Voice For Liberty

Tag: Constitution

  • A second Bill of Rights, by Franklin Roosevelt

    If we wonder what was the genesis of the modern nanny state, listen to this speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s part of his State of the Union Address from 1944.

    The purpose of the original Bill of Rights is to protect our freedoms from government. But to provide the things Roosevelt calls for — food, clothing, a decent home, adequate medical care, and a good education — requires an expansive government. These rights are called positive rights because they require action by the government, in contrast to the negative rights found in the Bill of Rights. Richard A. Epstein explains the consequences of the “Roosevelt Rights”:

    All of these are positive rights, which means necessarily that some unidentified individuals or groups have the duty to provide decent wages, home, health, and education to the people. The individual so taxed can discharge that duty only by forfeiting his own right to reap the fruits of his own labor. Yet the incidence and size of these hefty correlative duties are left unaddressed by Roosevelt.

    We are witnessing today a modern rerun of Roosevelt’s incomplete strategy. Obama’s healthcare plan, for instance, designates a generous set of “essential health benefits” to a large number of individuals entitled to affordable care on the newly created government exchanges. But these benefits cannot be funded with higher taxes on the “millionaires and billionaires,” whose combined wealth falls short of what is needed. So what duty will undergird the new right?

    This sort of funding crisis could never arise under the Bill of Rights 1.0, whose correlative duties are negative — or, put another way, they impose a “keep off” sign on other people. If I have the freedom of speech, your duty is to forbear from disrupting the speech with force, and vice versa. Each of us can demand forbearance from the use of force by all others.

    David Kelley elaborates further in a chapter from The Morality of Capitalism:

    By contrast, welfare rights are conceived as rights to possess and enjoy certain goods, regardless of one’s actions; they are rights to have the goods provided by others if one cannot earn them oneself. Accordingly, welfare rights impose positive obligations on others. If I have a right to food, someone has an obligation to grow it. If I cannot pay for it, someone has an obligation to buy it for me. Welfarists sometimes argue that the obligation is imposed on society as a whole, not on any specifi c individual. But society is not an entity, much less a moral agent, over and above its individual members, so any such obligation falls upon us as individuals. Insofar as welfare rights are implemented through government programs, for example, the obligation is distributed over all taxpayers.

    From an ethical standpoint, then, the essence of welfarism is the premise that the need of one individual is a claim on other individuals. The claim may run only as far as the town or the nation. It may not embrace all of humanity. But in all versions of the doctrine, the claim does not depend on your personal relationship to the claimant, or your choice to help, or your evaluation of him as worthy of your help. It is an unchosen obligation arising from the sheer fact of his need.

  • Kansas lawmakers, including judges, should be selected democratically

    While many believe that judges should not “legislate from the bench,” that is, make law themselves, the reality is that lawmaking is a judicial function. In a democracy, lawmakers should be elected under the principle of “one person, one vote.” But Kansas, which uses the Missouri Plan for judicial selection to its two highest courts, violates this principle.

    A recent paper by Kansas University School of Law Professor Stephen J. Ware explains the problem with the process used in Kansas. The paper is titled Originalism, Balanced Legal Realism and Judicial Selection: A Case Study and may be downloaded at no charge. The Kansas courts that use the judicial selection described in the paper are the Kansas Court of Appeals and the Kansas Supreme Court.

    At issue is whether judges are simply arbitrators of the law, or do they actually participate in the lawmaking process. Ware explains: “This realist view that statutory interpretation often involves ‘substantial judicial discretion’ and therefore constitutes ‘judicial lawmaking, not lawfinding,’ had by the 1950s, ‘become deeply rooted.’”

    A “‘balanced realism,’ to use Brian Tamanaha’s appealing label, recognizes both that judges’ policy preferences have little or no influence on many judicial decisions and that judges’ policy preferences have a significant influence on other judicial decisions. Empirical studies tend to support this balanced view.” In other words, there is some role for ideology in making judicial decisions. Politics, therefore, is involved. Ware quotes Charles Gardner Geyh: “In a post-realist age, the ideological orientation of judicial aspirants matters.” And the higher the court, the more this matters.

    Since judges function as lawmakers, they ought to be selected by a democratic process. In the Kansas version of the Missouri Plan, a nominating commission dominated by lawyers selects three candidates to fill an opening on the Kansas Court of Appeals or Kansas Supreme Court. The governor then selects one of the three, and the process is over. A new judge is selected. This process gives members of the state’s bar tremendous power in selecting judges.

    Ware presents eleven examples of judges on the two highest Kansas courts engaging in lawmaking. In one, a workers’ compensation case, the employee would lose his appeal if the “clear” precedent was followed. Justice Carol A. Beier wrote the opinion. Ware explains:

    But this is not, in fact, what Justice Beier and her colleagues on the Kansas Supreme Court did. Rather they did what Kansas Judges Greene and Russell say never happens. Justice Beier and her colleagues engaged in lawmaking. They changed the legal rule from one contrary to their ideologies to one consistent with their ideologies.

    Justice Beier’s opinion doing this started by criticizing the old rule, while acknowledging that it was, in fact, the rule prior to her opinion by which the Supreme Court made new law. Here again is the above quote from Coleman, but now with the formerly omitted words restored and italicized: “The rule is clear, if a bit decrepit and unpopular: An injury from horseplay does not arise out of employment and is not compensable unless the employer was aware of the activity or it had become a habit at the workplace.”

    Who decided that this rule is “decrepit and unpopular” and so should be changed? Was it the Kansas Legislature? No, it was the Kansas Supreme Court. It was judges, not legislators, who decided that this legal rule was bad policy. It was judges, not legislators, who changed the law to bring it in line with what the lawmaking judges thought was good policy.

    Beier wrote in her opinion: “We are clearly convinced here that our old rule should be abandoned. Although appropriate for the time in which it arose, we are persuaded by the overwhelming weight of contrary authority in our sister states and current legal commentary.”

    The result: New Kansas law, made by people selected through an undemocratic process.

    In conclusion, Ware writes:

    Non-lawyers who believe in the principle that lawmakers should be selected democratically need to know that judicial selection is lawmaker selection to be troubled by the Missouri Plan’s violation of this principle. Non-lawyers who do not know that judges inevitably make law may believe that the role of a judge consists only of its professional/technical side and, therefore, believe that judges should be selected entirely on their professional competence and ethics and that assessments of these factors are best left to lawyers. In short, a lawyer who omits lawmaking from a published statement about the judicial role is furthering a misimpression that helps empower lawyers at the expense of non-lawyers, in violation of basic democratic equality, the principle of one-person, one-vote.

