Blogs For Victory

We are ever the authors of our own destruction. We have been given clear, easy instructions on what to do, but we refuse the office and out of sheer perversity, set ourselvs on the path to destruction. This all stems, of course, out of our fallen nature – because we rebelled against God, we became out of sync with what we were supposed to be. It isn’t even so much, now, that we consciously rebel (though some do precisely that) but that we are internally incapable of sustained good behavior. Only a few people, by constant discipline, have trained themselves to be mostly in accordance with the truth – with God’s will in our lives. And even they will be first to say how often they still fall short.

it is because of this innate ability to fail that we must always be on guard against great power being concentrated in the hands of a few, or one. As an individual, the most spectacular failure imaginable would still, at worst, only bring down a few immediate neighbors with me. Enlarge the power I have, and you thus enlarge the scope of failure, should I not measure up. Its the difference between a man benig a fool and ruining a company employing 500 people, and another man foolishly destroying another company employing 500,000. At bottom, the larger the organization, the less actual power it should have.

Wise men have long known this. Our Founders, especially, were clear eyed about the nature of humanity. The system they built is deliberately designed to prevent things from happening – and our error this past century or so has been our efforts to get around the restrictions built in to the system. We are greatly impatient. We don’t want to go through all that tedius effort of garnering a Constitutional majority to enact a new law. So we consign powers to things like the Federal Reserve, to regulatory agencies, to the Supreme Court – if they’ll just give us a short cut to whatever we want, we’ll be fine with it. The trouble is the power we have allowed to these organization is still wielded by regular people. In other words, we’re being ruled by people just as likely to screw up on any given day as the rest of us.

And while the department of parks and recreation in your local community can screw up your city by boneheaded action, a mis-step by the Federal Reserve will mess up the entire nation. Heck, the entire world, given the importance of the United States in the global economy.

Think about where we’ve come from and where we are. Back in the 1960’s, the United States was supreme in all respects. We made more things. Grew more things, Farmed more things. We were the envy of the world – we were sending a man to the Moon. Now, in 2010, its extraordinarily difficult to even find so much as a pair of shoes made in the USA. Our mines have been moved to Chile. Our farms are in Mexico. Our factories are in China – and the United States government just decided that gonig back to the Moon is too expensive. This is the result of assigning ever more power to fewer and fewer people.

Who consulted with the people before making a decision to, say, cut off the farmers of California from the water needed to grow crops? Did you vote on that? When did we, in our deliberations as citizens, decide that we’d go decades without building an oil refinery, or a nuclear power plant? When was the vote taken which decided that the United States would become the world’s largest debtor? Indebted to China for some trillion dollars? The answer, of course, is that we never did – various elites, behind closed doors and in consultation only with those who could most financially profit from the moves, decided what would happen. And it came about this way because we did not insist that we, the people, rule this nation.

One can pick many land marks upon the road to atrophy of our democratic republic. The so-called “progressive era” of the early 20th century struck many blows at the Founders system. FDR, of course, gleefully over-rode all manner of protections for the people. But to me, the final straw, was when the Supreme Court issueed the Roe decision, legalizing abortion in all 50 States, local laws and US Constitution notwithstanding. Regardless of how one feels about abortion – pro-choice or pro-life or just not sure – it should horrify everyone in love with liberty to think that 9 judges got to decide that issue. There should have been an uprising – and it should have been led by the pro-choice people, outraged that any judge, anywhere, would usurp the rights of the people to decide such a difficult issue. But, of course, that was not the case – in fact, the pro-choice people, with that impatience noted above, led the fight to have the judges usurp the rights of the people – they wanted to be less free (though they didn’t think of it that way) because freedom was (and is) difficult and allowed for all manner of local differences (another thing which annoys those with a zeal for change – they hate the fact that a law might hold in one area, but not in another).

While that was the watershed, it was also just one in a series of dimunations of the power of the people. The whole thrust of politics over the past 100 years has been to remove power from the small and local and assign to the large and national. Some how or another, the idea developed that if we could just get things done and have “experts” lead the way, we could get things all set in no time at all. The end result of this has been the near collapse of our civilization and the near destruction of the ability of the Aermican economy to produce wealth. In the phrase of the radicals of old – though they really had no conception of what the words meant – we need “power to the people”. We need, that is, to return power to the people – to the individual, the family, the community, the states…and take most of it away from the federal government.

But not only in government, but in economics, as well. Big business is, in its own way, just as bad as big government. A huge, bureaucratic corporation can cause massive dislocation when it makes a mistake – such as what we’ve seen in instituitons like Lehman Brothers, GM and AIG. It isn’t so much about breaking up the behmoths – people have a right to invest in such firms, if they wish – but in resetting the economy so that small and mid-sized corporations are encouraged. In order to be in control of our destiny, we must reserve the most power down to the lowest level. It must be us in our families, churches, community groups and local governments who call most of the tune. If this means some localities will get it horribly wrong, then that is ok – better one town to blow it than the whole nation. Additionally, diffused power provides a series of political experiments…with everyone working on it and thinking about it, the best solutions will come up and can be copied by others.

The road back is the road to the destruction of such monstrosities as, say, the Department of Commerce. Commerce will get along just fine without Uncle Sam’s tutelage. So will Energy. The times comes, my fellow Americans, when we’ll have to courageously face up to the fact that it is we, in our communites, who can best judge the needs of our locality…and thus things like the EPA will disappear, education will become the province of parents, health care will be done by doctors and the work of America will be done in America, not overseas. We do that and freedom will bloom, again.

UPDATE: Sorry, everyone, didn’t know I had set comments to “off”. Have at it.