Here is a true, empirical, statistical generalization. Smart, mature, politically attentive adults gradually move toward a classical liberal philosophy. This philosophy is committed to the ideal of limited government under constitutional constraints, the rule of law, due process, and individual liberty. This includes freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets. 

Independent of their education, through experience and observation, the people I describe intuitively come to understand that government’s natural devolution is to become a mechanism to transfer wealth and preferential opportunities. Some consider such government a relatively gentle engine of plunder, i.e., one that economizes on bloodshed. 

Ideally, government officials foster a system that rewards productivity, provides security, and cares for the helpless and unfortunate. Alas, democracies tend to degenerate into transfer societies. Their focus becomes redistribution, usually to the wealthy and those in privileged positions, often government employees. Today’s Greece is a prime example and America is not immune. Consider the unsustainable pension obligations to public sector workers in California. 

Such perverse outcomes are largely independent of the professed intentions and pronouncements of politicians. National politicians are rewarded for lying and most do much of the time. They have strong incentives to do so. Rewarding constituents is the primary means of maintaining their office and generating personal wealth and privilege. Further, the ideology of the welfare state justifies opportunistic and ultimately destructive behavior.

I occasionally receive a commentary describing this sorry process. The comments that follow are by a friend, Elliot Justin, MD. Elliot is not trained in economics, but rather studied literature and languages at Harvard before medical school. I consider Elliot an acute observer of America’s political economy. His observations demonstrate an intuitive understanding of public choice economics. I consider this an optimistic potential. 

As a physician, Elliot is sensitive to pathologies and activities injurious to systems. Our system of political economy has been the most successful large-scale social experiment in human history-but one at great risk. Only if we identify the causes of decline can we arrest and cure them. Diagnosis is a first step. His follows. 

-John Baden

Rejecting or neglecting the Founders’ values condemns the Republic to founder

By Elliot Justin

Propelled and pushed by “progressives” since the late 19^th century, the power, exactions and expectations of government have increased radically. Inevitably, democracy and liberty are harnessed in a heavier and heavier yoke.  Whereas government used to do a few things, it now does a great many- so many that they can no longer be enumerated and described with any clarity. The Patriot Act, ObamaCare, and Dodd/Frank’s turgid 6,000+ pages epitomize the impossibility. 

This expansion has been promoted by passionate, well organized groups who conceive their beneficial intentions and interests in terms of group rights and collective responsibilities that eclipse the natural rights and personal duties of individuals. Since the ends are conceived as preeminently important, the Constitutional and common law restraints on the power of government are dismissed as antique, self-serving and socially unjust. The President attacks the Supreme Court’s power to overturn ObamaCare, California counties clear land for solar farms without compensation, Congress mandates light bulbs and flush toilets, cars are stopped for DUI sweeps, and cell phone usage. What transactions and activities are no longer touched by regulations and taxes?

Elected leaders delegate power to ever larger bureaucracies, which inherently are unable to perform effectively and fairly. Larger is not better; but certainly more costly in terms of money, lost opportunities and individual autonomy. The Departments of Energy, Labor, Education, Health Agriculture, the White House employ more bureaucrats and drive more limos, but is energy less costly, citizens’ incomes higher, students and workforce better educated and knowledgeable, healthier, better fed, better governed because of these agencies? Imagine if these Departments were the same size as they were in the 1980’s. Have the increases made a difference?  Imagine if they didn’t exist at all!

“Causes begin as movements, evolve into businesses and end up as rackets”, noted Eric Hoffer.

So the public becomes disenchanted and contemptuous and fearful of its “democratic” government, which has become less democratic-a “soft” tyranny in effect.

The people were to have a government mandated to protect the liberty, happiness and property of individuals; we now have a government that redistributes freedom, opportunities and wealth, under the guidance and pressures of demagogues, the PC fashions of the news cycle, and the crooked alliances of politicians and crony capitalists. While the nomenklatura of regulators, pols and venture socialists make off with the money and power, Liberty is sacrificed on the altar of fraternity and equality and justice.

Debt soars. Unfunded obligations pile up. Inflation and default loom. Meanwhile, the Senate has not met its responsibility to present a budget for 3 years. The President’s budget is defeated unanimously in the House, including his own party.  Even his own Secretary of Treasury acknowledges his figures and projections are “untenable”. The President challenges judicial review, like a Chavez or Morales or Kirchner. And last week, the US Park Service busted folks in Arkansas for hunting Big Foot without a license!

When the Federal government controls and  arbitrarily regulates the financial sector, the health sector, energy, automobiles, farming, intra-state commerce under the Commerce Clause, and the behavior of individuals and  families, we are no longer a limited government of and for the people, but an invincible Kleptocracy and unchecked Social democracy.

This President may call it “the way business works”, but the crony relations between the public and private sectors make most Americans blanch-and those self-serving rackets drive some into the streets. With venture socialism, financial and government elites direct favors and investments to each other.  They trade access for wealth, while  tax payers assume moral hazard and costs. . These relationships make a travesty of entrepreneurial risk-taking and free enterprise. The creativity, energy and upward mobility of small businesses that so distinguished the United Sates are stifled.

When the United States are no longer “exceptional”, the world will lose. During the 19^th century, they were the beacon of liberty; during the 20^th century, they became the arsenal.  The USA decisively defeated German and Japanese fascism, resisted and subverted the pretensions of the Soviets to world domination, while extending unprecedented prosperity and freedom to her citizens and allied nations. The “Pax Americana” has been the most benign hegemony. The chattering class, the academy and those under their influence have come to a different conclusion. Instead of pride, they feel shame over legacies of racism, violence and resistance to the causes of the Left. They have finally seized the power to atone for this shame and crown their ideal of social justice and technocracy over hoary notions of liberty and limited government.

Just as it became grossly obvious that the European model and New Deal/Great Society variant were abject failures--we took on more of it in spades. As Orwell wryly noted, “Only an intellectual could be so stupid…”

The pension obligations for state and municipal employees exceed $4 trillion, with only 4 percent funded.

Medicaid now consumes 25 percent of State budgets, and will go higher with ObamaCare. Funds will be shifted from education, police and other services. Losers will demand free education, fret over higher crime, etc. Higher taxes will be demanded as fair and just-while the USA now ranks in the top 3 nations for taxes in the developed world and our competitors are cutting taxes and adopting austerity measures.

The President says regarding Solyndra, “This was not our program per se.” Whatever. The failure of DoE green energy selections approaches a dozen, all involved bundlers and major contributors etc. And then there is the Volt. Are 100 percent of the government’s portfolio losers? (Why should Energy be different than Banking?)

The President castigates Congressman Ryan’s budget for zeroing out renewable energy subsidies as “aggressively and deliberately ignorant of the world economy”. Meanwhile, the cascade of green tide of bankruptcies and overruns elsewhere has led to Spain, Holland, German, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and China to cut budgets and subsidies.

As feared by the Founders, who were steeped in a Polybian view of the inevitable decay of Republics into tyrannies, we have not been defeated by foreign nationalists and totalitarians, but promiscuous promises on health, pensions, education, stifling regulations and taxes, and a citizenry that sees resistance to power as hopeless.

Mr. Franklin, we have had our Republic, but we could not keep it.