When I saw that Jim DeMint had written an article titled Our Health Care Mess Is a Symptom of a Much Bigger Problem my interest was piqued partly because I like DeMint as a senator and partly because I had just been saying the same thing in a series of comments with a reader from New York. It was exactly as DeMint predicted in his final paragraph:
The current debate over health care reform is a symptom of a bigger problem in Washington. But it can be the catalyst for a wider debate about the proper role of government in our lives.
The comments I was receiving demonstrated exactly what DeMint was talking about when he said:
All of these things have happened because we’ve stopped asking, “Should government attempt to solve this problem?” Instead, we start by asking, “How should government fix the problem?” It’s now considered a sign of admirable restraint to occasionally ask, “How much should we spend?” And somehow we started thinking that anything less than a trillion dollars is a bargain. (emphasis mine)
We can’t expect to come up with the right answer when we start by asking the wrong question. For too long we have been asking only how the government should fix our problems and not if the government has any business fixing those problems. Obviously there are some problems that the government should fix, but there are many that it should not address.
Because er have been asking ourselves the wrong question we find ourselves as a nation in this situation:
There’s not a word in the Constitution about the government deciding what medical tests private health insurers should pay for. Nothing about the government deciding how much executives on Wall Street should earn, or what kind of light bulbs and cars we should buy. There’s nothing about the thousands of parochial earmarks that fund local bridges to nowhere, golf courses, bike paths, sewer plants, and tea pot museums.
There’s nothing about these or many other things in the Constitution because they have nothing to do with the proper role of a federal government in a free society. But these are exactly the kinds of things our government spends its time and money on, and we don’t even question anymore why that is.
As the length of that list indicates we have had many opportunities to ask the right question. Hopefully health care will be the issue where we finally step back and ask the right question. Once we ask the right question we will begin to understand the truth that:
It matters because every time we give a job to the government, we take away some control that people have over their lives, and we take away a little bit more of their freedom. In return for letting government try its hand at solving a problem, we as citizens cede our ability to try for ourselves to find a better way.
It’s awkward to admit it, but my colleagues in Congress have led this country into the woods despite our oath of office. We swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and to bear true faith and allegiance to it. The Constitution prescribes a very limited role for the federal government. There is not a word in our oath, or in the Constitution, about most of what we do. As we’ve wandered off the path of liberty, there are few crumbs left of the Constitution in the halls of Congress to lead us out of the woods. (emphasis mine)
If we honestly ask the right question we will undoubtedly reach some uncomfortable conclusions such as the fact that the government has already overstepped its bounds with things we would rather not alter, like Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare, but if we continue to shut our eyes to that primary question there will be no way to reverse our downward spiral, the best we could ever manage to do is quit digging the hole deeper.
We have a very different view of the role of government obviously. I don’t believe the authors of the Constitution knew what their nation would look like 200 years later nor did they imagine that the document they were crafting would still be usable that long into the future. I think it’s time to rethink the Constitution instead of trying to limit ourselves to the letter of that document.
Government, ideally, is the instrument by and through which citizens band together to achieve goals they cannot achieve on their own or in smaller voluntary associations. I believe in Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. If it is for us, if it is the mechanism by which “We the people” are to “promote the General welfare”, then government should be available as a solution to whatever problems we face as a nation. (Note: Available not inevitable.) Where I have a problem with government overstepping its bounds is in the area of basic rights: warrantless wiretapping, partial elimination of habeas corpus, use of the state secrets privilege to hide wrongdoing, and torture.
I will concede that a government for the people is impossible when the government is neither of nor by the people. A government dominated by the interests of large corporations cannot act on the people’s behalf even when it sets out to do so – the current health care debate being a prime example. There are a number of polls that demonstrate that roughly 60% of Americans wanted a single-payer health system, but that was never even discussed in the Congress because the people aren’t really represented by their Representatives. Even the initial vague compromise of a public option was inevitably defeated because a government of corporate interests and by corporate interests is hardly likely to overrule those interests in favor of the people. That is, IMHO, the crux of the problem we have with government today.
