Replies

It would only take an administration with "nothing to lose" (for example, the second, lame-duck term of a Gore administration, Deity forbid) who might consider the implementation of a national socialist system to be preferable to the damage to the economy

Ah political suicide for the party of said lameduck office holder. Remember a grossly erroneous change can and would be stopped through injunction actions entered into the Courts by those who would be adversely effected. Financial Markets, Corporations, and the power folks all up and down the line will be out with blood in their eyes for the party at fault and minimal pennies and support to the candidates of the political party in their sight.

Numbers that are grossly in error, which is the only thing that could conceivable cause the effects that you envision, whould not stand long enough to be implemented. Everything number, every regulation, impacting enacted programs are put through a very strict process involving committe reviews, public input and review, 90 delay of implementation to allow congressional action(only takes one Congress Critter to bring implementation to a complete halt for challenge and Congressional tabling of the the proposal to kill it outright.) Even when implemented evidence material error, malfeasence or misfeasance brought through civil court action, would be sufficient for administrative relief of injuction until the controversy is resolved.

Your belief that substantive change of that magnitude is mere excessive imagination and paranoia on your part. The mechanics of process & political opposition simply does not allow for the exercise of the kind of individual arbitariness you imagine.

If the system were that fragile and lacked the capacity to prevent such changes from implementaton, we would already be in your full communist dictatorial h'll hole right now, and this discussion would not even be taking place.

Ah political suicide for the party of said lameduck office holder

Not necessarily. Granted, the party would lose the votes of "peter" (those paying the price in the marketplace), but it would gain the votes of "paul" (those getting the now massively inflated government handout).

Everything number, every regulation, impacting enacted programs are put through a very strict process involving committe reviews, public input and review, 90 delay of implementation to allow congressional action(only takes one Congress Critter to bring implementation to a complete halt for challenge and Congressional tabling of the the proposal to kill it outright.)

This isn't completely true of bureaucracies using administrative law via publication in the Federal Register. Instead of only taking "one Congress Critter to bring implementation to a complete halt", once the power is given to the bureaucracy, the opposite is true. Without an act of Congress, whatever the bureaucracy publishes becomes defacto law. This mechanism has been used many times for (what I consider, at least) tyrannical purposes. As was previously mentioned, once the power was transferred via GCA'68, treasury secretary Bensen was able to ban many 12 gauge shotguns merely by the stroke of a pen by declaring that they had no "sporting" purpose; and use of this power did not require any action by Congress (by Congress's inaction, it simply allowed it to become law). Similarly, the HIPAA regulations passed in the late 1990s allowed the HHS to impose arbitrary medical "privacy" laws (which were anything but, since they mandated sharing of information with government) merely by publishing them in the Federal Register (although they did provide a comment period for the majority of those new regulations, they did not do so for all of them).

Your belief that substantive change of that magnitude is mere excessive imagination and paranoia on your part. The mechanics of process & political opposition simply does not allow for the exercise of the kind of individual arbitariness you imagine.

I disagree. The same thing was said of GCA'68, but treasury secretary Bensen showed that those concerns were valid. Just because it took 25 years for the abuse to occur does not invalidate the concerns of those people who spoke out against it. Similarly, the fact remains that the potential for abuse exists with the current system. While I do not disagree with your assertion that such abuse of the system would have catastrophic effects on the economy, a view of history shows that administrations have been willing to perform equally catastrophic effects in the past (such as FDR's banning of private possession of gold and deliberate deflation of the economy).

If the system were that fragile and lacked the capacity to prevent such changes from implementaton, we would already be in your full communist dictatorial h'll hole right now

Personally, I think we're a lot closer to collectivism than you might believe. Certainly any of the founders, if they were alive today, would find aspects of the current system to be abominable (social security, EITC, medicaid, medicare, HUD housing, food stamps, corporate subsidies, etc). In any case, the reason the numbers have not been manipulated to such a degree so far is that the "payoff" for doing so isn't significant. When the system changes so that manipulation of those numbers to a greater extend than is currently done is even more advantageous (such as implementation of a socialist state), I fear that it only becomes a matter of time before some future leftist administration uses that power. I would prefer simply not to give them the opportunity in the first place.