of that majority will be conservatives, who believe that total Democratic control requires that we address the structural problem of Federal power before that power is turned on them with the purpose of turning them into political eunuchs.
The squishy middle, which determines the outcome of all such efforts, is just tired of the same-old same-old. They – almost to a person – believe the system is broken because they are constantly forced to choose between two extremes, neither of which they like or are comfortable with. And after this election, we will be facing – regardless who wins – four more years of extreme partisanship punctuated by occasional “bipartisan” efforts that will invariably result in legislation that hurts them. After all, when the two extremes can come to agreement on something, it’s the middle that gets squeezed.
Heck, such an effort might even spawn a third party. Let’s call it the Subsidiarity Party.
L3
cedarford,
I’m surprised to see you refer to the banking industry as “self-regulated.” Banking is one of the most heavily regulated industries we have. I know that the bank we use has government regulators in their offices year-round. They are regulated by the Fed, OCC, FDIC, and SEC (if they’re public), State regulators (if they’re State chartered), and if they have trading or insurance operations there are additional regulators, both State and Federal. There are a large number of lender laws, usury laws, consumer protection laws, and securities regulations that also influence and proscribe their daily activities.
Now, if by “self-regulated” you mean that the regulators often come out of the banking sector, well, by that measure every regulatory regime is “self-regulation.” The phenomenon of “regulator capture” or “regulatory co-optation” is well documented and well understood, and an inevitable result of any regulatory regime.
The truly scary idea being floated about now (with Sarkozy on point) is that of a single, global financial regulation regime. This policy virtually guarantees a total monetary disaster in the future. Monopolies, when they fail, fail catastrophically. And, in the mean time, those who run the monopolies become utterly corrupt, as shown in the Fannie-Freddie fiasco or the former Soviet Union. If greedy cabals are a problem now, just wait until one small group of people control the entire global financial system for real. Yikes!
I continue to be mystified by the notion that the financial services industry is “special.” (Loaded word these days, I understand.)
Why is money more special than food (needed for survival), water (ditto), energy (ditto), health care (ditto), transportation (needed for economic efficiency), real estate (isn’t shelter critical?), or telecom (vital for a modern society)? And if we regulate all of these, don’t we just end up with a command economy, driven by the same elites that appear to be a big part of the problem today?
Seems to me that the only way to regulate greed (aka financial self-interest) is to use a system that pits one group’s greed against another’s. This is typically what happens in well-designed, well-functioning, standards-driven markets. There is simply no way that a regulator can catch all transgressions, especially for the “bad guys” who learn to focus their efforts on gaming the regulator rather than competing for the customer. I’d rather the customer be the king than the king be the regulator.
But maybe there are some examples where regulation, over some reasonably long time period, has been successful. I’m not aware of any, but that might be due to my limited knowledge.
L3
L3: There you go again, being reasonable.
c4 has his mind made up. Please don’t confuse him with the facts.
I must admit though that he does do a pretty good imitation of Karl Marx “howling gigantic curses” at anything and everything that has kept us alive and prospering.
With him around, we at least know what not to do.
Vanderleun, in other words, congress needs rebooted.
US students are behind much of the rest of the developed world on “Average” however, US spending per capita is among the highest. For example, the last debate mentioned how much District of Columbia spends on public education and how poor their results are.
Charles,
That was exactly my point.
Politicians bragging about how much money they have spent or would like to spend on public education is like bragging about how much money they’ve burned in the fireplace.
Gentlemen,
We’re probably not going to change the system without a civil war. What all of you fail to mention is the number of people who vote but do not pay taxes. What incentive do those folks have to limit the size of government or its tax burden? Why should they care? They’re not paying for it so why shouldn’t they have everything the government can provide and damn the costs?
The vote of the fattest, laziest housing-project ghetto scumbag counts just as much as that of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. Problem is there are a lot more ghetto scumbags than there are billionaire capitalists. Remember Econ 101? “Wants are unlimited, while means are limited.”
I own rental property. I used to have higher rents and include utility costs in that rent. I stopped doing that after about two years. My tenants simply had no concern about the costs of electricity, gas or water as long as I was paying the bills and the bills were astronomical. It was amazing to see how much those bills went down once the tenants had to pay for their usage themselves. I’d NEVER own a rental property and include utility costs again. People just don’t care when they don’t have to pay.