You may be surprised to learn that I am perfectly fine with the idea of rethinking the Constitution. Personally I think the Constitution is still valid today and if I were rethinking it I would not make very many changes – in fact some of the changes I would make would be to return it closer to the original. What I have a problem with is sweeping the Constitution under the rug and ignoring it. If we think it no longer applies or that it needs revision then we should stand up and say so – come in the front door.
I also agree that the authors of the Constitution could not have known what the nation would look like in 200 years – I’m sure they knew that as well – but that does not mean that they did not hope that what they built would stand the test of two centuries. They were not building to the idea of planned obsolescence like we do so often today, that’s why they built in a mechanism for altering the Constitution. We may still argue about whether the amendment process is sufficient for the changes that we might want to make, but its very presence indicates that the founders had no intention of building in an expiration date to their framework.
Well point me to the front door! I believe it applies – otherwise the rule of law is dead – but I would make major revisions.
“Let us provide in our constitution for its revision at stated periods. What these periods should be nature herself indicates. By the European tables of mortality, of the adults living at any one moment of time, a majority will be dead in about nineteen years. At the end of that period, then, a new majority is come into place; or, in other words, a new generation. Each generation is as independent as the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before. It has then, like them, a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness; consequently, to accommodate to the circumstances in which it finds itself that received from its predecessors; and it is for the peace and good of mankind that a solemn opportunity of doing this every nineteen or twenty years should be provided by the constitution, so that it may be handed on with periodical repairs from generation to generation to the end of time, if anything human can so long endure.” –Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:42
That pasted, I still think the greater problem is that our government has been co-opted by corporate interests and to at least some extent, the Constitution is a barrier to addressing that problem.
The front door is called a Constitutional Amendment. They’re not easy to pass, but I don’t think you’ll have a harder time getting one passed than I am having trying to convince people to use the front door.
Jefferson was referring to something more than an open-ended amendment process – he was talking about regularly holding a constitutional convention/referendum. I would not be opposed to that if we were to specify an interval (through amendment). I am not opposed to making major revisions either, so long as we use the prescribed vehicle for making those changes legally. As it is now, the rule of law is dead, what we have is the rule of money and that leaves most of us out in the cold. It is allowed to continue because so many people are willing to use the rule of money for their own desired ends rather than insist upon enforcing the rule of law.
I agree with Jefferson. A periodical total rewrite of our nation’s foundational charter would serve us better than what we’re doing today; occasionally paying homage to the Constitution while ignoring most of its provisions.
I also agree that the collusion between big business and government is taking us in the wrong direction. The current health bill would not exist at all if it were not for rent seeking by the medical industrial complex.
But we must understand that there is a direct tie between the scope of government and the depth of the involvement of big business in government. (To say nothing of the size of big businesses that would not exist today without the complicity of big government.) Business has little incentive to meddle in a properly limited government. There just isn’t enough profit in such an enterprise. The grander government becomes, the greater the incentive for business to act both defensively (to protect itself from injurious treatment) as well as offensively (to get a piece of the action and put up barriers to competition).
The only way we could have big government without big business in control would be for government to completely take over big business. We’ve seen multiple examples of how poorly that works out. As it is, we have big government and big business continually vying to take over each other, much to the detriment of the people to whom the government supposedly belongs.
Envisioning a benevolent big government that neither owns nor is in bed with business is belief in a utopian fantasy that will never exist in the realms or mortality.
Well Reach, you are right that a limited government would get less attention from big business (except of course for all those military contracts). But without strong government, business would run everything and for its own benefit, not that of the society as a whole. Instead of having government surrender and let corporations rule the world, would it not make more sense to make it illegal for corporations to involve themselves in the political process? IMHO, an entity created by state fiat to provide economic benefit has no Constitutional rights and the Congress could (if they were OUR Congress) pass a law that made it illegal, punishable by dissolution, for any Corporation to directly or indirectly participate in any way in our electoral process, or our political debate. The individual citizens who work for or own shares in the corporation are, of course, free to do as they please as long as they do not use corporate funds or assets to do so. That would fix the problem.