    Prospects for Kansas

    In Kansas, the process for selecting judges to the Kansas Court of Appeals is governed by statute, and can be changed by the legislature and governor. The House of Representatives has passed a bill to reform the process, but it was blocked by Senate Judiciary Chair Tim Owens. He said “I think this is the first time I did not hear a bill because I thought it was so bad. This is a terrible, terrible bill that’s hated by the courts; it’s an attempt to take over control of the courts.”

    One of the dividing lines between “conservative” and “moderate” Kansas Senate Republicans is their attitude towards judicial selection, as revealed in a vote taken earlier this year. Owens, who ranked as the least friendly senator to economic freedom in the 2012 edition of the Kansas Economic Freedom Index, lost his bid for re-election in the August primary election. Many of the other moderate Republicans who voted against reform also lost their primary election contest.

    Owens, it should be noted, is an attorney, and is therefore a member of the privileged class that has outsize power in selecting judges.

    Sometimes legislators are simply uninformed or misinformed on judicial selection. An example is Jean Schodorf, who lost a re-election bid in August. In an interview, she was quoted as saying “We thwarted changes to judicial selection that would have allowed the governor to have the final say in all judicial selections.”

    The bill that the senate voted on, and the one that Owens killed the year before, called for Court of Appeals judges to be appointed by the governor, with the consent of the senate. It’s actually the senate that has the final say.

    Newspaper editorial writers across Kansas are mostly opposed to judicial selection reform. An example is Rhonda Holman of the Wichita Eagle, who in 2010 wrote: “Some critics may have a beef with past court decisions, perhaps even a legitimate one — which is no surprise, given that judicial decisions pick winners and losers. But they also may be motivated by politics — which is a problem, given that the judiciary is supposed to be fair, impartial and independent. In the absence of a strong case for change, Kansas should stick with what works.”

    With the change in composition of the Kansas Senate next year, the climate is more favorable for reform for the way judges are selected for the Kansas Court of Appeals. The law governing how judges for the Kansas Supreme Court are selected is in the Kansas Constitution, and would require an amendment to alter the process. Such an amendment requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the Kansas Legislature, and then a simple majority vote of the people.

    Just last week a federal appeals court ruled that the method Kansas uses to select justices to the Kansas Supreme Court is constitutional.

    The Court’s discussion starts on a promising note: “That citizens have a fundamental right to vote for public officials on equal terms with one another is uncontroversial.”

    But in the end, the Court sided with the present undemocratic Kansas system: “Kansas designed the Commission to favor lawyers in order to limit the influence of politics on the nomination process and ensure the quality of its judicial nominees. Preserving the quality and independence of the judiciary is a legitimate government interest, and having attorneys elect a majority of the Commission’s members is a rational way to accomplish that goal. Attorneys are better equipped than non-attorneys to evaluate the temperament and legal acumen of judicial candidates and more likely to base their votes on factors other than party affiliation. This is owing in part to their training which enables informed judgments about a candidate’s experience — his credentials, his area of expertise, his body of work — and the extent to which it strengthens or weakens his candidacy. ”

    Originalism, Balanced Legal Realism and Judicial Selection: A Case Study
    By Stephen J. Ware

    Abstract: The “balanced realist” view that judging inevitably involves lawmaking is widely accepted, even among originalists, such as Justice Scalia, Randy Barnett and Steven Calabresi. Yet many lawyers are still reluctant to acknowledge publicly the inevitability of judicial lawmaking. This reluctance is especially common in debates over the Missouri Plan, a method of judicial selection that divides the power to appoint judges between the governor and the bar.

    The Missouri Plan is one of three widely-used methods of selecting state court judges. The other two are: (1) direct election of judges by the citizenry, and (2) appointment of judges by democratically elected officials, typically the governor and legislature, with little or no role for the bar. Each of these two methods of judicial selection respects a democratic society’s basic equality among citizens — the principle of one-person, one-vote. In contrast, the Missouri Plan violates this principle by making a lawyer’s vote worth more than another citizen’s vote.

    This Article provides a case study of the clash between the inevitability of judicial lawmaking and the reluctance of lawyers to acknowledge this inevitability while defending their disproportionate power under the Missouri Plan. The Article documents efforts by lawyers in one state, Kansas, to defend their version of the Missouri Plan by attempting to conceal from the public the fact that Kansas judges, like judges in the other 49 states, inevitably make law. The case study then shows examples of Kansas judges making law. The Article concludes that honesty requires lawyers participating in the debate over judicial selection in the United States to forthrightly acknowledge that judges make law. Lawyers who seek to defend the power advantage the Missouri Plan gives them over other citizens can honestly acknowledge that this is a power advantage in the selection of lawmakers and then explain why they believe a departure from the principle of one-person, one-vote is justified in the selection of these particular lawmakers.

    The complete paper may be downloaded at no charge here.

  • Walter Williams on government in a free society

    Walter E.
    Williams

    Last September in Wichita economist Walter E. Williams spoke on the legitimate role of government in a free society, touching on the role of government as defined in the Constitution, the benefits of capitalism and private property, and the recent attacks on individual freedom and limited government.

    Williams’ evening lecture was held in the Mary Jane Teall Theater at Century II, and all but a handful of its 652 seats were occupied. It was presented by the Bill of Rights Institute and underwritten by the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation.

    Williams said that one of the justifications for the growth of government — far beyond the visions of the founders of America — is to promote fairness and justice. While these are worthy goals, Williams said we must ask what is the meaning of fairness and justice, referring to the legitimate role of government in a free society.

    In the Constitution, Williams said the founders specified the role of the federal government in Article 1 Section 8. This section holds a list that enumerates what Congress is authorized to do. If something is not on the list, Williams said Congress is not authorized to do it.

    The Article 8 powers that Williams mentioned are to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises; to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; to borrow money on the credit of the United States; to coin money; to establish post-offices and post-roads; and to raise and support armies. It is regarding these powers, plus a few others, that Congress has taxing and spending authority. “Nowhere in the United States Constitution to we find authority for Congress to tax and spend for up to two-thirds to three-quarters of what Congress taxes and spends for today.”

    Farm subsidies, handouts to banks, and food stamps are examples Williams gave of programs that are not authorized by the Constitution. “I think that we can safely say that we’ve made a significant departure from the constitutional principles of individual freedom and limited government that made us a rich nation in the first place.”

