A 50 year plan: Role of government

The other night I read the State of the Union speech. Since I was out enjoying life (it was bowling night) I didn’t actually watch the speech but reading it took about 5 minutes, thus saving me about an hour of my life. These are just a few of many Bush Administration initiatives in the speech that I’ll use for illustration:

  • Setting a mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels by 2017.
  • Dictating new fuel mileage standards for autos and light trucks. (I’ll bet Rep. Gilchrest is all over this.)
  • Changing tax laws regarding employer-paid health insurance and direct Federal funding to assist states that provide help for poor or hard-to-insure residents with health insurance.
  • Reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

For years Presidents of both parties have used the SOTU speech as a showcase for whatever programs they wanted to push. Invariably, these were billed as panaceas for problems that faced our nation, and always it was a Federal solution that would cure the ailment. To use Bush’s speech as an example, these new programs either create or extend Federal mandates on what states or private enterprise may do.

Unfortunately, these energy-related items may all have unintended consequences.

The most likely way that our country would meet the 2017 alternative fuel mandate is by the additional use of ethanol. While ethanol is more environmentally-friendly and comes from a renewable resource, it actually takes MORE energy to create a gallon of ethanol than a gallon of gasoline, and ethanol costs more to boot. It also drives up the price of corn, which is a food staple, so grocery prices would increase from the twin factors of higher prices for the raw food material and transporting the finished product. That’s going to be most apparent in prices for produce, which is almost always shipped long distances.

A similar conundrum exists with the government mandating additional CAFE standards. In recent years, the market has favored large SUVs which come in below average on the fuel efficiency chart. These also provide the largest profits for the Big Three automakers, and with less profit coming in because they can’t sell so many of the profitable SUVs the automakers are cutting costs the one way they can – laying off workers. The Michigan economy is already hurting as the Big Three buys out as many employees as they can, and raising the CAFE standard bar would be another blow to their efforts at recovery.

In regard to the other two SOTU items, these fall into a category that has bothered me for as long as I’ve been a student of politics. It’s the basis of this essay on the role of government.

I keep a small booklet-sized copy of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution on my desk. The Tenth Amendment reads:

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.

The first and foremost objection I have to the current method of government (practiced by both parties; neither is blameless in this) is when Congress puts together a bill that holds either the carrot of giving additional Federal funds or the stick of a Federal money cutoff to a particular state based on their action or inaction on a particular measure. One example I see as I drive into Maryland is the sign stating that .08 BAL is the law in Maryland. Apparently Maryland was one of the last states to lower the BAL but got with the program once their highway funding started to (or was scheduled to start to) suffer.

One Senator was responsible for this, Ohio’s now-former Senator Mike DeWine. Tragically, he lost one of his daughters to a car accident involving a drunk driver. But if he had been a proper government servant he would have lobbied the state of Ohio to lower its BAL limit as a statewide effort to promote highway safety. Instead, after trying for a few years to get this adopted, he managed to place this stick in some Congressional legislation and thereafter states had the gun of losing part of their federal highway funding put to their head if they didn’t follow the .08 BAL standard.

A couple days ago I heard a radio news item talking about Delaware not having a compliant open container law, thus it loses a small percentage of its federal highway funding (the figure I saw was 3% based on a 2001 article.) Yet again, it’s an example of the stick being applied to a state government to bend over to the wishes of the federal government, which is once again overreaching its Tenth Amendment rights.

With the latter two SOTU examples listed above, state and local governments will be placed at the beck and call of what some bureaucrats and do-gooders in Congress want them to do. If you give health insurance to your heretofore uninsured residents, we’ll give you more money. If you don’t enact the federal NCLB regulations, we’ll take away your federal education funding. (The same principle applies to taxation for individuals as certain actions are either encouraged or discouraged, but that’s a topic for another day.)