If you follow that thread you come to the point where you either have to disenfranchise lots of the poor or push the tax burden downward. Neither party wants anything to do with either of those alternatives. However, as long as the taxpaying segment of the nation continues to shrink relative to the national population as a whole, you’re going to have an ever increasing free-rider problem.
What that will mean is more tax avoidance, more tax evasion, and more draconian tax laws. It wasn’t an accident that Charlie Rangel and Co. in this Congress passed a law that levies a 45% tax on assets of U.S. citizens who renounce their citizenship and leave the country. They know more and heavier taxation is coming and they wanted to make sure no one could escape without them getting their pound of flesh first.
I don’t have a solution for the problems I’m posing. I do know what needs to happen, however. One of the smartest men in America, Thomas Sowell, once said that “there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” He’s right. Let me give you an example of one that is surely coming: Social Security.
The tradeoff for “fixing” Social Security’s impending bankruptcy will be what the British call “means-testing.” That means that at some point, to keep the system solvent, it won’t matter how much any individual has paid into it; if that individual has more than some arbitrary, government-decreed level of assets/income, they will no longer be eligible for it. The justification, of course, will be that “the system has to be preserved for those who REALLY need it.”
Will that be extraordinarily unfair? Yes. Will those who lose in this new arrangement have any real recourse? No; the costs of fighting the decision will be much greater than disgustedly capitulating. I’ll leave to the reader the exercise of determining just what race and gender will lose most in that action, and how much sympathy they’ll receive.
To be honest, I fear for my country and my children. I’m seriously considering moving overseas permanently.
This may be tangential to the main thrust of this thread, but bear with me, as it might make any discussions of US Constitutional law moot. There is a large hole in the logic of the Constitution.
From the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. This is quite clear, and makes no distinction between religions. Incidentally, it is probable that the Founders and those not long after them didn’t even think about the possible problems with this, because they thought that the USA would always be essentially Christian although the particular majority sect might vary.
The problem is that the free exercise of one particular religion means the freedom to commit sedition, as for one particular religion the writings of its founder are held to be the basis of the workings of the State.
So; is it reasonable for the Constitution to permit the exercise of one particular religion, when the exercise of that religion means its adherents seeking to overthrow the Constitution as a whole and replace it with something wholly different?
I submit that another amendment might be in order. Something like: “The free exercise of religion set forth in the First Amendment shall not be taken to include religious beliefs and practises contrary to this Constitution as a whole”. I am not a lawyer and the language needs tidying up, of course; but this might be a protection against zealots of any stripe taking over the government of the USA. This does not just include Islamic zealots, of course; for a rather good treatment of another sort of zealotry see Heinlein’s “If This Goes On…”.
Mac: The vote of the fattest, laziest housing-project ghetto scumbag counts just as much as that of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.
Yeah, and they vote for the same guy too!
mac – may I suggest France?
Signed – A Non-Gentleman
Leo Linbeck #43
Your idea of starting with an amendment to the Constitution that permits (or, better, requires?) Congress to set a limit to the agenda of a Constitutional Convention, whether it calls a Convention on its own initiative or in response to an application by the states, is creative, an approach I had not considered. I have always feared a Constitutional Convention for fear it would run amuck with our Constitution. Your idea would provide a control.
I’ll have to think a bit about possible unintended consequences of such an amendment.
Jim
RE: cedarford’s post:
IMHO, there is validity in pointing out the potential danger of the role played by the obscenely wealthy oligarchs on the national and international stage. When money is concentrated in the hands of the few, those few can become very powerful. They can have the power to buy governments. They can have the power to manipulate election outcomes. They can have the power to manipulate markets. They can have the power to be dangerous.
Food for thought- Who will ultimately dominate us- Bureaucrats? Wealthy oligarchs? A collusion of both? Does our system effectively check this collusion?
peterike said:
“Mac: The vote of the fattest, laziest housing-project ghetto scumbag counts just as much as that of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.
Yeah, and they vote for the same guy too!”
Bingo.
“Mac: The vote of the fattest, laziest housing-project ghetto scumbag counts just as much as that of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.
Yeah, and they vote for the same guy too!”
Bingo.
Monopolists and oligopolists will often prefer to esconce a scumbag rather than a straight shooter in office because in a relatively level bureaucratic playing field there is an equality before the law. Oligopolists want to create a situation of inequality before the law and the best way to do this is to put someone in office who can be “fixed”. The more perfect the competition the less likely that one market player can manipulate the regulator.