    The institutions of private property and free enterprise are the embodiment of these principles, Williams said. But there have been many successful attacks on private property and free enterprise. Thomas Jefferson, Williams said, anticipated this when he wrote “The natural progress of things is for government to gain ground, and for liberty to yield.”

    Taxation and spending are the ways government has gained ground. Taxes represent government claims on private property.

    But an even better measure of what government has done is to look at spending. From 1787 to 1920, federal spending was only three percent of gross domestic product, except during wartime. Today, that figure is approaching 30 percent, Williams said: “The significance is that as time goes by, you and I own less and less of our most valuable property, namely ourselves and the fruits of our labor.”

    In the realm of economics, Williams said that the founders thought that free markets and capitalism was the most effective social organization for promoting freedom, with capitalism defined as a system where people are free to pursue their own objectives as long as they do not violate the property rights of others. An often-trivialized benefit of capitalism and voluntary exchange is that it minimizes the capacity of one person to coerce another, he told the audience. This applies to the government, too.

    But for the last half-century, Williams said that free enterprise has been under unrelenting attack by the American people. Whether they realize it or not, people have demonstrated a “deep and abiding contempt” for private property rights and individual liberty.

    Williams said that ironically, capitalism is threatened not because of its failure, but because of its success. Capitalism has eliminated things that plagued mankind since the beginning of time — he mentioned disease, gross hunger, and poverty — and been so successful that “all other human wants appear to us to be at once inexcusable and unbearable.”

    So now, in the name of ideals other than freedom and liberty, we pursue things like equality of income, race and sex balance, affordable housing, and medical care. “As a result of widespread control by our government in order to achieve these higher objectives, we are increasingly being subordinated to the point where personal liberty in our country is treated like dirt.”

    This ultimately leads to tyranny and totalitarianism, he said. To those who might object to this strong and blunt conclusion, Williams asked this question: “Which way are we headed, tiny steps at a time: towards more liberty, or towards more government control of our lives?” He said that the answer, unambiguously, is the latter.

    It is the tiny steps that concern Williams, as they ultimately lead to their destination. Quoting Hume, he said “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Instead, Williams said it is always lost bit by bit. If anyone wanted to take away all our liberties all at once, we would rebel. But not so when liberties are taken bit by bit, which is what is currently happening.

    It is people’s desire for government to do good — helping the disadvantaged, elderly, failing businesses, college students — that leads to the attack on private property and economic freedom. But Williams explained that government has no resources of its own, meaning that for government to give one person money it must first — “through intimidation, threats, and coercion” — confiscate it from someone else.

    Williams told the audience that if a private person used coercion to take money from someone and give it to another person, that act would universally be considered theft and a crime. It doesn’t matter how needy or deserving the recipient, it would still be theft. But Williams asked if there is any conceptual difference between that act and when agents of the government do the same. Williams says no, except that in the second act, where Congress takes the money, the theft is legal.

    But mere legality doesn’t not make something moral. Slavery was legal in America for many years, but not moral. The purges of Stalin and Mao were legal under the laws of those countries. So legality does not equate to morality, Williams explained, and he said he cannot find a moral case for taking what belongs to one person and giving it to another to whom it does not belong.

    Charity is “praiseworthy and laudable” when it is voluntary, but it is worthy of condemnation when government reaches into others’ pockets for charity. Those who accept the forced takings are guilty, too, he explained.

    “The essence of our relationship with government is coercion,” Williams told the audience. This, he said, represents our major problem as a nation today: We’ve come to accept the idea of government taking from one to give to another. But the blame, Williams said, does not belong with politicians — “at least not very much.” Instead, he said that the blame lies with us, the people who elect them to office in order to get things for us. A candidate who said he would do only the things that the Constitution authorizes would not have much of a chance at being elected.

    The further problem is that if Kansans don’t elect officials who will bring federal dollars to Kansas, it doesn’t mean that Kansans will pay lower federal taxes. The money, taken from Kansans, will go to other states, leading to this conundrum: “That is, once legalized theft begins, it pays for everybody to participate.”

    We face a moral dilemma, then. Williams listed several great empires that declined for doing precisely what we’re doing: “Bread and circuses,” or big government spending.

    But there is a note — only one — of optimism, Williams believes. The first two years of the Obama administration, along with the Democratic Senate and House of Representatives, has been so brazen in their activities in “running roughshod over our liberties” that people are starting to argue and debate the Constitution. State attorneys general are bringing suits against the federal government over Obama’s health care plan. State legislatures are passing tenth amendment resolutions. The tea party and other grassroots movements give him optimism, too.

    We must also ask ourselves if we are willing to give up the benefits we get from government, he said. But most people want cuts in spending on other people, not ourselves, as “ours is critical and vital to the national interest.” With all of us feeling this way, Williams said the country is in danger.

    Young people have the greatest stake in the struggle for limited government and economic freedom, as the older generations have benefited from a relatively free country and the economic mobility that accompanied it. He said he’s afraid we’re losing that: “I’m hoping that future generations will not curse us for bequeathing to them a nation far less robust, far less free, than the nation that our parents and our ancestors bequeathed us.”

    In answering a question from the audience, Williams said he would be afraid of a constitutional convention to be held today, as some are advocating. We wouldn’t be sending people like John Adams. Instead, he said we’d be sending people like Barney Frank and others who have “deep contempt” for personal freedom.

    In response to a question on regulation, Williams said that regulations like health care and uncertainty over taxation cause businesses to be afraid to commit money to long term investments. Uncertainty “collapses the time horizon” causing firms to look for investments that pay off in the short term rather than the long term. This contributes to unemployment, he said.

    Williams also talked about the economic history of America. From its beginning to 1930, there were recessions and depressions, but there were not calls for the federal government to intervene and stimulate the economy. It wasn’t until the Hoover administration and the New Deal that the federal government intervened in the economy in order to “fix” the economy. Williams said that what should have been a “sharp two or three-year downtown” was turned in to the Great Depression — which was not over until after World War II — by government intervention. The measures being taken today are similarly postponing the recovery, he said. He added that most serious economic downturns are caused by government. It’s also futile for the government to spend the country out of a recession, which he likened to taking water from the deep end of a pool to the shallow end in order to raise the level of the shallow end. Government taking money from one person, giving it to another, and expecting the economy to rise is similarly futile.

    A question about mainstream media and their representation of the issues of today brought this response: “You have to make the assumption, I believe implied in your question, that those people are ignorant, and if only they knew better, they would change their behavior. Human ignorance is somewhat optimistic, because ignorance is curable through education. I’m very sure that many of these people want government control. The elite have always wanted government control, and the media was very responsible in getting President Obama elected.”

