Victor Davis Hanson explains:
Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others. What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common?
Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about — in sanctimonious fashion — the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state…
The reason our Founders sought to limit the power of the government was not because they feared a jack-booted Gestapo kicking down our doors – the Founders knew of no such things – but because our Founders were incredibly wise to human nature. These were, for the most part, practical men of affairs. Well off, as far as things went in 18th century America, but not fabulously wealthy – men who had to work and scramble to get ahead and thus understood the weakness of humanity. Our inflated opinion of ourselves; our willingness to rationalize our desires; our slowness to give credit where it is due; our penchant for falling in to financial or sexual corruption…men are weak, so don’t give them too much power over other men.
What we have done wrong over this past century is that while men have remained as weak as ever, we have assigned ever more power to them. This is why, in practice, all Big Government programs fail – even if you really could work out to a nicety exactly what should be done, you’d still have to confide the execution of the plan to people just like you…in other words, people who are likely to mess up again and again and again. Remember that – best plan in the world put in to place with the best of intentions: it will still be screwed up. Just can’t get around it – just can’t get around the fact that people will have to carry it out. And the more authority you assign to these screwed up people, the greater the scope of the disaster. Consign a company of soldiers to a dimwit and you might get a company of soldiers wiped out by an error…put an army in to such hands and you might have an entire war lost. See how it works?
But it gets even worse…an army commander still doesn’t command the whole of the country. Now take that witless army commander and put him in charge of health care; of manufacturing; of the legal system…worse and worse and worse it will become. This is why the Catholic Church, quite a long while ago and at the dawn of the super-State ruled that “subsidiarity” must be the rule. Having no illusions about the nature of Man, the Church held – and still holds – that action must take place at the lowest level possible. This is because the closer you are to a problem the more likely you are to find the right solution – and the smaller the error will be if you mess it up on the lowest level possible. There was a reason the Psalmist wrote:
I Put no trust in princes, in mere mortals powerless to save.
When they breathe their last, they return to the earth; that day all their planning comes to nothing. – Psalm 146:3-4
Trust God, but for heaven’s sake don’t trust your fellow men – not even yourself – with too much power. Even if it means something doesn’t get done, better that it should be so than risk putting a complete scoundrel in charge…and you will get that complete scoundrel the more you repose your trust in men.
The good news is that we can fix this – by returning our government to its Constitutional norms. Are you tired of all the Weiners out there making a mess of things? Then take away their power and give it to no one…then you will have seen the last of them. Oh, they’ll still be there…but they’ll only be ruining their own lives, not all of ours.
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