Once a candidate creates a growing power center it snowballs. He attracts more and more support from everyone who expects a piece of the action. He is “selling shares” in the coming order, which naturally, the candidate will head. But after grasping the levers of power betrayal follows.
NahnCee,
You can suggest anything you like. However, your suggestion, combined with your opinion and $0.50 will get you a soda at Sam’s Club.
There were phrases that were glibly tossed about in the 1990′s about “a paradigm shift” and that “all the old dinosaurs are dying” and the “new economy” and the “long boom” was going to solve all our wealth and prosperity problems.
In retrospect, we can see how that didn’t quite work out.
I submit that there is indeed a paradigm shift underway, and we are only beginning to grasp the barest outlines of it.
Indeed, when people think that they can vote themselves anything, the Republic is gone, and the true Democracy (rule of the mob) will arise. That is the paradigm shift that is taking place under our feet right now. The outline of the New Order is still too vague to make out, but the New America that will emerge 10-12 years hence will be much different from the one of the past.
No one wants to wrestle with this craptacular financial debacle that we are about to enter, the least of which is a novice politician out of the realm of corrupt Chicago politics. But those are the cards we are about to be dealt.
Fletcher Christian,
The first amendment protects our freedom of religion, but it does not protect religion which is subversive of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness – our unalienable human rights. The Constitution its self was established in order to secure our essential human rights. Freedom of religion is not a license to destroy our Constitution or the human rights it was designed to secure; that would be called treasonous or tyrannical religion.
mac – what a languid riposte. you’ll love it there, I promise. (French are all pseudo-macho, too …)
bon voyage
I doubt that you’ll be missed.
“I doubt that you’ll be missed”
Oh, you’re wrong, babe. Way, way wrong. The tax collector will miss me a lot. That said, I will gratefully hand over my share of that burden to you as I head off to a country with 10% taxation and a crime rate America could only dream about. No Muzzies, either. Have fun with Bama, honey. You two deserve each other. Don’t bother to write.
Happily, I can offer an alternative to Wretchard’s gloomy scenario. It solves the policy and fiscal problems facing Social Security and facing federal assistance programs generally, without reducing benefits. Its method also introduces a solution to the broader public-choice problem of ever-growing government spending. The transparent effectiveness of the policy solutions, combined with the financial effects of the proposal on individuals, give the proposal a political viability that no alternative of which I am aware can approach. That is, besides working, it can also pass, and handily.
This comment is a synopsis of a paper I that I wrote and submitted to Public Choice at the urging of my brother Mark, a lifelong economist. They rejected it as lacking adequate scholarly citations, so I am recasting it now with reference to an expanded Buchanan-Tullock model of collective choice (from The Calculus of Consent). I include some of that reference, as well as some other newer ideas, within brackets. I am also reorganizing the arguments as above: public choice, policy, politics.
(A) As government grows, suppliers to and dependants on government programs constitute a growing class of citizens who rely on government for their livelihood, who can vote that interest, and who, in the absence of alternatives, are highly motivated to do so: adverse public-choice effects.
[This is a case of Buchanan and Tullock’s interdependent constitutional variable X2, basis of representation, changing from a more randomized to a more functional basis, and so leading to the imposition of higher external costs by government. The authors do not note the possibility of such a result from the mere passage of legislation, though it is inherent in the activity. Note also that an increasing U.S. population changes the X3 variable, degree of representation, in the same direction. Separately, note that each expansion of government raises the total and marginal cost of informed citizenship, costs that the authors, for simplicity, assume to be zero. If the increasing cost of informed judgment concerning government activities tends to inhibit conscientious citizens from casting a ballot, the result is an effective change in the same direction of the X1 variable, the rule for electing legislators.]
(B) The programs themselves, besides the allocational and redistributive costs that their legislative inception exacts (TCoC), exact similar and other costs in their execution as well: adverse policy effects and adverse first- and higher-order economic effects.
[I am integrating these arguments into the desired framework, though I view them as coherent without doing so. Buchanan and Tullock end their analysis once the legislative decision is made, but the decisions thereafter are also collective. I call the organization that exists to carry out a law, whether constitutional or statutory, a government enterprise (GE), and have this to say about it:
"The apparent similarity of the GE to the firm of microeconomics is misleading. Where the firm is a locus of entrepreneurial activity, the GE is a locus only of sovereign power. None of the economic assumptions or conclusions concerning the behavior of the firm or its decision-makers is necessarily applicable to the GE. The kinds of economic information that guide an entrepreneur through the life-cycle of a firm have no necessary bearing whatsoever on actions that affect the creation, operation, or termination of a GE. Instead, such actions reflect only the manner in which sovereign power is exercised within the public-choice environment where the GE resides. The degree to which those actions incorporate economic rationality depends upon the same consideration, and is an empirical question in every case."