    In an interview, I asked what President Obama should say in his jobs speech. Williams recommended the president should reduce regulation and lower taxes, especially capital gains and corporate income taxes. The spending programs of the past will not help. But Obama’s constituency will not favor this approach. The spending on roads and bridges benefits labor unions, for example.

    On those who accept who accept and benefit from government spending, Williams said that “one of the tragedies of our nation” is that the growth of government has turned otherwise decent people into thieves, because they participate in the taking of what belongs to someone else. But because of the pervasiveness of government, sometimes this is unavoidable.

    I asked do we need better politicians — ones who will work to limit government — or do we need different rules such as a balanced budget amendment or spending constraints? Williams said that the bulk of the blame lies with the people, as politicians are simply doing what voters ask them to do. “The struggle is to try to convince our fellow Americans on the moral superiority of liberty and its main ingredient, limited government.” Politicians will then follow, he added.

    I asked if we’ve passed some sort of tipping point, where people look first to government rather than voluntary exchange through markets. He said perhaps so, and mentioned another problem: Close to 50 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax. These people become natural constituents for big-spending politicians. As they pay no taxes — “no stake in the game” — they don’t care if taxes are raised or lowered.

    On the issue of the subsidy being poured into downtown Wichita, Williams said the issue is an example of the “seen and unseen” problem identified by Frederic Bastiat. We easily see the things that government taxation and intervention builds, such as a convention center. But what is not easily seen is what people would have done with the money that was taken from them through taxation. While the money taken from each person may be small, it adds up.

    On government funding for arts, an issue in Kansas at this time, Williams said that it ought to be an insult to artists that their work has to be funded through government forcing people to pay, as opposed to voluntary payments.

    Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Dr. Walter E. Williams holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, Los Angeles, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from UCLA. He has served on the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, since 1980. His website is Walter Williams Home Page.

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Thursday March 8, 2012

    Candidate representatives at Pachyderm. This Friday’s meeting (March 9th) of the Wichita Pachyderm Club features Republican presidential candidate spokespersons. In addition, Lora Cox, Executive Director of the Sedgwick County Republican Party will be on hand to answer questions regarding the mechanics of Saturday’s Republican Party Caucus. … The public is welcome and encouraged to attend Wichita Pachyderm meetings. For more information click on Wichita Pachyderm Club.

    Sedgwick County pre-caucus rally. Friday afternoon (March 9th) Kansans for Liberty is producing a pre-caucus rally at Century II. Ron Paul is scheduled to appear. There will be other speakers and live entertainment, say event organizers. Tickets are $25. For more information, see Kansans for Liberty.

    Libertarian ideals. The Winfield Courier criticizes U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo for his bill that would eliminate all tax credits for energy, writing “This is a case of putting libertarian ideals ahead — far ahead — of the interests of our region and our state.” But the libertarian ideals of personal liberty, economic freedom, and free markets ought to be all that government concerns itself with. … This is not the only way this op-ed is misinformed on facts. The anonymous author writes: “New, life-changing technologies, from the railroads to the Internet, have long had the active support of our national government.” But: Consider the railroads. The government-subsidized railroads involved in the transcontinental project went bankrupt. Only The Great Northern Railroad, which was built without government subsidy, was profitable and not a burden on the national treasury. (See Interfacing with Obama’s Intercontinental Railroad). Shame on the Winfield Courier so being so misinformed on U.S. history and the proper role of a limited government.

    High Kansas taxes. Kansas Reporter covers more of the Tax Foundation’s report on the high cost of Kansas business taxes: “A new national study says Kansas business owners pay some of the highest taxes in the country. … Kansas businesses that are 3 or fewer years old pay the third-highest total taxes in the nation among all 50 states and Washington, D.C., the study found. Older businesses, such as Midway Wholesale, pay the fourth-highest totals. The findings contrast sharply with previous surveys, including some by the Tax Foundation, that put Kansas closer to the midpoint in regard to tax burden. As recently as January, for example, the foundation released its latest compilation of its Business Tax Climate Index, which put Kansas almost dead center — in 25th place — among lightest- to heaviest-taxed states. ‘Those surveys focus on tax policies, such as what types of taxes do states have or what are their tax rates,’ said Scott Hodge, the foundation’s president. ‘This new study looks at the issue from a business’ viewpoint and what they actually pay.’” … More at New study finds KS tax loads worse than reported.

    Harm of individual mandate explained. In the following short video, Elizabeth Price Foley of the Institute for Justice explains the harm of the individual mandate that is the centerpiece of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). She explains that if the U.S. Supreme Court fails to strike down the individual mandate, there will be nothing to stop Congress from forcing people into other contracts against their will — employment contracts or union membership, for example. If we still have a constitutional republic in which the federal government’s powers are limited, then the Court should strike down this law. More information on IJ’s brief is contained in this press release.

  • The effect of government grants

    Trackside is a column written occasionally by John D’Aloia Jr. He lives in St. Marys, Kansas.

    TRACKSIDE © by John D’Aloia Jr.
    February 5, 2012 AD

    How do you view government grants? Are they “free” money handed out by a caring and beneficent government? My view is that government grants are funded by a forced redistribution of the resources from many people for the benefit of a few. Such grants are a means by which the grantor achieves control over the grantee. Such grants are morally and politically unacceptable.

    “The Eighth Commandment does not say ‘Thou shalt not steal … except by a majority vote or unless it’s for a park swing set.’” (A paraphrase of a line from Mark Hendrickson’s article “Our National Blind Spot,” American Thinker, 6 February 2010.) Those who accept government grants for projects that they cannot fund from local tax sources are stealing resources from others, and in so-doing, are no better than the Occupy Wall Street gang which wants government to extract dollars from everyone else to give them what they want. (I am conflicted on grants that fund what would otherwise be an unfunded federal mandate — if the feds mandate X, then the feds should provide the dollars and take the budget hit, not the government unit needing the dollars to comply — but what if only some governments get a grant to pay for X, setting up an environment for favoritism? or the feds give a grant only to the governments that accept all the attached strings? As I said, conflicted.)

    The only real beneficiaries of this government-forced redistribution of resources are the politicians who buy “good” press by making the grants available (look what we are doing for you), crowing that they have “brought-home-the-bacon” for their constituents, the Clerks in the myriad agencies who administer the grants, and those companies to which some of the dollars ultimately trickle down.

