We Need a Return to Principled Government

It’s widely recognized that our government is in dire shape. Our annual deficits are in the trillions of dollars. Unfunded entitlement programs run many times that. Lobbyists and earmarking rule Washington. Special interests, including public-sector unions, environmental groups, the AARP, and countless others, vie against one another for exorbitant privileges — all meted out at taxpayers’ expense.

Our most responsible mainstream news venues, like Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, often carry stories exposing the sobering facts. The analyses are penetrating, succinct, and eloquent. But the recommendations? Timid and trite. The best they can offer is to advise moderation: slow the growth of government here, cut back a program there, oppose a few details of the most onerous regulations, but basically resign oneself to the status quo.

It wasn’t always so. When faced with more difficult problems, our Founding Fathers imagined, created, and then fought for a radically new idea of government. Why were they able to do so, when our modern leaders and pundits can’t?..

Very true but exactly how do we do this?

This is a subject I’ve given some thought from time to time. My conclusions usually come back to one goal and that is we need to put the federal government back on the constitutional leash from which is has escaped. First up is reducing the size and scope of the offender. I’ve had a very simple idea that would be done legislatively. In a nutshell we would simply account for the size of government in both dollars and number of employees. Let’s just say for argument the dollar amount is one trillion per year and employees are 10 million. (These are just made up figures). We pass legislation forcing a 10% reduction each year in the dollar amount and the total of government employees. It does not matter where the cuts take place, so if the government employs ten million workers at the start next year it must be cut to nine million and only spend 900 billion. The year after that it goes to eight point one million and so on until we’ve reached an acceptable level. The only items off limits would be that associated with national security and military. Everything else is open season and must be cut by ten percent per year. Eventually all unessential programs and employees would be eliminated.

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