Neither in the initial finding of a problem, the crafting of solutions, the creation of a GE to implement those solutions, nor in the day-to-day operation of the GE does a requirement exist that anything economically productive be done, nor indeed anything at all that is more than nominally related to the presumed problem. Citizens must impose any such requirements on their representatives.]
(C) Every existing GE will continue its activities indefinitely (barring sunset provisions and assuming that its activities are lawful, which I do throughout), regardless of any unproductive, counterproductive, or irrelevant effects, until citizens can impose contrary requirements on a coalition of fifty-one Senators, 218 Representatives and the President. Any such democratically enacted correctives, already difficult to achieve because of cumulative public-choice effects, become increasingly more difficult over time and can at last become impossible: adverse political effects.
[Each new GE that is directed toward a particular group adds to the number of voters who have a significant financial stake in continued government activism (assuming unlimited debt financing, as appears to be the case) and subtracts a like number from those who do not. The marginal financial cost to the former of ending their relationship with the GE is far greater than the marginal benefit to the latter (and the former), a situation enhanced by the non-market returns, i.e., rents and subsidies, that the former usually enjoy due to the nature of the GE. The former group are thus more likely to vote their specific interest rather than their more general. The former group are also more naturally and thus better organized, have more political expertise, and have obtained greater legislative access than the latter, because the marginal value of political activity is greater for them. The latter group, meanwhile, experiences ever-rising total and marginal costs to monitor and assess the activities of the former.]
My proposal, the Lifelong Endowment (LE), addresses the complex of issues above. It taxes all income monthly at 16%, distributing the proceeds in equal shares monthly to every adult citizen and in quarter shares to minor citizens. [I suggest that the rate be variable, set by an independent board with a mandate similar to that of the Fed. I selected the initial rate to have the necessary public-choice, policy, and political impact on the current environment.] The LE tax paid and the benefit received are both free from federal income tax. The program is administered by the banking system, the float providing at least partial compensation: the funds never go to Washington. Tax rates for corporations are adjusted to make the proposal revenue-neutral for them; and tax brackets for individuals are adjusted so that before and after brackets remain the same.
The proposal is extremely powerful as regards effective policy (1-5 below), public-choice incentives (5-8), and politics (9-11). Here’s how:
1) It replaces by statute the Social Security Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program immediately, with a guarantee that no beneficiaries now or in the future will receive less total benefit than they would have otherwise. Current OASDI employee and employer contributions revert to the employee. Based on 2005 figures, here as elsewhere below, it saves about $10.4 trillion of the public financing that the OASDI Trustee Report says (said) will be needed to keep the current system afloat. (I don’t believe that my methodology is suspect, but neither is it as sophisticated as that used by the SSA actuaries upon whose work it is based. It would need to be redone using more current figures and more sophisticated methods at any rate. In addition, my actual analysis only goes out for ten years, and the figure given uses a straight-line interpolation beyond that point. My point is that if the figure is only $8.5 trillion, to pick a number, that’s still pretty good.)
2) Transfers of surplus OASDI receipts to the General Fund via the OASDI Trust Fund cease immediately. I am not so naive as to believe that the current spending of those funds will cease also, so the $10.4 trillion figure above assumes that they will be borrowed rather than taken in as payroll taxes.
3) Passage of the LE does not itself replace any public assistance programs, but instead makes them largely redundant by raising incomes. It lifts almost every single American family above the federal poverty threshold. (The $20,300 annual LE income for a family of two adults and two children, for example, is 106% of the FPT.) [This analysis may need to be updated to take tax rates into account…payroll, income, and LE. The point holds, however.]
4) Under the proposal, families currently receiving assistance gain tremendously in personal, economic, and political liberty. An important component of increased personal and economic freedom is increased mobility to seek better job prospects or a lower cost of living wherever they might be found.
5) Under reasonable assumptions, the fuller integration of families now relying on assistance into labor and product markets will add several hundred billion dollars to annual GDP.
