Many generations of Americans have taken our founding principles for granted, thinking that a few writings on old parchments would somehow inoculate the country from the ravages of concentrated governmental power. But like rust, power never sleeps, never contents itself with what it has gained. Empowered men must be reined in because they do not rein in themselves.
Perhaps the writers of our Constitution underestimated how far power-driven men would go to tear the Constitution apart by sentence and clause to uncover thousands of hidden implications of new powers to serve their endlessly expanding schemes.
Perhaps Americans simply got tired of the unending struggle to police our governors and their teams of lawyers funded with public money, constantly writing constitutional ciphers to further empower government.
Today, only a small percentage of Americans have a functional understanding of the governments’ legal machineries – constitutional, federal regulatory, state regulatory, county regulatory, school boards, etc. – that exercise control (beyond criminal enforcement) over the elements of citizens’ daily lives. Perhaps a slightly larger percentage have some inkling about how their life choices are actively proscribed, limited, forced into a narrow set of options bounded by governmentally enforced parameters.
The Founders tried to set America on a path toward a future unconstrained by the paralyzing grip of governmental power. Let’s face facts. Hindsight has shown that American majorities, through their elected and appointed representatives, did not choose to follow the Founders vision.
The American future our many levels of government will now permit us to attain will not be dramatically different from our present reality. That’s the nature of top heavy monolithic societies. They don’t change much. I guess we woke up from the American Dream.
From citizens practicing free decisions in liberty, we’ve become a nation of applicants who request permission from faceless omnipotent government bureaucrats. The American spirit left the body, and our mythology hasn’t caught up to this reality.
Republicans keep selling a value structure that they do not stand by with their votes in our governing bodies. And Democrats can’t write new codes and statutes and regulations fast enough, as if passing laws somehow cheats the undertaker.
We applicants just keep funding the powers who minister with immunity to us, their unintended beneficiaries. With the thin veneer of presumed general consent, usually from a few marginal votes, the powers impose an endless stream of plans and schemes on us, each one designed to solve the problems the previous ones created.
No real outcomes ever get discussed by those who caused them. The power-driven run to make government accountable and transparent, only to be digested by the same bureaucracies they fought against, victims of their own good intentions.
The nightmare is quite real, and I don’t know how to wake up from it.
B_Imperial