    The willing accomplices in the grant process ignore Frederic Bastiat’s concern for the unforeseen consequences, particularly the impact of grants on the national fiscal mess, the inability of the citizens whose resources have been taken (higher taxes, inflation) to use those resources for their own benefit, and the impact of grants on future tax demands. Grants do put a long term tax burden on communities. In their report titled “Do Intergovernmental Grants Create Ratchets in State and Local Taxes — Testing the Friedman-Sanford Hypothesis,” Russell Sobel and George Crowley wrote: “Our findings confirm that grants indeed result in future state and local tax increases of roughly 40 cents for every dollar in grant money received in prior years.” The report is cited as Mercatus Center Working Paper No. 10-51, West Virginia University, August 2010.

    For immediate satisfaction, grantees are placing the financial burden on others and on future generations. Grant dollars come from three sources: taxpayers at large, deficit spending (insane, obscene borrowing), and the Fed’s printing presses creating phony money out of thin air (inflation). All three sources extract resources in one way or the other from citizens who cannot, will not, benefit from the grant, nor even ever receive a thank-you note.

    Bastiat said that “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” In The Law, published in 1850, (which should be mandatory reading for all legislators and voters), Bastiat used the term “plunder” to describe the “legal” appropriation of the fruits of one person’s labor for the benefit of another. If he were alive today, he would be applying it to grants, recognizing that specific organizations and local governments are using the grant process to obtain the resources of others for their specific benefit and enjoyment.

    Grants are not an economic development plus — at best neutral (dollars not spent by X are spent by Y) — but most likely they have a negative economic impact, directly because the grantor government agencies extract a “shipping and handling fee” out of the economy to keep themselves employed, and indirectly because grants provide an impetus for a sprawling, out-of-control Leviathan.

    Accepting grants also place the grantee under the thumb of the grantor, as grants impose requirements that detract from the authority and sovereignty of the grantee. People look in glee at the line in the grant contract that has a dollar sign and a bunch of numbers after it but neglect to read the fine print that requires them to do this and that for eternity. The federal government uses grants to bribe states to pass laws that the feds want but don’t have the authority to impose. In all too many situations, federal grants are unconstitutional in that they are for purposes that are not within the enumerated powers given to Congress by the Constitution.

    The ends (accomplishment of a project that local groups want but will not fund locally) do not justify the means (stealing now, and in the future, from all citizens).

    See you Trackside.

  • The creeping expansion of government power

    Trackside is a column written occasionally by John D’Aloia Jr. He lives in St. Marys, Kansas.

    TRACKSIDE © by John D’Aloia Jr.
    12 December 2011

    A belief I encounter increasingly often is that, with few exceptions, the Guardians ensconced in Washington, and their minions in the bureaucracy, The Clerks, are driven by greed, corruption, fraud, power, and immorality, not by the Essential Liberty principles of our Founding Documents. The electorate is angry and frustrated. They see their resources and their freedom being whittled away for the benefit of the Guardians and their cronies. They see the basic morality of the country being banned from the public square and perversion jammed down their throats. They see the very gas they exhale being cited, in spite of the evidence, as a reason to deny the use of energy resources. They see the Guardians trash the Constitution and their oath of office. They see themselves being made slaves of the state. Daily headlines reinforce these beliefs.

    Much internet traffic has circulated about the words in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (H.R.1540) that gives the federal government the ability to detain U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism, at home or abroad, in military custody, outside of the court system, and hold them indefinitely. Bye, bye Fourth Amendment. This reading of the law was confirmed by Senator Graham, who said in the Senate on November 17th that Section “1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens, and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.”

    The Guardians manipulate words to mean whatever they want them to mean and they have the force to impose their meanings — this makes the power of warrant-less arrest of citizens highly dangerous. A pesky Tea Party activist is shining a spotlight on your misdeeds and machinations? Designate him a terrorist and haul him off to a military gulag where he will have no rights, no recourse to the courts. It gives me no comfort knowing that the Guardian-in-Chief’s rule book, written by Saul Alinsky, holds that lying is a tool of the trade, that ends justify means, and that there is no moral code.

    A provision of H.R.-1540 that has not gotten the same notoriety is the one that repeals Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the article that makes sodomy a court-martial offense. (I refrain from quoting Article 125. Google can assist if you must know.) Why repeal it? The repeal fits right in the with the Guardian-in-Chief’s efforts to promote the homosexual agenda as part of his effort to dissolve society’s moral glue, its standards, making it easier for him to impose his vision of a state in which his whims are the law.

    The 9 December issue of the economic newsletter “Casey Daily Dispatch” contains an article titled “Man vs. Morlock” in which the writer reached back and pulled up a book by Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, University of Chicago Press, 1955. The excerpt in the Dispatch included this paragraph, one you may well have read elsewhere, but was not aware from whence it came — I wasn’t:

    “Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the … and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something — but then it was too late.”

    And further on in the excerpt was this “boiling the frog” analogy of how the Nazis gained complete domination:

    “In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.”

    We must make a stand in November 2012. Absent a massive “Road-to-Damascus” constitutional epiphany by the Guardians, and by their Clerks, the only recourse citizens have to regain our country’s future as a free people is to turn them out, election after election, until we again have a Constitutional Republic governed by the virtues established by The Founders. The eviction of the Guardian-in-Chief and voter-imposed term limits on all those who believe they are our Guardians are actions that I encourage all to undertake.

    Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas, Pray for Us, Pray For Our Country.

    See you Trackside.

  • Obama’s executive orders

    Americans for Limited Government has commented on President Barack Obama’s recent use of executive orders to step around the will of Congress:

    “These unilateral executive orders, whether on government-backed student loans and mortgages or FDA oversight, are intended to sidestep the consent of the governed, and as a result they overstep the President’s constitutional boundaries. Obama can rhetorically dress this up however he likes, but his actions are not predicated on the consent of the governed, they are fueled by his desire to maintain and expand power. This is not the rule of law, but the rule of man.

    “Obama is just following the playbook of the Center for American Progress, which had argued for the White House to use executive orders and other regulations to advance its agenda after Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in the November elections. This is all designed to get around the political process, and has occurred repeatedly under Obama’s watch, whether with the EPA’s carbon endangerment finding or the unilateral implementation of management-labor forums for the federal civil service.”

    The full press release is at Obama’s executive orders overstep.

    Phil Kerpen’s recent book Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America — and How to Stop Him holds other lessons of how presidents — from both political parties — overstep. In the introduction Kerpen gives us a history lesson on a topic that doesn’t receive much discussion in public: the grab for executive power by presidents through the use of “signing statements.”