There are three principles I’d like to see the next generation embrace when they get to the positions of power. First and foremost is an end to these government mandates. Let the states be individual laboratories of government as the Founders intended. It’s a shame that all the faceless bureaucrats who get to push paper and make sure that the lower reaches of government do exactly as they have dictated to them would lose their jobs, but perhaps their talents can be used effectively in some other task. Lord knows eliminating red tape would open up a lot of jobs in the private sector!

The second principle is not something that the Founders intended, but I’ve come to believe in the last few years they’ve become necessary. Additionally, the Constitution now has a precedent for it in the 22nd Amendment.

I think there needs to be term limits for Congress. Where I live now, this district has had the same Congressman since 1991. Maryland has one Senator who has held her seat since 1987, with the other just beginning his Senate career after two decades in the House of Representatives. He takes over for a Senator who served 30 years.

The Founders intended a legislature composed of public-minded citizens who would serve a short time in Congress then return home to their communities. President George Washington embodied this principle by refusing to serve a third term, despite the fact he would’ve almost certainly won in a landslide. It’s been suggested that a person be limited to three terms in the House of Representatives and two terms in the Senate, and that seems like a fair number. Ohio has term limits for its state officeholders of eight years. Of course, what’s happened in a few cases is that legislators who run through their four (two-year) terms in the Ohio House run for the Ohio Senate to take advantage of its eight-year limit (two four-year terms) and vice versa. Since the Ohio law was enacted in 1994, I haven’t noticed yet if the switchers will try to return to their original legislative body for another eight years. To combat that tendency, I’d also like added to the law a lifetime limit of 18 years in Congress (three terms in the House plus two terms as Senator.)

The third principle I’d like to see adopted is the automatic sunsetting of government rules and regulations after a point in time, say, ten years. Just as many government programs need to be reauthorized from time to time (like NCLB) encoded laws themselves need to be revisited occasionally.

After the 9/11 attacks, Congress enacted the PATRIOT Act, which curbed some of the civil liberties that libertarians in particular hold dear. If I recall correctly, the original authorization was for three years so it had to be reauthorized in 2005 – meanwhile, some of the supporters called for the provisions to become permanent.

I understand how curbs on certain rights are required during a time of war. During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus for a time as part of prosecuting the war. President Franklin Roosevelt interred thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

But to me these provisions need not become permanent, as at some point in our future the War on Terror will be won. (If it’s not, then the diminished rights we enjoy now would become meaningless. I don’t think there’s a right of habeas corpus in Sharia law.) Occasionally someone will write a newspaper column or a website post about some archaic law that has long since outlived its usefulness but still languishes on the books. (A Maryland example is the concept of ground rent.)

The other factors in this are sort of sneaky. If a Congress is debating the merits of existing laws that have come to the end of their sunsetting period, they have less time to dream up new restrictions! Also, because of the term limit principles I’ve touched on earlier, it would be an almost entirely new Congress that debates the issue, and they wouldn’t have the ownership aspect to color their view. To use one example, would John McCain (a Senator since 1987) or Russ Feingold (occupying his Senate seat since 1993) be in favor of repealing their campaign finance law? It’s doubtful, but if it came up for renewal in ten years their successors may feel differently.

In my thinking about government, I think I have envisioned something a little closer to what the Founders intended. As it stands right now, the governmental pyramids are inverted – power is concentrated at the top, but that’s where the fewest people wield it. I believe government was intended to have the maximum power placed at the bottom of the pyramid with the people, then the “several States”, with the federal government at the peak of the pyramid – only intended to do things that have a national interest like coining money and defending our nation. The Constitution addressed the failings of the original Articles of Confederation and defined the roles of government more clearly.

As I stated when I began this occasional series, this change is not one that’s going to happen overnight – it’s going to take decades and the generation of my stepdaughter and whatever children she’s blessed with to accomplish these goals. But I believe it’s possible and it just may refresh the tree of liberty without shedding any blood of patriots, tyrants, or bystanders.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

5 thoughts on “A 50 year plan: Role of government”

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