The Lessons That Guided The Nation’s Founders

The founders of our nation were wise and well-read in world history. They came from Europe and were well aware of the historical problems with the sort of strong, autocratic central governments that had ruled nations like England, Spain, Russia and France, and older empires like the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. They were well aware that powerful autocratic central governments tended to become corrupt, self-serving, and out of touch with the people they ruled. They crafted for our new nation a highly decentralized system, with three independent branches of government to provide checks and balances on abuses of power, and reserved most powers to the independent states as another check on the growth of excessive power.

Over the past 200 years we have steadily eroded these protections, and have grown a huge, widely expensive, intrusive, ineffective and highly corrupt central government – the very thing they feared.

Huge? The on-budget federal population, the one reported in the budget, is about 2.4 million people, In 2006 (the last date for which I can find reliable figures) the true federal government workforce stood at between 14.6 million and 17 million people, including the “off budget” population that the government budgets generally try to hide. This includes all the civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors, and grantees, and the uncertainly in the size reflects the fact that even the government itself isn’t quite sure how big it is. There are over 1,300 official federal facilities, and tens of thousands more leased private facilities.

Wildy expensive? The current federal government arrogates to itself between 17% and 20% of the entire economy, and the percentage is currently projected to rise toward 30% over the next few decades. This is largely to support the huge federal bureaucracy and the massive entitlement programs, as well as the swelling interest payment on the national debt.

Intrusive? The federal government now routinely listens in to domestic email and telephone conversations (thank the misnamed “Patriot Act” for that), and will soon regulate exactly what services your private or employer health insurance company can offer you (thank the recently-passed and also misnamed “Health Care Reform Act” for that) The current federal government even requires that a homeowner keeping a few hens for eggs register them with the federal government using a 15-digit number on Radio Frequency Identification Tags, (RFID). Sound outlandish? Read Another intrusive government regulation by Bill Horne.

Ineffective? Think Katrina. Think Gulf oil spill. Both disasters in which an efficient government might have made a big difference, but which in fact were marred by confusion, slow response, agency infighting, unclear lines of authority, and any number of other inefficiencies. Think about the recent report that there are now over 3,100 federal contractors and agencies involved in national intelligence and counter-terrorism, so many that many are duplicating each other’s work, and no one can manage to read or coordinate all the reports that they are issuing.

Highly corrupt? Well, it’s true we don’t seem to have much of the outright bribery that prevails in many nations, but in fact positions and favorable policies are routinely bought by large corporations, unions, and well-funded interest groups in their financial support, or lack of support, for expensive political campaigns. And of course we have all known for years of the extensive Washington “revolving door”, wherein government officials conveniently retire to lucrative positions in the very private industries to whom they used to direct multi-million dollar contracts. It may not be outright bribery, but it certainly is corruption.

Can this be reversed? I doubt it. Will it ultimately be fatal to our nation? Probably. It is exactly the same path of over-reach and over-spending that previous empires and great nations have followed, always with disastrous results at the end. It is instructive that at the very time when the European Union is finally facing up to the problem and beginning to cut government spending to avoid financial ruin, our own government is massively INCREASING spending.

Too bad our current leaders don’t know their history. Too bad our current leaders don’t understand what a gift the founders of our nation gave us in our original small, balanced, decentralized government.