    Elizabeth Drew made the case against Bush’s abuse of executive power in a lengthy New York Review of Books piece called “Power Grab.” She specifically highlighted Bush’s use of signing statements (a technique to object to elements of a law while signing it, and refusing to enforce those elements), the detention of foreign combatants at Guantanamo, and warrantless wiretaps. She concluded that Bush was a tyrant.

    Kerpen explains how the view from the oval office can make one forget campaign promises:

    Even the Bush practice that raised the most ire — the use of signing statements — was embraced by Obama just weeks after he took office, when he said: “it is a legitimate constitutional function, and one that promotes the value of transparency, to indicate when a bill that is presented for presidential signature includes provisions that are subject to well-founded constitutional objections.” Contrast that with what Obama had said about signing statements on the campaign trail: “This is part of the whole theory of George Bush that he can make laws as he is going along. I disagree with that. I taught the Constitution for 10 years. I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We are not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress.”

    Later in the chapter Kerpen describes another critic of Bush’s use of executive power and how things would change with the election of Obama:

    One of the harshest critics of executive power under Bush, Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman, dismissed the overly simple view of many on the left regarding Obama ending abuse of power. After a warning about an authoritarian takeover, he says:

    This grim prognosis depends on structures, not personalities, permitting us to move beyond knee-jerk reactions to the politics of the day. Most obviously, the election of President Obama has, for many, sufficed to dispatch any serious doubts about the system: Good-bye, imperial presidency; hello, Americas first black president, and the nation’s remarkable capacity for constitutional renewal!

    But a paragraph later he falls into the very trap he warned against, absurdly writing of Obama:

    He may be charismatic, but he is no extremist: there is little chance of his running roughshod over congressional prerogative, even those as indefensible as the filibuster. But the next insurgent president may not possess the same sense of constitutional restraint.

    Sadly, contrary to the ideologically blinded analysis of most observers from the left, all of the elements of excessive executive power that they feared from Bush have continued — or worsened — under Obama. On top of which he has used the financial crisis as an excuse to seize control — without Congress’s approval — of the energy supply, industrial activities, the Internet, and labor policy.

    Some of the loudest voices opposing Bush’s use of executive power are now cheering for Obama to push things much further. It’s different when its your guy in charge.

    Or: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

  • Walter Williams: Government must stick to its limited and legitimate role

    Walter E.
    Williams

    At two events in Wichita today, economist Walter E. Williams spoke on the legitimate role of government in a free society, touching on the role of government as defined in the Constitution, the benefits of capitalism and private property, and the recent attacks on individual freedom and limited government.

    The evening lecture was held in the Mary Jane Teall Theater at Century II, and all but a handful of its 652 seats were occupied. It was presented by the Bill of Rights Institute and underwritten by the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation.

    Williams said that one of the justifications for the growth of government — far beyond the visions of the founders of America — is to promote fairness and justice. While these are worthy goals, Williams said we must ask what is the meaning of fairness and justice, referring to the legitimate role of government in a free society.

    In the Constitution, Williams said the founders specified the role of the federal government in Article 1 Section 8. This section holds a list that enumerates what Congress is authorized to do. If something is not on the list, Williams said Congress is not authorized to do it.

    The Article 8 powers that Williams mentioned are to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises; to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; to borrow money on the credit of the United States; to coin money; to establish post-offices and post-roads; and to raise and support armies. It is regarding these powers, plus a few others, that Congress has taxing and spending authority. “Nowhere in the United States Constitution to we find authority for Congress to tax and spend for up to two-thirds to three-quarters of what Congress taxes and spends for today.”

    Farm subsidies, handouts to banks, and food stamps are examples Williams gave of programs that are not authorized by the Constitution. “I think that we can safely say that we’ve made a significant departure from the constitutional principles of individual freedom and limited government that made us a rich nation in the first place.”

    The institutions of private property and free enterprise are the embodiment of these principles, Williams said. But there have been many successful attacks on private property and free enterprise. Thomas Jefferson, Williams said, anticipated this when he wrote “The natural progress of things is for government to gain ground, and for liberty to yield.”

    Taxation and spending are the ways government has gained ground. Taxes represent government claims on private property.

    But an even better measure of what government has done is to look at spending. From 1787 to 1920, federal spending was only three percent of gross domestic product, except during wartime. Today, that figure is approaching 30 percent, Williams said: “The significance is that as time goes by, you and I own less and less of our most valuable property, namely ourselves and the fruits of our labor.”

    In the realm of economics, Williams said that the founders thought that free markets and capitalism was the most effective social organization for promoting freedom, with capitalism defined as a system where people are free to pursue their own objectives as long as they do not violate the property rights of others. An often-trivialized benefit of capitalism and voluntary exchange is that it minimizes the capacity of one person to coerce another, he told the audience. This applies to the government, too.

    But for the last half-century, Williams said that free enterprise has been under unrelenting attack by the American people. Whether they realize it or not, people have demonstrated a “deep and abiding contempt” for private property rights and individual liberty.

    Williams said that ironically, capitalism is threatened not because of its failure, but because of its success. Capitalism has eliminated things that plagued mankind since the beginning of time — he mentioned disease, gross hunger, and poverty — and been so successful that “all other human wants appear to us to be at once inexcusable and unbearable.”

    So now, in the name of ideals other than freedom and liberty, we pursue things like equality of income, race and sex balance, affordable housing, and medical care. “As a result of widespread control by our government in order to achieve these higher objectives, we are increasingly being subordinated to the point where personal liberty in our country is treated like dirt.”

    This ultimately leads to tyranny and totalitarianism, he said. To those who might object to this strong and blunt conclusion, Williams asked this question: “Which way are we headed, tiny steps at a time: towards more liberty, or towards more government control of our lives?” He said that the answer, unambiguously, is the latter.

    It is the tiny steps that concern Williams, as they ultimately lead to their destination. Quoting Hume, he said “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Instead, Williams said it is always lost bit by bit. If anyone wanted to take away all our liberties all at once, we would rebel. But not so when liberties are taken bit by bit, which is what is currently happening.

    It is people’s desire for government to do good — helping the disadvantaged, elderly, failing businesses, college students — that leads to the attack on private property and economic freedom. But Williams explained that government has no resources of its own, meaning that for government to give one person money it must first — “through intimidation, threats, and coercion” — confiscate it from someone else.

    Williams told the audience that if a private person used coercion to take money from someone and give it to another person, that would universally be considered theft and a crime. It doesn’t matter how needy or deserving the recipient, it would still be theft. But Williams asked if there is any conceptual difference between that act and when agents of the government do the same. Williams says no, except that in the second act, where Congress takes the money, the theft is legal.

