Government always moves to protect itself and to accrue power wherever it can. The Founding Fathers knew this in their bones, which is why they designed the Separation of Powers. But when there arises a whole class of elites who expect to either be in government or drawing their pay as intermediaries between the private sector and government, and especially when these elites all share similar liberal political values, it renders the Separation of Powers moot.
There are no longer three separate co-equal branches when too many people in office and too many people in the bureaucracy and too many people who serve on government advisory boards all share enough of the same big and Bigger government ideology.
One solution for this is term limits for everyone. And not only term limits on office-holders, but term limits in the bureaucracy as well.
Another solution recognizes and deals with the Iron Rule of Bureaucracy. This rule states that the bureaucracy only seeks to expand its power and will do so to infinity unless and until it is stopped by some greater power.
Up until recently, the limits of the budget simply stopped bureaucracies from expanding to infinity. But we now have a Federal Reserve that is willing to create trillions of dollars out of thin air for as long as it takes to stimulate the economy. But the money they create is in the name of government and government gets to spend it. A bureaucracy with near infinite funding will expand its power forever. How else can we explain that the government landlord agency, the bureau of Land management (BLM) can justify the expense and liability of its own sniper team? How else can the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service afford to employ a paramilitary unit to raid Gibson Guitar for importing wood that might be improperly labeled? How else can we afford to make millions of acres of uninhabited land in Alaska that has billions of barrels of oil underneath it, off limits to development and as a byproduct bring an early death to the Alaska oil pipeline?
The answer is that government creates as much money out of thin air as it thinks it can get away with. Of course, the debt will eventually crush both our economy and our liberties.
Every day more people are coming to the judgment that a carefully organized effort to repair the constitution via the States’ power to propose and ratify amendments has less risk to our liberty and prosperity than the present trajectory of the federal government and especially the federal bureaucracy.
The first order of business of an Article V Convention must be to limit government’s ability to spend and create near-infinite amounts of money.
A similar principle applies here. Until recently, the limits of surveillance (the effort it takes to open paper mail, plant listening devices, physically follow and eavesdrop on people, etc) kept it under control -- even a totalitarian state couldn't see everything, and the effort of trying was a major economic drag. With their new toys, the snoops have been overcoming these limits (and getting lazy -- remember how the Boston Marathon bombers were able to do their deeds even though the Feds got advance warning).