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Have Our Founding Fathers Failed Us?
If the Founding Fathers failed in any regard, they failed to make governance sufficiently horrible, thankless, difficult, rancorous, disagreeable, and ineffective. No doubt once they found themselves in it, they discovered just how awful it really was, but they failed to keep it that way.
Little by little, steps have been taken, salaries increased, perks added, trappings acknowledged, and holding office has morphed into the insular, protected, self-congratulatory, celebrity, investment club that it now is. To paraphrase Mel Brooks: it’s good to be the government.
Our government used to be the place where only prominent, wealthy, self-less men took on the thankless tasks of self-governance. Now it’s the place where the politically ambitious rise to gain wealth and prominence. It’s full of carpet baggers and grifters on all sides of the aisle. They aspire to Washington as that’s the place where the real money and power is. Forget that the real work of government should be a tedious grind of difficult choices. “Go along, get along” is the motto; that and “You’ll get yours.”
So hard budget choices? Fageddabout it. We’ll just run deficits and borrow. Better yet, we’ll borrow from the Federal Reserve and let them worry about where the money comes from (have paper and ink, will travel.) Conflicts around the world? Let’s wring our hands, talk about how awful it is, how it could all be different if there were just more opportunities, if we could just all be friends, if we could sit down and talk, share a cup of tea or a beer.
Do you feel your opportunities are limited, that success is passing you by? Look to the successful, not to emulate them, but to despise them. They are hoarding all the success, not paying their fair share, and that makes you a victim, their victim.
Are actuarially certain bombs set to go off in the Social Security and Medicare systems? Ignore the hissing fuses. Thinking about those issues just makes everyone’s head hurt. Instead, say you’ll fight for those programs. Fight, fight, fight. You’re a fighter.
Our government is all unicorns and rainbows, with you, the determined Congressman, Senator, President, fighting, fighting, to keep it that way while you golf, vacation, make money, make more money and go along to get along, la di da. It’s a wonderful job and a wonderful life.
But it was never meant to be so, and it cannot last.
I have a new rule for conservatives: never vote for a candidate for office who likes the job. The time for hard choices is coming.
Published in General, Politics
Ask, rather, have we failed our founding fathers? We have allowed all of this to happen.
I accept no blame.
Crabby Appleton
Ask, rather, have we failed our founding fathers? We have allowed all of this to happen.
Crabby:
And how, pray tell, could it have been stopped? Wilson showed it was possible to ignore the constitution and simply assume executive power. FDR took that advice and when opponents turned to the court for relief, packed the court and jammed stuff through. LBJ had majorities and did what he wanted. Now Obama has coronated himself. We had one brief point during Bush 2 where we could have acted, and we were too polite and preoccupied to do it.
We will soon have a second chance.
The Chinese and the Assyrians relied on eunuchs to run their empires. Is that sufficiently horrible?
And it would have resolved the Bill Clinton problems…
I like your rule to elect people who don’t want the job. I listen to adam carolla and he always says you can weed out the pedifiles by getting the guy who is trying to not get noticed when asked for volunteers to take the kids on the jamberee in the woods next weekend. The guy who volunteers is a little too eager, get the guy who would rather watch the game that weekend. Same for the politicians
Also I think the founders would be surprised the country lasted this long. If you read what they said at the time of the ratification of the constitution they didn’t have much faith that self government could last very long
Agreed Crabby. Remember the words of Ben Franklin:
— John Adams
— Thomas Jefferson
— Elmer Peterson
— Thomas Jefferson
Did the Founders fail us? I’d say not, because it isn’t fair to judge what they did against an impossibly-perfect ideal. They did damned well; maybe, history may learn in the fullness of time, as well as will ever be done.
Our Founding Fathers have not failed us.
It is not a failure to have been born in 1743 and unable perfectly to predict what the world would look like in 2015.
“Tom, you disappointed me. You failed. You thought you could get a passing grade with “Champion of the Enlightenment?” You thought you’d just sail along in my history class on the name Jefferson? No grade inflation in my class, Tom. You had to predict a world in which I could instantly grade you. From Paris. In real time. And one in which, should I feel like it, I could simply fly–flap my wings pretty much–to America. I can get back in less than 24 hours if highly motivated–and I’m just a normal American. The important ones can do it a lot faster. Normal ones like me have to figure out how to get the bots at BofA to take the hold off our credit card and wait in line at the airport. If you didn’t see all of that coming, you failed.”
Well, we’ve come to the point, haven’t we, of examining the basic Madisonian assumption of the Constitution – namely, that dividing power among branches will create equal and therefore balancing forces. But experience shows they don’t.
Madison should have studied game theory.
Game theory studies a game called Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). One of the lessons that PD teaches is that when there are multiple players, each player faces a tradeoff between (a) the amount they will be required to contribute and (b) whether withholding their contribution will be noticed and penalized. The larger the group you belong to, the less likely you’ll be noticeable individually. Once the group grows past a certain point, it’s possible to free-ride; you get the benefits of the group without contributing anything yourself.
In any contest between the president and Congress, the fact that the Congress is made up of many individuals (versus the single president) means that it is categorically easier for each member of Congress to fail to contribute. In this case, to “contribute” is to go on record and vote against the president (especially if he’s the leader of your party) because that contribution becomes a cost. Each member of Congress has the possibility of free-riding; that is, they want other members to bear the cost of opposing the president – but not them. Inevitably, since that possibility exists for every member, the power of Congress breaks down, and that weakness means they have less power to oppose the president. Eventually, the president gathers so much power from repeated victories that there is no balance.
The only balancing power left is the Court. But that has its own Prisoner’s Dilemma game.
KC Mulville
Well, we’ve come to the point, haven’t we, of examining the basic Madisonian assumption of the Constitution – namely, that dividing power among branches will create equal and therefore balancing forces. But experience shows they don’t.
Madison should have studied game theory.
Wow! That’s one of the coolist things I’ve read in a LONG time, but it’s so true! To extrapolate, when Senators were beholden to state governments, they had a real constituency to deal with and this was something of an innoculation against the theory you describe. Likewise, two year Congressional terms were likely thought to insulate the Congress. Also, if I remember, the founders were appalled by the concentration of power into two dominent parties. I think that they expected more of the pluralcy of a parlimentary system, but more independent as there would be no need to form alliances to make a government along with a regular purging of the ranks at election time.
Unfortunately, the Genie is out of the bottle; the 17th Amendment will never be repealed. People will never cede their right to elect their senators even if this would improve governance.
There are no structural defects in the original Constitution. The only true defect of the Constitution is the 16th amendment. Get rid of the federal government’s power to directly tax it’s citizens and the public treasury barely exists and so there is little danger that the public will vote itself largess.
LMAO!
I might argue we have our own eunuchs in Congress and they seem to be having a gay (archaic meaning) time of it, so, NO!
To Mr. Z in MT ,
As with publius
Brutus would disagree.