    But mere legality doesn’t not make something moral. Slavery was legal in America for many years, but not moral. The purges of Stalin and Mao were legal under the laws of those countries. So legality does not equate to morality, Williams explained, and he said he cannot find a moral case for taking what belongs to one person and giving it to another to whom it does not belong.

    Charity is “praiseworthy and laudable” when it is voluntary, but it is worthy of condemnation when government reaches into others’ pockets for charity. Those who accept the forced takings are guilty, too, he explained.

    “The essence of our relationship with government is coercion,” Williams told the audience. This, he said, represents our major problem as a nation today: We’ve come to accept the idea of government taking from one to give to another. But the blame, Williams said, does not belong with politicians — “at least not very much.” Instead, he said that the blame lies with us, the people who elect them to office in order to get things for us. A candidate who said he would do only the things that the Constitution authorizes would not have much of a chance at being elected.

    The further problem is that if Kansans don’t elect officials who will bring federal dollars to Kansas, it doesn’t mean that Kansans will pay lower federal taxes. The money, taken from Kansans, will go to other states, leading to this conundrum: “That is, once legalized theft begins, it pays for everybody to participate.”

    We face a moral dilemma, then. Williams listed several great empires that declined for doing precisely what we’re doing: “Bread and circuses,” or big government spending.

    But there is a note — only one — of optimism, Williams believes. The first two years of the Obama administration, along with the Democratic Senate and House of Representatives, has been so brazen in their activities in “running roughshod over our liberties” that people are starting to argue and debate the Constitution. State attorneys general are bringing suits against the federal government over Obama’s health care plan. State legislatures are passing tenth amendment resolutions. The tea party and other grassroots movements give him optimism, too.

    We must also ask ourselves if we are willing to give up the benefits we get from government, he said. But most people want cuts in spending on other people, not ourselves, as “ours is critical and vital to the national interest.” With all of us feeling this way, Williams said the country is in danger.

    Young people have the greatest stake in the struggle for limited government and economic freedom, as the older generations have benefited from a relatively free country and the economic mobility that accompanied it. He said he’s afraid we’re losing that: “I’m hoping that future generations will not curse us for bequeathing to them a nation far less robust, far less free, than the nation that our parents and our ancestors bequeathed us.”

    In answering a question from the audience, Williams said he would be afraid of a constitutional convention to be held today, as some are advocating. We wouldn’t be sending people like John Adams. Instead, he said we’d be sending people like Barney Frank and others who have “deep contempt” for personal freedom.

    In response to a question on regulation, Williams said that regulations like health care and uncertainty over taxation cause businesses to be afraid to commit money to long term investments. Uncertainty “collapses the time horizon” causing firms to look for investments that pay off in the short term rather than the long term. This contributes to unemployment, he said.

    Williams also talked about the economic history of America. From its beginning to 1930, there were recessions and depressions, but there were not calls for the federal government to intervene and stimulate the economy. It wasn’t until the Hoover administration and the New Deal that the federal government intervened in the economy in order to “fix” the economy. Williams said that what should have been a “sharp two or three-year downtown” was turned in to the Great Depression — which was not over until after World War II — by government intervention. The measures being taken today are similarly postponing the recovery, he said. He added that most serious economic downturns are caused by government. It’s also futile for the government to spend the country out of a recession, which he likened to taking water from the deep end of a pool to the shallow end in order to raise the level of the shallow end. Government taking money from one person, giving it to another, and expecting the economy to rise is similarly futile.

    A question about mainstream media and their representation of the issues of today brought this response: “You have to make the assumption, I believe implied in your question, that those people are ignorant, and if only they knew better, they would change their behavior. Human ignorance is somewhat optimistic, because ignorance is curable through education. I’m very sure that many of these people want government control. The elite have always wanted government control, and the media was very responsible in getting President Obama elected.”

    In an interview, I asked what President Obama should say in his jobs speech tonight. Williams recommended the president should reduce regulation and lower taxes, especially capital gains and corporate income taxes. The spending programs of the past will not help. But Obama’s constituency will not favor this approach. The spending on roads and bridges benefits labor unions, for example.

    On those who accept who accept and benefit from government spending, Williams said that “one of the tragedies of our nation” is that the growth of government has turned otherwise decent people into thieves, because they participate in the taking of what belongs to someone else. But because of the pervasiveness of government, sometimes this is unavoidable.

    I asked do we need better politicians — ones who will work to limit government — or do we need different rules such as a balanced budget amendment or spending constraints? Williams said that the bulk of the blame lies with the people, as politicians are simply doing what voters ask them to do. “The struggle is to try to convince our fellow Americans on the moral superiority of liberty and its main ingredient, limited government.” Politicians will then follow, he added.

    I asked if we’ve passed some sort of tipping point, where people look first to government rather than voluntary exchange through markets. He said perhaps so, and mentioned another problem: Close to 50 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax. These people become natural constituents for big-spending politicians. As they pay no taxes — “no stake in the game” — they don’t care if taxes are raised or lowered.

    On the issue of the subsidy being poured into downtown Wichita, Williams said the issue is an example of the “seen and unseen” problem identified by Frederic Bastiat. We easily see the things that government taxation and intervention builds, such as a convention center. But what is not easily seen is what people would have done with the money that was taken from them through taxation. While the money taken from each person may be small, it adds up.

    On government funding for arts, an issue in Kansas at this time, Williams said that it ought to be an insult to artists that their work has to be funded through government forcing people to pay, as opposed to voluntary payments.

    Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Dr. Walter E. Williams holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, Los Angeles, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from UCLA. He has served on the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, since 1980. His website is Walter Williams Home Page.

  • Balanced budget amendment is needed

    Despite claims made in a Wichita Eagle op-ed by its former editor Davis Merritt, we desperately need a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution. (Balanced-budget amendment is unworkable, August 2, 2001)

    Merritt calls the promise of a balanced budget amendment a “cruel deception” that “limits imagination and progress.” He gives three reasons as to why we should not adopt such an amendment:

    First: “It would need to define exactly and in detail what constitutes a balanced budget, and that’s unwieldy and impossible.” He cites the gimmickry that is often used to hide the reality of what’s in a budget. This, no doubt, would be a difficult problem to solve — but it’s not a reason to fail to try. Some things we could do would be to reduce the complexity of the budget so that we actually understand how much and on what we’re spending. Requiring a high hurdle for the treasury to borrow funds would also be a signal that spending is being hidden in the budget.

