Dear Reader,
It seems to me that the huge amount of money that politicians spend to get into office today is telling of what they want from the office. Why would a sane person be willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to be elected to an office that pays under five hundred thousand per year? Of course most if not all of the money is someone else’s. But still, tens of millions of dollars?
The founding Fathers said that they wanted a WEAK but STABLE government. Weak in that it was severely limited in the scope of the Federal government’s power. Stable in that the government was to be regularly and, with a minimum of political convulsions, transferred to the next regime.
The Constitution was the limiter of governmental power. The tenth amendment says it all, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Powers that are not given to the government cannot be exercised by the government. Madison was against the Amendments. His logic went like this, If the government is not given the power to do a thing. Then it has not the power to do that thing. However, if the government is barred from one thing, and is not given the power to do another thing, does that mean that since the government was barred from the one, the other may be permitted. It could then be argued then that anything not put in or barred from government was ok. Thus the Amendments were to him redundant and dangerous.
The Constitution guarantees stability by separating powers, and providing for a straight forward means of transferring power. Much debate was given to the terms of all members of the government. The terms were to be long enough to be profitable to the people but short enough for the people to exercise their power of suffrage effectively.
The underlying philosophy of government was this. Stable governments are conducive to business. Weak governments have less regulation and taxation releasing the power of business. With the guarantees of property and liberty, the thought was, that free people freely exercising their liberty would build, a better, more sound, and with an ever higher standard of living, society.
Today with the “Living Breathing Document” of a Constitution we have toilet paper. The greatest fears of our Founding Fathers is realized. We have willingly put out collective heads into the ox yoke of dependence. The same corrosive habit that destroyed Rome. We have let our government grow strong, by becoming dependant on it, and with the giant sums of money more factious and thus less stable.
As the power of government has grown so has the penchant of politicians to spend more and more money to get into office. The inordinate power of government today can be directly measured by considering the vast ocean of money that surrounds it.