Government doesn’t need to take over business, that would not be in the people’s best interests. Neither should we allow business to take over government. Whether a government free of business interference would be benevolent remains to be seen, and I agree it’s utopian, but the alternatives we have are detrimental to our national interest and contribute to the unraveling of our society. Better to strive for the ideal and fall short than to give up without a fight.
If business interest in the government were limited to the defense related businesses we would be in much better shape than we are today. If we were to be a little less “proactive” with our military action we would probably also have less interest in government from those defense industries (they would either be smaller or they would have to find other sources of revenue).
I absolutely agree with you that an entity created by the government has no Constitutional rights – and we would definitely benefit by not allowing them to participate in the electoral process. It might not completely fix the problem but it would definitely help.
Well, the relationship between the large “defense” corporations and the government is so close now, that it’s hard to imagine how much closer it would get if that were the only way to ripoff the public treasury for private gain. My own feeling is that the reason we are so pro-active with military interventionism is that it is a big money maker for lots of huge corporations. That’s why the mainstream media and anyone desiring a leadership position in Washington has to be a full-throated supporter of our imperial interventionism. As Tom Englehardt points out, the 30,000 troop surge in Afghanistan is only the tip of the iceberg. We have over 104,000 contractors in Afghanistan working for big American corporations providing logistical support (at least). We’re building another huge embassy complex in Pakistan ($$$$), not to mention the huge expenditures for American bases in the area. All of that funnels huge amounts of money, with very little oversight, into the pockets of big business. I just can’t imagine that these billions have nothing to do with the unquestioning support for war inside the Beltway.
There has to be a way to elect people to congress that openly oppose our military aggression. Actually we know there is a way because Ron Paul opposes it and he’s in Congress. Honestly that’s my biggest complaint with my congressman, Rob Bishop. I generally like his principles, but he obviously believes that bigger is always better where military spending is concerned.
The “Defense” industry is an excellent example of what happens when you allow corporations to run government. When the Pentagon decides it needs a big new weapons system, it lets out bids to the largest corporations: Northrup Grumman, Lockheed, et.al., and whichever one wins subcontracts carefully so that there are a sizable number of jobs created in every Congressional district occupied by a member of a relevant House Committee. Then if the Pentagon decides to scrap the system because it was designed for the Cold War and is no longer helpful, the Congress insists not only on keeping it but expanding the program because it creates jobs in their district. Around the Pentagon this is called the “self-licking ice cream cone”.
An example from my own district where our Congressman is a member of the Progressive Caucus and generally opposed to out-of-control military spending. Lockheed won the Presidential helicopter contract a few years back and put lots of those jobs in Owego, NY right in the middle of our district. When the Obama team decided this was wasteful, our thoroughly liberal Democratic delegation including my Congressman, Maurice Hinchey, went to work full time to save the program and all those good jobs. The military industry has us right where they want us and they aren’t going to let go. Now is Rob Bishop going to do anything that might seem to threaten all those good jobs at Hill AFB or ATK Space Systems? What would happen if he did?
Now I have work to do so will have to slow down my response pace for the day.
“The self-licking ice cream cone” is a great term for that and apparently it’s no secret in the military what’s happening. This is business for them just as much as it is for Lockheed. Growing government is motivated by the very same forces as growing business in a commercial setting.
Your example of your Congressman and mine is right on. Rob Bishop would get tossed pretty quick if he did not try to protect jobs at Hill AFB and ATK – I wonder if he could get away with trying to close bases and reduce jobs in Germany, Japan, or Saudi Arabia?
Thanks for the comments Charles – now get back to work 😉
Thought you might like to see why a prominent libertarian prefers the French health care system.
Thanks for the link. I notice that he opposes ObamaCare. He’s right to point out that many of the prominent arguments against it are off base though.