    Second: “It would destroy the constitutional tripartite balance of powers, the core of our system, and would strip citizens of their only leverage, their votes.” Here Davis raises problems with enforcement of such an amendment, noting the delay in bringing court cases and giving judges too much power to decide how to balance the budget. But cases can be fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, and a judicial remedy could be to simply refuse to let the government spend any money until Congress and the president produce a balanced budget.

    Third: “It would leave the most crucial fiscal decisions in the hands of congressional minorities, a profoundly undemocratic idea.” Davis mentions the need to spend for national emergencies like Hurricane Katrina. Also: “… less than 15 percent of the House of Representatives paralyzed that body while the nation hurtled toward default and collapse.” I would counter that our nation is hurtling towards collapse precisely because of spending and resultant debt that politicians of both parties have approved for decades. Without the opposition of this small group, it would have likely been business as usual, and that business has been harmful.

    (At least Davis didn’t mention war as justification for deficit spending. Forcing politicians to pay for wars now rather than later might help keep peace.)

    As for national emergencies, a few thoughts: First, people might decide to take care of themselves through advance planning and the purchase of insurance. Second, along with a balanced budget the government could establish “rainy day” or contingency funds for these types of disasters, should the federal government decide to still have a role in these matters. Or, the federal government might buy insurance to cover its costs for handling these disasters. Then, that expense becomes an annual budget item that is known in advance.

    Davis also mentioned a recession cutting into revenues. Again, a rainy day fund can help. While not Davis’ argument, many opponents of a balanced budget amendment cite the need for the federal government to engage in counter-cyclical spending to manage the economy. This, of course, is the Keynesian formula that has been proven many times to be a failure. A policy that prevents our government from engaging in Keynesianism is a plus, not a minus.

    Unless restrained by constitutional rules, legislators will run budget deficits and spend excessively

    One of the best arguments for a balanced budget amendment is found in the book Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity by James D. Gwartney, Richard L. Stroup, Dwight R. Lee, and Tawni H. Ferrarini, in a section titled “Unless restrained by constitutional rules, legislators will run budget deficits and spend excessively.” That title says it all, and it is exactly what has been happening. Despite the debt ceiling deal reached this week — a deal denounced by liberals as one that will ruin the country and its economy — huge deficits will still happen, and debt will increase.

    Before 1960, the authors tell us, there was “widespread implicit agreement” that the budget should be balanced, except in times of war. And, the deficits and surpluses that did occur were small relative to the economy. But enter Keynes:

    The Keynesian revolution changed all of this. Keynesians — those accepting the views of English economist John Maynard Keynes — believed that changes in government spending and budget deficits could help promote a more stable economy. They argued that, rather than balancing the budget, the government should run a budget deficit during periods of recession and shift toward a budget surplus when there was concern about inflation. In short, the Keynesian revolution released political decision makers from the discipline imposed by a balanced budget. Freed from this constraint, politicians consistently spent more than they were willing to tax.

    Imagine if Lord Keynes had called upon politicians to fix the economy by doing something other than what they like to do: He would be merely a curiosity of economic history. But Keynes calls for government deficit spending to fix the economy, and spending is what nearly all politicians and bureaucrats like to do. They just don’t like to pay for it, as Common Sense Economics explains:

    The political attractiveness of spending financed by borrowing rather than taxation is not surprising. It reflects what economists call the short-sightedness effect: the tendency of elected political officials to favor projects that generate immediate, highly visible benefits at the expense of costs that can be cast into the future and are difficult to identify. Legislators have a strong incentive to spend money on programs that benefit the voters in their district and special-interest groups that will help them win reelection. They do not like to tax, since taxes impose a visible cost on voters. Debt is an alternative to current taxes; it pushes the visible cost of government into the future. Budget deficits and borrowing allow politicians to supply voters with immediate benefits without having to impose a parallel visible cost in the form of higher taxes. Thus, deficits are a natural outgrowth of unrestrained democratic politics.

    Then, the realities of public choice economics are cited: the well-known problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs:

    The unconstrained political process plays into the hands of well-organized interest groups and encourages government spending to gain rich patronage benefits for a few at the expense of many. Each representative has a strong incentive to fight hard for expenditures beneficial to his or her constituents and has little incentive to oppose spending by others. In contrast, there is little incentive for a legislator to be a spending “watchdog.” A legislative watchdog would incur the wrath of colleagues who find it more difficult to deliver special programs for their districts and retaliate by providing little support for spending in the watchdog’s district. More important, the benefits of spending cuts and deficit reductions that the watchdog is trying to attain (for example, lower taxes and lower interest rates) will be spread so thinly among all voters that the legislator’s constituents will reap only a small part of these benefits.

    This is another reason why earmark spending, while a small part of the total federal budget, is harmful. We need to watch to make sure the promised earmark reform is meaningful and lasts.

    A numerical example helps illustrate what happens when there’s a disconnect between receiving something and paying for it in a collective manner:

    Perhaps the following illustration will help explain why it is so difficult for the 415 representatives and 100 senators to bring federal spending and the budget deficit under control. Suppose these 535 individuals go out to dinner knowing that after the meal each will receive a bill for l/535th of the cost. No one feels compelled to order less because his or her restraint will exert little impact on the total bill. Why not order shrimp for an appetizer, entrees of steak and lobster, and a large piece of cheesecake for dessert? After all, the extra spending will add only a few pennies to each person’s share of the total bill. For example, if one member of the dinner party orders expensive items that push up the total bill by $10, his share of the cost will be less than 2 cents. What a bargain! Of course, he will have to pay extra for the extravagant orders of the other 534 diners. But that’s true no matter what he orders. The result is that everyone ends up ordering extravagantly and paying more for extras that provide little value relative to cost.

    The section goes on to explain how large debt leads to higher borrowing costs, which make it even more difficult to control spending. Eventually the result is a financial crisis.

    The authors conclude that spending must be controlled, and that rule changes are needed: “It is vitally important for the federal government to control its spending and borrowing in the years ahead. This is unlikely to happen without a change in the political rules. The rules need to be changed so it will be more difficult for politicians to spend more than they are willing to tax.”

    As for rule changes that would work, the authors mention a balanced budget amendment or requirement for supermajorities for spending proposals and increases in the debt ceiling.

    While I’m encouraged about some of the new members elected to Congress last year, there are still many members — and their constituents — who believe more spending and more debt is the way to go. Relying on people to do the right thing is different from relying on systems to be correct. This is why we must have a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Consitution.