6) As current assistance programs rapidly wither away, about $400 billion in annual federal spending disappears, to which one can add in both debt service and state-level assistance spending. The political use of those funds to buy support disappears also, as does the support already purchased. In terms of numbers of citizens (votes), this support now comes primarily from current program dependants and from the government and NGO labor force.
7) The monthly LE benefit amount depends on aggregate national income: all citizens instantly gain a tangible self-interest that aggregate national income should grow. In addition, this new incentive immediately replaces the incentives that now inform the large numbers of voters those who rely on the OASDI program and the various “welfare” programs for their livelihood, either as resource suppliers (GE suppliers) or recipients (GE clients). Upon passage of the proposal, one can expect ever-increasing electoral demand based on the former incentive at the expense of the latter. [The proposal increases the total and marginal value of informed citizenship, and of economic understanding in its furtherance.]
9) What prevents this proposal from being just another example of “well, if we just did so-and-so…” is its political dimension: it has a natural constituency based purely on financial self-interest. The first-order effect of the proposal—its tax, its reversion of OASDI contributions to employees, its reduced income tax liability, and its monthly benefit—is to increase the after-tax income of over eighty percent of citizens (voters). For example, a family of four with two children and earned income of $45,000, the approximate median, would enjoy forty-three percent more pre-tax income and an eleven-percent smaller income tax liability. The simplicity and transparency of the proposal also allows voters to see that in glaring to the programs that it replaces, the LE actually achieves its policy goals.
10) A significant portion of that 80+%, of course, will oppose the proposal because they will lose the livelihood that they enjoy by government activism. This is the class of individuals (voters) that now continues to grow, and the class whose growth the proposal reverses. However, note that GE clients are in a radically different position from the individuals, GE suppliers, who provide labor or other resource inputs for those same programs. Many or perhaps most of the former, by far the more numerous subclass, will welcome the proposal. Almost all of the latter will tend to oppose it.
11) None of the public-choice, economic, or political arguments above need be made in order to gain adequate electoral support for the proposal, as the policy effects and the individual financial effects by themselves are more than sufficient. (The arguments certainly need not be avoided, either.) Greater public awareness of economic and civic principles comes about as a result of the proposal’s passage, rather than being a requirement for it.
[Though I do not pursue it, a point worth noting is that limiting the LE benefit to citizens while placing no such limitation on the LE tax, changes the dynamics of the immigration debate dramatically.]
The Lifelong Endowment attacks the situation that Dr. Voegeli describes in a fundamental, effective and completely transparent way. It is a basic entitlement system that empowers citizens at the expense of the State, and that grows the private sector at the expense of government.
And as a bonus, it will generate all the same effects under an Obama administration as under a McCain.
The proposal has other specifics, and the paper provides a range of arguments and statistics to support the assertions made above. Any or all of it may need tweaking or more basic correction, and certainly the numbers need to be updated and thoroughly vetted. Nonetheless, it does appear to work as I’ve described. If readers find it worthwhile, it needs allies such as yourselves to help provide more thorough analysis and to get it in front of the public. Once it becomes known, I think it can generate enough momentum to take care of itself.
“Then the question is raw politics. Who? Whom? Or more specifically, how will Big Government simply exclude various categories of people that it helps?
I would suggest to all, that FDR’s actions provide a window into the future. FDR had financial constraints — a depression meant there was only so much money he could spend. He spent to maximize political gain. Mexican nationals were deported, citizenship required for participation in the New Deal. Blacks were also excluded as much as possible. Ugly? Yes but it worked.”
1) Talk about how most of the pension payouts go to white males. Sneakily compare this to their *current* population size (not to how many there where when they were working).
2) Use this as proof that white males get more than their fair share, and let people draw the conclusion that this is the main problem of social security.
“White Mens’ Greed! Ruins! A Nation! In need!”
3) When tempers have flared enough, step in with a compromise that says that white men of the boomer generation will still get pensions but white men after that will be excluded from benefits, but they will still have to pay of-course.
“Most of them are married. Women live longer than men! Their wives can take care of them!”
4) In 2042 when the votes of white women isn’t needed anymore, cut benefits for them too.
5) In 20?? when the votes of blacks isn’t needed anymore, cut benefits for them too.
6) Introduce straight ”You get benefits if you vote for me”.
7) Civil war between various cliques who realize that since all votes are locked in the only way of gaining votes is to kill the opponents voters. Rwandan democracy.
Most folks can’t remember anything long enough to be able to change anything. Wasn’t there talk of campaign finance reform a while back?